 Mac Observers, MacGeekGab, Episode 881 for Monday, July 19th, 2021. Greetings, folks, and welcome to the Mac Observers, MacGeekGab, the show where you send in your questions, your tips, your cool stuff found. We take your questions and tips. We share them. We take your cool stuff found. We delight in sharing those. Really, we delight in sharing everything. And then we try to answer your questions and, you know, the goal is for each of us to, you know, it's no big deal. Just start a little key, learn five new things at least every single time we get together. Sponsors for this episode include upstart.com slash mggandfastmail.com slash mgg, where you can get 10% off, actually, a fast mail. And we got a cool thing to talk about. We actually had one of you right in. So we'll talk more about all of that shortly here. For now, here in Durham, New Hampshire, I'm Dave Hamilton. And here in Fairfield, Connecticut, this is John F. Brun. Uh, how? Hello, Mr. John F. Brun. How are you today? Howdy. All right. Should we just get right into the cool stuffs found, my friend? Please. All right, cool. Ajax sends in, well, it started as a question, but it very much became a cool stuff found. Asking the question to set this up was, I'm looking for something that has a piece of software that has the ability to program the extra buttons for other functions on my Mac that will work with anything other than a, you know, Windows device. And so I told him better touch tool. And then he did some digging and he says, after trying better touch tool and Steermouse, I went with Steermouse. It's more expensive for licensing, 20 bucks versus eight bucks, but also way more wide ranging in terms of what you could do with the buttons and all that stuff. I had never heard. I don't remember talking about Steermouse. I think we might have talked about it in an episode many moons ago, but, you know, they just released a new version less than a month ago. So it's totally up to date. And it is there to customize all of your buttons on your mouse and other various and sundry pointing devices and all that good stuff. So I didn't know that. So that's what makes it cool stuff found, man. Had you heard of Steermouse, John? No, no. See, there we are. And if you have certain Kensington devices, I had to upgrade this recently, but they have something called Kensington works, which let's you customize several of their device. Sure. Yeah, the vendor, you're talking about vendor specific stuff. Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yep, cool. Cool. Yeah, Steermouse is universal. So as is better touch tool. So, yeah. Cool. All right, we'll put a link to Kensington works in there too. Fun. Cool. Thanks, Ajax. Good stuff. Micah. This isn't so much cool stuff found, John, as it is cool stuff made because Micah, longtime Mackey Keblissner, wrote this. He says, my wife requested that I code an app for her. So you know how it goes. I took the order seriously. Have you ever taken pictures of newspapers, magazines, books or anything with written content and sometime later tried to find it again? Well, document finder will help you out. That's the name of the app. It says using AI document finder scans the content of your image library and then will let you perform searches on the things that it decides are documents. Nothing is sent out from your device. Everything is stays safe in your hands. Yeah, he's using Core ML to do this on device. And it was amazing. Like I launched it and within a few seconds it started identifying, oh, here's the document, here's the document. And when you search for something, it shows it in the thing. I think we've got something like this coming in iOS 15-ish, but I thought this was really cool. And plus, you made it. And so we get to learn about it. So thanks, Micah, for making it and telling us about it. Very cool stuff. I love it when something like that happens. Fun. It's good. What's next, John? What's next is, you know, it's, hmm. Did you confuse yourself? No, no, no. No, I was just thinking, no, I was gonna mention the software that I use with my scan snap and I can't remember what it is up top of my head. I'll find it later. All right, cool. But they have software that does document management too and lets you store your stuff in the cloud and all that great stuff. Yeah, but this isn't document management. This is, it looks at the photos on your phone in your photo library and auto finds anything that's a document and then indexes the text that was in that document, which is pretty cool. All on your phone, yeah. Yeah, their stuff does some of that. Well, sure. Yeah. All right, so next up, my friend. All right, Neil, I wanted to share a supplemental cool stuff found. Last week, one of the cool stuff founds was the app expressions, which I agree is a great tool for developing and verifying regular expressions. I have been using this website, regx101.com which has been free to use allows you to specify several different dialects of regx's, including standard Python, Golang and others and provides a nice visual system for building and verifying your regx's. Nice. Cool. Yeah. I never gotten a regx's. You know, they are super powerful and super efficient. I use them when I know that I need to be using them but I, as I've said many times, I do not speak regx natively. So I need stuff like this. So I love things like this. It's great. Very good. Yeah. And you may be asking yourself, what is a regular expression? It's a sequence of characters that specifies a search pattern. Yeah, it's a search pattern. That's right. Yeah, you can define like, like, you know, a simple one would be to say, all right, find me every file that ends in .txt, right? And so, you know, we tend to think of that as like star.txt. It's represented differently in a regular expression but that sort of thing can happen. But you can also say, find me all the files that start with a number, any number, and then have, you know, somewhere between zero and any number of other characters but have the word john in there somewhere and then end in .txt. And you can write one right, I can't, but you can write one regular expression that will define that search pattern. And so it becomes this really powerful thing because it's super efficient. You don't have to do all of these if-then-else statements to parse your text. And it doesn't have to just be file names. It could be anything. You're just putting text through it and out the other side comes the filtered list. So it's a pretty cool thing and it's pretty universal in that it's available in I guess every programming language including shell scripting and all of that. Yeah, it's a good thing to be familiar with. Do as I say, not as I do. Are we moving on to the next? All right, good. Kelly, Kelly Gamont here at the Mac Observer host of our Daily Observations podcast tells us about SOFA. This is a list of, or an app that allows you to create lists of books, board games, movies, TV shows, other apps, podcasts, music albums, video games that you want to enjoy later. And that way it keeps it all the same. It syncs between your iPhone and your iPad with iCloud syncing. And so when somebody says, hey, you should watch this, you just throw it on the pile in SOFA. So then you could be the SOFA king. Cool. All right, anyway. Thank you for indulging me. All right, great. Donna writes in, she says, I've been using the free warp version of the Cloudflare 1.1.1.1 VPN on my phone for a while and I'm quite happy with it. I think there might be times that it slows things down a bit, but it could just be that I'm in poor service area occasionally. The way I'm reading it with my limited technology, I think privacy is well-protected with the free tier. They also offer paid models to support their business. Please let me know if you think otherwise about privacy after reading into this. Yeah, so warp is a cool thing. Warp is in the free warp mode, all of your traffic is encrypted, but it is not changing or hiding your IP address like a VPN would. And you can confirm this by starting up warp. So this is in an app. It's in the 1.1.1 app that's available for your iPhone and the primary purpose of that app is to do Cloudflare secure DNS lookups, right? That's what 1.1.1.1 is. And so it will do DNS over HTTP or secure DNS. I think it's DOH, but I can't remember which way they're doing it. But it's not running you through a VPN server in that sense. It is just encrypting all of your traffic. There is a paid tier called warp plus, which adds what they call Argo smart routing, which is a technology, which theoretically makes your connections faster by choosing better routing than what TCP and all the BGP and all that stuff will do natively. And it's based on what Cloudflare has learned to be the best according to their servers. But even then it's just changing your routing. It's still not hiding your IP address. But I dug into this some John and warp plus appears to work at least anecdotally, like speed tests that people are doing are consistently faster when done over warp than done just straight, even on like a cellular, like a LTE or 5G connection or something. So it's an interesting little tech, I wanted to share it because it's cool, but I also wanted to say pretty clearly that it's not a VPN if what you're looking for is to change or obscure the IP address or location that you're coming from. So yeah, thanks for that Donna. No, it's good. Okay, what did I do here? Oh, I put that in the wrong spot. Great, awesome. Moving on John, shall we? Yes. Listener Tim shares a new find with us. He says, the ultimate ears fits. He says, are my contribution to cool stuff found? I'm one of those guys who can't get a good seal from any of the silicone or foam ear tips that I've tried in earbuds. I'm getting better noise cancellation from these UE fits with passive noise cancellation, passive noise cancellation being seal it and high and block out the signal. He says that I've gotten from AirPods Pro, the Anchored Liberty Air 2, Beats Studio, et cetera. He says, if Ultimate Ears comes out with an ANC version of the UE fits, I will, that will even change it further. So this is the UE fits. It's a cool technology. You, they are universally custom fit in that you don't have to go and get your ears scanned or molds made or anything like that. You download the app, you put these earbuds in your ears, you start, you press a button in the app, which activates the mold that's in your ear. It fits to your ear in 60 seconds and then boom, you've got custom fit Bluetooth earbuds and they're 250 bucks. So, you know, same range as AirPods Pro-ish, right? And you're getting a fit that is truly custom for you, but you get to do it at home. It's a cool tech. I haven't tested these yet. I'm a big fan of Ultimate Ears. I've been wearing Ultimate Ears on stage for, I think 18 years now, maybe 17 years. And they obviously, you know, they've won my heart with their sound and their fit. But so this is a fantastic way to kind of get this out to the masses without a huge price tag, which is great. So, yeah, thoughts on that, John, before we move on? Nice. Cool. All right, the next thing was something I found and that's, you know, I'm a big fan of Sonos and I have been a huge fan of their partnership with IKEA because they have been able to use the partnership with IKEA to make lower cost speakers than they would ever make with the Sonos brand. You know, they like on the bookshelf speaker, which is only $99, the Symfonisk bookshelf speaker, it's only $99. It's the least expensive Sonos speaker you can get because it's an IKEA speaker with Sonos technology in it. They use cloth as the grill and whereas Sonos wouldn't use cloth on their grills, they would use, you know, some acoustically neutral mesh that's metal or something, which is awesome. But they've got a new thing out, IKEA and Sonos do and it is the Symfonisk picture frame with Wi-Fi speaker and it's 200 bucks and it's this fairly large picture frame. I'm trying to see how just how big it is, product size. It is 16 by 22 and it, but it's flat. It's only two inches thick, obviously meant to hang on the wall and I have not heard it yet. It was just announced last week, but it looks like a pretty cool thing and, you know, a nice big speaker, but it hides in plain sight right there on your wall. So, and you can swap out, I think there's different panels that you can put on it, but yeah, a cool little thing. So that's why it's here because it's cool stuff found. It's what we do. All right, we've got a couple more cool stuff found, John, unless you've got something to add. I do, but go on while I find it. Okay, great. I will go on to Tony here. Tony shares, really it's a cool stuff found in answer to one of our questions from a previous episode. He says, for years, are you were talking about needing to print a PDF or create a PDF of a website that looks like the website as opposed to whatever the website's gonna look like when it's printed? And he says, for years, I have used the print friendly and PDF extension on my Macs. It's available, as he says, as a browser extension in browsers that support that. Or in the case of Safari, you just create a little JavaScript button. And I did this in Safari, it's super easy. So it's like, it's one step. You just drag to the toolbar and you're done. So then at that point, whenever you're on a webpage, you just click the button and it'll format the page for printing and or you can save it as a PDF. And he's right, but it and it works better than the built-in functionality in Safari, but it still doesn't represent the webpage as it looks on my screen as a PDF. And this really is a factor with responsive websites that change as you get smaller, right? Like Mac Observer is a perfect example of a responsive website. You can open up Mac Observer on desktop and it looks one way you open it up on your phone and it looks completely different, right? But what's cool is if you open it up on desktop and then start narrowing your window, it will change before your very eyes. That's what happens with a responsive website. It's responding to the width of your browser at all times. It seems like responsive websites get affected by print friendly and PDF. And so the current design of Mac Observer, Hint, Hint, is very different when I engage print friendly and PDF on my desktop. So I'm still looking for the answer of printing a website as it appears on my screen, but more than one page at a time. So, but thank you, Tony. That's, I mean, this does it better than anything that I have been able to find recently. So I do appreciate that and obviously wanted to share. There's links in the show notes. Allison, along the same lines, Allison of Podfeat, said you asked on the show about how to save an entire webpage. My favorite method on iOS is to take a screenshot with the webpage open. So go to Safari, do your normal screenshot, dance, and then tap on the screenshot. By default, the selected tab at the top will be screen, but then tap on full page. Now you've got the full page, the full webpage organized as a PDF. It's no longer a PNG. You can confirm this by hitting done and you will not see a save to photos option, only a save PDF to files option. And then you don't even have to save it. You can just use the share icon to print or send the PDF if that's what you wanna do. So, so there you go. Thank you for that, Allison. Good stuff. Good stuff. John, I have a cool stuff found that I'm gonna throw into the mix here. I don't know if any of you can tell the difference, but for the first time in certainly over a decade here in the studio anyway, I am using a different microphone. I've been talking with the folks at Earthworks and they said, you know, you might wanna check out the Icon Pro. It's a built to be broadcast mic. And it is a condenser mic, which is sort of against my religion when it comes to broadcast mics because you don't want it to pick up anything else in the room and condenser mics generally, but not always will be more active in their listening, if you will. Where's a dynamic? And I'm oversimplifying this and actually saying it incorrectly, but the way I think of condenser versus dynamic is that a dynamic mic gets its energy from the sound that you put into it and a condenser mic actually gets its energy from the microphone preamp via phantom power. So this is a condenser mic, but it is built and tuned to be a broadcast microphone. And it is super responsive to gain. And when you've got the gain set right, which wasn't difficult at all, then you get this smooth, rich sound. It's got a higher top end. I think it goes up to 30 kilohertz, which is of course beyond the range of my human hearing. And I think everybody's human hearing. But by going up that far, you don't get that distortion roll off that happens in the top end of mics that might just go 20 to 20 or something like that. And I find it's a little smoother than the previous mic that I was using in the mid range. It just kind of gives me that nice, slow, you know, it responds fast and so there's no honkiness in the mid range either. So I'm duly impressed by this thing. I'm not sure how long I'll be using it, but I'm happy that I'm able to use it right now. What I'm also curious about John is, so this is an XLR microphone that plugs into a pre-mixing board and that's how that works. And it's $499, I think the $499 bucks, which is right in that price range of what you would pay for a decent broadcast mic. They also make the Earthworks Icon USB, which appears to be exactly the same microphone, but instead of having an XLR jack on it, it's got a USB-C jack on it, but it does also have its own gain control so you can affect the same outcome as I'm able to do here. And so that I'm really curious about because that would be great like down in the office where I'm using a USB mic to podcast all the time. So cool stuff that Earthworks is doing there. They've impressed me a lot lately with some things. You can hear about that on my Gigab podcast or at gigabpodcast.com too. All right, John, so let us know what you think about the sound though. I'm curious if you notice a difference, folks. John, did you find your cool stuff found? Yes, so little story, I was, so I like playing lottery and I like to scratch off tickets. And the way most of these work is that there's a barcode on it that's a sequential number and you go to the retailer and they scan it and if you're a winner, then they give you money or more tickets. Every now and then though, when I scratch one off, it scratches off so much of it that it's kind of not readable anymore or their app can't read it. And I'm like, oh man, I wish I could read this barcode. The problem is the iPhone, the camera app reads QR code but it doesn't read the symbology used on the lottery ticket which is something called data matrix. So, but the thing is I wanted to repair the barcode but I needed a scanner that would read data matrix. And I found one and this is a company that I actually worked with their stuff in the past. They'll call Cognix and it's Cognix Barcode Scanner and it basically COGNEX, so they make cameras but they also make a barcode scanner app and it has like, I looked and I think it's like over 20 symbologies it can read. So, if you need to, in the past it works with your iPhone camera, right? This app? Yeah. Yeah, okay. Yeah, and then they make, you know and then it uses their algorithm, algorithms and just show you what's in the barcode. So, I use that because what I wanted to try to do and it actually kind of worked is that I then went online. So, their program was smart enough to tell me the number in the barcode. I then found another site, I don't have it up top of my head but another site will actually let you take numbers and convert them to a barcode. So, what I was trying to do was do that so, you know, it would work and then I'd get my money. Yeah, interesting. That's cool. Oh, fun. Yeah, it's amazing what you can do with these devices that are in our pockets. The world is truly open to us. It's pretty good. It's pretty good. I like it. All right. Last week, John, we started the conversation about cutting the cord. Really, I think it's gonna come down to cutting the coax because the way I don't, and I have some things I wanna share from all of you but what I'll say is looking at the pricing, like right now in my area, the lowest price thing that Comcast offers is $119.99, $119.99. And that includes 800 megabit per second internet on limited phone calls on a VoIP line and their basic but fairly substantial TV channel package. If you only want TV channels, that is the option. If you, right? So there is no less expensive way to get just TV from Comcast, at least here in my area. So were it not for me having the availability of internet via a different source, now I have fiber, none of this would make any sense. But here's the thing, it's $119.99. And then there's another $40 worth of broadcast fees and that fee that are like tacked on to the top. So I'm paying like $160 something a month for just for TV is how that works. So that is, but it really is, in order to get rid of that, you gotta be able to cut the coax because if you need internet from them, you're paying 65 bucks a month for like the lowest speed tier, 50 megabits per second at 65 bucks a month. So that's just downstream. I'm sure upstream is five. So anyway, I wanna share something from JP about YouTube TV, which is what I asked about last time. And then we'll share some other thoughts as well. So JP actually goes on for about five minutes. We're not gonna go quite that long, but we'll let him go a couple of minutes because he has some good things to share. Fellers, it's JP calling from the Northeast. I was listening to the current episode and I hear you were talking about YouTube TV. And you were considering moving to it. I would have to say that it's one of the best things I ever did. I've been a direct TV subscriber for like 20 years, mainly because of Red Zone and football and dish because I didn't want cable. And since Spectrum became such a high speed cable provider over the years, and I was looking for a way to drop some pricing every month because let's face it, the cable and the dish companies literally are still charging a monthly fee per box just to have it in the building. And not only that, direct TV was charging an HD fee of $10 a month. And every time I called them to say, hey, guys, HD is no longer premium. It's the de facto standard. Stop charging people for it. Preach on brother JP with that. So out of just sheer rage against the monolithic system where I was paying 200 bucks a month just for HBO showtime and all the channels you never watch, I looked at all the streaming services and found that YouTube TV was by far the best one because it had nine months of DVR in the cloud, multiple accounts, it's on every device, it's on web browsers, it's on your Apple TVs, it's on everything. And once you get used to the interface which you can customize using a web browser, it's fantastic. Never look back, even the Mrs is into it now and you wanna DVR something, you just put the little check mark next to it and boom, it's there in your library. Yeah, see. The other great thing about it is the cost, obviously. I shaved over $100 off of my monthly bill which equals thousands of dollars per year and I'm literally getting the same stuff. And right as I signed up for it, they adopted NFL Red Zone and the NFL Network which is all I need. No, thank you for this JP. It's, this is fantastic. It really, and thank you everybody for your comments. I've got two more that I'm gonna, we're gonna share here. One is from listener John and he says, I've been on YouTube TV since very early in the service when it was just 35 a month. I've tried other cable replacement services and YouTube TV is my preferred one. I've tried Hulu, Sling TV and my brother has AT&T and YouTube TV is the best of the bunch in my opinion. It just consistently works better and has a better interface than the others. And this is the important part for me and you too, John and a lot of us. I have been a Tivo user for years and was hesitant to give it up just like you. I've gotten over that very quickly, he says. My initial desire to move to all streaming is that I've got an apartment in New York City and also a house in the country in Connecticut. He says, and I wanted a TV service that didn't force me into paying for two cable TV packages. So think about this, right? Like if you've got two places, a vacation home or whatever, two homes, right now you're paying for two services because they're coming in on a wire to those locations by YouTube TV or something like it and boom, you use it wherever you are, it doesn't matter. So that saved him a ton of money and is on top of what it would just already save, right? I'm paying 70 bucks a month flat. Like that 70 is my cost for my consolidated gigabit fiber line, right? And then I could pay another 65 a month to YouTube TV or Fubo TV and I want to talk about Fubo TV and now I'm at 125 bucks a month and I'm done. That's it, unless you want to add like HBO or something like that, in which case, great, go add that. Fubo, one issue that I have found as I've been looking through this, John, with YouTube TV is that they seem to have let all of their contracts with regional sports providers drop out. So like NESN here in New England is something we use to watch the Bruins and I think there's even some Patriots games on it but we certainly use it for hockey, UNH hockey as well as Bruins hockey and they have let their YouTube TV has let their contracts lapse with NESN and lots of other similar regional sports providers. I'm not sure why I think they're gonna need to come back around on it but Fubo has been pushing, Fubo TV has been pushing super hard over the past year and really has gotten their game up to the same level or past YouTube TV the same price as YouTube TV at 65 bucks but they have all of those regional providers in addition to just more channels in general. So I think we're gonna try Fubo TV here at the house. That's kind of where we're leaning but the nice part about this is and JP went on to talk about this but he, I cut him off but he said the nice part is there's no long-term contracts so A, if you wanna switch from one to the other what you lose is your DVR content, that's it and you can DVR anything up until the show ends, right? So if you start DVR'ing with one minute left in the show you get the whole show, right? Which is cool, you don't get that with Tivo, obviously but if you want, let's say you want a sports package but you only want it during football season you don't care about hockey or anything else but great, just turn it on then and then turn it off when it's done and you're good to go. So, but yeah, Fubo TV seems to be better for the way we watch TV and what we watch on TV here. So I think that's the way we're gonna go with it but I appreciate everybody's comments. John, you said you found one other from listener Mark, right? No, Mark also talks about YouTube TV. Okay, all right, okay, cool. And then he's, yeah, I mean he went into a little detail so let me see, he mentions the Entertainment Plus package which has HBO show times and stars and that's 30 bucks. So if you want lots of movie channels 30 bucks a month isn't too bad. No, that's not bad at all because you'd pay 15 bucks to HBO if you just did it directly on their website. So yeah, all right, there you go. Yeah, now there's a lot of love out there for YouTube TV from everybody that's using it and I've got a bunch of family members that are using it around the country and all love it. So for us, we essentially have three homes that need TV. We have obviously the home that we live in and then my son's dorm room out at Reed and my daughter's apartment here at UNH. And so we can kind of sort of fake that with VPNs and Xfinity and like a lot of geeky, disastrous things but I don't know man, like it's a lot of headache. It's fun to know that I can set it up. It's not necessarily fun to have to manage it constantly for any of us, not just me but the family and all that. So yeah, it's been interesting, it's been interesting. All right, so we have, we got a bunch of questions that you all sent in. The next thing I wanna do, John, if we're ready is I would like to talk about our two sponsors. I'm ready. All right, our first sponsor is Fast Mail and just like we've been doing all episode, I'm gonna read an email from one of you. Dary is right. I've been using Fast Mail for my email for close to a decade. I'm pretty happy on the whole and glad to note that you got them as a sponsor. In addition to all the bells and whistles you've mentioned on the show, I also use Fast Mail's web dev feature. For almost a year now, I've been syncing my encrypted OmniFocus database using Fast Mail servers. This is amazing. Yeah, Fast Mail, it's the email service that I moved to a couple of months ago and I couldn't be happier. Not only am I happier about the service itself, like it, I mean, it's super focused on privacy, right? I'm the customer, I'm not the product, which is great. I'm also happy about the migration. It was super easy. I just told it. I wanted to migrate from Google and gave it my credentials and went to sleep. And when I woke up the next morning, all my mailboxes, all of my mail, of course, everything had been slurped over. Doesn't get any better than that, except it does. As Dary has mentioned, Fast Mail has lots of great features, web dev being sort of probably one of the ones that most people that use Fast Mail don't even know about. And that's the cool part is Fast Mail is super simple to use. But if you wanna dig in, they've got all kinds of different things there. And like their rules, super easy to use their filtering rules for mail, but you can also get really complex with them if you want. If you wanna use email from a custom domain, right? You have your own custom domain. Fast Mail is less expensive than Gmail. You can bring in all your domains for just five bucks a month for your addresses to like, you know, you at your company or whatever. And you can use hundreds of email aliases that keep your main address private. It's great stuff. You can be part of the very best in email and you get two things for being a Mac Geek Hub listener. You gotta go to fastmail.com slash MGG to get both of these. You get Fast Mail free for 30 days and then you get 10% off your first year. Again, it's fastmail.com slash MGG or thanks to Fast Mail for sponsoring this episode. Hey, if you dread looking at your credit card statements, you are not alone, my friend. Debt can feel crippling and Upstart, our next sponsor here, can help you on your path to financial freedom. Financial freedom is what you wanna get to. You wanna be able to control this and Upstart is the fast and easy way to pay off your debt with a personal loan all online. So whether it's paying off credit cards, consolidating high interest debt or funding personal expenses, like, you know, maybe you want a new network storage device or something fun, right? Over half a million people have used Upstart to get one fixed monthly payment. Upstart knows you're more than just your credit score though and they are expanding access to affordable credit because unlike other lenders, Upstart considers your income and your current employment to find you a smarter rate for your loan. And it's all done with this five minute online rate check so you can see your rate upfront for loans between $1,000 and $50,000. And you can receive those funds as fast as one business day after accepting your loan. So find out how Upstart can lower your monthly payments today when you go to Upstart.com slash MGG. That's Upstart.com slash MGG. Don't forget to use our URL to let them know we sent you. Loan amounts will be determined based upon your credit, income and certain other information that you provide during your loan application. Go to Upstart.com slash MGG and our thanks to Upstart for sponsoring this episode. All right, John, you wanna take us to Andrew and... Yeah, Andrew brings us to a topic we haven't talked about for a while. So let's give it a go. His first question, so they're all SSD related. Can an SSD be formatted so that the data is unrecoverable before reinstalling the OSN applications for use by another user? No. The thing is, this utility does have, and I'll do this with my rotational drive. So this utility does have a secure or multi-pass erase option and for rotational drives, that's what you should do before getting rid of it. Sure. But that doesn't work. The thing is a rotational drive has a predictable block layout. So this utility can march through it and clear out each block or write data and rewrite data to each individual block. SSDs don't really work that way in that the logical and the physical block number are not the same. In that you can't predict what block you're gonna write to with an SSD. So I mean, you could try to do the secure erase but there's no guarantee that it's gonna get rid of all the data. No, it could write, this probably wouldn't happen but there's as much chance of it writing everything to the same block all of the time as there is to it writing it only once to each block, right? So yeah, interesting. Okay, that makes sense. Now, some drives do have an erase command that's usually in their software. So most SSDs have some utility software. For example, Dave, I have a couple of SanDisk SSDs and they have something called a SanDisk dashboard, SanDisk SSD dashboard. And that software actually has a couple of buttons in it. One is sanitize and then another is secure erase. Okay. So as long as the vendor could theoretically control this since it seems some of them do, okay. One other thing from the chat room, Brian Monroe points out that's why Apple and others are doing and encouraging full disk encryption is that means you could throw away the key and now the data is gone, right? Because you don't need to erase the drive if what's on the drive is gibberish. So as long as you throw away the key, boom, you're done and that's exactly what full disk encryption allows you to do. Yeah, and actually that was last part of my first answer. I'm sorry. Okay, sorry. The best option is to encrypt the drive as soon as possible. And yeah, as Brian said, it's somewhat automatic with a T2 Mac otherwise enable file vault or whatever secure option it is in the operating system. Yeah, I think it's more than somewhat automatic with a T2 chip. I think it's unstoppable with a T2 chip. The only difference with the T2 is whether you are in control of the key or the T2 chip is just in control of the key. But I think the drive's encrypted either way. Somebody will correct me if I'm wrong. Feedback at mackeycap.com but I'm pretty sure that that's how the T2 chip does it. And Dave said feedback at mackeycap.com. And Brian apologizes for stealing your lead and he'll send his apology formally to feedback at mackeycap.com. All right, so a second question. Will using either of these options shorten the light and the answer is no. Then he has the third question. I understand that cells in an SSD only have a limited amount of read write cycles. Does the OS know how many cycles are left in a cell? And is there any warning if the cells fill up or degrade to the point where the drive would fail? I know I have heard that when an SSD dies, it just dies. The drive itself manages that. As far as I know, in that, what do they call it? What was the term? Where leveling or something over provisioning? Yeah, so the drive manages this in that the operating system doesn't really need to know the state of the cells, the SSD again, the SSD manages that. There is a value that you can read though, which is kind of interesting to let you know how far along you are with your SSD as far as when is it gonna die. The drive does maintain life left, if you will. So it's one of the smart parameters. If you look at all the smart parameters, one of them will say, okay, here's how much life is left. ISTAT menus also does this. So for example here, Dave, I'm looking at my Mac mini and I'm looking at the disks menu in ISTAT menus. And when I hover over my Macintosh hard drive or the SSD in this machine, it says, oh yeah, by the way, you got 90% lifetime left, which is nice. Interesting. Okay, all right, yeah, that makes sense. All right, yeah, ISTAT menus, man. It's always right there for us, literally. Yep, and then let's see. Yeah, so there's some way you can see how much life is left. There's also some programs like, let's see, DriveDSC and Distral R2 that I think will also show you a lot of additional information and predicted lifespan. Let's see. And then the last thing he asked about Trim, and I guess he was just asking is Trim gonna shorten the life and I don't think it will. I mean, if anything, but he asked, is Trim garbage collection? And as far as I know, that is kind of what it does. What it does is I think it scrubs a cell so that when somebody comes to write to it later, it'll write faster. As I understand, writing to a cell on an SSD requires that the cell be empty first. So it's unlike on a rotational drive, you just write to it and obviously when you write, it's erasing what's underneath it and putting what you put new. And there's talk about latent images and certainly that things can be there. Effectively, there is no extra step whereas with an SSD, if you need to write to a full cell or a cell that has something in it that's no longer necessary, the first thing that has to happen is it has to erase that cell and then it can write to it. And I believe what Trim does is lets the operating system communicate with the drive and say, okay, now's a good time to go and clean this particular stuff up so that you have it ready later when I need to go and write to it and it so it makes it a little more efficient. That's my recollection of what I'm sure was my limited understanding to begin with. So I could be wrong. Feedback at mackekept.com. Yes. Yes. And also with Trim, so if you have an Apple branded SSD in your machine, Trim is enabled, third-party drives are not, but you can enable it. There's a command which you can look at if you go into the terminal called TrimForce. Sounds like a superhero. So. It does, yeah. All right, good. This is great stuff. I'm glad we went through this, man. Is there more or did we hit our limit for today but I'm sure we'll hear from you folks. I think that's it for SSDs. Great. Okay, for now, right, yeah. No, I'm glad we reopened that conversation. This is good stuff. All right, opening a conversation about M1 Max, Ralph brings us a question or a comment. He says, apparently there is a complication or limitation with the new M1 chip Max in terms of external display support. Do you think you could give the mackept.com community your assessment of the issue and its solutions? Yeah, this is a great thing. So the most important thing to remember is that the M1 chip, the one that we currently use and know about in the M1 iMacs, the M1 MacBook Air Pro and Mini can support a maximum of two displays. That's it. So if it's a laptop or an iMac, the built-in display is one mandatory. And then you can have one external on each of those. If it's a Mac Mini, you can have one HDMI display and one Thunderbolt display or you display out, you know, display port via the Thunderbolt port. That's it. Those are your options. And that's as far as it goes. There are people that want more than two displays on their M1 Macs and there is a solution. It's using something called display link. We'll put a link in the show notes that sort of explains a lot of the options of how to do this. But the idea is that you use your computer's CPU. Remember, the GPU natively in the M1 chip supports two displays. So when you're adding a third display, you are not using the GPU as a display driver. You are using software on your computer to generate the display signal. And that might use a combination of CPU and GPU, but it is not natively using your GPU. So it's not fast. It's not good for gaming. It's not good for video editing or anything where like timing matters. But as an alternate display where you've got maybe your, you know, Slack and messages and things like that, it's probably fine. The name of the technology is display link. And that's the software that you're gonna use to do this. And then you will use a piece of hardware that goes USB to display, usually HDMI, but it could be USB to display port. That's gonna be your path there. So you're using the display link software with some sort of USB to display connector hardware. And so it is a USB to display thing. Again, possible, totally doable, a little bit slower than what you would get with your native stuff. But yes, that's what's going on now, Ralph. Now, whether the, I'm sure there will be some version of an Apple Silicon chip in FutureMax that does not have this same limitation, but this current one does. So there you go. Thoughts on that, John? Or did I get it efficiently? I'll let you know when I get an M1 Mac. Oh yeah, you gotta get an M1 Mac, man. Yeah, the time is right. All right. Speaking of running apps that don't run, David has a question, huh? Yes. All right, so David says, I'm thinking of upgrading the software on my 2014 Mac Mini, which runs off an external SSD drive from 10.14 Mojave to Big Sur. I use this Mac Mini as my archive source, Photos app, Finder files, and iTunes apps. I'll store their originals on this one computer while all my other devices use iCloud Photo Library, iCloud Drive, and iCloud Music. I then have this computer backing up with Time Machine, Carbon Copy Cloner, and Backblaze, using the 321 backup crawl. Very good. Because this computer is my master source to all things digital, I generally have one, one to two operating systems behind just to safeguard my files and older software that I might need in the future. Well, I don't mind upgrading to latest software for my other devices just for fun in the new futures when it comes to this computer. If it ain't broke, don't mess with it. Yes, I fully support that. That said, Monterey will be coming out in the next few months and Big Sur will technically run on this Mac Mini, so I was thinking of upgrading it to Big Sur, skipping Catalina, so that it will continue to be one operating system behind. But this brings me to my question. How do I best achieve the current version of the operating system so I can access any 32-bit apps, specifically the old iTunes app for my really old iOS devices? I have an iPhone 4S original iPad, iPad Nano, all working perfectly and want to be able to connect to them in the future to show my kids. I'm assuming that I will need to keep this computer, so right now this is more software question using current hardware. I want to preserve my technology experience for as long as possible. I was thinking of using parallels or VMware, but I've never used these programs to host live systems that I depend on, so I was not sure if there were special steps to consider to make sure future Mac OS systems can run them properly. I'm sure I'm not the only one facing this 32-bit dilemma and I slightly recall a previous caller with a similar question. Any help would be appreciated. Honestly, I think he kind of answered his own question. Yeah. If I wanted to maintain a legacy environment, parallels of VMware can both do that easily. On Intel Max. Yes, on Intel Max. Yeah, yeah. Right. And even VirtualBox. I looked and VirtualBox doesn't officially, look for an article if you want to use VirtualBox. VirtualBox is free, but you kind of got to jump through some hoops in order to run Mac OS on it. Okay, okay. In that it's not an officially supported target, whereas for parallels in VMware it is, last I checked. Got it, got it. The other thing would be just, like you're already doing now is have an external drive with the legacy OS and all your apps on it. Maybe, but it sounds like he's already backing it up. He's already got that. Excellent. Yeah, yeah. And be aware, to my knowledge, there is no way of doing this on an M1 Mac. I don't think there's anything that would be able to emulate Intel yet, if ever, but certainly not yet. Somebody correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think that you can run a, there's no way to do that on a 32 bit, to run 32 bit or any Intel apps, that Intel operating systems. You can run Intel apps, of course, on M1 Max. It's super smooth. You don't even realize it's happening. Rosetta 2 is amazing. But in terms of running an operating system, I don't think we have that option out. And you have to run an earlier operating system in order to run 32 bit apps. So, yeah. Somebody will correct me if I'm wrong. And hopefully, if I'm not wrong, then somebody's working on that. But I can, what's the use case? Like, is there a big enough market for it? I don't know. I don't know, might not ever happen. If we haven't seen bits and pieces of it yet, I don't know, yeah. All right, anything more on that, John? Or are we good? Nope, we're good. Okay, Bill has a question, and we'll answer his question, and then I'm probably gonna make it a little geeky. Bill says, you mentioned a few times, recently setting up a VPN on your Synology router, so that you can VPN into your house. I'd like to set up a VPN on my Synology disk station, which is presumably roughly the same, is that right? With that in mind, which protocol do you recommend? There are three offered, PPTP, which seems to be fairly obsolete, but it is Apple supported. L2TP slash IPsec, which is way more secure than PPTP, and Mac OS and iOS natively supported. And then OpenVPN, Mac OS supports it as does iOS, but you need third party apps. His objectives. He wants to have his devices appear as if on his own network. Some Fios features, his DVRs, channel streaming, only work when he's on his home network, and he would like to use those out of the house. Number two is to access his home network and computers. Number three is he has two networks, one connected directly to his Fios router, one to a Netgear router that's connected to his Fios router through DMZ. Most of the time, this isn't an issue, but there are two use cases where it's a problem. Number one, I need to be connected to the Fios network to stream some channels. Ah, hence, okay, I get it. To use DVR from the devices. Number two, I'd like to set up Plex to stream to my Roku TVs, but the problem is that they are on different networks, so how do I get them to be on the same network? Okay, so I'm gonna address your question, objective number three, separately. I wanna answer everybody's question about VPNing into your house. Most routers that support VPN inbound really have one option, and so that's the option you're gonna use. With the Synology stuff, the Synology router actually supports more VPN stuff than the Distation, but the Distation supports these three, which is more than enough. Like 100% of the time, I'm gonna recommend L2TP IPsec if you're setting up a VPN for home use. Stay away from PPTP, it's not secure anymore, and some things actually don't even support it the right way. And OpenVPN will work, but it's a super pain because you don't have native clients on anything. So if you've gotta set it up for more than one device, it starts to become a real pain, especially if you've gotta set it up for more than one human to use. It's a support nightmare, simply because there's no native OpenVPN support on the Mac, but even if there was, with L2TP, you could set up, if you know your address, you know your address to use Dynamic DNS for your address, and your username password and shared key, which is like a second password that everybody uses. If you know those four pieces of information in your head, you can connect to your L2TP VPN from any Mac or iOS device anywhere, even if you just wiped it clean. So that's huge. With OpenVPN, you need a certificate file, you need a configuration file, whatever it is, big pain in the neck, you gotta go figure out how to get that if you don't have it, don't do it. Too much headache, not enough gain. But what are you, I know, I know you use OpenVPN, John, but I'm guessing that probably wouldn't have been your preference. It's the first one that I got working. Right. No, that I guess. Synology, when I, yeah, it's the first one I got working when I ran their VPN servers. I'm like, okay, it used to be, and yeah, I agree with you. Having to drag configuration files, I mean, the good news is that the certificate secures the, helps secure the traffic. Sure. It used to be kind of a pain because how do you get configuration files over to your iOS device? You used to do it through iTunes, now you can do it through files. Yeah, just the files app, right? Or any other app too, like, yeah, yeah, yeah, right. Yeah, and then on the Mac is, what's the client? Tunnelblick, I think is the client on the Mac side. Yeah, so you need third, oh, right, that's right. It was setting up, if you wiped your iPhone or your Mac clean and you needed to do OpenVPN, not only do you need the certificate or profile file, you need the app too. So yeah, yeah, do that. All right, now I wanna get a little geeky, John. And this was answering Paul's question, which I didn't really prep for the show, but I think it might help with what Bill is trying to do. And Paul has something called CG NAT, which is, we know what NAT is, and if we don't, we're gonna tell you, NAT network address translation is what happens inside your router when you get one IPv4 address from your internet service provider, but you need to share it with, you know, your dozens or hundreds of devices in your house. NAT network address translation is the tech that makes that happen so that all of your devices can appear to be coming from one. Well, Paul is using Starlink internet and they don't have a big enough block of IPv4 addresses for all their customers. So they use something called CG NAT. And what CG NAT does is it is NAT at the carrier level, it's carrier grade NAT. So it means that they are using one IPv4 address for lots of customers who are in turn using it for lots of their own devices. So it's almost, in fact, I guess it is a double NAT scenario because you're getting your own subnet, you know, for your house, but it's still subneted one layer behind. You can see cell providers do this sometimes too. I'll see that I get like a 10.1 address or some 10.0 or whatever the thing is like. When I was on AT&T, I would notice that occasionally. And so this is not a new thing, but it makes things like hosting a server really difficult. And so Paul's problem where he wants to host a Plex server on his network and Bill's problem where he wants to host a Plex server but he wants his two networks to see each other. Well, there might be an answer. And that answer is called zero tier, Z-E-R-O-T-I-E-R we'll put a link in the show notes for it. Zero tier, John, is a, they call it a global area network. So what happens is you go to zero tier.com and you can set up a free account that I think can have up to 50 devices in it, which is gonna be more than enough for what we're talking about here, hopefully. And there are clients available for Linux, Synology, Mac OS, iOS, right, all that good stuff. And you log in with your client into the zero tier system. So you set up a network on, you go to zero tier.com you set up your free network, there's an ID, right? So you take that ID, you put it into the client app on your iPhone or your Mac and then your Mac connects to that network, essentially like a VPN, but not like, you don't have to worry about inbound to you because you're doing, you're creating this tunnel from your Mac, you're initiating from your client device. So it initiates the tunnel. And then once you connect, you have to authorize it because otherwise anybody with your ID could connect and you don't want that. So you authorize all the devices and then they share an IP pool. And it's just like you're on a local network together. All of these devices, no matter where they are, are always on this global area network pool. So you can have all of your devices just sharing this zero tier network. So the nice part would be like, let's say, you have a laptop, this is where I think about it. Then you constantly are connecting to your server at home, right? Well, you don't want to open ports and you don't want to have to think about VPNing in. So you set up one of these zero tier networks, you put your server on it, your Synology, let's say and then you put your laptop on it and then no matter where you are with your laptop, it's always going to be connecting to zero tier and then from there it figures out. If it sees that you're both on the same local network, it will let you connect directly. You don't have to worry about that, right? Like this is the cool part, John, right? Think about this. You've got, you know, it's always connecting, let's say it assigns you a 172.16 IP address range, right? Like that's what you choose for zero tier. Well, you're always gonna have that address range no matter where you are in the world as long as you're on the internet, you're connected to this zero tier network and so are all of your other devices. It's pretty cool and you can use it to connect to a server. Like let's say you want to do SSH management of your server but you don't want to open up SSH to the whole world but you don't have to. You just set up a zero tier thing and now you're on a local network with your server and you can just let SSH in from that local network but you don't have to worry about if your IP address at home changes or anything, it doesn't matter. You're always still on that same local network. It's pretty cool how this zero tier thing works. So hopefully I didn't get too geeky with that but I'm not sorry if I did because it's fun. Pretty cool, huh, man? Yeah, so, all right. So maybe that'll help you too, Bill. I realize it gets geeky but you've got a geeky scenario. Any thoughts on that, John? Nope. Did you listen to anything I said? Yes. Okay, good, good. I'm glad. Yeah, all my VPN stuff works, so. Well, I know but you have to connect it and disconnect it. Yeah. Whereas with zero tier, you just sort of... That is pain. You configure it and it just lives as another network interface on your devices. That's the cool part. It's just like you're just there and you don't have to think about, oh, what do I connect to? You're just always connecting the same way. I, there's something, and it's all, yes, it is coordinated by zero tier.com servers but everything is end-to-end encrypted so they can only see how much traffic a given device is sending, not what traffic. And of course, if you are able to connect directly, either you're on a local network or via UDP streams, via different networks, then zero tier only sees that the two devices connected and they don't see any of the traffic. They don't want the traffic really. But they will proxy it, if necessary, for a scenario like Paul where he's like way behind something. Anyway, it's fun stuff. I like learning new things. All right, what do you got, man? We got one little tip here from Dom. Okay. One of my HomePod minis was recently stuck for days downloading the update iOS 14.6. I didn't find clear instructions online how to fix it so I just unplugged it, deleted it from the home app, plugged it in, then set it up from scratch with my iPhone again, and now it works. I don't have automations for it so I can't say whether those would have needed to be reconstructed and now I'm waiting for the update to try again. For what it's worth, my other HomePod mini updated with no problem. Okay, well, if you got it stuck HomePod, that's what you need to do. Yeah, there were a lot of issues with the 14.6 update on HomePods I saw. I don't have any HomePods, but I saw a lot of reports of that, yeah. Yeah, I hate when turning it on, turning it on then off again is the solution to the problem. Yeah, but you know, it's easier than many other solutions, so. Now, what do you think about his question though? I wonder if the automations or scenes or whatever are stored in the cloud. I think they are. I think they are tied to your home, which is, I think that data, I don't know that it's stored in the cloud, but I think it's stored on your iPhone as well as whatever your Home Hub might be. That would be, yeah, because I've changed HomeHubs and those don't go away. So I think they're stored on your phone. They might be synced to your iCloud account as a backup, yeah, so in that sense, they probably are stored in the cloud, yeah. So the answer is yes. I'm liking this microphone. This is good, I'm comfortable with it and I can back off from it and it just forgets about me, it's nice. It's good, no. I wanna talk about Harmony Remotes before we get out of here because there's an important thing for anybody that cares about this universal remote discussion we've been having. I do also wanna answer Bob's question, so I'm gonna try and do both as quickly as I can. Bob asked about a new Mesh Wi-Fi system that he saw, it's called the Velo, V-I-L-O Mesh, and it's $60 for three units. Now, these are AC 1200 units, which means they are dual-band Wi-Fi 5, right? So they're not Wi-Fi 6, they're not tri-band, but for a lot of our homes, dual-band and Wi-Fi 5 is great. It's more than what you would need in a lot of scenarios. However, I dug into this and the reason I dug in is everybody pretty much is using the same pool of hardware in terms of the chip set for the Mesh stuff. It's Qualcomm, I think it owns that market. Broadcom might have something to do with it, but for a long time it was just Qualcomm and that's probably what these chips are. So that's a good sign, right? Like the same chips that, you know, your Eero and your Orbi and, you know, your Plume and all that stuff have been using. So I dug in and I very quickly found an article on their website that asked, does it support Ethernet backhaul? Now, before I dig into this, I wanna say, I know many of us will not need Ethernet backhaul. That's not why I dig into it here. The ability to support Ethernet backhaul tells us how much effort the software team put in to implementing the features that exist in the hardware of these Mesh chips and how robust that software is at any given point in time. And the reason we know this is look at the difference between the first Netgear Orbi and today's Netgear Orbi or the first Netgear Orbi and everything else that was on the market. Their meshing was awful initially. And the fact was it couldn't support an Ethernet backhaul because they weren't really meshing, right? They were doing some weird stuff to sort of shortcut some things. So I looked into this and they do some wireless pre-pairing of those three devices in the three packs so that you don't, so when you get them out of the box they just know about each other. But because of that, the article says Ethernet backhaul would slow things down. And the fact that the devices aren't smart enough to notice that, yeah, okay, I'm paired to that one. Whether I was pre-paired at the factory or the user paired me, doesn't matter, right? I'm paired to it, great. Now I see that I've got this other path to it that is a better, higher priority path. I should just use that. Like that's pretty basic spanning tree stuff even if you're not using spanning tree. Like that logic isn't that hard to implement and yet we've seen examples in the past where it's very hard to implement. So I'm probably missing something. It's probably very difficult to get it right. And it seems like Velo has skipped that step. I wanna talk, I've reached out to them but and I wanna learn more, but I would say let's pump the brakes on this for now until we learn more. The price sounds right, but we wanna make sure that we're getting what we want, not just what we wanna spend. Thoughts on that, John, before we move on to just a couple- Yeah, I mean, it sounds like a gen one Eero kind of. Well, no, gen one Eero was super robust in the software place. Hardware wise, yes, gen one Eero, dual band AC 1200. Exactly right, but that's what I'm saying is the hardware only matters if you've got good software to support it and this software, like there's a red flag there. I haven't tested it, so it's hard to say but there's a red flag there with the software. So I would not equate it to gen one Eero, not even close. So yeah, it's interesting. All right, in terms of universal remotes, I asked all of you about what you're using as a universal remote now that Logitech has discontinued the Harmony line. And listener Joe said, I've been using Logitech universal remotes for the past 15 years. I currently own yada, yada, yada, lots of devices. On the day that Logitech announced that they would cease manufacturing universal remotes, I purchased a top of the line Logitech Harmony Elite remote. I'd been eyeing it for a while. But now I pulled the trigger and talks about the features of it, which is great. Like it is the top of the line. The reason is Logitech stated that they would maintain their database. If true to their word, I should be able to continue to add new devices for the life of this product. I listened to many tech podcasts and was surprised how people said they were immediately dumping their Logitech remotes and looking for a new solution. But just like when Apple updates a device, your old equipment still functions fine. There's no need to immediately trash it. I did the opposite and hunkered down. And then we heard from, I think I'm gonna leave his name or her name out of this because I'm not sure, but we heard from someone who is a smart home system installer and said, there is no equivalent alternative in price and functionality to the Logitech Harmony remotes. Logitech has stated that they plan to continue supporting the Harmony remotes with fixes and possibly even minor software and firmware updates indefinitely by spare hardware now. Some retailers still have some stock. You can also find on eBay and other sources are worth exploring. Goes on to say, I've been a Logitech Harmony certified dealer for quite a while. I spoke directly with the former product manager. Logitech still values their customer reputation and really does want to support the products ongoing as much as possible. It makes business sense as they have why they are and have a widely known brand for mouse keyboards and other devices. There are no plans to discontinue or stop supporting the cloud backend servers that manage the Logitech Harmony products. So yeah, like the one thing, there were a few mentioned, we'll talk, actually we'll talk about those in another episode and I wanna go crazy here. But yeah, I think we need, so last night when I was prepping the show, I decided I would join Joe and others. And there were many of you who wrote in with similar advice on Twitter and via email too. And I bought two Harmony 665s and two Harmony Companions. The Harmony Companions are the ones that work with the hub. And the 665 is the standalone one and I have spots in my house where I have a TV downstairs with like an old 880 or something that I can't even charge anymore. It's just been terrible. So it was, it's time to replace that one. So one of those 665s will go there. One will probably go in the bedroom and then I've got some spares to live for the living room for long term. I think Logitech's problem is that the one that I'm using in the living room right now is the Harmony One, which was the first of the hub based versions, John. I think I got that like over a decade ago. That's the, but it works with Amazon A-Lady. It works with the Google thing. I can use a Homebridge plugin to use it with HomeKit and it does, it supports all of the devices. Every device that it connects to is newer than it and yet it works totally fine. And I think that's the problem. They built really good hardware. They keep the service and software up to date. I think if they had charged 50 bucks a year for people to subscribe to the service for Harmony Remote and maybe lowered the price of the remotes or gave you three years free or something like that, I think that would have been a business model that they could have continued with. But the fact that the remote we use in our living room is a decade old. That's crazy in the technology world, right? I have Sonos devices and my Logitech Harmony Remote that are 10 years old and every other piece of tech that I use is newer than that. I'm looking around thinking, but I think that's, I think it's true. So my microphone is 10 years old and look, there's a new one here. So there you go, I don't know. But microphones tend to last a really long time. They have sort of fixed purpose devices. Anyway, those are my thoughts on that. Anything, John, that you have to share on that before we get out of here? No, no. I'm gonna suffer with four remotes for the rest of my life. Dude, just go get one of those 665s. I found this, I put the links in the show notes. The 665s you can get at normal price, 80 bucks or something at Best Buy and the Harmony Companion, you can get at normal price at Amazon. Everywhere else, they are like super inflated. Like the 665 at Amazon, they wanted like 200 bucks or 250 bucks for it. Like these people are going nuts with these things. So the links are there. Do with them as you like. And best wishes to you. All right, that's what I got for today. You got anything else, man? Nope. All right, sweet. Then we're gonna get out of here. Thanks everybody for hanging out with us. Thanks for listening. Make sure to go subscribe on YouTube. Means a lot to us. So it's youtube.com slash macgeekgabpodcast is how you get there. But you know, you can just find it on YouTube. Go subscribe. Enjoy our little vignettes that Sadie's putting together and we're pushing out. It's really good stuff. And I appreciate you helping. Appreciate everybody at Cash Fly. Thanks to Cash Life for providing all the bandwidth to get the show from us to you. Of course, thanks to our sponsors. We've got fastmail.com slash mgg and upstart.com slash mgg today. And if you want to learn about the links and deals from our other sponsors, go to macgeekgab.com slash sponsors. John! Yes? Help us get out of here, would you please? Oh yeah, we gotta get out of here. But before we get out of here, I have some advice for your life. Don't get caught. It's good advice.