 Hey, folks, it's time for Matt Geekab, and I will bring us our quick tip of the week with Cellular's Low Data Mode on your iPhone. You turn this on by going to Settings, Cellular, Cellular Data Options, Data Mode, and then choose Low Data Mode from the list. This is something I have on all the time on my phone. It doesn't seem to do anything negative. What it does is it defers some operations from happening while you're on cellular until later on when you're on Wi-Fi, things like picture uploads in the background and that sort of thing. And I think it gives some apps some hints too. So you can save your data by saving your wallet by turning this on. More quick tips like this, plus your questions answered and some cool stuff found with a special guest today on Matt Geekab 995 for Monday, August 14th, 2023. Greetings, folks, and indeed, welcome to Matt Geekab, the show where you send in your quick tips like that one. You send in your cool stuff found, you send in your questions. We share your quick tips and your cool stuff found. We answer your questions and then we string it all together loosely into an agenda that hopefully gives us each the opportunity of learning at least five new things every single time we come together. Sponsors for this episode include macpaw.app slash Matt Geekab where you can get 5% off CleanMyMac X today, hopwater.com slash mgg that's hopwtr.com slash mgg where you can get 20% off your first purchase today and linkedin.com slash mgg where you can go and post your first job for free. We'll talk more in depth about each of those shortly here for now, here in Durham, New Hampshire. I'm Dave Hamilton. And here from our nation's capital, Washington in the District of Columbia, it's Pilot Pete. How's DC today, Pilot Pete? It is mostly cloudy and warm, it's gonna be warm today. We're heading over to Arlington National Cemetery in a couple hours. A squadron mate passed about 30 years ago and now they're gonna enter him with his father who recently passed. So it's a bittersweet gathering of old squadron mates and family and friends and all that, but a chance to formally say goodbye to a squadron mate who gave his all to our country. So yeah. My condolences and I know I don't say this often on the show, but again, thank you for your service, Pete. Oh, thank you. That's very kind. I did mention we have a special guest with us today. Although it's someone who has been on the show recently. Adam Christensen, thank you for joining us, my friend. Hey, thanks for having me, glad to be here. Absolutely, you can, for those of you who don't know, Adam does a show called Maccast, which he's been doing exactly six months longer than we've been doing Mac Geek at. We figured that out the other day, so. Yeah, we absolutely did. Yeah, yeah. So you need to go on hiatus for six months and then we'll tie in. Well, I think you actually end up being a little more consistent than I am. So I think you've actually done more episodes at this point. Isn't that interesting? Okay, all right, all right. Yeah, do you, when, because we had a thousand soon, will you be getting a thousand? Yeah, it'll be another year probably. Oh, wow. I mean, I want to say I'm at 880. Oh, wow. You guys forget sex or something. We did, for a few years, we were doing an extra two episodes a month. Two shows a week, right? Or a month, yeah. An extra two a month, yeah, yeah, yeah. So yeah, yeah. Cool. Well, I'm happy to have you here, Adam. Thank you for doing this with us. It's been, it's been a long, I mean, it's been two weeks since you were on the show, but prior to that, it's been a long time since we've had you here. So I think it was Machica 300. Yeah. It was the last time. Whoa, way back when. Yeah, way, way back when. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Back when you were just babes. Yeah, that's right. That's right. Virtual children. Yes, virtual children. Well, maybe something like that. Hey, for our next quick tip, it comes from listener Ben, who, you know, we love keyboard shortcuts and he says, I discovered an unlisted and undocumented keyboard shortcut in pages on the Mac to insert a new page in a page layout document and that is command shift and he says, I tried it and it worked like a charm. Thank you for that, Ben. That's, I love quick tips like the command shift and it went in page layout mode. All right, cool. Yeah. These undocumented ones, like the unlisted, the commands, like the one we found with the finder last week to change the icon size and list view. It's just weird to me that they exist, but there's no menu option for them. There used to be somewhere, it was an app or a website. I don't remember which now. I'll have to look for it, but it had all those keys, strokes, I mean, thousands of them available to you, but play with them, find them, send them in. I haven't brought the, doesn't the iPad has that feature, right? Where if you hold the command key in the app, it will pop up the shortcuts, right? And that's not on the Mac. No, but there's a, you're right. So it's, so you just, that's the hidden quick tip right there is it on the iPad, if you have a keyboard attached, right? It is, is it the command key? You hold down the command key. Yep. And then it shows you all of that, all of the available shortcuts. Short thank you. For that app. Yeah. There used to be a, there used to be, I don't know, like a third party tool for the app or something for the Mac, but I think when Apple redid the whole system security thing that may have gone away. Isn't that pop care from Ergonis systems? Yeah, pop char, pop care. Yeah, does that still exist? Pop char, that's it, yeah. Yeah, I mean, the website still exists. I can't find a, like a changelog. I can't find something that tells me when the last time it was updated, but I'll put that in the show notes. Yeah, because it did the same thing. It would show you the list on the screen of all the available things. So yeah. And also hidden in there, in that an impromptu quick tip, on any program on your Mac, if you go up to the file, the menu across the very top bar, hit pull down one of those menu windows. Well, it's displaying, just touch the option key and see that, see the changes that come. There are dozens of changes there for your viewing pleasure. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah. But some of these, like this one that Ben just highlighted, don't happen that way. And yes, Popcar, Popchar, whatever we're gonna call it, P-O-P-C-H-A-R, it's linked in the show notes. 9.5 for Mac was released on May 15th of 2023 of this year. So it full venture compatibility, all the things. So yes, it is an- It's probably Popcare. Popcare. Like character. Yeah, that's, yeah, yeah. I think that's probably, that makes a lot of sense to Adam. Yeah. But when you read it, it looks like Popchar. Popchar. Same. Yeah, sure. Call it whatever you want. Yeah, right? Yeah. Just call it. Make sure you call it. Just call it. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, yeah. Tony notes that Freeform, Apple's app, Freeform, is now populated in as a share sheet option on iPhone. So you can take things and send them over to Apple. Send them over to Freeform just from the share sheet, which is great. But it begs the question, do either of you use Freeform? I have not started using it yet. I was gonna actually comment on this because like, I work 100% remote and so we're on remote all day long and we used to use whiteboards in the office frequently. Yeah. And you'd think this would be a great tool. But the problem is, our whole office isn't on the Mac so it doesn't end up being a useful tool and then I do my show by myself so I don't really have a need for it outside of a work environment. I'd love to use it. I mean, we have other whiteboard apps that we don't use either. Yeah. I forget the one that we have access to at the office. It's, but I mean, very rarely do we actually get on it. Yeah, they're handy though if you use them. I mean, they're great tools. Yeah, I guess I'm wondering. Yeah, I gotta think of a use case to just test it out with. I'm thinking maybe like the next trip I take with my family or something, this would be an interesting way to just like start that process. So. Yeah, interesting. Yeah. Yeah, I'd be curious folks, if you're using Freeform at work or especially if you think you have sort of an off-label use of it, we'll call it, right? Like Apple says, use it this way and you're like, well, yeah, that works, but here's how I'm using it. Let us know. Feedback at macgeekab.com because. You heard him. Feedback at macgeekab.com. What do you say, Anna? Feedback at macgeekab.com. That is correct. That is right. Yep. All right. What's our next one? Steve. Steve writes. Yeah. He says he's not sure if this is cool stuff found or quick tips. I think it's more of a quick tip. So he said to compliment Todd tips in 994 on using FaceTime as a backup camera, which I still think is brilliant. Do you know you can FaceTime yourself? Okay, first of all, why would you need to do that? But secondly, he says there's multiple usages that I can think of. If you need to test a wire or lights or you name it in another room, well, you need to be in a totally different part of the house at the other end of the wire or the main circuit or the 10-canon string. You need to look at something not easily accessible. Then taking a photo with your phone doesn't help. Then use your iPhone to FaceTime your iPad. And voila, isn't that cool? But now you ask yourself, how do I do that? But if you FaceTime yourself from your iPhone. Yeah, right. It will call itself. That's very useful. The trick is to configure your iPhone to make the call from your phone number and disable your iCloud email address on it. And on your iPad, you tell it only to use your iCloud email for FaceTime and disable receiving calls from your phone number. To do so, just go to FaceTime entry in the Settings app and configure accordingly. Now your iPhone, on your iPhone, you can call your iPad in FaceTime by calling your iCloud email and only your iPad won't answer. So it's a little complex, but it makes sense there if you listen to this and go back through it. Now make sure you mute the call to prevent feedback in audio feedback loops. And otherwise it's very useful. And I will also add this quick tip to the end of it. When you're done, switch it back or you will not be able to figure out why you can't take calls. Yeah, one thing that you've done. Yes, be sure to un-configure, if that's a word, de-configure, dis-configure. Yeah, well, we have a different word, but we keep the word, we keep the show clean. So that word doesn't apply. But yeah, yeah. So I like this idea because if, of course, like the last episode, Adam, Todd, and I think his father or something or his son where one of them was driving a U-Haul, the other one was in the back with the iPhones, essentially creating an impromptu backup camera so that he could line up the trailer hitch or whatever. If that person were alone, you could use this and like, you know, aim the camera and then do the same kind of thing. Another way to do this would be to sign your device into an alternate Apple ID, right? So that you're not there. And Pete, I heard you say, I saw you say, oh yeah, but I did not hear you, so I don't know if your sound cut out on your end, but you know, that would be the other way to do it. If you have a phone that you use for, say, beta stuff, and it's on a different Apple ID or something, that would, that would be the thing. You're still with us, right, Adam? I am, I'm thinking that there's now a market for MagSafe iPhone backup camera mounts. Oh! Yeah, yeah. I don't know what Pete did to his audio. He, Pete seems to think he knew what he did. So I'm gonna go and share the next quick tip, and then if we need to pause the show and fix Pete's audio, we will, because it's how we do things here. I can't imagine what he changed, but it doesn't surprise me that he changed something midstream here. Jim brings us to our next quick tip, and he says, just now on my M2 MacBook Air, I held the option key and clicked on the More Space icon, and it switched to the resolution list, like an external monitor. So he's in his system settings displays, and setting the resolution of the display, he option clicked, and he clicked, he option clicked on the More Space icon, but he, really you can option click anywhere in that area, and he says it changed it from the icons that are just descriptive, and say normal, more space, less space, or whatever they say, to toggle between that and a list. He says, I then held the command key, and ticked the Show All Resolutions toggle, that expanded the list to show additional resolution options up to 2560 by 1664 for my 13 inch MacBook Air's display. I used Switch Res X for years to customize resolutions on my 15 inch Intel MacBook Pro, and five external monitors that I didn't realize Ventura would natively give me all those options. Someone out there is going to love this, it's true. So the trick is switching to the resolution list, which yes, you can do temporarily by hitting the option key and clicking in there, but you can also do it by clicking advanced down at the bottom and changing the toggle to always using the resolution list, which can be super handy. So, Pete, you're back. Is your microphone actually back? Yeah, that was just weird. In the middle of the show, it just died, so I turned it off and unplugged it and replugged it, now it's back, so. Okay, you're not on like a powered hub, or something that's toggling like I had when I was in Austin, where my mic would just like die. No, it was bizarre, but it's back. Welcome back, welcome back, I'm glad to have you back. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That last one, I was still stuck on five monitors, like where do you look? Oh, you don't know where to look at them. There is a discussion though, in our MGG Discord about how people are using their multiple monitors, and there's a lot of talk about having one monitor, if you have multiples, having one rotated in portrait mode. Are you a portrait mode monitor kind of guy, Adam? I don't own that kind of monitor. I've been eyeing some 4K monitors for a while. I have just these old cheap ones that I bought that I use. I would do mostly text because of programming, but for programming, yeah, there's a developer at my office that does that, and it would be fabulous to have a vertical monitor. I had on my original Mac Plus, I had a black and white one page display. What was that company, Radius? Yeah, Radius, they were the first to really do that, that's right, yeah. So I had my nine inch, you know, Mac screen in the right next to that, a full page, but it was, you know, one bit black and white display. Yeah. That was awesome, but I was doing page layout and you know, like that page maker at the time and all that fun stuff. Yeah, some people, and I'll put the thread in, I'll link to the thread in the show notes at mackeycap.com so that you folks can find it easily. But yeah, there's been, people have been showing their setups and this idea, I mean, I've always known of the idea of putting a monitor up in portrait mode. If your monitor supports the ability to be mounted that way, or you can, you know, kind of rig up some way of mounting it that way, Mac OS will do the rotation for you. Like your monitor doesn't have to natively support doing the rotation, Mac OS, you just tell it, you know, either 90 or 270, depending on what you want the top to be. And it will happily just do that. So, your options are not as limited as you might, as they used to be in the old days, Adam. Yeah. Yeah. I also wanted to comment on that more options list because I have found that more space option, right? On a laptop, on a MacBook Air, there is, if you look in the, you know, if you go into system settings or system preferences, either one displays and look at the resolution choice for the display. There's the default one that I never think to change my air off of. But I was messing around in there this week and I saw that more space option and I clicked it. And yes, it makes the text smaller. Yes, it, you know, it's not what I would prefer full time. For those moments where you're finding yourself fumbling around with multiple windows and just trying to do something where you need a little more space, try that. Because like for me, it was a game changer. I was like, wait a minute, I can do this even just for a little bit. Like if I'm trying to fill out a, you know, a spreadsheet where I also have to look stuff up on the web and I don't have my extra screen with me, just nudging it up and getting, I think I calculated it. It's like almost 20% more space. It's like 17 and a half or something. And it really makes a difference. It makes my screen seem bigger. Yes, the text is smaller. It's not how I want it full time. But you don't have to have it that way full time. You just go in, you change it, you do your thing and then you change back. So, stage manager mode. I don't use stage manager, but like, and then probably give you that 20% extra space you need for stage manager. Yeah, because that stage manager steals from you. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I've been messing around with stage manager the past couple of days too, just because I hadn't given it a fair shake when it first came out. It's not as terrible as I thought because yes, it takes up the side of the screen when it can. But if I switched to an app where I have the window larger than stage manager would normally leave, it lets the window be full width and then stage manager just tucks away until I like float over to the right and then it sort of flips back open. And the, you know, on a laptop, I'm generally only using one app at a time. I don't have multiple apps open if I'm just using my laptop screen because it's just that one screen. And I mean, I have multiple apps open but I don't have multiple apps visible to me. So stage manager, like I don't know how much of a difference it actually makes. But I have been messing with it. I don't know. We'll see. We'll see where I get. I think where it might be powerful is you can, like by default, it puts each app into its own stage or whatever. But you can drag a window from, you know, app from say mail or something and drag it on top of where say Safari is in stage manager and now those two apps will live on their own stage. So I can see a world where that becomes valuable because there are times where I want to see two apps and I will wind up clicking, you know, five different times to get the layering right because I'm fighting with the 14 other apps that I have open in the background. So like now that we're having this talk, maybe there is some value in stage manager. I'm the old guy with the, you know, get off my lawn because I just, I'm used to windows the way they are. And Apple's been trying for years to get us to do this spaces desktop. Yes. Stage thing forever. So this is just the latest incarnation of it. Yes. It is the latest incarnation. You're not wrong about it. You are a hundred percent right about that. That, yes. For sure. But maybe, maybe. Maybe this time. Maybe it's time. Yeah. Pilot Pete. Yeah. You have a, yet another quick tip for us. I did. You and I had this discussion on the way to the hotel one night at Mac stock. And I'm like, you know, I just got the thing that my server is going to be renewing. And years ago I got it, you know, and it's like $3 a month. You know, well, that's for the first 24 months or something like that. Sure. And then they went to renew it. You know, it was going to be like $17 a month for, you know, for 24 months. And I looked at that bill and I went, whoa, it's going to be well worth my time. And I started asking you, how would you move all of your web server data from one server to another? And then it hit me. I just call them and ask them for a lower price. Oh yeah. Voila. They gave it to me. I said, look, I can go somewhere else. And I can pay, you know, four bucks a month where I can stay with you guys if you can give me a little bit better price. And almost immediately he came back and he goes, look, the best price I can offer. And it was like $6.95 a month or something. And I go, sure. You know what? It's worth the extra two or $3 a month not to have to move all that data, you know, gigabytes of data from one to another. Yes. But they also, I hope, know that at $16 a month they were not going to keep me as a customer. Right. And I think that applies. I think they did know that when you told them that. Like, I think they believed you. Yeah, yeah. And you know, I think that also applies to not just web server companies, but pretty much anybody. Call and ask for a better deal. SiriusXM radio is an example. Yeah. If you're paying more than five or six bucks a month for SiriusXM, you don't have to. Yeah. Do you find SiriusXM works OK for you in our coastal region of New Hampshire, Pete? Oddly enough, there are times, especially when the trees are wet, not so much. However, quick tip number four, whatever it is. Here's what I do. We pay for it in Debbie's car. And then I use the app on my phone. And then I Bluetooth my phone. So that's how I listen to the SiriusXM channels. That I want in my car. Yeah. Right. Because you don't need to receive from a satellite. You don't have to use the satellites anymore. I use my cellular data. Do they offer a cellular like a data only subscription that's less expensive? I don't know. They should if they don't. Right. I mean, I don't know. Although, I think that may be that may be a higher infrastructure cost for them sending that band without then it is up to the satellites and back down. I guess. Yeah, which is more expensive for them. But yeah, that's why, like I say, I hate offering that tip up because when they figure out we're all doing it, they're going to find a way to change it. So I found this. In real time, folks, we had the answer. I found the pricing on SiriusXM's website. And they have a chart of pricing. You can have platinum music and entertainment or music showcase. But you can get your pricing for car radio or for streaming only. So platinum is $23.99 with car radio and streaming. And it is $10.99 for streaming only. This is per month, by the way. Yeah. But that's actually, wow. Yeah, man. That's worth it. Yup. That's worth it going platinum. Because yeah. And I don't know what level we have. But like I say, I think it's the base level. But we're paying like $5 a month plus taxes. Because if you tell them, look, it's just not worth it to me. They're like, remember, anybody here ever tried to get rid of AOL? Oh, yeah. Yeah, you couldn't. They wouldn't let you. No, like four hours later, you're still going, no, I just want to cancel. No, no, you can't cancel. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Sirius is kind of the same. They aren't nearly as bad about it. But they will offer you the best price they can very quickly to keep you as a customer. Interesting. Yeah. Yeah, no, they know that when you're hooked, you will continue to use it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Sirius is still really pumping the Howard Stern, huh? Yeah. I would assume so. They paid a lot of money to be able to do that. It's on their list as one of the premium features, I think. Oh, it is literally like, yes, you get news and issues, talk and entertainment, comedy, sports, Howard Stern, personalized Pandora. Yeah, these generic things. And Howard Stern. You only get Howard Stern with the Platinum, by the way. Platinum, yeah, you got to pay up. Just FYI. He was expensive. Howard has always been expensive. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Howard, he pioneered the whole, I think of Howard as pioneering the whole talking points ad model. I listened to Howard when I was a kid on WPLJ because I'd lived near New York. And I can still remember dial-a-matress ads that he read, the host read ad kind of thing into the show. For sure. Yeah. What was that movie he did? Private parts? Private parts, yeah. That was clever, right? Yeah, that was clever. His feud with Don Imus, or I guess Don Imus' feud with him. Yeah, whatever, yeah, yeah, yeah. All right, I know we have one more quick tip and I'm determined to find it. Did I just screw it up? It's disappeared. No, I made it disappear. It disappeared. I did my automation too quickly. There you go. Jamie says it's a quick tip. It might not be particularly quick. It also has a bit of a fish shake. I have a Mac Mini and I'm using a TCL 4K TV as a monitor. It's big and I like it. However, I have had monitor sync problems from day one. The Mac will fail to drive the monitor and the TV will say looking for a signal, no signal, is it on? This used to happen on Wake from Sleep, but I think I fixed it by finally using a Thunderbolt to HDMI adapter instead of the built-in HDMI port, built-in HDMI port on the Mac Mini, obviously still using the built-in HDMI port on the TV just for clarity. However, in spite of everything, after five years often, when I turn on the Mini from a cold start, it will fail to sync with the monitor still. My only recourse has been to turn it off with the power button and try again. This works, but it is particularly frustrating because it slowly takes me to the forgotten password screen where I have to select restart and boot one more time. Then I can log in and all as well. Obviously, this is a bug. Meanwhile, he says I finally found a workaround. I turned on an option in system settings enabling voiceover on the lock screen. Voiceover for those who don't know is what blind folks use or visually challenge folks use to navigate on the Mac. I don't need it normally, but when I can't see the login screen, I can use it. So today I turned on the Mac Mini and the screen didn't sync up. At this time, I heard a little voice which said username. I typed my username, then it said password. I typed my password and a few seconds later, my screen lit up and macOS logged me in as usual. I had always suspected that if I could ever get logged in that the full macOS would be able to do the sync and the screen would become alive. That is fascinating to me. Yeah. Yep, yep. There's a lot of handy tips around accessibility stuff, but yeah, it's also great if you're gonna run a machine headless or something like that as a server. Oh, right. You need to reboot it and then boots to the lock screen. Yeah. Oh yeah, okay. I wonder if FileVault is on this computer, right? That's the question, right? Yeah. Because where is it getting to the macOS login screen or is it getting to the FileVault? You need your password to decrypt the disk screen. Right, so I can load the operating system. My guess is it's the FileVault screen and that's why it's not... Because there's very little that's loaded before you get to that FileVault screen and maybe that's why it's not doing the monitor sync or not waking up the Thunderbolt port, the right way, whatever, so... Adapters matter though, too. I mean, that other tip, like I said, I have these old monitors and they're DBI monitors and I had these really cheap Thunderbolt to DBI adapters and they just didn't work and just getting different adapters and actually I didn't even get expensive ones but I got, I think these are from Monoprice, which makes great cables and adapters at a really affordable price, but they're good quality, so that made all the difference. There's the whole, oh gosh, I forget what it is. Like the bit rate, the data bit rate or something, there's like a eight bit versus six bit versus 10 bit and if you don't have, and I can't remember the name of the term and I'm not gonna be able to look it up in my email quickly enough, but there is a bandwidth when you're talking about HDMI cables and even monitors that support this bandwidth and the Mac likes more of that bandwidth than less is really what it comes down to. I'll look it up, but yeah, fascinating. Yeah, interesting, yeah. All right, so I love to drink seltzer, but it gets a little boring and sort of plain all the time and certainly I love to drink alcohol sometimes but I don't always want alcohol and I have really been loving hop water, which is a non-alcoholic sparkling hop water that has adaptogens and nootropics. One of the things it has in it is ashwagandha, which I really love that helps you relax and add some mood boosting benefits. Again, it's hop water, H-O-P-W-T-R and it's made from this exclusive blend of hops that give it a crisp, citrusy, piney flavor. It's delicious. I've been having one of these pretty regularly. I'll go down to the fridge to grab a beer and I'll be like, actually, I'm gonna have a hop water instead. It's delicious and the best part is that it's purposely crafted without calories, without carbs, without sugar, but it's refreshing. It's got that crisp, clean taste. It's carbonated so you get that sort of carbonation and feel in your mouth, which I really like and it's full of flavor and they've got all kinds of different flavors. Last night I had the mango one, which I had had before and I'd forgotten how much I liked it. Then I grabbed it and I'm like, oh, what a treat. It's really fantastic and hop water is the perfect brew to help you unwind at any time and I know you'll love it too. 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Like screening questions which make it super easy to focus on candidates with just the right skills and experience so you can quickly prioritize who you'd like to interview and then of course hire. It's so important to get the right people on your team and LinkedIn is gonna help you do that. This is why small businesses rate LinkedIn Jobs. Number one in delivering quality hires versus leading competitors. So LinkedIn Jobs helps you find the qualified candidates you wanna talk with faster. Post your job for free at LinkedIn.com slash MGG. That's LinkedIn.com slash MGG to post your job for free. Terms and conditions apply and our thanks to LinkedIn Jobs for sponsoring this episode. So about 10 to, well maybe 26 minutes after we finished recording Matt Geekab last week Pete if you were here in New Hampshire you are fully aware that we had the mother of all lightning storms to blaze through southern New Hampshire. It sounded like incoming artillery to say the least. It was nuts. I was up here producing the show and felt the ground rumbling. Of course I don't have windows in the studio and so it's like what's going on? And I look at my phone I turned off the focus mode that I had for podcasting and saw all the lightning. And it was like lightning struck within a mile of you. It's like what is going on? So I'm doing all my thing and then finally I get to a point where I have no internet connection from the studio anymore. Power's still on but no internet, like okay. So something went wrong. Interesting because you're on fiber. Correct. So it was like time to go outside and go back because the office in the house are separate from one another, separate buildings. So I go out, power's on in the house, internet's fine in the house. I'm like oh no, okay. I have direct burial ethernet between the house and the office. Long time listeners will remember that I've been through this before. It used to be just a lightning rod there in southern New Hampshire. Correct. I was the lightning rod in southern New Hampshire. That's right. So much so that I put APC protect net, ethernet surge protectors on either side of this line and those work really well. I think over the years I've had one of them blow up and save those because what would happen is it would blow out the ports on the switch every time that a lightning storm would happen on both ends of things. Right. And so I put these APC things in and they've been totally fine. Everything's been fine. Like well, okay. And then the power flickered. The power had flickered but it never like died. The power flickered again while I was at the house and then I noticed the office was back online. I'm like oh, all right. I'll take it. Sure. So as I'm walking out of the house, I hear Lisa say oh, I guess my computer shut off. I'm like okay, you know, sure. Like it's on a UPS. So I don't know why it would have shut off but okay. She has her 2018 Mac mini in the house there still. And so she goes and I can see that she's like things aren't right. So it's like okay, well, what's going on here? So push the power button, nothing. Hold the power button, nothing. Check the UPS, make sure it's like still providing power which it is okay. Unplugged the Mac mini from the UPS for 15 seconds or whatever plugged it back in. And immediately now the fans spin up full tilt which is normal when the Mac mini 2018 turns on because the fans by default run at full speed until the operating system slows them down and manages them, right? So fine, no light on the front of it. Certainly no display on the monitor, nothing. The fans will stay running for hours if you let them because I did. I tried. It would warm up in the house, right Dave? Yeah, I tried everything. Including something I didn't know it was, it exists. And this is a DFU revive on a T2 based Mac. Adam, did you know anything about this T2 revive? No, but I know there's all kinds of fun stuff with T2 chips. Yeah, so you use Apple configurator. It's kind of like restoring an iPhone except it's not Apple Silicon. It's still Intel. But yeah, you start up the Mac a certain way and it depends on which Mac. There's Apple has a knowledge-based article about this. I just had no idea that this was even a thing but for the Mac mini you disconnect it from power for 10 seconds. Then you plug a USB-C cable into the Thunderbolt port, a specific Thunderbolt port on it but not a Thunderbolt cable, a USB-C cable. A Thunderbolt cable will not work. But you plug USB-C cable into that and then also into a up and running working Mac that has Apple configurator to download it onto it but is not yet running on that. That there's like, you gotta hold, this is the hold your mouth just right scenario. Then you hold down the power button, add, you know, plug the Mac mini in, continue holding the power button for three seconds and it should go into this DFU revive mode. That's for the rest of you. For me, that's not what happened. That Mac mini is dead. And near as I can tell, it died over, it died from the ethernet port getting fried. Now, my ethernet into the house is protected. My ethernet into the house never had a problem. That lightning hit so close that it charged up the ethernet wires inside my house and fried the Mac mini's ethernet port and by proxy, its motherboard. It fried two ports on an ethernet switch. And I think that's, I think that's it. Now, it's been a week. That's impressive though, Dave. Geez. Right? Yeah, there was, and I didn't quite realize what had happened because I was trying to like scratch in my head like, dude, I'm protected. Like, how did this get in? How did this get in? And later that afternoon, I got a text from a neighbor saying, hey, and this is like a guy about three houses away from me and as geeky as the rest of us. And he said, you know, he protects all the stuff with UPSs. He's got his own sonology. Like, you know, he's like us. And he's like, Hey, do you have an extra router? I can borrow mine got fried during the lightning storm. And I'm like, of course, I have an extra router. Like that, that, that please come take a router for me. You know? And, and then I was, you have more than best buy does, I think. Yeah, probably. And so, but he was like, yeah, it was, and then the next day I was texting with him, like, you know, what of your things were plugged into UPSs? He says, oh, everything. And I lost this and this and this neighbors. Then I posted in our, we have a Facebook group for our neighborhood. And I posted, I'm like, Hey, is anybody noticing things that don't work? I know I'm not the only one. And sure enough, people were just like, Oh yeah, my garage door opener, my this, my that, like, but at one, another guy said, Oh, I lost two ERO units. And I thought, okay, were they plugged into Ethernet? He says, yes, these are my two that are plugged into Ethernet. The ones plugged into, to, to Do we're just Wi-Fi? Wi-Fi are totally fine. So yeah, it was low voltage. And then I noticed, yes, the office is back online, but no, it's not online at gigabit speeds. It is online at hundred megabit speeds. So one of the ports on that switch didn't entirely fry, but it's sort of fried. And so I had to replace, I replaced a switch, which was the inexpensive part of this. And then it was- And the Mac Mini's coming. Well, no. So I started thinking about this, you know, it was time. I mean, that Mac Mini was five years old. It should have lasted another five years, but it was Intel, right? We had not yet upgraded Lisa to Apple Silicon. We started talking through different options because now we were presented with options. And I said, are you at a, like she likes to have a laptop when we travel, but otherwise does not need a laptop. And so her laptop is also like old and slow. It's like, it's a, you know, prior generation Mac, Mac MacBook Air, right? The pre-M1. And I'm like, would it make sense to you to just have a MacBook, like a laptop that we connect to your keyboard and screen and do all those things with. And then when you want to travel, you take it with you and then you don't have to worry about is my laptop configured for travel? Cause- Did I sync that data? Do I have- Yeah, well, and sync the applications and the settings. The data actually syncs just fine these days, but it's the setup of it, right? She's like, oh, that kind of sounds amazing. I'm like, all right, well, you know, I have this M1 Air that's like all decked out and would be great for what she's doing. And I've been eyeing an M2 Air. And I know because at Mac stock, I used the 15 inch version that John had gotten. And 15 inch is awesome, but it's too big for me. So I know that the 13 is right. And all the 13 inch MacBook M2 Airs are on refurb now. So it was like, this is a perfect time to buy. I can't afford not to. But I had reached out to my local, when my Mac mini wouldn't work, I reached out to Dan over at Mac edge, which is my local Apple authorized repair shop. And he was the one who told me about DFU revive. And so I kept him up to date on this. And I'm like, yeah, I think it's time to get a refurb, you know, M2 Air, I want the 13 inch to 15 is too big. And he says, so I just got a 15 inch Air to replace my 13 inch M2 Air with 24 gigs of RAM and two terabyte drive in the midnight color, which was the one I was thinking about getting. And he's like, I could sell you my old Air. It's got two and a half years of Apple care left on it. This sounds perfect. He's like, I just hadn't bothered to put it up for sale yet. I'm like, well, there you go. So I now have a new M2 13 inch Air and Lisa has her set up that way. And you know, yeah, it's all as well that ends well. But at Mac, the last time the three of us talked on this show, I asked, this was at Mac stock, has anybody needed to like actually restore from a backup recently? Because I haven't, what's the, you know, what's the big deal about all these backups? Do we even need them anymore? Well, if Lisa's machine hadn't been cloned daily, restoring to her new MacBook Air would have been, there would have been some data loss. Like not everything was synced to, you know, some cloud service somewhere. So I answered my own question. And I should have known, yeah, I should have known asking that question on stage. Like I was tempted. Yeah, you did indeed. Because what does it take, right? I mean, pre-show Adam and I were chatting before you got here, Dave, about how creepy the internet is. You just mentioned a product and the next thing you know it's popping up on your screen, right? So you just mentioned needing to back up and boom. Now that's creepy. Yeah. The universe was definitely listening. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But yeah, all's well that ends well. When I got the new M2 Air from Dan, they had wiped it and, you know, all of that and they had put its default OS on it, which was Monterey. Of course I was migrating from a Ventura machine so as soon as I loaded it, it was like, oh, I can't migrate from your old Mac because Ventura, I was like, oh crap. So now I have to go through this process and I couldn't get internet restore to load on that machine. So I went through the create an account, log in, upgrade to Ventura, then go back into recovery mode, wipe it, reinstall Ventura again. Now migration assistant worked. But I am told that you can maybe get into internet restore on an Apple Silicon machine by doing essentially a double tap on the power button. So the way you get into the options that then lead you to restore mode on an Apple Silicon Mac, on an Apple Silicon laptop is you just, you shut it off and then you hold down the power button until it presents you and tells you it's bringing you to options. To get into internet restore, you shut it down, you tap the power button and then hold it. And that's the secret incantation I'm told. It was, I'd learned this too late. I was already deep into migration assistant by the time somebody told me about this in our Discord. But yeah, so. So there's a link for that then, right? To tell you how to do that? No, that's the thing. Apple's website had no no instructions that I could find it. And I was looking, I'm like, how do I do internet restore? Because that's what I need. Like I just need internet restore. No, I found nothing. So you tap the power button once and then press and hold. And then press and hold. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, I don't know. Well hidden, no, it's the only place you can find it folks. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I don't know. Right here. Right here, yep. And then I was asked a question, not only by our neighbor who went through all of this but also by Uncle Jamie in our Discord. And Jamie didn't really ask it as a question. Jamie made a suggestion and Jamie is correct. He says, after a nearby strike, you'll likely be continue to find things that will have problems. He says, I've read that surge protectors and UPSs should be replaced after a while. They can really only suppress a few major surges before they themselves are damaged and no longer provide protection. He says, if you know that you've had a direct or near direct lightning event, you should probably replace them now. And the idea of replacing all of my UPSs right now. Yeah, I don't like this advice. I don't like this advice. It is like my neighbor asked me, are you replacing all your UPSs? I was like, don't ask me that question. Don't put that out into the universe. They've been hit. So it's actually like the circuitry will start to break down, right? That's what... It's not just like the battery is... Correct, yeah, it's not the battery that folks are concerned about. It's the surge protection circuitry in these things. Again, this is just coming from... Right. Like I haven't done any research on this because I don't want to, but I know that I need to. I don't want to know the answer. Put your head in the sand, Dave. Yeah, I'm going to ostrich this one, man. No, that makes sense though, right? I mean, that circuitry has been hit. It did its job. Now it's time to... But we don't... Here's why this is me rationalizing. We don't know that. We don't know that because nothing that was plugged for me, nothing that was plugged into power, even things that weren't protected by a UPS or a surge protector, nothing got fried from AC power. It was all fried from the low voltage stuff over ethernet. So I don't... Like my question is, should I be replacing my protect net connectors, the ethernet connectors on either end? Probably, but I've had those blow and when they blow, you know it. They don't... Like they smell, that you can smell the magic smoke, got let out. They smell like ozone. Yeah. Like, and these are totally fine. So, well, that's not true. I have one, I have two cables going between the house and the office. One, they're both cat 5E cables. One passes my network connection. The other passes essentially a phone connection. I'll leave, we'll call it that. And that one doesn't work. So I did order a replacement for that ethernet protect net. And you've got that in conduit now, right, Dave? No. No, these are direct burial cables. It's just a burial, okay. Yeah. Yeah. They've always been. We've got some more, buddy. I don't know. I mean, am I? No, that's true. They're shielded and, you know, I guess, but... Yeah, yeah. They're shielded. It's not like Perian Copper in the ground. Well, it is Perian Copper in the ground. Well, but directly. I'm talking, you know, without shielding on it. Correct. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I'm not sure that conduit would have, would make a much of a difference with this. Maybe it would. It probably would, actually. It just adds more shielding. Yeah. Yep. Yep. Yeah, and, you know, if you ask APC what they think, they're going to tell you, you should replace your gear. So just saying. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Oh, of course. Yeah, I did. So the UPS that Lisa's Mac Mini was on is an Amazon Basics UPS. They don't advertise that they have an equipment protection plan like APC does, but I've been through APC's plan and they get very specific with their questions about what blue we need to see the UPS, we need to show that there was a lightning strike that affected the UPS. And so they would, if I, if it were an APC unit and I went to them, they would almost certainly, very quickly deduce that, no, this was a low-voltage thing. We weren't involved in that. Sorry, buddy. And they wouldn't pay up. But thanks for asking. I did ask Amazon and they're like, huh, yeah, we might be able to pay for something on that. We'll get back to you. And so there might be, you know, 600 bucks or something coming from Amazon. I'll keep you posted. Yeah. Adam. Um, well, if certainly if you have any more thoughts on this, great. But were there any, please share them, but were there, I'm trying to decide where to go in the show here. Were there any of the questions that we have queued up for the next segment because we're not going to get to all of them that you wanted to discuss while you were here? Well, in the business of a bunch of Wi-Fi things, I have something that I found out about to add to Wi-Fi. I don't know what kind of Wi-Fi problems people are having, but yeah, I have a thing about better way to get wired connections in your house if you don't want to have to run cable. We're all ears, go? Yeah. I just felt, I think I knew these things existed, but it was, I don't know if you guys follow Snazzy, Snazzy Labs on YouTube. Yeah. But he did a video recently talking about alternatives, like how to how to get wired connections when you don't want to, you know, run drops through your house or whatever because he has some old house. Now he, he ran wiring, but so he was testing different things and I was a big fan for a while of the phone, I can never remember what they're called, the phone link ones, right? So where you, where you plug it into the electrical, or no, the electrical out one's homelink or whatever, I always want to call it phone. Power line. Power line, yeah, power line. But the problem with power line is, you know, it's temperamental and you don't really get great speeds. You know, you're not going to get gigabit kind of speeds and stuff like that. Correct. Yeah. So he said, you know, those are no good, but do you guys know about Mocha? Yes. I did not know about Mocha. Tell people about Mocha. It's been a long time since we've talked about it on the show. This is, and it's especially good now because like, you know, I stream everything and I don't, I don't use my coax cable and that's in my house. And pretty much most houses already have coax cable running around. So these are adapters, network adapters that use your coax cable line in your house and they work just like the phone things. You plug one in by your router to the cable, plug that in, you know, ether that into your router and then on the other side, there's a receiving one. You plug that in, you pair the two things and you've got full, you know, full gigabit connections through the copper that's already in your wall. You don't have to run anything else. Yeah. They're a little pricier, I think, but they're not too bad. And yeah, he was able to get basically full, his full gigabit speeds, you know, through his through these little adapters. That's awesome. Yeah. And like I said, most people already have, you already have cable running through your house. So you can, and then you can split them. So if you need to run a TV and something else on the same thing, you just throw a splitter in. And so I'm going to start playing around with these because, you know, I'm out in this remote office and I'd love to have a wired connection to this office rather than, I mean, I have mesh and with mesh is great too for wifi, but sure, you know, I can go router to router straight into, you know, a switch in here through the cable. So I'm definitely going to give this a try. Yeah. Mocha is awesome. I ran it in my house to get ethernet to my, essentially from one side of the house to the other where I didn't have ethernet cable up until February of this year when I finally paid somebody to run ethernet cable to the north side of my house. But yeah, no, Mocha is great. And what's cool about it is it's not just point to point. It is its own mesh. So you could plug, you describe plugging one in at your router and one in somewhere else. You can do that. And then you could add a third one and it will all, they will all talk to each other and share the bandwidth. And yeah, I've seen it. It really depends on the quality on a lot of things, but the quality of your coax cable, which for most of us is awful because it's been in our homes for, you know, decades. But even with awful coax, like my, I know the coax in my house is probably, it's certainly older than my kids. It's, it might even be older than me. But I get, you know, 800 megabits per second over it with good low latency and consistent connections. You, you'll want to, if you, if you are not using coax from the street, like if you're not using cable for a cable modem anymore or, you know, for your TV, just disconnect it from the street. So you have no interference coming that way. If you do have to use it from the street, you want to get a P O, is it a P O E crap? Crap. What is it called? Oh, there's a, I want to call it P O E and it might be. But it's a, it's an inline filter. And I will look at my Amazon orders here and see if I can find it. I think it's a P O E filter. Yeah. And while you're looking for that, I'll mention that Mocha is spelled a M O C A. It's in our show notes, but M O C A is. And another thing is he, because he was bringing a step two for people who might be, you know, renters or an apartment or something like that. And he didn't mention, if you're going to do that, you have to get, I forget what it is, something to block, basically lock your place from like other people who might be on the same, you know, cause they all routes down to the same central point. The P O E filter will do that. It will stop the Mocha signal from going in or out of your house. And that's what stops the interference from coming into, but yeah, it's, it is called a P O E filter. I, when I see P O E, I'm thinking power over ethernet, right? And I don't, I forget what P O E stands for, but it is a P O E filter. You can buy it for nine bucks on Amazon. I'll put a link to the one that I bought years ago out there, but put one of those in. I watched my speeds go from like 300 megabits per second to 800 when I first installed this, this filter. Yeah, obviously it's not going to be as good as running, you know, cat cable, but, you know, it's a good option. It's almost as good and you don't have to, you just get the, you get the adaptive. Oh, the other thing is unlike the power line stuff, apparently these, you can just make, it's a standard. So you can mix and match. You don't have to have the same brand. Correct. Oh, right. Okay, that's good. Correct. I actually don't have, I was gonna say, I don't have cable in the one room that I need it. So I do use a power line bridge for, but it's just a Debbie's work VoIP phone. Yes. So that has plenty of bandwidth for a phone, a power line bridge should work. Absolutely. Just fine. But to get that kind of speed up to the third deck with Ethernet would be really nice. I've got cable up there, so. One thing I will share is Mocha, power line, it suffers from this too. Mocha doesn't pass 100% of the package that would go across an Ethernet link. I don't mean to say that it drops packets. It filters certain types of packets to keep the connection, you know, unencumbered for lack of a better term. And some of those packets that some of these Mocha implementations filter are the loopback detection packets that things like a mesh network might rely on to not start to cause network loops. So if you wind up putting say, you know, a mesh point like an Euro or something like that on the tail end of a Mocha connection so that it is, you know, Ethernet backhaul instead of wireless backhaul. If you start running into weird problems, it is your Mocha connection unplug the Ethernet cable from your, you know, from your Euro or whatever that is at the far end of the Mocha connection. And Sonos too does not like to be on a Mocha connection. So just be aware, just be aware of those things that like. There's quirky things. It acts like Ethernet except for certain, except when it doesn't and. Yeah, he also did point out that these are, compared to that, you know, the phone ones, I kind of made it sound like it's just plug and play. They're not plug and play. You have to set up some sub. There's some networking things you have to do and. They are kind of plug and play though. You have to configure them a little bit more. It sounds like you have to like, at least he was saying like you had to plug in because they don't have just a web interface right off the bat. Like you have to plug them in initially and kind of set them up on a computer. No, yes. If you want to access their web interface, they have a fixed IP address and you need to set your computer to whatever IP range it is. It's that whole sort of, you know, like custom network fiasco. But they, that's only if you want to change the default configuration on them, you can add security to them, which if you're in an apartment, you might very well want to do. But otherwise no, they are plug and play based on my experience. You just plug them in and it's like, you'll watch it sync up. And I would find that once every two weeks or more frequently or less frequently, that one of them would lose its sync and I just had to power cycle one of the adapters and that headache was sort of what got me to the point where it was like, you know what, I'm just going to have ethernet. I found a good electrician. I'm just going to do this. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it is better now because now I can rely on that connection and I have a generator in the house. That was the reason for doing it. But for getting rid of the Mocha was just because I wanted, I didn't want my entire network running on it. It's great for those satellite locations. I still am using it in fact in one spot of the house where I don't have ethernet. And it works great. It's like I said, they don't have magnets. I would only advise it for people who are like, I want a wired connection and I really just can't or won't install ethernet. It's great. It's great. It's way better than power line and in most cases, better than Wi-Fi. Because in nowadays, Wi-Fi is probably faster than power line in most of our homes. Oh, yes. With the mesh systems. With the mesh system. Yeah, exactly. Incredible. Yeah. Yeah. Interesting. Interesting, interesting. Well, I'm glad you brought that up. That's good, Adam. We've essentially jumped over questions and gone into cool stuff found, which you started with Mocha, which I'm super glad you did. No. Porthos John in our chat room during this episode suggested a cool stuff found called Better Snap Tool. And Better Snap Tool, he brought it up when we were talking about having different screens connected to our Macs for different things. Better Snap Tool will set up, as he says, screen areas that are based on which monitor you are on. And so, you're shaking your head, Adam. Do you? I don't use it. You're not in your head. I'm very familiar with the tool, right? It snaps all your windows. You can kind of configure everything, right? That's one of those tools that lets you put windows here and windows there. And I want them sized, you know. This one's on half the screen. This one's, I think, right? Isn't that? Yeah, no, that's it. That's it. I thought that was a sub function of Better Touch Tool. I think there's a few of these that do this. Yeah. Yeah, sort of thing. Because I know if I drag a window to a certain part of my monitor, it will resize it and put it in a certain corner or throw it in the lower corner for me. And then you just move it again to undo that. But I think I always thought that was part of my Better Touch Tool. And it sounds like it might be the same folks. It's... Is it or is it not? Yeah, what's... I don't know. Yes, it is the same folks. Fullerbora.ai. So that's in the show notes as well. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, good stuff. Good stuff. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So thank you, Portos John. Better Snap Tool has hotkeys and is a companion to Better Touch Tool. Great, cool. Have you guys discovered? No pun, well pun intended. Apple Music's new Discovery Station. This is a... You just heard about it the other day. Yeah, they rolled this out without any fanfare. And it is... Well, it's their new sort of competitor to Spotify's recommended playlist, like AI-based recommendations. And here's what you listen to, here's... Yeah, exactly. And you... The place you find it the first time is in Apple Music, you go to Listen Now, Top Pics, and then swipe to the right until you find Discovery Station. But once you've listened to it once, you'll now find it, for a little while anyway, in Recently Played, and it won't be in Top Pics anymore. So, like... But it's pretty good. Now, my Apple Music knows that I, at least recently, have been listening to a lot of, like, classic rock and wedding band music because I've been learning songs for the wedding band that I play in. So it was a little top heavy on that kind of stuff, the Discovery Station. It was like, yeah, I don't need everything at 120 beats per minute. Like, what else do we have? You know. But, like, it very quickly got into some really great stuff for me that I did not know existed, some new music. So, and you can like things on the phone. You hit, either way, when a song is playing, you can hit the little three dots next to it and either tell it a thumbs down, suggest less, or love, which means suggest more. On the Mac, the same three dots in the, you know, the title bar or whatever of Apple Music, and you get love and dislike, but dislike means suggest less. And so you can tweak it as it goes, but I've liked it, yeah. I use Hey Lady on my home pod for that. I just tell her, I don't like this, or I love this. Right. Yeah. I bet you could, I bet you could Hey Lady play my Apple Music Discovery Station. Yeah. That'd be the right way to do it, because that's other ways, right, Mayor? Yeah. Oh, yeah, it's pretty good. I don't know why Apple hasn't said anything about it. They just, like, I think it was, like it was 95 Mac or Apple Insider who I think were the first ones to just, like, they just, somebody noticed it and was like, what the heck is this? So nice that it's there, and then they hide it from you and to recently played. And they continue hiding it. It's like, oh, I know where to find it. Nope, not anymore. Yeah. And I guess I have to remember, it's soon to be just Lady. It is soon to be just S Lady. That's right. Yeah, exactly. I know I have a Lisp too, but I said something about a theory the other day, and she started talking to me. I said, oh, I said theory, not. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Exactly. In theory, what are you on? No. Yeah, that's gonna get, it'll get so much better when they take the hay away. Yeah. I'm pretty sure you're being facetious, Adam. No. No. Yeah. Yeah, it's gonna be a nightmare. What could go wrong? Yeah, like, I'm not sure two syllables is correct. Yeah, I like three. You know. Well, the other one I've had it even go on me is, because we used to do committee meetings at work, and we had, you'd get fined if your phone dinged or anything like that during the thing. So you'd silence your phone and that kind of stuff, but God forbid you, and someone said, seriously? Well, guess who started about four different phones went, you know, go ahead. Yeah, yeah. Ding, ding, ding, ding. Ding, ding, ding, yeah, exactly. Yeah, there's a lot of common words. It really makes you think about, like, on Star Trek why they had computer, and how bad would that life have been? You know, I wonder, has anyone now, I'm not gonna be able to watch Star Trek the same way ever again, and neither are any of you after I finished talking. Has anyone gone back to Star Trek and counted the number of times they just said the word computer, and the computer didn't answer, right? It answered when they wanted it to, but of course, it's because it was scripted and it was an actor named Major Barrett. But, like, how often did they just casually say the word computer and the whole ship didn't just light up on it? Exactly, right? I'm here, what do you want? Yeah. Maybe they actually fixed her in the future. Yes, correct. Maybe Apple fixed her by the time they got to Star Fleet to contract. I'll believe that. Yeah, I have to imagine they're playing with some of their machine learning AI stuff and that you shall hear it and then start to hear additional words and then try to use AI to figure out are you actually talking to me or are you just saying something? Conversational. Right, right. Well, that's hope. But even, I don't know, man. I don't know about the world we live in. We're gonna find out. We're definitely gonna find out real soon now. And then there's the other one that's funny. I gotta share this with you guys. Years ago on Saturday Night Live, they did a skit about the A-Lady for old people. And it was very funny. It was very funny. But it answered almost anything sounding like Lexa. So hopefully I didn't send them all off. Well, now that my mother's 97 and in a nursing home and has the A-Lady there, she can't remember her name to save her life. And the different name that she comes up with. No, it is though. You tell the story in a funny way. The fact is, life imitates art or art imitates life. And sure enough, I mean, she just cannot remember A-L-E-X-A to save her life. And the names that she comes up with and then gets angry with her for not responding. I love it. And I feel bad for mom. She's doing her best there, but oh, dear God, me. That's, and it just made that skit all that much funnier because they call it a bunch of different names, but the computer learning or the AI machine intelligence for old people picks it up. Oh yeah, you're talking to me. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Yeah, yeah. Funny. Yeah. All right, Adam, you have another cool stuff found for us before we have to pull the ripcord on this thing. Yeah, no problem. This is a really cool one and I have it now because my company finally approved me being able to upgrade to Ventura. And so when they sent me up with this M1 Macbook Pro that I have, they gave me this really cheap HD webcam thing to hook on my monitor. And they let me upgrade and I realized, oh, I can use my iPhone and continuity camera, but I need a mount. And so I went and look, this is the one that I think they actually sell through Apple, but you can get it in Amazon, wherever. But the Belkin iPhone mount with MagSafe, they make a laptop version. And this one that I particularly got because I use desktop monitors is a desktop monitor version. And it works great. You throw it up there. You put the iPhone, it snaps on to the back. It actually holds on nice and securely. One downside, it only kind of has up and down adjustment. I don't know why they didn't put some sort of twist adjustment on it. There's no rotation adjustment. Yeah, there's no rotation adjustment. But I think the reason is because with continuity camera, you have center stage. So you just turn on center stage and it centers you. So like maybe you don't need it. I don't know. But now I get all the effects and stuff like that. And then you're showing it there. They also, it also has a tripod mount. So you can actually screw this into a tripod. It compacts flat. So it'll fit in your bag. You can take it with you. It won't take up a lot of space. It's a little heavy. You know, it's metal. It's well built. So, but it works great. The only weird thing is, you know, using your iPhone as a webcam. I sometimes forget it's up there. Like, I'll put it up there for a meeting. And you're like, where's my phone? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. So like a little old man disease there. But yeah. And then I was like, well, what about because it doesn't deliver power. And I was like, oh, you just plug a cable and into the side of it, right? If you need to, you need to. Right, right. Charge your phone. Yeah. So I mean, I'm sure maybe there's ones where you can actually, you know, plug into the bottom of power cord and it'll do that. But yeah, it snaps on and off pretty easily. It's not it's not too bad. I haven't had it fall off or anything. So yeah, it's a nice little thing. And I'm using it now and it works. Yeah, that's great. That's great. I I when when we first I went through a whole webcam fiasco a couple of years ago, like trying to find a decent webcam when we started streaming the show. And the reality is for 500 bucks or less, you can't buy a webcam that's any good. In fact, the best webcam for 500 bucks or less is like an iPhone SE or, you know, like and using it this way. And so I started using it with camo from reincubate because there was no continuity camera, right? And I still use it with camo because I get way more control over how I do things. And it seems to be more reliable for us than continuity camera, although your cameras worked fine today on it. But what that meant was I was looking for a way to mount this before Apple had even announced continuity camera. And so there were no I want to mount my iPhone on top of my computer mount. So I have I went through like a whole range of things. And what I settled on was a clampable. I it's it's got like a gooseneck on it and it you clamp it onto. I have it clamped onto the stand of my iMac here in the studio, but it's built to be clamped onto, you know, anything like the desk or whatever. And it's got this gooseneck and it's got a pressure mount to put on the, you know, to hold just hold the iPhone is not using MagSafe. But the nice side effect of that is because of the way that the pressure mount is like the gooseneck comes into the center of this pressure mount. I can hang the iPhone over my screen like a lip over the screen and it brings the camera down to where the camera on the screen is whereas most of these continuity camera mounts raise the camera above, you know, the iPhone's camera is above the screen and I like having the camera further down. So I'm looking for a, you know, an over the top of the monitor like hang it hang it on your monitor mount but let it hang over a little bit like and let it be forward a little bit too because it it you know, it just helps the the viewing angle and all that stuff. Maybe I'm being too picky. This one does have the ability to go for whatever reason, portrait or landscape. Sure. Right, that makes sense. Yeah, okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. What would be ideal is for Apple to put a camera at dead center in the middle of your screen but that the camera's looking through your pixels. Yes. How nice would that be? You listening, Apple? Well, they've had, there's been rumors about them looking into that technology for a really, really long time. For a long time. Yeah. Because that would be so nice throughout the show for those watching, you know, we're looking down at the screen, we're looking over there, you do a good job, David, looking into the camera a lot, but. I try to, yeah. Like I keep my video monitor window up right below the camera. So even if I'm looking at that window, it kind of looks like I'm looking at the camera. It's closer to it, right? Right. But if they could master that technology, then the notch gets to go away on laptops too. Right, yeah. I think way, way back when I read, like there was even companies looking at LCD technology where the LCD pixels and the camera pixels were just like with each other. So basically, the whole display becomes a video camera. Oh man. It's like two-way. Oh, I like that too. It's slick, yeah. Yeah. Or even if they just made like the top of the screen, those pixels, right? Cause they're probably more expensive and you know, perhaps less flexible or something, but yeah, it's interesting. All right, well, we have used up all of everyone's time. And now I think we could probably go for another, you know, 75 minutes. I don't think we've used the band's time yet though. Close. No, we haven't. Adam, thank you so much for taking your time. This has been amazing. I love having you here. Great. Well, we'll do this again. Sooner than we're not going to wait like another 690 episodes. 600 episodes, yeah. No. Tell people where they can find you in between now and the next time we have you on. Mine is really simple. It's Maccast, M-A-C-C-A-S-T, pretty much everywhere, Maccast.com and then all over social media. So if you see Maccast, that's pretty much me. Sweet. Again, thank you, folks. Thank you, Adam. Thank you, folks, for listening. Thanks to Cash Fly for providing all the bandwidth to get the show from us to you. In addition to listening to Maccast, check out the other shows that we do. Pilot Pete does. So there I was, a podcast for anyone who's interested in great aviation stories. I do business brain for entrepreneurs and GigGab for working musicians. Check those out. We'll put links to everything in the show notes here, of course, at mackeekab.com. Check out our sponsors, which are also linked in the show notes. Topwater, hopwtr.com, M-G-G, macpa.app, slash mackeekab, linkedin.com, M-G-G. Hey, Adam. If you had to share three words, and they were the three words that are on Pete's shirt as a lasting piece of advice for everyone listening, what might those three words be? Don't get caught. Made. That's good advice. Thanks for hanging out with us, folks. Later.