The Mac Observers, Mac Geekab, Episode 799 for Monday, January 27th, 2020. It's folks and welcome to the Mac Observers, Mac Geekab, the last of our 700 series of shows, only because we don't have any more numbers left unless we go outside of the integer realm. And there's no reason to do that because we have more numbers past 799 that we can use, so it's all good. You know, where the show, where you send in your questions, your tips, your cool stuff found, and we have geeky conversations about it. But the goal is for everyone to learn at least five new things every single time we get together. So we try and make this stuff understandable and fun and interesting and helpful. That's really the goal. And of course, we all get to learn stuff. You do, of course, but hopefully that's why you choose to listen, but we do as well. It's really quite, it's quite the thing. Sponsors for this episode include lino.com.mgg, maxsales.com, expressvpn.com.mgg, and clearme.com.mackgeekab. I know it's a different URL. It's fine. It's good. It's just tough.  All right. We'll talk about all of those a little more detail, a little more depth later. But for now, here in Durham, New Hampshire, I'm Dave Hamilton. And here in Fearful Connecticut, this is John F. Braun. There we are, Mr. John F. Braun. I'm going to dive right into it because Ari's got, we've got quick, we have so much stuff to go through today. It's ridiculous. Ari says, I just learned today that you can drag and drop a Memoji onto any text or photo and essentially make it a Memoji sticker. So you would, this is on your iPhone.  Then it shows you all your Memojis, assuming you've created one. If you haven't, you can right there. And then instead of just tapping it, which would put it sort of in the area where you would type, if you just push on it and hold on it rather and drag it up, you can leave it on top of prior message. That somebody else or you typed and it will show up for everybody in the chat trail right there in the message, which is really kind of handy.  So thanks for sharing that, Ari. I don't think I knew that. I've certainly done stickers before, which is what those essentially are. But I'd never realized you could do it with Memojis. And what's cool is you can put, once you get it to where you want, you can put a second finger down and zoom out or spin it too. So you can really get kind of creative with it. Just fun. Yeah. But to be clear, Memojis is something you can only do on iOS. And on, yes, that's right, on iOS. That's correct. Correct. You can see them on macOS. And I think can you then manipulate them? Can you copy and paste them? Yeah. You're right. No. One of our listeners copied, put all of his Memojis into like the keyboard, you know, or the text field there, copied them, pasted them into a note that was then synced across iCloud and then had them on macOS. You're absolutely right. That was a nice, nice call back there. That's good. All right. Well, Donna has two quick tips, both about the watch. The first one is if you go into Control Center on your watch, which is swiping up from the bottom, you can see all the... There's a bunch of things that you get to see. I've never done that on your watch. You can turn off Wi-Fi, cellular if you have it. You can see battery percentage.  But one thing that I never realized about Control Center is that you can rearrange its content. So you swipe up into it, scrolls to get to the bottom of that sort of screen slash list, and then tap Edit, and the buttons start jiggling. Now you know what to do. Touch and hold and drag. And when you're done, you either tap Done, or you press the digital crown in, and that sort of locks it all in together. So that I found exciting, because that's interesting. I had no idea that you could rearrange those. I always kind of... Maybe in older versions of WatchOS you couldn't. I don't know. I've never tried. So I certainly didn't find it in WatchOS 5. I don't know if it was there in prior versions. So that's a good one. Thank you, Donna. And her second quick tip is very much related to this. One of the things that you can do in Control Center on the Watch is that you can ping your iPhone, which is really handy. That I've definitely used in the past because, you know, if you can't find your phone, it's great. You just swipe up, do the thing, your phone makes a noise. Even if it's muted, it'll make a noise because it's your phone and it's your watch and it's all tied together. However, what I did not know was that the little icon... The icon to make a noise on your phone has like a picture of an iPhone with sound waves emanating off the side of it. It looks like sideways Wi-Fi icons if the sound wave thing doesn't make sense to you or doesn't resonate. But Apple has a support dock that we'll link to and it says you can play a sound if you can't find your iPhone. Or if you don't want to make a noise, touch and hold that little icon on your watch to flash your iPhone's light without making a noise. So if it's in the bedroom and maybe your partner's sleeping or something and you don't want to make a big lot of noise, just hold it down. It'll flash the light and you can find it without waking anybody up unless it happens to be aimed like right at them and then maybe that would wake them up. You know, I can't help with everything. So thanks for both of those, Donna. Those are great tips. Now I got to go and rearrange stuff on my watch. I like it. I'm minorly annoyed because you would think that you could flash the light in general like if you did an iCloud because I went to iCloud and used Find Your Thing and I'm like, you know, we'll play a sound on my iPhone. Well, why can't I, through that interface, flash the light? That should be able to. You know what I'm saying? Interesting. I do. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, it's only locally to it with the watch. So it's only with the watch and the iPhone that it's married to or bonded with or whatever. Correct. And I'm looking here. I know that there is, while we're talking about flashing the light, if you go in iOS 13, this has been there for a while, but this is the path to get there in iOS 13. So if you're running an older version of iOS, you can still probably do this. But you can have the light flash for notifications if you want to go in, go into settings, accessibility, go to audio slash visual, which is in the hearing section. And then at the bottom of that list is in the visual section is LED flash for alerts.  And for some reason, while you're podcasting, you want to know that you have an alert on your phone, but you don't want it to make a noise or anything. I actually don't want that, that this particular podcaster would not care for that. But others might, I don't know, more for others than others. But it could be better than because, I don't know, like many, but I almost always have the sound off on my phone and I rely on it buzzing. Buzzing is a pretty distinctive sound and you may not want that. Yeah, that's right. Yeah. You prefer LED flash versus buzzing and somebody knowing that your device is buzzing. To be fair, it's worth testing, but I'm pretty sure that turning this on does not turn off the buzz. The buzz will still happen. The beep will still happen. So if you want it not to buzz, then you need to go into sounds and turn that off. Just so you know, just to bring that full circle. We had a discussion in the last episode about installing Ethernet. I want to share Ken's tip. In fact, we have a bunch more tips. But the first thing I want to do is talk about our first sponsor, which is Otherworld Computing. We always say that Otherworld Computing is one of our favorite companies and it truly is the first company that I go to anytime that I need to upgrade, add anything to my Macs because they have that stuff and they know how it all works. Well, they're always doing new stuff. Their new Mercury Elite Pro dock is like the perfect combination of docking solutions and storage. It's got two bays for drives that you can put in there. So there's your storage and seven ports. So it's got two Thunderbolt 3 ports, a Gigabit Ethernet port. It's got a front side SD card reader. It's got a display port, 1.2 for adding up to a 4K monitor. Two USB 3.1 Gen 1 ports. And it's also got a hardware RAID controller in there. Or you don't have to use the hardware RAID controller if you want to let it happen via software. But I talked to Larry about this. In fact, I interviewed him and he walked us through this thing. So I'll put a link to that as well so that you can see this thing. But they said that hardware RAID in these two bay units actually makes a lot of sense.  And it starts at 299.99. So you get like your Thunderbolt 3 dock and some storage. You get to your desk, you plug in your new machine, you're good to go. And I'm pretty sure it passes power to, I think is what he told us as well. So you got to check this out. Go to macsales.com or go to macicub.com. We got a link directly to the OWC Mercury Elite Pro right there on the sponsors section. So you won't miss it. And our thanks to Otherworld Computing for sponsoring this episode. Our second sponsor for today is Linode at linode.com. I will tell you, you are going to need a server someday. It's just how it works. It's just how it works. And Linode understands how it works because they know, like we learned years ago here on macicub, we all learned that having an SSD in your Mac made a huge performance difference, right? Didn't matter as much about the CPU and the RAM. What mattered is moving from rotational drives to SSDs. Linode runs all of their servers, the low CPU ones, the high CPU ones, all on SSDs. Everything, native SSD storage. And what does that mean? You get a really responsive server without necessarily having to buy the top of the, you know, the most expensive one. Now, you might need the CPU and RAM that the most expensive ones come with or something in between, but the lowest cost one for five bucks a month, they call it a nanode. And that too runs off of SSDs. And if you like the terminal, you can SSH in and go nuts on Linode servers. And I have, and it's fun. But if that's not fun for you, then you don't have to worry about it because their cloud manager lets you set up your server and manage your server without ever even knowing how to get to the command line. You can configure it to spin up a WordPress server, a Minecraft server, a VPN server, really anything that you could think of, they've probably got it set to go. There's just tons of these options out there.  So you got to check this out. And the cool part is they've given you a $20 credit just for being a MacGeek user, free out of the gate, which means you get four months of a nanode to play with for no cost. I know. Linode.com slash MGG is where you've got to go in order to get that $20 credit and our thanks to Linode for sponsoring this episode. All right, John, moving on to Ken here because I loved it. We talked about how important it was in the last episode to add Ethernet when you have your walls open. And Ken writes, as a semi-geek, some of what transpires on MacGeek have sales right over my head, but every once in a while I actually feel that I can contribute. And in last episode, 798, discussing whether to install CAT 6A or CAT 7 cable while the walls of a house are open, says I've got something to add. Of course, he says I must give credit words due, namely, to Leo Laporte, who has dealt with this subject many times on his tech guy show. He will also recommend the installation of cable while the walls are open, but even more importantly, he has also suggested installing Conduit, which makes updating or replacing that cable much easier in future years. And that is so true.  So you'd run Conduit, but you always want to, if you're going to run Conduit, and I don't know what that would cost, but my guess is it's way cheaper to do with the walls open than with the walls closed sort of by definition.  Having the Conduit there is great, but once the walls are closed, it's sort of difficult to get cable all the way through it unless you have something that can pull it through and string is generally what is used in those scenarios. Oh, there you go. Yeah, and I remember a tip a long time ago. Remember at home? I used to have them as a cable service and I think it was lore associated with them, but when they had the right of way to run their fiber, I think backbone to do what they wanted, they were like, hey, you know, if we got the right of way along, you know, wherever, why don't we run like two Conduits? Like we'll put the stuff that's serving our current needs in one Conduit. And hey, if we ever expand, we got another Conduit. So that, I mean, that's great for a, you know, infrastructure installation. I'm not sure I would recommend running two Conduits in your house. I think one would be enough.  Oh, no, I get you. You know what I'm saying? Yeah, especially in the age now of, you know, 10 gig, 10 gigabit lines. Correct. That should be enough for, but hey, maybe not.  So I think you'd probably be okay. But who knows? I don't know. I don't know. All right. Take us to Allison, John. Yeah, I guess, you know, cool. We just saw her, but yes. So Allison had a comment here and she said, Hey guys, I heard a cool stuff found about tracking devices, battery status from Fidel.io for Mac or batteries for Mac. Yeah, it was a cool stuff found in a recent episode. That's right. Yeah. And we sent him a note and said, you know, somebody mentioned it and she said, sounds cool, installed it, but then it asks for permissions to watch keystrokes from any app and her evidence is as follows. If you go into security and privacy in the privacy tab under input monitoring, it showed batteries. And here's where I think the problem is that the text in this says, allow the apps below to monitor input from your keyboard, even when using other apps. And I think that's not entirely correct. And I'll tell you why in a moment here. Okay.  I mean, why would you need to monitor keyboard? Why would you want to do that? And, uh, Ronnie, I think it is R-O-N-Y. Yeah. One of our listeners told us about batteries for Mac. Another listener decided to try it and was wondering why he needs privacy input monitoring. And his answer is as follows, um, the app only asks for privacy input monitoring when you enable touch bar support so that it reacts to a long tap of control tilde, which is not not carrot. Yeah. I'm sorry. No, you're right. Uh, to display battery levels on the touch bar. Okay. So that makes sense. So technically, I think he is monitoring the keyboard, but I think it's also offering permission. And this is why I think it sounds kind of weird is that he's actually kind of writing to the keyboard or the touch bar. Right? Uh, no, I think I, well, yes, he is writing to the touch bar, but, but he doesn't need keyboard, uh, monitoring for that. What he needs keyboard monitoring for is so that when you hold down control, uh, control carrot, it knows it can see that regardless of what app you're in. Right. If you want to see battery levels on the touch bar, then, you know, the way the app works is no matter where you are on the system, you hold down control carrot and hold it down long enough and it shows it to you. Well, in order for this batteries app to know that you've held down control carrot long enough, it must be able to see the keyboard and that's where this goes. But Allison's totally right that in theory, Ronnie or, you know, any other app developer that asked for this support could look at a hundred percent of what you type on the keyboard. Because in fact it sort of does. I mean, it's not logging it if, presumably, but it is waiting to see that, yeah, I've, you know, the key, that key is held down. Okay, great. You know, it doesn't get to, there's no way with the OS, at least not that I know of, to register and say, hey, let the OS tell me when just this particular key combination is held down. You don't get to do that. So you got to watch for a hundred percent of it. It's similar to how TextExpander works and others like it, that, you know, if you're looking for a certain keystroke to invoke some magic function, well, you got to be able to see everything. And, and that, that is just a function of the way that works. So yeah, makes sense. Yeah, here's the weird thing though, is that the screenshot that she sent, the other app listed there, which I don't have listed on any of my machines is Discord. So I'm like, why would Discord need universal, like all the time keyboard access, unless there's some secrets that. No, Discord, you can turn on like a system-wide mute. So Discord is a chat app. John and I happen to use it for our Makikeb audio so that the audio you're hearing from John is actually coming to me via Discord. He's hearing me also via Discord and then I'm recording it. But he, but it is possible to set up system-wide keyboard shortcuts for Discord to turn, say, mute on and off so that you don't have to bring Discord to the front and then tell it to mute. It doesn't matter what app you're in. You hit the magic keystroke and then boom, Skype did the same thing. So if that makes sense, if you start to set that stuff up that it would need, again, need system-wide keyboard access in order to respond to whatever its magic keystroke is. Okay. All right. And then both of my machines last pass is listed and that's kind of an obvious one, I think, because. Well, I mean, it's not necessarily obvious. Again, if you don't use a system-wide shortcut to invoke your password manager, then you wouldn't need that. But most of us do when we have a password manager use that. Right? So I think that's where that goes, I think. So I guess the message is it's good to be cautious and I guess you have to trust that the developer doesn't have, you know, they're not going to do bad things with your data. Because that's a topic these days. You know, people taking data when they shouldn't. So at the very least, Catalina and, you know, prior Mac OS versions. Right. Let you know. It may be annoying at times, but it's, you know, it's probably better to know too much than too little, right? I think so, yeah. But I mean, you know, Allison brings up a good point that these kinds of things are not entirely obvious to, you know, to why they're asking for this sort of thing. And, you know, that's up to the app developer to sort of better communicate that perhaps. I think in the, you know, when you first launch the app saying, hey, here's the thing, you're about to be asked for permission for this. Here's why. And feel free to decline, but know that if you decline, you won't get this particular functionality or, you know, whatever, some context sensitive thing. So, yeah. Yeah. Where I've seen that a lot is more with full disk access in that basically the utilities are like, well, if you don't enable this, then I'm not going to work, right? Not going to work. Same kind of thing. Yeah. All right. Kurt has a, another tip for us. Kurt says, I stumbled onto a nifty little gem. I keep a copy of my application folder in the dock, which I think is no longer a default. However, if you click on the application folder in the dock, it will present you with an array of icons for the applications as expected. The tip, hover over one of the application icons you're interested in and don't click. Instead, tap the space bar and you'll get a little sub window pop up with information about the app, such as version, size, last modified, kind of like, he says, a quick look for apps. And it's true. You can actually get that information for any folder that you have in the dock. Like if you've got your downloads folder, you can do the same thing.  So it really is a quick look. But if it's an application, then yeah, you'll start getting some interesting data about the, about the app itself. So yeah, I kind of like that. I hadn't, I hadn't really, even with the downloads folder, that can be really handy to kind of looking at something and say, wait, what is that? Oh, no, that's not what I want. You know, kind of move around. So yeah, that's pretty good. And actually, I might have to integrate this to my, I might need to teach my fingers how to do this, so to speak. You know what I mean? All right, John. Mike found, Mike went through a very interesting thing trying to get his old printer onto his new network. And he found, man, one of these things that if only he had known at the beginning, what he knew at the end, it wouldn't cause him to tear his hair out. So what did he learn, John? So here's what he started off with. So his network consisted of the Xfinity Comcast router, which I believe offers wireless and I think four ethernet ports. I think my parents have the same one. And you've probably seen it as well. So that's their standard offering. So here was his initial setup. So he got that. And then he also had a time capsule. So in this configuration, he potentially has two routers. And I think that's important to this problem, but maybe not. But then here's what happened. But then he decided because Dave and I love them. He decided to get an arrow. It's like, OK, good idea. So he got the arrow and I guess he plugged the arrow into the Xfinity router, which I assume is his primary router handing out the addresses and all that stuff. And that capsule was just acting as in bridge mode as a time capsule, not a router. Yes. So then here's what he did. So I think because he had the printer plugged into the Xfinity router, when he plugged the arrow into the Xfinity, he then plugged the printer into the arrow, expecting it should work. And that doesn't sound unreasonable. Right. Yeah, fair. But it didn't. And so then we're like scratching our heads. It's like, oh, now, well, why isn't it seeing it? And he called the arrow and they tried to figure it out and he just wasn't getting any success. And that's when he wrote us, right? Yes. And I totally understand why, but he was under the assumption that the arrow and the printer were incompatible with one another because the printer was working fine until he added the arrow. So this logic makes perfect sense except that John and I know full well, there's so little chance that a printer plugged in via Ethernet would have anything to do with his, there's no, like it would be so difficult for Eero to have built a system that could be incompatible with that. And we've never heard of anything like it. So we kept pushing him and he finally figured it out. John, tell him to get out. Now you led him down one path. You were like, okay, can you ping it? Which ping is a you can use various utilities and it basically asks the device, hey, are you there? Now, of course, you need a way to see what is there. And I think this is where the problem kind of started or ended because I made a observation that led him to the path to success here. So the Xfinity router has something similar. It has part of the interface lets you see the devices that are that are connected to it wired or wireless. And, you know, he sent us a screenshot and I saw one and I'm like, well, that's kind of weird. So it showed one device which we thought was the printer, but we weren't quite sure and you were like, well, ping it and he was able to ping it and it's like, oh, that must be the printer. So what's wrong? Here's what I think happened as it turns out Dave. So in addition to listing the IP address of this device was which was 10 dot something something. It also showed the MAC address of it. There is a database and we'll link to one of them because I sent it to him. The MAC address of something is the physical hardware address. Every device has a unique 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 12 character hexadecimal MAC address, which should be unique in all the world, believe it or not. The first six digits of this indicate the vendor of the product. So there's a registry of this. So if you type in the first six digits and it's like an Apple computer, it'll say, hey, it's from Apple if you go to one of these databases. So I went to the device that he thought was the printer and it came back to a company that doesn't make printers and this led him down the path to conclude that that was not in fact the device. So then he went to his brother printer and for whatever reason he had at one point set it up with a static IP address. And my guess is that the static IP address was incompatible with the subnet that the Eero had established. Yeah, if it was on a different subnet, it's on a different subnet. Yeah, exactly. And if it's on a different subnet, unless you have some rules somewhere saying, we'll go from here to there, it's not going to see it. Right. The solution to the problem was that through whatever interface the brother printer offered once he changed it to DHCP instead of a static IP address, everything worked great. Yeah, yeah, for sure. Yeah, so so he in my case. So in my case, though, Dave, my though using a static IP address isn't necessarily a bad thing because my aging laser printer, I actually do have a static IP address on it. But number one, because it, believe it or not, doesn't have DHCP. But number two, I know the subnet that it's on so I can give it a unique address that doesn't conflict or doesn't route. Right. Yeah, it that's weird that your printer doesn't support DHCP. That's bizarre. Wow. Yeah, the only thing. Yeah, I mean, dude, this is like a 15 year old. Yeah, I know, but 15 years ago, DHCP was was, you know, I mean, very common to use. So here's the thing, you know, he added this this router to it. Thought the router was incompatible, but really the issue was that his printer was forcing its own IP address on a different subnet. And this is why using DHCP is so handy and and why using static IPs can be even if you know what you're doing and know why you're doing it and perhaps better said instead of know what you're doing, remember what you did because you might know what you're doing, but if you don't remember what you did, then it's less valuable. But except for scenarios like yours, which I would put a big asterisk on where you have a device that doesn't support DHCP. My advice is if you want something to have a fixed IP address, do it in the router as an IP reservation and let the device ask the router for an IP address, which is what DHCP does. And that way, if it moves to a new router like it did in this scenario, you don't have to worry about it. We had a server years ago that ran headless, you know, and which was fine. We would connect to it via remote access or whatever. And I ran it with a fixed IP address because I wanted to know where it was on the network at all times. But I set it manually on the device and then we had a power outage and I needed to get that server up and running. So I took it to someone else's network and when I plugged it in I still couldn't get to it because it didn't have a local IP address there. Now, what I had to do was bring my laptop over, set my laptop to that same IP range, get into it and tell it, yeah, go get an IP from the local router and then it could come online and get on the internet and do all the things that the server needed to do in a different place. And it was at that moment that I decided no more static IP addresses. Everything comes from the router and if I want something to be fixed, I reserve it in the router and we're good to go. So, yeah, good lessons. Right, and you're correct, but because from what I saw, both the Comcast device and of course Aero both support DHCP reservations. Right. So, that's what you want to do for the long term. So, this doesn't happen to you. Yeah, for sure. Moving on to some cool stuff found here. We'll go to Ben because Ben brings us to a good one here. He says hearing you talk in the last episode about the audio engine 512 speaker, I wanted to share the portable speaker I've been using for almost five years from Fugu. They have Bluetooth 4 and an aux jack up to 40 hour battery life and six or eight speakers inside. They also have Bluetooth LE for a wireless remote, a mic and speakerphone for mobile assistant and phone call support and aptX, which is a high quality Bluetooth codec for higher quality audio than you might get by default, at least from older Bluetooth stuff. Finally, he says their IP67 waterproof and the XL model can serve as a power bank with up to one amp of charging. The standard model runs around 120. It's a little smaller than that audio engine 512 you mentioned last week and weighs under a pound and a half. The XL model runs 170 is quite a bit larger and weighs over three pounds and it's at Fugu FUG I might be pronouncing it wrong, but it's FUGOO.com and I feel like we've run into these guys over the years John. I've certainly seen these somewhere. I want to say it was probably at one of our press events or whatever and they looked pretty rugged. They say protected against mud, snow, water and shock. Pretty cool. Thank you for that Ben. It's always good to find I find it really handy to have a Bluetooth speaker in each of our cars because that way when you find yourself at the beach or somewhere in the summer or anytime really you know you've always got one with you and these batteries tend to stay charged for a while on their own. Just leave it in there and it's like, oh yeah, no, I got a speaker it's right here and you're good to go and then take it inside maybe and charge it up when you're done. Thank you for that. Good stuff. Thoughts on that before we move on to the next one John? No, not a big Bluetooth speaker guy. Yeah, maybe someday. Maybe. Alright a different band I believe also from episode 798 we were talking about the question where someone wanted to create a text file or com separated file of all of the email addresses in a mailbox and Ben has a different solution we suggested using an app that you can take the messages and drag them into and they have it extract them and I think it was called mail extractor. It's in the show notes for the last episode. Ben thought of it different way. He says, I would first disable all contacts accounts for syncing meaning forcing the local contacts app to re-enable the on my Mac account and to avoid confusion with existing contacts lists. Forcing contacts to be using something on my Mac. Then he says in mail select a group of emails who's addresses you want to extract and choose add to senders from the message menu and then use an app called a B to CSV to export the contacts from your contacts app to a CSV file it's a 99 cent app and this is interesting right because it basically leverages all the capabilities of the Mac to get this stuff into a contacts database and then this can spit them out into a form that you might want for importing into like a mail chimp or something like that. So I like that. I like that different approach totally the opposite direction which is great. Yeah I know pretty good right? Yeah, pretty good. Also last episode we were talking about tracking planes in the sky and I couldn't for the life of me remember what app it was that I had used to do this in the past. Thankfully let's see. Bill, John D. F. Allen Jeff I think there were two Jeffs many of you sent in emails saying Dave it's called Flight Radar 24 and it is it's called Flight Radar 24 that's the app so that's in cool stuff found for links this week it's available for free on iOS and I think there are some in-app purchases and stuff but you can point the iPhone at a plane to find out what plane it is and where it's going using augmented reality which I think is super cool. So if you don't have that on your phone yet put it on your phone it's fun. Pretty good huh John? No. Oh my gosh I actually haven't installed it on my phone I know we both put it on our phone years ago I just couldn't remember what it was Oh I didn't know but yeah I guess we didn't know they had an AR No I didn't know that's what I was saying last episode I just couldn't remember the name of it. Yeah yeah it's pretty cool it's pretty good we got to see Pilot Pete in that app so number of years ago. Okay so thank you for everybody for that listener David has hipped us to something that I had no idea about he says um you guys should check out Bitwarden he says I know you have reviewed and talked about password managers on the show and he says I'm a one password user with my family since its inception he says however the idea of handing over my most precious passwords to my entire existence to a third party regardless of encryption measures taken to protect them always sort of rubbed me wrong he says I now have Bitwarden running in a docker container on my Synology NAS using HTTPS and an SSL certificate across all my browsers, desktops and mobile devices to import most of his one password passwords in there and it's all just totally free and self-hosted he says you Bitwarden does offer their own hosted service if you want to use them for that but the cool part here is that you can run your own Bitwarden server point all your apps and they do they have iOS apps on a Mac app I think they've got apps for Windows and Linux as well and and you just point them at your local server you can have groups of passwords shared amongst multiple users on your local Bitwarden server he actually let me log into his Bitwarden server to check it all out so I didn't have to set mine up and it's cool and the app for iOS you can use it as like autofill like you would iCloud Keychain and or one password or last password ever it's all right there but you're storing all the passwords on your local server which is pretty darn cool so yeah this is worth checking out I don't think they have I'm assuming because he did it through Docker that they don't have a sort of what I'll call a native Synology package yet or no one's created one yet but maybe someone will because that would be even easier to implement although Docker's not terrible once you do something with Docker it's not horrible just a little weird so the first time with Docker is definitely you want to leave yourself some time for frustration and then once you get it you're like I got it so thanks for that David that's pretty good I like it might be your answer there John don't you think it's John I don't know for your password manager you were having some trouble with last pass recently weren't you or somebody was maybe somebody else was telling me now I'm in pretty good with them but no the option to not use someone else's cloud is certainly attractive if you have something to hide well I know that's the wrong way to look at it you know the whole I don't have anything to hide so I don't worry about what people find about me that's that leads to a path of complacency and that's not good for any of us yeah I'm kidding I know I know I just want to make sure people know like this is nice as an option and I see github so you know it's open source you want to look at the source code and make sure that I pull in a fast one that's a good point oh yeah good call oh yeah I like it I think I saw that somewhere on their list of features that wouldn't surprise me I hadn't dug that deep but yeah that makes sense I like it as far as browsers go Michael says I wanted to put in a cool stuff found candidate because I recently recently started using the new browser from Microsoft called Microsoft Edge on my max he says I found it quite snappy reliable and for him unlike Safari in that it is not a memory or CPU hog he says I quite like it it's worth giving a look says Apple's a funny company mobile Safari is great but Safari on the desktop he says is a mess I find Safari on the desktop I don't find it to be a mess but I certainly find it to be a ram hog and I just make sure I have quitter quit it every day and then I'm good to go so but there you go so thanks Michael that's good yeah it's that I remember we talked about it when the somebody sent it in when the very first like you know alpha release or whatever came out at the really I thought they were joking we've been talking about it on the show I mean we talked about it on the show probably it was at least over the summer maybe even last spring when the I know the very I still thought they were first but I ran it back then I mean it like I've run this yeah yeah it's like again come on man yeah cool all right I want to take a minute and talk about our next two sponsors the first of which is clear clear makes your life safer simpler and more secure by using your eyes and fingertips to help you get through security faster at airports stadiums and other venues now I am a clear customer in fact I am now a paying clear customer and I am happy to be one I've been using clear for I think a little over a year now and I've only been able to use it at airports I haven't encountered a stadium where I've gone or any other venue that uses it but man it is so awesome at airports because I like I've said on the show before when I show up I feel like I'm a diplomat or something you know I get brought right to the line for the metal detector after I go through the clear process and it's so simple you just scan your eye or your fingerprint and boom you're done like it's so easy and fast and so you just get to like it it takes a lot of the stress out of the travel process you know all of that that stuff matters you know to be able to get to the security line where you just sort of chill and then get through and you've got time to relax for your before your flight and get you know maybe a sandwich or whatever it's awesome and enrolling is super easy you do it online right and then once you're finished online it take doesn't take very long but you kind of put in all your information online and then you get to the airport you don't have to make an appointment in fact I did my appointment as I was getting off a plane so that when I got on to go home I was able to just bask and go right through it was really easy in fact I got to the luggage I did my walked off the plane went did my clear setup and in that particular airport wherever I was I got to the luggage carousel and my bag still weren't out so that's how fast it happens really really cool stuff and they've got it now in over 65 airports it seems like every time I travel there's more and more clear availability either in you know new to the airport or new to the each terminal or whatever and it really makes life so so much better and and you can add I've added my family to clear and it's great it really makes a difference for all of us if we really like it so here is the deal I've found that clear is the best way to get through the airport security you know it works with pre-check to their partners with the TSA so clear and pre-check together is like perfect right and right now listeners of Mack GeekGab can get your first two months of clear for free that's right because your Mack GeekGab listener you get your first two months of clear for free go to clear me dot com slash Mack GeekGab and use code Mack GeekGab I know that's different than the normal one we use so you got to use this one that's C L E A R M E dot com slash Mack GeekGab code Mack GeekGab and that'll get you your free two months of clear so check it out and our thanks to clear for sponsoring this episode our next sponsor is ExpressVPN ExpressVPN dot com slash M G G we've been using ExpressVPN for over a year John we started using it last December before we wound up going out to C E S and man it works great it's fast I've never had trouble with it on any network it just launches and gets out and creates that secure tunnel for me no matter where I'm traveling from I know that nobody's sniffing my traffic but what's even cooler is you could use it at home to get access to TV shows that are only available in other places and this gets really cool so you can check out like I was watching Rick and Morty by connecting to an endpoint in France and then I could watch Rick and Morty on my Netflix account it works great you gotta check it out they they do a really nice job there it's one click to connect you use the app on the Mack use the app on your iPhone you know other platforms of course are available as well and it just works ExpressVPN dot com slash M G G is where you go and when you use that link and you sign up you get an extra three months of ExpressVPN for free so you can support the show by using that link watch what you want protect yourself and get an extra three months of ExpressVPN for free ExpressVPN dot com slash M G G are thanks to ExpressVPN for sponsoring this episode alright John Perry has a question here and this is a weird one John alright so Perry has media sharing problems if you go on your Mac in Catalina the home sharing function was moved it used to be in iTunes and photos preferences now it's been moved to the system preferences sharing pane and it's called media sharing where it appears as an option alongside like screen sharing and file sharing and you know all that stuff right except for Perry it doesn't and this is the part that gets weird so and you see it right there right if you launch system preferences you see media sharing on yours John that's one of the options yeah look at that well not for Perry Perry says it's just not there so I walk Perry through a few things and the first was okay let's make sure this isn't a problem with the iCloud account because when I turn this on it says oh you gotta log in and create a home and all of that stuff right so okay fine no problem I figure what we should do is create a second account on that same Mac and log that second account he had tried logging that second account into a different iCloud account and then turning on media sharing and it appeared no problem so great so now we know it's not the system software on your Mac but let's make sure it's not your iCloud account or that it is your iCloud account so create a new temporary account on your Mac but log it into the same iCloud account that Perry is using you know on his main account there on the Mac and sure enough media sharing showed right up so we know it's not the iCloud we know it's not the Mac which means it's Perry's user account now this is where I get stuck and maybe we turn this into a geek challenge because I have no idea what would cause the user account to not show this and I suppose you know there's a couple I always I always say that I approach these things from the if I were there what would I do next standpoint and the problem is anything that we do next is going to start kind of messing with Perry's life outside of checking the media sharing box the first thing that comes to mind and I don't know if I like this better or worse than the second thing that comes to mind but the first thing that comes to mind is sign out of Perry's iCloud account and sign into a different one and I expect that not to work but maybe that might wipe out something in iCloud's preferences and and kick it back into gear Perry has tried signing out of iCloud and just signing back in with his same account so we know that doesn't fix this and I'm not sure what else to do here we know it's something about this user account but we don't know what you got any thoughts John safe boot I like that yeah it could be some kernel extension thing so you know that part of Onyx that yeah yeah okay it just sounds like a low level thing alright so those and then maybe when he upgraded or installed the OS it kind of missed that part so maybe a reinstall of the OS which don't worry folks if you go into recovery and you reinstall the OS it will not destroy everything but it could replace or cause the system to update a corrupt or missing or kernel extension yeah it's kind of where I'm going here because that's something that's kind of really buried in the system here and yeah when I saw the screenshot because I go to both my machines now if I try to click on the check box it won't let me but that's because and actually I'm not happy with the way they did the UI on this apparently you got to click on either home sharing or share media with guests before you can click on media sharing which is like kind of dumb yeah right right yeah I agree yeah yeah but yeah just it not you know it's interesting because I looked at his screen and I saw there were I have like way more entries in my list here but then I have an older machine that has different stuff in it like dvd or cd sharing oh right he probably doesn't have hardware for blue tooth sharing or yeah I see several more entries but I do see media sharing and yes you pointed out I guess it's something new with yeah Catalina they kind of move it's like why'd you put it yeah why'd you do that yeah exactly why did anybody ask you to do this yeah exactly yeah huh that's interesting so yeah I mean it could be time consuming to go through all those and if I see safe boot you know last time I tried to do a safe boot I actually a lot of machines get really picky about allowing you to do a safe boot because safe boot clears out a lot of stuff and rebuilds a lot of stuff and it's a very useful sometimes I've had to fix a lot of problems oh that's true oh I like that oh yeah yeah huh huh yeah clearing out all that stuff safe boot does a ton of stuff Mr. Braun you might that's I would I would not have thought of that as the next thing to try but that is a very non generally non-destructive step to take that might just solve these kinds of things huh I like it nice okay cool cool alright I'll link to a little diddy about that okay okay cool cool yo alright let's move well let's talk about yeah listener John has an interesting question that I don't I'm not sure I have the answer to this one either well I'm not sure I have the answer that he wants because I don't know that the answer that he wants exists but what John says is we need to send audio from our sound board at our church to a speaker that we have not yet purchased in another room to allow the people over there to hear the service he says there is Ethernet at the sound board but not in the room that we want to put sound in there is Wi-Fi in the room and the room is 75 yards away down the hall and around a corner okay so Bluetooth out of the question right I'm assuming we want to do something wireless because there is no cable run to this room 75 yards is a long way to go so you know but given that there is Wi-Fi there and presuming that the Wi-Fi is the same network there are options for this right but there is not a lot of options for this I took a look to see if anybody made like a Wi-Fi speaker extender kind of thing and none of them would go this far they are sort of built for I have my subwoofer in my living room or my surround speakers in my living room but I don't want to run wires to them so here is this thing that will send audio 20 or 30 feet full quality audio but basically built to do in the same room definitely not going to go 75 yards so you know my first thought and well AirPlay in general would be an answer here because AirPlay does work over Wi-Fi so you could find an AirPlay speaker but then you would also need to find an AirPlay transmitter which is like an iPhone or a Mac and this might or might not be the best slash easiest solution there as far as I know and I am happy to open this up as a geek challenge if one of you knows about MacGeekab.com but I don't know I don't know that there is any piece of gear that would do this without it being attached to some other ecosystem Sonos is the other thing that I was thinking of and if you get you would need something to go line in for Sonos so some of their speakers have a line in port and then once you connect to it you can pair those two speakers together and you'd be good to go but but that's about it or you get like a Sonos connect amp or something you know anything that would of theirs that would kind of let you connect it all together so I don't know what do you think John? Get a really long XLR cable from Monoprice or somebody Um I don't know but I know we're looking for a wireless solution I mean I don't disagree with you wiring this may wind up being the simplest and most reliable even if you set this up with say Sonos or whatever or Airplay there's going to be probably regular opportunities where you need to sort of reconfigure the the wireless side the speaker ecosystem side of this it's not going to be the just like set up once and forget about it it will definitely be a thing that well remember though that remember that we went to this Bluetooth event at CES and they were talking about this whole broadcast new broadcast mode? Yeah but this is Bluetooth it's not going to go 75 yards no way 75 yards? Okay so that's like types there okay 200 feet right? No 225 plus walls there's no way no yeah so I don't know this is the this is why we still see cables running all over the place it is but again Sonos Connect it's not going to be cheap you're going to wind up spending 450 for that probably just shy of 1000 bucks maybe to do this and do they have if I understand so they have relays so you could jump from one to another if you needed to with Sonos you mean? Yes Airplay 2 supports this as well and most of all of the new Sonos components also support Airplay 2 so there's a variety of ways of doing this but once you have sound playing on one of your Sonos speakers you can play it on any of them in sync with that that's that whole multi room thing and you can do that with Airplay as well additionally with Sonos again like I said some of their devices including the Connect and some of their speakers have a line import and that line import can be this and in this scenario would have to be the source for the audio you don't have to play that audio out of the speaker into which it is physically plugged it can just feed the ecosystem and then you can have the sound come out of some other speaker so yeah I mean it's it's doable but you're going to wind up needing to reset it it's not going to be the kind of thing that you set it up once and it just stays set up that way forever I'm kind of with you so it's doable is going to be run so in order to minimize headache I don't know of any other you know what what you really want is some device that you buy and it's a pair of devices one is the you know you plug they both have ethernet ports on them they both have audio ports one has an audio in port the other has an audio out port and you know you plug them in and you're good to go right or and you could approximate that with you know with wifi somehow but I don't know man like this is I don't know of any solutions for this but maybe in the pro audio world there are you know maybe there's something out there where somebody has solved this problem this way so I don't know but you start getting into weird latency issues with I was going to say that with wireless yeah versus the wired I mean a wired solution I mean in theory there's some delay but way less than an RF solution correct correct and now presumably the people in the the room that this would go to aren't able to hear the main speakers in you know in the main room so the latency of that wouldn't be the issue however the latency of this sort of thing in general would likely be something that keeps someone from marketing a solution like this because you know you're talking about a very very very specific use case I'm not sure this exists yeah the other thing you know just say hey hey everybody come on sit up front what are you sitting in the back well it's not no like sitting in the back actually that's where you have to account for the delays right because if you and I forget what the numbers are but it's not very much if you've got let's say you know you have a big crowd of people that you want to reinforce the sound for you've got a stage and you've got your speakers on that stage and you want to have you know reinforcement speakers say 300 feet in you need to delay the sound that comes out of those reinforcement speakers so that it is pushing that sound out when the sound from the main speakers is passing it if you don't do that you'll get this really weird effect that makes it even harder to hear because you've got the sound coming at you and then it'll sound like an echo following it because it's you know because if it comes out of all the speakers at once that's bad and there's like you can try and tune that on your own by hand but there's computers to do that kind of tuning for you we're sort of off the off the trail here but that is you know that's why you wouldn't necessarily have a wireless solution here because that latency isn't predictable again in John's scenario that he described that wouldn't be an issue except it's an issue everywhere else which is why someone probably hasn't developed the solution that he wants so so there you go yeah and if anybody knows of a solution like this it would be interesting or you know my guess is it's going to be something that was built for a different purpose and that could be adapted to be used here yeah and be sure to send it to feedback at that is correct feedback at that com Steve sent something into that address this week asking about something that sonos did earlier this week sonos announced that early last week this is this is what they announced exactly I think everybody was that's sort of the problem right so what they announced was that come may their old two of their old devices the original sonos amp I think and the the original play five or zone player five if you bought it before they re-branded the name of the product would not be able to receive software updates and this I get right I know look I own three of those original play five so I am I am you know stuck here like the rest of you but I get it they're 14 year old speakers yeah companies like Apple do this too like they stop doing software updates for older OSes right correct I mean and sonos has been really good about this I mean when those speakers came out you know lots of features that they now have didn't exist including things like true play where you get to have this your phone help auto tune the speaker for the room and like all of that stuff didn't exist and it's all been added via software which is freaking awesome and it's one of the things that we sonos owners have come to love and yes expect so when you tell me that this speaker that you just pushed out a software update for three months ago that added you know some enhancement will no longer receive software updates yes of course it's like oh that stings especially when replacing it you know those are the new play fives or like 500 bucks so that's not cheap so I get it I was upset too but also it's a 14 year old speaker you know that is running on hardware that was specced out probably 15 years ago and they want to do different things in fact there are some things that those speakers can't do like Airplay 2 because they don't have I think it was enough RAM was what it turned out to be if that's unofficial that's my own speculation but I'm pretty darn sure that I think it was RAM but whatever it was maybe it was also the CPU who knows you know there are these things that they couldn't add and so that's already we've already seen the beginnings of this and stands to reason that it was only going to continue and that this is not a huge surprise now what the surprise was or perhaps what the insult to the injury was is that they told customers about two options they sent an email out to anybody that had these things in their system and said hey look here it is come May software updates will stop for these now that means that may will be the last software update that these will get that's not security related you know in terms of feature related and they say because sonos is an ecosystem and I understand this too you can't have speakers on your sonos network running two different software versions because they won't work with each other you know they constantly are evolving things and they all need to be on the same software version so this creates a little bit of a pickle and they told customers about two options one was that you could choose not to let your system get a software update that every component couldn't take right and what that would mean is that you would not get new features and eventually you might get yourself into a scenario where you know you start losing the ability to say connect to even existing audio services if something about the audio service changes that requires a software update that you know you can't have even if you have new devices right but if you've got these old devices you could choose to continue using it just like you are but not get software updates and that might over time sort of erode your sonos experience number two is you can take these devices off of your sonos system and then upgrade everything else and let it stay up to date and sonos has a recycling program where they if you recycle one of their speakers you get 30% off of a new one or you could sell these speakers on your own to someone else or you don't have to sell them you could you know you could just but you could not use them on that same system and update the rest of the system so I called sonos and I'm like okay you know I don't like to jump jump the gun on anything I don't like to jump the conclusions like but I also know being a geek you know that it is possible to split your sonos and run two separate sonos systems on the same network and so I call them up and I ask them like that's still possible right they're like well unofficially yeah it is okay cool so that could be done there like right but also there's a third option that we didn't put in the original email to customers but it's totally public and we've even put it in like the stuff that we're sending out to press which evidently I missed because I was having a crazy week with some family stuff and and they said if customers want newer products to continue receiving updates and new features but still want to have their older products on the network we'll offer a way to do that so you don't even have to do the geeky split into two separate sonos system solution they're like come up with a way or we already come up with a way they don't have any details to share yet but they like by May we will have details to share on how you can keep everything working what it'll mean though is that where you can't have speakers interacting is the multi-room listening so they all need to be on the same software version for that so if you choose this path or you choose my geeky path of you know creating two separate sonos systems they're not gonna do the multi-room listening other than that you're fine and for a lot of folks multi-room listening especially if you choose strategically where to place your speakers you might not care about having one speaker or two speakers or like me three speakers that can't participate in that with the others and you can set it up that way and then you know maybe you'll be alright they don't have a whole lot of details on that but that's certainly one of the things that I would expect would not be a not be able to work but I don't know why they didn't send this to customers in the first email because it caused a meltdown on the internet and I was busy writing the article about okay so this is what can happen and then sonos did it better than me because they emailed everybody again and said hey there's also this third option that we'll tell you more about in May but don't worry we've got you I was like okay great so I don't want to say it was much ado about nothing but it certainly blew up and led people to believe things were much worse than they actually are and to be fair like when the Verge posted their story they included this third option no one saw it because no one everybody read the email that sonos sent to them not what someone else was saying and thankfully sonos realized that and just sent out a better email or a follow up email so I you know there you go thanks john yeah I think so the thing is yeah the media or some media or some people interpreted as you can't use your old stuff anymore because that's basically what the first email said I mean not in so many words but that's basically the message but they didn't explicitly offer the third you know off the record that was the part that was weird or maybe people chose not to read that part it wasn't there it wasn't in the email but it was for experienced sonos users you kind of knew that this was possible right no I didn't because it's not yet possible this is a new thing that they're gonna offer I knew that as a geek I could like hack together a solution where I had essentially two separate sonos networks running you know at my house and they put it in the press release but they didn't put it in the email that they sent their first email that they sent to customers which is why it got so confused yeah but thankfully they they fixed it and you know sent the email out and everybody was happy everybody was like oh this isn't as bad as we thought so I don't think this was their strategy to get people all bent out of shape and then tell them no we have an answer for you I think they probably just wanted to keep it simple and not share details about this thing that they don't have details about yet but quite you know correctly realized oh no we need to tell people that something so yeah it's crazy it's crazy but it was there all the way through this wasn't like a change that's the part that's the part that was weird when they said well it was in the press release I'm like oh okay like I said I haven't read the press release it's been a busy week so yeah just the fact that they've been running their let's call it version one product line for so long 14 you know you said yeah I mean that's it's crazy it's crazy it's like my MacBook Pro I mean that's crazy too if you want to talk about that because let's talk about that so John you're thinking about getting a new MacBook Pro you're going to get one of these 16 inch ones aren't you I think so because so here's what's happening now so I have the MacBook Pro mid 2012 15 inch the last of the user replaceable Macs and that's a fact don't fight me on this okay I know and then you can replace the user can replace the RAM the battery and the hard drive with nothing more than a screwdriver maybe a couple of different screwdrivers but um here's the thing that's been happening as of late so I bought a new battery from iFixit and it's working good I bought a cheap knockoff and then it like died like within a year sure so I got a new battery but then I'm starting to run into it I don't know it had a minor fall on carpet and stuff so I don't know if something just shook loose or whatever but now what's happening is that when I put it to sleep which I think is what most people do when they're not using their machine especially other portable so I put it to sleep the thing is it consistently fails in that when I come to the machine in the morning it's off no it's not sleeping the LED is not pulsing it's off and I hit the power button and it's restarting and loading the image from RAM and then it comes up and says EFI uh something like EFI fault sleep wake failure yeah EFI related sleep wake failure that's not good and if you search for this term you'll find it online I'm not the only one but to me there's something something going yeah so I'm like you know what and you and I you know when we were out in Vegas there we went to that store and you know we were checking out the 16 inch looks uh the prior models made me nervous especially because the keyboards were garbage or on a lot of them were garbage right and there were all these recalls and you know repair programs and stuff like that and I don't want that so the feedback garbage is maybe that's too strong well no no no no some people are more faulty than most well there's that's the thing is there's two issues with the butterfly keyboard one is that some people just don't like it and a lot of people do like it but a lot of people don't like it just personal preference and then they've had a lot of issues with it which at this point they've sussed out I think I think we've gotten the butterfly keyboards to the point of reliability they keep changing it in fact when they swapped out in my MacBook Air at six months of age or something they put in the new design with the extra film in there and all of that stuff so I think they've gotten it there but you know time will tell so so the 16 inch looks like the class of machine that I want and yeah doesn't surprise I mean as far as the buying decision I mean I looked and so if you go to their page you'll see two they offer up two there you know the one on the right I think is what I want Dave yeah so it's a 2.3 gigahertz eight core processor one terabyte storage radion 5500 so the processors probably way more than I need it's definitely it's like at least twice the processor in this machine if not more right I mean this has a 2.7 gig four core I think and it's an i5 or i7 and yeah so anyways the processor is crazy on this it goes up to 4.8 has Mac Tracker been updated with the new pro I don't think so so I don't know well we can look at geek bench scores right yeah but anyways the processor looks fine and you know it's got a hefty you know a better GPU the two points or the two parameters that I was looking at so I'd really like to have 16 gigs of RAM I may not need it but I want it with you on that I we don't need it I've in fact proven to myself that I don't need it but I would still buy a machine with it so there you go yeah right and then the built-in SSD is one terabyte which is what I have right now with my crucial SSD so I'm like yeah that meets my needs yeah there you go yeah your multi-core speed on the i9 8 core that's what you're talking about right the 8 core i9 the multi-core speed on that one is right about 7000 if I'm browsing geek bench results so you know where does your current one what MacBook Pro do you say you have the 2012 mid-2012 15 inch correct pre-retina right yes exactly because the retina I think was the first model that I think you the battery was not replaceable so they started good that was the machine that started going down the path of don't touch this so this is interesting 7000 is really low I don't know I mean like ridiculously low I don't know if maybe we're not comparing apples to apples here because yours clocks in yours clocks in it like somewhere in the 11,000 range and this one it doesn't make sense that it's only 7000 it's got to be two different scales because this has a 2.3 gigahertz quad core i7 in this machine which is decent okay so that is the 4 core i7 so on these geek bench results just so that we are comparing apples to apples like I said 7000 for the 16 inch MacBook Pro for your machine 2800 so that makes more sense that it's essentially a little more than 2.5 times the speed that's great and you'll get a retina screen which you've never had you don't even have one on your desktop you don't have one on my iPhone oh that's right of course I will tell you it is different when it is big you'll like that for sure and the touch bar and the touch ID the only thing and actually I've been looking on Amazon though I may want to go to OWC because I believe you did mention that they do make some nice docs but I think just for the purpose of data transfer I may want something more tuned to just I just want something that gives me a USB port so I can import my data from my backup oh like in that case I don't have a USB port so I do my backups right now to a SSD with a USB A port so I need an adapter that gives me at least that and Apple does sell one but there are also some like pre hundred sub hundred dollar things that I found on Amazon that will give me a basic set of ports don't buy cheap crap docs let me tell you seriously that's the thing is that I'm looking at them and some get like shaky ratings and I mean you and I both know that OWC makes total quality stuff so and some others but certainly OWC does is they make sure that they put enough USB buses in their various docs to ensure that you can get full throughput on all your USB ports simultaneously and they make sure that power is passed the right way like you definitely and again OWC is not the only company that does this there are many others but you want to make sure you're not just getting some you know unknown crummy doc but if you're looking for a USB-C doc you can get quality stuff in like the $50 range I mean depending on how many ports you want you might wind up spending upwards of a hundred but if you're getting a doc for your desk I would think about getting a thunderbolt doc so that you've got you know more I mean it depends like I have several doc what was the one that you used when we were at max doc so that like saved the day because you were missing some connectivity that this but which one was that oh well I mean I anchor is one of the ones that I travel with and that doc is good I forget which the model name is but it's the little thin one that has three USB and HDMI and an ethernet on it so that one works well but I now travel with the OWC USB-C doc and I think that's what $39 or something right I mean all I really need for data migration is a USB port and again Apple makes something but I'm going to stop you again and correct you you need a port because your computer is going to have four USB ports they are USB-C ports yes I need USB-A to talk to my right yeah backup right other than that I mean you know I've seen there are batch of things that have HDMI and SD and ethernet and stuff and I may use those on occasion but sure I just want to bring over my data that's all I wanted to right right because yeah I mean getting the machine I mean otherwise I can't import my old data from you're going to want to have USB-A ports somehow yes for sure oh yeah yeah yeah yeah the other ports that's I'll continue to do research so that's yeah that's my process man and then when I went to the Apple site so first off Apple is like hey you know what we got a recycling program and I'm like oh really and they're like yeah put in your serial number of your ancient machine and they're like okay does it work does it turn on and they're like yeah we'll give you 250 for it I'm like really yeah and then if I put it on my Apple card I get 3% so so that'll knock a few bucks off of it yeah there you go there you go all right well I put a link in the show notes to it's a new version of it I actually don't have the one that's in there but I have one that looks and is laid out very similar to that from and then and then I'll put a link to the the other world computing USB C travel dock because yeah but it's actually nice that they'll take it back oh yeah to take your computer back sure yeah for sure yeah it just worries me I mean our town does have electronics recycling but which actually works fine I mean I you know drive in and I'm like I hear for recycling and I put it in a tractor trailer and I don't know what happens after that right right yeah of course of course because I know for neither of these machines so what my 2012 and then I buy once my Mac mini 2014 I'm not going to get any serious dollars but yeah yeah yeah for sure for sure yeah yeah right now well thanks for the uh yeah travel doc that's that's the term I was looking for I you know so I did find like I said I found the upgraded version of the anchor one I have that's 32 bucks I think 33 maybe the OWC one is 55 it is a better dock and it's got the um the the SD card reader on it too if you want and I think it'll pass power which is a handy thing to have while you travel so you might you might like that so yeah so anyway it but yes USB C docs can be had great ones can be had for well under 100 bucks generally about half that it's especially the travel docs yeah it's where and and again you know for your laptop you might you might not need a um a a dock at your desk um you might just need the travel doc but I will say this because you now will be in USB C land you have the ability to have lots of different charging options so you might like the idea of getting a more permanent uh doc for wherever you use your your laptop most so that you can just plug in and you get power and ethernet like it's really does finally reach you know the Steve Jobs vision of one cable for your computer right because like when I plug in really my son is a better example maybe because he has his laptop on his desk and he's got the OWC Thunderbolt 3 dock there and he plugs that in and now he has you know a bunch of USB A ports he's got extra Thunderbolt ports he's got uh display for a monitor he's got ethernet and power all coming across the same uh the same bus which is really handy and then that way now you can leave your power adapter in your bag so that you know you've got that when you need to on the go or whatever or you could buy a gallium nitride power adapter that's lighter and can fit in your bag and you know there's lots of options you don't you're no longer hamstrung by the MagSafe port in that you have to buy your power adapters from Apple or you know accept the consequences there's lots of people making power delivery uh devices including batteries right like I've got a couple of batteries that I can use for my laptop on the go which is amazing it's something we weren't able to do before so it is good it is good yeah well I guess Apple a lot of Apple's latest stuff I mean what is it latest iPad has USB-C right it does yeah so it can take power delivery too that's right so it sounds like they're so are we going to see an iPhone with USB-C um I you know I think someday yes um the the USB-C port is a little thicker than the lightning port so that alone might be the reason that we don't um but I think there's potentially a world where we do yeah yeah yeah so yeah we'll just have to see what happens well it sounds like they're moving in that direction it's funny because I've been hearing chatter among uh various countries that would like certain technology companies to kind of standardize on one charging which I gotta say so you're talking about what's happening in Europe I mean I don't want to say some countries I want to say Europe yes because that's what yeah so the EU I think is is considering enforcing or suggesting that everybody standardized on one connector now you know in this day and age you know micro USB is probably it for non-Apple people right either micro USB I mean I think if if you were going to make that decision today I think you would choose USB-C instead of micro USB oh absolutely but I'm saying currently I think on the other side of the fence it's it's uh well I think they would choose USB-C today I think five years ago they would have chosen micro USB and I think that's the problem with with that sort of you know mandated thing is you will naturally choose the most popular you know I don't want to say bleeding edge but you know cutting edge technology so that y'all we're getting the right thing in place for everybody but I'm not convinced that that's smart I mean I think that's going to wind up with a scenario if we had chosen if we had done this five years ago we would have chosen micro USB and like those connectors were were crap they'd fall apart all the time so that like that might have caused more waste not less I don't know I don't know that there's a there's a good answer here this is this is not an easy it seems like an easy idea but it in implementation and and of course you know their hearts seem to be in the right places at least on the surface but I don't I'm not convinced that that there's that this is a smart move when you stop and take a breath and think about it I think I think you wind up with with inferior tech being mandated and and I don't it doesn't seem like a good idea no I could see that view on the other hand I'm just thinking you know I mean at least you know in most countries you have one standard for what's in the wall are we talking about what's in the wall or what's in my device because that's two very different things oh well yes we are what I'm saying is that what's in the wall you know at least in this you know so we got 120 volt 60 cycle electricity that's the standard you know you don't have another standard for providing power to your devices in your house right but I have well but I do I mean most of my devices are DC devices so they need to run through a transformer and and those DC devices actually are more universal than even my house so right so I think we're saying is that yeah yeah no it's more diverse universe with portable devices yeah I'm just saying I don't know I mean USB-C sounds like it may be the way for everybody to go I mean it's kind of getting there but even Apple is fragmented right now are we talking about on the device or on the charger because that's two very different things if you're saying all chargers have to be say USB-C okay well then I could still have lightning on my device just get a USB-C to lightning cable no problem but if you're saying that the devices all need to be USB-C now you're you're mandating how the device can work you know I don't I feel like that might stagnate technology I'm not convinced that that's a good idea I think we might again I think we might want we might wind up with a scenario where we're forced to use something inferior with stifling any innovation I mean the market has sorted it out already right I mean people go up in arms anytime somebody changes a power connector you know so people like companies are resistant to that until they're like well we got to bite the bullet because it's the it is the best way to go so they they make that choice but it's not without you know a lot of thought I don't think any major tech companies are doing this without really thinking it through so all right folks well we've outrun our time here today I want to thank you so much for spending your time with us we will do this again next week because that's how we roll here it's you know it's kind of what we do I want to thank our sponsors of course clear me dot com slash mac geek gab express vpn dot com slash m g g max sales dot com and lino dot com slash m g g it's all our sponsors for this episode of course I want to thank all of you because without you there's really no reason for us I mean John and I would still chat and get together and you know dissect tech but we wouldn't record it for maybe maybe for posterity we would but it's better to know that this way it's way better so thank you we really appreciate you listening appreciate you sending in all your stuff we appreciate those of you that are premium listeners premium ever mac geek up dot com slash premium is where you would want to go it is good stuff to have you and we are stoked so make sure you subscribe to our email newsletter at mac geek up dot com so that you can get all the show notes sent to you as soon as the shows out well really it's we send them out once a day at eight a.m. eastern and so they you know they're out within 20 or in your inbox within 24 hours of the show being published usually much sooner but sometimes you know it's a little closer to the market anyway we appreciate it we we look forward to seeing you next week John if you had one thing to say to these people now I want you to take a minute and think about this because this is this is important right we've used a lot of their time hopefully we've both entertained and informed that's the goal hopefully everybody's learned at least five new things I know I have so with all of that in place what's one last thing you might want to ensure everyone remembers well Dave if you're insisting on not three not two but one thing then the one thing I can say is don't get caught maybe


Thanks, everyone, for coming. Actually, who's from the EF here? Okay, not everyone. That's good. All right, my name is Thore, and I'm working for the Privacy and Scaling Explorations team at the Ethereum Foundation, and in these slides, I will talk about what we do in our team and how you can get involved. Before I start, I would like to get a sense for the room, so please raise your hand if you have used a ZK-powered application in the past. Nice, that's like 30%, that's good. And who has written code related to zero-knowledge proofs? One, two, three, and two are from our team, one is from our grantees. And who would be able to tell a relative about zero-knowledge proof and explain, like, high level what a ZKP does? Okay, 20%, great. Nice, so let's get started. The Privacy and Scaling Explorations team is one of the larger teams at the Ethereum Foundation, and what we do is we explore what can be done with zero-knowledge proofs, what type of applications can be built. So we are not building proof systems ourselves, we use the existing proof systems to build applications on top. And this space is really exciting and rapidly evolving right now, especially due to some recent advancements in, like, engineering and academic work such as PLONK and PLUKUP, much more complex use cases are possible just recently, and so it's a really good time if you already had an itch to get involved, to get involved now. So what we do in our team usually starts with a circuit. A circuit is a description for the ZKP system to tell it what it should be proving about. So we have a bunch of guys in our team that are deeply familiar with ZKPs and they understand what type of circuits could be useful, and we build these circuits. On top of these circuits we often build what we call gadgets or primitives, so these are tools or libraries that allow you as a non-ZK savvy developer to integrate the specific functionality that the circuit provides into an application. And sometimes we also build user-facing applications on top of these gadgets in order to showcase to the ecosystem how this can be used. On the side we also do some other things such as education, so we do like blog posts and workshops to help people get up to speed with ZKPs. One thing that we do quite a lot as well is grants, so we work a lot with the ecosystem support program, and that's the reason why I'm invited here today in the second part of this presentation. I will show you a little bit how you can get involved and get a grant with us. So this slide is sort of a black box explanation just to get everybody on the same page about what a ZKP is, so you might have heard that with a ZKP you can prove that you have done some computation correctly. You might have also heard about all these different proof systems like Snark, Starks, Plonk, Groth 16 and all of that. They all have in common that these proof systems need these circuits or something like that, so a description for the proof system that allows it to understand what the proof should be about. Once you have this circuit then you can set things up and you will have a prover algorithm and you have a verifier algorithm. If you satisfy the prover algorithm, so you give it the right witness, it will provide you with a short proof string. This is the actual proof. And that proof can then be fed to the verifier algorithm, and this checks basically, gives you assurance that this computation really has been performed correctly. So that way Ethereum is essentially able to learn whether something that happened off-chain, some computation that happened off-chain and that is potentially large, is correct or not. So it can learn something that it couldn't process itself. And it has sort of this scaling aspect to it. It also has, like with zero-knowledge proofs, it also gives you the optional ability to hide the inputs of this computation. So this is how zero-knowledge proofs got their name because of this property, but it's actually an optional thing. So with these two things together, you have the scalability aspect and you have this privacy aspect. And if you tag them together and you use them in the right way, you can give Ethereum back its privacy and its scalability. And this is why we are in our team excited about CKPs. So now I'm going to show you a couple of projects that are in our team, that we work on in our team. And these are just three projects. I counted we have 15 different projects at the moment, and you can see them all on our website. On the last slide I showcased, I have the link to that. So I give just these three examples. And I've included the people that have the right access to the repos here. That was the easiest way for me to determine who is willing to be publicly associated with the project. So the first project I want to talk about is CKEVM. That's our largest project and it's a really talented team, really interesting project. And what they work on, they build a set of circuits that allow you to prove that you have processed an Ethereum transaction correctly. And of course this can be useful for like roll-ups or so the roll-up can prove whatever state transitions happened in the roll-up are correct and Ethereum can verify this then. And maybe in the future it could also be useful for layer one so that light clients make use of this technology. This project is also called the Community Edition of CKEVM. So everything they build is open source. You can go on privacy scaling minus exploration CKEVM circuits and look at what's going on there. If you have the right skills then you're welcome to become a contributor. They're working quite closely with the scroll project as well. So please check that out. Vitalik has done a blog recently that shows like the differences between this various CKEVM projects. There are quite a number of them out there. And they all make like different trade-offs. This project goes for perfect compatibility with Ethereum at the expense of proven time. The project is written in the Halo 2 proof system and it's developed by CKEVM. They made some modifications to that but everybody's really excited about Halo 2. So this was our first project. The second project I want to show you here is SAMA4. The main contributor is CEDOR, he's sitting back there. And we have hired a PO, Andy, who's not on the slide, and actually Wager and Kobe, these two guys, they have left us a while ago but they have made some very important contributions. So what is SAMA4? SAMA4 is a protocol that allows you to prove that you are part of a group privately. So you can think of a group as basically a merkle tree and you create an identity, you stick it into this merkle tree and then you are able, using SAMA4 to prove that you are in this merkle tree. In practice it's a set of circuits, some contracts and some JavaScript libraries that make it easy for developers to integrate this functionality into their applications. And CEDOR has built some quick setup template. It's really straightforward. If you have an idea, some application in mind that could use that, then you can go ahead. We have recently started a SAMA4 grants round and I will talk about that in a future slide. If you want to see SAMA4 in action, you can go, I think on the first floor, there is the temporary anonymous zone and they will give you a card, you, on this card is a link, you join, this link allows you to join the DEF CON Bogota SAMA4 group and then you are also able to make use of that, interact with some applications there and it's a nice showcase. If you want to learn more about SAMA4, you can go on SAMA4.appliedckp.org. So this is the last project I want to show here. The name is Macy and it's an idea that Vitalik came up with. It's currently run or managed by an anonymous guy called Q. And there are also two important people that don't write code here. This is V and Feeney. They should also, they're not included in this slide. So Macy stands for minimal anti-collusion infrastructure and the idea is, the point of Macy is to prevent bribery in voting systems. So as an example, you could have, you could think of something like Gitcoin where there are voters that basically vote on allocation of funds and in this system someone could say, everybody who provably voted for me will get an airdrop later on. And so this would sort of distort these incentives of the quadratic funding system. And Macy can help you get around that using zero-knowledge proofs. How Macy works is that all the voters, they encrypt their votes, they put them on chain and then there is a coordinator who tallies all the votes and so he's able to decrypt the votes that are on chain. He tallies the votes. He publishes the result along with the zero-knowledge proof that shows that the telling has been performed correctly. So he only has two choices. Either he doesn't participate at all or he publishes the correct result. Another important feature of Macy is that it's always possible for voters to override their vote again. So if the briber looked over their shoulder while they were voting, they could always change their mind later on and override that vote. Yeah, so this is Macy, how it works. You can also see this in action here on DefCon. They are running together with the clear fund guys, clr.fund. They're running a quadratic funding round, DefCon, Bogota, quadratic funding round. They are supporting local communities here in Latin America, I think with 250K. The team is also running a project called QFI. This is an incubator that helps local communities to spin up their own quadratic funding round and basically provide them with the infrastructure for that. Yeah, so these were like a sample, a couple of projects we are working on. And I hope those got you excited because in the following slides I will talk about how you can get involved and how you can contribute to such projects. And in fact, these projects that I just showed you were in large part built by also grantees that made like big contributions. So the first thing that I want to talk about in regards to how to get involved is targeted grants rounds that we're doing. So occasionally, we just get out to the ecosystem and encourage them to submit applications on a specific topic. The first one I want to mention here is SAMR4. So this is a dedicated grants round for people that build an application on top of SAMR4 or that extend SAMR4 or that have like a completely different approach to solve the same problem as SAMR4. So we're interested in supporting all such kind of projects. Projects at all stages are welcome to apply here. You can follow this QR code here. It will lead you to the announcement blog post. And in this blog post you find your way to a submission form where you can type in the actual application. And there is also a wish list which can give you some inspiration on what type of projects could be interesting to build on SAMR4. So examples for that could be anonymous voting application, whistle-blowing application, anonymous chat applications, anonymous reputation systems. There's a huge amount of like untapped potential here. One of our guys had the idea to build like a private feedback, but in Discord that our team can use internally to like share feedback. So yeah, please, if that's interesting for you, follow this QR code and submit an application. An upcoming grants round that we are currently preparing is the L2 community grants round. It is with James from the Ethereum Foundation. This will start on October 24th. So there will also be a blog post about that with a submission form and a wish list. So examples of interesting things here would be like R&D stuff, like cross-rollup execution or compression for rollup, better compression for rollup data, L2 Lite clients, things like that. Educational efforts would be great to like inform the ecosystem about advantages of rollups and potentially the risks. Yeah, so yeah, please look forward to that. So these targeted grants rounds, we get quite a lot of grants from that. But that's not most of the grants that we're doing. Most of the grants are what I would call discretionary grants. So these are things where we find someone, someone tweeted a cool project that did on Twitter and we reach out to them and ask them, do you need support like we can give you advice or we can support you with funding? Or sometimes people also come up to us with ideas. In general, if you are thinking about getting a grant from the EF, your first thought should be the ecosystem support program. Like they have the right infrastructure and well-oiled machine to process your application and make it a nice experience. With us, it makes a lot of sense to talk directly to us, however, if you have a ZK focus and if you're an individual, we are not really working with like Corpse or DeFi project, DAOS or whatever. Like this is just too difficult for us to deal with in terms of like the due diligence. Yeah, so these type of discretionary grants are very often these are people that build something on top of our projects or that extend somehow the functionality of our existing systems. So people find out what we're doing and just want to get involved somehow here. Quite often people come also to us with ideas on their own that we don't really have in-house expertise on. So we have been doing a number of ZK machine learning grants for example lately and we support them as good as we can with like what we know and with funding. Finally, we always have like some ideas of what we would be excited about. If you have no idea at all about what you would like to do but you do definitely have the right skills to do something, then please talk to us. We have like these are normally the more difficult grants or more complex projects like we would be really interested in supporting the Halo 2 ecosystem more like building a DSL for that, make it as easy to ride a circuit in a circum. I see the battleships guys are excited about it. Make it as easy to build a circuit in Halo 2 as it is for circum or have more circuits, make recursion easier and things like that. Or if you're into breaking things, we want to see people that try to break these snark-friendly hash functions for example. Yeah, so if any of that is up your alley, please get in touch with us directly. We are also hiring. I have in the last slide, I have a link to our jobs page. You can check those open positions out but it also always makes sense to just talk to us. If you're good at rust, if you have experience building circuits or if you are just really excited about building applications about that use CKPs in some way and you don't really have a lot of deep experience in CK, it still makes sense to talk to us directly. We might just be able to find something for you. And of course, if you don't want money, everything is open source. Everybody's welcome to contribute to what we're doing. So this is the last slide, how to get involved. Our website still has our old name. It was called AppliedCKP, so it's AppliedCKP.org. The GitHub is privacy minus scaling minus explorations. This left QR code here is for our job site and the right QR code is for our Discord. We have a very friendly and open Discord channel. So please get in touch there. We would be welcoming you. Yeah, this was my presentation. Thank you so much. You can talk to me later. And you can reach out to me on Telegram at ck.discord.ch.