 Welcome to Mac Geek Gap episode 933 for June 20th, 2022. And welcome to Mac Geek Gap, the show where we take your questions that you send in to feedback at MacGeekGap.com. We take your tips that you also send in to the same address. Your cool stuff found. We mix those with some of our own tips and cool stuff found and sometimes even our own questions to form an agenda that we will talk through in a moment here. And the goal is by talking through this agenda, answering your questions, sharing your tips, sharing your cool stuff found. We each learn at least five new things every time we get together. Sponsors for this episode include LinkedIn jobs. We're at LinkedIn.com slash MGG. You can go and post your first job for free, for free. And also Wealthfront.com slash MGG, where you can get your first $5,000 managed for free for life at Wealthfront.com slash MGG. We'll talk more in depth about each of those in a moment here for now here in Durham, New Hampshire. I'm Dave Hamilton. And here with a crummy internet connection, which you know how you fix it folks, you power cycle your cable modem. This is Jennifer. Let's talk through your let's talk through troubleshooting that because we we this is take two of the episode, but we didn't get very far into take one because as soon as the theme music started, John's connection went to like all cyborg mode. And so the other than knowing that there was a problem, you want to talk through the troubleshooting steps that that we did, John, to isolate where the problem was. The troubleshooting step was do a ping to something and see if there's packet loss and there was packet loss. All right. So what was the something that you did a ping to? Ping www.apple.com. You can ping anything. But yeah, so the thing is, so I ran a ping test and it would say that most of them failed. So how do you solve that? I don't know. I've been having some issues with with my connection. Interesting. So what I want to what I'm what I was hoping to get to here is that we didn't just do one ping, right? Well, I think, yeah. So the thing is, is it my internal network? And it's like, well, let me ping my router. And so I ping my router and everything was fine on that. So it wasn't an internal network thing. It was definitely an external network thing. Yep. And that's that. And that's often my favorite way of doing this stuff, too, is like, I want to know where you want to, you know, it's the we call it the troubleshooting process, right? We want to narrow down. All right. Where's the problem? Because if, you know, we could blame your internet connection, which in this case is 100% correct, at least given the symptoms. But if you had some device that was causing either Wi-Fi interference, like I talked about last week or or just clogging up your network, maybe something was doing a backup. I don't know. You know, and like any of those things could cause your internal network to go south. So it's always good to isolate where the problems are. So yeah, when I was troubleshooting the issues with something recently, like I was pinging different devices on my network and noticing that I had good connections to some and bad connections to others. But that also helped me isolate. Like, oh, okay. Like, all right. I'm going to compartmentalize this and, you know, slowly walk down the path. But tedious. But we got there and it seems like you're going to, you know, you're pinging still, still looking good. Yep. Great. I like it. I like it. All right. Well, then. I don't know why things fall apart. The thing is, I'll typically listen to the radio using tune in. And that was also acting up on me in that it would be streaming content and then all of a sudden it would just stop and I'm like, what? Interesting. Huh. Huh. Yeah. So, I mean, it's kind of annoying that I got a power cycle of my cable modem to fix this problem. But maybe I need a new cable modem. I don't know. Or just jump to the fiber connection that's being offered in your area and then leave the cable modem behind. Yeah. Okay. I'm going to tangent rat hole here, but that's totally fine. Well, I've been thinking about this recently, right? Because I talked about how I had a weird issue with my fiber connection where if it rebooted, if the power went out when the power went out, when things came back, if the ONT is effectively that we'll call it the modem for the fiber connection, even though it's not really. Anyway, the ONT. If that came online before my router came online, then the ONT would never see an ethernet connection from my router. And obviously, you know, then I have no connection. And so I didn't, it took me a couple of weeks to realize that's what the problem was. And in the interim, I rekindled my Comcast connection as a backup because, you know, I had a bunch of travel in May and I didn't, I needed to know that the network was going to remain as stable as possible. And thankfully, my Synology router will do fallback. And so I was like, all right, fine. I'm just going to do this and then I'll figure it out. And we figured out that the ONT was faulty and now is fine and I've tested it and it all comes back up the right way. But I still have that Comcast connection. And you know, there's part of me that's like, okay, well, for 40 bucks a month, you know, given what I do, it's kind of, it's, that's not a terribly expensive insurance policy. So I've left it in place. But our conversation last week about Verizon and T-Mobile's home internet, especially Verizon's 5G home internet caught me to thinking like, wait a minute, if I want a real insurance policy, and I've got a generator at the house now that runs on propane, why would I be using another wired connection as my internet fallback, right? Because Comcast is, I mean, it's, you know, it's wired. It's a different wire. It's not the fiber. It's a coax cable, at least not to my house. It might be somewhere. But if a tree takes down, you know, the poles to my house or the wires to my house, chances are it's going to take down both the fiber and the cable. Now, in the past, I've had it take down electric and the cable line is laying on the ground, but the cable actually still worked. So, you know, it's not a, it's not a one-for-one thing, but still it got me to thinking, should I be using, if I want to pay for a backup connection as an insurance policy, should I be using something that doesn't require wires and is wireless like Verizon's thing or Starlink or any of the things that we talked about last week. So my guess is, you know me, folks, that over the next month or two, that will probably happen because that's just how I am. So, anyway, it's, those are the thoughts. I don't know, what do you think about that, John? I am, so they're also offering fiber now, both Optimum, who is my current provider, offers a fiber option. Actually, everybody's offering fiber now. Yeah. Which is nice. There's a new outfit called Go Net Speed, I think, that is offering it, but then all of a sudden Optimum was like, oh yeah, by the way, if you want gig service, we can give you that. And it's like, hmm. Now, I'll have to figure the wiring because, you know, I have cable coming into the house. I don't have fiber coming into the house. I think I'll have to drill into the side of the house in order to get it up to where my current connection is. That's what, I mean, that's what they did here. I would venture to say that most homes that aren't already on a fiber internet connection don't have fiber to the house. Like they came and they drilled into, you know, they ran the fiber along the side of my, well, I chose to have it run to my office. That may or may not have been a mistake in retrospect, whatever, that's where I had them run it. And then they drilled and put the ONT on the wall inside the office. I mean, it's fine. I happen to be in a scenario where I can have the ONT right next to where I want my router to be, but the guy that actually came out to troubleshoot the most recent issue and swap out the ONT was telling me a funny story, but where they had the ONT in the basement and the router upstairs and they just, you know, they consolidated or fit him, they call the brand now, ran an ethernet cable. I think they snaked it through the walls up to wherever the connection was. The funny part of the story was they got it all set up, everything was working, and then like the next day the customer called and was like, it doesn't work anymore. And the guy gets there and he looks at the router and he says, wow, there's no ethernet light on the router. That's weird. I wonder what's going on with the ONT. So he walks down into the basement and looks at the ONT and the ONT is like powering up. And he's like, wait a minute, is this ONT? He goes up and he hits the light switch for the basement and the ONT turns off. So they had plugged it into a switched outlet. It was the old Clark Griswold, Ellen Griswold trick. So he said they found a different outlet for it. But yeah. So anyway, we'll stay tuned on that. But if anybody out there has one of these Verizon Home 5G or the T-Mobile Home 5G or any kind of, if you're feeding your house or your office with a wireless connection or Starlink, let us know feedback at MackieCup.com. We would love to hear your real world experiences with it and how it works. I was looking at the speeds and stuff, John, from that article you posted last week. And upstream is going to be like on the Verizon one. Upstream was I think 100 megabits or less, but downstream for a lot of people is in the 7800, 900, like close to gigabit speeds, which is plenty in today's world. So, yeah. Anyway, that's where we're at. Shall we move on to quick tips here, John? Go. All right. So, the next one is from Greg says, I use focus mode on my iPhone a lot, but one feature I didn't use until today is the home screen feature to hide all pages except for the ones that I set focus. He says, I think I learned this from the show and you may have. I'm not sure. I think we talked about it incidentally. So great. I'm glad. I love that still counts as one of your five things, even if we didn't intend for you to learn it. I put all my mindfulness apps on a few pages and then moved the pages in the order I wanted. One thing I didn't care for was that if I wanted an app on that focus page, then I have to move it to a different page than it was on originally. And if it's not on my first page anymore, the page I want just to make it in a focus, like it was an either or thing, or so he thought he found a solution to this. He says, I don't know if it's a bug or a feature, but I found a way to have an app on two pages at once. Here's how. Go to the app library and do a search for the app that you want to put on a focus page. Once you find the app, then just tap and hold the app to get it into jiggle mode and then drag it down and move it to the focus page you want it to be on. Now it's on two pages. So I guess the idea would be when you're not in a focus mode, put it on one page and then go to the app library, grab it and put it on the second page. He says, originally this happened and I was scratching my head and thought it was annoying to hide it. I just chose to move it back to the app library. After trying custom pages and was frustrated that I had to move an app from the original location, I happily remembered this. Nice, fine, Greg. Yeah, I don't know if that's a bug or a feature. It's hard to say, but, you know, we'll take it. I like it. Thanks for sharing that. It's pretty cool, huh, John? I haven't really done much with focus mode. Maybe I should. I got to tell you, especially like right now when we're podcasting to be able to know that you can text me, but, like, my family or Rando's can't interrupt me. Like, that's good. My family are not Rando's, at least not most of the time. All right. The next quick tip comes from Todd. He says, there was baked inside of a question. Right. He says, I recently replaced my beam gen one in my living room TV with a beam gen two. He says the full setup. Well, anyway, he's got a big nice big sonos setup in the living room. He said, when I check the sonos app on my iPhone, it often says that the beam is receiving or playing audio in stereo PCN PCM. Well, he knows that he is playing something that has say 5.1 or at most audio. He says, after monkeying it around with the Apple TV settings and that's in on Apple TV video and audio audio format. He says, I discovered that if I left it on the default setting under audio format, this is on the Apple TV, a title recorded in 5.1 was coming to the beam as PCM stereo titles recorded in at most though came over in at most. Okay. He says manually changing the Apple TV audio format in settings like an animal. He says to Dolby 5.1, then those 5.1 titles came over appropriately as 5.1 and sound much better to him than the PCM stereo. Okay. So he's getting what he expects to get. But if you've set it to force 5.1, all those at most titles also come in as 5.1. Oh no. In fact, he says the utmost titles don't even come in at 5.1. Now those come in as PCM stereo. So the trick is moving things back and forth. I don't know what's going on with the Apple TV and its audio output. And I don't necessarily blame Apple for this because there's a lot of weirdness as we've talked about on the show a few times about how audio gets passed from whatever your source device is through your TV to your sound bar. There's so many negotiations and compatibility issues and all of that there that it's possible his TV is filtering things in a way that he's solving with his Apple TV, but he might need to go into his television settings and tweak some of the pass-throughs there to get things. But the not-so-quick tip, I suppose, is you can force the Apple TV to output sound in different ways and it's worth experimenting with all of that. So thank you, Todd. It's a convoluted thing, but the nice part is Sonos makes it super easy to see what it's receiving. It shows you right there in the iPhone app what format it's getting. It didn't used to and it used to be really difficult to troubleshoot. You have to go into the settings and diagnostics to get those details. But now it's right there on the page, so you know. Are you getting 5.1? Are you getting at most? Are you getting 7.1 that's not at most? It'll tell you all that good stuff, which is great. While we're on that subject, John, we've talked about various streaming services and one of my complaints or observations with Direct TV Stream was that it did not have a way to follow a team. So if you are using one of these services like YouTube TV or Fubo TV or Direct TV Stream for live sports, which is one of the more common reasons people would subscribe to one of these services, especially cord cutters, because that's the way you can get live sports is through one of those not cable but cable over the internet things. The issue is, like YouTube and with Fubo, you could just go in and say, OK, I like to watch the Bruins or I like to watch the Patriots or whatever team you like to watch. And then it would just record all those games for you. Good to go. Direct TV Stream did not have that. I could go into individual games and tell them to record those and that's fine, but it's nice to just say, go get them all. I'm good. And I happened to be messing around with Direct TV Stream the other day and I noticed that they now have a follow team option, which is great. So I had to test it with the Red Sox because there's no Bruins or Patriots games on and we don't really watch baseball in our house. For us, it's like watching paint dry. I totally understand that for other people, it's not and that's that's great, but we never. Baseball was never a thing for for us. But anyway, it worked with the Red Sox, so I'm presuming that it will work with, you know, other sports teams, too. So. Yeah, good. All right, sports. Are you on you're you're still like getting your TV from like your cable cable company? OK, well, if you wind up changing to a fiber connection, you will have reason to reevaluate that, which is what kind of caused that for us. Once we got away from Xfinity, it was like, OK, wait, now we're not buying a package deal from Xfinity anymore. Let's really think about what we're doing here. And that's when we moved to initially YouTube TV and wound up moving to Fubo, because YouTube didn't have our local sports stuff like we couldn't watch Bruins games on YouTube TV because they blocked. They they they ended their deal with Nessan. Now there's this whole Nessan 360 thing coming to solve that problem for those folks. So anyway. Yeah, and even with my current program. They put a sports surcharge on my bill. It's it's like a few bucks, but I'm like, yeah. Well, can you not do that? Because I don't really watch sports. So I'm like, can you take that fee off? And they're like, no. Huh. Yeah. No, that's the that's the $5. They call it the RSN surcharge, right? The regional regional sports networks. Yeah, you pay for that. That's right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. All right. Yeah. OK. One more. It's kind of a quick tip. I suppose this could be a cool stuff found, but. But related to Episode 932. Todd says, hey guys, in regards to covering those annoying LED lights with a large NFC I store that you might or might not end up using instead, get a $6 sheet of LED dimming stickers and shut those annoying LEDs down for good. Yeah. It this $6 sheet comes in all different shapes and sizes of these stickers that are, I guess, completely opaque. Like they will not even let the, you know, retina searing LEDs through. So yeah. Yeah. Good. I like that. There's a link in the show notes to an Amazon listing or a pack of these and it is like six bucks, I think. So that's, that's the way to go. I like it. Yeah. All different, all different shapes and sizes and little, lots of little things. Or electrical tape. Yeah. You're right. Yeah. Black tape works. Yeah. Yeah. That's what I've used. Yeah. Six bucks though, you know, then. Yeah. I had a light in my car one time that was in a faulty state and it was just annoying me because it was like always flashing and. Yeah. Yeah. Trying to get my attention. So I'm like, yep, get that tape. Get that. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. That's what I've used in the past is black tape. In fact, it wouldn't surprise me if what these stickers are, are that same material, just, you know, pre-cut to be, pardon me, the size of, you know, little lights. Cool. All right, folks, let's. We've got, oh, we have some more follow-ups. In fact, one very important follow-up to get through. And then some questions. The next thing I'd love to do, John, is tell everybody about our couple of sponsors for today. Sounds great. All right. Our sponsor, Wealthfront, wants you to think long term with your money. And that's why they asked me to read this ad is if I'm talking to you from the distant future. Well, I got to tell you, it's pretty weird here in 2112. 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LinkedIn Jobs helps you find the candidates you want to talk with faster. Did you know every week nearly 40 million job seekers visit LinkedIn? Post your job for free at LinkedIn.com slash MGG. That's LinkedIn.com slash MGG to post your job for free. Terms and conditions apply and our thanks to LinkedIn Jobs for sponsoring this episode. All right. We talked last week, John, about the remote access specifically for someone's accessing someone's grandfather's computer. So, you know, abstracting it out just accessing the computer of someone that's not technically comfortable to like turn on remote access when you need it or invite you in or any of that stuff. And we mentioned a lot of solutions. There was evidently one that we did not mention and all of you mentioned it. I think counting out here. Every single one of you. It was Steve and Sylvain and Dan and Frank and then I started to lose count. He says, the simplest answer, try any desk. They have a free personal use license and it works across Mac, Windows, iOS and Chrome. It certainly seems like any desk is what at least most of you are using for exactly this purpose. And so we have not used it yet internally here at Mac Geekab, but it comes highly recommended from from the Mac Geekab family. So I'm happy with that. Yeah, it's good. The one and it's funny because we're getting a comment at live.MacGeekab.com right now from Warren about the other one that we didn't mention. It was Warren that just mentioned it in the chat and listener Jed mentioned it via email this week. He said, jump desktop. It's really the new best one I've used. Once it's set, it always seems to work through firewalls. It's the most solid remote control software I've ever used, including TeamViewer, LogMeIn, Google Chrome. And as Warren points out, jump desktop is inside set app. So if you have a set app subscription, you are already set to use jump desktop. Thank you for both of those. Yeah, thank you for both of those. This is great. This is why I say this all the time, but it like I say it because it's true. This is really like one of my favorite things about doing this show is that we get to learn like there's no way me or John or any of us could know all the things and so having these conversations it really just, you know, it allows me to love it. I love it. I also learned a thing, John and listener Carl will point this out to us. I ranted last week about how it took me 20 minutes to edit a PDF and PDF and even though I've been using PDF pen for over a decade and I know what to do last week we had the conversation and there were lots of things mentioned. One of the things that was mentioned was PDF expert and so I tried it and within five minutes of launching it on my Mac for the very first time I had not only edited that very same PDF that I needed to edit. I figured I'd use as close a litmus test as I could but and I had the edits done perfectly. I didn't. There was no jankiness like there was with PDF pen for me. I just like clicked and edited and it worked and I didn't have to reformat anything. It was just done and so because that only took about 90 seconds literally like first time using the software I was finished in 90 seconds then I thought okay well let's see how easy it is to get a signature in here. Can I build a stamp that I can use for like approved stuff that has a date and a time on it and so within five minutes I had done everything editing the PDF adding the signature into my library and PDF expert sorry and then also building the stamp and then when I added it to my iPhone the signature and the stamp were already there it must sync via iCloud it's amazing so I have moved to PDF expert not just on my Mac but on all my devices and not just for editing I've moved to it for reading PDFs too so now I have PDF expert open PDFs instead of preview and I've done it for a week like it and I've signed contracts with it like I've done all the things and like the amazing part to me is that I could have that PDF that I needed to edit a while back that was kind of the catalyst to this conversation I could easily have edited it on my iPhone too and to me that speaks to a company that really spent some time focusing on user experience because that kind of thing can be wonky on an iPhone and they made it as wonky free as possible so it's the folks at READDLE that make PDF expert so that's my new favorite and I and Carl wrote in this week and said make sure you use that too in fact I think Jed where we mentioned jump desktop I think he also said so lots of great feedback from episode 9 30 two have you messed with PDF expert yet John any of these? No okay there it is that patented no we're going to record that we're going to make it yeah actually I think we just did record it if I am mistaken we're kind of screwed because it means we're going to need to do the episode over it means that this isn't take 2 we did have one piece of feedback from Barry he's a few episodes behind he has a comment on Mac eCab number one which his comment was I don't think it's a good idea Mac to run Intel processes processors they should develop their own so we'll see how that works out Barry might be right I'm just saying he went back and listened to episode one you know there you go what do you think about that John should Apple develop their own processors uh maybe though I'm looking back in history and the thing is I mean I remember fondly when they were running power PC which is a processor from IBM yes and I still remember that the thing was the Apple started or actually Intel wasn't or IBM wasn't really delivering the goods in that the processors were just like falling behind in performance compared to other platforms yeah and then I remember the day when Apple was like you know so IBM was like oh what are you going to do switch to another processor and Apple was like uh yep yeah by the way we've been testing this for years yeah we're ready that's right yeah in you know deep in their labs they were running concurrent versions of macOS that's right yeah just in case and that just in case came up and here we are yeah it was a good decision but moving to Intel I think at the time it was a better idea because you got better performance but then Intel had the same problems that they really weren't keeping up yeah exactly right I totally agree obviously it was a moment of humor to bring in Barry's comment from episode one but I 100% agree with you at the time moving to Intel was 100% the right move and also at the time moving away from Intel to Apple silicon it has been the right move clearly it's ridiculous Apple silicon does in terms of performance compared to what we were getting at at the time they leapfrog the industry in a huge way amazing it's awesome we're super lucky I still see Intel saying oh well no here's the new shiny this one's better and it's like maybe but I think give it a few years I can't imagine that other chip vendors won't start producing their twist on what Apple's done with Apple silicon the whole system on a chip thing I mean they have to otherwise they can't compete Apple sort of cracked the code on high performance low power use and blew everybody else out of the water but obviously other people have smart folks working for them too I think we're going to see this from I think Intel's probably right some version of their new shiny will get us there or get them there I don't think Apple will jump back to Intel but other vendors will alright thank goodness even though we've had lots of tangents fun ones don't get me wrong I like this it's time to answer some questions John you want to take us to Terry we have a follow up because we mentioned NFC in the last episode evidently we didn't go deep enough yeah so Terry asks a question I am interested to use an NFC tag just to embed my wifi for guests what a time saver what tool do you use to program the tags and here's the tool so I found this boring NFC tags Dave and it's an app called NFC QR code document scanner and it lets you do all these things what was interesting that I found out that as far as I know you can't normally do this with with your phone or at least Apple doesn't provide a facility to do this but the nice thing about this app is that it does exactly what Terry is asking for is that you can not only read NFC which the phone does but you can write to an NFC tag which I thought was just like totally cool and there are a number of predefined formats one of them as pointed out is you can create an NFC tag that has your wifi password so if you wanted to you could program an NFC tag and then when your friends come over for a party or stuff like that all they have to do is hold their phone up to the NFC tag and it has an embedded password and it'll log them in to your location and check out this app but for example you can do a business card I'm trying to remember there's so many predefined formats that this program will support yeah very cool I like it that's good I gotta admit I haven't really used it lately okay maybe I'll revisit it because you got me a pack of them very cheap a pack of NFC tags or another six bucks or something Warren in the chat room is saying that he thinks he was able to do this with the home app but I didn't think the home app let you trigger an automation based on your phone's proximity to an NFC tag that is very much a thing that the home app does but I didn't think the home app let you program data into an NFC tag like you I've always had to use a third party app about that Warren says he's not sure how but he's pretty sure he was able to do it without a third party app so if there's a way if somebody has some specifics on that feedback at mackycup.com or share on our discord channel I'd love to have you there so very cool you know an app that we talked about a number of years ago called AppTamer from St. Clair software lets you manage how much CPU apps are allowed to use especially apps when they're in the background and this can be super handy but since I moved my machines to M1 I had kind of forgotten about AppTamer and then I was digging around in it and there is a feature now and it's been there since January a feature in AppTamer 2 that seemed new to me one is definitely new from January and that is the ability to tell an app when it's in background to run on the M1 or presumably the M2's efficiency cores so that everything in the background isn't chewing of power and of course you can do this app by app it's not a universal setting so you can say okay I want this app when it's in the background only go on efficiency cores now Apple's doing some level of this too but they don't give you any granular control over it AppTamer gives you that granular control the other thing that I found in AppTamer and maybe it was there all the time and I just never thought about it is what I'll call a quitter like functionality quitter is an app from Marco Arment that I know and love and use because what it does is it it allows me to say hey if I haven't used this app in you know X number of minutes just go ahead and quit it and it's how I make sure that like Safari is my favorite example that you know after after three hours I have Safari quit if I haven't used Safari and that way I'm sure is that Safari will be relaunched on my machine at least once a day because I tend to sleep for three hours so even if I'm using my computer way too much there's still going to be a three hour period where Safari gets quit and I'm good to go the other thing where it's really nice is like we use QuickBooks and we have a shared folder that we you know that we save all the company accounts to and we don't both want to be in QuickBooks at the same time and we're pretty good about making sure that we're in QuickBooks but if I were to leave my desk and have accidentally left QuickBooks open by setting it to quit after 30 minutes it really eliminates a lot of that risk so quitter is something I use for that and other reasons and it seems like AppTamer now has quitter like functionality in it so I just wanted to share that I had sort of forgotten about it when M1 came out because I thought well I don't need this anymore but maybe there's a benefit to it so anyway I share yeah did you ever use AppTamer John or any of that stuff I have not okay no I haven't found a need for it and it's actually kind of annoying so if you look into the past in your crystal ball there were two types of multitasking back in the day if you remember Dave there was cooperative multitasking and preemptive multitasking cooperative was where applications could say hey I need all the processor now and that's kind of bad because any one app could take over and then once Apple and everybody else moved to preemptive multitasking the hope was that the OS would manage this mess right right for sure and it doesn't always it still seems to be that somebody wrote in I think it was Dropbox they were like Dropbox is like monopolizing my processor and they were like oh well AppTamer takes care of that now that's right so this day and age it's kind of annoying that you still need something like this because the OS should manage it properly but it doesn't always well I mean yes I agree that the OS it would be perfect if the OS managed it but the OS can't know what it can't know right it like computers still don't read our minds and so they don't know what our priorities are as users right and that to me is where AppTamer comes in like for example right now I know that Chrome needs to be the most important one of the most important apps on my computer because I'm using Chrome to connect to StreamYard which is the engine that you and I use to do this show so even when Chrome is in the background I absolutely need the system not to like deprioritize it right and with AppTamer I can be very clear about that in fact earlier today after we started this call AppTamer jumped up and it was like hey I'm using a ton of CPU in the background you want me to tame this and it's like no definitely do not thank you for asking you know so it'll proactively give you alerts if it thinks something isn't right correct yeah yeah it's great and then I could have said yes please tame that for me and then you're good to go it also knows some things about system processes so if I go in and there's some spotlight processes where if I go to the box to tame it it's like okay I will let you do this but I need to warn you about a thing I know about this specific process first right and so but being able to just shift things when they're in the background to the high efficiency cores I kind of like that now that feature is different on Intel because there's no facility to do that but you can say hey when you're in the background run at a lower priority so it'll for those of you that have used UNIX it will renice your processes as they come to the foreground and background which is really hand again being very intentional and then that does let the operating system sort of manage it and nothing that app tamer is doing get in the way of the OS to me it at least not that I've seen to me it it helps you teach the OS how you want your computer managed and then the OS can kind of do its things so I like it it's yeah yeah I think you would like it too John it's it gives you some granular control over some very interesting aspects of the OS one thing I will point out you mentioned the listener that wrote in where we talked about app tamer and that might actually been the thing that brought it back to top of mind for me with regards to Dropbox because the Dropbox syncing app is terrible at CPU well there is a third party open source app that you can use instead of Dropbox to sync and it's called maestral m a e s t r a l at maestral.app and so we will put a link to that in the in the show notes so open source Dropbox app I like it oh more on that or as we moving on to Chris to fur moving on moving on up Christopher says I purchased an iMac studio and connected it to two 43 inch LG 4k monitors with the intent of selling my late 2020 27 inch iMac with 64 gigs of RAM and eventually replacing that with the new studio display as I began setting up the Mac studio I realized I did not it did not have a microphone or camera on the monitors that I was using oops no problem he says I'll just order your order the studio display also oops wrong they're on back order for several months not good now what and then he says wait as they say necessity is the mother of invention with my recent upgrade to macOS ventura so he's running betas I've discovered universal control I cannot believe how seamless I can traverse through my two 43 inch monitors Mac studio and then slide on to the iMac one keyboard one mouse interfacing with two computers a beautiful experience to say the least thinking this through and boiling it down might the question popped up why not keep the iMac is a glorified studio display my iMac gives me everything the studio display offers and more it has the ports a microphone a camera and something better than the a15 chip plus for graphics 64 gigs of RAM 512 gig SSD and with universal control who needs the studio display and it's flawed webcam for the same price as the studio display you can purchase a 24 inch m1 iMac with a 5k retina display all the ports camera microphones and something much more powerful than the studio display so the summary is I'm keeping my iMac and forgetting about the studio display is my thinking flawed we'll answer that question in a minute second and this came to mind as I was reading this to he points out that as a bonus using the iMac instead of a studio display you get a backup computer too which is really good point speaking of you know insurance policies I think this is great I like what do you think John I no thoughts okay I mean what like the thoughts of using a a Mac you know with universal control using a Mac instead of monitor it you know you're paying arguably about the same price and you get like you get the backup computer sitting right there ready to go if you if you need it something to be said for this year good thinking anyway if you folks at folks happen to have thoughts that John doesn't feedback at macicab.com I think you said feedback at macicab.com I knew you'd have thought about that I did I said feedback at macicab.com want to take us to Scott yeah so I don't see Scott in our Evernote for some strange reason but I got the email great so oops alright so Scott has a couple of questions my sister has a 2012 27 inch iMac running Catalina she is having a couple of problems first when we can get the machine to finally stop restarting she cannot turn on Wi-Fi when you click on it it does nothing I tried to reinstall the operating system using the method of holding down command R on boot and the Apple logo does not appear for me to release the keys I have depressed what are your thoughts well I'll give you my thoughts and maybe you have some Dave as well for the Wi-Fi the only thing I could think of is go to system preferences network and then you'll see a list of the interfaces that are approved or the machine is using at the moment and one of them is going to say Wi-Fi maybe your entry is corrupted so what I would do is maybe highlight the Wi-Fi and then you'll see in that window as well there's a little minus sign so I would click on Wi-Fi and remove it from the list of interfaces and also I'd be curious so the thing is if you do go to this place in the system Dave there should be a little green or at least on my system because it's working there should be a little green bubble and it'll say connected I'm wondering if in your case that is not what you see and if that's not what you see it could be possible that your Wi-Fi radio is broken I would do the same thing I would remove it and re-add it for sure I've never had to do that but that's the only thing I can think of to fix that I've done that before I've had not exactly this problem but something close enough to it in the past and absolutely because all it's doing all system preferences is doing in Ventura the settings app is doing is managing a bunch of P-Lists and like you pointed out those P-Lists can get corrupted by removing one and removing the entry and re-adding it forces it to rebuild those from the OS defaults and I've had it solve network issues in the past for sure so yeah yeah and I mean the other thing is if your Wi-Fi radio is broken well number one if it is then maybe it's time to get a new Mac but you could also get an external Wi-Fi adapter oh yeah sure I had one once when you know they were rolling out 802.11ac I had an external adapter it connected via USB but it offered me you know better speeds so yeah I'm trying to think USB Wi-Fi adapter like how many of these work with the Mac they like well there's okay so I'm looking on Amazon right now and I'm seeing one that does 802.11ac so it's not AX for 25 bucks and it says that it works with everything Mac, Windows Linux and it's just USB and it plugs in so yeah yeah so it's a hardware problem um if it's a hardware problem then yeah there is a solution that's I hadn't really thought about that that's a good idea man yeah right though um you know I mean it's a 2012 Mac I think you know that's a it's a pretty good run man yeah exactly I mean it's what it's a what it's 10 years old yeah like wow I'm amazed that you know you're still using it I mean 10 years seems to be about right these days I mean we're crazy people because we wanted to upgrade to M1 like all those things but prior to that I think I remember on the show pointing out that you know throughout our various homes we had you know it was not uncommon to come across a machine that was still in daily service maybe not on our main desks but certainly with our family members and stuff super happy about the machine I mean it back in the day we attributed that to uh SSDs allowing you know computers to actually use the power of their CPU and not being logged down by you know by disk access and so yeah I mean but 10 years is this is not a disagreement I'm 100% with you if you get to the point where it's 10 years and there's problems that you're going to start paying money to fix it's like well maybe that's the sign yeah so yeah kind of like me and my Saturn like you and your Saturn John yeah exactly well I mean yeah exactly yeah yeah yeah we had this conversation and it's ironic on the small business show a couple weeks ago where my co-host Shannon Jean posited that all devices should come with an expiration date and really what he was saying and I agree with him on this is that we as consumers when we buy stuff we should level set and say okay you know I expect this to last for X number of years and then when it gets to that it might be smart to be proactive and replace it and I used the example in that show of my refrigerators there's two refrigerators in my house they were here when we bought the house that was 17 years ago certainly they weren't brand new on that day so you know they're 20 year old refrigerators and they work they're a little bit there's quirks about them as there are with things as they age but I was also pointing out that you know I think if I replaced both of those refrigerators today within a couple of years I'd probably make my money back on the energy saving of not just because of new technology but because you know the seals on those old refrigerators are old and I'm sure they aren't sealing in as well as they did originally certainly not as well as a brand new one and I thought but you know much better to replace it on your schedule as opposed to on the schedule of hey your refrigerator broke and now it's an emergency and then literally the next day our oven one of the the up button on the control panel so the thing that sets not only the time on the clock but the temperature of the oven is non-functional and I took the whole thing apart I actually took the control board out thinking maybe it was just like like the outer panel and we could just maybe poke the up button with a chopstick or something and no the button itself has just it's just dead it barely works so we have to buy a new oven but the problem is you know it's an emergency in a sense if we want to cook things at a temperature other than 350 degrees well then we need a new oven but ordering an oven right now is no small feat because of all these supply chain things appliances in general it's not atypical to find a six month wait you know that's kind of normal right now so thankfully we were able to find an oven that was in the state of New Hampshire and should be delivered in the next week or two and it's fine like we'll get through it but as soon as we're done with that I'm going to replace both refrigerators and if they tell me you got to wait six months for one of these that's fine but I'm being proactive about it so I like this idea of treating things like they have expiration dates because they kind of do might be a smart thing businesses do it all the time right you know because you don't want to find yourself caught behind the eight ball and so it's not uncommon for a business to have a policy that like oh yeah when your computer hits X number of years old you put in a requisition you know we will or the IT department just does it automatically depending on the size of the company but waiting for things to break is not necessarily the most economical path through and certainly not necessarily the most efficient path through so yeah I think your car is past its expiration date John nah you're right oh just like Cal goes unfortunately to your story my last fridge it broke and the reason that I knew it broke is that there was a puddle of water on the floor and I'm like uh oh that's bad yeah uh oh right so basically the compressor had failed which is pretty much what a refrigerator is right for the most part yes it's a fancy box around a compressor yeah that's correct yeah now fortunately I have relatives nearby so I was able to bring my contents and my sister and brother-in-law they actually have a backup refrigerator so I was able to save the food there you go that's good alright as to the second question here so you know I've run into that Scott's question about booting into recovery I found that at times I don't know if it's a bug in the OS or something but so the way to get into recovery is normally you hold down command R well you hold it down after you hear the startup chime I found that you may want to do this before the startup chime on occasion I've just found that it gets very picky about going into recovery mode and I don't know why but as a follow up what you may want to try to do so I found a little article that gives you a whole bunch of suggestions when command R does not work and I think the one that I would try first from this article Dave is the last one that they mention is that you can do something known as an internet recovery so rather than booting from your hard drive recovery partition this actually goes over the internet okay and it's a slightly different startup sequence so rather than holding down command R hold down command option R assuming that you have an internet connection it will do recovery that way yeah alright I'll buy that they may also have this may not work easy for me to say and also thank you John for getting us back on track there might be the need for a cheer here that you were the one that brought us out of the tangent world so thank you for that I wanted to acknowledge that I have seen recovery mode fail with third party bluetooth keyboards or third party wireless keyboards good point yes it generally works with Apple's wireless keyboards but I have seen third party keyboards some not all fail with recovery mode so I often will employ a USB keyboard to solve this problem now it's a 27 inch iMac so it's not like a laptop with a built in keyboard it's entirely possible that a 10 year old iMac has a third party wireless bluetooth keyboard or something so that could well be the issue here try it with a USB keyboard try it with an Apple keyboard if you still got the original that came in so yeah that's a good suggestion because I think this article that I found mentions that is that the keyboard may not be talking to the computer when you're trying to get into recovery so that's why you want a wired keyboard the wired keyboard is the simplest way to do it I gotta remind myself to actually get one I don't have one I had one and then I think I recycled it aha I should get one just as a backup yeah yeah I keep one not too far away from you know myself in the office there just just for these scenarios so I mean on this machine on my mini my podcasting machine I actually have a Logitech and I found that that it it talks when it should in that I can get into recovery is it wireless um uses the so Logitech is kind of weird in that they have this little dongle right so the Mac sees it as a USB keyboard yes even though you know that the USB part is wirelessly connected to a keyboard right yeah that I've never had a problem with the Logitech with the dongle keyboards in this regard because yeah the Mac sees it right away so yeah unless the battery is dead in which case you know it's a different problem hey I've had a problem John for a while and the problem has been I cannot remove files from my Apple music playlists that in the music app on and at first I thought it was just on my Mac and like okay well someday I'll solve this problem and really it's my use case for removing files or removing tracks from a playlist is mostly that I download a lot of live shows I put them I put all the tracks into one playlist and then I play them and then when I and then I'll go through and be like okay well I've listened to that live concert so I'm going to remove that from this playlist even though I want to leave it in my library and it just helps me manage the stuff that I just listen to that things that I want to listen to once which might be in a friend's album or something like that right so I just have this cue and I couldn't remove things from it and then I realized I also couldn't remove things from it on my phone and I couldn't remove things from it on another Mac and I'm like okay what's going on here and so finally the other day I started messing with it more than just you know trying to hit delete multiple times in a row and the first thing I did was I was like well if I'm going to mess with this the first thing I do is clean things up because I've got a bunch of extra playlists that are kind of junk playlists and so let me delete those and clean that up first just at least that way I'll be productive about something and also I was curious like I know I can't remove a song from a playlist but can I delete a playlist meaning could I create a new playlist and only copy the things into it that I want and then delete this old one I didn't wind up having to do that but that was sort of my thinking it was like okay let me clean things up first and we'll get there probably cleaned up 10 or 15 you know just sort of random junk playlists or not even junk but like Apple Music Playlists that I had unintentionally added to my library or whatever that I just hadn't messed with and so I deleted all those and once I had deleted them John I was able to remove tracks from my original playlist so there is something with Apple Music where there is I'll call it a maximum number of playlists although that's probably not the right term but there is a scenario where Apple Music gets itself tied into a little bit of a knot when there is more than X number of playlists I apologize I now realize I did not count the number of playlists that I have but let's say it's about a hundred I have them nested I've got folders of playlists and all that stuff I keep playlists for all the different shows that I have to do like oh I've got you know I got this gig coming up on Thursday night I need to learn these 10 tracks for that gig so I make a playlist of it and then when it's over I archive it into a different folder but I don't delete those playlists so I think there is some maximum number if you're having problems in Apple Music try removing some playlists and see if that makes life better that's my that's my share for today I don't know are you using Apple Music John? No okay I know and you got like your whatever your phone or something it gave you a free three months or something I'm not sure if you the um yeah one of the devices that I bought yeah they threw in a whole bunch of a trial so HomePod mini that's it they were like oh well you know here's a free trial chapter music and here's a free trial for news and here's a free trial for some other thing yeah yeah yeah that was nice well lasted okay good sure uh do you use any streaming music service just out of curiosity like Spotify or any of those no okay all right interesting use tune in I use tune in to stream radio sure you could use tune in to stream podcasts to you know yes that happened one time yeah I accidentally excuse me started a podcast now we accidentally started a podcast 17 years ago you accidentally started playing a podcast that's right yeah all right uh you want to speaking of HomePod mini you want to take us to uh to Ross yeah and why is the content not in Evernote I'm all certain I put it there but I have the email so here we go um also sync your Evernote because it's definitely there but but go ahead and read the email sync sync later yeah yeah that that's annoying yeah yeah I think we're going to need to move to Apple notes I think I think it's a doable thing for us yes okay so uh Ross says uh I'm trying to figure out how to play lossless music using Apple music with HomePod minis I can play lossless using my iPhone and wired headphones I can play lossless using my Apple TV 4k and my stereo when I try to play lossless using my Apple TV 4k and minis or airplay to the minis the lossless logo disappears when I see the logo and press on it or click on it using Apple TV 4k and stereo it shows what the audio format is the same with iPhone and wired headphones but using the minis I don't see the lossless logo uh I'm also interested in using a DAC which is known as a digital audio converter I think to listen to high res lossless music with my iPhone and MacBook Pro M1 I think the Apple TV is limited to regular lossless you have a suggestion for DAC so um first off uh to do lossless there are two places you can look Dave okay so one I found a support article from Apple title about lossless audio and Apple music uh unfortunately uh I didn't see it although the article indicates that there should be a setting within the Apple music app to do this I didn't see it and I think it's because um I don't have an Apple music subscription probably right okay uh fortunately there's another place that you can set this Dave that you know I dug deep to find this um uh and it's in the oddly enough in the home app yeah okay this is kind of weird yep so uh and I found another article HomePod and HomePod mini get Apple music lossless and and basically you go on the home app and you dig down and there will be a place where you can say enable lossless um settings back from October or an article back from October when this came out for the HomePod mini and and it agrees with you that it's in the home app you go you open the home app tap the home button tap home settings and then under people tap your name then tap Apple music and then you can turn lossless on or off in the home app so I guess the home app is the app that controls many settings so okay you know so that yeah it seems to be the right the right path there so yeah and I've actually had what's interesting is I've actually had the home app come up on my iPhone saying hey there's an update available for your for your home pods I'm like sure oh that makes sense yeah yeah yeah okay all right yeah it still hasn't the my only annoyance with with the HomePod mini is that if I try to stream video using something like VNC VLC VNC is the remote access thing right sorry that's okay I got you I got you back the audio is totally un-synchronized I don't know why if I use Apple's app yeah but if I if I try to stream a video using QuickTime everything's fine right because it's Apple stuff talking to Apple stuff and it knows how much to delay sending the video or sending the audio so that it matches the video or vice versa whichever needs to happen yeah that and I mean that's not an uncommon scenario most TVs and soundbars and all of that have some facility to adjust that delay if it's not happening automatically with Apple's stuff you can use your iPhone to do that syncing for you which is kind of magical I mean it makes it's not magical it's just you know it's a device ecosystem and it works so yeah I like that but yes that would be the thing it's possible inside VLC you have some controls to adjust that delay that might work fine for you because it's really obviously a common thing syncing if you talk to anybody that does audio like editing of live audio like concert videos are a huge one because that needs to be in sync especially when you're showing a video of a percussive instrument being played you know if you hear and that happens the split second before you see it things are like your brain does not like that at all and I think we've all experienced it watching TV when the audio and video gets a little out of sync and you know you hear the words at a different time than you see the person's mouth make them and you know that can be tolerated to a point but not but it's pretty fine point so yeah alright so the second question a digital audio converter so if you want to get better quality then a digital audio converter can do that for you off top my head Dave as soon as digital audio converter was mentioned the first thing that popped into my head was audio engine has an offering the D1 I have that DAC on my Mac the D1 and it I really they offered to send it to me years ago and I'm like okay fine like I'm using I'm using actually a set of their speakers the little A2's or something they're tiny little desktop speakers I'm like sure send it to me but I didn't expect to hear a difference right you know my the whole thing about a DAC is well there's two things about a DAC one is that you potentially get a higher bit rate like capabilities of playing either higher bit rates or higher sample rates out of a DAC an external DAC then you would the internal DAC that's in your Mac and so okay but you know I've already sort of proven to myself that that in and of itself doesn't make a difference the other thing that a DAC gets you if it has its own discreet power or is built to separate power from the DAC or insulate power from the DAC in the right way is that you get a lower noise floor that everything starts with right the DAC inside your computer is exposed to all the noise of the things in your computer the electrical noise of the things in your computer and it really does translate into audible noise you get this noise floor that is not as low as it could be in an external DAC can do that for you I thought okay well you know but also my office isn't kind of noisy I have a couple of distations running like I just don't notice this I don't think it's going to be a big deal and it literally as soon as I plugged it in it was like wait a minute what's going on here sound felt like it had more depth it was more like 3D the stereo field felt wider and I hadn't moved anything you know I just changed the plug from the back of my computer to the DAC and I mentioned this to Brady at Audio Engine and he was like yeah he's like of course that's what you're hearing he's like you know that lower noise floor really makes a difference when producing sound he's like it's not so much about the noise but it's about the nuances of the sound that can shine through when in the past you know they couldn't because the signal to noise ratio was limited and he's like yeah this is why people buy external DACs I was like oh okay yeah I'm sold like I'm going to keep it he's like great you know so yeah it does make a difference and that D1 is a fantastic option I still use it every day to play the aforementioned playlist that I couldn't remove things from until recently right and I think the other thing is that so Apple's DAC I think is limited to 48kHz is that right? depends on the device I not necessarily okay yeah I don't know I will risk running audio MIDI setup while we are doing the show I apologize to everyone let's look at my max built-in output and this is a 2019 iMac I could change the sample rate it's at 44 one right now because that's what I have standardized everything on this computer too and I'm hoping that I don't accidentally change this but I could go up to 96kHz 96,000Hz yeah so it depends on the device that's what you're limited to yeah so and this Mac will do 24 bit too like it's not about it might be about the bit rate and the sample rate but it's more than that or really makes it and the amplifier too right even if you're using speakers there is a preamp in there and the quality of that preamp also makes a difference and the part of what makes a preamp higher quality is a lower noise floor of its own right so there's a little headphone amp in your Mac there's a little headphone amp in the DAC my guess is the one in the DAC is actually probably a little better at least in my scenario so yeah I'm trying to think if Spencer's comment is if we have covered this because somebody else also asked about DACs Spencer says let's see my question is about portable DACs and I'm looking at the Helm Audio Bolt DAC which is a USB-C portable high end DAC and headphone amplifier with MQA playback to be able to get high res lossless should I get this or am I wasting my money due to my 55 year old hearing that was put to the test using a Sony Walkman on Bust back in the 80s yeah so my answer would basically be what we've said here is that yes you know depending I mean I don't know how your hearing is but you may well hear a difference here so yeah I don't know anything about the Helm Audio Bolt but but the reviews of it look quite stellar so yeah now we're on I know we're a couple minutes over our thing here whatever that actually is while we're on the subject of audio I want to talk about a device that I've had the chance to use lately and I'm pretty excited about it is the Sonos Ray which is their latest soundbar the lead here is that it is a $279 soundbar from Sonos it is a fully Sonos device it fits really well in front of a 32 inch TV it's super narrow and the speakers are only on the front of it so if you wanted to put this soundbar like inside of a bookshelf or something you're not going to be dealing with all the reflections that you would get the undesired reflections that you would get if it had speakers aimed to the top of it or the sides of it or whatever I mean it does have speakers that aim out to the side to give you a nice wide stereo field but it is the speakers are all on the front so you could put it in a bookshelf and just have it at the front of the bookshelf and you're not going to have any issues it uses an optical input which most TVs have output from your TV into it and John one thing I really liked about this was you know those the optical inputs or those little what I called what I learned as TOS link connectors and those things are always a pain in the neck to plug in because there's like one side that's shaped a little bit differently than the rest the jack on this Sonos ray is what I will call a universal TOS link port. I plugged it in perfectly on the first time and I'm like wait a minute and I looked at the port and then I pulled it out and I rotated it and I plugged it in again and it also fit it it takes it at any rotation so whatever they figured out whatever they whatever vendor they worked with on that that TOS link port or maybe they designed it themselves very it was a super nice touch because it just made setup super easy. The sound of this thing is fantastic it it's great I talk about a spectacular dorm room speaker right because you can play music through it too but then also it will it will play your you know obviously the stuff from your TV it's your home theater as well I'm blown away it does not have any voice assistant with it that's part of how they got the cost down it it does not do it does not do Dolby Atmos partially because it doesn't have speakers that are aiming up and down so it wouldn't really get anything out of that anyway I really like this thing for $279 it's a great great little thing and I'm just blown away that Sonos is making this at this price and you know offering something at that level so yeah anyway I like the connector option that that's neat it's like you know looking back in the battle days of USB yes exactly right is it was always like the chance that you're gonna plug it in wrong is like almost 100% yeah even with USB you have a 50% chance of getting it 100% wrong every time that's right yeah why is that what this is one of the mysteries of the universe whatever you do with a USB port you know I don't think the other thing okay brought John this brings me to a question that I have for everybody you know when you're you've got your computer on your desk right like you do and all the power cables like the power outlets are you know on the floor usually and so you know that move that you do where you plug in the power brick or whatever and there's the little power cable that then needs to go up and plug into your device and you reach around the back of your desk and you gingerly hang the little cable there and then move quickly but carefully so that you don't jostle the desk and let the thing fall off and it falls off like half the time but you know you reach your hand in and you finally get that thing why is there not a word in our in our common lexicon to describe that maneuver that the the the gentle hang whatever it is that that underneath you're doing it blind you're hanging the thing so that you can climb out and go do that we've all done it why does it take me 10 minutes here to describe what that maneuver is we need a word for it folks and I'm looking for you you folks can do this feedback mackykev.com this is this is the this is your homework for the week gotta come up we've gotta come up with a word or a phrase to describe what that little maneuver is and sometimes you know you you tuck it under another cable right so that it's it's uh you know it's got some pressure on it and hopefully you know it'll be there when you go and reach around to grab it I don't know what it is I don't know what the word is but there's a phrase there's something we need to come up with to describe that we do it all too often and the end is not in sight okay I'm glad I got that off my chest I've been I've been thinking about this for like 10 years John I don't know I don't know this is fun alright yeah anything else to add John before we let everybody go no alright well that's then that's what we've got thanks for hanging out with us pilot Pete wasn't here today but make sure you go listen to his new podcast so there I was dot US I love this show have you listened yet John it's good you would I think you would love it even you don't even have to be an aviation enthusiast I don't think to to be into this like yeah it's fun he and he and Fig do a great job and you get to learn why here we know him as pilot Pete in the aviation world his call sign is repeat and there's a funny story for that and if you listen to episode one you will learn that funny story alright thanks for listening folks thanks to all of our great sponsors of course well front dot com slash mgg linkedin dot com slash mgg thanks to cash fly for providing all the bandwidth to get the show from us to you thanks to all of you participating in our discord chat Mackie cup dot com slash discord it's nice to have a place it's our family room it's where we all hang I'm gonna hang there a little bit this afternoon it's gonna be fun your F Bron what do you have to say don't get caught