The Mac Observers, Mac Geek-Gab, number 738, for Monday, 3 December, 2018. Greetings, folks, and welcome to The Mac Observers, Mac Geek-Gab, the show. You know, we take your questions, we take your tips, we take all your cool stuff found, we take some of our cool stuff found and our tips, we mix it all together so that each and every one of us, every week when we get together, learns at least five new things. Sponsors for this episode include Ops Genie from Atlassian at OpsGenie.com, JamfNOW at Jamf.com slash MGG, TextExpander from Smile at TextExpander.com slash Podcast and Ring at Ring.com slash MGG. We'll talk more about each of those in a moment here, here in Durham, New Hampshire. I'm Dave Hamilton and here in Fairfield, Connecticut, where I got down to the wire but managed to get all my leaves put in bags and they were just picked up today. This is John F. Rohn. And here in another part of Durham, New Hampshire, it's a pilot Pete and it's darn good to be here. It's good to have you, pilot Pete. It's good to be here. I know it's been too long. It's been too long. Welcome back. For those of you that have never heard pilot Pete and I know there's probably at least some, Pete is, well, he's a pilot, but he's great at asking the questions in real time.   It's like really good questions. In case we get a little too heady here, Pete keeps us grounded, so to speak. And it helps out. And of course we have everybody in the chat room helping us out with that too at MackieGab.com slash Stream. So thanks for that. I'm here to prove the ax.    Well, there's that too. We try not to, we try not to.   I want to take a quick minute here and thank our first sponsor though, which is TextExpander. So look, TextExpander is one of these utilities that I could not possibly live without having on my Mac. And the way it works is this. I have things that I need to type all the time. So do you phone numbers, email addresses, responses to people like you folks when you email us questions, right? Or someone that wants to have information about a product that we offer or whatever. You don't want to mess that up, especially when it's a prospective customer. But you really just don't want to mess it up at all. You don't want to mess up your email address, fat finger or phone number. That's not fun. That's fun to say, fat finger or phone number, but it's not fun to do. So TextExpander, right? The way it works is this. You put all those things into TextExpander and you assign them short little keystrokes. So you have all these snippets and then you have the keystrokes that invoke them. So I have one thing at Backbeat Media when someone emails about doing a certain type of thing, I type comma bbm post and boom, like five paragraphs worth of text are now in my email and they are perfected because I sat down and perfected them. And I can reply to these emails in about 19 seconds now. I don't have to proofread. It's already done. The same when I want to enter my phone number on a web form field or an email address on a web form field. I just type DTMO and my Dave Mac observer email just appears. You can do this too. Go get TextExpander. It syncs to all your devices, Mac OS, iOS, Windows and even on the web. It's updated immediately everywhere. You got to check it out. Go to TextExpander.com slash podcast to learn more about TextExpander. You can use it for yourself, your company, both it's great and our thanks to the folks that smile and of course making TextExpander for sponsoring this episode. All right. Let's see. What is what is first on the list here, John? What do we got here? We got something from Paul, right? Right? Sure. Okay. Oh, boy. No, and it's a favorite application. What's mail? Mail. It's true. All right. So here we go. Paul writes, I have a few iOS devices and a Mac. I use a dot Mac email address and I have two terabytes and iCloud. I tried to move a bunch of messages from my inbox to other mail folders and iCloud using Mac OS's mail.app, but it got all mixed up. I tried rebuilding the mailbox and so on, but it didn't help and sometimes mail.app would crash. So I disconnected my Mac from the internet, went to iCloud.com on another computer, used mail and iCloud there to get everything cleaned up and the way I wanted with no problem. My iPhone and iPad are perfectly in sync with iCloud. All three are correct, but my main Mac mail is still messed up. And in fact, the last rebuild inbox left inbox empty on my Mac. I don't want to mess up the true state of my mail and iCloud. How can I safely start over in mail.app on my main Mac? I'm afraid if I connect to the internet now, iCloud mail might think I deleted those emails on purpose when it syncs with my Mac and thereby delete stuff in the cloud as well. So it's a good question. And you know, anytime we have a scenario like this, the first thing I want to say is make a backup, right? Problem is, yeah, but it's really hard to make a backup of iCloud mail, right? You assume that Apple is making backups for like data loss, but in terms of keeping the state of things, I wouldn't expect Apple to be making those backups or it's certainly not making them available to us. So in order to... Well, they're on the server. They're on their servers. Correct. Right up until you sync with it and change what's on their server. Then they make a backup of your deleted inbox. Right. So my thought in terms of making that backup is create a new account on your Mac, log in to your iCloud mail with this new fresh account and let it sync everything down. Now you have a backup of what was in iCloud in a way that you can like materially use. Sure, you have it on your iPhone and iPad, but we can't really touch those. We can definitely touch what's on the Mac. Okay. Pilot PD expertise time here, Dave. Yeah. Make a new account. Are you syncing it with the old account? I'm missing. You're syncing it with iCloud. You're not syncing it with the old account on your Mac. You're making a new account, a new user account on the Mac. On the Mac and Mail app? No. No. You are making a new user account on your Mac. Good question. Right. So it's a completely separate user account. We always say it's good for troubleshooting to have a test user account configured anyway. So this would be a great use for that. Right. So you go do that, sync it down. Now you've got a backup. Now, log out of that user, log back into the one in question and before you launch mail, remove the home library mail folder and then relaunch mail. When you do that, it should do the same thing that your test user account did. And it should ask you to log into mail and then hopefully sync everything down. And in that case, it should pull everything down from the server. Whatever was going on with mail on your local machine is gone. And that's an important thing to remember. If all you had was something synced with iCloud, you're fine. But if you had things in say the on my Mac folder, those are now gone too because you've removed the home library mail folder. You can go and find them. They are still in there and they're usually relatively well labeled the way mail sort of builds its archive. But just be aware if you had anything in there that was not already synced to the cloud or intentionally not synced to the cloud, perhaps for storage reasons or something else, then you just want to be aware of that. So there you go. Yeah, that's my thoughts on this. How about you, John? I mean, some other things that I would try. So one is that you could if you go into system preferences, internet accounts and go to your iCloud pane, there is a checkbox for mail unchecking that and then rechecking that may be a less drastic way of restoring order to the universe. Okay, right? Yeah, fair, right. Because that way you know, that way you'd keep the anything that was in the on my Mac section. I kind of like that. Yeah. The other thing that I found is just doing a quick, you know, using the old Google foo here is that another suggestion that I've seen many make online is that whack your com.apple.mail.plist file, which is stored in your home folder library preferences last I checked. Yeah. Okay. Destroying that that may eliminate, there may be some confusion in that file but by getting rid of it and then restarting mail that may also bring order. Yeah. Yeah, all right. Chaos. Yeah, I'll give you that. So just offering, you know, a couple of different things I've tried. I've fortunately never run into a case where my email was not in sync across all my devices. Sure, sure. Right. Yeah, this in case it wasn't clear, right? This shouldn't be happening, but that's the whole reason we exist here is to deal with the things that shouldn't be happening. So yeah. Worst case, how many people would celebrate if their inbox was finally empty? So Paul, you've got that going for you. I like it. You're efficient. Yeah. Yeah, you beat us all. Good luck with that. All right. Question number two here is from our Mackie Kev forums at Mackie Kev.com slash forums from BK Miller there who says, I have a late 2013 13 inch MacBook Pro according to system information. The USB ports are USB three. I just picked up a sand disk ultra fit USB 3.1 flash drive 256 gigs to move my pictures to off of my internal SSD. These are not in the photos app. He says, okay, good. The copy window says I'm moving 175.16 gigabytes and it will take about seven hours. Is that reasonable according to the file transfer time calculator at techinternets.com? It should take about eight minutes at 3.2 gigabits per second, roughly USB 30 speed as I understand it. Am I right? And there's actually some great discussion for many of you folks about how this all fits together. But the lesson here is that you might have so it you have the maximum theoretical speed of the of the USB three bus. Then you also have the maximum theoretical speed or perhaps actual speed of the drives themselves. And I say drives because there's the drive in your Mac that is having data read from it. And then there is the drive in this external SSD that is having data written to it. And both of these matter, right? Because whatever the weak link in the chain, whatever the slowest link is is going to define what it takes to copy these files. But then there's one more step. And that is the overhead of actually copying files. If you were just taking data from one drive and beaming it to another, then whatever the slowest drive was would dictate how fast that data would be copied. But that's not what's happening. What's happening is the finder is going. It's reading the details about each file one at a time. Okay, cool. Here's the details about this file, the name, the size, some other attributes. Great. Now we have to go to the destination. Let's create the shell for that file, create it, write a directory entry. Great. Now let's copy the data over. Okay. Now let's seal up that file. Okay. It's closed. Great. Now let's move on to the next one. So much of what I just described was not the raw data being beamed across. A lot of it is the setup and the finishing of that. And so the more files you have, especially the more smaller files you have where you have a greater ratio of setup time to data transfer time, the longer it's going to take. So yeah, you might if you've got, you know, if you've got a thousand files that are each one megabyte and you have one file that's a gigabyte, those thousand files are going to take a lot longer to copy than that one. And that's sort of the trick right there. And with these pictures, yeah, I mean, they've got some, some bulk to the data, but there's probably just a lot of pictures. So that's probably part of what's slowing it down. Thoughts on this, John? Well, I'm with you in that the theoretical maximum of a port is rarely the maximum speed that you're going to see. It's probably going to be limited by the performance and especially with what I'll call non SSD flash drives. Sure. Like this one, I just looked at the specs and they say, well, you can get up to 130 megabytes per second read speed. They don't even specify the right speed. So yeah, you got to look at all the all the numbers in the equation to figure out where the bottleneck is. And in this case, the bottleneck is not USB. It's it's the drive. Yeah. If you want to see how fast your drive is itself, I recommend running Blackmagic disk speed test. It just writes a block of data to the drive and then reads that block of data and then writes a block and reads a block and back and forth. And that lets you really test to see how fast an individual drive is. You can point it at one drive at a time and we'll put a link to that in the show notes. Of course. Yeah. Well, what I like what they do is that because I guess it's it's meant to help though it it'll serve everybody but that they'll do different file and block sizes to kind of give you last I checked right in order for you to grok. Okay. Well, you know, if I'm writing a big blob of data, typically that's where you get the best performance. If you have a huge continuous file, then you get the best performance.  Yeah, you just got overhead. That's just life. Yep. That's just life. It's true. That's true. You want to take us to Royce, John? Yeah, Royce has an interesting one, which we're kind of digging into here. But Royce says aloha and he says aloha because it looks like he's out on this little island called Hawaii. So aloha, which I think is both hello and goodbye. So I recently been having issues with doing backups to external drives from my MacBook Pro 13-inch mid-2012. Ah, very similar to what I have. Actually, I get error messages partway through on many types of drives except Western or digital. Most of the externals are one terabyte or larger. My MacBook Pro has a one terabyte SSD drive upgraded from OWC and it's formatted as APFS. I also keep my very large iTunes library, currently four gigabytes on an external USB 3WD platter drive. Whenever I try to super-duper it to another external, I get the negative 50 error message this shape. This message disabled to copy to drive until I restart the computer. Any ideas or quick fixes? This is a relatively new issue and I've had problems copying. I've never had problems copying large drives before. So I'll throw you my insight on this. OK. You have some additional fellas. So my understanding, number one, is that super-duper has a logging capability. I actually downloaded and checked it out.  So first off, I would do that. I found a post on Mac rumors that actually showed one where it said, oh, it's error negative five. That's an input-output error, which probably means that there's a, probably means there's a hardware problem or your drive is damaged. Sure. Though it could be other things. So that should help identify the file. So look at the log and that should help identify the file and the volume super-duper is having issues with. Now, you may want to try another backup utility. I think the other big player in this space is Carbon Copy Cloner. So you may want to try that and see if you get the same problem. If you don't, then maybe it's a bug in super-duper. I don't know. Huh. Yeah. Right. Sure. And they have a free trial. They're a free trial. So, you know, check out Carbon Copy Cloner. From what I understand, I think you're a super-duper guy, Dave. No, I was for a while. And then there was, years ago, there was an issue where super-duper couldn't schedule itself to do backups. And I needed scheduled backups. So that's when I switched to Carbon Copy Cloner. They relatively quickly remedied that problem, but I've been on CCC ever since. So there you go. Just for what it's worth, my experience with super-duper has been good customer support, though. Yeah. Oh, they're great. You know, yeah, you send them your logs and they'll ask for your logs. Right. And they'll help you get to it. Yeah. Okay, but I think feature-wise, they're pretty much on par with each other. There are some things that are different between the two. But in terms of cloning and that sort of thing, yeah. Yeah. So one thing I would try. So this is the whole troubleshooting scenario here. So one, try different utilities. See if you get the same problem. I like that. Yeah. If you don't, then you got to, then I would suspect you may have a hardware issue. Now the thing is, it could be the media. It could be your cable. It could be your enclosure. Or it could be the port that you're plugging this external drive into. I believe those are all the pieces of the puzzle here they would have to look at. And the way to determine this is to just, you know, methodically try different ones and see, try to isolate it to a certain device or again cable or port or something like that. It could be any of them. It's hard to tell here because the error message is really telling you nothing. Sure. I had an issue a while ago with carbon copy cloner on one of my machines where I schedule a do backup and it would send me an error message which these utilities typically do. And it said, yeah, it failed. And their help actually said, well, you know, you may have a problem with your cable or your hardware. And it turns out the enclosure that I was using was just flaky. And I took the drive, same drive, different cable, different enclosure and that solved the problem. And I didn't have the problem anymore. So that's pretty much what I got. So follow our troubleshooting method here. You know, be disciplined in the things that you swap in and out. Change one thing in test, change another thing in test. Yeah, I think it's correct. Yeah, I think that's good, man.  But I would say you got to change one thing at a time and see and that will help you isolate the problem. Reduce your variables. That's it. Yeah, exactly. All right, jumping to listener Ken. Ken writes, he's actually got two questions. He says, I keep wondering that or he says, there it is. He says, I keep wondering that since net neutrality was stopped, my browser is slow to load sites. I won't go into details. So does anyone agree with me? It's hard without having details. But well, I haven't experienced this. Ken is on charter. So I'm on Comcast here. So two different providers. I haven't heard of anyone else having an issue with charter and what may seem to be intentional slowness. But it's possible that loading a site, especially the initial load, has a DNS query that happens first. You got to look up the IP address and then go and do the actual request of the site. Most of the time, unless you intentionally change it, your DNS server is going to be that from your provider, your internet provider. So it's possible that they might be steering you wrong intentionally or otherwise. We've seen this before. There is a DNS service. There's several DNS services that you can use. For years, we talked about Googles at <IP_ADDRESS>.8. And now Cloudflare is kind of the new one on the scene, relatively new anyway, at <IP_ADDRESS>. And that could be a good thing to test. It's just change your DNS. If you're on iOS, Cloudflare via their 1.1.1 service has an app that is called <IP_ADDRESS>. And it's actually kind of a cool app because what it does is it doesn't just change your DNS, it tunnels your DNS and only your DNS over a secure tunnel. So no one knows what you're looking up except anyone at Cloudflare, of course, because they know where your DNS is. They want to know. Yeah, but they say they don't log it. Well, they say they don't log it on their end. They log it on your end by default, but you can go into the app and turn that off. But that can actually in and of itself be a great little troubleshooting tip. If you're trying to figure out what server an iOS app is trying to connect to and you can't see that, run Cloudflare you'll be able to see because it logs it. But yeah, it runs as a VPN even though it's not tunneling all of your traffic. It's just tunneling your DNS lookup. So you still maintain your local connection and all the speed and everything for your stuff. So I would test with that. That would be my thoughts. John, I'll get your thoughts on this and then I'll move to the second part of Ken's question. And the only other thing that occurs to me is some sites almost every site can potentially throttle you as well. That's true. Just because I pay. So right now I'm paying for 200 megabits down 35 up. I rarely ever see that sort of performance. Really? Well, the thing is the server that you're talking to, the web server that you're talking to, whoever you're talking to on the internet absolutely has the capability to throttle their bandwidth because, right? Yeah, of course. Yeah, I'm just surprised that you're not seeing because I have essentially a thousand down and 40 up rounding and I routinely see downloads of, you know, 900 plus and uploads are always at my max. So I'm just surprised that you're running into places that are throttling you that much. Yeah, I mean, it depends on the content. We won't really go into much detail about what content. Ken didn't want to go into detail either. So I think you might have found a kindred spirit, my friend. All right, let me go to the second half of Ken's question. He says, I've tried Jamf many times, but since I don't have a business, I can't supervise any device. Am I wrong? And as I mentioned at the beginning of the show, Jamf is one of the sponsors of the show. So I decided I would sort of try and merge these two things together so we'll answer Quinn's question and acknowledge Jamf as a sponsor and do their spot here because as for Jamf now, no, you don't have to have a business to use it. You can just go sign up at jamf.com jamf.com slash mgg for free. And when you choose a device to supervisor manage and perhaps I think this is where Ken's confusion came in. He says, well, without a business, how do I tell Jamf to manage these devices? And that's the key, right? When you sign up and choose to manage a new device, it will walk you through the process of installing a profile onto that device. It'll work on macOS, works on iOS and once you've got that profile in there, that profile is essentially you saying, yes, I am allowing myself to via Jamf manage this or Jamf now manage this device and that profile is sort of the glue that ties all that together and allows your iOS device to be remotely managed to be a Jamf now. And once you do that, then you can manage any device. It can be yours. It can be a family members. It can be a clients. It can be an employees, any of those things. And this is sort of the beauty of Jamf now is it just works. And the other beauty is that your Jamf now account has up to three devices for free at all times. So if you're only managing three devices, then you pay nothing. If you want more, more devices start at just $2 a month per device. And as I said, you can create your free account at jamf.jamf.com slash MGG and you can control all kinds of things, right? You can check your digital inventory to see everything you have. You can distribute Wi-Fi and email settings. You can deploy apps. You can enforce pass codes. You can protect company data. You can even lock or if necessary remotely wipe a device from anywhere without any IT experience. So again, I think that answers Ken's question and of course, I wanted to thank our sponsor and it's jamf.jamf.com slash MGG. And obviously we very much appreciate your question, Ken. Hopefully the answer helped and we appreciate Jamf as a sponsor for this episode. All right. No, that's good. I actually, when I did some stuff with Mac OS server which offers a subset of functionality Jamf, I would say. The one thing that thrilled me, Dave, that I was able to do is I was able to disable the camera app on one of my devices. Yes, that's right. Yeah. But yeah, I think the only requirement is do you have a family? Do you have multiple devices? Do you have a family? You don't need a business. But if you have devices where you want to monitor more or less limit the functionality, then... Well, it's not just limiting. It's controlling, right? Like if somebody calls, we just had somebody right in this week that says, wow, yeah, you know, my mom somehow keeps erasing an email account from her iPhone. She's like, I don't know how this keeps happening, but it was driving me crazy. So they built a Jamf Now profile and can not only manage it but keep it from being erased in the first place. So yeah, no, it's...  Yeah, exactly. Yeah, it's great. It's great. So again, one last time, jamfjamf.com slash mgg. All right, we've got some tips here, John. Shall we go to... We'll go to listener Scott. Sorry. Yeah, Scott says, I was recently recording my daughter's Taekwondo class and found a new feature on my iPhone. While using the camera app, you can tap the 1x zoom indicator next to the shutter button to switch lenses, again, on a phone that has two lenses, to the 2x level. That's not new, he says. But while making a video or slow-mo and maybe more, if you were to tap and hold on the 1x zoom indicator and then drag your finger up and down, you can then fine-tune the level of zoom that you'd like to use. And that is surely a thing. Yeah, it's pretty cool. And that fine-tuning actually can be done on any device.  There you go. I would offer that you would also want to make sure if you want to zoom in, you want to tap, so you've got the macro lens and then fine-tune. Because you can also fine-tune from the 1 lens and that's all digital zoom. Right. Right, right. Yep. Right, yeah, if you have a multiple lens. Yeah, if you've got a multiple lens device, you can digitally zoom from the... Is it micro? The 1 power lens and the 2 power lens, you want to be in the 2 power lens and then zoom from there. Actually, I get what you're saying. Right, you're switching to your... But you don't have to worry about it. iOS does that for you. Does it? If you're zooming and you get past 2x, it jumps to the 2x lens. You don't have to switch first. Oh, very clever. Those guys have thought of everything. They have. Yeah, no, I thought of that first when it first came out and it was like, oh, actually no, it's already doing the switching. Got it, okay. The camera on the 8 Plus and the 10 and 10 Max. Yeah, it's good. Right up until the moment that you use the camera on one of the Huawei phones or the new Pixel 3 or anything like that. That's right, yep. This is the Mac... I understand. I just like to acknowledge the fact that if you want the best camera that you can get in a smartphone, it doesn't have an Apple logo on it. That's okay. It's okay. It's okay. It's how it goes. Man. Yeah. Those Huawei cameras are awesome. I'm awesome. Okay. But I got to say the iPhone 8 camera, I think one of the breakthroughs with Apple that maybe want to use that camera more is the improved night performance and the anti-jitter. I mean, that's... So this is actually where Google has Apple beat, like, you're right, it's way better as of the phones that Apple released last year, the 10 and the 8 and the 8 Plus obviously. But it does not hold a candle, no pun intended, to what you can get on the new Pixel 3 or even like I said, the new Huawei phones or not even the new ones. Huawei phones for the last two years have been just stellar with that low light stuff. Wow, it's crazy. And there's some amazing aftermarket apps too to make your cameras, you know, and if I may offer quickly, I see Lapsit is one of my favorites. It does time lapse photography. Have I ever shown you a setting? I've set up, I'll have to find a way to get it to you, but it's a time lapse. I set the camera up before we blocked out from one city and left it running until after blocking in another and one shot every three seconds. And then you can, with Lapsit, you can put music to it and slow down because otherwise it looks like you're taxing at 300 knots. Right. You know, that doesn't work well. So you can slow down the playback, stretch out the playback and the together. So, yeah. That's pretty cool. I've done that. I've done that with just Apple's time lapse where I take my phone and put it like, if I have a window seat, I wedge it in the thing and just do it for the whole flight or parts of the flight.  It super speeds. Yeah. So this is going to adjust your playback speed so that it works out nicely as well. And it hits all those.  Because most time lapse is just hilarious with Yackity sax. That's a good point. I hadn't even thought of that. But yes, you can dub in all your own music. You can put in all kinds of things. It's neat. That's pretty cool. Yeah. And then there's a Pro HDR app too that manually such your exposure is different. I don't know. It's just again, because I watch Benny Hill for some reason. But any time I see a sped up video, I think of the Yackity sax. You have to. There you go. All right. I'll put a link to Pro HDR in the show notes too. Oh, thank you, sir. All right. We got a note from lawyer Jeff. And he says, here's a cool stuff found for the upcoming holidays. What do you do with all of those credit card style gift cards where there's just a small amount left on them? You've got a Visa gift card and Amix gift card. It's got a couple of bucks on it. They're banking on you not being able to spend that down to $0. And that's actually how they make some of their money. But lawyer Jeff has to send those two. Oh, that's right. He says, go to Amazon.com and buy a custom Amazon gift card for the exact amount left on your gift card. Then have the Amazon gift card email delivered to your own account's email address. Amazon allows you to buy a gift card for any amount between $1 and $2,000. So that $2 and 32 cent gift card balance is transformed into something that you can actually use. You'll receive a receipt email, then the gift card email, click the link and the gift card balance will be added to your Amazon account. Then an email confirming your recipient received their gift card says, I recently spent an evening buying a dozen of these Amazon gift cards that way. And then I bought $100 Apple gift card with it. So there you go. That's pretty good. This is this is actually one of the reasons I love the whole quick tip thing because I have been doing exactly this for about the last five years and never once thought to mention it in the show. Sure. Right. But as soon as Jeff's email came in, it was like, oh my gosh, of course, we should mention this in the show. So thank you, Jeff. This is why the quick tip category exists. It's perfect. Yeah. Perfect, perfect. I wonder whatever happened to so that they were floating this thing in my area, Dave, from Coinstar. You know Coinstar, right? Yeah. And they briefly had kiosks in my neighborhood. And I think they call it Coinstar Exchange. They would do something similar. It's like, hey, you got a gift card? Well, we'll give you money for it. OK. But I think the last time I tried one and I put in the gift card, so apparently there's some gift card network where you can check the value. And it's like, oh yeah, $20 gift card. I'll give you $15 for it. And I'm like, yeah. Thanks for asking. Oh, interesting. Huh. Well, yeah, they would offer the full balance. 92% or something if you take cash, right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, but so it sounds like this other thing gives you a better deal. Yeah, you get to preserve your value. Assuming that you shop on Amazon, which I'm pretty sure we all do. So there you go. So they give you 100%? Well, you're just buying a gift card. It's all you're doing. Amazon is buying a gift card for whatever amount you've told it to using a credit card that you've told it to use.  So yeah, it's great. But you see what I'm saying? You know, a lot of these services, I mean, well, I guess their benefit is we'll give you the value, but you got to use it in Arsador, not theirs. Yeah, I feel like you might be misinterpreting what I'm saying. They are not taking like, say, a Macy's gift card and giving you any value for it. It's only gift cards that are credit cards.  Okay. Yeah, like the fixed value, you know, you buy somebody a $50 Visa card and give it to them as a gift when they've got 417 left on that because, you know, they can't buy a cup of coffee. Okay. No, no, I get it. I get it. So it's not a proprietary. It's not like a store gift card. Correct. Correct. Which this coin, corn star thing. Yeah. Last I checked would do, but the price you pay is that you don't get the full value. Correct. That's right. That's, yep. That's right. Yeah. But I guess the benefit is you get something you want versus something you don't want. Right. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah.  So I'm assuming that gift card would not be of any great value to you. You could turn that in even 80% of that might be, might be valuable. You haven't seen John and his juicy sweats. Is that what you're saying? Man, I, like, whatever you want to do is fine. I don't really care. I'm a piece of ML fixer, folks. Yo, I don't need any extra juice, man. There it is. Okay. Graham, save us. Uh, Graham, yeah, for the love of Pete. Uh, Graham says, I've been, uh, I've just been doing the legwork on creating historical evidence that involves collecting lots of financial statements. And I wanted to combine many months of separate PDF statements from my bank into a single PDF file. Prior to Mojave, I've done this using a Python script that was seemingly built into macOS Automator. However, today when I was right clicking on the selection of PDFs so as to use the finder's batch rename feature because they weren't named alphabetically, I decided to check the quick actions option and was pleasantly surprised to see a create PDF item listed. Sure enough, when I used that on my selection of PDFs, it created a single PDF just as I wanted. So much faster than having to remember and type and then syntax check a Python command. So that's pretty cool. I had no idea that that was there in, uh, in Mojave. So thanks for the, thanks for the heads up, Graham. It's good stuff. Good stuff.  Good. Yeah. Combining PDFs. Haven't you been able to do that in preview? Yeah, but not in the finder. You can do it in preview when you open the, you're correct, you're absolutely right. You can do it in preview with the thumbnail view and drag things around. That's correct. Yeah, but this is just highlight them. Quick action, right click, quick actions, create PDF done, which is awesome, I think. No, I get it, but an additional tip. Yeah, preview has much power in that. Yeah. So I, if you load a PDF and then you, I guess copy a PDF and then paste it, it'll, it'll munch them together, which is like, oh, that's kind of nice feature. Yeah. Yeah. Haven't had to do it for a while though, but. Right. Right. Yeah, yeah. No, it's handy. Yeah, exactly. In 737 last week's episode, we talked about Allen's issue with restoring from a backup and Dominic wrote in and says, I'm afraid it's too late for Allen with this tip. He says, but the quickest way to back out of a jammed Mojave update is to restore from a time machine APFS snapshot to a hard shutdown by holding the power button, then reboot into recovery mode with command R in there, select restore from a time machine backup. The first source on the list is very likely to be the max own startup disk, which is where the snapshots are. Select this unlocking file vault encryption if necessary, and you'll be presented with a list of snapshots from the past 24 hours or so restore the latest. And after just a few seconds, the Mac will reboot to its state right before the failed update. Says I've done this on SSD only and on Fusion Drive Max and it's worked every single time. I've had to do it more than I might like because I follow the beta releases, but he says that's the price I pay. The technique is also useful for removing all trace of software that I evaluate and decide not to keep. Oh, that's really interesting. While on the subject of snapshots, he says, carbon copy cloner can do cool things with APFS snapshots, but its own if enabled and those made by time machine, both its own and those made by time machine. In particular, it can mount any snapshot read only providing a much quicker way to retrieve lost files than digging them out of a traditional time machine backup. If you're feeling really geeky, you can mount two snapshots and do stuff like see how a file changed from one to the other. So very, very cool. Thank you for that, Dominic. I, you know, again, this is why we love quick tips, even though that one wasn't entirely quick, but just remembering that these snapshots and APFS are there and can save us from a scenario like a failed update is, you know, it's sort of mind blowing if you rewind five years, but, uh, but it's, it's the world we live in today, which is pretty cool. So anybody thoughts on that, Pete? Oh, that's brilliant. That's it fast. It's brilliant. It's fast. That's the thing is it's because it's right there. It's not actually restoring. It's just moving a pointer and saying go use that. Yeah, nice. Pretty good. I know. And speaking of snapshots, uh, that is something which, uh, I've been noticing as of late, um, because I'm doing carbon copycloners, APFS, but carbon copycloner maintains and I'm looking right now and I got a big long list here of snapshots that it made. And if I want to restore to a certain point, it will let me do that as well. So that's nice. Nice. Yeah. It's pretty cool. I'm pretty sure SuperDuper does the same thing. Does SuperDuper work with snapshots? That, that part I wasn't sure of. I don't use them. So I can't answer. Yeah. Um, all I know is I see them in carbon copycloner. It's showing like it looks like it's making them like hourly, which, uh, I'm wondering what algorithm they're using here. Well, all it's got to do is drop an anchor and you're done. All is, is, is, do you have carbon copycloner set to, to make those snapshots or those the time machine snapshots that you're seeing in carbon copycloner, John? Oh, that they may be. Well, they have a time machine. Yeah. Cause they, cause I con next to them. There you go. So it may be the ones that they're making and it's just making you aware that yeah, if you want to restore one of these then. Okay. Yep. Yep. Very cool. All right. In the, uh, in the Mac geek gap forums from crazy moose, we have a great little tip. Have you ever wanted to watch YouTube but remain quote, unquote productive? Once you start watching a YouTube video, control click or two finger tap or right click twice on the video, you will be presented with a new menu, select enter on picture in picture and like magic, the video will pop out of safari and be presented to you in one of the four corners of your monitor. An alternative is that there is an app on the Mac store called helium. If you download this app, you're able to use the share option via safari to send YouTube Netflix or any other video provider to place videos on top of whatever else you're doing. Hope this helps out some of my fellow Mac users. Those are, that's two great tips. I like it. That's pretty good. Huh. I never heard a helium before. Huh. All right. Pretty good. I like it. Thanks for that crazy moose. Good stuff. We'll put a link in the show notes of course. Any thoughts on that before I go to our last tip here for this episode? Yeah, I like helium. Cool. Makes it, makes it talk funny. Oh, that's not what he meant. I think he meant it like a balloon. It floats it up, right? So what are you saying, John? Okay. On Twitter. We're lightning the mood, Dave. I know you were cranky. We got you happy now. Right? Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Lighten the mood. Lighten the mood. Lighten up Francis. Lighten up Francis. One of my favorite lines. Yeah, sorry. I had a physical and a TDAP booster shot today. So a little, a little, a little out of the game. But TDAP, the tetanus diphtheria and pertussis, I think, was a booster shot. It had been over 10 years. So there you go. Yeah, I think I got one of those recently. I didn't get a flu shot though, because I know the the goal of that is that they're actually trying to harvest your DNA to work towards it. Have you watched that? Let me get my tinfoil hat. No, you know me. I emotionally support all conspiracy theories, even those that I cannot. John, we're not allowed to talk about that or the chemtrails, brother. Well, no, in X-Files, the smallpox vaccine was a ruse to harvest DNA to, to, you know, work towards the upcoming alien invasion. Right? Yep. Yep. You know who else is harvesting our DNA is Twitter. But the good news is on Twitter and he actually had a bit of salient advice. He, we were talking about the new iPad Pro, 11 inch, but any 2018 iPad Pro and he wanted to restore it from a backup that he had on his Mac. So he got a USB A to USB C cable because that's what the iPad Pro has. And that's what his 2013 MacBook Air has. And it wouldn't work. It wouldn't see it. It would, in fact, it complained. And he contacted Apple and Apple informed him that cables need to be USB 3.1, not 3.0, 3 USB 3.1 to be compatible with the 2018 iPad Pro. Of course, Apple doesn't sell one of these cables at the moment. I don't think so you've got to go find one. But, but yeah, USB A to USB C and it all has to be 3.1. So wow, there you go. Good, good find though, Andy. And thank you for, for letting us know that's good stuff. So thoughts on that, gentlemen? Gentlemen, where? Yeah, okay. Hey, uh, how does it sound to you all if, uh, if I talk about our next couple of sponsors here? Dandy. All right. I'd like to thank Obstini for sponsoring this episode. In fact, I'd like to thank Obstini for doing what they do because as we all know, like this show wouldn't exist if incidents weren't inevitable and really it comes down to being prepared, right? You don't want to get caught. We say it all the time. Obstini helps you not get caught because what Obstini does is it's a system that helps you plan for disruptions because you know they're going to happen and to stay in control during incidents. So Obstini gives your team the power to respond quickly and efficiently to unplanned issues. We've talked about this. All issues like this are unplanned, right? It helps you notify the right people at the right time. So if someone's asleep, but someone else is awake, it knows who's on duty when it knows who's off for the weekend or who's off for a holiday or who's off on Tuesday. And it's smart about making sure the right people are notified at the right time. In addition, because Obstini is now part of the Atlassian family, not only does that mean it links with everything else that Atlassian does, but because Atlassian is so open, it links with lots of other stuff. You know, Jira, of course, Amazon CloudWatch, Data Dog, New Relic, all of those things tie right in because that's how Atlassian is and that's now how Obstini is. It tracks all your activity and provides really useful insights to improve future incident responses. So here's how it goes. Visit Obstini.com to sign up and get a free, yes, free company account, no credit card required. And then you can add up to five team members to that free account. That's Obstini.com. Never miss a critical alert again with Obstini because with Obstini, your next incident doesn't stand a chance. Our thanks again to Obstini and Atlassian for sponsoring this episode. And I'd like to thank Ring at ring.com slash MGG for being a sponsor here today. Look, we've talked about Ring. Ring is the reason that smart home stuff began making sense to me, right? We started talking about this last year because ring does it right. The whole out-of-box experience is very Apple-like. They include all the right tools to get everything set up. The first thing that I got from them, of course, was their doorbell, the video doorbell. And then I got floodlights and suddenly my house was smart. It could do all of these cool things. And of course that opened a beautiful can of worms that I could just head down well. After reinventing the doorbell, ring knew there was something else and they just reinvented the home alarm system. We all know that traditional alarm companies prioritize high monthly premiums and try to tie you into long-term contracts. So ring changed that. The ring alarm is like everything else they have, easy to install, affordable, and it's a home security system with no long-term contracts. You build the system that's right for you and your home and you have it up and running in minutes and then the ring alarm security kit comes with everything you need to protect your home and 24-7 professional monitoring is only 10 bucks a month, if you like. Very, very cool stuff. It's really a smarter way to protect your home and the ring alarm security kit is available, as I said, at ring.com-mgg and of course, retail stores across the US. So go to ring.com-mgg to learn how you can get whole home security for just 10 bucks a month. Our thanks to ring at ring.com-mgg for sponsoring this episode. All right, John. We've talked about different types of speed discrepancies, right, in terms of copying files. We've talked about it with various things here and I want to talk about another type of speed discrepancy and David leads us down this path quite nicely. He started an email trail with us and he said, I just upgraded my Comcast Internet service to gigabit speeds and the Nighthawk X6 router that I have has been working flawlessly up to this point cannot get past about 500 megabits per second. My modem is the Netgear CM 1000. So I know that's okay. And plus I plugged ethernet directly into my Mac and got gigabit speeds. I power-cycled both devices. I did a hard reset of the router and set it back up. Same results. I searched Google on this and it seems some folks were having issues with this and found it to be working sometimes, but most of the time not. Any thoughts? I'm tempted to give in and go with the Orbi as an excuse to move to mesh, but I would like to get this router working properly. So and we went back and forth. I wanted to make sure that he was actually testing his router with these speeds when he plugged in ethernet and not just plugging directly into the cable motor. And sure enough, if he plugs in ethernet to the router, he gets his gigabit downstream speed. He's with Comcast. So he's like me as a thousand down and then 40 up. So but those speeds worked and here's the thing. Your router can definitely handle a gigabit speeds. Right. It can route them and you're proving that when you're doing the test over ethernet. The problem is Wi-Fi. So let's talk about this because generally speaking, you're not going to see gigabit speeds in the real world over Wi-Fi with any router. What? Right. I know it's crazy. You buy a router. I'm going to interject a small fish shake and I'll let you continue. If you look at the specifications for the Nighthawk AC3200 tri-brand Wi-Fi router, yes, it says you can get speeds up to 3.2 gigabits per second. It's true. They make this claim, but I will let you qualify it because I think that their advertising is I wouldn't say they're it could be considered a bit misleading. Well, it is misleading, right? And what's happening is when they say that you're going to get 3.2 gigabits or 3200 megabits per second, they are talking about across all the radios theoretical maximums. So that router is a tri-band router. It has a 4 by 4 radio for the 2.4 gigahertz channel. So in each of those on 802.11 and can each of those streams of the radio can go 150 megabits. So 150 times 4 is 600. Great. So we get 600. Then it has four streams on each of its two 5 gigahertz radios 802.11 AC goes for 33 per stream for 33 times four is oh, maybe it's only tri-stream three streams. Yeah, it's only three streams on the 5 gigahertz radios. My most most routers don't do it that way. But this one has a four stream 2.4 gigahertz radio and then two three streams. So 433 megabits per second times three streams is 1,300 plus another 1,300. So now we've got 600 plus 1,300 is 1,900 plus another 1,300 is 3,200 or 3.2 gigabits. So in order to take advantage of all that speed, we would need a device, a single device, which doesn't exist, uh, with three radios that also match those. And then somehow we'd have to be able to get like the perfect world, uh, theoretical maximum connection quality out of each of those. TLDR, it ain't going to happen, right? So your iPhone and every Mac that you have except the MacBook Pro and the iMac are all two by two devices means meaning they have two streams in them. And so if you were to connect to the five gigahertz radio, your iPhone or your MacBook would get a maximum of a connection that goes 866, but 866 is only a theoretical maximum. So we got to ratchet that down and guess what? What I've seen in, you know, real world tests is right what you've seen. Even with a four by four router settles in right about five or 600 megabits for a single Wi-Fi client. Now, as John said, this is a little bit misleading. It is, but if you've got multiple radios on your router, it means that they can reach different devices simultaneously and you can get more throughput out of these things, especially if you've got say, uh, one computer copying. Remember in our previous segment, we were talking about copying data between two drives. Well, what if you're copying data between two computers and they're both connected via Wi-Fi? Well, if you connect them to two different radios, now they're not sharing and you can start to get some real speeds. So there are benefits to having a tri-band device in addition to just having more bandwidth on at different frequency ranges that might be able to avoid some, you know, interference from other things. But the reality is that that 500 megabits a second that you're seeing for your Wi-Fi, you know, your speed test, that's actually really good. It's rare that I see something go over 500. I've seen it, but usually like on a good day, it's about 450 for me and other times, you know, it's somewhere between two and 300 because I'm not right next to the router or I've got four other routers running because I'm testing things and they get in each other's way and all of that stuff. So yeah, your Wi-Fi router doesn't do gigabit and it really is because your Wi-Fi devices don't do gigabit and that's what it comes down to.  So yes, technically Max is out at 1300. I've seen that do about 750, maybe 800 on a current gen MacBook Pro and that's pretty darn fast, but it's not gigabit. So there you go. Thoughts on that? No, you're right. Whereas I think in our last episode, we discussed the mechanics of a wired gigabit router, which those in theory can handle the maximum throughput on all the ports. His does, right? By his tests. Yeah. Well, he said he did ethernet. The thing is, yeah, the mechanics of Wi-Fi and I think you zeroed in on it. It's that unless you have all the channels that unless your device that is talking to the Wi-Fi router has all of the radios and all of the channels, you're not going to see this theoretical maximum speed. Right. We're going to see something pretty good.  It is. It looks like it's one of the ones I recommend for a standalone router. It's great. Yeah. Yeah. There's there's absolutely nothing wrong with it and a lot right about it. So, yeah.   Well, so, no, no, no, no, that's it. That's actually a good sort of extension to this discussion because because that is a good question. Like, I mean, seriously, even, even for Netflix, even for 4K, 25 megabits per second is enough, right? That's what it takes to just to stream 4K and 1080p is like six megabits a second. So all of these things that we're talking about, it's like, well, that's crazy. Well, yes, except that the further you get from the radio, the less you're the less connection strength you're going to have the lower connection strength and therefore lower speeds. So if you're starting out with something that could do on your iPhone 500 megabits a second on your MacBook Pro, you know, make 750 or something like that. Now, when you get three rooms away, you're still getting 200, maybe 250, 300 megabits per second, and that's great, right? So this is why this helps. And this is frankly why mesh in the home can work now because we have 802.11ac that can do these pretty fast speeds over wireless. And that creates the backhaul that this mesh can then use to amplify or repeat, I guess is a better way to say it. And then everything's good. So yeah, no, it's a it is a good discussion. It's just, I mean, I know you were doing it to sort of be tongue-in-cheek and but like there there's an answer there. So maybe maybe you're right. I checked this the other day. So Netflix I have on on the well, I have on both the Apple TV and the Tivo, but if you typically hit the info button, it'll show you the bandwidth that's being consumed. And yeah, it's on the order of what 10 as you said for for HD content, it's like. Megabits per second. Yeah, single digit. Yeah, right. Exactly. Yeah, it's like. Yeah. So, so even I would argue even a 802 and access point could probably handle that. It could AC could handle it better. Right. Yeah. Yes. And and just doesn't have the the same bandwidth per stream, but it could. It could do it. Yeah. No problem. Yeah. All right. Let's jump to let's jump to Joe here. And Joe says says to the wizards of Wi-Fi a question. My home network has been giving me fits over the last few months with the basic issue being devices lose their Wi-Fi connections. The root of the problem seems to be that my TP-Link Archer C59 AC router forgets or ignores its password setting for some devices over the course of a few days. Initially, repowering the router would seem to fix this, but lately that seems to not help. Changing the password saving then going back and changing back to the original password now seems to be what works, but is rather a bother. iPhones, iPads, I thought home pods or I home smart plugs are six to eight echoes are ring doorbell and cameras and ecobee thermostats have all of course been impacted. Interestingly, my four Apple TVs have not wired devices of course have no issues only wireless. I have five to six wired devices and typically 35 wireless. Today by chance I had done a password reset on the router and a couple of the echoes had to be repowered to get them back online. I decided to leave a couple unpowered and it actually seems like this immediately solved an ecobee that had been stubbornly offline. I'm now surmising that one or more Internet of Things devices are screwing my network up either keeping the old IP address when duplicating or somehow else misbehaving. I'm not sure why the router reboot does not fix this though. This brings me to my question. When you start getting this many wireless devices in the home, how do you start troubleshooting issues like this separating separating out a bad router from a bad IOT device? So yeah, that's a really good question.  The first thing I would do is take a survey of what are all these devices that we have and are there any, you know, that are what I would call off brand? Everything he mentioned was was on brand, right? But he mentioned some smart plugs. And so maybe one of those is, you know, not something we just hear about all the time. Not that something name brand could have a couldn't have a problem. Of course it could. But, you know, you got to start somewhere. So I kind of trust my gut on that. Find the things and like you found maybe it's one of your echo devices, right? You said you left it offline and it was, it was, you know, everything else was fine or at least your ecobee was fine. So maybe that echo needs to be factory reset and maybe it is holding on to an IP address. You know, so I do some of that and then if that failed, I would put the router a different router in place just temporarily to isolate your router. I would set up the new router with the same SSID and password. So I didn't have to go around and change any devices and see does the problem continue. If it does, then we know that it's definitively one of your devices doing something on the network. If it doesn't persist, then it could still be one of your devices and the new router is just handling it differently and in your scenario better or it could be that something's flaky with your router. It could also be that your router is having trouble sort of managing that number of devices simultaneously. 35 doesn't seem like a lot, but maybe it's more than 35. I don't know. We've certainly seen it where some routers like my cousin just had a it was an old 802.11n router, John. It was like a, you know, 600 speed router kind of thing. And you know, they've got kids that are playing games and they're actually all everybody in the family plays games and they've got a lot of devices now and their router. They just had to reboot it once a week because it couldn't handle it. So we got them a new router and it's like, it's great. No problems. So it, you know, lots of wireless devices require your router to sort of keep not only the devices in in memory, but also all of the traffic to and from them. It's got to remember. Oh, yeah. If, you know, if traffic comes in on port 1040, you know, or not 1042, I'll say, you know, 10,420 that goes to device A and traffic on port 10,421 goes to device B. It's got to keep these, these tables, these mapping tables in, in memory. And maybe you just don't have enough ram and your router for it. So there you go.  So there you go. I think I'm with you on that. Okay. Looking at this device and I used to use a TP-Link one of the Archer units. But I don't have nearly as many devices here. So I suspect as, as I think you do, that you may be reaching the limits of the capabilities of this. I'm looking at the spec sheet for this thing and it doesn't specify how many devices it can handle at once. Sure. Some people try to do that, like Apple used to do that for the airport. They're like, well, yeah, we can handle 20 or 30 or 40. Right. Right.  But, um, I'm consider, what I'm considering is I wonder if getting a few of the TP-Link extenders and kind of doing a quasi mesh thing may help. Maybe it depends on what the issue is. If it's the router not being able to keep all these devices in memory, that won't help. That's because that's what I suspect. Well, I'm thinking spreading out the pain or spreading out the bandwidth. Well, but if it's not, that's what I'm saying. If the router, the router still has to be the router, right? There's only one device doing the routing. So if it can't keep them, it doesn't matter if they're, although he's saying that he's using it wireless, not wired. So maybe there's, maybe that is the answer is spread the wireless load around. Yeah, that could be. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Or, yeah. I know. That's a tough thing. It's going to take some trial and error and some troubleshooting. And that's, that's where it sounds like based on what was said here is that it sounds like you're pushing a limits of what a consumer level Wi-Fi access point can can handle. Yeah. That's right. That's right. Yeah. And check for a firmware update. That's actually not a bad. Yeah. I had to do that with TP link. And then definitely they would have patches where one, I still remember one when I had a TP link and I was like, yeah, we're in our DHCP algorithm was kind of messed up and we fixed it. So that'd be the first thing to do is see if they have a firmware update. I agree. That's a bug in their firmware. That's a, you know, tossing your devices off the network when it shouldn't. Yeah, it happens. It does. It totally happens. Yeah. All right. While we're on the on the Wi-Fi thing, I want to, I want to go to Carl's question. We've had this floating for a little while. So Carl says, my question is, when do you think Apple will support 5G cell service in the iPhone? I know 5G cell service is still in its infancy, but I think it would be good to have that technology available so that when 5G comes available, we'll be ready for it. What do you think? Is it 2019? Is it 2020? What is it? I think it's not going to be 2019. At this point, I wouldn't even say it's going to be 2020, although Apple's got to already be planning for this. The real trick is when will 5G coverage be ubiquitous enough that it actually makes sense to have it in our phones and simultaneously? When will we be able to get 5G radios that operate efficiently enough to have them run off of a battery? Right. Because the first place that 5G, so 5G is the, sort of the next iteration of over-the-air broadband, not Wi-Fi, but replacing or moving on past LTE on our, for our, I don't want to say our cell phones, but from our mobile carriers like AT&T and Verizon and those sorts of things. They are doing 5G rollouts now this year and that'll continue into next year, but in the places where they are going to do those, what you will get is a 5G router or quote unquote modem that attaches with an antenna to the outside of your house and then comes inside like your cable modem does now and then plugs into a router and then connects to a Wi-Fi access point or, you know, whatever to give you Wi-Fi in your home. Normal Wi-Fi like we have now because that way the 5G radio in your home can be plugged into AC power. It will replace your cable modem or your DSL or your files and now you don't have to have a wire to your house. You can just do it over-the-air, which will help in a lot of scenarios and you'll get lots and lots of bandwidth over 5G that way. And again, just like you get with your cable modem, once you get it into your house, then you just connect it to a Wi-Fi router that can talk to everything you already have. So I think it'll be a few years before they start adding it to handsets. Apple, my guess is it would be 2020 at the earliest, but I don't, I mean, maybe not even until like 2022. Again, it depends on what they can do with power and batteries, I think. What do you think, John? I mean, I'm with Verizon and I'm just looking at their statement and there's like, yeah, well, we're going to have very limited rollout in 2018 and more in 2019. But I think I'm with you is that the, you know, it sounds like 2020 to the thing is first, you got to get Verizon and AT&T and Sprint and all the other guys to deploy it and, you know, they got up, you know, they got to install new, new antennas or new radios and stuff like that. So, or maybe they just upgrade them remotely. I don't know. Yeah, I would assume there's new radios and stuff involved. So, there's going to be a lot of infrastructure upgrade on the part of all these guys. So, yeah. What do you think, Pete? Have you put any thought into the 5G thing? I heard somewhere today and I don't remember where that Apple was planning on delaying a year at least on their next phone based on the 5G and I wish I could source that. I can't. It's just something that's in my head. But, no, other than that, no, I haven't. I mean, obviously, we're all looking to the day when that comes. I mean, it's going to be, you know, compared to 300 Bod Modem, you know, to the progress. And I'm frankly amazed at it watching them, you know, as the speeds have increased over the years and they're going to do it again. I'm looking forward to 5G actually opening up competition for broadband, like broadband to the home. I forget about my phone. Yeah. I just like at my house, I want an option other than Comcast. Yeah, yeah, and you'll be able to tether your phone and pay that. Correct. Yeah, the reason we have good Comcast speeds here is because even though we can't get Fios in our town, we are part of the Comcast block that includes towns that can get Fios. So, they had to open that up to stay competitive. Well, with 5G, now it opens that door and you don't need a cable run to your house. So, there's no like we need to, you know, deal with the local municipalities and all of that for running new wires or whatever, or leasing space on existing wires. Nope. Here's the, here's the competition we just turned it on today. So, that to me is, is what I'm really looking forward to. Now, I'm with you because for, especially for an iPhone, like my iPhone. Yeah. LTE is fine. I don't have any, personally, I don't have any scenarios where I'm like, oh my gosh, I wish I had more bandwidth. The stuff I do on my phone doesn't even probably need LTE. I sometimes I've actually switched down to 3G and you know, it's fine for the stuff that I do. Yeah, but we're not talking about what we're doing on our phones today. Right, you know, I mean, we like, we can do video conferencing on our phones because we have the band, the bandwidth to do it. It, you know, if we rewind 10 years, we say, well, I don't need bandwidth because the stuff I do on my phone, I don't need it for. But at the same time, we couldn't do video conferencing. Right. As we discussed, couldn't do Netflix on a modem, on a bod, 300-bod modem. Or a 9600-bod modem, yeah. But I think I'm with you is that I think the, the scenario where it's going to make the most impact is it could be a wired broadband replacement. Yeah. That's, that's the power of it. Not, not so much making your handheld devices being able to do, you know, gigabit or whatever because do you really need it? But, but, but to ride you a different channel and kind of break the, you know, kind of monopoly we have in this country right now. Yeah, or the sub monopolies. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Because you have one option for a decent piece. My choice for cable is cable vision. That's my only choice. That's it. In my town, similar to you, or I could get, you know, but each medium, and I think it was pretty much throughout the country, each medium only really has one major player. Correct. If you get him to get it. Right. Right. Yeah, exactly. And that's because we've decided we don't want 30 cables strung up on the street. So we only, you know, we essentially offer a monopoly to the various providers. And I mean, that's, that's how it works. No, that's how it works. You know, but, but I mean, if you go back to equal access with telephone lines, the thing is that you share the access to the medium among different providers. You know what I'm saying? I do, but like Comcast would have to, per equal access, as I understand it, they have to sell space on their service to another service provider at a 30% discount. That's not like, I don't know if there's enough there to make, clearly there's not enough there for people to make money because no one's doing it, at least not en masse. So we've, we've extended these monopolies and in a good, I mean, I think it's like, I get it it, because I don't want 30 cables strung up on the street. I don't want to see a truck every other day putting another one up, you know, that's how it goes. So you know what I'm saying? It's like, well, you know, but if, if I give, so if you take the major player in town and if they can rent their infrastructure to other providers, which they have to technically possible. Yes, right? It's not profitable. Right. It's just not profitable. Yeah. If it were, it would be done. I mean, by definition, it's not profitable because otherwise someone would be doing it. Yeah.  So yeah. So 5G can't wait. Same. Yeah. I'm sure we're going to hear, I'm sure we're going to hear a lot about it at CES. I have no doubts. Yup. We heard a lot about 5G at CES last year. So yes. Yes. They were, they were hyping it. Definitely. Definitely. This is going to change the world.  And it's going to be really fast and then all your problems are going to be solved. It's true. Yeah. Yeah. And the server has to be that fast. I want 5G not between my phone and a server. I want, forget 5G. I want like LTE speeds between my phone and my brain because that's when I get really smart. Right? When I can get past this, yeah, when I can get past this really slow interface that is either a keyboard or a mouse or, you know, tapping on this thing, like that's terribly inefficient. I can't get thoughts from my brain into this thing and thoughts from this back into my brain. I got to read it. It's really slow. So, you know, that's when we can increase the speed of that interface. We could leave every other speed exactly as it is and we'd all be geniuses the moment we can do that. Chips and play in our head. That's what Neuralink is up to, right? I mean, I don't know what their play is, but like that's what Musk is doing with that Neuralink company. So, yeah. Well, you guys read Neuromancer, right? I mean Microsoft. That's what it's all about.  You want to speak a different language. You want to be a good cook. Hey, just buy the software and plug it in your head. Plug it in? There you go. Yeah, you don't need to plug it into your head.  And then you torrent software and someone's playing on the virus in it. Oh, that could get ugly. Oh, absolutely. Yeah, no, there's like... Where's your firewall? Yeah, where's your firewall? And if you haven't read it, friends, pick it up and give it another read. Neuromancer, William Gibson, good stuff. Yeah, it is a good book. There's a whole story about how the whole concept of cyberspace came to be implanted in William Gibson's head. And I think John Perry Barlow and Ketamine were involved in this scenario. But I'll leave that as an exercise for the listener. And we will tell you how to contact us both before and after you read about that at Feedback at MackieGab.com. Did you say Feedback at MackieGab.com? No, no, no, no, Pete. He said Feedback at MackieGab.com. Unless you're a premium subscriber, in which case, premium at MackieGab.com is the address that you can send things into and we get to those first even though even this week, we got to everything. You can call us at 224-888-Geek and John, Geek is? Four, three, three, five. I thought he was going to say it, Pete. You can visit the forums, as we said, at MackieGab.com and our thanks to all of our sponsors, of course, with JamfNow and Smile at TextExpander.com slash podcast ring.com slash MGG opsgenie.com such good stuff. Otherworld computing at maxsales.com barebone software at barebones.com all good stuff. Eero at Eero.com slash MGG our thanks to cashfly at cashfly.com for providing all the bandwidth to get from us to you. Thanks to you, our listeners. Thanks to you, Pete. I'm glad you're here, man. Glad to be here. Glad to be anywhere. I'm glad you're here. Yes, no kidding. Pete, did you learn anything this week? Perhaps a lesson that you want to encapsulate and share with everyone. Man, we got away with it. We got, I'm here in one piece and I almost wasn't and it's only because I didn't and don't you get caught.


Hi there, I'm Sunit from the Institute for Global Change. This question is mainly for the last speaker. It was really interesting to see all the sort of data analysis that you did and the fact that the sort of texting initiative didn't actually push government to deliver. I sort of had a parallel experience of that in my previous role and I spent years perfecting what I thought was a really beautiful data-collecting system and it was shared. And it became apparent, like with you, that either the data was not the binding constraint or it was one of several binding constraints and it made me think a lot more about the complex ecosystem of what motivates people to do really well. And so for me, like I know if I did exercise every day and ate a really good diet and slept eight hours a night I'd be great but I don't do it. And so I wondered if you had any reflections on what are the motivating factors that would make government particularly like lower level public servants do their jobs if the data or public shaming is not sufficient. This is a huge question. I think first of all I want to separate between two types of actors that we had in government. One is the district officials and one is the service providers. And so the hope was that the pressure on service providers and when I say service providers these are the frontline service providers, the teachers and the nurses in the clinics and the school, that the pressure will come not necessarily from citizens but will come from government. And so this comes from, there's been a lot of studies recently where government has been cut off completely and the idea was to organize communities to monitor directly service providers and this usually fails because of as I said disparities in power and collective action problems. And so the idea was to bring the government back in. I think in order to get the district government to be more active, I think more could be done. One thing that we failed to do is create common knowledge and I think this is something that is very important. My common knowledge is the way the platform ultimately worked because of the limitations of not being in a G4 world but in a G2 world is that it was person to government. I send the message and only I know what I sent and only the government is communicating with me. If you look at the platforms like 311, Philly and others in more developed countries, you see that information is aggregated in a very conspicuous way on the website where other people can see what came in, what has been addressed, how much has been addressed and I think that creating a common knowledge where not only I but other people also know what are messages that came in, what has been addressed or not is really important to get government to feel some pressure to act upon the information that they get. I think I was going to ask a very similar question so maybe it's more of a comment. The GAP program is something which I worked for the European Commission and I think it's the EU either has or is going to be supporting GAP program but I had a question about this difference and transition between transparency and accountability and the fact that as you were saying with this one-to-one connection rather than aggregating it and publicizing those results so that for example the different layers of local government within that region were not named and shamed there was an indication of how they were operating and to what level of efficiency and equally for the actual facilities, the clinics, the schools and so on that they could see how well, how many reports there were about that particular facility and what had happened about them and I know that two things about Uganda which may be relevant is that one they haven't had local council elections for just like 20 years, there's very little accountability there and secondly nepotism and corruption in those kind of facilities and services is very, very high so without that kind of accountability you're not going to get much response no matter what kind of transparency but I think it's a fascinating initiative and I think it's something we definitely would follow up on. I just want to say one thing about that very quickly and just to correct that at the district level so there's district councillors each district is divided to sub-counties and each sub-county sends a male and a female representative and for these types of councillors there's been a periodic elections every five years there was in 2016, 2011 and so the place where we didn't have elections in Uganda is only at the village level, the LC1 for 20 years but at the level of the district and the sub-county elections were regular every five years. Hi Kirsten from Ewing Global Pulse I just wanted to make a comment that we should maybe look also beyond the internet and say well we can do summaries through radio for example so that people know okay this has been reported and this has been worked on yes or no so that people get a feedback like that and secondly I think there were a lot of talks over the last two days already about providing information to the governments and nothing is being done so maybe we should engage also more with the power relations around governance and not just say okay information is the problem information is part of the problem but then we should also think on how we can strengthen the compact between citizens and the government and on taxes etc. around that. Cool, one more question for the room and then we'll answer several at once. Hi, Michaela Maira-Sende from democracy reporting international the question to Tiago on your research it's very interesting research because generally I think at the moment the assumption is traditional media play a better role on the social media than anybody else and them being undercut is a problem for democracy because there's no gatekeeping and no fact checking etc. You didn't say very much how you measured media journalism so what kind of sources did you look to compare to what political parties and candidates said that would be one question and another is maybe to moderate the findings a bit or maybe you could comment on that you know you could say all the journalists they raise scandal instead of talking about programs but in terms of accountability of course scandal sometimes is a good thing there may be a scandal with a politician it's about his or her honesty so it's something we want journalists to do so that's not programmatic reporting but still very important for accountability so if you could talk about this and maybe a small question to a colleague from Sierra Leone you concluded by saying complex problems are not that geared towards being solved by technology if you could just add two or three sentences on that takeaway I would like to understand that takeaway better yeah, thanks so basically, I'm sorry it's like I presented it like kind of the bright side and good news but of course this I was looking only in institutional communication so I didn't look how people interact and communicate with each other in these platforms and how polarized it is how informative it is but the alternative would be much much worse it would mean that parties don't care at all and that would mean that no matter which channel elections will never be so informative to the citizens so in that sense it's still good to cities and to find out that still parties do care and they do try to inform the electorate and how I compared it was I looked at the press so it's a more conservative approach if I look at television the difference would be much higher because as you know the press is still more informative and still the salience of conflict and the horse race strategy is much lower there even though some studies show that it's becoming similar to television so the difference are no longer so drastic but still it's a conservative approach so in the sense like it gives more value to these differences and of course the scandal like you have this watchdog role of journalists and they perceive that's informing the people and this is important to know that and my point was not really that it was a small note I'll see how the difference our media can somehow distort a campaign by overemphasizing scandal of course it's important to know this but in every single newspaper I have three or four articles about scandals so politicians might have somehow kind of a negative impact on the attitudes of these citizens towards politics because basically what they read is only about scandal and how bad their politicians are and in that sense if they follow the campaigns on social media then it's not as bad of course I'm looking at institutional communication again and I don't know what their friends are talking about what is like people discussing probably and if you look at user data of course the scandal type of story will be much more salient but still it's good to see that in my opinion that politicians are not as negative and are not so interested in discussing attacking the opponents based on this kind of story so I guess, thank you Sorry so to reframe your question is a few more words around the last comment I made that's to do not include technology when the problem is still too complex so I think the basic premise is that technology tends to undermine our problem-solving skills so and the assumption is that when you first encounter the problem it is complex and you need to first begin to understand it the place to start from is not to introduce technology it's not for you to throw a solution at a problem that you have just encountered so you first need to start understanding that problem before you can then figure out where exactly and how specifically can technology help you the other, the flip side to it was also that when you have complex solutions it may also not be a good point in time to bring in technology and by that I mean that I think in the process of problem-solving we get to point in time where we have multiple ways in which technology can help us and you need to slow down a bit and streamline on that that's kind of what I meant by when the solution is too complex right, thank you Perfect timing Thanks to all our speakers there's now a short break before the next event Thank you


Another way of dealing with Friartos is a resource management. It gives you a possibility to do tasks or parts of the application that need exclusive CPU access. And it as well allows synchronization of external means. So first, when we want to guarantee that microcontroller doesn't switch to another task, we can turn on a critical section. So there exists a macro, task-enter-critical and task-exit-critical. These macros technically disable the interrupt and between disabling the interrupt and re-enabling it, the CPU is completely ours. So if you have some time critical code or code that must not be interrupted, the critical section is a way to go. However, if you enter a critical section, you are blocking all interrupts. So you are not able to react on external events. Which means if there is some other critical event, it will not get the CPU time until you exit the critical section. Further, you can as well suspend the scheduler. This is available through the vTask suspend all. And here, be careful because when you suspend the scheduler, you need some external thing, external means to resume it again. So you need typically enable the interrupt with a resume all function to return to the scheduler functionality. And finally, we have got as well a possibility to use mutexes. Mutex needs to be enabled with this macro in the Friartos config. And it allows to guard a unique resources. Now let's come to the critical sections. How it can be used whenever you need an exclusive code running on the CPU, you can call a port-enter-critical. This is a macro that technically disables the interrupts using a base priority register. So it boosts the current task priority to the maximum system priority so that no other interrupt can preempt it. Then you do the sensitive code and you exit the critical section. This port-exit-critical restores the base priority to the original level so that it comes to whatever previous setup you had.