 The Mac Observers' Mac Geek Gap, Episode 884 from Monday, August 9th, 2021. Folks, and welcome to the Mac Observers' Mac Geek Gap, the show where you usually send in your questions, your tips, and your cool stuff found. And we usually share your questions and answer your questions, share your tips, share your cool stuff found, share some cool stuff found on our own with the goal being that we each learn at least five new things every single time we get together. Today is going to be a little bit different, folks. The goal is still to learn five new things, but we're going about it in a different way. We had to record this episode a little early because of some travel and such, and so we decided to try an experiment. And so we're going to do a series of deep dives today, mini dives, snorkels, I don't know, where we go through some of the cool things that we use and we tell you about them. We are giving ourselves permission to fail today, more so than usual. You know, we usually have a relatively high bar for ourselves where we like to be prepped and we are prepped. But we're doing this a little differently, and so it might be a completely failed experiment. One thing that we are also giving ourselves permission to do is use video more today than we usually do. I need to say up front, this will not become a habit. This show is an audio show. Yes, we do record and stream to video. And yes, we do release segments of the show and indeed the entire show as videos on our YouTube channel, youtube.com. But today, but usually we air on the side of making certain that the content is not, that video is not required to enjoy the content today that may or may not be true. We're still going to really try to make this work in an audio fashion. But we might that's the first place we might fail. And again, we don't intend to make it a habit, but we're going to have some fun with it and see where it goes. Five new things. That's our goal for now here in Durham, New Hampshire. I'm Dave Hamilton. And here in fearful Connecticut, no longer being overrun by the wildlife. That's good. We're being overrun by by by rain here in at least in New Hampshire. It's been crazy, man. Oh, yeah, we had a flash flood alert. Yeah. Yeah. Each we usually get that my little pool overflowed our little inflatable pool. It's not that little, but it got it got too full. I had gotten in the habit of draining it when after rainstorms and we had a big one yesterday. I was going to drain it today and I woke up this morning. It was like, oh, so some of the sand around it washed away. It's kind of a pain in the neck. But anyway, all right, let's let's just dive right in puns intended. Wait a minute. Wait a minute. Wait a minute. We have we have a jingle for this. I think we have a jingle for this, John. And it's time for a deep dive. There we go. That's right. The first one that I am going to start with is my recent forays into cord cutting, John. And it's been amazing. We are no longer Comcast customers. We have no link to Comcast in our house anymore for our Internet. Of course, we're using consolidated communication. And that really is the linchpin to all this. If we did not have an alternative to using Comcast, a better alternative to using Comcast for Internet, Comcast was fine. It's just that consolidated is better because I get symmetrical gigabit fiber for less money than I was paying Comcast. So that is certainly step one of this. And then with that sort of opening the door, we started looking at what we were paying and we couldn't pay Comcast less. They forced us to buy a package from them that included TV, phone and Internet. And if we just wanted any one of those three, it was the same price because they were going to give us the other two for 120 bucks a month. And so it started to become this very... And it really isn't just 120 a month. With all the extra fees and everything, it actually becomes closer to 175 a month. I know it's crazy that the package is 120 and then whenever all is said and done, you have to rent the box and the cable card and the this and that and the other and the fees and the yada yada. And suddenly it's 175 bucks a month. Yeah, that's about where I'm at. Yeah. So it's actually cheaper for us to pay for consolidated, which is 70 a month flat for symmetrical gigabit. And then whatever streaming TV service we want to use. And we do like to watch things on network TV. We like to watch some sports. And so having something is important for us for people that don't watch things on network TV and don't watch sports. You can probably get away from paying with paying a lot less, but we do. And so we have been experimenting for the last couple of weeks with both YouTube TV and Fubo TV. And what I'm showing here on the screen right now is is YouTube TV. And this has been it's been fantastic, John. I have to say YouTube TV, they get it. And it is the user interface of YouTube TV works really well. The biggest change for us, in fact, is not so much being away from Comcast, but not having Tivo anymore. We have been Tivo people since 1999. No, no, no, no. Summer of 2000. Summer of 2000. So 21 years since we bought our first Tivo. That has been the biggest change for us. But YouTube TV, they get it. Right. So when you launch YouTube TV, you're brought to a home screen. You can choose to either have it mimic the experience of live TV and start playing something right away, or you can turn that off. We turn that off. I have no interest in any of that. But it what's great is we have the option. And then you can set up they have what they call their DVR, which is a cloud DVR. But you tell it what you want it to record for you. And then it records your local version of whatever show that is. So you get your local commercials and all of that stuff, even if it's a, you know, nationwide show. And so you can, if you're looking at this with us, you can see some of the things that we've watched. There's a lot of things in our library, which is our DVR section. They call it your library. You got three tabs, library, home and then live. But in your library, you've got that's your DVR. We've got a lot of Olympic stuff because I told it. Sure, go get the Olympics. One nice thing about the YouTube TV is that your storage is unlimited and they save things for nine months. So when it when we were setting it up, the Olympics are just starting. They're like, Hey, do you want to watch some Olympics? And I was like, sure, I checked the box and kind of went nuts with it. And so you see a lot of Olympics things in my library. And then you can also see the rest of the stuff that we have there, like a Rick and Morty. So do you a Rick and Morty and that show is messed up. You were asking a question though. Yeah, I mean, what was it with the turkeys, man? Anyways, so do you run the YouTube app on your TV? Excellent question. I run the YouTube TV app on my TV. So we have an LG TV and there are separate apps for YouTube and YouTube TV. The same is true on your iPhone. If you if you're looking at my screen here, you can see that I'm in. Well, it's I'm in Microsoft Edge, but it's a Chromium browser. And it's offering to have me download the Chrome app of YouTube TV to my Mac. I'm not going to do that on this particular Mac because I don't watch TV on this Mac. This is the Mac in the studio. But you can and you can do it on your phone, your iPad and all of that stuff. And they do have apps available for Apple TV and Roku and all of that. There was some I think it was for a brief spell. There was some service that blocked the YouTube TV app. And so all Google did was they put YouTube TV functionality inside the YouTube app. And essentially, you know, caused a little bit of a stalemate and said, Hey, I dare you to block the YouTube app from all your customers. Which, of course, this company, whoever it was wouldn't do. And it's like that ended real fast. OK, all right. Well, yeah, I have an LG as well. Yeah, so you probably you certainly could install the YouTube TV app on your Apple TV. If you don't have an LG TV, you know, if the app isn't available for your LG TV. But I think it I think it probably is. And so you get the same experience everywhere. You can have, I believe, up to six people connected to your account. And what's nice is each person gets their own DVR library. So like my daughter can put the things in that she wants. Even though, yes, I realized you're seeing that I watched the Bachelorette here. The Bachelorette is the key to me getting Mac GeekGab prepped early in the week. My family watches the Bachelorette and I sit there on the couch with my family, half watching the Bachelorette. I probably know more about it than I think I do. Answering Mac GeekGab questions on my laptop. So but, you know, that's so that's why it's in my account and not my daughter's account because we do it as a family event. And as the kids get older, the more family events that we have, the better. And as you would expect, and it seems weird to say this out loud, but I have a point here. Once it starts recording something, you can start watching it from the beginning. You don't have to, you know, you don't have to wait till it's finished or anything. You just go ahead and start recording, start watching. So if I fire open, you know, Rick and Morty here, we can see that. Okay, you know, if I've watched the episode already, I can mark the episode or even the entire season is watched. And you can see some of these things are DVR'd episodes that it got for me. And then others are set as VOD, Video on Demand, where it's in YouTube's library. And so it's able to present that to me as part of my subscription. The subscription cost is 65 bucks a month with YouTube TV. And you get all this stuff. And, you know, so here we go, right? If I say I'm going to play the DVR'd version of this up, it comes. You can see my local commercials. YouTube TV is nice. I can fast forward 15 seconds. Now what we're doing here on my browser is a different experience than I would get on my TV. And that's an important thing to know. Every one of these services, each app is going to act a little bit differently based upon the platform that it's on. And they all offer like a seven-day free trial. I highly recommend you take. You can't not take advantage of the trial. You can't just choose to skip the trial, but definitely take advantage of it and test it where you're going to be watching. Because as you saw in my browser, when I hit the 15-second skip, it just skips, right? When I hit the 15-second skip on my TV, I start getting a little thumbnail along the timeline. It pauses the TV's action. And it shows me just a little thumbnail. And so I can 15, 15, 15. Oh, I went too far. Back 15. Go. Very smooth experience with YouTube TV. And it works really well. So as far as the user experience goes, YouTube TV of the ones I've tested absolutely wins. Like it just works. Does it look different than my Tivo interface? Of course. Is it just as easy to use? Of course. It works great. And if I want to go to live TV, I can go to live TV. It'll show me a grid view of, you know, what's currently on and where. And then I can just choose, you know, what channel to watch. If we wanted to watch morey, we've got eight minutes left. Oh, it wants me to verify my home area, which I guess, evidently, I haven't done on this browser. So I'm not going to go through and do that now. But that's one of those things so that it's sure that it's showing you, like I said, the right commercials at the right time and all of that. So that's YouTube TV, John. The other one that I've been testing is Fubo TV. And at Fubo.TV. And we've got links for all of these in the show notes here. And the thing that got me to start testing Fubo, John, is that YouTube TV does not have the same channel lineup. That Fubo has. And one of the things that Fubo has is our local sports station, NESN. And we like to watch the Bruins sometimes. And we also like to watch the local UNH games if we're not at them. And many times those show up on Nessan. Fubo prides itself in being the network or the service that has access to all your regional sports networks, your RSNs. YouTube TV has been divesting itself of those relationships. And so they do not have Nessan anymore. And it's not entirely sure if they're going to get it back. I think Nessan charges them five bucks a customer. Fubo passes that cost right along to you, right? So effectively Fubo is the same price with add-ons if you want, but Fubo winds up with your regional sports networks being that same 65 bucks a month. But Fubo only has a 30-hour DVR for your account. So unlimited YouTube TV 30-hour for Fubo. Their user experience, especially on our LG TV, and to be fair, the app is new. It's new as of May, I think, John. But it's not great. In fact, it's pretty terrible. We can't really watch anything with it. For example, on our TV, when we go to fast forward things in Fubo, it's like a traditional fast forward. There's no 15-second skip and there's no thumbnail. So we hit fast forward and I can watch the counter go and the screen is black otherwise. And I just have to guess, blind, whether or not I'm where I want to be in the show. So that's non-optimal. It really makes watching things on it quite terrible, especially when we could watch the same thing, at least currently, on YouTube TV. So what we've been saying we want is the YouTube TV experience on our TV with Fubo's lineup. You can pay more with Fubo. You can pay an extra, I think an extra five or six bucks a month to add a family plan to that. And that increases your DVR from 30 hours to 250 hours, but still more limited than what YouTube TV has. And the biggest one for us. And this doesn't seem to be universal on Fubo TV, John, but it's definitely something we've experienced more often than not. We will DVR a show. And this happened with The Bachelorette the other night, whatever it was we were watching. We turned it on and the show had already started. It starts at 8 p.m. Eastern. It might have been 8.20 by the time we finished cleaning up from dinner or whatever. So we go in, we hit play, and it gives me two options. It says, yes, this is in progress, the recording in progress. Do you want to join it live or do you want to stop the recording so that you can go back to the beginning? And it's like, well, I want neither one of those things. I want to keep it recording and start at the beginning like I can on YouTube. And Fubo was like, yeah, that's not an option. And evidently, this has been a problem with them for quite some time, especially it becomes a real problem with sports games where they add an extra hour to the end of the recording just to make sure you don't miss overtime or whatever that is. And so people sometimes have to wait hours after a game has completed to start watching it. That doesn't seem like a good experience for a service that prides itself on being there for sports primarily. But you know, that's been our experience with it. I'm hoping to see them get better with that. We will keep an eye on it because, like I said, their channel offerings are way better with Fubo than they are with YouTube TV for us. But that's really what it comes down to is the for us. They're about the same price, like I said, and they are showing the wrong thing. They are about the same price and they are equally targeting similar audiences. But YouTube TV is the one we're leaning towards, even though we're probably going to be unhappy about not having access to Nessan. So I don't know what we're going to do. At the moment, access to Nessan isn't that big of a deal for us. So we're hoping that by the time it matters, somebody will have sorted out either YouTube will have added it or Fubo will have cleaned up their interface for our TV and we can actually, you know, suffer through it a little bit better. So that's where I am on that. Any other questions, John? No. All right. Well, you want to take us to the next deep dive, my friend? Yes. So I'm going to do a little dive into my charging choices, Chi and otherwise. Okay. Let's go to the video. Ah, and there we are. Okay. The first one here, and you can see I purchased it in 2018, when I got my iPhone 8, which supports Chi. Yep. I was like, yeah, the phone didn't come with a Chi charger. And I was looking for one budget. And this is one that came to my attention. So I picked one up. It's the Samsung Chi certified wireless charging pad with two amp wall charger. And it performs as advertised works fine. It has a little ring on it that will be one color. It'll be blue when it's charging, and it'll go green when your device is fully charged. So that's kind of nice. Sure. And now let's move along here. Yes, sir. I'm going to go to the next one here. So when I look at the page on Amazon, they're like, oh, there's a newer model of this item. I'm like, okay. And this is the Samsung Chi certified fast charge wireless charger pad 2019 edition with cooling fan. Okay. That's nice. That's actually really smart. I've because my Chi devices are always hot when I pick them up off the charger. Oh, that will that will because I've had my devices stop charging. I got to get one of these rights. Interesting. Okay. Yeah, go on. Sorry. Okay. So, um, so we got those two here. Um, let's go to the next one. Let's see. Copy URL. Paste that in here. So when I got my MacBook Pro. Um, it comes with a, I believe it's a 85 watt charger. Okay. Okay. That's kind of nice, but I wanted, I wanted more. Okay. And what I found, what is going on here? It's not showing. Why is it not showing? All right. But anyway, tell us about it. It's fine. Power, power port, Adam PD four. Um, and this one got the juice man. It, it can provide up to 100 Watts of charging power. Okay. Um, it has two USB a ports and two USB C ports. Nice. So you can charge up to four devices. And will each of those USB C ports. Provide 100 Watts of power. If that's the only thing connected to that port, if that's the only thing connected there to the device. I believe if you have two devices, then I think it splits it 5050. Right. But if you only have one, it, it'll give a single device. 100 Watts is if the device request that. Yeah. Up to. Okay. Yeah. And it's probably not a hundred because I think the chief standard falls just shy of it. Right. It's like 98 or something like that. But yes. Okay. Yeah. Cool. Cool. So, um, it's a hundred bucks. You know, it's a little pricey, but, um, you know, it does what I need. And I got two of them. Okay. All right. Yeah. Those are, those would be nice to have probably too big to travel with, but nice to have because I've got one of those too. And it sits in the living room and, and so it becomes the charging station, uh, for the living room. So yeah. Yeah. It's a bit weighty. Yeah. I mean, you could still put it in your computer bag, but, um, you know, there are other options that we'll talk about in a moment here. So next, this is a device. Uh, so I remember I saw these guys at, um, yeah, go ahead. No, I don't want notifications. How annoying. Okay. So, um, Luma Charge is a company that I ran into at CES, um, a couple of years ago. And I think that this is, uh, quite a unique device here. It's, they call it the universal phone dock with fast wireless charging. Okay. So it does Qi, but then it also has, uh, and you can, uh, well, you can't, if you're looking at the video, you can see it. And then it has a little dial on it. What is that for you may ask? Um, uh, it provides, let's see here, uh, the one I have. Yeah. So it provides a lightning port, a, um, a micro USB port. And, uh, I believe a USB C. So that's, that's for, if you don't have Qi, it, it will, it will actually charge via a wired connection and you get to pick which one pops out of it. Is that right? Yes. Great. That's cool. Oh, I like that. Oh. Yeah. And so I, you know, and I use this regularly. So, uh, so yeah, uh, 50 bucks, which, uh, I think, uh, for what it does is, uh, it's pretty good. Cool. Um, okay. Next we're gonna, we're gonna get current device that I have in my car. Okay. Uh, for charging things. Um, it's the anchor row of smart charge F2 Bluetooth FM transmitter wireless audio adapter and receiver car charger with Bluetooth car locator app support with two USB ports. Um, and you can do all sorts of the, I mean, the, the number of things it does is pretty impressive. So, um, so the one that I have has, uh, two ports. They're, you know, smart, you know, they'll, um, charge as fast as, uh, as your device will, uh, will be willing to accept. Uh, but some of the other things it does. So it has, there's an iOS app. Um, but some of the other neat things that it does. So, uh, it's an FM transmitter. So I can send audio. So I wouldn't say it's, it's, you know, hard play, maybe kind of. But anyways, so I can stream using Bluetooth from my phone to this and then my radio in the car. Um, and you tell it what frequency you want. So I picked, you know, an unoccupied channel, which is kind of a challenge in the metro area. I think I have it at like 87, uh, megahertz or something like that. Um, but you can stream music from your phone. To this device and it comes through your car radio. Sure. Okay. Okay. So this is for people that don't have Bluetooth in their car or, or car play, of course. Um, but if your car doesn't have Bluetooth or car play, um, then, then that's this device. But you have a, there's a newer version of this, right? That you've got on your list. Um, uh, but some of the other features. So in the app, here's another thing. Um, which is, is pretty cool. Um, it'll tell you the status of your car's battery. So it shows the voltage. Right. Cause it's, it's plugged into your car. Oh, that's pretty cool. I like that. That's smart man. Yeah. And it actually comes up. So normally batteries in cars are about 12 volts. Yep. Um, mine actually comes in a little higher. Uh, I've got a new car battery a couple of years ago, but it actually comes up to like 14 volts. So that's nice. Is it, is that when the car is running versus when the car is not running? Okay. That makes sense. Yeah. So you're seeing power from the alternator more likely than just from the battery. Yeah. Yeah. That's cool. If it's just sitting there, it'll show a lower voltage. So, but I think the new one is the one to recommend to people because it's the same price. It's 25 50 for the new one. Right. And, um, and that's basically all the same functionality except you get a USB C port and a USB a port, right? Correct. Yeah. And it's got noise canceling on the Bluetooth mic. Yes. And another thing you can do with this is you can make a phone call. Right. Right. And I tried this the other day. So it has, you know, a little, little button on it for making a phone call. So you can also make a phone call with it. And let me see the last feature. Oh, yeah. It has a Bluetooth locator. So if you're running the app and you leave your car, it will mark where it is and then show you where it is on a map in case you're forgetful and forgot where you parked your car. Sure. Sure. Yeah. Yeah. So very cool. Kind of like an air tag. And yeah. So yeah. As you pointed out, there's a link to the newer version that as far as I can tell the difference is that it has USB C and USB A whereas the one that I have has two USB A ports. And noise cancellation within the microphone and Bluetooth 5. So yeah, this, in fact, this one's 50 cents less or 40 cents less expensive than the older one. So I would definitely go get the newer one. Yeah. All right. Moving on. Keep moving here. We're 10 minutes into this segment just to give you a thing. So let's see. I know you and I said we were trying to do 10 minute segments. Let's see if we can do 15 minute segments. Okay. All right. Next. We don't know what we're doing here. We're making, like I said, we're making this up. So there you go. Yeah. Okay. So this, as you can see, I got this in 2018. I wanted to, I wanted to get a mount, a chi mount in my car. Okay. And I chose this one and it does exactly as advertised. The IOD easy one touch wireless chi fast charge car mount kit. IOD makes good stuff for the car, man. I've had good experience. Yeah. That's a good choice. Yeah. So it's very flexible. You know, it has an adjustable mount for various phones. You can see, or well, if you're looking at the, and then when you put the phone in, you can see there's a little button there. Once you put it in, in the mount, it'll start charging and there's a green LED on it. And it's pretty much it through this. And then they have a, and they had a slightly newer version that we're going to link to. Okay. Always buy the newer version folks. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. But yeah, 40 bucks. Cool. So that's great. All right. Next here. So let's talk about battery packs, Dave. Okay. So I like this one here. So there's two that I like. So this one of our friends at my charge provided, but it's the my charge wireless charger, portable charger, power bank, dual USB, 10 Watts, 2.4 amps, 10,000 milliamp hour battery. So that's, that's pretty, pretty hefty. It has two USB ports and a micro USB that I think you use to charge it. But here's the interesting thing. So it's a Qi charger. Well, you can charge either using the USB ports or it's a Qi charger, but so you can put the phone on top and it'll, it'll charge your phone, but it also can receive a charge from another Qi charger. Check that out. Oh, okay. So it can be passed through Qi. You can, you can lose all kinds of power to heat. If you try with this scenario, you could charge it from another one. You could stack four of them and, and, and, and heat the air. Okay. That's cool though. I mean, well, super handy if you've got like a bedside charger with Qi, you put this thing on it, you put your phone on it, you wake up in the morning, everything's charged up. You take it, you're ready to go. I like it. That's good. All right. We got time for like two more things at this pace. Maybe. All right. All right. Let's look here. All right. And this is one I forgot how I learned about it, but let me copy the link URL here. So this is another Qi power bank. It's a similar functionality, but it's a, I think a little less expensive than the one I just mentioned, but the Jarve PPS wireless exec power delivery, 10,000 milliamp hour power bank with 10 watt wireless charging and type C 18 watt power delivery. And it's 50 bucks. I use this on occasion as well to charge my phone. Cool. Let's see. I would say skip the next one because you focus mostly on phones. And so let's stick with phones on this for your last one. And then in a future episode, we will do a dive into chargers for our max because there's a lot to talk about there. Okay. All right. Where are we? All right. All right. The last one I'll mention here. And I think you have this one as well, Dave. So copy the URL. But I like this little ditty from Ventev. It's a T charger. What's nice about it is that you can move the charging element up and down and you can also change the orientation. And the other thing I like about it and actually my phone is sitting in it right now. We've talked about this before. The LED will blink a couple of times when it's charging and then it'll turn off. Right. Which especially at night, you know, having a big, you know, bright blue LED is kind of annoying. So I like the design of this. No, that's my favorite one to have next to my bed for sure. Yeah. Yeah. I like it. It's good. It's good. Cool. I like that. This is good. I didn't know about this Jarve company. So yeah, I like it. Good stuff, man. Fun, fun. All right. So let's let's. All right. So the next thing that I will take us to is Plex. And so I use Plex to manage my all of my local media. Right. And and so the. I think it's important to talk about two things with Plex. The first thing is price. Plex is free. We'll dig into the details here, of course, but I want to make sure everybody knows Plex is free for the most part. They do have a Plex pass, which is either five bucks a month, 40 bucks a year or currently 120 bucks for a lifetime that adds some additional features. And I'll make sure to highlight which features those are. You can definitely get started for free. And that's how I recommend you get started. So what is Plex? Well, what Plex says is Plex brings together all the media that matters to you. Your personal collection will look beautiful alongside stellar streaming content. Plex TV and DVR, a growing catalog of great web shows, news and podcasts. It's finally possible to enjoy all the media you love in a single app on any device, no matter where you are. I think that Plex buried the lead because the very last thing they say is the key, no matter where you are. That's the key to what makes Plex work. Right. All your media, no matter where you are. Now there's an asterisk there. It's all your non-DRM media. So if you've got DRM media inside your Netflix app, inside your Apple TV plus app or whatever, or Apple TV on Apple TV plus, that doesn't work with Plex. It needs to be non-DRM media. You need to either rip it yourself or acquire it however you choose. So when you, and I will explain how to get Plex set up a little bit later here because there's a couple different ways. But we talk so much about Plex on the show. I just wanted to go through what I do with Plex. So here's my home library. It is, you can see things that I've added here. You can see things that I've added to movies and TV shows. You can also see different playlists that I've created. If we go to the movies list, you can see my entire movie library or if it's currently organized alphabetically. These are all stored on my Synology Disk Station but you can install Plex on your Mac. You can install it even on a Raspberry Pi if you want. Although be aware that the CPU that runs it will define whether the Plex server can do transcoding or not and that's an important thing to test and check with. But if you've got a Raspberry Pi and you want to try it out, hey, nothing's stopping you and it might work out just fine. Plex allows me to just have my media anywhere I want, right? That's what we said, no matter where I am. And that's the key here. So you can see that I was taking our TV shows from the TVO and slurping them into Plex. I can't do that anymore because I don't use TVO anymore as I mentioned. But I have TV series in Plex. Actually I've got some that I ripped from DVDs that we enjoy and so I can watch my TV shows wherever I want. If there's a movie that I want to watch, I just go and tell it I want to play the movie and what's cool is when you pull your media into Plex, all the metadata that you're seeing here, the title, the poster image, the description, the actors, the trailer, all of that stuff, that is on Plex. They pull all of that stuff together when it sees the movie file. So you put the movie file in a folder that is your Plex library. You name it a certain way and it's pretty flexible with how you name it, but I generally name it movie and then year in parentheses and then dot whatever the format is. So usually dot MKV if I ripped it from a DVD or dot MP4 if I want to convert it into that format or whatever. And then from there, Plex looks and says, ah, okay, I'm going to check my databases, pull in, figure out what movie it is, pull in all that metadata and then organize it for you. And that's how it works. Then you can take these things and sync them to your iPhone, iPad. Now Plex, like we were talking about with YouTube TV and Fubo, Plex has apps for all of your devices, your iPhone, your iPad, your TVs, your Apple TV, Roku, all of that stuff. There are Plex apps available so you can just stream your content directly. Streaming content from your Plex server either locally or remotely. So I go to an Airbnb, I launch the Plex app on their smart TV, I log into my Plex account and boom! Now I have access to my library over there. Works just fine. That is all included in the free version of Plex. If you want to download content to sync to your device to watch offline, that requires a Plex pass. If you want to use the Plex AMP app in your car to listen to your music that you can also store in your Plex library, that too requires a subscription. And I will pull up the music thing here so that we can all see it. But pulls in all of your stuff and again the metadata pulls it all together. Like I said, they have an app called Plex AMP. You can play music in your web browser and on the Plex apps on your various devices that's part of the free version. The Plex AMP app which is a new car play specific iOS app. They might have an Android and Google Auto version of it too. That requires a Plex pass subscription. But again, it's 40 bucks a year, 5 bucks a month or currently 120 bucks for a lifetime. It goes up. When I bought my lifetime pass for Plex, it was 70. So if you again test it, use it for free. But when it's time to move, I recommend the lifetime thing. That's Plex. That's what I got. Can you explain? So you talked about transcoding. Yes. Earlier. Why is that important? Good question. So you may choose to store your content at super high quality, right? So if you rip it from a Blu-ray, you probably want to keep it at Blu-ray resolution, right? So you get this big 26 gig file or something for a, you know, whatever two-hour movie and that's what you store on your Plex server. When you watch it on your TV, whatever format that movie is in may or may not match what the app that you're running on your TV can display natively. It may or may not match what your iPhone can display natively. Your Apple TV, your iPad. Apple's devices are notoriously restrictive in the formats that they can display. So Plex and the Plex server and the Plex app negotiate this when you start playing something and then they decide, can I send it natively? If I can, I will because that way the device gets all the data and it can display it the best that it can. If it can't, then it's up to the Plex server to transcode to convert either the audio or the video or both into a format that's usable on that client device and that is where transcoding comes into play. The other time transcoding comes into play is if you want to download to your iPad, for example. I don't need to download a full 4K movie onto my iPad. I can't see a difference, to be perfectly honest, on a little, you know, 11-inch screen. Some people may and then you can choose to do that but I choose to save things in what Plex calls medium quality on my iPad so that I don't fill the stupid thing up with movies with only just a few movies. And so then it's up to the server to transcode it and the faster the server can do that, the better off I am, obviously, if it needs to transcode it for real-time playing then it needs to be able to do that in real-time. So, yeah. Makes sense? Answer your question? Yeah, cool. Any other questions? No. All right. Well then, that's Plex, my friend. Shall we move on to the next one? Yes. So, I thought I'd highlight some of my favorite network tools to help diagnose what's going on. I like it. Or when things go wrong. Sure. So the first one is network utility. Now, unfortunately, I don't know why Apple did this but Big Sur, they deprecated it. If you try to run it, it'll say, yeah, sorry, you're going to have to run all this stuff from the command line. The good news is that you can take a version of network utility from a earlier version of Mac OS and it runs just fine under Big Sur. Nice. So again, I don't know why they did this. The part that I like, so it, you know, port mapping and ping and trace route and all that stuff, which you can, again, run from the command line. But the one thing that I like with this is that it has an info screen that'll show you statistics that I don't know how to get from the command line, Dave. Okay. So it'll, the one that I think is most interesting is that it'll show you send and receive errors. Oh, you can see that from the command line. I will find the command. I believe it's, keep going. I think it's ipconfig. Okay, maybe. All right. I thought it was maybe netstat or it could be ipconfig. Ifconfig will show you that stuff. I think, I think I'm looking here. No, it doesn't seem like it does. It doesn't seem like it does. Yeah. If one of you knows, send us an email, send us back at mackeekab.com. Yeah. And if your network is working properly, you can send something to feedback at mackeekab.com. That's right. Yes. In fact, it often requires a working network to send to feedback at mackeekab.com. So the part that I think is useful is, again, typically if you get tons of send and receive errors, you probably have a bad cable. Yeah. This can help resolve that. Next up, this is a tool that I think you made me aware of, Dave, but it's one of my favorites. IPerf 3. What does IPerf 3 do? It basically lets you check your network throughput. So get your favorite package manager, and IPerf 3 will be in there somewhere, homebrew or otherwise. And then basically you run it on one machine in server mode, and then you run it, and oh, you're running it. Look at you go. You keep talking. I got you, man. I got you covered. Yep. So IPerf 3 is a great tool to check your network throughput to make sure everything is working properly. Okay. Yep. Next up, this is something that you may not know exists, but we're going to tell you about it. So there's a Wi-Fi menu in your menu bar. It's little radio waves here. If you click on that, no matter what version of the OS you're running, it'll show you some things, like you can turn it on and off. It'll show you available hotspots like I'm looking right now, and it's like, oh, you can connect to your iPhone 12 as a hotspot if you want. And it shows my network. Here's the fun thing about it is that if you hold down Option and click on that menu, you get a whole boatload of additional information to the network that you're connected to. So I see the IP address, the router, what version of security, the BSSID, channels, gigahertz, 80 megahertz, et cetera. Cool. Cool. If you have set up, there's an app called Wi-Fi Explorer in there that I've found way better than iStumblr. Just in terms, it shows all the same data. The presentation of it has helped me in troubleshooting more than the way that iStumblr presents data. So if you've got set up, check out Wi-Fi Explorer for sure. Oh, okay. All right, well, you beat me to the chase. So iStumblr was one of the first tools I used that will show you various information, mostly for seeing what is surrounding you in the Wi-Fi world. And in the old days, what would happen is it would show you what channel that you're on, and it would also show what channel other people were on in your neighborhood. Eero, prior access points that I have would actually let you set the channel, like Apple's airport and stuff like that. I don't think the Eero lets you do that. It just kind of figures it out. Most mesh setups choose their own channels and leave you out of the mix. Yeah, that's right. Okay. And Wi-Fi Explorer, they just lay it out better so that you can easily see, oh, that channel is stacked with people I want to be over here. So you don't have to process the data. It just shows it to you graphically. It's pretty good. Okay. Another tool that I ran into, and this is probably more appropriate for enterprise users. But as an individual, you can run it too. And I've actually done this. NetSpot. So NetSpot also will do Wi-Fi analysis. But here's the cool thing that it does, that I think other tools do. But it lets you do what's known as a site survey. So what you do is you import a map of your premises into it. And then you start running it, and it will basically, once you're done, and then you'll say, sample the Wi-Fi, sample the Wi-Fi, sample the Wi-Fi. And it will then, when you're done with this operation, it'll basically show you the signal strength that the machine is receiving in various locations. The good news about this is, I mean, it's probably kind of redundant with a mesh system. But especially with older traditional Wi-Fi access points, it will help you identify dead spots. And you could then maybe change the location of your access point. Again, mesh systems kind of do this for you. Yeah, but they try to do their best. But if you know that you could move something to another location to spread it out better, NetSpot is the way to get that information. No, I think NetSpot's great. Yeah, for sure. All right. Another tool that lets you see what's going on in your world is Angry IP Scanner. I don't know why they're so angry. But yeah, you run it and it'll basically scan your network and show you the devices and ping and various things like that. Probably a good tool if you think that there's something wacky happening on your network or there's somebody on it that shouldn't be or a device is going, hey, where? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Interesting. I like it. Angry IP Scanner. Let's see. Yeah, yeah. Fast and friendly network scanner. I like it. Cool. All right. All right. Next segment. Yeah. Well, last one. Okay. One more. Okay. Thing desktop I like. This came out recently, but it does health check for your network, advanced speed testing, level one troubleshooting. Notifications of connectivity issues. Yeah. Like every now and then it'll come up. So it's smart enough to know your ISP. Okay. And like every now and then I'll get a notification and it'll be like, yeah, DHCP on optimum is sucking right now. Oh, interesting. Oh, there's a network outage in your neighborhood. So. Interesting. Huh. Huh. I haven't, I mean, I've seen, I guess I know I do run thing desktop. I haven't seen it. I guess I just haven't had those problems with Comcast or consolidated. I've, I've had it tell me that my max internet connection is offline, but I don't think I've had it tell me that's interesting. That's really helpful. That's cool. Yeah. Thing, they've done great stuff there. I like those folks for sure. All right. My next thing, John is hooves and home bridge. So the idea behind these, these tools. So hooves really is home bridge. It's just a different graphic interface for it. And what home bridge does is it connects your home kit network to your non home kit devices of which I have lots. And so that's sort of the, the, the, the point of this here. And it, it works really well. I have this installed in the Docker container and my next segment is on Docker. So watch that. If you want to learn how Docker works, but, but it's fairly straightforward. And the way that it works is you go and you install plugins into your hooves setup here. So one of these, you know, you can see I've got my Arlo plugin and my Eve plugin and my, I have a FOSCAM camera and I've got some Yuffie stuff. Now some of the Yuffie stuff is already home kit. Some of it's not. I've got ring and it's telling me ring has an update. That's one of the things I love about this hooves interface is it takes care of all that. And you can add more plugins. I'm not going to show you the configuration for the ones that I have because every single one of them would expose my password, but I should be able to add. Yeah. Okay. So I could add like a, like a WiIMO plugin or something. Right. If I had WiIMO devices that weren't there and I would just click install. If I need to know details, it tells me, okay, look, this is the hooves certified WiIMO plugin, which means that the hooves team, which is an open source team at some level has gone through and made sure that this like works not just with home bridge, but with the interface here. And then you can come see all of my devices and, and there they are. So here, you know, it's just showing you all the devices and sensors and everything that it has found. And if I want to, I could turn off the light right from here, right from the hooves interface. Now that's not how it's really meant to work. How it's meant to work is inside the home app. And inside the home app is what we're used to on our iPhones and our, you know, our various Apple devices. And if I can bring up the home app here, which I can, you can see my home app. Now one of my ring cameras isn't showing up here. I don't know why it doesn't show up in the ring, it doesn't show up in the rapid ring app all the time either. It will come up eventually. But you can see my driveway camera. That's a live view as I'm, as I'm talking to you here. In fact, if I could open this little window at the top of the, of the office there, you would see me sitting here talking. You can also see that in our garden camera, which is an Arlo camera. The Hector cam is a FOSCAM camera, office basement and office garage. Those are Ufi cams. So those are home kit native. My pool camera is another Arlo cam. You can see my little pool that I was mentioning that overflowed earlier this morning. But these are live views of my things. And then of course all those various, you know, here's that couch corner lamp. I can turn that off if I want. I can turn it on if I want. And that's a, that's how, that's how home kit and hoops works. It's a, I'm, I'm a huge fan of this because I don't have a lot of home kit devices. I've only got a few and yet the whole family can use their home app to get into the, um, the, you know, the, all the devices, which is great. It's not, and it's nice to have all the cameras consolidated into one place. Like I said, I've, I've got cameras from at least four different vendors. So yeah, that's hoops and home bridge. Can you share the Hector cam? I did share the Hector cam. I, oh, you mean can I share it publicly? No, it's a camera that's inside my house. No, that's the only camera that's inside my house. I'm very careful with. I remember Ambrosia would, would share the Hector cam from the office. Sure. That's right. Yeah. No, the Hector cam, uh, you can follow Hector at Hector D BYRD Hector D bird on, on Twitter. But, uh, but no, I, I don't share. In fact, that camera is, is a FOSCAM camera for a reason. It does not go to any cloud. Uh, it is only accessible locally in my house. And so hoops is the link to seeing it inside the home app. It's not linked to any cloud service. So yeah, because it's inside my house and it's got a microphone in it. So, you know, we're very careful with that. Yeah. Yeah. That was a four minute segment. Go. Okay. Um, Karen feeding of your hard drive. Here are some tools that I use. Um, and you should use, um, the first one is built into Mac OS and it's this utility. Um, it's good for basic stuff, um, setting up partitions and volumes, some rate types. Uh, and they have this first stage, which will do some basic analysis and tell you if things, things have gone bad. Sure. Um, even with APFS, um, in the early days of APFS, it would yell at me that, you know, something was out of whack and I think I was eventually, you know, this, this is terrible. I'm going to restore from a clone. Sure. Sure. Yeah. Um, next up, this is a tool that I've been using for quite a while, uh, called smart reporter. Um, what is smart? Uh, system management and reporting technology. I'll look it up. Yeah. Yeah. All right. What is smart? Smart is a standard for hard drives to advertise things that are happening, uh, within it. Um, Mac OS will, will do basic, like if you run this utility, it'll actually show you the smart status of the drive and it should, there are thumbs up, thumbs down. Smart reporter actually digs deep. Um, so it'll do that thumbs up, thumbs down, but it'll also show you the value of various, we'll show you various smart values. Um, and if they exceed, so you can see like, you know, block reallocation and, you know, other horrible things that could happen to your drive. Um, lifetime, other things like that. Uh, I actually have it set up to, uh, it can send you a daily status report telling you, uh, how your drives are doing. Um, cool. So I just find that comforting. Um, next up here is drive DX. Um, I really love this tool. So this will actually do more sophisticated analysis than smart reporter in that it'll tell you, um, yeah, your drive is like, you know, at 80%, um, it'll, it'll, it's more effective in telling you when your drive is going to fail. Okay. All right. Okay. Good. Yeah. I actually, it was funny because I actually, so I think I told you, I have a one terabyte drive, uh, from like 20, 2008. It's really old. Okay. And I actually hooked it up to drive DX and it was like, yeah, it's, it's about 80%. And oh, there's this one parameter that's really out of whack. So the drive's going to fail soon, but it hasn't. So, uh, next up, um, you may, uh, you know, some people say, oh, you know, the viruses and all that aren't really a risk on, uh, Mac OS. Well, they kind of are viruses and malware. Uh, clam XAV is another tool that I've been using for quite a while. Okay. Uh, it, have you compared it to malware bites? Uh, at all? No. Okay. It malware bites. I, I like malware bites. I, I find it very easy to use. It runs really fast. You're seeing a scan of my entire system in real time here and it'll be finished probably before I'm talking about it. It, it, you know, it, I don't like to have a virus protection tool that runs in the background. And the free version of malware bites, that's what you get when you pay for malware bites is it runs in the background. I, I don't have enough of a risk here that I want background detection. So I run this once a week and, um, yeah, malware bites and it updates the database all the time and everything. So I was just curious if you had compared the two cause, cause malware bites is, uh, you know, one of the more popular ones. So yeah. Yeah. The one that was found is mostly emails with attachments and macro viruses. Yeah. Exactly. Um, and the last one here, um, CleanMyMac X or 10. It's CleanMyMac X. They were a sponsor for a short period of time and they corrected us when we did the read and said CleanMyMac 10. So CleanMyMac X is definitely the right way to, to say the name of that app. So great. Um, and it does, it does all sorts of things. So it does cleanup, protection, uh, speed, uh, has an uninstaller and, uh, a space allocation tool. Yeah. I'm, I'm a big fan of CleanMyMac, especially the uninstaller and the, uh, the system junk thing, uh, and space lens. This has become my favorite tool for finding where things are on my Mac. I'm not going to, uh, I'm not going to run it right now. Evidently. I haven't run it on this Mac, at least not since I reinstalled the OS because it needs full disk access and it's telling me it doesn't have it, but, um, I also am not running out of space on this drive. So I probably haven't been driven to run it, but, uh, it does a great job of displaying where all of that stuff is used. So yeah. Big, big fan. Okay. Like Omni Disweeper. Well, yes. Except Omni Disweeper is like, you have to, you have to jump through a lot of hoops to get Omni Disweeper to see the whole drive. Right. Because it doesn't know the right. I guess it sort of knows about full disk access now, but you have to run it with sudo, I think, still to get that to run right. Um, CleanMyMac just does it. It's, uh, all good. So yeah. All right. Okay. Yes. Um, all right. My last one here, I think my last one here is, um, is going to be Docker. I talked about, uh, Plex, I talked about hoops and the way to get these things installed or one way to get these things installed is with Docker. Now you can run Docker on your Mac. You can run Docker on your network storage device. You can run it on a PC. You can probably run it on a Raspberry Pi, although it might work. What Docker is, is it creates tiny little single purpose virtual machines. Uh, very self conti, yeah, that's a good way to think about it because it, it is, um, it is built to be CPU and RAM efficient. Now that doesn't mean that you can't run something like Plex that wants to use the CPU for transcoding, but it's not going to install like some window to operating system and all of these other things that are going to take up resources. It's kind of efficiency wise. It's very close to just running an app on your device, but the nice part is it is running inside of its own little Linux container, which means that you don't have to worry about what platform it's running that, that Docker is running on. So the same container that's running on your Mac could run on your network storage device or on your Linux machine. It's a very portable environment. Um, I'm showing one of my distations here and you can see I'm currently running just one container and it's called Minio. What Minio does is it's a open source way of emulating Amazon S3 storage and I use it for some of my backups. I use ARQ for my backups and it backs up to this Minio container. Uh, but there are other things that you can install. And so like, for example, on this one, I really should be running a Docker called Watchtower because what Watchtower does is it watches all of my Docker containers and updates them automatically for me if there's a new version. Uh, so the first thing you do is you go to the registry, you find the, um, the container that you want and then you download it. Now I've already done that because I wanted to save a little time. So I have Watchtower here. I say launch. Uh, and I can choose. Do I want it to be with high privileges? No. Do I want to have resource limitation? No, but I could. I could say no. You only use low CPU, only use a certain amount of RAM. Um, again, it's really built to compartmentalize these things. I can go into advanced settings. I can tell it to auto restart. I don't recommend doing that when you first set up a Docker container just in case it doesn't launch right. You don't want it to get itself into a loop. Um, I probably need to follow the instructions for setting up Watchtower to know whether I need to add any network or volume settings here. But at the moment, I'm not going to do any of that. I'm just going to say, yeah, go ahead, create yourself and run the container after the wizard is finished. If I crater my disk station, which I won't because it's Docker. Uh, now I can come up here and see is, uh, is it running? No, it's not running. It stopped unexpectedly, which is not a great surprise because I didn't really follow any instructions to set it up. The best thing to do is to go and look at the Watchtower or whatever image you want to run and compare and contrast. Now what I can do is I can go to my other disk station where I have lots of things running in Docker. This is the one that has hoops running on it. Uh, it does have Watchtower running on it. It has ZNC running on it, which is my IRC relay so I can communicate with all of you, uh, at, uh, live dot macgeekub.com. This is where I was running Iperf before, John. So I run Iperf permanently here inside a Docker container. And that way I can always have an Iperf server to talk with. Um, so lots of it's lots of cool stuff. But what I could do is I could turn off Watchtower here. I can shut down the Watchtower one, uh, and then we could look at its settings that it's finally stopped. So now I can say edit. I do have it set to auto restart here. I don't have any volume settings. I don't have any port settings. I don't have any link settings. Aha. I do have an environment setting. Uh, so I probably need to go to the other side and, uh, and configure all of that stuff right here. I guess I would do it there. Watchtower, I would say edit. It probably already has that in an environment setting. So I have no idea why this failed, but, uh, but it failed. And so we could look at the log and see can't connect to the Docker demon. Is the Docker demon running? Well, yes, it is. So not sure why that failed. Maybe we try again, but it's probably going to fail again. So I got a little troubleshooting to do, but that's how Docker works. And that's how Docker runs. And yep, it stopped unexpectedly. I don't know why. I'm sure there's some configuration thing I just need to do. But, um, but, you know, as you can see, I pulled down images for things like Iperf. I could run an Iperf instance on this distation. I could run Plex. And this is Plex coming from Plex, Inc. So this is the official Plex installation. They just push it out in addition to pushing it out for Mac and, you know, and Linux and Windows and all of that. They also push out all their updates to Docker so that you get those updates. And now I just need to figure out how to get Watchtower running so that it, uh, so that it works. And then, uh, it's a little more interesting if you look here, but Docker will tell you how much CPU Docker in its entirety is using. This is the Docker interface, the web interface for my Synology. But that's how, uh, that's how Docker works. It says that it's using three and a half gigs of RAM. And I can see who's using the most. It seems to be Docker. But it, you know, it's, like, it's fine. Maybe, maybe that's overall CPU usage and RAM usage of my distation because it doesn't add up. Um, but yeah, I, I love the way Docker works. It's, um, it's super handy. Oh, I gotta restart my, um, my Watchtower container. Otherwise, my things won't stay up to date. And that's a handy one to have running. So yeah, that's, um, that's Docker. It's super easy to use. And again, you know, normally you would be following some instruction. You know, I would search, um, Google for, uh, you know, a, um, you know, how to set up Watchtower on Synology, right? Tower Docker Synology. And then it would give me an instruction. Okay, great. Here's Marius hosting. It would give me an instruction, uh, you know, do this. Oh, there might be some container that I need to link in the files or something. So okay, no problem. You do all that. And then off and running. And it works. So that's Docker. Any questions on that, John? No, I'll have to give it another look. I think I, uh, quite a while ago, I tried to run Iperf. Yeah. And, you know, so I would get the Iperf package and I would say, okay, you know, fire it up. And nothing happened because I don't think I had to provide some arguments, command line arguments, I guess. It Docker on Synology, the web interface for Docker, it's built to be a command line utility, right? Docker is, but the web interface for Synology has gotten so much more full feature over the years that now it's like I almost never have to do anything with the command line. But what you do often have to do is point ports at the Docker. Remember the Docker container is this little self contained computer. So if you want to access it from your local network, well, you don't see the Docker from your local network. You see the machine upon which it runs. So you have to do effectively what becomes port forwarding. So like on the Iperf Docker, I have to go into port settings and say, okay, whenever somebody attaches to port 5201 of my disk station, connect that to port 5201 of this Docker instance. So it really is port forwarding. And I've told it to do it for TCP and UDP. I am 99% certain that Docker that Iperf runs on UDP, but you know, I'm never 100% certain of anything. So I just set both of those up. And now when I connect to this device on port 5201, it knows to say, right, go to this Docker container. So it's port forwarding is essentially what it is. And now you didn't used to be able to do that kind of port forwarding with the Docker Web interface. You had to do it from the, you know, from the command line and it got I mean, it was doable, obviously. It just got messy. This makes it way easier and keeps all the settings and you can see it, you know, all that good stuff. So that's that's what we got today. And there we are an hour and 13 minutes on our show, John. Like right there, right where we, right where we thought we would be or right where we would normally have been, I guess is the right way to say it. Hopefully, you know, why does my mixer sometimes do this? I don't get to control. See, I like to fade in the sound, but it's not letting me. It's like in some kind of lock mode. I don't know. I have this, I have this nice little fader thing that I can control our levels if things get nuts. And I bring the fader down and then I bring our music in. But I can't bring our music in today. Why is that? I don't like that, John. More things to troubleshoot, my friend. But that's that's what we do here. So that's what we will do. That's what we will continue to do. Any last bits to add before we say goodbye for the day? That was fun. I like to be able to share our screens and I'm really curious to hear from anyone who made it all the way through listening to this as audio only, how this experience was for you. We tried our level best to show things while we were doing them, but not make the content reliant upon audio. And so let us know. Feedback at MackieCab.com. We'd love to hear from you. You got anything else to add or are we on our way out, my friend? Uh, Twitter. He is Dave Hamilton. I am John F. Braun. There's also MackieCab and Mack Observer and Pilot Pete. We'll get him back someday. It's going to happen. I'm on it. I'm on it. Full headed persistence is going to win this one. All right. Thanks for hanging out with us, folks. Of course, our thanks to Cash Fly for providing all the bandwidth to get the show from us to you and subscribe to the MackieCab calendar at MackieCab.com to know when we're live streaming this show. Or just subscribe in your favorite podcast app and you'll get it after we're finished. Have a good week. Enjoy yourselves. Stay safe. Stay as healthy as you possibly can and don't get caught. See you later!