 The Mac Observers' Mac Geekab, episode 753 for Monday, March 18th, 2019. Folks, and welcome to the Mac Observers' Mac Geekab, the show where we take your questions, your tips, your cool stuff found. We mix it all together. We jumble it all up. Then we sort of organize it loosely into an agenda that we sometimes follow with the goal being that we answer your tips and share your questions. Well, we do something like that. We haven't quite organized it yet, but there you go. The goal is that each of us learns at least five new things every week when we get together. Sponsors for this episode include Cashfly at mac.cashfly.com and ExpressVPN at expressvpn.com slash mgg. We'll talk more about what those all mean and what you'll find at those URLs shortly here. But here, back in Durham, New Hampshire, I'm Dave Hamilton. And here, still in fearful Connecticut, this is John F. Braun. I am so happy you did the intro today because I'm, you know, of course, watching and reading along. I have, you know, all my stuff here because sometimes I do the intro. Sometimes you do it, right? We typically go back and forth. And for whatever reason today, I was thinking, probably because it's March 18th, I was like, I had it in my head that you were going to say, you know, March 18th, 2018. And when you didn't, of course, you know, and I have to listen because I got to, you know, fire off the theme song as soon as you say that. So of course, I'm paying attention, but thankfully you said it right. So that was good. I have no, I would have almost certainly said it wrong today. So there you go. Yeah, I can usually speak what I read. Yeah, see, I don't, I don't read. I know where you read it from in our little agenda. And you folks can actually see our agenda if you want by joining our chat room at mackeykeb.com slash stream where you can hear the show live while we stream it. But there's always a link there to see the agenda. And you actually, many of the folks in the chat room often help out with, you know, putting links and things in the show notes that then or think in the agenda that then gets copied over to the show notes when we publish. So I know where you're reading it from, but I don't read from there for whatever reason I read from my menu bar where I don't have the year. It's just force of habit, right? You know, it's just how it goes. So yeah, thank goodness, huh? Thank goodness. So I got all sorts of toys this week. Cool. We have all kinds of things to talk about. You want to talk about one of your, what did you get, John? Well, this is kind of retro because the machine I have here, but I did. So I noticed that I was only getting like two hours battery life out of my MacBook Pro, and it's like, that's not good. So fire up a fruit juice, which is a nice battery app, but it has a very handy feature and it shows you the factory capacity history. And I'm like, well, let me check that out. And it's like, all of a sudden it went from, you know, high 80%, which is acceptable for most people would agree that if you're at 80%, you're good. All of a sudden the tank to 60. Wow. Like literally like in the course of a few days, I mean, this is a battery you had for years, right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. This is the original Apple battery. Okay. All right. I mean, I've had this machine since 20. What is it? It's a 2014. Is that right? Mid-2012. Oh, mid, I think you got it in 2014, if memory serves, right? Okay. So, all right. So not surprising that the battery would eventually degrade the really the only surprising part is the speed at which it happened, which I think you have a theory on and I think I agree on that. I would almost guess because it went down by almost half capacity that one of the cells just is dead. Yeah. I think that's right. Yeah. These batteries, almost every battery, though, actually I think some Apple ones, maybe not, but most batteries are made up of multiple cells. It's not one big blob. It makes more sense to go and sometimes, you know, and they're stitched together and sometimes, you know, one segment may just give up. I don't know if you're lucky. I mean, battery cells dying isn't necessarily a lucky event, but I had that problem with a prior vintage MacBook Pro years ago and the symptom was that it would get down to 33% and then die. Like not like crash and say, hey, I have five minutes left. It was just like, okay, we're going to shut off. And after I did that a few times, I had this same sort of thought like, oh yeah, this is this is a cell, whatever the last cell it goes to use in this battery is not functioning. Yeah. Well, there was a discrepancy between the reported and the actual capacity. And at some point it gives up. It's like, you're asking too much for me. I'm not sure what's wrong. So I'm just going to shut down. Yeah. I think it was, you know, when it went to use that final cell or whatever, it was just like, yep, not going to happen. And it was consistent. Like I tried, you know, recalibrating and all the things that we used to have to do to batteries and no, no. So you were able to replace it, right? And you were able to do it relatively inexpensively? Pretty much. Yeah. So I searched on Amazon and I searched for MacBook Pro mid-2012, 15-inch battery and got a hit on this one which got, you know, like four and a half out of five stars of HUSAN, H-U-S-A-N. All right. It's like, yep, this is a, and you know, this is a 7,200 milliamp hour capacity. It's brand new and it would appear that, I mean, it fit perfectly. You know, they even included the screwdrivers, not only for the case, but for the silly, you know, three-way screws that they use to put the battery in. It's like, dude, why are you using, why do you have to use a different screw to screw the battery in? Got it. Got it. And it was funny because the Apple battery also, I noticed this, it says on it, warn it, do not remove. It's like, it's three screws, man. It's like, yeah, calm down. Yeah. Cool. But this is the last of the machines where you can easily replace. I think every machine forward from this machine would have either oddly shaped cells and or it's glued to the case. Right. You have to like pry it out. Whereas this, it was just three screws in and out. So I'm happy. It's cool. Doing a full cycle right now. But the other thing I got was a knockoff. So you know, the charger that allows you, you know, with our phone, or at least my phone, yeah, and your phone too, is that you don't have a 3.5 millimeter audio jack. Correct. And I misplaced the one I had from Belkin that was the one that was one to two. It was basically, it gave you two lightning ports on your device. Oh, I see. Charge. Got it. And audio. But I found this, it was kind of funny. So I searched, you know, I was searching, I wanted to get the newer one because now I have one that has a 3.5 and a lightning, which kind of makes sense. So you plug directly. So you don't need the adapter. Oh, I see. It's just the one thing. Oh, okay. Right. Before you would have to have the adapter, which is a pain because the other, the belt original. I have no idea where my adapter is. My mind's gone. Yeah. Yeah, it sucks. Yeah, I got a couple of them. But anyways, and I got one of these. And I think, I think it directed me to a shop in Walmart. And it was like, well, yeah, it has 3.5 millimeter and this and it's 20 bucks, which is the other product is more. And when I get it, it was just kind of hilarious because I look at it and about the only thing I can say, Dave, is that it's made in China. Okay. There's no other identifying. Nice. But it works perfectly. And you know, I'm almost certain it's probably made at the same factory that makes it for the other guys. Yeah. Because the Belkin one is called the Belkin Rockstar, right? Which has the audio and charge. Okay. Yeah. This, I just found a place and they just happen to have one that was, you know, brand X. Yeah. Well, I see one, I see one on, I mean, I see Belkin's on Amazon here while we're talking and it's 40 bucks. And then I have brand X is I have a two pack that I can get for $12.99. So there you go. Huh. That's fascinating. All right. So just some shopping adventures. Yeah. No, that's great. That's great. And I also got the smart things hub, but I'm not doing too much with that. Going between smart home hubs is a, can be trying. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, this associate your stuff from the one or like reboot your whole system. Correct. You can't really, from what I found with this, except for some devices, for the most part, you can't have both smart home hubs talking to a device is that there has, it's like Bluetooth, I think it's like pairing. Oh, yeah, that makes sense. Sure. Sure. Well, Steve sent in a cool stuff found, you know, and he said, regarding your recent issues with the Wink Hub not working, he said, have you considered the Hubitat hub? H-U-B-I-T-A-T. This is right now for 99 bucks. It works only locally, but accessible remotely and handle Z-Waves, it'd be Lutron and is Alexa and Google compatible. He says, it does have a home bridge plugin for HomeKit. Okay. Well, that makes sense. Homebridge is not for the faint of heart, but you, well, but you can, it is a thing that sort of advertises itself as HomeKit accessible, and then has these plugins that you can use to adapt HomeKit to devices that aren't HomeKit accessible, which is kind of cool. But anyway, he says this Hubitat hub works without an internet connection, and they state that privacy is one of their main design goals. He says, I haven't used it, but it looks intriguing. So it's at Hubitat.com, and I'm sure I'm mispronouncing that. I'm almost certain I saw them at one of the CES events. Yeah. Yes. No, I remember the guy was talking about, oh, and by the way, the privacy thing. Yeah, we're all about that. We're all about, yeah. That's cool. Cool. So thanks, Steve. That's good stuff. Yeah, well, I'll dig into that. I don't recall them from a PEPCOM, but you know, those events get crazy, so it's not surprising that I wouldn't remember. So, cool. All right. Let's see. You know what? While we're on the whole cool stuff found thing, why don't we just stay here? We have some tips and questions and all that stuff. But while I was in Austin for South by Southwest last week, I went and spoke at the local user group meeting, the CAPMAC meeting. Great group of folks, really good-sized group. I love getting to go hang out because that's like my people, right? We're all the same. We get to be together. Is that like capital area or something? Yeah, because Austin is the capital of Texas, so it's CAPMAC. Yeah. Oh, I thought it was Dallas. No, no. No, Austin's capital. So, before I spoke, they do some normal stuff that they have at their meeting. One of them is a little segment kind of like our cool stuff found, where they talk about some cool stuff that members have submitted throughout the month. And one of the things was this app called Libby, that I had not heard about before. It allows you to borrow books instantly and for free on your iPhone electronically from your local library. Now, your library has to support this, the one in Austin did, which is why they were mentioning it, Austin Public Library does. But, you know, they support lots of libraries, and so you go download the app, and then you put in the details from your local library card, and you're good to go. So, and you can sign into multiple libraries and all this other good stuff. It used to be called something else. Bob, Bob told me, Bob Levitis was there because he lives in Austin, so he was at the meeting. He told me what it used to be called, and that name sounded familiar, but there you go. So, cool stuff found from CapMac. So, we'll put a link to that in the show notes. As usual, Overdrive is the other one. That's from Dave Ginsburg in our chat room. So, very cool. I think I have one more here. So, another like... Yes. Now, I'll bring it up later. Okay. But, our library has a couple of services here. I'll get the URLs, but it's like, if you give your library card info to the service, you can then virtually rent. So, something similar. Yeah, it sounds like the same thing. You bring up a couple of libraries across. Yeah, cool. No, it's great. I think it's awesome. All right. So, while I was in Austin, we'll talk about some of the things that I saw. South by Southwest is... Well, man, it's... We talked a little bit about this in the last episode, I guess, too, right? But... It's three shows, right? Yeah, four, really, or five. The big three are interactive film and music. And then there's an education show and there's a gaming show, right? So, there's really... And this thing lasts almost two weeks if you really stretch the numbers. But really, it's about a week and a half. And so, I was there and was able to attend lots of different things that sort of fit my various different worlds that I do. And the interactive part is generally the part that most applies to what we do here on Makikia. But that's not always true. There's always other stuff that sort of filters in. But as soon as I got there on Sunday, I went straight to the convention center, or Saturday, I should say. I went straight to the convention center because they were having their South by Southwest Innovation Awards finalist showcase, which was like all the cool stuff found. And there were some cool things there. And there were two... Actually, three, if I'm being honest, that caught my eye. One is called Y-Charge. And it's wireless charging. We've talked about wireless charging on this show before. We've mentioned companies like Anarchist that are doing it with RF. Well, Y-Charge uses infrared. And some of the benefits of infrared are that you can focus the beam way better than you can with RF, right? Because it's just a beam. And you tend not to lose as much power as you would over a distance, or at least over about three, maybe five meters, I guess, is about how far it goes. They currently have a demo that delivers a full watt of usable power at 15 feet away, at five meters. But they think that they can go up to two watts of power, which is actually pretty good. It is all line of sight, but it is safe because it's just infrared, right? So there's no high frequency stuff, right? I like that aspect. So you won't die a horrible death like if they were using microwaves, like 4 gigahertz, which literally cooks things. There's infrared, I think, is pretty safe. We've proven that. Yeah, exactly. So pretty cool. It is line of sight. They had a little train running on some tracks there. I tried to use our... We talked on the show that the FaceTime camera on the iPhone could see infrared. This infrared beam was moving too quickly for me to see it. But the beam would follow the train around, and it has a pairing thing. In fact, it can even send data back up the stream. Very small amounts of data, but it could send things like, I need power, or things like that. But it would follow this train around the track, and the train had no batteries in it or anything. As soon as you put your hand over the IR sensor on the train, then it just stopped. And then they also built a case for one of the Amazon Echo Dot units that does have a battery in it and also has one of these charge sensors on it. And so you could power your Echo Dot wirelessly, which was pretty cool. So yeah, it was an interesting thing. They had some light strips or whatever that they were demoing. So it was cool to see. Fun stuff. That's all. Any other questions on that before I move to the other one or ones that I saw that are sort of related, but not really? Continue. Okay. So Clear, which it just so happened we mentioned at the end of last episode two, and that we were always jealous when we're in the pre-check line of the people going through. Clear. They're the ones that have the biometrics-based airports security lane at some airports, not every airport, but a lot of airports, right? Well, they... Hang on one second. I hate it when this happens. Did I lose? Are you there, John? Okay, good. Somehow I lost my audio. All right. Well, we'll keep going here and then we'll see if we get it back. I found it. Yeah, kind of sort of. Why is this happening to me? Okay. Anyway, they are expanding this now to use their same identity verification for entrance into places like stadiums. They're doing some of those in Seattle, and they're also using it for point-of-sale stuff, where it could be used for anything point-of-sale, of course, because once you verify someone's identity, then if that person has bought into the system, you're signed up, then they could have their credit card or whatever. But it's also for places where, say, they're selling alcohol or whatever, where they need to do age verification. If you've already done age verification as part of the identity verification, now they're biometric stuff, their whole model was, well, if we can get the government to say that we're okay for boarding airplanes, then we know we're doing more than we would need to be for point-of-sale and that sort of thing. I thought that was pretty cool, right? Did I lose you, John? No, no. Just pondering aspects of travel in general. Let me add something else that I saw. That's cool, and that will be coming and rolling out nationwide here in the US and probably elsewhere throughout the year. Then I saw something else. My first inclination was that it was a very negative thing. Then I realized, well, wait a minute. What it is, is it's a company or a product called Veriscan. I think it's from mwaa.com. They had a booth there, and their tagline was, your face is your boarding pass. They were showing people just walking through and not being checked or anything because their faces were just being scanned and just walk right through, and you're good to go, and everything's good, you don't need to worry, you don't have to scan your boarding pass or your ID because you're just good to go. At first I thought, oh, man, this is bad. This is like Minority Report. We don't want this. People are going to track us everywhere we go. Then so I started, well, I kept walking around and looking at different things, and then it hit me. It was like, wait a minute, they're already doing that. This tech, the genie's out of the bottle, right? Pandora's box is open, so we might as well get some convenience out of this if people are going to be doing this to us anyway. So, yep, sign me up. I'll happily just walk through without having to show my boarding pass. That's fine. That was my thought. I still, no, I like the Minority Report observation. The only thing about that that bothered me was that they were charging you with a crime that you had not actually committed. Oh, right, right, right. They have committed. Yeah, you were going to commit. No, but like in their world. But on the other hand, a lot of the effects I remember is like, yeah, so he's walking around with like, hello, mister, whatever. It's like the ads are creepily specific to you. They know exactly where you are. That's right. And people that wanted to hide had to get new eyes, right? That was the whole thing. She had to get a new set of eyes. Yeah, that scene was kind of disturbing. Yeah, it was. Yeah. But I thought it was just interesting. It was like, oh, yeah, this is the world. Like, this is where we are. Well, I think a lot of, I mean, I've seen this when I've been in Manhattan, but they have like signs that say NYPD security camera nearby and it's like, okay. Of course. Of course. You've got to assume most communities have, whether it's law enforcement or private or whatever. Right. I have two. You have more, I think. I do. Yeah, mine aren't doing facial recognition though, but they could be, right? So that and that's what we're talking about here is like, you know, definitive facial recognition. That's sort of what reminded me of the minority report. Like you said, we're, you know, wherever he went, it was like, hey, hey, we know you. We know you. It was like, oh, crap. That's not good. I don't think any of our toys natively do face recognition. That's a good one. But, you know, with the way machine learning works, like that is perhaps the best example to explain machine learning to people. The idea behind machine learning is that you certainly could have a CPU connected to each camera that was powerful enough to analyze a face and figure out who it was. However, economically, that's not going to happen. So what you do is you take all of these faces that were seen from many, many different angles and correlate the data and feed it into one big computer. And it generates the pattern match so that when your camera at home sees a face, all it has to do is match against a pattern that's already been like pre crunched and you're good to go. And that's, you know, what machine learning does in a very sort of watered down rudimentary sense. But it down to its essentials. That's what it does. So there's no reason that our, you know, ring cameras or our, you know, whatever our phosphate cameras that are linked to our sonologies or whatever it is, like my sonology knows people's faces because it's already crunched through a bunch of pictures. So I wonder if I could like if at some point they would be able to link say moments and surveillance station and tell me who's in my house. Like that's, that seems like a reasonable thing to be able to do. Oh, absolutely. Yeah. Maybe I already can. Yeah. Well, I found this article here. I don't know if you read about this or if we had a commentary on this. If we did, I missed it. But IBM sucks up flicker photos without consent to train facial recognition technology. There you go. Thanks IBM. Yeah. Yeah, that's it. Yeah. I just remember reading about that and it's like, dude, the databases are ready. It's already there. Right. So we might as well get on the plane. IBM, it's IBM now. I mean, you're offering a technology. It's neither good nor, I don't know, maybe. No, you're right. It's a tool. It just depends on how it's used. Yep. And it's all, and to your point, it's already there. So, but I will say, we were talking pre-show about travel and things like that. And John, you were mentioning it, I had a 35-minute connection on my way home yesterday. And yeah, that's rough, man. It can be. It can be. That could be like a disaster in that that's just, I mean, that's when they start boarding people. So you land when the next leg is boarding. That's bad. That's really bad. I still have to get off the plane and get to the, you know, and get to the other gate, right? And now it worked out great because my gates, I knew that this was going to happen. So I booked a seat in the eighth row. So I would get off quickly. And my flight was about 15 minutes early, which normally isn't it? But was it the same airline? It was. Oh, yeah. Of course. Well, that helps too. It does. Correct. And then hopefully, they'll be in the same terminal, you think? But they aren't always, right? And I was in Charlotte and I've been in Charlotte and connected on flights that were, you know, a good 10-minute walk from one another. So I use a service called Tripit that I just feed all my travel into it. I choose to, it can slurp your email for you if you want. I don't know. I'm not a big fan of that. Not that I don't trust them. I just don't trust anybody to slurp my email. Well, I trust Sanebox, but that's because I couldn't live without it. But anyway, it's true. When I get like my airline reservations or my hotel reservations, I just forward them to plansitripit.com. And it takes care of the rest. And it builds a whole itinerary for me. But it also, because I'm a Tripit Pro member, it watches my flights for me. And I think it'll do this whether you're pro or not. It'll show you what gates you are landing and taking off from. And then it will show me a terminal map and show me how to get from one gate to the other. Now, as it turns out, you know, the gods smiled upon me. And my new gate was directly across from my old gate. So I actually had time to go and refill my water and whatever. But it was nice to, as I landed, and as we were, or I didn't land, they landed the plane for me because that's what I hired them to do. Me and everybody else on the plane, they, you know, I pulled up Tripit and was like, okay, how far do I have to go here? And it showed me the map. And it was like, okay, it reduces that stress of, I'm going to walk out of the plane. Now, what do I see next? I already knew what I was going to see next, you know, because it did it all right right there for me. So yeah, anyway, right. Yeah, my recent experience, all I'm going to say is that I'm a happy customer. So I used to use Travelocity. But as of late, the thing is it's a major pain in the neck now to book flights, because now they have all of these different types of very restrictive flights. Like, yeah, maybe you'll get a seat, you know, if we. Now, you got to book direct with the airlines. That's the only way. No, and I took your advice. And for the last couple of times I flown, I booked directly. Delta has the best information so far and online or onboard amenities in that you can access maybe not full Wi-Fi, but at least entertainment. Sure, like that. Sure. But the thing I like is that they have an SMS system where, like, if there's a change and you book directly that there's I found is one of the best saying, hey, yeah, your gate changed, right? Oh, they all will do that now. That's not just Delta. Some, I found there, there's this, as of late, the one I traveled with, the thing I like about them, which I've only seen with them, though I fly American other airlines, but I get a text saying, hey, your bag is. That's pretty cool. On the plane. And I'm like, dude, that is because I've had a lost bag one time. You remember one time. Oh, yeah. Yeah. When we had one of the shows that we were showing up at and I got delayed because the weather was terrible. And it's like, well, I'm here. Yeah, I think I'm like, hey, you got one of those, you know, t-shirts. Oh, yeah, that's right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's right. I didn't have any clothes. Yep. Yeah. It's not that's that part's not fun. Yep. Yep. But Tripp, it will take care of that for you too. It'll tell you if your gate's changed and pushes you notifications. And yeah. So anyway, there you go. That's that's that we do have some Mac tips to get back into here. I do I want to take a minute, though, and talk about our first sponsor, which is ExpressVPN. I just came back from a trip, right? You know, it's really easy to think that cyber crime is something that happens to other people. In fact, I am perhaps one of the worst offenders at this assumption. Now, part of that assumption is I'm pretty aware of what I'm doing and I'm safe. But the reality is that, you know, even if you think no one wants your data, like people, if you make it easy for people to get your data, they will get your data. Like people don't necessarily when somebody wants to do a bad thing, they don't say, I want to get that guy's credit card number. I want to sit in a coffee shop and just slurp data. And if I stumble on somebody's credit card number, that's the one I want, right? You know, it's the low hanging fruit, the easy, easy stuff. Public Wi-Fi is the place to go and get this stuff if you are so inclined. And if you are, please don't use your powers for good. But some people don't listen to this show and they don't know that they shouldn't be using their powers for evil. So when your internet connection is unencrypted, you might as well be writing your passwords and credit card numbers on a huge billboard for the rest of the world to see. Unless you use ExpressVPN, which is what I was using all week at South by Southwest because what better target rich environment for people that have all this data right there. So I was using ExpressVPN everywhere. It's secured and anonymized, all my internet browsing by creating that tunnel that VPNs do, right? The VPN creates a secure encrypted tunnel between you and the ExpressVPN server. So it doesn't matter if your Wi-Fi's unencrypted, everything that you do is private. No one can see that you're doing anything other than maybe if they dig really hard, they can see that you're connected to ExpressVPN. That's it. And their apps are super easy to use. They run on your Mac, on your iPhone, they'll even run on Windows and Android and Linux, even if you want. Just one click and you're good to go. You can safely surf on public Wi-Fi without being snooped on or having any data stolen. And it's just less than $7 a month that you can pay to get the same ExpressVPN protection that John and I have. And it's got a 30-day money-back guarantee. So we have a deal for you, right? You can protect your online activity today and find out how you can get three months free by going to the special URL, expressvpn.com slash mgg. That's e-x-p-r-e-s-s-vp-n.com slash mgg for three months free with a one-year package. One more time, expressvpn.com slash mgg to learn more than our thanks to ExpressVPN for sponsoring this episode. All right, John, let's get to some of these tips, shall we, my friend? Indeed. Sweet, fun. All right, let's go to Robin here. Robin has a quick tip. If I can find my way there. Oh, that's right. I had Steve's thing up from before. This is where I confused myself. Robin says, in add-on to the last show, he says, my last tip to add to the last show was that dragging from the download view from Safari to any location, you want. This is another one is, once you've opened a document in preview and you want to copy it somewhere, you don't have to go to the finder. You can just drag the title in the title bar of preview to a new location. So if you've got a finder window open and you've got your preview document open, just go up and I find it actually easier to just grab the icon that sits in the title bar of, say, a preview document. You can just drag that anywhere and, boom, it will copy it there and you're good to go. So nice little quick tip. Thank you, Robin. Good stuff, huh, John? I think that's pretty much general. It's not just preview. I think you're right. Yeah, I think you're right. When I read this, I was playing around and actually in the finder. So like right now, I have a folder in the window and if I drag the icon to the desktop, it's like, hey, here you go. Here's a little shortcut. And if you're dragging it to the sidebar, so I think it's a general, if you're, if you follow Apple's rules, then that's right. The other thing I noticed is if you right-click a lot of times, it'll show some sort of hierarchy in the finder. It may show like, here I'm clicking on it and it says, oh, that's an iCloud drive. So it's like an OS wide phenomenon that there's way more you can do with that icon other than just seeing it. Just seeing it, yeah. It helps you navigate all over the place, which is actually kind of awesome. That's pretty, yeah, I forgot about the right-click on that. That's pretty good. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And if you are in the terminal and you drag, you can drag that from a finder folder. You can drag into the terminal and it will give you the full path. So if you want to, like, write, you know, so you can type CD, which in the terminal is change directory, you type CD space and then drag in the folder from the finder and it will put that there so that now you're right there in the, you know, in the terminal at the same location that you're in the finder. A reverse tip for that, if you're in the terminal and you wish to have the folder that you're in opened in the finder, just say, just type open space period, which will open the current folder, which is what period means. And because the current folder is mapped as being openable by the finder, it will do it in the finder. So it's fun. Yeah, all kinds of cool stuff. That's what I love about doing this show. Cool. All right. Let's see, what do we have next here? Why are things, things are slightly a little weird for me. Oh, I forgot. I messed with my audio before. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Hey, let me see if I can fix my, my sound. I know why things are weird. All right. Let's see if I can do this. All right, we're back. Yeah. Okay. I was able to fix my sound from before. No wonder things sounded weird. Okay. Now we will go to Mike and Mike says, Mike from Canada says, back in early January, you were discussing USBC docs or hubs or whatever you want to call him says, another alternative is to use USB cables for USB C max. He says, while I have purchased an OWC doc, I also also purchased several USB cables, allowing me to connect directly from my MacBook Pro to hard drives and scanners and so on. So he's getting USB C to say USB B or USB A or whatever he needs to get to to connect to this device. They are essentially little, you know, mini docs, right? That just have the conversion in them. But, but that can be handy, especially for traveling if you just need like the one thing, you know, that way you don't have as much stuff to bring. So it's a good idea. And you can search Amazon for them. They've got, you know, they're, because USB C is actually a standard and isn't something proprietary from Apple, you can get lots of these things and generally they work. And now am I not mistaken that USB, so USB 3.0, I know I'm going to get this wrong. So help me here, John or people in the chat room. USB 3.0 went away, right? And, and when USB 3.1 came out, we called USB 3.1 Gen 1 was really USB 3.0 and then USB 3.1 Gen 2 became what we wanted to call USB 3.1. And then now that's gone, right? And we just have USB 3.2 and we have Gen 1, Gen 2 and Gen 3, which are what we used to call 3.0, 3.1 Gen 2, and now USB 3.2. Right? I'm pretty sure of this. I haven't really been following this because the thing is, so I got USB 3. And now how do you define that? Now, at least on the machines that I have, that's five gigabits per second. Is that right? Well, that's what we're talking about though. That's the problem. But then if it's not 3.0, which is what I'm going to use as my baseline here, then yeah, things, I haven't really, honestly, my friend paid attention to this because it just sounds stupid. Well, so we need to know though. So USB 3.1, okay, I get it has higher bandwidth. I'm not sure if I've thought in my head what it is. No, no, no, I can, I can tell you. So, but, but it's not that USB 3.1 has higher bandwidth or had, there is no such thing as there is no such thing as 3.0 or 3.1 anymore. Everything is now 3.2. Yeah, okay. Okay. So USB 3.0 was then 3.1 Gen 1 and is now 3.2 Gen 1. What's wrong with these people? They just describe speeds. That's it. You're totally right. So Gen 1 is 5 gigabits per second. Okay. Gen 2, which was USB 3.1 Gen 2, but now is USB 3.2 Gen 2 describes 10 gigabits per second devices. And I think I'm getting that right. Gigabits, not gigabytes, right? And then USB 3.2 Gen wait for it. It's not Gen 3. It's USB 3.2 Gen 2 by 2 is 20 gigabits a second devices. It's craziness. Yeah. What? Well, we got the, well, you were probably looking at the same article I did, which our friend, Brian Monroe, in our chat room, where's our chat room again? Is it macigap.com slash stream? Same as it was 20 minutes ago. Yep. Oh, yeah. Sorry. No, it's okay. Yep. I don't know if that was mentioned. It was. I mentioned it right at the beginning of the show. Yeah. All right. So what we're saying is that you could have between 5 and 20 gigabits per second throughput, depending on things. Correct. Well, that's, but that's, that's not a laughing worry myself. Well, that's not a laughing matter. I mean, it like, that's important, right? Oh, no, I shake my fist in that they've confused Yeah. The designation. So even smart people, tech savvy people like us and our listeners, except for that one person, but, but keep working on it. But no, it's like they're making it too complicated. Stop. I agree. I agree. So there you go. Now it's like, what does USB 3 even mean anymore? Right? I mean, I think that's the question. Yeah. I don't know why we're not just naming it after the speed. I mean, why don't we just call it USB 3, 5 gigabits, USB 3, 10 gigabits, USB 3, 20 gigabits. Like that would be way easier. To me, I think for most people, that makes the most sense because it explains to you exactly what does this mean? I mean, USB that there's a whole bunch of stuff in USB that we don't care about. I think it's interesting, but it's like, how much bandwidth do I get? I think it's what everybody wants to know. And it's like, yeah, just do that. Call it USB 480 USB. Oh, that's true. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's crazy. So anyway, there you go. All right. And then another tip from our friend Ben, Ben writes, he said, I just upgraded a 2011 MacBook Pro to an SSD and was getting ready to migrate data from the hard disk via a newer tech universal drive adapter. Weirdly, the connected hard disk wouldn't show up in migration assistant. And ultimately, the computer couldn't even find the adapter on the USB bus. I'd verified that the USB ports worked fine and realized that the low-level magnetic field in my iFixit magnetic project mat sitting under the adapter was causing interference. I removed the mat and up popped the drive. Beware the magnets, folks. This is a thing. Magnets are weird. I can feel magnets. Did I tell you that, John? I wouldn't tell the world that. I wouldn't say that on a podcast, for example. Yeah, because people will think you're crazy. There's something wrong with me. I know. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Because I mean, last I checked, most humans are not equipped with sensors for certain portions of the electromagnetic spectrum. Yeah. Well, I get all weird when magnets are around. So I don't know. I don't know what it means. On the M plane, you're... Yeah, all right. I don't know. Just beware of the magnets. But that's it. It was interesting, right? So there you go. Did you ever play with those magnets when you were a kid that they used to remember for fish tanks? They had two magnets and they had like little scratches. To clean the fish tank? Yeah. Yeah. And they were really powerful. And I remember when I was a kid, I found out that using this on our old TV, no CD, no, no, no. Don't do that. Magnetic. And I was like, wow, this really strong magnet does really cool things to the TV. Yeah. Without a degauss button, though, you got to like spend some time. No, I think that's what we eventually found. It's like, John, what did you do? And I'm like, nothing? And it's like, oh, but yeah, most of these had a reset, an analog reset called a degauss to reset the polarity or whatever of the two. But I still remember that. Magnets. I think I had the other day. I don't know if it was my iPhone or something, but I held it. I was holding something near my MacBook Pro. And a lot of MacBook Pros, I think they still do, have magnets to detect for the most part when the lid goes down so it knows to go to sleep. But if you hold other magnets near the sensor magnets, the same thing happens. And I had something the other day where I just waved it, but all of a sudden my Mac went to sleep and I'm like, okay, this is like Ghostbusters or, oh, yeah, there's a magnet in this thing. Yeah. Well, and if you're, so it that's actually an important thing to remember if you're using a watch band that has a magnet in it, you can accidentally put your laptop to sleep if you, you know, if that floats over where that sensor is. So, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. All right. You want to take us to Lauren, John? Do I? All right. Lauren's next. Yeah. Where is it? Where is it? Should we write there? There we go. No, we're good. We're good. Cool. All right. All right. Lauren says, Greetings Geeks. Last night I ran malware bites for the first time in a year or more. It immediately offered an update. So I did. When it finished, it scanned, said it found only one threat, a browser history tracker inside Dr. Cleaner Pro that I got with the software bundled a while back. I've never been really happy with this app. I want to do much more than I wanted for, but it has been a thorough. All right. To get to the end here, how do we uninstall that app, that crummy app, and how do we uninstall malware bites? That's the question. Well, I'm actually going to finish because that's not the question. That is one way to solve the problem. But he says, yeah, the browser history tracker inside Dr. Cleaner Pro that I got with the software bundled a while back, I've never been happy and I want to remove it. Now I need something to use to uninstall it in any files associated with it. Also, I'd like to uninstall this new version of malware bites that stuck a bug up in my menu bar. I don't want it there and I see no way to tell malware bites to take it down. So let's go, let's march forward with that and then we'll address the core issue as well. So. Okay. Well, I think my response kind of wrapped it up, right? Which is, go ahead. Yeah. Well, if you want a general uninstaller, which I think is one of the questions being posed. Yes. Yes. Yes. Sure. Then I would say App Cleaner is one that I've been very happy with. So. Yeah. That's for malware bites. And this is actually kind of a fish shake. We may want to generate a fish shake from this with malware bites. The thing is, the question was, how do I remove malware bites if I want to do so? You can just hide the icon, which sounded like an annoyance. And it's like, well, if you want to do that, it does offer that option. But then if you want to remove it, and I think this is just a good general question, how do you remove apps? Do you use an uninstaller? Do you use the facilities or the capabilities of the app? Is there room going here? I do. Yeah. So you're right. For malware bites, you can actually just go into malware bites preferences. And on the general tab, there is a checkbox for hide application icon. And while that may be misleading, it does hide the menu bar icon. It doesn't change the dock icon. So that option would actually do exactly what Lauren's looking for. But to uninstall malware bites or to uninstall any app, I would use, if the app has its own uninstaller, I would use that. If it doesn't. It does. Okay. Yeah. There you go. It's in the help menu. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah, there it is. It's just kind of a finger rag or a fish shake is like, uninstalling apps on the Mac is a mess. That's all I'm going to say. If apps offer it, and maybe it could be, they offer it if you run their installer again, there is an option. Last I checked, when you build an installer using the official Apple thing, you could have an uninstall option. So you run it and it's like, duh, this app's already here. You want to remove it? It's like, yeah, that's cool. Now, I don't know if they've removed that or just people don't choose to use it. Then you have these app specific things, which also is right certain. So malware writes to their credit. Yes, they offer the option, but it's in a place where I think most people would not look would not think to look. I agree with that. Well, it's in the help menu. Yeah. I would think it could be in the preferences or some other place, right? Yeah, no, I'm with you. I agree though. It's nice that it's there. I use, if an app doesn't have or doesn't obviously have a way to remove it, I always run Hazel on my Macs to do all the automation stuff, the folder automation that we've talked about on the show. And one of the things that it will do is it'll remove all of the remnants of an application. So if I take an app and drag it to the trash, Hazel will then pop up and say, hey, man, do you want to take care of the rest of this stuff that was related to that app? And you can choose which parts of it you want to delete or whatever. If you don't have Hazel and you're not using that, you might want to be for other reasons with the folder automation. But if you're not, CleanMyMac is another one that's a great kind of all-around utility to take care of that stuff. And it too will do the same thing. It'll watch what you've done and then say, even when you launch it weeks later, it'll be like, hey, you didn't quite clean up these other apps the right way. Do you want to take care of that? Which is handy. But yeah, I would say, yeah, use the app's functionality. We got a note from listener Jim who was removing Crashplan. And he says, when you're going to remove Crashplan from your Mac, use the uninstall app from Crashplan, which is a removal tool located in your system or user library. First, he says, for me, the uninstall app was in the library application support Crashplan folder. So hidden far more than Malwarebytes has hidden it, John. He says, if you use something like app delete, which I did, you will be left with a very well locked file which defies all attempts at deletion. He says, I finally had to reinstall Crashplan in order to use the uninstaller to truly get rid of it. He says, after using the uninstaller, then use FindAnyFile to locate the cruft, which the uninstaller app leaves behind. He says, allow it to have full disk access, allow FindAnyFile to have full disk access, then search for code 42, including hidden and system files. So that's another little tip right there. FindAnyFile. I don't know that... Code 42? Oh, that's... No, no, no. Code 42 is Crashplan. FindAnyFile is a utility from temple.org, I think, right? Yeah, look at that. We've heard about... We've mentioned this, I think, in the show a long time ago, but man, it doesn't look like it's been updated for a long time, but I guess it's still working for Jim. So we'll put a link to that in the show notes. He says, but allow it to have full disk access, then search for code 42, which is Crashplan's corporate parent, and that should do it. So yeah, there you go. Cool. Thanks, Jim. Much appreciated. I'm just like the 42 part, you know. Yeah. Yeah, I'm sure Matt Dornquast was a Hitchhiker's Guide fan. I have always assumed that. I never asked him that, but I assume that's why he came up with the name Code 42. It's almost assumed. Yeah, it's almost assumed. That's right. It's a safe assumption. Yeah, for sure. All right, let's see. I want to take a minute and talk about our second sponsor today, which is Cashfly, where at mac.cashfly.com, you can go. That's their special URL where you can get a free optimization consultation for your website. Well, it's only for listeners of this show at mac.cashfly.com. I don't think I need to spell com, right? All right. What Cashfly does is they have, so Cashfly has been providing the bandwidth to get this show from us to you for well over a decade now. You hear us say it at the end of every episode, which is awesome. They're really good at that. They're also really good at optimizing and making sure all of the stuff that you put on the web gets to people quickly. With their new web optimization capabilities, all your content gets optimized before it's delivered to visitors without requiring any extra development efforts from you, right? And they've got flexible edge platforms where your data is as close to your users and your customers as it can be, right? So their capabilities far outreach like what you would get from, say, a traditional CDN. They get powerful APIs for solving content distribution problems. On the fly, next generation image optimization, right? This is one of the places that can make your website really slow. If you've got sort of non-optimized images, they're taking care of it for you on the fly. They can do all this load balancing of your applications and make sure all your assets are delivered really intelligently, which is exactly what they do for us here at MacGeekab. And when your website is tied to your revenue, which it is for most businesses, optimization matters, right? And this is why it's awesome that they will provide this free optimization consultation for you at mac.cashfly.com. They'll give you a lighthouse score report, and then they'll show you, if they find that they can, of course, they'll show you how they can help you, and that helps them. And obviously, if there's a fit there, that's a beautiful thing, right? So check them out, mac.cashfly.com. That's m-a-c.c-a-c-h-e-f-l-y.com. And our thanks to Cashfly for providing all the bandwidth to get this show from us to you and for sponsoring this episode. All right, let's talk about email for a second, shall we, John? Oh, not again. So, Larry, I want to do a show. Actually, before we get into Larry's question, I want to ask all of you to email us your email workflow. What are you using to manage your email? And I'd like to go, we don't have to go crazy deep from all of you, but if you want to, obviously you can. But what I'd like to know is not only what apps you're using, but how you're managing your email. And Larry's question might help frame some of this. But how you're dealing with, what do you do with your messages after you've read them? How are you archiving them? How are you storing them? Are you using any third-party utilities to manage your email? I mentioned Sanebox earlier. That's one thing, certainly I use. I also use mail, act on, things like that. Right. But I would say, Dave, I don't want to hear about this. Oh, yeah. Well, I'm sorry. So, I believe you said feedback at MacGeekApp.com. I said feedback at MacGeekApp.com. That's where we want you to send your stuff. So, yeah. And then John and I'll share our workflows for email in more detail too. But I would say we just don't want to hear about your tools. We want to hear about your woes. We want to hear about your pain. Well, but we also want to hear how you solved your pain. What makes you, if you have, that's awesome. But if you haven't, because every now and then we get a whopper or it's like a really, you know, I've been doing this for this long and now I'm like, it's help. Well, that's the idea, right? Is it's good for all of us? Even if we think we have a system that works, it's really good to reevaluate that pretty regularly and make sure we're taking advantage of the tools that are out there. I think like you, Dave, I have emails from when I was with Atom when I had this like ancient cable mode. And I was still, you know, where I grew up. But it's so funny that I have emails. I have probably most of my emails, Dave, archive back to when I was doing email. Sure. Yeah, same. Oh, I definitely, the first email I ever sent was to you. Well, that's not true. The first email that I have in my archive is the email I sent to you because I was using Eudora at the time. It was like I started Eudora. Well, that was the first mail client that I had where I got to store my email. Prior to that, it was always stored on whatever server, you know, was my host. And that was still pop, right? That was still pop. But that pop was a big deal at that point. It was like, whoa, we get to do this. Yeah, it's pretty cool. Yeah. So Larry's question, therefore, is he says, it has been my practice to save all my incoming email to a series of mailboxes on my Mac. This is tied into my desire to empty my inbox as much as possible and to retain all my incoming mail. So I have a record. Consequently, there are four files that house all these emails. One is as large as 14 gigs. The next largest is nine. As I as time progressed, I created, I saved messages to one mailbox. And as that grew large, I opened a new one and started saving there. Based on the create date on the first folder, I have started this as long ago as 2011. I wish to migrate my main Mac to another machine and wipe and then sell the current machine that houses all this stuff. I don't want to use migration assistant because I don't want to overwrite the newer machine and do not wish to move any crud. But he says, when I've tried to export the mailboxes, the resulting file that I'd import into the newer machine is labeled partial. And I assume that not all the messages have been exported. I've tried importing the inbox files from the home library mail folder, but end up with strange subfolders and it all looks funky and takes forever. Do you have a suggestion on how best to move these? Yeah. So I think your best bet, especially if you're not going to use migration assistant, is to take your home library mail folder and just move it from one Mac to the other. That will, if you're running the same version of Mac OS on both, then it will just see it and launch it. If you're running a newer version of Mac OS on the new machine, it will actually see it and reindex it and kind of pull it all in just as though you had upgraded that machine. But that really is, especially with that kind of mail, that kind of volume of mail, I think that's going to be your easiest, your best bet. In terms of how to do this, if you're going to store this stuff on your computer inside a mail, what you're doing isn't wrong. I do something very similar. I, years ago, standardized on one mailbox, well, two actually mail boxes per calendar year. One for all the mail I had received in that calendar year and then one for all the mail that I had sent in that calendar year, because those messages are treated very differently by mail and I'd like to have them separate. But that's how I do something very similar. And if I'm going to move to a new machine, I just move that folder if I'm not going to use migration assistant. Makes life way easier. Yeah. Any thoughts on that, John? Absolutely. Although I haven't used it recently, something you may want to look at is a program called Mail Steward. At mailsteward.com. Yep. Right. No, that is the other way to do this. It provides a pretty much a backup service of your, although you can do it yourself with Time Machine and stuff like that. I mean, Time Machine packs a mail, right? Mail Steward is more than a backup. It's an archive, right? So you can search through it and all of that. Yeah. I've always, I've tried Mail Steward a couple of times and I worry like I would never put mail in there and this isn't because I don't trust Mail Steward, right? I actually don't know it enough to trust it or not trust it, but they've been around forever. So like my inclination is actually to trust Mail Steward in terms of like data integrity, but it is a proprietary format, right? I mean, I know they're storing it in a SQL database, so it's not that proprietary, but you know, the interface to it is proprietary. No, I, your concern is valid. You know what I mean? Even if I put stuff in Mail Steward, I would never remove it from Apple's mail. Also a proprietary interface. Oh, no, no, no. But I see it as a backup factor. Yes, totally agree. Because enough people have said either nice things or not. Yeah, no one has anything bad to say about Mail Steward. That's right. I've never had anybody say it, you know, ruin their life or anything. Right. No, we have a lot of listeners that love it. Yeah. Yeah, for sure. Yeah, I've just never, again, I trust, and maybe this is an error on my part, but I trust Time Machine, which as some may know that a lot of apps integrate with Time Machine and Time Machine archives your email to a certain extent. It backs it up. Yeah, I wouldn't necessarily call it. I wouldn't treat Time Machine as an archive, but it is a backup. Yeah. All right. Yeah. Yeah. All right. But it's a vector. I wouldn't make it my only vector, but it's a vector. Yeah. Time Machine can look in the past in Mail and maybe retrieve things that. Yeah, for sure. For sure. Yeah. All right. So yeah, I'm curious to hear. We'll do a deep dive on Mail. And so that's where we're setting up that for. In a recent episode, Lauren wrote and said, you know, I had mentioned that I turned off SIP on most of system integrity protection on most of my computers. Why would you turn that off? Well, I'll get to that. I think the most recent one we were talking about, either SwitchRes 10 or something that required it to be turned off. It was like, oh, yeah, that's fine. But Lauren has a, paints a good picture here. And he says, you say you don't know if you've been protected by SIP. I think I can, I think SIP works like my nifty amulet that keeps wolves away. You say there are no wolves within hundreds of miles from here. I can only say, see how good it works, which is, which is good. Right. He says, no, I do look with an, with an especially squinty eye at any software that says I first need to turn off SIP to install or maybe even use it. To me, it sounds like it's asking for my root password on Unix. No, thank you. I don't know that a lot of things designed to protect me really do. But if I haven't had any disasters, I assume that they have. And I get this line of thinking. I think of SIP in a different way. And it's because, you know, we've sort of watched the evolution. SIP didn't used to exist, right? A couple of years ago, there was no SIP. Now there is. But Lauren's comment here, I think highlights the benefits of SIP, right? For folks that don't want to dig into the details, SIP is perfect because it keeps everyone, including you, out of the dangerous parts of macOS. Right. And to be clear, SIP is System Integrity Protection. And it's meant to prevent somebody tricking you into changing a core part of the operating system that will then let them run rampant on your system. Potentially. Yeah. I mean, you know, run rampant implies that the only reason to use SIP is to do something you shouldn't be doing. I think of SIP as less of a security feature and more as a keep me from breaking my system feature, right? Which, I mean, the two are related, obviously. I like it. But the latter, I think, was the reason for SIP's inception, right? Prior to having SIP, we had macOS where you could go and mess with any file in the operating system that you wanted. And that, if you knew what you were doing most of the time, that would probably work out just fine. Sometimes it wouldn't. If you didn't know what you're doing, perhaps more of the time it wouldn't work out all that well. And that taints people's experience with the Mac, right? If you've got some system that's not running right because the right files aren't there, it probably increased support phone calls. And I think, you know, given all of that, somebody at Apple says, okay, you know what, just lock them out of those areas of the OS. And that's a very reasoned and logical response, especially when Apple is the same company that has the iPhone that's totally locked down. No, it's not. Apple is the same company that has the iPhone. I demand access to all parts of my system. How dare you prohibit me from accessing parts of my system? Well, I paid for it. I mean, you give me the OS for free. Okay. All right. That's cool. Thanks. Oh, it's a support thing, right? And I get it. But there are certain things that if you want to make changes to the operating system, for example, you want to change the way the OS detects and then therefore displays the resolutions available on your screen, then you need to go and change the OS. Now, in doing that, can you mess things up and make it so that you can't see the image on your screen? Yes. Absolutely. Do I get for clay glory? Or do I get? Oh, no. Now what? Now what? Right. And that's why SIP is there to protect you, to keep you from, you know, changing that thing that can render your system, you know, far less usable. So this is why SIP is there. And my feelings towards it are actually not all that different from Lauren's. I don't just turn it off because I can. I turn it off only when I'm faced with the scenario of, okay, I want to make this tweak to my system. I am willing to turn off SIP to do that. I mean, I lived for decades with a Mac without SIP. And well, I was going to say I didn't have any problems. That's totally untrue. It's like a bald-faced lie. I had lots of problems. I fixed them and, you know, learned a lot of stuff. And now we, you know, some of that stuff is what helps us help you folks, right? So, so I trust myself in that I know not to trust myself. I have backups, you know, I've been through it before. So that it is a good, but it is a good question. So thank you. I have personally never circumvented SIP to do anything. Okay. What I do have is, at least on my MacBook, and I think on the mini, I'm not sure on the mini, but on my MacBook, I do have the firmware protection password, which is... Oh, well, yeah, okay. Right? Yeah, sure. Yeah. So if you try to access certain features on older Macs, I don't know if it's current, but it'll say, hey, well, no, you actually have to go into recovery and then say, hey, I like this option of, you know, asking me for authentication before certain things. Sure. Right? Sure. Yep. No, I like that on my portable, but it's actually, it's uncharging. Okay. Oh, awesome. Cool. I want to take a minute and thank all of our premium subscribers. We've mentioned the feedback email address, but there is the premium at macgeekyab.com email address, which we look at. First, we pay a little closer attention to that. And that's because that's the email address that all of you that support us directly via our premium program at macgeekyab.com slash premium get to use. In addition to, of course, the warm fuzzy feeling you get from supporting your two favorite geeks. So I want to thank everybody whose contributions came in this week. On our monthly $10 plan, we have Chris from Hartfordshire, James from San Antonio, Jay from New Jersey, Joe from Kansas, Abdullah from Maryland, Ari from Oakland, sorry, Ari from Oakland, Dave from Socrates, Michael from Kansas, Bob from Quebec, Frank from Tunbridge, Timothy from Tennessee, Jeff from Connecticut, Barry from Illinois, John from Pennsylvania, Santiago from Florida, and John from North Carolina. On our $25 every six month plan, thanks to Joe from California, David from Chicago, Domenico from Massachusetts, Erica from New Jersey, Graham from New South Wales, Mike from Kansas, Mike from Arizona, no relation, and Craig from California. Thanks so much to all of you. We couldn't do it without you. You know, I know that's we say it all the time, but we couldn't do it without you. So it's good stuff. Thank you. And if anybody's interested, of course, macgeekyab.com slash premium is where you can go to sign up for that. So thank you, everyone. Truly some tips from things from the last show. We have listener Jeff, who says in episode 752, you discussed the difficulty of archiving messages on the Mac. The eponymously named iPhone text messages application at iphonetextmessages.com for Mac and Windows allows you to print text messages stored on an iOS device or export to a PDF. It works by accessing your iOS device backups in iTunes. You can print or export all messages or only those from selected contacts. I can vouch for its successful operation and it's eight bucks from iphonetextmessages.com. Very cool. Thanks, Jeff. Good stuff. I'd never heard of that before. So that's handy. No, I like that. If you don't need iMazing, which we'll do, and you just want to extract your messages, it's actually I thought it was kind of cool looking into this in the past. You know, it's come up before, but there's an awful lot of information in these iPhone backup files that you should be making using some tool. And that's all I'm going to say. Yep. Agreed. Right. Yeah. No, I make local backups as well as iCloud backups. The iCloud backups are the most convenient ones to use most of the time if you have the bandwidth, but having something local allows you to do stuff like this where you can actually get in there and archive those things out. Yeah. And I've also seen that iOS, and I think macOS, but mostly iOS will nag you. It's like you have an updated backup in like this amount of time. And it's like, I think you should really do this. And it's like, all right, all right, all right, man. Yeah. Yeah. But it's good about that. But it's like, all right, be online, be charging and do this. And then, yeah, I'll make a backup. All right. Are we good? And it's like, thank you. No, but I really like how it kind of shames you into making a backup. It's like, you got to do this. Yeah, you got to do it. Absolutely. No, it's smart. It's a good reminder, for sure. Also, in the last show, we were talking about memory tests, and we were answering Scott's question. And Kurt wrote in and says, you both mentioned some utilities that can help diagnose RAM errors. And it seemed like you were struggling, I was, to think of one particular test program that had slipped your memory banks. I was talking to my iPod Nano, Kurt says, at this point, exclaiming, just say it, MemTest86, MemTest86. I'm sure that's what you were thinking of. I was thinking of MemTest. I don't know that in my head, I called it MemTest86, but that's the URL now. It has evolved throughout the years as these things do. Right. No, you may ask yourself. But MemTest86 is where you want to go.com, so. But you may ask yourself, why is there an 86 there, Dave? And I'm going to tell you, though I'm sure you know. Sure. Back in the old days, Intel made a processor, and you know what it was called? The 8086. That's right. Motorola made processors that had a six in the beginning. Right. Intel put the eight. I was just thinking about this today, and I just wanted to babble about it, because I think it's just such a fascinating aspect of computing history. Motorola chips had one number at the beginning, and Intel's, which was six, and then Intel had eight. And it's like, why? It's like, I have no idea. And actually, if anybody knows, and I'm sure there are some people that worked in that world, let us know. But still, it was kind of fun. So that I'm almost certain is why we have the 86 at the end there. Right. I am certain you are right. Yeah, it would be shocking. So 86, 42, very different reasons. Same episode. There you go. But yeah, so thank you very much, Kurt. And actually, Kurt continued, says, as I'm sure you now remember, memtest86 is a free standalone piece of software that you put on a USB stick and then boot from it, been around a long time, well respected. And this is an important thing. You can, well, because you can only test the memory that is available to be tested, which means if you're running macOS, there's lots of memory that is in use and therefore unavailable to any test utilities you might run from within the confines. Well, you can read, but writing is another story, I think. Correct. And so memtest86 boots its own, you know, USB stick and then it's its own world. It's its own world. So it doesn't have to compete with anything else. It can test basically everything. It's not, you know, there's still some things that it can't test, but it can test way more. So that's that. So nice. And Kurt also, you know, we just mentioned premium. Kurt said that he wanted to donate via PayPal directly without logging in and creating a premium account and all that stuff. And, you know, certainly we have the premium system there, so you can track your donations and all of that good stuff. If you just wanted to send something through via PayPal, though, we're certainly not going to stop you. We appreciate it. Well, I get that it's setting up an account and going through all that, like there's there's some steps to go through. And if you don't care about tracking any of that stuff on or having us track it on our end, you can just send us, you know, either of the email addresses, I've made it now, so that either of the email addresses, the feedback at or or premium at macgeekab.com, you can just PayPal directly to those and it'll, you know, it'll get straight to us. There's no, you know, no problem with it. It doesn't, it's no issue. So if that's what you want to do, please feel free, you know, it's there. We're not here to stop you. PayPal at macgeekab.com will also work, but, you know, it all goes to the same place. So just they're all listed in PayPal. It's like, we will receive things at these addresses. So thanks. So awesome. Thank you, Kurt, for all of that. Also in the last episode, Donna, we were, oh, that's right. We were talking about repurposing old Macs that are no longer usable as computers. And she found a website or shared with us a website, jakeharms.com, who has all kinds of cool things that you can do with your old Macs. And I think Jake will actually do some of these for you or shares like the instructions and do it yourself kits and things like that. Donna says, I'm keeping my sunflower and pink iMacs for these someday projects. So very cool stuff. It's worth, it's worth going and just looking at this website, jakeharms.com. We'll put a link in the show notes too. So yeah, some of these, I like that the lamp made from the G4 iMac looks really cool. I like that. So with a little slot or a little hole where the media, you know, the DVD drive was. So it's pretty cool. So I think I'll put it in here, but so one, I have a old G5 Mac, which if you have two of them, Dave, and you may have seen this online. Oh yeah. You put a piece of wood across them. It's per, it's a perfect coffee table. Yep. But also I'm trying to find this. So our friend, Jody, you remember Jody? She's making custom crazy airport. Like remember the like spaceship airports? Sure. She's been finding those and actually repurposing them with circuitry that makes them like a cool LED like party light. Oh, that's cool. I like it. You can do other things with that. So I'll dig up the link for her stuff there, but it was like, what else are you going to do with those? Right? I mean, I recycle mine a while ago because I mean, they were like 802.B. I mean, it's cool to have a silver airport spaceship based thing, but it's like it's not really. Yeah, right. Cool. Right. Yeah. Pretty cool. I like it. People repurposing Apple equipment. I don't know if you've ever done that. No, I haven't. I don't know. You know, it's not going to surprise anyone that I don't find myself with a ton of just free time sitting around wondering what I'm going to do with it. So those types of things don't generally float to the top of the list for me. But speaking of, there's this band that's been waiting on the deck there. Yeah, that's right. I let them in. I let them in. Yeah, it's time. Yeah, it's good. All right. Well, you know where we can email us. Call us 224-888-Geek, which John is 433-5. And visit us in the forums at macgeekup.com slash forums. Good stuff over there. Thanks to everybody who sent in stuff. Thanks to everybody who just thanks to you for listening. Really, that's like the best thing you can do. You know what else you can do for us? And this I would really appreciate. If you can go to iTunes and leave us a review, macgeekup.com slash iTunes is the closest I can get you. You still need to click a couple of times to get to where you can leave a review. But macgeekup.com slash iTunes will get you as close as we can. And you can just, you know, I think there's a click to leave a review button or I think you got to go to view in iTunes or whatever. But it's there. That's like I said, that's there. We can get you. So I would really appreciate that. That would that would be awesome. It really helps us to have kind of a surge of reviews every few months. The thing is, you help us, we help you. That's it. Yeah. Adding more listeners to the show. No, it's a fact. No, it's good. We're all one big. We're all one big community here. That's it. A fellow geeks just trying to figure this out. And hey, if it's, if it's iOS, cool, if it's macOS, whatever. Indeed. Indeed. No, it's good. It's good. Cool. No, it's actually over the weekend. I was yelling at a T-Mobile. So remember that iPad Air that you, that we got us? Yeah. I've been trying to debug the 4G LTE SIM failure forever. And I think they finally figured it out. They're like, yep, it's a, it's a backend. Okay. Problem. Well, okay. Because all of a sudden, yeah, I mean, you know, we got me this because we were like, dude, you got to know about this. And I'm like, yeah, yeah, I agree. Yeah. I had this plan, but ever since like two years ago, it wouldn't work. And I'm like, dude, man. Yeah. Anyways. Yeah. New iPad, new iPad Air and new iPad mini. I saw that today. Both work with the OG Apple Pencil came out today. Yeah. Dave, very disappointed. I wanted airpower. Who's taking responsibility for this failure? Oh, I don't think airpower, I don't think we'll ever see it. No. No, dude, I've been saying this since the day it was announced. It was vaporware. They needed to do something because they weren't going to talk about, no, no, no, they weren't going to talk. They were going to talk about the iMac at that announcement and they didn't have that. And it was like, all right, what products do we have in the queue that like we could just, you know, throw some slides together and mention tomorrow. And it was like, why not airpower? Yeah, that's it. Perfect. Great. We're doing stuff. No, no. It was obvious that this was not going to work from day one. Like he just say no. Yeah. It's just like the rumors or the reports have been coming out, you know, leaking out of Apple. Oh, they're having heat problems. Like, really? No kidding, huh? You're trying to put cheat coils just anywhere willy nilly where people can just toss down devices. And when I'm in my hotel room and I travel and I have my iPhone just like slightly off center on my cheat coil and I wake up and the thing nearly burns me. So yeah, of course, Apple is going to have a heat problems with this. It's physics guys. Like as far as we understand and as far as the rules of our simulation here go, physics says that that's going to wind up with heat problems. So you've got to change the rules of the simulation in order to make airpower work. And maybe Apple, maybe, you know, maybe Apple's got a, you know, access to maybe they're the ones that built the simulation in the future. And so maybe somebody's, you know, coming back and get some of it. Yeah. What I'm going to say is you've got to get the out roll ready here because I have many people I still need to thank. But, you know, there you go. I think you should. Well, I will. I will thank them all because I want to thank, of course, I think cash fly being a sponsor and also for providing our bandwidth. Of course, Express VPN is our, whether our other direct sponsor this episode. And then in our podcast marketplace, we have Smile and other world computing, bare bones, Ops Genie, Eero, all good stuff, folks. Very, very, very lucky all of us here. Have a good week. Thanks to my good friend, John F. Braun here. John F. Braun, do you have anything to say? It seems like you might have something to say. I don't think I do. Oh, okay. No, I think I do. Well, you listened to me at the last show and I had some advice, Dave, and you're back. So I think we can all conclude that you didn't get made up.