 The MacObserver's MacGeekGab Episode 783 for Monday, October 7th, 2019. Folks, and welcome to the MacObserver's MacGeekGab, the show where we take your questions, your tips, your cool stuff found, and all the other stuff that's come up. And we mix them all together, mash them all up, formulate them into some kind of agenda, with the goal being each and every one of us learning at least five new things every single time we get together. Sponsors include hero.com.mgg, textexpander.com.podcast, capterra.com.mgg, and expressvpn.com.mgg. We will talk about each and every one of those URLs a little bit deeper, a little bit later. For now, here in Durham, New Hampshire, I'm Dave Hamilton. And here, yet again in Fairfield, Connecticut, this is John F. Brown. And again, yeah, it is, it's amazing. Our locations stay the same, and yet the topics always change, so I like it. It's good. Hey, we have a lot to go through today. We oftentimes will record this show on Sundays. My schedule this week was such that we just couldn't. And it turns out that was a good thing because we're able to record our segment about installing Catalina and what happens and what to do after you've installed Catalina. After Catalina has been released. So that was, that happened a few hours before our recording. But we've got a lot of stuff to go through on that. We've got a few other things we'll talk about first. And then, and then we'll get there. The first thing that I want to mention though, John, in iOS 13, a little quick tip that you may not have noticed, especially if you have automatic app updates turned on. And that is if you go into App Store and you tap on your name or your icon in the upper right, you will see all of the pending updates as well as anything updated recently. Well, here's a cool thing. If you got an update or about to get an update for an app that you realize, hey, I don't use that anymore. If you grab it and swipe to the left on the right, a little delete icon will appear and you can delete the app right from there. Super handy. I don't know why it took 12 extra iterations of iOS for us to be able to delete from the updates in the App Store. But I mean, I know other things took priority. I do know why, but you know, just how it goes. I am very happy that we can now do this. You like that, Mr. Braun? So, yeah, so I see that you can do that. My question is, so if you say delete, does that, so then that will never show up again until they release a newer version? No, no, no, that deletes the app. Oh, it deletes the app. It's clearly from your phone. Yeah, good question. Yeah. Oh, that's not very intuitive. Okay. Well, no, I mean it's in the list of update notifications. If you delete to me, that doesn't necessarily imply that you're deleting the update. You're deleting the app in its entirety. You know what I'm saying? I do. Yeah. Now that you say it, I had never thought of it that way, but I get that. Yeah. It's the same functionality works on the updated recently list, which are things that you just hit open by and open instead of update. But the same delete option happens if you swipe to the left. Yeah, but I totally get what you're saying. Yeah. Right. Of course, the other thing that I've had more than one of my Twitter followers shake their fist about is they've kind of hidden. So the thing is now you see your icon, your user icon in the upper right hand corner. Yes. But unless you tap on that, it's not entirely clear that that's the new vehicle to get to updating your apps. I would kind of tend to agree. It's like, why did they bury it? Right? Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. For sure. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, once I noticed it, I'm like, oh, okay. Well, the app store is saying there's updates and then, you know, I click on the icon. It's like, well, wait, something's different. Oh, I got to click on my user and then I get to do my updates. Well, they needed to leave room for Apple Arcade to have its own icon at the bottom. So the updates icon got lost in the shuffle. I think that's what happens because I agree with you that is also less than intuitive. So perhaps there was a hidden tip here, even just getting to that delete option. So there you go. Nice little quick tip sandwich. Which is good. Speaking of quick tips, listener Chris says, well, I don't personally use emoji as a second language. It is occasionally a fun way to respond to a message as a sort of hieroglyphic one-liner. Although browsing for an emoji seems to be better in iOS 13, I find myself relying on the emoticon text replacement feature when the need arises rather than scrubbing through the emoticon keyboard. And by the emoticon text replacement feature, what he means is typing in a word that you hope there is an emoji for and then it shows it to you in the suggestions box between the keyboard and the screen there. He says, however, if you want to send a specific emoticon through text replacement, one must know the specific text that corresponds to it. Correct. I discovered that if you type the emoji you are looking to send, so find the emoji, however you're going to find it, tap it once, select it, and then here's the trick. Choose speak from the cut copy paste pop up. The text behind the image will be audibly revealed. While useful for some emoji such as the microbe emoji, which is like the green little bug. I never knew it was called microbe. He says there's another one smiling face with sunglasses. He says it is a bit much to type for a specific emoji. Thankfully, iOS is smart enough to show emoji containing the word you are typing, so sunglasses will give you a few options. Thanks for the great show, Chris says. Yeah, I like that. That's good. That's great. I had no idea. I still need to find a way to get Siri to insert emojis into my replies that I dictate audibly. I've never dug into this because I only ever think about it while I'm in the car, which is actually a bad time to dig into these sorts of things as you might imagine, you know, driving and all, but that's when I want to do it. And of course now the second, this is the only other time I've thought about it while not in the car and of course now I'm podcasting. So the good news is I'm hoping one of you might know the answer and if you do feedback at MackieGab.com would be a great place to send that. I didn't hear that right, Dave. I don't think because of these headphones I have, which we're going to do something about that. But I think you said feedback at MackieGab.com. You're correct, sir. I said feedback at MackieGab.com at another tip for iOS while we're at it. Tony jumps us to the new cameras and options in the iPhone's 11. Tony says photos capture outside the frame is off by default, but it can be turned on in settings under camera. So you go to settings, go to camera and turn on or off, photos capture outside the frame. Your photo can be edited after taking it and you can pinch in with crop to bring the ultra-wide part of the picture. This doesn't work in low light and apparently the extra data will be discarded after 30 days. Yeah, and you're right. He sent some pictures through which the iPhone 11 cameras are great. But he says, I dug into this a little bit. It is off by default because turning it on disables deep fusion, which is a tech that's coming in iOS 13.2. And iOS 13.2 will and deep fusion rather is this. It's the tech that Apple demoed that does the direct pixel analysis and enhancement of the photos that you take. So it essentially adds more detail and more sharpness than we can get with the current calculations that happen. These pictures that we get on iPhone, when we talk about how no filter and all of that, that's a great little hashtag to use. But the reality is the iPhone currently is and always has been doing a lot of math behind the scenes to make your pictures look good. You're not ever really seeing the raw thing, at least not in Apple's camera app. And you wouldn't want to. You would want to have this analysis done and this enhancement done. And deep fusion is another layer of that. But turning this on, turning on the capture of the photos outside the frame will turn off deep fusion. And come iOS 13.2, you might not want to disable that. So have you messed with any of these, John? Not really. I got to say the, you know, kind of disappointed me because so I have a point and shoot like a super zoom camera. And when I was on our Chicago trip, there was an occasion to take a picture of monkeys. And it was dark. But it was sad because when I used what I thought was a nice Nikon point and shoot that pictures were terrible. But the pictures in low light with even the iPhone 8 on the older OS were outstanding. I mean, it just amazes me with a tiny little lens. But they have all the, but they have all this processing power as you pointed out that can really make your pictures look a lot better. So it's true. It's true. So I've run into that ever since I think what was it the eight or the, I think the seven is where they started to introduce image stabilization. Right. Yeah. I think you're right. I think that's when they started adding some of the smarts in. Yeah. Yeah. I will, I will say something, John, that will remain part of the inside baseball Mackie cub lexicon because we're not going to explain it. But I will say, we should all say thanks to the Griffin for, for helping make that. Oh, I saw your post. I'm just leaving that alone. I'm just leaving alone. We're not going to explain why we say that, but thanks to the Griffin for making that technology possible. So he did that. I have no idea what you're talking about. So all right, moving on another Tony has a different, a different thing. And that is assistive touch can be used to include series shortcuts, which is super handy. So if you go into touch and turn on assistive touch, you can embed series shortcuts inside your assistive touch panel, which is pretty darn cool. So, you know, he's got one that says find Linda and it's right there in his assistive touch panel that pops up, which, which is, you know, super handy. So yeah, that's in, I think it's settings. Accessibility is that where assistive touches usually have. Yeah, settings, accessibility touch. And then you can turn on assistive touch and it will pop up a, a more explicit way of using taps on the screen and all that good stuff. So yeah, fun, fun. Hey, all right. Let's see. I will, I want to take a minute, John. 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All right, John, it's Catalina time, man. You ready? Catalina? Oh, are we going on vacation? You know what? It's funny. Are we going on a business trip? I'm going out to the West Coast for business. Yeah, but I'm not going to make it as far as Catalina. I'll be very close as it turns out for the second half of next week because I'm going to be at Mac Tech. And if you still haven't bought your tickets, actually I have a link where you can save a bunch of money. I will put it in Dave's special Mac Tech ticket link. So I'll put that in the show notes. But Catalina, I mean, as you know, of course, Apple's new operating system. Yeah, Catalina is going to ruin everything for everybody. Well, other than other than me, it's been fine. So, you know. No, I'm just saying I understand, especially as a developer, that you want to nudge people to 64-bit. And, well, this is it. Yeah, it's... I don't know that... Yeah, I mean, the 64-bit thing, I think for most people it's probably not going to be a problem. I mean, not only have the majority of apps updated, but we've been talking about this on the show for a while. So, you're right, the first thing that you want to do is go run Mac Updater and make sure that you have up-to-date versions of all your apps and then run Go64. We'll put links to both of these in the show notes. Go64 will go through and tell you if there's any non-64-bit stuff left. And lastly, do a clone with Carbon Copy Cloner or SuperDuper, because that way, if you need to roll back, you've got an easy way to do that. So, once you've got that out of the way, I updated to Catalina, I updated my main machine. And so, well, my main laptop, which for the next 11 days is going to be my main machine while I'm on the road. I updated that to Catalina. And, you know, things went pretty smoothly. Like, I did it with the Golden Master, so I had to install the beta profile and all that, but it worked. It was fine. John, you actually had some problems with that, so I'm hoping that you don't have an issue updating your machine to the release of Catalina, but we'll see. I had a nightmare. So, if you're part of the developer program, you have to download this beta access magical thing that all of a sudden makes your system preferences software update see the betas. Right. Dave, I tried, man. And I did clones of drives because I'm not going to do it on my daily driver. But I clone my drives and tried to run this. And in one case, it would never finish the download. It was like eight gigs or something. On another machine, it said it downloaded it and then I restarted and it was like, oh yeah, you're running Mojave. I'm like, dude, you just applied. So I don't know why. I don't know if it's the vintage of my machines. Maybe it shouldn't be once a 2012 Mac mini. I'm sorry. So I have a 2012 MacBook Pro and a 2014 Mac mini and I cloned those drives using carbon copy cloner before I applied the beta update. Yeah. And I don't know. Yeah. Well, hopefully it works for you when you do the... Now that we have the release. Now that the release is out. Yeah. And the GM, as I think you told me, the GM was a couple of versions behind the release, right? Well, I mean, it's one notch behind. Yeah. The release build number was one digit less than the one that wound up being the release. So, but I had no trouble. Well, certainly no trouble installing it. It worked flawlessly and even using it has been flawlessly but or has worked flawlessly. But I did want to go through a few things just to prepare you all for any failure or changes or differences. I don't think you're going to see failure, to be perfectly honest. It's been pretty smooth. But you might. I mean, John experienced some failure there. So who knows? The first thing I want to point you to after you get it installed and up to date is go into system preferences and into iCloud because you want to make sure you're logged into iCloud. My machine, for whatever reason, was not. And I re-logged myself in and everything worked out fine. Like it was a non-issue. I thought, oh no, like I got... It's going to be some major deal. No, not at all. There are two things in... And of course now I'm opening up my laptop, which I have Catalina on so we can talk about it and I'm getting all kinds of notifications. Which is great. You'll see the layout of system preferences is different. Apple ID is one option. So it's no longer an iCloud widget in system preferences or PrefPain in system preferences. It is called Apple ID and it is at the top. Next to it is family sharing, at least for me. My guess is for everyone and if you have it turned on then it will have more details in there. So I went into system preferences, Apple ID and just had to log back in. And then things were fine. It retained all of my preferences in there. I don't have mail turned on in the list of apps on this Mac using iCloud. And it remained not on just as I had previously. I think I needed to click the iCloud Keychain box to turn that back on for whatever reason. But it came back on and it was fine. Everything, you know, it logged me and it was a non-issue. Just check that because it was not immediately obvious. There was nothing yelling at me about the Apple ID not being logged in. So just make sure you check that. Any thoughts on that, John, before I move down my list? Other than I ran into the same thing. When I was attempting the upgrade at some point it said, oh, I don't know who you are via iCloud. I don't know who he's logged in again. Interesting. My installation was, yeah, not entirely successful but I ran into that as well. Well, but you never got it installed, right? I'm talking post install. I was logged out. No, I get it. Okay, okay. All right, so one of the big differences that we know about is the music app because the music app was not in prior versions of the OS. We had iTunes and that has been broken out into several other apps. The podcast app is new so, you know, and frankly works to me has worked way better than the podcast functionality in iTunes. It's not sluggish anymore. I open it, it works. That's great. The music app, so I use iTunes every day at my desk to play songs from my library. I have music going almost all the time when I'm on my desk other than when I'm on the phone or whatever, obviously. I'm not listening to music now while podcasting. But getting work done, you know, I like music. It helps me focus and all that. So the music app, I was really worried about what they had done to that and there is one major change and that is in iTunes when you viewed your library you could view anything in what they call as songs view. And the nice part about that was you could see, like when you viewed songs in the library you could get a listing at the top that let you break it down by artist and album. And that is now gone. Those filters are no longer there. And to me that's like a huge sadness. But fine, it's gone, we accept it, we move on. But just kind of wanted to warn everybody, if you used that little thing there you used to be able to do that and now you can't. When you go to view a playlist, regardless of how you had it viewed in iTunes it will be in the as playlist view which is maybe what you want and it just shows the songs with their time stamps. I like to sort by album, I have a playlist that I sort of throw things into and I like to be able to sort in different ways. You can go to the view menu and choose view as songs and then it will sort by, you know, then you can see a multi-column, a true multi-column view just like you had in iTunes and you can go to view, show view options and turn on whatever columns you want for that playlist. It works the same way that it did in iTunes which actually this is something I don't think we've ever talked about on the show. Thankfully it's not too late to talk about it but I like to sort my songs by album, by artist slash year. Now that seems like a very specific way to do things and it is and if I have the album column there in iTunes or now in the music app and I click it it will let me sort by that column and then if I click it again it adds the artist to that column and if I click it a third time it adds the year to that column and this is something that works like I said both in iTunes and in music I've never seen it documented anywhere but I love it because I can sort by band and then by year which for a crazy music person is exactly what I want. I want it alphabetical by band name, chronological by band and it lets me do that. So I've been I actually have been very happy with the music app it's again far less sluggish than iTunes had gotten for me and other than losing that way to filter the song's view really there isn't anything else that in my use case you know wound up sort of jarring me so figured I'd share that. Any questions about that before I move on to mail John? Not really questions but I'll throw something into the ring here is that so my music so I was kind of surprised that you use iTunes for your music. Yeah. The thing is I'm set up as you know but if you don't and I'm going to tell everybody about this but so the thing is I actually have copied my iTunes library to my Synology and then I use I think they call it audio station which presents it as a D L N A audio source and then I have a Denon Heos which offers the thing that you mentioned Dave that I think is very valuable is sort by album slash artist. So it's a speaker system that has software it's hardware and software but they've been improving their software I'm actually still pretty happy with it and actually prefer it playing my music versus iTunes because one D L N A integration and number two that it offers a pretty rich set of sorting options that like you I find it very handy to sort by artist and album. Sure. Right. Yeah. I don't know why Apple pulled that but hey I'm trying to keep us on track here with with Catalina for this segment. That's all. Okay. No, we'll get back in your lane. Any questions about the music app in Catalina I just want to give folks something to focus on here. That's all. No, no. It's good that they broke it out. It's sad that they pulled a feature that you like. Yeah, but that happens. Right. So that one is not nearly as big of an issue as the next one I'm going to tell you about John and that is in mail. You and I I think you and I but certainly me I have been a huge fan of what they called the classic mode in mail and you could invoke that by going into mail preferences view options I think or maybe it's just viewing and there used to be a checkbox to turn on classic mode that is now gone. However, all is not entirely lost. What classic mode was or and and and what this new mode that they have sort of is is having a list of your mailboxes down one side of the screen and then in the in the sort of main viewer window that would be split horizontally with the message list at the top and then the messages themselves the content of the selected message at the bottom. That's classic mode. So that's gone in its place is an option that came up by default for me in the view menu and it is use column layout. If you don't do that mail looks similar. You get that same three pain view if you if you want it but the message list at the top of that screen is showing like the person and subject in a in a in a not columned layout. It's a it's a just a sort of sort of like iOS shows you the preview layout is probably the best way to say that. So that's fine. However, column layout isn't really multi column layout. Sure it displays data from multiple sources including whether it's red or unread. So that's one column and you can have the bullet to show you that it's red or not flagged. That's another. Well, that's another thing that is sorted. We're not sorted. That is another thing that is displayed. It all looks like a column layout. This is why I'm having trouble saying this. So you have you have red or unread flagged attachments. The from name, the subject and the time. And you can choose to sort by most of those. Here's the problem. I cannot set how wide the columns are because it's not actually columns. It is one column with all of that data spaced out to look like it's in multiple columns. So in a sense it's a it's an active screenshot of what a multi column view would look like. But you can change what the screenshot has in it by by, you know, changing what it's sorted by. And you can choose like I can choose to sort by date with newest messages on top or oldest. I mean, it's got that level of granularity is there. But if I want to change the width of those columns. No, not going to happen. Like now I can't see what time yesterday a message came in because the width of that portion of this one column is only wide enough to show either the time or the word yesterday. So I can't see that it came in at yesterday at 4pm. I just see yesterday. This is no bueno. This I mean, this has actually really been a shock to the system here because I'm so I spend so much time in mail that I, you know, I'd really gotten like I really find functionality in being able to see more about specifically the time of when a message came in. Will I adapt? Of course. I really don't have any choice, but I'm not happy about it. So a fish shake there. So just so you know, that's I'm sure you're going to notice this too, John. Yeah. So what you're saying. So things right now in mail on my non updated machines. Yep. Excuse me. If you right click on the where all the columns are, you'll see various categories, attachments, author. Yeah. So what you're saying is that they've reduced or changed the way that some of the selections work because like I don't get to see. You don't get to choose which columns you have because there's only they've gotten rid of that. So you cannot choose which columns you want anymore. Those are the words I just said, unfortunately. Okay. I just wanted to make sure. No, no, it's you're right. Yeah. Yep. And you cannot change the width of the, you know, and I'm using air quotes here for columns because they aren't columns. So therefore you can adjust width. It's one column with these fields laid out in relation to each other for each message. Yeah. It it's. Wow. I'm not sure who thought that was a good idea. Well, I mean, let's, let's face it. It was called classic view for a reason, right? They came up with this new view what several OSes ago and left classic view around, but, but the two were, were operated very differently. If you, if you turned on classic view, things just changed dramatically in mail. And similarly, if you switched back to not classic view, so this new column view is not all different from the view that you get if you're not in column view. It's just what, what is contained in the cell is different if that makes sense, but it's still just one column. It's just what's the layout of each cell in the column. And now that's what you get. So. Right. Yeah. I mean, it is what it is, right? But just FYI, you're going to notice this. Sorry. Here's a good thing. Sidecar is awesome. And with 11 days on the road ahead of me here starting later this week, I got to speak at Google at the end of this week. And then Mac tech, as I said, so I'm on the road having the second screen of my iPad that works. I tried duet in the past and I don't know, man, maybe it was just me or I don't know, but it was always sort of janky. I could get it to work and then it would fail. It, it was unreliable for enough such that I never used it. I did not rely on it while on the road. With my experience, I had sidecar up yesterday while I was preparing some slides for one of these presentations and it was just flawless. I mean, it was, it was, it worked great. And it's super easy. Sidecar being the technology that Apple introduced that extends your Mac screen to an i device is, did I get that right? Yeah, thank you. Yep. Just to an iPhone, to an iPad. I don't think it works with an iPhone. Oh, just an iPad. Okay. Yeah, it wouldn't make much sense on an iPhone. I don't think so. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Maybe maybe the larger iPhones. I don't know. And I think it's iPad. And it's actually pretty cool. You set it up inside system preferences. There is a new sidecar preference pane there. And you go into sidecar and configure it. And I'll talk about some of the configuration options in a minute. And then once you've sort of turned it on and the display is up, then you go to system preferences, displays, and you configure it there like you would any other secondary monitor. So if you want it on your right-hand side versus the left-hand side, you use the arrangements tab. I mean, it's exactly like any other secondary monitor. It's just not wired. And it's working with, you know, sidecar magic. Now, a couple of cool things. One is that if you have a Mac that does not have a touch bar, you can add the touch bar to your sidecar device, which is cool. I've been, you know, still experimenting with this MacBook Pro. I've come to like the touch bar, as I mentioned recently. So it's nice to have that option. I have it turned off for now because I have a real touch bar. But if and when I go back to not having a real touch bar, it'll almost certainly turn it back on. And I'm currently using my iPad with a bridge keyboard, the B-R-Y-D-G-E keyboards, which are awesome. And that keyboard works fine in sidecar mode. So I can type on that keyboard and it types into, you know, whatever window on my Mac is right there. And so it and it works really, really well. Like, I didn't even think I, in fact, I was using it going back and forth. And I was like, wait a minute, like, why is this work? So, so, yeah, yeah, yeah. That it's good. It's super smooth. It's it's not like, like I said, I used to it. It was janky. It was, you know, weird and wonky. I have yet to have any, like, interruptions or sluggishness or, you know, any of those weird things that you might expect with a wireless monitor, essentially. So, so that's sidecar. Apple Arcade is now available in Mac OS Catalina to everyone, which I am stoked about because for five bucks a month, the whole family gets the Apple Arcade on all of our devices and now our Catalina Macs are included in that, which is kind of cool. Have you messed with Apple Arcade yet, John? On your iPhone, I mean, not on your Mac because you have you need Catalina for that. No, OK, but I hear rave reviews. So that's it's fun. I mean, you know, it depends on the game. Yeah, but they, you know, it's it's kind of a nice thing, the way they've built these things. It's it's nice to have games that can that are truly just written to be games and not profit centers, trying to eke out, you know, extra dollars to buy coins and things like that. It's like that part of this is a big win. And the games can just kind of fun. OK, like Pokemon Go, which I and I believe a lot of our listeners play as well. But yeah, if you want to get ahead in the game, you got to throw down some coin. Yeah, exactly. So you don't have to. But but it makes it right. It accelerates the process of you getting to higher levels and all that stuff. So that's cool. No, yeah, it's it's cool. The other thing and I'll jump us to a cool stuff found here is that the Tripit app for Mac came out today. And the reason it was today that it came out is because it's a catalyst app or as Apple calls it a project catalyst app, meaning that the Tripit engineers took their iOS app code base and spent some time and tweaked it and modified it to make it so that it has a nice Mac user interface and they're good to go. And I've run it and it works and it's available in the Mac App Store for free. So if you are a Tripit customer and I can't imagine doing any amount of travel without using Tripit because it just manages all of my stuff for me in a mostly automated way. It's fantastic. Now you can manage your plans on the Mac using the app. And this like I'm really excited. Not I mean having a trip it up on the Mac. I never really had any trouble managing on the web. So that's fine. But I am really stoked about the possibilities with project catalyst because you know take for example Twitter, right? Twitter apps any third party Twitter app is is like crippled because Twitter doesn't allow third parties to have the same access to their notifications and things like that that Twitter's native app does. But Twitter doesn't have a native app for the Mac yet unless it's come out this afternoon since we started recording. But they will as they said and it'll be based on their iOS code base and the Twitter for iOS app is absolutely the best Twitter app I've found because it's not crippled. Doesn't matter if you like the user interface better. It's just a better app because it has the right features. So I'm stoked about Twitter for Mac coming around. Like again it shouldn't be that way they should open up their API if you ask me but they're not going to. So this is you know this door opens and I'm pretty stoked about this whole project catalyst thing. I think it'll I think it means a whole lot of good stuff for us Mac users which which is the key so. Any other questions of personally I'm a Twitter fan. Yeah, I know but I got tired of I got tired of Apple's or Twitter's lackluster support for going between platforms or between devices and no Twitter I think it does the best job that they can of offering features that people need within the limitations of the Twitter app on iPhone and iPad. You get all of that right like and so once Twitter has a Mac right and I run it yes I run both on my iPhone and yeah so like notifications for example you know like you know just today it was like hey Dave Hamilton you know posted you know like a really cool message and that's coming from Twitter not from Twitter right right because they can't access that you know a whole stream of data ridiculous but again just how it is yeah so yeah I'm stoked about Catalina I am comfortable especially now that it's actually been released I'm even more comfortable running it on my you know what will be my daily driver laptop but but even after you know running it for the last whatever four days or something five days it's been it's been fine like I wasn't worried it is as we pointed out earlier if you were on the beta track or are on the beta track the release version is one notch different of Catalina so you might just want to go to the Mac App Store download Catalina there and install it so that it will upgrade you to the latest so there you go now you being the audio guy curious so you have it on your you don't have it on the machine you're using right now to do the podcast right I don't know I don't but I have tested I'm sensing you're not in a rush to do that because major OS upgrades typically break audio things right so they haven't you are you are not wrong and I have always hesitated to update this machine for primarily for that reason but the last few updates really haven't broken that it really was the transition to core audio that was the issue and and the first few OS updates after we sort of you know gotten onto that core audio platform were very there were a lot of just a lot of fundamental changes that's not so much the case anymore it's a pretty stable thing I after I updated the laptop you know it was like I don't know Saturday night or something and I had this moment of panic like oh crap I'm gonna need to record podcasts on the road is audio hijack the app that I use like as the core of my recording scenario is that Catalina ready and the answer is officially at that point in time no this afternoon an update came out that that begins to offer what they called preliminary Catalina compatibility but I tested it on Saturday night with a version that said it would not run in Catalina or was not certified for Catalina and it ran fine now would it have run fine for two hours you know maybe probably it doesn't seem like a whole lot has changed in that regard but but I don't know you know you know I'm happy now that that update came out it's like okay good so I'll be good whenever the the recording okay so it looks like the audio subsystem has not changed dramatically I don't think so but don't hold me to that I might I could be very wrong of course you know it wouldn't be the first time so yeah alright any any other questions I want to get to some of these other tips I want to talk about our other sponsors but I want to wrap up Catalina first here just to you know just to get us in the in the right right zone I guess the only thing is that since I never got to experience the joy although I tried it's not for a lack of trying it but I'm curious what was the first thing that struck you as like wow this is different or this is better and maybe you've covered that already but that's a good question you know honestly the speed of the music app was a welcome change so so there definitely is is that okay so they broke that out and they optimized it it sounds like so that's that's good but now today like I wasn't able to run any project catalyst apps over the weekend because there was nothing in the app store at least nothing that I knew to find those started appearing today and so that that really like I said that excites me just for the possibility okay but was there anything that you couldn't do was there anything that upset you or just you're like we're shaking your fists like wait I was able to do this on the prior OS now I can't anymore now where bites wouldn't run okay so they have not yet properly updated for yeah and it's not a 64 bit thing with them it's just a whatever they're doing is you know not right like it it will not run and I downloaded a new installer and it would not install like it was like no no this not gonna happen man like okay got it okay so at least it as of the last time I checked they had not yet updated it I assume they're on it they've got a forum post about it and all that so I will you know I'll assume they're gonna make it happen but but yeah that was I think that was the only thing though that didn't run like all my I was worried about things like Synology Drive you know the stuff that I sort of rely on that that lives behind the scenes that I don't think about but is super critical for me I use small cubes mail suite with their plug-in sigpro and mail act on and their beta came out on Friday which which is good because I can't live without that and it's it's bugger than I would like it to be but it's mostly functional so that that has been if there's and there you know if there's a thing that's that's still sort of janky it's definitely that in my world so okay the one thing I saw and I don't know if you still run a Drobo but um now okay I mean I do not only one of their components so if you go to Activity Monitor you can see the bittiness of things and the only process that was running on my machine I think it was called DD server or DD something but that was the only process that was 32 bit so I don't know if my Drobo or the Drobo dashboard well I'll see if they came out with a new version yeah you still be able to connect over like SMB or AFP like you could still connect in the finder to get the data on your Drobo but you might not be able to run the management software that's true yeah right that's the only thing I notice so again folks you know look at your you know Run Activity Monitor or Go64 would tell you the same thing I think all right well yeah sounds like a good upgrade so far so far yeah I will point out one thing it really I mean we don't have enough experience with it to say whether it's good or bad I think it's really good but time will tell is that in you know your drive or my drive and once you upgrade your drive to well now be split into two volumes you'll have a system volume and a data volume macOS does a very good job of obscuring this from you and not making you worry about it but your operating system is living on a separate APFS volume from your data files and your applications and things like that and it's because that way they can make the operating system volume read only and it really eliminates a lot of the holes the security holes that that could potentially have existed it does change some things like I was worried I really like Intel power gadget because I like to see what you know where my CPU is running and all that stuff they updated Intel power gadget the plug-in or the extension for it works in Catalina it's fine all good so so you know it it's fine it's it's not an issue for me but I we I'm sure it will mean that troubleshooting disc problems is different I'm hoping that by different I mean way less frequent and better but you know we'll find out so but you you'll only see it if you go into disc utility you won't see this if you're just browsing around in the finder they they the finder take does a very good job of of sort of merging these into one visible volume for lack of a better term so so okay yeah and if we haven't mentioned it already Dave for goodness sake before you apply a major OS update make a backup no make a clone I'm going to say not a time machine but I'm going to say a clone with either CCC or SuperDuper because time machine is is all right and you can certainly when you install a new way so you can certainly suck down the time machine your most recent time machine backup but just because it's not bootable makes me uncomfortable so so just one listener actually not one listener many listeners in response to a topic we said we discussed in one episode recently pointed out that time machine is bootable if you're doing it on a local like a direct attached drive now it doesn't mean that it's bootable like a clone you can't boot and start running but you can boot and access your data and you know restore and do all of that stuff there so it is somewhat functional in that way okay no you're right I but I still agree with your advice yeah but they have a sport article that I think says that is like yeah if you if you do the magic hand wave you can in fact make it bootable yes it's not entirely clear how to do that I was surprised when we got the tip so yeah yeah same I yeah yeah I've been I hadn't been doing direct attached time machine backups for a very long time I'd been doing them across the network so I missed it which is great that's I mean that's why we love doing the show but there might be some apps that you need to replace when you get Catalina and that's why our next sponsor capterra at capterra.com slash MGG is super super valuable because capterra is where you can go to look at over a million reviews of different products from real software users so that you can discover the app that you need and you don't have to filter through blindly because not only do they have over a million reviews they've got over 700 specific categories of software so especially those you know business apps sometimes they don't get updated all that often and you know you can live with it it's fine until Catalina comes along and you can't well that's what you need capterra for you just go to capterra.com slash MGG and they're gonna be your leading free online resource oh yeah did I mention capterra is free you get to review the reviews of over a million people right it's amazing it's crazy 700 categories of software a million reviews or more and you get to find the apps that you're looking for you've got to check it out and like I said it's free go to capterra.com slash MGG for free today and make an informed software decision for your business and find the software that's gonna work for you our thanks to capterra for sponsoring this episode ExpressVPN folks this has become my favorite VPN to use and you know that with you know more than a week of travel coming up ahead of me that I've got ExpressVPN dialed in on all of my devices so that I can make sure my data is secure without slowing me down ExpressVPN is super easy to install it just works it doesn't use up a ton of CPU or anything and it makes it so that even if I'm in like a coffee shop or an airport or some wherever I happen to be and they haven't updated their router and so there's like some crack flaw still living in their thing it doesn't matter because I've got ExpressVPN and ExpressVPN has got me it's awesome you can check this out right go to expressvpn.com slash MGG not only does that get you the best in online security and privacy protection it also that special link expressvpn.com slash MGG gets you three extra months for free with your one-year package so you can protect your internet today with the VPN that I use all the time to keep my data safe go to expressvpn.com slash MGG to get started and of course our thanks to ExpressVPN for sponsoring this episode you want to take us to Dimitri John yes Dimitri thank you very much so we helped Dimitri out or I did I think but here we go so he's giving us some feedback or a follow-up from a prior episode and he says feedback that hopefully can be useful you recommended two tools to recover data from badly failing external rotational drives that won't mount namely the free tool DD rescue and the paid tool data rescue 5 by ProSoft I went ahead with DD rescue it took quite some fiddling to get it up and running and the recovery process started and was into several hours with tiny progress and forecast the drone over several days that's a long time at this point well you know I mean you know I guess that's you bringing data back from the dead you know it takes time right yeah fair yeah at this point I decided to look at the trial of data rescue there's one huge difference DD rescue won't give me any view of the directory of the failing drive data rescue recovered and showed me the drive directory which allowed me to select only folders with photos which apparently he has a 14 12 year photo library so so that was nice yeah I may have recovered a couple of photos to test and then I went and paid the 120 which I guess that that's with tax I looked at their site and I think it's 99 bucks which and I think you get five licenses or five devices which hey if it saves your your bacon that that's cool but then he did a total of a couple of weeks to painstakingly recover folder by folder but he broke the process down into chunks of time so apparently there's level of granularity that you can do with a DD rescue and then I was able to leave my computer to safely run the next recovery session after two hundred gigabytes of recovered photos was so worth the money so just thought we'd share that success story so my only comment was well I had two comments so one there is a GUI for DD rescue I don't know if he did that and actually I think we have a so DD rescue you can run from the command line right and using something your favorite package manager whether it be what do you use what do I use I use homebrew for my packages okay and then oh okay yeah so homebrew is cool and then there's something called cake like a cake brew is a GUI front end for home yes yeah yeah so so we're going to go in the tunnel here and talk about GUIs for things that otherwise don't have GUIs right but um graphical in a graphical user interface for those of you that that don't know wow boy you're going back yeah but um but anyways there is a GUI for that may make DD rescue more approachable and we did an article about that and of course they did rescue from our pals at a prosoft which actually I just saw an alert come up several alerts saying hey we got new versions of our software because there's Catalina right that's right I guess they upgraded though I had we haven't yeah we'll we'll have to talk to them but I guess they upgraded a drive genius and some other things that's great yeah no I got to think about I think drive genius six I think is out now and now it's standing that's good they took a while to get updated I think for Mojave or something right I mean they were a little slow on that one so that's good oh that's great to hear good coolio so um so yeah so the free tools are you know they're worth what you pay for them but having a GUI on top is a lot I mean well there's sometimes worth a lot even though you don't have to pay but you you might wind up paying in say time or frustration to get the functionality out of them that they can deliver so right and I got to say that I'm fascinated especially data rescue I know a bit about how they do what they do but yeah so if your directory is destroyed which is sounds like that's what happened in this case how would you even figure out and thing is that they do some really smart stuff to try to figure out well hey is this a picture is this this or that and yeah apparently for Demetri it it worked out so hats off to a pro-soft and data rescue for getting your data back coolio thanks thanks Demetri that's great all right we talked I talked in the last we talked in the last episode about the new MacBook Pro which I mentioned here the low end MacBook Pro and I promised that I would circle back around to Ram and then we didn't so I wanted to circle back around to that but we were talking about the $200 delta between the between the the MacBook Air and the MacBook Pro and Gillies wrote in and says a small comment about that I believe your assessment about CPU and GPU is this one thing that you didn't mention is the 200 you could use the $200 on Ram over the years of use I think 16 gigs will most likely be a better investment in the air so I I get that and I was gonna bring that up to you as well and I'll let you finish and then I'll give you my fish shake okay well you know I I when I bought my MacBook Air last December I ordered mine and Lucas's with 16 gigs of Ram because I Ram I felt what and I think I'm correct about this was the reason that my 2011 air couldn't have another year or two eaked out of it right it really was you know that I was just running against RAM limits all the time but I think eight is enough because this this and I don't just mean to invoke the name of the old 70s sitcom yet but but eight they were right right like those people in the 70s knew stuff man and then what they knew was that eight is enough and eight gigs really is enough on like because this this laptop that Apple sent me has eight gigs of Ram in it and they apologize for that when they sent it and I said actually no that's good I need to know whether you know how I feel about this I've taken this thing on some trips with me I am going to do it again I have no hesitation about that because of the you know eight gigs of Ram in fact I see zero performance like it I am not running into problems Mac OS we've said it on the show before but now I can say it based on personal experience Mac OS is very much geared to run extremely well with eight gigs of Ram the only reason you'd need more is if you were doing something where you really were pushing those Ram limits on in a specific app like let's say you were editing lots of video or something you probably wouldn't be doing that though with something that's you know a sub $1500 laptop so I I really feel like for anyone that's considering this machine and I count myself in this group right I know I'm a geek this is not my main machine but it is my main machine when I'm on the road and I think eight gigs is is enough I really don't think about it so I know this bothers you fundamentally John but you're going to have to trust me on this um I'm just going to look at the numbers and just tell you what I see here so the thing is my MacBook Pro has 16 gigs because you can upgrade it to that sure and I'm looking here and I see that the memory pressure is at 13% and there is no swap occurring now if I look at my mini which is not my daily driver but when I ordered it I got it with eight gigs and it shows memory pressure at 32% and it shows some swap so but to your point I haven't noticed a huge performance right well I'm on the fence if when I order my next MacBook Pro I'm going to get 16 gigs I get that although I trust your judgment the thing is especially since you can't upgrade the RAM yourself anymore the thing is you probably want to err on the side of getting more RAM than less RAM you know what I'm saying I I know you know what I don't I don't fault that logic I I I don't think it's necessary but I also can't know the future right I can only predict and and if you're willing to spend an extra 200 bucks just to have that peace of mind by all means then do that if that makes you feel better do it I truly don't think you're going to need it I think you'd be better off banking that money and then just replacing your laptop a year or two sooner and getting all the new capabilities instead of just like using RAM to to you know get blood from a stone kind of thing and and eek that along a little bit further yeah right no it's just that we're in the age now where at least with Apple stuff your RAM choice is your RAM choice you can't change it but if all you're worried about is swap look at how fast the SSDs are in the oh yeah no I I get it yeah and of course yeah I mean having swap problems with a rotational drive is very different from swap on an SSD so I'm with you but again my next machine I'd be more comfortable with getting 16 because you know how other than it emptying my wallet a bit faster than right getting eight I'm willing to spend the extra couple hundred bucks to get more RAM I get it now I don't think I get 32 because that's crazy unless you're like as you pointed out like a superpower user and you're doing like a lot of video or no I have I have 32 in this machine in front of me here the 2014 iMac uh-huh and I've got 40 ever had 32 I've got 40 in the machine downstairs the new 2019 madman well I didn't know these things about you rams rams relatively cheap I got well I got that machine downstairs with eight gigs of RAM because I was able to get it that way from the refurb store which was awesome eight gigs of RAM one terabyte drive like this is good because rams way cheaper to buy from third parties and so I did and I I put to 16 gig sticks in which means I have you know 16 plus 16 plus 8 so 40 there you go unless I'm I think my math still works so yeah it's fine I mean did I notice any issues when that machine was on eight for a couple of days no it was fine which also which is the thing that started making me think maybe eight actually is enough and it is it's fine but but again I don't fault you for like is 40 way too much for me yeah oh dude way too much but it was relatively cheap I mean I think it cost me like a hundred bucks or something to to put 40 in there I was like yeah it's fine now I won't have to think about it no I get it it's just I used to work with graphic artists and advise them on on their Mac purchases very different you would those people need super graphics cards and lots of memory because there's lots of stuff happening when you're doing you know right heavy movie or graphics work well and you wouldn't record just emailing it's one of these machines for one of those people regardless of RAM right this is not that you know the sub $1500 MacBook Air or MacBook Pro is not the computer for those people even if it had you know 64 gigs of RAM it's just not not for what I'd call heavy lifting right maybe I mean you could certainly do work on the road absolutely oh no these machines are these are great machines they really really are yeah yeah you've uh piqued my interest in that even though I think I want to think I need a pro the air I mean since they've upgraded it and it doesn't have a totally wimpy processor right like 1.4 gig group this Mac the early years had a pretty no but I think the early MacBook Air's had pretty wimpy processors and that was a concern to me but I don't think that's the case anymore yeah this is the one in the in the pro here is a 1.4 gigahertz quad-core i5 so I mean definitely wimpy if you look at numbers but but in terms of how it actually performs not wimpy totally great it's no problem like I said the only time that I have fan spin up is when core audio is running but that has nothing to do with taxing the CPU it's that macOS puts the processor in turbo boost mode when core audio is running right and so I could be at 8% CPU usage but the CPU is running not at 1.4 but at you know 3.2 or something whatever it you know maxes out at and that causes it to heat up and then the fans cook but yeah the um the MacBook Pro sorry the MacBook Air I don't have it in front of me I just want to make sure I'm getting this right it has a 1.6 gigahertz dual core i5 is what is what's in there it would not really huh I know it's great it's a it's a great machine so um there's another thing I want to I know this this show is like action packed here but I've been messing with personal automation John on iOS what is that I've never heard of such a thing yeah so iOS 13.1 I'm a big fan of the shortcuts app right where which used to be called workflow but what it so there's workflow and you can create various little workflows that can happen you know when you trigger them or whatever uh it's always or for a while now it's had automation for your home if you have home kit capabilities and you can have it like I can you know it's sunset I can have it turn on lights and you know whatever if the motion's detected in the driveway I can have it do other things like there's those home automations which has been great and now with iOS 13.1 we get personal automations which means John that I did things like when I arrive at my address turn on the Wi-Fi on my phone because a lot of times when I'm out I'll turn the Wi-Fi off and then I'll get home and realize oh crap my is still off and it hasn't automatically turned on again no problem when I get home this automation runs because it geofences it knows where I'm going to be or knows where I am and boom it turns the Wi-Fi on okay so where where is this automation stored it's in it's in the shortcuts app um and if you don't have that I don't think it's installed by default I think you have to download it is okay I see it but I I've I haven't done much with it but I probably should I mean I remember when we went to Mac stock there was actually some talks about it it was like oh yeah that's cool you can do that sort of thing like yeah I think I remember one of the presenters actually showed a workflow saying okay here's a workflow showing how you can estimate the amount of time for me to get from here to there and I thought that was just like totally cool like wow I should look at this stuff no it's it's awesome I have I also have my my carplay I use carplay as a trigger so I have it I have two workflows one when carplay is connected and one when it's disconnected and I do a variety of things that are specific to my car but I also turn the Wi-Fi off when carplay is connected because the last thing I want when I'm at an intersection stopped in the middle of some city somewhere is my car trying to connect to the you know Xfinity Wi-Fi that it's seeing or whatever it's like nope turn Wi-Fi off so is the workflow so is it stored number one is it dependent on the home home kit number two where is it stored okay it's on device these are on device they are called personal automations yep and it's okay so they're stored on your iPhone or iPad or correct and they are you they're unique to the device so if I wanted to do the same carplay workflow on my iPad which would be I wouldn't because I don't use my iPad that way I don't even know if it would work that way I don't even I don't know it's interesting maybe I should try I you know I would have to you know essentially write that that automation over there but it's super easy you just go into shortcuts the automation tab is in the middle go to automation in the upper right is the plus button and when you go to create a new automation as long as you have 13.1 or later you can choose create personal automation and then you can set all kinds of different things and listener Andy has a cool thing to add because he said with the new personal automations you can choose a trigger for personal automations based on things like events or phone locations or carplay or if you're connected to a certain Bluetooth device do certain things which is cool one thing I would like to be able to do is launch an app because the radar detector has an app and I want a personal automation that says when you're connected to the radar detector launch the app because it doesn't always launch in the background and it doesn't get the data at once but I can't and that bothers me back to Andy but Andy says the one in particular I found interesting was called NFC tag for the first time he says I think Apple has opened up the NFC capability of the device in a really useful way it allows you to scan an NFC tag or sticker which you can easily find for purchase for cheap on Amazon and then define actions to undertake when the phone comes in contact with the sticker some of the things I am using it for is to I put an NFC sticker on the bedside table and when I put the phone on the sticker it turns off the lights when I'm going to bed I put a sticker he says outside my garage and when I tap my phone to the sticker it opens my garage door he says the options are pretty endless I hope people find it useful I'm definitely going to get a pack of these NFC stickers and start messing around with it what a great thing I like it this is good I've seen that the thing is I think Apple is not always the first but I believe Android has had this ability for a while they had Apple it was last year the XS Max and the XR that the NFC reader was on all the time but with iOS 12 if you woke up your phone you could have it read an NFC tag so they did begin this process of sort of opening up NFC on your phone a year ago but now that they've added it to shortcuts like that is pretty cool because now it used to be like you would have to program a URL into the tag I think that was the only thing you could do and so you know URLs can be used to launch apps and do different wait a minute URLs can be used to launch apps wait a minute that might be the answer for my radar detector thing because if I connect to Bluetooth and I use a URL to launch the radar detector app my problems might be solved okay I have to podcast to finish first but nice I like this though because it's similar to the QR code stuff that you have now in the camera app in that it's like well it's a QR code so read it and like deal with it and so now they're adding that feature for NFC which is nice because I don't know like you read it and deal with it like a year ago we could read it and do like exactly what we're doing with QR codes right where if there's a URL in there and you could bake a URL into the NFC tag like there was a conference I was at where NFC tags had the Wi-Fi information and if you just tapped your phone on the tag they had a URL that would say here's the Wi-Fi and that was actually handy but now it's beyond the URL right it doesn't have to the data isn't in the tag the data is in your phone so for clarity the prior way prior to iOS 13.1 the tag had to have all of the data necessary and anyone who tapped the tag would get whatever the data was that's fine if it's Wi-Fi and you want that that's not fine if you have a sticker outside your garage with what Apple's done in 13.1 the tag is merely the trigger your phone is the thing that's acting and running a script because it encountered that trigger so that the tag doesn't have any data to open your garage the tag is just a trigger and you tell your phone if you encounter this trigger you open the garage so it's a little bit different which is good I mean it's secure which is cool okay so it's just like a GUID or something so it's just a unique ID that you can tie to something else whereas the QR code actually has the data embedded within it and then you got to say yes or no which I'm an idiot here by the way folks so I started thinking about this because even though I'm doing a podcast so I went into my carplay connected trigger and I thought can I add a URL to launch an app and so I hit the plus button to add a step to my automation and I realized that there's an option called scripting and I'm like right scripting is where I would go to do a URL option available in scripting it is open app and so I can choose open app I can find my radar detector app and I choose that and my problems folks are now solved wow you just helped yourself that's one of my new five things I'm so excited now I feel super powerful oh man I don't know that we can top that so I think this is where we need to wrap things up here I think this is it to get the hook I need the hook where did that come from wasn't the hook from the gong show I think the hook predates that I mean pulling somebody off the stage though the gong show was brilliant yes I do believe that acts that weren't going well they would get the big hook and pull people off the stage otherwise people start throwing produce and fruit and all sorts of things who wants that now I have also heard I don't know if this is true but I'm glad we ended earlier than we could have so we have a little extra time here we go hold on we got another emergency the phrase break a leg there are many different accepted that's painful but that phrase means a lot of different things to different people and if you ask anyone involved in any sort of performance or theater they will give you what they believe to be the reason for that phrase and I have heard one explanation is that what you want to do is get an applause so that you have to bow and when a woman curtsies she breaks the form of her leg it's no longer straight it's bent and so break a leg was that another one and I like this one I don't I honestly I think I don't I don't know that there's any definitive answer on this but one that I like is that the the sides the curtains that hold that that like to find the size of the stage are called the legs they're also called like well the wings or whatever beyond those curtains but the curtains are legs and in vaudeville you hoped that you would be chosen to go on stage because if you were chosen to go on stage you got paid for that performance if you were not chosen you would not get paid and in some scenarios of course I'm sure there were you know different ways but if you were chosen to go on stage then you would be breaking through the legs the curtains from the wings and being able to go on stage so that break a leg means I hope you get to perform today so I like that I wish painful injury upon you okay which is what most people would assume when you hear the term it's like what why would you there's the other that right the interpretation that follows sort of the more literal you know breaking of of a bone is I'm going to wish you bad luck so that because if I wish you good luck bad things might happen so let me wish you bad luck so that good things happen no that's the that's perhaps the most commonly accepted you know interpretation of that but I like the other ones so yeah you know well but and it may well be the good luck thing because like there are a lot of superstitions like you do not say the the Scottish play that begins with M that's right yeah no no what no no what is that you don't say Macbeth in a theater man it's no bueno oh well there was like death and destruction right yeah oh it's a it's it's known to be cursed like any time the play is not any time but many times the play was performed like people would there would be problems and people would oh okay so it's a cursed it's a cursed play yeah it's just cursed yeah I'll put a link to the Wikipedia section on the Scottish curse and we'll go for it oh nice so we've we've already told you how to contact us via email I you know I we have I want to take what else we got I want to thank all of our premium contributors whose contributions came in over the last week oh my god yes you know you can you have you actually have three options you can contribute a one-time payment you can contribute on a monthly basis from ten dollars a month and up if you choose and you can contribute on a biannual basis if you want to schedule that way and that's 25 dollars every six months or up so on the one times we want to thank for 25 to two folks with $25 one time payments Kurt from Portland and Leslie from New Haven and one $50 one time Ken from Gilroy so thanks to all of you the monthly payments I want to thank Frederick from Nashville Gary from Babylon Anthony from San Francisco Robert from Clearwater Stephen from Mesa Joan from Sarasota Everett from Marina Olga from Bellevue Jason from Charlestown Stephen from Plainfield Lou Ann from Albuquerque Ward from Mesa Kenneth from New Lampton Paul from Fishers Mark from Milford Nick from Mount Clemens Stephen from Dromor and Neil from West Hartford and on the biannual $25 every six month plan I want to thank Andrew from Edinburgh Troutdale from Quebec Craig from Pace Chris from Windsor Mike from Silver Spring Ulysses from Brooklyn Keith from Edmunds Jonathan from Woodside Ralph from Bangor Paul from Pomona Ken L from Who Knows Where David from Troutdale Chris from Nailsworth Lawrence from Stamford with $50 every six months Kurt from Tawanda Lewis from Novato and Robert from Westford thanks to all of you you rock fun stuff John what else did you have something someone something somehow you wanted to any anything did I miss something no other than well no I believe I was talking about ways to contact us and there are several ways we mentioned the email but it's always worth mentioning because Twitter is such a fun place but I am John Efron he is Dave Hamilton the podcast is Matt Geekab the publication is Matt Observer and Pilot Pete if you want to reach out to him because he's driving the engines of commerce or something like that he gained like you know thousands of new followers because of the bachelorette there was a guy named Pilot Pete on the bachelorette and they many people thought it was him it was maybe it was well maybe it was he's a good looking guy so you know I don't blame people but he's already married and stuff so you know I don't know I don't think that was him on the bachelorette I was there were many Matt Geekab episodes prepared from my MacBook Air in my living room while my wife and daughter watched the bachelorette this summer so it was a nice way for me to be present with the family without detaching to do work but they were engrossed in the bachelorette and kept up with nothing you listen you can do a lot of work and still know everything that's going on far more than you want to know is going on with the bachelorette including knowing that that pilot Pete is different from this pilot Pete oh and I don't know it gets scandalous John maybe you do right I still think our Pete is still quite the catch he is that's right that's right alright so thank you for listening folks thanks for sending in all your stuff I am not sure when the next episode will release because of my travel schedule it will be some point next week but it might be Wednesday let's say it'll be by Wednesday so if you're not hearing from us that don't fret we're on it we're just a little bit delayed so thanks to all of you thanks for 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