 The Mac Observers' Mac GeekGab Episode 667 for Sunday, July 23rd, 2017. Greetings, folks, and welcome to the Mac Observers' Mac GeekGab, the show where you send in your questions, your tips, your cool stuff found. We share it all, the goal, of course, being us, each and every one of us learning at least four new things. Topics today include passwords, managing photos on your iPhone, some solutions for running your laptop in closed lid mode without power, and probably some other little diversions and such as we go. Sponsors for this episode include Backblaze, where at backblaze.com. You can get a 15-day free trial for really the easiest backup software I've ever used. So we'll talk more about that a little bit later. Here in Durham, New Hampshire, I'm Dave Hamilton. Here in Fairfield, Connecticut, John F. Braun. How are you doing today, Mr. F. Braun? Good, but I'm on the horns of a dilemma. What's your dilemma, Mr. Braun? I think you saw me mention this. So I look at my latest bill for my ISP, and there's two new entries. One of them says, you know where. So I'm paying for what they call Altar 100, which is 100 down 35 up. There's a new entry on my bill this month, Altar 200. Nice. And the price is zero. That's a good thing. Yeah, so the Eero doing the speed test kind of gave me a heads up that this was happening because they run a nightly speed test, and I saw rates double of what I was supposed to get, which is nice. Sure. Here's the other thing. I noticed another item because my bill was a little more. They now seem to have introduced a 4.95 a month modem fee. I wondered if that would happen because there were people that have your same provider of optimum online that had written into us and told us that they were paying a fee, and they stopped paying the fee by getting their own modem, and I asked you, do you pay a fee? And you said, no. And I thought, I bet you're grandfathered. And my guess is you were. And then by changing from the 100 megabit plan to the 200 megabit plan, boom, the grandfathering went away. So now you got to get your own cable modem. Yeah. And they list, so they list a few errors models. I'm sure any Docsis 3 would work. But you know, yes, it should. Any Docsis 3 should work. But sometimes, and we've seen this with other companies, if it's not a model that's certified by them, even though it's Docsis 3 and they literally are all the same, sometimes you would have trouble activating it. Yeah. So I'll probably get one of these Eris ones. Now, the one they set me up with is an eight down four up, eight channels down four up. Wood is also available. So that's the TM822. But they also have a TM1602, which is 16 down four up. And then in the documentation, it says, oh, and if you buy an optional license, you can get 24 down and eight up. And I think it retails for most places that I checked. Actually, Optimum has a place where you can buy it directly from them. Sure. Or if I go to the Eris store, and that one, the TM1602 is $99. So I think I'm good. So really what this sounds like is it's time for you to go get a few of these and do a little bit of a roundup and tell us if you see any difference between the functionality of them all. Before you do that though, let's talk about what these downstream channels mean. Because with four downstream channels or sorry, eight is what you have now. Your modem in the US here will max out at 343 megabits per second downstream. That's what that gets you. Four upstream channels gets you up to 122.88 megabits per second upstream. So moving to a 16 channel downstream modem, you would get 686 megabits per second downstream. Now you won't actually get that because your service is capped at 200. So some may ask why would you want anything for your service level? Why would you want anything more than eight, right? Because eight still gets you more than the 200 that you're getting. And the answer is you might not. But if you are in an area where you've noticed sort of that classic cable modem issue where things start to slow down after hours or after work hours when the kids get home from school, that kind of thing, it can, not always, but it can help to have a modem that will do more because it essentially gives you more headroom between you and the head end. And it can make a difference. Like my Comcast service will, even though I have basically the same downstream as you, my Comcast service will sync up to 20 channels no matter what, regardless of your service level. And it can give you more error correction, but potentially sort of stave off some of that congestion that can happen, potentially. Yeah, and just open myself up. So right now they officially have 100, 200, and 400 megabit plans. So I would not be able, at this point, with my current equipment to get their 400, or if I got their 400, as you pointed out, it would only go up to three-something. Yeah, exactly. So just future-proofing, I should get, it's always good to have more channels or more RAM or more disk space. Rarely is it good to have less. So while we're here, it's also worth mentioning that DOCSIS 3.1 is being rolled out nationwide with some providers. I don't know if this is doing it yet. Comcast is, but not everywhere. And I haven't checked prices in the last probably six weeks, but when I checked not that long ago, prices for end users on DOCSIS 3.1 modems were astronomically high. Now, 3.1, even though it just sounds like a point update from 3.0, it's a completely new signaling mechanism or protocol. They are all backwards compatible to DOCSIS 3.0, but the way the prices are on those 3.1 modems now, I mean, eventually, in theory, we would all want to have DOCSIS 3.1 modems, but it's not worth buying your own right now. I think it would be cheaper to buy a DOCSIS 3.0 modem today. And then even if you needed a 3.1 in a year, probably cheaper to buy that, to wait a year and buy that. So there you go. So it's good news, bad news? Yeah. Yeah, no, that's good news. I mean, you should have your own modem there. That's good. That's good news. I can call it my own. Right now, I can't. Yeah. It's borrowed. It is leased, actually, as it turns out. Or rented, whatever. But it was all sneaky, like how these two events occurred at the same time, and I think they did that. Well, did you call them and ask them? The first I noticed it was after hours. Okay. Yeah, I'm sure if you call them and say, yeah, by the way, I noticed this new charge and they're like, they could either be like, oh gee, because you're a longtime customer that will wave it or deal with it. My guess is they'll wave it. You ungrateful person. We just gave you free speed and you're complaining about $5 more and it's like, well... Yeah. Yeah, exactly. No, I'm just asking you about it. All right, let's go to Louis here. Louis says, I just got my hands on a new iMac and since I started setting it up, all my iDevices connected to my iCloud account are relentlessly asking me to enter my Apple ID and password. I try to racing the account on some of the devices, but they always end up asking me for the password. Surprisingly, my emails do trickle in now and then I'm getting really fed up with the password request assaults. Any advice? I've seen this before and actually yours, Louis, this week was not the only question about this in particular, but it's nothing new. It does tend to happen, certainly if you change your password, but also sometimes when you log into device and it just sort of resets this authentication. Generally, if you just type in your password, there's two ways to approach this and this is the odd part. I have personally found both of them to work. One method is to simply answer the password request every single time. There are four things like FaceTime and of course iCloud itself to log in, the App Store to log in, those sorts of things. Answering them repeatedly, even though they seem like they're repeated requests, but they might not be. They might actually be from different subsystems. iMessage needs its own login at times. Doing that will help, but I've also found that hitting cancel also solves the problem in the long run. You can probably do either. I don't know the magic answer. John, do you? I'm speculating on another thing that may cause this. Okay. You may even notice that Apple got into a software update-a-thon. Okay. I'm curious if doing an iOS upgrade may prompt re-authentication requests like this. Huh. I don't know that I've ever seen an iOS update prompt that, but it certainly could. Especially if they're made security tweaks. Sure. You may get prompted again. I seem to recall that happening sometimes. Yep. On the Mac as well, because there was also a Mac. They updated everything, I think, WatchOS, TVOS, MacOS, and iOS. That's correct. We saw maintenance updates to everything this week. At least on the iPhone, they did actually do a security. Apparently it was a Wi-Fi, Broadcom exploit that they repaired. So it could just be coincidental with his new Mac. Or it could just be one of those things. The thing that concerns me sometimes is that it's not entirely clear, at least on iOS, who's asking for the information. That's the problem, is you don't know. It seems like it's just the same thing happening over and over again. Like I said before, it's not. FaceTime, iMessage, App Store, iTunes, they all kind of need their own logins. I'm just wondering if it could be a phishing attempt. Is it if you stumbled across a web page that tries to throw up a prompt that looks like it's iOS or iCloud asking when in fact it's not? I mean, at least... That's actually a good piece of advice, folks. If you are seeing that prompt and you're at, say, the home screen, that's almost certainly not a phishing attempt. Because it'd be very, very difficult, if not impossible, for a non-jailbroken phone to have a third-party prompt on your home screen. But if you're on a web page and this comes up, even though it looks the same or it looks similar, it would be very difficult for them to make it look exactly the same, but it might look similar enough that you felt compelled to type your password in there. So, yeah, never do it when Safari is the front-most app. That's good advice. I mean, at least with macOS, you typically, when a dialogue is thrown up, you get an icon representing the app that is asking. Right. It's kind of a level set there to make sure that you're providing it to who you think you're providing it to, but iOS offers no such luxury. No such luck. Currently. Well, on the subject of passwords, Todd wrote in. He says, I think I've heard you guys say that you use one password. He says, I do too, and I have for several years. But today I learned they may soon disable local storage of my vault and instead require my password data to be stored on their servers. And of course, along with that charge a monthly recurring subscription fee. I'm not sure which I'm more concerned about, but I wonder if you share these concerns and might have suggestions for alternatives. Apple Keychain lacks many of the features of one password, and other apps and services like LastPass are also cloud-based. So I've heard a lot of people saying this. In fact, we've gotten, Todd's wasn't the only email this week either. One password's not taking anything away. Okay. You can still use your local vault that you sync with Dropbox or iCloud or nothing, if you like. All one password is doing is making the default option to use their cloud servers. And the reason they're doing this is to limit support requests, right? Syncing with Dropbox and even syncing with iCloud is not something they can see or control. And when there's a problem, that can get to be a pretty dicey thing for them to have to troubleshoot. Totally fine for their geekier users to do, but for the general user, they wanted to make it as simple and easy to troubleshoot as possible. So they've defaulted everyone new users to use their cloud. They don't have to. In fact, I just set up my daughter with her one password account earlier this week. Yeah, I know. She should have had one a long time ago. But I set it up for her on her phone from scratch. And sure enough, it offered, the default was to use the one password servers. But all I said was no. I want to use Dropbox or iCloud rather. And it was like, yeah, that's fine. But Dropbox was there on the list. No issue whatsoever. So I think there's just been a lot of confusion about the reporting on this. And I wanted to make sure we got the facts straight. Yeah, well, we did recently interact with one other... Oh, that's right. Their lead developer was at MaxDoc last weekend. That's right. Yeah. So he set us straight. Yeah. Yeah. It works great. It's fine. So no worries. It's just them looking to make things a little bit simpler for everybody. All right. You want to take us to Robert, John? I will take us to Robert. Cool. So Robert writes in and says, wondering if you've had this problem backing up your iPhone. I'm having problems getting a backup of my iPhone to my computer. I always get this message. iTunes could not back up the iPhone Bob's iPhone because the iPhone disconnected. It happened at the end of the backup, but my iPhone is still connected. I've attached the message. And we got the dialogue here. And I think I've seen it once or twice in the past. And he said, I cannot find a solution on the web except for the software called decipher backup repair. Who? Well, I've... I've never heard of them. So... And he said, do you wonder... I'm wondering if this is legit software. Yeah. Don't use that software. There's no reason to. I think John's got a solution for you. Well, I tossed out a couple and I think one of them worked. But I haven't run into this recently. My first reaction would be, it could be a hardware issue. And he said he had it connected. So of course, one way to solve it is that maybe it is actually disconnecting during the backup. And that's somehow your USB connection is... There's something wrong. So one thing to do would be, hey, try a different USB port or try a different cable if you get this sort of message. Well, and also disconnect your other USB devices. If you've got something that's commandeering the bus, that could also cause at least a momentary disconnect that might trigger this. Yeah. Or if you're plugged into a hub, it might be unplugged the other devices. So make sure it's the only device there to rule out something disrupting the signal. And the other kind of shot in the dark here, which turned out to be brilliant, I think was... The backup file might be corrupted. Yeah, that's usually what this means, yeah. So you're being lied to in that there is not actually a disconnection occurring, but I think what's happening is as it's writing the backup file, it's having trouble removing the contents of the old one. So of course, what it says is there's a connection error. So what you can do is if you go to iTunes Preferences devices, you're going to see your backups. Now, you could either right-click on one and choose Archive, which will rename it. That's an option. Or you could highlight the last backup. Right. And just say delete backup and then start anew. And see what happens, because you probably have a backup. I think most... Well, if you have iCloud, then you have a backup in the cloud as well. Right. So there's no worries. I wouldn't recommend it if your only backup is the one on the computer. No, but doing the archive thing is a great option, because not only does it rename it, but it effectively makes it like you have no backup at least when you start the next one. It has to start completely from scratch, and that would also work around this problem. Yep. And the report from our man on the scene is that, yes, the renaming or archiving was the solution. Yeah. That's usually the answer when you've got a backup a local backup that just won't complete. It's usually because the backup that's there is corrupted. And it does a incremental backup when you do that. So it's got to parse through the existing one, weed out and throw out the stuff that's going to be replaced. And so there's a lot of management that happens in there. Really? Yeah. Yeah. So it doesn't delete it and then write anew? No. So it's doing a delta? Oh. It's doing a delta. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So there's a lot of management to happen. You know, and another plug for iMazing Mini, which changes the backup structure entirely, it uses its own, but it's a it's a SQLite database. So it allows you to have not only these delta backups, but you can go back in time and find snapshots at points. So we'll put a link to iMazing Mini on those. I think it's just iMazing.com slash mini, but but it's free. And and in my opinion, a much more reliable backup system than that, which exists inside iTunes. I would still recommend I would recommend using both local and cloud, cloud being iCloud backup and local. These days for me is iMazing Mini. So there you go. All right. Also on the iPhone, John Chuck writes, he says, I was wondering if you guys your listeners have come across a way to add tags or keywords in the iOS photos app. I would love to keep it Apple native, but if there was a third party app that could modify the exit data and add keywords, that would be great. I would like to do it on my iPhone and have it stay with the photo as it sinks across the cloud. So, yeah, I don't think it's doable currently on the iPhone. That may change in iOS 11. I haven't tested that part of iOS 11 on the phone, but on the iPad it is doable, especially in iOS 11. But but also in in iOS 10. There is a tags option right there in in photos and you can flag tag or even hide photos. So what you do is you hit the little you hit the little tag icon, which is sort of down at the bottom there and then you pick the tags or enter a new tag that you want. And yes, that will sink across iCloud. You just can't see that on your iPhone. So that's that's what I know of. There might be a third party utility that lets you do this on the iPhone, but as I understand it, there is no way to do that natively on the iPhone, only iPad and Mac. Yeah, I was looking here when you're looking at a photo in photos that there's a little there's a circle with three dots in it and if you click on that, it will then show you what other programs on your on your iPhone may be able to do some additional processing. Right now I see PS Express and Markup. Okay. But need to learn those two keywords. Yeah, there are EXIF editors. I do have some of those. I don't. Yeah, I don't think I don't think that adds there, right? Yeah, well, that it does add additional information, but not in a format that your photo program may necessarily photos itself may necessarily see. Right. Right. Yeah, totally. Yeah. All right. Also in the photos realm, but this time asked on Facebook and our Facebook group at Mackeygab.com Facebook. Kent asks asking for a friend. Really? I received a message this morning from a friend that she inadvertently reformatted her external hard drive which she described as her backup drive for her photos. The reality is that it was not a backup at all, but her sole repository for the vast majority of her photos. She didn't say how big the drive is or how many photos there were on it, but apparently it's essential without knowing much more than that. I'm guessing that she doesn't use I photo or photos. I said I'd look into recovery methods after a mild scolding and lecture on the necessity of multiple backups and copies of important files. I was hoping Lexar's image recovery five would do the trick. It's about $34 U.S. Unfortunately, that seems to only work on flash media and not on hard drives. Anyone have a recommended recovery app that would do the trick. So there was actually a great discussion that ensued from all of this and really the magic answer I think is ProSoft's data rescue. That's kind of the or Yes. Well, they also I noticed this when we did have a photo lost question in the past. So while Lexar's program seems to be limited to just SD cards, that's what they choose to do. Well, that's the way they created. As far as I can tell, it is a version of picture rescue, just one that Lexar licensed in some form. But when I tested picture rescue, which they had actually sent both you and I copy long ago. Thank you very much. That also saw a hard drive as a valid. It didn't seem to be limited like the other program and only seeing a flash media as a candidate for recovery. But it saw my hard drive too. Well, it saw my SSD. And I'm wondering if because it saw the SSD and it's like, oh, it's a memory device. It is right, but it's also hard drive. So I'm curious if picture rescue may and picture rescue also from ProSoft. Right. Right. So either one. And I think they have free trials for both. So. Right. Yeah, the free trials can be and I haven't used them with these particular pieces of software, but generally what might happen with a free trial of recovery software like this is you will see one. You will get to see what it's going to recover, but it won't actually recover it until you pay for the software. But that at least tells you if it's worth paying for this particular incident. Yeah. Good stuff. Right. You want more? What's that? You want more? Sure. I'll give you more. Sure. Well, in the same thread. So believe it or not, I actually made a contribution, but well, it was an indirect contribution. But there is DD rescue. And you know, I bet you someone's written an article about how to use DD rescue, which is a free program and maybe even. Yeah. Jeff Dammit wrote it for us at Mac Observer. I'll paste that link or I'll paste them right in the notes there. But yeah, the price is right. Try that as well. And I think when we talked about this last day to wrap it up, we did get drive savers. We mentioned them as well. Sure. I think they wanted they wanted to point out that they do have a where you can send them your damaged device and they will do a free assessment as to whether they can recover anything kind of like the device that you can decide, well, OK, I'll go for it. Or, you know, that's too rich for my blood. That's not the direction I wanted to take. Oh, that's yeah. That's right. Yeah. That's worth. Yeah. That's worth remembering. Good stuff. Cool. All right. And then well, well, in this particular segment, we'll also go to Bob here who has somewhat related question. Perhaps he says, I've got a head scratcher for you all. According to iTunes, I have two thousand four hundred twenty six apps in my apps library. Don't judge me. Says the head scratchy part is that my mobile applications folder at iTunes iTunes media mobile applications contains three thousand four hundred twenty nine files one thousand three more than iTunes reports. I'm pretty sure I know why, but I'm stumped trying to figure out how to get rid of the duplicates. Says I've tried every app with duplicate in its name and none of them were any help. The issue is that there are duplicates of some apps that have an extra space followed by a number at the end of their names as shown by say busy to do space two point oh point one and busy to do space two point oh point one space one. Two copies of one version of the same app. But wait, there's more. There are also multiple versions of buffer five dot two dot two buffer six dot three dot two and buffer six dot six dot one. Three copies each with a different version number. I'd like to get rid of all of the duplicates with the same name and version number and the extra space in number and also get rid of all the except the current version of apps with the same name with a different version number. I've been struggling with this for days and it's wreaking so much trouble with that. When I was in the U.S. I was in the OCD in alphabetical order as Dave has told me he says as it should be. That's right. Nothing I've tried has even come close thanks to any of you or MGG listeners that can provide any help. So there's a couple of ways to do this that I've thought of and I don't think any one of them is perfect. apps out to the finder, right? Bob tried this with 200 or, you know, with 2,000 of his apps, and it never would let him drag them out. That's probably because when you start dragging out, it's the same as with songs with iTunes. The more you have selected, the longer it takes between when you click and hold the multi-selection and when it's ready to actually do something with it. I don't know exactly what iTunes is doing, but it feels to me like it's gathering all the information about these files, and maybe that's taking far too long. But if you could do that, then you would have, and you drag that to a separate folder, then you would have one folder that had a copy of everything that you wanted, and more specifically, everything that was in iTunes. And then you could just trash your mobile applications folder and, in theory, that might work. Replace that with the contents of your mobile applications folder with that. Or you could get to the terminal and get smart with grep and regular expressions and the RM command. I haven't really gone down the rabbit hole of crafting that command, but that's yet another way this could be done. I would love to throw this out if you don't have an answer, John, to throw this out as a geek challenge and see if somebody can come up with perhaps a much better way. But the other way is to just delete them all, Bob, and because you don't need local copies of your apps, but of course you might, maybe someday. Any thoughts, John? I've learned to not use iTunes for my app management. So what do you use for app management, though? I just mostly on the device. I install it on the device. I delete it from the device. OK, yeah. So you're not keeping archives of your app files on iTunes? I mean, I see them. You know, if I have the device, it lists my apps. Yes, of course, of course. But yeah, because they changed the way they did things a while ago, so what you see regarding apps in iTunes isn't necessarily good information and can lead to madness, as we found in this case. You're seeing all sorts of garbage that is irrelevant. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, the reason that all those extra files exist, the ones that Bob talks about, I mean, I don't know why he's got two copies of the same version of busy to do. Although I could speculate and say maybe one family member is licensed for one, and another family member is licensed for another, because that's how it works when you download an app from the store, it actually bakes the iCloud ID of the licensee into it so that you have to be authenticated as that particular licensee in order to use the app. But the reason that it keeps Buffer 522, Buffer 632, and Buffer 661 is you might need. If you've got a device that's running, let's say with Buffer 6, they didn't support that iOS 10 was required for Buffer 6. Well, if you've got a device that can't run iOS 10, then you want to run Buffer. Maybe that Buffer 522 version is the one that you need to run, and so now you've got a copy of it that's licensed to you. The app stores pretty good about allowing developers to keep multiple versions out there that will only be presented in a scenario like that, where you go with that, say, iOS 9 or iOS 8 device and go to download that app, it'll say, oh, you can't use the current version, but the developer has made this older version available. But it is up to the developer to keep that older version online, and not all of them do. So the problem is that I'm hearing here is that you want to be a packrat, Bob, but not an entire packrat. You want to packrat just the things that matter to you formulaically, not specifically. So you want to delete all the old buffers and all the old versions of every app, even though perhaps you might have a scenario where you actually want one. And I think that's what Apple's doing here is protecting you against that kind of stuff. Yeah, I don't know the magic answer. I do keep copies of everything. I have it archived off onto my Synology distation, where I have an ever-growing mound of storage that I just keep throwing things at. But Apple would tell you just to lead them all and use your redownload them from the app store if you need another copy. And if it doesn't exist in the app store, well, there's good reason for that. And that's that, and you don't get to use that app. Like busy to do, that app's been deprecated, right? I don't know if it's still available in the app store, but according to the developer, you don't use busy to do anymore. You use busy Cal on iPhone and iPad. Thoughts on that, John? All right, are we in agreement? There's a, I still got to copy a flappy bird. Right, see, that's what we're talking about is, yeah, exactly, exactly. Exactly. All right, John, I want to talk about our first sponsor if, in fact, that is okay with you. It'll have to do. Our first sponsor today is Backblaze. We're at backblaze.com slash MGG. You can get a 15-day free trial to this very easy to use online backup service for your Mac or PC. Here's the thing, Sync is not backup. Sync is awesome, right? We talk about Sync here all the time, but it's not backup. Clones, clones are not backups. They're part of the puzzle, but they are not backups. What you need is something that truly does a backup and doesn't store it locally. And that's where Backblaze comes in. It is so simple to use, it's ridiculous. You install it and you're done. That's it. Yeah, you can go in and tweak your options and you probably are gonna do that if you're a geek, but you don't have to. You set it, you forget it. That's how it is, right? It's the old principle, right? This is how it works. 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I've been using Backblaze for years and it's one of those things that I do. I mean, I know I have it, but I forget that it's on my computer. You're gonna enjoy forgetting that it's on your computer too till that moment that you need it. Backblaze.com slash M-G-G are sincere thanks to all the folks at Backblaze for sponsoring this episode. All right. Last show, two shows ago. Last show was crazy because we had Guy Searle from the My Mac podcast on. We actually recorded an episode that, you know, you heard that was a combined show of theirs and ours. They're recording their episode 666 today, Guy and Gazzar. But in the show prior to that, in show 665, we talked about running your Mac in closed lid mode, your laptop in closed lid mode without a monitor attached. And that led to a great series of emails and discussion and speculation and prognostication. So we have several suggestions for anyone that wants to do this. We're gonna run through these quickly. And John, I'm talking to you. We're gonna run through these quickly. But Martin is gonna start us off. Martin says, when I find that when an HDMI cable is connected to the Mac, it thinks that there is a monitor there even when no monitor is connected to the cable. Just a thought. So perhaps just plugging in an HDMI cable if your Mac supports that might be enough. John, you wanna take the next one? Yeah, so we have, okay, you mean the goodies here from our friend Rob. There you go. In a similar vein, so he says in 665, when we discussed listener Dave in his MacBook Pro to use as a server, it occurred to me a trick I used on my Mac mini server might help here too. The articles these links to talk about using a monitor adapter dongle to trick a Mac mini into thinking it has a monitor attached so that the GPU is activated. And we'll link to those articles. Sure. So I gather it will cost less than a monitor. Right, right, yeah, that's the trick. Yeah, exactly, exactly. And of course, if you have an old monitor kicking around, well, you know, I suppose that'll do. Yeah, and one of the things he suggests is an HDMI adapter for a Mac. So that might in fact be exactly that to run headless. Oh, actually, I think it's pretty affordable. I'm looking at a picture of one solution here. It basically consists of plugging in a VGA to mini display port it looks like and then putting a resistor between two of the pins which I guess simulates the presence of a monitor. So that makes sense. That's probably not too expensive. I think the adapter would cost more than the resistor. Right, yeah, exactly. All right, and then Russell also wrote in and said, one option to make the laptop think it has a monitor is the headless accelerator from other world computing. And sure enough, this is a little dongle that does exactly this. It's available for 1875. It plugs into your mini display port port. And that might be exactly what you want. It's probably doing something very similar to what you just described, John. So yeah, very good stuff. Cool. And then on the software front, however, this problem might just be solvable without any hardware. And Scott writes in and suggests a piece of software called Insomnia X. He says, I asked a friend who does this and this program was the recommendation. So we'll put a link in the show notes to Insomnia X and perhaps that will do it. It'll keep it up and running. So we'll put that there, too. And then lastly, John, you came up with or you and listener Brian perhaps came up with something. Actually, well, Brian also suggested Insomnia. OK. Like Scott, but when I followed up with him. So in the discussion on Facebook, the original, I think it was Everett, opposed the question here. So he said, oh, well, I saw I figured out how to solve this problem. I installed Mac OS X server and for him, it seems to have changed the machine sleep behavior. I found that not to be the case, Dave. But what I did find is what I believe Insomnia is doing underneath the covers. So Everett also posted his power management settings, which if you go to the terminal and you do PM set dash G, I don't know why it's G. The thing is, once I did that, I noticed at the top of that list, it said system wide power settings sleep disabled. OK. Well, that's weird because my machine didn't show that, Dave. Yeah. I was thinking somehow they installed OS X server and that somehow put this system wide power settings setting into sleep. So I did some more research and I found a secret undocumented PM set option, Dave. Really? Yes, believe it or not, because if you look on the manual page for PM set this option, unless I was reading through it too quickly, is not there. Now, what is this option you may ask? And I'm going to tell you, please tell us quickly because if you remember the segment was going to be short. Pseudo space, PM set space, disabled sleep space one. Really? Really? Now, one thing that this does, which convinces me that it's black magic. Once you do this, Dave, on the machine in question, if you then click on the Apple menu, the sleep selection is grayed out. Interesting. This is like telling the machine, don't go to sleep. And what happens after I put this setting into place, Dave? I put the lid down on my machine, kept my eye on the LED, which indicates whether the machine is awake or asleep. And sure enough, it stayed awake. I even went to another machine on my network because I had file sharing turned on on this machine. And I said, and I looked and in the shared bar, it showed that MacBook Pro was still on the network. Oh, nice. Sleeps, of course, it goes away. Now, here's my only concern, Dave. When I did this, I did not hear, although the machine was running, I did not hear the fans running. OK. I'm wondering if because, so either this is something that you should not meddle with or because the GPU and the screen are off, there's not enough heat that the machine can run. This is Sudu, PMSET, Disabled Sleep Space 1. Is that right? Correct. Sweet. That's awesome, man. Nice find. Nice find. Very cool. Very cool. I like stuff like that. That makes it fun. Fun stuff. All right. We also talked about having issues with monitors. And along those lines, Tim actually came up with a really, really cool tip for us. So what Tim says is, last year, I acquired a MacBook Pro 15-inch with Touch Bar. And for the past eight months, I've been trying to use it to drive a Dell 27-inch 5K display. This Dell 5K display has two DisplayPort 1.2 ports and one Mini DisplayPort port that's also DisplayPort 1.2. The Mini DisplayPort for a single display can only drive 4K. This is 5K on this monitor requires two DisplayPort connections to the MacBook Pro, which makes sense. That's how that works. After multiple failed attempts, including an embarrassingly inept response from Apple Tech Support, easy for me to say, I was finally able to drive 5K by using two Thunderbolt 3 to DisplayPort cables, 35 each for mono price. macOS can scale this to a very pleasing 2560 by 1440 retina result. Of course, this required plugging four USB-C cables into the MacBook every single time I placed it on the desk, two sticking out of each side since the ports aren't all on the same side. They were for power, USB connection to the display, and then, of course, the two DisplayPort cables. It's a picture that would embarrass any Apple marketing or design executive. With the outlandish goal of connecting to the MacBook Pro with a single wire, I ordered an OWC Thunderbolt 3 dock in December. The dock finally arrived during the first week of July and I was dismayed to realize that I had misinterpreted the available ports, although the dock is advertised as having two Thunderbolt 3 ports. One is required for the upstream connection to the MacBook Pro, leaving only a single Thunderbolt 3 slash USB-C port for connection to the display. After multiple failed attempts, I did finally come upon a solution. One of the USB-C slash Thunderbolt 3 ports to DisplayPort cable and one mini DisplayPort to the DisplayPort cable. The display blinked and sputtered for quite a while, but appears to finally have settled down and I am for the first time in eight months looking at a 5K retina screen connected to my MacBook Pro with a single Thunderbolt cable. So yeah, the way he's doing this is that OWC dock has a USB-C port, which contains Thunderbolt 3, but also DisplayPort coming out of that dock and using the mini DisplayPort cable or port from that same dock and boom, out he goes. So very nice Tim, nice little story. I like it, it's good stuff man, don't you think John? Yeah, the initial solution didn't sound that great. No, but at least it's doable, right? I mean, not elegant, but functional and that's important, I guess, right? Good. I don't know, I just think the Apple people should hang their heads in shame for forcing everybody to get all these dongles. Well, this isn't so much about dongles, this is to drive a 5K display, you have to either have a display that's Thunderbolt native or you have to have two ports come in because DisplayPort does not have enough bandwidth to drive all the 5K over one port, right? So it's, I mean, it's struggling with standards and the bandwidth thereof, that's all. Oh, I need all those pixels. Oh dude, 27 inch, that's real nice. Oh, I know, when I see the UHD and 4K TVs in the store, I'm like, wow, that's pretty. Yeah, but the retina on that size screen is awesome. So I get it, I'm with you Tim, this is good stuff. It's actually good to know because I have a 4K screen connected to my 5K iMac downstairs, but the day might come where that needs to be a 5K screen and this might be how that's accomplished. So it's good to know, good to know. You know, I had an interesting issue this week, John. It started sort of slowly. These days, my network and my network changes regularly, right, but these days, the way it's running is I have a, I've got the Synology RT2600AC router as my main gateway to the internet and I really like that thing. It's got inbound and outbound VPN, like all kinds of options for VPN, including native VPNs that are available on Mac OS and iOS, which is huge and it'll do all kinds of things. It would do cloud station if I wanted and it's a fast router, it's great and the wireless on it is great, but I have the wireless disabled because I'm constantly testing different types of mesh systems and these days, the one that's running is the Linksys vellop mesh in bridge mode with everything connected via ethernet. So I've just got these mesh points all over the place and they're all managed from one interface and they're only doing bridge mode so the vellop's not doing any routing, the Synology router's doing all that. And it's fine. Actually, it's a little bit of a geeky setup but it's relatively straightforward. It's just router with no wireless access point, wireless access points with no router, easy. We started having an issue, I wanna say Monday, Tuesday, where it seemed like maybe the same time each day, sometime in the five to seven PM range, it would feel like we had no Wi-Fi in the house but only for a minute and I noticed it one day, my son noticed it another day, he's like, did the internet just go down? I was like, no, but it wasn't all devices. It was just like some people but it started to be consistent enough that I kind of put a note in my head and thought, all right, what's going on? And I started thinking, well, maybe one of the mesh points on the vellop is offline or not fully online and so things are getting wonky but I didn't really dig into it. Until Friday, we did our TMO staff meeting and then I went to record daily observations which is a great podcast by the way that we do at Mac Observer every day. Jeff wanted to have me on, so I was on and we got on our Skype call to do that thing and we started talking in about 30 seconds in, I lost Jeff. So I was like, okay, is it me or him? I start looking around, I ping www.apple.com, nothing. Okay, so when I realized that I can't get out to the internet from my computer in the office, I go through a different series of troubleshooting. I ping my router to see, can I get all the way to the router which is back over in the house? And then if so, okay, I know we're just offline on the internet but my home network is working fine. No, I couldn't ping the router. So I ping my disk station which is local to me in my office. My iMac and that disk station are both plugged into exactly the same switch and I could not ping the disk station. So that told me I had a network issue in the office. So I go over to the switch in the office and this happens to be a, I think it's a 16 port switch, I wanna say. Yeah, I think that's right. It's a 16 port switch and this is where it's worthwhile kind of being aware of what normal looks like in a lot of things, right? Because then when it's abnormal, you have a chance of identifying that quickly. Normal on my switch, it's got a lot of lights on it, one for each of the 16 ports that it has but the flicking, and they flicker but the flickering is, I don't wanna use the word random but there's no pattern to it. It's just related to whatever each of the devices is doing and they're not all flicking on and off at the same time or anything like that. It's seemingly random. Well, I looked at that switch, John and every light on that switch was flashing very quickly, just going nuts, like okay, there's a network loop. So, okay, fine. And then, so what I started doing was, and I know when there's something like that, it's just one device barfing packets out at the switch. You know, at the switch. So, okay. So I just start going across the top level of the switch. I pull out a cable. Did the flickering stop? No, actually the first thing I did was I power cycled the switch because sometimes a switch can just get itself confused. No, that wasn't the answer. It actually was for about three seconds. I got some pings out, everything was good and then boom, you know, back down. Okay, so it's not the switch, it's something else. So I start pulling cables one by one and watching the lights on the switch and then watching the screen of my Mac which has all these ping requests still going. Nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing. Finally get to actually the eighth port problem solved. All right, what's this cable go to? Aha, it goes to the vellop access point that I have in my office. Okay, that's interesting. So I left it unplugged for a minute, made sure everything worked, plugged it back in. Now I hadn't power cycled the vellop, I just unplugged it from ethernet, plugged it back in instantly, the network goes down again. All right, this is interesting. So my theory is that the vellop for whatever reason had started looping and was connecting both Wi-Fi mesh and ethernet mesh and not blocking between those two. Then so that, you know, any kind of loop on your network is gonna echo every bit of traffic that you have and that's just bad. So I turned off power to the vellop, waited 10 seconds, turned it back on, everything's been fine since then. Assuming you're still here with me, John, yeah? I'm still with you, buddy. I hear the chair, I hear Mr. Braun's voice, so everything's still working. So, you know, and I haven't seen that problem recur. It was just, you know, this one thing, but we also haven't had any, you know, in the last 48 hours or whatever, we haven't had any, you know, of those weird internet problems either. So something was happening with this particular device and network loops when they form sometimes can immediately impact you and other times can be a little more nefarious and not quite rear their ugly heads right away until there's enough traffic kind of going over that segment that it just takes everything down. So it was an interesting little tour, Mr. Braun. Mm-hmm, right? Glad you kept that brief. Yeah, yeah, well, this was a new topic, John. We just had to keep the, yeah, that's right. Keep the ball rolling. Uh-huh. So thoughts on that, John? I think I have some sort of loopback prevention on the little TP-Link switch that I have. So I wonder if your switch has a feature to prevent this sort of chaos in the future. Um, I wonder if it could. Like, how would it know? Because one segment of the loop was happening wirelessly. Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. All right, and that's usually the problem. I've seen it before where that exact same thing happened with a Sonos device because Sonos is also wireless or wired mesh and it uses a STP spanning tree protocol to decide which hop is the one to send and which is the one to block. But a power line was filtering out STP packets, this old power line adapter. A lot of the new ones don't and it works fine, but it was filtering out those things so it didn't know to block, so. And that's what my guess is on this too, that something happened inside, you know, these, I mean, any router, and I'm sure these Linksys develop units of the same way, they, you know, they're just running Linux, so something happened and it stopped listening or hearing those things and just said, yeah, let it wide open. Everybody shares. Bad. Yeah, they don't go into much detail. I see here, they say loop prevention detects loops using loopback detection packets. Okay. And then display and alert or further block the corresponding port. Okay, so that might have fixed it. The issue would have been, would I have known, would my wireless network then have, or yeah, would my wireless network then have been defaulting to a wireless Link and would the loop have been just pushed down the line to somewhere else, right? Like if you got, if something, if you're, if your switch detects loopback and it shuts that port down, how do you as the network administrator know? Does it send you an alert? Well, here it says the switch will display an alert, so. Well, how does your switch display alerts? That's, that's a fantastic question. Okay, yeah, fair enough. I don't know. This, this maybe flashes a led a different color. I'll have to see their documentation isn't, doesn't always go into great detail. Right, right. Yeah, it's type of documentation where like, oh okay, we'll list the name of the feature and then the description is the name of the feature. Right. Oh, that's awesome. Like here, they use the word loopback detection three times without really explaining kind of what that is. Right, right, right. It involves a loop though, sort of loop. Okay. Well, that's, that's, isn't that special? Yeah. All right. All I know is when I had that one device that I thought was barfing on the network, when I got this new switch, it did not take down my entire network. You remember the good old days? I do. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, no, this took, and I don't know if it took things down in the house. My guess is it probably either did or eventually would have. So, yeah. Yeah, it's interesting. But you know, it's another one of those scenarios where knowing what normal looks like, even on the things that you don't pay attention to regularly is really, really helpful. You know, and that's, it's kind of why I suggest to people, is your system working great? Great. Go and launch console and just watch it for a little bit and see what normal looks like. Cause there's going to be a lot of stuff in there that would appear to be the issue, right? But you're not having an issue. So get used to what that is. All the, you know, debug messages from app developers to themselves, effectively, all of that stuff that's just sort of left over there. Take a look. You might actually look at your console when things are good and actually find a problem. But more than likely, you will simply get a feel for, oh, okay, like these are not the red herrings I'm looking for. And that's a helpful thing so that you can kind of spot the anomalies when they actually show up. Yeah, good, John. All right. Listener Doug sent in a great little thing that we turned into a quick tip over at Mac Observer. Doug says, with all the talk of panorama mode with pictures, he says, did you know that you can turn your iPhone 90 degrees and take a vertical panorama for things like tall buildings? And he is totally right. This isn't just like some weird hack where you turn your phone sideways and it takes a panorama but isn't actually a vertical panorama. Your phone knows how to do this. It knows that you've turned it. It creates a picture that is a vertical panorama, not a horizontal panorama. And it's very cool for I took a picture of a, you know, we've got a 150 foot tree in our yard and then I popped a picture of it and it was like, oh yeah, this is great. So very, very cool. Just interesting little tip. Next time you're either in nature and you want to take a tall tree and you're too close to it to do it otherwise or you want to take a picture of a building in a city. Boom, there you go. Thanks for that, Doug. That's good stuff, man. Did you know about that, John? I don't think I've ever done a panorama, so. Seriously? Seriously. Oh, dude, you're like Mr. Photography. I figured you were all about the panoramas. Well, maybe I will be. Yeah. Well, we'll see if I see something panor-worthy. Panor-worthy, well, and then the other thing that we hadn't mentioned, but if you take a panorama and it is sufficiently wide and you post it to Facebook, Facebook will immediately turn it into either a 360 degree or however wide the picture actually is. Yeah, I've seen that. You see a little globe with 360. Exactly. Hey, you can pan around in this. You can stuff with this. The only thing I will do is shake my fist at people that take videos in vertical format when horizontal would probably be much better. So orientation is important, and I think you know what I'm talking about. I do. Is that you see the video and you're like, boy, I wish you did it horizontal instead of vertical. Yeah, and while we're at it, I'd like to point something out. If you are at an event, like a concert or the theater or whatever it is where there is an audience and the crowd, if you are in the crowd and you decide to take a picture or a video, there are a few things of which I would like you to be aware. Number one. Don't. Well, you're right. But if you're going to do this, think about your fellow patrons and also just simple logic. If you are somewhere like the theater or a concert, take a look at all the lights that they have aiming at the stage. All of them. Your little LED on your iPhone that functions as a flash is not going to make any difference in terms of lighting that stage compared to those thousands of LEDs that make up the array that is lighting that stage. But what your LED will do is annoy everyone around you and possibly the performers on stage as well. So turn off your flash. Yes, it's dark. Yes, your phone thinks it should use the flash because your phone notes that it is dark. Your phone is wrong and you will be shamed for it if you have your flash on. So turn off your flash. Yes, I know we all make this mistake. I've done it too where my flash is in auto mode. I go to take a picture at a concert and oh my God, there comes the flash. But that's the only one that I do that way. Then I turn it off and then I go take any other pictures that I'm gonna take. If you don't turn your flash off after the first one, you will be shamed and you should be. So do that. Also, think about the people behind you because when you are taking that picture, what everyone behind you sees is your camera or your phone screen in this case. It's actually not so bad if it's a camera without a screen on it. But if it's your phone, everyone behind you will see your phone screen. This gets very distracting, especially if for some reason, you decide to have your phone screen's brightness at a thousand, right? Set it low. You don't need to look at the picture and the people behind you don't wanna be blinded by the glowing screen of your phone. So think about that. And if you're in like stadium seating where the people behind you are higher up than you are, even if you pull your phone out to say check a text message or something in the middle of the show, that's gonna shine very brightly into the eyes of the people behind you. Think about that a little bit. Maybe now is not the right time to check that text message or crank that brightness all the way down. So that's my PSA for this one. In general, I found by default, Dave, I turned the flash off on both my phone and my small point and shoot. Most modern cameras can compensate by either jacking up the ISO or adjusting the shutter speed. That combined with vibration detection or stabilization. I found the iPhone 7 takes excellent photos even in the dark of night. As long as there's some light lighting something somewhere and as you pointed out, if there are stage lights, that's more than plenty to allow you to take a picture. And if it's not more than plenty, your flash isn't going to help. In fact, your flash might ruin your pictures because what it will do is light the backs of the heads of the people in front of you and then that's what you wind up seeing in your picture. Well, that's what I found. The flash, in my experience, unless you got a professional level flash that has nice dispersal on it, it's going to ruin the picture. Even in a concert setting, no professional would use a flash. It doesn't like look at the people in the pit, right? Or anywhere, look at a concert because now bands employ full-time photographers not just to be in the pit right in front of the band but to go all around the venue and take pictures. So you may encounter these people. They will never have a flash in use on their camera. It's just not necessary. But one thing that is valid is if you point your iPhone at a stage and it's full of lights and everything, you might just get this blob of white showing up on your screen. Tap that blob of white. That resets the white point. Your phone might have found one of the darker spots and set that. And like John said, it opens it up too much. Tap that brightest point in the picture and it will very likely make your picture much, much better because it'll dial it out and balance it properly for you. And you can actually have some fun with that too. If you tap the white point and it makes things too dark, find something in between on the screen, in between the brightest point and the darkest point and tap that to see if you can find that magic spot. It's like, okay, that's what I want as my white point and now boom everything or as my dark point and then everything goes. So a homework assignment for everyone listening is when it gets dark, go out with your camera, take some pictures with the flash off and see how you do. You'll probably be pleasantly surprised. As will the people around you, especially behind you. Yeah, there you go. All right, see, that was good. It was nice that we crafted time to have that helpful discussion, John. It was almost a mini rant. Well, it started as a rant, but then it turned into, you know, a couple of photo quick tips, so hopefully helpful. Larry, let's go to Larry. I think we've got time for at least two more. So let's go to Larry. Larry writes, this was also in our Facebook group, says, I am confused as all get out, so maybe someone can help talk me off this ledge. Larry, we're here for you. I just purchased a shiny new MacBook Pro, and I see in the specs it has four Thunderbolt 3 ports. I was under the impression that the MacBook Pro has USB-C ports, but what I'm finding out is if are those the same thing or are they? On my 2013 MacBook, I have an array of drives and other peripherals plugged into a hub. I'm guessing I simply need an adapter. Is that right? So here's the thing. There is no such thing as a Thunderbolt 3 port. There is Thunderbolt 3 that can be transmitted over generally a USB-C shaped port. And this is where it's worth having the brief reminder discussion about letters versus numbers. We hate the USB-C alliance or whoever they are because USB describes both connector shape and transmission protocols. Connector shapes are all letters, USB-A, USB-C, USB-B. Those are all shapes of connectors. Many USB, micro USB, also shapes of connectors. And I think those are technically many USB-A, micro USB-A, I think that's how that works. But it might be micro USB-B, but it is still a lettered connector even though common parlance tends to eliminate that. So it's the shape of the connector, but also I guess the wire ring, physical wiring, in the cable, right? Yes, right, the physical wiring in the cable. Although USB-A and USB-B and USB-C can all be linked together, right? I mean, you can have a USB-A to USB-C cable, same wires, right? Happily talk with each other. And then they all have their electrical specifications as far as maximum current and what goes across which line and stuff like that. And this is all physical. Has nothing to do with the data, the type of data or the protocol as you said, but continue please. No, no, no, you're totally right. Yeah, the letters are all physical characteristics of the cable. The numbers where you have USB-1, USB-2, USB-3, USB-3.1, those are all transmission protocols. How the data is communicated across whatever cable it might be, because you can have USB-3 go across a USB-A cable. You do it all the time. What? You could also have USB-3 go across a USB-C cable. You probably do that all the time too if you use those. Yeah, where it gets even more fun is Thunderbolt. Thunderbolt does not describe cable shape at all, ever. I know it becomes conflated, but the port that we all equate with a Thunderbolt 1 or 2 port is actually called Mini DisplayPort. That's what that cable and connector shape is, but it can communicate either Thunderbolt or Mini DisplayPort. That doesn't mean that every Mini DisplayPort cable or any device with a Mini DisplayPort port on it supports Thunderbolt. No, it's just possible to send Thunderbolt across those if the devices connected to it are built to do so. And the same is true for USB-C. Thunderbolt 3 can be transmitted over USB-C. Again, that doesn't mean that every USB-C device is a Thunderbolt 3 device. The MacBook is a great example of that. It has USB-C, but it is not Thunderbolt 3. It's not Thunderbolt at all over that. It's just USB. Your MacBook Pro has the same shape connector, USB-C. Guess what? It is Thunderbolt 3 capable. Sends Thunderbolt across it. Apple's specs are a little bit misleading on this, but I sort of understand why. I mean, because what are they gonna say? And actually there's specs on the MacBook Pro. Let me pull this up here because this gets interesting. If we pull up the MacBook Pro, I think they sort of acknowledge this in the tech specs, so let's see if I can find it. Yeah, it says that it has either two or four Thunderbolt 3 parentheses USB-C parentheses ports. So that's their way of communicating that, yeah, it's actually a USB-C port, but it's Thunderbolt 3 capable. But it can also be used for, and this is what it says, four Thunderbolt 3 USB-C ports with support for charging, display port, Thunderbolt, up to 40 gigabits a second, and USB 3.1 Gen 2, up to 10 gigabits a second. So there you go. I know, it's crazy. It's crazy. Crazy, crazy. But it's worth remembering. It might help keep you sane, Larry. And that's what we do here. You wanna take us to Everett, John? I wanna take us to Everett. I think I interpreted what he wants properly, but let's find out. Let's find out. I have a question that may seem strange at first. Is there a device that I can configure and plug into a network, and then allow me VPN access to the network outside of the router? And it will need to support DHCP. This will be helpful for remote network support, especially when the client or organization has the logins for the router and decides to change the Wi-Fi passwords. And DHCP scope that makes printers and static devices inaccessible. Then leave on vacation without telling me or any coworkers. Ha! Those admins, those crazy admins. Your input is appreciated. I think whatever it is asking for is a portable point to point VPN solution or server. I think server is the right word there. Because yeah, that's what he wants, is he wants to be able to just drop a pre-configured device onto someone's network, and that will magically, but we know magic generally doesn't exist. So using things like UPNP or whatever, open the right holes in the router, and accept inbound VPN traffic to it, such that Everett can get online. Now I, and I think I know this about Everett because he's been a listener a long time, if it's the Everett I'm thinking of, he helps support other people, right? And so what he wants to do is just say, okay, yep, I just want to do this without having to configure your router or a computer to be on all the time or some other thing to be my inbound VPN server. Right? Yeah, yeah, I thought, it looks like something has changed here. I found one device that sounds like it may do this. Yeah? And I'm reading up more on it, it seems to be restricted to Wi-Fi, but it says meet Kiesel, the easy way to protect yourself online. Kiesel protects all your Wi-Fi devices from malware, ransomware, and snoopers. I thought I came across a different description at one point, but I know there was a show I went to, Dave, where they were showing something that pretty much did this, is that you plugged it into the, it was a little device that you plugged into the USB port of one machine and then you plugged the other complimentary device or it's twin or it's mate into the USB port of another and it would establish a VPN tunnel. Huh. But I can't, we're gonna have to scratch our head on this. So I'm wondering, no, I'm thinking, you know, there's a lot of routers out there that can be VPN, inbound VPN servers, right? I mentioned the Synology ones earlier, the, about the 1900 and the 2600 will do it. And then actually a lot of Netgears routers can do this too. But, so, you know, would it make sense to just drop one of those on the network? But that's not gonna give you access to the network. And it's also not going to go and it's not expecting to have to do any upstream configuration in terms of automatic port forwarding or something like that. So you'd have to put it into bridge mode and set up the VPN server. And yeah, I don't know, man. I don't know that there's an answer for this. It's a good geek challenge. I mean, I like it from that standpoint, but you know, I don't know, John. I don't know. I don't have an answer. Folks, do you have an answer? Was this it? Maybe. Okay. I did another search and I think I, again, I'm almost sure I saw this. It's called iTwin. And it is a USB device that does a VPN. I'm just trying to get the status of these guys are still still alive. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It was something that was reviewed a number of years ago by PC Magazine around 2013. So, see something about 2015. Well, I mean, I see it on Amazon for 140 bucks. But like you said, it's a USB device, so it's going to require a computer to be on. That's worth digging into. We'll put a link to that in the show notes. We'll dig more into that. To be continued, I think, is the right answer there. Don't you think, John? TBD. If you folks have a thought on this or a thought on anything, or a question, or a tip, or really, you know, whatever it is you want to send us, feedback at macgeekab.com is, in fact, the place to send that. And in fact, you heard that right. It's feedback at macgeekab.com. And that's feedback at macgeekab.com, John. Unless you are a premium subscriber, in which case you get access to premium at macgeekab.com. And there are so many of you to thank this week because we didn't do this last week when we were at Macstock, the craziness. We had Guy Searle there, so just blame Guy. But we'll catch it all up. Or Gas. Gas wasn't there. Gas wasn't there, so we can blame it on him then. Oh, we totally blame it on him. Because he wasn't there. Right. Right. Exactly. 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That's the kind of fishing trips we like. Yeah, man. Have a great week, though, folks. And I will give you the same advice that I am going to give to myself, which is actually two pieces of advice. Number one, take care of your shoes, whatever you do. Take care of them. And number two, very, very, very important, don't get caught.