 Welcome to Mackie Gab episode 942 for Monday, August 22nd, 2022. Welcome to Mackie Gab, the show where we share your tips and our tips, your cool stuff found and our cool stuff found, your questions and our answers and sometimes even our questions because the goal is every week when we get together for each of us to learn at least five new things. Sponsors for this episode include collide at KOLIDE.com slash MGG where you can go and what you can get a swag bag for signing up. We'll talk about its device security made simple through Slack that engages your users as opposed to alienating them. Super cool stuff. And and then we've got a podcast to tell you about as well that makes some things kind of fun. We'll talk more in depth about both of those in a little bit for now here in Durham, New Hampshire. I'm Dave Hamilton and here in fearful Connecticut. This is John and I, John, we have a very special guest with us today. The cohost of the number 13 aviation podcast was able to join us. This podcast called So There I Was. We were able to get get this person to join us today. So thank you, Anonymous, sir, for for being here. OK, I'll tell you my name. It's Pilot Pete and here in Lee, New Hampshire. Thanks for having me. And so my call sign was repeat. So that's what you hear me on. That's right. There I was. That's right. I was at US. This thing is starting to take off a little bit. I noticed. Congratulations. Yeah. Thanks. Yeah. Lucky 13. There you go. Well, it's going to go up from there. Well, go down from there. It'll get better from there. Let's put it down. There you go. Yeah. Lower numbers. Higher ratings. Yeah, that's right. That's right. All right, let's. Yeah, I'm I'm glad, man. I think it's amazing. That's that's awesome. All right. Starting with a quick tip from Brian, eighty nine forty four in our Discord group at MackieCup.com slash discord shares with us how to turn on series captions on iPhone and iPad and doing that so that you know what Siri thought you said and that can be a very helpful thing. And turning on captions allows you to do that to add a little bit of clarity to what is going on with Siri, which at times really smart idea. You open settings on your your iPhone or iPad. You go to Siri and search. You go to scroll down to Siri responses. And then there is a switch beside always show Siri captions and you turn that into the on position and boom. You are good to go. So thank you for that, Brian, eighty nine forty four. Good stuff. Yeah, I bet that's dangerous. I mean, some funny stuff. Correct. Correct. But but seeing, you know, the the the the responses and being able to get that stuff is can be really helpful. So thank you for sharing that, Brian. Yeah, good stuff. I like it. John, we had a quick tip from Larry about credit cards and discounts, right? Yeah, we've been talking about that lately. So Larry says, so speaking of getting points, how about this trick to get two more percent on your Apple purchases? I'm sure most of you pay for your Apple purchases using your Apple card because, well, you're an Apple geek and that's what Apple geeks do. Well, since you can pay for your Apple things using Apple gift cards, if you have an Amazon card, first purchase an Apple gift card to send to yourself for whatever denomination I usually go, I usually do 100 or 200 bucks and then apply it to your balance. You can also buy them in a whole foods, but why waste the gas? I load up all my balances this way, Starbucks, Panera, etc. So if you feel all smug about your three percent, feel even smugger with five percent. They even have some gas cards available. And yeah, that's good advice. I do something similar. So I don't know. BJ's is one of our warehouse stores locally, and I'm a member. They actually offer a discount on all gift cards, usually two to three percent off of the face value. So that's nice. So you could do something similar because one of my credit cards also gives a discount for warehouse stores. So. Smart, stacking them up. I like this. Oh, that's that's realized they did that. That's cool. So if you use your Apple card to buy an Amazon gift card, you get two percent off. That's what John, right, John? Mm hmm. He's asking. OK. Yeah. That's that's awesome. That's awesome. Because I know the one thing like we drove to Florida a couple of months ago and I used my Apple card, mobile and Exxon have a deal where if you use Apple pay, you get three percent off your gasoline. And when gasoline's four fifty a gallon and more, that starts to turn into real money. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Interesting. Yeah, it's been going down, though. That's that's a good thing. I'll take it. Sure. Sure. The fact that we're happy about gas being below four dollars a gallon is is a whole other conversation. I think we've been conned, but, you know, that's that's really conned. It's just a bitter pill song. So I'll put the link for our video in the in the show. Speaking of using our gas, I have been using I was 16 on the betas on my phone. And the other day I was heading somewhere and asked it to get directions to somewhere in the middle. And it said, oh, yeah, do you want me to add a stop? And this is new. You could not previously do this with Apple Maps. And not only could you not do it with Apple Maps, you certainly couldn't do it with CarPlay and Siri. And it added to stop just fine. It works great. So like you don't have to use Google Maps anymore if you want to do the multi stop trips with with like on the fly and all of that. The other thing I did and I swear I've done, I've tried this in the past with with utter failure. We were coming home from somewhere and quite frankly, we needed to find a place to pee. And I said because for the first time in my life last Saturday, I played a gig where there were no restrooms available at the venue. I won't get into the details. But yeah, yeah, like there's a first time for everything. I've been playing gigs for 35 years or something. Never had that happen before. So and we had like an hour and 15 ride home. So I was like, yeah, we're going to have to like this is going to be uncomfortable if we don't stop to pee. So so, you know, and there was supposed to be some like Dunkin Donuts that wasn't open by the time we left. So I was like, well, let's find a McDonald's. OK, great. And so I asked Siri, I said, find me McDonald's along our route. And she did and listed not only all of them and showed them on a map, but. Indicated the amount of time it would add to our journey, essentially what the detour would cost us to go to each of these places. And it was like, OK, well, this one's, you know, the closest one to you at the moment, but it's going to take you. It's going to add 10 minutes to your journey. But if you go to the one that's, you know, 20 minutes away, that's only going to add three minutes to your journey or whatever. It's like, wow. Then, of course, it turned out that the McDonald's we went to the lobby was closed because there was some sort of fire. It added far more time to our journey. It wasn't that wasn't Siri's fault, obviously. Yeah, but it was it's like the improvements, the incremental improvements to maps in Iowa 16 are stellar. So be on the lookout for that when whenever you add Iowa 16, if you're one of the beta people, great, if you're not, you know, it's coming. So yeah, it's come a long way from the days where the icon drove you off a bridge. Yeah, well, it's come a long way. I had given up on Apple Maps, as I think many of us had, like pretty much people that didn't live in the San Francisco Bay area found that Apple Maps was a disaster. And so we all used ways or or or Google Maps even. But I think most of us just standardized on ways I certainly did. And then when I got my iPhone 12, I think I got a 12 pro and then went to the 12 mini, right? Because anyway, I'm stuck in the weeds here. I think they were they were released at different times. But anyway, whenever whichever 12 I got first, I decided I was going to do just a start from scratch kind of thing. You know, I'm not going to reinstall maps. I'm just going to start it fresh. It's been too long. And I decided I would only load the apps that I was going to use. I wasn't going to preemptively load anything on my phone. And that way, I figured I would keep from, you know, crapping it up too quickly, which might have worked or it probably failed. But I realized after like six months, I'm like, you know what, I haven't put any other mapping app on. I'm just using the built in Apple Maps. And that was, you know, a couple of years ago. It's been fantastic. I'm really impressed with how how well Apple Maps works. I will point out that when many of my friends at Apple send me like waypoints or directions, they do so with Google Maps. I don't know what that's all about. But anyway, they seem to be the only ones that don't use Apple Maps. Yeah, it's like UPS in your application to FedEx, right? Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah. I point this out to them all the time and they I get zero reaction or response. I'm like, it's not lost on me, you know, that you're sending me these waypoints or, you know, these things with Google Maps and it's nothing. The other thing that's cool about Maps, it's been there for a while now, is that like ways used to be or ways I'm sure still is. I haven't used it in a while because of this is that you can report hazards, speed checks and accidents in Maps. Yeah, it's not as it's not as widely used yet. So it's going to be user adaptation, adaptation, adaptation. Both I think you're the language. Shall we? It's our job. Yeah. Yeah, I yes, it's like I I wound up using ways for something. There there was I can't remember why. But it was like, OK, like we're in a disaster here. Let's get ways up and and see what the three different mapping apps say about routing around whatever the heck we were dealing with. And I had forgotten how cluttered ways can be because of that. Like it's just constant interruptions about, you know, there's this and there's this is it's still there. Hey, by the way. So yeah, there's more of that data being added to ways still or in ways. I don't know if it's all being added by ways users or if some of it's coming from other sources, which I guess it's a blend. But yeah, Apple's it's there, but not not universally adapted yet. So it's going to take some time. But yeah, yeah, so everybody listening, start using it so we can. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, they they report. I remember when you and I were traveling in California one time and it kept ways kept coming up and saying water ahead. And I'm like, yeah, I can see that. Yeah, right. Exactly. There's also cars. Yeah. It's like, do people in California not know how to drive in in wet conditions? So that's a I mean, I realize that question was asked rhetorically. But, you know, they don't get nearly as much rain out there as we get here in New England. And so, you know, and the same was true in Texas. Like when we would get a first rain after a while and the same is true here, it's just less frequent because we get rain, you know, pretty consistently. But that, you know, first rain can make the roads really slick as it sort of lifts up to all the oils that have yet to be washed off. And and so that may be why it was telling us that. I don't know. But I agree with you. It seemed a little like, OK, yeah, water, right. Got it. There it is. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, and Apple Maps is my choice when I'm trying to navigate an area I'm not familiar with. Yep. I'm like, how do I get there? And yeah, yeah, it works. It works. Yeah, no, great. I know sometimes I lose my bearings and I go in the wrong direction because I thought I knew where I was going. And then I'm like, wait, I don't know where I'm going. It's obviously mapping apps are great for exactly that. I I use Apple Maps for almost every journey I take. Short little ones like to grocery store or whatever, that's, you know, five minutes away, no. But I find it. What's the best way I can sort of relate this? Well, just share it. I don't and that analogy is not coming to me. The whole idea driving down the highway, right? And but this is also true in just like driving in around my towns and stuff. But driving down the highway, you know, you got 25 exits to go or whatever. And the amount, once I started using GPS of any kind, you know, the standalone GPS or now, of course, it's all in our phones or our cars or whatever. Once I started using GPS of any kind, I I noticed how much mental energy I was expending, thinking about each exit and processing whether or not I needed to take that exit or if it was not yet mine. And it was like, oh, I got 10 exits to go. OK, yep, can't miss my exit. You know, this, that and the other thing. And and once I had GPS, like that that the entire background processing or even foreground processing of that went away. It's up to that device to tell me what I have asked it to tell me. It's not like, you know, it's not like information I couldn't see. But, you know, even when I'm driving home and I know exactly where I'm going, I'll use that. And it's a much I find myself less exhausted and exhausted. Might be the right wrong word, depending on the length of the drive. But, you know, less fatigued than I am if I don't have the GPS running. Right now, it's nice that, you know, and what's funny is how we just kind of take that for granted. Because yes, you know, I remember I was active duty the first time I ever had GPS and it was it was about twice the size of those old brick cell phones. Right. And you turned it on and it took about three to five minutes to catch all the satellites and then it would give you your latitude and longitude. And you took a paper map and you plotted it. Right. Right. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. But that was, you know, like, wow, OK, we're right there. That's cool. We had no idea that it was going to be detailed mapping in your car. For it's such a useful talk about killer apps. Right. I mean, I remember when the GPS satellites went up, in fact, my dad interviewed with the name of the company is on the tip of my tongue. It was doing sort of the first deployment of those. But I remember he interviewed with him and he's like, yeah, he didn't wind up taking the gig. But he told me about it. I'm like, oh, that's like really fascinating. Low orbit satellites that you can always see where you are. I'm like, OK, that's cool. And I, for some reason, and the image still comes to mind, I thought about mountain climbers like, oh, that's going to be great for mountain climbers. But, you know, I'm not a mountain climber, nor is anyone I know. And so sort of this, you know, thing that was useful to people over there, you know, it never quite hit me. But I've often said, like, you know, I'm not the type of person that sees around those corners usually. But but yeah, it's pretty pretty fantastic. And it has it has taken over as the primary means in aviation of navigation. Of course. Oh, yeah, still external. But so we do it used to be years ago when I first started flying, if you were going opposite direction from another airplane, you'd see them over there to your left or right, a half a mile, a mile, two miles. Sure. And now it it will split the cockpit right overhead, right underneath that sort of thing. So we actually use a thing called SLOP strategic lateral offset program where we will offset a mile to the right of our course. And the other guy will offset a mile to his. So we aren't hitting each other with turbulence, blue ice, isn't falling off the airplane, which is not really a big problem anymore. Interesting. Yeah, but it's so you intentionally you intentionally parallel your course by a mile or two miles or what. So and everybody agrees to what this SLOP is so that it works. Well, then it's your choice. So you can go a mile, two miles, you go zero. I mean, that's that's considered part of the SLOP program. But if you're behind in the guy who's two thousand feet above you, you know, straight ahead, you're going to start depending on your distance, you may get some weight turbulence from the guy. So and you can, especially on the oceanic areas, not not over the continental US, you're under radar control and mostly in place. But when you're out over the open ocean, you just you can move yourself off to the side. Amazing. Yeah, that's great. So there you go. You learn something. I did learn something. John, is Gary have something to teach us? I think he does. So Gary sent us a very nice article that talks about Duck Duck Go and why you may want to use it. What is Duck Duck Go, you may ask. What is Duck Duck Go, John? In a nutshell, it basically prevents sites from tracking you. You know how when you search for something and then all of a sudden you get ads in your feed for the thing that you just searched for? Well, that's because somebody's tracking you. So how do you prevent that? You can use Duck Duck Go. So Duck Duck Go has both a so they have browser plug-ins as well as a mobile app that you can use. But that's I mean, in a nutshell, that's that's what they do for you. So if you don't like being tracked, you know, give Duck Duck Go a peek. The nice thing is that Safari also does this. So if you go to Safari or at least on the Mac, you'll see a little shield. On on top of the. On top of the window, if you click on that, like I'm going to click on it right now and it says, oh, seen it dot com, 32 trackers prevented from profiling. Well, 32, that's a lot. And then, yeah, if you click on that also, and I'm sure Duck Duck Go offers that as well. But yeah, it shows you all the all the trackers on a particular website. So if you don't want to be stalked by your browsing, check it out and read this article for a little more information. I swear to go. Go ahead. I have a question, though, because I you said if you don't want to be stalked by your browsing, use Duck Duck Go, I I had I've long used. I have no Duck Duck Go apps. I've never downloaded an app or an extension or anything. So all I've done is added a set Duck Duck Go to be my default search engine. And it keeps it. It solves the most of the problem that you were mentioning, John. But that's not keeping my browsing private. I rely on Safari to keep my browsing private. I rely on Duck Duck Go to keep my searching private. And what I really like about that is I get what I'll call mostly uninfluenced search results from Duck Duck Go. When I search on Google, I'm getting results that are like attempting to be tailored to things based on what I what else I've searched for. And for whatever reason, I don't like that. I can see where that might actually be helpful. You know, like from, you know, the 10,000 foot view, you know, the more tailored they are for you, the more valuable they are to you. And so that could be a good thing. But for me, I always found it a little bit weird. And so I like Duck Duck Go. But that's the only thing I do with it is I just use it as my default search engine on my devices. And it's one of the ones Apple has built in for years. So what I guess I guess the question I have is. Why on my phone or on my Mac? What's the what's the added benefit of using either the app on my phone or the browser plugin? We'll call it that. I know it's maybe an extension is the right term on my Mac. Like what's the delta there? That's the part I'm I'm curious about. Pick me pick me. Oh, oh, I don't care. So yeah, so I use it on my iOS devices. OK, and the couple different things it'll do for you. First of all, on iOS to every now and then, I think we refer to it on here is looking at your data through a straw when you're on a iOS device, more so on the iPhone than on iPad. But there's times when it's like, ah, you know, if I could get. But it's serving you up a mobile site. You can tell Duck Duck Go, hey, give me the desktop site. I can do that in Safari, too, though, on my phone. You can. You can. But Duck Duck Go will do that. OK. And then, of course, it's all private browsing. Like recently I searched for eBikes and I made the mistake of not doing it on Duck Duck Go. Dude, I can't get the eBike ads to stop. I am served every time I log into Facebook and Twitter and every. Oh, man. Right. One time. And this is this is the creepy part. One time Debbie mentioned a brand of dog food and then just mentioned it in the kitchen while we were chatting. And then within an hour had ads all over her computer and her phone for. And I'm like, this is creepy. Now, again, no such thing as a coincidence, man. I'm sorry. I don't know how they're doing that, but they're doing it. Yeah, I like that's one of those things I because I've experienced that, too. Yeah. And like I am I am fairly certain my iPhone isn't listening to isn't transmitting what it hears of everything I say. I know it's listening to what I everything I waiting for you to use the S lady or correct. But I'm fairly confident in that. But maybe that's that's naive confidence. Maybe it's false confidence anyway. I'm pretty sure Google isn't getting that data from the A lady in my home. Right. Right. And so but I but so so I take those two things and and let's set those aside for the sake of argument as truth. They may not be. But then I also know that like Amazon knows what I'm going to order before I order it, not because it's listening to me, but because it knows my habits and it knows the habits of people who also do this, who fit the same profile as me. Right. And so they will move inventory around to have it as close to me as possible so that when I go and order the thing I went and ordered yesterday, they can deliver it today. Right. And they they know this. And of course, they're not doing it up just about me because they would lose money if they if they did that because they're going to guess wrong. Some not insignificant percentage of the time, but they're going to guess right enough that if they're doing it en masse for, you know, millions of us in in in any given area, they get it right. And Amazon is a great logistics company. So if I take those two truths, those three truths and combine them all together, is it possible that like the the dog food companies or whoever they use for their ad targeting is doing something similar and profiling and saying, we think this person is going to need or be interested in our food on this day and let's deliver the ads because it's creepy when you say, you know, alpo dog food and then you see an alpo dog food ad, but it's not creepy when you say alpo dog food and you don't see an alpo dog food ad and we don't count the number of times that happens because we don't look for patterns. And that's because our brains look for patterns. And and so what is what's the how correct, how frequently correct is it? And my guess is not all that frequent, but it's relatively inexpensive to do a test of targeting ads, you know, those kinds of retargeting things like that. So I've always thought it's just OK, you guess a lot. And occasionally you guess so correctly that it seems creepy, but it's probably not as sinister as we think. That's my there you go. That may well be. I just hope that when it happened and I've seen it happen a couple of times, it's not just, you know, what you say, you know, you notice the pattern, you notice what you notice the success, you notice the positives, not all the times they because there's times when I'll get ads, you know, I'll get I'll get berated with ads for a certain thing that I know no one in my house has any interest in, right? And it's like, OK, well, you know, they think I want that. I don't, but they got it wrong. But whatever you move on. And so yeah, yeah, yeah, I don't. But I don't know, like I'm in the ad business. I've never heard of people talking about using that kind of like we heard someone say this and now we target them kind of thing. Like there's there's zero discussion of that. I think if somebody had that technology, it wouldn't be hidden. Well, yeah, right, exactly. I get that it's just and here's the thing, though. But here's the dog food one. I'll mention the brand just because it's not, you know, it was an Alpo. No, I get it. It was farmer's dog. And it's like, oh, my God, you know, we're pretty niche. So yeah, exactly. So that came up. But hey, two other quick points, though, about the browser that the iOS browser. Sure. Go. One is that when you're done, you can burn. There's a little fire icon at the bottom and you touch that and it will burn all your cookies, all your browsing history, everything you've typed into it. It completely wipes it from the phone. Unless you tell DuckDuckGo, hey, fireproof this website. I want to be able to come back and pick where I left off. So it will burn everything except what you tell it. Hey, I want this. I want to be able to go back to this. So I think that's pretty useful. That's pretty cool. OK. All right. Yeah, you're answering my question despite my efforts at tangentializing this. Thank you. Yeah, no, this is good. Huh. All right. Cool. Now, here's a weird one. The other day, I got an email from Amazon and they're like, yeah, did you know that your inkjet printer may be running low on magenta? And I'm like, how do they even know that? Wow, very specific. Because like, is your printer connected to to like? Well, is it connected to like HP or whoever made the printer and they're funneling that through to Amazon targeting you? Maybe it's a it's a cannon. OK. And now that I think about it, yeah, I think I did link it to a cloud service. So maybe they picked it out of that. That's why I don't know. Maybe it was just kind of weird. It's like, how do you know specifically which one of my inks are running low? Yeah, that's pretty. Huh. Yeah. A lot of companies, I mean, I know companies, restaurants use inventory management on their refrigerators. The food is going in and out and it automatically orders. Yeah, resupply. And they can tell when they're going to use more fish and more steak. And and there's some big brain people figuring this stuff out. It is pretty impressive when you think there's money in it, right? You know, yeah, absolutely. If nothing else, saving money that, you know, you aren't wasting food, throwing away what's not going to get used. True. That's a fair point. Right. Well, that's the pitch to the consumer, which in this case is a business, but right, you know, like that it's like, yeah, if you if you do this, you'll save money, but also, you know, use our service to order from. And then we've got you, you know, it's a it's a symbiotic relationship. Right. Right. So. Huh. Any more on that, guys? OK, I will share one last thing on this. And that's from listener Brian Monroe in the chat here says that beware of DuckDuckGo these days. They are pro censorship as much as Google. And so he says there's really no difference in using DuckDuckGo versus Google. You know, traditional end point security tools can make your workplace feel like a surveillance state, turn users and the IT team into adversaries. Don't want that. And ultimately drive your employees to work on unsecured personal devices. This is bad news. Good news, though. It doesn't have to be this way. Our sponsor, Collide, is a device security solution built around honest security. Their philosophy is that employees aren't your biggest security risk. They're your biggest allies and your relationship with them should be based on transparency and informed consent. So Collide works by notifying your employees of security issues via Slack and then giving them step by step instructions on how to resolve the issues themselves, truly making them your allies, engaging them. This is great stuff for IT teams and security teams. Collide provides the right level of visibility for Mac, Windows and Linux devices, and it can answer questions about your fleet security that traditional MDMs cannot. You can meet your security goals without compromising your values. Visit collide.com slash MGG to find out how. That's K-O-L-I-D-E dot com slash MGG to find out how. And if you follow that link, they'll hook you up with a goodie bag just for activating a free trial. That's K-O-L-I-D-E dot com slash MGG and our thanks to Collide for sponsoring this episode. Next up is another podcast you might want to check out because when it comes to covering all things tech, boy, do we have a show for you every week. This week in tech gives you a no holds bar deep dive into just how big tech influences our culture and our lives. Join twit.tv's Leo Laporte and their ever changing panel of journalists and experts every Sunday. Sometimes I'm even on that show as they break down and often disagree on the latest in tech, subscribe to this week in tech wherever you get your podcast. And our thanks to this week in tech for doing this swap with us. All right, John, you want to do some cool stuff found? I think I think Gruzky is the place to start. Yeah, why not? Yes. So, Gruzky has a good one. I found a wonderful bit of freeware. Do we still use that term? I think so. That has helped me with my photo organizing anxiety and anxiety is not good. No, well, a little bit is, but in my experience, digital cameras and phones have been good at saving the wealth of info contained in the EXIF exchangeable image file format data. I'd hazarded a guess that for most of us, much of that data, such as the metering mode of or the focal length is unimportant. Maybe to him. Yeah. But it may be for some people, especially if you're learning how to take pictures properly, however, what can be of extreme important is the photo date and time. My photos library is regularly used to verify dates and times of events that we often can't remember. They created a modified date and time that the finder uses don't always correspond to the date and time the photo was taken. Also, if you forget to use the export unmodified original in Mac OS photos, the date and time data are changed, at least for videos. What better way to remember the date and time of a photo than by renaming by renaming it? I was ready to shell out 25 bucks for a Mac OS app to do this for me when I stumbled onto this German site, dev.de, which features this free open source app called appropriately EXIF renamer. It works on all variety of digital photos, videos and audio files. There are options for the format of the new file name and flags files that have the same EXIF data, and more importantly, it doesn't disturb the original data. Very cool. Yeah. So thank you. Yeah. EXIF renamer from qdev.de is where it is. We've got a link in the show notes, of course, at maceacav.com. Is it the question I have? Is it is going to goober up? That's a technical term goober up your database in photos. I wouldn't use this on your photos library, right? I would just use this for folders of things you've either exported or that aren't, you know, aren't otherwise part of that. Yeah, I got you. OK. Yeah. Yeah. It's tough. Cool. I like it. Don't try this at home. No, do try that at home. Just not. No, I mean, photos. Yeah, yeah, exactly photos at home. Then we'll have other questions to answer. Yes, that's true. We do like being able to do this show. We don't like being the cause of the problems that allow us to do this show. So, yeah, Mike shares with us two new things. He says, when you were talking about travel accessories, I have two to add. The company Hyper makes an amazing gallium nitride charger. In fact, they make two of them a small and a large. The large still being amazingly small about the dimensions of a credit card. And just a little thicker than that. He says the large has three USB C ports and one USB, a the USB C charge at 100 watts, and I've had no trouble charging a MacBook Pro and Air and an iPad Pro all at the same time, seemingly at something approaching full speed. The unique feature it touts is that it passes through an AC outlet. So you plug it into the wall and then you still have an outlet that you can plug something else into. This is the part I like best and it's so often overlooked is that it fits flush against the wall. I've been to many older motels that have loose outlet switches and a charger sticks out far from the wall, especially a heavy one like the Apple laptop charger and falls right out onto the floor. I've seen this. He says these hyperchargers by being light and sitting flat to the wall. I've never had a problem with this for falling out. Very cool. Yeah, I'm not sure the the 100 watt one is 99 bucks at Hypersight. The 65 watt one is 70 bucks. That has two USB C and one USB A and also the pass through. They both do this pass through thing. They're both both listed as out of stock at Hypersight, at least at the moment. We're recording this, but yeah, keep an eye out for that or maybe, you know, grab one at a reseller like Amazon or something like that. Very cool. Oh, thank you for sharing that, Mike. I like yeah, yeah, yeah, it's so good. This gallium nitride stuff, like it makes that the space and weight of packing chargers and the heat given off, it's like so much. This is one of those. I mean, it's not a revolutionary improvement. It's an incremental improvement, but it certainly is a welcome one in my book. Yeah, I think I've replaced pretty much everything with the gallium nitride stuff and I'm probably going to do it again, because now that they've got them in the right form factors for me, that moving to, you know, you talked about this after your last trip, John, but now that we've all got lots of more than one USB C device that we travel with, aka, you know, a MacBook and an iPad that both use USB C. That's where it's like, OK, now I need I need all new charging gear. So it's fine. It's fine. But, you know, just tell it, yeah, but they're not going to stop at USB C. You know, there'll be a D or some other. And that's the problem, right? When are they going to be good with lightning for a long time? We're still good with lightning. I think we're going to have lightning on our on our on our iPhones 14 as well. Sure. But eventually everything, you know, it's now you've got a mishmash. You used to be able to carry, you know, a USB lightning and then maybe a USB micro. Yeah, that was it. Now I've got four cables and adapters. That's the way to go. The adapters, at least today. Yeah. Yeah. Having adapters for both directions, USB C to A and USB A to C without those, my travel bag would be, you know, twice the size. Right. Yeah. And then actually the mic that I'm using for this show is different. The first one was a USB C. This one is a USB. USB A. Yeah. But it's USB C coming out on my computer. So I had to, I bought a little adapter and it works great. But that's the way to do it rather than try to. Yeah. Yeah. You'll drive yourself crazy the only other way, man. Yeah. Yeah. And those adapters work like it's it's great. Oh, you can get you can get like three of them for nine bucks or something. Absolutely. But at first I thought it was USB mini, but it's not. There's micro. There's USB, then obviously C and lightning and. Right. Oh, yeah. Drive yourself crazy. Yeah. But I ought to look for a website that puts the photos and throw the link in the show notes. Let me see. Oh, for yeah, for the USB shapes. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's good. Well, you guys are chatting about the next one. OK, cool. Phil shares with us a something we've mentioned before, but Phil has a sort of a different take on it. He says, I want to remind us all about Switch Res X or Switch Res 10. I'm not sure which which way we're supposed to pronounce it. He says, I have an old 2011 two and a half inch, two and a half inch iMac. I think it's a little bit larger than that that I've been using for music production works surprisingly well with Maxed Out RAM and a big SSD. Great. I add in a 32 inch LG HDR display as a second monitor to the iMac, but could only get it to display at 1920 by 1080. So things looked pretty large. Not bad, but it wasn't great for displaying my DAW's mixer, like Logix Mixer. So I came across Switch Res 10, Switch Res X, that gives you much more control over your monitors than our stock OS. After installation, you have to temporarily turn off system integrity protection to access more display options. But you can turn it back on after getting your display set as you like. Setting it up was a bit fidgety, though. I now have my new 32 inch monitor running at its native resolution of 2560 by 1440. I think the screen refresh might be a bit lower. But for my uses, i.e. not playing games, it's been awesome. Thank you for that, Phil. Ah, very good. Yeah, I like I like this idea of using Switch Res X for that good call. Yeah. That's what we love about cool stuff found. Not only do we learn about things, but we learn about like a way to use them. So you get some extra life out of that old iMac because of it. Yeah, cool. PC McConaway in our Discord chat pre-show shared something else called Resolutionator, which is from the many tricks, folks. And that also adds some easy access to switching resolutions. I don't know if it requires system integrity protection to be disabled or not. So this might even be a better solution for Phil's problem or certainly an alternative solution. So yeah, thanks. Thanks for that, too. This is what I love doing. That's why I love doing this show. Have you run into anything like this over over the years, John F. Bron? No, no. OK, next up on the cool stuff. Found list is listener Ghana with the Nix mini two color sensor. It's a pocket sized color sensor that is like the eyedropper for the real world. And it's you know how like you can use the digital color meter on your Mac to grab the color of something on the screen and then you can apply that to whatever photo app or coloring app you're using. Well, this thing is an analog to digital color sensor. It's like a truly just a little device that you float over things in the real world and it will show you its digital equivalence. And I think it links with your phone and all of that good stuff. I'm sure Donna shares more colors and central part of any visual project. When you find inspiration in the digital realm, it's easy enough in the real world. You can use the Nix mini color sensor version two as your pocket color picker. Yeah, very cool. Thank you for sharing that, Donna. Huh, I've always I've done it with like my phone camera before, to be to be honest. And I think there's apps for the phone that can do it, too. My guess, my guess is they're not as calibrated as this. I mean, it's hard to do because lighting changes everything, right? You know, I have it. In fact, I have a set of drums behind me that are silver and they don't look silver. It they look silver very, very rarely. Most of the time they look gold because lights are typically filled with a lot of yellow rarely. Do we just have like, you know, six thousand K, you know, white light going? Yeah. And so, yeah, it's just one of those interesting things. They they look gold, but they are called granite sparkles. So anyway, light can change things. And that can be an issue when you're trying to do this with your phone. So now using a true color meter, that's it. Good stuff. That's what I like. More thoughts about any of that before we keep moving on down our cool stuff. Nice. I've had to do it at the paint shop. You know, you just bring them a paint, you know, imagine that they're pretty good at that. They're really good at that. Yeah, yeah, similar. So, yeah, yes, exactly. Exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. All right. Jeremy shares a pretty cool thing. It's called Woojer W O O J E R. And it is I'm going to call it wearable sound. It is a, you know, our headphones certainly can it is possible to have them produce sounds as low as 20 Hertz. That's what our ears typically can hear from about 20 Hertz up to at least one more children, 20,000 Hertz as we age. That top number sort of comes down rapidly, but there's a difference between hearing 20 Hertz or even 100 Hertz or 80. Or 40 Hertz in your ears and feeling it in your body like you would at, say, a concert or something where, you know, that low end is being amplified. And for some things, like the truly like sub low ends, like the 12 Hertz to really kind of move bodies, you're not going to feel. And this Woojer thing at W O O J E R dot com is a wearable. You can wear I think they've got a couple of versions. There's a vest and there's a strap that you can wear and you put on headphones as well. And the Woojer takes care of the low end for you. And I've never tried one, but it certainly makes sense that this would offer you a much more immersive sonic experience, both for music listing, also for gaming. I could totally see where this would be. You know, a lot of gaming chairs will have subwoofers built into them so you can feel it. In fact, you know, I'm a drummer. They as people as more and more people move to in ear monitors and and gave away the like monitor wedge that would be, you know, down on the floor screaming at you all night, you could hear a lot better and at a lot lower volume with in your monitors, which is a good thing, as long as you don't turn them up too much and then that's a bad thing. But regardless of how much you turn them up, you're never going to feel that thump of, you know, even a 12 inch speaker next to you. And so they came up with these butt shaker devices that you would clamp to your drum throne that would effectively do the same thing as this Woojer, which it, you know, just takes the the subsonic or even the not quite subsonic frequencies and just shakes your butt a little bit so that when you can feel the low end through your throne, which is kind of a cool idea. And this takes the same thing. So, yeah, I like it. Woojer. Thanks, Jeremy. Fun stuff. Huh. Interesting. Interesting. Expensive. What's that? Shows getting expensive. Yeah, well, it's I mean, the strap is 99 bucks. And yeah. And the the the the other thing I think is two ninety nine. I'm looking to hear back on their side. The vest is two forty nine. So there you go. Yeah, ninety nine bucks for the strap, two forty nine for the vest. So. Fun stuff. All right, John, you want to take us to Roy's question, my friend. Jumping ahead. We'll get into some Q&A. Well, you know, we're only jumping ahead for us for the listeners. We're right here. We're always right here. Yes, jumping. We asked, is there a way to adjust the date in a group of photos all at one time rather than to individually have to adjust the date for each photo? Good question. How about the thing that we mentioned earlier? EXIF renamer, I think may do it for you. Well, that would that change the date like in the exif info? I thought exif renamer just took the date out of the exif info and renamed the file, I think it can do both. OK, all right. OK, it was a suggestion. Now, the two other tools that I have had. In my in my toolbox that may also do this for you. They're both from publicspace.net. One is called a better finder attributes. OK, and maybe this one would be more appropriate. They also have one called a better finder rename. And from what I could see on one of the pages for one of these, it can dig into the exif data. Yeah, it looks like a better finder attributes. I'm looking here on their website as we're talking is is exactly that. In fact, there's one section that says change, add and remove exif, IPTC, and video metadata, and you can you can tweak that as much as you your heart desires. Yeah, that's I always forget about this stuff from publicspace, man. But they like they live in this realm. Yeah, there's an app in setup also called the edit image metadata. Oh, what are the odds? Sure, this is right on the nose there, isn't it? All right. So I'll edit image metadata. That's the name of the app. That's the name of the app. Yep. A meta image, maybe. But meta image, it's called meta image. That's it. Yeah, OK. All right. OK. That sounds a little more clever. Maybe the description is a meta image. It is. I had it backwards. That's all of meta image. Ah, got it. Well, I mean, that's the thing you would be searching for. So yeah, I just put in the word meta data and it was the first thing that came up. Very good. Yeah. All right. We'll put links to both of those in the show notes. Yeah, that's good. Oh, great stuff. Set up routinely, man. I need to I need to remember. I need to make it a habit to go there first for sure. So yeah, they they've cracked the code on a lot of this. It's a nice job. Well, yeah, I mean, they've in a sense, they've solved the discovery problem as long as we remember to use them for discovery, which clearly you do and John, you often do. I rarely do. But by curating a a family of apps that for the most part doesn't have a lot of duplication. And for the most part, it may not have like the cream of the crop of of an app that does the thing because they can't negotiate the right deal with whomever that is, but it will have an app that is capable of doing the thing that you want to do and very capable and oftentimes, you know, more capable than any of us need for those little things. And so, yeah, you just go in there and you search for, like you said, you search for metadata and I mean, you found an app that will do this for you. So, yeah. Yeah, I remember some somebody a while ago asked about they were having problems dealing with PDF files. Yeah. And I was like, OK, well, if preview doesn't work for you and Adobe's doesn't work for you, which it really should, right? I mean, Adobe's PDF stuff and kind of stupid over the years, if you ask me. But yeah, so I went to set up search for PDF and there were numerous options. So exactly. Yeah. Good stuff. All right. Sticking with the photos thing, but from a slightly different angle, Steve asks, he says, I have a problem so far that I have had no success. I'm an avid National Parks visitor. 362 out of 40, 431 visited. That's pretty good. He says, my primary photo library for my National Parks photos is my iPad. It's primary and it's a 256 gig iPad. It is my primary file used more than my MacBook Air. There are more than 12,000 photos, including those of family trips. And he shows how he has albums and he has one sort of parent album called National Parks, which has like 10,000 photos in it. And then in that are nested albums for each park. So all broken out. Very nice. His problem, he says, with this National Parks parent album, getting so large and my grandson beginning to become efficient in iPad use. I'd like to move all of my National Park albums from the iPad Pro to my new 512 gig iPad mini that I got to use exclusively for my travels and all things National Parks, Tripit, his stamps, all that good stuff. And I'd like to use it under a separate iCloud account. I've spent hours online with Apple support utilizing four different advisors. Their most viable solutions are to open a National Parks album on the, you know, on the existing iPad, but only open one of them. Select all of the photos in the park, airdrop or copy those to the iPad mini and then create a new album, rename it, paste it in, drag it under the National National Parks album, rinse and repeat 300, you know, how many parks as he visited 362. So, you know, repeat that 361 more times. Choice B is highlight and copy all 9000 photos, but without the album structure, doesn't want that either. He says, I'm not sure what to do. So I'm assuming that Steven is not currently using iCloud Photo Library, but he says he is backing up all of his photos to iCloud. And so if that's the case, he's already using iCloud storage for these photos, which means he has enough iCloud storage for these photos. So I think if it were me, I would enable iCloud Photo Library, at least temporarily, to sync the two iPads with each other and making sure on both of them to check that slider, John, that is, you know, download and keep originals on this device, right? So that in the end, both of these devices will have the originals of all of these photos and your iCloud, you know, or your photos album structure. And then all you would do is turn off iCloud Photo Library on the iPad. Or on both of them, you could. And when you do that, it's going to ask you, do you want to keep the photos locally and you say yes, and then it will let you. And then at that point, you're done. And if you want to log into a different iCloud account, you certainly can, because the photos are staying locally on your Mac. But I'm not entirely sure why you wouldn't just want to keep using iCloud photos throughout all of this, because why not? Like, if you're already backing them up to the cloud, why not let iCloud Photo Library do that, you know, quote unquote, backing up for you and then you get the syncing. And if you want to look at one of these photos on your phone, you know, it's there, you can download it, all of that. So that would be my. That would be how I would go about solving this problem. If for some reason iCloud Photo Library is, you know, against one's religion. I think you can still. But I haven't tried this in a while, so please correct me if I'm wrong. But I think you can still plug a non iCloud Photo Library attached iPhone or iPad into a Mac and sync your albums bi-directionally there. But again, I, you know, it's been so long since I've done that that I don't know. You could also try using. Could you use? I don't know. I don't know that Power Photos does that. Amazing might do that. I don't know any ideas from anybody else there. I haven't done anything but photos for years. So I think, yeah, you know, there used to be the if it was for everything else, too, was Sanuti, which was iTunes spelled backwards. Right, right, right. It's still available. Right. Yeah. Yeah. But that allowed you to access the stuff on your iOS devices. I know I'm amazing will let you do this kind of thing. So that might be the answer. I don't know. What would you do, John? That's what I was thinking. OK. Amazing. Yeah. Let you peek into your device. Yeah. But again, I, you know, if you're already storing your backups on on iCloud and using storage for that, it just seems to make more sense to just jump that over and and use that same storage for iCloud Photo Library. And you get so much more out of it from there. I don't know. That's my. I'm always missing something. But that's why we do this show. And that's why you send in your notes to us at feedback at MacGeekApp.com, because that's how we that's how we know what you're thinking. Where feedback at MacGeekApp.com? I think what he said is feedback at MacGeekApp.com. OK, that's correct. That's correct. Yes. All right. John, you want to talk VPNs with Don here? I think so. All right. So Don asked the question, thinking of installing a VPN to protect privacy. Do you have any recommendations for best VPN and reasons and features? Will a VPN protect my emails? And I'm going to kind of address this backwards. Sure. Based on what I've seen. Your email path should already be encrypted in that they use SSL or TLS to secure that channel. So your connection to your email provider should be secure. Now, if you want to get beneath the covers, you can go into the terminal and type net stat. And that'll show you all your network connections, including the ones to your mail servers. And they're going to have a little dot IMAPS. And I'm going to assume that means IMAPS secure. And I would think it would be similar for the outgoing as well. Now, if you want to protect your email, another thing is, though, I've not been doing this. You can use an SMIME certificate if you want to sign and encrypt your emails. But I found administering the cert and finding a free source to be quite a chore. Well, and in order to encrypt them, you can sign them on your own to encrypt them. You need to it depends on which direction we're talking about. But either way, you need the person with whom you are exchanging email to also participate with an SMIME cert, right? And and the same would be true for PGP. I quite frankly, I think I think Mac PGP or Mac GPG, whatever it's called now, would be the the right way for any of us to go about wanting to encrypt emails back and forth with each other. It's going to be it's a much more comprehensive and turnkey solution than the whole SMIME disaster. So that's that's what I would go for that. And I realize we're answering this backwards, which is fine. The he asked about protecting email. I don't know what he means by that, right? So, OK, I mean, maybe I'm wrong. We each have our own guesses. John's guess was about the transport and maybe the encryption of the email. Your guess, Pete, is I just assumed that my email was always in the clear. Maybe I'm wrong. I just assume my my password username was going to my mail server in the clear. No, therefore, being BP end up, which was the way to go. So no, it's not. Yeah, it's it's not as in the clear as you would think. So long as you're doing what John mentioned, which is using SSL for the transport of your, you know, of all of your email, which by default, most of us are these days, you'd have to go out of your way to use email in the clear. So almost all clients Thunderbird, Mac, Mail are all going to be SSL. And all the servers are going to be SSL. And all the clients will attempt SSL by default and only fall back to not SSL. OK, you know, there. But but again, that might not be what our listener was asking, right? You know, he might I took away from the question. Yeah, that's but that's yeah. He might he might not want the people on the network, the people who manage any network he's on to know where his email is stored. And and that would certainly be seen when you go to connect, even if you connect securely to say Google Server, you're you're connecting a very obviously to Google Server. They can't see what's being sent, but they can see the type of data that's being sent, they can see that you're connecting on an email port, et cetera, et cetera, right. So it all and and stored on your computer and more importantly, stored on the recipient's computer. Your email is stored in the clear and very, you know, like the protecting email and transit sort of pales in comparison to the fact that it's going to be stored forever in the clear on the other end and potentially stored in the clear or at least, you know, in the clear once a subpoena arrives at your email server, too. And so, you know, encrypting it via John's methods, you know, SMIME or GPG or PGP would be the right thing. But we don't know what that means. Shall we move to the VPN part of the question here? Sure. So option number one, if you have a sonology, which I don't know if you do. But if you do, they offer a VPN server, which is what I personally mainly use. So that's one option. But then the other that is only that won't protect the activity from his network. That's only for if you're somewhere else and want the VPN from like Starbucks or a hotel or something like that, you're VPNing into your house, but everything you do, everything you do from your house can be seen by your ISP because you're not using a VPN for your outbound stuff. So just just making sure everybody. No, thanks. Thanks for clarifying. Yeah. Outside of that, we have a friend who over analyzed VPN offerings. So we're going to point you to Allison Sheridan's 2022 VPN research for Mac users. She distilled down. She went through everything Consumer Reports did and and and sort of distilled that down to four. And those four are MOLVAD, Private Internet Access, IVPN and Mozilla VPN. And she did this just back in May of this year. So like this is super current. And she went through. I think it wound up being like 7000 words or something like this. But but she she distilled it all down and came up with a series of criteria, which she explains and ranked the criteria and then went about evaluating each of these VPN services and came up with, you know, the bottom line where she tallied everything up and came up with the fact that Private Internet Access scored the highest by far. And some of these things in no particular order are platform availability, turns itself on automatically on untrusted networks. Easy to figure out how to trust a network, family sharing, price, speed. You can have it on enough devices, local network access. Is it pretty? Is it fiddly? Those things are important. She tallied it all up. Private Internet Access won by a landslide. And we had a conversation about this back when she did this. And I switched immediately after after reading this. I had, you know, I'd had Express VPN that I've been using. And it was like, oh, OK, well, this is easy. And I think I was able to get three years of PIA for, I don't know, seventy nine bucks or something like that. Ninety nine bucks was like, OK, it was three months. Pete, you just cut out. But I think you said plus three months for you or something. Yeah, I think they usually it's three months free in addition to that. And then the other thing that I noted was when you were new, it's more expensive. So let it expire for a day and go in as a new customer. And all right, well, we'll have to remember that in three years and three months. Yeah. Yeah. But yeah. And then the other thing that I noticed about that recently, it is getting really granular, which server you when you're overseas, you can choose cities in Italy, you can choose various. It used to be USA East, USA Streaming East, USA West, USA South. Now it's New Hampshire, Vermont, Connecticut, Maine. So they they have got a ton more servers out there. And and I haven't noticed much of a speed. There's some if you do a speed test with and without, you're going to get some hit, but not significant. I mean, it's well over a hundred megabits. And I'm not. Yeah, like I have found testing here on, you know, my home network is a I've got gigabit fiber, right? And I have found like with the ones that I was testing with Private Internet Access, I was getting over 300 megabits per second in both directions. So for most people's connections, that's faster than what your, you know, your cable connection, if you got a 250 down and 10 up or something. Well, you ain't going to have any like PIA is not your bottleneck. Right. And even for me here. So technically a bottleneck, but I mean, 300 up and down is more than enough. I have my my gigabit connection because I want plenty of upstream. I want more than 10 megabits of upstream, which is sort of the most I could get from Comcast. I guess I can get 40 from them. But I wanted more of that because I upload big, huge video and audio files all the time. So but 300 megabits is fine. Most servers, I will tell you, as someone with gigabit symmetrical, it is rare that I connect to anything other than a speed test server that will either let me send or send to me faster than a couple of 100 megabits. Like the 500 megabit symmetrical plan for me would be would make zero difference other than it being. But I think that's the problem is like consolidated and only charges five bucks a month less or something for that. So it's not worth it. It's not worth it. Yeah. Yeah, but yeah. Yeah, so yeah, I've been very happy with private internet access. And there are some others I've been wanting to test. I want to test out Nord. That was I don't know why that didn't come up on Allison's list. But it's like it's not there at all. So that's another one I'm curious to test out. But because I know quite a few people who have had good luck with that over the years as well. Also, there's like an ownership thing with the VPNs. They're most of them are many of them are all owned by the same country company in like Russia or something, I think. Yeah, so, you know, I don't know. But Allison is a retired engineer and she approached it with an engineer's mind. So yeah, she was very granular. It was awesome. I would say you're correct that she is a retired engineer called calling her a recovering engineer would would be incorrect. She's still very much an active engineer. She's just not working for the company that she used to work for. Yeah, yeah, for sure. Yeah. All right, more on this one. Go ahead, John. Yeah. The one that I still like and works for me is Tunnel Bear. The reason that I like them and I don't know where they came up in in her analysis, but what I like about them is that they have apps for everything. Mac, Windows, iPhone, iPad, Android, browser extensions and also it'll make you appear to come from different areas if you need to do that, because some things. I remember when I was trying to access BBC content, they're like, go away. You're not in this country. And it's like, oh, man, it's like when the blackout sports event. Same thing. Sure. I'm looking at the price here. So Tunnel Bear is quite a bit more expensive than PIA. So you might want to switch just to save some money. Allison did mention Tunnel Bear. Well, she did not mention Tunnel Bear. She quoted consumer reports mentioning them saying at some point only IVPN, Mozilla VPN, MULVAD and Tunnel Bear accurately represent their services and technology without any broad sweeping or potentially misleading statements. So but yeah, I think my guess is pricing sort of kept Tunnel Bear out of it because they're they're pretty expensive. It's like, I don't know, 40 bucks a year or something, which I mean, that's, you know, that's a lot. I usually manage to get away with the so they give you a certain amount of free data. They give you 500 megs a month for free. That's right. Yeah. Or 500 megs total now. Yeah. So yeah, I mean, yeah, we'll put a link in there. And I like the bear. Of course. There you go. All right. Let's move. You mentioned Synology there as a way of creating an inbound inbound VPN for yourself. Listener Mace has a question. He says, I am currently I currently have my tunes on my MacBook and it must be powered up for the music to play from my Sonos devices. I also have a portable plug-in drive for carbon copy cloner and a second one for time machine backups where whenever I perform the I do them over the it's been X number of days since your last backup nag gets to me. So I'm looking for an always on network device that I can carbon copy clone to time machine to and store tunes on for Sonos and Apple music. My first Google's brought me to a product comparison with devices in the $400 range. That's a little steep for me, considering I don't know anything about how to configure it once I get it. So I am, as you all know, a big fan of the Synology NASA's. They the the thing about getting a network storage device like Mace already knows three things that he wants to do with it right out of the gate. And those are three good things to do and in three very good reasons to go and get a nest, something always on your network that can sort of be this thing that you do stuff with is great. Most people and I would venture to say almost anyone who actively listens to this show will likely wind up looking to do more with their device once you get it. And so he was looking for what's a what's a good entry level model. So for me, entry level is two drives. Synology definitely sells at least in the past has sold one drive models. I figure if you're going to bother to do this, start with two drives. That way, at least you've got some fault tolerance. And if a drive dies, you know, you're not losing your data. And there's three of them that I would go with. I'm going to list all three on our site. And in fact, I've built a little URL that will compare all three of them for you so that you can you can take a look on your own. But they range from the DS2 20 J at one hundred eighty seven dollars up through the DS2 18 play for two hundred thirty and the DS2 20 plus for three hundred bucks. And the the lowest end one has five hundred twelve megs of RAM, the DS2 18 play for an extra of forty three dollars has the same CPU that doubles the RAM up to a gigabyte that will make file sharing quite a bit faster. And then the top of this particular line that I've created is the two twenty J at three hundred bucks, that adds a Celeron processor, doubles the RAM again to two gigs with the ability to expand to six, bring support for BTRFS, which is Synology's APFS like file system and more that. That's that's sort of the top of the well, it's not the top of the line of the two days, but it's the top of the line of the entry level two days. But, you know, if you're just looking to get started, even that DS2 20 J at one hundred and eighty seven bucks really isn't a bad place to begin. The lack of support for BTRFS would be the thing that would give me the most pause only because I know how I am. And so I project that onto all of you, but I know I'm wrong. I know that eventually I would want to have more storage than just the two drives that are in there and Synology's cool because if you, you know, you have your two bay Synology use that for a couple of years and then you're like, great, I want to move up to a five bay or four bay or six bay or something, eight bay, whatever. The coolest part is you can take those two drives out of your original one, put them in one with two or more base and all of your files, all your configuration, everything comes with. And so once you get to that point, you're going to want to be on BTRFS and you're not going to be able to if you don't start that way, so you'd have to, you know, rebuild your volume and sort of go through all of that. So that would be the only reason, but I don't know you need to decide for yourself if that's the reason to spend an extra hundred and thirteen dollars. If it is, do it. I don't think you'd be upset about it. If it's not, don't do it. And I also don't think you'll be upset about it. So it really comes down to that. But I would say one of those three for entry level, you could certainly go and get the 720 plus or whatever it is. It's also two days and has way more computing power and all of that. But I don't I don't think it's going to make a difference for you out of the gate and you want to get yourself started, get your feet wet and not spend a fortune and this is the way to do it. So, Dave, I have a question. Are any of the three or four bay drives within 50 bucks of these two bay drives? And, you know, would it be worth just going to the three bay or four bay to start and only putting two bays in and then go as you need it? So I mean, I think that would be my approach for expandability. But that's not a bad idea. And the answer is no. I think you're even at the top end, probably a hundred bucks or a hundred and fifty bucks away. So, you know, you're talking about tripling the price pretty quickly to get, you know, and and and that's I think what Mace was finding. So, you know, if you want to get your feet wet, though, one of those three is is not a bad place to start. But you've got I mean, if you've got the extra cash and you want to future proof a little, then, yeah, absolutely. Get, you know, get one of the four or four or six bay ones, the five bay ones. I am I'm lamenting the the lack of the DS 15, 20 plus in the product line. And I'm also lamenting the lack of anything released since 2020, not having a GPU in it. I've been using the 1522 plus. And as I said, it seems to hold up OK for transcoding, but it doesn't have a GPU. So it can't do quote unquote hardware transcoding. I'm not I'm still I'm still not sure how I feel about that. What I what worries me is the direction of that. You know, if there hasn't been a product release since 2020 with a GPU, it does that mean that Synology is not the right brand five years from now to be using for our media libraries? Because it's kind of an easy way to make a NASA friendly to all of that transcoding that we at times are going to want. Yeah, you know, it's all like I don't know. I'm I'm I'm asking I'm asking questions. Get them on the horn and give them a shake, Dave. Yeah, well, it's yeah, I know that's right. I do know I have I have a call scheduled with them coming up to ask that specific question. Yeah, and I will I'll I'll report back what I what I find. Yeah, yeah, because I was amazed at the support that I got. I had a file corruption issue three months ago or so. Yeah. And you know, it's a seven year old. Drive and I didn't get any pushback from them. Yeah, that's all that's out of warranty. None of that. They scanned it and they went, oh, you got a corrupt file. We got this. Yep. Boom. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, which which model are you running these days? Is that the 920, John? Is that what you're is that you're kind of your your primary one? The 920 plus or whatever it is. Is that right? Yes, 918, 918. Oh, OK. Yeah. And then the one below it is a B.S. But it's the 918, your primary. Um, I kind of split workloads across the two. OK, which one do you have your media library on? The one that's below it. Oh, interesting. It's a six bay. Oh, OK. Yeah. All right. OK. Oh. Yeah, I was looking at the processors and and yeah. So like, for example, Plex, when it's doing the potential for transcoding, I wanted to put on the machine that had the beefier processor. Yeah. Right. Right. Right. OK. Yeah. So yeah. OK. Yeah. Yeah. If you it's that's the right that's the right decision. Yeah. All right, folks. Well, that brings us to the end of our our fun little time together here this week. I hope you learned your five new things. I definitely learned my five. It's fascinating stuff. Yeah, it's a good show. Good stuff. Yeah. Congrats again on your show, pilot Pete. So there I was. Thank you. Yeah, we're having a ball. Yeah, the show that came out yesterday. Wildest landing in naval aviation history. Far none. And we talked to the crew that did it. I can't wait to listen. Yeah. I can't wait. All right. Cool. John, you got anything else to share with them as we as we begin to head out for the week? No. OK. Thanks for listening, folks. Thanks to cash fly for providing all the bandwidth to get the show from us to you. Thanks to collide at KOL IDE dot com slash M G G for sponsoring the show. Thanks to Tweet for doing the swap with us. Thanks to all of you for sending in all your tips and your questions and just listening to the show. That's really amazing. We are humble stewards and very, very thankful to be able to do this all the time for all of us. John, I think I was the one that started us off today. Do you have anything to finish us off, my friend? Well, I'm going to end it. Oh, some advice. And that is don't get me. If you're a podcast movement this week, look us up. John and I'll be there.