 Welcome to MacGeekGab episode 924 for Monday, April 18th, 2022. And welcome to MacGeekGab, the show where you send in your tips, your questions, your cool stuff found. We take those. We try to answer your questions. We share your tips and your cool stuff found. Mix them all together into an agenda that we can all follow because the goal is that each and every one of us, all of us, me included, we all learn at least five new things every single time we get together. Sponsors for this episode include other world computing with all of their great stuff. We'll talk about some of those in depth in a minute. TrueBuild.com slash MGG, where you can stop paying for subscriptions and potentially save thousands per year and collide at collide, K-O-L-I-D-E dot com slash MGG, where you can get device security that fixes all of the problems that plague your team. It's fantastic stuff. We'll talk more in depth about each of them in a moment. For now, here in Durham, New Hampshire, I'm Dave Hamilton. And here in Fairfield, Connecticut, this is John Efron. And here in Paris, France is Pilot Pete. And if you're watching, I put Mike Lerner's comment on the bottom. Once again, welcome gentlemen and Pilot Pete. Thank you, sir, for singling me out. There you go, gentlemen and Pilot Pete. Evidently, he doesn't know us as well as you. No, he doesn't know us as well as he knows you. I think that's the question. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, lots of stuff to go through today. Some great quick tips and some cool stuff found kind of a standard show. The one thing that I do want to share, we sort of began slowly leaking this out last week. The first thing I did was I just put a link on the MacGeekUp.com website and some of you found it. And then I put a couple of tweets out and more of you found it. And then this morning, as we're recording the show, even more of you have found it. MacGeekUp, we now have a Discord channel. I mentioned it was coming. It is here and our Discord server. I should call it with several channels. Well, really just two at the moment that we can use the MacGeekUp general channel for text. And then when we're doing the live show, we will stream the audio and eventually the video there. So you can go check it out. MacGeekUp.com slash Discord will redirect you to the correct place. And you can you can go from there, but it will be our home, not just when we are recording the live stream, but it is our home. The other 166 hours of the week as well. So join chat with other other, you know, other listeners and and us too. We're all right there. So yeah, fun stuff. Really, really looking forward. Actually, it's already been great. So yeah, there was a fact there was a question that came up yesterday in our email that also had come up in Discord from me because I woke up yesterday morning to an alert that my Synology Distation was in a state of reparations. And I was like, well, why is that? What's going on here? A drive had died overnight. One of my guess what? One of my Iron Wolf drives died overnight. No great surprise there. Yep. So thankfully, another Iron Wolf drive, because I evidently had one spare left, took over as the hot spare that I had in the unit. So it is I think it's almost finished now as we're talking here. But but that's all set. So I needed to order another drive. And one of you, I think it was listener Stephen, wrote in and said, just serendipitously timed, what are the best drives to get for your NAS? And I told him I ordered an Exos drive, the Seagate Exos drive. That's that's what certainly what I found to be the most reliable. They have the better warranty and they're cheaper than the Iron Wolf drives, even though they're rated better. So I'm not I'm not exactly sure about that. But I wound up I have a I have a couple of 16 terabyte Exos drives. So when I ordered this one, I figured I'd pay a little bit extra. And it was relatively inexpensive. I think it was like 320 for the 18 terabyte drive. So I grabbed one of those and that should be here, I think tomorrow or something. So that will become my new hot spare. Highly recommend having a hot spare, folks, so that when you have a drive crash overnight, the distation can get right on repairing it. So I don't know. Yeah, if you guys have any thoughts on that, anything? No, I got nothing, but I did put a link at the bottom of the video there. Okay, we'll put a put a link in the show notes too. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Thank you. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. And we do record these videos. We the show is an audio show and it will remain an audio show. I know we've said that many times and we will continue to say it. But we do record video and stream video when we record it live. So that we can take these little snippets and chop them up and put them out there on YouTube for for you and other folks to get some benefits from because we really do have a show where there it can be compartmentalized. So speaking of compartmentalizing, shall we go to our quick tips here? I'll start with I'll start with start with Chris. This is I this is one of those things I had no idea even existed until I saw it. But I saw Chris Howman on on Twitter shared that preview has a built in zoom lens, which is amazing to me. I had no idea that that this was even a thing. You hit the back tick on your keyboard and the zoom lens in preview appears. So the back tick would on most Apple keyboards be in the upper left just below the escape key. And then you get this little magnifier zoom lens that you can drag all over the screen in preview, which is amazing. There are so many times when I need to like see something and I wind up just didn't command plus plus plus to zoom the whole thing in and then scroll around. This sort of saves me from that. So I'm just glad you talked about what the back tip was because I was sitting in the back arrow button. Oh, yeah, that's fair. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Yep. Yeah, no, the back tick. See, these are the things the the ancillary things that we learn either doing or listening to the show or more likely, or at least for me, both where where yeah. So that's it's good. I love learning things like this. Jose has a quick tip for us. He says, I wanted to share something I've been doing recently to jot something down while on the go without having any open app. I simply bring up spotlight on my iPhone by swiping down on the screen from the middle. Okay, yep. So iPhone search. And then I type the text in the field and then I take a screenshot. I found this to be faster than bringing up the notes app or the reminders app. That's a really fascinating way of doing this. Huh. He says what makes this even quicker is that the cursor is automatically placed in the spotlight text field, whereas in notes and reminders, I have to first tap the screen to activate some kind of text field. He says, of course, there's limited space in the spotlight field that can be captured by a screenshot, but for short text and little notes, it works great. Once I'm back home, I review the screenshots folder on my phone and parse the information accordingly. That's a really interesting hack, Jose. I never would have thought of that, but you're totally right that, I mean, that's the, you know, it's the fastest way. You know, if you have to be quiet, that works. I tend to use Siri. Hey, remind me to... Oh, yeah. Right. Right. Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Wow, fascinating. Do that in a movie theater. Someone's gonna be like, hey. And for most people, a screenshot is accomplished by hitting the power button and the volume up button. Fair. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Then you have to hit done and tell them to see files or photos. It doesn't automatically save, right? It will save if you ignore it, I think. It will save. I believe. Yeah. And there's a screenshots album that I think it puts it into. Yeah, I think that started, I think you're right, John. I think that started in iOS 14. Yeah, that's right. Which makes, you know, Jose's little workflow a little easier because doesn't have to sort through all the pictures. He just sorts through, you know, the screenshots album and boom, there they are, especially if that's what you use screenshots for. That's where they're gonna be. All right, fun. I like it. Scott has a quick tip for us, I believe, somewhere. Yeah. What did I do with Scott? Well, that's why I don't have it. It's yours, John. So here's something from Scott. I use the Safari reading list to collect all of my web reading. Quite often, I find something that I like in my RSS reader. I use reader with a Feedly subscription, by the way, both highly recommended, or just browsing and put it in the reading list to read later when I have time. That's fine as far as it goes. What I'd like to do, though, is to keep the other PDF and text documents that I have to read for business in the reading list, too. It's easy to do. Just use the file, open a file, menu item, to open your PDF or text file. Once it's open in a Safari window, you can just add it to the reading list as you normally would. So that's great. I like that. Yeah. Yeah, I love these little hacky things. This is great. Yeah, good stuff. That worked out well, John. You want to take us to Dominic? Yeah. So Dominic has one that I think was for Pete. But he says, in Macagabre 923, you wondered whether iPadOS supports low power mode. Indeed, it does. It's new with iPadOS 15, and it has mentioned a long way down on the iPadOS features list. Unfortunately, it's only available for certain models. And unfortunately, the one that Pete was mentioning, the 2013 iPad won't run. It wasn't on there. Yeah, that's interesting. I'm curious how many people out there are using low power mode on their iPads. I've never found a need for it. But I mean, I am a sample size of one. So I'm largely irrelevant in the grand scheme of things. Super relevant to me, but I've proven myself wrong many times in the past. So I'd love to hear from you folks about that. So yeah. Yeah. So he says, so you can either enable it in settings, battery. And yeah, I looked on my iPad, which is fairly new. And yep, it's there and it's off. Because yeah, I mean, the iPad has a you know, swamp and huge battery. So exactly. Yeah. Although, you know, maybe on like a long plane ride where I'm going to be watching a lot of movies or something, maybe I don't know what low power mode would help with in that regard, because the screen is going to be on like the power hogs are going to be there. But who knows, maybe maybe there's something to be gained from that. Yeah. And you can also toggle it in control center. And also this is common to iPad and iPhone. You'll get a pop up when you get down to 10%. And there's also an option there to put you into low power mode. Interesting. And you'll know you're in low power mode because the battery icon will be yellow. Very cool. Yeah, I've had to do this with my phone sometimes, like if I'm going to the store something and all of a sudden I arrive and and, you know, my battery is almost shot. Well, I'll put it in low power mode and usually make it. Yeah, right. Oh yeah. Well, I've said like when I travel, I keep my phone in low power mode the whole time I'm traveling. And the trick to that is going into the shortcuts app and creating an automation, because what will happen is when your phone charges past 80%, it turns off low power mode, which is great because it figures well, you don't need it anymore. Well, if I'm traveling and I want to maximize my power, I do need it or I at least want it. And so I have an automation in the shortcuts app that is triggered by low power mode being turned off and it has one action in it. And that is it turns low power mode on. So low power mode gets turned off for a split second and my automation runs in the middle of the night while I'm asleep and the phone's charging turns it back on. So I don't have to I don't have to remember. And then when I usually when I get home, I just turn the entire automation off. So it's just right there. Just it's been handy. Yeah. Yeah, it's good stuff. And the other advantage to that is no data, low, low data, I should say, I guess, in the background, background apps, don't you aren't going to burn up your data if you're on the road, especially internationally? That's true. Yeah, you know, a lot of your data. And then the other thing I might mention is in order to find things in settings, when I go to settings on my iPad and or my iPhone, I will pull down the settings list just a little bit. So I get a search window at the top. And then I type in the setting that I'm looking for. If you happen to remember the name of the setting, that's a lot better. But that's a lot easier way to find it than scrolling down through 70, 75, 80 apps. Yeah, for that one setting. So that's how I get here. You mentioned that it will use less data sort of as a byproduct of low power mode, which I think is is correct. I haven't tested it, but it certainly makes sense that the background apps wouldn't be doing anything right. It doesn't upload photos and check your email. And that's right. There is also the ability to set low data mode on your various connections. And you can do that for your cellular, you know, data connection and also for individual Wi-Fi connections. So you can, you know, maximize. I knew you could do it by Wi-Fi. I didn't know you could do it for your cellular. Yeah, I don't I would pull it up on my phone, except I'm using my phone as a camera today. Well, there's that. Yeah, there is that. Yeah. Hey, speaking of things that I have learned on a few recent episodes, I've mentioned that I don't quite understand the benefit of universal control as it relates to iOS devices. Because I always said, well, if I'm going to have my iPad next to my Mac and I want to be able to control my iPad with my Mac, why wouldn't I just put it in, you know, expanded desktop slash sidecar mode, right? And then just put my windows over there. And several people out there, including Denny, but you're not alone, says they use it when the iPad is their primary computer. And as soon as I get for me, my iPad is very much not my primary computer. So I was, I had, you know, tunnel vision with this. But as soon as I started getting emails from all you saying, oh, yeah, well, my iPad is my primary computer. Sometimes I'm sitting at my Mac and it's was like, ah, ding, ding, ding. Of course, you then don't want to hide your primary computer. You want to be able to control your primary computer. And that turns out is your iPad. So having the mouse and keyboard to be able to do that while you're using your ancillary device, a.k.a. your Mac, makes perfect sense to me. I just don't live like that. So I would never would have thought of it. And this is the thing I love about doing this show. So yeah, I learned. It's great. Makes makes sense. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. You're you're on the road more than any of us, Pete. Are you using universal control or sidecar on on the regular? Yeah, I'm not. I can say, in fact, never. And I've been intrigued the last several weeks by the discussion of doing that because I do have an iPad with me all the time. Right. So I mean, yeah, if you're but the thing is your workflows are all all founded on the one screen scenario, generally speaking. They so but I think I think that's the difference. Yeah, it may be. But right. That's because yours were two until you figured out how to use two screens or three screens. And that's fair. You know, and it's like, Oh, I've got all this real estate here. That's fair. You're right. That's a lot of times that I would love to, you know, that I'm having to do even during this show, I find myself tabbing back and forth between browsers and having that over there would be ideal. Yep. Yeah, you put the you can put like the Discord chat over there or whatever, whatever, you know, yeah, it's super handy. I yep. But yeah, and for those that don't know what I'm talking about, it hit the hold the command key down and hit tab until you highlight the icon of the program to which you want to go and let go and it will come up with that window. So it's an easy way to switch between applications when you have multiple. Yeah, there you go. Listen, Gary shares a quick tip that is just good to bear in mind as iPhones in some US states are now being able to house your ID, for example, you know, there I think there are five or six states now that your driver's license can be displayed from your iPhone and that is considered a, you know, a legal way to present your ID. You don't need to have the physical card. You can just do it on your phone. And that's great, I guess. But listener Gary points out to us, he says, you know, the Fifth Amendment protects passwords. But if you, it does not protect fingerprints, eyes, and face ID, at least not at the moment, which means you may very well be giving authorities a device that has lots of personal information on it. And that could be, you know, if you're handing it to them to show your ID, it could be construed as permission to look at anything you've you've handed them, which is on that device. And then theoretically, they could ask you to use your fingerprint, your eyes, your face to unlock this device. If you haven't already, and who knows what the ID process is going to be like, do you need to unlock it to show your driver's license? You know, that sort of thing. I don't know. Someone out there actually does know the answer to that question. That's, it's not rhetorical, but you know, so you want to make it your splash treatment, so it remains locked. Well, it's not just a picture. That's the thing. It's like a boarding pass. Yeah, yeah. So, so just bear that in mind that it, you know, that you do not want to give any authorities, customs, TSA, any of those your unlocked iPhone, it has, there are, there are too many stories that come out where that has wind up going in a, at the very least, causing a long, boring conversation that you did not schedule in your day. So that'd be a good outcome. Exactly. And obviously, the fingerprint ones are different. There is, there are a couple cases where identifying which finger unlocks it. So if you don't use your index finger or something is now giving not being required to give knowledge that's only in your head. And they, they, they can demand that from you? No, I don't think, I think the case law is such that they can, you know, requiring a fingerprint, they can require, but as to which finger will unlock your phone is, is, they can't require it. They have to guess that. I got you. Right. So if you only use your right ring finger or your, you know, something like that. And actually, one that comes to mind is, because I use it on the iPad all the time, if I try to use my thumb print to open my iPad on the flight deck, it won't open. But I use the tip of my thumb. And so there's a different print there. So when I set up my, because that's the way I naturally touch it when I'm flying, and I want to pull something up. Oh, so it has, it has learned that that's your, yes, like an approach, yeah, I taught it. My thumb print is actually at the end of my thumb, not the, not the pad. Interesting. But I don't know that there's any case law with regards to your facial, you know, because you can require attention for your face. Yes. Yes. Right. Right. Am I is requiring attention? Is that novel? You know, that's, yeah, that's right. I think that's yeah, because you're right. The case law protects knowledge, not physical attributes. That's correct. That's, that's really what that boils down to. And that may well change. I mean, they're, you know, as, as our phones become, I mean, they really are like second brains for us or ancillary brains for us that we store so much and rely on it. And, and this is what we, what we should be doing with these things, right? They, there's no reason for me to know your phone number P, right? Right. But when we were 12, I would have known every number. Correct. Yeah. But there's no reason for that anymore. And so, so we don't, but we have it on this device. But that's true of a lot of things. And we have this expectation of privacy with the data that we store there that used to just be data in our heads. And now that is not the case. I've, there are certain passwords that I don't even store the actual password in one password. What I store is a code that tells me what the password is. So it'll be things like, what's the, what's one way I could do this? Ah, okay. So I could say, you know, I was, I don't think this is overly private information, but if it is, it doesn't matter. You know, my, my, my birthday is, is the 24th of September, right? And so I could say, ah, if, if my password was, ah, John 24 Pete, let's, let's say, I wouldn't store John 24 Pete. I would store, ah, OG MG co-host, birth date, ah, you know, second MG co-host, right? And that would tell me it's John birth, you know, 24 Pete, but I would never have typed that in there. And of course I can be far more obscure with my notes than that, because that's something pretty much a lot of people could figure out, right? But, but those kinds of, of mnemonic things to remind myself of, oh, this is, this is what that means. And it might be, you know, if I want to do John 24, 24 Pete, well, then I could do, you know, MG, OG co-host, birth date, birth date, you know, second co-host, right? And so now I know, oh, I'm repeating the 24 thing. And there's a lot of these things that I just, I do, and I know. So I have passwords that even if you got into my one password, you would not be able to get, you would not be able to log in. It's a thing I know. You can't prove, you can't force me to divulge a thing I know. And so let me tell you this, if you ever get dementia, you're hoved. But that's, that's true in a lot of ways. Well, that's true. But earlier than most, in that case. Yes, that's, that's fair. And these are, these are very specific passwords, right? So, but yeah, otherwise, like my, my wife knows how to get into my one password and like all of that stuff, which I think is a really handy thing to pick someone that, that can get in or, or at the very least do the, they have a recovery, a recovery thing that you can, you can put it in your, your will or your safe deposit box or whatever. So that, that information doesn't just go with you because that can be a major pain in the neck. I, I will tell you, I had to go through a thing a few years ago with a family member who was unconscious, traumatic brain injury for months and getting it, you know, but we like their finances and their life and all of that still needed to happen. And guess what? You generally don't plan on, you know, being in a coma with a TBI. And so there was no way to say, Hey, I'm going under the knife. You should know these four things about what needs to happen over the next month or whatever. You know, this was, you know, here's a phone call on a random Tuesday. Guess what happened? And sorting out all of that was super difficult. Thankfully, we were able to get the password for their Mac. And with that, I could see their iCloud keychain passwords. And that gave us enough to sort of scrape by with things. But, but yeah, man, like that, pick somebody somehow, make that, make that easier for other people, for sure. Yeah. All right. Well, that went in a weird direction. No, on that happy note. On that happy note. No, but like, is this valuable information to it? Because these are the things you don't want to think about, right? And and then you're in a scenario and it's like, oh, hey, huh, okay. So anyway, we have lots of questions from you. A couple of voice questions today. And I'll talk about some some interesting things we're doing with those that we're experimenting with, I should say. But let's see the now the next thing I want to do is is talk about our sponsors, if that if that timing works for you, Mr. Braun. Okay. All right. Everybody listening already knows that Otherworld Computing, our first sponsor year is the place that John and I go first whenever we need to get stuff for our Macs, our iPads, our computing environments, the OWC Envoy Pro Electron. Man, this thing, it's this tiny little portable USB-C SSD. Fastest, toughest, mini sized, universal, waterproof. You can get it from 240 gigs up to two terabytes. That thing's fantastic. Whenever I travel and sometimes even when I'm just at home here, the OWC USB-C travel dock is a staple of my travel kit because it just does what I need. It's got five ports of connectivity, two USB 3.1 Gen 1 type A ports, HDMI, an SD card, USB-C with power pass through. It's what you're going to want. The OWC Thunderbolt Hub, that's sitting right in front of me here in the studio because it lets me take one Thunderbolt port and turn it into three more. It's amazing. I love this thing. And it's also got a USB-A port on the front. And the best part is about the folks at OWC is they know what they're doing. They understand their products. They know how to support them. They make them high quality so that they just work and they last. John just got some of their new OWC Thunderbolt cables. You got to go check this stuff out. Go to maxsales.com to check all this and more. And our thanks to Otherworld Computing at maxsales.com for sponsoring this episode. 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The reason I mentioned the crash is I took my original spinning drive and recloned it back to my SSD because everything was really messed up and then did a restore from my backups. I did not have and did not make a bootable thumb drive to reinstall High Sierra and then reapply the APFS. The oddity is, I have noticed over the past I think month, that it seems to be booting a whole lot faster back to its original fresh SSD install. Do you have any suggestions on what I might have done or changed that has allowed that? And do you think it'll start slowing down again? Keep up the good work. Keep having fun. Bye-bye. That's a good question. I can answer the second question first. Yes. Yes. Yeah. I think it's going to start slowing down again. Thanks, Pete. That's super helpful. They do. Hey, it's what I do. No, but you're not wrong. There's a lot of reasons that it could have gotten faster. Reformatting an SSD, depending on what the SSD was and its garbage collection path and all of that, you may have been pushing up against a scenario where rights couldn't happen efficiently on the SSD. So doing that may have made a huge difference. It also could be that simply doing what effectively is a Nuke and Pave wiped out a lot of the temp files and all of those things that don't migrate around. So I mean, we always say that a reinstall, even just an over-the-top reinstall can make things more efficient because it will wipe those things out. Certainly, a Nuke and Pave can make things a lot more efficient. So it's hard to say, obviously, what specifically was slowing you down ADD, Todd, but time heals all wounds and time slows all computers, I guess. So I don't know. That's my thought. John, what do you think? A safe boot is another way that could perhaps speed things up that clears out some caches. I like that. The other thing, I don't know if you did this, but Onyx also has a feature that removes lots of caches and corrupt caches can slow you down. Yeah, for sure. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, it makes sense. Yeah. Yeah, interesting. Good question, Todd. I like it. Let's see who's next. Brian is next. We will let Brian share on his own, I believe, or at least ask his question on its own. Hey, Mac Geeks. I've been listening to the show for a few months now, and I've got a question for you regarding remote access software. I'm currently using Google's remote desktop to provide remote access to my four Macs from my iPhone or iPad when I'm away from home. I'm finding it to be less than a satisfying experience. Years ago I used Timbuktu back in the pre-OSX days for remote access. It was a remarkably bulletproof and reliable solution, even over a dial-up modem. Later on, I was happy with LogMe in for years. Their web browser access to my home computers was awesome. But they discontinued the free version and the paid version was out of my budget. I switched to TeamViewer and that worked for a while. I don't remember now why I had to quit using them. My journey to after that lead me to Google's remote desktop. I'm finding it to be frustrating, inconsistent and buggy. So, do you have any recommendations on the best way to access a Mac remotely from an iPhone or iPad? It doesn't have to be a free solution, but of course, free, as in beer, is always good. Thanks, guys. You want to take this one, John? Yeah, I don't road into my network that often, but I still have the tools. So my current solution for this, Dave, is as follows. Oh, and by the way, all of this is free, or mostly free. All right, like as in beer, yes. Did you know that Apple has a built-in remote or a built-in facility to do this, Dave and Pete? Settings, sharing, screen sharing. What this actually is, is a VNC server, Dave. All right, so first activities. And system preferences on the Mac, not settings. Oh, I'm sorry. No, it's fine, just for folks following along at home. So turn on screen sharing, then fire up a VNC client, which is the protocol it's using. Now on an iOS device, I like Mocha VNC Lite. Okay. And we'll link to that. And then here's the tricky part. Well, you have to get into your network. The way I get into my network, Dave, is to VPN in. What I use is there's also a VPN client that runs on iOS, and then I connect it to my Synology, which offers open VPN. And then you typically have to open a tunnel on port 1194 for open VPN. And then I use the open VPN Connect app. Sure. Okay. And it was for the Connect app for iPhone, right? Yes. Yeah, okay. That's a lot. It's free. Well, it's free if you have that open VPN server on your network somewhere. You've got it on your distation. Somebody might have it on there, Netgear Router, because Netgear does those. And some routers, of course, have VPN servers. For most people, I probably wouldn't recommend this route. I mean, it works. Well, it's just it's a lot to set up and maintain a VPN. And then you've got to have, it's not native to yours. Yeah, none of, right. You need to do dynamic DNS so that you can connect. And of course, none of this is native to the iPhone, which stinks. And I don't know that there's a path to doing this that is. Largely because there is no remote access client for the iPhone. If you were trying to connect Mac to Mac, you can even just forget about being remote locally on your network. Screen sharing works Mac to Mac. It's built into the OS. Why this isn't built into iOS or iPad OS even baffles me. But it's not. So you do need some third party thing. And you could use Mocha VNC Lite on your local network without needing to VPN because you're already in. Right. Like the VPN just effectively takes your device and puts it in the local network. So the trick is what can we use on an iPhone or an iPad to both connect, remote, you know, do the remote control and do the tunneling into the network. And the easiest thing would be screens and screens connect. That is a fantastic utility. I use screens locally on my network just to connect the things from my iPhone and iPad because it's it's just so smooth. And then screens connect is an app that runs on your Mac that syncs with the screens server. And then you don't have to worry about port forwarding or anything like that. You just use screens and screens connect. And it takes care of 100 percent of all of this for you. And you just get in any time I travel, I make sure screens connect is running on my Mac in the office. Just in case there's an issue with my VPN. It's, you know, because because that geeky stuff can fall apart. And and, you know, I'm a pretty hardcore geek when it comes to this stuff. And the last trip I took, there was a moment where I needed to get in and my VPN. I wouldn't let me in. You know, it's just like, OK, cool. This is amazing. Thanks. Yeah. It was I had a whole weird problem that we haven't even talked about on the show that I won't get into right now. But yeah, it was like screens connect saved my bacon. Oh, that's nice. Why the question I had also was because it's been years since I've run my Mac mini as a home server that I've remoted into. I seem to recall there was a setting on there so that if there was a power interruption, it would it would reboot and come back up and be available. So you want to be able to do that too. Yeah, that's just turn itself off and stay off. And that yeah, that's right. If you go into energy saver schedule, so system preferences, energy saver schedule, you can schedule events for different times of the day or week. And I have my computers set to start up or wake every day at a certain time. So I know that at worst, I'm out for 24 hours and then it will start up. And I have it at like, you know, 4am or 7am or something, depending on what room it's in. But yeah, that's a really good point. That's right. You want that to you want your computer to to be forced to start up if it's not on. If you're planning and then not have a password on it, or else it's going to be stuck at the password screen and you won't be able to get in. You can have a you can have a user login password. You can't have a file vault password. Right. Yeah, because because my computers, some of them, the one in the office auto logs me in, but the one here in the studio doesn't. And so there's many times where I go to, you know, remote in and it's like, hey, type your password, Dave. And I'm like, yeah, that if I get that far, I'm in great shape. But I know that information. Yeah. At least I better then at the at the last Mac world. I got a one year subscription to something that I thought was only for emulating other machines, which was parallels and parallels desktop is a fabulous remote solution. And it's not bad. It's 1999 a year or 3499 for two years. And they have a client app for the iPhone and for the iPad. And you can and I used it to leave my computer on at home and I could bid on the road. I don't have my my bidding software for my monthly schedule is only on a on a laptop or a desktop machine. They don't have it or didn't then have it available for iOS devices. But parallels desktop is a it. Yeah, it's it's like remote for dummies. Parallels access, you mean parallels desktop is the Did I say accident desktop? Yeah, yeah. You said desktop. Yep. I just wanted to make sure we get that right for the first thing. Yes. Yes. Parallels access. And there's a link in the show notes. Right. But yeah. Cool. Yeah, that that that worked really well. And the price is not bad. 20 bucks a year. Yeah, that's a buck 66 a month. Yeah, that's not bad that and and worth it for again for just the the headache free way of just getting in without having to poke holes in your firewall and worry about, you know, things too many points of failure. Right. So yeah, but the geeky way that John came up with is far more satisfying. There's no doubt. Oh yeah. No, I can do this is my default as well. I VPN into my network and I, you know, and I use, you know, he uses you use Mocha VNC, John, I use screens, but like it's I VPN in except when the VPN for whatever reason isn't working. So yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Fascinating. Brian's Brian's voice. You can go back and listen was brought to you by Veritones Marvel dot a I we we're experimenting with this. You know, we're always reading unless you call in to all I was going to say the old number, which we don't have anymore. And I'm super bummed about. You can call into 224 888 geek, which John, I think is what is geek for 4 3 3 5. That's it. Yes. So you can call into 224 888 geek and leave us a voicemail. You can use the app, the Mackie cab iOS app to record a message and send that to us. But unless you've done one of those two things, you're hearing us read your message. And so I thought, well, wouldn't it be interesting if it wasn't us reading your text messages? And so this week we experimented a little bit. So it's fun. I thought that voice was pretty good. That was the I think they call that the Gary voice in the Veritones. Really good. Right. And yeah. Yeah. And there's some tweaking that you can do with like speed and pacing. And so, you know, it's it's fun. Yeah, it's geeky. It, you know, keeps it interesting. All right. Yeah. Should we go to Lewis? Yeah. All right. Lewis, I am going to read. Lewis says I've got a very large photos library, 561 gigs with 88,000 photos and 1400 videos. I ran photos sweeper last month to try to get a handle on my duplicate photo situation. It freed up about 10 gigs. I noticed a very sentimental photo was missing several weeks ago. And he did. He shared this photo. It's a photo of Lewis working with Fred Rogers on an episode of his show at one point. He says, luckily, I still had a clone of the drive that I made before I ran photosweeper. I was able to locate and restore several missing photos from that day. Now I'm worrying about how many other potentially important photos I may have inadvertently deleted. I've added many photos since running photosweeper both from my phone and my scans. So I'm not sure it makes sense to just revert to the old library to add complication. I changed the dates on many of the scan photos to reflect when they were originally taken. That means I can't just export photos added after a certain date. I am using iCloud photos if that helps and store the originals locally on my iMac. And I run time machine on my boot drive in addition to cloning. But my photos are stored on an external SSD that isn't backed up by that. I'm looking for some kind of tool to compare the two libraries and see what's missing any ideas. Yeah, so my the first thing I'm thinking about this is he's created a scenario where for whatever reason and we know his specific reason but many of us might run into this scenario. You want to merge two libraries that may and in his case almost certainly have duplicates, right? And the thing that I have used to do that time and again is power photos from Fat Cat Software. It does a fantastic job of exactly this. You point multiple photo libraries at it and it will scour through them, do the comparing and figure out what photos are in both places, what are not and give you a great interface to really kind of choose like yeah I want this one I don't want that one and and and then you're good to go. So that's if I were you know most of the way we answer these questions for you unless we happen to have been through this scenario ourselves exactly and I haven't exactly but I've been close but most of it is what would we do next if we were there might not be the end all be all but the next thing I would try for you Lewis is power photos and I think that might be the end all be all but you know we'll see we'll see what happens. I've actually got an idea for one that I use similar does a similar sort of thing and that's called Delta Walker have you ever used that Dave or John? No I don't even I don't even know what Delta Walker is. Delta Walker is a program that you grab two files it well it let me back up it can go from I think $39 an $59 option and an $89 option and I think the $89 option and the $59 option allow you to compare three separate folders in any given time but the $39 version allows you to compare any two folders and then make them identical yeah you can say hey take all these that you see over here but aren't in this folder and and push them over into it. Will it specifically do photos? I think so but and here's here's the danger man I would have a backup which is what yeah on any of these with if you right click and show package contents on your on your on your photo library really in that package right yeah yeah and so you could do that and tell it okay show package contents on both of those folders and then get them to and tell Delta Walker hey compare these because you can drop and drag the folders you want into the top of Delta Walker got it got it so is Delta Walker new? I've had it for years oh no they they have an Apple Silicon version okay the website said copyright 2019 so I was just a little concerned uh that we were you know pointing people to something that didn't actually exist but but no it totally exists it's it's um it's you know it'll they've got an Apple Silicon version so clearly it's it's been updated well since 2019 right and it it does some neat stuff like I say if you pay the $89 version there's there's almost nothing you can't do with it as far as multiple folders and multiple machines and users and I've actually used it comparing a folder that I had on my Synology Drive compared to what I had on my oh my laptop so it'll do across your network drives too oh I wonder if it's using rSync to do this rSync is a unix command yeah that that that will compare and sync two folders so and you can have it go bi-directional or unidirectional I don't I don't think super duper or carbon copycloners still use rSync but they might but I think at least one of them did use it in their original versions I mean because it's you know it's right there it's on your Mac but yeah this Delta Walker has seen two updates just in 2022 alone so including one a week ago so yeah we're we're we're good recommending it that's great I don't remember where I initially got it but it was it was one of those early utilities that I found like yeah Gemini Delta Walker clean my Mac you know some of those are really powerful yep yeah interesting interesting interesting hey so we've talked on this show a few times about all of us that are using Google's grandfathered free email for a lot of things you could use certainly use it for a business but there were many of us who were using it for our personal domains and then earlier or and maybe still are using it for our personal domains and then earlier this year we got the note the note that said your free time has ended thank they ended new subscriptions to this program 10 years ago and for the last 10 years they've just let those of us that had them stay grandfathered in and it was fantastic I mean I'll be perfectly honest we use it for for backbeat we use it for we used it for Mac observer we use it for Mac e-cab and then I use it for my my personal domains too and those days at least to be used freely are coming to an end so the question is what to do and when this first came out we sort of I my advice to myself and I shared this with all of you was a pump the brakes here they aren't going to be making any of these changes until June or July at the earliest so let's see how things evolve based on the feedback that they are almost certainly going to get and that they were soliciting up until the beginning of this month from all of us and so we did we submitted our feedback and now we know some more details so Google works there are two things Google is offering a free version of this but it doesn't include email it just includes like docs and in those sorts of things so not entirely helpful for some I'm sure not not at all helpful for those of us that need to figure out what to do with our email the for the for the email they have announced pricing and it is zero dollars for the first six months now this is zero dollars per user per month I realize if it's zero dollars for anything it doesn't matter what you multiply it by but bear with me because this is where the pricing gets in in in Google's email setup you can have users which have separate individual accounts that they log into IMAP addresses storage all of that good stuff with the free one you have 15 gigs of storage per account and then you have groups which are effectively forwards right you know so for a quite some time our feedback at macgeekab.com was just a group that went to two of us and then the three of us the groups got a little weird with forwarding and some things weren't getting through so we then made those actual accounts and then things you know and then just did some forwards from there so you could look at this and and sort of try to narrow down the number of actual accounts you need and then forward into those from other things which might be able to save you because after the first six months it is what Google is calling half price and that is six dollars per user per month that still gets pretty expensive right because you know you're looking at what 72 bucks a year for uh you know per user there are other email services and we'll talk about some of them in a minute here that are certainly less expensive than that but the the lack of friction of just being able to say oh sure yeah 72 bucks a year per person great that like problem solved isn't a bad path for some right and and certainly we've we've been we've been given a six month at least six month reprieve looking through the details of this p uh because I know you you're going through this too all of the time frames that they listed were were qualified with an at least so it's zero dollars USD for at least six months in the terms and then it is half price six dollars a user a month for at least the next 12 months so they they are trying to find a path here where they can offer something that's actually competitive which at the moment I'm not convinced they're they're hitting you do get two terabytes of cloud storage per user now with that 72 bucks a year so that's not a bad thing like you could use hyper backup I think hyper backup on your Synology to backup to a Google Drive and if you got two terabytes out there like this now's could become like wait a minute if I use my storage and all of this uh wisely then maybe there is a a cost savings by canceling something else you know if you're paying you know something like backblaze or somebody one terabyte okay well maybe you know you turn that off and you pay this and you get your email and your storage and you use you know ARC ARQ from uh from haystack software on your Mac to do your backups to Google Drive which I think it'll do like like there's there's a path here where this makes a lot of sense and I think Google's trying to make that argument for us to us who knows I don't know yeah it's still yeah I guess I'm a I'm a cheap pilot so I'm gonna tell you that right up front um I don't mind the 72 bucks a year for myself and two terabytes is great but for instance my wife I have her on a four gigabyte a month phone plan she might use half of that when she's really grinding out that data so sure who terabytes for her she you know yeah she's never gonna use it in the mail and all that so I wish you know my curiosity goes to you know what do we do are is users like me really that much of a cost center to them we're not that's the thing yeah like this I I get that they need to they need to solve this this free they need to monetize it they you know they've been carrying us for a very long time and my my guess is through this they are looking potentially for a few things one is to just weed out the cheapskates right and and and and also find but also find the businesses that happened to get in on this when it was free and didn't need more than free and say okay uh this is no longer free is it worth it for your business to pay 72 bucks per you know per user per employee per month or whatever or per year sorry not per month and and maybe you know maybe there's a maybe there's a like I think they're they need to learn and they can't learn it with the current scenario so you know I get it there's a couple that we have talked about on this show that might work and that came from you our listeners the first is po box couple of replacements or potential replacements the first is po box dot com so po box po box yeah exactly from the po box and and where it gets interesting is you know you can pay 50 bucks a year and you get an actual mailbox and forwarding you can forward up to five different destinations using your own domain you get outgoing smtp access which is super important because you're going to want to be able to uh see you you know you're going to want to be able to send email from your custom domain right but this is your mailbox you can send and receive here you get your vacation auto replies filters web mail imap and pop access and 50 gigs of storage which for email is is a lot it's not two terabytes though so 22 a year more right but so that's 50 bucks a year if we go to the cheapest pricing for po box and there is a middle ground but for just 20 dollars a year you get forwarding only and you can forward up to five destinations but you can use your own domain and you still get outgoing smtp access so there is a world where you go sign up for a free gmail account not a gmail account with your custom domain but just a free gmail account you get your 15 gigs you use po box to be the front door that your email comes to for your you know me at my domain dot com behind the scenes that forwards to your gmail and then you can send from a free gmail account through your custom domain if that custom domain has an smtp server and guess what po box offers an smtp server right so for 20 bucks a year per user you could do this with po box.com so there is that path it's a little geeky right you've got to you know set things up and and link all the things together and get the thigh bone connected to the head bone and whatever's in between but it's doable and it saves you some money that's path number one and i i think probably the one of the better paths then there's forward email dot net i want to say yeah yeah yeah that also and these all come from you i i didn't find any of these these are these are all from you folks and i've collected them as you've sent them in the pricing for that is free or you get enhanced protection for three bucks a month so thirty six thirty six dollars a year but you do get custom domains unlimited email addresses unlimited disposable email addresses i don't know that they offer an smtp server i think it's just inbound forwarding but they might offer smtp i don't see smtp on their f a q on on that page let's look at the f a q how to send mail as using gmail yeah all right so evidently there is a path to using this there there may be a path for for them to use smtp with with forward email so maybe that's maybe that's the truly free option um the hard part i see with both of those save is saving what you have now already in the google domains that's a fair question so it's it's not as bad as you would think there are and and i will offer the third option is i i'm super tempted to do this but i i need you guys to continue to talk me off the ledge please don't ruin your own server man correct i well synology is new uh like the new mail server the new version of synology mail server that's coming with dsm 71 is like it is it literally has been built for people in this scenario it will auto slurp in all of your mail and and essentially replicate your gmail config locally and data locally i haven't tried it so i i'm sure that i'm sure it's not quite as simple as i'm saying but it is built to do this and then you could just run your own mail server i i'm please talk me off the ledge on this guys um i'm almost certainly going to wind up being stupid and doing it with at least one of my you know less important domains because that way at least we can talk about it on the show so that's what about your spam filter uh well you can synology doing that for you it's your synology doing your spam filtering for you okay but now you're in now you're inviting the world to your doorstep and some isps will not let you do this they block inbound access on that i think consolidate yeah i think comcast xfinity does block it i most cable companies block it i believe consolidated which is the fiber provider i use they don't block anything they don't they truly don't care they're just like here's a connection we don't know how much data you're using enjoy you know which is awesome yeah it's great um so but if you don't have and and like also to be fair like i'm using fast mail with my um my my purse well i'd say it's my personal domain it's really not everything that i do comes into fast mail uh and so i am using fast mail as my primary and fast mail's pricing is uh five bucks a month so i you know right in in that same realm when i moved from gmail to fast mail a few years ago i gave them my gmail credentials for that account and went to sleep and when i woke up all my mail was over so they also have the importer so bear that in mind that some of these and po bucks might have that too i have been super happy with with fast mail by the way and so it you know at five bucks a month 60 bucks a year maybe you know it's another right that is 60 bucks a year from doing the math right so yeah but it looks like they have annual prices too which may be cheaper correct i'm guessing oh that's right you're absolutely right yeah it's 50 bucks a year if you pay annually so there you go nice catch p yeah yeah for sure um so here's a little trick yep that i use um yahoo email they give you a terabyte of storage so what i do and i just checked my account i'm using like one percent of it but what i do is i'll take the mail that comes into my inbox and then i'll have rules and then i put them over on yahoo because they give me a terabyte of space rather than storing it in iCloud or or google interesting but you can't you can't do custom domains with yahoo so this would be yet another this would be like your forward destination right yes okay okay all right i use rules to yeah reroute my mail yeah yeah we just forwarded over yeah yeah for sure it's been more than 25 years but i i think yahoo may offer something where you can use your own domain i don't remember yeah yahoo mail custom domain uh right i mean why not how to let's see yahoo add add free email and a whole lot you are more with yahoo mail plus five bucks a month and you get is there a custom domain here i don't see it yeah uh head to toe customization i don't know all about your own domain oh yeah i said oh yeah uh no domain blocking oh they might have it it might like it might be here i'm just not finding it as we're as i'm searching while we're talking here but yeah interesting all right that's good to know huh interesting interesting interesting um but as far as let's say you go with one of one service for whatever reason doesn't have the ability to import mail it's really not the most terrible thing it depends on how many mailboxes you have but you can connect mail like mail on your mac to both imap servers and then uh take the con you know select all in the inbox from old server and move it or or copy it i would say don't don't move there's no reason to cause deletes to happen yeah you know but copy that to the new server and then do the same with your sent box if you're only using one archive box then your life starts to get really easy because you only have three or four mailboxes with which to do this if you're using lots of different things well you might want to you know but if you're coming from gmail even if you use multiple boxes it really is just one archive box right like because gmail imap boxes are just filters so everything theoretically would be an all mail or or archive so there's probably a way of doing this that's not too terrible coming from gmail dave do your kids they're remote do they use the hamilton family no email no and that's because my kids do and that's going to be tough to get them all switched over it it's not as bad as you might think because um my well the reason my kids don't use a you know the hamilton whatever email address is because they used macobserver.com email addresses and and we thought that would be great because that domain existed before they did and that domain will continue to exist it's just not mine anymore so uh we had to move all their email over which was great and mine too obviously but yeah they were they were when i told them i'm like yeah like last fall and i'm like i think sale might actually happen they're like oh that sounds great and it's just like Thanksgiving or whatever and you know we're having Thanksgiving dinner when they're home there you go and no no we were actually out in Portland when i like when i i mean they they knew that like things were bubbling you know but it was like over Thanksgiving it was like well this i think this is gonna happen and they were like oh that's that's exciting i'm like yeah it means you guys are gonna have to change your email and they were like so are you sure you really want to go through with this uh but it has been mostly great for them because each of them moved to their own domains which i bought my kids their own domains like when they were born or something uh they moved to their own domains uh via iCloud and we already pay for that we're already paying for iCloud storage so the iCloud custom domain thing is spectacular the only kids have their own domains i completely forgot about that yeah see there you go there you go but the the issue is and the reason i can't do it with like we couldn't do it with with Mac Geekgab is because of that feedback at address right you can't have one address come in and go to multiple people uh with with iCloud right now and and i tried doing it with Cloudflare which offers email forwarding but they have the same issue that you can't do uh one or they did i haven't checked it that because that would start to open up doors here if we could if we could do all the routing at the Cloudflare level i could figure out the rest but um but they weren't allowing that either so anyway that's um that's where the fun comes in so yeah long conversation but one that i know is relevant to lots and lots of folks out there yeah yeah i'm still looking at my domain registrar too they hover offers it for 29 a year yeah yeah yeah right that's the other thing is look at your domain registrar they may offer you less expensive email on your custom domain than uh than you can get anywhere else so yeah that's you're right yeah that's the other way to do it that's the other way to do it uh we have a little bit of time left john you want to you want to do this thing from david here and like just talk through some of the uh some of this it's kind of a weird geeky one i don't know i don't know if it's actually going to go anywhere but sure see what happens it could um there it is um a client of mine sent me this and i'm like wtf did he mean what's that font yes yes i'm sure that's what he meant um facebook.com slash facebook-wifi have you seen this it literally wants me to set up his unify routers to connect to facebook and instagram who in their right mind would do this thoughts um i looked through it i'm not sure of the exact mechanics of how you enable it i don't think my router would support it um but they're they're privacy concerns with letting any third party inject something into your data stream but i could see the value if you offer a wi-fi hotspot and want to afford your users the convenience of linking with facebook or instagram to say hey i'm here or hey i like this place or here's a picture of my food right um personally i i use something similar dave uh so there's a system called four square and they have a client called swarm and you can check into places and every now and then um you may get an email or query or notification is saying hey what you think of this place do you like it do you not like it wait four square four square has a wi-fi thing with businesses no no no they they have a uh they have an app right four square has an app and then they have a companion app i know but this is this is like your business is offering wi-fi but you you authenticate with facebook and so it it takes the the headache out of it this isn't about checking in this is about using the wi-fi at a business right right um but it but it will show people like your you know it does help promote your business in in that way yeah the the mechanics of it are it looks to be router specific if i go into like the instructions for a netgear router you enable a guest network and then in the advanced setup there is a facebook wi-fi tab evidently and it looks like that's the case for any supported router so it doesn't seem to be a way of um of just doing this on any router your router specifically needs to have facebook wi-fi uh support but it looks like a lot of them do and and then you're just authenticating with facebook so you're you're logging these people in probably capturing who was there and like you said yeah maybe you know that maybe that's what you're trying to say that you know they you could you as the business owner would then know okay i had these people here let's you know let's see what they chose to share with us and and go from there that's interesting i haven't run into any businesses that have this and it seems like it's a thing huh yeah i haven't either though when i'm out and about i'm typically on my isp's wi-fi so sure i'll have to uh look around yeah interesting yeah because it will cause it will increase the the stickiness and it'll it'll you know gives people once you once you connect it says hey you should check in here you know so ah that's interesting very interesting i you know i don't i i mean i don't think there's it looks like you have the option to skip that check in based on the the facebook page you know you can you connect to the wi-fi it comes up and says check in at whatever and then you can but then you can say no no no skip the check in i don't want people to know i was here so that's not terrible i think that's pretty good huh i don't know well let us know what you think feedback at mackeykeb.com wait where feedback at mackeykeb.com pete i think he said feedback at mackeykeb that's what we said yeah fun stuff we didn't get to any cool stuff found today but that's uh that's okay we've got some good stuff though in the queue we will maybe we'll start with cool stuff found next week and plow through some of that those shows get expensive i you know i'm looking at the i'm looking at the list of cool stuff found and at first i was like oh no no no and then i'm like oh actually you're you're right pete they this one this one will also be expensive but not terribly but there's some cool things that we found right we want to tell you about that's that's the beauty of it they aren't meant to be expensive they are just it's a byproduct because we're excited about things and so we tell you it's just how it is yeah yeah yeah all right well that's what we got thanks for hanging out with us folks um make sure to check out that discord channel mackeykeb.com slash discord and then uh and we're gonna be doing more things with it right now there is literally one channel like i said we might have a live stream channel to talk about we might wind up having if there's a lot of like q and a there separate from just the general discussion we might have a you know tech support kind of channel or a cool stuff found channel i i don't want to overdo it and force some structure on us all that we're not going to use so i'd rather have it organically kind of grow and as we see that things are getting too crowded all right well we'll break that off and and you know compartmentalize some of that there so go check in my apologies to people that are there today i was not very good about checking for comments that may have been relevant for the show so it's the first time we're getting there and we're figuring it out yeah but you know that i i have been enjoying the heck out of it this week just having our community and you know like when i had that thing with my uh with my um my drive in the Synology i put it in there and we had a nice little conversation that wasn't like lost in in twitter mania it was just you know we could all see each other's replies and and talk like like humans and you know we could do things like a a group hangout in there sometime like maybe you know maybe we'll do some i don't know we'll pick some some day of the week we'll have the mackey cub cocktail party or something i don't know you just hang out and it won't be a show it'll just be us hanging out you know here you go yeah so it'll i think we're gonna have some fun with this so make sure to join mackeycup.com slash discord they make it pretty easy to get in there i think i hope all right uh yeah that's it you guys have anything else to share with them before we before we pull the plug on this thing no huh thanks for having me back oh man oh dude it's like yeah it's it you make the you you you round out the show my friend it's it takes calling me fat yeah sure it didn't yeah sure it didn't yeah no it was fun but and i only lost audio on you twice there was one point in here i lost you for about 45 seconds so i went i'll just nod and smile there you go that's and then it just and just magically so that's gotta be something with something your yard and and hotel yeah yeah yeah fast but but you didn't lose video or you did no not once video has been rock solid the entire time so audio first to go which doesn't make sense yeah all right i'm gonna think about that i have a i have a trip to the uh floatation tank scheduled for this afternoon so you clearly now i know it will be distracting me for the first 15 minutes in the tank is why would that happen yeah i signed up for a membership at the uh at the float place around the corner from us here so not around the corner but local to us here so that way i'm doing it it'll burn me no uh actually there's it's it's uh it's seacoastfloat.com i think it's um it might be flote.com but uh it is um there's one in portsmouth and one in uh campton and so i go to go to either one i hear that's awesome i've never done it great i recommend it i highly recommend it it's it's one of my favorite things to do for myself so what's that you fall asleep rarely but but it has happened i spend an hour it's either 60 or 90 minutes in the tank yeah no most of the time i'm like super wide awake for the first some indeterminate period of time for me anyway i wind up being distracted by all the things that you know that happen like and i just i just do breath meditation just breathe in and out and that's it and i well i notice these things but i don't obsess about them i just like okay or there's that thought there's that thought there's that thought and then eventually because you're not getting any sensory input uh because you're in that you're not sense you're not deprived of your senses you're deprived of input to your senses so sensory deprivation tank is a great term slightly wrong but uh you're described you're deprived of input to your senses and and then i get if i'm lucky i get to the period of what i call clear thought where i have no thoughts but i'm hyper aware oh it's dude it's super yeah it's good very very it's a very good way to sort of decompress it's it's good so anyway now the show's run long hang out with us mackeycup.com slash discord make sure to check out our sponsors at mackeycup.com sponsors including the three we mentioned in the show other world computing at max sales.com collide.com slash mgg at kolid.com slash mgg and truebill.com slash mgd start saving money and let them do it for you great hey uh john you got us into this mess p you want to get us out if i only knew the french word for caught nespaget nespaget cut don't get caught