 The Mac Observers, Mac Geek-Eb, episode 732 for Monday, October 22nd, 2018. To the Mac Observers, Mac Geek-Eb, the show where we take all your questions, all your tips, all your cool stuff found. We mix them together like a big stew, because it's like getting chilly outside and it's nice to have a good stew going. So we get a good stew going. This week, the stew includes some things about the best way to charge your iPhone, managing spam calls on your iPhone, we've got some fun stuff about deleting stuff on your Mac, but that's all just part of the stew. And we mix it all together so that each and every one of us learns at least five new things every single time we get together. Sponsors for this episode include iMazing, we're at imazing.com slash mgg. You save 30% on all licenses to that stellar iPhone management utility. We'll talk more about that in a moment for now. And hopefully for the duration of the episode here in Durham, New Hampshire, I'm Dave Hamilton. And here in Fairfield, Connecticut, with, actually, I have some Sirloin marinating in the fridge. So maybe I will make some stew. But this is... Nice. ...Jonathan Brown. Yes, I like that. Yes, stew is delicious. The right time of year. It's got to be the right time of year. We made pumpkin chili last night, so that was good. They know what I could do without the potatoes and the vegetables. I think I'm just into the meat. I'm a meat eater. I admit it. You should eat vegetables. I listened to a big, long podcast. It was an episode of the Joe Rogan podcast where these two dietitians were arguing back and forth about, really, they mostly agreed, but they decided to argue about veganism versus the paleo diet. But they both really agreed, if you're going to eat meat, eat with vegetables, and so there you go. That's all. I'll share that with you. That's not usually the kind of advice we share here, though, but you know... Well, I think we could here. And some other advice that we had shared. And well, we just had some advice or an observation in our chat room here, Dave. Where's our chat room? It's at mackegap.com slash stream. And our friend Michael King says he has a T-bone on the grill right now. Nice. Okay. Great. Well, listener David actually has some stuff to share with us. He points out that and this started in iOS 11, I believe. But he says, have you guys noticed that there is a scan documents option now in notes and it will save to a PDF file as well, which is super handy, says I never noticed it before. Yeah. So I think the iOS version of notes since iOS 11, yeah, it's actually really handy. It's being able to scan, you know, right there. It's you just hit the plus button inside a note and you get scan documents and you're good to go. We've got a little link that we'll send, we think we did a how-to on it back in April. Now, has this, because I thought he was talking about notes on Mac OS. No, no, it's in iOS notes. Yep, you just hit scan documents and you're good to go. OK, but when did it start being in? I don't recall it being in notes on Mac OS, but I see it here as well. There's like a little, little menu. And if you click on it, like a little picture menu and it has three options. Photos, take photo and scan documents. Oh, maybe that is what he meant. Haha, look at this, a double tip. I like it and yeah, I think, well, you know what? You're on Mojave, right on that machine, John? And I am on on this particular one. I am on Hi Sierra. And where do you see your notes thing? All right, so if you run notes on Mac OS, yeah, look in the upper right hand corner, you should see if this feature is enabled. Right. A menu that looks like three pictures in a row and then a down arrow. You do not see that. No, that's newly. That's new. Oh my gosh. And I just clicked on it again. So it initially showed one menu, which was titled John's iPod Touch. And it has two options, take photo and scan documents. But then when I clicked on it again, Dave, apparently it found my other devices. Probably do. Yeah, the whole newity or whatever. Yeah, exactly. But it also now shows John Afron's iPhone 8 and John Afron's iPad Air as two other sources because they both have cameras. Wow. OK. So we got like a mega tip here. Because again, it wasn't clear to me what he was talking about. So yeah. So I guess the thing is, is that it's on both Mojave and iOS 12. You're not got this option from notes. Oh, pretty good. Pretty good. Sweet. Thanks. Yeah, I don't know which which notes David was talking about. It wasn't clear from from his note, but hey, there you go. Another tip, actually a double tip from listener Ron, who says find it here. He says something cool happened that I wasn't expecting. I got caught. I received several phishing emails every day in my Comcast account. None on my iCloud account, he says. I saw one that said Spotify charged me one hundred fifty nine dollars for a year subscription and I don't have Spotify. I was freaked out and tired and made the mistake of clicking on the click here button. And lo and behold, Eero Plus blocked me from going to the site. That got my attention. He says, I usually don't get caught when I check the sender's address. Of course, it was as usual weird. He says to me, that makes Eero Plus more than work at not to mention the other stuff like VPN and one password subscriptions and things like that. Good stuff. He says, yeah, for sure. Yeah, Eero Plus is yeah, they're doing good stuff with that. And and this is where it gets really good, John. He says, I'm sure you know, but small cubes mail suite is now out and he is right about that. So we get to use this is the thing that small cubes, the company that makes all the mail plugins they made make what is it? Mail tags, mail act on, mail perspectives and SIGPRO, all of which are now rolled into a product that they call mail suite. And that finally came out last week. So yeah, we can all use that again in in Mojave. So they were bit behind the curve with Mojave, which we'll let it. We'll let it slide this one time. You know what, all's well that ends well. So here we are. We're good. Yep. So thank you for that very much, Ron, for the heads up. You know, Eero Plus, the only thing so so, you know, they threw me and I think you, you know, a subscription just to check it out. But my only it gives you a report that tells you about all the scan events and the and the threats that it prevented. Yeah. The thing is, I personally like a bit more detailed, Dave. Now, that could be a double edged sword. You know what I'm saying? So it's like, oh, well, we block the fishing attempt. It's like, well, I've seen it identify threats that it claimed to protect me from. But I don't know what they are specifically. You can dig in to you can dig in in the app and see some of those details. Right. When you when you go in and look at like the list of of things that it blocked, no. I'll double check. Yeah. Yeah. Since we email a very weak saying, right, you get the summary. Here's what happened. The summary email. But if you go and you have Eero Plus, you launch the app, you go into the upper right corner and you'll see the little stats logo icon. Yeah. Yeah. You hit that. And then if if there have been, you know, threats, you can you can look and dig deeper and and get more details about, you know, which which kinds and all that stuff. Right. All right. So activity threat, OK. And actually, I haven't had any. So I've had 70,000 inspections, but it has not identified threats. So yeah. But I will get more detail. I will agree with you that too much detail can be a problem. In fact, it was a question that I had not queued up for this episode, but I happily will will have the discussion now that now that you brought it up. The you know, Synology added their own threat protection to their routers now with version 1.2 of the Synology SRM, which is their router firmware. And and it works. It's great. But it provides way too much detail when it's just configured default. Like I was getting, you know, push notifications and emails constantly, like like many times an hour about all sorts of things. So I had to go in and like dial it back a little bit and I set it to only email me when there was something like a DOS attack, which should never happen at my home, by the way, a successful administrator privilege gain. And I think that's pretty much it. Otherwise, I let it continue to do all of its blocking and everything, but it does it without me involved. And I don't need to know. And if I want to go look, I can go and dig into the reports and see all that stuff. But man, it was way too much information. So so, you know, yeah, I think I saw in, yeah, in a discussion you were having with someone, a screenshot. Yeah, I was like, oh, my gosh, there's this many individual threats that it identifies. Yeah, that's way too much. There's there's like 10,000 told about all of them. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. No, it's insane. It was crazy. And some of them were like, like not bad. Like I was being notified of things. I forget what the description was, but it was essentially not a threat, like that's what the description of the threat that I was being notified of was that don't worry, this is not a threat. It's like, yeah, OK, I really don't need a push notification for that. Thank you. So OK, yeah. So with Synology, you were able to manage it through through the web interface for there, which is how you manage their routers. Yeah. Yeah. OK. And then Eero may want to open it up just a little bit more. Yeah, they won't. No, they won't. I mean, you don't want like I. Well, I mean, they're really geared for, you know, to make life easy. Like they are definitely if someone's if someone's airing on one side or the other, the side of not providing too much information is is the right one for for this. You don't want your router running your life, right? Like, I mean, you want it running your life, but you don't want to know about it running your life. You just want it to do its thing and stay out of the way. And it and it does, you know, like, I think so. Yeah. Yeah. Yes, you know, I am using a new piece of gear here, John. I am. Yeah, I always. Come on. It's just how we do things here. The. The way I have things set up here in the studio, I have the 27 inch iMac and then immediately to the right of that screen is the mixer that I use, which is a Mackey Onyx mixer. And then to the right of that is a second screen that I use. And I've had a 27 inch screen there for a while. I had a mono priced UHD screen, you know, right right next to it. It's great. But that's a big screen to have that far away. And I'd always sort of wondered, well, wouldn't make a difference if that screen were curved because that way, the far edge would actually be much closer in. And I wouldn't have to sacrifice having the close edge further out. Right. And so I'm checking out this view, Sonic. It's a it's a curved 27 inch screen. It's the VX 27 58. Link will be in the show notes, of course. And it's a 1080p monitor, so it's not a UHD thing. It won't do retina. I believe they have one coming that will. But this thing, it really it. So first of all, the answer is a resounding yes, especially if you're having a monitor sort of off to the side. That curve is fantastic to have on there. You know, they started with curved TVs. I never really bought into that. I never really I tested one and it was like, no, this is stupid. But when your focal point is one human that's pretty close to the screen, the curve starts to make a lot of sense because you're not, you know, you're not looking as far to see those edges. And it really does help. It makes a huge difference here, even though I've I've, you know, quote unquote gone down in resolution because I it's not a UHD screen so it won't do any sort of retinizing or anything. It, you know, having that curve is like, oh, yeah, this is great. It's a it's a nice little screen. It's got speakers in it if you want to use those. And, you know, it's it this one's got a what 144 Hertz refresh rate, I think my Mac will support up to 120 on this screen, which is which is great. So very cool stuff, really smooth motion on it and colors look great. So, you know, all right. So you dig the curve thing because not I think about it. First, when I I'm like, why would you curve it? Because screens have always been, well, for the most part, at least LCD screens or OLED screens have been flat flat. Right. But now I think back, I mean, the analog tubes were curved and our eyeballs are curved. Well, maybe the curve thing makes sense. The analog tube was curved the wrong way. Right. It was convex instead of concave. Yes, I would I would agree with that. Yeah. Yeah. But this is it really makes a difference. I'm kind of blown away. Yeah. Yeah. And I could see we're having this as your main screen would also be a great thing, you know, curved because it's right there. You know, you're not you're not looking further to get to the edges. It's, you know, it's a pretty standard thing. It's pretty good. Like I said, I'm impressed. It's good stuff. So. Very interesting. And it's I think it's it's less than 300 bucks. It's like from ViewSonic 273. And that's what they ask for it. So yeah, it's pretty good. Pretty good. It does. It makes it a little more immersive is really what it does. So yeah, pretty cool. I want to talk about our first sponsor, if that's OK with you, my friend. Fantastic. I'm sweet. As I said at the beginning of the show, our first sponsor is I Amazing. And, man, like if you have an iPhone or an iPad and you want to do anything with that with your Mac, you want I Amazing, right? iTunes does a very, very small amount. Like in the in the range of things that your Mac can do to manage and manipulate data on your iPhone and iPad, your Mac gets to like 8 percent. And then I Amazing picks up and gets you all the way out to 100 percent. It's it's really that good, right? It can and it can and should be the way that you manage your backups for sure. It can also allow you can put apps on there. If if you need to take apps off, like if you're like me and you barf all kinds of apps all over your phone and then you want to clean those up, it's a pain to do it right on the phone. It's nearly impossible to do an iTunes. I Amazing right there makes life easy. Go ahead and do it. You can also put files out onto your phone with this. They've got a drag and drop thing. They call it the drop zone. It just allows you to just drop files right into it. It'll say what app do you want it to go to really, really working well. And because I Amazing is a Mac app, dark mode support from Ohavi is supported as is migrating data over to the new iPhones, the the 10S and the 10S Max. And of course, the 10R is coming out later this week. So very, very cool. You got to check this out. So and they're always adding new features. They're obsessive about this because they use this too. So you got to check it out. Go to I Amazing dot com slash M G G. That gets you a 30 percent discount on all licenses. So go check it out. I Amazing dot com slash M G G. And of course, as always, our thanks to I Amazing for sponsoring this episode. John, you want to take us to David? I'm going to take us to David. So even David's got a problem, I think. OK. And David writes, hi, John and Dave. I have an early 2015 MacBook Pro that I've upgraded to 10.14 Mahavi. My pattern is I mostly charge laptop during the day at work and then put it to sleep and use it intermittently overnight for on the weekends at home. It always has had good battery life. And usually it only loses a little power overnight if I don't use it until Mahavi. That is, I noticed at some point a week or two ago that the battery was heavily depleted in the mornings when I would return to work. At first, I thought I just wasn't remembering using it. But when I paid more attention, I realized it wasn't me using it, it's just running down much quicker. As a single example, I shut it down last night after using it for a while at home. It was a 70 percent charge when I did that today. When I plugged it in at work 10 hours later, it was down to 46 percent. Oh, in the past, it would have lost one to three percent. And yeah, that's been my experience as well. Yeah. As I said, I've upgraded to Mahavi, but nothing else is really different. I run dark mode, but can't see what that would matter in sleep mode. My battery shows 359 cycles and it is in normal condition with a full charge capacity of 55, 23 milliamp hours. OK, that sounds good. For the first night or two after I started paying attention to this trend, the laptop felt warm to the touch when I pulled it out of its carrying case at home while it was sleeping. It doesn't seem to feel that way anymore. And the best I can tell it isn't running down quite as fast as it was a week or so ago. But it isn't acting like it did before the upgrade either. Am I the only one to encounter this problem? Do you have any thoughts on what might be causing it? So I think you may be the only one. If any listeners run into this, let us know. But my guess, Dave, is that Mahavi introduced the change to the sleep behavior of your machine. If you're having power issues, though, the first thing I would do would be to reset the SMC since if you look at the page, which we're going to put in the show notes, it's called how to reset the system management controller. The system management controller is this chip with some configuration in it inside your Mac. But a lot of things that it handles is dealing with power events, whether it be charging or lights or whatever. So that's the first thing I tried, Dave. Yeah, it sounds to me like it's not sleeping. Is I mean that and I've had this and I get to that. OK, yeah, it sounds it. No, that's what I'm saying is like it. I've seen this with my 2011 MacBook Air, where sometimes it will just I'll I'll go to like wake it up and it'll be hot. And, you know, clearly having been running and all of that. And I think resetting the SMC is also helpful with that. So it's a start. OK, I think otherwise. Now, you stole my thunder, but otherwise it sounds like for whatever reason, the machine is no longer sleeping when you think it is, which is what you just said, right? My experience with my MacBook Pro is that sleep mode consumes very little power and you should see your battery go down maybe a few percent, but not half the charge if it's sleeping overnight. Right. And also, do you see that with yours? Have you seen that with yours where you go to wake it up and it's even if it's plugged into power, it's hot and obviously been running and not not sleeping? I had that happen once with one of my prior ones. And here's what was happening. If I recall, what happens is that at that at some point, I had a Bluetooth peripheral in my computer bag. And there's a setting in Bluetooth that says if there's Bluetooth activity, you better wake the machine up. And that's what was happening. It was waking my machine up because I had a Bluetooth peripheral that somehow got jostled and the machine was like, oh, well, you told me if there's Bluetooth activity, I should wake up. So I'm going to wake up and then I'm in a bag and I'm insulated. And now I'm going to get really hot and run the fans and run the battery down. And it's like, dude, stop. Yes, stop. Yeah. So in the in the chat room, we've got a couple of people saying that they've seen the same thing. And Kiwi Graham says he's actually seen amazing, believe it or not, be the culprit for keeping his MacBook Pro awake. He says it gets stuck trying to talk wirelessly to his iPhone. And I can see that, right? Where if you've got some process that says, no, no, no, I need to talk. I have stuff to do, you know, the same sort of general scenario that you're talking about with your Bluetooth device. Then, yeah, your Mac's going to stay awake. I yeah, I this is this is this is not uncommon. You're not alone, David. In terms of the solution, you know, take what you've heard here. Maybe you've got some process that's looking to do some wireless activity. Maybe you've got, you know, maybe the SMC needs to be reset. I haven't found on mine. This happens, you know, once a month, I'll say. And I haven't been able to narrow down what it is. It doesn't happen like I don't do anything differently that I can tell. Obviously, something different has happened. We know that because that's how computers are. But I can't tell what that something different is. And every now and then I'll go pull it out of the bag and it's like, you know, hot to the touch. It's like, man, come on, you're going to blow yourself up if you keep doing this. It's not good. It's bad. It's bad. Now, I had one observation is that in his email, I think it was a typo, but he said when he shut down the machine and then woke it up and then looked at it the next day, went down like half of the the battery capacity. I think he meant sleep. I don't think he meant shut it down. I'm almost certain. Now, the thing is, if you shut your machine down and it loses half its battery overnight, then you have serious battery issues. That's a different. Yeah, that would be a different problem. That's right. Yeah. And now the thing is, there is a place you can go. We're also going to link to this. Say you want to know all of the exchange of repair programs that Apple has in place, Dave, well, you'd go to apple.com slash support slash exchange underscore repair. And they'll tell you all the programs. And actually, there is one for the for a 13 inch MacBook Pro, but not the 15 inch that he has. So a battery draining without the computer being on could be due to the battery malfunctioning or swelling or whatever. Yeah, definitely. Yeah. That's another possibility. And even though you're you're you're not under a repair program, there could be something with your battery. I mean, it's a 2015, but still sure. You never know. Yeah, you never know. Yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure. Yeah. Otherwise, the thing is what you could do is I recently did a little write up called how to tell what's waking or putting your Mac to sleep. The thing is, if it is waking up when it shouldn't. Read this article. And you'll find out what is waking or putting your Mac to sleep. I had a similar issue with my Mac. Many Dave is that for whatever reason, you know, I'd come in the room and I'm like, I put you to sleep. Why are you up? Yeah, right. Yeah. And I did the same thing. I'm like, what will you what woke you up? And the thing is, it's not going to tell me if I ask it or ask, you know, who the S word or maybe it will, I don't know. But in this case, looking at the logs and looking for the reason the machine woke may tell you why your battery is draining. And like, you know, like we discussed, it could be a nearby peripheral. Who knows? Yeah, logs could or should tell you. And that's all I got to say about that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, it used to be, you know, with the lights on the on the old, like, you know, titanium MacBooks or whatever, you could tell when it went to sleep, like the light would go from what fully lit to pulsing and be like, OK, great, it's asleep, because it used to happen with those two, right? You know, it would start doing some activity on its way down and never finish, and it would just stay on. This is this is not a new thing, but it's a frustrating thing. Speaking of what makes me miss and what makes me miss and then moving on. But the only thing that I miss in the in the newer Max Dave is that if either of my machines wake up, I'll know it because I hear the DVD drive make its little wake up sound with the newer machines where you don't have that anymore. How do you know when it wakes up? You know, you really don't unless you look at the logs. Yeah. Yeah. I hope that it's. Yeah, you don't. That was another sign is that sometimes, even now, my my my 2012 machine, I'd hear the rear and I'm like, OK, why'd you do that? Yeah. So speaking of heat and all of those related things, we got a note, a question from Rod. And Rod asks, he says, has anyone done any research into whether chi or lightning charging, so wireless or wired charging, is better for the longevity of an eye device battery? Basically, is one method of charge charging healthier for or less impactful on a battery? So I realize the degradation of eye device batteries take potentially years to show any real significant signs. But I'm always looking for ways to maintain optimal health for my devices. So I thought about this. In fact, we even sort of speculated on it briefly in a previous episode. But, you know, I've noticed how much warmer my iPhone is while charging on chi versus lightning. I mean, it warms up either way. But on chi, you know, it makes a lot of sense that it would be even warmer because so much of that chi energy is lost to heat in the coil and not actually captured by the battery, you know, as as new charge. So the heat also then warms the case, which I would presume warms the battery. Now, I know the batteries have temperature sensors or the iPhones have temperature sensors everywhere, including on the battery. So maybe it slows down its charging. But still, heating a battery continually and routinely doesn't seem to bode well for its longevity. I don't think. But I don't, you know, I don't know. What do you think, John? You're the you're the here. Well, not really. Yeah, I know. Yeah. C E E C, whatever, right. Based on all the things that I've read about batteries, Dave, the one thing about batteries, whether they be the battery in your iPhone or the battery in your car is heat kills. Yeah, OK, right. That's true, the one the battery in your car, for sure. Yeah, that's right. Yeah. And I've had friends tell me this, that one would think that the thing that kills batteries, especially living in the northeast is the cold. And, you know, you get the amperage rating and stuff like that. But the house of mine that live like in Arizona, they're like, no, no, no, no, no, no, heat is much worse than cold, much worse. That is going to kill your battery. So I'm going to go with your speculation that the more heat that you generate. And I and I'm with you that the inductive nature of Chi creates more heat than doing it through a lightning cable. The more heat and also if you do a fast charge, that's probably going to generate more heat as well. So consider how you want to charge your device in order to prolong. Yeah, the battery life. So I would say the more heat generate, the quicker the battery is going to die. But I guess the question, because I would agree with that, you know, in theory, the question that we don't know the answer to is how much quicker? I mean, are we talking one percent, you know, quicker or 50 percent? Like, because there's a big delta there, if it's one percent, I'll take the convenience of Chi all the time, especially at night where I don't care how fast it charges, just put it on the thing and let it go, you know, no problem. But if it's going to, you know, kill it 50 percent faster as opposed to one percent faster. Well, yeah, I might I might feel differently. So if anybody knows, let us know. Feedback at MacKicab.com. Oh, no, no, no, no. Oh, if you don't want your battery to die, you're going to send an email to feedback at MacKicab.com. No, no, no, no, no. If you know whether our batteries are going to die faster and how much faster for Chi versus lightning feedback at MacKicab.com. Yeah, the thing is, you could look here. So I'm just max matching a website that I know exists and might as well. Link to it as well, Dave, is that if you go to apple.com slash batteries slash maximizing dash performance, Apple has a little ditty, which has their advice on how to get the best out of your battery. And what do they say there? Oh, they say a lot of stuff. Temperature, they mentioned temperature. OK, avoid extreme temperatures. Remove certain cases during charging, stored half charged when you store long term. And a few more things, optimize your settings. And there's a lot of stuff here. So there's nothing on this page about Chi or wireless. But yeah, so now. You'd have to wonder if the Chi consortium would have some propaganda about this. Well, that's the thing is I'd rather hear not from the Chi consortium. Yeah, exactly. Our stuff's great. Yeah, yeah, don't worry, our stuff's great. You can also call us, you know, and we told you how to email us. But 224-888 Geek is the number that you can call us at, John. And John Geek is. Four, three, three, five. Now, Brett has a question about calling because Brett says I get too many phone calls on my iPhone from local numbers that are robocalls. I was getting them on my home phone, but I have Uma and I uploaded all my contacts to my Uma address book and set the preferences to call that any call from someone not in my address but goes to voicemail. It says it has made a huge difference. I'm trying to achieve something similar for the iPhone. He says I have I have posited a few options. Number one, set do not disturb to allow all contacts to ring my iPhone. I do this now because I don't use do not disturb for anything else. However, this lets calls through but silences, texts and notifications. So not optimal option to set each contact to a ringtone instead of default, then set the default ringtone to silent. OK, he says this will require to me to go through every contact and set a ringtone and any new contacts would need to also set ringtones would be great if Apple provided an easy solution like default ringtones for contacts and separate settings for non contacts. I'm willing to go through all my contacts to set a ringtone if I have to. So here's the thing, Apple doesn't provide this, but your carrier might have a ringtone. AT&T has an app that you can download called Call Protect, and we'll put a link to that in the show notes. It's available for free that gets you auto blocking. And then if you choose two ninety nine a month, signs you up for Call Protect Plus that adds some customization features and reverse caller ID. I am an AT&T customer. I use the free version and it's it's like blissful. It's great. In fact, just earlier today while I was prepping this show, I got a call and I look on my phone and it says telemarketer and boom, that's it. It like just deals with it and off it goes and it will block. Like there's calls that don't even make it to my phone because, you know, they're on the list that AT&T has, but you've got to opt into this. So that's AT&T's Call Protect. Verizon has an app called Caller Name ID also available to download for free. But there is no free use of it other than a 10 day trial. It costs two ninety nine a month for any of the features. But that two ninety nine a month does get you the reverse caller ID that you also get with AT&T if you pay them. But you can't do this for free. You can't get the call blocking for free if if you're on Verizon, at least not from what I could tell. And I tried it and I wasn't impressed. Really, I did the trial and it didn't tell me anything beyond. Well, it's was it doing the blocking? Or you don't get enough of those calls to know. No. OK, I get. I mean, I get like many I get calls and if it's not in my address book, then it shows maybe the locale that, you know, they. Well, that's what I'm saying. If you have like the AT&T call protect app has a database of telemarketer numbers and then other numbers too, and it will classify them right on my phone for me and and and dispatch them. So I don't like I have it set to ring once for a telemarketer and I can look and be like, yep, OK, good, cool, off you go. And then T-Mobile also offers a free solution just like AT&T. T-Mobile's there's no app required. You just log in on their website. It's a T-Mobile resources call protection. I get it's T-Mobile call protection. Yeah. And and and that from what people say works really well. Like AT&T, they offer an upcharge to add reverse caller ID. And theirs is actually a little more expensive. It's four dollars a month, not or not two ninety nine. So we'll put links to those. So if you have AT&T Verizon or T-Mobile, you can get rid of this. Most likely in a way that will work for you, unfortunately, with Verizon, you got to pay. There's also NoMoRobo, which is I think it's a dollar ninety nine a month after a free trial and that you can set up to use on your phone and also on your. You can use it on your home phone, too. It's not just for cell phones. So you've used NoMoRobo, right, John? Um, I think I did the trial and also it did it. My methodology, Dave, is that if it's a number and it's coming from a place, I mean, so I still get the things that have my first six digits of my phone number and it's coming from there. And the thing is, I know that's bogus because none of my friends have that that extension. It's to get you to think, oh, well, you know, they have the same first six digits, so it must be somebody I know. And no. And then I get some, you know, Orlando or whatever. And, you know, it's clearly forged. And I just let my iPhone pick it up. It'll transcribe the voicemail if they decide to leave one. And it's usually one of either, hooray, we're going to give you zero percent on all your credit cards. Just give them just give us the numbers or the IRS is going to come and bust me. And I forget the other one, but sure. Sure. So you don't mind. You don't mind these calls getting through this is essentially what you're saying. And if you're OK with that, I'll just say the client. I'll just, you know, if it, you know, right, make my Mac. Yes. So you're OK, self self managing. Yeah. That is the low tech way that I manage it. That's right. Yeah. But I don't know who you are. I don't answer. Yeah. Yeah. No, I found because I'm some I'm quite the opposite. If if my phone rings, I answer it. I I learned a long time ago that, you know, opportunity knocks. And if you pick up the phone, sometimes you're right there. Oh, sure. But it is having my phone aware of a database of telemarketers and having it show me, oh, no, this is not just some random call from someone whose number you don't know, but might actually be somebody that you want to talk to as opposed to, oh, no, if you don't want to take a survey, don't answer this call. Like, yeah, OK, that's it's been super handy. So and especially for free with AT&T, it's easy, you know, that's a no finer. I mean, I do appreciate Brett's attempt to try to come up with the iOS based technological solution. But I think all the things that you threw out of one of them. Yeah, hopefully one of them. Yeah, terrible. Like, I just wish they would have designed the system so it wouldn't be so easy to spoof a phone number. Well, that's, you know, you know what I'm saying? Yeah. But I mean, that like that's how every system is, right? We would go back in time and and change the way SMTP worked if we thought about spam. And I mean, you know, it's just how it goes. Hey, you you started playing around last week. You told us about your new thermostats that were coming. You were getting some smart thermostats that were not Wi-Fi thermostats, but they were Z wave thermostats. Did they did those make it? Have you started playing with those yet? They made it come. So yeah, it was a very I'm up and running, man. So I got smart thermostats at a fraction of the price I would have to pay for a single nest. So yeah. So how many of these how many of these things did you get and what did you pay for them? So I have, yeah, it's an interesting question. So the thing is, I got three of them because I have three zones in my in my heating system. So I have baseboard. It's a it's a, you know, basically a gas furnace that heats water and then it runs through the house and there are fins and it radiates and so you bought three of these things. How how much did you pay for each one? You know, that's the weird part is that the availability of these Dave, at least through Amazon, was very weird in that I paid three different prices from three different sources. I think the least expensive one was like 40 bucks and the most expensive one was like 50 bucks. OK. Oh, so quite a bit less than a Wi-Fi thermostat. And in yours, we talked about the C wire last time and you don't have the C wire in your in your wiring, which is the wire that would provide power. You just have the red and white wires. And but these things, because they're low, Bluetooth, low energy, they can run on batteries. There's a wave. Sorry. That's not Bluetooth, low energy. It's low energy. It's not Bluetooth, my apologies. Thank you. Z-Wave. So Z-Wave is both hardware standard for radio and also, I think, a protocol for how to control things. Right. Right. So that's technology these use. And they they they have four double A batteries and they claim that the batteries last two years. My prior thermostats, which were programmable honeywells, also had battery power. Because you don't have that wire. We'll see if they last that long. So I get some of these things. This is a this sound. Now, OK, so tell me you're able to like how do you could. So here's. So here's my environment. Yeah. So the thing is my environment. So there are a number of environments for smart home control. One of them, of course, is Apple's own home kit, which I have nothing that speaks it. And I'm not sad about that. I'm sad for Apple because I think they botched it in my humble opinion. The thing is, Z-Wave is a standard to talk to smart home devices. So you need a few pieces. Now, the thing is, the first piece that I got they've actually was when I bought one of these starter kits and it had two. GE light bulbs, sure. And a link, what they called a link hub, which was only meant to talk to the light bulbs. I'm like, oh, well, that's a cool way for me to get into this. And, you know, it integrated with the A word because they have a skill for that. And it was cool. I mean, you've been in my place. You could say lights on like it's like the smart things hub or the Wink hub or whatever. Right. The thing is, this hub was only meant to talk to light bulbs. And then one day it died. The light was flashing and it wouldn't control things. I'm like, OK. And so I looked on the market and now they make a big boy version of it called the Wink hub, too. OK, so you got a Wink hub that that is sort of universally speaks Z-Wave and it talks to your old bulbs. And now we'll talk to these new thermostats. So it speaks Z-Wave, it speaks ZigBee, it speaks what you mentioned, which is Bluetooth LE, and it speaks another kitty, I think. So it speaks like four protocols. So this is for most of you, if you want to. It's like the C3PO of hubs. It's a smart home hub in that it supports all the protocols. And then you have an iOS app that you use to control it. Now you can do just that. But as I mentioned, you can also integrate it with an A word skill. And they have a plug-in. So so I can control it either through the app or through, you know, who? Yeah. OK, so the app is the app is an app that was built for your thermostats or is it through the Wink app? It's the Wink app. OK, so you're like, OK, add a thermostat and then they have a number of options, some are explicit brand names. And then they're like, hey, just add a generic Z-Wave thermostat. OK, so once you've developed once you've got it added, how do you like what can you can obviously set the temperature? I am assuming you can schedule things. Can you pull it for data to? Exactly. Yes. So you can do all of those things. So Z-Wave supports all that. So I can see the temperature at each of the thermostats. I can set the temperature or as you assumed here, the Wink app lets you schedule events. Sure. So on its own, the only thing you can do with the thermostat, if you don't have Z-Wave or have it tied in, is you can just set the temperature up and down manually from the front panel. So it's not a learning thermostat, right? Which is what the nest and the ecobee will be if you want them to be. This is just programmable through. The Wink app and Z-Wave is the protocol that they use to talk to them. And you could probably if being that it's programmable through Wink, I'm guessing Wink links with both Ift, right? And why can't I think of the name of the other thing that I use to stringify, right? So I don't know if it does. But the thing is, it talks to. So the Wink app knows about my light bulbs and it knows about my thermostat. And it doesn't work with Ift. I'm certain that it may. I just haven't. I just haven't looked into it. Yeah, OK, OK, I think. So right now, the Wink app is aware of my light bulbs, my thermostats and also the two cameras, both the ring and the drop cam, which is now the Nest cam. So so it's kind of so Wink is my. That's the world that I live in. Right. Oh, I see what you're saying. Well, yeah, but the cool and it what there is Stringify does have a Wink skill in it. So you can do all that. OK. Yeah, which is great, right? Because now I think I have TTT may as well. But I would assume. Yeah, but what that means is you could have it notify you when the temperature gets too low, right? You know, built into the Wink app. Actually, one of the parts of what I assume is a standard Z way profile is that they have a thing saying, hey, would you like temperature alerts? And I think the default is like if it gets above 80 or below 40. OK, we're going to give you a notification. Well, but you could you could use that. You could use if or Stringify to have it turn your lights on. And if you had colored lights, you could have it turn your lights red if there's a problem, right? So you don't have to have your phone right there. Like, you know, you've got a problem. Oh, sure. And another thing about the Wink app is that they have built into it. And actually, I should probably try it. So I could either schedule my lights to kind of turn on and off to make it appear that or at least the four I have up to it. But they also have a feature that kind of simulates that within the Wink app, I forget what it's called exactly. We can say, hey, enable this feature that kind of randomly turns lights on and off. So it looks like somebody's in the smart. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Cool. That's great, man. That's it. So for people that, you know, that know how to program their house for heat, this is a great little option. If you want to turn that, you know, from from just being a programmable thermostat that's isolated, you could, you know, you can, like you said, you can create zones and stuff with them. So if your schedule says, you know, turn the heat down at eight a.m. when I leave for work, you know, turn it down to 60. And then at five p.m. when I'm going to be home, turn it back up to 66 or whatever, and you're not feeling well at work. And you say, oh, you know, let's go home. I'm going to I'm going to go home. You can, you know, trigger it with the app and say, hey, I'm heading home, turn on the heat. And then way it's on when you get there. That's pretty good. I like pretty much. And and even the ones that I had before, which was just a basic Honeywell one, I would have four events. One would be. The OK, let's turn up the heat because it's it's time to wake up. Then let's turn off the heat because maybe you're going to go out go out either, you know, to your nine to five or go out and do errands and stuff like that. And then another one, at least the way I have it set up is, oh, OK, well, you're home now for the evening. Well, we're going to turn the heat back on. And then, oh, it's late at night. Well, we're going to turn the heat down again and manually either voice control or through the, you know, the panel on the thermostat change that. So that's pretty good. And I'm hoping to save, you know, it's not so much because, as you know, I had a frozen pipe event and I'm not going to go into any more detail. But the thing is at that point in time, when I was traveling, I didn't have a way to see the temperature of things in my house. Right. Now I do. Yeah. I have three of them and set up to alert me. If you find if you find links for these things, because right now you can't buy them. I have the link that you shared last week and this thing doesn't exist on Amazon anymore. So what? Really? I mean, it's there. It's just you can't buy it. So, yeah. The stock on it was very weird. But the thing is there are other. So if you find them, put them in the. Yeah, put them here in the show notes. That's great. Very cool. There's a Z way. I think there's a Z wave marketplace and they that's actually how I learned about this is that, you know, I follow them on Twitter and they were like, hey, check, you know, check out our marketplace and see if there's something that. That's great availability of it is kind of wacky, Dave. I mean, it's a company you never heard of. Go control, I think, which is part of a larger company. And, yeah, I had to buy it from three different places because you folks, if you folks know of any other Z wave thermostats that are in this similar range, you know, that $40 to $60 price range, come and join us at the Mackie cab forums at Mackie cab.com slash forums and let us know, like, you know, drop a drop a note in there. We'd love to love to hear about it. This is great. Very, very cool. And and also solves the problem for a lot of people that don't have C wires and can't use like an eco be or something. You know, you can you can do something like this because the power is the power requirement is much less because the Z wave bridge is doing its job. That's pretty good. You know, that weirds me out to C wire is that it's 24 volts AC. Is that right? I believe that's correct. Yeah. Yeah, that's right. I would you use it. I don't get it. That's right. Yeah. Yes. Yes. Yes. Another question from from Rod, I think it's the same Rod. In fact, he says, I have zero knowledge when it comes to SIM card technology with that said, do you have any knowledge as to whether there's a difference between regular SIM and E-SIM? Could there be a signal slash reception issue or performance functionality difference using one over the other? Assuming performance has nothing to do with the SIM technology, why even bother having physical SIM cards anymore? So as I understand it, I've used E-SIM with with the iPad. Obviously, I don't yet have an iPhone, although I'll have a 10 R this week that I'm going to check out. I've used it, you know, with the iPad and it reception wise, it's it's no different. I mean, it's using the same antennas. It's, you know, it's just how is it processing this connection to the, you know, whatever carrier. The SIM is if you will, your personality of your device. And with the physical one, you can pop it out and put it in another device and assume that it'll work in a similar fashion if it's not locked, right? That's right. Yeah. Well, and that so that's the that answers the second part of the question. And and that's not necessarily it's there's pros and cons to this, right, where if you have a SIM, you can just move it from device to device and things work fine. Again, as long as the devices are unlocked and able to use that SIM with an E and also it works with any carrier that can provide you a SIM with an E SIM, two things are true. Number one, you can't move it from device to device. And number two, the E SIM is only supported by a limited number of carriers. Now, it might be supported by all the carriers that you care about. So it might not matter. But if you're in some country where they don't have an E SIM carrier like China and you just have to get a physical SIM, well, that's what you have to get is that physical SIM and you put it in and you're and you're good to go. But the E SIM is super handy if you land in, you know, get off a plane in some country where where they do support the E SIM, you can sign up for a phone plan on your phone, right? You don't have to go and procure a SIM just to be able to to do that. And, you know, when you're playing lands at midnight, that can actually be a really handy thing. So that's the I think I think that in a nutshell that hopefully answers the question. If anybody else has questions, you know, we already told you how to find us. So yeah, it's. Yeah, I think Verizon was doing kind of a hybrid version of this, because the thing is that. One time when I upgraded my phone, I had to physically move the SIM from one to the other. Now part of it could be because they're doing CDMA and all that stuff. But the last couple of times that I upgraded my phone, Dave, I didn't have to touch anything in that I think what happened is it transferred the personality from the old SIM to the new SIM. So it was kind of a hybrid E SIM, you see what I'm saying? And that I didn't have to move it. Well, that's because Verizon doesn't use a SIM, really. I mean, they have the fake SIM kind of thing. But CDMA does not. I don't know. I got a SIM. That's what I'm saying. You have a SIM, but that SIM is not really for your your phone service. It's to get the phone happy to then connect to the CDMA network. Yeah, I don't know about that. No, no, I do that variety. If I take it and I put it on my iPad, I'll get I'll get data service. So it's it's with Verizon. Yeah. Really? Telling you, man. Because for years, there were no SIMs for Verizon phones. Like when you got an iPhone, it was like there was no SIM tray. There was nothing. Yeah. No, I get it. No, now they have it. And if I put another device, it'll really. Huh. Yeah. I mean, yeah, Verizon is the. Yeah, all these CDMA guys, I think Sprint is another one. And yeah, who's a PCS and then a few others. But the CDMA slash GSM, because it does both. The phone is capable of doing both. Yes, that's right. Well, as far as I know, if I traveled in an area where there's only GSM, as far as I know, my phone would work like if I went to Europe. And I think I'd have to throw some more money at Verizon to enable that. OK, so here's the deal. The CDMA does not use SIM cards. The SIM cards are there for Sprint and Verizon's LTE networks because the LTE standard uses SIM cards. So there you go. There you go. That. So, yeah, that's that's that's where that comes from. That's interesting. That's interesting. And Paul Frans in the chat room is saying he says, I thought that changed with LTE and that's exactly right. Yep. It's the LTE requires SIM or LTE uses SIM. That's why we have those now. So there and that's why you were able to get on. You weren't you wouldn't have been able to get your iPad on a CDMA network that way, but you would have been able to get it on the LTE network that way. Yeah, interesting. Yeah. All right. That explains it. Cool. Fun. I love this stuff. It's great. I want to thank all of our premium contributors for the last week here. As many of you know, you know, our show is supported in a variety of ways. We have our sponsors, of course. We have all of you listening, all of you contributing, asking questions, sharing tips, hugely valuable. Like it's that's what that's our content here. Right. I mean, I know we funnel it together and we answer your questions when we can and all that stuff. But without you catalyzing all of that, this show is very, very different. And certainly doesn't exist in this way. So thank you. And then we have our premium program, which is which really created at your request. There were many of you that wanted to offer direct support to the show. And so that's that's what this is. So if you visit MacGeekyeb.com, premium, you can see how it all works and and get signed up if you care to, if you are able. But I do want to take a minute and thank all of our premium subscribers, whose contributions came in this week on the biannual twenty five dollars every six months plan. We have George C. Willie M. Gary B. Jed E. Scott S. Steve R. Laura S. Scott C. Andrew G. Deborah F. Linden N. All at twenty five and then I Edward I. Maybe Ed I at at fifty dollars every six months. So thank you to all of you. And then on our monthly ten dollar plan in the last week, we had Michael P. Bob L. Jeff P. John V. John D. Kaz M. Ken L. Clive S. Dave G. Gary B. And Jeff F. So thanks to all of you. Really, I know we say it every time we do this, but it really does mean a lot. So very cool. You want to you want to take us to Mark, John? I'm going to take us to Mark because Mark, you solved my problem, dude. Sweet. We love it when it works that way. Or at least this. My solving his problem. Solved my problem, Dave. So as Mark says, he says, hey, guys, after upgrading to ten dot fourteen, Bobby, I ended up with a folder called incompatible software that contains two files. I want to toss them, put them in the trash and try to empty, but get these notifications. Libgoodinprint.2.0.3.dylib can't be modified or deleted because it's required by Mac OS. And now sneak peek here. I had the exact same problem with that exact same library predating this. But he also had another one. Q master D can't be modified or deleted because it's required by Mac OS. First off, it's all lies, but let's continue. The operation can't be completed because the item incompatible software is in use. So anyways, the story here is that he had files he couldn't delete. And the thing is, especially if you're an administrator on your machine, not being able to delete a file. What? Come on, I'm running this operation. You're not going to allow me to delete that. You know what I'm saying? I do. And the thing is, Dave, I've had we discussed this in a pre-show chat at one point. So I've had this Libgoodinprint.2.0.3.dylib file living on my computer for years, and I was never able to delete it because I did, for the most part, this Mac Mini. I've done upgrade and not a Nuke and Prey for installs. Something just went horribly wrong because I tried everything, Dave. I even went into. So the thing is I would try what most somewhat technical users like those that are listening is maybe go into recovery and go to the terminal and try to delete it from there. Because the thing is, when you're in recovery, it's not in use by that Mac OS, but it's in you're booting like a baby version of Mac OS when you're in recovery. And the Mac OS on your boot drive is a totally separate world. Right. You're booting a separate version of Mac OS. Yeah. That's right. It's on the same drive, but it's not the same Mac OS because I can understand the concern with system files that are being in use. You don't want to delete them while you're using the computer because you're going to destroy everything. But I had the exact same problem, Dave, in that same folder. And I was trying everything. The thing is this time, Dave, when I tried it and I'm suspecting it was a change, either APFS or Mojave, is that I did the same thing that I'm almost certain I tried in the past is that I booted in recovery, went to the terminal, navigated. Now, here's the thing. You may have to mount the drive in question, especially if it's a file vault thing. So that's another step is that you've got to mount the drive through this utility. Then when you go in the terminal, you say cd slash volumes slash and start typing the name of your boot volume and hit tab and that should complete it and then go to wherever that stupid file lives. And this time, Dave, when I did it and I said RM space and the gluten print thing, it deleted it. Okay, so you just had to boot from a different drive is the net of all of that. The thing is I'm almost certain. What I'm saying is I'm almost certain that I tried this in the past on a prior OS and it did not work. What I thought it should have is it said, I think when I tried to do an RM, which is remove in Unix space and the file, it said permission denied. I'm like, dude, what do you mean? I don't understand. Something subtle happened either because I migrated to APFS or I'm on Mojave where finally, I was able to get rid of this cursed file that I could never delete before. Yeah, I've had that where I had to boot from something else to get a file to go away because either because the OS had some permissions wrong or I seem to remember it being that it would tag the file as in use or something. It's like, no, it's not. If it is in use, it shouldn't be. And so the only way to get it to do it was, yeah, and recovery is great because it's a bootable partition right there, which is awesome. So we like that. That's good. So work. I mean, the thing isn't the grand scheme of things. I mean, it was a tiny little file, Dave. It was just, I'll control my language, but no, it was just bug. It's like, look, I'm running the operation here. I don't want this file here anymore. Let me delete it. And I've been told very recently I couldn't get rid of it. So it was taking up an infinitesimal amount of space, but it was just the fact that it wouldn't let me do what I wanted. Yeah, no, that's a thing, man, for sure. For sure. So I guess the overall tip here is that booting into recovery or another bootable drive to change things on a drive that's giving you permission and other permission-denied things is a good strategy. So have another bootable. Either have recovery, which you should have if you're running a recent version of. Yeah, right. Right. Or have a bootable clone that you can use. Cool. Yeah, for sure. Yeah, that's great, man. Yep. Or a Linux boot drive. I've got some stuff. We'll be right. Although, as we said when we talked about that, if your drive is encrypted or running APFS, that starts to get a little more interesting trying to mount it with Linux. You're way better off with the recovery partition for that sort of thing. Okay, let's go. You know what? I have two questions that would be and actually will be answered most likely in two different podcasts that I do. We'll go to the first one, but they're very relevant for what we do here. They just happen to cross the streams, if you will. So we will go to Louie first. And Louie's would also fit with my small business show that I do with Shannon Jean every week. He was the person while we did deals on the web together years ago. And then Shannon and I did or Shannon alone did Tech Restore and Mac Rescue and all that stuff. But we do the small business show every week, which is a total blast. And if you're into that, you know, businessshow.co. So with that in mind, we will go to Louie's question, which is I have a business related. I want to start selling pictures online. And I read that it would appear more serious if I had my own domain name. My plan is as follows. I'll register a domain. I'll sign up on SmugMug and create my SmugMug website, which is a place to manage pictures. Great place to do that. And he says then I'll read and I'll get, you know, when you do that on SmugMug and you set up a thing to sell your own pictures, you get essentially mydomain.smugmug.com. And he says then I would redirect all the traffic from www.mydomain.com to mydomain.smugmug.com. And I would set up email using, you know, like user at mydomain.com. Great, sounds like perfect. He says my questions are, where do you suggest I register a domain? Should I settle for anything else than a .com domain? How easy is it to redirect? How do I set up email? And he says I already use a free account with noip.com. Can I do this with their paid services or should I look elsewhere? So, you know, for domains, there are lots of places to register. I've been using GoDaddy for a long time. I know some people hate GoDaddy. That's fine. I don't hate them. So I continue to use them for a couple of reasons. But there are, like Namecheap is another one that I've used. I have a separate business with some people. And one of the guys hates GoDaddy, so we use Namecheap, which is fine. The thing that I like about GoDaddy is that they make this redirecting from one domain to another very easy. Most of them do. They also usually include email forwarding with the domain. So you can forward up to 100 email addresses, which is super easy. But again, others will do that too. Is .com mandatory? You know, it depends on your audience, right? If I told all you people that I have a new business and it's, you know, davesbusiness.co, right? Or davesbusiness.net, or davesbusiness.tv, I don't think anybody listening to this show would have any trouble understanding that I did not say davesbusiness.com, right? Any of those things would be fine. You'd be okay with it. There are some people though that would listen to everything I said and say, oh, yeah, it's davesbusiness.com, right? Because it's just a thing. And the less technically savvy someone is, the more they're going to think they heard .com, because they think maybe that's the only thing that's out there. So depending on who you're marketing to, .com may or may not be important. That's sort of my, you know, but you have any thoughts on that, John? I don't know how much flexibility, I mean, you know, there's .org, there's .info. I mean, I'm just thinking off the top of my head, you're like our local transportation is mta.info. Why info? I don't know. Right, I guess that's true. I'm just showing stuff, it's a commercial entity. I mean, you can buy stuff on the site, but it's .info instead of .com. Well, you can sell things on any, I mean, the type of domain it is doesn't matter. It's just what are people going to remember? I mean, to me, as long as you get a registrar that, you know, maintains the record properly, I don't know if it, and I know they've expanded, I haven't really looked into this, but I don't know if you can choose anything as the last three or four characters of your domain name, but there's all these top domains. Yeah, there's a bunch of new ones. Photo? I don't know. I don't know if there's a .photo domain. That's a good question. Yeah, yeah. I mean, if you're going to sell photos, I would think, Hey, maybe that that's a good thing to consider. I don't know if they name cheap has .photo domains. So there you go. Squarespace has some name cheap. I'm assuming GoDaddy does. You know, yep. There you go. Sure. Nice. So if your only intent is to sell photos, then dude, I get a .photo domain. That is a fantastic idea. Yeah, I like it. Very good, man. That's perfect. I'll put a link to that in the show notes. There you go. Perfect. Yeah. 25 bucks a year. So 25, 80 or whatever it is. Yeah. Yeah, there you go. Really? That's it? That's it. Yeah, that's pretty good, man. Good thinking. Yeah. So there you go, Louis. Hopefully that helps. Hopefully, hopefully it helps. Pretty good. I mean, the other, you know, I was just thinking in my head here. I know a few folks and actually there's a thing called Photo Plus Expo happening on the East Coast here this week. I'm going to be going to it at least one day. I got my confirmation that they still recognize me as a tech journalist. Sure. But this is a show on the East Coast and they have another places for photographers. But I know a few professional photographers and maybe there's something you could talk about on your show, Dave. Maybe we should get one of my friends and volunteer is making money selling photos is tough. Look, making money doing anything is tough. Really? But photo is the problem. I don't, you know, I'm not convinced that there's any business that's just, you know, intrinsically difficult. I really think as long as you understand your market and you're willing to put in the work and you're willing to deliver a product that people want to buy, then, you know, I mean, it's business, right? Nope. I don't know that any business is easy. The thing is there are so many people out there, especially with the iPhone. There are so many people that can take photographs and kind of like in Ratatouille where the chef said, everybody is a chef. The thing is everybody is a photographer. The thing is not everybody is necessarily a good photographer. Well, you've got a really crowded space and the thing is how do you get exposure in order to make money by taking pictures? Well, I do, but I also, I mean, this is, you're right. This would be a great topic for the small business show. I'll briefly say maybe if you're going to be in the business of selling photos, general consumers are not your best customers, right? Maybe you're better off targeting corporations, targeting people that actually see the value in, you know, automatically see the value in what it is you're selling. Maybe you sell through someone like Shutterstock or, you know, any one of those aggregator sites. Right. To me, that's kind of the thread here is that, all right, so paying for a domain name, that's easy, but finding a service, so smug bug, and actually I have friends that abuse smug bug. Okay, the thing is they get a cut, you get a cut. The thing is there are a lot of services that some would feel, especially photographers, that kind of exploit the photographers and that they take too much. So do you go on your own? Yeah, you go on your own. Yeah, start marketing to direct to companies. I mean, it's like any business. If you want a middleman to do the job for you, then you're going to pay what that, what the market says that's worth, right, or you're not, or you choose not to. It's, again, it's how much work do you want. Anyway, if you want more of that stuff, small business show at businessshow.co. Now, moving on to Marcus, staying in the Mackie Gab realm, although I will say, as I said before, this one sort of hits, it hits two things. It hits what we talk about here, but also what we talk about on my gig gab podcast for working musicians. And Marcus asks, I'll find it. Oh, it was right there. He says, I'm asking for a recommendation for a good app to slow down music on iOS. My seven-year-old daughter is learning cello, and I'm looking for a good slow downer app to export pieces that she needs to learn. Something that can handle Apple Music or Spotify would be good. Also, pay once option would be good so that she can use it on all the family devices through family sharing. Her teacher uses the amazing slow downer app. I have used any tune free and the Tempo slow mo app. They're all about the same price for pro versions. I'm wondering which is best for the cost. I know Dave has mentioned capo, but that is subscription based. And I stick with capo. It's freaking amazing. Capo Touch is by far my favorite for this. Not only can it slow things down, but it shows you the chords. It finds the time signatures. I used it on something the other day. We were talking actually on gig gab about songs that start not in an obvious place in the beat or whatever. And capo still figured it out. Like the Beatles drive my car, that intro. That thing starts on an upbeat. It totally figured it out. And then you can slow things down and go through and see where the beats are and everything. Capo is by far the one that I would recommend for this. I've used them all. And for someone trying to learn an instrument, capo makes it really easy to do it. They've got guitar fingerings. They've got piano chord, like fingerings where they'll show you where to put your hands on the piano. It's really cool. So anyway, that capo is it. I can't imagine using anything else for that. So capo touch, I guess, is the one for the iPhone. We'll put a link in the show notes to that. But yeah, I don't have anything other than that. That's that's my thing. I don't mean to assume anything, John, but I will offer an assumption that you've never tested any of these types of things. Is that right? Yeah, I shouldn't. I don't think psychoactive substances should probably no discussion. No, no, no, no, no. That could be one way to make things speed up or slow down, right? It might change your perception of time. And we could get into a whole discussion about the fact that time is not nearly as constant as our feeble human brains might might want it to think it is. It's going to be the physics geek gap here. Well, you know, there you go. So you say time is relative? Definitely. There was this guy that talked about that. What was his name? I forget. Yeah. So yeah, no, time is we just are feeble human brains. We need to perceive it as this linear construct. It's fine, but it's not actually how it is. I don't think but I can't I can't tell you what it is because I have I suffer from the same feeble human brain limitations that the rest of us do. So there you go. Hey, a couple of weeks ago, we talked about chapters and also that we may do away with the AAC version of this show. And we got a note from actually we got notes. I should say from a few of you, Andrews sort of summed it up where he says you briefly mentioned that you were thinking of getting rid of the enhanced AAC chapters. Please keep them. There are many podcast players out there that still support AAC. I've been using downcast for many years and it works great with your AAC chapters. I can easily go to certain points in the show, listen to a particular topic. It's one of the reasons I love your show. Downcast would also show the different photos you used to add per chapter. And downcast even lets me use the chapter function on my Apple Watch. OK, so I'm totally with you. I'm totally with all of you. And we would never get rid of the chapters. Here's the thing. Getting rid of the AAC does not mean getting rid of chapters. It used to, like 100 years ago. But right now we publish both AAC and MP3 feeds and both, yes, both, have chapters in them. And every podcatcher podcast listener software out there supports chapters in both the AAC and MP3, including downcast, including Apple's podcast app on the iPhone. All of them do. Overcast, you name it, chapters are supported, except one. And that is iTunes on the Mac. So when I say that we're going to get rid of the AAC potentially, and I think we will, but we haven't really made the decision yet. When we, if and when we get rid of the AAC feed, we would have one feed, which is sort of the goal. It would be MP3 only. It would have chapters in it. And it would work with everything, except you would no longer see our chapters in iTunes on the Mac. So that is the, that's the one place where you would miss it out. But otherwise you could run downcast on the Mac, no problem, right? No problem. It's just iTunes. Why Apple, like their libraries support it. They're obviously doing it on the phone. Why in the world? They haven't put it into iTunes. I don't know, but that's that. Yes, John. You would think that iTunes being the kitchen sink of Mac software would support this one little. Yeah, no. Facet of. No. High-cast or audiophile chaptering, but they don't. I'm just baffled. Yes, same. Yeah, that's good. All right. We have time for one more. And so I will leave the, we have a couple of about photos that we will come back to next week. I promise. JP has a question, though, and I think we might have an answer for him. JP says, fellas, is there a way to only sink my desktop items and not my documents with iCloud? And so here's the thing, not technically. No, JP, you cannot. And that's only because the way, you know, when you go into system preferences and you go to iCloud and you go to iCloud Drive and you go to options, you, one of the options that you have there is to sink the desktop and document folders. There's no way to dig deeper than that. So the answer is no, it's all both or nothing. But if you store your documents in a different folder, then you'll still sink the desktop folder and the documents folder, but if the documents folder is empty, well then it won't be sinking anything because there's nothing to sink. You can create another folder that contains your actual documents. It's no problem. I've actually done this for years. I created a separate folder years ago when I started testing different things like Resilio Sync, which was BitTorrent Sync, and then Synology's Cloud Station and Synology's Drive. So my documents actually don't live in my documents folder, but they are synced amongst all of my Macs because I use a different syncing engine. But if you want to use iCloud and you don't want to have your documents synced, well, just don't store them in the documents folder. That's the, to me, that's the easy answer. Any other thoughts on that, John? Ah, we lost John. So John is coming back here. I think we'll have him in a minute here. You know, there's something about John's connection, folks, that is just not quite right, but I think he's about to be back. So welcome back, my friend. So I think you heard enough of that. Sync the documents folder. Sync the, turn on documents and desktop syncing, but empty your documents folder. Store your documents somewhere else. That would let you sync the desktop with iCloud without having to sync your documents. Thoughts on that before we bid our friends farewell for the day? Um, yeah, I was scratching my head over that, how to decouple those. But personally, what I do is, yeah, so the one thing that if you do enable the iCloud syncing there, it does move your documents folder to a mysterious new location, which, the way I deal with that is I put it in my sidebar. And the other thing you mentioned here is actually I've had this happen. So things on my desktop, when I delete them, I get this, you know, notification saying, hey, you're deleting this from iCloud, dude, are you sure about that? It's mildly annoying. But sure, sure. So I can deal with the current state. Yeah, I think he just doesn't want to use his storage for that. So no, no, I know I got it. But yeah, makes sense. Yeah, perfect. All right, folks. Well, that does bring us to the end, doesn't it? Fun stuff, though. And that's why we do this. I learned something. Did you learn something, John? Did you learn your five things? I couldn't believe how much I learned. You're not going to believe what happens next. My brain hurts. My brain hurts. That's right. You know what happens next? MacGeekUp733. That's next week. That's what you're not going to believe it, but that's what happens next. I believe it. Yeah, I promise you. As I said, visit us macgeekup.com slash forums. Really great stuff happening. Thank you for all of you that have come and joined and participating. It's a great community and really growing fast. So good stuff. Huge, huge thanks to Cashfly at CACHEFLY.com Providing all the bandwidth to get the show from us to you. And of course, all of our sponsors in the podcast marketplace, that includes, of course, IMAZING as you heard about at the beginning of the show and in the middle of the show. Smile at smilesoftware.com slash podcast, Otherworld Computing at maxsales.com. Barebones Software at barebones.com. Ring at ring.com slash mgg. LinkedIn jobs at linkedin.com slash mgg. So many more coming. It's good stuff. Thanks for hanging out with us. Thanks for all your questions. Thanks for all your answers. Thanks to everyone in the chat room. Thanks to you, John. Always fun to get to chat with you every week, my friend. And one little piece of advice though. One. Well, it's one piece in three words, but it's one thing. And that is, you know, while you're out and about this week, while you're doing whatever you're doing, using your computer, not using your computer, driving, walking, flying, whatever it is, make sure that you don't get caught.