 The Mac Observers, Mac Keekab episode 900 for November 15th, 2021. And welcome to the Mac Observers, Mac Keekab, the show where you send in your tips, your questions, your cool stuff found. We, as we have been doing for 899 episodes up until now, we try to answer your questions. We share your tips, we share your cool stuff found because the goal is for each and every one of us to learn at least five new things every single time. We get together. Sponsors for this episode include boxofawesome.com where code MGG gets you 20% off. Upstart.com slash MGG to help consolidate your debt. Napjitsu.com slash MGG where you can save 30% off your first purchase. And HunterDouglas.com slash MGG to take advantage of their season of style rebate savings event. We'll talk more in depth about each of those shortly here. For now, here in Durham, New Hampshire, I'm Dave Hamilton. And here in Fearful, Connecticut, hoping we don't get a tornado because we did get a tornado watch. This is John F. Brown. That's not good. And here on the screen in Southern Durham, New Hampshire, something below John and Dave. That's right. Pilot Pete, thanks for having me back, John. Thanks for coming, Pilot Pete. Yeah, man. Yeah. And you are in a slightly more southern portion of Durham, New Hampshire. I am actually north of you. There we go. So this is all checks out. That's right. That's right. 900 episodes, gentlemen. 30 squared. 30 squared as I found out this morning. Yep. See, learning five new things, man. One down. One down, four to go. I did a little math, a little research, not math, but we started the show. John, you and I launched the first episode on June 13, 2005. That was two full years away from even meeting Pilot Pete, by the way. Certainly before he would join us regularly for the show. We would like Windows. You were. I was. Wow. Thank God for Windows Vista. Here I am today. Yeah. You're a refugee. Wow. Interesting. XP was still my favorite. That wasn't a bad system. No, it wasn't. I agree with you, John. XP was my favorite too. Yeah. I'm in that camp. For sure. I remember when I did development, corporate development. Some people wouldn't get off of XP. They're like, ew, I don't want. I think Vista is what followed it, right? Yeah. ME followed it, I think. Oh, maybe. Okay. I think Steve Gibson stayed on XP until like two or three years ago. Yeah. Just become. Totally untenable. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, just because the next version, they tried to copy Apple and they added all sorts of eye candy. And most people hated it, especially developers, because it's like, I'm going to develop. I don't want to pretty pictures. Right, right. Right. Yeah. Yeah. And Apple's marketing folks had a ball. Of course they did. Yes. I'm a Mac and I'm a PC. That's right. You're coming to a sad realization, except for tonight. And then recently they swapped them, right? Yeah, they kind of went the other way around. Yeah. But thinking about this, like back in 2005, we were still in a power PC world for our Macs. It was one week prior to releasing our first episode that Apple, AKA Steve Jobs, because he was the one that did all the fun announcing back then, announced their transition to Intel, which he said would begin by June of 2006. It began in January of 2006. I have recollections of being at the Macworld Expo keynote where they announced the MacBook Pro with Intel. And I remember running back to the Speaker's Lounge because there was no Wi-Fi in the keynote room, running back to the Speaker's Lounge, opening up on what it must have been like my tie book at the time, and ordering my Intel MacBook Pro there to get it done, whatever. That was my first Apple product was that. Intel. 2007 Intel MacBook Pro. Interesting. Yeah. Yeah. So that was, yeah. But it's amazing to think that, I mean, of course we've been through two transitions, but this show has been through two transitions, right? From PowerPC to Intel to M1. Yeah. Or to Apple Silicon, I guess that's what we should call it. And the guy at, here's a blast from the past. The guy that talked me into it was the sales rep at Circuit City. Oh, interesting. Who? What? Yeah, right, right. Long gone. Exactly. Yeah. I remember they had those stores, store in a store stuff back then. Yeah. Right. That's right. You know, Apple stores, I didn't even put that on my list. How far away we were from that happening. We were running Mac, we were running Mac OS 10 Tiger. Mac OS 10 itself was five years old when we started the show. It was seven years away from being renamed OS 10. Despite the fact that I'm wearing my, the joy of OS 10 shirt today. It turns out for the first time I pulled the shirt out of the closet thinking, oh, this would be perfect to wear. And there was still a tag on it. Oh, funny. Yeah. So that, that, um, that teaches me a few lessons. But Tiger, which had been released, I think in April of, of 2005 was, was, well, A, the subject of our first episode in many ways, but also sold for $129. Sold? Sold. That's right. That's right. They used to sell the operating systems. They used to sell operating systems. And it wasn't cheap. No. But I think that was part of the, it's been a little while since I've listened to that first episode, but I do catch it occasionally, once every year or two. And, and I, I, my memories that we talked about why we had chosen to, you know, finally upgrade to Tiger or what the benefits would be to try and encourage people to, yeah, we know it's $129. But here's what you're going to get out of it and, and that sort of thing. And it was Tiger 10.4.4, I believe, which is what ran on Intel first, at least for us, plus, you know, customers. Yeah. So in 2005, in June 13, 2005, when we did episode one, the iPhone was two years away from its release. The iPad was five years away. So, you know, the fact that the site was named the Mac Observer, the fact that this podcast is named Mac, and Mac Observer is still named Mac Observer, obviously. And the site, and the podcast was, and is named Mac Geekgab, made a whole lot of sense at the time. I think if we were to launch this exact show now, we would probably name it something different. All things Apple or something. Yeah, or yeah, Apple Geekgab, which is a domain that we've owned for a long time. Yeah. But the iPod Rain Supreme, the full color iPod photo had been released. I think it was about six months prior, but I might, I might have my numbers slightly incorrect on that. But that was like, that was the first of the color iPods was out at that moment. And that was actually, I think, probably my first true Apple product before the laptop was I saw somebody on the airplane because I was hauling around a DVD player and, you know, on a big folder full of DVDs, you know, 810, or not DVDs, CDs. Yeah. CD player. And the iPod, by that point in time, was already running, iTunes was already running on Windows. Yeah. They were previously, the first method by which you could sync a Windows machine with an iPod was Music Match, I think was the name of the app. And they sunsetted that when they finally launched iTunes for Windows, which was a much better solution anyway, but. Well, and then let me ask then, was that Apple officially supported Windows thing then? It was. It was officially supported. Yes, the music. There were other ones like was Sinuti, was iTunes spelled backwards. Right. And then a couple other ways you could. That's right. It looked like a drive, essentially. And you just pull. Yeah, you just put. No, yeah, the music match. I mean, music match. If memory serves dealt with it like it was a drive, but it was the official way of doing it as opposed to any other way. And it was all and it was a USB product by then because remember the first iPods were Firewire only, which I know. I like it's amazing. And as I was just looking and you know, I just decided to do this last night before we, you know, I'd already put the agenda together and I was like, we should do a little bit and we don't spend a lot of time walking down memory lane here, but you know, we should do a little bit of this retrospective. Yeah, just to put it in all on perspective, you know, because there's a lot of people listening that have been with us since, you know, day one or certainly year one. And a lot of people listening who are in year one of listening to the show and all are welcome, of course. But, you know, for those for those of us that have been here all the way through. Interesting little walk down memory lane for those of us that haven't a little bit of perspective about, you know, how quickly things change because it's, you know, it hasn't been that long, 16 and a half years. I mean. What I find interesting, too, is that the products that we just talked about were not the first to market. I remember. So for example, iPad. Oh, sure. So iPad, I remember when I did the corporate thing. I remember distinctly remember using a tablet. It was a Fujitsu tablet. Sure. Yeah. The thing is, they just didn't get it quite right. It's like, yeah, let's put a touch screen and make something this shape and let people use a pen and navigate. Yeah. Yeah. Well, as the stories go inside Apple, the iPad was developed first. And then when they got inertial scrolling working, inertial scrolling being that thing where, you know, it scrolls faster or slower, depending on how much you push and then, you know, kind of bounces at the top and that sort of thing. Once they had that, that's when Steve Jobs said wait, wait, wait, wait, this would work on a phone. He saw how the interface was going to work and they shelved the iPad. They shelved all of that development over to a smaller device. Obviously, called the iPhone. And so that's what got released first, but the iPad was in development first, which makes a ton of sense once you know. It was a computer company. Yeah, they're a computer company. It's a larger device, much more difficult to develop for a smaller interface. It reminds me of, it was in the movie 1941. They're trying to jam the radio down right, right, exactly. Yeah, exactly. And I think the iPod, I believe who had a, was it creative? Sony had one, too. Sony had one, creative had one. I had a creative one. It was like a 5 gigabyte MP3 player. Okay. And who needs more than 5 gigabytes? That's right. That's right. Yeah. And I think they were all hard drive based. As was Apple's right out of the gate. I mean, it was a hard drive in your pocket. It was what the first iPod, many, like most of the first iPods for many years were, yeah, they didn't move to flash memory until maybe even after we, after 2005, I got a, but I think that iPod photo was still a hard drive if memory serves. I don't think it got smaller. Yes, it was and it had that rotate, the thumb wheel on it. Yeah. But yeah, I seem to remember it spinning up and Yeah. It's crazy, man. It's crazy. All right. And no, and Macworld Expo was about to return to Boston for one year only. And that, I think happened two weeks after, three weeks after we launched the first episode of this and it came back to Boston, which was Charlie Greco. Man, I can't believe I pulled that name out of my wherever. Charlie Greco was running IDG. He was a Boston guy, tied with many, many entities in and around Boston and wanted his legacy to be that he was the one that brought Macworld Expo back to Boston because it had moved to New York, right? We had two a year, one in New York and one in Boston or sorry, one in San Francisco. And he moved the summer one from New York to Boston and it lasted exactly one year before it died. It was not the right city in which to have a Macworld Expo anymore. That decision had been made long, long before Charlie brought it back and which was great. We had just moved to New Hampshire. It was really nice to, you know, have Macworld Expo. I mean, I still stayed there, but it was nice to be able to just drive down the street. Yeah, essentially down the street, you know, tower and quarter away or whatever. So what's your crystal ball say? Any more Macworlds ever? No. No. That's too bad. Yeah. Well, it like, we don't need them. You don't need to go to Macworld Expo to hear a session about, you know, Mac troubleshooting because you literally get that right here, right? Like the web and really ubiquitous distribution of valuable, engaging content is what killed that off. And largely it's for the vendors, right? Like I would happily go and speak at a Macworld Expo just like I do at a user group or whatever, but there's no reason to have vendors go to a Macworld Expo, like to pay to be there. And that's what paid for Macworld Expo was all the vendors and their booths and everything. And it's just not like, you know, why would they want to do that? They don't need to do that. They can sponsor a show like this for much less money per year. And make better sales on them. Yeah, it's a better ROI. Yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure. What got me though was I would never I would I would rarely bother with going to the big companies, like even Apple's Boot. Sure. Or Adobe because it's like, I already know what you do because you guys are really big. What I liked and the other other observations. So I remember it was I think the New York one and also they didn't prep their people very well. Right. Or the people they had at the booth. I remember this. So remember the one in New York in 2000 where they gave everybody a mouse. Yeah. You reached under your seat and you got a golden ticket for a mouse. It wasn't even a ticket. The mouse was stuck there. Oh, yeah. Okay. Yeah. Yeah, you got a golden ticket for you got a golden ticket for keynote the next year, I think was how that worked. But yeah, the mouse was just stuck under the seat. Yeah. But what I remember so every show that I go to now I reach under the seat to see if there's just if there's a key to a Buick. That's right. But what I remember is that I went to the Apple booth and they had the mouse and you know, and I looked at it and I saw that there was a little wheel with a plus and a minus and I'm like, what's that for and the person was like, I don't know. Sure. Yeah, I think it was it was just sensitivity. It was to adjust the sensitivity. I think how hard you had to press down to click. Sure. But they didn't tell the people and they knew as much as I did about the product. Right. Right, right. Right. Yeah, no, it's fascinating. It really it's an interesting but I always like and yeah, and we talked about this before, but I always like the concept of tiny town where they gave that is primarily who I wrote about because I would never find these guys online, you know, where's Apple, Adobe. Yeah, I can, you know, I know you wouldn't have found them online. I guess you might have. No, you would have found them online. Yeah, yeah, of course. One off products, though, that you would otherwise not see because you weren't looking for that's right. Yeah. It comes to mind for me, you know, I got still still use it. When was the last Mack Mack world that 13 that's a really good question. Yeah. Anyway, I'm still use it's called the base egg. Do you remember? Did you get one of those? I don't think so. It's like it was like a speaker driver and you set it on any object and the hard object like a granite countertop or a wood shelf or something like that and it turns the whole surface into a speaker. Yeah. It's pretty cool. 2014 was the final one. Yeah. That's when we had Cirque du Mack 11. That's how I knew to look at it. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. No, it's pretty it's pretty amazing. Hey, we have some quick tips that we will do. We have some questions to answer, but given that we have found ourselves talking about trade shows, I want to share one comment about from Doug before we tell you at least about our first couple of sponsors here. But Doug said I was listening to last week when you guys were talking about CES being under capacity and wondering whether it was going to happen. He says we're exhibiting at the SEMA SEMA show in Vegas right now, which is the second largest show in Vegas behind CES. The SEMA show this year is down on exhibitors by a bit over 40%. Attendance is way down as well. A big part of this is due to international travel restrictions as many vendors in the automotive market as well as CES obviously are from Asia. However, we've had a very successful show. The floor is more open with wider aisles and it appears that the attendees actually see our small booth and don't just pass us by. Everyone I've talked with has indicated how happy they have been with the show even with the reduced attendance. If this plays out for CES and they still have the show, I would not skip it for those reasons as you might find that it is the most productive one you've been to in years. Yeah, if they have CES, I'll go. You know, as I've said many times, it's the gravity of it that brings people to town and I just want to see those people whether I hit the show floor or not. Most years it's not but it's good to know that it's the evolution of this is very interesting to me so thank you for that, Doug. Good stuff. All right. Like I said, quick tips, questions maybe we'll have time for some cool stuff found. The next thing I would like to do if it's okay with you, Mr. Braun, is talk about our first couple of sponsors. Okay. All right. Hey, if you love a good midday nap, listen, you're not alone. In fact, people like Albert Einstein, Thomas Edison, Stephen King and even Dave Hamilton have known to be nappers. So why do we feel guilty when we allow ourselves to take a snooze? It's time to get rid of that and Nap Jitsu is a new way to recharge your body and your brain and they're committed to changing the culture around rest and napping. Our sponsor, Nap Jitsu's natural supplements were made by people who know how it feels to be tired and busy. I like to say productive but being productive makes me tired. Nap Jitsu's patent-pending formulas have natural ingredients like B vitamins, guarana and ginseng to help give you a boost of energy without the crash later and each Nap Jitsu product provides brain boosting nootropics that unlock steady energy right when you need it. The result? Your peak performance all day long and all these supplements are packaged into small little packets so that you can take them wherever and whenever you might need an energy boost. Remember, the smart rest more. The wise rest better. Rest up and level up with Nap Jitsu. And for a limited time, because you're a Mackie Kepp listener, receive 30% off your first purchase. When you go to napjitsu.com slash mgg go to napjitsu.com slash mgg for 30% off your first purchase today that's napjitsu.com slash mgg and our thanks to Nap Jitsu for sponsoring this episode. Hey listen if you dread looking at your credit card statements you're not alone. Debt can feel crippling but Upstart can help you on your path to financial freedom. Our sponsor 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's paying off 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 Upstart knows that you're more than just your credit score and because of that they are expanding access to affordable credit because Upstart unlike other lenders considers your income and current employment to find you a smarter rate for your loan. This part's very cool and you get to do it all with this five minute online rate check where you get to see your rate up front for loans between $1,000 to $50,000 and you can receive funds as fast as one business day after accepting your loan. So to find out how Upstart can lower your monthly payments today when you go to Upstart.com slash MGG that's Upstart.com slash MGG don't forget to use our URL to 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. Again go to Upstart.com slash MGG and our thanks to Upstart for sponsoring this episode. Alright John let's go to a quick tip here from well you know what the first one's going to be from me I was, well I was talking to my son this week and he was telling me that he was in class, now he's at Read, smart people, astute people but as we all know you can be smart and not know everything. In fact it doesn't matter whether you're smart or not, you can't know everything no one can. And he pulled up, he did you know the workup for Spotlight on his Mac command spacebar and did a little bit of math in Spotlight in the search bar there and the people are like wait are you doing, where are you doing that math, you're doing it in your web browser like how did you do that? He's like no I'm just doing it in Spotlight and people had no idea and this is sort of the epitome of the quick tip right this is why we came up with the quick tip in the first place. The thing that you do as a matter of habit that other people are astounded by until they know and then they do it as a matter of habit very quickly too. And so yeah command spacebar, you can type a math formula in and type it in you'll see the answer right there. If you hit the enter button twice after doing math formula it will bring up the calculator with the answer so that you can do more from there but the answer will be 10 plus 10 or whatever and then command C it'll put that answer on your clipboard so you can paste it in to whatever app you might need that number in. So I don't know if anybody knew like that's the quick tip on top of the quick tip. So let me bump into that a little bit. Yeah go ahead Pete and Siri will do math for you as well. That makes sense never thought about it before. She will do hey what's this that you know add a bunch of things up or really see but yeah the calculator so I do bill pay and so I have two parts of the process one is that I have a template because all of my bills usually occur on the same day every month and then I go through and I put the number in calendar and it sets a reminder saying transfer the money to your bill pay account and then I use the calculator add them all up and transfer just a little bit more and I like it because it's the closest calculator I got it's all it's right literally right there at your fingers. Yeah that's sort of the I think that's the beauty of it is it's it's just right there you know and you don't have to go anywhere you're actually my calculator I remember my calculator days did you ever get into HP calculators yeah with RPN reverse Polish notation yeah absolutely yeah yeah and they came out with one that would do a calculus which was yep kind of sneaky thing to do it was one of the first to do that because yeah I dig graphing and all that stuff but the other thing is that no one would ask to borrow your calculator because they couldn't figure out RPN right that's right yeah yeah you know it's interesting you mentioned that what was that the it was at the HP 43C calculator was that the 28C I can't remember which one I had 28C is the one that I had the 28C was that the one that opened up like a like a little a small little book or whatever yeah as a 28C and you could program it too you could put like create little scripts and macros on it Lucas my son was telling me he created you know he uses keyboard maestro for a lot of different things one of which is the clipboard history right so that's that's where his clipboard history lies he said he created a keyboard maestro macro to pop the top thing off of the the clipboard history so that if he knows I pasted you know these four things in order he can go in and in reverse order paste one pop it which means delete it paste the next one pop it and this is a you know a stack kind of thing which that HP calculator also had and so I told him like well you could make a special paste command that pasted and then popped just like it would on a real stack and he was like oh right he's like that'd be super handy he's like I wouldn't want to be my normal paste I'm like definitely not you don't want to delete it from your clipboard history but sometimes you do and it you know just going through it yeah I know yeah it's just this stuff's fascinating Alex in the chat room reminds us that in addition to all of this the I'm assuming Siri would would do this as well but certainly spotlight will do currency conversion if you need to convert yeah yeah so it's handy stuff I spotlight I like it that's great I forget about Siri that's yeah it's a good one yeah I don't know if serial currency conversion I use a little app called units plus okay I'm overseas and whether I'm online or not if somehow it seems to grab it magically and greatest that's great yeah that's good cool uh let's see Val uh Val has a quick tip for us and I don't seem to have it in our our file here so I will I will quote this from memory but Val reminds us or tells us that we had a listener a couple episodes ago who was having bluetooth interference and resetting your network settings on your iPhone can help eliminate issues of bluetooth interference I'm not I don't think that would have helped with what listener Kenny was going through though it might but the you go to settings general reset and then reset network settings on your iPhone and that will do a lot of things it will erase the Wi-Fi networks that your phone knows about so bear that in mind it will it will it will fix a lot of things I've had it fix battery issues I've had it fix cell related data issues and I've had it fix Wi-Fi issues I've never had it fix bluetooth issues but then again I've never had bluetooth issues to fix so don't know if it would have fixed my bluetooth issues there's a lot of weird talking going on in there though between your laptop and your iOS sure by way of example I've gone in and found networks on my Mac that have only been on my phone that's right somewhere in downtown Dubai yeah I've been with my phone but on my laptop and low and behold there's the network they sync with iCloud keychain but what's interesting is if you went on your phone and did a reset when I've done a reset network settings on my phone right I don't get those networks back and it's frustrating because I was it I think it was at your house John and I you know I had to get the Wi-Fi password from you but you said oh I saw your laptop joined it was like my laptop is literally it was a one day old 14 inch m1 pro macbook pro but I you migration assistant did it right and then it like it grabbed it from my old ones like okay why won't it give this back to my phone like that would I would really like that that would be super handy so anyway yeah I've also noticed it's nice when you're on a network and someone wants to join you can just give it to them yes type in the password you share the network that's right yeah yeah well it's not just anyone it needs to be someone obviously within bluetooth range right who is in your contacts list oh interesting I said to be in that's how that that's how that works I think of course if if I've got that wrong or if you have anything to add you'll find out feedback at mackeycap.com is where we would love to have you email us where feedback at mackeycap.com Pete I think he said feedback at mackeycap.com I think that's right and that was not the address originally though I won't say what the address originally was I think it still works but but it was an address at Mac observer and then we finally got the mackeycap domain and migrated everything over just to you know tie it into the intro segment here the fact that we're 900 years old yeah uh yeah sometimes I feel like I am one last quick tip is is that Apple's holiday return window extends all the way through January 8th so just bear that in mind if anything you buy now is good through January 8th feel free to confirm that if it's a big purchase or something but you've got your return window and I think the warranty window I don't have I have one data point and the plural of anecdote is not data and I don't even have plural data points here however I will share this with you my son got an iPhone 12 pro for Christmas last year he is for the second time with this same phone or with this the replacement and this phone he is the chi coil on the phone has stopped working it won't charge over cheek we're pretty certain that it's the chi pad that he has in his dorm room at school that is cooking the chi coil on his phone right fine he'll get a new phone we bought that phone for him on December 6th of 2021 I remember I looked at my calendar I had an appointment to go down to an Apple store somewhere in mass because they were super hard to get last year and and and we got it for him put it under the tree he did not activate it until probably Christmas night it may have been the next day but it was probably that night in reality when he was talking with them today or yesterday two days ago whatever it was this week let's say last week doesn't matter they told him how many days he had left on his warranty to get this phone replaced and by doing the math which quick tip in I used Excel or I use numbers to do this in but it works in any spreadsheet put in a date you know so I put in the date of whatever we were they said your phone is good for you know your warranty is good for another 47 days so in one cell I put today's date in the next cell I put the number 47 and actually I made it I may have not even done that I just did equals selected the date cell hit plus 47 and it will show you the date that adds 47 days to that so that's cool that's a good little tip yeah you can you can do addition that way and subtraction to you know would Siri have done that how many days you know what date is 47 days amazing yeah of course she was pretty smart unless you're in the car I can't show you that now 47 days from today if I type this into spotlight nothing at least not on big sir I haven't upgraded this machine to Monterey but anyway 47 days was December 27th so that was two days after Christmas not three weeks prior to so he got longer on his warranty last year and I don't know why but if you I'd be curious to hear from any of you that bought Apple devices you know in sometime in December when does Apple think your warranty ends so oh yeah so well and Alex in the chat room is saying that if you reported something on the last day of the warranty the issue remains for another 30 days after warranty expiration interesting interesting yeah that that's that makes sense yeah so that they're you know well you didn't get it to us in time right that's right yeah time's up yeah yeah I've had them with my M1 Mini that I got in trade this year I wanted to put Apple care on it and I knew that it was going to be close to that I think you have 90 days from its original purchase to add Apple care to it right and I ordered I ordered it you know I did the trade I traded a domain for and I got it and then we went to Portland in like April to pick up Lucas and I think the machine arrived like the day before I left or maybe even the day after and it I was back for a few days before I finally was like yeah I got like Apple care this thing and it was two days too late to do it online and I'm like oh crap so I called them up and I just kind of acted dumb because I am dumb I didn't do it when I should have and they were like oh yeah yeah yeah well I see the problem yeah this is no worries and they're like yeah just like we'll just do it on the phone you're willing to pay for it now I said oh yeah yeah yeah here's my credit card go go go and so it was fine so yeah they're good about that they're good about that I think you know I sometimes you wonder you don't know the numbers how they make money on that but even if it's a lost leader they're making happy customers that's the thing is there's a I don't think it's a lost leader for them first of all but secondly it is a customer service tool as much as it is a profit center so yeah or maybe even more so to your point yeah alright let's uh let's answer some questions shall we mr. Braun sure um question number one fellers got a new 16 inch MacBook Pro M1 the other day love the fingerprint reader but my beloved a check button is gone I used to use the keyboard shortcut of control eject to bring up the shutdown dialog box can't find the keystroke combo or keys to duplicate this be uh to duplicate this be loved shutdown procedure now I have to mouse around to shut down have you heard of a similar keystroke combo that once live have you heard of a similar keyboard combo and the answer Dave is yes really um I don't know why I did this I think it was to solve um one of my friends asked me how do I what keys can I use to bring up a shutdown or restart dialog and I'm like um I don't think there is a keyboard shortcut so you know what make your own and that's what I did so on my MacBook Pro uh so here's the secret system preferences keyboard shortcuts shortcuts shutdown dot dot is what I so I added shutdown dot dot dot and then say what function key it maps to there you go right yeah and you're adding that in and you're typing in shutdown dot dot dot there right but that's because it matches an a menu item of shut space down dot dot dot so you're just typing what the menu items name is and then just giving it a function or whatever a keyboard shortcut whatever you want that to be yeah and um fascinating and it still works on um on Monterey uh uh yes yeah it still works on Monterey so that's awesome yes you gotta hit that little plus button at the bottom once you've highlighted shortcuts and then put it in there I've for years that uh Max Sparky came up with which is uh to pdf say something's a pdf you just hit command p hit the p twice and it automatically say don't have to go through all the print dialogues and all that oh just bang bang you just blew my mind yeah pd of course yeah oh something's a pdf instead of going through the print dialogues and finding it saves pdf and all that just go command pp and it saves what you're looking at as a pdf but the keyboard shortcuts are so powerful so how does your keyboard shortcut for that work like what are you well like uh let me go to um uh I'm on the uh the agenda page now okay so if I just hit pp it comes up you know I know what the function is how do you how did you get that there like what did you type in uh so uh I'd have to go find it but um it I'm sure oh there it was okay so it's uh print I'm gonna have to find it and get back to you on it exactly what I did because it is print you know with the ellipsis yeah it's the print dialogue yeah that's command p once and then when you do it a second time it it automatically goes to it goes to a save go to system preferences here p okay yeah let me do that we're gonna do this in real time okay yeah you can go to system preferences so it's system preferences uh keyboard shortcuts and there it is but oh I see no I I see what you did and I see why it works so he has in the same place you know that John just said system preferences keyboard shortcuts app short app shortcuts you have an entry item that is named save as pdf save as pdf and you have that mapped to command p now on the surface this seems like a really bad idea because you want command p to be saved to print however you don't have a menu item named save as pdf unless a print dialogue is up and then there is a menu in the print dialogue that has all of those things yeah so you just hit the p the second time you hit the p the second the first time it means print because there is no save as save as and so it takes the default of whatever the application you're in the second time there is a menu item named save as pdf and boom there you go so what I could do is make that we have an Apple script that we put in our in that same menu that that saves to like Evernote and does all these things for Mac Geekab and so I could just name I could I could create a shortcut with the same name you have you have successfully blown my mind I love this good cool because yeah I've been used that's one of the first shortcuts I always put on whenever I get a new Mac yeah take there yeah that one that's amazing that's amazing oh I love this I love this alright cool anything more on that one John before we move on to the next M1 related question no okay cool but that was off shutdown just just to circle back for the people that were I know yeah I know where we are I'm going back to the people that were that are listening yeah yeah yeah how to get the your shutdown command in there right right no yeah yeah no thank you yeah thank you for keeping us on track the tangent that needs to go back we need to I'm good on line man that's right listener Greg says my current MacBook Pro is about one year old I believe it's the very last of the Intel processor MacBook Pros the trade-in value however means that I can get one of the M1 airs or MacBook Pros from last year for not much money exchanged at all he says my needs don't warrant the power of the newly announced M1 Pro or M1 Max models right yeah Pete now you were just having a conversation before the show start we were like many geeks the lure of the new shiny and strong the new and shiny is strong for me and I am itching to take advantage of this deal there's just one problem my current work setup is to take my MacBook Pro plug it into a single hub that provides connection to power a few other things and to large monitors I do not believe that the M1 Max will run to external monitors currently I purchased one as a test month or two ago and could not get it to span the desktop across all three screens including the built-in display in both external monitors so I returned it would I be able to utilize this setup with a new M1 Mac if I got a different USB hub is this something that might be fixed with a future software update is there anything I can do to make three monitors work on an M1 Mac and the answer is no the M1 well no with an extra risk because I do have an answer for you but natively the M1 chip supports two screens and if you have a laptop with an M1 chip one of those is the internal screen whether or not the it's running in clamshell mode so the internal screen and one external screen on the laptops with an M1 this is not the case with the M1 Pro and the M1 Max those have higher limits they do have limits but there the limits are higher the Mac mini can run two external displays because there is no internal display one must run over DisplayPort aka Thunderbolt whatever you want to call that the other one must run over HDMI that's how the M1 chip works so natively on the built-in GPU you will not be running two external displays on your M1 based Mac however it can be done with USB graphics called the software and the technology let's say is called DisplayLink what that means is your Mac will be telling over USB a device to then convert the data into graphical form and display it on the screen the net effect is for most things we all do you won't notice a difference however the frame rate and there will be a little bit of lag happening naming or doing any truly interactive time sensitive activities whatever they may be you'd want to not do those on that external monitor you'd want to do them on one of the two that are native to the M1 but we'll put some links in the show notes the DisplayLink from Synaptics is the software and then there are all kinds of USB adapters and at a web page that they host and we will put a link to those in the show notes because that is going to be the magic answer but you know I mean there's all kinds of things there's docs that have it built into them there's single USB adapters that have it built in all kinds of stuff so you'll find the one that works for your environment it is doable you just need to you just need to have the right hardware and software but it's doable and it's not super cost prohibitive so you're going to need to spend a little money to do it but there you go Alex in the chat room points out guys that sidecar would work yeah so with an iPad which may or may not I mean if you already own the iPad then your cost delta is zero but that would be another way of doing it with sidecar so yeah thanks Alex yeah good stuff I like it live.macgeekab.com is where Alex and many others are right now while we're recording this episode and if you subscribe to macgeekab.com slash calendar you will know when we are recording episodes so if you want to join us feel free in fact you're not just feel free you are invited consider this your personal invite no one else is hearing this right now except you this is your invite well if there's two of you in the car you're both invited but it's just the two of you nobody else you want to take us to Tony John sure excuse me um here's a weird one I use carplay with Apple Maps for GPS however we have an older Garmin Nuvi GPS that my wife refuses to give up I have not been able to update its maps since buying the M1 Air I originally tried a USB-C to USB-A adapter but the computer can't see it as a drive which is how updates happen I bought the 179 OWC Thunderbolt hub and I've tried it with its USB-A port it doesn't work either the cable works with other USB-A devices I thought USB-3 is backwards compatible I mean it should be um I actually had a Garmin and told they wanted to charge for maps I'm like charging for maps crazy talk but it was good for a while cars still do it if you have a GPS in your car you'll pay for map updates there yeah terrible only thing I could think of is maybe a firmware update or maybe you have to I don't know some devices that update this way I find that you may have to um put it in a certain mode maybe it forgot that it's to activate drive mode yeah that's the best I could think of and then he wrote back and he seems to have solved the problem but I'm not sure why he sent us a picture of his setup and apparently it works if he plugs a power USB hub into the machine is it a powered hub? what like a powered hub? I didn't think it was but you might be right it was like a seven port Amazon basics hub or something so yeah it could be that it needs more power than his Mac was providing or his dock you know whatever was providing the other thing it could be is that his um he was going from like his Mac with a USB-C port you know a USB-C based dock that had a USB-A port on it and then from that USB-A port to this seven port Amazon basics you know hub that USB-A port on the dock so the first thing in the chain is almost certainly a USB-3 port as Tony mentioned I would guess that the seven ports on this Amazon basics hub are all USB-2 ports remember USB-A is just the shape of the connector it can carry USB-1, USB-2, USB-3 and a couple of different flavors of it but not all the flavors of USB-3 my first thought was that device needs USB-2 and I know it's supposed to be backwards compatible but that doesn't mean that the devices that were built before USB-3 and so that was my thought but the power thing that you brought up might be the answer instead I've certainly seen that when I've had to update my Escort radar detector I need to make sure it's plugged in and that uses mini USB not micro USB I forget the names of all these things but Pete's enjoying his tea in my right ear that's alright it's fine my right ear and yours so I need to make sure it's plugged into something that's going to give it enough power to fire up because it doesn't have a battery in it so power might be more of an issue than I initially thought you might be right on that one just hard here to get the maximum amperage I think you can go up to 5 amps 1 amp, 5 watts I'm pretty sure USB-A, not USB-C USB-C can go up much higher of course with power delivery and all that I got like a 65 watt or something USB-C and the new M1 Pro MacBook Pros can come with a 140 oh wow but it only works over the MagSafe because power delivery maxes out at 95 watts or 99 watts 99 and for a little inside baseball by the way your battery is charging me up I'm about 6% higher than I was hey good news that's great to hear I didn't bring my power cord today folks so it was kind enough to hook me up to a secondary battery to power the camera I think it's a my charge big honkin battery that offers power delivery probably jump start your Subaru no I don't think that'll jump start the Subaru that's not the one you gotta get the ones we mentioned a couple weeks ago alright we've got more questions we have a little bit of time left so and we've got some cool stuff found we'll go through some of but don't worry 900 isn't where it ends 900 is where the fun begins folks so the next thing though that I would like to do is talk about our next two sponsors that works for you Mr. Braun alright hey look this fall as we all get back into the swing of things bespoke post is here with a new seasonal lineup of must have box of awesome collections our sponsor bespoke post partners with small businesses and emerging brands to bring you some unique goods every month I got to check out some of these things they sent me a weekender box which this bag this great carry all bag but it's super well constructed it's rugged looks nice fantastic so that's the weekender I was looking at some of these other ones they've got a last call box that has you know you consider yourself a mixologist maybe well this now comes with all kinds of things to add to your cocktails so that you can have the stuff that you need dehydrated garnishes a grapefruit jalapeno soda they've got a Moscow mule mix a hot toddy mixer right things like that they've got this thing they call it the flame no it's not the cheap trick song it is this like small little cement fireplace like small enough to put on your desk even or we're on a table or whatever and it runs on rubbing alcohol it looks really cool it's got this beautiful cement frame and stuff you got to check this out that's how you that's how this works right so to get started take the quiz at boxofawesome.com your answers will help them pick the right box of awesome for you it's free to sign up you can skip a month or cancel at any time each box costs only 45 bucks but has over $70 worth of gear inside so you can get 20% off your first monthly box when you sign up at boxofawesome.com and enter code MGG at checkout that's boxofawesome.com code MGG for 20% off your first box and our thanks to boxofawesome for sponsoring this episode you like to live well right to be perfectly at ease in comfort and in style well Hunter Douglas can help you do just that with their innovative window shade designs gorgeous fabrics and the super cool control systems that are so advanced they can be scheduled to automatically adjust to their optimal position throughout the day there the way they do this is you got to go check this out at hunterdouglas.com because you can see the way the shades diffuse harsh sunlight to cast like this beautiful glow across the room you can see how you can enjoy the view outside while protecting your privacy inside they've got superior insulation in the shades to keep you warmer in the winter cooler in the summer and lower your utility bills when you tap into Hunter Douglas is power view technology your shades can be set to perfect balance of light privacy and insulation morning noon and night and you can live beautifully with Hunter Douglas enjoying greater convenience enhanced style and increased comfort in your home throughout the day visit hunterdouglas.com mgg today to take advantage of the season of style rebates savings event that they've got going on that's hunterdouglas.com mgg for limited time savings and over expires on December 6th here in 2021 so you got to go check it out now and our thanks to Hunter Douglas at hunterdouglas.com mgg for sponsoring this episode alright let's answer some questions John you uh you had something from Chuck yeah um for many uh Chuck says for many years I was a satisfied user of pdf pen pro but as smile software continued to upgrade the program with options they never used I stayed put for very usable um early versions for just one example I think I used the OCR function perhaps once in four to five years then with my new M1 MacBook Air or was it the recent OS upgrade my early versions of pdf pen pro ceased to work but I don't want to spend 90 or 140 dollars for the current version um it's too much bloat and too much money uh so I've been using a hybrid but tedious combo of Adobe's pdf reader and Apple's preview as with pdf pen pro Adobe wants money for any additional functionality preview works for most of my needs but every once in a while I need to edit something in a pdf document that preview can't manage so does so do we have any suggestions for pdf editors that have pdf pens basic functionality a reasonable price point in an upgrade policy that doesn't feed the bloat or am I being unreasonable in my expectations um especially concerning price um you know if you don't have to spend 140 bucks then you don't but um he does exactly what I doesn't own pdf pen pro anymore right I think didn't uh pdf pen get acquired by uh oh I'm looking here acquired by nitro software yeah so not that that we'll put it I'll tell you how I saw it yeah go ahead John so he um he does pretty much what I do so for example when I do my taxes I do it on pdf and I fill it in and I think I use um Adobe's reader and it fills out forms just fine um as does preview thing fills out forms yeah sometimes they don't get it quite right like they use the wrong font or something like that so I've had you try that in recent years because I previews gotten a lot better with forms than it used to be yeah oh yeah like I said I you know did my taxes with it so um but it was like huh well where would I look if I wanted to find a good pdf um reader so I fired up my pal set up and searched for pdf and guess what showed up pdf pen pdf pen you stole my answer John yeah a whole bunch of other things came up so my suggestion now eventually you know I think the least expensive plan is $9.99 so you'll eventually spend $140 but you get to learn I mean um what I like about set up is that I keep getting notifications they're like hey we added something new hey we added something new check it out sure yeah um so um if you look at it from that angle that you get access to a whole bunch of things what else a better touch tool is in there and a few of our other favorites yeah what'd you say clean my Mac clean my Mac is they've got some amazing expensive software in there yeah it's true no they do yeah no set up is a it's a wonderful thing to have I agree yeah that's one of my favorites for sure yeah I you know pdf I use pdf pen all the time um it makes it way easier than preview to you know put stamps in documents either signatures or approval stamps or things like that it's so it's somewhat doable in preview but not nearly as easily as as pdf pen so it that's still something on my you know that I I'm in if it's not every day it's four days a week kind of thing so I yeah I would be curious to hear if somebody's got something they like even better again you know feedback com this where we would go with that pre show oh what's that Pete no I said no oh Don did you say something I was going to say feedback that's what you say I like it you know I should have said feedback com you should have think to be yeah I know it's calling and we got a few people tossing their suggestions in the ring okay um let's see one person says can't google workspace open pdfs um I don't know okay um Brian says LibreOffice I haven't well LibreOffice edit pdfs I don't I don't I've never tried I don't know that it has a pdf editor as part of it but because it's not part of open office which is what LibreOffice is based on interesting yeah okay yeah yeah yeah um pdf element from Wondershare right okay yeah um pdf elements yeah that's right yeah yeah yeah so yeah there you go thanks guys it's great I love this is what we love about the chat room it's awesome we were having a conversation pre show that that has come up a couple times recently but it you know it's worth with with the borders of many many countries including the US here now you know opening up more and more there is more and more travel that's happening and when we do that we need to think about how we can use our phones especially for those of us that uh finally used the pandemic lockdowns to realize that we didn't need international plans every day of every week on our cell phones we only needed them when we were traveling but now that we're traveling we kind of need them so uh Pete you and I were talking about having to use uh you're on mint mobile like like us and in some places I think Alaska being one they simply have no service right right I mean it was amazing to me that I could go to China yeah or Japan turn on my phone and pay to roam sure pay to roam is not an option I wonder if that's because maybe T mobile because mint is an MVNO of right T mobile and so maybe T mobile doesn't have any 4G of any LTE in in Alaska maybe I mean there's just no bars it's just that's not a thing it's bizarre and they actually don't have coverage in Hawaii either I was told but when I was in Hawaii this week it worked fine okay well that's good to know yeah all right good but Alaska no no super you so the good news and I know we've talked about this a couple times so we'll make this relatively quick and kind of make it an overview or a review depending on your uh knowledge set but most of our iPhones now have dual SIM capability and and for most of us at least they bought US based iPhones one of those sims is a physical SIM and then one is an eSIM and this is where the eSIM shines because you can set up you can set up a new phone plan on that eSIM you can also set up a data only plan on that eSIM for when you are in an area where either you don't have service with your carrier or you don't want to pay your carrier's exorbitant roaming fees I mean I think what AT&T Verizon I think are still charging 10 bucks a day 10 bucks a day but uh I know AT&T caps at 100 for the month not that okay okay but still yeah it's like yeah I like to have some of what they're smoking um but uh I'd like to have some of what they're collecting yeah you'd buy whatever you want to smoke with that that's true yeah uh but there's a better way right and for me it starts with a free resource called eSIMDB which is a website where you put in where you're going and sort of narrow down what type of service you want and it will show you a whole list of your available options and you can sort that list based on you know I want my cheapest price per gigabyte or you know I know I'm going to be there for 30 days so what's the best way and you can sort of you know navigate through the list and figure out what it is that you want for many places overseas you're going to find that TruePhone is either the best option or certainly one of the best and the nice part about TruePhone is that it does have some I'll say ubiquitous but somebody will tell me I'm wrong so close to ubiquitous coverage depending on the plan that you that you choose you can choose a Europe wide plan for example or one that's just for a specific country right and you know obviously you're going to pay more for the former but you know you get more or at least you get more flexibility another service to mention is GigSky which does a lot of this too and works well with the eSIM not just on your phone but your iPad so links for all of those are in the show notes but hopefully this will allow you to make informed decisions about how you need to do these things and the nice part is if you make if you do your research ahead of time and download the apps for the plans or the services that you might use then that's what you need to get rolling when you get to a new country and that's way better than the old days where you had to hunt around you know sometimes at two in the morning after you know bleary eyed after a long flight trying to find somebody that was going to sell you a local SIM card because you can't buy a SIM card without a credit card in the you know you can't buy a UK SIM card with your US address on your credit card it's a whole big regulatory disaster and so eSIMDB true phone GigSky and then download the apps for any other things that eSIMDB sort of points you towards and you're going to be in good shape so that's my wrap on that any questions thoughts or you want to take us to Todd, John? I can take us to Todd sure or we can skip Todd no we could what else you want to do alright I'll talk about some of my cool stuff found here because I've got a couple of things I mentioned I am digging deep into MagSafe and one of the what I've been looking for is I'm forcing myself to use MagSafe to see if it sticks no pun intended and I think I've found the killer app for me so when I go out I have three things that I have in my pocket one is my phone one is my chap stick and then one is my wallet now I don't carry a full like huge big thick but that makes chiropractors rich in my back pocket in my front pocket I carry just a thin little money clip really and it's a the money clip is great I have one that has a place for a silver dollar in it so I keep a silver dollar in there that my grandfather gave me and it's amazing but we all like technology and we all like moving forward including my grandfather so he would understand if I stopped using that money clip and what I have found is a wallet attachment and this would work with any wallet based MagSafe attachment for your phone and the idea is I don't want my wallet on my phone all the time I want my phone to be thin and naked however when I'm out and about I would normally leave my wallet I leave it in my car right that's because I know I'm gonna need it when I'm going out and so I go out and make sure my wallets in my car and I go when I get out of the car I grab my wallet and put it on my you know put it in my pocket well now I can just grab my wallet which is you know I found a couple of things from this company on Amazon called Sinji Moru and so the first one that I've got here is just a wallet attachment a card attachment I should say for your phone or for my phone but it would work on your phone too you pick it in the color that you like and it'll hold up to four cards in its little pouch and you know the pouch will hold the phone like it's definitely strong enough with the magnet to do what it needs to do and then when I get back home I just put this back in the car and I'm good to go I found a second thing as I mentioned from Sinji Moru that is another wallet attachment this one if you're watching the video it has my cards in it so it looks a little fatter but it's more realistic it has my cards in it but it looks fatter than that and that's because it has a little grip on the back of it so that I can hold my phone with it's kind of like a pop socket style thing it's more like what grip to you has on their iPhone cases so I have this grip and I have my wallet and what's cool about the grip is you can squeeze the little grip into a tray or into a kick stand and now your phone will sit upright on this little kick stand that's built in to the grip you can watch the video we'll put them on our Makikyub YouTube channel at makikyub.com slash youtube as well if you want to see the video or you can just watch the whole video of this episode of Makikyub.com but the Sinji Moru the wallet grip stand they call it is 23 bucks and the regular wallet is 18 bucks and I think I have found my killer app that will keep me from stopping using MagSafe I think I finally got there because I have car play in the car so I don't need a MagSafe mount in the car I certainly can use and have been using a MagSafe mount you know it like my desk or my bedside table but it's not mandatory for me but the MagSafe where my wallet is on the phone and you know my phone can hang from it and it's all fine and good that's cool right? like it's sort of a game changer so yeah I kind of like it and then when I need to charge my wallet is not on there when I need to charge but of course there's those battery packs my charge are the ones that we mentioned most recently but there are MagSafe battery packs that are great because you just MagSafe them to your phone and boom now it's charging so I'm pretty stoked about my new finds with MagSafe yeah sorry I'm getting calls from no it's fine of course they do don't think no sorry I'm busy this month now I I think I kind of get it because I saw someone in line at the store have something similar I saw that they had a phone an iPhone it looked like a new one and then they had something similar a little case with their credit card in it it was like why are you carrying your credit cards in a case when you have Apple Pay oh because there's many many places that don't use Apple Pay I mean it just go to a restaurant right and but you also need you also need your ID with you sometimes or maybe you want to have your insurance card right so yeah it works yeah I can't certainly I can go into the grocery store without grabbing my wallet out of the car and pay there with Apple Pay but in general you need to have a credit card with you in today's world still if you're going like I said out to eat is the prime example many gas pumps right you need a credit card so yeah hey Martin I believe I'm saying that right might be Martin my apologies had a follow up to last week's episode you know John we were talking about the fact that network network utility is gone right and won't run and we talked about a couple of options ways of getting around that last week with Monterey well Martin says I've been using an app by Marcus Roscoch called Network Toolbox on my iPad for some time after your last show I wondered if it run on my Mac to my surprise there is now a dedicated app for the Mac in the Mac App Store we'll put a link to that too it's probably overkill for most people but I found it a valuable tool to have all these utilities in one place so thanks for that Martin again my apologies for I certainly mispronounced your name at least once perhaps even twice so there you go what else do we have John any thoughts on anything no we'll find Todd in the future I suppose but external usb drives I do want to talk one thing I was going to mention if we talked about Todd and his external usb drives is this new you and I saw it pepcom finally the new OWC Envoy pro electron this thing and it's worth looking at the video just to see the size of it in my hand this is I believe this model is a two terabyte model that they sent me here and it is a it's a usb c drive 10 gig usb drive their specs say it'll do a thousand megabits per second I'm sorry a thousand megabytes per second I will do a thousand megabits as well but it'll even go even faster up to a thousand megabytes I my tests on my m1 pro MacBook Pro with black magic did 900 megabytes per second writes and about 650 700 megabytes per second reads it is crush proof dust proof and waterproof and it comes with a cable so it doesn't have a built-in cable but it has its own cable of course it's a usb c cable one end of the usb c cable has a little adapter that you pop on to the usb c port or plug I should call it and it gives you a usb a plug so it's adaptable to whatever you need to use and yeah it's a nice little drive I'm just like blown as soon as I put it in my hand it's like wait a minute they're like we've sent you one of these I'm like you may have and it may be sitting in a box in my office but I guarantee this is the first time I've been able to hold one of these in my hand because I just never realized how tiny and compact this little electron is it's almost too small almost we'll go with almost on that I will agree the defense stipulates that it is almost too small so is it an nvme I'm sure it is in there it looks almost too small to be an nvme yeah I don't I mean I don't know that it would need to be because of the speeds like it's not thunderbolt so they don't need to get it up to you know 2,500 megabytes per second I'm looking at their website now and it doesn't say easily for me to find it is yeah it's nvme you're absolutely right yeah it's aura SSD powered aura is OWC's internal name but yeah it's nvme yep yeah good call alright we got anything else here John I have one more thing and I don't mean that in the Steve Jobs way I just mean that I have one more thing that I want to talk about before we wrap the show today but do you have anything to add before we do that we talked the last time you were here Pete about YouTube TV as our replacement options I have been testing a new one called Direct TV stream it used to be AT&T's streaming service now Direct TV it is what you're using man I am loving this it is good yep the interface is pretty good none of them are perfect at YouTube still YouTube TV in my opinion is still the best user interface because they really understand what you want in terms of flexibility of control for example there is never a world in which I want TV to auto start playing when I launch the streaming app and many of them want that as the default and only I think YouTube TV and Fubo will let me some of the Fubo apps will let me disable that Direct TV I have not found a way to disable that so it just it starts you know randomly playing some channel at me which if I want to start if I'm recording a football game or hockey game and I want to start at the beginning really kind of sucks because I don't want to know what's happening live I want to know exactly but I hover over the pause button and I've been able to avoid any issues but the nice part is unlike Fubo Direct TV stream will let me start watching a recording from the beginning that is in progress so to me that's a huge win so that's better than Fubo on most apps some Fubo apps it's been inconsistent there but with Direct TV it's 100% of the time YouTube will let me do that but YouTube doesn't get any of the regional sports networks anymore they've cut all their deals with them so I can't get here Nessin but Direct TV stream has Nessin now it is not the least expensive plan I think you've got to spend the most expensive plan is like 65 a month like everybody else's like Fubo on YouTube in order to get the regional sports networks you need to jump up to their choice plan which I think is about 80 bucks a month and then you get the regional sports networks which makes sense because the regional sports networks charge the providers 5 bucks a month per customer so I understand they're charging 15 more I get that you do get more than just the regional sports network but they've got to cover that cost somewhere that's fine so I've been very very happy and very impressed with Direct TV stream for the last I don't know two or three weeks so if you don't mind I'll jump in a couple of things one of the things that's nice about them is I can unlike YouTube TV I can turn on a VPN to the states and watch from overseas interesting YouTube won't let me do so I did have one the other day maybe I was looking at Amazon Prime video or something like that but it was mad at me about being on a VPN so I went alright I'm smarter than you are and I went to my home VPN instead of my paid VPN then it didn't think I was on a VPN that's interesting because YouTube will not rely on the IP address it gets from you YouTube TV they'll let you get away with it for a short period of time but they will eventually force you to let your browser share your location which goes beyond IP it gives you the that goes with the actual IP of your computer not the VPN IP of your computer but I've noticed now pretty cool about it is you can often go you can set it up so that you look either alphabetically ABC, CBS Fox, NBC or you can go by direct TV channel number for those who have had direct TV you know that ESPN is I think 206 or 306 so you can go by channel number so when you hit channel up or channel down on the box that they give you at your house that'll work but you can set it up either way that you go alphabetically or by channel and then you can go favorites you can filter out all the crap that you don't want to see highlight the favorites and have your guide come up with the favorite channels that you want to see so you don't have to go through QVC and home shopping network and all that yeah so that's nice and then the other thing that I found that I really kind of like is if I'm watching say a football game and it's you know it's time to go to bed and watch the last quarter upstairs I just turn off the TV and when I go upstairs and turn on the TV it's right on the football game where you are just watching yeah yeah so I'm doing it without the without the the the box I'm just using the streaming service and it works great the box was free so when I brought it and put it on my brought it into the house and put it on my main TV in the living room and then the other thing with regards to price ask for a deal I got the first year for 49.95 or 49.99 and then then it jumped to 90 so it's going to average $70 a month over two years some cable cutting I mean it's better than $141.50 you seem to get jammed with on a lot of the cables yeah right right right but there's just nothing cheap about getting TV anymore no matter which way you go you start adding in Netflix and Apple TV and Disney Plus and Amazon Prime you know you starting to pay money real money yeah I know you are yeah for sure so that's frustrating but there then you got to pick what you like out there personally I'd be happy with a whole lot of whole lot of nothing yeah yeah you know well cool yeah no I this seems to be the one I mean it's the one for me is the right way to say that there is no one you know one service to rule them all but it's well thought out they definitely put some design effort into their in some ways it feels like they've solved some problems that I'll call reactionary solutions to what other people have failed at right like they're definitely delivering a couple of things that I can't get from both of the other two I can get one from one and one from the other but it's like this gets me everything and it even works with TV everywhere which is great for that channels app that I mentioned so I can run my own DVR that on your Synology man I highly recommend checking that out okay it's called TV everywhere no TV everywhere is the service it's the login it's the authentication service that allows you to you know when you go to like abc.com for example and you say I want to watch live TV on the web they say great login with your provider and they give you a list of 80 providers or whatever it is that login is happening through something called TV everywhere okay okay and they authenticate you and then come back and say yeah this person's allowed to watch ABC show them the one from this network affiliate in this location and all of that stuff right channels get channels.com leverages TV everywhere and other things to act as your own DVR on your Synology or you can put it on any like lots of different things I run it on my Synology but you could run it on your Mac and then it records locally and then and then you have no problems with a VPN because your VPNing into your house it's your house that's recording for you and then you can VPN and you can watch it's not just recordings you can watch live TV and channel around and it's the best interface so leveraging TV everywhere with one of these services with channels starts to become Panacea got it and so yeah yeah so for those of you haters out there here it comes but I was trying to watch the Patriots game last week yeah and I was out on the west coast and watching anything but that's how I got finally got into my house and AT&T TV thought well okay you're now a direct TV stream yep okay and let me watch the rest of the game but yeah but channels would solve that problem and with our son out in Portland it's been it's been a great little solution so yep alright yeah it is cool yeah it's very cool yeah yeah yeah that does get us there we went a little over again I know we got it we're gonna break this habit we're not gonna let it become a habit John that's really what we're gonna say about this I want to know I may have like discovered a new keystroke yeah because you disappeared like a couple minutes ago yeah you cut well only from the video you the audio kept us rolling it was fine which is the majority of the audience anyway but but yeah you somehow dropped me from the stream but I saw you and Pete so like it wasn't like my connection stopped or something yeah the only thing is that your window isn't even visible hmm you know there's so I had to click show on stream again but yeah I don't know why you had to click show on stream yeah same sounds like it's time for band practice what's that it sounds like it's time for band practice I know yeah the band's playing it's good alright thanks again for listening thanks for the last 900 episodes now you folks are amazing we really truly couldn't and would not do this without you so thank you please make sure to check out our sponsors learn about our premium program at mackeycup.com premium if you are interested and of course able and uh but really just keep listening and and the the most important thing that we could ask you to do is to tell a friend about the show I know we've done 900 episodes you think we have all the listeners that we need but there's always people that need to join the family here right so share the love tell somebody about the episode tell somebody about the show in general maybe just share one of the little youtube snippets about your favorite segment if there is a favorite segment that you don't see a youtube clip about let us know feedback at mackeycup.com we will make one so that you can share it it's that simple we're we're here for you truly this is I mean we do it because we love it but we're also here for you it's how it goes it looks like your audio dropped out on youtube right that would have made sense yeah when John cut me off yeah that's right it would have dropped out on youtube but that's fine we have we have this audio so one other comment there though and I don't know if I should be offended or not very at the top but yeah we said good morning gentlemen and pilot Pete so you know there you go okay they understand knows I was in the Marine Corps they know they know they know they know all right thanks folks thanks again really thanks for hanging out thanks for everything and we'll see you next week it's just how it goes because you know that's what we do that habit we will keep so I'm wondering if I'm not referred to as a gentleman did I get caught I don't know what do you think John um all I gotta say Pete is don't get caught that's some good advice right there sorry we waited until the end of the episode to tell you