 The Mac Observers, Mac Geekab, Episode 687 for Monday, December 11th, 2017. Greetings, folks, and welcome to the Mac Observers, Mac Geekab, the show where you send in all of your tips, questions, and cool stuff found. We share them all with the goal being that every single one of us here, me, you, him, her, all of us learn at least four new things, each and every time we get together including right now. Sponsors for this episode include Barebone Software with their brand new BB Edit 12. Yes, that's running right here on my computer as I speak and Eero. We're at eroeero.com. You can get free overnight shipping using our special coupon code MGG. And yes, I'm running Eero here in the house and office right now as I speak. And that house and office is here along with me in Durham, New Hampshire. I'm Dave Hamilton. And here in snow covered fearful Connecticut. This is John F. Braun. How are you doing today, Mr. John F. Braun? Good. Well, I had our first event here. First snow event of the season, huh? Mm-hmm. Yep. Just after I just the day after I bagged all my leaves. Hey, say there's snow on them. Yeah. No, our leaves. We got rid of all our leaves on Thursday and then the snow came Saturday. So it was good timing. So, yeah. Yeah, the snow's, I mean, it was interesting snowstorm. It was only maybe four or five inches here, but the roads were awful during it. I don't know why that was, but hey, there you go. I was fine here, but then we're, you know, it's pretty flat here. I like testing my car so technology against the snow. But anyways, yeah, enough about the snow. Enough about the snow. You know what I want to do? I want to start right out of the gate today and thank all of our awesome premium subscribers. Really, I want to thank every one of you. I want to thank all of you for listening, doing what you do, sending in questions, all that stuff. Our premium subscribers, you get a little bit of extra thanks. And especially those that whose contributions came in this week. I want to make sure we send those shout out. So in the one time donation department, we had Rick S with 25 bucks. Thank you so much. In the $10 monthly department, we had, I believe they were all renewals from Abdullah B, Dave C, Frank A, Mark R, Barry F, James B, Neil L, Scott F, John G, James C and Joe S in the $10 month department. Thank you very much. And then in the biannual department, which is by default at 25 bucks, we had this week Tony S, David T, Francis F, Chris M, Randall M, Mike M. I don't think there's any relation there. Larry S, John E, Phil G, Stacey S and then Chris B signed up for a new subscription biannual at $50 every six months and Charles G signed up for one at 35 every six months. So thank you to all of you. You rock. If you want to learn more about premium, visit mackeykeb.com.com. And you can learn how to support the show directly and how that all works. You get access to a special email address premium at mackeykeb.com. And now for everybody, John, we have quite a few cool stuffs found this week. So I'm going to go right into it and start with Charles. Charles says, I am an IT consultant and I travel between corporate clients. Some clients, I can get internet access immediately when connecting to their network. Others, I have to request access. Also at times I'm making changes to the client's corporate network or firewall and I need to know if the internet and network connectivity is still operational. At home, there are times where my wife asks if our internet connection is down. I use a tool called Ping Bar. It is an app that sits in the menu bar and reports back the round trip time to an IP address that I define. And he uses the IP address of 4.2.2.2, which I want to say is, I forget who that is. It's not Google. It's not Apple. Maybe it is Apple. Who's 4? I don't know. I forget who 4 is, but he says it's a nice... That's a class A address. That's like a big, that's like an old one. Yeah. He says it's a nice, quick and easy way to check my internet connectivity at a glance. That's owned by level3.net, John. That's what that is. Yeah. So, and to look, to find that out, here's your bonus tip for the episode or at least the first of many. How did you do that so quickly? I fired up a terminal window and typed nslookup space, the IP address, and it does a reverse lookup on it and comes back and says that the name of 4.2.2.2 is b.resolvers.level3.net. So, that's how I do that stuff. Okay. And actually, well, I'll toss out another one here. Sure. You can also say who is. Oh, would who's work with a single IP? Well, I'm looking here and it says... Oh, that's true. ...level3 communications. Oh, yeah, you get the full read out there. Two slightly different ways of getting... Yeah. ...accessing a database that knows about IP addresses. Yeah. Wow, two. We already learned things. Oh, and Ping Bar, there's three. I didn't know about Ping Bar. Oh, my gosh. Yeah. Well, it's better to shut down now. That's it. Thanks so much, folks. We'll see you next week. Yeah. That's how that's going to go. So, yeah, the Ping Bar. So, we'll put a link to that in the show notes for you. And there you go. And Portos John in the chat room at macgeekab.com slash stream says that Apple's address block starts with 17. 17. whatever is Apple. So, there you go. Now, moving on to Ed, and if I can find Ed here, I know I can. There it is. Ed writes, he said, a menu bar app called AudioBridge can be found at audiobridge.site and is 8.99. It connects your Sonos speakers via AirPlay to all of your Apple stuff and it makes it much easier to play, say, macgeekab anywhere in the home. And it does. It basically makes an AirPlay destination for all of your Sonos speakers. And along with audiobridge.site, there's the command line core, which I think is what AudioBridge is using, available. It's called AirConnect and it's available from GitHub. We'll put links to both of those things in the show notes. But perhaps you get that running up on a NAS, then you don't need your Mac running. And that's a pretty cool thing. Didn't Sonos recently improve their offering to be more AirPlay compatible, or was that on their... They announced that AirPlay 2 support is coming to Sonos next year in 2018. Okay, so this is like a stop gap until they figure that out, or this will do similar. Similar now. And it does it now, correct. But what we don't know, and I've asked Sonos about this, is which Sonos units will be able to participate in AirPlay 2. It's possible that older ones, especially like the Play 3 and perhaps the first generation Play 5 will not be able to participate in that. I don't know the answer. But when I sort of speculated that to some folks, they were like, yeah, you're thinking along the right lines. It depends on how the engineering works. I don't think they had answers either, to be perfectly honest. But those things had less RAM and different processors and that sort of thing. So it just depends on what they can make work. But maybe they could just run AirConnect on one of your other devices, and there it goes. It becomes the bridge. Anyway, hey, while we're talking about Sonos, I have my own cool stuff found to share. If you have a Play 3, a Play 1, or a new Sonos one, which is the Play 1 with a word built into it, for voice control, this company called Sanis, S-A-N-U-S, sells these awesome wireless speaker stands that are built for Sonos devices. And they are truly built for Sonos devices. They have the brackets that just mount right onto them. There's no funny business with anything. It perfectly fits. And they've got brackets for all different ones, including different angles. So I'll put a link to that in the show notes. I just got a pair of them and have them in the living room so that we've got our satellite speakers just in the perfect spot. It's the right height right behind the couch and stuff. So it's cool stuff. I wanted to call those out because I know we have a lot of Sonos listeners. Sonos users that are listeners. But I guess that would make you a Sonos listener, wouldn't it? If you're a Sonos user, I don't know. I don't know what else you would be, right, John? I don't know. A listener? Well, if you have Sonos stuff, you're using it to listen. I mean, I would assume. Huh, anyway. Yeah. All right, Bob. I'm not yet. You're not? Maybe someday. Yeah. All right. So listener Bob has another one for us. Bob says, listening all the way back to MaciCab678, which really isn't that long ago. And the login items bug reminded me of a useful tip. He says, really, it's cool stuff found. It's called Delayed Launcher. And Delayed Launcher allows you to sequence all your login items, which has several potential uses. Number one, your initial login goes faster while your typical login items start up in parallel over the next few minutes. With Delayed Launcher, you can have them start up one at a time or in parallel. For example, you can have Dropbox or Debuki or Quitter. Those kinds of things, you don't, you're not going to miss them if they're not there in the first few minutes. Since many menu bar positions, he says, or menu by items get positioned based on when they're launched, you can somewhat control their positioning in the menu bar. And he says, with respect to the login items bug, where you were losing login items, you only need to have Delayed Launcher as a login item. And it will have all the other things you launch in its configuration. So if your login items get deleted, you only have to remember to put Delayed Launcher in. So that's a pretty cool one. I never knew about Delayed Launcher, John. Is that new to you as well? Yes. And it makes me shake my fist because at some point in time, Dave, there was the ability, and I was fiddling around with this while you were discussing the issue at hand here. And I know at some point there was a way that the OS itself would allow you to reorder things. I don't know if it was Shift or Alter. But you could go to Login Items and reorder things within the OS, and at some point they took that away. They did take that away. I think that was several versions ago, too. Based on my research, it was 10.5. Yeah, OK. Because basically you're just interfacing the UI with the P-List file, as far as I can tell. It's what both of these are doing, and Apple decided to not do that for a reason. Well, it's still there. I mean, with UNIX Core, all that stuff can still happen. And obviously it can still happen if a third-party developer can make it happen. Oh, yeah, clearly. Just not through Login Items. Right. Right. Anymore. Anymore. Hey, we've talked about Proton Mail on the show and Lawyer Jeff, which is, I think, still the right title for him. Although I think Judge Jeff sounds, has a nicer ring to it. But at the moment, still Lawyer Jeff, has suggested something or turned us on to something called Proton Mail Bridge. Now Proton Mail is a web-based and app-based secure email service. Proton Mail Bridge lets you run an app on your Mac that effectively acts as a proxy server to Proton Mail and exposes itself locally on your Mac as an IMAP server so you can connect to all your Proton Mail stuff via mail or any other mail client that supports IMAP, like Thunderbird or Outlook or whatever you want, right there on your Mac. So it begins to integrate this a little bit better while still taking advantage of all of Proton Mail's features. So put a link to that in the show notes. Very cool stuff. You don't use Proton Mail, do you, John? Fully encrypted email. So I guess they have to be using a combination of plugins or something there to accomplish this feat, right? Well, I mean, you're running a separate app. You're running a proxy server, essentially. That's what Proton Mail Bridge is. Oh, OK. Yeah. Yeah, because otherwise Proton Mail is just at their server. Like, that's the only place that the encryption can happen. And obviously, some people want to manage their mail and mail. So there you go. OK. No, I have to, yeah, Switzerland, OK. Yeah, Switzerland, OK. Yeah, and they talk about their Swiss security, which, hey, you know, works for banking, so I guess. Sure. But last I heard. But yeah, I should kick the tires. I'm sure they have a free trial. I think they do. Yeah, I think they do. I'm looking at their signup page right now, but I'm pretty sure they do. Yeah, you get a basic account with limited features for free. 150 messages a day and half a gig of storage. So I think that's perfect. There you go. While we're on the subject of, I don't know what, how to do this segue, I've been using Mocha in my house for a while. It replaced Powerline across especially this one length where I really needed or wanted a wired connection, but have yet to run Ethernet. And I've been experimenting with all kinds of different Mocha adapters. The ActionTech bonded 2.0 ones are sort of the top of the heap, but there's also the Mocha 2.0 stuff that's built into, say, all the Teavos that are out now and into your cable boxes and things like that and other devices. Well, I really wanted to make the bonded 2.0 link work at full speed. And so I took all of the non-bonded stuff out of the mix so that it would really just go bonded 2.0 and the ActionTech stuff fell apart on me. It wouldn't do it. It would send data, but it wouldn't, like I would get all kinds of packet loss, like, you know, more than 50% packet loss, which is really bad, even 10% awful. This was like 10% of the time the packets would make it through. I could get speed sometimes if I blasted data, but I would lose too many packets, and my network was in a shambles. All right, what is quickly bonded? What is bonded by you versus non-bonded? Yeah, good question. Actually, I'm very glad you asked. So normally Mocha picks essentially one channel over which to send its data, right? It's using Mocha. Let's rewind one last step. Mocha is the method of bridging Ethernet and Coax in your house, right? And so you hook these Mocha things up to Coax, and then they have Ethernet ports on them. Whatever you plug into those Ethernet ports will be connected on the other end of the other Mocha adapter, right? And you can have multiple. You don't just have to have. It's not limited to just two. You can have four, and it creates this thing throughout your house with the Coax wiring that's in there. Mocha 1.0 and then Mocha 2.0, and I think there was Mocha 1.1 in there, too, were just different signaling methods going over these channels. And Mocha looks at what you're using and finds a channel, like your TV channels or your cable modem uses different channels, too. It finds a channel or a frequency that is unused. So it can sit right alongside of your cable modem and your TV and all of that stuff, and it doesn't get in each other's way. It works really well. Mocha 1.0, Mocha up through 2.0, non-bonded Mocha, to answer your question, John, only uses one channel at a time. Bonded Mocha is kind of like, you know, Doxus 3 for cable modems where you're bonding multiple channels together. In this case, I think it's just two, but it allows you to get that much more speed. Whereas with Mocha 2.0 unbonded, I could get maybe 400 megabits per second. Bonded Mocha 2.0, I can get, you know, 800 megabits a second. Real world. But not across my house with the action tech adapters. So I thought, wow, this is interesting. Talk to the engineers there. They're like, yeah, sometimes the cable runs aren't that good. I'm like, yeah, but it works fine without the bonded stuff. Like so, I think something's weird here. Like at worst, it should just fail to that and it works great. So I checked out these bonded two adapters from a different company. Their name is either Kiwi, K-I-W-E-E or Yitong, Y-I-T-O-N-G. Regardless, these things work flawlessly. Like 850 megabits per second, both directions, 0% packet loss, and I've been running them for two weeks straight. So any heat issues that we're going to creep up with long-term use or whatever would have, that's why I haven't mentioned it until now. So they are occasionally available at Amazon. And I've put links in the show notes to that, and I've asked them where else people can buy them. So we shall see. I think the cable question can be valid, kind of like with Ethernet. So Ethernet, you get now, you know, cat 5, cat 6, 6e, maybe 7, I don't know. And the cable could limit your... It could. Last I checked, I think I have what's, I think it's RG58. It's pretty much standard, you know, what almost everybody I've seen that does cable TV uses, and it's fine, as long as you don't run it for hundreds of feet. Right, right. No, and of course your splitters, whatever splitters you have in there are going to add some noise to the signal and all of that. But my issue and the reason, I'm glad I kind of went with my gut on this, the action tech stuff would work fine across that link to my Tivo, which is not bonded. So I'm like, okay, wait a minute, if we're going across a link like that, and the unbonded connection works flawlessly. Now suddenly when I try to bond it, it fails. And I isolated to make sure it wasn't like one of the units that I had, which is bad and all that stuff. No, it was just when they were running bonded mode. And I even tested it with these ones from Yitong or Kiwi, I'm not sure which brand name they're using, but it still failed. But without the action tech stuff in the way, and the Yitong stuff running, it's flawless. So, yeah, all right, so they got to work on that. They got to work on that. Yeah, to be fair, and actually to give Yitong a little bit more credit, when I first got them, I set them up and my network totally cratered. But I sort of, I was almost smart enough, John. As I was setting them up, I was telling my son, gosh, I don't know why it came to mind. I should have listened to myself. I was telling my son, yeah, sometimes it doesn't happen anymore. But like devices like this, people would block spanning tree protocol packets, STP packets. And it would cause all kinds of problems if you had things like Sonos or other things that relied on spanning tree to decide, spanning tree is essentially a way for devices to look and eliminate loops in your network, right? And because the Sonos devices will all talk to each other over wireless or over Ethernet, so they have to know not to loop all your network packets through them. So they use this thing called spanning tree protocol, and the devices all talk to each other with it and decide, figure out where the loops are and just avoid them. It's all very elegant. And do all this smart stuff. However. However, yeah, I had a power line adapter once that blocked just the spanning tree protocol packets, just those. So the conversation couldn't happen. The devices would assume there was no network loop because they weren't seeing their packets coming back around to them on a different interface. And so they wouldn't block any packets. And then real network packets would go out there and totally craters the network. I explained all this to my son just like that while I was plugging in these Yitong adapters for the first time. 20 minutes later, my network cratered. Why it took me two hours to think, hey, maybe these Yitong adapters are blocking STP packets, I will never know. The mind works in mysterious ways. But I drove myself crazy. I missed out on a Saturday afternoon nap because of this. And sure enough, then diagnosed that they were doing exactly that. Yeah. So I sent them an email, explained all this. They wrote me back the next day. They're like, we talked to our engineers. You're totally right. Like, oh, no, I know I'm right. I have a Saturday afternoon lost to prove it. And then they sent me a firmware update that fixed it. So there you go. If you get some of these and you're in your, I would run the firmware update. There's almost no reason to block those packets these days. It used to be that there were poor implementations, so they blocked them. But now no reason. So anyway, there you go. As I say, I used to say the day you learn about spanning tree protocol is a rough day. Evidently, that's true, even if you already know about spanning tree protocol. If you need to learn about it again, as I did, I just, I needed to viscerally experience it. Anyway, that's what I got. Hey, can we talk about some tips that we got from our listeners, John? Of course. Yeah, cool. Ulysses wrote in actually with a question initially saying that iOS 11 on his iPhone frequently needs to be rebooted because the lock screen is corrupted where only the wallpaper shows. The date and time disappears as well as any music or podcast player controls any of that. And so my initial reply to him was, yeah, it's a cache file, right? I mean, there's no question about it. There's some cache file or P list file that's, that's, you know, not set right. And we need to ram or something maybe it could be. But my first thought was it's iOS because we see this on the Mac too. And you know, we fair it in and we blow away a P list file or whatever a cache. And then everything's fine. Unfortunately, on iOS, you can't fair it in and do that stuff at all. So my, my initial thought as it often is, is I don't like, even if I knew which P list file it is, I can't tell you how to go and delete it because I can't tell, I can't go and delete it. So you have to back up your phone, restore your phone, hope that it's not a P list that's backed up, hope that it's something like a cache file that's ignored in the backup, then you're good to go. Well, Ulysses wrote us back, John. And he said, I changed wallpaper and that solved the problem. So evidently, that rewrote the either the P list or the cache or both and solve the problem, which makes sense, right? You know, if you've got a setting, it's, it's kind of the turn it off turn it on again approach where, you know, just doing that rewrites these files. Everything we see in the graphic interface on both Mac and iOS is really just a graphical representation of some value or values in a text file or a P list file somewhere. By changing something in the graphical interface, it almost always rewrites one of those files. And in this case, it rewrote it from being a corrupted file to a correct file and solved this problem. So that's something for all of us to remember. Interesting, right, John? Yeah. Yeah, I just did a device restore, but that's a long story. Okay. Told it in another time. At another time. But um, but I had the same thing. Something's messed up. Gotta pull it back from back up. Or flip the switch. That's, I mean, with him, Well, that's essentially what I did. It's like, all right, the content that I need is, is, is not anywhere handy. All right. I have this backup in the cloud. Okay. That worked for me. All right. Yeah, that's why it was. I mean, I reset the device, you know, which I'll go into more detail later. But so I basically had to do a wipe of my iPhone because something wasn't working the way I thought it would. Sure. It restored it and iOS 11 actually. And I think we'll, we'll compile these hints. Because I had one in the last show about Wi-Fi, but iOS 11 doing, this is the first time I did advice restore on a iOS 11. Dude, it's a much, much smoother process, especially if there's a nearby device that's already logged into iCloud. Right. Just, just like getting all the stuff they added. They were just like, there were so many things that happened that I was like, oh man, I have to trudge through doing this and that. And they're like, no, no, nearby device. You know, we'll talk to it about your iCloud membership. Right. Yeah. It gets your, not only does it get your Wi-Fi credentials, it'll get your iCloud credentials and all of that from your devices. Oh, yeah. And then, you know, pulled my iCloud back up and everything was exactly back to the way I wanted. So it wasn't always the case in the past that it was that smooth. So hats off to the iOS team. Yeah, that's good. Doing all this stuff because we didn't really hear much about a lot of the, I don't know, maybe I wasn't paying attention. Yeah, they were around during the betas for sure. Oh, okay. I didn't really fiddle with the betas. Yeah. All right. So you saw a lot of these things that were like, hey, that's nice. It's really nice. No, exactly what you're talking about where you restore a device. And it's like, hey, just, do you have a, you know, another device logged into that account handy? Just go and touch something on that and then we'll authenticate you and you're good to go. Yeah. Yeah, it's good. It's good. One thing I will say though, while we're on the subject of restoring from backups is iCloud is great because you can backup anywhere you are, as long as you have data connection. And it, you know, the restore is almost always flawless. But doing a local backup, especially if you do it inside iMazing, I, or rather iMazing mini, then you can restore individual things. Like you could choose to just restore one app's settings. And you don't have to pull in everything from the backup. You get to granularly pull things back. So I just wanted to throw that out there for while we're talking about backups and troubleshooting. Because that can be handy if that's all you, if you only need one thing, iMazing mini can be pretty good about that. Yeah, in this case, it didn't quite do it. The issue actually had to do with visual voicemails and that I did something regarding diagnosing a problem and then all of a sudden all my voicemails were gone. And I'm like, well, what? But I know like a lot of things there, I was like, I'm hoping that that's stored in my iCloud backup. And as it turns out, it was. It was also stored by iMazing backup, but I couldn't find a way to restore it. It'll let you see them and play them back, but it won't let you restore them to the phone, at least as far as I could tell. Yeah, that would make sense. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I believe that. I believe that. One last quick tip, though some of our quick tips haven't been so quick today, but that's okay, is from Roger, who says, this one seems so simple that it's entirely possible. I am the only person who didn't already know it. However, I stumbled across this cool feature in the iOS version of Google Maps and wanted to share in Google Maps. After you enter your destination, you'll be presented with a screen showing you the destination on the map. After tapping on the directions button, you are presented with a screen, which shows you the quickest choice marked with a dark blue line running from the beginning to the end. However, you are often shown one or two other choices which take longer or perhaps have a similar ETA. They're marked in gray. Here's the tip, until recently, I thought the only way to choose one of the alternate routes was to tap on one of them on the screen. This causes the alternate route to become the primary route and it changes to blue. However, I found out quite by accident that if you simply swipe to the left, the bottom part of the screen, which shows the miles in the ETA, the screen then goes to the next choice, which is marked in blue. Swipe again and you go to the third choice. Swipe to the right and it takes you back to the previous screens. It's so simple, but I had no idea. It's also much easier, he says, to swipe than to try tapping on the alternate route on the map. Yeah, I find that tapping thing to be annoying. I'm always missing it and, you know, like zooming in the wrong spot or whatever. So I had no idea about the swiping either, Roger, you're not alone. We're learning this together or rather, I'm learning it from you. So thanks, man. That's good stuff. I had no idea, John. No idea. Nice. Yeah. I'm more, believe it or not, when I'm traveling in these directions, whether Manhattan or another major city, I actually find Apple Maps isn't too horrible. Most of the time. Yeah, I've had, I keep going back to it. At least Manhattan. Yeah, like I don't use Apple Maps. I basically use Waze when I'm in the car. But on foot, I will use Google. I've tried Apple Maps a few times or I've been with family or whatever who's like, oh yeah, we'll use Apple Maps to do this. And then suddenly we're in the wrong spot and it's like, what map are you using there? Like, oh, Apple Maps. Like, oh, dude, you can't do that. And actually it happened with us, with the family in New York over the summer when we were there, Lucas kept using Apple Maps and finally it was like, dude, just turn that thing off. I know where, I know how to go. And it was, I don't know. It just was, the experience has been less than stellar. Let's say that. But I don't know. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Hey, I want to talk about our two sponsors, John, with which I have had extremely stellar experiences with both of them. You mind? As I think I have as well. I think that's right. Yeah. So our first sponsor is Eero at E-E-R-O dot com. Eero is the Wi-Fi network, the Wi-Fi hardware, the Wi-Fi experience that both John and I are currently running in our homes and actually have been for months. They've come out earlier this year with their new second generation Eero systems, which adds some hardware, which is fun. The second generation Eero box now adds a second 5 gigahertz radio to have three 5 gigahertz radios in there. Sorry, three radios, two of them 5 gigahertz, one of them 2.4 gigahertz. But it actually does add more radios than that. It also adds a thread radio for your low power devices too. Also in the new hardware category is the Eero beacon. Now the second generation Eero looks very, very much like the first. It's a little rectangular item, kind of the size of an Apple TV that you set on your counter or wherever you want to put it. And it's got two ethernet ports in it that can be used in a variety of different ways. For the router one, you would plug one into your cable modem or your internet device. And then the other one is free to access your local network. But on the satellite ones, the ethernet ports are there for whatever you want them for. The beacon, you don't have to sit on a table. You plug it into the wall and that's where it stays. It just sits there, plugged into the wall. It's got a little nightlight on it if you want. So you can put it like in a hallway or something and have it the nightlight turn on when it's dark, which is very, very handy. And it's got two radios in it, a 2.4 and a 5 gigahertz. And it participates in the Eero mesh and expands your Wi-Fi and just makes things work. Like I said, I'm running Eero here at home. It is stellar, works. I don't have to think about it. It just takes care of my Wi-Fi. And I have Wi-Fi everywhere I'd need it and beyond. Really, really good stuff, what they do. I can't speak highly enough about them. And it's just fortuitous that they're a sponsor. I would speak highly of them anyway. And their whole distributed system with the mesh works really well. Their customer support is fantastic. And really, it just works. So here's the deal. Go to eero.com. That's Eero.com. And remember our promo code, which is MGG. Here's how it's going to work. You're going to add your Eero to your shopping cart there. You might pick a set with one second generation Eero and two beacons, or you might want a set with three, or whatever you want to get. Mix and match, build what you want. Then add overnight shipping. That's going to be an extra charge. That's where you remember coupon code MGG. You put in coupon code MGG after you've added overnight shipping. And guess what? The charge for overnight shipping goes to zero. That's right. They've partnered with us. So there you go. It's a deal for you from us, from them, via us. That's how it works. So again, go to eero.com. Add your overnight shipping. And then when you put in coupon code MGG, you get free overnight shipping to the US or Canada, all right there for you. Our thanks to Eero. Again, at Eero, Eero.com. Thanks so much. All right, John. And the second sponsor that we have for today is Barebone Software with BBEdit. BBEdit is an app that I've used forever. I can't remember a time. I'm sure there was a time when I didn't use it, but it was a dark day. Because now with BBEdit, I can do so much. And with BBEdit 12, they've added so much stuff. In fact, they heard my comment about dark day and they added improved dark theme support. So when you're using a dark color scheme, BBEdit now colors the editing and project window Chrome to match for a more integrated overall experience. So it looks nice. And you can do that inside BBEdit's preferences too. You can tweak it any way you want. There's a way improved UI for the whole FTP, SFTP thing. I don't know about you, but that's one of the things I love about BBEdit is I can open a file from an FTP server or an SFTP server, edit it. And when I hit save, it's no different for me than saving on my Mac, but when I hit save, it in the background saves it across the FTP or SFTP link. It's just right there. It's just perfect. Really, really, really stellar. It's great. You can do previews inside BBEdit windows now so that you can see everything in WebKit right there, just like it's going to be when somebody loads it in a browser if you're doing HTML or anything like that. You got to check it out. And that's the best part about it is you can go and download a copy to use. And most of the features that you're going to want, you're probably going to get for free for the lifetime of the product. But if there's something that you want that's not included in the free version, well, then you can buy it and it's 50 bucks. So you got to go check it out. Go to barebones.com, download BBEdit 12, test it out, decide what features you need, whether or not you need the paid version or the free version and you're good to go. Our thanks to BBEdit and Barebones for sponsoring this episode. All right, John, should we go to Terry here? Go into some of our questions. Might as well. Yeah. Yes. All right. Terry writes, I'm using photos and I sync with iCloud. I have one very large photo library, 140 gigs, and I want to start a new photo library so it won't take so long for photos to load. What happens to iCloud sync when I do this? Will I lose the photos that I have in the cloud? Well, both libraries sync. I want to be able to go back and forth between libraries and perhaps in the future have one library for each new year. Added to my question, if I were to turn off photos in iCloud syncing in System Preferences iCloud, what would happen to the photos that are in the cloud? All right. Well, so here's the thing. We're talking about iCloud photo library here. That's the photo syncing engine that happens. There's also a photo stream, but that's different and that's not what you're asking about. iCloud photo library supports one photos library per iCloud account holder. So if you want to have two separate photo libraries on your computer, you are more than welcome and your Mac is smart enough to know that it's only going to let you designate one as the primary and therefore synced library. So you can open up as many different libraries as you want, but only one of them is going to sync with iCloud. And if you start toggling the iCloud syncing on and off for different libraries, at that point, you're going to probably wind up with lots of duplicates and a mess in iCloud. So I think what you're saying, so the thing is you really should, I'll take it back, having a single photo library, probably in your pictures folder on a computer and having a single iCloud photo library associated with that is probably the best, easiest solution. It's the easiest. When you try to deviate from that, then this is where things get... Yeah, it's deviating from that. Deviating from it's not a problem. You can have, like I said, you could create a second photo library on your Mac to do exactly what she's talking about or one for every year, but you're only going to be syncing one of those. Okay, so that could be an archive. So that's kind of cool then. Yeah, if you break it out with the... Right, you could have your... But that's sort of the point of iCloud photo library is to have everything available everywhere and it manages it. But if you want to break it all out, there's nothing that's going to stop you. But again, just remember, you only have one synced to the cloud. Now, I did say that it's one library per iCloud account holder. So you could create a separate iCloud account and sync your second library with that, but there's another catch. You can only have one... You can only designate one iCloud account to sync with iCloud photo library per each user account on your Mac. Yes, you can sign in multiple iCloud accounts on one user on your Mac, but only one of them gets all the sync features and that includes photos sync. So the work around then is to create a separate user account on your Mac and sync the alternate library with that. And that would work. It starts to get a little convoluted and you kind of have to make sure you know what you're managing. Your iPhone will never be able to see these secondary libraries because you can't log into your iPhone with separate user accounts. So you only get the one. But at least that way you're backing it up and if you want to take advantage of the iCloud family shared storage, you could certainly create a family even if it's just you and multiple accounts so that you buy one blob of storage and everybody's gonna... All your accounts are sharing that. So it's possible, but be careful that you don't create a mess for yourself because as soon as you sync the wrong library on your Mac with the wrong library in the cloud, things get, like very quickly, will start populating duplicates everywhere and that's probably not what you want. In fact, I'm pretty certain that's not what you want. Now, in terms of turning off iCloud Photo Library on your Mac, what happens to all the stuff that's already synced to the cloud? It stays there. You could turn off iCloud Photo Library on all of your devices and whatever was previously synced to iCloud will stay there unless you tell it to delete it from iCloud or you back down your iCloud storage to something that won't fit all those photos and then it within 30 days, it'll, or after 30 days, it'll wipe it all out. So, but just turning off iCloud Photo Library syncing on your Mac won't change anything about the cloud. Everything that was there stays there. You can still visit it. Even if you turn it off on all your devices, you can still visit it from a web browser. Just go to iCloud.com. You can browse all your photos there. You can even restore things that have been deleted from there, which is a little tip that most people don't know. So, there's your extra, another extra tip for this episode. Any thoughts, John? I like the concept. So, on the one hand, it makes me sad that 140 gig library. Oh, why did you do that? You just moved the question. I did. I archived the question. But it was you're right. It was 140 gig library. Thanks, man. Sure. So, so anyways, 140. So, so on the one hand, I can appreciate that, so it makes me sad that whatever computer that you have right now isn't able to keep up with this because as photo libraries or any library or any database gets bigger, it takes longer to bring things in there. So, thinking kind of like an engineer or a geek and saying, hey, if I can split it up into individual libraries, I actually hats off. That's a great idea. And I think probably the best thing to do that that you can do it manually with photos, I think, if you're brave. I think power photos from our friends at Fat Cat Software is probably a better option to optimize your photo workflow. It certainly, if you're going to break things up, that would be the app that I'd use because it's going to do it very intelligently for you. So, yeah. And also, just helping out our buds at Apple is maybe you want to buy a more powerful Mac. Well, or... I don't know what vintage, but I mean, yeah, I mean, everything gets slower when the data you're dealing with is bigger. I mean, you can't avoid that, but it's like, you know, maybe time for more RAM or an SSD or maybe a new Mac. I'm just saying. No, I think RAM and especially the speed of the drive that you're using to store your photo library will make a big difference. Yeah. I would say an SSD or the drive technology is probably the... Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Not so much processing power. I think that most Macs have plenty of that. Yeah, it's true. Yeah. I mean, there's going to be a lot of background crunching that goes on, but still, your Mac will probably deal with it okay. While we're on the photos thing, Johnny wrote in, he says, I recently upgraded to an iPhone 10 and decided to clean up my photos. I discovered that I had unfortunately shot a few hundred live view photos. I really don't like live view, but sometimes it seems to be turned on anyway. I've discovered also that on my iPhone, I can delete the still image associated with the file, but the short live view clips seem to have a life of their own. There is no trash can icon or apparently any other way to delete these files. I can delete the file in the photos app on my Mac, but it doesn't affect the file on my phone. I don't use iCloud photo library or photo stream. I just sync my phone to my computer manually to transfer the photos. Help me guys. And I must kill the zombie live view files. Yeah, I feel you. I will say, and this is just because it's come up before and I've had a change of heart on this, the concept of taking every photo as a live photo and then going in later and picking which one you want to make the key photo really does allow you to correct those shots where maybe somebody had closed their eyes or something like that. So it has saved me more than once and I've only really been thinking about it this way for what maybe six weeks. So there's my case for using live photos all the time. That said, if you don't want to, of course you don't want to. I reject your statement, but go ahead. Do you want to tell me why? I don't ever use live photos. Well, that's what I'm saying. You're missing out on the opportunity. It complicates, but it complicates things. And more often than not, I find that I've accidentally added extraneous information to my photo library and I'm like, I don't want to paint in the neck. Now I got to stretch through these and delete the ones I don't want because I didn't want them anyways. But yeah. But they really, they only come in as one thing to your photo library. Yeah, but they're taking a precious space on life. You think they are. You do. But you forget that with HGIF compression, it really, it's not that much larger than a photo. But you know. Anyway, here's another trick. Try to manage photos directly on your iPhone. And if you have iCloud Photo Library, this will be a weird scenario for you. But if you don't, use image capture on your Mac. It's built in. It's free. It's part of the operating system. And it will talk directly to your iPhone or a USB connected camera and let you manage photos directly on the device without trying to get smart like photos does and, you know, thinking about things. It's just basically a raw interface. And if you have to bulk delete photos from your phone, this is the best way to do it, I think. You could you also use iMazing. That will let you do similar things. But image capture is right there. It's on your Mac. It's free. I've used it countless times to solve this problem. So there you go. That's that's my thought. I love image capture. I always forget about it. Yeah. It also, I think it links to image scanners as well. In cameras and all sorts of things. It's funny how many things show up when you plug them in the piece of the hardware show up in there. It's true. It's true. Hey, you want to you want to take us to Devon, John? This is a blast from the past man. All right, man. I got to say so Devon says, I don't know if you will be able to help, but he made a total loss of what to do here. I have an old MacBook Pro 2009. All right. 13-inch and I'm trying to restore it back to its glory days. The computer works fine. It needs a little bit of TLC. I'm removing dirt from the... Okay, we don't need that. So I've tried three hard drives in the system. I created an El Capitan USB boot disk while testing the stick on my Mac mini. It was able to install to a USB hard drive perfectly fine. All right, an external one. All right, so we want to create the scenario here. So he has a drive in the machine, which is where we like it, but they need to also try to test with an external drive in a USB enclosure. But when I put the USB stick on the MacBook and boot it up, this utility cannot format any drive I put inside the Mac. I get wiping volume data to prevent future accidental probing fail. What? I cannot get this computer to install El Capitan or Yosemite. Please help. All right. So first off, dude, I've never seen that air. That is just one of the most ridiculous error message I've ever seen. It almost sounds like reticulating splines or something that they would have put in the Sims. But it's like wiping volume data to prevent future accidental probing failed. Future accidental? Are you accidentally probing your drives often? So what does this really mean? So the thing is, I think there's one developer in Apple in a basement somewhere that knows what this means. And if you can call us or send us an email at feedback at macicab.com, Dave. I think you said feedback at macicab.com and I think the title of this episode is Future Accidental Probing Failed. I just don't even. Good as any because that's such a great error message. So yes, I want to reiterate. Number one, Dave said feedback at macicab.com which if you're that developer that made this error message, hats off to you, my friend. Yeah, and tell us what you meant. Please. All right. So as far as I can tell, Dave, so I did find an iFixit article that had a report talking about the partition failed wiping volume data to prevent future accidental probing error. That's a tongue twister. Yeah. So I said I'd send it out to the Pena Gallery, which is what I affectionately call all our lists. All of us. At least the people in the chat room. Yeah. I mean, it's good. Peanuts are cool. But a basic search that I did, they found that this seems to be it. Now, let's note the date of this machine. It's a 2009 MacBook Pro. Okay. You know what type of SATA port was in that, Dave? SATA 2, right? Is that right? It's on iFit exactly. So at this current point in technology folks, we have SATA 1, SATA 2, SATA 3. SATA 1 is 1.5 gigabits per second. SATA 2 is 3. And SATA 3 is 6. And I don't know if there's a SATA 4 yet. There may be. I don't know. Do you know? I don't know. No, I don't know. I'll look it up. The indication here in the SciFixit article is if you try to plug in a faster drive than the machine expects, you may get this error. So. Interesting. Even though this is a thing we've seen also, Dave, with RAM, is that when the machine was made, the machine had no concept of what SATA 3 was. It's a SATA 2 machine. Sure. Right. That makes sense. Should people that design SATA 3 things make them SATA 2-compatible? Yes. And the way it works mostly is that that happens. Is USB, SATA, whatever. You make it backwards compatible with older standards. In this case, I'm assuming that there is a bug or a glitch in the firmware in that MacBook that doesn't like certain SATA 3 drives. So my recommendation would be, in this case, try a SATA 2 SSD or rotational. And I don't think you'll get that error. Yeah. I remember, and it could still be the case that for a long time, OWC over at maxsales.com was selling SATA 2 specific drives so that you could avoid this problem and also the problem where they would run those at half speed. Right? If you put a SATA 3 drive on a SATA 2 bus on a machine like this, I'm not sure if it was exactly this one, but there was something where put a SATA 3 drive on that one and instead of running it at 3 gigabits per second, which is what the SATA 2 bus maxes out at, it would actually back it all the way down to one and a half gigabits per second, which is what you got with SATA 1. So it was even better. Oh, blast from the past. Sorry, tangent here, but I'm going to tangent. So one of the MacBook Pros that I had, Dave, I think the 2008 that I had had a bug in their firmware where even though it was technically a SATA 2 port, it would only talk at SATA 1 speeds until they introduced an update. Yeah. Because people are like, dude, I got this machine that has this, it advertises this speed, but it's doing half that, if not even. Not even. So I guess the general guidance here is that even though standards evolve and they should be compatible with older ones, sometimes they're not. So sometimes you may have to old-school it and get a USB 2 thing or a SATA 2 thing. Sure. Or whatever older standard thing so that it doesn't crash your machine. While we're on the subject of all of this crazy interface stuff, we have an email from Sharon who says, I just upgraded from a 2009 iMac to a 2017 iMac. She says, I have several OWC external hard drives, Daisy Chained using FireWire 400 and FireWire 800. Two of my drives also have USB 3. So I can connect those directly to my new iMac. What would be the best way to connect the rest? Should I get a USB hub? Can I still Daisy Chained using FireWire and connect one using USB 3? I use the hard drives for iTunes, photo storage and backups for those and then clone one of my drives onto the Mac. Speed is not a huge issue. As I replace the drives, should I be looking for USB 3 or Thunderbolt? Okay, so on an iMac, I would not get a USB hub isn't going to help you with this problem. But a dock might. But I wouldn't do a USB dock. I would do a Thunderbolt dock. And the reason is that most Thunderbolt docks that you're going to come across, but certainly you want to make sure that you do this and the other world computing dock would most likely be the one that I'd recommend here. You'll get a FireWire port with it. And generally that's going to be a FireWire 800 port. But connecting FireWire 800 to FireWire 400 is as simple as just getting a cable that goes from one connector to the other. So what I would do is get yourself a Thunderbolt dock that has a FireWire 800 port. I would connect that to your FireWire 800 devices. However many of those there are, you're going to Daisy Chain them. And then you're going to Daisy Chain the last FireWire 800 device to a FireWire 400 device. And then as many of those as you have. And that would be the least inefficient way to do that. You cannot connect one drive via USB and then have that go FireWire. I mean, I say that I've never tried it. It would require a very special bit of circuitry inside the drive that I don't think exists. I don't think it's built to bridge all that together. I don't think it's like a hub in there or a dock in there. So once you connect a drive with USB, then that's that. You're not going to then also connect FireWire to it. So it's one or the other. And then as for new drives, and if you don't want to get a dock, if there's no reason to get a dock other than this, you certainly can get a Thunderbolt to FireWire 800 or even Thunderbolt to FireWire 400 adapter that just does that and doesn't add any of the other things that you might get with a more expensive and more full featured dock. And that's going to work fine for you. And that's the beauty of Thunderbolt. It's kind of like the PCI, the old PCI expansion slots. You just get to put whatever you want in there and it just talks directly to the motherboard and you're good to go. As for new drives, I would go USB 3. Thunderbolt interfaces are really expensive. And for the most part, you're not going to get the benefits out of those that you would that you would want in order to spend that money. And most drives that you're going to buy aren't going to come as just Thunderbolt drives. RAID units might, because they can start to push well past the limits of USB or USB 3 in terms of speeds. But yeah, USB 3 is going to be fine for single drive enclosures. That's my thought. What do you think, Mr. Braun? My thought is I'm going to go off the rails here and say... I know. Well, no, I agree. Well, the thing is that the fact is the two options, no, I'm sorry, three options. So the primary hardwired options on this machine, yes, are USB 3 and Thunderbolt up to 40 gigabits. So you got five gigabits or 40 gigabits. That's awesome. But you also have, so I'll spit it out here. You also got Ethernet. You may want to take some of those drives and toss them into NAS. If she has a NAS. Just saying. So you're saying you got all these drives and you want to access the data on them. So you may want to consider a NAS because that gives you good throughput as well. So yeah, just kind of a relevant tangent there. She doesn't care about throughput though. Yeah. Well, in my case. She's wide. Yeah. Just it just pains me hearing that you have individual drives and enclosures. At the very least get a super enclosure or something, right? I don't know. I kind of like the idea of especially with backups of having a separate drive that like especially with a clone that you can grab and just go plug in anywhere you want without having to extract it from something. Yeah, that's okay. You know. But yeah, otherwise I'm with you. If you're just, if you're storing blobs of data out on something in a general sense, again, unless you need portability with specific bits of data where you like you're working on a movie or something and you want to say, all right, great, I'm done with that. Unplug the drive, hand it to the next person that needs it and you're done, right? In that sense, yeah, individual drives are great. Yeah. I'm just saying for the most part, my use case is for big, as you said, blobs of data. Makes me think of the Star Trek episode, ugly bags of water. Yes, that's right. Blobs of data. But yeah, for the most part, you know, it's big blob of data than a NAS in my humble opinion is the place it should be. But if you need portability or you're on the road or stuff, then absolutely you want a USB or Thunderbolt or whatever. Yeah. Portable drive. Yeah. All right. I want to jump. We had some questions. Man, we had questions from recent shows. We're going to jump around a little bit, John, here and see if we can get to where we need to get. The next one I want to go to is listener Paul, who asked a while back, one of you guys mentioned a shipping app that notified you, even if you didn't add the shipping info. What app was that? And I think what you were asking about, Paul, was that the automatic notifications that you get when you sign up with UPS My Choice, FedEx, what is it called? FedEx Delivery Manager or USPS's Informed Delivery Service. All of these, you put your address in, you create an account, you put your address in, you associate the two, and then when a delivery is coming for that address, boom, you get an email, even if you didn't know that the delivery was coming. Beware, this time of year, that might ruin the surprise on a gift or two. I've had that happen to me around birthdays and Christmas. It's like, oh, you're getting a delivery. Oh, I know what somebody got me. Okay. You know, it happens, right? With information comes responsibility. So I have found Informed Delivery, I actually did have to renew my credentials with them because I was getting something with USPS and I knew it was coming and I didn't get a text or anything. Oh, interesting. And then I had to go to them. But now, of course, So Informed Delivery shows you the image capture of the mail piece before you get it. In addition, I think to giving you text and email alerts if you want them. Right, right, right. But I found that it broke temporarily and I'm like, oh, it must be because they kind of re-rolled out the service. The other cool thing is, dude, I got a delivery yesterday. You know what yesterday was? Sunday. Yeah. Yeah. All the Amazon stuff comes on Sundays. Well, I don't know, but the thing is USPS didn't always use to deliver packages on Sundays, but now I think they... Yeah, now that they have that deal with Amazon, they do. I get them all year long. It's not even just a Christmas thing. Yeah, it just surprised me that I got an email saying, yeah, you got a package to deliver on Sunday. It's coming today? Yeah, that's right. Yeah, for sure. Back on track. No. And then just in case that wasn't the question or while we're here, the Deliveries app from junecloud.com is the one that I put on my phone to track all of my inbound and outbound shipments. Yes, I can track them individually in the apps or web interfaces for every shipper that I use, but the Deliveries app is great and it does local syncs. And so it does its own background refreshes on the phone. It'll notify me when something changes. So we'll put a link to that in the show notes too, because man, I love that Deliveries app. So do you use that one, John, or no? No, I love Deliveries. Every time I get that text message, it's just... Yeah, it's good. That's a special feeling you get. Somebody's sending you a present. It is. I know. It's great. Ken asks us, oh, where is it? He says, and this is a bit of a repeat. He says, what I want to do is remotely log into my mom's iMac from outside her land. In other words, from my home, so that I may take control of her machine to do administrative tasks and or help her solve problems. This time of year, I figured it was good to have a quick refresher on this. He says, I'd like to be able to do this at any time at my own initiation without having her there to accept my connection. This seems like a really common use case. Last week, you mentioned that maybe only airport routers would allow the Mac to wake for access. Yes, in a sense, that's true, but perhaps not relevant here. He says, I've been doing this for a while using Apple Remote Desktop and running the built-in Mac OS facility on her end in sharing, but in order for this to work across the internet, across the WAN, I have to set up port forwarding on her end to route traffic to the right machine. There are two problems with this. Number one, security. Exposing a machine like that to the outside world can cause some problems. In fact, we've told of Tales of Woe on this show about exactly that. Number two, he says, is her IP address changes. So when her IP address changes, I don't know what to connect to anymore. So he says, what's the answer? I think there are two apps to answer your question, Ken. The first is TeamViewer, which is free for personal use with exactly what you're talking about here. So you'd set up TeamViewer on your mom's computer, you would set it up on yours. And when you set it up, as we discussed, John, you can tell it or you can get the right credentials so that you can connect without her having to authenticate you. So that's the first one. And then the second one is screens from Adobe. Screens connect would run on her computer and registers itself so that you can just connect to her machine from wherever you are without having to know her IP and all that stuff. So those are the two, really, that I think are going to get you there. But, John. Well, I'll agree with you. So one thing is that there was an Apple product mentioned, Apple remote desktop, which can be used for this. But yeah, it gets kind of squirrely when you're crossing network boundaries. Yeah. I'm just trying to scratch it because back to my Mac in theory, I'm wondering if you set up an account for someone on your machine and have backed my Mac enabled, if that would enable them to get into your system and diagnose it or maybe that's just crazy talk. I mean, it should be able to do that, right? But honestly, I haven't used back my Mac in ages, but I know it allows mostly with Apple equipment kind of seamless remote access. Seamless. I would put a question mark after that word. But I mean, it's using open standards. You know, like I forget it's called raccoon or something, but it's using a lot of open source things underneath the covers to allow, for the most part, seamless remote access. Sure. I would have better luck with these other ones. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. If you want some pain, then, you know, try it back to my Mac. There you go. Otherwise, yeah. I mean, team viewers, to me, the best. I mean, that's what I use when I support my parents when they have. Yeah. And you can set it up so they don't have to allow you in. I really, I think for you, Ken, that's going to be the right one because screens connect, it's not very expensive, but screens isn't free. So if you're looking for free, this is going to get you there. Um, yeah, let's answer Nick's question because this keeps coming up and it makes me sad every time. Nick, yeah, Nick writes in, he says, I'm Nick from Costa Rica, longtime listener, first time writer. It looks like I got caught and I'm going to say I'm sorry for that, Nick. He says, the thing is, I knew that my transporter sink wasn't supported any longer and I've been meaning to find a new solution for it, but I haven't. I used to make regular backups of the transporter folder and library, but haven't for quite some time. The problem is that it looks like the sink just died on me tonight and I can't find any solution for retrieving the information in the transporter library. The stuff that's in the private cloud says I've looked high and low and haven't come up with a good solution. Do you guys know of any way that I can access and retrieve the data on the hard drive before repurposing it? I, too, have looked high and low, Nick, because yours is not the only request I had. Actually, one of my new MGG listener turned Dave the nerd consulting clients asking me exactly the same question. We went through quite a bit of it together and no, there is no way to get the data off that drive. It's stored in their own format. It's encrypted and that's kind of the way it was by design, right? So that I could say put a transporter sink at John's house and sink all my data between the two of them and John couldn't dig in and muck around with my data if he wanted. So, yeah, there's no way to get that data. If you are a transporter user, back up your transporter library early and often because if the hardware dies, I mean, really what you could do, Nick, is, and actually I say this, or I start to say this, but I'm not even sure. I haven't tried it. You might be able to, if you can find somebody else with a transporter sink, you might be able to connect that drive to it and get it to work. I don't know how much of the configuration is stored on the sink versus the drive. So no promises, but that would be another thing to try. But I'm not even that as I'm saying it doesn't sound all that great. So that's the unfortunate part of that answer. Do you have anything to add to that before we go on to his next question is, which is, okay, now what's the next thing? Anything to add? Sadly, my transporter, despite replacing the drive, like would just drop off my network. Oh yeah, you had a weird problem. Yeah, or it would cause broadcast storms and take down my entire network until I got a better switch. I remember that. Oh, hey, it was a good run though, good sponsor. It did what it advertised to do and then they decided to do other things. So I have to say, and I'm going to preface this by saying that these people don't run Drobo anymore. But the people that started Connected Data, which and they're good people. They're listeners to the show. I know they're cringing as I'm saying this, but I'm just going to be honest about it. They have a habit of creating products that really serve a need and then abandoning them altogether. The transporter sink is, in my opinion, the second product that this team did this way. The first was the Drobo FS, which was the first network attached storage device that we really ever tested here at Mackie Cab and really went nuts over because of how great it worked and then the promises of the future. And we and therefore you got burned on these things. Now, the transporter sink was less of a burn than the Drobo FS. Well, you know, dude, my FS is still running. It's still sitting on my desk here every now and then it chirps and says it drives about to die. But no, I still use it day to day. Yeah, but you can't install the apps and the future of that thing. Oh, no, the app promise is gone. It's gone. But as an as, it's performance wise. But I think, yeah, I've had it for a decade. I was trying to look in my file saying, how long have I had the Strobo FS? And the fact that it's lasted this long. No, you're right. Quite honestly amazing. To offer clarity and transparency there. Yeah, the FS hardware was great. Is great. I know many people, including you, John, obviously, that run these things. It was the app promise that they delivered on or they they they promised. And then it really never went anywhere. That's gotten slightly better with the Drobo 5n, by the way, different management team. So there you go. The transporter sink worked. It delivered on its promise right out of the gate. It's just that, you know, here we are with some customers that are in a bad spot with it because support ended a couple of months ago and yada, yada. And the service, I think, actually, I think the service will keep going because the next next sand, I think, is the company that bought them. They're using the connected data service for their enterprise products. So in theory, as long as your device works, the online portion of it will remain. So I'm really hesitant to recommend things in there to replace this without a lot of thought because, you know, here we are. But the interesting thing is to deliver on the app promise for the FS and to deliver on the idea of a replacement for the transporter and transporter sink. I'm looking at the same company and it's Synology. They've done a great job delivering on the app promise of the NAS market. We talk about them all the time. Of course, anything could happen to any company at any time and I have no knowledge of the internal workings of Synology. So I can't tell you that they're not going to be bankrupt tomorrow, but I don't think they are. I think they've got, I think, what you do, John, you know things, but okay. No, I think they're going to be around for a while and they're focused on the right things in terms of what we want for our market here. And in terms of private cloud, you know, cloud station, which is being rebranded to Synology Drive, is awesome and works very well. And you could do cloud station, well, with any NAS from Synology, including a single bay NAS. I probably would recommend a dual bay NAS if you're going to do that, but there's nothing inherently wrong with a single bay NAS. You just don't get the option of any redundancy. But you didn't get redundancy with the transporter sync either. So there you go. Single bay NAS or a Synology router hang a hard drive off of it and it will be a cloud station server. And it works really well. Their apps for iOS and especially their Mac app are beautiful. They work really well. So that's my advice for replacing your transporter is looking at the single and dual bay or really any Synology NAS. But price wise, you're looking at, you know, obviously the smaller ones. So there you go. Yeah. The only problem, the only fish shake I have for Synology, Dave? Yes. Ready for this? Yes. Like, oh, should I mute him? No. Is that... No, you can fish shake any way. I just, it's fine. No. The thing is my only fish shake with them is they have too much stuff and I'm being totally serious. Yep. They have so many different models and until I learned the secret code to figure out what the numbers meant. But even then, they have so many products and so many pieces of software that they're offering and rolling out new things. It's on, even though they have events like their Synology event in Manhattan and, you know, other cities. And check it out if you can go to one because it's cool. You get to hang out with storage geeks, which is like most people. Yeah. But they offer so much and it's really hard to wrap it. I mean, you and I don't know all the things they do. We try to, Dave. We try, you know, it's impossible. It's like the Performa days with Apple. You just, there's too many models. Yeah. So that's my only, it's difficult to choose among their offerings. But they offer pretty much everything you'd want from the Cloud NAS company. The other guys? Yeah. Yeah. It's true. Sometimes. It's true. All right. And then let's see, where are we here? All right, John, I did some math this week. And I wanted to address Douglas's note regarding our discussion about AppleCare in the last episode. Oh yeah, we did a little math. Yeah. It's like, well, if I pay this and it costs this much, is it worth it? So there's two things though. So we were talking about the dearth of third party sales on AppleCare for Max. And Doug, Douglas, sorry, Douglas pointed out a very prescient thing that I had, I knew about this and I had completely forgotten about it and overlooked it. He says, I think the reason AppleCare is becoming less available, less and less available at third party suppliers, is that Apple recently replaced AppleCare for the Mac line with AppleCare Plus, giving it the same hardware coverage, even if caused by you, aka accidentally, as AppleCare Plus for iOS. The only difference is that it still extends the coverage in additional two years, as opposed to an additional one year on iOS. So you get a total of three years with AppleCare Plus for the Mac, a total of two years with AppleCare Plus for iOS. He says, so this means that AppleCare Plus must be bought within the first 60 days of purchase of a Mac and you must verify the machine is in good working condition. He says, this makes a lot of sense for notebooks, but I don't really see the benefit for desktops such as the iMac unless you have a bunch of young kids running around all the time or possibly get frustrated and put your fists through the screen. The good news though is that it seems to be the same price as the former AppleCare, the non-plus version, though I think what this means is that third parties might not be getting it at all. I agree with most of what you said there, and I half agree with you on the third party thing. I think eventually AppleCare Plus, if it's available to be sold at retail by places like the Apple authorized service providers, which it is, then I think you will find it with other third parties eventually. I think we're just in a transition here. I hope. Maybe that's just wishful thinking. Doug then goes on to say, wait, I heard you open your mouth, John. Am I stepping on you? Do you have a thing to do? I don't know. All right. All right. Doug then goes on to, Douglas, sorry, goes on to say, I would also like to reiterate, and I have mentioned this in the past, that AppleCare Plus for iOS is in my opinion a must have. Maybe you are very careful with your phone, keep it in the case, don't let your kids handle it, etc., but you have to keep in mind that most people are buying an iPhone under a two-year contract with only a one-year warranty. Things can go wrong with the device no matter how careful you may be. It must also be noted that if you do a drop and break, do drop and break your iPhone, you will have to pay a premium price to have it fixed. There are places that will do repairs at a lower price, but if it's within the first year, you end up voiding the remainder of the warranty. So I get that logic, but here's the thing. When it comes to the necessity of AppleCare Plus for iOS, the lesson I always try to teach for everybody here is that you need to make this decision eyes-wide open, and so I went back through and did all my math to open up my eyes, and here's what I came through. AppleCare Plus is a significant premium on top of the iPhone. It's $129 for the iPhone 8, right? So that's 18% of the price of an iPhone 8, or 16% of the price of an iPhone 8 Plus, because it's $129 for either one of them. For the iPhone 10, it's $199 for AppleCare Plus, which means it's 20% of the price. And yes, those percentages begin to inch down the more storage that you get because you're paying more and yet the AppleCare prices stay the same, but those are good percentages to work from. Then here's the thing. On top of that, you pay $99 every time service kicks in. So that's another 14% for an iPhone 8, 12% for an 8 Plus, or 10% for an iPhone 10. That means for repair, you pay the first repair, you pay 30%, right? And that's if a repair needs to happen. So the question then becomes, is it worth paying a 30% premium because that's what you're banking on on every single one of your devices, right? Here's the thing. A broken screen that was also a broken motherboard for an iPhone 6 when the 6S was out. So between the first and second year was $299 or 40% of the cost of a new device at that point. So yes, in that one instance, AppleCare Plus would have been less expensive. 40% if you're doing it without the insurance of AppleCare Plus, 30% with AppleCare Plus. But not everyone with an iPhone lives in a bubble. I've been through, I counted, I've been through at least 10 iPhones in our house, right? We get them, we pass them to the kids, or the kids get them, whatever. But in the course of since the iPhone came out, I've been through 10 iPhones, at least 10 iPhones. But let's do the math based on 10. I've only paid for one repair in that time. That includes a family of children that at the time they started touching iPhones, they were like 10-ish. Now they're like, what? Actually, my daughter's an adult now. It's crazy. If we price the iPhones at $700, that's $7,000 worth of iPhones and $299 worth of actual repair costs. That number, I'll save you the math because I did it. It's 4%. So 4% versus 30%. We can see why insurance like AppleCare Plus is a moneymaker for Apple. But there's a risk, not so much a risk in the percentage of failures. I think that's probably pretty consistent. But there's a risk in terms of when it will happen. The insurance company, i.e. Apple or whoever they have carrying the insurance for AppleCare Plus, is presumably well funded and can afford to pay out a repair at any time. With AppleCare Plus, we can choose to pay for the convenience of mitigating that. You still got to pay the 99, but you're saving on the rest of it. Without it, you need to be ready to pay for a repair at any time. People on a tight budget, maybe it is worth paying that whatever it is, 18% to 30% for that peace of mind. But if you can back off of that, you might save a bunch of money. That's my thought. So there's the math. I'm with you, brother. It's all about risk mitigation. It is. That's all it is. That's right. And it's almost a gamble. Well, of course it's a gamble. Do you plan on smashing your iPhone? Probably not. Not today. But if you do. I'm pretty happy today. Today's a good day. No, I'm with you. I'm still wrestling with my dilemma and that my seven I dropped and there's cosmetic damage, but not functional damage. Right. And what do I do? The thing is Verizon won't take it for a trade-in unless I fix it, even though it's a crap screen on it. Yeah, but I bet Gazelle would take it. And there's all kinds of places. I mean, they ding me for it, but the thing is, dude, I think you saw it. It's a crack in the lower left-hand corner and it's not on the display portion. The thing is, if you didn't know it was there, and even if you did know it was there, it doesn't matter because the phone still works, but it'll take away from the value. So do I go to the Apple? Which actually I could, you know? Maybe I'll just do that. The thing is, they actually have so you can schedule and it just be honest about the, you know, the cosmetic damage on it. But also the thing is, so I could go, so my closest Apple store and my favorite Apple store right now is Trumbull Connecticut at the mall. And they've always been very good about repairs. And the thing is, from what I understand, the last time I went to the Apple site and I said, can I get a same day screen replacement? They said, yeah, you want to set up an appointment? Sure. And I think it takes them like an hour to do it because they got to fiddle with the, you know, touch ID and all that and make sure they don't screw that up. So it's a, it's not a, you know, quick repair, but um, right, right. And I think it's 129 or 149 if I'm out of warranty, which I am. So yeah, yeah, yeah. So you just got to repair that cost. Then I can upgrade to the eight, which I'm more inclined to do at this point. More than the 10? The 10's just too, it's too different, yo. Yeah, you got it. Yeah. My advice to anybody who's on the fence between the eight and the 10 or thinking the 10's too different, like try it out, right? With your carrier, you get 30 days for free. It's also, it's a, it's a thousand dollar phone. Yeah, what's the eight going to cost you? Don't worry, I have the numbers here. It's not that much less. It really, it, you know, if you're going to spend that kind of money, I don't, I don't, you know, I think there's a, there's enough of a fudge factor there that you just down the road. No, I'm seeing more, I mean, the thing is in the app updates, I see, I see more and more app developers saying, yeah, we fix this for the 10. Yeah, it'll work. Of course. It won't look silly. You know, most apps didn't, I see those in all the notifications that I get all the time. They, I, but I've never, like I've never launched an app and said, oh my God, it doesn't look okay on the 10. Like it just, they just run. I don't know. Yeah, yeah. No, I get it. Well, it's like on the iPad. So something isn't right optimized for the iPad screen. Right. So it's like, oh, okay, it's all pixelated. Well, all right, you were just lazy. Yeah. Yeah. Didn't flip the switch. Didn't flip the switch. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. All right, folks. Well, where are we? You know where I think we are, Dave? Yeah, we're near the end here. Yeah. How did this happen? The last time I looked at the clock, it was like 10 minutes. Yeah. Well, we, you know, we got into it. It's how it happened. Yeah, it's good. Well, we all got into it. It's true. We told you how to email us. You can find us on Facebook. If you go to macgeekab.com slash Facebook, that will bring you directly to our Mac Geekab support group over there where we've got so many of us answering your questions, helping each other. I ask questions there. You can ask questions to anything goes. It's really a great place to be. Again, I want to thank all our premium subscribers. Visit us macgeekab.com slash premium. And I want to thank Cashfly, C-A-C-H-E-F-L-Y dot com for providing all the bandwidth to get the show from us to you. I want to thank our sponsors, of course, Eero at E-E-R-O dot com, coupon code MGG, free shipping in the U.S. and Canada, Barebone Software, BB Edit at Barebones dot com, Smile at Smile Software dot com, Otherworld Computing. I've been a sponsor for a long time at MaxSales dot com. And you, I want to thank you. Really, seriously, it's been great. Yeah, and you, and you, and you. Hey, you, you have something to say before we leave for a week? I mean, not that we're leaving. We're leaving just for less than a week. We'll be back. It's like normal schedule. No problem. But do you have anything to add? Yeah. I got two things to say. Now I got one thing. No, I got three things to say. Get ready. Don't get made up.