 It's time for Mac Geekab and Porthose John brings us our quick tip of the week by saying if you are an iPhoto on your Mac and you don't see your recent photos that you took on your phone, assuming you're using iCloud Photo, it might be due to the fact that syncing is currently paused on your iPhone. I have all the options set to allow cellular data, etc. but still I find my phone seems to pause photos syncing a lot. One reason it seems is that if I use quick camera access from the lock screen without unlocking my phone, those don't want to sync until I unlock my phone Wi-Fi or not. The quick fix is to go into photos on my phone and at the bottom of the library I see a little line of text telling me that whether or not syncing is paused and sometimes even why and a small link to resume it now. More quick tips like this plus your questions answered today on Mac Geekab 1029 for Monday March 18th. What is the day? Oh I know I pulled it up. It's National Sloppy Joe Day folks! 2024! Welcome to Mac Geekab, the show where you send in your quick tips like that, you send in some cool stuff found, you send in your questions, we try to answer your questions, we share your quick tips and your cool stuff found, we put it all together into an agenda so that each of us, every single time we get together, we'll learn at least five new things. Sponsors for this episode include LinkedIn.com slash MGG, we can go and post your first job for free, FactorMeals.com slash MGG50 with code MGG50 to get 50% off your first box and coda.io slash MGG, you can bring all your texts and tables together into one doc that will rule them all. We'll talk more in depth about each of those in a little bit for now. Here, I almost said that I was at home but I'm not. In rainy Austin, Texas, at least as of this morning while we're recording, I'm Dave Hamilton. And here in South Dakota I'm Adam Christensen. And Guten Tag all from Landstuhl, Germany. It's Pilot Pete, good to be back with you guys in spite of my internet which has been atrocious at every stop on this trip. It's been horrible. So hopefully I'll hang in for most of this show. Yeah. I'm getting blistering upload speeds like 0.8 megabits a second. Oh, that's nice, Pete. That's great. 1024 milliseconds ping times. That's nice. Yeah. So if I digitize, everybody will now know why. So you couldn't possibly have planned it better to digitize during the word digitize, Pete. So there you go. Yep. There you go. I've planned it. I'm still stuck on Sloppy Joe's and Dave's made me want one though and I probably haven't had one in years. I can't even remember the last time I had one. Right? When I was a kid for sure. The thing is having a Sloppy Joe, if you haven't had one in a number of years, could be like an awkward moment. Maybe you've forgotten how to eat it. Maybe you've forgotten how to make it. And the good news is though, in addition to being National Sloppy Joe Day, it is also awkward moments day. So. Perfect. Yeah. I think so. I gotta do it now. So one of my earliest memories in life, it was an awkward moment when I was eating a Sloppy Joe. I was at another kid's birthday party. I was probably about four and I was horrified because I didn't have a napkin and I was covered in sauce and it was like I couldn't. I was frozen until this kid's mother came over and cleaned me up. I might have been three or four. What sort of horrible hamburger is this? Why don't you form it right? It's falling apart. That's aptly named. I wonder if these two things are related, Pete. Maybe it's all about you. Yeah. Yeah. All right. So I'm here in Austin for South by Southwest, as I typically am every year at this time. And we've got a couple things to talk about that I have found here. Some great stuff. You know, South by for those of you who don't know is a conference for creators. It is a tech conference. It is a music conference. It is a film conference. It is an education conference. And there's all kinds of things going on in addition to being there being sessions about all of those topics. There are also those things that musicians perform. Films are premiered. Tech is shown. It's all just all in one. I joked with them that they created this conference specifically for me once because it like hits all of the things that I kind of do. I don't make films, but they make films about tech and music. And so like that. Yeah. It's been good. But I noticed something this week, right? And it's a quick tip. Like I'm going somewhere with this. We have our notifications on our phones, right? As one does. And I noticed that while I was out and about like attending sessions or doing things, many of these notifications I want to get. I want to know when there's you know, like I get a text message and I want to know most of the things. In fact, I don't want to be and do not disturb. However, there were a series of notifications that I started getting that I realized I wanted to ignore. And I created what I now call my conference focus mode. And specifically what I have turned off, I have used that focus mode to silence notifications only from specific apps. And those specific apps are things like home, my ring cameras, my vacuum cleaners, all of those things that I don't need to know about in real time being that I'm not at home. You know, I'm not concerned, overly concerned. I mean, I'm always I'm always a little concerned, but I'm not overly concerned about people being at my house when they shouldn't be or whatever, you know, and but I don't need to know when the garage door opens and closes. I don't need to know when someone's in the driveway. You know, I don't need to know when the humidifier in the bedroom runs out of water. Like these are not things that are relevant to my life here in conference, you know, in conference mode. So I've been in conference mode all week and it really has worked out great because it's let me get the things that I want to get that allow me to be productive and and focused on what I'm doing here. So think about these things. You know, at first I put myself in do not disturb and I'm like, I don't really want that though. I want something more granular and I am I am constantly reminded of the first time on this show John asked me, you know, with the iOS betas, whatever version of iOS it was that had conference, I had focus modes in it. Yeah. And he was like, you know, what are those like are using them? I'm like, nah, they're stupid. It's dumb. I don't think it's going to catch on whatever. And obviously, I prove myself wrong every single day. I have a few set up, but I have not really used them, but I see the value for a lot of a lot of people. I mean, part of my problem is I work from home. I don't travel a lot. So there's not a lot of scenarios where I actually need that. I think I have a work one and like after work one that I've played around with, but I haven't really done a lot with it. But for it for people who, you know, really want to control that stuff and really want like, I think it's a really cool feature and the fact that they all sink and you can, you know, turn things on and off and like really hunker down. I mean, I think it's a great idea. It's just you have to be that type of person where you're disciplined to like set them up and use them. So I think for those people who are like that, and that's just not me. I just recognize that's not me. But for people who want that, like, it's a really cool feature. And that I that's why I thought it was going to be dumb for me because I am generally not that person, Adam, right? But it's I will create them. I do get frustrated at times, not all the time, but I do get frustrated when my phone starts notifying me of things that I don't want to be aware of in that moment, right? I'm trying to focus on one thing. I, you know, may resemble some of the list of symptoms that describe ADHD, right? You know, so certainly there are times when I don't want to be distracted. And so it's in those moments that I create my new focus modes, like I use, I use that frustration as the fuel to create one. And one of my favorite ones, I've talked about it on the show, is the one I call Nuclear, which just has only allows notifications from my Nuclear family. And that's it. And, you know, and a couple of other like very specific apps that sort of are related to my family. And it works out great. Like I turn that on. Sometimes I'll have that on all weekend, the Nuclear mode. So, yeah. One thing of note, and I'm sorry, Pete. So, one thing of note, and I may be describing this improperly, but I'll do my best. With the focus modes, I found that there seems to be no way to only exclude unknown callers. I could be wrong. I could be doing it wrong. I've tried several different ways. But it seems to me that once I'm in any focus mode and the lock screen is on, only the people I allow can get through. And I haven't found one that allows all people in my contact list. I could be wrong. But it seems to me that that's a... Couldn't you just go into, and I'm using my phone as my camera, so I apologize for not being able to dig in. I'm traveling. I don't have my, you know, spare phone camera set up. But can't you just go into whatever that setting is in iOS? There is a setting in iOS that says block unknown callers. Yes. That's in the phone settings, yeah. In the phone settings, thanks. Yeah, so that may be it. But then that... I don't think that that blocks texts from Joe Biden and Donald Trump and JFK and Margaret Thatcher and everybody else who's running for something. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. So, yeah. I tried to cover every political... Yeah, yeah, yeah, you did great, Pete. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The problem with that setting is I sometimes forget to turn it off when I'm like, I've had to do... Yes. You know, get people to do work on the house or like, you know, like, and then I don't get calls. And for whatever reason, a lot of times these days it feels like I don't know why people don't leave waste meals. But yes. Yeah. And that's not granular enough because you can turn it on for an hour or until the evening or the end of this event. I'd like to be able to, you know, turn it off in two hours and 26 minutes or something like that. But I wonder, is there... Is it possible to automate that switch with a shortcut? The answer is probably no. Sure. But if it is, you can run a shortcut when you turn on and off a certain focus mode, right? You can have a shortcut triggered by a focus mode. You can. There you go. You can. In fact, when I'm... I had it at one point when I went into StreamYard, I automatically turn on podcasting focus. Cool. Right. Exactly. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Grumpy Mike comments in real time here that he's pretty sure that JFK and Thatcher are not running for office at this time. And that's only because time is this relative thing. Right. Like, we live in all of the times at Grumpy Mike, so it's all the same. I was going to say JFK, Junior, and then I didn't, and then so I had to include Margaret Thatcher, you know. Of course. Who knows? They may be running for something else somewhere else. That's the thing, the parallel universe, or just, you know, at a different time in our same timeline. Right. Yes. All right, you want to take us, please, Adam? Yeah, please, Adam. All that's good and pure. Please. Ah, Aaron Doug says, I've set a yearly reminder to clean up my macOS chastrophies system logs that Apple's developers never saw fit to do because they invisibly eat up your disk space, causing you to run out of disk and to be forced to delete stuff you really want or buy a new computer. Here are the infinitely growing ones that I've found. There are others, no doubt others, and it's, these are log files that build up in var logs from the root of your system, you know, in a hidden directory. And it's like core capture D, FSCK, APFS log, FSCK, HFS log, the install log. So all these different log files that would potentially build up in, you might have different ones, not everybody's going to have the same ones. It's going to be dependent upon, I think, what you do on your system, right? So. Yeah. Yeah. And we have, we have a link in the show notes to a list of these. So, yeah. Do we give folks the dangerous tip keyboard shortcut if you're in Finder? Yeah, go ahead. Command shift period to toggle on and off invisible files in Finder. So, end folders, just be careful because you don't want to be messing around too much or deleting certain things, especially at the root system level on your, on your Mac, but you could go in and find these. So if you want to find these without having to go through the terminal, you can pop open your computer's hard drive and command shift period, and you will see the var folder, and then you can go into the logs folder and see which, which files you have there. So you're right about this, that you could navigate there that way. And I love the reminder of the quick tip of command shift period to show hidden files. The way I get there is I go to the finders go menu, and I choose go to folder, which is also command shift G and type in slash var slash log. You don't even have to have hidden files turned on for that to work. So that, that would be the other way to get there. So, yeah, I like it. I like it. For some reason, my fingers on my laptop don't know my archive shortcut, and I need to relearn that. So, but there you go. Pete, you want to take us to the next quick tip from Ben and Portless John? Yeah, I'll do that. So, both of them wrote in about this, and Portless John writes, it's probably been said, but it's worth saying again, because I use it every day. There's a much faster way to attach photos to email or to upload to Discord websites, et cetera, on your Mac, as opposed to the old way of opening photos, dragging them out or exporting them to a folder on the desktop or somewhere else where you know where they are. This is when you get the upload dialog, scroll to the bottom left sidebar, and you'll see a media section that has photos under it. It also has movies and music, I think, but tense media. So, if you click that, it will show your iPhoto library and allow you to select images to upload, easy as pie, no duplicating slash exporting necessary. And then Ben followed up with, and if you find it easier to locate a picture in photos, you can drag it from there to the attached dialog in the other application. So, without having to export, you can just drag that thumbnail over to the export dialog and boom, you got it. So, yeah, and those came to us through Discord, macgeekab.com slash Discord. Macgeekab.com slash Discord, that's right. Yeah, yeah. Or you could send something to us in feedback at feedback at macgeekab.com. Wait, did you say feedback at macgeekab.com? He heard me at him. Yeah, feedback at macgeekab.com. Yeah, that's just what it is. All right, we have one from, my face is too big. Love these call signs. In Discord, they're great. Yeah. It's a time-honored thing. I know, obviously, in your world as a pilot, Pete, the call signs are a thing. And online, like when we were on bulletin boards, nobody used their real name. Like it's everything was a sock account, folks. It's how it was. My face is too big, writes. Someone was recently expressing frustration about how man pages in the terminal are displayed. Did you know that you can actually view any man page? And I'll put an asterisk on that, some man pages in their own separate windows with the default terminal app. Go into terminal, simply click help and type in whatever man page you are looking for and click on it. Plus, they appear a different color, making it simple to distinguish them from your active terminal window. This is also searchable with command F. And it's interesting. I tried this, right? And it only works, it seems to only work for things that are built into macOS. I'm not sure why that is, but it is. The other option is, well, there's two other options. One is to use a command called TLDR that from the terminal, you have to install it. So it would be brew install TLDR. And then that shows you, it's the right way to describe TLDR. It shows you, well, the TLDR, the synopsis of how to use a command with some examples. So it really distills the man page down into its essence that most people are going to need. And then, Porthos John says, there is a TLDR app that is built for the iPad, but because it's built for iPad and not restricted, it will work on any Apple Silicon Mac in its own windows. So you can use this TLDR pages app to pull up all of your TLDR pages in a separate window on your Mac too. So lots of interesting ways of going about this. I think I mentioned this last time, but I'll mention it again, because I just love this app and I use it for way more things than just man pages. But the Dash app is an app for all documentation and for different languages, for different things. There's an ASCII character set one. I think there's a Regex one. And it's an app that you can choose to download different types of basically documentation and have it locally. So I have the entire PHP command library locally in here, and I can search it and pull things up. Not only that, it has a little section in it where you can put code snippets and scripts and things like that and fire them off with keyboard shortcuts and stuff. So great little app and it's on set app. And of course you have set up, you can get it. And remind us again, say the name of that app one more time. Dash. Dash. The Dash app. Nice. And for those who are new to the show, and there's a couple of you out there, keep joining. Man page means manual. You know, not trying to insult anyone's intelligence. All right folks, let's talk tech and tacos. Well, maybe not tacos, but definitely tech and terrific meals. Coming back from my recent trip to Mexico, my mind was still in vacation mode, but my stomach was in a state of panic. Enter factor our sponsor and my culinary hero. Imagine landing jet lag dreaming of nothing but a quick nap only to remember dinner requires effort. But wait, we had factor at home with meals ready faster than your computer can wake from sleep mode. 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That's code mg g 50 at factor meals dot com slash mg g 50 to get 50% off because my fellow geeks who has time for cooking when there are algorithms to solve and our thanks to factor for sponsoring this episode. All right, have you ever tried to find that perfect addition to your tech squad but felt like you were just sifting through endless pop up ads? Well, that was me before hitting the jackpot with our sponsor LinkedIn jobs. Let me tell you about Sadie our social media and promotions ninja. Three years ago, we were on the hunt for someone who could speak fluent hashtag and meme. And let's just say LinkedIn jobs turned that quest into a victory dance with LinkedIn's vast network of over a billion pros. It was like having the ultimate cheat code for hiring. Finding Sadie was just as easy as beating that final boss level on easy mode. We posted our job and bam, LinkedIn jobs used its algorithm magic to match us with quality candidates, including the ninja herself. And get this 86% of small businesses score a qualified candidate in just 24 hours on LinkedIn. It was faster than a fiber optic internet connection. So don't get caught in the endless loop of hiring to spare. Check out LinkedIn jobs were finding your next team member is as seamless as syncing your devices. Post your job for free at LinkedIn.com slash MGG. That's LinkedIn.com slash MGG to post your job for free terms and conditions apply. It's the must have resource for small businesses juggling too many tasks, including those of us in the tech sphere who might prefer coding over writing job descriptions and our thanks to LinkedIn jobs for sponsoring this episode and finding Sadie. All right, Adam, should we do some questions? Yeah, let's do some listener questions. We have one from Michael. He says, Dave, Pete and Adam, welcome, Adam. I've listened to both Mac Geek and Mac Essence the beginning. I guess that makes me old, but I've never been caught. That's a good thing. I need your geek wisdom on adding my desktop and document files to my iCloud drive. My first question is, do any of you use it? Second, my main Mac is a work issued M1 16 inch MacBook Pro with a 500 gigabyte internal hard drive. I use Dropbox and store almost all my documents there except one work specific folder I store on the hard drive on the MacBook Pro. We also use Google as our system at work. So much of my work related stuff is on a company Google Drive. I backup my photos in iCloud photo library. What would the advantages and disadvantages be of turning this feature on in my situation? Thanks for all you do. Yeah, I use the desktop and document syncing on all of my Macs years ago after upgrading to the two terabyte family plan, which last week I mentioned I might need to upgrade past, because I figured, well, I have more storage than I need, which is getting to be less true. I thought, well, why not? But I am not using Apple's documents folder as my main document storage. For that, I use Synology Drive, but that's kind of a material, you know, use Dropbox, whatever. But still, having whatever is in my documents folder, synced everywhere, proves useful every now and again, especially with the files app on my i devices. Yes, there are integrations for Dropbox into the files app and Synology Drive into the files app. I haven't found anything that is as seamless as Apple's own documents folder in the file. Yeah, exactly. So when I need to get something to or from my, mostly from, if I'm saving it from my phone or something, I will put it in the documents folder and I just know it's going to work. I don't have to clunkily re-log in to my services and all that. So that works fine and that's convenient, where this syncing really pays off for me is that I love having my desktop folder be the same on all of my Macs. You know, I use my laptop, obviously, when I'm traveling, I have a Mac in the studio, I have a Mac in my office, and just knowing that whatever I put into my desktop folder or a sub folder thereof is just there. I use my desktop folder for a lot of the, I have a sub folder of my desktop folder that I use for a lot of sort of in progress files, like the agenda document for the show notes, where I actually track the timestamps and all that. That's in my desktop folder, so it's always synced. Some of the way I do the ad preparation and all that stuff. And by the way, I keep meaning to say, I've been using chat GPT to write my scripts for the ads to keep things kind of interesting. So if you have been, if you are someone that, if you say, oh, well, I already know about, say, LinkedIn jobs, or I already use Factor, I don't need to listen to the ad, give it a listen because you might actually, I get a chuckle out of the scripts that I started getting bored with the scripts that I was coming up with because it was the same me oftentimes the same talking points. So I would just wind up saying the same thing over and over again. So I let chat GPT help me make it funny. And yes, that is literally part of the prompt, make it funny and incorporate the phrase, don't get caught into the ad. So that'll be in every ad if I can make it happen. But yeah, having that desktop folder be that sort of active things that I might need to touch quickly. And just having those there all the time, I have a folder on my desktop. Here's another quick tip. And yes, the caffeine is kicking in because I had about three and a half hours of sleep. But I have a folder on my desktop called kill me. And I know that at least in the moment that I put something in that folder, I do not need to keep it forever. And then I have a Hazel rule that deletes things in the kill me folder that are older than like 60 days or something. I can't remember exactly what it is. But I this this way I know it's just being purged constantly. And I can throw things in there be like, yep, I want to put this there. I want it synced on all of my Macs. But I don't need it long term. And I might not even need it past this very moment in time. But I want to save it there. That that little tip, I think is one of those sanity savers too. So yeah, I also used desktop and documents. I don't have a lot to add there. I think like you covered a lot of it. For me, a big advantage to is just having access to that stuff from my iPad or iPhone when I need it. Right. Yeah, it's not downloaded there. Obviously, I use the optimized storage on those devices. But doing that and then the other tip that I would have because he mentions the work situation is I have my iCloud connected to my computer at work. But really the only feature I want there is the copy paste because I have to copy and paste URLs for testing to like my personal iPhone and stuff like that. But I turn off I go in iCloud and I turn off every other every other syncing like I don't seek my contacts. I don't seek my I just use certain features on that computer. So I don't it sounds like he might want to do more than that. But like be aware, you know, you can go into an individual machine and really control what's syncing via iCloud and what's not syncing there. Yeah. Anything more on that? Or are we we good to move on to Andrew here, Pete? Yeah. So Andrew wrote in with a question for us. And here it is. Okay. He says, I've been listening to the Mac Geek, Gab and the Mac Cast for years. And I've got to say I'm enjoying listening to you all together. Thank you, Andrew. Anyway, my question is about backing up iOS devices. Adam, especially as a passionate, passionate advocate of backing up. And I follow your advice, Adam, religiously for my Mac. But I'm running out of available iCloud space and looking for ways to save a bit of space. Because I'm a cheapskate and all right, I'm sorry, I got editorialized here. You're not a cheapskate Andrew, you're a frugal pilot. And I don't want to pay for storage if I don't have to. So I was wondering about all my iOS devices and whether they really need to be backed up. I mean, email photos, music, social media, data, notes, up note books, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, all cloud based anyway. And apps can be really downloaded. Is there a compelling reason to back up anymore? Looking forward to hearing your thoughts. Yeah. I mean, I turn on iCloud backup and I use it, right? Like that's for my iOS devices, that's my main backup. I know people who will religiously also backup locally. So that gets backed up by other backups, right? You can go into the Finder and you can set up your iPhone to backup locally and sync like it did back in the old days. I just mostly use iCloud for that. And I would say I'm kind of with you. I'll say what I always say about backup. Backup has to be a personal thing in my opinion, right? I am fanatic about it. I've had losses. You should have some form of backup, especially for important things. But what we were just talking about with documents and if you're syncing your documents and folders somewhere, right? And they're being backed up on your Mac, it's okay to probably not have those downloaded to your iPhone and backed up there. And same thing like if you're using iCloud photo library. So yeah, your point is well taken. Yeah. You don't need to probably back up everything, but you probably should think about the things that are really important to you and maybe adjust your backups for that. Yeah, I think an important thing to discuss here is, you know, Andrew mentions mail, photos, music, all of those things are cloud based and don't need to be backed up. That is correct. Apple agrees with you and doesn't back that stuff up separately in your iPhone, iCloud backup. So you are not duplicating and double dipping into your iCloud backup space. The only things, as I understand it, that are being backed up are bits of data that are not otherwise synced to Apple devices. And actually, even Dropbox, like I remember when all of this kind of was developing years ago, Apple lets app vendors flag data as should this be backed up or is it something that can be gotten from somewhere else? Like is this a cache essentially that doesn't need to be backed up? Or is this the only place that at least the app thinks the data exists? And so yes, it should be backed up. And so even like if you're syncing Dropbox files locally to your iPhone, that's not going to be backed up in your iCloud backups either. So like the things that it's backing up are the things that you would need to get yourself to the point where you could then sync back down from the cloud everything else, including all your app binaries, if you were to have to get a new phone or what have you. So yeah, and of course, the piece of software that comes up all the time, if you don't want to back up to iCloud, but you do want to back up to your Mac is use iMazing, which you can do. But you can also back up your iPhone to your Mac with the Finder too. Like that functionality used to be in the iTunes app now, it's just in the Finder. And so you can do it Apple's way, you can do it iMazing's way. iMazing lets you be a little more granular and more reliably wireless about it, I'll say. Yeah, so I don't know. Remember the days when you used to have to plug your iPhone in to sync it and back it up? Yeah, what's wrong with that? You don't do that just for the sake of the second end or false. I mean, there still is one reason to do it that way. And I will typically do that one time before I do like an upgrade of stuff. And that's because if you do the manual sync and you turn on the encryption option, it will back up your health data and other data that normally would not be part of that backup. Oh, that's right. The locally stored encrypted stuff that is only on the phone. Yeah. Yep. Typically. I forgot about that. I forgot about that. Yeah, so. But, you know, one other thing to add on this is like if you're running out of backup storage space to Dave's point that, you know, it documents like your apps do not get backed up, just the data for your apps gets backed up because Apple knows we can redownload the apps and then attach the data to it. So a couple of things, you know, I have turned on recently the option in apps to allow it to, I forget what it says, like when an app has been not used for a long time, you can offload the app itself and just keep the data. So I do that. And then if you need to use that app again, you just tap it at redownloads and away you go. You know, obviously that's not convenient if you don't have internet at that point. So that's where you can get caught with that one. So take that with a grain of salt. But yeah, I use that. And then the other thing is like I tend to find what mostly eats up my iCloud backups are my iCloud photo library and my kids messages because they get videos and photos and like everything. So you might look at like cleaning up that data, maybe backing up the things that are important. Say like if you have 10 years of photos that, you know, people have sent you in in messages and back up, you know, download and back up the ones that you want to keep and like maybe purge off the ones that are just like, you know, a picture of, I don't know, a meal you had or something. I don't know what it is. Silly cat videos. Tacos. Random memes, random memes that got shared with you that you could go find the meme again if you really needed to. Yeah. So I want to circle back and I'm hoping as I'm vamping here that I'll remember what I want to ask you about. And I do because I don't have, I usually have a piece of paper where I can like write down the hey, remind me, you know, remind myself to ask Adam about the automatic offloading of apps because I think it's on by default at times. I have found it enabled on my phone in the past and I've gotten caught, right? I'm in one of those moments. I want to launch whatever the app is and it ain't there and I, you know, I'm either on a weak cellular connection and can't download or whatever, right? So my question about that, so I have that turned off and I like, anytime I notice it turned on, I'm furious, right? So my question is you use it still. I have not used it in a long time. Is there a way to flag specific apps and say no matter what, even if I haven't launched this since the day I installed it, never offload this particular app? Is there a way to do that? Not that I am aware of, but that doesn't mean it doesn't exist because I haven't gone in in a long time. The reason I have it turned on is frankly, I'm lazy about cleaning up apps on my device, especially since we got the new app Launcher Space. My important apps live on my home screen, but every other app is often purgatory in the search menu. So I never go in there and see and when I do, I'm horrified. I downloaded this app as a flyaway because somebody mentioned it and it's been sitting here for, and especially with games and games have a lot of data a lot of times, like hundreds of megabytes, although that data would still stay there. So this is mostly about saving local storage on your device. It's not going to really help you with this backup thing. That's a little bit of a tangent. And a quick easy way to do that is to type storage and go into settings and pull down that left menu and type storage and it takes you to, you can get to the storage manager there. It allows you to choose. It shows you what, I think it sorts it by the most data used. Yeah. And then you can go into there. Yeah. Cool. All right. So that's a little bit of a geek challenge. Like, is there a way to flag an app as a please save this on my phone? So feedback at macgeekab.com. I have another personal geek challenge. I've been in a hotel room for, I think this is my sixth day or something here, which is fine. I like to stay in these residents in. So I have a little like efficiency kitchen and I can make hotel room nachos at night when I get back, which I really like. Sure. Judge me if you want. They're delicious. I, and I'm in and out of my room all the time, right? Like, especially during conference days, I'll go over to the convention center. I'm really, I always try to get a hotel that's close to the convention center and I'll be like, you know, I have some work to do. I'm just going to go back to the room. I have my separate screen. I have my fortress of solitude here where no one's going to bother me. And I can like heads down and get some work done. I would love to know if housekeeping has come. And I started thinking about this because I was sitting in the convention center in a session. I'm like, all right, when this session's over, I've got like 90 minutes. I don't have anybody to meet with. I think I'm going to bounce back and get some work done. But I could stay here and do it like in the media room or something. And if housekeeping hasn't come, I'll stay out of my room, you know, for, for this. And so I started thinking, well, what would it take to do that? All of our hotel rooms have Wi-Fi. Is there some, and of course, anything we're looking for would need to be able to use like the captive portal, at least for configuration in a hotel room in an easy way. But couldn't we just have a motion sensor to trigger that? Yes, there's motion in your hotel room and then I could just use that and say, okay, well, if there's been motion in my hotel room, I'm going to choose to believe that it was housekeeping, right? Like, you know, could be anything. But then it's like, all right, great. And has that motion, when was that motion most recently detected? Was it detected, you know, two minutes ago, in which case, they're still working and I want to stay out of their way? Or was it 30 minutes ago or two hours ago? And I'm like, oh, yeah, I'm good to go. It is possible, like the world exists in such a way in our timeline currently, anyway, that this would be possible. And I feel like I, I, and maybe this is just something about me and I need to talk to someone about it, but I'll talk to you guys. You know, I find myself wondering this often, like, oh, has housekeeping come? You know, and then I know whether to detour around or whatever. I don't know. I don't know. You could bring like a Yuffie doorbell with you, Dave, and set that up. No, you know what grumpy, grumpy mic in our discord says, bring a travel router, like your barrel thing or whatever, that would bypass the captive portal part of this. So then any IOT motion sensor would work. Yeah. Oh, I tell you, I have no idea what, what they're doing here. And in this hotel in Germany, I was an hour yesterday screwing with it and I could not get a login page for the hotel's wife. Unless I was directly on the Wi-Fi that I could not get the router to repeat it to me and get on the barrel. I'm thinking, here's the thing, this comes from living in a state now where like hunting is a big thing. I'm thinking there's got to be like a cellular enabled, like remote game camera that can like notify your phone. Right? Yes, because they put those out in the woods, you know, to like detect game in certain areas. They have to have those that would just like probably come some of Pete's devices, as he mentioned, that just come with built-in cellular, you know, plans or whatever when you buy the device. You could just point it at the door, you know, just any time there was motion. Boom. Yep. And send you a photo. I don't know if that's a violation of privacy, but. Yeah, you're right. Like that's a, yeah, I don't necessarily need to laugh. I don't know that they have a reasonable expectation of privacy in your rented room though. Right. I have a reasonable expectation of privacy in here. Yeah. Yeah. Huh. That's interesting. But yeah, no, the travel router thing, that would probably be the least expensive way to get there, especially over time. And with the relative infrequency that I travel, I wouldn't want to be paying for, you know, cellular service for this device just for like this purpose. But, you know, yeah, but I like your idea of a game camera like, oh, we've spotted the wild housekeeping staff, you know. Right. So, huh. Yeah, that's okay. All right. There's a solution here. I know that like, I obsess about weird things. They were atypical things. I don't want to say they're weird. But you can say they're weird. You can say it about me. It's fine. Yeah. Oh, yeah. And Portos John says a Raspberry Pi with a wired IR motion sensor. Right. There you go. Oh, my son just got a Raspberry Pi that he's playing with. So maybe I need to get him working on this. I have a toy called Little Bits that has a mini Raspberry Pi thing and you can set it up with all kinds of sensors. You could do trip sensors. You can do motion sensors. You can do IR sensors. And they're these little snap together. It's like a science toolkit for kids. It's like the modern version, in my opinion, of the old Radio Shack electronics kits. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. All right. So you could build a little contraption with those. Even like to physically detect when the door opens and then cloud send you a notification. Yeah. All right. Yeah. No, no, no, no. This is good. I will think about this. All right. Look, have you ever felt like your team's work has spread across so many apps and tabs that you need a GPS to navigate through it all? Well, let me introduce you to our sponsor, Kota, the compass that guided one of my other businesses out of the digital wilderness. Imagine a world where documents, spreadsheets, and the magic of apps unite under one digital roof. 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Start weaving your team's digital tapestry with Kota today. Trust me, it's the upgrade your workflow has been waiting for and our thanks to Kota for sponsoring this episode. All right, let's continue with questions, shall we? We've got a couple of good mornings left in the queue here. I got Michael here, and he says, my wife and I just finished hosting a Josco, Stefan, and Sven Juneback, two guys, for a house concert with about 50 attendees. They came from Germany and do gypsy jazz and jazz mnosh. It goes by various names. Great stuff. I have a mixture of attendees wanting to post short videos of the event. The main guy doing this uses Apple, so he sent me an invite to add to his album, Fine. Of course, this limits who I can invite to view the album. So we have so far and possibly contribute more. I'm mutilating that, sorry. This is a very informal and private group of course, and we're not looking to publish it online. We just want a way to share with those who attended, and actually there was an incredible jam afterwards. Some of the young musicians who came asked for vids from the jam as well. Should we Google drive it, Dropbox, some other way you keep using the Apple world? We of course do not want to get caught. Michael. I have thoughts on this. I don't know of a perfect solution for this, but if I were in this scenario, I would probably create it, I would probably put it on YouTube with a private, marking the videos private, right? So that only people, I don't think you can do a password on YouTube, but you can do, you know, unlisted or something, so that you get a playlist and you can share it that way. You may run into YouTube's content filters that will identify any songs that they played which are copy written, including their own songs if they've written their own songs that will identify those. It shouldn't be a problem though. It will just notify you and say, hey, this is a version of a copy written song. We're going to put ads in this, but you're not going to get money from this. The rights holder for this song will get the money from this. Other than that, there's no friction. YouTube's not going to put a naughty flag on your account or anything like that. There's no strikes generally for this kind of thing. So that would be one way to do it. The other way to do it would be to upload it to Vimeo and that does allow a password protected link to be used. And so you could do this one of, you know, one of two ways. I'm sure there's more than two ways. So I'd be curious if either of you or any, anybody out there in the Mackie Cap family knows. Pretty sure Rumble allows you a private portion channel too that only those with the password can get in. Yeah. I was thinking similar with the Vimeo. I mean, obviously Dropbox is probably a good option too, although that's more of a download. I don't know. It depends on what functionality you're looking for. Are you looking for them to be able to just, you know, sort of view it and stream it right there in their browser or app or whatever? Or I can't remember if Dropbox will actually, I guess it probably depends on the video format, but not really set up for streaming, right? Dropbox is more about uploading and downloading. Shaking. Yeah. Yeah. But you're right, Adam, that Dropbox will show, like for it, given the right type of file, Dropbox will let you play in the browser. I've certainly done that. Yeah. Yeah. But for like a, it sounds like part of this too though is maybe there's different people that need to be able to upload or want to upload clips. So that's where it gets challenging, right? So like the Vimeo thing's great because they could, they could, I guess they could all send it to them and then they could put them all on Vimeo for everybody to access. But if you want, if you're looking for that more collaborative thing where anybody can kind of share in the, like uploading to a directory, you know, I mean, obviously you can do that with Apple, like photo shares and iCloud photo library, which would be really cool. I'm trying to think if there's any, like cross platform. And the other thing that I can't remember is now if you do have an Apple share, can't you invite, you can invite Windows people. I think they just have to go through a web interface, right? Yeah, I think that's right. I think that's correct. To like an iCloud shared folder and stuff like that. Yeah. I think that's right. Yeah. Yeah. Interesting. So that's maybe a geek challenge. I've, you know, I don't, unfortunately I don't work a lot with Windows anymore. So I don't get a chance to test a lot of these things, but I'm fairly certain Apple's sharing of iCloud stuff with Windows devices has opened up a little bit, but you go through a just a web interface. Yeah. You know, you don't get a nice desktop integration. Yeah, right. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Huh? Yeah. We'd be curious if you folks have a solution to this. Obviously feedback at MackieCub.com, because it, it's not, it's not all that off the beaten path to want to do this. Right. Right. Like this is, this is a thing. And then what I, what I really want, maybe this does exist, would be an app that takes all of those videos. And certainly for your house concert, this would work, but where this would really see more sort of general appeal would be, you know, any kind of party, a wedding, that sort of thing, where lots of people are taking photos and videos, all of which are timestamped and of course geolocated, right? And if they all shared these things with one library, why couldn't a tool go and stitch all of these together, creating a multi-cam video in, you know, by using the, it probably be a little bit of AI magic that sort of helped sync things up. But by using the timestamps of when all these things were taken, why couldn't it create like this multi-cam video of your wedding that was sort of crowdsourced, right? That's brilliant, Dave. I can't take credit for the idea. No, but still, that's, you know, one of the guys in, in, in fling, my friend Aaron, who's a, this genius, he's our keyboard player. He has these, the ideas like this. And he's like, wouldn't that be great at a gig when people are like taking pictures and videos, like to just stitch that together? He's like, why isn't this possible? And he said this, I don't know, five years ago to me. An app could do that too. Obviously AI now makes it even easier for that app to function. But that's, yeah, to really kind of sync things up or whatever, you've got all the pattern matching. I did like be in there without being there. And you get this multi-cam, you know, amateur given, but sure, right? So I don't know. Didn't, didn't points have an app sort of like that back in the day? Sort of, yes. Yeah. It was like part of the way there. It was part of the way there. Party snapper. Yep. Yep. That's right. You could create a video wall, I think, you know, like on your Apple TV and then anybody at a party could be snapping photos and it would in real time, I think, throw those up on the TV. Yes. Dangerous. Yes. Yeah. Right. Yeah. No, Aaron had asked me about this right about the time that Party Snapper came out. And so I remember sharing this idea with our friends at points like saying, hey, this is like, you're, you're, this is adjacent to, to what's going on right now. So, yeah. And they were like, oh, that would be interesting. I mean, it would be a lot of work, I think, to create that app, not just the stitching together of it or the correlating of it, but then there would need to be an interface where you as the, you know, final arbiter slash editor of this could go through and say, okay, well, not this video. This is terrible. You know, this is, yes, it was taken at the time, but it's of the inside of someone's pocket. Like, not maybe not so good. You know what I mean? Like, so there would need to be some human review capabilities. And that's where things start to get a little crazy. But if you've already got that, because you've written it for a video editing app for iPhone, well, okay, now, I don't know. I feel like this is something where Apple could shine. Like a first party app could do this. It wouldn't be perfect. It wouldn't be as granular as we'd want. But they could get it done. And I did look up shared iCloud Drive folders will work on Windows with iCloud for Windows on Windows 11. So you can, you know, obviously the challenge there is your Windows folks are going to have to get, I think, an Apple ID, which you can get for free and install Windows iCloud for Windows. But then you can share it says you can share a folder with any compatible app, make changes if you give them permission to edit. So you could create that collaborative folder there if you wanted to. Yeah. Interesting. Interesting. I will ask and answer Tom's question here. At least I'll start things off. Because then I've got a cool stuff found that I think that I saw here. I stumbled onto here at South by Southwest that I will share about it. But he says I'm in the market for some new small speakers for my Mac. And I have a general question about what speaker interface I should use that would give the best sound quality, knowing that that's subjective. I'm looking at either my Mac Mini's output audio jack or wireless speakers that support Bluetooth. Any thoughts on which interface or speaker brands, the speakers are just going to sit in my office. So wireless versus wired is not an issue in terms of those logistics. Okay. It's a great question. It is worth noting that Bluetooth is still a compressed audio format. So it is lossy, meaning you will lose data. There will be less data making it to the speaker in most cases than there is in the original audio source. Of course, if it's a very, you know, like it's a 128k mp3 or something, you're going to get it. The full thing on Bluetooth. But most of us are not listening to things like that anymore. Whether or not Bluetooth compression causes you any perceived quality change loss or improvement is subjective, as you said. But it is there. The other thing that Bluetooth does is it introduces a delay of somewhere between, let's say 40 milliseconds on the very best case, low end, all the way up to, you know, 250 milliseconds on the high end. And so you're not going to want Bluetooth speakers in your office. Zoom calls on Bluetooth speakers are terrible. Zoom does a pretty good job of managing the echo, but you will get more and more echo on this if you wind up doing that. So there's no reason to go Bluetooth. There's no reason to compress that. I would go with something wired. Now, for small desktop speakers, I still really like audio engines offerings. The audio engine A2, they're the speakers that I have in my office. They're about, I think they're like three or four inches tall. They're small. Maybe they're five or six inches tall, but they're compact is what I should say. They are wired and they sound great. They're full. You can add a subwoofer to them if you really want some full sound. I listen to music at my desk all day on just these audio engine A2s. Now, the audio engine A2 is not available anymore, but the A2 Plus is. And in my office, I discovered something because I was I was told to test this and the folks at audio engine were right. They said, oh, you're just plugging this into the audio output of your Mac. Try plugging it in to our D1 digital to audio converter. And I thought, okay, fine. So you plug this D1 into your USB port on your Mac and then you just plug the speakers into the output on the D1. The difference was night and day. It sounded like I like the stereo field widened. I was I was shocked. I really didn't expect much of a difference. And I normalized for volume levels. I checked it with a Db meter to make sure that I wasn't getting the it's louder. Therefore, it sounds better, you know, thing because that's like that is fairly universal. If you turn it up to a certain above a certain point, obviously, we might disagree on these things. But, you know, add a few DB to something and it sounds better because you're here more. I normalized for all of that. No, that wasn't the issue. It really is the discrete power supply in these decks and the quality of the deck that the deck that's in our Mac is not, you know, it's not engineered to be the very best, whereas like the D1 is one of the best that's out there. So I say all this because you don't have to buy the audio engine a twos and a separate deck. You can buy the audio engine a two plus, which for 269 bucks, it is the audio engine a twos. And it has a USB input, meaning it's got an external deck built into the speakers. So you could also plug it directly into your Mac and do your own a B testing and maybe that's fun. But you're probably going to wind up just using that. So for 269 bucks, you get your you get your deck, you get your speakers and they sound fantastic. So that that's yeah, that's where I would go with it. There are many, many, many good options out there. So Dave, I hate to break in with this, but my company has said they're not going to pay me if I don't go to work. I've unfortunately hit my heart out everybody. So I am going to say goodbye to everybody and be safe and we'll chat with you next week until then. Don't don't get caught. We'll see you Pete. Thanks for hanging out as long as you could have. Yeah, man. Blue skies, man. So what do you do? You listen to music at your desk, Adam? I know you are in an office where you like you're the only one in there. So you could be playing things I do all the time, but I just use a HomePod mini. That's another good option for someone in this scenario. Yeah. Yeah, I would prefer speakers if I was doing more with audio, but I for Zoom meetings, I just use my AirPods Pro. I don't really need any other audio coming out, but you know, depending upon what you're doing, I mean, the HomePod is really only good for music, which is mostly what I just listen to when I'm in the office. So I'm not playing games. I'm not like, I wouldn't want to watch a movie with the HomePod mini sitting behind me. Right. If I had a stereo pair maybe in front of me, then yeah, I guess I could set them up that way. But yeah, I think you can stereo pair minis now, right? Maybe no. Yes. No, yes, you can. Yes, you can. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. For a while, you couldn't. You had to use the big ones. So. Right. Right. That's right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No. Yeah, that's yeah. The HomePod mini would be great. HomePod minis connect using Airplay, right? Essentially, it's Wi-Fi, not Bluetooth. So you get lossless sound to them in a sense. Like there's, I believe you get CD quality sound. So if there's something that's higher, it will sort of dumb it down a little bit. Probably not in a way that matters to most of us. Yeah. Yeah. But like I said, if it was movies or games, I might prefer something like what you mentioned, the A2 pluses or something. Yeah. Yeah. The A2 pluses, it's a great thing. And I was stoked to find out that they baked in that DAC with it. So. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Cool. Here at South by Southwest, I went to the Expo Center, you know, and went to their Expo that shows all kinds of cool tech and stuff and all that. And I was like roped into a demo by a company called Brain Audio. They're actually an Austin company, B-R-A-N-E audio. And they have the BrainX, which is a smart speaker. It does the A-Lady. I believe it also does the G-Lady. It is Bluetooth if you want it to be. It is Airplay if you want it to be. You can pair them together to be stereo. It is actually a stereo speaker all by itself. It has multiple tweeters in it so that it, you know, creates a stereo field, which is quite impressive. They knew that people needed to experience this thing. So they built a room within the convention center that was fairly isolated sound wise. So we could go in and demo this. And they were comparing it against, you know, the JBL speaker, the Sonos move. And I, of course, was like, well, I need to hear this. So I went in. And what they told me before I went in was that they figured out a way to put a subwoofer into this that moved 10 times as much air as a subwoofer of that size using normal technology. They use this whole like floating magnet thing that keeps the speaker suspended. And so that when air moves, it was like, okay, like the tech sounded very cool and is very cool. It's like, what's it sound like? So I went in and listened to this thing. And I had to use the DB meter on my watch to confirm that it wasn't like six DB louder than the other one, you know, than like the Sonos move. The sound from this was full. It was really, really impressive. It's about 20% more. I think it's a $500 speaker. So not cheap at all. But they're on to something here. There's some tech. I'm sure they've got it all patented and all that stuff. But my guess is we will see people licensing something like this from them or other people developing their own versions of this. But it's a really, really smooth low end is the way I would describe it. So yeah, brain audio and it is the brain audio X speaker. So, you know, yeah, maybe that's an option for our friend, Tom, who needed an external speaker with his Mac. So yeah, we have any more cool stuff found to go through, Adam? It's just us. Yeah, I got one from two short planks says so on Mac, Mac, Geek, Gab, yeah, these names, right? They're awesome. On Mac, Geek, Gab 1027, you had to had a discussion about finding devices on your local network. One thing that you didn't mention was Bonjour, aka zero comp, the protocol that allows you to use the name of a device instead of its IP address. This is built in and enabled by default on all Apple devices and is supported on most printers and other internet connected devices. There's even an option to enable it on a Synology. How this works is everything effectively gets a dot local DNS entry that only works within the local network. So instead of typing the IP address my Mac, I can type marks macbook dash macbook air, macbook dash air dot local, which always points to whatever IP address my Mac currently has on a Mac, Bonjour broadcasts out two devices on your local network, whatever name is set in the local host name section at the bottom of system settings, general sharing. So you can change it if you don't like the default name Apple chooses for you. This is a great way to find a particular device if you know how to remember its dot local name, but Apple doesn't provide an easy way to browse for devices. The solution is to use a free app like Flame from the iOS or Mac app stores. This app shows all devices on your local network that are using Bonjour and whatever it knows about them, what IP address they're using and even what services they are advertising running. So you can tell if it's a computer or a printer, for example, that's, that's cool. I didn't know about this at all. Yeah, I, you know, we had mentioned Flame on the show. I think someone sent it in as a cool stuff found years ago, but I obviously completely forgot about it. But yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's, I mean, I knew the Bonjour part. I knew the whole thing, but I did not know there was an app that would display this. It's funny that that's not even just built in somewhere. I mean, maybe it is. Is it, it's probably look-up-able in, I would assume, system information, maybe? Yeah, yeah, fair. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I could see that. I think so. You would think you would hope that who knows. I don't want to launch it. My, my Mac CPU has been freaking out while we've been doing this, this morning. Chrome is, I don't know why, but it, it is. So there you go. But maybe I'm, maybe I'm asking too much. I don't feel like I'm asking too much of my computer, but perhaps I am. You'd think. I'm just doing a podcast. Yeah, but yeah, Flame. Yeah. Yeah, good stuff. I, yeah, I wonder, I wonder if there's an Apple developer tool or something, you know, is there something in Xcode that would, that would do this too? Yeah, I don't know. Yeah, I don't know. Where are we on time? I, well, I will, I will share maybe, maybe this is part of my issue here, but I, I like to, when we're, when I'm at home in the studio, I have, I've mentioned that I have an all digital setup. I mean, it's my voice is analog. So obviously there's analog and so are my ears. But my mixer that I use as we're doing the podcast live is actually Logic. Apple's audio recording suite. And Logic is not meant to be used as a mixer, but it can be. It's a little wonky to do it that way. And it requires me to use aggregate audio devices and those things that, you know, Apple has not done so well with, at least in the way that we're using them, causing some occasional car core audio hiccups and those sorts of things. And as I was planning for this trip, I thought, you know, I can just use my normal setup, which only uses audio hijack. And I say only audio hijack is a fantastic tool. But I'd like to have an external interface to control the audio so that it like when we're playing a comment or the music, or if one of us gets too loud or too soft, I can just go grab a like physical fader and adjust it in real time. I don't need to dig through four windows to find, you know, where I can click my mouse to slide the volume adjustment. And so I have one of these that's portable that I've had for years. And it's called it's the Korg Nano control studio. And it is you can plug it in USB, you can plug it in Bluetooth. It's very lightweight. It's flat. It's perfect. Like it is built for travel. That's exactly what I want. So I threw that in my bag. And I thought, I mean, you know, if I have a moment, I'll mess with it. So it turns out I had a moment. And so I started thinking about, you know, what can I do here? Do I do I really want to use logic again? And I thought, you know, this is kind of ridiculous. There should be what is there an app for the Mac that turns my Mac just into a mixer. I don't need all of logic. I don't need it to do recording because I actually want to use audio hijack for the recording for various reasons. I just want to mix things, send it to somewhere and record there or do whatever I want with it. And it would be an extra bonus if I didn't have to use an aggregate audio device to pull all of my things together. Like with with logic, logic sees one input device and one output device. I don't have just one. I have you guys on a virtual device. I have me on a hardware device because it's a microphone. You know, I have the the theme music on another, you know, virtual device. And so I have to use an aggregate device to pull them all into one. Wouldn't it be great if it's totally possible and audio hijack can do this? The one thing audio hijack cannot currently do is support a control interface with MIDI to to, you know, control faders. I'm like, All right, has someone cracked this egg? And it turns out the answer is yes. There's a piece of software from the folks at Loud Lab called Sound Desk that is built to do exactly what I described, nothing more and nothing less. And it's super configurable. It really didn't take me much time at all. It's a $40 app. And it is what I have used to mix this show today. So I know our sound is different today, because I'm in a hotel and all of that stuff. But I'm excited about the possibilities. And I can put effects in the in the chain, just like you can with logic. I can route things any way I want. It's really flexible and customizable. And obviously it works with my control surface. And so I can, you know, control things and all that stuff. So I'm excited about the potential for the future. And assuming you folks are hearing this episode, then it worked. So yeah, that is that is super cool and 40 bucks. I mean, what a deal. I know. Yeah, they need to charge more for it. I would think, you know, but yeah. Yeah. So I'm stoked. It seems to work. Maybe, however, maybe that's part of my CPU issues. Maybe, maybe Sound Desk uses more CPU than Logic did. I don't know. I got to that part I need to dig into. So it seems like it's Chrome. That's kind of Chrome and Safari. Actually, I think, I think actually some of the windows that I had open in Safari, like for the, I think the brain audio had some active things happening in JavaScript that might have been causing issues. I don't know. That's what I got. Tennessee Hoppin in Discord chat says, what about loopback? Do you want to kind of talk about that versus this? Yeah, loopback is is very much part of my workflow. Loopback is an app from Audio Hijack that creates virtual audio devices. So when I mentioned that I have you guys coming in on a virtual audio device, or I have my, you know, the theme music coming in on another virtual audio device, those are loopback devices. So you go into loopback, you tell it, create a device, and then it creates an audio device. It can be a pass-through device. You can send audio to it from one app and have it output to another. Or it can be a capture device or both, but a capture device saying, let me point it at that app and grab that app's audio and turn it into a device. And when I say a device, I mean, this shows up in system settings sound as either an input or an output device or both, depending on how you create it and loopback. So that is still, I'm using that very much here to route into and out of Sound Desk. Now, Sound Desk has its own loopback-ish component to it that I haven't dug into, but I did notice it as I was pulling this together. I was like, well, I already have all my loopback devices set up, so I'm not going to reinvent that particular wheel for this. But yes, they have that too, which is really, it warmed the cockles of my heart when I saw that because it means that audio hijack and loopback and those tools that we podcasters so heavily rely upon from Rogue Amoeba, it means they have competition. And that's a great thing for us. I think it's a great thing for Rogue Amoeba and for Loud Lab, too. Having competition validates the market, it means that we're not stuck with, if one company chooses to stop developing a product, we're not like, oh, no, please don't. It's like, well, I wish you wouldn't, but there is another option. So yeah, anyway. So the big difference here is loopback's not going to do the mixing part. It's doing the input-output part, and you wanted something to allow you to control each one of those things individually in real-time. Yeah, in real-time. Correct. And there's a world where audio hijack could do, well, loopback plus audio hijack could do all of this. And that's how I record episodes on the road up until this particular one. It's just that audio hijack doesn't support the external control surface. So I can have little sliders in there. It has the ability to be a mixer, but I have to go and dig and slide my mouse around. Yeah, it's not. The interface isn't optimized for that. Bill, that's exactly right. It's not optimized for that. But Sound Desk certainly is. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Cool. Yeah, I'm stoked about it. I'm eager to... Well, now I get to, since the show is about to end, I get to fade the band in all by just sliding the fader. Look at that. Yep, there they come. Love it. I love it. Thanks for hanging out with us, everybody. And thanks to Cashfly for providing all the bandwidth to get the show from us to you. Anything to add, Adam, before we play it all out? No, I think this was a good one. I agree. Yeah, I hope the recording's all worked. It would be a shame if they didn't. That's right. Yep. Thanks again, folks. Make sure to check out our sponsors, linkedin.com, slash mggkota.io, slash mggfactormeals.com, slash mgg50. Of course, you can go to mackeykip.com, slash sponsors and see everything listed. I'm glad Pete made it for most of the show. It was nice doing our first little segment of an episode together, Adam. Yeah. Do you have, Jeff, three words of advice to share for anyone out there? Absolutely. Don't get caught. Later.