 Welcome to the Mac Geek Gav show 912 for Monday January 31st 2022 Welcome to the Mac Observers Mac Geek Gav. Nope. It's just Mac Geek Gav, isn't it? I'm gonna get it right eventually Yes, this is episode 912 as Pete said in the intro We are the show where you send in your tips your questions your cool stuff found We take your tips you we take your questions We take your cool stuff found we mash them all together Into an agenda that we loosely follow 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 true bill comm slash MGG other world computing's new mini stack STX Helix sleep comm slash MGG is back where you can save up to 200 bucks off your mattress Congee.io slash MGG is back They want to hear from you about what you need for your MDM solution and the Jordan Harbinger show is Is on board as well. We'll talk more about each of them a little bit later in the episode for now Very cold here in Durham, New Hampshire. I'm Dave Hamilton And here fearful Connecticut getting ready for a northeaster. So I hear this is John Fron And here I paid my oil bill in Lee, New Hampshire His pilot Pete man, I'm sorry to hear about your cold troubles Dave get him fixed now. Yeah, that's what I'm working on here So the bomb is heading our way. That's right Pete is this is the first time we've had Pete on the show when Pete is not in my studio with me And that was just happenstance But it was a really smart happenstance for Pete dumb luck We call it but really we call it Pete luck because Pete tends to have find these sort of lucky things and Yeah, as Pete implied and as I inferred it's cold in my studio today because we woke up this morning and Both sets of propane tanks the tanks here at the office and studio and the tanks across the driveway at the house Had emptied overnight because it's been really cold. We were on the delivery schedule for both of them today But thus far only the house has gotten its delivery. So it's still I think it's about 44 f here in the studio It's probably lower than that now, but Yeah, so if you're watching the video, that's why I have a hat on today And that's why you'll see me clutching my my T mug or warming my hands over a candle An aviation Dave it's better to be lucky than good. So I'll take it. Oh story of my life, too, man Absolutely, absolutely Yeah, and John. Yeah, we we're all getting this nor'easter It's supposed to hit we record on Fridays, of course So by the time you all hear this unless you're at live.mechicab.com while we're doing it the nor'easter will have passed But but yeah, it's due to hit us Early early Saturday morning me about 4 or 5 a.m. How about you John? When is it? When are you supposed to get it? I? Think it's gonna be starting tonight Got it. Yeah, sounds good. Well, hopefully everybody's got heat and shovels Yeah, and and supplies for French toast because it seems like milk bread and eggs or what we buy when there's a Snowstorm coming don't know why but you know, it's just it's part of the deal of living in the snowy places All right, let's let's do this Ben has We'll go into quick tips first here and Ben has a great quick tip for us He says you know when you take a screenshot on the Mac and the thumbnail appears in the bottom right corner Did you know that you can drag that thumbnail to drop it wherever you want to use the image such as an email message? And by doing so the screenshot never then gets saved to wherever your default location is desktop or wherever you and as an aside quick Tip you can Change that location of where they go I use onyx to change the location of my screenshots But yeah, but it doesn't get saved when you do the drag-and-drop thing and Ben Offers a little context. He said this approach may be easier than saving the screenshot to the clipboard by adding the control key Or choosing save to clipboard in the screenshot tools options menu. I like that I don't know that it's easier than the clipboard, but I like the different option and I say that very Dave focused because I I have my fingers trained and the nice part is I can take a screenshot And then it's just all keyboard and boom boom boom boom boom there you go Although I guess I'm using my mouse usually to aim where I want the screenshot to go But yes, thank you Ben great great stuff So let me jump in on that because I tried it as soon as you talked about it and I think thank you for mentioning the control key I tried it with the control key because that's what I always do that adds it to the clipboard, right? So it's shift command for do it and then it comes up. That's cool. Yeah, I you know Shift command 5 is what we're supposed to be using for screenshots nowadays, right? Well, that's the new Incantation that allows for all of this other stuff Command shift command 3 is the the original the og screenshot that will take a screenshot of your entire screen both monitors Or all three monitors if you have three and save it to the default location Which would be the desktop unless you've changed it command shift 4 is the one I became quite enamored with and still used to this day most of the time because it allows you to either draw a You know a shape a square rectangle on the screen and have that screenshot taken or if you hit command shift 4 and then hit space bar You can float your mouse over a window and chew and then click your mouse And it you will now get a screenshot of just that window Including like a little you know shadowed background and stuff. It's really nice. Oh, that's awesome, right? No idea I've just been using shift control command for all these years Yeah, and try preview command paste and you're right to any of those command shift 3 command shift 4 If you add the control key the destination then changes to just be your clipboard So like a lot of times when I'm answering your questions that come into feedback at Mackie cub comm I'll do that y'all, you know to send you a screenshot I had to hold down control shift command for float over the window that I want I hit the space bar click the thing now That's on my clipboard paste it into your email and you get a nicely formatted thing without my cluttered background Where do the questions come into feedback at Mackie cab calm? Yeah, Pete I think he said feedback at Mackie cab calm. I did yeah, I know my teeth are chattering here. So, you know, I know You back exactly. All right, John you want to take us to Harvey? Ah Harvey's got a couple of keyboard tips here So he says the one of the latest podcasts you were talking about choosing between button options given when you have to make A choice such as between replace or cancel You mentioned that filled in button can be chosen using the keyboard by just pressing the return key You then gave a number of keyboard options to choose the unhide unhighlighted button In some cases it is outlined if the second option button has a highlighted outline In my case a blue one rather than a blue filled in button All you need to do is press the spacebar to choose it I now want to touch bar macro currently these two options are available without using the keyboard I'm not sure the spacebar option is available in Monterey since I have a touch bar back book pro And the secondary choice is not outlined. So I have nowhere the way to test it All right. Yeah, that makes sense though. I like that The I don't I guess it's possible. My fingers already know this but I don't know if I was asked to articulate it If I could have so thank you Harvey. This is great All right, and then the the second one, um, you talked about using two hands to choose a number on an iPad Slash iPhone when you are on the alphabet keyboard and you don't want to switch To keep switching back and forth between number alphabet keyboards Your tip was to hold the one two three key down with one hand and while holding it down press the number of the symbol Uh, you want and when you let go of the one two three key You go you remain in the alphabet keyboard You don't need two hands for this operation if you hold the one two three key down And slide it to the number slash symbol you want and let go it does the same thing It's the same as when you want one of the choices that a key provides such as uh E with a little accent you just press the key and slide or if you want a capital letter Press shift and slide to the letter you want and when you release it returns to the keyboard you were on Cool. Yeah, that's I like that. I'm up to three. I'm out of here soon. I'll have my five We'll have our five in the first I was going to say first five minutes, but we spent the first five minutes Prattling on it quite frankly in in atypical fashion. We usually get right to the meat, but you know, it happens sometimes Wow, the meat wasn't ready. It's too cold All right, good. I like that. Thank you harvey great stuff and patrick has A quick tip that I was going to share but he did it better. Uh, he says Looking at dr. Sir hot curt's mac reports Of course, sir hot curt is now the owner of mac observer as well He states that when trying to understand why files don't upload to iCloud Some of the reasons can be characters in your file names and he gives us some fantastic Characters to avoid in file names things like the pound sign the hashtag sign if you want to call it that at ampersand dollar sign Greater than open squiggly bracket closed square bracket carrot tilde I will add two to that list The one I learned the hard way is colon a Synology drive will not sync files with colons in the file name and My son learned the hard way This week not to put slashes the forward slash in a file name backslashes would also be bad, but he um You got that new m1 macbook pro the one that that I had and was trying to decide whether I'd keep that out of the air I kept the air he's got the m1 macbook pro off at school He needed to submit something for one of his programming classes john this week And they used this app called submit and it was the first time he had used it on this new machine And so great troubleshooting Sort of Tip if you want to call it that is Your assumptions going in it can cost you and so he went to submit his uh first assignment And you know launched this submit app, which is great because the teachers can grade inside it and all that good stuff And he navigated to the folder where he saved his code And it was blank and immediately he was like crap this the first time i'm doing it It's not m1 compatible like there's some problem or monoray or whatever it is Major issue and he's like okay. Well I know there is a version of this app that runs in ubuntu. So let me figure out how to set up a virtual ubuntu machine on my Uh on my mac. Well, the first thing he did is read has some he goes to read college read has some Virtual machines that you can remote into but you can't install apps on them, which he found out So it was like, okay, can't do that. So then he figured i'll set up my own vm Which on an m1 gets There's a there's a narrower path that you must walk to set up virtual machines on the m1 and so he did that and Tried to get ubuntu running and he did And but couldn't get this submit app to run in ubuntu because it's like sort of unsupported and yada yada And so six hours have gone by of him trying to solve this problem And then we just happened to have a scheduled zoom call with uh, you know Just a family kind of zoom thing we were chit chatting and he told me about all this I'm like, yeah, well good luck. You know, you know, like you'll figure it out and as often happens when you take yourself out of the weeds of troubleshooting and let your brain process and You know get some food and Deal with the things that your body needs to do and all that stuff At least this is what I find sometimes the brain keeps going on the back burner And sure enough he realized that he had also changed Not just to an m1, but he had changed his file naming conventions for this semester And he figured he would start putting the dates in his names And how would he put the dates in with slashes and as soon as he removed the slashes Everything appeared in the file browser and he was able to submit his stuff So yeah, the you know those weird characters The mac is more forgiving than pretty much any other operating system and most cloud services Including iCloud and that's um, you know, that's the lesson that he uh, that he learned here So uh, and and that that patrick helped this one too. So Yeah, watch those weird characters and file names Doesn't anybody already parsed through these days But well, yes fair. So yeah, yeah Like you saw the one, um, you know about code injection attacks. I don't know if you ever saw this, uh xkcd, I think is the the cartoon but um Here's what happened if you don't write a good parser in basically the just of the cartoon is that um, the school called and said, um Our database is corrupted and it's like well Why is that my fault? They're like, why did you name your kid drop table? Oh a little bobby tables. Yes little bobby tables If you don't know in in a uh database and a sequel database drop whatever, um Basically deletes that data So don't name your your kid drop table. Cool Uh, Pete, I'm gonna ask you to mute your mic something happened when you were muting and unmuting and now your game is like Super hot. So we're getting lots of sorry about that. Okay. Let's see if that changed over it did not Is that any better or no, that's better. Whatever you just did Pete. Thank you Yes, cool Whatever you did. Thank you. Thank you. Perfect. That's no, it's better than muting the problem solved. I like that But yeah, I didn't want anyone to hear the door closing in the background Yeah, little bobby tables. Uh, we'll put a um, we'll put a link to that comic john. That's a that's a great one. Yeah, yeah, yeah Xk cd, but yeah, yeah, what did they um, they uh named them with like semi colons and and You know all that stuff with the with the mysql drop tables command. I like it But yes, yeah, be careful of that stuff. Um, it's it can be can be headachey. Yeah All right John you want to take us to allison allison's got a good hack here Allison says listener both our shows add to bias tip me off to this tip You know how all the standard tripods use a one quarter inch 20 thread per inch screw Uh, I didn't know that. Um, it turns out lampshades do too That means if you're in a hotel room or pretty much anywhere and need a tripod just unscrew the lampshade and move the lamp anywhere You'd like and you have a tripod She's even sent us a photo and I verified it with my point and shoot as well because um that's uh That's the standard on cameras I like it. I love hacks like this. What a great thing. Yeah, this is um, this reminds me of when I was in my I think it was I was in my brother-in-law's apartment in new york city and needed to record an episode of something that might have been this show or a small business show or something and uh I you know, I brought my little uh audio technical mic which has a Like a really short mic stand. I'm like I need it higher up What can I place it on top of usually in hotels? I try to find like books or you know something and then oh right So if you're watching the video, you get to see that pete is taking this tip in this moment A paper towel roll is perfect to bring the mic up You drop the stand down the middle of it You leave the the whole roll so that you get some insulation and some balance and so now With allicin's tip I can use the lampshade for my light And it you know, it wouldn't be right in front of me to be off to the side Which is how light should be when you're trying to light for video and uh, and I use the paper towel roller Although I get a paper towel roller in a hotel room is tough. So I think I need to travel with a better mic stand but You know, but yeah, and then of course, I'm so thick when dave mentioned it I'm thinking well, how's this thing could have stand up because I'm thinking just the cardboard core Take the middle core. No, man You could you can use the whole thing No, we'll get there. That's right. That's right. They let me fly airplanes They do let you fly airplanes big heavy ones that are yeah, could you could you use the um, uh toilet paper roll? Nah, too small. I guess Maybe Oh, yeah, yeah, it would be too short is all but but like the same concept two toilet paper rolls would work That that would be fine. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, that would be fine All right Fun, uh, you want to take us to listener joe john Uh, yes so Joe says I was getting irritated by the behavior of safari when I linked to an article in an email to try to read it Instead of opening the article a new tab safari would open a new window But the behavior wasn't consistent and I only figured out what was happening when I realized that this is undesired behavior that this undesired behavior Only occurred when safari was open to a tab group rather than in its standard mode Make sense since safari doesn't want to open a new tab in a particular tab group unless you explicitly do so yourself in a random A new link incoming from your email app or elsewhere is not necessarily intended to go into a tab group Okay, I don't use tab groups. I like this You know, I've tried to use tab groups and this makes sense, right? That you wouldn't want to add to a tab group. My issue is The way that I started with tab groups um It might be the wrong example, but I when I do my banking every month I have a list of all the websites that I need to visit right that each credit card that I need to pay Each bank account that I need to reconcile all of that good stuff, right? And so I um, I Somebody somebody made somebody has decided what the episode image is going to be for today And it just appeared on my screen and you're going to love it. You've already seen it But I you know, so what I do is I have all those tabs or all those those things open in tabs And then as I go through each one I close it, right? And That way I know that I'm finished with whatever that account or website or you know, whatever it is I need to check The problem is That doesn't really work in tab groups because a tab group remembers what you did to it Which is why new links won't open in it because it doesn't want it to save that But if I close things in a tab group, well, that also remains So I'm still using a bookmark group a bookmark folder as my As my banking tab group, but I have like like all the switches that I have in my house I have in another folder that would be a good one to put In a tab group so I can just switch to that tab group I can see all my network switches and manage them and then just change out and boom. I'm good to go So yeah, all right. I I'm talking myself into how to use tab groups properly. So And evidently when you're in a google doc and someone paste a picture at the top It scrolls you to the top. So I didn't even know that my quick tip was next and my quick tip is from You know, I'm a fubo tv user and one of the things I often use The fubo app for Is watching live sports on a slight delay. We'll call it. You know, we've been watching the broons lately And I like to you know, let it get 10 minutes into the game or so So that I you know, at least the first period break I can sort of skip over a little bit You know, because hockey games have those 18 minute period breaks and it's you know, that's a long time So, you know, we'll we'll be doing whatever we're doing around the house finishing up dinner The the fubo will start recording the game And uh, and then you know 10 15 minutes in I'll go to join the game When I turn on the fubo app Like many of the streaming Service apps it wants to show me live tv. I don't know why this is I you know It knows I record things it can see that I never watched live tv and yet it insists upon shoving it in my face And what live tv does it shove in my face? The broons game that I was planning on going back to the beginning of and watching And so I had gotten into this routine where I would Turn on the tv and then I would start saying, you know La la la and I would put my hand like in front of my face So so is to block the score and hope that I could hit the pause or exit whatever button in time Before I learned the progress of the game and then might as well just watch it live if I already know And so I sent a note to fubo about this and they had a great hack I also Requested that they put a feature in that I could just turn off. Don't show me the live tv. It's totally fine Just bring me to my recordings tab. I'm good. You know, give me a place to start here, but um, but their tip was Put different channels in your favorites list And this works with the other streaming services that shove live tv in your face too And so they were like put the weather channel in Put, you know Something in that that is not what the animal planet. I think it was one of the ones they recommended I found like the smithsonian channel and a couple of others that that show interesting things the history channel So that when I turn on my tv, there's something, you know, the history channel is definitely not going to be telling me about the current status of the Bruins game They're going to be telling me about things that happened long before we had television most of the time and so Uh, it was just a great little hack and it has Improved my quality of life far more than something like that should But I love being able to turn on my tv and not feel myself all stressed about trying to you know, avoid the inevitable So it's good I like it. I don't know Don't sh right. Yeah Yeah, like I it had gotten to the point where it was like I would tell the family and like stay in the other room And I'll you know, I'll I'll take I'll take this one for the team You know, so yeah, it's much better this way. I like it. I've got a quick ancillary comment to that Yeah, man, which is with these tv services about Yeah, 18 months ago now. I went to AT&T tv which became direct tv stream Yep, and it was the first year for 49 bucks and then 90 bucks a month for the remainder of the year Yeah, and I look I went and looked I'm like, oh, I'm at 98 bucks Well, it turns out they charge you five bucks for the a month for the piece of equipment Which I don't need but you can't return that you're you're buying that But I called and said this is More than I expected to be paying and they said oh good customer discount for you $20 a month off for a year So call your providers tell them you're paying too much ask them for a discount and That's 240 bucks in my pocket for just just for asking just for picking up the phone and asking Yeah, man, that's great advice. I and that's true with I mean, that's a good life skill, right? Like that's not just your tv provider call any but call yourself provider if especially if you're like Either not a sponsor of this episode or of any episodes right now But you know, I know you you and I are on mint mobile peak because we got sick and tired of paying AT&T and Verizon and all that stuff But if for whatever reason you choose to stay with an AT&T Like literally less than half. Yeah, I'm literally saving thousands of dollars a year But if for whatever reason you're choosing to stay with the people that charge you too much Call them and tell them that they charge you too much They will lower your rate because they know that if you're making that phone call You know about, you know, whatever the xfinity mobile or mint mobile or any of the others There's another one that that is a Verizon mbn. Oh, that doesn't require you to have xfinity service and I sent it to you John, I'll find it I'll find it so that we can share it with people during cool stuff found today, which we will get to I promise Uh, the next thing that I want to do though is talk about our first a few sponsors. If that works for you, John Okay All right. Our first sponsor today is otherworld computing with the owc mini stack stx So mini stack it's a little box that is the same form factor shape size as a mac mini And it is built to stack your mac mini on top of it. What does it do? Well, it's got four thunderbolt 4 ports. So one of them plugs into your mac mini And then the other three can be used to Expand to whatever you want because it's got a thunderbolt 4 hub inside it, right? So you're good to go there It's also got inside it two connectors a universal hard drive ssd bay and An nvme m.2 ssd slot and you can use those in a variety of ways You can even combine them in a raid one configuration So you get to put the amount of storage in there that you want going onto their site You can put up to 18 terabytes into the hard drive storage bay. You can put eight terabytes into the ssd bay That's 26 terabytes of total capacity Right and and then you know you can sort of make that work however you want So it's there to take your mac mini And expand it in whatever way you want of course you could use this with any kind of mac It doesn't have to be a mac mini or even a windows machine I so I presume would work fine with this But it it looks great stacked underneath your mac mini you got to check this thing out You'll see it at max sales comm and max sales comm is where john and I go whenever we need to expand our max These folks know what they're doing They know how to figure out what you need and they know how to support you and make sure that you are solving the problems And expanding your system in the way that you want to expand it go check it out max sales comm It's the the mini stack stx that we're talking about here and our thanks To otherworld computing for sponsoring this episode You know as an apple admin the more you let users control which apps are installed on their devices the better for you And that's why our sponsor kanji self service app lets you do just that on both ios and mac os kanji provides Next generation apple device management for your mac os ios ipad os and tv os devices They know what they're doing in this regard and what's cool They in fact the reason they're doing this sponsorship is they want to hear from you They want to know what you need To serve your users best and they want you to go to kanji kandji i.io Mgg for a free demo or trial like i mentioned their self service app You can have it show users A curated list of the apps that they can install on their own You can customize that self service app with your own branding and help text and software categories even And apps in kanji's auto app catalog can be set to deliver via self service And once they're installed they're kept patched and updated automatically This is a device management solution for high growth businesses that run on apple devices kanji provides it teams with what they need Because they know that you often struggle with complex systems And you have to create these solutions from scratch when trying to get your company's apple device is secure and configured A new mac can be transformed into a ready-for-work computer with all the right apps and settings in place by using kanji So you're going to want to check this out and like i said, they want to hear from you So please go to kanji.io slash mgg. That's kandji dji Dot i o slash mgg for a free demo and trial You're gonna love what you're gonna see go check it out and our thanks to kanji for sponsoring this episode All right, let's get to some questions. Shall we? Why not? All right Steven has a question. Okay One of my clients needs a photo manager that will find duplicates and facilitate the trimming I recall you touching on one or two of these utilities many months ago, but I can't recall its name in a search of old show notes didn't help me Needs to run on an m1 macbook air any thoughts Yes, I have a thought so um, I got my google fugo and dave and um, so first off You know typically if you keep all your photos in a single app like uh photos Which is what I do. Um, it does a pretty good job of detecting dupes I found if you try to add pictures and it already has one that has the same name Um, it says hey, what are you doing? You really want to put two of these in here? Um So, uh, so the client i'm sure has photos in in numerous places, which is why we want to do this um So I did find one dave so the first one that came up when I did a search is something called surprise duplicate photo finder Um, and I branded on my photos database number one. It's really quick. I mean I have like 140 gigs of photos left sure um And it did it was interesting dave because it did what I'll call a fuzzy match In that it went through my pictures and like some of them Were from like days of mac world past And it would show two pictures and the thing is Sometimes they were exactly the same but sometimes they were close to each other So I kind of like that feature because it's like well, do you really need two pictures of this? Because you know they're pretty much the same Interesting that's cool. And that was just that was duplicate finder or that was photos itself that did that for you No, no, uh, no, it's a it's a program and you know, we'll have a link here a duplicate photos finder Okay, all right That all right, we'll put we'll put a link for that there for sure I found a summary. Oh go ahead. Yeah And then another one I found a summary at we the geek uh top seven best duplicate photo Finders for mac in 2022 um, and that lists various uh other ones gemini is one of them Anyways, it's a good summary has has uh You know check that out so between those two I I think you should be okay I would use power photos to do this. I of course, I didn't know anything about duplicate photos finder but power photos is the The app that I use for all kinds of photos library management and It definitely does a great job of finding dupes when I'm merging libraries together so for sure it I think it would it would help here too, but Yeah, no, it's good to have lots of options Good good. All right Yeah, hopefully hopefully all that all that helps while I'm uh While I'm doing this would you bring I'll do the the next one here if you would bring peep back in because it looks like he He left us I will take us to david here and david Uh Has a a follow-up to something we talked about in the last episode. He said I heard when you mentioned using Something to store your product manuals. He says I thought about using books for this Um, and so that I could you know have one place where all of my product manual pdfs were stored. He says Uh, and it works However, I wanted to share the collection with my wife and couldn't find a way to do it The only thing I found in books was the way to share individual pdf files. Do you have An answer for this and I think I do Actually, it was the listener in the last episode was talking about using notes not books And if you create a user manuals notebook Uh in inside or you know folder, I guess is what we call them in notes So you create a folder in notes called Uh, you know user manuals or whatever you can then share that folder with You know your family or other iCloud users and and they should be able to see it and and participate With it and get all the stuff. So that's that honestly That's going to be the simplest way. There's there's a million different ways that we could come up with this Right, we could do a shared dropbox folder a shared You know, Synology Drive folder you could share an evernote notebook like you could do it all But I think a shared notes folder if you're talking with other iCloud users is the uh is the key so Coolio. All right. Um any thoughts on that john? No, okay, cool. Let's uh, let's go to Todd shall we while we're talking about uh notes and the Interesting things that it can do because it's macOS Yes, um All right when I use my iphone open notes click the add new icon Um click my camera click scan documents scan a one page document and save it I can select the text from my scan and copy it within the notes app when I open the notes on my mac Uh running Monterey and double click on the scan. I get a pop-up window with the scan very similar to the preview app I can also select a text and copy it if I drag the scan out of the note to the finder and open the pdf with preview Or accurate reader. I cannot copy the text. I assume ios and macOS are using live text Uh to allow me to copy text and not actually ocr'ing the scan and say saving it in the pdf Um And that's correct. Yeah, I think that's right. I mean you're right It's using the live text feature of of Monterey and in ios 15 to do that I mean that is ocr. So like I don't want to say it's not ocr because it most definitely is But I don't think it's it's not converting the document from a picture into You know like a pdf with text or something like that it remains a picture But it it it has ocr'd it and that's one of the the handy things is like that gets to Usually link with spotlight the right way. I mean it's still not perfect, but you know Yeah, so if you want that um, if you want a searchable pdf Uh, you'll need some third-party software to do it. Uh, I agreed. Yes. The most obvious is the dobby acrobat, right? But from what I tell tell they want money for uh, for doing that for you Another option would be if you have an image scanner see if their software can ocr the pdf this came up in Another question But I have the Fujitsu scan snap home software And they license uh, and if you go to the bout box, but they license something called abbey fine reader Which certainly uh ocr's but here's a bonus tip. Dave. I'm like You know, I'm I'm cheap man. I don't want to spend any money on doing this I found a website that'll ocr your pdf for free Oh All right What's that website? It's in the notes here. Hold on. Okay. Well, yeah, we want to put it We want people to know what it's what where they're going. So um, yeah, yeah, yeah, it looks like it's sedgda s e j d a Is what you found? Uh, all right. That's cool. We'll put that we'll put that in the show notes I would also say um Check Whatever app you are using to scan things on your phone I mean if you're using apple's app, then you already know what the capabilities and limitations of that are because we just talked about it But you know, if you if you well if you have pdf pen on your iphone or pdf scan or any, you know, any of those Things that you're using to scan pdf's into your create pdf's in your iphone with uh with your camera Many of those will offer ocr. They're not all going to be free. In fact ocr is usually going to be one of the premium, you know plus features uh that they put there But but yeah, there's these engines are everywhere and you may not need it to ocr your document, right like live text You may not need a final document that's ocr You might just want to be able to search based on the text and something and that Live text will do for you, which is pretty cool. I'm curious to see where apple takes that next it's it's They are using ocr in a way that Most people need Not the way it's been delivered to most people in the past, right? Because it's been delivered in the past like if you want to ocr Then you have to create a brand new document that now is text and is not your original Whereas live text says you took this as a picture. You probably want it as a picture But you want to know what the text is in the picture, don't you that's all and I kind of like what apple's doing with it Which is you know They they right they mentioned the pdf You you mentioned pdf pen and you know again set app right comes with set app Um, so pdf pen and that ocr is it now set up isn't free But man, you get a lot of cool stuff with it And one of those things goes back to an earlier tip, which is gemini, which is a duplicate finder. So yeah, right? Will that find duplicate photos will gemini do that? You can drag your photos library into gemini and it will find them. I was doing it last night Wow gigabytes saved Oh man, that's cool. I had no I you know I knew like if you would ask me for a duplicate file finder I would have said gemini had no idea it would do it for photos But of course it'll do it for photos And yeah, you're right only thing the one caution I will add to that is close photos Before you have gemini delete the duplicates or it'll corrupt the database and get all mad at you It'll restart and it'll recover for it. Maybe it did for me But yeah, why take the chance? Yeah, let let Pete's lesson be a lesson for us all Don't corrupt that database. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's really is the the the core of the show, isn't it? Is is the lessons of one can become the lesson for many Is is what it is like like lucas is six hour tour the other day Like yeah, that wasn't like I like we've all been there I was I was talking to a friend of mine who I've hired to do some programming with one of the other projects That we do and I was telling him that story the other day and he's like Yeah, he's like You know that like there's something to be said for experience But of course you get that experience by doing those six hour tours like you you have to do those But you know as I said to him, he's like, yeah, I would never put slashes in a file name I'm like, yeah, I know like but you and I know that because we've been through, you know, not just one But probably five different six hour tours trying to solve the problem a different way until we realized what the problem was So hopefully our experience can help you that's the whole idea of what we do here and it's not just our experience It's it's our collective when I say our I mean the audience that the the Mackie Keb family's collective experience We all help each other. That's the key All right, let's see if we can help Susan shall we she um she has some cameras and she wants them to talk to each other She says I've been collecting different brands of security cameras will call them For a number of years trying to find the sweet spot between functionality and price point I have several of the following amazon cloud cams casa cams yufi cams and wise cams for a total of 10 cameras inside The house and for outside It is time consuming and certainly not productive to chase the pets around the house by going to four different cam apps So that I have a so I have abandoned my search for the perfect webcam And just want to standardize on one webcam. That makes sense. Okay She says i'm just having difficulty in determining which one that should be given that I want to maintain at least 10 cameras inside the house The inside webcams are all at ground level and track things like pet feeding dishes litter boxes And all the crevices that my nervous cat who does not want to go into the vet can hide These are this is smart. I like this idea. This is a person that knows how to live in her home. This is great Okay, uh, she says the amazon cloud cam was by far the best in quality But it also was the most expensive and they have been discontinued Although amazon says it will continue to support them casa is the next best in quality and also in price At just under 50 a camera. I've got a good deal on some yufi cameras And I like their quality too. I use them inside and outside the house The largest number of webcams that I have are the wise brand and although they're the least expensive I'm not buying any more as the quality of the picture the slowness to connect The ability to get knocked offline and the sometimes very frequent need to update the cameras all put them firmly at the bottom of my list Unfortunately, I have the most of these because they were cheap If I could slave all of these cameras into one master app where I could look at all of the indoor cameras at once I would be happiest But I've done a little searching and it doesn't look as though that's possible If I'm missing something, of course, let me know, please Really, I'm just wondering if there is an inside webcam that you would recommend While a setup for outdoor cameras would be nice. I'm not as concerned about having a master setup for the outside cameras Which are a mixture of yufi and wise is that generally only need to look at one at a time. All right I feel you Susan. I am in the same boat. I don't have exactly the same brands But I have lots of different brands the way I have and I want one interface and you know what I have one This may or may not work for you, but I'll share what I've done And then we'll talk about how to zoom out a little bit and solve it I have the home app apple's home app Is my one place to go and look at all of my cameras? But of course most of my cameras are not natively home kit compatible So the way I saw that is I use an app called hoops You could also use an app called home bridge. They are both effectively the same thing In fact hoops is based on home bridge. They just have different interfaces and ways of working with them These need to run on a server in your house or a computer in your house I should say that that is on all the time that could be one of your max But that means leaving one of your max awake 24-7 I have one. I have hoops running on my Synology disk station. You could run it on your raspberry pi You can even buy a box from hoops directly that will run it. So there are lots of options What hoops and home bridge do is they link your non home kit devices with home kit Not every brand of device is supported But most of them are and it's got great camera support. I have my ring cameras In home kit, which is something that ring said that they would bring to us and they still have it But uh, but it doesn't matter because I've got them in there. I have my yufi cams are already home kit compatible I'm trying to think of what other cameras I have. I have a fos cam Just a and this may be another way for you to go and I'll get more into it in a second But my fos cam camera is not Linked, I mean, there's the fos cam app, but it is just an ip based camera Where I can, you know, log into the camera with a web browser But also so can hoops and so it just logs into it and makes it a home kit camera Uh That that is it's a fantastic solution because everybody in my house has Uh home, you know the home app on their iphone because home kit, you know is apples thing and it works great The other way you could do this Uh, or at least the other way I could do it is using synologies Uh, synology dissertation has an app called surveillance station, which Also will link to some cameras most of the cameras that it will link to are like my fos cam camera, which are just You know open source cameras and not locked into an ecosystem like a ring or a You know a nest cam or any of those, you know that your wise camera anything I don't think surveillance station will work with it doesn't work with most of those it might work with some but That's not really the path for someone that's already gotten investment into these ecosystems to head down But that those you know That's the solution if you want to tie many different cameras together is if if the cameras work with surveillance station Then and you have a certain synology distation. So that's a lot of ifs That would be one way to go the other way is is hoops or home bridge Otherwise, you've just got to pick one and I don't have a specific I mean if if folks out there have a specific brand to standardize on let us know You know feedback at macicab.com as we said, but like I don't know that there is any one perfect one The perfect one is whatever works for you. So I've got a question. Yeah, man So I've got like an 11 year old mac book air. It sounds like it doesn't need much Processing power. No no hoops and home bridge. Do not that's right. Yeah So if you go to something like refurb.me and buy a 300 dollar 10 year old mac book air or something like that You can leave that running all the time You could yeah, I go ahead. Oh the other question was Will the apple tv? Is there an app that'll run that no it doesn't run the home app It it can run the home app, but it's not going to run home bridge. So yeah, but it bought an apple tv Would be the perfect, you know lightweight server to run They just apple doesn't allow us to install hoops or home bridge on it, right? But it could so it could Yeah, yeah um Yeah, I'm trying to think about uh Other other solutions. Oh, you said a mac book air that would be fine. I would look for A non-screened computer like a mac mini or something Just so that you're not dealing Only because of the form factor, right, you know a mac book air you've got to leave open Somewhere right where's a mac mini and you can run it in headless mode, right? Where you just remote into it and You know and use it that way so You'd need a monitor to get it set up and rolling, but otherwise then headless would be fine. So I don't know. What do you think john? Um I don't know. Um, if you're gonna get a camera. Yeah, um, I like the Surveillance station thing, but that only works with ip addressable cameras But they give you a huge list of the ones that they support. So yeah, yeah Yeah, exactly. I want to consider that before you get a camera. I have a I got the ufi one which is in Yeah, and that's not ip accessible. At least I don't think it is. Um, the ufi ones. Yes, they are I've been able to connect to the you some of the ufi cameras with uh, With surveillance station the other thing that you can use as bryan and roe and our chat points out Is that wise cameras, which he has a ton of Have a beta firmware or an alternative firmware that wise has made available To allow you to effectively just make them ip cameras And then yes, you could link those with a surveillance station or or or what have you. Um, so That that could work too. Yeah, and you know, I don't know that that's going to solve the issue of it being um you know Needing updates regularly or the low quality certainly it's not going to fix any of that But if you've already got a bunch of them, you know, again, you would also need a sonology distation So unless you've already got that stuff, it's I do not recommend that path Right, like you're going to be spending far more money than then you would need to to just buy a bunch of standalone cameras that work Then in the same app because they're all from the same vendor. So yeah, yeah, yeah But yes, if you've got a bunch of those and you have a sonology distation, why not try it out? But yeah, rtsp is the protocol that cameras use the open source cameras use that's what happens when you install the wise cam beta firmware That's what happens on the ufi cameras. You can go I was able to go into the ufi app and turn on rtsp support for my cameras And then I was just able to point distation at it or surveillance station at it and it worked great. Yeah, yeah All right, you want to take us to steve john Yes, uh, steve has a question for us regarding the need for solutions such as time machine or carbon copy cloner and similar backup solutions I store all my files photos documents work stuff on my sonology, which is backed up by a cloud sync to back plays And in iCloud I have the two terabyte plan, which is more than adequate for my needs If my macbook was to get stolen or my mac mini at home Was to die or any other tragedy afflicted any of my machines? I lose nothing I would just have to reinstall my applications and I'd be up and running So that being said is there's still any value in using time machine or carbon copy cloner If I store nothing locally on any of my max, what am I really? Uh, what am I really backing up my applications? I'm interested in your thoughts and your advice you guys speak so highly of products such as carbon copy cloner It makes me often wonder if I'm missing out on something I should be doing just to be safe Are there benefits to carbon copy cloner or time machine beyond just backing up my files? um I think he's pretty much following the uh, there's this thing called the three two one backup rule Uh, three copies of the data two different types of media one site One copy off site and it sounds like he's doing that. Um, the only thing you're missing is having a bootable clone Um time machine won't really do that for you, but that's exactly what carbon copy cloner is for um The benefit I would see is that it helps reduce the amount of time you have to uh I mean he said yeah, all I have to do is reinstall my applications But if you have a clone then you don't have to reinstall your applications. So that's that's my take Yeah, yeah Yeah, I You know, I use time machine I don't Prioritize it It has proven And I've been using time machine since it started right so I I am bringing baggage with me into this conversation and into my current decisions Uh time machine has not always been the most reliable. It gets flaky. The backups get corrupted. You have to restart them It it's not very good at telling you when it Is not working which I think is terrible Uh, you know, so like I have it on my calendar once a month to check my backups and I go and I look and make sure everything's backing up I am never surprised by anything That is not working other than time machine because my other backup apps will eat like carbon copy cloner will email me when it's failing That I like that. That's good feedback to get it, you know Whereas time machine you have to like you have to go and seek out The whether or not it's succeeding and that I don't like that about it. So I don't It's weird, right because I I let time machine run. I absolutely do Um, and if I there are times when It is the first place I go to restore from Because it's so easy and right there at my fingertips But I don't expect it to work and I think that May be the the most telling piece of information I've shared is It is not the thing like when I if I were to go into time machine and find out Oh, yeah, you know, it hasn't been backing up for two weeks And so it doesn't have the copy of that file that I wanted yesterday I'd be like, all right. Well, I'll just go to the next place You know, I'll go to my my cloud's my Synology drive Which syncs all my files and does versioning or I'll go to my carbon copy cloner backups because I know that You know those worked because I got the email about it, you know those kinds of things So I wouldn't I would be disappointed but I would not be in trouble when I found that time machine had been failing me for an unspecified period of time Um So yeah, like do I recommend not using it? I mean I don't recommend only using it. Let's put it that way, right Um Yeah, and the nice thing about carbon copy cloner is that it does what they call a backup health check you could find this in Advanced settings performance and analysis And that basically compares the the files between the source and the destination And if there's a difference it'll it'll take care of it and probably one or two. Yeah Yeah Because it could be a sign that some drive is somewhere is failing Yeah, yeah Well, maybe that's the theme of this episode is silent failures are bad Because time machine failing silently. That's bad My boiler failing silently Because it has no propane All so bad. I will say this I have an ecobee thermostat in the house And it sent me an alert that said there might be something wrong with your boiler Uh, we have been calling for heat for four hours and in that period of time the temperature has dropped three degrees That is a valuable piece of alert to get Your backup has failed your backup has failed. Yeah, but like it it figured it out Like that's you know, it it can't know what's going on with my boiler But it can know that it's trying to get heat and the temperature is dropping and correlating those two Like I found that really really smart. So If it only sent an email to the gas company Well, that would be the next thing wouldn't it, you know, um, we did get a new boiler This is a this gas this propane boiler that we have is is new but um, I opted not to pay the I mean, it would have been thousands extra to get the wi-fi Boiler but if I had I it would have sent me the error code f4, right? Like when I went into the the our boiler room, I you know, it has a little led or lcd screen on it Rather and it said f4 and I was easy able to look that up and it was like, oh, no flame detected like, okay Well, what what what what things are required for a flame propane would be one of them so All right Hey, we have some uh, some cool stuff found and one other Probably one other question to go through the next thing that I want to do Is talk about our next back a batch a back batch of sponsors if that works for you john Okay All right. Hey, you know the last year has been crazy, right? I mean, I don't have to tell you that But what I can tell you is that I have been sleeping really well over the last year And I attribute that to the fact that for the last year plus I have been sleeping on a mattress from our sponsor helix sleep Helix sleep has a quiz that takes just two minutes to complete and matches your body type and sleep preferences To the perfect mattress for you and helix knows that everybody's unique, right? So they have several different mattress models to choose from soft medium firm They've got mattresses that are great for cooling you down if you sleep hot and even a helix plus mattress for plus size folks It's very cool. They know what they're doing Uh, we wound up, you know, I took the quiz of course and uh, lisa took the quiz as well We wound up with the midnight mattress and as I said, it's been wonderful Really a huge upgrade over what we were using previously. It's amazing. I I love getting into bed with this thing every night It's fantastic. So if you're looking for a mattress, go take the quiz Order the mattress that you're matched to and the mattress will come right to your door ship for free You don't ever need to go to a mattress store Again, and you do this all at helix sleep.com slash mgg. That's where you go and take the quiz and go through all this stuff It just takes a couple of minutes It's actually kind of fun because they ask, you know a few questions and it's like, oh, yeah, okay, cool Helix is offering up to 200 dollars off all mattress orders right now and Two free pillows for you our listeners at helix sleep.com slash mgg So make sure you go helix sleep.com slash mgg and our thanks to helix sleep for sponsoring this episode Next up is true bill. 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I know pun intended They went and found like we had a bunch of subscriptions for mac observer that we needed to go and like cancel and it Went and found them and made it super easy to just like get rid of them But it also monitors my spending and it'll tell me, you know, how much I spent each week or it'll like recently I don't I forget what I bought but it it said hey you spent, you know, whatever $104 on a category that you don't usually spend That's a good thing to know that that expense was fully legitimate and valid But it's kind of a nice thing that they notice, you know anomalies from your patterns. That's a good thing True bill has over 2 million users, right? 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This is great stuff. You've got to check this out Harbinger has an undeniable talent for getting his guests to share never been heard before stories And thought-provoking insights. He's a master interviewer and without fail He pulls out tactical bits of wisdom in each episode point blank Jordan harbinger is smart funny and easy to listen to and you'll be pressed to find an episode without excellent conversation I love listening to jordan's show when i'm driving in the car and stuff like that It's funny and like I said super actionable. You can't go wrong with adding the jordan harbinger show to your rotation It's incredibly interesting and there's never a dull show search for the jordan harbinger show That's h.a.r.b. Is in boy i.n. As in nancy ger On apple podcast spot a fire wherever you listen to podcasts and our thanks to the jordan harbinger show for sponsoring this show all right, hey, um We got a note from scott that I think is a note A lot of us are going to be getting or have gotten in the last few days scott says I have had what google calls g suite legacy now for years He's been using this to manage. We all have used g suite legacy If we started with it to manage our email google Has they've now moved on and it's called google or a workspace But it is the System where google is your email provider for your custom domain, right? And it was built for companies But they allowed this free version or they had this free version and anybody who had it when they sunsetted it What 11 years ago or nine years ago or something was able to keep it for free? And it was great, you know, we used it in fact we used it we use it for macky cab We use it for mac observer. We use it for backbeat. We use it. I use it for my family stuff Like it was it's a great great thing and it's really nice to have email managed for free But we all knew this was going to come to an end and That end is this year google sent an email out to all of us Saying that this was sunsetting and I think as of july 1st We would need to either move our domains away or upgrade to the paid version And it's you know as as scott as listener scott put it in his email He says I don't want to pay google 36 $36 a month for email with five family members in the shared account Because it's you know, he's got he's got six accounts that he uses he says do you have any thoughts so The first thought that I want to share is that this will be an ongoing conversation This has just happened for all of us There I will tell you that for completely different reasons I went looking for a solution like this a month ago did not know that this was coming So, uh, I did some research I couldn't find anything that would let you manage your emails custom domain for free other than and and you know We talked about this iCloud's iCloud plus's custom domain Right and that may be the answer if you're already paying for iCloud that can be the answer for you However, that's pretty limited right now and may or may not do what you need But if you have everybody in your iCloud family account that you need to do that you might be able to make it work It's not as flexible nearly as flexible as pretty much every other solution out there But it is simple and it is Included with even the least expensive iCloud plan. So that would be one way to go However, the first thing that you're going to want to do if you are on this Plan is something that pete you pointed out to me the other night Google has a little survey for people who are using this better to be looking good better to be like, oh, we'll take it Yeah, yeah, it's the hive mind man. It's great. So google has this little survey and we put a link to it Uh, you have to be logged in as your g-suite legacy account to go fill this out But log into that then go click on the link that we have in the show notes to go fill out the survey They are asking people. Hey Are you using this for truly for personal use because and they already clearly have some thoughts on this because they have they have some Parameters they're like if you're using it for personal use only and have 10 accounts or less In your g-suite we want to hear from you And so they clearly are Considering they have a they have a solution They're just trying to figure out how many people are going to try and take advantage of it And how to compartmentalize it so that the right people take advantage of it and not the wrong people in google's mind, right? So I I think there is hope For this and certainly we have several months If if you are In this scenario where you have these, you know this g-suite legacy and you're getting it for free I would not make any moves right now I would breathe and wait and figured out google's saying you have to fill out this survey by april first, right? So we've got two months to do that And then sometime between april first and the end of june when you know, this is all supposed to change We're going to get a lot more messaging from google about what the future of this looks like What we're also going to get in this, you know Several month period of time is feedback from all of you some more research from all of us here And we will find a way to get we will find the best solution to move forward And I don't think it's going to be a universal best, right? iCloud custom domains are going to work for a lot of people Uh, and then for those of us, uh, for whom they don't for specific reasons Well, hopefully we'll find something else We might wind up paying for email though, and I'm not going to say that's a bad thing. I had moved my Uh main email account over to fastmail a couple of years ago when they first came on board as a sponsor for the show And I've been super happy with fastmail and they do custom domains Their spam filtering is actually I like it better than google's because I can configure it and it actually listens to me when I tell it Hey, you know, this this isn't spam. It doesn't put the next one into spam So there are options we might need to pay and it does get expensive when you've got multiple You know people in your family with you know, that all have accounts on the same domain, but uh, But yeah, we'll we'll get there together. How's that sound? Yeah Any I mean any thoughts from either of you out of the gate? Certainly, you know, let's get the conversation started go john. Yes, uh Maybe take a look at Synology office For hosting your own email. No, no for a well part of g-suite is is apps, right? Yeah, but you get that's free. They've announced that google docs will be free for everybody forever Yeah, no, no, this is just a this is just the email I mean, there are some other services that are part of the the paid portion of g-suite, but but no google docs is um That's free They've already announced that they announced that years ago that that that would all remain free But I will say I love using Synology office I use it for one of the companies we have here for all of our stuff because we decided we didn't want google Having our data and it it works great. Yeah. Yeah, but again That's certainly not free. You've got to go pay for a Synology distation To join that club. Yeah, the Synology distation could host your own email domain. I do not recommend Uh that for two reasons one, you don't want to be in control of your own mail server Trust me on this number two You don't want to be hosting your email on your home connection Even if your provider would let you and most will not most don't right? Yeah Yeah, like consolidated would consolidated has absolutely no limits on my connection pete I can do whatever I want with it But even still like I have no interest in in you know being a single point of failure on email My goodness No So well plus all the garbage. It's going to transit your IP absolutely. That's true. Yeah, right. I didn't even think about that And if someone I don't know I guess there are probably ways to hack you and take over your mail or use your mail server versus spam Oh, I'm awfully easily. Of course. Yeah Yeah, yeah, you don't want to be managing a mail server try like I I one of the happiest days of my life was the day I decided to stop being the person who managed a mail server Let alone the day that I actually stopped being the person who managed a mail server But just that the decision was the most freeing thing I'd ever been through up until that point. So yeah All right A couple of cool stuff found I promised earlier in the episode that I would share that mobile service That's a Verizon mvno mvno means it uses Verizon towers But they do their own billing and it is visible mobile service. I've got a link to it. It's a visible.com and I was looking quick on their page unlimited Plans or 25 bucks a month So you can do the math real fast knowing what you're paying for You know your your expensive carriers and of course then mint mobile is the other one that Like I said, they used to be a sponsor. That's what Pete and I use and that That's a t-mobile mvno, but uh works great. I've been I've been loving mint I got to pay for international because I'm going to be going to Mexico next month, but It isn't much though. You know little unlike the others who charge you 10 bucks a day Correct You know, you'll use it 10 bucks a year or maybe 20. That's it. Yeah, exactly I said, I remember saying to Lisa when we moved to mint I said, you know, when we travel out of the country It's going to feel like we're spending more money Because we are because there's this surcharge now to go to Mexico and Canada and pay for data there and all this stuff They're stuff. I said, but we just need to remember We're spending that out of the thousands per year that we say You know, so if we spend 100 bucks per year on international roaming, we're still way ahead of the game Even though in the moment, it doesn't feel like it. So yeah And well and I have another thing actually and I'll see if I can find the link for it. Okay. Um, I I have a thing called a pokey fight po ke Fi, okay that I use for my international data and it's a little it's smaller than a cigarette By it's like the old cellular Wi-Fi. Yeah. Yeah, it comes loaded with five gigs And I think it's 15 bucks for five gigs when it gets low And I just use Wi-Fi and I use Wi-Fi calling from all over the world It's it's worldwide right Yeah, and it comes from hong kong. It's a I want to guess it's about 160 bucks Comes loaded with its first five gigs and I think it's 15 bucks to load another five gigs on I'll see if I can find that link, but I put a link in the pokey fight in the show notes Yeah, and if you've got a referral link Pete feel free. We happy to share that in the show too. Wow That's what I carry with me for my international data. Yeah and phone calls and here's why here Here's how I found out I needed it Was uh, guess what of all the places I go Says a mint mobile says alaska and hawai are not supported. Well, hawaii it works But when i'm in alaska, I get no bars. Oh No roaming no nothing, but I can turn that on and I can make phone calls from alaska And and you're making phone calls from your number because you're using wi-fi calling. Yes Oh, this is a good solution Yeah Huh I knew there was a reason we had you on the show today, Pete every now and then, you know Better to be lucky than good. Hey, we got lucky today. I'll take it. Cool um speaking of home wi-fi and and and using cellular service, uh for Things like this patrick, uh his first contribution to cool stuff found this week Is cellmapper.net And uh, as soon as I find patrick in our our expanding list here, I'll explain why he says, um He says i've been using cellmapper.net For he has a home. He has one of those t-mobile Home hot spots, right? So you pay 50 bucks a month you get unlimited data And it's wi-fi, you know in your home Basically what you talked about with this pokey fi thing, pete, but you know built for to be permanent in in your house And he was getting slow service. And so I said, well, you know, maybe it's you know, you've got You know, maybe you're not too close to a tower or whatever And he says using cellmapper.net. I was able to determine the closest t-mobile tower Was on the northeast side of my house and I had our gateway device in my office hardwired Uh on the southeast side. So I moved it and uh Things have gotten better So cellmapper will let you know where your towers are Nearby and that can be helpful for a lot of reasons mostly just for geeky stuff But you know sometimes the geeky stuff like with patrick pays off. So thanks for the heads up about that patrick. That's good stuff Pretty good, huh? I like it. I never knew about cellmapper.net. This is why we do this show so we can learn Hey, uh, you want to take us to tod with his cool stuff found we got time for one or two more So we'll see where tod goes. All right. So a little background on this. We uh, uh in a prior show Someone had lost their uh sidebar folders and it's like Well, let me replace the finder p-list. Well as it turns out it's not in there Got it And then we thought well, how can I find out what? file that is stored in and um So that's the background. Yeah, um, if you want a handy way to track down where preference files is located that handles the finder sidebar use fs monitor.com Once you give it the proper security You can let it run in the background by making the change to your finder sidebar come back To fs monitor and we'll list out the files that change the tandy in this scenario But it can help in lots of others fs being Uh, so so I guess what it's doing is it's intercepting what we call fs events Which are file system events Very nice Yeah, I think I you I thought I used it Yeah, that's a pretty that's a pretty cool thing. I I I had used like saved searches to find like recently used files to Approximate this in the past But they never it never found everything like like especially p-list files Like you had to you had to trick the finder into showing you things. So Uh, I like this. That's good. That's good. All right. Well I find that a good place to uh Good place to bring in the band. It's uh, we've hit our we've hit our quota and I gotta tell you If it was 44 degrees in my office when we started this episode It's less it's less now my fingers are freezing as i'm scrolling down in the agenda here Uh One thing that I will do to warm up in the studios. I'll play my drums You can hear that if you uh, I'll put a link in the show notes the A band that I play and called fling we released our ep this week called the world is in our hands It's got six, uh, I think we put six songs on it. I can't remember But uh, all original stuff and I think you're gonna like it. It's on apple music I'll put the apple music link in there, but it's also on spotify and youtube and you know everywhere else. Yeah, p Oh, you were just That's great on spotify. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's on spotify. It's everywhere. Yeah, it's good stuff It's been fun. Um, what else do you want to tell him to go john? What do you have to what do you have to share? um There's always twitter.com. I am jonathan run. He's dave hamilton mackey cab is the podcast and Pilipi Pilipi there he is He had the band moved outside today to warm up. I I had to I had to coax them to come back in It's a good thing maybe 22, but at least a 20. That's right I have a I light a candle as you as many of you know went to record this before I record the show I like to have this minty smell in the air and so I've been warming my hands over that While we've been recording. I'm not proud folks. It's just how it is And you get to see one of my nice winter hats if you watch the youtube video today You can see us on youtube at mackey cub.com slash youtube that'll redirect you to our youtube channel Which I think is just youtube.com slash mackey cub podcast if I remember correctly All right, that's what I got. That's what we have. Thanks Thanks for listening folks. Thanks for having fun with us. Make sure you check out our sponsors at mackey cub.com slash sponsors And uh, yeah, thanks for coming p Thanks. Yeah, he's being had of course. Yeah Thanks, jon fun doing the show as always my friend You've been But the three other words that I think someone has for you What are three other words? What would those be? But we can each do one off start don't get caught