 The Mac Observers' MacGygab Episode 878 for Monday, June 28th, 2021. Greetings, folks, and welcome to The Mac Observers' MacGygab, the show where you send in your questions, your tips, your cool stuff found. We take your questions, we answer them, we take your tips and your cool stuff found. We share them. We sometimes bring in some tips and cool stuff found of our own. The goal, really, if we zoom way out, the goal is that each of us. You, me, John, we all, every one of us, gets to learn at least five new things every week when we get together here. Sponsors for this episode include Other World Computing with their USB-C travel doc and Linode, where linode.com.mgg gets you 100 bucks in free credit for a server you want to set up. We'll talk more about those a little bit later. For now, here in Durham, New Hampshire, I'm Dave Hamilton. And here in Fairfield, Connecticut, this is John F. Braun. We got a lot to go through today, John F. Braun. We're, we've got some consulting things to talk about. We have, Synology's DSM7 is about to be released, depending on when you're listening to this. It might already be released. You definitely want to listen to the segment on the show about that before you click the install button. So we'll make sure to get through that. We've got some tech problems. I went to PEPCOM this week. We've got some cool stuff found from that. Um, but we'll start with some quick tips if that, uh, if that works for you, Mr. Braun. Absolutely. All right. Sweet. Uh, Joe starts us off with a quick tip about the iPhone. He says, I found something this week that is so obvious. I can't believe I didn't know about it in app listings, just like mail list of messages. You can slide left and get options like delete, et cetera. But if you slide all the way left, it becomes an auto delete. I've used it in mail and in podcasts so far. And you're right. Yeah. That is a cool one, Joe. Um, whatever, whatever slide action you have, if you go all the way with it, it, it commits to that action. It's, it's like sliding and tapping. Uh, so yeah, very cool. And that's the beauty of a quick tip. It's one of those things that's obvious to you when you know it and not a moment sooner. So yep. Good, right? Uh, yeah. All right. Cool. Moving on to Steve. Yes. Please. Okay. Uh, Steve says Apple pays credit card security comes from the randomization of your credit card number. The number it gives a retailer is totally different than your actual card and changes for each transaction. I'm not sure about the changing for each transaction changes for each device. I think that's incorrect. I think it changes on each device. We can talk about that. I recently had to do a return at a retailer without my receipt, but they were able to look up my transaction by checking the last four digits of my credit card. I didn't have that since I used Apple pay, but the service clerk was tech savvy enough to show me that Apple pay actually does assign a constant last four digits for your cards. And he agrees. He says every device makes its own unique card number and unique last four digits. To find this on the iOS, on iOS, open the wallet app, choose your credit card, click the three dots and then look at the device account number. Yep. And you'll get the last four digits for Apple watch. Use the watch app on the phone and click your credit card to see the same info or on the watch itself. You can open your wallet app and then touch your card, scroll down and get card information. So, yeah, this is, this is a, he either I misinterpreted what he was trying to say earlier or whatever. But yeah, it's, it's a constant, consistent number per device. And that means that your watch's number is different from your phone's credit card number. And we were thankfully taught this like four years ago when we went to Europe where their public transit system, the tube and the buses and all that stuff used, you could use Apple pay on it and you would get, which was out of the gate. That's awesome. So, traveling to a foreign country, not having to like negotiate with some machine to buy a pass to be able to just use the public transit was great. We just put our watch or our phone up and let us on. That's amazing. However, we were taught in advance that if you wanted to get the bulk discount, the more you use the lower your rates get, but it's tied to your credit card number and they said, so make sure watch, phone, both are different, even though it's tied to the same credit card in the end. So, yeah, it's pretty good though. Good tip. You've had some experience with this, John. Yeah. Yeah, I did use it in Manhattan once when they rolled out the transit feature. I used it for the the subway there. Yeah. And it worked. But yeah, like you, the concern was how do you get a discount? And they didn't have it. You were paying full price when they first rolled it out. Now, I think they have a plan where you can, you know, if you're a known user, you pay less because with the metro card would do that. So, you know, if you bought, you know, twenty five dollars, they would give you bonus dollars and they didn't offer that feature if you used your Apple pay. But I think they do now. That's good. Yeah, you want to encourage people to do that. I would think you would want to encourage people. So, yeah. All right, cool. Moving on, right? Moving on. Yeah. Cool. We'll move on to Randall, who asked a question. But accidentally shared a quick tip. And like I said earlier, quick tips are those kinds of things that are obvious to you the moment you learn them and not a moment before. Randall noted he asked if we knew of a command line trick to return the F five and F six keys on a MacBook to their prior function of. Controlling keyboard brightness, because on the new MacBooks, my M one air, and I believe the others as well, they repurposed those keys and you no longer have keyboard controls for keyboard brightness. I thought that meant there was no way to control keyboard brightness. Randall pointed out, he says, it's a pain to have to go to the control center and control keyboard brightness. And I thought, oh, my goodness, this is a quick tip because in control center, you can control your keyboard's brightness and and so obviously I now do that. What he was asking for is there a way to reassign those F five and F six keys? I have not found a way. I feel like there might be like a better touch tool or keyboard maestro path here. I did a little bit of digging and couldn't find it. But I was very happy to be able to use control center to adjust my keyboard brightness because it was like super. It was unlike, you know, retina burnout mode. And I, you know, it's like I love my M one air. I love it more now that it's not, you know, glowing so so much. So, yeah, anyway, thank you for that, Randall. And if anybody knows the answer to Randall's question, feedback at Mac, he kept calm. I think you're muted, Mr. Braun. Yeah, I was. All right, unmuted now. But you said feedback at Mac, he kept calm. I did say feedback at Mac, he kept calm. And I'm guessing you said it when you were muted as well. So this is good. Did you know about the control center for keyboard brightness, man? Um. Yeah, not for my computer, but. Several times I've had to use that on my phone. Typically, I'll like have it in my pocket and I guess it cranks up the brightness because it's like, oh, wow, it's really dark. Sure. And when I pull it out of my pocket, it's like, whoa, that's way too bright. So I go to the control center. Yeah. On the iPhone. But, um, yeah, I mean, I knew to go there for the screen brightness. I don't know, just never hit me to go there for keyboard brightness. So anyway. And of course, I got the touch bar, so I have the brightness. Right. I can understand. Right. Wanting to have. I want to be able to control it. That's all. Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. It's like, wait, how do I control this? Yeah. All right. Cool. Elliot points out and shares a tip with us that if you're using the new Monterey betas, they come with the new Safari that gets rid of the whole tab bar. We talked about this in the episode where we had Dave Mark on the show. And you can undo that change, at least in the current betas. And the fact that it exists probably means that it will persist. But, you know, there's no guarantee of future compatibility. So there's a there's a post over on GitHub where a user describes, you have to create a P list file is really what you do. And then and then you reboot and Safari reads that and you're good to go. I also want to point out if you want to test the new Safari, but do not want to commit to running the Monterey betas. You can run the Safari technology preview on your, you know, big Sur based Mac and you get the new Safari complete with its lack of a tab bar and tab groups and, you know, it's lack of a tab bar inclusion of tab groups. I should say to be more grammatically clear. But but yeah, that's out there. And so that's, you know, freely available from Apple. We'll put a link to that. In the show notes, because that it's fun to be able to run that and test things. It's also nice to have like another copy of Safari on your Mac. Most of the time it looks very similar right now, because we're in this, you know, transition to a new flavor of Safari. It doesn't look similar at all, but you get a feel for it, which is cool. So yeah, I mean, in my Twitter feed, I've I've seen more negative comments than positive comments about Safari on both. Uh, the new iOS and the new Mac OS, you know, that's interesting. I kind of like it. I haven't been using the new iOS a lot, but I've used it a little bit. I have it on my iPhone 10R. That's our spare family iPhone here. And again, it runs extremely well on that. I'm putting, in fact, beta two is being installed on it as we just as we chat here, but I've, you know, it's from running beta one really stable, really fast. The Safari thing is interesting. I actually kind of like the way it gives you more screen real estate. It's a little weird getting used to the, the, like a dress bar floating at the bottom some of the time, but I think I can get used to that. Um, the new stuff in Safari on Monterey, I don't know. I, you know, I mean, a lot of times when, you know, certainly for me, but we're humans, it's the way it goes, like change resistance rears its ugly head, you know, in a very, very material way, right out of the gate. And so it's like, oh, different, bad, bad, bad, run, run. But, you know, then you give it about two weeks and your brain adapts and you're like, Oh, this, I don't change it. This is normal for me now. And, uh, I don't know how I feel about that in the new Safari John on, on desktop, I think it's, it's a weird paradigm. I don't know that two weeks is going to be enough to get used to it. I could be wrong. I mean, I've been wrong many times before. Remember, I didn't like the iPod when it came out. I thought it was a stupid idea. So, you know, maybe I'm not the best judge of these things. But, um, I don't know. Yeah, I don't know. What I don't like, so just to me in general, um, sudden UI UX changes to something that you're comfortable with are bad. And Apple tends to pull this more off. Yeah. You know, like in mail, you got classic, you know, there's a checkbox, classic view, it's like, okay, cause I like the classic view. So let me do it. And same thing in, in Safari, they should have a checkbox saying, I, I want the old tab style versus the new tab style. Yeah. In my humble opinion. Good point. Well, the fact that this, um, Peelorist exists me, maybe is, it opens the door for that possibility, for that checkbox to, to be available somewhere. Right. Uh, cause that, I, yeah. I think, I think this is too radical a change for many people to just like swallow on day one. I don't know. I don't know. I guess, I mean, I'm definitely, I fall into the realm of power user, right? So I have my tab bar set up. I live and die by my tab bar. There's very few sites that I visit with any regularity that aren't there in my tab bar and to just have that gone. It felt like you just took away all of the power of Safari for me. Like now I might as well use any other browser because I've got to go and type in the name of the site I want to visit. Like that, that's how I felt when I launched it. It was like, Oh, this is not, this is not my customized thing anymore. This is your thing. And so they need to find a way to migrate people to that. Perhaps that's the, that's the biggest issue is there is no, Hey, welcome to the new thing here. We took all the stuff that you had and we put it somewhere else. Try it this way. You know, there's none of that. It's just you're done. So, I don't know, we could ramble on this for a long time. Have you installed the the STP, the technology preview yet? It's worth it. I mean, it's, you know, it doesn't, it doesn't break anything. You can not launch it, obviously. So, all right, one last thing and then we'll then we'll talk about our sponsors and then we'll talk about Synology DSM. But one last thing here on the quick tip front from listener Jim. That's kind of related to the new stuff that's coming. He says, of course, the new version of mail in the new operating systems will block all those tracking pistol pixels as you guys discussed discussed. However, as you know, tracking pixels depend on your download of the pixel or the image, which is included in the HTML download associated with some email. You may be able to avoid those tracking pixels in the current version of mail by changing your mail settings to download only text, not HTML content, within Apple Mail preferences, viewing, uncheck the load remote content in messages box. While this makes some messages look ugly, you can always opt to download the HTML content while viewing an individual message by clicking the load remote content button in the upper right corner while it's displayed on the screen. So this way you can kind of be safe from those tracking pixels. That's a really good point. Yeah, you're right. It makes mail look ugly. So, you know, Apple's solution is probably certainly a more elegant thing for the masses, right? But but thank you, Jim. That's a great that's a great tip for sure. Any thoughts on that one, Mr. Braun? Yeah, I knew about that. Yeah, of course. Yeah, but it makes it ugly. Mm hmm. Yeah, so hopefully they won't be like loading these things into spam messages. Like if it if a message files into your junk folder, hopefully Apple won't just be automatically loading all that stuff. I'm curious to see how that works. Maybe I need to, huh, because we use we use MailChimp, you know, for our if you go to Mackeycap.com and sign up for our weekly email of all the show notes of each episode that we could. I mean, MailChimp does. Actually, I should say this full disclosure. MailChimp does track whether you click links and we can know whether you click links. We don't really do anything with that data. I mean, I've looked at it because it, you know, it's fascinating to just see. Oh, are people using these? Yes, great. Awesome. Like that's basically what it what we use it for is being able to see like we looked at it, you know, out of the gate. Like are people even clicking the the links in the show notes towards the bottom? Absolutely. If there's something of interest, y'all are clicking on it. And it was like, great. OK, that's all we, you know, that's good to know. It's helpful. It could get creepier than that. And that's obviously where. Well, that's where there's problems, right? Like, you know, you have to be responsible with this data. And we, not we here at Makika, but we humans in general have proven that we are not capable of being generally responsible with that kind of data. So I'm glad Apple's doing what Apple's doing, even though it's probably going to mess things up for for those types of metrics. But but yeah, it it's. You know, it's it I like what it where Apple's going with this because it just obscures it. So anyway. Cool. All right. Let's talk about our sponsors. And then we'll talk about Synology DSM7. If that works for you, Mr. Braun. Fantastic. All right. 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Create your free account and get a hundred dollars in credit to use. If it runs on Linux, it runs on Linode. Our thanks to Linode for sponsoring this episode. All right, John, I I spent some time far more time than I cared to yesterday with my disk station. Synology has announced that DSM seven, which is the next version of their operating system for their distations is finally out of its long testing cycle and will be released on Tuesday. So again, depending on when you're listening to this, it might already be out. It might not be their release candidate is out, though. And I figured, OK, well, release candidate, I'm good to go. Usually I install the beta on one of my sort of alternate distations here. I've been busy, so I didn't do that this time. But I did install the release candidate on on sort of my my alternate distation that went fairly well. And then I installed it on my main one. And that's when things kind of went sideways. It works like it. First of all, please listen to this segment. But my advice is if you are using any third party packages, wait, do not install this station seven yet DSM seven. It. It changes a lot of things under the hood with how packages can be installed. Most of this from a security standpoint, I think, John, I like I based on the the the knowledge that I didn't want to have to glean yesterday. That's where I sort of landed with it, is that, you know, permissions and things like that. We saw some of that with DSM six, where they they limited what what packages could do and how packages needed to to act. That got a lot stricter, it seems, with DSM seven. And if you look at the Plex threads on this Plex, it's pretty obvious that Plex's engineers are frustrated AF by the moving target of this. They like I had no idea. I just assumed that because it was released candidate, they were ready for it to be released, you know, I understand that there's going to be some things that aren't quite right out of the gate. But like as of three weeks ago, things were still changing. And maybe even like and there was some indication, according to Plex from Synology, that things were going to continue to be changing and that's not good with one of your most popular, you know, third but kind of first party packages like Plex is is, you know, one of the sort of default third party packages that's included. And like it would not work for me. I had to go through a huge monstrous exercise to get my distations, permissions. Like it uses ACLs in a weird way. And some shares can have their ACLs customized. ACLs being access control lists, you know, like Windows server permissions. Some can have their ACLs customized in the interface, like, you know, in the GUI and some cannot. And for whatever reason, my Plex share is not one of the blessed ones. And so, yeah. So I had to learn all about how to use Sino ACL control and do it all from the command line and try and beat my head against the wall and then try more. And I finally got it running with help from the Plex team. And all of this is available publicly. The conversation I have with them was all public on the on their forums. I'll link to that so that you can if you run into any of these problems, you can benefit from it. But and then most of I would say most of my other third party packages didn't work either. So it's been a bit of a chore, my friend. But it. But it is good. Like the things that that. So that's the bad. That's the warning. Danger, Will Robinson. What I what I do see, though, so I'm looking at a summary here of the features released on the summary. But they mentioned that I guess the good news is that they claim now that you can see how much data each package is using. So they've enhanced something in the package management. Yeah, they claim. Yeah, no, you're absolutely right. They've enhanced a ton. And that's the thing is is like even just the core components of DSM, like the storage manager is so much easier. Now you actually get a picture of your your your thing, you know, your your distation and you can see what drives are where it like they've increased the efficiency of the way like SSD caching works. They've added a lot of cloud management stuff, John. They've added this thing called Active Insight, which is you log into your Synology Cloud at Synology.com. And it can tell you like what's going on. You have to opt into this, of course. But once you do, it shows you all of your distations and it can, you know, report on on things for you. You can back up your configuration to send to your account on Synology's cloud. So if there's ever a problem, you can come back down. Synology photos, of course, I can't get it to work for whatever reason. It won't migrate my data in because the indexing the media indexer isn't running properly for me yet. So, you know, don't know why trying to dig into that, too. But Synology photos looks like perhaps finally the right step in the evolution that was photo station and then moments. And it seems like now they've sort of combined them into photos. Obviously, I haven't tested yet, but I'm excited about that. Synology Office, which has been awesome anyway, is now like, you know, it sees a pretty big upgrade as does Synology Drive, which is sort of the engine underneath Synology Office, but also the syncing engine that we use, like, you know, like a Dropbox kind of thing. You can see so much more about from the management side, it's a whole lot more flexible. So there's there's a lot. I'm probably missing stuff, too. You know, it's like they put a lot into this. But the third party package thing got. But was there anything else on the on the like the pros side, the good side that you noticed, John, I feel like I'm missing something here. No, again, I think you could, you know, so the storage manager gives you a lot more. So, you know, they increase the performance of certain raid and cashing, things like that. But also, yeah, like like you said, they give you with active insight. They give you a bigger picture. Another thing, which I think, yeah, they already launched it. Maybe they enhanced it, but, you know, they're they're also trying to promote this concept of a hybrid cloud in that they enable this or they make it easier for you to split your storage between your Synology and their cloud service, which is nice, you know, so you're you're. So it's you kind of have redundancy in that your data is in more than one place. And yeah. And as I haven't messed with hybrid cloud yet, you're right. That is maybe you were able to do it before, but certainly not at this level that DSM seven opens. But what's nice is you can have, you know, all of your data in the cloud and only sink down to your disk station. The things that you locally use regularly, but you have access to it all and you can slip it down. So if you and I, you know, we're in different locations, we each have disk stations, you know, if you're working on one project and I'm working on another, we're both saving it to the to our share, but I can choose not to download your project locally if it's going to take up a lot of storage or you're making a lot of changes to it. And I don't want to use all that bandwidth or whatever. But then when I want it, I can just go slip it down. It's like it's it's like you said, it's the best of both worlds. Like, yeah, I like that. Um, I as far as third party packages go, John, I am now all in on Docker. I moved, I think four packages from being the Sinnoh community, which is like the unofficial official repository for third party packages on on Synology. That's really where you're going to go get those from. Those are what are not up to date yet for most of them. I'll put a link out. They are tracking, which are fully capable of running on DSM seven and which are not yet fully capable. And then there's some that they say will never be. But that's very that's a small number. Most of them are still just being worked on. But, you know, Docker, Synology Docker has come a long way on Synology and what Docker is for those of you that that either don't know or haven't used it in a while. Essentially what Docker lets you do is it's kind of like creating a virtual machine. In fact, it is creating a virtual machine. It's a little, it's like a lightweight virtual machine. You're not going to log into the, like the graphical interface of it or anything like you would if you ran, say parallels or VMware, you know, fusion on your Mac or whatever, but it runs inside a virtual machine, inside a container. And what's nice about that is when you change the operating system, like say DSM six to DSM seven, well, the thing inside your container of Docker is still just Docker. And so it all just works. And Synology's made it that the user interface for Docker has gotten so much easier. I moved four packages over to Docker last night in less than a half hour, all four total, like probably closer to 20 minutes. It was about five minutes each. It was, you know, download the container. And while the container was downloading, the container being sort of the pre-built virtual machine for whatever service you're going to use, I definitely should have done this with Plex. Like that would have saved my afternoon yesterday. I didn't, I wasn't that smart. But I did do it with like ZNC, which is the thing that I used to connect to our IRC server for the chat at live.mackeygub.com. That Synology, Syno Community package, nope, doesn't work. But I moved, you know, I downloaded the container that has ZNC and all that stuff. And while I was doing that, I moved the data from where the app, the Synology App Store stores it, which is in slash volume one slash app store slash name of the app. So ZNC, I moved that data over to or copied, I should say that data over to a folder that I put in slash Docker. So I made slash Docker slash ZNC, I copied that data over. Then once the container was downloaded, I went through and I point, you just, there's basically like three things that you need to do when you're setting up a Docker container. You know, you say launch, it asks you what folders do you want me to use? And you can find, you can always find some guide online that tells you, okay, well, like for ZNC, the name of the folder needs to be slash config. I'm making that up. I could have that wrong. I don't have it in front of me, but you know, whatever. And then I say, okay, so inside the container when it looks for slash config, where is that data actually stored? Well, that data is stored at, you know, slash Docker slash ZNC. That's the file I can touch from the outside of the Docker container, right? So you're pointing inside to outside. Great. Put it there. It's slurped in my configuration. All good. Then you tell it what network ports. It's like port forwarding on your router. And I say, okay, you know, if I use port 8251 for ZNC, I want to point 8251 on my disk station to 8251 inside this Docker container. And then sometimes there's an environment variable to set up, like if you want to set like time zone or whatever. But that's really it. So it's mostly two things, I think that you, you know, you configure and then the Docker just runs. It's like, okay, great. And now I don't have to worry about it. So highly recommend before you move to DSM seven. Move all of your third party packages into Docker containers. And then your migration will be smooth or maybe not fully smooth. I don't know. Do you use Docker a bunch, John? My last experience wasn't very positive because, you know, you had to, I couldn't just take a Docker package and run it. That was my expectation is, you know, I double click on it and then it runs and when I tried it, you know, it didn't work because I didn't know the special incantation that was required for, I guess, the command line. Yeah, you'd point it out. You shouldn't have to use the command line at all now. All the things I just mentioned are doable in the Synology Docker graphical interface. And you're right. Excellent. Previously they weren't, especially the networking stuff. If you wanted to do like a bridge network or whatever, which is essentially what you want to do with everything and then just port forward, none of that was doable in the graphic interface. You had to go to the command line and then it was like, you know, you never remember what you did or, you know, whatever. So, but that's all fixed now. Like, and that's been fixed for a little while, not too terribly long, but like maybe DSM six, maybe, maybe later in DSM six, they fixed that, but it's, it's great now. Like I said, I moved everything in and I'm going to check and make sure that all my Docker containers are running. But yeah, I've got one, two, three, four, five, six, seven up and running, one of them is Watchtower, which keeps my Docker instances up to date. So, but, but yeah, it's, it's, it's so much better. And if I'm in the chat room at live.mackeycup.com, which it appears I am, then my ZNC Docker is working on DSM seven. So I'm stoked. Anyway, yeah, be, if you're going to make this leap, be prepared for perhaps like a package to not work for a while. You know, it, it got to the point. I expected it to be like, OK, you've got to update these packages and okay, fine, you know, whatever. I did not expect it to just say, oh yeah, no, fail. Not going to do it. You know, that was when I was like, oh crap. And I was shocked that Plex was one of those ZNC. That's sort of a weird thing. How many people connect to an IRC and need to do it through a relay or want to do it through a relay? That's a little weird, right? But, but Plex ain't weird, folks, that it should not be the problem that it is. The big issue is they had to move where they're storing the Plex metadata library, which used to be in a share called Plex, and that's where it is on DSM six, it needs to move into the package home because of sandboxing and being able to move that requires lots of permissions that it might not otherwise have. So anyway, it that that's the underlying issue. And they've been trying to solve it, but it's been like a cat and mouse game by reading the forum since December and spend like, OK, we got it working. It's like broke again. So anyway. Ah, yeah, let's see, some enhanced security stuff as well. I think they I see that listed as a new feature. I even have now the security adviser keeps yelling at me that my admin account is admin. Yeah, and I should change that. Yeah. But I see also that they have stuff here as far as like password policy, they they make that a little tougher, which is good, I guess it is good. And you can you can tweak that stuff, of course, but they've also got a more robust two factor authentication method that you can use one of their apps with. And so, you know, it's it's good. I mean, we use it a lot for, you know, business stuff with with some of the businesses that I have. So I mean, it, you know, it's it's not like it's a it's a real platform. It's not just, you know, a thing to play with, although it's fun to play with. Don't get me wrong. But you know, we rely on this for a few of the companies. And so I'm a little bum that Synology Photos isn't working for me. I think that's a me problem. But, you know, the migration should work, whatever that means. So I don't know. All right. Are we ready to move on from this? Sure. OK. Hey, in the chat room, before we get into some questions here, in the chat room pre show, we were having a discussion about consulting because there's a lot of folks that listen to this show, a lot of you who are consultants and a lot of you are, you know, what I call, you know, what I do and used to do a lot more is lone wolf consultants, right? Whereas it's just you solopreneur out there doing your thing. And the question that I want to ask and want to talk about is how do you do your invoicing? Because for many lone wolves out there, not just computer consultants, but contractors, you know, building contractors and plumbers and electricians and all that stuff. The invoicing is where many businesses break down in that most people get into business to do the thing that they're doing and not to be a professional invoicer. And so a lot of people don't. And then you don't have money to pay your bills. And that's a bad thing. You have customers willing to pay you. But so I'm curious how everybody does their invoicing. I am. I used to do mine, John. Eventually I moved to QuickBooks because I use QuickBooks for a lot of things, but I did mine with a series of numbers spreadsheets that I had just in a folder and had a folder structure and one was like, you know, pending. And once somebody paid it, I would move that numbers spreadsheet into the paid folder or I might move it into the collections folder if somebody was, you know, being problematic or something about that. So you you did some of this. How did you track your invoices? Uh, spreadsheet. Well, did you use like one spreadsheet to track them all? Or did you use just like, oh, OK, because my numbers thing was was like literally like a template that I used that was invoices. I didn't have a master like list of, you know, in any one place. But I don't know. It worked like the trick is remembering to get people to pay. Really, the trick is, I think, get people to pay before you leave their home or office at the time of the visit. Yes, I had one client many years ago that didn't pay me. Yeah. And it's like, what do you do then? You know, it was a couple hundred bucks. Of work, but but still, I, you know, sent an invoice and they never, you know, sent me the money. And, you know, eventually I called and I'm like, what's up? They're like, oh, yeah. But what you did is the thing that you set up doesn't work anymore. And I'm like, hey, it was it was setting up a remote access form. And, you know, I stepped them through it. You know, I think it was using it. Fantastic. And, you know, I set it up, you know, between two computers. And I demonstrated to the customer. I'm like, OK, here's how you do the remote access. Let's let's go through it. And he was like, OK, yeah, sure, I get it. Yeah. And then. And then they somebody screwed something up and he was like, well, it's not working anymore. It's like, hey, it was, you know, I mean, I stepped you through it. You know, before I left to make sure that, you know, the problem that you had was I solved it for you. Right. Right. And of course, what do you do in that case when somebody doesn't pay you? You know, and I was just like, yeah, I'll, you know, I mean, you can go to small claims court, you know, if it's, you know, a certain amount of money. But. Yeah, lawsuits, a friend of mine said to me a long time ago and I have proven this to myself over the years that lawsuits are like spiders in that they get into every aspect of your life. You know, even if you're a master compartmentalizer, it's still like they they wind up because they, you know, they become these things that you, you know, suddenly have to focus on. And it, you know, in like in your scenario, I think you made the right call to just move on. You know, the way I look at it is, OK, I'm not going to get this money out of this person by being a computer consultant, right? Like I tried that, they're not going to pay me. Fine. And sometimes that like that can help. Like if you say, OK, look, I'm willing to come back out. But, you know, we got to work with each other. If this work, if this turns out to be something that's outside of my control, I need you to pay for like the original call and the new call because I'm helping you solve a new problem. And if you can work that in, then you can make money by being a computer consultant in this scenario. But if you, you know, if you exhaust those opportunities and you realize, OK, it's this outside of my scope as a computer consultant, I am not capable of getting that money out of these people. Then you become a professional, you know, filer of lawsuits. And can you make money that way? And that's fine. But you need to sort of like I asked myself that question so that I can frame where do I want to spend my time? Because if the time I'm spending on the lawsuit trying to get, you know, blood from that particular stone of an unhappy client, is that really what I'm into this for? Or do I just want to go like work for clients that are happy to have me work with them and get money that way? Like, you know, when you're trading your time for dollars, you you have to stop and look at, OK, where am I going to spend my time? Yes, don't get me wrong. I am like a grand seeker of justice in life. And it has cost me dearly. I've occasionally won with seeking justice, as I'm sure we all have. But by and large, it's often a fool's errand. So I think you made the right decision to move on from that particular client, my friend. So, yeah. And yeah. But I think the policy is, you know, pay me now. Is good. I remember you had referred me to to someone that needed some tutoring and they paid me on the spot. It's like, OK, it's this much money and they, you know, wrote me a check. Yeah, which didn't bounce. And right. Well, these are the old days. And now you can avoid checks, right? You can use Stripe and take credit cards. You can use PayPal and take credit cards on the spot or PayPal. You know, in general, you can use Venmo. You can use Zells, E-L-L-E, like there's a lot of solutions. I had a funny job. I had a plumber at the house yesterday. We had a very minor problem with our well, but I'm super happy to have a person that like I can now call for when our well pump dies because it we realized, well, well, it's going to happen. We realized I asked him how long well pumps last. They said, well, you know, it depends. He said usually about 15 years, but he says I see him go anywhere between three and 45 years. He's like those old ones tend to like be really strong in the last while. And through them working on it, they realized our pump was installed in 1982. So it's going to happen. But now I know how to call who to call and what how it works and all that stuff, which is great. And but anyway, when I had to pay him for the job yesterday, it was, you know, over a grand or something. So I was like, you know, can I put in a credit card? And they're like, yeah, no problem. And I said, great, you want the card because if so, I have to go get my wallet. Otherwise, I have the number of my phone. He's like, no, we're going to do it old school. I'm just going to type in the number. But of course, he was typing in his number into in my number into the app on his phone that was going to charge me. So it's like the most new school version of old school that you could possibly come up with, because I had my iPhone out reading him the number from my one password database and he had his phone out with the Stripe app, typing the number in. It's like, wow, there could be a better way. He probably could have sent me a link, honestly, where I could have paid on my phone, but it didn't matter. So and then there's always cash, you know, I would always laugh. No, when I was doing consulting, like I would have people ask me, do you take cash? It's like, yeah, I take cash. Absolutely, I take cash. What a weird. I always thought it was a weird question. Like, do you take cash? Of course I take cash. Yeah, no problem. I haven't used it in ages. I said. Fiddle with it and see if it still works. But a square is another nice one. I actually see. Yep, a lot of small businesses here, like various festivals that we have. Square is good. I don't have the updated reader. I just have the bag stripe one. Sure, that's right. You can get a for like 10 bucks or something. You can get a chip reader from from them. Yep. Or NFC, I think. I think it'll do both. I think it does a chip and NFC. That's right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, right, because then you can do Apple Pay with it. Yeah, that one might be more than 10 bucks. I haven't looked into it. But you're absolutely right. No, square is another great option. Brian in the chat room asked about, you know, toward sort of pre pay discussion. Do you guarantee or warranty your work as a consultant? And I would say when I when I was doing it, I wouldn't I did not have a policy of any sort of guarantee when we were doing it with computer nerds. We really also didn't there. It was more of a we guarantee that you know what we did while we were here. And that that was a another part of it. We really worked hard and I worked really hard to make sure that people aren't hiring me to solve a problem because I can't guarantee before I know what your issues are that I that it is a solvable problem by me, right? Like, if there's a hardware issue in your computer and you hire me to diagnose that for you, that's valuable, but it's not your solution, right? And so I found that being very like over communicative was a valuable thing. Every, you know, if the client was right there, I would tell him what I was doing all the time. If they were leaving me alone with their computer, I would check in once every, you know, 20 minutes or so and just be like, Hey, just wanted to let you know, I've got the thing restarting right now. So I wanted to check in with you. Here's what I've done. Here's what I'm thinking of doing next. If it was appropriate, I would ask them, you know, does that sound good to you? Or if there was a fork in the road that we had to take, I would explain the two sides of the fork. I would explain which one I would take if it were my computer and then let them choose, right? So that they're engaged, involved in the process when you get to the end and you say, OK, now we know really what's wrong. And there is no answer. Pay me. They still pay you. Yeah, so. Yeah, I'm looking in the chat room here. Kiwi Graham, who's a consultant down in Australia, says, do not work on the basis of a fixed fee for a fix. Yeah, that's that's that's good advice. I like it. I don't know. What else did you did you ever do any guarantees for your work or anything, John? I would make sure that whatever I mean, I would go through with the customer. I'd be like, OK, here's here's your problem. You know, here's the solution. Let's let's step through it and make sure that I solved your problem. And I would get them to agree. Like, you know, in this one case, you know, I step the guy through it and I'm like, you know, is the road axis working? And he's like, yeah, I'm like, OK, great. And he broke it. And then yeah. And then you left like of all the people on the planet that broke it, it wasn't you like it might not have been the the person that hired you, but it definitely wasn't you. It was it was working when I left. No, that's really smart. I I would always in and we trained our our nerds at computer nerds this way, too, is like before you leave, you get out of the chair and sit the client down and make them do it so that they have so that the two of you have a visceral memory of them using the thing that you set up or fixed or whatever. Yeah, that's really smart. Yeah, the guy ever pay you John or no. No. OK. I am I I never use this with a consultant client, but I we have these other people that like bought some like self-serve ads from us, the backbeat and sometimes they don't pay. And I use it as an opportunity to like blow off steam in a really snarky way. I want to. So one of the things I like to send them via email. Now, this is when they're like six months past due. They've stopped replying to me is I say to them in the email. I even have this as a text expander snippet. I was thinking about the shame you must be feeling of this past due invoice, you know, and then I go on. Wouldn't you like to rid yourself of these horrible feelings? All you have to do is pay us. Here's a link, you know, to pay us for your paypal. But yeah, I was thinking about your shame. That's so you're free to use that, folks, if if you're in a scenario where you feel that's appropriate. I wouldn't use that for the first collections call, by the way. You know, this is when the bridge is already on fire. All right. Shall we move on to some tips and questions, John? Sure. All right. You want to take us to Craig? Let's go to Craig. So Craig says in 877 reminded me to send a possible diagnosis and a fix for a problem that John mentioned where his mother's camera would not auto import photos taken. Several years ago, I had needed to stop my camera from always trying to import photos upon connection to my Mac. This was back in the iTunes days. But I think this still applies and it would be controlled by a setting somewhere in photos or in the finder associated with the device. My theory is that the setting has been unchecked for this device. OK. Any links to an article that shows you and I went through the steps here and it still works. So I used my camera and so this is still true on Big Sur, this setting. So I have an icon, Coolpix S9700. And so I plugged it into the USB on my computer. Normally, I insert my SD card, but I wanted to try this to see if the setting was still there. And in fact is. So the good news is when I plugged in the camera, hardware growlers said, oh, OK, yeah, I see it. It's an icon DSC Coolpix S97 dash PTP. I'm like, oh, that's interesting. What is PTP? Picture transfer protocol. It's basically a driverless way of you to access the goodies in your device. And then even in the current version of photos, what happens is you will see your device in the devices column. So in this case, you know, I would click on it. And when you click on it, you then get a setting here or a checkbox. You see a checkbox. And in my case, and I think in my mother's case, we'll find out. There's a checkbox that says open photos for this device. Oh, right. I've turned that off in the past when I've had something where I'm like, please don't open photos every time I plug in this device, you know. But yeah, right. So I'm wondering if that may be the issue. So we'll I'll have to send the article off. Yeah. Yeah. But I mean, she's getting by using the, you know, just putting the SD card in. It was just, yeah, upgrading her environment to Big Sur broke something in photos. Because interesting. Yeah. Yeah. Huh. Cool. Well, I'm curious if that works for your mom. That's that's interesting. I'm also curious what your plans are for hardware growler starting in Monterey, because I'm pretty sure hardware growler is no longer, right? Oh, that's a. I mean, I think they said they stopped development on it, but. No, they made it pretty clear. I seem to remember them saying like, no, it's it's over. Yeah. Let me try to look here. Growler, hardware growler mentioned on Mac Geek up 818. Let's see. Do we have a link to hardware growler? I can't even like search for a link for it anymore. Um, there it is. So hardware growler connecting to the Mac app store app, not available. Yeah, they they I remember them emailing us or something and saying it like apples made this too difficult to continue with. So and I think Big Sur is is kind of the end of that. So yeah, there is I did find an article while I was searching for the link to hardware growler that and this is from like four years ago where people started talking about other things to replace it. But I'm not sure there is another thing. So yeah, I think the hardware growlers days are are numbered, unfortunately. So we'll put a link to that that Stack Overflow or ask different exchange out there. So all right, while we're on the subject of photos, do you want to take us to Ronald? I will take us to Ronald. So this is more a geek challenge, I guess. But Ronald has a comment here after all of the Apple updates for the Mac. Adults still can't export a JPEG photo from Mac photos and retain keyword metadata. So this is like a fish shake, I guess. Oh, and sure enough, I I never really use keywords, but. Yeah, I tried applying a few keywords to a photo, exported it. And when I imported it, no, the keywords were gone. So I. But if you export as a PNG, they're there, right? I seem to remember someone saying I did. There are two export options in photos. Yeah, one one exports it as a JPEG. And the other for me would export it as a PNG, but neither one of those when I re-imported them had the keyword filled in so. OK, did you look at them with with like an X if you were a graphic converter or something just to see if it was the import engine that was causing this or the export engine? You know what I mean? Yeah, I'll double check that. OK, I think you're I think you're right that it is the the like it's not in the export. I just was curious. I for some reason, I had it in my head that a PNG would do this, but I don't know why I had that in my head. But I thought exporting as a PNG would solve that problem. And maybe it used to. Maybe it doesn't anymore. Let us know feedback at kicab.com. Would love to hear from you. All right, we have. Oh, yeah, follow up another follow up from the last episode. John, we were talking about we had the listener who had a web page that was appearing at a different size than expected. If you go into Safari preferences, websites, page zoom, listener Jerry points out that this setting allows you to set a default zoom for a specific web page or website. The key is that it only shows settings for the currently displayed pages. So whatever you have open in your tabs, those are the only things that it says will show up that he says will show up there. So you need to navigate to the web page in in question initially and then change that to to be, you know, 100 percent. If you 100 percent is the norm. So whatever you want, that's where you're going to find it. So yeah, thank you for that. That's great. Yeah, preferences. I'm doing it online here just to make sure that what I'm saying. Is correct. Yeah, it's at. Well, no, that's not that's not entirely true. So it will show it for all the currently open websites. And then it will show a second section for configured websites. So anything that you've changed from the standard of 100 percent will show up in the configured website section, whether or not that website is open. So you could look here to see if you have a persistent setting, but probably best to open the website and that way you're certain to see it. So thank you for that, Jerry. Good stuff. Yeah. Good stuff. And that works the same for all of those other settings in there, too. Not just page zoom. You know, if you're looking at content blockers, you can, you know, auto play, all of that stuff, you can set those on a per website basis, which is which can be really handy. You can also get there if you right click in the URL bar and choose settings for this website. You can see whether, you know, what the zoom is and what auto play is pop up windows, camera, microphone, screen sharing, location. So you kind of get you can you can get there two different ways. So. All right. Right. Pretty cool. Pop up windows. Yeah. That's one I had not. Yeah, I had one website. It was actually, I think a state government website that was using pop ups. It was like, you know, blast from the past. Then I wasn't able to get to a certain portion of the site. And I'm like, what's wrong? And it turns out they were using pop ups and I had to. Allow them for this site. And then all of a sudden things things went better. It seems to be like state government websites. That's a standard thing. No, I'm glad you brought it up because I guarantee you we have listeners out there who will run into this if you haven't already. And that's exactly it. Yeah, you need to allow pop ups for that website. It probably displayed like the little pop up icon in the URL bar. But that's not that obvious when when you're when you're doing your thing. But but it usually does. It looks like it kind of looks like the screen sharing icon. It's like two two little squares, you know, overlapping each other as is what that usually is. So all right. Also, from last episode, we were talking about remove all cookies in the safari settings, right? And I posited I asked the question and did not want to test it in the middle of the show as to if when you even once you filtered things down, you know, you type in a search, like, let's say, you know, Mac observer dot com right in you. So you're going in. Let's let's get let's get everybody the right spot here. So we go to I got to find safari here. We go to settings. This is in privacy, manage website data. Give it a second and things will load up when you you can search in here for, you know, a specific website and that filters it down. Now, it might be that like for Mac observer, you only have one entry or, you know, I found that like for Citizens Bank, which we use a couple of the businesses, you know, I have three different domains that all match citizens, right? I have citizensbank.com, citizensbankonline.com and citizenscommercialbanking.com. There is if I highlight Citizens Bank, the remove button opens up. But there's also a remove all button. And listener Phil pointed out that that remove all button will only remove the items that are being shown on the screen. So the results of the filter. And in fact, if you hit remove all, they should put a dot dot dot after that, because there is another dialogue that comes up. John, I like the dot dot dot to tell me that that's what's going to happen. But I tried it and and it it said, do you want to remove the three or what would it say specifically? Do you want to you show you want to remove all data stored by the three displayed websites on your computer? So it would have been those three that I that I read on my sample filter there. So yes, that it does not remove everything unless you don't put anything in the search field and you hit remove all. But then presumably, even though there's no dot dot dot, it would ask you the question. So thank you for that, Phil. I appreciate the update. Yeah, should have a dot dot dot. I don't know. That's not my feeling. Yeah, because yeah, I just did it and it's like, are you sure you want to remove all data stored by the four hundred and eight displayed websites? No, please don't. You know, you can one frustrating thing is if you're doing any web development, you may get to a point where you want to remove a specific cookie, but not all cookies for a given website. And this interface doesn't give you the ability to do that granularly. But if you turn on the develop menu and then go into you know, you go into show page source, which really brings up the web inspector, you can go to, I believe it is storage and then twist open cookies. And you can see all the cookies that that particular website has set on your computer and you can highlight them one by one and delete them if you care to. So extra little quick tip there. All right, where are we here? Let's you want to take that follow up, John, on from John's distorted startup chime? Sure, because I think you you you provided some good advice for that one. So I want to I want to do that. Then we'll then we'll do some cool stuff found and we'll we'll call it a show. Yes. All right. Come on, cursor trackball is getting uh-oh here. I've got to clean it out. All right, so John's said it seems like you're right with your deductions. Apple telephone support said there was nothing further they could suggest remotely and I needed to take it in to be looked at after a couple of days of it being with the genius bar after a nuke and pave. They told me it was a blown right speaker and they would like to replace it. Well, so so we did kind of get that right, I think, or not. They estimated it would take three to five days to get the parts. After five days, I hadn't heard anything. So I found the store and they told me the speakers have been replaced and the problems didn't go away. That was the part we got right. We didn't think it was the speakers. Yeah, they had escalated the issue and been told that it was a cosmetic problem and the rest of the computer functionality was expected. So there was nothing further they could do. They told me if I want to take things further, I would need to speak to Apple care for those of you that they don't remember or didn't listen to the last episode. His it was his startup chime sound that is distorted. No other sound coming out of the computer is distorted. So that's the that's the mystery to solve here. So I'll let you continue. Sorry. Right. And I guess they consider that a cosmetic issue, which I would disagree with. It's broken. It ain't right. It ain't right. All right, to continue, I came to the conclusion that if I were to sell the computer, a buyer were considered faulty. So I called Apple care and explained the situation initially. They said if I wasn't happy with the computer and nothing more can be done at the Apple store, they could replace it if that's what I wanted. I said I didn't need it to be replaced. I just thought a motherboard replacement would likely resolve the issue. But the Apple store told me there was nothing they could do and it had to be replaced. However, there was also a question they had to complete regarding whether it was cosmetic damage because the genius bar had used the term cosmetic. So they put me on hold while they inquired. Eventually they came back to me saying they were handing me over to someone more senior. This person informed me that the noise was a known issue with this model that they were monitoring. They believed it to be a software issue where they were hoping that a firmware update would fix it in the future, though they couldn't say when. I commented that I was disappointed I was taken to the Apple store and had been without it for a week. But otherwise, I was happy with this. However, I pointed out this is not what the Apple store had told me. And then if I had been told this when I first contacted Apple support, I wouldn't have wasted my time trying to resolve it or taking it to the genius bar. In response to this, they said they're recommending speaker replacement initially. Make sure it's not a hardware problem. Interestingly, I comment I had two years left of Apple care. And then, for example, the issue hadn't been resolved in a year's time, I could get back in touch with them to arrange a replacement. And they said that Apple care didn't cover software, so it wouldn't be eligible. I would assume it's not a particularly common issue, though. I did find a form thread where someone commented they seen of a lot of Macs also had this problem. I would be annoyed if neither issue or a firmware fix or replacement is being done, not quite sure what is the reasonable amount of time or weight for a fix. But a problem with this Mac for as long as I can remember. If you mentioned this on the show, it would be interesting to hear how many of the listeners have had this had this issue. What's your advice for him, man? I would say get a new machine. Take the new machine a hundred percent of the time when Apple offers to replace your computer and give you a new one, take it. That's always going to be the answer, because like you, they're not going to always offer that. That's right. Yeah. Right. So you got to get you got to get back to the person that suggested a replacement. Yes, 100 percent. I had this actually happen. So I had, I remember, oh, man, this was. A power book, G4, I think I had. OK. And there was a problem with the screen, I think, and I had not one, not two, but six exchanges where I sent it to them, they said they fixed the problem and they didn't. And I'm like, you know, at some point I was on the phone with the guy and I'm like, you know, I mean, you're losing money already on this whole thing and I had Apple care on it. I'm like, how about a replacement? And they're like, yeah. And the good news is that they gave me a replacement that was the equivalent of that model. So it was actually a more powerful machine. And I suspect that if you get a replacement for this issue, that that would happen as well as you would get a newer machine. And sometimes. Yeah. Yeah, right. Sometimes. Yeah, you're what you went through is not uncommon. Often it is not Apple that suggests the replacement first. It is you that asks for it. And, you know, like like you did, like, hey, it seems like we've been around the block on this. I think a replacement is warranted. You know, they will often agree with you far sooner than they would be the ones to offer that. So, you know, that's that's but if they are offering it, man, the answer is yes. Because they'll usually cross ship it. So that if they won't tell them, please cross ship it. I need to be able to copy my data to the new machine. And they'll, you know, they'll do that for you. They'll take your credit card to guarantee that you're going to ship the broken thing back, obviously. All right. I am. I attended PEPCOM this week remotely. For the last time, John, in October, you and I will be in person at the Metropolitan Pavilion in New York City attending PEPCOM. So I'm looking forward to that. But I found a couple of cool things at this week's PEPCOM event. One is from a company called two, actually, or from a company called Rapid X at rapidx.io. The first is their modular five charging system. You can connect up to seven devices together. It's the links are in the show notes. It's definitely worth checking this out. They have pods, they're, you know, they're cheap ads or they are watchpads, right? So they they have the watch puck in there in the watchpad and then a cheap coil in the cheap ad. And the cool part about this versus other modular systems that I've seen, John, is that each one of these stands on its own. They all have USBC input, but they will also connect with each other. So you when they're all together on your desk, you plug USBC into one. You can plug a, you know, a power delivery into it or just a five watt adapter if you're only doing one thing. But if you're doing multiple, you do power delivery. And then it shares that with all of them because you they interconnect. But if you want to take one on the road with you, you just detach it and walk away. And as long as you have USBC power, you've got your thing. So that's their modular, five modular charging system. And then they also have what they call their my charging station, which is a thing that plugs into a two outlet jack on the wall. You know, your standard three prong, two outlet thing. It lets those two outlets essentially pass through so you don't lose your outlets. But it's this stackable charging station that has a cheek oil on it. And then like four outputs that you can use to charge your phone and your watch and your iPad and even your laptop. So it's very that's a very cool thing, too. Like I just love the the design of how they're doing things over there at RapidX. It really like it makes sense. There's other stuff they have, too, obviously, but these are the two that it really jumped out at me. The next thing I'm trying to move fast because we well, we took more time with with listener John's distorted startup chime follow up than I thought we would. But there's at least three things I want to get to the the Sense Smart Power Panel, and this is at sense.com. This is a thing that plugs into your your circuit breaker, you know, your panel, your box, it circuit breaker panel at home. And it intelligently figures out what appliances you have, like it just sees the master feed. That's it. You can also tell it about any smart devices you have. So light bulbs and things like that to give it a leg up. But then you just let it run for a few days and they've like built this huge machine learning database where they know, ah, this pattern of something turning on and off with this amount of power. And and, you know, at this this frequency of cycling, that's a refrigerator. So OK, your refrigerator is using a lot of power or your hairdryer is using a lot of power or the relay in your air conditioner is acting different today than it was last year. And so you might want to get that looked at before it just dies on you, right? Or your well pump, to my point earlier, you know, is cycling quickly. And it's just doing it by looking at your overall current usage and and the patterns therein. So very cool thing. And they say it takes like 20 minutes to install. They they advise that a licensed electrician does it. But if you're comfortable opening up your your breaker panel, then then you could do it yourself, too. They said a lot of people do. And one last one, John, that I will share, there's two, there's two more that we'll I'll share in a future episode. But one last one is very much for you. It is anybody that watches the video stream knows that John is evolving the window treatments in at least his his office where where you do your where we do the podcast because people can see what's behind you. And they the Graber Blinds has this very cool tool that they were demoing to show like you pick you take a picture of your home and or your room and then you start experimenting with their, you know, it's their visualizer tool where, you know, they they show you, OK, well, that's what this blind would look like here. That's what this shade would look like. And you can kind of figure out like what actually I know you had some curtains when you first moved in that you hated. And that's great that you hated those. So find something you like, right? And in this tool that they were showing from Graber was like exactly perfect for someone really for all of us. But I thought of you or you were like, I don't know what I would want. You know, it's like, well, you don't have to go buy a million things to test it out. You take a picture of your room, put it in, you know, mess with it on your phone or on your computer and you're good to go. So that's the Graber visualizer. So I wanted to share that with you, my friend. That's why that's why I took us an extra minute here on the on the show. But that that does bring us to the end, I think, unless you have any thoughts or questions or things to know. I could just get, you know, solid or blinds. You're right. You're right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Right. I guess you had some like somebody gifted you some like floral curtains that you didn't like or something, right? Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Well, thankfully, they make things that are different than that. So you get you get to decorate your own home. I'll try them out. Sweet. Cool. All right. Thanks for thanks for listening, folks. Thanks for hanging out with us. I don't have I don't have anything else to share. Well, I guess I could share. Visit us on YouTube. The well, I'll put a link to the Mackie Cub YouTube channel, but I think it's just Mac. It's YouTube dot com slash Mackie Cub podcast. Go and subscribe there. We're putting out all kinds of little helpful tip videos. It's segments from the show, some things that are not segments from the show. So, you know, really, we're trying to be helpful with that. I'd love for you to subscribe and then tell us what you think and what we could do differently, what you would like to see, what you like. All that good stuff. YouTube dot com slash Mackie Cub podcast, I will. But I promise I'll put it in the show notes right now. I'm doing it right now as we're typing. Mackie Cub YouTube channel, there it is. You got anywhere else you anywhere you'd like to send them, my friend? Well, there's that one person. And you know where I want to send them. Oh, wait, wait, you can't say that. We try to keep the show clean. That you're talking about the guy that didn't pay you, right? Yeah, I got you. Yeah, I got you. I got you. I think we all know where that person needs to go. There's a place for them. Yeah, it's warm. Yeah, yeah, not not paying people is is that's not cool. Yeah, that's not cool. Twitter, he's Dave Hamilton. I'm John F. Braun, Mackie Cub, Mac observer and pilot Pete. Rumor has it he may. I hear he might be coming back soon. No guarantees. We'll see what his schedule is like. He's been busy piloting. All right. Yes. Thanks for thanks for hanging out with us. Make sure to sign up for the newsletter at Mackie Cub dot com, please. I mean, it helps us all we in that, you know, tell you about the things that we're doing and we share all the show notes with you. That's basically all the newsletters for. We might do something else with it, but we promise it'll be content, not, you know, spammy. It's when we're not into that, you know, that's what we do. Yeah, thanks for hanging out. Make sure to check out our sponsors. Of course, there was the two there were the two that we mentioned in this episode, other world computing at Mac sales dot com. Lino dot com slash MGG. And then check out Mackie Cub dot com slash sponsors. You can see all the recent sponsors, including the sponsors that aren't sponsors anymore, but their deals are still good. That's what you got to learn. Have a good week. Have have fun. Enjoy the warm weather. Enjoy the ability to be more interactive with people if you're in an area where that's now safer than it has been. And.