 The Mac Observers' Mac Geekab, episode 682 for Monday, November 6th, 2017. And welcome to the Mac Observers' Mac Geekab, the show where you send in questions, tips and cool stuff found. We share it all. We digest it. We dissect it. We deliberate over it with the goal being to learn at least four new things each and every time we get together. Sponsors for this episode include TextExpander from Smile Software, where we have a way to get 20% off your first year there. We'll talk about that a little bit later. Eero, E-E-R-O, where you can get, we've got a deal for you to get free overnight shipping on the Wi-Fi mesh network that I am currently running in my home. And Plex, where, man, without Plex, I don't know what I'd do on the plane on Wednesday night going to Austin with the family because I'm able to download all my movies and do whatever I want there on my iPad. We'll talk more about that in a minute. Here in Durham, New Hampshire, I'm Dave Hamilton. And here in Fairfield, Connecticut, John F. Braun. How are you doing, Mr. John F. Braun? You know, it's been a rough week, man. I mean, we had to do the time warp, trees are attacking us in various ways. It's pretty crazy. It's crazy, man. That's yeah, it's been it's been nuts. Yeah, we had time shift. Of course, most of my advice is handle that. And then the trees I mentioned is that we had some storms and stuff. And not only the leaves, which are the least of our worries, but the trees were hitting things. Yeah. Well, we talked about that before the last show, because, you know, power was out for me and all that good stuff. Right. Yeah, I'm pretty clean it up. Yeah, that's good. That's good. Yeah, it's been nuts. And and we had several. Actually, we had iPhone 10 release day was on Friday. And we'll talk a little bit about that. Someone was updates. Yeah, I guess so. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, that's right. Yeah. Lots of stuff to go through. All right, let's but let's start with with a question that. You know, I love it when I read stuff from you folks and it it challenges me and makes me think, oh, I never thought about it that way before. And so Ev will kick things off for us here. He says, I had an interesting experience at one of my side gigs. I went to log into my email for said side gig and my inbox was there. But my other inboxes were gone. What a nightmare. This means all of my customer communications and past bids were lost. I tried booting from my clone. However, outlook started on boot before I could turn off my internet connection and the inboxes were lost when it synced to the server. I was able to recover them using data rescue, but man, that was a close one. So one thing to think about is what to make an offline copy of your email and an archiving system would be great for this. I'm currently working on a solution to have carbon copy cloner backup outlook data and have my Synology archive it. If you have any suggestions, it would be appreciated. I don't know of a of a piece of software to backup outlook data. There is mail steward, but I'm pretty sure mail steward is only for Apple mail. But we'll put a link to that in the show notes for those of you out there. But. Ev comes up with a very interesting scenario when you when you have a clone, when you boot from that clone, that clone, if connected to the network, will sync just like your main drive does. So if you're looking for data on that clone, that perhaps the deletion of which has already been synced to some cloud service. In Ev's case, email, but could be Dropbox, could be, you know, any other syncing service that you might have. Be aware of that, maybe pull the network cable, maybe turn off Wi-Fi. But just, you know, be thoughtful about that before you boot, because you could you could wind up losing data. Thankfully, like Dropbox generally is going to save iterations of older things, depending on what how your account set up. But even still, it's just it's interesting. iCloud Drive, I don't think saves iterations, right, John? I think it's just a syncing thing. So, yeah, right, nice. Yeah, but to me, the larger question is so. So we want to be clear here is that we're using a email system outside of the Apple Echo Sphere, because that stores everything, for the most part, in one place, and you can certainly do this. Well, this could this could happen with Apple Mail, too, though. There's nothing that would stop. Like if you if you went and if you had your main drive and you just deleted everything from your inbox, right? That's going to delete it and delete it from the inbox on the server. So if you now boot from your clone, everything that was in the inbox there as soon as that's allowed to sync with the server is now going to also be deleted. Now, it's going to be moved to a trash folder in this case. So, you know, maybe maybe not a huge risk, but still, it's interesting to think about. I don't know. Yeah, I'm just more reflecting on so, you know, in the case of Apple Mail, for the most part, it puts it in your user folder library. Mail is where you're going to have a local copy of most of your stuff, right? Sure. Unless it's deleted. Right. I mean, it's just a that's just a synced copy from unless the server says correct. Yeah. You know, I don't want this here anymore. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Which could happen as soon as you boot from your clone, right? As soon as you launch Mail, it's going to say, what's the server tell me to do? Oh, delete. Gotcha. All over it. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it kind of sounds like the problem I had with, you know, was talking to me about my iCloud document syncing where it's like, well, the folders were there, but the content was gone right the past. And it's like, well, I didn't tell you to do that. Well, maybe it did. And you just didn't realize. Right. Right. Right. Yeah, it's crazy. Anyway, it's it's yeah, it's good to think about for sure. Faux show. All right, let's let's take ourselves to some quick tips. Shall we hear and let's see what we got. We'll go to Tony. I think yep, there it is. Tony says, I found something interesting in iOS 11 while I was listening to Mackie cab actually on the way to work. I never had an issue with volume control on my iPhone 6S before, but maybe because I was using new headphones, he says, he's got the pioneer raise either using the inline control or the buttons on the phone itself, the volume with was either too low or too high. Frustrated, he says, I remembered the new control center in iOS 11. And as suspected, the volume slider there gives much more granular control of the volume. Not sure this wasn't also the case in previous versions of iOS, but I never had the need to seek it out. So there's my quick tip. Very, very cool, Tony. I like that. Yeah, it is. It's great. And you can, you can really adjust brightness and volume very, very granularly there. In fact, if you go to the iOS 11 control center and and and force touch or 3D touch, which is it? It's 3D touch on the iPhone, right? And force touch on the Mac. I can never remember. Anyway, push hard. And you can really get some granular control going in there because the volume then takes up the whole screen. So very cool. Very good feelings about that. Mixed feelings about what? Well, I had a battle with the control center recently. You know, I was at a show and met one of our friends, Andrew, and I wanted to airdrop something to him. And I was like, well, how do I get to the airdrop settings? And I went to the control center and I didn't see an explicit airdrop icon. It didn't seem to be on. The thing is, I had not. I should have taken iOS 11 one on one or one one zero or we had talked about this very thing. I know we had the thing is on the spur of the moment, I didn't realize that I had to, you know, do an extended operation in order to get that to come up and that it's not shown initially as an option. So for those of you following along at home, bring up control center. You'll see the little four icon network group, which has airplane mode, cellular data, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. If you push hard on that force touch on it, then you get two more personal hotspot and airdrop are shown. So, yeah. So it just escaped me. Force touch 3D touch there before it was there before Brian Monroe corrects me. So they got rid of the name force touch. It's now 3D touch on all products. So there you go. Thank you for Star Wars. Right. Right. Which is totally fine. Just different. Kevin with a quick tip, I believe. And Kevin says, I finally found a solution to a long time super annoying iCloud drive issue for the type A organizational freak that I am. When running Mac OS Sierra, I played around by enabling storage of my desktop and documents folders in iCloud. I quickly reversed that by disabling the option, then moving the files back to their place on my local drive. Even though the options now disabled in settings or system preferences, iCloud, iCloud drive, I still couldn't delete the now empty desktop and documents folders from my iCloud drive. No matter what I did, they kept resurrecting themselves. This was especially annoying as I had two pointless empty folders taking up precious real estate in the files app on my iPhone. He says, so here's my fix. From the MacBooks Finder window, I deleted the empty desktop folder from iCloud drive and then immediately emptied the trash before the folder had time to reappear in the iCloud drive folder. The folder did not reappear after I emptied the trash. After a few seconds, iCloud refreshed and the documents folder was deleted from my iOS device as well. I then followed the same steps to delete the empty documents folder. Cheers and thanks for great shows. Yeah, you bet, Kevin. Very cool. I like it. You just got to get ahead of it. That that. So what he's doing is getting ahead of where the the iCloud drive sink engine is kicking in and saying, no, we got to restore this by by emptying the trash and kind of pushing his change up to the cloud instead of taking the clouds change back down. It's pretty good, right, man? Yeah, just doesn't sound right. I know. It's like you're trying to second guess the OS. Well, that's exactly what I cloud, which I guess sometimes just have to do. Yeah, the nice part about iCloud is that it sinks without you having to be involved at all. The awful part about iCloud is that it sinks without you having to be involved at all, right? I'm I'm I just fear that at some point, random point in the future, it's it's going to put that stuff back anyways. Well, that may be true. But but if it didn't, if it synced that change to his iPhone, I feel like he's probably he's probably pretty safe, at least for a little while. I don't know. Chris with a K says, I listen to podcasts in my cars. I travel back and forth to work like many do. Some podcasts that publish daily episodes are nice to listen to at one and a half speed so that I can move through them the information quickly and cover more ground during my drive. However, some podcasts such as Keycap, he says, are worth listening to at one X speed so that I don't miss anything. This morning, I found my listening myself listening to MGG at one and a half speed accidentally because it automatically followed a daily news podcast. Normally, I would carefully adjust the playback speed setting at an appropriate time on my drive. However, the new do not disturb while driving feature in iOS 11 makes this more difficult. This is and I really do think it's better to not be fiddling with my phone while driving anyway. So somewhat out of frustration after pausing playback, I said, hey, so here's the thing, we're not going to use. We're not going to use the the the S word anymore because we don't want to trigger your phones. So he said, hey, S word, play at normal speed. And lo and behold, Siri resume playing MGG at one X speed. Nice. He said, I had no idea that Siri would understand normal speed and change the playback speed to one X. He says, so here's some tips. In addition to asking Siri to play a podcast, you can ask Siri to adjust playback speed by saying play at normal half one and a half or double speed. All of those will work. You can skip back or forward any number of seconds or minutes by saying, hey, S word, skip back, slash forward XX seconds or minutes. This is nice in that it is far more flexible than the UI on the screen, which just gives you 15 second increment buttons and a hard to precisely control scrubbing element. That's pretty good. I like that, Chris. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. It's pretty good, huh, John? I don't really talk to Siri. OK, well, you can. It's awesome. Yeah, it's the S word, John. Sorry, I use more the A word. The A word, right. And that's the other one that we won't say the the product that comes from from Amazon there. So, of course, there's the C word. Oh, I don't know about that. There's yes for the Microsoft people. That's right. Yep. All right. So moving on JP, why don't you take it from here and see where we go? Hey, Johnny, Dave, it's JP in beautiful North Atlantic Maine with a quick Wow. I didn't know that tip. I changed the name of the my user folder on my iMac here and I found it online as to how to do it. I did it wrong before, but now I've done it correctly. And I transferred all my preferences over to the new user folder. And lo and behold, in the dock, a lot of my shortcuts or aliases that I have in the dock came up as question marks. And in the old days, I would have just dumped the question mark and redrag the file or folder back into the dock. But just by accident, I right clicked on the question mark and clicked the button that chose the option that says show in Finder. And like a miracle, the icon appeared right where it was supposed to. And I didn't have to reconstitute anything. This is a tremendous find. I don't know if anyone's ever done that before and found themselves re putting in question marks. Pretty amazing. Anyway, that's the tip. Hope you're well. Cut me off. Yeah, man. Of course. That's a very good. All right. I went to cut you off and I started you over. That's a pretty good tip. It makes sense, right? Because if you say show in Finder, then it's it's going to to surface that and highlight that. And that would update the finder's cash of and therefore then the docks cash of what that icon is. That's pretty good. I like it. Huh. Yeah, I know. Again, second guessing the operating system, you know, we've all had that happen when you see the question mark, which initially means what I thought was here is something wrong with it. Something wrong. It's almost self healing. In that sense, as long as the file was actually there, right? If the file wasn't there, it wouldn't it wouldn't it couldn't self heal. But yeah, it's pretty good. I like it. I like when I learn these kinds of things. It's good second guess in the US. A little while back, Mark on Facebook shared this tip. He said, I thought my iPhone screen was fading. It was really dull compared to my old five S. But after digging around, I found in settings, general accessibility, display accommodations, the white point was up to about 80 percent. I turned it down to 25 percent and all was well. Very, very cool. I've always said, taking you around accessibility, you can find cool things, but you can also solve some problems. And and this is one of those who knows how it got set that way. But I guess I suppose that would be a good prank to pull on somebody. But but yeah, there you go. Yeah. I had no idea that was even there, John. Oh, did I lose you? I don't know. Oh, OK. No, I'm just you know, I'm just. That well, after after the pre show powered network flicker, I got worried so. Yeah, no, I'm just amazed at the number of things that are in accessibility. It's crazy. Yeah. Yeah. And a lot of them can can do some interesting things for everyone, not just for people with, you know, with different needs. It's pretty good. I like it. Yeah. Well, it can also ruin everything right out here. It's like, well, no, I never wanted that white point. Yeah. We touched on something related to that. I think you would you would have brought it up. There's like a smart what? Oh, smart invert. Oh, I couldn't live without smart invert. Well, we talked about something similar like two or three episodes ago. It was something else buried in accessibility that normally you don't want on. Right. Unless. Yeah. Otherwise, the screen looks funny. I think I inadvertently I was out and about today. And I think I actually inadvertently turned on. What's the night adjustment? Yeah, smart invert. No, no, it's something else. Oh, oh, oh, night shift. Yeah. And all of a sudden, I'm like, ew. Yeah, it's just I don't know. I'm I'm just trained to look at a screen and the only acceptable thing to me is if it's like bright, bright, blinding white, no yellow, no. Well, that's good. It looks sickly, you know, when it changes this, you know, changes it to suppose they accommodate better for your eyes, I think. I don't know. Just differently. Well, at this point, I mean, yeah, right. That ship has sailed. That's right. No, you can still take care of your eyes. It's OK. It's good. All right. We've got some follow ups from the last episode. We'll start with Bob. We were talking about sinking folders and local folders on the same machine. And Bob reminds us that Hazel will sink a folder live, but only in one direction. But it will sink deletes. So if you're sinking folder A to folder B and you add a file to folder A, it will be added to folder B. And then if you delete a file from folder A, it will be deleted from folder B. So I can see that being very, very handy. So there you go. Hazel. Love Hazel. Man, I don't even. I don't I do so much stuff with Hazel here and I forget about all of it. Really? Well, yeah, because it's just automatic. Like I have it now cleaning out our all our old audio files and automatically migrating them to their archive folder on the disk station after they're two weeks old and then deleting them from the local drive and keeping the space the way it needs to be. I mean, it's killer. Oh, so that's what you're doing. Yeah, it's pretty good. I saw something the other day was like a Dropbox alert on one of our folders and it's like, what's Dave doing? I'm going to hear with something. I don't know that I don't know that that folder. Oh, right. So I also have that's a different Hazel thing. I have Hazel when an audio comment comes in, it's saved. They come into our Google our Google voice account, right? For Mac, and then I'm running an app on Google's thing, which I'll find the instructions if anybody wants them because it it's a weird thing, but it's like you're running an app in the cloud or whatever. And the app monitors this and saves the MP3 to I actually have it save it to Dropbox. And then I have Hazel on my Mac in the office watching that Dropbox folder. I thought it was a Google Drive folder, it must be a Dropbox folder. And then anything that goes into that folder, it puts into our Evernote thing that's then shared between us. And I do the same thing like for JP's comment that we just played. I save JP's stuff to the I save the audio comment that I get via email. I save that to the to the special folder that does the same thing. So that's probably what you saw is it it hit because I'm pretty sure that the voice one is goes to Google Drive. I put my mind at ease because initially I'm like, is that really Dave and is he really? Why is he changing? Yeah, yeah. So it's really a temporary location. I just save it there and then it automatically puts it where I need it in Evernote and I don't have to bother to go do the steps. Yeah, it's it's no, that's smart. I mean, as you said, you know, spread the love, man. If you got a file, you know, share it, sharing is good. Sharing is good. So you put a copy here, copy there. And if something goes bad, perhaps the most popular tip came in from many, many of you after the last episode. And and and so I'll share. We were talking about Time Machine and we were talking about making bootable backups and recovering from a backup. And I said, well, you can't boot from Time Machine. Well, when I say the wrong thing, you people correct me and I appreciate that. You can boot from Time Machine, John. I suppose I can't. I just check my system, Dave, I check my MacBook and I go to startup disk. I don't see a Time Machine volume show up as a startup option. What are you talking about? So there's two reasons that I thought you couldn't boot from Time Machine. One is what you're talking about, because you and I. Do Time Machine to a network drive and you can't boot Time Machine from a network drive, but there's another option. Well, yeah, the way Time Machine was really built to be used is with a local drive. You just connect right up and have it Time Machine to a USB or Thunderbolt or a Fireware disk, you know, whatever, locally attached. And those, believe it or not, you can boot from and it does back up the system software. So he says, by default, it will back up the system software. And you can boot from a local Time Machine disk in a pinch. And Eric goes a little bit deeper. He says, if you boot to recovery and select restore from Time Machine that will perform two actions, it will erase the internal drive and it will transfer everything from your Time Machine backup, including the system folder. This is how someone is able to downgrade to an older operating system if they have Time Machine backups from when they were on that older system, which is very interesting. All right. So so it sounds like you got to take an extra step. There's an extra step. Yeah, you're not it's not a clone. You're not just booting and running, but you can if all you have is a Time Machine backup, you can boot and get yourself back into business. Because if I recall correctly, if you do a network backup, it realizes that in the form of a sparse image. If you do a direct connect Time Machine backup, it does it as a folder called something dot DB. And then it buries everything in there. I was thinking, right? That's right. You know, I'm kind of scratching my head on this, Dave. How hard would it be to create an alias from the root of that drive to the backup inside to the system folder? Do you see where I'm going with this? Oh, oh, I do see where you're going with it. Well, I think where I'm going is that not all the pieces are there. It's not just the system folder that you need in order to know. There are other things you need that are hidden files. You see where I'm going? I do. Yeah, really, it's just kind of winging it here. But I'm thinking it could technically maybe be possible. Yeah, if the data is all there, not to the network drive, to a direct connect drive. Yeah. Maybe they're working on that. You've seen a few other things. I've been doing some disutility stuff and have seen some different interesting things come up when you scan it. Right, right. Or doing an integrity check, like first aid and it's like, oh, well, I, you know, by the way, I verified that this thing and this thing is in good shape. And it's like, well, that wasn't there before. So. Well, yeah, APFS is a whole different thing. Yeah, going to this utility and, you know, check out your maybe newly formatted APFS drives and you may see some references to terminology that you should probably get familiar with. Right, right. Snapshots. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Cool. Eric also shares that we were talking about Barry's mail settings fish shake last week and he says, Dave mentioned that iOS and Mac OS would take over for mail settings, even if you went to the other section. This is often correct, even in current versions of Mac OS and iOS. Eric says, I had this issue when helping people who had a Comcast account while they were switching over to IMAP from pop, adding the account would just automatically configure it for pop, even if the account worked with IMAP configurations. My fix for this, he says, was to misspell the domain of the email. I was going to something I knew didn't exist. Then iOS and Mac OS would show the generic mail account setup options, which would allow me to correctly enter all of the account information. What a brilliant hack, man. Just dude, I already have a name for this episode. What is it? Fighting the machine, fighting the machine. Yeah, I thought it was serious. We've had we've had enough examples. Yeah, we show he's where people are fighting the machine to get it to do what they want. Yeah, yeah, I like it. So I think I'll certainly consider that because this is brilliant as well. It's brilliant because when we talked about this, that occurred to me as well as like sometimes the OS is too smart for its own good. It's doing things you don't want it to do. Right, right, right. It's crazy. I probably mistyped something one time and stumbled across this. And it's like brilliant. Yeah, yeah, exactly. I have what I believe is a fairly reliable solution for the iOS 11 battery drain that many but not all people are experiencing. And I want to tell you about it, John, but the first thing I want to do is tell you about our sponsors for today. Is that OK? Outstanding. All right. Our first sponsor for this episode is Plex, one of my favorite pieces of software and services, Plex lets you stream and share all your personal media to any device from your Plex media server that you can host at home. Photos, music, movies, even DVR TV shows. It's really amazing what they've done. I've been using Plex for years and I'm not sure what I'd do without it. In fact, when we finish this show today, I'm going to go and load Plex on my iPad and sync a bunch of movies down for my plane ride to Austin on Wednesday night. And here's the beauty. Everybody else in my family is going to do that, too. They all have their own accounts on our Plex server. It was super easy to set up, so simple. And here's the deal. Plex is free to download and set up. You can use it. You can use it for streaming for free forever. No problem. Premium features, of course, they would need to make money. So they save some features just for folks that sign up for a premium subscription. Things like syncing to your iPad for offline viewing. You can view online for free, parental controls. They've got some VIP perks, things like that. But really, just get started for free. Now, here's the deal. www.plex.tv slash Mac Geek. That's the URL you have to go to. I know it's a little bit different from what we normally do here and every bit of it matters, so it's www.plex.tv slash Mac Geek. Or you can just go to MacGeekApp.com. We have a link right there. We always have links at MacGeekApp.com sponsors for exactly this. Here's the other part of the deal. So that's where you can go sign up and use it for free. If you want a Plex pass, go back to www.plex.tv slash Mac Geek. Log into your account that you've now already created. Use the code MGG. You get your first month of Plex pass for free. Our sincere thanks to Plex. For sponsoring this episode. Our second sponsor for today is Smile at TextExpander.com slash Podcast, where you get a special deal. Twenty percent off your first year of TextExpander just because you came from MacGeekApp. So that's TextExpander.com slash Podcast. Choose MacGeekApp from the list. You get twenty percent off your first year. Now, TextExpander, one of the utilities that I also cannot live without. It's like on every Mac and iOS device that I have. Let's say you launch a new product or service. You want to update everyone's signature in your company, right? You probably have a little marketing message in your signature. Without TextExpander, your marketing person, whoever that is, it might be you, would send an email to everybody with a new text nudging them, pestering them, please update your signature. With TextExpander, your marketing person edits the shared snippet and it's instantly available and in everybody's signature automatically because you're using TextExpander to fill that stuff in shortcuts that you type on your keyboard, like for my my TMO signature, I type comma TMO S and boom. It fills out my entire Mac Observer signature. I want my MacGeekApp signature. You guessed it, comma MGGS, boom, right there. You got to check it out. Go to TextExpander.com slash podcast. Choose MacGeekApp from the list. Sign up and you get 20% off your first year. Our thanks to Smile and TextExpander for sponsoring this episode. Also, I am super happy to have Eero as a sponsor. We're at Eero.com. You can go and learn about the mesh Wi-Fi system that I currently have running in my home. Eero knows how to do it. They know how to do it right. They make it super easy and it's awesome. No more dropouts, no more dead spots. In fact, it spills out into my yard. I mean, way into my yard. It's great in a good way. It's great. It's awesome. They're new second generation products, which include the second generation Eero unit that now adds a third five gigahertz radio. So it's tri-band twice as fast as its predecessor. Let's you do more simultaneously in every room in your home. Whatever your Wi-Fi needs, Eero can blanket your home in fast, reliable Wi-Fi. They've also added the Eero beacon, which plugs directly into an outlet and also becomes a participant in spreading your Wi-Fi far and wide throughout your house, but it just plugs into the outlet so you don't need to worry about putting it on table or anything else like that. When you've got multiple people trying to do multiple things simultaneously, even in a small home, you need mesh. Trust me, I'm the guy. I do this stuff all the time. Eero is the one that I'm using in my home right now. Here's the deal. Visit Eero, E-E-R-O dot com. Add whatever Eero bundle you want for your account. They've got different ones for different sized homes and different requirements. Then add overnight shipping. There's going to be a charge for that. Don't worry about it, because the next thing you're going to do is use coupon code MGG and that takes the price of overnight shipping down to zero. You get free overnight shipping to both the US and Canada. Visit Eero dot com, add your bundle, add overnight shipping, add coupon code MGG, free overnight shipping to the US and Canada. Bingo, bingo, you are done. You're going to have great Wi-Fi all throughout your home. Our thanks to Eero at E-E-R-O dot com for sponsoring this episode. All right, I promised it, John. So this gets interesting, right? Because I started thinking about what you said, because we talked about this. And you said, yeah, I haven't had any battery life changes with iOS 11, right? If anything, it's improved. OK, all right. Remarkably or moderately? When I traveled in Manhattan, so I bring my iPhone 7, you know, we're in the latest OS. And I would say, typically, Dave, I would go for less than a day. I thought I attributed it to the increased use of cellular data. Because once you get on the train and you get in Manhattan, I'm away from my, from the most part, away from reliable Wi-Fi for my ISP. So it uses cellular data, which I'm going to venture uses significantly more battery power than Wi-Fi. I could be wrong, though. That's that's my story and I'm sticking to it. OK, is that that's one of the primary consumers of power in a cell phone. Sure. Well, the radios, all of them, but but that one, all of them. But I would say cell radio is probably one of the things that draws the most power. And the thing is, I would notice I would be able to go for less, almost always less than a day before having to find somewhere to recharge or get a battery pack. OK. After I upgraded to iOS 11, Dave, I went, you know, I just went to a show for three days in a row. And the thing is, the phone consistently would last throughout the entire day. And I was just like, now, maybe I just answered a prompt. I mean, the thing is, the OS is pretty smart about things saying, ah, well, this thing's running in the background. They really needed to. And maybe I hit one of those and it magically eliminated something that was sucking down all the power or could have been iOS 11. But sure, I'm going to say my instinct tells me that something iOS 11 did improved my battery life. So there you go. Well, you are you are in the minority. We know what I know. A lot of people are like, yeah, now I see it after everybody does a major update. The thing is after an update, the thing is the phone is re-indexing. So you should almost expect battery life will suck for a couple days after a major upgrade because the phone is doing lots of things that you aren't necessarily aware of that continues. Then yeah. And so then I will hand it back to you. No, you're right. So you're in the minority. We did a poll on Mac observers Twitter account asking, you know, after your update to iOS 11 has battery life stayed the same, gotten remarkably better or gotten remarkably worse. Four percent of the people answered as you did, John. Thirty four percent. Yeah, you're a four percenter. Thirty, let's say, thirty five percent answered that it's about the same. And everyone else, the overwhelming majority, said it's gotten much, much worse. And so I dug into this because it's like, OK, well, wait a minute, thirty five percent isn't nothing. That's not a rounding error. Right. Four percent might be around here. But thirty five percent ain't. So I started thinking like, OK, wait a minute, like, what could this be? And I started digging and thinking and, you know, I started deleting apps from my phone thinking, all right, it's got to be an app, right? It's not iOS Facebook. Yeah, I did. I deleted the Facebook app. I actually didn't help at all. And so I'm like, OK, maybe it is the OS. And I've learned that the if you go to settings, battery, it tells you some of the apps that are using things in the background. And I intentionally say some of the apps, it lies, it doesn't quite get it right. It's not comprehensive. I've tested and proven this. It's it's helpful, but it's not complete. And and so I started thinking, you know, if this were a Mac, what I would want to do is I'd want to run like Onyx or Safe Boot or something where I could like clean out the caches and just get it started from scratch. And I started thinking, maybe I just need to start my phone from scratch. Well, I hate the idea of starting my phone from scratch. So instead, what I did was I backed up my phone, I wiped it clean and I restored from a backup. And I've done that with a couple of phones here in the house that we're experiencing awful battery life after I was alive. That you will have a clean slate cash wise cash wise. And other low level stuff that you normally can't access. Correct. Yep. Exactly. I'm with you. That makes sense. Yeah. And it was it was, you know, not only do I get free of all the cash data that the operating system has, but also all of my apps, right? I mean, they have their data, but not every bit of data is backed up in your app. For example, cash is anything that's considered a temporary file is not backed up because Apple doesn't want you wasting your precious storage space on iCloud with things that can be recreated by the app. So, you know, that that was the logic. And man, it was even the first day where iCloud PhotoLibrary was still operating in the background and indexing and doing all of its thing. Even that first day, my battery life was remarkably better than it had been in months and I'd been running the iOS betas. But I don't think the fact that I ran betas was the reason I had battery life issues, at least now because because other people were having that haven't ever run betas, we're having exactly the same thing. Yeah. So you you did say the I word, though. What word was that? Which I word I cloud. Oh, I cloud. Well, yeah. But right, that's the thing is like, was there something that just wouldn't stop sinking previously, maybe that was just shooing up CPU power? And what I noticed was my phone started feeling so much colder than I was used to it feeling. And and obviously that's because the CPU is not running as hot, you know. But it was really remarkable. And and so there you go. That's that's my that's my story and I'm sticking to it, John. To so you're saying doing a restore. Yep. That's it may may give you new life, your phone, new life or more life. Yeah, well, I mean, I'm fairly confident in saying that if you wiped your phone down to ground zero with iOS 11 and manually reinstalled your apps, that your battery life would would not very likely be better. But doing it with a restore. And the nice part about the restore is there's only a couple things now that that you lose when you do that. One is you've got to redo all of your Apple Pay cards. Like it's not going to persist across the rest of you have to redo your touch ID. And you have to redo your hey, S word configuration. But otherwise. But it's like it's all right there. OK, and you have to redo your watch. You've got to re-sync with your watch, which takes up, which basically means you're re-restoring the backup there, too. But did you know Apple Pay has a limit of eight cards? I did. Oh, OK, I posted something like that. Yeah, maybe I mentioned in the past show or maybe I didn't. Yeah, I think you can tell me in a past show. Yeah, yeah. Not that I collect cards, but I just and you can put debit and credit cards in Apple Pay. And the thing is I really didn't need to put the debit cards in there. But I did anyways. And all of a sudden when I got an additional card, it's like, well, I can only hold eight and it's like, well, why? Yeah, because there's 256 gigs of memory on my. Yeah, I think that's the phone I got. But the second thing I want to ask you is that at one point you posted the. So if you get a settings battery and you go to the bottom after it does the chugging, yes, so you saw that your usage and standby were identical. Was that the key that led you down the path of considering a restore and that it indicated to you that something was running wild? Well, so I posted that after I had done this and that was on day one. And what I realized was that was iCloud photo library running constantly in the background for that first day. But that's all it was was the first day. That's it. And then and then that settled in. So I honestly don't know what that was prior to my my wiping. So for those new to iOS, if you go to settings and battery, you will see two times on the bottom time since last full charge usage and standby, if those numbers are the same, something's wrong. Yeah, yeah, right. Just let you guys know, standby should be greater than usage. If they're the same, then that means that there's something on your phone doing something stupid that prevents it from resting. Correct. Correct. Yeah. And and while we also got an email from from Wesley. So I'm curious if you folks and anybody who's willing to try this and obviously make sure you have good backups and all that before you do it. But I would love to hear from you feedback at MacGeekab.com. Dave, I wasn't quite sure I heard you because we had some network issues that were running eros, so I don't see why we would. So it must be something else. But but did you say feedback at MacGeekab.com? No, I think what you were trying to do was reiterate that. I said feedback at MacGeekab.com, which of course I did. And and if and that's that's where you would email us and tell us all about this stuff, unless you're a premium listener, we'll talk more about that in a minute. But that's premium at MacGeekab.com. Wesley wrote in and said, everyone's been talking about how since the iOS 11 update, their battery life has gone down. He says, today I let my iPhone go and I have been at one percent for over four hours. Could the issue be that there is an issue with the battery indicator or calibration code? I think the answer to this is also yes. And I'm not sure that this is iOS 11 specific, but because I've seen it in the past where exactly what you describe happens. It is good that calibration of that percentage reading is it is good every now and again to let your phone just run all the way down to zero and then charge it all the way back up just to get that calibrated. Yeah, my wife's phone was reporting. She's got an iPhone 6S plus 2700 milliamp hour battery. The other day I plugged it into coconut battery and it said that her battery capacity was 60 something percent at like 1700. I was like, wow, that's awful. She let it go all the way down. She let it come all the way back up really. It's not perfect, but she's at like 80 percent at like 2200 is where that is. And doing that cycling after reading Wesley's email definitely makes a difference in terms of the accuracy of reporting. It's not that your phone's going to die any sooner. You're not changing the capacity of it. You're just changing the accuracy of that reporting. Yeah, yeah. The thing is, there's a chip in there somewhere that's trying to translate something analog to something digital. And sometimes it doesn't get it quite right now. Some would also argue. So I've had battery problems in the past, not on this phone, but prior phones where it would say 20 percent and all of a sudden the phone would die. Oh, yeah. OK. Well, gee, I think maybe your circuitry or your software or maybe firmware that measures this is faulty. So another thing that some people may want to delve into. Some people say I'm crazy, but there is something called a DFU restore, which is like it rewrites the firmware on the phone last I checked. And sometimes the firmware, which is the software in the phone that kind of talks to the hardware, may get corrupt. And I've seen it fix my problems where the phone wouldn't suddenly die at 20 percent. Now, maybe I imagined that the DFU restore accomplish that. No, the DFU restore is kind of like doing. It's like a restore plug. It's like a it's like an SMC reset in that sense. I think it clears out an additional area that a restore from iTunes or something doesn't quite get. Yeah. Oh, for sure. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. So it helped me because it's very upsetting to see your phone at 20 percent. And all of a sudden you see it do the shutdown and it's like what? Yeah, what? Yeah. Yeah. Not good. Speaking of charging or power or batteries. Yeah. So we have while we're on the subject. Oh, crap. What did I do here? Well, I delete and I didn't do. I did. I hit delete and I just saw everything disappear in front of me. Yeah, we're we have a document that we keep all of our stuff alive in here. And I just killed it all. But thankfully I have undoed it to fix that. Yeah, maybe we should just work forward here. Thanks to everybody, by the way, in the chat room at mackeykeb.com slash stream that helps out with the show notes and and keeps us honest during the show and really just participates and keeps everything going. It's awesome. Thank you so much to all of you that that make the time to join us when we record. If you want to know when when we're going to record two things. Number one, mackeykeb.com slash calendar. You can subscribe to that. That is the exact same calendar that John and I use. So when changes are made for us, you will see them reflected. But you can also download the mackeykeb app and we send out a push notification when when we're about to record and you can join us right from within the app to you don't even have to go to mackeykeb.com slash stream. All right. Tannel writes and he actually wrote this a while ago. You know, I was I always say we go through we try to answer every question and we do answer every question and it's true. Eventually the premium stuff that's sent to premium mackeykeb.com by those of you that are premium members, that we get through multiple times a week. The stuff that's sent to the other address, we try to get through at least once a week, but when things get busy, that's the stuff that slows down. This morning I did. I finally got caught up all the way back to September 1st, I think. So it did like we were it wasn't like the whole thing had been had been filling up, but there were many questions that I just needed to get through. So anyway, we're there. Tannels was one of them and Tannels says now that some of the iPhone 8 and some of us have the iPhone 8 and many will be having the iPhone 10 soon, it would be most welcome if you would address the wireless and fast charging on the show, especially from the perspective of third party chargers bought from places like, say, Amazon or Aliexpress. My local Apple dealer sells the wireless chargers for around $50 or 50 euros. But on Aliexpress, they go as cheap as five euros. Are there any risks in buying cheap wireless chargers? What about fast charging? I hear that many are saying it's not good for the battery. Is it really that bad? Until I know I have used my iPad charger instead of the five watt iPhone charger in order to get faster charging. If I'm planning to charge the phone overnight, then would it be better to use the five watt charger? All right, so I do. I have an iPhone 10. We'll talk about that in a minute. And I have been on Friday night. I I thought, well, OK, I should test out wireless charging. And so I went on Amazon and I had a goal for myself, John. I said, I'm going to buy a wireless charging puck, the least expensive one that I can find that has at least three and a half stars worth of reviews. And then I was going to read the reviews to make sure. I'm not buying something where people are like danger of fire, you know. And because at the Apple store, they're like they're like 50 or 60 bucks. It's just crazy for this thing that's been around forever. So this is Qi, right? QI. And the and so it's, you know, this isn't just like an Apple specific thing. I figured I should be able to find it. It's induction. It's induction. It's converting electricity to a. Field that the phone absorbs. Correct charges. Yeah. OK. Not really all that much different from Wi-Fi. Just shorter range so that you get magnetic electrical. You're talking kind of the same technology. So I did and on Sunday because Amazon has two day, you know, shipping for us prime members and the US Postal Service is willing to deliver all Amazon stuff now on Sundays. I got this charger that cost me $8.99 and I'll put a link to it in the show notes. It and it works great. The charger will do up to 2.1 amps. I have no way of knowing how fast it's charging it. Maybe maybe one of those battery apps would would tell me, John, but. Well, no, I got your current meter. Get you. Oh, well, I could. That's true. I could put the current meter. Is it USB? It is. It's a USB cable that. Yeah, so you can see the current draw. That's true. Yeah, yeah, yeah, but it's not going to be a one to one relationship because there's going to be current lost in the air, right? It's probably up to like 50 percent, of course. Yeah. So I was able to charge this thing last night. It worked fine. And I did it with a case on it. No issue. I just laid the phone down on the on the pad and it charged and in the morning I took it off. Yeah, it was at 100. As long as the case, my only concern and I've seen some conversations battered around in our email along with our good friend, Adam, and people ask this. And the thing is, all right, so it's electromagnetic. If the case is metal, you may have an issue. You're going to have metal blocks, RF, right? And energy like that. If it's plastic or glass or whatever, you should be fine. As long as it's not too thick. Now, the interesting thing is an atom over it, Mac, casted some of this research. Oh, even plastic? Thirty five millimeters is the distance, the maximum distance for Qi one point two that can that can exist between the charging receiver, if you will, on the phone and the charging sender, for lack of a better term, on the pad. Now, that includes everything, the whatever is on the surface of the charger, whatever the back of the phone is, whatever the your cases, all of that stuff. But 35 millimeters is a lot of space, right? I mean, that's almost an inch and a half. So you've got some room there. Now, there's been some reports that Apple isn't quite doing that fully. But I was able to get this thing charging with my case on sort of hovering a quarter inch over the pad without issue at all. So I felt pretty good with it, obviously resting on the pad that it was going to charge just fine. Yeah, so there's and I've got a mono price case on a charger on the way, too. There's cells for 999. I haven't tested it, though. This one that I got on Amazon, which is the brand name is Soundbot or Powerbot. And again, like I said, I'll put a link in the show notes. This one says that it will do 2.1 amp. You know, at least it'll draw from a 2.1 amp power source. The mono price one, I think, is just a one amp charger. I think the Belkin and Mofi ones in the Apple Store are 0.75 amp. Oh, no, one point. They're more than the mono price one. I got to pull all that detail together. But so those might charge faster than the mono price one would. But but I'll tell you, it was really nice this morning, waking up and just grabbing my phone and not having to worry about unplugging a cable from it. It's pretty cool. And for, you know, eight to ten or nine to ten bucks a piece, having one of these on your desk and one of them on your bedside table. This starts to be, you know, it doesn't break the bank to populate your home with a few of these. And and of course, they can do it in cars, too. If you've got a car mount, you could have a Qi charger right inside that mount. So you just pop the thing in and it's charging while it's there again without cables. So yeah, we've got Koran in the chat room says he's using the Anchor Qi charger Qi being QI. That's the standard that we're using for this. And he says it was only 15 bucks. So yep, it's it's pretty cool. But like you said, I mean, I told you about my adventure buying a non-Apple charger or a Mac book with Mac safe. And it looks like the Apple charger. It charges my computer fine. I don't know how they were able to pull off what they did. The only thing it's missing is an Apple logo on it. But otherwise it's identical and it works fine. But like you, I looked at the reviews and I made sure that it didn't burn anybody's house down. That's the key. Yep. And there were there was everybody was like, yeah, it runs like one person was like, yeah, you know, runs kind of warm. And the thing is, I compared it to my existing one and it did. But it hasn't burned the house down. Right. So I trust it. Right. And then the reviews didn't look. I mean, you can tell fake reviews people like, you know, a good great product, you know, like two word reviews. And it's like, yeah, I know, dude, stay away. Danger. Well, I think even Amazon does this now just to make people happy is that it'll say like authorized buyer. Right. Because what they do is you buy it and then they send you an email saying, hey, can you rate this? And then they say, yes, this person absolutely bought this product from us. And so you can trust them versus anonymous, you know, Joe 123 review saying, yeah, it's great. So I have a few things to say about the iPhone 10. I'm not going to take too long about it, but I know a lot of people want to introduce one. So there's also a question about fast charging. Oh, yeah, yeah, yes. Yes. Good. Thank you. Well, I just want to address that. So the thing is some. So the thing is fast charging basically involves increased current. So the thing is you can send a certain amount of current and a certain amount of voltage to charge something. And the thing is the more current you have times the voltage means more power. The thing is if you do this, the benefit is that your device charges faster, right? The thing is when you're pushing more power, you're going to create more heat. The argument that I've heard and I'm just going to offer this to people. There's a lot of studies going either way on this is that some people believe that creating more heat in a battery shortens the life. That's all I'm going to say. So if you have the option to charge something not fast and you got the time, you may want to prefer to do that instead of fast charging. But if you're in a rush like we all are these days, then fast charge. It may make a difference. I don't think it's going to be like you're going to shorten the life of the battery by like years, but it'll probably shorten the life of the battery somewhat versus normal charging. So that's all I got to say about fast charging. I don't disagree with that. No, I mean, we haven't seen evidence of it being like the worst thing in the world. In fact, we haven't seen evidence of it really being bad at all. That said, what you just said about batteries where heat equals not as good as cold is true. Physics or physics, you know, I mean, I know I'll just toss it in here in my car. I know a lot of people, they say, you know what? The thing that impacts the life of a battery, a car battery is not cold. A lot of people think it's cold. It's heat. And I know this from people that I know that live in states that swelter like Arizona and stuff like that, where they have over a hundred. They're like, you know, what kills batter at car batteries is heat, not cold. Yep. Totally. No, we saw that in Texas all the time. Yeah. All right. So the iPhone 10 mine arrived on Friday. I think UPS dropped it off at about eight thirty at night. They were busy that day. The first thing that I noticed about it is the screen, right? I mean, yes, it's it's it's not edge to edge, but is it using a new technology? Well, it's OLED. That's right. And LED. Yeah. And, you know, maybe what it seems to me is that the screen or the image, the light of the screen is much closer to the surface of the glass than on previous non OLED phones. That may not be the case, but that's what it seems like. And as soon as this thing booted up, especially with a white screen, which is what is the background is for most of the setup process, it says hello, and then, you know, we're storing for my cloud and all that stuff. It looks like a piece of paper on your phone. In fact, I posted that to Facebook and Terry Blanchard, who used to work at Apple. And now he works for Riedel. He ran the mail team actually at Apple. And now he's running the spark team. No, no great surprise over at Riedel. He commented that he went into the Apple store to get his phone set up and asked them to peel the paper off of the phone while they were, you know, getting it set up for him. And they sort of joked and said, no, no, no, that that's your screen, man. You're good. And and the genius or whoever it was that was working with him said, and you know what? That's the third time today. Somebody has asked me to peel the paper off the screen. Everybody seems to think that that's how these phones are. So the screen is remarkable. And and being able to to the whole edge to edge, which I'll call top to bottom thing, save the, you know, the little cut out the notch at the top. I was wondering how I would function with that, right? You know, having to reach my thumb all the way to the bottom of the screen to get to apps and that sort of thing, especially one handed, no issue at all, none whatsoever. The the adjustment to not having a home button took, I would say less than 12 hours and I slept for most of those. It really it the way that they've done this, just the swipe up from the bottom of the screen is such a natural thing that I don't even think about the fact that I don't have a home button anymore, which it really surprises me, especially after, you know, so many years, 10 years of of having a home button. Really impressive. Well, they they didn't, you know, we talk about accessibility, but they actually kind of introduced this or accessibility is that if you wanted to, you could create a virtual home home button on the screen, right? But there's no home button now. You just you just right. There's a gesture is a gesture gesture. Yep. Instead of a button, which I got to say, I found comfort in having the button because it's always like, especially from a UX point of view, something that anybody can figure out. OK, I'm lost. What do I do? What do I do? Right. Right. To me, it's less obvious with the, you know, with the 10 because it's not there. So what do you do when you get lost or confused? So I'm sure they make it very clear to you how to do this when you. They do. There's there's a bar across the bottom of the screen in most cases that that really sort of is your is your app switcher, but it's also sort of the thing you nudge for the home button like your dock below that. Well, the dock isn't there. It's not there when the dock's there. It's not there on the on the springboard screen, but but it is there inside every app. But even on your your home screen, if you're several pages deep and you want to get to the the you know, the first home screen, you used to just hit the home button. Well, if you just do a little nudge up from the bottom, it brings you right back there. It really it really works well. And and Face ID. It's almost like going back to the pre passcode days. I just don't think about unlocking my phone anymore. I just look at it. What's very cool is and it did this by default and actually you folks with touch ID phones can do this, too. If you go in to settings and then on an iPhone 10, it's Face ID. And of course, on on previous iPhones, it's touch ID and passcode. You go into that, you enter your passcode and then you can set. Where is it? Oh, sorry, it's not there. I brought you to the wrong place. Well, I hope you enjoy that that spot. There's some things to see. But if you go to settings, notifications right at the top of notifications, you have an option show previews always when unlocked and never mine previously was always when I upgraded or when I restored my backup to the iPhone 10, it changed it to when unlocked. And what I noticed was I, you know, I'd get a bunch of notifications and it would just say like messages, Twitter, Facebook, whatever. But I couldn't see the contents until I looked at my phone. Of course, my face unlocks the phone and now the contents of my notifications populate, you can do this with touch ID, too. And it just keeps your notifications private until you until you want to see them, which is which is cool. So and the last thing I'll talk about here, John, unless you have any questions or anybody in the chat room does is the size of this. You know, I I lived with a plus size iPhone for two years and found that it really wasn't for me. It was just too much in my pocket and really even too much in my hand. And so I went completely the other direction and went to an SE. And then when the seven came out, I reluctantly went up to the seven because they didn't at the time release an SE model of the seven. So I've been with a seven for the last year, 13 months, whatever it is. The size of this one, it is larger than the seven. I can take the seven and put it inside. The seven in a case can fit inside of this case. But but not by much. It's pretty snug around the edges. It doesn't feel any larger in my pocket, despite the fact that it's the largest screen we've ever had on an iPhone. It really it it it feels just like my seven did. I really don't notice a difference, which is pretty cool. And of course, it has the, you know, the the better camera, the plus the plus size camera for lack of a better term. It's pretty amazing. Any thoughts? I think I'm going to get the eight. Oh, why would you get the eight instead of the 10 right now? Like I think it costs less. Oh, it definitely costs less. But in the grand scheme of things, I mean, you're talking about what? One hundred and fifty, maybe two hundred bucks, right? Face ID makes me jumpy. I like touch ID. What what makes you jumpy about face ID? Eh, I just don't know if I grok it. Well, what I'm going to take a baby step and go to the eight and then let you guys battle with the 10. But the thing is, I got to get my seven to fix. And I think what I'm going to do is get a same day repaired apple because I have a crack screen of Ryzen who I got my phone from. So I have a rise on corporate store. Right. No, we can't take it back with the crack. Right. And I'm like, oh, man, all right. So I got to get it fixed. And from Apple, I think it's one twenty nine flat rate. But I'm going to I'm going to I'm going to try and convince you if you're thinking about the eight, I mean, unless unless the cost delta it really truly matters, in which case, absolutely go with the eight. The fact, I know how much you like to take pictures. The cameras on the 10, especially if you're not going to get an eight plus, the cameras on the 10 blow away what you're going to get with the eight. I mean, in a size is not like like because the other thing is the plus size phone didn't really thrill me. Yeah, I wouldn't I wouldn't recommend the plus size phone for you. No. Yeah. So I scratch my head some more. But yeah, I got a local store. They they they have the phones in stock. Yeah. Yeah. A lot of stores do. You can't you can't get them for a few weeks if if you order online from Apple, but a lot of Apple stores and and even some of the carrier stores have them in stock. And and I know you know this, John, but just so everybody knows, you even if you're on Verizon, you don't have to buy from Verizon. You can buy from the Apple store and they can activate you on Verizon. And it's oh, yeah, fine. Yeah. Now, everybody talks to everybody. I just happen to have in the last I checked their Verizon franchise and corporate. Right. I happen to have a corporate one because I live in a hoity toity. You know, yeah, well, you live in a populated area. Yeah. I want to thank our premium subscribers for this week. The folks that whose contributions came through either one timers or renewals. And so we have on the by annual twenty five dollar every six month plan, Charles K, Kenneth C, Thomas S, Chuck J, Ed I, Mark W, Bobby H, Steven D and Anthony C. Thank you to all of you. And then, you know what? Actually, that's last month. That's last week's thing, John. I'm reading the wrong one. I mean, thanks to all of you, but I know that I'm reading the wrong one because I put these in the new one and we had an issue. There was a Google issue that threw us off last week and then, therefore, threw me off this week. Oh, telling us that our document at adult content. Yeah, our document, appropriate content that we use our document for the show notes. Yeah, it said it had inappropriate content and nobody could see it but me. So that meant that no one got to see the the thing and I wound up using the wrong one anyway, we created a temporary one and then accidentally I used the temporary one this week. So let's try that again on the by annual twenty five dollar plan, Anthony C, Lou R, Wayne B, Scott R, Doug A, David S, Andrew W, Craig R T and Brian M. And on the monthly ten dollar plan, we have Bob P, Jason A, Ward J, Greg S, Michael L, Dave C, David B, Frank A, Abdulla B, Mark R, and Barry F. And then a one time fifty dollar payment from Randall P. Thanks so much to all of you. Anybody on the premium plan, you know, we it really does. It moves the needle for us. It makes a difference. It really, really helps and we really appreciate it. So thank you so much. Very cool. All right. Are we here? You know, I want to go through yeah, well, there's one cool stuff found thing I wanted. I want to talk about, John, and that's something that was released today. It is. Yeah. And I heard these guys. Who's that? Yeah, Amplify, who they make their they make a mesh, a Wi-Fi mesh product. But but they've got something new out today. And it's called the Amplify Teleport. And and it's pretty cool. It's I think you can you can place an order today. I guess a Kickstarter campaign is happening today. You can go online and find out more information about it. What it is is a I'll read their description. Amplify Teleport provides a secure and convenient way to access resources at home, even when you are not utilizing any Wi-Fi hotspot. Teleport is able to create an encrypted connection between you and your devices, expanding your home Wi-Fi coverage wherever you go. So it allows you to securely access your home network from wherever you are. It's a really it's a device that creates a VPN tunnel. But I'm going to call it an enhanced VPN tunnel between wherever you are and your home network, which is a pretty cool thing. And and you can, you know, if you've got smart home devices and things like that, it's I don't know, I'm pretty excited about this kind of thing. I don't usually like to talk about stuff that's just on Kickstarter because you never know if it's really going to happen. But but you know, Amplify is backed by you or Amplify is ubiquity. Ubiquity has been making stuff for a long time. So I think this product's got legs. So anyway, that's that's my addition to cool stuff found for this week, John. Shall we go through everybody else's cool stuff? Founder, is there a question that maybe we should talk about Jeff's VPN question while we're here, since we since we just talked about this cool thing that's going to solve perhaps some problems because it is relevant. It is. All right. So we'll go to Jeff. Sounds good. Oh, what did I do? I changed everything, John. It's not good. Jeff writes, he says, I travel a lot and I want to be able to VPN back to my house so I can access my Synology and Network while I'm away. This seems to be fairly simple, but there are a lot of little gotchas that I've come across. I also don't seem to be able to mount my Synology. My home network is on the 192.168.1.x range. I've set up on my Synology and L2TP VPN. And I forwarded the appropriate ports from my router to my Synology. And he says, I have my VPN set to give IP addresses in the 192.168.2 range because he can't get his Synology to give his local network range. You can tweak your Synology to do that, by the way, but it's it requires some terminal stuff. He says, but my router sets the subnet at 255.255.0.0, which means everything should work. And that's correct. He says, so here's what I can do and what I can't do. I can connect to the VPN when I am externally connected wherever. He says, I've used my iPhone 7 as an access point, so I'm outside my home network and I can connect to the VPN just fine. He says, I can see my Mac Pro shared drive sometimes, although it's extremely slow and often fails to connect. I can even share the clipboard, Hi Sierra, which indicates I'm inside the network that might be happening over Bluetooth, by the way, so I'm not convinced. Yeah, that's my thought. Yeah, I don't think that's happening over the VPN, to be honest. I think it's just because you're in proximity to the machine. He says, but this is where I'm stuck. From my understanding, I should be able to simply mount the Synology using going in the finder, connect to server. And he says typing SMB colon slash slash Synology as I would if I was internal. This doesn't seem to work and I don't know what other things to configure or try so I can troubleshoot from here. I've tried Google to no avail, so I need geek help, please. Yeah, and I'm not surprised at any of this. There are two basically two gotchas when connecting to your local network over a VPN that chain that make it different from connecting locally to your local network. One of those is speed and reliability, right? You are connecting, you know, normally you're connecting over, you know, fast, reliable Wi-Fi or Ethernet connection, right? That's very different from most external connections that are either limited by your home internet connection speed or whatever connection you're on wherever you are, in your case, on your iPhone. That can add some latency. It can add some unreliability, that sort of thing. The second thing is DNS lookups and and Bonjour and really just name translation is the right way to think about it. Bonjour, generally speaking, is not going to work over a VPN. So any device that's advertising itself over Bonjour, not going to be available that way on a VPN to add to that. I think Bonjour typically has difficulty jumping between subnets. Oh, yes and no. But yeah, yeah. It has been my experience is that it's not that it seems to struggle a lot of times. I agree, yeah. Different network segments and that's just how it works. That's just how it works. That's right. Yeah. I mean, the one good thing here is that all right, so one problem is the whole subnet thing. But that we're fine on and that you're getting one. It's not the same subnet. It's a different one. But that that is a good point to bring up is that that's an issue that I ran to as well when I set up is like, all right, well, let's create one that's close, but not in the same subnet because, you know, yeah. So so here's what let's kind of dig into your problems to highlight what what how this relates to sort of what we know now to be the overreaching issues of a VPN and how you might solve that. So starting with speed and reliability, it seems like your comment about extremely slow and often fails to connect is completely related to being on a potentially unreliable and very different type of connection, SMB and even AFP. Those are the two file sharing protocols that are most likely to be used. And they are built to be used on local networks. They're quite chatty protocols. They need a lot of back and forth and doing that over a WAN link of any kind, a wide area network, an internet link. It depends on how reliable that link is. You could certainly it's possible to have a great WAN link. But when you're doing it over cellular or even not, you know, hotel rooms, things like that, probably not going to be the best. Mounting a network drive that way remotely. Well, it's possible and you've done it. It's it expects that your connection is going to be rock solid and relatively fast. Like that's how those protocols are built. So if your connection isn't rock solid or isn't relatively fast, the protocol is just not going to handle it while you're going to get dropouts and things like that. So for that, I never mount a network drive over a VPN because it because of this. What I do is one of two things. I either use a synced folder like something I'd use cloud station or even dropbox or you know, whatever, to just make sure that the files that I want are on both machines and then I'm working locally and then the syncing is happening over the WAN and that's built to do that. The other way I do it and I do this all the time is I screen share over the VPN because that way all it's doing is sending screen updates back and forth. All the file access and everything is happening locally on the Mac that's already inside the network generally connected via Ethernet for me. But it could be Wi-Fi. It doesn't matter. You're going to have a much better time doing things that way. And you know, screen sharing works great and very well. So that's that's kind of how I solve that problem. And then while while we're here, I'll throw in lastly, you said you tried to connect to SMB colon slash slash Synology, which might work locally, isn't working remotely. If you know the IP address of your Synology, try putting that in instead. So instead of SMB colon slash slash Synology, it's SMB colon slash slash 192.168.1.47 or whatever your Synology is. That's that's sort of my thoughts. What do you think, John? The other point is the DNS issues. That is the one thing that I found with VPN clients is that that's where it can all fall apart. Yeah, you know, you get your IP address and everything looks good. And I agree with you is that, you know, especially if you're talking into a TCP IP network, which who isn't these days. Right. It's usually best to address something like that. So, you know, it has some sort of strategy. I mean, like like you, I'm sure, Dave, I have burned it in my head. The IP addresses of my Synologies and my Drobo. So if I do want to come in from outside, but sometimes nothing happens, it says, yep, you're connected to the VPN. You're on John's network. And I'm like, OK, let's go to the site. And it's like, what? Yeah, what? Sometimes I've had to manually go into the the VPN client and actually hard code, although it should be talking to your router and getting the IP addresses from that via DHCP. Sometimes that doesn't happen. Right. And it still aggravates me when it doesn't. So sometimes I'll actually pop into the VPN client and say, OK, eight, eight, eight, eight, eight, or, you know, another well-known DNS and hard code it. And it's like, I wish I didn't have to do this, but I have to. Yeah. Yeah. The Synology running the VPN server on a device inside your home network certainly works. I did it for years, John. You're doing it, you know, Jeff is obviously doing it. Many of us are. If you can run a VPN server on your router, though, that's going to make things like this work a lot smoother. Because if the router is the thing providing DNS for your network and also providing the VPN, those services can talk to each other a little more seamlessly than if it's some other device inside the network and you're passing port forwarding in and out. So I and I've done it both ways, you know, many different times over the last decade plus, I think I've been running a VPN at home for like 15 years, John, which is crazy, but, but, you know, if you can run it from the router, that that is a more optimal setup for this. But there's some reasons sometimes where it's like, well, but that computer or that device is a better VPN server than my router. And in those cases, it's like, well, yeah, maybe. Yeah, well, maybe I'll I'll I'll send an email to Eero. Maybe they'll add it to I have asked my version one. I have actually asked Eero's CEO about that. And I love if they added it. They certainly technically could. But I don't think it's on the roadmap is like that. Well, so when they added Eero Plus and they told me about that and I was at the briefing for that, that, you know, it was like, oh, that's kind of cool. You know, the way they're doing all the, you know, the security stuff and the enhanced parental controls. And so that was my first question to them, John, was. Will you be adding a VPN server? And they kind of looked at me and smiled and said, you know, that's a great that would be a great compliment to all of the other things that we're offering, wouldn't it? So I really do think it's already on their roadmap. In fact, I know it is because it I mean, in terms of it's already on their radar. I don't know if it's on their roadmap, but I know that it's on their radar because you can you can go to each request. So you didn't get an answer, but you got confirmation. I got confirmation that they like the it's something that they they will not not do. Yes. Right. But they haven't committed to when they made correct. Correct. Yeah. Because they know they can do it. They know that there's a segment of the pop. I mean, right now, you know, I put the hole in it for, you know, open VPN. You know, I do the poor mapping and it lets me do that. So great. You know, it lets me use a different VPN, but it'd be so much nicer. And oh, it's great. Yeah. I mean, the setup I said earlier on the show that I'm running Eero here and I absolutely am, I never lie about that stuff. I am running Eero in bridge mode at the moment with my Synology RT 2600 AC as the gateway router that and I have Wi-Fi turned off on that, which I know is sort of a crime because it's a great Wi-Fi device. But, you know, whatever, the Eero takes care of all my Wi-Fi, so I don't need to. And that router, of course, is it's the best standalone router I've ever used, especially in terms of the firmware that comes from the factory. Synologies SRM, you've got a built in VPN server. They call it VPN plus server. I mean, it's awesome. It's better than the VPN server in their distations. It's just, yeah, yeah, yeah, man, it's awesome. Well, they were walking me through it. When I went to their event recently, they walked me through the OS and it's very DSM like, which is distation manager. So this is the SRM, Synology Router Manager. But yeah, it's great. It's really great. So anyway, I digress and as often happens about this long after we've started the show, it's time to end the show, John. In fact, we've kind of let this one go. I'm not going to say long, but we're sort of at old school length. We're at, you know, it's an hour and 24 minutes instead of an hour and 14, which is when I usually try to kind of tug on the reins a little. All I can say is this is the end. When we click the end, that's right. Yeah. So we told you how to email us for sure. 224-888 Geek is the phone number that any of you are welcome to leave messages on. And John Geek is four, three, three, five. But there's also this other phenomenon, which I hear these days, actually, people are kind of not so interested anymore. But I am, you are, and it's Twitter. And there's a few of us on Twitter. I am John Efron. He is Dave Hamilton, the other guy's pilot Pete. The podcast is Mackie Keb and the publication is Mac Observer all on Twitter.com, assuming they're around tomorrow. I think they'll be around tomorrow. Yeah, I want to thank everybody for contributing your questions. Everybody in the chat room, thanks for your help. Thanks for just being here with us while we do this recording. It really it makes a difference even on the shows where you you might not have any comments in the chat room. It's great knowing that you're here and just having kind of that interaction. And I say that paying attention. Yeah, but I don't think there's ever been a show where there hasn't been some sort of, you know, mid-show comment from the chat room. And it's great. I love it. I want to thank Cash Fly, C-A-C-H-E-F-L-Y dot com for all of the bandwidth that gets the show from us to you. They've been partners with us for a long time. And then it changes what we're able to do here. So thanks to you very, very much. Of course, all of our sponsors in the podcast marketplace we've got. As we mentioned in the show, Smile at Smile Software dot com. And we've got Plex at dub dub dub dot Plex dot TV slash Mac Geek. I know that's different. And then Eero at E-E-R-O dot com. Our coupon code MGG gets you that free overnight shipping to the US and Canada. It's good stuff. Other world computing at MacSales dot com. Bearbone Software at Bearbones dot com. Lots of others. Visit MacGeekUp.com slash sponsors to learn about all the deals that we have going even from sponsors that aren't active anymore. If the deals are, we leave them up for you because why wouldn't we? It's good stuff. John, do you have anything to say that isn't the S word, the A word, the G word or the C word? Oh, yeah, you seem to like I got another word. Yeah, you do. But not the bird, though. Some of us know that the bird is the bird bird bird bird bird bird. But the word I have for you. No, I don't have one word. I don't have two words. I have three words for you, Dave and everybody else. And those three words are don't get caught.