 The Mac Observers, Mac Geekgab, Episode 805 for Monday, March 9th, 2020. Greetings, folks, and welcome to the Mac Observers, Mac Geekgab, the show where we take your tips. But really, the show, I say we, it's about you, right? You send in your questions, your tips, your cool stuff found, and then and only then do we get to take them and, you know, kind of mix them together. We try to answer your questions and then we put them into engenders where we can share your tips and the answers to your questions or sometimes your answers to our questions or your answers to other listeners' questions. And the goal is, no matter how we do it, no matter what we do, sort of the umbrella policy here, if you will, is that everybody learns at least five new things every single time we get together. Sponsors for this episode include mintmobile.com slash mgg, simply safe.com slash Mac Geekgab. I know that one's on me. I told them to do that. I don't know why, but that's just how it is. And then cashfly, mac.cashfly.com. Really, if you just go to macgeekgab.com, you can see all of that stuff or macgeekgab.com slash sponsors. You can see everything and, you know, and then and then all of that. But we'll talk more about those three specific sponsors throughout the episode, as usual. For now, here in Durham, New Hampshire, I'm Dave Hamilton. And here in Fairville, Connecticut, this is John Afron. Yes, it is. All right. Cool stuff, because that's where we are here. Yet another week, lots of crazy things going on, lots of things to talk about. And we'll start with, we'll start with some quick tips, because we just get it out of, you know, out of the gate strong here. Mace, his quick tip really starts as a question. He says, what's the etiquette for finishing up a terminal session when I'm done doing what I need in the terminal? I want to just close the window and quit terminal to reduce clutter. Is there a proper way to do this? If I just quit terminal, might there still be something running? So this is like the epitome of a quick tip, the thing that's obvious to all of us that already know it. And not at all obvious to everyone else, right? Perfect quick example. I've been closing terminal sessions for so long that my fingers know what to do. But, you know, as soon as I read Mace's question here, I was like, oh, this is most people's fingers don't know what to do. So there's two options for closing a terminal session. One is you can type log out, right? And that will do it. The other, if you want the shortcut is control D, which in terminal parlance equates to log out. And sometimes depending on the terminal and how you're connected, you'll even see it when you hit control D, it'll like you'll see log out actually get typed in the terminal, but it doesn't have to. I don't know the last time I actually typed log out. It was probably if my control key was broken or something like that. But I was probably about 14 years old the last time I typed log out control D. My left hand especially knows quite, quite well. You can just quit terminal. It's pretty good. The terminal app on the Mac is pretty good about telling you, hey, you have a process running here. Are you sure you want to quit it? And that's even true if you're connected to a remote system. Like it's pretty smart about knowing that there's a process running on that remote system in your shell. And so it will warn you, but if you want to do it the right way, control D is the way. Alan567 in the chat room at macgeekyub.com slash stream is saying you can type exit as well. I think that's what he's saying. And that may well be true, but I've always done it with control D. So thanks for the question, Mace. It leads to, like I said, the perfect example of a quick tip. If you have your own quick tip to share feedback at macgeekyub.com. Did you say feedback at macgeekyub.com? I said feedback at macgeekyub.com. Indeed, John, listener John has a quick tip for us all that says for anyone using iStat menus, I noticed that my fans were running on my new 16-inch MacBook Pro and went to the sensor menu in iStat menus only to find that the only thing there was my SSD's temperature. Wondering why my config changed? I went into the app only to find that it was the only available listed sensor at all. I searched on Bajango's website and found they have a menu option to quote unquote reset sensors. That did nothing. So off to Google and some foo later, I found that if you migrate between machines even with a clone that iStat menus registers system assets when it is installed, if you move to a new machine using migration assistant or cloning, it will not find all the sensors that it should. Long story short, the quick part of the quick tip, if you are missing sensors to even put in the menu in iStat menus, open iStat menus menu, select uninstall and uninstall it, then download the latest from the Bajango website or wherever you got iStat menus. I think it's also included in like setup, things like that. Reinstall it, boom! It will save all your settings and license info, but it will re-register all the sensors. So the instruction is uninstall and reinstall iStat menus on a new machine. The one thing I will add to that is if you use some sort of uninstaller that monitors what you do, like a hazel or really or clean my mac or any of those things that offer to delete all the extra stuff after you've uninstalled an app, don't let them do that in this case, otherwise you will lose your settings and your license info and all of that. So try it without that. Obviously if that doesn't work then yes, absolutely let it clean all that stuff out and try again. But there you go. Good, right John? Yeah, I've been there. I didn't even think to mention it, but yeah, I ran into the same thing on my MacBook Pro. It just showed the SSD and I'm like, where's all the other sensors? The thing is, yeah, I found that tip as well. Unfortunately, at least, I don't know why, I'll have to, maybe I'll write them, but I wanted to see the light sensor and even after reinstalling it on my MacBook Pro, my new MacBook Pro, it doesn't show the light sensor, which I can live with it. Yeah, there is a light sensor in the MacBook Pro that can, well, it can if you set it up a certain way, adjust the brightness of the screen based on the surrounding light. Right, and I'm sure your computer does that. Oh, it does it. Yeah, it does it very well. I mean, it's kind of cool because you don't even really notice it. But you don't have a, iStat menus on your machine cannot see the sensor that is used for that, is that right? Right, it doesn't list it. It did on my older MacBook Pro 2012, it showed the lumens, you know, which is the the measure of brightness of that sensor. And I think I know where the sensor is. It's just like, it's just so I don't know why they don't list it. Yeah, well, they might not, their Apple might not provide API access to it, because I think it's probably doing more than just sensing lumens, right? If you've got a true tone screen, and I hope I'm using the right terminology off the top of my head, it's also not just adjusting the brightness, but adjusting the white point of the the color on your screen. So it might be doing a whole lot more and Apple might not expose that to third parties. But I'm just I'm just throwing it out there. So all right, one more, maybe somebody knows, maybe we can, maybe we can, that can be one of the five things that we learn for next week. Andrew shares, he says, there's a great little tip, and he shared a nine to five Mac article about it, about how to configure your iPhone or iPad to allow you to access notes from the lock screen. And it's that you add notes to control center, and then can can get to it from there. So we will go to control center in in settings on iOS and then go to customize controls. And and there you go. So you can add it there, and then you can get right to notes from the lock screen. He also shared an article with us that we knew a little bit more about going in, because it was from macobserver.com about using the Apple Pencil to write notes from the lock screen. And indeed, if you have an Apple Pencil, you can set it up so that when you start writing on the lock screen, it brings up the notes app, and you're right there, which is also super handy. So thank you for those, those tips slash reminders, Andrew, good stuff. Yeah, John, good. Indeed. All right, cool. Yes. Brian Monroe points out back to your missing sensor, John, that again, also in the chat room. If it is using if the MacBook Pro is using the webcam, that would be going through the T2 chip. And that would explain why that data is not accessible to third parties. So that would be, you know, it would be the T2 blocking access, right? Because there you go. Yeah. So that's that, you know, that's the yeah. Anyway, interesting, interesting, interesting, interesting. Let's go to Peter. Let's just get a little geeky right out of the gate here, I think. Peter says, I used to have a 2012 Mac mini and a Drobo mini with a mixture of SSDs and hard drives, and I recently bought a 2018 Mac mini with an i7 chip, which he says is a great recommendation from a podcast he listens to. And he says, I plugged in the Drobo mini with an Apple Thunderbolt to Thunderbolt 3 cable. He says, I was having a lot of problems that seemed like either bus or Bluetooth problems, trackpad not responding, for example. He says, thanks to that same podcast, I realized that some of the problems I was having were the way my cables were set up. So I purchased an OWC Thunderbay mini Thunderbolt 3 enclosure, and I have two SSD drives in there. Currently, the two drives show up separately in the finder. He says, I guess I set up the Thunderbay as a JBod, just a bunch of disks. Here's the question, should I raid the drives all over the OWC site for this? They mention raid via soft rate. If so, what kind of raid should I do? Some of the options, like striping, don't seem to make sense in SSD land in the same way that it did for platters. All right, so to raid or not to raid, that is the question. And I think you have two choices if you're going to raid them. Number one is mirroring. That gives you where the same data is written to both drives effectively simultaneously. And what this does is it gives you fault tolerance. If one drive fails, the other one still has all your data, which is great. But you only get the size of your volume once you do that is the size of the smallest of the two SSDs. So if there's the same size, it's the size of one of them because you're writing the same data to both. Right. Okay. Second option is striping, as you mentioned. And what striping is essentially is it takes one volume and it takes both drives or multiple drives if you are, you know, if you have more than two, but in this case, he's got two. It takes your drives and spreads your data across them using the essentially the full capabilities of both drives and presenting it as one volume. He alluded to the fact that SSDs don't need that like Platters did. And part of the reason is that striping can make things more efficient. It can make things faster because you're able to read from multiple volumes, multiple platters, sorry, as one volume, therefore increasing the effective speed, the data transfer rate, because you're taking the speed of each platter and adding it together. I mean, there's some loss in there as you pull it all together, but it's faster. The striped set of drives is at least it should be faster to read from and probably even write to than any one of those platters would be. In SSD world, as he points out that for him is less of a concern, although it still could be relevant. However, it also just is handy because you take these two drives or multiple drives and stripe them together. And now you have one volume of all your storage. So that can be super handy, especially as you, you know, like increase drives and things like that. You just sort of live with one evolving volume. It's not quite as easy with RAID as it is would say, like a Synology or something, but it's the same net effect that you have one volume made up of all of this storage. So my recommendation, if you're going to chop up the data and segment it anyway, then using JBOT is great. And what JBOT is is no RAID. It's essentially, I mean, not essentially, it is that this enclosure is an external drive enclosure that presents its contents to the Mac. And then the Mac decides what to do with them. And in this case, it's just mounting each of the drives separately as its own drive and probably own single volume, depending on how he's configured it. So if you're going to chop up your data anyway, then putting it in in JBOT mode makes life simple because you could take those drives out and put them in other enclosures and you don't have to worry about it. They aren't married together in any way, shape or form other than their current physical location gives you a lot more flexibility. But RAID gives you those, you know, kind of those other benefits we just talked about either the single volume is your benefit or the mirroring is your benefit. So it really is up to you whether or not you raid them. Hopefully you have enough information to make that decision. What do you think, John? So I'm with you, but you may want to consider an additional option. So what you mentioned, so RAID is redundant array of inexpensive disks, I think. So what's supposed to stand for? I thought it was independent disks, but you're probably right. No, you're better at these these these acronyms than me. So I'm going to go with Mr. Braun. Independent. No, you're right. Yeah. Or at least that's what oh, no, Wikipedia says either. They've got inexpensive first and then independent second. So there you go. Okay. So what you talked about. So yes, so RAID zero is striping, as you mentioned. RAID one is mirroring, but then the other thing you may want to consider is RAID five gives you. He's only got two disks, so he can't do RAID five. Okay. RAID five requires three disks. Go ahead and explain. I'm sorry, I interrupted you, but go ahead. RAID five introduces a level of integrity in that it let's see, they call it block level striping with distributed parity. Essentially, what it does RAID, you may want to think about, do you want to do zero one or maybe think about five five five just but makes the array more reliable as far as I know. Well, what five the right way to think about five is let's start with mirroring, right? Where you take two disks and then they are clone essentially clones of each other. So if one disk fails, the other disk has all your data. RAID five and I know this isn't exactly how it works, but this is how I think about it. RAID five says, let's do that, but with multiple disks. And so in RAID five, you take just like you do in RAID one, you have one disk, but it could be either disk. One disk is the size of one disk is not considered as part of the size of the volume in the interest of fault tolerance, right? So if you have two one terabyte drives in a RAID one mirrored setup, you get one terabyte of storage because one of the drives, and it doesn't matter which one can die and you still have your data. RAID five does exactly the same thing. It dedicates one of the drives as your fail safe. But again, it doesn't matter which one. So if you have three one terabyte drives, you actually get two terabytes of storage in RAID five and any one of your drives can die. And the other two drives have what's necessary to rebuild you all your tight to maintain all of your data. It might have to do some rebuilding, but it's got it all. If you have five one terabyte drives in a RAID five, you get four terabytes of storage because you're only dedicating one drive to that fault tolerance. So that's what RAID five is. And I agree with you. If you had, you know, more than two drives, then RAID five is a good way to go. You know, in my opinion. But yeah. Cool. All right. Are we good with that one more? I'd say the answer is yes, you should raid. You should. I think so. Yeah. I think so. I don't know. I mean, it, you know, in his scenario though, it, like I said, if he's going to chop up his data anyway, if he's going to segment it and say, okay, well, I'm going to put some here and some there, you know, there is some benefit of simplicity in just using a J-Bod. You don't get that fault tolerance. So you would need, you would want backups in any scenario. Fault tolerance really is just for work, the ability to maintain your workflow in the event of a drive failure. Right? If you've got, if one of your drives can fail and you can just keep working without even stopping, that's beneficial. And that's what mirroring or like RAID five would do for you. But, but otherwise, yeah, I think so. All right. Good. Cool. Let's, let's go on to Kevin. Kevin asks, he says, my wife and I are traveling to the UK this summer for our anniversary. Dave mentioned before that he traveled to London and he mentioned how he purchased SIM cards for the family while traveling. What are your thoughts about best practices for this? I want to make sure that we are reachable while we're gone, but I want to minimize the cost. Okay. So things have changed in the last whatever, three or four years since I did this. But when we went, if you want to buy a physical SIM, I don't think this part has changed. What we found was that buying a physical SIM and getting service on it without being in the UK and we were going to the UK first was not a supported scenario. There were ways around it. You could find like shady people on eBay that would sell you activated SIMs with service or, you know, if you had a friend there or something, they could do it for you. But you needed, I needed either a credit card with a UK billing address, which I don't have, no great surprise, or I needed to be in person in the UK to procure that card. And it was kind of a mess getting it all set up. The effort we went through in advance to try and get this set up was, in my opinion, not worth it. Thank you to all of the people that helped me, by the way. But in the end, it was and would have been simpler to just go at the airport. There are stores, not even kiosks, but at Heathrow, there are full on stores that are just furiously selling people data plans and SIMs and giving them to you right as you get off the plane, which is really it. We had to do that. I think we were able to get two of our SIMs activated beforehand, and then we had to do two onsite. And the two onsite took us way less time than the two beforehand. So if you're going to do physical SIMs, I think that's the right thing. However, you can do eSIM if you have an iPhone that supports that. And those you might be able to set up in advance, depending on how you're going to do things, I'll put some links in the show notes to all of the various services that we used and we've talked about in the past with this. But an eSIM might be the way to go. Still, if you want a phone number that people can use to call you, an actual SIM might really be the simplest answer in that regard. But maybe not. You might be able to make this work with an eSIM with some of the various providers, like I think TrueSIM and I should have pulled them all up. I did not prep for this as well as I normally would have evidently. But that's where I would go with that. I think the easiest is to just deal with it right there. What do you think about this, John? Yeah, the last time I... Yeah, it was pretty trouble overseas. I actually got a thing for Verizon. It was a temporary phone that my current phone forwarded to. Now, Verizon has something I think they call it travel pass, which is their plan for if you're going to go out of the country. Right. Right. I haven't been out of the country for a while, so... Yeah, that's true. It is worth looking at your U.S. plan to see what they can do for you because you certainly could pay whatever your U.S. carrier is going to charge you to activate your service overseas. If you're a T-Mobile customer, you get free roaming in the UK in 112 other countries or something like that. You're done if you're a T-Mobile customer with the right plan. AT&T was like... I think they wanted 10 bucks a day the last time I looked, and that's per line. So depending on how many people you're traveling with, 10 bucks a day for a three-day trip for one person, probably the simplest way to go. 10 bucks a day for a two-week trip for four people, not the best way to go. So, AT&T is what we're using at the time, and I think Verizon is similar to AT&T. Yeah, I'm looking here yet. For most countries, it's 10 bucks a day. Actually, so it's five bucks a day in Mexico and Canada, and then 10 bucks a day for everything else. Okay. Yeah. You're right. That could add up if it's a lot of people, but if it's just you for a week or something, that's still kind of pricey. Yeah. Well, you're going to pay somewhere between 15... If you do this in the airport, you're going to pay somewhere between 15 at the top and maybe $30 for a SIM that's got all the data you need for a month, which they know more than you're going to use. They're making money here, too. But to get off the plane and pay, let's say, 50 bucks for your family of three or four, whatever it is for all your access. Okay. Well, that's pretty good that you're saving some money there. So, yeah, the TruePhone app is the one that came to mind the last time to get data when traveling. I don't know that that TruePhone, yeah, I think that's just data plans. And GigSky is another one that we've used and they're great, but it's data only. So, to get an actual phone number, I think you need... But maybe not. Maybe not. There might be a way. Somebody will tell us. Somebody will tell us. All right. Let's see. Dan has a question about sharing something else with the family, and that is calendars. He says, I found a problem with using iCloud Calendar amongst family members. Our household, me, my wife and my daughter, all use the iCloud Family calendar, which is great, but my niece also shares our iCloud account, so she has room to store her photos. Similar to what we were talking about last week, right, John? Like I said, I've got my dad and my stepmom on our plan. You could perhaps put your parents on your plan to all share this one lump of iCloud storage for photos. That's great. As Dan continues, we would prefer that our family calendar is only visible by our household of three, but I don't think I get to choose which iCloud family members have access to it. I realize that my niece could deselect it on her devices so it doesn't show up, but ideally I would like to choose who has access to it. I guess we can manually set up a new calendar and share that with whomever we would like, but I'd rather take advantage of Apple's family features. Any thoughts? Yeah, well, you hit the answer on the head. You're right that the family calendar that is set up is, in fact, just made available to everyone in the quote unquote family group, and it's not unreasonable of Apple to think that everybody is, that people aren't necessarily using it the way many of us are. But what we have done because we're in very similar scenario here is we just set up a separate calendar. In fact, we have a few calendars that are shared amongst us. We have one that we call family group, which is events that are for all or at least most of the family to attend together. And then we have family personal, which is where we put things that will impact the family, but aren't necessarily for everyone to attend. And that works for us, you know, obviously whatever works for you. It's free to create another calendar, and then you can choose not only who you share it with, but how you share it. You can select some people to only have read access to the calendar, and then you can select others to have read and write access to the calendar. So it's really not that bad to just create and use different calendars, and you get some more flexibility with it and how it all works. We've been, our family personal and family group thing has worked well for us for a couple of years, especially now that we've got, you know, one kid in college, another kid about to be in college, and, you know, our lives are intertwined, but in a different way now, right? New family dynamic going on. So we find that that works, but, you know, obviously whatever works for you is what works. That's my thoughts on that, John. Yours? All I know is that we get a free community calendar that they send us in the mail that I like, you know, has nice pictures and all that. They list the daylight saving time as next week. Okay. All right. Well, you know, the thing is though, like, we had so much fun skipping the hour this week that they made a big announcement this morning, next week, we are going to do it again. It was so much fun, we're just going to do it again. No, we're not. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, as Brian Monroe in the chat room reminds us, in addition to sharing the storage pool that you get in a family calendar, you also get to share app purchases and music purchases, I think, and, you know, all the other purchases that you make too, except in-app purchases. Those don't get shared. So spare that in mind. But, you know, there's more benefits than just sharing the storage if you have people in your family group. So, and like I said last week, you know, your Apple Music subscription, a family subscription is good for up to six. So if, for example, and I don't think you subscribe to Apple Music, John, but if, you know, in your scenario, if you did and your parents did, now suddenly, you know, you'd be paying 10 bucks a month, they'd already be paying 15 to have the two of them. So you'd save 10 bucks a month between the two of you by combining that together and, you know, have iCloud storage and all that stuff. So anyway, anyway, it's just how it goes. Last question in this little block here, Brian has a fun little question. He says, I want to ask if you or the MGG Swarm, I like that, knows how to tame an iPhone and how it integrates audio with an automobile, specifically with Bluetooth or CarPlay. Historically, our two vehicles connected to our phones via Bluetooth. In November 19, we upgraded them both to CarPlay, their Mazda. He says, one behavior still persists when the car detects the phone either via Bluetooth or Direct Connect with lightning cable for CarPlay. It does not consistently pick up the last app that played audio content. For the two drivers, we use Pocket Casts or Apple's podcast app 80% of the time and Pandora about 15% with the kid and Apple Music is only used during the holidays. Why is it that the Music app is the one that comes up 90% of the time as the first audio source and is picked to start playing when the vehicle is started? We have tried force closing all the apps on each iPhone, rebooting the phone every few days and repairing them, having Christmas music playing in March is getting old. So how do we fix this? Well, I don't know that you can, but I have some ideas. This is pretty typical. Apps aren't kept, especially third party apps, but this can also be true for Apple's apps. Apps aren't kept in active memory when they're not being used. I have the same scenario where my podcast app of choice, and I mentioned that that's one of either Overcast or Downcast or Pocket Casts, isn't remembered when I connect to the car. Now, I have my car set, and every car is different in this regard. I have my car set to automatically play the radio when I get in. My car insists upon playing audio when I get in, just like yours. But thankfully, I have a SiriusXM capable vehicle. I don't subscribe to SiriusXM because they have terrible coverage in this town of Durham, New Hampshire. Although I've found it nice on road trips, but whatever. So I set my Sirius channel to zero, which is the station ID and is silent. And so when my car turns on, it goes and plays SiriusXM, which is the channel zero, and therefore, I get no audio. That might be a workaround for you or anybody else out there. That said, yes, my podcast app of choice is rarely the one that plays when I tell it go play from car play. And so I have an idea, though, as I was answering this question, I started thinking, wait a minute, you know, when I get in the car and I connect to car play, I want the Escort app for my radar detector to run. And so I have written a shortcut with, you know, an automation rather in the shortcuts app. And that automation does a few things. It when it is connected via car play, it opens my Escort app, and then it waits 30 seconds, and then it turns off Wi-Fi. Because as I've mentioned before, I don't like my phone trying to connect to, you know, the Wi-Fi signal at like town hall when I'm at the stoplight because that's a little bit of a pain in the neck because it never actually connects very well. And it's, you know, wonky. I just leave it on the LTE, you know, everything's good or 4G, whatever. Okay, so why not add having it open my favorite podcast app into that automation, right? And so I did that, and it's actually been working fairly well. So this might be the answer for you is to just, you know, it's in the shortcut tap, go to automations, which is the middle button at the bottom. And then, you know, my trigger is when car play connects. I do not have the ask before running turned on because I don't want it to ask me, and it's willing to do these particular operations this way without, because I plugged in my phone, so I have the option to not have it ask me. And I have it open those two apps that's in the scripting scenario, and then also in the scripting scenario, I choose wait 30 seconds. And then for Wi-Fi, I have it turn off. And then I have another script that when I, or automation, when I disconnect from car play, it just turns Wi-Fi back on for me. So there you go. Maybe that'll help. I don't know. I don't know. But hopefully, I hope, I hope, I hope. What do you think, John? I don't know. I don't know if car play, I will maybe have you, have you used, have you used shortcuts yet, or automation or anything like that in the, in the, the shortcuts app? Yes. All right. Because it's pretty cool how that, you know, how those, those, those, yeah, maybe we'll see it on macOS someday. That would be nice. That would be nice. It feels like a Catalina app that's waiting to happen. Yeah, there was talk that, right, a project catalyst app. Sorry, not Catalina. Thanks. Right, right. Yeah. Yeah, there was talk among the various pundits that it was going to be part of Catalina, but it didn't quite make it. Maybe it'll be in an update. Be nice. Yeah, or it'll be in the next one, too. So we'll see. It'll be interesting to see whether or not they have a WWDC this year with all the, you know, conferences being canceled and all that for coronavirus. I was planning to go to South by Southwest. And now they canceled it, right? They canceled it Friday afternoon. Yeah. A week before it was supposed to start. And yeah, I know. I know. Now, do you have, did you get travel? Did you book a flight? Are you going to get a refund or are you out of luck? So that's, that's actually a really good question. I, I booked, it turns out that this particular year, the way I booked South by Southwest, I have almost no cash outlaid for it. My hotel, I generally don't book through South by Southwest. I, I stay with a friend. I have this system that I, that I follow and it's worked well for me. I stay with a friend for like the first half of my time there. I'm usually there for like eight days, nine days. And that's a long time, you know, to be in one hotel room. So for the interactive part of South by Southwest, which for me is the beginning of it, I stay with a friend and that works out well. And then I move, you know, downtown for, for music. And I am a Marriott points member formerly Starwood. So I have lots of points and I'm thus far have always been able to book a room right across the street from the convention center at the residence in on points, which has been awesome. So I have that booked and I can cancel that up until like Saturday and get all my points back, which is great. So that's fine. My flights, evidently, I chose to book my jet blue flight down with points as well. Don't know why. And I reached out to jet blue and asked them, I mean, I suppose if I looked at it, you know, the decision I made to book with points was probably the right one at the time. I'm, you know, I probably compared it to whether or not paying cash was worth it and the points were probably the right move. So that's what I did. I reached out to jet blue the moment South by Southwest canceled just via Twitter and via direct message and said, hey, you know, is there anything, because I know a lot of airlines are offering um, no change fees on flights that you book, you know, after like February 27th or something when when all of this craziness with with travel and coronavirus hit. But of course I booked my flights months ago. So I reached out to jet blue and said, Hey, is there anything you can do? And they're like, Oh, absolutely. We want you to be comfortable when you travel. Just let us, you know, if you want me to cancel the flight and put the points back in your account, no problem. So I was like, well, that's really nice. My flight home, but I haven't changed anything yet because I may still go to Austin. I have some other non South by Southwest meetings and things that that I had sort of scheduled and it may well be worth it for me to just go there for a few days, probably less days than I was going to. But I'm waiting to sort that out. Really, I just want to see it what the kind of what the temperature in Austin is on this whole thing with the sentiment is like, are people not going to want some, you know, person from New Hampshire walking into their office? Are they afraid of coronavirus? You know, that sort of thing, right? So I'll figure that out this week. But I was just getting my options. And so I reached out to Delta, who is the airline that I paid $192 for my flight home. And initially they said, the only refunds are available on trips to and from China. Okay, that's fine. I'm like, fine. Like if that's how you want to play this, sure, I get it. Yeah, that's what the letter of the law says. Okay, no problem. And so then I asked them, Hey, can I change my flight? You know, I might still be going to Austin, but, you know, might be for less days. And, and they're like, uh, yeah, let us know what you want to change it to. So that's still pending. They may try to charge me a change fee. They may, you know, who knows, we'll find out. So I might be out that 192 bucks. I also think I tend to rent a car for the first like half of my, my visit there and then surrender it halfway through or whatever and go on. And since I've worked that schedule out enough in the past, I have to look, but it's possible I did the whole Avis prepay and save money thing, which if I cancel that, I think I'm, I would technically be out 50 bucks. But, but I haven't looked deep into that yet. I'm not going to until I know when I want to be there and figure all that out. But, but yeah, it's interesting. So yes, I might be out, I don't know, a few hundred dollars or whatever, which is, I mean, not a, not a big deal in the grand scheme of things. The interesting part is that South by Southwest themselves, the, the, the business did not have insurance that covers them for this. They have it for like terrorism and other things like that, but this they do not have. Now it was the city of Austin that canceled this for them. So I'm pretty sure that means they won't pay the city of Austin for the deposit or whatever they would have put down for the convention center, because I think the convention center is run by the city. However, that's only part of it. You know, whatever they paid to people that were going to come like, you know, speakers or musical acts or, you know, whatever, however those deals worked, they might very well still be on the hook for that. They might, they are on the hook for refunds for tickets. Although they're asking people, look, just keep your ticket. It'll be good for the next show. They might also very well be on the hook for hotel rooms. A lot of times, like again, I don't know their business model, but a lot of times these kinds of, you know, conferences will go and buy blocks of hotel rooms at the hotels, you know, for the conference and then they sell them to the attendees and they, you know, they get a good deal at the hotel and they say, we're going to go buy, you know, 300 of your rooms and, you know, what discount can you give us and they get a discount and then they sell them to attendees for, you know, higher prices and they make a little bit of money. I mean, it's just part of how that business works. My guess is that they would be on the hook for buying all those rooms regardless of whether or not their attendees stay in them. So, yeah, so I don't know that South by Southwest survives this. I mean, I don't, and I say that I'm not, I don't mean to imply that I think they won't. I mean, the words that I say, I don't know. I don't know anything about their business, but I do know that one of the founders of South by Southwest came out the other day and said, we do not have insurance to cover us for this, which is, you know, bad news. So, Dave's, whatever, two, three, maybe 400 bucks that I'm out, whatever it turns out to be, is a drop in the bucket compared to whatever their exposure is on this. So, yeah, it's crazy. It's crazy. I don't know. And I don't know if it's an overreaction or if it's the right reaction or what. It's hard to say. It's weird to me that the city of Austin chose to call this. It's not weird that they decided to cancel. That kind of makes sense to me, given the sentiment. They called it a disaster. They had a better term for it, but disaster was part of it. It's like, there's no confirmed cases. There's no, like, what's the disaster? It seemed a little strange that that was the term they chose. It felt like it was chosen for insurance reasons, quite frankly. But again, who am I? Just some geek that spouts off about things. But that's okay. I don't know. I don't know. Yeah. Well, we had our first case reported. It was somebody from New York, I think, that brought it over here. It's like, thanks a lot, New York. If it's as contagious as everybody thinks, then we're all going to be exposed to it. I mean, it's like, that's, that's just sort of a, I mean, it's like the common cold in that sense, except maybe even more contagious than that. So, you know, I don't know. We'll find out. Well, that's, you know, wash your hands. You know, I, I had toyed with the idea of throwing the, you know, several of these things into cool stuff found, but maybe we will. Maybe there's, there's some, there's some ideas I have about cool stuff found. But anyway, we'll get there. Lots of good stuff. Yeah. Yeah. We have some cool VPN things for Apple TV to talk about, John. Like, yeah, I know. But, but first I want to talk about our, our first two sponsors, if that works for you, my friend, Dandy. All right. Look, with home security, there's two ways you can go about protecting your home. There's the traditional way where you wait weeks for a technician to do a messy installation that costs you a small fortune and, you know, gets in the way of your life because you get a rearrange and plan and it takes longer and they're late and all of that stuff. Or there's the other way with our first sponsor here, simply safe, because simply safe blankets your whole home in security, right? 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So I'll move back over here and we'll talk about DNS based VPNs for Apple TV, right? Because we're talking about this in Episode 801 where wouldn't it be nice to be able to kind of control where your Apple TV thinks it is or where the apps on your Apple TV think they are. And the problem is there is no VPN app for Apple TV that will let you do this. However, there are ways. Guido says you cannot store VPN on your Apple TV, but with the paid service smart DNS, you can change the DNS server of your Apple TV by going into Settings Network and you change it to one of their servers located in many countries. This way he says, I watched US shows on my Apple TV while I was living in Mexico and it was awesome. So you sign up for this service, you use their DNS server on your Apple TV and then you go to their website and configure where you want it to point you and it points you there. So that's pretty cool. Again, it's not a VPN in the sense of the protection and all of that isn't there, but it does get you some of the benefits of VPN. So we will put the link in the show. It's thanks, Guido. It's good stuff. I will share Andrew's thought because it's very similar and then we'll talk a little bit about it, John, because Andrew's got something to say. Hey, John. Hey, Dave. This is Andrew in Bellengine Australia. A couple of episodes ago, you were talking about the issue of running a VPN on the Apple TV and you said there isn't an app or anything like that to do that at this time. That is correct. But there is a pretty cool VPN system for the Apple TV that I use quite successfully. So in my house, I have two Apple TVs. One is for the Australian Apple Store and that's the latest generation of the Apple TV. Then I have an old generation three Apple TV that I run on the US only Apple iTunes store and it's set all the settings in it for the United States of America. And there's a company called UnblockUs.com that's UnblockPythonUsasinUS.com. They're a Canadian outfit and what they do is they give you a couple of DNS addresses that you put into your Apple TV and you just set that once and forget it. And then when you want to use that VPN connection to the United States or the UK or anywhere in the world, you just go on to the UnblockPythonUs.com site, say connect and it works out a link between this network you're currently on and your Apple TV and its DNS settings for that country. And voila, I'm on as a US citizen or a US user on the iTunes and Netflix and Amazon Prime in the United States from Australia. So it works really well. It doesn't involve anything at the router or the modem or anything like that. It's purely a setting on your Apple TV and an account which I think is about 60 bucks a year with this company UnblockUs.com and it works really well. So I have one Apple TV that runs purely on the Australian store and it has automatic connections for DNS and that's fine. The UnblockUs doesn't interfere with that. Then I've got the Apple TV with UnblockUs US on it and that works perfectly. And it's just one button connection and the way I go. It works perfectly. So I didn't get caught. See you boys. Have fun. Bye. I like it. Yeah, that's really smart. Yeah. Yeah. And if you've got that old Apple TV around, you know, you could... Interesting thought, right? To have that plugged into your same TV for different reasons as Andrew points out. So yeah, that's good stuff. I like it. Lots of tips sort of baked in there. Pretty good. Thoughts on that, John? I like it. Okay. Very clever way of tricking. Yeah, tricking. Yeah, exactly. My guess is that Apple cannot allow VPN apps on Apple TV lest their media partners would revolt. I mean, they do allow them on iOS, of course, but there's a straight-faced explanation for why you would want a VPN app on your iPhone. It is not just a media... It is not primarily a media consumption device, although for many people it actually is. But it's your portable communications device. It makes a lot of sense that you'd want the full privacy of an actual real VPN on there. But for Apple TV, it starts to be... It's like, well, wait, why do you want a VPN on this? Because you want to circumvent our various blocks that are part of licensing deals. It's not so much a control thing, although at some level it is. But for a lot of these media partners, it's like Netflix signs a deal to allow a show, but only in this market because somebody else has the exclusive in that market and they don't want to run afoul of that. The VPN obviously can circumvent that. Netflix doesn't really care. They just have to be able to put up a face that says, no, we don't allow this. But when there's a will, there's a way kind of thing. Apple might have trouble if they allowed real VPN apps on the Apple TV. So I like these workarounds. That's good. While we're on the subject, listener Bill says... I read an article he had at Mac Observer about private DNS and the companies... So the ISP can't snoop and sell your data. I was wondering how this worked with VPNs such as ExpressVPN. He says, I currently have the Cloudflare DNS settings in my TP-Link router and I use ExpressVPN on my Mac and my mobile devices is one not benefiting the other when VPN is enabled to the Cloudflare router DNS settings only come into play when the VPN on my devices is turned off when they're inside my network. So it's a great question. And the answer, the short answer to cut to the chase is yes, that's correct. The VPN apps especially and specifically ExpressVPN on your iOS or Mac devices will do its own DNS because that way not only does your DNS provider not know where you're visiting but no one can see where you're going. All they see is that you have this tunnel to ExpressVPN and nothing else. One of the issues with secure DNS is that yes, the DNS lookup is obscured or hidden from prying eyes by being encrypted and going elsewhere so it's not going to your ISP. However, if you do a DNS lookup for say, you know, Citibank or city.com and then you go to city.com that connection itself is also encrypted but someone can see that you're connecting to Citibank. They can't see what you're doing but they can see that you're connected. The same is true for any other site that you visit. So it is still possible to get a fingerprint of the types of places you visit even though because of SSL it's all encrypted, that the actual traffic is encrypted. Back to DNS, yes, VPNs generally take care of this internally but you can test this by going to the terminal and typing and we'll put this in the show notes but you type, you use a tool called NS lookup and you type NS lookup space some domain. I always use Apple. So I go to the terminal, I type nslookup www.apple.com and the nice thing about NS lookup is the first thing it returns is the server address of the DNS server that you are using and then it will tell you, you know, what information it found out about say www.apple.com. So you immediately get to see, ah, okay, you know, the server I'm using is this Cloudflare server I put in or it's my router or it's something being used, you know, assigned by my VPN and that, that's, to me, that's the best way to kind of look this up. It's just very quick, very easy and it, you know, and I did some tests with this to confirm and sure enough, once ExpressVPN was connected, John, I found that it was using a 10.181 something address, which is a private network address clearly assigned by ExpressVPN because I don't do any of that here and, and that way, you know, I know that my DNS lookups were happening with ExpressVPN. So pretty cool, huh? Yes. Dig is another option. I think Dig is a little newer than NS lookup. It is, but does, and so yes, I'm, I use NS lookup because I'm used to it, but Dig doesn't, oh, I guess it does include the server address. It's not quite as forthcoming. It's not quite as broken out as it is with NS lookup, but you're right, you could type dig space www.apple.com and in the kind of, in the tail of it, you can see the IP address of the server. So yeah, there you go. Yeah, that's there too. All right, we'll put both of them in there. Neither one hurts. So it's good. There is one other thing that is worth pointing out in, and it is on by default. So you don't have to worry about this, but with ExpressVPN on your Mac, go to ExpressVPN preferences advanced and ensure that the checkbox next to IPv6 leak detection is on. That will keep IPv6 from muddying any of these waters and perhaps, you know, doing an end around and doing a DNS lookup in the wrong way. IPv6 is, is, you know, kind of meant to make all these direct connections and everything and, and it can wreak havoc with VPNs just in terms of letting things as they say leak around the VPN, turn that protection on and then IPv6 is essentially, you know, shut down for your VPN session and you are certain to be going through that secure tunnel. So yeah, good. Nice. I like this stuff. It's fun. All right. I want to do something a little bit differently here. I want to, I want to hire somebody, John. We've been thinking about this for a while here. We need a, I'll call it a producer, but really it's, I need someone that can come on board with us and help us take the content of this show and, and certainly if there's any improvements that we can make to the content that great, of course, but there are lots of little things in this show like for example, you know, this little segment that we just did on VPNs or the segment that we did on any of these little tips that you've broken out, could be highlighted very well on various social media channels and all of that stuff and it, but it is something that takes time and takes a little bit of work and it takes someone that is sort of naturally inclined and, and, and skilled and, and just into the social media part of it, but also into the tech part of it, right? So that you can like listening to the show, you say, oh, right, that would be a great thing to highlight and then go and make it happen, right? That's the kind of person that we're looking to hire here. There's more stuff too. You know, this is, this is something where quite frankly, I see it sort of, sort of expanding over time. I think it could start as a, as a part-time thing for sure for someone that's got sort of room in their schedule and all of that. So if you think you are the right person for this, please let us know. You know, we mentioned, we'll break the rule, we mentioned feedback at mackeykev.com. That's, that's a fine place to send us stuff. We'll, you know, we'll see that and, and sift through it all. But, but please let us know. You know, I figured I'd reach out to you folks first before just sort of putting out a general call somewhere. I'd rather, I'd rather have someone that's already listening to the show do this because you already understand the show. You're already into podcasts, but you do need to be someone that's into social media and really engage there because that, I feel like that's a big part of this. If you know a lot about YouTube, that's another place where these kinds of sort of bite-sized chunks can work out really well. So that's, you know, bear that in mind. And anywhere else, you know, tell us what you think. This is a position we're creating. We know what we need in the end. We don't really know how to get ourselves there entirely. Of course, we have some ideas, but we'll be looking to you to sort of provide us with that too. So tell us what you are an expert at and how you want to help. And we would, we would love to consider all that and see what we can do. But, 2020 is the year to really kind of take this thing to the next level. So and we need help to do that. So please let us know. While we're at it, I do want to thank all of our premium contributors whose contributions have come in in the last week or so here at matkeekyub.com slash premium. Again, this is not a mandatory thing. It is an appreciated thing. And it does come with the premium at matkeekyub.com email address that you can use. And we do answer that stuff first, although we try to answer everything. So, thanking for the folks on our biannual $25 every six month plan, Patrick from Shreveport, Bruce W., Matt from Midlothian, Eric from Trondheim, Doug S., Jeff S., Daniel from London, Mary from Monterey at $100 every six months. Thank you. Ben from Sustainable Computing in Berkeley with $36 every six months. Thank you. Corey from Kenmore, Michael from Naperville, Richard from Pontrug, Jason from St. Louis, or St. Louis, probably better to say. Michael from Troy, Norton from Bethesda, Edward from Crumb, Gerard from Meridian, JP from Studio City at $50 every six months. Joel F., Craig S., Dan E., John O., Tony G., and Michael P., Paul from Tunbridge Wells, Gary from Chicago, Richard from Quakertown, Ron G., John from Vevi at $60 every six months. Greg from Los Angeles, Robert from Oro Valley, Brian from Johnson City, Anthony from Ride, Joe B., Eric from Albuquerque, and Drake from Honolulu. And then we had on the monthly $10 plan, thanking Robert from Clearwater, Steven from Costa Mesa, Everett from Marina, Olga from Bellevue, Gary from Babylon, Jason from Charlestown, Luanne from Albuquerque, Ward from Mesa, Paul from Fishers, and Mark from Milford. And then we had some one-time donations come in. Thank you. Joseph from Marietta for $50, Jordan from Santa Barbara for $25, Jay from Caledonia for $50, Eric from Brampton for $25, and Mack Monkey Boy from Toronto at $50. Thank you so much to all of you. You rock. Cool stuff found time, John. Andrew starts us off with a kind of a big one. And that is all of the cool stuff found made by the software, or by the folks at Irradiated Software and their labs specifically. We've mentioned some stuff from Irradiated Software. We mentioned size up from them a few times, but it's been about four years. That said, there's some cool things in their labs specifically. They've got FinderMinder, which allows you to specify where and what size you want newly opened Finderwindows to appear. I wish I had known about this like a while ago. That one alone is worth mentioning and then stopping the show so that we can all go and install it. Because Finderwindows often open in the last place I expected than certainly not the place I wanted. So FinderMinder from in their labs jazz up that plays sound effects as you type. Hey, look, I'm not here to judge. If you want that, that's great. Key up is an onscreen keyboard with some themes and sound effects. And Pixel Peeper allows you to watch a pixel on your screen and execute an Apple script when that pixel changes. And they say, for example, you can watch a pixel within the progress bar when performing a software update, downloading files or backing up. And when it hits the end of that or any point in that operation, you can have an Apple script run to do whatever you want. So cool stuff. Thank you for telling us about that, Andrew. I knew, like I said, I knew about Irradiated Labs, but I did not know about these things. I got to go get FinderMinder. Wow. Okay, that's exciting. Now I'm excited, John. But any more thoughts on that before we move on to the next cool stuff? All right, Keith says, I was really interested in Episode 802 regarding testing speeds using iPerf3. He says, it worked great. I found that my Mac connected via PowerLine to the router is more than double the speed, sometimes triple the Wi-Fi speed that I get there. So this is handy data to have, which is the point. He says, today my wife is having internet issues from another room. So I thought, is there iPerf for iOS? And it turns out there is. And he sent us a link to iPerf3 speed test for iOS. So we will put that in the show notes. He says, now I'm set to test our iPhones connected to my Mac Mini now that we can use files to connect to it as a file server, which is true. Another little quick to baked into the cool stuff found. I like it. Pretty good, huh, John? There's another place you could run iPerf, Dave. Where's that? I was just looking here, network tools. In Catalina? No, no, on iOS. There is a, yeah, the Hurricane Network Tools actually has an iPerf selection as well. That's another option. Oh, okay. All right. I will put that. I remember seeing that. Yeah, it's a nice package of all these Unixi network tools that are on iOS. Nice. All right. I will put that in the show notes as well. Cool. Nice find. Awesome. Barry, who is traveling all over the place always, he says, I want, are you aware of flighty? It's another geeky AV app he says that I've quickly fallen in love with. It does the usual tracking of flights, but this app gets down to the tail number of your plane and will track it for 24 hours prior to arriving at your airport of departure. It shows the past 60 days of history for each leg you were flying and show statistics of flight arrivals early on time and delays. He says it's awesome and I quickly subscribed to their pro version to get all the features. It synchronizes with Tripit, so there's not a whole lot to enter if you use it, which I know you do. You're right. He says it also will show you your history of flights that you've taken on the same route and all of that. And he says, of course, it's developed by flight nerds, which how cool is that? Yeah. Yeah. This looks really interesting. One thing I always like, and I'm able to get this with FlightAware, I believe. One of the apps that I use, and I think it's FlightAware, is knowing where my plane is and is it going to be on time inbound to the airport from which I am departing, because if it's not, then I know I'm going to be delayed. Like if there's no equipment there to fly on, doesn't matter if I'm there on time because the plane ain't. Now, sometimes they will change to different equipment for a flight, but that's very rare. Most of the time it's just no, got to wait for that equipment to get here, and then we'll go. And then sometimes you get to wait for the crew rest and all that other stuff. But first things first, you got to have a plane to fly. So this app sort of pulls it all together. That's great. Yeah. I got to check out FlightAware. I was planning on subscribing before my South by Southwest trip, but we already discussed how that went. Thoughts on that, John, before we... I've got two other cool stuff found to discuss. Okay. IQ, E-Y-E, Q-U-E, they make this at-home vision test. Now, it's not meant to replace your eye doctor or anything, except it is. It's not meant to replace the health checkups that your eye doctor does, and it is good to get those done every few years or more frequently if you've got something going on. But in terms of... I'm about to order new glasses from Zeni Optical here, and I want to make sure that my prescription hasn't changed even a little bit, because if it has, I'll go change it, and then send it in to Zeni, and they'll just make my glasses for me, because Zeni will make glasses without a doctor's prescription. You just need to put your numbers in, and it's fine. IQ lets you do it. I did their at-home tests. I got one of their little test kits, because I wanted to see, has my prescription changed? A, it has not, and B, there... It took maybe... I want to say 20 minutes to go through the test, their thing. It uses your iPhone. You strap these little various little tools and sensors to your phone, like things that you look through, and then it goes through your vision test. And before, it would give me my results. It wouldn't even show me my results until I did the test three times, because they know anomalies can happen. So I didn't even get to see where it was until I finished my third test, and then I could do more to get the results better, or more accurate based on more samples. After I finished my three tests and it showed me my results, it was exactly the same numbers, like everything, the cylindrical and this and that. My vision's pretty good. I'm only like negative one and one eye and negative 0.75 and the other. I use glasses for driving and watching TV. I don't wear glasses all the time, and I certainly don't use them for computer work, thankfully. But it was exactly what my eye doctor had given me as a prescription. And the same was true. I had other people in the house test, and it was like, oh yeah, it's spot on. So it's pretty cool. And they've got other things that test how good your eyes are in each eye separately. And then together in terms of brightness, like it is one eye, you know, starting to fade in terms of its ability to see in low light. And then they will test for color blindness, you know, and all that stuff. And it's pretty cool. And it's great to be able to do these sort of conformational checks at home. You still go to the doctor every now and then, I think. But, you know, being able to test this at home before you order new glasses every single time, that's pretty awesome. So very cool stuff. So I throw it out there. Cool, John. Yeah, I saw them in 2018. It's a yes. Oh, cool. Did you did you test it? Did you have it test your vision? Oh, yeah. Oh, okay. Oh, cool. Yeah. No, I, yeah, I pasted a link to the article I did in 2018. But yeah, no, I thought it was a that was pretty neat. That's a great thing. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I don't know where you paste it. Make sure you put it in the show notes. That's great. Yeah, yeah, cool. And then the other thing that I started testing this week, and we're going to do a round up kind of on all of these, but I want to take a minute on each of them as I sort of go through them and highlight them. I tested the OWC Envoy Pro EX, the Thunderbolt 3 bus powered drive. I tested the one terabyte version. You know, these, it's crazy how fast these things are, right? Because it's an NVME SSD connected to a, you know, a Thunderbolt interface. So they're, you know, they're just are no bottlenecks is really what it comes down to. I was getting right speeds of 1,750 megabytes per second, right? Like that's fast. Read speeds. I was seeing 2,350 megabytes per second bus powered. It's it's it's rugged. It's a little big. It's a metal enclosure that is surrounded by a like a rubber bumper. And so they've done drop testing on this thing. And it's, you know, it's it's a serious piece of equipment. I mean, it's not that big. It's still certainly portable and all of that. But but it, you know, it is it is a it is a piece of gear. It's got a built-in Thunderbolt cable. So you don't have to worry about losing that. And it, like I said, fast, super fast. And it's OWC. So you know that they've tested the heck out of this thing. They, you know, it's it I'm I seem to have memories of them telling me that they just ran at it like full tilt for days and it didn't overheat and all that stuff, which which is exactly what OWC does. So I'm I'm certain that that's what they've done with this thing too, because they wouldn't release it if they hadn't. But yeah, the Envoy pro EX. And you know, these things are the one terabyte version, which is one I'm testing is 300 bucks $299.75. So like, you know, it's amazing the the pricing on these like where it all falls. And, you know, for a drive that I mean, certainly you could do, you know, your video editing and or your audio mixing and things like that to high bandwidth stuff on it. But, you know, even just for a drive connected to your Mac to do your clones and and, you know, store your photos library. Like if you need to store your photos library and you don't want to put it on your internal drive, putting it on an SSD that's this fast. My goodness, it makes a huge difference. Like, it's remarkable, because I always store my photos library on an, you know, an external drive. And it, you know, I've been using like rotational drives and things like that. It's like, oh, let's try it on this one. It's like, Oh, right. So I made a mistake in the past, but I've rectified it now. And so yeah, there you go. You can check it out. But yeah, it's the on by pro EX is what these are. So fast, fast, fun, which I like, you know, it's good. It is Thunderbolt three only on this one. So just bear that in mind, even though it's a USB cable, right? Good, John. USB C connector is a USB C connector, right? Correct. But it's the Thunderbolt connector. Yeah. Yeah. Is good. Is good. What else is good is our third sponsor, which is cash fly. You know, we talk about cash fly in every episode and have for almost the whole time of the show, because they're the ones that provide the bandwidth to get the show from us to you. And that's because they have this worldwide CDN content delivery network, which means they've got points of presence all over the world, which means all of our Makikap episodes are on all of those points of presence all over the world. And when you go to download, you're just downloading from your local point of presence. So you get it faster, but they do more than that, right? Because they've added web optimization capabilities that are spread around the world. And it's not just delivering, you know, static content like a podcast file, although they certainly do that very, very well, their web optimization solution includes APIs that can live at the edge for solving all of your content distribution problems. They do next-gen image optimization on the edge. They can do load balancing on the edge. They can do smart asset delivery. Right. It's awesome. So, you know, and if your website's tied directly to your revenue, and if you're running a business, it is, you optimize your site's content, you have a better chance of making more money, right? Guarantee the best user experience for all your customers no matter where they are or what device they're using, you got a better chance of making more money. And the good people at CashFly are even going to provide a free optimization consultation for you just because you're a listener of Makikap. So you can know where your site stands and get a lighthouse score report and learn how CashFly's web optimization solution can help add 60 points instantly to your score. Visit mak.cashfly.com. That's m-a-c.c-a-c-h-e-f-l-y.com. And our thanks to CashFly, not only for, you know, sponsoring, but just doing everything they've done for us. It's fantastic. So check it out. It's good. All right. Where's next here? We have that. Some tips. Jim reminds us we were talking about Comcast and speeds back in Episode 802 where Mark was having issues where when he was testing his speeds, it wasn't good. And when Comcast tested his speeds, it was great. He says, my issue was similar, but I learned that mine was time of day dependent, happening mostly in the evenings. The Comcast tech only arrives during the day when the speeds were fine. Therefore, quote unquote, nothing wrong on the Comcast side, except there was. They had insufficient load placed on their system when folks came home after work and started streaming video. He says, I badgered Comcast once a month, repeatedly asking them to send a tech after hours. And they finally did and were able to document the issue. So if you're having that problem, like Mark was or like Jim is or Jim was here, ask them to come out in the evening, pester them. They can and they might actually be able to get you there. So that that's good advice. I like it. It's good. Thoughts on that, John? Uh-oh. Awesome. Okay. All right. Yes. No, I remember when I had to, yeah, when I was having my problems, I didn't think of the time that the tech came out, but. Right. Right. Yeah. All right. Well, a couple more tips. Petter, it's amazing the things, you know, I probably should have put this in quick tips. Petter says, you know, I like to listen to Mackie Keb and I especially like to join the live stream. And he says, and I know that the live stream is it Mackie Keb.com slash stream. He says, but I think that you should just have live dot Mackie Keb.com point to the screen to the stream as well as Mackie Keb.com slash live. So we did. So now live dot Mackie Keb.com goes to the stream. And that's fine. Same place. You know, it's all good. It's a great idea. These are the kind of things we don't think of them because, you know, quite frankly, we don't visit the stream. We know where it is. We also stream. What's that, John? We are the stream. We are the stream. Right. Yeah. So these kinds of things that you folks think of when you're, you know, like, I wish they would do that. Well, Petter said I wish they would do that. And within about 10 minutes, you know, we did it. So there you go. Good stuff. Maybe you as our new producer slash promoter internally here would help us also think of these kinds of things. See what I mean? We need help. It's good. All right. And then I found out I was down at Mac edge this week or my local Apple service provider, Premier Apple service provider. And I was talking to him about a lot of things. We're doing some testing on that problem I mentioned last week. I don't have a lot of, I don't have a final answer on the whole when do things connect as Thunderbolt versus when they won't connect as Thunderbolt on laptops yet. But I have lots more data and I'm getting more. So hopefully in next week's show, we'll be able to kind of put a button on that and give you the guidance you need to know how to connect these things. But while I was there testing, we were talking about spinning drives versus, you know, SSDs. And just like I mentioned, you know, with photos, obviously, when you're doing things that cause lots of data to move back and forth, they get slow. That's even more of an issue if it's on your boot drive. You know, it's one thing if my photos library is on an external rotational disk, it's slow, but it doesn't slow down everything else because my system is still running for my internal separate disk, you know, SSD. They were pointing out to me that they have found that if you have, they've seen lots of customers come in with slow IMAX, like new IMAX that are slow. And they found that these were all fusion drive IMAX. And they were all people that had iCloud Drive enabled, which is enabled by default, the syncing of your desktop documents, folders, those sorts of things. When they are doing their syncing or their comparison operation, which happens often, the system just slows to a crawl when there's a fusion drive in it, aka a rotational drive. So the general advice is don't run iCloud Drive on a fusion drive Mac just because of speed. Reliability hasn't been an issue, but because of speed, if you're seeing speed problems, turning that off can make a big difference if you're on a rotational drive. Of course, the advice is get a non-rotational drive, get an SSD only, and go that route. But if you've got that rotational drive as part of a fusion drive setup, be aware that if your Mac starts feeling like it's slowing down, it may well be that. So thanks for that advice. It's good stuff. I like it. It's good, right? It's not good, but it's good to know. We make our choices. And Breiman wrote posits that may be an APFS-related issue with the fusion drive. I'd buy that, sure. Yeah, it could be. Whatever it is, it's no bueno, but yeah, you might be right about that. I like it. It's good. Yeah, I would love to do more because I love doing this show, and we have lots of stuff, but it's just not going to get there. It's not going to get there. Not today because we're out of time. So good news. We have a show to do next week, and you're going to send in your questions anyway to flesh that out even more. And this is why those of you that come to the live stream at live.mackeekab.com, you get to see the agenda that we have in front of us, and it evolves in real time throughout the show. And you can help us, and you do, and thank you for doing that, everybody that does, help us by adding links to the show notes and all of those things. It's great. But you also see that there's some good stuff, some good tips sort of left at the bottom here, and sometimes not at the bottom, sometimes we skip over them in the middle. And the intention is always, oh, great, we'll do that next week. And then you folks send in even better stuff, and then that's what we do anyway instead. So that's how you go. I don't know. It's not bad though. Like 15 years almost, we still get to keep doing this together, all of us, which is awesome. So tell your friends about the show. Tell us if you want to come work with us and, you know, help us promote the show even more, grow it to the next level. Yeah. Right. Good, John. Indeed. Indeed. All right. Yeah, I'm trying to think if we have anything else to say. I don't think we do. I'll just say thank you. Yeah, thanks. That's it. We said thanks to Cash Fly. We said thanks to our three sponsors for this episode, SimplySafe.com slash MacGeekGab. Sorry about that. MintMobile.com slash MGG, Mac.CashFly.com. But really, just go to MacGeekGab.com slash sponsors. And you can see all of our sponsors, including deals that are still in existence from no longer active sponsors. Folks come on board for a period of time, and then they stop their marketing activities, but they don't turn off the coupons sometimes. Well, you still get the benefit from that. So MacGeekGab.com slash sponsors lists all those. We test them once a month to make sure that they're still up to date. But of course, if you find one that's not, let us know. We'll fix it or tweak it, whatever needs to happen. So that's really the place to go. Or you can just sign up at MacGeekGab.com for our newsletter and what do you want us? Maybe once a month when we do those tests, would you want us to send that out to the list? I mean, I don't want to spam people, but I feel like that's kind of a helpful thing. And it's one of those things you don't really think about. So maybe once a month, we send that out to you on the list. Like, hey, here's the, we've gone through, we've checked all the past sponsors, and here's the ones that are still active even. Would you like that? Or would you hate that? Tell us. That's something we want to know, because we want to be helpful about this. It's good for all of us. Once a month list of sponsors, can we grab in the chat when we've already got a vote for a yes vote? So that's one. So it's 100% yes at the moment. That may change, John. That's kind of how this voting thing goes. Let us know what you think. And we, even if we try it out and then more people, like if you think, oh, I would hate that, but you don't tell us, and then we try it out. And then you tell us, whoa, whoa, pump the brakes. Oh, you know, then we'll take that into account and probably pump the brakes. That's how we do it. You know, it's all about making a work together. I'm rambling, John. I already said we went too long. It's just how it goes today, evidently. Thanks to you. We are still able to do this show all the time, and we love it. So give yourself a pat on the back, tell your friends how great you are that you listen to this show. Maybe they'll join us. That would be even better. Thanks to our other sponsors, Smile, Otherworld Computing, Bear Bones, Eero, Linode, you know where you can go to learn about those two. I already told you. I'm not going to tell you again. Okay. Yes, I will. back you up.com slash sponsors. John, help me get out of here. What are we going to do? I'm going to tell you one thing, Dave. Okay. No, I'm going to tell you two. No, I'm going to tell you three things. Oh no. And they are, don't get made.