 It's time for Mack Geekab and listener Jeff brings us the quick tip of the week. He says, keep your luggage air tag batteries fresh. I think one thing that should be mentioned in addition to putting an air tag in your luggage is to make sure that the battery is fresh so it doesn't die before the bag gets back to you. More quick tips like this plus your questions answered on today's Mack Geekab 1020 for Monday, January 15th, 2024. Folks and welcome to Mack Geekab, the show where indeed you send in your quick tips like that. We share them. You send in your questions. We try to answer them. You send in your cool stuff found. We share that too. We share some of our own quick tips, cool stuff found and questions as well because the goal is we're all in this together and we each want to make sure we learn at least five new things every single episode. Sponsors for this week include BB Edit 15. Yes, a brand new version of BB Edit. So we will talk some about those features, the new features in a little bit. Make sure you listen for that back here in Durham, New Hampshire. I'm Dave Hamilton in the frozen tundra of South Dakota. I'm Adam Christensen. And here in the path of that freezing cold air in lead in the Hampshire is pilot Pete. Could to be back all together, guys. It is going to be back all together. Yeah, it's been. Yeah, we made it. We made it through Vegas, Pete, so far. Anyway, it seems like we did. Looks like you're alive. Yeah, it feels like it. Yeah, I actually feel pretty good today. Yeah, we flew back yesterday and it all it all worked out. Make sure you check our YouTube channel, MackieCubb.com slash YouTube for all of the videos that Pete and I assembled. We did like these short little, I don't know. You did quite a few of them too. I'll catch you, but it's going to take me a day or two. You know, these these sort of two to four minute videos highlighting specific products that are new that we found in in Vegas at CES. So when we go out to CES, it's we don't see it as our job to cover everything. In fact, that would be awful not only for us, but especially for you. We see it quite differently. We see it as our job to curate and and and sort of filter the fire hose. So we go out and exhaust ourselves by letting the fire hose sort of just pour on us and then and then we find the things that we think you would actually want to know about and then we share those with you. So so yeah, we but we found a lot of cool things and I'm really stoked. I could be wrong. But I think if we were to go out there to cover everything, the show would have to take about two years. Oh, yeah. And, you know, at a minimum, it oh, it would be. Yeah, thousands of exhibitors, thousands. There's a lot of stuff. But I mean, a lot of it's probably not relevant in the context of yes, you know, what we do here in computers and technology, right? Like there is a lot of extraneous stuff that would just be like, cool. There's cool stuff, but, you know, yeah. And we did that on one of the earlier shows that was published. We covered a couple of things that, you know, just kind of doesn't matter to us in the sense of you can't go buy it. You're not going to be able to use it, but it's cool tech that's coming. Yeah. So that was neat. Like they've one company has reinvented the the barcode for lack of a better way to the barcode of the future. They called it. So that was kind of cool. I thought that was the QR code. Well, sure. Yeah. But if your QR code is chewed up, the computer can't read that either. So this is a radio frequency sonic. I think we did it in 1019. So just go listen to the last episode. Check it out. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. All right. Let's so thank you folks for, you know, checking all that stuff out. Let us know what you think, obviously. And so really what I wanted to say is it's we did those two episodes from CES, which you've probably heard. If you're listening to this, but also make sure you go check out our YouTube channel at mackeycap.com slash YouTube. That'll bring you there and that'll that there's lots there that I think you're going to enjoy. And it's all bite sized. So you can you can just kind of consume it. It's not, you know, it's not like you need to carve out about two hours to listen and you get to see the silly cat videos to look at this. It's good. Yeah. And you get to see the stuff that we did. Like we film video either in our hotel suite or in the we should have done a video of our suite to people to show people kind of how we are what our command center looks like. All right. Next year, but most of it in fact is from the events and the show floor showing these things right there. So yeah, go check it out. Speaking of quick tips, you you have a quick tip to share from listener Jed Adam that I wish I had before last week. All right. Hold on. I got sorry. That's okay. That's all right. I was I was on a different one from Jed. So oh, got it. Maybe you have a jet even my he's he says so everyone I know is complaining about the fact that whenever you pull out your phone and are on a on messages, it starts audio recording and sometimes sends. Honestly, I don't know anyone who uses this feature except my teenager and more often it's annoying or could even be embarrassing. So I think turning it turning off raised to listen should turn it. I think turning off raised to listen should turn it off according to multiple articles. I read like this one and he links to an article but he says just a good way not to get caught. And what was interesting to me about this is it felt not only like a quick tip, you know, turning off the raised to listen feature, but also it's kind of a cool stuff found for me because I said, I don't even know this was a thing. Did you know this was a thing? Well, so I mean, yes, I knew it was a thing. Hey, because I my my daughter, she's not a teenager anymore, but she will often send me instead of typing a big long text. She'll like send me a one or two minute audio message to listen to. It's essentially the replacement for voicemail these days, right? You know, it's it's that kind of thing. But I also knew about this raised to listen thing because several times this week I looked at my phone after, you know, I would have like a little text chat either with Pete or we had a group of it was a group of sort of Macworld expo refugees who are at CES every year and and so we had that group going and I would pick up my you know, I would finish texting in that group, put my phone in my pocket and then pick up my phone a few minutes later and see that it had been recording ever since in that group and it would be like, oh man, like do not press send no matter what you do. Like I have no idea what I said in the last two minutes. I probably said stupid stuff and and so it's like, oh, I hit that. You know, there's a little X there that you can hit if I knew if I had seen this quick tip if I had been reading Mac geek e-mail while I was gone, I would have seen this and turn it off immediately because it happened probably three or four times. Thankfully, I didn't realize that that's how you could turn it off. Yeah, I didn't know. Yeah, I was there. I see that occasionally. It's like pushed. I didn't record anything, but apparently you can do the push to talk or push to record. Right. Right. Yeah. Yeah. So yeah. So to disable it so people know just go into settings messages and there's a raised listen raise to listen toggle and you can just toggle that up and that'll disable it from automatically happening. So when you it's it's the proximity sensor, right? So it's normally the way it's supposed to work. You raise it to your head. The proximity sensor sees it's close to your ear. Yeah, it's recording. Yeah, it can happen. I guess in your pocket or even if you just maybe put your thumb over that sensor. I don't know what else triggers it, but obviously it's triggering it. This never happened to me. Luckily, but I have a feeling if there's an Android user on the other end, you may not be able to send it either. Oh, yeah. Good point. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I don't know that it would do it even. Yeah. Yeah. I think it's only it's just sending a little audio file, right? Correct. But it's only in iMessages. It's a messages feature. I think yeah. It won't do it on an SMS. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. It's just for iMessage. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. So I had to try it immediately and I was like, oh, that's pretty cool actually, but I've never had it trigger accidentally, which could be very scary. Yeah, right. Right, right. Yeah, exactly. All right. Yeah. Good stuff. Thank you for that. I have now turned it off on my phone as of this very moment and I think my life will be better for it. Todd brings us our next quick tip, which is a follow-up to episode 1013 where Todd says when you were talking in that show in that episode about the doubt using the downloads folder as an archive of sorts, which of course you can like things that are just stored there and and you can delete them automatically with, you know, an app like Hazel or something. He says it's worth noting that iCloud drive does not sync your max download folder. So don't assume that things there are preserved if you were to lose the drive on your Mac. So yes, thank you. And he's right because there are two downloads folders, right? There there's your max downloads folder, which is in home downloads and then there is a downloads folder with the same name in iCloud drive, but that's not where your Mac saves downloads. It is where your iPhone or iPad would save downloads, but not where your Mac saves them. So I can see why someone might be confused about that and I'm glad. Yeah, I'm glad that Todd highlighted this. I never thought about it that way. I suppose because the max downloads folder is so it has been there for so long. It essentially predates, you know, any of this type of iCloud syncing that I don't know. I guess I just knew. Could you just change that like go into Safari settings and point Safari at the iCloud one? I see absolutely no reason why you couldn't. That's a there you go. That's an interesting other quick tip. Yeah, too. Yeah, because there if you go into iCloud drive there is a downloads folder and it is all of the things that I've downloaded on my phone. So yeah. I see why Mac or why Apple does that though. Generally speaking, I don't want to sink everything I download. Right. A lot of it I grab and and use like a DMG installing software and then I don't even want to waste a bandwidth on it. You know, you're not like my wife and use the downloads folder as a storage location for everything on your Mac. Oh, or mine who uses the desktop. Yeah, both location. Yeah, I'm sorry. Well, okay, we both have to pay for divorce lawyers now Adam. So yeah, this show is getting expensive and more this is not a surprise that this is a complaint of mine is not a surprise to her even if she heard this and she won't. But yeah, I don't think she'd be mad. We've had this discussion. Yes. Openly in our family. Yeah. Yeah, we but making it public is not as it's different. Isn't it conducive to marital bliss? So I will I will admit to using my downloads folder as a permanent archive only out of omission in that I don't go and manually prune my downloads folder on the regular. I will if you know, my Mac is running out of storage or something. I'll go and like sort my downloads folder by that, you know, largest file or largest folder and you know, kill those off. But I have and I think this is where this came from and I mentioned it in 1013 and just now too, but I'll dig in a little deeper. I use a Hazel rule to prune my downloads folder that anything that's been there, I think I have it set to 30 days. If it's been there for more than 30 days, go and delete it. I'm totally fine with that, you know, it's I so I don't think of it as an archive, but it has be it had become a de facto archive because I wasn't doing I had not implemented anything to change that. So I can see why people would start even relying upon it that way. But I think of my downloads folder is essentially a trash folder. It is it is temporary storage only and on my desktop to that same point years ago, I created a folder called kill me on my desktop. And well, it was a note, it was a note for myself knowing that if I if I put something in there, it's truly for transient storage only. It's like, I'm going to yes, I'm going to save this here, but I do not in I don't in the moment that I'm putting it there. I don't expect it to last. And so I also now have a Hazel but it did last and my kill me folder also just bloated up because of course it did. So now I have a Hazel rule that also goes and prunes out my kill me folder after 30 days or something like that. So so, you know, it's just it this falls into the category of learning how to live with yourself. Yeah, I wonder if I wonder if you could set Hazel like I use Hazel that I put it in a tidy folder for my desktop. Sure. I am my downloads and then I wonder if you could get Hazel to go. Hey, this has been here. Do you want to get rid of it? Yes. No. Oh, I don't I don't know. I've never I've never used. I would like to get eyes on it one last time. I think you either file it properly or go ahead and yeah, yeah, pitch it. Yeah, but if I were going to and I don't know if Hazel could do that for you, right? But if I were going to do that, I would do it differently. I would create a calendar event, you know, once every two weeks or something like it to do on my calendar. Right. Just to remind me to go in there. I do that with my spam folder. You know, I've mentioned I pruned through my spam folder once every two days, but the way that I remember to do that is I have to do a recurring to do in my calendar that's every other day. And it has a link to the web interface for fast mails for my spam folder on fastmail. So I don't even have to think about it. I just click it and it brings me right there and their interface is fine. It remembers that I sort my spam by from address, which we've talked about on the show before and it just brings me there and I can prune through my spam in, you know, 90 seconds or less if I'm doing it every two days. Boom. Yeah. So that's how I would do that with Hazel. You could do a set of countdown folders. If you wanted, you could have like this is going to be deleted in 30 days. And then, you know, at 25 days, take everything 25 days older and move to this is going to be deleted in five days and then a one day. Oh, that's true. Monitor it that way too. Right. Yep. Boop, boop, boop. All right. It's countdown. And I'm hesitant to start messing with Hazel while I'm recording a show, but could Hazel, when it puts something in a folder, could it open that folder? Right? Does it have that ability to cause the finder to open that folder? Because if it did, that would be an interesting way. And if it doesn't, you could have keyboard maestro open your five day, you know, it's going to be deleted in five days folder every morning for you. So you just see it, Pete. Right. Yeah. And just review it. Be like, I just review it. Yeah. Hazel could almost certainly open a folder though. I don't know that it can. That's why that's the question I'm asking. Yeah. I just don't know that it has that functionality. Like you say now, it's not the time to experiment with it. Yeah. Yeah. Have those Discord people do it. Yeah. It's possible that someone listening would know better than us. Yes. Peoples. Peoples. Yes. Yeah. Someone will let us know. If someone will mark M wrote, you know, cleaning your downloads folders with Hazel is for. And I think that's how it was developed. Yeah, I agree with that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But if, if, if you know the answer and or have a tip or a question or anything for us feedback at MackieCab.com is the place to, the place to go for that. Whoa. Dave, did you say feedback at MackieCab.com? I heard him. Feedback at MackieCab.com. All right. Good news though. Paul Conaway in the chat says there is a show in finder option in Hazel. So we're all good. Here's your answer. Thank you Paul. Thanks Paul. All right. You want to take us to our final quick tip here Adam from Jim. Yeah. Jim has a question about adding a website to favorites on an iPad. He said, I wanted to add a new website to the menu bar in Safari on my iPad. For the life of me, I couldn't figure it out at first since this was a site I visit a lot. I wanted it visible in the Safari menu bar. Of course you did all the time. So I tried dragging the website address into the menu bar as I'm able to do on my MacBook Pro, but no luck. It didn't work. Then I remembered to click on the share icon and add the bookmark to the favorites. And sure enough, it appeared in the access list where you can see when I click on the ellipses at the far end of the Safari menu bar, I have all my favorites, but it was at the bottom of the list and I wanted it at the top drawing on years of Apple experience. I tried an often used rearranging technique and clicked on the new shortcut and tried dragging up the list and nothing happened there. A bit frustrated. I closed Safari, opened a brand new blank page. And of course it showed all of my favorite website shortcuts with a new site at the very end. Then came the aha moment. I clicked on the icon or the new website and dragged it to the top of the screen and dropped it as the third item in the array. It's stuck in Safari and the Safari menu bar now shows the new shortcut right where I want it. Not sure why it's different on the Mac than the iPad, but it is. So maybe this will help someone save a few minutes trying to get their website shortcuts visible on their iPad Safari menu bar. Nice. Yeah, that makes sense. Now that he says it that way, it makes sense. Yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure. Yeah, so I don't know that this got me playing around though, because I thought this was a great tip. And I was like really baffled by the fact that there wasn't a drag and drop way to do this on the iPad. Well, the first thing that I had to realize was that the favorites bar on the iPad is not always there. You have to go like turn it on in Safari settings. So you use a favorite bar. So first I turned it on and you know, I tested it because you know, that's that's just me. And yeah, you can't just drag a URL from the URL bar into right into the menu bar like you went on the Mac. But that got me thinking. What happens if you drag it over to the little icon where you would open up the bookmarks menu? And sure enough, I drug it over there. I hovered and it did the whole spring loaded thing and then I could go to my favorites folder and it spring loaded the favorites folder open and then I could drag it anywhere in the list and drop it and then it appeared in order in the bar right where I wanted it. But what you have to drag on to is the little, you know, the sidebar bookmarks icon and then you can and that works on the iPhone as well. So what a tip. Okay. So it is possible to do with. I mean, I'll call it one step, but it's really one drag operation because you're yeah, you're there. There's many things that have to happen in there, but the spring loaded thing, you know, that likes to do, you know, you can spring load drag and drop on your Mac. So you can spring load drag and drop in sparring. And I think this kind of works for other things too, you know, they have this thing where you can drag and drop onto, you know, folders or little icons and things happen. So I, you know, this is another one of those. I always called it Apple's hidden UI stuff, which I'm not a big fan of, but there's tons of it, especially on iOS. Yes. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Um, I'm trying to think if there's anything else that comes to mind for that. No, that's, that's great. Yep. Thank you, Jim. Thanks, Adam. That's cool. Uh, thanks to BB edit for sponsoring this episode and BB edit just this week came out with BB edit 15. Anybody who's listened for any length of time knows that BB edit is always open on my Mac. I use it for simple text editing for things like the chapters for the show notes when I'm processing those after we finish the episode. I also use it for programming and of course everything in between and things just like counting the number of words in a document or comparing two documents. They've added some cool features. One for us programmers out there is what they call a mini map palette, which if you've got a document that's super long, which a lot of programming, you know, you code some documents will be, you know, many pages long. What the mini map does is it shows you an overview of the document. It doesn't, you don't see the text. It collapses it down. So you just see kind of the layout of the document, but visualizing this makes a lot of sense when you have these long documents. What's cool is if you select text in the document, it shows the selection in the mini map. If you select text in the mini map, it shows it in the document, right? So you can really kind of move and you can use it to move around in the document too, which once you start programming, you kind of get a feel for, oh yeah, that's down here somewhere really handy to be able to get there without just having to scroll page, page, page, page, page, you scroll in the mini map and be like, yep, that's where I want to be. So that's, I love this feature. The next one I want to share for today is that they have added functionality and by way of a new worksheet, which essentially is a text document that has extra features and extra functionality buried behind it. This time a chat GPT worksheet. So you can interface with chat GPT right inside BBE edit, which also means that when you get responses from chat GPT, you can, they are treated as text in BBE edit and you can copy them and do other things with them just like you would any other text and it just happens right in line in that worksheet document. I will definitely be using this for processing the show because I would take text that I had the chapters that I would, you know, sort of massage in BBE edit and then I would copy and paste those over to chat GPT to have it help me summarize for the show notes and come up with, you know, the little description tag and all of those for our search engine stuff. This way I just get to stay right inside BBE edit and I know that I'm getting unformatted text, which is much better to paste into WordPress because then it just inherits WordPress is formatting instead of bringing formatting along and all of those things. So these are two of the many new features that are here in BBE edit 15. Go check it out. You get it even if you've used it before you get a new 30 day full function trial period that you get to try out all the features of the app. You get that fresh eval period and then after 30 days, some of the features go away. Some of them stick around, but of course that's when you would go to barebones.com slash store and buy yourself a copy of BBE edit and there's upgrade pricing and all of those things depending on which version you're coming from. Of course. So barebones.com slash store and our thanks to barebones and BBE edit for sponsoring this episode. Even Pete. What's that? I said Dave and Pete. You guys were just at CES. We were just did you swing by the Apple booth to check out the Vision Pro? Adam, there's no Apple booth. They've used the Apple booth. I was there for two days. I spent a lot of time there. Catch this week. Apple being Apple. So yeah, Apple for whatever reason, you know, doesn't want to do the CES thing, but they definitely like to steal the thunder because every year or almost every year, I think it is they wait for a big press announcement. So did you notice this week that they announced when the Vision Pro is going to be able to be be purchased right during CES? They like to steal the media thunder. It's classic Apple was classic Monday. Monday morning was when this announcement came out. So like the beginning of the the effective beginning of press days for CES when all these companies are going to push out their press releases. Actually, a lot of companies waited until Tuesday to push out their press releases media days at CES or Sunday, like half of Sunday and all of Monday. But every press release you get says embargoed until Tuesday morning, not apples. Apples came right out on Monday and announced that the Vision Pro goes on pre-order next week and or this week. Yes. Yeah, the 19th. Yeah. Yeah. So that's that's this week in terms of when this episode is released. But yep, they sure did. Didn't they? They they stole everybody's thunder. Well, not a lot of details about it. Like, you know, they they announced that when we knew the pricing thirty thirty four ninety nine. They announced the prescription lens and reader lens pricing. So those ice lenses are one forty nine if you need prescription ones, which I was surprised that was the price. I thought they were going to be a lot higher. That's lower than I thought. Yeah, I am ninety nine if you need if you need readers. But I'm a glasses where I'm obviously going to need the prescription lenses. What I don't know is you need a prescription. So I don't know what the process is going to be, at least in terms of pre-order, as early on there were rumors that you were only going to you're going to have to go in store to buy it. I don't know if you're still going to have to go in store to like, I don't know what's going on. And I haven't found a lot of details on what the buying process is going to look like online. Like, can I just say, I need the prescription ones and then am I going to have to go to an Apple store to get pick it up and get fitted? And because, you know, you've got the light seals and all that stuff. Sounds like there's two different comes. Is that only yours? In other words, you know, my wife wears contacts. Could could you take the prescription lenses out and let someone I believe from what they showed when it was released, the the the prescription lenses were kind of a drop in. They're an insert. Yeah. Yeah, I remember that. Okay. Yeah, I'm assuming they'll go in magnetically and you can pop them out and so you could have different if you had two people with different prescriptions. It's I'm pretty sure you can pop them in and out if someone only needed readers or something like that. You could pop them in and out or just take them out completely if you didn't need. My my guess is that it'll be something like ordering glasses from Zeni Optical or I buy direct or whatever online where you just you just key in your prescription. Those sites really don't even you should have a prescription from a doctor. So they say, but you can just key in your prescription and they will make you the lenses for that. They don't have to validate it. No, no, I remember like buying from one site and you had to like upload your like literally upload your prescription. Some of the some sites will let you do that. But I certainly I know with Zeni you can upload it, but really they just want you to type in the you know, the OS and OD or whatever the things are and your your your pupillary distance and all that stuff. So we will find out on the 19th, right? Yeah, so well, that's my concern, right? Because pre-orders are always crazy and I'm like, I don't want to get caught off guard and be like, I don't have my prescription here handy. I don't, you know, yep. I recommend keeping a PDF of your prescription in, you know, something on your phone, notes or even just in a synced folder like in your iCloud Drive documents. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm pretty sure I know where it is. I'm pretty sure it's in paperless. If I went to go look for it. There you go. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I actually need a new prescription. So I'm going to be going this week to to get my eyes checked just in advance and in prep of pre-order just in case Apple does weird stuff. Not a bad idea. Not a bad idea. Right? Yeah. I am. Yep. You have to be within two years. I think for them. Yeah. Yeah, that is want to verify it. If you want to verify it. Yeah. And Mark M in the chat in Discord says, I can confirm that no confirmation is required for glasses. He says in Pennsylvania, only contact lenses need to be confirmed. So yep. Interesting. Interesting. Yeah. Yeah. For sure. Well, that's Apple being Apple. Yeah. Yeah, I'm trying to steal the deal to see if they just need to go. I mean, you guys should have been the evil like what a place to show off vision. I mean, they had units, right? They right have given them to press them. They must be close enough. They could have brought some there and what a buzz they would have generated. I mean, they probably did. They probably were that, you know, a team. Yes, privately, I would be shocked if a team from Apple was not there. You know, CES provide the reason we go is that CES provides gravity, right? It, it, you know, pulls a lot of people into one place and make it makes things really efficient. Yeah, Pete and I, you know, usually at CES. I got to come up with a new term. I've always said at CES, I avoid the show floor like the plague. Well, I've had COVID like three times. So I'm not all that good at avoiding the plague. It turns out, but thankfully fine every every one of those times. But we generally avoid the show floor because it's inefficient and usually people don't want to talk to press on the show floor. The show floor is for those kinds of meetings that you would have with Apple, right? Where it's the strategic partnership meetings with, you know, resellers and vendors and that kind of stuff is what a lot of people, at least traditionally have gone out of the way to get booths on the show floor to attract. You're selling. You're selling. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, you're either. Yeah, you're either selling your, but it's not, you're selling to one on one. It's you're looking for distribution channels. Correct. Right. You want to talk to Walmart and Amazon. Yeah, exactly. And I can't tell you how many times I had meetings even with companies that like I had deep relationships with and it would be like, all right, I'll see you in your booth in the South Hall at 11am on Wednesday and I would get there and be like, oh, yeah, sorry, Brian's in a meeting with, you know, Walmart just showed up and so I don't know when he's going to be out. It's like, cool. And that just happened over and over again so much so that I wrote off the show floor. I would, I would agree to go meet somebody on the show floor, but only after like some sort of the vetting process, right, where I felt confident that they would not be wasting my time. But even if they weren't, even if once I got to the booth, they weren't wasting my time. Getting to and from booths on the show floor is such an epic journey that even from one booth to another is an epic journey. It's not so bad now that the South Hall is closed. They have not refilled the South Hall since Yeah, but how about a feature request for the CTA app? You let the navigation in your phone actually work. I mean, they tried it one better this year than it was. But, you know, no, you don't, they, they, they, maybe they could try it again, but like six, seven years ago, they tried to use directional things in there and being in a concrete jungle. Okay. It, it was a nightmare. So that's, I think that's why they did away with it. The app got better this year, even over last year. Yeah. Getting from booth to booth. But yeah. But this year I was surprised when we did wander up to and because we did do a little bit of booth time, of course, we, we do most of our, most of our content comes from these evening press events. We've talked about PEPCOM on the show here. There's two others. One's called the unveiled ones called showstoppers that happen at CES and they're like four hours long and it's just speed dating with the press. Everybody has a little table and that's it. You know, so there's no wandering from booth to booth. You just kind of, you know, you can really be efficient about it. Um, but we did spend some time on the show floor this year, Pete, and we were, I was pleasantly surprised. People wanted to most, almost everyone was happy to talk to us once they saw our media badge, which is atypical of the show floor. But we did get one, didn't we? Yes, we did. We, we stopped at one booth and it literally had pretty lights and we were kind of looking at it. And the guy came right over to us. Hey, gents, how are you doing? What, what, you know, what could I show you? We said, oh, you know, here's who we are and here's what we're, we're looking for cool stuff found smoke was coming out of his heels as he turned around and left. He only forgot to flip us off. That's what I was shocked at how fast he turned his back on us and walked away. He didn't say goodbye. Nothing. No, it was bizarre. Yeah. Pete spent some time in the military, of course, and I don't think you ever saw somebody doing about face that efficiently. No. I wonder if he was just concerned about being videoed or being, you know, interviewed and just made quoted or something or just maybe he's really uncomfortable about being on camera or being but we weren't camera and we were just asking questions. I know, but he's been there all day, right? So how many times has he had someone come up and say, can we do an interview? Here's a camera. Here's a microphone. Here's a fair and I always did ask, you know, do you mind if I record that sort of thing? But yeah, the as Dave called him, the lookie lose were out in forest this year. And that made it more difficult to quickly get from one booth to another. But most people 99.9% of them were happy to see us and chat with us and tell us about their stuff. It's great. Super atypical compared to previous years. Yeah, which was great. Don't get me wrong. I was it was pleasant to to, you know, have people interested in sharing their products with with us and with all of you. So yeah, worked out while we are on the subject of CES. I want to take one more time to thank all of the sponsors who made that trip possible for us. And those are, of course, carbon copy cloner at carboncopycloner.com slash MGG Mac Updater at corecode.io slash MGG and collide with a K K O L I D E dot com slash MGG. Those three companies, not only do they make fantastic products and of course I use carbon copy cloner Mac Updater. Thankfully, I don't run a huge business. So I don't need to use collide, but I have recommended it to to many who do and many who manage and they love it too. But Mac Updater and carbon copy cloner apps that I use all the time and love them. So please go check them out. We'll put links in the show notes as always. But yeah, thank you to all of them for making this past week possible and doable and and all those things. So yeah. All right. Shall we go and we shall. We shall. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So Rob writes, y'all, I only heard about your podcast from Adam and I've been a consistent listener since Adam joined the team. Thanks, Adam. I'm a big audible listener and the option to download and D D R M my purchases really hit a chord for me. However, I downloaded libation and I'm a bit reluctant to run the command line required to turn off the warnings and allow the installation. I install non app store software pretty regularly, but I've never had to run a pseudo command to do so. Do any of you have experience with libation? I don't want to install anything. I'll regret regret later. Thank you. My best Rob. Yeah, that can be a little bit scary and I'm I'm always leery of that too. And thanks for sticking with me, Rob. Thanks for coming over to have you here. But, um, you know, I'll say I personally haven't used libation yet, but I did go look at what commands they wanted you to run and it looks like it's specifically running the SP CTL command. That's essentially the gate, the gatekeeper subsystem. So the same thing when you go into preferences and you change sort of your options to like, Hey, allow me to install everything. Um, so there's a great scene at article that we can link to that goes through a lot of the details of this. If you really want to better understand everything that's going on with this command, but for libation, um, the command that they give you, if you look at they're actually running a series of commands. They're, it looks like what it's doing is temporarily disabling gatekeeper. So it can add a rule that will allow libation to launch and run on your Mac and then it re enables gatekeeper. So to me, it looks pretty, pretty benign. Obviously deciding what you want to do comes down to, do you trust the code from the libation developers? A nice thing is that's on GitHub. You could go review that if you wanted. Um, I, you know, and, and I would assume at this point, a lot of people I've heard about libation from a lot of people, if it was doing something nefarious in that code, you would probably know about it. Um, typically apps made by developers need an Apple signing key. Not everybody wants to do that. So those also come with rules and I would assume in the case of libation, uh, because it's dealing with copy protection and DRM you know, bypassing that, that they might not even be able to get an Apple developer like they might not be able to do that. So this is the road. There, you know, the road they kind of have to go down. Unfortunately, um, but again, yeah, security is always a personal thing. I've always said that. So you just have to decide what you're comfortable with, what you're not comfortable with. But with this one, from my perspective, it looks like I said relatively benign as to what it's doing. I have installed libation and I've used it and I mean, I was the one that brought it and recommended it on a recent episode. I, I don't think I had to go through this because I already have gatekeepers set to allow all third party apps. But I do remember when you go to launch it, it doesn't launch. And I think this is why they have these instructions for folks is to get them over this hump. Even once you go into, you know, your security settings on the Mac and tell it, tell gatekeeper you know, stay as far out of my way as you're willing to. I'm good, you know, I'll take responsibility. Even with that apps that aren't signed, when you go to launch them, it's simply the finder simply says no. However, you can bypass this either by doing what what gatekeeper does and sort of what libation does and pre installing that rule. Or you can cause the rule to be installed yourself by right clicking on the application. Choose open and then the Mac will say, Hey, are you sure you want to open this app? We can't verify anything about it. And you say yes. And when you do that, that same rule or an analog of it is installed. Yeah. So I think they they created this script to do it for you so that you could just have a one click operation and you're done as opposed to, Hey, by the way, you need to go and right click and like all the things I just described. So they they've automated that process. But that I think that's all they're doing with it. Yeah. I mean, I hid in their face the right click open thing. A lot of people just don't know. Just don't know. Right. Exactly. Yeah. Right. Exactly. So if you didn't know that there's yet another quick tip for us for the episode. But yeah, it libation runs great and it does what it does. I will also say that libation the way you authenticate with Amazon feels equally as weird. They tell you, all right, look, go click this link. It's going to open a page on Amazon where you're going to log into your account because Amazon owns audible. That's how this works. And then you're going to be brought to a page that says this didn't work. And they say it actually did work. What you need to do is copy that URL from your menu bar into libation. So libation can use the key that's sitting in this URL bar to authenticate itself. It's just the way it works. Like Adam said, this app is probably not supposed to exist, but I'm glad that it does. I don't know. I like, yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's supposed to exist. It's just Apple has their rules in Apple. Right. Right. Right. Knowingly like allow a developer to build an app. It's going to bypass Amazon's dear like that. Yeah, all kinds of stuff they don't want to deal with. Tim doesn't want that call from Jeff. Let's put it that way. Basically, but it was down to that's what it comes down to. Yep. All right. What's what's next here? You're going to take us to Jed Adam. Jed. I'm failing today. It's okay. He's got the printer reset issue. So Jet says, why does one Mac cause my printer to reset? He says, I'm trying to help my parents with their printer. And I'm stumped. It's an HP. It's HP and networked. One laptop and an iPhone and an iPad all print to it. The laptop I'm struggling with because the printer restarts every time I've deleted and re-added the printer. I've reset the printer services to he's stumped. So he wants to know. Do we have any ideas? I have some ideas. You know, it's hard to know because we have exactly the information that that you just read, right? We don't know what kind of printer it is. We don't know what, you know, what's happening or what's said on the printer, you know, on the printer's display when it restarts. But when we're in these scenarios and it's time to answer a question, the way I approach it is if I were there, what would I do next to try and suss out what's going on? And my first thought is to compare the two computers, right? You've got one Mac that's not causing the printer to restart. You've got another Mac that is. So what's different about these two computers? Are they on the same OS, right? Does one of them have the manufacturer's printer driver installed and the other is using the one baked in to Mac OS? And I don't even have speculation as to which one would cause it to restart. Actually, I do. My speculation is that the manufacturer's drivers would cause it to restart, but I might be wrong about that. But but the fact that your iPhone and your iPad don't cause it to restart tells me that Apple's drivers are probably okay and they are shared between the Mac and the iPhone. So, you know, it's looking at these things. What's different? And if you really, if you think about these questions and dig a little and you still can't find something different, I would then look, you know, what to do next after the first next. I would look at each Mac's local cups interface, cups being, I believe, common Unix printing system. And you get there by going in Safari to the URL of local host colon 631. So you're looking at port 631 on your Mac to see what's there. This link is in the show notes. You don't need to remember it. Just go to mackeycup.com and look for show 1020 or mgg.fm slash 1020. It's right there in the show notes. And the first, if it's the first time you've gone there on this Mac, you might be told to issue a terminal command to fully enable the cups web interface. That's also in the show notes, but it'll be right there on the screen. You just open terminal you type this one little command and then it paste this one little command and you're done. And then you can really dig in and look at what driver versions are being used on each computer and really dig and compare. And you can reset the cups printing system there. So this is where I would that's where I would start with this. Hopefully somewhere in there you would there would be that aha moment like, wait, this is different. Well, let me change, you know, one computer to match the other and then see what happens. Yeah, that's good advice. I, you know, I would also as Sylvia sounds, I know he says he's deleted and re added the printer. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm pretty sure that several years back Apple bundles some printer drivers with the OS, but depending upon the age of this printer or what model it is or whatever it might be, it might be worth checking the manufacturer's website. So even if you're up to date with the operating system, there's no guarantee that HP has been delivering drivers to Apple to include with the operating system. So you might want to check and make sure, you know, there's not a new set of drivers or something on like in this sucks because I hate going HP's website because it's impossible to find these things. But yeah, but there could be updated like drivers. I think you're on you're on to something, Dave, because again, he's saying the iPad, the iPhone work fine. That's going to use Apple's whatever, you know, Apple's system is. Yeah, right. Likely at one point they installed the HP software on there. That Mac, it's got some version of the driver. No guarantee that that has ever been updated or that it was delivered, you know, along with an OS update. So I would check that too. Yep. And I know Jed mentioned that he reset the printing system. So I'm pretty sure he did what I'm about to describe. But for everyone listening, there is a semi hidden feature in system settings. So and this also exists in system preferences. If you've got a, you know, a pre Sonoma Mac or pre venture whenever they made this change. I can't remember anymore. I'm lucky I'm awake. So you go into system settings, you go into printers and scanners and in the list of printers, right click and you will see one of the options, the one at the bottom of the list is called reset printing system dot dot dot. And that means that there is going to be a confirmation dialog. And when you click that, it says, are you sure you want to reset the printing system? This will remove all of your existing printers, scanners and faxes and all their pending jobs. It does a full reset on that cups system that I mentioned earlier and can make a huge difference in solving problems just like this. Obviously, Jed already did this. So this didn't solve Jed's problems. There's more to it than that. But but that would be that would have been my first step as well is all right. Let's just start from scratch with this and see. And since that didn't work, then it's like, OK, well, let's compare the two and then, you know, go from there. So yeah. Fun stuff. Oh, did you have more to add Adam? No, I just said good stuff. Yeah, good stuff. I noticed something interesting. We did two episodes from Las Vegas and, of course, I was on my laptop, which is an M2 MacBook Air. So plenty with with, you know, 24 gigs of RAM or something because that was what was available the day I had to buy a laptop since, you know, we had all those computers blow up with lightning over the summer. And yet the first episode that we recorded as soon as I opened up Chrome, which is what we use here to connect to StreamYard, which is the engine that that connects our voices to each other, but also does video. My my video was stuttering. My computer, my CPU was pegged and it was like, what's going on? This is sort of, at least a more powerful machine than the Mac Studio I have in the studio because this is an M1 Mac. It's at least on par with it. It should be able to rock and roll here. What's going on? And finally got it to sort of settle down and we were able to record the episode. My video stuttered a little bit, but fine, whatever. And the next day I was using Ecamm Live to do some of the the locally recorded videos that that we put out on our YouTube YouTube channel. And I was noticing at times that it was stuttering there too. Like what is going on? Like this shouldn't happen. I wasn't even using an external camera. I was using the Max built-in camera because I forgot to bring a stand for my continuity camera thing. And it was just driving me crazy. And then, you know, walking around the show floor, there's always these things like, you know, percolating in the back of my head. And I said to Pete, I'm like, wait a minute. I have my laptop set to go into low power mode when on battery. And the way we had things set up in our like suite, we had like two bedrooms in a living room. And in the living room, there was a, you know, the common room. Essentially, there was a table where we had our computer set up. Don't worry at the table. But there was no power at the table. So we would charge up our laptops elsewhere and then, you know, just work at the table because it was nice to have like a big work surface that we could be at. And that's fine. You know, the Apple Silicon Macs hold their charge quite well. But, you know, I had an external monitor plugged in which uses some GPU-ish stuff. And then, of course, I was using my camera and streaming video which uses some GPU-ish stuff. And I thought, oh, wait a minute. And so that day when I got back, I just plugged my Mac in and, you know, I strung like a series of cables across the floor really unsafe. Thankfully, neither one of us tripped all over it in the middle of the night or something. But, you know, and then it was fine. I thought, okay. And then I tried it with turning off that low power mode went on battery option which is in system settings battery on your laptop. And the problem totally went away. So low power mode can cause you some problems in terms of the performance of your Mac or at least anecdotally based on my one test case. It caused me some problems. So just be aware of that. I had forgotten all about that low power mode thing. And that's the reason it just didn't spring to mind as soon as I started having those issues. But again, you know, kind of walking around it's like, well, there is one difference between the Mac and my studio and the Mac on this table here. And that's that is this one doesn't have power applied. So it clearly it's more than just a monitor dimming. Yeah, exactly. Right. Oh, yeah, for sure. Yeah. It cranks things way down. Way down. Yeah. Which makes sense. I mean, of course it does. However, you know, I would have thought when asking the Mac to do more, it would crank things back up. You would think and maybe it thought it was right. But you know, if Chrome wasn't the frontmost app, maybe it was using that as a signal to like de-prioritize it. And of course, when I'm recording, Chrome is rarely the frontmost app. It's, you know, it's managing the connection, but I've got, you know, the agenda up. I've got notes up. I'm doing different things. I'm, you know, I've got audio hijack going. So I'm constantly moving around. So anyway, yeah, I noticed something similar on my on my iPhone because, you know, I'll watch videos or whatever at night and got up one morning and I was watching something on YouTube and I'm like, man, the quality on this is really, really bad. It's like 240. But my battery was at 10%. Oh, yeah. Same thing. It had cranked. I had gone into low power mode and in low power mode, it's like, okay, we're only going to deliver you low quality video because that's going to save save battery. Yep. Which made sense. And it's like, oh, okay, I get it. And I couldn't even change the options. I think this is more of a YouTube thing, but it wouldn't even let me change the options and it's like, oh, I got to plug it in plugged it in and then I could. Yeah, everything was fine. Yeah. And to be fair, you know, I mentioned I was using that external screen. It was that view Sonic 4K OLED gorgeous screen. But without my Mac plugged into power, my Mac was not only driving the graphics on that screen, but it was providing power to that. So the max battery was being used for both of these things. So, I mean, I really was taxing my Mac, but that's why I bought it. So I could tax it like, you know, but but I needed to tell it. I want to tax you. And and that's that's where that setting, you know, that was definitely on me. Yeah, it was in the way. Yeah. So, you know, you don't carry around a, you don't travel with a 25 foot grounded power cord. I travel. Cable. We didn't have any. Yeah, go ahead. He did have an extension to power strip to plug us into. So yeah. I do in fact, travel with a short extension cord with power and then also a 10 foot USB C power cable. So yeah. No, I always have a short one, you know, with multiple outlets or whatever that I used to travel with. But yeah, not like a big, you know, get across the roof. And as Dave said, fortunately, we didn't trip over it, but that wasn't the danger. The danger is the uneven floor in every room in that hotel. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. At least those, at least those types of rooms that the can joined rooms with the with the are you sure? I think it's so when you're a lot of drunk, you can walk street without any problem. It's compensation. Yeah. I I can confirm Pete. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, it's we've been in a, you know, we've it's the same type of suite we have. We've gotten every year and so I've probably been in four or five of them. And yeah, the floor in them is not even close to level. Like it like, it is immediately noticeable by everyone. Yeah. I presume it's to ensure water runs. You know, there's a big bathtub in the thing and stuff. So my that's been always been my guess is it's like, we want to know if there's some sort of, you know, overflow issue here, the water's all going there no matter what. I wonder if it's even set up or like, I wonder if there's literally a drain so that if that water overflows, I bet there is like under the carpet or whatever. You're right. I bet there is. I would do that. Yeah. Yeah. Because you know somebody it's going to leave the and you know, we might be those idiots, by the way, but we didn't. We weren't this time. Yeah. But you know, somebody's going to screw something up hundreds of thousands of people traipsing through your building every year with the ability to turn on water and leave it on and walk away and walk away. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. There's some poor thought going on there. Probably. Yeah. But yeah. Yeah. Yeah. All right. We have a you want to take us to Wayne Pete one more question. Yeah. This week from Wayne Wainwrights and guys, I really enjoy your show every week. I think Adam was a great addition to the crew. I'm noticing a theme here, Dave. I know. Yeah. No, I agree. I absolutely agree. So do I. This has been awesome. Yeah. I have a question that I want to run past you guys. Could each of you give me your two cents on which router each of you have or would get today to replace an aging air Apple Airport extreme and currently still running the extreme because it just works. But would like to update to a current faster router. I currently have an M1 Max Max studio along with my current iPhone 15 Pro Max. I really appreciate all the terrific advice you guys give your listeners and we'll look forward to hearing what each of you have to say. Sincerely, Wayne. Amazing. Thanks, Wayne. Yeah. The first I'm happy to share what I use but the first question I ask myself in any environment where I'm setting up wireless and so I would ask of you or have you ask of yourselves is do you need or want the ability to have multiple access points a.k.a. a mesh system or is your home such that you can do fine with just a single access point to to broadcast and reach all the corners of your home and that question you may not know the answer to that question. My guess is you probably have a sense of whether you need that and you may already have mesh or you might be wanting to go that route. So if it's just one router I really really like Synology's offerings. The RT6600 AX and the WRX560 are the two that I that would be sort of the ones that I would recommend right now. They the Synology web interface on their routers is full featured and when I say that I can't stress enough just how full featured it is. It's fairly easy to use if you're just setting it up and going but if and when you want to add inbound VPN great it's got it right there. You can do all kinds of you know DNS tweaking with it. There's all sorts of stuff that remote access to it is very robust and simple and smooth. It's just a great interface and the routers are not underpowered. In fact, that's the wrong way to say it. The routers have plenty of horsepower to do everything you would need to do. So I'm a huge fan of these Synology routers and have been since they got into the router business. I I wondered initially I don't wonder this anymore but when they released the first router the RT 1900 AC it was like well this is sort of a departure for Synology. Is this a one-off kind of thing like it was great and but I was really hesitant to you know go all in and obviously it's not they've now released what five different models of router over the years. So yeah that's where I would go with it. If you need mesh it turns out the Synology mesh is pretty good. I switched back to it recently and was pleasantly surprised. It's it doesn't suck and you know what it used to suck especially for Apple users but it doesn't anymore and that's a good thing. They they've released it. Every mesh went through this by the way. This is not unique to Synology when Eero first came out it kind of sucked. They needed to get it out into homes and gather data and learn how to get these things together. Orby was the worst when it came out like it. You couldn't do half the things you needed to do and heaven forbid you took their advice and wired your ethernet for backhaul between the mesh points and we just crater your whole system. It was awful but they've improved on it right like and so this is how mesh goes. This is how a lot of tech goes. You you know you build it in the lab you test it. You have maybe a group of you know 500 customers maybe a thousand customers to do your beta testing but it's never enough. You need more with wireless no one gets to see what's in the way. There's no and so troubleshooting is really kind of just you need lots of data to build a something that's robust. So Synology's mesh is there. If you want something simple that is going to work and you aren't interested in geeky features or anything like that the Eero mesh is absolutely fantastic as well. The TP-Link Deco model of our line of routers we talked about this last week from CES. They are budget friendly high powered mesh system. I don't I'm careful with how I talk about their pricing because their pricing does not match everyone else's. They are half the price or less of everybody else and their quality and and the feature set is on par with everyone else. So they just have a way of keeping things inexpensive. So that's that's my thoughts on this. Adam, what do you what do you think on on all of this? I agree with everything you said. I will say well and especially like on the you know because I had Eero system back the day. I think it was a second gen system so it was pretty good. Sure. I switched to an Orbi Wi-Fi 6 system that I'm using now and I absolutely love. I felt like it was mature enough at that point and it had you know pretty good reviews and stuff like that and I've had a great success with it and found it very easy to set up. I think I think that's what it came down to for me too was like I just wanted something I plug in the you know the base unit I plug in my internet connection I set up the you know the satellite ones and boom there I go was not cheap. I think right you know it was like 700 bucks at the time for the base and to to you know remote units but I had a lot of area I needed to cover it cover out here I got to cover all the way across the yard so and it works great I have gigabit and you know even out here which is not the best connection I'll typically you know be running 600 megabits up and down from from here so you know I was shocked when I found out that you were on a wireless you know backhaul back and back and forth to the house I had no idea if I had an idea I probably would have freaked out about the idea of like having you as a regular part of the show with that is like oh man this is just going to be a nightmare but we were several weeks in before it just came up in our pre-show chat and was like wait what no that's not allowed but it works fine like it's great yeah I would agree to like I mean if if really performance is your thing you got to go wired right if that's your number yeah priority like that's your only option but I mean if you want simple setup you know the the Orbi has worked great for me but I agree I've looked many times at the Synology stuff you know I I agree with your assessment of the Deco stuff like if you're looking to get something really solid and not spend $700 on a system like yeah yeah yep exactly exactly yeah and then in the in the chat listen to Rod L suggests the new Unify Express from Ubiquity it's $150 it is a standalone router which is not always what you get as part of the Unify line it's a it that's a very sort of piecemeal mix and match thing where you get to build exactly the system you want this is its own gateway router and Wi-Fi 6 access point for $149 and it is full you Unify capable so you can add other access points and mesh this thing and all of those things so that I have not yet tested one of these but it's time so I I will but talk about go talk about going high end if you want to do mesh I did some work for a guy who had a Unify like system throughout his house ooh they're great it can be it's amazing commercial grade it's commercial grade for your for your home or your office no they they really and I ran Unify here for quite some time as well their inbound VPN was really the reason that I went back to Synology because at the time anyway it was kind of janky in terms of what I wanted out of it and and so I went back but yeah no I I've got I've got some in fact I've got some Unify switches on my network now what Pete I I skipped over you what no yeah you didn't skip to me just you know the kitchen line today and that's fine but I I cannot justify getting rid of my RT 2600 by Synology yet that thing has been cranking in my basement corner for years now and as I told the Synology people last week look it I'm up in the attic I'm in a finished attic in my third floor my home so that's three floors away from me and across the house and and that's what I'm on right now now I also have the TP link decos because the the only room in the house that doesn't get great Wi-Fi is my daughter's bedroom which is below me oddly enough so huh how it goes through her bedroom and gives me great strength and great throughput I don't know but it does so that's the thing about Wi-Fi is you you like you don't get to see what's in the way yeah yeah yeah so it's in that sense it's it's a little weird but it it cranks throughout the house I love that router and I will say that it was out of warranty and we were having a hard time for some reason it was throttling and we couldn't figure it out Dave spent a lot of time working with me on this router and we couldn't figure out why it was just stopping and slowing down and not making things work right so I wrote to Synology and said hey I'm going to buy a new router I would love to get this into your hands though so you could troubleshoot it and figure out what it's doing wrong and instead they just sent me a new router and that way you know that that's the kind of customer support that they give they support things that are years old years out of warranty will that happen forever and happen for everybody? probably not but I've had great experience with them and like you said Dave that the versatility of it takes it away from having to jailbreak your old syslink or link sys router yeah that you know and having to put the DD word aftermarket software on it or firmware on it and you don't need to do that once you've got a Synology router of any from the 1900 on all the way up to their latest offering you can do anything you want with those things they're incredible so I love the link sys and then as Dave said you know we saw some of the tp link routers you love the Synology right you said links you said I love the link sys oh yeah it's okay we didn't we just came back from Vegas I just wanted to make sure I like yeah I didn't want I didn't want to leave that comment hanging thank you for stopping me there yeah and but I did want to say we we did see some amazing routers from from tp link that that are later coming out so it's obviously this is a very personal thing right what what do you need what meets your needs the best but yeah I don't think you can go wrong with with Synology it made it's a little different in that it's so robust you it's going to be a learning curve a little I I mean only only if you want it to be yeah yeah yeah exactly yep well this is a common question that comes up because of this like I've had so many people say that they want to they move away from their airport extreme which was can you discontinued how long ago I held on to mine forever too because it was just the easiest thing in the world to set up and it just worked you know there's so many people that wish Apple would get back and this game but I don't think they ever will so no I I think once like Eero came once the the mesh world appeared and and I really do think Eero was a a driving force in Apple's decision not to head down that path because they did like they they are as easy to use as the airport extreme was right and so I I think that's that's where Apple was like you know what somebody else is doing this better we don't have to be in this business they had to be in the router business when the I book came out because there they were the I believe they were the first consumer targeted Wi-Fi router right there there was none so if you wanted to buy this I book that had this magical wireless internet capability well how does that work well you also need one of these okay well we'll sell you one right I that they were forced in they I mean they forced themselves into the router business and I think they were just as happy to get out oh yeah for sure and it's funny you mentioned the you know the Apple airport extreme and all that and I still have an airport express sitting in my arm more which I rarely I in fact I never take it with me anywhere anymore because it's it's hard to find cat 5 ethernet plug-in in most hotels anymore but I did bring with us to Vegas that router we talked about a couple weeks ago the barrel acts by GLI net by GLI net yeah and we we played with that a little bit it it was it was a solid solid piece of gear we did come off of it because when we were both on it and both trying to stream it it did throttle not to the point I don't I don't think it would have stopped us no the problem the problem was and you know I never thought about this ahead of time but the problem was that hotel like many hotels throttles each device one device right so each device at that hotel got about let's say 15 to 20 megabits down and about the same up well if all of your devices are going through your one router then all of your devices are throttled as though they are one and and that router makes life super simple especially for things like your Kindle and your you know your Roku stick or whatever that can't do the captive portal and get on a hotel network they just make it super easy but they did throttle so as soon as we realized that it was like well Pete and I are both going to be uploading video you know from here we don't need to intentionally put ourselves in a box like that it cut our cut our bandwidth in half in half at best yeah so so for that reason which is not something I thought about so it was nice to have that real world experience with it to be like ah okay here is the one downside of doing it this way we also found some added latency doing it that way which of course makes sense because you know you're that's how that works you know when you're relaying a Wi-Fi connection it's going to be it's going to have that so but the the other cool the coolest part I thought was you can then name it so that your computer doesn't know it's not home right I named it the same as my home network all my stuff just joined yep yep yep yep yep alright we are almost at our limit here so I think we've done a lot of cool stuff found in the previous episodes this week so we'll we'll we'll save our cool stuff found that we were going to talk about this week for next week's episode I do want to take that minute that I love to take and thank all of you who are premium subscribers for your recent contributions and you can learn more about the premium program at MacGeekab.com slash premium it is of course not mandatory it's not even expected by us it is however very very very much appreciated because all of your premium contributions really do help us do what we do and so I want to thank those of you we'll start with the $10 contributions that have come in in the last week or so here thanks to Jeremiah from Edgewater Cal from Russellville Donald from furlong Chris from Charliewood James from San Antonio Scott from Bourbonnay's Mark from Coopersburg Abel from Santa Rosa and Neal from West Hartford for your $10 contributions you rock and then we have $25 contributions the first five or so we don't have address info for because they have been with us for so long they've been with us longer than we started capturing that data a bit longer than we had to capture that data I should say Joel Craig Dan John thanks to all of you Richard from Quaker Town Greg from Los Angeles Bruce from Alpharetta Karen from Chagrin Falls Terrence from Avon Lake Corey from Kenmore Warren from Fairview Jeff from Delmar and Paul from Tunbridge Wells and then so for your thanks to you for your $25 contributions and then $30 contribution thanks to Dennis in Chapel Hill and a $60 contribution thanks to John in Switzerland so thanks to all of you you rock it is true thank you thank you thank you um yeah that's that's good I think I think we wrap it here because otherwise we're just going to go and go and go and we've already you know used a lot of time this week so we'll we'll take it thanks for listening folks thanks for hanging out with us thanks for all your questions thanks for your quick tips and thanks for your cool stuff found we'll just you know roll those forward we've got some cool good ones too like something about time machine a cool stuff found for time machine that I have I did not I didn't know existed and I am 100% going to install it on my Mac now that I'm home because it's so we'll learn about that next week I promise thanks to cash fly for providing all the bandwidth to get the show from us to you thanks well like I said everybody that made everything possible for this past week make sure to check out our sponsors for this episode of course pairbones.com and then Mac Updater CCC Backup and Collide for our CES coverage sponsorship follow us all on Twitter and Mastodon link sir in the show notes at smackkeepup.com Adam Sir Do you have anything left to say maybe Pete's shirt is inspiration I don't know but don't get caught may later