 The Mac Observers, Mac GeekGab, if you can believe it, show 891 for Monday, September 20th, 2021. And welcome to the Mac Observers, Mac GeekGab, the show where you send in your questions, your tips and your cool stuff found. We mash them all together into an agenda. We bring our own tips and cool stuff found and sometimes quite frankly even our own questions because the goal is for each and every one of us, me and him and him to learn and you, of course, all of us. But I meant the three of us here when I'm saying me and him and him, right? The goal is for all of us, each and every one of us to learn at least five new things every single time we get together. Sponsors for this episode include Cashfly at mac.cashfly.com. Of course, Cashfly is a company that provides the bandwidth to bring this show from us to you, especially the audio version. So we love Cashfly. We'll talk a little bit more about that later here in the episode for now here in Durham, New Hampshire. I'm Dave Hamilton. And here in fearful Connecticut. This is John F. Braun. But wait, there's more. And here in the best looking recording studio room in Durham, New Hampshire is Pilot P. Pilot P. Man, we were just talking, it's been certainly a pandemic since you've been here, but even more than that. 22, 23 months since I've been here. Yeah. Because I was doing union chairman stuff and that kept me unbelievably busy and all that. But so if you'll indulge me for about 15 seconds, then Dave, I want to say to the listeners of the MacGeek gap. Thank you. You guys have kept me included through your shows, your letters, your emails and all that. You've always included me over these. I have not been forgotten. You have not. It's amazing to me how much I've been included. So thank you. It's humbling, humbling experience. I love it when we get emails that say to Dave, John and John and hopefully Pilot P. For those of you, though, that don't know. There are new listeners. There are listeners that have joined in the last two years, believe it or not. Yeah. So Pete is a Pete lives local to me. Pete is actually here in my studio in Durham, New Hampshire. Although, obviously, that's not necessary because John is not. And we're we've been doing this no problem for 16 and a half years that Pete is a neighbor and a friend and a MacGeek listener. And you were here Pete before we had a live stream. Yes. And before we had a chat room. And so for a long time, especially when your schedule permitted you to be here most often, Pete played the role of. I was the stupid questioner. Well, you know, I. There are no questions. There's only stupid questioners. Well, and I was he. Fair. Yeah. Pete played that role of. Wait a minute. You're a little ahead of me. You're ahead of me. Yeah, guys. Catch me up here. You know, you glossed over a thing, rewind a little bit. So it was that real time feedback that is invaluable. And of course, those of you that joined the chat room every week at live.MacGeek.com know this and know how valuable that is to. And know how much we prioritize it. So yeah, Pete was the OG. So before there was feedback at MacGeek.com. I was feedback at MacGeek.com. I mean, I think feedback at MacGeek.com predated you, but yes. Did I hear you right? Did you say feedback at MacGeek.com? We said feedback at MacGeek.com. Yeah, that's how we that's how we hear from everybody here. So yeah, it's it's great to have you. Yeah, it's just been thrilled. I've been thrilled to be included so many times. So thank you to everybody. And thanks for having me back. Of course, man. Fun to be here. And let's let's not make this. Let's not let it go another two years. Let's not even let it go another two months. There you go. Yeah, I'm in. Yeah, we have the technology to include you wherever you are if you're available. Well, that'll be fun because I do a lot more world traveling now than I was doing two years ago. And there you go. You know, switched airplanes and yeah, that's all I do. That's right. That's right. You're on you're on the 777. I'm on the Boeing triple seven now. So mostly long haul fun. Although funny. It's a lot of last month. My international flying consists consist of all the way from Liège, Belgium to Paris, France, 170 miles nonstop. Well, that is international if your home is here in New Hampshire. Absolutely. Yeah, but we also go from Osaka to Paris. You know, of course, that's so cool hours. So yeah, a few more hours. That's right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You gotta you gotta earn the money to buy the new gear all the time. Right. And so speaking of, we record this as many of you know ahead of time. So this episode comes out and it is the episode for Monday of September 20th. But we are recording this on the morning of September 17th, mere hours after pre-orders for the new iPhones have gone into effect. Pete, did you order anything? I haven't ordered anything yet, but I that I'm only nine months into my 12 pro max. Yeah, which I love and the cameras on that thing. Oh, my goodness. If I got some amazing shots in the air and yeah, I took a shot of Santorini grease from 30 miles away week before last. And you can pick out the white buildings on the top of the volcano ridge. And yeah, it is it is wild. And then the night shots, the Aurora borealis coming across the North Atlantic. I you pilots that post pictures of the Northern Lights. Like it's like, oh, yeah, that's this beautiful thing I see all the time because it's this beautiful thing you see all the time. It is a little bit frustrating for those of us plebeians that live mostly with our feet on terra firma. I get it. And if you'll indulge me one more time, quick, funny story about being a pilot in the Northern Lights. This show is going to go off the rails. I know it is. And I promise to do this quickly. So I'm a brand new first officer in the MD 11. This is 100 years ago. Yeah. 16 years ago, something like that. We're traveling across the North Atlantic back to Memphis. And it's a beautiful night. And the Northern Lights are like, I have never seen before in my life. And I'd seen them before. They were amazing, but I'm brand new to this airplane. And the captain is back in the back on his rest break of sleep. And the relief first officer is in the captain's chair. And he's like, oh, this is amazing. And he turned down all the lights in the airplane. It was dark as we can get it so we can enjoy the show. And after about five minutes we go, all right, you know, we've had our fun, but it's time to actually, you know, make sure that our 500,000 pound piece of aluminum is where we want it to be. Yeah. Having drifted off course somehow. Yeah. So reach down and turn up and it's all, this is an MD 11. It was an all glass cockpit and reach down and turn the lights on and they are black. Nothing's done. None of the instruments come back up. And dude, let me tell you adrenaline to the heart. I think we've, we've all been there with our computers where we've messed with things, but, but that's a little bit different. Now we got to go tell the captain we're out of the middle of the North Atlantic at night with two little peanut gyros that are about as big as, you know, three, four inches across. I'm sorry to wake you sir. Yeah. And no navigational equipment. All we've got is a radio and the INS is, or the INUs are still working, but it, it were like, oh my God. And then about the time I'm getting ready to go to bed, they don't buckle. They start fading in. I had forgotten they were CRTs, cathode ray tubes. They were not LED instant. So they had gone down, cooled off, turned them back on. It took a minute. You know, the captain may have been asleep, but the two of you were wide awake at that moment. That's right. I had an adrenaline shot to keep me going. So John, did you order anything new? My friend, since we last spoke. It's a binary question. No. Okay. Are you considering ordering anything new? No. I'm considering the 13 mini maybe. Sure. Yeah. I, I, I'm kind of. We talked about earlier and the thing is, I mean, there's not a heck of a lot that's like super, super advanced past what I have. It's, you know, incremental. I mean, you know what the screen's brighter and, you know, processors faster and all that stuff. Incremental, not evolutionary. Yeah. And very incremental at best. We did. We talked about this in 890, but I agree with you guys. Like if it weren't for this, like the job that we have here, I really don't think I would have ordered phones this morning. You know, I did order that iPad mini as soon as we finished on Tuesday and that should be here on, on, on the 24th. So happy birthday to me. And then because that iPad mini is like for those of us that are iPad mini people, the iPad mini is friggin amazing. Like that, that evolution of it is that's a big leap forward. I will probably get one of those two for the airplane. Yeah. Yeah. For my own airplane, not for work. I could. Yeah. Right. Oh, right. Yeah. Right. 8.3 and screen. It's like, yeah, it's perfect. Yeah. I did this morning order a 13 mini John for me and a 13 pro for Lisa. She didn't want the mini size and I figured it'd be good to have the, you know, the pro cameras in the house so that I have the ability to test them and things like that. So, and she was on an 11 pro. So it's, you know, she, she was sort of the, what's that? It's time. It's time. Yeah, exactly. It was time. So I've got those all coming on the, on the 24th, but I, you know, I was going to trade my phone in with Apple. I went through that and declutter, D E C L U T T R for those of you that don't know about declutter had prices that were probably 15% above Apple. Oh, wow. I wish I'd known about that. Yeah. So I opted not to. Now there's two reasons for that. Number one is, is exactly what I said. The other is I get the full tax deduction on the full amount of the iPhone as opposed to just the delta amount of the iPhone. Sure. Now of course my accountant will then take the money I get from declutter and apply that as a, you know, recouped things, but you know, I, I like to look at it and say, yeah, I'm getting the full tax deduction and then, and then maybe the recoup thing, maybe, you know, there's a depreciation magic that can be done. I don't know. I let my accountant do all that stuff. So just two months ago, but Debbie the 12th for, for a birthday. Yeah. I wish I'd known about declutter. Oh yeah. There you go. I've not, I can't remember if I've used them before. I, I've priced things on declutter many times before, but I don't know that I've used. I don't know that I've actually made it there. It, like, usually we have things that cascade downward in the house here, but now that I'm on the, the, the mini phones, there's no one in the house that wants them. That thinks they want them. Yeah. Yeah. Well, and if you, again, if you'll indulge me one quickly is the, well, I didn't order new this time. I do have some new Apple gear in the house. And, and that is the air tags. Boy, are those cool pieces of gear. I just thought, you know, I've got the tile. I'm not, but boy, they are amazing down to, you know, here's the arrow. Here's where they are. It's your within inches of it. And, and the fact that somebody doesn't have to be running an app in the background to get you to your gear. That, that's the biggest thing. I already, and we've talked about this here, but I already see that people are like, my devices are more easily found with air tags than they were with tile. Yes. And that's, sometimes, and sometimes tile won't connect and you're like, what's going on? Well, but there's just not like the network of people that are running the tile app. I think, John, I mean, if you found, you've got a bunch of air tags and, and the Chipolo one, like, are you finding the same thing? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's like, it's, it's as good as a GPS. In a city. Right. Yeah. In an area where there's a lot of people with devices. Correct. Correct. Like I used it to, I had to get my car towed to the service place. And I was like, you know what, let me try this. So, and there's one in my car. And sure enough, it, you know, showed its progress on the map, you know, going from my place to the service place. Oh, that's cool. It was just very accurate. And we've had, you know, people give us stories of tracking their luggage. Is another one. Yeah. That's kind of a cool application. Yeah. No, I did it with my luggage for the last trip I did. Actually, the last two trips I did. And, and the, the granularity of, of the reports was way better than I ever saw with tile. And like you said, it's because everybody with an iPhone becomes part of the network. Whether they have air tags or not, and I think that's the big differentiator, right? Tile, the only people running the tile app are people that own tiles. Right. So, so, yeah. Well, they're a little more expensive. They're worth it. A little, a little, a little more expensive. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's the Apple tax. Yeah. It's again, it just works. Yeah. So, yeah. No, I've been loving them. Okay. I'll stop jumping. No, no. I'm not sure you'd have any here, John, you, but it is time to get to some content like that y'all have sent in. So, John, you want to take us to our first quick tip of the day? Yes. So, um, Jamie writes in and says, I occasionally run a new situation on a web page where part of a dialogue doesn't fit on the screen. So I can't see or click the OK button or equivalent. I ran into this today while using the Synology DSM Web interface. My browser window was already maximized on the laptop, so there wasn't a lot of screen real estate. I could see the top of the dialog box which asks some question, do you want to do something? But the buttons to respond were off the bottom of the screen with no way to scroll down. So the fix for this is to press Command minus on the keyboard. This rescales the browser window to make everything a little smaller. Now the entire dialog box fits on screen including the control buttons. The other options are Command plus or Command equals to zoom in and Command zero to restore the default zoom setting. So, thank you. Yes, I've, uh, I've run into this now and then, um, last time I ran into this, Dave, um, it was, uh, last pass, oddly enough. Uh, and, yeah, I had the same thing happen is that, um, I guess some browser plugins, um, get confused as to where the end of the Earth is and, yeah, I had the same thing. Um, my solution was to resize the, uh, the window, but, um, having these, uh, keyboard shortcuts I think is, uh, a little nicer way to see everything. Yeah, that's a really good idea. I wish there was a way to do this on iOS because I've run into this same kind of thing there, uh, at times, but, yeah, that's a, that's a smart idea to just do, you know, command minus and away you go. I like it. This is what we love about quick tips, folks. Alright, uh, listener with the handle of PC Unix, uh, shares a medium article that, uh, he found he says, I don't know if you can distill this for a quick tip, but if you can, please do. It's about you, the, the idea and we will link to this medium article that, that walks through it. Actually, and I believe he wrote it so, uh, because it is listener Tony, who goes by the handle PC Unix is talking about how to use side car, uh, which is the, the ability to use iPad as your second screen of your Mac, uh, which I was talking about in the last show that I use when I travel using sidecar to take screenshots because screenshots on the iPad are so much easier than screenshots on the Mac and you get a much cleaner view. So, uh, so Tony will move a window over to his iPad and take a screenshot there if he can't just do it from the iPad directly. So, uh, well, again, it's, it, it's worth reading through the article. He's got some additional tips, including using the floating accessibility assistive touch feature to make screenshots even easier so that you can just tap that little button and boom, up comes the option to take a screenshot, but thank you for sending this in. Thank you for writing it up, Tony. That's really the, the key here and, uh, and we'll put a link in the show notes as promised for you all. Good quick tip. John, thoughts on that or you want to take us to Simon? Uh, let's go to Simon. So, um, Simon has a quick tip. Um, you got to see Simon says, come on. Nope. Sorry. It's not going to do it. But Simon asks, are all your iPhone images now HEIC and you need JPEG or another format? Um, first maybe wondering what is HEIC and HEIC is high efficiency image file format and as far as I can tell, all photos on iDevices are now using this new format. Um, but what if you need a, well, what if you're dealing with someone on a different platform or legacy operating system? They may not understand what HEIC is. So, um, let's say we want to convert it to something else. Um, here are the steps. In the finder, select your images. Uh, right click on one of the selected images and either do open or open using preview if it's not your default. Uh, ensure the preview sidebar is open showing all the images. If it's not, click the view menu thumbnails from the preview menu bar. Then use command A, which is select all. Um, and select all the open images or edit select all from the preview menu bar. And then here's the fun part. Um, mass image file type change. Select file export selected images from the preview menu bar. Then pick a location to export your images, click the options button in the export window to pick a new format. Just save them as. Interesting. Let's see, hold down the option key when you click the format button to see more image formats. Okay, that's a nice little secret. Um, click choose to export the images to the new format. Interesting. Fascinating. And then, um, so the, to distill it down, it's get all the images into preview, select them all and then file export and choose your your, you know, your change. Wow. That's fascinating. I like it. That's great. Right. And, um, let's see, and there's another one here you can also, all right, at some point you can also do a mass resize if you need to do that. Um, and for that go to tools and adjust size from the preview menu bar. Okay. All right. Well, some good imaging tips. Thank you. Cool. Awesome. I have a, a quick tip of my own to share that I wind up using all the time. I, uh, as with many of you, I'm sure I live in mail. Mail is an app that I, you know, spend a lot of my life in and often what will happen, especially as I'm triaging my inbox is I will, you know, see a message and then think, oh, I want to search for some other email so that I can take action or, you know, did this person do something or whatever. And what happens in, if I just do that is I lose my focus on where I am in my inbox. And so, uh, mail has tabs. So what I've gotten in the habit and now that I finally have it in my workflow where I'm not just automatically starting to search and losing focus is I create a new tab or more often I have a second tab just open in mail as kind of a work tab, a temp tab if you will. And I open a new tab and I do my searching there and then I can go back to the inbox and my focus remains exactly where it was. It's awesome. And you can have multiple tabs open. So especially when I'm answering listener questions, I'll have the, you know, premium at Mac Geek Hub tab open for those of you that are premium listeners. I have the feedback Mac Geek Hub tab open for those of you who are not premium listeners and then I have like my inbox and sometimes an archive tab open and being able to bounce between those without losing focus, especially on where I am in the flow of answering your questions is amazing and super at like, you know, I'm an efficiency maniac. This it's, I mean, it's so pleasing to me now that I finally got this into my workflow as you can probably tell. Yeah, just open the tab because when I do the search then you have to go clear the search in order to get the rest of your mail in order to get the rest of your mail back. Yeah, I almost feel like there should be a checkbox to open search results in a new tab. So that you're not like by default not losing focus, right? You know, I wonder if some mail plug-in developer could add that like I know mail is super extensible, but I'm going to write to the folks at SmallCube to make all my favorite mail plugins to see yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. All right. All right. This is good, but I like it anyway. Quick tip for you, an idea for me. Okay. Moving on. Do we have any other quick tips, by the way while we're while we're here? I don't have any on the agenda, but the we've it's been a tangential show to begin with. I've got the one and you said it's been covered before, but it's just a follow on to your one from your last week show, which is when you press and hold this is in iOS when you press and hold the number key, you can then use your other hand and type in a number and then let go of it and you haven't switched out of your keyboards and dissembles and such. But the other one is and this has been covered before, but one of my favorites and when I show people they love it, press and hold the space bar until all the keys go blank and then you can move the cursor anywhere around in the window because the most difficult thing I swear sometimes especially if I'm in the airplane using the iPad and I'm trying to type something up like right up an airplane and I find a misspelling thanks to auto correct or something like that and I want to get the cursor back to that one word. The easy way to do is press and hold the space bar, slide the cursor to where you want it and let go instead of trying to touch that one specific spot on the screen and I'm one letter off and so I love that one. That's my that's my favorite little iOS tip. It is being able to essentially turn your keyboard into a trackpad on the iPhone. Yeah, yeah, invaluable. I agree and it's worth that's worth a reminder. You know it's probably been a year since we've talked about it so that that's no that's I'm glad you mentioned that. That's good. Anything else, John? We good to move on to cool stuffs found. Indeed. Alrighty. David brings us one. This is kind of a semi answer to the geek challenge that I posed recently and also a cool stuff found. He says I just listened and I have an imperfect and probably unsatisfying suggestion for Stelios and Dave who wished to have weather preferably radar overlaid on the navigation app in CarPlay. I do not know of such an app. Cool. Great. Well, we'll move on. No, wait, wait, wait. He says and I believe you're correct that no such animal exists. I have a vague memory of a companion app for ways that did this but no longer and I don't think it was CarPlay anyway. But I do use an app called Drive Weather which is available for iOS and Android. You tell it your start and end points and it displays the weather along your selected route. There are several options including radar which are included in this free tier for the paid tier you can add way points stop points, wind speed, other items. I use it when planning trips that are longer than an hour or two. I often drive right past you Dave which is almost unavoidable whenever I leave my home in the great north woods. Very nice. He says I checked and I'll see if it worked on CarPlay and it does not. However, I set up ways and drive weather and I can display my route in ways on the car's CarPlay display and then the drive weather route remains on my iPhone screen, right? That's right because a couple of iOS iterations ago they split it so that you could have your phone showing one thing and CarPlay showing the other, right? So there you go. Okay. So if you put your phone on a mount you could have your cake and eat it too. So, and said that he checked in with the developer of Drive Weather and shared our segment from 889 with him and the developer is like I'm going to add a CarPlay screen to my app. There you go. So, yeah, maybe the question is will Apple approve it? No, none of these apps exist. This feature doesn't exist anywhere. Clearly, me and Stelios are not the only people that would want it. I would imagine you as a pilot. You're so used to seeing weather along your route on an overlay shirt. An overlay, right? Yeah, yeah, turn it on and off like whatever but you know, a long drive it's nice to see what's happening with the weather. So I know we're not alone in wanting this and even knowing that we want this, right? There's one thing about there's a difference between seeing a feature for the first time and saying how did I live without this and another is lacking a feature and knowing you want it. I think there's a lot of us in the latter camp but Apple has yet to approve one. I don't think that means it has never been submitted. Well, and I wonder if the other question is what did the automakers have a say in that as well? Huh. Maybe. You grazed the edge of it on 889 which was boils down to I think product liability. For sure. Very different in a plane. You can spend a lot of time staring at a screen and not be a danger to yourself and others. The Ford Honda Toyota, you know, all the automakers if they have a say in it, they may go again though. Yeah. Which is why you can't get YouTube to play on your on your screen. I was it. I gosh, where was I I was in LA at Mac tech and there was a an event like a Mac tech related event but it was offsite. They do like one offsite event a year and this one was at the aquarium which was super cool. Like being able to be in the aquarium was just us Mac tech geeks at night. It was amazing. Neil Tickton and his team always put together a good show but I wound up not going on the bus. Even if there was a bus I just wound up riding with someone who's a Mac Keekab listener. I'll leave his name out of it for reasons that might become obvious here. But and it was a great ride and was great to hang out. But he had hacked his car play into his car with some I don't know. He had some solution for making his screen on his car a car play screen even though it was not that way from the factory. It was using some third party thing. Yeah. And because of that though many restrictions including those where it carplay will only display apps that are carplay that are flagged as carplay compatible right. He did not have to suffer through these restrictions. Yeah. And so he did have YouTube videos playing all the time when I drive so that I can learn things and I'm thinking you know most of these YouTube how to videos are kind of like this right. Like you wouldn't need to be watching us. And so I'm like OK. This is how I convinced myself that it was OK in the moment anyway. But but like so maybe that like his solution would work for Drive Weather. And I've seen hacks you know to get into to get those to go. But just even if even a few seconds and you know at last week after the football game here UNH is home opener. Yeah. My youngest is learning to drive. So I hopped in the right seat as we drove into Dover to pick up my mother and my heart was in my throat several times. He's on the road. He's watching. But boy there's a lot of kids college kids in dark clothes walking down the side of the road and that's the thing that scares me. It's the other guy. It's the inattention on their part that'll hose you while you're driving. So oh yeah downtown Durham driving through that college campus any time there's a crowd. You know before or after sporting events but also at you know class transition time or doing the bars close that you know to the morning or whatever like the people just spill into the street taking your liability insurance in your hands. That's what you're doing. Yeah. All right. John what do you think can we stand on this or are we moving to Jeremy? I think we're going to go to Jeremy. Awesome. So we got a quick cool stuff found here. Pella makes an air tag holder. What's different about this one? I mean it's a holder. It has a hole in it. It has a clip so that's nice. Well you know almost all of these do but it's compostable. Oh. So okay. So rather than using plastic it's a compostable air tag. Trying to think of a use case but the price is pretty good. So one is $14.95 and then the more you buy the more you save and it comes in one, two, three, four, five different colors. That's cool. I like it. All right. Yeah. Compostable. I mean at some point you're going to stop using your air tag so nice that what will eventually become trash is compostable. Like that's not a bad thing. Yeah. I like it. All right. Cool. Sonos is one of you know my favorite my favorite brands but also just I am a huge fan of their products and last I say last year if it's not true two years ago Sonos released the ARC which is their sort of pro level sound bar with Dolby Atmos and all that. They recently released the Sonos Beam which is their entry level sound bar although it's probably the wrong it's like it's not the $700 one. It's the $400 one but I will tell you up until getting the ARC in our living room we use the Beam and our living room we're probably a good 15 feet from the television and like it still gave us full sound like yeah it was great. Now there's the Beam Gen 2 which includes Dolby Atmos support so if you know for all but the largest rooms you can now get all of that sound while still not having to buy the super Hooptie one. So this is $449 for the Beam Gen 2 and I think yeah the why can't I remember the name of the other one the ARC Thank you. The ARC is $899 so it's half the price I have not seen the ARC the Beam I've seen is similar. The ARC is just wider by quite a bit but they're both just soundbars in form factor so the Beam Gen 2 is now my go-to recommendation I have to couch that by saying I have not tested it yet I will but I have not so I can't like I'm going based on Sonos' track record here but I loved the Beam I love the Atmos sound from the ARC and so to be able to combine those together and have the price be $449 like it's a pretty easy it's a pretty easy recommendation to make so it's an educated recommendation but it is not an experiential recommendation. So stupid question time then. What is Atmos? I've not heard of that. Ah it is one of the 7.1 sound format so you get what Atmos adds is a high and low channel so really it's a high channel and so you get not just sound on a flat plane but you get sounds coming above you and things like that and it really does the way these soundbars can bounce the sound off your ceiling, Atmos works amazingly well it's similar to how they're bouncing the surround channels off of your walls they're bouncing the Atmos off of your ceiling and it's amazing how well it works it really becomes this immersive. I mean I love my Sonos stuff it becomes the way you get the immersion of Atmos even from a soundbar which really in my house anyway is my only experience with Atmos I've experienced it elsewhere with actual speakers and the ceilings and things like that but yeah no it's amazing and you have the sub too right? I also do have a sub I've got a couple of play 3's that I use as rear speakers in the living room yeah you're right. I do the same thing I got play 1's for the rear speakers it's probably even better but that sub makes it so immersive the beam or the arc will work with your rears and the sub so yeah that's good those guys know what they're doing over there they do know what they're doing over there they've known what they're doing for a very long time I'm glad that they survived long enough for people to understand why their products are so great because I know when I first found out about Sonos the first thing I said to them was it's like I should couch this a little bit they had been pestering me for two years to come and learn about their products and I was like I don't understand them I'm not coming and finally somebody twisted my arm and was like you gotta come to Boston I'd postponed it once or twice I finally went down within about 10 minutes of them explaining it to me I was like this is amazing how come you've never told me about this before and there were like 4 eyes 4 sets of eyes in the room that could I could feel really hard to explain this to people and I'm like no no it's fine and then I came back here on the show and you can go back and listen to this episode and hear me fumble for probably 25 minutes through trying to explain what Sonos was why people would want it in their home, why it's easy to use and then I had to call my friends at Sonos and my new friends at the time and say I'm really sorry now I understand I tried to explain this too but in the benefit of 25 minutes you have maybe 30 seconds in an ad spot or a static ad of PDF or something but there were some 10 times there you couldn't listen to Audible you couldn't what sort I'm looking for an airplane and now that you can do that and I know that was a lot of hard engineering to work into the software without making it without crashing what they were doing in the first place they stayed the course thankfully again we were able to remain financially viable and all of that through it to truly succeed and of course now it's paid off in spades form pretty good alright we were talking in the last episode about Apple TV Plus and Tony from Thailand sent us a note reminding us that there are some new things coming in the fall including shows from Tom Hanks Will Ferrell and John Stewart in the lineup for the fall here and into 2022 I should say but yeah Apple TV Plus John you mentioned foundation in the last episode I think no you mentioned foundation right was that the one you mentioned right yeah okay so there's also invasion and then there's the problem with John Stewart so he's got a new a new show coming out that will have a companion podcast which is pretty cool the morning show debuts well now so the season 2 has begun and there's a movie coming out about the Velvet Underground which will be on exclusive to Apple TV Plus too which I've enjoyed Lisa and I recently got back into we watched the first season of Dickinson and then for whatever reason you know sort of drifted away from it and this week we've been all but binging the second season and catching up with the second season of Dickinson which it's it's a fun show it's tough to find a 30 minute show that captures our our interest and Dickinson has been that it's it's hard to describe if I describe it to you I would fail and probably convince you not to watch it because on the surface it doesn't sound like the type of thing that I would enjoy and yet it's totally like the level of snark and the humor and taking this story from ye olden days and making it super modern but also still happening in ye olden days brilliant they're not putting crap up on Apple TV I gotta say from Ted Lasseter the other one that I thought did I say Lasseter Ted Lasseter Ted Lasseter that was fun and then the other one that I was certain I would not like but it was a howl and it was like a 6 episode and done was Shmiggedoon that's what John was doing that is a hoot it's an adult musical yes it is but boy it was fun is it Keenan Michael Key from Kean Peele so he's in it I'm not singing no no I'm not singing not another song I think I suffered through two episodes of that and then I had to you bailed on that I don't like musicals you know neither do I but it was fun it was fun calls did you watch calls Pete? I haven't seen calls John did you start Ted Lasseter or anything like that yet? no so calls is not a TV show except it's a TV show it is a 6 I wanna say 6 or 7 episodes the episodes are short I think the longest one might be 20 minutes this is not something that you can watch with another screen up because a lot of it is reading on screen it is the entirety of the show is a series of phone calls that happen and describe and I don't I don't want to give too much away but it becomes this very interesting sci-fi story that I think the way it wraps up my I found my room to become very dusty during the final episode and Pete I think your room would be even dustier than mine okay it tells a story that you think and is this super bizarre sci-fi apocalyptic thing but not in the disease way so yeah but it tells the story that all of a sudden becomes this very human thing which is the best kind of sci-fi and it's told in a very strange way it's phone calls between two or more people and all you're seeing on the screen is their names and the words that they're saying and the dialogue is super important so you just get immersed but some episodes are like 9 minutes so you're reading for 9 minutes at least then I started it a few months ago and then it got exhausting to watch and so we took a few months off and then this week or last week we were like we should finish calls and then we did and we were like oh why did we wait so long we should have done this so highly recommended for all of you out there yeah I guess the bottom line is I'm a full on cord cutter and same now but I'm paying for the Apple TV subscription after my first year free it's good stuff they don't they're not putting garbage on there so no it's good alright any more thoughts on that before we move on John people in the chat room are recommending CODA children of deaf adults I have not watched an episode of that yet it's on our list so people at live.mackycup.com we've got NCSU, CPE and Kiwi Graham both saying saying watch it it is a movie not but there you go great thank you for that guys alright let's get to some questions because that's one of the things that we do here shall we Cindy unless there's more John do you have any any more shows or Apple TV plus or anything nope okay cool Cindy asks a question which would be good for me to have in front of me so I can read I'm sure I she says and I'm sure other listeners would love to to find out ways of knowing how I can control my Mac with my iOS device I'm specifically looking for ways of controlling a Swinzian which is a flak audio file player on an iMac that I have hooked to my stereo but I may be out of luck she says I see seems that years ago I remember keyboard maestro having a way to control keyboard maestro via the iPhone but I have slept many times since then so alright so I have a lot of answers for you you are absolutely right that keyboard maestro macros can be triggered by web endpoints and when I say endpoints I simply mean URLs you run keyboard maestro on one Mac and then you can it will give you you don't have to guess at any of this once you build a macro you can say I want this macro to be triggered by a web endpoint and it will give you the URL and all you have to do is load that URL in your web browser and boom that macro fires so my example of that the one way that I use it is when I want to take a nap in my office I want my Mac to mute its speaker so that if I get like slacks or text messages coming in it's not waking me up so I have a shortcut that I have on my iPhone called nap time so I say Siri nap time and it loads the end point of the keyboard maestro macro on my Mac that does all of the aforementioned things and then it sets do not disturb on my iPhone so that that's not bothering me and then it sets a 22 minute timer because that's a perfect amount for my nap time and then of course launches my white noise app so that I can hear white noise while I'm taking a nap and this all takes a matter of a second or two so but the keyboard maestro endpoint is exactly that that may or may not work for you because they could be a little it's great for my use case if you're using it as remote control they could be a little pedantic to have to like you know load this bookmark load that bookmark load this bookmark to pause load this you know maybe like it might be the best and if it is then great because keyboard maestro can do a lot of things on your Mac so that's one way of doing it another way of doing it would be using an app called screens screens is essentially Apple remote desktop but for iPhone why Apple has Apple remote desktop on a Mac and no client from Apple to use it on an iPhone is something that I'm sure the makers of screens are very happy about but it's it is a sort of weird thing it's from a company it's from edoviaedovia.com great folks over there and screens for iPhone works very very well there was there was a period of time where we were having some weird issues with it and they totally like address that real real quickly and it is an app I use constantly to control my Mac from my iPhone you know especially if I'm over at the house and I want to control the Mac in the office that kind of thing it works really well so that's that's be on the same network it no it doesn't have to be on the same network they have a an app that you can run on your Mac that logs it into your screens account so that you can do it from anywhere yeah yeah but I when I'm connecting to the office I am on the same network I don't run that app on my Mac I use I just VPN into my home network and do it that way which totally works fine I'm just thinking of running my bidding program on my laptop from the far east from the far east yeah exactly yep totally good yeah you just have to have a way of waking up your laptop so that's the only thing you need to be aware of but then for very use case specific scenarios and Cindy's gets very close to this and I think might work there is the remote for Mac app from Evgeny I think I'm pronouncing your name wrong CherPak so it's CherPakE.com CHERPAKE.com links for all these are in the show notes of course and remote for Mac is a two app thing you put an app on your iPhone you put an app on your Mac and then they have built app specific templates that you run on your iPhone so if you want to run Plex on your Mac like you know you've got a Mac connected to your TV you want to run Plex on your Mac you use remote for Mac and now all the Plex commands and controls are right there on your iPhone in a format that would make sense for a remote control for Plex same is true for a Netflix window but the same can be true for lots of different things including complete just remote control of your Mac with a keyboard and things like that so that honestly that's where I would start is with remote for Mac because if it can do what you want their template and remote control first interface might be the simplest path for you if that doesn't work then you can sort of step down the chain there so so there you go thoughts on that Mr. Braun? no thoughts on that pilot Pete? no John you want to take us to listen to Jeff? yeah good morning gentlemen it appears I've hit my head on the time machine ceiling once again I have not had that happen I have a word doc that apparently I cleaned out of my documents folder I went back through my time machine backups and found the file it shows up as msword.docx and I thought life was good I clicked restore and headed back to the documents to no avail there was no file restored so I headed back to time machine to see what else I could see with most of my files in time machine I can preview and open them this was not the case with this file I dug around the time machine drive for the dates and times I found the file and they show up as shortcuts but no information is the location of the original file it would appear I got caught unless you have additional information I'm missing the only thing I can think of Dave I've had this happen as well where it's like I thought time machine backed this up but it didn't hmm I think it just gets confused every now and then the only thing I can think of Dave is there's a a tool called the time machine mechanic and it'll look at your time machine logs so maybe run this and it'll tell you where things went wrong I don't know if it could fix problems but that's the only way I could I did another thing you may want to reconsider your backup strategy so I actually have had cases where what I do is so I have time machine on my Synology but what I also do is I run a backup of that file using Synology's Hyper Backup the nice thing about that is that I've had cases in the past where I'm like oh man my time machine store is corrupt what to do well go to one that you backed up in the past so rights other than I mean you could you could open the sparse bundle and kind of dig into it and see if you can find it that way I don't know yeah I well the thing that comes to mind is that Jeff says he got he sees them as shortcuts and when we have to remember how time machine works right the way time machine works is it backs up a file and then if that file hasn't changed every time you back up it creates a new folder right and you can see these if you go into the time machine where it'll be named with the date and the time and you know probably other stuff too but that's effectively what it is and every folder appears to have a complete backup but really all that's happened is an incremental backup from the last one everything else is brought forward as a hard link which is similar to a soft you know a soft link which is similar to an alias or a shortcut right so they're not all exactly the same at all but they are related entities and so it brings forward everything that hasn't changed as a hard link and then the the new stuff is actually put into that folder and that's why you're not completely filling your time machine drive every single time that you do a new backup and also why it doesn't take forever although sometimes it seems like it does so when he says that he sees them looking like shortcuts that tells me that the original file of that hard link is gone and it shouldn't be right but somehow along the lines that file got yanked from underneath the you know the thing so that I that's kind of where my head goes on this it doesn't it's simply musing on the mystery it's not solving the problem like you I would run to m2 the time machine mechanic sorry and see if it reports anything but I probably either delete or archive off that time machine backup and start a new because if that files missing what else that's the only one you know about currently and I wouldn't want to find out about the next one are there any good searches but like spotlight the to try and go find this or any other good you could try to use spotlight or you could use one of the more powerful third party you know find search tools to scour and see if you can find something with that file name yeah especially know a specific phrase or something in the file yeah or even just the name of it should I mean like you know the name so you should be able to search that drive and spotlight might even do it for you but that would be that would be my thought process on that so yeah it might be there and the link just got broken key we gram in the chat room very correctly points out that the hard link is a file system thing not a macOS thing that is correct you know it it's it's actually a concept that goes back to Unix although it was not really a part of HFS plus it was tacked on and and that may also be part of the problem when they added hard links to HFS plus a person came to me after a macro session once and they were at the time a and I think still a former file system engineer at Apple and they told me we stored the data for the hard links in a text file don't trust them this was right after Time Machine came out it was like whoa okay so maybe this is his worst fears coming true I don't know well and then I guess the other question I have is very good it's probably too late now in his in this case but is very good undelete program for Mac Windows has a pretty robust undelete but macOS I've always seemed to struggle with that not really I mean once it's out of the trash can yeah I mean maybe there's a geek challenge if somebody knows feedback at macgeekup.com I haven't seen any have you John um I haven't run it in a long time data rescue maybe okay okay yeah see if they still if they still exist if they still exist yeah exactly yeah yeah data protection pro soft engineering data rescue yes have you accidentally deleted or lost important files is what they say well sounds like we did so um data rescue to the rescue maybe I think they have a trial um that'll yeah help you help you find those lost files yeah yeah you get to that the less likely that space is going to be overwritten obviously but uh and then the other thing is kind of a comment which I don't think happened here also because he can see the the links but uh with time machine you can exclude what files are backed up be careful you aren't excluding files that you want backed up fair yeah fair yeah great point I agree that's probably not the issue here but it is a good thing to to check with yeah all right cool we will put a link to data rescue in the show notes too all right moving on word we'll see where we get to with things here I knew we'd run I knew this would show the show would be different when we talk today and you were coming no this is exciting I love it it's it's it's great to have the additional perspective and interaction people I'll never be invited back let us know what you think no I could seriously folks like you know this show is always a work in progress right this is we are we are striving for excellence we never believe we've hit it there and then there have been shows where it's like we finish and I'm like nailed that one but I let that sort of carry me through lunch and then it's like all right how can we make it better so please please keep us posted uh on how we're doing here all right uh Bob has a question Bob says I've been monitoring how do I have a question about monitoring battery usage on my Apple watch I'm using a series four but he says I think this would apply to anyone my watch has recently started getting to the low power mode threshold by late afternoon and I have no idea why in the past four months it has seldom gotten below 30% by bedtime in iOS there is a battery preference pain that shows battery usage by app even if it isn't all that good I cannot find an equivalent for the watch we get something similar in Monterey it's not perfect but we get something similar uh he says how do I figure out which apps drain my battery so much well it could be given that it's a series four I don't know how long you've had it you might have just bought it on the refurb store in which case it would have a new battery but it is possible that your watch battery itself is on the decline and now you're just noticing that I don't want to cop out and stop there but I do want to acknowledge that that certainly is possibility I have noticed this over the years though with all manner of Apple watches including my og and my series five and I think I've even I know I've seen it on the watches of my family members and they've had different iterations than me we're sort of on a leapfrogging thing with the Apple watches we always have like three different generations of Apple watch in the family because it's not the kind of thing you need to replace every year so but that's a good excuse it is it is batteries not working new batteries not oh yeah that's right that series seven Bob this is going to solve your problem and honestly I think it might but not necessarily because it has a new battery when I have seen the battery life on the Apple watch just suddenly begin to tank with consistency like day after day it's just falling and falling every single time it has been caused by background syncing of contact data I don't know why this happens but clearly it's a problem that affects lots of people not just those in the TMO towers east household here and the reason I know that is because there is a button to fix it if you go into and so I would try this go into the watch app on your iPhone and I every time I have to struggle with this I'm hoping I remember doing it in this segment yet go to the watch app on your iPhone go to general choose your watch if you have multiple watches most people don't but you know do that choose your watch go to general go to reset and choose reset sync data that wipes out whatever it's trying to do and let's it just do a full on sync once now that full on sync will use more you know radio time and processor time and therefore battery life but anytime I've had this issue I do that and it's gone for you know the foreseeable future so that is exactly where I would start if I were there hopefully that does it but we'd have to turn off the light he's trying to show the screen on the screen but it doesn't work out oh there you go yeah that's it yeah reset sync data yeah cool yeah yeah we'll get better about this if you're here more frequently we will start doing some screen sharing and we can even do iPhone screen sharing live on the show it's totally doable and everybody listening in their car I just held up my phone yeah exactly yeah yeah yeah no we do we have to we we try to be careful that we fail it's part of the evolution so yeah so hopefully that hopefully that does it for you Bob please please keep us posted anything more on that or is it time to go to Chris John time to go to Chris all right what's a question I don't know if I have an answer maybe we'll come up with it I back up my 2015 MacBook Air running macOS 11.5.2 by plugging USB drives for time machine and carbon copy cloner each evening and eject them afterwards this is work well for a long time lately it takes a long time 5 to 10 minutes for the drives to stop cycling after the disk icon disappears removing the drives before their activity light quiets down results in a warning that the disk was not ejected what is happening I don't know what do you think is happening guys I mean I mean yeah as far as I know I mean time machine just kind of automatically ejects yes and carbon copy cloner it's part of the script you know I'll do that um I wonder if you have a similar setup what would be holding on to the drive to prevent it from being ejected is well I mean you could use LSOF right that's a terminal command and what I usually do is issue LSOF and then I do the pipe character in fact as I'm typing this on my mac it's auto-filling with exactly what I was going to say showing that I've done this on a time machine volume before and so I type LSOF which is list open files at least that's how I remember it I don't know if that's the correct command and then I do the pipe character which sends the output of LSOF to the next command okay and we'll put all this in the show notes I just want you to copy and paste this command but I want you to understand what you're doing so the pipe character takes one command's output and shoves it into another command before it shows anything to us as the users and then I pipe it into a grep command which is a search command it can use regular expressions I am petrified by those as we all know so I use single words and I keep it very simple so the command is LSOF pipe which is the straight up and down thing above the slash that's above the return character on Apple keyboards into grep and then I put a space and then my search terms and what I'm looking for is the name of the volume so that I'm filtering my results down by only the things that are open on the volume that I am curious about and so an easy way to do that is to use the word machine with a capital M because time machine the volumes name machine you might get a file with the name machine in it there but you are a human you can filter through that pretty easily if you have pipe grep machine it will show you everything that is open on that time machine volume and it might even show you what app it is in fact it will so you can parse that output and maybe try to figure it out KiwiGram says that spotlight can hold on to disks longer than you might want the terminal command that runs spotlight as he reminds us is often MDS or MD stores or something like that so if you see MD something that's probably spotlight spotlight should not be indexing your time machine volumes if that's the case go in and tell it not to index those in system preferences and that might solve this problem for you so yeah it's fun I love doing this stuff I love answering people's questions we really do, I don't know it's weird, we like helping alright we've got a couple questions Pete, as I'm planning our escape from this episode one you said you are a cord cutter are you using things like YouTube TV or Fubo or anything like that so yeah and you've had some great discussions over that I used YouTube TV because I was with an apartment in Memphis and the union and that apartment was provided as was YouTube TV and then when I finished that job and moved on I kept YouTube TV for a while and then they went from 50 to 65 or 69 a month and I thought I could have taken 5 bucks a month but that was pretty steep so out of protest I left them but they they were very good content I'll give them that they were very good so are you using anything to get like how do you watch football games right now AT&T TV which has been changed to Direct TV Stream so I wouldn't want to test this out how do you like Direct TV Stream I like it, it's good what it doesn't have well you get HBO Max included with that don't get the NFL Network though for those that are sports fans I think remains your option Direct TV Stream does have many of the regional sports networks that YouTube lacks including Nessan here in New England but also the same is true in other localities the other thing that I found that I didn't like about YouTube TV that Direct TV Stream does do is I use a commercial VPN and when I am in Europe and YouTube TV would not let me you are on a VPN no TV for you and let me tell you when you are 72 hours restricted to your hotel room you can't leave you get room service in one country a police officer unlocks the door does not give you the keys leave your room go to jail and you are like oh thank you pandemic so 72 to 96 hours in one of those rooms without even your own TV will drive you nuts quickly so we have been experimenting Direct TV Stream it doesn't gripe when I use a VPN and we have heard the same about Fubo and specifically that yes YouTube TV does gripe we have been experimenting with this we have got YouTube TV and Fubo and we want to add Direct TV Stream to that and I will but with my son out in Oregon we are having the same you are in a different location and thus far I need to see if this is going to work long term but the solution that we have put into place that does work is that he VPNs into the house so this is not a known VPN endpoint in fact it is very much the same endpoint so he is VPNing into the house and he went into system preferences security and privacy location and turned off location for Google Chrome because Google Chrome will ask to get your actual location which regardless of whether you are connected to a VPN will give you lets your computer give it the real IP address or other data it might have to give a more accurate location but turning that off seems to work fine you found this too I did but I also but you were on a commercial VPN well that and I did use my own VPN through my disk drive my Synology drive but my concern at that point and now it has been put off for a little while they were Comcast was starting to put the data caps back in and I was right up against my data caps and slightly over and I thought well I don't want to be streaming this is why I'm happy to have consolidated here in my neighborhood unfortunately you can't get it in yours well I can but it's not at Gigabit speed I mean to be perfectly honest Pete if you want to head down that path I am happy to give you a login to my VPN we don't use our whole gigabit symmetrical bandwidth as you might find surprising dude I'm in we'll talk about that off the air so we're not just sharing the VPN with all of you but you know we do like that well that's no fun you know while we're on the subject of cord cutting and all of that Fubo TV listener Damon wanted us to remind all of you about Fubo's picture in picture feature and this is I mean it could I could see it if you are really into watching multiple sports at the same time but you can have two, three or four different streams happening on your television at the same time much much like much like what you're watching here except they're all going at the same time actually we're all going at the same time too interface is great it only works in the Apple TV app so it doesn't work in the apps on TV yet they'll add it I don't know but in the Apple TV app for Fubo and it's very smooth and you can do all four being equal or one big and three small and you can navigate through as to which one's providing sound or which one is the zoomed in one so if you got a couple of games that you're watching and you're like oh that team's about to score you can cut over without losing it got your own red zone channel got your own red zone channel yeah exactly exactly so it is cool and I appreciate you reminding us of that listener Damon I don't know why I call you listener Damon your name's Damon so thanks Damon you might be watching that's true that's true audience member Damon yeah alright so what else do we have here where were we where were we I want to do this follow-up since you are here Pete listener Steve revisits a conversation we started two episodes ago and Steve it was about phones and airplanes and interference yeah so I'll share Steve's but then I also want your thoughts on this too he says as a helicopter pilot I thought I might get you some additional details around known interference between cellular phones and aircraft and aviation systems a number of wide-body aircraft have air-to-ground comm systems for flight tracking sensory telemetry and maintenance 3G and 4G is known to interfere with these systems that being said the systems do a lot of CRC so error checking and are smart enough to retry our biggest and newest challenge is with 5G interfering with radar altimeters and he shares an article about it aircraft of all sizes may have been often I think he seried this to us have radar altimeters please provide a some provide these provide to think of what how he would have phrased this these provide a precise measurement of the distance between the underside of the aircraft and the actual ground below these are pressure altimeters but the most accurate are there are pressure altimeters but the most accurate are radar altimeters and it dramatically augments flying over terrain and visual flight approaches to airports so any census picture of him in the helicopter so thank you for this Steve this is a great follow-up it starts to make sense you I don't want to ask what you do in the cockpit Pete but I want to ask what you've heard other pilots do in the cockpit and do they have problems if they happen to accidentally leave their cell phones on when I'm trying to when I'm trying to finish a level on my game when I'm doing an approach just kidding FAA just kidding right actually one of the best discussions I ever heard about this was and I wish I could point to a show number and I can't was by Allison Sheridan over at Podfeet she threw her engineering mind at this and so stand by but it was it will be coming at us yeah it was and here's the thing we now have we use iPads as an EFB and I know some of the airlines use surface pros for electronic EFB electronic flight bag which has your jets and charts your approach plates and those sorts of things she brought into it you know yeah you probably want to be an airplane mode because are you sure that your phone isn't somehow you know has the engineering been done is it is this properly shielded is it in the proper frequencies it won't interfere right so obviously the FAA has been proven to their satisfaction enough that a certain amount of Bluetooth and Wi-Fi and all that can continue to go on if you leave your phone in the cellular mode on they know it's going on they know it's there and if not like you said the previous show that there would be some very strict enforcement right they would take your phones from you absolutely because because the fact is and he mentions the difference there's barometric and radio radar altimeters and the radar altimeters what you use when you let the airplane land itself we use the radar altimeter height above touchdown because it's getting right to the runway now the terrain before the runway a couple miles off the field is still varied but as you get in close that last hundred feet or so you are definitely over the field you're definitely over the runway and that needs to work I don't know any of the engineering and the bandwidths and whether or not these could or could not interfere I if I had to guess my educated guess is no it's not going to interfere and it shouldn't be a problem because there's people in the terminal with cell phones on all the time and they're right there watching your plane land now that being said there is a protected area and when I take you out flying sometime I'll show you there's a hold short and then there's the category 2 hold short so when the weather goes below 802 I believe is the number the 800 foot ceiling 2 miles visibility then they protect the what's called the ILS critical area the instrument landing system critical area and that keeps other aircraft and vehicles away from the broadcast antenna that gives you your localizer which is your course your runway course and your glide slope because frequently when you're flying in VFR weather you're coming down the glide slope and all of a sudden your course will bend way off and oh yeah there's a truck crossing down you know on a road short of the runway the large metal objects will bend that signal so yeah so they protect that sure and I assume that the engineers have all looked into the cell phone signals the Wi-Fi the bluetooth and but definitively speaking I can't give an answer but I wish maybe Allison if you're listening can touch it on your next show or give an answer here because her her engineering approach to it was look are you sure you know you turn it on and you think it doesn't happen but what if 200 people are in the back with their phones on what's really going to happen then have you done that research no you definitely almost certainly you haven't right yeah they have and but I you know I there is the thing to remember it is there is a segment of this ruling or this rule that comes not from the FAA but from the FCC and that that was the part that we I know we recently touched on this but I just don't want to lose that here and it's that the towers are not built to get to to focus signal anywhere other than you know terra firma and things not too high above that and so it's just that the network is not engineered I mean again back to the engineering point to efficiently do that and so it does muck with how handoffs work and all of that because it's not built to do the handoffs in the opposite direction so there is that too and that's a big part in addition to the distance of why your battery is dead if you leave your phone not in airplane mode because it's constantly searching for a signal it can't operate efficiently so there's really no reason to leave airplane mode off when you're up at altitude like that right yeah yeah you just don't need the cellular especially now so many of them I know I know there's at least two I know delta is one of them offers you free text messaging anyway yes regardless of whether or not you buy their wi-fi signal that's right you can log into their app and register and get free text back and forth and jet blues wi-fi I mean you know jet blue has always understood what it takes to keep people distracted in that the truth while they are crammed onto an airplane I mean they like they were the first with TVs and they're the first with free wi-fi but they're also the first with wi-fi that in my experience is fast enough to do some level of streaming over you know when I said I was testing Lucas's Oculus headset I was able to stream Netflix on the plane I didn't do it for very long but it you know came right up yeah probably probably be really a strain on the system for 200 passengers to do that obviously right they don't yeah but they also have all those movies like online at the plane so you you know yeah but it does like it's it's the best wi-fi in the air and it's included in the price of your ticket right I don't want to say it's free right but yeah yeah it's like my daughter got a free university t-shirt sure you did honey sure you did yeah let me show you the checkbook yeah yeah John any thoughts before we before we wrap this one up no I think you yeah beat that dead horse yeah do like you guys do just turn off the cellular yeah yeah why not I you know speaking of cellular in the last episode we I asked the question why would anyone get a cellular iPad these days pick me okay I will pick you I want to share what other listeners had to say unless unless it's the same reason for you for me it's for flight I can update when I'm flying I can update charts and weather and I mean I do it all before I leave anyway okay I'm flying and I need to change airports and I want to download the plates for that other airport yeah I'm on cellular and it only a few thousand feet in a late civil yes yeah you totally within range it's right there yeah for sure yeah so the other option I was using and my daughter took to school with her my other iPad mini it was wi-fi only so it had to tether to the phone if I needed to do something yeah that makes sense okay I like that so yeah just not in in in a crunch having the ability to just do it without oh let's tether let's do all the other things right and then I and there's a thing that's cool I'll show you a little thing it's about the size of a cigarette box and it's called a century and it gives me ads being announced I see other traffic yeah it's a carbon monoxide detector and it's back up a harsh attitude and heading reference so I have digital on the iPad a pitch attitude indicator that's and yeah but it wi-fi to the century ah and so I have to turn off that they take that off that wi-fi network and tether it to my phone if I need to get so I'm having to change networks on it whereas if it's cellular I can leave that century attached to it and I can and still do you still get the data I need downloaded so so there's yet another reason and it might even be relevant for you as a pilot is the iPads with cellular radios also have GPS radios and the GPS receiver is part of the cellular radio so if you get a wi-fi only iPad it does not have GPS interesting right yes so these these are the reasons and thanks to all of you who wrote in and shared that with us that that that makes a lot of sense for obvious reasons so thank you for that Dave I'm not sure that's true and I hate just because the small iPad the mini iPad we were using we had the church and the church would moving along well I don't know if I look at the specs for the iPad mini okay on apple.com they're using some magic I don't know what it is right yeah yes for sure yeah but if I look at the specs and I look for GPS it's only in the wi-fi in cellular models yeah I don't know what magic they're doing but it is correct at least according to apple specs so if anybody knows what magic they're doing I mean obviously mine was a very granular specific case but there are bunches of good reasons for I think to have cellular for sure oh the other one is my mother didn't buy wi-fi for her home her iPad is her only connection to the outside world she's 95 she does e-mail on her iPad and it wasn't worth 50-60 bucks a month to get wi-fi so she could e-mail that makes sense 15 bucks a month I could cut yep no that's the least expensive internet access and suits all of her needs yeah that's great I'm sorry I've talked way too much it's fun to have you back and it's nice to have your perspective on lots of things there's like four more topics that I want to ask you but we do need to like you know the band already started playing so I don't know what to do cut that thing off we will uh I still gotta figure out why the mixer goes into lock mode I should google for that cause I might be able to find an answer not a mixer the control surface usb control surface alright folks thank you so much for hanging out with us thanks for sending in all your tips and questions thanks for your feedback about everything that we do here John do you have any thoughts for them any places you'd like to send them anything you'd like to say my friend um Instagram I've seen myself on Instagram I think it's instagram.com mackeycap it is we're just at mackeycap on Instagram absolutely yeah yeah yeah so see us on Instagram you can follow us all on twitter he is John F. Braun he is pilot Pete I'm Dave Hamilton the show is at mackeycap just like it is on Instagram and at macobserver as well so I don't know what sort of signs Pete is making there we go I was trying to point today yeah it's a tricky thing for those of you listening in the car I was trying to point in the right direction it was trying to point but nothing happened though uh yeah alright thanks for hanging out with us and we are looking forward to seeing you next week so make sure you go check out all our sponsors all our deals at mackeycap.com slash sponsors that's where you can find the still active deals even from past sponsors we try and vet through that list about once a month but if you find anything on there it's not right let us know feedback on mackeycap thanks for hanging out thanks Pete thanks John thank you well John I know that Pete got us into this mess but who should get us out um I could you want to get us out? Get us out man and how do I get us out? I'm gonna tell everyone three important words and they are don't get caught