 The Mac Observers, Mac Geekab episode six, six, four for Sunday, July 2nd, 2017. Greetings, folks, and welcome to the Mac Observers, Mac Geekab, the show where you send in your questions, tips and cool stuff found. And the goal is for all of us to share those things, answer those things, talk about those things and, you know it, say it with me. Learn four new things each and every time we get together. But that's really at least four new things. That's right. Sponsors for this episode include text expander from Smile at SmileSoftware.com slash geek will talk more about that shortly here in Durham, New Hampshire. I'm Dave Hamilton. Here in Fairfield, Connecticut, John F. Braun. How are you doing today, Mr. John F. Braun? Yeah, it's all weird. It is weird. We are just so you folks know we are just because of the holiday weekend and a little bit of travel and all that. We're recording this in advance. So we're actually recording this on Thursday the 29th, which is the 10th anniversary of the iPhone sales happening. So the first members of the public to get to get iPhones happen 10 years ago. Three days ago or whatever, whenever it was when you listened. But I did not get an iPhone on day one, John, and I don't think you did either. No, my first iPhone was an iPhone four. OK. So I was very happy with a Trio 650 when when the iPhone came out and I had and the trio was in comparison and even just in reality at the time. Was a disaster to manage. It was totally free. You could install whatever you wanted on it and you could extend the operating system any way you wanted. But kind of like the old, you know, system nine or Mac OS nine or whatever we called it days of and six and seven and eight of extensions manager. You had all you had the opportunity for all kinds of conflicts on that trio. So it took me probably six months realistically to get that thing to a stable point and I'm sure we talked about it on the show because that all happened through that through that time. But I had gotten it stable and it worked great. And, you know, it was an extension of my life. And to think about going to this closed system of the iPhone that did not allow third party apps and didn't allow me to really configure anything or much of anything made no sense to me. I like the idea of the touchscreen interface. Don't get me wrong. That was attractive to me. But the fact that, you know, there was no app store. I mean, there was there was no plans for an app store. It was all, oh, you can do web apps. Yeah. OK, thanks, Steve. So I bought one, but I made my wife, Lisa, use it. But she was coming up from like a Motorola Razer or something that was, you know, non smart, functional. So it was a step up for her. So we had one in the house, but I didn't get it right away. I think I got it a couple of weeks later. So. And then the 3G, yes, I think the 3G. No, it must have been the 3G. The second iPhone, I think I went with was the second wave of iPhone when the app store finally came out and stuff. It was like, yeah, OK, I got to go get one of these things. Yeah, there was 97. I know that because I was looking through my pictures the other day because, you know, I'm printing things trying to anyways. Sure. Yes, of course. Yeah, but I was going through some pictures and there were pictures of a keynote and I noticed there was a screen that said iPhone and I'm like, oh, wow. Wow. Yeah. That's when they introduced it. That's right. You know, that keynote I was recently, I mean, you know, obviously this has been in in the news. And we've been talking about it a lot because it has been 10 years really, and it's been 10 years for the last six months because it was announced in January and then we, you know, got to prognosticate and and and all of that for six months. And then it came out in June of 97. But so we've been talking a lot about it. But I will say this, if you have not ever or even if you haven't in a while, watched that Apple keynote from Macworld Expo in January of 97. Please go do yourself a favor and watch it. It is, you know, I had the pleasure. We both had the pleasure, John, of seeing Steve Jobs on stage many, many times. And in my opinion, that one was head and shoulders above any other performance he put on. I mean, that one was it. You talk about the magic of Steve Jobs that it is palpable when you watch that video. I watched it. I don't know. It was probably five years ago, maybe on the plane. You know, I downloaded it and watched on a plane with my son. And and it was I mean, it was awesome. My son turned to me about halfway through. He says, this is amazing. He says, you were there for this. Yeah, man. Yeah. And it was just as amazing as you think. So it's worth watching. Similarly, it's also worth watching the Computer History Museum interview with Scott Forstall that happened just last week. Stellar interview with Scott and really kind of makes me miss that level of energy coming from some executive at Apple. Apple just does not have someone like that. And they pushed him out because they didn't like his sort of abrasive atmosphere, but I don't know. Maybe they need it. So anyway, that's worth watching, too. If you have, in fact, I would say that's sort of mandatory watching. We made everybody on the TMO staff. It was like, no, this is like an Apple keynote. You've got to watch this because we're going to talk about it for, you know, years to come, I'm sure. So did you watch it yet, John? Ten years ago, I did. No, no, the Scott Forstall thing, I mean. Oh, no. Oh, yeah, do it. It's worth an hour of your time for sure. Did I say 97 Chris Fields? Wow, I did. Yeah, because you said 97, John, right? It was 2007, folks. Yeah, of course. It was only 10 years ago. Yeah. Oh, 2007. Yeah. I'm like, when you said 97, I'm like, I guess that's right. And so I just went with it. No, it's it's 2007. And I'm thanking Chris Fields in our chat room at macgeekab.com slash stream where you can always listen when we're recording the show live. And we put a calendar out at macgeekab.com slash calendar so you can always know when that's going to happen. All righty, shall we get into the meat of things here? Meat. Yes, yes, yes. OK, all right. So let's go to Ken and start off. Why don't we pick up the pace and go with a couple of quick tips? Ken says one tip I didn't know about reinstalling Mac OS was that holding keys during a restart won't work. Long story short, a few weeks ago, I was having troubles on my iMac. I wanted to reinstall Mac OS. But when I held down any key during a restart, like shift, option, command, option PR, command R, when it started, it seemed as if it didn't hold as if I didn't hold any keys and it started normally. So I started googling Mac startup keys not working. And I saw something on an Apple support page that said, hold down command option R, then press the power button. Continue to hold down those three until you see a spinning globe at the center of the screen. I had no idea about this, he says, but it worked. To explain my problem, I just bought and set up a Seagate Wireless Plus. So I installed some Seagate software on my iMac, which caused problems. So I uninstalled them. I had no idea about holding command option R before hitting the power button when holding keys at startup didn't work. So I wanted MGG listeners to be aware. That's pretty cool. So it puts you into into internet recovery mode, I guess, is command option R, right? OK. It's pretty good. I like that these quick tips. I had I never knew about that. Yeah, man. Yeah. So is that booting? Booting into internet recovery mode. I think that's what it's called, too, right? Recovery mode on the Mac. Yeah, pretty sure. Yeah. Yeah. Command option R. Internet recovery mode. There it is. We'll put a link in the show notes. Great, great stuff. Thank you very, very much, Ken. Here's a little tip. Yes. I'm going to paste this and everything. I'm going to ask you all while John is talking, talking about pasting instead of telling us about the tip. For my next tip, I'm going to ask you all if you have an iPhone and you're in a scenario where you could pull it out, get out your iPhone and open up the camera app and get to a panoramic thing. And then, John, what was what's your tip? My tip is that if there are situations where holding down certain keys makes things not happen, whoa. OK, I didn't want to paste it in super huge. John. Yes. How you doing? Boot argument options in OS 10. There is a way from the command line that you can invoke certain features that normally are done with the keyboard. But for whatever reason, you find the keyboard is not working. Have you ever done this, Dave? I've done. You can set it with NVRAM from the terminal before you reboot. Is that what you're talking about? Space NVRAM space boot dash args equals. And then what you put after that can evoke certain things like for post mode, safe mode, single user mode. There may be a few others. Cool. That this article lists. But I've had to do that once or I'm like, it's not seeing the keys. I think it's because my keyboard was screwed up. But it's good to know there's another way to go about this. Cool. Yeah. Very, very good. That's that's super handy. And I bet I bet there are plenty of field techs out there that already know this consultants that already know this and and several hopefully that are listening and saying, oh, man, that's handy to know. All right. So now that you get your iPhones out and you are in panorama mode and the phone is ready for you to start taking a picture swiping or or or moving from left to right, tap in the middle of that little line that you see going across left to right on the screen and boom, you will see it reverse. You can take a panoramic photo from right to left if you so choose. I had no idea that this existed until I accidentally stumbled on it a week ago. And then, of course, Jim Tannis and our staff meeting the next day told me, yeah, I wrote that up like three years ago or four years ago or something. So I had no idea. So that's why we do these quick tips because there's these things that we use and take for granted that we assume everybody else knows. And in fact, that is rarely the case. So did you know about that, John? I've never been done a panorama. Well, there you go. Panoramas are awesome. Oh, dude. That's fun. One. Well, yeah. And then you can post it to Facebook and it turns into a 3D or not a 3D, but a 360 degree photo. Yeah. All right. Also from Ken, but I think it's a different Ken. Another quick tip. I sometimes use my iPhone to track how long it takes for something to happen, like when my iMac starts up. The iPhone shows the time at the top of the home screen, but it doesn't show the seconds. So I have to open some app on my iPhone like the clock and select timer on the home screen, though. The clock app shows an analog face and the second hand. He says, I'm sure everyone knows this, but I didn't. And you're totally right. I I did know that can. But I thought it was something that was introduced with iOS 10, I think, and started telling people about it. And I'm like, dude, that's been there for a long time. So yeah, it's handy to be able to have a second hand right there. Pretty good stuff. iPhone home screen is the clock. He's talking about the clock at the top of the screen. Yeah. Yeah. It just shows the minutes, but not seconds. Does not show seconds. Right. At the top of the screen. But the clock app has a analog face with a moving second hand. Yes. What do they call that? The name for that, where the icon. Repres the icon, it's something morphic. You know what I'm talking about? Skeuomorphic. I think that's it. Yes. I think that's the concept that that embraces. It's not just well made. Yeah. I mean, Skeuomorphic is interesting talking about that after suggesting that we have people watch the Scott Forstall thing. But I wouldn't. I you're probably right that it's tangentially part of that. But but really, Skeuomorphic is is meant when it implies that it's supposed to look real like something from the physical world. And and that was where like the the Game Center app had like leather and felt and all of that crazy stuff. And and that sort of thing where you put bolts on the side of the the clock face so that it looks like a watch as opposed to just this, you know, digital representation of a clock. So I mean, yes, that looks like an analog clock, but it doesn't look like a physical clock, if that makes sense. I don't know that I would call that Skeuomorphic, but yeah, I mean, you know. Skeuomorphism always Mr. Braun, you know, I like that. I like that you come up with this stuff. It's good. All right. I know we've talked about this before, but I also know that these kinds of things that not everybody listens to every episode, not everybody has been listening for 12 plus years and that not everybody remembers everything or any of that. But Mark says ever get one of those cryptic numeric error message numbers or messages on your Mac trying to copy something or whatever. And it says error negative five thousand two. What's an error negative five thousand two? Carefully open up the terminal says mark and type all one word Mac error. M-A-C-E-R-R-O-R space. The error number, for example, Mac error space negative five thousand two. And you'll get unknown user authentication authentication. Easy for me to say method specified. Hopefully this ticks up the tally on someone's four things to learn from the show today. Thank you so much, Mark. That's yeah, it's a handy one for sure. Using Mac error because it because it translates those things into whatever language you happen to have your Mac speaking to you. So it's good. Good. I got more. Yeah, go ahead, John. Ready for this? I'm totally ready. Um, now iTunes being iTunes, Dave, guess what? They have their own error codes. Isn't that awesome? And I know this because I found the article that says find air to iTunes error codes. So within iTunes, if you get an error code, and it's typically in parentheses. Yeah, this handy day. The article has an explanation of what those error codes mean. Just makes me kind of upset that they have a separate. A separate one. Yeah. Yeah. But hey, link to that, too. So. Cool. Yeah, this is good stuff. Really good stuff. Fun. All right. And then I think the last in our quick tips comes from listener Larry. Who says in the last show, I think you referenced some things. Oh, wait, this this comes from a long time ago. He says, when you update a multi-user Mac to a new OS, make sure you also sign into all of the user accounts after the update completes. I updated my iMac, but I did not sign into my wife's account on the machine. I could not complete a time machine backup until I had signed into her account. Seems the update does not completely finish until all user accounts are signed into. Took a lot of console and Google searches to solve the problem. The time machine would just get stuck and not complete until I logged into every account. And yeah, I've seen that happen where when you log in or when you log in the first time after an update doesn't happen all the time. But some updates say, hey, I have a bunch of questions to ask you. And you're usually just saying, yes, you know, share your, you know, crash logs with Apple or whatever whatever those questions are. Sometimes it's a please re log into iCloud message. And sometimes it's nothing at all. But yeah, I have seen that and is worth making sure you go through and do all that stuff in all the accounts. So yeah, good fine, Larry. Thank you for that. Great, great stuff. Fun, huh, Mr. Braun? I've only got one account. Right. Right. Well, some people even even just single user machines wind up or people who use a machine for a single human wind up having multiple user accounts, you know, one for admin, one for non admin, one for test purposes. I mean, you should wait a minute. You only have one account. You should have two, John, because if you don't already set up a test user account ahead of time before you have problems, you're going to have problems and then maybe you can't set up a test user account. So that's my advice everywhere is add a test user account to your computer. You're going to have problems no matter what. So. Well, yeah. But if you do something to your account that you can't log in or whatever, but a test user account lets you in, I think, I think, I think. Hey, in our Facebook group, listener Adam pointed out a piece of software called Retinizer and Retinizer is it's a crazy little app that takes any Mac apps that aren't retina ready where everything is displayed pixelated because you're on a retina screen and things aren't quite right. It takes all of the UI elements and doubles their their pixel depth so that you get that retina feel. It won't kind of it won't do everything, but but it'll do a lot of things. And I've tried it with a couple apps and it it works. So very cool. They say don't use it with Adobe Creative Suite, though. But other than that, you're good to go. So we'll put a link to that in the show notes. It's a donation where so you are free to to download it, use it for whatever you like. So thank you for that, Adam. Very good. And of course, our Facebook group is available at makeykev.com slash Facebook. It's a great group, huge, huge help and lots of stuff going on there. Sometimes it's that's great and it's really great. And then, John, yesterday, I found out about something that I think has existed for a while. But we've never I don't think we were talked about on the show. I certainly wasn't aware of what it did. It's called Parallels Toolbox. Now, we all know Parallels is the company that makes virtualization software. But this toolbox thing is very different from virtualization software. It sits in your menu bar and it has all kinds of tools like a convert video, download video, eject volumes, hide desktop, launch, lock screen, download audio, go into airplane mode for your Mac, which is handy. Presentation mode, where it hides the desktop and then mute notifications, record audio, switch resolution, very, very just simple, handy stuff to have kind of all in one place. You can take snapshots, you can record the screen with it. So so I figured I'd throw that out there. I think it is it's nine ninety nine a year to use Parallels Toolbox. And it it's it's available for yes, it's for Mac and Windows. So so there you go. So check that out. It's worth it's worth checking out. You may or may not you may or may not buy, but but that's OK. Yeah, good stuff, John. I know. Right. Did you know about this? Not to be not to be confused with Parallels Tools, which is right installs typically after Parallels updates their app. Yeah, inside the virtualized environment. Right. It'll then apply some, I guess, specialized drivers to make your life easier. That's why I had always kind of ignored it because I always thought, oh, we've released a new version of Parallels Tools. It's like, oh, OK, I mean, fine. That's great. And I know it'll tell me that when I go into my next window session and then I'll update them. But look at this. If I search, oh, yeah, Parallel. I seem to have Parallels Toolbox installed. There you go. You can even you can block the camera with it so that apps can't use the camera. I mean, it's pretty. This is pretty good. Fun stuff. So anyway, just want to make sure everybody knew it is. It is cool stuff found, so. We have a couple of tips to share. From from previous episodes. So we'll go to we'll go to Dave here and Dave says. I just caught up listening to MacGear 662 where listener Jeff was reporting Wi-Fi chaos. Anytime I hear Internet of Things devices and chaos in the same sentence, I begin to think failed security. Listener Jeff needs to consider the possibility that his network has been hacked or compromised. Always a worthy discussion when it comes to these devices as they are profoundly insecure and the vendors of a $15 light bulb aren't going to keep a crack security team on alert to patch every latest vulnerability in the software they release. Turn all those devices off says listener Dave and see if things start behaving patch them if he can. But as a general rule moving forward, we should always keep them in separate untrusted network that's nowhere near any device or data that you actually care about. So Dave's sentiment and thought process is actually quite sound. It could very well be that one of your Internet of Things devices has has been compromised. I mean, certainly we've heard about that before where they you know, they start participating in botnet attacks and that kind of thing. However, I disagree with Dave's advice. And it's not that I disagree with it. It's that I don't think it's practical. And I think it's perhaps misleading. When you say, you know, I don't trust the maker of a $15 light bulb to keep it secure. The reality is there is no $15 light bulb that works on Wi-Fi. That's you're going to pay a lot more than that to get a light bulb that works on Wi-Fi. And Wi-Fi based devices are the ones that could potentially be hacked. Right. But yes, the sentiment is right. That that that they all of these devices could be hacked. Here's the thing, though. All of the light bulbs and webcams and everything like that that I've used tend to see regular firmware updates. What doesn't see regular firmware updates is things like your printer. That is also an Internet of Things device. And many of them are Wi-Fi capable now, which means that they've got some sort of embedded operating system in them, and it's probably Linux. It's probably the, you know, the easy off the shelf operating system that can be used to do this. And your printer is worthless to you if it's on an isolated network because it means your computers and iOS devices can't talk to it in order to print. So it's an interesting trust scenario that seems to happen. Everybody, everybody that I've talked to about this when I say printer, they're like, well, my printer's going to be fine because they know they can't isolate it off. It's like, that's really interesting that, you know, this printer that you've had for five years that literally has seen zero firmware updates is something that doesn't concern you. And yet the brand new whiz bang light bulb or webcam that you have that's seen for firmware updates a year is the thing that you're most worried about. And, you know, I'm not I think there's a logical disconnect there. I think and and and and from a convenience factor, even with a webcam, most of the time, the way you're set, you're going to set it up, you're going to want to point that webcam or point something on your network to that webcam to read from it. So isolating it isn't going to help you. In fact, it's going to limit the functionality and perhaps limit it down to zero. So I think the solution to this because it is a problem. I'm not dismissing the problem. I'm just dismissing the the the idea of creating a separate segmented wireless network that only these things are on. I mean, first of all, that's a pain in the neck to do, even if there was no problems with it, but there are problems with it. And so people aren't going to do it. 99 percent of the people out there aren't going to do it. I think it's up to router manufacturers like Iro with their Iro plus service that's monitoring your one of the things it does, right, is it will monitor your network for suspicious behavior like this, right? Or that bit defender box that we talked about. But obviously don't get that particular one. But there's several products in the category like the Kujo and Norton's got something coming. And, you know, there are things either routers or separate boxes that will just monitor the traffic on your network and make sure that nothing seems out of whack. And that, I think, is the the the realistic way for most of us to do it. It should just be built into every router. And it seems like some router manufacturers are going that way, just to be clear, like Synology with their intrusion, intrusion protection. And because it's it's not just intrusion protection, it's actually protection in both directions and then Iro with what they're doing. So I think that's the solution here, John. What do you think? We haven't heard back. I'm I'm still kind of up in the air. I I'm with you and that I don't think the problem was IoT devices specific. No, I'm not a secure. I don't think it was a security. Yeah, let's get out of the weeds, though, of of of Jeff's scenario and just have. I mean, because that's I mean, Jeff's scenario is Jeff's. But let's, you know, but really, I'm asking, what do you think about this in general? Because I that's sort of the problem that's more applicable to the audience here. Oh, yeah, it's an emerging space. And yeah, we've looked at some of them, some and we'll follow up. I think I had a Kujo, which I think they got in touch with me, saying, yeah, we've got some follow up to do from the show we just went to. Right. Yeah, they were right at that PEPCOM show that we just did. And that that's one of the things I love about those those shows is you do get to start to see kind of like you said, emerging, developing trends. And there were three, four companies there, four out of like 30, which is sort of a high percentage that we're selling some sort of solution for the not selling, but but pitching some sort of solution for this problem. Again, either in a router or in a separate box. So, yeah, I think I think two years from now, anything you buy that manages your network will have something like this in it because it's the only play. It's the only way, I think. You know, Mr. Braun, no, I'm just because Kujo. I mean, who doesn't love Kujo? Yeah, well, after well, actually after what we went through with Bit Defender and their box, I'm I'm hesitant to recommend anything until we've tried it. And and so we promise not to waste 10 minutes of your time talking about something we're not going to recommend again. We will simply not discuss it, maybe in passing, we will, but we will we will not spend a great deal of time discussing something that's bad. We will just tell you, don't get that one, get this instead. So yeah, yeah, well, they're working on it. They're working on Rev too. Yeah, which is great. I gave them my my list of the demands, right? And it's stuff they're all aware of. But yeah, yeah, they're sure. But they, you know, dip their toe in the water. And now, yeah, like you said, there were five, five different people there. Yeah, it's crazy. It's crazy. Yeah. All right. And then Mark had a follow up here. So Mark was the one in 663 that was having issues updating all of his Apple apps. And we gave some sort of generic advice to go through and do that. But we had known at the time when we were giving you that advice that in Mark's specific scenario, that did not solve it for him. But Mark did find a solution. And it really is strange. It was that iTunes was not up to date. And so he updated iTunes by manually downloading the latest iTunes from Apple and installing it. And after doing that, everything worked. And I will say this. I, you know, I use Noteburner to take movies that I've bought from the Apple store and convert them for to strip the DRM out of them so I can use them in Plex or whatever. And and I have no problem doing that, by the way, because, you know, I bought the stupid thing. I just want to use it on my devices. Your mileage may vary with that. But when I ran Noteburn the other day, it says you need to update iTunes. Do you want me to download it for you? And I'm like, no, I'll do it through the Mac App Store. I went Mac App Store. No updates. iTunes, no updates. But so I said, all right, Noteburner, go ahead and download it. I was on iTunes 12 6 125. And the manually downloaded copy was 12 6 127. So it seems like something about iTunes is still far. More deeply baked into our O.S.'s than I certainly realized. I always treat it like an app. But no, I think I think the O.S. relies on it a lot more than that. So manually downloading iTunes and at this point, you know, as of the day we're recording the show, which is three days before it's going to come out, so it might change again. But 12 6 127 is the latest release of iTunes. Strangely enough, there you go. I don't know. What do you think, John? Huh, I only have 25. See, I'm the curve, man. Well, how would you know, right? It's crazy, crazy, crazy, crazy. Anyway, that's that's what we got here. Any other thoughts on any of these tips, John? Or I think it's good. I think you can also this may be a good troubleshooting step sometimes. But I think you can also manually download. And I think I've had to do this in the past. But Safari, you can also manually download. Huh. All right. Right. So if it gets corrupt or starts acting up, we want to toss it, download it again. Oh, interesting. I'm looking, I'm looking at, I don't know where that would come from. I'm looking at Apple dot com slash or support dot apple dot com slash downloads. And I don't I'm not seeing Safari listed separately. I mean, I'm seeing it's right there, man. Which version of Safari are you seeing, though? I mean, I'm seeing like Safari for Snow Leopard and Safari one point two, but not not Safari 10 dot one dot one or later. I'm seeing it at support dot apple dot com slash download slash Safari. Oh, interesting. Look at actually there. It says a lot of categories of downloads there. Quick time peripherals. But did you go to that page? I mean, if you go to support dot Apple dot com slash download Safari. Get the you see get the latest version, right? Yeah. OK. And when you click the link to download, you are brought to Apple Knowledge Base article, HT 204416 that says Safari is included with your Mac to get the latest version of Safari install the latest Mac OS. So there's no separate download for Safari. There's just instructions on how to make sure you get it to be. That's what I'm saying. There's like for Snow Leopard and before it seems like you can download Safari, but but not separately the first one. You can, though, download WebKit separately, which is sort of the core technology under elite underneath Safari. And WebKit is available as a browser. It's also sometimes called the Safari technology preview. But yeah, so WebKit can be fun to play with. And there's always stuff and the release notes are always interesting too, because it is updated far more frequently than Safari, as you might expect. And you can see things that are most likely going to come to Safari. So which is fun. So we'll put that in the chat and in the show notes for everybody. All right, I want to are we good on this one, John? I think so. OK, cool. Just learn something. Yeah, exactly. That's why we do this. I know it's good. Changed it. I know they change a lot of things, man. The only constant is change, my friend. Well, and TextExpander from Smile, because I couldn't live without it. And good news, as I said before, that's our first sponsor for today's episode. Visit TextExpander.com slash geek to learn all about TextExpander. But I will tell you that TextExpander is one of those apps that I can't live without. And this week I put my money where my mouth is. I have because I'm a member of the press and because we do the show and because we're friends with the people that smile, I've always they've always provided me with a, you know, a complimentary copy of TextExpander. And last year it moved to a subscription service and they provided me with a subscription this week. My subscription expired and I didn't even think twice. I didn't ask anybody at Smile. I didn't do anything. I went in, I gave him my PayPal. I think it was PayPal was either my PayPal or my credit card. And I bought myself another year of subscription of TextExpander because I want to support this app because I use it. I mean what I say in these ad spots. This is a piece of software that I I suppose I could live without. I certainly do not want to even think about using a Mac without having this installed. TextExpander eliminates boilerplate drudgery. It's perfect for standardizing and improving all the little replies written type that you do every day. And the cool part about it is you get to pull these things together and make them perfect. Right. So, you know, an easy one to think about is like an alternate email signature where you're like, yeah, I want to say this when I'm talking to these people. And boom, TextExpander can do that for you. You just would type like you would you would craft. You would perfectly craft your alternate signature. And then you would invoke it with a shortcut like, you know, comma alt, SIG or something. I don't know. Whatever you want that to be. Just something short that you can remember. I put my address in there. I have John's address in there. So when somebody needs my address for something, I type D-H-A-D-D and boom, out comes my address perfectly formatted. No opportunity for human error. I know my address, but it doesn't mean I'm not going to type all it. And then that's bad because on my address, Durham, New Hampshire is one letter different from Durham, North Carolina. And that's bad when things go to Durham, North Carolina and they're supposed to come to me and TextExpander can save me from that. And I'm certain it has. TextExpander also lets you do very, very cool things with formatting and inserting live data. So you could craft a perfectly worded email response for, say, a frequently asked question. And you could have it put the date in there or you could have it auto bake the URL from your clipboard into it because TextExpander has these macros that can be very, very powerful. In fact, they can even prompt you to ask you for data. So you got to check this out. Go to TextExpander.com slash geek, download it, try it out and and then join me in paying for TextExpander and making it a part of everything that you do every day. Our thanks to Smile for sponsoring this episode. OK, I really love TextExpander. In fact, I just used it at the end, like I said, I use it all the time. All right, let's go to Marcus, because Marcus is going to we there were lots of weird issues with email this week. And it seems seems like that's where we all that's where we've all been. So Marcus says, I currently have five IMAP email accounts enabled in Mac OS mail on my Mac Pro and Mac Book Pro. And I would like to get better at managing my inbox right now. Emails come in and stay in their relative inboxes. But I would like to start organizing them into folders because my combined inbox has over 41,000 emails. Can you recommend any methods to make this easier? Googling Mac OS mail add-ons brings up a good amount of options. But I'm not sure where to start. I'm hesitant to use clients like Air Mail and Spark since I don't trust their security and they like to create additional folders in each account. I really don't care about snoozing emails. I I'm totally with you. If, you know, if the UI of things like Air Mail or Spark or any third party client are not your thing, no problem, I get that. I know the people that develop both of those and I would trust Air Mail and Spark security, no problem. But that, you know, there you go. Not trying to convince you to use them, just trying to make sure that we don't start a narrative here. There are a lot of different ways to go. You could create rules inside mail that take certain emails and filter them and do different things with them. You could, depending on who your mail provider is, iCloud, Google, Fastmail, I'll do it sort of differently and at different levels, but you could create those emails on the server side. And the nice part about server side rules is that you don't need to have mail running on your Mac. Your Mac doesn't need to be awake for those filters to happen. And then you get the benefit of those filters when you look at the inbox on your iPhone or another device. But I don't use any of those kinds of things. I mean, I do a little bit, but the bulk of my work is done by a third party service called Sanebox. Sanebox is it's a four pay service. It monitors your IMAP, so you have to extend them some trust. I do. I have been using Sanebox five years, maybe. And basically ever since they came out, they they start. They have their own layer of heuristics that decides what is important to leave in your inbox, what is not important, and then it puts those into other boxes for you to check later. But if it and it will, if it does something, I don't want to say if it gets it wrong, but if it does something that doesn't fit for you, like, for example, there's one newsletter that you get every day that's really important to you and you want that to be in your inbox, not in, say, the same news box where all the other newsletters go. All you do is you drag one copy of that newsletter from your same news box back to your inbox. Sanebox will realize you've done that and that trains it in order to do all of those things that you want later. And it will it's it's amazing. It just stellar. So I for somebody that gets a lot of email, Sanebox is hands down the thing that I would recommend and know this isn't yet a second ad spot. Although I know Sanebox is is dancing around fishing and interested in sponsoring the show. But I would say this regardless of that and have been for years. So yeah, there you go, John. So it watches you and it's a rule based on what you did. It does. That's really smart. I know. So trust me. And the cool part is I can I can do that from any device, right? If I do it from my iPhone, it watch it, it sees that too. So yeah. Cool. Mm hmm. Yeah. I'm my current. Solution is lots of rules. Right. And you can do that, correct. And I used to live like that, but it's it's tough to to keep on top of that. Yeah. Yeah. Yes. And sometimes I mean, most rules are cool when whoever's sending you stuff does the same thing. Unfortunately, that doesn't always happen. It's like for certain bills or certain whatever that I get via email. Yeah. You know, if it's from. Sometimes they do something silly and you have to tweak the rule a little bit. So it may come from, you know, megacorp3email.com. And it's like, oh, gosh, why are you changing? Why did you do this to me? Yeah. Yeah. Well, the thing is they make I understand that you want to have a server farm, you know, of email servers and stuff like that. But when you have a rule based on it being exactly the same as something and then all of a sudden they decide to throw a monkey wrench in there. Because sometimes I have I get something and I'm like, well, wait, that rule is supposed to handle this. And then I look at the from address and I'm like, oh, great. OK, you changed something or you had a new server or you had a new domain and all of a sudden you broke my rules. That's the thing I like about sandbox is they tend to pick up on, you know, if they aren't just, you know, they don't have their filters don't have tunnel vision, right? It's like, OK, if it's like this, then it's probably still we want to do the same thing we're doing with this other one. So yeah, it's pretty good. It would it handle the one challenge that I find. So so I had to go through this again when I switched my TMO email back to the Gmail interface versus forwarding. Yeah, but. The challenge with a lot of these, and I'm wondering if sandbox is smart enough to figure this out, but a lot of times you'll get an email and you won't be in the two field. So they do a BCC or something like that. And that gets kind of tricky because how do you determine? Well, but your mail headers still so you can deal with that on your own because there's generally a header that's not displayed, but is there in the message called delivered hyphen to capital D, capital T. That's exactly what I had to do for once that missed the filter. I'm like, well, why didn't this get caught? Oh, because it doesn't see my email address in in the two field. Right. But then as you pointed out, there's a way to tweak Gmail and most others to say, yeah, if delivered to is Johnatmackobserver.com. Then use that rule to put it in my TMO mailbox as well. Yep. Yeah. Yeah, it's pretty insane box. We'll pay attention to that, too. But like you said, you can do that with with mail or Gmail or I haven't done a lot with iCloud's server based filters. But but yeah. So anyway, there's there's some answers for you, Marcus. And hopefully that's helpful to to everyone. The link that I put in the show notes is is one of those. You scratch my back and I scratch yours links that I think you get five bucks off and I get a five dollar credit at my sandbox account because it's one I pay for. I always have. So sorry, there's no reason not to use the link. But I always like to disclose when it's like it's one of those, you know, mutually beneficial sort of things. So there's a link in the show notes for it. And that's the one that'll that'll save you a little bit if you want to try it out. But you can try it out. I think you get a couple of weeks or whatever. So anyway. OK, moving along, but staying with the email theme, we have a note from Ian saying I decided it was time to look at encrypting my email. So I looked at Jeff Butts's article that he posted at Mac Observer. And of course, he came on the show and talked about. He says, I set up a certificate from Komodo. Hopefully this email is signed as and he did. He sent us a signed email to our Mackie Keb address, which worked out great. He said, I do have a couple of questions. He says, when I signed up at Komodo, I noticed that the certificate is only valid for one year. Does this mean if I forget or am unable to renew the cert, then any encrypted emails will no longer be viewable. Number two, the Komodo cert was free. This always worries me as a long term business model. Do you recommend a different provider slash one that charges? Number three, for work email, I'd like to use a different iOS app to keep email accounts segregated. Currently, I'm using airmail, but not specifically tied to this. Are there any other apps apart from mail that support email encryption on iOS? So, yeah, in the expiration date and the free thing are sort of tied together, but not really the certificate. I believe the way they're issued, they have to have an expiration date. Komodo, but once it expires, the only thing that will stop from happening is people will be will not easily be able to use it to send you encrypted mail and you won't be able to easily use it to sign mail. But in terms of decrypting it, as long as you keep both the private and public key, which if you did it through Komodo and in Safari are stored in your iOS key chain, as long as you keep those forever and remember whatever password or authentication you put on them, which may be none and that's OK because it's saved in your key chain. As long as you have the private and public key pair, you will always be able to decrypt mail that was sent to you with a now expired certificate. Did you have something to say about that, John, before I answer the next question? The other thing that will start happening is that people that people that try to process mail that's been signed or encrypted with an expired certificate, they're going to start to get warnings. Well, yeah, only if you send them new mail that's expired or they haven't or they look at old mail, but that's right. Yeah, correct. What happens is that it'll say I had a problem verifying the email. If you look for the details, it's then going to show your cert. And it's going to say, by the way, the reason I'm complaining is that the it's expired and that the person needs to get a new one. So things will work, but people will start getting warnings. Same with websites. If you go to a website with an expired cert, you'll get a warning. And then when you when you dig in, you'll see that. Right. Yeah, exactly. But to your point also, don't get rid of. But we've had one or two people saying, well, I'm going to tidy everything up here and get rid of all my old certificates. And it's like, no, no, no, no, no. Yeah. Yeah. Don't best not to touch any of that. I've even been tempted also. I have some certs and various other. So a few things that show expired. And I'm like, should I be tidy and get? No, no, no. No, don't. There's a reason it's there. Yes, that's right. It's it's understandable that it's frustrating to see things that appear to be non-functional in your key chain, but don't touch that. Yeah, on this, especially in this case, don't touch it. Yeah, I'm with you. All right. And then the expiry or the free part, Komodo does offer personal email certs for free. They do have a a a healthy paid business model. I mean, I don't know if it's healthy. They have a paid business model. I have no idea whether their company is healthy or not. But so they they use this as a way to attract people and get their name out there. Obviously, here we are talking about Komodo. Every time we talk about email certs and so my guess is even from that, they've already gotten some paid business because they'll sell you a cert for your website or if you want an email cert for your business. Those aren't free. Only personal certs are free, etc. So that part doesn't worry me and it's a nice little service that they provide for free for for, you know, for the uses that that makes sense. But you could pay for an email cert and some email cert providers will then renew your certificate after a year in a way that's a little easier to manage than what we have to deal with with Komodo, which is there is no renewal. There is no fanfare one year after your cert's been issued. It will expire. So I have to put every year on my calendar a month prior. So at the 11 month mark, I put, hey, dumb dumb, go generate some more email certs. So every year our email certs, we really only use them for 11 months. And then we get new ones. And I say we because I have my own. John has his own. But then we also share certs for the the to Mackie cab addresses that we have feedback at Mackie cab dot com. And of course, premium at Mackie cab dot com. I think the first thing you said was feedback at Mackie cab. Yeah, no, the first thing I said was feedback at Mackie cab dot com. And we do maintain a live cert for that. So any mail you get from us will have that certificate. So if you then add your own cert, then you can encrypt mail back and forth with us and we love to do that because it gives the NSA something to think about. And that's great. As far as iOS apps that support encryption, mail on iOS is the only one that I know of that does Esmime. But for PGP, that landscape is actually growing quite rapidly. It's it's sort of sucked for a while to be perfectly honest. But but lately there have been a few new ones out. And the one I've been testing most recently is called Canary Mail at canarymail.io. And and that it's smooth. But it's not for Esmime. It's for PGP. There's nothing wrong with PGP. In fact, some may argue it's better than Esmime. It's not built into iOS or support for it is not built into iOS or Mac OS like like support for Esmime is. But but it it's still very secure and, you know, all of that good stuff. So canary mail and canary mail is available for both Mac and iOS. It does some cool things that will use iCloud to sync your settings. But obviously nothing that would compromise your encryption. But yeah, very cool stuff. So I recommend checking out canary mail if if you're if you're interested in this. I think it's like ten bucks or something. So it's not, you know, it's not it's the right price. If you ask me. There you go. Yeah, John, good. As far as I know. All right, cool. While we're talking about mail, let's do I'm going to say one more question. But I'll be perfectly honest that it's going to be two things because I had my own mail issue here, John, that I'd like to tell everybody about Dan writes the segment in last week's show about the unread the incorrect unread count in mail made me think about one frustration I have always had with the mail app on my iMac. I have my Gmail address set up on my iMac under the Gmail account. I have set up folders for different things like Amazon apps, orders, work people, etc. If I click on any of those folders, they appear empty. If I do a search, mail finds the message and shows the location as archived. But in iOS, in the mail app, those same folders appear and the messages are in them. I've always wondered about why the discrepancy very ironic that this mail, this message came in, or at least I read it on a day when I prepped Matt Geek up from the studio here. And the reason was that yesterday on my iMac. And I think I think my answer might be the same answer for for Dan here. On my iMac, suddenly midday yesterday, my inbox only showed unread messages. And as soon as a message was read and I moved off of it, it disappeared from my inbox. Now, of course, when I first saw that, I thought, everything in my inbox is gone. It's not. I checked online. I checked on my iPhone. Everything's totally fine. No problem. Why won't it appear on my Mac? So I told it to rebuild the mailbox and go to the the message man. And any one of these things might work for Dan, by the way, most of them didn't for me, and I'll tell you what did. But but any one of these things might work for Dan. So the first thing is mail caches, a lot of its data. And it's possible that those caches can get stale, corrupted, whatever. So I I highlighted my inbox and I went to the message. Sorry, the mailbox menu and I chose rebuild didn't solve the problem for me. But it might for you. So it's worth doing. Then I thought, OK, let me run onyx and tell it to. So I quit mail. I mean, you know, I did the obvious things. That didn't work. I restarted my Mac. That didn't work. So I launched onyx and I told onyx to wipe out my mail envelope index. And it didn't seem to do anything because when you wipe out the mail envelope index, you quit mail, you wipe out the index, you relaunch mail, and it has to rebuild the entire index, which can take a long time. It for me, I have, you know, hundreds of thousands of emails that I've archived over the years. And so, you know, it can take an hour even on a fast machine with an SSD. But it didn't mail just launched just fine. And I looked in home library mail and I think it's in like v4 or something now. But but there were the three files that comprised my mail envelope index. So I quit mail again. I deleted those files, everything related to envelope index there. And then I relaunched mail and said, hey, we need to reimport your email, which is what should have happened. So I did that. And while I was doing that, of course, I couldn't use email since most of your questions come in via email. I had to prep back from the studio, which is fine. Very comfortable up here. No problem. So I did that. And then when I finished prepping, I went back downstairs. And it had finished and I still had the same problem, John. So I started freaking out like I, you know, I can't live like this. And I noticed something at the top of the screen. When I went and here, the interesting part was, you know, I have two email accounts and this was happening to my main one. But if I went to the unified inbox that sort of, you know, Coles is all of my email, those messages were there. So it's like mail sees them. Why won't it show them to me when I want to just see the messages in this email box? And I noticed at the top of my alternate email, my secondary email box, it listed the number of messages said, you know, whatever, 20 messages, one on red or something. But when I went to my main email box, it said zero filtered messages. So I'm like, aha, I think I know where to go with this. So I went to the view menu and I saw that it said, I forget what the option was because I'm not different problem, but I'm not on Sierra here in the studio and this is a feature of Sierra. But there's something about hide or show, enable or disable message filter. And the option in the view menu was disable message filter. So I did that and then everything appeared. OK, how do I configure this message filter? Because I have an option now in the view menu to enable or disable the message filter and its command L. But there's nowhere I can find nothing to configure what's being filtered. And I know it's not calling it in the menu disable the unread message filter. So I know by default it's that filter. And I look because I know on iOS there's that little down in the lower left of your mail list on iOS, you've got the little it's like a, I don't know, it's the filter option. And you can tell it to filter and then you just tap it. It's like in the lower right, there's the new message icon in the lower left, there's the little filter icon and then you can configure the filter. There's no icon. There's nothing telling me. And I'm looking online and they're saying, yeah, you have that same icon on the Mac. I don't have that icon on my Mac. Do you have that icon in mail on your Mac on Sierra, John? It's like it's like three lines in a triangle in three lines in the shape of a triangle inside of a circle. I bet you don't. And I don't think it's able but enabled by default. So well, no, it is enabled by default for certain. However, I there's no icon for it in the toolbar. It is not in the toolbar. It is in the title bar of messages of your message list, and it will be there by default with, I guarantee you this, and you cannot put it in your toolbar. It is only in the title bar of your message list, but it is not in the title bar of your message list. If you use classic layout in mail, filters are not configurable if you use classic layout in mail. So I had to go in to, I mean, I didn't have to. Once I turned off the filter, everything was fine. But by going into mail preferences, viewing and unchecking the box that says use classic layout, of course, now I went to the three pane layout in mail and at the top of the screen or at the top of the message list, I get the little filter button that lets me configure what that filter is going to be. Pretty interesting, huh, Mr. Braun? That's a journey. Exactly. Yeah, I've had, this is going to be much quicker, but I've had some cases where what I see in the message list isn't what I expect to see. Make sure that you don't have the search field. Hmm, I've had that happen to me once or I'm like, totally. Why am I not seeing it? And then all of a sudden, looking carefully, well, you'll see at the top of the screen don't normally say in box and we'll show the number of messages and the number on red, right? But if you're operating on a search term, it's going to say in box and then found, for example, seven message matches for search. Yeah. I've panicked a couple of times because I'm like, wait a second, all my messages have disappeared, kind of like you. Yeah, right. There's a reason for this. Right, right. Don't panic. But yeah, yeah, I went quickly from panic to just frustration because I knew they were there and it's like, can you just show them to me? But yeah, very, I must have hit command L. It somehow, because that's the that's the keystroke to toggle this on and off because obviously I didn't click anything in the UI because it's not in my UI. I really like the list in non classic layout, but I prefer the preview pane of my messages to be below my message list so that it's wide as opposed to to the right of my message list, which makes me have to make it narrower because it's sharing space. So that's why I like classic layout. But but there are a lot of little UI widgets in the standard layout of mail. If you don't have classic layout on that are actually much, much nicer. It just seems like Apple like classic layout is truly being treated like classic layout. Like, OK, we're not going to change anything about this, including not adding any of the new features that we're putting in the standard layout, which is just interesting. I kind of make sense. So, you know what I mean? No. Yeah. All right. I want to, you know, we talked about the premium at MacGicab.com email address, John, and I want to take a moment and thank all of our MacGicab premium subscribers that contributed this week. Let's see, we had one time contributions, one from Harvey for five bucks and one from the entity known as working smarter for Mac users, which is a great book from Bob Levitis for 100 bucks. So thanks so much, Bob and Harvey, for your one time contributions. A great book, too, by the way. Bob's a good guy. Monthly on the monthly ten dollar plan, we had Michael P. This week, Elizabeth B., Chris F. and Jim E., thank you to all four of you for your support. And then on the biannual 25 bucks every six month plan, we had Robert P. Karen Kay, who was new this week, David P. Richard S. and Jeffrey F., thanks to all of you, Karen for being new and Robert, David, Richard and Jeffrey for your continued support, you folks. You rock. And I know I say it every week, but we really mean it. So thank you so, so much. That's awesome, but you are able to help us in this way. It really means a lot. So thank you. All right, John, let's let's answer a couple other questions here. Let's jump to Mike here, because Mike's got Mike's got an interesting one. He says, I allowed Comcast to install their latest cable modem router over the top of my old airport network. The router in the airport is in bridge mode. We still use time capsule for regular time machine backups of both my wife's iMac and my MacBook Air. The Comcast network, as in the private one that they created for me, the one that's only for my house, works quite well for wireless communications to both my Macs, my iPad Airs, my iPhones and my Apple TVs. It has from day one worked well now for months. Just speed tested it and I get 200 down and 12 up. Cool. He says, but the doggone Xfinity Wi-Fi network keeps popping up. In particular, my wife's iMac likes to pick up the Xfinity Wi-Fi instead of the preferred private Wi-Fi. This wreaks havoc when trying to talk with printers and such. So my question is, is it worth keeping the Xfinity network enabled? Will it come in handy if my private network fails? Do I keep it just to be a good Xfinity citizen? I live in an area where most homes are on two acres or more if that makes a difference for Xfinity. Furthermore, if I want to kill it, is it a straight, is it straightforward to browse to the Xfinity router and just turn it off? So answering your questions in, well, I don't know about in order, but separating them out. In terms of your Xfinity network helping you when your home network fails, your Xfinity network is running on exactly the same radios and on the same channel as your private network. And in fact, it from a wireless standpoint, it is the same network. It's just that the traffic on it is segmented out from a privacy standpoint. Right. So the traffic is not mixed on it, but it's literally on the same radios that are in that are being used for your private network. So while I suppose we could come up with a scenario where the Xfinity network would work and the private network wouldn't in general. No, I don't think it's going to make difference. I don't think there's going to be a scenario. I mean, if the radio dies, they both die. If the router dies, obviously they both die. And my guess is even if your account goes into a rears or something and they turn off your account, my guess is they're going to kill both of those things anyway. So yeah, I don't think from that standpoint, you need to have it as a backup because it's not really a backup to disable it though. So I see, especially for you, I see no downside in disabling it. You're on a two acre lot. Chances are you're not reaching the street with that anyway. It's not like you're in a downtown area or like you, John, you know, where you're close to the street and people walking could, you know, could pick up that kind of a network. You know, if you're on a big lot, I don't think it's going to help. It could be convenient for if and when you have guests over because they could pick up that Xfinity network without pestering you for your Wi-Fi password and being on your network. So you might want it from that standpoint, but otherwise, no, I don't think you need to keep it running. Turning it off is simple, but it's not through the path that we would think you don't log into the router locally to do it. You actually log into your Xfinity account and turn it off essentially in the cloud and then that pushes the change down to your router. And I'll put a link in the notes about how to do that. Xfinity provides actually very, very clear instructions. So there you go. Yes. Any thoughts about this, John? The only thing that I would make sure that you do here. So in the case of it, finding your finding the Xfinity network before your other one, your private one, let's make sure it sounds like this is not the case, but if you go to your network and your Wi-Fi and then you click on advanced in the Wi-Fi tab, you're going to see preferred networks. Just make sure that your private one is at the top of the list there. It sounds like it's not or somehow Xfinity may have gotten placed in there too. So it has higher priority, which should it should connect to a secure one versus an insecure one. But your house is probably broadcasting both. I mean, that's what they generally do is they broadcast the secure one and the yeah, the insecure one. So go to the preferred networks and just make sure that the one you want is at the top of the list. Sounds like it may not be. Yeah. So we've got an interesting chat happening in the in the chat room. Listener Brian Rowe says, because it's on different IP ranges, it's a different it's not the same Wi-Fi network. And perhaps we're splitting hairs here. But my feeling on this is that, yes, you're correct in that from a security and privacy standpoint and from a network name standpoint, it's a different network. However, you are still sharing Wi-Fi bandwidth with whatever devices are on both because it is the same radio. So it is the same Wi-Fi network. You just have virtual names happening, virtual SSIDs. And then and then you're taking the traffic on those virtual SSIDs and doing things, different things with them. So depending on what your definition of the term Wi-Fi network is, yes, it could be considered different, but very important to remember, especially for those of you that are close to a street or, you know, somewhere where people will regularly be using this network. It will because it's sharing the same Wi-Fi radios, it will impact your ability to use your data. Now, maybe Comcast is doing some some interesting things that somehow prioritize, you know, the devices connected to one SSID versus others, but it is on the same radio. So there you go. Yes, yes. Yeah. All right. All right. That's another question. I'd love some thoughts on this, although I don't think we're going to have a great answer. But also one from another listener, Mike, he says, I have my phone hooked up to my car radio through Bluetooth for music. I just used the music app. The new car that I have has a crappy sound sounding sound system. So I've been playing with the EQ because I'm a sound geek. I have found a good EQ with smart live and a measuring mic. I'm just trying to find a way of implementing this setting into iOS. There's this app called Smart EQ that I tried and it works pretty well. The downside is that it doesn't play protected songs and doesn't have the car control that the music app has. So I would like to use the music app for this. Number one, is there a way to customize the EQ settings in the music app? Number two, is there a better EQ app for iOS that I could use that would still play my protected songs? He says, I know I can burn and re-rip the protected songs, which may be coming soon, he says. Number three, is there a better EQ app just in general? Have you guys tried any others? Number four, should I just buy a Sonos system for the car and run an internal Wi-Fi? Says, I wonder if I could mount the play bar on the dash. Well, if you do number four, Mike, I want to see pictures. That would certainly be interesting to have a Sonos network in your car. But short of doing that. The you can apply EQ for the music app. It's not entirely obvious until you do it. And then, of course, it is like anything. But if you go into the settings app and then scroll down to music, in there, you will see EQ. There are a bunch of predefined EQs in there that you can choose from. I on my phone, I don't find any customizable EQ there. I think at one point in time, there was a customizable EQ, but that doesn't exist anymore, at least not for me. So you may remain up, but there's a lot of settings. So you might be able to find one that gets you close. If that doesn't work, then, yeah, you're stuck with third party apps. I had never used any of the ones that you mentioned, but I had tried one a number of years ago called Boom from Global Delight. And we'll put that in there. And they they do it's not just EQ, but they do some compression and then some processing on the music that, you know, you may or may not find to your liking. So I'll put a link to that in the show notes, too. But but yeah, there's no there's no plug-ins for EQ on the phone. So you can't do a third party app to run things from the music app. And of course, the music app is the only one that can play your DRM content, et cetera, et cetera. So any thoughts on that, John? Get some car speakers that have an equalizer. Well, my guess is he does have an EQ in the car, but it's probably just treble and bass and get right. I mean, but but yes, I mean that easier said than done when they're built into the car. But, you know, yeah, sure. All right. Hey, you want to take us to Rick, John? Rick's got a good one. All right. We're going to get geeky for a second. Yeah. Yeah. All right. Rick says, I'm looking for a Wi-Fi router setup that would allow me to change the Wi-Fi password programmatically daily. I have twin 13 year olds on my wife and I are concerned that they are not doing anything but playing on their iPads computers all the time. I talked to parents and one of the cool idea was a work for a Wi-Fi setup. You do a set amount of chores or school work, and then you get today's Wi-Fi password. It would be simple for me to generate the password by any number of programming languages. My problem is I don't really want to go into my time capsule and change the password every morning. I want to automate it. And he said, what do you think? And then you replied, Dave. Yeah, well, you were on the right path here. Yeah. I mean, there's no... I guess you could write some kind of Apple script that would use user interface scripting on your Mac, right, to go and change the time machine or the time capsule password. It's probably fraught with opportunities for malfunctioning and then possibly locking everyone out from your Wi-Fi network. So I started thinking, OK, is is there a better way? Do you use a third-party router with maybe even third-party firmware like DDWirt where you can go and program this stuff in Linux and script it? And of course, DDWirt, sort of picking up from our last question, DDWirt will let you have virtual SSIDs on your same router so you could have one for the parents that never changes and then one for the guests that you do change and the guests or not even guests, but just kids that you do change and you could do that programmatically with a Linux script. But really, what's built for this is a radius server, which is where you have an external server and people log in not just with a password, but with username and password. So enterprise WPA2 instead of personal WPA2. That's kind of where I was thinking with it. But I'm crazy, John. And I like your thinking because a radius server is something that you can do using Apple equipment. So first off, what is radius? Well, radius stands for remote authentication dial-in user service, though we're way beyond dial-in dial-in, right? But it's basically on a authentication server. And you know who has one, Dave? No, Mac OS server. Is that crazy or what? I'll put on my, yeah, so I did a little research here and there is a radius service in Mac OS server. There's also one in your Synology Disk Station. If you want to go that route, just FYI, so that, you know, if you don't run Mac OS server, but you run Synology Disk Station, you could do that too. Yeah. All right. So if you have OS 10 server, you can then implement radius and one of the things that radius does and that goes beyond the scope of this here, but there is an article that explains how to get at the radius server. Sure. Yeah, some association. So it's conceivable you could generate, you know, one option for radius servers, it could just look at a text file. So you could upload a different text file to it every day. The other thing is that almost every Wi-Fi and there's also mentioned in this article, I think of wanting to move to a mesh product at some point or why just to explore it anyways. So the thing is the Apple equipment and the end the era, and I think almost every Wi-Fi access point has parental controls. And typically what this involves is setting rules for a device to access it. And it's usually time. So it's like, OK, run this device, then don't allow access between these hours and allow access during these hours. And maybe that's good enough. Maybe that's what you maybe that will give you enough control. Yep. Saying, OK, you know, after. You know, before dinner, whatever you're supposed to be doing your homework. No access. Yes. That's it. Now, their behavior may not be that predictable. I kind of like the idea. It's getting geeky because you're going to have to set up a radius server. Another option is that I did find they have cloud based radius servers and actually did find a free one. Though I haven't tried them. I'm going to have to try one of these guys either set up my own. In Mac OS server, there's also open source radius servers, and then there are cloud based ones. I have one called jump cloud dot com. And they say, yeah, we got a 10 user free forever deal if you'd like to try it. So here's my advice for you. And I don't mean you, John. In fact, you and I had this conversation. But in in general, I would say be aware that what you're doing is creating a scenario where access to your Wi-Fi network is dependent on now two devices. It's not just up to it is not just self-contained in your router, right? If you're doing radius authentication and the router can't speak with the radius server, wherever that may be locally or in the cloud, you're likely going to have trouble getting into your Wi-Fi network. So that and maybe they cash credentials. I don't know, right? I haven't done enough testing with radius, but you want to be aware that you're creating this scenario where, especially with a cloud server, if your Wi-Fi, like if you can't get out to the internet, neither can your router. And now you can't even authenticate with your Wi-Fi to do anything. And but the same would be true if if you did it, say with your Mac OS server or your Synology, if that box, your Mac OS box or your Synology box goes down. Well, same problem. So just be aware of the the potential for for issues or if the cat choose the cable between the router and the the thing or like last week, John. Yeah, your cat's becoming quite the network engineer. Different cat, but yes. Right. So last week, folks, if you listened all the way to the very end of the show, you heard John drop off at the end and I had no idea at the time, why? Well, I did some diagnosing and my internet was was down. I had no internet connection. My router was down. So I ran across to the house after we ended the show and and I looked and the router was off. And I'm like, oh, man, it burned out or it died or whatever. I'm like, crap. I mean, it's not awful for me. I, as you all know, I have piles of routers. So it's like, OK, I got to put a new one in place. Like, wait a minute, it's awfully quiet over here. There's nothing on like the TV, nothing's on. I realized that the UPS had been turned off. The power switch is on the on the top of it. And we have this kitten and his name is Puck. And Puck killed the Wi-Fi, man. So, you know, he'd turned off the UPS. I turned it back on. Everything came back up. No problem. He's on his way to a basic troubleshooting. The only half of it. He only implemented half of it. That's right. I don't know what the problem was he was trying to solve. But but but I mean, but hey, you know, oftentimes my family doesn't know what problem I'm trying to solve when I do crazy things. So, you know, I'm not here to judge. I'm just saying, dude, you got to, like, like you said, you got to complete the circle there. Yeah. I think he was upset that I didn't like his last Instagram photo. Maybe that's it. Yeah, you can you can follow Puck on Instagram as a Puck the star. So we'll put that in the show notes. Yeah. All right, John. Well, I think I think that's that's a cue for us that it's time. I believe I do believe if anybody's done anything with a radio server like to hear about it. Yeah, totally. I mean, there are numerous. There are numerous ones that I could set up. But have you set one up? What's your experience been? No, I've never I've never been asking you. No, I'm asking them. Oh, I see. Oh, I know you haven't. Right. You are y'all y'all. What about that? I like that y'all is good. Y'all is good. That means everyone except you. What? No, it's inclusive. Oh, oh, it is. That's right. Yeah. Yeah, it's inclusive. Well, there we go. I don't even I don't even know where to begin that this. I know where to begin. Yeah, you can visit us on Facebook at MacGeekUp.com, Facebook, where we have a great group. I think I already said that, though, that's the thing. Thank you for those of you that are leaving us iTunes reviews, MacGeekUp.com, slash iTunes. Let's focus on that again this week. We could really use more push there. It really, really helps when I talk to the people at Apple, they say having a fresh crop of iTunes reviews regularly is really good for getting their attention. So please, please, we could use it MacGeekUp.com slash iTunes. Thank you. Thanks as always to all of you, our premium subscribers. Thanks as always to Cash Fly for providing all the bandwidth to get the show from us to you. Thanks for our sponsors. Of course, we had Smile in this episode and in the podcast marketplace. Rounding that out is other world computing at MacSales.com and Barebones Software at Barebones.com. And we've actually got some new sponsors dancing back into the fold here, which is good to see. Tell you more about those next time. Hope you had a great fourth of July weekend. Hope you have a great week. We'll see you next time. John, you brought us into this mess. Why don't you bring us out? What do you have to say? I'm going to get us out of this mess. I don't know. I can't put it any more simply, Dave, than don't get caught.