 The Mac Observers' Mackie Gab episode 886 for Monday, August 23rd, 2021. And welcome to the Mac Observers' Mackie Gab, the show where you send in your questions, your tips, your cool stuff found, we share them, we mash it all together into an agenda, answering your questions, sharing your tips, sharing your cool stuff found, such that we can accomplish our, it's a system, it's not a goal, it's a system so that we each learn five new things every week, no matter what, no matter what, it's just how it happens. All you got to do is show up, that's your part in the system, well your part in the system is also sending in your questions, your tips, and your cool stuff found, but you know, the system works, it's been proven. And that's the goal, it's each and every one of us learns five new things, every single, every single, every single time we get together. Our sponsor for this episode is Upstart.com slash M-G-G, which is a cool little service that we will talk about in a few minutes here. For now, here in Durham, New Hampshire, I'm Dave Hamilton. And here, batting down the hatches because we're probably getting a hurricane. Or by the time people have heard this, we have had a hurricane. In Fairfield, Connecticut, this is John F. Brown. Yeah, man, yeah. Yeah, there's something coming through New England. We record this on Fridays, usually, and release on Mondays. So hopefully the weekend goes well for all of us here. And then we'll be, for those of you that like to be involved in the live stream, you can subscribe to the calendar at macgeekab.com slash calendar so that you know when we are recording. And the next episode 887 will actually be recorded on Tuesday the 24th because we've got some I've got to go to Oregon to drop my son off at school. So we figure we record ahead of time so that I'm not having to. I mean, I'm going to bring a mic on the road with me because I always do. It's sort of in the podcasters, tricks and tools of the trade. But, you know, we like to make sure the show is well polished, at least as well as it can be JP likes to have a well polished show as well. And he has sent in a little quick tip for us, John, which I will play fellas. It's JP. I finally have a cool stuff found, which you probably already know about, but I just stumbled upon the other day. I use Syria a lot in my car car play when I'm driving. And I'm always dictating texts and sending and reading texts and all that stuff. But so I thought I need to send a voice text. So instead of opening the Voxer app, which I normally use for walkie talkie style because I don't like the Apple where you have to hold the button down and messages just to talk. I literally said, hey, Siri, send a voice message. And she came up and said, who would you like to send it to? And I'd say who it is. And then she says recording. And I talk and it records my little voice message. And it places it in the outgoing text and, you know, she asked, do I want to send it? I go, yeah, I couldn't believe it. I mean, quickie way to not have to hold that button down while you talk on the voice, you know, voice texting feature of the messages app. That's cool, man. Yeah, I tried it. And actually, if the person you want to send it to has multiple phone numbers, it'll ask which phone number you want to send it to. Oh, interesting. Yeah, because I tried sending myself one and it's like, oh, dude, do you want to send it to this number or that number? Because I have multiple phone numbers. Oh, interesting. Many of us. Huh. I guess, okay, because I, you know, we talked, I don't know, six weeks ago, let's say, about how I was using a similar functionality, not a voice message, but I'd say Siri send myself a message and then I would dictate a text message. And it never asked me which number to send to, but text messages are sent via iMessage, which sort of goes into that whole, you know, unified person queue. So I guess that makes sense. Yeah, but a voice message, huh? And did it come, like how did it come through? Did it come through as a, as an iMessage? Yeah. Interesting. I wonder why it's asking. With an audio attachment. Right, right, right. I'm wondering why it's asking for the number there and not when you're sending a message. Did you try it with other people, although I've tried, I mean, I do it with myself literally all the time. No, I'll have to try it. Interesting. Yeah. I'll try sending you one. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Interesting. All right. Fun, huh? Thanks JP. Thanks John. All right. Listener Mike has a quick tip for us too. He says for Dropbox users, my recommendation is to never store your Dropbox folder on Dropbox folder on an external disk. One day I came into work to find that tens of thousands of files were missing from my Dropbox. In a panic, I got on the phone with Dropbox support because we have a business account. After an hour or so, the friendly support person asked, by chance, do you have a machine that has its Dropbox folder on an external hard drive? Why, yes I do. My home office iMac has that. So it turns out if a machine reboots or the Dropbox app launches, which often happens at reboot, and the external hard drive has failed to mount or for any reason disappears, Dropbox will or may think that you have deleted the files in the folder and then begin the process of removing them from everywhere. Of course, they were able to roll back to a previous date without much more drama. But he said when he got home that evening, sure enough, he realized his external hard drive was down. That's interesting. So I have always, often, I think and at the moment, store my Dropbox folder at least on one of my machines, I think I store it on an external drive. That's an interesting little conundrum there. Yeah, yeah, because I like sometimes, you know, if you get a lot of stuff in there, it's like, yeah, sink it over there. It's like, I don't really use Dropbox for mission critical stuff anymore. I do, but now I actually use Synology Drive for that. That's interesting. He says, so the question is, I would like to make a system-wide permanent setting that instructs the finder to always list the folder contents in alphabetical order. Oh, that's a different question and I don't think there is a way. But you know what? I didn't intend to read that, but I will. We'll leave that as a geek challenge. But first, John, any thoughts on this Dropbox thing? I was trying to check it out on this machine and Dropbox isn't running. And when I tried to launch it, it said it can't. So my Dropbox is acting up. Interesting. Interesting. Yeah, Dropbox. The application Dropbox can't be opened. Sounds like you have a different problem. Huh, interesting. Yeah, I mean, I guess you could, like, set up your own launch agent, right? I'm glad we learned how to do that recently. And use that to only launch the Dropbox app when a certain drive is mounted. I wonder if you could do that with a launch agent. I know you can do that with Keyboard Maestro. So you certainly could have a Keyboard Maestro script that only launches the Dropbox app if, A, the Dropbox app is not running. And B, you know, that external volume is mounted. Otherwise, don't run the Dropbox app. So that would be a way around that, perhaps. Yeah, there's a Dropbox folder. Huh. Well, the Dropbox folder is always there. It's just whether or not the app is pointed at it and syncing, right? That's sort of the point of it. Yeah. Though it has a file folder as the icon, whereas on this machine, it has the Dropbox. Well, that makes sense, because that icon only changes when you have the app running. Yeah. Well, it sounds like you maybe need to reinstall the app. That would be step one. Interesting. All right. So we might as well ask Mike's Geek Challenge here. He said, I'd like to make a system-wide permanent setting that instructs the Finder to always list folder contents in alphabetical order, no matter how I last left it or how Mac OS thinks I want to see it based on the frequency that I access certain folders. I don't know that there is an answer to this, but since I didn't leave myself a note not to read this part of the question, which I usually do, then I am reading it. So my thought on this was Pathfinder is, use something different than the Finder and maybe you can set more specific parameters and guidelines for the way folders are displayed. But the Finder very much remembers what you did last time and that's how it be. I'm trying to think if there's any automation utilities that could go and change that for you back. I don't know. Feedback at macicab.com. If anybody has an idea. Do you have an idea, John? Do you have something to send in feedback at macicab.com? I think you said feedback at macicab.com. How about a better Finder attribute? I think that just enhances the Finder, right? A better Finder attribute. I think that's... Does that even still exist anymore? Yeah. Oh, yeah, there it is. Yeah. But is it like the screenshots? I guess maybe it doesn't work with Big Sur. That would be my question. That would be the first question. I think this is just for seeing. It allows you to change JPEG RAW and video content creation dates, EXIF data, deal with invisible files. You can edit creation and modification dates. I don't think it changes the way. Corrects for sorting by setting the dates correctly. I don't think it's messing with the interface of the Finder more that it's giving you a deeper ability to edit things like metadata that exists in the Finder. Which is also a good utility to know about. We will definitely put it in the show notes. But I don't think it's the answer here. Huh. All right. Well, if you let us... If you know, feedback at MackieCub.com. We'd love to hear from you. All right. You want to take us to Timothy, my friend? Yes, Timothy. Here's a forgotten tip. I had no idea how I enabled this function, but I did and it's proven to be handy trick in a lot of MacGyver type situations. I love the old world keyboard and wired mouse. And I still have mine somewhere, but I have now came to me with about 10 each of magic keyboards of magic mice or magic mises, mouses. And between USB-A and USB-C and the timing of getting caught, I have a spec out 2018 Mac mini and my main home computer and at some point I enabled the keyboard viewer from random logouts that OS 10 does when I overload the system to the ever-frequent Mac mini-only Bluetooth anomalies that occur at the worst times, having the ability to enable a floating keyboard from the menu bar of me troubleshooting or password entry of breeze. Having heard several situations lately that reminded me of my virtual magic keyboard that had me saying out loud keyboard viewer, duh, when driving and listening to the podcast, I felt I needed to email in and remind you about this feature. Pretty sure it could come in handy and some headless scenarios were accessing and remotely using a mouse, maybe not the best use case scenario. But at least enabling it and having it as an option eliminates the variable of not being able to enter text when you get caught. Another nerd arrow for the geek quiver. Thanks. Yeah, that's... Oh, and I got a bonus tip. Okay, go, bonus. So, yeah, there's an accessibility you can select the accessibility keyboard, Dave, but a bonus tip, rather than going to System Preferences Accessibility Keyboard, Enable Accessibility Keyboard, there's another path that offers additional option, System Preferences Keyboard, Show Input Menu. And then what you'll see in the menu bar, you'll have two options. Show Keyboard Viewer, but also Show Emoji and Symbols. Right. Right. And that one, you can also... And how do you get emoji and symbols? Well, that's Control Command Space. Command Control Space. That's one that my fingers know very well. So, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Putting it in the menu. Oh, that's good. Yeah, putting it in the menu, especially if you run into this a lot, putting it in the menu would be the... would be a good place to have it. Yeah, I like it. Cool. All right. You want to take us, Stevens, our final quick tip that might not be so quick. Yes. Just got through over a year of kernel panics, and I thought I would share this saga. I bought it in 2019 on Intel iMac. Like I'm guessing many people do. I bought it with only eight gigs with plans to upgrade with OWC RAM at a more affordable cost. I added 16 gigs of RAM for a total of 24. Sometime later, I experienced the kernel panic with the help of Apple Support. We reinstalled the OS from Recovery Mode. I went about my business, had another kernel panic, and this time we did a complete nuke and pave. After yet another kernel panic and escalating to Apple Engineering, the recommendation was to remove the extra RAM. This was not the answer I wanted. I contacted OWC and they walked me through testing the RAM using a memory test tool which reported the RAM was fine. I did remember hearing tips about the order of RAM and tried multiple iterations, none of which ended up making a difference. Finally, out of frustration, I simply took it to my local genius bar and said, please look at anything and everything. After about a week, they confessed they could not identify any hardware or software errors, nor could they find out any hardware or software errors, nor could they replicate the kernel panic. The only thing they saw in their testing tool was the RAM was non-matched. In a final act of desperation, I bought another 16 gigs of RAM from OWC. Since then, no errors. It's been over three months now and that one change made all the difference. So... I didn't think RAM needed to be matched in pairs. Yeah, I was looking. I thought Apple had a support article talking about this, but I couldn't find it. I mean, I know... because I have either the same iMac or something similar. This iMac that I used to record the show is a 2019. I chose to do two... I mean, there's four slots and so I have two 4s in here and two 16s in here. And I did it that way with the matching and the balancing leading somewhere for this model that while you don't need to do it that way, when you do, it's faster. It can take advantage of interleaving or something. Now, I could be wrong about that. No, you're right. Interleaving gives you more memory performance. I think it makes the memory bus larger or something like that. Yeah, there was something about that. Exactly. But I didn't think it was mandatory. I could just have a 4 and a 16 and in theory it would work. But it sounds like, at least with his 2019 iMac, that's not the case. Fascinating solution. And weird that the Genius Bar... the fact that the Genius Bar identified that as a problem to be solved tells me that it's not just his 2019 iMac. They have seen either at that specific Genius Bar or via some internal knowledge based article, service bulletin or something at Apple that it is a known issue to some people at Apple, if not all. Interesting. Interesting. The moral of the story. I remember long ago, every now and then Apple does something weird with their firmware. One of my old MacBook Pros. Yep. And I had non-Apple RAM in it and all of a sudden they did a firmware update and the machine would crash right and left. Oh, yeah. Right. Remember that? Then everybody started yelling at Apple saying why did you make this change? Yeah, they tightened the tolerance or something. That was like, I want to say that was 20 years ago. It was on my Pismo book, which I think is what it was called at the time, Pismo Power Book. That word, those words feel right together. Anyway, yeah. And I remember I had Ramjet RAM in there and they I don't even know if Ramjet is Ramjet anymore. But anyway, I had Ramjet RAM in there and they, you know, replaced it with RAM that matched Apple specs and I know OWC did the same thing at the time too. But yeah, it was that was a good test, a litmus test for how good your RAM vendor actually is with their lifetime warranty. Fun. I got a fun one moving into cool stuff found here for our developer friends. Jason sends in Showtime which is a framework that you bake into your iOS app that makes it easy to show off all your iOS tabs and gestures for demos and all of your demo videos that you want to build. So if you want to do it that way, then Showtime is the framework to go check out and we'll put a link to it in the show notes. Thanks, Jason. I know you can also do this by, like, sharing the screen with screen flow. I have made demos like this too where it shows, like, what's happening. So and I think the simulator will also show those and you can capture that and record it for movies. So lots of options, but yeah, there you go. Thanks, Jason. Got one for us, John. Patrick has a nice one here. Just wanted to remind you both and listeners that a great way to not get caught is to use Langent T softwares batch mod to check on permissions of folders and files and get them in order. It is free, but it is so worth the donation. I highly recommend one, pay something at least in my humble opinion, of course. And yep, sure enough I thought we had mentioned it at some point. I think we have but it's been a while. Yeah. Yeah, let's see but you know it'll show you permissions and extended attributes and all sorts of other interesting things regarding a particular file or directory, I would think. Interesting. I wonder, I haven't used this. I know we know about it, but we haven't used it before. I'm wondering from you folks out there who have used this how it compares to the thing that we mentioned earlier, a better finder attributes, like are they the same? How do they compare? I would love to know. Yeah, we'll put links to both of course in the show. Thanks, Patrick. Good stuff. We got questions. We actually have a lot of follow-ups to go through. So we'll do that. We'll not quite next because next what I want to do is tell you about our sponsor, which is Upstart, where as I said at the beginning of the show, Upstart.com is where you go. And the idea is this, look, if you're carrying your credit card balance month after month that can feel like you're in a never-ending cycle of debt, right? That's where Upstart comes in because Upstart can help you make that final payment so you can get ahead. Upstart is the fast and easy way to pay off your debt with a personal loan and you get to do it all online. So whether it is paying off those credit cards, consolidating high interest debt or funding personal expenses over half a million people have used Upstart to get one fixed monthly payment. And what's cool is Upstart knows that you're more than just your credit score and is expanding access to affordable credit because unlike other lenders, Upstart considers your income and your current employment to find you a smarter rate for your loan. And you do all this with a five-minute online rate check and you get to see your rate up front for loans between $1,000 to $50,000 and you can receive those funds as fast as one business day after accepting your loan. Find out how Upstart can lower your monthly payments day when you go to Upstart.com slash MGG. That's Upstart.com slash MGG. Don't forget to use our URL because that's how you let them know we sent you. Loan amounts will be determined based upon your credit, income and certain other information provided in your loan application of course. Go to Upstart.com slash MGG and our thanks to Upstart for sponsoring this episode. Alright, let's go to Uncle P here. Uncle P has a follow-up for us on the YouTube TV versus Fubo TV. He says I wanted to chime in and make your intuition feel correct. I have paid for and used to some degree all of the streaming TV services. I travel for work and I'm highly invested in the Apple ecosystem which includes several Apple TVs. I've been paying for YouTube TV for several years now, mainly due to the points you highlighted, the DVR and the Apple TV app. The dedicated Chrome Mac app for the OS X dock or the Mac OS dock is a nice quick access feature when I travel and do not feel like going through MAC address spoofing to use an Apple TV in a hotel. But for the features you describe, the reason I continue to pay for the service the user interface rocks. Now, Fubo TV is a service I have been paying for as well since I figured out while traveling that YouTube TV does not offer the weather channel. So I pay for Fubo TV only to access the weather channel. Okay, a lot of people pay for Fubo only for the sports, but hey, you know, like that's the thing is Fubo's channel lineup does seem to best YouTube TVs. He says my traveling profession is cleaning up after disasters. So the weather channel is a must for consistency for info on the fly. I cannot for the life of me figure out why they are not a part of every lineup for standalone access for a fee. Perhaps I am missing something if I am it's due to their inability to make it obvious to the consumer who wants to give them money. Either way, this backs up your thoughts that their channel lineup is a superior product to YouTube TV plus YouTube TV only lets you and this is an interesting thing I have not experienced yet, but I'm sure I will. YouTube TV only lets you change your home market a few times per year before they lock you out of access to the TV that you pay for and then make you call in. I hate calling in anywhere, says Uncle P. So I find myself using Fubo on the road since they don't mess with me and they offer the weather channel live TV and access to regional sports without restricting me by saying I'm out of my home TV market. No kidding. I'm the one paying for the hotel. I know I'm out of my home TV market. I still want to watch my stuff, he says. So I wish I could join the two, but I also pay for Apple TV plus Netflix, Amazon Prime Petra. Too much disposable income perhaps, he says, but I think we find ourselves still in the pregnant moments of everyone trying to lure you into their product and for now the features and benefits are too widespread. The takeaway, YouTube TV is the best and most user friendly as long as you log in from time to time and record the shows or sports items that you want to be in your DVR. Fubo has the best lineup and doesn't mess with you while traveling. So this is interesting. I also want to thank you, Uncle P. It was based on somebody else's comment that Fubo's Apple TV app is better. We were messing with it last night when I figured, well, we got to keep this test going. So I used instead of using my smart TVs app, which for Fubo is awful on LG's WebOS, it's just very, very basic. But the Apple TV app, so long as you're using the Apple TV remote does have a 10 second skip forward and backwards and for Fubo TV, this is also if you do the scrub thing where you hit the middle of the Apple TV remote and then you can scrub back and forth there you actually get to see thumbnails as you're scrolling. So there's that. It was a little weird watching. We put on the Patriots preseason game because I figured that was a good way to test this and the scrubbing was kind of working but it was also working while the thing was recording. We were able to start it from the beginning before the program had ended. So it seems like Fubo is evolving their platform pretty quickly here and may wind up. I mean, they definitely have the best channel lineup. So if they can get their user experience together, which it seems like they're working on, a year from now we might be having a very different conversation. Of course, I feel like over the next year I might wind up paying for both YouTube TV and Fubo TV which sort of I was going to say it causes me to lose money based on my cord cutting, but it doesn't like I think that would I think I'm saving about $70 a month by only going with one of them based on what I was doing with Comcast before. So having dropped Comcast completely for both internet and TV and obviously phone but we did that years ago. But just internet and TV by dropping them and going to Consolidated for the fiber and then $70 a month for a streaming TV service we're saving about $70 a month. So if for the next year I wind up paying for both Fubo and YouTube TV, it's a business expense, isn't it? Because we have to test this stuff for all of you and keep you posted. But I'm hoping that within the next year one of these two services will actually be able to deliver for us either YouTube TV will get their act back together with their channel lineup or Fubo will get their act together with their user experience and user interfaces which it seems like the ladder is more likely than the former but you never know YouTube TV is Google they could they could move very quickly they have a lot of money and so you never know. But we'll keep you posted. Thanks Uncle P for the updates good stuff. John you have a follow up or any thoughts on that before we move on to Allison I know you're you're like you're dancing on the edges of potentially cutting your cable cord right? No. Oh I thought you were thinking about going to fiber for your internet. Oh way faster way I'm happy with what I got well you know but that's that's not that's not living on the bleeding edge man it's complacency we are bleeding edge here no there there were a lot of actually we had a it did go out though I think everything would have gone out but we actually lost power at like three in the morning. Okay and your internet went out right away? Well I didn't have oh you don't have power to my cable mode. Yeah yeah yeah no that right when we've lost power and fired up the generator most of the time our cable signal has been alive and I'm told that consolidated you know with the fiber would be the same way because they have generators at all the you know at all the head ends but yes you need to power your cable modem or your your ONT in order to have that access and your router you know but yeah yeah yeah though um though I was able to still surf the internet at three in the morning I just used my phone instead as a hotspot. Right sure of course of course of course yeah yeah yeah yeah because actually yeah my laptop was like uh oh you know what I just connected to went away do you want to connect to your phone and I'm like yeah it's a good idea that's a good idea yeah three in the morning no no sense sleeping when we can be on the internet some way that's the side that's what I'm talking about living on the bleeding edge right there I love it yeah alright so uh Allison um did a little experiment for us um I heard you talking on this week's show about trying to figure out which email address and email on iOS I've been struggling with this too since we can't see the header someone suggested I tap on the from name and then look for which address said recent in the tag next to it like you I was happy for this solution um but as I listen to you talk about it I got to be wondering about where the recent really means recent not this email actually came from this address I have three email addresses that helped me set up an experiment I sent two emails to my dot mac email the first was from my pod feed domain and the second was from my gmail address I tapped on the first one to come in and when tapping on the from name it showed the v card and showed the pod feed address tagged with recent as expected when the second email arrived the gmail address was tagged with recent but when I went back to the first email to come in the recent tag had moved to my gmail address even though that mail was sent from the pod feed address so recent does not necessarily tell you the address from which the email comes in it's simply telling you the most recent address from which you received an email I'm going to follow up to this so thanks for the experiment there Jeremy I think it was Jeremy suggested the following rather than trying to divine the address on viewing the all inboxes of you select the individual mailbox in mail right well sort of right I have a few things to comment on here the well the first is is that the premise of Allison's experiment is not the same as the discussion that we had last week because Allison is looking for the address from which an email came and of course by sending it to herself she's also confusing mail by having from and to being the same person albeit with different addresses however what we were talking about was trying to figure out the address to which an email was sent like which of my addresses did you use when you sent this email to me and for that I've because I've done this experiment and it has worked flawlessly as I bounce around from email to email but again like the last week's discussion was was about the emails coming into us not where it came from the where it came from I'm not sure it like Allison's email maybe her pod feed address no I don't know to my dot mac address okay so maybe her dot mac address isn't included in that so maybe that experiment was valid it's possible it was that it's not telling you the right from address and that's getting confused to confirm for me that it is coming that that recent is showing correctly for my address the one to which the email was sent I reply to the message and mail on iOS right will reply from the address to which it was sent so that's another way to test it and honestly now that I say this out loud that might even be faster than trying to tap on it and scroll through the contact record and look for the recent thing just hit reply and boom it'll show it to you it usually gets that right but to be fair iOS doesn't always get that right the and Jeremy's solution I like but is only valid if you again Jeremy's is about the question we discussed last week not about Allison's thing it's you know about the two address Jeremy's only works if you have one email address per inbox you and me on I know both have lots of email addresses for any one inbox for example both feedback at and premium at Mackie com for us I believe each come into the same inbox and then we filter by you know by mail headers to to kind of so we know who to prioritize because those of you who contribute we we answer emails first for the premium program and Mackie com slash premium so but I say this is a good thing it highlights the fact that all I want to do is see mail headers on iOS sometimes for the love of Pete like how do I do that I wonder I need to start looking at third-party email apps because that may be the answer here is wire up a third-party email app to my I map account and turn off all the notifications so that it's like not driving me crazy but when I need to see headers maybe that's the way to do it so if anybody knows of a third-party email app for iOS that shows me mail headers feedback at Mackie com or if you're a premium listener premium at Mackie com or if you're the truck driver that is going by John's house right now while we're doing this use your horn and Morse code that's suckered to us because that's another way to get to us yeah they're doing some heavy construction yeah man yeah man it's crazy crazy yeah I want to take us to Andrew yeah so just listening to your discussion about air tags apple said not to put an air tag on pets bollocks I've had one of my dogs since they came out and it has come to the rescue several times I picked up a silicon holder for it from Amazon for five bucks and that attaches easily to the dog's collar it doesn't bother him he goes in the surf every day with it and when he goes off the reservation he gets caught he's in Australia so that's why he said bollocks and yeah it's waterproof so yeah you know the thing is I couldn't find anything specifically prohibiting the use of an air tag to track people or pets on their web page I did find this snippet from an interview with kyan grants Apple's VP of worldwide iPhone product marketing it's an article at Fast Company how Apple designed air tags to be privacy first and stalker proof and I found this paragraph when I asked grants about parents using air tags to track their small children such as during an outing at amusement park or pets we know you're up to something shady fluffy she was quick to stress that the company designed the air tag to track items not people or pets if parents would like to safely track their young children she suggests an Apple watch with family setup might be a better choice and makes them more money right but for what I've seen David the find my network is pretty darn good so so while for a child Apple watch may be a better choice I don't think Fido would benefit for one versus an air tag Andrew sent in a couple of pictures of his dog color air tag holder thing and so I found something on Amazon that matches that and will and will put a link in the show notes to that for us but it's a I mean so your air track is a it's a dog track right not that kind of dog it's a dog tag okay it's a dog aha oh I like this that's right yes not that kind of dog track a dog tag maybe they should make a special one called the dog tag I mean I wonder I wonder if yeah it's interesting like I wonder why they would care like why Apple would would have said anything about like I said they follow the money yeah yeah yeah right right oh well for a child the Apple watch nets Apple more money for sure yeah that's right yeah plus they don't want people trying to sew these things to their kids so you know I do like having them in my luggage like I said for that last trip I did it it was way more granular and way more frequently updated than tile ever was so Apple really has a thing here but but tile is partnering with you know with Amazon and others so we may we I don't think we've seen the last of them I think I think they're they're moving on but yeah you can get four of these little dog it's what's interesting John this this page that I found on Amazon here it's the surupow for air tag dog collar holder and it's four of them for ten bucks which is great and it shows a picture of a dog with a collar and the air tag and then also it shows a picture of a parent with a young child so I don't know what they're trying to imply by these pictures my friend but I think I know what they're trying to imply by these pictures so there you go but it's not like it's going to harm your child or your dog as long as you don't sew it to them that's correct yeah I agree with that alright and as long as they don't swallow it ah that could be the reason yeah that would be yeah I suppose that it is I mean it's large it would definitely be a choking hazard if you isn't a choking hazard like is it there is a size of things and when I when I was a younger man and more specifically when my children were much younger I probably could have told you what the size was where things had to be labeled a choking hazard above a certain size no below a certain size yes my guess is air tags are not below that size because they don't say choking hazard all over the box I don't recall that but I wonder if that's part of what Apple's trying to dance around here is staying away from that I don't know because no I think it's it would be you know it's funny recently I bought some CR 26 CR 2032 batteries sure and they have a sticker on them number one they're really hard to open but they also have a sticker on it and it shows a little baby and it says choking hazard and you have to peel it off to I guess acknowledge that you realize that that batteries a choking hazard and that's what I'm saying the air tags don't have that on them you're absolutely right that the air tags battery is small enough to be considered a choking hazard but I think the air tag itself is big enough that it is above that threshold and I'm looking at the how to reset your air tag knowledge base article and indeed at the bottom of it there's a warning the battery cover oh wait nope here it is you're totally right air tag the battery cover and the battery itself might present a choking hazard so there it is yes that's yep good call good call alright alright moving on I'm going to change this order here slightly okay because you'll see why so Allison hello again Allison says you asked whether anyone out there uses gcharging most of the time for their iPhone you can count Steve and me on that list the reason it works pretty flawlessly for us is because we use easel chargers not the ones flat to a table with an easel the charger coils are automatically lined up we even have cheap easel chargers in our cars the only time I've had a problem is when I use that stupid magsafe duo charger that is super finicky about the size of the power supply being 20 watts or higher I had it plugged into 100 watt charger both Steve added his watch charger to the same power supply and that stopped the magsafe duo from working with my watch so cheap on an easel for the win I can see that I think you and I both have the ventev easel gcharger that's a nice one and you can reorient and move the thing around for maximum maximum coverage yeah that's right yeah cool yeah I'll use cheap when available but I do understand yeah I've had that happen when I try to put it on the magsafe charger that sometimes it doesn't engage properly yep for sure finicky and though something may be hitting the market soon that'll fix that Dave and that's all I'm going to say about that okay fine good to know yeah what else of course the other piece of feedback I have here is if you want maximum power then charging via lightning is the way to go just let people know oh of course oh well and as we said last week charging via lightning from a power delivery usb c based charger is really the way to go not just lightning because lightning could be limited to you know 5 volts on a usb a you know non power iq device but if you go if you want maximum power get usb c to lightning cable and plug it in to a I think 18 watt or above is what your iPhone like I don't think anything above 18 watts is going to make your iPhone charge any faster I think but yeah getting a power delivery and using that that's your fastest path yeah and then David says I've been charging my iPhone 8 plus via Qi for a while now it started when I got to tell you at a Prius hybrid in May 2019 that has a Qi pad below the center console then last year I got an anchor charging stand for my desk that charges the iPhone, AirPods and Apple watch all via Qi so there's a data point where date for you nice cool and I'm sure we'll be putting all those links in the show notes right John sweet alright thank you Allison and David oh you mean the chargers yeah the ones that they mention yeah cool cause that's what we do and Kansas Dave gives us a follow up from the child joking hazard thing and he says it's one and a quarter inches is the magic size so I will trust you Kansas Dave that sounds about right sounds right to me I'm not going to say it sounds about right it sounds right to me but it's been a while since I've had to been actively aware of these things so alright um yeah listener mark asks it's time to go to some questions here and listener mark says I'm looking for your suggestions on a Wi-Fi router replacement my current router after a storm is dishing out IPs which are not part of the DCP scope and I think it's time to upgrade my wishes are this I could separate my IOT devices from my personal devices I can do that via a guest network but I want to logically separate them as far as I can for speed we are typical cord cutters here so we have plex we have sling we have netflix users in the house expandability the router is in the basement but devices are used on the second floor and the backyard deck I want above average user experience and tools I'm not your average desk jockey and have IT geeky skill sets I'm happy to mix it up and get nerdy nice and he says I'm not trusting of Amazon or Google so I'd prefer to stay away from their offerings hopefully this list isn't too daunting I've been looking into this and some of the ubiquity devices and the TP-Link AX 1100 my budget is less of a concern in order to get the right solution thank you thank you so looking at all that I think you're heading down the right path looking at ubiquity specifically unify I will say this I know you don't like Amazon I will say that both Eero and Plume which is not an Amazon company Plume is I believe currently still just Plume they have partnerships with Comcast they provide the pods for Comcast the whatever they are the access points the mesh points that Comcast will put in your house for you if you like they put those but Plume is separate but both Eero and Plume as far as consumer focused solutions work extremely well they have all of the internal smarts that you're going to want in a mesh system they're not just dumb mesh systems that leave it all up to the device they're actually doing some of the smart things inside them so that is for sure a path to go with my theory on Eero and the Amazon acquisition is this when Eero was a scrappy startup that was you know the venture funded or whatever I was going to say self funded but I don't think they were I think they were venture funded and if they had some sort of data breach where the aggregated information about your network or even specific information about your network was unintentionally divulged I think we probably would have given them a pass they would have said we're small scrappy startup we moved fast we broke things we're sorry and many of us I think would have said yes cool like you're doing cool things you're living on the bleeding edge we get it if that happens and it's Amazon who is on the hook for it I think that's a far worse outcome from a PR standpoint and I think Amazon knows it so I think our data is even safer now that it's Amazon data but it could be aggregated even within the Amazon ecosystem so maybe we start getting Amazon product recommendations for things that they know about us because of Euro I haven't seen that yet but certainly that's a possibility I share that however unify based on Mark's description here I think that's the way to go that's from ubiquity it is there I'll call it there prosumer and up system because you certainly can do really you know high-end enterprise systems with unified but it also works very well in a home you know or a prosumer or small office environment I really like the unify stuff for for that and it has lots of great geeky tools and lots of great options you're not just stuck with here is our one access point you know they have different access points for different purposes they've got outdoor stuff they've got indoor stuff they've got you know two by two access points if you only need a small room they've got four by four access points which is what I would recommend in a home because you're going to be wanting to go through walls and probably not put access points in each room and things like that so get the stronger ones for that and save yourself the hassle of trying to you know manage multiple points but it is a cool system and it is really fun to manage so the ubiquity stuff is definitely the way to go I think so Mark so I don't know if you have any other thoughts on that but Mr. Broad no thoughts no thoughts all right the Kansas Dave in the chat room says it echoes his thoughts that he's happy with the Euro he's got the Wi-Fi 6 version and he said while on the phone with Euro support they discovered my network loop which is a handy thing to discover because sometimes they're not obvious so yeah yeah it's more and more of us having loops these days John it's how it goes all right shall we move on please all right Christopher brings us a question he says my issue is because of the new Apple mail features I'm considering moving and using Apple mail for all of my emails but there is a problem when I compose an email and send it to Gmail it does not display in the original format and he showed us that his email was the font size of that text was much smaller when it appeared on Gmail than when he sent it in Apple mail what is up with this and yeah you're not alone here and this isn't necessarily an Apple mail issue it's just a mail issue using different email clients especially when you're sending HTML email it's going to be interpreted differently on each device or each email client even on the same device and so because of that John I have for years made it a habit to send all of my mail as plain text which you can set for default for new messages you go into mail go to preferences and go to message format and you can set it to plain text that's great for for creating new messages sometimes though when there's another setting if you go into the where is it oh on that same page on that same preference pane the composing message or the composing pane there is another checkbox that says use the same message format as the original message I highly recommend checking that box and the reason is if you don't it will default every message to in my case plain text because that's what I've said it to a lot of times that's actually what I want but if I'm replying to or forwarding an HTML message that actually has a lot of formatting like a newsletter thing like that it will blow all that away and it's not the most optimal thing so what I do is I leave that box check so if I reply to you know John sends me an HTML email which he rarely does because he sends in plain text to but if you were to send me an HTML email John and I replied to you my reply would be an HTML at the start unless I changed it but if I go to the format menu and choose make plain text or hit command shift T which my fingers know all too well it changes the entire message it toggles it between plain text and rich text so command shift T is the way to get rid of that and when I'm replying to people that don't have any formatting or special things in their email I always revert the message to plain text so that they are getting my reply in whatever their native font is I like to make sure people have a nice experience reading emails from me and the best experience is them getting email in whatever font they have chosen to view email with and so by sending as plain text it leaves it up to their mail client to display it and I like to do that for folks so I like well actually you do sometimes send in rich text John because I get like mails from you in courier sometimes which is like to me looks weird right I mean that's what you choose to use a monospace font for your email which is fine that's you but sometimes not always but sometimes I get messages from you where like I'm seeing it in courier and it's like huh wonder why but again maybe you were replying to something or forwarding something that had some HTML elements so it kept it that way I mean I like courier because I mean the other issue is that if the recipient doesn't have the font the client will the email client will do its best to find the closest match but courier is pretty much a universal font that's what I'm saying though if you send in plain text it doesn't matter what font you choose to view the person's going to see it in whatever font they've chosen right so that's why plain text is better because I don't I don't want you forcing courier on me I hate reading email in courier it's bad enough I don't even like reading the emails that you prep for Mac Geek have because you print them in courier but that's you it's you know I I can't deal with playing with a monospace fonts it just looks weird to me but that's me like you know I'm a nitpicky guy so yeah alright you want to take us to listener John yes so John says over the last year I've been using my mobile devices much more out in the real world haven't we all been zooming a bit more as such I've been paying more attention to my public online etiquette including the use of VPNs my Amplify Alien router comes with a built in software based teleport VPN which promises to protect my online presence I've been wondering how this type of VPN compares to cloud offerings like free VPN tunnel bear and so on do they offer comparable online protection do they work in a similar manner I use Comcast for internet one gig down 40 megs up will this impact the speed of my connection if I use my teleport VPN versus a cloud based VPN obviously I'd like to continue to use my free teleport VPN as opposed to paying for a service but if the clouds VPN offers substantially more protection I'll consider paying for a subscription the only downside Dave that I can see from a router based VPN is that it may not mask your IP address or at least in my case it does not when you say it doesn't mask your IP address if you're at a coffee shop and you connect to your router based VPN do the people the websites that you're visiting are you saying that they see your coffee shop IP address or your home IP address well if I connect so the one that I use mostly is the VPN server on the Synology on your Synology router or Synology distation well Synology distation okay alright okay alright yeah and so I did a little test as I connected to it well I connected to optimum wifi and then I connected to open VPN and then I went to what is my IP and it said oh yeah your IP is Comcast so however wait wait wait slow that down so ask the question at a higher level when you went once connected to the VPN were you seeing the VPN were you seeing what is my IP tell you that it was seeing your home IP address or your devices well of course it was because you're connecting to your home's network and so your home network is the one that is advertising you to the outside world because you're tunneled through it yeah that makes sense okay yeah yeah yeah that's the point I want to make and then I looked up the specs for the amplified teleport and it actually says it does some sort of IP masking so that's kind of interesting I wonder how they pull that off interesting huh so the benefit of the cloud-based offerings and I have a couple of them is that they give you quite a bit more flexibility as to where you appear to be coming from which can be useful if you know like sporting events and stuff like that you know a lot of content is restricted as to who can watch it like I remember one time I was trying to get some BBC content and it was like well no you're coming from the United States buzz off man fire up express VPN or Nord VPN choose that as your end point now you go yeah that makes sense yep yep if listener John just wants to mask where he's coming from though the good news is that my guess is within a month or less we will have at least iOS 15 which will have iCloud private relay going and then whenever you know macOS Monterey comes out that will also have iCloud private relay that may be within a month but it might be two months right because just based on Apple's you know history is often the best predictor of the future so but certainly within a couple of months your devices will naturally do this for you if all you want is to obscure your home you know or your existing IP address so bear that in mind too but your point about a third party VPN is solid here there are a lot of good things about I do the same thing I pay for an express VPN subscription but I also you know have my home VPN set up on my router just because because it's there but there are times when I want to use someone else's VPN and not my home one I guess those are changing there's a period of time where when I was on a cable modem and I had you know limited upstream I didn't want to use my VPN at home because I wanted more bandwidth than I had you know you're the weakest link in the chain is now the speed of your VPN connection right so my upstream was the weakest link in my chain now it's not because I live in gigabit land so I suppose I could start using my home one more that's interesting might be another benefit of having the fiber connection huh alright in um as far as performance um one thing that a VPN typically does is encrypt I think that any device that is doing the encryption um is going to have enough horsepower so that that's not going to be slowing you down if anything it's going to be one of the pipes along the way right yeah just like I was saying yeah exactly I agree with that yeah encryption's not going to the type of encryption that's being used is super efficient and not really going to slow you down so yeah Paul Frans actually makes a really good point about iCloud private relay that's worth all of us remembering he says uh any is correct private relay only hides the IP address for Safari it does not cover applications like for example Discord that is true unless the application is not using encrypted connections so if the application is using HTTPS which most of your iPhone applications are when they're connecting to their own network servers and things like that then it just goes direct however if the application is still using HTTP that will be routed through iCloud private relay in a secure tunnel so that everything is secure and at least your local network admin can't see what's going on there but yes Paul Frans by and large Safari not just not just every web browser but Safari is the thing that's being protected there on both MAC and iOS so yeah thank you sir Listener Sheldon in our live stream here at live.mackeekub.com asks should I buy a new MacBook Pro with an M1 chip now or wait until the new MacBook Pro with the new chip whatever that is comes out so you know this is the age old question right and my answer my short answer is if you need a computer today I would buy a computer today are there new you know Apple silicon laptops coming out certainly like I would be shocked if that never came to pass we don't know when those are we do know that the Apple silicon the M1 chip is ridiculously fast and while it's not what Apple truly considers a pro I know they call it a MacBook Pro I'm going to talk about that in a second it's not really what they are considering the pro version of their Apple silicon and we've seen that right because they're not doing any you know what we would consider high end iMacs or MacBook Pros or anything like that the 13 inch MacBook Pro is not a pro it never has been the 13 inch MacBook Pro is you know right now it really all it is is a MacBook Air with a touch bar and a fan right those are the differences between the M1 Pro and the M1 Air so if you're going to buy today I don't know about you I don't really care for the touch bar it just never resonated with me and I also really never liked my fan and my computer so I would go with a MacBook Air and that's in fact what I did and that would be my recommendation if you need a computer now buy a computer now and get the M1 Air and you're going to love it if you want to wait my guess is that before the holiday season is like in the thick of us there might be that we'll call it the M2 chip I know it could be the M1X it could be whatever else they want to call it but that next version of Apple Silicon could be out but I wouldn't if you need a computer now get a computer now that's always going to be my advice but thank you for the question Sheldon it's good stuff I don't know what do you think John yeah if you need one now get one now because something better is always going to come out always always now it's funny though because sometimes what happens is some people believe that their their purchase of a computer is what prompts Apple to come out with a new one next week chaos theory I love it that's correct yeah that's right if you're lucky like me then that is exactly what will happen for you so yeah but those M1 Airs are available on Apple's refurb store just wore when I checked last week so that would be the place to buy one is go to the Apple refurb store we'll put a link in the show notes to Apple's refurb store here so that you can you can check the availability of the M1 Airs and then go grab one so yeah there you go you want to take us to Louie John yeah I think I misinterpreted what there's a follow-up which I had to open the email so anyways tell you what's going on here it seems I got hacked I have been the victim of identity theft recently and by coincidence I have installed Nick gear armor software on my Orbi and I can see that my iPhone iPad and Apple watch are showing up with weird names with a mix of Asian characters and Android phone brand my question where do I start I think the Nick gear is doing a good job to stop the threats definitely think I need to wipe my three devices any specific order should I consider any my backup contaminated so it sucks you got hacked or identity theft it could be that the names of your devices were changed for nefarious reasons but looking at something like malware bites it can protect from threats but it can't scan for rival malware because I don't really think that's a thing on iOS right right yeah so I change you may just so I check the name of the device you know settings about a name and that that that's what lets you name your device maybe that's all you need to do but then he sent um or restoring from a recent backup but um he then sent along some screen shots so I do not think I think the problem is the software um bit defender I guess it's called here okay because he sent me a screen shot and you can see it or I don't know if you saw it in the email but uh I'm just a listener man I'm just hearing what you tell me so um so like it shows a a um an alert here saying new device connected to your network um xiaomi and then some I think Chinese characters watch um uh so I think the problem is that software is injecting Asian characters in here for some reason is it possible bit defender is misinterpreting what it's seeing there I think so yes yeah I mean you know there are other things that you could download that would show you then what what they see as the names of your devices I think thing desktop might be or the uh not not thing desktop but thing for iOS right would would scan your network and tell you what it sees I would start looking at other things yeah because I it sounds to me like that that one piece of software is just it's database is corrupted for whatever reason or just miss a sign for whatever reason yeah yeah yeah because he shows side by side two dialogues one I think is on the router and one is some other piece of software so I think yeah so the software is I mean I've seen this every now and then so I don't know why the software is misrendering the uh yeah right right it's just myth yeah it's miss misinterpreting what it's seeing yeah yeah this this would not be the sign of your device being hacked at least not in my opinion yeah that's right and as paul france points out Xiaomi is a manufacturer of cell phones and I'm sure we're both mispronouncing that but you know X A O M I but my guess is it seeing something that's telling it oh it's this not that so yeah uh two more questions one that I have an answer to and one that I think is going to be a geek challenge and then we're on our way Dennis writes and asks as I recall there were some reservations regarding Synology's DSM 7.0 when it came out now I now see that it's showing is available on my disk station are there still some concerns or am I safe to upgrade so I've been running DSM 7 on my devices since day negative one right I or maybe day negative three or something I installed the master so that I could have it to talk about here on the show before it came out and things like by and large it works great the biggest issue that I had and I suppose it still could be an issue but most of these have even been solved is with third party apps Synology did not give any warning to third parties that they were releasing DSM 7.0 into the wild as a release not as a beta and through the beta process many things about the way packages work and the sandboxing of them that now exists in DSM 7.0 that didn't really exist before was a moving target and literally was changing with every beta release and then finally they were like okay yeah this one here's the here's the one that's going to be released and that changed him again so that was the issue I ran into my biggest part of that was Plex but Plex has definitely solved the issue they just needed a little time to you know figure out how to work with this new paradigm that Synology had sort of thrust upon the world so short answer to your question Dennis absolutely I think you're fine with DSM 7.0 upgrade all your packages before you upgrade to DSM because there are some sandboxing things and Plex is a great example where the developer of the package has to change the way the package stores its own data in order to be compatible with the new restrictions that DSM 7.0 pulls in and it's way easier for the developer to do that in an automated way with DSM 6.0 which doesn't have all those restrictions that was sort of my problem is it was a chicken and egg was like oh you need to make all these changes but DSM 7.0 doesn't let packages make these changes so you dear reader must do them on your own and it was this very involved intricate process that's all fixed now so as long as you upgraded all your packages then go do DSM 7.0 and you're going to be fine so that's my answer that you want to do this geek challenge unless you have any thoughts about DSM 7.0 you want to do this geek challenge and I'm getting the dialogue on both my so my synologies are new enough so maybe I'll pull the trigger yeah I think you can pull the trigger man yeah I was just hesitant because yeah there was that you know some packages but yeah all my packages are up to date so yeah then you're going to be good alright so from Scott this could be a geek challenge I have an annoying dialogue window that mail pops up sometimes about it not being able to do a move message because the server isn't responding and he sent the screenshot but that's pretty much what the dialogue says the problem is that mail will not do anything until you click on okay that's fine if I'm sitting at my Mac but if I'm away from it none of my rules will execute because no mail is coming in I have my Mac mini up and running mail all the time I already get mail sorted through all my different rules I usually notice this when I see I have more than two to three emails in my inbox on my iPhone so I go to my Mac unlock it and look for the dialogue to dismiss it any idea on how to either stop these annoying dialogues how to get my Mac to click on the okay button automatically um yeah I get that too every now and then I get one that says server connections interrupted and I have to get rid of it but the thing is it's not because I'm connected to the server but it stays up there he's talking about mail not like a file server okay I've just seen a similar dialogue but enough about me one thought that won't solve your problem immediately would be to send some feedback to Apple regarding mail um did you say send feedback to Apple yeah you know I thought they had a menu in mail that would let you do this but I couldn't find it in the current version of mail I think they got rid of it um but there's a link apple.com slash feedback slash mail.html is where you can okay gripe at Apple so maybe suggest that you know they fix that um because yeah I mean a modal dialogue should not um make everything grind to a halt but apparently it does yeah or a different type of dialogue would stay up there but not make everything grind to a halt um but here's my thought Dave so standard dialogues uh typically allow keyboard equivalents usually escape to cancel and return for okay so maybe creating some sort of script to do this for you like maybe an Apple script um you know something like go to mail app press return wait five minutes and do it again um oh that sounds dangerous I wouldn't I wouldn't automate that yeah yeah and uh I'll follow up um now you could go to dugscripts.com um maybe there's a script there that'll do this um I think I don't looking at the dialogue he sent I don't think I don't think there's a default of return will pass you through this I think this is a you must click this in order to move forward because it doesn't look like the one I've seen this it's you know the message whatever you know subject could not be moved to the mailbox subject and it's because the server return the error mail box does not exist that's a weird error and he's getting it from his uh his mail.com or is you know his iCloud.com mail uh account which is bizarre but that's what he's that's what he's getting it from I think I think in order to script this you would need to use something that will let you do user interface scripting which I think keyboard maestro will do in fact I know it'll do and you can say you know click move the mouse to X number of pixels to the right and X number of pixels below the uh you know the corner of a window and then click so you could get it to position the you know the mouse cursor there and then click it nice to move past it right like that I mean that is a way to do it the question is how do we trigger this script like at what because because I think just telling things to press enter randomly or press you know to click a mouse randomly could be like at best a nuisance and at worst might wind up you know changing things for you so the question is how do you get this is there you know is there is there a name of a window and there isn't because it's a modal dialogue so it doesn't have a name but you know there's something that could be the the is there some symptom of this that could then be used as the trigger to tell keyboard maestro go do your thing so that that's the part I don't quite get maybe we'll ask Scott to post this in the forums at mackeygibb.com so y'all can see the error message too and then maybe get to a solution but I think user interface scripting is going to be your friend on this one that's my thoughts the trick is what's the trigger like that would be the issue and I don't know that we have it's weird that this is happening at all like I would also want to solve this problem because why is iCloud's mail server saying mailbox does not exist that's weird is it necessarily apples well his screenshot makes it very clear that it's coming from a me.com server yeah it says mail was unable to open this mailbox on the server you know blah blah blah dash imap.mail.me.com so without question this is an iCloud issue so why could you replace that server with another one no you don't get to pick your iCloud server you just say that you have iCloud email and it knows which server you're on or yeah it just picks one round robin I guess or something I don't think it's round robin I think your mail account is on a different iCloud server than mine I remember that when we were I was part of this business a few years ago where we were doing calendar stuff and figuring out which caldav server an iCloud account was assigned to was an interesting little trick we actually had to come up with a little cheat and it involved talking to the Apple engineer that created caldav so that got a little interesting so yeah no I don't I don't think you can just pick one at random I think it's very specific to your account but I will say this one thing I learned server names are pxx where x's are a two digit number dash imap.mail.me.com I believe if you use p01 that will work for everyone I haven't tested that in several years though but that was the work around that we found at least initially for the calendaring thing so try p01 dash imap.mail.me.com that might be the answer and in fact may solve your problem maybe there's a problem with whatever server scott's assigned to so that's what I try set it up as an imap only account let's see what happens I don't know that's what I got John but I also got the band plan cause it's actually I think it's really sunny outside right now I'm getting pictures from my son who is elsewhere in the state but going on a skydive this morning the blue sky is a nice thing to see the sky was not blue when I started this episode and I have no windows to look through here in my TMO Towers East podcasting studio calm before the storm perhaps yeah I just got a text what does your text say John about the storm from the town Tropical Storm Henry is expected locally Sunday morning there you go well hopefully by the time this episode comes out Tropical Storm Henry has passed you my friend and all is well you can follow John on Twitter to learn more about his weather issues and other gripes John F. Braun at John F. Braun on Twitter you can follow me at Dave Hamilton you can follow the show at MacGeekab you can follow Pilot Pete who is not to my knowledge flying the plane out of which my son is jumping at this very moment at Pilot Pete you can follow Mac Observer at Mac Observer go subscribe to our YouTube page we'd love you long time if you go over there so go to it's a MacGeekab podcast on YouTube you'll find it subscribe we take little snippets of things and share them it's actually pretty awesome we'd love to have you over there alright anything else John before we before we truly wrap this one up nope I'm not gonna go and batten down the hatches batten them down my friend stay safe have fun check out our sponsors that's upstart.com MGG for this episode and then macgeekab.com sponsors for all of our active and even past sponsors whose deals are still active so that's a good resource macgeekab.com look at that good luck with the storm to all of us and um may uh may none of us get caught see you next time may not