 The Mac observers Mac Keek have episode 887 for Monday, August 30th, 2021. And welcome to the Mac observers Mac Keek have the show where you send in your questions, your tips, your cool stuff found. We find our own cool stuff found. We sometimes find our own tips. We try to answer your questions. Sometimes we ask a question or two of our own. The goal being that each and every one of us, you, me, Mr. John F. Braun, we each learn at least five new things every single time we get together sponsors for this episode include other world computing with their new Thunderbolt doc that we will talk about more in depth in a few minutes here. But it's about to be back in stock folks. So you are in luck. In fact, by the time this episode is released, it will be in stock. And so you are in luck here for now in Durham, New Hampshire. I'm Dave Hamilton and here in fearful Connecticut. Having made it through Henry, no, not Henry. Tropical Storm, this is John F. Braun, Tropical Storm, Henri, I believe, is the pronunciation they've chosen for their name. It's French. It is a French name is the name of a French person or a French storm or something like that. Yeah, we made it through just fine here in these parts of New England, other parts, not so much. So hopefully things can get repaired and back to normal for for most of you out there. Yeah, I'm glad I did my Tropical Storm dance. That it veered like way east before it got to me. Is that right? Oh, I thought it hit Manhattan hard, but I guess not. Did it just hit like like Boston and Rhode Island? Is that what it was? Yeah, well, set down in Rhode Island. Yeah, they thought it was going to set down in Connecticut. But right, right. That makes sense. That makes sense. OK, all right. Well, we have got interesting things to go through today. We will start with listener Tony and Tony has a quick tip for us about Siri. Tony says, I cannot tell you how many times I use my watch, my phone or car play to say with or without the. Siri invocation phrase, depending on what or where. Tell my wife I'm leaving the store now or tell my daughter I'll be there in 15 minutes using tell is quicker and makes me feel like I have a personal assistant. I guess I do. Well, it's true. We have we do have personal assistants. They are electronic. Yeah. Yeah, that that tell that's really interesting because it it it is faster. It's way more efficient than saying send a message to write tell is all you need. And there you go. So yeah, thanks for that, Tony. I like I like all these Siri tips that we're getting. It's personal and it is. And it feels more personal. Yeah, exactly. But how how does she know who your wife or daughter are? You can set those in set nicknames is how I do it in my like, for example, you know, for you, your nickname is the shadow. And so anytime you text me or call me, it doesn't say John F. Braun, it says the shadow across the top there. So I just set a nickname for for for people. So my wife, she is currently favorite wife in my phone. When I said her to current, what's that? I'm sorry, wives do have just the one, just the one. I she's also my first wife and and I've been known to introduce her that way. She also doesn't like that. And and when I had her in my phone as current wife, that did not go over well. So so I had to change it to favorite wife and that that's much better. So, you know, yeah, my wife's got you. Well, you know, she introduced me somewhere as her current husband. That's where I got the idea to put her in my phone as current wife. But that didn't matter. It didn't matter. I I still was I was blamed for invoking that and putting it on my phone. It had a little hard after it. It was really nice. You know, so yeah. So I set I set the nicknames there. You can do it on your phone. You can do it on your Mac. You may in in contacts on the Mac, you may have to say, like, add field. If it's not already in there as one of your defaults. So just bear that in mind if you're if you're looking for that. But but yeah, then it works out fine. And I can say, you know, tell my favorite wife on my way home. And there it goes. All right, we good on that. You you're going to maybe do that later, John, are you doing this now? No, it's just I'm trying to identify another field that you can do this with. Because I recall, I think. Is it this one or this entry, one of my entries? Maybe it was a nickname. OK. But I remember one of my entries that had my sister, Marcus sister. There was there was a time and I'm looking to see if there's like a relationship thing here, but there's not there. There was a time when there was a way to set relationships in a prior contacts app. But I do have I do have a memory of that, too. But I don't think that exists now. If you have a better idea of how to do this feedback at MacCicab.com is where we would love to hear from you. That's right, folks. He said feedback at MacCicab.com. That is correct. All right, let's do we have some tips in the form of follow ups, including or starting with one from listener Scott. He says back in MacCicab 882, Jed asked about folder actions and you folks told him about Hazel. If someone does not want to purchase Hazel, though, Mac OS does still include folder actions by way of automator. You can create a folder action inside automator. He says I have several folder actions that I created with various run functions like run an Apple script, run a JavaScript, run a shell script. And you can do whatever you want with the file once it lands in the folder. He says one of my favorite folder actions is for my downloads folder. This is actually what Hazel sets up by default. So very interesting. He says when a new file is added to the downloads folder, automator runs a shell script that determines the file type and moves it to a folder, a sub folder in the downloads directory. Then I create a symbolic link in the downloads directory to the moved file so that I can find it quickly. That helps me keep the unwieldy directly directory somewhat organized and prevents me from getting caught. So I like that. Yeah, I you know what? I had completely I had assumed it wasn't that I had forgotten. I knew folder actions existed at one time. I thought they had been deprecated. I didn't think that they were there anymore. So this is one of my five things to learn. Thank you very much, Scott. That's great. It's good. You want to take us? You have any thoughts on that one before we go to Bob? OK, all right, Bob, it is. So Bob wrote in and gave us a description of what is happening with interleaved memory in the past show. We had someone who was having issues with kernel panics because they had two different size RAM modules. Right. And eight and a 16. The way they stopped the kernel panics was to put two 16s in. So but but but the point here, yeah, so Bob wrote in. So what that is called is interleaved memory. And I guess the best way I could interleaved when you have two of the same size, two of the same exact same memory module, got it, enables something called interleaving. And if I had to sum up what he's saying here, if you're reading from two dissimilar RAM modules, the machine has to kind of do the hokey pokey. The bottom line being, it takes two two memory cycles in order to read from dissimilar. If they're matched, if they're matched pair and they're both the same, it only takes one. He did. He did offer a little bit of context there, which I think is relevant that the way memory works is that the first cycle, the trip drains the location. And then the second cycle is that the chip rewrites the contents back to the location. So you can't read again on the second cycle to your point, John, right? It has to it has to wait to write it back so that it can then read from a different location. Whereas if the memory is interleaved, it can sort of link it together and go down the line and read from one and then read from another. While it's writing back to that one and gain some efficiencies there. It's not it's not always going to be twice as fast. In fact, rarely is it going to be twice as fast because you're not doing sequential memory access all that often. But when you are, it can be a whole lot faster. I'm still I'm still perplexed about why not having interleaved memory would cause kernel panics, but who knows? Maybe he's running some kernel extension because you can still run those that relies on a timing of things that that wasn't the system was not able to provide without the faster memory access. I don't know. So it's interesting. Yeah. Fun stuff. Thank you, Bob. Thanks, John. It's I never understood until now how interleaved why interleaved memory was faster. And it's because of that double cycle thing. And I didn't know that. I call that the Hokey Pokey. That's the technical term. Yeah, no, the Hokey Pokey. That's it, man. Yeah, yeah. The memory Hokey Pokey. Remembering the Hokey Pokey. Yeah, I link to a Wikipedia has a thing that goes over this as well. And it has pretty pictures, too. So. All right. Well, we will we will put that in the show notes at MacGeekUp.com. If you want to sign up to get the show notes delivered to your inbox so you don't even have to think about it, go to MacGeekUp.com. Put in your email address and we will send them to you every week after the show comes out. And, you know, it's interesting. We had a note from listener Andrew, which I don't have in front of me. So I will paraphrase, but he. He explained how he uses the show notes and how many of you might be able to use the show notes to sort of be your safety net. You can listen to the show. You don't have to take notes because we are putting those notes over there at MacGeekUp.com. You've got a reference for the things that we mentioned in the show. And we try to be as exhaustive as we can about that. The other thing that we've started doing more recently is highlighting some segments and releasing them as individual videos. So you get to see us talk about these things sometimes, even with visual aids. But, you know, you can carve out segments of the show. And of course, this episode that you're listening to right now audio wise has chapters. So you can skip around in the chapters and the chapters are often named for the very thing that we're talking about. We try to put lots of chapters in the show. So lots of things to help you get value out of this while you're learning things. So see, I'm already at like at least two things. I think maybe even three. I didn't know about the tell, Missouri. I didn't know about the folder action still existed. I didn't know about interleave memory. I do have a dog though, although I haven't put an air tag on her yet, but that may be coming. Jim, after our discussion in the last episode shared with us a piece about why you might not want to put air tags on your dog or at least why you might not want to rely on air tags to help find your dog. And the issue in summary is that dogs roam where there are no phones. So it won't do nearly as well as a GPS based tracker that links to like a cellular network or something, which is how most of those dog trackers work. So yeah. Yeah, we've seen those various shows. Of course they're a bit more pricey, but they're not to GPS. And a mobile radio. Yeah. And service for the mobile radio. And the other thing is if it's a good, although if it's a good dog, it should come when you call it and... What if you don't know to call it? What if you don't know that it's run off? Well, I mean, that's the thing, right? What if it can't hear you? What if it went off in the woods chasing something? No, that's a good point. Good point. Yeah. All right. One last follow up from, well, based on a conversation we had with Bart? Yeah. Well, the question was, we were speculating about how one could see, could diagnose network issues by seeing how many receive or transmit errors there are in a particular interface. How do you do that? You ask. Now, one way you could do it was to use the network utility, which has since been deprecated in Big Sur, though you can take a version from an earlier OS and it will run under Big Sur, as I found out. But if you want to do this from the command line on macOS Big Sur, the command is netstat-i as in India, b as in Bravo. Do you know what those, the i and the b stand for in those off the top of your head? No. Okay. Well, I just figured that out. We can always look it up. You can do a man at netstat and ETSTAT and man short for manual page. So dash i allows you to specify the interface and then dash b says with the interface display, show the number of bytes in and out. So that's how you get your, and maybe you don't even need that. Maybe you just can you just do netstat-i and you will get i get i errors and o errors. So you don't even need to be. You can just do dash i, it looks like. Yeah, I think. Well, well, yeah, it's weird the way it doesn't line up. The columns sort of are off center from their labels at the top of the screen, but I think it's all there. Yeah, yeah, I think it's, yeah, because I'm showing zero errors on both. So yeah, netstat-i gives you a slightly cleaner interface. Interface is the right word, but it's also a confusing word display, I will say for reading those. So yeah, very good. All right, John, in the intro, I mentioned our sponsor and I wanna talk more about this here. Otherworld Computing, of course, this week is our sponsor and I am stoked because we get to talk about their Thunderbolt Dock which is this thing. This is what you want, right? Because it's got 11 ports on it, but four of them are Thunderbolt ports. So that means one goes up to your host Mac and then you've got three more downstream ports that you can plug into drives or even another dock if you want, right? So it really truly allows some expandability, especially on these M1 Macs that only have two Thunderbolt ports to begin with. And of course this is, you know, it leverages what we are calling Thunderbolt 4 for that Thunderbolt hubbing that allows you to expand the number of ports. It's also got gigabit ethernet. It's got three USB-A ports on it as well, right? And there are 10 gigabit USB-A ports. So you've got, you know, plenty of speed there for your drives and stuff. You only have to put the even faster drives on your Thunderbolt ports and tie those up, but you can put 10 gigabit drives on the USB ports there. It's got gigabit ethernet. And of course it provides power, upstream power to your Mac. It'll do 90 watts of power to charge your laptop and then give power delivery to all of your connected devices. And did I mention it as an SD card slot? I know, man, like they figured out, like they figured out what you need and then gave you that plus a little bit extra so that you've got, you know, some love coming down the road. It's got a USB-2 port on the front of it. So the USB-3 ports, the 10 gigabit ports are on the back. USB-2 port on the front. It's got a headphone jack. It's fantastic the way that they've really put this thing together. They are back in stock as of the end of the week of the 20-something. So when this episode comes out on the 30th, you will be able to order them and get them. It's $279. Very cool. And I have one of these. John, do you don't have one of these yet or no? No. But when I get an M1 Mac, I'm gonna have to get one. Yeah, I have one of their older Docs, which I use on this machine. And what else? 8K display. I don't even have an 8K display. So it supports both 4K and 8K displays. So that's pretty neat. That's standing. Very cool. And yeah, like I said, you can go order it at maxsales.com, the links and the show notes if you wanna use it from there. And our thanks to Otherworld Computing for sponsoring this episode. All right, let's go to... Let's do some cool stuff found and see how we do here. We've got quite a few things that are sort of piling up. So I'm excited to flush the queue. The first comes from Gadgetcoma on Twitter who asked us and told us about Maestral, which is M-A-E-S-T-R-A-L, an open source Dropbox client. He says that he got frustrated with Dropbox, still not being M1 native. Maestral is M1 native. And as a bonus, it doesn't count against your three-client limit because it's not a native Dropbox client. And so you can put it on multiple Macs. It connects. And he says memory use is one quarter of what Dropbox uses. Yeah, Dropbox's Mac app has been not the most efficient thing on the planet. Let's put it that way. And I'm glad to see this. I stopped using the Dropbox app a long time ago. I just sync, well, I use Cloud Sync on my disk station. And I have all of my syncing services, Google Drive, Box, whatever I happen to be using at the time, Dropbox, of course, I use Cloud Sync on my Synology to sync all of those just to my disk station to a folder there. And then I sync that using Synology Drive to my Mac. So I only have one sync client running on all my Macs and everything's there. I don't have to keep things up to date. I don't have to worry about accounts or anything. It's all just one place. And of course, that also doesn't count against my three-client limit on Dropbox. But this maestro thing, if you are running a dedicated client for Dropbox, which I'm assuming most people are, this seems like, if it were me, I would use this very, very, very quickly. I would use this. So yeah, thank you for that, Gadgetcoma. Pretty cool, huh, John? Very nice. Yeah. I was looking at my Mac this morning, John, and thinking about what tools, what tips, what things do I do that we haven't shared in a little while? And one app that I use constantly, in fact, I'm using it right now, is called Amphetamine. We've talked about it on the show before, but I think we'd only talked about it when one of you told us about it. I hadn't really integrated it into my workflow yet. Amphetamine is built to keep your Mac awake. And what's cool about it, you can do this from the command line. There it is, built into macOS, if you go to the terminal and type in the word caffeinate, that will keep your Mac awake. And then if you, I think even with caffeinates, I'm looking at the man page, you can do a dash T and give it a number of seconds that it will stay awake and then allow it to go to sleep, assuming nothing else, keeping it awake. And then you can set assertions to keep the display from sleeping or prevent the disk from sleeping, all those things. So I'm assuming Amphetamine just leverages caffeinate, but it's a nice little GUI interface. And even better is you can set triggers. So for example, I know FileMaker is a great example because we connect to a FileMaker server or a remote FileMaker server. And if my Mac goes to sleep while FileMaker is running and then wakes up, I get all kinds of pesky error messages saying, oh, I lost my connection to the server and it's like, give it, just relax, just reconnect. It's going to be fine. And it lost because it went to sleep. Well, I don't like to have to deal with all those error messages and quit FileMaker and relaunch it. So I just have my Mac set that if FileMaker, I have Amphetamine set that if FileMaker is running, do not let my Mac sleep. That's it. But I also have Marco Armand's quitter running to quit FileMaker after two hours of me not using FileMaker. So my Mac won't stay on forever. It quits FileMaker. And then of course, Amphetamine realized it's quit and will allow the Mac to sleep and all that good stuff. So I guess I suppose my cool stuff found is the combination of quitter and Amphetamine to really manage what's going on with your Mac. Because it is really nice if I'm, you know, QuickBooks is the same thing. I do not want my Mac to go to sleep while QuickBooks is running. And so I have the same sort of thing set up and the two of those apps together work really, really well. So I share them both. I don't know. Do you use either of those apps, John? Nope. Okay. All right. I like my Macs to go to sleep. Well, same, but I just don't want them to go to sleep when I love my Macs to go to sleep. Otherwise I would just tell them not to go to sleep, but I don't like them to go to sleep when it's going to cause a problem. And so, you know, having FileMaker open during the day, it's fine. My Mac stays awake, you know, but if I'm gone for more than an hour and a half or whatever I have it set to two hours, I guess I said, then FileMaker quits and my Mac can go to sleep. It's a way of letting your computer manage your life for you, which I really like and managing its life. So. And I think the place you set that is there a way to do that. Energy savers, system preferences, energy saver, I think is where you can set certain sleep parameters. Yeah, it's limited, but you're right. Yes, that's exactly right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Cool. All right. Moving on. Yeah. All righty. Then we will move on to a cool stuff found from Ralph. Ralph shares with us, the NoCo Boost GB40. He says, I recently had to jumpstart my car and my neighbor helped out with a portable battery to get me going. My battery was completely flat, a 12-volt battery and a mid-sized SUV. The portable battery we used was the size of a hard-covered book and weighed about two pounds and it worked like a charm. So naturally I thought, I got to get me one of them. So the same day I went to the local auto parts store and bought the NoCo GB40 jump starter. It is designed to jumpstart a vehicle with a dead battery. I charged the booster battery with a USB plug into 120 volts AC. And the bonus is that it can also charge USB devices. And it's not all that big. It's, you know, the trick is that it has enough juice, enough amperage to turn over the engine and actually get the battery going. So that's the key. I don't have that one in my car, but I've got one like that. I highly recommend it. You know, check it every three to six months just to make sure it's holding a charge for you. But otherwise, that's a thing I keep in my car for sure. You said you have one too, John. I have old school. It's a, I think it's a black and decker. Okay. Probably weighs about 15 pounds. Oh. Oh, a big one. Okay. Okay. Yeah. It also has an air pump and charges USB and stuff like that. So. I got you. Oh, that's cool. Oh, put a link to that in the show notes, if you would. That sounds like a good, you know, multi-tool for the car. But, yeah, I have one of these small little ones that you can just kind of keep in the car without thinking about it, without it being in the way. That it saved my bacon. Super, we, it's weird. We now all drive Subarus in my house. I don't know why, but it's just how it worked out. And they have an issue where it's way too easy to leave an interior light on. They can get flipped on. It's, it's really my only complaint. And it, it spans all three of our Subarus. The, I have an outback. We have a legacy that the kids use. And then of course, Lisa drives a WRX because, you know, that's what she wants to drive. And all three of them can suffer from this. So, you know, I've had this in the car. And it's like, oh yeah, just like wired up. I don't need to worry about like trying to get jumper cables in proximity to another vehicle. So yeah, it's good. I had a couple from the last PEPCOM that we attended remotely, John. And one of those is the I just blue light screen filters. I think this is blocking blue light has become a fairly common thing over the last couple of years. And I think we saw even more of it with, you know, with pandemic and so many of us spending so much time looking at screens. And these are screen protectors for your iPhone starting at 35 bucks for your iPad at 45 and for your laptop starting at just 39. And so you just put them over your screen and they block that blue light for you. Of course, if you wear glasses you can get blue light filters built right into your glasses. I did this on my last few sets of glasses and like it's flawless. I don't notice it at all. I was worried I might see a yellowing tint or whatever especially on my non sunglasses because I wear glasses when I drive and watch TV or watch concerts, right? That's basically the three places I wear glasses for distance, obviously. And I was worried about the ones that I use in the living room for watching TV because I thought, oh, it's gonna yellow things not at all. So, and it does, it makes a difference especially it's kind of staring at screens for a long time. I highly recommend doing something about blue blocking and this is one thing that you can do. My kids both have, I probably should do it too, get non prescription blue blocking glasses for when they're spending a lot of time at computers which you may be surprised to find out, I do. So, there you go. That, oh, plus the anti-glare thing makes a huge difference to both for me and for the people who have to look at me if I have glasses on. So, yeah, it's good. Nice. Of course, the other way to do this is Apple added something called night shift which I think does pretty much the same thing. Not pretty much the same thing. It doesn't actually block the blue light as well as a filter that's going to block the blue light. Yeah, it changes the color and so it's sending you less blue but it doesn't, it's not really, it's not blue blocking in that way. It's yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But you're right, I mean, it makes it better and certainly makes it easier on the eyes. Yeah, yeah, for sure. The second thing that I saw at PEPCOM that we had yet to talk about and has still been in the queue here for a while is the multo by cooking pal. This is this magic little device that you just sort of throw all your ingredients into and it makes your food. It comes with its own tablet, it's a thousand bucks so it's not clearly not inexpensive but you, it's a kitchen robot is essentially a way of talking about it. You just put all your ingredients in, tell it what you're doing. It sort of coaches you through this and then it even like will do some level of self cleaning and then you can, I think, clean it in the dishwasher. You gotta just go watch the videos that they have for this thing because it really is, it's amazing that they've been able to build something that just sort of does what needs to be done. So a thousand bucks is a lot but if you value time for convenience then maybe it's not that much at all. So I was impressed by this thing so it just walks you right through it so I don't have one, I've only seen demos and remote demos in the videos so but I wanted to share it in case anybody was looking for something fun like that. Have you seen this thing, John? I think, I think I saw it at a, not the most recent PEPCOM but I saw it at another show. Okay, yeah, okay, cool. And then I recently got a thing that I've been testing out, John, called the Rotor Riot Game Controller. So it is a, it's a, it looks like a, you know, an Xbox or a PS4 game controller kind of thing. It's got the D-pad and the two joysticks and the four buttons and the bumper buttons and all of that. What it has though is a lightning cable to connect to your iPhone and a mount so that you can put your iPhone in the controller. And that is what allows it to be a pretty cool little thing. And then, you know, you've got your iPhone right there in the controller and it just, you know, it's zero latency because it's not trying to do Bluetooth or anything for your, it's, you know, it's an MFI controller. So any games that support a controller and there are tons of them will work and it just does the, it just does the job. It's pretty cool. I've been, my son and I have been messing around with it and I'll put it in the video link and we'll publish that as a separate video. But you can see is, you know, you hit the buttons, it knows, it's right on the money. So very cool. It's 50 bucks and it's the Rotor Riot wired video game and drone controller, which I suppose, of course, your drone app would work with this too. Why not? So I thought for 50 bucks is a pretty good thing. And having it wired up means your iPhone can charge this thing too. So it's got the juice that it needs and it's got the, it's got a, what's the right thing, a friction mount for your iPhone. So it fits all size iPhones and it just kind of fits right in there. Just like, like you might have in your car or something like that. So pretty cool stuff. That's why we call it cool stuff found. Yeah, Russ, listener Russ sends in a cool stuff found. We were talking a little while back about changing the pitch and playback speed and things like that of your music or anything, really. And he says, another similar solution. He said, we came up with CAPO, which we'll do that. Another similar solution is an app called AnyTune, which is also available for iOS and Mac OS and it is a universal app, so it runs native on M1. He says, I've been using it for years. It can change the pitch, change the playback speed without changing the pitch and loop sections so that you can practice them if that is what you're doing it for. He says, I like to record rehearsals with voice recorder on my iPhone and then edit it down to individual songs using something like Audacity, but you could also do it with GarageBand. And then I load them into AnyTune so I can practice them on my own. Ooh, I like that idea. That's really smart. Thank you, Russ. That's good. I love this, man. Learning all kinds of things, all kinds of things. Two more cool stuffs found, John? Okay. All right. Listener Scott, we were talking about diagnostics on the iPhone. And listener Scott says, many episodes back, I heard you lament and wish that there was a console app for iPhone. If that was the case, then I think I found what you were looking for with a free Mac OS app called Apple Configurator 2. Packed with a lot of features, including being able to rearrange your iPhone screens like you used to in iTunes. Let me know what you think. And he's totally right. You can see the iPhone's console in Apple Configurator 2. And I didn't know that was in there. And you also can see it if you run the Mac OS console app. So the regular console app on the Mac, if your iPhone is connected to it, then you get to see that. It has to be connected via USB or Lightning. And so my issue with that, John, is that it means the phone will be charging when it's connected, right? Because you can't have it connected to your Mac via Lightning without it passing power across it. So the phone will be in charge mode and that changes the phone's state. And it means the phone will be doing different things. What I really want and will remain a geek challenge is the ability to see the iPhone's console when it's not connected to any sort of power. So that if you've got an app that's running rampant on battery, you can really see what's going on. Because as we've proven here, the battery listing and settings shows you a subset of those things that are chewing your battery and not necessarily the most important ones at all times. So, right? But does anybody make a Lightning cable that only does data and not charging? Oh, that would be interesting. Because remember we talked about this with USB and to avoid getting hijacked. This is how people make special adapters that only do data and not power. Only do power and not data. Because you may want data. Right, right. Yeah, this we want the other side of that. Yeah, I don't know if that's possible. But maybe, I also think, and I will put this on any developers out there, including my dear friend, Mr. John F. Braun. Well, I know Apple would not allow you to put an app in the App Store that showed the console on an iPhone. Would it be, is it possible to use a non-public API or a non-permitted API, I should say, to display the console in an iPhone app that you write for yourself? Because if that's the case, that's fine. I don't mind building an app that I install locally so that I can see this just for troubleshooting. So, that would be another way around. So, I'll put that out there. My guess is if it's doable, it's very simple. And I say this having no knowledge of whether or not that's the case, but my guess is it's either super easy or super not. Super impossible, so. So, throw it out there. I have a question for you, Mr. John F. Braun. Do you use Keybase at Keybase.io? What's Keybase, Dave? So, Keybase has evolved. I started using Keybase as a place to store my, and look up my PGP keys, right? Because these are public keys that are out there and it's nice to be able to manage them and see them in a directory and also find other people's keys in a directory. And so, that's what I started using Keybase for. It has evolved since I installed it on my Mac though. And I've just let it update over the years. Now it has like chat in it and file sharing and you can have groups in there too so that you're chatting not just with one person but with multiple people and you can connect to your Twitter communities and even Reddit and I think GitHub as well. So, yeah, it's like secure messaging and file sharing leveraging these PGP keys that live out there. So, I saw it the other day. I saw it push an update or it push some notification. I was like, I gotta look at this again. And I was like, why do I have this here? What's this for again? Because it really was just a place to look up other people's PGP keys which I also don't do a whole lot of. And cryptid email is not, it's not all it's cracked up to be folks. It's a whole lot more of a headache than anything else. It feels like for the uses that I have seen I have experienced for me, it seems more like a novelty than anything that's actually helpful. Certainly there are scenarios where sending encrypted email is literally saving lives. Like I get it and I'm glad it exists. But for me, it's a novelty with a side of headache that isn't really worth the novelty of it. So, I've abandoned all my S-Mime keys. That was a disaster. And I have my PGP keys because you don't have to renew them but I'm not sure that like I'll, I don't think I will buy the next version of Mac GPG for example. I hope, I may wait to buy it until somebody sends me something that they've encrypted and then I'll be angry with them but I'll go buy Mac GPG so that I can see what they've sent me I suppose. I don't know, that's sort of where I, that's where I'm landing on this. Do you still use any of those encrypted email or anything like that? I don't really use GPG because it would always be lagging as far as support for mail. Yeah, that's right, yeah. I think they caught up but nobody that I communicate with really uses it anyways. And S-Mime, as you know, I tried to renew so we found another place that's not Komodo. I think it was an Italian company. And I tried to renew my certs because they expired this month and I was able to renew my personal one and my Mac Observer one and one of the, one of the Mac Geek gap ones but the other one, they never sent it to me. I kept applying and they never got it. So I don't know if they limited to three or... Oh, three per IP address or something maybe. Yeah. Yeah, I don't know. Yeah, it, you know why, as we're having this conversation, it's immediately obvious to me why this has sort of languished. And it's because if we need to communicate with end-to-end encryption, there are apps out there that will simply do this for us. I message chief among them but also things like signal and telegram, right? Where you are, everything is end-to-end encrypted. And so you don't need to jump through any hoops. You just, you know, set it up. Most of those, you just link to your phone number so you don't really even need to go through the process of setting up an account. You just link yourself to it and boom, you're in. And now you're end-to-end encrypted with the person you're chatting with. And it's way easier than trying to jump through all the hoops we just discussed that used it, well, still are necessary for email. So I think that's it. Do you use signal and telegram and things like that? Like, do you have accounts on there? No, have you set those up? Oh, I would advise you to do that. It's not a bad thing. It won't take very long. Like I said, you're not having to jump through all kinds of account hoops. You just link it to your phone number, your mobile phone number, and you're done. But that's a good place for those kinds of things. I message as well, but I message obviously only if you're within Apple's ecosystem. So I mean, the other thing to keep in mind is that pretty much all mail connections or last I looked will tunnel it through SSL. So sure, but your data is not encrypted. Understood, but yeah, but the, so somebody's watching your connection, it's gonna be gibberish because it's using SSL. It's not gonna be encrypted on the server. Right, somebody in the middle could theoretically see it in the clear, right? Yeah, and the same thing, you know, so IMAP and SMTP, there is an option to encrypt both of those. That's right, yeah, but again, only for the transport, not for the actual, not for the content. Yeah, exactly, yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, for the content, you could use something, like this is a tool that came out a number of months ago and it's still current, and I think it's still free, but encrypto. Okay, ENCRYPTO, is that right? All right, it's from MechPaw. Yes, okay, yeah, good stuff. So if you wanna encrypt your payload, that's probably a good thing. I mean, you could also use zip from the command line, there's an encryption option. Oh, sure, yeah. But then you need to be sharing keys and things like that with people, right? It just uses a passphrase. Well, that's what I mean, a key, password is a key. So you need to have some secure way of communicating with that person already to share the password, which is the beauty of public key encryption where somebody can encrypt, but not decrypt, and that's what Signal and Telegram and iMessage and those do as well. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, and as Paul Frans points out, even though, if you send me an email, for example, John, the connection from you to your mail server is encrypted because you make sure that it is, right? For the outbound mail. The encryption from me to my mail server for inbound mail is also encrypted because I make sure it is, but the connection between our two mail servers, you and I have no control over and may or may not be encrypted. And in many cases is not these days. So thank you for that, Paul Frans. Live.macgeekyab.com is where Paul and many others hang out and join us for the weekly party that we throw when we record the show. You can join the party too and contribute to the show. We had questions last week from folks in the thing and obviously this week we've got help, which is great. All right, yeah, that's what we got. Maybe it's time to add, we've got some network questions on deck. Shall we see how many of those we can do before we burn ourselves out? Okay, we will start with, well, we will start with one. I was gonna say we'll start with an easy one. I'm not gonna set us up for failure like that. Gary says intermittently the kernel task process on my iMac Pro running Big Sur starts using 106% CPU, AKA a full core and the ethernet stops working. I cannot find any logs, which tell me what the problem might be. Apple support suggests that I reinstall Big Sur. It doesn't appear to be a hardware issue and a reboot fixes it. He says I ran hardware diagnostics as well and that didn't report any issues. The Wi-Fi continues to work throughout. I'll probably do a nuke and pave when I move to macOS Monterey later in the year. So it will get fixed then if it was just an upgrade issue. It could also be some driver, but I have no idea how to troubleshoot that. It seems there seems to be no rhyme or reason to it, just random. I suppose a PRAM reset might be something to try. So for sure, I would do a PRAM and SMC reset first and foremost when it's hardware, but it might be software, right? Like PRAM, SMC, those are your friends, for sure. We'll put links in the show notes as to how to do those at macgeekyeb.com. But I think there's another thing that I would try first if I were there. And that is I would go into system preferences into the network and I would highlight the Ethernet adapter and delete it. I know, it sounds crazy. You're not actually extracting a piece of hardware from your Mac though. You're just removing the Ethernet driver from the software and then go hit the plus sign. So you remove it by hitting the minus sign at the bottom of that list. Hit the plus sign right next to that minus sign and add, you guessed it, an Ethernet driver. That will wipe out any of the settings, any of the P lists, all of that stuff that was unique to that Ethernet driver. And clearly it's not your networking stack. It is something about that Ethernet driver. And so that may be the answer for you. So that's what I would try first. SMC and PRAM never hurts to do. So on your next reboot, certainly do those, but this is what I would try first. Hopefully that fixes it. Because reinstalling Big Sur is throwing a new haystack on top and hoping that the needle disappears, right? And oftentimes it works, but I think this might be your needle. So check it out. Let us know. Feedback at mackeygibb.com if it worked. Feed thoughts. mackeygibb.com. It is feedback at mackeygibb.com. Yes, I do have some thoughts. When I read over this one, it could be a hardware issue. Okay. So replace your Ethernet cable and try a different port on your switch or a different port on your machine if you have multiple ports. Yeah, yeah, for sure. Yeah, yeah, yeah, you're right. Or the thing we mentioned earlier, check that error count for your Ethernet port. That's right. Which is EN1, usually? I don't, yeah, I'm not sure. It changes. Or is it EN0? It might be EN0 on a Mac with it built in, I think. Yeah, I know it changed a while back. I'm looking at, like see on my Mac, the Ethernet port is EN2 right now. So like, yeah, I don't know. It's not always the same. All right. Listener Steve has another networking question sort of in a different direction. Steve asks, he says, I've been a very happy Eero user with their Wi-Fi 5 stuff for over three years. And because my house has a long and wide footprint, my Eero setup consists of one main router with three extenders scattered across the length of the house. Thanks to KIPA, I saw that the Eero Wi-Fi 6 dropped in price quite substantially overnight. So I jumped in and bought the new Eero 6, not the Pro, with six Eero routers and one extender. I bought this configuration because presently I had my Arlo base station hardwired via Ethernet into my Eero 5 extender and my Xbox and Samsung Smart TV Cat 5 into another Eero extender. And I'd like to maintain the same type of setup to allow for stronger and more reliable connections for those important devices. Smart says, but of course the Eero 6 extenders don't have Ethernet jacks, a notable distinction. So he bought routers so that they do have Ethernet jacks. All that being said, I have a few questions. Number one, will the new Eero 6 routers that aren't the main router understand that I am using them as extenders or will they want to establish three separate networks on my system and make a mess? No, they will not make a mess of your mesh. The Eero stuff is super intelligent and will realize that you have one main router and then one, then a series of extenders and it doesn't matter what the type of hardware those extenders are. What is cool is each of those devices that could be a router will know that it can be a router. And if something were to happen to your main router hardware wise, whatever lightning strike or whatever, if you just take it out of the mix, you put one of the other ones in there, obviously you got to connect it to the internet on the outside. It now has your settings and it will become your router for you and your house will continue running. So that part's cool, but yeah, it will know, so you're fine. The second question is, what's the best way to upgrade from the Eero Wi-Fi 5 to the Eero 6? Do I unplug all the 5s, delete the network from the Eero app and then start fresh plugging in the new 6? And am I gonna see the new system setup process or can I just add the new 6 system concurrently while the 5 is installed? The answer is what you could do either. Either of these will work for you. What I did when I upgraded from Eero 5 to Eero 6 is I did the latter. I added the Eero 6 devices to my network. Actually, the first thing I did was I went in and renamed the old Eero devices like office dash old, kitchen dash old, whatever, so that I had the names that I wanted these to be open and available to me for the new devices. And then I put the new devices in and named them as I wanted to. And so I had a double network going and I had double the density of devices. And then one by one, I just removed the Eero 5 devices from the network and all worked out just fine. There were some, there was some advice on like day zero that that might not be the best way to do it because there were some settings incompatibilities between the two, but A, I didn't have any problem with it and B, like those issues are now resolved in software so you should be good to go. So yeah, have fun with it, man. I think you'll enjoy it. Especially for the way your house is laid out. I think that's a good move. I mean, I haven't seen his house obviously, from the way he describes his house being laid out. I don't know. Do you have any thoughts on meshing for him, John, before we move on to Wilco? No, I'm still on gen one. And you have, I mean, it still works great for you, right? Yeah, that's great. Yeah, I get almost full speed. I think when I benchmark using my phone, I'll get 150. Okay. Because I think that's the size of the channel. Oh, okay. Well, I have 200 service. So if I went to six, would that increase? It depends on a lot of factors. It may. Your phone supports Wi-Fi 6, which is a key. Yes, 150 is the size of an 802.11n channel, but which is Wi-Fi 4, the size of a single Wi-Fi 5 channel is 433 for 802.11ac. And your eros, even if they are gen zero, are two by two radios, which means they can do 866. So you've got something else slowing things down there, I would say. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. All right. Yeah. All right, but moving on to Wilco, it looks like I got caught, but I haven't figured out how or why. Since a few days ago, I cannot start up Apple Mail anymore in my iMac with Big Surd. First, I thought, no problem, I'll just use Spark. Alas, same problem. It must be something very fundamental since they both show the dot in the dock indicating the app is active for about a second and then disappears and the application quit unexpectedly window pops up. There is no window, no nothing appears. For Spark, there's also the blow message. The application Spark cannot be opened. And at number four, which is probably a numeric error code that we all know and love. Use English or whatever language is local for error messages, please. Well, actually they did this one. All right, anyways, moving on. After some Googling, I tried a few things. Man, he tried everything. Opening with the shift key press to prevent the message being selected, no luck. Disabling all mail accounts and system preferences, no luck. Deleting Gmail account, restarting, no luck. Starting in safe mode, no luck. Deleting com.apple.mail-share.plist from the library, no luck. Deleting the envelope files from mail, mail slash v8 slash mail data, no luck. Resetting the PRAM, no luck. Removed Ethernet and disabled Wi-Fi, no luck. As a last resort, moving the entire com.apple.mail-service agent folder in containers and library. Man, you're good. Yeah, he did a lot. He's clearly driven to solve this problem. I wouldn't have even thought of some of these. I know. Yeah, this alone is a nice exercise in troubleshooting. It's great, yeah. I look to the log files with unexpectedly, but that is beyond me. I have attached the log files should you care to look at them. Okay, maybe. I look briefly and nothing really jumped out at me. Any suggestions on what the next steps could be are greatly welcome. And by the way, everything on iOS works fine. So it's not a problem with this mail server. All right, Dave, I would have, yeah, I would have initially suspected a corrupt preference file or envelope index, but you're ready to care that. Two things I could think of, Dave, use our friend Onyx, specifically the maintenance category. There were several rebuilding options, many that have to do with caches like the XPC cache, components, applications, and one of those could be corrupt. Well, Onyx, okay, the other thing, Dave, is that it could be a damaged app or system component. I suspect the system component. So if Onyx doesn't do it, reinstall the OS by recovery and maybe that'll fix whatever's broken or corrupt. Yeah, I'm with you on this one. The fact that it's happening to two apps, I think it might be coincidence that it is two apps that run mail. The fact that it's quitting so soon after launch tells me that it's not likely not getting to the point where it's doing anything with mail or the network or anything like that. And clearly it's not because it can't because he turned off all of his network access at that point. So yeah, I think you're right that there's something fundamental with macOS, probably some library that is corrupted that for whatever reason these two apps happen to use, but the only way you and I, mere mortals, get to fix that is with a maintenance reinstall. Then when we say maintenance reinstall, we mean an over-the-top reinstall. You don't have to nuke and pave, just reinstall Big Sur like John said from recovery mode to exactly that. It should inherit all of your settings but replace any components of Big Sur that may or may not have survived. So hopefully. The funny thing is is that I think, remember last week when we were talking about Dropbox, on my Mac mini, and I'm looking and I got a similar error message. It says the application Dropbox can't be opened. Mm, right. Those is 254 instead of four. What does that number mean? Yeah. Maybe it's random. I don't know. It might as well be, you know. All right, hopefully some of those things help but I think that maintenance reinstall is gonna be the key for you. Yeah. All right, Andrew has a question. He says, I recall in days past that there was the ability to use iMessage on your local network to chat with another computer without needing a phone number or even an account. That being said, I don't see that anymore and I'm not sure when it disappeared. Do you know if it is still possible to chat with local users on your network who have also enabled the local option? I used to go into preferences for messages and choose accounts and could be used to do this. It was helpful at work. Yeah, so that was called Bonjour messaging, right? It used the local network to discover other users that, like you said, had the feature enabled and then you could do it. I think that went away quite a while ago and I think the reason it went away, I'm speculating, is that we now have the iMessage protocol, right? That allows you to communicate with anyone that has an Apple ID. So you don't need people with, you know, phone numbers or anything. Certainly that's one way to communicate via iMessage or SMS but iMessage supports just connecting to someone via email address and I do that with people all the time if I don't know their phone number or whatever. So that's how I would go about it is doing it with iMessage. I don't know though to answer your questions, that may solve your problem and it probably is the right way to go because most people that run Macs are gonna have iCloud accounts, right? And that's your iMessage account so you're sort of all, it's already there. But for something that does bond your messaging, that I don't know. Off the top of my head, nothing comes to mind and I'm not sure anything exists but it's certainly possible that something does. And if you know of something, feedback at macicub.com, we'd love to know. All right, yeah, Dogster in the chat room says, we might have an answer. SnapTalk is a cross-platform private chat and file transfer utility similar to Bondure compatible with Macs and Windows computers. It's not been updated since 2010 though, it is freeware. So we will put SnapTalk in there, although I wouldn't expect it to work entirely perfectly for anyone out there, but it is from Glass Bead Software. So when you see that, that is the correct one. And he continues to point out that Bondure was used by medical and law offices as a way of securely communicating into office knowing that the data was not leaving the local network. That actually makes sense. So yeah, for that reason, I can see there might well be a solution to this that's in existence. So hopefully someone knows what it is or hopefully maybe SnapTalk will work for you and then you're good to go, but 11 years old, so tread carefully or at least tread with knowledge. That's really the trick, isn't it? Speaking of lawyer Jeff, you have a note from lawyer Jeff about Synology to share. Yeah, John. Yes. So lawyer Jeff writes in and says, it appears Synology has learned of a concentrated botnet brute force attack which targets Synology devices. And they have an article about that, which you can go and read to learn more. What is a botnet attack? It's other computers that have been taken over on the internet all trying to beat up on you. Yeah, Synology, if you could, if you were someone wanting to launch a botnet attack, targeting network storage devices like popular ones like the Synology disk station would be a great place to start because there are so many of them. They are on 24 seven and they are connected to the internet 24 seven and their owners aren't always in there like looking at what processes are running. So they really are a great platform from which to do this. If you're the type of person who does this, please don't be that type of person. But I'm just saying they are a good attack vector or a bad attack vector depending on who you are, probably bad for most of us. Yeah. So he continues, therefore it's a good time to review what users should be doing to ensure their Synology devices are as secure as can be. And you link to another article from Synology that goes through all of these. The first being they have something else called security advisor which I have had yell at me telling me that my admin account is called admin and that's bad. Though I have a strong password. Yeah, yeah, that's right. It started recently, past six months. Synology devices started complaining if you use an admin account named admin because the account name is one half of the attack vector, right? If you know the account name then all you have to do is guess the password. Whereas if your admin account is not named admin, well then now anybody trying to hack in as admin is going to fail even if they guess your admin password. So I get why they're doing this, makes sense. I wish, go ahead. And I've gone through, so they have a security section and they're set up. And one thing that I have set up, Dave which I think is set up by default. Maybe it wasn't in the past but there's one feature where it says, okay, if you get X number of login attempts from this same IP, shut them off. Yep, yep. I wish there was a way to say only allow the admin account to access from the local subnet. I realized that, right? That doesn't, it still leaves a hole open. But you know, like one of my disk stations mostly is inaccessible to the outside world anyway. So I'm not really worried about the admin account being called admin on that one. However, it would be really nice to add that layer of security saying, okay, yeah, if somebody does get to the front door somehow, now if they VPNed in, now they would be coming from the local network and would be allowed in and that's okay. But otherwise, and I guess I could, maybe there is a way to do that now that I think about it. Yeah, there probably is. There probably is. All right, well this is good. I like this stuff, it's geeky. Let's do a couple of other geeky things and call it a week, shall we? So let's, listener Joe, while the weather, at least in the Northern Hemisphere is still warm, there's people still doing some projects outside. Joe says, you've talked about this numerous times in the past, but now I'm building a detached garage and I'm looking to run cat six out to it after multiple lightning damage issues. You Dave, finally found a solution which works. What was that exactly? So the best solution, and it has been recommended to me many times, I have not implemented it. So this is a do as I say or do as others say, not do as I do would be to run fiber because that is not going to be susceptible to lightning strikes, right? It doesn't transmit, there's no copper, so lightning, it doesn't transmit across the insulated fiber line because it's just fiber. So you'd need to get some converters to convert the fiber to ethernet and back, right? That sort of thing. But, and then of course you'd need to run the actual fiber cable, but that's it. And I will say, we've got fiber in the neighborhood now. That's how John and I are talking. That's how I will upload the show, right? And I was asking them about how well does this work? And the guy was like, yeah, man, you're going to be fine. Like lightning cannot touch this. And it's a super thin cable. Your biggest issue is putting a kink in the cable, but obviously if you lay it properly and set it up the right way, then that won't be an issue. If you don't want to do the fiber thing or do you want to know what I did, which is sort of the same. When I moved in here, there were two coax and two cat 5E cables, direct burial cables run between my house and my office slash garage. And that's still what's there. Despite a stump grinder trying to kill my cables at one point. Amazingly, these four cables are run altogether. I mean, they're not, to call them a bundle would be a little overstating, but they're all buried in the same place. Like there was one little trench dug and we just, they laid the cables in them. Stump grinder caught one cable. That's it. And snapped this one ethernet cable and the other ethernet cable and the two coax survived. So I was able to jump to the other ethernet cable and then since then have patched the original ones. So everything's all good. But, you will. You could spray paint CBYD. They're supposed to do that anyway. And also it's a good idea if the homeowner tells you there are cables there, don't dig there. Maybe the homeowner might not be entirely the idiot that you think they are. But, you know, there you go. Yeah, I was on a Skype call or some sort of video call or whatever. And the guy's out there grinding the stumps up. And all of a sudden I did not have the call anymore. And this was when we had the internet coming into the house and across the way. Right now it comes into the office and goes the other direction. But as soon as that happened, I knew what happened because I saw where he was. And I went out waving my arms like, stop, dude. So anyway, what I... CBYD, of course, standing for call before you dig. I didn't know what that stood for until very recently when they tore up my neighborhood to upgrade the natural gas lines. Interesting. Yeah. What does that mean? And then they use different colors for the different type of lines. So I think blue is water. Oh, I forgot. Interesting. Interesting. Huh. I need to find out where my well cap is. I wonder if the CBYD people would tell me. Oh, seriously. All right, anyway, that's weird. My well cap is buried. I just don't know why or how or how that passed building code. Do you have a metal detector? I do. And I was thinking about just using that too. Yeah, that would be the way. Yeah. All right, but to get back to the question at hand, if you do have or decide to run the ethernet cable and you need to worry about lightning stuff, you will need ethernet surge protectors. Some of them, like if you buy UPSs, some UPSs have ethernet surge protectors built into them. You'll want to make certain that the surge protectors that you buy will allow 1,000 megabit, gigabit ethernet or faster to pass through them because some of them in certainly older UPSs would only allow 100 megabit to pass through them. So you just want to eyes wide open when you're making your purchases and all that stuff. I have been using the APC protect net devices over the years and I will put a link in the show notes to those. Those have worked very well for me and have saved me many times. I have had one of them blow up over the years, but it saved everything past it. So that's, you know, that's its job. Yeah, there you go. Any thoughts on that, John? Before we answer, ask, we will ask and answer, I believe the final question here, which is sort of related, so. No. Okay. Listener Brent writes and says, do you have a recommendation for a surge protector to get from my cable modem? He says, I currently have Xfinity gigabit internet and my Aris SB8200 modem seems to have had its ethernet ports damaged from last night's storm. I'm planning on buying a new modem today. Hopefully that fixes it, but I would like to make sure this doesn't happen again. So of course the protect net adapters are great to have to protect the ethernet side of things. However, I don't think that would have protected you here. It's hard to say whether the lightning strike came from within your network and therefore blew up the ethernet port on the router from that direction, or if it came in from the coax side and blew it up from that direction, I have had both happen to me. And so in addition to the protect net adapters or devices that we just talked about, you need a coax surge protector. And I will put a link, generally I just go to Amazon and buy, you know, whatever the best one is. I found one just now, so I will put that in the show notes so you can have an example of what that is. Just make sure that whatever you get goes above 1500 megahertz. The ones I found go to 2500, so you're fine. You just don't want to filter out the frequencies that are used by your cable modems channels. So usually, really it's above a thousand, I think, is the key, but these things will go much higher. So there you go, that should help you out, I hope. I hope, I hope. Yeah. Anything else that, any thoughts on that, John, that you have while we're rolling? I'm electrically surge suppressed. But not, you're protecting your AC, but not your DC, right? I highly recommend protecting DC. Although, I mean, you've been in that house for a very long time. You haven't had any DC related issues. Doesn't mean that you won't, right? You know, but I mean, these things are a few dollars apiece. It's not really all that much. And it's a headache when your coax blows, you know, your cable modem blows. It's like, okay, well, then that's the end of that. So, so I recommend it just to, you know. Yeah, I'm sure they, yeah. Next time I go to Home Depot, I'll look. I'm sure they have them. Yeah, you might pay more. I've seen them at Home Depot and they're like 25 bucks as opposed to the $6 that you can get them on Amazon. And then you don't have to worry about going to Home Depot because you already have it. Amazon just brought it to your house. So, you know, there you go. All right, folks, well that, believe it or not, believe it or else, that brings us to the end here. So, we're just gonna have to call it the end. We'll bring the band in. We will thank you for listening. Thanks for hanging out with us. Thank you for sending in all your tips and your questions and your cool stuff found. We love it. We truly love it. So, I don't know. Do you have anything else to share with them before we get on our way, Mr. Bruin? No? All right. Well, Mr. Bruin sometimes forgets that most of you can only hear us, so. He's shaking his head now. He's had it. His voice is done. That's right. All right. Well, thanks for hanging out. Check out our sponsors, MackieGubb.com slash sponsors for everyone. And of course, for this episode, wow, there's all kinds of crazy noise over there. Check out the Thunderbolt dock from OWC Force 279. Great device. Follow him on Twitter. John Fruin, I'm Dave Hamilton. The show's MackieGubb. John, I'm gonna ask you to say one thing because I got us into this. I need you to help us get out before I have to head out to out West to make some deliveries. I'm gonna say more than one thing, Dave. I'm gonna say three things and that's don't get caught. Maverick.