 The Mac Observers' Mac Geek Gap, episode 749 for Monday, February 18th, 2019. Greetings, folks, and welcome to the Mac Observers' Mac Geek Gap, the show where we take all your questions, your tips, our tips, everything that really we can think of and cram it all into an hourish, sometimes a little more, with the goal being that every single one of us, you and me included, learns at least five new things every single time we get together. Sponsors for this episode include capterra, capterra.com slash mgg, hairclub at hairclub.com slash mgg, and Jamf now at jamf.com slash mgg. We will talk about all of those and spell the URLs for you shortly here in Durham, New Hampshire, where it's currently snowing. I'm Dave Hamilton. And here in fearful Connecticut, where it's not snowing, and it's above freezing. So, ah, yes, pretty nice. This is Jonathan Braun. Yeah. Yeah. It's crazy for the weather, you know, but whatever. It's this time of year. It's how it goes. Yeah, it's been weird. It's been snowing all day since before I woke up. And it wasn't until maybe an hour ago that it like started to actually accumulate. But now we've got like two inches on the ground. And I think that that'll be it. I think by the time we finish recording, snow have stopped. But, you know, whatever. It's pretty. It's all good. Yeah. We got what they call the wintery mix, but it wasn't a lot of it. Oh, that's good. Yeah, that's that's worse than snow, if you ask me. But but I speaking of things coming down or downloads as I like to say, I was showing our esteemed editor-in-chief, Brian Chaffin, something this week that I do all the time. And this is like the epitome of a quick tip. And it it is because it's something I do all the time and didn't think to share with you folks or him until it came up. Have you ever clicked on a link in Safari, like a video file or an audio file or something? And or a picture even. And it loads and you can see it or hear it or watch it in your browser. But really what you wanted to do when you clicked on the link was download it, right? And sometimes the link is such that you can't right click on it and download it like if you're just being brought there by say a link in an email or something. Well, here's the trick. You have to have downloaded something previously for this to work. And the reason I say that is otherwise the downloads dropdown in the Safari menu doesn't appear. But once you have downloaded something and you can get that downloads thing to appear, the little dropdown, click it, highlight any one of the things in the list. It doesn't matter which one you highlight. And as long as the URL to what you want to download is on your clipboard, you click you do Command V, which is the shortcut for paste. It will paste this into the downloads window and begin downloading it immediately. So get the URL on your clipboard, open up the downloads window in Safari, paste it in and boom, down it comes right into your downloads folder just like you would have wanted. It saves a lot of headache a lot of the time. So I wanted to share. Did you know about that one, John? Yes. Okay. And I see it. So, and yeah, so the icon for that is a circle with a down arrow. Right. That's right. Yeah. Yeah. Can I see it on Safari on one machine, but not on the other? Because I don't think I've done a. You haven't downloaded yet. Right. Exactly. Exactly. Cool. All right. Which is as Jeff, listener Jeff reminds us is artist Leon Ivy Jr. So thank you, Jeff. Now on to Alan with a quick tip about the large red circle. He notes that you can place the large red circle emoji at the beginning of a subject line in an email as an excellent way to get the recipient's attention. And I have to admit it works because boy, did that thing stick out like a well, a big red button in our in our Mackie Keb email box at at feedback at Mackie Keb.com where he sent it. And did you say feedback at Mackie Keb.com and inquirerative? Yeah, that's correct. That's and that's where Alan sent it. That's exactly right. Feedback at Mackie Keb.com. And and and he's right that you can insert any emoji into a subject line of an email. And as long as subject lines are are very much, you know, text only fields. You can't put HTML there. You can't do any styling of the text or anything. But emoji, at least on the Mac and iOS works just fine there because it is treated by by those operating systems and those male clients as part of the plain text alphabet, if you will, in at least in so far as the subject line goes. So yeah, you can put anything you want there. So it's a it's a handy little trick. As with everything, it is a tool. The tool in and of itself is neither good nor bad. How you choose to implement it. Well, that may fall under future judgment. But but there you go. So thanks for that, Alan. Good stuff. Yeah. Yeah. Well, there are emails that I get that actually do that. I'm just looking right now. So flicker did one that had symbols. Home Depot likes to put emojis in their subject lines for their emails. There you go. On a regular basis and even even gazelle. So I just got one from gazelle and they have a little smiley face there. That's nice. And I'm going to add a bonus quick tip. If you want to type an emoji on Mac OS control command spacebar brings up Mac OS's emoji browser, which includes a search field. So if you wanted to find red circle, you can do that by typing red. For some reason, circle doesn't work, but maybe button. I don't know. But if I type red, there it is. It's it's it's right there and all it's a well red glory. So pretty cool. Thanks, Alan. Good stuff. All right, Greg has another tip, another thing that I use pretty regularly. He says, have you ever wanted or needed to use the icon of an application, perhaps in artwork for something else or in showing people we use it at Mac observer all the time. If we're doing, you know, an article about a certain app, we might include the app's artwork in in amongst a image that we create or something for that for that article. And you can get the the high quality artwork of an application image by following Greg's instructions, highlight the application in your applications folder in the finder, then go to the file menu, select get info or just to command I in the info window in the upper left, you will see the applications icon, click on it. And then from the edit menu choose copy or do command C that puts actually a whole slew of icons. It puts the icon package, I think on your clipboard. And then you can go into preview and paste that or into whatever image editor you want, and paste that and boom, there you have it, you can resize it. It'll be the big Mondo image and you're good to go. So there you go. That's another handy quick tip. This is why we do quick tips because it's super handy. I'll give you another path. So there is another way to do this, Dave. Okay, this I think is the is the most direct. But if you have an application, here's here's what you can do. You right click on it, you say show package contents, you'll then see a contents folder. You're then going to see a number of folders within that. Open up the resources folder. You know what you're going to see there, Dave? You're going to see somewhere a dot ICNS file, which is a icons file. Okay. That's another path to get at that. Yeah. Yeah. Very cool. Awesome. One last one for all of you who are keyboard maestro users. And if you are not, maybe this will be the thing that convinces you to start using it. Keyboard Maestro is good for a lot of things. I say all the time it's the future of automation on the Mac. Frankly, I think it's the present of automation on the Mac to because you can do all kinds of great things with it. But but it can also I use it as a secondary clipboard or a clip, sorry, a clipboard stack so that everything I copy to my clipboard, when I copy a new thing to my clipboard, the old thing doesn't get erased. It just moves down the stack and I can choose when I go to paste something, I can choose which item from my clipboard I want to paste, not just the most recent one, which is super handy. But Lucas, as in the Lucas that I live with over at my house, reminded me of something he had a Google Doc that actually is a lab partner of his was editing and it was driving his lab partner crazy because he was trying to just format the text a little bit, but it had some baked in formatting that was making paragraphs automatically space a certain way and no matter what he did inside of his Google Doc, he could not get this to go away. And Lucas is like, I know how to fix this. He said share the document with me. So he did. Lucas opened up his web browser. He highlighted the entirety of the text in this particular report, hit cut, so as to remove it from the Google Doc. Then he used the shortcut that he had previously made in Keyboard Maestro that takes the clipboard and inserts text by typing. And you do that and it is as though you typed it all in. Keyboard Maestro takes what's on the clipboard and types it in, which makes it inherit plain text or whatever the format is, does not paste in any of the formatting because it's just literally retyping it as far as the app's concerned it was typed in not pasted in. And sure enough, the formatting problems went away. So handy thing for Keyboard Maestro and I have a keyboard shortcut that will do exactly that too because of how handy that is. It's super handy sometimes to be able to just strip formatting. So it is good stuff. Are you using Keyboard Maestro yet, my friend, Mr. Braun? Nope. Okay, okay. 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So yeah, what you're hearing is if you go to jamf.com that's J-A-M-F dot com slash M-G-G, you can create your free account, you can add three devices to it for free, more devices you can add starting at just two bucks a month per device, but don't worry about that right now, just go to J-A-M-F dot com slash M-G-G, create your free account, add up to three devices you could go, or thanks to Jamf for sponsoring this episode with Jamf Now. All right, John, I think it's time to talk about the Wi-Fi industrial complex, and by that I mean, I know, we talked a little bit, because, well, I was going to call it big Wi-Fi, right, but that doesn't have quite the ring to it, so we'll call it the Wi-Fi industrial complex. Right before we recorded that kick-off 748, last week we found out that Amazon had purchased Euro, and we talked about that very briefly in the show, but we've gotten a lot of emails and texts and carrier pigeons and pretty much any way any of you could figure out how to get in touch with me, and of course that's not that hard, you did, and you asked about it, so I figured, let's talk about it. Dan has a great setup for this, very brief setup. He says, I'm curious what you do think about this. He says, I trust Amazon with my shopping, my digital content, and standing behind my purchases, but I'm not sure how I feel about them owning my router and potentially being able to see every site I go to and not to spy on me. Am I being crazy? So, no, I don't think you're being crazy, Dan. You know, it's one of those things, right? We talk all the time on this show about choosing our place, right, on that continuum between security and convenience, and it's also not a surprise that Euro was acquired. You know, as we said, I think we said this in the last show, I've talked a lot about this all week, so forgive me if I'm rehashing myself, but you know there were a VC-funded company. An acquisition was an obvious exit for those VCs. From what we have heard, Euro will remain a standalone brand, you know, how long that remains, et cetera, et cetera. We will find out, right? My biggest concern about this acquisition is not the security of it. You know, I find it interesting and don't take this the wrong way, folks, but you know, here we are suddenly very concerned with Amazon having access to all of our data, right, or all of the sites we visit, but I never heard anyone concerned that Euro had access to this. Actually, I did hear some people concerned about it, but not in the numbers that we have. Everybody, lots of people, not everybody, lots of people were happy to trust Euro to manage this data, and to be perfectly honest, Euro is an unknown to most of us. I've talked to the CEO of Euro. My guess is I might be the only one, right? Like amongst us here that's talked to Nick, that doesn't, but what does that mean? Like even that, even though I've talked to him, what's that mean? Does it mean like he was an unknown quantity to me before Euro came on the market? I mean, I know he did some other things and that's fine, but I don't see any reason why I would trust him any more or less than I would trust Amazon and also, you know, who else had access to our data while Euro was in charge of it, right? Like, we just don't know. And so I'm not really, it's an unknown to unknown, and I'm not that worried about it, but go ahead, you are. There are some things I'm worried about, but I'm curious to your thoughts on this, John. So, number one, I'm not worried. I mean, when I first got the Euro, I thought it was kind of creepy that they could remotely do some things, which was part of our, you know, initial setup experience. They're like, oh, well, you know, something's not right. Can we, you know, and when I was on the phone with them, they're like, well, yeah, we can peek into your network and kind of tweak things to make sure it's set up right. And I'm like, okay, well, that's okay. I guess I trust you guys. But the thing you have to do in a lot of these cases, Dave, is to see if any, if the company in question has any sort of documentation on what they do and what they don't do. And you know what I found here, so the thing is I just did a search and I said, can Eero see my data? And it came up with an article, which we'll link to here, called What Type of Data Does Eero Collect and Why? Now, you could decide to not trust what they say in the, you know, their evil and are collecting all of your stuff and all that. But this, and with any company that you trust things to, you want to see if they have some sort of privacy document or a document like this. And I'll get the link to it. It's already, it's all set in the show notes. Yeah, no problem. So they explain to you what type of data they collect. And the thing is, I don't, as far as I can see, they're not collecting your raw data. So they're not going to be, you know, taking your credit card numbers and stuff like that. No, I think people are, people are concerned about the data that that Eero does collect as part of its normal service. What kind of devices you have in your home, right? Which they definitely collect. And they explain in the document. They're like, yeah, we collect a bunch of stuff. We collect IP addresses. We may collect, you know, the type of devices and, you know, I guess. They collect all your DNS queries now if you have Eero Plus are theoretically logable by Eero, right? And, and so, like, I mean, there is some personally identifiable data there. Or, you know, potentially private data. Like, do you want people to know that you, that you have an Android phone in your house, right? Like, the Eero knows that. You kind of want them to, because it helps, like in a, in an aggregate sense, knowing, oh, well, every Android phone has trouble connecting to the Wi-Fi like this. And Plume actually does this even more so than Eero, where they're really watching and creating heuristics, you know, in that whole machine learning kind of way, where they say, okay, cool, well, we now know when, when that model Android phone tries to connect, we have to answer this way for it to be successful, not this other way, etc. The same with the DNS stuff, you know, with the, where they're doing their, you know, their parental controls and the security and all that stuff. And, and they would know if you had some malware on your network, which might, again, when you're building a fingerprint about someone knowing that, okay, you've got Android devices, you've got a Windows device, you have some malware, you know, the type of malware may lead someone to conclude you visit certain types of websites, right? And they might even see those websites, right? So, I get, I get what the concern is, but I just, like, I'm not worried. But I see their statement here. So, I'll just, you know, it's very quick here, but they say, we don't ever track the websites you visit or collect the contents of your network traffic. And I think that's the concern with a lot of people. And they also say we don't sell our customer data and we don't sell ads based on this data. So, if that's good enough for you, and that's good enough for me, that they state this, then, okay. Yeah, but does this change now that Amazon is here? Like, I think that, that's people's concern is, because they can change this anytime they want. And, and I get the concern, but, but I mean, I understand it. I don't agree with it. If they do, I don't share it, I should say. Yeah, the thing is that they do change the terms saying, yeah, now we're going to, you know, scan all your data and throw ads that you're right and left. And I think that's going to bubble through the tech, tech universe and people are going to abandon them saying, you know, what you're doing is unacceptable. So, I'm going to, I'm going to take devil's advocate here. They could, if Amazon inherits this exact, this exact thing where they say they don't share your data with third parties, that's fine. But now, Amazon knows that you have an older Apple TV and a Tevo and what kind of TV you have, as well as that you have Apple devices. Not just Eero knows this, now Amazon knows this and nothing has to change about the privacy policy. So now, when you visit Amazon, they could say, hey, you should buy a new Apple TV. You might really like that, right? Yeah. I mean, and nothing has changed about the privacy policy. So, and I think that might happen, right? Like, it depends on where Amazon chooses to put the walls up, et cetera, et cetera. But it does increase Amazon's fingerprint about us. Potentially. Potentially. I think Amazon knows a lot about all of us anyway. Yeah. So I don't, I don't know, like I hear my biggest concern is not this. Certainly, like I said, I understand this concern. I don't share it. It's not my primary concern about this. I'm just not that worried about it. I use Amazon all the time. I have chosen to trust them with more data than I realize. And I know that, right? I'm at least aware that they're aware of far more than I have intentionally shared with them. Dude, I mean, we probably both have several credit cards on file with Amazon. I trust them with that. Correct. I've never had anything terrible happen and that the data has been revealed. And if anything, a lot of times when I do returns and all that, they'll be like, oh, yeah, you know, what? Keep it. Don't even send it back. Sure. It's not working. No, their customer service is good. And that actually is my next, my big concern is one of my favorite parts about Eero, or my favorite parts about Eero, are really three things. Number one, the drive towards innovation, right? They are constantly refining, adding features, updating the product. We've seen things like their whole QoS thing that they added in response to listener feedback, to user feedback, customer feedback, right? So I like that, the regular updates. I like, and their level of customer service has been phenomenal. Like you call them up, they know, I mean, it's a little creepy, but they know who you are. And then to your point, John, they can go and dig into your data and figure, or not your data, but your settings and fix things and all of that. And that has been a very good thing. Like that's, those three things, to me, are the reason that they have remained among the upper echelon of this more and more crowded mesh market. And I'm worried now that they are not a hungry, bootster, VC-funded startup, now that they are owned by and presumably will be sort of, you know, assimilated into the Amazon ecosystem there, at least at some level. I mean, I hope Amazon does that. That would be smart, you know, from a financial standpoint, not to have like, you know, two customer service centers or whatever. Like, I don't know. I hope that they are able to maintain that level of customer service and that pace of innovation. And if they're able to do that, I think, I think it'll be okay. But time will tell. We don't know. We don't know. We have a lot of other Wi-Fi questions though. So, and the good news is that there are lots of options. So if you are not happy with what's happening with one mesh Wi-Fi option or one Wi-Fi option in general, good news. They ain't the only game in town. Russell asks, he says, I'm too cheap to buy a mesh system while I have plenty of capable equipment all over or I sometimes I try to paraphrase and I fail. What's that? No, Russell. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. I'll try this again and I'll just going to read what Russell said. He says, I'm too cheap to buy a mesh system while I have plenty of equipment capable of covering my house and Wi-Fi. I wonder if I should continue to use different SSIDs for the networks created by all of my access points or if I should give them the same SSIDs. He says, I may answer my question with my next statement. That is, my current configuration works with no complaints from my wife or my daughter. This is an important metric. He says, in the upstairs south corner of my house, essentially my daughter's room, says I have an old airport extreme in bridge mode, that creates a wireless network called balcony. It says, I think this basically is her private network and gives her all the bandwidth she ever needs for streaming and schoolwork. In the downstairs north corner of the house, I have a Synology RT 1900 AC, their first router, in bridge mode, that creates a network called airport. He says, these match the names that were used before this equipment came into place. So my wife and daughter didn't have to change anything on their devices. Smart. He says, this has good coverage for our home offices and basically the rest of the house. In the furnace room, in the middle of the downstairs, I have a Zytel C3000Z that terminates my CenturyLink cable service. This is where all the Cat5e terminates in the house and I use its switch functions to connect to my Cat5e infrastructure. It broadcasts a CenturyLink and CenturyLink 5G Wi-Fi networks that I sometimes might connect to to be closest to the source of my internet, not that it makes much difference. I originally intended to use this to bridge to my Synology router, but it has features I like and the wiring location issues that convince me to just make it my primary router. So bottom line, would there be any major benefit to changing all the SSIDs to the same name or would it be worse than checking to see if you were connected to the wrong Wi-Fi if your internet was slow as you move around the house? Another question, he says, I see about a dozen networks if I hit Wi-Fi on my iDevice, should I broadcast fewer networks to be a good neighbor or take some action to select the best band to the networks I'm broadcasting? Okay. So good questions. And I will rewind back to the beginning. You know, there is the if it ain't broke, don't fix it mentality here because otherwise you wind up in a world like I live where you, you know, if it ain't broke, you fix it till it is. Still, yeah, correct. You know, there is a thing though about the the multiple SSIDs, obviously it's working for you. So like, I like, I preface all of this with that, but macOS and iOS still basically choose their network based on whether they can get to the network that is at the top of your preferred networks list. You can see this in macOS, you can't see it in iOS, but if you go into system preferences, networks, Wi-Fi, and then click on advanced, you can see it there that it's the list of Wi-Fi networks. Whatever is at the top of that list and you can reorder it right there, it will connect to if it can. Even if the second thing on the list has a higher signal strength. And I say this usually, there are some other factors involved, but generally speaking, that's what's going to happen. So by having different network names throughout your house, it's not unforeseeable that, if your daughter's primary network is say, airport, it might choose that one even though she's right next to the balcony router, right? And so that could, give her a slower scenario, you already described how to fix that, you realize it's slow, you choose a better network, you're good to go. I would name everything the same. And let the devices decide which access point they're going to connect to. All your access points in your house are connected via ethernet to each other. So presumably everything has, you know, this nice gigabit backhaul between it. You're going to be fine in that regard. I would change them all to the same. That way it's picking five gigahertz or 2.4, whatever is best, or whatever has the strongest signal, which may or may not be best, but it's going to get close. I think that's a better option for you. Yeah, as far as the good neighbor part of it, you're still going to be broadcasting all of these Wi-Fi networks. So in terms of congestion, it's all exactly the same, whether they're the same name, have hidden names, or all have different names. They're all still broadcasting. So from a radio standpoint, the congestion is no different. From the pollution of the airport drop-down menu, yeah, you know, having one is simpler. So sure. If you want to really worry about congestion and potentially even in your own house, for better connections, running your, if your routers let you, running your Wi-Fi at full power versus reduced power can make a big difference. And oftentimes reducing the power of your Wi-Fi router will lead to better connections because you won't have things fighting with each other. So, but a lot of things don't let you adjust the power level. So, you know, this is, it's nice to think about, but unless you have something that lets you, I think your sonology will, I don't know about the other thing that you've got, the old airport extreme may or may not, I can't remember. So what do you think about all this, John? So number one, I agree with you is that you should give everything the same name and let the devices figure it out. Yep. Or, you know, the thing is it doesn't hurt. Try it. Wait, that's true. And see if you get better performance or not. I suspect that you will because the devices try to be smart about what they want to connect to. And as you pointed out, either a priority list or the signal strength or things like that. It's interesting you mentioned that because I actually saw, so there's this thing called Nextdoor, which is like a community, you know, chat thing. And one of the people in my area posted a thing saying, hey, I'm always connecting to optimum online Wi-Fi. Oh yeah, not their house Wi-Fi, sure. And they're like, why? And the thing is, depending on if you bought the modem or if they provide it to you, they may make your modem, like a lot of other providers, an access point, in which case that. But I got back to the person that said, well, you know, if you're on a Mac, so I assume they were on a Mac, I'm like, go to the preferred network and the thing is, you want to remove anything that you don't want to connect to. And the thing is, the person got back to me and said, thank you, thank you, thank you, because there were all these extraneous entries in my preferred network list, as you pointed out. Sure. Well, and even like if you may want to connect, you may want to connect to Opt Online while you're out and about. So just move it down. Well, this person doesn't. Okay, yeah. Well, this person doesn't. If you do, just move it down on the list and then it'll connect, but not if it sees your home network. So you can leverage this to your benefit. Yeah. Right. And the thing was, they didn't. The thing is, their home devices were connecting to Opt Online. They didn't want that. They wanted to connect to theirs. And the reason they was doing that was because it had polluted, because by default, I think when you connect to an access point, unless you change the settings on the computer, it's going to put it in the preferred list and then it's going to screw things up. Right. But here's why you may not want to remove Opt Online from your Mac. Even if. Well, maybe not remove it, but I pointed out to the person that the priority is important. So the thing is, put yours at the top. The thing is, they also wanted to, they, as it turns out, deleting those solved their problem. In that they wanted the home to connect to theirs. Right. And not Optimum, because there was an Optimum close by. Or I think it was higher on their list. So it was connecting to that. She's like, I don't want that. And I'm like, okay, well, here's how you fix that. So. But here's why you don't want to remove it from the list. Oh, not remove it, but change the priority. I agree with you. Well, but she removed it and she thinks it solved her problem. And this may be the case, right? I'm sure it did temporarily. Here's the problem. The next time she is out at a coffee shop and it has an Opt Online network that she can connect to, she will do that. Right. Great. She pays for it all good. And it puts it at the top of the list. On her iPhone, which syncs via iCloud with her Mac. And now her Mac at home has Opt Online back at the top of its list. And it will start connecting again. So by removing it from her Mac, she has essentially created a scenario where very likely she will have it back at the top of the list. By deprioritizing it, it will stay deprioritized amongst all her devices. And that's probably just fine. Because when she's at the coffee shop, can't see her home network, it will choose the Opt Online. All is good, yada, yada, yada. So yeah. I understand what you're saying. Yes. So change the priority, which is what I do. So I have my home network at the top of my list and then I have Opt Online. And you know, whatever the other freebies there are, you know, the librarians. Yeah, of course. Or blow it. Right. Right. Cool. Good stuff. All right. Ian has a question. I'm trying to kind of walk us through a little path here. Picking and choosing our Wi-Fi related questions. Ian has a question sort of next in the queue. He says, my current router access point is a Netgear Nighthawk AC-1900. He's got a handful of devices, maybe two handfuls of devices for wireless and another handful of wired clients. He says, I've heard you recommending the Synology RT-2600 AC as the best standalone router. He says, my house is probably not big enough to justify mesh. He says, I've already got a Synology Disk Station so the ability to run packages in the router really doesn't add much functionality for me, which I agree with. He says, do you reckon the upgrade from the Netgear Nighthawk AC-1900 to the Synology RT-2600 AC is worth doing? And so my question here is, and I do still stand by, like my recommendation hasn't changed, my favorite standalone router by far is the Synology. Really, it's a fantastic router that RT-2600 AC. However, for Ian, my question back to you would be what problem or problems are you looking to solve or perhaps look at a little differently? What capabilities are you looking to add? The answer to the latter I think is none because you already have this DS718 Plus so you can do inbound VPN, you can do Synology Drive or Cloud Station, you can do all those things that the router would also let you do. So I guess my question is, is there a problem? If the problem is Wi-Fi range, speed, or coverage, the RT-2600 AC's additional radios, because remember that's a 4x4 router, not a 3x3, might help quite a bit. That's, I mean, it's a really strong router. So there you go, but I don't think that's your problem because if it was, you'd probably would have said, maybe I need mesh because I don't have good coverage, right? And maybe you did or maybe you didn't. But he didn't say that. So I don't, like upgrading for the sake of upgrading because objectively this is a more capable device. If you don't need any of those capabilities, I would say no, stick with what you have, ride it out until such time as you do need some capabilities and reevaluate, you know, based on what's available in the market then. That would be my thought, John. I concur. Although, so if you look at the numbers here, AC-1900 versus 2600. Okay, so obviously the 2600 has more capabilities, but as you pointed out, is there a problem you're trying to solve, right? Unless you're not getting enough, you know, if you're streaming something or whatever, if you're, if it's stuttering and it's getting pixelated and stuff like that, that would be the only reason, you know, as I guess you pointed out is that you don't have enough oomph and you need more oomph, in which case maybe it does make sense to upgrade your, your base station, but because it's the same class, I think that's cool. Yeah. All right. I think it's, it's those two are probably unlikely. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, they're both AC. I mean, the thing is, my, my, my sister, they, they had some catastrophe and the thing is they had an 802.11n Wi-Fi and I'm like, you know what? I think there's something wrong with it. Get an AC and they were like, oh my gosh, like the speeds are so much better. I'm like, yeah. So if you're upgrading from a prior standard, yeah, I would say that you should probably do, but within the same space. Yeah. Yeah. No, I totally, yes, exactly. Yeah. It doesn't, doesn't sound like for Ian that this is something that, that he would, that he really needs. I don't think you'd notice a difference to me, to be perfectly honest. I think you're going to be fine. But, you know, I do, like I said, that, that RT2600 AC, if you're looking for a new router and you, you don't need anything like a mesh system, even if you do right now, Synology has their mesh and you can add things to their mesh. You can even get the MR2200 AC, that's their mesh router, which can be a mesh point for the main Synology router, or it can be a router all by itself. So that's, it's a little, a little less expensive way to get into Synology and you get a tri-band router with that MR2200 AC. So that's also not a bad router to consider. In fact, there's probably some segment of the population for whom I would recommend that instead of the RT2600. So lots of options out there, but Synology is doing a good job in the standalone router market for sure, for sure. You know, we have a few more Wi-Fi questions to answer, John, but first, but first, if it's okay with you, I'd like to talk about our, our next two sponsors. Okay. All right. I'd like to thank HairClub for being a sponsor of Matt Geekyeb today. I know what you're thinking, what does HairClub have to do with Matt Geekyeb? We asked this question too, because we want to have sponsors that fit for you. And as I learn more about HairClub and who they can help the most and how they can help, it became obvious why they were interested here in Matt Geekyeb and how much of a great fit it really is. Look, confidence is important. We know that, right? We talk a lot about that on this show by way of making sure you know what you're doing when you're doing things. And sometimes one change can make all the difference, and HairClub knows this. And that's why they're inviting you to become part of the HairClub family to see how getting the most out of your hair can change your life. 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No matter what kind of software your business needs, right, Captera makes it easy to discover the right solution quickly. You put in what you're looking for and they've got it, right? And they tell you all about it so you're not having to test a million things yourself. Right, we do this here on the show. We have, like, cool stuff found. Captera is full of cool stuff found. That's what they have. So check it out. Join the millions of people who use Captera each month to find the right tools for their businesses. Visit captera.com-mgg today for free. And you can find the right tools to make 2019 the year for your business. Again, it's all free. Captera.com-mgg. Captera. That's C-A-P-T-E-R-R-A.com-mgg. Just go. It's free. And you can support the show while doing it. Captera.com-mgg are thanks to Captera for sponsoring this episode. All right, John. I think it's time to talk to Dan. A different Dan. But Dan nonetheless, because Dan asks. Back to the Wi-Fi. He says, here's my situation. I'm running an Apple time capsule, one of those 802.11c models, 802.11ac models, along with an airport express. The express, he says, appears to have given up the ghost and died. I tried resetting it, but it doesn't seem to power up. The time capsule is still running fine. In looking at extenders to replace the express, I was looking at a Netgear one, as well as one from D-Link. Would it work well to mix brands between the main base station and an extender? Or would that be difficult to set up? He says, I like the airport stuff due to accessibility and ease of use of airport utilities. He says, I'm a voiceover user, so I wouldn't want to get something that was horribly inaccessible with a web interface to administer it, or that had a horribly inaccessible web interface. Some web interfaces are great. He says, if you think it'd be best to replace everything with a mesh solution, which out of the mesh solutions would you recommend? I know you've tested them all, so I figured I'd reach out and ask. Okay, so a few questions sort of baked in here that walk us down our Wi-Fi path today. As far as mixing brands, it's generally fine. It's all Wi-Fi, so as long as you're buying an extender and not something geared only for a specific mesh system, but as long as you're buying an extender that's built to extend any network, it's going to work. Now, let's narrow that down a little bit. Some stuff, like the new Nighthawk mesh line from Netgear, is interesting. It'll join and help any Wi-Fi network, but it also tries to add some meshing smarts as best it can to it, keeping the same SSID as we talked about before, trying to do some intelligent steering of the clients again as best it can. And if your original router were a Netgear, Nighthawk, mesh-capable router, then suddenly it would become much more like a full-blown mesh system, which is cool. As for whether a full-blown mesh system is better for you, it's hard to say. It would certainly give you a single interface from which to manage everything. That's one of the big benefits of mesh. And objectively, that's better in most cases. You might like the level of configurability on your current network, and going to a mesh or any other router would change that with more or less configurability, depending on what you choose. And it's different. Change is change. So there you go. I think you're going to be fine. As far as extenders go, Ubiquiti has their consumer mesh line that they call Amplify, A-M-P-L-I-F-I. And I really like what they've done with that. I mean, they've been doing that for several years. It's not a new thing. But they do have these what they call their mesh point HD units that plug directly into the wall and are extenders for any network, not just theirs. So this would work for you. And it does start to add some of that meshing stuff to it and works fairly well. It may or may not be the thing that you want. You might want something with Ethernet ports. Those don't have them. So that might not be the thing. But you know, there you go. Thoughts on that, John? I've actually had hands-on. I haven't had hands-on with Necure D-Link extenders, but I have had hands-on experience. And I think you even brought me one time, a TP-Link one. So check them out also. They have a pretty wide variety of extenders. Yeah. Yeah, it's true. But I agree with you that a basic extender, as long as we're talking AC, because I think if it's anything pre-AC, the chatter or efficiency is just not going to cut it. Whereas an AC solution, extender solution, is probably what you're looking for. Yeah. Or mesh. But again, that entails a, I would say, replacing what died with an extender is something to try. And they're not terribly expensive. They're, I mean, they're a hundred bucks or something, or a couple hundred bucks maybe. Yeah, it's true. And that's the thing, right? If you were to jump to a full-blown mesh system right now, you would be adding a substantial cost to what you're talking about here. Like you said, you're looking at 100, less than 150 bucks to get a decent 802.11 AC extender, maybe even less than 100 bucks. Going to a mesh system, you're at least 200, probably closer to 3, 350 by the time all of a sudden done. So, yeah, I would, you know, the one thing you could do, well, you know, you could buy one of those Amplify HD mesh points, right? That will work with this. And then when it's time to replace your router, you could replace it with the Amplify mesh router. And now, you know, you're sort of piece-mealing yourself into this realm. You could do the same thing with the Netgear Nighthawk mesh stuff. Buy a Nighthawk mesh extender, do that. Then when it's time, you replace your router with a Nighthawk mesh capable router. And now, you know, you've sort of, you know, baby stepping yourself into that ecosystem without wasting any money and having to throw away this extender because you're replacing it. You know, I don't know. There you go. Right. I think that's that. Last week, John, I talked about the beginnings of my experience here with Unify, which is sort of the prosumer level of ubiquities mesh products. And when I test a new mesh system here, what I like to do is the first thing I do is I set it up as what I call double NAT, right? Where I let it be its own router and it controls its own mesh points. But it's a subnetwork of my local network, right? I don't connect the family to it. I just connect my devices to it. I let it be in this double NAT scenario where I have two routers, you know, one running under the other. And it's good because I can test it without screwing everybody else up too much. And then step two is usually promoting it up one level and being my family's Wi-Fi for everything. But I do that by putting the router in bridge mode so that I don't have to, you know, once a week reprogram my router, you know, and put a completely new router in place for my entire network. I leave these days, it's the Synology, the RT2600AC, that's the router that manages my network. And then all of my mesh stuff lives, you know, kind of below that in bridge mode. And so it was time to promote this Unify thing up, John, to bridge mode. But the Unify Security Gateway, which is the router, I mentioned this is a modular system, right? Where you've got the router is one thing, the mesh points are another, the switch is another, and then the remote access controller that is the interface for everything is yet another device. And I looked into this and you cannot put the Security Gateway, the router, into bridge mode. And you can, but it requires like a lot of terminal foo and it just seemed a little bit like, whoa, and I don't know that I want to do that. I thought, wow, crap, that sucks. What am I going to do? I really want to test, you know, the rest of this stuff. And then it hit me, John, as I was, you know, like, I don't know, doing the dishes or driving or one of those things where you're not really thinking in your mind, gets to kind of do some work on its own in the background, you know? And it hit me. It was like, wait a minute, we talk here on the show all the time, what is bridge mode? Right? Well, bridge mode is when, you know, we always say that your router, in most cases, not with Unify, but in most cases, your router is a three-in-one device, right? It's a switch, right? It's an ethernet switch. It is a wireless access point and it's a router, right? It takes your signal from the outside world and routes it to these other devices on the inside world. Well, with Unify, everything is separate. And when we put something in bridge mode, like, you know, a normal router, when we do that, essentially what we're doing is we're turning off one of those three functions, right? We're turning off the router function and leaving the switch and the access points, the wireless access points, on. Like, well, wait a minute, I know how to do that. I can just turn off the router. Like, it's literally a separate device. That's bridge mode. So that's what I did. And that's what's running in my house now. It worked totally fine. Everything else worked. You know, the controller device was like, yeah, no problem. And it's great. And so I've been testing that and actually very happy with it. I was, I got some Wi-Fi speeds that blew me away. I think I sent you a speed test, John, that was like, what, 520 megabits per second on my iPhone or something, which is... Down. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, it's pretty smoking. At 40 up, which is pretty good in this stage. 40 up is what my cable company gives me. Yeah, but being, well, I mean... No, I got the same. On Ethernet, I get 1,000 down. But with Wi-Fi, getting anything over 500 on my 2x2 device on my iPhone is pretty, that's pretty strong. So... Oh, absolutely. Yeah. Because that's your limitation is the... Correct. The streams. Correct. The number of streams. That's it. The radio's in the iPhone. And in this case, you are crossing the streams. That's the idea. You want to combine them even. Yeah. Right. So, listener Keith, he had sent it like a few days before I had this, you know, this realization, Keith had sent in a big long message to us about Unify. And I saw it come in. I'm like, oh, I got to read that. And so I did read it this weekend. And I wish I had read it earlier because of course he explained all of this. He's like, dude, just turn off the router, you're fine. But Keith actually offers a different perspective on Unify in general that I thought would be very helpful because we talked about it last week. And, you know, we started doing the math and it was like, wow, it's like $600 to get here. Well, Keith points out. I installed a couple of Unify access points in my home roughly two years ago and I've been very happy with them. He says, I have one in my radio shack and one downstairs. And between them, they give excellent coverage. He said one would probably have been enough, but two is always better than one. Right? He says, however, I have been able to save some cash compared to the setup you described. He says, I don't own a Unify security gateway, the router, because as you suggested, it's just a router. He says, I use my Netgear router with the inbuilt Wi-Fi switched off. He said, it's literally providing a connection between my cable modem and my access points. He says, it could be providing DHCP, but that's where the other cost saving comes in. He says, I also don't have a cloud key. That's the device that provides a controller for the Unify network. He said, instead, I'm running the Unify controller software on a Raspberry Pi, which works perfectly. It sits in my shack and just percolates along doing what it has to do. He says, it's also configured as my DHCP server for the entire network. He says, of course, I could have lifted CP on in my router, but I like to tinker. And he talks about how he has his SSIDs set the same on the two access points. His clients swap seamlessly between them. He also has a guest wireless network configured with a different SSID, which is isolated and has around 10% of the bandwidth allocated to it. That is one of the cool things about Unify is you can really control things. I wanted to have one network that was only coming from one of the three access points that I have, because I really wanted to test something and I wanted to know, can I get to this one access point from other places? So I just added a second wireless network to my Unify setup. And I said, only assign it to that access point and only assign it on the 5 GHz band, not the 2.4. And it's like, okay, no problem. Super flexible, because it is that prosumer kind of enterprise-ish kind of stuff. He says, I've effectively reduced the cost massively by not buying a Cloud Key or a Security Gateway. All I had to buy, he says, were two access points. And I downloaded the software and put it on my Raspberry Pi. And he says, I love this setup. So very cool. It's just an interesting way of thinking with all this stuff that's modular. You don't have to have it all. You can buy the modules that work for you. So thanks for sharing that, Keith. It's a good perspective on this kind of different take on a mesh setup. So pretty good, huh, John? Yeah. So I want it all. Do you? I don't know. Like I have that Security Gateway turned off right now. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know. It's interesting. Then things are working. It's right. I'm actually kind of liking it. It would be nice to have my router in the same interface. That would be good. But I don't know. I don't know. Honestly, I think the Synology router is more capable for us home users than the Unify Security Gateway is in terms of the VPN options that can come in and the Cloud Station and all of that stuff. It's interesting. All right. Interesting question from listener Eric, using Powerline. It says, I've decided to go solar this year. My system will have a control box that collects data and uploads it to the solar company's website so that production statistics can be tracked. I believe my Wi-Fi single signal is strong enough to reach the exterior control box, but for a stronger, more consistent connection, the design team would like to install a Powerline adapter near my router connected to my router by an Ethernet cable. What network safety and privacy am I giving up by allowing the Powerline adapter to be attached to my router via Ethernet? Would I give up less network safety and privacy if it was a Wi-Fi type thing or if the control box was connected by Wi-Fi without that? What would you recommend? This is a good question. So, is the proposal to have a physical connection to the control box instead of a Wi-Fi connection? Yeah, they want a physical connection. Okay, they're proposing that. A physical connection over Powerline to this box. Yeah. I mean, I think they would prefer a straight Ethernet cable, but that doesn't exist. So, in lieu of that, I think they're saying, yeah, just use Powerline that way. It's still a wired connection, albeit, you know, with Powerline in the middle. And so, security-wise, it's an interesting question, right? Because the risk with Powerline is that by default, once you have one Powerline device plugged into your network, it means that any Powerline device that is plugged into your house's electrical system would be able to see all your Ethernet data. And all is this. Right. Okay, so the risk is, and to me, I would say the risk assessment here is very low, is like, if you've got people plugging into your wall to try to monitor your network traffic, you have bigger problems than network security. That would be my feeling. Like, if somebody's running around inside my house with a Powerline adapter, the fact that they have the Powerline adapter is sort of, you know, we're talking about deck chairs on the Titanic here, right? There's other problems. The thing is, I do have, and you probably do as well, so the thing is, I do have a power, a plug on my deck, which is outside. So in theory, somebody could, while it's on my property, and if I had Powerline and it's on the same branch, could plug in and could monitor my traffic if security was not enabled. But I guess that's- But that's the trick. I don't want to steal the computer here. No, no, you're absolutely right. No, you're painting the right picture, because that is a reasonable assumption. All Powerline traffic is encrypted, but it uses the default encryption path. Yeah, so it's all encrypted, but everybody has the same password, unless you change that. And you can force your Powerline units to change it. You get them all plugged in. So in Eric's case, you'd plug two in. So when you set up one, I've never done Powerline, but I'm going to assume that when you set one up, at some point it'll say, hey, would you like to have a password applied? Or maybe there's a default. Yeah, I think you were saying this, so sorry. No, it's okay. There's probably a default password that'll provide a level of encryption, but I think as you're suggesting changing that password is probably a good idea. Yeah, but it's not obvious that any of this is happening, because generally speaking, when you install Powerline, there's zero software, right? You just plug the things in and they do their magic. That's it. It's because they're both using the default password. On each Powerline unit, generally, there's a little button, and you can push the button on one and put it into security mode, and then go to the other one within 30 seconds and push its button. And now between the two of them, or if there's three or four in your house, whatever it is, they will negotiate their own key that is now unique to your house or randomized and presumably unique to your house, and then you're good to go. And if you plug in a third one, or in Eric's case, it wouldn't be able to see any of that traffic because it's using a different encryption key. So that's the solution. In general, I wouldn't worry about it, but to your point, John, you might have an outlet outside that someone could poke into or whatever. So there you go. No, I'm with you. Actually, I would think in almost every case, I would trust the physical connection versus a wireless connection as far as potential for being exploited. Yeah, well, yeah, I mean, I think Wi-Fi's encryption is probably stronger. Like WPA2 is stronger than PowerLines, I think, but in general. The thing is, when I was in the corporate space, I always thought it was hilarious is that they had all this focus on Wi-Fi security and we did a Cisco infrastructure, but we had ethernet ports in every office. It's like, if I was going to attack somebody, I'd plug into the wall because typically, I mean, there is software that can manage physical connections and say, oh, you're not on the list, so I'm not going to authorize you to get on the network, but that's atypical from what I've seen. Most of the time, hey, you plug in the ethernet, you're good to go, you get an address and you can see, depending on how they're set up, you can see traffic and monitor traffic. My daughter, she goes to the University of New Hampshire here now and in the dorms, they have Wi-Fi everywhere, but of course, she has to authenticate through a captive portal kind of thing with her student ID and all that stuff. If she, what's that? Yeah, no, I get it. Okay, if she connects to ethernet and there are ethernet ports in the rooms that most people don't use, if she connects to ethernet, she also has to authenticate through the captive portal. Really? Yeah, which means if like for kids that want to use like an Amazon A-Lady or a Google Assistant device or some people want to run their own routers and kids do for perhaps gaming systems or whatever, you have to call campus, whatever, IT services, whatever they call it, and give them the MAC address of this device that you're going to plug in and then they go in and assign it to your account and allow it to just be used without having to, because you can't get an Amazon Echo unit to go through the captive portal, right? Like there's no interface for that. So they just have to authenticate it on the back end. They put it in and you're good to go. Yeah, yeah. So there are some kids that use, that just put routers in their room and that way it's nice. If like if you wanted to use an Apple TV or something like that, you can because otherwise if you put your Apple TV on the main campus network, well, now everybody gets to see your Apple TV. That may or may not be what you wanted, yes, or a network printer, right? Same kind of thing. So it's like, yeah, all right. Interesting, interesting. Speaking of paying for college and really just helping support the show in general, I want to thank all of our premium supporters that have whose contributions have come in throughout the week. Of course, our premium program was created, well really in response to those of you that wanted to find an additional way to help support us here and we are ever so thankful it really does help. And we do some things for our premium listeners, including probably the thing that most people like, well maybe the second to just that warm fuzzy feeling you get from supporting your two favorite geeks is our premium at macgeekyeb.com email address that gets prioritized when your emails come in. On our monthly $10 plan, in the last week I would like to shout out thanks to REL Michael P. Barry F. Bob L. Timothy G. Jeff P. John D. Santiago M. and John V. And our biannual plan, which is 25 every six months by default, Elliot G. Kevin S. Jim M. J. Richard F. Harry M. Mike P. David R. Tom M. Jr. Matthias S. at $30 every six months. Dimitri S. Andrew T. Thank you to all of you. You rock. All right, John, we've got some time here. How about we answer some questions, shall we? Some non-Wi-Fi questions, yeah. Alan writes, he says, I'm looking for your recommendations on a specific model flash drive that has both a USB-C and a USB-A connector on it. He says, I plan to use it as a boot disk for a wide range of computers at work that may need OSs reinstalled, utilities done, etc. He says, I plan to make several partitions on it and make it make bootable installers of different versions of macOS, etc., etc. The good question. So it's interesting. In researching this, I found a few things, John. Really three things that I'm going to talk about here. I'm curious, of course, if anybody has any ideas. But the first two are just USB flash drives, 128 gigs, right? And the first one looks like a normal USB stick, but it has two ends to it. And one end is USB-A, and the other end is USB-C. And it's 30 bucks for 128 gigs for a flash drive. And reviews look okay on it at Amazon. I'll put a link in the show notes. So there you go. Right? Thoughts on that, John? You know? Pretty good. I'm going to wait until you finish. Okay. All right. You're going to... Okay. I have some thoughts, but I want you to... All right. So I'll put them both in the... They're basically the same thing. One has like a swivel cover on it, and the other just has like the little removable covers. So I will put them both in the show notes. And then my... And I think the second one that I found is... Let me look here and just make sure I get the pricing right. The first one was 30 bucks for 128 gigs. This one's $36 for 128 gigs. So same kind of thing. And actually this other one also has a micro USB port, like the USB-A port. It's worth looking. It's Sunswain branded. And you like open... You flip open the USB-A port, and it has a little micro USB port inside it. I've never seen anything like this, but it looks like it would work. So anyway, there's that. And then lastly, but certainly not leastly, and perhaps the best solution, or at least the best I came up with. Oh, now I am waiting with the Antissa patient here is the Amazon Basics USB Type-C to USB 3.1 Gen 1 female adapter, which is a long way of saying it has a USB-C port on one end that you could plug into a computer and a female USB-A port on the other. So you get a USB-A flash drive or external SSD, and you use this cable to convert between A and C depending on whatever computer you're plugging into. And that opens up the world of possibilities to you all for just eight bucks. So I think number three is what I would go with in this scenario. But, you know, there you go. What do you have, John? Well, I'm with you in that the first two devices that you find and, you know, congrats for finding them. But these are companies that I've never heard of. I mean, it's 30 bucks. Well, but they're flash drives. Like it doesn't really matter like flash drives or flash drives. We all use flash drives. We don't even know the vendor, right? I get it. But I concur with you is that I think the Amazon converter, which is also Amazon's choice, and also it's $7.99. So I mean, yeah. Yeah, I would go with that for flexibility. I'd rather not tie myself into a device from a company that I'm not familiar with. Yeah, yeah. Amazon Basics, anything I've got from Amazon Basics and especially it says Amazon's choice, I've never gone wrong with getting something under those banners. I agree with that. I agree with that. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, although with a flash drive, I mean, so many of us use, you know, we repurpose a flash drive that we got it, you know, some trade show or whatever. And who knows what brand that is, right? Like, it doesn't even have a bit. Well, I know what brand name it has on it, but it has nothing to do with the company that made the flash drive. It's whoever gave it to me, you know. I literally gave probably like you have cupfuls of flash drives. I try and give them away as fast as I can. And I still always have like 30 of them. So yeah, I have hundreds. And the thing is I'm actually, and I've talked to some vendors about this, it will be wonderful if I could take all of the flash drives that I have from all the vendors that have given them to me and make them into some sort of huge array. You can. Why couldn't you? I haven't seen. It would need a USB dock with enough ports to accept hundreds of. Yeah, but think about that. And I don't have to raid and stitch them together. Yeah, but Apple's software would do that, right? So you could do this and they make those USB ports or those USB hubs that were for like the Bitcoin miners that have like 30. You know, it's powered USB for like 30 things. That might like you might be able to do that would be an interesting thing because on their own, they're all really slow, right? But if you've got 30 of them, you might actually get some decent speed out of it. Dude, oh, yeah, if you raid them. Yeah, exactly. I got one gig, two gig, four gig, maybe eight gig. Yeah. I probably have a terabyte of USB storage stored and it's just. And think about the fault tolerance, right? If one of them dies, so I throw it away. It doesn't matter. Just put another plug another one in. Huh. This could be an interesting thing, John. All right. I now I have a mission. I may have a personal I may have a personal project. My mission is to make sure you do this project. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Well, I've approached vendors and I'm like like Lexar one time. I saw they have something that's kind of like this, but it only has a limited number of ports. And I was like, why don't you make one that has like hundreds of USB ports and they're like, go away. Yeah. No, no, no. Yeah. Yeah. You want like a 30 port USB hub, right? I'm searching Amazon. Okay. I found a 10 port hub for 40 bucks. I found a 28 port hub, John. Here it is. 30. All right. We're getting there because there has to be because 60 ports, John. All right. Now we're talking. All right. Send me the link or something. I may do it in the show notes. I may rate it. I may get one of the how much is it? 109 bucks. Okay. It's got a huge fan in it, man. You got to check this thing out. I'm going to try. I think I'm going to try it. 60 port. That's crazy. All right. Well, but wait a minute. Wait a minute. Wait. This one, this is not a hub. This is a charging station. So this won't do what you need. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But it certainly looks impressive. I'm still putting it in the show notes because of, you know, obviously. Yeah. Okay. No, the Bitcoin miners use it. So it's a mass charging station. Is that it? Well, it's a power station, right? So the Bitcoin miners use these to power their Raspberry Pis that as a cluster can, you know, could. I don't know if the people still do it this way. But yeah, yeah, yeah. All right. That's not it. Dang it. That's okay. Let's wrap things up. Why? This is such a fun little tangent to be down here though, John. We got to find this one. I'll do more research. Okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. You want to bring us to Andrew, John? I'm going to bring us to Andrew because he asks a very good question and he actually introduces. I'm actually kind of disappointed we haven't had a fish shake yet in the show. Oh, all right. But this is a fish shake. And Andrew says, hi, Dave and John. Am I going insane or just not with it? As I don't think the purchase category exists in the Mac App Store in Mojave. I wanted to read download apps I previously purchased and think I must have missed something. It's probably right in front of my eyes. Well, not really. But I will agree with you, Andrew, in that you're right. There is not an explicit purchased category. You think it'd be listed in the store menu. So if you access the App Store, there's a store menu and it has a whole bunch of choices that pretty much mirror what you see in the UI. But there is a way to get to this. And I actually had to dig as well. And I was actually kind of surprised when I ran the App Store. And I'm like, where the heck's the purchase stuff? He's right. Here's what you want to do. You want to go to either store and then there's a view my account menu. And if you go to that, and there's another way to get to it. There's also, if you open the App Store in the latest Mac OS, you're going to see in the lower left hand corner, your iCloud avatar and the amount of money that you have in your account, which is good to know. You click on that, that gets into the same place. And if you go to the same place, Dave, it's the account page, but you know what's in the account page? Your purchase list. How stupid is that? I'm sorry. Now, the other thing is that if you're in the App Store, you will see is that if you hover over to the right of the app, you're going to get, I guess, the equivalent of a share menu. And it's going to say, oh, you can hide purchase. You can copy the link to it and things like that. But basically, I would agree that this UI, it's a UI oversight. It's like, why did you move something that I already know about? It is weird. And in iOS, like something similar happened, right? In order to see your purchases, especially if you have a family account, you have to go to, you know, like you tap on your name, like you go to updates and then tap on your picture and then you can go to purchase, right? And then dig further and further in from there. Yeah, I'm with you. It is kind of weird. Yeah. I mean, it's like iTunes. Every now and then iTunes. It's like, where's the thing that I used to see in the sidebar? Why did you hide that? So, yeah. And I drove back and basically shook his fist saying, why are they doing this? To me, it doesn't, well, you know, I'll have to say, they made, on the one hand, they made the Mac App Store similar to the iOS App Store. And that, you know, you got the same progress icons and kind of looks the same. And that's a pretty recent change. But so maybe it's not, so maybe to your point, it is consistent with what they did on iOS. At some point they decided we got to take that step, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, the Mac App Store is definitely more iOS-like than it used to be. That is true. Yeah, huh. Yeah, yeah, you're right. Like, if we go with the iOSification to steal Ted Landau's term, that now it actually makes more sense. Yeah, yeah. So, it's in the speedbar. Yeah, it's there. Okay, yeah, I'm with you. Yeah, yeah. I also found you a 28 port hub for 65 bucks. So, I'll put that link in the show notes. Like, this might be your thing. And it shows a couple of USB thumb drives plugged into it. So, like, this is good. This is good. Hey, that's the dream. I want to plug all my thumb drives into something and access them as a huge. Yo, just Jbottom, right? Don't even worry about rating them. Just Jbottom and see what happens, right? Don't worry about fault tolerance. Just like, you know, boom, there you go. Uh, crazy. In the forums, we had someone and I'm pulling it up here. So, I'll tell you their name in a minute. We had United 9198. Right. I'm running high Sierra on my Mac and suddenly my Safari app will not retain my home page setting and keeps reverting to the default Apple website. I've tried everything I can think of and have been unable to come up with a way to fix this. I even created a new admin identity and tried that without success. Upgrading to Mojave is currently off the table. Okay. This is interesting, right? Like, if it, even if it were just in a user account, I'd still be worried. But in a system-wide sense, I'm especially worried. And the reason I'm worried is because one of the attack vectors for malware is your home page. And the reason for this, a lot of people set their home page to Google, right? Or something and if a malware vendor creates a home page that looks close enough to Google's, you know, home page, you'll use that and you might search for stuff and they might even send you to different places. But they might be sending you to places where they have baked in, you know, affiliate codes or other things that earn this malware vendor money. And, you know, when you multiply that by tens of thousands of computers of unsuspecting users, then you might actually, you know, make some, you know, you might make some real money with this. There's a reason for it. The fact that your home page keeps changing and the fact that it keeps changing even with another admin account makes me a little concerned. I would download and run malware bites just to make sure that you are not subject to some poorly written malware that's trying to change Safari's home page failing and causing Safari to reset to its default, which is Apple. So the good news is whatever's happening, it's not malware like or the malware people aren't winning even if it is malware. But you probably want to scan your system and make sure that you don't have some malware on there. That's one of those things. So the reason I wanted to include it in the show is so that everybody can kind of remember that that home page location is in many cases of target vector for an attack vector for malware. Just like we talked in a couple episodes ago about profiles being another attack vector, this is one as well. So check that out. Thoughts on that, John? We think alike because that was my same concern is if your home page is changing and you didn't do it, then somebody else did. Right. Yeah, probably. And that's a common thing. They'll direct you to a page where they get money for clicks and stuff like that, as I think you suggested. So yeah. Malware bites I think would be the first place to start. Yeah, I run malware bites once a week and let it scan all my computers. And thus far, it hasn't found anything on mine, but that doesn't stop me from running it once a week. Do I? Well, no, I have it too. It's part of Eero. So Eero Plus offers you malware bites, the super duper version. Right. I don't like malware bites running in the background. So I don't have the real time thing running. So you do the manual. Okay. Well, so we talked earlier in this episode about keyboard maestro being the future of automation on the Mac. I wrote a keyboard maestro macro that triggers at 8 30 a.m. on Sunday morning and it launches malware bites, waits a few seconds, clicks the button that says scan now and scans my computer. And it's weird on the computer in the studio, it works flawlessly. On the computer in the office, I would say it works 50 percent of the time. But in either case, I do not have it, then quit malware bites. So I, when I launched the computer either later on Sunday morning or at any point on Monday, I see the malware bites window there and it shows me when it was last scanned. So if the office, it doesn't say last scanned yesterday at 8 30 a.m. Well, I can click the scan now button and then it scans for me on Monday morning. So it's all good. Yeah. Yeah. I guess my only reservation is that as you recall in the past, they had a little problem with the massive memory leak with their real-time stuff. That's why I don't like the real-time stuff. I mean, their memory leak not withstanding real-time. And choose processor, I think, as well. They use this disk space. They're disk, yeah, time. So, yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. So I think I get your strategy of doing it manually rather than enabling it. Look, if I was running an OS like Windows where, no, no, seriously, like where that is far more of a concern, you know, it's far more likely that I would have gotten malware, then I would probably sacrifice some CPU and disk usage to, you know, to running the real-time scanning. I'm not at that point yet, right? As long as I'm scanning once a week, if I'm not finding anything at all or if I'm finding something once a year, I'm okay. You know, but as soon as it gets to the point where it's like, oh, yeah, I know, I'll make that trade-off. So that's my logic anyway. So I just want to know, you know, so there you go. That's the thing is we want to know and we want to learn at least five new things. I hope you have learned your minimum quota of the week, the five new things. Did you learn your minimum quota? I did, John. I'm pretty sure, yeah. Yeah, that's how it works. I love it. It's great. I love what we do here. Yeah, but there's some other things I want to know, Dave. I mean, I know the email address. Both of them, in fact. Yeah. Yeah, both of them. But there may be some other things about the podcast that some people only want to know about. Well, I'm going to tell you what they are, Dave. Okay. So, there's this Twitter thing. And on Twitter, I am John O'Pron. He is Dave Hamilton. The podcast is Mackie Gab. The publication is Mack Observer and that guy who's flying around somewhere That's Pilot Pete. It's Pilot Pete. All on Twitter.com. So, check us on that every now and then. We get some good tips and then interactions with the Twitters, even though you're only 240 characters, right? That's right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Double what it started as. So, there you go. Or double what it was when we started, I should say, to be more accurate. Yeah. Yeah. All right. Well, thanks for listening, folks. Make sure to tell all your friends about the show. And I don't just say that off-handedly. Like, that actually, the word of mouth or word of the keyboard is one of the biggest and most effective ways that we can grow our audience. So, if you like what's going on here, share the show with your friends. It really, really makes a difference. It's a good thing. Thanks for listening. Thanks for sending in all your questions and your tips and everything. It really, like, we're a community here and it's the only way that if we weren't, if it was just me and John, it would literally be just me and John. But it's not. Thank goodness, right? It's all of us. And you are a huge part of that. So keep doing what you're doing and do more of it. It's awesome. I want to thank Cashfly for providing all the bandwidth to get the show from us to you. Of course, I want to thank all of our sponsors in the episode. We had Jamf. Jamf now, actually at jamf.com.mgg, hairclub.com.mgg, capterra.com.mgg. And of course, in our podcast marketplace, smilesoftware.com. Slash podcast, other world computing at maxales.com and barebonessoftware, barebones.com. Thank you so much for listening, folks. Thank you for why I already thank you for everything. I'm going to give you some lasting advice. And that lasting advice is don't get.