 The Mac Observers' Mac Geekgab, show number 6, 7, 8, for the 9th of October, 2017. It's folks, and welcome to the Mac Observers' Mac Geekgab, the show where you send in questions, tips and cool stuff found. We share your questions, your tips and your cool stuff found, and we answer your questions in addition to all of that. One of these days, I'll get that right, but I think I did get it right. It was just a little circuitous getting there. Sponsors for this episode include Jamf Now. We're at Jamf.com slash MGG. You can get your first three devices free for life. Remote management, magic stuff. We'll talk about that in a minute. And Barebones Software at Barebones.com with BB Edit. We'll talk about that in a minute too. Here in Durham, New Hampshire, I'm Dave Hamilton. And here in somewhat wet, dreary, Fairfield, Connecticut. This is John F. Braun and... Here in another part of Durham, New Hampshire, getting visited by Nate. Thanks a lot. Yeah. He's a pilot. Pete, thanks for having me back, guys. Yeah, it's good to have you back, Pete. This is why we have changed the recording time to Monday evening. That's one of the reasons. It was the catalyst for us changing it, although there's other good reasons to do it too, I think. For the month of October, at least, we're experimenting with recording here on Mondays at 5.15 p.m. Eastern. I'm just hoping you didn't get grounded there, Pete. No, nobody caught me, so I'm good to go. It's good. That's good. All right. And hello to everybody in the chat room at MattGeekUp.com slash Stream. Thanks for joining us today. Very good stuff. We've got all kinds of stuff to go through. So let's start with Ken. You've got a few cool stuff found from you, folks. I've actually got a pile of cool stuff found here, John, that we're going to probably wind up surfacing in the next week or two, but we will go with your cool stuff found for now. Ken says, last month, Elevation Labs made Elevation Dock 4. I bought it, and I love it. Their Dock 3 was $99, their Dock 4 is $59. It's a Dock for your iOS devices, and it works for the iPhone and the iPad. It's the only Dock that I could use one hand to pull the device off because the Dock will actually stick to your table or work surface, whatever that is. It has nanopads on the bottom, and he says I can use the same Dock with my iPhone 5S without a case, and my iPad Air with a case. Very cool stuff. We've put a link to that in the show notes. I've got a little video there that actually makes it look pretty cool. Yeah. Yes. Very good stuff. Anybody have anything to say about that before we move on to listener Dave here? I guess not. You're with me, right, John? I'm with you. The only thing I notice about my Dock is they're missing the text on iOS 11. The text for some of the items is gone, other than that. But yeah, always good to check out an alternative, right? The text on your items is gone on your Dock? I seem to notice, I seem to recall that in iOS 10, the name of... You're talking about software, and we're talking about a literal piece of hardware that sits on your desk. Oh, all right. Never mind. Okay. Moving on. No, no, no. It's fine. Now that we've made that distinction, what's the problem? Because we do that here too. I don't think it's a problem. I've noticed that the iOS 11 Dock, there were a lot of visual changes, but one of the changes that I noticed as soon as I upgraded is, well, where's the name of the apps in the iOS Dock? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. And they decided to, I guess, free a real estate. They're not there anymore. They're not there. Not that you really need them, I don't think. That's right. Yeah. If they're in your Dock, you probably know what they are. So there you go. All right. Moving on to listener Dave with his cool stuff found. He said, I found a piece of software. It's a terminal piece of terminal software. It's a command line utility. Thank you. Called GPAC, and it's a package that lets you create, modify, and extract items from MP4 files, MP4 files. We mostly know those as video files, but really what it is, is it's a package format that can contain lots of different things. And what GPAC does is it lets you extract items from those packages. You're not transcoding. You're not converting it. You're just taking things out. And he says, I was using Audio Hijack to record a bit of audio from a web video. I wanted to capture something. And he says, so because of potential audio processing, I had Audio Hijack record in an Apple lossless format. Audio Hijack by default stores Apple lossless recordings into an MP4 container. And in their preferences, they indicate that that's a safer format. I think it's saving more frequently to it or something. Anyway, we do the same thing here. We use Audio Hijack and we record in this MP4 format into that container. And he says, usually MP4 packages hold video, but they can just hold audio. That's fine. He says, or so I thought. Then I wanted to use CAPO, which we mentioned in the last show, so that he could loop this little section of music and learn the guitar solo. He said, but CAPO doesn't understand MP4 files. It does, however, understand M4A files. He said, so I needed a way to extract the audio from the MP4 package so that I could play it as an M4A. I didn't want to convert or transcode because that leaves artifacts. I just wanted to unpack or extract it. So I discovered GPAC. And he says, it works really well. Very, very simple. He installed it with Mac ports. I was able to install it with Homebrew here, just brew space, install space GPAC, and it just put it out there. And if Fink, he says, will do it as well. And it worked because it just pulls the audio out. Now, here's an interesting thing. And I think this might only work in this exact use case that Dave describes because I do the same thing. We occasionally pre-record some segments of the show. And then we play them back. But we have like we do for our ads, right? I like to keep the ads tight. So when I have the opportunity, I will pre-record them so that I can play them back for you during the show. And it's it's a tight thing. And I'm not stumbling through an ad read. I can actually give it the time it deserves while keeping it short for all of you. But that means I have an MP4 file and Evernote, which is what we use to kind of manage the show and the flow, won't play back. Exactly the same problem that Dave's that listener Dave is having. But what I noticed is G-PAC would do this. And now that I know about it, I might actually do that. But say for today's show, I did what I've always done. I simply renamed the file from filename.mp4 to filename.m4a. And magically, it plays as an audiophile. I don't know if that's how it's supposed to work, folks, but it certainly does. And it has in for several versions of OS 10 and then Mac OS. I think starting with El Capitan was the first time I even tried it. It may have worked prior to that. So interesting stuff. Thank you. Thank you, Dave, for for bringing this one up. It's always fun to. Interesting. Yeah. I recall a similar trick. I don't know if it still works since they've totally destroyed iTunes. But I remember the rename trick actually works for ringtones. I think you you you rename them to M4R. Yes, that's why that's what made me think of of this is exactly that. Yep. Yep. Yeah, and I've done that trick. I mean, you can certainly go to the ringtone store. I don't know what they call it these days. But in payroll money for a ringtone. But yeah, but if you have your own audiophile, if you rename it to M4R, then last I checked at least with my installation, I haven't installed new ones. But, you know, they're they're still working on my iOS devices. Yeah, yep, for sure. And then, you know, you mentioned iTunes and not being able to kind of manage some things like apps and that sort of thing that iTunes 12, 7 brought into the world. Well, Abby Vackel, the founder of Fast Mac and all that stuff. I'm trying to find his post. There it is. He posted earlier today that he found a page really kind of hidden on Apple site that that talks about how you can install iTunes 12.6.3, which, unlike iTunes 12.6.2, will work with iOS 11. So we'll put his his post in the in the show notes here because it you can actually roll back to iTunes 12.6.3 if you which came out, I think, after iTunes 12.7. So it's built to work with iOS 11 and manage apps. But as Abby also notes in his post, the fact that it's called 12.6.3 and not say 12.7.1 or whatever that would be indicates that this functionality is going away. Really, this is linked to a knowledge based article titled Deploy apps in a business environment with iTunes. And so this is for people with the volume purchase program and Apple Configurator that want to be able to install apps with iTunes. So you can roll back to this. I don't know. It's it's kind of nuts, but you know, for now it's available. So sometimes you got to look back instead of looking forward, Dave. I don't know. I I yeah, I've kind of moved on. I don't I don't. Someone in the chat room mentioned that they don't aren't able to use them for R and iOS 11. Are you having problems in 11? I haven't had a problem with it in 11. I've been able to put ringtones on a couple of different ways. You can still use iTunes to do it. OK, yeah. I won't attempt to say his NCSUCP. It's John. We just call him John. Oh, yeah. Hey, John. There it is. Not this John. But I haven't added new ones. So it could be in fact that that has changed. But my existing ones that I did, yeah, like you, I think. They worked out. Yeah. Cool. All right. One last I don't know if I would call this a cool stuff found. I mean, I did call it a cool stuff found. So I guess I do Robin writes, I just had to share this cool thing because I can't believe the information was there in plain sight. And I didn't know for historic reasons. I have a wireless network made up of Apple time capsule and Apple Airport Extremes and Airport Expresses. I was trying to track down a new rogue wireless connection being found by my Fingbox, which, by the way, is another cool thing found all on its own. Talk more about that in a minute. And trying to track down this errant router, I found some really useful and well hidden in plain sight information in Apple's airport utility. If you open airport utility, you see all your airport routers. If you select one, you can choose to edit it. And that's all the normal stuff. But if you select it and then simply hover the mouse over the airport name, it will give you some really useful information on all of its MAC addresses and model. While the airport is selected, you can also see all the connected Wi-Fi clients. But if you hover over any of the clients, you will get to see connectivity status, connection status, connection speed and a bunch of other useful information. This is maybe I'm excited over something really silly, but I never knew this much information was in there hidden in plain sight. It's true. Yeah. Floating over stuff in the tooltips, as we call them, in the airport utility can be very, very handy if you're running Apple routers still. So yeah, or just with a lot of Apple utilities holding down either option or command or maybe both reveals all sorts of wonderful secrets. I found when I did use airport as my primary. Hmm, Wi-Fi. Yeah, the upper utility was pretty good. And there was a lot of really good stuff as pointed out hidden underneath the covers, including like a really detailed connection tool saying, oh, here's everybody connected to you and here's the channel I think it should go to. It's a. Huh, I'm trying to remember. I think it's now. Where is it in the Wi-Fi menu? I think if you know, for those that are still using the airport, if you go to the Wi-Fi menu or the little blob up there and you hold down option, you will get is it option? Yes, it is option. So you will get enable Wi-Fi logging, create diagnostic support and open wireless diagnostics as mysterious additional options to talk to your airport. And that's not just that's not limited to people running airport stuff. Like you should be able to see that on your network, even though you don't have airport devices, John. I mean, I see the choices. I'm not sure how. That's just your Mac creating that report. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But it's worth noting because, you know, it's extra goodies there that you get for free. Yeah, for sure. Now to hold down the right keys. He mentioned Fing in his note to us and Fing is an interesting. First of all, it's an interesting app. It's a great way to scan the network that you're on and see what everything is there. I actually had to use it recently. I was at a theater that I hadn't worked at before. And like most theaters now, thankfully, they had a mixer that was iPad or iPhone addressable, which makes life super easy when I have to like if I have an in-ear monitor mixer, whatever, I can just use my iPhone or my iPad to mix my own ears. I don't have to drive the sound engineer crazy. It's great. But this particular board, it's either a Mackey Berenger board, sorry, or or a Midas board, basically the same one. It doesn't announce itself. So you have to know its IP address to connect to it, which is sort of interesting because most sound engineers don't know the IP address and you kind of have to dig around in the mixer to find it. And, you know, I had driven this engineer crazy with questions enough already, who's very, very nice. But like, man, I so I started guessing like, you know, dot two, dot three, dot four, dot five, I didn't find it like, OK, I got to I got to ask him. I thought, wait a minute, thing. And so I ran thing. And sure enough, it showed me every device on the network. And one of them was named like, you know, M32 dash something or whatever. Like, oh, yeah, that's the mixer, because it's a Midas M32 mixer. And I put in the address, which was dot 21. It would have taken me forever to get there. And sure enough, I connected right up. So if you need to know anything about a network, go download Fing. It's a very, very cool thing. And then their their Fing box is is sort of one of these devices. In fact, we've got several of them, Kujo and and a few others that we're going to talk about possibly next week, where it you route all of your traffic traffic through it. We talked about the Bitdefender one that was sort of behind the times a while back, but it's working on it. Well, it's only they're working on it. They're there. There's other people that have passed them. And then the show we went to, there was at least one or two other vendors that have similar, you know, I'm going to take care of your network. And network defense devices is what I call them. Yep. And you just route stuff through it. And Fing boxes is one of these. I haven't checked out the Fing box yet, so I can't really speak to it. But but yeah, so there you go. That's that's what the Fing box is. Now, I'm going to throw in an additional tip here, my friend, but please do. We didn't put it on the agenda, but I just ran this. And this is something to note here is that iOS 11 puts some restrictions on what iOS apps can do. Basically, I think it's ARP resolution. You don't get to see the MAC address of of devices like the Fing app can show you a device's advertised name and IP address, but it cannot show you the MAC address. Right. And I'm looking right now. And the thing is, if you run Fing and I just did this on iOS 11, it says, switch to IP address identification. iOS 11 limits apps accessing list of MAC addresses, blah, blah, blah. Yep. And we're working with Apple to try to fix this. I don't know if they did it. I don't think they're going to fix it. Yeah, I think it's it's more lockdown. Yeah, I don't think it's I don't think they're going to do much. Well, the thing is ARP have a hack at it. But the thing is ARP, which is address resolution protocol, it's a low level thing in TCP IP and maybe other protocols. You can do bad things. And I actually have done these in the past as far as redirecting people to the wrong. When I was doing security work, yeah, the thing is you can trick devices into going to the wrong place by manipulating this ARP thing. Yeah. So my knowledge, there were no apps on iOS that could manipulate it, but they could at least read it. And now you don't get it's really, you just don't get to see MAC addresses. So but a thing is still rocking and and the thing box, I look forward. I don't know if you got one or, you know, we should talk to them. But yeah, yeah. Yeah, I don't I don't have one. I mean, they know what they're doing, but not just looking at the app. I mean, we saw them at CES and the thing is they know what they're doing. Yeah. As far as networking. And so I would I would consider a thing box as a likely candidate to secure my. The real question about these, and this is why we haven't talked about them yet. I've had these for a while, testing them, take some time, because there's there's a lot of different aspects to it. And I'm not going to go too deep into it, because we'll talk about it next week. But hopefully. But, you know, it's got to be able to process data fast enough that it doesn't slow down your connection. And with so many of these, including that bit defender box, which didn't even have a gigabit ethernet port. But they just, you know, if it even if it maxes out a couple hundred megabytes a second, it's like, OK, well, if your connection is slower than that, then great. And I realize most people's connections are, but there's a lot of people that have connections that are way faster than that. And you don't want to put some security box in that slows you down. So it's a it's a it's an interesting thing and a very complex thing to evaluate, which is why it's been taken security versus convenience fight. It is exactly that. Where on that continuum do you want to be? That's it. Yeah, exactly. Are you willing to lose? You know, are you willing to have gigabit internet and yet only use 200 megabits a second so that you can have security? I get kind of the kind of antsy when I think about that. But when I look at their device, they advertise even though it was a hundred. Yeah, the thing is that the processing involved in watching the traffic will slow you down. Well, it kind of has to if the processor. Well, if the processor is wimpy, right? Well, I mean, not beefy enough. I don't even want to say wimpy. I mean, we're talking about real time packet inspection. It takes a lot to do that. So yeah. All right. Speaking of iOS 11, let's run over here to Jed's question. Did I I I? Oh, yeah, we might as well run to Jed's question. I think he jumped us on the agenda with where the thing box isn't. So anyway, it's fine. We'll sort it out. I just was getting rid of some of those bullet points, Steve, to help you out. Yeah. I was making you more organized. Yeah, you sure were. Who's your buddy? So Jed says this is more of a Google and iPhone gigab question, but you're all I've got. It's totally fine, man. We talk about all kinds of stuff here. He says I created a calendar for my school's PTA in Google Calendar. Since I added an iCal link button on it, hoping that people will be able to add it and have a live synced calendar. But I'm sitting here with someone who has an iPhone and that link doesn't add it or it adds events, not as a live calendar. So I tested this out and sure enough. Yeah, Google is just publishing a list of events that you could slurp into another calendar on your phone, but you're not going to be able to subscribe live to this Google Calendar without having a Google account. That that's that's been my experience with all of this. Yeah. So I mean, if you want to join a Google Calendar, you have to do it with your Google account. I've never found a way to publish. Really? That's why I'm saying these words. Yeah, I've never heard. I hear what you're saying. I'm just thinking in the world of standards and maybe there's too many these days. Well, why would this be the case? But I guess everybody has. Well, I mean, it would be possible for Google to publish to allow you to publish your calendar as a subscribeable thing. But I have not found a way to do that. There are calendars that are subscribeable that you could subscribe either on Google. You know, you just put in a web cal dot dot colon slash slash address or whatever and and iCloud can subscribe to those. But but Google doesn't seem to publish in that format. So or allow you to publish your calendar in that format. So you in order to connect to a Google Calendar, you would need to add a Google account to your to your iPhone, which I mean is very doable. And then you could you can turn on or off all kinds of things. And you could just turn off everything but calendar and sync to that. It it's not it's not perfect. If there is a way, I'd love to know it because that would be kind of great to be able to publish a calendar out that that anyone could use. But I don't see a way to do it with your, you know, your personal Google Calendar. And I've tried. It's John in the chat room is saying that he has organizations that do it. But he doesn't know how they get it done. So perhaps there is a way and we'll leave that as a geek challenge if somebody knows that'd be great. I'd love to I'd love to know it. But yeah, otherwise, if you want to subscribe to calendars, they've got to be part of that engine. You know, you need to be part of that engine. That's been my experience. Because two billion users registered is not enough. Well, they want you registered with them. That's right. It's all they've only got two billion. There's at least five more billion people on the planet that should be registered users. Correct. That's right. That's right. And yeah, while we're here, do you have a way? Do you have any thoughts on that, John, before we before we move on? Standards are wonderful in that there are so many of them. That's all I'm going to say. Yeah, I guess my question, you keep saying standards. And I guess my question is I get emails. So for example, you know, a lot of my like my physicians, like my dentist sends out an email saying, hey, you know, you know, you got an appointment coming up. Do you want to put it on your iCal? Do you want to put it in your Google account? So we're talking about two very different things, right? Because what you're talking about is exactly what he's doing or what Google allows him to do. No, no, no, because what that is is a dot ICS file. And that is a standard thing. But that is just static appointment data. So when you're when you say, yeah, I want to download the ICS file and add it to my calendar. You're adding it to your calendar. According to your yeah, to your account. Right. You're not subscribing to some calendar that your that your dentist, you know, sends you. Yeah, it's an event versus a subscription. Correct. Yeah, I got that right. And that's what I'm saying. So that works fine. And that standard does. I just don't know like what standard we're talking about here for subscribing to a ever changing calendar. Like, for example, we publish our Mac KeyCab calendar and you can go to Mac KeyCab dot com slash calendar and subscribe in iCal or busy Cal and and that'll work. But to my knowledge, you can't subscribe to that in Google Calendar. So there you go. Dave, you know, it seems to me, I think there's a link. They create a link that allows people to either join and edit or join and read only for my cloud. For Google. OK. And with a Google with a Google account, I think you may. That's that's what I'm saying. I don't know if you have to have the Google account or not. I'm trying to look at it right now. But. And so John in the chat room is saying that that you can create this link that will let you subscribe without having a Google account. And so what I would love to know, John, and we can follow up. And if you can't get it done before the end of this show, that's fine. But how in Google you go and and modify the calendar to do that? So that would be that would be the trick. So like what he's got a URL that he's telling us all about, which is great. My question is, how do you create that URL? And and if we can get there before the end of the show, we'll come back around. So. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, because it would be like I said, to my knowledge, you have calendars that you can subscribe to in your Google. You have calendars you can subscribe to with with, you know, iCloud, whichever client you choose to use. But Facebook, we we use Facebook for our events, right? I mean, they're everywhere. So what are you saying, though? Where are you subscribing to this Facebook calendar? It just appears my calendar. I have no idea what's going on. Right. Yeah. So that's right. That's yet another thing that that you're you're connecting to as a different account. It's not it's not iCloud getting to that, right? On my Google calendar, I pulled down, you know, more details on my calendar. And there's a check mark where you can say, make this calendar public. And it says, if you choose public, all of your calendar information will be available to anyone, including your details. So that doesn't tell me that a Google account holder only a Gmail only. Say that again. If you choose public, all of your calendar information will be available to anyone, including your event details. So I'm assuming someone can import that into busy cow, into calendar, into iOS calendar. And where are you doing this? You if you're in your Google calendar, yeah, right next to your name. There's a little down arrow and you click on that. Yeah. And you say and it says more information. I think it was what it was. OK. Let me back that calendar details. My name on there, it's calendar settings. No, no, I'm sorry. Share this calendar. You click on Share this calendar and share this calendar with others. I've shared it with everyone in this organization, which is my family. And one of your options is to check make this calendar public. And next to that is learn more. If you choose public, all of your calendar information will be available to anyone, including event details. So that may be the answer to his question. It may be. Well, that's what I'm saying is, is, is that the answer? Yeah, I'm not willing to take my private calendar public. Sorry, folks. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Moose out front should have told you. Right, right. Yeah. Yeah. So that's that's the question. Maybe that is maybe that's the the key. It's a definite maybe. Yeah. I'm sorry. I'm more definitive on it and faster. Yeah. No, no problem. Yeah, yeah. It doesn't seem like anybody has that answer. So that's it's interesting. So we'll see. Maybe John in the chat room will will understand the question we're asking and get there with us. I'm hoping I'm hoping. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Cool. For the moment, moving on in iOS. So I was actually working with my dad the other night with his phone and he's had a Microsoft forever. He had an iPhone. What was it? It was a five. I don't know. He moved from a five series that would not do Wi-Fi calling to an iPhone seven, right? And and he's had a he has a microcell at his house because he's got sort of crummy service and he's had it there forever and it was working fine. And he's moving. So we turned off the microcell and I said, well, we're leaving your Wi-Fi on, you know, temporarily. So you'll just connect to that, but his phone wouldn't connect to that. And so I went in on, you know, into I went into settings, phone and sure enough, Wi-Fi calling was off. And so this is not something that's turned on automatically. And to be clear, Dave, a microcell is a device that AT&T will provide you if your coverage sucks for a mere 150 clams. Provide you after you pay them. They will provide you with a device that extends, allegedly extends your cellular and maybe. Well, it doesn't extend. So what a what a microcell is, is it connects? It connects to your local network in your house. And broadcasts a cell signal from there. So that that's what a microcell does, but they won't sell you one anymore because you don't need it because you can get a phone that supports Wi-Fi calling, which essentially does the same thing. You're leveraging the Internet connection that you have locally to get cell service to your phone, except with Wi-Fi calling, it's doing it direct Wi-Fi to your phone as opposed to with a microcell. It is the thing that talks over the Internet. And then it has a little tiny little cell circuit in it, which is why they call it a microcell, and it broadcasts that out so you can get cell service in places where you might not otherwise be able to get it. But Wi-Fi calling was not on by default, which really shocked me. It just seemed to me like this would be something that that had been turned on. He actually got that iPhone 7 at an AT&T store. So he went there to upgrade. I just so I put it on our list for today because it's entirely possible. There are many, many of you listening that don't have Wi-Fi calling enabled, and there's really no reason not to enable it, assuming your phone supports it, which most of the newer iPhones do. And I got news for you. There are many people who haven't enabled it who don't have it. I was one of them. Really? Yes. And we turned it on. Debbie was complaining to me about her phone not working well and our M-cell died for the second time. And I'm like, well, even if they would sell it to me, I'm not about to drop another money for more M-cell. So I said, listen, Wi-Fi calling, it works great, lasts a long time. I have it on my own phone. I went in and I turned it on and I gave it phone back to her. And two months later, she's so gripe and I can't hear anything. I have to stand at the front door on my right foot with my left arm in the air and spin around while I'm talking to people in order to be able to complete a call. And the worst part of this is she does business from the home. So she gripe and about it again the other day and I'm like, something's wrong here. I went in and looked, Wi-Fi calling turned off. Well, why did you turn your Wi-Fi calling off? No wonder you can't complete calls. So I turned it on and went to give it back to her and just before I handed it to her, I saw a little note pop up and then it went away. And it told me you need to contact your carrier. It's going on. And what carrier do you have? AT&T. Okay, so they were the first ones to support Wi-Fi calling. One of the big ones. So I went and tried to turn it on again. You know, I said, okay, well, something's wrong here. I rebooted the phone, turned it back on. Little note pops up, says contact your carrier and then it turns off. So if you aren't fast enough or you aren't paying attention, you think you have Wi-Fi calling enabled and you don't, I actually had to go change out the SIM card at the AT&T store because the gal on tech support told me- No, that's right. Yeah, she goes- The SIM needs to support Wi-Fi calling. She goes, yeah, this SIM card doesn't. That's correct. And they'll comp it for you. It's like a $35 fee or something like that to go, don't worry, you're not paying for that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But yeah, but we thought, I had thought I had Wi-Fi calling on her phone for months and it wasn't there. Wasn't there? So yeah, so turned it on and now she's happy with it. Works great, last long time. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Great sound. It's right, yeah, it's right. Cause you get HD calling just like you would if you were connected to an LTE circuit. Which you don't get with the Microsoft, right? Cause the Microsoft only acts as a 4G so you don't get HD calling with that, yeah. So boy, was that frustrating. So to throw this into the ring, so I'm with Verizon right now and I'm very happy with them. I have no complaints with them. Number one, at least with Verizon, up in the menu bar of your iOS device, you will see, and I'm looking at mine right now, and it says VZW Wi-Fi because it's saying, dude, your Wi-Fi is stronger than my cell signal so I'm gonna go with Wi-Fi. Is that okay? And I guess it is. The other thing I see in the notes that Dave made here is that it's, well, it's not unusual for the providers to have different paths. So what I see in yours, Dave, is that you say settings, phone, Wi-Fi calling is the path that you take, I believe with AT&T. With AT&T, that's right, yep. With Verizon, just for my Verizon peeps, you go to settings, cellular, and then within that screen is a Wi-Fi calling which you can enable or disable. Yeah, okay, so I mean, that's the same. If you go to settings, phone, you'll also see Wi-Fi calling there. You can get there both ways, right? If you go on your phone, because I see Wi-Fi calling if I go to settings, cellular, but if you go to settings, phone, do you also see it there? Let's see here, settings. We're gonna do live. I do not have a settings, phone category. Yeah, you do, it's down a ways. Down, down, down. There it is, all right, phone, Wi-Fi calling. Okay, it's in different places. Yeah, so it's not different per carrier, it's iOS 11. Okay, but at least Verizon doesn't, I mean, I never had to ask them for permission. I think they just enable it at some point, so good for them. Yeah, cool. Well, you know it's gotta lift their tech support headaches way off when people aren't having roaming issues and calling and going, I got terrible service. That was the best thing they could ever do was to support that. Yeah, right, right, yep. Very, very cool. All right, so make sure to check that because it's good stuff. It's good stuff. All right, we had a couple of questions from the last episode that I wanna go through here, but the first thing that I wanna do, guys, is I want to, actually I wanna talk about our two sponsors if that works for both of you. Yeah, not really, of course. We love our sponsors. All right, I'm gonna keep this first sponsor really short, it's Barebones Software at Barebones.com. You've heard me talk about them before, we talk about them when they're sponsors, of course, because they pay us to do that like they are right now. We also talk about them all the time when we're just discussing things in the show because it's a utility that John and I both use regularly. I have it open right now on my computer. I use it all the time and here's the deal. It's available to you for free. So go to Barebones.com, download BB Edit. Anything you need to do with text, you don't have to be a programmer to use it and to get value out of it, but if you are a programmer, you'll get even more value. But if you need to count words or compare two documents, and it makes it so easy when you're comparing stuff right there, you gotta just go check it out. Go to Barebones.com, download BB Edit. You can use it for free. They do have a paid upgrade, but most of you, frankly, you probably aren't gonna need that. So just go download the free version. Barebones.com, our thanks to Barebones for sponsoring this episode. Our second sponsor for today is Jamf Now. That's J-A-M-F. Now, Jamf Now helps you manage your Apple devices from anywhere. So this is geared towards people running a business, but trust me on this, listen, because you might find a reason that you wanna use this too and you can use it for free in a limited sense. Then that limit might be enough. So bear with me. When you first start your business, it's pretty easy to keep track of your own computer and your phone. But as you start to grow your business and you buy more tech for your employees and people that are working for you, it gets harder to keep track of everyone's Macs, iPhones, iPads. Figuring out how to secure the iPad that your sales rep lost can be tough, especially when you're in different locations. Jamf Now makes that in a lot more way easier. You can configure settings, protect sensitive information, even lock or wipe a device remotely from anywhere. It's like magic. Jamf Now secures your stuff so you can focus on your business. Instead, no IT expertise needed. You do it from a web browser on anything. It just works. It leverages Apple's MDM tech that we talk about here with Apple Configurator, but this is the remote control version of that. Very cool. Here's the deal. Mac eCab listeners can visit jamf.com slash MGG, J-A-M-F dot C-O-M slash M-G-G. And you can set up your first three devices for free for life. After that, each device is just two bucks a month per device. So go create your free account today, jamf.com slash MGG. Here's the thing, I promised you, even if you didn't have a business you might be interested. Ever want to manage your parents' iPhone or a relative's iPhone or even a customer's iPhone? I guess if you have a customer, you have a business. But you get my point. You can manage all this stuff, tweak settings, control things for people remotely, makes things way easier. Go check it out, jamf.com slash MGG. Our thanks to Jamf and Jamf now for sponsoring this episode. All right. Yeah, so let's go through some of these things from the last show, which I've got to find now because it seems to keep things. Well, you know, follow-ups, questions, things like that, right, John? Don't you think? Yeah, we always have some. Yeah. And we thank you for those. No, it's great. It keeps it moving. It's good. From 677, Guido wrote in and asked, I think it's Gwee. Is it Gwee? I thought he liked Gwee. Did I do? Sorry. Guido. Go ahead. Hey. Well, if it's GUI, wouldn't that be Gee? Remember, Father Guido, so I don't know. I don't know. It depends on whether we're talking about. I know we got a pronunciation correction at one point. So our apologies. All right. Our friend. Guido, right? Or Gee. Or it doesn't. I mean, your name is yours, whatever you'd like it to be. He says, Dave mentioned in show 677 that he now shares his iCloud storage with six family members, including his almost grown-up kids and his very grown-up parents. This means, in my opinion, that all six are part of his Apple family. That is correct. He says, but doesn't this also mean that all app purchases from his kids and parents are charged to his credit card? Or how does he prevent that? They can all buy apps, et cetera, and charge his card. This is what has held me back to include my adult sons and their wives slash girlfriends into my Apple family. Thanks for helping. Yeah, you're totally right that my credit card is what gets charged for their purchases when cash is involved. But the trick is doing this with iTunes gift cards. Now, the overreaching principle to remember, and this is both a benefit at times and an absolute curse at times, is that iTunes gift cards only apply to the single person whose account they are attached to. So if, say, my son wants to buy an app, if he doesn't have any gift cards associated with his account, then it builds my credit card. But if my son has a gift card associated with his account, then it dings his gift card first until he runs that out. And then, of course, he doesn't have one in it. Really? It's my credit card. Yeah, so that's where that works. But again, remembering, gift cards are only available to be used by the person whose account they are on means that if I have gift cards on my account and my son goes to buy something, it will charge my credit card. Whereas if I go to buy the very same thing, it would charge my gift card. So there's no way, even though my son, because he's part of the family, even though he can charge my credit card, he can't charge my gift cards, which drives me crazy. Because I load up with gift cards. I try to do that first, sure. Yeah, especially when they're on sale at Christmas time, and that, you know, high pay full price. Well, let me ask this, though. If he has a gift card on his account and he's signed into his Apple ID on his phone, it'll charge to that? Does he not? Or is he signed into your store account? No, he's signed into his account, but he's part of my family, my iCloud family. Boy, that's a really blurry line. And now I'm confused again. Sorry. Well, again, just remember, gift cards are only usable by one person. That's really the way it goes. But the benefits of having everybody on a family account, and you can have up to six total, are numerous. Number one, you share purchases, right? App purchases. Right. So that's great. Everybody's on the same. Yeah, you only buy an app once. Yeah, if I bought the app and my son goes to buy it, it'll say, hey, you don't need to buy this. Now, it's not entirely clear that that's what's going to happen. If he's signed into the family, if he's signed into his own account, then it won't show. Really? Yes, his account is part of the family. And there's no other way to be signed in. So once I make him part of the family, anything he does is part of the family. So we get that, which is good. But we also get Apple Music. You buy a family plan for $15 a month, six people involved. That's good. And again, each have their own Apple Music accounts. But we pay once for the family. Also, as our listener of potentially varying names suggested, as we mentioned last week, we now can share a storage pool. So I buy $10 worth of two terabytes of storage every month. And everybody gets to use iCloud Photo Library and Backup. And we're not even close to hitting two terabytes. And it's awesome. Nice. Yeah, yeah. That brings in the whole. Lisa takes photos on her phone. You take photos on yours. Are they merging the library? They are not merging libraries. There's the problem. Right. They're not merging libraries. They're just sharing storage. OK. Right. Right. Yeah. Now, we can share an album with each other. And then that is shared. And that's fine. Create an album with all photos in it. Could you do that? I don't know. I don't think we could share a smart album, because that's what you're talking about. I mean, you could manually dump all your photos into an album. Yeah. Yeah, sorry. I mean, that just gets tedious. I'm making this hard, Dave. I know it, but I'm sorry. But when we take vacations together, whatever, we'll create an album for that trip. And then we all just sort of pump things into it. And then everybody has it going forward. I mean, it's, oh, yeah. I know that Apple charges folks for storage. And I know that other companies like Google and Amazon, Amazon. Yeah, I guess let you do photo storage for free at some level. And that's frustrating. I'm with you. But once you sort of get over that and start paying Apple the $10 a month for storage so that you can use iCloud Photo Library, man, life gets so much better. Because it's so inaccurate. I love it. Yeah, because it optimizes it on your phone. Yeah. You don't always have a full one. The only problem is I'm on the airplane a lot. So I'll go to pull up like a short video I shot. And not so much. It's not there. Right. But that's OK. Right. Right. Yeah, you've got to get Wi-Fi on your planes, man. We have it, but not for us. It's for the plane to talk to the company. OK. You know, when they pull up to the gate and say, hey, he landed hard. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Big brothers watching. Yeah, of course they are. Yeah. But really, you know, it's like iCloud Photo Library is so well done. I'm really impressed with it. So you are using iCloud Photo Library, right, John? Or no? No. I use the streaming. So I use Photo Stream. You use Photo Stream. Yeah, OK. Yeah, but I do not use iCloud Photo Library. Though I may reconsider that. It's like I said, you know, I know it sucks to pay for it. But man. It's just. Well, I just found it's so good. I mean, the thing is, I just got a sweet deal on a iTunes card, which if you look hard enough, you can find it. I think right now I have like a. $100 plus balance on my. Yeah, iTunes account. So maybe I will. I mean, I did. And that's the right way to do it. Because I mean, I did throw down the cash to get the additional storage beyond the what, five gigs or 10 gigs or whatever they offer now. Five, yeah, yeah. I think I got 50. So yeah, I think that's a dollar a month. OK, I can, you know, I can handle that. Sure. Yeah. Yeah, and you might not need. You might not need two terabytes, right? You might be able to do. You might do OK with whatever. I think there's a 200 gig plan or something like that. So there is. Yeah, they have various plans. And I think if I wanted to move to the next level, I think it's only a few bucks more a month than iCloud would would handle my rather huge photo library. How big is your library? Yeah, it's it's over 100 gigs. I mean, it's basically all the digital photos that I've ever it's all the digital photos that I've ever taken. Sure. Yeah, I think it's 100 or 150. Yeah, I'm not the only one. A lot of a lot of a long time Mac users have photo libraries if you use Apple. That's oh, yeah. No, Lisa's library is almost 300 gigs, which is great. I mean, it you know, and it's all in the cloud now and just killer. Yeah. And for me, now that I have the well upstream that you used to be jealous of, but not anymore. My jealousy caused me to spend some money. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I got 35 gigs upstream. So yeah, it would take a while to get that whole thing up in the cloud, but I can handle it. Yeah. Right. Right. Well, while we're talking about Apple products that did actually are fantastic, I want to take a minute. No, and talk about the AirPods, right? Because I've been using AirPods now for several months. And I have to say, I should not like these things, right? They are. I've never been impressed with the sound of Apple's earbuds or, you know, earpods. Earpods were number one in ear, dude. And number two, I think it wasn't the highest quality. Right. I never was impressed with them. Never liked the sound, never liked the fit, the comfort. None of that with earpods or even the prior ones, the earbuds. And and I'm a I'm an audio snob. I'm picky about the way things work. And so I thought, OK, well, I need to try out the earpods. So I, you know, I got a pair and I bought them. I, you know, these weren't a review unit or anything. I waited my six weeks or whatever. And actually, I didn't even talk about this on the show. I don't think because I wanted to test them out before we talked about it. But they they got I think somebody at FedEx wound up with an extra pair of of earpods because it wasn't me. No one saw me. You can't prove a thing. They made it to Memphis Pete and that's where they stopped. But I was off that day. No one saw me. But Apple shipped out another one and it's fine. But when like these things, they're they're comfortable. Like I almost don't notice they're in my ear, so there's no discomfort with it. I I'm used to in ear earphones. I mean, at the moment, I'm using a set of J.H. Audio Layla's as my monitors because they're reference monitor. But they're, you know, custom fit in ears. But these are not they don't seal at the AirPods. And so I thought I wouldn't like that about them. But man, they're comfortable. They stay and I have I've I've worn them when playing my drums. I've worn them walking around in numerous cities. I've worn them on the bow of a boat going about 25 knots with the wind right in my face. And I turn my head every direction possible. Not only did they not fall out in any of those scenarios, they didn't even move. Like they just stay in and the sound is good. It's quite gravity. They do. Yeah, the sound is good. It's not they're definitely not the best earphones I've ever heard. But I don't expect them for something so tiny. I mean, come on. I mean, how much quality you can get out of a dude. The things I have in my ear now are smaller than AirPods and are the best sound quality I've ever heard in my life and in a headphone. So yes, so you get what you pay for. Because from what I understand, you get the custom ones, like you put a thing in your ear and they mold it. And I have 12 drivers in each of my ears at the moment. And it's very personal. Yes, that is a very personal thing to have. I mean, what do you do? Do you do you actually put something in your ear like a mold? And then they they. All right. So so hold that question. Or let's not know that's a good it's a great question. And I know people are interested. But let's just let's just come let's just come around to it. So we'll finish up the AirPods and then I'll answer that with with these AirPods. The sound like and I've worn them on airplanes too. So on the boat and on an airplane and playing my drums, they're not my favorites because they don't seal. And so sound gets in wind sound, the noise of the engines, all that sort of thing on the airplane. It's just you've got to crank them all the way up to hear them. And I know if I'm cranking them up, I'm damaging my hearing because I'm operating at full blast, even though it doesn't sound like I'm operating at full blast. So that's frustrating. Yeah, you know, they aren't the best airplane. No, they're not. They're not built for the air. You know, they need active noise canceling to do that. So they're going to do that. Yeah, but in order to do active noise canceling, you need to seal. Yeah. Yeah. And but here's the thing, like walking around in a city not having them seal is awesome because I can leave them at a very low volume. I can listen to music or a podcast, whatever I want. And I'm still totally aware of my surroundings. I can hear things. It's I mean, it's fantastic. I really love these things. And and and so they're worth the hundred and twenty nine bucks for all the reasons I just told you. And they're also worth another hundred and twenty nine bucks because it's absolutely the best Bluetooth headset I've ever used in my life. And you get it all together as one. They are stellar, like there's nothing I've used that's better than this. And I've tried out a ton of high end Bluetooth headsets. These just work. Let me say a couple of things. Yeah, the cool thing is you can use them one of the time, if need be. Either ear, either ear, one of the time. If you have both in and you take it out of your ear, take one out of your ear, talk to somebody in a line of the store. It pauses your podcast. It pauses your music, whatever. Stick it back in. It goes, oh, you ready to listen to more? Starts it back up again. Amazing. And then the whole back and forth with one ear or the other. When you put it in the case, the case has a little battery in it. Recharges so it go all day and you never have to recharge. My only complaint is there is the find my iPhone app, right? Yeah, it would be nice to be able to. And it will find your AirPods if they're not in the case. Really, I didn't know that. The case I saw you post about that day. Do you believe the case shields? No, no, the case turns everything off. That's all it is. Yeah, yeah. So when you put them in the case, they power down, right? And the case powers down to like the case is intelligent. If I open the case near my phone, I get a little sheet that that sort of appears on my phone and shows me the battery level of both the case and of the AirPods. But but but when the case is closed, it never wakes up, not even for a little bit. And so these things will go missing for me for days. So so in theory, with a software update, they could fix that for you. You know what? That's true. Yeah, because all it would need is like the case to wake up once an hour and just say, hey, anybody looking for me? Right. I'm looking. Anybody looking for me? Nope. OK. Yeah. And the case battery may. But I understand that one or two people at Apple may listen to us. So right, perhaps your feature request. That's true. Each stem. And maybe they could put it. Yeah, that would be nice. Yeah. In the in the selection saying, hey, you know, it'll draw some power. But it'll provide you with the functionality that you want. I like it. Yeah. And you actually there are some things. There are accessories. There's cool ones that have like a little strap that fit around the shaft down at the bottom. So you can hang them around your neck if you want to. And the other one was the the ear buddies. And they get it's like a little rubber hook and they fit on there. Provides a little bit more of a seal. I can listen to mine on the airplane. With the with the ear buddies in, I believe that, you know. And so there's a picture of OK, like it almost looks like something on a other Bluetooth headset. But I got to say, Dave, I saw more than one person, as you probably did when we did our Manhattan venture. And I did another one. I saw more than one person during my MTA subway ventures that clearly had these devices in their ears. Oh, yeah, they're quite. Just like the crummy apple, you know, standard ear ear pods or whatever the hell they call them. Yeah, I saw plenty of people wearing them, and they all seem to be pretty happy. Oh, it's awesome. You know, I was in New York again this week for the Sonos. Oh, yeah, I got some nice stuff going on. Yeah. And it's just crazy. I got off the plane, walked through the airport, went outside, flew into Newark. I walked outside, was waiting for my Uber to take me into town. My Uber gets there. I start walking toward the Uber. And I feel like there's something on the bottom of my foot, but something's not right. And I get in the Uber and realize the heel of my shoe has now, like, totally disintegrated. And, you know, I was only going overnight. And so I it's the one that's just New Jersey, man. It's the one trip I've done in years where I didn't bring a second pair of shoes. And like, oh, crap. And I was but I was staying in the Loris Village. And so I thought, OK, fine. So I like ripped the heel off my shoe. And it was functional, but it obviously wasn't comfortable. But I could walk and it wasn't going to like hurt me or anything. And so six blocks away, there was a shoe store or whatever from my hotel. But I put my AirPods in and I walked down to the shoe store and I bought more shoes. But and I threw my old ones away because, you know, no heel sucked. Yes, it's crazy. But yeah, they're really they're stellar. I'm really blown away with with the job that Apple has done. I I will say this. I believe that the AirPods are this single best product that Apple new product that Apple has announced in the Tim Cook era, like by far, by far. I've heard the same. And for you as an audio that's the thing is I should not. Oh, I would I would say that your opinion counts. I almost felt embarrassed. How much I liked them. And I've I've run into other, you know, audio nuts. And and we all have the same reaction. It's like, OK, right? We can we can talk about this, right? That we like these things that's OK. Yep, we can talk about it. That's OK. Yeah. Yeah. They're great. But I think of anything they're not the best sound. It's making up for the totally crummy experience. I've never used the AirPods that came with any device. No, in my ears, because number one, I'm not really an ear in ear person. I'm more a headphone person. And even when I tried them, I was like, you know, these suck, man, and they fall out of my ears. You know, but apparently Apple did under Tim an excellent outstanding job of making the UI slash UX of this to be. Oh, a pleasure. It's a that's what it is. It's a total pleasure. Yeah. Yeah. Here's the thing. It is what you need. And you don't think about it. Every other pair of earphones that I have also cannot be found by my iPhone when they're off. Right. Let's point. I mean, let's be fair here. There's nothing that I own that can do this one thing that I've complained about with the AirPods. But it's simply because the AirPods work so well in every other way and are intuitive in every other way that this isn't glaring. What you wanted to do. Sure. Right. Sure. Yeah. That's the only reason I'm complaining about it. So and the one thing we haven't mentioned about it is the microphone quality on phone calls is outstanding. No one knows you're on a dead set. No, it's bizarre. Stellar because I've had some headsets and people are you're in a can. I can't hear you know, don't get that. I had that piece when I used early, very early, like version one Bluetooth headsets, I could have people telling me you're talking on a headset, your audio sucks. And yeah, they've gotten past that. The audio quality of Bluetooth. Some haven't done, John. I had some I had some of the early I hate to drop a brand name here. I had some early LG Bluetooth headsets that the microphone quality was good. People are like, Oh, that's great. Yeah. You know, oh, yeah. But recently I had a hundred seventy dollar pair recently and I couldn't I gave them to my son. My 11 year old son has a hundred seventy dollar pair Bluetooth headset because the microphone is so bad in them. I couldn't make the product stuff is good. Yeah. That was what I used. The fifty two hundred or whatever before I got AirPods and though it's like it's why I still use that when I can't find my AirPods. The ones that I think are designed for calling are pretty good. But some of the stereo Bluetooth headsets are. Yeah, exactly. All right. So traumatize you guys. The thing is, I still use as those some people in my family like my sister, we still use analog headsets. Yeah. Well, you won't use that when you get a new iPhone. That's crazy talk, John. There's I mean, well, no, I have the adapter. I still have an old digital analog. I still have a wireless or some AirPods. I'm actually curious. You know, I'm I'm I'm I'm considering it because of your. Yeah, you as someone who is enthusiastic, who does not who does not like in your stuff. I'm really curious how you feel like it's in here because of that seal. I think I can throw down the coin. Yeah. And get some. Yeah. Like so to answer your question, to move on, well, I'll answer this and we'll see where we are time wise. But in terms of factor, in terms of getting custom fit earphones. So the old way, which is still done by most companies is that you go to an audiologist and they squirt goop in your ear, each ear and then depending on how you're having them made, they might tell you have your mouth open, have your mouth closed, but you leave it like that for about five minutes. The group sort of solidifies in your ear. They pull it out and they give you your molds that you that they just took out of your ear. You ship those off to whatever company is going to make you your earphones. And usually you can get your audiologist to do the aforementioned molding impressions for like 50 bucks. You know, that's about what you're going to pay. And then from there, you ship those off to whatever company's going to make them. Most recently, the ones that I'm wearing right now, I had done that way just this past year from their J.H. Audio. Jerry Harvey, that's where the J.H. comes from. He was the person who founded a company called Ultimate Ears, which is one of the first ones that was doing this. He wound up selling Ultimate Ears. There's actually a great gig gap interview that we did with Jerry about how he sold that company and he didn't want to, but he kind of had to. Investors forced him to do that. But anyway, he he made this this set that I have for me. Like I said, they're the Layla's from him. They're they're they're built as reference monitors. So they're they're built to do exactly what I'm doing here, either with a podcast or if you're mixing music, they've got 12 drivers per ear. It's insane, but they are stellar and they sound crystal clear. But then they're perfectly comfortable because they're custom fit to my ear, but they seal 100 percent. Well, not 100 percent, but they seal like, you know, 35 decibels or something. I mean, it's a huge drop. So they were they were molded in the in the traditional way. And these were correct on the first pass. And not everything is. And if they're not and you're getting custom fit stuff done, where you're paying, you know, at least hundreds, if not many thousands of dollars to get a set done, you definitely want them right. But the J.H. Ones that I did with the traditional molds worked out fine. Ultimate ears, which I've had many sets before, including some that Jerry made me when he was when he was running it. Uh, recently made me a set of Ultimate ears, U.E. 11s that I use on stage and and those were done with a new method. I went to see a guy who was not an audiologist. In fact, he's he's a drummer guy named Libor Hadrava down in Massachusetts. And he had a 3D scanner that he put in my ear, John. And I could see it scanning my ear on the computer screen in front of me as he did this. Uh, it took maybe about the same amount of time, maybe five minutes per ear or whatever. He did this scan and then, you know, had me type in my name and my email or whatever into a web form. We hit send and boom, they were already at Ultimate's office in Irvine, California. And, uh, now those took a couple of times back and forth to get right that I've had happen. It happens where the fits, like the seal's not perfect or whatever. So I wouldn't say that the 3D scanning is any more or less accurate than, than the other way, but it's certainly way more convenient and not having to get gooped up and you don't have to pay an audiologist and all that stuff. So that's sort of the new way to do it. Does that answer the question? I think so. So it sounds like at this point, so you can either get an audiologist or a specialist. It'd be nice if kind of like, uh, you know, kind of like we do, we do with, uh, uh, Warby Parker. Yeah. Yeah. You do self serve, like you get a kit that has the goop and you stuff it in your ear and, you know, it dries or whatever. You could get a kit. You can. And I did it for my aviation headset and I worked out pretty well. But, and I was sitting here and I'll give you the link if you want. This is cool. It says make them make custom silicone in-ear molds for your in-ear monitors. And essentially what you do is you need a you need a set of earplugs like I have it in these of the little $20 in-ear buds and all that. But you get this kit from Radeon, I think it is. I'll find it. It'll put it in the show. You put it in, you do the mold. And then what you do is you take the little rubber piece off of your monitor and stick it into the molded silicone. Yeah. Let it sit for the five minutes or so, then take it out and then it shows you how to cut the little the last little bit, that little hole out. Yeah. And then these fit in and you've got it in your mold. Yeah. So you make your own pair. It looks like it's less than $15. So there are people that offer self-serve. But yeah. But I mean, is this I mean, you know, aviation earpieces? Oh, well, those have to be. Yeah, those have to be TSO to a certain level and all that kind of stuff. But so there's a there's a company called Decibels with a Z D-E-C-I-B-U-L-L-Z that does the same thing. They send you a kit. You put the the it comes with the mold, which then becomes your earpiece. Right. And you put it in boiling water or hot water, whatever it is, you get it soft, you mash it into your ear with either an earpiece or an earplug in it. Yeah. Pouring boiling water in your ear doesn't sound like the best idea. Well, yeah, there's some instructions. Oh, follow the instructions. All right. Once again, no, but and I will say this, I'll add this costume because I do have a good but not great aviation headset right now. And I did the reason is I did not push the mold far enough into my ear canal that I get the seal that I really like with it. It's good, but it ain't great. Yeah. And so be sure to push it far enough in if you're going to do that on your own. That's why the audiologist is good. They've done this before. That's the thing is they know they can pull it out. And like I've had them. There was a period of time, I don't know, like 10 years ago, maybe more, where I was getting this done constantly. And my audience, there were times where she pulled it out and looked at it and said, no, got to do a new one. Yeah. It's like, how do you know? She's like, come on, like this is my I've trained. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Like, oh, never mind. You you do you. Yeah. So I guys take you exciting. Again, I think I'm going to put on my shopping list. Cool. Ear pods because they sound pretty cool. Yeah. Air pods. Ear pods are different. Ear pods are their pods. Ear pods are the wired ones. You have those already, most likely. Yeah. Ear pods are the ones. Yeah. I want the air pods. Take us to Eric, John. We have a little like a little bit of time left. So let's see if we can. OK. Well, I'm going to take us a few places here. So number one, well, the thing is it was initially a question from Greg and basically his question was, how do I partition a USB flash drive that I store my iOS installers on? And he said, we talked about this last week. Yeah. Yes. And so we got a follow up here. So number one, Apple's utility out of the box doesn't cut it. So we suggested that he goes to the terminal. OK. And believe it or not. So his feedback, so I'm going to do a double dip here. So his feedback was thanks that did exactly what I wanted it to do. And I discovered an interesting tidbit about partitioning drives in the guide that you sent me to. In the GUI for partitioning drives, Apple only allows you to make 16 in the terminal. You can create as many as you want. I didn't need more than that, but it was interesting to add that note. So I wanted to add that note. So thank you, Greg, for giving us the feedback and that the terminal is the way to go for, you know, if you want to get the bang for your buck. But then we got a follow up from Eric saying, you know what? Yeah, that was kind of overkill, John. And I'm like, OK. But basically, the feedback from Eric was you probably the listener probably could have gotten accomplished what they wanted to do if they went into. If they went to this utility and the thing is in this utility, there is a kind of hidden secret menu. And I think it's a show all devices. And the thing is, if you if you go to that and you select that, you'll get a lot more options where is this super secret hidden menu? Because if it's secret and hidden, we're not going to find it unless we know. Well, it's not super secret and hidden. But the thing is, so in this utility, if you go to view. So by default, this is in high Sierra only. It could be with prior versions. There is no view menu in this utility in Sierra. OK, well, then it's just high Sierra. So the thing is, so the feedback was in this utility in high Sierra, which I'm running right now and I'm looking at right now, you have a view menu and you have two choices. By default, it says show only volumes. Then there's another choice that is not the default as far as I can see. Say show all devices. So if you choose that, you will get additional options in the menu bar on the left side of the screen. OK. And in a nutshell, to keep things tight here, that is another way to accomplish, to potentially accomplish what you want with this utility, sure, as far as partitioning. Oh, that's cool. So cool. Just want to share that. And I see that. And yeah, it definitely shows additional partitions and containers and whatever. So for anybody that runs this utility, it's probably worth your while to run it. And I think it's command two. So normally volumes, command one, show all devices, command two. And there you go. You get more options. Cool. All right. You got time for one more follow up there, John, from the last show. Do you think? And let me. Well, while you research that, I am going to follow up from us earlier in this show with a calendar discussion. John, a listener, John, in the chat room, dug into this and indeed what Pete was suggesting will work according to his his tests is that you make a calendar public. Now, the trick is, if you click that link, it will do exactly what we just heard. And that is that it will try to download all those events and put them on your calendar, but it won't subscribe in order to do it. You have to in in whatever program you're using. So in calendar, you say, where is it here? He gave us instructions. And now I'm trying to find them. You you say, add a subscribed calendar and you paste in the URL. So you go to settings, you choose mail contacts and calendars on your iPhone. You say, add account, you say, other, you say, add subscribed calendar. And then you paste the URL into the window. And that will work. That will subscribe your iPhone directly to that calendar. So hopefully that helps folks out there. But the trick is on the Google side to make the calendar public. Grab the iCal link, but don't click it directly. You just need to use the URL and paste it into that add subscribed calendar thing. So yeah, yeah, very cool. So thank you, John. Pays off, beautiful. Yeah, no, it's good. That's why that's the thing I love about the chat room is we were able to do this stuff in real time. So thank you follow up, Dave. Yeah, very brief. But so Peter provided this as a follow up to six, seven, seven. So we had we've had I've seen a ton of people complain about this. And I was a victim of this. I don't know if you guys were when you updated to high Sierra, but it seemed to obliterate your login items. So I didn't have that, John, except OK, when I rebooted my machine probably for the first time three days ago, it blew away my login items. So they made the transition and now they're gone. It was just a reboot. It wasn't an update, nothing had just rebooted. Well, it's just a feature you didn't know you needed, Dave. You didn't really want all those logon items, did you? No, I did. And the problem was it's like I didn't know what they were. I had to pull up the iMac here in the studio to say like, OK, I basically have these computers similar like what what am I missing? Oh, crap. Yeah, I need that stuff like Hazel. I wouldn't have known if I was missing Hazel until like all my automation wasn't working. And I think I told you, I noticed it was like, gee, my menu bar seems very. Lean. Why could that be? And then I looked at my login items and it's like, well, that's because it wasn't launching half the things that we used to launch. Anyways, so Peter wrote in Peter, one of our longtime listeners and Twitter pal and Hi, Peter, thank you. He says, I, too, experienced the bug of login items from system preferences, users and groups being blank. After upgrading the high Sierra, the fix and this is a potential fix. But I'm going to give it a copy up because I looked into this. The fix, one fix could be replacing home slash library slash preferences slash com dot apple dot login items dot P list with a backup from a prior upgrade. Back up. Yeah. And I will get that, though. The thing is I will offer a caveat for that, Dave, in that. So the thing is, this happened on both of my machines, both my MacBook Pro and my Mac mini. And on my Mac mini, Dave, one of the items in the login items is something called iTunes helper. Right. OK. The thing is, as far as I can tell, the thing is I saw. So the thing is my solution was to take screenshots of login items from my prior. That's a smart move. Yeah. And then migrate them. The thing is, Dave, they moved some things, including iTunes, which I'm not surprised about, because the thing is when I looked for iTunes helper, all the help articles I could find said, well, yeah, look here for it. And I'm like, well, it's not there. So my only caution with the best way to re-add things is to go to their apps and check the box that says I started startup. Yeah. The thing is, in the case of iTunes, iTunes moved as far as I can tell between the the the various versions, the the old OS and the new OS, Apple moved the location of iTunes helper, OK, which is an app that for the most part detects when you plug in a device. It's like, oh, hi, iPhone or iPad or whatever. Yeah, let me do some nice things for you. That's what I let me launch iTunes is what it does as far as I can do. And then do useful things. The thing is they move the location of that. It used to be in one place in the iTunes package. Sure. Would you map to in login items? And then they moved it in in the latest OS. So right. But the best way to to do that would be to just go into iTunes preferences, devices and make sure the prevent isn't checked automatically. Yeah. The thing is, some of the things that are in login items aren't necessarily easily locatable. I agree. This is what I'm saying. Well, if you don't know that sometimes they're buried in packages. Yeah. And you can't easily add. Well, that's what I'm saying. Just go into the apps and tell the apps to do it. Yeah. And that's what I did. For the most part, when I said to the app, like Dropbox or this or that, it's like, yeah, load on login. And they're like, yeah, sure, whatever, we'll re-add it. But it's just not a fish shake. But now I'll I'll say it's a fish shake. Why did Apple destroy this? Yeah. So listener Warren in the chat room has been saying that that there's some things being blocked because of kernel extensions loading. But none of the ones that got removed from me had anything to do with kernel extensions. So I know, likewise, it's just they just all got obliterated. Yeah. It was like, where'd they go? Yeah, where'd they go? Yeah, no kidding. So for those who are thinking of upgrading to High Sierra. Check your login items. Yeah, just take screenshots. Yeah, take screenshots or whatever. And when you're back from the upgrade, you may have to add them back. Yeah, yeah. Good stuff. Pete, it's good to have you back, man. Good to be back. Yeah. Thanks for having me. It was nice being hit. Yeah, it's good to have any here, man. All right, I want to take a minute and thank all of our premium subscribers that contributed this week. But first, I want to thank all of our premium subscribers that were on credit cards that converted to our new credit card system this week. There are lots of you. We sent out emails to everyone affected. It's possible it wound up in your, you know, spam or news folder or something. But but you can visit your subscription at mackeykeb.com slash premium if you want to see if you're on the legacy system. It'll show you when you log in there. But for everybody that converted over already, thank you so much. There's so many of you and and you rock. So for those that contributed this week, we had a couple of one time subscriber, one time contributions. Kevin asked for 100 bucks. Kenneth Kay for 25. Thank you so much to both of you. And and then on subscription renewals, we have in the 10 bucks, 10 bucks a month plan, Frank, a Abdullah, B, Mark, R, Michael, B, Barry, F, Jim, E, James, B and John G. And on the biannual plan, 25 bucks for most of you, although Lawrence H was at 50. And then David C, Chris H, Anthony T, Kurt T, Ralph F, Paul K, Bob H, Robin J, Bob H, Mark W. Thank you so much to all of you, you rock. Really, really rock. Thanks so much. They all rock. I'm going to say, I think we mentioned Barry F. I think I think we both know that guy. We both know a lot of the people that I mentioned, John. Barry F. Was the first is the nicest guy in the world. Barry was the first was the first premium subscriber. That's right. Yeah. Thank you, Barry. Yeah. Thank you, everybody. You really rock. Really appreciate it. All of you premium subscribers, of course, can email us at premium at MacGeekAb.com. Everybody can email us at feedback at MacGeekAb.com. And I think, Dave, I'm pretty sure I heard you, but Pete may help me out here. But I'm pretty sure you said feedback at MacGeekAb.com. Feedback, back, feedback, feedback. That's what the horse. No, no, no, no, no, no, feedback. No, feedback at MacGeekAb.com. I think that's what you said. You're not helping, Pete. 224888 Geek is the number that you can call. And John Geek is always four, three, three, five. Indeed. And you can visit us in our Facebook group at MacGeekAb.com slash Facebook. That is where you will find some great folks helping you answer your questions. We're there, too, of course, but it's more than just us. Really, really good stuff. I want to thank our sponsors, of course, Jamf at or Jamf Now, I should say, at Jamf.com slash MGG. Barebone Software at Barebones.com. Smile Software at or Smile at Smile Software.com. I'll get it right one of these days. All the world computing at MacSales.com. Very, very good stuff. Pete, help us out. I got one quick question for you guys. Would you guys both agree that we're all good guys? I think we're all good guys. John, are we good guys or not? That's relative, man. Are we good guys? Yes or no question. Yeah. You see what I do? Yeah, see, exactly. I'm thanks for the help, Dave. So we're good guys. And by definition, good guys are bad guys who don't get caught.