Episode 237 - WWDC, iPod Touch, and GCHQ

**Using Synology to Store and Access Files on Your Mac**

Having 1 Gigabyte shared for up and down you can pair them with a Smart Switch that's managed and aggregate them so that you get essentially two gigabytes that's one gig up and one gig down okay so you get faster access to it which is cool. Let me tell you something else you can do with this thing this thing can host virtual machine images Right which means you can use it as the virtual machine server and either use Thin Client devices as computers and and use those to be the virtual machine recipients or you can just do it through your your computer so you don't have to install VMware on your Mac kind of thing all the VMS will be hosted over at the drive and you can have them anywhere on your netor work you might be missed to know which is kind of of like net booting

**Managing iCloud Storage**

I got an error message on my Mac which told me your storage is almost full ah manager stor said I think if I clicked away to get rid of it I imagine the next sentence was ask Victor about this Synology thing he keeps mentioning uh that's probably right there in the error message so right so so there are a couple different things right Apple would tell you buy more iCloud storage and put your documents and desktop in the cloud and don't keep anything in downloads and that that would be a way of keeping your Mac clean and keeping things stored and that's true that would be one way of handling it the other way would be to put folders that are autom mounted on your Mac that are stored over on a signology and work out of them that way for instance I have video and music folders that mount when I boot the computer and I have them set up not to refer just to the local network link but also to what's called Dynamic DNS that signology makes as signology connect so that I can be out there in the world and View and work with my storage device

**Using FileMaker Databases on Network Drives**

I mostly like I use and mostly like icloud's uh documents and desktop thing except as a file Mega database I use every day and recently for last week every time I've launched it it's told me the the database I need can't be found because iCloud has backed it up it's the smallest thing and I use it every day but I have to go get it and then FileMaker can open it uh okay here's here's the thing you really really really need to be careful using FileMaker databases on network drives this is and iCloud counts as a network drive okay right yeah it does get also backed up every night through a keyboard Maestro script but that's another story I I would tell you to keep it local open it local don't have it in something that's shared with iCloud and then have their keyboard me script back it up overnight to an iCloud location because the way that FileMaker works is that even when you're not doing anything with it they make changes to the FileMaker database in the background sure and that's why why FileMaker server exists is FileMaker server exists exclusively basically to fix this problem so that you can use network drives so that you can have multiple people accessing at one point or time together

**Upgrading Your Home's Wi-Fi**

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**Author's Goodbye**

I'm going to let you go to do that because I don't want your data being in Risk I'm genuinely going to do it this moment and I I appreciate that thank you yeah um William is available at William at appleinsider.com and on Twitter at w Gallagher William where am I available everywhere that good something are sold I can't remember what the phrase is it's probably UK phrase wherever good books served no you uh you're over there aren't you on on that on I am yeah yeah good I'm V marks I'm on Twitter and Victor appleinsider.com we have really enjoyed this one I'm so glad you you guys were here for it thank you for listening leave us positive runes reviews on iTunes leave us positive comments in our email leave us questions in our email we'd love to answer listener questions we love trying we'll be back

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enwelcome back to the Apple Insider podcast I'm Victor and joining me is William Gallagher no superlative just William space Gallagher but in that space surely there's room to run out yay give me a w in that space universes Live and Die in that space or just a w a w a d and the C yay in that space species are born grow old and are buried in that space universes come into existence William space Gallagher and about WWDC I need an echo effect Gallagher Gallagher gallager Gallagher yeah right but WWDC it's here AR aren't you excited by this no oh okay I genuinely am I mean most of the time I'm you know when you work in this thing you go to lots of events you follow so many announcements and things and you get kind of a to it but uh this one I really look forward to every time I know I know that you do and I think it's cool I do there are frequently good talks that that come out of this thing these this is where developers learn about what they'll be able to do with the next OS release and they start getting their hands on Sample code for these kinds of things and they start getting to to be able to ask Engineers questions about how things are going to work so that when they get their hands on it they'll be able to work with it nicely it's it's really a great event I think the thing that I don't like about this event is that the keynote for this event gets used for talking about hardware and we we've seen that in the past but I I think it's better when this event gets used to talk about the upcoming software capabilities okay which happens a little bit less now obviously it's it's part marketing it's part PR it's all of this kind of thing what what do we want to talk about that's going to put Big Splash about Apple out there well they just released new hardware they released the MacBook Pros not too long ago they released um an iPod Touch which is kind of awesome clearly I didn't want to talk about the iPod Touch at WWDC so what could they announce what do you think I think you're building to saying that this is like the March event where they got some Hardware stuff out of the way so they could concentrate on services and this time the con software is that what you're thinking well that would be ideal but I think what if at WWDC they announced a new Mac Pro what more developer of a machine could you want besides like an iMac Pro or a MacBook Pro that they already announced last week or so yeah what if this is the time of the Mac Pro what do you think no for I love it I love it are you excited about wwcd no are they going to announce a new Mac Pro no okay we did swap science in that conversation bet you're doing great over there Victor WWDC is a software event but you're right they obviously launch Hardware there but you can well understand that they have managed to get an amazing amount of attention for every keynote of course they're going to put in things there they're going to do well for them and that often always maybe somewhere in between those two means Hardware uh however I think apple is extraordinarily precise in what it chooses to exploit when they would never put two new products out at the same time they would always emphasize one I they they know how to get the maximum and not to dilute anything they have no need that I can see to announce the Mac Pro now because we all know it's coming we all suspect it'll be very late this year but they can make an event all by itself when it comes and they don't have to make an event out of it anyway uh so I don't think they'll use the slot for something they don't have to there was a report that they had seriously considered um whether or not to reveal the Mac Pro at whatever stage it's got to now and I don't know what the outcome of that is maybe they've gone the route for yes but it I don't think it's like the tent pole feature of this WWDC event and I'm fine with that uh but I think you're Keener than I am I I want to see the machine in existence yes I do and they've said the word modular yes and I'm curious to see what that means yeah me too and other than that I'm not particularly fussed it could be end of year I won't mind because I'm not exactly in the market for one and I haven't been thirsty for one but boy would I like to see it so if they just emailed you a photograph you personally you have individually that that would do the job I could neither confirm nor deny yes you could but you're not going to okay I'm interested to know I mean there's so much attention on this forthcoming there's so much attention on this Mac Pro that even though Apple were really clear that it wasn't coming out when they they mentioned it in what 2017 that they were very very clear it was not coming out in 2018 either and still a year later they basically had to say look people we said it's not coming out this year uh people kind of got very over excited about it and and I understand why and I'm interested as well but I suspect that uh you're not in the market for it uh I'm not I mean I with me you know financially whatever it is there's no way I can go from having just bought a macman to buying a Mac Pro but also what it's likely to offer as the power I don't need uh I imagine the number of sales it's going to have it'll be comparatively small next to an iMac or a Mac Mini or something and yet it's this I big thing coming I I am concerned that by taking so long they have seated ground that that this was a machine that people were hungry for and people either kept their old machines and upgraded them as much as they possibly could or pursued things like Hackintosh or gave up entirely and either run Linux or window for certain purposes like that and if those alternatives are better for them then well it's not that they are better for you know obviously first position would have been desirable just to get a new Mac Pro but when the the dir of support has meant look elsewhere it it's it's a bad thing it's always better to stick with the machines you know and like uh easier to get a newer better version of the one that you are very happy with um but other than that uh unhappy for Apple not that as long as people can get tools that they need to do what they need then ultimately whether it's Apple or Windows does it matter well that's an interesting position for the Apple Insider podcast to take Willian well I was throwing it out there because I mean I think I think that that we we need to pay attention to Pro users that where you know it's it's an interesting thing historically it's been the pro user that kept apple and Macintosh alive for so long that it's the home user is the reason that we don't all use os2 and where where people use Windows um you know originally os2 was the business operating system on the PC side of things and Windows ran application you know os2 ran Windows PC applications and people ended up making windows the dominant operating system for PCs instead of os2 because it was what they used at home so there's this perspective from that sense that home use matters more but I I I think it's very important to not forget Pro users and when you do it means you lose things like aperture which went away it means you you lose people using Final Cut to using Premiere and once you start using Premiere you can use premiere on Windows it means and and that once you use people using premere on Windows you you lose the sales of Max as well it's it's a difficult thing you don't want to create a situation that allows your customer to leave so easily and apple does I thought ios2 failed because Windows was cheap but okay no os2 was was not exorbitantly expensive comparatively it os2 was designed for business use and the the plan the marketing strategy was os2 at work windows at home and run Windows apps on os2 at work and that failed as a strategy okay were the machines expensive then the no okay so os2 blew it os2 was very wellmade very robust where Windows wasn't but it didn't succeed you know there there are a lot of things that don't succeed right BOS was fantastic but did not succeed yes I think there's an issue that of pro users consumer users this pruma word that goes in between there are things I do that are uh professional users I mean app development I don't do very much of it but when I do it it's it's a pro use uh I have done lots of video editing uh using Final Cup Pro does that make me a pro user yes for about hour and things um there just a blurrier line I think I no question there are people who need the absolute maximum that Apple or Windows or anybody can give them and a lot of the time they're getting them so uh yes I see your point but I'm less concerned in the longterm for you I I mean you were saying you were mocking me for saying this is an apple Insider thing and I was I was starting to say that I threw this out to you really because um I was sounding like an argument I've often heard which is that it's the specs that matter that it is how fast or how many cor you've got and all this stuff for it and I accept that these things are important I don't follow the specs on things I'm only concerned with the end result and what you use it for but I do think it is fundamentally important which operating system you're using uh because to me the Mac helps me do what I want and windows is forever getting in the way so Windows is a massive production drain for me and I know for other people it's the other way around one suits different people and when you found the one that works for you it's really hard to swap to the other and I think that will keep apple stuff going while they wait to get the Mac Pro right rather than get another one wrong welcome to this episode of the Apple Insider podcast I'm Victor and joining me for for a very special segment is Russ Shanahan hi Russ good morning Russ tell me a little bit about yourself what what what is it that you do well for many years I was a salaried full-time uh programmer I was doing Android C++ and stuff like that but when the App Store came out I was really excited because I always dreamed of having a computer that I could program for that was right there in my pocket so I started working on an app called happy scale about eight years ago and it is a weight loss tracker that averages weights out so that you can make predictions about how things are going and stop worrying about fluctuations and for many years it was just a nights and weekends project that gave me satisfaction but along the way it caught enough traction for it to become my full-time job wow that's very cool congratulations thank you I have been interested in in the what I call Quantified Self or or this sort of Fitness tracking thing for ages starting back I want to say about 2009 2010 and I got my first scales connected scales I think in I want to say 2013 and I've been using them with the app that that came with them which is uh in my case with's healthmate and I had occasionally paired them with with like lose it what what is the the real advantage to using something like happy place so when you use happy scale it will take happy scale so sorry happy scale that's okay that's okay uh when you when you use uh Happy scale it I actually have a withing scale myself and I use their health me app and it will read the weights from Apple Health it will import them into Happy scale and then it has um several algorithms that it can apply to those numbers so that it can make predictions about how things are going if you smoothed out all the weights because like for example I'm losing weight right now I'm using this app and I've lost about 74 pounds to date I think wow yeah I yeah I'm I'm I'm also a user it's it's it's the inspiration for the app I am in awe that's that's significant wow yeah it's um so what it what it does is it will take it will take the weights that you weigh in Daily and it will average them out so that you can like I get I get so um discouraged when my scale won't budge and I'm finding as I lose the weight that I could I could my weight could drop three pounds lower than I've ever seen on any given day and then it might be 10 days that I go for seeing a new low number and that's always been something that's been frustrating for me and so what happy scale does is it instead of showing you like a three pound loss on the day when the scale whoes down it will just kind of take a little bit of that and say okay th this is a your progress today but let's save some of that progress for the future so that you can you can see a downward trending line consistently and it kind of averages out all the fluctuations that your body does naturally okay when I open the healthmate app I'm just going to look at it really quickly I get the list of the different uh the different weights by day and they sort of try and smooth this out a little bit too they they show a month or a quarter or a year with a sort of smoothing line through all of the the uh bouncing around data y right so I can sort of see a general Trend and the truth is I almost never look at that view the the real truth is that I almost never actually open the app and it sort of nudges me and reminds me hey you haven't weighed in in a few days or you haven't it's been three weeks since your last weigh in are you ready to skip on the scale this morning and my answer is no no I am not yeah it's funny it's funny when apps give you those nudges like that I've I've I've restrained myself from adding those because they kind of annoy me too well it's not that I'm annoyed by it it's it's that I I know that the last time that I weighed in that I am now 30 lbs higher than my goal yep and previously I was 20 pounds higher than my goal and so it's so disillusioning it's crushing I mean it just weighs on you it's total it's it's right yeah I I I think that um one of the things that I hear from users is that this app changes their relationship with the scale where they they went from this attitude of like I don't even want to see what the number is to shifting to this is just a data point but this this doesn't have the same meaning or significance or detriment that it had before it's just a data point that I'm going to feed into the algorithm I'm going to look at my trend line it's still going down or it's still going up but it's not going up as badly as I thought it would be and everything's going to be okay because really when you're trying to lose weight the number one thing is to just find a way to keep going and I and the the best feedback I hear from users is when they tell me that it's changed the way that they think about the numbers and and that they're not scared of it anymore and it's actually helping them continue on because for whatever hard goal you want to achieve in life the the number one thing that you can do in my opinion is to just persist and keep going I think there's room for humor in this kind of thing you know it's one of the the apps that we talked about in the past on this show has been carrot weather where carrot weather takes the approach of injecting humor into the weather and I can't think of a single health application that actually does that right yeah I and I think about it because I was at the doctor's the other day and they asked me to step on the scale and they said so what's it say and the answer was more more than I wish that it did and and so we sort of use this sort of self-deprecating humor to talk about things like weight or Fitness I I wonder why there isn't an app that actually takes advantage of something like that it's a great question uh and I actually I love the carrot weather app myself too the the developer is brilliant and um but I I I think the the concern that I have with adding humor to it is that I don't really know how the user is exper exping that uh it's just such a personal thing to um to to struggle with weight loss I I know personally like there there are people that um it that it can it can it can really be bad for their life and I I I I've always stayed away from using humor because I don't want to make a joke when somebody else when it would hurt somebody's feelings my My ultimate goal is to try to make a tool that will help people feel better or encouraged and I've always thought that if I added humor maybe some people would love that but if 10% of people would if it would be a turnoff for them then I I would actually prefer to uh stay away from it just so that I can have this be a useful tool that's kind of agnostic that can be used by everyone and I know that with carrot weather for example one of of the things that he's done in recent years is ADD added settings to the app where you could just completely turn off the personality and I I think that that was a great solution because again that can make it very agnostic and it could be something that everyone can use and I I think that if I ever went down the path of adding more personality to the app i' definitely want to make it something that the user could control and turn on and off I want to say that I I thank you for being that considerate you know there I think there are app developers out there who would who would take the chance and say if they're just going to offend 10% of Their audience that they're okay with that in favor of making something that they thought was better for the the remaining 90% being so considerate being so caring especially around something as personal as weight is uh well I I think it's something that that you should be really proud of and thank you well thanks you know it's um it's it I I think they reason behind it is that this this tool is a is one of a kind um there there is a smoothing algorithm in with's health meate and it's great to see that I'd love to see more apps adopt this there there are other apps that are doing it now but uh my app has more of a spin on it where there are different algorithms that you can choose they're more sophisticated and it can also make predictions into the future about how things are going to go and I know that as a utility it's position very uniquely and because of that I want to make it accessible to as many people as possible let me ask you a little bit about the the business side of things you started this as a hobby you grew it to the point that it could become your full-time job MH how has that been going how how has that that been that that Journey been progressing it's really cool um it's something that I dreamed about my whole life my dad was a machinist and he was self-employed and he had his own machine shop down the street from where I lived and I used to love riding my bike down there to visit him in his machine shop and I thought it was so cool that he was in control of his own destiny and everything and it was something I always wanted for myself and um ever and I it it's been really nice to be able to have so much control over the direction of the product and the personality of the product and to to say say where everything is going I've really enjoyed having this opportunity but there was something that happened the other day I I noticed you on Twitter talking about troubles with the App Store can you talk a little bit about that yeah uh it was two Saturdays ago now it was about 13 days ago I was getting breakfast for my son and I got an alert and the alert was from App figures which monitors downloads for Indie iOS developers and my downloads had plummeted to a number that I hadn't seen in years and it was I had no idea why it might have happened so I didn't really have time to look in into it then but later that night I looked into it and I did a lot of research and I found I I found out that I think that it's happening because I got delisted for the term the search term weight loss tracker and Weight Tracker and those were two of the most important Search terms for users that were discovering my app and because of that my downloads went down 44% wow that is that is drastic um why do you think that happened why why do you think that change was made and I know it's speculation but I'm just asking to to sort of think about why this could happen well I actually I tweeted about it yesterday and I was very fortunate because this this story got picked up and um a lot of people shared it and when I woke up this morning I actually heard from other people who have experienced this exact same issue and I feel confident at this point that I know why it might be happening uh apple has a subtitle field for all apps where you can give a uh a description of what your app does as as one of the lines in the App Store and mine is predictive weight loss tracker and they give you 30 characters for that field and I use exactly 30 characters and what I heard from people was that there was some kind of a bug in Apple's system where on the exact same day that I was affected there were many other developers who were affected and if you use exactly 30 characters every single character it would kind of ignore the very last word it seems to be like cutting off the last letter and so I feel I feel very encouraged in this moment after hearing back from these people that uh to work around this all I'm going to have to do is change the subtitle field to weight loss tracker and I'm I'm knocking a wood right now hopefully that's going to get everything back to where it should be yeah because you know dropping by by more than half of your sales is a big deal it's it seems crazy that that that would be the change yeah yeah it was it was quite a wakeup call uh to see it drop like that and it can be it can be a blessing uh to have moments like that too in spite of all the uncertainty because it can really I I know for me there there are certain things I take for granted with the app and I think I think whenever you're doing anything there are just some things you have to take for granted so that you can focus on the most important thing but this is a great opportunity for me to take a step back and say like okay what are all the things that I was taking for granted that put me in this vulnerable position where such an arbitrary change could throw everything out of whack for me and what can I do about it definitely the difficulty is when you have a a single retail outlet you've placed all of your eggs in their baskets basically and if if they have whims that change or or even it's not even whims it's an error that changes things you you have no control it it yeah it puts you in this huge position of being in Jeopardy and for for you know physical Goods businesses it definitely puts them out of business when a change like that happens yeah in the software business you you may have a chance to recover you may have a chance to fix the problem and keep being listed uh and it all comes down to that this whole thing is sometimes held together with with shoe strings and ceiling wax right bits bits of glue and paste kind of thing you know I was reading another thread on Twitter the other day where it was uh someone saying never use the second address field because that's the first thing that people drop when they when they do shops and things like that and you you see it in people whose addresses lose the apartment that they're listed in kind of thing because that second field gets dropped right away it's never kept up wow and uh you know all of this stuff is is just barely held together and barely working even when it comes to the App Store yeah we're all rushing into the future so quickly it's it's easy to build systems that are brittle and not so robust and that's just as true for me as any as the larger systems that I depend on you know the uh the the only thing that I saw as people giving advice was besides fixing the bug that you'd found was um contact Phil Schiller which I mean in the old days you could email s jobs at Apple and get someone from his team to respond and and in the really old days you'd get him to respond and we've seen that happen a little bit with Tim Cook but but emailing Phil is not really uh you know sort of a hitle Mary it's not really a respected support path right absolutely yeah yeah I'm glad to hear you're confident that this is going to be resolved have you seen it uh have you seen the results come back yet I actually have a build you have to submit a new build to Apple and push out a new build to everyone in order to make a change like this and so I have a uh I have a build that's on Deck waiting to be released least and in just a a little bit later today I'm going to just verify that there are any mistakes in the build and push it out and I'm very eager to see what happens does it seem strange that you have to create a whole new build to change metadata like the subtitle for your application I wish it weren't that way but I understand why they did it in the early days of the App Store uh they gave you a lot more control to change your screen shots and your title and all all the fields without submitting a new build and we were seeing that some developers were doing baits bait and switches where they might change their screenshots after the app was approved and released to the App Store uh so they it looked like it did one thing but then when users saw it it it presented itself differently and so I can understand why they do that because they they they take everything that you want to present to users and they review it all at once and they make sure that you're being forthcoming and so this is just a this is just one of the ways that they've had to work around the fact that some people try to rip people off on the App Store all right well I want to thank you for joining us I have a couple of questions about the app um what what does the deluxe edition inapp purchase do in the app it unlocks all the features uh there's a um there's an integration with apple health so that you can automatically Import and Export all of your entries that it unlocks there are extra predictive features so that you can see what you'll weigh by your upcoming High School reunion for example um and there there are some reports that it unlocks so it it it will give you the full experience of the app if you unlock it that's what I need to get then well I I want to thank you for this and I'm just going to read from your your your reviews on the App Store a little bit because they really they they looked so great you know you mentioned that you've lost over 70 pounds using the app there was a review that the first review that I saw says something like I lost 40 pounds yeah right away and then the next review after that it says that that uh right so over the past few years through stress eaing I'd put on about 40 pounds two years of dieting only put on more weight I set my goal Target at 40 pounds with a lofty goal of three pounds a week and I am down now down 40 pounds with only a few more pounds to go that is that has got to be so rewarding to hear oh my God it's I I had one one of the things that um drove me in this direction was that I felt frustration be because the day jobs that I was working on they weren't necessarily tangibly making the world a better place uh they they were they were like B2B software things that were helping businesses Thrive but I really was hoping that someday I'd be able to make something where I could I could see that like somebody's life was getting better in a tangible way because of what I made and this feels like the culmin of so many years of effort and it it really makes my day to wake up in the morning and see an email or a review from a user that says that it's helping them it's it's it's an incredible motivation to keep working in the app too fantastic well Russ thank you so much where should people go to check out happy scale you can go to happy scale.com uh it's if you can search for Happy scale in the App Store and uh it'll take you right there Fant fantastic thank you so much thank you very much it's been a pleasure to be on the show yeah how do you feel about the 2019 iPod Touch I was pleased to see that it was out it brought back some memories I can't remember from exactly when I last sign I presumably before 2007 and the launch of the iPhone but I was glad that it was there yeah the iPod touch you know there were a bunch of people asking why on Earth you'd bother releasing one but it makes sense if you aren't seeing the market for one you're not really paying attention cuz first of all you can give your kid an iPod touch or you can give them an iPad and maybe it makes s more sense for an iPad but the touch is also a great device you know if you want to have portable TV watching you don't necessarily want to carry around an iPad everywhere yeah it's a good form factor you want portable gaming you want things like that you want to be able to test as an app developer and don't necessarily buy a whole spare phone right yeah good point I hadn't thought of that one yes yeah yeah um suppose you actually I was talking with a fellow named Jason Leupold about this Jason leapold is a senior editor for BuzzFeed news MH and he was saying that the the fastest way to get secure Communications going was to use an iPod touch with Google Voice on it okay that makes and uses it a phone and Route your Communications through their viip because their viip was more secure than using the phone system is it true that the sole difference between an iPod touch and an iPhone is that there isn't a phone in the iPod Touch um mixed right the the iPod Touch doesn't have the true depth sensor on the front so there's no face ID going on I didn't think of that right of course right okay the the iPod Touch doesn't have the uh the same processor necessarily I mean the updated one is is using the A10 Fusion right but it's not using an A1 or an a12 or whatever so okay because it seems to me that of all the features of my iPhone that I'd miss the phone is pretty low down the list in fact I'm at a stage where uh my mobile phone contract uh gives me more free minutes per month than there are minutes in the month uh because I'm not using any and it's cheaper for them to say knowing I won't use any um you could do without it I hadn't considered uh voiceover Internet Protocol um I've heard mixed things about Google's phone over the years I can't remember if it's uh not available in the UK that's why I didn't try it it probably wasn't when I first heard about this but I knew people who were fans who then just slowly kind of dribbled off to Alternatives and I don't know why uh is that well Google has not paid a whole lot of attention to it in recent years but it's there and it still works it's probably not going to go away right among the many services that Google could cancel it's probably not one of the first um it works reasonably well as a voiceover internet thing the calling rates are very cheap so it's it makes a ton of sense in terms of doing international calling in through it okay it's uh it's good for a lot of things there I I do like their they they were among the first to do the voicemail transcription to email all right you know where where Apple now has voicemail transcription in the voicemail section of the phone app Google Voice was doing it for years now does that mean that Google trains on your voice calls to be able to understand how to do that yes yes it does but it's a really hand app for for making calls and having them being relatively secure and doing that on iPod Touch is a good way of doing it cool so yay for the iPod Touch why did it take them four years to bring out a new one because people buy phones and iPads all right if it were a runaway seller they would keep doing it it sells enough but but essentially this is not the newest fastest phone as a touch it is an iPhone 7 without a phone okay and without Touch ID still sounds pretty good to me I mean I'm unlikely to go buy one as I have an iPhone but I I ABS you said about um missing the market for that people don't understand I get that completely yes A Fine Thing a fine addition to the Apple lineup right and since we're on the to topic of security just a little bit uh the British spy agency gchq I'm not sure that's how they build themselves British buy agency and they probably have some no no no they're they're they're I mean intelligence services or Global Communications Headquarters right that's that's yeah yeah yeah so or I'm sorry government Communications Headquarters Global is a little ambitious for them I suppose oops a secret as a British national it's out there no okay you and your Global Ambitions is British colonialism coming back is that what you're telling us uh a lot of people are telling us that it is but they're the ones who want us to leave the EU so so you know we don't listen to them oh well I wish that were true but okay yes I considering that 50% or more voted for this nonsense you're undergoing right now I don't know that you do this okay that's a very generous thing saying all more but anyway what have we done now I know this one but what do you think we've done now there's proposal from your government to require the right to Eaves drop on encrypted messages okay would you like the official British POS the position of the British person in the street yeah go ahead it is astonishment that the UK government is doing anything about anything that isn't to do with brexit CU genuinely so much legislation has ceased for three years because of all this so somewhere along the line this has been coming out so we're a bit surprised to be honest but you know other than that where do you stand right can you explain what they well first of all I'm going to read a quote and then I'm going to explain why this is terrible and nonsense and yes that's my position so gchq's Ian Levy and Christen Robinson proposed this system in November of 2018 and they laid out principles for how service providers could implement it they said it's relatively easy for a service provider to silently add a law enforcement participant to a group chat or call they wrote you end up with everything still being endtoend encrypted but there's an end on this particular communication and they insist they insist this is not the same as granting backd door Access Communications they're insisting that this sort of solution is no more intrusive than virtual crocodile clips that can be used to tap traditional voice intercept Solutions and that it isn't an expansion of government power I do think the crocodile Clips line is was well chosen uh explains what they're doing very colorful description covers up the uh that next part about not giving the government uh too much power because of course it completely gives every government power and I I'm careful to say every government there because once the UK If the UK got this through all governments would get this everyone would come asking for it yeah yes so as you say this this would introduce significant additional security threats and it it poses threats to user security because users no longer be a trust that they know who's on the other end of the communications which poses threats to Human Rights privacy free expression end to end encryption just adding another end point in there is a cute turn of phrase and I I think it violates the concept here completely I mean I've read this is about an open letter that has been written signed by Apple Google WhatsApp Microsoft it's a total of 47 people incl individual Security Experts and they are all they they wrote nine page PDF open letter sent to gchq it's about three 3,000 words long a very detailed rebuttal of everything that's said and it's not the most thrilling read but uh it's very serious about how this is Dreadful in every conceivable way yeah and then the impact is that it would force a change on the encryption schemes used yes so this government law would force the companies to change how they are implementing software which is a violation if software is speech if software is the expression of an idea and it is then the government forcing a company to change how they express that idea is a violation of the principle of code of speech it would that's me extending a little bit IA Apple would have to stop iOS telling you uh when someone's joined your chat it would have to it would intentionally mislead users by suppressing the notifications that appear when a new person joins a chat and there's no way to prevent other governments from relying on this newly built scheme which is a real concern when you have oppressive regimes in the world or any country with a poor record on protecting human rights the open letter asks that gchq abandoned this idea and gchq responded we welcome this resp response to our request for thoughts on this on exceptional access to data for example to stop terrorists Ian Levy said the hypothetical proposal was always intended as a starting point for discussion no it wasn't no it wasn't no it wasn't they intended for this proposal to be rammed through without modification and and ideally without a whole lot of comment well I don't think they were naive enough to see that would happen we will continue to engage with interested parties he said and look forward to having an open discussion to reach the best possible solution we will continue to engage with interest part we will continue to ignore interested parties and we will look forward to having no discussion at all okay is what he really means right uh I shouldn't be amused by this but I was the way um the response toing that line about exceptional access to data for example to stop terrorists that was uh definitely one of their we're the good guys kind of part of this for so there there are are three parts to hysteria right there's but terrorists that's one part to hysteria we're going to do something completely outrageous and we're going to do it because stop terrorists yeah or we're going to do something completely outrageous but won't somebody think of the children yes right right or the third the third rail to all of this which is the we're going to do something completely outrageous because someone out there is a child molester right those are the three reasons that people use to justify bizarre bad legislation yes yep just running through the list of horrible things there yes that that's certainly the top three yes yeah you know it's it is I think there is also seriously an aspect that they have drawn out the other side and by making gcq be anti-terrorists they are suggesting just letting us be suggested that everybody else in this argument is Pro terrorism and that is a way the governments get what they want for it so I don't believe that they were unaware that this would happened I don't believe they thought they could get it straight through but I do believe they think they will get it through I'm back thank you can I trivialize this entire thing for just a moment because we got a bit serious there talking about nity you you may only if you want to be labeled Pro terrorist William well you can't control what people call you um I love the fact that this is being referred to this whole gcq plan as a a Ghost Protocol um the IDE ghost being that there is this third person reading all of your messages uh but of course right right the the the person who's joined in and listening in as an as an additional end point in the end encription but is not notified is a ghost right but if you now Google to see where the Ghost Protocol is some sort of intelligence agency firm you get a screen full of listings about the Mission Impossible film of that name and for some reason that pleases me yeah it's a good film so it was a fantastic film but ah frustrating I I am the governments continue to ask to break into encryption and they do so to their detriment because it makes everyone less safe you yes and that is that is my position and I stand by which you would think is fundamentally the opposite of what a government should do for its people but we live in strange times we do live in strange times speaking of strange times so in the US we have four cell phone carriers we have AT&T we have Verizon we have Sprint and T-Mobile M Sprint and T-Mobile ask permission of the US Justice forment that they they want to go ahead and merge they want to become one yes right and and that would be fine that would be fine although there was some resistance given antitrust concerns so one of the proposals from the Department of Justice in order to to sign off on it was that fine fine T-Mobile Sprint you can merge but you have to create a new carrier so that there will be a fourth carrier to compete with you hey so that was an intelligent comment there um get together but then split off a bit Yeah okay they would want them to create a spin-off carrier that would run on the combined Sprint and t- mobile network but be presumably autonomous or uh it's not competition right okay I've further confusing for you can I make this even more confusing for you I doubt it but I think you're going to try yes all right so they've already agreed to several concessions one of them was selling off Sprint's Boost Mobile brand which was a brand that Sprint owned as a carrier so people would be a Boost Mobile subscriber as opposed to a Sprint subscriber so that is they already had this kind of thing basically and agreed to sell it off and they're being asked to create another one but to whom have they sold off this no well they they agreed to sell it off they have not sold it off yet oh right so isn't this just but they conceded that they would they they committed to a three-year 5G expansion so that 5G would be there and they avoided they agreed to avoid price hikes while that Network's under construction um yeah well you succeeded in the more confusing I didn't think that was possible so yeah well let me make it more confusing the new entity the new Sprint T-Mobile would still control Metro Mobile and Virgin Mobile USA right I should say from the UK perspective I I've obviously heard of Sprint and Verizon and T-Mobile we have T-Mobile we have virgin we have had it different times uh some of these other ones are getting more and more obscure are you saying that Sprint you call it uh boost Sprint Boost something yeah so Sprint owns Boost Mobile okay Sprint controls Metro and Virgin Mobile and they have a GRE that they will sell off the Boost one and separately keep control of the others but also separately spin off a new one but that would make five not three don't ask th this is this is weird and it's it's unusual that they would be asked to do this but the FCC and the doj both have to sign off on it before the July ju 29th deadline that Sprint and T-Mobile have self-imposed okay why would they self-impose deadline because otherwise things just going for it because otherwise it'll drag out and and so the answer is we're going to merge we want to get permission to merge but we have to lock in before July 29th if we don't the deal's off and if the deal's off then T T-Mobile's been for sale for years right T-Mobile has has been up for sale for ages and Sprint has been underperforming for years and so it makes sense for the two of them to merge and T-Mobile gets an in huge influx of cash for it in in a way and it's sort of reverse takeover Sprint in the best possible World okay you want John Ledger and Mike sver in the charge of this combined entity right because they are the ones that are shaking up the carrier landscape in the US I don't know who those people are I don't know which one runs which but I get the idea for it which is the bigger then Sprint or or T-Mobile in the US uh Sprint has been bigger okay Sprint's number three in the US traditionally okay what possible Advantage is there to this whole what's the advantage to the consumer then let's assume the FCC and the doj are looking out for us or at least Us in States T-Mobile has been T-Mobile's been very consumer forward T-Mobile has been very consumer forward on billing prices on um bundling of services on things like that Sprint has also been pretty consumer forward in terms of pioneering the idea that your device is consistently exchanged for the upgraded device as soon as the upgraded device is available kind of thing upgrade plans uh everyone else has sort of tried to follow suit but Sprint has led the way on that and people you know people pooo Sprint service coverage area but tons of people use Sprint because they're a lowcost network Um T-Mobile has kept prices down and also has bad service coverage in some places in a lot of places and so the idea that you combine the two gives them increase range increased range to compete keeps the prices low which gives them a way to compete with AT&T Verizon on better footing it's actually a pretty good idea okay but it just has not taken place yet because doj is imposing weird new restrictions that we've never actually seen them ask for this kind of thing before that I can remember does uh Tom Jes have to publish reasons for doing things presumably not they would no no okay is this anything to do you said the backing of the FCC is this to do with the fact that you've got a a very uh internet Savvy kind of FCC at the moment over there you know the the pro net neutrality uh guys and gals um I mean the well so agit pie is the chair of the FCC he is a former Verizon lawyer but this has the backing of him he's he's on board with this but he's specifically on board with uh this if they create this new one or just he's in no he's he's been on board he's been on board before this the doj came with this requirement he was on board already okay so what do you think is it just that it's it's you know it's lunchtime things are quiet uh M reports done let's have some fun make up some laws I don't know CU face it if you were in charge wouldn't you be tempted to do something like that uh on a Monday for example would you just let's up a law with an em it and see what happens no no no no no no no I I didn't think so no no no well so presumably he said uh July 29th for deadline I imagine we'll know by then if it's going to happen maybe but possibly it's going to is of it okay well probably um wonder what they'll call the new uh thing uh boost something I know well no but if they're spinning off boost then that'll go away boost uh yes or be someone else's name booster yeah booster I'd sign up for a booster thing I'm imagining by the way that uh you said Sprint Sprint and T-Mobile have uh spotty reception areas one imagines that they are not spotting in the same places so they would get better coverage well that way Sprint as a name right Sprint was originally part of AT&T because everything was part of AT&T when they split off they had to come up with names Sprint comes from Southern Pacific Railroad oh right okay because the telephone wires the telephone poles were laid out on the path of the train tracks oh is this like the whole Mason Dixon line thing wow well West Coast Mason Dixon is east side of things right Mason Dixon is is you um the the mapping of the Eastern United States and and where the North and South separate kind of just throwing a bit of American History there you know sort of just you know not completely Southern Pacific is West Coast my friend I think there a book wa uh okay so that's where Sprint came from good name I think there's a book yes yes there's certainly a book I should say I wasn't clear a book you upgrade your smartphone your TV and your laptop but when's the last time you upgraded your home Wi-Fi uh we've talked about this before and I said I was looking into it now and I done anything me before that uh 10 years you haven't done anything no I've had a cold can't you hear it in my voice St the future of Wi-Fi is here it's time to welcome Wi-Fi 6 the Netgear Nighthawk Wi-Fi 6 router gives you Ultra fast speeds and wider coverage we were just talking about coverage throughout your home it's the biggest revolution in Wi-Fi ever you get four times the capacity compared to today's Wi-Fi which means means you can connect more devices and stream simultaneously without impacting Wi-Fi speed and reliability the devices of today and tomorrow demand more your old Wi-Fi is timing out and you need the latest and high performance Wi-Fi that can keep up with you and your entire family if you stream your shows on services like Netflix or Hulu the newest line of high performance routers from Netgear will eliminate buffering and let you stream smoothly even in 4k it's like giving your streaming the VIP treatment if you game online lag will be a thing of the past turn your Wi-Fi up to 6 with a NW Wi-Fi 6 router check it out today at netgear.com wii6 that's netgear.com WiFi and the number six in homekit news Lutron released the Lutron fan speed control now this is something that Andrew Hara who wrote the review and I saw back in January at the show at CES and he and I talked a lot about it then where where he liked the idea and I thought they'd made some mistakes right and so what it is is they make a in-all device that controls the fan speed and in homes that already have ceiling fans installed with the wiring in the wall to bring the fan speed control down to the wall then this is an easy upgrade forgive me I've never had a system like this what's what's the alternative if you don't have either and that's why Andrew loved it and I didn't so Andrew's Andrew's uh family builds homes and when they build homes they do this custom wiring where you know how ceiling fans have a pole chain on them right and the pole chain controls the speeds selects from four speeds off one two and three and when you're doing these and and have the walls apart it's possible to extend those wires that usually go to that switch down into the wall where you'd have a light switch for example and put a controller there on the wall sometimes it's a a dial a knob that you can turn up to control the fan speed or a selector or something like that it was the old way of doing it but Lutron has made this device where you can put it in wall using those same wires that are custom run up to the fan and control the fan speed now that's great if you're like Andrew's family and have those all installed already in the wall but if you're like the rest of us who don't then this becomes a really intensive install because now you have to start cutting up in holes and running wires through the wall okay but you would anyway if you wanted to have a wall control thing so presumably if you've got the wall you get one if you haven't you don't right except that the there are very few kits that make a a ceiling fan controllable by home kit right you can C currently if you wanted to have before this if you wanted to have a ceiling fan controlled by homekit you had relatively few options you could buy a brand new fan from Hunter you could or or or you had to do something where you had to buy a Bluetooth based remote control and Patch it in via home assistant or homebridge running on Raspberry Pi kind of thing okay which is a nightmare and what I had been hoping for was something like what Inson does inston makes a ceiling fan controller remote control unit that goes in the canopy of the fan where the fan is installed there's a little canopy cover that's right at the ceiling and just you you wire it in right there where the wires to the switch are and that will control the light kit and the fan speeds and put it on the network for homekit control okay which is brilliant it's an easy install and the the Lutron product is easy only if you already have all that existing wiring in place which is terrible because many people do not so if you have the wiring get the Lutron if you don't get the um the other one you just said well well except that does the other one doesn't work with homekit so okay screwed there too I don't think you can fault Lutron for doing for not doing two things I can I can let me let me well no but I can fault them for making this choice so what they did was they chose to make this in- wall thing and they did it for a couple reasons one they already have the form factor down for making inall stuff because they do it for the lights so they got to reuse all of their tooling for the Plastics there which was a savings makes sense yeah the the other bit is it pairs with the Lutron Bridge product which they've already been using sucessfully for lights and plugs and outlets and things like that for homekit so there's that they have a thing called a Pico remote which is a device that pairs with the the in wall switch so that you can control them from the little remote control and the remote controls have a little pedestal they snap onto and so when I told Lutron that this was kind of silly when everyone else's remote controlled fan uses a single remote that has the control of the light kit and the fan speed on it what was their answer they took two Pico remotes out each one paired with the light one paired with the fan and put them on a pedestal with two parts on it so you'd have a really wide pedestal with two Pico remotes on it to control this thing and I said well you've got a fan speed controller there what if you want to control the light kit on it well now you have to open up an extra hole in your wall and put a two gang switch in there to have a light switch and the fan switch so so basically your cost for remote controlling your fan is something like 200 bucks one for the light kit one for the fan kit plus another 100 bucks for two Pico otes so you're already getting up to the cost of just buying a hunter fan in the first place sorry I'm losing some logic there and this Hunter Fan is that home kit Hunter fans are about 300 bucks for home kit yeah but I thought Lon were the first people to do home kit or something but they've been beaten nope no L H Hunter did first Lutron are the first to make it separate from the fan as an add-on unit oh okay but they but but the price to get there to do all the functionality that you could just do with the other one is close to basically just buying a new fan it's kind of dumb okay basically I think they should have made the canopy remote and called it a day but they didn't because they really wanted to use their Pico remotes over again well I I recognize some of this because I've just written about Ikea's I believe exp bounced Trad free uh system and they have what sounds to me the equivalent of biger remote uh they call it um uh a steering device sometimes or a steerer uh and it I don't like it because I've come from the side of home kit where I want to control things to Siri or my phone or whatever they are coming to it as Furniture sellers Ikea sells masses of furniture this is you go to IKEA to buy something physical here's a physical device it's a knob that will turn it on and off and I understand it works fine it's very slow compared to homekit stuff but it does what it does um I don't see a reason why they wouldn't do that even if in my case it means once i' finished pairing this remote I chucked it over my shoulder and then only had to go scrabbling for it when I added the next thing um you set it up like this and then you it is what it is you buy it if it works for you you don't if you don't and this thing about it being the cost of a buying a new fan well you've got a fan you can live without homekit if you want it at least they're giving you options the options you didn't have before right but options that are are unsatisfying because they came so close to doing the right thing and then didn't from my perspective that seem was a very Andrew gave it a three out of five stars and oh I I think he said that he was much Pro this because he has the wiring things what did he find against it what didn't he like well he if you have a fan without lights and a single box on the wall then this is easy to do otherwise you need to have an electrician right it's a costly addition um because you know that's that's he says our main issue with C cassetta by Lutron fan speed control is how expensive it gets when out of fitting your home not even your home but just a single room especially if your fan has a light kit because if you have a light kit like I said you have to buy the cost of the fan controller a light controller the bridge and then also the Pico remotes if you don't have a light control you end up having to putting a second Gang Box in your wall just to run the other wire for that light control so it's not it's not cheap um it it works there's nothing inherently wrong with this although it's it's just it it's it's like they took a lot of shortcuts trying to make this thing rather than starting up from the ground on something that made sense they reused their existing light controller and put fan screens on it and they the same thing with the Pico remotes if you don't have the pedestal to keep the light on one side and the fan on the other side it's easy to mix them up because everything's identical because they reused all their tooling that you can well understand why sometimes I think the more you go into homekit the more irritating it is and yet then when you've actually got it and you use it I try taking it away from me but it's far from ready for prime time sometimes well I I keep holding out hope that there will be an easier better way to do this you know there's there's a product called a sonoff s o n which is made in China available on T-Mart and AliExpress and so forth and eBay and what's nice about them is that they're reprogrammable with alternate firmwares you know out of the they work with Alexa and Google and that's fine that's well but there are people who have written firmwares that allow them to be used on homekit and okay so sorry so they can be hacked to work with homekit well I I think hack is is sort of the wrong word here it's just uploading an alternate firmware to the device and then it works differently enabled to work with homekit Okay yeah yeah and uh I'm just going to my mom ask if she's uh ready with her firware update installation yet well I've been working with one of the people working on this in open source world to see if it's possible to support the ceiling fan controller from them because if it is then all of my fans will become homekit compatible and we'll have remote controls and will be lovely and I'll tell you all about it as soon as it actually works great okay things that I do want to tell you about that do work I reviewed signology d101 uh sorry DS 1019 Plus network attach storage device and I love it excellent I'm actually I'm not in the market for this in the sense that I can afford to buy uh lots of network attra attach St attached storage but I am in the market for the fact that um I'm having trouble with storage on my we Little Mac Mini and would like some help so should I Pony up um I don't know how much it is but I'm guessing quite a bit for this this unit costs quite a lot this unit is something like I'll tell you in a second it is uh $640 without the discs okay so with the discs it's it's quite a bit more whatever the cost of storage is yeah quite a bit but but there this this is a 5 Bay Drive Unit right I can slap five drives in there and have loads of storage which I have done yeah but there's nothing that says that you have to have a signology unit that has that many bays you could go for a single Bay unit or a two Bay unit and be much less yes but one imagines that these things aren't uh scalable so if I buy a two Bay NAS drive enclosure thingy now and later realize I actually need three I've got to Chuck that one away or sell it and buy another one again and start all over that right incorrect oh yes they they all tend to have and of course we'd have to look at specific models to be to verify for sure but they tend to have ESAT ports on the back of them and sinology sells a 5 Bay external enclosure specifically for expansion uh expansion to an existing one so if I did buy a pair I could oh now I truly didn't know that and that Chang is things for a excellent um right now so this this 5 Bay unit for example can become a 10 Bay unit through the use of that expansion box and not all of the Bays have to be populated when you start out right now obviously if you want to take advantage of of things like raid or which is a a redundant array of inexpensive discs um you need to populate more than one drive bay but you can populate them singles at a time in create volumes as you go or combine volumes or do things like that I don't want to sound cheap here but you spend 600 odd pound whatever it was for this drive bait then you have no drives and you spend quite a lot of money on a drive but then you spend a lot of money on another drive and you end up with the same storage capacity of one drive because of the whole raid backup system um I'm just cheap again you don't have to use Raid you can do it in in a just a bunch of discs configuration where it combines all of their storage into a larger volume okay how about this on my desk right now I can see 1 2 3 4 five 6 7 eight external drives yeah some Portables some not two of them I don't think the connectors even still exist to use them on my Mac uh is there any way I can plug those into some sort of enclosure potentially yeah cool oh I'm learning a lot today uh but uh I have 44 terabytes in one of these things okay quite happy right well that's nice for you um but that's just me bragging for the moment but what I want to tell you about is is what this thing does for you cuz we just talked about it so far as it's an enclosure and it holds drives which is nice but there's a ton of features you can get out of it and you know the the normal features that people think of are things like music sharing or music storage and sharing that to iTunes or the idea of you know hosting video or story video which is nice uh but how do you actually use that stuff well it turns out that they make a DS video application that works on iOS and tvos so you can store your videos on it and then display them on your Apple TV or your iPhone or iPad iPad all right which is quite cool um you know I I've gone ahead and put my whole music library on the thing and I'm sharing that through to iTunes uh but it goes further than that because one of the cool things that they do is they've created basically a replicated version of Google docs so you can write documents through the web browser that are stored on the thing and then share those with other people you basically create your own private Cloud okay I'm liking that quite a bit has its own email hosting and email service kind of like Gmail has its own chat so you can chat with people let's just and I I this is very specific to me I'm sorry to ask a very P question but I already use iCloud drive so I have access to documents and I have Plex um yep you can run Plex on this by the way this can be a Plex server okay and I would want to do this instead of their one why why or well it is it is their one it is it is the same thing from Plex except putting it here as opposed to your computer means it's not dependent on your computer being on oh okay that is good yes I have issues with my computer being on all the time yes I like yeah okay uh in terms of iCloud there's there's not a whole lot to say here other than it's additional to that kind of thing now if you're a Dropbox or a Google Drive user this thing can synchronize with those so that you have a local copy on your own drives of all your stuff that's up in the cloud there that's not dependent upon dropboxes sync product on your computer working or drive sync product working on your computer okay which is good um and you're happy with this it's delighted excellent delighted very happy with this thing um and it's not my first experience with them and it took me a while to get accustomed to using one a couple years ago I had a tubay unit from from them and it it took me a while to understand why I'd want it and the first thing that I learned that I could do with it was time machine backups over the network to it oh grief time machine I've forgotten about time machine yes that seems very useful yeah and with the discontinuing of the U the airport express the airport line and the um Time Capsule units it it really makes a lot of sense to be able to do this to the over the network to robust drives so I'm very happy with that and you know they they this thing is just so flexible there's surveillance station as a piece of software that runs on it so if I have IP cameras around which are you know connected cameras over ethernet basically it can use the drives as recording medium and go ahead and record all of them and you can view the cameras from there and also use their IOS app or to to view these things it's really great you have this second reminded me that the other day I wired up an old iPhone to be a security camera in my office and have uh since then managed to put something in front of the lens completely forgetting that it's there so if I I could go away and see that yes that book is just where I left it yeah thank you for that okay brilliant yeah now I'm I'm really happy with this I like the idea of this uh the way this works now they have an application in there called download station where you type in the name of of whatever file it is you're looking for and it can download it and then make it available through their music or video or whatever else servers now I can't really comment on the the copyright nature of such a thing but I think it's very interesting that this is really a full-fledged solution from start to finish whether it's trying to replace an office in terms of Google Drive kind of stuff trying or or Google Docs whether because they have docs slides and spreadsheets equivalents um and a chat server and a mail server and backup and restore and music serving and video serving and surveillance and all it's it's just so flexible yeah but apart from that you know yeah I I get it I mean apart from that what else you got what else does it do well I mean the one that I've got here the the D 109 1019 plus has two ethernet ports on it which can be configured for aggregation so that instead of having 1 Gigabyte shared for up and down you can pair them with a Smart Switch that's that's managed and aggregate them so that you get essentially two gigabytes that's one gig up and one gig down okay so you get faster access to it which is cool let me tell you something else you can do with this thing this thing can host virtual machine image is Right which means you can use it as the virtual machine server and either use Thin Client devices as computers and and use those to be the virtual machine recipients or you can just do it through your your computer so you don't have to install VMware on your Mac kind of thing all the VMS will be hosted over at the drive and you can have them anywhere on your netor work you might be missed to know which is kind of of like net booting I got an error message on my Mac which told me your storage is almost full ah manager stor said I think if I clicked away to get rid of it I imagine the next sentence was ask Victor about this Synology thing he keeps mentioning uh that's probably right there in the error message so right so so there are a couple different things right Apple would tell you buy more iCloud storage and put your documents and desktop in the cloud and don't keep anything in downloads and that that would be a way of keeping your Mac clean and keeping things stored and that's true that would be one way of handling it the other way would be to put folders that are autom mounted on your Mac that are stored over on a signology and work out of them that way for instance I have video and music folders that mount when I boot the computer and I have them set up not to refer just to the local network link but also to what's called Dynamic DNS that signology makes as signology connect so that I can be out there in the world and View and work with my storage device I mostly like I use and mostly like icloud's uh documents and desktop thing except as a file Mega database I use every day and recently for last week every time I've launched it it's told me the the database I need can't be found because iCloud has backed it up it's the smallest thing and I use it every day but I have to go get it and then FileMaker can open it uh okay here's here's the thing you really really really need to be careful using FileMaker databases on network drives this is and iCloud counts as a network drive okay right yeah it does get also backed up every night through a keyboard Maestro script but that's another story I I would tell you to keep it local open it local don't have it in something that's shared with iCloud and then have their keyboard me script back it up overnight to an iCloud location because the way that FileMaker works is that even when you're not doing anything with it they make changes to the FileMaker database in the background sure and that's why why FileMaker server exists is FileMaker server exists exclusively basically to fix this problem so that you can use network drives so that you can have multiple people accessing at one point or time together it's it's really if you have it not on your local drive you are risking your database um I now want to say goodbye so I can go off and do this straight away goodbye okay thanks seriously that'll help this has been the Apple Insider podcast and I want to make sure that your data is secure that your data maintains its integrity and is not lost so William I'm going to let you go to do that because I don't want your data being in Risk I'm genuinely going to do it this moment and I I appreciate that thank you yeah um William is available at William at appleinsider.com and on Twitter at w Gallagher William where am I available everywhere that good something are sold I can't remember what the phrase is it's probably UK phrase wherever good books served no you uh you're over there aren't you on on that on I am yeah yeah good I'm V marks I'm on Twitter and Victor appleinsider.com we have really enjoyed this one I'm so glad you you guys were here for it thank you for listening leave us positive runes reviews on iTunes leave us positive comments in our email leave us questions in our email we'd love to answer listener questions we love trying we'll be back we love struggling with listener questions we'll be back next week when's the last time you upgraded your home's wi-fi turn your Wi-Fi up a notch with netgear's new line of NW Wi-Fi 6 routers whether you're gaming online or watching Netflix in 4k it's like giving your streaming the VIP treatment you'll enjoy buffer free streaming and zero lag no matter how many devices are connected to your network upgrade your router to netgear.com wifi6 make your WiFi feel young againwelcome back to the Apple Insider podcast I'm Victor and joining me is William Gallagher no superlative just William space Gallagher but in that space surely there's room to run out yay give me a w in that space universes Live and Die in that space or just a w a w a d and the C yay in that space species are born grow old and are buried in that space universes come into existence William space Gallagher and about WWDC I need an echo effect Gallagher Gallagher gallager Gallagher yeah right but WWDC it's here AR aren't you excited by this no oh okay I genuinely am I mean most of the time I'm you know when you work in this thing you go to lots of events you follow so many announcements and things and you get kind of a to it but uh this one I really look forward to every time I know I know that you do and I think it's cool I do there are frequently good talks that that come out of this thing these this is where developers learn about what they'll be able to do with the next OS release and they start getting their hands on Sample code for these kinds of things and they start getting to to be able to ask Engineers questions about how things are going to work so that when they get their hands on it they'll be able to work with it nicely it's it's really a great event I think the thing that I don't like about this event is that the keynote for this event gets used for talking about hardware and we we've seen that in the past but I I think it's better when this event gets used to talk about the upcoming software capabilities okay which happens a little bit less now obviously it's it's part marketing it's part PR it's all of this kind of thing what what do we want to talk about that's going to put Big Splash about Apple out there well they just released new hardware they released the MacBook Pros not too long ago they released um an iPod Touch which is kind of awesome clearly I didn't want to talk about the iPod Touch at WWDC so what could they announce what do you think I think you're building to saying that this is like the March event where they got some Hardware stuff out of the way so they could concentrate on services and this time the con software is that what you're thinking well that would be ideal but I think what if at WWDC they announced a new Mac Pro what more developer of a machine could you want besides like an iMac Pro or a MacBook Pro that they already announced last week or so yeah what if this is the time of the Mac Pro what do you think no for I love it I love it are you excited about wwcd no are they going to announce a new Mac Pro no okay we did swap science in that conversation bet you're doing great over there Victor WWDC is a software event but you're right they obviously launch Hardware there but you can well understand that they have managed to get an amazing amount of attention for every keynote of course they're going to put in things there they're going to do well for them and that often always maybe somewhere in between those two means Hardware uh however I think apple is extraordinarily precise in what it chooses to exploit when they would never put two new products out at the same time they would always emphasize one I they they know how to get the maximum and not to dilute anything they have no need that I can see to announce the Mac Pro now because we all know it's coming we all suspect it'll be very late this year but they can make an event all by itself when it comes and they don't have to make an event out of it anyway uh so I don't think they'll use the slot for something they don't have to there was a report that they had seriously considered um whether or not to reveal the Mac Pro at whatever stage it's got to now and I don't know what the outcome of that is maybe they've gone the route for yes but it I don't think it's like the tent pole feature of this WWDC event and I'm fine with that uh but I think you're Keener than I am I I want to see the machine in existence yes I do and they've said the word modular yes and I'm curious to see what that means yeah me too and other than that I'm not particularly fussed it could be end of year I won't mind because I'm not exactly in the market for one and I haven't been thirsty for one but boy would I like to see it so if they just emailed you a photograph you personally you have individually that that would do the job I could neither confirm nor deny yes you could but you're not going to okay I'm interested to know I mean there's so much attention on this forthcoming there's so much attention on this Mac Pro that even though Apple were really clear that it wasn't coming out when they they mentioned it in what 2017 that they were very very clear it was not coming out in 2018 either and still a year later they basically had to say look people we said it's not coming out this year uh people kind of got very over excited about it and and I understand why and I'm interested as well but I suspect that uh you're not in the market for it uh I'm not I mean I with me you know financially whatever it is there's no way I can go from having just bought a macman to buying a Mac Pro but also what it's likely to offer as the power I don't need uh I imagine the number of sales it's going to have it'll be comparatively small next to an iMac or a Mac Mini or something and yet it's this I big thing coming I I am concerned that by taking so long they have seated ground that that this was a machine that people were hungry for and people either kept their old machines and upgraded them as much as they possibly could or pursued things like Hackintosh or gave up entirely and either run Linux or window for certain purposes like that and if those alternatives are better for them then well it's not that they are better for you know obviously first position would have been desirable just to get a new Mac Pro but when the the dir of support has meant look elsewhere it it's it's a bad thing it's always better to stick with the machines you know and like uh easier to get a newer better version of the one that you are very happy with um but other than that uh unhappy for Apple not that as long as people can get tools that they need to do what they need then ultimately whether it's Apple or Windows does it matter well that's an interesting position for the Apple Insider podcast to take Willian well I was throwing it out there because I mean I think I think that that we we need to pay attention to Pro users that where you know it's it's an interesting thing historically it's been the pro user that kept apple and Macintosh alive for so long that it's the home user is the reason that we don't all use os2 and where where people use Windows um you know originally os2 was the business operating system on the PC side of things and Windows ran application you know os2 ran Windows PC applications and people ended up making windows the dominant operating system for PCs instead of os2 because it was what they used at home so there's this perspective from that sense that home use matters more but I I I think it's very important to not forget Pro users and when you do it means you lose things like aperture which went away it means you you lose people using Final Cut to using Premiere and once you start using Premiere you can use premiere on Windows it means and and that once you use people using premere on Windows you you lose the sales of Max as well it's it's a difficult thing you don't want to create a situation that allows your customer to leave so easily and apple does I thought ios2 failed because Windows was cheap but okay no os2 was was not exorbitantly expensive comparatively it os2 was designed for business use and the the plan the marketing strategy was os2 at work windows at home and run Windows apps on os2 at work and that failed as a strategy okay were the machines expensive then the no okay so os2 blew it os2 was very wellmade very robust where Windows wasn't but it didn't succeed you know there there are a lot of things that don't succeed right BOS was fantastic but did not succeed yes I think there's an issue that of pro users consumer users this pruma word that goes in between there are things I do that are uh professional users I mean app development I don't do very much of it but when I do it it's it's a pro use uh I have done lots of video editing uh using Final Cup Pro does that make me a pro user yes for about hour and things um there just a blurrier line I think I no question there are people who need the absolute maximum that Apple or Windows or anybody can give them and a lot of the time they're getting them so uh yes I see your point but I'm less concerned in the longterm for you I I mean you were saying you were mocking me for saying this is an apple Insider thing and I was I was starting to say that I threw this out to you really because um I was sounding like an argument I've often heard which is that it's the specs that matter that it is how fast or how many cor you've got and all this stuff for it and I accept that these things are important I don't follow the specs on things I'm only concerned with the end result and what you use it for but I do think it is fundamentally important which operating system you're using uh because to me the Mac helps me do what I want and windows is forever getting in the way so Windows is a massive production drain for me and I know for other people it's the other way around one suits different people and when you found the one that works for you it's really hard to swap to the other and I think that will keep apple stuff going while they wait to get the Mac Pro right rather than get another one wrong welcome to this episode of the Apple Insider podcast I'm Victor and joining me for for a very special segment is Russ Shanahan hi Russ good morning Russ tell me a little bit about yourself what what what is it that you do well for many years I was a salaried full-time uh programmer I was doing Android C++ and stuff like that but when the App Store came out I was really excited because I always dreamed of having a computer that I could program for that was right there in my pocket so I started working on an app called happy scale about eight years ago and it is a weight loss tracker that averages weights out so that you can make predictions about how things are going and stop worrying about fluctuations and for many years it was just a nights and weekends project that gave me satisfaction but along the way it caught enough traction for it to become my full-time job wow that's very cool congratulations thank you I have been interested in in the what I call Quantified Self or or this sort of Fitness tracking thing for ages starting back I want to say about 2009 2010 and I got my first scales connected scales I think in I want to say 2013 and I've been using them with the app that that came with them which is uh in my case with's healthmate and I had occasionally paired them with with like lose it what what is the the real advantage to using something like happy place so when you use happy scale it will take happy scale so sorry happy scale that's okay that's okay uh when you when you use uh Happy scale it I actually have a withing scale myself and I use their health me app and it will read the weights from Apple Health it will import them into Happy scale and then it has um several algorithms that it can apply to those numbers so that it can make predictions about how things are going if you smoothed out all the weights because like for example I'm losing weight right now I'm using this app and I've lost about 74 pounds to date I think wow yeah I yeah I'm I'm I'm also a user it's it's it's the inspiration for the app I am in awe that's that's significant wow yeah it's um so what it what it does is it will take it will take the weights that you weigh in Daily and it will average them out so that you can like I get I get so um discouraged when my scale won't budge and I'm finding as I lose the weight that I could I could my weight could drop three pounds lower than I've ever seen on any given day and then it might be 10 days that I go for seeing a new low number and that's always been something that's been frustrating for me and so what happy scale does is it instead of showing you like a three pound loss on the day when the scale whoes down it will just kind of take a little bit of that and say okay th this is a your progress today but let's save some of that progress for the future so that you can you can see a downward trending line consistently and it kind of averages out all the fluctuations that your body does naturally okay when I open the healthmate app I'm just going to look at it really quickly I get the list of the different uh the different weights by day and they sort of try and smooth this out a little bit too they they show a month or a quarter or a year with a sort of smoothing line through all of the the uh bouncing around data y right so I can sort of see a general Trend and the truth is I almost never look at that view the the real truth is that I almost never actually open the app and it sort of nudges me and reminds me hey you haven't weighed in in a few days or you haven't it's been three weeks since your last weigh in are you ready to skip on the scale this morning and my answer is no no I am not yeah it's funny it's funny when apps give you those nudges like that I've I've I've restrained myself from adding those because they kind of annoy me too well it's not that I'm annoyed by it it's it's that I I know that the last time that I weighed in that I am now 30 lbs higher than my goal yep and previously I was 20 pounds higher than my goal and so it's so disillusioning it's crushing I mean it just weighs on you it's total it's it's right yeah I I I think that um one of the things that I hear from users is that this app changes their relationship with the scale where they they went from this attitude of like I don't even want to see what the number is to shifting to this is just a data point but this this doesn't have the same meaning or significance or detriment that it had before it's just a data point that I'm going to feed into the algorithm I'm going to look at my trend line it's still going down or it's still going up but it's not going up as badly as I thought it would be and everything's going to be okay because really when you're trying to lose weight the number one thing is to just find a way to keep going and I and the the best feedback I hear from users is when they tell me that it's changed the way that they think about the numbers and and that they're not scared of it anymore and it's actually helping them continue on because for whatever hard goal you want to achieve in life the the number one thing that you can do in my opinion is to just persist and keep going I think there's room for humor in this kind of thing you know it's one of the the apps that we talked about in the past on this show has been carrot weather where carrot weather takes the approach of injecting humor into the weather and I can't think of a single health application that actually does that right yeah I and I think about it because I was at the doctor's the other day and they asked me to step on the scale and they said so what's it say and the answer was more more than I wish that it did and and so we sort of use this sort of self-deprecating humor to talk about things like weight or Fitness I I wonder why there isn't an app that actually takes advantage of something like that it's a great question uh and I actually I love the carrot weather app myself too the the developer is brilliant and um but I I I think the the concern that I have with adding humor to it is that I don't really know how the user is exper exping that uh it's just such a personal thing to um to to struggle with weight loss I I know personally like there there are people that um it that it can it can it can really be bad for their life and I I I I've always stayed away from using humor because I don't want to make a joke when somebody else when it would hurt somebody's feelings my My ultimate goal is to try to make a tool that will help people feel better or encouraged and I've always thought that if I added humor maybe some people would love that but if 10% of people would if it would be a turnoff for them then I I would actually prefer to uh stay away from it just so that I can have this be a useful tool that's kind of agnostic that can be used by everyone and I know that with carrot weather for example one of of the things that he's done in recent years is ADD added settings to the app where you could just completely turn off the personality and I I think that that was a great solution because again that can make it very agnostic and it could be something that everyone can use and I I think that if I ever went down the path of adding more personality to the app i' definitely want to make it something that the user could control and turn on and off I want to say that I I thank you for being that considerate you know there I think there are app developers out there who would who would take the chance and say if they're just going to offend 10% of Their audience that they're okay with that in favor of making something that they thought was better for the the remaining 90% being so considerate being so caring especially around something as personal as weight is uh well I I think it's something that that you should be really proud of and thank you well thanks you know it's um it's it I I think they reason behind it is that this this tool is a is one of a kind um there there is a smoothing algorithm in with's health meate and it's great to see that I'd love to see more apps adopt this there there are other apps that are doing it now but uh my app has more of a spin on it where there are different algorithms that you can choose they're more sophisticated and it can also make predictions into the future about how things are going to go and I know that as a utility it's position very uniquely and because of that I want to make it accessible to as many people as possible let me ask you a little bit about the the business side of things you started this as a hobby you grew it to the point that it could become your full-time job MH how has that been going how how has that that been that that Journey been progressing it's really cool um it's something that I dreamed about my whole life my dad was a machinist and he was self-employed and he had his own machine shop down the street from where I lived and I used to love riding my bike down there to visit him in his machine shop and I thought it was so cool that he was in control of his own destiny and everything and it was something I always wanted for myself and um ever and I it it's been really nice to be able to have so much control over the direction of the product and the personality of the product and to to say say where everything is going I've really enjoyed having this opportunity but there was something that happened the other day I I noticed you on Twitter talking about troubles with the App Store can you talk a little bit about that yeah uh it was two Saturdays ago now it was about 13 days ago I was getting breakfast for my son and I got an alert and the alert was from App figures which monitors downloads for Indie iOS developers and my downloads had plummeted to a number that I hadn't seen in years and it was I had no idea why it might have happened so I didn't really have time to look in into it then but later that night I looked into it and I did a lot of research and I found I I found out that I think that it's happening because I got delisted for the term the search term weight loss tracker and Weight Tracker and those were two of the most important Search terms for users that were discovering my app and because of that my downloads went down 44% wow that is that is drastic um why do you think that happened why why do you think that change was made and I know it's speculation but I'm just asking to to sort of think about why this could happen well I actually I tweeted about it yesterday and I was very fortunate because this this story got picked up and um a lot of people shared it and when I woke up this morning I actually heard from other people who have experienced this exact same issue and I feel confident at this point that I know why it might be happening uh apple has a subtitle field for all apps where you can give a uh a description of what your app does as as one of the lines in the App Store and mine is predictive weight loss tracker and they give you 30 characters for that field and I use exactly 30 characters and what I heard from people was that there was some kind of a bug in Apple's system where on the exact same day that I was affected there were many other developers who were affected and if you use exactly 30 characters every single character it would kind of ignore the very last word it seems to be like cutting off the last letter and so I feel I feel very encouraged in this moment after hearing back from these people that uh to work around this all I'm going to have to do is change the subtitle field to weight loss tracker and I'm I'm knocking a wood right now hopefully that's going to get everything back to where it should be yeah because you know dropping by by more than half of your sales is a big deal it's it seems crazy that that that would be the change yeah yeah it was it was quite a wakeup call uh to see it drop like that and it can be it can be a blessing uh to have moments like that too in spite of all the uncertainty because it can really I I know for me there there are certain things I take for granted with the app and I think I think whenever you're doing anything there are just some things you have to take for granted so that you can focus on the most important thing but this is a great opportunity for me to take a step back and say like okay what are all the things that I was taking for granted that put me in this vulnerable position where such an arbitrary change could throw everything out of whack for me and what can I do about it definitely the difficulty is when you have a a single retail outlet you've placed all of your eggs in their baskets basically and if if they have whims that change or or even it's not even whims it's an error that changes things you you have no control it it yeah it puts you in this huge position of being in Jeopardy and for for you know physical Goods businesses it definitely puts them out of business when a change like that happens yeah in the software business you you may have a chance to recover you may have a chance to fix the problem and keep being listed uh and it all comes down to that this whole thing is sometimes held together with with shoe strings and ceiling wax right bits bits of glue and paste kind of thing you know I was reading another thread on Twitter the other day where it was uh someone saying never use the second address field because that's the first thing that people drop when they when they do shops and things like that and you you see it in people whose addresses lose the apartment that they're listed in kind of thing because that second field gets dropped right away it's never kept up wow and uh you know all of this stuff is is just barely held together and barely working even when it comes to the App Store yeah we're all rushing into the future so quickly it's it's easy to build systems that are brittle and not so robust and that's just as true for me as any as the larger systems that I depend on you know the uh the the only thing that I saw as people giving advice was besides fixing the bug that you'd found was um contact Phil Schiller which I mean in the old days you could email s jobs at Apple and get someone from his team to respond and and in the really old days you'd get him to respond and we've seen that happen a little bit with Tim Cook but but emailing Phil is not really uh you know sort of a hitle Mary it's not really a respected support path right absolutely yeah yeah I'm glad to hear you're confident that this is going to be resolved have you seen it uh have you seen the results come back yet I actually have a build you have to submit a new build to Apple and push out a new build to everyone in order to make a change like this and so I have a uh I have a build that's on Deck waiting to be released least and in just a a little bit later today I'm going to just verify that there are any mistakes in the build and push it out and I'm very eager to see what happens does it seem strange that you have to create a whole new build to change metadata like the subtitle for your application I wish it weren't that way but I understand why they did it in the early days of the App Store uh they gave you a lot more control to change your screen shots and your title and all all the fields without submitting a new build and we were seeing that some developers were doing baits bait and switches where they might change their screenshots after the app was approved and released to the App Store uh so they it looked like it did one thing but then when users saw it it it presented itself differently and so I can understand why they do that because they they they take everything that you want to present to users and they review it all at once and they make sure that you're being forthcoming and so this is just a this is just one of the ways that they've had to work around the fact that some people try to rip people off on the App Store all right well I want to thank you for joining us I have a couple of questions about the app um what what does the deluxe edition inapp purchase do in the app it unlocks all the features uh there's a um there's an integration with apple health so that you can automatically Import and Export all of your entries that it unlocks there are extra predictive features so that you can see what you'll weigh by your upcoming High School reunion for example um and there there are some reports that it unlocks so it it it will give you the full experience of the app if you unlock it that's what I need to get then well I I want to thank you for this and I'm just going to read from your your your reviews on the App Store a little bit because they really they they looked so great you know you mentioned that you've lost over 70 pounds using the app there was a review that the first review that I saw says something like I lost 40 pounds yeah right away and then the next review after that it says that that uh right so over the past few years through stress eaing I'd put on about 40 pounds two years of dieting only put on more weight I set my goal Target at 40 pounds with a lofty goal of three pounds a week and I am down now down 40 pounds with only a few more pounds to go that is that has got to be so rewarding to hear oh my God it's I I had one one of the things that um drove me in this direction was that I felt frustration be because the day jobs that I was working on they weren't necessarily tangibly making the world a better place uh they they were they were like B2B software things that were helping businesses Thrive but I really was hoping that someday I'd be able to make something where I could I could see that like somebody's life was getting better in a tangible way because of what I made and this feels like the culmin of so many years of effort and it it really makes my day to wake up in the morning and see an email or a review from a user that says that it's helping them it's it's it's an incredible motivation to keep working in the app too fantastic well Russ thank you so much where should people go to check out happy scale you can go to happy scale.com uh it's if you can search for Happy scale in the App Store and uh it'll take you right there Fant fantastic thank you so much thank you very much it's been a pleasure to be on the show yeah how do you feel about the 2019 iPod Touch I was pleased to see that it was out it brought back some memories I can't remember from exactly when I last sign I presumably before 2007 and the launch of the iPhone but I was glad that it was there yeah the iPod touch you know there were a bunch of people asking why on Earth you'd bother releasing one but it makes sense if you aren't seeing the market for one you're not really paying attention cuz first of all you can give your kid an iPod touch or you can give them an iPad and maybe it makes s more sense for an iPad but the touch is also a great device you know if you want to have portable TV watching you don't necessarily want to carry around an iPad everywhere yeah it's a good form factor you want portable gaming you want things like that you want to be able to test as an app developer and don't necessarily buy a whole spare phone right yeah good point I hadn't thought of that one yes yeah yeah um suppose you actually I was talking with a fellow named Jason Leupold about this Jason leapold is a senior editor for BuzzFeed news MH and he was saying that the the fastest way to get secure Communications going was to use an iPod touch with Google Voice on it okay that makes and uses it a phone and Route your Communications through their viip because their viip was more secure than using the phone system is it true that the sole difference between an iPod touch and an iPhone is that there isn't a phone in the iPod Touch um mixed right the the iPod Touch doesn't have the true depth sensor on the front so there's no face ID going on I didn't think of that right of course right okay the the iPod Touch doesn't have the uh the same processor necessarily I mean the updated one is is using the A10 Fusion right but it's not using an A1 or an a12 or whatever so okay because it seems to me that of all the features of my iPhone that I'd miss the phone is pretty low down the list in fact I'm at a stage where uh my mobile phone contract uh gives me more free minutes per month than there are minutes in the month uh because I'm not using any and it's cheaper for them to say knowing I won't use any um you could do without it I hadn't considered uh voiceover Internet Protocol um I've heard mixed things about Google's phone over the years I can't remember if it's uh not available in the UK that's why I didn't try it it probably wasn't when I first heard about this but I knew people who were fans who then just slowly kind of dribbled off to Alternatives and I don't know why uh is that well Google has not paid a whole lot of attention to it in recent years but it's there and it still works it's probably not going to go away right among the many services that Google could cancel it's probably not one of the first um it works reasonably well as a voiceover internet thing the calling rates are very cheap so it's it makes a ton of sense in terms of doing international calling in through it okay it's uh it's good for a lot of things there I I do like their they they were among the first to do the voicemail transcription to email all right you know where where Apple now has voicemail transcription in the voicemail section of the phone app Google Voice was doing it for years now does that mean that Google trains on your voice calls to be able to understand how to do that yes yes it does but it's a really hand app for for making calls and having them being relatively secure and doing that on iPod Touch is a good way of doing it cool so yay for the iPod Touch why did it take them four years to bring out a new one because people buy phones and iPads all right if it were a runaway seller they would keep doing it it sells enough but but essentially this is not the newest fastest phone as a touch it is an iPhone 7 without a phone okay and without Touch ID still sounds pretty good to me I mean I'm unlikely to go buy one as I have an iPhone but I I ABS you said about um missing the market for that people don't understand I get that completely yes A Fine Thing a fine addition to the Apple lineup right and since we're on the to topic of security just a little bit uh the British spy agency gchq I'm not sure that's how they build themselves British buy agency and they probably have some no no no they're they're they're I mean intelligence services or Global Communications Headquarters right that's that's yeah yeah yeah so or I'm sorry government Communications Headquarters Global is a little ambitious for them I suppose oops a secret as a British national it's out there no okay you and your Global Ambitions is British colonialism coming back is that what you're telling us uh a lot of people are telling us that it is but they're the ones who want us to leave the EU so so you know we don't listen to them oh well I wish that were true but okay yes I considering that 50% or more voted for this nonsense you're undergoing right now I don't know that you do this okay that's a very generous thing saying all more but anyway what have we done now I know this one but what do you think we've done now there's proposal from your government to require the right to Eaves drop on encrypted messages okay would you like the official British POS the position of the British person in the street yeah go ahead it is astonishment that the UK government is doing anything about anything that isn't to do with brexit CU genuinely so much legislation has ceased for three years because of all this so somewhere along the line this has been coming out so we're a bit surprised to be honest but you know other than that where do you stand right can you explain what they well first of all I'm going to read a quote and then I'm going to explain why this is terrible and nonsense and yes that's my position so gchq's Ian Levy and Christen Robinson proposed this system in November of 2018 and they laid out principles for how service providers could implement it they said it's relatively easy for a service provider to silently add a law enforcement participant to a group chat or call they wrote you end up with everything still being endtoend encrypted but there's an end on this particular communication and they insist they insist this is not the same as granting backd door Access Communications they're insisting that this sort of solution is no more intrusive than virtual crocodile clips that can be used to tap traditional voice intercept Solutions and that it isn't an expansion of government power I do think the crocodile Clips line is was well chosen uh explains what they're doing very colorful description covers up the uh that next part about not giving the government uh too much power because of course it completely gives every government power and I I'm careful to say every government there because once the UK If the UK got this through all governments would get this everyone would come asking for it yeah yes so as you say this this would introduce significant additional security threats and it it poses threats to user security because users no longer be a trust that they know who's on the other end of the communications which poses threats to Human Rights privacy free expression end to end encryption just adding another end point in there is a cute turn of phrase and I I think it violates the concept here completely I mean I've read this is about an open letter that has been written signed by Apple Google WhatsApp Microsoft it's a total of 47 people incl individual Security Experts and they are all they they wrote nine page PDF open letter sent to gchq it's about three 3,000 words long a very detailed rebuttal of everything that's said and it's not the most thrilling read but uh it's very serious about how this is Dreadful in every conceivable way yeah and then the impact is that it would force a change on the encryption schemes used yes so this government law would force the companies to change how they are implementing software which is a violation if software is speech if software is the expression of an idea and it is then the government forcing a company to change how they express that idea is a violation of the principle of code of speech it would that's me extending a little bit IA Apple would have to stop iOS telling you uh when someone's joined your chat it would have to it would intentionally mislead users by suppressing the notifications that appear when a new person joins a chat and there's no way to prevent other governments from relying on this newly built scheme which is a real concern when you have oppressive regimes in the world or any country with a poor record on protecting human rights the open letter asks that gchq abandoned this idea and gchq responded we welcome this resp response to our request for thoughts on this on exceptional access to data for example to stop terrorists Ian Levy said the hypothetical proposal was always intended as a starting point for discussion no it wasn't no it wasn't no it wasn't they intended for this proposal to be rammed through without modification and and ideally without a whole lot of comment well I don't think they were naive enough to see that would happen we will continue to engage with interested parties he said and look forward to having an open discussion to reach the best possible solution we will continue to engage with interest part we will continue to ignore interested parties and we will look forward to having no discussion at all okay is what he really means right uh I shouldn't be amused by this but I was the way um the response toing that line about exceptional access to data for example to stop terrorists that was uh definitely one of their we're the good guys kind of part of this for so there there are are three parts to hysteria right there's but terrorists that's one part to hysteria we're going to do something completely outrageous and we're going to do it because stop terrorists yeah or we're going to do something completely outrageous but won't somebody think of the children yes right right or the third the third rail to all of this which is the we're going to do something completely outrageous because someone out there is a child molester right those are the three reasons that people use to justify bizarre bad legislation yes yep just running through the list of horrible things there yes that that's certainly the top three yes yeah you know it's it is I think there is also seriously an aspect that they have drawn out the other side and by making gcq be anti-terrorists they are suggesting just letting us be suggested that everybody else in this argument is Pro terrorism and that is a way the governments get what they want for it so I don't believe that they were unaware that this would happened I don't believe they thought they could get it straight through but I do believe they think they will get it through I'm back thank you can I trivialize this entire thing for just a moment because we got a bit serious there talking about nity you you may only if you want to be labeled Pro terrorist William well you can't control what people call you um I love the fact that this is being referred to this whole gcq plan as a a Ghost Protocol um the IDE ghost being that there is this third person reading all of your messages uh but of course right right the the the person who's joined in and listening in as an as an additional end point in the end encription but is not notified is a ghost right but if you now Google to see where the Ghost Protocol is some sort of intelligence agency firm you get a screen full of listings about the Mission Impossible film of that name and for some reason that pleases me yeah it's a good film so it was a fantastic film but ah frustrating I I am the governments continue to ask to break into encryption and they do so to their detriment because it makes everyone less safe you yes and that is that is my position and I stand by which you would think is fundamentally the opposite of what a government should do for its people but we live in strange times we do live in strange times speaking of strange times so in the US we have four cell phone carriers we have AT&T we have Verizon we have Sprint and T-Mobile M Sprint and T-Mobile ask permission of the US Justice forment that they they want to go ahead and merge they want to become one yes right and and that would be fine that would be fine although there was some resistance given antitrust concerns so one of the proposals from the Department of Justice in order to to sign off on it was that fine fine T-Mobile Sprint you can merge but you have to create a new carrier so that there will be a fourth carrier to compete with you hey so that was an intelligent comment there um get together but then split off a bit Yeah okay they would want them to create a spin-off carrier that would run on the combined Sprint and t- mobile network but be presumably autonomous or uh it's not competition right okay I've further confusing for you can I make this even more confusing for you I doubt it but I think you're going to try yes all right so they've already agreed to several concessions one of them was selling off Sprint's Boost Mobile brand which was a brand that Sprint owned as a carrier so people would be a Boost Mobile subscriber as opposed to a Sprint subscriber so that is they already had this kind of thing basically and agreed to sell it off and they're being asked to create another one but to whom have they sold off this no well they they agreed to sell it off they have not sold it off yet oh right so isn't this just but they conceded that they would they they committed to a three-year 5G expansion so that 5G would be there and they avoided they agreed to avoid price hikes while that Network's under construction um yeah well you succeeded in the more confusing I didn't think that was possible so yeah well let me make it more confusing the new entity the new Sprint T-Mobile would still control Metro Mobile and Virgin Mobile USA right I should say from the UK perspective I I've obviously heard of Sprint and Verizon and T-Mobile we have T-Mobile we have virgin we have had it different times uh some of these other ones are getting more and more obscure are you saying that Sprint you call it uh boost Sprint Boost something yeah so Sprint owns Boost Mobile okay Sprint controls Metro and Virgin Mobile and they have a GRE that they will sell off the Boost one and separately keep control of the others but also separately spin off a new one but that would make five not three don't ask th this is this is weird and it's it's unusual that they would be asked to do this but the FCC and the doj both have to sign off on it before the July ju 29th deadline that Sprint and T-Mobile have self-imposed okay why would they self-impose deadline because otherwise things just going for it because otherwise it'll drag out and and so the answer is we're going to merge we want to get permission to merge but we have to lock in before July 29th if we don't the deal's off and if the deal's off then T T-Mobile's been for sale for years right T-Mobile has has been up for sale for ages and Sprint has been underperforming for years and so it makes sense for the two of them to merge and T-Mobile gets an in huge influx of cash for it in in a way and it's sort of reverse takeover Sprint in the best possible World okay you want John Ledger and Mike sver in the charge of this combined entity right because they are the ones that are shaking up the carrier landscape in the US I don't know who those people are I don't know which one runs which but I get the idea for it which is the bigger then Sprint or or T-Mobile in the US uh Sprint has been bigger okay Sprint's number three in the US traditionally okay what possible Advantage is there to this whole what's the advantage to the consumer then let's assume the FCC and the doj are looking out for us or at least Us in States T-Mobile has been T-Mobile's been very consumer forward T-Mobile has been very consumer forward on billing prices on um bundling of services on things like that Sprint has also been pretty consumer forward in terms of pioneering the idea that your device is consistently exchanged for the upgraded device as soon as the upgraded device is available kind of thing upgrade plans uh everyone else has sort of tried to follow suit but Sprint has led the way on that and people you know people pooo Sprint service coverage area but tons of people use Sprint because they're a lowcost network Um T-Mobile has kept prices down and also has bad service coverage in some places in a lot of places and so the idea that you combine the two gives them increase range increased range to compete keeps the prices low which gives them a way to compete with AT&T Verizon on better footing it's actually a pretty good idea okay but it just has not taken place yet because doj is imposing weird new restrictions that we've never actually seen them ask for this kind of thing before that I can remember does uh Tom Jes have to publish reasons for doing things presumably not they would no no okay is this anything to do you said the backing of the FCC is this to do with the fact that you've got a a very uh internet Savvy kind of FCC at the moment over there you know the the pro net neutrality uh guys and gals um I mean the well so agit pie is the chair of the FCC he is a former Verizon lawyer but this has the backing of him he's he's on board with this but he's specifically on board with uh this if they create this new one or just he's in no he's he's been on board he's been on board before this the doj came with this requirement he was on board already okay so what do you think is it just that it's it's you know it's lunchtime things are quiet uh M reports done let's have some fun make up some laws I don't know CU face it if you were in charge wouldn't you be tempted to do something like that uh on a Monday for example would you just let's up a law with an em it and see what happens no no no no no no no I I didn't think so no no no well so presumably he said uh July 29th for deadline I imagine we'll know by then if it's going to happen maybe but possibly it's going to is of it okay well probably um wonder what they'll call the new uh thing uh boost something I know well no but if they're spinning off boost then that'll go away boost uh yes or be someone else's name booster yeah booster I'd sign up for a booster thing I'm imagining by the way that uh you said Sprint Sprint and T-Mobile have uh spotty reception areas one imagines that they are not spotting in the same places so they would get better coverage well that way Sprint as a name right Sprint was originally part of AT&T because everything was part of AT&T when they split off they had to come up with names Sprint comes from Southern Pacific Railroad oh right okay because the telephone wires the telephone poles were laid out on the path of the train tracks oh is this like the whole Mason Dixon line thing wow well West Coast Mason Dixon is east side of things right Mason Dixon is is you um the the mapping of the Eastern United States and and where the North and South separate kind of just throwing a bit of American History there you know sort of just you know not completely Southern Pacific is West Coast my friend I think there a book wa uh okay so that's where Sprint came from good name I think there's a book yes yes there's certainly a book I should say I wasn't clear a book you upgrade your smartphone your TV and your laptop but when's the last time you upgraded your home Wi-Fi uh we've talked about this before and I said I was looking into it now and I done anything me before that uh 10 years you haven't done anything no I've had a cold can't you hear it in my voice St the future of Wi-Fi is here it's time to welcome Wi-Fi 6 the Netgear Nighthawk Wi-Fi 6 router gives you Ultra fast speeds and wider coverage we were just talking about coverage throughout your home it's the biggest revolution in Wi-Fi ever you get four times the capacity compared to today's Wi-Fi which means means you can connect more devices and stream simultaneously without impacting Wi-Fi speed and reliability the devices of today and tomorrow demand more your old Wi-Fi is timing out and you need the latest and high performance Wi-Fi that can keep up with you and your entire family if you stream your shows on services like Netflix or Hulu the newest line of high performance routers from Netgear will eliminate buffering and let you stream smoothly even in 4k it's like giving your streaming the VIP treatment if you game online lag will be a thing of the past turn your Wi-Fi up to 6 with a NW Wi-Fi 6 router check it out today at netgear.com wii6 that's netgear.com WiFi and the number six in homekit news Lutron released the Lutron fan speed control now this is something that Andrew Hara who wrote the review and I saw back in January at the show at CES and he and I talked a lot about it then where where he liked the idea and I thought they'd made some mistakes right and so what it is is they make a in-all device that controls the fan speed and in homes that already have ceiling fans installed with the wiring in the wall to bring the fan speed control down to the wall then this is an easy upgrade forgive me I've never had a system like this what's what's the alternative if you don't have either and that's why Andrew loved it and I didn't so Andrew's Andrew's uh family builds homes and when they build homes they do this custom wiring where you know how ceiling fans have a pole chain on them right and the pole chain controls the speeds selects from four speeds off one two and three and when you're doing these and and have the walls apart it's possible to extend those wires that usually go to that switch down into the wall where you'd have a light switch for example and put a controller there on the wall sometimes it's a a dial a knob that you can turn up to control the fan speed or a selector or something like that it was the old way of doing it but Lutron has made this device where you can put it in wall using those same wires that are custom run up to the fan and control the fan speed now that's great if you're like Andrew's family and have those all installed already in the wall but if you're like the rest of us who don't then this becomes a really intensive install because now you have to start cutting up in holes and running wires through the wall okay but you would anyway if you wanted to have a wall control thing so presumably if you've got the wall you get one if you haven't you don't right except that the there are very few kits that make a a ceiling fan controllable by home kit right you can C currently if you wanted to have before this if you wanted to have a ceiling fan controlled by homekit you had relatively few options you could buy a brand new fan from Hunter you could or or or you had to do something where you had to buy a Bluetooth based remote control and Patch it in via home assistant or homebridge running on Raspberry Pi kind of thing okay which is a nightmare and what I had been hoping for was something like what Inson does inston makes a ceiling fan controller remote control unit that goes in the canopy of the fan where the fan is installed there's a little canopy cover that's right at the ceiling and just you you wire it in right there where the wires to the switch are and that will control the light kit and the fan speeds and put it on the network for homekit control okay which is brilliant it's an easy install and the the Lutron product is easy only if you already have all that existing wiring in place which is terrible because many people do not so if you have the wiring get the Lutron if you don't get the um the other one you just said well well except that does the other one doesn't work with homekit so okay screwed there too I don't think you can fault Lutron for doing for not doing two things I can I can let me let me well no but I can fault them for making this choice so what they did was they chose to make this in- wall thing and they did it for a couple reasons one they already have the form factor down for making inall stuff because they do it for the lights so they got to reuse all of their tooling for the Plastics there which was a savings makes sense yeah the the other bit is it pairs with the Lutron Bridge product which they've already been using sucessfully for lights and plugs and outlets and things like that for homekit so there's that they have a thing called a Pico remote which is a device that pairs with the the in wall switch so that you can control them from the little remote control and the remote controls have a little pedestal they snap onto and so when I told Lutron that this was kind of silly when everyone else's remote controlled fan uses a single remote that has the control of the light kit and the fan speed on it what was their answer they took two Pico remotes out each one paired with the light one paired with the fan and put them on a pedestal with two parts on it so you'd have a really wide pedestal with two Pico remotes on it to control this thing and I said well you've got a fan speed controller there what if you want to control the light kit on it well now you have to open up an extra hole in your wall and put a two gang switch in there to have a light switch and the fan switch so so basically your cost for remote controlling your fan is something like 200 bucks one for the light kit one for the fan kit plus another 100 bucks for two Pico otes so you're already getting up to the cost of just buying a hunter fan in the first place sorry I'm losing some logic there and this Hunter Fan is that home kit Hunter fans are about 300 bucks for home kit yeah but I thought Lon were the first people to do home kit or something but they've been beaten nope no L H Hunter did first Lutron are the first to make it separate from the fan as an add-on unit oh okay but they but but the price to get there to do all the functionality that you could just do with the other one is close to basically just buying a new fan it's kind of dumb okay basically I think they should have made the canopy remote and called it a day but they didn't because they really wanted to use their Pico remotes over again well I I recognize some of this because I've just written about Ikea's I believe exp bounced Trad free uh system and they have what sounds to me the equivalent of biger remote uh they call it um uh a steering device sometimes or a steerer uh and it I don't like it because I've come from the side of home kit where I want to control things to Siri or my phone or whatever they are coming to it as Furniture sellers Ikea sells masses of furniture this is you go to IKEA to buy something physical here's a physical device it's a knob that will turn it on and off and I understand it works fine it's very slow compared to homekit stuff but it does what it does um I don't see a reason why they wouldn't do that even if in my case it means once i' finished pairing this remote I chucked it over my shoulder and then only had to go scrabbling for it when I added the next thing um you set it up like this and then you it is what it is you buy it if it works for you you don't if you don't and this thing about it being the cost of a buying a new fan well you've got a fan you can live without homekit if you want it at least they're giving you options the options you didn't have before right but options that are are unsatisfying because they came so close to doing the right thing and then didn't from my perspective that seem was a very Andrew gave it a three out of five stars and oh I I think he said that he was much Pro this because he has the wiring things what did he find against it what didn't he like well he if you have a fan without lights and a single box on the wall then this is easy to do otherwise you need to have an electrician right it's a costly addition um because you know that's that's he says our main issue with C cassetta by Lutron fan speed control is how expensive it gets when out of fitting your home not even your home but just a single room especially if your fan has a light kit because if you have a light kit like I said you have to buy the cost of the fan controller a light controller the bridge and then also the Pico remotes if you don't have a light control you end up having to putting a second Gang Box in your wall just to run the other wire for that light control so it's not it's not cheap um it it works there's nothing inherently wrong with this although it's it's just it it's it's like they took a lot of shortcuts trying to make this thing rather than starting up from the ground on something that made sense they reused their existing light controller and put fan screens on it and they the same thing with the Pico remotes if you don't have the pedestal to keep the light on one side and the fan on the other side it's easy to mix them up because everything's identical because they reused all their tooling that you can well understand why sometimes I think the more you go into homekit the more irritating it is and yet then when you've actually got it and you use it I try taking it away from me but it's far from ready for prime time sometimes well I I keep holding out hope that there will be an easier better way to do this you know there's there's a product called a sonoff s o n which is made in China available on T-Mart and AliExpress and so forth and eBay and what's nice about them is that they're reprogrammable with alternate firmwares you know out of the they work with Alexa and Google and that's fine that's well but there are people who have written firmwares that allow them to be used on homekit and okay so sorry so they can be hacked to work with homekit well I I think hack is is sort of the wrong word here it's just uploading an alternate firmware to the device and then it works differently enabled to work with homekit Okay yeah yeah and uh I'm just going to my mom ask if she's uh ready with her firware update installation yet well I've been working with one of the people working on this in open source world to see if it's possible to support the ceiling fan controller from them because if it is then all of my fans will become homekit compatible and we'll have remote controls and will be lovely and I'll tell you all about it as soon as it actually works great okay things that I do want to tell you about that do work I reviewed signology d101 uh sorry DS 1019 Plus network attach storage device and I love it excellent I'm actually I'm not in the market for this in the sense that I can afford to buy uh lots of network attra attach St attached storage but I am in the market for the fact that um I'm having trouble with storage on my we Little Mac Mini and would like some help so should I Pony up um I don't know how much it is but I'm guessing quite a bit for this this unit costs quite a lot this unit is something like I'll tell you in a second it is uh $640 without the discs okay so with the discs it's it's quite a bit more whatever the cost of storage is yeah quite a bit but but there this this is a 5 Bay Drive Unit right I can slap five drives in there and have loads of storage which I have done yeah but there's nothing that says that you have to have a signology unit that has that many bays you could go for a single Bay unit or a two Bay unit and be much less yes but one imagines that these things aren't uh scalable so if I buy a two Bay NAS drive enclosure thingy now and later realize I actually need three I've got to Chuck that one away or sell it and buy another one again and start all over that right incorrect oh yes they they all tend to have and of course we'd have to look at specific models to be to verify for sure but they tend to have ESAT ports on the back of them and sinology sells a 5 Bay external enclosure specifically for expansion uh expansion to an existing one so if I did buy a pair I could oh now I truly didn't know that and that Chang is things for a excellent um right now so this this 5 Bay unit for example can become a 10 Bay unit through the use of that expansion box and not all of the Bays have to be populated when you start out right now obviously if you want to take advantage of of things like raid or which is a a redundant array of inexpensive discs um you need to populate more than one drive bay but you can populate them singles at a time in create volumes as you go or combine volumes or do things like that I don't want to sound cheap here but you spend 600 odd pound whatever it was for this drive bait then you have no drives and you spend quite a lot of money on a drive but then you spend a lot of money on another drive and you end up with the same storage capacity of one drive because of the whole raid backup system um I'm just cheap again you don't have to use Raid you can do it in in a just a bunch of discs configuration where it combines all of their storage into a larger volume okay how about this on my desk right now I can see 1 2 3 4 five 6 7 eight external drives yeah some Portables some not two of them I don't think the connectors even still exist to use them on my Mac uh is there any way I can plug those into some sort of enclosure potentially yeah cool oh I'm learning a lot today uh but uh I have 44 terabytes in one of these things okay quite happy right well that's nice for you um but that's just me bragging for the moment but what I want to tell you about is is what this thing does for you cuz we just talked about it so far as it's an enclosure and it holds drives which is nice but there's a ton of features you can get out of it and you know the the normal features that people think of are things like music sharing or music storage and sharing that to iTunes or the idea of you know hosting video or story video which is nice uh but how do you actually use that stuff well it turns out that they make a DS video application that works on iOS and tvos so you can store your videos on it and then display them on your Apple TV or your iPhone or iPad iPad all right which is quite cool um you know I I've gone ahead and put my whole music library on the thing and I'm sharing that through to iTunes uh but it goes further than that because one of the cool things that they do is they've created basically a replicated version of Google docs so you can write documents through the web browser that are stored on the thing and then share those with other people you basically create your own private Cloud okay I'm liking that quite a bit has its own email hosting and email service kind of like Gmail has its own chat so you can chat with people let's just and I I this is very specific to me I'm sorry to ask a very P question but I already use iCloud drive so I have access to documents and I have Plex um yep you can run Plex on this by the way this can be a Plex server okay and I would want to do this instead of their one why why or well it is it is their one it is it is the same thing from Plex except putting it here as opposed to your computer means it's not dependent on your computer being on oh okay that is good yes I have issues with my computer being on all the time yes I like yeah okay uh in terms of iCloud there's there's not a whole lot to say here other than it's additional to that kind of thing now if you're a Dropbox or a Google Drive user this thing can synchronize with those so that you have a local copy on your own drives of all your stuff that's up in the cloud there that's not dependent upon dropboxes sync product on your computer working or drive sync product working on your computer okay which is good um and you're happy with this it's delighted excellent delighted very happy with this thing um and it's not my first experience with them and it took me a while to get accustomed to using one a couple years ago I had a tubay unit from from them and it it took me a while to understand why I'd want it and the first thing that I learned that I could do with it was time machine backups over the network to it oh grief time machine I've forgotten about time machine yes that seems very useful yeah and with the discontinuing of the U the airport express the airport line and the um Time Capsule units it it really makes a lot of sense to be able to do this to the over the network to robust drives so I'm very happy with that and you know they they this thing is just so flexible there's surveillance station as a piece of software that runs on it so if I have IP cameras around which are you know connected cameras over ethernet basically it can use the drives as recording medium and go ahead and record all of them and you can view the cameras from there and also use their IOS app or to to view these things it's really great you have this second reminded me that the other day I wired up an old iPhone to be a security camera in my office and have uh since then managed to put something in front of the lens completely forgetting that it's there so if I I could go away and see that yes that book is just where I left it yeah thank you for that okay brilliant yeah now I'm I'm really happy with this I like the idea of this uh the way this works now they have an application in there called download station where you type in the name of of whatever file it is you're looking for and it can download it and then make it available through their music or video or whatever else servers now I can't really comment on the the copyright nature of such a thing but I think it's very interesting that this is really a full-fledged solution from start to finish whether it's trying to replace an office in terms of Google Drive kind of stuff trying or or Google Docs whether because they have docs slides and spreadsheets equivalents um and a chat server and a mail server and backup and restore and music serving and video serving and surveillance and all it's it's just so flexible yeah but apart from that you know yeah I I get it I mean apart from that what else you got what else does it do well I mean the one that I've got here the the D 109 1019 plus has two ethernet ports on it which can be configured for aggregation so that instead of having 1 Gigabyte shared for up and down you can pair them with a Smart Switch that's that's managed and aggregate them so that you get essentially two gigabytes that's one gig up and one gig down okay so you get faster access to it which is cool let me tell you something else you can do with this thing this thing can host virtual machine image is Right which means you can use it as the virtual machine server and either use Thin Client devices as computers and and use those to be the virtual machine recipients or you can just do it through your your computer so you don't have to install VMware on your Mac kind of thing all the VMS will be hosted over at the drive and you can have them anywhere on your netor work you might be missed to know which is kind of of like net booting I got an error message on my Mac which told me your storage is almost full ah manager stor said I think if I clicked away to get rid of it I imagine the next sentence was ask Victor about this Synology thing he keeps mentioning uh that's probably right there in the error message so right so so there are a couple different things right Apple would tell you buy more iCloud storage and put your documents and desktop in the cloud and don't keep anything in downloads and that that would be a way of keeping your Mac clean and keeping things stored and that's true that would be one way of handling it the other way would be to put folders that are autom mounted on your Mac that are stored over on a signology and work out of them that way for instance I have video and music folders that mount when I boot the computer and I have them set up not to refer just to the local network link but also to what's called Dynamic DNS that signology makes as signology connect so that I can be out there in the world and View and work with my storage device I mostly like I use and mostly like icloud's uh documents and desktop thing except as a file Mega database I use every day and recently for last week every time I've launched it it's told me the the database I need can't be found because iCloud has backed it up it's the smallest thing and I use it every day but I have to go get it and then FileMaker can open it uh okay here's here's the thing you really really really need to be careful using FileMaker databases on network drives this is and iCloud counts as a network drive okay right yeah it does get also backed up every night through a keyboard Maestro script but that's another story I I would tell you to keep it local open it local don't have it in something that's shared with iCloud and then have their keyboard me script back it up overnight to an iCloud location because the way that FileMaker works is that even when you're not doing anything with it they make changes to the FileMaker database in the background sure and that's why why FileMaker server exists is FileMaker server exists exclusively basically to fix this problem so that you can use network drives so that you can have multiple people accessing at one point or time together it's it's really if you have it not on your local drive you are risking your database um I now want to say goodbye so I can go off and do this straight away goodbye okay thanks seriously that'll help this has been the Apple Insider podcast and I want to make sure that your data is secure that your data maintains its integrity and is not lost so William I'm going to let you go to do that because I don't want your data being in Risk I'm genuinely going to do it this moment and I I appreciate that thank you yeah um William is available at William at appleinsider.com and on Twitter at w Gallagher William where am I available everywhere that good something are sold I can't remember what the phrase is it's probably UK phrase wherever good books served no you uh you're over there aren't you on on that on I am yeah yeah good I'm V marks I'm on Twitter and Victor appleinsider.com we have really enjoyed this one I'm so glad you you guys were here for it thank you for listening leave us positive runes reviews on iTunes leave us positive comments in our email leave us questions in our email we'd love to answer listener questions we love trying we'll be back we love struggling with listener questions we'll be back next week when's the last time you upgraded your home's wi-fi turn your Wi-Fi up a notch with netgear's new line of NW Wi-Fi 6 routers whether you're gaming online 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