 The Mac Observers, Mac Geek Gabb Episode 795, the last episode of 2019 from Monday, December 30th, 2019. Greetings, folks, and welcome to The Mac Observers, Mac Geek Gabb, the show where we take cool stuff found, tips, things we found, your questions, we answer them, we share them, we dissect them, we argue about them, with the goal being that everybody, us, you, everybody that's here listening, participating, learns at least five new things every single time we get together. And I believe, John, I don't have the 2020 plan because my 2020 vision is not clear, but I'm pretty sure in 2020 we are going to be sticking with the five new things as the metric for the show. Sponsors for this episode include otherworldcomputingatmaxsales.com. We'll talk about how they can help you with your new Mac Pro shortly here for now, here in Durham, New Hampshire. I'm Dave Hamilton. And here in triple Connecticut. This is John F. Braun. Hey, Mr. John F. Braun. So our next episode, we're going to have Mike Bombick from Carbon Copy Cloner and also former Apple employee joining us. So send in your APFS questions, your Carbon Copy Cloner questions to us at feedbackatmackygabb.com so that we can go through those with Mike. We've got some. We'd love more. So we will do. You heard him. Feedbackatmackygabb.com. That's correct. Yeah. Send in a feedbackatmackygabb.com. We will be recording that episode early. We're recording it on Friday before we head off to CES. So please make sure you get those in. And a big shout out. Thank you to our CES 2020 sponsors. I'mazing Otherworldcomputing, which happens to also be a sponsor of this episode, as I mentioned, TextExpander. And as it turns out, and completely unrelated to the fact that he's coming on the show, but Carbon Copy Cloner is a returning. In fact, all four of these are returning CES sponsors for us. So it's great to have all of them. But yeah, good stuff. And who are you again? Who am I? Did I not say who I was? Oh, I don't think you did because I don't think I did. Oh, I thought I said here in Durham, New Hampshire. I'm Dave Hamilton, but maybe you did. Maybe not. I don't know. I think and I think you said who you were too. I'm pretty sure. Yeah. Maybe I did. I'm pretty sure. Wait, you know what? We recorded it. We can go back and listen later. But that is John F. Braun, ladies and gentlemen, right there. Cool Stuff Bound is where we're going to start this episode. And Bruce is going to kick us off. Bruce says in the last episode, you talked about browser plugins for downloading YouTube and other online videos. My favorite utility for this is a Mac app called ClipGrab at clipgrab.org available for free. You just paste your video's URL into its interface, and then you have the option of downloading it as an MP4 video or just an MP3 audio file. And you can specify the resolution and quality. They update it regularly and it just plain works. Well, we like just plain work. So thanks for that, Bruce. Of course, that's in your show notes, which you can find at mackeygab.com or if you go to mackeygab.com just once, you can sign up for our weekly email and get all the show notes in your inbox. So then you don't have to think about them, which is good. The other thing that we were talking about in that same episode, and I couldn't remember off the top of my head, was something that Ben reminded us of. He says, I've been using Charlie Monroe's Downey, which makes it really easy to download any videos embedded on a website. So put that in the show notes too. So thanks for that, Ben. John, I've been checking out this little C rugged SSD Pro. I've got the one terabyte version. It comes in a two terabyte version. It's the size if you took like maybe six or maybe eight credit cards and stacked them on top of each other. That's how big this thing is. It's tiny. It's an NVMe SSD. It's Thunderbolt 3. And I did some speed tests on it. Read speeds, John. I'm getting 2,600 megabytes per second and writes I'm getting 1,400 megabytes per second. It will work over if you're just on a USB-C interface as well. Obviously, it won't go quite that fast because USB-C doesn't go that fast. But it will work over that. So if you, you know, for compatibility reasons, it's totally fine. It just, just not going to, you're not going to see Thunderbolt 3 speeds. But I think that, and I think it's like 399 to, to grab one of those. So I thought that was, I'm pretty stoked with it. It's a great, and it's, it's their rugged thing. So it's in addition to not having any moving parts, which is great. It's also covered in like this rubberized black kind of thing so that it's, it's very, you know, shock resistant and all that good stuff. It's the kind of thing you could throw in your travel bag and not worry about, but also super fast if you need to be doing things like, you know, video editing or really anything. I mean, you know, faster the better. But yeah, it's pretty, it's pretty amazing how, how fast and, and how relatively inexpensive these things are getting. I'm, I'm loving it. So it's pretty cool, huh, Joe? Yeah. This is like waterproof or dust proof or anything like that. Well, it is, it is certainly, oh, IP 67 rated, making it resistant, resistant to dust and water. Oh, okay. All right. I'd say that's rugged then, because I mean, rugged isn't really a consideration for SSDs, right? Right. Right. In terms of shock resistance. Yeah. I mean, unless you smash the thing hard enough. Unless it's going to break it. Yeah. Right. It's like going at hypersonic speeds here, but whereas mechanical drives tend to. Yeah. And that can be no bueno. That's right. Yep. Yep. Yeah. So that's why they put that. Well, I think they still have the feature, but the sudden motion sensor in some of the max. Oh, in the old days, they did that when they had rotational drives in them to bring the drive offline just ahead of the full impact or something, right? So. Yeah. I think they, I think there was an accelerometer somewhere in the machine. Yeah. And if it detected that it was in falling, it would pull the head back. So you wouldn't scratch your. Oh, that was it. That's right. Platters. Yeah. So like you said, that's not an issue with SSDs. But yeah. Yeah. Water resistance, drop resistance. And they say that it's got three meter drop resistance. So, you know, my, yeah, my guess is at some point, like you said, it will hit the velocity that that would potentially damage the enclosure. But otherwise, yeah, pretty good. I'm stoked. I've always liked their rugged drives, but they've always been big. And this one, I suppose, certainly they can make it smaller without the case. I think Seagate probably does offer something that's that, but, but this thing's pretty tiny. I mean, it's, you know, fits in your palm, fits in your pocket easily fits in your bag. So pretty stoked. It's good. Nice. We had talked about various ways of controlling remote controlling your 3D printer. And I think it was listener Mark, who brought this whole thing up. He said, I found a solution for my remote 3D printer connection. And it's called the Astrobox Touch. They have two versions, one ready to use and one that is a kit. He says, I just plug my 3D printer USB cable into it and I can send files to it via their web browser or even their iPhone app. It connects via Wi-Fi so I can print from anywhere, not just in my house remotely. And as a bonus, you can plug an inexpensive USB video camera into it and watch the progress even shoot, stop motion so you can see your entire several hour build in seconds. And you can plug multiple printers into it too. So he sent us a link. It's like he said, it's the Astrobox Touch from Astroprint.com. So thanks for that, Mark. Fun stuff. I love these like, you know, kind of just like very purpose built things. This is the beauty of where we are with like computers and everything. I love it. It's good. Yeah, somebody mentioned something before that was I think a Raspberry Pi based solution. So this is like doing the same thing, but it's in the cloud, which well, it's cool. They have a there's a I mean, it's a box that connects to your printer, which probably is something similar to a Raspberry Pi, right? Or or but it is also linked with like you said their cloud service so that they can so you can manage all this stuff that way. Yeah, it's good. It's good. What was the other thing we mentioned that you said, John? The Raspberry Pi one. Oh, is this it? No, that's not it. All right, well, we'll put it in the show notes so that no, no, octoprint octoprint. All right, there you go. Cool. Cool. Well, we will put that in the show notes so that you can find it at octoprint.org, I believe. So if you've got a Raspberry Pi, you can do some of this stuff, not probably not the video camera and but maybe I don't know. I don't know what the features of octoprint are. So perhaps Michael hipped us to something that I thought we had talked about before, but I can't find any mention to it. And it's called file bot. It is a tool for organizing and renaming all your movies, TV shows and other stuff, other such stuff. And it will fetch subtitles and artwork so that you can feed this to, say, Plex or any other movie library management system. And it's got everything that you need to really have that robust experience. You've got all your subtitles and all that good stuff just baked right in there. And so it's at file bot.net. And it seems really interesting. I haven't tested it yet, but I want to because I wind up manually renaming things a lot for my for my various stuff. And they have a Synology NAS package available so that it could be done right on my Synology, John. So that makes this really interesting. So we need to we need to check this out, John. But yeah, I've had to. So I installed the Plex client on a couple of my devices. Sure. And one thing I had to do, there was one movie that the usually it takes the title of the movie and makes it the file name when you rip it. Right. But I had one where it misidentified the movie because I think the word was either in there or not in there. And it brought up a totally wrong movie. At least the Plex client has a selection where you can basically say, no, no, no, that's not it. It's that movie. Right. The web client does that. The web client does. No, video station, you can do that, too. You can you can fix an incorrect match with Synology's video station as well. Yeah. I wasn't able to figure out how to do that. It was more obvious with Plex client. Yeah. And even in the Plex client, to be honest, I I mean, it's there, but you've got to like dig into the movie. And I don't know that it's in the client. I've only ever found it in the Plex server web interface. Not on like, I don't I don't think I've ever been able to fix a match on my iPhone. I've always had to do it on the web, but maybe I'm not finding it there. But on the web, you go in and go to your, you know, movies, and then you right click, like, you know, there's like the three dots or something, and there's an option to fix match or rematch or something like that. Yeah. Yeah. But I wasn't able to I wasn't able to find that on like my iPhone or in the Mac client review. Maybe it's there. I think it was the Apple TV client or the Tevo client. Oh, the Tevo client. No, that's super feature limited. That's okay. It must have been the Apple TV app. Okay. Okay. Yeah. Because I'm looking here on my iPhone, and I don't see any way to, to, you know, to change a match, even if I hit the three dots, it's like, I can play or I can delete. That's it. So yeah. But yes, this filebot thing, it's not going to deal with, well, maybe it will help deal with missed matches, but that's up to the, you know, the server software to do its matching there. But at least this will get all your right subtitles and all that and name it correctly. Because a lot of times when you pull in something, like if you rip a movie from your, your Blu-ray or whatever, it just doesn't get named the right way. And this can kind of help do it. So pretty stoked about that. A gentleman named Chuck Petal passed away recently. I think it was on December 15th. I had no, I had never heard his name before and had no idea what he did, of course. In 1974, he and several other engineers were designing a new silicon chip at Motorola when the company sent them a letter demanding that they shut the project down. Because Chuck Petal was designing a low-cost chip that he, in his thought, could bring digital tech to the masses. But his bosses saw it as unwanted in-house competition for their $300 processor. Again, 1974 dollars. So $300 was not inexpensive that they had unveiled that year. So he and his engineers quit and moved the entire project to MOS technology or MOS technology. And they built a processor called the 6502 that was priced at $25 in 1974. And that chip powered the first wave of truly personal computers, including the Apple II and the Commodore PET. And an interesting thing is that in 1976, MOS was acquired by a calculator company at the time, Commodore Business Machines. And Mr. Petal was named its chief engineer. Soon after, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak offered to sell Apple to Commodore. But Commodore declined. Of course, they were using this chip in the early Apples and Apple IIs. So after they declined, the Commodore Business Machines built their own personal computer around the 6502, which was called the Commodore PET, which sold for $495. And so Chuck Petal, like without him and his team of engineers, but certainly without his vision, I don't know where the personal computer revolution would have begun. Because that $25 chip is what made it possible to get these things into people's homes. So I thought that was pretty cool. And when I saw it, I wanted to share because, you know, it's kind of a geeky thing. Had you ever heard of Chuck Petal, John? I know some of the history of the 6502, but no, it didn't jump out at me as well. Now I know. But yeah, I mean, it was, I mean, I remember fiddling with, you know, if you had an Apple II, then they actually had an assembler you could get to when you could write your own 6502 code. And honestly, it was, I would say, the risk processor of its day and that it had very, you know, it had lots of little instructions, the reduced instructions that computing, right? Which is what risk stands for, right? Was the, yeah, which was the paradigm, one of the paradigms back then, it's like, you know, do you make a really complex chip with, you know, like the Intel chips with, you know, tons of instructions or do you make one that's kind of elegant has smaller little instructions, right? Interesting. So I would kind of consider it a risk processor compared to the other things that were out there at the time. That makes sense. I hadn't, yeah, I hadn't even thought of it that way. Wow. Huh. Interesting. See all the things we learned. I like it. Yeah. No, the 6502 is, I mean, yeah, that was, that was what, that's what we all started with with our Apple IIs and our Commodores. I didn't, I guess at the time I knew that the Commodore 64 was based on the same chip, but I certainly had lost that reference until I read this article too. So. Oh man, I remember servicing those things. The C64 had a terrible failure rate. Well, they had, I repaired more than one of them and I remember, well, usually it was the power supply failed because they had that external power supply. Oh, they had like a brick. Yeah, right. Right. Yeah, those had a high failure rate from whatever call. Because yeah, people are like, it's not working anymore. It's like, yeah, it's your power supply shot. Here's a new one. And where were you repairing these things? What were you, what were you doing? Oh, this was, this was back. Oh gosh. Like in the, in the 80s, I worked at a little place called Small Computer Service Center. I think you visited me. I did. I remember visiting you there. Yeah, for sure. Huh. Yeah. Yeah. And we did, the owner was a teacher in the local school system and her husband haven't talked to him in ages. Yeah. And her husband was a engineer and at a Perkin Elmer taught me many things, including doing component level repair. That's cool. Huh. Yeah. On Apple twos and PCs and all that. Yeah. It was a fun gig. That's cool. You, you, was it you that was telling me that Bill Gates walked into your small computer shop or was that somebody else that was telling me that back in the year? No, it was Meatloaf. Well, I know, I know Meatloaf was one of your, your gaming customers, but I thought, okay, I must have conflated the story. Somebody else worked all, you know, another friend worked at a small computer shop and they said Bill Gates came in peddling his, you know, latest stuff from Microsoft because that's what you do. So yeah, interesting. Yeah. But I remember, yeah, because yeah, his name, you know, his, when he came in to, you know, I think he had, you're talking about Meatloaf again? Yes. Yeah. Okay. But, but his real name is Marvin Aday, I believe. Okay. All right. But yeah, that was the name on the slip and I didn't know that. And then at one point, he's like, oh, I'm Meatloaf. I'm like, wow, the meatloaf. Yeah. It wasn't really into Meatloaf at the time, but he, he had a, he had a, well, he has had a fantastic career. And, and his first album helped Todd Rungren launch his career, fuel his career too. Todd Rungren got a fantastic deal publishing or producing Meatloaf's first album. Totally. Now we're off on like a tangent of a tangent, but they wanted Todd to produce what became, you know, Meatloaf's Bad Out of Hell, huge album. And they knew they needed somebody that like understood not only rock and roll, but like theater and, and performance and that, because it's a weird record. You know, it's not your typical like just throw a band in the studio and run it. I mean, it's this very theatrical rock and roll opera-ish kind of thing. And so they kept going to Todd and Todd's like, no, you don't have enough money to pay me. You don't have enough money. And finally they said to him, all right, we'll give you some base rate, which I think was like $30,000, which okay, you know, decent amount of money back then, and we'll pay you a dollar for every record that's sold. A dollar. Like nobody gets a dollar. Meatloaf didn't even get a dollar for every record that was sold. Todd did. Todd has a really nice house in Hawaii now. And, you know, I think he finally sold off future rights to that for a lump sum payment maybe 10 years ago or something to help. Actually, I think to help purchase, help finance the purchase of his house. But yeah, it's a good thing for him. All right. Well, that was quite a departure. For Christmas, I got a new Apple Watch, which means I went from an OG watch, like literally a watch that was delivered on release day and somehow had yet to have any battery problems, which is amazing to me. Everybody else that I know is that got watches on release day if they were still using them had the swelling battery problem. I did not yet. But anyway, got this watch series five, which I'm actually quite liking. I like the fact that the screen's on all the time, which is nice. And of course, this means now that I can run watch OS five. And I noticed some things because there are other people in my house that have watches that at least prior to Christmas were much, much newer than mine. And we're also running watch OS five. And there are some features touted by watch OS five that were not set up automatically for me or anyone else in my household. So there's a there's a few of them. The one that that is the feature that convinced me that I wanted a new Apple Watch finally after all these years is the noise app, which is a sound or an SPL meter, a decibel meter, if you will, built into the watch. I am obsessive about protecting my hearing. And I like the idea of having an SPL meter, not just with me all the time, but warning me when I'm in a range where the sound is loud. If, for example, you're in environment where the sound is above 90 decibels, more than 30 minutes of that can cause, you know, potentially cause permanent damage. So it's a good thing to be aware of. I just like the idea. And let's face it, it was also time for a new Apple Watch. So but that is not that's not on by default, believe it or not. And you have to go turn it on. So for the noise notifications to work, you do it on your phone. The watch is of course managed by the phone, but more and more of the watch is managed on the watch. So this stuff gets a little crazy. But you launch the watch app, you go to your my watch tab and then scroll down and tap on noise. And then you can set a noise threshold for when you want to be notified. And and I have mine set at 90 decibels. So when the sound average over a three minute period exceeds 90 decibels, it lets me know. And then you can you can of course turn those things off there too. But it's worth going and then also launch the noise app right on your watch. It's then a yellow icon of a human ear is what it looks like. Go launch that there so that you can configure it there too. So that that's the first one that I set up. The next one was the whole ECG, the electrocardiogram. You have to set this up to and it does not just happen by default. In fact, I didn't even think about it until I finally started until it hit me. It's like, wait a minute, this will do that. How come it hasn't been offered to me? And I didn't restore my watch from a backup. I set this one up brand new. So I would have thought it would have maybe walked me through some of this, but it did not. So to do that, you launched the health app on your phone. And then you should see once you launch the health app for the first time, it should have something on the first screen there that that turn that allows you to turn that on. If you don't see it, go to browse and then go into heart. And in there, you should see ECG or electrocardiograms. And then you can set those up. And you've got to go through a little process of taking an EKG, which uses the crown on the watch to connect both sides of your body and do all of its stuff. So that's another good one. And lastly, the walkie-talkie feature is pretty cool on the watch, but you also need to set that up. And in order to do that, you do this. I did mine on the watch. Just launched the walkie-talkie app, which is a yellow icon with, I mean, it looks like a handheld radio if you know what that might look like, but otherwise it's like a box with a circle in the middle of it. It kind of looks like an Apple watch with a circle in the middle of it, but with like a little nub of an antenna sticking off. It's yellow. That's the walkie-talkie app. Launch that. And from there, you can add other people or invite other people to link with you for walkie-talkie. Because what walkie-talkie does is let's say John and I both had watches that supported it. I could, once we're linked together, I could just hit the walkie-talkie button and my voice now will start coming out of your watch, John. It's not like, you don't answer the, it's not a call. It's an announcement. So you got to kind of choose wisely who you want to give this power to. If you're in mute mode or theater mode or whatever, then it won't do it, but otherwise, yes. So those are my three things to turn on. I'm sure there's more that I'm missing, but I figured, and nobody on my house had had, my wife had had the noise thing turned on because that was of interest to her as well when she got her watch or when WatchOS 5 came out. But she didn't have walkie-talkie set up and my son and I needed to set up her. He also got to watch Series 5 watch because he too was on an OG. So we had to set up all this stuff and it just wasn't obvious. It was kind of surprising that there was nothing to walk me through like, hey, here's your new features. You should do all this stuff. Like, no, go find it for yourself. So thought maybe folks out there would not have found it, even if you've had WatchOS 5 since the fall, you may not have known about at least some of these. So there you go. You're still a non-Apple watch using person, right, John? Correct. Okay. Any questions about any of this? No, it's getting better and better. Yeah. Yeah, it's pretty crazy. I like it. It's good. Hey, I want to take a minute and talk about our first sponsor, which is Otherworld Computing at Otherworld Computing, well, at maxsales.com. They must be at otherworldcomputing.com, right? Let's look at that.com. Let's see. Are they smart enough? Of course, they are smart enough to do that. They're smart people there. So maxsales.com is, though, where you want to go. And as I mentioned in the intro to the show, Otherworld Computing is ready to help you upgrade your new Mac Pro. They will let you max out the new 2019 Mac Pro and save you up to 65% versus the factory RAM that Apple would sell you. So when you're ordering your new Mac Pro, I know it's fun to go online and see how it is expensive you can make it. That's cool right up until the moment that you're going to purchase. Then ratchet that way back down by taking off all the RAM you can and go to Otherworld Computing at maxsales.com to max out your RAM because they offer up to 1.5 terabytes. Terabytes, John. Can you imagine that? Yes. Well, that's good. 1.5 terabytes for the new Mac Pro and they have more configurations than Apple does. It's crazy. It's crazy. I know. What comes after that? Pedabytes, I think? Yeah, maybe we'd go from terabytes to pedabytes. Yeah, I think that's right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm sure they're on it. It's not just your Mac Pro that Otherworld Computing will sell you RAM for. In fact, the RAM that I have in all of my Macs here all came from Otherworld Computing at maxsales.com. They've been offering memory upgrades for years and they understand this stuff. It's crazy how deep they go into all of this. They maintain a state of the art test lab that we got to see last year and they ensure their memory upgrades offer the highest quality and reliability by backing them with their OWC Lifetime Advanced Replacement program and a 30-day money-back guarantee. So you got to check this out. Go to maxsales.com or if you want, go to otherworldcomputing.com. If that's easier to remember, it's fine. That will bring you to maxsales.com as we just found out and get your RAM there. Get all your other stuff there too. That's where John and I shop first for anything we need to add to our Macs. Our thanks to Otherworld Computing for sponsoring this episode and doing what they do. All right, Mr. Braun, let's go on to some questions, shall we? It's been a little while since we've done some questions. In fact, it's been, you know, well, at least 30 minutes of this episode. So we will go and start with Jason. And Jason, this is such a great question. He says, can you explain the difference between RSS readers versus RSS services? In other words, why do I need Feedbin, Feedrangler, et cetera, and Reader 4? Reader 4 being an app for macOS and iOS. It says, Reader 4 allows me to sign up for an RSS feed directly. What does Feedbin or any of the others do? Feedbin also has their own reader for RSS feeds. At first, I thought the RSS services were like an email provider. And the reader apps were the client or the email client that you use. He says, but that doesn't seem to be quite the right analogy. So I hope this question makes sense. It does. And you're right. What is RSS? Good question, John. You want to answer that? You want me to answer it? Well, I think it's a real simple syndication is what it stands for. And I think it's just a standard way of representing news articles. Well, not just news articles. In fact, most of the people that are listening here are using RSS, whether you know it or not, because podcast subscriptions are also published in RSS. But it is, you're right, that it is a standard format to publish and then also read or parse any sort of article. You're right. News articles is where it started and certainly is where it is popularly used right now. But podcasts are, you know, a pretty big use case as well. In fact, arguably probably a bigger use case than news articles because so many people listen to podcasts. And my guess is that not the same percentage of people use RSS for news. The nice part about using RSS for news is, you know, at Mac Observer, we publish our articles via RSS, but also on the web. And so you could certainly go to the website and read at Mac Observer. And then you could go to Apple Insider and read there and Daring Fireball and read there, you know, whatever you want in New York Times and read there if you like. But if you want to pull it all together into one app that you curate, then an RSS app is or an RSS service is the place where you could do that because you could subscribe to all four of those and many, many others and organize them the way you want, read what you want. And now you've got it all in one interface that works really nicely for you. And I use RSS quite a bit for just parsing through things, seeing trends and headlines and things like that. I use Reader, the app that Jason mentioned, and I also use a service called Feedbin. But I use Reader, the app for most of my RSS reading on either, you know, macOS or iOS or iPadOS now. But what I use Feedbin for is to sync all of my subscriptions. And occasionally I will use their interface on the web. But I have Reader set to log in and sync with Feedbin on all my devices. So I don't have to worry if I read something on my phone and then I launch Reader or any other RSS app on my Mac that is linked with Feedbin. I know like I don't see that same article because I've because I've already read it. Now, of course, if I mark it as starred or flagged or something, then I will see it that way. So it is like the email provider backend service that adds a bunch of features to what would otherwise just be a sort of standalone client. And I've been a user of Feedbin for years and years. It just makes life so much easier to have a service. And I think it's only, I don't know, 20 or $30 a year. It's not it's not a huge expense. Although, like we talk about here, you know, those those little sort of smaller subscriptions add up and, you know, what is it, death by a thousand razors or death by a thousand cuts or something like that. So but I so that's that's what I use it for. And I hope that answers your question, Jason. But any any other stuff you want to add to this, Mr. Braun? No. Okay. It's a I don't. Yeah, that's not the way I consume news. Though underneath the covers, it may be doing RSS. What what are you? What do you mean by that? Well, like, so I have a few apps. So one is Apple's news. So I use that and I get notifications of things. And then we have a couple of local publications that also will put a note notifications under iOS, or actually, well, news works, news does it on the Mac and yep, on iOS. But I also have some clients on that are iOS only. One is, we have a local thing called Daily Boy, Fairfield Daily Voice, I think, just like Fairfield News. Sure. And another another one that I found that also posts local news called Newsbreak. Interesting. So that's how I get my news. I wonder if they're aggregating via RSS. I bet they probably are. Apple News. So Apple News can aggregate via RSS. When it started, that's how we published to it was it would essentially just slurp an RSS feed. We created a pretty custom one that just Apple News knows the URL for and they can they can slurp. But we have since changed. And now we push new articles up to Apple News via JSON. So when we get a new article out, it pushes JSON, I think is JavaScript object notation or making that up. But it's a way it's again another standard format where you can package up something and send it to an endpoint at a web server. And so we just push those to Apple News and that way it has it immediately. And if we need to make a change or we update the article or something, we can, you know, that push sort of happens automatically with this this engine that we use now. So okay. Yeah, you were right. JavaScript object notation is a lightweight data interchange format. So it's like RSS, but it is RSS almost in reverse because you're pushing instead of pulling, although you could do a JSON poll. So yeah, yeah. But anyway, yeah, we use we use JSON. Yeah. So but but you're right that Apple News is doing for is doing what what RSS does for a lot of people, whereas it's aggregating your chosen news sources together. And if you like the Apple News interface, and you like the services that are available there, then that works really well. And of course, you know, packaged up in a way that is much more user friendly to get started with RSS isn't terrible. But you know, it takes a little it's a little bit geeky to, you know, say, Oh, I want to subscribe to the RSS feed of that website or something. It's not that it's not terrible. But you know, yeah, there you go. Good. Yeah. Yeah. All right. Michael has a question. He says, I'm thinking of retiring my 2013 six core Mac Pro. And I'm amazed that my 2018 six core Mac mini specs faster than my Mac Pro Xeon. The only real negative is that I use three Thunderbolt ports with with Daisy chain devices, three external large storage drives, two large displays, and occasionally other external storage devices. As I can't find one, do you know of a Thunderbolt three device that supports multiple Thunderbolt inputs? I do have several Apple Thunderbolt two to Thunderbolt three adapters, and I can buy more if needed. So, you know, the thing in terms of the speeds between those two machines, you're right, that's the CPU in your 2018 Mac mini is is faster than your 2013 Mac Pro. But, you know, that that sort of makes sense. I mean, time as the way time works, it's entirely likely, though, that the GPU in your old Mac Pro outpaces the on chip GPU of your Mac mini. Now, of course, with a Thunderbolt three device or a computer like the Mac mini, you can add an external GPU and mitigate that. But just bear that in mind for anybody that's, you know, doing these comparisons. All that said, your migration question is a good one. It's possible that your displays are Thunderbolt, some there are there are a handful of displays that are truly Thunderbolt displays. But my guess is that they are just using mini display port, which is the port over which Thunderbolt one and two are sent. And that makes a big difference here because you don't need, if that's the case, and they're just display port devices or display port devices or HDMI devices, you don't need Thunderbolt ports to connect to them. You just need either display port or HDMI to connect to them. And with that in mind, take a look at what you need and then go find a Thunderbolt three dock that serves your purpose. And this is the beauty of, you know, what we call dongle world or dock world. There are so many different, especially with Thunderbolt three, so many different permutations of docks and dongles out there where you can say, okay, I need, you know, three display ports or two maybe because you're going to use one that's, you know, baked into the Mac mini. Great. Okay, so I need a Thunderbolt three dock with two display ports and X number of, you know, USB A ports or USB C ports or whatever it is, and you can bake it all together and get what you need. You probably will still have your storage devices. You say you're using those with Thunderbolt two. Take a look at the speeds that those devices can deliver you and decide whether they need to remain being used over Thunderbolt two or if not, I would highly recommend moving them to USB three. The Thunderbolt two to Thunderbolt three adapters in my experience have been a little wonky. Use them when you need them, but otherwise do not use them. And if in a case like this, if you drive support USB three, and you're not losing any speed by jumping to that, then I would highly recommend jumping to that just to be as native as possible. And that that conversion from three to two, at least in my experience, has been very, very sort of flaky, but you know, do it where you need it and otherwise don't do it. So those are my thoughts on this, John. Do you have any thoughts on any of this? I may in the next question. Okay. All right. Which kind of has some Thunderbolt involved in it, I think, right? I don't know. Take us there. Let's see. Okay. All right. So this is Martin. And Martin writes, got an interesting problem I'm hoping you can help with. It's been going on for a couple of years, but hasn't really caused me many issues, so I haven't bothered with it. The problem first occurred on my iPhone 7 when I connected it to my MacBook Pro 15 inch retina 2015. And thank you for being specific with the machine model, because that helps us do our thing. The phone would rapidly start connecting and disconnecting, stopping the phone from charging and syncing properly. I mean, it's to solve this by resetting location and privacy after using some Google foo. Okay. However, the problem soon returned. After then upgrading to an iPhone 10, the problem persisted from day one of owning the new iPhone. The same thing has started happening to my iPad Pro 12.9 first generation. Recently upgraded and again, wow, this guy's going through phones like crazy, upgraded again to an iPhone 11 Pro. And would you believe it? Yep. The same problem out of the gate. With some more Google foo, I have learned that the USB D process is causing the problem and either force quitting the process or using some terminal command to stop or kill the process will make the problem go away until next plugged in. However, after killing the process, my iPad Pro will not charge. It displays not charging next to the battery. However, I can still sync with the finder. Just fine. Any ideas on what I can do to stop this from happening? It seems silly to have to kill the process every time I plug in my iPhone. Even stranger, this does not happen with any of my family's Apple devices. Everyone having an iPhone watch an iPad, but only my devices seem to be affected. All right. This will be a good one because I think I'm going to go in a different direction than you would Dave here. So the first thing that I didn't suggest, but whenever you have a problem that seems to be power related, which I think this is resetting the SMC cannot hurt. Oh, yeah. Yes. Yeah. When it seems like, yeah, yeah, for sure. Agreed. Yeah. And even mentioned that you'll find the article I'm sure that tells you how to reset the SMC. So that may fix it. Other than that, I'm going to you may want to run some sort of diagnostic and I'll have two tools here that can kind of help you isolate if it's a USB issue or not. So one, there's something from Micromat called Mac check. Okay. Which you can download and it does some basic checks here and one of the checks that it has is an IO check. I would run this and see if it thinks there's anything funky with your USB stuff. The other tool that I find useful for diagnosing these things Dave is our friend Hardware Growler and I have had that confirmed that I had a USB issue at one point because Hardware Growler will show you, one of the things that can show you is when a USB device connects or disconnects. The OS may not report this but Hardware Growler does and I used it in the past to diagnose a USB issue because I would see pretty much what he was seeing is that it would come, it would go away, it would come back, it would go away and I think it finally resulted in a repair or motherboard replacement because it was something with the USB ports. So yeah, killing off. Now, I find this interesting when he says he kills off USB-D. What is USB-D you may ask? Well, if you go in the terminal and you type man, which is the manual page, USB-D. One of the things that says Dave is that USB-D allows the system to configure USB iOS devices to charge and to present notifications related to USB devices. Killing that off I think is why he gets that where it's not able to charge anymore because I think the process that configures the USB chip is now not running anymore so he can't charge. Okay, so this is interesting though, right? Let's look it because knowing that killing USB-D off fixes this forum is good. And USB-D, as you just said, does two things, configures the charging and also allows USB devices to present notifications. Okay, let's compare that or let's factor that in to the thought process that this only happens with devices that are his, not his family members. So what is the difference between those sets of devices? Well, I mean, there's probably lots of differences. One of them though is likely that these devices are signed in, his devices are signed into his Apple ID, his same Apple ID, and his family's devices are probably not signed into his same Apple ID. So what is it that his devices are trying to do? Because it sounds like it starts to work and then it stops, right? Then you get this disconnect loop, but it only happens with his devices. So what is it about either his Apple ID? Are they trying to send some notification because his Mac is also connected to that same Apple ID? Or, you know, that his family's devices, the Mac would be like, oh, yeah, no, these are different devices. So let's treat them differently. I wonder, like that to me, that's where that that's where the stink is on this one, right? It's like, well, why is it just his devices? And certainly, it's any of his devices, new ones, old ones, doesn't matter. I would wonder, you know, you said he goes through a lot of iPhones. I wonder if he rolls them around, right? Like if he takes his, you know, old iPhone and gives that to one of his family members, once that process has happened, does that old iPhone, which previously had a problem on this machine, now not have a problem on this machine once it's being used by a different family member? This is just one of those, you know, there's something wonky going on software wise here that's causing this to get like flaky about certain devices when they are configured a certain way. My gut says to, well, a couple of things. Number one, try loading the combo updater, although I'm going to guess that this has persisted across a couple of different OS versions, right? Because that 2015 MacBook Pro can run Catalina. So I'm assuming that this problem didn't start with Catalina that maybe it was there from a hobby and perhaps even older stuff, although that's presumption I'm making based on just a guess. But I wonder if it's ever been wiped clean. So, you know, clone your drive off or create a new drive, you know, trying all of the sort of troubleshooting, isolation things, create a test user, see if it happens with that test user when it is and also isn't logged into your iCloud account, right? That might be a, that might help us narrow this down. And if you wipe the drive or start with a fresh drive, if you're booting from an external or something, does the problem happen? Is it something about, you know, is there some preference file that for whatever reason is getting wonky because your phones are trying to do some extra communication that is, you know, not going to happen? Or is it, see the charging thing, the charging thing would also be an issue with other non devices that aren't his, right? Because it's either charging or not charging. So I don't, yeah, I don't know. I don't know. It's interesting. It's fascinating one. I don't know. My gut just tells me I could be wrong, but it may be a hardware issue. So there's two ways you could deal with that. Now, one, you could go to your friendly local Apple authorized service provider or Apple store and have them test it, which I assume they have the tools to test it. And maybe your USB ports are shot. But if they were shot software and I don't understand that, but well, but if they were shot, wouldn't they be shot with all hardware, not just the hardware that's logged into his iCloud account? I see your point. You know what I mean? You could be right. Hardware problems can be a bear to diagnose because generally hardware problems don't present 100% of the time. Obviously, if you have a dead power supply, well, okay, that does unfortunately present 100% of the time. But there are lots of hardware problems that are triggered by heat or other external or even internal factors that make it so that it's inconsistent, which is why I always say if something is inconsistent, start thinking hardware. Whereas if it's consistent software, and this seems like freakishly consistent, like his devices, no other people's devices, yes. So to me, that's not, that doesn't have the stink of hardware on it. But it could be. Again, it could just be coincidental, maybe he's, I don't know how often he's plugging in his family's devices versus his devices, and maybe this problem isn't presenting often enough, like it could just be coincidental. So I don't know. Right. So anyways, if you have a service provider, they'll probably offer to test it for you and then give you advice on what to do. It's listed as a supported machine, so they should be able, I don't know if they still do flat rate though. I was looking for info on that. I know they use the charge like $300. And then I found a post from a couple years back that said for that class of machine, it was more like $500. Yeah. But yeah, and you may not want to dump that much money into an older machine. The only thing that I noticed, Dave, is that this machine has a Thunderbolt 2 port. And you can get a Thunderbolt to USB 3 adapter. Dock. Well, no, it's an adapter. Look at the thingy that I came up with. Okay. I mean, it's a dock though. It's not, like Thunderbolt 2 doesn't have a USB chip in it. So whatever you want to call what you plug into it is adding a USB chip to the chain. I always just call that a dock, but sure. Yes. Yeah. But yes, fair. Yeah. It's Thunderbolt 2 on one end and then it has an eSATA and a USB 3 port. Yep. Yep. Makes sense. Makes sense. I mean, you could try something like this and see if the USB then works, in which case it would. So, so, um, Brian Monroe in the chat room pointed us to something very interesting. It's an iFixit article that is talking about this exact problem. When I plug my iPad Air into my MacBook, it acts as though I'm plugging it and unplugging it rapidly and it won't stay connected long enough for me to sync or backup. And the fix that, you know, dozens of people have said, oh, this also fixed the problem for me, is something that Martin mentioned. And that is going on your iOS device says go to settings, general reset and reset location and privacy. So I think it is that his devices are trying to sync some data that is maybe corrupted or something's corrupted on his Mac. But, but it seems like there's something about location and privacy. And people are saying, you know, like there's like I said, there's dozens of comments saying, you know, I've been looking for a solution for over a year. This did it. And it seems like these same people are having the USB D killing off the USB D process also fixes this for them as well. So it seems like whatever this privacy location handshake thing is happens only when the USB D process is running. So maybe it's more than just power and notifications. Maybe there's one little extra piece of something. So this is fascinating. Okay, so it's getting stuck because yeah, you and I have both seen that before. It's like, hey, you want to trust this device that I don't know about anymore, right? Like, please. So maybe it's getting stuck in that dialogue. Okay. Yeah, there's like maybe maybe it is a software thing. Like I said, it smells of software to me. This is really interesting. So yeah. Yeah, I wish I I wish I knew why this would be the way it was. You know, what like why resetting privacy fixes that or location could be either one of them. Yeah. Speaking of location, listener Steve has, he has a very interesting question. Steve says, my fiance has to prove in court that she isn't the person named in a lawsuit. The incident in question happened in 2015. He says, I found that Google Maps has a function called timeline that keeps track of your location for the last 10 years. If we could prove where she was at the point in time that this happened, she could extract yourself from this lawsuit. Unfortunately, on her iPhone eight, she did not enable the Google timeline function. She says, I did also look in system privacy or system preferences, I guess, privacy, location services, system services, significant locations. But that only goes back about a week, at least on her phone. Do you have any other suggestions that might have this information so that we can prove it wasn't her? So this is a crazy scenario. Thinking about other things. Yes. You know, he suggested maybe calling Verizon to see if they have records that would certainly be something you could probably, you know, issue them a request for data or Spina or something like that to get that, you know, you would do that through your attorney. And that's certainly worth exploring, I would think, because that would give you, you know, some third-party corroboration that she was where she actually was, not where this person who's suing her thinks she was. If she sent any emails from that timeframe, those might have the IP address of the device that she used to send them. And IP addresses, especially if they were sent over a cellular network, can sometimes at least get, you know, sort of what I'll call rough location down. So that might be helpful. If she uses Facebook, you know, we complain a lot. I don't not hear it because we try to stay out of the politics of tech. But, you know, in general, we complain and are very aware of the fact that Facebook is constantly tracking and logging our location, especially when you make posts. So it's possible that something there could prove her location in relation to time. Twitter is the same way you can choose to tag your location when you post a tweet. If she did that, that might be able to, you know, she might be able to narrow things down. Any other thoughts, John? I'm trying to think of other ways that our location, I mean, this is sort of a creepy thing, right? I mean, I get that in this case, Steve wants her location to have been tracked without her, you know, direct involvement. Of course, the more answers we come up with, the more we're all going to sit here and be like, oh, crap, like this is the ship has already sailed, Pandora's box is already wide open. So, you know, as you mentioned, yes, if you check into a place with Facebook, there's another app called Foursquare. And then they have like kind of a mini spin-off called Swarm, which I still use along with some friends. I didn't even realize Foursquare was still a thing. Well, Swarm links to it. Yeah. Foursquare has, is I guess the heavy client, if you will. And Swarm is kind of the lightweight thing. I thought they went out of business. Like, I didn't even realize that was still a thing. Huh. Fascinating. All right. Cool. And the other thought is, do you have any photographs from them? And do you have a camera that has a GPS in it? Well, the phone would have a GPS in its camera. So if she took any pictures with her phone, the metadata of those pictures would show where she was. Right. And it would show the timestamp. Yeah. Yeah. And my camera has, and a lot of cameras these days have a point and shoot cameras have a GPS in there too. So I mean, I suppose you could forge that, you know, kind of like the time and date stamp on something. But, you know, if you have enough data points, it could be convincing. So check out your photos from that time period. I like it. I like it. Yeah. Huh. Interesting. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I'll put a link in the show notes to the Google data location history thing where you can check your own out. Steve said that she didn't have that on for her. But that is sort of an interesting thing to go and look at. They have a timeline where you can see where you've been based on your location history. And I'll just warn you, you might not like what you find. But it's fascinating. So anyway. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So hopefully something's there, Steve. And if anybody has a thought, of course, send it into us, we would love to hear from you. Speaking of loving to hear from you, we have what I believe is going to be a geek challenge. I think we've got a couple of things to offer, but I don't think we have the magic answer for Robert who writes, do you know of any app that will give me the name and address associated with the owner of a phone number or at least the name of the owner? I have used any who in the past, but I don't seem to be able to find it or any other reverse phone number services except that except those that charge for a one time use or offer an ongoing subscription at a large monthly fee. I don't know what he defines as large, but I would be interesting in this. I if I need to look up, you know, who's calling me or whatever, I usually use Google and just put the phone number into it, which is an interesting thing. It won't always, it's not, it's maybe 40% effective in my use case. So it, but, you know, sometimes you can see the number and be like, ah, okay, got it. You know, somebody will post the number on their website or it's associated with, you know, some, you know, Craigslist posts that they made or something like, you know, things like that make it easier to tie people directly to numbers like, aha, gotcha. Other than that, I don't really use it, but I don't have a desire slash need to use it all that often. I would love to know, and I'd love you folks to tell us, John, what do you, what do you use for this scenario? Usually if I get a number that I think is spam, I'll just punch it into Safari, which hands it off to Google. And more often than not, it comes up with a directory of spammers. Right. Yes. Right. If you see it. People will report the, people will report the number and say, yeah, it's, you know, some guy selling this through that. So, um, I mean, the other thought is they're localized directories. And actually I was looking here. So I did have Frontier at one point and now I don't. I have it with, I moved over to Optimum, but they have online directories for certain states. Unfortunately though, I looked at their listing and they said, oh, by the way, we don't want to reverse look up anymore. Oh, interesting. Huh. So the local, if you have a general idea of where they are and who their provider is, though you and I talked about this earlier, with a cell phone that, that can be very difficult with a landline. It may not be as difficult since the area code. And the first few numbers give you a general idea of where the person is. Right. Where they were when they got the number. Right. I mean, right. Because you can take a landline and, and move it with you. I mean, we took our, it's a great case in point. Right. We, we had a landline here in New Hampshire and then we moved it from, I think it was Verizon or Frontier or something like that to a Comcast number. We ported it in, but still in the same house. And then to stop paying Comcast, what a year and a half, two years ago or something, we migrated it to a Google voice number. And now it's as virtual as we would ever want it to be. I have it attached to one of those little, oh, I can't think of the name of the company off the top of my head. The little device that lets you plug your Ooma. Is that right? No. Is it? I don't think so. No. No, I, it's a, it's a one time purchase device. Gosh, why can't I think of it off the top of my head? I'll find it. But we have it plugged in and, and now it, the device has three ports, power, ethernet and phone and, you know, plug it into ethernet and it connects to my Google voice account because I gave it the, you know, the credentials to log in and it then feeds into my house's old landline phone system and everything just works. It's great. Works really well. I can't think of the name of it off the top of my head. It is kind of like Ooma, but it's, it's not Ooma. It's something else. I'm looking in here to see if I've got it in my, oh, it's the OB 200. OBI 200. OBI 200. Yeah. And that's from, it's from OB Talk, but I think like Plantronics owns them now or something like that. But, but I'll put a link to that in the show notes. It's awesome. I, I mean, it's, I bought it for, I don't know, let's say $49, maybe $50, whatever. And, and that's it. Like, it just works. So there's no, you know, there's no monthly fee. Google doesn't charge me a monthly fee to have a number there. It was a little bit of a trick getting the number there because you can't port, or at least you couldn't, and I don't, I don't think you can still, you can't port from Google to, from Comcast directly to Google, you can only port into Google from a cell carrier. So I had to get a temporary T-Mobile SIM for like $3. And I ported from Comcast to T-Mobile. And then once that was finished, I could port from T-Mobile to Google. And then, and then I canceled the T-Mobile account and the Comcast portion and, you know, all was, was good. So anyway, that was more than, more than you folks bargained for, wasn't it? But, you know, hey, that's how we do it. This is how we do it here, John. You scratch your head, we scratch ours. That's how it works. Right? No, wait, that's, is that how it works? I don't know. You scratch your head, I'll scratch mine. Yeah, you scratch your head, I'll scratch mine. That's right. Or something like that. So let us know. And you already know the regular email address. If you're a premium listener, send us a note to premiumatmatkeygab.com if you have any reverse phone lookup thoughts or services or anything that you use. Even if they are a paid service, send it in. It would be good to kind of put a button on this conversation and have the options, the best options available there. Speaking of premium subscribers, I, we have not done this for a couple of shows here largely because we've had so much stuff to pack in. But I did want to take a minute and thank many of our premium subscribers whose contributions have come in recently. So I will try to get through this list and I might have to defer some of it to the next episode just to play catch up a little bit. But on our monthly $10 plan, and of course you can learn all about this at matkeygab.com slash premium or just at matkeygab.com. There's a link there as well. But for those of you who want to support the show directly, it is of course not mandatory. We try to answer everybody's questions. But the folks on the premium list get a special premium at matkeygab.com address that does get priority, especially when things get crazy and hairy and busy. Thanking those on our monthly $10 plan whose contributions have come in recently. 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If you want to learn more about that. All right, John, some quick tips for everybody. How about that? Yeah? Outstanding. Outstanding. You are a man outstanding in your field. Or in your yard, I guess, I don't know. Hopefully you're not in your yard right now. It seems pretty quiet. So I think you're in your in your studio slash office. But what do I know? You could be anywhere. You could be in Bangladesh for all I know. Are you in Bangladesh, John? Never been there. That's what you say. That's what they all say. All right, Jeremy says, did you know that if you're in the contacts app, highlight a contact and hold down the option key when on that contact and it will highlight the groups that it that that contact is in, which is fascinating to me. I had no idea. So if you highlight somebody and you have some groups or whatever, you just hold down the option key. And if you are, you got to have view show groups on so that you can see your contact groups on the left and whatever contact is highlighted and it doesn't work with multiple contacts. It does not. It needs to be one contact that is highlighted and it will show you all the groups that these people are that person rather is in. I had no idea. Love it. It's great. So thank you, Jeremy. Good stuff. Any thoughts on that, John? No, it's neat. It is neat. I agree. Yeah. All right. Tony sends in another quick tip. He gives credit where it's due, of course. Max Sales, the World Computing's blog, has articles that they post all the time and Dennis Sellers posted a great article that Tony sent to us about how to increase or decrease the zoom level in Mac OS Safari. As Tony points out, most people, but though not everybody, knows that Command Plus, which can also be Command Equals, so you're not holding down the shift key, Command Plus and Command Minus will allow you to zoom the entire web page in and out in Safari and in many other apps too. However, adding the option key to that, so Command Option Plus or Command Option Minus, restricts the zoom to text only, so it leaves the images where they are and only zooms text in or out, which I find really interesting. I had no idea that was there. And he says what the article doesn't mention is that Command Zero returns the web page to its normal size. So a great set of zoom tips for Safari. I had no idea about the Command option to just zoom text. I love it. It's great. I know. This is what we love about the quick tips. It makes it really easy to hit those five new things every week because they're quick. Lastly, Neil sends us a note. He says, I know you've been talking about where to find your serial numbers. And of course, you can find some of them online and you can find your serial numbers for your Apple devices on the devices themselves. Generally, he says, I have tried to keep track of the serial numbers for my various Apple products in case I ever need to prove that they were mine and I can't directly get to the involved device. He says, but of course, I never remember to keep that list up to date. And I try to do the same thing. And of course, Neil's reading Neil's note here reminds me that I have not put the serial number for my new Apple watch in my database for of those sorts of things. He says, it turns out that if you go to the iCloud panel in the system preferences, and the same is true, he says he's doing this in Mojave. So there is one of those in Catalina, you go to the Apple ID pane, which will have the same kind of thing. He says, you can see the devices panel in the iCloud one in Mojave and again, Apple ID. He says, you'll see a listing of all the devices registered to your iCloud account. If you click on any one of those devices, you will get an informational display that includes the model, current OS version and the serial number. This works not only for your Macs, iPhones and iPads, but also for HomePods and Apple watches. As long as you have a device registered to your iCloud account, this is a handy way of retrieving that device's serial number when you have access to a Mac, but not directly to the device in question. Of course, you can also get this at appleid.apple.com as well. So yeah, it's pretty interesting. Handy. On devices that support them, it also shows what cards you have attached to that device. So if you have, for example, an Apple watch, you can have all your cards, your iPhone can, your iPad can, your T2 equipped Macs can as well, which makes life a little bit easier. So you can see what cards are attached and you can even remove cards from a device right from the system preference pane, at least in Catalina. So thanks for that, Neil. It's a good one. I like it. Handy handy. Pretty good, right, John? Indeed. Indeed. All right. Let's go to Joe here. Joe asks, he says, I was listening to episode 793 and both of you commented on how you store and backup photos. He says, I have a dilemma because my situation is a little bit different than yours. My wife has an old MacBook Pro with a 200 gigabyte photo library. She has a new MacBook Pro with a 256 gig SSD. He says, I suppose it was my mistake to buy an SSD smaller than her photos library. Oh, maybe. He says, I have a 2016 MacBook Pro with a 512 gig SSD and my photos library says is about 90 gigs. He says, I'm also relatively paperless and have a library of PDF documents also stored on the 15 inch MacBook Pro. I need to get the library off the old MacBook Pro and onto something more reliable. I'm worried about backups and automating them. I purchased a Synology, but he didn't say which model. He says, using either of the newer MacBook seems like a nightmare to use to keep these photos local copies because I would have to use an external drive for the library and also an external time machine drive or carbon copy cloner or some location. He says, but I can do time machine backups to the Synology as I learned how to do this for sure. He says, I'm wondering if the best thing to do is to set up a new iMac or Mac mini with a large enough hard drive for all the media files and attach an external drive to do continuous time machine backups. I could also have a second time machine instance running on the Synology that would give me two backups locally and the media would fit on the internal drive for now. Any thoughts about this? So my initial thought is to use iCloud Photo Library to store these things. It does incur a monthly fee for storage, but it is so well integrated into iOS and macOS that it becomes nearly seamless and solves that I don't have enough storage problem fairly elegantly. That said, I would strongly suggest and consider that. That isn't the entire solution, though, or there might be some others. Depending on which Synology disk station you have, you could try to do the same sort of thing with Synology moments, saving yourself the monthly fee of iCloud Photo Library. Synology moments isn't quite as automatic and not nearly as well integrated with macOS, but it is doable in theory. You just have to run the app on your iPhone and have it pump all those photos into your Synology and then they are stored there and you're good to go. It's doable. The idea of a fixed machine like you said in iMac or Mac Mini with a drive to store everything is the best option if it's an option. It's not always economically feasible to buy a new machine and dedicate it to just that, but it would work especially if you were using iCloud Photo Library to get everything to that machine. I've run into some folks in a similar situation, Joe, and one of the things I've done for these folks were the only computers they have are laptops, which these days is not at all rare, and either don't have enough storage on their laptops or want to store it differently is to use iCloud Photo Library and set it up so that you have two different user accounts, one that only stores, you know, the manage, optimizes storage on your Mac and let that one store photos on the internal drive. That's fine. It will optimize in theory. It shouldn't fill up your Mac with photos because it will manage that and then set up another user account, same iCloud account, but make that user account store its photos on an external drive and download all originals. As long as, and that way you don't have to have the external drive connected all the time, you could say once a week, plug the external drive in, log into that user account, let it slurp everything down, check, make sure it's finished, great, log out of the user account, and then eject that drive. And in theory, that's a way to manage it. I have some folks doing that. It does, of course, require the manual management of that library. So, you know, it's not perfect if you are the type of person that would forget to do this or wouldn't it heed your own calendar reminder to do it? Well, then this is not the right solution for you, but it is workable and saves you the money of buying a new Mac Mini or something like that. So those are my thoughts. John, you have any thoughts to add on this? I kind of like to get something, put everything on a single machine with an external drive that's large enough. Sure. If that's possible. In his case, he doesn't have that machine, right? Correct. Right. He could. I mean, he mentioned getting an iMac or a Mac Mini, but you know that if I were, if this were one of my consulting clients, I certainly would mention that as an option, but I wouldn't necessarily lean somebody towards like, hey, go spend $1,500 on, you know, a thing to store your photos. Like that seems a little overkill, but if somebody's got the money and that's what they want, that's great, right? So that's just, you know, I'm not sure I would be hired all that often if the advice I kept giving people was, you know, well, yeah, your car needs an oil change, but did you see the new car over there? You know, go buy that one and then you won't need an oil change for six months. And then we'll talk about your next car, you know, sort of thing. It's just, like, I feel like there's, you know, I feel like people hire me to, you know, to find the creative solution, not the obvious expensive one. So that, but I agree with you having that always on machine that does that. And maybe that's your old MacBook Air or a MacBook Pro, right? The old machine, there's no reason that can't be always on just because it's a laptop. If you've got a place where it could be, you own the machine, hang an external drive off it, do it, let it do its time machine backups, even use carbon copy cloner to clone from that machine to your Synology so that your data is there. And you could even have moments slurped from that library. So now everything is like, like that might be a great solution because I've already got the machine. Yeah, actually, let me think about it. My only concern is that it's a 2011. So, but, you know, to use it as a file server. Essentially, yeah, it'll log into iCloud photo library. Like, that's the, that's the, for this, that's the only thing you need. So maybe. Yeah. And then using, you know, what both you and I do is, or at least I think you do, but, you know, doing a time machine backup to the Synology is good. And doing a CCC clone to replicate your libraries is good as well. Yeah, back them up. I do that. I do the ladder. I don't think I have time machine set to back up my photos. But I do have carbon copy cloner set to copy it from my download everything library on my iMac in the office to the Synology disk station. So, so it's all there. I don't either. Time machine last I checked isn't too smart with I'll have to give it another world, but it's not too smart about figuring out the delta in a photo library. And the same with virtual machines, they're usually pretty large. It's like, oh, let me back up the whole thing. It's like, whoa, whoa, it's just changed this one little piece. Why are you why? Yeah. Because, I mean, you know, backing up, you know, tens or hundreds of gigs that, you know, especially wirelessly, that's a I've had that, you know, sometimes take a day. Oh, sure. Oh, yeah. And I do the initial backup. Yeah. Yeah. Crazy. All right. Where are we here in time? What do we have? You know, we've had this connection with connection. I don't know why it's that word. We've had this question floating for a while. And it's an important one. So with with New Year's Eve coming up and people potentially going out and seeing bands and that sort of thing. Lewis asked, I think it's Lewis. I don't want to get your name right. No, Louie wrote and he says, I have somewhat of an odd question, but any suggestion for noise protection muffs? I'm looking for something comfortable. So no, when when when you say noise protection muffs, I'm thinking of like, you know, shooting headphones or whatever, or you're shooting ear protection where you're literally putting something over your ears. Those I don't have a ton of experience with in terms of buying or suggesting, because generally they are not built to let any sound in and they're not supposed to sound good. They're just supposed to be truly protective. So with that, I would just say go to, you know, Amazon or really anywhere and get yourself a set and make sure it's that they seal well on your ears and that they block, I would say at least 30 decibels, but but if they can block more and they probably do, that that's even better for ear plugs. And when I'm recommending ear plugs, I'm looking for something that simultaneously protects your hearing, but also reduces the volume levels in such a way that it still sounds like what you're intending to hear. So for concerts and even sporting events, I've worn ear plugs. Where were we recently? We were down in Nashville, and we went to a football game there while we were looking at colleges. And it was super loud in that stadium. And I happened to have ear plugs in my pocket. And so I put them in. I was like, Oh, this is great. You know, like the crowd and everything was like the announcer, like the way the speakers were aimed at us was just super loud. So put them in and that's I wore those through the game. For universal fit ear plugs that aren't going to break the bank. My absolute favorites are from a company called Loop Ear Plugs. We found them at I think it was at CES a couple of years ago, but they are super comfortable. They fit well inside the ear. They kind of look cool for ear plugs. You know, they've got like this little loop that sort of sits inside your ear so it's not hanging out or anything, but it protects your ears. It looks, you know, again, somewhat stylish, you know, and the loop is a sound channel. So it really helps to the sound that you hear sounds like, you know, if you're at a concert or whatever, it sounds like the band. It's just lower volume because they're offering a 20 dB sound reduction, which is fantastic for ear plugs like this. So they are they are my current favorites. I also like Edomotic has been, I mean, they've been, you know, a foundation of the hearing protection industry for a long time. They make their, I think they're called Eddie plugs now they've gone for a variety under a variety of names, but they are also 20 dB ear plugs. They fit well inside the ears. They're triple flanged tips. So they're a little more traditional in in look in terms of what you're what you probably used to seeing and you can pop them in your ears and and they will also block at a they will reduce the sound pretty equally across the the spectrum so you can still again just like the loop ones you can hear what you're what you're going after. So loop ear plugs and Eddie plugs would be my absolute favorite recommendations and I suppose this does fit in with our conversation about the watch and the noise app earlier here. So it it's it's not the the benefit of knowing that your hearing is potentially at risk is only helpful if you have a way to protect it. One way of course is to leave that environment. Another is to use something like these and reduce the the level because if you if you're at 95 dB and you lower that down to 75 dB you're in good shape. So that's that's what you want to do. I use these. I use ear plugs. I mean I have custom fit ear plugs because I'm a because I use them all the time and I'm a crazy musician but I you know I use them at gigs if I'm not using in-ear monitors which also block my hearing but or block my you know block the external sound from coming in. You got to be careful with in-ear monitors that you don't turn them up too much because you can cause the same problem you're trying to avoid but I either use those on stage or if there's if I don't have the ability to use those and I have to use like monitor wedges or whatever I put ear plugs in and it's really nice driving home from gigs without my ears ringing so that's uh and I highly recommend it for the people not on stage too. So there you go. Any thoughts on that my friend? It pains me when I see people that are wearing earphones and I can hear their music because I'm like you may want to turn that down a bit. If I can hear it and their ear ear plugs you're probably doing some damage though I know a lot of devices these days limit the the output volume so you won't go deaf. Yeah maybe a lot of ear headphones including earbud style headphones will leak sound out pretty terribly in fact with when we have people on you know well we'll have a guest on this podcast next week but when we have guests on other podcasts we have to tell them use headphones that seal in your ears because with a microphone that close to your ear you it's very common to have bleed over from like Apple's ear pods those do not seal in your ear original generation AirPods you know the only the AirPods Pro seal in your ears regular AirPods do not and you can definitely hear people you know hear the sound coming out and it's not necessarily because they have it too loud it's just a function of the way those things are built they they tend to spill sound in all directions not just directed into the ear but when I get on an airplane and I see somebody with regular AirPods and then I know they have to crank them up to get them over the you know whatever you know the the 85 decibel din of an airplane I always feel like oh man like I wish I had something to give you to to protect your hearing because you're going to hurt yourself doing that for five hours or whatever so yeah I'm with you yeah other than that I like the ETY yeah I think you you convinced me to get some of those before you and I went to a concert yes at first I was questioning I'm like what are you telling me that the sound that they're going to have at a live concert is so loud that it could damage my hearing and the answer is yes absolutely yes yeah 100 of the time almost yeah yeah there are some bands out there that really try to keep things you know below 90 decibels but it it a it's tough be that feeling of you know feeling like the subwoofers are moving you and that sort of thing at some level is part of the you know certainly the rock concert experience and and it's not if done properly it's not dangerous at all but you know to balance things things are going to be a little louder plus you're going to have people around you talking and that sort of thing and in order to sort of mitigate that they just generally bring the level up a little bit so that so you know so that the sound translates with like line arrays and stuff now it's not like it used to be where you just had one set of speakers at the stage that everybody was hearing from now you'll see those things if you go to concerts or even just you know public events where somebody's speaking they're called line arrays and and they usually are look like a series of flat you know horizontal speakers that sort of curve as they're hanging down each one of those is its own speaker and each one of those is tuned to the specific area at which it is aimed it's very they are all very directional and the beauty of that is the ones that are aimed at the people in the front row are much quieter than the ones that are aimed at the people in the back row so you don't have to blow the ears off of the people down front just to get sound all the way to the back which really changed the whole picture of everything because it means you can eq differently for different corners of the room it's it's quite fascinating it so much it works so well that if you go to a concert or any kind of event like that and you can't hear at your seat that is their fault that is a very easily solvable problem and it means they didn't put in the work to tune to the room ahead of time and you probably should you know like get your money back or something because you should be able to hear perfectly everywhere especially inside an arena or something like that because they can really tune it so that's my that's my rant for now and I guess that that brings us to the outro my friends it's time mr. brawn it's time for us to say happy new year to everybody it's the last time we're going to talk in 2019 it's just how it goes right I suppose yeah yeah no at least this calendar right is there another calendar that that goes to 2019 I guess there's a different calendar I guess that's true yeah yeah other calendars that are newer than the grigorian one that we are operating within I think that's that's the latest release yeah so well no what I'm saying is is are there calendars that that are that are still on like you know year less than 2019 I know there's calendars that are on years more than 2019 but but do we have any that you know start like is there the calendar of Dave that starts the year I was born and so this is your you know whatever 40 something I don't even know how old I am anymore but whatever like is there that could I guess we could all do that then it'd be really interesting like you know what year is it for you you're just asking people based on their birth year so that'd be a little weird I don't know I don't think that's I don't think that's a good idea thanks for listening though thanks for everything thanks for another great year everybody we we love getting to be able to do this and even even the work that we put in to do it I find you know super enjoyable it's it's really I love helping people I love answering questions I love learning new things I love finding out that what I previously thought was right is wrong like it's all it's it's the evolution keeps the mind limber doing this show which is you know as our as our years advance is a good thing so it's good thank you thanks to you mr. Braun thanks to all of our listeners happy new year to everybody thanks to our sponsors of course for this episode was otherworld computing at max sales.com I mentioned our ces sponsors which also includes amazing text expander and carbon copy cloner all of our other podcast marketplace sponsors linode.com slash mggeiro.com slash mgge barebones.com smile software.com slash podcast our thanks to cash fly cachfly.com we told you how to contact us via email john what's another method pick one um I've been seeing stuff on the twitters all right so you can tweet um I am John F. Rond he is Dave Hamilton Mackie gabbs the podcast Mac observers the publication and you can tweet at pilot Pete he's at pilot Pete there you go happy new year everybody have uh have fun have uh have a good time all the time right wasn't that spinal tap drummers motto creed something like that was that uh the keyboard player made of the keyboard gotta get my spine I gotta watch spinal tap again that's what I gotta do maybe on the airplane now it's a ces and no matter what you do make sure that you follow our advice what I believe is the best advice we could give to anyone and that is don't get caught happy new year everybody see on the other side