The Mac Observer's Mac Geek Gab Enhanced

Quick Tips, Cool Stuff Found and LOTS of questions. Sleeping Mac? No problem. VIP Mail help? No problem. Building a home? No problem. Want to know about VPNs? Well, now… just kidding. No problem! Mac Geek Gab answers your questions and shares your tips so everyone can learn at least four new things each week!

Sometimes you have to get geeky. No worries, Dave and John will talk you through understanding what NAS and MDM mean and why you might want to use them. Don’t worry, fellow geeks, there’s stuff in here for you, too. After all, that’s how Mac Geek Gab rolls! Listen, enjoy, learn, and prosper at the same time!

SMC Resets, Migration Assistant tricks, Auto-Upgrade solutions and Renting vs. Owning your Cable Modem are just the beginning for your two favorite geeks today. S/MIME is taken to a whole other level with guest Jeff Butts who helps us all understand how to make this work on both macOS and iOS! Then it’s time to dive into your system certificates – and which ones you can touch vs. those that you can’t. Security is always on the mind and a quick VPN discussion rounds that out. Then John and Dave move on to something more pleasing to the ear: sound, and how best to manage it on your Mac!

Quick Tips about VPN, Sierra’s storage, Universal Clipboard, and Wi-Fi priority are just the start to the show. From there we talk about using Flash on your iPhone or iPad (it’s true!), portable VPN options, accessing a file server with iOS and much more. Download or just press play right here and enjoy. You’ll learn at least four new things, we guarantee it!

Security is on the brain this week! Learn how to secure your iCloud account and also learn how to secure your entire home network from your ISP’s prying eyes! Dave and John also help you determine what devices and processes are using your network, and what the difference is between WPA2 Personal and Enterprise. All of this and more in this week’s Mac Geek Gab. Press play and enjoy!

Have a webpage you use all the time? Why not make that its own, separate app? Need to create Symbolic Links (symlinks) but don’t want to use the Terminal? How about if you want to get an equipment warranty for that new Synology NAS you just bought? That’s just a sampling of the things you’ll learn in the first segment of this week’s episode. There’s more, folks. Lots more! Press play and enjoy!

Manage your 3rd-party external “Retina” display, use custom icons for each mounted volume, use private browsing to keep your various Google accounts from conflicting, and move your Dock to make better use of your screen real estate. Folks, that’s just the tips section of this week’s episode. Listen for much, much more!

Ever get the spinning beach ball at the top of your screen? John and Dave can help with that. After all, they come together each week to solve your Mac questions and problems. Other topics include selecting your sending address from Mail, controlling when iCloud Photos get sent to the cloud, deleting stubborn files, and more!

Spring is almost here for the northern hemisphere, and that means it’s almost lightning season. It’s time to talk UPSs and battery backups. Listen as John and Dave talk through all the permutations you’ll need to know to choose the right UPS for your setup. On top of that, a few things in Cool Stuff Found, solving mailbox syncing problems, and a deep discussion about how to rip movies and then to get them onto your iPhone or iPad!

Inexpensive quasi-mesh Wi-Fi, cloud management for your videos, changing your Finder icons and upgrading your Mac’s Wi-Fi to the latest standards are just how this show starts out! From there it’s on to answering your questions about monitoring iOS data usage, looking at PDF data – all of it! – and then your geeks dive into the Wi-Fi danger conspiracy! We promise you’ll learn at least four new things!

A little iOS Geek Gab segment starts the show, discussing batteries – both internal and out – as well as screen protection. Your geeks share their picks and, more importantly, how they pick. Then it’s on to some great tips from both your two favorite geeks and you, including managing RAM, converting Numbers to Excel (without Numbers!), upgrading your Mac mini and more. Press play and enjoy!

Cool Stuff Found kicks off this week’s show, with email clients, Wi-Fi Widget(s), combo iPhone/Watch chargers, disk utilities and much, much more. Then, after a few additional tips from you, dear listeners, it’s time for your questions. Topics this week include comparing local vs. Cloud storage for things like your music, videos and documents; memory interleaving and when to use it; solving corrupt user accounts that won’t login; and solving the issues with web pages that are slow to load. Press play and enjoy!

Have a website with multiple passwords and Safari always chooses the wrong one? Want a shopping list app to manage as a family? Photos showing greyed-out people? That’s just how this week’s Mac Geek Gab starts, folks. Then it’s on to Dave’s review of the new Synology RT2600ac standalone router, plus some related router questions for good measure. That’s not where it ends, though, because there are more questions and tips answered in here, as well. You’ll just have to listen to find out everything. After all, you must learn at least four new things each week, right? We’re here to help you do just that!

Cool Stuff Found today contains lots of things you suggested after listening to recent shows, including tools to help your Mac sleep, help you manage your keyboard shortcuts and macros, privately sync your notes, auto-file your Mail, and free backup storage! Then its on to sharing your tips and answering your questions. Want to learn how to factory reset your AirPods, enable band-steering on your router, or have Siri search Google instead of Bing? Let’s go!

Migrating Photos to a new Mac, managing and syncing your family’s photos, speeding up iOS Spotlight searches, fixing an unresponsive Digital Crown on your Apple Watch and resolving website loading delays are just some of the things you’ll learn from your two favorite geeks in this week’s show! Listen as Dave Hamilton and John F. Braun answer your questions and solve your problems.