The Mac Observers, Mac Geekab Episode 694 for Sunday, January 28th, 2018. And welcome to the Mac Observers, Mac Geekab, the show where you send in your questions, your tips, your cool stuff found. And the goal is, of course, by sharing your questions, or all of those, and then doing our level best to answer your questions and or solicit answers from the community. Of course, the goal is that each and every one of us learn at least five new things each and every time we get together and ready to learn my five new things here in Durham, New Hampshire. I'm Dave Hamilton. And here in Fairfield, Connecticut, John F. Brunn. How you doing today, John F. Brunn? You sound better.  I'm less congested. Good. Yeah, I don't have navigation issues anymore. Right. That's good. Yeah, yeah, yeah. With my ears being clogged. Right. Right. Yeah. Very disconcerting. I can only imagine. I can only trust your own sensors. Who can you trust? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's weird. I can hear your, I can hear your chair squeaking around. So it's, uh... Yeah, I gotta, uh, I gotta get some WD-40 or something there. Reapply. That's right. I've been trying to find the exact spot where the squeak come from and I can't. Oh, well, maybe you need to get less exact and more general and just like bathe the entire, like fill your bathtub with WD-40 and then just put the chair in it. Dip the chair. It's just a dip. That's right. Think of all the other things in your house that you could dip at the same time. Right? I mean, this could be very efficient, man. And, uh, and, well, I don't, I don't think it would ever be safe to stand in your bathtub again, um, you know, certainly not with water running. I mean, I think you'd fall and like crack your head open, but, but, you know, you'd have a, uh, it would be just be a different type of bath, be a WD-40 bath. Uh-huh. I don't know if that's a good idea, though. So maybe not. Hey, uh, we got a bunch of follow-ups from previous shows. So we're going to go through those. We've got some tips. Then we have some, some topics that have been happening lately to discuss. So we might get somewhat cerebral in the middle of this one. And, uh, and of course, then we've got some questions from you and, and that sort of thing. So let's, uh, let's do it, John. Drew reminds us, shares with us and, uh, to be fair, to be accurate, corrects us. In the last episode, we were talking about note burner replacements and we got, uh, someone in the chat room said use M4V gear. It works great with High Sierra. Well, it doesn't. Um, and thank you, Drew, for reminding us of this and M4V gear seems to be a clone of note burner or note burner is a clone of M4V gear or their clones of some other thing that all shares the same code base. But when you launch it, it says it's not compatible with High Sierra. So, uh, sorry about the false alarm on that folks. We will endeavor to continue searching and hopefully find something. Also in the last show, we were talking about photos and finding corrupted photos amongst a sea of folders of various things. And, uh, Warren on Facebook had a great idea. He said, create a new photos library in photos on your Mac and just import all of the folders into that. Uh, in theory, photos will skip the bad ones and import the good ones. So, and then you could use something like power photos to sort through any duplicates that come in like that seems to me like that might actually be a really good, uh, that really good solution. You know what I mean? I like it. Yeah. And last I checked, did we, I don't know if we mentioned this last time, but a graphic converter is, uh, usually pretty good about if you see something in this that'll be like, well, I'm not quite sure what this is. If I'm going to make a guess. Got it. Got it. Yeah. Right. Yeah. There you go. Yeah. We'll put graphic converters in the, uh, in the show notes too. Um, all right. Uh, you know, also on Facebook, it came up while we're talking about different, um, different pieces of software for manipulating images. I think Ian on Facebook, I don't think I prepped it for the show. So I don't have a link, but, um, Ian on Facebook asked if there was any vector editing in programs that, that people could recommend. I think he was using like vector works or something like that, and it was sort of end of life to whatever he was using was end of life than he was having trouble. Um, Pixelmator is my Photoshop replacement of choice. Not only is it less expensive, but it's way more full, uh, full featured. And then of course now there's Pixelmator pro. Um, but Pixelmator just the regular one as of, I think like three or four years ago has a vector mode in it call that they call vector meter and it's, it completely lets you edit vector images and things like that. So, uh, bear that in mind the next time you are, you are thinking about what to do, um, because it's, uh, it's great.  I never was someone who could grok Photoshop. I mean, I can use Photoshop, but it never really, I don't know, it never stuck with me for lack of a more specific term, but, uh, but Pixelmator really, uh, really easy to use. And I feel like I'm a genius with that thing. And, and when it comes to editing photos, I am not a genius. So very, very cool. Very cool. So, uh, yeah.  Yes. Um, apparently there's something called inkscape. What's that? It's a professional vector graphics editor for Windows, Mac OS 10 and Linux. Well, cool. They're using the old terminology. Is it, um, have you used it? No. Oh, I just, I just did a, I was just surfing for vector graphics programs and it's like, Oh, this one seems popular. Interesting. Yeah. And it's totally free. So that's worth checking out too. Huh. Very cool. Oh, I'm curious what to, uh, I would like to see like, uh, they don't show any screenshots on their page. I'm always worried when it's like, you know, an app that's Mac and Windows and Linux, it's like, okay, you know, how much like X windows is this actually going to look? Right. You know what I mean? Like, is it going to feel like a Mac app? And, and sometimes that doesn't matter. And sometimes it absolutely matters. And I feel like, um, with, for me, editing images, like I really want something to feel like a Mac app. Um, and I think that honestly has been part of my problem with graphic converter over the years. It, it, it, it's not like it feels like an app from another platform, but it, it lacks some elegance in its UX. It had, it prioritizes features overflow. If that, to me, right? I mean, there were years where I used it because it was absolutely the best thing. And it, I mean, to do, it's not really an image editing app from that standpoint. It's just an image conversion app. I mean, it, it's true to its name. So yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Cool. All right. Well, there you go. Inkscape draw freely freely, freely. Um, also in 693 as listener Neil reminds us as I'm moving things around here. Um, he said a few comments on the recent discussion regarding thunder connecting a Thunderbolt external drive to an iMac with Thunderbolt two ports. I just had two quick comments to offer. Number one, you had noted that the Apple Thunderbolt two to Thunderbolt three adapter does not slow the data transfer rate. And this is true as far as I know, and that the addition of the circuitry to the data transfer path presumably does not have a noticeable impact on data transfer. He says, although I have seen no real word world test, but it is, it is important to clarify that this adapter originally marketed by Apple as a way to connect legacy Thunderbolt one and Thunderbolt two devices to the new Mac book pros and iMacs with Thunderbolt three aka USB C connectors does work bi-directionally and can be used to connect a Thunderbolt three peripheral to a Mac with an older Thunderbolt one or Thunderbolt two host port in which case the data transfer rate is of course limited to the 10 or 20 gigabits per second allowed only by Thunderbolt one or two respectively. So that's a good point. I did not know that the Thunderbolt adapter. I mean, it makes sense, right? As Neil points out, but I never really thought about it being used in the other direction. So if you get some peripheral that's Thunderbolt three over USB C, Apple's Thunderbolt two to Thunderbolt three adapter will work in the middle between that and your, you know, older Thunderbolt Mac. That's pretty good. I like it. Good. Yeah. Thoughts still not on the Thunderbolt bandwagon. I think it's close. It's it's it's knocking knock. It's knock knock knocking on your door. I think I want to try a, but we saw it that CES but a OWC has some Thunderbolt enclosures for a.  For sure. Yeah. For right. Is no no just just for a single drive. I wouldn't waste your money. I mean my feeling and not that there's anything wrong with OWC specifically just that there's no reason to pay to use a Thunderbolt interface between your Mac and a drive that's never going to go faster than yeah, you know, I mean the Thunderbolt speed is way faster than the drive speed will ever be even. But it's also an SSD. Oh yeah. Okay. So it's possible with an SSD. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Okay. All right. Cause it's with an SSD you could theoretically get something that's going to be faster than what USB three would allow. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. All right. All right. I'll allow it. No, that makes sense. That makes sense. Yeah. Yeah. Cool. All right. So thank you for that, Neil. And then going back one show before listener Marcus, well, if I don't drop a timestamp, we're all going to be unhappy says about text message forwarding that Jeff was having issues where it was not going to his iMac. He says I too have run into the occasional issues with it with that not forwarding and the following has my has been my fix every single time. Number one, I make sure to add my Apple ID accounts email address in addition to the phone number, which I typically leave is the only option as an iMessage send in receive address. He says you may try toggling it off and then back on again if you already have this email as an address. And then number two quit the messages app on my Mac allow a minute or two and then relaunch messages typically SMS forwarding or iMessage thinking we'll get the kick in the pants it needs and then number three go back and set your iMessage send and receive to the address or addresses you prefer once you've confirmed it's working. So thanks Marcus. That's that that makes sense. And I you know, I have a feeling in the middle of his step two, which was the wait a minute or two to relaunch messages. I think there's probably some value in that. Don't just quit and relaunch it quit. Let it do whatever it's going to do. So much of this stuff happens with all these background services that sort of kick off and do their thing and happen in parallel and you don't really know it. So thanks, man. That's good. Any thoughts on that, John? I think you may want to also know is that now? Okay. No, I thought that was handoff, but that's a handoff some something different. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Right. It is very related, I think, but but but different. Yeah. Yeah. All right. Anything else before we move on to the next little tip that's not related to an episode, but okay. So Brett, I love you, Brett, because you addressed an issue that's near and dear to my heart and that is the brightness of phone screens at like concerts and places where at least currently it's socially acceptable to have your phone out. Like it's not socially acceptable at the moment to have your phone out at the movies, but and it may or may not be socially acceptable to have your phone out at like live theater, but certainly at concerts it seems to be socially acceptable to have your phone out. And, you know, like, I feel like we'll sort of probably settle on something somewhere where it's like cool to take a picture here and there and maybe a short little video snippet, but when somebody becomes the official videographer in their own minds, that gets to be a little annoying. And Brett says, regardless of where you fall on that spectrum, he says, I ran across an article that pointed me to another article related to astronomy that talks about using color filters on iOS to change the color of your screen. And you can add it as a trigger to your accessibility settings too. So you can get it right from your control center. But but the place to go first, it's just go settings, general accessibility and then display accommodations. And you'll see an option in there called color filters. Well, if you turn this on, you can start doing different things to your color, which, you know, depending on if I mean, I think it's built for people in theory with with, you know, varying degrees of and varying types of color blindness. But if you go to the last option, the first option is grayscale, but the last option is color tint. And you can set that to be to essentially make your screen live, set its white point at whatever color you want. And it's those bright white screens that are really, really annoying.  And and this was an astronomy article. So again, same sort of thing. You don't want to pollute people's eyes with bright white light when they're in the dark. So they set the hue. You get two sliders. When you turn on color tint inside of color filters, one is the intensity, how much of this it's going to apply. And then the other is huge. So the astronomy articles suggest cranking the intensity all the way up so that you get all of this color and then setting the hue all the way to the left, which sets it to red. And now you get when anything that's white on your screen will be red and far less annoying and obtrusive in the dark. So it won't affect your pictures or your videos.  This is just how it's displayed on the screen. So do that and then turn your brightness down. If you're going to do this, it shows and you know, things might be there you go. Yeah, well, I remember, you know, when I was in band or on stage or something, they would typically you put a red gel over a light bulb over your stand light. Yeah. Yeah. I you know, it's funny. I was thinking about that last night and it had been a long time since I thought about that. But now all the stand lights are LED and they're this awful, you know, they're like that awful, you know, six K very blue LED light color and it just looks terrible. It would be way better to put a gel over those and you there's no reason you couldn't gel an LED light. I mean, it's the same concept, right? But that's kind of red LED. Well, that too. Yes, there's that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But some people are probably going to be like, I need bright white. Like, no, you don't get used to it. Actually, I thought about last night in the theater. I was doing a theater show all weekend and as usual, of course, reading from my reading the music from my iPad. For this one, it was using the 10 and a half inch iPad Pro, which was great. And I actually thought about doing that and turning it to like a red screen as opposed to a white screen. A lot of times I'll invert it entirely so that it's black on or white text on black print, which is easier to see in the dark in many cases, although when it comes to music on a staff for whatever reason, I like and maybe it's just because of the way my brain's wired and what I'm used to. But I have a harder time reading intricate rhythms that way versus black on white. I don't know why so. But you guys used to just gel your your stand lights. Is that right? Yep. Back in the days of incandescent bulbs. Yeah. To date myself here. Yeah. You know, there's a lot of lighting designers. I encounter them in theater, but I'm sure it's true everywhere that that appreciate the the flexibility of LED lights, especially, you know, when you can have colors that change and strobing and all of that stuff, but but still use incandescent because Ford for a lot of the just general lighting because it simply looks more pleasing to at least their eyes. And I don't disagree necessarily.  It's all good. Any more thoughts on that one, man? Before we move on. Okay. So this next little tip is a combination of something I received from a listener and I don't have your name. I think you said they might have been Jason Taylor or was it Jason Hooper? I think it was Jason Hooper actually on Twitter. But you know, when you stay in it, I figured this out sort of in parallel while staying at the hotel for CES, they had Wi-Fi as John, you mentioned in the last show was, you know, quote unquote free. It was included, but you had to reauthenticate with their portal once every 24 hours. It was a typical captive portal kind of thing that happens where you have to say, yep, I'm here. It's cool. And then and then you were good to go. It didn't incur any other charges at this particular hotel, but otherwise, you know, very much the same thing that you see at a lot of these places. And a lot of times I would hit my 24 hour number, you know, whenever that was, which was I think sometime in the evening every day, because that's when I first checked into my room. And it would, it would take a lot of jiggering to finally get it to load the portal, you know, and once it loaded the portal, then of course I could click the one button I needed to click and it, you know, would let me in and everything else worked. And I find it finally hit me after the second day, John, that the problem is that every page that I had open in my browser, normally it would just take one of those and like, you know, redirect it to the portal, but it wasn't happening. And I realized these days every page that I had open in my browser was SSL, you know, I was writing a lot of articles at Mac Observer. We've been SSL site-wide for, you know, what going on two years now. Google is SSL like everything's SSL and my browser was being smart and just not even letting that happen where it wants to redirect to a non SSL page with a different certificate and it seems like DNS spoofing because that's kind of how they do that to make those portals work. And so I started loading a non SSL page any time I, you know, realized what was going on and it totally worked. And so there's your answer. But there's an even better answer and this is where I think it was Jason Hooper on Twitter shared a URL to use and the URL is easy to remember. It's never SSL.com. So as more and more sites become SSL capable or even just SSL only, it's harder and harder to find one when you need to tell your browser. No, please go to a, you know, a non-secure link. And so never SSL.com says they will never be SSL and that hopefully should do it. So there you go for those captive portal things. You know what I mean? Did you run into that too, John? It was funny. The behavior of it was inconsistent depending if I was using, I think on my Mac, it actually just logged right into whatever MGM. Yeah, whatever the name was, it was a MGM property. It was actually kind of interesting because when we moved between buildings that were both MGM properties, my phone actually connected automatically. It's like, oh, here's, here's MGM Wi-Fi. Right, right. Yeah, it was really neat. But I think on my computer, it didn't ask for any additional information, but for my iDevice, it did, which I thought was kind of weird. Huh. So it didn't seem to do authentication on one device. Yep. But on the other, it did. Yep. All right. Well, there you go. So there's a, there's your, there's your tip for today. We have another tip that came from both Leon and Abby in our Facebook group at mackekeb.com slash Facebook where Leon started talking about how he got tired of Dropbox being a CPU hog again. And, and he also needs to sync with like Google Drive and Microsoft OneDrive. And it was driving him crazy to have all of these things. Dropbox is an awful CPU hog. It seems to want to be aware of any changes that are happening to files anywhere on your Mac as opposed to just in the Dropbox folder. It's not doing anything wrong with them or doing anything to them at all, quite frankly, but anytime there's, you know, file activity anywhere Dropbox just like, you know, spawns up and, and goes nuts. And really it should only be doing that on its folder, but hey, whatever. So he said, you know, combine those three with his Synology cloud station drive. And he says, I started getting overwhelmed with all my sync clients. He says, I don't use any apps on my Mac that required direct access to any of these clients APIs. So I found a nice way to clean it up. I installed cloud sync on his Synology on my Synology. I'll stick with Leon's voice here. So he says, I use cloud sync on my Synology so that it syncs with Dropbox, Google and OneDrive. I share the synced folders from my Synology and then use the Synology cloud station drive client to sync everything to my Mac. So he's got his disk station, his Synology, doing all of the work of syncing with these varied services and then his Mac only syncs with his disk station, which of course it can do locally or remotely. And that's where he gets his updates all from one app and he says it really simplifies things and his CPU is way more idle than it used to be. That's interesting. Um, I haven't done that yet, but I like the I like the efficiencies there in.  So and it's not really a single point of failure. It's just a single point of failure of convenience. If something happens to your disk station and you need a file that was on Dropbox, you can still go get that from Dropbox. It's not like it's inaccessible to you. It's just not conveniently accessible. And then, um, in the comments there, Abby commented, he says, I use expand drive to do the same thing. Um, and he says, and the benefit there is that the API is in hidden files all still work. And the nice part about expand drive is you don't need to have a Synology disk station to do this expand drive. Does it all just on your Mac? So there's two solutions to the problem. You didn't know you have, but now you do. So what do you think, John? Yeah, I was having, uh, so I'm using the, you know, cloud station. Okay. And actually I was having it act up. So here's a tip for some people here. So I noticed it was taking quite a bit of space. So I'm like, hmm, I wonder what, you know, what it's getting so excited about. What it was getting excited about is that, uh, apparently it saw the activity in the, uh, now that I have iCloud photo library on it kept getting really upset that that file kept changing. Even though you want a time, even though you weren't syncing that file with cloud station, or you were syncing that with cloud station. Yes, I was. Oh, okay. The thing is that, and so the act and so there was a flurry of activity where it kept getting stuck on the iCloud photo library file and kept trying to update it because it saw like constant activity on it. It's like, well, I, you know, I got to sync this because it's changing. Oh, it changed it again. Right. And it was taken up like half of my CPU and so I'm like, okay, let's not sync that. Yeah, I wouldn't, I, I ran into that. I think I tried with, was it Dropbox or maybe it was Resilio sync, which was BitTorrent sync prior. Um, I ran into the same thing a couple of years ago when I decided to start syncing my, my photo library that way. And it was like, oh yeah, no, no, this is bad. And actually I ran, I ran into it becoming corrupted over and over again. I was finally like, no, I need to back this up a different way. So I just clone it daily now from where it lives in an active sense to a location. Actually, I think it's on my disk station, but it doesn't matter. You know, you clone it anywhere you want and I just do that and it's backed up but not synced and life is just calmer and more predictable, which is good. Yeah, good. Yeah. All right, good. Uh, let's see where we are. Um, all right. So you know what? Actually, I want to take a minute and thank everybody on our premium subscriber list that, uh, that made their contributions this week. As you know, uh, premium is a huge part of what supports our ability to continue to do this here at, uh, at Mac Geek App Central. And you know, it sort of in the same vein, we couldn't do this without you. Um, it really takes all of us to be perfectly fair. You know, uh, the questions and tips from everyone, everybody listening. Uh, every one of you matters for us for a variety of reasons. Um, and you know, they're sort of all over the place, but, uh, but we really do. And those of you that can and are willing to contribute some, you know, helps even a little bit more. And so if you want to learn about that, go to macgeekapp.com slash premium this week. We had a one time $25 contribution from Jim L on the monthly $10 plan. We had Nick S and David M renew this week. Also, Micah P, who is on the monthly $15 plan. And then on the biannual $25 plan, we have Michael D, Dionysio Y, Dan B, Mike D, Ralph M, Tim M, and Joseph K. And then adding to the biannual plan this week, uh, was Tom H at a $75 every six month contribution. So thank you to all of you. Like I said, we, uh, we couldn't do this without you and it really means a lot. So thank you so much. And with that, John, I want to get into something that might lead to a little bit of a cerebral conversation, which is good for us. And that is some of the changes that have happened recently to Mac OS or been announced, uh, that are coming to Mac OS server. For those of you that don't know, Mac OS server has essentially been a graphical interface to that you can add for 20 bucks from Apple to your Mac to give you the ability to manage a bunch of what otherwise would be command line only type of services for servers of a variety of kinds, the file servers and web servers and mail servers and DNS servers and calendar servers and all of that stuff. Well, Apple announced that Mac OS server is changing to focus more on management of computers, devices and storage on your network. And some changes are coming in how server works. In that a number of services will be deprecated and will be hidden on new installations of an update coming in spring 2018. They do say if you've already configured one of these services, you'll still be able to use it in this Mac OS server update. But I will point out that, you know, deprecation generally follows a path of we're going to recommend you stop using it. We're going to not let new people use it and then we're not going to let people use it at all. I don't think these services are going to actually leave Mac OS. They are just not going to be part of the GUI that is Mac OS server. And they include calendar servers, contacts servers, DHCP, DNS, mail servers, messages servers, net install VPN servers, web servers and wiki servers. And there are at least two, if not three that are being deprecated in every one of those categories. And when I look at the web server category and I see that Apache, Nginx and light HTTPD are being deprecated, there are no others. So it's gone. It's not that they're saying, well, these aren't really used often. So we'll turn them off in favor of something else. No, no, if you're not going to have Apache and Nginx, you don't have web servers. So that they're just closing off these things. Before I, so what do you think about this, John? I don't know if they should call it server anymore because what they're offering is what a server is supposed to do whereas they're proposed redirection, you know, to device management. I don't see that as really a purpose of a purpose of a server. I'd more call that like a management console or a configurator, right? Right. I believe that Mac OS server for device management, does it do it? It doesn't do it remotely. Right. It's only for things that you direct attach.  So yeah, I saw this as a very dim bit of news. But in our Facebook group, just why I love this group, Graham posted, he said, I have to admit that most of my clients who use server are now doing so just for storage purposes file sharing and time machine. They will be, there will be a few affected by this change, but they're likely, they're just as likely to not upgrade or update Mac OS anyway. So that's interesting, right? And maybe this is where Apple's decision is coming from, that most people aren't bothering to use a web server and a calendar server and a contact server or any of that. Most of their users aren't. So the cost of maintaining and updating that GUI doesn't make sense for Apple if the people that are using this are not using those much, if at all. And so maybe it's them just saying, okay, here's what our customers are using and let's go use it. And if that's the case, well then that's not a bad thing at all, is it? Right? Just because it's there doesn't mean people use it. Sure. So maybe this isn't dim news that I thought it was. I mean there's, and actually now that I think about it, it is, there's kind of an indirect way to use it for device management when we were talking about radius or something similar. I know that this came up is that you can potentially use, it's kind of hidden though. Okay. That's service, that's really the only device managed, but I mean to me that's something that people, most people really aren't using. OS server, Mac OS server 4. Right. Right. No, just again, digging back, I know that they have a version of radius buried within server and you can use that. I think the topic was how do I prevent my kids from using the internet or the Wi-Fi during certain times. So I'm going to offer a correction to what I said before, John. They are taking all of these things out, but what they list on here is alternatives that you can go and get. So they're saying, yeah, we're taking out the ability to configure web serving, which in OS server is Apache. Right.  So it's not like they're taking those out. They're offering that these are your options. So yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So thanks for that. That's actually Graham in the chat room on your stream. Hello. For offering that bit of correction. But still, yeah, yeah. It's interesting. I'm surprised that people aren't, although I guess, you know, I was going to say I'm surprised people aren't running calendar servers. I grok why people might not be running, you know, DHCP or DNS on their Mac OS server. Like you've got a router that's going to be able to do that. This is duplicate functionality. There's a reason to leverage it. Don't get me wrong. You know, having all, like you said, John, even using radius or whatever, having all of your authentication and accounts in one place can really help with simplification of management. But, you know, running a mail server is, it's heavy lifting, man. It's, and that can be a real bear. So yeah. But calendar, I always kind of felt like I'm surprised if people aren't using calendar server because it seems like that would have been a good, it seems like Apple was putting a lot of work into that. And maybe they were for a while and then walked away. So there you go. Yeah. All right. Well, there's one. Anything else on this, John, before we move on? No, I noticed they just actually upgraded server with the other updates that came out. Right, right. It's like 5.5 right now and they fixed a few bugs. Okay. Okay. Huh. All right. A question from listener Todd that I think might also send us into the, in this direction, John. He says, I know you've had a Synology NAS for a long time, both of you, and I think you're happy with them. He says, I'd love to get a NAS, but I've been reluctant to jump in for a few reasons. A big one being that from reading forms and reviews, it sometimes doesn't play well with the Mac. I'd actually like to see those reviews because I've had pretty good experience with the Mac, but he makes some other very salient points. Also, he says, despite DSM being a very well-regarded OS for a NAS, it still takes some configuration and skill to set up properly. That's very true. He says, so I've long hoped for an Apple NAS, not because I'm a fanboy and would buy anything Apple. He says, in fact, I've become very frustrated and disillusioned over some things in the past few years, but he says, I think an Apple NAS would be so much easier to set up and more reliable, at least for NAS newbies like me. I'd even be fine. Well, they have one. Remember? Let me finish his thought here. OK. And then, yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He says, I'd even be fine with something Euro-like. I know there are a few user friendly Mac-friendly NAS boxes already, like MyCloud from WD and Apollo from Promise, but they don't seem to have great reviews. He said, today I saw an article at Apple World discussing that Apple might finally be exploring a NAS. He saw an article about a patent filed for, you know, personal cloud type stuff from Apple. He says, I'd be interested to hear your thoughts on how an Apple NAS could be better than a Synology, or how a Synology NAS can be tricky with a map, or if you entirely disagree. So, John, yeah, finish your thought there. Well, I thought it was. And actually, I actually played with one many years ago when Apple had, or I had a relationship with Apple Enterprise Sales, because I was working in an Enterprise, not the Enterprise, but. Right. Right. Of course. But the X-Serve was Apple's first shot at that, right? Yeah. Yeah. I would call that more of a server than a network-attached storage device. I mean, I realized. If I recall, it offered the option. Yeah. And then you could arrange the, you know, you could arrange the disks in some sort of rate from what I recall. So it could have been. Oh, yeah, yeah. From that standpoint. It would act as a NAS. And then the other thing I'm looking at here, so I finally just fired up the latest version of a server on my machine here. And here's something else interesting, which I don't know if they're going to deprecate, but there's a category, advanced category in the server currently called XSAN. Okay. Which apparently you can use Fiber Channel to connect what they call a storage area network. I'll have to dig into that. So that sounds like another kind of Nazi-like thing they may currently do, at least with server, but I don't happen to have any Fiber Channel stuff here. So. Right. Right. Huh. Yeah. Well, okay. So you're right. Right.  But like, Apple's definitely never offered a NAS for consumers.  And now, first of all, should Apple like do we would we want an an Apple NAS before before we even get into the NAS for newbies, you know, question. And I don't I don't know. I mean, certainly there's a lot of smart people at Apple. They could focus on making a great, you know, network attached storage or private cloud device or whatever you would want to call that. But like that doesn't fall into what I consider Apple's core competency. And so I'm not sure there's plenty of players in the space already. Yeah, I'm not sure. And to Apple's credit, like they'll it wouldn't surprise me if they had a team go and build like if Apple were building as what would that be like. So, you know, you whatever 25 people go like run forth and do this and then Apple will evaluate it in comparison to what their customers want or what they think their customers want and what the market already offers. And if they feel like they can they've got something that's remarkably better, they'll go ahead and roll it out.  And I think that's like that's a really good trait of Apple is that they're willing to invest something and then say no. My guess is that that is what is happening there because and probably where this patent came from, right? They developed something. But I just don't I can't see what Apple would add to this that would be valuable. And the reason is that, you know, like I totally get what you're saying. I actually don't get what you're saying about technology not playing nice with the Mac. They're Apple like clients and native apps and everything that integrate really work well for me. And, you know, I can connect to it anywhere I want, any way I want it really for me has become an extension of my Apple universe. So so from that standpoint it's great. But it's very complex. I mean, the user interface is friendly. It's easy to do things once you know how to do them. You know, like it's I will say to your comment earlier about UX. Yeah. I don't the DSM user experience for setting up certain things is terrible. Right. Totally. You have to go to like four different places.  You have to pop into like, you know, several areas in order to get that right. Right. Right. Oh, yeah. No, no. Am I doing this right? Yeah. Is this really how they meant to do this?  It is. Oh, well. Yeah. No, I totally agree with you that like that part of it. Again, once you know what to do, it's very easy to get around. So it's not clumsy in that standpoint, but it's definitely it lacks a lot of intuitiveness that is, um, you know, sort of the trade off for all the flexibility that you can have. So in our chat room here actually, Brian brings up a good point is that a time machine was kind of Apple's NAS. So, you know, it didn't have any sort of, uh, you know, it was a single drive network attached. Yeah. In a sense. It didn't have, it had the smarts of a router, but it didn't have the smarts of like being able to run any other services other than file sharing, which, you know, again, like that's probably what 90% of the people need.  I feel like they either those circles never intersect or they only intersect for a sliver because I think once you get a NAS you will like you you are no longer a novice user. Like I just don't see how you would do this. I guess the one way that Apple could do like, you know, private cloud or novice NAS or whatever is to sell you really just a black box or a white box or whatever you want. That's totally not configurable. Right. Just a magic box that sits on your network and, uh, automatically your iCloud photo library is just on it. Right. Without you having to configure anything, automatically your iCloud drive is just on it. Without you having to configure anything, you know, it becomes a software update server. Without, again, no configuration. You just plug it in and go.  Like I can see that being valuable to be perfectly honest. But that would frustrate the geeks. And I'm not saying that they shouldn't sell that. But like once they, if they were to even begin to cater to the geeks with a box like that, it would still be frustrating because it wouldn't ever have enough features to, you know, to, to, to be what geeks want. So it'd be better to leave it as I initially described, just this completely, you know, unconfigurable thing. You can't add apps to it.  It just becomes this thing that that's just a data storehouse. And we've seen this every time. But for some people that is what they're looking for, like, especially when I'm into like the, the PhotoPlus show. Photographers, they just want, for the most part, they just want a place to store their pictures about RAID levels and stuff like that. They just throw discs into it and they get storage. Right. Yeah. If storage is all you want with a NAS, then absolutely, you know, NAS for novices works. But as soon as you start opening that door or it, and maybe even better to say it this way, as soon as a manufacturer provides you a path to open that door beyond storage, what I've experienced, certainly for myself, but also, you know, something from you folks listening and others, is that, because there have been some NASs for novices built with like a very limited set of beyond storage features, you know, like maybe one little media server or an iTunes server or something. Over time and it doesn't take much time, those services sort of become stale and users want more or different for an upgrade or something and without the ability and the openness of something like a Synology or a QNAP where you just have all these services available, maybe too much for novices, in fact, definitely too much. You immediately, like there's this frustration that sets in at about the six month mark, right? So these people buy these novice NAS things and put stuff on them and then realize, hey, well, if I can do that on here in a sense to do this and then suddenly you hit a wall and most of those people wind up jumping to, you know, Synology or QNAP, really, or the two that that are worth talking about in that sense. So I, like if you want more than just, you know, black box that you never think about and never can configure, which I do, actually now that we've described it, I think that would be a great thing for Apple to make to be perfectly honest. But if like that would be good with all the openness, like a Synology would be good. Anything in between, I think just leads to frustration. Like that, that's just my experience. Yeah. Yeah. Well, my observation is that for a lot of people, a Drobo is, if you just want storage is exactly what they need because you don't need any knowledge of, you know, all the technical. Right, right. No, I totally, I totally agree with that. If all you want is storage, that's right. And then there's frustration with their, you know, here's a couple of app type things that you can add to this.   And then they're like, I got a networked one and it's great for storage. And it has these other things that I started playing around with, but can I do this? Do you know how to do that?  So I feel like they should just not even have that door open. It should just be network storage and nothing more. I don't know, maybe, you know, whatever. It's not my company. I can, I can, you know, I can say whatever I want.  All right. Yep. Okay. Now where are we, John? You know what, let's just stick with it. So Leslie, Leslie wrote in and sort of opened the HomePod can of worms. It says, I think the best reason to buy HomePod and Apple's main reason for making it is that it's an extension of Apple Music. It will be the easiest way to stream the service. HomePod is to Apple Music as Apple Watch is to iPhone. That's a really interesting perspective on HomePod. You know, it's been interesting watching HomePod, the messaging around HomePod change, right? When they announced it at WWDC, it was that plus Home Assistant with Siri, plus, you know, multi-room audio plus stereo pairing, right? And I thought, man, those three things, the Home Assistant, the multi-room audio, the stereo, stereo pairing, we even said that on this show, are really difficult to do. And I would say even impossible to do write the first time out of the gate because you need a very, very widespread, you know, test audience. So I feel like the HomePod beta test begins on February 9th, right? And it's an open beta and you can pay to participate in it by buying a HomePod and what you get out of it is you get to play with this thing and you'll be the first to get updates because they'll push them out via software. And so what's changed with the messaging is, you know, two weeks ago, they said, all right, multi-room audio and stereo pairing, we're not doing those in version one because it's like, it's really hard to do. They had to pick one hard thing to do out of the gate and that's, you know, Siri out loud, right? Farfield Voice with Siri. Also extremely difficult to do, but I don't think they could get away with not having Siri in it at some point on day one. And honestly, I think that's where the delays came from was that, right? I don't think it's a hardware issue or anything. None of these parts are, you know, difficult to get or anything like that. And I don't think they're going to sell so many of them that it's going to constrain supply. I mean, I think there's so plenty of them. Don't get me wrong. But, but, but yeah. And then to downplay that even more, right? Last week in Canada, Tim Cook starts talking about how the best part about HomePod is that it's a really great sounding speaker. Not even talking about how great Siri is because even the initial reviews are like, you know, Siri's tough on this thing, which is exactly what I heard from somebody that I talked to at CES that has one. And they'll get it right. I have no doubt. But having watched, you know, Amazon and Google do this and having with the voice and then having watched Sonos, you know, struggled and figure out how multi-room audio works in millions of homes when conditions are weird and different. Like this is going to be a support nightmare for Apple. And they need to sort of embrace that and make it a part of the way the product works because it's just the only way that goes. So it's interesting to see, you know, the messaging change from these four things down to these two things and then really just focusing on the one. I think I would assume, and I can't wait to hear one, I ordered one, that HomePod will sound great. You know, will it sound better than a $250 speaker or better than a $10,000 speaker or an $85,000 speaker or some people on Reddit are claiming? I don't know, right? We'll find out. But sound quality is not a problem we needed solved. It's not a bad problem to solve, right? It's a really good problem to solve, in fact. But like other people have solved that problem. That's a checked box. So it's interesting to see Apple, you know, refocusing their messaging to the point where they're saying, hey, me too. So it's interesting to me. I'm curious to watch this. What do you think, John? I think it's not for me. Are you sure about that? Not for the... Well, not for the smart home stuff, because none of my stuff speaks HomeKit. Well, that's what I'm saying. Even Apple is downplaying that. And my audio setup here I'm satisfied with, so... Right. And that's just it. But for sound aficionado such as you... Yeah. Well, but my sound... Even as a sound aficionado, I don't consider myself an audiophile. I like the term you just used, right? Sound aficionado. I care... No, I do. I care about sound, but I'm not like... I don't get... To me, audiophiles, and there's nothing wrong with this, in fact, I think it's great. To me, audiophiles, as much about the hobby as it is about how it actually sounds, right? So, like, there are people out there that will tell you until their last breath that vinyl sounds better, right? And we've had this conversation in different ways here. But, like... And two amps. And two amps sound better, right? Right, right, no. And only speakers that I built with my hands sound the way I want them to sound.  In fact, it's a necessary part of it that, like, even if we're aware of the fact that confirmation bias could affect us, it still affects us exactly the same, right? Especially when it comes to audio. Because if we think that vinyl sounds better, which I don't, by the way, but it doesn't matter if you do. It's great that you do. If you think it sounds better, and therefore, in your mind, it does sound better playing vinyl, then that's great, right? It sounds good to you. That's what matters. It doesn't... Like, it's the end result, which is sort of the combination of it. And to me, the audio files are the hobbyists that like to spend time so that when they go and enjoy their music after spending all this time and money and research and tweaking or whatever it is, however they get themselves there, that's cool. I appreciate that stuff. I understand some of it, certainly not all of it, but it's not my hobby, right? I have other hobbies. Plenty of them, but not enough time in the day. So, to me, I just want music to sound good. But I also suffer from confirmation bias. Sonos stuff sounds good. Is it the greatest sound in the world? I don't think so. I mean, probably not. But it sounds really good. They keep working on making it sound better. And the Sonos experience, again, just like the vinyl experience for some and the tube amp experience for others, for me, the Sonos experience is delightful. And it sounds, you know, good enough, frankly, a lot more than good enough so that I'm happy with the whole of it. And yes, some confirmation bias falls into that. So, but that's the thing is, people that were going to solve this problem have solved it. Not only manufacturers, but customers. And I even saw Rene Ritchie. It's been interesting watching him because he seems to be very bullish on HomePod. I don't think he's heard it since WWDC, but he's posting very, very positive things and really trying to work on this audio quality angle and how that's going to be great. But even he said, yeah, I've got a bunch of Sonos stuff in my house. I was hoping to only want to buy one HomePod and not replace all of my Sonos stuff with HomePod. He solved that problem, too. So, I'm curious where this goes. Obviously, Apple is big enough to compete in any market they want to compete in. You know, speakers, cars, airplanes, whatever they want to do, they could do. And they could last out that first, whatever, ramp-up period where they have to sort of wait for buying cycles to come around and people to really buy these things. So, if Apple wants to do this, I'm just not sure where HomePod fits. But I said the same thing about the iPod. iPad, when that came out, and now you'd have to pry mine for my cold-did fingers. I don't know. I don't know. I think for HomePod to succeed, they will need HomePod Mini and HomeBar or HomePodBar, BarPod or something sound-bar-ish to pair with an Apple TV. Why that doesn't seem to be part of the roadmap in the short term is weird to me. I have an Apple TV in my living room along with my HomePod and the sound from my Apple TV for movies and shows on it cannot be involved with HomePod. And never will be, to be perfectly honest. I've heard some people say, well, you could buy two Homepods and put them in a stereo pair. But you still need a center-channel speaker to do that properly. It doesn't have to be a super-high-quality center-channel speaker. But with music, you can get away with bouncing sound around and making it all sound good. You can get away with that with TV, too, but your movies and TV as well. But you need a speaker that comes from the middle of your TV in order to not feel like you're in a weird zone watching TV with dialogue coming from the sides and trying to be bounced in. So there would need to be a different piece of hardware and a different form factor from Apple to help solve that problem. It's just a fact. So I don't know. Any other thoughts on this, John? I've been rambling. That's the fact. Jack. Yep. Yep. All right. All right. Let's get technical. Should we? Okay. Well, not yet. Okay. We can get technical. You want to ease into it? All right. We'll take Kenny's question from Facebook then. We're at the hour mark, so we get a little time here. Kenny says, I'm looking for some advice. Is there a site that you can plug in some information about something you want to buy or find and then get notifications from that site if a less expensive price is found? It would be ideal for something you kind of want to buy, but only if you can find a deal. I think that explains it. And so there are, there are plenty of sites in the, in the Facebook comments, people mentioned slick deals. They mentioned camel, camel, camel. And what's the other one? thrifter.com. I think John was, was one you mentioned in a previous show too. Right. Yes. Yeah. They have daily deals and I've got a couple of them. I don't know how they swing it. You go to Amazon and it's like, oh, well here's a, you know, virtual coupon for the thing that, so I don't know if they scour Amazon for, I'm sure they do. I bought a router and a few other things through them. That's good. That's good. Yeah. So the thing I know is that some credit cards have like a rewind feature. I think one of my city cards does where if you find something for a lower price, they'll actually refund the money to you, which is a kind of slick. Yeah. That's right. In fact, I've had that done quite a bit. Most, most of your credit cards, especially like rewards cards that have some more features and you might pay an annual fee for it. A lot of those add, you know, whatever, somewhere between 30 and 90 days of price protection. And if you can find it, you know, on fore sale, I should say at a lower price, they'll just credit you back. So yeah. All right. Good. If you have any of those, send them to us. Feedback at MackieGab.com. I don't know if I heard you right. Well, I think I do because I'm getting less congested now, but I'm pretty sure, Dave, you said feedback at MackieGab.com. As far as you know, I said feedback at MackieGab.com. Yeah. That's correct. That's correct. You want to take us to Jim, John? Now you want to dive into some of the tech stuff? Yeah. Okay. Jim's got a head scratcher and actually we may have to cogitate on this for a bit because dive right in. All right. So Jim says, I need some help with my new to me refurbished 15 inch Retina MacBook Pro mid 2014 running high Sierra upon receipt of the machine, which already had one admin account configured with all of the high Sierra updates installed, which is kind of weird. I think I've never received a refurbished machine that's already set up. No, but I can see it happening.  And I think this may be the basis of this may be the cause of the problem here. Let's continue. So he says that I then use migration assisted to bring two accounts with files and applications from my MacBook Air 2011 running Sierra to the new MacBook Pro. After the migration, I attempted to enable file vault from the admin account that was on the machine at the time of the purchase. File Vault listed both of the two other accounts previously on my MacBook Air and asked for their passwords, which I entered in the system validated trying to enable file vault by clicking continue. The system returned the following message. The following users weren't allowed to unlock this disk because an unknown error occurred. Then it listed the names of the two user accounts that I migrated. Have you run into this error or found any way to correct it?   You know? Yeah. I mean, if it knows an error occurred, how can it say... It's like I know an error occurred, but I don't. Right. Right. Yeah. Wow. Shake my fist at them along with numeric error codes. Guys, stop. Put it in my language. All right. So, I did some surfing here, and I actually found an article, which we should link to here, but it talks about... it's actually from a UVM, University of Vermont, I guess, right? Oh, yeah, right over in Burlington. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, but they had a little article in their support site saying File Vault 2, enabling and disabling additional authorized users. And I think I came across that article because I typed in the name of the stupid error, and this is one of the things that came up. Now, I've never seen this. So, the thing is, I work... If you work your way through the article, at some point, you'll see the File Vault screen, and I don't see this, Dave, and I don't think you do, because, well, I don't know about you, but I only have one user on my computer. So, I'm never going to see this dialogue that says, oh, by the way, there's a...  However, he, you know, adds them and confirms them, and then the unknown error occurs. One suggestion, Dave, is a lot of times, if the GUI doesn't work, you got to roll up your sleeves and go into the terminal. And the thing is, Dave, I did not know this, so we just learned at least one new thing. Well, no, we've learned a lot. But from the command line, you can issue the following. Pseudo space FDE setup space add space dash user to add space username. You may have success adding that user. Adding a user that way. Sure. And yeah, it's the File Vault configuration tool, which I never knew. I never knew that there was such a thing in the command line. I'm with you. I didn't know that that that was even a thing. It seems weird to me for whole disk encryption that you would have users that couldn't access the disk. I mean, although I get it, right? From a security model standpoint, sure. From a user experience, you know, these are built for consumers standpoint. Wow. You know what I mean? I don't know why there's this level of granularity. Yeah, exactly. As far as I know, the key is stored in the recovery partition, the File Vault key, right? Or at least the one point of us. Huh. So I don't know what you need this additional level here, but so a couple of suggestions, Dave. Let's try to add the authorized user using the command line. The other, like I said, it made me kind of nervous that the machine already came with an admin account. You may want to take that machine and do a fresh install. Yeah. And go through the... I'm thinking because it was already set up, there may be some other restrictions on that admin account. Well, it sounds like there are some other things that you could do. So my suggestion would be to reformat. Yeah, I would reformat. And do the migration assistant again, and I think you may have a more pleasant experience. Yeah. The other thing is that the error... Now this may have affected the migration, so he said the error that he wants to bring this stuff from has Sierra. Last I checked that if upgrading that machine to high Sierra may... There may be some mysterious incompatibility with importing from a Sierra machine to a high Sierra. I don't know. Just a thought. I don't think it could hurt. And Mac Tracker indicates that that vintage machine should accept that update. Yeah. Yeah, that's a weird one. Huh. Yeah. Alright. Two things about that. Well, number one, I was a little distracted. So you'll appreciate this, John, because my machine started deciding that it needed to run four or five processes right now full tilt to index spotlight. All these empty worker processes fired up. So thankfully in the chat room I asked, can somebody remind me of the terminal command to just disable spotlight? I can't think about it.  So sudo mdutil-i off slash solve that problem for me. After we finish recording I'll turn it back on. It seems empty stores is probably erasing my spotlight index right now, but that's okay. It'll rebuild it later. He also pointed out though, several times Brian's a consultant out in the San Francisco Bay area for lack of... Actually, I think that's exactly right. And so he sees a lot of these machines in person, as many of our listeners do. And he started by saying, do not enable file vault on a MacBook Air. They corrupt the system. And he says, I've seen a couple of MacBook Airs that do not like file vault. Please tell them to skip file vault. So clearly he's had an experience with this. I have still my old 2011 air that I breathed new life into recently with disabling all those other things that wanted to run in the background. And I have no problems with file vault too on that machine. But I don't want to discount Brian's experiences here. If he's seen that on multiple machines, it's worth sort of factoring that into our canon of knowledge here. So thanks, Brian. Yeah, good, John. Yeah, okay. Now I got to figure out where I am. I had to do some on the fly stuff. Oh yeah, let's go to Royce. He has a question about Java. He says, I keep getting a pop-up window on my 13 inch MacBook Pro that says to use the Java command line tool you need to install a JDK. Click more info to visit the Java developer kit download website. And he says, it took me to some Java page where I cannot track down anything that looks like it would make this thing go away forever. In the course of a day, it will pop up about four to eight times, definitely if the computer is left running overnight and doesn't seem associated with any specific app running in the foreground any ideas of what course of action I could take. So there's a couple things that will actually will tell you how to install Java on your Mac but then we'll also talk about how to figure out what might be wanting to run it. But the first thing I'll say is that Java is not bad. It has gotten a there is a negative association with Java largely because of running Java inside your web browser via the plug-in can be very, very bad because it opened up all kinds of security holes in different ways. There's just no way to protect around that if you're going to choose to let some website run a program on your computer. Right? Let's think about that again. Some website gets to run its own program on your computer without you really having anything to say about it after saying okay. So that's where Java can be very, very bad. But if there were a way to say run, you know, objective C binaries from a website on your computer, that would also be very, very bad. It's not just Java. It's that Java has the flexibility to allow this. Don't. But running Java binaries that you've downloaded or installed on your Mac that you know what they are. That's totally okay. Just like it's totally okay to run objective C binaries that you've installed on your Mac. Like all good. Java binaries need usually a Java runtime environment a JRE not Java development kit and maybe that's what Royce needs here too. But there you can go get either. So to get the Java runtime environment and that's honestly even though I know it's saying you got to get a JDK I would start with the JRE I think that's at java.com slash en slash download right we'll put that in the show notes and then John you found a link to download the development kit that the downloading the JRE the runtime environments pretty pretty straightforward right the web page is just sort of looks normal and easy to understand what you're supposed to do. I think there's one link and you just download it you're good to go don't let it install the plugin in your browser though or if it does just disable it the page to download the development kit looks like it's built hey for developers and you've got all kinds of things there's Java development kit right now anyway 8u161 then there's Java sorry Java SE development kit 8u161 then there's Java SE development kit 8u162 then there's demos and samples for each of those I would choose and then in each of those things for different flavors like six different flavors of Linux five different flavors of Solaris two flavors of windows and thankfully only one for macOS and it's a disk image so I would either pick 8u the development kit for 8u161 or 8u162 I don't know why they're offering to maybe they're transitioning from one to the other do you know John I'd pick the I'd pick the first one on the page is frankly what I would do I think 8 is the current I think 8 is what you want well 8 well but they're both 8 it's either 8u161 or 8u162 I mean oh well the latest is always the best yeah right I'd pick the one at the top of the page which is 8u161 I don't think I mean unless you're actually doing development you're probably not going to care about the changes in in 162 and if they're not confident enough to have that as the only one on the page I'm okay with that right so just download the disk image there if the runtime environment doesn't work and get it installed and then you'll be able to run Java on your Mac and these are both these websites that we're going to link to are not Apple websites they are Oracle websites Oracle maintains Java these days now Apple used to offer their own packaging and sometimes that is the cause especially on older machines why you get a Java related dialogue right right yeah it was kind of confusing for a while because you know Java was supposed to be right once run anywhere it's like well why is Apple making their own version then yeah because it's Apple John yeah so do you agree I mean you've done some Java development I've only ever worked with people that have done it and then of course run things on my Mac would you agree that even though it's saying to download the JDK they should probably just download the JRE or is the JDK what they want am I wrong on this I mean the runtime is a subset right and should be all you need to run Java stuff so I'd start with that unless you feel there's a reason you want the JDK because I think it includes documentation and a lot of extra stuff but it's meant for developer I know the runtime environment I think that's the one that also includes the plugin the browser plugin so it's possible that that's why people are that's why Apple is saying just download the JDK so that you don't wind up with the you know with the plugin because that browser plugin you know is where that security hole can exist but Safari is really good about it even if you have the plugin it's not just going to willy-nilly let any website do it it's going to ask you hey this website wants to use Java do you want to let it use it once do you want to let it use it all the time or do you never want to let it use it and you know like choose wisely and if you don't know choose never yeah I don't know you want to do one more question John should we pick any Java space-version yep I'm around a 1.8 okay yeah let me actually let me look here I have terminal open so I might as well do the same thing oh look it I got the it says to use the Java command line tool you need to install a JDK so I don't have one installed on this computer and it does actually well now this is interesting John searching Google for Java JDK brings up the Java 8 page that we just talked about clicking Apple's more info link I'm glad we did this brings up the Java SE9 page which has the JDK the server JRE and the regular JRE right there so Java 9 is the newest not Java 8 so we'll put a link to that in the show notes too huh now the other thing is that somebody could be trying to run yeah we're talking about how to identify yeah maybe trying to run Java Dave yes and I'll give you one way to find out just occurred to me yeah it could be a startup script well how do you search through your startup scripts here I would say that you probably want to use something like Lingon which does have a search feature and I just fired it up and search for Java and it has two scripts that seem to be invoking Java so that's a way to that's one could be one source of somebody wanting to try to launch it yep what I usually do is I mean you kind of have to let it launch for this to happen so your way might be better is I run activity monitor I find the Java process and I double click it and I see what you go into files and ports whatever that that page is I don't have activity monitor open but I'll get it there and you know you find the Java process you double click it you go to open files and ports and then look through that list that list should generally sort of betray what files Java is talking with and then maybe that'll deal with it so that's my that's my thought do you have any thoughts not anymore good I took the links to Java 8 out of the out of the show notes and I just put the links to Java 9 in there so that we don't confuse people sorry about that always glad when we can correct things before we have to ship the show so okay do we want to answer another question here John Andrew David let's go wild here you want to go wild yeah it's going to get out of control okay I mean we're at the hour 20 mark so we could wrap this up here but I feel like we can go a couple of minutes so which one do you want to go to actually Andrew's is kind of here's a quick one David so again google foo to the rescue so David asks are you aware of a utility available that can block the use of removable media on a Mac I have a client looking for solution work and control writing to external drives and can be locked down with admin only privs are better get control by something like Jamf so I think I think I created my search in the context of disabling the USB port kernel extensions got it okay kernel extension one thing a kernel extension can do is let the software aka the operating system like macOS talk to the hardware like a USB port if you don't have the right kernel extension you're not going to talk to the device so that was the direction I was taking which is came up in this article that I found at guess what Dave jamf.com and there's basically people saying how do I achieve this and it started off with okay well here's all the kernel extensions typically they have the word USB in them and they were like yeah try to remove those but then some other people were like well that may be a great idea especially with system integrity protection if it's easier fiddling around with the kernel and stuff it may panic or not even let you do it but then farther along that article Dave someone did a screenshot of what I believe is the jamf software and it has a specific restrictions category and one of them is would you like to enable or disable varying levels of access to external media so huh that's cool I like it that's good man so so I got the answer of course you got a so that's as far as I can tell exactly what you're looking for that's I think that's exactly what he's looking for yeah cool yeah I haven't I should try this trial I haven't oh yeah I'm pretty sure they're not a like active current sponsor but I'm pretty sure jamf.com G gets you your free you know free devices for free for life so no reason not to we always list those by the way active sponsors and I try to go through it about once a month at least to make sure that you know we're keeping it up to date but if you go to mackeycap.com sponsors not only does it list the sponsors from all the recent episodes but right at the top it kind of lists some of the highlights that still exist even for you know people who's you know sponsorship runs had expired or you know whatever we try to try to maintain all that if there's good deals for you folks so check that out and I'm really excited John because for the last 10 months I've been using a tool to record mackeycap or as part of the recording of mackeycap that I couldn't talk about and now I can it's called Ferago F-A-R-R-A-G-O from Rogue Amoeba it's the thing that I used to trigger all the sound effects and stuff now I used to have to fight with like doing those inside of you know like an Evernote file or I was doing it with QuickTime for a while and I had Yojimbo for a while but none of those was really built to be like a sound board and so this now is totally my sound board and I can just like trigger things with key presses and it makes life easy to bring in things like the theme music and to jump from the theme music to the outro to the you know all of that and I like it very excited about this so yeah we talked about how to reach us we did talk about our premium sponsorship or premium membership program if you are a member of that you get a special email address to use and that's premium at mackeycap.com and this folks yes was one of those weeks where only the premium stuff got got addressed before the show answered because it's how we roll here but we do prioritize you folks on the premium side so thank you to all of you and then you can call us at 224-888-Geek anybody can call us and if your phone won't translate what Geek is John will do it for you because John Geek is 4-3-3-5 we had lots of great questions and tips in fact from our Facebook group so hopefully that shows the value over there visit mackeycap.com as I said earlier and you can join us there too I gotta be perfectly honest I cringe every week when I recommend that because I know that it could be better if we hosted our own sort of purpose built discussion forum like the Facebook discussion forum is the best of the generic ones that are out there for our community but we have been working behind the scenes to create something that would work even better so that we could have some indexes so that you could search and find questions and answers that have been discussed before and that sort of thing so that may be coming not that we would tell you you have to abandon the Facebook group obviously whatever happens there is great but we are talking about some enhancements internally to give us a more purpose built community or home or whatever you want but for now and perhaps forever mackeycap.com I want to thank everybody at cash fly cachefly.com for providing all the bandwidth to get this show and all of our media files from us to you and of course our ongoing sponsors in the podcast marketplace which you can find out about it mackeycap.com smile at smilesoftware.com OWC at max sales.com barebonessoftware at barebones.com we have roboform at roboform.com mgg as well in there it's good really really happy with the folks that we have it's great very fortunate you know John it's always a community here so I know sometimes you say it sometimes I say it sometimes Pete says it should be said by many voices simultaneously


Evoked potential tests measure the electrical activity of the brain in response to stimulus from senses such as sight or sound. They are often used to diagnose conditions related to the auditory system, including hearing loss, retrocochlear pathology, and intraoperative and intensive care monitoring. This article was authored by Syed Hamid Habib and Syed Shahid Habib.


Welcome to Intro to AP Computer Science for a new AP teacher. This topic is math and variables. Let's go ahead and get started. So topics in this video are math operators, the order of operations, increment, and decrement, combined assignment operators, and the math class. Again this video is not to teach you how to do these things. You are assumed to know them or if not I have another set of videos that does explain these things in detail. It's just kind of an overview of the topics and maybe some things to think about as you are teaching it. So the first one is the math operators. So we have addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. Of course point out to the students that multiplication is an asterisk. Some students might not know where that's at in the keyboard. On mine it's shift 8, but on others it might be in a different spot. And then that division is the I guess that's the forward slash I believe. And then the modulus, the percent sign. Again students might not be familiar with that. So you definitely want to go over some examples. So the one here on the screen is five percent three or five modulus three equals two because it gives you the remainder. Three goes into five once and there is two left over. Also be sure to point out integer division. There are definitely questions, AP type multiple choice questions that this will be a factor. So five divided by three equals one. So if you ask the students usually what I do is I say well what's five divided by three and they'll say well it's one point six six six six six six and then I'll say okay well let's try it put it into Java we'll run it. We get a one then we talk about why that happens. Okay so you have to tell it so the students realize that okay well if I need that level of accuracy if I need point six six six six six six I'm gonna need to use a double data type in this case. And then this is super duper important as well. There are definitely gonna be multiple choice questions about this subject. The order of operations. Now most students should be familiar with this from their math classes but some may not be. In America at least when I learned it I learned PEMDAS. Please excuse my dear Aunt Sally. I actually do have an Aunt Sally. I messed her on Facebook the other day as a matter of fact. My British students with British backgrounds they use bid mass and I think it means brackets, indices, division, multiplication, addition and subtraction. So basically you know the order of operations we start with parentheses then we do our exponents then multiplication and division. Notice they're on one line so if you have multiplication and division in one equation you go from left to right. Okay so that's why in bid mass the D and the M are reversed whereas in PEMDAS it's M and D, bid mass it's D and M. And then finally addition and subtraction are at the end. Again those are if they're both it's left to right. The actual order of operations in Java is very complex. If you take a look at my e-book I talk a little bit more about that. It's yeah it's pretty involved but this is this is the major thing that most students will have to deal with. They don't really give you anything too much more complex than this. Next one is increment and decrement. So basically we're just talking about adding by one or subtracting by one. So in Java we have x plus plus and we have x minus minus. I just chose x of course whatever integer that would be. Also works with doubles. So this is what you'll see on the AP exam. This is called the post fix. You also see I tell the students because if they're googling if they're getting stack overflow they might see plus plus x or minus minus x. Again the book has an example of why that's important what difference is so but the prefix one plus plus x and minus minus x is not on the AP exam. So they don't have to worry about that one. So they'll only see x plus plus and x minus minus. Along with that is the combined assignment operators. So we could do x plus plus. We could do x equals x plus one same thing. We could do x plus equals one. So we're combining the increment and the assignment into one symbol. By the same time we have x minus equals two x times equals three x divided equals four and x modulus equals five. So they can combine that those into one statement. I like to do that. It just makes your code a little bit shorter maybe a little more clearer but they are welcome to you know write out the longer version. There's no point penalty for that. They can just do it as they wish. And then finally in this section there's the math class which has some functions or some methods that we can use. Basically the two big ones are math.power which is power. So notice that it takes a double so 2.0 and 4.0. So that's the same as 2.0 raised to the 4.0 power. So that's two times two times two times two or 2.0 times 2.0 etc etc. So that should give us a two times two is four times two that gives us 16. And then math.square root for example 25.0 that will give us of course 5.0. Now there are others there's sine cosine tangent. There is a math class method to convert radians to degrees and degrees to radians. You may not need those. They're not on the AP. They're not part of that AP subsection. But you know students may find them useful for writing their own software to help them in their other classes. It's one of the things I try to get the students to think about is well okay in your math class could you use any of these functions to help you with your homework for example. But don't tell them I teach you that. And then there's there's a few constants such as math.pi. Notice the pi is capitalized. There's also math.e which is Euler's number 2.7 blah blah blah whatever it is. Okay so there is this built-in math class that helps you obviously with math functions. So yeah so that was our topics. We looked at the math operators, the order of operations, increment and decrement, combined assignment operators and the math class. And then for an introductory exercise one of the things after I talk about all these things I like to do is just ask the students to brainstorm a bunch of mathematical formulae from their math and science classes. So they might come up with you know force equals mass times acceleration. They might come up with you know calculating the angle based on you know like sine cosine all that kind of stuff. I'm not that familiar with it myself. I think earlier in the book at least there's a section about doing area. So just kind of come up with different formulas that they would have used in a different class. And then in you know you can write those on the board you know what's named the formula. And then in pairs I like to do the pairs and I do this on paper not on the computer. Have them write those formula in Java code and then they can share it and then if there's a group that's done ahead of time then I have them start coding it into the computer. This is a pattern that I do a lot is we do it on paper. Well we talk about it. They do it on paper first because they got to get used to doing that for the AP exam and then they do on paper then they do it into the computer because that helps I think really cement the ideas. And they seem to like it. They seem to like working together and honestly at least at my school we're on the computers far too much and any chance I can to get them off the computer is a good one. So that is that. I think I did I already did the summary so let me just skip past that and we are at the end. Thanks for watching. Talk to you soon.


Artivity. Artivity is a collaboration between the University of the Arts of London and Simeo Desk and we've been lucky to receive funding from GISC. The problem that we're trying to address is this. Since the development of conceptual arts and performance arts what we have discovered is that the process that ends up to a network is as important as the artwork itself. In a gallery context of course you do not see the process, the method or the research that happened before the artwork you only see the artwork. So typically, and excuse my textbook example, when you look at Jackson Pollock painting if you don't know who it was, when it was, what was happening at that time it is impenetrable, you don't understand anything yet. A more recent example is this artwork by Gino Ballantyne which again is very difficult to understand if you don't know his work. So the solution. What we do is we try to capture the process. Historically people have done that by visiting the artist in the studio, taking interviews, observing them and then writing up a text and communicating what they think was happening. Sometimes they had a camera with them, they set up the camera, they press record, they ask the artist to do something and they capture it. Okay, these are good things to do but actually they focus on the making event. They do not really capture the process, the method. Artists have methods. They do things, they solve problems. So it has been methods like that to record process have been criticized. Now in a digital art landscape, things are slightly different because the production of the artwork, the research that led to that production and all the communication and everything, they all happen in the same computer, in the same box, so we can capture the technique, methods and the output itself. And because it's all on the computer we can program it and we can automate it which is important. Artists don't want to spend time documenting their work. They want to do it, they want somebody else to do that stuff. The idea for activities started from Nepomac. I don't know if you are familiar with this project but it's the idea of the semantic desktop whereby all the interaction of the user with the desktop and different applications and data, they all can be modeled in one framework and recorded. That led to the Zeitgeist project in GNOME which some of you may have followed. But basically the technology behind it is RDF, the resource description framework. It's a generic format to store any kind of information. You have a subject, you have a property of a subject, you have a value of the property and with these three things you can capture everything that is going on on your desktop. Since Nepomac, other projects have proposed new models and new ways of capturing this information, we are using one of them that's called the W3C provenance ontology. I'm not going to go into detail but we can discuss that later. We gave a laptop with activity running to Gino Ballantyne, one of our artists who is testing it. He dropped it back two days later. I was expecting two or three files there. We got 40. This numbering up here doesn't correspond to any logical sense. Files have been delivered, so files, dates are all over the place. We didn't really know how he ended up building that artwork that I showed you. We run a query to tell us that. We've got activity data in the background. We can run a query and get that sequence. This is what happened. He started off doing linear drawings. Then they became a little bit more aggressive and then a little bit more stylized maybe. He started doing a lot of copying and pasting to a larger scale. He created these columns or linear drawings. Then maybe started mirroring other abstract shapes and this one as well. He brought all of these things together into this file and produced the artwork. Artivity can tell us how the process, the technique, how the file got all together. That's one thing. It still doesn't tell us what it is. Another query. Why don't we look at the browsing history and the files that Gino was looking while producing that artwork? This is what he was looking at. He was looking at manuscripts. Manuscripts are typically arranged in columns like that one, for example, or there. Perhaps what he was trying to do with this copy and pasting to create the columns is to produce a manuscript. If that is a manuscript, it means that the linear drawings are symbols. Not letters, but symbols. Another piece of information. He downloaded and used this file as a background to his artwork. This file is an empty musical score. It's what musicians used to write notes on. It's everywhere in the background. We've got the linear drawings as symbols in front of the musical score. Perhaps these things are actually music. We've got musical notation. Musicians write music all the time. Why did he have to do a new one? This is the next clue that we get. The fact that he was based in the Chelsea College of Arts studios alongside 20 students preparing for their show and these studios, when 20 students are in there, are very noisy. This is not music. This is noise. Perhaps what Gino was doing is creating a musical score of the noise in the surge of the creativity in the college at that time. This is what activity does. It gives us an interpretation of what has gone on in the artist's mind. Potentially we can answer questions about the development of an artist artwork or a group of artists or even of a whole domain. Imagine we're having data over 10 years, lots of data. Who cares? Like I said, artists care because they don't have to do the documentation. The computer does it for them, so that's important. Art historians care. Imagine in 10, 15 years' time they will be writing about art history and digital history today. What will they be doing? Will they be looking for archives? That's what art historians do. Where are the archives? On the computer, but we're not actually recording this stuff. Of course, we could consider all sorts of other things about technique and so on. But for this community, we've got various user groups, but for this community it's perhaps important to say that the activity can be used to track the way that artists use your software. What features are more popular? When is it that people press undo? Why do they press undo? What can they do at that point and it fails? Perhaps we can use activity to understand how creative software is being used. All these things would have been ideas in my mind if it wasn't for Sebastian and Moritz to get involved in the project and transform into something much bigger and much more important. I'm really grateful to them for that. I will let Sebastian now talk to you about the more technical stuff behind activity. Hello, thank you for the nice presentation. Is this the most? Yeah, well, you can personally. So, it's Moritz and Sebastian for me. We're from Simu Desk in Augsburg and we've been participating in the activity project to actually implement the stuff based on zeitgeist in the beginning and we moved on to have it based on RDF and Napomuk so that it becomes more flexible than zeitgeist. We figured out zeitgeist is pretty limited. So, what I'd like to talk about is just to give you a quick overview of how the application actually works, what there is and what it can do and a little bit about the software architecture and abstract. And I'd like to talk about what we're going to be releasing in the next couple of weeks in the last phase of the activity project that is being funded by GISC. So, in the current release, which is primarily developed on Linux and based on the GTK toolkit, activity is nothing more than a recently used list. So, since it records transparently in the background, you're presented with the files that you've been using and you can access the details of the files by just clicking on it and it will show you the region of the file that you have modified does show you per editing session how many interactions there have been and it does, of course, show you all the details and the data that has been recorded. So, it's a very simple user interface because most of the artists are not very familiar with defining complex queries in SparkQL. That's where the real power is. But it's simple enough to have an impression about how stuff works. So, we also added the possibility to export data into RDF format, of course, and CSV to have it imported into statistical application and being reused in office and wherever. So, and of course, as Tarnas has already said, it's not only recording of the artistic data of the programs but also the browsing history because that is the context that belongs to the picture. So, we have browser plugins that currently are very simple. They allow you to disable or enable the capturing and once they capture, then all the stuff that the browsing history is recorded. And then, later on, you can start ask queries which pages were visited during some editing sessions and five, ten minutes later on and so on. So, that's what the activity is currently presenting to the user. It's very simple. Our platform support is, as I said, rather limited to Linux currently. We have integrated it into Inkscape and we have a plugin for Krita and we have plugins for most of the web browsers that are common. I have to note that Inkscape is the application that we started out in the beginning because it's a vector application and it was most simply a simple one to get into. The problem is that it doesn't have extensions. Soon it will. The architecture of the current release is very simple. We have, on the bottom, an RDF database that's open link to other. It's the same one that was used for KDE, Netomock KDE, which is pretty capable. We slimmed it down a little bit so that it doesn't have to run as a fully-fledged server. Then we have a very simple HDTV REST API simply for the reason for the browsers being able to talk to activity because the Inkscape plugin API has been disabled and currently plugins are being written in HTML only. There is this native GTK GUI, the activity explorer that can directly talk to the open link virtual also database. In the upcoming release, we are doing some fundamental changes and we'd like to move the project huge steps forward. One of the biggest features is multi-platform support. We figured out that many artists use macOS. If you want some real data, you need to go where the artists are. We redesigned the activity to work across all platforms. That's why we switched from a native GUI to a web GUI which directly talks to the REST API via JSON. That's a very nice step because turn out there's pretty good statistical JavaScript libraries and image processing libraries available which just makes development of the GUI much quicker than using GTK and we have much more possibilities there. On the other hand, nothing else really has changed because it was pretty good, so that's the new architecture. For this phase, the new features is one of the biggest ones that we have not yet started which will be very good, I think, is the video recording. We will allow to record a single frame per editing step in the video so that we can also capture the image data and have a visual recapturing of the whole process because right now, activity is pretty abstract and all about data but once you have that data along with the image and see how the artist actually worked it will begin to be much more powerful because then you can do bitmap analysis and color analysis and lots of nice things. The other thing is that we are working on publishing methods to being able to publish the results to repositories such as e-prints which are common in academics use and being able to allow the artist to add comments and notes because they might be helpful in understanding what's going on. Zero minutes, okay, I'm finished. So, our new platform support, we go to the other operating system and we also added support for the Adobe software seed but that doesn't belong here. You can find this at Bitbucket and we are preparing a new website that will be launched pretty soon. If you have any questions, just ask me Jantanasis. Thank you very much.