 Welcome to MacGygab episode nine hundred forty one for Monday, August 15th, 2022. To MacGygab, the show where you send in your tips, your questions, your cool stuff found. We share all those. We try to answer your questions. Sometimes we have questions of our own. Sometimes we have cool stuff found in tips of our own. It doesn't matter who sent it in because the goal is, I mean, it does matter. We quite frankly, we've really appreciate when you send your stuff into feedback at MacGygab.com. It's what makes the show work. The goal is for every single one of us, me, John, you, pilot Pete, when he's here, he's not here today to learn at least five new things every week when we get together. Sponsors for this episode include Helix mattresses where Helix sleep.com slash MGG gets you 200 bucks off your mattress and up to 200 bucks off your mattress and two free pillows. We'll talk more about them in a few minutes here for now here in I can like 70 degree perfect weather Durham, New Hampshire today. I'm Dave Hamilton. And here in Fairfield, Connecticut, where it's also quite nice out. Yeah. This is John. I'd be sitting on my patio this morning doing work if it weren't for the show. But I think the I don't know, maybe maybe everybody would appreciate hearing the birds chirping and all that. I doubt it. I doubt it. It'd be terrible on a podcast. But but, you know, I would appreciate it. That's it's not really what the show is about. The show's not really about us. It's about them, John. Although today, I feel like something that happened to us might actually be a helpful conversation to have. And when I say us, well, mostly I mean you somehow your old TV broke in or something, you replaced your TV. Yeah. Yeah. So my old LG suffered a mishap. Got it. Basically, I knocked it over. Oh, that sucks. Oh, that sucks. And what I found out is that LCD TVs don't necessarily handle damage very well, because what happened is once I knocked it over and then I looked at it, there was like a big ring of nothing. Got it. Got it on it. So my fault. But the thing is, you know, went to my local BJs because they have plenty of TVs and I actually found a really nice one that met my needs, which was a 4K UHD 43 inch TV. Nice. And you chose 43 inch just because of the space in the living room or the watching room you have, right? Yeah. The thing is in the past, what happened is I actually, in the past, I got, I think, a 45 inch. And the problem is the stand was too wide for my stand. Yep. So, you know, if you're going to mount your thing on a stand versus like bolting it to the wall, make sure you check the dimensions of little stand things. Yeah. And there are options. I've been through this. You can get many TVs support the VISA standard VESA or potentially generally VISA mounts are for the wall, but the VISA mounts are usually the thing that's used for the inbuilt stand that comes with the TV. You can replace those stands sometimes. And I've done that. In fact, the 65 inch LG that we have did not have a swivel stand with it. And I kind of wanted it to have one. And for whatever reason, in my pile of things that have appeared at my house over the years, I had a VISA swivel stand. So I will tell you changing the stand on a 65 inch TV is an interesting exercise. And my son and I went through it once and we hope to never have to go through it again. But but it is doable. So if you buy a TV that you really love, but it doesn't fit the table you want to put it on or whatever, take a look. There are stand options so that that might work. It depends on your TV, obviously. But VESA is the standard we're talking about just for anybody following along. All right. Sorry, continue, please. All right. So and my criteria for getting a TV was that it had to have at least three HDMI ports, which is unusual for the smaller TVs, and as a matter of fact, I tried to I wanted to replace my LG with the same model. Unfortunately, it's discontinued. And its replacement only has two HDMI ports. So that wasn't going to work for me. But then I went through the other choices and TCL, which I never heard of before, had one that had not one, not two, not three, Dave, but four HDMI ports. So I'm like, OK, that's for me. TCL is a pretty popular brand. We've talked about them here on the show before. They've been it that shows I have a couple of TCL TVs in the house. They they're they, you know, when you're buying a 43 inch TV, you are sort of naturally in the budget realm, whether you whether you need to be or not. There's just not a lot of high end TVs in that are 43 inches that the Venn diagram just doesn't fit, right? And TCL really cut their teeth in the budget TV realm. Now they've expanded that and they've got larger TVs with, you know, like all the all the bells and whistles that you would expect at the at the higher price points and stuff. But yeah, no, the TCL TVs are great, especially the ones and most TCL TVs do this, that don't use some TCL operating system, but instead use Roku as their operating system. That is freaking key, man, because Roku that like on my TVs that have my TCL TVs, I don't need an Apple TV device. I just use the Roku apps. They've got an app store that is, I mean, it doesn't have games. But other than that, it rival, I mean, it's it's the best of the TV operating systems, for sure. I mean, it blows away Apple TV, in my opinion. So yours is Roku. Yeah, John. Yes. Yeah. So I got the Roku one. Yeah. So I got it. And, you know, being a technical type of guy, I just pulled it out of the box and plugged all the cables into it and then turned it on, leaving the manual safely tucked in the box. Absolutely. That's right. I'm like, I can handle this. I mean, the connections weren't too complicated. So there were my three HDMI things for my Blu-ray player, my Apple TV and my Tivo. So I plugged those in. There was an Ethernet port, though I think I could use Wi-Fi if I wanted to, but there's an Ethernet port. So I plugged that in. And then I plugged my optical out into the TV. Out from the TV to the receiver, the AVR. To my receiver. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Okay. All right. So that was cool. So, you know, I fired it up, turned it on, and it was like, oh, software update. And I'm like, okay, that's cool. So it, you know, saw the network connection. That's nice. That's a good first step, yeah. Here was the bad news, though. So when I, you know, fired it up and, you know, tried to watch stuff, my receiver said, oh, LPCM 48. And I'm like, oh, no. Because that's not good. Right. I mean, that's basically means you're getting stereo. And it's like, I don't want stereo. I want surround. Okay. Okay. Now there's some does have a, what is it? E ARC port on it? Does it have an E ARC port or just an ARC? So ARC is audio return channel. And that's what ARC stands for, folks. And it what it means is it uses an HDMI connection to send audio out from the TV to the receiver. It's an audio only send over HDMI. It's, it's, it's, I think it's a subset of the rest of what happens over HDMI, but it, it needs to be like, you need to have an ARC out port and an ARC input port on your, you know, on your receiver. And, and then that, that, that, that works great. Because that's a fully digital connection. And I mean, optical is too, but yeah. Yeah. So here's what I found. So I went online to their support board. Yeah. And a bunch of people were complaining about the same thing. It's like, I'm not getting surround out of the optical connection. Okay. Here's what I had to do, which is annoying. So I think it's a bug. And maybe I'll report it to them. But if I went into the settings audio, it's like, well, what do you want to use for audio? And I'm like, optical. Sure. Of course. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And I chose that. But my receiver kept saying LPCM 48, which is like, no. But in the menu for audio, there was also a ARC selection. And I'm, I'm like, well, okay, let's try that. Even though I'm not using ARC, once I made that choice in the menu, Dave, it then said Dolby three slash two dot one. Huh. So I think it's actually a bug in their implementation, because I'm not using ARC. Right. I'm using optical. Huh. But I had to fiddle with this one menu in order to convince it to do that. And so now I'm getting surround some some version of surround interesting. I may be able to do better. And you actually recommended a breakout box and each of my breakout box, I guess you'll call it. Yeah. Yeah. So I ordered that one. I think I can do better. And that from what I read about the protocols for for audio, I think I may be able to get DTS as well. If I have a better optical connection. So there's a lot to unpack here. I going with what you were just saying, I think and and and having looked at the specs for your TV ahead of time, I'm pretty sure your TV itself only supports Dolby Digital and not DTS and the two are competing standards, right? DTS. Oh, crap, who was who created it? It wasn't Dolby, obviously. Anyway, the so if your TV is is essentially acting as your HDMI switchbox and doing the audio pass through. It's only going to pass through that which it can pass through. And so you're going to get Dolby Digital being passed through. And that's fine. If you use a breakout box, which ironically would mean that you could have bought the LG TV you wanted because you're you you bought an HDMI switchbox. So you're not going to be using your TV's HDMI for HDMI. Fortunately, you're going to be using one of them. And then you're going to be using this switchbox, which by the way, those modern price switchbox is you're going to need some electrical tape over the front of it. Otherwise, it'll sear your retinas as we've as we've discussed over the years on the show when we've talked about those boxes. But you you may if if the device you're sending from say your Apple TV, if that's plugged into the switchbox and then the switchbox sends audio directly to your receiver, then and your receiver supports DTS, then you might be able to get DTS because you're essentially cutting the TV out of that part of the mix. But and I have a we have a listener that might help with some of this in a minute. You may wind up with a lot of audio video sync issues because now your audio is being processed in one path, and your video is being processed in another, it's much better to let your TV if you can, it's much better to let your TV sort of handle that because it it sort of knows more about what to do. But you're right, you might be able to get DTS out of that kind of a setup by bypassing the the new TV and essentially not using a external switchbox instead of the TV as a switchbox. But I want to unpack, there's a couple things I want to go to the the whole thing about Dolby Digital versus DTS. There's been a lot said about whether which one is better than the other. And the the proponents of DTS say, well, it uses a higher bit rate, and therefore is higher quality. And the proponents of Dolby Digital say it uses a better codec and therefore is higher quality. It's it's kind of like the conversation that we've had between MP3 and AAC in term because MP3, you know, they're both things that take uncompressed audio and compress it, right, to make it smaller so that it can be streamed or whatever and or just transferred. And so Dolby Digital is is like the AAC of things and DTS is like the MP3 of things in some of those arguments. My guess is for most of us, we won't be able to tell a lick of difference so long as you're getting the channels that you need, which it sounds like you are. So so it may not. I mean, confirmation bias definitely matters when it comes to both video and audio at some level. If you are happier seeing DTS show up on your receiver, then you will likely believe that it sounds better. It's like the people that that enjoy the experience of using vinyl, right? Well, I mean, you know, like objectively, there is like vinyl commits crimes against like sound. It completely rolls off all the high end and all that stuff, right? But but if you if you know in your heart of hearts that you like vinyl better, then you will actually enjoy listening to vinyl more than you will, you know, CDs or or any other medium. And you know what? That's OK. Like it's it's totally fine. So the same thing holds true here. And I think most of for most of our setups, it doesn't matter. Dolby Digital or DTS, the difference between two channel and, you know, 5.1 channel, however, does make a difference. So like making sure you have that. Yeah. All right. Well, I'm curious to hear your experiment. The the other part, Brian Monroe had a question. He says, if you have the ability to use EARC, why aren't you using EARC? Why are you even bothering with the optical is effectively his question. Why aren't you just using an HDMI cable for EARC? Um, I tried and I couldn't figure out how to get my receiver to understand EARC. I don't think it supports it. Even though it has the port, there's no way of telling it to use it. Um, if I plugged in so it has three inputs. OK. And then a port marked TV out uh, ARC, which is not what I want. I don't know why it has an output for EARC on the receiver. Yeah, but it does. That's weird. OK. So so your receiver might not support EARC input. I don't know that I've ever seen one that does ARC output, but maybe. OK. All right. Sure. Maybe that's for maybe that's to use the TV speakers. I don't know. I mean, I think so. Yeah, that that that was the thought process I had is if I use my tuner as the switch, then it could do some form of audio processing. Right. Right. Yeah. We should check the manual of your your receiver there because leave that safely tucked in the box. Don't want to break the spine on that. That's right. I got to say hats off to them because setting up this TV was was a breeze. I didn't have to read the manual. You know, I went through the setup. It was like, OK, let me update the software and then, OK, tell me about all the devices that you have. And you know, so I turned them all on and I'm like, OK, you know, I got a Blu-ray player. I got this. I got that. And when I hit the home button on the remote net, that was my concern is like how easy is it going to be to switch inputs on this thing. And with this, it's a breeze. Right. Right. Right. Well, that's good. Yeah. No, it's much better if you're T if everything works in your setup, it's much better if your TV can be your switch box for sure. If it can't, you know, there's you you mentioned or I guess I mentioned, but you wound up getting a Dolby or a Roku TV. And if you don't have a Roku TV, there's this thing that Roku has that I've gotten a chance to test out recently, the Roku Streambar Pro. It is it is a essentially a Roku stick, like has all adds all the Roku functionality, but is also a sound bar. Right. And so you get it not only does it upgrade your TV to be a Roku TV with all the apps and the ease of all of that, it adds sound right built into the bar. So you don't need to like mess with any of the rest of this stuff. And it's all happening from the sound bar. And it'll do 4K with HDR. It'll do Dolby Audio. It supports Airplay, which I think your new TV, if it's a Roku TV from TCL, I think your TV also supports Airplay, John, for video. Yeah. And check my computer. Yeah. Because the the yeah, the LG would also show up as a destination. Yeah. Yeah, they added Airplay. So this right now. Yeah. But this this Roku Streambar Pro for like 180 bucks, it's a sound bar and and and a video processing thing. It doesn't do Atmos. But maybe maybe they've got one coming that does. I don't know. But but other than that, you know, it kind of handles all of it. So so how is Atmos different from so I'm getting three, three slash two dot one, which means five speakers, right? Probably six speakers generally. I don't have a boomer. So a subwoofer, right? The dot one would be the subwoofer, right? Yeah, exactly. Yep. And then yeah. So 5.1 is generally means three front channel speakers left, center, right, and two rear speakers. So those are your five. And then the dot one, as we just said, is the subwoofer. Atmos adds at least two more speakers and metadata. And that that's kind of the key differentiator here, right? So Atmos, the two speakers at minimum, you are adding two speakers either in the ceiling or upward firing to bounce off the ceiling, because what Atmos adds is a the third dimension, right? So if we if we say that 5.1 goes sort of around you on one plane, Atmos adds height to that. But what Atmos also adds, as said metadata, it with 5.1 sound, what's encoded into the stream is which speaker any given sound should come out of, right? So it's like, all right, well, you know, if you're going to hear a train coming from behind you to to, you know, in front of you, okay, it should start in the right rear speaker and then slowly blend in the left rear speaker and then start blending in the front speakers. And now you get this like immersive thing where the train comes. And that's cool. With Atmos, it doesn't do that. It says, okay, this object and this is where the metadata part comes in. This object should move from the top back to the bottom front. And then it's up to the sound output generating device or devices to interpret that metadata for that system to replicate that as best as possible. And that's where things, yeah, which is pretty interesting, because if you know, if your speakers are in different locations, then if they were just saying make the sound come out of this speaker, you wouldn't necessarily get that experience. And with Atmos, it's the metadata part of it that says, no, like move this, this quote unquote object from, from here to there or make the sound here. And it's cool. I have, I mean, I think we've all experienced Atmos in the movie theater. And that's a very different experience than I've been able to see in the home. I have experienced Atmos two ways in the home. One is with actual speakers in the ceiling. And then the other is what I currently do, which is with I have a Sonos soundbar, the Sonos arc, the ARC, which has up firing speakers in it, as well as side firing speakers. So you get all the up front, and left and right center, left and right from that. And then it will also use those side firing speakers to bounce the rear stuff if you want. I've added rear speakers in a subwoofer. So it only has to do the front and the top. And it's pretty cool. The hesitation you hear from me, though, is because it's got all this processing in it. It's using those up firing speakers, even when there's not Atmos data to tell it what to do with them. It's it's like being smart about it and and trying to enhance your immersion, regardless of whether there's Atmos data. If there's Atmos data, it like it's it's maybe 80% without Atmos data. And then, you know, 100% with Atmos data in terms of the immersion experience. So like that just having the Atmos system makes arguably more of a difference than having the Atmos system with Atmos source material, although the Atmos source material absolutely is like it does make a difference. But but there's a step up you get regardless. So so yes, it makes a difference. Does that make sense? Does that the whole metadata thing? Did I explain that right? I think so. I remember I was at a show where they, you know, demonstrated the additional depth that you could get. Yeah, 3D sound, I guess, if I had to encapsulate it. It really is. Yeah, it really is. Yeah, it's cool. I don't have enough speakers. And I'm totally happy with regular surround. I'd like some depth. I don't know if I need more depth. Yeah, I would agree. The difference between just having like, you know, TV speakers going from that to actual surround where you've got speakers behind you, that Delta is a bigger Delta than the than the Delta from that up to Atmos. You know, but again, depending on the quality of your system and all that stuff, you know, it may or may not make a difference. But like what Sonos has done with the Ark is fantastic. I have not checked out. Sonos also has the beam gen two, which supports at most in a smaller form factor. So for a room like yours, you know, going to that might actually make a huge difference. Yeah. Yeah, because I mean, you're you're viewing you're like you're what maybe six feet away from your TV when you're sitting on the couch six to eight maybe. Yeah. Yeah. So like that, you know, you don't you don't need something built for a 20 foot depth room. Right. So yeah. Yeah. Brian Monroe, sorry, Mac Vader in the chat room asks, how is the sound of that Roku sound that Streambar Pro? It's good. I've been impressed with it. I've tried it. You know, it's it it's to me, it's built for those somewhat smaller room scenarios. And it's tight, man. Like it it fills the room. It really is is impressive. You can add a subwoofer to it. I have not tested it with a subwoofer. But but it's yeah, it's it's good. And you can you can add other speakers from from Roku to it if you want as well. So yeah, that's I'm I'm for 180 bucks, man. Like it adds a lot. The whole even just adding Roku to your TV and getting the 4k HDR, all of that stuff. I mean, your TV has to support 4k and HDR, obviously. But then the sound is just taken care of. So yeah, it's it's a great thing. Yeah, pretty good. Last week, John, staying on this, this this here. And we were talking or two weeks ago, I guess we were talking about we had a listener who was having sync issues. And we offered some options. Listener Andrew chimed in and said sync issues between audio and video on their TV. And he said, Andrew says, Yeah, regarding Larry's issue in 939 with the on cue receiver and delayed audio or video from the Apple TV, try a new or different HDMI cable. He says I had a similar problem. I swapped out the cable. And the problem was solved. Always check the cable first. And this was interesting. I started digging into this, John, because I thought, wait a minute, you know, here I am running at most and 4k and HDR. And when was the last time I bought an HDMI cable? Like how old are my cables? And it turns out my HDMI cables are at best HDMI 1.3, I think they might be 1.4. But I doubt it. And where that starts to matter, essentially, without getting too deep into the weeds, they keep increasing the bandwidth of those cables, right? So think of it like Ethernet, you know, we had 10 base T, then we had 100 base T, then we had gigabit Ethernet, now we have, you know, 2.5 gig and 5 gig and 10 gig Ethernet, right? They just keep increasing the maximum speed, the maximum amount of throughput that the cables can do. And HDMI 1.3 maxes out at, where was it? I had this all. I think, oh, 10.2 gigabits per second. And I think HDMI 1.4 goes up to, I think it's 15. I was digging into all of this and realized, where is my, where are my HDMI speeds here? Yeah. I realized that in order to do 4k, that my cables limited me to 4k at 30 frames a second. If I wanted to do 4k at 60 frames a second, I needed, and to do HDR, right, with a color bit depth of 10, which is generally what, you know, these things come in at, I needed a cable that did at minimum 20 gigs per second. And maybe even more than that, if there's sound and all of that good stuff coming across. So I just bought a bunch of HDMI 2.1 cables. I bought the mono price ones, because, you know, that's what I always buy mono price cables. And Amazon had them for, like, I don't know, they're 13 bucks a piece. But if you buy them, I think I bought a 5 pack or something and got, you know, you get a deal on them. So, yeah, and if I were to ever go to 8k, I would absolutely need these. Like, it just, it wouldn't even work. But my guess is, some of my Apple TV trying to do different types of audio and failing issues are likely related to the fact that I've got these old cables. And quite honestly, if you've, if you haven't updated, I say this to you, John, but I say it to all of us, if you haven't updated your cables in the last few years, you are almost certainly running old stuff, you know, you're not. HDMI 2.1 is as of 2018. So if you haven't bought a cable since 2018, and you're running 4k with HDR or 10 bit and and Atmos or even just 5.1 sound, go spend the 12 bucks or whatever it is and get yourself a an HDMI 2.1 cable for that. So thoughts on that? I have not had any issues. Honestly, I just talked about a ton of issues you just had. Like, some of these may actually be solved by sending more data from your Apple TV to your TV. That's what I'm saying is like this may in fact be the source of some of what you're experiencing. It may not be. But I mean, if you're going to be running 4k stuff, I would say HDMI 2.0 at the least would be would be what you want. And and if you're going to bother to buy today, go to HDMI 2.1. So I mean, they're cheap. So that's that's the first money I'd spend. And I say that because it's the first money I spent. It's on its way. I think it's supposed to be delivered while we're recording this show. Nice. Yeah. Yeah. So I'll let you know if that if that fixes any of the weird things I've had. But but that is good advice. Andrew, thank you for that. Fun stuff. I love digging into this. Yes. Anything more on this on the the TV side of home enhancements? I have a I have a question about about something else related to our smart homes. But but anything more on this one? No, I I still have to explore all of the options on this thing. I've just been yeah doing basic watching of TV. But yeah. Right. Yeah, I'm curious cables. I'm curious. Well, and one way to avoid having to worry about that is if, like you, your TV is a smart TV, right? Like on and you don't have to use your Apple TV. You can just use the Roku apps that are in your TV. Our LG is not Roku. It runs LG's WebOS, which is pretty good. And we have without question I have found that if whatever I want to watch, be it Plex or even Apple TV, like if we're watching Apple TV plus, we run the LG app, the app on our TV to watch that because we get better 4K, we get better, you know, we get the full sound experience. We, you know, we can get at most sound out of Netflix from the app on our TV, not the app. And so, like, like eliminating the use of the cable entirely is is potentially a huge part of this. And so I'm curious as things go forward, John, how much you wind up using the Roku apps versus versus, you know, the Apple TV apps or or or any other external device. So and when you get rid of your cable modem and move away from using cable and Tivo, I'm curious to see what service you move to if it's, you know, YouTube TV or Fubo or or maybe you won't move to any, like maybe you would just use subscriptions to non, you know, quote unquote broadcast stuff. That's pretty much what I'm doing now and I'm okay with it. Are you? Yeah, you're not, you know, are you not using your Tivo anymore? Oh, no, I use the Tivo. There's not much on it right now because, you know, all the shows are on. Yeah, you're not at least the ones that I watch. So you could you could cancel your your cable TV and probably be fine. I'd rather not. Okay. There's a lot of stuff that I watch that is I can only get through cable. Well, I could get through other means, but yeah, you know, I'm trying to limit, you know, death by a thousand cuts. Of course. Well, and that I mean, that's where we wound up moving when we canceled our cable TV with Comcast. That's when we moved to well, initially YouTube TV and then now we're on Fubo TV, although direct, direct TV stream would also be a contender for us. YouTube TV, like most of what we use terrestrial and I use air quotes for that. Most of what we use terrestrial TV for is many of it is sports and YouTube TV is is not great for sports. Fubo and direct TV stream are much better for sports. So but but that's that and that's cheaper than what we were paying Comcast, you know, so those things are all about 70 bucks a month ish. So yeah. So I'm curious to see what happens as you, you know, as you get rid of your cable modem and move to to like fiber. Well, then you might not you might find you don't want to pay optimum anything. So there is one question in the chat about all of this. Steve Hammond asks at Mackie at live dot Mackie cub dot com. He says, how can we test our HDMI cables and determine what they are really capable of? In most cases, it is not written on the cable what version of HDMI it is. I I went through this this week as I was prepping for the show. And I had to go through my mono price order history to figure out what version HDMI cables I am using. Yeah, it's not written on the cable. What I'm going to do when my new cables arrive is with a label maker. I'm going to put a label on them. It says HDMI 2.1. Because otherwise, I have no freaking idea 10 years from now what these things are. So yeah, I would I would label your cables. But yeah, I had to go back through my order history. It was the only the only way I could deduce what they probably are probably. Yeah. So yeah. Yeah, I wonder if somebody makes a somebody probably makes a tester. Well, I mean, I think our TVs in a sense are testers in in that we get these symptoms out of them. Right. I mean, right. But but they aren't necessarily telling us, hey, dumb, dumb. I mean, it like when you plug in to Ethernet, you can go into your computer and see like, okay, I'm seeing 100 megabit connection, why, you know, and and figure that out. But yeah, I don't I don't know of any way of seeing that on the TV. Yeah. Yeah. So anyway, I love this stuff. This is fun. While we're on the subject of our smart homes, John, I do you have are you a a weather you seem to be someone who might have like one of these Wi Fi weather stations that links to your smart home and you can check from anywhere and it broadcasts to weather underground and all of that stuff. Are you one of those people? Not really. So I do have a weather station, but it only does temperature and humidity. But is it Wi Fi capable? No. Oh, OK, so it's not a smart home kind of weather station thing. No, it's it's actually from Accu write a C U R I T E. But it does what I need. So yeah, it tells me the inside temp and humidity. And then I have a sensor outside. And it tells me the temperature humidity outside. The cool thing is that it has a feature where once you set it up over the course of like two weeks, it learns about the weather in your area. And then at some point, it will actually show you a prediction once it's, you know, watch your weather. It'll show a little prediction. So it'll show like, you know, raindrops or clouds or sun or whatever warning me what's going to happen within sure. So a couple of days. How is it getting that data? I have a sensor outdoors powered sensor. OK. And that detects the outside temperature and got it. Got it. OK, then it's just deducing based on on that. Interesting, interesting. And what else? And it also shows the atmospheric pressure, which is a good indicator, I think of, you know, when the weather is going to be bad or good. Yeah, yeah, right, right. Interesting. OK, so I'm looking here at Accu write site and they definitely have some Wi Fi capable weather stations here that this is something we should dig into. I'm curious, folks, if anybody out there is using a smart weather station. And if so, what? Let us know feedback at Mackie Cub dot com, because I think this is an interesting thing. And and how you're, I mean, obviously, I, you know, some of them will do rain. And like, that's all that's very interesting to me. But also, I'm curious how you're, if you've got a Wi Fi weather station, how you're, how that's linking to your network and how you're leveraging that. Is it like, does the lady know about it? Does home kit know about it? You know, those kinds of things. I'm very curious about this, because I think these are these are places where we can upgrade our the smarts of our home. Because if you've got like shades that are blinds that are automatic, and it can you've got something that senses rain, well, you know, you can start doing some interesting things with this. So yeah, I'm curious. All right, cool. Let us know, folks. Feedback at Mackie Cub dot com. All right. Hey, well, you know, if you've listened to this show for any length of time, you know how happy I am sleeping every night on our Helix mattress that Lisa and I got, I don't know, about a year and a half ago, maybe maybe even longer now, it's been fantastic. Helix sleep is a premium mattress brand that provides tailored mattresses based on your unique sleep preferences. They have 14 different mattresses, including a collection of luxury models, a mattress for big and tall sleepers and even a mattress made just for kids. And the way you figure out which one is going to work best for you and your body is you take the Helix sleep quiz. It only takes two minutes and your personalized mattress is shipped straight to your door free of charge. Helix knows there's no better way to test out a new mattress than by sleeping on it in your own home. That's why they offer a hundred night risk free trial. Try out your new Helix mattress, see how your body adjusts. And if you decide it's not the best fit, you're welcome to return it for a full refund. We use the midnight mattress Lisa and I took the quiz together. It works out great. I can't tell you anymore about how much I love it. You just got to try it out for yourself. And the cool part is you try it out using our code MGG that helps support us. So you're getting a good night's sleep and you're sleeping a little better knowing you're supporting your favorite podcasters out there. You got to go check it out. Helix is offering up to $200 off of all mattress orders and two free pillows just for our listeners. Go to helixsleep.com slash MGG with Helix Better Sleep starts now. And our thanks to Helix Sleep for sponsoring this episode. All right. Are you saying something before I started talking about the ads, John? Um, I think I was saying feedback at MacGygab.com. I think you were saying feedback at MacGygab.com. I like that. We have a couple of quick tips. The first one is actually a smart home ish quick dip. Craig says I was starting to have some gremlins in my home kit installation, particularly that hue lights were starting to randomly turn off or dim on their own. And this was annoying. I would have weird events like one bulb in a two group set just start to turn itself off during the early morning hours. Only one of the two would shut off. Very odd. On one occasion, I was sitting in my office the other night and saw a hue bulb start to dim over time. It was very weird to experience this almost like my home kit setup was haunted. I decided to research and noted many postings about similar scenarios. In my installation, I have hue bulbs, cost Wi-Fi switches and smart plugs, Arlo cameras and eco B smart thermostat. I also have home bridge install running on my sonology. So several components of my home kit installation and and he underlines this point. I also have Amazon Echo devices throughout my house. My initial thinking was that this would be the culprit. I checked everything and inspected any scenes or routines that I had in the a lady app. Nothing there. Then while digging around inside the a lady app on my iPhone, I noticed a reference to hunches. What? Lo and behold, sometime in the last 18 months, Amazon introduced a feature called hunches in a nutshell, hunches makes decisions and takes action to change the status of some of your devices that have mapped to the a lady based upon observed behaviors and other routines. I started digging and stumbled upon a section of the app where there was a list of these hunches that would tie directly to the problem devices that recently started. I would like to see things like Alexa noted that he goes on. He says, but these hunches were the issue and you I found them in my app by going, you go into the a lady app, the a Alexa app devices hunches. And in there, it will offer you for me, it offered for me to turn them on, John. So I, I, I have not turned them on, perhaps Craig, you know, or someone's someone in Craig's household, click the button to turn on hunches. But mine, it showed me the ones it wanted to add for me and I decided I wanted exactly none of them. But, you know, but, but yeah, that's a good little tip. Craig, thank you for that. Nice. Fine, man. I'm sorry. I'm yeah, I've never seen these. So yeah, it has four suggestions for me, most involving turning stuff off when I'm asleep. Yes. Yeah. Right. Right. Yeah, I had which leads me Dave. Yes. To the question, how does it know that I'm sleeping? I don't know. You're getting kind of creepy there, a lady. Yeah. How, how would it know that you were sleeping? I mean, like one way to deduce that you are asleep is that you've turned off lights. But if it's going to, if one of the hunches is to offer to turn off lights when it thinks you're asleep, like, well, what data point are you using a lady to decide that I'm asleep? Because that would be interesting. I would, I would like to have the lady run my vacuum an hour after it thinks I've gone to sleep because I have it set to run at 3 a.m. most days. And that's great. But it's not uncommon for me to be awake at 3 a.m. on that floor of the house. And I'll be sitting there and then suddenly I hear the vacuum, you know, start to wake itself up. And I'm the one that startled the pets are totally used to this. They just kind of look at it like, yeah, whatever, here it goes. But, but for me, every time it's like, oh, yeah, I guess it's 3 a.m. Okay, great. Should I go to sleep? No, just turn off the vacuum. It's fine. So yeah, I, yeah, how does it know? That's a good question, Mr. Braun. These are the mysteries of the universe. All right. Well, anyway, hey, in the last show, we were talking about refurb iPhones and listener Steve chimed in and he says, I thought I would mention backmarket.com. I've been using them for years. And in fact, I just purchased iPhone SE for less than 300 bucks for the sole purpose of streaming music from Apple music to my outdoor Bluetooth speakers by the pool. I thought it would be a helpful quick tip. Yeah, that is a quick I'd never heard a back market before, John. I guess you said you said somebody mentioned that in our post show chatter last week. Is that right? They mentioned them and they also mentioned, believe it or not, Walmart apparently has refurb. The only caution I would offer is that you know, keep an eye on return policies and warranty and stuff like that. When you buy from Apple, you do get a warranty not as I think typically one year. Right. With stuff from the refurb store. Check these other guys because just because it says refurb, I don't think it's Apple refurb. So you may not get all the benefits. Great points. Oh, yeah, man. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Good point. I like it. Yep. Yeah, it's not the same necessarily as buying. Yeah, just look at their policy. I think backmarket had a pretty good policy as far as, you know, returns and stuff like that. Yeah, I'm surprised I'd never heard of them before. This is new to me. I mean, look, I get one of my five new things. So it's great, but yeah, interesting. Phil shares a quick tip with us, John. He says, a fun and great way to get comfortable with the terminal is to, A, open the terminal app and B, type man, space man. You get the manual page for the manual function and you can do a lot with it. I like that. That's cool. He says I was going to type man, space man, space man, but I got scared that I might break the space time and continue him. That's true. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The A lady, I think she might chime in and say that's no bueno. The A lady is always listening, especially in the morning. And the whole by the way, if anybody can figure out how to turn off that by the way, like we talked about last week anyway. Yeah, that's cool, Phil. I like that. I never thought to look at the man page for the man function that does feel very, very meta. So yeah. You want to take us to Alameda, John? Why not? I could come up with some reasons. We could talk about other things. Sorry. Alameda gives us a little tip here, which I didn't know existed. Stop Siri suggestions from adding likely contacts by going to on iOS settings, Siri contacts and turn show contact suggestions to off. On the Mac, it's system preferences, Siri, Siri suggestions and select contacts and uncheck show suggestions. So. Okay. Personally, I found I've never, I don't think I've ever had a suggestion for a contact come up on the screen. Actually, I think I have had. I have had something come up saying, oh, do you want to update the person's avatar? I have had that come up in relation to contacts. That's only in messages though, right? I think so. Yeah, that's a function of messages. When somebody updates their name or their avatar, it will, well, the first thing it will do is ask that person if they want to share that data with you. And then if they say yes, then you see the little thing at the top of messages where it's like, yeah, yeah, yeah. Huh. All right. So what, okay, this is interesting. So settings, of course, I'm on the 16 beta. So maybe it's a little different, but yeah. Okay. And then you just go to contacts and turn that off. Huh. Yeah, but I think most major apps have a way to detect. Yeah. I've had it actually pick up emails and say, oh, you know, it looks like you're scheduling a flight. So let me put that on your... Right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And that I find useful. And it usually gets it right. Yes. Yes. Yeah. Interesting. Yeah. If you don't want the S lady looking over your shoulder, then yeah. Yeah, I haven't disabled contacts from it, but I have disabled other things off the top of my head. I can't remember what I was hoping it would show me like a list and I could see what I turned off, but you have to go in app by app. So I can't easily do it while we're recording here. But I know I've turned some things off where it just got in the way. Like I, one of the things I use Siri for most on the phone or search for most, I should say, is launching apps. Right. And so when it wanted to start showing me like web pages and other things was like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, I like put the, like turn things off that you're showing me so that I can get to the apps. Like let's just get to the apps. So yeah. Interesting. Cool. I'm going to take us to Carlos. Yes. All right. Carlos has a good tip here. Carlos says he got caught. Uh-oh. It was with interest that I heard the last episode where a guy was asking about using migration assistant with his new M2 MacBook Air from a 2015 MacBook Pro. I have both. Here's what happened. I migrated the data, but something bad happened in spite of my 25-year Mac IT career. Okay. I never use migration assistant at work. I was a Casper suite guy, which I assume is some sort of system configuration suite. Okay. Yeah. But usually work fine at home. The error upon rebooting after migration assistant got stuck in a restart loop. None of the usual keys, option, command R, zapping the PRAM, single user mode worked. I finally looked up resetting the SMC on the Apple chip Mac, command option shift power, and then I finally got the recovery assistant to launch. I had to erase the drive and reinstall OS Monterey. Then the OS setup came up. By that point, I realized what I had done wrong before pertinent to your listener's question. I had left checked the system files box, and that's what started the restart loop. Interesting. This time I left it unchecked and it booted up fine with all my apps and data migrated. A 48-hour tale of woe but a happy ending. So uncheck that box. No, that's interesting. We often get questions. In fact, I think last week's question was kind of that. I want to get rid of the cruft, and the definition of cruft is different for each of us, but also just in different circumstances. But I want to get rid of the cruft without creating a headache for myself. So moving apps and data over without bringing system files might be for some considered skipping the cruft. For some of us, it's all the apps that we install that are the cruft in and of themselves. So maybe you do move system files and data, I don't know, or maybe just data. Maybe that's the key. Just move data and then download the apps. Yeah. I'd be curious. I know we have a lot of consultants who listen to this show, who help lots of people. And I'm curious what your kind of default is when someone's moving to a new machine and they've had the old machine for a while. To me, there's essentially three steps. I'm sure there's a lot more than three. But the three steps would be full migration assistant. Just let it do whatever it wants. The other end of the extreme would be 100% manual migration. And then there's the middle, which is kind of what we're talking about here. I'm curious what your decision trees look like as far as when you choose which one of those three or some other option. So yeah, let us know. Feedback at mackeycup.com. We'd love to hear from you. Yeah. More on that before we move on here, John? Nope. The next time I migrate, maybe I will uncheck that box. Sure. Yeah. Kiwi Graham is one of those consultants. And he happens to be here while we're recording this episode in the chat with us. And he says, I want to reiterate that clients I have migrated from Intel to M1 have had no issues. So thank you for that. That is valuable. And I am happy to echo that anytime. That matches my experience. Obviously, there are times when migration assistant, as Carlos just pointed out, there are times when it fails regardless of CPU architecture. And I think that's the important thing to note here is that there is no fundamental issue migrating from Intel to M1. There are just sometimes issues that migrating at all cause or bring with them. All right. We were talking about some travel things recently, John, and we got a couple of tips and a question about all of this. We'll start with Paul. He says, I travel on vacation with an Apple Watch, seven AirPods, an iPhone and one or two MagSafe chargers and finally a MacBook Air. The phone is so good, though, that I could maybe do without the rest of the stuff. He said, because I always travel with only a carry on. So a true lightweight traveler, I've been trying to reduce weight and volume on my charging gear. Okay, so even checking a bag, this can matter. I did some, I did my own version of this and I pulled out 1.5 pounds of stuff just by rejiggering my charging case bag. That's a lot, especially when you, you know, even if you're checking a bag, you get a 50 pound limit on a suitcase. Getting an extra pound and a half out of that can make a big difference. So I will back to Paul. He says, I'm willing to give up charging everything all at once for space savings. Okay, so this is a smart approach. Another less is more advantage is that checking everything is there before leaving. Sure. He says, it's an amazing reduction from just a few years ago with a bulky Intel MacBook charger and perhaps an SLR camera. He goes on to list the minimum charging kit that he's been using, which he says is pretty small and versatile. The biggest breakthroughs were to leave the charger that came with the MacBook and the charger cable that came with the Apple Watch seven at home. If packing space is an issue, I'm able to charge my MacBook Air M one overnight using the 35 watt anchor charger, always test that at home, of course. And that's one reason he says he prefers the MacBook Air to the MacBook Pro makes sense. So his daily bag has a USB A to lightning cable. And then he has a pouch with minimal chargers that he generally takes with him that has his 30 watt anchor nano two, a 20 watt anchor nano one, those are both USB C, one USB C to lightning cable to one USB C to USB C cable to USB C to USB A converters. So this is what we were talking about when you got back, John, and two USB A to USB C converters. This way, your cables, you only, you don't, you have to bring, you only have to bring one or two cables and your cables can now start serving multiple purposes with these converters. That's the key. One third party Apple Watch charger, which is very small. That's the one we've mentioned on the show before that's just got it's one piece and it's got a charging puck with a USB A port on it and you can just plug it in and you're good to go. There's no cable in the way and one mini USB to USB A cable that he brings and then he brings any country converters he needs if he's going international. That's really smart. So yeah, using the USB C to USB A converters in both directions that having those these days, I think, I mean, I think you, you sort of stumbled into proving that that was sort of mandatory nowadays, John. So I like that, Paul. That's good. Any thoughts on that before we move on to Elliott here? No, that's a good suggestion, though. The one that I brought with me when I was traveling, Dave, though, was... That thing's a monster. Yes, but it has enough ports on it. So anchor makes 100 watt, not entirely portable. I mean, it weighs a bit, but the thing is it's got the juice. It's 100 watts and it has two USB C and two USB A charging ports on it, which is what I need. I don't think they sell that anymore. What you're talking about does not exist anymore in terms of people being able to buy it like that. I don't think this existed for a number of years. The thing that I would recommend for anyone, and I'm waiting for mine to show up, John, is the anchor 727 charging station, which is the new GAN Prime 100 watt thing. That's got the same number of ports that you mentioned, two USB A, two USB C. It's 100 watts, super thin, super lightweight, and it has two three-prong electrical outlets on it as well. This is the replacement for what you're talking about, John, is the anchor 727. That's the new thing. A listener, Terry, got one. What's interesting is it's far too thin for the AC outlets to take a plug, but in an all-mechanical design, as you push the plug in, the outlet lifts out of the charging base to accommodate the length of the plug. It's actually pretty cool. He sent me a little video about it, so I will put a link to that in the show notes. Fun stuff. All right, where are we here? I want to go to, oh, Elliott, yeah, this is a good tip. Elliott says that when traveling, please remind listeners that you can go into Control Center and toggle on low power mode, no matter what the battery level is, to significantly extend battery life with a very minimal performance hit. So thank you for that, Elliott. Yeah, for sure. Yep. Yep. Yes, indeed. Yeah, I actually have, I think by default, that is shown in Control Center? I can't say that it's there by default, but you can put it there, but you can also find it in battery settings too. Okay. Yeah, I don't remember what's in Control Center by default anymore. Yeah, but I have it on my Control Center, it's a little battery. Yeah, if I'm out and about and get a red, it's about to die, then I'll turn that on and you can make it until I get to a charging station. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, right. When I travel, I've talked about this before. I leave my phone in low power mode, like from the moment I wake up the day I'm at home, the day I'm traveling until I get home, because I don't want to get caught out there without enough juice. And I said, you know, one thing that will happen on the phone is when you charge the phone, if it starts below 80% and you are in low power mode, once you hit 80%, John, it turns off low power mode, right? Have you experienced that before? Right? It just automatically turns it off. So I set, I built a automation in the Shortcuts app that says, whenever low power mode is turned off, do this action. And the action is turn on low power mode. And so when I travel, I turn on that automation. And so it just stays in low power mode no matter what the entire time I'm traveling. And that works out amazingly well. So I highly recommend that shortcut. It's easy. I mean, it's that simple. But if you need, if you want a screenshot of or something, just let me know. Feedback at MackieCup.com, I'll happily help you build it. No problem. Hey, Elliot asks, he says, we're talking about in that last episode, when you were traveling, John, we were talking about public USA ports. USA. Wow. Public USB. I swear I didn't smoke my breakfast this morning, folks. It feels like it didn't even smoke my dessert last night. I did have alcohol last night. Wait, is that why I'm so foggy today? I had, I mean, I had two beers between seven o'clock and 10 o'clock or something. Maybe is that why I'm foggy today? It's interesting. It's like the first time in a week that I've had alcohol. All right. Anyway, as for public USB ports, he says, I've heard this too, and it's definitely scary. Every time I plug my iPhone into a new, oh, oh, oh, he says, you, I told you I'm in a fog today. He says, you're discussing public USB charging outlets. Here we are. Hi, I'm Dave. I do a podcast. I've been doing this for 17 years. You think I'd know what I was doing? I've always read that I should avoid public USB charging outlets because you might be vulnerable to them slurping up your data rather than just transferring power. What do you guys think of this? See, that was an easy question to ask. I don't know why it took me two minutes to do it. You know, I don't worry about this, John. And the reason is that I think, maybe I'm wrong, that Apple protects us because every time I plug my phone into a, you know, like any data capable port, like on my computer, anytime I plug my phone into my computer, the phone asks, do you want to trust this USB connection? And that doesn't happen when I plug into a charging only USB device. It only happens when I plug in to a device that wants to pass data across the USB connection. And so to me, that's the litmus test. Even like, I don't even have to answer the question to know that something fishy is going on. And so that's why I don't worry about it. I just plug in and I'm good to go. I mean, honestly, the thing I worry about more is what happened to you when you had that bogus charger in your car that was frying your devices. Like that I worry about with public USB ports, like how much power is coming through this? Should I trust it? You know, if I could get like a USB surge protector, that might, I might be more tempted to use that on public ports than something that would like, there are those devices, right? That block like data connections or whatever and turn them into charging only things. But I don't know that that would save you from a, you know, the faulty electronics in it. So no, I don't worry about it. Do you worry about the data sniffers on public USB ports, John? No, maybe I should. But yeah, as you pointed out, so if you do a search here, and I just did it here, search for USB a data blocker. And actually, the first thing came up is something from a company called Portapow. And for two of them, it's eight bucks. So basically, what it's doing is it's eliminating the data lines. So it will never get to your device. I mean, that's what they're doing. I mean, you could do it yourself. I wouldn't recommend it unless you're good with the soldering iron and clippers. But that's the intent of these. And yeah, there's plenty of them. And actually, the one I see here, it says, protect against juice jacking. I guess it's another term for people try that. But yeah, I mean, if you're worried about it, then I would think that's the way to go about it. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I don't, for the reasons I mentioned, I just don't worry about it. I feel like the phone's gonna tell me. And maybe I'm being foolish. Let us know if I'm being foolish. Feedback at Mackie Kev.com. Glenn sent something in to Feedback at Mackie Kev.com. John, he had some cool stuff found. You want to share what that was there? Oh, there he is. Okay. Glenn. All right. Thank you, Glenn. All right. Software recommendations. Not sure if they're cool. They sound cool. The first is Freeware called Easy Find, a freeware program from Devon Technologies. And this is an interesting way that he uses it though. I would never thought of this. I've been using Easy Find to uninstall programs for years. Simply select the area you wish to search, such as Macintosh HD, then enter the search term. Usually the program name works as a search term. Sometimes you need to use the developer name. Easy Find is fast. When it's completed, simply select items and delete them. Some protected items require you to show in Finder, then move them to the trash requiring you to enter your Mac password to delete. I've cleaned countless trial programs out this way. Okay. I'd be kind of nervous using this search program to uninstall, but okay. Yeah, but that's interesting. Like, yeah, that's kind of the manual brute force method. Right. Sure. Yeah. I mean, I'm still very happy with App Cleaner. That does a good job of and it's smart enough that it will identify, you know, all the auxiliary stuff. So my only concern here is that this may not get everything. But we talked about in an earlier episode, somebody who had uninstalled something and it didn't uninstall it. I forget what it was. It was some audio device or some piece of carbon copy cloner. They didn't do the uninstall method or whatever. So this could be helpful in those scenarios, right? Because like App Cleaner is not going to help because there's no app to clean. You've just got to go and dig. So yeah, all right. Cool. What's the other one? He said he said he had two, right? Yes. So the second one he mentions, which I've never heard of and I don't think you have either, security spy at Ben's software. Hi, Ben. Or Ben's software. I guess that it will. Is it Ben's software or Ben's software? We don't know. I think it's Ben's software. I think you're right. Incredible software that you can use to easily build home and business security camera systems with a multitude of IP cameras. I've been using it for home security for about five years, running on an old Mac, iMac. It's incredibly powerful and flexible and the developer has an active user form and provides great and personal customer support. It's fully integrated with the Mac and can be scripted. It has iPhone and iPad apps that fully integrate with the Mac software and home kit. Nice. I get sent a notification to my phone and an Apple watch when a person comes to my front door. In fact, the watch app shows a still frame picture of the person almost instantly. Okay. Yeah. This is a, I think where this is coming from is on the Synology. They have something called, is it? Surveillance station. Surveillance station, which is also IP camera utility, which I've actually never run because I don't have any IP cameras. They're all proprietary. Isn't that sad? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Interesting. This is, huh. Yeah. That's exactly what it is. Yeah. I had the same thought that this is surveillance station, but you don't need a Synology. You just run it on a Mac. Pretty cool. And it turns out it is Ben's software, John. Of course, you were right on that. I have, you know, we've been talking a lot about having an extra screen with us when we travel. So many of us got, well, I've always worked at home and I've always had lots of screens, but so many of us wound up working at home during lockdowns over the last couple of years and got used to having more and more real estate as we plugged our laptops into larger monitors. And then we take those laptops and now that we're traveling and going to conferences again and all that good stuff, we take our laptops with us and we're left with just that, you know, one screen on the laptop and sometimes it doesn't feel like enough. And so we've been talking about lots of different options for having that extra screen with you when you travel. Most of the ones that we've talked about, in fact, all of the ones that we've talked about thus far, are screens that essentially would be, they're portable, you know, a 15-inch screen that sort of sits, folds flat but sits on the desk. And when you get back to your hotel room or your Airbnb, you plug in and now you've got the extra screen and all of that good stuff. Well, what if you don't want the extra screen just at your hotel room, but what if you want it when you don't have a desk to put it on? And that's where this new Zbeck Try Screen 2 comes in. This screen does not sit on the table next to your laptop. This is actually two screens and they sit on top of your laptop and then the screens, the extra screens fan out one from the left, one from the right. They, they, it works with the Mac. They have a display link adapter that they can send so that if you've got an M1 Mac like I do, that only supports one extra screen natively, no problem. The little display link adapter running in line adds the third screen, no problem. And it works great. It's 500 bucks. So, you know, in the realm of what the rest of these cost, it's even got a little kickstand on the back of it because this thing is heavy. You know, you're adding the weight of two more screens on top of your laptop and so it's got a little kickstand to help your laptop stay upright when you, you know, when you're, when you're using it if you, if you need that. But, but yeah, man, this is great. And you can, you can pull out only one of the screens if you want. So like you could, I think you could use this on an airplane, you know, as well. So yeah, this thing's pretty cool. It's like I said, it's, it's for when I first got it, I was like, wait, why would I want this? I have to, you know, when I get back, I have to add this thing on instead of just plugging in and all it, because you also have to plug it in. And it was like, no, no, no, wait, what if I wanted a screen when I'm not at a desk? And that that's this thing. It's kind of self-contained. So yeah, pretty cool stuff. Zbeck. Zbeck is X E B E C. We'll put a link in the show notes. We put links to everything in the show notes. We're maniacs about it. Mac, you can even sign up and put your email address in and we'll send you the show notes once a week after the show comes out. So you're certain to have them. So yeah, cool. Uh, anything else on the cool stuff found list you want to share for today, John? Or I think we're, I think we're at the, I think we're at our limit here. We're at, we're an hour 17. Yeah, I think it's time, man. It's time. It's time. SLT info. That's how it works. The end of 941 is upon us. Thanks for hanging out with us, folks. This was a fun one. Lots of stuff. Great tips. I learned, I learned a lot of things I didn't expect to learn this week. Let's put it that way. Yeah. And we'll see how those new HDMI cables work for us, John. So it sounds like you might be in in a position to, to need some of those too. You want to make sure you're doing the 4k thing right? Because I think your TV supports HDR as well. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. And a little icon comes up when it is doing HDR, which is nice. Yeah. Again, I highly recommend just use the apps built into the TV, the Netflix app, the Apple TV plus app, if you're, you know, whatever you're watching on that, you're going to, it's going to be way better. The YouTube app. Yep. Yeah, that's what we got. Thanks for hanging out. Make sure to check out helixsleep.com slash mgg to get your deal on your new matters. Thanks to cash fly providing all for providing all the bandwidth to get the show from us to you. Thanks to all of you for sending in all your questions. Thanks to all of our premium supporters. You folks get to send in to premium at mackeycup.com. You can learn about that at mackeycup.com slash premium. Who got us into this mess today, John? Was that me or you? I think it was me. I think you're right. Well, folks, I'll get us out. I have one last thing to say. Don't get caught.