 The Mac Observers' Mac Geek Gap Episode 800 for Monday, February 3rd, 2020. And welcome to the Mac Observers' Mac Geek Gap, the show where we take all your questions, your cool stuff, found your tips, all that stuff. We mash it all together. We come up with the answers. Sometimes we have them. Sometimes you have them. The goal is, as we go through this every week together, for every single one of us. Us included. All of us. For every single one of us to learn at least five new things every time we get together. Sponsors for this episode include a long time sponsor of the show, PDFPanel11 from Smile at smilesoftware.com slash podcast and a new sponsor of this show, although not a new company to this show, Zapier.com slash MGG. We'll talk a little bit more about each of those later, but you can go visit those links now if you want to, you know, get a little jump on things. For now, here, for the 800th time, although I haven't done all 800 of them here, but for the 800th time doing this show in Durham, New Hampshire, I'm Dave Hamilton. And here in Fairfield, Connecticut, this is John O'Pron. 800. Well, yeah. How'd that happen? It's like the only star. It feels like we started doing this just yesterday. I know. It's crazy. Yeah, you know, I mean, so 800, it's like, you know, I thought about a lot of different themes for this, you know, there's the octet theme. There is the one 800th time we do this together, right? Like, I kind of like that one, that was sort of fun. But, you know, otherwise, it's like we just keep doing what we do. That's kind of what I love about this show is that we just keep doing what we do and everybody seems to get help by it and all of that stuff, which is just what makes it. Yeah. This is what makes it fun. Yeah. We could we could scream this is podcast, but that's 300. Right. That's right. One of the people in one of my feeds had, he went to a club and yeah, it was like Club 300. And so he was like posting pitches of everything saying this is whatever. Yeah. Right. Right. Yes. Right. Right. Yeah. I don't know, man. You know what I do know? I know we should just let's dive in. Why not? We got a lot of stuff to talk about today. We have, of course, like I said, you know, we've got the questions. We've got cool stuff found. We have some quick tips, but I don't know if we may save those for the next show. We might get to them in the show. We'll see. You've got some new toys. I've got a rant or two to share. So let's do it and we'll start with Andrew, who says, I'm writing because I encountered an issue for which I am at a loss to explain. I present frequently in various different venues and because of that, I carry with me a wide range of dongles so I can connect my new 16 inch MacBook Pro or whatever other laptop I have to whatever projector winds up being in the room. Yesterday says I plugged into the projector system using Apple's Thunderbolt 3 slash USB-C to HDMI adapter and the projector would not see the computer. It showed no signal. The computer, however, showed that it saw a projector on the other end. He says I tried unplugging, re-plugging different USB-C ports, nothing. He says he also tried changing and this is a good tip. I actually just helped my son deal with this for a presentation he was doing the other day when the computer sees the projector and the projector doesn't see the computer. Go to the projector and change the HDMI input for that or whatever input. Because sometimes the projector might not be on the one that you're on, especially if it's one of these sort of conference rooms with a detached system. He says later I tried that same Apple dongle on a regular HDMI TV and it worked fine and the previous day I'd used it with a projector at a different venue and it worked fine there too. So I don't think there's anything wrong with the adapter. He says do you have any idea why? Oh, and then he says I tried a different USB-C to HDMI adapter. He says a much cheaper off-brand one and it worked fine. I unplugged it, tried the Apple one again and it still didn't work. So he says do you have any idea why this might be the case? I've had similar experiences before with my previous MacBook Pro, the 2013 model. And in some cases I couldn't connect with the built-in HDMI port but was able to connect with a mini-display port to HDMI dongle again, some off-brand one. He says in each case I think the issue occurred in a larger venue where the Mac was connecting not to a single projector but to a system that then linked to the projector which is fairly common in like college classrooms and things where it's a little like the AV is sort of built into the infrastructure not just you know wheeled in on a cart or whatever. It says it probably seems like a small issue. He says but my livelihood depends on being able to present slides to audiences so I'd like to understand what is happening. Yeah, this is a weird one. I've run into you know I present enough probably not quite as much as Andrew here but I've run into weird things before and I too have learned to carry a variety of things to solve that problem because you know you wanted any good presenter should be able to do their stuff without slides but sometimes like it's really helpful to be able to show something visually instead of just talking about it so says the podcaster that does an audio show but you know so yeah like it's good to hedge your bets and be ready you know I'm a long-time Boy Scout here always be prepared right. So you know I don't know the answer to this I don't know why Apple's adapters work differently from the third party ones I would be curious in his specific example to plug both in you know I always head down the path of what would I do if it were me and I were there right so plug them each in and look at system profiler and see how they show up you know is one showing up as a Thunderbolt device is one showing up as a USB device how do they present themselves to the system that might kind of give us a little more insight which might give us the answer. Brian and Rowan the chat room is suggesting maybe it's an HDCP issue which is the copy protection built into HDMI that's possible there is a negotiation that happens with HDMI signals and perhaps Apple is being more aggressive about that with their chips than third parties feel the need to be that would not surprise me in fact that's the yeah yeah interesting yeah yeah that that interesting that could well be it and and to solve that of course you do exactly what Andrew did you have multiple adapters with you so thoughts on that John. The one thing that I found sometimes may convince something to be seen when it's not is that if you go to system preferences displays and you hold down the option key you will then get a detected displays button that couldn't hurt to try that and maybe that'll convince something to wait up or sink I know he said the computer saw it but sometimes I found that explicitly saying detect displays will kick some things into gear so that's not a bad idea I like that yeah yeah good call man and that's that's just another one of those good things to remember you know there's that sort of series of troubleshooting steps you go through in the moment when you plug in the projector into your Mac and you're like crap it doesn't show up okay I what I wish is that I could tell my Mac don't default to the two displays being mirrored please never mirror by default if I want to mirror great I'll tell you that but but my experiences with current Mac OS that it defaults to mirroring every time I plug in a new projector and there's no way to change that default but I would I would love that so I don't know uncle P in the chat room says you could carry in Apple TV with you an airplay the display as a backup to your backup I like that idea too that's you know if you again if you're doing this for your part or all of your livelihood that that's easy money to spend just to have something right there so I like it I like it Brad asks my son dropped his iPhone SE running 13.3 and it is toast the screen is broken can't access anything but thankfully I had a backup on our Mac Mini running 10.15.2 and his old iPhone 5s in the drawer for just such an emergency so here's the problem the 5s cannot run iOS 13 it can only run iOS 12 and the Mac won't let me restore a 13.3 backup to a 12.4.5 iPhone I found an article that instructed me to edit the product version in the P list file of the backup but now that backup does not show up in the manage backups list and is not even available to restore from am I out of luck if so I am shaking my fist with one finger extended and Apple I like that I think there's an emoji for that in fact Brad we need now we need the fish shake the closed fish shake emoji not just close fist emoji but the closed fist shake emoji honestly you know might again falling into the what would I do if I were there I would try amazing I would see what it could do you know amazing does some pretty special things with backups and will allow you to manipulate the data in a backup such that you can choose to restore only certain things so I wonder if there's something about I amazing that would make this work I actually reached out to the folks that I'm amazing but I haven't heard back from them so I don't have this answer here but but that that would be certainly the next thing that I would try is is that and I'm trying to think if there's any other any other work around I don't know that there is well what if this might be difficult to get done but would I cloud restore the data would you know if you restored the backup from iCloud instead of from your Mac and I realize you might not have the backup in iCloud I but but just kind of as a mental exercise would that be intelligent enough to know I've got to adapt this thing through some you know Apple magic that could do it I don't know the answer obviously but you know I don't know that you mean like doing a restore a restore from iCloud like he's doing the restore from his from his Mac but doing a restore from iCloud would would there be some some smarts there that that might I don't know yeah yeah Brian Monroe in the chat room says nice idea but no I've tried it and iCloud also has the same limitations for iOS devices so okay well that you know that this is how we do things right we exhaust our we troubleshoot and exhaust options so I would I amazing is where I would begin with this because it it does they really have have worked and they convert your backups to their own format so it's possible this might be able to do something that honestly that's my only hope so yeah yeah you get your data back you wouldn't get your settings but but I mean maybe that's all you need so and it's also possible remember that a lot of apps save their settings in a way to iCloud as well so and and save their data even to iCloud as well so you might find that you've you've got more of that data accessible to you than than it seems right now maybe not but depending on what apps you're using and how you're using them and all of that stuff you may find that you know starting from a nuke and pave which is essentially what we're talking about here if you use the analog on the Mac although that's just a metaphor anyway thankfully that might you might be okay I mean certainly you know nuke and paving your Mac and and getting back up to functional is a much simpler and faster process now than it was even five years ago and certainly even ten years ago so the saint you may find depending again depending on your use case you may find the same to be true with your iPhone so there you go that's those is my thoughts what do you think mr. Brun any other thoughts on this one yeah that's you pretty much covered it by amazing is our only hope I hope yeah exactly exactly alright let's go to the Mac on this one Rob says a question regarding the shares that I have on my Synology but this would apply to really any network shares whether they're coming from another Mac or you know a third-party network storage device or something he says I can't seem to maintain connection to my shares on my disk station without a considerable considerable degree of consternation sometimes the NAS appears in the finder by host name sometimes it appears by IP address sometimes I get an error message when I try to click on a share I can only surmise this is due to the Samba implementation in Mac OS plus some quickness with the finder at least as far as I'm concerned so my question to you guys is this how do you manage these connections efficiently I really like a clean desktop so I don't want to go and make a bunch of alias shortcuts to each share etc is there some utility or finder replacement that handles this more elegantly I know it's a simple question but I really don't know the answers so what is your approach to this look like okay you're right Rob that this is a simple question I have not yet found a simple answer although it would seem relatively simple for someone to write a utility to do the things that I have mine doing what I do is the first thing I do is put an alias to each of my shares that I want to remain and have mounted in login items so that they're at least theoretically mounted at login or startup then I created an automator action that I saved as a self-running application okay so you can you can build automator actions that they're saved as apps that you just double click and they run standalone which mounts those shares it actually is a little more in depth in that what it does is it ejects the shares first and then mounts them I know this seems crazy but otherwise you might wind up with several mounts to the same share so I have it eject and then mount and but I don't ever just run that willy-nilly I have a keyboard maestro script that runs that app either when I log in so to make sure that these things launch or when it notices that one of them is unmounted and and that's kind of the trick is is you know waking from sleep it looks for it if it's unmounted then it runs the the you know the application that I that I wrote so and in automator so very very straightforward so I'm using keyboard maestro is sort of the trigger to say is this volume mounted if it is don't do anything if it is if it isn't go and run this little app to make sure that it is and that tends to keep things mounted most of the time but it is not a perfect solution I I really like I think many of us I wish that there was some way of telling the finder just keep this share mounted please for the love of all that is good and pure I like could there be a checkbox that says that for the love of all that is good and pure please try to keep this mounted I would like that but we don't have that John so what did you deal with this John or do you just kind of deal with it have you have you created a solution for it or do you deal with it I pretty much now I usually don't mount servers unless you know on a per instance basis when I need to get something I know is on a server then I mount it so I typically don't leave network volumes mounted when I'm not using them interesting okay so yeah okay I mean and that that's just a use case scenario I mean for me I use stuff on network volume volumes all the time I have Hazel scripts that that auto copy you know an archive things off to network volume so I'm not worried about you know filling up disk space like like our podcast files right I keep them on this computer for two weeks and anything in that folder that matches you know certain criteria this is what I use Hazel for you know shoots those off to my disk station for you know cold storage essentially well it's warm storage it's right there online but not on this computer and that keeps this computer from filling up because I was doing you know this is the thing about automation you know you do things in the moment it's like oh it's pretty quick to just go and archive these when the disk gets full and finally I was talking to somebody and it's like I could write it could easily write a Hazel action for that and literally never think about it again and and so I that's what I did that's the beauty of automation so I highly recommend Hazel for that kind of stuff but to keep your volumes mounted someone in the chat room Ari to or I guess Ari and probably his second account of the day or something uses an app or suggests an app called auto-mounter from pixel eyes in New Zealand and we got a link in the show notes for you it sure seems I'm just scrolling through it now but it sure seems to do exactly what I wished for and it is available on the Mac App Store and it is it's not cheap in that it's 17 bucks but oh no oh I don't know why it shows 17 it's 17 New Zealand dollars good news 10 US dollars so there you go yeah tired of remounting your network shares auto-mounter ensures that your shares are always mounted when you need them so I may be spending 10 bucks on this because that way I don't have to deal with maintaining my my automator keyboard maestro you know scenario so very cool thanks Ari much appreciated that's good good good you know John this is the perfect time to talk about our first sponsor which is Zapier at zapier.com slash MGG that's Z A P I E R.com slash MGG we're talking about automation we're talking about doing all those things that make your life easier yes you can do these repetitive tasks on your own and they seem relatively easy when the you do them but when you add up the time that it takes to do it and the mental effort thought you know in in the process of remembering to do it well sometimes a lot of times an automated solution works better for I'll use a perfect example here at Mac eCab we have our premium you know program right we're folks like you donate and and you can do that on a recurring basis or a one-time basis and we like to thank you in the show and so what happens though is we get a bunch of emails in telling us when your orders have been processed and then what I would do is I would copy I would read each of those emails and copy your name and your city to a spreadsheet that I could go through and then thank you during the show and that's a relatively tedious process I was happy to do it because here we are you know thanking the folks that are supporting us is great but then I realized and I've been using Zapier for years right then the best part about Zapier is once you get something working you kind of forget about Zapier well I had forgotten about Zapier and then I was reminded of it at a conference and I had it running doing lots of other things but when it just does stuff you forget that it's there I'm like oh wait a minute so what I did is I linked I use Zapier it's like the glue that ties all these different engines together I use Zapier to look at our e-commerce engine we use one with WordPress called Woo Commerce and Zapier links with that like it does with I think like thousands of others and then I linked it with Google Sheets and I said okay anytime a new order comes in go fish this particular information I eat your name and your city out of that and put it over in this spreadsheet and now it just happens automatically I don't have to do any of the work it's all right there it makes life so easy and I have Zapier doing all sorts of other things linking with like Slack and you know like I said it links with Google Docs so I can get a Slack notification when someone edits a Google Doc and I mean it's just all that kind of stuff and you can try it out for 14 days for free as a trial go to Zapier.com slash MGG for your free 14-day trial right and this is only good through the end of the month so you have to make sure you do this right now and why wouldn't you because this is the kind of thing that we love here on Matt Geek Kevin we were just talking about automation and now here we are with a sponsor that's going to help us do this and it can help you with all kinds of different stuff so go check it out go to Zapier.com slash MGG for your 14-day trial again that's Zapier.com slash MGG and then tell us what you're doing with Zapier and we'll share that here on the show too so our thanks to Zapier again ZAPIER.com slash MGG for your 14-day trial our thanks to them for that all right next question here John Rand has well you know a question because that's kind of how it works here on the show Rand asks he says I run a 2012 MacBook Pro Retino with Mavericks and I think he means Mavericks but there's always sometimes he might mean Mojave but I don't think so to support some legacy expensive apps if I clone the Mavericks OS to an external SSD and then update the machines OS on the internal can I continue to run the Mavericks OS by booting into it from the quote-unquote now Catalina machine and is the answer the same even if I were to do so using a newer laptop like a 15 inch MacBook Pro that I've been drooling for so the answer is yes if your machine can run whatever OS you want to run then you could boot to it on an external drive no problem and and run it you know it wouldn't also be running Catalina Catalina would been the answer internal drive but at that moment in time you'd be running from booted from the external drive and therefore running whatever it is Mavericks Mojave whatever you want it to be the question about a newer machine is whether or not that machine is capable of running the OS or perhaps a better way to think about it whether or not that OS is capable of booting the machine that you're asking about because for example I don't even think Mojave can boot the new 16 inch MacBook Pro I might be wrong about that it's possible they built it so that Mojave can boot that machine but generally speaking OS is that were released prior to the machine being released cannot boot the newer machines so that's the only thing to think about the other way to get around it would be you know to virtualize that old OS and then you can run it you know inside of whatever parallels or VMware or whatever they that process is not the simplest process in the world really the the it should be simpler and they quite frankly know it could be simpler but they just haven't spent the engineering resources like when I talked to the folks of parallels and VMware one way to do it is to install a clean OS and then migration assistant into that clean OS on on like parallels of VMware and then you're good to go so any thoughts on that mr. Braun Mac tracker can give you some guidance as far as the OS is that the machine can handle nice I like it all I'm gonna say yeah no I that's that's right yeah yeah yeah yeah right does Mac tracker probably doesn't have an entry for the 16-inch MacBook Pro we found that last week and we're trying to find the watch yeah not yet yeah anyway you know there you go it's good all right shall we continue with our our questions here John so you know normally we only talk about the day that the show is released which is Monday February 3rd if all goes according to plan but often times as those of you that join us in the chat room at mackey cub comm slash stream no we record the day before so on Sunday and this episode in fact is being recorded on Sunday February 2nd and normally we don't obsess about the date that it's being recorded but this is quite the date about which to obsess because this is the first time in 909 years we're all obsessed with palindromes here right well at least I am and you know I know some of you are too and so 909 in and of itself not only being part of the title of a great Beatles song is of course a palindrome being that it reads the same forward and backwards but the day that we're recording this episode is February 2nd 2020 which means that if you do either month day four digit year or day month four digit year it is a palindrome right 0 to 0 to 2 0 to 0 right so there you go or if you do year month day four digit year two digit month two digit day you get 2 0 2 0 0 2 0 2 so that's the that happens once about every thousand years so which is cool so we like numbers here is what I'm trying to say and I wanted to celebrate this this very very palindromic event and Brian has a question about numbers he said very simply please explain the difference between megabits and megabytes so it the simple answer is that one megabyte equals eight megabits or more generically bytes are quite a bit larger than bits but John of course because he's John if Ron knows a little bit more about this that I think you would like to share right well and Apple and others have have shared this so 8 bits in a bite okay that's how things started the only thing that a lot of us observe during hard drives and stuff getting bigger because you can measure the content of a hard drive in megabytes as well or terabytes or you know whatever they get up to but um there started to be a deviation because the hard drive industry would define a megabyte in terms of a thousand and not base 10 it's that a base 2 so 2 to the 8th is 1024 right and a thousand is a thousand the difference between those two isn't that great but as you scale it might be though right yeah well that that's when there was this you know hubbub in the industry a while back people were like well you're ripping me off you said I get this many megabytes and I'm really not because you're measuring it differently and so eventually and I think the you know I was looking on one of Apple's pages they used to have a big explanation saying okay well here's how we define a megabyte okay deal with it right right yeah okay that's fair I mean sort of yeah uh-oh yeah no okay I wasn't sure yeah yeah okay I so we're good on we're good on megabytes versus megabits is that right I think we are okay cool cool all right gillies writes so I updated my old iPad Air 2 to 13.3 my problem is that I can't connect it to my 2017 5k iMac that runs Catalina since I updated to 13.1 and then 13.2 and 13.3 I felt that my iPad was much slower to launch apps batteries seem to be depleted much faster with mail and even worse Safari open and he says you know to improve that or in the hopes of improving that I tried resetting the iPad from scratch over the holidays the device had gone through many iOS updates over more than you know it's four years so I did it to connect to my I did connect it to my iMac after that reset and I saw it in the finder and made a backup I do not use much iCloud for iPhoto just screenshots of the iPad and such I don't have an iPhone I don't have an Apple music subscription I managed my music library local with my iMac and my Synology network storage I did recently notice that I don't have any music in my iPad and indeed nothing in stockage not sure what stockage means that's a that's a word that is probably colloquial native to wherever Gillies is from anyway I don't remember if the music was there when I saw the iPad connected to Catalina I've got quite a few folders of documents locally on the iPad etc. I tried to connect the iPad to the iMac I see the iPad now for about one second and then it disappears from the finder I rebooted of course both the Mac and the iPad still plugged in then I see the iPad but the finder gives me only two options restore as a new device or restore from backup so I tried the latter the backup was from December when I did my most recent backup after the restore my data is there except podcasts that read download and overcast the iPad is seen by Catalina only if I reboot it and then I only have the same two options before trying reset as new device I thought I would ask for your advice would you try this option while the iPad is connected to the iMac and would you try first to disconnect the iPad like I did in December reset it to factory and then reconnect so this is obviously another weird one which is why it makes it to the show but we've had a couple of other notes not a lot but a few about Catalina's finder not managing iOS devices quite right so again you know following the this is weird what would I do if I were there because I don't immediately know the answer have you tried something like I amazing to see what it sees right and you can get a 14-day free trial in fact I actually I think and there's a deal because they were sponsors of CES I think if you go to I amazing comm slash TDO well that'll work I don't think that's the thing they used for CES but but I think it'll work that'll get you a 30% off after your after your 14-day free trial so but try the trial out and see what it sees it might truly be it so it's either something with the finder and its new software functionality that lets it manage iPads or it's something with your you know something deeper down on your Mac like at the USB subsystem or something that's causing the iPad not to be seen you checking it with I amazing will tell you which way it's going right whether it's the finder is just being wonky about it but I amazing has no trouble holding a connection or I amazing can't even hold a connection and so you've got something deeper and if it's something deeper now that I'm sort of walking through this I would think about how you're connecting it like what USB port you're connecting it to if it if that's part of a USB hub or that's the direct on your iMac if it's one I would try it with the other there might be a power issue or I don't know right there's there's lots of different reasons why a USB device might you know present oddly or not presents so yeah what do you think Mr. Braun or don't yeah I think you suggest that I'm with you is that you could connect it via USB or you know try connecting it another way and see if you get different results yeah yeah yeah right yeah exactly yeah try right when the same thing when doing the same thing doesn't yield different results try something different yeah no I like that that's that's good troubleshooting advice yeah and it yeah so that that's where I would go with it I don't know that I would I wouldn't jump to wiping it clean again I mean certainly something could have gone wrong with that process but it doesn't sound it sounds like it's different than that you were having this problem before you wiped it clean or weren't you maybe you weren't yeah I don't know yeah yeah I just try try different stuff try different cable try different ports see see if something acts differently and even if it doesn't solve the problem if you see something different that might be the kind of thing that that you know triggers an idea like oh hey wait a minute I'm seeing this is different when I do that okay this tells me that it's you know more likely to be a problem with software or hardware or you know something like that try the iPad on a different Mac and see if it just appears you don't need to change anything with it but that'll help troubleshoot you know where the problem is you can try the same cable try different cables all that stuff so that's where I'd go with it and hopefully it gets you somewhere that's the that's the idea that's the idea no more thoughts on that one John okay all right uh let's see so John I want to talk about our second sponsor here which is PDF pen 11 from smile and you know PDF pen is one of those tools that I don't use it every day but I use it several times a week and if I didn't have it I'm really not sure what I would do because it's the ultimate tool for editing PDFs on my Mac you know I can ease it I can go so much deeper with this than I ever imagined I'd be able to do like to the point where you can edit the content of table cells inside a PDF you can like edit the text you can change fonts you can move graphics around and PDFs are these things that are fairly static you know or at least they seem to be that's not the case you know in PDF pen really lets you dig dig deep and and then on the other side you can turn things into PDFs that also aren't necessarily the easiest thing I mean you can turn web pages into PDFs and and control how the layout works and all of that stuff which is really really handy when you need to share these things in a meaningful way you can even export PDFs to Word and Excel you know it just like there's so many different things you can do with this and then of course the thing that I often use it for is signing documents not only can I keep my signature in there but I can also they they have these dynamic they call them stamps where you drag in a thing and it shows like mine you know I have it set up so that when I drag this thing in it says you know I put my signature in there and I drag this dynamic stamp in that says approved by Dave Hamilton and puts the date in the time so it makes it look really nice for the person that's reading it it doesn't just look like you know a signature with a type date it looks like a signature with an electronically stamped you know time and date and that really does make it more official in in that sense and kind of gives people a little more confidence makes it seem more professional and and that's really the trick right is you want any of your communication like this to look professional and pdf pen 11 makes that super super easy and of course it supports you know macOS Catalina obviously and then there's pdf pen for ipad and iphone that is totally ios 13 ready so you got to go check this out go to smilesoftware.com slash podcast and go get it and and and now now you can now you can make your stuff look professional and get those edits just right without having to go back to the source document or anything like that so check it out and our thanks to smile and pdf pen 11 for sponsoring this episode all right john you got some new toys this week or ain't well no i think you got several new toys this week what um what'd you get well i got a couple of new toys so so here's the first thing i ordered um in preparation for the second toy so you know we were talking about usb c adapters and i ordered the anchor one that you suggested okay it was like 40 bucks or something yep so it's usb c it has three usb 3a ports hdmi and ethernet wide and i also got some drive enclosures oh nice i was going to be moving some data around well what was i going to be moving some data around to well i just decided to get a shiny new macbook pro 16 inch that's awesome man congratulations yeah um so it's fun ordering it um i ordered it on my you know old machine and it um connected to my phone to do apple pay which uh is kind of cool um i put on my apple card here's the thing you don't have to connect to your phone to do apple pay anymore because your new machine has a t2 chip in it and so you get to the next time you just do it right there locally on the device yeah yeah so it was neat that um you know i was able to pay it you know when i went to purchase it it's like okay we'll select your card and you know do touch id on your phone so you can pay for it put it on the apple card so i get three percent cash back which is uh nice and it arrived in two days and i got pretty much the run of the mill i don't know i guess higher end uh it was like 29.99 or something which um which um which um what processor what ram what hard drive i guess is the uh so i got the uh 2.3 gigahertz eight core intel core i9 okay which should be plenty of processor nice yeah 16 gigs of ram and one terabyte nice um ssd which is what my old machine had so uh yeah no i think i think that's a i mean look that's way more cpu than you will probably need and is exactly the right thing to get i think that's great man yeah yeah so i did the migration and it didn't quite work out as planned so at first i was like you know i maybe i'll just plug a backup uh or a drive into the uh into the adapter using usb and you know get some throughput there and i was like wow you know what i could do though um and so i actually ordered something again and went to my local apple store which trumble is the closest one to me and i actually ordered um so apple makes a thunderbolt 3 to thunderbolt 2 adapter yep yeah and i was thinking maybe i could use target disc mode to uh transfer the data because that would be faster because then that would be uh you know usb 3 in theory is uh five gigabits right and thunderbolt 2 or no no my uh the macbook pro my old macbook pro had thunderbolt 1 so that's 10 gigabits but it's still faster yeah in theory for some reason it didn't work it didn't see i put my old macbook pro into target disc mode and it shows you know firewire and thunderbolt icons because those are the two interfaces that it supports and it just didn't see it i don't know what it was because i put the machine those those thunderbolt 3 to thunderbolt 2 adapters are like the best thing i can the best way i can describe them is wonky i i use them truly as a last resort i i would i would spend money to avoid using one of those uh just because they've proven to be super flaky so i mean they work in that if you need to connect like a drive or something and all you've got is the interface you know the enclosure that that uses that fine but i would not rely on those long term in fact i tried to hear in the studio this summer when i moved the 2014 iMac up here and it it was like that was part of that disaster the unreliability of this machine all hinged on one of those adapters and we've heard the same from listeners so it's good to have one like if you've got it you know if you're like we are and you have those older devices or whatever it is that you know you might stumble upon someday like oh crap i don't have a thunderbolt the two oh yes i do you know okay great uh that's good but i wouldn't i i wouldn't definitely not have it as part of my workflow if if at all possible to avoid yeah but i have had the old mac in target this mode before so yeah so it could be the adapter the thing is when i hooked it up to my mac mini which has thunderbolt two it could see that machine so i don't know if there's something flaky with the oh no you hit you hit the you hit the nail on the head it's a thunderbolt three to thunderbolt two adapter not a thunderbolt three to thunderbolt one adapter i wouldn't i don't know i mean yeah i i thought it'd be backwards compatible maybe it's not maybe it's i don't know it's it's barely directly compatible is is what we found at least not in a reliable sense so yeah yeah i mean the adapter plugged into the port on the mac but yeah whatever so anyway so i'm like okay well what's my next option and my next option was to suck the data off of a backup sure right so i plugged it in and you know it gave it it was funny you know time estimating is always weird so when it started off i think i had about 600 gigs of data on the drive it's like yeah so take about five hours i'm like really that seems and it was giving me throughputs of like 200 megabytes a second or so which i think is the speed of the ssd that sure i had the backup on and then i look back on the screen and it's like oh yeah 27 minutes did you not it would wi-fi have been that much slower i mean especially when you factor in all the headaches of of all of that because like i've done all of my migrations recently including all the ones that i was doing this summer back and forth between the you know the macbook pro the 13 inch that i was testing from apple and the macbook air and they you know they create their own ad hoc connection it doesn't like they use your your infrastructure of your wi-fi to find each other and then once they find each other it drops down to the ad hoc connection and it's it's it's the fastest most reliable thing that i've used in a long time for direct things like that so yeah yeah my only consideration is that the old macbook was 802.n not ac oh oh that so okay yeah no no no so be a little slower so anyways so the migration went went fine good um well actually no it didn't i ran into something i think you would run into this so i plugged the drive in and it's like um yeah by the way the version of the os on this drive is newer than the os on the machine so you want to update and i'm like yeah sure and it's like okay looking for the update can't find it i'm like oh oh yeah welcome to the club man that you're right yeah that sucked yeah yeah so i think you went through that too and i think the solution was i did a reinstall of catalina and then it bumped the version up on that machine i think that's how i solved it yeah okay so okay i'm glad that that worked for you you know the weird thing is like with that t2 chip in there you can get yourself into a corner where that's a very difficult thing to do like i got my machine to the point i i did that right and then wanted to just you know install a new os before i sent it into apple i think just to get the keyboard fixed and uh and i never was able to get it and when apple got it they're like oh yeah the motherboards toast or whatever because the t2 chip had gotten out of sync with the mother it's not it's not quite perfect yet so have you gone in to uh uh uh whatever recovery mode and launch the security utility to tell your mac that it's allowed to boot from an external drive because by default it is not and right right might want to change that before before you cannot yeah because i remember going into the utility i tried to do something and it's like uh what's your admin password it's like uh i haven't said it yet oh another kind of that's weird oh yeah you know you have to have an os already on the drive with an admin password before you can do that in recovery mode yeah so don't forget to go back and do that well i mean choose your own path you know apple has chosen for all of us that we should not let our machines boot from external drives i think that's i think that's a pretty dangerous thing to do with i what i really think they should do is upon setup of the machine a dialogue should come up and say hey with this computer by default because this is new behavior with these t2 max right this computer cannot boot from an external drive if you want to keep that behavior click okay if you want to change that behavior you know choose from a drop down tell us what you want and then go i you know i like that they give us the utility to change it but i i feel like they could be a little more upfront about that because we've had folks right in that have been caught you know by the fact that they assumed like all max they'd owned prior when they ran into trouble they could boot from an external drive and you can't with these new ones unless you change it so well this is great man so you're in not only do you have a new shiny fast machine but but you've joined dongle world so welcome welcome to the dongle world side this is yeah so some of the things about this thing so one oh my gosh it's so thin and light compared to the uh the uh 2012 machine yeah it's amazing that could cram all this in here the uh i like the touch bar the touch bar is uh pretty interesting uh you know shows different things context sensitive and then he has pointed touch bar yet where you can like drag things down to it it it oh yeah no it's definitely worth like you can put a screenshot tool on the touch bar but what's the cool part is you can act like when you're editing it you're dragging from your screen like down to the touch bar it's pretty cool so i definitely recommend playing with that yeah yeah and then the other thing is so you know of course i logged it into uh iCloud and it's like hey you want to you want to do apple pay on this machine like oh okay right right yeah so all my cards and it actually asks for the uh you know ccd or whatever for for each of the cards before it added it and then the other thing that's nice on this is this also has touch id because i love touch id so it's kind of need to be able to use that for um uh logging in so you can use it in lieu of typing your your password right oh it's the best does um i do it with i mean i do it with everything on my laptop now and i love it does last pass support it one password supports touch id on the map oh does last pass look yeah you might you might need to switch because maybe it does i don't know but um but yeah and then uh Sirius ghost in the chat room says try better touch tool uh i think this is in regards to your comments about the touch bar that you have kind of a new way of editing that touch bar so so there you go yeah i will put that i'll put a link to that in the show notes thanks sirius ghost yeah that's good yeah yeah i like it so um you were sending a box okay so i'm gonna i'm yeah so i chose so when you buy a new machine uh they give you the option they're like hey you got an old one you want to trade in and i'm like yeah sure and they're like yeah well we'll give you a hundred bucks for it that's great so they're sending a box so i can uh that's awesome that's responsible yeah somebody pointed out one person in my feed was like well you know you could probably get about 500 bucks for it if you if you put it on the open market and i'm like no i don't want to deal with yeah no they right well and that you're you're trading convenience for dollars there i mean that's that's i mean that's that's that's how it works that's great so i it's good it's good that you like your new macbook pro john but there's somebody that doesn't not yours specifically but in yeah i know and and it's somebody that'll all of us know about it or most of us anyway and that's neil young and you know neil young this is not so recently to give this some context neil young was on uh the verge cast with neil petel and they were talking about music and technology and neil young got into this rant about how the macbook pro uh the new the 16 inch specifically but i think he's sort of just talking in general that is crap and it's like you know in terms of recording on it he's like it's crap it's fisher price you know he's really really downplaying it this is not the first time that mr young has dipped his toes into our geeky technological waters right a few years ago he and famed producer the guy i mean he did la woman and other things this guy bruce botnack partnered up and created that pono player and it looked like a toblurone right but it was a portable player that played everything at and this is the phrase that they kept thrown around at the bit rate that the artist intended so it would play up to 24 you know bit 96k songs and they were saying how mp3s are terrible well you know and and neil young is still beating down this door and so a lot of smart people have set a lot of smart things online about this but as i've been digging into this i you know it's like why and so i tried to approach this like i do a lot of things with with compassion right like why where is all this coming from mr young now i have to say i've never been a neil young fan i i totally appreciate his place in rock and roll like and there are many people that i love to listen to and that were you know super influenced by this guy like it rock and roll he did you know he had his his influence and has certainly left his mark on rock and roll aside from these sort of you know technological gibberish that he keeps trying to throw out i've just never like to hear him sing so i there are some neil young songs that i like i just don't want to hear him sing them i just don't care for his voice and that's fine and that's coming from a lifelong rush fan so i get it when people say they don't like to hear a singer right because i've i love getty lee's voice but that's just how that goes but you know neil young is like as i as i approach this i think that there's you know relevance involved in in him saying this and a little bit of nostalgia and he's got this idea of purity right and and and this is what he's holding on to but the reality is like he is holding technology hostage in time because when he recorded all of his hits that he then you know delivered to his fans that created the career in life that that i'm assuming he enjoys and you know now he's even an american right um he or an american citizen he um i'm sure the engineer just picked whatever the engineer felt was the best technology available at the time especially on those first records that neil was doing right and so he was using state of the art tech and now the state he has not evolved you know he's stuck in in that world and you know i mean i i i get this you know as a human who is lucky enough to still be actively aging i can relate a little bit to the concept of relevance right and purity and all of that and there's two ways to approach this right you can wax poetic about all the things you did way back when or you can embrace change and evolve with the times and neil has not really you know he tries to live in both camps but this whole thing that he that he started with polo and maybe it's just because he's entrenched on this i don't know but this whole thing you know about how humans like cd quality sucks and you need to because cds are 16 bit at 44 kilohertz and and you know his polo player is 24 bit at 96 kilohertz well the reality is humans can't hear the difference in that he talks about how you need to like set up an analog recording of something and then the digital version and he's like you can hear the difference i don't know that you can um in fact no one reliably can uh there have been blind ab tests we call them abx tests because they're they're they're blind to both the the person administering the test and the person receiving the test and when you take all of that knowledge out of it and you don't know what you're listening to uh people generally cannot tell the difference now telling the difference between like cd quality and let's say apples aac 256k quality most of the time you also can't hear a difference there i have trained myself to hear the difference on very select tracks one is kathy's waltz from dav brubeck's timeout album okay i can hear the difference between cd and apples a 256 on on like very select segments of that song because i compared them a lot and i went nuts and i went deep because i knew that album was really well recorded with just ribbon mics in this church right i'm pretty sure it was in the church uh and and there's some breath to the like the length of the decay is where you can hear the compression artifact kick in now does it change my enjoyment no but i can if i really am like listening for it i can hear it there i can't hear it on every track i can't hear it universally but i can but the difference between 16 you know 44 on a cd and 24 96 on a uh you know on neil's pono player no it the humans can't hear the difference in that now if you know that you're hearing your preferred vinyl version versus the you know high quality digital version of it then you can tell the difference and your brain will actually if you have previously decided that you like vinyl better than cd and you know that you're listening on vinyl instead of cd or comparing the two if you know what you're doing then your brain will tell you that you like the thing that you like better and you will actually like fire pleasure receptors on the one that you like better this is called confirmation bias and it's a very real thing and that's why when somebody says oh you got to hear this on my speakers it sounds so much better like you know that's great and and i i love that you like the sound of the things on the things that you bought like of course that's awesome and i'm not gonna i'm not here to ruin that for you like we all suffer from i don't want to say we all experience confirmation bias neil seems to think that he can push his confirmation bias onto the world as though it is fact when it when in fact it's not and so it's a shame when you've got somebody out there that certainly is a respected artist constantly saying things like this because you can record stuff on a mac book pro i mean look at what billy elish did right she's got like i mean she won all the grammys and recorded everything with a mac book pro and the podcasting mic it was an audio tie or a usb mic it's an audio technique of 2020 that she used the same mic that adam christensen uses for maccast it's a good mic it's a condenser mic so i wouldn't use it for personally i wouldn't use it for podcasting because it'll pick up a lot of the extra stuff in the room but for a sung vocal mic it's great adam deals with it because he like padded the heck out of his podcast room so he's fine but you know like basically the same setup that adam uses to do his thing and not all that far off from the setup that you and i would use in a hotel room to record a podcast she recorded you know albums that won her all the grammys so uh maybe we were doing the wrong thing when we were in vegas john maybe we should have been recording an album um and telling people that we were you know young women but that that's weird so maybe we shouldn't have done that maybe maybe we made the right choice so yeah yeah so you know uh i don't know what to do about neil i i wish we wouldn't give him this platform quite frankly uh and that's sort of why i held back on writing or saying something about this was like we just don't need to but it got spread around so many people were asking me about it was like okay let's address this but to quote another native american songwriter not native american but but born in america's songwriter you know um and i'll paraphrase i hope neil young will remember no he won't this geeky man don't need him around anyhow but i don't mean that in a morbid way i hope he continues to live along in prosperous life but just stops poo-pooing tech that he doesn't really understand so focus on the positive brother neil that has served him quite well in the past so there you go you know there we are can we talk about cool stuff found now john indeed sweet thanks i did you i didn't mean to cut you off did you have anything to say about mr mr young and any of that there no you uh you you covered it well okay thank you thanks for giving thanks for the opportunity thanks thanks for your time folks all right now let's tell you about some cool stuff uh andrew sends us this man like this is one of the coolest things it's called mouseless and uh it's in set app although you can get it you know on your own too this is an app for people that enjoy using keyboard shortcuts in that it trains you to use new keyboard shortcuts and the way it does this is it puts you through like a series it gamifies it a little bit but it's not just keyboard shortcuts for mac os they have all kinds of third-party apps in their side i did some you know tutorials slash games about slack because i use slack all the time and it was like you know it just shows you a keyboard shortcut it shows you what it does and then the keys to press and then you press them and it shows you three or four and you press the keys to match and then it moves you to the next one and it shows you what to press and then it shows you the name of the keyboard shortcut without the keys and sees if you remember and if you remember then you pass that one and if you don't then it keeps cycling you through until you remember it and there are some cool keyboard shortcuts that i'm sure all of us aren't using but that's certainly true of me and mouseless helps you learn how to use these very very cool i had no idea that this app existed and i'm already better with slack based on the you know four minutes that i spent messing with it messing with mouseless to to learn some new keyboard shortcuts like i can move around so much faster in it because i just didn't even know i didn't like that's how it works right you know that these things are there theoretically but until you start using them you don't use it it's kind of like our automation thing you know you can do it the the the long way but once you learn how to do it the quick way then obviously gets better so thanks for that andrew very very cool i like i like mouseless had you did you mess with this yet john it's pretty cool sounds like a drill sergeant no no it's fun it's it's it's more far more fun well i've never experienced a drill sergeant i mean i know i know some drill sergeants but i've never been sergeanted by them if that makes any sense so all right uh tannel tells us about paper like he says it is a screen protector that gives you a paper feeling to the ipad screen he says if you're like me and write a lot with apple pencil then this product is very enjoyable it really feels like writing on a piece of paper with rustling sound as the pencil slides and all the slightly negative side is that it does make the ipad screen more matte in appearance on the other hand it might be useful under direct sunlight to keep reflections from happening but i do not know yet he says as i live in north europe and there is not much sunlight this time of year fair point so yeah there you go paper like dot com and of course link is in the show notes i i like that idea with more and more apple pencil usage coming out so that's pretty good yeah good yeah yeah cool uh we've got time for more of these things we'll go to mike and mike says i wanted to share with you a piece of software that i found a few years ago and have been having have been loving ever since site hound which can be found at site hound dot com s i g h t is an nvr network video recording software that can be run on a mac for recording any network security cameras that you have in your home it works with most open ip based cameras and has a ton of functionality says i run nine hd wired cameras around my home uh from many different vendors and the app does a great job recording from all of them bringing them all together then categorizing the type of movement and alerting me on my phone based on my custom alert settings and it ingrates with ift and overall is easy to use and configure he says i should note that it does not work with closed systems like ring or simply save but it complements those systems very well he says i use simply save for my security system and site hound for all of my video cameras i enjoy the open systems because i have tons of options when it comes to cameras it's a fantastic use case for that old mac mini that needs a second life so i wanted to share with the mgg community community so we can all not get caught yeah this is i i haven't used site hound yet but i started looking into it and it does it can it can you know in basically real time tell you whether the object moving is like a person or a pet or a car and and you know like he said you can get alerts based on different things so that's it's pretty cool uh and you know we talk a lot about this with like synology surveillance station but if you don't have a synology disk station then you can't use surveillance station because that's what it runs on site hound is is that analog that can just run on your mac and then you've got all that stuff and you can connect to it and like you said it links with uh with all the other stuff that's pretty cool aren't you yeah did you say simply safe i did say simply safe yeah huh yeah i must have talked to them at c s because i got a notification from uh fedex that they're sending me something no you got a notification from fedex because it well i i would i would think that maybe they might be coming on board as a sponsor but even in that they haven't sponsored an episode yet i couldn't i certainly couldn't say for sure but oh but yeah yeah yeah okay yeah so we'll get the opportunity to check it out ahead of what might or might not be uh an upcoming sponsorship why don't we say that there you go yeah oh yeah interesting yeah okay yeah yeah i didn't i didn't think of that yeah yeah that that's uh sometimes how that happens so yeah we'll get to check that stuff out yeah i'm looking forward to where we're always people are always sending us stuff it's true it's true sometimes i'm not sure where it came from just same oh very much the same yeah yeah there's there's times when you know fedex or your ps or even us posted service shows up and it's like what is this and who sent it and then it's nice when i get to open the box and it's not some piece of junk which is quite frankly most of the surprises that i get i either things that i don't know are coming that people just decide to send are usually things that never even make it into the consideration for cool stuff found folks because you know we don't like to tell you about junk so yeah all right we're not we're not going we're not going to do uncool stuff found no we are not a terrible show well maybe that could be a fun show just beating on things if you folks want to hear things that are terrible i always you know as i as i as i advised as the advice i offered to to neil young i would is the advice that i've always followed here is focus on the positive but but if you folks want to hear us like rag on i don't know that i really want to do that but let us know maybe maybe there's a way to do it positively i don't know why you ragged on neil young so all right well man you're in a role neil yeah okay well it was a departure but it needed to kind of be like if needed to be compartmentalized because because i don't i don't want people thinking the thing like he's he's spouting these untruth um let us know feedback at macgeekab.com and even if you didn't like my rant about neil young and you say yeah you shouldn't be doing that stuff on the show yeah that's fine tell me yeah don't care but if you want to rant you could send something to feedback at macgeekab.com or even feedback at macgeekab.com we get stuff to all of those addresses uh taren writes he says uh and along the same lines as mike he says i have uh he says i know that you guys have messed with sir now it's uh easy for me to say 800 episodes still can't say the words uh synology surveillance station uh and he says i have one too and i've been thinking of setting it up for myself the list of supported cameras on these is mind boggling he says i'm fine i'm definitely feeling like this is too much choice i have access to power in various locations that are currently used for outside lights and could pull data cable if necessary my wi-fi is currently set up with a distributed system he's he's doing it with an old airport pay station and several um extremes with wired backhaul but so quasi mesh system planning a coverage he says i'm looking for three or four reasonably priced cameras that i can mount on the exterior of my house with good picture quality and low light performance uh that would be a high priority any help in choosing ip-based cameras so yeah taren i'm kind of with you on this and and i would love to hear from all you folks mike especially like what cameras you're using uh i've i've messed with some of these ip-based cameras the thing is most name brand cameras these days don't offer ip support so you're kind of stuck using some you know quote unquote off-brand camera d-link used to support direct ip access in their cameras but at least for now they have stopped that i i chatted with them at ces and they don't seem to have any interest in reopening that door they said it caused them a lot of support issues and no one really used it and i can certainly attest to their support issues they they were doing silly things with with the camera in terms of it becoming a dhcp server at the wrong times and that was really bad if you rebooted your router and suddenly your camera started handing out ip addresses to all your devices that was no bueno um but uh i told him i said you know there are a lot of people that use you know either sonology the surveillance station or the qnap one or something like sighthound that would love to have you know a name brand company and they're like oh we never really thought about that like okay well maybe they will uh in the interim the only brands that are like brands we've heard of that i've used are ubiquity who makes like the unify and actually i have it won't make it into today's cool stuff hound but i think next week i'll i'll tell you my thoughts about the new unified dream machine but you know ubiquity with amplify and all that stuff they make ip cameras that that are really probably what you want here taren because they make lots of different options they understand outdoor wiring and you know all of that stuff so that might be something to think about and then foscam fos cam are kind of i would call them the sort of the leaders of the off brand camera i mean they're not off brand but i think you get what i'm saying they they they're definitely reliable they're cool i've got one of their cameras in the house and it's great uh you can pan and zoom with it it's got a motor in it and all of that stuff and it's really handy we actually have it trained on um in on the room where hector uh that hector d bird on twitter uh lives now i don't have the camera streaming to twitter or anywhere that any of you would see because it's a camera inside my house so you know access to that is is very tightly controlled as you might imagine but it was handy like lucas and i went to a hockey game i don't know a couple weeks ago and as we got to the game i'm like dude we forgot to close hector's cage and he's like oh oh crap now she's usually pretty good she'll stay in her cage and chill especially if the lights are off or whatever but it was really nice because i could check on her you know frequently with the camera and um you know and be able to see so but the the fos cam stuff is good so i would i would look at that i would look at i'd really take a look at the ubiquity stuff especially based on you know the the use cases that you're looking for taren but if anybody's got any recommendations for you know ip based cameras let us know that would be that would be good um yeah the nice thing is that if you want to see an exhaustive list of all the cameras they have sonology has a list cool and i already pasted a link to that thing uh in our show notes cool um yeah a lot of the brands i've never heard of though they do mention the two that you mentioned so okay yeah if you want an exhaustive list of ip cameras that's probably a good place to go yeah so i'm really excited about a new app that's finally available for the mac and it is from mackey the audio company that makes mixers among other things we've talked uh in this show on the past about mackey's digital mixers in fact this is one of the first places i think that did anybody ever talked about their digital mixers when they first came out with them and when they first came out with them and really up until fairly recently you had to use an ipad or an ios device to control them uh their master fader app was only available for ios and you know slowly they rolled it out to android but it took a while uh very recently just past couple of days mackey released master fader 5.1 which now is available for mac os and windows uh and it adds some other features too to the mixers that have existed for years which is so cool you know being able to like add the new effects engines and stuff that it's got but um but to be able to run and manage your mixer from your mac is really kind of handy you know for some for a lot of folks that's what they would use to mix from but even if not you know being able to connect to it and set things up from your mac instead of having to do it from your ipad or whatever can be way easier so uh so i'm really really stoked to finally have master fader available for my macs i've long been a fan of mackeys digital mixers they're reliable they sound really good they've got exactly the right feature set which is always expanding which is even better for you know live mixing and also you know their newer ones their newer mixers are great recording interfaces too so you can use them both live and in the studio to record and especially with that being able to really control it with the mac is so cool and i'm i'm really stoked that they did this there was a lot of question as to whether or not what it would ever actually happen and so i'm i'm really happy that it has happened so check that out too we'll put a link to that in the show notes and i think we will wrap this show up talking about audio specifically calling back to a topic in the last show where a listener was looking for a way listener john was looking for a way to get audio from the mixing console but really it doesn't matter what the source is but you know in his environment he has a it's a church and they have you know a mixing console and then the main hall that where they mix the sound but they want to take what's coming out of the speakers there and run it to speakers in a room that's 75 yards away so that those people can also hear the service or whatever is going on and so we got into this discussion of how to do audio long range and we really didn't come up with any perfect answers and there are a couple that you folks have come up with that i wanted to share and the first comes from listener gordon who suggests the bows sound touch he says bows makes standalone sound touch speakers that they could use and these are wi-fi speakers so in and the way that it works is bows also makes the sound touch wireless link adapter that works over wi-fi so the adapter has an aux in and an audio out and and you would plug the one side of this in to the aux in and from the from the mixer and then you know wherever you need to on the other side you use the other half of this that has the audio out and then it works over wi-fi and this might be the man the magic answer because it's 149 bucks but but it's got kind of the pieces that that you would need the problem is it doesn't seem to be easily available so but but you might be able to find it um you know actually well i know amazon has it today so it's 149 at amazon and this might this might do it so we will uh we will see if in fact this is it i think you'd need i don't think it's a pair of them i think you'd need to buy two of them and of course the question is i haven't used these but the question is would it once you get it configured would it remain set up sort of forever so for 300 bucks plus a speaker not the most inexpensive path to take but certainly seems like worth investigating so thank you gordon for that and and like gordon said bo's also has their own standalone sound touch speakers so maybe you get one of these things for the input and then just link it to the speaker so he says the audio at the destination will have a delay from the source because of the fact that it's over a wireless link but that might not matter so and he says he also is not sure that the sound touch line is being actively developed so that might be but still a solution that works works david takes us a little bit more open source i'll say he says a workaround that i just recently installed to my church soundboard was to plug in an fm transmitter dialed into a dead channel into the headphone monitor out of the soundboard to create an fm broadcast of the audio out signal then you can place an fm fm receiver a boombox or really anything you like anywhere on the church property and tune to the specified channel he says the quality isn't perfect but it does allow the nursery staff in his scenario and a couple overflow rooms to hear the exact same audio played over the main house speakers so that's pretty cool he didn't offer any fm transmitter you know specific fm transmitters to use but you know depending on the like for personal use you can't broadcast a very strong signal but like he said you know you probably can get something that's strong enough to do on the church ground so i kind of like that idea because because it's open source john you know you're not you're not trapped into a specific system right i mean that's pretty good i don't know what do you think yeah sure all right and then uh robert and will wrap us up here uh and he says i recently learned about a professional digital audio software architecture it's sort of a software and hardware architecture called daunte dante and i've used daunte before he says it's used to switch and manage audio and professional studios and live productions over ethernet cables it doesn't use your ether network but it does use ethernet cables to transmit the audio he says it provides isochronous magic to keep audio in sync and although one company controls the tech it's widely licensed and used and he's right about that it's you know for the church he said uh the challenge of remote audio connection i would geek out and run ethernet instead of analog speaker wires or xlr cables then experiment with some daunte gear i would actually turn that around i would experiment with some daunte stuff before you run the cable make sure it's going to work for you and he put a he gave us a link to a company that seems to have all the necessary endpoint devices named ordinate and so i will um i will put that in the uh in the show notes here so that we can so that you know if you if you're interested in this path you can you can check it out so yeah i've used daunte for you know in in installations with mixing consoles and stuff and it's fantastic because because of what it can do and sending all kinds of audio data over just one single ethernet cable makes a huge difference uh you don't have to run snakes and you know it's not it's not a disaster which is you know with a zillion wires or thick wires that you need to worry about it's just an ethernet cable so that's pretty good uh so now you got three options and i feel like that's you know that's where um well that's where this particular episode finds its home i think john i think we are we are finished with uh with 800 of these crazy things that we call mac geek uh i don't know it's amazing 800 more i'm ready yeah man i i have no you know it was interesting waking up this morning it was a couple of weeks ago that somebody pointed out or like uh this one of my friends at yamaha like hey you know you got episode 800 coming up it's like what oh holy crap like that's true and it was like well what do we do to celebrate 800 like i don't know like i said at the beginning of the episode let's just do what we do everybody's into this so just keep rolling that's kind of to me that's the i don't know it's the best the best testament to what we can do is what the show's evolved into and and uh everybody's into it so thank you though uh for 800 episodes of all of this it's fantastic we are very it is not lost on us how fortunate we are to be able to do this and that really does kind of drive us to to you know put in the time and make sure that we're doing the best we can for for all of us and really focused on that goal of all of us learning because that's i think that's the key to this this whole thing here is the the the fact that it really is just about learning stuff that's and trying to focus on the positive my my rant about new young perhaps perhaps that's the uh that that's the the indulgence that for me anyway in this episode was that hopefully that was valuable to folks out there too if not then thank you for the indulgence and john your new laptop that's a heck of that's a way better celebration of 800 episodes i like that the best that's killer man you've got you got a fast machine with a motor that's clean i don't know yeah no hey you know i figure every uh every eight years or so i should update my laptop you know it like you say that and i i mean i get the and appreciate the self deprecation there but but that's like that's the right amount of time these days like laptops and machines in general tend to have that seven to ten year lifespan um and what's weird is those machines that we bought ten years ago uh were bought when computers had to be replaced every three years you know and so it just for me it was i don't know maybe three or four years ago i started looking around the house i was like wait a minute i haven't bought computers in a long time and i don't need to i mean eventually we needed to and you know and that hence the the relatively recent upgrades but you know computers they they're they're fast enough for most of us for most of what we do and so like it wouldn't surprise me if this one lasts you another whatever six to ten years like that's yeah yeah the migration was really smooth well the the first time it booted it actually did come up with a lot of security dialogues oh because i guess it loses that authorization but that that was a one-time thing yeah that's that's something that i don't think apple got right in catalina but we'll leave it at that we've we've talked and yeah it was asking me too many questions yeah yeah well you get you get you know numb to those questions eventually and you just start hitting yes yes yes and i don't know that i like that so yeah and there was only one weird hiccup but but i was able to fix it but i stat menus so actually when it first came up it showed me all eight cores i'm like well i don't i don't want to see all eight cores but you could have to show you all 16 man if you uh oh wait if i if you show the hyper yeah yeah i don't need to see that that's taking a little on my 27 inch in the well here and down in the office in the office i have the eight core i9 in my iMac it's like a whatever the four gigahertz eight core i9 whatever the top of the line one you could get in the iMac was this you know earlier this year or lat last year um and i have it show me all 16 because why not you know i've got the i've got the desktop room i've got the room in my menu bar so it's like i can i can see it it's good rarely does it even ever yeah it's mostly just dark yeah the weird thing is that the sensor list didn't show up and i stat menus and i looked online and people like yeah just reinstall it and it'll kind of fix that yeah yeah yeah all right well that's that's what we got today so thank you to everybody for 800 thanks for all your questions uh all your help your tips all the knowledge that we share really that's what it that's that's the best part of it and thanks for your premium contributions mackeykev.com premium i know i mentioned it earlier in the show and really thanks for everything and you can follow uh hector d bird on twitter uh at hector d bird you can follow him at jonah fran you can follow me at dav hamilton you can follow the show at mackeykev say hi to pilot peat at pilot peat and no he's not the same pilot peat as is on the bachelor but that's funny uh and i think he gained like i don't know he said he gained like 500 or 1000 new twitter followers overnight at one point he's like what happened like oh it's the bachelor guy it's great so you can follow him for the right reasons folks because he's happily married and not on the bachelor and any of that but it is kind of funny uh you can call us 224888 geek thanks to all of our sponsors oh jon if someone were to dial three three five that's right thanks to all of our sponsors of course the ones from this episode make sure to check out zappier dot com slash mg g that's zap i er dot com slash mg g smile software dot com slash podcast for pdf pen 11 uh of course you know all of our ongoing sponsors other world computing bare bones software ero dot com slash mg g lino dot com slash mg g and more coming perhaps one that we might have even mentioned earlier in this episode thank you so much everybody fun stuff i can't wait to do another 800 more or at least another eight or another eight thousand jon as you're spending the week with your new mac book pro and messing around with it changing things tweaking things experimenting having all that fun make a backup first and that is there so that you don't get caught made