 The Mac Observers' Mac Geek Gap, episode 895 for Monday, October 18th, 2021. And welcome to the Mac Observers' Mac Geek Gap, the show where you send in your tips, your questions, your cool stuff found. We mash them all together. We string them into an agenda. We loosely follow the agenda with tangential outbreaks from time to time because, you know, that keeps it interesting and fun and keeps us on track by being off track. But the goal is, when we're on track, when we're off track, all of the time, the goal is that we each, every week we get together, that we each, each and every one of us, me, John, you, all of us, we each learn at least five new things every single time we get together. Sponsors for this episode are three new sponsors for us, gabby.com slash MGG, where you can, they've got this great little engine that will find you auto insurance without you having to do any of the work, which is awesome. We'll talk about that in a minute. Overbeats.com slash MGG, a delicious and healthy way to start your day. And I mean that. Like I've tried these things, but we'll talk more about it. And then custom shades from hunterdouglas.com slash MGG, where they're having a great season of style sale. And there's, these are shades you can control with your iPhone. Yeah, it's cool stuff. All right. So we will talk more about that in a minute. But for now, here in Durham, New Hampshire, I'm Dave Hamilton. And here in peripheral Connecticut, this is John F. Brown. How are we today, Mr. Jeff, Brian, above average, stellar. I like that. We have been getting above average response to our survey at mackeycup.com slash survey. So thank you all for filling it out. We are starting preliminary results are in. And one thing is clear and that is y'all want merch. So we will be making merch happen. We will have merch ahead. Well, ahead of the Christmas season, ahead of, you know, ahead of the holiday season, you will be able to get mackeycup merch, assuming suppliers can can deliver. But we're going to make it happen, John. Right. OK, they want merch. Yeah, I got my eye on somebody. OK, all right. Well, we want to we want to. Yeah, we've got some ideas. It's good. It'll happen. It's going to happen. All right. You know what else is going to happen? We're going to talk about some quick tips because that, you know, makes life fun. And I need to get to where I need to be in order to share quick tips with you. But the first one is from Pensacola, Craig. I love I'm often like all of us frustrated when Apple rolls out some new feature in, you know, iOS or Mac OS doesn't matter. And it's like, oh, I wish I could do more with this, right? And then over time, they often deliver the more, right? And that has happened in iOS 15. I didn't even realize it. And Pensacola, Craig says, full transparency. This tip partially comes from a listener of Allison's Nozilla cast. All right, great. Cool. We're all one community. So yeah, absolutely. It's great. He says, one big pain for me has always been when setting text to a larger size via settings, wouldn't it be awesome for some apps to support dynamic text sizing, but awful for others? Like I want it in messages, but I don't want it in safaris as well. The good news is iOS 15 now lets you set up some attributes. Text is one on a per app basis. One way to do this. And I think this was the one that was shared over in Nozilla cast is go to settings, accessibility. And under the general section, you will find per app settings and you can add apps there to make customizations for those that are not already on the list. He says, but that's the hard way. And here's the tip that I will add beyond. What has already been shared? He says, the easy way specifically for text size is to add text size to control center. Once you've done that, you can swipe into control center while in an app and then control the text size for that specific app. He says, the view is similar to iOS 14 with one additional control. You can set it for just the app you're in or for all apps. That's the easy way when using iOS 15. I like this. Yeah. OK, so I'm definitely adding adding that to iOS 15's control center on my phone. Yeah, because you're right. There are some apps where I would like it to be bigger and other apps where it's like, please know. And so you sort of had to, you know, make Sophie's choice, right? And pick one or the other. Now we don't have to. It's beautiful. I love it. Thanks, Pensacola Craig. Good stuff. You know where Pensacola Craig sent that, John? Um, Feedback at MacGeekab.com. That's right. Pensacola Craig sent that to Feedback at MacGeekab.com. That's a beautiful thing. You can send a feedback at MacGeekab.com too, just like Todd did, right, John? Exactly. And what did Todd send us? Well, here we go. I remember a long ways back that a listener asked about a way to import photos into the photos app on the Mac and keeping the finder folder structure in photos album slash folders. Back to Gary Rosenweig. Rosen's wig. Rosen's wig. Yeah, at MacMost. We just talked about him a couple of episodes ago. Yeah, he does great work over there. Yeah, yeah. Well, we'll link to it. Yes. In the show notes, there's a video that shows you the surprisingly robust photos import feature. So nice. That's great. So yeah, I guess it just got it now is part of the photos app to be able to do that. That's great. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Cool. Thank you, Todd. I love these quick tips. It's great. This is this is where we learn like this is how we get to learn our five new things. Listener Bill was having a problem and in it, he stumbled onto a quick tip. He said I had an old iPhone 5 go a bit haywire. It was on its charger, but only at one percent. I plugged it into a different charger and that helped. But then iTunes would no longer sink. It kept hanging at the final step. He says I progressively ended up going as far as a factory reset reset with no restore. But my iMac still treated it as the same iPhone with the same sync issues. How did I fix it? I ended up sinking it to another computer. Somehow that forced the iMac to treat it as a new slash different phone and sinking finally worked again. So that's really interesting that even after a factory reset, the Mac knew that it was something it should try to like I'm trying to figure out where the data is stored that would cause that would allow another computer to reset it. I mean, if you factor reset the iPhone, theoretically, that would have wiped out anything on the phone. So is there something in like your iCloud account that ties a computer to a phone or as a factory reset? Not quite a factory reset. Like these these are the things that inquiring minds want to know. I like the solution, though, like that should not be overlooked because that's great. Excellent. It's stuff, Bill. Thank you. I don't know. What do you think about that, John? Um, I don't know. I've I've never really had sinking problems with my phone. Sure. Well, you probably do sink your phone directly. Like I don't it's rare that I sink my phone directly to my computer, you know, via like cable or even Wi-Fi. I just sink with iCloud and and that's where my sinking happens. I have iCloud backups. Scheduled and then also iMazing. Oh, OK. I got my devices. Got it. Got it. And what about like when you want to put music on your phone? You don't use Apple music. So do you you have to sink that manually or not manually? But but locally, you have to sink that to your phone, correct? Yeah, but I don't really have much music on my my phone. Got it. Got it. Got it. All right. Yeah. Cool. Thank you, Bill. I appreciate it. It's good stuff. Hey, moving into the the Cool Stuff Found segment here, I found yet another third party app that is doing being used for vaccine and or test, you know, covid test tracking status. We talked about what are we talking about clear on a recent episode. We talked about that that way of putting your Vax card in your wallet. It looks like what did you say, John, that CES is going to use the clear app to do it, right? I think you correct. Yeah. So the clear app has venues, right, including CES, but also like, you know, sports events and all sorts of stuff in there. So the clear apps being used. And then I found another one called Bindle at join Bindle.com. There's no reason to join it unless you know you're going to an event. That the venue or the the event in some way uses it. But there's two theaters at least near us here. And we went to one the other night to see my friend of mine plays in this tribute band called Foreigner's Journey. And we went to went to see that the other night. And the venue was like, you can bring your proof, you know, you can even bring a picture of your proof on the phone. But it's way faster if you do it all in the Bindle app. And then all you have to do is show us the, you know, the screen of your phone and it'll, you know, it shows like a green check and there's like moving things kind of like, you know, so that you're not just taking a screenshot or whatever. It's a real time kind of thing. But but yeah, so there's yet another one. I'm curious, as I said, when we first talked about this, you know, which of these third party ways are going to be used and which are not. So it's going to be interesting. It's fascinating. Anyway, so I just figured I'd throw that out there that I'm actually seeing it in the wild that an app is being used. So. Because thus far up until now, any concerts or anything I've gone to, it's just been, you know, bring your card, bring a copy of your card or show us a picture on your phone of your card. Like that that was the first time that I've actually seen a venue, say, we accept the app, you know, and even in this case, prefer it because it's more efficient. Really? Yeah. Yeah. So I have yet. To I have yet. I have not yet had to present my proof to get in somewhere. Just I think that theater down the street from you, a friend of mine played there, the was it called the one theater or something? The one we walk by all the time by the train station in Fairfield. Oh, Fairfield Theater Company. Yeah. Yeah. I. Yeah. Yeah. That's it. Yeah. I think that one, at least for some events, requires vaccination because a friend of mine played there recently. And I remember seeing that that they they required that. So they have a lot of good events there, man. That I'm surprised you're not there more often. All right. Andrew has a cool stuff found for us, John. And it is for for users of Synology. He found this app called DS Manager Pro, which is a third party app for using and and managing your Synology disk stations. So it seems to do quite a bit more. It's got a Mac app, which is cool. And of course, iPhone and iPad apps as well. But you can sort of see what's going on. And you can even do some controlling of like logging certain users out and then changing some settings and things like that. Yeah, it is free with in-app purchases. And I think the in-app purchase is like 10 bucks to unlock everything I had it up before and now it's gone. So but I think that's that's about where it where it falls. So yeah, DS Manager Pro. And so obviously we'll put a link to it in the show notes. And you can you can you can go download it for yourself and check it out because, you know, freemium, we love it. Thank you, Andrew. Cool. Do you have any any cool stuff? I've got a bunch of cool stuff found to go through here. Do you have anything to add to the list yet for this week, John? No. OK, the next one comes from my friend, Billy, who once he wanted and found a way to store his music library in the cloud. So similar to what Apple Music Subscribers can do with iCloud Music Library, but he is not an Apple Music Subscriber and Google changed the way they were doing things, which is where he stored it in the past. Now it's all moved to YouTube and the cost structure wasn't attractive to him because he's just got tons and tons of his own music that he's ripped. And he found this thing, John, called iBroadcast at iBroadcast.com. You can if you've got a project iBroadcast.com, that's the link I'll put in the show notes that kind of explains a little bit of it. But it is it is your music library. You upload it, right? So it's not like it's not a streaming service in the sense that they have all the songs and and you just pay to do it. In fact, you don't have to pay them anything. You upload all your stuff. If you use the free account, you get there. They will stream or download and they do have iOS clients and they've got a Mac client for uploading and all of that good stuff and a Windows client and a Linux client. And the free version gets you streaming and downloading at one hundred and twenty eight K and then the premium version increases that substantially. And I think it's four bucks a month, three ninety nine a month for that. It's a relatively new service. It's growing. They're privately funded currently. So but it's a pretty cool, like great little thing to find. Of course, the other alternative, if one other alternative, not the is if you have a Synology Disk Station, you can put it all there. And then use Audio Station or even Plex or to play your music, you know, on your devices when you're when you're not around. So if you've already got a Synology Disk Station, that's the way I would do it. In fact, that is the way I do it. But if you want to put it in the cloud, then Project I broadcast is a great option. Yeah, so yeah, it's a good find. I like it. Pretty cool. Had you ever heard of that before, John? Negative. Yeah, same. Right. Yeah. A family member is heading to Italy for about six weeks. And so we needed to figure out what to do about cell service for that, you know, six week timeframe this winter. And I I pulled the Twitter hive mind and was turned onto a website called eSimDB.com where you go and type in the, you know, the country name and it will tell you all kinds of eSim providers for data. And you can sort by, you know, how many days you need it or the price per gigabyte. I I find that sorting by price per gigabyte is the best way to start this and then kind of filter it down to OK, well, you know, they're going to need 30 days, 30 days isn't quite enough, but maybe that's the right plan. You do that twice or whatever. And, you know, that there's services I never knew of because I don't live in Italy. Like I knew of Truphone and Truphone may well be the right answer. But there's also AirAllow, A-I-R-A-L-O and U-U-B-G and Orange. So and probably others, if I scroll down the list and start letting it get more expensive, like Mogo, eSim and things like that. So a great little resource for for this. And of course, eSim's make this way easier than it used to be because you don't have to like go and get a local sim the moment you step off the plane. You just do it with an eSim and you download the app in advance when you have control over things. And so but it is an interesting thing. I, you know, we've been talking about whether or not data a data only sim is enough. They're on Mint Mobile, which has roaming in Italy, but you you pay for it. And it's it's fairly expensive. That's sort of one of the tradeoffs of of Mint is you save work like as a family we're saving literally like, I don't know if it's thousands a year. But it's probably it's well over a thousand dollars a year. It's probably close to fifteen hundred for four of us. And but, you know, they don't have just built in baked in roaming like a, you know, like a T-Mobile does where you can, you know, roam for in a hundred different countries without doing anything different. But of course, you know, you're paying triple every month for that luxury. And if you need that luxury, then perfect, that's great. But for the one month you need it doesn't make sense to to buy it all the time. So, you know, so the question is, is data only going to be enough and I think the answer is yes with all of I mean, certainly iMessage is fine because that's just using data, you know, and then there's if you and then there's FaceTime, of course, for us Apple users. But there's also WhatsApp and, you know, Zoom and Skype and, you know, lots of other data based services, not database services, data based services and that can that can get you there, you know, so. And then and then maybe load up 20 bucks on there for the, you know, quarter a minute phone call that you might have to make occasionally here and there and you're covered. So it's in that way, it's way easier than having to get a local SIM with a local number and all of that good stuff. So. So anyway, that's if I thought eSimDB was a great place to start. But it seems like TruPhone is probably, well, I don't know. We'll see. We'll find out. I'll keep you posted as things progress. So I've never heard of eSimDB before. So I actually had to solve a Skype issue for a family member. OK, Mr. Brian, here's the thing left field. No, go ahead. Yep. Here's the tip. So my mom wanted to. Has been using Skype to to talk to relatives over in Germany. Because it's free. Yeah. But she tried recently and she was able to hear and see the other person. But the person on the other end. Could see but couldn't hear. OK, and it's sure. OK, what's up? Here's what I eventually figured out. So first off, I'm like, OK, well, update your your version of Skype. I think she had an old one. Sure. Here was the problem. Until she upgraded to the latest version of Skype on the Mac. All of a sudden it said, oh, yeah, by the way, I want permission to access the microphone. Apparently, the older version of Skype didn't know about this. Makes sense. But the newer version did. So that was the way to solve the problem. Yeah, Zoom is, you know, Zoom's been adding features left and right. And I find Zoom way better than Skype. I recommend to your mom and anybody that's doing like that kind of thing. Try out Zoom, you get 40 minute, you know, for the free account, you get 40 minute calls for free. And sometimes it'll even extend those for you. But anyway, Zoom, I think as of November 1st, is enforcing a an update schedule where you have to be using a version of Zoom that is no more than nine months old. And it's because of, you know, certainly things like this. That sounds like there was an API that that Skype chose not to use in the past. And then obviously did. Who knows how old her version of Skype was, right? But but with Zoom, you know, they're adding features left and right. And if all the clients are incompatible, those features get a little bit, you know, sideways. So it maybe it would be good for Skype to do that. I think it's a great idea, though, for you to enforce that policy upon yourselves. And I use I'm a big fan, as you all know, of MacUpdater. It's the only it's the the main way I find out about updates for apps on my Mac, including Mac App Store apps, because the app store doesn't always show me when an app needs an update. And this is true on all four of the Macs that I manage here in the house. It is it is routine at least once, maybe even twice a week. There will be an update to a Mac App Store app that if I go to the updates, you know, little whatever section tab or everyone call it Mac App Store, it's not there. It'll say you have no updates. And then I click from MacUpdater and it brings me to the, you know, the page in the Mac App Store for that app. And there's the little update icon. Like, yeah, when were you going to tell me about this? So MacUpdater is is a great thing. And I think it's like 10 bucks or something. So highly recommended. I'm a big, big fan because it just it's, you know, it it it checks everything. It's great. Love it. Love it. Love it. Love it. But yeah, keep your keep your video conferencing or your video chat apps up to date, for sure, for lots of reasons. Probably security, too, I would imagine. All right. I went to PEPCOM yesterday, John. We record this on Fridays, as you know, or as I think you folks know, live.MacGeekApp.com is where you can go and join us when we're recording. And you can go to MacGeekApp.com slash calendar to subscribe to our calendar that we use for when we have recordings scheduled so you can know that it's time to join us. You could also get the MacGeekApp app because that will get you get a push notification when we are recording live. So, you know, there's lots of different ways. But at PEPCOM yesterday, I saw actually I saw many things, but there's two I want to talk about. One is from the folks at Ampere. I think it's Ampere.shop, Ampere.shop. And they've made all kinds of great cool things over the over time. But what they've got now is a new product line that they are calling Dusk. And there are two products in the line, Dusk and Dusk Light. And these are smart sunglasses or, as they call them, app-enabled electrochromic smart sunglasses. They do a couple of things. They the dusk and dusk light. So it's 295 for the dusk and I think 195 for the dusk light. These are non-prescription sunglasses so far. They may, of course, add the option for prescriptions. But the thing that they both do is you can control the amount of tint of the sunglasses with a slider in your app. You can also set presets so that you can just tap it on the side. They kind of look like wayfarers, these glasses. They don't look overly bulky or like, you know, clunky or anything like that. They just look like pretty normal sunglasses. And if you don't know what wayfarers are, that's what Tom Cruise wore in Risky Business. And if you don't know Risky Business, then ask your parents. And the the that's basically all the dusk light does. The the non-light, the dusk also has sound capabilities with speakers and a microphone. So you can use them for calls, but you can also use them for you know, listening to music or podcasts or whatever. And of course, it's just sound coming out of the frame of the glasses. So you don't have anything, you know, sealing off your ears and blocking you from the surroundings, which could be a good thing. Of course, rewind back to last week. People like Mr. John F. Braun and pretty much any other human with ears will be able to hear your music if you are using these glasses because it's not directed into your ears. It's just directed into the air around them. So bear that in mind. But yeah, I thought that was pretty cool. I like those those folks. They you know, they're always doing interesting things over there at Ampere. So yeah, it's good. Thoughts on that, John? Did you check that out yesterday or not? Was that one you skipped over? I skipped that. Yeah, that's good. That's what I love about, you know, there were what, at least three of us from the Mac observer team there at PEPCOM, you, me and Jeff Butts. And I think there may have been others. I just didn't run into I didn't run into you in any of the the zooms. But I ran into Jeff and a couple of them. But, you know, I mean, it's like, you know, it's a four hour event or something. The second thing that I found there rewinds us back a little over a year. So when I mentioned this company called Thermosel that has these really effective mosquito repeller units, the ones that I was talking about last year, these little butane powered units. And you put like a little, a little pad in them that that the butane sort of heats up and then it it effervesces this. It's something that's based upon like chrysanthemum oil or I don't know something, but it keeps the mosquitoes away like it really works. They now have the Thermosel live L.I.V., which is a permanent. I mean, you can move it around and you can install it yourself, but it is meant to be permanently placed in your yard or, you know, around your patio or on your deck or whatever. And it's a system that is Wi-Fi controllable that does the same thing. It uses a slightly different method of repelling mosquitoes. It's still a you put a cartridge in there and it the cartridges are like forty nine bucks a piece and they last for like a hundred hours. But similar kind of, you know, I mean, the same effective thing at these. But they connect to each other and to Wi-Fi so that you can control with schedules and things like that. They expect to have them shipping in February. So ahead of the summer season, at least here in the United States. So and it's meant to be outside all the time. They're from they say Boston, but really they're from Bedford, Mass. I think is is where they are. So if they say it works all year round outside there, I mean, you wouldn't be using it in the winter, but you can leave it out in the winter as the point. And and it it survives and works fine the next spring and summer and fall. If it works there, then it didn't work pretty much anywhere. So it's pretty cool. I was stoked to see that. We might be tweaking things in our yard here and have a use for that. So excited. I don't know. Pretty good stuff, huh? Well, any any thoughts on any of that, Mr. Braun? No, I. Well, I saw a couple of things. OK, here are things that caught my attention. Sure. Yeah. Excuse me. So the first is from Verizon. It's the Verizon Stream TV. OK. OK. So it's a it's your it's a media streaming box. Oh, OK, so like an Apple TV or a Roku box or a fire stick or something like that. Exactly. Got it. Oh, OK. Yeah, I saw that. It looks like it's it's based on the Android TV platform, kind of like the TVO stream. Right. And this in the specs here. Yeah. So stream your favorite shows and movies with Android TV, Chromecast built in 4K, UHD. Voice remote with Google Assistant. So. Yep. OK, so they're throwing their hat in the ring. Yeah, they're throwing their hat in the ring and it's 4K Ultra HD. Right. And what's the price on it? Seventy bucks. OK. All right. Actually, it says when I went to their website, it says 60 bucks, but it says it was 70. And my pricing reflects a 14 percent savings, which I have no idea why I'm not a Verizon customer and I'm not logged in. So but yeah, that's cool. All right. Cool. And then here, let me link to this kitty was showing a combo network, networkable carbon monoxide and smoke alarm. So that's kind of neat. I have their older unit and it doesn't really network, but apparently the one that they just announced does. So. Interesting. All right. That's cool. Like like when you say network, there's there's two types of networks that that could happen with smoke alarms. One is the network in your house of of electrical cable that I think building code requires at least nowadays, requires them to all be synced together so that if one starts going off, all the rest of them know to go off. When you when they say networked in this regard, is it that type of network only? Or is it like Wi-Fi like a like a Nest protect or something? OK, cool. Both. Yeah. And yeah, both right. So I know what you're talking about. Yeah. My my it's weird because in my house, my upstairs smoke alarms are networked in that when one goes off, they'll all go off. Yep. But not the downstairs. I have a guess as to why. Well, when your house was built, similar to when my house was built, I guarantee you, you know, there was no I mean, my house is 50 years old in your house. I think almost double that, right? But the building code did not require smoke detectors to be networked. However, if you do any renovations, then you have to apply for a building permit and then get a certificate of occupancy. And those things require you to be up to snuff. So my guess is that the upstairs of your house was either turned from an attic into what you have or remodeled in some significant way at some point prior to you owning it. And they had to network the smoke detectors in order to get that CO from the building inspector. That would be my guess. I don't know. That's. And I say that based firmly on experience. So, yeah, it's always a always an interesting thing. So, yeah, what's this kiddie smoke alarm? Oh, they call it the smart smoke alarm. Oh, OK. All right. Cool. Cool. Nice. I like it. Fun stuff. Yeah. This is the time of year when all these fun things happen. It's great. We're supposed to have a pep common person in a couple of weeks, which I think I'm going to be able to make work to get there. It's like conflicts with like four other events that are happening. So, yeah, I might have to. I think I have to go down the night before and just stay in New York so that I can go to this like podcast industry event remotely during the day and from a hotel room and then go to, you know, PEPCOM because I wouldn't have time between that to get down to New York. So, yeah, it's a plan. That's what I think. I just got to decide if it's worth the hassle of going through all that to do it. But so anyway, folks, we are having this will come out on Monday, so you'll probably already have seen that we're doing a second show this week because I assume are you available to do that second show on Monday? I hadn't asked you the eighteenth after Apple's event. Cool. So we're doing it. There it is. You heard it here first. We will be doing a show after Apple's unleashed event. I there's an interesting thing about this, John, eight. Well, two interesting things. One is that it's on a Monday, which is has never happened, you know, hasn't happened in a long while. But I think it's because Google's having an event on Tuesday, right? So they needed to kind of, you know, do their thing. The other interesting part is that I got invited on the press list for this one. Now, that doesn't change anything for me. You you know, we all watch the same stream. It's just the timing of when you get the things. The press list comes out first at like whatever, you know, noon Eastern or one one Eastern. And then the other invites come out, you know, a few hours later when it makes it to Apple's main mailing list. I do not always get invited on the press list to events in person or remote. And so you can read into that with me, if you like, that you know, so I'm on the sometimes press event list, which is fine. Years ago, I gave up on trying to chase, you know, how to be on the different lists and all that stuff. But it is interesting that this is the first one in. There was one or two last year that I was on the press like list, but the ones this year, the WBC one and the one before that I wasn't on the press list. And so this tells me either that, you know, something happened internally and they reshuffled things and and it's there's no speculation to be had, or we could have fun and speculate that it means that this is definitely about the Mac and they wanted to make sure we were on the list. So I like going with the latter because I'm pretty sure it's going to be about the Mac and, you know, specifically about M1, you know, the next generation of Apple Silicon in hopefully a larger screen iMac and larger screen MacBook Pro that would be. And I, you know, I mean, I think obviously all the rumors are kind of pointing to that. So I'm excited about this one. You may have stuff to buy, John. Hmm. I know. It's good. Speaking of stuff to buy, I would love to talk about our three sponsors, if that works for you, my friend. Fantastic. All right. Hey, who doesn't love to live well, right? To be perfectly at ease in comfort and in style. We all do. And our sponsor, Hunter Douglas, can help you do just that with their innovative window shade designs with gorgeous fabrics and control systems that you can use, like with your phone and stuff so that they can be scheduled to automatically adjust to their optimal position throughout the day. You know, the way their shades diffuse harsh sunlight to cast a beautiful glow across the room, some of these pictures look amazing. I really want to check these things out. You know, the idea of being able to enjoy the view outside the window while protecting your privacy inside, right? 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That's hunterdouglas.com-mgg for limited time savings. This offer expires December 6th of this year, 2021. So go check it out. Our thanks to Hunter Douglas for sponsoring this episode. Listen, it's crazy how fast the prices of just about everything are rising. Gas, groceries, clothes, you name it. And all the experts are saying is that it's gonna get worse before it gets better. And you know, it's nice. We always hear look at all the ways that we can cut costs to save where we can. And our next sponsor, Gabby, is how we're gonna do that with auto insurance. Auto insurance, the shopping for it, it sucks. You know, if I get this, you get this. Well, good news. So does Gabby. That's why they do all the work for us. Things that would take days or weeks, Gabby does in minutes. Because Gabby, I went and checked this out. It's really cool the way they do this. It's super fast. 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Since I upgraded to iOS 15 on my iPhone, I realized that even if I was on Wi-Fi and my router was configured to use cloud-fared DNS, that my device is variable access sites that should have been prohibited. When I investigated, I realized that the culprit is the iCloud private relay. If you let the default of settings for the DNS in your Wi-Fi settings as automatic, iOS will use the private relays default DNS servers. Go there on your device to see the message on top. I have not yet investigated how to force things otherwise but it may be good to know if you expect that behavior and see it act another way. Yeah, that's interesting. I like that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, huh, it makes perfect sense because the whole idea behind private relay is that what you do on your phone and your Mac once we have it with Monterey is yours and no one, not even the people who administer your network should be able to see what's going on or control what's going on. So that, like, this makes perfect sense. The problem, of course, is when you want that control. So there are, you could disable private relay on your devices to do that. As a network administrator, you can also effectively disable private relay and I don't have it in front of me but there is a way to, what you do is you block lookups to, I think it was two Apple domains. You set them on your network to route to null or something to not look up and as soon as you do that, iCloud Private Relay will be like, I can't work on this network. Do you wanna go ahead and continue using this network without iCloud Private Relay or do you wanna try and use a different network? Which is a good, you know, that way the user's still aware but yeah, you might, you know, from a parental control standpoint, you might wanna block iCloud Private Relay. So I'm gonna, yeah, I can't remember but I'm gonna put it in the show notes and we'll put a link in there as to how to block iCloud Private Relay but yeah, yeah, I think it's at developer. It's one of the articles at developer.apple.com. It's titled, I think I've got the right one. Prepare your network or web server for iCloud Private Relay. Yeah, if you, the fastest and most reliable way to tell users that you don't want, that you wanna block access to Private Relay is to return a negative answer from your network's DNS resolver, preventing DNS from resolving and it's for two things. It's mask.icloud.com and mask.dash2.icloud.com. So yep, all right, so we do have the answer. I like it when we do that, it's good. Okay, interesting, yeah, makes sense though. Like that's, yeah, that's how it goes, yeah, yeah, yeah. All right, Jim had a, do we have more on that one, John? No, okay, cool. Jim had a question about Private Relay and really it can be boiled down to, could you please explain how does Apple's private, iCloud Private Relay work? How effective is it in hiding your ID and location as compared to a VPN and what other benefits of any does it provide? So I will link to my article that I put together right after WWDC when I dug into all this stuff. But iCloud Private Relay, you know, it's similar to a VPN. In some ways it's way more secure than a VPN, albeit with less granular control over how things are working. So it's different. A VPN, generally speaking, you connect to your device, creates a secure tunnel to some computer that is a VPN server out there somewhere, right? And this computer could be owned by Nord or ExpressVPN or it could be owned by you, right? Your router or your, if you have a distillation or something, it could act as your VPN server. So it creates a secure tunnel to that computer and then that computer is the one that goes out. So if you were on a VPN and you visited www.macobserver.com, you would actually connect to the VPN server. The VPN server would connect to www.macobserver.com and then it sits in the middle and passes this traffic back and forth. And Mac Observer only sees the requests coming from the VPN, not from wherever you actually are. But the VPN server could know or does know who you are or where you are, your IP, it knows some things about you and depending on how it's set up, it could know more or less. But it certainly knows some things about you in that moment and it also knows what you're visiting in that moment. So there is the potential for a, you know, some sort of attack if that were compromised, right? And lots of VPN providers go out of their way to make sure that they aren't logging any of that data so there's no place to go get it after the fact, which is great. In fact, most paid VPN providers do. The free ones tend to gather that information so that they can sell it and make some money. With Apple's private relay, there is a third, a second, there is another device put in. I don't know if we call it a second or third device, but you connect to Apple. Your device connects to Apple. Apple's server connects to some other server and then that other server is the thing that would, in this instance or in this example, connect to macabserver.com. And Apple doesn't, your request is encrypted up to the server that's gonna then go connect to apple.com. So Apple doesn't, to macabserver.com, I'm sorry. So Apple passes that along, but in an encrypted way that they cannot see. So they know who you are, but they don't know where you're visiting. And then the server that's doing the visiting on your behalf knows where you're visiting, but doesn't know who or where you are. So there's this split of available information that truly makes it impossible to do that. But it is still this secure tunnel just like a VPN. And so, yes, in that sense it acts like a VPN and it makes total sense with listener Steve, but you just explained John where Steve was seeing DNS queries, being resolved by a different DNS server and he's like, yeah, of course. So hopefully that explains how iCloud Private really works. And you can turn it off on a per network basis, which is certainly a thing you may choose to do, maybe on your home network or of course, as if a corporate network blocks it. And I've seen some networks block it already. Have you seen any, John? I think the network at the university here blocks it. But I mean, it makes sense. Like they need to be able to control what's happening with their network. And you are a guest on their network. If you don't like it, don't use it. It's really simple, so yeah, so cool. Any more on that one, John? Nope. Okay, all right. Who's next here? Is Everett next? Are we gonna, you wanna read Everett or shall I play Everett? Yeah, he gave us the audio. Let's use it, I'm with you. Hello, John, Dave and hopefully Pilate Pete. I just wanted to send you a quick note about the custom email domain option for iCloud Plus and my experiences with it. The issue that I'm currently running into is that I have previously organized my email by what email it was sent to. For an example, if it was sent to Everett at mydomain.com, it would be placed neatly into my inbox. But if it was sent to Amazon at mydomain.com, it would be sent to the Amazon box. And so on and so forth with many different retailers as well as uses. So examples like ads.com would go directly to my spam folder. So you can probably imagine my dismay when I found out that iCloud Plus only allows for three aliases per user per domain as well as a maximum of five domains and no way to expand upon that. So unfortunately, iCloud Plus's custom domain support does not allow me to cancel my Microsoft 365 subscription. So thank you for allowing me to rant and have a great rest of the show. Yeah, huh, okay. I mean, like, what do we say? The first little quick tip about the text sizing. There's things when Apple rolls it out, I want more than sometimes later we get the more. So this may become one of those things. It wouldn't surprise me, right? You know, so was there more to it than that, John? I thought, I thought he had written more. He said, yeah, yeah, yeah. He added in the written part of it. He says, they also don't allow for a plus designation like Gmail, which is a quick tip we've done before where if you have, you know, whatever, davidgmail.com, which is not me. Dave Hamilton at gmail.com is me, but it is such a useless address because so many other people think they have it that it's almost useless to me. I still keep it though with an auto responder on it, saying you didn't reach the Dave Hamilton you're looking for. Anyway, I digress. So Dave Hamilton at gmail.com does go to me essentially. Dave Hamilton plus MacGeekab at gmail.com also goes to me, right? So it's this on the fly and it could be Dave Hamilton plus blah, blah, blah at gmail.com also goes to me. That like Gmail allows you to do that on the fly so that you can create essentially custom inbound addresses for yourself to do the kind of compartmentalization that Everett was telling us about. And iCloud, you know, custom domain, iCloud plus custom email domains also don't allow that. So yeah, maybe they'll get there. I mean, it's new, right? And what they're offering, John, I think is probably more than what, you know, let's say 90% of the people would need. I don't know, maybe less. If you're doing a custom domain, you like that, that sort of puts you into power user camp already. You know what I mean? Like, yeah, huh. I recommend everybody does custom domain, by the way, so that when you change providers, you can just take your, you know, your email doesn't have to, it doesn't have to be, you don't have to mess with it. Your email is just you, not, you know, you at your provider.com or you at your company.com because, you know, those two things can change. So unless you own the company, I guess, well, actually it's even that could change, right? If you were to sell a company or something. So anyway, yeah, yep, yep. So avoid headaches, use a custom email domain that is like yours personally. That's my advice. And iCloud is a great way to get started with that, right? iCloud Plus, because they do make it easy. But now you know the limitations. I don't know, what are your thoughts on that? No. No. Do you, you don't use a custom domain for you. I mean, obviously you have your Mac observer and Mac Geek app addresses, but you don't have a, like your own. No. No, hmm, hmm, and curious. I'm curious how many of you out there, let us know feedback at macgeekapp.com. How many of you out there are using a custom domain for that reason? Not, I mean, obviously if you have your own business or, you know, your work for someone else, you know, you're gonna almost certainly be using that. But I'm curious how many people out there are doing it. All right. One last thing on iOS 15 comes from listener Greg. He says, there's a great new feature for recovery options in iOS 15, it's iCloud Data Recovery Service. It's an interesting service, and it's, you can look it up at apple.com, they have a support article about iCloud Data Recovery Service. iCloud secures your data in the cloud by storing it in encrypted format. If you forget your password or device passcode, iCloud Data Recovery Service can help you decrypt your data so you can regain access. They, and they talk about a few of the different ways that you can do this. And they talk about some things like keychain, health data, and a few others that use end-to-end encryption that is not able to be decrypted via the iCloud Data Recovery Service because only you can access that. However, they say to make sure that you can recover all of your data, you can also set up an account recovery contact or use a recovery key. Either of these methods will give you additional ways to recover your data, including that, which is end-to-end encrypted. But of course, as we all know, if you lose the key, well, then you have a problem. So Greg asks, he says, I know I can store the recovery key in one password, but if I get locked out of my devices, then I may not be able to get at the recovery key. Also, I can store the key in a text document and make sure an encrypted sparse disk on the Mac and make an encrypted sparse disk on the Mac and store it there. But the message that it shows before enabling that gives me pause. It says, are you sure you wanna create a recovery key? If you lose your recovery key and can't access your devices, Apple won't be able to help you regain access to your account or your data. To your account or your data. Seems like, from Greg, he says, it's better to add a recovery contact instead and be interested in your thoughts. Yeah. As I was going through it, I had that sort of thought of beware the recovery key because once you enable that, it's the only way you can get your data back. And if you lose the key, curtains, right? And so it's the trade-off between convenience and security. Recovery contact seems better, but what happens if you lose access to them, or you have a falling out with them, then what happens, right? I mean, like, these are, there is no one answer to these things. It's just one of those things, like we often do here on the show. It's like, okay, eyes wide open, make the decision and know what you've made. I think I'm pretty comfortable with recovery keys. I have a lot of things that require me to use recovery keys. And I do, I store them in one password. And then for some of them, I store them elsewhere and I will leave it at that to keep things obscure. And I also store my one password, password elsewhere so that I can get into that. And so that my family, if something were to happen to me, could get into that. One thing that I've heard recommended is if you have like a one password shared family account is for everyone to store their one password, password in a shared family vault. Obviously that requires trusting the family that you're sharing this with because they have access not just after something happens to you, but also at any time they could decrypt your one password data. But as long as you're okay with that, it makes life way easier because you can, if you need to get into someone's vault, you can just get in as long as you're one of the four. So it's, I mean, obviously everybody's got to protect that data and you need to have some trust there. But if that works for you, that's a super easy way to sort of do an end around on all of this, including Apple's recovery key. So I haven't set up a recovery key yet, John, but I probably will, have you? No. No, all right. Okay, will you? Maybe. Maybe. Well, I mean, what are your thoughts on it? I haven't really looked into it. Well, I mean, we just talked about it. Like what, like after this, like where, what leads you towards maybe or not maybe? Like what are the, what are the thoughts that are swimming? Not many. Not, yeah. All right. What do you have thoughts on next, my friend? You wanna, you wanna, you wanna, so in the last episode, we asked a question and many, many, many of you came to our rescue, Joel, Dan, Bill, Jeremy, Dale, Tim, Mike, and as John is about to share, Stephen. Or Stefan. Oh, it could be Stefan. Yeah, no, you might be right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Fair. And thank you, everyone. So, I just listened to episode 894 where listener Mark asked how to enter something in Excel that looks like a time such as 12 colon 34 without having Excel automatically change the cell to a data time format or date time format. There's actually a way to tell Excel not to mess with what you enter into a cell. The way you do that is by starting the entry with a apostrophe or a single quote, I think, right? Yes, right. The single, the thing next to the return key on most Apple keyboards, yeah. Yes. Yeah, the one next to the return key. So if you type in a single quote, 12 colon 34, it tells Excel to store the contents exactly as you have entered them. I hope this helps. Yeah. And, you know, John, I tested this not only in Excel, but also in LibreOffice, which is the free Excel clone that I use on my Mac, the office clone, really, that I use on my Mac, which is fantastic, by the way. I know we've talked about it on the show before, so great to be able to run Excel without, you know, paying for Microsoft Office if you don't need to. It works there. It works in numbers. It works in Google Sheets, you know, the web Google Sheets thing. And it also works in Synology Drive, which has, it's like, you know, clone of that same sort of thing. So this is a universally, at least as far as I could tell from, you know, Dave's point of view, but I tried to go pretty wide with it and it tested out exactly the same everywhere. If I put in, I tried it with 1444 because I wanted to see what it did to the time. And yeah, sure enough, if I just typed in 14, 44, it, you know, and I looked back at it, it was 2 44 PM. But if I did apostrophe 14, 44, it just stayed as 1444, which is great. So I can't believe I lived this long without knowing that Excel slash spreadsheet trick. So yep, it's good. All right, what else do we have? We have time. This is good. You want to take us to Mark quick? I thought was a, it's probably nothing that anybody will ever help anyone, but it's super interesting. Well, you never know. You never know. So Mark says, crazy as it sounds, disabling the screensaver on my 2020 MacBook Pro, running Big Sur, fixed my built-in keyboard issue with extra spaces and accent characters mentioned in 8.94. And he says he found this solution on the internet because other people had the same problem. That that's the weird, like, that's the most surprising part to me is that, like, why is this an actual solution? It's crazy. It's a bug. Yeah. Or a feature. Yeah, well, I'm curious if everybody was, were you all using the same screensaver? Like, what's the, why is this a thing? I'm flabbergasted. I don't get the connection between screensaver and keyboard input weirdness. Right, like, your screensaver is not running when you're typing on the keyboard almost by, and maybe that's it. Like, is it watching to know? Okay, so let's think about this. Your Mac is gonna, if you have a screensaver enabled, it needs to know when you've stopped engaging with your Mac, right? In order to know when to turn on the screensaver. And so something about that must be monitoring keyboard input as well as, you know, mouse input, and those would be the two main things. So maybe, okay, all right, this is less detached than I initially thought, but even still, like, how is this a bug? I don't know. I guess they're, you'd say that a lot about a lot of bugs. Fun. All right, let's go to Lauren, John. You're on a roll here, man. So keep on truckin', if you don't mind. Ah, all right. So Lauren, there we are. Hold on, hold on. All right, hi, John and Dave. I'm possibly Pilot Pete. Thanks for the podcast, okay? You're welcome. I'm always excited when it comes through my podcast app. Well, so are we. I remember a while ago- It means everything worked. I remember a while ago, y'all had talked about some OBD2 devices for your cars, and I was wondering if you could give me your recommendations on those. Thanks for always making sure that I learn new things every week. So I have one, Dave, believe it or not, I still have the box. I got an OBD2 scanner from CarMD, and the label on the box says, yeah, come see us at MapWorld Expo 2010. You know what, John? I believe it when you tell me you still have that box. It's one of the things I love about you. Yeah, unfortunately it looks like they don't do consumer anymore. So, buddy just wanted to mention that. But then what's funny, Dave, somebody must be looking over my shoulder because I was flipping through Instagram, and all of a sudden got an ad for an OBD2 scanner for free. Well, that sounds good. Well, I had to pay 99 cents for shipping, but all right. Okay. And they have various offers, but it's fixd.com. Okay. And apparently they've been doing this for a while. So I ordered it, checked out the software, but it seems like a good basic OBD2 is on board diagnostics, just if you're wondering what that stands for. Right, right. So this is like a Bluetooth-able little dongle that you plug into your car's OBD2 port, OBD2 port, sorry. And then you have like an app on your phone or something that you use to... Yeah, exactly. Yeah, okay. So similar to what CarMD did years and years ago. All right. Yeah, and it's kind of neat. So there's a serial number on the device itself, and when you run the app, it's like, yeah, show me the device. And it then reads the serial number and then you get a link between the two. So that was kind of neat. So that's one that looks affordable. I'm not sure exactly how you'd get the free deal, but it looks like it costs about 20 bucks. So it doesn't break the bank. Right, right, right. Then I got another ad, Dave. It's like, everybody's looking over my shoulder, man. You need a cloud private relay, man. Yeah. Yeah. Actually, you know, I don't mind. So, you know, every now and then you'll get a prompt on iOS saying, hey, are you okay with me tracking you? And I'm like, okay. John, that has nothing to do with this. We've had this conversation before, and I want to help you too, because I want to make sure people aren't misunderstanding this. Okay. When iOS asks you, like when you go in on your phone and go to settings, privacy, tracking, and you have the thing that says, allow apps to request to track, what they are asking is for that app to be able to track your activity in other apps and websites. So like the things that show up on Instagram are because your IP address was used to do a search and then they just match that to your IP and off they go. But this gets a whole lot creepier. Like, you know, it's not, this is things that go well beyond the scope of that app. Right? So I would be very cautious about allowing things. The example that we used the last time that you brought this up was Redbox, where you said, oh, I want Redbox to be able to track me so that it knows when I'm near a Redbox. That's not this, that's location tracking. And it's very different than allowing Redbox to see what you're doing when you're on Facebook or what you're doing when you're in your email app. Or right, like those, that's the, in my opinion, overreaching thing that Apple is very much helping us to protect against. So I just wanted to make sure people weren't misunderstanding what this is. I have found no apps where turning on the tracking or turning off the tracking limits my experience in the app, you know, apps can have full functionality for their own realm without being able to see what I'm doing in other apps. I have it off for all of them. I have it set to ask me, because I'm always curious which apps are going to ask to do it. And, you know, like an app like ParkWiz, why does ParkWiz need to track me in other apps? That's, there's no benefit to me for that. There might be a benefit to someone for that, but it ain't me. So yeah, yeah. So just be aware, I'd like to make, because I know it's a confusing thing and I'd like to make sure people understand. So anyway. Thank you. You're welcome. Yeah. And then I did some more surfing, Dave. And then I found another one that does something that I had never heard of called CarCoding. Okay. And the device, so it's an OBD2 reader, but it also lets you access hidden features in your car. Oh. MyCarly.com is the device. And, you know, all of a sudden I realized, so I've noticed around town, Jeep's driving around and they have LEDs on the front and the color wasn't yellow. It was like blue or red. And I'm like, how did they do that? I think this is how they do that. Oh, interesting. Okay. So, so yeah, so you can kind of hack your vehicle with this one. Oh, that's interesting. Oh, okay. All right. I like this. Huh. Take back control over your car. Look at that. Interesting. You put in the brand of your car and then it starts to, you know, narrow down to what you can do. And I'm like, oh, this is fascinating. All right. This is great. I'm gonna put that over here so I save it and we don't lose it. It seems like there's something in the air because Chris Parker posted on Facebook. He was an Apple engineer for a while. I don't know what he's doing right now. But anyway, he posted on Facebook asking, what's the best, you know, OPD gadget for reading codes and, you know, that sort of thing. And as you might imagine, you know, a former software engineer at Apple has some good geeky friends. And so there were lots of things suggested. I put these two in the thread, John, now so that they are there. But there were three. One is the, how much is that my Carly thing? Do you know? Was that made clear? I'm looking at prices. Oh, you got to pick, you got to pick your car first and see prices. Come on. Okay. So somewhere, somewhere between 80 and 130 depending on what features you get and want. Okay. Great. So just a, you know, level set for everybody. One that was mentioned is called the Blue Driver which is available on Amazon for 120 bucks. And this is one that folks seem to like. It lets you get more, you know, deeper, deeper than a lot of the sort of, you know, more general scanners will do. There was also the Autel, A-U-T-E-L AutoLink AL319 which does not use your phone. It is its own standalone plug it in. It has a little, you know, it's got a cable that goes from the, you know, the OBD2 plug to this little unit. It's about the size of, you know, like a voltmeter or something and it kind of has that look to it too. And then you can see and reset the codes and things like that, which can be super handy. Being able to reset those codes if you have an engine fault can, I mean, you got to hopefully know a little bit about what you're doing, but it can be the thing that sort of gets you back on the road at least temporarily. And then one called ScanGauge which is a dashboard based OBD2 device that shows you all kinds of things in real time and sort of more permanently on your dash. So it's, you know, it's built for installation in your car and uses OBD2 as its sort of path in and out. So yeah, lots of these things. I'm not sure that one I don't have a price on. The Auto Link, the sort of standalone one is like 30 bucks. So, you know, there you go. This one is one, the ScanGauge ranges from 170 to 240 which makes sense. I mean, it's got its own little screen and, you know, it fixes permanently in your dash and that sort of thing. So yeah, fun. Sadly, my vehicle does not have OBD2. Well, it sounds like it's time to get a new vehicle so that you can test these things for the show, John. That sounds like a tax write off to me, man. Hey, you know, there you go. You check with your CPA, of course, as I am not one. I prove that regularly. Could be, but my car does have OBD, but some call it OBD 1.5. Okay. And I figured out how to activate it. So there's a data connector in my car and if you short two pins in the connector, it all of a sudden starts flashing lights on the dashboard and if you have the magic decoding chart, you can tell what it means. Sure. Sure. Oh, that's good. Oh, that's good. Paying versus OBD. I mean, you know, I'd like to have OBD. So yeah, no, I guess I'll have to. It's time. Yep. Yep. That's going to be the thing, folks. That pushes it over the edge. That's also the thing that pushes us over the edge. This episode is over. I mean, we'll say goodbye. We're not just gonna, you know, ghost you. We'll be here next week. In fact, we'll be here on Monday again after Apple's unleashed event. We will unleash an episode with our thoughts and reactions. So yeah, it'll be fun. Hope you'll join us and you can live.mackykeb.com. We I put it in the schedule, I think for 3 p.m. Apple's events, Apple's 3 p.m. Eastern. Sorry. Apple's event starts at 1 p.m. Eastern. We will be here shortly after the event ends. So it might be 3 p.m. If their event goes, you know, till whatever 232.45, but it might be earlier than that too. So you get the hot, hot take from us. We try to be reasonable about it. We might not be though. We might be totally gaga. We might have to like go order lots of computers and then go do our thing. I missed that last time, right? Like I missed ordering my iPad. Thankfully, it's still a right. Love that iPad mini. That's great. All right. You got anything else to say to him before we shuffle off for this particular episode? I don't think so. Okay. What about you? Thanks for, oh, go ahead. But yeah, I mean, you know, for always I like to say thank you. So thank you for listening. Thanks for sending in all your great stuff. I mean, this is what keeps this show going. We've been doing this 16 and a half years and you started participating on episode three simply because we didn't ask you in episode one. We did in episode two. And then, you know, episode three was where you, you shined and you've been shining ever since. So like you really are the reason that the Mackie Keb community exists because you are the Mackie Keb community. But you ask us all these great questions. Yes, we have to go and do some research and figure things out and, you know, call through it all and make sure everything is, you know, good, but you help with that too. It's fantastic. We love you for that. So thank you. Make sure to go check out our sponsors. Of course, Mackie Keb.com sponsors just re updated that page. So all the deals are current as of like two days ago or something like that. So that's always a good thing. But of course, the sponsors that were in this episode Hunter Douglas.com slash MGG super beat the ETS.com slash MGG and Gabby G.A.B.I.com slash MGG. So go check all those out. Check out Mackie Keb.com sponsors. Thanks to all of our premium members and Mackie Keb.com slash premium. And yeah, have a good one. Have fun. Enjoy your, your day, your week, your weekend, your evening, your morning, whatever it might be. And while you're doing that, John, you, you too. Really, this goes for all of us is don't get caught. May.