 Welcome to Mac Geek Cab episode 913 for Monday, February 7th, 2022. Welcome to Mac Geek Cab, the show where you send in your tips, your questions, your cool stuff found. We share all of those things, including some tips and cool stuff found and sometimes some even questions of our own. We answer your questions. We try to get answers to our questions. We share your tips. We do it all because we want to each hit our goal, we have a system in place to ensure that we each learn at least five new things every week or your money back. Sponsors for this episode include Mac Update or wear coupon code MGGQ1 at corecode.io slash MGG saves you 10% on your order. The Jordan Harbinger show, which we will talk about a great show. It's kind of like Mac Geek Cab for the rest of your life, informative, making you aware of great stuff. Dock.com slash MGG where you can sign up for free and find your next doctor right there and trade at drinktrade.com slash MGG where you can even learn to like coffee like I have because they have some delicious coffee. We'll talk more about that. You get 20 books off your first three bags at drinktrade.com slash MGG. We'll talk more in depth about each of them a little bit later. For now, here in warm Durham, New Hampshire, I'm Dave Hamilton. And here in rainy Fairfield, Connecticut, this is John Frodd. And here in warmer and sunny Daytona Beach, Florida, pilot Pete, thanks for having me, guys. Thanks for flying to Daytona for us, Pete. We appreciate you balancing the temperatures out that someone had to do it. Thanks. Yeah, we appreciate that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, it's it's neither raining nor snowing here today. It is but it is precipitating. It's spitting ice on me when I go outside. So we have like this cake. It rained all night, so we're going to have a nice layer of of like a sheet of ice. And then we got some snow. So there'll be the snow sandwich in the middle and then with like an icy crust on top. So yeah, it's going to be really nice out there. Let's do some quick tips. Shall we? Shall we warm up with, you know, with with some of those teaching us learning things sound good? All right, Ben is up with our first quick tip. He says, I love this. I had no idea this is the beauty of the quick tip in messages on Mac OS. There is a tap back last message command in the edit menu with the keyboard shortcut of command T after invoking tap back with the command or a long press on a message. You can then use numbers one through six to select among the six responses instead of having to click one. That means if you're in messages typing back and forth with someone and you want to like love their last message or thumbs up it or whatever, you don't have to jump to the mouse or the trackpad. You do command T and then use the numbers on your on your keyboard to select the responses from left to right. And it will just do that to their most recent message. I tested it. It works. I had no idea that this was there. Thank you, Ben. It's this is awesome. Like perhaps my favorite tip of the right. I mean, there was a reason I put it first. Yeah, I couldn't. I couldn't help it. Yeah. All right, next up is Andrew with another, you know, these are those things, another tip he says, if you're in the camera app and you would like to change between the options, the types of things that the camera app is doing, video, photo, portrait, et cetera at the bottom, you can just tap the name of it on the, you know, on the screen and it'll jump right to it. You can also swipe them back and forth on the bottom of the screen. But as Andrew continues, did you know that you can also swipe higher up on the screen instead? So you can swipe like just in the middle of the screen back and forth and it will switch from photo to video to portrait and, you know, all of the other different modes that whatever your phone's camera has. Pretty good tip. I like it. These are good. It works. It does. Yeah. It does. All right. More like any thoughts on these tips or am I just rolling? I'm rolling. Oh, brother. Okay. So good, man. All right. Those are both awesome. I use, um, I use mail for, you know, Apple's mail app on my, on all of my Macs and on my iPhones. I was noticing on one of my Macs that, you know, and you get like this is, this is how muscle memory is. I got to the point on one Mac where anytime I wanted to know what address someone sent their message to, like, because I have many different email addresses that come to me. And sometimes I like to know, especially right now, trying to wean myself off of the macobserver.com domain name. I like to know what address something, uh, you know, came into and on one Mac, I found myself constantly going up and tapping the little drop down carrot, like the reverse carrot, whatever that is next to the message name so that I could see the list of my addresses and I look for the one with the checkbox on it. Like, wait, why am I doing this on my laptop and nowhere else? What's the difference? And so I started to pay attention instead of just going with the flow. And I realized on all of my other Macs, I see not just my name, but my name and the address right there in the header, uh, block of the message, like, okay, there's a setting somewhere. And indeed there is, uh, in mail that will either show you the name and email address or just the name, uh, of, of both you and the, the people who sent it to and anybody on the, you know, CC list or anything like that. So I have unchecked use smart addresses and that way I get to see the addresses that I'm sending to and, and getting mail, you know, into and all of that stuff. You know, helpful. I love it. Yeah. Yeah. Uh, listener, John, I'm just going to blast through these quick tips, guys. If you're not going to stop me because I love them and I know people like them quick, uh, listener, John says, um, he was having trouble getting his, um, staying logged in on certain websites and just issue weird issues and we started digging into it and I was like, this sounds like a private relay thing because that would, you know, if you're, when you log into a website, sometimes not all websites are like this, but sometimes not only do they store what would be called a session cookie on, on your computer that says this is who they are. I've authenticated them. Here's the thing only for this domain, et cetera, et cetera. Right. It's all secure and, and, and all good. But on their server, they might also store a matching, we'll call it a cookie, even though it's maybe just a database entry and in that, uh, in that entry, they store, you know, the same ID that they've given you so that there's some handshaking that goes back and forth and also the IP address that you came from. And if you're using private relay or things like that, not a VPN, it can screw that up. Or if you're like me, like my new fiber connection, my IP address changes twice a week and it drives me crazy because I'll go log in somewhere and it's like, oh, you're logging in from a new location. It's like, no, my butt's in the same place it was yesterday, but let's go ahead and do the little authentication. It's fine. Uh, he noticed that the limit IP address tracking option is now in the network preferences pain. So you have two places to, to control private browsing. One is in the, uh, iCloud preferences and then the other is now in network preferences for your specific network. So you go into system preferences, network, and then select your network and it will be there. Uh, it did then the option is limit IP address tracking. These are two related things. Private relay is the entirety of it, right? Uh, limit IP address tracking is just for known trackers in, uh, mail and Safari mail messages and on, on Safari website. So you could not be using, uh, iCloud private relay, but still be using limit IP address tracking and that only impacts the little tracking beacons, the Facebook cookie, the Google analytics stuff, all of those things that are embedded on the web pages that, that you visit. Uh, however, as listener John noticed, some of those things, uh, are the, are the engines that are actually tracking, you know, you for the authentication. So for his purposes, he turned it off. I thankfully, I have not had issues with that. I tried it off. It didn't matter. My connection is the issue, but, but I can see where it's just good to know that that's yet another place. If you're troubleshooting, that's where you can turn it off. So have you guys had any, uh, any trouble with, with the, uh, IP address tracking or iCloud private relay? Pete, you, I mean, you've been traveling a bunch. Do you use, do you leave that on and just let it roll? Yeah, I do. I do. I haven't any issues. No issues. Yeah, that's good. It's supposed to be, it's supposed to be just seamless to all of us. Yeah. Yeah. It's good. Yeah. My iCloud private relay is off, but my network is doing, uh, but, but the, the, the, the other setting is on. So I guess that's, no, that, that, honestly, if I were setting things up for someone at home, what you have, John, makes sense to me, right? Because you're, you're on your network and you can set these preferences on a per Wi-Fi network basis, right? So you, and of course in the, you can set them for Ethernet on and off too. And I, like that makes sense to me that you would not have private relay on at your house. You might choose to, like there, there are reasons to it, but like even if you're going to use it on your laptop when you're out and about having it off at home, but still using the limit IP address tracking at home, like I think that's the best of both worlds, which is, I presume, why Apple gave us the, you know, those two options separate from one another. Yeah, makes sense to me. All right, moving on. Yeah. I got one more quick tip. Then we got some questions, uh, talk about a couple of our sponsors after this quick tip. But Javier shares a fantastic tip with us. Uh, we were talking about in 902 was sort of when we began the conversation about keyboards in general. And Javier says, you know, on the subject of keyboards, he says, I highly recommend if you're using a wireless keyboard that you keep a wired backup somewhere nearby. Because sometimes when you boot your Mac, some third party wireless keyboards do not sync up with your Mac in time to do any of the startup key command combinations where you might need to go into single user mode or recovery mode or any of those things. And or if you're Mac's having a Bluetooth problem, obviously it's not going to connect at all. So having the ability to plug in a keyboard. Now a lot of wireless keyboards also can be plugged in and used wired. So in that case, the only backup that you need is simply a cable. But bear that in mind, uh, at least think about what you would do if you needed to do that ahead of time so that you're not in that moment of troubleshooting where you're like, oh crap, how do I do this? And then maybe you can't or maybe you need to like literally go out and buy a different keyboard. So Apple's keyboards, most of them you just you can just plug in. That's how you charge them anyway. But most of them, the newer ones are that way. So and Brian, 8944 in our chat room at live.MacGeekup.com shares that he would recommend the same for mice as well. I agree. Some sort of wired or wire a bull pointing device. I know I have that problem. I have a magic trackpad two in my office that I love. And occasionally and it's Bluetooth, you know, occasionally if I have my phone in the wrong spot or some device in the wrong place or whatever, it starts getting super janky and I just have a lightning cable there that that I could plug my phone into. I rarely do, but it's there for whatever I need. And more often than not, it's like, oh, time to plug in the trackpad. And as soon as I plug it in, everything's fine. And, you know, it just smooth and all that. So yeah. Yeah, I don't I don't have issues that the Logitech. So I have the the Logitech solar keyboard. OK. And it comes with this. You've probably seen this, but it comes with this thing called a unifying receiver. So it's not Bluetooth. It's doing its own RF thing. But I've never had issues that don't know what you're talking about. Sometimes, you know, the computer doesn't catch the, you know, you know, going into recovery and stuff like that. Yeah. Yeah, you're right. The because I had a Logitech wireless keyboard for a long time up until, you know, whatever that was right around show nine oh two. When I started, when I decided I need to move on from this keyboard that's, you know, 15 years old or something. And it was like yours. It had that yeah, unifying receiver, whatever it is, a dongle that hung off my Mac that then spoke to the to the keyboard and a mouse if I were to use their mouse. And you're right. Those are ready to go the moment your Mac starts because your Mac isn't pairing with it. The thing pairs with itself and it USBs into your Mac. So your Mac thinks you've got a wired keyboard, which is great. I did have weird problems, though, that was especially sensitive if my phone was in the wrong spot. It would like my keyboard would start acting wonky. It took me a long time to figure out what it was the first time. It was like, I change the word excuse for those bad text messages, Dave. You know, I didn't send it. My phone wasn't me. Exactly. Yes. No. And I changed the batteries. I'll never forget. I probably spent a half hour trying to troubleshoot. And I was like, wait a minute. And I I took my phone and like my phone is in the in between my keyboard in that thing. What if I move that over here? And it was like, oh, everything's working fine. OK. And then for a wired mouse, Dave. Yes, sir. I think you got one of these, too. I use my Mac World New York City year 2000 mouse that they gave everybody in the keynote of their new mouse. Stuck to the bottom of the chairs. Yeah, that was fun. Yeah, I have. I think I had still have one of those new inbox. I it's a great mouse. The the issue with it is it doesn't have any of the new like magic features, right? If I'm going to use a mouse, I want to have the ability to scroll on it and all of that good stuff, which I don't think that one did, right? It was just a single button mouse, right? Yeah. And I'd like that it's oval. I mean, you you remember the nightmare of the first iMac mouse circular mouse. Why? It's like, who thought of this? It looked cool. I hated it because I was going to say, but it looked cool. I mean, it looked cool, but the thing is you didn't get a sense of where you were in the world, if you know what I mean. Yes, because no, no orientation. Yeah, I found myself having to reach over the top of it and and like orient my my hand based on where the cord was coming off because it was a wired mouse, right? So the cord was always, you know, the North Star, if you will. And then some people even made adapters like plastic clip on things that you would put on top of that mouse to make it more like, you know, to make it more oval. Oh, well, these days, you could do 3D printing and make a little enclosure. Sure, crummy mouse or just or just buy a better mouse. Yeah, they're probably 15 bucks. Right. I mean, yeah, exactly. Yeah, you could pay as much as you want for a mouse. Pretty expensive. That's right. Yeah, exactly. They don't give those away. No, no. All right. We've got, like I said, we've got your questions queued up here to answer. The next thing that I would love to do if it works for you, Mr. Braun, is talk about our first two sponsors, Dandy. All right. First up today is Mac Updater, one of my favorite apps. I know it's crazy to be excited about an app that updates the software on my Mac, but I totally am because I like my apps to be up to date before I launch them, especially apps that I don't launch all that frequently. It drives me crazy when I go to use an app. And then it's like, oh, do you want to update? And it's like, well, I know I have to. Yes, I want to, but I wished I had done it earlier. And that's what Mac Updater does, is it scours everything on my computer, including the stuff in the app store and goes ahead and does the updates for me. In fact, it can trigger the updates for many apps. They've got like 6,000 most popular apps that can be updated directly inside Mac Updater with just a single click. And they have over 60,000 apps in the database there. It's crazy how well this works. Version 2.1 added support for even more software types, including Adobe plugins. It's more flexible. It added integration with Alfred for automation to trigger updates. Tons of other small quality of life interface improvements. You're going to want to do this. And of course, it's ready for Monterey. It's been working great with Monterey for a long time here. Coupon code MGGQ1 is the way to get your discount on Mac Updater. Go to corecode.io slash MGG. Use coupon code MGGQ1. Make sure use that to get your discount that also lets them know we sent you and our thanks to Mac Updater for doing what they do and sponsoring this episode. You know, there are some amazing doctors out there, but really the ones that matter are the ones who actually take your specific health insurance. With ZocDoc, you can focus on doctors who are in network, putting you on the path to see doctors who are right for you. No more wasting time hunting down on Shirley's cash-only chiropractor or the dentist, your coworker recommended who's out of your network. ZocDoc, it's all about the reviews, but again, with this metadata that helps you filter things down. I've used ZocDoc. In fact, I'm currently looking for a new primary care doctor. Mine retired, I was like a savant. I'm trying to find a savant. I don't know that I'm gonna find that, but ZocDoc's gonna help me. If anybody can do it, ZocDoc can, because ZocDoc is a free app that shows you doctors who are patient-reviewed, take your insurance and are available when you need them so you get to read up on them. And then in ZocDoc, you can even choose a time slot and whether you wanna see your doctor in person or a video visit, you can do it too. Go to ZocDoc.com slash MGG and download the ZocDoc app for free. Then start your search for your top rated doctor today. Many are available within 24 hours that's ZocDoc.com slash MGG, ZocDoc.com slash MGG and our thanks to ZocDoc for sponsoring this episode. All right, let's dig into some questions, gentlemen. Shall we, John? You wanna take the first one? You wanna go to Christopher? Christopher says, whilst listening to your most recent podcast, 912, I heard you speak about being in the Apple HomeKit ecosystem. I've been looking in the HomeKit background since its introduction, eager to jump in and did so over the weekend. Like, I began my journey with four HomePod minis. My intentions are to use them in my office to connect it to my 27-inch iMac, living room to connect it to our TV and then one each into bedrooms. I set up my office first, which is my only connection until I get more and understanding how best to utilize the HomeKit ecosystem. Getting comfortable first before diving into the rat hole. Never heard that before. Here's my question or issue. Both minis are close to the iMac, one next to the iMac, the other three feet from the iMac. I view a lot of YouTube videos and most of the time they play mono and not stereo. Then there is a latency when you pause or quit a video. The audio continues playing for a second or two. Is this normal to experience both of these issues? First, I would make one recommendation, Dave. Set up a stereo pair for the ones that are near the computer. It's not obvious that you have to do this, but I found at least from my experience that it's a much nicer experience. So set up the stereo pair and we have a support article that tells you how to do that. It's pretty straightforward. It's in the show notes at mackeykev.com. The only issue, now I have run into, Dave, I think you said you sent yours back. I have an issue with lag, but it's only if it only seems to happen if I play a video with VLC. There's a multi-second lag between what I see and what I hear, and that's annoying. But it doesn't happen with Apple apps. So if I play a video from VLC, I'll get a delay. If I play it from QuickTimePlayer, works great. And playing from a browser works great. So just use a different client, I guess is my advice. Interesting, no, well, first of all, wireless audio is hard. Technically, not for you and me as consumers, in theory, it's up to the designers and the right to make it easy for us. But it's a very difficult thing because video, our brains will tolerate an amount of lag that is quite astonishing if you actually stop and nitpick it. And in terms of quality, our brains will do just fine at reassembling a video signal that's a little garbled and things like that. Audio, our brains can do it, but we are hyper aware that it is happening. We're so much more tuned in to audio, which is why we worry about audio quality on the show. And I will apologize. We asked Pete to be on today, even though he told me last night that he did not bring his high quality microphone with him to Florida. So that's on me. And it's cause we love having Pete here. So, but we knew it going in. But how do I sound? You sound fine. I mean, you sound like you're in a hotel room on a computer that has a great microphone array, which of course your Apple MacBook does. People knocking on the doors and the wife walking in and out. Right. Stuff like that. I'm trying to mute when that's going on. Oh, you've been doing a great job. Yeah, it's been fun. Okay. Yeah. All right. But audio... How's that rat hole, sorry. Yeah, no, no, it's a good rat hole. Wireless audio is hard. And it gets even harder when you're trying to sync two playback devices together. Because if they were out of sync even a little bit, you're left and right. You would... I mean, the first thing you do is hit pause and figure out how to solve it before you hit play again. And so there's all of that going on. And then there is the inherent issue of getting the signal from, you know, the source device, your computer in this case to the output device, which of course is the speaker. And when you're doing that wirelessly, there is going to be latency built into that. That's just how it works. My guess is that in Apple's apps, they have calculated that latency and they are probably delaying the video to play when they know the sound is coming out of the speaker so that it's more in sync. You can do this like your Apple TV doesn't use, if you have a sound bar, it does not use an Apple sound bar. Why? Because Apple doesn't make a sound bar, right? But, you know, or whatever system you have, unless you've got home pods, it's not, you know, all an Apple ecosystem. And, you know, your TV isn't Apple either. So there's definitely going to be some non-Apple devices involved. Well, they solve this on the Apple TV. You can go into the settings and tell it to calibrate your audio and it uses your phone, which is in your hand, at the location where you sit and watch things and it, you know, bounces sound around the room out of your speakers and figures out what that lag should be. And then it adds that lag in and then everything's good, you know, so they make it easy. But it's not an easy problem to solve and it doesn't surprise me what you said, John, the third-party apps having trouble with it. I've always been blown away by Sonos being able to do this because they only own the speaker part of the ecosystem. Right? They are not the Apple TV. They are not, you know, any of that. And it's not perfect there either. Like you have the ability to adjust things and tweak things. You also have the ability with Sonos to decide whether you're prioritizing quality with the audio or latency because the more data you're sending, potentially the higher latency could be. It depends on your wireless network and all that good stuff. But yeah, it's hard. And I think Apple has learned that as they've gotten deeper into this HomePod game and have slowed down what that product line is meant to be because I think out of the gate, it was meant to be a pristine home audio solution with a, you know, smart Siri speaker. And now like we don't have the expensive HomePod in the lineup anymore. We have the mini. And so now it's a, for its price and size, it is a high quality speaker. It sounds fantastic. But they are prioritizing being in the smart speaker market not in the audio file speaker market, which is fine. I mean, like, you know, that's Apple's, that's probably a surprise though. I mean, Apple has never been, they acquire companies. They aren't like other big tech companies that acquire everything. They, you know, vacuum up every company they can get their hands on. That being said, I'm still mildly surprised that they haven't gone after Sonos and said, you know, that's a great product. That meets our quality standards. We would love to have them be part of who we are, but. I am not convinced they haven't tried. I don't, this is, I have no inside information. But I mean, like to, you know, let's see, it's sitting on the outside looking in. You know, it's an obvious marriage, right? Like they created something that would be way faster for Apple to bring to market if Apple just acquired Sonos as opposed to trying to figure it out on their own. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I mean, remember Sonos was the first consumer focused mesh wireless network. Think about that. Yeah. I mean, and I talked to the folks that. You know the bridge and. Well, I mean, even just their speakers are a mesh network. It's how it works. You know, and when Eero first came on the market, I remember talking to the folks at Eero and saying, hey, you know, you might want to talk to the folks at Sonos like they've been down this road a few times. And they're like, oh, are you kidding? Like we've been in touch with them since day one. I'm like, okay. They're like, yeah, they're the pioneers here. They have more answers than we knew questions to ask. Yeah. I'm like, I'm sure they do. But it was cool that they were being, that, you know, Sonos was being very collaborative with Eero because they knew they could see that people were going to want mesh for all their devices, not just their speakers. And they were going to be buying Eero's and they wanted to make sure the Sonos stuff worked with Eero before it became an issue. And it, they didn't quite succeed. There were issues, but they've mostly ironed them out for now. Yeah. So. All right. Fun. I don't know. Yeah. What are we? Where were we? Is it time to talk to Kaz? Speaking of mesh and wifi and all of that good stuff. All right. So Kaz has a simple question. I think I've got a simple answer for him, but we'll see where we go. He says, I have my house pre-wired with ethernet cable. Unfortunately, I have my fiber line coming in my house through my living room where the entertainment center is located. AT&T, who is this fiber provider, used the only ethernet cable at this location to run back to the network cabinet on the other side of the house where my gateway Eero is located. This arrangement's been working fine, but now I have added a Sonos Arc, a sub, and an amp to the entertainment center greatly expanding the number of wifi devices at this location. According to Eero, I can connect a switch to a satellite Eero, not just the gateway, an ethernet switch, that is. So if I relocate an Eero to my entertainment center, hang a switch off of it and then plug in my TV, soundbar, amp, et cetera, will it reduce my wifi load since everything is coming back through the mesh anyway? Is it worth it? So it's a hard thing to answer because we're not there. Everybody's house is different. Every wifi scenario is different. Every mesh is even more different. But my answer is, yeah, I think so. But that's what I would do is I would, if you have, your home entertainment center is a great example of this, but anywhere that you've got multiple wifi devices in a fixed location that are gonna remain in that fixed location, you're probably better off putting one of your mesh points there and ethernetting everything to that. That way you're taking advantage of the mesh backhaul, you're not clogging up the mesh front hall. It chances are, if it's your entertainment center like that, you're also going to be in that room regularly and so letting the Eros front hall connections for the wireless be there for you and your devices, your, you know, your iPads, your phones, all of that stuff, you know, taking all those fixed place devices and just putting them on ethernet, you're right. It all takes the same backhaul over. But let's think about this. Your TV or your Apple TV, whichever way you do it is going to be using you know, if you do air play, let's say, you're gonna be using your iPhone to air play wirelessly, no choice about that. However, your TV doesn't have to also be wireless. If your TV is now wired in, that's gonna be a smoother air play experience for you, right? So I would definitely do that. That would be my advice. I think that's what you did in your entertainment center, right, John? You wound up wiring most of your devices into your ERO and then letting the ERO backhaul do its job? Yeah, and I put a switch down there as well because I needed more ports. You needed more ports, yeah. And that's exactly what Kaz is asking, is use a switch because yeah, your ERO is only gonna give you, well, it would give you two ports in that scenario, most of them would, but you know, yeah, adding a switch is totally fine in that. In fact, it's the right answer. And it's even supported by ERO. They will tell you to go ahead and do that. So yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. All right. What's interesting is that my switch, and I didn't know this, but it's funny. So the switch that I have, I think it's a mono price switch. Okay. When I plug things in my entertainment center into it, I saw green lights and I'm like, that's good. And then I plugged in another device and the light was yellow. Why, you ask? All right. Some of the devices are not gigabit ethernet. Right. That's right. Yeah, the old, in fact, up until the current. I think it's my Blu-ray player. Yeah, I think that's chiming in at non gigabit speed, but then you don't really need it. Yeah, my non 4K Apple TV, the one that I just replaced was 100 megabit ethernet and it was fine, you know, no huge issues, but yeah, you can stream with 100 megabits. Oh, sure. Yeah, what is Netflix's 4K streams require 25 megabits. So there's plenty of headroom there. Yeah. All right. You want to take us to Larry, John? Yeah. All right. Larry says, this has been bugging me for a long time. I have an anchor hub that I plugged my various portable drives into when I eject them from my MacBook Pro and then unplug my MacBook Pro, the lights on the drives are still lit up and I actually hear a faint humming coming from them. Should they be doing this? Will this harm my drives to be doing this? I don't think so. The one place I would look, Dave, is NPT, System Preferences Battery. There's a setting there. Put hard disk to sleep when possible. You may want to select that. Things may get less noisy. But I have noticed, at least my external drives, is that the LED is on even though they aren't mounted. So when you see the light, it means that it's getting power. Yeah, the chattering, again, I think the only thing you can do is say, shut up. And select that setting because I assume it's a rotational drive. So that's what I got. Yeah. You hope you're a solid state drive in chattering. Yeah, I was just going to say, your SSD should not chatter. If it's chattering, that would be a good sign that it probably needs a quick replacement. Yeah. Yeah. So yeah, yeah, but you're right. I agree with you. Yeah, that's just a power light. Sometimes the power lights will flicker for activity if a vendor has chosen not to put two lights in, and that's fine. Yeah. I think my OWC drives are, a lot of them have just the one light and the power light will actually flicker off, you know, and then back on when there's activity and that way you just know. Yeah. Fun, fun, fun, fun. All right, let's see, should we, let's talk to Tim. Yeah, this is, okay, well, we'll get there. Tim says, my wife uses an iPad and an iMac for work and syncs files with iCloud Drive. Tonight she worked for several hours on a paper in Word on the iMac, saving as she went. Then she went to sync to her iPad so she could continue working on it at work tomorrow. I noticed it had a cloud icon by the file in the finder indicating that it wasn't local. And when I hovered over it, it said downloading. When it finally finished syncing, it had replaced her work on the iMac with the old version from the iPad and I couldn't find any way to restore the right version even though she had been saving. Any thoughts on why iCloud would replace her work with an older version and are there best practices I might be overlooking that she should be doing to avoid this again, like maybe drag the file out of iCloud while she works on it, then put it back, et cetera. So like that's super frustrating and you definitely should not have to be dragging things out of iCloud while you're working on them. It should be smart enough to do this. That said, iCloud is, well, it's Apple's sync engine, isn't it? And so it's gonna be very much integrated with Apple. If she were using pages or using numbers or some other Apple app, she could go to the file menu, go to revert to and browse all versions. And that will show you like a time machine style view of the various versions of that document. iCloud saves those locally only. It doesn't say, well, I don't know where it saves them. Let me change this. You can only see them locally. So if I have a file that I'm working on on the Mac in the studio here in Pages, and I realized that Tim's wife was working in Word, which is not part of this game, but for the rest of us, and just to know if I have something in Pages here, I'm working on it. I can go see the versions if I do that file revert to and browse all versions thing. However, if I open that same document in Pages on my Mac down in the office, I don't see those versions. Those versions are only visible to me here. Where it's storing them, I don't know. I would presume here, but I could be wrong. But that, so, you know, it's frustrating that iCloud does not give you just general access to its versioning in this regard. Most other sync engines do. Dropbox does, Synology Drive does, Microsoft OneDrive does. You know, it's part and parcel of a syncing engine to be able to see versions. iCloud has them, but not the way that we would want. You know, as to how to avoid this in the future. I mean, Time Machine may still be your friend, right? You know, I know last week we were saying, I don't know if we need Time Machine. Like in this regard, Time Machine might have those versions that you had locally on your Mac saved if it's doing those iterative saves over time. So Time Machine may actually be the savior here in a scenario like this. I don't know, that's my thought. Either John, you or Pete have a thought on this? Go ahead, Pete, yeah? Well, first of all, you had an inadvertent quick tip in there, which I didn't realize. Which is- It happens. That the Apple products had versioning in there. I don't think I ever knew about that feature. That is awesome. And in spite of the fact that what I was gonna say is, you can use the Apple products and anymore virtually seamlessly convert to the word .docx format, XLS format, that sort of thing. When I was in the office environment, I used it all the time. Now, are there some issues? Yeah, but by and large, there are not. And especially I found that everybody can read PDF, right? Yes. Sorry about the camera thing. So I would often put my documents into PDF format. So everybody could read them universally and then if we needed to edit them, we could go back and edit them. Sure. Yeah, you're right. They will save out as- That's pretty neat. Yeah, they will save out as Word and Excel, whatever, depending on whether it's pages or numbers or whatever. And that works fine in a unidirectional capacity where it breaks down or at least has broken down for me is in a collaborative capacity. If you and I, Pete, let's say, are working on a document together and you are choosing to use Microsoft Office, be it on your Mac or Windows, doesn't matter. That's what you're standardizing on. If I show up as like Mr. Smart Techie Guy and say, oh, I can read your Excel document and I can make edits to it in numbers and then I can export it as an Excel document, you're gonna get it back and you're gonna say, what the heck did you do to my Excel document? Because you're not getting back a version that I've edited. You're getting back a version that I've double converted and it's, unless it's the most simple, it starts getting wonky. Yeah, especially with formulas and formatting. That's really where it starts to break down. I mean, they'll still be there but they're not gonna make you happy. So like if I'm working on a, you know, an RFP like a proposal for an advertising client or something and they send me an Excel doc, I very much keep that in Excel format all the way through on my end. Now I don't like to pay for Microsoft Office and the university, you know, I taught that one class last semester and now I am on sabbatical Pete and they turned off my access to Microsoft Office. This is what they do to professors on sabbatical. No, I just, you know, I taught one class. I mean, I have chosen not to go back until we can do it. A podcasting class was very difficult to do during like raging COVID times at a university. So I think I will attempt it again but we're sort of waiting until, you know, it's gonna, it has a better chance of being an actually interactive. Yeah, a little bit. Like we gotta be able to talk to each other without, you know, risk of infection. So, or at least, you know, pandemic infection. So anyway, but I don't have access to office anymore. And so what I do is I use LibreOffice and I know you're probably sick of hearing me talk about it but man, it works great. I will say this, version 7.2 which is the first version of LibreOffice to be M1 native is super unstable. So I really don't recommend relying on it. I spent a lot of time the last two weeks fighting with it until I finally just rolled back to 7.1 which is the stable version. 7.2 is considered the experimental. So, you know, that's on me but I wanted the M1 native one. Turns out I didn't. I wanted the reliable one. So, but LibreOffice is great. Again, go with the reliable, go with the stable, but yeah. Now someone brought up, I think it's a possible solution I see here in the show notes but I'm wondering if you could go to a local snapshot and restore the version that disappeared. Yeah, I mean, that's what Time Machine does, right? Is it's Time Machine triggering those snapshots? So yeah, that would be potentially if it made them, they could be there. Yeah, for sure. Yeah, cause all you need to do is go grab, you know the version that happened before iCloud blew it away. So, you know. Yes, good stuff. Good stuff. I like it. Oh, where are we on time here? Let's see. Yeah, okay. So, Jim has a question that's got, it's multifaceted cause there's a lot of opinions involved here. We'll try to be as informative with our opinions as we can be. He says, he's looking for a 27 inch monitor and he says, first he asked, what's your favorite 27 inch UHD slash 4K monitor? So he wants something that's gonna be able to do, you know retina in Apple terms ish. He says, is mono price still your choice for an external display for my 2019 MacBook Pro? I haven't pulled the trigger yet. The 28 inches out of stock but they do still have the 32 inch. Not sure if I could, I should consider another option as I don't really need a 32 inch monitor. I'll tell you probably, well, you probably don't want one too but I don't know who else to go with any other recommendations for something in that 27 to 32 inch range that comes in in that $500 or less price range. So 32 starts to get difficult with a 4K monitor which is also known as UHD because you are taking the same number of pixels and spreading them out over a wider space, physical space which means your pixel density gets less and so you get less of that retina effect. Remember, Apple's 27 inch monitors are 5K. So even going 4K, you're already sort of coming off the bar that Apple would have set for you. Now you don't necessarily have Apple's monitor and maybe that's a good thing because you have nothing to compare to because that's where the problems come in. So if you did want what Apple has, the LG 5K display is gorgeous. I have one of those on the Mac mini downstairs in my office because I went from a 27 inch iMac and so I had to just go spend the whatever, I spent like 900 bucks and that was on like a refurb or something, it's just ridiculous how much these things cost but it was totally worth it. That said, to the right of that in my office I have the currently the ViewSonic VP2768 4K and honestly that looks almost as good as the LG but there's definitely a difference but it looks pretty good. And then here up in the studio I effectively have that LG screen inside my 5K iMac, right? And then next to it I have that 27 inch mono price 4K UHD display. The model number doesn't matter because it's more than six months old and so they just keep revving models and tweaking things and making them slightly better and slightly the electronics and et cetera, et cetera but I have the mono price display next to this one and it looks fine but it isn't nearly as good as the ViewSonic, the Apple slash LG screen as main screen and then either mono price or ViewSonic to the right of it that's my scenario in two places. The ViewSonic is definitely a step up. Like if I set the LG or the Apple screen at 100 I would say the ViewSonic is an 80 and the mono price is like a 60. Maybe a 70, it's good and it's worth the price that you pay for it because 180, 65, let's say that's about what you're paying for these screens or maybe even a little less. So it's definitely worth it. And then I've also recently started checking out the ViewSonic VP 2756 4K and that looks fine. I would call that like an 85 on this list but still 4K display not 5K. Or maybe not obviously by the model number. So to answer your question, I've told you what monitors I use and so that's really the best I can do. Would I still recommend the mono price? Yes, I still use one. I have one right here next to me every time I do the show. Is it what I would want as my main screen? No, the way I can answer that question is I did not choose to use it when I could have it down in the office with my Mac mini. I chose to pay $1,000, 900 and something for the LG 5K screen because that's what I'm used to. And once you get used to that, there is no going back. It's just how it be. So yeah, I don't know. I'm sure we, and that's why I said I started this by saying it's just gonna be opinions based on what we have long-term experience with. So John, I think you're a mono price only right person, right? That's what you've got? So I have the mono price 37923 Crystal Pro. Okay, and it still seems to be current. It looks like it goes for about 400 bucks or so. And then I got a Asus refurb, a slightly smaller screen. And it's not as nice. I mean, there's definitely a difference in that the background on the mono price is like really black, whereas the background on the Asus is, it's a little washed out. I gotta play with the settings. Sure. Yeah, right, yeah, exactly. Yeah, it makes sense. It makes sense. Yeah, no, the mono price displays are good. The whites are weird on it. I can't get them to be the warm thing that I have that is just natural to these Apple slash LG displays. And of course, I mean, I'm comparing a 4K display with a 5K display, like I know that. But there's something about it's just a little harsher than the Apple LG and even the ViewSonic. And I've tried tweaking it. I've got a couple of these here. I've got one, obviously right here in the studio. Lisa's got one over at the house on the Mac Mini there. And so, I mean, they're good displays. It's just, when you start A-Being them, literally like moving windows between them, that's when you start to notice like, oh, that's very different over there. Yeah. And when I look at the product page, I think actually this particular monitor for mono price is actually using an LG display. Okay, yeah. No, mono price is good with like they, their whole stock in trade is figuring, taking, I think mono price based their displays on the popular Dell 27 inch 4K displays years ago. And they, like they do with a lot of things, they reverse engineer it, figure out what the most, like the core component is that makes it a high quality and a high priced item. And then they figure out how to incorporate that into something that has less expensive parts, right? So you might not, like if you compared the mono price to the Dell that it was based on, you'd get the same glass, but you know, the stand might be a little less firm or adjustable or it might not look as pretty from the back or something, you know, like that's what mono price does. So yeah, I mean, a glass is usually good. It's just, you know, I mean, not as good. So it's, but it's fine. It's how it is. Or maybe it's the electronics in it, like maybe the same glass with more expensive, you know, electronics to drive it, suddenly changes things like, I don't, I don't make these things. I just use them and buy them. And as someone in the chat room is typing, you get what you pay for or do not pay for. And it's absolutely right. Like these things are all priced exactly where they should be in relation to one another. And so there you go. Yeah, thoughts on, any more thoughts on this? Pete, you don't, you just, you travel too much. You're a, you're a laptop only person. Well, I'm just on a, I went from my 16 inch to my 13 inch M1 laptop. Yeah. So I don't have any monitors now. I did have the 27 inch iMac when I was doing my office job. Sure. Beautiful machine, absolutely gorgeous. Yeah. But don't, don't have any yet. But at the one comment I gave on the, on the comparison between the two of my sister, I'd be 10 years, 10 years ago, I bought a MacBook Air. And so she brought that back and gave it to me as I traded her one of my other old laptops. And that's not in retina. And you never noticed how much you didn't notice until you look at it now and you're like, oh my God, how did I ever use this thing? So I know what you mean. Like, you know, you get used to a 5K, I can imagine the 4K is just, you notice the difference every time you turn it on without having to have a side by side. No, yeah. Oh, I didn't need a side by side. Cause that was my thought down there. It was like, oh, I'm not going to have a 5K screen, like in, in the same room to compare it with. It'll be fine. And that lasted for, you know, I don't know. Well, as long as it's, yeah, I mean, as long as it took to start hunting on Amazon for reefer of LG screens, like there was no, there was no, there was no, it was, it wasn't going to happen. No, no, but it's fine. You know, it's only money, it's whatever. Like it's, it's the thing I stare at all day. Like, okay, sure. It cost me probably three times what the monitor price screen would have cost me. And twice what the, the view Sonic screen would have cost me. It's like, and a hundred percent worth it. You know, yeah. I'd have an expensive headset for work. It's what I listen to all day. So exactly. You know, it's worth it. It's a professional expense that makes it worth it. A hundred percent. That's it. If you used it an hour a day, it wouldn't be worth it. It's a very different thing. That's correct. And that's why I try to couch these things with, you know, here, here's what I use. Here's what I recommend. And here's why there's a, there might be a difference between those two things. All right. We've got some cool stuff found to get to. And we've got some time, which I love. So let's, let's talk about our next couple of sponsors. And then let's do some cool stuff found if that works for you, Mr. Braun. Alrighty. All right. Hey, you a coffee drinker? How do you take your coffee? Is it a full-bodied rose? Something light? We all have our preferences. And no matter what you love to drink, trade coffee. Our sponsor here makes it easy to brew your best cup at home. You folks know me. Caffeine is not part of my daily habit. I have it sometimes, but it's not just an automatic thing for me. And I got to be honest, I didn't think I liked coffee until trade coffee came on board as a sponsor here. This coffee tastes delicious. 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That's drinktrade.com slash MGG for $20 off your first three bags and our thanks to trade for sponsoring this episode. Next up, we have a different kind of sponsor for this episode. And that is the Jordan Harbinger Show, which is a podcast you really should be listening to. Jordan's show was actually one that Apple named best of 2018 is aimed at making you better informed and a more critical thinker. Doesn't that sound like what you get here, but it's not text up. This is stuff to round out the rest of your life. It's a perfect match for what we do here at Mac Geekab. You know us, we're focused on like self-awareness and learning things. Turns out Jordan is too. It's fantastic. And he's had some fantastic people on Martin Cove, the actor who plays evil Sensei John Crease in Netflix's Cobra Kai series was recently on. He had Gary Vaynerchuk on. Like these are cool people. And then he's also got these starter packs where he's organized the show into topics, abnormal psychology, activism and resistance, criminal justice, cults, scams and conspiracies. I'm definitely gonna check that one out. I've enjoyed what I've heard of this show and I think you will as well. There's just so much here. Check out jordanharbinger.com slash start for some episode recommendations or search for the Jordan Harbinger show. That's H-A-R-B is in boy. I N as in Nancy G-E-R on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you listen to your podcast and our thanks to the Jordan Harbinger show for sponsoring this episode. All right. I know pilot Pete has to go and fly the plane. So I don't think you're gonna make it to the end of the episode with us, but you brought a cool stuff out. I'd love to have you tell us about it Pete. I did, thanks. Yeah, and I'm actually gonna get to go to my daughter's commercial ops class. That's where I'm going. Oh, that's even better. So I'm not sure I could pass the class. I've only been a commercial pilot for 27 years, but the things they discuss. So anyway, cool stuff found. So not trying to disparage the AirPod Pros. Love them. Absolutely love them. And when about a year and a half into, a year, year and a half into my second pair, the right AirPod started going and when I would talk, I'd get a buzz in my ear and then it got so bad that even when I wasn't talking, it was buzzing when I was trying to listen. So I really don't wanna drop another two and a half airplane dollars into a pair of Airpods. And so I started looking around, is there a replacement? And I found these. These are the ANC, which is active noise canceling, skull candies. And I have the little case that I got on Amazon with an air tag, so I don't lose it. A reminder that we've got people, most of the audience listens. So please show it on the video, but explain what you're showing. I'm holding it up. Yeah, so I'm holding up a case that's slightly larger than the AirPod's Pro case, but it's a charging case and it does Qi charging, wireless charging. It also has a USB-C on the bottom, so you can do wired or wireless charging. And unlike most other in-ear AirPods, Airpods, these also work independently, like the Airpods. You can put the left ear in and listen, or you can put the right ear in and listen, and have a phone conversation with either ear. So that was a huge selling point to me because I've got another pair that I really like, but only the right ear works independently. And then, of course, active noise canceling here through ambient sound, it has three other modes too. So it's got a podcast mode, a music mode, and a movie mode. And then there's a little bit of a, they call them ear gels, but it also, so in addition to the rubber portion that fits into your ear, there's a little bit of a rubber gel portion that helps hold it into the ear as well. Like a bum on top of it. Yeah. Yes, yeah. They don't quite feel as substantial as the AirPods, but other than that, I gotta say, I've been super satisfied with these. The sound is nice. The quality has been good. The independent wireless charging, the independent operations, and here was the big part. I got them for $79. Yeah. So that's less than an airplane dollar. Speaking of which, I gotta figure out, we're in the wrong business here, John, because we're gonna start earning airplane dollars. That's the key. So. Right. $79. No, I spend airplane dollars. You don't have to spend your money. Well, I guess that's true, yeah. Yeah. How do those relate to kid in college dollars? That's the part that I need to figure out. So yeah. Well, those, yeah. Those are many hundreds of airplane dollars. Let me tell you. Oh, you don't have to tell me. You're telling me. Yeah. I'm paying twice right now. Yeah. Yeah, my sympathies to your wallet. So yeah. Yeah, man. Gosh. But based on that, I'm gonna duck out of here and say thanks again for having me, Gents. Yeah, man. I'm gonna go to commercial operations and see my daughter, so. Enjoy, my friend. That's what's paying for college. That makes it all worth it. So yeah, for sure. There you go. Thanks for that, Pete. Thanks for hanging out with us. We do have more cool stuff found to share. We will jump to Russell, who shares something with us that we have seen in the past. And it's been a couple of years. So it's worth talking about again. And it is Patrick Wardle, who he publishes a site called Objective C. That's Objective-SEE.com. Patrick Wardle is a Mac security researcher extraordinaire. And he writes, he does his research, he publishes his findings. I'm sure he does some consulting and all that too. But what's relevant to this show is he writes security apps that can really help the Mac. And there's several that he does there. One's called Knock Knock. And we've talked about this before on the show to it checks to see what's persistently installed on your Mac and what's running. And it compares that against what should be running and can really be helpful. And then Block Block is there to help block out malware. There's others. There's Lulu and Oversight. The Oversight checks out or monitors what's looking through your Mac's mic and webcam. So yeah, yeah, it's cool stuff. It's cool stuff. Thank you for reminding us of that, Russell. Thank you. It's good stuff. You wanna take us to Gene, John? Gene. I don't know if he's a dancing machine. Gene, Gene. The dancing machine, remember that? He might be Gene Gene, the cool stuff found machine. So Gene says, you recently discussed doing calculations in the spotlight search. Calc Service by Devon Technologies is another great way to do calculations without the calculator. It is free and available on the Mac App Store. Enter calculations into any service-aware apps such as TextEdit, Mail, Messages, Safari or Xcode and calculate the result with a single keystroke. My favorite is Calculate and Append which works by selecting the formula and pressing the keyboard shortcut option equal. The service has been around for a long time but it's still being refreshed and provides full support for M1-based Macs. WordService is another set of services that is very handy. So yeah, I tried this and it's really neat. So yeah, like you said, you're in an app. Yep. You highlight the formula, like for example, I did two plus two. Okay. And you highlight it and then say this append thing and it throws an equal sign and then the total at the end, so very handy. Wow. Yeah, I love stuff like this. Man, yeah. Very cool. And then the other one I tried this also, WordService. It basically gives you statistics about a block of text like how many words and I think that's pretty much all it does. Yeah, okay. But no, it's neat. So you don't have to go out to spotlight. You can just do this within your app as long as it understands services. Right, yeah, you know, services can be a cool thing. I use, there's an app called ImageOptim or ImageOptimizer or something. I can't even remember the name of it because I just do it all the time. And I have it in as a service so that I can just highlight an image and go to services and say it's called ImageOptimize, of course it is. And I just choose ImageOptimize and boom, it goes and runs the app. I'll put a link to the app in here for cool stuff found too, because it's great. It strips out, it's perfect for publishing images to the web where you don't need thumbnails and all of that stuff embedded in them that just gives people more load to download, right? Or more image to download. So it strips them out and it also will compress the image if it's a JPEG that's too big for its bridges, it'll fix all that too. So yeah, it's good stuff. All right, let's see. Next up, I know I have it here. Yes, I do have it here. Is the EasyQuest Ultimate Power, it's a PD, a power delivery wall charger. It has three ports on it. And yes, for those of you that know about this, I'm bearing the lead. It's got two power delivery USB-C ports and one USB-A port. The brick is just a little bit bigger than Apple's 30 watt brick that I have with my MacBook Air. This thing is 120 watts, right? So yeah, I know. And it's got a little flip out thing to plug into the wall. You can also attach a little adapter to it for international travel. And it's just lightweight. It's GAN, it's that gallium nitrate nitride. I can't ever remember what GAN stands for. But I know that it makes my chargers lighter and stronger. So 120 watts total. And you can split it up between the two power delivery. Perfect little travel charger to have in my bag with me. So I'm stoked about this thing. It's not available yet. They say coming soon from EasyQuest at easyq.com. Of course, we will put a link in the show notes for that because so that you can pay attention and grab it when it's there. Right, cool stuff, man. Yeah, gallium nitride. Nitride, okay. All right. So the next thing I have listed as a CSF is perhaps not cool stuff found. Maybe John will call it creepy stuff found. You can now request your data from Amazon. All the data that they have on you, you can request it from them and then download it. And it comes, they've got it categorized out. You can choose to download everything. And it can be your purchase history, data about what you've visited on their website. Like they track a lot of things about you. And also your Amazon A-Lady data, including all the recordings that it saves. For example. Hey, Alexa, tell our groceries to add butter to the list. Yeah, that's me in my kitchen, about 10 feet away from my Echo Dot, putting butter on our groceries list. Yep, and so it saved that. It also saved everything else it ever thought it parsed. And I mean, there's just gigabytes of these files that you can download. And they're, you know, I mean, they're just in a folder. Once you download them, there they are. All happy for you right there. Yup. So I don't know. I mean, I suppose I knew that it was doing these things, but I didn't know. You know, it's a little different when you, well, you know, when you hear it. Hey, Alexa, tell our groceries to add butter to the list. See, it's just, I don't know. I don't know. I don't know how I feel about that. Yeah. I know Apple does it too. Right? I wonder what prompted this though, because yeah, I got the email and I was like, it was like, oh yeah, you want to download your location data of, you know, places that I've, you have creepily tracked you. And I'm like, not really. Yeah, I don't want to see it. Right. Yeah, exactly. And like, I know that the main reason they use this stuff is for, you know, bettering the algorithm and all, you know, quality control and all that stuff. That's one of the reasons. I don't pretend to know what their main reason is for having this stuff, but that certainly is one. And I'm sure they use it for that because it makes the product better and the product has gotten a lot better. So, yeah, it's, I don't know. It's just a, it's a weird thing. Anyway, I figured you all should know. I'm sorry. Now, here's something that started happening to me, Dave, and I don't know what caused it, but it's bothering me. My iPhone. So I have, you know, a routine, you know, I go to certain shops every day or every other day. And I got a notification on my phone. It was like, yeah, you're going to stop and shop, right? It'll take five minutes to get there. And I'm like, dude, why are you telling me this? Yeah. And all of a sudden just started telling me where it thinks I'm gonna be going next. And I don't want you to do that. And I think I found an article. It's buried in privacy. I think it's buried deep within the system, setting to disable this. It's not very intuitive. Yeah. Yeah, that's interesting, huh? So I, and this is just, this is part of Siri, right? Or Apple's stuff, right? I think. And yeah, and let's see. Okay. And I found an article here. Disable unwanted ETA notifications from Apple Maps with these. Okay. Yeah. So let me link to that article. But yeah, just start. I don't know what caused her to all of a sudden tell me where I'm gonna be. Had you put it on your calendar that you were going to stop and shop? No. That's weird, man. Huh. Yeah, although, you know what, I had something recently where it was a habitual and habitual thing that I do, you know, going, I think it was going to my chiropractor or something. And for whatever reason, it wasn't on my calendar. And it was like, oh, you want directions? Like it's, you know, it's Wednesday afternoon. You want directions to your chiropractor's office? And I was like, yeah, I guess I do. Like, okay. So, but I'm not sure with Apple, I'm not sure how much of that stuff is just stored locally or stored on the servers, right? Because that could be the, like that's the difference. I do know though, that like with Siri stuff, you can opt in to having it stored on their servers or at least processed by them so that they can, you know, again, the quality control thing. But yeah, man. Yup. Interesting. All right. Listener Mark takes us to a cool stuff found from last week's episode where we were talking about webcams and, or not webcams, but security cameras, surveillance cameras in your home. He said, look at Amcrest cameras at amcrest.com. These are IP cameras, you know, open, open source is the wrong term, but open access, right? RTSP cameras that can be accessed by anything. He says, I used to use Synology Surveillance Station, but I was, I had trouble setting it not to record. He says, my camera is the ones that I buy. I have micro SSDs in them. And I just figured I'd use that and didn't want my disks on my disk station, just, you know, cluttering up with recordings all the time, which is what Surveillance Station does when you stop and think about it. So he's right about that. So he says, I moved on to using something called Sight Hound Video at SightHound.com for his home surveillance. And he likes that a whole lot better than using Synology's thing. So we'll put a link to that too. Thank you, Mark. Great stuff. Anything else from you here this week, John? No. All right, Eric, I have a couple more things. Eric pointed out something, and thankfully we had caught it before it got too far. Our T-shirts, the one if you watched the video where I wore the beta, it looked, the front of it looked great. And so did the back. If you ordered a T-shirt and got it, the back got it, the back looked great. And the front looked okay. But it had this weird gray box like almost shadowing on the front around the don't get caught lettering. We reached out, I say we. I told Sadie about this. Sadie is a rock star. Sadie worked with the folks at Threadless who was our partner on our T-shirt store here. They figured out what the problem was for whatever reason their system didn't make the graphic that we sent them transparent even though it was when we did our shirts. It was something weird, right? And anyway, they fixed it. So anybody ordering now forward, and really from a few days ago forward, is getting the right thing. If you ordered one of the first batch of shirts, congratulations, you have a limited edition Mackie Cab shirt with a minor error. Like NFTs, I guarantee you that's gonna be worth something down the road. However, you also have en route to you a replacement shirt that you get to keep both of that has the graphic on the front as it was intended. So you get both, you can wear both, enjoy both and save one of those because you never know, maybe, like an NFT. I can't, it's not unique because there were a bunch of people that ordered these. But the numbers are certainly in the 100 range I think is about maybe what it was. I think, I don't have the numbers in front of me. But you're part of an elite club, which you know you are because you listen to the show. And yeah, you can go check it out. MackieCab.com slash merch. If you wanna go check out a t-shirt. Right now, the t-shirt's the only thing we have. We've been doing some surveys asking you folks, what else do you want from us? And we have other ideas coming. I really just can't believe, John, that bobbleheads continues for years. Bobbleheads is the thing that floats to the top of the list. And I have hesitated from even saying it in this show, but it started coming up probably 10 years ago. And so I feel like it's probably gonna happen. So I don't know, it's weird. One last thing just cause it's fun. A listener, Adam found a YouTube video that's announcing an auction for a 1979 Steve Jobs business card. You can go check it out. The YouTube video shows everything, right? So that's fun. And it shows the card VP of operations was his title on the card back then. And it also shows in the video, a floor plan layout of the offices that they had. This was of course before they built their own offices. And it has Jobs, you know, his desk or workstation listed on it. Wads listed on there. It has Daniel Kotke listed on there. Like it's pretty cool to see some of these, you know, some of these people and names listed. So it's worth going to watch the video even if you're not gonna bid on the tattered business card. Cause, you know, whatever, it's a cool thing. Don't get me wrong, but it's, you know, watching on video and then you're good to go. You can watch us on video, you know, if you go to MackieCab.com. Go ahead, John. Probably the most notable one that I have is from Bill Campbell. I think I met him at a Mac world. Interesting. So I got his card. From Intuit, right? Clarice or FileMaker. Bill Campbell. I thought Bill Campbell was into it. Right? Am I thinking of somebody else? It would have been into it if he were hanging out there. Cause he was a board member at Apple for a very long time. And everybody called him coach. Like that, right? Are we talking about the same Bill Campbell? I think so. Okay. I didn't realize he was, he was with Clarice. Really? That, huh? Was he really? I don't know. Let's see, he was the CEO of Clarice. There you go. I had no idea. Fascinating. I always knew him as Intuit. And actually got to see him speak. He gave the commencement speech at my, let's see, my sister-in-law's college graduation. And he, I mean, I talk about a fantastic speaker. Like that dude knew what he was like. He's a master of the craft. Yeah. Interesting. Had no idea that he was the CEO of Clarice. I knew he was Intuit. That's where it came from. Huh? Fascinating. Cool. Yeah. And who else did I see at a Macworld? I saw John Scully, though I didn't get to talk to him, but it was like, hey, I know that guy. Right? Yeah. He looks familiar. That's cool. Oh, and then, oh man. I'm trying to remember the former Apple CEO, but it was like, he gave a keynote, I think. And it was like, oh my gosh, I'm going to like fall asleep. Was it, was it Spindler? Yes. Okay. Okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I don't, I never got to see keynotes. Like when we were going to Apple Fest, I don't, I don't remember going to keynotes, but maybe we did. Maybe we went to one of them. Because that would have been, no, I meant Apple Fest. Oh, okay. No, because like Macworld Expo, we were only ever at Macworld keynotes with Steve Jobs. I don't remember, and maybe, maybe we did go, because you and I would go to Macworld Expo before we ever started Mac Observer or anything. Like, I mean, it was just a, like, we went as fans. Like, you know. So, but I don't remember going to keynotes with you that weren't Steve Jobs, but maybe, maybe we did and maybe what you're saying is the reason I don't remember it. Because they weren't overly engaging. So, yeah, interesting. But yeah, I mean, I remember talking about going to the keynote at Apple Fest one year, but I don't think we did. But maybe we did. I don't know. I don't know. Those were fun. I miss those days. Those were, you know, I don't know that I miss them. I have fond memories of those days. I enjoy thinking about them. It's good stuff. All right. Well, what else do we have? Anything else? I think that's it, right? I think that's it. All right. Well, thanks for hanging out with us, folks. Thanks to Pilot Pete for taking time to join us. I promise he'll bring his mic with him next time. We'll make sure to get on with about that because we want him to sound good. We want the show to sound good. I think it sounded okay to me. Let us know what you think. Feedback at MackieCab.com. We always want to hear from you. It's what we do. Did you say feedback at MackieCab.com? I did. I can't believe this is only the third time in the episode that I've said feedback at MackieCab.com. How did we miss this? Even with Pete here, who usually is all about the bit. So, yeah, well, that's, then there you go. That's our ask for today. Send us something, a question, a tip, a cool stuff down. Kudos, send us a picture of you and your shirt. We'd love to see that. We'll post it on social media and, you know, share the heck out of it because it's fun. Like that's why we're doing this, because it's fun. All right, check out our sponsors, MackieCab.com slash sponsors. Soon, we're real close actually. And I say we, you know, again, taking credit for Adam Christensen's hard work because he's the one making it happen. But we are getting very close to being able to launch the new MackieCab site. All the technical pieces have come together, which is no small feat trying to extract all this stuff from, you know, where it has lived. Because it's not just, you know, Mac Observer. We moved Mac Observer to WordPress with five, six years ago or something. Prior to that, it was on Expression Engine. And I think we were on EE when we launched this podcast, but it's possible we were on our own publishing system when we launched the podcast too. So it's pulling all this data from multiple places and coalescing it into one, you know, one set of data that goes all the way back to episode one, getting all the show notes right, formatted in a way that's gonna not look terrible and, you know, all that stuff. That's all happening. And actually we've had success with some dry runs of it. So I'm really excited. And hopefully by the end of this month, we will be launching that site and have MackieCab on its own as, you know, next step into the future here. So fun stuff. Thanks for hanging out. Sponsors, MackieCab.com slash sponsors, that will always direct you to wherever that is. That's what started that. Of course, you can check out our sponsors for this episode, The Jordan Harbinger Show, as I mentioned, really, truly great show. Go listen, I love it. Of course, ZockDoc.com slash MGG. DrinkTrade.com slash MGG. CoreCode.com slash IO with coupon code MGGQ1. Just go to MackieCab.com, the link is there. Way easier. ZockDoc.com slash MGG. John, any parting thoughts to share with our esteemed audience? I just have one thought, Dave, and that's don't get caught. May not.