774: Answering Common Tech Support Questions
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Hello and welcome to Mac Power Users. My name is Stephen Hackett. I'm joined as always by my friend and yours, Mr. David Sparks. Hello, Mr. Hackett. How are you today? I am good. How are you? Good. What's the December weather like for you? Like you guys don't get like snow, right? We only get snow every couple of years and normally it's like February or March even. Okay.

But this is kind of the first like cold week. Like we've just now dipped below freezing, but you know, the highs in the fifties, like it's not, we don't get it bad here. Yeah. We're getting like daytime right now. Sixties. It's awesome. I get to wear a sweater. So I'm happy.

Yeah. Not much really. I like the days where like, you know, you have a jacket in the morning and the evening, but it's kind of like crisp during the day. I love fall. Like fall is my favorite. Yeah. Me too. There's a lot of ginkgo trees in my neighborhood, if people are familiar with those. And ginkgo trees drop their leaves basically all at once. And so you just like drive by a house and their whole yard is like these bright yellow leaves. Yeah.

It's pretty for like three days. And then all the giant oak trees in my neighborhood, you know, cover them up with big ugly leaves. But I just, there's something about it that I, that I enjoy. Yeah. That part makes me sad. All my bonsai losing their leaves. The Japanese maple is looking a little rough right now, but, but you know, spring is, is near. Yeah. In spring we'll get new apple hardware and my, my tree will get leaves. It's all good.

Yeah, I think there probably will be Apple hardware in the spring, but that's not the topic today. The topic today is it's a time of year where, you know, you're just, you're in line at the family dinner, getting some food and.

Someone asked you a tech question. So that's what we're going to get into today. Wouldn't that be great? Spending time with your family rather than arguing about politics, say, hey, let me turn on your iCloud for you. Yes. Yes. We're going to get all into that today. But-

Before we do, a quick reminder, we are nearing the end of the annual sale on Relay memberships. So if you go to GiveRelay.com, it's the first link in the show notes this week, you can get more power users for 20% off for the year, or you can support any other show on Relay. A bunch of our shows are

offer extra content. So this membership includes an ad-free version of Mac Power Users, and that ad-free version comes with an extra chapter at the end. This week, we're going to be talking about the sort of, I feel like, a pretty big misstep Apple made in getting out of wireless and getting out of their airport base station business, right as that became actually a really interesting market.

But we cover all sorts of stuff and more power users, and it's always a real treat. And we don't say it enough, but boy, do we appreciate subscribers. That really helps support us and keep the show going. So for those of you that have subscribed, thank you. Yes, absolutely. For those of you thinking about it, go check it out. You get a deal, but not much longer. Something else I did. So we talked about last week my little Black Friday sale thing.

for the new field guide and I didn't put the link in the show notes for where you go buy it. So, um, I got a lot of email from NPU listeners about that and I apologize. So I'm extending the deal, um, uh, an extra week and I'm going to have, I will have a link in this week's show notes and sorry about that King. Uh, uh, the new, um, the new code, which I make the code, Steven, how about,

The last one was gravy. What's your other favorite Thanksgiving food? Ooh, I do like mashed potatoes. Okay. So, uh, we'll just make that it mashed potatoes.

No space. Mashed potatoes for another week. Get 20% off. That is not going anywhere else, by the way, that code. So just, I will have a link for you. And for those of you that wrote me, I'm sorry. I am the world's worst marketer. I tell everybody that I have a code and I don't give you the link to buy it. So there you go. Yeah. So that'll be, that'll be in the show notes. So go check it out.

Okay. So we talked about earlier, you're going to visit family, family tech support. If you are listening to Mac power users, you are very likely the person that does family tech support. We've got a long outline here and I think we just should get started with it. Yeah. And I think we're going to start with the big one. I feel like this was a really, is really common is my iPhone or my cloud or out of space. And again,

This one is tricky because the answers don't, in some ways the answers are very easy. In other ways, they're very unpleasant. I think with iCloud space, you just got to pay Apple's ransom, right? Am I, am I missing the point there? Like, is that, is that what people should do? Yeah. You know, it's tough because also because you're a Mac power user for some reason, at least in my case, my family has associated me with Apple. Like,

Like what Apple decides to do is somehow my fault, you know? And I'm sure a lot of our listeners experience that too. Oh, you told me to get this phone and now they keep bugging me and blah, blah, blah. And I think you just own up to it and just say, yeah, this is lame for the amount of money you spent on that phone. You should have enough storage. You and I just talked about this on the show, so I don't need to go over it again. But yeah, don't defend them because this is not that defensible.

But say it is what it is, but how important are your pictures? Are they important enough for a Starbucks once a month? You know, would you pay the price of a Starbucks to keep your pictures? And, and that's what it is. And, and just walk them through it, help them get it set up. But I, I have had that uncomfortable conversation with many family members and I have,

convince them and, you know, be smart about it. Look at their storage, help them make sure they pick the right tier. Don't let them over by and, um, or under by and just kind of go with it. Yeah. I think for most people, the, uh,

It's like an emotional decision not to pay for iCloud, right? Like they either don't want a subscription or they think it's silly. But I think in some cases they don't understand, you know, what they get for it. And that's where we can be helpful as nerdy friends and family members. And honestly, I think the photos conversation is the most important.

important one. It's like, look, right now, you know, unless you're plugging your phone in and importing your photos, which I will bet you money, they're not. And something happens to that phone. Those photos are gone. I went through this with a family member just a couple of years ago. They had their first kid and, you know, suddenly photos are much more important to them. And I walked them through this and they're now using iCloud photo library and everything.

If it is a, you know, a financial issue and it's somebody who, you know, maybe like a parent or something, you could add them potentially to your iCloud family sharing setup. There are a limitation on the number of people you can have in iCloud family. And, you know, it does come with some other trade-offs, but that may be an option. Or you just hand them 25 bucks and be like, look, I just paid for your first year, you know, and let them do it.

Yeah. But you do have to, I would insist on it. You know, I just, I just feel like it because you also, as the family tech support person, are the person who's going to hear about it when they drop their phone in the bottom of a lake and all the baby pictures or wedding pictures or whatever goes down with it. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. It's, it's, uh, it's really important. And, uh,

Yeah. Apple should offer more like, and you can, you know, all that's still true. But at the end of the day, it's like, this is the world we live in. And for me, it's, you know, uh, the photos are the most important thing. And so I don't have, I don't have a big deal. You know how I secretly believe Tim Cook listens to every episode of our show. Yes. Do you think he's giggling right now? Uh, while rolling around in a pile of cash. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, I guess so. It's tough. It's tough. I mean, the backup and spending money for infrastructure on local hardware, that's just really hard for...

normal people to process, right? It's like, I bought it. Why do I need something more? This is crazy. Yeah. It's like, what if someone told you, Hey, that refrigerator you bought? Yeah. You also need to pay $5 a month to make sure your eggs don't go bad or whatever. It's like, what? That doesn't make any sense. I understand why it's difficult for them, but, but you gotta, you gotta have the conversation. Yep.

The flip side of this is my phone is out of space, right? And I'm going to have a link to an Apple support page. That's what I do here. That walks you through kind of how to check it and what some of the things mean. One thing I really like about this screen, and actually we're not talking about the Mac in this segment, but the Mac has a similar setup here.

is iOS will give you recommendations about ways you could save some storage space. So things like offloading unused apps or, hey, maybe you didn't realize you had a whole season of Game of Thrones downloaded on your iPad. Get rid of that. It will give you kind of some steps that you could take to improve the situation.

Yeah, I feel like this is one place where we can compliment Apple. I think they've come so far in making it easy to understand what storage is getting used and how to easily manage it, like offloading apps and getting rid of media files. That stuff now is a press of a button. You used to have to go hunt it down and figure out how to delete it in the app directly. And overall, they've come a long way.

They have. And, you know, they're not selling 16 gigabyte iPhones anymore either. Remember that? I forgot about that. Yeah. I mean, yes, you can definitely still fill up an iPhone, of course. But I think this is less of a big deal than it used to be. But definitely go check out that article. I will say, especially in older devices, this page may take a minute or so to like load in, like as it's figuring out what's on the device. Yeah.

And so if you tap into this screen and it spins for a second, like, don't freak out. Sometimes it takes a minute, even on the Mac. It's like, I don't know what it's doing. It's thinking about what's on the disk, I guess. But it is pretty easy to go through this process. And of course, you know, I mentioned this is the other side of the coin. If they're paying for iCloud space, you know, the biggest toggle you can check is, okay,

Don't keep all my photos locally, you know, have my photos on the cloud and then just have them cached on my local device. Of course, it's not sync is not a backup, et cetera, et cetera. But look, we're talking about improving people's tech setups who are starting, you know, kind of on square one. So that can be a very useful thing.

The other thing I always do when I look at storage with somebody is I just check generally how they're doing and what their profile is. Like I recently had a friend who wanted help and we checked her storage and she had a five, 12 gigabyte phone and she was using like one 28 of it. And I told her, okay, so good to know. Next time you buy a phone, you don't need to get one this big because you just don't, you don't use that much space. You're good. You know? And, and,

And, um, she, you know, she made a note of it. So when she's ready to upgrade her phone, she can get the smaller one and, or you can look and say, Hey, you got two 56 and you're at, you know, two 50, you're really on the edge here. And that, you know, next time you need to get the bigger one. One thing you may see on that screen is system data. And again, this is a problem that I think is, uh,

is less of a big deal than it used to be. But system data on the phone is things like the operating systems, various caches, that sort of thing. And I've got a MacWord article in the show notes you can check out that walks you through some of the things that

This does. There are times where this has gone mad and you need to restore the phone or something. But I think Apple has done a better job over the years of dealing with this. But the other thing that this article mentions is messages. And this is where I think Apple can improve things. I keep my entire life.

messages history i sync it to icloud it's 148 gigabytes of stuff and that's got to be on all my devices and it's got to be in icloud and i would like for this to work more like icloud photo library like let me just have a cache of this on my device and look if i'm scrolling back or i'm searching you know then go to the server and get you know sort of the legacy stuff

Apple does give you options to keep less message data. So again, I'm keeping mine for all time, but you can set it to keep like the last year. There are a couple options in there. And that can be a way to decrease space if someone doesn't care about their history there. But I do. And 148 gigabytes is a, but it's a heavy price to pay for that. Yeah. Why do you keep it all? I mean, what are you doing? You just never know, man.

Just never know. I didn't know that about you, Stephen. Are you surprised at all? Yeah, no, not really. I'm just surprised that they're not all tagged. But yeah, I didn't know you did that. But yeah, I go and blow it out once in a while, and I don't think twice about it. I just don't really. It doesn't matter. More than a couple weeks worth. I actually don't use. I don't text much. I'm such a Luddite when it comes to like.

other people. So I prefer to talk to people, you know? So, um, I don't know, maybe it's my age. I don't know, but the, uh, I will pick up the phone. So that's cool. Yeah. But the, uh, but I, I don't keep a big history in that, but I know when I think about it, if you do keep it all with iCloud, that's just a huge, that's just a huge, um, footprint. And I think a lot of people

probably are carrying that footprint without knowing or needing it so this is another opportunity to help somebody out take a look at their messages database and have this conversation you know do you want to have the pictures that you know i sent you last year or whatever you know can i delete some of this to free up some space on your device yep

What about on the Mac? I think that is a problem. It's an old problem, but still a current problem. And I see this with family members. They do bring me their Macs. My family's kind of funny. They always bring their Macs to holidays, but they tell me, Hey, it's, it's fully up to date, which tells me that they never update it until they see me. And then they update it the night before, but yeah, often they are out of space. Yeah. And, um,

And that slows the machine down. And that's a problem that creeps up on people that don't know what they're doing. And it's an easy fix where you can really improve the quality of life for them.

Yeah, so if you were running a Mac with system settings, it's under general and then storage. And it's basically the same screen that's on iOS and iPadOS. If you're running an older Mac, you get through it through system preferences. But it gives you a kind of a breakdown of like, this is kind of where you're...

storage is spent and you can click into them. So if I like click, click into music, for instance, it has all the things in my, you know, music, music, video files, not music itself, but video files. And I can decide, okay, like, do I, do I still,

Do I still want these? I can go into developer, right? Because I've got Xcode set up and I can see my caches and everything. It's really pretty detailed and it lets you manage a lot of things right from system settings, which is nice. Steven, I just sent you a screenshot. I just had a discovery. I looked at my storage on my eight terabyte hard drive. 7.53 terabytes used.

That's not good. That's more than me. I'm using about five and a half. Well, you know, I make a lot of videos for the labs and for the field guides and I need to go through and, you know, honestly, I just keep the final product, but I haven't been cleaning up after myself. And I think I've got a ton of production files on this machine that probably need to be deleted or offloaded. Yeah.

Yeah, that's a surprise. But see, you even catch it on your own machine. Oh, yeah. Stop the look, yeah. Yeah, that's wild. So the way to do it is, like you said, in the settings you can do it. There are software packages you can buy. CleanMyMac is probably my favorite. But if you're looking at your aunt's computer, she's not going to pay for CleanMyMac. But you can do it for her with the built-in tools. But take a minute, look at the storage situation. Yeah.

Okay, so you've got storage. Now you need to back them up. Yeah. What good are your photos if they're not backed up somewhere? And on the iPhone and iPad, it's really simple. It's you're backing up to iCloud or to a computer. You know, the iPhone and iPad don't,

Don't have things like Backblaze or other ways to get files off of them. iCloud Backup is fantastic. It backs up everything that's not synced with iCloud. So think about notes, right? If you're syncing your notes with iCloud,

They're synced. But if you have things that are locally on your phone, that's when the backup comes in. So you kind of have two ways to get data to iCloud. And it's all automated. It is really easy to just set the switch. Don't ever think about it. Your device will notify you if it is not backed up in a certain period of time. So I had this issue recently, actually.

where I picked up an older phone that I keep for testing and it signed into my iCloud account for backup. And for whatever reason, it hadn't backed up in a couple of weeks. And so when I picked it up, I had notification on the lock screen and I could go in there and re-enable it. And it's really designed where you just don't have to think about it. And it's great because if your phone falls in the ocean or it gets run over by a car or whatever,

I don't know why such dramatic things could happen to your phone, but you know, if something dramatic happens to your phone or you just replace a phone. Or if a steamroller rolls over. If a steamroller runs over your iPhone. Yeah.

then you just sign into your new phone with your iCloud credentials and you restore from the backup. And Apple's done a lot of work to make that really seamless and it's really easy to manage. And again, you got to pay for the iCloud space, but it is totally worthwhile. And it, you know, a device like a phone, things happen to phones and having that data safe and sound is a, is a important thing.

Yeah, agreed. How trusting of you are iCloud? Are you of iCloud? Like you get your photos on iCloud. Yeah. That's really the only way you can back them up. So let's talk about the hypothetical family member that doesn't own a Mac, but they own an iPhone. I'm sure that's a lot of people. There's really not much you can do other than say, back it up to iCloud. I mean, you can back up an iPhone to a computer, but that backup is

It's only good for restoring to a new device. That doesn't actually get your photos off the phone. At that point, you're looking at needing to import them with something like Image Capture or in Windows, I think File Explorer will actually import the photos for you. So it's all doable without iCloud, but iCloud makes it a lot easier.

Yeah. And to answer my own question, I'm pretty trusting of iCloud. I mean, I think for photos and everything are fine. That being said, I do have a Mac and I do have all my photos on my system. Like I don't use for my Mac. One of the reasons why I'm at capacity on my hard drive is that got all my photos on it and I don't intend for that to change. So if you've got, you know, the family member that has a Mac, uh,

take a look at what they've done there. Cause usually by default, it's all the cloud, but if they have storage on their Mac, why not have the photos download locally? It makes them more responsive when they clean them on their Mac and it gives them kind of a, a belt and suspenders approach to their security. Yeah, I think that's a, I think that's true. And yeah, I mean, I'm, I'm have a lot of stuff in iCloud and it has not failed me in a really long time. I mean, I've got,

My whole life is in Apple notes, right? And it's just synced with iCloud and in their system and same thing with photos. And so, yeah, I, I think they've come a long way with it and I think it's a trustworthy system at this point. Yeah. Agreed. I will say one thing about local backup. So if you're plugging your phone into a Mac or a PC to back it up,

You do need to encrypt those backups if you want to save health and activity data. So Apple has that information behind an extra layer of security. And I think also, I think it's a good plan if you're backing your phone up to a computer to encrypt that backup anyways. And to save that password somewhere, you'll need that password to restore that backup later on. But if you do want to save health and activity data, you do have to encrypt it.

The other thing is the family tech support member. I can tell you that if I can get them over the hurdle of paying for iCloud storage, that just solves so many problems. If, you know, like, you know, if the steamroller does come for their phone, that's really all you have to do. And like Steve was saying, you get the new one, you plug it in, your data shows up. With the Mac, however, I still have catastrophic data loss from family members and friends, uh,

you know, not routinely, but often enough. And it's still a bit of a, you know, it's still a bit of a wild west out there, even though there is such a thing as time machine, a lot of people don't know about it or use it. And there's a lot of data among our friends and family that is not getting backed up on their PCs and Macs. Yeah. I mean, just, you know, copy everything to a floppy disk every once in a while. Right. Yeah. Tape drive, you know, get your tape drive out, get your tape drive.

Or if you're really old, a cassette. Get your cassettes out. There'll be a lot of cassettes. There'll be a lot of cassettes. I remember in college, people who have used the Mac for a long time remember in the dot Mac days, so before MobileMe, there was a backups app that came with your membership.

And you could use it to back up to CD or DVD or even back up things onto the hard drive of your iPod. We've come a long way with tools like Backblaze and Time Machine. I'm going to ask a chat GPT, how much data did the TRS-80 store to a cassette? Not much. 60 kilobytes, 30 minute audio cassette.

So if you got a 500 baud, you could get 120 kilobytes per side. So what would it take to get my photos library on cassette? Okay, I'm going to stop there. This is getting crazy. A tractor trailer full of tapes. But yeah, Backblaze is great for this because you can install it. You can pay for it for somebody. You just give your credit card.

to Backblaze and they don't have to worry about the, you know, the monthly fee or whatever. Now I will say tools like Backblaze and even iCloud backup to a degree, they are putting data on the internet. Now it's all encrypted and safe, but if you have, you know, if you're out in the middle of nowhere and really slow upload speeds, or you have like metered internet, so you have satellite internet and you only, you know, you can't upload gigabytes and gigabytes of data, uh,

There are some limitations with that, right? These tools may not be a good fit for everybody, but I think for most people, iCloud backup, the amount of data it needs to move, backblazing amount of data it needs to move is reasonable and worth it. But just a little note, because sometimes we hear from people like, I live in the middle of nowhere, I can't do this. Like, I totally understand that, but a lot of people can use these tools now, and I think they're good options.

Yeah. And I've done this for people. I bought them hard drives for, and set it up for them with time machine. I've paid for backblaze accounts. My kids went to college. I've got them both backblaze accounts because I knew they would never back up otherwise. And I think this is like a nice favor you can do for someone. If someone has data upload problems, like if backblaze doesn't make sense, I would just say, just get two drives and,

And, you know, and swap them once in a while. You can run, you can even run two different time machine backups. And look, we're Mac power users. We do backup shows. You all know that Steve and I do way more than this. And we'd be recommending you do way more than this. I'm thinking about, you know, Uncle Joe, what are you going to be able to convince him to do? Right. Yeah. Yeah.

And, you know, you can get a hard drive pretty cheap these days. Yeah. And you can get a pair of them even. Mm-hmm. I don't know. Is that a good holiday present? Is that... Here, instead of socks, I got you a Western Digital drive. Yeah. Is that like socks to people? I don't know. But I don't know. Just...

You know, have the conversation about the photos and the data. And honestly, it's really easy to convince them to buy it after they have data loss. So see if you've got some war stories up your sleeve. Or even if you have another family member who you bailed out, have them tell them about it. It's just, you know, dumb not to do those backups. And it's just so easy now. But I feel like on the Mac, there's a lot of folks who haven't, like, seen the light yet. Mm-hmm.

I think that's true. You don't really have a choice on iPhone and iPad. It nags you to get that extra storage. But on the Mac, it's perfectly happy to not be backed up. Yeah. This episode of MPU is brought to you by NetSuite. What does the future hold for business? Well, if you ask nine experts, you're going to get 10 different answers. Some will say that rates will rise or fall. Others might say inflation is up or down.

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And speaking of opportunity, you can download the CFO's Guide to AI and Machine Learning now at netsuite.com slash MPU. That's Netsuite, N-E-T-S-U-I-T-E, netsuite.com slash M-P-U. Whenever I see family, it always, you know, I hate it. I hate this question. Dave, can you look at my printer? Oh, it's the worst. Yeah.

It's still a thing. It's still a thing in my family, at least, you know? Yeah. When we put this in here, I was kind of thinking like, is this still a big deal? You know, I think fewer people have printers than they used to, but printers are just as bad as they've ever been. And, you know, this one is definitely going to be Mac heavy. If you're having trouble printing on windows, like, you know, that's a different podcast. Yeah.

But on the Mac, at least, you've got actually a lot of tools. But in general, like even on Windows, there's some basics, right? Restart the computer, restart the printer, like eight times out of 10, that's going to solve your printing issue. I mean, seriously, like, you know, I've, you know, sometimes my mom works for herself. She has an office at home.

and she prints a lot of stuff for her business. And it's like, Oh, I can't print or I can't scan is like, just restart both things. And you know what? Most of the time I just get like a thumbs up back from it's like, yes, that fixed it. It's amazing how simple things can really fix this sort of problem. Did you ever watch the it crowd? You know, people keep recommending it to me, but I have not, I have not seen it. You have to, there's a running joke in the show where all they say is it, have you tried turning it off and on again? And, uh,

And that solves, you know, the problem so often. But yeah, you need to watch that show. The thing too about printing is like they're physical things, right? So check for paper jams. A lot of printers, if they have a display, will like tell you like, oh, the paper is jammed. But sometimes also like you just go over there and like lit the lid of it and see if there's paper stuck in it. Make sure it's got ink in it. Like again, physical, simple things can get in the way of getting the way of printing.

I've also started questioning my family members on what they print. Like I have a sister, I'm like, what do you print? And she says, Amazon returns. I'm like, do you print anything else? No. So I taught her how to get the code. And when you go into the UPS store, you show them the code and then you don't need to print. You know, it's like sometimes you can social engineer around the printer problem and

But some people still need it for work or whatever. And I do think it is easier than it used to be. I mean, remember the old day with those big honking cables and everything? It's a lot better. But you're right. It's like sometimes they just stop talking and

And this is one where I recommend not only trying to fix it, but also teaching troubleshooting to the user. Like, okay, so this is what I did, you know? And so long as it's like within their capability, it's,

um once you start getting into like the the settings i'd probably stop there but you know the turning it off and on again the clearing the cache checking you know sometimes it's just checking the printer feed like there's just a piece of paper stuck in there like teach them the basics because this is one you definitely want to teach them to fish on yeah because printer problems are always going to come back right you don't gotta uh you don't gotta wait um

Yeah, I think that's good. On kind of moving to the Mac a bit more specifically, you have a print center application. It's in the utilities folder on the Mac and it pops up in the dock when you're printing. One of Apple support documents I read was like, go to the dock and open. It's like, well, it's not always in the dock. But anyways, you can find it utilities, any print jobs that are stuck or paused. Yeah.

We'll be in there. And sometimes it's just a matter of like what you tried to print the printer didn't like. I had this issue actually very recently where Mary was trying to put this like pretty complicated word document. And for whatever reason, it just kept choking. And so I was like, well, let me export it as a PDF and the PDF printed immediately. And I could see in print center on her MacBook, like, oh, this job is stuck for whatever. And so I went there, removed the job,

and then printed the pdf so sometimes it can be it can be a file issue as well and the reasons for that can be impossible to understand yeah well only the electrons know that's right well one of the nice things these days is air print printers you know though a lot of them just about anything you buy anymore yeah is out of the box gonna work with a mac and with an iphone and ipad but uh

I think a lot of people don't even realize you can print from an iPhone.

Yeah. Air print is awesome. And Apple has this like big list on their website, but if you go and buy a printer, it's, you know, got like the air print label right on it. And with iOS and iPadOS, it's basically zero configuration. So if you go to the share sheet and hit print and air print printer on your, on the network will show up right there and you can select it. And weirdly the print center application is also on the iPhone and iPad and

You can't launch it on your own. It only opens when something is printing. Now on the iPhone, it shows up in the dynamic Island while you're printing, which I just love. I love someone at Apple was like, Hey, we have this dynamic Island. We have printing. Let's marry the two, like hats off to whoever, whoever thought of that and proved it. It's quite fun.

But with the simplicity means there's not a lot of troubleshooting options on the iPhone and iPad. You can't reset the print system like you can on the Mac. You can't remove and re-add any printers like you can on the Mac. It's really AirPrint's design to be zero configuration. But really, I have not had much trouble printing from an iPhone or iPad. Now, I will say I don't do a lot of it, but it seems like Apple's got that down. And if I do have issues, it's things like...

I'm out of paper or the printer got knocked off the network for some reason. Very rarely it's an issue of, oh, the iPhone just can't print this thing that I tried. What if you've got like an ancient HP that's heavier than a Buick way before the existence of air print? I mean, we all have a relative that has one of those, right? It was like in an office or something. Yeah.

And they're like, yeah, I paid $8,000 for this printer and I'm going to use it until I die. Yeah. I mean... What's available for that person? I mean, I'm that way. I have...

The Brother HL2270, which is basically a 10-year-old version of what The Verge calls the only printer people should buy, which is very funny. It's just a LaserJet black and white Brother network printer, and it's worked for me forever. It was one of the first things I bought when I quit my job. I was like, I need a printer, and went and bought that.

But it doesn't have air print. It's got a network jack on it, but it does not have air print support. And so I use an app called Printopia. Now I will say, dear listener, that when running on Sequoia, Printopia says it isn't supported, but there's not an update to it and it works just fine. So I don't really know, like looking in their support document, support documents, they mentioned iOS 17 and like Mac OS 13. So I,

It still works. It doesn't seem like it's getting a lot of attention, but what it does is it takes a printer that your Mac knows about and basically the Mac becomes an AirPrint server. So on my phone, I go to print and the Brother printer shows up like it normally does, but because it doesn't support AirPrint, what's actually happening behind the scenes is I'm printing through the Mac mini that I have Printopia running on and then that prints the document.

It's seamless to me as from the iPhone and iPad. You set this app up once basically, and it just works. It's 20 bucks. There are other apps that do this sort of thing. I've just used Printopia forever. But it's great. I use it anytime I print from an iPhone or iPad. It's going through Printopia and it's pretty sweet because otherwise I probably would have

I probably would have updated that printer by now because my wife does tend to print a lot of things from her iPhone, you know, just like stuff for the kids or like a form or something in her email. She's a teacher, right? So she's going to have to print. And it would drive her bananas to have to like go to her Mac to do that. But it's worked for me for a long time, even though like I kind of have an eyebrow raised about its future, to be perfectly honest.

All right. Here's another one. Sometimes they don't ask you for help, but you observe that their Wi-Fi is terrible. And you say, hey, let me help you with Wi-Fi. I mean, how far are you willing to go down that rabbit hole over your turkey dinner to get their Wi-Fi working? This is a more long-term project, I think. Yeah. Potentially. My answer is I'm willing to go pretty far because I just hate it when you go and they're like,

I mean, there's a lot of really easy fixes, though, for people who don't know what they're doing. Yeah, I think a lot of people, most people probably, just use the Wi-Fi that comes on their internet service provider router, right? So I pay Comcast or whatever. The guy came and put a box in the closet or under the TV, and that's how I get Wi-Fi. And if you're in a small apartment, that's probably fine. But...

Those routers that come from your ISP, they're not the best things in the world. And you may have issues with speed or with reach. And where I have observed this over time is people adding smart home stuff, right? So they want to have a light bulb they can turn on with Alexa or they put they want to have a doorbell camera, right? And the Wi-Fi is

barely reaches the front door or, you know, lots of reasons you may want to extend that Wi-Fi from what you had initially. And thankfully, like you said, it is pretty easy to fix that because you're not, regardless of what they might say, you are by no means stuck with using the Wi-Fi on the equipment from your internet service provider. You do...

for most intents and purposes have to use their router, right? The thing that the coax or the fiber comes into, you're probably stuck with that, but that doesn't mean you can't have your own wifi downstream from it. Yeah. I had a funny conversation with my ISP because they couldn't understand why I would want to have my own router. Like that we're giving you one. Why would you want one? Yeah. But the, I think that the trick here is to look at internet usage and

in your guest wherever you're at and like if the person works on the internet or if they do a lot of media consumption and you notice it a lot of people have terrible wi-fi and don't even realize it because you know it's always been bad so how do they know that it's it could be better and then you can have a conversation with them about mesh and and the other options available to them yeah i think mesh is probably the way to go for for most people so this is

multiple access points that all kind of work together. So things like Eero or the Netgear Orbi, those are two popular brands that, you know, it takes a little setup. Most of them, you know, I know Eero, I think Netgear as well. You manage them from a app on the phone, right? And it's pretty easy to set up. They kind of walk you through it.

And even their websites will give you an idea of, you know, how many like do I need a three pack or a two pack or whatever? And it extends that wireless out. And this is unlike, you know, if you back in the day you had like Wi-Fi extenders and they were pretty slow and kind of buggy like these systems work really well. It's come a long way. And I think you really can't go wrong with with either one.

Yeah, when I go into sales mode on this, I often will just go on there and do a speedtest.net run. They've got apps where you can just go to the website. And like, I went to a family member that had 15 megabytes down, you know, and I have 2000. And I said, yeah, I have 2000 and you have 15.

And you could have a lot more than 15, you know? And it's just, you know, and then the conversation starts. And you're right. It's not that problem you don't solve while you're digesting turkey, but you start a conversation. That's right. Maybe you go over there and set them up after they buy them. Yeah. But they're forever thankful for you because suddenly the movies show up and the work uploads happen faster and all that. Mm-hmm.

Yeah, it's an easy life improvement kind of thing. When you are shopping or recommending, Wi-Fi has gotten kind of complicated. There's Wi-Fi 6, 6E, and 7. They're kind of the three kind of current standards. They're basically trade-offs with speed and reach. I think for most people, Wi-Fi 6, or if they're feeling fancy and have the money, Wi-Fi 6E is

Probably the way to go. No one needs Wi-Fi 7 at this point. Like very few devices support it. And it is it is faster like Wi-Fi 7 on my phone and Wi-Fi 6 on my MacBook Pro. Like the 7 is faster, but it's not that much faster. And the expense goes way up.

And if you're talking about like a family member who's coming from like a Comcast box stuffed under their entertainment center, Wi-Fi 6 is going to be such an improvement. There's really no reason to spend a bunch more money unless you just want to. Yeah, you hit the hockey stick shows up when you start buying Wi-Fi equipment. And for the type of upgrade we're talking about, you don't need to get anywhere near that vertical jump. Yeah.

The other thing you want to do is in addition to running something like speed test is you may want to get a wifi sniffer app. They're out there and they're in the app store. We've talked about them on the show. I don't know which one I've got running right now and I'm not at my, my phone, but you can get a data on what the local wifi networks are. So you want to look for channel overlap. Like a lot of times if you're visiting somebody, it could just be a question of them being on the wrong channel.

And a lot of these systems will have like automatic channel detection where they can kind of have the sniffer built in and look for congested channels and work around them. But yeah, that's a, that's a great tip too. And I think these companies, Eero and Netgear and others who have these mesh networks, like they know they're being set up by kind of normal people. Like my Unify stuff is very complicated and I don't definitely don't understand all of it, but yeah,

Like these systems, you know, iPhone apps is set up right. Relatively easy. Let the auto configuration kind of take over. And this isn't as hard or as nerdy as it once was, which is, which is a good thing. Yeah. But I mean like the channel sniffer in an arrow, we'll figure out what channel to put you on, but you're a, you know, your, your local cable company router. Yeah. It's not going to do that. So, so you can help out there if you want.

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I want to talk a little bit about being proactive. So we've talked about some responsive things, right? Like, Oh, my iCloud is full. Oh, my wifi is bad. I can't print anything. But there are some things if your family members are in the Apple ecosystem that I think are worth having conversations about. And, and,

Maybe just where I am in my life, but a lot of these are around like having older family members and making sure that their data and their accounts are and they themselves as people are safe and secure. And one that came to mind instantly for me, but I'm not sure would come up for other people. So I wanted to share it was Find My. So I had a conversation with my dad about a year ago.

hey, I would really like to share our location on Find My. Not so, you know, I'm like creeping on you or you're creeping on me, but like, you know, he's in his late 60s. He goes hunting. He goes fishing. Like, if you disappear off in the woods one day, we would like to know where you are.

Um, and he lives by himself and like, you know, and so we talked about it and he and I share our locations on find my, and you know, it's also beneficial sometimes like, you know, Hey, we're gonna, we're getting ready to leave somewhere. Like, are you, you know, are you still on your way or whatever? But yeah,

For me, it's really given me peace of mind. My dad's out doing stuff that maybe he shouldn't be doing at his age, but at the very least, we know where he is. That conversation was easier than I expected, but I would imagine that in some...

that could be a difficult conversation. I think a lot of it has to do with like, hey, I'm not going to use this to keep tabs on you. This is a kind of emergency use only kind of thing. But I think it can be useful and can be a real safety feature. I mean, earlier in the iPhone days when getting a new iPhone was an event, I have a couple of friends. They're a married couple and they got new iPhones and I went over their house and set them up with them.

And I turned on Find My for each of them, you know, between each other, not with me. And I'm showing them everything. So I said, and I turned this thing on. So now you'll know when she leaves work or when he's, you know, whatever. And they're like, what? They both completely freaked out that they had the ability to see where the other person was. And they were both like, turn it off, turn it off. And I've always now I look at those two and I'm like, huh. Yeah. Yeah.

so be careful when you do that. I think Steven's approach was much better than mine where I just turned it on. But yeah, having that conversation, we have a lot of our family members to answer the question that we, we do that too. We, we share with a lot of intergenerationally and, um, and in addition to being in a safety thing, it's also just nice. Like, you know, when, like you said, when they're on the way to the house, you see, and, um,

And, you know, just it makes it easy when you're doing family gatherings and whatnot. But but there's a lot of benefits to it. But but the way you set it up, I thought it makes a lot of sense. Think about the conversation, how they might react and and try to make it work. Yeah.

Uh, I would throw in this bucket too, that, uh, air tags are perpetually on sale and, you know, having an older relative have having an air tag on their keys or in their car, even also useful. Um, they also make really nice stocking stuffers, like get a four pack of air tags and spread the love around, you know? Yeah. Yeah.

I have a fine for my dog, but it's a separate product. It's called the FiCaller. It's always on, and she's a flight risk. But yeah, there's ways you can do this that are not creepy. I have it with my kids who are adults now, but it's just always been the case. They're on the family plan, and I joke with them that, hey, I pay your phone bill. I need to know where you are. But it's not...

That way. I don't, I mean, I can't think of the last time I looked where they are, but if they didn't show up for something, if they, you know, if they went missing, I would want to know where they are. And, uh, and, and, you know, so long as you're not creepy about it, I think you can, you can make this work. I think an even more difficult conversation, but important one with older relatives is the legacy contact stuff, which is relatively new. And I'm sure a lot of them haven't hooked it up yet.

Yeah, so this is, if something happens to you, who can access your Apple account? And we think about the things that are in iCloud now, photos, notes, passwords, if they're using the Apple password system. It's important that someone else can get into those. And so this is something that I set up for myself, where my wife is my legacy contact, and she is mine, and my brother is also a legacy contact to my account. And yeah, it's awkward, like it's weird, but...

The reality is having older parents or relatives, iCloud legacy contact may be the least awkward conversation you need to have. And it's an important thing, and not just if someone is older. I really think this is worthwhile for anybody with an iCloud account. Sure. Yeah. My wife and kids are my legacies. But the...

But yeah, just turn it on. None of us are getting out of this alive. Make it easy for everybody. Exactly. Yeah. Same thing with, you know, like we use 1Password. I have like the 1Password recovery stuff printed in our lockbox. Like something happens to me and you need my stuff. Like this is how –

this is how you get into it. The other thing I did with 1Password is I put my 1Password in Daisy's 1Password vault and hers in mine, if that makes sense. Yeah. So we can get into each other's vaults and don't have to remember it. Yeah, that's good. Another thing that I think is less important than the legacy contact, but I think it's worth talking about because it's in the same kind of ballpark, is advanced data protection, where more content is...

and you can turn off access on iCloud.com. I'm actually not sure I'd recommend this for everybody because you do have to keep that encryption key. And if that is lost or the recovery key is lost, like then you're potentially in trouble. I have it on my account, but...

I think this is one where you need to kind of feel out where the other person is, but it is a good option, if anything, for yourself. Like if you're on top of this stuff and you haven't turned this on, I think it is a good feature, but maybe a bit much for everybody. Yeah, agreed. It's good for nerds and conspiracy theorists. Yeah, encryption is good. That's not what I'm saying. It's just a matter of the ease of use kind of thing I worry about with maybe an older user or a user who's not savvy. Totally agree.

It is a good thing though. Passwords, you know, you guys have heard the one password ads. I have sold my whole family on one password. Apple now has its own passwords app. If you've got people who don't want to spend money on it, you can get them on it for free now. It's just always good. We have more talking points later about phishing and whatnot, but you know, it doesn't hurt to have a conversation as the representative nerd about passwords and

why they're important and how bad passwords are so easily guessed. You know, they just released the annual update of, you know, passwords. I think the most common one was one, two, three, four, five, six, you know, password and like just the dumb passwords people use. And sadly at any family gathering, I'm sure at least one of my family members is using one of the ones off that list. Yeah. I think we all probably have folks who are doing it.

Yeah. Yeah.

It syncs them and you can show them how to, you know, make sure their passwords are different between their major accounts. Like I think that's the biggest thing. And again, we're talking about security stuff in a second, but my like top level priority when talking to somebody about passwords is, um,

The very top, your email password and your bank password should not be the same. Like, let's just start there. And email in particular is the way into almost everything on the internet, right? If they have your email, they can reset a password and those go to the email address on file and then it's over. And so email and bank accounts, good passwords, different passwords, like email,

Let's get that done. And then we get to talk about the other things because, you know, it's it's inevitable that passwords will be stolen. I actually had this come up about a month ago, had a family member call me and they got if you're in the US, you got one of these probably where I think it was AT&T had a major breach and like a bunch of data was stolen from it. I think I think it was AT&T, a cell company had a bunch of data stolen.

And they were obviously concerned about it. And they were like, you know, would something like a VPN protect me from this? I was like, well, no, like, you know, VPNs do very specific things. But when there was a breach like this, the data was stolen from that company's servers or database or whatever. Like it wasn't in flight. It was nothing you did wrong. They did something wrong or they were the ones who were attacked. And that's when a different password for everything happened.

really comes into play and for me like you know when that happens when i get those emails i got a letter in the mail the other day from an old health insurance company like our records were breached and your stuff was in it's like well you know it's a real bummer that someone has my name and date of birth and stuff but they're not going to do any damage to any of my other accounts because uh you know separate password for that and everything else and so the very least email accounts bank accounts good strong different passwords and then and then go from there

Yeah. I don't even think this episode is sponsored by one password, but one of the features they have that I really like is, is watch tower. I think it's worth mentioning where they keep an eye on the, um, the depositories of passwords. And so they'll check your list against known breaches. So you, cause sometimes the people you work with don't tell you when they've had a breach, which they're supposed to, but they don't always. Yeah.

We've already talked about photos. I think just convince them to pay for iCloud. I guess that's the one thing you have to do. I think that is the number one thing. I think anyone, we said it earlier, anyone looking at their iPhone objectively, that's the most important thing on it. And so iCloud Photo Library is so, so easy. It's all built in. It's super easy. There are other things like Google Photos is a good product. I like it.

But uploading from the iPhone in particular is dependent on the Google Photos app being open. It's not doing it in the background automatically. And if you're one of those people who force quit all their apps, it's not going to be running. And so if you're on an iPhone, iCloud Photo Library, I think, is the way to go. And then, of course, you can import to a Mac or PC every once in a while. But iCloud Photo Library is the answer, honestly.

There's another area I'd like to discuss that I think you need to bring up with family that people aren't keeping up with is just kind of the security and phishing threats to non-techies, which I think is getting and going to get much worse over the next few years. And I think people are really unaware of it. And I'll just tell a story. One of my family members,

Saw, you know, had a pop-up on her Mac about Microsoft, you know, says you need to update things. Of course, she didn't have any Microsoft software installed. She called a number, she gave them a credit card, she let them install software. I mean, she was completely owned by

And to this day, I have to argue with her about that. But like, she still thinks that they, it was Microsoft and they were helping her. And this lady's pretty old. So, you know, let's give her some grace, but that's exactly the kind of people that are getting preyed upon now. And the P it's not like the old days where you got an email, a phishing email and they spelled half the words wrong and everything was bad. A lot of these people have got very sophisticated and,

And I think, you know, people like listeners of this show probably aren't going to get caught in most of these traps, but for our family members, they're not aware of these things and they are getting caught. Yeah. It's, it's so, so common for someone to get an email or a text, literally yesterday. I'm looking at notion, look, preparing, you know, for the show, looking over the outline and,

And I get a text message that looks like it's from the post office saying, oh, you've got a package. Check this link to see what happened to it. It's like the link looks so bogus. Like it is not a USPS URL, but someone not paying attention or unaware would click it. And God only knows what happens at that link. If you click it, like what it wants from you.

Um, and in emails in particular too, like someone can make an email that looks a lot like an official PayPal email or an official Apple email. It's like, Oh, your iCloud space is out. Click this link. And it happens all the time. And, and people click the link or call the number and they give a password over or they give a credit card number over. And then it's, uh, it's all bad news from there.

Yeah. I mean, I, I got one this week. It looked believably from Apple saying, you just renewed your YouTube account at $300, you know, sign in here to make changes. Like, and someone looks at this and says, I didn't pay YouTube $300. I'm going to sign in and turn this off immediately. Well, as soon as you sign in, then you're cooked, you know, and this happens to people. Like I said, I think a lot of our listeners have heard enough of this that they know that

But I think there's a lot of people in your family that don't. And they're not even aware that this stuff is going on.

When I was a lawyer, there were various scams and lawyers would get trapped in it just because they didn't know. But once you knew about it, you could see the telltale signs of it, you know, urgency threats, spelling mistakes and grammar. That's, that still is a thing, but it's not always, you can't rely on it like you used to be able to. A lot of these people are getting, like I said, they set up whole centers. There's, you know, countries in the world that

that people create businesses that do nothing but try to scam people. And that's, they have a business plan and the employees get insurance and you know, the whole thing is designed to do this and they're very good at it. Oddball URLs is another obvious giveaway, but you can't count on any of that stuff anymore. Yeah.

And then it gets even worse from there because then you have like social engineering stuff people are doing. One of the scams was I had read, and this was being run out of a foreign prison where they would call you.

And they would scream like it was your kid being kidnapped. And they would say, and they'd say, give me, you know, send me this much PayPal or whatever. I'm going to kill him. And people would do it, you know, even though their kid was perfectly safe in school or whatever. Yeah. Because, you know, you hear your kid crying. Well, just think how bad that's going to get with the arrival of artificial intelligence where they can model your kid's voice. Yeah.

And you hear your kid on the phone, but it's not your kid. It's a computer model. You know, it's just like the IRS stuff is, I get that one all the time. Hey, this is the IRS. We're on the way to your house. We're going to arrest you. You didn't pay your taxes. You know, it's like, damn, you want to get triggered? Look at that. And it's like, there's a part of you like, what? I thought I paid my taxes. You know, people get caught in this stuff and it just, you know, forewarned is forearmed.

Yeah. And it's, you know, it's a matter of some of the simple stuff, right? Like having some awareness about URLs, right? That, oh, Apple is probably not using URL that or an email address that isn't apple.com.

PayPal is not texting me a link that has a bunch of letters and doesn't end in PayPal.com, right? Some of these are tricky, and it can be difficult to educate people. But there's also, I mean, it's like the simple sniff test, right? Like, does this seem right? Does this URL look like what it is supposed to? An easy way...

uh, to, to do this in mail in particular, if someone gets an email and it's a bit weird, go up to the sender and just look at the email address, right? Does it match? Does the domain name, the.com or.net, whatever at the end, does that match, uh, what it's supposed to be? And if it's from, if it looks like it's from Apple or PayPal, but it's from a Gmail account, like, uh, not, not what it's supposed to be.

Yeah. I give a couple of rules to my non-geek family. One of them is never call a phone number in an email. Like if, if you get an email and it says it's your bank and they want you to call them,

go on the internet and look up your bank's phone number and call it, call that number. Don't call the number they give you. Cause that's a common thing that happens. The other thing I tell them is nobody is ever going to text you or email you and ask for your account name and password. Like if, if they're asking for that, it is absolutely fraud. You know, you know, bank of America is not going to say, Hey, we need you to log in. It just, they don't do that. You know?

And then the third rule I tell them is if there's any question, call me, you know, I'll be your lifeline here, you know? And so, and I have a few family members that do that. Like you sounds like you have one too. And I don't mind that service is all at all. It's, it's my free service to my family and friends. Like you gotta, if something sounds fishy, let me know. Cause it probably is. Probably is. It's a, it really is that simple. Do you think that, um,

uh, people, you know, who are unaware of these things. Right. Um, do you think that step of like, Hey, if you have a question, call me, like, do you think that's hard for folks? Like I've gotten the sense before, cause I've said that to family members and like, I always try to, when they do ask, like thank them for asking me, like encourage them that they're doing the right thing. I don't want them to feel stupid. I don't want them to feel like,

oh, I don't know what's going on. And so I feel like if you're in that situation, like positive reinforcement goes a long way. Is that fair? You think? Yeah. And I also make myself dumber to them. I tell them like the YouTube thing, I'll tell them, oh yeah, I got this thing from YouTube and I was ready to call them. I was super mad. And I realized, oh, wait a second. Whereas, you know, I knew immediately what it was, but I want them to kind of go on the emotional journey with me

The other thing is I have told them some of the horror stories about the fake kidnapped kids and stuff just to give them an idea of the scope of the problem. There's just so much going on out there where people are just doing terrible things to other humans.

to make a few bucks. Yeah. And they're able to do it at scale because of the internet. And, and, and like I keep saying that the real penny to drop here is artificial intelligence and voice. You know, like if you're in the call center business, you should get out of it because the AI voice assistant stuff is so good now that that's just going to take over. Right. So what are those call centers going to do?

maybe they're just going to put it in a bunch of servers and just start dialing everybody and trying to like sound like their best friend and convince them to give them their bank account number, which wouldn't work on you and me. I mean, I don't even, you know, talk to strangers on the phone, but if you're 70 years old and you're lonely and you're sitting at home and this convincing a 70 year old lady calls you to tell you about some cookie recipe she saw on Facebook that you posted and how good it was,

and how she would like to copy the recipe. And by the way, I also am from where you are. And all of a sudden, you've got a new friend. And suddenly, and all of this is done by a computer, which is very adaptive. I mean, I just think it's going to get worse. And you can do that at scale. You can make a million of those calls a day if you have sufficient hardware. It's a profitable business to steal people's money. Mm-hmm.

And you're in another country, so it's going to be harder than heck to catch you. I don't know. I just think that we're at the tip of this iceberg. And it scares me. That's why I wanted to talk about it. I don't want you to freak out your relatives. But as I keep saying, let them know what's going on. Tell them that other people are getting caught with this. Don't want them to be that way. And let them know that you're a resource available to help them with this stuff. Yeah.

What do you think people should do if something goes wrong and they realize or you realize that their information or something has been stolen or if they're on like a PC or something and computer's been taken over? Well, you turn it off and unplug it. You know, I mean...

You know, it's such a silly thing. I used to have clients who are like, my best salesman just left and suddenly my customers are disappearing. And I would say, go to your server and disconnect it from the internet because there's a good chance that guy's in there right now. You know? I mean, but that's, you know, it's that simple at the beginning level, you know? Yeah.

Uh, get ahold of the bank and the credit card companies. They have fraud units. They're, they're all set up to do this. Um, I know there is a, um, there isn't the, uh, federal trade commission has a website called identity theft.gov. You can go, that's for us listeners, but, um, your country may have something similar.

uh, local law enforcement. Although I think that's less, you know, I just don't know that they do that much because it happened. It's happening at such scale, but the banks and credit card companies are very tuned into this stuff. A lot of times, especially if it's credit cards, you'll have some sort of insurance, but with bank fraud, if they get into your account, a lot of times there isn't a way to get that money back. Yeah. And, um,

It's scary. It is. I think our regular listeners are unlikely to get trapped in this stuff, but I think there's a lot of people out there that want, especially these robot voices that sound so convincing. If you don't believe me, download the ChatGPT app and start talking to it. Just

See how convincing it is. I forget it's a computer at some time. I was sitting here the other day talking to it about, you know, Socrates and it's like having a nice conversation with a person. It feels like it after a while. And, um, and there's a lot of lonely people out there with money in the bank. It's tough. And you know, the world shouldn't be this way, but it is. And so having people be prepared is the, is an important thing.

Yeah. And it's, it's a line, right? I, I really, I'm not sure if I'm getting it across, but I don't want you to go to Christmas dinner and freak everybody out. Right. That's not what you're supposed to do. But as the representative nerd in the family, you know, they're probably not getting this information and find a way to gently explain it to them.

And like I said, the three rules, I make a real simple, never call a phone number in an email. They can remember that, you know, nobody will ever ask you to log in. So that's a red flag and I'm here to help you. And like you said, help in a positive way. Don't say grandma, you're such an idiot. Don't, don't do that. You know, be loving and, and help protect these people. Happy holidays. I know. I know. Right. Where did I just go with this? I don't know. It's important. It's really important. Yeah.

Well. Okay. Well, on that note. I think we've done it. Yeah. I think we've done it. Family tech support. Yeah. Also, don't put peanut butter in the DVD player. Okay. It's never good. Glad we cleared that up. Yeah. Most importantly. Does anybody have DVD players anymore? I was getting ready to ask. All right. We're the Mac Power users. You can find us over at relay.fm slash MPU.

We don't try to scare the hell out of you in every episode, but apparently we did that today. Go to relay.fm slash MPU to learn more. Sign up for membership. Get that deal while you still can. Why not? Right? Sponsors this week, NetSuite and Squarespace. Thank you so much for your support and helping us keep the lights on. We'll see you next time.