The Mac Observers, Mac Geekab, episode 760 for Monday, May 6th, 2019. And welcome to the Mac Observers, Mac Geekab, the show where we take all your questions, your tips, your cool stuff found, all the stuff you find, all the stuff we find. We mix it all together, the goal being that every single one of us, that includes us, your hosts, all of us. Because we're all in this together, the goal is we all, every one of us, learn at least five new things every week when we get together. Sponsors for this episode include, TextExpander.com slash podcast, MalwareBytes.com slash Mac, Kaptera.com slash MGG, and a new one that I'm actually really excited to tell you about, Experian.com slash MGG with Experian Boost. I'll give you more details about that in a little bit. For now here in Durham, New Hampshire, I'm Dave Hamilton. And here in Fairville, Connecticut, this is John F. Brown. How you doing today, Mr. John F. Brown? Yeah, all right. Good. Thank you. That's good. That's good. So it's just an exciting week here in Mac Geekab Land. We actually have some housekeeping to go through, but it's, it's, well, one is a cleanup and one is a new thing. We've added a new addition. There's a new, a new room over there. And that new room takes the shape of the Mac Geekab weekly newsletter. So this is a little bit meta because we're announcing the newsletter in the episode that will be sent out to the newsletter. Two weeks ago, I decided we needed to take advantage and, and like, you know, be able to be in touch with you people in, you know, in better ways. But I didn't know what to do. And, and, and then listener Rob serendipitously suggested and said, hey, wouldn't it be great? Have you guys ever thought about sending out a weekly newsletter that includes all the show notes because we don't get to click the links when we're listening to the episode, you know, if we're at the gym or driving or commuting or whatever. And sir, we can go back to MacGeekab.com. But if you were to send those to us, that would be great. And it was like, oh, the heavens opened up like that's brilliant. Awesome. So we created it and it will go out Monday morning. May 6th. In fact, it will probably go out before this. This episode goes live. Oh, it should not. I should make sure this episode is live before it goes out so that this episode is the one that's in it. Okay, I will do that. So now I got to, I got to do a little juggling act, but that's okay because it's there. Now it's being sent to all premium listeners. In fact, if you were a premium listener or were half, have ever been a premium listener earlier late last week, you got an email sort of announcing this list and saying, yes, we know you signed up, but we've never sent you anything. So we certainly understand if you want to unsubscribe, but we hope you don't though. In fact, we hope you subscribe. But if this list is not limited to premium members, it's just they're the folks that had signed up for the list. So anyone can sign up now. If you go to MacGeekab.com, we've got little forms there. You can type in your email address. We're currently using MailChimp as our partner for this. So we'll see how that goes. But it's an evolution like everything here. We listen to what you have to say. We're very excited about this as you can probably tell. And I think it's going to really be a great thing because you've got all the links for all the things you mentioned. You've got all the links for the sponsors, right? And we always say it's our job to encourage you to get you to go and check the sponsors out. And from there, it's between you and them. Well, this makes that easier and it makes it easier for you to help us do our job in that regard. And that's also going to be a good thing. But really it's about getting those show notes and the links and all that stuff to you. So very excited about that. But please do feel free to sign up. You do not. There are no everybody's welcome as always. So just go to MacGeekab.com and sign yourself up and we will rock this thing together. Anything to add to that, John, before I get into the rest of the housekeeping here? Nope, it's awesome. I'm excited about it. We aren't. Say that again, John. Write in your mailbox. Write in your mailbox. Yeah. And you know, the cool part is, certainly we're going to have this, you know, every week we'll send out the episode notes. Absolutely. But we can also use this to, you know, and we're not going to pester you because we trust us. Like you think you get a lot of email. I think we probably get at least as much. If not, perhaps a lot more. So we do understand inbox clutter. We don't want to be a part of that. We want to be valuable. But we might do some things, you know, occasional like once a month addition to the list on a Thursday or something like that. But it'll evolve. It's a thing. We'll just keep in touch. Let us know what you think, you know, feedback at MacGeekab.com. Did I hear you right, Dave? Did you say feedback at MacGeekab.com? That is exactly what I said. It is feedback at MacGeekab.com. Speaking of MacGeekab.com, for a long time we have published our recording calendar. And this is truly the calendar that John and I used to schedule when we are going to meet and record the show. But we have made that public. Something as an iCloud shared calendar link. Something happened to that. At some point in the last few months, I'm not sure when, where you could subscribe and you would get events, but they wouldn't necessarily be the right events because they would be like they were frozen in time as of some date in the past. Any changes we made like when we, you know, if we have to adjust the schedule or whatever, no. So we had to essentially refresh that calendar. Really what we had to refresh was the public-facing link. Now the link is still available. The new link is available at macgeekab.com.com. So if you just go there, that will offer to subscribe you in your calendar of choice and you're good to go. Unfortunately, there's no way we could automate this for all of you that were previously subscribed. So you need to remove the MacGeekab calendar from your calendar of choice and then visit macgeekab.com. Again, everyone's welcome, so if you want to subscribe and then that'll let you know when you can go to macgeekab.com. Or join hashtag macgeekab. Join us and listen to the show while we record and give feedback which you've heard about and all that good stuff. There you go. There's that. Anything to add about that, John, before we get to things here? Nope. Okay. Is there more? Well, there's one last thing and that is that on Saturday, May 11th, so this coming Saturday, if you're listening to the episode shortly after it comes out, I am speaking just outside Philadelphia at the mainline mug at mlmug.org. Saturday morning, I think I'm speaking. I think the meeting starts at 9 a.m. I think I'm speaking at 10. It's talking about backups. So if you are in the area, please, please, please, please come out and say hello. It would be great to see you. And that's what I have to say about that. And now let's go to Neil because Neil has a fun one. Neil says, I am having the frequent USB drive improperly dismounted problem. The machine is an iMac Pro just upgraded to 10.14.4. The odd thing is that there are multiple such notifications all with a strange icon that is basically a sheet of paper with a large A at the bottom right-hand corner. The notification has a button labeled show, which does nothing. When clicked, if I lock my screen and then either enter my, or then enter my unlock password, the notifications change to the standard finder device improperly dismounted icon, and then I can click the dismiss button. This is happening with two different USB drives, both connected to the same USB3 hub, connected to a USB3 port on the iMac Pro. Interestingly, most of the time both drives are still present on the desktop and accessible just once I had to reboot to get them to appear. Disconnecting and reconnecting the hub did not fix the issue in that one scenario. This is not happening with my two Drobo's which are connected via Thunderbolt 3 in a daisy chain configuration. In the past, when I've had these kinds of dismounts, I found they get resolved when the drive is replaced. I usually assume it's a failure of the drive, but oddly, it's happening with two different drives, so I wonder if it's because they're both connected to the same hub. Could that be the issue?  It says, I thought of disconnecting OneDrive and seeing if it fixes the problem and swapping and isolating and troubleshooting and honoring the troubleshooting process and all that. It says, I'm reluctant to start replacing drives until I have a better handle on what's going on. Any thoughts? So, I would... In reading this, I would think it's an issue with the hub. If possible, can you connect directly to the iMac and or a different hub just to test, again, part of that isolation thing? Honestly, again, you know, guessing from far more than arms length away, it sounds like a power issue where the drive or interface is losing power very briefly and then coming back, the computer's noticing the drop, but by the time you're, you know, made aware of this, the drive's already back and everything's good. So, John, I would recommend one of your favorite utilities, Hardware Growler, because that will give you far more granular information about when and what is happening on the USB bus. Any thoughts from you on that? I had this happen a while ago and as it turned out... So, I agree with what you said so far, but the other thing you may want to check, it could be one of your cables.  Sure. As it turns out, I think it was a flaky cable. Fast. So, it was the form factor that I don't really like. It's like crimped in the middle. You know what I'm talking about? Crimped in the middle of the cable? No, one end of the cable. It's almost like two sections and it's flat. Oh, yeah. Okay. Okay. That's called. Huh. Is it one of those universal USB-A things where you can go either way? I've seen those, those always seem a little janky to me, where you can, you know, flip it and it still works. Or was it, is it the one that's, that's custom to USB-3 over USB-A that has like the little extra hop in it or something? Yes. Okay. Yeah. Okay. You know what I'm talking about? I do. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The name of it. Yep. Anyways, that was, it turns out that, that was just flaky. And then everything was great. So it was the cable or the connector on the enclosure? It was the, one of the connections from the cable into the enclosure. Got it. It was intermittent. Got it. Yeah. Okay. Yeah, fair.  Correct me if I'm wrong on this, John. My caffeine hasn't quite kicked in yet today. Yes, I'm having caffeine. Had a gig last night. Is that 2.4 gigahertz devices, right? Can interfere with USB-3 hard drives? Oh, yeah. Right? Okay. So if you've got like, it might be a proximity thing.  Be the problem, right? Oh, yeah. Okay. All right. So, you know, think about that. All right. Yeah. So relocate them. Yes. Yeah. Or yeah, speed drop it down to USB-2, but that you probably don't want to do. And sometimes you can't. All right. Going to Phil, who says a few years ago, I moved my airport extreme 2011 to my office, setting up a personal Wi-Fi network on my end of the building. It's been working well and I connect my mid-2010 MacBook Pro and my 2018 Air without a problem. Also, the MacBook Pro via Ethernet cable into that works. He says, but I usually just use the Wi-Fi connection. Okay. He says when my iPhone 6S joins the network, however, I get the following screen, which he sent us a screenshot showing that orange, no internet connection below the Wi-Fi network with the exclamation point in the Wi-Fi icon. So this is in the settings app on iOS. He says, Google Foo has failed me, rebooting the router, updates on the phone and airport, changing the network name, hiding or unhiding, resetting network settings, none have worked. So when the iPhone connects, and the Macs do this too, the iPhone is a little more obsessive about it, if you will. When they connect, they don't just connect to the Wi-Fi. They also try to load a page that Apple.com hosts, and it's one of a variety of pages. Apple hosts several of these. To make sure that not only does it get an IP address from the router and appears to have a strong Wi-Fi connection, it also makes sure that it can get out to the internet. And this is the thing that if you're in like a hotel or coffee shop, perhaps, triggers that captive portal scenario or it's supposed to trigger the captive portal and show you the, you know, the, hey, you're supposed to log in here, you know, welcome guests, that kind of thing. So generally it works fairly well. Sometimes it doesn't. And sometimes non-standard or non-default settings in the network scenario can cause this, especially DNS settings. I have seen. So when you're there, tap on that little I next to, you know, the information I next to the network name that's failing. And see what it's doing. See if there's anything in here that's not just default. Make sure configure DNS is set to automatic, set configure IP to automatic. You know, just take a look through these things. And it may be that you have to forget the network and tell it to reconnect fresh, you know, with a new password and not, not a new password, but you will be forced to re-enter the password. So those are my thoughts on that, John. What do you think? I think I'd read this article that I found called, if your iPhone, iPad or iPad Touch won't connect to a Wi-Fi network. I like it. And they go through a lot of steps, including the one that you mentioned, which I've actually had to do that, especially when connecting to a public Wi-Fi, is sometimes you got to click on the little I in order to get some progress. Yep. Like a lot of times when I click on that, I'll get the webpage asking me to log in or agree to their terms or something. Yeah, of course. Yeah, the captive portal is what we call that. That's right. You know, speaking of captive portal, I mentioned I played a gig last night. We were, it was this party function band that I play with, which involves, you get to the place really, really early and set up before all the guests arrive.  And then at the end of the night after dinner, we appear and rock the house, right? And all of that happened. But in those middle few hours, you know, you just kind of sitting around and, you know, camaraderie and we chit-chat and stuff. But, you know, it, you find ways to pass the time. And our guitar player had brought his tablet with him. It was an Android tablet. And was trying to connect to the Wi-Fi. We were at a hotel function center. And he could get connected, but any time he went to Google or Yahoo, which are the only sites he was trying, it was saying, do you have an encryption error? Like someone is trying to hijack your internet connection. And he's like, man, I can't get on the network. And I'm like, right. Because Google and Yahoo always now do their connections as secure. HTTPS connections. And so the first thing they do is negotiate that security certificate. And then, you know, and then pass data back and forth. But Google is saying wait, or your browser rather is saying wait, you visited Google.com, but I have a security certificate that does not identify itself as being from Google.com, we have a problem, right? And that's what his browser was saying. And the problem is the captive portal at the hotel. So the trick is you need to connect to a website that does not use SSL so that when you are redirected to the captive portal, your browser doesn't freak out. And this happens on Macs too. In fact, I see it all the time. There is a URL you want to memorize. And it's pretty easy because what you want to do is connect to a website that doesn't use SSL. NeverSSL.com will never they've promised use a security certificate. So you can visit NeverSSL.com. So we typed in NeverSSL onto his tablet and boom, it came up with the welcome to, you know, the hotel thing and click to agree to for, you know, 24 hours of internet access or whatever it was. And boom, once he did that, then Google and Yahoo loaded totally fine. So, NeverSSL.com I don't think that's your problem here, Phil, but it is one of those things that we all should should memorize. It's a handy, handy thing. I use it. I almost use it by default when I join a hotel's network just to make sure that I'm not going to deal with, you know, everything because every other site I visit uses SSL. I mean, Mac Observer, Mac eCab, like all those, we all we use SSL everywhere and we should accept these captive portals. It doesn't work because SSL is doing its job. Right? Good. Have you used NeverSSL, like when we traveled to CES or whatever? Uh, didn't really have the... You never had to. Yeah, okay. Everything seemed to work. That's good. But I have had, yeah, what you mentioned one of our local public Wi-FIs they were setting up a new Cisco filtering system and I would, yeah, I'd get you know, security errors. Yep. It was like, yeah, the certificate doesn't match. I'm like, well, what? Yeah, right. Exactly. Yeah. So, yeah, this would have solved that. That's right. That's right. Yep. Cool. E.O. All right. Well, while we're still on the airport realm, old airport realm, let's talk to Dennis, who says, I have an old laser printer that I attach to an airport express so it can act as a wireless printer for everyone to use. Can I still use that airport express to extend it with the printer attached? My printer is far from the router so that I can't attach it directly. He just recently, the back story is he just recently added a Synology RT 2600 AC router and he wants to know if he can still use his airport express and the answer is yes but to make your life easier and to keep your network from being messy, you want to put that airport express in bridge mode. Essentially, you want to turn off the router inside it and just have it be an equal citizen on your Wi-Fi network. If it has the router on, the way I think about it, and this is really hard to do via audio to describe but, you know, I think about it as a hierarchy, right? So at the very top of the hierarchy is the internet outside. Then one step down from that is your cable modem or whatever and then assuming it's a separate device one step down from your cable modem now would be your router because it's the thing through which everything flows, right? And then below that, below your router, are all of your devices sort of flat and equal and that's a good thing. You want everything flat and equal but if in, for example, Dennis's scenario, you have a device on that flat and equal that is a router, anything connected to that now will be another level down in the hierarchy. Meaning those things can only sort of see through the airport express and are going to be on a separate IP range and that can cause all kinds of weird problems. In fact, I was just dealing with a Mackie Cab Listener slash Dave the Nerd client this week solving exactly this problem and putting the new device into bridge mode solves it because it again keeps everything on that flat and equal level of the hierarchy. So put it into bridge mode, Dennis, and you should be totally fine. What do you think, Mr. Braun? Does that Synology? Does that offer a print server? It does. Yes, so the right, and that Synology router has a couple of things. It's got USB ports, so he could connect the printer directly to it. He has a distance problem in this scenario where he wants the printer in a place that's right. I saw that, but yeah, I just thought I'd mention it because I tried that once to use my Synology as a network print server. It didn't quite work out at the time because the driver that it had for my printer wasn't quite right. Got it. Yeah, there was a slight mismatch. It was a HP 13 by 19 inkjet printer. Got it. The things didn't come out quite right. Yeah. You're totally right. So the Synology and this would be true of the router or their disk stations. They both have this same technology in them. So they have USB ports and you could plug a USB printer in and then share it amongst your network. In addition to that your Synology is also capable of being all call an air print or and Google print proxy. Meaning any printer either one that is connected a USB one that's connected directly or any network printer it can proxy for you and it can be that thing that allows you to take a non-air print printer and turn it into an air print printer which is great if you've got iOS devices. I use this all the time. So there you go. That's good. Thoughts on any of that, Mr. Braun? Yeah, I like air print. Yeah. When I replaced or upgraded my inkjet I got a Canon. And his air print which is great. Having air print is cool. And again if your printer doesn't support it there are ways to get yourself there and the Synology routers are one. I think Uncle P in the chat room called printopia and we will of course put a link to that in the show notes but that will that will also allow you to turn a non-air print printer into air print. It's the proxy. It just grabs the thing and does the thing. Hey I want to take a minute here and talk about our first two sponsors if that's okay with you my friend. 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for sponsoring this episode alright John an interesting question from Paul it sort of dovetails into a conversation we were having last week or perhaps the week before Paul says when why I think either works do you happily buy a first one or two generation old item versus something new and what are the reasons is price the factor is lack of major changes in the product a contributing factor he says for me for example my bluetooth headphones got washed he says I found a two generation old set of bluetooth headphones the ones I had for under 20 bucks and knew they were 120 so it was an easy choice for me and they still work great so this is an interesting conversation to have right for me you know I'll start this and say I think price would be the biggest deciding factor but there's always an asterisk right especially or perhaps only if there aren't enough major changes to warrant the latest and greatest like when the MacBook Air and Mac mini came out and I purchased those new in December because they weren't on the refurb store yet and that's sort of the middle ground here is the refurb store I would say 100% of the time by refurb if you can if you can afford to wait I was in a scenario where waiting wasn't really the right thing and we wanted to get our son a laptop for Christmas he would have totally understood if we said wait till January or maybe it was February but you know whatever so the latest and greatest had arrived with the Air and the mini they were the right things for what we needed the Air was great for me and my son the mini was a perfect replacement for my wife's 11 year old iMac at the house and so that took precedence over price at the time with the iMac though that I want to get for the office it's kind of silly given Apple's current pricing to buy some we talked about this last week like there's no reason to buy some 4-core machine from 2017 on refurb when you can get a 6-core machine with the 2019s but I still want to save 15% because that's generally what you get with the refurbs so I'm waiting for those to hit the refurb store because I'm not in a rush right I don't need an iMac right now if I did I would buy the new one there's like that those CPUs and the old ones like there's just no reason to pay today's prices for 2-plus year old technology but you know I can afford to wait I'm not in a rush my machines work so when probably sometime I figure June might be the magic answer but we talked about that recently and then hopefully I'll be able to pull the trigger and pick something up so that's sort of my thought process I don't know if that answers the question John what do you think every machine that I've all my recent machines have been refurbs but have they been so I agree with you right as I said refurb 100% of the time but I think the the one layer deeper is is it latest technology on refurb or is it you know a generation or too old also on refurb which for you are you buying latest tech on refurb I know the answer to this but I'm just like prompting for the sake of the show we're always buying on refurb so let's just take that as a given are you buying the latest technology or you know a generation or too old and why probably a generation or too old just the price of the other reason yeah fair I don't need the latest but you know if and when I upgrade which all of my machines are doing what I need right I suppose they'll break some time but yeah one of the other yeah fix it till it's broke that's right but um yeah and then I you know compare the latest to what I got in the refurb store and you know just see if uh see if it's worth paying a premium to get the absolute latest yep you know like you said it's like well I could get a six core now versus a old four core and it's like well you know to me it's like well maybe there's nothing wrong with getting the four core but you could wait six weeks and get the six core on refurb right right and now like it's a far less compelling delta right to to do that yep yep yeah yeah yeah yeah no it's a good question though but you know I so I think the takeaway here is always buy on refurb if you can whether it's the latest tech or old tech doesn't matter you know buy on refurb you get the same one year warranty on computers you can add Apple care to it and Apple actually has a thing where they talk about their refurbishment process but essentially your machine has now gone through the hands of an Apple technician and that is not necessarily the case for your brand new machine that's being shipped direct to you from the factory so uh you know I've had really good luck with refurb machines everybody has like I've just not heard of any issues so yeah they're better than new sometimes sometimes yeah I agree yeah yeah they're burned in that's right they do they test them all right Scott has a quite timely question for us hey guys this is Scott from Virginia as I'm sure you'll cover on the show Apple has announced that Aputure will no longer run on future operating systems after Mojave this has me worried as Aputure seems to be the only app that fits my workflow I always felt Aputure had the best balance between having advanced features and not being overly complicated like other applications such as Lightroom Aputure is also very flexible with the ways that you can store and organize photos which syncs very easily to my iOS devices with iTunes another benefit of this setup is that there isn't any monthly fees to use the software or sync my photos one feature that I've been unable to find from other solutions is the ability to create and sync smart albums between my Mac and iOS devices I use smart albums and keywords on my photos to easily sort and find things for example I have a keyword of family that I apply on any pictures with my family and then I have a smart album setup to show all pictures with that keyword this means I can keep my photos sorted in different albums for events like holidays or vacations but with the smart album I can view all of my family pictures in one place Apple's photo app appears to have this feature however there is no way to sync the smart albums to iOS devices and outside of Apple's photos app there's no other software than aware of that can easily sync with my iOS devices unless I pay for cloud service like Adobe's Creative Cloud which costs $240 per year so I'm curious to know what you in the community uses for photo editing and management I know Dave has talked in the past about storing his photos on distation and using their apps to sync photos but I don't see many capabilities for editing the photos only sorting them ideally I'd like something that can both edit and store and categorize my photos in one place and then sync that amongst all of my devices does such a service exist for a reasonable price I look forward to any feedback you or our listeners can provide thanks yeah good question so you know it's I don't have the magic answer I think we'll perhaps treat this one as a geek challenge because everyone has the magic answer but I I use photos I don't my needs are not quite as specific as yours Scott although like if I had been doing that workflow they of course would be so I grok the the necessity of it all I'm not I just don't know the magic answer I use photos I also sync to Synology for moments but you're right there's no editing capabilities there moments is more of a backup for me than anything else although it's pretty cool like it does a pretty good job with it all it's just not sorry moments is the Synology app that and service you know it's sort of the service that runs on your Synology and then the app that runs on your iOS devices to sync everything up and and all of that and it works very very well and it has all the facial recognition and all that stuff it's like hosting your own Google photos but editing isn't I haven't messed with a whole lot of that but you can do some tagging and things but its goal is to be sort of the thing that auto tags and finds people and think like you could search for cars and it'll find all the photos that have cars in them and things like that right I mean just like photos and Google photos except you're hosting at your own so I think I think photos or Lightroom are your answers here although it I know that especially for what you described it's going to change your workflow in a way that certainly we all don't like change so there's that but it may not get you the capabilities that you want what do you think John one thing I think is that there's an article here that may help you and it's called how to edit with third party apps and extensions and photos all right so one or at least in my case is like you photos does enough for me but you can extend it the reason that I abandoned aperture is because you know people started saying well you know we're not going to support plugins anymore because Apple's abandoning this and it's like oh great yeah right but photos does support extensions you know as far as the organizational and all that I think it's really your best choice you know because it's baked into the Apple environment yes I agree yeah yeah yeah I always forget about the the extensions that you can use with photos in fact if you go to system preferences extensions and I'm trying to find this on my machine but I'm realizing is that just a that's not just a mojave thing no go to system preferences extensions and then go to photo editing you can choose which of your existing apps including Apple's built-in markup are made available to photos for photo editing so that's a there's there you go there's another tip yeah they kind of go through that on this article okay yeah yeah it's just similar things that you yeah no that is on the Mac that's what I mean on the Mac you go to system preferences extensions and photo editing right there and you might have some things you didn't even know that you could do so right okay I mean another thought is that you could it's not really a nice integrated solution there maybe I mean there maybe edits that you want to make that are not really possible in photos I mean photos has pretty basic you know at least you know enough for me I rarely do edits anyways you know because I always take perfect pictures naturally that's right yeah yeah that that's one way of editing is just delete the bad ones yeah exactly yep there is and actually you know I just checked this out I haven't looked at this in a long while here but if you need more sophisticated editing bring out the GIMP right I guess I okay so you used GIMP recently GIMP is an open source photo editor have you used it on the Mac recently I just went to their page they're up to a version 2.10.10 and it's mac native okay it's not the old X11 hack but I just fired it up and it launched on my MacBook Pro here and it looks to have a whole bunch of tools and did you it's so you've launched it on your MacBook Pro oh yeah so I now I have a question for you go to system preferences extensions photos and tell me if there's a GIMP extension there for photo editing this would be because this I would be curious of I'm not convinced GIMP is the editing so go to yeah system preferences extensions yeah it doesn't show up there yeah I I'm gonna I'm gonna push back a little bit I don't think GIMP is the right answer for most people but I could be wrong I have not used it in a long time for doing more sophisticated edits again it has tools that are not in photos sure but so does pixelmator and so does like like what's the other one acorn right I think acorn is the name of it I use pixelmator and for the price I mean it's less than 50 bucks right I think for pixelmator and it is so powerful and so easy to use in fact I would argue that if you aren't already totally entrenched in the workings of Photoshop and I grok that you might be in and that therefore makes Photoshop easy for you but if you are not there pixelmator is way easier and for most people way more powerful than Photoshop because you can actually get stuff done it pixelmator is fantastic and I've heard and I've experienced the same thing with acorn right but I just you know I started using pixelmator and it became my thing and I can go to it and I can whip up images and do edits very very quickly because now I'm used to it but it's so easy to use so yeah but I haven't tried Gimp in a while I'm not convinced that that's going to be the right thing for most people because Gimp was built to be a Photoshop clone so I think it pretty much yeah I think it might be too much yeah exactly I mean the tool that I needed at one point to use was a lasso I needed to you know grab an object out of something and then had the lasso tool just like Photoshop did sure yeah I think it even had a smart lasso but yeah I haven't had to do it it's like that in a while the one thing I will mention here is that now you were asking you know what's in the photo editing section here the one program that does show up in mine here is our PAL graphic converter which also lets you do some sort of edits yeah in a different way is that it can read or output a huge variety of formats right and I'm going to thank Brian Monroe in our chat room here Affinity Photo that's the one I have not tested it comes up every time we talk about this and I'm glad Brian that you saved us from getting a pile of emails about this that that's the other one that really is a strong contender in the kind of pixel meter acorn scenario they've got apps for both the iOS and macOS it's 50 bucks and I've again heard great things I gotta I gotta test out Affinity Photo that may be the that may be the next one on the on the list so very very cool yeah good I have to check out GIMP and just see but if it's if it's a Photoshop clone my guess is it's the wrong thing for anyone that's not already a Photoshop user but if you are a Photoshop user GIMP might be a great either no cost or you know low cost alternative so good good more on this John or are we ready to move on to Jim let's go to Jim all right sweet so this is Jim's this this falls into my realm of five new things I've learned this week listener Jim asked a very simple question he said I'll find it here my daughter is going to Italy for a study abroad program she has an iPhone 10 s and we have AT&T is our provider here in the USA AT&T offers an international plan for 60 bucks a month for one gig or 120 bucks a month for three gigs covering most of Europe she typically uses about three gigs of data per month at home so I'm thinking of getting the three gig plan for 120 is there a better way for her to get service in Italy since the 10 s has dual sims should that be considered we would prefer having her keep and use her current phone number but it just depends on what else is out there yeah so a couple of things just as set up here in order for her to keep her phone number she needs to keep her AT&T sim in the phone like that that's for sure and you know when we went to Europe a few years ago of course dual sim iPhones didn't exist and we chose not to pay what at the time would have been AT&T's massively exorbitant rates I think it would have you know added five or six hundred bucks to the cost of our vacation for four phones to you know enhance the AT&T service for international so we just got sims from a company called 3 in London I think cost us 20 bucks for each of them and got unlimited data for a month which was more than we needed throughout Europe which worked and that may still be your best option here is something like that but now that iPhones and specifically hers the 10 s have dual sims she can do this without having to turn off her AT&T number for two weeks I mean it doesn't turn it off it just means that any calls into it or texts into it won't arrive on her phone until she puts that sim back in but with dual sims she doesn't have to take it out on that phone unless you get the Chinese version which I'm pretty sure you didn't it's not true dual sim it's one sim tray and one eSIM so you have to pick a provider that supports eSIM that's a virtual sim that doesn't require a physical addition to the phone this can actually be a very handy thing because what we had to do is get off the plane in London and get all our crap and go through customs and immigration and all that stuff and then we had to go to a 3 store in Heathrow and it was like mayhem in there because everybody does this and tries to get a sim and you have to buy it and activate and all that stuff you can avoid that because you can use eSIM Apple has an article that talks about what carriers support eSIM and they don't list anything specific for Italy but don't fear there are options because there are global options but also there are some you know European sort of general options the first two that I will mention and as I was going through this I realized everyone with a dual sim capable iPhone so it's the 10S, 10S Max, 10R I think those are the only three correct me please if I'm wrong on that anyone with a dual sim iPhone should get all the apps that I'm about to mention and have them on your phone ready to go the first two are GigSky and TruPhone these are companies that offer eSIM support basically worldwide and the cool part is you can get to a country and say okay I'm in Italy what are my options and you know with GigSky it was like okay we have Italy and other countries so they have a European plan and I can get a 15 day plan a one gig for 20 bucks a gig for 30 bucks or a 30 day plan that gives me 5 gigs for 50 and that's throughout Europe okay great then I ran the TruPhone app and they have an option specifically for Italy and so 3 gigs was only $19 so you know that's quite a savings over even what the GigSky was going to offer and you know and that's for 30 days so you have these options obviously this is you know from when I checked earlier this week these things will evolve and change over time but you can just look and I could have bought right there on the moment like you do it you pay for it and now boom your phone is activated with your eSIM and you now have two numbers on your phone you have the one that you just got from GigSky or TruPhone and then also your AT&T number and then iMore has a great article that sort of shows you all the options you would then go into the settings for cellular for your phone once you've enabled this eSIM service and you can pick which one is the default for outgoing calls in fact you can even pick per contact which sim is going to call outbound you can pick which sim is the default for your data so that you're not using your AT&T data expensively in Italy you know all these great options and iMore put together a great little article about how to do this so those are those are sort of the world options and then there are a couple of options us carriers now some us carriers now support eSIM, T-Mobile Verizon and AT&T the first two allow you to do it in an app that you understand with AT&T you have to go into the store to do this probably not going to be the right one price wise for what you're talking about Verizon and T-Mobile are not built to sell you these sort of one-off plans at a price that competes with GigSky or TruFone especially just for data but it might be the right thing so it's worth checking out but it is worth having all four of those apps GigSky, TruFone we'll put links to these T-Mobile has a separate app called T-Mobile eSIM and then Verizon just uses their My Verizon app to do this so and then like I said AT&T you've got to go to the store but lots of options in the chat room pre-show we were going through some of this stuff and making sure we had our ducks in a row and someone pointed out Dave Ginsberg in the chat room pointed out that he used T-Mobile's eSIM app here in the US and moved his phone to T-Mobile and that's it like he's only using the eSIM from T-Mobile not just as a secondary backup whatever it is his app and and T-Mobile if you can get good T-Mobile service at your house and where you normally are T-Mobile is a plan it is a service very much worth considering you'll pay quite a bit less than you would for like Verizon or AT&T and their international stuff is just automatically included with their I think they call it the T-Mobile One Plan so anyway it's very interesting and worth thinking about and like I said at the very least worth getting those apps and putting them on your phone so that you have them in the moment when you need it because in order to download the app you got to have data service and so now you're in a catch 22 you can also sign up with eSIM using QR code so you in theory could do like buy it Heathrow and like scan or whatever app you're going to it's crazy but it's flexible and that's the key because it's yeah I like the idea of not having to procure a SIM especially if the plane lands at 2 in the morning and the SIM store is closed you just want to get to your hotel and yada yada yada exciting what do you think John? good to know yeah that's good I'd probably go with whatever Verizon offers because I have the iPhone 8 and it only supports one SIM so my advice to you would be don't do that depending on how long you would be in Europe I think Verizon will charge you like 10 bucks a day exactly you which is why I recommend just take your SIM out put a European SIM while you're there you know and you could use I think I know you can do it in an iPad you could use a like a Giggs guy SIM which is sort of a universal SIM but I think that's only data I don't think Giggs guy is offering phone service so that might not be enough for you but it might like depending on what you're using while you travel but but yeah no I would just get a for people that don't have dual SIM phones you can't easily you're willing to like jump through some hoops maybe but you can't easily buy like a European SIM from the US because you know you have to be local to that area in order to buy phone service there it's just how all these regulations work but you know you just like for you I would say get off the plane go to you know the T-Mobile or the like the 3 store or any one of those stores and just buy a SIM and put it in your phone and use that in Europe way cheaper like way way cheaper so and it's really not that big of a deal it's just sort of the mayhem of the store I will offer one piece of advice if you're going to do that ahead of time decide where you are going to keep your Verizon SIM or your AT into whatever SIM you're taking out of your phone decide where in your travel bag you're going to keep that get like a baggie or something and as soon as you take it out of your phone put it there I recommend doing this on the plane so that you don't accidentally use your data service you know from the US abroad put it there and leave it there and don't lose it because you will want it again you know what I'm saying yes yeah no I did a search and yeah comes up with what you said 10 bucks 10 bucks a day per line yeah per line right yeah yeah yeah for one person traveling that's not terrible for four people like it was instantly okay 40 bucks a day no no no no no for two days worth of service on AT&T of Verizon I got you know a month's worth with all the data I wanted so yeah Mac Vader in the chat room is saying he's lost a SIM during travel you are not alone we thankfully thought about that ahead of time it was like oh we need to be very careful and even putting them back in in the plane you know on the way home it was like alright if we hit turbulence while we're messing with these tiny little SIMs and they fall on the floor of an airplane nope they're gone so Uncle P says that Pelican makes a SIM case so if you're doing this a lot that's perhaps worth it but we just put them in baggies that you know like plastic bag one bag per person with a label in the bag as to whose phone that SIM was to go back into because otherwise as you might guess you will get it wrong alright ah yes yes yes I want to talk about our next two sponsors if that's okay Mr. Braun sure surely our first one actually is TextExpander TextExpander 6.5 man like this is one of those tools that I truly can't live without TextExpander for those of you that don't know allows you to take big blocks of text or small blocks doesn't matter that you routinely use over and over again so it could be simply your email address or your phone number and you don't want to get it wrong or your mailing address and you don't want to get it wrong you don't want to fat finger anything in any of those when you're sending them to people but it could also be if you have like a customer service type response you know if you find yourself here if you find yourself either using a sticky or going through when you have to send an email to someone and going back through your sent folder to find the similar email that you sent to a different someone and copying and pasting that for that particular person TextExpander would save you time and make sure you are accurate because that's how TextExpander works you take those snippets instead of leaving them in your outbox or stickies or whatever you put them into TextExpander and then you get to just invoke them either by a click of a mouse or by typing a short bit of text hence type a short bit it expands into a long bit and you know that it's accurate you know that it's perfect because you've already built the snippet and the cool thing with TextExpander is you don't just have to have static snippets you can have things in them like insert the current date insert the name of the person to whom I'm replying insert the contents of the clipboard all sorts of those things and now with TextExpander it's five for macOS and version 2.0 for Windows it sports a new visual editor for snippets so you don't have to remember like short codes and things like that to put in there you can see it visual fill-ins dates date math nested snippets and more and you can insert them all like words phrases forms templates with just a couple of clicks right this is where TextExpander totally rocks so you got to check it out go to textexpander.com to learn more and download TextExpander and get 20% off your first year you'll choose MacGeekEb from the list when you visit textexpander.com of course and then you get 20% off your first year so our thanks to TextExpander for doing what they do and for sponsoring this episode our next sponsor is Malwarebytes for the Mac man this is another one of those apps I was so glad I have it I was messing around with my MacBook Air the other day and I was like oh man I got to make sure it was being slow or whatever and you know I ran Onyx on it and did other things and I was like wait a minute I need to run Malwarebytes on it and so I did and you know the best part is it scanned my entire Mac and it took 29 seconds they say it scans the average Mac in under 30 seconds it took 29 seconds I can't scan my Mac for anything it looked at the whole thing 29 seconds it thankfully didn't find anything but if it did it would have found and removed adware viruses ransomware and any other malware right there and you can even have it do that in real time with their advanced anti-malware technology so that it catches all your dangerous threats automatically so you're protected without even having to think about it and your Mac keeps running silky smooth I have Malwarebytes on every Mac I know John used it too and it's fantastic it truly is one of those things that everybody should have because it's when not if someday this will happen to all of us we will wind up downloading the wrong thing and boom we've got it Malwarebytes protects us and here's the deal Malwarebytes.com you can download Malwarebytes for free and you can use it for free but you also get a 14 day trial of their premium offering which includes that real time scanning in the background all the time so you get to check that out too check it out Malwarebytes.com and our thanks to Malwarebytes for sponsoring this episode alright John you use Malwarebytes right oh yeah cool go ahead no it actually came in handy because the last time I was at my parents it found something really yeah now when I looked in there was actually a dialogue up saying hey yeah this download is bad I'm gonna get rid of it for you wow and it did get rid of it yeah that's awesome it intercepted it it's great man yeah so check it out Malwarebytes.com it's a it's a good thing everybody we all need it alright we have kind of a geek challenge I think another one here and this one comes from Barbara who asks she says I'm videoing my granddaughters high school softball games they're usually about an hour and a half what I want to do is go through the whole game and delete the parts that we don't want keeping the moments that we want to keep she wants to essentially create a highlight reel of the game she says I've tried with iMovie to help and also I've taken some Apple classes at my Apple store about iMovie but it seems like the wrong tool for this she says I wonder if you know what the right tool is to do something like this I don't because I don't do enough of this but I like I like this path if I were in your shoes Barbara and I had to do this right now knowing what I know I would most likely use screen flow it's not it's not advertised as doing this it's built to record your screen videos and things like that tutorials and how to's it can also film the camera but you can also import a clip into it so I would import the clip that you took and then it's got a really easy timeline editor where you can just go through and chop things out and make life really easy starting just from the one clip you don't have to keep bringing clips in it just sort of does it so I would use screen flow because it's familiar to me and I know that it has this timeline editor but I bet there's something better Uncle P in the chat room is suggesting both clips and QuickTime Pro so and M Prime and Row notes correctly that screen flow is 129 bucks so not inexpensive I already have it but that's a very good point that's quite a bit of money to spend just to do this and again there's probably something more purpose built so we'd love to hear about it we mentioned feedback at MackieGibb.com but you can also call us 224888geek I believe is the right phone number John what's geek 4335 thank you thank you or post in our in our forums at MackieGibb.com we'd love to we'd love to hear about it so yeah do you have any thoughts on this one John? yeah video editing hmm yeah I find a nice little summary here from iMore Adobe Premiere elements Apple Final Cut Pro yeah these all seem a little bit overkillish to me oh yeah no those are yeah those are more pro editing tools and they also list iMovie saying hey it's Apple's freebie yep and as mentioned yeah I think yeah I mean even QuickTime Pro can do it for you you just you know put a marker and then the other and then you delete the stuff you don't want does QuickTime Pro exist? is that a going concern though? I don't or the QuickTime editor just a QuickTime player okay alright so we don't call it QuickTime Pro it was an old thing well actually I did activate it on I still have the old QuickTime 7 player it still runs it still gets selected as the player for some videos that I have but I actually had my pro key enabled it I saved it somewhere that's too funny yeah so yeah it would just be QuickTime okay well that I mean and that's fine that's good yeah UncleP says he's using it on Mojave too so alright where are we here we have so much to go through here let's um you know we've got some tips and really some follow ups from recent episodes and I think we should probably take the a moment and go through these here so that we don't so we don't forget so let's see how quickly how many of these we can get through and how quickly we can do it listener Tim is actually Tim from Sectigo which formerly was Komodo and we talked about their certificates um over the years and he pointed out that these certificates in their eyes and he also acknowledges that certainly in the past they didn't do anything to to make this apparent but now they are that those free certificates for S-MIME for email are built to be trial certificates so that you can test out the service and then you know move into it and with a 30 day cert now that is exactly what those become he also pointed out I said you know I was looking for an inexpensive option for for a certificate and he pointed out he says you know it is $19.99 a year or you can do three years for $49.99 so you save $10 on that so you know like if you want to continue to use S-MIME there you go um um I'm not sure if I will continue to use S-MIME after this I think I might just stick with open PGP because that's arguably even more secure it's just not native to iOS although S-MIME certainly doesn't feel native to iOS either even though officially it is so there's nobody else that offers a free certificate? No and I think that that's a that's an indicator that this is not a um not a viable path right I mean usually you know like like if you've got we're talking about Dropbox how they're changing their free tier or whatever and then that but there's you know like there's other services there's box and there's you know whatever there's no one else and hasn't been anyone else for a very long time that offers free certs free S-MIME cert so I think that that's a good indicator that maybe this is not something that's viable although I'm hoping let's Encrypt will do it right because let's Encrypt does free SSL certificates for your website I read my mind I think I'd look to see if they offer S-MIME and they currently don't but they would be yeah they would be the people that I think could do it but again it's I I don't know that the market is big is worth is big enough to be worth doing this right like it it yeah I'm not sure S-MIME is the right path to go so KiwiGram points out that let's Encrypt's free SSL certificates last three months and he's right but because those certificates are running on a web server you can very easily set up an engine that will just auto renew them every 60 days and so you never run out in fact I am 99% certain that McGeekGab.com uses and a let's Encrypt's for those of you that are on the stream you might be able to see it there but anyway I'm pretty sure we're using a let's Encrypt's for McGeekGab so anyway there you go Listener John points out something very interesting but we do use let's Encrypt's for lots of things even if I'm 99% certain we're using it for McGeekGab. Yeah but you're right Kiwi that not doing that in mail every three months is also not unless there's some automated way to just have those regenerated and I don't know that there would be the problem with mail certs I don't want to spend too much time on this but problem with mail certs like an SSL certificate for a website is used for the session and only the session there's no benefit to using the same certificate tomorrow when you visit a website you're just going to renegotiate the connection and it's fine it's real time it's synchronous email certificates are asynchronous meaning I send you my certificate yes I can sign my message with it and that's handy but in order for you to Encrypt a message to me you need to use the certificate I've already sent you so asynchronously I send it to you then in a future date you Encrypt a message with that certificate back to me if the certs are expiring every 30 days or even every 90 days that makes that process a little weird because if I send you assert and you wait two weeks to send me an email and my certificate has expired you now cannot send me an email with it so yeah really it would need to have a longer expiration so anyway listener John points out something very interesting about resetting the T2 chip which he had to do on his first gen MacBook Pro trying to install the Mojave Beta screwed up his T2 chip and he needed to reset it and there is an Apple article actually it's a section in the user guide about this and it's weird he points out that the instructions say to hold down the power touch the touch ID button is a power button you can float your thumb on it or finger on it to do touch ID but you can also push it and it's a power button and then hold down right shift left option and left control and the issue is that it requires you to do those things in a specific order but it's not clear about it because what it says is and I'm trying to find this on the web page it says while holding down the power button at the same time press all three of the following keys right shift left option left control when you know that you need to hold down the power button first that sentence makes sense but if you don't know that you might think that you hit all four at the same time the problem is that any key other than the power button will start up your Mac just by pressing it so and will bypass this scenario and you need to have power plugged into the right port it needs to be on the left side front most port like the port closest to the keyboard so you have power plugged in and then you do this and then you hold down the power button don't release it any other key that will also start it up hold down the power button and then right shift left option left control and that will reset the T2 so just bear this in mind that there is an order to these things if you ever find yourself there and thank you listener John for for hipping us to that because handy handy stuff alright moving on to Todd here oh wait a minute, hang on I had a link for everyone so I will put that in there and then we'll clean up the show notes later maybe one of you can clean up the show notes for us because not only will the show notes be at mackeycap.com but the show notes will also be in the email that you get when you sign up at mackeycap.com alright now listener Todd says um I'm not sure why but macOS only gives you a head up when your magic mouse 2 battery is at 5% which means you will soon have to stop your work day to give it a charge says I started searching around for another solution and found a number of terminal solutions and apps but the winner was what I was already running i-stat menus the new i-stat menus the current i-stat menus I should say has notifications built in and you can customize these and one of those things you can customize is setting up a notification for the battery life on any of your devices that report battery life back to your mac and of course your magic mouse can be one of those so thank you very kindly Todd that's a great little tip do you use that for notifications John battery notifications rather no I use fruit juice gives me notifications on your on your oh you don't have like a you don't have a wireless mouse or a wireless keyboard that reports to macOS like you don't have a track a magic track pattern okay yeah fruit juice would not tell you about those batteries it would only tell you about your max internal that yeah yeah so I get notifications as to my max every level right I'm not really using any any battery powered wireless devices right right right all right speaking of notifications bill has a tip he says there's a new setting in notifications mail favorite mailboxes that enables notifications on favorited folders as well as the inbox he says I noticed this when my folder notifications started appearing on my phone and not iPad he says I don't think this setting was here in the past and and he's right it wasn't it's I think it's might have been iOS 11 but but certainly I was 12 so yeah on iOS go to notifications mail favorite and then you can set favorite mailboxes so that your favorited mailboxes now see now you now get notifications for things that are filtered into those as well so yeah very handy to have that granularly controllable it used to happen sometimes to people I think bill was one of them several years ago that was reporting this and there was no way to tweak it so yes yes yes we talked last week last week two weeks ago about one password and you know we're talking about divesting ourselves from Dropbox because of the new changes and that I was going to move one password syncing to iCloud because I assumed that would mean that it could sync in the background without the app running turns out no it does not but if you sync with one passwords onepassword.com service it does sync in the background and I have confirmed this and John you also confirm this with last pass if you're in last pass you are always using their service with one password that's sort of the default now but for those of us using it a long time it's not necessarily the default it does sync in the background you don't have to launch the app to keep everything up to date which makes life way easier if you're you know using the Safari integration and all that stuff so using a onepassword.com account you get multiple vaults I have had a onepassword.com account for about a year and I hadn't been using it but I after we talked about it last week I started using it it's fantastic I added my family to it I have a family account now we have shared vaults which is I know this isn't new but it's new to me and if you haven't done this it's awesome we have some things in our shared vaults that everybody gets to see I have one credit card that I actually share with the kids they have their own you know their own cards to use but it's the same number and everything so we have that in the shared vault we have like our driver's license and our passports so that if anybody is like booking travel or whatever and needs that information it's all right there my wife does at least it does a lot of work with us at the you know services so there are many logins that we needed to share like bank logins where the password changes every three months or something and we would always screw it up because one of us would change the password and then have to tell the other nope now we just put it into one password and it's automatically synced like no thought needs to go into the process whatsoever it's automatic so I'm really actually stoked about this I will also say this though I had no idea that I was running password six on two of my three Macs that I use regularly I never got if I got a warning it stopped I have it checking for updates it doesn't tell me if you are running one password make sure that you are running one password seven because there's some things especially with touch ID on my laptop that are just way better with one password seven go so go check that out just be aware so and last pass and you did confirm that right John for us that last pass does background updates without having to launch the app too that's what they say but I thought you said you tested it I found a support article it said this is what should happen but if it doesn't here's how you can force it got it yeah right and I think that's also true of one password like it most of the time it will happen but I'm sure there's some scenario where iOS won't let it exactly alright in 758 we talked about wiring your house and when the walls are open wire everywhere well we have two additions to this listener Glenn says another suggestion is to put a few land drops in ceiling boxes in central locations that could allow for access points in the ceiling for Wi-Fi for coverage over a large area he says I typically run single runs to locations that need more connections like a TV with a satellite receiver Apple TV and then use a switch there that that makes sense but yeah the ceiling there are many things and you can you know if you're using something like like I am currently I'm using ubiquities unify setup those are all powered with power over ethernet so you can you know run power to these things it's like yeah drops in the ceiling that's a good if the if the ceilings open run them you will not be disappointed down the road so that's a good suggestion Glenn and then listener Rob along the very same lines says oh he's we in 2005 we had a custom home built and took a weeks he says I took a weeks vacation to String Cat 5 and Coax all over the house before the sheetrock went up when the electrical inspection was performed the inspector said he hadn't seen that much cable in most commercial buildings he says I bring this up because I thought I really covered it all including the garage and thinking ahead to even IP based cameras using power over ethernet in strategic locations oh right ceiling could be used for that too says however I missed one and I think it is a rather important one I couldn't have foreseen the emergence of doorbell cameras at the time but I am now aware that companies like ring make a poe version of their cameras for more elegant installations poe being power over ethernet I only bring this up to encourage you to mention it on the show or at least pass that along to anyone asking yeah it's great advice man yep the doorbell anywhere and everywhere it's good it's good alright can we make it through more of these tips here not sure how many we can get through I will do Chris's because password managers came up and that's a good one Chris says I loved your tip about the Apple TV and being able to use the remote app on the phone to type in passwords instead of having to navigate around he says my kids know already that if a password page pops up on the Apple TV they just call dad to fix it on his phone but it's even better than you mentioned because not only can you type on your iPhone keypad through the remote app if your password manager is installed on your phone that's integrated as well he says for me it's one password and he also notes the family plan is a lifesaver but it would work for you know iCloud keychain and last pass also integrates like it's all right there and he says if you have the auto fill password setting from that enabled the password will auto fill when clicking on the toolbar over the keyboard wallah a 16 character random password entered instantly on the TV screen and the kids are watching their next show with no fuss so that's a good one Chris thank you for that I like it I like it uh anything left on the agenda that jumps out at you John for us to do before we say goodbye to everyone for this week hello mr. Braun yeah just just looking okay I will um I will share Bob's we will end with Bob's and uh you know that's how it goes he says he points out in fact that you know we were talking about startup chimes on the Mac in episode 757 and Bob notes that the startup chime died at the age of 32 he has uh he has an article at his working smarter for Mac users website this is Dr. Mack and uh yeah startup chime died after 32 nice long years but that's the end of that and I think he says he posted this in 2016 and said the MacBook Pros that were introduced in the fall 2016 did not have the startup chime so there you go and speaking of chimes and sound and music John I think it's time to bring the band in out of the lovely spring weather that I know is outside yes yes yes anything to add to that mr. Braun no no yeah it's bad about the chime is it I bet you there's a hack I don't know that there is I think that's a firmware thing man right I mean like there's no mac macOS running when the startup chime happens so yeah not convinced but alas it's how things go you know uh so we already told you how to email us we told you how to contact us but please do go sign up at Mackie Keb.com for the email newsletter we would love to have you there we would love to have you push us into the realm where we have to pay for a mail chimp account so that is on you sign up and fill it up it would be awesome we would love to have it and thank you again to all of you that went to Mackie Keb.com slash iTunes and either updated or added reviews so many of them coming in let's keep it up folks let's let's keep going as long as we can with uh with new reviews it's it's really awesome and it it you know helps us percolate there which is good for a show that's 14 years old uh it's hard to percolate and uh we almost 15 is that right we in our 14th year is that what it is I forget that's coming up next month man yeah I thought I saw it on my calendar yeah it's uh June 13th is the day and uh so this will be this will be our 14th anniversary alright we are in our 14th year right is we started in 2005 so uh yeah no just go to Mackie Keb.com Alex is asking in the chat room how to um how to sign up just go to Mackie Keb.com there's a there's a form right there on the website just good to go sign up right there uh yes yes yes I want to thank Cashfly at CACHEFLY.com for providing all the bandwidth to get the show from us to you and of course thanking all our sponsors as we mentioned at the beginning of the show Burean.com slash MGG Captera.com slash MGG TextExpander.com slash Podcast MalwareBytes.com slash Mack for other world computing at Fairbones other world computing at MaxSales.com Fairbonessoftware Fairbones.com Eero at Eero.com slash MGG anything no wait I got something something is Dave? what is that something? don't get caught


Γεια σας, είναι Vicky, εδώ και καθώς ήρθατε! Σήμερα εμείς διεθνήσαμε την 4η βαρτή της Pinkfresh Studio με ένα καλύτερο μπλόγκο, πολλές εμπειρήσεις και δημιουργίες μεταξύ την στιγμή Λοιπόν, πρέπει να πάμε στο μπλόγκο μου για να μιλήσουμε περισσότερο για αυτό Σπρινκ είναι σήμερα εδώ στην Ελλάδα, δηλαδή δεν μπορώ να δεξεύω από πλόγκο Είμαστε ανοιχιώντας καλύτερη στιγμή Και αυτό είναι λοιπόν why i will be using this wonderful stamp set This is called Fleur 2 And it comes with a bunch of flowers and leaves as well as a vase And there are also matching dies So I'm going to stamp a few of the flowers that I picked from the stamp set along with the vase I'm stamping them with black ink And I made sure that the ink that I used was alcohol marker friendly Since I will be using my alcohol markers to color everything Now the images are quite small so you don't need to spend a lot of time coloring So I'm going to use only a couple of shades of green for the leaves And I'm going to use a couple of pinks for the flowers After coloring my images I decided that I wanted to add some patterns on the vase So it doesn't look as plain as it is now And a great way to add patterns is to use this stamp set which is called basic banners I'm going to stamp the vase one time in a scrap piece of paper Just to create a mask which then I'm going to stick on top of my vase And then I'm using black ink to stamp the banners I decided to go with different banners just for some variation And now I can peel off the mask And you can see that my vase is looking better now Since it has all that design on top Now I'm going to use the matching dies to cut out all the flowers, the leaves and my vase And I used my yellow shades to color the vase Just because I want to keep my card fresh and spring looking I decided to go with green, pinks and yellows Which I think is a great combination for spring cards Now I will add some tape adhesive at the back of my vase So that I can play around with my flowers and decide where everything is going to go I'm going to stick the three flowers inside the vase And I need to add a little bit of tape adhesive there just to secure my third flower And then I'm going to work on my card base My card base is made out of white cardstock That's a standard sized card, 4.25 x 5.5 And I have a piece of green paper which I'm going to stick at the bottom Now this is going to add a touch of design on my card So it doesn't look so plain And at the same time it's going to provide an area Where I am going to ground the vase So it's not just floating on top of my card And of course if you follow my videos You probably know by now that I love dimension on my cards So I used some foam tape at the back of the vase and the flowers For some added dimension Now I need to secure down the leaves For that I'm going to use tape adhesive at the back And just place them as if they are coming out of the vase Now I have enough empty space there to stamp my sentiment And this is a very versatile card So it would be perfect for any occasion Depending on the sentiment that you use Now I decided to go with one from the Always Flowers stamp set by Pinkfresh Studio And it says, don't forget to smile Always Flowers is a lovely stamp set Full of beautiful sentiments about flowers And it also gives you flower arrangements to color and embarrass your cards Now I need to add some finishing touches on my vase So I used my white Nuvo drops And I'm adding some dots all over the place And using those Nuvo drops are actually very addictive Once you start adding those dots you cannot stop So you will see that I'm going to add dots all over the vase And I'm also going to add some dots around the flowers And this is where I decided that I needed to add something more on my card To make it look more finished So I cut out these thin strips of patterned paper Which I'm going to stick along the edge of the green cardstock And of course my Nuvo drops are not dry yet And I had to stick my finger there Anyway, that's a mistake I always do I'm too impatient to wait for glitter and dots to dry So that was the card for today I hope you had fun that you got inspired Don't forget that this is part of a blog hoop So make sure to visit my blog to find all about it And to enter the giveaway Thank you all for watching and I'll see you next time