 The Mac Observers' Mac Geekab episode 794 for Monday, December 23rd, 2019. And if you're listening on Monday the 23rd, happy Festivus to all of you and welcome to The Mac Observers' Mac Geekab, the show where we take all of your questions, tips, cool stuff found, pretty much anything that comes in and process it, formulate it, hone it into an agenda so that for today we can have a Festivus for the geeks in us. And that'll start with some cool stuff found because we love cool stuff found and then we will have an airing of the grievances because mail provides for such a platform these days, but then regular questions of course and tips and all kinds of things and even the mail brand I think will have a little bit of help and tips because you know we all have to learn every time we get together each of us needs five new things. Sponsors for this episode include Linode at linode.com slash mgg or promo code mgg2019 gets you 20 bucks to start. We'll talk about why you want to do that shortly here but for now here in what has become quite frigid Durham, New Hampshire, I'm Dave Hamilton. And here in fearful Connecticut, this is John Efron. How are you doing Mr. John Efron today? Good. We're actually thrown out today. It's finally above freezing. It was kind of neat. So we had like a ice storm but not bad enough that it was like taking trees down everywhere. I think some places it was but it was actually really pretty but then as it started getting above freezing, the trees in the power lines were hurling ice missiles, little ice missiles of the cars. It was kind of fun driving around and all of a sudden here. You have an odd definition of fun my friend. That scares the heck out of me when there's ice missiles. That's bad, right? Well actually one of my pals actually had their windshield broken. They were driving on I-84 and I think one flew off of a truck and shattered his windshield. Remember to brush off your cars people otherwise you're going to you could hurt other drivers. That's bad. Yeah, there you go. Well, you see there's your PSA for the day. There we go. We will start with cool stuff found as I promised listener Chris reminds us of one that I think we've mentioned before but it's been a number of years and that is cheat sheet which is a great little overlay you hold down the command when you have this running in any app you hold down the command key like you would to say invoke perhaps command C for copy but just hold it down a little bit longer don't hold down the C with it like you're going to copy just hold down the command key and up will pop an active a list like an overlay of all of the command key shortcuts for the current application super simple super handy and that way you don't have to go digging through the menus to see what each of them can do it's all just going to be right there and that's from media atelier and we will of course link to it in the show notes because that makes life way easier for all of us and you can get the show notes delivered to your email every week that just go visit macgeekgab.com put your email address into the form and boom you're good to go it's free and you know it gets them all right in your email and we well as long as you don't consider that spam because that's what you're signing up for we don't spam you so you know there you go yeah I remember mentioning that one long ago long ago searched for it on my machine and I don't see it but it says it works on 1010 or greater so yeah yeah all right cool thank you Chris I can finally mention my favorite current favorite travel power adapter or power brick well it's this thing from anchor that I've had actually for several months it hasn't been embargoed or anything it just hasn't been available so I didn't want to tell you about it without you being able to order it it's called the anchor power port atom three slim and what it is is it it's this little little little thing it's it's it's about the thickness of your iPhone and it's square but not nearly as wide as your iPhone right so and it's got three usb a ports and a usbc port with 45 watts worth of power delivery on it and then it plugs into the wall super lightweight it has lived in my travel bag but of course it would be very much at home on your desk or you know on your bedside table or whatever anywhere you need to charge a lot of stuff but for me for traveling this is fantastic because I just throw this into my travel bag and it's all I need because I can charge my laptop with it and I can charge all of my usb devices and it provides plenty of power because it's anchor and so every port has power IQ and it does the right amount of power and yeah it's fantastic I've been super happy with it and I've been bummed every week for the last several weeks because I haven't been able to mention it because it hasn't been available but now it is it's on amazon for $54 as of today anyway so and they've got them in stock so there you go it's a pretty good thing John and I think I would have to assume it takes advantage of the gallium nitrite technology to be as thin and powerful as it is but but I but that's just me presuming whatever it is it's thin and it is yeah it's instead of using silicon mentions it yeah gallium nitride nitride thank you yeah yeah that's what makes all these new especially power delivery chargers thin and lightweight is is that so it's it's awesome love this thing so gotta check it out good yeah all right cool and then from listener Julie we were talking we have been talking about various different screenshot tools that let you screenshot an entire web page as one pdf as opposed to having to do you know a screenshot of the window then scroll down then another screenshot another screenshot and she found a chrome extension that she says she's been using for years called blip shot that does this same thing and it's built right into chrome so thank you Julie and we'll put a link to that in the show notes any thoughts about that my friend mr brawn no no it's cool all right it's good from listener craig he says it was interesting to hear the discussion that Julie in fact posed in episode 792 how to hook up dual monitors on a macbook equipped with thunderbolt 3 ports via usbc like you i was thinking what is the complication it should just work not knowing why she was having difficulty he says my first thought was if it doesn't just work which i think it does there is at least one specific solution from our good friends at o wc called the o wc thunderbolt 3 dual display port display adapter which is at least currently on sale for on clearance for 38 bucks or 39 bucks so we'll put a link to that in the show notes as well and thank you craig for that all good stuff i love it this is what i love about this show so we just get to learn and talk about geeky things that excite us right it's i look forward to it every week so yeah anything there john okay all right um david has a question that then turns into one of the coolest cool stuff founds i've ever found so he says i've been pondering something for a while now and would like to get your input on it i have an xbox one s in my basement and the controller via bluetooth works in my office 20 feet away one floor up but i have to keep changing batteries all the time and every once in a while the controller loses connectivity because of it sure rechargeable batteries work but having them die in a game or match is not ideal and random shutdowns are also a problem so my thought is this can i run a usb cable from the xbox front panel port to a keystone port in my office like a little plug port in the wall uh then uh plug in a six foot cable from the wall port says i've dug into this and the maximum usable distance i've found for usb is 16.5 feet but even that is not advised for something like this he says my thought was to get a small powered usb hub and mount it in the basement and then run another cable the last few feet to the wall port would this get me functional and can a hub act as a signal booster as i've described above i don't think so um i don't think a hub will do that the good news is david sent his question in but did not stop digging and what he found is i believe not only his solution but a solution for many of us if in fact we run into a scenario where we need to talk to a usb device that is far away i'm thinking of the 3d printer thing that we were talking about several weeks ago where you wanted to have a 3d printer in a far away place that might have been able to be connected via ether net because he found a mono price usb extender over cat 5 uh and it can go up to uh 150 feet in uh and so this it's essentially two dongles that you buy one they both connect to ether net in the middle and then one has a female usb a port on one end and the other has a male usb a port on the other and so it effectively becomes this usb cable that has ethernet in the middle and of course ethernet does a decent job going over long distances so that's pretty cool he hasn't tested it uh so we don't know but you know seems like uh seems like it should work pretty cool huh john yeah i remember we were talking about that i think here and there i found some wireless solutions to do that but i don't think a wireless solution would be good for this right oh yeah no that would be bad for this i i think yeah yeah yeah yeah you know it's funny it was i i actually recalled so uh remember key span yeah yeah they actually had a device like this years ago and actually i'm looking at the box right now key span usb server and it does exactly what i guess this other device that though it's using older protocols that um it's ethernet and it has four usb ports cool huh well let's put a link to that in the show notes yeah i like it i like it that's good cool cool anything more on that one all right cool um i wanted to talk it's i'm surprised i have not yet mentioned this uh the iphone case that i've been using on my iphone uh 11 pro since i got it i mean i've tested other cases as we've discussed but the one that keeps coming back on it is from a relatively new company called grip to you their url is prevent the drop dot com and what it is is it takes the concept of having something like a pop socket on your phone something where you can actually get a grip on your phone with one hand that's that's pretty solid and it bakes it into the case itself and the way it does it is by a rubberized strap that sort of sits flush with the back and there's a little bit of an indent in the back of the case so you can just slide your fingers under this and then you've got this rubberized strap that sits and and holds your phone on your hand but it doesn't get in the way when you're putting it in your pocket it's charger compatible like chi charger compatible and the case even has a little kickstand in it so if you wanted to watch a movie or or read the news or whatever while you're you know eating breakfast or what have you it it props your phone up in uh and i i don't think it'll prop it up in in uh portrait mode i haven't been able to sort that out but it certainly will prop it up in landscape mode it it's a it they've got several you know of course they've got several models they've got one that they call the boost case which i'm actually not sure what that what that does because i've been using the slim one which i really really like so uh it's worth checking it out folks i uh i highly recommend oh i guess no i haven't been using the slim case turns out i've been using the boost case because the boost is the one with the kickstand so there's a slim one that i need to check out so there you go but uh but yeah they make them in all colors and patterns and like they even have some translucent ones and so yeah pretty good that's um it's it's my favorite iteration of this that i've seen yet so and it survived a couple of drops and all that good stuff that's as phones do so it's pretty stoked yeah good john yeah okay it's good for uh yeah i've had a few phone fumbles uh fortunately only one resulted in screen disaster do you put a tempered glass uh screen protector no i highly recommend those for exactly what you described i had a uh i've always put as soon as they came to market whatever that was four years ago or something when they just you know flooded the market with them and you can buy them cheap you certainly if you want to spend 30 bucks on a tempered glass screen protector by all means knock yourselves out but i have had good luck with the you know three for seven dollar ones that you can find on amazon so uh so that's what i use and they do crack and and get chipped and that sort of thing which is sort of their point but i had a fall i got out of the car and my phone uh you know fumbled out of my hand i think it was going to a band rehearsal somewhere else and so i had like extra stuff and my phone just like flipped and it perfectly landed on an asphalt driveway so rocky you know uneven surface but with lots of points face down and i thought oh yep okay well it finally happened you know it's fine i've i haven't paid iphone insurance ever so i've saved all kinds of money on that here's where i get to you know spend some of some of the money that i haven't spent and uh and i i picked it up and it was just like you know the screen was just shattered and i'm like okay and so i slowly i went back to the back of the car because i had to get some stuff out of the the trunk or whatever and so i opened up the hatchback and i you know laid the other stuff down and i slowly carefully peeled the the shattered screen protector off and the phone was totally fine it's like yeah okay this is why i put these things on there that's why so highly recommended they feel good because they're they're glass you know similar to your iphone screen so it's not like the plastic cheapy things that we had to use initially so the temper yeah and when it comes and when it comes time to remove it is that an issue no no you just pick it up just lift it up with your uh with your nail like i said i did it um i removed mine and and usually even when they shatter you can usually get them off in one or two pieces yeah it's no problem it's no problem to get it off yeah easy easy it's a good question though i'm i'm i bet there's a lot of people out there that have hesitated to put these things on because of that no we'll be one of my concerns because if you're going to trade your phone in they probably don't want all sorts of gunk and other stuff on the oh no that's the beauty of it when i go to trade my phone in i have zero scratches on my screen because like they're the only ones to ever see the screen without a screen protector on i order when i ordered my iphone whatever 11 pro i immediately the next thing i did was i went to amazon and i found you know screen protectors that were uh that were for it and so those arrived before the phone did i took the phone out before i even set it up wiped the phone screen clean pop a screen protector on it and it's been that way i don't think i've replaced this one yet my kids seem to be able to crack theirs within about 37 seconds of putting it on their phone so they tend to live with you know a minor crack in there in their screen protector for a while before it finally gets bad enough that they're like hey can we replace it like yeah of course just go in the drawer we have a drawer at home that has a ton of them in it and they're welcome they're welcome to use them any guests that come over we always have enough for every phone shape and size it seems so always happy to pop them on for people because they cost us about two bucks but um but you know mine i i don't i guess i don't drop my phone as much as my kids do yeah i um yeah i had a drop event the other day i put my phone down on a little shelf at the grocery store in the cashier managed to push my phone and it fell on the ground nice but um but the case that i have so i have one of the spec cases that advertises drop protection and it worked good yeah those spec cases are miraculous for drop protection for sure yeah yeah yeah and the other thing if something terrible happens uh one of my credit card actually if i pay my bill my cell bill with this card they offer i think a small deductible like 25 bucks it's a it's a well-sparkled card but that was one reason i got that card yeah okay if you you know if you hurt your phone will uh you know and i think it's like up to 750 of uh up to 750 dollars with like a 25 deductible so wow huh so uh that's pretty good check that out too folks uh your various credit cards offer lots of benefits this one just caught my eye when i signed up for it so that's pretty good i put a link to that in the uh in the show notes for us cool i found the the card i did yeah well google found it i typed in this is the beauty using google docs for for you know sort of managing the show notes live so that we can well a we can share them not amongst not just amongst us but with anybody in the chat room at uh matkikev.com slash stream of course but um but you know you just type in i typed in wells fargo cell phone protection 750 bucks as the label and that's what you will see if you visit the show notes at matkikev.com and then you just highlight it and i hit command k because that's the shortcut to make a link in uh google docs and when you do that google starts searching the web for the text that you have typed and it found it and so i just selected that and boom the links in there it's all good to go saves a ton of time it's great super efficient so hopefully it got the right link but i'm assuming it did so google's pretty good about that yeah this one says it's uh 600 dollars worth of protection for uh for 25 bucks or with a 25 deductible so oh okay yeah yeah but still that that should cover all but the most catastrophic yes that's true that's true yeah that's right i think a screen replacement the last couple hundred bucks yeah yeah yeah because i had to do that for the one that i dropped i had apple replace the screen yep yeah yeah all right and uh so i got something cool dave yeah uh hooked up with uh these guys at pepcom and uh they they let me check it out and i i think it's pretty neat it's the moxie signal personal safety wearable what the heck is that you ask and i'll tell you what it is it's kind of uh not quite you you you would try to quantify it it's kind of like uh the i've fallen but i can't get up well it seems like we saw the corny commercials about yeah it seems like this sort of than the the technological uh evolution of that product yeah so here's how it works it's pretty quick so you get it um it has an app you pair it with uh with bluetooth actually the first unit i got wooden bluetooth i think i had older firmware but the second one did and so that's great so out of the box um but and then you add contact information when you set up the app and i just set up myself but you can add other people uh who are concerned about the whereabouts of the person who has the device uh if you run the app it'll locate them via gps so you can see where the person is at all times kind of like you know find my uh or whatever they call it now um you know find my iphone or the evolution of that but then it has three modes so there's a button on it there's also a mic and a speaker and lights you press the button once that does a check in and what that'll do is send a notification to the contact or contacts uh it can also email and send a text so that's the one mode and that's just you know say hi i'm okay yep and uh when it's received i think the the device will make a noise indicating that the the person that you know was concerned about you has has received that the second is what they call yellow alert and that'll do that but what it'll also do is record audio in the area that the person is in and then you can later listen to the audio to kind of figure out well why are they doing a yellow alert so that's mode two and then they have a red alert mode that does those two things but then they also have a bunch of people that are sitting by the phone and if they get a red alert they will actually get in touch with you uh to talk about you know what's happening because they'll be able to hear the audio as well and you guys can decide what to do and you know i guess they would call 911 or whoever sure needs the help um oh the and the last thing is that at yellow alert and above um you actually get a map but you also have the ability to chat with the contacts to a text chat so you can all say okay you know uh you know what's oh the other contacts i see oh got it got it cool yeah and you can do it either through the app or you know it sends a url and you can do it through a browser so you can have a chat with the contacts listed for that person that's uh that's pretty much it so um you can do a payment plan or it's it's 120 if you want to buy it and then i think the service because it's doing you know lte through uh t mobile i think it's 15 bucks a month for the uh cell service so for somebody who you know you want to know where they're at and yeah i mean i could think for you know caretakers and uh you know our kids or whatever it seems pretty neat cool cool i like it yeah that's good sweet thanks man uh i found a cool thing this week i've long been a fan and user of pixelmator and and now sort of the the next version of it which they call pixelmator pro an image manipulation app i use it to create all of our maki keb artwork of course it can do far far more than that i'm very a very rudimentary user but they added something this week called ml short for machine language super resolution and what this does is normally when you try and zoom into an image or resize an image to be larger than its source things get very grainy uh you know there's some algorithms that they can use to sort try and smooth it out but it's going to get blurry and all that stuff right but uh enhance exactly right so we watch these tv shows right in zoom enhance yeah exactly this does that on your computer you can do this if as long as you have katalina i think it requires i think pixel meter pro just in general requires katalina i could be wrong about that but i'm i'm pretty sure it does and it's freaking amazing i did some tests with it with uh faces of like the staff we have some images on the site that are just naturally small images and i tried it with the normal you know kind of whatever bilinear uh algorithm and i was like yeah okay that's what i'm used to it's pixelated and blurry and then i tried it with this one and it like it was freaking amazing john it's totally uh i mean if you have to do this thing all the time my advice would be well maybe get better quality source images but for those moments where you do have to like zoom something in that you don't have a better source image for this it's it's fantastic i was really blown away that it just works and that's sort of the beauty of machine learning right they were able to take all of these various pictures and then zoom them and it learns about patterns and you know all of that sort of big data thing where it's just you're just dumping tons and tons of examples in and then the machine learning engine that you know learns from those and can extrapolate to apply those same sort of patterns to to other images so yeah it's pretty cool it's well well worth playing around with it and it's it's free as part of the the you know sort of regular updates to pixelmator pro and i think pixelmator pro i can't remember how much it is um it's less than i think it's less than 50 bucks i'm gonna say it's 40 but yeah it is it's 40 bucks 39 99 in the mac app store so there you go it's it so go ahead so how do you how do you enable this um it's just up just do the update and it's there there there's two ways to invoke it if you have pixelmator pro uh there is i believe it's in the do i have it open on my mac here i don't know that i do um i don't like to open apps while i'm podcasting but i will for you i will do this so in the image menu of pixelmator pro there is now an option called ml super resolution but but it's also in the image size um sort of widget if you will so when you go to resize an image you now have four algorithms to choose from and one of them is this ml super resolution so you can you can do it that way or you can choose one of the other three some and and depending on your image you may like the results of one of the other three better of course but uh in general i think you want to use this ml super resolution just pretty cool good no thanks no because i was trying it out and um i just did a zoom on something and it was still pixelated right yeah it's not on it it's not automatic the first time but i think the image resize uh widget remembers what you used the last time on that computer so if you change it to ml super resolution then the next time it it'll default to that oh this is cool see what i mean i know but um but at first i thought it crashed my machine so it must take a bit of horsepower which my machine is an older machine at first i yeah at first my machine was unresponsive because i guess it was doing some heavy lifting okay yeah it i think if you have a gpu it would probably work faster would be my guess um but i think your mac mini has the on chip gpu so it's you know not not as efficient so yeah well now it has it has the uh yeah it has it has both discrete and oh it does oh okay it's just older yeah maybe that's it yeah yeah it's pretty cool all right i it's fun so anyway there you go something fun to play with here for the holidays ben offers what uh what i will say is a quick tip but it's certainly a valuable one he says i just discovered that by holding shift and control down the docks magnification setting is temporarily reversed he says evidently this has been around since leopard but he just learned about it and ben you're not the only one i just learned about it too so if you have your dock set not to zoom but you want to zoom it perhaps because you've got lots of apps open and now your dock is very compressed just hold down shift and control and float over your dock and it will zoom as ben notes it reverses the setting so if you have it zoom and you don't want it to shift and control will keep it from zooming uh for that particular session there well at least while shifting controller down so thank you for that ben good little tips this is i know it's good right it's what i love about this show john i keep saying that but you know it's it's true i get excited by this stuff yeah good okay let's see uh i want to talk about our next sponsor which is linode at linode.com slash m g g years ago on this show we got obsessed talking about how migrating from a spinning hard drive to an ssd would make your computing life so much better it and it turned out to be very very true in fact the entire industry has now moved this way right because we weren't often taking advantage of the full capabilities of our cpus because we were waiting for the spinning disk to either finish writing or reading the data that we were working with ssd's changed that right now we were able to use the full extent of our cpus and all of that stuff which was great i tell you this because linode has standardized on ssd's across their entire platform that means no matter what server you get you are getting the maximum speed out of this thing and you're not dealing with latency like we described because everything is run on an ssd even their lowest cost five dollar a month server runs on ssd's so you are avoiding the bottleneck that is the most common thing that slows down your server apps obviously if you need more cpu you can get more cpu they scale all the way up to dedicated servers and everything and you get to pick from one of their 10 worldwide data centers it's fantastic what they do there if you like the command line absolutely sign up for your linode server and get to the secure shell and you're good to go if you don't like the command line or if you just don't care to use it for that particular session no problem their cloud manager allows you to set up your server without ever even knowing about the command line let alone touching it you want to do a wordpress install you just tell it i want to do wordpress it knows what to set up you don't even have to know what linux apache mysql or phpr it takes care of all that and then installs wordpress inside it for you you can do the same for a vpn server you can do the same for a minecraft server you can do the same for all kinds of different servers because they already have built it you've got to check it out and as i said at the beginning of the show using promo code mgg2019 you get a twenty dollar credit which yes if you've done the math means that you could get four months for free of that five dollar a month nanoed server with the ssds of course because everything has them for free because of the twenty dollar credit you get just for being a mac geekyab listener linode.com slash mgg use promo code mgg2019 and our thanks to linode for sponsoring this episode all right mr brawn shall we move on to uh to the airing of the grievances of apple mail section here is that does that uh that fit for you for our our festivist show here today yeah yeah we're gonna do feats of strength or that that's gonna be the next show oh uh that'll be in the post show you've got to be in the chat room to uh to experience that i think i think that's that sounds that maybe that's best that's right so left win writes it says this is beyond a mere fish shake following up on some comments over the past few episodes regarding apple mail in katalina it's time he says for a full airing of the grievances he says i have a dozen or so personal email accounts in apple mail and uh several domains with multiple email accounts for each one he says with katalina here are my problems and i i i can't answer all of these if you can there's one that i definitely have an answer for uh so we can solve at least that but if any of you let's treat this as a geek challenge because that's what we do here so if any of you have thoughts about this feedback at macgeekab.com we'll get uh we'll compile them and and see if we can't help left one and all the rest of us use mail and katalina so good back at macgeekab.com that's right feedback at macgeekab.com so the first he says which i don't believe i have an answer for i cannot keep the sidebar listing of my various mail accounts in priority order i can reorder them by dragging them so there's a tip for you if you have mail accounts uh you know if you twist open your inbox you'll see all your multiple mail accounts you can reorder those he says but the reordering for him does not stick anymore earlier versions of mail he says has had the same problem but eventually it came to be some version several years ago that his preferred order would stick this is no more okay so that's problem number one for for left one he says i am getting the lost connection time out all the time yeah same left one most of my accounts he says are hosted in google and i expect it's a delay in security handshaking as you mentioned in the previous episode but come on he says give it a minute before flashing me with an error message and the worst thing about it is the dialogue box that comes up connection doctor seriously it's a terrible interface design in that i can only have the choice of going offline or run the connection doctor with no option of simply dismissing and trying it again he says this is very unapple like you know that's the best description of this problem that i have seen it is very unapple like why does mail fail like this it it i mean we anybody that's experienced this and i'm guessing it's a lot of us where you get the little triangle and mail says oh i can't connect it's like well we know if we tell it to connect again it's likely to work i mean unless something has happened with the mail server but by and large that's not the case it's just that mail is has said its tolerance a little too low so why doesn't it just try again that's that's the interesting thing now there might be a good reason for that maybe too many failed log they're worried about too many failed logins locking your account out or something like that but clearly that's not the case so yeah i i appreciate your your categorization of that it is unapple like uh he says uh number three says you've already addressed the fake column view he says which i also find infuriating why i ask what is the benefit to the user of this change another poignant question john um but i i don't know that there is any benefit to the user of this change so yeah that's good perspective uh the next one he says have you found a way in macOS to change the default actions for right and left swipe on a message as you discussed last week ios lets you change the default action of a right or left swipe why not catalina well the good news is you can with catalina um if you go to uh yes go to mail preferences viewing the second option there is move discarded messages into and you get to choose trash or archive and in fact that is what decides what your i believe it is right to left swipe i don't have a trackpad available in front of me on this computer so i can't confirm it but i believe that's the right to left swipe the left to right swipe lets you toggle red or unread on or of course off i might confirm this cool thank you so so that is the option of where you can set that is for for better or for worse so yeah good uh yeah it's kind of annoying that it's not as featured as ios because i thought yeah their goal was to try to make them feature compared because you have a lot more options especially with the uh right to left swipe on ios that's correct yeah that's right maybe the next update yeah uh yeah maybe right that that's true like we have seen things for example the like i think we talked about this on the show but if we didn't uh them yeah we did the music app when they added in the column browser right that that was not ever in the music app of course it was in itunes for years and years but uh they put that into the music app in the most recent update which is great so so i i feel like these things you know i'm hoping that the male column view gets a a regression back to what we had in mojave because yeah the single mondo column is not really what we want but anyway yeah and and these things with mail the swiping i think i agree with you those could those could be made more feature compatible with ios yeah he says uh his last one he says finally the frequent complete lockups on updating the inbox with no feedback unless you happen to look at your phone and see a bunch of new emails in ios that aren't showing up on your laptop i think these i unless i'm misunderstanding him i'm conflating i i would combine these two intentionally with the that one and the lost connection thing i feel like that's the same certainly the same impact on the user where mail just stops but we did see this last one on ios up until i believe 13.3 right isn't that what we're on right now whatever the latest one is yeah 13.3 where ios mail would just like you wouldn't know that it wasn't updating there was no error message thrown but if you looked on your mac so the opposite of what left one is saying that and you realized oh crap there's a bunch of new messages here if you you know force quit the ios mail app by going to the task switcher and and you know swipe up and then relaunch it you would get all those messages to appear so yeah so he has a question though john he says what's my best viable alternative to apple mail i want a native mac os app not a web interface he says and i have not considered this option for many years but what is what he calls the 2020 thunderbolt uh thunder sorry not thunderbolt thunderbird equivalent um thunderbird is still very much a uh actively developed and maintained mail client uh it is cross platform it's built by the the mosella group the people that make firefox and i i've used it in fact you know when i have like staff members leave or whatever and i need to be actively checking their email for you know a few weeks to months or whatever i will put that into a thunderbird thing so that i can compartmentalize it because it lets you have multiple users and and all of that and it's just sort of separate uh and and it works fine the problem with it is that and and and so the problem with it is that it is not apple mail so all of the integrations that you get with apple mail go away it is the good news about thunderbird is that because it is cross platform because it is maintained by the people that make firefox i don't expect it to go away anytime soon i mean it you know it has been around for a long time there are lots of people that use it so that would be my first choice just because of its reliability there are others out there and uh you know it's i mean it's worth checking out i know readle makes a a mail client i can't remember the name of it off the top of my head maybe some spark is another one that i have that's i have on my mac yeah so do you like spark do you use it at all um haven't used it lately but uh and i just started it up here and apparently it's uh forgotten about me because it's asking for me to resubmit my credentials okay yeah yeah so i know a lot of people like spark and uh absolutely oh yeah no that that that is a that is one of the more popular ones my issue with i find it non-trivial to change mail clients not that the change itself is a problem in fact these days with imap it's it it is quite trivial you just put in your credentials and boom you can have the same email even in four different clients running simultaneously we see that all the time even just with apple mail on our various devices right it's it's all in sync it's great but the workflow interruption and impact of moving to a new mail client is uh is a transition right you know i i do a lot of my work in email i'm very efficient uh in my email workflows and right now i'm constantly working to improve that efficiency because i'm crazy uh moving to a new email client even a fantastic one and i think all the ones that we've mentioned are fantastic ones is uh you know it there's a there's a learning curve right and that will slow you down a little bit so changing email clients every few weeks is not something that i can sort of afford to do and i've been burned by email clients in the past that you know third party ones that that you know come and go and that sort of thing i you know like i said i don't expect Thunderbird to go anywhere spark has been around for a while the folks at readle don't seem to be going anywhere so if that works for you uh then that's a good one i think i would feel comfortable recommending that one i i found with email clients it's interesting you i find that i think i learned more about the main developer of the client than i do with any other kind of app because people make email clients for themselves and i don't mean to say that any of these are are not you know listening to users of course they are but the the overall gestalt of an email client is driven by the you know the core developer of of that client and so if that person's you know world views and and on email that doesn't have to be the rest of their world views but if their world views and on email and and their workflows match what you are looking for then you are in heaven and it's great um and if they don't then you just won't like it and that's okay you know it's we're all different people so anyway yeah so here's a good sign is that so i was trying to log into my iCloud account and this is uh it looks like spark supports uh one of the advanced features here it said i'd like you to create an app specific password yeah that that actually i think that sucks and i that's not spark's fault you would have to do the same with thunderbird this is iCloud does not allow any third-party apps to use their um their you know oauth style things so you can't do two-factor authentication login with a third-party email client with iCloud uh which which sucks with google you certainly can they it because it's open authentication apple's authentication is not open it is only for apple apps which is yeah a little bit of a drag but but you have to do it if you're going to use iCloud email with with something like spark or thunderbird or anything that's not apple mail so but it but but spark is good about as you as you're finding you know walking you through that process and all of that yeah go ahead one thing i want to mention for for the first point that he made a suggestion though it didn't seem to work in my case but me and yours uh about the sidebar stuff yes hello logging in through the web interface may let you change it i've had to do that depending on the no he's he's not talking about that sidebar he's talking about the sidebar if you have multiple email accounts uh on apple mail and you twist open your inbox right and then you can you can move those around in there just by dragging but you won't be you that that's that's unique to that bill that you know that uh instance of apple mail on that machine yeah so speaking of um oh okay okay go ahead yeah yeah okay okay no i seem to be able to do it but then yeah it sounds like he doesn't or mail overrules him for some eventually it overrules him no he said he can do it but but it reverts back relatively quickly which which stinks okay so then i offered kind of a mini tip there because i've i like to have my mail folders in a certain order and sometimes that doesn't work depending on their implementation so sometimes like i said if you go to the web interface you may be able to reorder your mail folders whereas you can't through mail for whatever reason got it got it that makes sense um while we're on the subject here this is kind of an important thing for all of us to plan for if you are using google mail accounts specifically google g-suite accounts so if you have one assigned to your domain i don't think this applies to a g mail account so that's going to be our work around but if you have a g-suite account in 14 months so february of 2021 g-suite accounts will not allow app specific passwords to log in to mail uh caldav cardav or something else too what that means is a lot of us and this is very much true for me apple mail doesn't support multiple from addresses with the standard google oauth two-factor secure login because of that as we mentioned many times on the show we use imap to connect to you know we just treat our our google our google suite or even our g mail accounts as direct imap accounts log in with a app specific password and then we can edit the from address as an apple mail so this is an apple mail limitation and and using imap as the work around that work around will go away forever starting february of 2021 sooner than that in june 15 of 2020 you can't add a new app specific password for those services but if you already have one it's grandfathered in until the following february so just bear that in mind hopefully between now and then someone at apple then maybe somebody's listening will add all you got to do is add the ability to edit from addresses on google accounts in apple mail it's all we need on ios and on macos and all this problem goes away but um but until then we have a problem and if we get to february 2021 and nothing has changed what i'm thinking i would wind up doing if i stick with g suite which i've been thinking of moving to something like fast mail for a long time so maybe this is the catalyst but um what i would do is forward all the mail that comes into my g suite account into a g mail account that i can then check via imap with my various uh various things so so that that would be a potential work around and uh you know be that as it may but currently this is the problem so i just wanted to throw it out there yeah had you uh you i'm not would you have gotten that that email john i can't remember if if uh you probably would have but but anyway yeah no i'm i'm not well you use it for your tmo mail for sure yeah yeah yeah because if you want to reply from like our as you said you know the the the mac keekab addresses including premium at mackeekab.com for all of you who are premium listeners so all right well on the subject of cloud based services and i cloud and all of that michael has an interesting problem and i think i know what could i can only come up with one answer for this so i'm hoping it's right michael says i've had an issue with a dress book for a long time and i have no idea how to fix it when groups is showing on the left hand side of the window i have i cloud showing twice if i add a new group it shows up in both sets of i cloud any changes are immediately visible in both sets i've tried signing out of i cloud and back in any idea of what's going on so my first question to him was if you go into uh system preferences i cloud and unchecked content do both of these disappear there's only one is it showing the same thing twice or is it not and the answer is that only one of them disappears when he unchecks contacts in i cloud preferences and that opened the door because the question then becomes where else could you define a connection to i cloud because clearly there are two separate connections to what happens to be the same i cloud account so where can you define them one place is as we noted system preferences i cloud and you can check or uncheck contacts there's another place if you go into system preferences internet accounts you can add a second or third i cloud account here and it can't sync to everything that your main i cloud account can but it can sync to many things and contacts is among that list so i'm guessing that somewhere along the line you added your i cloud account to internet accounts and that's why you're showing two and i would say unless there's some reason to have it there remove it from internet accounts you'll probably see two of them there you should see one we all should see one when we go to system preferences internet accounts but if you see two that would be the answer so that's that's my thought on that one thoughts john um yeah i'm with you on that i'm looking at i think on both my machines i have i cloud in internet accounts and then it shows all the services below it as it should yeah i don't yeah i would yeah but if he has two of them here this is the only other place yeah yeah and and that is a handy thing i mean a lot of people have like people that want to share their contacts database with you know say their spouse or a you know a business colleague or whatever have often used a second i cloud account to do exactly that where you've just got you know everything that's in there is available to both people and you can compartmentalize it of course you know you can you can only put some contacts in one or whatever so it is a handy thing but um but you know obviously like any technology you gotta you gotta know what you're doing and and manage it properly so i'm guessing that's what that's what this is i'm hoping that's what this is good yeah yeah me too yeah i've got another one just kind of like this uh jp writes in he says my wife's got an iMac brand new with Catalina the mouse will not scroll in any direction with her fingers so i'm assuming this is a magic mouse great uh but everything else about it works he says i created a second troubleshooting user good tip uh and it works fine in that user other than reapplying the Catalina update he says which i'm trying now any suggestions so i'm guessing reapplying the Catalina update won't work because this is a user specific problem so start asking myself where on our max are these settings stored right certainly you could go into system preferences you know mouse or trackpad or you know whatever the the appropriate one is for you but you know where else are these things and of course the answer as many of you are probably screaming at your car radios and steering wheels is accessibility sure enough if you go to system preferences accessibility pointer controls mouse options dot dot dot there is a box that in if you have a mouse that can scroll will say scrolling and it is probably unchecked because for accessibility reasons there might be a time where you would want to not have the mouse scroll if somebody isn't quite as dexterous with their hands or fingers you turn that off so that they're not accidentally scrolling and and screwing themselves up so my guess is that somehow that got unchecked recheck it and you should be good to go yeah accessibility yeah that was my thought too i i think i told you one time i activated uh what was it mouse keys which all of a sudden made my trackpad appear to not work anymore and that's because i had accidentally enabled mouse keys so yeah yeah so i guess the accessibility stuff so it kind of takes over sometimes as it should and and there are some handy things in there that can be used sort of you know um but but it off label if you will right you know they're there for one reason but if you know what they do well you can use that for any reason but it's also good from a troubleshooting standpoint to go and take a look in there right so yeah i was doing also the preferences trick here but i don't see that i was fiddling with my mouse settings on this machine but none of the files that came up have the word mouse in them so i'm yeah well you don't have them oh no it's not yeah it's somewhere else i think um but yeah well it came up with like system preferences ap list which i don't i don't think you want to whack that file um maybe you do i mean in in yeah if you have to you have to but yeah yeah yeah so yeah and for those of you following along at home you will only see a scrolling checkbox there if your mouse or trackpad if your pointing device has the ability to do that kind of scrolling with the fingers otherwise like on this machine i've got an old razor mouse uh that doesn't you know it's not a touchpad on it so there is no checkbox for that here so just just fyi if you're looking for it and you don't have that option in your hardware it will not be there in this or will not be exposed in the software so all right where are we here what are we looking at let's see um mark says i'm getting ready to do a nuke and pave on my 2013 mac pro for the first time i know there has to be plenty of crap from all the years of just updating the os my question is can i run migration assistance several times slowly adding back files from my backup uh he says of course first thing would be all my apps but then what and what not to bring over at all says i have lots of applications purchased and installed from non-apple store websites so it's not just a get them from the app store process so you know this is one of those questions that my answer to it as many things has evolved over the years but there's no definitive answer um you certainly can run migration assistant after you've set up your mac but depending on what you run and how you bring it in it may wind up putting it in a new user account um applications though are separate from user accounts so you might be able to bring those over after the fact but applications aren't the biggest thing there right um i think the user if you're going to bring over anything from your user account with migration assistant my advice is to do that as part of the install because you don't want it you can do this but i wouldn't want it creating multiple user accounts every time i you know tried to bring something new in and then having to sort of manually migrate uh from there but you know as to the more general question of what to bring over and what not to bring over migration assistance pretty good at not bringing over sort of obvious cruft now the problem is some cruft isn't obvious right if you're like me you install a lot of stuff and then forget about it right and then you don't want to move that over but you don't even know what you don't want to move over and while stuff like that does take up space it usually doesn't take up any other resources like ram or cpu unless it has a running process and looking in login items and then also checking like lingon or something to check the non-login items processes can usually help eliminate that stuff and that's good to do even if you're not migrating to a new mac or nuking and paving right so my feeling on this and i'm curious to get yours too john is you know pick one of two paths either move over everything with my migration assistant or move over nothing right and if you choose the latter then you'll be migrating things over manually and you might well forget or miss something if you choose the former then you still have the option to intentionally go through and weed out stuff after you've migrated it over of course you could do this before you migrate but then you're eliminating your backup uh you know in in the shape of your previous system drive of whatever you had so if you realize you need something now where do you go to get it i've done it both ways um and when i set up the this iMac here in the studio earlier this year i decided it was time to start from scratch this had been migrated from a power pc machine like like this installation so it it was it was well beyond time um and you know with everything that's synced to the cloud and all of that nowadays it really wasn't a bad process at all it took me what maybe half a day and this machine was up and running with all the crazy things that i need to record podcasts in here which is i mean we all have our crazy stuff but you know my crazy stuff i got up and running within you know a few hours it really wasn't that bad so um so that's me but what do you think mr brawn um i mean the uh the feature does give you some granularity so i don't know i've done it in the past i haven't had that user problem so i don't know i mean i i would so you know it'll show you um applications which i think in the past i have done and then it shows your home folder and and you know the various contents there um that you may not want to bring all that stuff over i don't know and then they have an other files and folders and computer network settings um i think the last time i used migration assistant i think i did applications other files and folders and i think i did all three of those and then i was kind of selective about what i did for my home folder sure yeah that makes sense yeah yeah yeah yeah um yeah most of the time bringing over an application without bringing over the home folder is fine you won't keep any of your preferences of course but that's sort of the point but your apps generally speaking will run there are some apps where whatever they put in your personal library folder are you know instrumental to making the app run and in those cases well then the app won't run without perhaps the installer disks or or what have you so i think i i seem to remember and i can't remember if it was with the i don't think it was the iMac in the office which i did with migration assistant when i got the 2019 iMac down there i think it was with my macbook air that i wound up doing migration assistant twice with it you know i migrated over i i chose granularly to try and you know not inherit six years worth of the entirety of cruft and then realized no no no no no no no and i went back to the drawing board and and sort of redid it again it was like okay this is much better this is what i wanted and that you know there's nothing wrong with that other than time the migration assistant's gotten really good but the whole uh it creates an ad hoc connection a wi-fi connection between or ethernet between the two computers so it's not relying on your local wi-fi it's like whatever the best of the wi-fi is in those two macs it's just going to blast back and forth between them and not clog up your your main wi-fi network or go through your router or anything like that it's which is pretty cool uh and i've had it work flawlessly so yeah it's good it is good all right moving on mr brawn sure cool uh phil phil has two i like these kinds of questions they take us off the beaten path phil says uh a fellow agent mentioned this new browser and i was hoping to get your take on it called the brave browser uh it says also the same agent i i guess i could reveal that that phil is a realtor i know that kind of dispels the the thing so we maybe we'll forget that says this same agent sent me a youtube video about replacing the thermal paste on my macbook pro and could you comment on it to see if it is a worthy repair all right so we will take these two in order the brave browser is something i messed with uh a few times it is fast and it's interesting they block ads right but they know that publishers get paid you know when you visit a website it's not free right visiting a website means you agreed to watch the ads that that particular publisher has chosen to show you that's the quid pro quo uh well with you know with anything that blocks the ads you know that's that's the end of it the publisher doesn't get paid and the publisher gets screwed unless there's some other monetization model well brave has built their own monetization model with a reward structure where publishers can sign up and mac observer we have signed up for it i we haven't there hasn't been enough data for me to say actually this is fair or you know it's a nice attempt but probably not i don't know where it falls so i have no judgment on that but it's it's probably one of the other uh where they reward publishers based on the um the the users that visit so they are doing some sort of tracking in that regard i'm assuming that it's not tied to any one person it's just tied to page views and ads blocked or something like that but um but it is a fast browser it's available for both ios and mac os and it's like i said it's fast it blocks all the trackers and most ads and things like that and like i said you can earn rewards and help publishers and all that good stuff so which is good you know it's a it's the best model of this that i have seen so uh i don't use it i still use safari i prefer it just for its ubiquity across apple devices but um but things like brave help test out new ideas and paradigms and stuff and a lot of those sort of things wind up filtering into what apple does with safari because they sort of care about all the same things so right thoughts on brave john before we move on to thermal paste um no i haven't really looked at it okay no my backup browsers typically uh and i've had this happen a lot um pages that don't work in uh in safari work just fine in firefox yeah don't know why right yeah for sure and then my third choice is uh chrome but it rarely gets to the point where a page doesn't work in either safari or firefox so i wind up i i'm kind of the same although because we do so much with google hangouts both for our you know we we have a daily staff meeting that we use hangouts for with tmo and we use them for other things um were you drinking water out of a mac keekab water bottle just there john and we're hearing is that what that was okay yes yeah got it so so because we use hangouts so much uh hangouts only work properly in chrome now they used to work kind of okay in safari and that went away so um so like safari is weird with hangouts sometimes you can hear the audio of some participants but not all like i don't even understand how it gets there but anyway hangouts works way better in chrome so that's the browser that that's now become my secondary browser because it's it i'm running it fairly regularly um you know just for that reason it's a fine browser it works quite well and you know like we mentioned earlier in the show the extensions library is is quite vast so is firefox's but yeah yeah other than that john though i wouldn't pick a i don't really have a favorite between firefox or chrome so yeah and firefox uses that mozilla renderer which is not webkit so that's probably a good choice to use when um when you have a page that won't you know render properly in safari or whatever so yeah and i like um the other thing i like firefox for because i haven't found anything that does this on safari is firefox has several good plugins or extensions or whatever you want to call them that'll let you pull video off of a web page and put it in a mp4 i think hmm what what plugins are those now no i'm an inquiring mind both for myself and by proxy for everybody listening what what plugins do you like with firefox all right well hold on yeah okay no problem this is good this is the beauty of this show we can uh we can you know we can get things video download helper is that one of them do we need to teach john or video download a professional now they change the font that they use for this download or professional okay what else is that that's the one yeah that that's the one that uh that i last installed yeah for some strange reason safari doesn't seem to have any video extraction extensions that i've been able to find huh i um yeah uh i found the one friend so the interesting thing is you know i mentioned how i search in google docs especially while we're doing the the show notes and uh the the first iteration of video download or professional that i found is for chrome of course because uh it exists for both but i've now found it for uh i think i've found it for firefox i'll let you confirm when you go through the show notes whether that's the same one but there you go cool thanks for thanks for that yeah i if i want to pull down videos from a web page uh there's a variety of things i use but honestly the one that i use the most is uh youtube dl i believe it's called oh i don't have it installed here on this computer uh i uh it's a it's a thing that i installed with homebrew it's called youtube dash dl and uh and you just do that and then put the url and usually i put the url on quotes and then it just goes and finds it and slurps it down but other people have mentioned better ones in uh in the past so if anybody if anybody out there has any to recommend please let us know because i i'm feeling like we talked about this recently and somebody was like why bother with the command line you could use this and then it's like oh yeah okay probably use the same basic engine but i just installed it by typing brew space install space youtube dash dl so i'll put the very least put that in the uh the you know the the old show notes there because that's what we do yeah and i remember back in the day another trick so some websites would uh say oh no we're only going to let you stream the video you can't download it if you dig through the source and you could find the name of the video you know like with a dot m o v or dot whatever type of video it is and you highlighted that you could then put that in the download portion of safari and it would download it that is less and less common these days yeah i do because i think they go through more effort to obfuscate that well it's not so much the it's not an effort to obfuscate it's an effort to manage bandwidth uh they put a player in the web browser and then that player streams chunks of the video it doesn't just try to slurp the whole thing down as fast as it possibly can right because we know that you're not going to watch the video faster than one x i mean maybe you'll watch it at two x right that maybe you know but otherwise the player can define what the fastest is and it can all right you know so you can manage bandwidth that way yeah yeah of course they could manage their download bandwidth but then they may not well but but you want to be able to let kind of have it work dynamically so if someone's streaming at one x if you if the player requests the video at one point two x well that is probably enough i mean i'm sure they've done tests on this to decide you know where to where to do it so that you have a nice flow and there's no buffering and all of that but if somebody's watching it two x okay well now we need to you know stream to that particular client at two point three x or whatever you know whatever it works out to be yeah wow it sounds like you almost run a website that uh that uh serves a video or something it's one of those things well the nice part is that we do obviously but the nice part is the engines that are out there take care of this like youtube just does this naturally uh vimeo does this naturally it's part of like it that i think of that as delegating expertise like they are the people that's their thing so we will pay them and use their engine because they are going to stay on top of it far more than we would if we wrote our own so yeah cool all right um for the second item yes right so this video that that he sent on youtube uh was explaining how to crack open your macbook pro and replace the thermal paste on it and these exist i would think the most popular one that i've seen is for the the 2018 mac minis but you certainly you know there there are folks that believe there's reason to do this with the macbook pro so let me explain the concept of why what the problem is on your mac there's the cpu and it gets hot and there's some sort of heat dissipation uh system in there and the idea is that you need to transfer the heat from the cpu to whatever this heat dissipation system is we'll call it a heat sink but that may or may not be the right term but that's close enough right i think that's the right term okay so the idea is you you know you transfer the heat from the cpu to this heat sink and then the heat sink has some uh more efficient way perhaps it's got like fins so that its air passes across it there's more surface area and and you can dissipate more heat faster right the trick is you want as much heat from the cpu to dissipate to that uh heat sink as possible or to transfer to that heat sink so that then the heat sink can can slurp it away apple does not use enough of or the right kind of paste that lives between if you just put the heat sink on top of the cpu some heat will transfer but you can get more to transfer if you put this paste in there that really sort of glues the two together now it doesn't actually glue them it's they are removable but the paste ensures that this process is happening it makes it more efficient and as i said some folks feel and they have tested and they're not wrong then apple uses not enough and the wrong kind of thermal paste so the idea is if you take things apart remove the heat sink from the cpu wipe off all the thermal paste that's there and put new thermal paste on things can be more efficient and when things are more efficient your cpu can run faster because your cpu especially in your macbook pro and your 2018 mac mini will throttle down when it gets too hot and that's sort of the time when you would want the cpu to throttle up not down so folks have replaced the thermal paste on these things and then you know done before and after benchmarks and this video that that he shared with us which i'll put in the show notes just so we can all kind of have the same point of reference talks about you know kind of shows some of these tests and it really it can make a difference you know we're talking it's we're not talking anything astronomical but it's you know five to maybe 10 percent of a boost this really matters when you're doing something where the cpu is going to be running at or close to full tilt for a long period of time right like you know video rendering or or any of that right where where the heat it's going to build up enough heat that you want to kind of you know keep dissipating it so that the cpu can stay hot okay because that was my thought because if your cpu yeah unless you're on a edge you know what i'm trying to say yeah unless you're running really hot i would see little benefit in doing this correct correct maybe you'll save power and that the fans won't be drawing as much juice um right i would be uncomfortable because number one you're fiddling with the cpu so you know if you're going to do this you know use proper procedures like we're a grounding strap and all that and there is the potential that you could ruin everything if you're fiddling around in there and you know zap something or did you watch the video that no i did not he sent in it's worth watching to make that decision for yourselves folks because it really if you're comfortable opening up the machine the rest of this process really isn't that big of a deal so if you would open up your machine to say you know replace the ssd in there or any of the other various things that we've opened our machines for over the years if you're comfortable doing that the the steps that once it's open you would take to sort of unscrew the heat sink wipe off the thermal paste put new thermal paste on and re screw the heat sink are basically as simple as what i just described there's not you're not taking the cpu off that's soldered to the motherboard you know like that none of that is is happening it's just you're just unscrewing the heat sink you're cleaning off some thermal paste you're putting some new thermal paste on your screw in the heat sink no i've done this sort of thing yeah not on my machine but you know in other worlds i've you know done stuff with thermal paste and heat sinks and all that and it's uh you know it's just you're taking a risk that uh as always i would i would say if it ain't broke don't fix it well but that's the thing is some people are are are very much saying that it's broke right wrong thermal paste and the one argument is maybe aging thermal paste i don't know i mean would apple use the wrong thermal paste i don't think they're using enough of the right uh paste okay right there could have yeah and and you know a tube of the right thermal paste will run you about six us dollars uh so and you would probably have enough for the rest of your life you're just not using very much of this stuff you know it's i mean we're talking about a thin layer of paste across the cpu so a tube of it you know if you think of like a half-sized tube of toothpaste or something like how much paste would it take to have a thin layer and not much so but one other concern that people have is that a cpu even one that's not even if you're not looking at the best performance out of it if your cpu is running hotter than it should be well then its lifespan may be reduced because of that so having better thermal paste having uh you know the ability to dissipate heat better arguably might extend the life of your computer you know so that's that's the that's sort of the the you know the oh yeah i remember actually looking at this for uh most any processor has this feature but most processors have some sort of input that is the temperature of you know some sensor nearby and they will turn off if they get too hot yeah it's a feature of almost any processor so they don't destroy themselves because they will if it gets too hot it's it will oh yeah we had that problem with lisa's mac mini we have one of those um we have one of those 12 south uh um mac mini stands why the high rise i think uh and maybe it's the high rise pro high rise deluxe i gotta look at 12 south no i will find it so that i can link to it here but um the it's a great little thing that you can put all kinds of uh different you know things inside it's a high rise pro it's built for an iMac but i had talked to them and they were like yeah you can put a mac mini inside there no problem well this was basically like the day that the new you know mac minis came out last year in 2018 and we got lisa the i7 one which you know has a faster hotter processor in it and this putting the mac mini inside this it fit but it looks like there's enough air flow for cooling and once a day your computer would turn itself off because it got too hot so i opened the doors on it and the problem has not and and i also used i-stat menus to start monitoring heat and you know make sure that we were operating within good parameters and uh opening the doors gave it enough ventilation that everything was totally fine but um but yeah it was just an and and i love this high rise pro because it keeps everything nice and contained and you can set a monitor on top of it it it's really kind of a nice little it's a nice little compact thing it it looks like it's built for a mac mini to use and in a sense it is but um you you know you just gotta you gotta monitor your heat flow so instead of putting a fan in it we just open the doors and it's been fine so yeah and sure enough yeah i was asking myself this question but i kind of answered it i-stat menus will send you a notification if a temperature gets above a certain point oh yeah yeah you can have it for sure yeah yeah yeah is that one of their default notifications or or uh just no because it doesn't but it yeah it's an option i'm looking right now and so you know you choose temperature sensors and then you can do any temperature above or any of the individual temperature sensors within the machine yeah usually there are several yeah cool cool cool all right um where are we here we got all kinds of stuff we've got some tips where are we on time man man it has been fun well i will share Demetri's tip because it is a handy one for us all to know uh he says to help other listeners not get caught he says i rely on text expander a lot on my max and ios devices and i recently got myself an ipad pro with apple's smart folio keyboard i then quickly found out that text expander doesn't work with the hardware keyboard which was which was confirmed by their tech support in fact it's not just text expander it's any third-party software keyboard uh which of which text expander is one do not receive keystrokes from hardware keyboards such as bluetooth keyboards or anything like that uh and you know it's interesting i use uh the the bridge keyboard on my ipad pro and it's uh it's fantastic i love them uh but i this is certainly the case with that one too i never even thought about it because i would go and invoke the keyboard and there's the text expander keyboard on the screen and i would just type on the screen and you know do my little shortcut and then hide the keyboard and then back to the my normal typing i never live in the text expander keyboard i just invoke it for the one little snippet and then i like the ios keyboard with its you know predictive text and all that stuff so i didn't even think about it but but he's he's totally right so just bear that in mind folks as you are uh you know as you're doing this stuff so yeah thank you for that heads up to me tree very very good very very good um i'm trying to think if there's a one more tip yeah in the last show we were talking about the handshakes in fact at the last few shows we've been talking about the handshake issue with max specifically the mac mini because it is a mac that needs a display uh with third party displays and all of that and listener jamie uh has been using his mac mini with a 4k tv monitor a 49 inch display uh and he says it is connected to the tv via hdmi but he's had some uh some wake from sleep issues which is what we've been talking about where the computer seems to be on but the monitor says i'm not seeing any signal and he says sometimes he sees something on the display that's corrupt or the colors are way off but typically he says the scenario is that the computer's gone to sleep hours ago and stopped driving the display and then the tv you'll notice that it hasn't had any input and also turn itself off he says uh then i wake it up and of course here's the problem so he developed two workarounds one that is in the moment and then one that is preventative though in the moment one is to hit command option eject hotkey to put the system to sleep immediately wait a few seconds and then wake it up again this gives you a quick retry of the wake up sequence and maybe you know and for him that's worked so that's interesting and it fits into our handshake uh discussion from last week where it might be that the computer is not powering the gpu on because it doesn't see a display on the other side of things so that that's sort of worth keeping in mind so command option eject if you have an eject key is the shortcut for putting the system to sleep and then you can wake it back up and see if now that the display has had a chance to sort of you know get its bearings maybe now the max sees it and and syncs up properly he says i've also developed a preventative workaround he says i've come to believe that if i turn the tv on first and then wake up the computer a few seconds later all will be well and he says i've had far fewer problems since i learned this so thank you for sharing that jamey this is helpful helpful advice because it it really does make sense that it's the mac that's not even attempting it's not seeing a display so then it decides not to try and drive one at all and that that's kind of yeah i think that's the that's the thing so yeah good well my friends uh i think we have come to the end i think that's just how it's going to have to be for today john why am i only hearing that in one ear are you hearing are you hearing the music john yes it's weird it's very very left balanced and i'm not sure why that is do i have like a weird it's a mono signal uh it's really weird i don't know why i'm only hearing it that way well i will try and pan it but that's doesn't make any sense it all should be mono uh what's wrong ah aha there we go there was an analog problem okay well thank goodness we found it plugged in all the way uh you know i think it was just a like all the dry air all i did was twist the rca or the quarter inch cable that's going into the mixer and everything was was fine so you know that's how these things go with when you're dealing with analog stuff so i can have john go to the mixer digitally but the music there's only one digital channel well actually there's two digital channels into the mixer but they both go it's a left and right into one fader so i could go from there and route around but i don't bother so the audio goes analog out from the mac to the mixer and then of course captured back in it's fine i'd rather have your audio without any analog noise and and deal with it for the band this is what these are the things that i think about john i care you know we care we do and we thank you for listening we uh very appreciative of all of you all that you do for us thank you all of our premium listeners there really weren't we have no grievances to airy with with any of you it was just the grievances about mail we don't even have grievances with each other and we've known each other a long time maybe we do have some grievances maybe we'll we'll air them while we're at uh at ces john we can we can uh we can do that because we're going to ces soon right oh boy yeah boy uh if ces have you gotten any emails about anything my my schedule has the funny part for me is the the emails that come in now that are like you know and we're talking about december 23rd or whatever where people are like hey you want to come meet with us like dude my schedule has been full for three weeks like oh what what part of like you are late to the game i always leave time for the important people at ces like there's always room in my schedule but but you know the by and large i know exactly where i'm gonna be i certainly know where i'm gonna be uh every every day i sort of chunk my day up into three things morning afternoon evening and i know uh even before i start booking appointments i know okay this morning i'm gonna be at like the sands and then this afternoon i'm gonna be at the you know south hall whatever it is like because otherwise you lose all your time trying to travel around from place to place so oh yeah no no i'm doing the same thing yeah it's just uh you know i still get things and it's like oh yeah this these guys are in the same place that i'm going anyway so right you know right add you i'll add yeah you gotta yeah triage or whatever otherwise you'll you'll be lost you're lost absolutely i found i found that out my first you're going to ces it's not a show you can just walk around like macworld expo or no no com or show stop well actually the ones the pepcom and the showstoppers that they have it uh ces are huge oh yeah even manhattan even for those i have my lists of people that i'm gonna see uh i've already gotten like they tell us what they're gonna be announcing so that we can sort of decide do we want to um you know is there something worth covering so like i already know i think what i'm gonna be telling you folks about from ces not everything obviously but you know it's um it's definitely you know part of it so and uh while we're talking about it our ces sponsors for this year include a lot of folks who are coming back to help us make all of the coverage that we do possible what we do at ces is you know it it's already started as we just described we there's so much there you couldn't possibly learn about everything and you probably don't want to so when we go to ces we see our job as to be your filter right and and that process is obviously already started where we're filtering through stuff and then while we're there still filtering through and only reporting on the things that uh we think would be of interest to you of course we've sort of self selected each other because the things that interest you are at some level the things that interest us that's why we that's why we all like this podcast together right because it's we have shared interest so uh so we you know we provide those filters and then we bring the content to you but it it does take some time and of course expense and all that good stuff so uh our sponsors this year we are happy to welcome back four returning sponsors which is fantastic amazing other world computing text expander and carbon copy cloner and i am totally stoked to have every single one of them on board i know it's great it's a quality list there i couldn't agree more my friend yeah you could you could try i could try yeah no it's yeah i'm i'm stoked about it yeah and in this year it's ces john you know when the uh hotel rooms came out like you know in june or whatever i was i was going through it all and i padded myself on the back because as soon as we got home from ces last year i got online and i started looking at hotel prices we like to stay at the mirage it's a good central location for the type of stuff we cover and uh and i started looking and i realized that at that point in time it was cheaper to buy a two bedroom suite at the mirage for five nights than it was to buy two individual rooms and i thought okay well i will book us a two bedroom suite john so that we have a living room between our two bedrooms and then i figured well when the you know when the price is when the actual ces blocks come out in uh in like june or whatever we'll take a look and it'll probably be cheaper and we'll cancel the suite turns out they were uh they were a little cheaper in that the two rooms uh through the ces block would hit cost us the exact same amount of money as our two bedroom suite so uh we're staying in a two bedroom suite john and uh but but it's actually the economical choice and it gives us a living room so that we can uh and be in a kitchen type thing and all that stuff so yeah we're going to be living large there oh wow but economically more for less it's more for i know it's right it really is when we went there with our kids uh whatever it was last two summers ago or something yeah you told me you did that with the family we did the same thing and it was it was the same price at that point which is what sort of got the wheels churning for me for for ces this time so um so anyway you know so i booked a booked us a suite which it's it it's fan i love that we can do that and save money so that's what we're doing yeah so what else do we get like a butler or masseuse or you know i i would assume that we could hire the services of all of the above and more to come to our suite and do whatever we like but um i don't necessarily want a butler massage you know at the end of the day that that sounds like a good idea probably cheaper to go down to the spa at the mirage and get that done but that's now you're now you're talking my friend so well you know it pretty much every trade show i've been to they have at least one bunch that does massage that's true that yeah on the show floor is somewhere that's right yeah yep so yeah good anyway there we are uh that took us longer than than than our our normal out time so i will say thank you to everyone for listening we already told you how to find us we would like to thank of course linode for sponsoring this episode at linode.com slash MGG and then our our stable of MGG sponsors that include of course smile and other world computing that we mentioned are sponsoring us for CES a CES barebone software ero.com slash MGG and lots more thank you so much to everybody and uh and we'll see you one more time before the new year john before we go do you have anything to share uh i don't i don't want to share now i'll share some good advice especially this time of year with uh all the holidays uh about the start that's right yeah happy hanukkah and merry christmas and and all of that whatever else to everybody out there yeah happy week but the advice to all of you uh is don't get me