The Mac Observers' Mac Geek-Gab Episode 692 for Monday, January 15th, 2018. Thanks, folks, and welcome to the Mac Observers' Mac Geek-Gab, the show where you send in your questions, tips and cool stuff found. We share it all. We share our own cool stuff found, questions and tips, with the goal being that every single one of us here, me included, learns at least, yes, five new things each and every time we get together. Sponsors for this episode include BB Edit from Barebones Software at Barebones.com. We'll talk about that shortly. And a new sponsor, Roboform, the password manager. We're at roboform.com. You can save $10 off your Roboform Everywhere subscription with the coupon code MGG. We'll talk more about that later, too. Here in Durham, New Hampshire, I'm Dave Hamilton. And here, a bit out of the weather, no doubt suffering from post-CES cruft. In beautiful Connecticut, this is John F. Brun. Hey, John F. Brun, you got to get the cruft out, man. And I'm trying. That's what you got to do. I will try to not do it on mic. Can you run Onyx on your body to clean the cruft out? If they had a version that would work on bioforms instead of computers, maybe. I think that would be a good thing, man. But we got to get to work on that. Isn't that what they used on Star Trek? Who is that over there? Oh, and here. Here. And another part of Durham, New Hampshire is Pilot Pete. Thanks for having me back, Dave. Thanks for coming. I'm glad it all worked. Yeah, it's good to have you, man. Good to have you, man. I'm rushing over here, but I made it. Cool. So, hey, quick question before you start. Quick question. I think we've already started. Well, you know what I mean. It's the agenda. You said we had to learn five new things. The problem is I have to forget five things to put the five new things in. I think so. Yeah. Okay. All right. Now, let's get going. I'm sorry. You need more RAM. You got to upgrade your RAM there, people. I hate that the truth. Wet, wet where, right? We call that fixing our wet where? Yeah. Got to ram more in there. There you go. Let's go to Jeff. Let's make sure we get what we need to get out of this show. What is Jeff wanted, though? Jeff asks. He says, I recently installed macOS on my Mac Pro. All is working fine, but I seem to have lost the option in messages on my Mac to send an SMS text message when the recipient doesn't have iMessage available. This used to work fine and does work fine on my MacBook. I guess it's an iCloud thing. On my iPhone 7, I have gone into settings, messages, text message forwarding, and I have Jeff's Mac Pro in there, not once, but twice. Both are checked to allow the devices to send SMS via this phone. I've flipped them on and off, but I can't seem to find where I can maybe remove them so I can reset it. Can you please investigate as I've tried and tried and cannot find a solution? So the only thing, or at least the first thing that I would check is on your Mac, go into the messages app, go into preferences, go into accounts, and choose your iMessage account. Put them one account in there if you've got like Google Talk or whatever. Not aim because that's gone now. On that screen with your iMessage account, make sure that your phone number is checked as a device or as an address where you can receive and then also send things. That I think makes a difference here because if you don't have your phone number kind of activated on your Mac, then you can't do SMS. So I think that's certainly the first thing I would try. John, you got any thoughts on this? Where's that again? Messages. Right. Preferences. Oh, in the messages app. In the messages app. Yep. Preferences. And then accounts. And then your iMessage account. And there's a thing that says you can be reached for messages at. And you've got all these things there. One of them is going to be your phone number. That has to be checked in order for those things to work in my experience. Okay. Now it's a little buried. Now, to be fair, you don't have to at the below that you have an option for sending red receipts. I'm on Sierra, not high Sierra on the podcasting machine still. So this might be a little different, but I saw it earlier. It's not that different. It's the same. Okay. And then at the bottom you have the option start new conversations from. And you can pick anything you want here. Having the phone number selected here is not mandatory for the, for the SMS thing. It will automatically do that. I highly recommend not starting new conversations from your phone number. Only because. Really? Well, if your phone number changes, ie. If you travel to a foreign country and use a SIM card that has by its nature, a different phone number. No one that has your phone number for iMessage will be able to reach you. Yeah. Yeah. Because yeah, that freaks my wife out. She can't figure out why sometimes my email address and other times it's my phone number. But I actually have another suggestion here. I'll come to it. I just want to just to complete that thought starting new conversations, pick an address and homogenize all your devices to that. You've got to go into the settings for each device and say start new conversations from and then just choose the same thing so that at least there's some consistency when you're sending messages to people. So go ahead. Well, and then it's on the iOS device as well. It's under settings messages and then text message forwarding. And you have to select your your Mac. Yeah. And I don't know what to do if your Mac isn't there. Well, his Mac is there twice and selected. That's right. He did say that. Yeah. You mentioned that. And try. That's true. He said he has. Yeah. Yeah. I think I think it's the setting on your on your my brain will be here in a minute. Hey, it's fine. I literally walked in 90 seconds before we kicked it. It's true. Yeah. It's true. It'll be right behind me. I'm sure. Yeah. If it doesn't get lost. At least on both of my Macs is set to my cell phone number and not my email address. Yeah. By default, that's what it's going to start. That's what it's going to be set to. But I just I found a couple of years ago when we traveled and needed new SIM cards, it was like, oh, this sucks. Everybody that I message with does it with my phone number. And there's no reason to have things tied to a phone number because I don't own that number. I mean, I might that number may change. I have three selected though. I have my phone number and both of my iCloud email address. So I had. Yeah. What we're talking about is the start new conversations from box, which is at the bottom of that preference window. Send and receive. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, lucky there at that. You get to pick. Now, if somebody texts you or I message as you at your phone number, it doesn't matter what this start new conversations from thing is going to reply to from now. Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. So now this you may have mentioned this, but I was fiddling with my device here, which of course we all do these days. On my iPhone, when I went to settings messages, there's an option send as SMS and it's off. And it says send an SMS when I message is unavailable. Carrier messaging rates may apply, which at least my current plan, I have unleaded voice and text and all that stuff here. But it's funny that it's off. Yeah. I wonder why you have that off because by default, I believe that's maybe that's no, that might be off by default. Yeah. Yeah. It's buried in there. It's in the, yeah. Settings. So you still have a plan that requires text. Yeah. Pay by text. Yeah. Yeah. It sounds like it's a backup here. Yeah. For the people that I know that don't have, well, I'm going to turn it on right now and hopefully the world will come to an end.  What that's for is if the phone can't get a data connection to send an iMessage out, it will, if the person has a phone number attached to their contact record or if you're sending to a phone number, it will send. Right. Right. It won't use data. It'll use the phone line inside of that. If it can. And then I think what you mentioned is that the entry below that is send and receive and it has three addresses. And it looks like my cell phone number is the default. Start new conversation. Okay. So that's the equivalent on the iOS device. All right. So all of mine are set to my cell phone number, same for decades. So sure. See no reason to change it. But I understand your concern. Yeah. You know, you pop around and change your cell phone number all the time. Yeah. If you, if you put a new SIM card in your phone number will change. Right. So if you go to a different country and you're not using your US data plan there, sort of by definition, you're going to have a different number. So yeah. All right. Good. Fun. That's the beauty of the new data plan, at least with AT&T overseas. Yeah. It's cheaper than. Oh yeah. It is now. Yeah. That's awesome. All right. Moving to staying on the same subject. We'll go to Zach. Zach, he has kind of a rant, but I think it's an interesting conversation. He said, I would like to start a movement to upgrade standards of cell phone texting to include better group texting standards, including A, some sort of BCC and B, a warning when you were replying to a group text you didn't notice was a group text. Hey man, Zach. Yeah. Maybe starting with the developers of Apple messages would be the way to go. Let me know your thoughts. So, yes. Well, Dave. I echo Pete's sentiments, right? Go ahead, John. But I agree, but I got an asterisk there. Go ahead. Well, all I'm going to say is that at our recent trip to CES, you had created, thank you, a group which we jokingly, or not jokingly called, I think it was Mac Cool Kids. I just called it Mac Kids. I left cool out of it. The Mac Kids. Yeah. But we know we're cool. Okay. Or we think we're cool. That's what I'd say. Sure. But that worked out splendidly because it did exactly. It was people in our circle who we knew had texting abilities and you just created a group and then it was a broadcast and now it's done. Right. Yeah. But to Zach's point, that doesn't solve any of the problems that he's talking about here. Right. Well, because iMessage doesn't really have any advanced features, right? iMessage is... Well, you made a group, but that's part of the standard then. You just created a group of numbers that you had on hand and then that group persisted. Yes, but it, right. So it's important to remember that iMessage is sort of almost an analog to SMS with some what I'll call compatible enhancements. User interface wise, compatible. Not necessarily compatible with SMS. And that is, they've added for non-groups, red receipts. You don't get that with SMS. But you don't have to change the UI to do red receipts for iMessage and not for SMS. Right. So messages has to be kind of live within this box of the UI needs to work for both SMS and whatever enhancements they make to iMessage. And one cool enhancement to iMessage is that you can create a group as you can with SMS and then you can name the group and everyone in the group sees the new name, which is handy because that will help with these kinds of things when you're replying to a group. You'll see the name of the group at the top of your thing and be like, oh yeah, right. Okay. But even still, like I texted the group the other day and we have a family group to and my wife replied and it wasn't anything awful or anything, but she replied something that she probably didn't intend to send to the kids. You know.  Right. No, it was actually a comment about one of the kids. She was watching one of the Lucas's hockey games and she was very honest about her comments about how the team was playing. I was like, huh. Okay. Well, I mean, we're pretty honest that she did intend to send it. But, you know, like that kind of thing can happen. Better than than SMS is our platforms that are completely independent of SMS. And I don't consider iMessage independent, but something like Facebook Messenger. It definitely is. Snapchat, kick, Slack. Right. Those are all. WhatsApp is the one we use at work. Okay. Yeah. That's right. Yeah. That meets it perfectly. Yep. I don't remember all the way back to the question. Sure.  Yes. Which is not ideal, you know. Yeah, you can't leave. Yeah.  I'm in class. Yeah. Right. Right. WhatsApp is great. Yeah. I'd forgotten about that. Yeah. Pete, you can check out at any time, but you can never leave. There you go. Yeah, exactly. I messaged Hotels California for sure. Man. But Facebook Messenger, I feel like that one and WhatsApp, and WhatsApp is also owned by Facebook. Now it's owned by Facebook? Yeah. It was independent, Facebook was bought at it. They haven't figured out how to monetize it yet, I guess. But I love WhatsApp. WhatsApp is great. The sound quality on it's good, the ability to have group chats. So, to me, that's really where this is going is just completely leaving SMS behind and going with one of these other messaging platforms, because Facebook or WhatsApp or any of these certainly could put all these features in. And I really like Facebook's ability to ... I was part of a couple of CES, like different cool kids groups, John, for lack of a better term, like the CES party group and the CES this group. And those messages, you probably noticed it at dinner, I would mute them for 24 hours, because it was just like an insane amount of traffic on this. And I could go and check it when I wanted, but I wasn't getting notifications. And for whatever reason, it was like 7 p.m. when I muted it the first time. So, I'd be in the middle of dinner, and suddenly it would be like, I have to take my watch and throw it across the room, because I can't function anymore, and I would just go and mute the chance. You didn't mean to stop vibrating. Yeah, exactly. At the very least, you could have given me the party list or something, man. I was going to say, you're going to hurt John's feelings. These cool kids groups, you were belonging to anyway. Sorry, it wasn't mine to give somebody else's group. But it did get us into all the parties we wanted to, so everything was good. But that's really where this goes, is we just leave SMS behind. iMessage could detach from SMS and really just enhance iMessage to the point where SMS still worked, but it felt very feature-constrained. So, what do you think about Apple engineers? Are they going to mess with iMessage anymore, or are they going to leave it to these other apps? I think it's going to stay pretty simple. I mean, they've added things like Animoji, there's Apple Pay Cash now. So, I think that's where it goes. And they've added some things, like per message, red receipts, and that kind of stuff. I mean, it's evolved, but Apple evolves this stuff slowly. But not bigly, like, sorry. Thanks, Pete. Like WhatsApp, like Facebook Messenger, hasn't gained those major features. Correct. Like the Messenger bots. I saw a ton of those at CES. I think I can talk about it anyway. I saw, well, a Messenger bot is a thing where you can fake Facebook message with a device. So, I think it was, I think I'm allowed to talk about this, I think it was TiVo that had a Messenger bot for, like, they've got, they demoed Alexa, sorry, A-word, and G-word control of TiVo, which is really cool, because you could say, like, A-word, record any movies with Chevy Chase or whatever. And it just, like, it knows, right? And you can also do it with a Facebook Messenger bot. Let's accept, and we'll talk about this in a minute, but voice assistants really aren't voice assistants. They are text, they are speech-to-text engines. Yes. And you have to know the exact syntax to get the resulting engine to then parse and process your command. So, it's not understanding you. Or do you? Well, yes, you do. Right. I mean, that's just how it works today. Well, the evolution will be that it won't. Yeah, correct. I'll argue in the negative. Which reminds me, there's actually a pretty, pretty fun, funny, set it in a live skit on using Odessa, or answers to any name that even resembles TiVo. Yes, I remember that. Yeah. So, it's worth looking up on YouTube for a chuckle. Yeah. So, the Facebook Messenger bot, I want to come back to what you said, John, because I think that would be a good conversation. But to complete the thought on the Facebook Messenger bot, that takes the speech-to-text out of it, and you're just typing to the engine, and then the engine talks to whatever you want. And so, that's what these Messenger bots are, and they're great. I saw them actually had several people demo those to me, because if you've done any sort of voice assistant control, you already have the back end to deal with the Messenger bot, because it's literally just text, which is all you're getting from the voice control assistants anyway. Yeah. So, that could work really well, and if Facebook has done that, could Apple do that? Yes. Have they? No. Not in that sense. Well, it's interesting. And then some are better than others, and I don't mean, sorry if I'm going down too much of a rabbit hole, but have you noticed, it's my anecdotal observation that Siri is far more responsive and accurate on my watch than ever on my telephone. Huh. That's interesting. I mean, I forget what I was asking for recently on my phone, and it was trying to find me restaurants in Turkey, and I'm like, no. That's bad. Cool. Yeah. But my watch almost never misses, so. Huh. Cool. You haven't noticed that? No. Okay. No, I find it equally... Equally frustrating. Yeah. Yeah. You know what? No, it's good. When it's good, it's great. And there are times when you just want to go, oh, well, thank goodness my belt and shoelaces have been taken away from me because the frustration level is rising here. So, let's have this conversation in a minute. Yeah. 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So you got to check it out. Go to Barebones.com, check out BB Edit. They too have a, it's not just a free trial, it's a free version of BB Edit that has most of the features I just discussed. So you may not ever need to upgrade that. Check it out. Our thanks to Barebones Software at Barebones.com. All right, John. Let's talk about these voices. Let's talk about these voice assistants and what we saw at CES. So, but let's start with, we'll go right down the rat hole here.  I like rats. Okay, good. Yeah. You said that you don't think voice assistants are simple, simply speech-to-text engines, right? That's what I posited before, and you disagreed. Yes, because as I pointed out to you, no, as I pointed out to you in the past, their behavior, they're not simple translation engines, because as I pointed out to you, I think in the last podcast, maybe you're setting me up for this, but my assistant responded differently in something that worked in the past didn't work at another time. And I'm like, why is this? You know what I'm talking about. Well, whether or not I do is sort of a relative challenge. Very specifically, so the thing is, so my A-word downstairs, I say A-word lights off. A-word lights on. And it always worked. These are link somewhat dated technology with the hub, but it has an action, what do you call it, or recipe, whatever. A skill. Yeah, a skill. So it has a skill in that ecosphere, and the thing is, I would expect it to work the same way, and that if I say the same thing to it, the same thing happens, but that doesn't happen. So what's happening there, I think, is it's trying to apply intelligence, but it's doing it poorly because it didn't do what I wanted. So that's just my one data point to throw in the conversation here is sometimes they're too smart for their own good and that it thought it was doing the right thing, and maybe it was loading a different context or thought I was somewhere else in the house or something, but it didn't do what I wanted. So and the thing is, we all want our assistants to do what we want. Not, you know what we say, but what we want. I would actually argue that you're proving my point for me, but... Great. I mean... Continue. Well, just because that's exactly what I'm saying about these things is they aren't able to interpret what you want all the time. Like a human in the room hearing you say this, even if they are, you know, for the first time hearing this instruction, if you said, you know, Dave, turn on the lights, I would know to turn on the lights in the room that I'm in. Yeah. Or you could get persnickety like my assistant didn't say turn on your own lights. I'm not going to do what you want. Right. Exactly. Which is what it basically relayed to me. It's like, I'm not going to do what you asked me to, and it's like, why not? You did before.  That's the thing. It's not intelligent. Yeah. Yet. Right. So it's just, it really is just, and I say this with a huge asterisk, just speech to text translation. That's really not as easy as I make it sound. Because doing that far field with other background noise, constantly having to ferret out who's talking, what direction, what's happened. I mean, like there is a lot of intelligence there. It's just not enough yet. Yeah. But it is enough. It is astounding technology. Let's assume that the technology that can do that is perfect. Then you have the layer below it or above it. Right. To the side. I don't know. Which is, how do you do something smart based on what I said? Right. Right. What John says lights on and lights off. It's pretty clear in my mind what it means, especially if you have something called lights in your database of devices. So I don't know why it fails. Yep. Well, because the way it's built is you have to say a word, tell lights to turn on a word, tell lights, turn off. Right. John, where are you flaring your words? Ben to its, but it's making me bend to its will. It's exactly what I'm saying. Yes. Yeah. But you know, so at CES, we saw quite a few. I can't do that, Dave. We saw quite a few things that, I mean, everything, frankly, was adding voice control either, some companies were adding their own voice control engines, but most were adding either, you know, a word or G words voice control because they're open platforms and they let people do this. And I mean, it's actually great what some of these people are doing. They're really pushing the limits. And what was really cool is in each of the conversations that I had with companies that were doing this, it was obvious that both Amazon and Google were partnering with these folks, like at a very deep level to find out, like it would be, the conversation would be like, well, hey, okay, say Tivo, right, wants to add voice control or is adding voice control. It's not quite yet certified by Amazon, but it will be. It'll be out, I think end of next month. So, like it's coming. I think Dish already has. Okay. Yeah. Because I had, I'd got one of the Alexa Sonos. Yeah. The Alexa Sonos one now. We say a word on the show. Yeah. I meant to do that. Yeah. Hey. A word. So, but they're working really deeply with them and saying, hey, you know, what is it you want to do? And can we work together on this? And like the demo that Tivo did for me, as I said before, was very context aware. Once, once you said a word, turn on living room Tivo. From that point, you could say a word changed to CBS. And it knew the focus that you had. It's a different type of skill. And they've created these skills for companies like Tivo and Sonos, right? Where once the, once the Amazon device has focus, you don't need to be pedantic about it. And you can say, you know, pause, rewind, skip. And it's just like doing these things. Well, you shift in a new vocabulary, potential vocabulary. Yeah. It's a subset. But also interesting, and I'll use the Sonos example that if I, if I group my speakers, it can handle the groups.  It doesn't. Well, they're right there. That will be coming, I'm told. No, but I can understand this is astounding technology anyway for for a microphone to translate audio impulse into machine language and turn it to ones and zeros and send a command to turn on a light, turn on a television, change the channel, record something. It's pretty cool. Yeah. Yeah. It still makes me feel bad, but I gotta share the story is that one day I set a timer with Alexa. So Alexa is in my entertainment center. Please say a word, John. Yeah. Yeah, John. I'm sorry. I'll try to remember it. So anyways, but so my entertainment center has a unit and then my kitchen is where I cook my food and then they were apart and the thing is the alarm went off.  Of course. I had to yell because the far fell microphone picked it up from like two rooms away, but then I felt terrible because I was yelling at my assistant. It's like, what kind of good person does this sort of thing? Yeah. But she honored my request. Good assistant does what she's told. That's kind of the nice part is it's an emotionless assistant.  Well, that would have been worth it. They aren't quite replicating yet. So it's CES though, you know, one thing was missing from I would say 98% of all the conversations that I had about voice control and it was HomeKit. And I don't mean to say that people said we aren't including HomeKit. I mean that HomeKit was not part of the conversation at all. Really? No one even brought it up. Despite the fact that it's obvious that I'm, you know, clearly talking to an audience of Mac and Apple. My experience was varied in that I had more than one, especially when they saw Mac Observer. They were like, oh, by the way, we support HomeKit. So I, I saw. That's good. It wasn't the trend, but it was, it caught my attention and that more than one person that I spoke to with a Mac specific product did try to tout that there and the thing is they've lessened the requirements. I think with HomeKit before you had to get like this embedded chip and I had to talk to an Apple to that they've changed that they've loosened up the rules for them to become part of the club. It can be done with software. Now, I think it used to have to include hardware or they strongly encouraged you to put a security chip and people are like, dude, are you nuts? Yeah. Well, the security requirements are really are CPU dependent CPU hungry and that's where having a dedicated chip was. More than one person said, you know, when we talked, it's like, yeah, how's dealing with Apple? No. And I'm like, yeah, I know. Well, that's the problem. Right. Anybody, any one of us could go right now and write our own skill for for Amazon for a word or Google G word and start using it without ever needing to have a one-on-one conversation with someone and get it certified. Like, like you don't have to do that. You do with hardware devices if they're going to listen. But otherwise, no, you can just go like put a skill up and test it out. And HomeKit's not that way. And, you know, Apple's behind the eight ball on this. And the reason I'm telling everybody here this is that I don't think it's worth waiting for HomeKit to catch up because frankly, I don't think it ever will. There's so many devices out there that will never support HomeKit that will always support, you know, Amazon or Google's offerings and it an Apple centric household that has like an echo dot in it works very, very well. And I can say that from personal experience. In fact, I think we all can. Right. I mean, none of us are using HomeKit at all. Actually, I am. I can't see any of my devices with currently. Okay. Yeah. Well, I'm using it for the hue. And I have the Apple TV 4th Gen 4k that has HomeKit that kind of has to be there to hub everything. Yeah, sure. But that's all I'm using it for. But the question that I have is why is Apple out of it? Is it because they're worried about security? Is it, you know, and is that because, you know, the security of the Internet of Things, it doesn't seem like that big of a deal right now, but it can quickly be a problem. Right. But it will. But HomeKit doesn't change that. Okay. Well, that's what I'm asking. Is Apple behind because of security or are they behind behind because they're just more stringent for. I think it's the left. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Well, you just said they made it too difficult to become part of the club. Yeah. Or part of their. That's what vendors would say when I asked them. It's like, wow. Oh, same. Like I told you, I was like, yeah, dealing with Apple and I roll. And it's like, yep, I hear you. Right. Totally. They made it too hard. If they're a standards group for voice interface. Yeah. There's several of them. Yeah. Well, there you go. And like we said, Dave, in the past standards are awesome because there are so many of them. Exactly. Right. Yeah. HomePod was the other thing, you know, kind of related to this that came up quite a bit at CES. Mostly it was people asking me, have you, what do you know about HomePod? And, you know, the more time that passes, the more people sit and scratch their heads and say, $350 to walk into the door with a speaker that does this. It's like, you can buy a Sonos One, which has great sound for $199. Yeah. Yeah. And on sale at Christmas time for $149. No. Was the one? Oh, no. The A-word one was $199 still. But yeah. Yeah. But still, you know, like there's, and they sound fantastic. They do. Yeah. So I, it wouldn't surprise me if when HomePod comes out, we see the price drop. I did hear about one person that has HomePod in their home. And the comments, the comments were that room tuning actually works. The auto room tuning, presumably because it's really only doing it for music, not for theater. Theater requires a much more sort of directional focused approach where as music can, you can sort of make some guesses and be okay. They said that part works. The sound of it is fine. The voice control is serious awful. Is what, what I've been told. And you know, it makes sense because if we compare S word to A word to G word, A word and G word are, were built out of the gate to be voice interactions end to end. Right. There is no screen. So everything happens. Now you might not get the information you want, but it, when you get to the end of the interaction, it always ends with voice. I think anybody that has access to S word, which most of us do on our Apple devices, finds ourselves, I would say half the time, if I'm asking questions of it, I am basically told, okay, now you need to look at your screen. Yeah, I'll continue on. I'll put it on your phone. I'll put it on the screen for you.  I'm driving. Like, no, that's not okay. You know, and so, like that was the issue and I think is Apple's issue with HomePod getting like closing all of those doors because HomePod doesn't have a screen on it, at least not one that's going to function in that way, based on what we saw and based on what I've been told. So, like, they have to not say, by the way, oh, sure. You want the results of that search. I've brought up a Bing search for you. Yeah, where? Right? Not on the HomePod. That's for me to know and you to find out. Right. Be nicer to me and I'll tell you. Yeah, exactly. Don't get so snarky. You're yelling at me, John. Yeah, so this is it's going to be interesting. No, you're yelling at me. No, I said, you're supposed to yell the day word the other day. Yeah. So I think that's that's going to be it's going to be interesting. And it may, HomePod may force Apple to make S word better because it it closes this loop and makes it makes them have to live in a voice only system. Right. And I don't know how they work there, but they've got to be sitting in rooms or groups or areas over there that are just have got to be doing wild ideas. Oh, sure. Of course. Smart people. Yeah, of course. But I don't think HomePod is going to be a home run. No pun intended out of the gate. No voice interface. No smart speaker has been it. When you get these things are Wi-Fi, they are far field voice and you need to have a million homes as test cases. Yeah. In order to learn what's wrong with your device. Yeah, you got it.  And I mean, that's OK. But, you know, I've I've watched Sonos do this. I've watched other companies do it and I've watched Amazon do it and like they didn't get it right out of the gate until they just stuffed all these things in people's homes and was like, OK, great. Now, you know, race, race, race, let's iterate and let's make it better. So I don't know. But, you know, Apple's problem is they they have this reputation mostly in their own minds. Don't put out beta. Don't put out beta. And I don't see how that's possible with multi-room audio or far field voice. And they're doing it all in one product for the first time. Tough. Yeah. It's a tough place. Oh, yeah. Yep. All say is if you have access to this treasure trove of audio data from homes far and wide you should do something with that. Well, they do. I mean, Amazon does. Well, except making a I'm I'm thinking world domination. Oh, oh, who cares about making a voice assistant that actually does what you want. I would take all that data and aggregate it and there's that. Sorry. World domination. Let's let's go. Let's go back and find. Well, we started this show about messaging. Let's let's continue there. Shall we? There's light out of this bunny hole. Yeah, we'll go back to Terry here and and Terry asks I've looked everywhere in Mail.app and can't find a place to turn on red receipts. Is there a terminal command or is this just not possible in Apple Mail? The simple answer is it's not possible with Apple Mail in default mode. Correct. But the good news and the reason I continue to use mail despite there being other mail clients out there is that on your Mac mail is extensible, which means plugins can work. And there's a plugin called Mailbutler that will do red receipts. It actually does all kinds of great things. One of my favorite features that Mailbutler does is it will delay sending your messages. So when you type a message you hit send, you can set it to delay as long as you want. I have mine set to 60 seconds so many times. I've hit send and thought, you know, I want that back. Let me rephrase that. Oh, and it'll also, if you say the word attachment in an email, but there's nothing attached, even before it puts it in the 60-second queue, it'll be like, hey, you didn't, you said attachment, but you didn't attach something. Are you sure? You wanted to do, it's a nice catch. So Mailbutler is probably going to be your friend, but John, do you know about something else that will do red receipts? Yes, sir. Cool. And I just pasted it in our notes here. So there's, oh, no, wait, what's going on here? Hold on, insert link. Tell us what it is. We can get the link in the notes later. There we go. The thing is it's hidden, Dave. Okay. So anyways, basically what you can do is through the terminal, you can, there is a header that you can set in your email called this position notification two. And if you set that on an outgoing email and the incoming server decides to honor that, it will ask you, and I've had this work, Dave, it only seems to work. So the thing is, there's a standard for asking for a reply. The problem is, nearly every email client that I've seen ignores it. The only one that doesn't, Dave, is Outlook. Right. Because I have this set on one of my computers. So I say, all right, disposition notification two, and I have it set to my dot mac address. Only people that are running Outlook can see this because Outlook for some bizarre reason honors this heading and will ask the person, hey, did you read this? And they're like, yeah, sure. But it's only Outlook. So I just want to offer that is that the standard, the email standards did embrace this concept, but they all ignore it. Yeah. So as you said, either Mailbutler has the feature. I know I've seen that. Or things like MailChimp and others. And I think what they do, they all use what we call a web bug. A hidden one pixel. It's a hidden one by one graphic that basically if you open an email wherever that graphic is hosted says, hey, somebody access me and that leads to, well, somebody probably at least read me not necessarily understood or comprehended what I said, but at least open the email. Right. That's how they pull that off. So it's sneaky because why not just to use the standard, but I don't know. Well, because because nobody supports the standard. Right. The nice part about and I use nice in quotes about the one by one tracking image is it sort of is the end around for clients trying not to be tracked.  Right. Because it figures those are trackers that will confirm that this is a valid address. Yep. And then you'll get piles more spam. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. It's your way of saying, yes, please send me more cannot have any services if you search Dave. So you know, we love MailChimp because they have a feature if you use them for mass mailing. But there are several others when I search, you know, email, read receipt. There are a lot of services. Some I've never heard of, so I'm not going to use them.  So that's another option if you don't want to roll your own with something like you mentioned. Yeah. What was it? Mail Butler. So do they set up a local server? What do they have their own server? Okay. All right. So they put the tracking graphics on their server. Oh, nice. Thanks. Well, I mean, you know, it's a they there's some level of it you can do for free. And then beyond that, you pay, you know, depending on how much you need to do per month or whatever. Right. So, yeah. Now, you got to think about this. Do you really want to obsess over how many people open your Yeah, maybe a certain emails. Yes. And it helps with like a mailing list to know if people are opening it for a lot of reasons. So well, for us, like, you know, when we want to know if you like a goodie from us, we'd certainly like to know if you receive email. Yeah, exactly. We'd like to. Yeah. It's important to us. Yeah, it's good. I used to use one called Mail Acton. And at some point that went away apparently because from off of my laptop and I just tried to go back to their website and it says site not found. No, no, no. Mail Acton still very much exists. Indev.ca Well, so Indev and and little known software. So Scott Morrison who ran Indev.ca and Scott Little who ran little known software both made mail plugins and they merged to a company called Small Cubed. Okay. And Mail Acton is very much still good because I remember boy, you know, sitting there as soon as I saw that question, I went, yeah, I used to do that all the time and it would let you pull mail back for about a minute, you know, until the connection with the other server closed and that kind of stuff. So I don't know. I don't remember. I use Mail Acton every day and I don't I don't know that it has that feature, but it may. Maybe I just don't use it. Yeah. And this is okay. I'm looking on the Macworld website. It talks about having a Mavericks version. So, so it's at least fairly up to date. I mean, Mavericks not too far back. Okay. I thought Hazel at one point supported this, but maybe not. I mean, Hazel does like a Cajillion things and maybe that was one that I misremembered. Remembered. She's powerful. She is. Yeah. I don't think Hazel will do mail though. So Mail Acton will do delays on the send, but it won't do the red receipts. No. Oh, interesting. Okay. But it did some cool filing. I remember that because when I was the safety chairman at work, it was you know, I had so much email and it allows you to trigger rules with keystrokes. Yes. Which is great for like you said for filing because you can do lots of different things in a rule and when you've got a message highlighted, you just say, you know, like for me, for press releases, I want to mark it as unread. I want to like do a couple things and then file it into our, you know, general press release folder. So I hit control R and all of the things that I need to happen to happen. Yeah. Yeah, that's great. Yeah. That's good. There's some really cool extensions out there for mail is the point. That's why I like mail. More than a red receipt. Yeah. Okay. So you say red receipt and not read receipt? Yeah, because it's red. Past tense. Red. Okay. The message has been red. Yeah. What's red and white and black all over or something like that? Oh, no. No, we're not even going to. I got some I got some. Oh, yeah. All right. You know, I've got there's all kinds of things we're going to talk about here. But last week I didn't have all this data with me on my laptop in the hotel in Vegas. So I want to make sure that we go through this all and get it here now before the end of the show. And that is, I want to thank our all of our premium subscribers that have contributed for the last two weeks because you all rock. And then you can find out about this at macgeekab.com slash premium on our 25 dollar a month, sorry, 25 dollar by annual plan twice a year is Graham R Robert T. Mark S. Zach E. Bruce M. Gary T. Paul W. Avram M. James M. Richard J. Kurt W. Walter H. Eddie M. Greg H. Anthony N. Deborah L. Bob L. and Ron G. Thanks to all of you at the 25 dollar every six month plan also Dennis J. at 30 dollars every six months on the monthly plan we have to thank Michael P. Bob L. R. E. L. J. C. Paul M. Scott F. Neil L. Mark R. Joe S. James C. John G. James B. Barry F. 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Thank you so much to all of you and I say it every week it really it makes a huge difference in us being able to do what we do things like CES and you know really just everything that we do your support means a ton so thank you very much and with that it's time to answer some questions from a few premium listeners Louie is on deck and and Louie asks something that's probably going to be controversial I recently moved to high Sierra on my laptop and my iMac I started from scratch from fresh like really fresh I got all my hard drives reformatted in APFS file format on both my machines some of my backup drives using carbon copy cloner are now getting drive genius consistency issues when I run the drive genius repair I get an error that says Mount APFS exit status three safe backup could not be repaired and on the consistency check an issue is detected with this volume should I worry I tried some Google food but with very limited success I'm running the latest drive genius of course what do you think so there's two things here number one this is the very first version of drive genius that supports APFS so it is possible that you are running into a corner case with drive genius that's not that's reporting an error that isn't there I would I would run disk first state on these to see what that says that said I also wouldn't run APFS on rotational drives right now given everything that we've seen I know it's like we want to I like the idea of partitioning and all that stuff but we have to remember Apple isn't supporting it on a on rotational drives they are they're not you say that but continue well I say that because if you have high Sierra installed on an SSD and you or if you if you have Sierra installed on an SSD it will auto convert the drive to APFS when you upgrade to high Sierra if you have Sierra installed on a rotational drive it will leave it as HFS plus when you upgrade to high Sierra okay it's Apple is not supporting this there they are not recommending it and and I disagree but to be fair APFS was not built to be used on on a non SSD it was in fact it was built specifically to be used on SSDs and it takes advantage of a lot of the features of an SSD so continue all right yeah okay I will counter your statement with information from Apple okay specifically an article called frequently asked questions about compatible B about Apple file system so it's an article I will show you I think it's not it's in their developer database so okay maybe it's old data but it says can I use Apple file system with my existing hard drive yes Apple file system is optimized for flash but can also be used with traditional hard drives and external direct attached storage so that is a statement that you're making in a document on their developer website sure I'm just gonna throw that out there the reason I say this Dave is that I made the crazy decision today to reformat both my backup drives that are rotational that I use for carbon copy cloner as APFS okay then we'll see what happens it could end in tears it's good to see what happens I don't disagree I just wouldn't recommend it to anybody the thing is I ran the situations with both of my rotational backup drives where I'm like you know what it's about time to reformat them either they got full or I'm using iCloud photo library or increased my iCloud storage which I did both by the way oh sweet we'll talk about that later yeah cool but all of a sudden it resulted in my taking up lots more space on my drives right and one of my drives actually filled up on carbon copy cloner because it was taking up a couple 100 more gigabytes because you know so I decided to reformat them as APFS encrypted and well we'll see I mean full backup you did a complete like wipe and reformat you didn't use disc utility to convert them for no I did not do a convert I did a race APFS encrypted because you can use disc utility to do it and without losing data non-destructively I mean well I chose to do it destructively sure yeah of course of course yeah I'm curious to see how it works out I mean I think you know two years from now APFS will be mature enough to be reliable on you know on all types of drives and it just won't engage some of its features in fact I'm pretty sure that's how it works now that there's certain features it won't engage if it's not on an SSD because SSDs are different so but I like based on everything that I got yeah yeah okay yeah based on everything that I've seen I just wouldn't recommend it to a client to a you know I mean I would tell everybody I don't recommend this now if somebody says that's fine but I want to take the risk great no problem in fact I probably will do it too but it's this is one of those let me test or let us test and now you're testing so maybe I don't have to but I wouldn't do it I wouldn't rely on it I would definitely have okay I was doing it myself I would have clones of clones because oh but I do good so good yeah they would those drives are backed up to at least one other destination so good so this is my test for you the listener I'm making the leap here to see if APFS is a good thing to do on rotational drives yeah and I'll let you know if you don't hear from me for several weeks then probably not yeah that's right well we hope to keep hearing from you every week regardless in fact you tell us about it all right I'm jumping around a little bit here listener Steve wrote in and asked he had a networking question and we love networking questions especially the ones like Steve he says I'm considering adding using a Synology RT 2600 AC as a router for my network and then using my existing two airport extremes as wired extensions in bridge mode can you tell me how this compares to a mesh network and am I losing anything not going to true mesh he says on the mesh side I'm looking at things like or be links and the latest era so you're creating with your RT 2600 AC or really any router series of routers where you put one in router mode and then others in bridge mode you're creating what I call a quasi mesh and what I mean by that is you have some of the characteristics of a mesh most notably access points spread throughout your location all of which I would recommend you have the same SSID so that your devices can just sort of roam from one to the other and pick up whichever one they feel is the right one and that's basically and that's actually a lot like I would say that's maybe 65% of what benefits mesh provides but go ahead John what I think well correct me if I'm wrong but do you want them on different channels I would I would lean towards yes I would some of the mesh products don't put things on different channels but in controlling it yeah I would put them on different channels so you don't have anything over that for the most part I think it makes the life of the client easier it's like do I choose this one with this name on this channel or this one with the same name on that channel and I think channels don't confuse the clients they go by MAC not confused but may help them oh okay but it will make your without having channel contention assuming you don't have any neighbors that are causing it regardless but if you if you get to control the environment without channel contention you get more bandwidth on every channel because there's no sharing of right so general practices you should probably spread out if you have multiple access points spread out the channel yes yeah totally that's a great idea yeah um that but that's about where your but see this is this is a perfect example of what you don't get by going to a real mesh doing a quasi mesh you have to think about all these things with a real mesh it manages everything for you from one interface so instead in the scenario you describe you'd have to go to your Synology router to set the channels there and the SSID there then you'd have to know the IP address of each of your airport extreme base stations well or you'd run airport utility actually which yeah which is fine and it'll find them and then you have to go to each one and set them into bridge mode and set their channels and set their SSIDs and you know go through all of that whereas if you have one of these mesh solutions you get one interface and everything happens there right you also don't with a quasi mesh you don't get what I call the common intelligence where every access point knows about the others with your you know your your hybrid approach your quasi mesh approach your Synology doesn't know what's connected to your airport Wi-Fi and your airport Wi-Fi certainly doesn't know what's connected to your Synology the Synology is going to route it all but from a Wi-Fi standpoint they are not sharing any relevant information and that can you know and that can kind of make it know about each other but they don't know what clients are connected but they don't do anything they're not going to hand off remotely intelligent it's just like yeah you're you're another channel you're just another thing and you've created a device and honestly they're all going to show up as Ethernet devices right so if you're in this scenario where the Synology is the router and the airport is the bridge the mesh point if you will if you have your iPhone connected to the Synology it's going to show up as a wireless device on the Synology if you have your iPhone connected to the airport base station it's going to show up as an Ethernet device on the Synology because that's how it's coming through and that's the third thing you can only do Ethernet backhaul in this quasi mesh now I'm presuming by nature of you asking the question that's not an issue but if anything happens to your Ethernet or anything you don't really have the option of doing Wi-Fi backhaul and I put an asterisk on that there's always the option of doing Wi-Fi backhaul but it's in this scenario the one you're describing it's a major headache to set it up whereas with a true mesh solution Wi-Fi backhaul is sort of part of the game and you can just do it in fact some quasi mesh is don't even support Ethernet backhaul but thankfully the three that you mentioned or be the develop and the Euro all do now so there's nothing wrong with creating a quasi mesh again it's one of those geek scenarios would I recommend this to my family members not anymore I used to set it up for them because we had no other choice but now that these other things exist it's like screw that I just want one thing and you can manage it yourself it's awesome so it just works it just works I still see you know it's still even though they insist they don't do this I still see with my Euro on my various machines running what am I running here I'm sorry hold on I'll get the pointer but anyways I see my machines shifting from one to the other and I'm still convinced there are smarts somewhere Dave even though they insist there aren't they really agree with you with the Euro and then all of a sudden I see it go from one you know it says like B SSID from here to here and I'm like well why did you do that somebody told you to do that I don't think the Mac told you to do that their CEO has looked me in the eye across a video conference but still and told me that they don't do this because I asked him I'm like so how are you like you're using 802.11 KVNR to do this he's like no we're not employing it now they have started employing 802.11 R which is the fast switching which means a client at the client's choosing can switch from one access point to the other without renegotiating the security key which makes it way faster and better for like VoIP calls so that if you jump if you're wandering around your house as this certainly I do when you're on the phone you know if you jump to a different access point you're not going to lose the call that's the only thing they that they say they're doing but I'm with you I feel like there's a little bit more intelligence there but yeah I'm sorry it's a Dubuque tools so Dubuque tools is like totally awesome if you're on a Mac and it basically tells you when your machine is shifting from one access point to another and I'll see this it's like I'm going from here to here here's the SSID here's the you know the channel width and all that and I'm like why'd you do that why'd you do that exactly somebody told me to it's like who told you so yeah I'm with you on that but you know works great yeah alright so I think we got that covered um where are we on time here let's do Gary I think Gary wants to be done yeah Gary does I don't know if we're going to go where we want to go home I'm talking about upgrading your memory your RAM on your iMac um I've seen a couple shows one was nine to five where they added two eight gigs to the existing two four gigs and he added them together or whatever and uh but I've seen I saw another show that did that but I once saw a Larry Jordan radio show or heard a Larry Jordan radio show where an expert on memory was on there and he said if you do that if you have you know two at four and two at eight the system only recognizes four the lowest one so you'd really only have 16 but I wonder if you could do a you know do a segment on clarifying that because you know a person would like to be able to do the four and eight but and I think I've heard that another place too that it only recognizes the smallest one so you know you see a lot of people quote the nine to five guy but I wonder if he's accurate on that or not but thanks a lot I appreciate all your help and all your your content and work my name is Gary alright Gary the yeah so this is it it's a good question there are computers that require RAM to be installed in banks of say two or four and in in that case if it requires RAM to be installed in a bank of four and the first two or four whatever gigabyte chips and then the second two or eight it's only going to see all of those as four gigabyte chips and your Mac though most of your Macs and I say this without knowing which the Mac Pro does I'm hoping John you'll you'll catch me on this or somebody will maybe somebody in the chat room but most Macs are do not require RAM to be installed in pairs now there can be a benefit to installing RAM in pairs because it can do memory interleaving and you can get like a 10 to 15 on your RAM when that happens but it is not mandatory on most Macs and hopefully somebody's going to tell me whether I'm wrong for interleaving stuff it has to be the same clock speed and same size same clock same everything you get a benefit in that it basically last I checked it makes the data bus twice as big as it normally would be if they're the same flavor of chip okay so hooray you get you get increased throughput but what was the machine again specifically the year he didn't say which machine he was just talking in general so okay my advice would be so the best source that I've seen Dave for information about this the problem here folks is Apple sometimes lies and that they will underestimate the amount of RAM that a machine can handle my best source for finding about finding out about the truth is backtracker okay yeah yeah okay no it basically tells you okay well here's how much RAM your machine said it could take from Apple and here's how much it can really take so they're the best source and the thing is I found their advice accurate so far sometimes it gets weird I haven't found it getting weird and that you have like mismatched like in the past they'd be like okay well if you have a four and a two gig then you get six gigs in this machine and it's like why are you doing this? but for the most part I think the most recent machines will take their happiest when they get paired RAM chips of the same capacity for that interleaving that we talked about yeah and just in general I think it makes sense it doesn't make sense to you know get a two and a four why would you even do that well I mean you would totally do that let's say had a computer that only had a two in it and you wanted to add some RAM and you add four like there's nothing wrong with that you had a dead laptop that had some memory in it you wanted to use yeah I don't it's not like your computer is going to be so suffer from a sense of malaise if it has mixed sizes in it it's either going to have matched pairs and take advantage of interleaving or it's not but I mean it's not going to be upset with you if you put it I think it's just a typical in this day and age that you don't get what's being made right now anyway the Mac Mini what about the MacBook are they user serviceable everything else is you have to buy it that way or go to iFixit or something the iMacs other than the iMac Pro iMacs are upgradeable yes I think because like my MacBook Pro I don't know I put like 16 or something in it but that's the old adage buy as much RAM as you can possibly afford up front so you aren't fighting this issue at a later point in time and most of them recently seem to me not to be user serviceable well yeah again the iMacs are even the 2017 5K is user serviceable from RAM it's just not the iMac Pro and the Mac Pro is the same way so you don't have to put matched stuff in there it's just if you do you'll get advantage of interleaving if not then you won't yeah so I get where whatever I think it was the Larry Jordan show that listener Gary was talking about I mean there were computers and probably still are some servers that require RAM and banks but generally no I remember that being a lot more of an issue I was a first a new switcher and 07 and 08 and yeah they were very adamant about I remember my SE 30 I mean now we're going back to 100 years to 1989 but that one had eight slots two banks of four and the four had to be matched yeah and I got the machine with four ones one megabyte chips yeah four megabytes brother and then I added four fours to that I think of RAM man yeah I had more RAM than I would ever need in my life and in that computer that was true but not necessarily all I remember is there was one point in time Dave in our past when Apple was being a bunch of babies and the RAM that you put in the machine they all of a sudden tightened the restrictions on it or timings yeah so all of a sudden RAM that used to work didn't and the machine would start up and I'm like dude wait this RAM worked why are you yeah folks John's right but we're also talking about 18, 19, 17 years ago no it was more than that because it was with my Pismo power book that I experienced this so that that was 17 years ago it's pre-mac geek so just you know bear that in mind it's not anything we've seen recently but he's right the Apple tightened up their timing restrictions to be fair and this was kind of one of those things OWC, RAMjet and memory to go and the last two the last two companies don't their had a party don't really exist no they had to they honored their warranties and replaced everybody's RAM I remember that they're like okay Apple's being jerks but we'll we're not right yeah more power to them yeah yeah yeah mentioning OWC I did want to mention we talked about CES in this show so I did want to mention the fact that both or not both all three Elgato, Smile and OWC were there to help support us at CES and helped cover our expenses they were our show sponsors for our coverage and I wanted to throw out a thanks to them in this episode as well lastly we got time for a few tips so I think we can do this Christopher with a K says in episode 690 you mentioned a problem with responsive web design whereby Allison Sheridan's father-in-law unintentionally triggered a website's responsive design features by using a narrow browser window I've run into that another way that the responsive features can be invoked on a sufficiently wide browser window by using command plus to zoom in occasionally my wife will forget that site using command plus in order to see some small detail and if you didn't know that that can be one of your five things command plus command minus you can zoom in and out of web pages it's really really nice upon navigating to a responsive site though a sufficiently wide but still zoomed in browser window triggers responsive features which makes sense and Safari presents her with the mobile layout it's not uncommon for me to suggest command zero which is also the same as going view actual size as my first suggestion when she thinks a site looks odd many times that's all she needs thank you Christopher that's awesome I wouldn't surprise me if that's part of what Allison's father was seeing too so very good stuff and also episode 690 we heard from Ed who said you said that note burner is what you use to remove DRM from from Apple's iTunes store videos on your Mac but note burner does not work with high Sierra and they haven't been able to get that fixed I've tried using my wife's laptop running El Capitan a note burner and attaching my external iTunes media drive with mixed results I've also tried screen recording with QuickTime but wasn't able to get that to work either I'm trying to use my purchased iTunes movies with Plex but can't get past this DRM problem now you're any asked if I have any ideas sadly I don't you're totally right when we talked about it a couple weeks ago I've realized I've realized since that I haven't used note burner since I upgraded sort of the Mac that I do it with to high Sierra and you're right it doesn't work with high Sierra so I don't know the answer if somebody out there does feedback at MackieGab.com is what you would send that to us and then we will share with the rest of the folks out there are you sure about that Dave I wasn't quite sure I heard you but I thought I heard you say feedback at MackieGab.com that's where I heard feedback at MackieGab.com and I'm borrowing the headset so it's true you look good with the borrowed headset the last thing we started this episode talking about messages and we are going to finish it listener Dave says talking about messages in episode 690 where things were out of order he found a an article that offers some suggestions for fixing these out of order I messages and I'll tell you I have seen this on all of my devices at least once I really do think it's related to iCloud and the message the I message syncing that doesn't yet exist on any of our client devices I think there's there's like I think frankly that Hi Sierra and iOS 11 were built with the assumption that we would be doing iCloud for the I message syncing and now that we're not I think there are some edges and crumbs left over in the code that maybe don't sort things the way they're supposed to so there are five I think suggestions in this article we'll put a link to the article in the show notes but we'll read the suggestions and kind of top level down number one is restart your phone or your Mac I've definitely seen this work number two is to force restart your phone I'm not sure why they would say that at Gadget Hacks but sure why not and there are different ways to force restart different iPhones that they've got in there reboot the automatic date and time settings so go into settings general date and time and turn off and then the set automatically option there so that it sort of forces itself to re-sync its time zone that people seem to think that might be part of it method five then oh I lied because there's a sixth one but I don't like the sixth one method five says toggle I message on and off so again settings messages turn I message on or rather off wait 10 to 15 seconds turn it back on and then the last one is reset all settings but like I said I'm not into that because nobody likes to have to reset all their settings especially not me so that's what I got for today John I don't know what you got I think that's where we're gonna have to wrap it up my friend I think I think I have a big old bag of we're done with this yeah I'll share can I share your big old bag of we're done with this do you want to share in the bag? yeah I do can we share in the bag everybody in the chat room at macgeekab.com slash stream can we do that? somebody just joined you're late if you're late you have to buy the bag if we're done with this everybody else in the room we already told you how to email us if you'd like to join our great Facebook group visit macgeekab.com slash Facebook I want to send a big shout out of thanks to the folks at CashFly who provide all the bandwidth to get the show from us to you I want to thank our sponsors as I said earlier in the show Roboform where coupon code MGG saves you 10 bucks off of Roboform everywhere that's at Roboform.com and also BB Edit from Barebones Software at Barebones.com in the podcast marketplace and of course Smile and OWC are there as well as a new one coming in that we'll talk about coming up in a new show new episode I should say same show, new episode and I want to thank all of you for listening again a huge shout out to all of our premium subscribers Rob and Pete you had some tips going earlier I got one more for you guys and Gals what I'm going to do this week don't get caught


hey there friends thanks for checking in it's time for another handgun showdown where the viewers of this channel decide which manufacturer produces the better handguns this time we are matching up glock versus canik now i actually study this stuff and glock really has not done too well in this handgun showdown series they lost to sig cz and walther as where canik has done very well you know they beat torus car arms and barely got edged out by walther so i think this will be a good one but before we get into that let's report the results from the last handgun showdown where we matched up revolvers versus wonder nines and i have to say the people who love revolvers they really love revolvers i remember revolvers beat 1911 that one kind of shocked me so this was no shocker to me but the wheel gun class took it they love them they treasure them and they say there's just something about these revolvers that do it for them a little more than the wonder nines so that is what happened there but this will be a good one so let's get to it let's start with glocks people love glocks for many years probably still is the most popular carry gun in america people love glocks they trust glocks they just run and they'll get you out of a jam but this is my favorite glock right here it's a glock 26 little subcompact model the 3.4 inch barrel 10 round magazine and one of the greatest advantages that i see is calbert consistent double stacks work with each other right there 10 rounds right the 33 rounds and that is a big time advantage as well as aftermarket support you know there is no company that would receive the aftermarket support that that glock enjoys and people change out the triggers the frames the slot you name it the sights it goes on and on and on people love customizing their glocks and they really really dig that but the sights you know they're so so out of the box polymer sights easily changed out same with the trigger looking at about five and a half to six pound trigger pull with a very short trigger reset and they're rugged and their duty and they get the job done and that's what people love they say you can run anything through your glocks they don't hang up on much and i have to agree here we have the glock 19 this is extremely popular this is the gun that others are compared to because of its longevity all the way up to a gen five now they now have the 19x which is excellent but i've got a standard gen four glock 19 15 round magazine it'll also take that 33 round mag no problem same feature is pretty much full grip here four inch barrel five and a half to probably five and three quarters would be more accurate trigger pull right there but if you love customization and you don't mind doing it on your own putting a bunch of extra money into glocks to make it a one of a kind to fit you then you're going to love it and people do they love their glocks they say they just run they're simple and they get the job done and there's no question people love glocks and i don't see that changing anytime soon and here we have canik probably offers more in the case than any other manufacturer out there the people who own them say i don't need any aftermarket support because anything i'd want to do to my canik handgun canik offers in the case including holsters which i think is very nice right here we've got canik smallest gun it's the tp9 elite sub compact and over here we've got the largest gun the tp9 sfx i remember when canik first came out people were saying it's a great deal for 300 bucks it was reliable people loved it and since then they have expanded to a large line of handguns but this is what i have to feature today here we have the elite sub compact i love this gun 12 round magazine three and a half inch barrel a sweet trigger i measure it right at four and a half pounds trigger reset right there both these models have seracoat tungsten slides this one here optic ready all right three dot sights metal also has a striker fire indicator and it's it's a sharp looking and shooting handgun and canik has also developed a lot of confidence amongst the the owners of their models they they love them they they say that everything you need is in the case and they function they run everything and i don't need to put any extra money into my canik's and i can testify i haven't put a dime into these other than the ammo that i shoot up but here we have a race gun it's the tp9 sfx a lot of people love this 20 round magazines and i measure this trigger right at four pounds it's a nice trigger very short reset also optic ready they offer four plates they offer everything i couldn't even go through everything that canik offers in the case but here we have lightning cuts in the slide fiber optic front sight serrated black rear also has the striker fire indicator right there 5.2 inch barrel and a sweet model a lot of people love this gun you know priced right around 550 with everything that it offers is amazing canik says you can take this gun hit the range immediately and you don't need any other accessories and from what i've seen and what i've experienced all that is true and i certainly enjoy these models so which is it for you is it glock or is it canik let me know and i'll be sure to report the results back with the next handgun showdown if you like videos like this please subscribe and share i always appreciate thumbs up button thanks for watching and you guys be safe


Students, now we are going to see the third type of literature review which is called meta analysis. Meta analysis entirely different from the systematic literature review and scoping review. Let's see how it is different from both type of reviews. Meta analysis is a method for systematically combining pertinent qualitative and quantitative study data from several selected studies to develop a single conclusion that has greater statistical power. Meta analysis is different from systematic literature review and scoping review because what we do in this? In this, the different studies that we have conducted, the qualitative and quantitative inferences are drawn, we integrate those qualitative and quantitative inferences in one study and integrate it in one study and draw a journal inference from it. And we believe that the inference we are drawing in a collective study is more significant as compared to all those single studies. This conclusion is statistically stronger than the analysis of any single study due to increased number of subjects, greater diversity among subjects or accumulated effects and results. Because in this, as I told you earlier, we consider it to be more significant, so why is it more significant? Because in that, the analysis of your meta analysis, your sample size has increased, your sample units have increased and in that, your methodological analysis has become more rigorous in that. So on this basis, we consider that these results are more valid. So why do we do meta analysis? So on that, we see that what are the objectives of doing this? The first objective of this is to establish statistical significance with studies that have conflicting results. So here, if you look at the main thing, which is important, is that meta analysis is done in such situations that when you have conflicting results, one branch of studies supports a particular hypothesis, accepts it, whereas the second branch of studies rejects it or disapproves it. So in such situations, we conduct meta analysis so that all those studies are included in a single study and see what the results are. To develop a more correct estimate of effect magnitude. So in this, we try to follow our analysis in a way that is more significant as compared to earlier conducted studies. And the third objective of meta analysis is to provide a more complex analysis of farms, safety data and benefits. This analysis is more complex as compared to the single handedly conducted studies. And in meta analysis, we try to examine subgroups with individual numbers that are not statistically significant. So in a single study, it is possible that the results of subgroups are not statistically significant. But it is possible that when you include those studies in meta analysis, then that subgroup becomes significant for you. What are the advantages and disadvantages of meta analysis? The first advantage of meta analysis is greater statistical power. The results you draw from meta analysis are statistically stronger and their generalizability is better. The meta analysis is confirmatory data analysis, that is, its initial preliminary data analysis has been done and you are reassessing them in a way and confirming the last data analysis. For meta analysis, you have greater ability to extrapolate through general population affected. That is, the population in the study, you can see the high process conducted on it, whether it is conducted correctly or not. And you considered an evidence-based resource. Because you have multiple studies analysis, this is a more reliable evidence for you. Now let's look at the disadvantages of meta analysis. The disadvantage of meta analysis is that it is very difficult to do. And it is a time-consuming work to identify appropriate studies. If you add those studies to meta analysis, it needs some time. This is why it is a time-consuming work. And not all studies provide advocate data for inclusion and analysis. When you do meta analysis, we see that some studies, impact factor studies, some of your local studies, we cannot bring them to one level. And most of the local studies published are not their statistical regressness. So it becomes very difficult to include or not include anyone. And to do meta analysis, you require advanced statistical techniques. For this, you need to use scantry data analysis techniques and for that, you need advanced statistical knowledge. And the last point is heterogeneity of study populations. This is a hypothesis that is tested in different study populations. There will be some European societies, some Eastern societies, some American societies, some communities. So it is very difficult to control the cultural variation in meta analysis. So on the basis of all these things, we can see that meta analysis is a scientific work, but it is difficult to perform. And for this, you need a certain amount of skills to perform the meta analysis.


Hey Jenny, this is Megan with Oxmoor Toyota. I just wanted to send this quick video greeting just to personally introduce myself. It has come to my attention through Toyota.com that you're interested in trading in your 2005 Jeep Wrangler for a new 2016 Toyota Tundra. When you can, go ahead and give me a call. You can reach me at<PHONE_NUMBER> and I look forward to hearing from you soon. Bye!


Hey guys, this is Matt Beck from freesaloneducation.com, and I have something pretty exciting for you guys I it was in the salon last week and what I did was I put a camera on my head and a GoPro camera and we just went at it and just filmed the whole thing So I got a haircut for you on one of my friends Jack's keys So I hope you guys enjoy this It's just gonna be straight from the point of view haircut so that you can see exactly what I'm doing as I'm working in The salon, so I think this could be a really fun way for us to just showcase real salon reality cuts So I hope you guys enjoy check this video out, and I will see you in the next video. Thanks All right guys, so we're here with another point of view haircut with our good friend Jack's Jacqueline's been coming to me for probably at least Four or five years, so just great great guests another member in the salon So she comes in to get her haircut quite a bit the thing I like about Jacqueline is she's so open for anything that we ever want to Do she likes her hair nice and short so we cleaned up the sides already using scissor over comb And now what I'm gonna do is go through and just cut the top I didn't think I really needed to show you guys so much the scissor over comb part If you want to see that there's plenty of videos that we've done showing that So now I really just want to go through and show you the top you can see how I parted down the center That's a reference point for me That's not how she's gonna part her hair and then took it down the the Division point of the head I parted there So it really leaves that crown exposed and what I'm gonna do is go in there now and just clean that up with a nice straight line using Cutting just over my fingers make sure that one blade is moving I'm using a nice sharp scissor for this. This is the DB 20 from Mizutani. I love this scissor and This is a brand new. It's a brand new scissor from Mizutani. It's really really razor sharp So we're going through you'll see how I comb it I comb the hair towards the center of the back of her head And that's really just to build up the consistency and my and I want to make sure that I always push The new hair that I have in my hand push it towards the guide We get too caught up pulling the guide towards ourself because we always want to pull things towards us because it makes Us comfortable that way But you really want to make sure that you're pushing when you're working if if it pushes the hair towards the guide That's really the focus so make sure you're never moving that guide from where it lives So again, so just pushing the hair working with nice clean sections Don't rush through even if it's a nice short haircut like this. Don't rush through it There's really no no sense in in rushing because like I said in Previous videos if you rush you just got to go back and fix it. So you might as well get it right the first time So working through diagonal sections working with the round of the head with my fingers The longest point will be in the center of her head So I'm really just building up a line using the guide from the bottom of her hair and Just following the round of the head up and then leaving a weight line right in the center of her head Now as I work towards the front of her hair everything will be slightly over directed back Still following the rounds You'll see I'll take one section and cut and then I'll shift and remove a little bit more weight right down Towards like the temple area of her head Even if you're going for a textured look in this Let's say you have a new guest and you're trying to change her that doesn't mean that you go through in point cut right away It's good to build a structure in her hair Or anybody's hair go and build the structure and then go in and point cut at the end and add the texture But get the structure first We're going through now point cutting just to blend that line a little bit more and then I'm gonna work the other side You're gonna notice right away. I'm gonna take the same sectioning. So keeping it still clean But now I'm gonna pull the hair towards me because the guides now towards my body So always pulling that old hair or the new hair towards the guide every time you cut That just builds consistency in the haircut the best way to get a perfect haircut or the you know Most perfect haircut you can get is just be consistent with everything you do again pulling through Towards myself so you could see in the on the left side of Jacqueline I was standing standing in front of her now I'm standing in the back of her and that's again just because of the consistency So I'm combing towards myself. So I'm standing in the back and I'm working short to long So I'm cutting behind her head before I was working short to long So I had to stand on the opposite side in order to still cut short to long and have my guide where I want it There you go again combing that down now I can see the wait line from the scissor over comb before so I'm just gonna go through working scissor over comb technique But you'll notice And this is a 5.7 inch blade on this scissor works really well scissor over comb, but I don't I Only move the one blade and that's what you really got to get good at and you know I've been stressing that I think we're on our this is probably video 184 I think so, you know, we've done a lot of videos and I probably stressed it every single time I'm cutting hair but I still go into slans or teach classes and see people moving both blades and you really if you want to be Consistent you got to work that way now. I'm going to go into the Mizutani Acro Yoragi number six Thing I like about the number six is it has less teeth But they're wider spread apart so it creates a lot of texture and Jacqueline's got a wicked calyx Right in the front So what I'm going to do is go in and just take out a lot of weight create a lot of texture in there and a Lot of movement which lightens up the hair if there's not as much hair trying to push in a certain direction Then you're going to have an easier time. So I've just taken diagonal forward sections Grabbing them up in my comb starting at the base and then I'm sliding my fingers out as I go It's just lightening up the whole section. We're going to throw a product in the front spike it up a little bit So it'll be really cool. It'll work really well So just checking it with my comb making sure it's laying right now I'm going to go through and just slide cut through with the Yoragi number six just building up a little bit or not building up but taking out a lot a lot of that weight in the front You can see because the number six and it has wider teeth It does remove a few if you cut in a section quite a few times You're going to see that bolt go away Jacqueline her hair right at her recession point Grows straight down at her head and then the rest of it grows kind of up. So I go through there with that Texturizing scissor and just take out some of that bulk and soften the hair that pushes down right there And it really creates a nice Fall to her hair Jacqueline's got the type of hair that if she goes to the wrong place that somebody that doesn't really understand How that her hair is is falling she could get a really bad haircut.   So we're gonna take her back in the wash house Cool thing about our son, you're gonna get to see a little little preview of it But we have doors that shut for the wash house, you know, the cool thing about that is it separates it We play it different type of music a little softer music back there though sun's coming in right now But normally we just have it all candle lit at night So it's really relaxing. I always put a towel on the sink because they're not comfortable Doesn't matter how much money you spend on a sink. It's never never comfortable. So we're gonna go in We're gonna shampoo her on I like to use we're using a tea tree shampoo, it's got a really minty feel to it I like to use in that because it's like the customer gets to actually feel the shampoo working on their head So we'll really work that in And then we have a little treat for Jacqueline after that. All right, so we're gonna rinse her off The key to what when you're given a great shampoo, you know, and I get in a rush just like all of you guys This is during my normal day. This is not just filming hair. So I have a guest coming in right after Jacqueline So but you really want to take your time with it and just I didn't blast the water out at first because you know That's not relaxing. I softly turned it on waited till the temperature got right ask her if the temperature is okay And then you know then rinse her hair off But just take a little extra time with this part because this is what they really love This is why they come into us. Okay now.  It's got some tea tree shampoo on it. So it has a minty scent to it So just lay that over her face and then we're gonna work a slight massage through her face I let the towel kind of sink in for a minute Then we work just at the temple area down the cheekbone into the jawline Just a real quick thing. This doesn't have to take you a lot of time in the song But it's a huge add-on service for the guest and if you're thinking do we charge more for that? We don't charge more It's included in the price. We don't have the cheapest men's cuts in town.   It'll make your salon life a lot easier I'm gonna go through comb through the hair And then we're gonna blow it dry I like to organize the hair a bit before I blow it dry just because it's it's just easier to work with even with short hair So oh going back grabbing a brush So brushing through using the best brush that gives me a little bit tighter tension Jacqueline does have those callix. So just keeping that airflow pushing down on the hair And just brush and clean it up nice. That's really it's just the small little details even going through with a brush It just organizes the hair makes it lay better makes the cuticle shine Before you put the product in work in those callix areas just to make sure that the hair lays flat Oh once I got the hair flat then I'm just gonna pop it up right in the front area and That will you know make it easier when the product goes in so I wanted to make her hair lay nice but then at the very end I just pop the front up with the heat and Then when I get the product in there, it just goes where exactly where I want it to now We're using concrete from cool grease. This is a new product line that we have on shop fse.com And the great thing about this product is it's such a matte finish, but it does have a Really awesome hold to it. I mean they call it concrete for a reason but The thing I like about this we're selling it retail price on the website But if you contact me, this is a product that you can also get in your salon You can get a wholesale through me and not and carry it in your salon But it's such a cool product It's from Japan and it's a ton of different barbering pomades different shines different holds But it's this is a such a cool product and you can see how it controls Jacqueline's hair Even though she has that callic it doesn't matter. It just holds it up nice It's got a really nice feel to it. I love the texture in the haircut So I hope that this haircut helped you guys Please check us out on free salon education comm for more videos and subscribe to us on YouTube. We'll see you in the next video guys Thank you


The most important thing with the rigorous and relevant curriculum is for our teachers to look at the curriculum through the eyes of the student. And they have to give those kids those tools and those connections so that it becomes ingrained in them. That it isn't something that they're just going to remember overnight and then lose it the next day. This is something that they have to make meaningful to the kids and relevant so that when they do leave here there's lots of things that they can transfer to make it a part of their everyday life. I think that rigorous and relevant curriculum is when students are engaged at a level that they understand why they're learning what they're learning and they want to learn it. And so they devote a lot more of their energy and their time into doing so. You know, I think if we can build relationships with our students with one another, it's really easy to make the curriculum relevant because we know about their lives and we can actually build specific examples into what we're looking at. As the educational leader of the school, I feel it's my responsibility to make sure that I give our teachers the best opportunity for them to be the best teachers that they can be in their classroom. If they can see the big picture, they can see how classes connect and how skills learned in different classes can be used in different situations. They can apply that to real life, they can apply it to their learning and they can apply it to their future in society. I distinctly remember learning the term positive transfer, which I take to mean being able to take a skill that you learned and apply it in a different but similar scenario between my French studies and my English studies. We started with the Shakespearean masterpiece Hamlet and going through the text I found particular francophone verbs that I was able to recognize and thus take my experience from that and possibly apply it and figure out what the words meant. I get to live in a world in Comtec where I deliver a unique skill set to students in audio and video production and after they've become comfortable with that skill set, they're always anxious to bring it into their other classes, be it a social studies video on the French Revolution or a French weather video. There are also a lot of opportunities that are bigger than us and we need to provide avenues and access to those things for our students by bringing people in. Schooling just doesn't have to happen in a high school. It could happen outside of the walls of a school and that's where the importance of community comes in. We have to rely on our communities and members of stakeholders in our schools to be a part of that educational journey for our students and be able to take advantage of those experts that are outside of the schools. Having outside experts come to the high school as part of the health care program is really beneficial because at the end of every day we had an LPN come and teach us and then also we had the opportunity to do all of our clinical and practicum hours at the hospital and long-term care facilities. It was a great experience to not only have the high school teacher teach us part of the health care program but also have those other resources available to us. For the students I think it's important that they see we are involved in feeling they're important to us, showing them that they have value and that we're excited to be part of their learning and we're excited to be around them and that we can give back to them and help them to grow and hopefully down the road they get back to us and that's how the community works. One thing I found interesting was we had teachers come to our school from all over the province. One of the things they did was they came to our Math 10, Physette 10 class and kind of asked the students what they got out of it and the interesting thing came up over and over again was the community and sometimes you don't realize as a teacher how important that is to students but it really matters. To me it's important for learning to be relevant so that I'm able to use it in my future studies in my everyday life and I feel that if they're not relevant to you then in class no one's going to put their energy into something that's not going to benefit them in the future. When a student enjoys what they're doing they're engaged in their education they're engaged in the projects that they're doing they see a pathway that they're following they see an end result to it they get passionate about it they really enjoy working and learning.