 The Mac Observers' Mackie Gab episode 876 for Monday, June 14th, 2021. And welcome to the Mac Observers' Mackie Gab, the show where you send in your questions, your tips, your cool stuff found to us at feedback at MackieGab.com. We take those questions, tips and cool stuff found. We try to answer your questions. We share your tips and cool stuff found. Sometimes we share tips and cool stuff found of our own with the goal being each and every one of us learns at least five new things. Every single time we get together, sponsors for this episode include Bear Bones, BB Edit, Long Time Favourite, LadderLife.com slash MGG. Great service there. Lino.com slash MGG. Great service and Long Time Favourite and Business Movers. The Enlightenment of Steve Jobs over on Wondery. Great new podcast. We'll talk more in depth about each of those shortly here. For now, here in Durham, New Hampshire, I'm Dave Hamilton. And here in Trifle, Connecticut, this is John F. Brown. Yeah, man. How how's the the spring that is quickly approaching summer becoming for you? Oh, pretty good. How to a minor adventure, as I think you saw last week. With with your car? Yes. Yeah, I think you mentioned it in the show, or maybe you mentioned it in pre-show. I can't remember. We spoke a lot last week with both eight seventy four and eight seventy five with Dave Mark. So yeah, it's good. It was kind of a cool stuff found, though. OK, I can make quick work of it. So. So yeah, I was driving around town and my break pedal went to the floor. It's like, OK, fortunately, I could still break. It was just a lot harder. So. Sure. Tip number one, get triple A if you have an older vehicle. Because they they came to tow it to my preferred place. But I did a little experiment. So, you know, I put the air tag in my car, Dave. Well, I I also put one on my extra set of keys. And the guy brought it there and behold, the power of the find my network. And I sent you a map showing so apparently as long as, you know, you're in an area that has other devices, it's essentially a GPS because the address it gave was exactly the address of where it was being brought. So that was neat. I never tried that with my other trackers. Though they have a similar concept, it's just, you know, their net versus the find my network. And I think the find my network is probably bigger. I would guess that if it's not currently bigger, it will be because it it would be every iOS device running iOS 14 or later, right? So it or 14 point something or later. But yeah, yeah, I agree. Hey, I know it's not quite as old as your car, John, but we do. I would like to wish you a happy anniversary, my friend, because on Sunday, June 13th, so depending on whether you're listening to the live stream, which is being recorded on Friday, June 11th or the show, which is being released on June 14th. It's either in the future or the past, but Sunday, June 13th marks the 16th anniversary of us doing this show because it was June 13th, 2005, was when we released our first episode. I will find a link to the first episode and put it in the show notes. By no means is this an endorsement or a suggestion that you go and listen every now and then. Our first episode, John, it comes up on my, you know, in my car, whatever on my playlist for whatever reason. And it's the it let's just say we've iterated. We've come a long way. We did not stagnate. We have, I think we've made the show better. So but you can let us know. I'll put a link in the in the show notes. So yeah, when I learned something else, what's that? Speaking of the age of one's vehicle, I was chatting with the people at the place once they finished the work and I'm like, oh, you know what? I never got an emissions card in the mail. Most states do some form of emissions testing, of course, on a regular basis. And I'm like, I didn't get the card. Now there was a hack. So I read and apparently the database got corrupt or something. So maybe it's that. And the person at the at the place said, oh, well, I have access and enhanced access to the database. And she was like, oh, there's a good reason you're exempt. I'm like, really? Really? Cars over 25 years old no longer have to get emissions, which I think is kind of weird. I think you want to do that since it'd be more likely to. Yeah, malfunction. Yeah. Interesting. Huh. Well. That's a saving 20 bucks a year. There you go. There you go. All right. So I think I found a link for the for the Mackey Cab anniversary in the show notes, I think I can't test it all right now because obviously we're, you know, we're doing this. So I'm going to keep doing this. Speaking of keeping and doing, let's should we jump to some quick tips here, John? Please. Do the thing that we do. Alex shares, he says, as you may know, Safari has a picture in picture mode for that it's had for more than a little while. By default, the floating video window is attracted to one of the four corners of the screen in that it snaps there when you move it. He says, but if you hold the command key while moving the window around, it will not get pulled to the nearest corner. Instead, it will remain wherever you leave it, allowing your picture and picture window to end up wherever you prefer. Moving the window around a second time without the command key held down, returns the snap behavior and will pop it back into a corner. I could see this being really useful. I often will take a picture and picture window and drag it to my like my second screen or something. And I don't I I've always it's always bothered me that it like snaps to the corner. It's like, no, can you just stay there? Like I've got all this real estate. I know where I want it. Never knew about this command tip. So thank you, Alex. Go command drag Safari's picture and picture window and it it behaves and stays, which is good. Nice. Yeah, pretty good. Thanks, Alex. All right. Jamie's got a good one that will help prevent disaster, I think. You think you know the rules for dragging and dropping files. If you drag and drop to the same volume, the files are moved. And if you drag to a different volume, the files are copied. However, as our file system environment has become more complex, it becomes less and less obvious which destinations are considered to be on the same volume. I have lost files because I thought I was making a copy when I was actually moving them. The bad thing about this is that you might not realize it until much later that the files are no longer in their original location. The problem is magnified if the original files are located in a folder monitored by some kind of sync process like Dropbox or Synology Drive. The accidental deletion can propagate to other systems. This is the problem on the Mac for sure, but my biggest problem came on the Synology DSM using File Station. I wanted to copy a lot of files from my Synology to a USB Drive. I dragged a huge batch of them from their home volume to the USB Drive. That's a different volume, so it should copy, right? Wrong. I found out about two-thirds of the way through and maybe a couple of hours later that it was actually moving my files from the NAS to the USB Drive. I stopped the move and managed to get the files copied back. I never imagined that DSM would move my files without an even, are you sure? So on macOS and DSM, you can select a batch of files and copy and paste them. I'm gonna do this for now, Juan. Yeah, that's interesting. I guess this sort of makes sense with the split volumes and stuff. I don't know, I would have assumed it would copy not move, but it's good to know that it does not. He's right. If you wanna copy something, use the finders copy and paste or if you're running a Synology, use DSM's copy and paste. That's, yeah, okay, fair. That's not how I thought it would behave, but that's a good one, man. Yeah, I thought. Well, I think if you right-click in DSM, it will give you explicit choices in the little pop-up in the contextual menu. That's right. Yeah, dragging in DSM is not as clear, but you're absolutely right. Yeah, right-clicking in DSM, you get to choose copy or move, which I've always liked. I find that handy. Yeah, it's good. In the last episode, John, we were talking about powering down your television with your Apple remote and how that was a little bit of a trick. Well, listener John has an answer for us. He says, believe it or not, the sleep command on the Apple TV will turn off TVs with infrared if they don't support the HDMI CEC off command. He says, but you have to have your remote pointed towards the TV. He says, I know this because my bedroom TV behaves exactly like this. I had no idea that there was infrared transmitter in the Apple remote, but according to listener John, there is. He's someone who has sent in advice many times over the years. He understands this stuff quite well. So I have not tested this. I can't really test it, but I trust him. So thank you for that, John. That's great. Very cool. Yeah, I looked at mine the other day and yeah, it has a little window on the top, which yeah, it must be the IR. Now it does the, you know, I don't think my, no, I think that maybe it does. The Mac mini has IR also and I've used it in the past like with the Apple remote. I don't know if my 2018 has one though. Okay, yeah. Well, how do we find out? Go, I would probably look at USB. What does it think I have? Nope. No, nothing. Okay. Yeah, so the last one did. That was kind of a neat hidden feature. And actually the MacBook also had an IR receiver, or a prior one. Yeah, the older ones did. It's been a while though, since they had IR receivers built into them. I remember when I got my, it might have been my 2018 MacBook Air, but honestly it might have even been my 2011 Air. I was all excited. I'm like, oh, I have an extra Apple remote. I'll use that for like when I'm doing keynote and stuff. And I got to a hotel room to practice and was like, how come this doesn't work? Like, oh, it doesn't have an IR. So I think it's been 10 years since they've had a released laptop that has an IR receiver. But it's fine. Yeah. Actually, I'd be curious, folks, what is your favorite, now that we're getting back to sometimes doing things in person, what is your favorite keynote remote? And obviously you can do it with your watch. You can do it with your iPhone. I find both of those to be remarkably clunky during presentations. I have like a $9 remote that I have used for probably 15 years. It's all self-contained. It's like the size of a pen. And it has, like in the top of it, it's got a little, I wish I had it so I could show it on the video here, but it connects USB to my Mac and then it connects wirelessly to its little USB dongle. But it's a little USB dongle lives inside of it. So I'm never at a risk of losing it. It runs on a AAA battery and I think I've been using the same battery ever since I got it. It's very low power and it's even got a laser pointer in it. So that's what I use, but I'd be curious to hear what you folks use. So as I said before, feedback at macicab.com is where we'd love to hear from you. Yes, he said, feedback at macicab.com. That is true. That is what I said. All right, you want to take us, speaking of remotes, Greg's got something to say, right, John? Yeah, I'm looking at one that I was just playing around with. Oh, okay. I'm not sure if it can do keynote though. Keynote's pretty, I mean, if it works with a Mac, it would work with keynote. It's pretty universal in that sense. So, yeah. All right, well, let me, yeah, I'll read through the. Okay, cool. Later here, but Greg, okay, one remote to rule them all. A short follow up to listener David's quick tip in episode eight 74 where he discussed some challenges he faced powering off his TV with the Apple remote. The quick tip left and subsequent discussion left me scratching my head until I realized it was probably centered around the previous first gen S-Lady remote based on the comment from the listener that there is no off button. So I thought I'd share a more positive experience for those who may be considering the new Apple TV 4K model with the new remote that does have a dedicated on off button. I've been using the newest Apple TV 4K since it was released a few weeks ago and I found that the new remote works flawlessly with all my components as long as HDMI CEC is enabled. I have the aforementioned Apple TV 4K, a 10 year old then on receiver at 2016 LG OLED with HDMI CEC enabled on all components. Using the new Apple TV remote, remote's dedicated power button. I'm able to power everything on with a short tap by the power button and power everything off with a long press. Additionally, the volume up down mute operations work exactly as they should control the volume on the receiver. I haven't needed to reach for my harmony in route since I got the new Apple TV 4K. As an aside, thanks to CEC, the original LG magic remote that came with the TV also works flawlessly to control everything in case you're in a household with his and her remote. I didn't think about that. That's a great idea, yeah, okay. You don't get the nifty fast forward rewind capability Apple rolled out with the new click pad ring but the directional arrows work just as you would expect then all components including the Apple TV are controlled properly. I know this may not work with TV's receiver, some of the manufacturers, but it seems like if HDMI CEC is implemented correctly in the various components, the chances of success should be pretty good. Last, I know that it's possible to purchase a remote to use with an older Apple TV but I don't have the previous gen model to test with so can't say for sure if it works. Okay, Greg, thank you. Yeah, that's very interesting. Those LG magic remotes, my only problem, I like their remote because we have an LG TV. The problem is it's like a cat toy, John, because as soon as I aim the remote at the TV and move it to show that I'm potentially gonna do something with the remote, a red dot appears on my TV screen. I got three cats in my house. That becomes a magnet for them to dive at my television which is something I try to avoid for a variety of reasons. So that remote has to be used very, very judiciously if you will. So yeah, we have to use it when it's like we look around and it's like, all right, are there any cats in sight? Okay, no, great, we can use that remote, but yeah. All right, let's see where are we here? Yeah, oh, jumping off the remote train and back to quick tips in general, listener Jeff notes something he says, I found by accident when I was clearing out random screenshots that I seem to accidentally keep taking on my phone. He says, I noticed a screenshot of my carplay screen and thought, wait, when did I take that? Well, he says, it turns out if you take a screenshot while connected to carplay, you actually take two screenshots at the same time. One of them is of the phone screen and the other is of your carplay screen. When you click the little icon to edit or mark up the screenshot, you can swipe left and right and select which one you wanna use. I'm not sure how useful this would be for your listeners, but nevertheless, it's cool. And one of the five things to learn and put away until you actually need it one day. Yeah, there was something I needed to do where I were having a screenshot of carplay was helpful, but yeah, I stumbled upon this. I think it was the first time I was driving in Boston and I noticed this was probably iPhone 11 days, let's say. And I noticed that my phone said 5G E for the first time. This was like fake 5G, right? The AT&T's, whatever it was at the time. And so I just reached down and did the screenshot motion on my phone, you know, with the two buttons. I didn't, I was as safe as possible in this. Never once did my eyes leave the road. But yeah, when I got home and looked, it was like, hey, there's two screenshots there. That's interesting. So yeah, yeah, it's good. The things we find, I like it. It's good. Speaking of the car, you got some gas tips to share, following up from a previous episode, John? Oh, I'm gonna share some, Don shared with us. And I'm gonna regionalize a bit because he regionalized it. So he's saying it's common knowledge that gasoline is expensive in California. And I saw somebody post a little while ago and it was almost like a dollar more than I pay out here. Right now it's about three bucks a gallon out here. And there have been various disasters that have caused the prices to fluctuate, refineries and that whole, anyways, and that whole pipeline thing. The pipeline thing, yeah. So it's kind of getting back to normal. Anyways, so a couple of categories. So one, membership stores like Costco, Sam's and one that we have out here is called BJ's. But typically these are places where you pay a membership fee and then you can get mass quantities of things for little money. So we got that out here. So that's one suggestion. Yeah, cause they sell gas. They often have gas pumps at a discount for members, right? Yeah, our BJ's in Fairfield does not, but the other ones do. And then, so the second suggestion is grocery stores. Albertson, Ralph's, Vaughn's, none of which we have in Connecticut, though we have Stop & Shop, same thing. Is that for every dollar you spend, like here it's every dollar you spend, you get 10 cents or every $100 you spend, you get 10 cents off a gallon. I think right now I'm at like 60 cents. So that's pretty good. Yeah. And then they have alliances sometimes with local chains and they do this here as well. So like Shell, Chevron, Tesco may have a deal with this. So like for example, I can use my Stop & Shop points at Shell as well and they give me the same discount. So that's another one. And let's see. Now the thing is, the little tricky offered here is that you can buy things like gift cards at the grocery store and get points for that, right? Right. All right, so I guess that's, you know, maybe not an obvious tip, but yeah. So if you buy a gift card, you get credited towards your gas points. So that's neat too. Yeah, so you can, what's the right word for time shift? Spend shift, your future grocery purchases, if you need gas today, right? Buy a $100 gift card for groceries that you're gonna spend two weeks anyway and then use it to leverage a discount for gas today. All right, I like this little hack. That's good. Yeah. Yeah. Now maybe another one here. So I have, it's the only card that I pay for but Amix has a blue preferred, I think it's called. And for a yearly fee, the thing that I like about it is you get 6% back on groceries. So I put all my groceries on that. Okay, okay, that makes sense. Yeah, yeah, yeah, makes sense. Cool. And the final thing is that, and also I use something called Gas Buddy. Oh. It's a debit or it's a fleet card in that when I go to the pump and I use this and then it's tied into my checking account, I guess the motivation. So what happens is if you use this, you typically can get at least five cents off a gallon using this card linked to your checking account. Oh, because they're bypassing credit card fees, right? Because they're- Well, I think is that, so the money is not taken out of your account immediately. So I think they play with the float is maybe another motivation for them to do this. Oh, maybe, yeah. I would just think avoiding credit card fees would be the key, right? Because that's, I mean, you know, for you and me here at Mac Keekab, like for our premium program, we pay what it all said and done with transaction fees and credit card fees, we pay about 4%. The credit card fee itself is 2.9 and then we're paying a 30 cent transaction fee or something, but in bulk, you can get that down. When we were taking a lot of credit cards at Backbeat Media, we were able to get it down to like somewhere under 2% and I'm sure nationwide gas chains get it even less, but even still, like even paying a point and a half on every transaction, like even at Backbeat Media, like we were paying 2%, start doing enough business and it's like, wait a minute, giving away a lot of money here. So incentivizing your customers not to use credit cards is a good thing. And it sounds like that's what this guest buddy, at least that part is doing. Because they're basically acting as a debit card in this case. The fees are typically lower for that as well. That's right. Way, way, way lower. That's right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But you don't get, like if I use my debit card or gas buddy to pay for gas, I don't get my hotel points or whatever I might get on my rewards card. And so that's the problem we were having at Backbeat is, you know, we had some people that were like, oh, cool, you know, we'll do a, you know, whatever. They've got some $20,000 ad campaign. It's like, okay, I'll put on my credit card and I'll get 20,000 points back, which I do all the time if I can. But we've worked to discourage that behavior because, you know, you'd take 20,000 and multiply it by whatever, you know, two or 3% that was five, 600 bucks. So it's not, it's not fun. Anyway, I do that for my flood insurance. If I'm going to pay it, and all I'll say is that it's four figures. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. And I have to have it as long as I have a mortgage. Right, because of where you are. That's right. Yeah, for sure. That makes sense. Yeah. I've always joked that if I could put payroll on a credit card, I would. We try to run all our business expenses through. Actually, there are, we, with one of the companies we hire a virtual, I hate the term virtual assistant. They're a real person. We hire a remote assistant and they are out in, they happen to be in the Philippines. And so that one I'm able to pay on a credit card and it's great, you know? It's like, hey, I'll take the points. It's awesome. So anyway. All right, one more quick tip. Then we'll share a little bit about our first couple of sponsors and then we'll do some cool stuff found. In fact, our quick tip is related to our cool stuff found here, folks. In the last episode, I started out by saying that I really liked being able to capture notes while I ride my bike. And that means just interacting via voice with my watch. And what I was doing, what I still am doing, although you folks have had some suggestions, is I just say, hey, Siri, send a message to me and then it's a, you know, my message that's in my queue and then I can process it when I get back. But I did ask for suggestions and listener Reginald starts us off. He says a quick tip to let you know it's possible to create a note using Siri. All you have to do is say, hey, S lady, create a note. I was listening to your show and you were saying it was possible to create a text message. And I thought, why that's silly. Why don't you just create a note and Siri will create a note. So that's a great one. I need to experiment with all of these things because I need to see, like would I rather just have a text stream that I'm sort of capturing from or a bunch of notes barfed into notes because I'm guessing it wouldn't put it all in the same note, but, you know, we asked for advice, we're sharing and I am thankful that you all are providing it. So thank you, this is good. And here's a quick one I got for you related to voice assistance, the A lady. So I was, I don't know, I think of it, you know, I swallowed some food or something like that and I was mumbling something and she heard something really weird. All I'm gonna say to you is that say this to her the next time. Jurassic bark. All right. This is what she thought I said. Okay. I will put that in the show notes. All right, before we get to the rest of the cool stuff found in all of that, the next thing that I want to do, John, is talk about our first two sponsors, if that works for you. Hold on. Yeah, it's happening. All right. Hey, from the iPhone to Pixar, Steve Jobs led a career full of groundbreaking innovation, but his road to Silicon Valley success was a rocky one filled with failure and a few burnt bridges here or there. Well, from Wondery on the new season of business movers, you can learn how Steve Jobs took Apple from near disaster to total triumph. I got to listen to the first episode of this and man, it's so well done. They actually start with the conversation between Steve Jobs and John Scully and they sort of walk through how that came together and the result of it, which Steve wasn't entirely happy with if you remember your history. I don't want to ruin it for you. I think many of us know, but even if you know, they did a great job here on business movers, really talking through it all. They go through things. Steve Jobs used to like to say that a computer was a bicycle for our minds. He saw how bikes elevated our minds and bodies and he thought computers could do the same for the brain. And he had a knack for just seeing the big picture. And I always say that I think Steve Jobs could see around the corner for what was next that not everybody could see. Like he just didn't see in straight lines. I don't know. You got to go listen to business movers, the enlightenment of Steve Jobs. You can find it on Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music or you can listen one week early and ad-free by joining Wondery Plus in the Wondery app. Wondery, feel the story, go check out business movers, the enlightenment of Steve Jobs and our thanks to Wondery for sponsoring this episode. All right, you know, if you're like me, your kids are getting older, maybe you're starting to pay for college, maybe you've got that expense coming up or you've got other things happening. And you don't want to leave your kids or your partner with a huge financial burden if something happens. And on that note, it makes sense why people get life insurance, especially term coverage, which is surprisingly affordable. Why not pay a bit each month to protect the ones you love? Well, if you're asking yourself this question, choose our next sponsor, Ladder. Ladder makes it impressively fast and easy to get covered. It's awesome. In fact, you just need a few minutes. You can use your phone or your laptop to apply. You do it online. Ladder's smart algorithms work in real times. You can find out instantly if you're approved. There's no hidden fees. You can cancel at any time. And since life insurance costs more as you age and since we live in a world of linear time, well, now is the time to get this done and cross it off your list. So go check out Ladder today and see if you're instantly approved. Go to ladderlife.com-mgg. That's L-A-D-D-E-R-life.com-mgg. Ladderlife.com-m-g-g are thanks to Ladder for sponsoring this episode. All right, John, you have Matt for us here. Yes, Matt says you might like this for a dictation or note-taking while you're on your bike. I guess this is directed to you. And it's a good app all around. And what is the app? The app is called Just Press Record. I like that they get right to the point. It's five bucks, runs on iDevices and Apple Watch and you can record on any device and sync with iCloud, record anywhere, anytime on Apple Watch, turn speech into searchable text in over 30 languages. Okay, that's nice. And edit your transcriptions with a single tap. Well, it sounds like it's worth five bucks. Huh, that, yeah, interesting. Interesting, interesting. And I always look at an app's version history. So the most recent one was on February 12th of this year. So they are up to date. They're, you know, I always just make sure that it's not, you know, 2018, seeing the last update or something like that. So that's good. All right, yeah, thank you. That's a good one. Many of you to solve this same problem mentioned the Drafts app. So again, I'm looking for a way to take notes, mostly if not entirely hands-free while I'm on my bike, because that's a way, that's a place where I find I, I get into a meditative state and then ideas percolate and I want to capture them and then get back into my, you know, my flow state there. And so many of you have suggested the Drafts app. Listener Peter says, I find drafts really handy for taking notes on my Apple Watch. It goes something like this. Hey, S lady, use drafts to take a note. And then it'll say, what do you want to say? And then you say, here's the great content of my note. The note then arrives in my Drafts inbox and badges the app on all of my devices. He says, I've done this even without my phone on me. That's really interesting. I always bring my phone. I have a little pouch on my, on my bike that I put my phone in just so I have it. But wow, that's very interesting. Yeah, that sounds, I mean, that sounds super efficient. You know, just saying Siri use drafts to take a note and then boom, you're, you're in business. I like it. Okay. This might see, now we're talking here. I don't have to push a button. I just like triggered with Siri and goes with Siri. Listener John also had something to say about drafts and I kept it in the list. So I must have a reason for it. He says, one advantage to doing this is that drafts dictation does not have the same time cut off before dictation stops working as doing this take, as it does with the standard iOS interface at least with iOS 14. And so, so you can dictate a lengthy note without stopping. Once saved, it will sync over to the iOS app and then you can send it directly to notes if you would like. I heard about this one on the Mac Power Users podcast from David Sparks. Of course, Sparky is a big fan of drafts. Yeah, makes sense. Thank you. That's great. And you know, several people have also just suggested that I use Siri to set a reminder, which you can also do. I don't, this might, yeah. I like the idea of being able to save notes with some texts, reminders can get a little, I might get a little wordy for reminders at times. Although I do usually try to be brief when I'm doing this kind of thing, especially on the go. But yeah, I could see doing this in the car too. I'm not sure why it never hit me to do this in the car. I guess I used to. I would, whenever I would go into the flotation tank, John, you've probably gotten like voice memos for me that I've, you know, had inspiration about the show or something. I go into the flotation tank and come out and that drive home and my mind just like is racing with all these new ideas after I sort of get to detach my brain for a little bit. So yeah, all right, cool. Thanks everybody. That's great. Good stuff. Excellent. All right. What's next, John? We've got some cool stuff. Now that we're in cool stuff found, what cool stuff found do we have? Okay, I got one that came up. So I have, as of late when ordering things, the tracking numbers that I get are not always US, Dave. So I ordered this one thing, which looks cool, but I haven't received it yet. So it's on the way. And how do I know it's on the way? Well, the company I got it from, which must be based in China, sent me a tracking link. And so I click on it and it brought me to 17track.net and had the number embedded in there. And it showed me that it was starting in China. I'm like, okay, it must be China and it identified the tracking numbers. So it's like, oh yeah, it's China post and yeah, it's in China. I'm like, okay, that's fine. It's here now. But they also have an app, Dave, which is cool. And it understands the format of carriers, not just US carriers, so it's nice. But it also does like clever things in the background because I was getting notifications from it when it wasn't running saying, hey, there's an update for the package that you asked me to track. So I thought that was pretty neat. Huh, I had not heard about that app before. That it looks good, one feature that I like, and I'll talk about the app that I have used for tracking packages, but one feature that is important to me is being able to sync to all of my devices. And they indeed have data sync using, I think it's their own cloud because the app and they say your PC, so I think it can sync to your Mac I don't know if they have a Mac app, but it sure looks like they've got apps for at least other platforms. So they say there's two membership levels, three bucks a month, you get 100 items tracked per month or five bucks a month, you get 200. So yeah, interesting, that's cool. I have to check this out. I've always used an app called Deliveries for tracking my packages. And they've got a Mac app, iPhone app, you know, iPad, they have the ability to sync with their own server. Or I believe still with iCloud, I'm pretty sure it works over either. And it's a pretty app, like you found, it works, you know, like 17 track, it works with lots of different carriers. It does auto detection. I think both of these apps do, I know Deliveries and it sounds like 17 track will let you scan a barcode on a package. That's one of the handiest things. If I, you know, print a label to go ship somewhere or something, just pointing my phone at it quick, scan the barcode, put it in, ship it out, and I'm good to go. So yeah, it makes a difference being able to track and then have that stuff sync to all your devices. I don't know, I'd like to keep tabs on my stuff. Yeah. All right, let's see. Oh, this was interesting. Oh, are we good on 17 track? Yeah, okay. Listener Michael brought us a thing. He was suggesting that I used Siri to create notes and he says, what he does is he says, I use Siri to create a new reminder in my ideas list. And then from that list, I can parse to any of my other to-do apps or however I wanna organize things. So that's interesting. So adding it to a specific list that's really just for idea capture. So great, thank you. The other thing he said, he says you also mentioned iCloud Drive, which is to our family only good. He says it's lack of ability to selectively sync to different devices like Macs and PCs where we have to use both for work is a real issue. With Microsoft's family plan, we get office on all of our devices and one terabyte per person up to six people in a family an easy file sharing to each other and the cost is $99 a year. So this gave me a little bit of pause because I thought, wait, did he say $99 a year per person or is it $99 a year for a family of up to six? And so I chatted with Microsoft and it is indeed for a family of up to six. And listener, and Microsoft Daniel, who I chatted with at Microsoft, this was about two in the morning the other night, said, look, it doesn't need to be family, family either. It can be four friends and a pet horse if you really wanted it to be. And I wondered if my horse really would need a full terabyte of storage. But as Michael pointed out, he says, think of all the hay you could store there. And then he pointed out, he says, H-A-A-S, hay as a service, it's gonna be big. But yeah. So virtual cloud hay would be Microsoft's fun thing. But it was actually nice to have an actual humorous response, but confirming in fact that yes, regardless of what you call your family, $99 a month gets you a terabyte per family member for up to six family members total. So you could have six terabytes of storage for $99 a month from Microsoft. And oh, by the way, this is Microsoft 365 family. So you also get Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, I believe with that. So that's pretty good. Did I say, have I said $99 a month the whole time? If I've been saying $99 a month, it's $99 a year. Did I say a month? I can't remember. It sounds, I'm thinking I said a month, I don't know. It's $99 a year for six terabytes of storage and Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. That's pretty good. That's pretty good. Or I think I saw $99 a month if you wanna do it monthly. There you go. Yes. Yes, so yes, I was incorrect. I kept saying month, it's obviously not $100 a month. It's $100 a year, or as you pointed out, John, $10 a month. Yeah. Great stuff. I love it. I love it. All right. John, it's been an interesting week with WWDC here. And I've had, obviously we talked about our initial reactions from the keynote and State of the Union with Dave Mark on Monday, which was awesome. Thanks for everybody for participating in that. It was a blast. And thanks to Dave Mark, too. I did some dugging. I dug some didding, John, because I wanted to learn more about a few things. And I dug into Apple's iCloud Private Relay, which was really interesting to me. And I was curious about how they were doing, what they were doing, and what it affects on your devices. So not only did I go and watch the WWDC session about this, I actually installed iOS 15 on our family spare iPhone XR. And it runs great on that device, by the way. I mean, I didn't inherit any apps or anything. I started it fresh, but it's been quite stable. So the best place to start when thinking about Private Relay is to start from what we know about how a VPN server works. Because this is not a VPN server, but it's a good place to start. So with a VPN server, if I'm connecting to your website, John, normally it would just be me connecting directly to your website, right? With a VPN server, I'm connecting to the VPN server, and then the VPN server is connecting to your website. But the VPN server, theoretically, has all the information. They know where I'm connecting to, and they know who I am, right? They see both sides of the chain. Apple did not want that. So what Apple did was they created a double server scenario, and they have ingress servers, which are the ones that I would connect to, and then they have egress servers, which are the ones that connect to you. So I would connect to an ingress server. The ingress server would talk to the egress server, and the egress server would talk to you. Now, here's where it gets really even more interesting. The ingress server is owned by Apple. The egress server is not. From my tests, I'm seeing it owned by Cloudflare, but that's just me here in the Northeast. It could, I'm sure they could have many different partners. What's also interesting is that the egress server has no idea who I am. It only knows what I'm requesting. Apple's ingress server only knows who I am and does not know what I'm requesting, because my request is encrypted on my device and sent all the way through to the egress server. So Apple knows it's me, but they don't know what I'm looking for, or what I'm getting, and the egress server knows what I'm getting or what I'm looking for, but it doesn't know that it's me. Speed-wise, obviously, this sounded like a thing that might slow things down. It does not. I had like 33 millisecond ping times all the way through. It was super fast. I got, I was on Wi-Fi, because I'm only doing it on my iPhone, so I haven't been able to test ethernet, but I got, you know, I'm on that fiber connection here. I got 300 megabits in both directions, which was the limitation of my Wi-Fi. So that worked really well. It doesn't protect all traffic, John. Only, really only three things are protected and really mainly just two of them. So when thinking about iCloud Private Relay, there's two things that go through it. All your DNS queries, 100% of your DNS queries go through iCloud Private Relay and all your Safari browsing. Anything you do in Safari goes through this. Now you can turn it off, but it is on by default if you have any paid iCloud subscription. They call it iCloud Plus now, but it's the same, my subscription just became an iCloud Plus subscription when I launched iOS 15. I'm not paying anymore or any less, but any paid iCloud subscription, even at 99 cents a month, goes up to, you know, we'll let you use this. And there's no traffic limits or anything. So Safari browsing and DNS queries. In addition to that, Apple is also encrypting, Apple is also encrypting, but also sending across Private Relay, any traffic from your apps that is not encrypted. So for example, the Mac GeekGab app, if it's connecting to download our podcast in an encrypted way, HTTPS, it's gonna let that go straight through to our servers. But if we're doing it as HTTP, it's gonna go through Private Relay. And that's just to make sure all your web traffic is encrypted so that your local provider can't see what you're doing. Local traffic, private domains, if you turn on a VPN, and then of course, like I said, secure traffic from your apps, none of those things are included in Private Relay. All of those would bypass it. So you turn on a VPN, it's fine. Network operators can also block Private Relay by simply blocking the lookups to the Apple's Private Relay servers and they publish what those servers are. So if you're running a corporate network or a university network or something and you're like, I don't want, I wanna be able to see and control what people are doing here, you just block access to Apple's Ingress servers and then Private Relay won't work, but it will tell the user, hey, Private Relay is not able to be used on this network. Do you wanna continue using this network without it or do you wanna use a different network? And you can go turn it off, John, in like if you go on the iPhone, I can go into Wi-Fi settings and disable Private Relay. It's on by default, but you can go into the settings and turn it off. So I think Apple did it pretty well. I'm pretty stoked about it, to be honest. Any questions or thoughts on this, John? Is the mail privacy protection separate from iCloud Plus? No, the mail privacy protection, I believe is included in iCloud Plus as well, I think. And it operates similarly to Private Relay. In fact, it uses Private Relay to load images, like inline images that would be in mail, but that gets interesting, right? Because simply loading the image is all that needs to happen to let someone know that you have opened the email, right? Like as soon as the image is loaded, now like your privacy is lost on that. They know you've opened the email. Well, Apple has solved this problem. I dug into that too. They load all images through their Private Relay. So they hide your IP address, they hide your location, and as soon as the email arrives on your device, it loads all the images. So it's gonna throw off the metrics for email trackers, like a MailChimp or a thing like that. It's just gonna say, oh yeah, your open rate is through the roof, but you won't know. Because to track open rate, what they do is they track whether or not an image has been loaded. And if the image has been loaded, then we know, oh, the mail's been opened. Well, that's gonna happen whether or not the mail has been opened. And so that's how Apple's getting around it. The only caveat that I can see with that, John, is that still confirms that the email made it to your device. And so for spammers that are using this technology to confirm that your email address is valid, I think it still lets them confirm that your email address is valid. So that would be right. I mean, I don't see any way around that. So unless they don't load images for things that are put in spam, only things that make it to your inbox, like there might be some filters there. Their session was not clear on the nuances of that. But yeah. All right. Yeah, I remember when we talked about this, I mean, clearly it's gonna, yes, as you observe, it's gonna upset some systems when trying to do metrics. Yes. Oh, absolutely. Well, that's the whole point. Yeah, no, I know. Quite frankly, I think that's a... Depending on your viewpoint, that's a good thing. Certainly from my viewpoint, it's a good thing. This will break all of the attribution tracking that the podcast industry is trying desperately to implement and I couldn't be happier about it. Like I'm really stoked that it will break this because Safari and the podcast app will be separated from each other. You won't have the same IP and user agent loading a sponsor's website that you would. So we never implemented any of that here, but other podcasts do and I'll just leave it at that. But yeah, the industry's really been pushing. So I'm stoked about it. All right. It's good. We probably have a little more cool stuff found to get to, which would be good. I wanna talk about our sponsors, but I wanna mention one thing that I had not dug into, but in the pre-show, somebody mentioned here, that iCloud Plus adds the ability to use your own domain name, which I find really interesting. I'm not sure how they're doing it. I mean, the normal way to do it would be you would sign up with an email provider and then point what are called your MX records. So your domain records that tell servers, other mail servers, which mail server is the host for your domain, you point your MX records at your mail hosts. Like when I moved to Fastmail recently, I pointed my, I used my Dave the Nerd domain. I moved that entire domain over to Fastmail and I pointed my MX records to Fastmail. So I'm not sure what Apple is doing here. If they're just gonna let us send, well, they've always let us send from other domains. So yeah, I'm curious to see if like Apple wants to truly be a mail like an MX host for this kind of stuff. So I'm gonna dig into that too. This is, it's been fun digging into this stuff. So yeah, it's good. I don't know. Any thoughts about that before we move on? All right, well then I guess it's time for our next two sponsors. Let's dig in. All right, our first sponsor today is BB Edit. One of our favorite apps. It is, yep, I just checked it's running right now on the Mac that I'm sitting in front of here. And that's not a surprise. It's running almost all the time on all of my Macs. And it's because I use it for so many different things. Sure, I use BB Edit whenever I'm doing any coding. And that could be in, I do a lot of PHP on the web. I do a lot of HTML and that sort of thing, but of course you can use it for Java and JavaScript and C and any other language really that you can think of, they've probably thought of it. And it's cool because when you do that, you get to see what the code is trying to tell you. That's really the best way I can say it. It doesn't change the code on the disk, but it lays it out in a way that makes it really easy to follow. You can twist open functions or twist them closed to get them out of the way. It highlights variable names and function names. So it just makes it look good. And that's not all BB Edit does. I do use BB Edit to just count the words and files or compare two files. And I also use it for its pattern playgrounds so that I can get better with regular expressions because Grep scares me and BB Edit makes it less scary. So go check it out. Go to barebones.com, check out what BB Edit is. You can download it for free. You get a 30 day free trial of every feature. And after that, some of them go away, but some of them stick around for free forever. So go check it out, barebones.com, download your free trial and our thanks to Barebones and BB Edit for sponsoring this episode. Of course, if you're doing any coding at all, you are going to wanna visit our next sponsor Linode.com slash MGG and see why Linode has been voted. The top infrastructure as a service provider by both G2 and Trust Radius. From their award-winning customer support, which has offered 24-7-365 to every level of user. So all their ease of use and setup, it's really clear why developers have been trusting Linode for projects both big and small since 2003. That's older than this show is. And this show just turned 16. Deploy your entire application stack with Linode's one-click app marketplace or build it all from scratch and manage everything yourself with supported centralized tools like Terraform. Linode offers the best price to performance value for all compute instances, including GPUs, as well as block storage, Kubernetes and their upcoming bare metal release. Linode makes cloud computing fast, simple and affordable, allowing you to focus on your projects, not your infrastructure. Visit linode.com.mgg, create a free account with your Google or GitHub account or even just your email address, and you'll get $100 in free credit. That's linode.com.mgg, and our thanks to Linode for sponsoring this episode. All right, John, should we do a few more cool stuff's found here? Sure, Rick has one for us. Hey guys, I have been a user of Mailbutler plugin for Apple Mail and Gmail. There's a suite so you get other features, but one that I like is delayed mail send. I attached the screenshot of the icon that allows you to pick in the calendar and then it resides in a folder until it's time to send. Cost is about 10 bucks a month, but very helpful. Interesting, cool. Yeah, have you ever messed with Mailbutler, John? I messed with it a couple of years ago. No, I could... No, I'm just thinking of a... Yeah, I mean, sometimes you may wanna wait, especially sending off an emotional or charged email. This may be a good feature to be like, ah, maybe I won't send that. Well, you have this feature, right? Because you and I both use small cubes mail suite. I'm sure what brought up Rick's comment was our discussion in 8.75 with... Yeah, in 8.75 with Dave Marks about using mail act-ons delayed email send, which is included as part of small cubes mail suite that you and I use, at least we both use SIGPRO, but that's where I have it set. Every email I have is on a two-minute delay and some of them I set to a two-hour delay. Well, yeah, like you said, emotionally charged or really just anything, like we were talking about last episode. So yeah, it's a good feature. It's one of those things that once you have it, like I miss not having it on my iPhone. So, and I think actually doesn't Mail Butler have an iPhone app that does this? Maybe not. Maybe it's just, no, maybe not. Okay, yeah, yeah. iPhone, iOS, let's see. Yeah, Mail Butler is leading products for your iPhone. Yeah, yeah, yeah. They do have an iPhone app. So you might be able to do this kind of stuff there. Even on iOS. All right, well, maybe there's an answer. Oh, I have to check that out. Okay, I'll have to check out the fast mail app for iPhone too. That might have something like this. All right, a couple more cool stuffs. Andrew, let's find Andrew. Now I need to get my stuff back in business here. Andrew, come on, Andrew, find me here. Recommend Snail. It is a per app bandwidth limiter with a reasonably nice GUI. He says I just started playing with it. It's at snail.murisfirewall.com, meaning it's from the same people that make the Murisfirewall. So it does not, like this is not necessarily a trivial thing to be able to do. It's a traffic shape for apps on an individual basis, like capturing a traffic from each app and, you know, you've got to understand how to talk to the network stack and the Murisfokes definitely know how to talk to the network stack. So I got to check out Snail. This is interesting. I could see this being super useful if you're on, like, tethered to your cell phone or something, John, and you want to, you know, be able to use what you're using without going nuts with bandwidth. Oh, no. Yeah, it's been a while. I know there's something you can do, I think, with IF config from the command line to limit the bandwidth of a particular socket. It's been a while, though. I wonder if that's... I remember messing with this back in the... Yeah. When I was trying to solve a problem, I'm almost certain there's something you can do from the command line saying, you know, limit the bandwidth of this connection. Of that thing, yeah. I wonder if that's how they're doing it or if they're using, like, is there... And I'm definitely gonna betray my lack of knowledge about the Xcode in general, but is there, like, a core networking or something framework that all apps use? And so would it be better to tap into that or just trying to... Because trying to figure out, like, what ports do what could be a fool's errand? Right, right, like, okay, I want to limit, you know, screen-sharing app. Okay, great, well, how, you know, what ports do you go and get? Oh, I don't know, you know. Or I want to limit what terminal can do, which you can do anything from terminal. Okay, how would you do that? You know, that kind of thing. So, yeah, I don't know. But you might be right. Like, I know there is a way. You're right. You can... Yeah, I mean, I just searched traffic-shaving. Banned with limit and the first thing that came up is limit outgoing bandwidth on a specific interface. So we're at stack exchange. There you go. Well, put that in the show notes. That would be a good one to have there. I don't know, just for, you know, geeky follow-up. Show notes are always at macgeekab.com and almost always we'll make it to your email box. If you go to macgeekab.com and sign up for the email, I say almost always because our email is parsed and goes out once a day. We do use MailChimp for that. And we're fine with you using, you know, what is the name of the feature? I'm gonna get it right one of these days. Mail's privacy protection to keep us from knowing whether or not you've opened that email. Really, we don't, we certainly could have that data. It's there at MailChimp, but we don't spend a lot of time worrying about it. But we send it out once a day. Well, last week, we sent out two episodes in one day. On Monday, 8.74 came out in the morning and then 8.75 came out at night. And so you only got 8.75 show notes in your email box. You never got 8.74s. And I'm not exactly sure how to tell MailChimp to remedy that. So I haven't yet, but maybe I'll look at it later this afternoon. Wish me luck. All right, on the cool stuff found front, I got to mess with, more than mess with it, I've been using this, it's the PolyStudio P15, which they call, I'm gonna find what they call it because it's the personal video bar is what is their name for it. And I like this name because it's hard to envision otherwise. It's worth going to check it out. What it is, is it is all in one of camera, a, like a webcam, but a good webcam, a 1080p webcam, a microphone, again, a good microphone and stereo speakers. And it sits on top of your monitor. So for someone using a Mac mini, which doesn't come with very good speakers, doesn't come with any camera or any microphone, this is a fantastic idea. And I was excited to check it out. And since I've been checking it out, I can tell you, it's a fantastic implementation of that idea. The camera is great. One thing I love about this camera is that kind of like the anchor one that we talked about recently, it does facial detection and you can control all this in their app, but it does facial detection. So when you get on like a zoom call, it centers your face on the screen. And the other night, I have this on my wife's Mac mini and in the house. And the other night we were on a zoom call with some of my extended family. And when she sat down next to me, it noticed and it like reoriented the video, zoomed out a little bit and centered on both of us. And then when she left, she got up to like go deal with Hector or something. Hector's are, well, you can follow Hector on Twitter, at HectorDBird, we'll put it in the show notes. But she went up to deal with Hector or whatever. And so the camera noticed, oh, only one face and it refocused on me again. Really made life easy. A lot of times these family zoom calls that we do, you know, it's like, oh, we'll get a move your chair over so that you're in the frame or whatever. Nope, just sit down. It's got a huge wide frame and it just dealt with it. The speakers on it sound fine. I mean, you know, they're loud and clear, right? Which is what you'd want from them. Music sounds fine through them. The camera has a little, you can twist the bezel of the camera so that it locks the, like shields the camera. So if you're worried about privacy, like there's a physical shield that you can see that's in the way and it works great. It's not inexpensive. It's like 600 bucks. You might be able to find it cheaper at Amazon or whatever, but it's the Poly Studio P15. So very, very good implementation of this sort of all in one and mounted on top of your monitor. So it's not taking up any desk space with external speakers or anything like that, which is nice in some scenarios. So yeah, that's what I got on that one. Any questions on that, John? Nope, no, Paulie makes good stuff. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I mean, I, well, I use their, they acquired Obahai. And so they have that OB 200, which is the thing I use for our kind of sort of landline link to the network, to our Google voice number here at the house too. Yeah, it's good. Listener Bruce, listen to Bruce, I'm finding it here. My last cool stuff out here. Listener Bruce says, greetings from Suburban Atlanta. He says, we corresponded before about Ethernet that you have running between the office and your house. He said, when we discussed this, you stated that you had installed some surge protection devices at the end of the network cable to hopefully protect you from future lightning surges. Yes, it's true. He says, when I saw the following devices being offered by Ubiquiti, I thought of your installation and thought I would share. And it is the Ubiquiti Ethernet Surge Protector. Ubiquiti makes unified devices, which are sort of the prosumer network stuff. They also make, you know, enterprise level mesh Wi-Fi stuff as well. But then they've got some products that are like perfect little problem solvers that are super competitively. I'm gonna say super inexpensively priced. This Ethernet surge protector is $12.50. And it's, you know, an inline Ethernet surge protector. When I buy these on, when I buy like off brand ones on Amazon, my memory is that I paid like 20 or 25 bucks a piece for these things. So to get a name brand one from Ubiquiti for $12.50, perfect. So thanks for sharing that Bruce. I will put that in the show notes. Of course he recommends that in addition to my fiber connection that I have from Consolidated that I put a fiber connection between the house and the office. I almost did that a couple summers ago when one of the stump grinders that we had here ground through where I told them not to grind and ground up magically, ground up one of my two cat five cables running between the house and the office. I don't know how they only got one. Like this is amazing to me. Yeah. I guess so. I mean, they're literally right next to each other buried underground. Yeah, I don't know, man. I don't know. I got lucky. But and I fixed it with the help of a Comcast technician, believe it or not, they had they had this underground. So it like we I patched the cable and what the guy had is this this enclosure that seals up both ends of the cable and leaves room in the middle for like a, you know, fatter patch job. And it's full of that that goop. Whatever it is that that waterproof and freeze proof goop that seals out all the elements. And so, you know, I fixed it all up. He's like, are you good to go? I said, I'm good to go. He's like, are you sure? I said, yeah, we've tested it. It's all good. He's like, great. And he closed the thing down and it just like, you can see the goop just like spread out the edges or whatever. And and that's it. It's been there for years. It's like totally worked fine. Make it through the winter and all that. So but fiber would be better because it's not susceptible to the elements or power searches, which is versus point. All right. Should we answer some questions, John? We've got a little bit of time. Sure. Maybe. All right. Let's see if we can do, we'll try and do at least two. So Jose asks, let me find Jose here so I can make sure I ask the question properly. I recently made a purchase on my Mac using Apple Pay. I received email confirmation of my purchase from the vendor and noticed that the email they sent it to was my Apple ID. I have a different iCloud email that I use for purchases and email subscription so it's not to have my Apple ID out in the wild. I don't remember having changed the email to be my Apple ID for Apple Pay. I don't even know how I would do that. Also, it seems a bit tedious to have to check the email being used every time one makes a purchase. Just wondering what your thoughts are on using your Apple ID as an email address where you can be reached by others. I mean, it depends on how you manage your email. There's nothing inherently wrong with it but if you don't like that email being out there in the public and on mailing lists and all of that then you definitely wanna avoid using it for purchases. When you make a purchase with Apple Pay you can choose the email address that is sent through to them. You can, just like you can choose the shipping address or the credit card even that is used, right? You have that option on the screen before you confirm an Apple Pay transaction. So be mindful of that. And I think there you can even, I'm hoping somebody in our chat at live.mackycup.com will comment on this. But I think there you can even have it use one of Apple's obscured email addresses for you. So that would be my advice is just be mindful. I know it's a pain in the neck that when you're making a purchase you've got to think about all these different things. But be mindful of that and maybe it'll become habitual and maybe your iPhone will even remember what it is that you like to do and then you don't have to make any changes. So what do you think about that, John? Am I crazy? Wait, don't answer the second question only the first one. Now, personally I use my Apple ID. Yeah, yeah, right. Buying stuff and I don't see any risk. I mean, you'll want to probably, all right, so say somebody knows your Apple ID and I could probably, you could probably guess mine and I could probably guess yours, Dave. In fact, I know one of them. Right. I'm almost sure. For sure. I mean, just make sure you have two F. So then the question is how do I detect if somebody's trying to hack into my account, I guess. So. Oh, interesting. I read this as he didn't want spam being sent to his Apple ID email. Oh, that could be the case too. But you're right. There's the security part too by obscurity. If somebody doesn't know your Apple ID then they don't, they can't try and log in as you either. I hadn't even thought about that. Yeah, that's a good point. Yeah, so, you know, enable two FA, which I don't even think you can, I think it's almost required now that you have to have two FA. I think you're right. Yeah. Apple ID, so. Yeah. Yeah, so a dialogue would come up if somebody's trying to hack you, right? Yes. Yes, you would. Saying someone's trying to log in from here and then, yeah, you know that something's up. Yeah, totally. Or I think that's how it works. I mean, I've never had someone try to hack my Apple ID. I haven't either and I'm hoping we didn't just invite people to test that for us. Yeah, don't do that. Please don't do that if we have enough going on during the week. Thank you. Yeah. You want to take us to Patrick? I think that'll probably wrap us up for the day, but I think that's a good way to wrap things. Yes. All right, Patrick. Greetings. I'm getting spam in my Messages app. Can't find a way to block these on Mac OS Catalina. Support articles and John Martillaro wrote an article about how to do this once. Suggests that one has to add the sender to contacts then block it. That must be improved now. I hope, as this is ridiculous. Do y'all know a way to block SMS messages on Messages? No. Yeah. I mean, we got a support article from Apple and I'll dig up the article from John, which if you search for blocking spam in Mac OS comes up near the top of the list, or at least for me. Yeah, we had suggested this in the past, a little Dave, it's kind of a hack, but set up a contact called block senders or spam or something like that and then add the phone numbers to it, though they're probably fake phone numbers. The other thing you can do, almost every cell carrier, if you search for block SMS and the name of them, typically it involves you forwarding the spam to spam or the digits, at least for Verizon, that's what they suggest. They're like, hey, if you want us to mark this as a spam, then forward the SMS to us. Yeah. Yeah, not every provider does this, but a lot of them do, but then there's also RoboKiller, if you wanna implement your own solution, or not your own, but someone else's with whatever your cell provider is. So we'll put a link to RoboKiller in the show notes. I wanted to reiterate what you said, John, because I think there's a little bit of magic in what you just said there. So it is pedantic, as Patrick points out, to have to add each number as a contact and then block that contact, because that's the only thing that can be blocked as a contact, you can't just block a number. However, what you said is, I think the most clever way to solve this problem, and that is to create a single contact called block senders or spammers or whatever you wanna call it, block that contact and then just keep adding new phone numbers to it when those come in. And then they will automatically be blocked for the future. So you just have the one contact and then that keeps your address book from getting over cluttered and you just start dumping these things in there. And once they're in there, if that contact is blocked, every number associated with it is blocked, including the new ones. So I like that solution, John, that's good. It's great stuff. Yeah, let's see Verizon. 7726 is the spell spam. Okay, all right, okay. Spam to 7726. Okay, on Verizon. All right, I'll put that in the show notes too. In fact, it's in the show notes, cool. Check them out at mackeekyub.com folks. Thank you so much for hanging out with us and spending your time with us. This has been a blast, as always. Actually, I really, I like the pacing of this episode, Mr. Braun, I thought this was good. Did you folks think it was good? Let us know. I like it when we can bounce stuff back and forth. It's good. All right, what else do we have to say? Where do you want to find us, John? Any, anything else you want to share? I got to put Hector's Twitter address in there. You want to tell everybody else about the other, okay. Hector rules with an iron beak. That is correct. I thought it was an iron wing, but I guess. No, the wing is not the dangerous part of Hector. Well, if it was made out of iron and sharp, could be. Like her beak, you mean? Which is natural, naturally sharp and dangerous. Yeah, when you can, when I watch her like, carve into a walnut without really breaking a sweat, I know that I don't want her upset with me and specifically my fingers. So, yeah, yeah. All right, so Hector's on Twitter and we're also on Twitter. Well, we are her minions and so we must be on Twitter. Yes. Yeah, so on Twitter, he's Dave Hamilton. I'm John F. Braun. Mackie Gabb, Mac Observer, Pilot Pete. Those are the places you want to be. That's it. Thanks so much for listening, folks. Make sure to check out our sponsors as we noted in the show, lino.com slash mgg, of course, barebones.com, ladderlife.com slash mgg and go check out that Enlightenment of Steve Jobs business movers series on Wondery or Apple podcasts wherever you get your podcasts. Of course, go to MackieGabb.com slash sponsors to find out about all our other sponsors. All right, good, we made it, another one. Happy 13, I keep saying happy 13 years because I'm thinking of June 13th, but it's not 13 years, it's 16 years. So happy 16 years again, John. You got us into this one. I've been rambling here. You want to get us out, my friend? Yeah, I'm going to get us out. And the way we're going to get out of here is making sure you don't get caught.