 It's time for the Mac GeekGab, and listener Todd brings us our quick tip of the week with, I have been using the Mac since the 128k Mac a long time. I've never really started using tabs and windows in the Finder. When moving files around, I often want to open the folder I'm in in a new window. Right-clicking on the folder in column view gives you the option to open a new tab. Not what I want. It has been driving me crazy and thinking there must be a way to open a new window. Today, I right-clicked and for the heck of it, held down the option key and voila! Open new tab changed to open in new window. More tips like this plus your questions answered today on the Mac GeekGab 971 for March 6, 2023. Hey folks and welcome to Mac GeekGab, the show where you send in tips like that. You send in your questions, you send in your cool stuff found. We share your cool stuff found in your tips. We try to answer your questions as best we can. Sometimes we have tips, cool stuff found, even questions of our own. We put it all together into an agenda. And the goal is that we make it through the agenda successfully. Success means every single one of us has learned at least five new things. Every single time we get together, sponsors for this episode include ZockDoc at ZockDoc.com slash MGG. That's where you go to sign up for fee for fee. No sign up for free. Correct. Yeah, no fee. Sign up for free first day with a new mouth and download. You can download the app and find doctors. It's fantastic. We'll talk more about that in depth. Other sponsors for this episode include CollideKolide.com slash MGG and Honey at JoinHoney.com slash MGG. We'll tell you why you are going to want to visit those URLs for us later. I mean, one of the reasons would be to just support the show when you visit those URLs and learn about our sponsors. That actually helps us regardless of whether you buy. But there's other reasons why you will want to talk about, why you will want to learn about them. We will talk about those reasons in a little bit. For now, back here. Hot off the plane from Cancun here in Durham, New Hampshire. I'm Dave Hamilton. And here in Fairfield, Connecticut. This is John F. Brun. Bonjour from Paris, France. It's Pilot Pete, everybody. I'm stoked. After the show today, I'm going to wander over to my favorite restaurant in the entire system. Fenetra Sucur, Window on the Courtyard, which is the French name for Jimmy Stewart and Princess Grace's movie, The Rear Window. Rear Window. What a great movie. Oh, so it's Window on the Courtyard. And it's all his menu is all Hollywood themed movies and all that. And I'm going to have my favorite burger, the Casablanca, which is a lamb burger. There you go. This place is amazing. Nice. So I'm stoked to be here with you guys. That's great. You know, traveling it can be can be tiresome, obviously, but when you wind up being able to sort of visit the same places and have your favorite things that you simply cannot get at home because we don't have transporters yet to like, you know, bring you there for dinner, it's a nice little respite in the the grind that can sometimes be traveled. So that's great. Rear Window. Geeky fact about that that I learned in a film class in high school. That was the the intent of that movie, and it was it was almost successful. And I'll explain the asterisk there was to film it in with one shot. And it it was filmed with one shot, except there's not at the time there was not enough film to film the full movie in one shot. So there is a moment in the middle of the movie where the camera pans across a column in the middle of the apartment. And that is where they paused the camera. They had everybody stay where they were. You know, they they changed the film out and then they continued the pan. And so that that's the one little change. So the first Blair Witch trial. Yeah, and shot. Yeah, but but much better shot than the Blair Witch project was. Absolutely. Absolutely. So as long as you're on that one other little piece of trivia, old timey films, you know, in the upper right corner, you see the little circle. And then a little bit later, you see the circle again. That's not a flaw in the film. That's a signal to the projection operator to change wheels. Oh, yeah, I was going to say that. What is that? I didn't know that. That's interesting. Amazing. I love this show. See, I'm already learning new things. See, we're learning things, right? We're learning things. I would I think maybe though our listeners might want to get back to learning things about the Mac. And so you started with the finder Pete and listener Mike will continue with the finder. He says if you want your folders listed first in a finder window that's in list mode, scroll over to the right most column and sort by kind and when you sort by kind folders float to the top. Thank you for that, Mike. That's great. I do that. This is the beauty of Quick Tips. I I well, the Quick Tips that I love the most are the ones that I did not know like like your opening Quick Tip. I had no idea that you could you could hold down the option key to right click and do that. That's amazing. My second favorite kind are the kind that I've known and use all the time, but have completely overlooked the fact that they would be valuable to everybody else. I don't like the fact that I've overlooked it, but I like the fact that somebody else hasn't and we share it and that's what Mike's Quick Tip was. So yeah, I think I'm going to go through menus and just tap the option key and see what I get. I am looking forward to the results of your experiments, Pete. Yeah. John, you got something. You stumbled on to something this week. Yeah. So I was playing with my HomePod minis and we had some questions about the HomePod, which we'll get to eventually, I think. But here's something I noticed, Dave. So I ran the Home app on my phone and when you do that, it shows you all the devices that it knows about and it shows my TV, it shows my Apple TV, it shows HomePods. But then on the top of the screen, I noticed a little button. It says climate and I'm like, huh? If you tap on it, the HomePod, I think it was an update like in January that did this, but the HomePod knows the temperature and humidity in the room. I'm like, okay, that's an interest. I didn't know it could do that, but it can. Interesting. I think I even had a chat with it. I'm like, you know, what's the temperature and humidity? And it told me what it was. It's like, okay. So I would imagine that the use for this would be, you know, writing a script where, you know, if the humidity is over a certain amount, turn on the air conditioner. If the temperature is below a certain temperature, you know, sure that alert me if it's too low. Yeah. So we would, I mean, you correctly, but in a misnomer kind of way refer to it as a script. It's a shortcut automation is what you would, that's how you would interface with it in the, do you do those automations in the Home app? I guess you do. You could probably do them in both places. You know, I do it and I don't think about it. Yeah. It's the automation tab at the bottom of the home app would be, would be where you would do that. And, and you're absolutely right. Like I have, I don't use home pods for this because I don't have any, but I use like my Nest thermostats to alert me if the temperature gets too low. That'll tell me that there's a problem with the heat. Like, like that morning, not too long ago, where the heat didn't want to turn on in the studio here. It is the HomePod mini and the second generation large HomePod that have temperature and humidity sensors that you can access. So, yeah, good stuff. I do something similar with, so I also, so I don't really use the Home app, but I do something similar with my SmartThings hub. So that's, that's my main platform. That's your access to it. Yeah. And one of the, one of the triggers that I put in the, in the app is, yeah, let me know if the battery gets too low because I don't have a C wire. I think that's what it's called. Yeah. So I have to have a battery operated one. And if the batteries are shot, then the thermostat doesn't work, which is bad if it's going below freezing. Yeah, for sure. Tell me that and the temperature. It'll also tell me, you know, or I, I think I wrote one also. I think I wrote a trigger also for, or I call it a trigger, a script, whatever. And it says, yeah, it's too cold. I, I, I have scenarios here where I don't have C wires in my thermostats. And I finally did away with the, with having to like deal with that by getting a 24 volt C wire adapter from Amazon. They sell them for like, well right now they're 18 bucks minus a $2 coupon. I'll put a link in the show notes to the C wire adapter. But the, the, I mean, the simplest way to do it would be to just run it in into your thermostat and let the cable run down the wall and plug it into an outlet. The, the, the sexy way to do it is to, you know, drop it down in the wall and poke a hole next to the outlet and, and then just, you know, kind of run it that way so that you don't have a wire running down your, your wall, or you could run it up if you're on the top floor and you have outlets in your attic, but putting these things on my thermostats has made my life so much better. So, so it's been a long time since I've installed a thermostat. What does the C wire do? I mean, it's been 15 years. Yeah. So a typical thermostat installation like old school thermostat for just heat would be a two wire installation and it would be a white wire and a red wire and likely what would be called red heat, R H and, and essentially what happens is you, you cross those two wires and that tells the, the, the source of heat, whatever that might be, time to activate, right? And then when, when the, closes the circuit and then opens the circuit when it, when it reaches temperature or whatever. Right. If your thermostat needs its own power though, it, a lot of thermostats are built with sort of the presumption or expectation that you have more than two wires in your system. And the third wire, one of the, the additional wires would be what's called the C wire or the common wire, most heat systems run on 24 volt AC, which is super bizarre in that it's, it's uncommon, right? But, but that's what, that's what like, you know, most oil and propane boilers or even natural gas boilers, like that's what they run on. And so you can feed that C wire right from the power supply, the transformer on your, your boiler or whatever your heat source is. Right. And so it's there. That makes sense. That's why the thermostats are built to run on 24 volt AC because they, they know that, that the heat sources are built for that. So if you have the wire there makes life super easy. If you don't have a third wire in your system, you either need a thermostat that will support not running the C wire, they had two wire and like some of the Nest thermostats support what they call power stealing, where they don't quite close the circuit enough to trigger the heat to come on. That is such outside the box thinking. Right. But they, they grab and they like trickle power from it to, to, to charge the battery in the thermostat. And so power stealing can be weird. It depends on what kind of zone valves you have. Like I was finding my new zone valves were, were like half open all the time. And it was like, okay, like I can either go to different types of zone valves or I can just solve this problem the right way and put a C wire adapter in there. And that's where this whole long conversation started from. So sorry to mean to go down that rabbit hole, but it's a good rabbit hole. No, this is a, this is a major headache for those of us that like to run digital homes and, and, you know, smart homes in houses that were built without more than two wires for our heating systems. Yeah. No, it's a real, I'm glad you went down this rabbit hole. I think it's, I, we've, we've referred to it many times in the show, but I don't know that we've ever gone this deep. So I'm glad we did. Yeah, man. Yeah, it's good. So a link is in the show notes for the C wire adapters that I've been buying. I mean, at, you know, they're, I am not brand loyal to these at all. So if you are brand loyal to Gmail, because you, you know, use Gmail, listener Bruno has a tip for us. He says yesterday I received an email that was destined for a person that shares my first and last name. It was addressed to Bruno dot last name at gmail.com since the email contained an invoice. I saw the man's actual address and was able to find him and email him back. My email address, he says, is Bruno last name without the dot between the first and last? He says he started researching this and found a link on Google in their help index that says that you don't just own the email address you think you own. You can insert one dot between any letters and that is still your email address and you can have multiple dots just not right next to each other. So, you know, first name dot last name fine first letter dot second letter dot third letter dot fourth letter, etc. Fine. First name dot dot last name not fine. That's not your address. So I wound up with Dave Hamilton at gmail.com. When Gmail told me somebody else already had that. So I got Dave dot Hamilton at gmail.com before they instituted this change. And then when they did institute this change, somehow I won that lottery and I am I have all of those addresses. I am happy sharing this address on the show because it is utterly useless to me because of all of this. There are so many people that instead of writing down, you know, Dave Hamilton 65 at gmail.com. They write down Dave Hamilton and I get their email the only thing that Dave Hamilton at Gmail address does is has an autoresponder on it that says you didn't reach the Dave Hamilton you're looking for. That's it. Well, wait a minute. How are you going to get all that cash out of Zimbabwe? Oh, I already got the cash out of Zimbabwe. I wasn't really in Cancun seeing fish last week. I was over meeting with a Zimbabwe Prince's agent. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, with American dollars and his trunk. Correct. Yeah, it was all those American dollars. I certainly wouldn't have flown back into the country with more than 10,000 American dollars because who would think to do that would do that? Hey, along those lines, though, here's I've done it over the years for spam control and I had forgotten about it till the lady the other day goes, Well, your email address isn't over Honda dot your email address at Gmail. I went, Oh, actually, it is. And that way, if you ever sell my email address, I'll know it and I'll turn you off forever. You don't use the dot for that. You use the plus sign for that. Is it the plus sign? Correct. I forget you're right. You're right. Thank you. The dot is yeah, the dot is as we just described in invisible as long as it's a single dot for your your Gmail address. There is an RFC meaning a standard for lack of a deeper explanation that says that your email address. So for example, I use my Dave Hamilton at Gmail dot com address for this. I get mail to Dave Hamilton at Gmail dot com. As we just discussed, I get mail to Dave dot Hamilton and D dot a dot v dot et cetera. You know, all of that. I also get mail to Dave Hamilton plus pilot Pete at Mac at Gmail dot com or Dave Hamilton plus, you know, Dover Honda at Gmail dot com. And that is a standard most but not all email providers adhere to this standard. I think even iCloud mail adheres to this standard. Hopefully someone will correct me if I'm wrong. But to your point, Pete, it's a great way of of sort of compartmentalizing things. Using it as an anti spam thing. It certainly could work if people are stupid, but if someone's going to spam you, they know about this RFC and they can just go and parse out the plus sign and anything after it. Right. So I've used it on a couple of occasions to go. Why, you know, that's not who got that email address the first time. And then I just turned that email address off completely. Sorry. I dropped your volume there, Pete. I turned off your echo cancellation while you were talking and your volume dropped like crazy. Yeah, I don't know why that turning back on my apologies because I'm on that. Anyway, my point was I have used it on a couple of occasions to go. Okay. Now I'm turning that address off because you clearly sold my email. Yeah, you sold my stuff. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. I think I discussed it back was the duck dot com. Got it. And yeah, I'm sorry, John, you were starting. Um, I found out that there's a teacher out there named John Brown because and I had to I had to abandon one of my early Gmail addresses because everybody was sending me stuff and I found out this guy was a teacher because I would get students begging for extensions or stuff like that. And I was really tempted to say, I'm sorry, you failed the course. Oh, I would grant the extension. I'm a terrible person. I, you know, be like, sure, sure. Yep. Next fall, just bring it to be my next fall. There you go. I don't know why I can't get your level up, Pete and turn off echo cancellation. Let me see if we do this. I'm going to hit mute for a second. Okay. I'm going to I'm going to tell them about the next quick tip while you work on that. All right. Yeah, there you go. All right, Mark M shares a happy little quick tip back in nine sixty eight. We were talking about various different remotes to be used with Apple TV. And Mark says, I have an Apple TV gen one, but only one so but but I have lots of remotes and I tested all of my old white remotes with my Apple TV gen two, my Apple TV HD, my Apple TV 4K and my Apple TV 4K third generation. All remotes worked with all of my Apple TVs. It seems you can use any Apple TV remote with any Apple TV version as they all seem to have IR receivers. That is fascinating. I didn't I didn't realize that the newer Siri remotes had IR receivers. I'm not do they? Is that why this works or does it work over? Yes, like Wi-Fi somehow. Okay. All right. You know, the Siri remote. The thing is the so the first two ones, the first two remotes were IR only. The the Siri remotes have both IR and Bluetooth. So that's the difference. So yes, they all have IR and they all have IR. Okay. Interesting. Yeah. But it's neat because the newer ones, if you if you try to use them and they aren't paired, one of the latest updates on Apple TV, you know, it came up and because I had to reset it for some reason and came up and said, yeah, could you could you hold your remote a little closer to the Apple TV so I can bond with it? So that must have been Bluetooth, right? The hold it closer to bond. Okay. Right. Interesting. Interesting. Interesting. Huh. Cool. Cool. Yeah. Okay. I guess I got to look at my Siri remote and see. Sorry. Go ahead, Pete. Yeah. Oh, sorry. Okay. So how's my volume now? Is that good? Yeah. Yeah. If you stay on the mic, it's good. Yeah. Yeah. All right. So my assumption was it was the Apple TV itself that had a had the IR receiver. So regardless of the generation of the TV, an old remote would work on it because an IR receiver is pointing at it. I didn't realize the new remotes were IR and Bluetooth both. Yeah. I guess it kind of makes sense. It keeps them backward compatible. It right. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. That's that's I mean, what a it's really smart. I like it. I like it. I'll have to just lean in. There you go. Okay. All right. Yeah. And Tivo kind of does that too. They let you choose whether to be in RF mode or IR mode. For those that still have a Tivo. Yeah. Yeah. Time to get rid of that. Time to to move on to. Oh, I'm going to run it. I mean, I have lifetime service on it. So I'm, you know, I'm going to run it until it dies. Of course you are. That's one of the things I love about. I mean, there are still shows that I record that I can't easily get to by other means or would have to pay money, which right. But it leaves you stuck requiring a cable like subscription like an old, you know, so that that's what I'm saying. Like losing that you free yourself and probably could save a boatload of money moving to like fiber and and not paying for your cable and just like pay for yeah, pay for some version of, you know, Fubo or YouTube TV or something like that. So yeah. All right. Our last quick tip comes from a listener Ken who shares I'm not sure I understand this, but I'm hoping I do. He says it's almost too simple. That's probably why I don't understand it. I overthink everything. He says I notice when booting when when booting Ventura is in the upper left corner of the screen and it's it's small. Some might say too small. Apple says it cannot be made bigger until you log in. You can use the keyboard to highlight the user you want to log into. So I guess he's talking about the login screen. Press the down arrow and the first account will be highlighted. Press the right arrow and you can select which account to log into. Press return and enter your password. So I guess he's seeing the login screen for Ventura is has small text, but you can use the keyboard to navigate that that login screen. Yeah, that's that's that's handy stuff. I like it. We got we got questions. We got quick. We got to know we're done with quick tips questions cool stuff found all sorts of stuff. All right. So look, you know how it goes. You've been stewing about this health problem you have you almost resort to texting your group chat to get your friends opinions, but you're extremely unlikely to find quality medical advice in your group chat. However, you can find it from a doctor on our sponsor Zock doc. Thousands of medical professionals on Zock doc are there to help you. They listen like a friend and give you the expert care you need. Zock doc is the only free app that lets you find and book doctors who are patient reviewed. Take your insurance are available when you need them and treat almost every condition under the sun book surprise twists and tangents might work for podcasts, but maybe not so much for the medical care. Right with Zock doc. There are no alarms and no surprises choose from thousands of patient reviewed doctors and specialists browse doctor profiles upload and verify your insurance information and get the care you need to do this. Go to Zock doc dot com slash MGG and download the Zock doc app for free. Then find in book a top rated doctor today. Many are available within 24 hours. That's Zoc doc.com slash MGG Zock doc.com slash MGG make sure you go there that way they know we sent you and our thanks to Zock doc for sponsoring this episode. Next up our sponsor collide has some big news. If you're an octa user, they can get your entire fleet to 100% compliance how well if a device isn't compliant, then the user can't log into your cloud apps until they fix the problem. It's that simple collide patches one of the major holes in zero trust architecture device compliance without collide it struggles to solve basic problems like keeping everyone's OS and browser up to date. Unsecure devices are logging into your company's apps because there's nothing there to stop them. Collide is the only device trust solution that enforces compliance as part of authentication and it's built to work seamlessly with octa. The moment collides agent detects a problem. It alerts the user and gives them instructions to fix it. If they don't fix the problem within a set time they're blocked and it uses slack to do this. It makes life super easy for everyone collides method means fewer support tickets less frustration and most importantly 100% fleet compliance visit collide dot com slash MGG to learn more or book a demo that's KOL IDE dot com slash MGG and our thanks to collide for sponsoring this episode. All right, John, let's take us to our first question. Would you please? Yes. Chuck has a question. I don't know. And John's John's got the ambulance coming. Yeah, that's right. Now that's that's the part truck. Okay. I know I know the different. I'm sure you do. Yeah, all right. Oh, yeah. Um, all right. So Chuck says after restarting my wife's computer and being sure only email and safari are running the low memory flag appeared again and what he means by that is a message comes up saying your computer is low on memory to free up some memory. Please close a few applications. Um, I've seen this. I'll tell you more later. Um, before and after the system monitor memory window looked like the following, is it reasonable that with two applications running almost five gigs of memory of eight is in use? Uh, a few minutes after another restart low memory flag appeared again, but the memory monitor did not change. It is still showing green. Um, and it's showing green for memory pressure. Um, and green is good. Um, for that setting. So I'm still not sure why, why this is happening. Um, on the off chance that it is an iCloud syncing function, we've turned off all iCloud functions. The reason to suspect that is that we have a cable internet with great download speed 60 to 100 megabits down, but only 10 megabits up. So if they did it is being synced to iCloud. Could that be bogging things down? We're also planning a call to Apple support. And I thought I knew the answer, but I don't think I do Dave. So, um, I've gotten this and we've touched on a while back, but that memory is actually a lie. The, which, which memory, the dialogue saying that you're low on memory, I don't think he's low on memory because he said, you know, five of eight is being used that, you know, there should be plenty of breathing room there. And, and from his screenshot, we can see that no swap is being used, meaning the system hasn't decided to engage the, uh, the, the drive, the SSD or the hard drive, presumably an SSD on this machine to like for overflow, right? So it's not hitting that overflow point and that, that overflow point happens commonly and is not necessarily a bad sign. So the fact that he's hitting no swap use tells me like we're not, we're not having a problem. Hmm. Yeah, I'm, at least in my case though, um, what I found is that that's probably a sign that you don't have a lot of free disk space. So I can't make swap. Oh, at least that's what did it for me, right? Were you out of, so, so when you saw this on your machine, you were, I was critically low on free disk space. Aha. And I got this message. That makes sense. So what I did is, you know, I ran omni disk sweeper to, uh, you know, free up, find out who's hogging on my disk space. Um, another thing that stopped, stopped, stopped, stopped omni disk sweeper is the wrong thing to run these days. It, it like, it doesn't see everything. Um, it hasn't in many OS versions unless you like run it is rude. You, you, you want to use something more modern, um, and space lens, which is part of clean my Mac would be my recommendation unless something has changed with omni disk sweeper that I don't know about. Obviously that's possible. Did in a recent update, but I mean, it, it. I mean, it helped me get the job done. The other thing that I found, Dave, is that APFS is a bit lazy on freeing up this space. I've noticed this and you probably noticed this. Um, so, you know, you put some files in the trash, you empty the trash and you'd look at the free space and it hasn't changed. It's like, dude, um, what I found is running disk utility from recovery. Sometimes nudges the machine into freeing up that space. I've definitely had this happen to me. Where, you know, I go to recovery, I run disk utility and then I, you know, go back and into the OS and it's like, oh yeah, here's, here's all that space that you, you wanted. Huh. Um, the thing is Chuck wrote in and said that isn't it. So I'm, I'm looking at you guys, I'm looking at you guys to, for suggestions here. He has like, I think he said he has like 80 gigs free, which that should be plenty. Yep. I would, I would agree with that. Um, so why is he getting this, this message? Well, I, you know, I'm, I, and, and this may be a red herring and I'm still trying to figure out how, whether the, how recent Omni-Disk Reaper is, um, and I, I've got an observation about, I can't. Yeah. Go ahead, Pete. Yeah. Yeah. So I get that message on certain websites and I can't tell you which ones it is, but some that seem to be using lots of resources and I just don't have, I'm sorry. I can't go out. It's this website or that website. It's not coming up and it spurts, certainly not in my memory at this point in time, but I've noticed that certain websites seem to trigger that error for me more than others. And if I get, I'll, I'll let clean my Mac, free up some memory and I'll close that website and it goes away and stays away. If I open the website back up, I get that error again. So it's, I think it's some poor code on, on some interactive sites slash servers. Is that, that's, and it's purely anecdotal. So wait, you're saying that it, it's just like poorly written apps? Yeah. I think, well, I think poorly, poorly wit speaking a new mouth, poorly written interactive. For instance, there's a website I can go to that I can do bidding on and it doesn't happen on that site, but I can bid for my schedules, there's, there's server side activity going on there. Oh, okay. So like Safari memory leaks is, is what your browser memory. Yeah. I mean, certainly that can cause memory to blow it up. But when that happens, you will see more memory used and generally speaking, you'll see it spill into swap when that happens. But you're totally right. Yeah. I mean, your browser can often in fact be the largest user of memory. I'm, yeah, yeah. But, but you would see usage, like it, it wouldn't be hidden from you. And so like the fact that there is zero swap used on this system, which clearly only has eight gigs of memory, that tells me that makes it a real poser. Well, there are ways, at least there used to be ways. It's been a while since I've dug into this. John helped me here, but there, there were at least ways of telling your system not to use swap. And, and I remember doing some of this in the past when, when we had slower, like spindle discs, you know, that would, when, when things started swapping, it would get super slow. And so like intentionally, we nerds would say, okay, well, I'm going to do whatever terminal incantation it was. I can't remember, but essentially disabling the system's ability to, to, to spill over into swap in today's world, like it doesn't slow things down, at least not the way it used to. And I'm not convinced it slows things down at all to go into swap. So I don't even know if that's possible, but seeing a system that's using no swap makes me wonder, like, is it, is it, has it been told not to? And then in that case, you know, all of this would, would start to make sense. I don't know. That's, um, that's my, uh, that's my story. At least that's what I think my story is. I don't know. Do you, do you have any recollection of this, John? I remember we talked about it on the show, but it's been a while, like, like years, maybe even decade. No. Um, all right. Hmm. No, I remember the thing you were talking about. I personally would not, disabling swap, I don't think is a good thing to do. Well, no, I mean, and that's why it was a, a terminal, like a thing that we would, we nerds would intentionally do for certain scenarios where it's like, I, no matter what, I don't want you to spill into swap while I'm doing this thing. And so we would turn it off. And you just have to remember to turn it back on because otherwise, like you said, it would be a bad thing. But, you know, it, but I, I, I, I forget. So feedback at Mackie Cub.com. If you folks have any thoughts on this, or if you have a question of your own, your quick tip of your own, cool stuff found of your own. Was that feedback at Mackie Cub.com? Yeah. Now that I've got you loud enough, Pete. Yes. That's what it was. Yeah. Like you said, feedback at Mackie Cub. Amazing. Okay. Okay. Um, I was just doing, while you were talking, I was doing some, some Google foo and that there are some articles there on disabling swap and speed up your SSD and in Mac OS. So yeah. Um, so, so maybe checking that and, and doing it in the reverse, right? So that, you know, you turn, turn it back on. Let's put some of those links in the show notes for folks, Pete, for further, uh, for the reading, those, those show notes will be at, at Mackie Cub.com. And yeah, I had to turn on your echo cancellation again, Pete. I don't know why your system, and it's probably a stream yard thing, but whatever. I just hate, hate having, you don't, you are using headphones, right? Like the sound. I am. Yeah. Okay. Right in my ear, boss. Yeah. It's so that there shouldn't be a need for echo cancellation. Anyway, we will just have to try and not talk over each other. Uh, you want to tell us about our Lee? I can do that. Yeah. Let me, so let me pull up what I had on him. So this goes back to, uh, hey, Siri. Hey, hey, yes, lady. Yes, sir. Sorry, everyone. Uh, you know, turn off the light in 20 minutes and right. And I said that wasn't possible. It was. Yeah. And so he wrote in and said, well, yeah, in 20 minutes, hey, you know, hey, yes lady in 20 minutes, turn off the desk light, fail, turn off desk light in 20 minutes, success. I tried it and I got, you know, sorry, I can't do that for you. And the other one was, you know, hey, uh, that Google app isn't installed. I'm like, I didn't even mention Google. So as lady, you know, you're, you're not being very helpful, but he did, I will add that he added some, some hilarity in there for like a better word. He said, let me help with a personality analysis of Siri using the five, five big personality traits. Openness scores high. She likes to whiteboard ideas, but doesn't pay much attention to outcomes or results. Conscientiousness scores low. She often forgets to fix what is wrong and sometimes appears unorganized. She's not consistent and doesn't seem to care extrovert scores high. She loves attention and playing agreeable. This scores high. She just wants to get along. She'll agree with you if you like her afterwards and neuroticism scores high. Yes. She's moody. Siri is indeed moody. Yeah, Siri is moody. So I, we got a lot of comments about this after our, my opening quick tip of a recent episode where I said you could do this with the A lady, but you can't do it with the S lady. And, and like our Lee wrote in, many of you said you're wrong. I do this all the time with the S lady. And so I set about trying to figure out where and why and what and some of my devices will do this with Siri. Some of them will not and they are 100% consistent as to which device. If a device does it once, it will do it all the time. If a device never does it, I can never get it to do it. I thought maybe it was, okay devices that are connected via home bridge would be in one category and devices that are super native home kit would be in another. Not the case. I can't even using my, my well honed troubleshooting mindset. I cannot find a rhyme or reason as to how to decipher whether a device will support this with Siri or not support this. And again, by this, we mean saying S lady, turn off device in five minutes or in five minutes turn off device. Whatever the language, I've tried different permutations of language. It doesn't seem to matter. I don't get why this would happen. I'm sure there's a good reason or there's a reason. I'm not convinced it's going to be good, but but yeah, it's been, it's been interesting. So what's the name of the new protocol that everybody's leaning into matter, Pete matter. Yeah, that's right. I knew it would matter. It does matter. Sorry. Sorry. You know what matters is mail and we had we've had a couple of questions about mail recently. Listener Jared wrote in and asked. Is there a tool or keystroke I can use to file email messages in Apple Mail? I recall a long time ago, you on the show shared your favorite add-ons or extensions for mail and one of them could help file emails. For example, do a keystroke, maybe get a dialog box, start typing the folder name and boom, the email is filed. He says last year, I switched to the Spark email client and I like the UI and it allows for tons of keystrokes, but with their latest version, I can no more, no longer export emails to things. They say it's on their roadmap, but he says I'm thinking of going back to mail for exactly this. You can so in mail. You there there is the message moved to command and you can go to that and choose mailboxes and you probably could even set some keystrokes there by by going to whether would that be system settings. I believe is where you would do this like using the Mac OS is name a keystroke functionality. It's going to be a little tedious to do this, but you could go into where is keyboard? Is it in general now? I can hate what they've done to me here and in this. No, I guess it's just there's just I love it when my audio cuts out when I'm doing things in Mac OS. I am dealing with Apple on that, by the way. They they are very curious about this and the fact that I can replicate it on all of my Macs and my guess is all of you can too. But anyway, going into keyboard shortcuts in the keyboard system settings pain would be one way to would be one way to do that. However, there is an add on that will that will do this for you and it is mail act on that is the key. No pun intended. It's part of small cubes mail sweet and and includes a couple of other things. Mail act on is is is one of them signature profiles another. Those are the two I use mail tags is I believe their most popular one. It's just not one that I use, but it's all part of small cubes mail sweet. So I can't imagine running mail without mail sweet. And so so that that would do it because I can I can assign rules to any keystroke I want is one of the things mail act on does. So you know, I could I could say, you know, anytime I type this keystroke, I want it to go into that mailbox no matter what and then boom, but you can also have it be because it's a rule you can actually have some if statements. You can have it be conditional based on criteria of the message. So you could have a keystroke for archive, but if you've got four different mail accounts, you could have the archive keystroke archive to the correct archive box for that mail account based on the criteria in mail's rules, but you're still just using the same archive keystroke all the time. It's cool. It's it's really it's fantastic thing. John, you and I've been talking about mail act on because one thing it can do is it has outbox rules. So you can have it like for example, when we reply to you front when you email feedback at mackeycap.com or if you're a premium listener and you email premium at mackeycap.com. When one of the three of us replies to that, we CC that same address so that the other two of us can see the reply and it it makes us realize, oh, that question has been answered. I can move on to the next one. I think I realized recently that you weren't using mail act on to do this as an outbox rule because I've been using that for a long time. Have you started using mail act on's outbox rules to auto add that CC? Not yet. Oh, dude, please do that because because it eliminates the opportunity for human error, not only human error where you might forget to do it, but also human error where you pick the wrong one, the computer will always pick the right one makes life super easy. So yeah, and you've already you already have mail suite, right? Like you use that for signature profile. Oh, dude, dude, this is a five minute ad and it will change it will change your life. So, uh, all right. Do you guys have any other ways of of filing mail that don't rely on mail suite? Maybe maybe another plug-in or another another thing before we move on to the next mail question. No, I find it's leak. He works great. Well, but that always that that files them in the same place. Yes. But effectively every time it's tried effective. So yeah, I'm using that, although I'll be interested to play with using a key stroke to file it because I have not been doing that. Oh, I've been, you know, it comes in and messages about my other show turn blue and go to that folder. Sure. Nothing is about the airplane do that. And, you know, so that's cool. I like that about it. It's nice. Yeah, yeah. The rules are super effective, but I got to play with this keystroke thing. That's it's amazing. Yeah. And you write you have you have mail suite too because you use it for signature profiles. So yeah, you're good to go on that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The the next thing that we have here on mail is I don't know why I don't have any of this stuff is from Chris about filtering spam. And I'm going to try and find Chris's note. But if I can't, I will simply. Yeah, I'll simply read it. Chris asked, and I don't think we've answered this, but maybe there has. All right. Now, maybe we did Pete. Did we do did we do this in a show where you weren't here? Oh, because Pete surfaced these for us. But I I don't know. Did I missed it? I mean, I try to listen to the shows even when I'm not here. Yeah, I just I just wonder if there's a way, especially I don't think we have. I don't think we have. All right. So Chris writes, there's been a problem with my wife's email for years that needed wrangling or total destruction. First, I thought I'd ask them before going the scorched earth root. Her inbox is out of control with 90,000 plus email addresses. And most of these are spam. She says that some of them, of course, are that this particular address is related to a hobby business that she has and many friends, contacts and even new business leads come into this address. And she's had this email since the day he dragged her away from Windows to the Mac in 2010. So it's an email address that is well entrenched both in the spam world and in the not spam world. As a quick fix, Chris says, we set up VIPs. Too many new junk emails come in faster than we can deal with them. So we need a better long term solution. It's OK. So VIPs, that's not a terrible like Band-Aid because you can essentially get a filter based on who sent you the email. But but he says, I need a better long term solution. I agree. So it just seems like you need a better spam filter in place. And I'm I'm surprised to hear like, I don't know what Chris's wife's email like what the provider is for this. But there are services that you can use to help filter mail that go beyond what either Apple or Google's generic spam filters do. Mail route is is one of the mail route was a Mackie Kepp sponsor a number of years ago and you essentially insert them before your mail providers. So your mail would go to mail route first and then go through their filters and if it passes muster for their filters will then be delivered to iCloud or Gmail or wherever else you want your mail. It requires doing some DNS configuration to make that happen because that's how you choose where your mail goes. You may or may not have the ability to do that depending on what your email address is. But but if you control your own destiny and control your own domain which it sounds like you probably do for a business then that would be one way to do it. And I'll put a link to mail route in the in the show notes. Fastmail is the mail provider that I use and I their spam filtering is fantastic because not only do they have sort of a generic spam filter like like most mail providers do they also let you configure your own spam filter. And it is very trainable unlike Google's where you know you move a message out of the spam folder and then the next one that matches that just goes right back in. That's not what happens with fastmail. Their their engine actually listens to you and mail messages you put into the spam folder or delete from the spam folder are trained quote unquote as spam things you move out of the spam folder are trained as not spam and it really learns and listens so fastmail might be the the and the answer for you. So we'll put a link to that in the show notes too. John what are you what are you using for spam filtering these days? What are you relying on? I should say for spam filtering. The one built in the mail. Okay. Okay. Is that the only one you're using or are you letting your mail provider currently? Yes. So you don't use what mail provider do you use? How much and none and you have you have junk mail filtering turned off on the server side. You're only using Apple mail. Yes. Interesting. Yes. I'm using Apple mail for spam filtering. That's it. That's the other like how do you what? Okay. So now I'm really curious how you went ahead and did this. Like what your primary email what what does that come into? All right. Let me ask a different question. You're your Mac Geek Gab email right that I know where that comes in because I because I control the domain that comes into a Google address. So you have Google filters the spam. That's what I'm asking. So you you have not gone into Google and turned off their spam filters. Correct. Got it. So you are leveraging both the server side from Google and then anything additional that Apple mail wants to do locally. Right. So you're using both. Okay. Opt online also does that that there's a they have spam filtering. So that's my ISP for the moment. Okay. So you're so you're letting whatever the server side for your provider. Correct. Is do their thing and then you've enabled you've gone into mail preferences and actually turned on its junk mail filter to to do more on top of that. Okay. All right. That makes more sense. All right. Got it. Got it. Yeah. Now in the past I don't know why I stopped using it because the the various services do a pretty good job on the server side of filtering out garbage. Oh yeah. That's why I was surprised when you told me you turned those off. It's like why they're usually pretty good. Yeah. I was for a while using spam sieve and I think that's one of the better client side spam filters. Yeah. But yeah, I agree. My my only issue with with any sort of client side spam filters is they don't run on iPhone. So if you want your like if you if you're relying on your phone for email which I mean I think it's true for most of us certainly some of us not but you kind of have to rely on on the server side stuff and that's one of the reasons I've been really happy with fastmail is just how configurable it is. So interesting. Okay. Because I use spam assassin on my server on my domain. Yeah. I control my own and I've cranked up the number a little bit on that. Still when one sneaks through a cage now when one sneaks through I don't worry about one but it kind of torques me when I get all the sudden out of nowhere. I start getting a new email every day from the same domain. It's like all right. So I'll actually go into my server and filter out that domain when when a message arrives from this domain delete it. Done. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No. Yeah. Yeah. And my guess is a lot of providers whether we know it or not are leveraging spam assassin as part of their sort of you know heuristic sweet because because it's just so good. I do want to share one don't make the same mistake I did. So with fast mail I mentioned that it's super configurable. It's more configurable than I than I shared. First of all there are you can create like super customizable nerdy rules if you want you do not have to but if you're into that they'll let you the second thing that you can do is say OK Hey look these mailboxes because it's an IMAP server so they have mail you can you can designate mailboxes to be train as not spam or train as spam so you can say Hey my archive mailbox train that is not spam you know my in my whatever you know if you've got mailboxes for things that you're archiving things to or putting things in great to train those is not spam you can also set mailboxes to train as spam I made the mistake early on when I set up fast mail is a you know bushy haired I don't know what the right thing is you know knee high to a grasshopper whatever that is I made my spam folder train as spam they now have a knowledge based article folks that tells you don't do this because we put the things that we think are spam into your spam folder so that you can review them by marking your spam folder as train as spam you've effectively told us anything we think is spam you are confirming automatically and that resulted recently in me winding up with piles of things that were just being called spam that shouldn't have and I couldn't untrain them finally I found this I actually had to ask fast mail can you delete my personal spam you know customizations and they're like yeah we can I'm like great please do that for me now that I've turned off this feature because I needed that so you know make sure out of feature yeah well read read the you know read the manual yeah read the manual yeah I don't know that's oh there's that sound that sound that's a nice sound right that's kind of how we feel when we find a deal right there's that surprise that delight thanks to honey our sponsor for this episode manually searching for coupons to find those deals is a thing of the past honey is the free shopping tool that scours the internet for promo codes and then applies the best one it finds to your car imagine you're shopping on one of your favorite sites when you check out the honey button appears and all you have to do is click apply coupons then you wait a few seconds as honey searches for coupons it can find for that particular site and it tests them and if honey finds a working coupon you'll literally watch the prices drop on your screen I just did this you know we were just in Mexico I realized I lost a bunch of weight that summer and my jeans still fit fine with a belt my shorts yet not so much so they were fine with a belt last week but I got to fix this problem before I go away again so I was looking for more shorts and I had honey running in my browser and boom up came the coupons form it was amazing I saved like I don't know I saved like 20 bucks buying a couple of pairs of shorts it was amazing super easy and honey doesn't just work on desktops it works on your iPhone too you just activated on safari on your phone and you can save on the go if you don't already have honey you could be straight up missing out and by getting it you'll be doing yourself a solid and supporting the show get PayPal honey for free at joinhoney.com slash MGG that's joinhoney.com slash MGG and our thanks to honey for sponsoring this episode. Hey while we're here if you like tech podcast then you need to subscribe to software defined talk right now it's a weekly podcast that recaps all the news in cloud computing DevOps and enterprise software the host Koteh Matt Ray and Brandon will help keep you up to date on topics like Kubernetes DevOps platform engineering and anything related to enterprise tech plus they'll weave in plenty of nonsense like how to optimize shopping at Costco it's a fun freewheeling conversation that will keep you informed and entertained while doing the dishes or walking your dog so what are you waiting for subscribe to the podcast today by visiting software defined talk.com or by searching for software defined talk in your favorite podcast app and our thanks to Koteh Matt Ray and Brandon for doing this swap with us. All right John cool stuff found what do you got more home pad stuff. We wrote in and said my one month old home nobody said no sorry we were going to cool stuff found and oh sorry that's not cool stuff found but go ahead no you're we're here now go stick with Lee that will that's fine go okay my one month old home pod mini suddenly died it wouldn't power on even with a definitely live AC outlet and a different power supply the online reset instruction say to unplug it unplug it for 10 seconds plug it back in wait 10 seconds then touch the pad on the top for a while and you'll see a white red spinning light indicating it's in progress when I did this nothing happened no flickering lights okay so I went to the Apple store luckily not too far away and expected to have to get a replacement but the genius just sighed and while plugging in the home pod still no lights said watch this he then risked at a finger on the top pad for a good 30 seconds boom it sprang back to life half a minute is beyond my threshold of waiting in cases of a reset but I guess not anymore he said he said he'd seen it take a full minute and then we're told to wait two minutes all right so right so re-explain this here what's the procedure to sort of force reset the home pod and home pod mini well there are a few ways but what the genius did was powered it up rested a finger on the top pad for 30 seconds and then that revived it Oh Oh so this wasn't just to reset it this was to revive it interesting okay huh all right that's good to know that's that's long I like I tend to agree with Lee that's longer than I would have held it yeah yeah yeah no another way to go about it so yeah there is an article here which we will of course link to called reset home pod or home pod mini and it has a few different ways to do it I actually had to do this once Dave is you can do a restore on the home pod mini how do you do that you may ask well you plug the USPC cable into your computer and then the home pod shows up in the finder and you say restore home pod huh Oh interesting so same huh yeah so it's a using the data connection in the yeah right cable and stuff yeah I mean normally you have a plugged into power and there's no data going across the wire so it's neat I wonder if I plugged it into the computer would it show up as a speaker probably ooh I wonder like would that be a way of having you know essentially zero latency sound I mean I know with digital there's no such thing is zero but like closer then over Wi-Fi yeah I should I should try that yeah huh interesting alright yeah well I'm glad we did that one I that like that's a great tip for for all the home pod folks out there now going to cool stuff found Allison shared a great little monitor with us she says I heard you talking about the view sonic 1080p USB USB USB C display a few weeks ago she said I had a 1080p display from Coco Par that I like to but I just bought a 4K display from K Y Y and it is so much better it's super bright and super crisp and get this it's only 240 bucks at Amazon and at least as the moment of her email and the moment at which I bought it yesterday uh there's a $20 off coupon bringing it down to 2019 yeah I'm moving from the uh the previous one that I had that was I'll call normal uh to the 1080p OLED display which is what I talked about most recently after CES that too made a huge difference uh and and there are OLED 4K displays portable you know we're talking about these 15-inch displays the portable displays to use when you travel I've got you know about 10 days of travel coming up between podcast movement in Vegas and then South by Southwest in Austin so I figured perfect time to test this $220 uh 4K display so that should arrive before I leave and I'm looking forward to checking it out so thank you Allison for sending that in of course links are in the show notes including a link to Allison's review about that display as well so thanks for thanks for sharing that now you want to take us to Alan Mr. Braun great um Alan says uh in a recent episode you were talking about options for scanning family photos that were not digitized I have used Google's photoscan to get photos from our children's scrapbook into photos the app has the ability to take multiple photos um multiple photos of the paper photograph one at each corner in order to illuminate any glare from lighting on the glossy surface of the photograph it then stitches these photos together to get the best photograph in a digital format the photos can be saved to the iPhone's photo library nice uh or to Google if you desire I've used this multiple times to get scrap photos into a slideshow that can be shown at rehearsal dinners and other family events okay cool yeah Google does everything don't they that yeah we've go ahead it's an HDR let's just say it's an HDR photo of your photos basically yeah yeah yeah yeah and I think it does like a lot of aspect correction and like all of that stuff key stoning yeah key stoning yeah exactly we've we've had people recommend us in the past I completely forgot about it until until I saw that you know you had this one on the show notes it's right that's the if you want to do this on your own that might be the the answer because you probably already have the hardware to make it think I may have done that we used that at one point you don't even need to take you just move the phone around on over the picture right and it takes it automatically when it sees the best that's right that's right yeah yeah yeah you know what the worst part of that problem was my personal tech guru decided to take that week vacation in Mexico so I'm just saying I I wonder if I ran into him down there you may know him well man let's go yeah I I was on Tails scale when we talked about Tails scale several months back I jumped right on it played with it a little bit got it up and running I'm like man this is great and I've been all over the world get right VPN right back into my right into my disk station yeah guess what it doesn't appear to happen on any other device well any other device that I have but your disk station has a software key that allows it to encrypt and decrypt and be part of that overlay VPN that that is Tails scale and that key expires I have no idea why it doesn't appear to expire on my Mac book or on my iMac or on my DVR on my Mac mini or any of those things but I couldn't all the sudden connect to my disk station so I started looking around and I couldn't find a simple answer right away I did find one that's like okay well go create a new key and then install it this way and and it wasn't was it Docker or something else Dave I don't know what anyway you know there's there's an answer for you here and really there's a piece of advice that if your tech guy wasn't on the beach in Mexico or floating in the pool by the way if you're going to go to Mexico talk about cool stuff found I'll find the link that Lisa bought we she bought this year you know we always bring little floats to kind of float around the pool with and we bring like we bring Arctic brand our TIC brand because they're like half the price of Yeti brand but we bring insulated mugs so that we can have ask the bartenders to pour our drinks in these mugs and then they they stay cool in the hot sun this year Lisa bought floating pool of cup cozies and they tethered the two of them tethered together people we loved them and everybody went gaga over it because all you had to do was float around if you needed a drink you just lean forward and sip out of the straw and the thing would just float in the pool was amazing so I'll I'll put a link to that somewhere in the show notes or or whatever I I got to get it from Lisa yeah no it was great but as for everyone running tail scale yes right yeah but wait there's so I I yeah I I found the answer on well actually I found I don't know I don't know that you found the answer because because what you shared with me is not the advice that I not the permanent advice so if you go log into your tail scale account you will see a list of all of all of your machines and three dots to the right of each of the machines that are logged in you can choose to disable key expiry for any or all of your machines and this solves the problem that you ran into because the keys expire so I don't know if that's the solution you found it did like when I read through your email I wasn't sure so it is yeah so that is what I found but it took me a while to get there like I said initially it was all this all this doc like well the question I have is overall is is a a rhetorical one why would you expire this key well need to expire I mean I guess if the device hasn't logged in in a while it's possible someone could command your control of that device without having credentials to log into your account right and so the key is what lets it be part of your account when you disable key expiry you are making it less secure because you don't have to log in and and and do this on the regular so that's the that that's the issue yeah so my my answer was to go to the little tail scale logo up in the menu bar and then you highlight your name and then the second item down once that pops up is admin console like you said you go right and you say it first option the the disable key expiry I don't recall being there the first option that I saw was extend key life and I went oh okay I'll just extend the key life and it was good for 30 minutes now had 30 minutes to find an answer to figure out how to get my key to keep working and then I click in and that's when I saw disable key expiry I went out okay I'm just going to do that and be done with it so but I found it interesting I put that answer on the forum at where did I put hide that from myself and I put that answer on there and someone else who had that exact same question said I tried disable key expiry and it's not working for me so I don't know what the is but yep so my problem I got right right yeah exactly yeah yeah yeah yeah all I can tell that person is go find your own personal tech expert yeah go let him go on vacation yeah well sometimes you got to go on vacation it's just how worse so you know yeah all right what do we got next here we got time for one more John you want to share Neil yeah this looks cool I make get one I don't know if this really counts as cool stuff found I think it does however in the past I know there have been many online discussions about USB see hub in contrast to a multi port dock and hub something analog to a USB a hub of times past I saw a link to this of the most recent pod feet blog Oh well thank you Allison ah to the first time great I have seen a pure USB see hub and it appears to be a USB see hub from a where these so techie I believe the techie yeah yeah I think I got some of their other stuff yeah but yeah it has some limitations so I think it's 40 bucks yeah 40 bucks and you got four ports the only warning from them is that it does not do power and it does not do video so right this is a data only you cut out a little bit at least for me John so just to reiterate the data only four port hub for 40 bucks yeah yeah I mean like if you you would need you can't run bus powered drives on this like that that would sort of be the right right like there there's zero power coming from it or is there like five there's got to be five volts of power right because otherwise it can't be USB I don't know maybe maybe not maybe there's zero maybe there really truly is zero power coming from this yeah okay all right okay yeah and and it deploys USB three rev well it five gigabits per second is much better there we are yes right yeah I'm like oh I don't even remember which version it is what is that naming convention mean yeah so maybe good for traveling when you want to plug lots of things in yeah and especially for people that have machines that have only two USB C ports which I don't know if I could handle that I've got a quick stumped the dummy question then yeah go why won't stream deck work unless it's plugged directly into the computer you can't use a you can't use it through a hub I'm pretty sure that in there I'm pretty sure mine is plugged into a hub really yeah it I mean test it Pete I've seen a lot of manufacturers put that as a requirement because it keeps them from having to own the troubleshooting process of of dealing with perhaps a hub like this right like as a stream deck wouldn't work on a hub like this because it does not pass power and the stream deck needs power because it needs to be lit up like your device for it to work on this it would almost have to be externally powered like I'm maybe a mouse but I yeah I don't well yeah here's here's where it didn't work on the little hub that I have my little travel dongle type of sure is the only USB C port on that is power in Oh right therefore so now I'm using it with a USB C day adapter and that's where it's gone stupid uh interesting so okay yeah I just answered my own question yeah exactly yeah yeah yeah yeah well yeah that's weird I mean again I like I'd be curious as to why I believe you but but there's that's not a fundamental truth but it might be a specific truth about the way the stream deck folks are doing whatever it is they're doing yeah like that might be the the thing it might need more than than a would provide I don't know I mean it's got lights on it and stuff the stream deck we're talking about this device that allows you it's really a a bunch of customizable hot buttons on a on a nice little compact interface and and you can change the buttons are each their own lcd screens led screens lcd whatever they're each their own little screen so you can put icons or even words on there to tell you what it is that you're about to do when you push the button yeah means and yeah it's awesome I use it to quickly set up my entire setup when I'm in a podcast with you guys same yeah it launches everything I need launched and and I don't forget something yeah no it's great it's great yeah and I use it to change and I know you do too Pete to change the views and mute things and unmute things it's it works out really well one last thing I in Mexico this past week as as Pete mentioned I wound up using yet another data only sim this time I I chose one from the folks at alo sim they had reached out to us and said we think you're going to like what we have and I was impressed price wise they they provided it to us for free so I I didn't I did go to esimdb.com to to see how they how they're pricing fit they were a couple of bucks more expensive than the one that I would have picked however unlike what I had to deal with in Europe and I'm not sure even talked about this on the show I wound up in Europe the the esim that we chose and I forget the brand name but but they I had we had to manually keep choosing the carrier to connect to like it wouldn't auto choose the carrier as we drove around to different places it sucked I'll be honest with you this Allosim did not do this to us it auto chose the carrier wherever we were in you know Mexico Airport Hotel whatever and and it worked great and it you know grabbed LTE signals and and that is something to look at what the maximum speed that the that the esim you're choosing will support because I've seen some that are like oh yeah we only do 3G or 4G not LTE not 5G the one this Allosim one that I had this week did LTE not 5G but but worked fairly well so it was yeah so it was good if they come up and they're there they're the right sim for the right price I would I would happily choose them again so and that's that's going to do it that's where we get that's where we're at thanks for hanging out with us folks thanks for sending in all your questions and your tips and your cool stuff found to feedback at Mackey Cub dot com of course if you're a premium member please use premium at Mackey Cub dot com and you can support us in a variety of different ways of course you can go to Mackey Cub dot com slash premium to learn about how to support us directly with either you know credit card or paypal if you're using fountain the fountain browser or the fountain podcast listener or any of the podcasting 2.0 apps you can support us directly there you can stream to us whatever works any kind of support consider yourself premium and of course apple podcast subscriptions you get early access to the shows and that warm fuzzy feeling you get from supporting your favorite tech podcasters that that also counts as premium folks so apples weird because we don't get to know who you are because you know they hide all that so let us know premium at Mackey Cub dot com make sure you check out Pete's other podcasts so there I was dot u.s. check out my other podcast podcast too businessbrain dot show check out our merch Mackey Cub dot com slash merch thanks for hanging out thanks for thanks for telling other people about the show that's that's really the that's that's that helps us immense thanks for visiting our sponsors too like I said at the top just visiting you choose whether to buy all right john if you're not tired of doing this what's it say on Pete's shirt um beetle oh no that's your shirt um what's it say it says don't get caught made that's some good advice wish me luck in buying fish tickets in two minutes later