 Welcome to Mac Geekab episode 921 for Monday, March 28th, 2022. Welcome to Mac Geekab. I almost said it the wrong way, but I didn't. Episode 921, the show where we take your tips, your questions, your cool stuff found, we mash all of that together and then we try to string it together into an organized and cohesive agenda that we loosely follow because the goal is for each and every one of us. Me, you, John, Pete, all of us, each collectively, individually to learn at least five new things every single time we get together. Sponsors for this episode include Otherworld Computing, with all kinds of great stuff that they've got for your new M1 iPad Air and Mac Studio. HunterDouglas.com slash MGG, where you can go get your free Style Get Smarter Design Guide and a new sponsor, Collide, at k-o-l-i-d-e dot co slash MGG, where it's a cool, it's a very interesting security compliance education thing for your users. So we'll talk more about each of those here in a little bit. For now, here, back here, finally, back here in Durham, New Hampshire. I'm Dave Hamilton. And here in unusually chilly Fairfield, Connecticut. This is John F. Brown. And here in Lee, New Hampshire, also a little chilly here, pilot. Once again, thrilled to be with you guys. It's we're happy to have I'm happy we're all here. I'm happy we're back in our elements. Yeah, it's I had Pete, you travel regularly for extended periods of time. This was I was on the road for what, 12 days? That's the longest I've been on the road. And, you know, half a decade, at least. So it was, yeah, well, it's just not, you know, I had Tuesday. I know I did it, right? This is it's just, yeah, it's just an observation. But yeah, it was interesting because I, you know, I was in, as you all know, because or as anybody who listens to listen to last week's episode knows, I was in Austin for South by Southwest. And then on that Sunday, I flew to LA where I attended podcast movement Evolutions and also got to see my son came down and my wife actually flew out. So we had a little bit of family time on my son's spring break because he's up at Reed in Portland. So it made it made more sense for me to head all the way west from Austin as opposed to heading east for two days and then all the way west from from, you know, from New Hampshire here, Boston or whatever. So but but yeah, podcast movement, Evolutions. That was a well, South by Southwest was fantastic. It really it had the vibe of like South by from five years ago or eight years ago. It really was like it was full of serendipitous moments throughout. And that sort of made it wonderful. I actually got to see Dolly Parton perform, which was amazing. And yeah. Yeah. And any other old friends or what's that old friends and I did. I actually had dinner with with Dr. Dr. Mack, Lovitis while I was down there because he is currently lives in Austin. And yeah. And then I then I flew to L.A. For podcast movement, which also had a good vibe to it. You know, I think a lot of people are just happy to be able to get together South by Southwest. These were two interesting conferences for me because South by had not happened since 2019. It was the first big show here in the U.S. That was that was canceled with like a week's notice in 2020. And then podcast movement was the last show I went to in 2020. Late February of 2020. And I remember being there was while I was there that MWC was canceled. Mobile World Congress in Barcelona was canceled. And we were all sort of asking ourselves like, what's going on? Should we be here? What's happening? And, you know, all of that. So it was nice to get everybody back together. There were some there were some good things to be learned. I actually got to meet Sadie for the first time because she came out to podcast movement Evolutions, which was fantastic. She is she will celebrate her one year anniversary here tomorrow at Backbeat Media. So it was nice to be able to meet her before we hit a year. So, yeah, it worked out. It was it was good. And and Dave Slusser, who has always been a friend for 16 years and also a Backbeat Media show with his evil genius Chronicles and also podcaster number five was inducted into the podcast Hall of Fame the other night, so which is fantastic. So, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So that's that's where I was. It was it was yeah, it was nice to be on the road. Yeah, Dave, you said you had an agenda you follow. Do you I do, John? You want to take us to our first quick tip there with Brian? I will do that. So Brian has a good one for us. This is a follow up to an issue I wrote to you about a while back. When I'm listening to a podcast or any other audio on my iPhone, I will sometimes open up Facebook. Annoyingly, Facebook likes to pause whatever I'm listening to, presumably, so they have my complete attention. My original solution to this was to remove the microphone permissions from Facebook. This worked for a minute, but eventually the problem returned. I've now found a solution to this issue, which seems to have worked permanently. It seems to be that the reason Facebook pauses other audio sources is so that the app is ready to auto play any video that might appear in one's Facebook feed. The solution is to switch off auto play. And you get there by going to Facebook settings, video and photos, auto play and set it to never. Fingers fingers across that this permanently fixes the problem of Facebook switching off other audio I am listening to. So that's a good one. Now, but my commentary on this, Dave, is that I've run into this with so I like to play Pokemon Go. And the thing that I found frustrating and I'll have to look and see if there's a setting is that I almost always have my phone in silent mode. You know, the little switch on the upper left of your phone. But if I plug in a headset and I'm running Pokemon, it plays the audio. And it's like, no, it's like I told you to shut up. Why, you know, you're right. The headset will play audio. The switch on the phone is for the speaker on the phone, not for all audio devices connected to the phone. That's right. Yeah, I think, though, I think there are some things that are still muted when the switch is like I've run into this where things that I expected to make sound did not. And I don't remember the specifics. But but yeah, you're right that, like, if you've got your AirPods in or whatever, like you will get noise, even if the rocker switches in in, you know, silent mode, but which brings me to a question, which may wind up being a geek challenge. Sure. And I don't know if there's a way to stop this or not. But I want to say it was scramble with friends or one of the others when my phone is on silent and I'm, you know, mama likes to go to sleep long before I do. Sure. And I'll sit there and play that. And every now and then with the phone on silent, an ad will blast through. And I've noticed particulars. There's one PayPal ad that blasts through with loud sounds. And yeah, how are they doing that? And is there a way to stop it? Because that's. No, I I've seen that before, too. Yeah, the the rocker switch, if you play, if your phone is on silent and you play a video, you will hear that sound like that. That that is for that's what they're doing. They're playing a video. Yeah. All right. That's right. Yeah. Well, that would be my assumption. Yeah. Yeah. But but yeah, things will make no sound coming from the game. Right. You know, if the rocker switches up, there would be sound from the game with that out. OK. Because, you know, a couple of times she's going like, what's that? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, nothing. No, I've had to I I I wind up using my iPad in bed and I've had to work very hard to set all of the iPads volumes low. Yeah. It is not just the rocker switch, turn volume on. Correct. Yeah, actually, I think this iPad, the iPad Mini Six doesn't even have that rocker switch. I don't think. But even even with it, I've like had to set everything low. So if if I am like doom scrolling on Facebook or whatever, you know, before I go to sleep, which probably is a really bad idea. Anyway, but but if I am and I happen to come across a video, I know that it won't, you know, play. So yeah. All right. More quick tips or more on that one? I got my. All right. Great. Dan has two of them for us. The first is he says, I wanted to share a quick tip and a feature that I've always loved about Mac OS as one colleague of mine was pointing out this feature in Visual Studio for Windows. I had to mention that this feature had been standard. He says in the help menu of pretty much any app, there is a text box to search. Not only does this search the health files themselves, but if you type the name or partial name of any menu item, it will temporarily pull that item into the help menu. And when you hover over it, it will point out where that item item is in the other menus. Yeah, this is super handy for finding a menu item that you know exists, but might be buried in several sub menus or something. You just go to the help menu, you start typing, you know, and it will show you where it is and even point a little bit to it. As as Dan, as Dan mentions. Yes, it is one of my favorite features of Mac OS. I'm with you on this, Dan. It makes life. It's so again, it's one of those things where if you know it, you know it and it becomes part of your workflow and you forget it's even a tip. Forget it's there, which is why we have quick tips to begin with exactly. Yep. And then Dan's second tip is he says, I've heard some complaints about Mac OS no longer providing an option for a solid menu bar and I have heard tips, some even on the show to edit your wallpaper and put a solid bar at the top to solve this. That's right. Yeah, he says that always sounded like a pain to me and I wasn't bothered enough by the transparent menu bar to try it. But between my ultra wide screen monitor and my aging eyes, I found myself having trouble glancing at my I step menu sensors over in the corner lately. I have an app I installed recently called 24 hour wallpaper and I checked in the preferences and found that it has an option to include a solid white or solid black menu bar. The app's 10 bucks on the Mac app store are also available through set app. But my tip is really that if you want a solid menu bar without the hassle of manually editing wallpaper, look into wallpaper management software. So thanks for that, Dan. Yeah, good stuff. I like it. Yeah, 24 hour wallpaper. I have to check that out. Yes, pretty good. You guys mind the menu bar being translucent these days? No, yet it hasn't bothered me. But speaking of aging eyes, you know, I'm getting there. It depends on what I'm using for a background. You know, I am I think on most of my Macs, I am still using the default background for for Monterey, which is kind of a purpley thing. I like purple for those of you who watch the videos. You know, I am in a purple studio with purple ceilings. I like purple. But that and that being dark sort of makes my menu bar. It's fine. Like the white, you know, shows up well on it. I generally will if I have the option, I will set my menu bar items to be monochrome, which I really like so that, A, they they pop, but also B, I don't have this weird, colorful, you know, menagerie at the top of my screen that gets a little distracting. Sometimes it's just, you know, dark and white. So. All right. Any thoughts on that before we move on? All right, back to Brian. I think it's the same. Brian might be a different Brian, John, either way. Yeah. All right. So Brian writes in and says, I figure I share this useful quick tip with you. I had a folder of images that I wanted to print as a contact sheet. I was wondering how I could do this without loading the images into the photos app or arranging them on a page in Photoshop. This helpful article explains how to delve into the print settings to do this. A contact sheet being it's basically printing the photos in a grid on a piece of paper and apparently professional photographers like to do this sort of thing. So. So we'll link to the article, but the the the way that the way that this works is you you select multiple images in the finder, you open them in preview and then you single click on the first image holding down the shift key to select all right. So you select all the images in the thumbnail view and then file print and then in the show details section you can change the layout and and choose the layout that fits all of your images into one page. So yeah, it's just selecting all the images and and choosing a print layout. The article super slick. That's a great idea. I never thought about this before. Yeah, that's pretty good. Oh, actually years ago, I bought an app collage it or something like that because the kids were going off to camp and I wanted to give them a sheet to tape to the top of their foot locker, you know, with family pictures from home, that sort of thing. But I want to find an app to do that if I'd only known I could have done that in preview. Well, I'm not convinced that you you although I don't I think that might be a print feature, not a preview feature. Oh, yeah, OK, because you're printing multiple pages and just telling it to arrange the pages in one in one. Right. Yeah, exactly. So I think that might be. Yeah, that might have been there all along. Yeah, because I don't I don't think it's a preview specific feature now that I'm kind of thinking through this and looking at it. OK, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But you're right, it's one of those oft ignored features of the of the printing system on Mac OS because other than that use case that both you and Brian mentioned, what what else would you want to I guess I guess if you've got a multi page PDF or something, you know, and you want to print it to have as a reference, but you know, but the text is big enough such that whatever, right? There might be some world where save paper, you know, yeah. Yeah, I don't know. I love these things because now it'll sit in my head, right? And the next time I need to do something like that, maybe. I'll remember. Exactly. Not necessarily, but back in show nine 20. I, which is just the last episode, I talked about listening or watching and listening to that movie 32 sounds using my AirPods and wondered if I would have been able to watch with my wife with her on her AirPods. And it turns out, yes, you can connect two sets of AirPods, but only two to your Apple TV. And it's using the share audio feature, which is what you would use like on your iPad. If you were on an airplane watching a movie and you wanted to share audio with with a fellow Apple AirPods, you know, user or I guess maybe maybe it's any Bluetooth user, but certainly it works with AirPods. But but yeah, use the share audio feature, which is accessible on on Apple TV as well. I'm pulling up the link to to do it. But I think it's in Control Center. Yeah, you press and hold this the the the button that looks like a TV on a stand on the Siri remote. And when you hold that Control Center opens up and then you select the little audio share icon and use and then share audio and you can add the second pair of headphones there. So the answer is yes, which is great. I'm glad to hear that. I wish it was well, I wish I was going to say I wish it was possible to do more. But syncing up the audio of two Bluetooth devices is non-trivial because you've got different amounts of delay and all of that stuff. So that that's pretty interesting to me. I know airfoil from Rogue Amoeba can do that on your Mac. And I've done it where I remember we stayed in this Airbnb and the TV was connected to like a, you know, a five point one sound system or something. And the five point one sound system had its own airplay. You know, it was an airplay destination, whatever the Denon receiver that they were using to do it. And then I had two Bluetooth speakers with me and I wondered, I'm like, can I play sound? Like can I put one Bluetooth speaker upstairs, one out at the hot tub and then airplay for the main floor of the house? And can I make the music just play everywhere? And sure enough, I could. It was it was actually pretty. I was like, oh, look at that. Yeah. So so it's yeah, but it's tricky. Those folks at Rogue Amoeba know what they're doing with with that stuff. But this is obviously with Apple TV, you don't you aren't running core audio apps on Apple TV. So you need to use the built-in settings. So you're using share audio. But thank you, Raymond. It's good. Anymore on that before we move on to Ed. Anybody? Mr. Ed. Mr. Ed. Of course, of course. Speaking of Apple TV, Ed says, I was watching my Apple TV the other day and I was pressing the TV button on my fourth gen Siri remote and I accidentally double pressed it quickly. That caused the Apple TV to bring all the apps in a cover flow like style like it is on your iPhone when you swipe up halfway. You can then scroll through all the different apps and select one to launch it. I thought this was interesting and I'd never noticed it before on the Apple TV. Yeah, in fact, that's how you can also force quit an app just like on your iPhone. Get to the app that you want to force quit and swipe it up. And I've definitely had that help when, you know, I'm running an Apple TV app that like doesn't want to sync with whatever it's supposed to sync with, you know, it's just like, all right, bail out, let's launch a new. And and it's it definitely has worked. So and I had I had one Apple TV app. I can't I wish I could remember the the scenario. But I had something that was actually conflicting with something else, which was weird because everything's so sandboxed on, you know, iOS and TV OS. But I had I had something where I had to quit one. It was like one video player app to make another one work. And I run weird things like, you know, I run plaques and channel. I mean, it's not weird, but I run, you know, closer to the edge stuff than than might be just typical with Netflix and Hulu and things like that. So I don't know what it was, but it was an interesting little like, let me quit. It was like, oh, now it works weird. So anyway, yeah, it's interesting. I mentioned I had I had flown a bit here, which was nice to get around the country and see people. I noticed on my phone, every time I went to get on a plane, I had to unlock my phone before my boarding pass would show. And I knew that this was not how it used to be for me. So after watching my wife just pull up her boarding pass, I was like, OK, wait a minute, like there's a setting somewhere. Sure enough, settings, face ID and passcode allow access when unlocked the wallet slider for me had been turned off. I probably turned it off, you know, just to be fair, like I don't think there was some gremlin that did this. I'm sure I thought, oh, I don't want my wallet available while I'm locked. So I probably turned it off. But it turns out I do want my wallet available when unlocked because all those passes are what actually are being those are the things being made available. So yeah, and then I could just tap the boarding pass and up it comes. Right. Yeah. And then a dovetail to that maybe that I think I don't know if I mentioned it on the show or in the pre-show one point not too long ago where my wallet was not syncing to my watch. You recall? Yeah, I do. How did you fix that? Solved it and even with the updates and all that, Apple ostensibly knew about it. But instead, what I did is I unpaired the watch. I reset at the factory settings and I brought it back in and it came up. So there was some stray bit in there somewhere refusing to allow my wallet to sync to my watch. And so that that fixed it. Not not the easiest fix. It's kind of the last thing you want to do. But I set it up as new and then brought all my apps in again. And, you know, but but that worked out really well. And then I'm OK. Yeah, I'm actually I'm glad you brought that up because I know we were we were trying to figure out what that was. And yeah, it was a problem, but they didn't know why. And it only happened on some and they couldn't duplicate it. You got to get it. But interesting. And then the other thing along that line with the wallet and the watch. Not many people know this. You can leave your phone in the car inadvertently and use Apple Pay on your watch. You don't have to have your phone with you, even if it's not a cellular watch. That's right. Yeah. Apple Pay does not rely on you having a data connection. It relies on the merchant having a data connection. That's right. It keeps the pay token with you. Yeah. Yeah. Your token is your token. Right. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. That's a no. That's a really good point because go ahead, John. No, I didn't know that. I thought that your phone needed a data connection of whatever sort in order for Apple Pay to work. You're saying that's not the case. That is not the case. No. It is just an just like your credit card doesn't for NFC, right? Like, right. OK. Same similar kind of thing. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Well, that's a good way to think about it. Is it's a gift in the card? Yeah. It's just, yeah, I mean, it's it's not exactly that, but it's close enough. Yeah. Sure. Yeah. Now, the only thing I got to say that I love now in 15.4 are we at now? I can finally use Apple Pay and wear a mask. Right. So you got to retrain it and it was actually interesting because so I retrained it and the first profile, it's like, OK, I got it. And then it's like, oh, by the way, take off your glasses. I'm like, how do you know I'm wearing glasses? It knows. Yeah. Right. I do it. No, I got 15.3.1. So if we are 15.4, I'm behind. Oh, yeah. Well, you have an Apple Watch. So it's not as big of a deal for you because your phone will unlock if you're wearing your watch. But yeah, you get real face ID, full face ID with a mask on with 15.4. So not only does that mean unlock which your watch will do, but unlike your watch, unlocking it, 15.4 face ID with a mask will let you unlock things like one password. Or as John just pointed out, you know, Apple Pay. So yeah, the point you have. Notice I still have to pull my mask light in the airport and trying to unlock my phone. Well, one password, not not unlock password, unlock the apps. Yeah, I just got in the habit of using my watch for Apple Pay, which doesn't require any, you know, subsequent any in the moment unlocking. It requires it to already be unlocked, but it usually is. I got to say, though, I'm amazed at the number of people who are amazed that you can pay with your watch. Still still mean how many years in the signal? Every time I do that, like, yeah, yeah, I know, I know. I can count the number of times on one hand that I've actually seen somebody use either an iPhone or watch. Yeah, I was actually shocked one time that I saw somebody using the watch. And I'm like, oh, wow, that's cool. Yeah. Have you ordered a watch yet, John? I know there was some post-show discussion about that a few weeks ago. It's in the queue. All right. I can't tell how many years I didn't wear a watch because I always had my phone in my pocket. Yeah. And it was the whole, you know, the wearables. And are they going to do a watch? And remember all that discussion years ago? Yeah. Yeah. Well, like you, Dave, I mean, you know, this is what I got. It's a time X, you know, tried and true. I just like a mechanical watch or quartz watch. Yeah, you're right. Yeah. I was just going to say that's not mechanical, that's quartz. But yes, right. Yeah, no, I like wearing different watches, but there is a convenience factor with the Apple watch. And then there's the health stuff, you know, especially for folks who have, you know, conditions. It has saved lives. Don't know they have conditions. I'm routinely reminded of our friend, Chuck LaTornos, who years ago wrote an article for Mackerel about this. So I feel OK talking about his health issues. But he, you know, he was the picture of perfect health felt fine and his watch alerted him that he was having an incident and he went to the hospital because he believed what his watch was telling him. And sure enough, it, you know, we can't say whether or not it saved his life because we don't have a control group of another Chuck LaTornos and a parallel universe without an Apple watch. But we do, Dave, you just don't know about it. Well, that's it. Of course. Of course, it's parallel. You know, that's fair. Yes. Of course, it's there. Wait a minute. If it was truly parallel, he'd have a watch there, too. But I'm sorry. See, that's the thing. What is this? Is it, you know, adjacent universe? Maybe that's the way we need to think about it. OK, I'm sorry. I didn't mean to go down that rabbit hole. No, it's good. Rabbit holes in adjacent universes. I think that's the show title. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. But yeah, it saves lives. It's it's great. Yeah. Yeah. And it's it can be fun, too. And handy. Can also be proud of how much I love having mine. I had no. Do you wear your watch? And you are correct me if I misremember this, Pete, but I believe you are a left handed person that that outwardly identifies as left handed. So you do you wear your watch. I wear it on my right hand with the crown down. Yes. Well, crown down. I mean, that's because you're a civilized human. Right. Exactly. Yeah. I wear a crown down as well. I just don't wear the watch while I'm doing the show because it'll I bank things and that's bad. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But yeah, that's the cool thing about it is that you can put the crown on the side that you can touch it with your other hand. Unlike other watches. Right. Right. Yeah, I use the crown with my thumb. You know, I wear it on my left wrist, although I've been told I'm left handed. I identify outwardly as a right handed human. So. But, you know, it's just one of those things. I'm ambient almost everything I do, except writing. Yeah. And. And golf, I've golf right handed. Interesting. I don't know that much. But I when I golf, I golf right handed. When I played baseball, I would switch it. I could hit a little better left handed than right handed. Sure. Yeah. You chopsticks with both hands. No, I taught myself to do to use both hands with chopsticks just to mess with my brain a couple of years ago. But it's super handy at tables, like to be ambidextrous with with whatever your eating implement is. Because if, you know, especially if I'm sitting next to a left handed person, you know, I don't want to be banging elbows all meal or whatever. So yeah, it's funny how the brain works. So I will mention I have a friend who lost his right arm. In a motorcycle accident, forced to become left handed. That dude can do stuff with his left hand. I can't do it with both hands. It is amazing how he has adapted and overcome. And he's one of the few pilots in the country with an unrestricted medical. Wow. Yeah, he was able to demonstrate flying without a prosthetic device. Yep. Yeah. So amazing. That's amazing. Wow. It really is. Are you I'm curious about this. So I'm just going to go down the path here. Do you know if you're right eye dominant or left eye dominant? Yeah, I think I'm right. I dominant. That's it. You know, that's how I shoot. When I don't have done the, you know, hold your thumb out. That sort of thing. OK. Yeah. But my vision is actually weaker in my right eye. That's. Well, that yeah, that doesn't that doesn't matter, right? Like it is. It is the dominant. I I it was maybe 10 years ago. We were at that that family camp we used to go to on Labor Day weekend. And I was asking the guy, we're at archery yet again. I'm like, how do you aim this thing? I'm like, I got a cock my head over and he looks at me. He's like, wait a minute. Are you right eye dominant or left eye dominant? I'm like, I don't know. And so we did the test. He's like, oh, you're left eye dominant. He's like, do you feel comfortable shooting with a lefty bow? I'm like, yeah, let's try that. Ten bulls eyes right away. It's like, oh, now I understand how to aim. I see. And yeah. Yeah. When I when I've gone to like, you know, rifle range, ranges or whatever shooting gun, I very much am, you know, left eye dominant with that too. So yeah. I didn't know that was a thing. It is a thing. Yeah. Yeah. The quick test is hold out. Now you hold your thumb out and you put it over something, right? And then you close your right eye and your left eye and you go, I mean, you kind of are going to see two thumbs. So you hold it out at arm's length. I'm kind of demonstrating that. And then you close. You put it over a dot across the room, a wall switch, something like that. And then you close one eye and the other. When you without moving your thumb, yeah, without moving your thumb. When you close the eye that's weak, when your eye is open, it will cover that dot. Right. That's right. Yeah. And when you close your dominant eye, that your thumb will have appeared to move. Yeah, that's right. Yeah. The whole parallax thing. That makes sense. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Which is that the eye doctor. And at the risk. Oh, I'm sorry, John. No, it was kind of cool. So, you know, once a year, I get a vision field test. And they have this big monstrosity of a machine that will basically flash lights and you got to press the button. And it's funny because at first, you know, it's like, you know, it's basically a computer or a robot. And I was like, oh, well, you know, I can figure out how to trick this thing because it makes a noise between lighting up the lights. And I was like, oh, I'll just press the button. Maybe I should just press the button every time. No, no, no. No. They know, unfortunately, my vision is fine. That's good. Yeah. Hearing tests are going to be the same way. Don't don't guess. Yeah. And that whole thumb thing, real, another quick rabbit hole. But that whole phone we're still in the rabbit hole. Yeah, I'm sorry. Yeah, we are. Is how I people say, you know, how can they not find that Asiana 371 or not? What was the triple seven that disappeared? It wasn't easy on it. It was somebody else's. Yeah. Anyway, coming out of Kuala Lumpur. And I often say, hey, look, you got a jumbo jet flying over. Hold your arm out at arm's length. Close one eye and put your thumb up and you can cover up that airplane. Now, make that airplane still at the bottom of 15, 20,000 feet down of an ocean and now search for that airplane in 30,000 square miles or have a million square miles. You can't find it. It's not going to happen. It's I mean, you might get lucky. Yes, that's about it. Right. Yeah. So but that's that's my favorite thumb thumb over an object. That's my favorite thing. Elliot's next quick. There you go, which is our final quick tip for the for today. And hopefully we'll make it. No more. Elliot says I was listening to the last episode 920 tonight and appreciated the quick tip about force quitting the focused app with command option shift escape, but that's an awkward key combination. So I used better touch tool to remap that key combination. I happen to use the hyper key, which is caps lock and that sends command option control shift all together on my system. So I have set the force quit shortcut to be hyper Q easy to remember. If you are not familiar with the hyper key system, it used to be a chore to set it up and I used to have to use carabiner and then carabiner elements. But a couple of years ago, better touch tool implemented an option for it. So I have a host of new keyboard shortcuts with command option control shift plus a key press easily set off by using the caps lock and key press combination. So this is interesting. I never I I had seen reference to hyper key in the past in a couple of things. I think keyboard maestro might even do it, although I haven't looked. So don't necessarily quote me on that, although you can take this video and chop it up and share it and that's effectively quoting me. But I never understood how it worked until reading Elliot's note here. So it's not whether it's you have to hold down caps lock and then hit a key. So it's not like if caps lock is down and he hits Q, it's just going to force quit the app, right? Or if caps lock is activated, I want to say that's better than down. I say down because on the typewriter, it would actually lock down or come up. But in today's world, it is a key like any other. So it's either activated or not activated. That's not relevant to this part of the conversation. It's when it is down with your fingers still on it in an active sense. So yeah, I need to think about. I like this idea of using caps lock as this hyper key. Interesting. See the five things we have learned many of them already. We have lots more to learn. We have lots of your questions. Hopefully we'll get through many of them. We might even get to some cool stuff found, but it's possible that won't happen until nine twenty two. The next thing that I'd like to learn about, though, is our sponsors. If that works for you, Mr. Braun. OK. All right, first up today is a new sponsor. 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So visit hunterdouglas.com slash MGG today for your free style, get smarter design guide with fresh takes, creative ideas and smart solutions for dressing your windows. That's hunterdouglas.com slash MGG for your free design guide and our thanks to Hunter Douglas for sponsoring this episode. All right. How about you take us to Roy's question, John? I will take us to Roy. Roy asks, is there an easy way or someone I can talk to when you can talk to us that will help me block websites on the Google Chrome browser for my MacBook Pro? I spent a lot of time researching it, but the directions are complicated or I can't find the area or link that the article wants you to go to. Very frustrating. And I'm like, OK, and I did the same thing. I, you know, searched for ways to do this. And the first article I found the the instructions were garbage, so I'm going to point out who it was. But then I did a I whipped out my Google Foo, Dave, and I did find something. User dot block site dot C O is a Chrome extension that. Well, basically does that. So, you know, I punched in our website. Mackie gab dot com into it. And when I tried to go to it, it's like, nope, not going to happen. So it looks like you have to throw down some money to get the service past the free trial. But the reviews that they have on their site seem to be positive. I don't know why you put negative reviews up. So anyways, that's what I have to offer. But I think you gentlemen have some other thoughts about how to accomplish this. Yeah, I had a question that came up when when looking at that question when I'm wondering if what I had done in the past was more broader than just Chrome, more broader, more broader, more broad than just Chrome, which is open DNS. You set up your home to use open DNS to filter all manner of websites. You can even blacklist certain websites as opposed to just general. Like, for instance, I think, John, you mentioned at one point a couple of shows ago about not being able to go to the lottery website because it was gambling, but you could block out specific lottery type or I'm sorry, specific gambling type websites and allow lottery in by whitelisting lottery. Yeah, so I'm wondering if that might be an avenue worth pursuit. That's that is a good way to go. The only issue that I would mention with that is browsers like Firefox, which use their own secure DNS. So if you're using Firefox in its default mode, I believe it completely bypasses your Max DNS, does its own DNS in the browser and will completely bypass anything that your router is doing because it uses the secure DNS tunnel. And I think you can set up Chrome to do the same thing. You can't with Safari. And I was going to say, don't get me started on Safari and DNS, but it's already happened. I don't know who I do know who at Apple works on the Safari team, at least one of them was a is a recovering Mac key cab listener, but he he's the one that came up with the the put your your two-factor text message in your keyboard automatically kind of thing. But Safari will hold on to its DNS resolution forever. And that is super frustrating when you're trying to do web development and say, want to change from, you know, pointing to the origin server versus the proxy server or you make some other change, and it's like, yeah, I'm just going to hang on to this like my life depends on it. But anyway, Open DNS would would work for most things, test it. That would be my my advice for any of these solutions is just to test them because some browsers will bypass that stuff. So finding a plug in that can block it would be the way to go, I think. Interesting. Yeah. So I thought I thought there was I thought once you sent your DNS, that that's where it went on that given machine. Yeah, it should. But yeah, I know Firefox for sure. Well, you can turn it off, but but I believe it is on by default to use secure DNS tunnels over HTTPS. So so all of you people who have I'm sorry to me and talk over it. No, it's fine. So all of you people who have set up Open DNS and think your kids aren't going places, they shouldn't be going. As long as you're not using Firefox, they probably aren't. Yeah. And then the other thing where kids could do as long as they have admin access to their device, which on their iPhone, they all well, depends on how you set up parental controls, but they could go in and change the DNS to be, you know, one dot one dot one or or nine dot nine dot nine dot nine. And then now they're not using your router's DNS or, you know, they could switch over to cellular. I mean, we had we had somebody a number of years ago that wrote in and they said, look, you know, my my daughter's been obsessed with watching Gossip Girl. And and she, you know, she wasn't doing her homework and all that stuff. It's like, how do I fix it? He says I I'm at my wit's end. He said I I instituted, you know, Open DNS so that she couldn't go to whatever it was, Netflix or whatever service was streaming Gossip Girl at the time, said, but then she just turned on tethering on her phone and used up all her data, right? And and so what I did was I armed him with the most important information, which I won't share here, although my guess is that we are well outside of the spoilers window, but my daughter had watched Gossip Girl. And because of the conversations in the house, I knew who Gossip Girl was. The big reveal at the end. And so I told him who Gossip Girl was. And I'm like, this is the information that will solve the problem. So I don't know if he chose to use it that way or not. But, you know, with great power comes great responsibility. While we're talking about parental controls. Oh, yeah, it is there because we had a question about parental controls. Well, is is Open DNS free or you got to throw them some money? Open DNS is free for home home internet security, filtering whatever. The part the part we're talking about here, absolutely free. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And they even have a little client. So those of us with varying what's it called? Don't get old. If you remember that your DNS is yes. So yeah, when you get a new when you get a new IP address from from AT&T or Comcast or Roadrunner, it follows you. Yeah. Yeah. Right. Yeah, you can. Yeah, you can link it all together. While we are on the subject of parental controls, listener Able had a question and I'm not sure we have an answer. John, do you want to you want to take this first? Do you want me to take it? How shall we do this? Um. I got it. He says my question is with an iPhone. Can you monitor I messages for youth accounts? We are discussing getting my 12 year old an iPhone next year since she will be in middle school. However, unfortunately, she is still growing and not mature at the level that she should be. So I would like to be able to monitor her activity. Any advice would be appreciated. So this is interesting because this is part, you know, I messages are end to end encrypted. They are part of Apple's, you know, whole security pipeline. If you if you will, for lack of a better term, the way one way to do it would be to have another device and it could just be another account on your Mac that you log into her iCloud slash iMessage account. And then you will see all of the iMessages sent for sent to and from that account when you log in on your Mac, just like you do with yours, right? I mean, it's the same kind of thing. So that would be one way to do it, but it does require dedicating a Mac or a user account or another device. You can do it on a spare iPhone or spare iPad, but it does. It requires a little bit of sort of, you know, doing a little end around on things to to get there. And theoretically, your daughter could switch that off on her phone if she really wanted to, you know, so. But but that is one way to do it. The other way would be to use one of the myriad of spy software options. And there are tons of them. I don't want to mention any of them on the show because I've tried zero and many of them come from questionable vendors. I know that there are some from reputable vendors. So this is where I think it's a little bit of a geek challenge. Please let us know feedback at MacGeekUp.com. If you use any of these kinds of things, if you've had good luck with them or bad luck, let us know because it would be good to share. But yeah, there there is software you can install to monitor these sorts of things on on iPhone. But like I said, it's a geek challenge. So feedback at MacGeekUp.com. Did you say feedback at MacGeekUp.com, Dave? I think he did say feedback at MacGeekUp.com. I sure did. But Dave, I actually found something at Famikeep.com. That's F is in Frank. A-M-I-K-E-E-P.com. And go to the show notes for the rest of the link because it's a long one and you'll not remember that's what the show notes are for. Exactly. But I found out you could do this through the iPhone operating system quite inadvertently. A neighbor of ours had their child on there and he goes, all her text messages are coming to my phone, too. And he went back and checked. Oh, good. He inadvertently set it up correctly because at Famikeep.com it tells you how to set this up so that your text messages back and forth aren't showing up on her phone, your daughter's phone or your son's phone, whatever the case may be, but theirs are automatically showing up on yours, which I think is excellent. And I know everybody comes here for parental advice. But that's what I did with my kids. Did that work with iMessages, though? Because I thought text message forwarding was just text messages. It is because if you follow the instructions on that website to use it with iCloud, you go in and you have to log in in the right order, you know, her account and then your account. If you do it backwards, then your daughter is going to get all your messages back and forth, too. But no, it actually it comes right up. You see all the message traffic going back and forth because it's logged into that same account, so it's got the key to get it. And then, you know, for what it's worth with my kids, it was I'm paying for the phone. Guess what I get to do? I get to have total control over it. I mean, it was just right up front. And I think it was incentive for my kids to keep it clean and keep it keep it honest. Yeah, we when they turn 18 and I'm still paying for the phone, but you're an adult now and I hope I've taught you enough responsibility and then I go in on your birthday. Here it is. We're out of here. Yeah, I'm out. That's right. Yeah, with our kids, we didn't do that. But we the policy was any of your devices. We need to always know your passcode, which was helpful both from a parenting standpoint, but also just an IT standpoint, because kids tend to forget these things, especially once like Touch ID came into the world and all that stuff. And the other was at any point in time, if we ask you for your phone, you've got to give it to us immediately. You know, you know, and that was yeah, and that's that's the way to go. And if kids are reluctant to do that, then, you know, OK, go buy your own phone service. Yeah, luck with that. Yeah, right. Yeah, we were we were pretty we were very open with our kids. And there is no one right way to parent. There are many right ways and many wrong ways, I suppose. But, you know, it worked out well for us just being we have a lot of really probably what would seem to other families, very awkward dinner table conversations, but but we were always really open with the kids in it. That plus the, you know, your device is open to us at any time. Yeah, and once they were, I think the last time we checked it, they probably weren't even 17. Yeah, you know. But I mean, you get to a point where you're like, OK, it's a trust equation. And here we are. And yeah, they've built up the trust. Yeah, exactly. Well, and it's a two way trust is a two way street. Yeah, exactly. And it's so early on, they're so eager to get the device that they're going to agree to that. Oh, yeah, great. You look at my phone any time. I don't want to do anything bad with it. Yeah, you have a lot of leverage right up until the moment you hand on the device. That's right. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, negotiate wisely. Yeah. Yeah. So the two things I'll throw in the ring. Number one, of course, there's parental controls with family sharing. And does that does that do this? I didn't think that shared message. No, I don't know. I don't think it shares messages from what I recall. I haven't. I don't use it. Sure. But I think it will let you restrict web access. And I think also set timetables when it can be used. So it could be part of a solution. Yeah. Yeah. For sure. The other thing I found is that check with your carrier. Verizon offers something called Verizon Smart Family, which I think you can actually track where you OK, where that phone is. You can do that with Find My Now. Right. I mean, that that works really well. The whole if you're part of a family on your phone, Find My is baked in. So which is great. Like that's super, super. Yes, give your kid an air tag so you can you don't have to with it. With an iPhone like that. Right, right, right. Yeah, yeah, with an iPhone, you don't need to. It's it's just there. But so what else does Smart Family? OK, so Smart Family from Verizon does allow you can man it. You can view their online activity, manage calls and text, filter content and pause the internet internet. Yeah, I was going to say, I know AT&T had a similar thing when I had that I could turn the kids data off at dinner time. Yeah. When that became a problem, just turn it off. No, we're not doing that now. Yeah. And when the homework wasn't getting done, you could turn off internet access on the phones. And I wish, you know, although it's based off, it'd be nice if Mint Mobile would allow those features somehow. Yeah, yeah, I mean, I like that at least they let me. I guess I like that they let me collect all the billing into my account. So if they didn't wait, that's not a good thing. My kids would have to pay for their own data. Yeah. Yeah. Wait a minute, I need to make some changes in my life, Pete. I'm an empty nester now. Why does the phone bill still come to me? Oh, it's because I still want to be able to reach my kids. That's what it is. Yeah. If they paid for it, I would have less leverage. There you go. All right. So but if you do let us know of anything you've tried feedback at MacGeekUp.com, I appreciate this conversation. This is great. I learned a ton. This is good. Pete, you found something interesting about the new Mac Studio. I did and I sent it to you and then I completely forgot I had found it, Dave, but it was an I fix it email that I got. And it talked about the modular storage and whether or not it was upgradeable or not. And they tried several several attempts to do it and they kept getting the a few restorers and they were not able to upgrade the Mac Studio with with a third party drive. But they were able to get drives of the same size to do a storage swap. Right. That was and so there's a link there in the show notes as well. They, you know, they can get. Yeah, I have written down they can't get to they can can't get two base models to boot in in a single machine. But they were so they weren't able to do upgrades, but they were able to get the drives to swap storage, which was kind of surprising. You would have expected they'd be able to stick. Another drive in there and and make it work. Well, it's the I would have. I should say not. Yeah, Josh, you understand why they're doing that. You think Josh centers over at tidbits. I put together a great article that that links to an ours Technica piece where they they dug in Andrew Cunningham over at ours dug in and sort of figured out the why behind this. And as Josh points out, I'm just going to read what Josh wrote because there's no reason to paraphrase. He says every SSD has two components, the controller, which is the interface to the machine, and then the storage, you know, the storage part itself and Apple builds the SSD controller into either the M1 chip or the T2 security chip now. And the SSDs inside the Mac Studio are just the raw storage without a controller. And that's why I fix it was able to get a drive swap to work because it's an Apple drive being paired with an Apple controller. And so it worked. The problem was initially what I fix it was trying to do was just put in a generic SSD. And that did not work because it was not that the Apple control battle. Yeah, the Apple control. Yeah, probably that. Actually, you're right. Probably it was it was that, you know, that there were two controllers in the line there or at the very least. Yeah, Apple's controller was like, I don't trust this. I'm not going to use it. That kind of thing. So the speculation that Josh goes on to say is that, you know, vendors like an OWC might eventually offer Mac Studio compatible SSDs that are built specifically for the Mac Studio. But our advice would be make sure you buy it with what you need. But bear in mind that the thing's got a, you know, a hefty amount of Thunderbolt four ports on it, you know, buy it with with enough to boot it and run your apps and put your documents and all your big, big files on a on an external drive. Like, you know, it's not a portable machine. So having a drive tethered to it will become I have a drive tethered to this machine, the the venerable. OK, I guess I'll call it venerable 2019. I'm back in the studio and I forget that I have a drive tied to it. Why? Because I don't move it around. When I rejiggered the office last weekend or two weekends ago, I sure remembered I had the drive then. But, you know, you forget because it's all just right there. You should do encrypt those drives. Well, yeah, you can. Yes, you can file vault the the external drives, which if you. Yeah, if that's important to you, then then you would want to do that. The internal drive likely event someone burglarized and walked off with a drive, all your tax documents on there. Sure, yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah, right, right. Yeah. Yeah, for me, it's Mackie Cub and, you know, audio files, my pictures and. Oh, and like any any of the fling or bitter pill studio stuff that we do with the band. So I'm not that worried about it. But but yes, you can encrypt them for sure. The internal drives are anything connected to an M1 chip or T2 chip is automatically encrypted. So, yeah. Yes, good stuff. Thanks for bringing that up, Pete. I like it. Speaking of things that came up recently, listener Patrick alerted us to or reminded us whatever it is, if you've heard about it already or not. This article that happened that came on the Wall Street Journal. And then John Gruber over at Daring Fireball wrote about it, too. How Nicole, when it at Wall Street Journal, did some tests streaming video on her iPhone 13 Pro, I think, using the various settings of 5G or not 5G and found that she got several more battery life hours out of the device, turning 5G off entirely. So there are three settings. There's 5G on all the time. There's 5G auto, which Apple says in the little description will, you know, only use 5G when it's not going to negatively impact battery life. And then there's LTE only and LTE only was far better with battery than 5G. My kids, I will point out, have known this for a long time. They always turn off 5G and prior to that turned off LTE for the same reason. You know, they were fine with whatever, you know, 4G or whatever. That was that was that was labeled on the phone because battery life was more important to them than speed. So this is this is a common practice amongst people of that generation, it seems, or at least my kids live in the battery saving or energy saving mode. The yellow battery icon. Yeah, that too, right? That helps as well. And I just turned I have an automation shortcut that turns that power saving mode on and it's 80 percent. Yeah, when it hits 80 percent on a charge, your your phone will turn power saving mode or low power mode off and thankfully turning low power mode off can be an automation trigger. So when low power mode is turned off, I have a trigger that turns it back on. And I I turn that on when I am traveling when I'm around the house here. I don't I don't bother with it, but it was on for two weeks straight almost. So, yeah. Yes, yes. Good stuff. Have you guys, John, have you done any experiments with with? Do you leave 5G on or 5G auto on on your phone or are you? I don't know what's going on in my neighborhood, but. So I don't have the ultra wideband. The plan that I have with Verizon is just the slower 5G version. Regular 5G, yeah, sure. And for like a couple of weeks now, the 5G icon doesn't come on anymore. I don't know what's up. It used to be certain spots that I went to. And yeah, I have it set to auto, but I even try to force it. And no, I'm not getting 5G anymore. Not the thing is I'm fine. I mean, for what I do, LTE is is good enough. Sure. For now. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, this the stuff that I do, you know, I'm not streaming huge amounts of data. I mean, you know, the I mean, the most intense thing that I do is Pokemon Go. And I don't think that really uses a lot of data, right? At least according to my data widget, which it's nice that Verizon offers that so I can look and see, you know, is this this is chewing up data and it's not. So not a biggie right now, but maybe at some point in the future, if I do some heavy lifting, yeah, like to have 5G. I mean, our data usage, I mean, we used to say that, you know, whatever one XRTT was fast enough, right? That would be. 300 pod. Dave, you froze. Wow, John, it's you and me, brother. Can you hear me? Yeah, you're stuck. Yeah, Dave is frozen there. Interesting. I wonder if he knows it. It's cold here, but it did that cold to freeze him up instantly. So anyway, well, in case the show is still going on, I was going to say, I just looked on my phone, John, and I noted that when I turn Wi-Fi on, my little 5G or LTE icon goes away. But I still, but I still obviously got it. Is that if you turn Wi-Fi off? Does it do you see what you're on? No. Well, interesting, because that hit it. All right. I think we probably ought to pause because Dave is not going to want half the show without him. Well, let's ask this, can you hear us in the chat room? Bueller? Bueller? Bueller. Yeah, because it's still I'm still seeing the live counting. Now, Dave is a spinning widget. Oh, OK. And I'm seeing the counting going up. Dave says he can hear both of us. I just got a message. There we go. Well, he could. Well, we stopped talking briefly, Dave. So. Can you can you still hear us? That is interesting. Kind of. OK, Dave has paused the show and they can still hear us in the chat room. But now it's just me and you. Yeah. See. If he can read insert. There he is. Or at least I see a window with his name on it. OK. Yeah. OK. That was weird. Well, I just had to reconnect. But I. Uh oh, what happened? We got you here. OK, I just I lost John again, which is weird. I see John here. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I just like went dark and then came back hang tight, though. The YouTube channel says they can hear us. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I have not resumed the recording yet because I want to check to see what happened here. There's a I am curious about a few things. Speaking of Colonel Panix. Yes, that's right. I think I'm still connected here. Let's see. Yeah. Yeah. OK. All right. I will. I will bring us back in and we'll we'll go from there. So. All right, we're back. We had a I had an interesting connection issue. I wish I had more logs from my router. What's what's interesting is I never lost connection to www.apple.com like I could ping Apple, but I did lose connection to StreamYard, which is the platform that we use to to do this. And what I I wish I knew if it was like my IP address changed, right? Which happens sometimes with my consolidated connection. Or is it something else that that that caused it? But but we're back. So it's all good. Yes. Fascinating. Where were we on things? We were talking about something with 5G and then I realized you guys couldn't hear me. So yeah. Well, John had said he couldn't couldn't see what he was on. His icon went away and I had mentioned that when I go to when I turn my Wi-Fi off, I can see what kind of connection I have. I turn Wi-Fi on that icon blocks, whether I'm LTE or 5G or what have you. And you were talking about it and you froze instantly. Well, there we are. If you yeah, you're right, you can you need to turn Wi-Fi off to see that. But that's interesting that maybe they turned off your 5G tower near you, John. I don't know. Like if you walk outside of your house, like if you walk downtown, is it still not 5G? Yes. Interesting. Well, yeah. No 5G for you. No 5G unless there's something that happened to your 5G radio. I mean, it would be interesting to A.B. test that, you know, ask your neighbors if they if they're seeing 5G, they're Verizon based neighbors. That would be the the other thing. I don't know or or maybe an iPhone because you you had often said that you weren't at home, you weren't getting super fast 5G speeds. And so I wonder if Apple recalibrated the tolerance for when it shifts to 5G or not and realized, wait, there's no reason to shift these phones to 5G if they're not going to see speed. So let's leave them on LTE and and preserve battery life. But then in those instances, I would think by putting it on, you know, 5G forced or whatever that option's called, then that would that would put you there. So, yeah, I don't know. I don't know the answer. Well, I could. Yeah. So I could switch it to 5G on, which means that whenever 5G is around and I'm not a Wi-Fi, it should selected if it's available. Right, right, right, right. Interesting. All right. We've got a time for a couple more things. I'd be curious to hear if your stuff comes back. Adam brings us the next question, which I'm sure I have here. I do have here. It's a fascinating tip. He was having all kinds of kernel panics while his Mac was asleep or waking from sleep and things like that. And I've I've seen this on Lisa's Mac Mini 2 and digging in. I've noticed it said something about Thunderbolt and it's been very like touchy as to like I can't figure it out. Well, he went through all kinds of things. He reinstalled. He did all the things that you would do. And he said, finally, here is how I fixed this. He says, I disabled spotlight indexing on my large external drives. He did it by dragging the disk icon into the privacy pane of spotlight in system preferences, and he says, now the Mac no longer panics. So something about spotlight indexing of large drives is causing kernel panics on Monterey based Macs and maybe others. I went to turn off spotlight indexing on Lisa's two external drives. And I cannot add the second one to spotlight privacy. Like I can't even get a spotlight status for it, which tells me that things are munged with at least with spotlight on that drive. I even deleted the whatever it is, the dot spotlight dash V 100 folder or whatever that is and tried to, you know, start from scratch. No, it's like error. So I've got to dig more. But this is a really interesting thing with these kernel panics. Have you guys seen because, John, you've got external drives on your you know, on your your Mac mini there. Are you seeing kernel panics? Are you indexing those drives in spotlight? You are. OK, so they're not in the privacy tab and excluded from that. Yeah, the only thing that I did notice and I don't use the mini as often as I used to. Sure. But when I upgraded my Macbook Pro to 12.3, something broke in spotlight because I couldn't use it to launch apps, which is a little mini tip for people is that if you want to launch an app, type it into type it into spotlight and it should show up. But it wasn't showing up for a while. So I don't know if 12.3 did something weird. And it's definitely predated 12.3 for both Adam and Lisa's Mac. But I mean, that's interesting. I mean, maybe Apple knows that there is a problem and is is trying to address it. So but you're not having any issues. What's the largest drive that you have attached to your Mac? One terabyte. OK. It's a Sandisk SSD that I do for my carbon copy cloner. And well, so are you that would naturally be excluded from spotlight, though, for your carbon copy cloner. So is it indexing that drive or is it excluded from the index? If you go to System Preferences, Spotlight Privacy, you can see if it's listed in privacy, it's excluded from the index. Because that would be the interesting thing. But the drives that at least Adam and Lisa are having trouble with are larger. They're two and four terabyte drives. So there may be a size. I mean, I can't imagine why size would make a difference here, unless there's lots of files on it. But is that drive exclusive size doesn't matter, Dave? I didn't say that. OK, I appreciate you being here. It's not in privacy. OK, but is that drive even mounted or does carbon copy cloner eject it? OK, so no, my my carbon copy cloner script will eject it after it does a clone. Yeah, OK, so it's not indexing that drive. OK, all right. OK, first of all, I'm glad you said the second time you said how to get there. So to go to System Preferences, Spotlight and then privacy, because I was going security and privacy and looking in the privacy tab and I couldn't figure out what it was. We're talking about so I've got that. I'm back there now. So Spotlight and then the privacy tab. I have a two terabyte let's see drive that I frequently mount. And I use either SuperDuper and also Time Machine on it. So I think it's indexing the Time Machine. I've never had any. It shouldn't be. No, OK, clones and Time Machine get excluded from Spotlight index. Otherwise, well, otherwise, you'd be launching at files from the wrong place and well, I've noticed it. Try to do that at times with when I have the drive plugged in and I look for a file, it finds both of them. Oh, then you then you might want to manually exclude that. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I recommend it. But I haven't it hasn't kernel panicked on me that I'm aware of. So are you leaving? I think this is happening when drives are left alone, you know, when max are left alone with the drive attached, it goes to sleep. It wakes up to do the, you know, the index to go back to sleep. That I think that's when these problems are happening. We're not seeing them just in the natural course of using it. It's right. And he was in his email. He said, hey, this doesn't happen when I'm using it. It's right when I leave it alone. Yeah. And the same is true for Lisa. It's exactly the same and with large drives. So yeah, OK, so so yeah, interesting. Interesting. I'd be I'd love to hear from any of you folks. I mean, I that are doing this and either have the problem or don't have the problem. I mean, I'm running Monterey on this Mac in the studio, which has a one terabyte drive attached to it. And I'm also running it on the Mac mini down in the office, which has a four terabyte drive and I have not seen, you know, recurring kernel panics on either of these. So it's obviously not an always problem. But given the right scenario, it is. So yeah. All right. Well, we yeah, let's we can answer Louise Louise. It's either Louis or Louis. And I don't know because I don't have it in front of me. Let's see. It is it is Louis. So he says they I have a Sonos Apple TV question. He says I have the latest Apple TV 4K connected to my Samsung TV, which is not Dolby at most capable only Dolby stereo plus listening to Dave. Listen to you talk about the Ark and your TV experience. I realized I was missing out on the Atmos experience because of my TV. That is correct. He says I found many articles which support what you were saying two years ago that the only switch box to get is a new TV. And is there another option? He asks. So that was true two years ago that there there was no switch box. There was no way of breaking out the signal into. So that the many soundbars in the Sonos Ark is one of them. But, you know, if we just zoom this out to Ark to Atmos capable soundbars, a lot of them receive their audio signal via HDMI using what's called the e Arc, E, A, R, C path. This requires your TV to be able to send data back up the HDMI cable to, in this case, the soundbar. And it needs to be sent with that e Arc format. So there's some special processing that needs to happen. It can't just be a raw HDMI signal that you plug in from, say, your Apple TV into the soundbar. That's not how it works. It needs to go to the TV first and then come back down. So the TV was the only switch box until the HD Fury folks came out with their Arcana adapter, which is a pass through adapter that will send the HDMI signal via e Arc to your soundbar and up to your TV, you know, in full four K glory. It's a it's a somewhat geeky thing, but this is the product. It's the HD Fury Arcana. I think I don't have pricing right in front of me. So I don't want to get it wrong. But I think it's about one hundred and fifty or two hundred bucks. I will I will look, but it'll it'll do the full, you know, 18 gig, four K, you know, full at most. It's it's the way to do it if you want to do it. Sorry, it's two hundred and fifty bucks now. But that's that's going to be the way to make this happen. Is is using that HD Fury adapter, unless unless you want to buy a new TV, in which case I support your decision because, you know, why not? It's almost the same price as the. Yeah, well, that's true. Right. The TV has gotten so ridiculously low for what you get now. Yeah, it depends. Like if you if you want a new OLED TV or something, you'll pay a little more than that two fifty, but otherwise you're right. Yeah, for sure. So yeah, that's that's the way to do it. We are doing it with the with the LG TV because because that's what we did. But I do have one of these Arcana adapters. I've tried it. It does work. It does all the things that it's supposed to do. Yeah, it's it's a well built device, for sure. So and it's geeky. It's got like a little screen on it that'll show you what you're passing. So you don't even have to guess like it knows. So it's good stuff. No, I'm with you guys. I had an LG LCD and. After a couple of years, all of a sudden, I noticed there was like a bright spot. Apparently that model had a problem with so they have like what I'll call a diffuser in there and apparently the adhesive that they used wasn't that great. So I'm like, no. So yeah, went went to the locals, local BJs and I could get a bigger TV that was 4K UHD and all that for less than I paid for this thing a number of years ago. And I use it as an HD on iSwitch, which you suggested to me at one point. At one point, I was like, oh, my Sony tuner doesn't have enough HDMI ports. And you're like, well, why not use your TV? And I'm like, in most cases, the TV will is the is the way to go. It obviously this case not, you know, for if you need to pass an atmost signal and then like if you're a receiver, you know, if you have an audio output device, I hate that we still use the term receiver, especially when they don't even have FM receivers in them or that's not their primary function, but actually mine does. But yeah, but you probably never used it, right? You know, we can we call them receivers, but but they are, you know, sound output boxes, right? And and and you want to make sure if you are using one of those that it will pass all of that 4K goodness to your TV, because many of them won't. And so you wind up getting, you know, you have all your 4K devices and you run them through the weak link in the chain and then boom, you know, you're not getting what you want. So as far as I can tell, it's working fine. And so I have so I have my individual devices plugged into the TV. And then I have a toss link from the TV to the to the to the receiver, whatever, calling it these days. Yeah. Yeah. The only thing about that that I will say is many, not all some. I don't even want to say many. Some TVs will for a misinterpretation or an overcautiousness of of of of security in terms of like data protection will downgrade the audio sent out of the optical you call that the toss link connector to two channel. So not only do they not pass at most, they don't even pass Dolby's Dolby, you know, five point one. So be aware, check your your receiver probably will tell you what it's yeah, no, exactly. It'll show, you know, DTS or whatever, but it'll show, you know, three slash two dot one or whatever. So I'm like, yeah, so they're not downgrading it. That's good. OK. Yeah, some TVs do many don't is probably the right way to say it. But but yeah, you just want to be aware. And really, of all of this stuff, that's what you want to do is you just want to look like, you know, if you're passing your 4K Apple TV to your 4K TV through a receiver, check your TV and make sure your TV is saying, yes, I am getting 4K, you know, because oh yeah, yeah, it has a yeah, you have LG so you know this. But yeah, you hit the info button on the remote and it'll tell you what the resolution is. Exactly. Yeah, you just want to make sure you whatever you're putting in the chain isn't diluting things. So yeah. All right. Well, there we are. Yet again, we've had a blast. We've had a good time. We even had a little bit of a hiccup in there. No matter where you go, there you are. And here we are. And here we are. And there you are, folks. Thanks for listening. Thanks for hanging out with us for this hour and a quarter here. We will try not to make it an hour and a half, despite our our tangential. Excursions, I will say. Pete, thanks for coming. Thanks for having me. It was nice being had that didn't come out right. That's right. You've been always always fun to be here. Yeah, John, thanks you for adapting your schedule to meet mine and doing this on a Monday, the release day. Now I actually have to go and like do all the work to get it out. Craziness. And then I got to go record another podcast where we have to talk about it's gig gap, so we will naturally be talking about the death of Taylor Hawkins, which is just I'm still not sure how to process. Yeah, that was a total shocker. I mean, Taylor Hawkins was the drummer for the Foo Fighters. And prior to that for Alanis Morissette, but just 50 years old, a fantastic drummer, a a a joyous human, at least on the outside. But I know that he struggled with addiction. And and it sounds like that may have been part of what's too bad. I've got a buddy who did years and years and years of charter flying. And he once told me many years ago that he flew the Foo Fighters somewhere on a charter. And if they weren't just the nicest group of guys, one of the funnest group of people he ever had the pleasure of flying, that they were just. Just genuine, down to earth, fun people to be around. And which is rare in the charter industry, you get a lot of real permanent honors and that is the case with those guys. That's good to hear. Yeah, I got I got the chance to actually chat with Taylor Hawkins and Pat Smear, the one of the guitarists and the Foo Fighters back in the in the hands on room at an Apple event. I forget what Tim Cook had announced that day, but it was like a theater of 200 people in downtown San Francisco. And then they had the Foo Fighters play and Dave Grohl was busy hobnobbing with Tim Cook. And the guys were like, oh, yeah, you're not going to get to talk to Dave because, you know, he and Tim need to like buddy, buddy, but you can talk to us. And like, I'd rather talk to you guys anyway. And and it was, you know, Dave Grohl obviously was a drummer for Nirvana. And and so being the the drummer for another drummer is a tough role to fill. And the two of them had a bond that was palpable when you watch them on stage. And then hearing Pat Smear talk about it, he was like, oh, man, you never want to be in a band with two drummers. These two guys and I told him, like, well, I'm almost I'm also a drummer, Pat. And he's like, oh, he's like, it's a conspiracy. He's like, I got to get out of here. But they were they were good guys. I ate my my limited brief experience with them matched exactly what what your friend said to Pete. So, yeah, it's just it's awful. Yeah, it is. Man, I I I we are doing better to reduce the negative stigma associated with addiction and treating it like a like the disease that it is. It is a disease. Yeah. And it's hard to get your head around that because it's not a disease like the flu or right, right. And it's one that you that develops and is it goes one way. You're either in remission or you're not. Or you're not. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, it doesn't it doesn't get better on its own. No, no, it's a good friend of mine who is a recovering addict said to me recently says it's it's a disease that lies to you in your own voice. And I thought that was a really poignant way of putting it. So anyway, I I I feel for for Taylor's family. I feel for the band and I feel for Taylor. I mean, it's, you know, yeah, anyway. So that was my prep for gig gap later today. Thank you for joining this important bit here. But really, you know, compassion is is the thing I'm working on with with any of the people in my life that are that are addicts. Thank you for listening, folks. Make sure to check out our sponsors. Mackie cop dot com slash sponsors is the place to go to see all of that. Of course, you can check out the sponsors that were in mentioned in this episode. Other World Computing at max sales dot com hunter Douglas dot com slash M.G.G. and collide dot com slash M.G.G. KOL IDE dot com slash M.G.G. Have a good one, folks. Enjoy. John got us into this mess today. Do you have anything that might help us get out of it? Only one thing comes to mind. Everybody take this to heart. Wherever you go, whatever you do, make it a great week. But don't get caught.