 It's time for the MechEatGab and listener Dan brings us our quick tip of the week with When in the all photos section of the photos app even after you hit select at the top It's tedious to hit each photo individually, but I accidentally discovered a much better way to select many photos at once After you're in selection mode by hitting select at the top Swipe from left to right beginning with the first photo you want and without lifting your finger Scroll downwards through the photos. This will let you select all the photos and subsequent rows As you scroll through until you lift your finger This allowed me to insert all those photos that I wanted into a shared album brother quickly More quick tips like this plus your questions answered today on the MechEatGab number 982 for Monday May 22nd 2023 Greetings folks and welcome to MechEatGab where you send your quick tips in like that one your cool stuff found your questions We share your quick tips. We share your cool stuff found. We share your questions We put them together into an agenda that loosely makes sense and maybe follows a bit of a flow The goal being each and every it's not even a goal. It's just part of the system It's a byproduct of the system that each and every one of us will learn at least five new things Every single time we get together sponsors for this episode include HelloFresh.com MGG16 where you can go use code MGG16 for 16 free meals and free shipping ShadyRays.com MGG where code MGG gets you a second pair when you buy one pair It gets you that second pair free and collide.com MGGKOLID.com MGG Which is zero trust tailor-made for Octo. We'll share details about all three of those shortly here for now Here in slightly chillier than last week Durham, New Hampshire. I'm Dave Hamilton And here and also chillier than normal fearful Connecticut This is Jennifer and here for at least a few more hours in Lee, New Hampshire Pete Thanks for having me back you you cut out there at least for my audio when you said the word pilot Pete Okay, so you are indeed pilot Pete today Pilot Pete and I'm gonna execute those pilot skills in just a few short hours while I wing my way to Europe tonight That's great. Yeah, I don't I don't know if anybody else heard that little clip and hopefully it is short lived Even if it was yeah, but I made a mistake live streaming with us today No, that that's that's why we're recording it day early. Yeah You know it doesn't matter because time is not linear time is not linear. No, I as we determined last week doctor That's right. I made a mistake today I use I'm a very superstitious person in in certain ways and I always take a sip of my fresh mug of tea as The theme music starts today Pete I was so engrossed with your opening quick tip there that while I was listening I just grabbed my tea and started sipping it and So maybe I'm the one that caused the audio hiccups. Hopefully that's the only thing I caused At least the only negative thing that I caused the I have a positive thing to share though And that is our next quick tip, which is an article. I found called 80 shades of option key and It is a notion site. So actually published on the site of one of our sponsors I don't know who it was that published it But it is all kinds of things that you can do with the option key some of which you probably knew But some of which I certainly I didn't know one is that when you're in the finder to Looking at the get info screen Sometimes you'll you'll pull that up, you know, and it'll all be the although triangles will be twisted closed And and it's like, oh, no, I want to see the details and so you go and you twist each one open one by one Hold down the option key when you twist open one of them. All of them will open Handy and that's also true in the finder itself. Like if you're in a finder view That's it's got things twisted closed option click and it will either twist them all open or closed at once another Thing that if I knew it. I forgot it holding down the option key and clicking or pressing like the Keyboard brightness key on your keyboard will open up the monitor system preference, right? And the same with sound will open up if you option click the, you know Volume up or down button on your keyboard. It will open up the sound system preference and those sorts of things and the one that I have been using all week that I Like has blown me away. Is you know when you got a scroll bar on the you know on the side of the screen and Great, but you can grab it and and like move it up and down or you can click in the area between the scroll bar and Either the top or the bottom and it will go one page in in either direction, right? Right. So we knew all that what I didn't know I'm curious if either of you knew did you know that you can option click anywhere in That scroll bar and it will jump the scroll point to that point Right, you know to have to play with that some I know so these are like four of the things that That the option key can do for you and there are 80 of them in this article. It's linked in the show notes at Of course Mac keycap calm you can get directly there at mgg.fm 982 and while you're there Sign up to get the show notes delivered to your email box every single week That works out great for you and works out great for us. So so that's the difference. I just found it All right So I always thought that that just did it without having to hit the option key But if you if you do it it just moves at a page like you said, yeah, I did not realize that But yeah, yeah, hold the option key down. It takes it right there, right to whatever that point is now Right, you know if you got a you know 40 page document and your option clicking in there if you can you know hit page 32 consistently more power to ya, but But it does get you close, you know It's like oh, I know it was like three quarters of the way down You just option click instead of trying to grab the little tiny thing and drag it because the longer a document is the shorter The little handle is to grab right so let's make it so small that you can't Right. I'll simply click exactly exactly you don't have all right I just and and I toss up in the show notes, okay It's an Apple support article titled Mac keyboard shortcuts, okay Which I don't know when they update it or how they update it, but it's a pretty long list So yeah, check that out sometime just just for fun. Yeah, that's great good stuff Pete you got one you got a an e-sim tip for us Yeah, so as Joe Al rates in I Recently took a trip to China and you as you may know the internet can be pretty challenging there for Western visitors with the current situation in Taiwan Most VPNs don't work before I my trip. I bought a 5g hotspot with a China Chinese 5g sim But unfortunately I could not use it the only use I found was sinking my iCloud drive in three weeks I used 150 gigs of data however discovered a solution that worked wonders for me for all Gmail Instagram and news related if you use an E-sim purchased in Hong Kong You can use it in Macau and mainland China since the e-sim is from Hong Kong and you're roaming in mainland China Your location is registered as Hong Kong and it will allow you to use the internet without restrictions Of course, you'll still face Hong Kong's limitations such as the blocking of tiktok, but overall this approach worked for me Allowed me to work comfortably with a 45 gig plan for only $40 and that last line actually is what piqued my interest because I did buy a Recent one. I paid $40 for 13 gigs. I'm like, what'd you do? Well, guess what? He bought it as he says they're specifically a regional a Chinese You know Hong Kong one and Mine was global so if you if you know you're only going to be traveling to Europe It's cheaper to buy Europe only or Asia Asia only or even more country specific it lowers the data plan mines global So yeah, I'm paying data rates for Canada then Mexico in the United States and the United States Which you which unfortunately is probably the most expensive of Those at least as I found as I've shopped around for Sims, right? And I've been using the the pokey-fi for a long time and yeah with really good results However, I found it a little frustrating that you turn that thing on and you have to wait for the red light to turn green And sometimes it doesn't seem to connect to Services and so I thought well, okay, you know, I'll try this e-sim thing and I did it and it turned I actually got hey, we couldn't activate you and you're out of luck and No data for you, but it worked. It was actually on and working so in spite of the error message It was up and running. Oh, I'm just saying if you if you the other one with these global ones that you buy in Hong Kong If you're traveling to Hong Kong, you're gonna have to fill in your passport number and your name and all that stuff and register it So that it will work in Hong Kong. Otherwise, you won't be able to roam there Yeah, I remember that and then but lastly Dave and I were talking about this before the show started I found it kind of interesting that I was trying to Select mint mobile off and my Moby matters E-sim on so just it just to zoom that out a little you were trying to turn off your turn off data for your home sim and Turn on data for your your your e-sim that you would buy for travel Yes, and then I thought you know what I I don't want to crunch all and I go in the low data mode But I don't want to all these background programs anyway crunching all my data up So I went through and I turned off all kinds of programs, but I found them out of order It's like, okay a bunch I use her at the top Then I get down and somewhere alphabetical and then there was out of alphabet and then some more alphabetical and I'm just like Oh, I'm so confused and I wound up going to the bottom and resetting All settings or not all settings all data resetting my data usage and they all magically went to alphabetical So that's when I figured out that oh It's they're sorted by data usage. Yes, they're only alphabetical if the usage is the same aka zero Yeah, however, and there is pointed out this other tip. That's cool. Go there. No, no, there is a place where you can Choose and see the list of applications alphabetically And it's simply in the at the bottom of the main settings screen on your phone And that's where you can set all kinds of settings for applications and you can even search there to find a specific application and Yes cellular data is controllable here, too So it's one of those scenarios where you can switch the same thing on and off in two different places as I you know from from you from the user interface design schools You would probably say that's a really bad idea being able to do the same thing in two places It is or it isn't however in this scenario perhaps it You know, it's I think it's better there because you go to the top and search for the thing by name And if you're like me and you've got a hundred apps on your phone then finding the ones well to start with a u or a v Yeah for a while if we think about it from the standpoint of You're gonna have you know the settings for each individual app and in those are gonna be things like cellular data and background You know usage and all that stuff that's got to be there Right when you're controlling the settings for an app all the settings should be there and if Apple followed You know strict UX design paradigms where you only have things controllable in one place now when you're inside the cellular settings and you're seeing that list of apps Organized by data usage it would be super frustrating to not be able to choose to turn an app off right there Right, so it's a convenience feature of not having to like Oh, you better jump to the settings for that app and turn it off. It's like no We're just gonna expose this same And then and then don't forget to come back here because by the way you can't have two windows up on the iPhone because everything's modal So I think I get why they made the decision. They did and I I tend to agree with it. So yeah, Dave You probably remember back in the day So I do but they used to have a bunch of binders and it was called Apple human interface guidelines And I may have them in my attic somewhere, but I just sir My only reflection is that I think somebody took those and threw them away, especially with venture Well, yeah, well, no, they're not thrown away. They are they are no matter principal No, they're available on the web at developer dot Apple comm slash design slash human dash interface dash guidelines like that That's where those exist. No, they still are very alive. Yeah. Yeah They've they've evolved perhaps not There's a Pleasant is a polite way of saying it. Okay. I agree with you. They've evolved. They've evolved. I'm not saying they've evolved for better or for worse I'm just saying I'm not I'm not Quantifying this. I'm simply acknowledging. They are different than the binders you had in your attic So and if you still have those binders folks Recycler get rid of them. You don't need them anymore All right. Do I have a Lisa in my attic that I still want to revive? Well Yeah, yeah, I don't if I said I kept a Lisa in my attic that there would be people would people would knock on my door All right, so we will go from the Managing cellular data podcast which has seemed to be a topic of conversation many weeks in a row to the Chat GPT pod geek gab and John you've got a quick tip about chat GPT. Don't you which us everybody's into Chat GPT these days except me but um anyways, so Sasha says I was listening to Pete's tip in episode 980 where he said you could ask chat GPT to summarize changes after a proofread something This gave me an idea to try Being in New Zealand. We use British British English Spelling and I was manually Changing the spelling from jet GPT results after Pasting into my work. So instead I tried telling it to proofread something but added using British English and it complied Using the spelling of the words. I'm more familiar with I thought this would be a useful tip and yes, that is that is Awesome that it was yeah, there are different versions of English. Well, and it knows different languages, too I mean it it's not not just English that's there. I um, you know, I relate to Translations, I haven't tried it. I mean there are plenty of tools to do that. But yeah, yes I know some I haven't I haven't messed with it, but One of the guys at Backbeat Jeff has been using it for some translation stuff, too You know what they say about England in the United States, though Sorry Pete, I didn't mean to step out. No, you're right. I should have gotten out of the way You do know speed I do know speed but they might not have yeah Speaking of chat GPT I am a I mean we use it a ton here for production of the show and Many other things yeah, so So I have a paid chat GPT account so that I a Have guaranteed access to it and be get access to GPT for and I will say as an aside We have a great thread by the way going on in our Mackie cub discord at Mackie cub comm slash discord where We're talking about these kinds of things because it's evolving every day There's all sorts of different ways of using it and just not even if the tech doesn't evolve on any given day our understanding of it and our ability to use it does and It like this is one of those things where learning from one another is hugely valuable So I'm very thankful to our Mackie cub family here for that, but I Will say that you know the defaults that you get on the free version is is GPT 3.5 and then they have GPT 4.0 as well I wouldn't say that 4 is always better than 3.5 There are times I often will do queries to both and see which one Starts giving me an answer that's either formatted the way I want or simply it takes the tone that I want or what have you But this week because I have a paid account I got access to two new features one of them is chat GPT's plugins If you are a paid user you go to there's like a little three dot thing next to your name in the lower left Click on that then click on settings in the settings You will see beta features go to beta features and you can start turning these things on some of the if if if you don't have access to them yet if they won't even appear it won't it's not like They'd be great out or anything so you just go turn them on plugins are very cool. There's all kinds of things It's like dozens of plugins already written and some of them are things like open table or kayak Where you know, you're able to leverage the engines of these websites and let chat or let chat GPT leverage the engines of these websites To do some of this assistant style stuff for you, which is awesome There's one called perfect prompt where you type your prompt in and then invoke this plug-in and It will rewrite your prompt to get you results that are better and it's sort of meta because in a sense it's using Chat GPT's engine to help you rewrite a prompt for chat GPT So like you can wrap your head around that if you if you so choose talk about a do loop Yeah, exactly, right, right But I've had good luck with it like it I have given it a prompt and then open another session and given it a prompt and told it You know make that prompt perfect and the results I get are they are better But the one that I'm really excited about is and I got this last week too is web browsing And what this means is I can give chat GPT a URL and tell it go do something for me I was sending out an email the other day to a bunch of our Like main sponsors and agency contacts and I wanted to end it I was talking a little bit about how the Economy has you know impacted the podcast advertising industry and and it was saying look, you know We've been doing this for well podcast for 18 years, you know Publishing for 25 like we've seen sighted things are cyclical We've seen downturns before we've seen you know like this is gonna be okay Like what we're seeing here and I put it into some context and then I shared some stuff But I wanted to end it on a positive note because you know the economic stuff isn't necessarily all positive right now But it's fine. And so I asked chat to be tea I said visit backbeatmedia.com and come up with an email ending tagline that is enthusiastic and on brand and It went through and it scoured our website It took maybe 30 seconds and then it came back with a list of like five taglines and it even said I checked out your website. It seems you're very into representing independent publishers both in the development of websites and you know chiefly involved in podcasting from the beginning like it definitely Grocked what our company is about and then it gave me a bunch of taglines And I liked you know one or two of them and I didn't like five or six of them But that's totally fine and it it cost me nothing, you know 20 bucks a month and took you know Let's say five minutes. It didn't take that long, right? But you know it was like instant that I was able to get this stuff And so having it being able to browse the web also gives you access to things like It solves the problem of When you're using chat GPT you can only paste in up to I don't know 1500 or 2000 characters or something like that If I wanted to summarize the transcript of this episode, I would have longer than 2000 words Correct. Well, but I will have a web URL of the transcript of this episode and so I can Link I can just pass it the link to that URL and tell it to go read it over there and summarize And one of the plugins that's available is a PDF plugin where you can tell it Here's a PDF go summarize that for me. So it's pretty cool So I'm uh, I'm having fun with chat GPT You got to let us know what what your thoughts are how you're using it feedback at Mackie cup calm We love to hear from all you All right. Hey look our sponsor collide has some big news if you're an octa user They can get your entire fleet to a hundred percent compliance. How do they do this? Well, if a device isn't compliant the user can't log into your cloud apps until they fix the problem It's that simple collide patches one of the major holes in zero-trust architecture device compliance without collide IT struggles to solve basic problems like keeping everyone's OS and browser up to date Unsecured devices are logging into your company's apps because there's nothing there to stop them Collide is the only device trust solution that enforces compliance as part of Authentication and it's built to work seamlessly with octa the moment collides agent detects a problem It alerts the user and gives them instructions to fix it if they don't fix the problem within a set time They're blocked collides method means fewer support tickets less frustration and most importantly 100% fleet compliance visit collide comm slash MGG to learn more or book a demo. That's KOL IDE comm slash MGG and our thanks to collide for sponsoring this episode Hey, what's worse than buying a pair of expensive sunglasses and losing them right after you get them? Well, breaking them but not for me not since I got shady rays Shady rays makes high quality sunglasses that are just as good or based on what I've seen even better than the expensive ones and Shady rays are a fraction of the price. These things are durable. They look good. I just got a pair of the Recycled ocean tortoise frames with these glacier. They call the lenses glacier. They're these reflective blue. They look awesome they become my my go-to pair of sunglasses and I don't worry about losing or breaking them ever because every pair of shady rays is backed by their industry leading lost and broken Replacements program break or lose your pair the second you take them out of the box. They'll send you a replacement pair No questions asked and they're not happy unless you're happy and that's why they give you 30 days to try them And if you don't like them you can exchange them or return them for free What's better than getting one pair of shady rays and not worrying if you break or lose them getting to Go to shady rays comm slash MGG and use code MGG friend for a limited time When you buy one pair of shady rays, you'll get the second pair free. That's s-h-a-d-y-r-a-y-s Dot-com slash MGG code MGG to get a second pair of shady rays free Shady rays comm slash MGG code MGG and our thanks to shady rays for sponsoring this episode All right, we were talking about chat GBT and I think Pete you might have a question about this I did well actually It was several weeks back. We mentioned Mac GPT, which is the Mac native app for using chat GPT You can yeah log in and use it natively and create the API and all that sort of thing But I'm interested I find it interesting that when I can go either native or web so native means it's more on your machine Then it's using the API to send the data back and forth as opposed to just opening up a web view essentially Yep, but I'm wondering if you've seen this if I select in settings 3.5 I get answers in native if I select a 4.0 in Mac GPT I get the model GPT-4 does not exist. Are you a paying customer? Yes, and sometimes that goes away. Oh And sometimes it doesn't I have not experienced that I don't use Mac GPT as often as I Should I wound up nuking this machine after right after we had done that and I haven't reinstalled it on here And so it's just not in my fingers to use it I do have it installed on on one of my other machines, but again it I need to get into the habit of using Mac GPT, right? but It might be like if if I were it so when questions come into Mac geek if we have the answer We answer right like that's easy if we don't Generally to geek challenge. Well, no generally the approach is What would I if I were there? What would I do next? So if that were happening to me what I would do next is I would go into Chat GPT on the web and to my settings and generate a new API key because maybe your API key for whatever reason isn't tied to GPT-4 Versus maybe you created it before you bought GPT I don't know remember right that like but that's what I'm saying That would be the first thing to do is just like let's let's try this with a clean slate or as clean a slate as we can Yeah, the other thing I would do is I would test it like on a different machine with a different account aka You know, you're having the problem. Let me test it and see if I'm experiencing the same thing I'm not gonna do that right because this question came in in real time Yeah, I'm not gonna do that because I don't have Mac GPT on this computer right now So I don't think yeah, no, it doesn't look like but the other thing is that I would just mention is it will do a lot of creative Stuff for you as well. For instance, I just was yeah, it's been a long time since we've done this But yeah, the days of haiku And I had to do a haiku for us. Yes, so which was Mac geek abtrio Dave John and Pete's insights flow Tech solutions a glow. I Love it. I love it. You know what else is a glow Pete Cool stuff found John. What's our first cool stuff found for today? So we got a cool stuff found here from Greg and it was titled DOS CSF and I'm like, what does that mean? What does this have to do with DOS? And then I realized That's Spanish for two. So we have two things here that he sent into us and this is great stuff Number one, I was looking for an app that would give me options when I tap on a map link in safari So I can choose which GPS app I want to use this one is great see recording below which you can't see because it's Anyways, it's called map redirect for map links. It pretty much speaks for itself And I checked it out and it has limited options, but if you only have Humble needs then they may do it for you and then the second one Opener, this is one. I've been using for years to use it and I use it very frequently You can use it on the phone the iPad and on the Mac. I couldn't find the Mac version, but we are linking to the I OS or iPhone and iPad version So if you tap and hold on a link in safari or tap the share button You can force it to open in the app instead as you can see below they support over 200 different applications, so the chances are the app is gonna be supported. That's pretty cool That's handy Yeah, because the either iPhone or iPad The OS Tems to be more limiting I would say in giving you that flexibility. Oh, yeah, that somebody figured this out So yeah, yeah, that's pretty good. I like this stuff. It's good. It's good That's good. This is what we love about cool stuff found. I didn't even know that app existed Like but what a what a clever way to do it in the vein of unlocking our Macs with Without our Apple watches listener Ben writes, I think it was Ben. Yes writes in with Unlocks it Which enables unlocking a Mac with a trackpad tap pattern as well as face fingerprint or any of the Apple You know connected Apple devices, so it is at unlocks. It which is unlox. It so we will put that I guess it's just called unlocks. It was formerly Mac ID But but now it's unlocks and that's the app. I could not think of the name of last week There you go. They used to be Mac. Yeah, I remember using that with yeah with my phone and my Mac. Yeah, it was Yeah, exactly. It still is good. Yeah, evidently. Yeah, it's still out there. Yeah All right, we were talking about Ways of exporting from Apple Notes last week because Apple Notes has only limited Export options and not so great if you want to move to a different notes app and listener Tom has a has an answer for us Yeah, good stuff. So Tom says I was listening to episode 981 and Dave's comment about needing a way to export notes from the Apple Notes app On the Mac. I was wondering if this app might do the trick and There's an app out there believe or not called exporter It can export to markdown or HTML and supports exporting to JPEG PNG if tip BMP PDF You get the idea Yeah, the free version will export all your notes But you can purchase an add-on that provides a feature called filter view from what I see this should allow you to export individual notes so Thank you for that tip Yeah, I'm I'm wondering looking at this exporter app as you mentioned it exports to markdown or HTML And it lists a bunch of apps that it would that you would Essentially let you take your notes in Apple Notes and move them to other apps And there's apps like obsidian which we mentioned last week bear Standard notes craft, you know some of these sort of Indie notes apps Ulysses, right? Good stuff, but there's no evernote or one note listed on this page So I as we're going through this I started thinking okay Well, what can we like how can we import into evernote and can we take HTML and import that in and it seems like Maybe so it would be it would be great if we could export from Apple notes to evernotes.enex file Which I will point out Apple notes will import from ever notes Enex format. It just does not export to it So that like there's got to be a way I just like I don't like being trapped. You know, I don't like my data being trapped I also don't like being trapped. I'm less like an eagle song You can check in any time you like but you can never leave. No, that's not quite the words Hotel notes of Formia You can check in any time you like but you can never leave that's right. Yeah, yeah Yeah, so anyway, that's um, I know there's there's got to be a way right like there's there's definitely a path here, so All right in the cool stuff found realm listener and discord user Raul nine. Oh, sorry Raul 605 shares an anchor Charging station and this one, you know that listen we're having this conversation pre-show Which you can always join if you sign up to Mackie cup comm slash calendar It'll tell you when we're recording and you can come hang out with us pre and post show But but this one is so I think there's lots of chargers You got to find some differentiator about it and this anchor 525 is I find it interesting because It's got on one side Two usba with power iq and two usbc with power delivery And on the other side, it's got three Grounded us ac outlets and then of course it's got a cord that plugs into the wall So this is you know for me The kind of thing that I want to have with me when I travel Something I can plug in Charge all my stuff and if it turns out that It's four ports on the front are not enough or the wrong kind or whatever for whatever i'm doing All I need is to plug into one of its outlets because a lot of times in a hotel or even an airbnb You know an extension one outlet behind the tv cabinet bingo bingo. Yeah, yeah, 600 pounds I was just gonna say I think I know why I need to visit a chiropractor regularly And it's because I've had to move tv cabinets in hotels Right, so now the only thing that need is a universal uh european chinese Yes, well, which you could put on the other end of it. Yeah, which which I yeah, we gave one in last week's show No, exactly adapter for yeah for a few bucks. Yep. Yep. Oh, yeah, I like it. Yeah, yeah, yeah so Yeah, there's there's all kinds of uh All kinds of there's all kinds of chargers out there, but but like this one Uh, it would would be like great. I'll throw that in my my travel bag, and I'm good I don't need anything else like I I want a couple of ac outlets That's for sure And then I want a couple of usba and a couple of usbc like that's that's what you need these days And and then from there you can you can you know? Do what you need to do Yeah, I'm comparing it to the behemoth that I have and you know the one that I have so it's uh It's similar in that it has two a and two c ports, but it's a hundred watts But it's much larger than heavier and heavier than this one I suspect Yeah, and what's what's the output of this one? Uh, this is 65 60 67. Yeah, okay. All right. That's yeah the one I have is 100 But it it looks to be larger and I'm almost guessing heavier. So I like I like the Um Yeah, this can it has to begin. Yeah, this one. I well now it might not be It doesn't say that it is Well, I'm looking to see is it g an It is not no no Or at least it doesn't say that it is so it therefore probably is not the anchor is usually pretty good about sort of leading with with that if it's got it, but um But yeah, like this is like I said, I I am finding that I want to be able to travel with AC outlets and and It turns out this has surge protection built into it too Short circuit protection over voltage protection over current protection Internal safety shutters fire resistance grounded protection. So I so in a hotel That's not a bad thing to have well and the coolest thing about that Like is is those ac outlets because I have to carry, you know two or three Foreign adapters for each thing I want to plug into now. I don't I don't know and I think I'm gonna I will say this technically these kinds of things are Either not allowed or frowned upon on cruise ships So if you are going to use one on a cruise ship Make sure you use it only when you're in your room and the door is locked aka Not when your stateroom attendant is going to be visiting your room to help you keep it nice and tight You know where else they're frowned upon. I've found this fascinating nursing homes Really they're Too many I believe it is a trip. Yeah type. Yeah, okay, but it reduces the cords Yeah, no, but I can see this like I've used one of these In a hotel room before where you know, you've got a you want to have it plugged in Or you want to have the outlets near the like the bedside table But the outlet is way over there, you know, and so there is the cord running across the floor now You know, it's like maybe it's a sobriety test even if it's against the wall. It's it's it's a trip hazard Yes, right and it's like, okay, like I'm but I get it. They have to have the rule and they can't Well, it's on like a nursing home is different from a hotel For for many obvious reasons and and they are taking More responsibility for ensuring the guests are not tripping the most. Yeah, they're taking the most conservative route Yes, because they have to because they have to correct. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah No, that's that's literally what they are paid to do is take care of people and keep them safe. So yeah Yep, keep hopefully keep them happy and comfortable All right We have at least one more cool stuff found. We'll see let's see where this goes. I love cool So, you know, uh David clumpkin shares Uh, two cool stuff's found about or I guess there's just several that that showed up in discord when this conversation happened but um, we were talking about different the cellular coverage in your area And he mentioned coverage map At coverage map.com which is a community sourced coverage and speed map and you can actually submit your own with You know with their I think you have to like it's kind of a pain in the neck with coverage map to submit your own I think you have to like use a speed test and export it as a csv And they've got a youtube video about how to do that But anyway, if you want to look at the data that other people have submitted via csv That's even easier because it's right there. You just put in a zip code or an address and it will do it I believe it is only for the united states right now But uh, it will show you Where you're getting coverage for, you know, at and tt mobile Verizon, et cetera, et cetera. And then of course they have the the mvno's as well like mint mobile and visible and all of that but Um Knowing where the the main carriers are are getting you coverage. It's it's handy, you know Um, I I use it I use it often to check like before I travel especially going to like visit family in rural Maine Like am I going to have coverage or am I going to enjoy this off the grid time? So there you go. Yeah, yeah That's good to do but I'll tell you what I recommend unless you've kind of limited data Don't waste your data on a speed check. So you'll be a check Yeah, that that's the use it Some companies don't count that against your data limits and some do I can say definitively that mint does Uh, I was using you're doing some speed tests recently For some reason probably As a you know, it happened or I did it while I was traveling But I had 5g turned off on my phone. I don't know why And uh, it was when I was down in austin in march that I realized it and I turned it on It was like, oh man, I'm getting service like in the movie theater now where I wasn't before and like this is great And uh, and then it was like, oh, well, let me see how my coverage is at home I've been toying with the idea of using T mobiles 5g to the home as a backup connection for my fiber I've decided against it for a variety of reasons. I mainly I just don't need to I don't need it You know, it's gonna be fine. I can always turn Comcast back on and that's only going to take a couple of hours I already have it all wired up. So like I don't I don't need it at the ready Right, but I was doing some speed tests to see like is this even viable Do I get 5g in the house and in the spot where I would need to put this device? And if I do What is the uh, you know, what kind of speeds do I get? And I I mean especially speed tests over 5g where you're seeing hundreds of you know, megabits per second They burn up data really fast So I I watched I watched it burn, you know, two 300 megabytes very very quickly on mint, but But yeah, if you want to use that there is In the conversation an app called open signal came out And that or it came up. It's been out for a while Open signal also does Tests of your connection and they have an app and it's community sourced and all of that stuff But they have an app and they will do the test and log it So a little bit easier to to get lots of data in there. So Yeah, there's another one. I and I don't I could turn my camera off and start thumbing through my phone But there's another one. It's a it's like an antenna finder or self Tau something tower I'll have to look for it. Sure back to you. But yeah, yeah, yeah But I did that when I was trying to determine whether I could put Uh Say the words use your word speed new lips. Sorry new lips Uh, whether I could use t-mobile here in the house, which is i.e. Yes, let's air towers, you know, because it could be close enough And I was thinking I was going to have to boost And put in the antenna on the house and which you know, which direction did I want to point the antenna? There you go But then it turned out that t-mobile is much better coverage here than the guys that start with the knee Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah t-mobile Generally, it depends on the area But in general t-mobile seems to have the best Coverage out there like like there are those areas of like rural main where Um, Verizon might still have the edge. They certainly did for a while. They've sort of They've not been expanding their network like t-mobile has You know, but here's a question that you may or may not know the answer to though You because you were talking about thinking of using the t-mobile 5g as a backup connection. Yeah Is that thing portable? Can you put that in your rv? Can you take it kind anywhere? Or is it is a geolocated? I don't know. I know that the um, The the the starlink Does have a starlink for rvs. Okay, uh, that's the satellite one not the mobile one, right? Um I don't know if your t-mobile 5g For the home is portable because the reason I think it was Verizon was offering one for 25 bucks And I thought well, that's that's half the price and I can do it at our place in florida, but it's oh, it's not available It's also not 25 bucks It's 25 bucks if you're paying for you know, some men like some higher end plan for your phone Otherwise it's like 60 bucks or something. So yeah, yeah, yeah, it's it's not probably not for you but But but like the the t-mobile one is yeah, I wonder I know that in order to order it You have to be in an area that they deem Has 5g coverage for your home like they need to be able to send it to an ad Sorry about that. They need to be able to talk him with my hands again So I told pete to use his words now. I need to tell myself the same thing uh They they need to send you have to give them an address a shipping address where you're going to use it that they Believe you will have good luck with it, right? Like I mean for lack of a better term They just don't want a bad customer experience now if you choose to take that somewhere else with you I don't know that's interesting feedback at mackey job.com folks. Let us know if you If you know the answer to that to that question because that would be a fascinating solution so so So send it to the address of feedback at mackey job.com and let me know if it works in the florida panhandle J. Oh, yeah. Well, you can put the address in I'll put a link in told it didn't and I like Oh, but if you shipped it here and then happened to accidentally leave it at your house there Yeah, whoops. Yeah But that was feedback at mackeycap.com. Yeah, it looks like moat, you know, I I did a Mobile home 5g search and it pretty much came up with You know Verizon mint T-mobile stuff like that. So I think you gotta just look at their map Yeah, to see if if it's likely that you're gonna get coverage Yeah, I know Especially middle america is a challenge or as you said, Dave, you know main because you know who lives in main I mean, why why even put cell phones? just Yeah, don't need them there Signal can't get there from here. That's that's pretty much how it is sometimes when I'm visiting my family up there Yeah, if I was going there, I wouldn't bring my cell phone All right. Well, we've uh, we've we've now I've watched our our download numbers We now no longer have anyone in the state of main listening to great If we can't be cancelled for uh, cancelled in main, that's right. Yes Yeah, that's the yeah cancelled in main. Well, it's either that or it's a hotel notes of fornia. Um We shall see I did find do you guys have any other cool stuff found to add before we move on here? I have one uh that I that I figured I'd share. So it's uh from our friend Howard Oakley Uh, I saw there are two apps that he makes one is called viable and the other is called livable liv viable I have it livable viable. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, and these will let you create and run mac os virtual machines on apple silicon max. That's what viable does And livable lets you create and run linux vms on apple silicon max, which is pretty darn cool if you ask me So I've put a link in there for those isn't the mac already running Oh, yeah, but but if you want to virtualize an environment so that you can Do a test of things or without yeah without corrupting your entire computer. Yes, exactly, right Yeah, or you want to know like does this problem happen in you know a clean setup? That's not a bad way to uh to test it. So yeah viable And liv viable or livable. I'm not sure what but uh, yeah from uh from our friend Howard Oakley Oh, all right, that sound means I get to tell you about hello fresh where you get farm fresh Pre-portioned ingredients and seasonal recipes delivered right to your doorstep You get to skip those trips to the grocery store and count on hello fresh to make home cooking easy fun and affordable That's why it's america's number one meal kit. It's fantastic There's no more scouring the grocery store for that one ingredient to complete your recipe Hello fresh takes away all the hassle by delivering fresh pre-portioned ingredients So you have exactly what you need and it helps you cut down on food waste It also makes it fun because they send you these instructions the recipes with your meal kit Meaning you get all the food that you need plus the instructions and what we find at home is if one person's making dinner Even if everybody's in the kitchen, that's what it is It's everybody's in the kitchen while one person's making dinner with hello fresh because you get those instructions Makes it really easy for everybody to be fully involved because there's no delegating that needs to happen It's just right there. You say, oh, you got step number one. Great. I'll uh, I'll take step number two and on you go Hello fresh makes dinnertime a snap with all these deliciously easy options that'll please everybody They've got fit and wholesome to pescatarian to veggie There's meal plans that suits everyone's lifestyle plus you can swap out proteins and sides to your liking go to hello fresh dot com Slash mgg 16 and use code mgg 16 for 16 free meals plus free shipping again That's hello fresh dot com slash mgg 16 for 16 And then you use code mgg 16 for those 16 free meals plus the free shipping our thanks to hello fresh America's number one meal kit for sponsoring this episode and hey while I have you here I got a show for you wouldn't you love to bounce out of bed feeling fantastic even on a monday morning? Well, you can if you listen to the five a.m. Miracle podcast hosted by productivity junkie trail marathoner and banana enthusiast jeff sanders the five a.m. Miracle is here to help you dominate your day before breakfast You can create powerful lifelong habits and tackle your grandest goals with extraordinary energy Every monday jeff will guide you through a fascinating and helpful personal growth topic Including action steps to give you something practical to achieve in every episode So these are out every monday morning. They come out I think about 15 minutes before mac ekeb comes out on monday So you do this first thing you do mac ekeb. You're good to go He's got 500 plus episodes and 12 million downloads over the last 10 years with focuses on productivity healthy habits and personal development go to five a.m. Miracle dot com or subscribe to the five a.m. Miracle an apple podcast spotify or your favorite podcast app again That's five the number five a m miracle dot com and our thanks to jeff For doing this swap with us Hey, john, we were talking about pass keys recently when google added them When google announced the pass key login and we started getting some feedback About that and some other things. So I figure maybe we should talk a little about pass keys here You want to take us to allison? Sharing some yeah, I got mixed feelings, but it sounds like allison's is too So allison points out as soon as google announced pass key login I enabled it using my mac now when I try to log into google it presents me with a qr code as Pete described When I scan it with my iphone it says there are no matching pass keys in iCloud key chain This makes perfect sense because I don't use iCloud key chain um I prefer to prefer to have all of my info in one place and that one place is one password I know one password plans on implementing pass keys Uh, they do have it for creating new accounts now uh But until then it appears I can't use pass keys at all unless I turn on iCloud key chain If I'm missing something let me know, but I thought it was interesting um The only thing that popped into my head with this dave is In really use things like home kit. I thought you had to You had to enable iCloud key chain um I don't think so okay, maybe not anymore, but I recall at some point when I was using it It's like hey, you got to turn this on but anyways other than that, um, yeah, I mean all the documentation that I found for um For these uh says yeah. Oh by the way, you got to enable iCloud key chain. So I think she's soon though that will not be the case because as uh Paul conaway pointed out in our pre-show chat today One password has announced that uh, it will support pass keys coming june 6th Which of course is the day after DC uh announcement happens, so we'll uh I mean it's no surprise like apple's been supporting pass keys obviously for a while I don't think they're divulging anything, you know of apple's secrets They are simply divulging their own secrets, which is that pass keys come to one password on one on on june 6th Which is great. Yeah. Yeah. I'm still I'm still living uh dual life I use iCloud key chain And one password simultaneously and it mostly works out fine I have I'd let kind of let my passwords get stored in both and whichever one wants to fill it is great I I have started Using apple for my credit cards again now because it will store My cvv codes Whereas it previously didn't so I would have to auto fill a pass or a credit card with apple and then go either look at the credit card like a caveman or Like look in or look in one password to find out what my cvv You know was and type that in but now it the last time I did it was like, hey, you want me to store that for you It's like, yeah, please So Sure they did How do you think they had got to they had to buy their like access and stuff I mean, what you use his currency back then? Well, I mean they see that was the thing is they they didn't use cash. They only used credit cards, john Like obviously we know cavemen. We know cavemen didn't use cash. That's ridiculous. This was thousands of years ago They didn't have pockets. They just had to remember their credit card numbers. That's it. Right obvious obvious All right, uh Kyle had a comment about that conversation. Yeah, I gotta try this out. So, uh, so kyle says Um a mackey got 980 during the segment on past keys There was a discussion of whether or not it is possible to use past keys to sign on to other devices That are not syncing the past key. This is possible If the past key containing devices present at least within Uh close enough With new enough software on all devices. Okay, there we go Uh, the device communities the device communicates over bluetooth. See the w w dc 22 session meet past keys That's nice. I want to meet the past keys. Um, you can watch that session. Yeah video um And he says he thought there was another video where it was demonstrated Yeah, whatever, but anyways That would be really cool. I haven't tried this though. I I do have Past keys enabled in a limited fashion. So I should give this a whirl because it'd be nice if you just had the device Present, right? I think what this is saying is it's possible to do this without using iCloud keychain um, no, I think you would still Need iCloud keychain, but um But maybe not. I don't know. Yeah, I don't I I yeah It's worth watching that session. I suppose. Yeah, yeah, it's good All right, uh one last one maybe not so much about past keys, but past codes john Yeah, um From Todd. Uh, yeah, no, no, I see it. No, great. There we go Okay navigating notes hotel navigating hotel notes of fornia Yep. Um All right as mentioned in mac iCloud 980 the apple password manager is getting more and more capable But it doesn't rely on your apple device password, which can be the weakest link agreed Many of my friends still have a fordage of passcode on their iphone or simple mac passwords Uh, and basically we got to tell everybody just get their act together or check your settings um And just so if you want to know here The place that you want to go to change this is Sorry, uh settings. All right Yeah, it's I've got it listed in the show notes. No, no, I gotta yeah, I know it's in the no, I'm just uh Settings here with the face id and past settings settings face id or touch id for older products and passcode change passcode and then there's going to be a thing that says passcode options and At the very least then I haven't done this so I still use a four digit one. I'm sorry. Don't steal my phone. But um But yeah, there you can then select to do, you know a multi digit one a multi character one There are all sorts of wonderful options there and they should Choose anyone except four digit again. Don't do as I say do as I or don't do as I do do as I say so if we were to Send chat gbt the you the url mac ekeb and have it go through every episode we've ever recorded Is it possible that chat gbt could find you uttering your four digit passcode on the show? That's a rhetorical question. You don't need to answer it. But i'm just saying like, um I recommend using a not four digit password. I recommend using a password where the phone Doesn't tell the person entering the password how many digits it is Yeah, because that way They don't know you could be using a four digit passcode You could be using a seven digit. You could be using a five Who knows right and it's like if you choose to use a four digit passcode in that scenario Still the same number of things to type in but there's not four bubbles for a hacker to know they need to fill out So right right? Yeah, and I believe the option is still available to have it wipe your phone after 10 wrong guesses Which is not a bad thing You know if you've got a backup your phone backs up pretty regularly and you had to recover it you could do so So I am uh, I don't let we talk on the show all the time about how there's that continuum between Convenience and security and I definitely choose You know security more often than I choose convenience. Uh, sorry Reverse that here in hotel notes of foreign. Yeah, I I choose convenience not uh security because I want to get out. Um I know I you're right Everything you said is correct. If you're backing up your phone You're doing all the things that are sort of relatively easy and good to do you're gonna be fine Except I know because I have murphy on my favorites list We used to say have murphy on speed dial, but kids you ask your parents what that means uh I know because I have murphy in my favorites list that The one time I would type my pass or somebody would type my password in wrong like not maliciously But just accidentally would be while I'm traveling and it'll be the one trip that I don't bring a spare iPhone with me And I don't have my data connection and I desperately need like that thing to get into onto a plane Or you know like it's definitely gonna gonna burn me If I do this, yeah, but 10 times a that's a lot The only time I wouldn't use it is if you've got toddlers in the house, right? Because right, right, right setting your phone every week Every week. Oh, yeah guaranteed. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's right. Yeah Yeah, it reminds me of uh, a very tangential story, but semi related when was Was uh, Steve Wozniak for those of you don't know kids ask your parents, uh, when was Woz loves numbers. He loves repeating numbers. He loves patterns Well, he would often post like his hotel room number to social media If he got like a good one that had like a repeating pattern or it was palindromic or something like that like he loves all that stuff and when the 888 area code opened up for toll free numbers was immediately went and got 888 888 888 Because he thought now I can do it. I can have one phone number that one digit and like like this This was like totally appealed to was and he had to give the number up Reason he had to give the number up was he was getting prank calls from babies All day long and he loved I mean he did love it because he thought what a perfect thing These kids are making their first prank call and I get it like but eventually it sort of became You know more trouble. It was But yeah Anyway, that's that's my story. I don't think they were intentionally prank calls. I think it was just roll with dice You know, but I mean they were having fun. They were pressing the buttons and see what would happen and talking to was I mean isn't that kind of what we also did as slightly older kids for prank calls as we press the buttons and see Although I will say when my oldest was about three years old He managed to get the police to show up at the house And yeah, and guess what that's entertainment, baby And and after the third day the cops are like, can you please keep the phone away from him? Well, that's why coming every day at least in this country 9-1-1 is 9-1-1 because the 9 and the 1 are As far apart as you can get on the keypad Yeah, it's not 9-1-1 in all countries though like different countries have different things But yeah here we chose 9-1-1 because it's diagonal actually some it's 1-1-9. I think japan is from 19. Yeah, yeah, that's true But they drive on the other side of the road too, so That's why the wrong side of the road Yeah, let's let's so we've got we cut we've cut main out As we say the wrong side of the road. We just cut out The uk, you know, obviously and uh And japan drives on the wrong side of the road too. They do indeed. Well forget them too. That's right And they use the wrong electricity. It's 100 volts 50 hertz. I mean what what's up with that? Actually it makes Perfect sense to me to have a math standpoint those numbers from a math standpoint Well in europe they they don't use The same electricity either that's a different electricity. So yeah, but yeah Yeah, oh, it's 999 in the uk, uh, tennessee poppa in the chat room says it's 999. So yeah Yeah, I think yeah, yeah, yeah, so it's it's you know, maybe they get prank Maybe they get more prank calls there than uh, then we do here Maybe we learned from them like that e9 11 system is is very like relatively speaking is new here Like it it definitely came into being when I was a teenager, I guess. Yeah, so all right, um Gary let's answer some questions here. I like these We'll see where we get I don't know how far we're gonna get. Yeah Isn't that you dave? All right. No, no, no never mind. It's john It was the next thing on the agenda, but you know, yeah, it's the next uh, he's next up. All right. Um, So gary says Why are you jumping around on me? Stop that? Okay, I just watched cnets pre w w dc show and the hosts were talking about what they want to see in the next iteration of ios I've been wanting this since the original iphone was created in 2007 Uh with ios 1.0. Wow ios 1.0, what did i mean tell people what this is Why doesn't apple have an audible low battery alarm? Uh, if someone doesn't pick up and unlock their device, they will look at the notification unless they have a video or something That's got a device on when the battery becomes low. I know There is an audible alert while on a phone call, but seriously guys um And a related ramp with the introduction of the dynamic island now the low battery notification only appears in that area I only saw it because I was looking at my phone when I saw it The only other indicator is a red battery icon apple is usually on top of making sure their hardware and software is accessible For those with disabilities, but this is two strikes. I'm legally blind and not always going to be looking at my phone Um as the horse on reynolds timby stated. No, sir. I don't like it Yeah, but you found him an answer john Yeah, believe it or not. I I poked her out and apparently someone else has had this problem as well um and it's a uh Little step uh group automation could take here to create a shortcut Uh, and it's titled to how to get siri to alert you when your iphone battery is low So check that article out and it'll teach you how to create a shortcut to Yeah, it's pretty straightforward. You just like create an automation in shortcuts automations being the things that trigger by Not you right like that how to how to trigger a shortcut that's that's not you and one of the triggers that you can select Is a personal automation is battery level. Yeah, and so you can choose it When the battery and I think you can even set it uh as to where it is 50 or something like that. Um There's a slide. My only finger wag is it's not visible until you scroll on that selection screen What what are you talking about? What i'm talking about is when you go to the criteria used for setting um The shortcut, um battery level does not appear on it. You have to scroll up. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah That's the only thing I said because yeah, I looked at it and it's like where is it? Oh, yeah, scroll up So yep, yeah, yeah, isn't big enough then. Yeah. Yeah, yeah But yeah, you find it and then you can you can set the level and you can actually get you can have it trigger a shortcut depending on Whether the battery is above below or equal to that battery level. So Yeah, that's pretty good. I that's that's I like that that's smart And then obviously you can have it say something or send you an alert or speak text, you know, whatever you want So I like it. Yeah, so With a two-year-old, so it'd be nice if they tossed it into accessibility, but you know, this will do it Yeah, and my phone's two plus years old. So I I'd use one of the shortcuts I have mine go into low power mode once I go below 65 percent just to slow down the discharge rate for the rest of the day Oh Pete Oh, i'm gonna do that for like 40 percent But yes because because it only asks you when you hit 20 And that might be low power. Yeah, do you want to go to low power? Yeah Yeah, instead when it automatically goes there when I when I hit 64 percent It's I said when it goes below 65. So thusly 64 comes up. Yeah goes up. I'm in low power mode now. Thank you Right But it doesn't keep doing it like if if you if you turn low power mode off Let's say and you're at 60 percent It's not going to keep turning it on because you have your automation set to equals 64 percent not Is below 65 interesting actually have below 65, but I need to change it to equals you're right I don't know and I can turn it back. Yeah, then you can turn it back on and not have it fight you all day long Yeah, yeah, yeah, because I would my solution to that before we just turn that automation off Yeah, I know what I want and go in and turn the automation off. I like that solution much better equals Yeah, we're gonna have to mess. Yeah, I love that. This is what I love about this show Yeah, I get to learn things while we're doing while we're teaching. Um, maybe we can learn something Pete You want to Summarize and briefly share your geek challenge here. I will yeah, so user Jeff wrote in And said I use my apple mail for all my mail or I use apple mail for all my mailing needs on mac and ios I find it frustrating. I can't have the same email signature on my os devices that I do on my backs I use a photo banner i.e a jpeg image Per my signature, but it doesn't seem to work on ios I can copy and paste the signature into my iphone which happily shows in the signature section But when composing an email it places a box and a question mark in it Other than using a different email app. Do you have any ideas on on how to Embed the graphic signature so I went man. I'm using my google foo and I found a life wire article that essentially says Go in Create your apple signature Or use your email and your apple or your mail signature Yeah, with you know, whatever scripting in an image that you want and save it as a draft Then go into your phone open that draft and you know Copy your signature You know if you select it all and copy it then put it into Go into the signature section of your ios mail And paste it in there and then you have to shake your phone to undo To get it to look like what it looked like before it went in I don't know why it doesn't paste right but you shake your phone and go undo and it goes back to what it should look like And then you save it and that all seemed like it was great and it was going to work just fine except Then when I went to compose an email Instead of you know the scripting of my name came out right and the thank you or comma, you know, whatever But the png file that I was using just came up with the file name dot png and you're like So it remains a geek challenge Is there a way other than creating a hyperlink to an image you've stored online? To make your your little graphic go with your signature in ios I can't find it. Sorry jeff thought I had it Thought wife wire had it Not so much That's just dumb because I've seen your uh your Uh signature for our site and you have you know what graphic in there Yeah, it should sink to the signature on your iphone, but So it's just being dumb about graphics which is disappointing you would think I I um And I know this is because I'm You know by every day becoming even more more of an old man But I really have always disliked graphics and email signatures and the reason is they People generally don't spend the time to size the graphics correctly And so they will just put like some mondo image in their email And then in their email program just say okay display it at a smaller size But you're they're still sending along this mondo image, which I mean fine Like we all have lots of bandwidth now It's it's not a big deal But when I go to reply if I wind up replying in plain text mode Now their image is this huge mondo thing and it's like oh, that's cool Like that's great. Let me let me fix this for you, you know while i'm busy replying So I I don't know I I've never Like I I know who you are I don't need you to brand yourself in your email like that like but I I get it like some companies It's actually a company policy to put the image. I'm gonna send you a bill For my tomy isp for all that for the bandwidth. Yeah Yeah Right exactly But it means a geek challenge that one should be you know, John's right that one should just be simple Yes, I don't know what I think that iCloud would take care of I mean iCloud does a lot of very useful things in the background Including syncing your signatures with yeah Yeah, I don't disagree despite my personal preference. I I fully agree that that That it's it's weird that this just isn't a thing So yeah, so Jeff in spite of having found the answer sending you the answer and going I haven't been able to try it tonight I'll try it tomorrow when I tried it tomorrow. It didn't work. It didn't work. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Yeah all right, um At the risk of potentially running a little longer than we normally might do it Bill asks he says I recently purchased An m2 max based macbook pro and i'm considering purchasing a dock to use at my home office Connecting two 4k external monitors and a plethora of usb devices mostly type a Um and because I have the m2 max I can take at least 96 watts of power from the dock You don't need at least 96, but you can certainly take it. Um, he says I'm having I've looked at the owc the belkin and the cal digit offerings in the thunderbolt dock range And he says i'm having a little trouble Choosing which one is which and it seems like he says that I need a thunderbolt 4 dock And it seems like maybe the cal digits the only one that really does what I need I'm not sure how to look at these things Help and i'm paraphrasing here, but that's that's where we start the Place that I will begin with the answer here is that when we're looking at all of this It's really important to go back to that conversation We had a couple of years ago with larry o'connor from other world computing where he came on and He's such a nerd and I say that with in the in the most positive way and with the utmost of respect Because he really understands this stuff and in many cases better than we do here Which is why we often have them on show but He explained to us that the term thunderbolt 4 Is really a marketing term And what it means is thunderbolt 3 But with all the features enabled and that sounds ridiculous to to me when I hear it that way And there's a good reason and it's because i'm a mac user We as mac users did not experience what non mac aka windows and linux users experienced with thunderbolt 3 and that is Many of the features of thunderbolt 3 were not enabled And yet manufacturers were still able to say they supported thunderbolt 3 until changed that Or the thunderbolt consortium whoever changed that with thunderbolt 4 in order to say thunderbolt 4 You must support and have enabled all of the features What that is for us mac users With thunderbolt 3 every feature was enabled save one and that one feature is hubbing and what hubbing means is Not being able to do With thunderbolt 3 you could have two thunderbolt ports on your dock One that would go up to the host your aka your mac and one that could go down to either another like thunderbolt drive Or to another thunderbolt dock which could then have two ports on it So pass through thunderbolt was allowed and and capable for us mac users with thunderbolt 3 with thunderbolt 4 Hubbing means you can have more than two thunderbolt ports on a On a dock and so you can have one go upstream to your mac and then many go downstream to other thunderbolt devices I will point out that the speed of all of it is aggregated and sent through the Thunderbolt 4 pipe up to your mac. So you're going to be limited there potentially depending on what you're hanging off of it and you need to be Cognizant of that when you're choosing how to architect your thunderbolt setup. You might be better off say hanging a an ssd directly off of your mac on one bus so that the other bus can have You know the the the dock with the hub and all that stuff But knowing that that's the difference between thunderbolt 3 and 4 You you can start looking at these docks a little bit differently You need to first decide do you want hubbing? Do you need hubbing for your setup? Do you even care about that? And if the answer is yes, then find a dock that supports multiple thunderbolt ports And if the answer is or more than two thunderbolt ports, I should say and if the answer is no then Don't worry about it. Just go get a thunderbolt 3 Hub that has all the other ports you want that said cal digits thunderbolt station 4 Has a ton of ports on it. It really is a great device And might exactly be what bill needs and what many of us need But there are others out there when you start taking The the need for the marketing term away and just start looking at actual capabilities You know the the owc thunderbolt dock, which is the name of that product Is a thunderbolt 4 dock and also has your 96 watts of power and Those sorts of things So That's That's my advice for going through that. I don't have any one to recommend any of the ones that that That bill mentioned are are great, but also, you know anchor makes thunderbolt Hubs, they don't make the one they used to which had tons of ports like the cal digit Seems like cal digits the only one making that sort of you know kitchen sink Hub these days, which is you know, just fine. So I don't know you guys have any thoughts on On this. Are you using any thunderbolt devices john? I like the owc 14 port Thunderbolt dock with cable blah blah blah Um, so that that's technically a thunderbolt. We would call that a thunderbolt 3 Yes dock just because it just has two thunderbolt ports on it, but yeah Right for my current setup. It has the ports that I need which are primarily Um, you know, believe it or not usb 3.1 uh connectors So you do you mean the peripherals that I have plug into this are for the most go ahead You're saying usb 3.1, but I think I correct me if i'm wrong, please I think what you mean is usb a connectors Uh, yes, they are usb a connectors and on the device itself. They are marked as usb 3.1 gen 1 Yes, right, but yeah, but because you could have usb 3.1 gen run over usb c as well Like it's not limited one or the other Um, and we would call usb 3.1 gen 1 correct me if i'm wrong, but these days we call that Usb 5 gigabits. Yeah, okay. That's way easier And then I think the only other port I use on it is there's a, uh A thunderbolt pass through and then there's a monitor port Which I have my secondary monitor plugged into what the monitor that's where I use so I don't I don't have I mean the the cal digit one that was mentioned sounds fabulous Because it's got it's got a lot of ports. Yeah, and has lots of power too If if you need that in my case, I really don't need that. Yeah, if you're plugging into a mac mini It doesn't matter. Yeah, that's the one I recommend it I don't know what you use these p let's know Well, I'm trying to figure out Why and I may be asking why is the sky blue, uh, but I my observation is then that's why The hub that I have sorry banging my microphone the hub that I have has uh the little pigtail One usb c in Yeah, and and everything else is all usba and Yeah sd card and that sort of thing. So that makes sense to me now You're probably using a usb c hub not a thunderbolt hub or dock or whatever Yeah, okay. Yeah, that's true. Yeah, but if that's what you need, that's fine And john, are you using you said it has a monitor port is that hdmi or display port? Uh, it's this lay port. Yeah, I'm looking at the diagram display port 4k. So, okay. Yeah So it's more than I need because my Secondary screen is not 4k and more often than not right? So many things are now usb c these days and that's why we covered it back in the pre christmas show Those just those little adapters usb c to a and then a little rubber top Uh Tether yes to hold it on the end of the game and that's how I solve my port needs at this point. Yep. Yep That makes sense that makes sense. Yeah, I'm uh, I'm I'm still I have a thunderbolt Uh, the the owc thunderbolt hub which has Four thunderbolt ports on it. So that's what I use to add thunderbolt ports to my setup here And then I also have the thunderbolt 3 doc, which I think is basically what you've got john From from them up here Downstairs I have the old cal digit thunderbolt 3 doc so that I can keep testing all those things I actually have the anchor one that's kind of a clone of the cal digit thunderbolt 3 doc as well But yeah, yeah these days that it would be the owc thunderbolt hub or the cal digit thunderbolt station 4 would be the Sorry the owc thunderbolt doc Would be what I would recommend for folks or the Or the cal digit one, but you know, they're they're both going to give you some extra ports and that's You know extra thunderbolt ports meaning and and then also some usb a ports and that sort of thing. So yeah, that's There's lots of good options there because yeah, the owc thunderbolt doc has four thunderbolt ports Four usb a ports three of them are 10 gigabits one is usb 2 So for your you know keyboard or mouse or whatever and it's got gigi and sd card and that sort of thing, but if you You could use the thunderbolt four ports for connecting your displays if you want Or you can or or then if you if you don't want you could get like the cal digit doc or something different to support your Displays if you if you want that hdmi or or display port port And all those extra pieces of gear white since i'm pretty much a single computer user instead of an iMac at home And a laptop in that i'm just going to get the 16 inch Macbook pro with all the big gum ports on the side i already need There you go. Well, you know, there's that 15 inch air coming pete. So there you go Maybe maybe put some ports in it Yeah, i'm still with you pete man I I hate it that the battery life on the intel's were were so bad But I just really liked having a 16 inch screen, especially when I was You know doing work. I wondered in an apple store last week in Cambridge, england And they had the air and the pros sitting next to each other The pro is 30 heavier or so 25 heavier. Yeah, but man, they're nice machines. Yep But yeah, try typing on the keyboard You know, I didn't No, those keyboards are all great now. Well, no, but no, no what i'm saying Um, maybe this is not the case in the uk But um, it is certainly the case in in uh, paris Because I went into a Apple Franchise and I tried typing on the keyboard and everything was coming out as gibberish so either where I was having a stroke or something or I look at the keyboard and i'm like, what what you guys Why did you what did you why did you do this? There's a different keyboard layout in Many countries have different keyboard layouts. I mean, obviously asian countries because they have so many characters But it was just like oh That's why what i'm typing is not what i'm seeing. You have to type in french john Then it would just be perfectly fine. There you go. Just listen french No, the you were typing english and the keyboard was translating it to french. That's what was happening Just because you don't know here it is a easy erty is their layout not qwerty and there's other differences. Yeah, yeah Thanks for hanging out with us folks Thanks to cash fly for providing all the bandwidth to get the show from us to you Make sure to check out our other shows pete's. So there I was my business brain and my giggab show And uh, yeah, thanks for hanging out. Make sure to check out Mackie kev.com slash merch. We've got all kinds of fun stuff Check out our sponsors as we mentioned in the show collide. K. O. L. I. D. E. Dot com slash mgg Hello fresh dot com slash mgg one six uh I'm gonna remember the other one just how it's gonna be I guarantee you it's gonna come to mind shady rays dot com slash mgg John Would you do me if I love it when you tell me what pete's shirt says because it I love it when you share pithy advice. Do you have anything to share? Um, yeah, I think you can get one of these if you go to um, uh, mackegab.com slash merch And if you do that you can get your very own shirt that says on the front of it don't get Made it. It's good advice. Thanks for hanging out with us folks