 The Mac Observers' Mac Geek Gab, episode 716 for Monday, July 2nd, 2018. And welcome to the Mac Observers' Mac Geek Gab, the show where we take your questions, your tips, your cool stuff found, we mix it all together, and we create for you a potpourri of knowledge, information, and entertainment, with the goal being each and every one of us. That includes me, that includes John, that everybody. We all learn at least five new things every time we get together. Sponsors for this episode include TextExpander, which now supports single sign-on, and we'll talk more about what exactly that means and how you can get a 20% discount off your first year subscription a little bit later. Here in Durham, New Hampshire, I'm Dave Hamilton. And here in Fairfield, Connecticut, this is John F. Braun. How are you doing today, Mr. John F. Braun? I'm getting ready for fireworks. We're doing fireworks on the second, I guess, because it's part of a long weekend, right? OK, sure. Yeah, yeah. Whatever works, that's great. So your town does its fireworks tonight? Tomorrow night? Well, tonight. We're recording this on Sunday. The second. So you do it on the second. There you go. Thanks, John. Yeah. Cool. Yeah. And as you recall, when you lived in the area, it's cool because multiple towns typically do their fireworks. So if you're on the beach, which is where everybody goes, you not only see yours, but you see the fireworks of surrounding towns. Yeah. It's really quite a sight. We were up on the lake on Saturday and coming back. We just went for a day trip. So we came back across the lake at about, I don't know, 9, 9.15. It had just gotten dark, you know. And I don't think there were any town-sanctioned fireworks. But of course, here in New Hampshire, you can do your own show if you like. And and we probably, I think we saw four or five different pretty spectacular fireworks displays as we came across the lake, which was really, really cool. So, yeah, like win a pisaki for anyone that anyone that's interested in which lake. But anyway, I'll put a link in show notes, because that's what we do. Our our state doesn't trust us to. Right. Well, they have displays that say fireworks, but they're really glorified sparklers, right? We're not allowed to we're not allowed to have anything beyond a sparkler. Yeah, we can have. So in New Hampshire, we can have anything not anything we want. We cannot have firecrackers, right? So nothing with a bang. But we can have the, you know, rockets that shoot in the air and have the big huge displays and all that stuff. But you can't buy anything that explodes. Or it explodes with the bank. But but in my town in Durham, everything is is prohibited other other than I think sparklers are OK. But but but everything else in town you need a permit from the from the fire department. That is not true of most towns. It's just Durham and probably because we have the University of New Hampshire here and by golly, if we didn't have some some law that said you can't shoot off fireworks all the time, it might be actually become a nuisance. So that's that's my assumption as to where the that particular law sort of the the genesis of it. But that's not what we're here to talk about. We are here to talk about all kinds of things. And I did promise some cool stuff found as we started off here. So let's do it. Listener Chris sends in. He says, gentlemen, I always hear you speaking about keyboard maestro. I have been using Y key from Plum Amazing Software previously. I key for almost 10 years now. And while my needs are simple, this tool has been extremely useful since purchase. Just throwing this application out there to include it in the ring. It is being updated regularly and is, of course, compatible with Mac OS 10.13. So high Sierra, it works just fine with. So yeah, it's 30 bucks and it is it looks to do some of this. It's kind of automation. Yeah, it actually it is automation software. And it actually links with key queue. So yeah, very interesting. You can have launchers. You can have contacts that cause your shortcut to be activated. So this might be like a little bit of keyboard maestro, a little bit of control plane. And actually, we did get an email this week. Someone said that control plane, even though it hasn't been updated in a long time, does still work with high Sierra, at least at least for them and for what they're doing. So I will throw that out there, too. I'll put that link in the show notes. So yeah, fun. Right, John. More the merrier, the more the merrier. I don't disagree. All right, as far as automation solutions as far. Yeah, well, we need them because those are the things that make our lives better. So I like any and all of this stuff that that we come in. All right, Phil brings us to another cool stuff found. He says, and this is a sweet one, I'll say. And I'm not sure if you have used this on your show, but I found a Mac app called Tooth Fairy for 299 in the Mac App Store that makes it so much easier to switch your AirPods from your phone to your Mac. There's an icon that sits in your menu bar and one click connects. But another option, which I use is creating a keyboard shortcut, which even saves more time. I'm probably sure probably that there is a way without using this app for a novice. But for a novice, it provides a great and easy way to switch between the two. He says, and yes, he says, I am running Mojave's beta. He says, I like the dark mode, except in certain apps like iCal and or Calendar and Mail. So so obviously this Tooth Fairy works with with everything up to and including whatever beta of Mojave he's running. So, yeah, that's cool. I have I use the the sound preference pane to do this because the sound preference pane allows you to put a little icon in your menu bar that usually works to switch. But I have had times where it does not switch the AirPods right. So maybe Tooth Fairy does does a little bit more. So thanks for that, Phil. Good stuff. Right. Good, John. Right. Cool. All right. And then let's go to Donna. We will keep on moving with our cool stuff found here. And Donna writes, she said, Andy and Ako recommended the on Mac break weekly recommended the anchor Soundcore Bluetooth travel speaker, which she says she wears a women's size medium glove and this thing fits easily in the palm of her hand with with plenty of room to spare. It's it's 1599 or 1699 depending on which color you get. And she said it doesn't have the strongest base, which I would expect out of something that small. But hey, for 17 bucks, she says it's great to listen to podcasts and things like that. So we put a link to that in the show notes, too. So thanks. Thanks for that. If I it is handy to have, you know, a small speaker that you can throw in your travel bag. I I and what I'm going to recommend doesn't even come close to competing with this on price, but I really like the the current version, which I believe is version four of the JBL flip speaker. It's it's bigger than this and costs more than this. But it actually has great sound for for for, you know, for what you need. You know, and also have pretty colors. The JBL, though, no, the flip does not. But the the JBL pulse does. And the day because I go ahead. No, I remember our playing with it in your room one time when we were at the show and yeah, it was neat to be able to select all the patterns and they sync with the music and, you know, you have like a little dance off or something. Yeah. Yeah, it's pretty good. Yeah, the JBL flip is 80 bucks. I think the pulse is, you know, I'll look it up while we're talking here. But yeah, the pulse. OK, so the pulse is it's supposed to be one ninety nine. Amazon's got it for one sixty six. We'll put it in the thing. But the idea behind the pulse, it's it's quite a bit bigger than the flip the flip and the pulse are these sort of pill shaped, you know, speakers, but large, larger than the palm of your hand. But still I consider when I'm packing and I want to bring a speaker with me, it's it's either the pulse or the flip. And the pulse takes up the same amount of space in my luggage that a rolled pair of jeans would. And the flip takes up the same amount of space in my luggage that a rolled up t-shirt would. So I decide which can I go without and and that's the speaker I bring because the pulse is cool. It really is nice to kind of have this, you know, electronic lava lamps sort of thing going on in your hotel room. It adds some ambiance that otherwise is, you know, cold and sterile in a room like that. So yeah, so there you go. Cool. Fun stuff. Generally, if I'm checking a bag, I'll throw the pulse in. And if I'm doing a carry on only the flip is my friend. So there you go. Yeah, good. Ready to move on, John? Moving right along. Moving right along to listener Matt, who has something for us. Matt says this is sort of a cool stuff found reprise. Guys, I was just listening to show 713 and you were talking about iCloud Drive and syncing files between Macs. I have had as many as four systems that I needed identical versions of client files on that that totaled more than 35 gigs. I use Resilio Sync, formerly BitTorrent Sync and have had had almost no issues. The only problems come when you try to sync things like a MySQL database file that can be rather large and changes constantly and often while you're working. Otherwise, Resilio Sync is fast and secure. And what's cool about it is it is peer to peer only. So if you have two Macs running Resilio Sync and you want to sync data between them, that's the only place the data goes. You can run Resilio Sync on something like your Synology or on a server based type machine so that you also maintain a copy and sort of do that private cloud thing. But it is very much a peer to peer, not a client server syncing solution. So if you've got, especially for what Matt's talking about here, where you've got a lot of data that needs to be in sync between two Macs, it's just syncing between those two Macs. You're not, you know, expending that transfer time twice or anything. So yeah, yeah, Resilio Sync is pretty cool. OK, I guess the only concern that I would have is. Well, I mean, so in the peer to peer mode, it's providing redundancy and that the file is stored on multiple clients. That's right. OK, so the bad news would be if all of a sudden all four got clobbered or however many you have, yeah, it does stored on a server. So no, I'm just thinking through with the, you know, the only downside would be, you know, if something terrible happened, you wouldn't have it on the server to retrieve. Well, but that that could that same argument likely could be made for Dropbox, right? If you this is the difference between sync and backup, right? It doesn't really matter whether you have a server or just peer to peer. If you blow away a file or change a file in one place, the idea is that it is synced everywhere. However, like Dropbox, Resilio Sync also does keep a versioning. So if something gets deleted or or, you know, changed and you want to go back to a previous version, you can and there are there are some settings where you can choose how much of a cache to keep of old, you know, slash deleted items. So it tries to keep up with you. But but you're right, it's sync is not a replacement for backup. And speaking of backup, and I mentioned Synology in this bit, too, we have an episode coming up, Makikap 718. I'm doing a little bit of traveling. And so we're going to record that earlier than we normally would. And so we will do a little deep dive into a couple of things. In fact, we've got a couple of deep dives coming up. We've got one on photos in that same episode and one on, as I said, Synology and I think we've got a Wi-Fi sort of networking revisit happening in 717, so you can look forward to all of that. And if you have stuff, of course, questions, tips, send it into us. Feedback at Makikap.com. That is what he said, folks. Feedback at Makikap.com. Well, really what I said was feedback at Makikap.com. So I just want to make sure we get that right. That's OK. Hey, I mentioned in a previous episode, when I was talking about how I had upgraded this machine here in the studio finally to High Sierra, and that's actually been going just fine, as you might have imagined. I mentioned that we were talking about screensavers and how on my iMac down in the office, I have the screensavers that we all get on our Apple TVs or our 4th Gen Apple TVs and later where you see these beautiful overviews, I think they're either drone or Helik, I think they're drone overviews of cities and very cool things, high-def stuff. It's amazing. And I have those running on my Mac in the office and couldn't find them in the screensaver list here. I had taken for granted that they would be on every Mac. And of course, folks in the chat room pointed out, no, no, Dave, you installed those separately and I did. So I have now put in the show notes a link to the GitHub repo from John Coates for the aerial screensaver that does exactly this and you can actually configure it. So when you when you go to GitHub, you see like you can see all the source files and everything, but he also has, if you scroll down the page, a download link for the latest build of it. And it works just great. I installed it up here and I actually now I need to update it downstairs. You can choose one of the things that was different for me is now you can choose where it stores all the video files that it downloads because they can be quite large. So I can choose to store. I can and do choose to store them on an external drive. So it's not taking up my, you know, my my boot drive and things like that. So link to that. It's all for free. Very cool stuff. So there you go. Yeah. Did you check those out yet, John? No, I've actually, I should because I've actually been performing activities that we'll mention in the Synology episode that invoked my screensaver on this machine. Cool. Yeah. So got me thinking. Then I started looking at it. So yeah, maybe I'll explore. Yeah, you don't get these on your because you have an Apple TV series three, right? You don't get these screensavers on that. OK, man, you know, away. They're awesome. We sometimes sit in the living room and watch just the screensavers. I mean, they're they're that good. So I mean, I think I have mine set up so it displays pictures from either my flicker. I think my my no, my photo library. So yeah, it uses that as a screensaver. Sure. That's usually pretty good. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah, for sure. Yeah, yeah. Cool. All right. One last cool stuff found a product from John Chaffee, who used to has always made the calendar software that I like. He he and Dave Riggle made a product years and years ago called now up to date and now up to date in contact that was for pre Mac OS 10 Macs. And then and then actually they sold it to somebody that sort of ruined it. And then they came back with something that they called Busy Cal, which was very much in the same vein. Busy, as I mentioned in a previous episode, Busy Cal has now been taken over by Fahad, the guy that does to do the number to do and he's doing a great job with it actually. It that it's been like that for almost a year, at least six months. So like good news there. And that means that John Chaffee is now working on something else. And he's released it. It's called when dot works. And that's the URL when dot works. It is an appointment booking engine. And what it does is it allows like I I've been using this for my Dave, the nerd business, right? I do some consulting. In fact, some of you folks have have engaged me to do stuff that's, you know, sort of goes beyond the scope of what we do here for you in the show. And I'm happy to do that for any of you. And now on my website, I've put a link to my calendars for when works. And the cool part is I do two types of of meetings, right? I have onsite meetings for people that are local to me here in Durham or wherever I happen to be. And then I also do, you know, phone time or, you know, however we wind up doing it, FaceTime or whatever is that. And my my procedures and the structure of things is different for onsite stuff. I have a one hour minimum for phone time. I don't need to do a one hour minimum because I'm not traveling anywhere. So there's no, you know, like my time invested in it starts when we start. And that's fine. So I typically do a half hour minimum for phone stuff just because I don't want people stressing about trying to squeeze it all into the first 15 minutes we ever spend together. And that's worked out really well. And so I've got on my website two different links and they both go to when works, when works pulls my availability from my calendar. And then uses different parameters that I set for each appointment type to open or close different windows of opportunity. I can say, look, I need, you know, 15 minutes in between appointments. If they're if it's, you know, but phone time, but I want a half hour in between appointments. If it's if it's, you know, on site where I'm driving around, I need a little extra time, a little buffer. I can set all that stuff and it's all very customizable per appointment type. And I don't have to expose all the links to you. Like I also have a lunch appointment thing that you don't see when you visit my when works calendar. And that's OK, right? But I can send the link to specific folks. Very, very cool. And he's kind of going with the freemium model here where you get you get five appointments a month for free. And then and then, you know, you can pay five bucks a month and do unlimited appointments and things like that. But it syncs with your iCloud, Google, you know, Outlook, Office 365, all that stuff. So it's a cool thing, man. And I highly recommend checking it out. When dot works. So that's my my contribution to cool stuff found for this week, Joe. There you go. Thoughts on that, right? No thoughts on that. But let me ask you a question. I just noticed something on my on my discord screen. The there's like a little meter and it says voice connected. OK, it was read a few moments ago. So we are showing one bar. So is that like packet loss? We use this. We use discord as our as the way that John and I talk with each other here. And yeah, if you're seeing. So it's in discord is not peer to peer, as we were talking about with like Resilio sync. So John and I aren't connected directly to each other. We are connected to one of discord servers. And voice connected is the thing that so we get a meter. And it's either green, yellow or red, depending on how well your individual connection to discord server is. Mine is showing voice connected green. Yours is not. Is that right, John? Are you back to green? It I noted. I just noticed out of the corner on my eye that it was red and then it turned green as I was glaring at it. OK, good. So whatever issue there was, it fixed it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, we mentioned that we moved from Skype to discord for a while back just just based on sound quality. And it's not perfect, but it's way better than Skype for sound quality. So I will I'll put a link to to thing to what we did. So there you go. Put that in the show. Yeah, keep an eye on that, John. And we can always change servers even midstream during the show while we have while we if we have to. So I in fact, I've done it while we've been recording without even pausing before it happens very, very quickly. I just have to make sure to do it when I'm talking, not while you're talking. So because because there is a brief interruption. Cool, man. Let me let me look at your packet loss here. No packet loss. Oh, I think you disconnected and reconnected is what happened. That's interesting. You're still with me, right? Yep. Yep. All right, cool. I want to take a minute and thank all of our premium subscribers that that had contributions that come in came in during the last week. As you know, if you are if you have listened for a little while, we do offer a premium. Option here, which really is just to serve those of you that are interested, capable and willing to support us directly here. And and obviously, we very much appreciate that. It's part of the whole way we can bring you the show every week. So thank you. And premium listeners, of course, get in addition to the warm, fuzzy feeling that you get from supporting your two favorite geeks doing something they love and hopefully you love. You also get access to our premium at macgeekab.com email address, which we which is a box that we pay attention to first when we are doing these types of things. And it's just our way of saying thanks for helping us keep the lights on and all of that this week. Those of you whose contributions came in include on the monthly ten dollar plan, John B. But I don't think that was you, John. In fact, I know it was it was a different John B. Tony Z, Micah P, Nick S and Robert D. And on the every six month plan for twenty five, we have Brett H, Terence N, Warren R, Robert P, Karen K, David P, David G, Jeffrey F and Rick S. Thank you to all of you. You you rock and you know that. But I like to say it anyway, just to confirm it. So we it is confirmed you rock, you all rock. I mean, you're all sending in questions. You're all we all participate in the ways that we can. And that's what the Mackey Keb family is all about. Speaking of the Mackey Keb family, if you want to come to the Mackey Keb family room, per se, go to Mackey Keb dot com slash forums and visit and participate in our new Q&A discussion forums that we have there. It's working out really well. You can get questions answered. You can vote answers up or confirm that this is the answer to the question. So when somebody comes in six months from now with something similar, they can boom, see it right there. It's much better than what we had to sort of deal with with the free for all that became Facebook. It's fine. The group over there is actually fine. It's one of the best Facebook groups I've ever been a part of. And I'm very thankful that we have it. But in terms of questions, it's it's it's difficult to see any history of it. So that's why we that's the big reason why we did this is our own thing. So Mackey Keb dot com slash forum. All right. A tip from Peter, John. Peter wants to remind us of something actually. And it really sort of came in a I don't even have it. Oh, I do have it here. Yeah, Peter was was doing some troubleshooting. He says after upgrading to 10 dot 13 dot 15. Sorry. 10 dot 13 dot five. I often receive the Mac death screen now black, forcing a reboot. I was weighing various options. You know, it's interesting. I've been having that issue here in the in the studio. So I might want to try the solution he proposes. So I was weighing various options, all of which were time consuming, even with a bootable clone backup of 10 dot 13 dot four. He said before proceeding, I gave resetting the PRAM a try, which is just rebooting with command option PR. He says that solved it. And I just wanted to remind my fellow MGG listeners and hosts of this easy solution to fixing many woes. You know, it's not a bad idea. I always forget about that. You know, it's easy to assume like, oh, no, this is, you know, a disaster that requires a time consuming fix before even trying the non-time consuming stuff. And that includes a PRAM reset, which, like I said, is reboot and hold down command option PR until you hear the startup chime again, and then you can let go. It resets a bunch of the NV RAM parameters. But and also along with that is resetting the system management console, SMC, which is essentially the power manager of the Mac. And I think after doing a major operating system upgrade, it's probably not a bad idea to do a PRAM and SMC reset. And I probably should do that here in the in the studio. So I'm not going to do it right now, obviously, but I'm putting it on the list. So thank you, Peter, for the tip and the reminder that rocks. So there you go. Yeah, Brian Monroe in the chat room at MacGeekUp.com slash stream. Hello reminds us. He says there's no startup chimes on the new MacBook Pros. So while you can still reset the PRAM, you kind of have to go, I guess you go by by Spidey sense as to when you should release it. I mean, you'll see the Apple icon come up and then it goes away and sort of starts over again. So there is visual indication that that it has restarted. So that's that's how you do it. And Brian confirms that. So thanks, man. That's actually really good advice. Easy to forget. Thoughts on this, John. Hmm. Makes me sad that they got rid of the it's a useful diagnostic tool. I don't disagree with that. Actually, a lot of the, you know, a lot of the startup key sequences, some are very persnickety as far as when they should happen to make certain other things happen and having that chime there. What I'm saying is that a lot of them you should really, you know, hit them. Most of them you should hit for the chime. If you hit it after the chime, it's probably not going to work. Yeah, right. It depends, right? Because doing safe mode, right, you actually want to hit the shift key right after the chime. At least that's always been my M.O. But but the chime is my is my sign. It's like, OK, here's the chime. OK, go. So yeah, yeah, yeah. Brian, Brian says he shakes his angry fist at getting rid of both the light up Apple logo on the back and the reboot chime on the new MacBook Pro. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I'll say the logo that was cosmetic, but the chime is not really cosmetic. Right. Right. Right. Yeah, I agree. I agree. Hey, you want to take us to tip from Phil, John? Phil's got a great one here. So Phil says my mom is not the most tech savvy person. Sorry, mom, and she got this email and forwarded it to me. And I think I'm going to describe the email to you before continuing. And the email. It said summer report. Your Apple ID was logged into iCloud via a web browser. It's like, oh, that that's kind of an Apple like message. Maybe there's an Apple logo at the top. So, yep. And it says dear Apple, the Apple ID email address. Your Apple ID was used to sign into iCloud via a web browser. And it gives the date and time and the browser. It says opera. And it says that the info is familiar. But if you want to confirm your data and it has a little little button in it saying confirm copyright 2018 Apple Inc. Wow, that looks pretty. Looks pretty authentic to me there, Dave. To continue with the email. Mom is sharp as a tack when it comes to language. And notice right away that the alleged sign in happened today at 11. Twenty five p.m., which unless someone has created a time machine, not the backup, there is no way that could happen. So in this case, just reading it carefully and not freaking out, helped to realize that it was a fake and she didn't click on anything. Go mom. Yeah. I mean, looking at this, I mean, you saw it too. I mean. I'll add something to this, though. So it did look real, including some some notes here when you're getting when you get emails. So the one thing that would probably we'd want to believe it's legitimate is that it's from managed apple.com. Thing is, you should know that forging a email address a from address is trivial. So don't use that to verify that something is legitimate. But what you can do, so it had a little confirm button in here. And what you can do is if there's HTML like that in the email, if you hover over the button after a moment, it will show you the URL that it brings it to. And in this case, this would be another way to verify that this is bogus is that it goes to HTTPS colon slash slash C zero N F I R M dot email. And then there's some more more stuff there. Last I checked C zero confirmed email is not an apple domain. And I actually went to the I actually went to the site and it looks pretty real. And I think somebody's reported them because now you get warnings from Google. So I think somebody's flagged it as as a fishing site. That didn't the first time I tried it. Yeah. And I think what else that I have in my head here. OK, a lot of time if you see what looks like a website that's been compromised and that somebody's figured how to put fishing software on it, which I think is what happened in this case. I still think as a general rule, writing to abuse at and the name of the domain may get to the administrator so that they know their system has been compromised. I haven't done that in a while. It's technically supposed abuse at and postmaster at our addresses that every domain that accepts email is supposed to have. Now, you know, there's no one forcing you to do this unless there is. Like, I mean, if you run your own mail server, no one's forcing you. But if you host your mail with, you know, any major domain provider or anything like that, they will not let you delete the abuse at and post postmaster at addresses like those have to go somewhere or they make it very difficult. They tell you, don't do this, have them. So yeah, in theory, abuse at should be there. But again, you know, like you said, this isn't abuse. I mean, sending it to abuse at Apple dot com. I mean, it might be helpful in that someone at Apple will take this and investigate it, but no one has breached Apple's mail servers to do this. Like you said, they're just spoofing the return address. So it's not, you know, there may be no place to to to report mail abuse to, you know what I mean? Got it. Yeah. But now, where would you she was? Because I mean, I mean, it's somebody spoofing, you know, Apple. You know, they're trying to harvest Apple IDs. And that's not right. I'm wondering the best address to write at Apple to resolve that. Oh, I mean, you could write abuse at Apple dot com. But I guess what I'm saying is like no aspect of this email came from Apple. Right. It's not like somebody somebody breached Apple's database. They're just they're just sending out these emails trying to look like they're from Apple. But it may be. And I think I think at some level, this is this is true that there is a department at Apple that does chase down some of the more egregious phishing attempts like this. But but but it's not they're not patching breaches. It's just like you could do this on your home computer if you wanted and create fake emails and send them to addresses. You could buy a list of addresses and send them in the hope that you get some small percentage of people that put in enough of their information that you can compromise their Apple ID. And I'm obviously not recommending that any of you do this. But it is totally possible and probably wouldn't take you a whole lot longer to do than it did for me to describe. It's it's a fairly trivial thing to to do, which is unfortunate. But it's just it's how the how the system currently works. So, yeah, there you go. Any more on that one, my friend? No, I think we're not. We're good. Cool. Yo, I want to take a minute and talk about our first sponsor, which is TextExpander. As I mentioned in the intro, TextExpander now supports single sign on, which makes things really handy if you're using TextExpander at your business because they support G Suite, one login, Okta, right? And that way you don't have to create new accounts for your whole team. And the question then comes up, Dave, why would I want all of everybody in my company to log in to TextExpander? Well, TextExpander is awesome for creating little snippets of text that you send out repeatedly. I have them for my email addresses, for my phone numbers. I have them for my snail mail address, my John's snail mail address, right? So I don't have to think about these things when somebody says, what's your phone number? I'm filling out a web form. You know, I can just type in the little shortcut, which for my cell number, because we're in the 603 area code, is just C603. And boom, it expands it for John's address. I do comma JBADD, and it just barfs out John's address. So if somebody needs to send something to us, I can just put these things there. It's very quick. I'm assured of not fat fingering anything, but you can also use these for things like your customer service emails, where you, you know, you send something out and you're like, oh, that's perfect. Great. I want to save that and use it again. Well, instead of copying and pasting it to some document that you pasted out of every time you want to use it, you assign it to a snippet and you type, you know, comma CS. And you can I use comma to start all of my snippets, but you don't have to. You can, you know, you can have him be anything you want, but you know, it could be comma CS response one or whatever, you know, some something that you name it and then boom, it barfs out this request. And when you sync with everybody on your team, everybody's using this same perfectly crafted customer service response. TextExpander even lets you have data entry points in it so you can put in it will ask you. You can have it prompt you. You know, what's the person's name or pull the name from the email. If you want, it can do some automated things. What was the date of the thing they purchased from you? What was the name of the item or product or service they purchased? And boom, it all puts it together. Really great stuff. So check it out. Go to TextExpander.com slash podcast. That's where you can get 20% off of your first year subscription of this. On check. I know it sounds generic. It is TextExpander.com slash podcast is where you go. And then on checkout, it'll ask you which podcast you heard about it from. And obviously, you know, the answer there. So our sincere thanks to TextExpander for sponsoring this episode. All right, man, you had a question in the pre show, which I thought was a great question to ask. And your question was how to position the dock, how to choose which screen the dock appears on with multiple monitors. And it's a great question. So the first thing to talk about is that this doesn't really happen in the dock system preference pane. It happens in the display system preference pane. But before that, even you have to decide how you're configuring your multiple displays, and that's in mission control. You have mission control on, right, John? I see it here. Yes. Do you have the box check that says displays have separate spaces? Yes. OK. So that is the that is the thing that. Chooses whether you have a menu bar on both displays or not, right? So you have a menu bar on both displays, right? Yes. OK. So that's the that's the default way of doing it. But I also call it, for us long old timers, the new way of doing it, which I think was introduced in. Oh, Mac OS 10.11 or something like that, where it used to be that you only had a menu bar on one display. Now you can have it on all displays. And it also comes with some other user interface differences. I don't want to call them quirks. But if you don't have that checked, then what? So I'm curious now, actually, because I haven't done this in a while. If you go into displays, John, and go to arrangement, you this is where if you don't have multiple displays, you won't have this tab. But if you do, this is where you can tell your Mac how your displays relate to each other in physical space so that when you drag a window from one to the other, it appears to happen seamlessly, right? You have to give it some some hints. And this is where you just draw. Yeah. Do you have a top one of those screens? Do you have a white bar that goes across? Or is it across both of them? It's the right most screen. OK. So and if you choose to put your dock at the bottom of the screen, does that appear on the right most screen? Usually, but not always. Really? Original. Real. Yeah, some sometimes it gets stuck on the my expectation is that it would. Be on the screen that with the window that's front most or the app that's front most is where my dock would be. And that's not always the case. There's some weird going on. Huh. That's interesting. Huh. Yeah. I get rid of this. Yeah, I'm going to the left most screen and now the dock is not following. So the dock follows from screen to screen when you're in this. Well, that's my expectation. It doesn't always do that. And I'm wondering if this is one of the apps that. So what I have on my left screen is I have discord and I have the chat app. And then I write my screen. I have. Everything else. OK. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And and it might. Make things a little janky, but grab in in system preferences displays. Grab that white bar, which you should just be able to grab just the white bar and drag it from whatever display it's on to the other one. Yeah, it lets me do that. OK, and things will probably flicker and redraw a little bit. Yeah. And now the dock is on that screen. OK, so that's how you get the dock to follow. I think I'm a fan of the neck. I didn't think the dock and again, you do this more than me. So maybe the dock does follow, but I didn't think the dock followed. If you put it on the left or the right, it will be on the very left screen, the left of the very left screen or the right of the very right screen, right? But if you put it at the bottom, it will be on whatever screen that menu bar is on. That's what I thought. And it sounds like that's what's happening for you. Most of the time. Huh. Yeah, whatever. Now, I I and this is just a personal preference thing, but I, you know, it's always good to try different stuff. I always recommend to people try putting the dock on the side of the screen. I like it on the left, but I know people who who like it just as much on the right. And the reason I recommend that is because for most of us, our screens are much wider than they are tall. And so by having the dock on the bottom of the screen, you're chewing into the space that you get on the shortest axis. And so I and I don't like to have my dock hide and appear, but some people do. And that's totally obviously totally fine. But I like to have mine up all the time. So by putting it on the side of the screen, I'm having my dock encroach upon the axis of my screen that has the most width to spare. And therefore now I can get, you know, almost full top to bottom windows in a normal configuration, which I really, really like. So I just recommend, especially on laptops that, you know, having the dock on the bottom can make things feel really cramped, whereas putting it on the side, it's like, oh, yeah, it's it's there and everything's copacetic. So that's my that's my advice to try it. See how you like it. That's what I like. Yeah. I just got a boat. I must have like 30 icons in here. I should clean that up. Well, get kind of cramped if I did it on the. No, no. Yeah, I'll play around with it. Cool. Cool. Yeah. We had a question come in from a listener, David. Let me let me find that question so that I can get it right. Well, oh, no, that's no good. Oh, they're way too tiny. No, things aren't good for you. We'll stay. We'll stay on the bottom. OK. Oh, when you moved it from the bottom to the left, things got got too tiny. Is that right? Well, yeah, I got a 16 by nine aspect ratio. Yeah, I think so. Yeah, it's just it's just that it's too small for me to. I hadn't thought about that. That smaller than I would have liked. I mean, I mean, I could change. No, I guess I could change the size to a limited extent. Yeah. Anyways, all right. Listener David sent in a request and he said, which password manager do you recommend or use? He says, I was thinking one password or last pass, but I'm seeing a lot of love for Dashlane. He says, rather than trust CNET or PC Magazine, I trust you. Also, oh, and then then he asked how he could increase his MacGicab contribution. So I explained that to him, too. In terms of password managers, and I'll start right out of the gate as anybody that listens to the last episode knows one password just came out as a sponsor of the show. But that doesn't really impact our advice here. In fact, I think it's with them specifically as it is with many companies, it's sort of the reverse. You know, we we talk enough about a product and they say, well, we want to, you know, this is an audience we want to get in front of and support. So, you know, they came on board. One password is the one that I've used for a very long time. And I I've tried. I have not tried Dashlane. I've tried many others and really keep coming back to one password for the user interface. John uses LastPass, I've tried LastPass. The functionality of it is is actually great. It's cross platform functionality, at least when I tried it, was better than than most others, although Dashlane probably now competes very equally there or perhaps even better. But its user interface was something I could just it always felt foreign to me and felt very wonky. And then, of course, there is the one that we haven't mentioned that we all have, which is Safari's or iCloud Keychain, but Safari's password manager. Safari's password manager is actually great. It syncs natively inside Safari for all of your devices, which we will sort of get with iOS 12 with third party password managers, finally, which is great. But I really like using iCloud Keychain alongside one password for that reason. But what iCloud Keychain, it does password generation, password syncing, and that's it. And it does those things very well, but that's it. It doesn't do two factor authentication. It doesn't, which would also be called one time passwords because sometimes it's two step, sometimes it's two factor and it's better to just call them one time passwords, like the Google Authenticator app will do. But it doesn't do those and it doesn't do any sort of threat assessments, which a lot of the other ones do, right? Where like one password and I think LastPass does this too. You can chime in on this, John. But it will look at the passwords that you're using and do some sort of threat assessment. We talked in the sponsor block in the last episode about how one password is now actually comparing your passwords locally, it's not sharing them. It downloads a database of known compromised passwords and compares your password to it and it can say definitively. I know you think that this is a unique password, but I have it in a database and it is not unique and you should change it. And then it will facilitate some of that. It'll like one password warns me when I have when I have an account on a site that supports two factor off. But I don't have that enabled. It will tell me that Dashlane, I think, will automatically change your passwords on some websites. I mean, I say automatically, you tell it to do it, but you don't have to actually log in and do it. They sort of have the script built in. And so if it's like, right, you know, hey, you've got a password that for. Yeah, they do that for sites that, you know, don't keep monkeying with that part of the site. So yeah, I guess it simulates you using a browser to update your password. Exactly. Yep. Yep. It's pretty handy. But yeah, so Dashlane is the one that keeps coming up that that I have not tried, but but probably should. You know, there you go. The only hiccup we had a question a while ago. The only thing with with iCloud key chain is that sometimes if you update the OS, or at least we found that at least got one report, it was turned off. Because all of a sudden the person was like, ah, what the hell, what happened all my passwords? Yeah, yeah. Oh, yeah, turn it back on. They were in the cloud. The problem was because the feature was disabled, it wasn't populating. It wasn't updating. Yeah. Yeah, for sure. Yeah. And then as for LastPass, I'm looking right now. So I'm running the LastPass app on my Mac here and they have a security challenge section. And it basically lists. Oh, gosh, I got a my score is not that great. Oh, yeah. So to show the number of accounts, duplicates compromised, which I guess is the thing you were talking about. So so I have none compromised. I have duplicates, which I self the fix weak passwords, old passwords and blank passwords. And it comes up with a score and then lists them all. And then you can fix the problems there. So sure. So similar to one password. Make sure you get all your ducks in a row there. Yeah. Good passwords. Yeah, which is good. Yeah, yeah, exactly. It interestingly, I was kind of looking through news feeds and that sort of thing this morning, right before we recorded the show. And I saw that I forget who wrote it. Bradley Chambers over at nine to five Mac wrote an article or published an article that says, what's the best password manager for Mac OS and iOS? And I mean, he's got a it's a great little little dive into it there. The the net is he he felt exactly the same way I did. Like there's some great options out there. However, the one that feels most like home is one password. And and sounds like that's the one that that he uses. But it's worth reading through this to to, you know, just get some of those some of those ideas out there. So I will I'll put a link to that in the show notes for sure, for all of you. It was a good a good read for certain. So yeah, there you go. There you go. And you like you like one. Sorry, you like last passes interface, right, John? You're used to. Oh, yeah. It I mean, it doesn't always come up. The iOS version doesn't always integrate as well as the Mac version. Sure. But you find I'm speaking specifically for the Mac, you find that pretty usable. Oh, yeah, they have an extension, Safari extension, or actually an extension for any major browser. And yeah, you log in. And then when you get to a site that it knows about it, you know, just figures out the fields of populate and populates them. So cool. And like I said, you can, you know, do update, you know, or change your password or make it stronger. Yeah, yeah, right. Now, I'm very, yeah, I'm very happy with it. I mean, they've I mean, both of them in one password have had issues over the years, but they've been pretty good about fixing them. Yeah, yes, of course. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, the. Yeah, I don't know. I just couldn't the way that you I was was just a little herky jerky for me. Yeah, check it out. Check it again. Yeah, yeah, I guess my only concern with, you know, one that isn't the one that you and I use is that it's kind of the new kid on the block and it's easy to make mistakes. What's that, Dashlane? Or has it been around a while? Has it? Yeah, I think Dashlane's been around a while. I think. I think. Yeah, it came out in 2012. So they got, you know, almost six years. Yeah, yeah, Dashlane's been around a while. Yeah, I wouldn't I wouldn't worry about them in that regard at all. Yeah, just hasn't hit our radar. Yeah, I mean, it's come up occasionally. But yeah, neither one of us has really dug into it. So yeah, it's and it's probably worth digging into as well. So. Coolio. Yeah, yeah. All right. Where are we here? I know we've got other stuff to go through. Let's do it. Tom, you want to take us to Tom, John? I'll take us to Tom. Sweet. Hey, guys, I've got an issue with an external four gigabyte Lisi hard drive that keeps ejecting when the iMac is sleeping. My client says she wakes the iMac she intermittently and she intermittently gets the improperly ejected error message. Sometimes the drive will mount properly after she clicks OK on the error message. And sometimes she has to turn off the drive and turn it back on for it to mount. The drive is connected directly to one of the USB ports on the iMac. I've had her switch the USB ports to help narrow down if the issue is the drive or the iMac, the intermittent ejecting is still happening after switching ports. I've read about waking issues with Lisi drives from Lisi's website, and they say that the error message was an issue with Mac OS reporting the issue before the drive was actually mounted. But I think it could be a problem with the drive. Hopefully it's not a problem with the USB ports on the iMac. I tried looking at the system log file to see if they could see any errors around the time the error was reported by the user, but I don't see anything unusual. I've included a couple of the system log files, which I don't think I've looked at. Sorry. We can still answer this. Sure. It's a 2012 27-inch iMac, 32 gigs of RAM, three terabyte Fusion drive. Maybe you guys have seen this kind of behavior. I just want to make sure if it's a hard drive issue or an issue with the iMac, one is much easier to replace. By the way, I don't like the changes in the console app. And the leader version's a Mac OS. Yeah, I'm with the other. It's harder to find errors if I'm not mistaken. Errors only since about 1.30 a.m. are recorded in system log on a daily basis. Yeah. Yeah, the console app has been engineered now for the last two updates to major updates, rather, to Mac OS. It's been engineered to be a developer tool, not a troubleshooters tool. That's how it feels to me. So anyway, go on, please, my friend. All right. Well, we have heard of drives from various manufacturers exhibiting this whole improperly ejected symptom. One thing you may want to do, one suggestion is, may I go to system preferences, energy saver? And if there's a thing that says, put hard drive to sleep when possible, I'd not do that. Otherwise, I've seen the issue being related to quirky firmware. Now, in this case, though, he says that let's see pointed the finger at Apple being the cause of the problem here, but maybe it's let's see. So some drives allow you to update the firmware. So you may want to give that a whirl as well. As far as a different USB port, that's a good suggestion that I actually recently, and we'll go into detail in a future episode, but I actually had an issue where I think it was because there's something wonky with the USB ports on my MacBook Pro, but a port not providing enough or intermittent power could be the cause of this as well. And for what I see on, that particular machine has four USB ports. While I'm guessing that they're all on the same internal USB hub, they may not be. You can see this in system info. If you look at, I think the USB category, you can see the cascade. So maybe on one USB hub, they may not be. You may want to try all the ports. I know that's a pain in the neck, but try all four of the ports here. Maybe you'll find a good one. It could also, and I've had this happen, Dave, it could also be a flaky cable. I had one external enclosure that had a tendency to give the improper eject message if I moved it around while it was running, which you should be able to move it around, at least in my opinion. So it was a bad connection, or bad cable. Never rule out the cable. Finally, as a suggestion here, if you don't like the new console, there is a dandy app called Consolation 2. And I think they're working on Consolation 3, but Consolation 2 is the latest release version. And one thing that it has, Dave, is an option to output results in what I believe was what we were familiar with, which is the syslog format. So if you go to eclecticlight.co slash downloads, you can get Consolation as well as a load of other cool utilities. So that's what I got. Cool. Yeah, yeah, the sleep drive thing can... That's a great one to remember to try, because like you said, some third-party drives just don't play nicely with that. There used to be a utility, and now I'm dating myself, pre-Mac OS X, actually from John Gotau at St. Clairsoft, who makes now, we talk a lot about default folder and app tamer and Jettison we mentioned recently, he made a utility called Sleeper. He doesn't make it anymore, it doesn't exist. But I'll put a link to a screenshot of it in the show notes where you could really manage this on a, well, it was on a drive-by-drive basis, but you were doing it by scuzzy IDs. If that means anything, kids ask your parents, right? But that allowed some granular configuration, if you will, of which drives got to sleep and which drives didn't and all that stuff. But anyway, it doesn't exist anymore. I don't know of any utility that does that for Mac OS. If there is one, I feel like there should be one. I feel like maybe there is actually one, but I don't know, I can't remember some. I mean, in the grand scheme of things, I mean, if you look at, I mean, most drives from what I've seen, even rotational drives, I mean, they consume what on the order of tens of watts, maybe, you know, like a light bulb. So is it really worth saving those pennies when it's consuming tens of watts versus, and most drives, when you sleep them, I think they go down to like really low, like maybe a single watt, single digit watts. So it depends on how many drives you're running, right? But at scale, I think yes, but for most of us in our homes, probably not. However, a spinning drive is more, is about more than just consuming power, right? So you've got heat that's generated by the drive and also wear and tear on the internal mechanisms in a spinning drive, right? So, right, you know, I mean, it's very interesting whenever in like one of my Synology units or a Drobo unit or whatever, if I buy two, three, four drives all at the same time and put them all in one of those units, they all die within, you know, a month to three months of each other, right? I mean, this is just like they start exhibiting errors and it's like, all right, immediately start replacing them because if you don't, they're all gonna be dead soon and whatever you think you have for fault tolerance doesn't actually exist. So I think there is something to be said about, you know, the number of rotations a drive makes and the number of hours it's running being very much related to its longevity. You can't really predict for any specific drive what that number is gonna be, but I really think it is related to that. So, you know, there you go. I don't know, that's the way I look at it. You wanna take us to Phil or should we jump to some of our tips and stuff, John? Phil's kind of, yeah. Okay. This is gonna be kind of maybe a community challenge, I think, because I don't know if we quite figured it out, but it's a weird symptom. Okay. And Phil says, I'm trying to use my Mac to create a spoken track of a PDF for someone who has limited vision. I tried selecting the text, then go to the services menu and then say add to iTunes as a spoken track and it isn't working. Here's the PDF of the book. I would appreciate it if you or anyone could create this as an MP3 file. Thanks. So you actually, in solving this, you actually found where for with most things you can actually do this, right? He had a very sort of unique scenario that prevented him from creating a PDF or an audio file from a book, right? But you were able to do it with sort of generic PDFs, isn't that right? And that's the thing. So I haven't even really realized that there is this feature, but it's pretty cool. And yeah, it does as expected in some cases, but I went through the same motions he did. And while they claim to be writing the speech to a file, which once you're done, it'll appear in iTunes as a track. But I never saw it appear. Or no, I'm sorry, I did not see it appear. So it claimed to be generating the file, but when I went into iTunes, after I did this operation on the text from the PDF that he sent me, there was nothing there. So wait, how do you do this? So you open the PDF in preview? Yes. Okay. And then- You can do that. Yeah. Well, I'll highlight some text and click and you should have a- In the services menu, I don't have any add to iTunes thing. I mean, maybe I should. I think you should. I'm not sure why you don't. Yeah, I definitely do not. But is it possible that I have turned that service off? Yeah, let me look at my mini. Okay. So on my mini, I opened up a PDF, just a regular PDF. It opens in preview and if I highlight some text in the PDF, the first choice is add to iTunes as a spoken track. So I see it on both my machines. I'm not sure why you're not seeing it. Yeah, well, I know I am not seeing it. So if I go into system preferences, keyboard and go to shortcuts, there's all kinds of shortcuts, but there is about halfway down the list, an option for services with a little gear next to it. And this is where you get to decide which services show up in that right click menu. And you can, it's probably worth, in fact, going through this and choosing the ones you want and removing the ones you don't want just to clean things up. And I guess at some point in my life, in the text section, there is an option here, which on mine, no great surprise, is turned off, which now I've turned on. And it is I'd add to iTunes as a spoken track. So there you go. I don't know why I turned that off years ago or how it got turned off, but that's where you can control this stuff. So yeah, very cool. Yeah, and I guess he had created his with something that maybe doesn't expose this as text. And so- Well, here's what I did. So I tried, so as you mentioned, yeah. So I tried highlighting text in one of my PDFs. And it works. And it was fine. So I'm like, what's the difference between my PDF and the PDF that he sent me? And I think I know the reason why this did not work. Okay. It gets even stranger. So I did a get info on the file and a PDF we'll show you. There's a more info section in that window. It'll show you some details about- Sure. The PDF. And here's the thing that jumped out at me is that the content creator for it is Calibre 3.24.0. What is Calibre? Calibre looks to be a ebook platform. Yeah. So they may have set some permissions on this PDF that keep you from doing exactly this. Maybe. What happens if you go to the encryption tab in previews, get info window for the PDF? Oh, okay. Right. There's a security flag and more info and it says none, but let me double click on this. All right, so what were you saying? Where should I go? So do a get, open the PDF in preview. So it's open. Yep. Do your get info, which I think I just did command to I. I'm not sure. Oh, it's in the tools menu. So do, yeah, it turns on the inspectors, what it is. And then at least in high Sierra. Show the inspector. Yep. The third tab over is the encryption inspector. And if you click that, what do you say, what does it say for permissions? It says you have full permissions. It does it say, because what I have is you have full permissions for this PDF, you can copy text, print or make changes to this PDF and save. Is that what yours says? Yeah, that's what it claims, but that's not what I see. So what happens if you copy that text, like highlight the text in the PDF and then just copy it, paste it into a text edit document and try to create your iTunes from there? When I tried that on one machine, it would look like it was pasting the text and then I could see like a highlighted area, but the text itself did not appear. Okay, so they're doing something to obscure the text. Yeah, for sure. They shouldn't because they claim to be a DRM free ebook solution, but so their generator may just be generating. Yeah, that's true. Yep. There's something unusual in the PDF that Interesting. I'm going to take it across to this iTunes. Yeah, right. Right. All right. Transcription. But then the final thing is that so not to be discouraged, but Phil put in the extra effort here and this is the thing that totally baffled me. So he thought he'd put a little automated workflow together to accomplish this and that worked. Here's the bizarre thing is that the workflow has exactly two lines in it, Dave. The first line is get on contents of clipboard, AKA copy what we just tried. And the second step is text to audio file. And that worked for him. So. So it, yeah. So it's something about the way this PDF is interacting with preview and how it presents itself to the user interface, not the contents of the PDF itself. Yeah, fascinating. Well, cool. Hey, they figured it out. That's awesome. That's awesome. All right. We have a bunch of follow-ups from previous episodes and I think I get through them. Let's see what happens here. So for back, we'll go in order, I think. Right? Maybe was I not smart enough to do this in order? Okay. Cool. Going back to MacGicab 708, David pointed out that he was subscribed to both iTunes match and iCloud Music Library, AKA Apple Music, and or as part of not, not AKA, but iCloud Music Library as part of Apple Music. And you get iTunes match functionality as part of your Apple Music subscription and you don't need both. He contacted Apple support and said, hey, you know, I've been paying for this for a while. I don't need it. What's the, what's the deal? And he said, if I had known that I didn't need iTunes match with my Apple Music subscription, I would have canceled iTunes match two years ago. And he actually sent us a screenshot of the chat trail. And sure enough, Apple said, he asked, he said, I'd like a refund for the past two years of iTunes match that I've been paying for that I don't need. And they came back and said, yeah, okay, here you go. We'll credit you. So a heads up to anybody that's paying for iTunes match, stop, but also ask Apple for a credit if you've been paying for it and have had to also had that Apple Music subscription because chances are you might get one. So there you go. So thank you for that, David. Thanks for the heads up on that. All right, moving on to, man, I didn't move any of these into our things. So I've just got to be really smart about this. Listener John, I think, yeah, in 709. Tip us or listening to 709. We were talking about Apple Pay addresses on your Mac. He says, and you were wondering how to set up addresses for Apple Pay credit cards on your Mac. He says, I suspect the reason it's not easy for you to find out how to change the addresses for Apple Pay for a card on your Mac is because your Mac does not directly use Apple Pay for web transactions, but rather uses another device to do Apple Pay for it instead. The only Macs he says that I know of that can actually do Apple Pay on their own by themselves are the Touch Bar MacBook Pros because they can authenticate with Touch ID on the machine itself. My Touch Bar MacBook Pro, there is a control panel item for wallet and Apple Pay just like there is on the iPhone and Apple Watch. You simply click on that, select your card, and then select the appropriate address and you're finished. Macs without Touch ID do not have this control panel. Thanks, man, that answers the mystery right there. So very, very cool. I'm very appreciative of that. I always, that makes perfect sense that they need those kinds of things, so. Very cool. All right, and then Paul from 714 writes, he says, he sent us this cool thing. I mean, this is as much of a cool stuff found as it is anything else. Somebody took a UPS and changed from having a battery in it, which can die as we mentioned to having a supercapacitor bank in there, which just holds power long enough to overcome any short-term outages or brownouts or whatever. And you can build a supercapacitor bank fairly inexpensively. So we'll put a link to this YouTube video that he found. We'll put that in the show notes because by golly, it's pretty cool, man. Did you check out this video, John? No. Okay, it's worth it. I'll put it in. I'll put it out there. It's, you know, do you know about supercapacitors? I really, this is my first time learning of them. I know about capacitors, and I know about their ability to store. Yeah. As well as release. Yes. Power, and you may want to be careful because... You're dealing with a lot of power there, absolutely. Yep. Yep. Yep. You can be dealing with a lot of power. So just... Yeah, for sure. For sure, yeah. So I found another article about it, and then I found one UPS vendor, MarathonPower at marathon-power.com, that actually makes a commercially available supercapacitor UPS, which is pretty cool. So I'll put a link to that in the show notes, too, because, you know, this is fun stuff. So there you go. Cool. And while we're on the subject of UPSes, you know, I, as we all know, I had those two brownouts during the up the, I guess it was 714. It was when Pilot Pete was here, and it caused, because my UPS battery had sort of reached the end of its life cycle in my, it's my BR1300G is the unit that I have. So I replaced that battery, it cost me 40 bucks. And the new battery I have proven now will last far longer than the old one does. But the problem was, I put it into my APC-branded UPS, I replaced the battery, and it still, it has a little LCD display that shows its, you know, information about the UPS and the load on it. And it's all very, actually very cool. But it'll also show the estimated runtime based on the current load of the UPS and the capacity of the battery. Replacing the battery did not reset its belief about the capacity of the battery. So it thinks that I have, you know, 188 seconds of pure power before that battery's gonna die. In fact, I had a lot less than that, as we proved from the experiment that we were forced to go through with 714. But this morning, I decided to see how much time my battery has. And I let it run 15 minutes after unplugging it from the wall and things were fine. When I plugged it back in, it said that I had about 25% capacity left on the battery. But that still has not, at least based on what I saw the last time I checked and I try not to check these things while we're doing the show. But the last time I checked on it, it still was showing that I had, you know, two or three minutes of battery time left based on the current load. So I think in order to recalibrate my battery, I have to let it completely die. Yeah, cause it's saying I have 160 seconds of estimated battery according to, you know, if I pull the thing and ask it, that's not enough. So I guess I gotta let it run all the way down and that's at least what APC's frequently asked questions or knowledge base says. It has to go all the way down and die. And then then it starts to figure out how much power, how much runtime your battery's got. But I know that it's got plenty of runtime. The problem is it's reporting that it has much less than it really does. So if I plug a device in with a UPS, a USB cable, the battery will say, going down, going down, when in reality, it's probably got quite a bit of time left. So not so good. Yeah, 159 seconds, Brian Monroe in the chat room is asking. So pretty crazy, huh, John? Yeah, it always tickles me. It's hard to estimate battery capacities or battery longevity. So it's not as simple as you'd think. No, it's not. I just wish I could tell it, you know, forget everything you know and just believe this test we're about to do, right? That that that's the frustrating part. It's like I know like a reset button somewhere. Well, I think I think the reset button is to let it die on the battery again, which which to be fair will happen, right? I mean, I will have an extended power outage at some point. And so this thing will recalibrate itself at that at that stage of the game. You know, I can either force it to do it or not. There was a discussion in our Facebook group. Able there asked, you know, essentially which UPS to get or started answering the question of which UPS to get. And there's quite a few of of them out there that that are good. I always liked APC branded stuff. Their warranty department is fantastic. Their support is generally fantastic when I've needed to use it. And also their support in terms of what third party devices will work with them in terms of the USB connection and automatically read it and all that. Your max will do it. Your, you know, your Synology distations will do it. But it's really handy to get that information exchanged with the UPS, assuming, of course, the UPS has the right information, but be that as it may, they generally do. And there's a there's a couple of them recommended in there. But really, you just need to buy one that matches the size of load that you want to that you want it to handle. This is really what it comes down to. And then you can choose whether you want to have a. LCD display on it, where you get some information out of it or not. I the BR 1300G that I have in my office, it, you know, it keeps my router alive. It keeps all of my various NAS devices alive. It's a little bit overkill in terms of its capacity. It's got two batteries that sort of you marry together and put in the thing. It's a little overkill, but I'm I'm OK with a little bit of overkill there, especially now that I've got it and it's in good place. So. So anyway, I'll put a link to that Facebook discussion there. So you don't run UPS. Is that right, John? Correct. OK. OK. Cool. The thing is, ever since I can count on one hand, the number of power outages that I've had since I moved here. Yeah. Again, I always say they're more about the power outages you don't know you have, right, the little brownouts and stuff. But again, you might have very consistent power, right? I mean, you don't know, right? You don't have any power conditioners because they do that, too, right? They condition the power on the way out to your devices. So I did make an effort and you probably noticed the result of this last time you were here. But I did a few months ago, made a sweep of my house and basically installed surge suppressors everywhere. Sure. So I have some level of protection. I know they don't protect it. And I don't think any of them do any sort of conditioning. But I decided that was a baseline that I wanted to meet. So, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. And there's nothing wrong with that. Yeah. All right. So where are we on time here? We're 120. That's probably more than but we've got we got to do this. We're going to get through Ron from Mackie Keb 714. We talked about the Cygnia pure charge and go NX. And, you know, Ron chimed in. In fact, so many of you chimed in about this. I really I wasn't sure how this would resonate with the audience. But, man, like, I got more feedback about this than than a lot of things and positive feedback. A lot of you use it. A lot of you have been considering it and that's great. But Ron, I had met when I spoke down in Princeton and he said, yep, these things are pretty impressive. And he says I was actually wearing them when we when we met. And I had no idea. You know, I don't generally look behind people's ears. So I totally didn't notice that he had them in. But he mentioned something in passing that I that I glossed over. And that is that these are have the ability to be charged wirelessly. It's not a charger, but it is very similar to that where you just take them and put them kind of in a cradle and they charge. You don't have to replace and fumble around with those batteries, which is a huge headache with hearing aids. So I just wanted to point that out. So thank you, Ron, for reminding me of that. So in in McGeek of 715, the last episode, the most recent episode, I should say, it's not the last episode. We discussed VPNs and such. And that led to quite a few bits of interesting feedback. And so we will start with Bill. Actually, you know, I'm going to. Yeah, yeah, we'll start with Bill here. He said you referenced VPNs and then also remote access. He says, at some point, could you discuss this in more detail? He says, I've managed to get this to work rarely, far from reliably using either Mac OS 10 server or my Netscape router. He says, I can consistently connect to the Netgear router VPN service, but only to then access the Internet. I appear to be coming in on a separate subnet than my home network. I contacted Netgear, who had people looking into it, but they never had an answer cue to the end of the Raiders of the Lost Ark. So Netgear. So his issue is he wants to access his local network. In addition, he wants to use his VPN at home to access his local network in addition to being able to have that sort of secure tunnel from wherever he is to home and then back to the outside world. Netgear's routers use open VPN as their server, which is, you know, for better and for worse, right? It's a great, well supported platform, except that it's not natively supported on the iPhone. So you need a separate app to do it, but it's fine. Open VPN lets you the server administrator configure lots of different things, only some of which are exposed in various graphic interfaces that we all get to see. And one of those things is the option to allow clients to access the local network of the VPN server or not. And it sounds like by default, Netgear's set up on whatever router he has is the answer is no, don't support that. You've got to dig into the settings. I didn't have a Netgear router set up at the time and don't have one set up here that has an open VPN server on it. So I can't dig into that for you. But that's what you're looking for is dig into those options and see if you have that turned on or turned off. And maybe if it's not exposed in the graphic interface, know that it is something that's available, especially in an open VPN server, you might just have to do a little digging to find it. So there you go. So that's the answer to that one. Do you have any thoughts on that, John, before we before we get into man in the middle attacks? The only other thing that I've wrestled with with some open VPN clients. So one is this, you know, how can I access my local network? But you pointed out I have that enabled. But the other thing is that I found a lot of times something that gets certain clients upset is a DNS resolution. What should happen is that the VPN server should be using its. DNS, but sometimes I've had it where either it's a bug in the client or something. Sometimes I've had to force or set it on the client side. You shouldn't have to do that. But sometimes I found that it is necessary for whatever reason. Huh. Yeah. Yeah. I honestly, the best VPN server that I've ever had the had the pleasure of running locally here is Synologies and specifically the one in Synology's routers. It's even better than the VPN server that they include in disk station manager, which is on their disk stations. And it's really quite stellar and reliable and like I have no trouble with it. So highly recommended. The only time that running a VPN server gets interesting is if you also like if you want to have your outbound connections from your home on a VPN, generally most VPN service providers that you would use would not let you have inbound connections across that link. So you can't have an inbound VPN server while you're doing outbound VPN, generally speaking, unless you run them in different places. So. But one thing we talked about in the last episode was I stood on on my soapbox and said, if you're connecting to secure websites or even, you know, secure email providers or whatever at your local coffee shop or whatever, you don't need to worry as much about having a VPN because that connection is secure. And I knew, in fact, I might have even said this, but certainly in the back of my head, I knew, yeah, somebody's going to yell at me about this. And you did. My both our email box filled up with it. And so I'm going to read two of those emails and then we can have a short discussion about it, John. Lex says, you gentlemen, you will get caught following this advice. He says any Wi-Fi connection without WPA to security, so IE no password is very susceptible to man in the middle attacks. A hacker, a script kitty can set up his own Wi-Fi hot spot. Lure you there instead, connect to the original hot spot and offer you a secure TLS connection, terminate that on their hot spot and set up their own link to your bank. The device he uses is called a pineapple, and you can buy these on the internet with no real fanfare. Your bank cannot detect the use of a pineapple. He says you could if you know how, but it's not easy. Using a VPN with two factor, two factor authentication or a client side certificate like open VPN does fixes this because in that case, the kitty cannot spoof you if your Wi-Fi connection is WPA to secured, but the attacker knows the password. He might be able to do the same, although this requires a far bit, a far more sophistication on his part. So that's Lex. And then and then Jim also chimed in with some thoughts on the process where which adds some clarity to what Lex says. He says, I respectfully disagree with the important aspect of your analysis of VPN while away from your homeland. It is entirely possibly says and in fact, not uncommon for an ISP or corporate IT department to inspect TLS traffic transiting their network. And it is not difficult to set up a proxy server, indeed, something that an astute Airbnb provider could even do. But what he points to is he says, use a fingerprint and Steve Gibson's G R C dot com allows you to create a fingerprint for free. He says, the only way I know to detect someone doing this is by making note of your VPN certificates fingerprint, then comparing that to the certificate fingerprint when you first connect to your VPN from a remote site. If your original certificate fingerprint matches the fingerprint from the remote connection, then that means you're connected where you think you're connected and you're good to go. Otherwise, you might get caught. So going and creating this fingerprint when you know that you're actually connected to your VPN and then comparing it might be the way to go. So we will put a link to Steve Gibson's fingerprint generator in the show notes, of course. Thoughts on that, John. They're right. I mean, they're not wrong, right? That, you know, the thing is they're right. And, you know, I kind of cheered you on in the last episode. I mentioned that there are certain public Wi-Fi servers that are not encrypted that I'm comfortable connecting to. And that I'm, you know, one is that, you know, a lot of them, you know, whether it be stop and shop or Whole Foods, they show a page saying, you know, yep, it's, you know, it's me. Yeah, right. Like, OK. And yes, if somebody wanted to, they could set up these intercepts. If I agree with everything that was said, the thing is I'm comfortable and I haven't yet gotten caught. Sure. I'm comfortable with. I'm comfortable with the that the server I'm connecting to is actually the server I'm connecting to or the Wi-Fi access point and that someone's not camping on it and or, you know, smoothing it like with this pineapple thing and all that. Yeah. Though they could be, you know, it may happen. Well, it may have already happened and people just didn't get information from you that they cared about, right? So. Yeah, it could be. Could be. That's what I'm saying. Yeah, it could be. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you got. I mean, the answer is maybe always when you're out and about, always make a secure connection and put a VPN on top of it. So this is pointed out having having the just having the key may give may give an attacker enough to to capture your traffic. Yeah, for sure. For some some good stuff. And I agree also what was pointed out is that, you know, either of it having multiple layers of security is is probably never a bad thing. Unless you have to pay lots of money for it. Right. Yeah. Listener Don had chimed in and said he uses a VPN service called encrypt dot me that will automatically connect when he's not on a trusted Wi-Fi network, which is really handy. And he says it just works on his iPhone. No problem. It, you know, he's able to whitelist networks. So the way their app works, he whitelists, you know, like his home network and things like that. So he doesn't need to connect. And then when he's out and about, as soon as he connects to a non whitelisted network, then boom, you know, encrypt me, he fires up and secures the connection and he's good to go. So and encrypt me is not the only one that does this. But but it is certainly one of them. So I'll throw that out there. Not a bad thing. And then that way you just, you know, you're good to go. So yeah, I haven't used theirs for a while. If I added that feature a while ago is that it'll yell at you with if you're on an insecure connection. Yeah, yeah, that's right. I that's one of the other ones. OK, yeah, great. We'll put that in that link in the show notes, too. All right. Unfortunately, with all the fun we're having, we're past the 90 minute mark. That's, you know, we don't like to go too long on these things for you folks. But sometimes we get, you know, we get rolling here. So this is a good one. I'm glad we did this last segment, even though it took an extra, you know, a few minutes. So thanks so much for listening, everybody. You you all rock. Like I said, we we couldn't and wouldn't do this without you. We really appreciate all the questions and the tips and all the information. And we've got lots more coming for you. Like I said, we've got a couple of episodes that we're going to record somewhat in advance. And we're actually doing that for those of you that are interested, we are doing that on Thursday the fifth. We're going to record two episodes back to back at Mackie Cub dot com slash stream. So you can hear things well in advance of when they make it out here on the feed, if you would like. But if you can't make it, don't worry, we will record it just for you and we'll release it in its due time. Where else are we here? Of course, I want to thank cash fly CACHEFLY.com for providing all the bandwidth to get the show from us to you. I want to thank our sponsors, of course, TextExpander, as they mentioned in the show. Agile, the makers of one or agile bits, I should say, the makers of one password where you can get three months for free at onepassword.com slash geek gab. Otherworld computing at maxsales.com. Barebone software at barebones.com. Ring at ring.com slash mgg. Some cool stuff coming from them, too. So we'll tell you more about that when the time comes. All righty, folks. Have a good one. We'll see you next week. No matter where you are, we will find you or you'll find us. I guess that's how that works. Just make sure wherever you are, maybe you need to use a VPN. Maybe you need to go off the grid entirely. Just make sure that you don't get caught.