 The Mac Observers, Mac GeekGab, episode 713, lucky 13 for Wednesday, June 13th, 2018. Greetings, folks, and welcome to the Mac Observers, Mac GeekGab, the show where we take your questions, your cool stuff found, your tips, our cool stuff found, our answers to your questions, your answers to our questions, and we mix it all together to present to you a lovely bouquet of information in a pleasant and entertaining way with the goal being that each and every one of us learns five new things every time we get together. Sponsors for this episode include Crossover, where at CodeWeavers.com, you can save 35% with coupon code MGG, BBEdit from Barebones Software at Barebones.com, and we heard some App Store news from them last week, and SetApp, where you can get over 100, actually over 119 apps for just $10 a month like Netflix for Apps. We'll talk more about all of those in a few moments. But for now, here, back in Durham, New Hampshire, I'm Dave Hamilton. And here in Fairfield, Connecticut, this is John F. Braun. Hey, happy anniversary, Mr. John F. Braun. Today is the 13th anniversary of our very first episode release. So it's very interesting. It's 7.13. We're recording the episode on 6.13, and it's our 13th anniversary. So there you go. I didn't get you anything. Sorry. I got you another podcast to do. We'll just keep doing this. How's that sound? Yeah, very, very cool. Very cool. It's really, you know, I was thinking about this. My daughter graduated from high school on Friday night. And when we did the first episode of this, she hadn't even started kindergarten here in New Hampshire yet. In fact, we hadn't even moved here to New Hampshire yet. So it's really interesting, kind of all the life events that we've all been through in the last 13 years. And of course, Mackie Keb has evolved and also kind of stayed true to our mission at the same time, which is helping people, helping you. And that's what we do. And we all help each other, really, is what it is. But our mission changed, too, because when we started this, we didn't know what we were doing. It's true, right? The first thought you wanted to hear what we thought about stuff. Yeah, like every other podcast. There's anything wrong with that. I mean, it's actually great. But yes. No, but then we kind of created our niche and then people started asking questions, but this is broken. Can you help me? Yeah. So I don't know. I know I've told this story in person to many people, including many Mackie Keb listeners, but I don't know that we've ever told it here on the show. So you're right, right? What John just said is totally correct. I think it was the first two episodes, may have been the first three, but I'm pretty sure it was the first two where us just talking about the happenings of the week. I mean, there was always a technical bent. I think one of our first two episodes or first few episodes was about whatever version of Mako as 10 had just come out at that point in time. And so we were talking about our thoughts about it. I want to say Tiger, but I may be wrong on the years there. But, you know, so it was always like, but it was just self-generated, right? Whatever we thought we were going to talk about, we're going to talk about. And we got to, like I said, either the third or fourth episode and I was at a loss for inspiration. And so I did what what any any any hungry podcaster would do. And I made up questions from the audience and we answered those questions in the show. Right. I mean, it wasn't fake information. It was just some of the questions were fake. Some of them actually were sent in. I used to do a column at Mac Observer called Ask Dave. And I had stopped doing that years before we started doing MGG, but that email address, which was askdavitmacobserver.com, still came to me. And so I kind of mined through some of those things. It was like, oh, we could answer this question, that question. So we made up a bunch of questions or pulled from that and kind of a combination of both. And we did our first, you know, mailbag show. And and since then we've been doing mailbag shows for, you know, 13 years, because that opened like John said, we kind of created and found our niche and something that worked for you and something you weren't getting elsewhere and and something, frankly, we love to do. So it's so it's very cool how this is all worked out. It's good. Yeah. So you're right. We've stayed true to our mission that we stumbled upon after we started the show. Which is pretty cool. Yeah. Well, the other thing is, you know, I think the space of. People saying what they are basically Mac news. It's a. There's a lot of options out there. There are. There weren't back then to be fair, right? I mean, we were not entering a crowded market 13 years ago. I mean, Adam was Adam. Adam Christensen at Maccast was pretty well established. In fact, I still consider us, you know, newer podcasters, because, you know, when we started, there were all those guys like Adam Christensen, Dave Slusher and Brian Abbott, Adam Curry doing, you know, that have been doing podcasts. Ken was Ken before us. That's possible. Alison Sheridan was before us, although I didn't find for whatever reason I didn't find out about her show until shortly after we had started Mac, but but she's been doing no silica longer than us. But I don't I didn't. I don't know was Ken. Ken was on Inside Mac radio before he started Mac OS Ken, right? With Scott Shepard. Now we're now we're walking down memory lane. It was bound to happen, right? Here we are on the 13th episode. So so yeah, yeah, it's very interesting, interesting stuff. Of course, Sean King at your Mac life has been doing something that we now would call podcasting for much longer than any of the rest of us have, including those people that started podcasting. He wasn't distributing the way that we do now and the way he does now. He was distributing through Audible and just online and then all of that. And then, you know, Dave Slusher and Dave Weiner and Adam Curry kind of all was Slusher and Curry and Weiner that sort of figured out the whole or applied the whole RSS logic to it. And then Slusher, I think, built one of the first podcatchers and all that good stuff. So anyway, that's but here we are. So, you know, I those of you in the live stream at mackeykeb.com slash stream. Hello. Thank you for joining us on this special episode. But those of you in the live stream know we made an agenda change at the very last minute. We were going to start with a bunch of cool stuff found and which is normally how we'll kind of front load things that way. But I figured, you know, we answer questions. So let's just do that. Let's answer some questions and start that way. Shall we, John? Surely. Surely. All right. So listener John writes in, he says, I have a Mac Pro 2012 that I have on all the time. He says, yes, I reboot it weekly and I keep it up to date with the latest software patches. He says, I had an 8 Bay Drobo connected to it from my iTunes library. I wanted to save some energy. And so I purchased an eight terabyte single seagate external drive. I connected it and transferred the library. I also have a four bay raid that has my time machine and my movies on it. And I have an external drive to clone my boot drive. So now I figured I would be set when I woke up the next morning though, I found the following. All the drives were ejected and repeatedly asked with notification center, you know, told me disk not ejected properly, eject it before disconnecting or turning it off. Is there a way that I can have the drives properly ejected and or mounted before or after the pro goes to sleep? So yes. And of course the answer is in theory, Mac OS should take care of this for you. But sometimes some external drives do not play nice with the way Mac OS wants to do this. And they don't quite get the message for lack of a better term that the system really hasn't gone away, that it's just asleep and that things should stay mounted and all of that. So I have two options to try. One is built into Mac OS and that is go to system preferences, energy saver and uncheck the box that says put hard disks to sleep when possible. I've seen that have issues with external with some, you know, third party external drives and we just had another listener that we were having an email trail with. Report some success after disabling that with a similar issue. However, I'm not entirely convinced that's going to solve it. So option number two, St. Clair software, the people that make the great default folder and app tamer also make an app called Jettison. Jettison is built for those of us on laptops that want to that have external drives say at our desks at the office or whatever, but you want to, you don't want to have to think about, oh, let me eject my external drive first, then put my MacBook to sleep, then I can, I can detach the drive and move and walk away. That's, I mean, that's what we should do, but that's sort of a convoluted process and often, you know, you forget and you're like, oh, do I just disconnect it and deal with the warning message? Or do I wake it back up, eject the drive, wait for it to eject all that stuff. What Jettison does is it essentially inserts itself into the process where the drive is about to go to sleep or the Mac is about to go to sleep. So you would close the lid. Jettison would notice that this machine was about to go to sleep and it would go and eject all of your drives properly. Then let your Mac go to sleep. Of course, if the drives are still plugged in when your Mac wakes up, your Mac will naturally just mount them because they are seen as quote, unquote new again and everything should be fine. So I think Jettison might be your answer here and I got to look at the pricing on it, but I think it's like, I don't know, 15 bucks or something like that. So it's not overly expensive. It's certainly not any more than, it's not 50. I'll look it up. Thoughts on this, John? I'm going to take the hardware angle of this. There you go. I'm going to take the hardware angle and that I have, so you'll get this message if you decide to just yank a drive. Right. But that may be happening on the hardware side is that it could be a flaky USB port. Okay. I think it's USB, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah, it would be. Or a cable. I've had issues where I've gotten this message and it was due to a flaky cable. So maybe try another USB port. That certainly, yeah. Swap out the cable because yeah, it could be you have an intermittent connection and that's when you get this message when it's like, hey, you went away, why'd you go away? Yep. And I would look at what you have connected to that new, I think you said it was a Seagate drive, John, listener John, because that's the new thing you added and now these issues started to appear. So how did you connect that? Did you have to add a new switch? Is there a cable, not switch, a USB hub? Man, I got too many things on my brain. You know, is there a cable between your iMac or your Mac Pro and the hub? All of that stuff. So yeah. Cool. Any more on this one, John? Or is it time to move on? Moving on. Moving on. All right. Well, we will go to listener Jed and Jed, we will let you ask your own question. Hey, guys, this is Jed. I was just listening to your WDC wrap-up episode kind of thing and I had a question because he said something that surprised me. You were saying that the desktop is just like the documents folder. Is it just that I have institutional memory and that because I remember putting stuff on the desktop sooner or later would actually cause some slowdown on your Mac. So I clean up my desktop just to be organized like John. But also, because I always assumed if you had a lot of stuff on your desktop, it would end up slowing your computer down like you used to. Is this gone? Is that not happening anymore? Anyways, just curious. Let me know. Thanks. Thanks for the note, Jed. You know, I do remember a time when this was the case, John, but I don't think that's the case anymore. You know, and I think it was in the early days of the Finder, the act of displaying all those icons on the desktop was not as optimized perhaps as it is now. And so because the desktop is a folder that also has its contents appear graphically at all times behind every window, I think there was something about that, but I don't think that's the case now. What do you think, John? No, no. It's just part of your, I mean, it's just part of your home folder or part of your iCloud drive because I just looked at my system and I'm like, where's desktop? If you choose to enable a certain feature of iCloud, then your desktop is actually, well, it's still on your desktop, of course, but it's also replicated in the iCloud drive. It always takes me by surprise sometimes because if I delete something from my desktop, it's like you're removing something from iCloud. Just thought you'd like to know about that. Yeah, right. Right. That's right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I have not yet made that plunge, John, the iCloud drive holding my documents and desktop folder. I mean, I sync my documents. I use Synology's drive, which used to be called Cloud Station Drive to sync my, not my documents folder, but a documents folder amongst all of my Macs. So I have that data everywhere, but I had started doing that before I wound up getting a lot more iCloud storage and I like the private cloud idea and all that stuff. So I never really rethought that. But how well does that work for you? Is it a pretty smooth process, the iCloud drive syncing your desktop and documents? I mean, it's pretty transparent. It's awesome. I mean, the only thing I had to do, so the only surprise is that if you enable this feature is, well, I actually have a, so what happens is it'll create a folder specific to that machine. So like I have one, you know, I see right now, it's called documents-jb-macmini. Sure. And actually I have a shortcut to that in my sidebar. So when I do wanna put things in my documents folder, it makes it a little easier. Huh, okay. Yeah, that makes sense. All right. All right. Yeah. That's the only thing that threw me is when you enable this feature, the hierarchy or your, you know, where you put things is a little, it may not be where you expect you should put them. So. Oh, when you're navigating to it, if you don't have the shortcut in your sidebar, you mean? Mm-hmm. Yeah. That makes sense. Yeah, I can see that. Totally. Right. Yeah. But again, it's seamless and, you know, it's just nice to know that my documents are in multiple places or being synced to the cloud without having to do anything. Without you having to mess with it. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Huh. All right. Well, that's cool. That's cool. Maybe I, you know, I, I keep thinking I should just do that specifically for the desktop folder. I feel like, you know, moving between different Macs, it would be handy to not to just not have to think about that. So, I don't know, you know, then, then, then I feel like I'm, I'm kind of breaking my whole thought process of, of the, the, you know, you know, private cloud and all that stuff. So, I don't know. Yeah. Yeah. And for people that want to check this out, where you would go is you would go to system preferences, iCloud, and there's an iCloud drive entry and then an options dot, dot, dot button. And one of the choices is desktop and documents folders. All right. So, if you haven't enabled it, I think when, when they started offering that feature, there was an upgrade where it's like, oh, hey, by the way, you know, we got this cool new feature. You want to do this? And I'm like, why not? Yeah. So. Yeah, right. No, I remember being offered it, but at the time, I didn't have a lot of iCloud storage. So it was like, no, no, no, no, don't do that. But, but yeah, yeah, it seems like everybody like listeners and, you know, all you folks and obviously you, John, and basically anybody I talked to. So yeah, it's like, it's not a, it's not a thing. We never get questions about it not working. Like, which is a really good litmus test for us here. So yeah. All right. Cool man. Thank you. Let's go to Ryan. Ryan asks, he said, I feel as if I've heard you address this in a previous episode, he says, but I can't find it. He says, I use daisy disk to keep an eye on my storage usage on my 2015 Retina MacBook Pro. I used it today when my MacBook Pro told me I didn't have enough disk space for my iPhone backup. He says, I could use the cloud, but I'm anal and I like multiple backups. I don't blame you, Ryan. That's smart. He says, I scanned as an admin using daisy disk and about half of my 500 gig hard drive is filled with quote unquote hidden files that daisy disk says it cannot locate. I use shift command period shortcut that we talked about here on Mac. He kept to reveal hidden files in Macintosh hard drive, but I don't see anything adding up to the hidden files amount that daisy disk says. He says, I've ran disk utility in first aid and all that stuff. What are these hidden files? So daisy disk is one of a few pieces of software that will scour your drive and tell you what is taking up all your space. And I've tried daisy disk before and it's got a beautiful user interface. It's one of the nicest interfaces that I've seen on these types of packages, but I've always felt like it's hiding something from me or not showing me everything. And it's for that reason that I always wind up reverting back to Omni disk sweeper, which now is available for free from the Omni group. And it just works. Ryan sort of casually mentioned it in his question, but it's important to note. If you just run any of these apps normally by going to the applications folder and double clicking them, you risk not seeing everything because the app can't see everything if it's not running as an admin. So I run this from the terminal. It's a simple terminal command that you can paste in. We've got an article that shows you exactly what to do. And when you paste this terminal command in, it runs it as a fully privileged user and that way you can see everything that's there. And we'll put a link in the show notes to just how to do this with Omni disk sweeper. But Omni disk sweeper will show you, and I have not had it misguide me or lead me astray. So I think that's the magic answer. Ryan said he went to try it again and those files were gone. So maybe they were temp files. Maybe, I don't know what they were. So what do you think, John? I think I remember wrestling with this. And when I last ran Daisy disk, yeah, I saw the same thing. It was a real head scratcher for us because yeah, it was like, I don't know if you're showing me what I want to see. Right, right. I couldn't figure out what the hidden stuff was either. It could have been stale data in a cache or something like that, but it was just like, I don't think you're telling me. Yeah, you're not giving me what I want to know. Yeah, exactly. And I've never had that issue with like you with Omni disk sweeper. Yeah, it just works. It's not, it's not the prettiest interface, but it is the most functional because what it does is it gives you kind of, it's very similar to that. It adopts, in fact, that multi-column finder view, but it sorts everything by space used. So, you know, you start with just one column of stuff in the upper left, which is, you know, the root level of your hard drive or whatever you told it to scan and it's sorted by space use. So, you know, it's just continually surfacing to the top the things that are using the most space and you can just drill down. It's very, very efficient to do this and you can go to the folder where, you know, you can open the enclosing folder if you want to see and it's really, really handy. And I, it, this reminds me, I need to run it on this machine. I've only got a 250 gig SSD inside it and I'm down to seven gigs of available space, which is dangerous. So, I need to run it on here at some point. I thought I had solved this machine, but evidently no. So, check it out. Hopefully that'll solve it for you, Ryan. And hopefully everybody else too. Listener John asks, he says, I've been using Plex Cloud to stream music, sorry, to stream, easy for me to say, movies from Dropbox and OneDrive to my TV via the Plex app on my Roku. You could do the same on your Apple TV. Except, he says, I noticed that back in February, Plex announced that it was no longer accepting new Plex Cloud customers and was re-evaluating the service. They've been getting a lot of flack from the Cloud service providers who don't want to host potentially pirated movies. So, that, I think, I think that's why. I don't know for certain, but it certainly stands to reason. He says, this has me, because you, you put, the idea behind the Plex Cloud services, you put your own stuff on Dropbox and then Plex will read from it and stream it. Well, you know, is Dropbox complicit in some piracy in that scenario, because they're hosting the file? Could be argued, yes, maybe not. Who knows, right? So, I think that's why Plex is getting out of this. He says, this has me concerned, though, and I'm looking for an alternative to stream from Dropbox and OneDrive. I know I can use apps like VLC Media Player on my iPhone and iPad, but there's nothing I've found that actually works on the Roku besides Plex, any suggestions. He says, I don't want to set up a NAS with my own library or an alternate server. He says, it doesn't really work for me and isn't warranted for the volume of movies and TV shows that I have. So, it's a good question. I'm not really a, I've used Roku at time, Roku at times, mostly in Airbnb's. And I have logged into my Plex server from there and then, of course, you know, make myself a big note to log out before I leave and check out of the Airbnb. But I've never, you know, I don't have one, so I'm not fully versed in this stuff. I did some digging, though. You know, on the Apple TV, anybody that wants to do this kind of thing, there are apps like VLC that, he said it runs on iPhone and iPad, and it does, also runs on your Mac, but it also runs on Apple TV. Infuse from Firecore also runs on Apple TV and really, it's gorgeous and it works really well. So, that's another one to check out. On the Roku, though, it looks like they used to have a Dropbox app slash channel that you could add. But it seems like that has gone away, but there is one called RocksBox or RokesBox for Dropbox R-O-K-S-B-O-X. And it looks like that might do exactly what you want. So, hopefully that helps for you and any of the Roku users. We probably would actually be curious. Let us know. You can let us know on Twitter at MacGeekGab or actually, you know what? I'll post a link in our brand new MacGeekGab Q&A forums asking what streaming box you use on your TV. And I would love to get some answers there. So, we did just yesterday, launched our long-awaited MacGeekGab Q&A forums. You can find them at macgeekgab.com slash forums. They are not linked publicly from Mac Observer yet. We're kind of soft launching it and letting everybody know. We eventually will, obviously. But, you know, we want a soft launch with friendly audience here, of course. So, macgeekgab.com slash forums will bring you there and I'll put a link after the show's up, unless one of you beats me to it. Which is totally fine, especially one of you in the chat room. If you want to go and add a post there in the Q&A forum asking what folks use, then I'll take the link to that and put it in. So, one of us will do this. But I'd be very curious to hear what everybody uses. Because my guess is, I know Roku is, generally speaking, way more popular than Apple TV or any of the others. So, I'm just curious to know what everybody uses, but actually be good in terms of our coverage and, you know, knowing what to do. You use Apple TV, right, John? Yeah, I still have the things of the third gen. Right, that's right. Cool. Streaming for the most part is it's all in my Synology video station. You don't have the app on your, you don't have a video station app on, or a Plex app on your Apple TV, right? You do it from your phone and then AirPlay from the disk station directly to the Apple TV, right? Yeah, whatever trick they use. The tricks. Yes, exactly. Yeah, that works really well. I guess they're basically establishing an AirPlay conversation. That's correct. Yeah, the Apple TV just sees it as an AirPlay conversation, which is great, because then you can use the Apple TV remote to pause and play and all that good stuff. Yeah, and I guess the other streaming is I got Netflix a while ago and that's always fun. Netflix is great. Yeah, they certainly know how to how to keep us entertained and engaged. All right, one last question before we might come back to questions, but one last in this block from listener Peter who actually I got a pleasure of seeing last night at our Seacoast Mac users group. Peter writes, he says, when I'm using public Wi-Fi like right now at a Wendy's I can usually always get a signal and use the internet, but at the same time, I often cannot send or sometimes even receive email any thoughts on the cause or the cure. So this is I've seen this happen on some public Wi-Fi networks not all of them, but some where the the network doesn't let you send email or I've seen it at like my kids high school, their guest network doesn't let you connect to Gmail and and so, you know, nothing of the sort would work there if you use Gmail as your email provider unless you use a VPN. So that's one of the reasons I use a VPN but if it's sending email in particular sometimes those public Wi-Fi things will block the unsecured ports for email, specifically port 25 so that people aren't using it to blast out email and potentially be a spammer and all that stuff. I mean there's not a lot of opportunity for that anymore to be perfectly honest because even port 25 unsecured most email servers won't let you send without authenticating and so someone knows who you are at some level, but but yeah, trying to use going into on your Mac go to mail preferences accounts, choose email account, go to server settings and choose edit SMTP server list under the outgoing mail account and then choose the outgoing mail server that you use and look at the port that is set if automatically managed connection settings is enabled temporarily disable it and look at what port is chosen and whether or not used TLS SSL is checked if the port's 25 then that's could be it try using either 587 or 465 and see if you can send mail through that that would be my guess or get a VPN which honestly you probably want to consider anyway if you're doing a lot of stuff from public Wi-Fi networks on a regular basis just to cover your basis so what do you think Mr. Brolin? Yeah, I think that's why they're doing it. The other thing is um a lot of ISPs will not let you set up a server on port 25 for the exact same reason because they don't want you hosting a source of a source of spam. Right, yeah, they don't want you to be the yes, they don't want it to echo through you either, that's right. And I think you can even see this if you run um I haven't run this for a while here but um I don't know if you've run this but um Gibson Research which I think is also security now they have a little tool called ShieldsUp that'll actually probe your system and say oh yeah by the way these ports are uh they're probably not going to work because your ISP doesn't want you doing any funny business. Oh nice I will uh I will put a link to ShieldsUp from GRC. Yes, Steve Gibson's a he's a smart guy and he's a crazy guy and he's kind of a really entertaining guy his like you said his security now podcast is um very informative he's he's uh he's great he's great cool alright uh how about we talk about our uh our sponsors for this episode John that worked for you fantastic sweet uh our first sponsor for this episode is Crossover from Code Weavers this is uh this a lot Crossover allows you to run Windows apps on your Mac without having to run Windows and if you haven't set this up and played with it recently I highly encourage you to do so go to CodeWeavers.com slash MGG you get a 14 day free trial there you don't need to enter a credit card or anything but and then you install the app you know you run Crossover and then you just install Windows apps into it so if you need to like if you're a quicken user and you want to use the real version of quicken uh from you know from uh into it well it's not into it anymore but it's the real version of quicken do it the Windows version is way more full-featured than the Mac version so just do it inside Crossover but it just runs you don't it doesn't run Windows it's kind of magic how it all just pulls it together and they've really done a good job at sort of unifying this experience and making it totally seamless so and of course you can run Microsoft Office and all kinds of things so it's really worth checking out go to CodeWeavers.com slash MGG download your your free trial it's 14 days make sure it works with the apps you want like good to go and then when you go back to buy make sure you remember MGG because coupon code MGG saves you 35% on your purchase so go and check that out our thanks to CodeWeavers and Crossover for sponsoring this episode our second sponsor is Bebe Edit you all know how much we love Bebe Edit here it's one of our favorite pieces of software I have it open on my Mac right now it's what we use to kind of manage all of the show notes and and the time stamps and all of that because it's just text it doesn't add any crazy formatting and if somebody has added crazy formatting like me or one of you in the chat room it doesn't matter Bebe Edit just turns it all into raw text that we can go and put inside the episode file so that you get your beautiful chapters and all of that stuff but that's not the only reason to use Bebe Edit you can use it to manage you can count words with it you can count characters and lines and if you're doing any coding well that's where Bebe Edit really springs to life because it detects what language you're using that could be you know C++ it could be HTML it could be JavaScript doesn't matter it's all known and right there so you got to check it out go to barebones.com because it's not in the app store quite yet but it sounds like from the keynote last week it's coming go to barebones.com and and download your your trial copy but it's really not a trial copy you get the full featured trial for 30 days and then after that you get a limited feature set for free forever and for many of us that limited feature set might actually be all you need so go check it out barebones.com and our thanks to barebones for sponsoring this episode our third sponsor is a new sponsor but it's not something that's new to us that is setapp at setapp.com setapp is like Netflix for apps you pay ten bucks a month you get this folder of apps on your Mac that you can just use it's always the latest version you don't have to pay extra you don't have to go and get a license code for the apps you just launch the app you pay your ten bucks a month they've got over 119 apps with names like Ulysses bartender we've talked about that a lot amazing we talk about that a lot they're growing the app collection every month of course setapp is from macpaw which is the company that creates and makes clean my mac that's also included in setapp they curate this list so it's you know it's like I said well over 100 apps from reputable vendors you don't have to waste time sifting through all the stuff on the app store it's just installed right there makes it really easy no paid upgrades no in-app purchases no hidden costs every app is fully functional and setapp is free to try and you can earn up to six months for free by referring your friends so go ahead visit setapp.com and check it out and our thanks to setapp and macpaw for sponsoring this episode alright John I got to experience a lot of interesting things last week both in terms of traveling and all that stuff and one of them was the new sonos beam which is their most recent smart speaker and it's interesting I've always called sonos speakers smart speakers but now that they've started adding voice controls to them it's like they're smart smart speakers but they this new sonos beam has microphones in it comes with amazon a lady support out of the box and google assistant support will be coming to sonos too so you can actually pick which voice assistant you want inside your speaker and that's true the sonos one two but it's a it's a it's a sound bar for your living room and it can either just sit on the table in front of your tv or it can mount on the wall it's got four drivers in it and then a couple passive radiators too but the drivers are spread around so you get this huge wide stereo field and I haven't tested it in my own house yet but testing it in their listening rooms in San Francisco last week it was obvious that it sounds good I don't you know want to make any comparisons or anything yet because I haven't been able to do it here at home but it certainly sounds good and the stereo field on this thing is super wide I mean it's crazy wide so great for you know targeted at watching tv but also built because as sonos always has been to play music out loud in your home and with support from you know the a lady you can use your voice airplay 2 is coming to most any new sonos speakers in in July so next month and this speaker the sonos beam will be supported and it's 399 which makes it a really interesting thing when you're considering a home pod so um so I'm curious to review this especially with that in mind the home pod really isn't engineered to play sound from your tv you can do it but you can only do you know that which can be airplayed to it the sonos beams got an hdmi port in it so and it can take the arc the audio return channel from your tv so anything that can play on your tv generally can play into sonos beam and if all you've got out of your tv is an optical cable they've built this little adapter that goes optical to hdmi so you can use that too so I'm curious to check it out um and learn more but it's pretty cool and at that price that's that's a pretty aggressive price for sonos everything else that they've offered for the living room has been you know in the $700 range and so this really changes that quite a bit so any any thoughts or questions on that John before we move on to all these other crazy things that I've checked out now I've seen soundbars before right from them um yeah I don't know if I don't know if my environment would really benefit from one I think it I think your environment is the exact environment that they really have built this for yeah it's it's for you know kind of the the smaller living room or apartment kind of kind of thing right um I mean they're still selling their play bar which you know we use in our living room but you know I'm 15 feet away from my TV and your living room you know it's just a smaller room so you're closer I think the the beam is perfectly is built exactly for you where you're using either your TV sound or maybe your TV sound plus some some other speakers that aren't you know really built to do that this is built to be the answer to be simple and you're good to go I think but we got to check it out well we will check it out and we will report back once we once we have the opportunity to do that some and you know it was interesting John last week obviously I was in San Jose for the first couple of days amongst all of the folks that are you know there for WWDC and Apple followers and and some of whom would even be the Apple faithful right and the general consensus kind of like we talked about on the show last week was that we were all really happy with Apple's decision to focus especially with iOS more on stability and performance than on you know new whiz bang features and all of that stuff right and then I took the train from San Jose to San Francisco which is you know about an hour long train ride it's not that far away and I did that on Tuesday because Sonos had their announcement on Wednesday so I needed to be there in time for that and so Tuesday night starting Tuesday night I was sort of immersed with the general tech press and general you know home theater folks people that are very interested in technology certainly like we are here but not necessarily Apple watchers right Apple Apple faithful you know they just watch Apple kind of on the periphery and of course the folks that Sonos were watching to see was Apple going to do anything that changed the you know what the HomePod does because you know that's where some stuff is and as soon as we I got there and people were talking about the Apple keynote it was that was the worst keynote I've ever seen boring they didn't add any new features there was no new hardware it's like oh this is interesting because this is how some of the rest of the world sees this it was just very enlightening it's like all right right got it yeah yeah yeah not everybody is as deep into this Apple thing as we are and it didn't change my opinion like I still really feel like you know iOS 12 aka iOS 11.5 was totally the right move for Apple to do but it was just interesting so I figured I'd share that any any thoughts on that John before we before we move on I liked it same right exactly yeah yeah I think it's good have you run iOS 12 on anything yet John no okay I put it on not my production iPhone but one of the production iPhones that we have here at the house I put it on my sons per his request and it's really been super stable way more stable than any other you know first developer beta and it doesn't like there's not anything remarkably different about it yes there's the screen time features and that sort of thing and actually put it on my iPad too but which is my main iPad like the one that I used almost every day and you almost don't notice that you're running a different operating system because basically you aren't right it really is it feels like iOS 11.5 so that whole stability and performance thing is really is really true about this I'm not necessarily advocating for everybody to go out and get the betas but if you are someone that generally does that you can probably dip your toe in the beta waters earlier rather than later and perhaps even for somebody who doesn't want to run betas you know this is perhaps one of the first times where I would say don't necessarily feel like you have to wait until 12.1 to make the switch 12.0 might be it's too early to say but 12.0 might be you know very stable because that's what they're focusing on here they're not they're not making any serious fundamental changes that they then need to sort of road test I haven't found any apps really that don't work or anything like that so I'm sure they're out there but yeah it's been pretty good good yeah I have another I have another cool thing I can't wait to tell you about John can I tell you about it oh yeah quiet okay so uh plume is the one mesh wi-fi company that I had not yet tested and uh and they their whole model is these little devices that plug into power outlets right they call them pods and they plug into power outlets and they have ethernet ports on them at least the new ones do yes there are new ones announced today um and I think the old ones did too and you just put them you know the idea is you put a bunch of them in rooms around your house and it builds this mesh they don't like to use the word mesh because they say traditional mesh uh means that everything's using the same channel for communication amongst the mesh but that's not actually how most of these quote-unquote mesh systems work and and it's definitely not how plume works they you know they they look at all the airwaves and spectrum and and do uh intelligent routing and and choose intelligent channels but they've got two things that are happening today number one is their new plume super pods are coming out and I'll talk about that but they're also changing the way you pay for this uh which gets very interesting so the super pods are super cool they are uh the the original ones had two radios in them 0.4 and a 5 and they were both 2x2 radios this new super pod has a uh has 3 radios it adds to those original 2 it adds another 5 gigahertz radio that is a 4x4 radio just like the netgear orbi and the plume is unlike the orbi the plume will use all 3 radios for anything so often times it will use that 4x4 radio for backhaul between the plume units because it can be most efficient at doing that but if you have like an iMac or a MacBook or something that is connected to one of your plume pods it might choose to use the 5 gigahertz 4x4 radio to talk to that because your MacBook or MacBook Pro rather an iMac can run uh they have 3x3 radios whereas like your iPhone 2x2 and I have to say it's real I've set these up on Sunday so I have to be very careful how much excitement I have to temper my excitement here because the setup process of this was amazing I've never been more impressed with the initial setup of a mesh system as I was with these new plume super pods I plugged them in I followed the instructions right I plugged them in now I test things all the time here John so I just plugged them in and was going to do essentially a double NAT scenario and create a separate plume network inside of my existing Wi-Fi because that's how I test initially and then I'll promote it to kind of being the main Wi-Fi for the house and I plugged it in it uses Bluetooth to know that you're near your phone and assign names and that part was super easy you just go and tap the pod with your phone it's like great what do you want to name it so I did all that but it figured out that I already had a router running and it was like oh we don't want to do double NAT mode I'm just going to put myself in bridge mode it's no problem and it just happened automatically I didn't even need to think about it and it just worked but I didn't lose any functionality in terms of what I can see in fact this app is awesome in terms of how much visibility you get I'll have to share some screenshots I couldn't share them obviously until today but you get this like little map of the planets that shows all your plume pods and it has little moons orbiting the planets that show your actual devices connected to each pod and then there's lines between the planets showing how the pods are connected to each other and how your mesh is all laid out but doing a lot of really what I would call aggressive in a good way management of not only band steering so saying okay well you connected to the 2.4 GHz band but that particular client we know that's an iPhone it should be on the 5 GHz band you're close enough like this is good it does all that steering and it will use all the technology like 802.11 KV and R which are the things that sort of manage that steering but some devices don't answer to that but they're cloud based so they know what device types will connect and the right way in which device types will answer to these different types of steering methodologies and so they use all kinds of different ways to force devices onto the right pod and the right radio and all of that and it happens really quickly and the cool part is you can see it like with it all the other ones like you know and I mean I really like Euro but it's really hard to see in real time when a device has moved from one you know access point to the other this just shows you but it's not overly geeky right like it's not it's not a pain in the neck about it it's just very visual visual is that the right word I think so it's just really well laid out and if you have one pod that's too far away it'll say there's a poor connection to that want to troubleshoot it and it'll show you but that's kind of the nice thing right is with all these others I have no easy way of seeing which pods are being used like right now I can see that there's one pod that I put in the kids bathroom so I named it kids bathroom and it's got one device connected to it and then everything else you know is on all these others so it's like oh maybe I should move that one out of the kids bathroom and maybe put it between the other two where that this other one is having issues and you could just see it very visual very well laid out I can I can get information on all these devices and the speeds are good you know I you guys know I don't obsess about the speeds I check them to make sure that they're not super slow but but the speeds are good it's not quite as fast as the links is vellop but I would say it it falls kind of between the vellop and the hero in my environment and heroes not slow by any stretch right I mean we're talking you know like the vellop I could get to in my network and so your network is going to be different but the vellop I could get to test out it on my iPhone is somewhere in the 450 megabits per second range which is pretty fast the hero sits at you know like 250 300 sometimes 350 and actually that's about where the plume sits is right in that range but I've only had it running for a couple of days and I need to give plume more time because like I said they're cloud managed so they um they keep optimizing your network over time in fact I've seen the lines change like you know I'll see oh these two things are connected to each other this way these two pods are connected to each other and then I'll you know I'll check a couple hours later and it's like I know I've made a better decision here the way your network the way you use it we should connect them this way and then it does so it's really cool um now the pricing John they're selling packs with the new super pods alone or suit then you know one new super pod with some of the old original pods so a pack with one super pod and four of the original pods which would be good for I would say most homes is 99 bucks five pods one super pod four original pods 99 bucks but there is a catch it's not a bad catch but there is a catch that gets you the hardware and and basic use of those pods but if you want all of these sort of cloud based smarts you need a subscription to the plume service and the subscription is 60 bucks a year or 200 bucks lifetime so you can be out the door for 159 bucks and that gets you a full year of all the service and then if it expires like you can still use all your pods that's fine you just don't necessarily get all the cloud smarts they are confident enough that you will get enough value out of that that you'll pay again which I really really like really cool and then there's prices all over the map you can get a pack with three of the super pods is 199 because the super pods are newer and more radios and all that stuff so to be fair I've been testing in my house with five super pods they sent me a pack with four of them and then one more for the office because I've got this stretch here but I'm getting a decent connection wirelessly I disconnected it from here in the office just to check I'm getting what I would call a decent connection wirelessly across the driveway with these super pods but I only changed to that this morning so I'm kind of letting it settle in and see how it does it's pretty cool man it's pretty cool like I said I have to temper my excitement here because you know sometimes the new shiny gets the best of me but I'm not feeling that here I'm feeling pretty confident if it's any if it speaks to this I've already moved I set these up on Sunday and by Sunday night I was like yeah I trust this enough I moved my house's main Wi-Fi to the plumes temporarily you know but I usually let it run several days before moving my main Wi-Fi to it but I did this right away within an hour setting it up I can trust this I can see what's going on I understand what's going on so there you go any questions or thoughts John? No I just check them out and I'm with you looking at the UI or UX if you will looks to be very well thought out and gives you the same information that other like Eero gives you a lot of that information as well but they don't necessarily lay it out that's it for you right you can go like Eero you can go to you can click on one of your Eros and it'll say oh yeah well here's all the things that I'm talking to right but it doesn't do it graphically maybe they'll add that someday it would be nice no it's a useful feature to understand how you're because yeah Eero I mean I trust it's doing the right thing but it's and some of the other systems too it's difficult to get the big picture right because you have to jump all over the place whereas these guys are just like yep here's here's the big picture yeah you want to see it you know to see it making the decisions it's awesome that's the thing it makes those decisions so much faster than any other mesh that I've tested like watching my devices jump between mesh points with this it happens almost in real time as I'm walking around the house whereas with others you know my devices will hang on for a while until it finally switches but this is like I said this is very actively kind of managing it and I'm it's possible that active management could cause issues with some devices which is why I want to test it with all of my stuff and see how that goes I haven't experienced that yet and it's been a few days but that's why I test these things for you folks before I now I mean the revenue model I think is interesting it's both the hardware and then the membership now how much can't you do if you don't have a member I mean I think you said you can use the system without a membership what you don't get is all of the kind of intelligence that the cloud provides down to the mesh so knowing okay the iPhone deals with roaming this way you know the Samsung Galaxy whatever deals with it that way the MacBook Pro deals with it this way right you don't get any of that what you also don't get is something I haven't mentioned but there's a lot of smarts in you get three types of authentication I don't want to say three types of networks because it's all using the same Wi-Fi but you get normal you know full featured internet right you get a guest network and then you also have an internet only network the guest networks kind of cool because you can set what of your local devices guests are allowed to talk with so if you say wanted to let people you know either talk to your Apple TV or talk to your printer or whatever you can do that while limiting their ability to talk to other computers and here's where it gets really fun John you can do it by password and you can even do that on your main network so you can have one SSID with multiple different passwords and people have different levels of access depending on which password they use which is really cool so if for example you wanted to change your Wi-Fi password like for years we never ran a guest network or anything here at the house because it just wasn't a thing and so all my kids friends know our Wi-Fi password I don't want to change everything but I could add a new Wi-Fi password for my main network to this slowly change things over to it with both passwords functioning just fine and then begin to limit access to the things using the old password and essentially nudge people over to a guest network without ever worrying about it or I could have different passwords for my IOT devices and easily turn off all of my IOT devices with one little tap so it's really cool like and that's the kind of stuff that goes away when you're not using the subscription so it's pretty cool like I said you can probably hear it in my voice I'm cautiously very impressed with this so we'll go from there good? yeah? sweet another cool stuff found that we won't spend nearly as much time on as we did this one is the new best tech Wi-Fi smart plug the thing that impresses me about this it's totally Wi-Fi capable so just like speaking of internet of things devices it just connects to your stuff but it's 16 bucks and it has two USB ports on it that you can use too but it's a plug you can control it with Amazon's A-Lady Google Assistant and Ift right and I've been testing it for a little while and you know it works there's no it's a thing it's a plug right but for 16 bucks that's a pretty aggressive price for a Wi-Fi capable plug for your summer travels if you want to have lights at home that you're turning on and off or you have a schedule you can let Ift do that not a bad little thing you can buy a couple of these and not break the bank so I've been impressed with it good stuff Mr. Braun smart plug yeah it means it's smart the next thing I really need to check out is smart switches not Ethernet switches although that's another topic to talk about but smart light switch replacements because that is one easy way to start converting entire rooms to be intelligent and then you don't have to cover over the switch if you plug the device in like a smart plug the outlet needs to be alive all the time in order for the smart plug to do its thing with its on and off so I want to check those out too I haven't tested any yet but there you go I'm trying to think if there's any other oh you know in the in the Qi charging world one of my favorite brands to play with their stuff and they just make quality stuff is fused chicken and they came out with a really nice they call it their gravity touch premium wireless charging base it's a Qi charger it wouldn't be good next to your bed because there's a blue light on all the time but you can either get it with leather a leather surface or a bamboo surface and it's either 40 bucks or 45 bucks it's the five dollars is the difference between the leather and it you know it's just a nice looking charging base it's the full size of your iPhone like my iPhone 10 fits on this base very very well so it's not like teetered on one of those charging pucks or anything it just you know it's a nice little thing just put it down and it's like I said you have 45 bucks so but I wouldn't put it next to your bed nice on the desk looks good on the desk in fact Andrew has the cool stuff found for us John unless you have something else I do let me um let me get some more info on it but it's also a Qi thing okay cool I'll do I'll read about Andrew here so I need to get back I've got it all over the place with my notes Andrew says he suggests this app it's an iOS app called export contact from new marketing lab ink he says it's an awesome awesome app that lets you export your iPhone contact list into a CSV file he says it's really hard to do this on a Mac this app makes it super easy and then you can save it to Dropbox or really wherever you want and it's $299 US and so if you want to take your contacts and export them to CSV so that you can import them or just back them up in a you know format that really you could read with anything that's the way to do it so thanks for that Andrew good stuff ready John I'm ready I got this a while ago and the price has been uh floating around here and there but I don't think I've mentioned it yet okay I will but it's the ioddy easy one touch Qi wireless fast charge car mount huh okay and it's a universal mount will work with you know any Qi phone but once I got the you know my iPhone here that would accept that sort of thing I'm like well I better upgrade my yeah better upgrade my car mount so I can do the wireless charging so it's really neat that um you know it has little you can you can put it in gimme mode and then there's a little button on it and when you press your phone against that the little clamps kind of wrap around your phone yeah yeah and it's adjustable and it you know charges it wirelessly so there's uh well you just have to have a cable running to power in the car the cable to the thing yeah that we actually mentioned that in 699 that's exactly the same one I use uh although I connected it to their CD player um you know bracket so that I I can just put the thing in my CD player and I don't have to put it like does that does that one mount to your air vents or is that uh like just no it's a suction it's the suction okay yeah yeah yeah yeah I like that thing I will say though that if you're using your phone for directions um it will not in my experience anyway with my phone if the screen is on and GPS is in use and all of that it the amount of power that the cheese able to pass to the phone basically leaves the phone even right you don't I don't lose power but I don't gain power doing this have you experienced that too uh now it increases but no I know you're saying yeah yeah but but what I find is it's super handy to just have there and like I can throw my phone in it and if I do need to use it for directions for say a long drive like notice this when I came down to your house the last time in fact it was this mount that I was using um you know I got halfway there and it was like whoa like I need I need to charge my phone because we're gonna go into Manhattan later and I need to have a full charge when I get to John's house so I just grab my my lightning cable and plug it into the bottom of the phone even though it's in the mount it's fine as we talked about on the show the phone's smart enough and will charge from lightning and stop charging from Qi when you plug the lightning cable even if the Qi coil is right there so so it you know doesn't hurt the phone or anything yeah I like that thing especially like you said I like the little arms that auto grab the phone when you pop it in the mount it's pretty good yeah and it's uh what 50 bucks at Amazon I think right I don't know well what did I get it for so I think it was a thrifter coupon deal so the price now is on Amazon that I'm looking here it's $49.94 but when I ordered it I got it for the amazing low price of $34.97 oh nice that's wow that's a good price yeah yeah cool cool that's great man I want to take a minute and thank all of our premium subscribers that contributed this week but really I want to thank I mean it's you know like I said it's our 13th anniversary we we couldn't and wouldn't do this without all of you premium subscribers non premium subscribers you know listeners contributors folks that help out in the the Facebook group those of you that will be helping out in the forums we're looking for moderators of course so you know as that kind of bubbles to the surface we would love to engage with you on that kind of stuff really really I mean it you know like we said at the beginning you know you helped define the the mission for this show by simply engaging with us when we started answering your questions you know almost 13 years ago so so it you know it means a lot and I do want to thank everyone and then also as we always do thank those of you that contributed this week either on manual or new subscriptions or the auto renew that that that so many of you sign up for and really makes a difference for us so on the biannual plan at $25 per month we had or sorry that's not what biannual means Dave on the biannual plan at $25 every six months we have James B Jeff K Tony S Francis F I got a look here because things change a little bit Randall M Michael M Larry S John E Phil G Stacy S and G D thank you all very much on also on the biannual plan at $50 every six months because you can choose your own amount we have Joe M and Chris B thank you very much and also on the biannual plan at $35 every six months we have Charles G and Anders E so thanks to all of you on the monthly $10 dollar plan we have in the last well it's really not the last week it's the last week and a half because we delayed this show to do it on our anniversary we have Michael L Chris F Paul M Michael C Mark R Dave C Bob L from the Working Smarter for Mac users Dr Bob Ryan M Neil L Scott F John G Frank a Abdullah B James C Barry F Joe S REL Michael P and a different Bob L so thanks to all of you and then a one-time contribution of $100 from Steve S as a happy anniversary gift thank you very very kindly Steve and thank you very kindly everyone this is like I said it's awesome and inspiring to it drives us to put together the best show we can for you every week so I got some quick tips on the list here John I think we still got some time you want to quick okay cool listener David brings us actually a great quick tip I did not know this he says I use command tab all the time to switch between open apps all the time he says but as handy as that feature is compared to reaching for the mouse or track pad I've been frustrated at times when I have simply too many programs open to quickly switch to the one I want he says and I really hate it when I have that many programs open and I'm hitting the tab key too fast and I race past the one I'm looking for causing me to have to loop around or to open the wrong thing says then I guess one day I must have been going too fast for my own good and didn't even let go of the mouse while I was command tab switching and I saw the highlighted app icon go the wrong way all together I didn't realize what I'd done until I repeated it by mistake again but that's my tip while still holding down command so you hit command tab to bring up the app switcher and then while still keeping command held down float the mouse over any app icon and as soon as it's highlighted you don't even need to click just let go of command and whatever you focus the mouse on or floated the mouse over at that point that's the app you'll switch to which is pretty cool I had no idea about this did you know this John no pretty cool isn't it I'd never tried it either yeah yet another one of those where is this documented kind of things and maybe it is documented I just never saw it before another mini one so he said sometimes he runs into a situation where he blows past the other thing it has to loop around again yep here's the other thing you can do so command tab switches between apps command shift tab makes it go in the other direction that's right so oh yeah next one hold down shift and go back to rather than looping around though you know it's not like you're gonna it'll let you save a little time yeah right yeah exactly yep yep cool alright and then listener Daniel where am I here there we are listener Daniel writes in and says file this one under things to know to avoid getting caught he's actually got two tips we'll start with the first one that's by definition where you start it says on a recent trip my dad was having trouble connecting connecting his windows laptop to his iphone's personal hotspot we tried all of the usual troubleshooting toggling wifi checking network settings even restarting the computer nothing was working we knew something was odd because my iphone and laptop were working happily just on the other side of the table I finally remembered way back in my brain about having read that spaces in the ssid or network name would cause a connection failure sure enough the ssid on my hotspot was just Daniel rather than the default Daniel's iphone so I directed him to settings general about name on his iphone to change the ssid device name to something different without a space and he was off to the races so the general advice is don't put any special characters no spaces no apostrophes no nothing even though that's the default right like that is what apple announces and you should be allowed to have those but as Daniel noted here some machines in this case a windows machine was not happy connecting so if you want to simplify not a bad idea yep and he has a good I think we've all seen parsing I'll call that a parsing issue they're like the code just wasn't written to handle something that's not alphanumeric which to me is just silliness it's silly but it's how yeah it's how the other thing is that I run into this also not as of late but um yeah putting spaces in file names sometimes confuses certain apps so what I would do sometimes to get around that was mostly on windows I think back in the day but um put like a dash or something instead of a space I remember that I distinctly remember having this problem early on but on windows yep yep yeah cool and then we have a second tip from Daniel he says the bonus tip is that if you were to change your iPhones you know hotspot SSID and password to match your home network details then all the devices you travel with would auto connect to your hotspot without any additional client configuration at all that's an interesting thing now you'd have to be careful and be mindful to turn your hotspot off when you don't want to use it otherwise devices at home like you know your Apple TV might start streaming Netflix across your iPhone's hotspot instead of your home Wi-Fi if both are there and advertising the same network name but not a bad idea if you want to make life simple just be aware that all of your family's devices would connect like you know I don't know if Daniel lives with his father or not but if they both lived in the same house then Daniel's father's laptop wouldn't be able to connect to his phone the network name was wrong but if Daniel's name was the same as the network they all use at home then boom and all your friends anybody that you've given your Wi-Fi password to would also just auto connect to your iPhone's hotspot so there's a couple of caveats there but there is a simplicity that comes along with it so I like that that's good interesting thought huh John one last quick tip well it's interesting and then sort of funny listener John said I discovered this trick when I used to work concessions at a local venue if I ever found an iPhone that was lost and not mine he says I would activate Siri and say call mom 9 times out of 10 that call went to the person's mom because and who could then get a hold of the person somehow and tell him or her that I had their iPhone says I'm assuming it would also work with android phones but I never tried that thought I'd just pass that along that's great advice because Siri can make those kinds of calls usually to without being unlocked which is super handy so that's good to play there's a setting for that right that's true yeah I was just digging around so if you go to if you go to settings Siri and search there's actually a slider saying allow Siri when locked and I would assume that the phone is locked if someone has lost it right I've seen some people who don't lock their phones sure yeah just like the old days yeah I wag my finger at some of my family members like I'll pick up my sister's phone and I'm like your phones not locked it's like why would I want to do that why would I want to lock it there might be a reason yeah I don't know about you but I got some I think we all have some data on our phone that we probably did not want to share with the world well and it's you know here's the thing like not only do you have data about you on your phone that you wouldn't want to share but in your contacts and maybe your calendar you've got data about other people that they might not want you to share and and so there is that whole conversation of you know where where does that responsibility and like if I've given you my phone number I mean I'll give anybody my phone number right I publish my phone number online it's not a big deal but some people don't feel that way about their phone numbers and they feel like they should be kept private and so it's not up to me to decide that you know I don't want to pass it on my phones but that means that anybody that grabs my phone can see your phone number two that's not such a good thing so it's and it's we're still figuring this out John this whole the you know ethics and and just the way these types of devices integrate into society so I think about it this way you know when cars were first built we didn't really have you know laws about cars we didn't have driver's licenses we didn't have traffic protocols I mean yes they're laws but we also have just simple traffic protocols that everybody follows like the four-way stop point right we all know what to do when we get to a four-way stop yeah some people screw it up right yeah I know but but in general like they work really well there there aren't accidents at four-way stops daily right you know they they generally tend to work really well but that's a pretty advanced concept right and the fact that that advanced concept is shared amongst the hive mind is pretty cool but we aren't at that point yet with smartphones we have not hit the four-way stop point yet we're getting there we're figuring it out and we're you know sorting through these things we're learning but you know we're not there yet let alone to the point where we have traffic lights and you know other things like it's we're just not there and it's okay I mean we've had these things for ten years I remember a while back when they when they added the ability to call someone with the the a-word device yeah I remember I think I had one one person on my list and they're like so I don't know if I'm too happy about you putting my contact information and sharing it with with those guys yep didn't even think about it exactly yeah or what if you what if you sync your you turn on that switch in in iOS which is sort of automatic why why you know what happens if you turn on that switch that says sync my contacts with Google right or or iCloud for that matter right now Google has I mean Google's got your phone number John now I mean I I don't know for certain but I assume that you've probably already done that at some level too but if you haven't well then I screwed you and I'm sorry about that but you know that that's like these are the things I got my contacts in the cloud too just because it's convenient because it's convenient that's the thing though it's like we don't think about all the implications of of not locking our phones or not you know hitting that button and I'm sure my phone number is shared to Facebook because someone has synced their contacts with Facebook and has my number in there so yeah okay the thing is as we've seen there are people that just don't follow protocol like right now I'm getting this one totally gotten this one too but it's a number it's always from a different area and it's like I don't I don't recall you know knowing anybody in that area and it's one of these outfits that are claiming that they'll give me zero percent they're like oh we've been monitoring your credit yeah you know they even leave a voicemail and I'm like uh no yeah exactly exactly well because they leave a generic message and it's like um so which company you with again yeah they don't know if they're just I think they're with yeah well I think they're with uh with scamsters international it could be you never know it could be some bank no I know they're fishing for yeah no it's not it's not one of my companies no but I'm saying it could be a different bank that wants your business I mean it's possible right you know about it that way I think it's a place that's just fishing for credit card numbers because they're giving me the promise of getting zero percent interest right right for transferring balances or whatever yep right I really get plenty of those deals but it could I was just going to say it could be one of those legit deals and they know that you throw away all your junk mail so let me see if I can get you on the phone and and get you that way I mean it could be it could be a legit business that's just trying different marketing tactics but it could be Dave could but I'm going to give you another legit thing okay and that's our email address that's totally legit feedback at MackieGab.com Did you say feedback at MackieGab.com? I'm afraid I did I said feedback at MackieGab.com I'm not going to spoil the surprise but I got something last night as a as a thank you gift for presenting at our local Mac user group that I'll actually I'll tell you about in the next episode because I want to take the right picture of it and I want to use it for album art for the for maybe next week's podcast so we've added album art by the way custom album art to each podcast episode because you know like why not we should and so so if you folks have anything any thoughts about album art send that into us and you can use the email address we just described you can use premium at MackieGab.com if you're one of our premium supporters you can tell us about album art you'd like to use but you can't I guess you could probably text it to us at 224-888-Geek in fact I'm pretty sure that would work so that's 224-888-Geek you can call or text us there and John Geek is four three three five that's correct and check out our new forums please check out our new forums MackieGab.com I saw some slack messages coming in while we're here I think some of you had visited the forums already and there might be a tweak or two that Adam has already taken care of for us so it's this is why we soft launch because there's bound to be some things that we didn't test we didn't come up with in testing even though we all a lot of us tested it together so that's what we've got I want to thank cash fly at cachefly.com for providing all the bandwidth for almost all of our 13 years but certainly for now and and our sponsors as I mentioned during the show set up at setapp.com we've got barebonessoftware at barebones.com we've got crossover at codeweavers.com slash mgg of course smile software and ongoing sponsor at smilesoftware.com slash podcast otherworld computing and ongoing sponsor max sales.com ring it ring.com slash mgg and you know since there's so many of you that listen I figure we should let you have the last word here today