Blender provides a lot of information with its interface, and can be flexible enough to fit the workflow you need. Let's go over some of the basics on how to interpret and interact with Blender's UI. Before we begin, I want to point out that there is a very handy display at the very bottom of the user interface. This is an informative display that lets you know what each click can do in the context your cursor is at the moment. It also applies to when certain hotkeys are being held down to change the function of certain clicks. For example, if you hold shift, you can see the information at the bottom changing. It tells us that without holding shift, your middle mouse button rotates your perspective, but holding shift pans your perspective. Feel free to refer to this display at any time while watching this series or playing around with Blender to learn more of its features. As a quick reference, here are what some of the mouse icons translate to. Now the next big thing you'll notice is that each important section of the UI is separated into panels. These panels are scalable if you click and drag any of the boundaries, and they can also be whatever you'd like them to be. Simply click the drop down menu in the top left or bottom left of a panel and select a different type of editor. You can also create more panels by right clicking a boundary, clicking split area and then left clicking at a position of the screen you desire. To delete a panel, simply right click a boundary, click join area and left click over the panel you'd like to overwrite. Additionally, if you would ever like to maximize a panel to focus on it, simply mouse over an area and press control space. You can also press control space again to return. While this is extremely powerful, Blender also provides default workspaces you can choose from that set up the appropriate editors for specific workflows. You can find these workspace options in the tabs above. For hotkey users, you can press control page up or control page down. We will be going over each of these workspaces in future videos, however for this video we will focus on the primary editors of the layout workspace. Further introduction of other editors will be given in editor specific videos. So let's begin. If you saw our viewport navigation video, then you already know what the viewport is. This is where our 3D scene is displayed. In this editor you can perform a variety of tasks that interact with your 3D scene and its objects. However, it's important to note that there are two helpful quick menus in the viewport. Simply press T as in tools or left click this arrow here to expand the quick tools menu for the viewport. This includes tools such as the select box, move, rotate and scale. For hotkey users, keep in mind you can also use shift space at any time to bring up the same tools menu but labeled and at your cursor location. This works similarly to a pie menu in that you have the option to hold the shift space hotkey, move your cursor to the tool you want and release the hotkey to select a tool. You can also press N as in number or left click the arrow on the right to open additional quick settings, which includes your items transformation data, tool specific settings and other viewport options. You'll notice here there is an option for the 3D cursor. This is a very powerful tool which you can see right here. This red and white circle acts as the spawning point for any new objects and can be used as a reference for pivoting, which we'll go over in another video. To place it around your scene, simply hold shift and right click. To recenter the cursor, simply press shift S and select cursor to world origin from the pie menu or adjust the location and rotation settings in the right hand side quick menu. Now, this feels like a good time to explain what pie menus are for those who are unfamiliar. Pie menus are quick wheel menus that appear around your cursor after a hotkey is pressed. You have 3 options when navigating a pie menu. The first option is to right click to cancel in case you changed your mind. The second option is to press and hold the hotkey to initiate the pie menu, drag your cursor to your desired choice, then let go of the hotkey to select with no clicking necessary. Or the third option is to let go of the hotkey that initiated the pie menu before moving your cursor. Then use your cursor to left click, select the option you like. After you get used to where each option is, this can greatly speed up your workflow while also making several options available with less keystrokes. Throughout the series, you will see pie menus quite often for various different contexts. Now, below the viewport we have the timeline. This controls playback of your animation. You can zoom in and out with your scroll wheel, drag the timeline with your middle mouse button, change the start and end frames for your output and create and manipulate keyframes, all of which we'll go over in another video. The properties editor contains several tabs vertically to display the properties of your scene, your current tool and whatever object you have selected. To start at the top, this first tab represents the options your currently selected tool in the viewport may have. In this case, the select box tool gives you a few different selection options. The next few tabs, which you can see are separated by a small gap, contain your scene specific properties. Just to clarify, your scene refers to your entire 3D scene. However, you can create more than one scene in a single blender file by clicking up here. You can also select a scene from existing scenes using this drop down. This back facing camera icon is your render tab. This allows you to change render engines, sampling, engine specific properties and other properties that affect your final image and how it's interpreted from the 3D scene. The next icon looks like a printer and this is your output tab. This is where all of your output settings can be tweaked before render, resolution, frame rate, file path, file type and much more. The icon that looks like a stack of photos is the view layer tab and is similar to what used to be called render layers. View layers are typically used to separate background and character passes, for example, for easy compositing after a render. However, you'll notice this is only the past properties, not the objects and it's for only one view layer, the one we're currently in. To select a different view layer to change its properties, you'll need to go up here, similar to creating a new scene. You can create and select existing view layers here. While we're on the topic, I'd like to point out what this panel above properties is for. In order to specify which collections of objects are rendered out in each view layer, you can check and uncheck collections here in what's called the outliner. I highly recommend using descriptive names for your collections and view layers by double clicking them, but we will go over this in another video. Next, we have the general scene tab. This has other miscellaneous scene properties that affect your scene, such as your active camera, your unit and rigid body settings. Finally, the globe icon is the final tab of this section and is called the world tab. This includes properties for the sky and air of your scene. In other words, the surface option for your world is the shader used for your sky or background color. While volume allows for volumetric lighting throughout the atmosphere of your scene as a whole, such as fog or mist. For the next section, the property tabs will be specific to the active object you have selected. So in this case, I will select the cube. Our first tab is the object tab. This contains basic information such as location, rotation and scale of the object. You can also specify parent-child relationships, which collections it belongs to, and visibility of the object. The next tab is a very important tab for blender. Represented by a wrench icon, the modifiers tab allows for powerful manipulation of objects using predefined modifiers. Simply select a modifier from the drop-down menu to add it to the stack below. You can use as many modifiers as you like and change the order or application of these modifications using these arrows. For example, the subdivision surface modifier and the bevel modifier. This next tab is the particles tab. You can see the icon looks like an object shooting particles out from its main body. In here, you can create particle systems and add them to the object you have selected. Next is the physics tab, which looks like an orbiting planet icon. This contains several different types of physics simulations and physics manipulators including cloth, rigid body, smoke, fluid, collision and force fields such as wind. The next icon looks like two objects wrapped together. This represents the constraints tab. This tab is very similar to the modifiers tab but deals more so with relationships of the objects you have selected with other objects or values rather than manipulating the object by itself. You can have an object copy the location of another object with the copy location constraint, stay above the ground with the floor constraint or point at another object with the tracking constraints. The green triangle icon is for your object's mesh data. To explain what mesh data is, I can tell you that the reason why our cube is a cube is because of the mesh data. If I were to take this exact same object and change the mesh data, its shape would not be the same but its object properties such as its location would remain the same. Here, you can manipulate your vertex groups also known as weight maps, your shape keys also known as blend shapes and your UV maps. Other geometry specific settings belong here as well. Finally, we have our material tab. This is represented by a material sphere icon and is where you control much of how your object is shaded during render. The material you choose here will affect how shiny your object is, what color it is, and how rough it may appear to be. The final tab is actually in a different section as you can see. There's a small gap there. This is the texture tab represented with a checkered canvas icon and is not object specific. Textures exist as separate entities that can be referenced for a number of things including the world, aka skybox, materials, or brushes. Because of this ubiquity, they are in a separate section. Before we move on, let's go ahead and left click to select our lamp object. This is the dotted circular thing you see next to our cube. Once you have that selected, you'll have access to its lamp properties which looks like a light bulb. This is where you can tweak its brightness, the radius of light, whether or not it casts shadows, and what type of lamp it is. We can also left click to select our camera object, which is this sideways rectangular pyramid shape we have here. Now you should have access to the camera options, which include focal length, perspective type, and much more. And that's the summary for the default layout workspace we see when we open Blender. I hope this is helpful for you and I'll be going into more detail about the other workspaces and what each editor does in separate videos.


The Mac Observers' Mac Geekab, Episode 659 for Sunday, May 28th, 2017. Greetings, folks, and welcome to the Mac Observers' Mac Geekab, the show where you send in questions, tips, cool stuff found. We share your questions, answer your tips, share your cool stuff found. Something like that, reversed, switched around a little bit, but the point when we get together is for each and every one of us, you, you, that guy and me, too, to learn at least four new things. And that's what we're going to do today. Here in Durham, New Hampshire, I'm Dave Hamilton. Here in sunny, fearful Connecticut, John F. Braun. How are you doing today, Mr. John F. Braun? Couldn't be better. Well, we could all be better, but pretty good. That's good. That's how it should be. That's, yeah, we get to have, what, two days of spring before it, for the season's change and it becomes summer again, I think. So it's crazy. It's crazy, John. But we have some tips and I think, I think I know how to start this one off. Elliot sent in this tip. He says, am I the only one who never thought of this before? And I'll tell you, Elliot, you are not because I didn't think about this either. If there are particular system preference pains you need to access on your Mac frequently, you can drag a shortcut to a particular preference pain from system library preference pains to your dock, desktop or wherever for ready access. And then you just click on it and boom, it opens system preferences right to that pain. Very, very cool.  Because that's where they're located. Yeah. No, there's a. So I did not know that, but but I will share an ancillary tip. If you have system preferences in your dock and you right click or control click on it in your dock, you will see a list of all of your preference pains and you can get right to them from there. So not quite as efficient as Elliot's tip, but certainly related. I wanted to make sure everybody knew. So there you go. That's not enough. Oddly enough, you know, you would one would think you could just drag it from the system preferences box into the dock. But apparently that is not an option. Correct. You need to go into the system library preference pains folder to do that. That's right. And take that raw file. Yeah, one thing you can do. So it heads up for people and don't move the file. Just make an alias to it. Right. I mean, I know that sounds obvious, but we're saying. Yeah. Go ahead, John. The other tip, boy, we're just full of them for full of something. So if you do have a preference pain that you no longer want and you are in system preferences, most of them may meet at the system ones. But if you right click, you will then get an option. Remove whatever the preference. Oh, right. For third party preference pains. That's correct. Yeah, let's see. I don't. Well, yeah, because yeah, you probably don't want to remove like network or yeah, yeah, yeah, this is that that might cause some issues. Yeah. Yeah. All right. Cool. In the cool stuff found department, Michael says, I wanted to pass on a very cool iPad app called Liquid Text at liquidtext.net. Having recently completed some grad work, one of the necessary experiences was reading large amounts of papers, usually available as PDFs. With the goal of not wanting to print any paper. I also needed to have a solution that provided easy markup and note taking. Liquid Text was by far the best app I have come across, says Michael. Well, what it allows you to do completely eliminates the need to ever print paper again. I just wish that they had an OS 10 version of the app to allow me to share the markup seamlessly across platforms. Very cool, Michael. Thank you for for sharing that good stuff. Yeah, I haven't used Liquid Text, but now I kind of want to. I need to I want to find a reason because it sounds good. So yeah, good stuff. As far as I know, as far as you know. And I believe, lastly, in the cool stuff found department, but I'm not sure we might find something else as we go through the show. Jim shares with us. He says, I'm not sure how this works, but it would look. It looks pretty cool. It's called the Bitdefender box. And what this does, I know Brian Chaffin just saw them at a PEPCOM event out in San Francisco. And I'm hoping that we'll get to see them at a PEPCOM event here in in June in New York, John. But this Bitdefender box is a piece of hardware that sits between your router and your cable modem, as I understand it. And it is doing on the fly filtering or more monitoring, I should say, of your connection so that if, say, you had an Internet of Things device like a webcam or a printer or something that that wound up getting, you know, compromised and became part of a botnet, this thing would and or could and should and would see it and stop that or alert you or whatever. A few months ago, I published an article talking about how routers could protect us from these Internet of Things botnets. And this device effectively would do that same thing. But it's not your router. It sits past your router and and their. Claim and not an incorrect one is that by being a separate box, it can also protect you if your router gets compromised because it's sitting there between all that stuff. So I haven't tested one of these, but but I was aware of it and it's 130 bucks. Pretty cool little thing. But right now they're saying it's only supported by Windows. I'm not I'm not even sure what that means because it seems like it's just a standalone box. But maybe maybe there's some configuration software that's not not Mac compatible yet. Yeah. But it looks pretty cool. I mean, it's it's an interesting idea. I still feel like the router manufacturers are in the unique position to do this. But what I will say is that this kind of thing takes a lot of CPU horsepower because it's doing real time inspection and or filtering of every packet that comes through. So so it's going to have to be, you know, the whatever box it is that's doing this or whatever device it is that's doing this is going to have to have some some horsepower to it. But but yeah, it's an interesting thing. So I'm going to have to look to my pile of goodies. I seem to recall somebody giving me a box that did something security wise. I have to see if I got one at one point. Just it's in the queue. There you go. There you go. But yeah, yeah, cool concept. And I'm eager to check this one out. So thanks for thanks for hipping us to it, Jim. You want to take us on to Kent, John? Yes, good one from Kent. Help. All right. Kent says, I'm listening to Mackie cab six fifty eight today in the discussion around Ari's unreadable photos on the SD card. I don't know if this will help, but Lexar has its image rescue now at version five that is supposed to recover lost files from SD cards of any brand. Sometimes it comes with the purchase of a card, but it looks like it can be it can be purchased outright for thirty three ninety nine might be worth it for fifteen hundred photos. And you know what, Dave? That's a great suggestion. And I actually looked on my machine and I actually have a copy of it there. Oh, there you go. Why do you ask? Because I bought a while ago, a couple of I think thirty two gig Lexar SD cards for my my digital camera. There's something funny about it, though. So I activated it and like many pieces of software, they they reach out to the Internet to see if there are updates or, you know, other things. And I think there was a minor update since I last ran it. Here's the weird thing, though, Dave, using my pal little snitch. Yeah. It wasn't going to Lexar.com for the update. It was going to pro soft edge.com. Oh, interesting. Now, you you may say, well, that's crazy talk. Why would they be going to pro soft engineering? And I think I know why. Well, they're either hosting it or it reminded me that there is another piece of software that I have that does something similar that I haven't used for a while. And so I fire that up as well. So they have a product called picture rescue pro soft has a product close. Yes, a pro soft engineering. And I actually look through my notes and actually have a license because they like us and we like them. So they actually sent me a license to it at one point. So that's and they look very similar both from the UI. So so again, I don't know if they're licensing. I mean, I looked in the Lexar software and it didn't say license from pro soft. Sure. So I don't know if they licensed a portion of it or what. But those are two pieces of software that claim to be able to fix your corrupt of photo card. Huh? OK, I think one of the programs, it was funny. So I didn't have an SD card in, but one of the programs that I ran, Dave. Actually showed my SSD as a device that it was willing to well, because it flashed memory. It is, in a sense, a big memory card, right? Right, right, different. Yeah, yes. But yes, yeah, I said, sure, why not? But I would rather software like that be more inclusive rather than less because the last thing you want is to have some maybe slightly different memory card or something where you put it in and the software just won't see it because it says, no, this isn't a picture card. So I'm not going to try it, but. Yeah, and to wrap it up. So under the wire, this came in after you would put the agenda together, Dave. Yes. But I noticed the email because every now and then I look in our inbox. Right. There I appreciate that. And and Darren. Uh, writes in and and he said regarding corrupt memory cards, my cousin had the same issue with a memory card for a digital camera. It was being and being the go to tech geek in the family. I was charged with attempting to sell the photos on the card after trying numerous workarounds and recovery programs. The one that worked for me was card rescue. OK. And I'll paste that. You are all on the notes. Sweet. And it managed to retrieve about 95 percent of the corrupted files. There's a Mac and Windows version and Mac version is currently. Oh, what? Oh, look at that. 35.9 four pounds. OK. But it worked for him. So. So we got three options. Hopefully that'll work for Aria or other people who have apparently photos getting corrupted is something that happens more often than one would like. Yeah. Yeah. Well, it's memory cards. They're, you know, it's. I've I've always, well, I mean, we always say one place, you know, having your data in one place is is not having your data. And and I don't know. I've always had weird things with long term storage on on memory cards. So I don't know. This is good. Nice to have some some options and and pretty cool that that little snitch sussed that out for you, man.  But I but I use them.  Oh, yeah. But, you know, I do use little snitch. I have two little profiles, one for when I'm tethered to my phone and it limits a lot of my bandwidth usage. And then the other one, just when I'm traveling, which blocks out any sharing services like, you know, photo sharing or itunes sharing or file sharing or anything like that. So cool stuff, man. All right. I just like it because you see who your computer is talking to. Hmm. No, I get that. I just I don't have time in my day for that level of granularity. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. All right. Also, a follow up from six fifty eight. Allison wrote in and said, I just heard this is Allison from the no silicast at pod feet dot com. Just heard the guy talking about his fan problem on his older iMac. I had a runaway fan problem a few years back that I couldn't figure out the root cause of for probably three months. Finally, she says, one of my listeners suggested that the vents had gotten clogged with dust 30 seconds after spraying with compressed air. My fan problem was permanently fixed. Thanks for sharing that, Allison. That's that's handy advice. Because dust can act as an well, blocked events or if it's on your components can actually act as an insulator. Oh, that's true. It might not have been the vents, right? It could have just been dust sitting on on one of the sensors and insulating it. I think both you and I have seen this, but especially if you can all avoid it, if you are a smoker, right, smoke near your computer because smoke makes it even worse. Yeah, there's a lot of reasons not to smoke, but but that's yet another one. Yeah, but it it makes the dust problem worse. And I've been inside machines where it's a smoker and it's not pretty. No, no, it's not. It's and it's a different kind of dust. It's actually, yeah, it really kind of starts to form almost a film. Yeah. Yeah. It's interesting. OK, let's see. Andy, let's go and we'll jump into some questions here.  Andy says, from across the pond, recently updated my MacBook Pro to the new 2016 MacBook Pro, which has all USB C ports with Thunderbolt 3 capabilities. So I preordered a Thunderbolt 3 dock from OWC a few months ago as they were due to ship at the beginning of April. They obviously have had some issues with manufacturing as now the shipping date is estimated to be the beginning of June. So my question is, should I just continue to wait for OWC's Thunderbolt 3 dock knowing it's probably going to be the best on the market or should I look for an alternative? Having used single adapters for HDMI, USB 3, ethernet, et cetera, is becoming a pain. And I'm worried that the shipping date of beginning of June may become end of June, beginning of July, et cetera. The only Thunderbolt 3 dock that I know of that's available is the Caldigit TS3 line. They also have a bigger and better unit available soon, but not yet. So he says the Elgato Thunderbolt 3 dock coming soon. Belkin Thunderbolt 3 Express coming soon. Any ideas are welcome. So I think, you know, we're seeing the same thing from all of the folks putting together Thunderbolt 3 docks that they're just not able to get enough parts is what I would assume. I don't know this for a fact, but given that everyone is delayed on being able to ship one of these things en masse, my guess is it's that, you know, some some component of it, perhaps even the Thunderbolt 3 chip is just in short supply and probably will will be available soon. So that's slowing everybody down. But but I don't know of any others that are that are out there. So I don't know that you have another option.  You know, I currently in my office, I have the OWC Thunderbolt 2 dock and then I have the Caldigit TS2 up here in the studio. And they both work great, you know, they do what they're supposed to do. And especially here in the studio, because it's a 2011 iMac, I get a lot of capabilities that I just don't have on this machine, including USB three. So, you know, and they've they've both worked flawlessly for me for years. So I think you're going to be OK with any of them. Really, what you're going to look for is what does it have the ports that you need? And we're all kind of different in that regard based on on what we need to do. So I think I think you just got to wait it out. And I don't think there's a I don't think there's an answer yet. There's none available that I know of, at least not in the way that you would want them. So. So there you go. Thoughts on that, John? I'm not yet on the Thunderbolt bandwagon. Really? Yeah. Believe it or not, up until recently, because I live in the past, I wasn't even on the USB three bandwagon. Well, that's true. Yeah, but now I am with with my two machines. So yeah, I don't have any any Thunderbolt peripherals. Right. Well, that's how I that's how I got on the USB three bandwagon with this machine, like I said, was, you know, Thunderbolt. It's a great expansion method. And I look forward to Apple supporting it more and more. I want to see official support for external graphics cards and all of that, right? Because, you know, that's a good point because more than one person has noted that the graphics performance of Macs are necessarily equal to their PC counterparts. I was speaking. Well, and it's it's it's that, you know, you're you you want to be able to use those Nvidia GPUs, but you can't because they aren't available. I was speaking with someone the other day who develops software in-house at at a fairly large company. And he was telling me that he develops on his Mac, but the fast he does and he does a lot of stuff that's GPU intensive and it runs faster on the iPad Pro than it does on his Mac, which is interesting. And it's because of the GPU that's available there. So I mean, he does all his development and sort of testing of the software on the Mac, but when he needs performance, it's the iPad Pro. Hopefully Apple can change that for us. They said they they've kind of hinted that they would. But really, like I said, what I would like to see is Apple just say, hey, if you need extra GPU performance, you know, use one of these third party Thunderbolt, you know, expansion chassis, put what, you know, whatever card you want in there. And yeah, I mean, because that works, right? But Apple hasn't has been sort of tight lipped about saying like giving that the thumbs up.  And then, you know, and then Apple's going to change something in the US that makes it unsupported or whatever. So it'd be good if Apple kind of gave us a thumbs up on that. But anyway, we'll get there. OK, moving on to a whole different concept. Robin says, I have a few questions about the mobile apps folder. My daughter is running low on disk space on her Mac. And when I use Daisy disk, it reported 66 gigabytes of files in the mobile apps folder, plus 30 gigs in backups. I have deleted several very out of date backups, which have freed 20 gigs. But that 66 is a huge amount of potentially wasted space. He says, I also checked the drive on my computer and my mobile apps folder is 50 gigs plus. My daughter backs up her iPad and iPhone to the computer. So I'm assuming I cannot delete the mobile apps folder. On my computer, I backup to iCloud. But I also do a manual backup to my computer as a belt and braces job. Do I need all these gigabytes of files? So the answer is no, you don't. And even if you're backing up your iOS device to your Mac, you still don't need to back up all the apps to your Mac. You don't need to download those apps. Now, I say that and I should put a huge, huge asterisk on it because what will happen if you don't have those apps is you will need to read download them from the app store. And that's all fine and good as long as they are available on the app store. There are some apps out there that Apple has conveniently retired for their developers or the developers themselves have retired and taken out of service. And sometimes those apps are available for download for people who have previously purchased them, even though they're not available for new purchase. But other times they are simply not available from the store. That's a pretty rare thing, but it happens. And if they're not available from the store and you don't have a local copy, you cannot put those back on your on your device. That aside, the only downside to not having them local is that they have to be redownloaded to your device as opposed to just copied over from the local network. But if you're not worried about bandwidth and the time it takes to download, then there's no reason to keep all those mobile apps around. I keep mine around, but you don't have to. I just do it because I've got a lot of storage and I'm crazy. So here's what you can do. Here's the here's the problem, though. You may have told iTunes to copy apps from your device. You may have also told it to automatically download apps that you've purchased. So deleting the contents of the mobile apps folder is one thing to do. Don't delete the folder itself, but delete the contents of it. Then go into iTunes, preferences, downloads and uncheck the box for apps. That way it won't keep downloading new apps that you purchase from the store. Number two, go into iTunes, preferences, advanced and click the box that says reset warnings.  There are apps on this device that are not on your computer. Do you want to copy them over and you want to say no? Chances are you've said yes to this in the past and that's why partially why those apps are getting copied over. So doing those two things and then saying no to to that prompt should keep your mobile apps folder from filling up for you. Thoughts on that, John? No. OK, well, that's that's great. I've never really. Yeah, that the space being taken up is not of no concern to me. Do you now do you store your iTunes stuff locally like on your internal hard drive or do you have an external hard drive that that it winds up getting saved to? The internal drive. Yeah. OK, but you have a big monster internal drive and you're not worried about the storage. Yeah, I got a one terabyte. Got it. One terabyte SSD. Right. Right. So yeah, so I my phone. So it both backs up to the cloud and then every now and then I'll do a manual. Sure, as well. Sure. Sure. You also want more than one backup. Well, right, right. Yeah, I I know and I guess I've started doing this too. But Adam Christensen over at Maccast hipped me to the concept of backing up your mobile apps folder, but doing it in a versioned way so that if you wind up with a version of an app that like crashes or does something you don't like, you can go back through the old versions and actually install an older version if if iOS, you know, if it's compatible with your current version of iOS, which is cool. So, you know, it's good. Good question, Robin. Thank you for that. If anybody else has any tips or concepts that they employ to to manage that stuff, we'd love to hear about it. Feedback at MacGab dot com. Oh, did you say feedback at MacGab dot com? Dave, I did. I said feedback at MacGab dot com unless you're a premium listener and premium listeners that support us directly, get access to a special premium at MacGab dot com address. And and I do want to thank our premium listeners this week. The the folks. Well, I want to thank all of you that are premium listeners. And specifically as we've been doing, I want to give a shout out to all of the folks who either signed up new or renewed their premium subscriptions this week. So at the twenty five dollar every six month level, we have Andrew D. Patrick C. Terrence G. Stephen S. Paul C. Peter E. Brent G. Paul D. And a new one, Monroe R. Thank you to all of you at the monthly ten dollar level. Nick S. Elizabeth B. Michael P. Chris F. and new to that mix is Jim E. Thanks to all of you for supporting us. And a one time twenty five dollar contribution from Charles M. this week as well. So thank you, you all totally, totally rock. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Awesome stuff. We really couldn't we couldn't do this without you. So it's it means a lot. And I know we say that every week. Which hopefully doesn't reduce its meaning in your eyes because it certainly doesn't in hours. OK, moving on, John. Do you want to take us to Felix? Sure. Absolutely. All right, great. And Felix writes in and says, hi, guys. I have a client who's having trouble downloading via FTP. The connection keeps timing out just before completing a download. Is there an app slash tool I can use to troubleshoot where this issue might be? The question is, is it the Wi-Fi connection? Is it the other person's FTP? I'd appreciate any suggestions. Well, so first off, what's FTP, you may ask? What's FTP, John? So FTP is file transfer protocol. It is a just a note here. Nonsecure, if you do it on its own. But it's a way of transferring files from one place to another. Yeah, and you actually have that functionality built in to the Mac, Dave. So if you want to go to an FTP server, it is something that integrates with the Finder. So there are a couple of options built into the Mac. One, you could just go to. So yeah, if you go to the Finder, let's see, go connect to server. You could then type in the URL, FTP colon slash slash and the address of the server and then you should get prompted. Or you could do it from Safari and it'll say, hey, I should hand this off to the Finder. What do you think? And you can say, yeah, sure. But it doesn't give you a lot of detail about what's happening. OK. You could also do it from the command line, but that gets kind of rough because FTP talk isn't necessarily very straightforward and you have to learn to FTP talk. And who has time for that? Sure. So I mean, if you do type FTP from the terminal, yeah, you'll connect to the server. But then what? Right. Well, yeah, it's not that hard. You're using get and put and things like that. But yeah, yeah. And they're diagnosed and you can get the spec if you want to do that. In that case, though, you would see, you would probably get some level of detail. But like I said, who has time for that? My suggestion, Dave, would be to get an FTP utility that offers you the best of both worlds. OK. And actually, my favorite, Dave, I haven't used it in a while. But and I like it for a number of reasons, but it's called Cyberduck. That's been around for a long time. Yeah. Yeah. And it is a client that does not only FTP, but it does SFTP, which is secure FTP. It does WebDAV, Amazon S3, Backblaze, Microsoft. I'm just looking at their page here. Sure. One. I mean, it's crazy, all the things that it talks to, but it does do FTP. The nice thing is that you can look underneath the covers, which was the question, how do I see the raw data exchange and messages that are going back and forth and perhaps the error messages as well? Sure. And they do offer that. So within Cyberduck, if you go to the review menu and then you say toggle log drawer, you will surprise, get to see the raw log data. Right. I think what he was asking. Yeah, I think so. You want to see what's transpiring between them. So yeah, plus it's just, like I said, I mean, it has like every protocol I know of or quite a few. So it's a very nice client for doing file transfer as well. Cool. A couple others for those of you that want to and need to do FTP. Andy in the chat room, as we'll run for fun in the chat room, of course, being at mackeycub.com slash stream is recommending filezilla, which appears to be an open source. It is. It's a free FTP solution. The client is available for all platforms. And that's what we're talking about here is just the client. So that's available. We'll put a link to that in the show notes. I am a big fan and use regularly transmit from panic. That's a paid for FTP client. But it, man, it's so smooth. I use it constantly because we're FTP things around for various servers and such, and it's got great integration. It syncs all my bookmarks so I can have things saved and it goes to all my computers and all of that stuff, which is great. And then lastly, I think inter Archie. I N T E R A R C H Y is. Well, that was an interesting little audio cup. This being recommended by Kiwi Graham in the chat room, too. So we'll put a link to that in the show notes as well. Very, very, very interesting stuff. Yeah. Good, John. Yeah. And I'm sure buried in all of them is a way to look underneath the covers. Yeah, I definitely I know with with transmit from panic it it does it no problem underneath the covers. So I'll let you see all the logs, which is good. And and you had mentioned the finder in our chat room, Alex. Commented that the FTP from the finder is limited to read only. So if you're just retrieving data, it tends to work just fine when it mounts in the finder. But and I think he's right about this, that you can't upload stuff. If you if you do it from the finder. So yeah. OK. Yeah. So there you go. So for those of you that need to upload, you do need a client and your recommendation of cyberduck would absolutely do that. So you need a server to. Well, but you need to struggle. Need a server for for connecting for read only stuff as well. I was actually struggling because I don't have one. Though, of course, you could set one up on, for example, Synology lets you set up an FTP server. Sure. That sort of thing. Sure. But I was actually I actually had to spend a few moments trying to find a public one. I remember Apple used to have one at FTP.Apple.com, but they no longer do. And. Right. Right. Because why? Well, I mean, that's how Apple. So it's right that the history of this and the reason FTP is is an insecure protocol or the reason we say that is because you're using a password or and all the transfers are sent in the clear. It's not an encrypted connection. So you've got to be very careful how where and how you use it. But but it started as this is how Apple would distribute their software updates online. I mean, prior to that, you'd get a disk that you could get in the mail or whatever. But when they started doing it online, FTP.Apple.com is where you would go to get your software updates. And it was the coolest thing ever because you didn't have to wait for a disk. You could just download if you had the time. Obviously, the world and our internet speeds or our bandwidth speeds have changed now. So we're able to do that and we don't even think about it. But this is this is where it all started. That's how that how that began. So it's fun stuff. All right. And now jumping all over the place because that's what we do. We keep an interesting jumping to listener, John, who asks, is there a Mac app out there that I can use to chop up a long 90 minute audio file into shorter length files? Yeah, there's a lot of ways to do this. But there is one that for me floats way to the top of the list. And that's Rogamiba's fission. And the reason fission floats to the top of the list is because fission lets you do this without having to re-encode the file. So if you're doing this with a raw piece of audio, like an AFF or a wave that is uncompressed, it's no big deal, right? To to chop up the file because the the the file doesn't have to the format of the file and the compression of the file doesn't have to change. But if you start chopping up files that are, say, MP3 or, you know, AAC, generally what software does is it decompresses the file, chops up whatever you need to and then takes the segment that you're kind of resaving and re-encodes that. So you've got this double lossy thing that's happening because you're taking data that was compressed and then compressing it again and then losing some quality there. Fission is magic. It allows you to edit audio without re-compressing it. It does it in its original form. So you you are able to maintain the maximum quality of the original quality, I should say, of the file that you're starting with. So that I like Fission for that. And it's very, very easy.  Fission is the app that I go to. The UI is just simple and really easy. So that's my that's my answer. If, John, yeah, I have an answer. Yeah, I'm going to get all audacious with you, Mr. Dave. OK, I'm going to suggest audacity. OK, another timeless piece of software. It's a. Yep, free open source. Right. Windows, Mac, GNU, Linux. When I've had to do audio work, such as cutting up a file, it's something it can do. I think the UI may be, well, there may be a learning curve, right, as many pieces of audio software. But that's another option. And now audacity will not do this editing losslessly, right? It it it does it the the original way that I described it decompresses it.  And if you choose to put it in a in a, you know, back into an MP3 format or something, it will you will lose quality by by doing that round trip. So that that's probably true. No, that is 100 percent true. OK, yeah, I use audacity all the time. I mean, it's it's a great piece of software. It's not what I would choose for this just because it converts. First, it converts to wave.  So but yeah, yeah, for free. I mean, it's pretty good. It's pretty good. All right. Let's see, where else are we here? You know, actually, before we leave that, I have a question and maybe this becomes a geek challenge. Again, Adam Christensen and I were having this conversation earlier this week. How would you do that? How would you answer that same question for video files? So let's say I have a video file, a movie or something.  What what would you use? What would you use to do that, John? I'd go pro, Dave. Yeah, so we know that Quicktime Pro, but I mean, that's Quicktime Seven, right? So Quicktime Seven, they had a pro and I actually saved the key and activated it at one point. Right. But I believe that lets you do. Do that sort of thing with with video files that it understands. So it does. Yeah, now now my question is what currently exists that lets me do this? And I know you can still run Quicktime Seven Pro, but that's yeah. So I'm I'm curious what what exists out there to do that. Yeah, I'm not a video type of guy, so I. Yeah. Yeah. I know. So it's it's a it's an interesting question. Fission for video would be great, but because it would be great not to lose that quality and time in the round trip of converting out and back. So final cut. Oh, no, they don't make that anymore. Do they? Yeah, they do. Movie, iMovie. Apple makes final cut. OK, they haven't killed it off yet. No, no, no, no, no, no, not at all. No, no. Actually, I think even Aputure would let you do very basic video editing. Of course, that is no no longer exists. Right, right, right. But how does iMovie let you edit? iMovie would. But again, it's it's lossy. Yeah, somebody in the chat room suggested FFM peg, which is a command line workhorse, really, that kind of does all kinds of things. I don't I don't know if you could do this losslessly with FFM peg. Wouldn't surprise me if you could, though. Huh. Oh, man. FFM peg, you know, I hadn't you. I actually did use that or rather used a well, they had a GUI front end to it. So I think underneath it all, it's a it can be a command line utility. I actually used it to recode videos that had too high a bit rate for my then PowerBook G4 to handle. Right, right, right.  I was like, what's wrong with you? It's just the processor was too wimpy. So I'm like, well, how do I solve this problem? Well, let me let me. Huh. Let me reduce the bit rate or bandwidth, if you will, of the of the video. And I did it. All right. So if you need to do anything with FFM peg, I just read Andy in the chat room suggested a tool called I FFM peg. So it's at I F F M P E G dot com. It's a GUI for FFM peg. And just based on what I'm seeing here on the website, it looks awesome. I mean, very, very Mac like. So this is what I would it's it's a it's a for pay piece of software. But I think it's like it's less than 20 pounds. So, you know, less than 25 bucks, I guess, built for trimming movies. Yeah. So, I mean, again, it's it's just a and I don't want to dismiss what they've done here, but it's a front end for FFM peg at the command line, which, to be fair, is what most of Apple's tools are too. Right. You know, a lot of the stuff in OS 10 is just GUI for stuff that you can do with the command line as we've been talking about FTP and all that other stuff. So, but this looks great. So, yeah, I got to check this out. Good stuff. Nice. Fine. Nice. Fine. I like this. See, we're learning new things all day long here. The one I used, I used a front end called FFM peg X. Yeah. And I think that still exists. It does. It's not as pretty right now. Yeah. I'm on their page, but it has the latest project news is in 2011. So maybe it's okay. So it's not actively developed as far as we can tell. All right. Yeah. As far as we can tell, right. I mean, it's it's an interface to. Yeah, to the the whatever. Yeah, cool. All right, let's go to let's go to Todd. Todd writes. Oh, actually, this was just a follow up, but but I figured I'd put it here because it's sort of related. We were talking about iTunes album art in the last episode and how to fix all that. And Todd's suggestion. He said, OK, so tune up might work, which is what we talked about last episode. But he says MP Freaker is his tool of choice. And it will do all of that stuff because it uses Grace note at its core, which is just sort of a universal database of all this stuff from lairware.com. So MP Freaker, we'll put a link to that in the show notes, too. Thanks, Todd. Good stuff. I like it. Is good. Yeah. With John. It's better than bad. It's good. It's better than bad. It's good. All right. On that subject, David writes and asks. He says, I maintain an iTunes library of a few thousand songs, which I often listen to ever since iOS 10 came out. I often can't find the lyrics to my music, at least not on my devices running iOS. All my songs do have the lyrics added because I put them there. As I add newer songs to iTunes, I always include the lyrics as well. My older nano has its own OS and the lyrics are still visible there. They are also still on my laptop, although iTunes now refers to them as custom lyrics. I know where the lyrics are supposed to be when a song is playing in iOS or paused, I suppose when I tap the playing song and it expands, I'm supposed to be able to tap on the red dot dot dot at the bottom right corner of its window. But the lyrics selection isn't available on my tracks. Mostly the only options are delete from library and add to a playlist, love or dislike. I don't use Apple Music or iTunes match or anything like that. I add all my own music and I have no need or desire to stream music wherever I go. I sync my iPhone, my iPad and my iPod to my laptop and my music is available wherever I am. A few months ago, I researched this and found a semi solution that involved essentially deleting all my songs from my iOS devices and then re-syncing them back from iTunes. That did work for most of my music, although it did not work with all tracks. I have no idea what the distinction was. I suspect Apple would love to have everyone migrate over to its paid streaming service. I see that they have disabled the genius playlist service on iOS. For example, do you believe they are chipping away at other iOS features like the displaying of lyrics to aggravate people into switching over? I don't think they're working to aggravate people, but this is interesting. When I so I use Apple Music, but more specifically, you know, iCloud Music Library, which is a feature of Apple Music, but that's probably the one we're talking about here. And that's where my lyrics come from. But I do notice that they often take a second or two to appear. And to me, that tells me they're coming from the cloud. But but they do make it there generally, generally when when I'm when I'm working with stuff. But yeah, I don't I don't know the magic answer for this, John. Do you have any any thoughts on on where the the lyrics come from? Yeah, yeah. That would be a no. That would be a no. Yeah. Yeah, it's because for me, it's it's the same experience. Sometimes the lyrics appear and sometimes they do not. So it's yeah, I don't it's a it's not a consistent thing when when it's there. So or you know, I don't know. It's I can find them usually, but not always. And I I grok the frustration. So maybe this becomes a geek challenge. Maybe somebody can send us their thoughts on how they consistently get the lyrics to appear to a song. Because that would be that would be handy. So geek challenge, we told you how to find us before via email 206. No, it's not. I'm I'm I'm pulling the old number from memory, John. It's two to four eight eight eight geek, which is four three three five. Thank you, sir. That's good stuff. Yeah, call us and let us know. We'd love to we'd love to I'd love to find a consistent way for this because I've I've looked into it and it just never seems to and I can't find it consistently. Somebody did put a tech note in the show notes for us that says when lyrics are available with an asterisk, you can read them in the music app on your iPhone. And to do that, when listening to a song, tap or swipe up in the player at the bottom of the screen to open now playing to the right of lyrics tap show. Yeah, well, there you go. It doesn't always appear kind of the issue. And you can do it on your Mac or PC as well. While listening to a song, there's the it's it's kind of like the hamburger menu that appears at the top of the iTunes list, but it's not all the way over on the left. In fact, it's closer to the right. It's it's between the shuttle controls for the like where you are in the song and and the search box. And if you click that, you can see up next history and lyrics. So that's where that should appear. But what do you do when the lyrics don't appear? That's the question I would like to get the answer to. Yeah, good stuff. All right, moving onward, I don't think we have anything else on that one. Francois brings up a very timely topic. He says, there's a problem I have with my iPhone 6 Plus. And before restoring the beast, I'm asking you, I regularly start applications by using the spotlight search from Springboard or from the home screen, I swipe down from the top of my screen, type a word like Safari, and then the application appears and I can tap it. This helps when I have lots of apps on my phone and I don't want to scroll through to find one. I do the same thing, Francois. He says, but it does not always work. And four out of five times, there are simply no results that appear. Very frustrating. He says, I tried disabling all that I can from spotlight search setting, but that doesn't work either. He says, also, I tried to delete network settings. Any advice. And he says, by the way, this only happens on my iPhone, on my iPad. It works fine. So I have experienced this same problem, Francois. And it's not consistent to all my devices, but it's not just my phone. It's not just my iPad. I've seen it kind of come and go on on different devices. In fact, there have been periods of time where the most reliable way I can search and launch an app is to open the app store and search for the app there. And then because I have it installed, instead of saying get or purchase or sorry, get or buy, it says open. That's not the most efficient way to do that. I have found that it has been better for me, though, since the 10.3.3 update. Now, I'm not yet convinced that 10.3.3 actually fixed this problem, though. I think it might have to do with the fact that an OS update A restarts your phone and B also likely wipes out a lot of cash files and things that can get corrupted and that may well include the spotlight cash, which, of course, is very much related to this. But your advice about or your sort of advice in passing about disabling things from your spotlight search results has resonated with a lot of people. There was a discussion earlier this week about how folks were having exactly the same symptom Francois and they found that disabling Slack from their iOS search results helped solve it. Others said they have the problem and they've never used Slack. So but so it's likely not just Slack, but it might be one app. What I've found when I when I've experienced this, sometimes nothing appears, sometimes it takes a really long time for something to appear. And that leads me to believe that the spotlight index is just getting overloaded with lots and lots of data and perhaps keeping it from parsing some of that data might be helpful, Slack being one of those things, but not the only one. So my advice is and this is good for for many reasons, go to settings, general spotlight search search results, which is sort of at the bottom of the spotlight search list. And you'll see all of your apps there and you can decide whether or not their content will be displayed as part of your spotlight search results. But just like on the Mac, I'm not convinced that this turns off the indexing of that content. I think it's still all indexed, but it certainly turns off the display of it. And whether or not you have this problem, turning off the display of unnecessary content in your spotlight results can help surface what you want. Like for me, just the way I use spotlight and the way I think about it, I would never use spotlight to search for my contacts. So I have always turned off contacts from appearing in my spotlight search results. And that way it just doesn't get in my way as I'm searching through and finding other things. So you can be very efficient about this. I generally, especially now, go in there and I've turned off almost everything and then only turn on the things that I actually want to see in those results. And I wish there was a way to say disable all.  But alas, that's not how iOS works. So you just get to sit and take about a minute to go through and turn them all off and then and then you can turn on the ones that you want. Thoughts on this, John? Hello. I saw I saw a good tip about that the other day, which is well, to find grain, you can find grain or what data comes up there. Yeah, right. That's the yeah, that's the point. Yeah. Yeah. And Alex asks a good related question in the chat room. If mail and messages is turned off, will search still work in mail itself? And the answer is yes. I have always had mail and messages off again for the same reason. If I want to search mail, I will go into mail and search that. But I don't just need that. I don't want that cluttering up my results. So so yes, I can guarantee you that it still works inside the mail app, which also supports my previous thought that spotlight still indexing this stuff, even if you turn off the display of the results in that particular list. So there you go. Yeah, good stuff, John. And did I cut you off? Was there was there more that you were saying? OK, cool. All right, Devin has, again, taken us in a different direction. I love all this stuff. Devin says, I'm pretty privacy and security conscious when it comes to my data. All of my data in drop by he says, I have all of my data in Dropbox. And while I do trust them, he says, I have two factor authentication enabled. And I still keep my most private of documents, financial stuff, tax stuff, passport copies, Social Security guard copies, etc., stored in encrypted disk images that way I can sync them with Dropbox. But the only person that can actually see the data is the one with the password. And that's me. He says, that has worked for years. But I've found the iPad ever more capable. And I plan to do a lot of travel with just my iOS devices. The problem for me is I often need to edit some of the documents that I keep in those disk images. My questions are one, is there a way for me to open a disk image or a DMG image on my iPad, edit the contents and then save them back to Dropbox? The answer to this question for many years seems to have been no, he says. And number two, if it's still no, is there another way you would suggest handling very sensitive documents that would allow them to be accessible on the iPad, but still leaves the ultimate security in my hands alone? So this is a great question. Let's I have some thoughts about this, but I believe the answer to his first question, John, is still no, that you can't edit disk it or you can't open disk images secure or not on on iOS. Is that still true? I'll have to play with it. I actually really haven't. So I don't think it does it unders? No, I don't think it does.  And the thing is, you had to pick just right with the certs, you know, right, right? OK, well, if you access one through Safari, Safari understands what it means and mail understands, means. But other clients do not solve. Huh? Yeah. So the way I deal with this, I'm going to try. Well, go ahead, but I'm going to try something here because I think I have a resource available that'll let me test something. All right, cool. So the way I deal with this is by using apps that sync data securely amongst all of my devices. And most commonly, that's for me, that's one password. I store so I can't store spreadsheets or things like that in one password. But I do have secure notes in one password where I store a lot of the types of data that you're talking about here. And that is secured. One password actually has categories, I should say, for passports and drivers licenses and things like that. And they're all stored in your secure vault, which is only decryptable by you with your password or by whomever has your password. And that, you know, I don't want to say that's just you because it could be someone else, but that has worked for me and obviously keeps things very secure. But again, it your flexibility is limited to that which one password can do. So yes, you have your driver's license and your passports and things like that. And you can store pictures of them in there and all that stuff works great. But beyond that, really, your option is what they call secure notes, which is just sort of raw text where you can store things. And I use that all the time for that kind of stuff because, as you know, you described, Devin, it's synced everywhere, but it's synced in a secure way. Or it's it's it's an encrypted piece of data that is synced. And then I don't have to worry about anybody else getting access to it. So I really like that. Kiwi Graham in the chat room is saying, I vaguely recall a product named Box Cryptor, which is encryption encryption software to secure cloud files. And I'm not I can't tell if it works on iOS, but maybe it does. Maybe, maybe. I don't think so, though. I think it's oh, no, yeah, it is available for iOS. All right. Well, that's interesting. So there you go. And it's built to do exactly this. It's end to end encryption for Dropbox and and more. Choose your cloud without worrying about safety and who can access it. We handle security and keep it simple, even for non techies. So this is at boxcryptor.com. And obviously, we will put a link in in the show notes. So this might be that magic answer so that you can. My guess is this this, you know, it stores its own. It's not probably not doing a DMG, but but doing, you know, whatever its secure blob of data is. And then it sort of parses through that and pulls out the files that you want. You edit them and then, I guess, save them back with this. I haven't obviously haven't used it, but but very interesting. And it is priced at there is a free version that allows one cloud provider and two devices. And then you can for 50 bucks a year, I think you get unlimited cloud providers and unlimited devices and so on and so forth all the way up. So, wow, nice find Kiwi Graham. That's pretty good. But Dogster is saying it was last updated in for iOS February of 2014. So that might or might not be as magic an answer as we thought. But it does have 64 bits of support. So it's not going to be one of those apps that stops working whenever Apple drops support for 64 bit for for 32 bit apps. So maybe maybe it has what it needs. I don't know. Interesting stuff. Very, very good. So, John, how does your how has your experiment been going here? Yeah, I was trying to play with disk images with various clients here. And I'm going to have to keep trying. OK, I tried to drop box and also Safari interfacing to drop box. And it kind of knows what a DMG is. But then when I try to do something, it's like, well, like, yeah, preview not available. I got it. It thinks about it for a while and it tries to do something, but it doesn't display the contents or. Yeah, or let me edit it. So yeah, keep trying on that one. You want to take us to Melinda here while we're on the subject of securing your your data and that sort of thing. Yeah, sweet. I think this is a good one. All right, so let's. All right. Hi, Dave and John. Love the podcast. Thank you. We love you, too. And I always appreciate learning at least three new things every time I listen. Excuse me. Clear my throat here. Get some liquids. I'm a long time listener with a first time question. My question is, can my ISPC or access content files and apps, et cetera, on the computers or devices in my network when I'm using my ISPs modem and router exclusively? My 2012 airport time capsule router recently went out according to my ISP when I contacted them for a service call after I was without internet for about four days, the first three incidents were apparently due to my ISPs, technical issues, but last occurrence was the fault of my airport time capsule router according to my ISP. They offered me a free router to use with their modem until I purchased the router I really want. I'm currently renting the modem, which consists of a small power over internet device that connects to the router inside outside cable runs from the inside. Speak up, John. I'm just looking. I don't think it's relevant. OK, got it. OK, my current network consists of two 2012 iMac desktop computers, one 2013 Mac Pro, along with my wireless printer, iPhone, iPad, cell phone, booster, extender. And OK, because I listen to MacGicab, I'm well aware of security versus convenience issue when using any device online these days, but I'm concerned that my ISP can now monitor every single device that runs through their router. My suspicions were especially raised when I found out I cannot set the router password unless I contact my ISP to do so and that they can remotely reset and monitor my router if I have any more issues with service in the future. The plus side is now my internet is working just fine. It's quite possible that my old time capsule was on its last leg and I plan to purchase a new router, Eero. Sounds good in the immediate future. All right, that that thing is relevant. I use my VPN tunnel bear when working online, especially when I deal with client files from my personal banking, etc. My internet is down. I go into town to the nearest coffee shop where I can work online by tunnel bear, of course. And I think that about that's the question, Dave. What's the question? Question. Well, I think the basic question is can my ISP if I have a device and a router for my ISP, if the question is. Can they see what's on my network? I would say that the answer is yes, in that anybody that has administrative access to your router would be able to see what devices are connected using SNMP or whatever they make available to the ISP. And they could probably see network traffic as well as anybody who can administer a router could do, right? Right. The thing is if they wanted to and as you probably know, there was a legislation recently passing that your ISP can monitor your browsing if they want to. But in both cases, Dave, I would say because they can doesn't mean they will. Hmm. What I could suggest is you look at their privacy policy. You know, as far as the the, you know, harvesting your browsing data, at least mine. I'll trust them on this, but they specifically state we're not going to do this. And they actually have a whole privacy section saying, you know, we could, but we won't. But they could and that could change without you being hyper aware. But but I but I don't think that's the question, right? I mean, we're we're talking about it as I understand it, she's wondering if because you have their router, can they see stuff internal to your house? Not just the data, regardless of whose router you use. Correct. They can see the data that's passing right across. But the question is and I'm going to address that. OK, all right. So as for accessing content on on the devices on your network, that's mostly up to you. And that if the device or services it offers has some sort of authentication, which is often used to generate an encryption key, it'll secure the network traffic, you know, AFP or SMB or all that. OK, so in that case, as long as you protect your, in this case, a file server with the username and password, you should be OK and that that traffic will be protected. You may just want to make sure this is just the general philosophical thing, but you may want to make sure you don't have services available unless you need them available would be another thing. So on Mac OS, you can look at these things in system preferences sharing and just make sure you're not sharing too much. Usually sharing is good, but in this case, you want to limit the services you want to make available. If you're running on a PC or Mac or your Synology, for that matter, sure. Yeah, they even have a Synology, even even has a security auditor that will tell you, hey, you know, yeah, you may not want to have that port open. Hey, your password kind of sucks, stuff like that. What you could do other than getting one of these magic boxes that they indicate will look at some of this for you. You may also want to do a scan of your network with a tool like thing or maybe end map is one of my favorites and that's that's an oldie. And both of those can identify devices on your network and also probe them to see what they're sharing. Right. I'm actually kind of tickled sometimes. So if if I'm on public Wi-Fi and and I see other devices and run thing thing will actually let you mean, it's kind of rude, right? Sure. Yeah, I agree. The thing will let you basically port scan the devices that it finds on the network segment that you're on. And yeah, I just do it for entertainment. I'm just like, do you know what you're sharing? Right. Right. I mean, one time I actually did it on our library's public network and I actually found that they had a network printer that I wasn't aware of. And so I asked them, like, hey, can I print to this? And they're like, yeah, sure. That's cool. That's cool. So sometimes it pays to be nosy. Yeah, this is this is an interesting question because, you know, there's this assumption of safety that exists on your local network.  But generally speaking, once something is, you know, on my local network, I tend to trust it. But but that's it. You know, this question brings up an interesting thought that, well, if you've got a device managed by someone else, i.e. your ISP or anyone on your local network, that's you know, it sort of raises the point that they could be sniffing around there if they manage that device, which they do, it's your router. They can see everything on your local network and it can get a list because it has one of all the devices that are connected to it for DHCP purposes. Right. So yeah, I I've always run my own router. I've always, you know, as we've talked about on the show, I'm a fan of running your own router. But this sort of adds a whole other layer to that that I'd never really thought about before. Again, you know, the thing is, does your ISP have time to to be worrying about what you're doing on your local network in general, probably not, but in specific cases, potentially so. So yeah, it's an interesting question. Thanks for thanks for making us think, Melinda. I think I think we have time for one more. I just want to wrap up the discussion. Yeah, the other aspect that I think is important here to remind people that there are different if you can secure whatever path that you're using, you can do that. So one thing that was mentioned, of course, is using something like TunnelBear, which makes me happy because the latest iOS update happily offers 17.4 percent more bear puns. Love that release notes. But also secure other portions, you know, so use WPA to or a password if you can on Wi-Fi. Use SSL or TLS between you and the devices that you're talking to. That also protects the traffic. So even if someone can get on the network, ISP or otherwise, they won't be able to see what's happening. Well, WPA is not going to protect you from your ISP, though, because the router gets to see it all. Correct. Right. Yeah. But it'll, it'll, yeah, I'm just trying to make the point that whenever you can secure the various, you know, portions, so if and when you do get that arrow, of course, put a password on there. So, right, right, he encrypts your traffic. And number two, people can't can't sneak around or, you know, if you want them on your network, set up a guest network. That's, you know, of course, another strategy. Yep. Yep. All right, I'm done. OK, cool. No, it's a good discussion. I like it. Larry has an interesting question, but it I think the answer is, well, we'll see if it's simple. He says, when listening to streaming audio, mostly via MLB dot com and tune in radio on my iPhone 5S, everything sounds great for about five or ten minutes. Then I'll hear a brief sound, almost like an audio tape being rewound as it passed by the playback head. And then the stream starts about a minute or two earlier. Another five minutes or so later. The same thing happens in a classic case of two steps forward and one step back. This can cause a baseball game for to extend when I listen to it. He says, so what's the deal? It's not the hardware. The phone was replaced a few months ago by Apple for battery issues. And both old and new phone does the same thing. He says, I've also done a clean install of the OS that had no effect. He says, I see nothing on Google and MLB dot com's technical support has nothing to say. I'm not even sure where to start troubleshooting. OK, and that's that's where I'll stop this question. So, you know, this is one of those interesting things, right? You've replaced the hardware. So presumably it's not the hardware. You've done a clean install of the OS and I'm going to assume that you haven't restored from a backup, right? If you have, then, of course, there could be corrupted data in the backup itself, but try it without that. But again, just to kind of take this as a as a bigger thing when you're having these weird problems with iOS, those are two obvious steps. I mean, replacing the hardware seems pretty severe. But it reminds me about when my son was having a problem with his device and we the first thing we did was we, you know, wiped it clean. And the same thing was happening. He was having some weird thing where any time he started typing, his his phone would just blow up and reset. And so, you know, we did the iCloud there. We did the the restore from from from iCloud. OK, that doesn't work. So don't restore, find same problem. Apple replaced the hardware in the store. Same problem. And that's when it hit me like, well, OK, what's the same? It's got there's got to be something that's the same. And it's your iCloud syncing, right? When you sync documents and data with iCloud, that feeds preferences to a lot of things, not just third party apps, but Apple apps as well and Apple services. So if you're troubleshooting a problem, wipe your phone, don't restore from a backup and don't sign into iCloud. Apple makes this very difficult. They really want you to sign into iCloud and that's understandable. But for troubleshooting sake, skip signing into iCloud when you first do that that reinstall so that you can truly test to see if it's the hardware of the device. You know, you'll download a fresh copy of the app, you'll log in fresh to the app. And, you know, in Larry's case, that's the MLB thing or tune in, test it again and then maybe sync to log in and let iCloud do its syncing. See if that fixes it or if that causes the problem to happen again. You can't go and edit the stuff in iCloud on your phone, but you can edit it on your Mac. They they've made it more and more difficult to see the hidden stuff there. But you can certainly do it from the terminal in the mobile documents folder. So I guess it's a home library mobile documents. And you can if you dig around in there, you can see all the stuff and you can delete stuff and hopefully keep it deleted. It is, remember, synced to iCloud. So you sometimes might need to delete twice in order to really get those preferences to wipe out, but but I just wanted to kind of remind everybody of that because it's easy to forget that iCloud can populate your device with a lot more than you than you thought. So any thoughts on that, John? No. OK. Well, it's time to bring the band in, man. It's that's how it goes, you know, because that's what we do. Yes, yes. Well, we told you how to find us. We told you how to contact us. Find us on Facebook, though. Go to MacGeekUp.com Facebook and join our great community of everybody that's out there helping out and all that good stuff. Yeah. Thanks to Cash Fly, CACHEFLY.com for providing all the bandwidth to get the show from us to you. I also want to thank everybody for listening. Thank everybody in the chat room at MacGeekUp.com slash stream for helping out. Thanks, of course, to all of our premium listeners. Thanks to our podcast marketplace sponsors. This month, that includes Smile at Smile Software.com. Otherworld computing at MacSales.com. Barebones Software at Barebones.com. We've got some great sponsors coming up for a WWDC content. The first of which signed up was GigSky, so I'm really excited about that. But there's more. Trust me, there's more coming. In fact, there's more that are signed up. Good stuff. Have a great week. I don't know when the next episode is going to be recorded, though. We'll send out a note because I'm flying to WWDC on next Sunday, John. So. Between now and then, I want you all to remember, have a great time. Enjoy yourselves and John. Do you have one lasting piece of advice for them all? I not only have one, I have two. I got three words for you. Yeah. And that's don't get me.


Welcome. Thank you for joining us. Yeah, welcome to our Tabla Rasa online retreat weekend. And yeah, we have a beautiful theme this weekend, true intimacy and holy relationship. So it's going to be a beautiful weekend. Yeah, we're going to, oh, by the way, I'm Peter. I'm going to be the host this weekend. And for this session, we're going to be joined by Francis Zhu and David Hofmeister. And then we'll also have a session later on with some community members and a movie session tomorrow. So very full weekend. So yeah, I'll just, I'll pass it right over to David and Francis now. Hi, hi, everyone. So sweet. Beautiful, beautiful. What a treat. We have a beautiful weekend in store for you. And there's, hi Francis. Hi David. What a beautiful opportunity we have. This is one of those topics that everyone feels so much in their heart and it's just praying for clarity. Just praying for clarity. And you and I were talking this morning about how really this holy relationship and true intimacy are the means for spiritual awakening. Isn't it fun to have a pathway if somebody says, what is your spiritual pathway? You say holy relationship. It brings a smile to our face just to say that, you know? Cause it's a deep dive. It's definitely a deep dive. Yeah, I was just thinking this morning when we kick off this year with the topic of spiritual vision, gaining the true vision. And this is actually the means to gain spiritual vision. You know, this is the pathway of a course in miracles. You know, spiritual awakening is so much associated with isolation and meditation, but also do it yourself, individual spiritual awakening. And yet with the course, Jesus gave us a pathway of holy relationships. So yeah, this is a weekend we can really dive into this topic. And I think deep down we're all yearning for deep relationship and deep intimacy because we're yearning for that feeling of have a heart opening, keep our heart wide open. We're yearning for that feeling of let our heart be filled with love and to be able to give love and receive love and feel safe, feel transparent, not holding up some kind of mask. So that is truly what this pathway feels like. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, I think everybody likes to feel connected and in this world, it's even a goal. Sometimes people sell me while I wanna be connected and at least I would like to be at least connected to one person or a few people. If I could just have one good deep connection and a few other deep connected friends, then that would be plenty for me. And now we have Jesus saying, no, this is actually your means for waking up to heaven. It's for everyone.  You almost do a double take, you have to say what, go back on that sentence again. What did he say? Every relationship is a total commitment. That's nothing we were taught when we grew up. I didn't hear that in Sunday school. That's radical. Every relationship is a total commitment. And what he's saying, that's how you reach this agape love, this unconditional love of the Christ is make no exceptions. Jesus didn't make any exceptions and he's just a way shower for all of us to not make any exceptions. Is it possible to be friendly towards everyone? Is it possible that friendliness is even a kindness? It's our states of mind that can be radiated to everything and everyone. And is it possible that we're guided so that the relationships that come to us are given? We feel like it's raindrops coming down and we just are so happy to welcome what is given every day. Show me what I need to see in my mind by bringing to me the relationships that will mirror back to me that which I have hidden from myself. All right, I was playing hide and seek in time and space. It's time to end that game. The hide and seek game is over. I want to be fully aware. So Francis and I were talking briefly this morning about how we call it given relationships. It's instead of you going out to try to search and find something or fill something that's lacking or missing, you have the prayer of your heart for healing and then the means appear as the relationships that show up. And that's one of our movie themes this week is going toward given relationships. So maybe Francis, you can just share what your experience has been about given relationships. Yeah, I think, you know, Jesus says and sometimes David always, you always say that this pathway is not more difficult. It's just very, very different. And sometimes I reflect on this summary and I have to say the one thing I feel is considered as very difficult on this path is we still think we have to make decisions for ourselves. And we want to make decisions. We think we have to make decisions with especially the parts about our lives that we cherish and value. And without knowing that the fact that every time we think we need to make decisions, we are blocking, we're blocking the decisions to be made for us by the Holy Spirit. Actually, Jesus says in the course that everything that the ego tells you you need will hurt you. Everything the ego tells you you need will hurt you. So our function is actually to decide against deciding for ourselves. I like that function very much. I thought, oh my God, my function is decide against deciding for myself in recognition that I do not know how simple is that function? You know, it's not so different from the past have to strive, have to achieve and have to reach a self-concept. You know, such certain kind of standard even in relationships a successful daughter, successful friend, successful or you meet a certain standard that the ego set up.  I want to decide for myself because I got too much investment. And these are the areas that, you know, the ego can just take hold of it very strongly. So I think in terms of the relationship that is very, very true on this path, I can see myself and also everybody in our community. I think tonight we'll have some community members share their own experience. But underneath all these parables, one thing that I truly see that is the secret of success in this awakening journey is let it be given you, let the relationship be given you, let the curriculum be given you, and also not trying to assume that I know how to do relationships, any relationships. You know, we're not here in this, we can't learn how to do your relationships because it cannot be summarized, it cannot be learned. There is no formula. But actually we're here to learn, we're here to learn to tap into the holy instant so that the curriculum in that moment can be given for us to shine, for us to reflect back to our brothers and to ourselves. So truly this is such a humbling journey of stepping away from all expectations, all the decisions and to let it be given. And I can tell you that Eagle would tell us that if you leave it to the Holy Spirit, nothing will happen. You will have a lonely life, you will have no relationships if you don't fight for yourself. And nothing can be far from, it can be so, it would be, I can't put it in English. It can't be more far from the truth. That's it.  If you really trust this Holy Spirit, this is his given curriculum. And you step out of the way, the relationship will be raining down on you in your life in so many different ways. And I also realized, I always feel like, okay, I know how to do this kind of relationship but not that kind of relationship. The relationships are categorized into different categories. They have difference in significance, they have difference in value, they have difference in how I approach it, but not under the Holy Spirit's control. The Holy Spirit is saying, if you know how to really approach one relationship, you know how to approach any relationship. That is his way. He's saying, let me teach you how, every given moment. This is the curriculum. Yeah. It's interesting, a lot of us have used the book, A Course in Miracles on our spiritual journey and it's worth quoting directly from the Course when we say Holy relationship is the means. Jesus says that in the I need do nothing section. He said, a relationship is given you as a means of salvation, as a means of awakening. But if we roll it back even a little bit to something just as basic as a miracle, it's like, I mean, the title of the book is A Course in Miracles, okay? Now, when Helen Shuckman and Bill Fedford first got that, that the title of the book, they were told what the title of the book was, it was called A Course in Miracles. They didn't like it. They didn't like it. They thought they would give the author, the invisible author of some other ideas. There's better ideas to name it, but no, the author said, no, it's called A Course in Miracles. That's what the title is. They were kind of awkward about it. And then when you look at it and some people may say, why do we need a Course in Miracles? This is a thick book. Why such a thick book for A Course in Miracles? It's because one thing, miracles are involuntary. They should not be under conscious control. Involuntary, involuntary. But oh my gosh, I've got a book this thick that's teaching me one thing that miracles are involuntary. That just means let go and let God. That just means I'm really gonna have to step out of the way to experience these miracles, to let them come through because they will come through. And Jesus tells us we don't even need any kind of special preparation. We just have to be willing to say yes. Yes, I let them come through my mind. That's all. It's just a yes, a willingness to say yes. Nothing more. We don't need a resume. We don't need to pass a long obstacle course and regiment. And I think the area of relationships when we think of relationships, that's the part where the ego wants a lot of control in the relationships. It wants to select the relationships. It wants to put parameters on the relationships. It wants to put boundaries on the relationships. It wants to put expectations on the relationships. And Jesus is saying, no, they are just given for you to learn to truly give as God gives, to let your light shine, to be like a flower, giving the fragrance to the wind, not telling the wind where to blow. He's not saying, here's my fragrance. Now I just want you to go to that person over there and that tree over there and that bus. It would be ridiculous to try to tell the wind where to carry the fragrance. And yet the ego believes in using relationships for its own purposes to get something. It's always trying to get something. It wants to get something from the world. It wants to get something from people. And what we're discovering is this involuntary experience is truly letting go. It's like taking your hands off of the steering wheel. It's like letting go of trying to control people. And that's the biggest temptation in relationships is trying to control the people. Jesus is saying, don't do that. Let me take over the relationship and use it for forgiveness. There's one part in the course where Jesus says, don't raise body thoughts to the level of mind. Wait a minute, what did you say? Don't raise body thoughts to the level of mind, meaning don't give causation to those body thoughts. Whether you're talking about relationships, whether you're talking about a diet, whether you're talking about exercise, whether you're talking about career, don't raise body thoughts to the level of mind. Don't think you are personally in control of that body or any of those bodies, but give them to me and I will use them to show you what forgiveness really means. So it's really simple. He's just saying the ego made up all these bodies and why don't you give them back to me now? I know what to do with them. I know what to do with these body thoughts. If you keep them and you believe you're in charge of them, you're trying to take control of something that you didn't create and really you don't have any business messing with those characters. The Holy Spirit can use those characters to help you release the addiction, to help you release the attachment, all the expectations. But we have to say, here Jesus, I'm giving all my body thoughts back to you. He's not telling us that we should somehow already be able to enter the Holy Instant and we have to prepare our minds for the Holy Instant. He's saying, no, that's the Holy Instant is the Holy Spirit will take you there. And all you have to do is desire it. You have to just want it. You have to want to go into the light and then let the Holy Spirit and Jesus, they'll handle all the rest. And that's what I mean by given relationships.


everyone will come back to another counterside video so i hope you are having a great weekend it's about sunday here in the philippines and the weekend is about to be off but today we will be discussing gear tuning increasing your stats but before that if you wanted updated counterside videos please hit the subscribe button down below okay guys so for gear tuning this has been a discussion and you know some of some of the chats that i've had that is really gear tuning important is it really that you know it doesn't really make a difference if you tune your gears optimize them does the little stats go a long way well the short answer is yes because again stats are going to determine um your progression moving forward so the the greater stats you have obviously um the better attack you have the better defense you have the better evasion you have so on and so forth so in terms of gear tuning which gears do you need to priority in terms of priority so first and foremost let's look at rarity so just to explain further when you look at your filters you have their four rarities okay so you have ssr sr rnn so which are they so if you can see here the gold background is actually your ssr the purple or violet background is actually your sr the blue ones here are your um r and the ones that are plain or have a plain background is actually your n so the only gears that you're going to tune more or less is either ssr or sorry ssr or sr okay so those are the only um gears that you're going to tune and another category has to be be in there which is actually tiering so in terms of tiering you also have here tiers the only tune gears which are tier six or tier five but if you really want to to to tune your gears the least uh tiering you can do is level is is tier four so as you can see here i already have tier five gear um this was actually a mistake i did before so i max i i did tune a this is a n gear which is not supposed to be tuned so anyway it's it's already equipped so i'm leaving it there let's take a look at let's see let's enhance okay so we go to gear tuning here um the bottom this is your bottom left side so more or less for kyle it's already maxed okay but if you let's look for a gear here that hasn't been maxed okay so for his uh tier six his own uh weapon actually his special weapon or special gear so more or less the the the stats here haven't been maxed yet so let's let's let's do a change options okay so if you can see here if it's going to be a a purple color you that stat cannot be changed anymore okay but if that stat was yellow you can still change it as you can see here so you can change before you you do a tuning you have to decide first whether you're going to keep that stat or you're going to replace it so more or less let's let's try to let's try to change this one so change the critical damage so is it good is it better than anti sniper damage probably probably yes probably no but anyway i i you can actually change this a bit and if you want if this is not the stat that you want you can still confirm this then reroll okay so try to confirm this one so going to change it to critical damage 19 percentage i think probably good okay again once i'm done with change options i go back to position and try to more or less maximize their stats so i have here this is the currency that you're going to use your tuning binary so you have to this is actually the the increase is actually random it's not a a a guaranteed increase like for example from 51 percent let's try one it's going to be 65 that's a jump of 14 percent then if i do another one that is a jump only of nine again the increases are usually randomized and you just have to farm this currency if you really want to max out this option but for now let's leave it as it is because i'm really out of tuning binary so we'll discuss later on where to farm your tuning binary but there's another stat that you can actually change which is your set option like for example here let's look for a gear that i can probably change let's say for example i want to change usually the ones that we would change are usually tier six because again um if you want to change tier five and tier four it would really pretty much be expensive and usually tier six are usually the ultimate ones that you change the gear sets because when when you get them they're not usually your idea your ideal uh what do you call this your ideal sets so let's see what i haven't equipped yet so this i think is for uh jushiun i think let's look at jushiun i forgot so let us equip him yeah yeah it's uh jushiun all right so let's just check his um his tier six weapon let's equip it so if you can see here i'm actually looking for anti striker because i already have anti striker equipped for his armor and i want to match it if i want to use it on him so let's try to change this one by gear tuning change gear set then more or less i have three chances at this because for each set binary um you only it's 10 per per reset more or less so let's try to check a reset so let's try to change this one okay so it's crit right now which um i don't need let's change it again it's right now it's anti sniper um this is a bit not sure it's good this is going to be good but i'll confirm it now i still want to change it though to anti striker so let's do a last one so it went back to hp okay okay i know it it it went to hp so basically that's it if you really want to change um this uh the the the set option for your gears do it for your tier six don't do it for gears lord and tier six because again uh your set binary is really hard to farm so guys let's go to farming so more or less you have here um tuning binary which we will look at where you could farm so let's go to your lobby monthly in terms of farming those you can actually farm them here in the attendance so you have here in the monthly attendance reward so i'm sure you're gonna get this on a monthly basis but i'm not sure i forgot how how many is this next would be your weekly mission so you can farm that as well in your weekly mission here tuning binary then more or less uh you can also farm them here in your dispatch dispatch is actually in your world map once you have set once you have set a a a mission um you can sometimes this portion the the right hand the reward is sometimes a set binary so you can actually select those before you dispatch then also if you're looking at um the dive shop so here in your dive shop you can also buy this one so this is actually unlimited it doesn't have a weekly recharge so you can buy this one using uh your imaginary core next would be in today's deals sometimes it pops out here as well so um sometimes it it can be paid out as a credit so for this one it it's uh um going to be for uh quartz so i'm just gonna buy this one then more or less you have also convenience deals you can actually buy it here but i'm not recommending that you buy it here this is very expensive for 790 quarts um gauntlet shop as well let's go to the gauntlet so you have here your gauntlet shop um where is it so here so i just actually um bought it and this is going to reset after three days so you can actually buy it here as well counter pass is also a good way to get it i think even for free to play you can still get it in your counter pass so if you can see here for the normal plan it's actually here as well so as one of the rewards so don't forget if you have the counter pass please do um get these rewards special events as well you can get them you can get them here in your sweet promotion so i think it's here yes it's here in your sweet promotion um i'm sure that sweet promotion is just a limited duration but more or less for other special events i'm sure that there will be other tuning binaries to be given out here and circuit link as well if you haven't noticed for your circuit link there is also tuning binary and mission reward so mission reward are more or less you're going to do on a daily basis so let's move on to counter case so for each each unit that you have finished your case three is usually a tuning binary then you can actually farm these in this level so supply operation you have here covert ops but you have to clear a lot of hard stages first before you could go to this part so this is actually your main reward which is which is tuning binary but you're going to have to open a lot of hard stages for your mainstream particularly in episode four then the last you could you could farm these are in your let's go back to your world map then you have here your dive so once the dive resets every i think this is every month i'm not sure but you can get here see you can get here tuning binaries for you to farm when these um when this is open already okay let's move on to your set binaries so for your set binaries um you could also get these in your monthly check in but again these are very scarce next would be in your mission so your weekly missions you have a you have it also here but this is going to be a small amount which is actually two you can also get these in your counter pass if you are a pay the if you are a paying player of course you can get this here so there's a lot um i'm not sure why they didn't put at least one for for the normal plan but that is the case then you are going to go to your shop i am not sure if it actually appears in your today's deals if i can recall i don't recall actually one pop popping here but you might actually get one here also in your convenience deals convenience goods but i'm not recommending this as well because again this is pretty much very expensive consortium shop this is actually one of the best ways that you could get it here because as as you mind these currency these are actually going to be free so 800 so you need 2400 every week so these resets every every week more or less guys so those are the the the areas where you can farm how to tune your gears how to increase your stack for those who have stayed this long in this video um please consider subscribing also click that bell icon so that you don't miss a video of counter side and also guys please leave a like in this video if this helped you and don't forget please put a comment down below on your opinion on gear enhancement and on stats enhancement by the way guys take care stay safe this is the warden and i'm out of here