 The Mac Observers Mac Geekgab Episode 696, a palindromic episode for Monday, February 12th, 2018. Greetings, folks, and welcome to the Mac Observers Mac Geekgab, the show where you are invited to send in your tips, your questions, your cool stuff found. We answer your questions. We share your tips. We share your cool stuff found. All with the goal of each of us learning five new things every time we get together. Sponsors for this episode include BB Edit from Bare-Bone Software with BB Edit 12.1 that has a very exciting new feature. We'll talk about that a little bit later here in Durham, New Hampshire. I'm Dave Hamilton. Here in fearful Connecticut, John F. Brown. How are you doing today, John F. Brown? I'm just playing with the intonation there. Yeah, I like that. It's good. It's good. Excellent diction, my friend. Diction. Diction. No, no, I think intonation is right for what you described. I was just adding to that. Excellent diction. As we always do. That's the goal each and every time we get together, isn't it? So I am very happy to be podcasting today because I slipped and fell actually middle of a week last week. I was fine for a little while and then I did a fateful stretch. I slipped on the ice and then did a fateful stretch on Friday. And really it was too painful to even talk all weekend. So I am very happy to be here sitting on the heating pad podcasting. Was it in your home or was it in an area where you could possibly bring action against someone? No, it was in my driveway. It was right after it started snowing on Wednesday. But really, you could sue yourself for improper maintenance or snow clearing. Yeah, I guess. I mean, it was while it had just as it had started snowing, but we had some ice underneath it. So anyway, yeah, but I'm like happy to be doing this. Really. It was the most pain I've ever been in in my life was dealing with this like muscle spasm that anytime I engage my core, not good. So but obviously we're doing OK. I'm doing OK. You're doing OK, John. I'm doing great. Good. Then then let's go to let's just dive right in here and let's go to Tom who asks Tom says, oh, wait, this is wow. That's really small. I'm also on a different setup today, John. I I'm you know, because why not? I should. I got it. They should just take over all kinds of things. He's he says. I have an old mid-2006 17 inch iMac that has an internal drive that has failed to boot. He says I get the flashing folder icon. The drive is not making any noises. It's assuming it won't damage the drive further to try to restore it. I'm able to boot the iMac into target disk mode. But when I hook it up to my MacBook Pro, the disk does not mount. When I bring up disk utility on my MacBook Pro, it shows an external disk, but the size is zero K and it still won't mount when I click the mount button. And he goes through how he tried disk warrior and he tried all kinds of things. Nothing will will fix this drive. Nothing will really even scan it. Disk warrior gets the furthest but not really happy. And he said, can I use data rescue five to restore some of the users files off this disk? I haven't purchased it yet and I'm wondering if I need the pro version to recover the files. I'm hoping I can get to the files without having to use a service like drive savers or total recall, which are too expensive for my clients. So this is a client's setup here. I mean, I think the drive is dead. Based on everything you're saying here, you know, I think it's dead. Dude, we're talking a 2006. I mean, this is over a decade old. So I'm amazed that it's actually still working. That's the thing. You know, with drives, it's not if it's when, right? You know, at what point will it fail, especially a mechanical drive, which this clearly is from a 2006 machine. You know, it's a it's a moving piece of machinery. It's got a motor in it. You know, like it's going to stop at some point. It is a maintenance free motor. So you can't like go in and add more oil or anything to make it happy, at least not without taking it apart and risking damage to the platters, which is why drive savers and total recall exist. ProSoft also has their own data recovery center. I believe it's called. But but I would I would start first with a demo of ProSoft's data Rescue 5 because the worst thing that's going to happen is it'll tell you it can't read anything. And then, you know, the demo version won't restore anything or much of anything. But that's sort of the point is you download the demo. It shows you what it can find. And then it says, all right, cool. This is, you know, most likely going to work at some level for you. If you want to buy it, I think it's 99 bucks or something. And you pony up, pony up and go. So the demo in this case is really handy, I think. But but your mileage may vary. But what do you what do you think, John? I mean, looking at the so looking at the disc warrior report. Yeah. What comes up and that he tried to fix is something named I node 104 535. Okay, that's bad because to me, that's the name of something that the user should never see. That's like an internal thing. So I think the my guess here is that the partition table or directory or something between the two got scrambled. And it's well, you can get it back though. The other thing is data rescue and things like that are pretty smart. So they tear through your drive and can take a real long time and they look for patterns like, oh, that's a GIF. Oh, that's a doc. Oh, that's a this or that. But what he tried to do here and drive genius will do this too. And actually, I've had this work sometimes is that it can do various rebuilds and rebuilding a directory isn't a bad idea. Because it sounds like I got corrupted. But I think something more, like I said, probably the partition table is being things called I node. That's normal. Yep. Yep. I don't disagree. Yeah. All right. Well, you know, I would, like I said, the demo of data rescue 5 is what I would go with and see what happens. Or restore off of the latest backup that was made, which I hope there was. Yeah. Well, especially with a drive that old, you kind of have to have a backup going, don't you? I gotta say, the thing about this question that got me, Dave, is 2006. Yeah. But it's still running. It's pretty good. And then it's still working. Yeah. But I had that too. I had a drive in my Drovo die recently and it was about 10 years old. So that's a pretty good run for a rotational drive. There you go. Like you said, all things fail. All things fail. All right. Simon brings us to the next question. He says, I'm stuck. I ordered a Dymo 4 XL printer and am used to wireless, wireless air print printers. I'm looking for a free or cheap option to share this printer on my network. I have a Vodafone router with printer sharing and I have a Synology DS 2 16 plus. I can't seem to find information on if this printer is compatible with these devices. He says, I know Dymo sells a wireless network adapter, but it costs almost 100 quid. So he wants to avoid that if possible. Well, two of the things that you have, your Vodafone router and your Synology disk station will share printers over a network. Now, I've never used the Vodafone one. So I can't speak to how well that works. But the I've used the Synology printer sharing and it's great. And your DS 2 16 plus thankfully has USB ports on it. So you could plug this printer right into that. And then the disk station becomes your print server. It shares the printer on the network. It will even share it as like a Google print or an AirPlay Air, sorry, not AirPlay HomePod on the brain. We'll get there later. An AirPrint printer. And I like that works great. So that's the first thing I'd try because it's free and it's a known quantity and we know that it works. The Vodafone would be the second thing I'd try because it should work. And then after that, you know, that's when that's when maybe we got to start some money. Yeah, go ahead. If you happen to have a Mac sit around, I did this for the longest time, Dave, is that I had my HP B 8550, which was a 13 by 19 inch inkjet printer. I plugged into my Mac mini. And then what you can do with a Mac mini or Mac OS is you can share a printer on the network. Right, of course. I mean, that worked fine for me. That's all I got to say. The driver was probably the best driver. And you know, that's the thing with the, you know, I tried, I actually did try sharing that printer, which is an older printer because I like running old things because I don't know what's wrong with me. But I plugged it into the Synology and actually because it uses, I think you pointed out it uses a... Is it Guten print, I think? Yes. Okay. That was in my head, but you confirmed it. So if we both think that, but the thing is it didn't have a driver that was quite right for that printer because it was an unusual printer. It had an unusual paper size. So sharing it with the Synology didn't quite work for that model printer, but I'm sure for tons of others it does. Because the driver on the Mac was specific enough, sharing it via the Mac, sharing is something I'd try. Yeah. Cool. Give that a whirl. It's not, it's not air print technically, but you know, I mean, you can access it as long as it's on the network. Mm-hmm. Cool. Yeah. Well, that's right. Yeah. And there are things. Is it printopia that will then take your Mac printers and share them as air print printers? Is that what it is? I know there's, yeah. Yeah. It's printopia. You install it on your Mac and then that will share your printers as an air print device if you want to print from your iOS devices. So we'll put that in the show notes too. Good. Yeah. All right. So you covered the bases there. All right. Cool. Moving on to Bob. Bob asks, he said, would a wireless mesh system such as Eero provide better coverage and speed throughout my house than my existing wireless router? He says he's got a U-verse residential gateway, a Buffalo WZR1750 DHP router, and he says the Buffalo router is attached to the AT&T device in bridge mode. So the AT&T device is your router, Buffalo is doing your wireless. My U-verse internet account speed should be 24 megabits per second, but I really get this. I normally get about 10 to 12. Recently it's been even lower. I've restarted both the residential gateway and the Buffalo router, but again, the speed is inconsistent. So, okay. I want to sort of dissect this a little bit because to answer the question, would a mesh system provide better coverage and speed? It depends, right? Mesh is great for increasing your coverage area. No question about that. But if you're not having coverage or range issues, like if you're able to see a Wi-Fi signal, especially a strong one, where everywhere you need to, then you don't have a coverage problem. Speed issues can come from a number of things, right? It's certainly possible that if you have weak coverage and you're down at like one bar on your iPhone that you're at the edge of Wi-Fi range, you're going to get lower speeds than you will, you know, further in, further close. So, doing some different tests from different places will give you an idea. But it's also important to do an Ethernet connected test from a computer that Etherneted directly into your router or, you know, something akin to that. If you've got, you know, switches running all over, that's fine. But just make sure it's, you know, Ethernet all the way from your computer to the router because you want to remove Wi-Fi from the equation here. We're talking about very slow speeds, right? I mean, 24 megabits a second really isn't that fast for today's Wi-Fi devices. 10 megabits is, you know, even less fast. I don't think your problem is your Wi-Fi. I think your problem is your Internet connection with AT&T. And doing an Ethernet test will confirm that. So that, you know, it's easy to run a speed test app or, you know, go to speedtest.net or whatever on your Mac. But that tests two things simultaneously. It tests whatever your local network connection is and then also tests your Internet connection. And whatever the weakest link in the chain is, is going to be the result that it shows. So if you have a weak Internet connection, it's going to show the speed from that. If you have a weak Wi-Fi connection, you know, then it would show that. But you have no idea without a baseline what it's showing you. That's why the Ethernet connected test is a good one to do. So at least you know what your Internet speeds are. I also recommend using something like iPerf, and I'll put an article in the show notes that Jim Tannis did for us a couple of years ago, explaining how to use iPerf to test your local network speeds without including the Internet so that you can rule out that variable. That's my feeling. Thoughts, Mr. Braun? And I think that's a good feeling. So things number one, I agree with you. Setting a baseline when Bob said, my U-verse Internet account speed should be 24. So yeah, that should be the speed you're getting from a wired connection. But I suspect, and I think that's how you interpreted it as well, is when he said he gets 10 to 12, he gets 10 to 12 doing wireless. Maybe. Yeah, I mean it's hard to say. So yeah, so absolutely do a wired test to get a baseline and to eliminate whatever the bottleneck is here. Yeah, you'll know right away. And sure, if you do that wired test and the wired test comes up at 24 and your wireless test only shows 10, okay, well now you know where the discrepancy is, but I don't think that's what's going to happen. Just simply because, yeah exactly. I had something very similar. So just to give you a situation where I verified that the problem was in fact the wireless and not the wired, is there's a certain room in my house, the throne if you will, upstairs, where sometimes I'll bring my iOS device in there. And so I'm like, hey, let me run a speed test. And it's like, well, your speed isn't what you're paying for. And I'm like, well that's not good. So I ran the Eero utility and saw that it had switched over for whatever reason to 2.4 gigahertz in that location. I suspect because it's a bathroom and there's lots of tile and the five just wasn't cutting it. So it's like, you know what? I'm going to put you on 2.4 because I just can't deal with five. Sure. So it was intentional, but the thing is until I dug into the utility to determine that it was actually on 2.4, that once I saw that I'm like, oh, well that explains it because I'm not going to get the same throughput on 2.4 as on 5 at this distance because it's very close. If you're close, that's right. Yeah. So I think it downgraded to 2.4 because there's just something in the way. And it's like, oh. Yeah. It could be ductwork. It could be, you know, a refrigerator. It could be stone. I mean, yeah. Or you could, like your houses, walls could be built as Faraday cages, John. Maybe. Oh yeah. They could. Yeah, all that metal. Intentionally built as a Faraday cage? That's right. Highly unlikely. Highly unlikely. We've seen it happen before. We have? I don't know that we have. I guess actually we have. That's true. You know, while we're on the subject of troubleshooting at wireless and 2.4 gigahertz wireless, I want to go to Debbie's question here, which Handily was actually up next in the agenda anyway. Debbie wrote in with a sort of a question and a concern that I'd heard before and I never really understood until I dug into it with Debbie. So Debbie's problem was she said that she bought, and I want to describe them, she bought two e-tech city, and that's E-T-E-K-C-I-T-Y, outlet six packs. And she said, and then learned that they have a 2.4 gigahertz restriction. And what she said was, I have Eero networks in our home and our vacation home, which doesn't designate a separate 2.4 gigahertz network. So I can't get these set up. Is there, are there any workarounds? Do I have to buy an old Wi-Fi router just for the plug setup? So this got my head scratching, right? Because I've heard people say that with some Internet of Things devices, they, the fact that their routers, I mean mesh isn't really the issue here, although most mesh routers do this, but so do a lot of others, name the 2.4 gigahertz network and the 5 gigahertz network the same. And certainly that's been our advice for years, even before mesh, because you want to let your devices choose which one they're going to connect to. Well, when people would, would tell me that they had some device or another, some Internet of Things device that only has a 2.4 gigahertz radio in it, and then would say, yeah, and I can't get it set up on my network, I would think, well, how in the world would the fact that both your 2.4 and 5 gigahertz networks being named, like the fact that they're named the same is irrelevant because a device with only a 2.4 gigahertz radio isn't even going to see any 5 gigahertz network, so it doesn't care what they're named. Like, why would this get in the way? And finally, finally this week, digging into it with Debbie, I finally figured out why this happens. And it's because the setup software for whatever her device is inherits the hardware address, as we call it, the MAC address, of the Wi-Fi network to which the iPhone that's setting it up is connected. So if the iPhone is connected to the 5 gigahertz network, the iPhone passes along the hardware address of that radio in the router to this device, and this device can't connect to that hardware address. Why? Because two different radios types. And so that's the issue. And to me, like, that's an utter fail on the part of the device manufacturers or who wrote the software. I mean, I can see the guy writing the software. He's like, hmm, should I connect via SSID or should I connect via MAC address? I think I'll connect via MAC address. That's a good idea, right? No. No, it's a terrible idea. Because let's say you change your router sometime and decide for your own sanity and consistency to just name the wireless network the same, keep the password the same. Like, a lot of people do that. And it's common practice. And that would break any of these Internet of Things devices. Or let's say you set up one of these plugs and then move it to another part of your house where if you have a mesh system, it's closer to that mesh point. Well, it's not going to talk to anything but that very first radio that it connected to. So, Iroh's suggestion, which is sort of what made me realize what the actual problem was, was to get as far away from her home network as she could so that the Iroh or so that the phone would fall back to the 2.4 gigahertz network, kind of going to your story where, you know, some interference or just some distance, the range issue brings the 5 gigahertz network out of the picture and then do the setup of this plug. And, I mean, I think that's the workaround. To me, the workaround is return those yet different plugs that don't... No, they don't act this way because it's such a huge shortcut for the software vendor to have taken that... I can only imagine how this is going to, like, fail in an awful way down the road. That's my thing. So, there you go. And it's interesting. In the chat room at mackeekyub.com slash stream, Michael King is saying that TP-Link switches are the same way. And I call these switches, which was a confusing part of my conversation with Debbie. It's a switched outlet. I'm not talking about ethernet switches, just the switched outlet. So, outlets. Michael King says TP-Link's outlets are the same way and it sucks, which is interesting because I just set up a TP-Link outlet a couple of months ago and didn't run into this at all. Also, didn't run into it with their webcam. But maybe those things have 5 GHz radios in them, too. That I don't know. Yeah. And the other issue could be so our friend Brian Monroe mentions, and I've seen this happen as well, also on poor implementations, is you assume in this day and age that everything supports WPA2 if it does Wi-Fi. Well, some things don't. Oh, yeah, that's true. Properly. Oh, yeah. So, if the code that they have that's trying to implement WPA2 isn't implementing it properly, that's another fail. And it's like, well, hello, here's the password. And it's like, nope, nope. Right. I've heard that happening. Yeah, I mean, you would think in this day and age, it's like, okay, WPA2, 5 GHz, you know, support all the latest standards, but a lot of inexpensive devices. Yeah, totally. That's right. Yeah. Aren't up with the latest standards. Like, oh, let's use WEP. It's like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. Yeah. Yeah. Hey, I want to take a minute now and talk about our first sponsors that are all right with you, John. Excellent. Sweet. As I mentioned in the intro today, our sponsors, we've got it from Barebone Software and BB Edit 12.1 includes a very important new feature. And that is that BB Edit is now a fully 64-bit app. That means that it's going to be compatible with operating systems going forward. Apple has officially announced that 64-bit support is deprecated and will be removed. I believe it will be removed from macOS in 2019. So that's next year. You mean 32. 32 will not be allowed. Sorry, thank you. See, this is why I have you here, John. Thank you. Well, same with iOS, I think. Yeah, it's already there. The iOS purge. Yeah, it's already there. So iOS is no longer 32-bit. That's right. And macOS will follow. Yep. And so BB Edit now is 64-bit. They also added new touch bar support in 12.1. And with all of this stuff, they now get faster performance and it opens larger files. And I noticed this actually. I have some huge files that I wound up scrolling through. And scrolling behavior was way faster with 12.1. So I was really, really impressed to see that just sort of sneak out as an update earlier this week. BB Edit, one of my favorite pieces of software because of how smoothly it works and how much I can do with it. In addition to the fact that they've made these under-the-hood changes, you know, BB Edit is the thing that I use all day to edit little text documents. It doesn't try to apply any formatting to the saved document. But if you open something up that's like got some JavaScript in it or really anything in any language, HTML, C++, C sharp, whatever, it doesn't matter. It figures out what language you're in and starts highlighting things just visually so that you can see it. But if you're just working with regular text files, then they just look like regular text files. It like doesn't get in your way until it thinks it has something to do very nicely for you. And if you're a terminal person, BB Edit's awesome because you can install their command line tools and it will offer to do this when you start it up. And then from the terminal, if you want to edit a file, you just type BB Edit Space, the file name. So you got to check it out. Go to barebones.com. Check out BB Edit 12.1. There's a demo that you can download for free and you can actually use that demo for free forever. And then there's some features that are only available in the pro version or the paid version, I should say. Go check it out. Barebones.com are thanks to Barebones and BB Edit for sponsoring this episode. All right, John. We've had some people, well, we have some issues and that's a good thing. I mean, it's not a good thing, but it does sort of define how we do the show. If people stopped having issues, I guess we'd just have to make the show tips all the time, wouldn't we? I mean, there'd be nothing left to do. I got issues, man. Yeah. Same. Talk about those later. That's right. All right. Dan. Going to Dan here. I will get us there. Dan says, a friend of mine has a MacBook Pro from late 2011, which he recently got an SSD put in. In attempting to update from High Sierra 10.3.2 to 10.3.3, sorry, 10.13.2 to 10.13.3. I blame the flexoril. He gets a message that some updates could not be installed. So it's almost as if the update didn't fully install. That's when he checks in about this Mac. It still says he's on 10.13.2. Any thoughts on this would be appreciated. Yeah. I don't think it has anything to do with his SSD. I could be wrong on that. And if I am, like I said, we just blame the flexoril. I don't actually like this stuff, but I begrudgingly admit my back. But I don't think it's related to the SSD. I experienced a similar thing on a 2011 MacBook Air trying to upgrade from 13.2 to 13.3. And the same thing, like it went through what appeared to be the process. And when it started back up, I don't know, something seemed like nothing had changed. So I went and checked about this Mac and it was like, oh yeah, it's still .2. So I had to do it again. And then it updated just fine. If your friends doesn't update, I would say try in safe mode. And I guess if that doesn't work, John, we go to recovery mode and just reinstall the OS on top of itself. There's nothing wrong with that. Like don't erase the disk. No, there's nothing wrong with it, but I have an additional suggestion having surfed far and wide. Go. The people that had this problem. Yeah. Here's another thing. Rather than applying the update that you download via the App Store, you may want to download it directly. Oh, I like that. Oh yeah, it does. Why not? I've seen sometimes the standalone installers work when the others don't. The other thing I've had happen. So I think the last major update that I did, Dave, to High Sierra, I actually had where I installed it, it got to a certain point in the install process and then the progress bar was just stuck and it wasn't moving. Right. And I'm like, all right. So I did what I'm going to tell you to do now is I think I, you know, rebooted this, you know, did a hard, hard power down. You hold down the power button for five seconds and the machine shut down. Then I restarted it and I downloaded the standalone updater and everything was better. Dude, that's way better than any of my ideas. Like that's the thing that you should start with, Dan. It happens every now and then. Now, where can you find these? You may ask. Well, this is kind of a different URL here. Normally, if you go to support.apple.com slash downloads, let me just verify this. It puts some extra garbage in there. Put like underscore. Okay, no. So yeah, if you go to support.apple.com slash downloads, you will then see browse downloads by product and one of the products is macOS. Click on that and then it'll show you all the latest updaters. So in closing, the standalone updater may be better than the one that you download from the App Store. Because as far as I know, they should be the same, but I don't think they are. Well, it's possible that the App Store updater is just the incremental and is not the combo, right? Right. And what do we mean by that? So there are different types of updates. I'm looking at the updates as of late, Dave, and they don't seem to distinguish between the combo and just... Yeah, but I'll tell you that, well, the 10.13.2, we're looking for it here, but the 13.2 combo updater is three gigs in size. I don't think the one you download from the App Store is that big. Right. Yeah. No, I see that. So I think typically, so the combo updater is... All right. So the combo is the... Is that the incremental? No, no, no. The combo is everything from .0. Yep, that's right. Right. So the normal installer will assume that you're on the prior .release. Right? Yes. Whereas the combo will be able to handle an upgrade from something within that .range, right? Yes. So if it's a 10.13.3 combo updater, that means it can update any system from 10.13.0 forward. That's right. And as a troubleshooting mechanism or tool, the combo updater is used because if there's something that... Like, if there's something that changed that got damaged or whatever that was, say, in the 10.13.1 update, just doing the... You know, the 13.2 to 13.3, the incremental updater, you wouldn't necessarily get that. So that's often why it's chosen. But in this case, I mean, it's great because you have everything locally contained and you're not relying on the internet and you have the whole updater. So yeah. No, that's great. Great advice. Good thing. All right. Let's see if we can get Daniel's problem. And I say Daniel because we just did Dan. So Daniel writes, he says, I have a small office using a Mac Mini as a server without macOS server to share a folder on the network. Five users log into the server share using the credentials of the one main admin account on the server. The shared folder is an active Google Drive folder with 300 gigs of stuff. The issue, he says, increasingly and more so since updating all Macs in this office to High Sierra, is that they're experiencing hard freezes and require hard restarts on their individual Macs anytime they create folders on the share. He said, do you think having Google Drive folder as the land share is a bad practice that it might cause problems or is this more of an issue because they all log in with one account or perhaps an issue because they're using Microsoft Office 2011 but now they're using Microsoft Office 2016 because, of course, 2011 won't run in High Sierra or at least it won't run well and so that's sort of out of the thing. So in general, I wouldn't expect any of these kinds of problems but obviously you are having these problems so troubleshooting time, right? Step one, let's disable Google Drive syncing on the server machine. Just turn it off, quit the app and let's see, then go and create folders and see if they still experience lockups. Well, then we know it wasn't Google Drive doing it. I would find it hard to believe that it was but you know, stranger things, right? So assuming Google Drive isn't the problem check and see how you're connecting from the client machines to this, right? There's essentially two ways. There's AFP, which is the old way, Apple file protocol and then the new way is SMB, server messaging block or I think that's right, right? And it was a window standard but now it's standard on the max too. So that's how I would suggest doing it now especially with High Sierra. Really anything since Mavericks, I think SMB is the way to go. So I would do that. And the one account thing really I don't think that's a problem. I mean I think there's a 10-user limit doing it that way without macOS server software at least they used to be but that I mean you're below that. I kind of feel like we're going to run through all of these though and still have the problem and at that point it would be booted in safe mode, you know, Onyx on the server. I mean I think it's a server problem given that the client machines all of them are doing it but it's also worth looking on the client machines that's consistent. Some third-party thing or a non-standard setting or something that would cause this. I don't know, that's, what do you think? I would suggest exploring a different option for a file server. Yes, technically. Well why? I mean it's a Mac. I understand that. I'm just offering a suggestion. Although you should be able but I've heard tales of woe in the past that people trying to use a standalone mac not running server as a file server and although you should be able to in this case it's not working. So I'm just saying you may want to think about a standalone solution for sharing the files. Maybe shake your fist at me and you can shake your fist at me but it's just the thought in my mind is like you know rather than I agree it's annoying and it should work but it's not so I mean maybe the Google thing is a part of it maybe there's some Microsoft wackiness that's causing it you know it was mentioned I'm not sure why those two things came to the top but Yeah. Suspicious, suspicion vectors. The chat room is blowing up with everybody saying it's Google Drive it's Google Drive so maybe it very well is and then there you go right step one of the troubleshooting would have gotten us there. I do like that idea the general concept of using Google Drive or Dropbox or you know some cloud syncing service to keep your data backed up now you could also do a private cloud with you know a Synology or something but I like that idea because it's just backing up your data constantly and if you have a cloud syncing service that offers you know some level of recovery so if you delete a file you can go and get it back which Dropbox certainly does and I'm pretty sure Google Drive does too then you're getting you know something approximating a backup of that that's happening in real time all the time so I like the idea but if Google Drive's desktop software is causing this problem well then you know pick something else I mean the other thing I do want to say I don't necessarily agree with your assessment that running a Mac without macOS server as a server is a bad idea I mean it's literally the same server software on there even when you're running macOS server it's just a different admin interface right so I mean I get it if it's a problem and move to something else but it shouldn't be a problem especially with a user load like this it shouldn't be it may be totally yes I agree but if it is I would wipe it clean and like start the OS from scratch like that could certainly be a solution or combo updater you know so right yeah I had something floating around the back of my mind as far as another option here but now so we have this I mean sharing files oh I'm sorry okay so it locking up so I want to address the locking up thing so sometimes it appears to be a lock up may not be a lock up and that you'll see the spinning rainbow of death the spinning rainbow of eternal weight sometimes that goes away so sometimes computers get confused networks get confused and they're all just fighting with each other trying to figure out how to do the right thing or do what you ask you may want to either just wait it out sometimes I see these things bounce back and they clear out whatever the congestion was it could be a network related thing too I don't know if you know you got a sketchy network but that's a whole other story but the other thing is that if you're able to still have control of the machine maybe go into activity monitor and see who's upset right sometimes I found that useful when I have a system that wedges sometimes I'm like alright who's being stupid let me get activity monitor up here and typically in activity monitor however you list the processes the thing is something's misbehaving it'll usually show up in red and it'll say you know I'm wedged or I'm stuck and I don't understand what's going on so let me help refine your theory as to who's causing this and it could in fact be that a Microsoft Office component or a Dropbox component or whatever file sharing you're using may just be having a bad day but activity monitor can should show you that yeah that's true yeah you'll either see it like wedged and using 0% CPU or you'll see it using maximum CPU and so that's like and again it's usually in red when the OS considers something to be a lost cause it'll put it up in red and say not responding so right give that a try the next time this happens yeah yeah yeah yeah I'd be curious what that is you know I mean I'm trying to think and I know we're kind of going down the rat hole here but Google Drive but like Google Drive and Dropbox and and even you know like Synology's Cloud Station or Synology's Drive all do things to change the finders icons to show when something is being synced or has been successfully synced so you can just get a visual confirmation of the state of that particular file or folder and if Google Drive's doing this and then for whatever reason the clients are trying to inherit these folder icons or whatever across the server across the network from the server that might be it so I don't know it's people in the chat room are saying use iCloud Drive and or you know a paid Dropbox account I mean it's going to be a paid iCloud Drive account too to do it they've had better luck with that so so there we go hey I got a couple of cool stuffs found here John cool stuff found I think it's cool stuffs found cool stuffs found okay the first is oh we're going to find it here why can't I see anything I blame the flexoril okay the first is from Listener John who says have you ever wanted to transfer that amazing Spotify playlist to Apple Music have I got the app for you it's called SongShift and it's free in-app purchase and will move your playlist from Spotify to Apple Music from Pandora to Apple Music from Pandora to Spotify etc etc and it does in addition to the three we already mentioned it supports Deezer and Discogs and Last FM and Napster and Title and YouTube and all of that so we will put a link to that in the show notes because that is pretty cool I know I would have liked that I would have liked that you know back when I migrated from a Spotify account to an Apple Music account so with the HomePod just coming out I think there's probably going to be a lot of people that might want something like this so we will put a link to that in the show notes pretty cool huh John hmm no not for me but sure doesn't have to be for everybody I don't need it but you know could be good for somebody out there sharing is good sharing is good sharing is good all right and then Joe because we do a podcast here said I recently needed to find a way to distribute recordings of my local church's weekly service talks I figured that a podcast would be the easiest medium with which to reach the maximum number of people who attend church whilst needing the minimum amount of work to produce rather than burning CDs or making USB sticks so then I started a journey on which I discovered the podcast generator app which is available on the Synology disk station along with a crash course on the best way of getting audio from our sound desk to my iPad I now have a podcast server sitting on my disk station serving up audio and video podcast seems to be very reliable and hasn't had any hiccups since I set it up the developers done an amazing job of keeping the product going and even has a forum dedicated to it where he offers support he then goes on to describe how it creates everything and it makes XML feeds and all this great stuff so I think that's pretty cool man thanks for sharing that with us Joe pretty good right John I got one can I go please yeah just off top of my head yeah man so I was surfing the other day and somebody mentioned this piece of software if we if we talked about it before then let me know but have you heard of sound source from rogue amoeba well I have but I don't think we've ever mentioned it in this show I will look that up but please go ahead and tell people about it yeah well I want to kick the tires on it but it was mentioned in my timeline my Twitter timeline but somebody said hey by the way you know what's really cool is that rogue amoeba is offering sound source if you already have another of their products licensed you get it for free because I licensed now of course you know we're rock stars so we could get licenses for pretty much anything but I still threw down coin for piezo because I want to pay these guys yeah I have tried to pay for audio hijack for years it's like dude I literally use it to make my living it's like yeah but you know I want you to have it like right they're great same yeah so yeah but it's funny so somebody basically posted saying hey if you have a license standing for their other products which I do then sound source license is free and they have a mechanism where you punch in your number and they're like okay here you go but it's basically well as they say the sound control that should be built in the macOS so all I'll say is that I haven't worked with it a lot but it looks like something to explore it's just basically a nicer way of selecting your input and output devices oh it's super handy I love sound yeah yeah yeah and we have not mentioned it on this show John I checked our our notes yeah me too yeah okay there you go yeah if you guys want to get into the exciting world of where your sound is coming from and going to then this looks to be a better option than offered in macOS yeah that's the way to go cool I'm glad you mentioned that man that's a good one hey speaking of sound and all that I uh you know I figured we should take a minute here today we don't have to take very long and talk a little bit about the home pod now I got one I had it delivered Friday John you did not get one correct no I um doesn't sound like it's for me but you know hey I mean for you well I'm not convinced it's for me either I mean but I have to because it seems to I mean is it a music device is it a home control hub kind of like the a word or the or is it kind of both or is it kind of neither is it the who's the audience here and I think you're an excellent candidate to determine yeah so I would call it I mean it's all of you above certainly in various capacities you know Apple has done a very good job making sure we understand that they see it as a music device first that they added Siri to right and and certainly in using it it feels like that because as has been covered in many places Siri support is limited it is the right word to use but it might come with it the wrong implication you don't have the full feature set but you have a lot of it and certainly enough of it to play music because that's what the device is is built for you can also ask it about the weather and things like that but if you start asking it about like things that might require a web search or something it it's like no not here but do you get for example elect sorry I stopped myself you did so she has skills so right home pod doesn't have anything there's no third party integrations with home right now yep alright that's a right there yeah and I don't know that there ever will be I mean we you know Apple hasn't said it it would be just as easy to assume that Apple will offer third party integrations or apps as it is to assume that they never will right because this is Apple as a as a speaker it sounds great I'm not like I want to get that out right up front it sounds great and it looks great and if you are someone that doesn't have an easy way to play music out at home and you are either an Apple music subscriber or want to be one or want to live in the Apple ecosystem fully and don't care whether or not it ever supports third party music services then this is absolutely a speaker that you should consider for your for your home because seven years ago when I finally made the jump to Sonos right that was really the only option at the time for streaming or listening to your local library local digital library being streamed easily out loud right they were the only ones doing the convenient out loud decent sounding audio and it changed my life right we had gone from listening to CDs all the time then we digitized all our CDs and we literally like within a year stopped listening to music out loud because it was just a pain in the neck to do it and then you know we went probably five or six years and then Sonos kind of entered our lives and it was like oh you know yay finally again like our room our home can be warmed with music and it's been that way ever since but if so for me looking at HomePod it's like well I need another speaker like I need a hole in the head right I mean I've got 13 rooms in our Sonos system it would take a lot to convince me to just walk away from that and HomePod isn't that a lot you know it sounds great to my ears I don't like it as much as I like like a Sonos one the HomePod is quiet it's not as loud as the Sonos one it has way too much low end for my tastes but again it's not so much that it's like it doesn't it doesn't ruin the listening experience it's just like whoa more bass you know like wow it's like it has something to prove right and that's fine I know a lot of people have shaked their fists at Bose because Bose tends to over extend the low end as well no highs no lows must be Bose that's what all the sound engineers say man I don't necessarily subscribe to that but I saw in my feed I think Jeff Jeff Gamut also pointed out that the low end there may be a bit too much low end for his taste on the it kind of feels like the out loud equivalent of the Beats headphone signature right it's that low end thing like okay but you know what do they have an EQ? that's the thing no there's not and you can't like yeah like Sonos does their own version of an auto room tuning thing but it's not that it's like the HomePod's auto room tuning is pretty cool I'll tell you a thing in a minute about that that was kind of fun but like you just you know set it up and it does it you don't have to like walk around the room waving your phone like a you know like a defining rod or anything it just works and it does a good job and it gets that consistent sound signature anywhere I put it so but nobody likes one like there's no universal good EQ right there's some universal bad ones I think we could probably come up with but you know we all have different preferences we're all deaf in different ways we all want you know slightly different things and music listening is a very subjective thing and some people just want to drop the bass Dave well that's it I understand that you know it's almost a primal urge but some people just want lots of bass some people and there's nothing wrong with that like you know yeah there is actually no there's not I mean you know and I put up a piece today explaining like all my thoughts on this but also saying like if you disagree with me that's okay you know like it's because your preference is your preference and again I like this is me being super hyper critical as I listened to this thing you know I would I would play the same song on say you know the JBL link 500 which is a $399 speaker that has Google Assistant in it then I played on the HomePod at $349 and then I played on the Sonos 1 at $199 and I kind of go back and forth and I get very particular about each of them and I was like finding things that I didn't like about one I liked about the other but if I let the music play long enough I would forget and I would just enjoy listening to the song like any one of those speakers is awesome it sounds great it sounds so much better than your phone speaker or you know the crappy bluetooth speaker that you might have to play music out loud in the kitchen or better than the Amazon you know Echo for sure I haven't tested the Google Max I've heard that sounds pretty good but you know like having decent quality audio in your house the HomePod definitely delivers it's a really really good speaker it's just that you know you could get a Sonos 1 for $199 or a pair of Sonos 1s for $349 the same price and really fill your room with sound so but you have to decide which way you want to go and any of those paths is going to result in you having awesome sound in your house so the auto tuning John you're going to love this I set the thing up and and I noticed like it one spot in my kitchen I put it on our counter and how come it sounds like it's sending the vocals away from me this is weird like the counter is kind of in the middle of the room and I'm like you know I've got like the front of it or the part with the cord aimed away from me so I would assume it would you know direct the sound this way and I'm like alright well fine so I just turn the speaker around but of course when you jostle the speaker the motion sensor inside says no no I got to recalibrate so it would go through its recalibration and again the sound was pointing away from me like alright what's going on and finally so I put my head like I looked down at the top of the speaker while I was playing so that I could hear where the you know where the vocals were going and sure enough they were always going away from where I wanted them to go and then I realized I had a salt shaker on the on the kitchen counter close but not right up next to it was maybe six inches away from the speaker from the home pod but you know the home pods microphones are around the kind of the middle of the device and what was happening was the sound was reflecting off of the salt shaker perfectly to hit a microphone and I assume the home pod was deciding okay there's a wall there that means that the front of the speaker is the other direction I moved the salt shaker I shook the speaker enough to you know force it to recalibrate everything was fine well at least you didn't lose your salt shaker because that's a big problem no you don't want to lose it we did post an article today Brian Monroe in the chat room reminded me we posted an article about changing the EQ kind of the article was originally unclear I think we've updated it since the home pod can be an airplay destination and certainly if whatever you're sending airplay audio from can adjust the EQ then that will be heard on the home pod so you can adjust the EQ on your phone why tunes has an EQ panel exactly but that doesn't change the EQ of the home pod it just changes the EQ of what you're sending to it from say your Mac but if you ask the home pod to play you know playing stones or whatever you want to listen to it's going to stream that directly to itself and the EQ changes you made in iTunes are irrelevant at that point but I did ask it I said hey S turn down the bass and what it said to me was I can't control that setting from home pod so I think there is a setting we just can't get to it yet it's telling you what you can't do but it didn't tell you what you can do correct by the way if you want to change this go here but it didn't offer that information you're going to have to beat it out of her you're just going to have to try to convince her to give you the secret so that's it I think that software updates are going to come plentifully quickly because there's a lot like every issue that I have with it short of the fact that it's just not that loud is totally a software issue you want to change the EQ just give me the software control and it'll do it let me ask you this say I'm a person that doesn't have any Apple devices at all is this something that I would want no in fact you definitely don't want it because you need I think an iPhone 5 later to set it up and maybe a subscription to an Apple music type service not just an Apple music type service you need Apple music so the requirement is you need probably an iOS device or a Mac you need an iOS device you can't configure it with your Mac so you need an iOS device and you need a subscription to Apple music and you can AirPlay to it without a subscription right and if you want so it's an AirPlay destination but then that's kind of an expensive speaker you're using it for as a destination there are AirPlay destinations that are also pretty pricey and you can AirPlay to it from your Apple TV believe it or not and it works maybe where it's lack of ability to get loud became an issue because we couldn't hear dialogue and stuff I think it's like 15 by 25 so we were sitting on the couch maybe the speaker was 15 feet from us or something and it was like hmm I can't really hear it yeah yeah we've got a bunch of follow-ups and questions from previous episodes so Giles is where we will go next and Giles I will find you says he was the one that we talked about his iPad he wanted to copy his movies from his iTunes library sorry to his daughter's iPad and he set up different accounts and he wanted to know how to figure the iTunes library with his daughter to point to the external drive that had it and he did that exactly what we explained to him and it worked so if you want to go back to that you can go to 695 but then he said he had a problem because when he went to convert or when he went to sync these things to the iPad he would get an error message saying it was not copied because the video format was not supported by the iPad he then found the setting in iTunes where you can go to iTunes File, Convert, Create, iPad or Apple TV version he said I tried this on one file it took about 10 minutes to complete I couldn't see any difference at all in the Get Info panel of the file in iTunes but it did sync so what gives what bit of these files is incompatible I don't want to have to go through the process of reconverting them all you're right iTunes is really really picky about what it will convert and it could be the order of the audio tracks in that movie that's one thing to check it could be the file container like maybe it's M4V versus MP4 there's very very particular things that iTunes needs before it will copy the movie but the trick is your iPad's pretty capable on its own so if you could get that movie onto it it would play it in fact there's a lot of movies that your iPad will play, your iPhone will play that iTunes won't sync over to it what's that John? No oh okay and thankfully there's a piece of software called Walter WALTR that is built to take those movies and shove them into the movies app on your iPad so that you don't have to mess with it anymore it's at softorino.com and that is Walter WALTR so that's where I would go with this is just dump Walter onto it if you want to go a different direction you could use something like Infuse from Firecore which is a video player app that you install on the iPad or iPhone and then you can copy things into Infuse's library and it's very forgiving about what you want to give it it'll even do some on-device processing if it has to to get the movie to display so that would be the other way to go is using Infuse from Firecore do you got any other thoughts on this John? huh just being annoyed that it's very nonspecific well yeah that's its job John when it says the video format is not supported it's like well which ones are? no but it will convert it for you yeah but I don't think in this case it's doing any converting I think it's just re-muxing it and ordering it how it wants it cause 10 minutes is I don't know how fast your computer is but 10 minutes is pretty good to re-convert a movie I think it's just copying it around hey we talked about vector photos or vector images on the past couple of shows and we have one last entry into the to throw into the ring for vector app editors and that is Affinity Designer um and then they also have Affinity Photos which is kind of their photoshop competitor each app is 50 bucks and you would pay Adobe for their apps but as we were prepping the show John you suggested that we should at least briefly explain what a vector image is versus a non-vector image do you want to take that or was that just a suggestion? oh yeah no that's awesome what is a vector Victor if you've watched their plane then you'll understand our reference what do we mean when we talked about vector graphics and I think the thing is at the very basic level a vector is a quantity that includes two things a magnitude which is a value and a direction what does that mean when we're talking about images though? well the thing is there's a couple of ways you can construct an image Dave I think there's two major ways one you could have a bitmap which is just bits that you see and they're pretty another way you could build an image Dave is you could construct it by a series of vectors saying okay well a series of lines I think is a perhaps a better way to sort of translate that probably so the thing is you can also describe an object in a series of vectors now it may take a lot of them start here start here and then go in this direction for this amount of time and then go in this direction so it's a different way of representing an object and the nice part about it is that with an image that's described with pixels it is one size you can take that image and sample it down to make it smaller you sample it up to make it bigger than it actually is things start getting very jagged because it doesn't know what to do your computer doesn't know what to do with these pixels so it just doubles them or triples them or whatever to make it bigger but it's not actually more data whereas a vector image that's a description of what things should look like that is literally redrawn every time it's displayed on your screen it's displayed at any size and it will look clear at every size because it's being redrawn at that size from this list of from this description all these vectors and I think we saw this in the early days of fonts we saw this we had bitmap fonts and vector fonts so the thing is you could have a bitmap font alright so I need one version for 10.1 and oh my gosh or I could just store a way of representing or drawing with vectors characters and the thing is I don't need a file for each size I just whatever size you want okay I'll start drawing it now computationally that can be tapping there's extra work that's right you gotta figure out how to draw that but then most modern computers can kind of handle that cool alright well I just wanted to make sure we kind of went through that now moving along to Patrick a quick tip from the related I should say to the last episode he said thanks for the tips in 695 concerning shortcuts with the finer and terminal to remind people command shift period shows or toggles the showing of hidden files and then from the finder open a folder in the finder from the terminal you get to the folder in the terminal and type open space period he said but I have a tip because sometimes when you're using the finder you have a file or folder that you want to open in the terminal to go essentially the reverse of the open space period tip one quick way is to select the file or folder in the finder and copy it with the command C command open up terminal when you paste with command V it paste the path to that file or folder not the actual contents of the folder itself he said sometimes I'd rather use vim to view a text file instead of text edit he says or I have a script to run a process on a folder instead of trying to type out the entire path of the folder I can use this method he says in other words it's essentially the open open period tip in reverse so that's pretty cool I always forget that you can copy and paste a file path there I know I've done it but every time I think about how to do it it's like nah I don't know how to do it and that's because it's super simple you just do it there's nothing to it there you go anything else on that one John before we move on to to Thomas here oh Thomas go oh he's got an awesome one sweet at least I think so so Thomas says like just listen to macigap 694 where you talk about macOS server you mentioned that the device management feature is just the local thing maybe just as the Apple configurator is this is not the case device manager in macOS server is a fully working MDM server with remote updates and mostly the same possibilities that other MDM servers have mostly because there are features missing which other MDM servers have got it so the reason these other MDM servers MDM stands for mobile device management and the reason that they exist is because they offer things that Apple's own server does not that's interesting though I had no idea that macOS server had a like a fully remote MDM thing set up so the thing is we were great and so I experiment with it a little bit Dave but I think it's worth looking at especially for the price of macOS server and the fact that they said they're going to focus on device management so right now the thing is my fish shake with them is that so I have macOS server as I'm sure you do under the when you start a macOS server it will list different categories server accounts services and under services my fish shake was they don't have a service called device management well it's called profile manager okay the thing is if you go to profile manager and normally it's off and you turn it on then it goes through this whole series of calisthenics I'm sorry just operations so creates a bunch of certificates because the thing it's going to present you with eventually is a webpage on that machine that allows you to register and manage devices got it it's really a pretty elegant once you know that it's there it's like wow so the thing is I started up and made some certs the cool thing is that certificates that it generates when you go to the webpage to do further configuration it shows up as an SSL page but it doesn't give you a warning that it's a self-signed certificate so it's doing some magic in the background to put it into your keychain to say this is well this is cool because you generated it and then there's like a intermediate certificate but I didn't get any warnings when I went to the page I'm like well it's secure how can it be secure if I didn't get a cert issued by you know a big guy and it's like well because that's how this works right then you can go then you can go to a page and then Dave so at least the way they advertised to use it so I registered two devices so I registered my iPhone and my Mac now the Mac thing it's really interesting but the iPhone so I register the iPhone things once you register it and then you get to the point where you can list your devices through the web interface it's pretty much very similar to Apple Configurator 2 you create what's known as a profile in this case with server you can push it to the device I haven't I've just scratched the surface but the first thing I do with my iOS device so once my iOS device so I went to the web page offered by the server on my machine I said register the device and then through the administration interface I said oh okay it sees the device it's like well what do you want to restrict or let it do and I'm like well how about you disable the camera because that's one of the things it's like okay so I clicked on disable camera and then said okay push this to the device the first time the device whether it be Mac or iOS it says okay I got this configuration profile that somebody wants to install is that cool it's like yeah because that's how this works that's how it's through the standard mechanism but the thing that was cool Dave was so as soon as I set it up on my Mac saying okay push this to my iOS device seconds later all of a sudden the camera app disappeared wow it just disappeared yeah yeah that's kind of similar if I did it with the configurator so the the point that's being made is that it's over the air it's a it's a more sophisticated version it's a centralized server based version of what you can do with the configurator plus a little more Dave because I also register my Mac now the thing is Apple configurator 2 last I checked doesn't let you administer or send profiles to Mac's but this does because when I configure my Mac so I like with my iOS device I went to the server and said yeah hi this is me I'm the Mac and it's like okay that's cool this configuration profile Dave it was amazing so all of a sudden in system preferences a selection appeared called profiles it just magically oh right yeah yeah well never there before yeah yeah that'll appear once once there is a profile that that that's pretty normal that's right I never seen that before though cool and and I did the same thing so at the very highest level you can do things like lock the device wipe the device and a couple other things and then if you dig into the if you dig into the guts of of the the whole system and then they let you link to an apple school manager program device and brolin program volume purchase program it's um I just scratched the surface but cool I just gotta say I was tickled that I was able to disable yeah yeah yeah my iPhone and it just kind of pushed it down because it's a local network now you probably have to do something a little different if you want this on an enterprise scale I'm just doing on my local server so I'm sure once I'm outside of my you know home environment I don't think this will work because when I go to the server well when I go to the server well the thing is right now the server I think I'd have to do additional work though or at least at the very least I'd have to do VPN because right now the server is called macbook pro local so oh I thought the I deployed on my local network pushes went through Apple stuff though I mean you could try it by turning off Wi-Fi on your phone and trying to push a change to it yeah I'm pretty sure it uses Apple's push service man I think it did generate well it did generate a push service certificate so that may in fact work if I'm outside of my I'm pretty sure that's how all the MDM stuff works is it it goes via Apple's you know APN push server whatever that is yeah so Thomas thank you we I was misinformed yeah same there's a full implementation there that I encourage people to check it out especially from people that have given us questions like how do I restrict the actions of my kids or my this or my that yeah what they do on their device and this is certainly a way to do that yeah cool make it some pushback right well you know hey buy their own stuff Patrick from show 695 chimed in and we were having a discussion actually we had several people it wasn't just Patrick chimed in we casually offhandedly even mentioned that transmit the FTP app was going away and we talked about some alternatives and we got actually quite a few of you that chimed in and said well wait wait wait what are you talking about transmit for Mac is still there like I can download it everything's cool what do you mean I rely on this I'm with you I rely on it too what I meant but we weren't clear about was that transmit for iOS went away on February 1st of this year and it went away solely because there was not enough interest to keep to keep it up to date they didn't want to let it linger or die on the vine so they have simply taken it down if such a time comes when panic feels like there's money to be made transmit for iOS then you know by all means I think they would head back down that path but transmit for transmit for macOS still good all plans are to continue developing that as far as panic has told us so everything's okay didn't mean to panic you no pun intended yes yes alright you know I have one last thing and this is just because I got things out of order be because I blame the flexor Rob also chimed in after our discussion about vector graphics and he suggests a piece of software for both the mac and iPad called graphic it's for it's from Indio Inc. IND EEO and we will put a link to that of course in the show notes so thanks Rob I really appreciate you chiming in with that because I think that's hopefully that gives us all the options that anybody ever needs to figure out and I think Jeff Gammett's actually putting together a roundup piece on all of these I've been feeding all of these to him as you've been sending him in so so you're participating in two ways and I like that John I want to take a moment here and thank our premium subscribers for this week you can find out all about premium at mackeykeb.com premium Patrick M sent in a one-time donation this week of 100 bucks thank you so much Patrick you rock on the $10 monthly plan we have from this week Abdullah B Frank A Paul M Mark R Barry F Neil L Scott F Thank you and on the biannual plan 25 bucks every six months that came in this week Gary W Louis Michelle Josh O Paul B Margaret M David G and Daniel P thanks to all of you really I say it every week we can't do this show without you and it's true so thanks so much for all your support your questions we're almost out of time and in fact if I was smart I would say we should wrap up here so I can get up and stretch but but is there is there anything you want to go through I'm trying to think I feel like there was one other thing but I just don't know if it's going to come to mind so bring the band I really don't like this stuff I looked it up here man it's got some nasty side effects here oh yeah I know yeah it's not you know so anyway that's what I got you can contact us though if you're a premium listener premium at Mackie Cub dot com is the way to find us if you are a regular listener and trust me when I say we value your contributions your questions we value the fact that you are listeners all of that stuff like big time you can send to us at feedback at Mackie Cub dot com and if you didn't hear that right because Dave's on drugs um he said feedback at Mackie Cub dot com I'm pretty sure I said feedback at Mackie Cub dot com the first time despite any other factors that might influence things you can call us 224-888-Geek 433-5 as far as you know just for kicks why not there's still this twitter thing that's full up around out there you can tweet I still don't get it on twitter he is Dave Hamilton that other guy is pilot Pete the podcast is Mackie Cub and the publication is Mack Observer all at twitter dot com slash there you go thanks so much to Cashfly C-A-C-H-E-F-L-Y dot com for providing all the bandwidth of course our sponsors smile at smilesoftware dot com slash podcast otherworldcomputing at maxsales dot com barebonessoftware at barebones dot com roboform at roboform dot com slash M-G-G I think we made it John and uh you know I feel like I'm so happy about the fact that we didn't do the thing that we warned people against that I want to hear it sung in multi-part harmony