 It's time for MacGeekGab and listener Allison sent in our quick tip of the week. You know that whatever app you're in on your Mac, you can launch Spotlight with Command Space? Well, try Command Option Space instead. It opens a finder window to the Spotlight search field. More tips like this plus your questions answered today on MacGeekGab Episode 951 for Monday, October 17th, 2022. Welcome to MacGeekGab, the show where you send in your tips like that one. Your questions, your cool stuff found. We share them all. We try to answer your questions. Sometimes we have questions, tips and cool stuff found of our own. We share it all with the goal being that each and every one of us learns at least five new things every single time we get together. Questions for this episode include collide.com slash MGG device security that uses education to help make your company more secure as opposed to mandates. It's pretty cool the way they do things. You're going to want to check that out. We'll talk more in-depth about that a little bit later here in the show. For now, here in what amounts to be a very rainy Durham, New Hampshire, I am Dave Hamilton. I'm here in Fairfield, Connecticut. This is John F. Brun. In Ohio goes Imos from Osaka, Japan. Pilot Pete here, guys. Amazing. All the way from Osaka. Yeah. It's moments like this that make me really scratch my head and wonder why it took us probably 10 years to have you join us remotely. Well, we did have to wait for some of the technology to catch up, but. No, the technology's always been there because we used to do just audio. And I mean, still the show is mostly an audio show. John and I have been remote forever. That's true. And we had used we, as I recall, we used a special beta version of Skype. So the all the background hits that that they put in there intentionally was taken away, correct. But it also, but again, you know, hotel internet hasn't always been anywhere. Fair, fair, fair, but it's gotten much better than it used to be. It has. I still don't know why we didn't even think to try it in the past. That's true. Whatever it's. Yeah, that's fine. But this is fun getting to travel the world and still play with my peeps on Fridays. Well, I like Monday's, Monday's. Yeah, now we record on Fridays. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And and for those of you that do choose our what we do with our Apple podcast subscription is we send it out to to to that as soon as we're done recording, which is generally on Friday. So you get that. I'm sorry, I realized I had all kinds of things on my wrist. So you get it a little early. We're still working with Apple podcast, though, because right now it's duplicating the episodes, the one that's released on Friday and then the one that's released on Monday, and there's no difference between them. I don't know why Apple podcast is doing that. Apple podcast, at least first level support, doesn't know why it's doing that. So they're on it. They're working on it. In the meantime, Eduardo has a fantastic quick tip. He says I was listening to episode nine fifty when you talked about BB edit. I remembered something I used almost every day. If you use shift option, the mouse cursor turns into crosshairs. Then you can make a vertical selection in the text defining your own column of text that you're going to select. This isn't he's right, by the way, but this isn't just BB edit. This works in a lot of different apps. I've used it, I think, in mail, certainly in like pages and Apple's text edit and other apps, too. It makes more sense in BB edit than others often because BB edit uses a mono spaced font, meaning every character is the same width. So when you're starting to draw a column, it actually works that way. A text that isn't really a column. But, you know, in in in apps that are using variable spaced fonts, which is pretty much everything, it gets a little weird sometimes. But it is nice if you need to just like copy the left hand side of something or the middle, if it makes sense to do that. Yeah. So it's a shift option does that. I always forget what the keystroke is. I know it's possible in the moments that I need it. But then it's like, all right, I wind up hitting 16 different keystrokes before I finally go. Cool. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, that's not just a cool a quick tip. That's a cool tip. Yeah. Don't try this if you're driving, but if you're not driving, that's cool. Yeah, I don't. I mean, if you're using your Mac while you're driving, I'd like to have a conversation about other problems. Yeah. Right on. Yeah. All right, Jacques, speaking of Episode 950, where we were talking about emergency SOS, Jacques reminds us that emergency SOS can be set to press. If you press the power and side, the power slash side button five times, it can bring up your contact window, but you have to go into your phone settings, your iPhone settings and turn this on or turn it or turn it off, depending on how you're going to do it, but you can have it show your emergency contact info and you go into settings, emergency SOS to set that. So that's just another way I must have. I must have said it without realizing it because as soon as I saw that quick tip in every note and did five times, came right up to my emergency contact. So maybe it is set that way by default, Pete, that that's entirely I don't. Yeah, I don't I don't it would be good in that way. EMTs and such. No, just no. Yeah, that's fair. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I stumbled across this accidentally. Go ahead. I was trying to do a screenshot, which, as you probably know, is the right button and the left top button. Yeah. But I fumbled fingered it once and apparently it just saw me clicking on the power button five times and it's like, hey, you want it online? One one and I'm like, no, no, no, no, no, probably not. Yeah. Yeah, but that's why it asks. Yeah. Yeah, which is good. Which is good. What else do we have here? Oh, Bill has a quick tip for us. Bill says, I recently discovered that Watch OS 9 has a feature that I requested from Apple years ago, although I'm certainly not taking credit for this enhancement. Bill, absolutely take credit for the enhancement. The credit is yours until proven otherwise. So Bill created a feature in Watch OS 9 and he's here to tell us about it. You can now delete reminders, tasks directly on Apple Watch. Previously, you could only mark a task as complete on the watch, but would have to delete it on a real device like, you know, your iPhone or your Mac or your iPad no longer. In fact, Apple went a step beyond Bill's dreams and added full capability. One can also now create and edit reminders directly on Apple Watch. And and he showed sent a screenshot for sure enough. You get to, you know, not only as Mark has completed there, but edit and delete are there as well. That's good to know. I had given up on that functionality. It's weird. I I use a hybrid of Apple's reminders as well as the the old school busy Cal reminders. They're all synced to iCloud, but they don't really intermingle. There's the Apple Reminders list and the busy Cal list. I've been thinking, though, about potentially moving everything to Apple Reminders. But I have to I have to look into it. There were there were features that Apple had cut out of reminders, like the ability to have things recur on a custom schedule and things like that that I I use all the time. So I got to I got to check that. But but I do use I have one Apple Reminders list. And mainly it's for Siri so that I can when I'm, you know, in the car, I can ask Siri to remind me, hey, mention this on the show tomorrow. And then it appears on my list and I can do stuff with it. Nice. Yeah. Yeah. Anything on any of that? Or am I am I plowing through our our quick tips here? Good. I tried that on the watch at work. Work slick. Cool. Good. Good. All right. Craig. Craig has an interesting one. He says, one great annoyance to me with dual monitor set up on a Mac is when the dock just moves from one display to the other. It says it can happen under certain scenarios or clicks in certain areas of the screen. I've never seen this and I use dual monitors all the time. However, I keep my dock to the to the left. I keep it on the left hand side. It says I stumbled upon a tip, though. How to very easily reposition the dock to the primary or either display with one click. And the trick is move the mouse to anywhere close to the bottom of the display where you want the dock. So if the dock is on one monitor, go to the other monitor, put the mouse near, but not at the bottom of the display. Left and then the move is left click quickly, release and pull the mouse pointer straight down past the bottom of the screen. That brings the dock over. So there you go. It says that'll do it. He says, one thing it does require the mouse to be pulled straight down. So if your hand waggles side to side when pulling down, it may not work the first time, but it's still easier than all the other methods available. It's interesting. Yeah, I haven't done that. You know, I've played with the sidecar and the iPad. You know, I had it. What my problem was for never using that before is I had a separate Apple ID for my work iPad and I went I finally just went, you know, I'm not doing anything. I'm worried about work scene. I just put it all on there and I used the same idea and then I could use the sidecar and that was pretty cool. The one thing I did trick stump stump myself briefly with one day, though, was out smart yourself to use a pilot. Let's use that without dropping any other bad words and starts with trick. Anyway, so I tricked myself. I'm going, well, why, you know, why, why can't I get the mouse to work? It's it's stuck. I could not get the mouse onto the screen. Well, the sidecar is always going to be on one side, regardless of where you put when you naturally. So, for instance, I had moved the screen, the iPad over to the left of my computer. But the sidecar thinks it's to the right. So I'm trying to move the mouse further and it won't go. I can't get on to the no matter what I do. Of course, because it's going the other way. Yeah, I couldn't get my mouse back onto my computer no matter what I tried. And then and then somehow I saw a movement over on the side and went, oh, there it is. It's way over on the other side of the screen. Yeah, that's great. Yeah, that's great. So just realized that your sidecar iPad screen is almost on one side. I have out where you put it in the room. I have outsmarted myself a few times with and I forget the name, John, help me with this. Whatever the Apple calls the technology where you can use one mouse and keyboard on multiple Macs, right? So you could have like like whatever that is in the in the latest. I mean, it's in Monterey or whatever, whatever that's called. I can't remember. But you can write and you can have two, three devices, I think, next to each other and you can move between your laptop and your iMac with the same mouse and keyboard and even, I think, to your iPad or whatever. And that must be cool if you have multiple computers on your desk. If you have multiple computers on different floors of your office and studio and they are right on top of each other, only eight feet apart or 10, whatever it is. This then becomes an issue sometimes because you move. I move my mouse off to the side of one screen. And now my mouse and keyboard don't work anymore. And it's because there on this computer up here when I'm down in my office and it would be I'm saying this, realizing it's only ever happened when I'm in my office and this computer is the one that gets my mouse. If we were in the middle of a show and that happened, that'd be really interesting. We host. I'd be host. That's the correct word. That's right. Yeah. Yep. Yeah. Yeah. Well, but thinking of things that do work between betwixt all of those, it I got to say they've done a nice job with the AirPods. If I'm listening to something on my computer and the phone rings, it'll swap over to that. Yeah. Not with other not with other headphones, but the AirPods do a nice job. They do. Yeah. Yeah. That's the magic Apple trick. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. They've got that chip in there that they can do all that crazy stuff. They know. Well, it helps to man first day with the new lips. It helps to control the whole widget. So there you go. Yeah. All right. Universal control. Kansas Dave in the live chat came up with that. That's the name of the feature. So universal control. That's it. Yeah. Sometimes it's no control. Universal control turns into nothing. So that's fun. All right, Jim. I'd like this quick tip because it's simple. And yet it shows enhanced functionality says, have you ever, after getting an attachment or download of like a four page insurance form, wished you could fill it out on your Mac instead of printing it and filling it out with pencil? Well, I don't know when Preview gained the ability to do this, but it has. First, he says I'm using Monterey Mac OS Monterey. Second, the document must be PDF. Obviously, if you receive it as an HTML based form to print from Safari, you can then export as a PDF, open the PDF with Preview, click tools, annotate text, you're ready to go. If the form has fields, click in the field and start typing. If there are checkboxes in the form, put the cursor in the box and then lightly tap the mouse or, you know, if it's on, you know, as long as you're on a laptop, it's quite sophisticated. He says, when I tried to type in a number too large for the field, it reduced the size of the font and gave me another field under what had already been typed, the finished form is a whole lot more readable than my handwritten version would be. Yeah, it's true. I, you know, I've always used for a while PDF pen now PDF expert to do that. And I have full disclosure. I have changed over to PDF expert for all my PDFs. Preview does not open for PDFs on my Mac anymore. It's just all PDF expert because it's great at reading them. It's also great at at doing all this form stuff. I can have my signature in there really easily, which, of course, now you can do in preview as well. So, yeah, previews feature set has has slowly grown, which is which I like. That's good. And the best part is it's well, it ain't free. But, you know, comes comes with the cost of your computer. That's right. That's right. Yeah. You've already paid for it. If you're listening to this show, chances are you've already paid for it. I think there's like like just shy 20 percent of the audience that their Apple device is limited to limited does not include a Mac. Let me say it that way. I don't mean to exclude anyone. It's just, yeah, there's there's people who don't use Macs, but also but use iPhones and listen to the show. And that's great. It's like, you know, some weeks back, I heard you talk about PDF expert. And I still haven't gone to that yet. He is dude. How much is that? Do you remember roughly? Uh, I don't. Pete, I don't know. OK, I'll look. I'll look at it. Will you move on? I just, I was just curious, because I've been using still PDF pen because that's included in set app. So right, you know. Yeah, I'm looking at the airline pilot that I am. I'm looking at Riedel's website here. There is a free download. You can use some of it for free. I think it's one of these things. And then it's not cheap. I think it's like 80 bucks a year to use PDF expert. So yeah. But it sounds like it's quite the. Yeah, it's oh, it's it has it has revolutionized my my life. I would I would they gave it to me for free. You guys can still hear me. Yeah, yes, powers flickering here in this rainstorm today. So just want to make sure that everything's holding steady. But it is so much better than anything else I've ever used that I would pay this. They, you know, I mean, they gave me a review copied it. But it's yeah. So go check it out for free. Like you do get the free download. And I think there's a trial period with all the features. And then I think some features go away after a little while. I believe that's how it is. So I've. But I seem to remember your comment that it was, you know, it just wasn't as clunky. You know, things in PDF pen would stop or, you know, you'd have to go reselect it. And no, no, no. Yeah, I won't use PDF pan again. I mean, I won't use the current version of PDF pan again. Like I'm happy to look at new builds of it. I'm not I'm not close minded. It's that I've learned my lesson and given what's available today. PDF expert is the best for my needs. Nice. All right, John, we've got a quick tip from Michael for a yes, we do. So Michael says, here's another way to restart the phone when locked. And it's using the on screen assistive touch dot. How do you get the assistive touch dot, you may ask? And you go to settings, accessibility, touch, and then assistive touch. You'll then see a white spot on your screen. It's kind of like a home button replacement. But anyways, if you click on the dot, then click on device, then click on more. There'll be a restart option. Isn't that neat? There's a whole bunch of other stuff in there, too. So yeah, check it out. It doesn't take up too much space on your screen. Yeah, yeah, that's good stuff. Yeah, yeah, there's always like the the whole accessibility assistive area of iOS is, of course, super valuable for people who need that. And then it's also an interesting place to find features that sometimes actually make it sort of to the to the front of the line for everyone to be using. I think some of the audio features, I think the flashlight or something was in there for a little while, too. Like, yeah, it's it's almost like the the if there's something that Apple decides, yeah, this would be useful to have, but we don't want to clutter the user interface and user experience for everyone with it. Let's just bury it in accessibility and they'll put it in a spot where it's like, OK, yeah, I could see where it would be used that way. And, you know, but it's I think it's I think it's treated as more than that. Um, I had an an issue this morning. Well, I didn't have an issue, but my wife did. Her alarm didn't go off. And the reason her alarm didn't go off was because her phone was dead, except it wasn't dead. It was the same issue I talked about, you know, I don't know, at the opening of the show three or four weeks ago where I woke up black screen on the phone. It had been on charge all night and I had to do the special the special reset, which I'll talk about in a second. Then my daughter had it happen and several of you wrote in that you were having this happen. Everybody thus far that I had heard from was on iPhone 14 pros of some form, the pro or the pro max. So we thought this was an iPhone 14 pro problem. I can say right now that it is not because my wife has an iPhone 13 pro. I think it's an iOS 16 problem. And because hers, the same thing happened. Listener Donna helps us remember what to do. She calls it an unknown device problem. UDP and the trick is press the up button on the phone release, press the down button on the phone release and then hold the power button up, down, power, UDP, unknown device problem, universal data packet. I don't know what's UDP stand for in network terms, John. Uh, is he user data? Datagram protocol. Yeah, I think it's something like that. Yeah, I think that's what it is. But yeah, so thank you, Donna, for that quick tip. I even it because my wife woke up when my alarm went off to remind me to be awake to do the show today and she was like, crap, why didn't my alarm go off? I was like, even in my slumber because I had prepped Donna's tip yesterday for the show, I was like, I know exactly what to do. She's like, man, you're really thinking I'm like, well, I mean, yeah, I don't know that I would have remembered it without Donna's unknown device problem, UDP, push the up the volume up, push it down, hold power. So you're never holding more than one button at a time. That's that's the key, but you've got to hold power for a while. The other ones you hit quick. Have you had this problem, Pete? Oddly, I have on an iPhone 8 Pro 8S Pro, the big, the big one. Sure. Many, many years ago, I happened to be in Memphis, but the phone just absolutely froze locked, would not do anything. And I'm like, well, I can wait about, you know, two weeks for this thing to completely power down because nothing's going on on it. And then and then hope it restarts and works. OK, I took it to the Apple store and I told the guy what was going on. And he hands me the phone back and about as I'm finishing explaining what's going on, he hands me my phone back with the little Apple logo coming up. I'm going, what did you do? I've tried everything except running it over with the car. He goes, oh, yeah, you just down power. OK, that's what it is. That's how it works. But hey, now I get to talk about Collide, our sponsor. 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You can meet your compliance goals by putting users first. Visit collide.com slash MGG to find out how. That's KOL IDE.com slash MGG and our thanks to Collide for sponsoring this episode. Is the Doug. Yes, our friend Doug has a question and I think I have an answer. I have an ongoing issue with Safari on my Mac. I am up to date with all software updates and I'm using a 16 inch M1 MacBook Pro. Many times, Safari will fail to load a page. It starts to load and just hangs halfway through the same page loads rapidly in Chrome or Safari Tech preview. I empty my caches. If I quit Safari and reopen it, the page will load fine. Any thoughts on what I might do to resolve this issue? Yeah, it sounds like a cache to me. Maybe the DNS cache. All right, so I would double check. So in Onyx, there's a maintenance section than cleaning than options and there's a number of them there, including DNS cache, maybe just make sure that box is checked. And there's a couple of other caches that Onyx will help you clean up. You can also do it from the command line. And we'll link to an article titled how to flush DNS, how to flush DNS cache on a Mac. Or it could be your DNS server. I don't know, there's a utility called Namebench that will tell you the best DNS server. I run it every now and then just just so I'm convinced I'm getting the best speed possible. Yeah, that's we'll put the command, the terminal command right in the show notes to it, macgeekapp.com, or mgge.fm slash 951. That's how you get right to the episode, but obviously it'll be right there from the homepage, too. That's yeah, that's an interesting. I would agree with you that it could be DNS. It could be one of your plug-ins with Safari. If you've got some content blockers or something running, I always recommend turning those off when troubleshooting just to make sure. And then, of course, trying it in another browser, that'll that'll tell you what's going on and try Firefox. Although there's a lot that happens with Firefox, so it might be misleading. Firefox uses its own DNS unless you tell it not to. So if it is a DNS problem, Firefox might might bypass that because it's not relying on the systems DNS to do things. So, yeah, that's I mean, I've certainly seen that happen before. But yeah, it could it could just be that DNS was the first place I'd look to, Joe. Yeah, yeah, just trying to talk it through and hoping that like some other thing will come to mind, but nothing is so. Not to try and bring us down a rat hole. I'm just wondering, you know, is what we do is yeah, I mean, this is just one of those things that I've. I don't think Apple does that well is Safari. It's just a hinky browser. Right, that's interesting. Am I wrong? Oh, well, I mean, I think all browsers are hinky. Yeah. Because because I would I'll say like Brave works. Brave is based on Chrome. Yeah, Chrome's a Chrome. Generally speaking, it works. I think Duck Duck go ahead their own browser. I think they do. They do on iOS. I don't know if they do on well Mac OS. OK, so an important thing to remember is that any browser on iOS, it doesn't matter what the app is named. Yeah, is Safari, a.k.a. Webkit. Oh, sure. OK, yeah, you put like because they have to use that API. Bingo thing. You cannot put your own browser on iOS. So Chrome on iOS is is Safari with less features. Truly, like that's that's just how it is, because they don't get to tap into everything Apple gets to tap into. But on your Mac, Chrome is Chrome, for sure. So, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, that's I find that every browser is is a little hinky. But I use I mean, I was going to say, but I find Safari to be a little more hinky and I guess this is the term of the day. I find Safari a little more hinky than other browsers. But I I don't know that that's fair. I use Safari as my primary browser and only switch from it when I'm having a problem. So I don't like I can't say that Chrome would be more reliable if I used that as my primary browser or if I'd have to switch to Safari just as often or more often, I don't know. Yeah, yeah, same. When I click on a link, Safari comes up. But when I open a browser, 98 percent of the time, it's brave. Hmm. So one thing I will say is that Safari is and I think there's there's tests, there's routinely tests done that sort of confirm this. Safari is the most power efficient browser to use. And and I think it's certainly that's true on Mac laptops. Obviously, it matters less on a desktop Mac. But I believe that's part of why Apple mandates Safari to be the old or WebKit to be the only browser on iPhone is is for that reason. I don't know. There might probably other reasons too. But they're they're also control freaks over there. So yeah, there's numerous reasons here. Yeah. Yeah. You mean that in a loving way, too, Dave. I do. I'm curious what what people out there use and what your experiences are. Feedback at MackeyCab.com or join us MackeyCab.com slash discord and and let's talk about it because yeah. Feedback at MackeyCab.com. That's what I'd write to if I had to. I'd write to feedback at MackeyCab.com. Even if you were in Osaka. I would. Yeah, we have several listeners in Osaka. They're going to be upset that they didn't get to meet you when they hear that you were there, but you're going to be gone long before I want to be here for 20 whole hours, whether I need to or not. So and then on West continuing Westbound to Dubai. So Westbound around the world this time. Yeah. Wow. How many how many stops on this particular Westbound around the world? Five, including the final stop. So OK. OK. That's not is that bad? Oh, it's it's kind of it's good. It's efficient, right? So I started in Memphis. I go Anchorage, Osaka, Dubai, Paris, Indianapolis. Done. Then I have to jump seat home from Indy. OK. OK. Huh? Which is easy. Yeah. Right. Right. Yeah. Yeah. That's easy. Yeah. Yeah. So you you actually go Westbound around and then some. Absolutely. And then some so. And then you got to come back. I'll tell you, though. And now we're way of speaking of rabbit holes here. We are find ourselves in one. It's much easier to go Westbound than Eastbound. OK. So I'm shift. You know, you get you wake up in the morning and, you know, you get some sleep and you get and you're traveling with the daylight. Or if you're doing it at night with the night. But so I flew all night going to Anchorage, but flew all day coming to Osaka. I'm going to fly all day tomorrow going to Dubai. And then I'll fly all day going from Paris to Indianapolis. So there's plenty of daylight and it's just easier to stay awake on the flight deck. So make sense. Fascinating stuff. If you want more fascinating stuff like this, folks, go listen to Pete's podcast that he started with his flight school buddy called So There I Was. Some great aviation stories. If if I can, I'll recommend that you start with episode 17. I listened to it yesterday or a Wednesday on the way down to your house, John, to PEPCOM, which we'll talk about in a little bit here. And and I like I literally was in tears that the story that was told was was wonderful. So So There I Was dot dot US and or wherever you find your podcast. Thank you, Dave. I'm humbled. Yeah. Yeah, you're welcome. All right. He's my he and by the way, he's my co we've we've coined this term on there. He's my co-horst. I've noticed that at first I thought it was a misspeak, which maybe it was. Yeah. Well, cohort and co-host and now we're just co-horsts. Co-horsts. I like it. That's a smart. Yeah. All right. Bob has a question about technology. So we will we will answer that because we are not an accidental aviation show. Although we certainly could become one. I love aviation stories. But Bob asks, he says, I looked in my activity log on my Synology Distation and saw all kinds of IPs, listings of failed logins. And he says, is the NAS being targeted? Is are people like trying to hack in? Says I went back a few months and there are thousands of similar entries. I think that I have my NAS protected correctly, but would love to have you cover that briefly on a show. Yeah. So yes, your NAS is being targeted. People, Synology and QNAP and, you know, probably others, but certainly those two are popular network storage devices. And so people know that they could sniff around and they're popular devices that have common open ports, right? Unless you change all kinds of things on it, you're going to have ports, five thousand or five thousand one open for login to your your stuff and and potentially others as well. Ten thousand three is another one. But but you want those open so that you can access your NAS from remote. Other people know this and they start banging on the door. This is one of the reasons that if you're running DSM seven on your distation, which if you can, you should, it will tell you you should not have an account named admin as an active account, you should deactivate the admin account. And the reason for this is because that's only that's one of only two pieces that people would need to log in to your distation username and password. And admin is the default was the default username for all distations with full complete root access on it. So that's why they're telling you to turn that off, because now you're leaving it to only one piece of information that people need to guess the password for your root, your admin user. This kind of stuff happens all the time on my units. I see it regularly. I highly recommend that we all go in to on our distations, go to control panel, security, protection and enable auto block. I've got mine set to block after 10 failed login attempts after five minutes. And then I have mine expire after one day. And the reason I do that is just in case it's me. If I'm traveling and I screw up and try to log in and I lock myself out, I want to be able to get in at some point. So that's why I have it unblocked after one day. I don't know if I should be sharing that on a podcast, listen to two by tens of thousands of people, but we're the Mackey kept family here until we find a better term that John's working on with all of you. But we'll all still be the Mackey kept family. So I trust you folks. So, you know, I don't know. Pete, you had an interesting take on this, though, on auto. Well, let me ask it before I go into my thing on that. You what you have it block is only the IP address from whence it is coming. Right. That's the only thing you can block. Yeah. So but it's so it's not blocking your account. So you if you're staying at the same place, you want to be able to get in tomorrow, that sort of thing. Correct. Yeah. So OK. And mine is my hotel's IP that's being blocked. I want that to unblock tomorrow so I can try again. That's OK. So so stupid question. Could you use a VPN show your IP address? OK, so of course, of course, I could get your work around that is. So so that would then allow you to use my method, which is I think I don't think I have mine ever expired. I think once your IP address is blocked, it's blocked. And I also set it to like four failed attempts in like five hours. So. Interesting. And attempts in five minutes is a lot of attempts. Four attempts in five hours is not a lot of attempts. And I use my one password in order to get so I'm not worried about. Not getting in. OK, that's really smart. I'm going to go change mine right now while we're doing this. Oh, seriously, like this is this is a great idea. Yeah, why would I want to only block it in five minutes? I mean, if it happens in five minutes, it will also still be blocked because five minutes is is a subset of four hours. So, yeah. Yeah, yeah, I thought, yeah, let's go with the longest. Sorry, hit the mic. Let's go with a longer time frame and we'll. Yeah, but catching more fish in that net, shall we say? Yeah, so I've set mine to I'm going to set it to five login attempts within 300 minutes, which is five hours. There you go. Yeah. And then to put the other thing, going back to another show recently, I have found and it could be purely anecdotal, but Dave, I'm using tail scale. OK, I find that my disk station seems much more responsive, much more. It's just faster. Am I wrong? I probably am, but it feels like it's just working faster. It almost feels like it's I'm on the same and I am on the same virtual network with it. Yeah. But it eliminates the whole login issue and all of that. Huh. I mean, you still have to log in. I think I'd. Yeah, you're right. I do. Yep. Now that you mentioned it, I did have to log in. But but. And now I'm getting echoes after using tail scale. I don't know why. Yeah. I mean, I'm you while I talk here for Pete for a second, just because I'm getting echoes from your scenario there, which is fine. Yeah, tail scale. Yeah, you wouldn't have to re log in constantly because your IP address of your client device, even as it moves around the world, stays exactly the same just like the IP address of your disk station says the same. So it sees you as logging in from the same computer, which it is. It's just cool because you're all over the world and it doesn't matter. That's where tail scale is perfect at doing that. So, I mean, whether it's faster or not, I don't I mean, tail scale uses WireGuard as at its core, WireGuard is a pretty efficient VPN. But yeah, I mean, I don't I mean, it could be faster than whatever other VPN or authentication method you're using. Yeah, it may just be anecdotal. You know, it probably was from whatever wherever I was that day. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I'm changing this on all of mine. So I'm going at five attempts in 300 minutes on both of my publicly accessible distations, so that is now done. I like this. That's really smart, man. Yeah. Why would I limit it to just five minutes? Because I mean, you know, if somebody tries that many times in five minutes, it's still going to get blocked, even if it's if it's look ahead window or it's look back window is five hours. Right. And you don't have any RAM usage issues or anything. I like like this is the kind of thing where a memory leak would would rear its ugly head if like DSM wasn't built right. I'm not suggesting that it's not. But no, so well, so far I haven't noticed it. But I'm not the power user that you guys are. Well, but it's it's it would be the hack attempts would be the thing that would build that buffer fill that buffer. Yeah. Yeah, I like it. Good stuff. All right, John, you want to take us to Richard? Oh, and don't forget security advisor. Oh, that's a great thing. Yeah. Yeah, the Synology has a thing that will run at regular intervals and warn you if things are not set up right. That is true. Yeah. And I don't know that it runs automatically. I had to I seem to remember having to log in and tell mine to enable the regular scan schedule so you'd go into security advisor advanced, enable regular scan schedule and the one that I'm looking at now. It's done on Wednesday at 3 a.m. But but yeah. And if there are things that it finds that you know about and are doing intentionally, then you can tell it. Skip this particular thing and only tell me about other stuff so that you're not getting alert blindness, which is which is a real thing. You know, beware alert blindness, folks, because for anything, right? Like that's I used to I know I've told the story recently, I think on the show where I would oftentimes, you know, when I was doing on site consulting, especially on Windows in the late 90s, it would be a lot of virus stuff, right? That's what I mean. I made my I think I paid for a house because of other people's viruses solving them. I wasn't writing them. I wasn't installing them with that. Dave, I want to make a fine point on this pencil. But I would get to somebody's house and, you know, they would bring them they would bring me to their computer after we set our pleasantries. And I would make them sit down and show me what was wrong. Because that oftentimes it was if I took my path into the system, I wouldn't see the same errors or have the same problems that they would. So I would say, OK, show me what's wrong. Then we'll switch seats and I'll, you know, see if I can do my match. And I can't tell you how many times somebody would, you know, wake up their computer, turn on their computer, whatever it was. And just, you know, there would just be a like an endless stream of error dialogues that would just pop up and they would start clicking through those like their life depended on it, just dismissing them left and right. And I would like I would have to tell them to stop. I remember one person I had to like put my hand on the mouse. I'm like, we need to read those. They're like, yeah, but those come up every time. I'm like, exactly. I'm here for like you're paying me by the hour. You called me on the phone and asked me to come over to fix a problem. I think this might have something to do with it. You know, let's let's slow down. Let's breathe a little. But it's true, right? We all get that alert blindness where it's like, no, I'm going to do something. I need to dispatch with all that crap. And and so like with Security Advisor, I highly recommend that you aim for having all green. And if that means telling it to ignore something that you agree that they think is bad, but you're doing intentionally, get that out of the way so that you really are only getting alerts when it finds something new, which is really what you're looking at it for. What what changed? That's the thing that Security Advisors is, you know, that's that's what you want alerts for things you didn't already know. So beware alert blindness. It's important. Yeah. All right. Thank you for coming to my Ted talk. John, now will you take us to Richard? We'll do Richard says, I am thinking about upgrading to a new iMac and thinking ahead to my external storage and connectivity plan. Excuse me. I currently have external SSDs with USB, maybe USB 3.1 connected to my iMac, but the new Macs have USB C ports. I do have an older OWC USB dock, but that will be obsolete if I upgrade. I also have a dimo printer and a laser printer connected. Should I look at a dock to expand my port options or different different drive enclosure that offers USB C? Yes. So I'm in a similar situation in that I have multiple SSDs in different enclosures. One is USB C to USB C, which I use on my Macs because they all have USB C ports. I also have some that are on USB A from from times past and connected via a dongle. So I think you could go you could go. You could either get a new enclosure or you could use your existing enclosure, which I assume that all the devices you're talking about here have USB A ports. So you want to get a dongle that has multiple USB A ports. And there are two that I like. So one is from Anchor and also OWC makes some nice Thunderbolt docks. Yeah, for sure. If you need more ports. Yeah, the anchor one here is less expensive and has less ports. The OWC Thunderbolt 3 dock has like everything. So you're talking about the just so people listening know what you're talking about it. What you had put in the show notes is the anchor 533 USB C hub. And this is really a travel hub. It's it's got it's just a little dongle and it's got HDMI. And I think what one three USB three ports on USB A. Yeah, OK, got it. Yeah, so that's what I do. Yeah, yeah. Which which which OWC one are you talking? Oh, just all in general, they're Thunderbolt three docks. Yeah, with different number ports. Yeah, if I might offer some advice on those two. I've had to the first one I bought and of course, if you're listening, I'll guess, I'll just try to describe. The first one I bought to fit in the side of my MacBook Pro had the two USB C mail plugs properly stationed so they would fit so it would fit right into the side of my MacBook Pro perfectly. Good to go. Problem is, as you use it as a laptop, you pick it up, you set it down, you move it around, that sort of thing. You wind up, I guess, elongating the ports on the side of your laptop and or damaging that that that little dock. Get the one that has the flexible cord that John is talking about that it plugs in and it just works so much better. I've had I've had both the one with the cord is perfect works works first time every time the other one quit working, you'd have to hold it the right way. And God help you if you had a external drive plugged in, it would, you know, you'd get yelled at for ejecting it without properly ejecting it and unplugging it without properly ejecting. So that's, you know, get the one with the cord. Yeah, the one. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The one the ones with the two that like sort of look like an extension of the side of your MacBook Pro. Those always worried me for exactly that reason. It's like this. Now you've just given me like leverage on the side of this thing to pop those off. I wasn't even worried about it stretching them. I was worried about it leaving them in there. You know, yeah, right. But that could also happen with a with a dongle if things were to fall or whatever, but at least then it'd be only one port. Yeah, yeah, yeah, good stuff, good stuff. Yeah, yeah, I like I like both of those things. Those are good, good companies. Yeah, what I found kind of weird though, so I must not have been paying attention when they released this machine, but the 24 inch iMac apparently has different configurations with a different number of USB ports. Just pay attention to that. OK, like there's one model with two Thunderbolt slash USB four ports and then a slightly different model also has two USB three ports. So. Interesting, I think you could get away with either one. Yeah. Yeah, you need four ports. You're right. Yeah, it adds the the 10 gig USB three ports. So that'd be USB 3.2, I believe. I don't know. It's 10 gig USB. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, fair. Yeah, good, good, good catch, good catch. All right. I'm still waiting to figure out what to replace the 27 inch iMac with. I'm it's it's wishful thinking that Apple will come out with something else. No, you're right. The Mac Studio is is it or the Mac Mini, right? Like those are the two things we can argue all day that there's room for something in the middle. I think that something in the middle is an M2 Mac Mini. I don't think it's a 27 inch iMac. I could be wrong. I could be right. All right, I'm going to mute you again, Pete, because I'm getting echo from you. The pizza no soccer. He doesn't have wired headphones with him. And so he's on, you know, his Max just playing out into the room for the most part, things work, but just there's moments where the lag in the echo cancellation can't quite keep up with each other. I noticed a thing this week. I launched carbon copy cloner. I think to answer one of your questions, you know, just to do a little research. And I went into the volumes tab on carbon copy cloner and looked at the data volume of my boot drive. And that's where I have carbon copy cloner and time machine creating snapshots. And I looked and I let it take a minute to calculate how much snapshots were being used and how much space was being used by each of the snapshots. And it said that 962 gigabytes were in use with snapshots. And these were snapshots going back to like March of this year. Why is it using so much space? Like I thought I have a two terabyte drive in my Mac mini prior to that. The machine that I used before that, the iMac that it replaced, had a one terabyte drive and I never even got close to like filling this thing up. Right. And like I couldn't figure out why I was just consuming space. It was it still had free space. Well, in the lower right corner of that, so in carbon copy cloner volumes, pick your volume and then in the lower right hand corner, you get to pick how much free space, how many snapshots are being saved per day, per week, for whatever, but you get to pick free space requirement. And I believe the default is 75 gigs. And so guess how much I was, I had free on my Mac at any point in time. 75 gigs. I would also notice occasionally, but but frequent enough that I would see it that CCC dashboard would just suddenly be using, you know, a significant amount of CPU when I had no backup running. But I think it's this, it's the snapshot operation and perhaps also the garbage collection of like cleaning up the old one so that it can add the new ones in. So I set that to 500 gigs. And within about an hour, I had 500 gigs free on my on my drive. And that's that's more than enough for for my use of snapshots. But really, this is just a PSA. Go check it out and make sure yours is set to whatever you want it to be set to and that you are aware. So yeah, it's one of those things. 75 gigs doesn't seem like enough to leave free on a two terabyte drive. But maybe I'm maybe I'm being over cautious. I don't know my my first computer had a 40 megabyte hard drive. So actually, I was thinking, I don't know why when I was waking up this morning. Maybe I was dreaming it last night. I was thinking about the the 800 K floppies that we used to use the three and a half inch floppies that we used to run our bulletin boards from. That was right. I mean, yeah, that was something here. Yeah, not only did I have a 40 megabyte hard drive, dude, I had a megabyte of memory. Now, my SE 30 came with a megabyte of memory and I added it had eight slots in it. And the first thing that I did was I added four one meg chips. I mean, not right out of the gate, but the first enhancement I made eventually to it was I brought it from one to five. Opening that thing up was petrifying because there were so many places you could screw up and if you lean the wrong way on on the little board that sits on the back of the CRT that's built into the SE 30 there, you'd let the magic gas out and you'd hear it leave and then your display would never work again. I didn't do it to mine, but I did do it to a client. A client's once I felt awful about that. I told them before I went in, I'm like, look, here's the thing. Putting ram in these means you've got to like fit your little hand in the wrong spot underneath and there's a chance I got to warn you there's a chance. Yeah, it was it was not. It's not a good day. Not a good day. Yep. Yeah. All right, where are we here? We have we have. I'm just looking here. I want to do this at least this one follow up here from from JP because this is an interesting thing. We talked a few episodes ago, episode 943 to be precise, where JP wrote in. And then many of you wrote in in response, saying that he couldn't get airdrop to work when his VPN was on. And we went round and round. We tried it here with the VPNs that we use and JP kept digging. We couldn't make it replicate. Many of you could replicate it. We started wondering, is it the specific VPN? And the answer is yes and more. He says. I use Express VPN. That's what JP uses. But it's not just Express VPN because we had some people that it would work fine and other is it wouldn't Express VPN has a network protection feature on both iPhone and Mac. Having that on means that it's going to protect you, even if the VPN is off from like leaking data out, but it even says that it might cause problems. It's that network protection feature that is the culprit here. And the good news is the Express VPN folks know about this and are working on a solution because they know that it will have it will cause trouble with things like airdrop, carplay, media casting, and even operating as a Wi-Fi hotspot. So it it does some things to the network stack to protect you, but it also as often, you know, the continuum between security and convenience leans one way or the other. And with this, it's leaning more towards security, which is exactly what this feature is for. However, it doesn't mean that we always want it. So thank you for the heads up on that, JP. And my guess is that there are other other VPNs that would do the same thing. And so take a look if you're having trouble with airdrop, take a look at that. Hey, the not nerd podcast is a different kind of tech podcast. It's aimed at, you guessed it, those who are not nerds. Tech used to be for the nerds and geeks of the world. But these days, you can't escape it no matter who you are. And although the show is aimed at the not nerd, the not nerd podcast has listeners at every level and provide useful insight to everyone every Wednesday morning. Nate and Dave take a lighthearted and fun look at what is going on in the world of technology and how it impacts us all. Each family friendly episode also contains pro tips and product picks to help the listener tech better. The hosts are big fans of Apple and always learn at least five new things here from Mac Geek, some of these even make it as pro tips on the not nerd podcast. If you or someone you know is looking to keep up with the wild world of technology, head over to not nerd dot com or go to your favorite podcast app and search not nerd all one word so you can get out there and tech better. All right. Hey, so we were at PEPCOM this week, John. I we went down on on Wednesday. We came back on, well, I mean, it was Wednesday night. PEPCOM is an event that my friend Chris Dragon over at JBL fondly calls speed dating for the press. There were like 50 companies there. We get to go. We get to talk to him about it, talk to him about all their new products. This is sort of the head of the holiday season. So people have some new stuff to show us. But there's also just industry catch up that happens there. And the first thing that was really interesting was talking to people about how different companies are approaching CES this year. The biggest news to me was that Seagate is not even going to be at CES, not in any way, shape or form, which fascinated me. Seagate used to have like a huge pavilion of their own there. In fact, I told the story years ago about how I did the walk the plank thing, the virtual reality thing that scared the life out of me. That was in Seagate's pavilion. They were showing off like VR stuff as, you know, the use where you needed lots of storage or something. And so they had this walk the plank thing and made me sweat, which was fun. But. Yeah, they're not going to be there at all. Talking with other companies, I don't know. I'm curious what you found if you even had this conversation with people, John, but most companies are really tailoring their CES approach. Now, of course, CES didn't say that it happened this year in 2022 is a bit of a stretch. It did technically happen. There were most vendors bailed, you know, with five days to go, and most attendees bailed also with about five days to go. So it just wasn't the same as a normal CES. So it's been a while since we've had a normal CES and companies have had to adapt and sort of reevaluate, and that's why this, to me, is really interesting is like, what's the future of that particular show? Because that shows that it's not a there are some conference sessions, but it really is about just the meetings, right? Whether you're meeting with people on the show floor, if you're like a vendor, if you're a distributor, like a Best Buy or whatever, that's where those meetings tend to happen. If you're pressed, those meetings tend to happen at like sweets outside of the show floor or the pep comms, like we mentioned, or show stoppers or other events like that. And so I was curious how people were going to approach it. And a lot of people are going for very specific reasons. No one that I talked with is going for just a blanket reason to just be like be there for all the reasons. Companies that are looking at going to CES to get like, you know, distributors like Best Buy or whatever and, you know, get on shelf space both both online and in the store. They are like, yeah, we're going to be there, but we're only going to be on the show floor or we're only going to be taking, you know, meetings. We're not going to be at the press events. OK, great. Because they're like, yeah, January is a weird time for us to announce new hardware, so there's no reason to spend the money on the press side. Conversely, there's other companies that are like, yeah, CES isn't worth it to us, except meeting with all the press that comes. So we're going to be doing the pep comms and the show stoppers. So I just found that fascinating. But yeah, it all started with when Seagate told me they weren't going to be there. I was like, wait a minute, there's there's something brewing here. I got to find out more. So I don't know. Did you have any conversations with people about whether or not you would see him at CES, John? No, no. OK. All right. We, well, so two things happened. John, John loves to take the train into New York. And and this time we went, we went with that. We took the train. I drove down to your house in Fairfield and then we took the train from there. You live walking distance to the train. So it was pretty easy. But what that means is, John, you left me with idle time on my hands. And as opposed to being the one that's driving in. And so we had extra time when we got there, not just the time sitting on the train. But when we got there, we got to Grand Central and then we have to take a subway out to where the event is. And we stopped at the Apple store because we had a ton of extra time. And we started looking at all things. Pete, we looked at the Apple Watch Ultra. I put one on it really it's it's it's thick, but no thicker than just any other chunky watch like it did not feel to me like something that was like enormous or out of place on my wrist. It looks to me about the size of my citizen aviator. You know, it's yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I would agree. Yeah, I have I have I have some chunky watches that are bigger than this one. Yeah. Yeah. So we also, though, tried on other watches and then on the way back because John left my hands idle, we got John over the hump. So not only do you have an Apple Watch Ultra on the way, Pete, but John and I have Apple Watch Series 8 on the way. Nice. Yeah, we finally get John into the Apple Watch world. So we took advantage of the Amazon Prime Day, whatever was pre-prime. We save 50 bucks, I don't know, on each of them. John, I'm curious what your thought process has been since then, though, because it's been a couple of days. So like, where's your head? The watch hasn't arrived yet, but I'm curious where your head is on this. Just waiting for it. Excited. OK, so you're eager. OK, OK. I don't mean to put words in your mouth. Are you eager? Yeah. Yeah, I want to learn. There you go. Cool. I think you'll like it. You know, I think it's. Yeah, the one thing I would scratch my head over is, is how do I get? Well, I'll find out when I when I set it up, but how do I get cell service on it? Well, you would you would just I mean, we didn't get you one with cell service. We got you the GPS one with Wi-Fi, so it pairs with your phone. OK. And and and so there you go. You don't you don't have to answer that question. OK, but the cool thing is it does so much that you never thought it would. You can if you're if your phone's in the other room and it rings, you can answer the phone on the bed. I call it the batwatch, you know, or, you know, Dick Tracy, yes, Commissioner, you can have and it sounds great to the people with whom you're talking. They have no idea you're talking on your watch. I have no idea. Yeah. Yeah. EKG sleep workouts. Yeah. As long as you have your phone with you, I have never I've never been. I've never found myself in a scenario where I wished that I got the the cellular version of the watch. I know some folks, you know, they don't like to take their phone with them when they go for a bike ride or whatever, and they want to have the cell connection that's on the watch. Great. You know. But yeah, to add to add the cell, if you got the cellular version of the watch, you just call your carrier and add it to your plan. I think it's like most plans are like 10 bucks a month or something to add the watch. OK. But but you don't you don't need to do that because it just uses your phone and and it's always paired with your phone. It's kind of magic. Got it. Yeah. Yeah. So Apple Watches are on the way. The other thing that we did was we took a look at the it was the first time I had gotten to see the new M2 Air in person. I got to hold it. And holy crap. Well, I mean, let's let's talk about this from your standpoint, John, because we were looking at the pros, the new, you know, the M2 pros and the M1 pros and also, of course, the M2 Air. Yep. Yeah. And I looked at the pro so they got a new pro, of course. But yeah, they had they had them, you know, on different sides of the table and I was like, you know, so I looked at the new MacBook Pro and it's for the most part, it looks like my current machine, although mine is a 2019. And I and then I I picked it up and I'm like, OK, that's that's kind of kind of weighty. And then I picked up the MacBook Air and I'm like, oh, my gosh, this thing is so light. Which may be a selling point for me. I mean, my only concern is that the screen, of course, is smaller. I think it's 13.6 inches versus 16 inches. Now, do I need 16 inches? Probably not. I mean, the screen looked fine to me. It was nice and bright. And it claims I always find these these claims hilarious. So my machine, if you look at the comparison, says up to 11 hours battery life. I mean, that to me, that's just hilarious, because I definitely don't get 11 hours of battery life from this thing. But here's the part where it stops being hilarious and becomes reality, because with the Intel chips, I never saw anything approaching the battery life that Apple claimed with the M ones that I or that the Apple Silicon devices that I have had, and this includes the phones and the watch. But also all of the Mac laptops that we have gotten with Apple Silicon here in the household, they hit their claims. Like this is not an exaggeration. So Apple's saying 18 hours. I definitely get 18 hours on my M one air. They say 18 hours on the M two air. I have no reason not to believe them. How about you, Pete, because you you you travel with an Apple Silicon laptop? I I do. And it's yeah, the battery is just amazing on these things. Well, I mean, obviously, it's the Silicon that does the power. It's the power consumption is amazing is what it really turns out to be. Yeah, it boils down to yeah, that it's it's beyond anything I've ever experienced before. I mean, you literally can go all day. In fact, I'm not plugged in right now. I haven't been since before we started. And, you know, frequently I do that. But what that's allowed me to do is I used to haul my cord and my charger and everything with me and I bring it home and unpack it and put it. Now I have it in the wall at home and it stays there. And I have a travel charger that I take with me and and it stays in the suitcase. But it's got a shorter cord, but I don't need a long cord. I don't need to have it. Yeah, that's what I have noticed, too. That's interesting. I hadn't thought about it until you started saying it, Pete, but I've noticed the same thing. I when I set up my work station in whatever hotel room I'm in or whatever, unless I know that I'm going to be working like for days on end somewhere where I need to like camp out and actually spend time working and I'm traveling for whatever different reasons. But if I'm bringing my office with me, that's different. But otherwise, I'd never set up like a charging station at my work station. I just charge it and, you know, I put I plug it the cord into the wall. I leave it near my backpack. And then when I'm done with my laptop, I just put it in there. And once every few days, I let it charge up. And that's it. Yeah, I'll probably plug this in next time when I get to Dubai. You know, after, but it'll be like right now, I'll tell you, my battery is in the 85 to 90 percent range. Oh, I was wrong, 84 percent. And so I won't need to plug it in until day after tomorrow and Dubai after I've used it a day there. And you're you're doing video encoding and decoding right now. Right now, while we're doing like that, of all the things that use horsepower, like that's kind of it, you're doing Wi-Fi, video encoding, video decoding, audio encoding, audio decoding, like you're sort of doing all the things that previously would just chew on the battery or chew on power. And when I turned it on to do this show, it was at 90 percent. So I've used six percent since, you know, in the hour of hour and a half. Yeah. So that you talked about the weight of of this, John, the your laptop is four point three pounds and the M2 air is two point seven pounds. So I've been trying to justify this M2 air as well. I I because I have an M1 air, I grabbed the M2 air and immediately it was like this is like I wanted this thing, definitely. But I like I'm having trouble justifying it because my M1 air has great battery life. It the CPU slash GPU, the system on a chip is faster than I need it to be. Like I do not need it. The brightness on this is, you know, a little bit better. I'm at four hundred nits. The the new one is at five hundred nits. Your brightness would remain the same, John. It's the five hundred nits on your 16 inch MacBook Pro because you got the sort of the last of the Intel's and it turns out this M2 air is lighter than mine by by one tenth of a pound, which is interesting. Slightly larger screen, but that it's I think for me, the the the difference in the screen would be the notch, right? Because mine doesn't have the notch. And this one does. So I think it's I'm looking for the display here. Yeah, it's it's sixty four pixels taller. The new one is but sixty four pixels on either side of the notch is kind of how that works out. So yeah, it's fun stuff. All right, I'm not seeing it now, but there's even find there was a benchmark website, too, you could take it to. Yeah. And oh, yeah, Geekbench. Yeah, Geekbench is the place to look. That's true, John, that that would be the the place to compare is compare Geekbench numbers on the night, the 2019 16 inch MacBook Pro and this new M2 air. My guess is you're going to see at least double, if not more. Yeah, it's it's pretty fascinating. Yeah. Yeah. And I think I'll go for the midnight. I like the midnight color. That midnight color is nice. Yeah, for sure. I agree. Yeah. I'm trying to pull up Mac tracker here. It's launching extremely slowly because Mac tracker generally has those Geekbench numbers, so you are a 2019 16 inch MacBook Pro, right? Where is maybe it was where is the 16? Oh, there it is. I see late 2019. The Geekbench numbers on this max out. I don't know what you which CPU you got, but the highest number is sixty nine eighty. So that's the most that this would do. The M2 air, its Geekbench number is eighty seven oh three. So it's not quite double, but, you know, yeah, thirty fully a third faster. Yeah, fully a third faster. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. All right. And we're pushing things. I know we've been trying to hit seventy five minutes with the show and we're there, but there are there are a couple of cool stuffs found that I ran into at at PEPCOM that I want to talk about here and share largely because it's relevant and really because one of them I want to talk to pilot Pete about that. The first is is the one I want to talk to you about Pete. And that is the twelve south high rise three. So we've been talking a lot about different chargers for your bedside table. It could be your desk, but the the idea being it's going to charge your phone in your watch and maybe something else too, like your AirPods or some other cheap pad that can charge things. And the one that I've been using and and the one that I'm still using, although now more reluctantly, is the Belkin one, the Belkin three in one. And it works great. Don't get me wrong, but this twelve south high rise three that we got to see at PEPCOM is I like even better because it is compressed. It's the three in one. The way they did it, the base of it is a basically the size of an iPhone. So it takes up the size of the iPhone and the watch sits behind the phone. It's a MagSafe thing. You put your MagSafe phone on it. Boom, you're good to go. Obviously works in a MagSafe case. And then you just hang your watch kind of off the back. And then the base of it also has a cheap pad. So you could put another phone there or you could put your AirPods or whatever. I like this form factor a lot. And twelve south has made it look good, whether it's, you know, even when your phone's not in it, which kind of makes a difference. It's ninety nine bucks. So just like the Belkin one. Now, the reason I say that I'm still using the Belkin one, there's one reason and one reason only for that. And that's because my daughter grabbed this one after I got home from PEPCOM and it is now set up in her room and we'll be heading to Italy with her. So I still use the Belkin one. No complaints, but now I know what I would like better. In fact, my wife walked into our daughter's room the other day. She says, now I know what I want for Christmas. She pointed to this. She's like, this is perfect. As it takes up the amount of space as an iPhone. Yeah, I get it. Now, you had something on the cool stuff found list that looks a lot like this. And instead of it being ninety nine bucks, I think the one that that you found, Pete, is how much 39, 999, 40 dollars, 40 dollars. Today, while we're recording, it's actually even less. It's 35, 99. Oh, there you go. There you go. Perfect. Yeah. Tell me about this one. So the links in the show notes, there's a couple things about it. It's similar in in form, not obviously not identical. It does a really nice job of grabbing the phone as all do them is do all the MagSafe chargers, but, you know, there's no doubt in your mind that it's locked on there. The one drawback that I will give it is that it in the back, it's wider where you set the watch. And because it's wider, I think the band tends to interfere a little bit in the way. So unless you're very proactive in setting the watch magnet and making sure the magnet grabs it, it could sit there and not charge. But that's the only drawback that I found in this thing. The thing that I really like about it, it's got three little lights on the front that tell you whether or not it's charging. And these lights don't keep you awake at night. They're bright enough to be seen, but they're dark enough that you don't have to find black electrician state to try and, you know, take take away the laser light that will burn your retinas out when you're trying to. OK, so that was my question is, do the lights stay on all night? Because the the twelve south one, the light turns on when you put a device on it, any one of the three to let you know, yes, I see it. Everything's good. And then after a minute or less, the light turns off. So so that's more brilliant. It is. So OK, that's where you're part of your sixty five dollar delta comes from. It's OK. Fine. You know, fair. The the watch puck on the the twelve south one is raised up. It looks like it's raised up more. I'm looking at the pictures of these because I don't have the, you know, the the van smuggle one that you've got, Pete, but it looks like perhaps that problem with the band pulling it off of the the chart, pulling the watch off the charger might not be as much of an issue with the with the the with the the twelve south one. And that's not surprising, right? The twelve south folks like they they all they're like Apple, right? They will go the extra mile and figure out the things that need to be figured out. And they sort of follow an iterative design kind of, you know, process. But it's clearly both. I think they were probably at least mine is clearly the latest charger. It quickly charges the watch up. It doesn't take, you know, a couple of hours like my old watch chargers do. My oldest pucks take forever. Got it. Oh, that's good to know. OK. Yeah. Yeah. It's fascinating stuff. So thank you for sharing that. So there's the the hundred dollar version and the forty dollar version. And and you can you can take a look at both and decide what's for you. But this is this is like a great way to go. I have one last thing that I want to share for today. And that is the spec Presidio grip MagSafe cases. The reason I'm excited about these, I always like spec cases. They always fit my phone really well. But what caught my eye when we were at PEPCOM guys was that spec had figured out how to do a grip case with MagSafe. Because the back of the phone, if the back of the case isn't flat, it's not going to stay on the MagSafe thing, right? You've got to you've got to be able to sort that out. And so what what they did and they showed me, it's fascinating. They there are the ridges on the back of the case and then there are the ridges on the side. The ridges on the side are pushed out and above the sort of the lines of the case where you'd want them so that you get a good solid grip. The ridges on the back go down into the case. So the back of the case is actually flat. It just has ridges that are carved into it as opposed to out from it. And they and they seamlessly change as you round the corner of the case. They go from from from being flat against the out east in East. That's it. That's it. Thank you. Technical term, folks. That's the technical term and brilliant. I like absolutely brilliant that they figured this out. And I've had it on my my phone since I saw them at PEPCOM. And it works great on all the MagSafe chargers that I've tried it. So, yeah, it's it's good stuff. I like it. I love to see a paradigm shifting thought process. Yeah, I mean, this is, you know, I wouldn't call this revolutionary, but it's definitely evolutionary. Like they they again, this is why I like companies like 12 South and and I suspect they spend the time to stop, breathe, touch the devices, figure out, like, wait, how could we make this better? OK, we made it. How could we make it a little better? Right. And that's just part of their their design process there. Yeah, guys. All right. Nice. You know what? There's one more thing I want to talk about. It is a cool stuff found, but I'll share it here because it seems like everybody who has run into me lately has noticed this. So I want to say I'll start this by saying my health is fine. I mean, like all good, no issues. But I have lost about twenty five pounds since July. And the it started because I have these lipo mas. I think I've talked about them on the show. I have to get them sliced out sometimes when they bother me. There's just these little benign, fatty little lumps that simply blow the skin or in the skin, really. Lots of people have them. They're not a big deal, except when they're pushing on something that causes problems and they this year they've been driving me crazy, like to the point where they started impacting my mental health, like because I couldn't play the drums the right way. I've been to the surgeon twice. I'm going again on Wednesday. So this summer I was like, I got to figure out what's causing these things to grow, because if I can stop them from growing, then, you know, I don't have to deal with this problem. I don't have to look like Swiss cheese getting sliced open. The surgery to take them out is like 20 minutes. It's nothing, but it's still, you know, leaves you a scar and it's a pain in the neck. So I did all kinds of research. Nobody knows what what really what to do about these things. But they are little fatty lumps. And so I thought, OK, if I stop growing fat like as much fat, like would this go away? Let me tell you, spoiler alert. No, this this this was a failed experiment, guys. It did not work, but it made me stop and think, OK, wait a minute. I'm still like the portions that I eat when I have a meal have not changed since I was in my 20s and my body needs less calories now than it did back then. And so I should reevaluate what a full portion means, what it means to be hungry, what it means to be full versus stuffed. And so I used an app at first because I knew that I didn't know these things. I had my own definitions that were ingrained in me for decades and I needed to break those those habits down. And so I did for for a little bit. I used an app called Lose It because it has a database of all the foods out there. So you can just like put in, OK, I had this much food. Here's how many calories I watched in my phone. Tell me how many calories I burn in a day and I turned it into a math problem. And so I just made sure that I burned more than I consumed. And clearly I've overdone it a little bit because I'm I'm losing weight, I'm not maintaining weight. That's OK. I had the 25 pounds was not a bad thing to lose. But it's time to start, you know, rejiggering that maybe and coming in for a landing so that I'm not just wasting away. But the reason I bring it up is because everybody that I saw this week at PEPCOM, except for you, John, because you're seeing me every week, everybody I saw was like you've lost like a significant amount of weight. And then the follow up question would be, is everything OK? So which I get, I totally get it. So everything's great. I just happened to I. I took on a math problem and it's worked out splendidly. It's fantastic. There you go. I see you nodding your head, Pete. Yeah. Well, what app were you using if you haven't said it's an app called Lose It, I'll put it in in the show notes. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, it's easy. Like, you know, it's just because it's a database. That was the that was the part that I was like, how am I going to know? Like, I mean, I internally I don't know. I didn't know what a full meal for me should be. Like, I was clearly wrong about this. So I need to learn from something else. And how am I going to know if I'm getting the right amount of, you know, all that stuff. So that's so I figured I'll treat it like a math problem. And but I needed the data from somewhere that wasn't me because I was wrong. My daughter is going to be disappointed to hear is Warren and I think was yeah, Warren and the discord chat pointed out, math did something useful. My daughter's going to be disappointed to hear that. Wait, you know, hey, I'll get to use math. I'll never have to use this. Yeah, that's right. Never have to use math. You know, this is an easy math problem. It's greater than or less than that's all. But yeah, and I will say that my daughter is training to be a professional pilot. Still trying to tell me she's not going to have to use math. I just laughed. Yeah, you know, somebody else will teach her this lesson. Pete, I think it's called life. Yeah. All right. Now we've gone on long enough. Thank you for coming to my TED talk, but I figured I'd share a because maybe it helps somebody else out there. It really was easier than I mean, my intention wasn't to lose weight, although, like, again, it was a good thing. My BMI was a little higher than it should have been. Like it, you know, I had put on the COVID-19, perhaps. And now it's gone. So there you go. Thanks to Cash Fly for providing all the bandwidth to get the show from us to you. Go go leave us a review. It would mean a ton. Go to Mackie Cub dot com slash reviews. If you would please and leave a review for us on the Apple Store podcast, Apple podcast review, that's what we would love. Ratings are great, but but like just typing something into that review field really does help us. So and make sure you click subscribe while you're there on Apple podcast as well, that helps the most as I learned from. So there I was US. Well, listen to that, too. All right, that's it. We're out of here. Thanks for hanging out with us. Collide dot com. K.O.L.I.E. Sorry, K.O.L.I.D.E. Dot com slash M.G.G. Go check it out. Anything else? I don't know who knows what we do. I do know one thing. We didn't get to everything, guys, so we have to do it again next week. What's that, Pete? Let's do it next week. Should we? OK, yeah, I think. All right, that's fine. Yeah, yeah, yeah. John, so we're going to do this next week. Are you around? I believe so. All right, sweet. Hey, before we go, do you have anything to share with them that might carry them through the week? I certainly hope so. And what we want to carry you through your week is to remember. Don't get caught.