The Mac Observers' MacGeek app, Episode 798 for Monday, January 20th, 2020. And welcome to the Mac Observers' MacGeek app, the show where we take all your questions, your cool stuff found, your tips, everything.  And the agenda serves the goal of every single one of us learning at least five new things. Now sometimes those things are learned just by, you know, the osmosis of inhaling the steam and other times it's like very specific stuff. It's all good. It doesn't matter how you learn. We just like to learn and we like to have a little bit of fun doing it. Sponsors for this episode include a new sponsor, LegalZoom.com, where promo code MGG gets you some great savings on, it's actually a great service to what they're doing there and the things they've added. Anyway, we'll talk more about that later. And also cash fly at mac.cashfly.com, you got to check it out. So we'll talk about all of those in a moment here. But for now, here, happily, in Durham, New Hampshire, I'm Dave Hamilton. And here in disappointingly snow and ice free, Fairfield, Connecticut, this is John F. Brown. Yeah. We had about six inches of snow last night. Yeah. We got nothing. I'm very disappointed in winter. OK. Some people might. Other than the ice, other than the cool ice storm we had a few about a month ago. Yeah. Yeah. They were saying we would, you know, be buried in snow and we haven't, though, maybe you have somewhat. It sounds like so. A little bit. Yeah. It was really like super cold here for the last few days. I mean, not, you know, not single digits Fahrenheit, but teens Fahrenheit. And so when the snow came, it was still, it was with that. It's weird here that there's a phrase that goes around here, too cold to snow. And there's some truth to that. You know, usually the snow comes because a front is moving through and that front is often a warm front that is, you know, causing that to happen. This was a weird snowstorm in that I think it was a warm front because it was like 40 Fahrenheit today. But when the snow was coming through last night, it was, you know, 13, 14, 15 degrees Fahrenheit. And that's that's that's colder than it generally is when it snows here. It's usually in the 20s, you know, high 20s. So it was this very fluffy, icy snow just coming down from. So it was pretty, you know, and it was it was that. OK. And then we've got what I've never muffled silence when the snow comes down, you know, where it's just like. Oh, that's always fun. But we've been getting what they call snow squalls, which I guess is like very short bursts of intense, like blinding snow and winds and stuff like that. And it's like we evidently had those daily here. Well, while you and I were at CES, my family told me that they were having those. All right. But but I haven't seen any of those this year. But yeah, those can be a little little crazy. I I prefer like snow that's like, you know, it's going to come down. There's going to be something on the ground. Like I said, you get that muffled silence. Anyway, let's talk about cool stuff found, shall we? We'll start with listener Larry, who says that way back in 792, there was a mention of a parallel screenshot tool. This sounds similar to Capto, C-A-P-T-O, which has options such as opening the current browser URL in the Capto browser for capture. And he says it has a benefit that it's also part of set up. So if you've got that, you've already got a license for Capto. But Capto's from from global delight, which makes actually lots of cool things. So we'll put a link to that in the show notes as always. But but thanks, Larry. Good stuff, man. That's what we do here for the cool stuff found. Thoughts on that, John. There's time to move on to Scott with his with his first one. What's Scott got? Scott says he says like most people I am constantly wondering and worrying about how much battery life is left in my devices. Not only my iPhone and iPads, but also my wireless keyboard and wireless trackpad. Checking the remaining charge levels has been a nuisance until I found batteries app from Fidel F-A-D-E-L dot I-O. The app itself isn't really the fantastic part, but rather what it adds to the notification center on my Mac. And he sent through a screenshot that shows, sure enough, a listing of all of his devices and their respective batteries. It's a little widget in the notification center that sees everything on your network that your Mac can see, which is pretty cool. He says, set up took just a minute, and now I can see the charge level and whether the device is plugged in for recharging just by opening the notification center. So that's super handy, if you ask me that I like. It's you can get a 14 day free trial from from Fidel.io. And then and then I'm not sure what it costs to buy, but I'll tell you because I'm looking and it should in theory come up six bucks. OK, well, there you go. Not so bad. So very cool. Yeah, I got a I got a mess with this. That sounds super handy. Yeah, I can know. No, that's awesome, too. I was going to say, introduce more anxiety into my life because now I'm going to know the status of my batteries and whether they're dying or not. Yeah, but that's the other hand for me, like sitting in my office knowing is my did I put my iPad on charge at home? I know I want to take it with me, you know, when I leave later, like without having to put on shoes and walk across the snowy driveway, which now is like a layer of a half inch of ice with snow on top of it. So you don't know where the ice is and you can fall and hurt yourself. Like I can avoid hurting myself with this app. Right. Six. No, it did though reminds me of a conversation I had at CES with the Z wave guys in that it concerned me that the vendor of a product can choose or not choose to expose a certain piece of data. And this is getting in a smart home and Z wave and stuff like that. But the only thing it reminds me of is that the thermostats that I got when I was on the Wink Hub, Dave. Their app did not offer battery level of battery operated thermostats, whereas smart things does. So there's a tip for you. If you're looking for the ability to look at the battery level, then smart things is probably for you because I added that. I added a trigger. The thing is I couldn't add that trigger because apparently the the Wink driver just didn't see that data. Yeah, right. OK, whatever. So no, so it's great that. Yeah, I mean, this takes it like to the next level and that it can show you battery levels on like everything, which is really cool. Yeah, yeah, I want to I want to start running it and see what see what it does. Yeah, yeah, for sure. Cool. If you have been listening to this podcast for a very long time, you might remember that I am a fan of not just standing desks, but adjustable desks. When I'm in my office, I love to stand at my desk, not all the time, but I would say 80 percent of the time. And so I've had an adjustable desk down there for 10 years. And when we started this podcast, actually, John, that was my introduction to the idea of standing because when we started this show, I stood for most of our first, I'll say, probably 30 episodes. Then when I when we moved everything up to the studio here, I the way the ceilings are and stuff in here, I it just didn't make sense. So I sit, but I've remained very interested in standing desks. Like I said, I have one in my office and I like a desk that's adjustable. And I recently had the opportunity to build and check out a standing adjustable standing desk from a company called Autonomous at Autonomous.ai. And of course, I'll put a link in the show notes. Their standing desks are very cool, pretty easy to put together, you know, and really solidly built and the motors slash hydraulics in this because they are adjustable are fantastic. They move quickly. They move in sync with each other. They stay rock solid.  And so it needs to move smoothly and not be too herky jerky because otherwise things don't stay where they are. And this one moves really, really smoothly. And John, it's got a control pad that has four presets on it, kind of like you'd have in like the old days with your car radio where, you know, you you get it to where you want. And then you set it so that you don't have to guess every time you're moving your desk up and down, you can have four presets so you could have one for when I'm sitting, one for when I'm standing, one for when if let's say you share the desk with somebody, you could have, you know, other things for other people and you just get it right to where you want. You hit the button and it goes there and then it works out great. So these are these are really nice, affordably priced like four hundred twenty nine bucks for for a you know, the home office smart desk with all the all the bells and whistles there. That's that's pretty good. It seems like they sell chairs and stuff to here at Autonomous and they look like, you know, the the Herman Miller style chairs, but they seem to be about half the price. I might want to check one of those out, too. But but yeah, check them out. Autonomous standing desk, good stuff, cool stuff found. That's what we do. And then, you know, at CES, John, you mentioned CES, which was it's always a great place to go and see things. You know, we've here been looking a lot at SSDs that we can attach to our Macs for a variety of reasons. The biggest one, you know, it was weird. It was what maybe six or eight months ago where we all started to realize that our clones that we were making to our, you know, our external drives were really slow to boot from. And that's because starting with Mojave, those clones like that operating system really isn't built to be run from just a rotational drive. It's either built to be run from an SSD or at least a fusion drive, which which has a lot of that stuff, you know, kept on the SSD. Mojave and definitely Catalina do not boot well or do not boot quickly. They will boot they will successfully. Sure, but not quickly from a rotational drive. And so it was like six or eight months ago. It was like, all right, wait a minute. We got to start paying attention to what we clone these things to. Thankfully, SSDs have come down in price and all that good stuff. So you can start getting those. And and depending on what you want to do with them, you can get them, you know, at a variety of different price levels at CES. I got to see the pluggable Thunderbolt 3 SSD. It's got a cable built into it. And just this week I got one here. I got a one terabyte version here, which I think on their website website. Wait, easy for me to say sells for 419. I think you might be able to find a little bit less expensive on like New Egg or Amazon. But this thing is fast, right? Because it uses the Thunderbolt 3 bus, so you're not stuck with SATA or anything. It is an NVME drive, John. And, you know, their their product packaging says that it'll do 2400 megabytes per second reads and 1800 megabyte per second writes. In my quick tests, I got like 22 megabyte, 2200 megabyte reads and like 1700 megabyte writes. So like their numbers are real. These are these are not, you know, theoretical. They are absolutely what I got. Just plugging it into my MacBook Air. I didn't even test it on the iMac in the office, which which maybe, you know, because it's got, you know, way more CPU power might a little bit better or whatever. But what I like is that they're quoting their throughputs in megabytes. Now, as some of you may recall, in the past, especially with rotational drives, they would state their throughputs in megabits per second, which makes it look like it's maybe faster, which it really isn't. Yeah. Yeah, no, no. So it's nice to see that transition happening with these wicked fast drives. Yeah. And this is faster than the internal drive in my in my air. I think the internal drive in my air does about just about 1000 megabyte per second writes, and I think maybe 1500 megabyte per second reads. So it's cool to be able to plug in a, you know, an SSD and see it go even faster, which which is great and super portable. Like I said, it's got a cable built into it. So, you know, good, you're good to go. It makes it easy.  So it's good. It's good. You want to take us to Lewis, John? Tell us what Lewis found with the Louis. Oh, I don't know. It could be either. I'm not. I think he's in Canada. So yeah, no, that that's that is Louis. You are correct. Yeah, go ahead. All right. OK. So here's what he's got. This is good in the age of Catalina here, but Louis says, hey, guys. I'm looking for a good replacement for scan snap manager, which no longer works in Catalina. That's the software that Fujitsu makes for their scan snap series of kind of proprietary scanners. I know you guys discussed it in one previous show, but I'm having trouble finding it. I've tried ViewScan, but it doesn't work well. As soon as I activate duplex feeder, the document gets mangled in different sizes, and the OCR seems no longer work, and it's just terrible. And he has a Fujitsu scan snap S1500. So here's the party line on this deal because I had to go through this. And fortunately, it worked for me, but it may not for Fujitsu. Released something called. So scan snap manager was their 32 bit suite of software, and they let people know by various means. They're like, hey, this isn't going to work under Catalina, and we don't have any intent of updating it to 64 bit, which they could if they wanted to, but they decided instead to release something called scan snap home. Now, what's nice is that at least so they list some very specific model numbers and they don't list the S1500 as a supported device, but they do list the IX1500. So my thought was that it's close enough. Unfortunately, he got back to us and said, no, it's not. Now, the thing is, in my case, I had an 1100 series that didn't have an exact match, but their new software seemed to work for that. So it's a roll of the dice. It is worth trying, though, to your point, right? Like that. That's definitely worth. I mean, I don't understand why it was being on his side so picky, because I mean, it's the same numbers. Right.  I mean, they gave it the same number as another product, because you would think it has most of the features, but hey, that's their decision. But what am I saying, though? What am I saying, though? What I'm saying is that he did find another piece of software. So this is kind of a troubleshooting thing and a cool stuff found. So the cool stuff found is that he found a piece of software called ExactScan. Cool. And I guess that's really about it. It appears to have been in it would sound like in his appraisal, it does everything and more that he needs to do with the scanner.  So I'm like, OK, I'm happy. But this software offers a bunch of other things that the Fujitsu software does offer as well. If it's supported, I see OCR. It does OCR. He said it was having problems with that. It supports it's a ton of formats, AppleScript. So if you want to kick your scanning game and, you know, we got this recommendation. But if you want to kick up your scanning game, this looks like some pretty cool stuff. Yeah, for sure. How much is it, though? Let's see, download by. All right, let's see if it's worth it, folks. 80 bucks. All right. Yeah. For good scanner software that does, you know, things other than scanning, I'm I'm I'm OK with that. Yeah. And they have an enterprise version and stuff like that. So thank you for letting us know about ExactScan. Yeah, I think the reality is you need to kind of if you've got an older scanner and you're trying to make it work, you need to try all of these, you know, ExactScan, ViewScan. And then if it's an old Fujitsu scanner, certainly scan snap home. But I have not tried ExactScan with my with my old printer. But I I don't even know. I don't know why I didn't even think of it as this as we were prepping this question. But maybe maybe this will work for me, John. So yeah. And, you know, we're getting we had some other emails in our in our queue about people that had problems with their printer, like one person we were still trying to figure out what's going on here had a brother printer that all of a sudden didn't work under Catalina. One reason is that their control software, just like in this case, was not compatible. It was 32 bit and then they didn't want updated. Sure. Yeah, right. So, I mean, we'll still see these problems. When I saw something from you the other day, Dave, in an exchange with somebody and it's like, do you think I show up great at Catalina? And I other than situations like this, I would say for the most part, the answer is probably now yes. Yeah. So we'll take a little detour here. I yeah, we've got a couple more cool things found to go or cool stuff's found to go through for sticking with the the branded message. But yeah, I I think, you know, I said it a few episodes ago that now with 10.15.2 and later, if you're listening to this after 10.15.3 comes out. But with 10.15.2, Catalina got to the point where it's really stable. And I've now migrated lots of friends, family can, you know, clients, consulting clients and that sort of thing over to Catalina. And as long as we've been doing it, you know, with 10.15.2 is like the first build of Catalina that they're seeing. Everybody's been, you know, I do the upgrade, kind of make sure it works or they make sure it works. And I, you know, I don't hear from them right away. A couple of days later, I'll be like, hey, your computer's still OK. Like everything good or are you secretly like hating me? And and they're like, no, no, no, it's it's fine. I don't, you know, most of the time it's there. The answer is, yeah, I don't really notice anything different. It's fine. You know, it's like, OK, great, good, perfect. That's that's the best way to go in. Then then I can sit down with somebody if they're interested and go through some of the new capabilities that you might have because of Catalina and their specific work case or whatever. But yeah, no, it's been good. I do, though, make sure that I do a backup. And this would be my advice for everybody, do a backup.  And that is a very important part of your workflow. Then you just roll back and, you know, go back to the Mojave and then, you know, kind of retrench and figure out what the best path forward is with a little more information and knowledge. So yeah, I think so. I think it's good. It's working. It's working well for us, which, you know, I mean, I shouldn't say that while I'm recording a podcast live and all that. But yeah, why not? Sure. It's been good. Yeah. OK. Back to cool stuff found, shall we, John? Sure. All right, cool. Scott has an interesting thing. He says, listening to episode 797, it became clear that you, Dave, are as much of a geek about travel as me. He says, I don't fly as much as I used to, but still hit the road and the skies occasionally.  And frankly, don't know how anyone who travels more than a few times per year could get along without it. Even just once a year, traveling with Tripit Pro makes life so much easier. So I'm with you, Scott. Anyway, back to the cool stuff found. He says, I often wonder where other people are going when I see planes flying above me. Are they headed any place? Interesting. What's their altitude, their destination? Now, he says, I can find out with a simple Siri command. He says, just ask Siri, what's flying overhead? And it displays the amazing Wolfram Alpha search results showing you all the nearby flights in a handy table. Plus most of the time, not it won't show this every time, but most of the time it also shows a sky map that shows where they are relative to you on the globe. He says it's a great use of combined GPO positioning and search technology and is there for literally the asking with Siri. Try it, ask Siri, what's flying overhead? And Scott says, but I agree, you'll be delighted with the result. Yeah, very cool stuff. I immediately did that, of course, as soon as I saw Scott's email, I was like, oh, that's so cool. It's fun. That's fun. I know there's an app out there that you can like point at the sky and it'll it'll show you the the the what you call it, you know, the the planes that are overhead or whatever. I used to we did that several years ago. The first Mac stock, I remember pilot Pete was he almost made it today, too. But it didn't work. Pilot Pete was flying in to Chicago and then going to come to he didn't make it to the Mac stock conference part, but he made it to Barry's party afterwards. And which might be the last time the three of us were in a room together and now that I think about it anyway. And I remember, you know, knowing what time his flight was supposed to land and he was flying it, right? I mean, he wasn't just he was he was piloting this thing because that's what he does and not. And I remember being able to like look up with my phone and see and I forget what app that was. I got to find that out that was those yet another cool app. So yeah, fun. It's always good. Anchor is one of my favorite companies because they make reliable, solid, fun, useful, interesting stuff at great prices. They are coming out with it will be in shipping like this week. An iPhone, LED flash and it's 50 bucks. And I got a chance to test one of these, John. It's so cool. It if you have an iPhone 11, it will it will work it ish with pre iPhone 11's. But if you have an iPhone 11, you plug you can you can plug this in via lightning. It has its own battery in it. And when you take a picture, it and it decides that the flash should be engaged. It uses this flash in sync with the camera, sets it the way it needs to set it. And they say that because it's, you know, only flashing the flash when it needs to, you can get like 10,000 photos on a single charge. Or you can just press a button and it becomes a flashlight, right? Very, very cool. It's it's synced with your cameras in a way like I walked into my living room the other night when it was pitch black in there. Like I could not see anything and I took a picture. And of course, I could see everything in the picture, but it was lit well. It didn't look artificial. The only thing that looked artificial to me was that my TV screen was pure black. And I realized when I have lights on in that room, just the way the lights are positioned, I see them reflecting off the glass of the TV screen. Whereas the way I had this this flash positioned, it was not reflecting off the glass of the TV screen. So that was the only part that that just to me was like, wait, this looks fake. But I know it wasn't because I literally just took the picture. But it was because of that because I'm, you know, not used to seeing the room lit that way. So yeah, very cool thing. It's got a little tripod mount on it and stuff. So definitely worth checking out, especially if you're someone that like if you like to do like a lot of portraits and stuff where it's good to have, you know, a light source that's a little bit off center from your camera so that you can get some better depth and and all that stuff. This could be a very, very cool thing. So yeah, that's why that's why that's why it's in the list of cool stuff found. Pretty neat, huh, John? Yeah. And hey, if you want to track planes while you were pontificating, I actually found something here. OK. So search for plain finder. Plain finder, that's it. OK. That sounds like the and they have a light version and a pro version and light version. I just ran it. And we do have it showed me like four flights here. We actually have some regional airports here. Yeah, it looks like that's what it was showing me. The thing is, the first screen that came up, it showed like the entire country and there was probably like 10,000 little plain icons. I'm like, OK, let's focus this a bit narrow. But I put in my zip code and everything's great. Oh, OK. Huh. So wait, do they have an app? Is this the is this the app that I used or is this just plain finder? Dot com or dot net. What I told you about is is an app called plain finder. An app. Oh, OK. All right. Cool. OK. It doesn't use like augmented reality where you can aim it at the sky. That's the app that I was using. No, no. I know what you're talking about. Literally highlighting the planes like on the screen. So OK. All right. Well, we'll find. We'll get this, I think. Yeah, no, that'd be cool to see. Yeah. You know, Pete would probably know about them.  Right.  It's like, yeah, it's going from JFK to Hong Kong. And it's like, OK, no, it's fine. Yeah. Yeah, I see. I see a little plane flying over you right now, John. Yeah, they're constantly, you know, and 31075 is going 150 knots. My enemies are constantly trying to determine my exact location. But I'm trying to stay a step ahead of them. It's an eighth. It's a private plane. It's an eight thirty six. I don't know off the top of my head. I don't know what this is, but it's a it's a forty two hundred feet. And yeah, oh, that's that guy. Yeah, he's always awesome. All right. So we should probably do a show instead of me just obsessing about these planes. They move on the map. Gosh, how can you not pay attention to this? All right, well, feedback at Mackey.com. If you know of the app that I'm desperately trying to remember and don't mind telling me about something that's probably going to distract me from work, feedback at Mackey.com is the place to send that to. And remember, folks, he said feedback at Mackey.com. You know, I am always looking for something that sounds good, especially when I travel and am out and about and all that stuff. And I've also been a fan of audio engines speakers for a very, very long time. They they were I was introduced to them. Actually, I was introduced to them at one of our early Cirque du Mac parties, the Dave and I think it was just Dave from Audio Engine. I don't think Brady was with them came to dinner at one of like one of our early Cirque du Mac dinners, like the band dinner or something. Brian brought him over. It's like, wait, you're not supposed to bring anybody that slant in the band. Like and it was like, oh, these guys are cool. OK, great, no problem. And and it's been a friendship ever since they were sponsors the show for a while in the early days, too. They have a new portable Bluetooth speaker that they call the 512 portable Bluetooth speaker. I have to assume they named it that because 512 is the area code that is throughout Austin, Texas, where they are based and founded. But maybe that's not the reason, but it probably is. The speaker, you know, it's it's for lack of a better term. I would call it one of these pill space shaped and size speakers. It it's like the size of a T-shirt when rolled up. And the reason I say that is because that's about the size of the space that it would take in my suitcase. And I almost always forego one T-shirt in my suitcase so that I can have a speaker like this with me in my hotel rooms. And right. Well, your favorites, the JBL, if I recall. Well, I like I brought one of the ones that usually take because it has pretty colors and, you know, it sounds good. Yeah, I had brought with me to CES, the JBL Pulse. I had to bring a big suitcase to CES.  So just kind of look cool. But but this in terms of sound quality, this one is freaking amazing. It's it's not inexpensive. It's 169 bucks. So, you know, certainly more than the hundred bucks or so that you would spend on perhaps some of these other pill speakers, not the not the pulse that you mentioned, but, you know, some other ones. But it's got two two tweeters, two speakers in it, if you will. And then a bass resonator. And I'm looking at the size of these speakers. So it's two two inch woofers and then one three inch by one and three quarter inch passive radiator on the back. But these two woofers are separated out such that when you lay this thing on its side, which is how you're supposed to play it, you really get stereo sound. Like I was able, you know, I always use Pink Floyd's money as my quick test of how well the stereo separation is. Well, it's just, you know, it's easy, right? It was recorded in quadrophonic sound, but it works in stereo. Yeah. Well, that song has unusual separation of channels. Correct. And it's right out of the gate so you can really test it well. And even at like 10 feet away from this speaker in my kitchen, I heard very clear stereo separation with this and the sound. And in addition to that, the sound was quite good. So, you know, to get something in a size like this that offers, you know, stereo separation at that kind of distance, one hundred and sixty nine bucks makes all the sense in the world. It's, of course, battery powered Bluetooth. I think it's got like 12 hours of battery and and it also has a an aux input, the little, you know, three and a half inch millimeter or a stereo mini jack thing that we're used to calling the aux port. And it's got, you know, like a USB port to charge it and all that stuff. So definitely worth checking out the Audio Engine 512 portable speaker. I put it on the show notes because that's what we do. One last cool stuff found, John, from listener Rob is an app called Sensei at sensei.app, S-E-N-S-E-I dot app. And it is a Mac cleaner style app, right? And there's a variety of these. There's some that are great, some that aren't so great. This is based on my experience with it this week. This is definitely one in the former category, the great category.  And then it's got it's some sort of, you know, utilities that you would use like an optimizer, an uninstaller, not all of that. One of the things that I found that was really handy is you can see what launch agents are being run on your Mac and you can turn them on and off in a very simple interface. I always mention Lingon. Anytime we talk about managing launch agents, certainly you can do it from the terminal, but it's sort of a pain in the neck and it's hard to get just a visual list of what's actually active versus what could be active. And and this makes it even easier than Lingon to see. It's certainly much simpler, especially if all you're wanting to do is turn things on or off if you don't need to like mess with their settings or anything. It was just like, yeah, I don't want that anymore. Just turn it off. You can do that. So yeah, you really it this one's worth checking out. They've got a free trial and then I'm not sure what it costs. I think it's it's twenty nine bucks for a one year license. And then if you want a just a purchase, you can do that for fifty nine bucks. So we're checking out Sensei.app, S-E-N-S-E-I dot app. So thanks for sending that in, Rob. Very, very cool stuff. I'd never heard of that before. So that's what that's what we like to do.  It's good. Yeah, I like them. So I've never heard of them before, but they they show how they compare to some other competing products. And they're in Sweden. So how could you not trust them? Sure, I guess I might the Swedish friends that I have are all people I trust pretty much implicitly. So, you know, I don't know what that says, but I might say something about them or me or both or who knows. All right, I want to take a minute and talk about our first sponsor, which is our newest sponsor, which is Legal Zoom. You know, so here's the thing with Legal Zoom, you can do all kinds of different stuff. They make it super easy to fill out all the forms that you might need for a variety of things. You know, if you're starting a business or doing anything like that, obviously, they've got it all. You can do your formation papers and all that and just make sure they make sure it's right, you know, because they're they're giving you these forms that are vetted and written and all that stuff. If you're not starting a business, though, I will plead with you as I have been with all of my friends recently had some stuff going on that I haven't really talked about on the show here, but I will say this, if you don't already have a will or a healthcare proxy or anything like that, please, please get that done and Legal Zoom can make it super easy. And you do that for yourself, but really when you do it for yourself, you're doing it for all of your family that might need to be the ones that help you when you can't be helped. And similarly, encourage your families to do this so that you can help them when they need to be helped and you are not stuck having to go to like, you know, probate court and all that stuff. This is really important and Legal Zoom can help. In fact, over the past 19 years, Legal Zoom has helped more than four million people because they provide the resources that you need to confidently resolve your personal and your business legal needs. Now, what's cool is they have a network of attorneys that you can turn to for questions and things like that. Like an annual payment plan to do with this. And it depends on what state you're in, but I checked a couple of different states and it's somewhere between 350 and 400 bucks. For an annual thing, you can talk to an attorney about some sort of preliminary stuff anytime you have an issue. Obviously, there's limitations and stuff, but because Legal Zoom isn't a law firm, you can count on their network of independent attorneys for advice at the right price since they don't charge by the hour. This is fantastic. So make 2020 a year that you'll remember for the right reasons and use Legal Zoom to help you out. And here's the thing, go to legalzoom.com today and then make sure you enter the promo code MGG in the box at checkout for special additional savings. That's legalzoom.com, promo code MGG, Legal Zoom where life meets legal. And that's a good thing. It really is. So thanks to Legal Zoom for doing what they do. Please, just if you don't do anything else, just go to legalzoom.com and use them to get your will and your healthcare proxy and your living will and all of that good stuff in place so that people, so that you can be taken care of if something happens. Please, just do that for me if you would. Legalzoom.com, promo code MGG are thanks to Legal Zoom for sponsoring this episode. Hi, man. In show 797, we were talking about notes and searching by keyboard and I dug a little bit more into this and so did listener Jeff, who says without opening the note, he says that command option F will search that note. I looked into this as I said and in notes I found that command option F is, for me anyway on my computer, is the shortcut to search all of my notes, but command F, just regular old command F, searches inside the selected note. So this is super handy to be able to just kind of find things that seemed very intuitive as I was going through it. So hopefully those of you that are having any problems searching in notes, check this out. Just go to the launch notes and go to the edit menu and look at the find list. Are you eating breakfast or something, John? I'm hearing a lot of like. Oh, sorry. Okay, everything all right? You hungry? Like, can we get you some food? No, no. Sounds like you've already got some. Okay. Working on it. Okay, geez. You're in good company, my friend. We interviewed, a couple of years ago, we interviewed Kenny Aronoff, the world renowned drummer. You've all seen him play with a variety of people. He plays with everybody. I think he's playing with Fogarty and I think Bob Seeger these days, but Bald Guy wears sunglasses and you've seen him at like shows or whatever. We had him on another show that I do called GigGab for working musicians. Great guy, really energetic. Like more energetic than me, which is saying a lot and way more energetic than me. And like halfway through the show, I hear exactly that. And I'm like, Kenny, you need to stop? He's like, no, no, no, no, no, no, I got to go into the studio after I do this interview, but I didn't want to stop and my wife brought me some eggs. So I'm just eating them while we do the show. I'm like, well, Kenny, there you go. Yeah, well, maybe I'll have to get something less crunchy. This is a crunchy granola. Yeah, don't eat while we record the show.  You need 90 minutes of not like, you know, snarfing down. So maybe just like save it for afterwards and in in savor it after save it for afterwards, savor it afterwards. There you go. But hopefully that helps you folks with notes. So yeah, and I put a link to that GigGab with Kenny Aronoff. If you're if you're into music, it's certainly if you're a drummer, but but he really just had some great lessons. Frankly, if you are anyone that is super busy and wants to hear how someone else who is super busy manages their schedule, he doesn't like to say no to anybody, but he obviously realizes he can only be in one place at one time and that like he's going all over the world. So he had some really good little tidbits and nuggets to share about managing your life and your schedule and all that. So anyway, that's enough pitching of that. Bruce has something to share. Bruce, oh no, I don't want to put that away. Okay, Bruce says, you guys recently talked about how to deal with the data volume in Catalina because in Catalina our volume, if it's Macintosh hard drive as it would be by default, once you're finished with the upgrade to Catalina, you now have Macintosh hard drive and Macintosh hard drive dash data. So he says, you recently talked about how to deal with the data volume in Catalina, but Howard Oakley at Eclectic Light Company, Howard Oakley's article really spells it out. He says, I did not know that there was a delete APFS volume option right there in Disk Utility. You might want to dig a little bit more into this and for sure we'll link to this article that Bruce sent along that you're absolutely right, that if you're doing a clean install in Catalina and that's really what Howard's article is about here, you will want to delete that data volume before you do the clean install. Of course, all of this, hopefully it goes without saying but we say it anyway, make sure you do your backups before you do anything crazy like this. But then you delete the data volume, then the system volume and then create the new volume and install Catalina and in the process, it will fork these and create the things that you need to do. So very cool and Howard talks through all of this in a little more, in fact, a lot more detail but not in a confusing way. He's very good at spelling all this out. So yeah, make sure if you are doing that clean install and you're trying to wipe a volume, I always, whenever I'm doing a clean install, I don't just erase the existing volume, I delete the volume and re-add it or add a new one and name it the same perhaps. But that way I know that I'm starting with something fresh and with this you got to delete two volumes and you should do the data volume first and then the main one, which is the system volume. Yeah, so. Yeah, I think I've just instinctually done that just because that sounds like the right thing to do is you don't want to delete one and not the other. Right, right, yeah, exactly. Then you get this crazy mix of old and new and it's like, yeah, it's not good for anybody. Yeah, exactly, exactly, exactly. All right, good. So thank you for that, Bruce. Very, very cool. Jed has a question and you know what? We'll just let you ask it here, Jed, if our technology will agree with us. Hey guys, happy New Year or, well, time being what it is is complicated because I'm leaving this message before New Year's but I bet you will not listen to it till after. So I hope your New Year is good and nothing drastically crazy has happened in the last since you checked this. Anyways, I have two questions for you. Both that have just been kind of picking at me. Both hopefully more opinions than a tech answer. So question number one is I am doing innovation in my house. Just moved six months ago. You guys gave me some good advice. Then I have a question is years ago you said there's no point to wiring electricity and not wiring ethernet. With mesh, with Wi-Fi, with kind of the new technology, is it still worth it to do wired ethernet throughout a house? It's not a big house and more importantly, the only place I really need something to the fast, fast speed I will be wired. So just curious of what your thoughts are. And then the second question as I drag on is I have a MacBook Pro 2018, I think. It's Thunderbolt 3 and USB ports. I am debating just for USB devices only getting another hub. The question is do you think a Thunderbolt hub is better than a USB hub in this case just because of the way it spreads all the information? Like to get a Thunderbolt hub for three or four USB devices, hard drives, do you think it's better to go Thunderbolt or do you think it's better to go USB? Better to go USB meaning it is substantially cheaper to have a USB port hub than it is to have a Thunderbolt hub. Hope this makes sense, love to hear you guys' thoughts and like I said, happy new year. Hope you didn't get caught. Thanks, Jed. He sent that I think about three hours before at least our clock flipped over here. So yes, thank you and so far so good. Starting with mesh versus wired ethernet and all of that stuff, I think yes. The cost to wire ethernet especially in the scenario where you have walls exposed still and yeah, all of that is super inexpensive at that moment and it just paves the path for the future. I would definitely still do it. Mesh with Wi-Fi 5 doesn't do full gigabit or higher speeds plus even with Wi-Fi 6, you're still talking about wireless technology for your backhaul. So there's all these sort of questions about what is gonna work, what's gonna interfere and those things are changing constantly in your home as you move things around as people move around as devices come in and out, what is going to cause interference that matters and all of that so you don't really know but with ethernet, you know. So I'd still do ethernet. Let me put it this way, at this moment in time I am still, now I haven't done this yet, I've been thinking about it for five years so bear that in mind too but I may still hire an electrician this year to run an ethernet line essentially from one side of my house to the other. Right now I'm doing it with Mocha in the past I've done it with Powerline which is much, much slower. Mocha is pretty fast but Mocha gets weird and sometimes needs to be reset because it's weird. Mocha is essentially running ethernet over your coax cables inside your house alongside your coax signal which is great that you can sort of do it all at the same time but it gets a little wonky sometimes at least in my house and I need to reset it and things are weird and I would like to have ethernet straight to where the TV is in the house. So I may still do that even with Wi-Fi 6 as the backhaul for this because I just like a reliable backhaul not just amongst my Wi-Fi devices but amongst my network as a whole. So a year from now after we've had a lot more sort of practical experience with Wi-Fi 6 especially with mesh backhaul with Wi-Fi 6 I might back off on this a little bit but probably not. If the walls are open, I say put the ethernet in and I think you should put two into every room but maybe that's a little bit crazy but once you're using one for ethernet you can't use the other for anything else and those twisted pair can be used for a lot of different things and you've got four of them per run so you've got a lot of different options so I don't know, that's my feeling is it just creates options. So I don't know, and then we'll go on to the USB versus Thunderbolt thing in a minute but John, any thoughts on? The only thing, so I'm looking right now, Dave and the thing is, so you're starting to now see various machines including like the iMac Pro and stuff like that offering 10 gigabit instead of gigabit ethernet. The thing is I'm looking here, Dave and the pricing on those switches, if you want like a 24 port 10 gigabit switch it looks like they're in the neighborhood of like 1,000 bucks. So to me, 10 gigabit is still probably a bit pricey for consumer grade stuff so I would say that gigabit should serve the needs of most people that that's just me. I mean, I have a 24 port gigabit switch and it only costs a few hundred bucks, TP-Link, I think it is, but yeah. If you want to be on the bleeding edge you could get a 10 gigabit infrastructure but I'm also seeing that a lot of these switches are like, oh, well, we'll give you four 10 gig things for your 10 gig stuff and then we'll give you a bunch of the slower but still pretty quick in the grand scheme of things compared to Wi-Fi. Right, right. So I don't think we're yet at the point where a 10 gig switch is affordable for your back call but gigabit definitely is. Well, so a couple of things about that. Number one, the cabling you have in your wall, if you're putting cat six in, you can run 10 gig ethernet over cat six cable. So that is like, you're fine. Cat seven or six A is better because cat six, it says it'll go 55 meters with 10 gig in ethernet and cat six A or cat seven will go 100 meters with 10 gig ethernet but still, so that cable you have in your wall could be used for either so you don't need to make that decision at the time but I would say definitely cat six, if you're doing it today, probably really though cat seven, because why not? And I don't have those prices in front of me as to whether it's significantly more expensive for a spool of seven versus six but the whole point of this is to pave the path for the future. As far as whether to use it for gig or 10 gig ethernet, those switches like QNAP was showing off a smart switch at CES that had, and I'll find the switch and put it in the show notes but it had I think eight total ports, four of which were, I'll call them combo ports. I mean, they had two ports but you could use one or the other of each of these four ports and it was either one gig ethernet or 10 gig ethernet on four of these ports and it was like 500 bucks for a smart switch that had quite a bit of 10 gig capability on it and that's super helpful because if you're using Wi-Fi six that can theoretically go way faster than gigabit ethernet and then you can start using things like maybe your Synology or your QNAP unit of course uses 10 gigs so you plug that in 10 gig and even if that's the only thing you have plugged in 10 gig if it can go faster than gigabit then that's great, you know because if you've got four client devices that are plugged in gigabit and then you've got 10 gig from that same switch off to your Synology unit, well now each of those devices can pull it a gig and you're still getting like you don't necessarily need all of your max on 10 gig to take advantage of 10 gig if you know we've got four of us in the office you know what I'm saying? Oh right, no, I think that's kind of what I said Yeah, no it is kind of what you said so you know, put in the best cabling you know and this came from the chat room from Brian and others but get the best cabling that you can even if you're not going to be using it at full capacity, you know I mean, you know, the logic is when you install it, you know do it right the first time because you don't want to go back and install it again Yeah, NCSU-CPE in our chat room at macgeekab.com slash stream looked up and says for a thousand foot spool of cat 6a cable which is which will go the same hundred meters as cat seven it's for a thousand foot spool it's 265, 265 dollars and for a thousand foot spool of cat seven it is seven hundred dollars so, you know, again in the grand scheme of things if you're doing a big install you know, I mean, you're talking you're probably not going to put a thousand feet of ethernet cable in your house you may wind up having to buy the thousand foot spool if your electrician isn't just stocking this stuff although if your electrician isn't you might want a different electrician so, you know, you're talking a couple hundred bucks for your entire house to run cat 6a versus cat seven you know, at that point you're going to blow a couple hundred bucks on something you don't even think about at some point, so I'd put cat seven in but 6a, certainly for 10 gig ethernet would suffice all right, now the question about Thunderbolt easy for you to say versus USB-C hubs so it depends, right? a USB hub will still be running off the same USB bus that your Mac provides at least to it so depending on how much speed you need from those drives simultaneously you might run into a bottleneck it also depends on how they structure the hub itself because USB-C is, you know, I mean, especially if you're plugging in something that's doing, you know, like USB 3.1 Gen 2, I can't ever remember what the terminology is because it changes every day but, you know, depending on what your hard drives are doing and how fast they are you might wind up having two separate let's say USB-A buses inside of a USB-C hub not all USB-C hubs are created equal you know, the folks at Otherworld Computing will correctly and appropriately tell you, you know that their hub has enough bandwidth in it for everything to operate at full speed that is not the case with every hub that's out there and so you wanna be careful to make sure that the hub that you're getting is doing all of that right Thunderbolt Docks and really we should be calling these Docks Not Hubs so USB-C Docks, Thunderbolt Docks add a USB bus to the system so it's an additional bus and sometimes two USB buses again for that reason of balancing bandwidth and making sure you have enough so that it can all your USB devices to operate at full speed all the time as well but you're paying what I'll call the Thunderbolt tax for that honestly, I think in my opinion the only reason to go with a Thunderbolt Dock is if you especially for something portable is if you're running multiple video streams and of course you can't do that effectively with a USB-C Dock you're better off doing that with Thunderbolt but I think for what you're talking about here you know, look at the speeds on the drives and then take a look at these USB-C Docks and make sure that they're engineered properly to manage that for you and like you said, you can save a ton of money going with USB-C Docks for $30 to $50 versus Thunderbolt Docks which are started 130 and go up to three or even 400 depending on how many ports you're getting and what you're doing with it and what other technology is in it so I certainly would look at like the other world computing USB-C Docks because we know that they've engineered those right they aren't the only ones that engineer them right the pluggable folks that I mentioned earlier they've been making USB-C Docks for quite some time and they, you know, I asked them at CES they've got a new dock out actually I think the new dock is a Thunderbolt Dock that they were showing at CES I'm pulling this off the top of my head so forgive me if I get it wrong but I was asking them, you know how many USB buses have you put in here and how have you balanced it and they're like, oh right good question you know, they seem to have the right answer and in that they had engineered it at least with the thought of making sure that people would be using this and really wanting good bandwidth out of it so I would, you know, check out those folks there are several other vendors that are good just ask the questions and make sure you get your answers about how bandwidth is balanced and all that good stuff so I think you can sort of start with USB-C when choosing a dock for the purposes you described with just having some drives in that attached and only go to Thunderbolt if you can't find what you want slash need in a USB-C dock but I think you will find what you need in a USB-C dock and save yourself a bunch of money so thoughts on that, Mr. Braun? Nope, okay, okay, cool. You and I ran into something interesting at CES and I don't have the, I have not finished all of my testing with it we did a bunch of testing at CES and I have not done this, have not completed the sort of other side of this testing since we got back but I had brought out that the C rugged SSD Pro and it might be the pro rugged SSD I'm getting the words in the wrong order I'd brought that out to CES with me A, because I like to have a clone drive with me in case something goes sideways with my laptop or whatever while I'm traveling but I also wanted to bring it out to show to you because it like the pluggable one we mentioned earlier it goes really, really fast because it's an NVMe Thunderbolt 3 SSD, right? Cool, so we're in the hotel- Show me. Right, right, so you said show me, exactly so we're in the hotel room one night and I plug the drive in and I do the testing and it's, I ran black magic speed test and it's doing USB 3 speeds not anything faster than that and I'm like, what? And I knew, like I had tested this at home and it worked fine I had tested it on that same laptop at home in fact and on my iMac in the office but I definitely tested it on a laptop I'm like, what's going on? I'm like, wait a minute so my MacBook Air has two USB-C ports that are both Thunderbolt 3 capable into one of them I had a dock plugged in a USB-C dock plugged in for so that I could have some USB-A ports for like our microphones and stuff because we recorded a couple of episodes of daily observations there but also, you know, to pass power through and various other things just so I'd have one cable at the little, you know desk slash table that I was plugging it into at the hotel I'm like, all right, so I ejected the dock and I plugged in the drive and then it went at Thunderbolt 3 speeds and it even showed up like looking in system profile or whatever we call it now it would, at that point it showed up as a Thunderbolt device but in the prior scenario it showed up as a USB device it's like, okay, why is this bouncing back and forth? Now I know this, this Lucidrive has the capability not all Thunderbolt 3 SSDs do but this one I know has the capability of connecting to a USB 3 only device not just, it doesn't have to just be Thunderbolt I think the pluggable one I mentioned has to be Thunderbolt earlier on the show but you know, we can look at the specs and check that and so like, okay, this is weird and so then I tried another USB dock that I had with me because for whatever reason I'm that nerd that carries at least two and exactly the same thing happened didn't matter which ports I used if, so what we diagnosed while we were in Vegas correct me if I'm wrong on this John was that if you plugged in a USB dock first then plugging that drive and I need to test this with other drives this is really the test but then plugging that drive in second caused that drive to come online as a USB device but if I plugged in the drive first it would come online as a Thunderbolt device and then I could plug in the USB hubs either one of them and they would attach as USB and work just fine the drive would remain attached as a Thunderbolt device and work just fine and we left it that way for several hours and then tested after a couple hours and yes, sure enough the speeds were all still if I wasn't like something weird happened or whatever so I feel like, and I had a long geeky conversation with Larry O'Connor at OWC I think it was the next day or something John and I told him about this I'm like, have you seen this before? He's like, do that, first he was like that doesn't really make sense and he's like, well, wait a minute the Intel chip that's being used this way I was like, okay, yep this guy knows a lot more about this stuff than me but he sort of reasoned out why it might be happening but he couldn't figure out whether he couldn't just in his head I didn't have any of the stuff with me for us to test but theoretically he wasn't entirely certain whether the problem was in the chipset of the drive that we're testing with or in the chipset of the Mac and he seemed to agree with us John that it's something in the Mac that was just his gut feeling he's like, you should test it because it might be the drive that's for whatever reason but the drive shouldn't know what's plugged into the other side of that bus so I feel like it's got to be the Mac I'm going with the Mac firmer or driver or something in that it should always negotiate the fastest connection should correct he's doing that and from what you and I saw the order in which you plug things in determines what the maximum connection speed is which is crazy talk it's crazy talk yeah but it I mean it sort of makes sense right if the Mac has just decided okay we're gonna call this bus a USB bus and then when something new gets plugged in it just says hi I'm a USB bus to it and the drive's like okay I guess that's what we're using good sounds good like if the Mac doesn't say hi I'm Mr. Thunderbolt first then the drive doesn't know to say are you Mr. Thunderbolt you know yeah I just wonder if there's like a power condition or something where it's like oh well I see this happening so I better connect this way instead of that way it's like okay okay yeah you're wrong but yeah right exactly you're wrong but I think you're wrong yeah because you could do you could do you could do better Mac but here's the thing if I didn't you know I got when I got this drive I tested it six different ways from Sunday we talked about it on the show like in my mind this drive was done you know like I now trust it I know everything I need to know about it and I moved on and and I say this because I probably did more than 99% of the people who buy a drive like this would ever do right but I proved that it was going fast enough because I need to do that before we talk about it on the show if I had there's no reason I would ever have speed tested this drive again except that I was sitting next to you and I wanted to show you how fast it was going had you not been there I don't know how long it would have taken me to realize that this thing was connecting USB not Thunderbolt in that scenario and that's a pretty common scenario when I travel to have a USB dock connected pretty much full time if I'm at the desk and then just plug this in so you know if I was deciding to let's say I'm at WWDC next year and you know I do the stupid thing that I always do which is install the very first beta on my laptop of you know 10.14 or whatever it's going to be or sorry 10.16 and I would not and the first thing I want to do is clone my drive maybe I'm not quite as stupid next year and I clone it you know clone my internal drive to the external and then install on the external and now I'm booting from the external and I'm booting over USB-C or over USB not over Thunderbolt and I like how long would it take me to know that that was the thing I'd probably blame any speed issues that I saw and maybe there wouldn't be really anything practical but certainly backing up I would notice you know that it was taking longer and I might start blaming that on saying well you know this 10.16 beta is running slow and you know like cause that would be my experience with it and I don't know that I would ever have noticed this and so it's just one of those things where it's like man. If you want things not to work I can tell you two ways guaranteed to do that. So number one is I found this at CES there was at least there were more than one vendor where I'm like yeah show me your product show me what it does and they're like you know this was working fine five minutes ago until you showed up. Yeah it's your fault. Hey it's my job.  Right, right. It's like oh CEO walks into the room and all of a sudden it's like everything burns. Yeah no that's right, that's right. Yeah so anyway you know I'm glad to have noticed this but it as you know I've been cogitating over it since then it's like man how many other weird idiosyncratic setup you know setups that impact performance. Have I experienced over the years completely blissfully unaware or perhaps not so blissfully unaware but you know I never would have thought to question.  Yeah now I just need to test it with another drive preferably from a different vendor and maybe this pluggable one is the right one to test it with. I've got a couple others that I can sort of mess with but I wanna see what happens like especially if this pluggable one is not capable of talking USB-C and I plug that in in that scenario does it not connect. You know which honestly would be preferable than to connecting slower. I mean I realize that's you know sort of a switch but it does okay so this pluggable one says compatible with Thunderbolt three host systems. USB-C systems without Thunderbolt three are not supported. So okay so now I know what to test with so like I have my marching orders. I will report back. I have another sponsor I wanna talk about John and that is CashFly's web content optimization engine. Now we all know CashFly as the service that helps us get the show from us to you because they have this worldwide, truly worldwide network of computers that make up their content delivery network. Well CashFly does other things too. They are interested in speed. Everything that they do is focused on making it easy for you to get your content to other people faster and more efficiently and that's why when we publish Mac GeekGab we send it to CashFly they then publish it to their whatever it is you know several dozen computers, their points of presence all over the world. So if you happen to be in Australia you're not downloading it. You're not downloading the show from Virginia like I might be here in New Hampshire. You're downloading it from a computer closer to you and that's great. Well their web optimization engine over there at CashFly is built to do this kind of thing for your website and it's so cool because they know so much about all this that they can apply what they've learned to what you're doing with your website and actually have even some of the intelligence of your website living on the edges right with their web optimization and that way it doesn't have to go back to your main server. It can all happen on the edges. Image optimization, load balancing, smart asset delivery that all can happen sort of out there closer to your users than it does here.  So go to mac.cashfly.com that's m-a-c.c-a-c-h-e-f-l-y.com or just go to macgeekab.com and click the link in the show notes. Our thanks to CashFly for sponsoring this episode and for providing all the bandwidth to get the show from us to you. So thanks CashFly. All right, Darry has had a question that I wish he had asked us this question years ago because it's one that I'm happy now to have the answer to. He says, I'm looking for the best solution to extract email addresses from Apple Mail into an Excel or text file. He says, I have over 100,000 emails from customers who bought items from us with names, emails, and address details. We'd like to extract email addresses to use in our MailChimp campaigns, i.e. if an area or city or country could be extracted, that could be great too because we could also do geographical mails to people. He says, I'm happy to use paid software like email extractor from maxprog.com but ideally looking for a one step solution, i.e. drag a mail's inbox with our sales data and hit extract, boom. Well, the good news is that Darry has gave me a clue because I didn't really have one when he thought about this, but he does. And it's email extractor from maxprog. It says that it will work with lots of different files to parse out email addresses, but one of them is EML files. And that's what mail for macOS stores all your messages in. So I did a quick test with their free download which is the full engine but it stops at 100 addresses. So once it's extracted 100 addresses, it's fine, I threw a folder of mail at it and boom. It just built a list which it then would export as carriage return separated or comma separated files and you could pull into Excel just like you said. I mean, it is a very portable list and that would work perfectly for slurping into MailChimp. So it's definitely worth checking out. And you can find your email files if you go into your home folder and go to library and you can get there just by going to the go menu, hold down in the finder. So in the finder, go to the go menu, hold down the option key and you will see the library folder appear, go there, then go into the mail folder. So home, library, mail for Catalina, all your mail is stored in a V7 folder. And then you're gonna see a bunch of different folders in here. One for each of the email accounts that you're logged into. So there might only be one or two. And then a separate one for what we call your quote, unquote, on your Mac data as well. So depending on where you have all these messages that you wanna look, you're just gonna have to kinda twist these open. The top level folder names are all these, you know, UUID or serial number kind of things that probably won't mean anything to you. But once you twist them open, you will see the names of your mailboxes and hopefully you can sort of suss out, which is which. If you can't, twist open the one that says inbox, twist open one of its subfolders and once you get down to an EMLX or an EML file, just go ahead and use quick look. Hit the space bar on it and see what it is. And then you'll see, oh, this comes into that address. Okay, great, now I know what it is. And then you can find your mailbox and throw it at email extractor and you're good to go. So super handy. I have no doubt that I will wind up using something like this. Don't worry, we will use our powers for good here at Mac E-Cab like we always do. We never try to be evil with anything, especially when it involves. I say this because I know that everybody listening knows that we have many of you. We have your email addresses because you've sent us email over the years. It's how we answer your questions. We've managed that with trust so far. So we have no intention of stopping that. So there you go. But it would have been handy. Like for example, when we had to switch feeds or whatever we did, there was a thing we did a number of years ago where it was like, we gotta get in touch with all the listeners. It's like, how do we do this? Ah, well, as long as we don't blast them with spam on a daily basis, a once every few year email to everybody saying, hey, it's us.  You've emailed us before. I wanted to let you know. Here you go. Like that's not such a bad thing. So, there you go. All right. Thoughts on that? All I got is, well, I'll toss out, if you want to try to do this yourself. So I started fiddling while you were going on about how to do emails and stuff. And it appears, Dave, that open office and more likely their offshoots seem to support something called an email mail merge. So if you want to roll up your sleeves and figure out how to do it yourself. But how would they get, how would you get the email addresses for that? I mean, that's what we're asking. Well, you'd have to get them. Yes, you would have to import them from something. And I think that's what Darius is looking for is not what engine are you using to send them out, but how are you extracting them from this slew of emails that you've received over the years? That's the question here. It just seems to me that there looks to be a feature in some of the office suites that may be smart enough to look at a file and pull out the email address for you. Oh, interesting. Interesting, huh? Yeah, it was just a tangent I was thinking about. It's like, well, if I was trying to do this, what would I do? At first I looked at pages and pages doesn't seem to have any sort of mail merge whatsoever, but then it's free. So you get what you pay for. Sure, sure. Office, as far as I can tell, has some form of it, but I think it's more physical mailing. But again, open office seems to offer a email mail merge feature. So, all right, cool. Just your kicks. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure, for sure. All right, there we go. The last time I had to do a mailing, yeah, we actually have one coming up, I think. But I like MailChimp. MailChimp is very good at parsing files and pulling out the good stuff. Yeah, yeah, yeah, like you would use this email extractor thing to get the CSV together that you would then sort of pour into MailChimp and let it, you know, let it pull. But yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Right, we got our boys in the back room working on that, right? I would use this.  If I've got email extractor, it's all good. So, yeah. Charlie sent me a Facebook message, actually, because he's somehow cousin, I don't know. Anyway, Charlie says, I have a storage question. My current production computer is a 2010 Mac Pro. It's four internal drive baits have one to 56 gig SSD with macOS on it, a two terabyte SATA drive with user documents, a one terabyte SATA drive with client files, and a one terabyte SATA drive with more client files, and then in a PCI slot, a one terabyte NVMe drive that's a work drive for sort of my in-progress projects. He says, I've ordered a new Mac Pro, but I'm stumbling on how to migrate all this storage from my old one to my new one. So what would you do? And you know, that is the question that you are almost always asking us whether you know it or not, right?  I mean, with Charlie's thing, it's more of a theoretical question, but not really, I mean, it's a very practical question, but sometimes troubleshooting things, it's like, you know, you write in and you tell us, I've tried X, Y and Z, you know, but it still hasn't worked. So it's like, okay, well, sometimes we know the answer, but a lot of times it's okay, well, what would we do if we were there?  So, so Charlie was hit that right on the nose and here's the thing, I'm thinking that for those SATA drives, maybe a Thunder Bay from other world computing would work.  And that's what you wanna do is put all these things into something that can like literally mount them and then also connect them software-wise, electronically to your new Mac because you're not gonna be putting them inside it most likely. So the Thunder Bay is one of these boxes. There are others, but you know, I'm assuming you, the nice part about these things is you then have a choice. Your Mac is what's managing this, right? So you could, although in your case, what you described Charlie, you definitely not wanna do this unless you're changing your workflow dramatically, but you could raid these together or you know, connect them as one volume in some way, but again, you'd be doing that from your Mac either with Mac OS's built-in raid stuff or because I'm recommending a Node-WC product, you could use their soft raid, right, to do this, but in this case, you really wouldn't. You just want your Mac to see that there are whatever, four or five drives in there and you wanna mount them each individually. So you put your four SATA drives in, you mount them and you're good to go. Again, you could use soft raid or even Mac OS's built-in raid to stitch them together, but that's not your workflow. As for the NV, so that's for your SATA drives, right? Is that something like a Thunder Bay, those are, that's really the trick because it's just right there. As for your NVMe drive, I think the Envoy Pro, also from Otherworld Computing, Envoy Pro EX would be the answer. That will hold your NVMe drive and also connect it Thunderbolt 3 or USB-C, depending on how you're gonna do it. Oh, actually, I guess it is a USB-C device, but it does say Thunderbolt 3 compatible. I don't know, I don't know. I don't know, I don't know. I'd say Thunderbolt 3 compatible. I don't know, what are its speeds that will tell us whether it's actually going, oh, I mean, it says it'll do 1,000 megabytes per second, which depending on what your drive is, might be plenty fast enough or maybe you'll need to go with a faster enclosure. But an empty Envoy Pro EX is $70 bucks, $68.99 right now from there. So that's what you would, I think that's what you'd wanna do. But there are other NVMe enclosures too. So if you need something faster, well, they're out there. But yeah, you're just essentially moving the enclosure, physical enclosure for your drives from the inside of your computer to the outside. But these things aren't terribly expensive. Like a Thunderbay is 400 bucks, $394.99 from OWC right now, a Thunderbay 4 and that's handy. You could find a sort of not name brand thing for less you get to choose whether you wanna put your drives in that or not. For a lot of us, that might be okay. For mission critical stuff, you might want somebody where you know you're getting support and all that stuff. So that's, you know, that's your call. But yeah, thoughts on that, John? Looking at that machine, my only concern, Dave, is that the 2010 and so first hats off, that you have a 2010 machine. I thought I was dead. That's the Mac Pro, right? Right, the only thing I'll mention is that looking at our favorite utility Mac tracker, that machine only has limited connectivity and that it only has SATA ports, so you're not getting the most you can out of, I suspect, out of the drives that you have in there. Well, except for the NVMe one, because he's got a PCI slot, right? Right, and this machine has PCI, let me see, two 16-lane PCI Express and two four-lane PCI Express. So yes, you could certainly get a PCI card to get better speeds. I'm surprised that you didn't suggest perhaps a Synology, Dave. That's actually, looking at the size of the drives, that would, oh no, no, no. You don't think? Definitely not, because he's currently using these drives as direct attached and addressing each drive individually. He's not looking for network storage.  So, I mean, you could, but as soon as you do that, like he can't just take his drives and put them in a Synology and have it read his data. It would require wiping these drives and sort of re-architecting these things. So that's why. And this is more just like, how do you clone this workflow to this new machine? And that's why. Okay, so NAS would just kind of complicate things. It's a different solution versus a direct connect. Okay, I get that. Yeah, it's just a different solution, that's all. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. And then of course, the other question would be, well, how about a Drobo, but I think you're feeling- Same problem. About the future of, well, they have direct connect stuff. Yeah, but not in a J-Bot. But no, but yes, he would have- Proprietary. Okay. Right, so that's why I'm thinking, yeah, no, it needs to be a J-Bot for what he's doing. No, these are good questions because I bet people listening had similar questions, like why wouldn't you just, Dave talks about Synology all the time? Why didn't he think of that? No, the J-Bot idea, it really is a cool concept because if you think about it, and then perhaps this is the best way to approach sort of learning about what a J-Bot is on these old machines like that Mac Pro, you could just put disks inside.  Similar to what we do with just a bunch of separate like external USB-C or Thunderbolt disks, you're just plugging them in. The nice part about a thing like the Thunderbay enclosure or like I said, even an off-brand J-BOD enclosure where you're just throwing these is each disk in there shows up to the computer as an individual disk just like it would if you plugged it in individually slash separately. So like I said, you can choose to raid them together but you would be doing that in software and there's actually a lot of arguments for why software rate, especially with more than two disks is absolutely the right way to go on a Mac OS machine. But I won't distract us with that. But that is a conversation worth having. And we've had it on this show before and we'll probably have it again. And I see, to add to the distraction, this machine actually does offer an optional Mac Pro raid card. Remember that? Oh, the old Mac Pros did, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, this machine, I'm just looking at the things they offer and that's one of the things and I'm like, wow, that's really going back. And that Apple actually offered a hardware solution to do the raid stuff. And then John in the chat room is saying he found the OWC Express 4M2, which looks to be an enclosure for NVMe SSDs that is Thunderbolt 3. So that's the answer. If the Envoy Pro EX is not fast enough for whatever you're using, you can use this and it's got four NVMe SSD slots. So this is a J-Bod for NVMe drives, not for SATA drives, which is an interesting thing and it can do up to 2,800 megabytes per second and you can have eight terabytes of storage in there. So, nice, fine. Thank you, John NCSU, CPE in the chat room.  That's awesome. Okay, yeah, Express 4M2. Good, good, good. Awesome, fun. You know what, Dave? Like all rockstars, I think we may have to step off the stage. You know, like, there is a rule in performing, leave them wanting more and I think it's time to bow to that. So there you go. Thanks for listening, folks. This has been a fun one. I hope you learned something. You know, I didn't... It's always interesting where we go in the shows in this last discussion about J-Bod and especially with the questions you asked, John, to help kind of frame what it is and what it isn't. It's fantastic. There was a method to my madness. Yeah, no, this is awesome. Yeah, this is great. That's good stuff. Plus, Dave and I both saw that big hook coming from stage left and that's usually a sign that we have to shuffle along. That is where we exit. It is true. Yep, very nicely done. Yeah, so thank you to our sponsors for this episode. Of course, LegalZoom.com and CashFly, Mac.CashFly.com. I do want to thank, and we mentioned actually quite a few things that we saw at CES. And again, that wouldn't have been possible without our CES coverage sponsors, which were iMazing, Otherworld Computing, TextExpander, and Carbon Copy Cloner. We'll put a link to that in the show notes here, to, of course, thanks to all of you for listening. Thanks for your great questions. Thanks for helping us through all of this. These conversations don't work without it being interactive amongst all of us. And so all the things that you do every week, folks, and posting in the forums and asking questions and sending them in via email.  I'm still thinking about ways of sort of compartmentalizing it all, but I think we've actually, we've got it in a good spot. There might be. There's always room for improvement, right? But in terms of workflow efficiency, I really do like when you folks ask questions in the MackieCab forums, because it means that the entire audience has the opportunity to see them and chime in with their thoughts before we first talk about it in the show. Most of the time, you know, if you send us an email, we read the email. Generally one of us takes it and runs with it. Sometimes we consult with each other before the show, certainly during the show we consult. And then all the, you know, smarts coming from you folks and the audience that can sort of help in the hive mind happens after we begin the discussion. But at the MackieCab forums, that happens potentially before we talk about it in the show. So really, it's awesome. So go to MackieCab.com slash forums, check them out, and you can post there, but you can also participate in the discussion. They, as I like to say, those forums are yours, not ours. We're there, of course, but they are, you know, for you to interact with each other as much as they are there, perhaps even more than they are there for you to interact with us. Although, you know, like I said, that happens there too. So, all right, enough of our rambling here, John. I think that's, that the hook is all too close, my friends. So it's time to go. We will see you next week. Thanks to everybody. Thanks to all of our other sponsors, Barebones, hero.com slash MGG, linode.com slash MGG. It's been good. Cool stuff found in answers. I mean, that's like the meat and potatoes of what we do here. I love it. Have a great week, everybody. We will be back, of course, next week, as is always the plan. And do us a favor. Take your time with what you do this week. Be intentional about what you do. Take care of yourselves. I meant what I said during the legal Zoom spot and get those, you know, durable power of attorney and healthcare proxy and all that stuff in place. Trust me on that. And that's just, that's part of this overall message, right? Because what you want to make sure is that you don't get caught. Made.


Personal Finance PowerPoint Presentation. Medigap? Who is it for? Prepare to get financially fit by practicing personal finance. Insurance is part of our long-term risk mitigation strategy where we follow the adage of measure twice, cut once, put in a formal process, and place something like setting the goals, develop a plan to reach them, put the plan in action, review the results, repeat the process periodically. Most of this information can be found at Investopedia. Who needs Medigap insurance? Which you can find online. Take a look at the references, resources. Continue your research from there. This is by Tim Parker, updated December 20, 2021. In prior presentations, we've been talking about insurance in general. Going to the medical insurance, which is a bit more complicated due to the complexity of the medical field and the laws and regulations related to it and the insurance of it. And now we're thinking about the Medigap insurance in conjunction with that overall insurance discussion. Who needs Medigap insurance? If you are covered by Medicare and are wondering whether you really need a Medicare supplemental insurance plan, I was wondering that. That's why I'm here. So let's talk about it. Also known as Medigap, you're not alone. I'm good. I feel comfortable that people, there's other people out there that are feeling similar stuff that I am. That's great. The Medicare website contains hundreds of pages of information, few of which are easy reading. That's for sure. It's hard to get an answer to the big question. Why should anyone who has Medicare get Medigap plan below is our answer. So Medicare, obviously, you might most likely most people getting Medicare after they reach the age threshold to be receiving it. And now the question is, well, what kinds of Medicare do I need? Do I need other insurance other than the Medicare? Do I need Medigap, Medicare Advantage, and so on and so forth? And the confusion spins and spins around in our noggin. So what is Medigap? Medigap is a supplement to Medicare coverage. So if you have Medicare, they might supplement it or add on in some way the Medigap. Depending on the type of coverage, Medigap policies are designed to provide more coverage for routine services. Medicare does cover and in some cases, all or part of the expenses Medicare does not cover, such as long-term care, vision or dental coverage. And you want to be careful with these items here, especially the long-term care to make sure that you've considered your options there. We've talked about in the past, the Medicaid and long-term care insurance. That could be a big one that you want to be considering. The purpose of a Medigap plan is to be reimbursed for the costs you paid directly out of your own pocket. These plans are offered by private insurance companies, so you'll have to do some comparison shopping to get the one that fits your needs and financial situation. Keep in mind that lettered plans from each company have the same benefits. So in other words, the government kind of put some restrictions around it so that they can kind of have the letters in place which should have the same benefits so that we can see some standardization and more easily possibly do some comparisons. So that's according to the government mandate. So why buy more insurance then? So if you have Medicare, we've talked about different options within Medicare, why possibly would you might need more insurance? As noted above, Medicare isn't a blanket insurance policy. This means it does have holes in it. Original Medicare as the government calls what we now know as Parts A and B, so if you hear the term original Medicare, we're typically thinking B which kind of kick in somewhat automatically although B you want to you know sign up or what but if you have been paying into the Social Security throughout your working time and Medicare prescription drug coverage that's Part D which we talked about in the past pays for most of your expenses but it's far from all of the costs you may face if you become seriously ill or get injured. Even routine services come with co-payments and deductibles. This is where Medigap insurance kicks in. So when we think about just the normal insurance you can kind of compare Medicare the original Medicare basically too at Part A and B and somewhat in Part D for example which still comes with the kind of terminology we talked about the deductibles and the co-payments that could be involved. So Medicare deductible here are a few examples. If you are admitted to the hospital 100% hospitalization coverage after the $1,484 annual deductible under original Medicare Part A as of 2021 $1,556 in 2022. So you've got the deductible that you know you got to clear the deductible for example and that's a general kind of insurance term. That's the basic bed and board. However you may owe 100% of some other costs such as anesthesiologists fees.  If you are in the hospital for more than 60 days you have to pay $371 per day in 2021 $389 in 2022 that are similar co-payments for long stays and nursing facilities and hospices. Regular doctor visits and outpatient medical care may cost you too. Your deductible for 2021 is $203 $233 in 2022 but after that you'll pay up to 20% of the Medicare approved amount for most doctor services. There's no upper limit. Medicare donut hole prescription drugs can also eat into your budget and need expensive medications. You should know that you can purchase stand-alone prescription coverage. That's part D in Medicare terminology. So in other words for the drugs then you typically looking at Medicare part D would be the first thing that would come to mind with that which is not part of the automatic kind of A and B which A is kind of automatic and B you kind of would most likely be put and signed up for the prescription drugs. So under the Affordable Care Act the ACA the prescription price donut hole has been closed each year but it's not completely gone yet. A certain level $4,130 in 2021 $4,430 in 2022 you enter the notorious donut hole in coverage that requires you to pay up to 25% of covered brand name and generic drug costs. When costs go above $6,550 in 2021 $7,050 in 2022 you pass through the donut hole and owe only 5% of the cost of drugs. So you've got that range where things get out of whack for some reason the way it's currently set up paying more of it. So how does Medigap work? You may already know that Medicare parts A and B comprise basic coverage while part D is an optional prescription drug plan you can buy from a private provider and attach to your Medicare. So A B and C we're kind of getting that down it's kind of like the basic chords in our music and our guitar playing strategy we're going to say okay I got those chords down but what is this new Medigap thing and then you got part C also known as Medicare Advantage that's the more complex combo chord that we got to put into place replaces all the basic government coverage with a private insurance plan if you choose part C you do not need the Medigap plan so then again obviously you would be making a comparison and say okay do I want to just do the part C kind of thing or do I want to do this Medigap type of thing or do I need either of those added components but if you go for the original Medicare plus part D and do want a Medigap plan for more complete coverage there are more letters to learn some complex scales that are like they're like minor scales and not just the pentatonic and what not it's like a Dorian thing or something that we got to learn some crazy scale so this time for plans rather than parts so each letter represent a standard level of coverage for Medigap plans the most popular choices are F and G plan F and G those are the standard of the more exotic Medicare items so the most popular plan F this is the most comprehensive plan and has been the most popular choice for years the average cost per month for the most popular Medigap F plan is approximately $326 as of January 1st 2020 however plan F is no longer available to people newly eligible for Medicare what people who already have plan F will be able to keep it and people who were eligible for Medicare 2020 but didn't have a Medigap plan may still be allowed to get plan F if they wish then you got the Medicare plan G this plan will likely replace plan F in popularity now that they banned it F was so such a cool one but now we've got plan G as it has virtually the same coverage except for reimbursement of the part B deductible a perk that is no longer included in any plans offered to Medicare newbies as of 2020 you're no longer grandfathered and you're out of that benefit newbie people newbies and the oldies so the average plan G should be cheaper than plan F however cost very widely according to applicants zip code gender and tobacco use and they increase with age they're always prejudiced against those tobacco users which plan is best here's the short answer we want 100% coverage of everything an F or G plan depending on your eligibility is your choice the other plans offer progressively less coverage for lower upfront costs as you would expect the tradeoff between the two for a more detailed answer you can do one of the following speak with a qualified insurance agent or Medicare Advantage to find the plan that fits you read the Medicare publication choosing Medigap policy will you find descriptions of each policy type and what it covers now we got to consider the Medigap versus the Medicare Advantage now because we've got that comparison going head to head toe to toe Medi to Medigap to care Medigap policy is a supplement to your original Medicare coverage that pays expenses that original Medicare doesn't cover a Medicare Advantage plan Medicare Part C in other words is a private replacement for the public Medicare program so most of these plans are set up as health maintenance organizations those of the good old HMOs that replace all of the services of original Medicare and add additional services such as preventative health care within a pre-selected network of doctors a Medigap plan will probably give you more freedom of choice than Medicare Advantage providing your physician or facility accepts Medicare so it is a better option for snowbirds or others who travel a great deal or have homes in more than one location so in other words as we've seen in the past one of the issues with the HMOs is you got that whole network situation so if you're moving around a lot that could be somewhat of a restriction on the HMO so is my spouse covered no no your spouse isn't covered because we're moving from like an employer type of thing where you can have other people on it and stuff when you go through the insurance to the Medicare stuff which is by age so your spouse could be like 20 or something like that which probably not for most people unless you're like an actor or something I don't know but that could happen and they wouldn't be covered because you have to be over the threshold typically so in any case no a Medigap policy covers only one person and doesn't cover expenses incurred by your spouse. Medicare isn't like an employer's sponsor plan you can't enroll your spouse under your coverage this means you and your spouse have to purchase separate plans to be covered for supplemental insurance can my plan be canceled no that's illegal as long as you pay your premiums your policy is renewable for the rest of your life which is nice because that's what I need here my life might not be lasted all that long you know time's ticking here so I need this one kicking in for the rest of it can't be pulling the rug out from under me so close to my right at this point you can only be dropped if any of the following apply you stop paying the premiums well that kind of makes sense you lie down on the original Medigap application okay I guess the company goes bankrupt well that wouldn't be good hope that doesn't happen if you choose to cancel your Medigap policy you must do so by contacting the insurance company directly the CARES Act of 2020 have you heard about it on March 27 2020 President Trump signed into law a two trillion coronavirus emergency stimulus package called the CARES coronavirus aid relief and economic securities act it expands Medicare's ability to cover treatment and services for those affected by COVID-19 the CARES Act also increases flexibility for Medicare to cover telehealth services so the doctor can tell you to do strange and unusual and embarrassing things over a webcam instead of in person so authorizes the Medicare certification for home health services by physician assistance, nurse practitioners and certified nurse specialists increases Medicare payments for COVID-19 related hospital stays and durable medical equipment the changes will likely continue into 2022 or whenever the pandemic ends how much does Medigap cost you might ask since Medigap is privatized insurance each insurance company offers different premiums for its Medigap policies so obviously the answer is there it depends the good old it depends answer the price might be determined by a number of factors like your age, inflation or how long you've been enrolled why do I need Medigap Medigap policy supplements your original Medicare coverage covering more expenses Medigap provides more choice and covers a larger network of health care providers than Medicare options if you travel or need coverage that original Medicare doesn't provide Medigap might be a good option for you is my spouse covered by Medigap no Medigap only covers one person both spouses will need to purchase separate plans