 This is Mackie Gab episode 910 from Monday, January 17th, 2022. Folks, and welcome to the one after 909 Mackie Gab 910, the show where you send in your tips, your questions, your cool stuff found. We share them all. We try to answer your questions. We share your tips. We share some of our own tips if we come up with some. We share some of our own cool stuff found in addition to yours. Again, if we come up with some. The goal is that we structure an agenda such that each of us has the opportunity and succeeds at learning at least five new things every single time we get together. Sponsors for this episode include BB edit at bare bones dot com true bill dot com slash mg g. You can sign up and save thousands per year like many of us and Mac updater at core code dot i o slash mg g where mg g q 1 the code mg g q 1 saves you 10% on your order. We will talk more about each and every one of those shortly here, but now here or for now, not but now and now here in Durham, New Hampshire. I'm Dave Hamilton. And here in peripheral Connecticut. This is John F. Brown. How are we doing today? Mr. John F. Brown. Yeah, just me. Everything's broken. Oh, that sucks. I'm sorry to hear that. We're not broken. We're working around here. All right. That's good. All right. Um, yeah. All right, let's get some quick quick tips. Shall we? All right. Tony has the first one for us today. Let's see. We like to fix broken things here. So maybe we can fix some of your broken things. I don't know. We can fix somebody's broken things, but Tony's quick tip. Is he says I just read that you can hold a call on your iPhone by holding down the mute button says I'm not sure what the advantage is. If I don't want the person to hear me mute does that. If you want to add someone, you don't need to put the first person on hold. So why? Well, first of all, great quick tip. I had no idea that this was a possibility and Tony's right. Obviously that, you know, if you just mute someone, they can't hear you, but putting them on hold keeps you from hearing them and I don't know about you folks, but if I've got, you know, if I'm trying to have a sidebar conversation, hearing noise from somewhere else, you know, can be distracting. So especially if you're on a conference call or something and it's like, Oh, I need to have a sidebar. He put it on hold. It mutes both directions. So that's pretty cool. Nice. Nice find there, Tony. I hadn't, you know, this is the beauty of the quick tips. I had no idea that this was even a thing. And yet there's Tony helping us out. Yeah. Did you know about that one, John? No. There we are learning new things every day, every day. All right. I learned a new thing I mentioned in the last episode that we upgraded to the latest model of Apple TV. It's not necessarily new, but it's new to us. And I just set it up as an Apple TV because it's logged into my iCloud account. It inherited all of the apps and layout and all that stuff that I had on my prior Apple TV. So that was great. And then the other night, there we are watching the Bruins game on a mild time shift. And the, the we were watching in the channels out but using the Apple TV and up there in the upper right corner, it says, will Brad Marchand score a hat trick tonight? Which tells me that I'm about to see Brad Marchand score two goals because they wouldn't ask if he's going to score a hat trick unless he already has two. Thankfully, that happened in the course of about, well, for us, it was about five minutes later that in a 15 second period, Brad Marchand scored two goals. And then the spoils for that particular episode were over, but I wanted to figure out how to solve this problem. And so I went into the settings on my Apple TV, the settings app, you go to apps, TV, and then there's all kinds of things that you can turn off, but the two that I turned off, John were show sports scores, which was on and I had turned it off on my prior Apple TV. So that setting did not carry over. And then there's another one called Exciting Games and I'm thinking the Exciting Games one is what got me to that particular point with with this. So so by having both of those off the following night, the TV did not tell us that do we think David Posternack is going to score a hat trick because he scored two goals early on in the game. And unfortunately, though, it was my phone that told me that the next night. And so I had to go in and turn off notifications on my phone for the TV app. But you know, it's fine. It's fine. It's something to do. I'll lock down and everything. So, you know, but there you go. So that's that's something I learned from the Apple TV app from the Apple TV. It taught me the hard way. Kind of like that Frank Zappa record. I don't know. All right. You want to take us to Michael? Yes. So Michael says, heard you mention David's quick tip for creating reminders from emails in Mackey Gap 908. And I was expecting it to be the Siri method. I already knew for iOS and iPad OS. I'm pleasantly surprised to learn there was way to do the same thing on Mac OS. The Siri method I discovered a couple of years ago allows you to create a reminder linked to an email message or even a mailbox to use. Simply have your desired message or mailbox open on screen in iOS or iPad OS and say, Hey, Siri, remind me about this. The writer will show up as created and will look like a regular reminder. But if you go to it in the reminders app, it will have a thumbnail for the mail app and tapping this will take you to the message or mailbox. There's several other Apple stockups that allow you to create linked reminders despite there being no reminders option on the share sheet or no share sheet at all. These include notes, contacts, voicemail in the phone app and a few others. I ironically can't remember right now. Fascinating. Nice. Yeah. Oh, and I got, I got a Siri one too, Dave. So, um, so I was out and about yesterday breaking my car. Okay. Um, and I realized, um, when I got to the store, I'm like, Oh my gosh, I don't have my phone with me. Um, unfortunately, I had my wallet with me so I could, you know, buy the things that I wanted to buy when I was out and about. But when I got home, yes, in fact, I had left my phone, um, next to my computer. Yeah. And I'm like, Hey, let me try this. And so here's what I did, Dave. Um, I said, Hey, Siri, where's my iPhone? And she sent a reminder to my phone. It started beeping. Oh, not a reminder, a notification. You mean? Yes. Yeah, I got a notification on the phone. And what did you say this to? Was it to Siri? I said it to the home pod. No, I said it to the right. You have a home pod. Right. Right. Right. Okay. That makes perfect sense. Fascinating. That's pretty cool. So it just started. Yeah, I suppose it would. No, it sounded, sounds similar to what would happen if you have a, if you had like an Apple watch and said like ping my iPhone or something. Did it start making that submarine ping sound? Yes. Yeah. Yeah. So it's, it's the equivalent of using the find by app. Right. Right. Yeah. Of course. Of course. Ah, all right. That's pretty cool. Another, another unique to home pod, uh, application. I like it. All right. All right. Fun. Cool. Cool. Yeah. When, uh, Warren in the chat room at live.mackycup.com reminds us that if we're going to talk about Siri commands, just say Siri instead of proceeding it with the word, Hey, such that we don't accidentally set off our friends. Home pods and such. So that's good. It depends. I guess your voice would have to be relatively close to the voice of the right. Home pods are our voice specific for that stuff. I believe like, I think like if, you know, if we had one in our house, like we could link it so that when I ask it a question, it pulls from my data and Lisa asked a question that pulls from her data. Honestly, I'm, I'm asking that. I'm not, I think that's how it works. But, uh, but as I don't use home pods regularly, I'm, I'm just asking, but I think that's how it works. Yeah. Ah, so Warren in the chat room follows up with and says, I don't know who's speaking. Who is this? Very cool. Okay. So yes. All right. Well, that's, uh, that's missed. Yeah. I'm the only one here. So right, right. I only have one user. Yeah. I could set up another one. I mean, you'd have to, you'd have to disguise your voice. That's right. You have to, for those days when you want to speak with like, you know, an affectation to your voice or something that might be a good thing. So. All right. Well, we're going to just speak with our regular voices today. It's the best we can do folks. Dale has a quick tip for us. Uh, he says another one of those tips, which is obvious once you know it, but not obvious. If you don't, yep, I agree. He says, I have a recurring workflow which involves updating a note, then making a PDF of this note in its latest state. Uh, I use the command P P shortcut to create the PDF that pilot Pete brought to us. So that's by adding a, uh, a menu item or a shortcut to the menu item in the print dialogue. So that by for him, I assume command P P P triggers the save of the PDF. So he doesn't need to leave the keyboard. He says, and then I use command S to save it as I am essentially overriding an existing PDF, which is what I want. I get an onscreen message that says the file already exists and ask me if I want to replace it. I have the choice of clicking cancel or replace. It seems super inefficient to spoil what has been up to that point. A keyboard only workflow by having to reach for the mouse or trackpad and navigate to the replace button. I discovered though by a bit of searching that I can keep the workflow as an all keyboard. The shortcut command R has the same effect as clicking replace on that dialogue. Anything to be more efficient. Thank you, Dale. Yeah. So anytime you see one of those dialogues up that has, you know, buttons to click cancel, replace okay. Things like well, okay is usually the enter key or the default is usually the enter key and that's that's very clearly highlighted, but you can choose other options generally by hitting command and the first letter of whatever that option is. So for him, it's command R, but in other dialogues it can be, you know, command D for don't save and things like that. So definitely try that when you're, you know, on the keyboard and you see a dialogue pop up before you jump to your mouse. See if you can train your brain to try the things in the command in the first letter. So it's great tip. I use it all the time and how many years have been we've been doing quick tips on this show? It never dawned on me to share it. So that's the beauty of the quick tip is the things that are so automatic. You don't even think about them until somebody looks over your shoulder and says, whoa, what magic is there now? I believe escape will usually option, right? You are totally right. Yes, my fingers know it and now that you say it out loud, I agree with you. Yep. And I don't know if this is still the case, but I thought tab would rotate through the buttons. You know, I think I think you're right. Think there's an accessibility thing that happens there and maybe some maybe it's in settings keyboard, but there's the gosh, there's a there's an option that's like use all use keyboard navigation to move focus between controls. Yes. So it's in system preferences. Keyboard shortcuts at the bottom of that screen is a checkbox that says what I just said use keyboard navigation to move focus between controls and the explanation is press the tab key to move focus forward and shift tab to move focus backwards. So yes, you're right. It will do that as long as that checkbox is on. So system preferences, keyboard shortcuts. Look at all the quick tips we're getting here. I love it. I love it. It's good stuff. More on that, John. Yeah, we're good. Okay. Penscola Craig has a fun one for us. He says, I recall in one of the last MGGs of 2021 there was a discussion about the Apple keyboards and how flat they were, especially for folks who prefer a bit of elevation like Logitech and others have done with their flip up posts on the bottom. I love the Apple keyboard feel and touch and have ever since its release. So I made a very simple hack that completely solves the problem as I also perverse prefer some keyboard elevation. The hack is to use the small rubber bumpers that are typically used for picture frames and cabinet doors, those things to keep things from slamming and all that. The ones that, you know, stick a little bit when it's super humid out. If you've got wooden cabinets, yep. He says they're small adhesive, very easy to take on and off, very stable. And since they're rubber, they provide a little bit of friction to avoid the keyboard from sliding around place two or three along the rear edge, two towards the corners and then one or two in the middle, even four of them. And he sent us some picture about it, picks about it and shows that what a smart idea. I love love love this idea. And he says a bonus as a pro tip. If you prefer higher keyboard elevation, you can use a combination of the felt style of the same thing and then place it and put the rubber one on top so that you build like a little bit of a sandwich to to build it up even more. Awesome. Thank you. Pensacola Craig. I like that one. It's good at these tips, man. I like the little hacks. Wonderful stuff. I had a problem recently, John, and it's a problem I've had over and over again. I use a few, not very many, but a few groups in my contacts and one of them is for one of the bands I plan. We wind up emailing each other. We use Slack mostly for our band communication, but but we do email some things occasionally. And so it's really nice to have a group for the band and and you know, I can just type the name of the band, which happens to be fling in this case. And then it just expands out all the addresses that I want to choose. And we replaced our bass player. And so I needed to figure out how to to edit the group. And I went into the group and I saw the old bass player and I right clicked on him and I saw it. Well, delete card. I don't want to do that. I just want to remove it from the disk from the group not. I don't want to delete the guy still stay in touch with him. We're still very friendly. He's just not playing in that band anymore. And and so I hunted and hunted and it turns out the way that you do it is either with the delete key on your keyboard or if you go to the edit menu, remove from group is there. So contextual menus do not have this option, which just seemed odd to me. I'm always used to contextual menus having everything that I would want to do, but in this case, no. And even the delete key, which does the right thing or the thing the intended thing for me. It removes it from the group is not mapped to remove from group in the edit menu. So I don't know what Apple's up to on this. There's a knowledge based article that explains how to do this, which is how I finally figured it out, but and its example is to press the delete key on your keyboard, not even use the menu. So, you know, good for Apple. Somebody there knows what's going on, at least part of it. The other cool thing about groups, John and this, I love once you've created a group of people and this is super handy for people where you have multiple email addresses for the same person go to the highlight the group, go to the edit menu and go to edit distribution list. There you'll see all of your groups, click on the one that you want and you'll see one bolded email address for each of the people in the group. You can change that bolded email address to be the address of your choosing so that when you send to the group, it will choose that email specifically and not just the first one that it comes up with for that person, which is super handy. Like, you know, if I've got somebody's work address and they're like, no, look, keep the inane banter with about the band amongst the band, like keep that to my private email. I don't need my boss seeing the crazy things that we're talking about, which is, which is good. You know, because most people don't need to read about Orderlon and things like that. There's crazy topics. I didn't even know about that thing until recently. We watched that show succession. You watch that show, John? No. It's on HBO. Fantastic show. Really, really well done. Just great characters and great writing and yeah, great. Everything. Yeah, it's good stuff. It's not an Apple TV show, but you know, there you go. All right. There's all kinds of things to talk about. We got a bunch of questions. We got some follow ups. We might even have like a little bit of something, a little bit of a surprise for you a little later. So, uh, but next up, I want to talk about our two sponsors or three sponsors. Oh, wonderful. If if that's okay with you, Mr. Braun. All right. All right. Our first sponsor is one of my favorite apps. I use it all the time. I have it on all of my Macs and that is Mac Updater from core code. We've talked about this on the show basically since it was released. It is something that I love. So Mac Updater scans and displays all of your installed software and they have version information for over 60,000 apps and growing and the 6,000 most popular apps and growing can be updated directly inside Mac Updater with a single click. So not only does it tell you that there's an update, but it'll just do the update for you if you tell it to, which is amazing. Mac Updater is a one time purchase. There are no subscriptions and we've got a coupon code for you. MGGQ one will save you on Mac Updater. Make sure you visit core code .io slash MGG and use that code MGGQ one to save on Mac Updater also in version 2.1 they've added support for even more software types now including Adobe plugins. It's even more flexible. They've added integration with Alfred for another way to trigger app updates. I love the automation and by popular demand now users can switch between classic and big sir icon styles. 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I've been using true bill for a couple of months now since they came on board as a sponsor and it's great. All of the things that I've been telling you I've done. It works on top of that true bill is also monitoring how much I spend and telling me on a weekly basis. Hey here's what you spent last week this is more than the week before less than the week before it just keeps an eye on things which is really handy. I love this thing and I think you're going to love it to don't fall for subscription scams start canceling today at true bill dot com slash MGG go right now true bill dot com slash MGG it could save you thousands per year true bill dot com slash MGG and our thanks to true bill for sponsoring this episode. Next up is BB edit from barebones at barebones dot com. You know that this is one of my favorite apps. It's an app that I leave running. I have running on all of my Macs at all times because I can do so many different things with it. I use it certainly for all the programming that I do because it's smart. It knows what language you're in and then it starts highlighting the text just visibly not on the server on the desk but just in front of you it adds some slight coloring and and formatting so that your code is easier for you to read and they're constantly adding new language support like recently they just added are go Russ Tommel Arduino and Pixar's USDA the universal scene description language they've got all kinds of things in fact they revamped the note system inside BB edit by adding a note system. Many of us were using it for notes for years by just creating a bunch of untitled text documents. Well those tend to get unruly and now you can create notes from any convenience source the clipboard etc. And notes are automatically named and managed by the app so you don't just have untitled untitled untitled all the way down. You've got your notes all put into one spot. Of course BB edit has a generous eval mode. You get a 30 day eval of full functionality to try out the app and if you've tried it out in the past well good news BB edit 14 resets that for you so you get a fresh eval period no matter whether you've used it in the past or not and then they've got upgrade pricing for existing BB edit customers go check it out barebones.com slash stores where you're going to see all of that and our thanks to barebones and BB edit for sponsoring this episode. All right John you want to take us to listener Roy with a question huh. Yes sweet. Roy has a question. Do you know if there is a way to make a shortcut to turn on and off silence unknown callers on the iPhone 11 pro. Yes. I whipped out the Google food Dave. Okay. I found something on Reddit. Ah nice. And the article both has a link to the shortcut which you can download or it gives you the the source code if you will which I thought was pretty neat. So you could do it either way but I confirmed it work. I don't know how you I mean you have to go into the shortcuts app to run the shortcut. No you can do it with Siri. I mean you can trigger shortcuts with a zillion different things. Oh okay. Yeah okay. Yeah yeah yeah. Yeah this particular one they you know they they call it silence unknown callers they call it S.U.C. for the shortcut and so so it's just you know Siri preceded by the word hey of course Siri S.U.C. and then boom it doesn't it looks like I looked at the source for it. So what it's doing is it's filling a URL field with a path which is and you don't have to write this down because it's right there in the thing but just to talk it through it starts with prefs colon and so what this is as opposed to many URLs which start with you know like HTTP or other things right HTTPS or FTP or mail to or write whatever it's like that except it's prefs colon which tells iOS to go and adjust a preference setting. So this is one of those things that's sort of a a hack if you will shortcuts doesn't have a way of impacting that preference but that URL is available and so the the rest of it talks about the specific preference and it says the root is phone and the path is silence underscore calls and so it populates the URL with that and then the shortcut simply tells it to open that URL toggling that particular preference so you have to know that you're turning it one way or the other I think because I'm not sure I haven't tested it so I I would assume it's just toggling it but I could be wrong about that some yeah yeah it's pretty cool that's I I didn't you know when when shortcuts was workflow this was how everything was done because there was far less integration you know other than Apple Apple's own what you call it you know frameworks or whatever open the API so everything was done with URLs behind the scenes and I'd forgotten about this way of interacting with things now that it's called shortcuts but yeah very nice fine man I like that that's good it's good it's good fun fun fun more on that there's a time to move to listener David you mean Andy no I was going to listen to David next oh yeah okay as per as per the the handcrafted agenda David David is probably going to be a geek challenge and but we'll see he says I mean I have an answer but I I want to know your answer to so remember feedback at Mackie cubcom is where you're going to send those answers for this one right feedback at Mackie cubcom I said feedback at Mackie cubcom so here's what David sent to that address and he says here's the deal my wife and I would like to share or save our pictures as well as manage them on our iPhones what would be the best way to do this ideally we would have two separate folders that we can both access backing up our photos would also be a plus alright so this is one of those holy grails that we've been after for quite a while here on the show because I club photo library is awesome for you but it's not that great if you want to share with somebody else or somebody else wants to share with you yes you can share albums but in the idea of sharing the entire library even just for people to see doesn't happen or even choosing things to automatically share doesn't happen and I get that there's potential privacy concerns and all of that but you know in the case of David and his wife they're good with that right but she's probably got more on him than whatever would show up in the pictures anyway so it's all fine so you know I don't I have yet to find a workable solution for this that only involves Apple technology the one solution I have found is Synology and theirs has evolved over the years with DSM7 they are up to what they're calling Synology photos which is very similar to the way you know Apple photos and Google photos and on all of those sort of work it's just an automatic thing in the background and you know and then it it does its magic and can find butterflies and cats and you know all the important things in our photos as well as faces and all that thing but Synology photos does allow for more flexibility on this and therefore yeah you know you could share libraries amongst family members or friends or whatever you you know whatever you've got so that's my answer but that requires having a Synology disk station and wanting to use that solution it turns out listener David does have one so like problem solved for him but I'm curious how the problem is solved for all of you and that's why I asked you to email feedback at Mackie Keb.com because this really is a holy grail thing and if there's a better way you know a lot of us stop searching when we find a way that's certainly true of me well I mean it's just you know it's human nature but I'm curious about the best way here or at least alternative ways so send them into us I'm guessing this isn't a problem you've even sought to solve is that right John? alright well we'll get there what do you do with your photos? because sometimes you know an answer might trigger something so like where do you just store your photos in iCloud Photo Library or yes okay and no online services or Synology or Google photos or any of that flicker but I haven't used that in ages is that even still a thing? I guess it is yeah okay yeah I didn't integrate it and at the time I was using Aputure and you could manage right right right right it's just like an Aputure flicker is still available for free to a degree right? yeah a while ago they um yeah so I don't take as many pictures as I used to I mostly use Instagram now right right alright so yeah I'm all in with iCloud yeah but I wonder if I wonder if flicker is an option here like would that be a good platform to use for two people that want to share it right? like I mean I don't know that's why I like to have these conversations so let's see flicker shared libraries I don't know it's kind of a thing flicker and libraries flicker no nobody seems to talk about it well maybe one of you will know I don't want to be just you know randomly Google idly Googling here while we're trying to you know do a show it's time to do a show alright what do we have next here you mentioned Andy you want to take us to Andy? let us go to Andy alright Andy Andy from the UK alright I have an odd issue here after updating to macOS 12.1 a couple of days ago with my 2021 M1 MacBook Air and Bose QC35ii headphones okay I noticed that my headphones connected by a Bluetooth were quieter in the right air when listening to one of my playlists on Spotify only quieter not missing sound altogether initially I thought it was my own ears then Spotify then maybe my beloved headphones but after connecting them to my iPhone iPad TV etc the sound was great and more importantly my hearing was good too what I've tested I tested Airpods and Beats 10 headphones on the Mac and they both sound and work well both Apple headphones I removed the QC35s from Bluetooth switched Bluetooth off restarted the Mac gone through the process of reconnecting them also via the Bose app I checked for any available updates enabled, disabled, noise cancelling etc and still got the same issue notice not just with Spotify I tested with Apple Music, YouTube, BBC iPlayer etc while typing this email I also thought I could test using the aux cable that came with the headphones so I disabled Bluetooth and with the aux cable tested again they work great with an equal amount of sound in both ears so it seems like a Bluetooth OS 12.1 issue have you guys heard anything similar have any advice on what to do next I have some advice reset the Bluetooth module yeah I mean restarting the Mac does that or no I thought restarting a Mac would reset the Bluetooth module right because what you're doing to reset it is killing the Bluetooth D process right we have to do that in Monterey now we can't because there's no like there's no way to do that like the old way was there was some like hold down enough keys and the Bluetooth menu would show it to you or something right and it took that away yeah and I was looking for that and then I and I'm like where to go this used to be here yeah option shift on the Bluetooth menu and pre Big Sur isn't they change the menu yeah out of it right so I said in my article I found which he obviously tells you how to do it from the terminal there's a couple of different ways to do it I think so if he restarted the Mac I love the idea of flushing Bluetooth and restarting it I think he did that but it's a great one you have to type sudo pkill bluetooth D at the terminal we'll put a link I guess you've got a link to an article in there that doesn't we'll put the command in there too just so you have it all but yeah I'm trying to think you know clearly something has I'm guessing and I think this is in line with what Andy is speculating too that the Mac is telling the headphones to only sound audio in you know or to skew the audio to one ear versus the other I don't think it's the headphones doing it clearly right other devices don't do this and I don't think it's the entirety of the Mac because other headphones work fine so it's something specific but he removed these headphones and re-added them and he's still having this balance issue I mean it's almost like the balance slider is too far to one side but he can't find the balance slider so I start thinking about things that can impact that and the first one that comes to mind is you know like a third party app like sound source or boom right those apps that impact the way sound gets to your speakers and you may have at some point decided oh yeah you know I like boom or I like what sound source does and and so you installed that and specifically told it to treat those headphones differently and maybe that's there so I you know I mean we don't know what Andy has on his computer but that's kind of where it like I can't think of anything in the OS that would be device specific for balance so I'm guessing it's got to be something third party but you know it's a guess what do I know I don't know it's interesting right so feedback at Mackie Keb.com if you have your own thoughts on this I like these kind of troubleshooting things alright moving on yeah alrighty listener Laura has sort of a general question for us about something very specific Laura says I'm looking for a a dock for my computer but I don't know what to get should I get a Thunderbolt 4 dock USB 4, USB 3, something else I understand that the letters mean different shapes for USB anyway USB A vs USB C but the numbering system still confuses me and whether all of the newer stuff is backwards compatible or not I know OWC is a regular sponsor is there something you can point me towards that will work that was highlighted as a cool stuff found perhaps and so choosing a dock is a very it's a unique process in that it will be the answer the correct answer will be unique to you based on what you have what you want to plug into it all of that good stuff Thunderbolt 4 really is just Thunderbolt 3 with all of its features enabled and the one that Big Sur enabled is hubbing what we call Thunderbolt hubbing which means having more Thunderbolt ports than just two on the dock normally in the past Thunderbolt docks would have two ports one from the computer and one is effectively a pass through if you will well with Big Sur and devices that support what's commonly called Thunderbolt 4 we've now they've now we I take no credit for this they've now turned on the feature to allow hubbing so you can have you know 4 or 3 or 4 ports and actually add Thunderbolt devices so that's what Thunderbolt 4 is going that's what a dock with the label of Thunderbolt 4 on it that's what it's going to afford you now it might be just extra Thunderbolt ports or it might be extra Thunderbolt ports along with things like Ethernet and USB and all those other things so you have to decide what you need and depending on what devices you have connected you might not even need Thunderbolt at all a USB dock might be more than enough for you I you know I do like the OWC stuff and they make great USB and Thunderbolt docks I like Cal Digits docks their TS3 Plus has long been a favorite of ours on this show I will put a link to that in the show notes too it's Thunderbolt 3 instead of Thunderbolt 4 but again if you don't need the extra ports that's fine right you know from OWC they've got all kinds of different things their current device that they call the Thunderbolt dock is actually a Thunderbolt 4 dock that includes some extra more than just extra Thunderbolt ports it's got the USB it's got sound it's got the thing for the camera card but what do we call that SD card slot yeah sure but it's got you know 3 USB ports on it in addition to all the Thunderbolt 4 ports and all that good stuff so you know there's a lot of options here and then we've like the anchor especially their new anchors 777 dock is one that I'm curious to check out and see how that fares because that's got all kinds of things in it I think that I'm pulling it up here just to make sure I have all the details right but that anchor 777 is a Thunderbolt they call it a Thunderbolt 4 dock it's got I think it's got one extra Thunderbolt port on it this is what I want to test it out but you know you need to look at what you need compared to what each of these devices offers you and then you know pick it there and you know I've mentioned Thunderbolt docks but you know like OWC's USB-C travel that is a fantastic dock and it's not just for travel anymore right it's a great dock that's got and you can get the travel dock E I think they call it which is the one that has an ethernet port on it so you know it makes it even more amenable more incompatible with things that you might have at your desk so yeah you know there's all kinds of good stuff out there I don't know what do you think John what doctor have you checked out that people should the one that I use the most is the anchor 341 USB-C hub 7-in-1 okay it has all the ports that I need yeah that's it right it has all the ports that you need that's the key yeah yeah yeah HDMI, SD card, USB-C another USB-C um and two USB-3 so yeah that's good oh wait no is that the one I no I have a different one this one I could use no because the one that I have I can't find it but it has an ethernet port too okay yeah and that's like what you have at your desk with your Mac mini or something like that is that right yeah that's great I like it yeah an experiment that I did it was kind of fun so my iPad Air has a USB-C port okay and I plugged the dock in and then plugged it into and then plugged the ethernet port into my my switch and all of a sudden in system preferences ethernet appeared I'm like wow so you can hook your iPad to ethernet yeah right that makes sense sure it should work right and you can plug audio devices into that like I've used you know a multi input audio device and um yeah there you go it's crazy all the stuff you can do I don't think we are ready to have you start ordering these yet but if you have been watching the video I am beta testing something today John and it's already seen a revision but um I have a shirt here that says on the front don't get caught and on the back I don't know if you'll be able to see it but it has the the old Makikyab logo there on it and we are days away from being able to let you order these so we are we're working through all the mechanics of it and I say beta testing if you're watching the video you'll see that the don't get caught logo is a little low it's a rookie mistake that that is made with these sorts of things and that's why we started testing these so we have fixed that on the production ones they are higher on both the men's and women's shirts it's a black shirt white lettering on the front says don't get caught on the back it has the Makikyab logo and these will be available very very soon for all of you to order we as I mentioned we will be revamping well everything as we move to Makikyab.com and all of that the premium program will continue to evolve it will still exist one thing with the premium program that's been it from a meta level you folks have taught us what the premium program should be over the years and it has continued to evolve in fact you're the ones that taught us that we should have one in the in the in the first place so thank you for your feedback and and it really has been proven to us that what most of you want out of the premium program is to support the the production of the show and every time in the past that we had done gifts one of the things that we added to the premium program early on was this thing where once you hit a certain level you earn a gift and this that and the other thing and every time we hit those levels and sent out the emails and said hey we want you know here's your gift there were many many many of you who said please don't spend the money that I sent you on the gift there were also many of you that said great I want the gift I want the stuff which is awesome that's great so for this one we've we're using something called threadless to to sort of manage the merch store and manage all the fulfillment of it and all that stuff and they will allow us to do coupons on a per user or individualized coupons that we could send to each of you before we generate those let us know if you're a premium subscriber that has hit the threshold and if you want a I don't know if we're like the we're still working it out I'm not exactly sure what the coupon would be but it would certainly be a discount if not a completely free shirt depends on how how that goes and and where it where the pricing all comes in and all that good stuff but let us know if you are interested in that part of the premium program continuing premium at Mackie Cub.com is of course your address to use for this and and anything that you want to connect with us we are going to be adding more things to premium more avenues and that's all I want to say at this point because I want to make sure we get it right but but yeah yeah so let us know it because I we don't want to go through the process of creating a bunch of coupon codes that no one wants to use so but if you want one let us know and we'll make sure you get one all that stuff because it is you know one of the things that we are currently offering so we want to make sure we honor that for those of you that do all right yeah yeah that's what I got so Merch is coming it's it's here it's super close it might be ready by the time this episode comes out like the store front might be might be ready so anyway that's what I got thoughts on that John anything somebody in the array array yeah Brian Rowan the chat room says make sure you offer Merch up via YouTube yes we will absolute oh yeah yeah yeah we'll we'll go nuts telling people about this for sure for sure all right so hopefully by the next episode in fact definitely by the next episode the store will be live and probably sooner than that I just don't know where we're gonna put it so check the show notes at mackeycup.com if the store is live I will I will make sure that link is in the show notes at this segment cool all right let's go to fun stuff let's get evolution let's go to listener David here because different David same concept in that we have a geek challenge all right listener David says we are in the process of downsizing from a house to something and we have bins and bins of old photos that my wife wants to just take to the dumpster me on the other hand wants to try and scan them all in before we dumpsterize them most are old black and white photos from our parents some are color and we also have a lot from when we were stationed overseas together I looked on Amazon I added the together together I don't know if they were together overseas sometimes I add things to the things to just you know make it flow there you go he says I've looked on Amazon and the usual places and all that seems to come up with flat bed scanners and four by six scanners and nearly all of them are 150 bucks or higher I don't mind spending some money to preserve the photos and would rather not have to resort to taking a picture with my phone but for that price I'm probably going to end up taking a picture with my phone anyway before I throw in the towel do you guys or the MGG community have any suggestions so yeah we'll take this in a few different angles John you have a picture a photo scanner that you've used or have some knowledge of is that right yes so it's I think the retail is 249 so that's so you may not want to spend that sure but it's really good the Epson perfection v 600 photo so it's specifically made to do photos and it comes with little templates so you can put your slides or your photos in it and it comes with some software that'll fix things up to okay so may want to consider that the nice thing about this is when I was doing a R&D in a imaging group this thing has a resolution of 6400 by 9600 which is pretty good so I was taking advantage of that because at that resolution I was looking for micro print on money and stuff like that interesting thing though a lot of scanners will refuse to scan currency that's correct there's a pattern on the bill that they look for and if the scanner sees it it'll just be like nope that's right nobody wants their scanner to be used in a counterfeiting operation right another thought I have actually someone asked this on our local next door board it's like a community discussion group someone asked how to do this check your local camera store specifically the one that was mentioned in my area was Milford photo which I've been to when I was in the photographs so a camera store may have the accessories to scan your photos in for you you can also look online just look for photo scanning services a bunch will come up and you can't dealt with any of them but that's another suggestion there are services that will do this where you just mail your photos in and they'll scan them and you know you get the digital that's another way to do it I want to take this in David's the direction he said is inevitable which is doing this with his iPhone because I know that that's possible the trick is scanning it right because if he's going to scan these and throw them away he wants to make sure he has good clean scans of these and there's two things that come to mind for me that would need to be solved one is the angle if you're just off angle a little bit the scan is going to be a skew and the photo may or may not look right similarly you need to worry about glare you want to have the photos well lit you don't want a big light reflection happening on them and most photos are on paper that's glossy enough to at least be impacted by that if not completely reflective of it so I'm really curious I know people out there have solved this problem what apps are you using what setup are you using to scan photos that gets you reliable results that you can replicate because obviously if David's going to do this or if any of us are going to do this we're going to be we want to get it set up and then just roll here's the next picture here's the next picture some app that's going to be smart about framing it and cropping out the extraneous stuff but also some way of setting it up that works with the no glare and all that good stuff so there you go yeah that's what I got I wonder if if I if I had to do this I think what I do is get some sort of bracket to mount the the iPhone I'm sure somebody makes one and then maybe get I actually have one of these square jellyfish okay it's a bluetooth remote for your phone not found alright, well some kind of bluetooth remote, sure your watch could do it yes oh here it is, square jellyfish okay oh the watch, right right yeah yeah I'm curious how this how this will go I'm curious if anyone has had success doing this with their phone because I think you're right and Brian Monroe in the chat room is saying that avoid these headaches, go with the service let them do it for you and I think there's a lot of benefits yeah now look at this, okay so square jellyfish actually makes both mounts and remotes, so one stop shopping if you want to do your own setup there you go, okay alright alright did you say squarejellyfish.com is that right yeah, looks like it cool, alright we'll put them in the show notes great great, great in a similar vein and maybe listener Tony a bit of insight that could apply here sharing a tip he says because we shop online and also at multiple physical stores I've wanted to be able to search for older receipts on my phone he says I think the best way to do it is to scan everything into notes, I use a notes folder and a new note for every receipt, I scan because scanning is faster, it auto focuses auto straightens there's no shutter click required and it does long receipts, he's right about this right, like the whole if you're doing a scan in the notes app or even in the files app it will do the auto shutter thing for you which can be super handy we talked to years ago about there was that, I forget what it was called PDF scan maybe that Smile made but now like baked into the OS is this same functionality where it auto straightens it snaps the shutter when it sees the new page or something in place and so you can just keep going and to your point you don't even have to worry about the thing from score jellyfish so maybe there's an option, so anyway he's using this for receipts but maybe there's an option for people that want to do this with photos he says that way once I get it scanned in I can manually search within notes, he says I can't seem to get Siri to work by voice but that's okay so if I'm at the store and see something I usually buy online I can check my receipts for what I have paid for it in the past I like that, that's good and he wrote up a bunch of this on Medium and so we will put a link to his Medium post in our show notes here so that everybody can take advantage of this Tony's Tech Corner, I like it that's good Tony, yeah yeah good stuff alright, I knew there was going to be a space in this link that I pasted in, okay the space is fixed, excellent thank you Tony good stuff one last question, go ahead yeah, keep going, yeah Speaking of scanning receipts Dave yes sir you want to save some money always I've been using this service which one part of it is it'll scan your receipts but it also will give you money so you search for an item like beer or whatever and if they have any offers they'll come up and then you go, you shop you get your receipt, this program scans in the receipt verifies the and also scans the barcode to make sure you're not lying about buying that item and then I have a question what's the name of it? iBOTA iBOTTA yeah that's cool, alright so keep going, I just want to make sure people knew what this was yeah and then when you reach 20 bucks they'll transfer it to your PayPal, oh that's cool oh so you really do get cash back that's right I've accumulated I think about almost 500 bucks wow and so you just scan the receipts of everything that you buy? well if they have an offer for it yeah that's what I mean, yeah if they have an offer wow, that's cool alright, I see I like this stuff you've mentioned that out before, I like it, that's good cool cool yeah alright that has come up a few different times and ways in the past couple of months understandably so he asked can you revisit the implications of upgrading my Synology disk station to DSM version 7 a while back you mentioned several preparation steps to make sure Plex and perhaps some other applications would keep working I filed your comments away as let them fix it all before I upgrade it now perhaps the dust has settled and I should think about doing this I'm a fairly light user but I do rely on my disk station for Plex, Dropbox and OneDrive syncing and significantly sized photo collections in moments which I understand will be deprecated and converted to Synology photos bottom line, is it a seamless upgrade or do I need to set an afternoon aside for fiddling around so my short answer is yes it is stable now and you're good to go but please don't go and do that until you finish hearing the rest of my answer you want to make sure 100% of your packages are up to date most of them can be done using Synology's package manager and just letting it check for updates Plex is not most of them Plex for whatever reason the package that often resides in Synology's repository is old and we've heard of people Pilot Pete just ran into this back in December so not that long ago going through making sure everything's up to date in package center and still having a problem when upgrading so go to Plex.TV download the package for your Synology from there or launch Plex and look inside Plex it will tell you if you go to the web interface the admin interface for Plex itself it will tell you if there's an update follow those links download a package, you're going to manually install it that's how the upgrades to Plex are done manually install that follow the instructions that appear on the screen you will see a couple of warning messages come up and even though you know better you are going to be so tempted to just click through them do not do that it's okay to click through them but you're going to miss instructions because there's a couple of things like permissions before you upgrade to DSM-7 you can do all this on DSM-6 DSM-7 adds some sandboxing for all apps and Plex was one of those that needed to revamp the way they did things in order to work with the new sandboxing your life is much simpler if you migrate to the new way of doing things with DSM-6 when Plex still has permissions across your disk station once you upgrade to DSM-7 it does not have the permissions to manually migrate you and you have to do things manually so make sure you get Plex up to date and that you've done all the things that tells you to do the only other caveat I would have for Lefwin is that he is a heavy moments user and moments will be migrated to photos you should be okay I was and I did this on day one of DSM-7 I of course was burned by the whole Plex thing as Pete was recently but you can avoid being burned by that I was not burned at all by the moments to photos upgrade I did have to change the apps on my devices of course on my client devices like my phone but that migration was smooth so do you need an afternoon set aside for fiddling about no but I also wouldn't do this when you need to leave the house in 12 minutes the upgrade is going to take probably even once you get all your apps and you're ready to pull the trigger it's going to take you probably a half hour before the disk station is like back up and running and ready for you to log in and then you're going to want to log in and make sure all of your things work including photos but everything else your Synology Drive syncing your Cloud Sync which it sounds like you're using Cloud Sync that don't know of that it will let you sync things like your Dropbox or OneDrive and others with your disk station so having your disk station act as a client and then you can sync those there then you don't need to run the clients on all your Max and iPhones and stuff because you can just get at it via Synology Drive it's a pretty cool thing so hopefully that helps John have you upgraded your disk stations to DSM7 already you did and did it go smoothly for you no well yes except for one thing the certificate problem I told you about that DSM7 broke that I'm not convinced DSM7 broke that I mean from what we were talking about in previous episodes your ISP no longer allows you to update certs in any way they issue certificates or renew them I don't think they did I really don't I mean I've been doing certs on DSM for years with Let's Encrypt and it seems to be the same alright then yeah maybe my ISP changed something yeah you need access port 80 and port and or port 443 is the key to Let's Encrypt self updating its certs alright so they pull the fast one yeah yeah the other weird thing is that so I use their DDNS to do this if I look in and the name of the cert is that address whatever.synology.me if I go to the DDNS section if they're setup it shows that it's not working interesting so you're going to like control panel what's called external access DDNS and it says that you're not able to connect to this it shows the name but it says disabled or whatever and it's like interesting no it's not because if I try to get to it from the outside I can get to it like my VPN I can get to that using the DDNS name but according to the Synology so maybe I have to remap that and then it'll work yeah it sounds like your Synology is not able to talk to the outside world at all I mean because your IP address probably hasn't changed since the last time your distation right updated this and so you can get the DDNS address maps correctly but only because of a past update if your Synology doesn't think that it has updated then it has not right so this sounds like your Synology doesn't talk to the outside world I mean it can't talk for Let's Encrypt it can't talk for DDNS I'm wondering can it do package updates oh yeah okay alright are you doing something weird with like like DNS or your networking on it or do you have a firewall installed that's like maybe overly secure because that sounds like you're having trouble talking to the outside it sounds like your Synology is having trouble with its own DNS so I would go into what's it going to be it's going to be control panel, network and look at the interface that network interface and I would look at IPv4 and see are you setting it manually is the DNS server correct I guess there's something about it where it's not able to get to the outside world because that's certainly what it sounds like yeah yeah you know ping me, you don't have to say it in the show because we don't want to give this out to everybody but ping me your address your Synology address and I'll see if I can get to your disk station and that way I mean that'll test to see if your disk station I mean I assume it's still connected to Ethernet and all that so yeah that's interesting connectivity yeah yeah it sounds like there's a network issue there do you have like manually maybe go in to control panel, network general and manually configure your DNS server to be not like your Eros make it 1.1.1.1 or something and see if that lets it get to the outside world because maybe your Eros blocking this for some reason I don't know yeah all right fun speaking of Synology tips I solved a problem for a buddy Duffy okay so he has a Sonos and his music is on his Synology hmm but he couldn't play it and here was the weird thing so you know they have the Synology Assistant that will um cause I'm like well let me get to the admin interface to see if I can figure out what's wrong the Synology Assistant didn't find it didn't have an IP address it only had a local address ds21j but that didn't work for mapping his music right so how do you get the IP address back um here's the secret I was actually thrilled that I figured out a Sonos issue not being a Sonos person reset the Synology there's a reset button somewhere probably on the back and if you hold it in for four seconds it resets the network interface and once we did that Synology Assistant found it and I'm like okay there's your IP address and then I also use that IP address to map his music folder interesting huh I've always done it by just unplugging the ethernet cable and replugging it which also has reset the interface for me when I've seen that issue uh okay but that's interesting so you hold the reset button for four seconds yeah and then you hear it it'll beep okay stop holding it yeah because I think if you hold it for 10 it'll like start like maybe a factory yeah you don't want that yeah interesting I've actually gotten to a state where I had to do this because I was trying to set up some fancy ethernet bonding and I managed to uh disable the network interface like oops yeah that bonding I have it configured on mine but I've seen it where it gets wonky sometimes so yeah interesting alright nice finds that's good um we have a couple of follow ups from prior episodes that I think will wrap us up for today you want to take us to George and or Jorge I'm not sure how to pronounce your name sir just listening to the 1220 episode and have a possible solution for the Apple mail search not finding emails this has started with big sir and continues Monterey the permanent fix I found is to customize the mail toolbar by removing the search and clicking done quit mail then reopen mail customize the mail toolbar and re-add search to the toolbar click done and try searching again secondly the search options changed a little in big sir and Monterey so be sure to select the mailboxes you want change interesting I I will I am willing to try anything at this point let me put it that way I wonder if this solution is also temporary like most of the rest of the ones that we've seen to this issue for this issue and because if I'm having this issue with mail and I do there was the one that we mentioned back in 906 was somebody said to hold down shift key while launching mail to like flush some other things out okay great this one you know involves you know remove the search thing restart mail re-add the search thing my solution to this has just been to quit and restart relaunch mail and it works fine so I'm wondering if Jorge's solution is any different than that because it involves quit and relaunch mail right which generally solves this issue for me I would love a permanent fix to this but even the hold down the shift key while launching mail has not resulted in anything of the sort unfortunately so I don't know have you experienced this John the mail won't search or do you not rely on mail search as much as perhaps the rest of us um yeah I've had I hate when they change the way it works well yeah I mean they they changed I mean they didn't change much about this they just changed clearly something under the hood that with the way mail and spotlight work with each other it just like it just won't the problems I have in mail are multiple are many and one of them is this where I go to do a search and I won't see anything on the results page changes it's just if I'm in the inbox and I go to search the inbox just remains right it doesn't show me anything and that's what I know okay this is never going to work I need to quit relaunch and then it works fine the other thing that I see is if I'm in a mailbox going through triaging mail and I you know tell a message to archive or a tell a message to delete or whatever it doesn't it doesn't share it doesn't leave the mailbox it goes to a much lighter gray it like grays out that message like it's doing something but it hasn't finished it yet and again if I quit and relaunch mail all of those will have then gone to their their appropriate destinations and will have left whatever mailbox I'm in which is usually the inbox but of course not always so I said they were many maybe they were just two my issues with mail but it seems like a similar thing like the display doesn't want to fully update with what I'm telling it to do I'm not I don't know I don't know what the answer is I wish there was an answer but there ain't there isn't I don't know how many times I've said ain't on this show and how many years but probably not many that ain't a word yeah probably not many probably not many alright you want to take us to the follow up well from both Donna and from you since it was research you were both doing on behalf of us so Donna followed up and said hi John you were correct about the 3% at T-Mobile so we're talking hang on let me paint the picture we're talking about the Apple card and the discounts that you can get on various vendors we were doing that in the last episode and now yes so carry on my friend so the standard cash back that you get is 1% if you buy Apple stuff 2% if you use Apple pay and 1% for everything else but they have a lot of special offers now and here are the special offers is that there are other there are number of ways to get 3% cash back and so yeah she confirmed that she pays her T-Mobile with the Apple card and she gets the 3% cash back so others are Panera Bread Nike, Uber, Walgreens and ExxonMobile nice oh that's great that's amazing I like it fun fun cool I gotta use my Apple card more 3% cash back yeah 3% cash back is good yeah yeah yeah I default to my Bonvoy right it's Bonvoy now it was my Starwood that Marriott merged with them and it's the Bonvoy MX and that works out really well I earn hotel points without even thinking about it and you know can basically stay at a hotel for free if I want but I wind up staying at Airbnb's a bunch and so I should probably be smarter about this the nice part is I can also transfer those Bonvoy points over to airline points and it usually get 25,000 airline points for every 20,000 Bonvoy points that can be handy but the cash back is not a bad thing to have and so I gotta be more smarter about this yeah yeah yeah it's good the best cash back I get though my favorite though this is the only card I pay for is American Express you'll put a link in the show notes for us yeah you're gonna look it up what are you doing? keep talking we are an audio show anyways they offer 6% on groceries which is good okay alright that's a lot yeah good good good we'll put links to all these things in the show notes John will find a link to his MX 6% card and we'll put a link to that in the show notes too folks thanks for listening it's been fun I think where's the uh how come I'm not hearing what we should be hearing music oh I see why we're not hearing music the interface doesn't want to play nice there's the music ah it's been a number of weeks since the interface has decided not to respond and yet there's always problems to solve which is good because that means we'll be here next week for MackieCab911 it's what we do it's why we do it it's good stuff John's lost in a world of googling and something so everything okay? okay this is part of what the part of you I love even though it's frustrating sometimes when you just disappear alright anything anywhere you'd like to send them Mr. Braun where are you too busy on finding links feedback at MackieCab.com I love it feedback at MackieCab.com is where you want to go where you want to send things to premium at MackieCab.com if you're a premium listener and please do let us know if uh if you are one of the ones that would like a uh your earned coupon on a t-shirt we are putting all that together as we as we move forward here lots of stuff in the air as you might imagine so trying to sort it all out fun stuff yeah alright that's what we got we'll uh we'll have links to where the merch is and all that good stuff it'll be one of the places it will be is MackieCab.com slash merch but that doesn't currently exist I'm just saying that because I don't know where to send it but as soon as I do that's where I'm going to send it so there you go that's what we got make sure to check out our sponsors you can go to MackieCab.com slash sponsors to do that and see all of our sponsors current and past that still have deals and then of course current deals from this episode are the code MGGQ1 at macupdater at corecode.io slash MGG trubill.com slash MGG and of course airbones.com we'll get VVedit 14 go do that get your 30 day trial have fun stay safe enjoy your day don't do anything we wouldn't do see you next week