 Welcome to Mac Geekab, episode 932 for Monday, June 13th, 2022. Welcome to Mac Geekab, the show where for 17 years, as of today, we have been answering your questions, sharing your tips, sharing your cool stuff found, although cool stuff found in quick tips were segments that came later. Even questions came a little bit later, but I'm pretty close to the beginning because the goal is now these days in 2022 for each of us to learn at least five new things every time we get together. Sponsors for this episode include BB Edit from Barebones Software at Barebones.com and New Relic. We're at NewRelic.com slash MGG. You can get a hundred gigs of data free forever. No credit card required. We'll talk more in depth about each of those because you're going to want to learn about what New Relic's doing and how it can help you. It's amazing. And BB Edit, one of my favorite apps that's open all the time on my computer because it does so many great things with text. We'll talk more about those in for now here in Durham, New Hampshire. I'm Dave Hamilton and here in Fairfield, Connecticut. This is Jonathan Braun and here in Lee, New Hampshire is a pilot Pete. 17 MGG anniversary gents. Yeah. Happy. It's amazing. We are as as as Brian 8944 in our discord room at live.mackycob.com pointed out this morning the show can now watch our rated movies here in the United States. There you go. Exactly. Almost old enough to drink one point of personal privilege. I'd like to mention there's a gent by the name of Ray lives here in the seacoast area and he drives elderly folks around to get the doctor's appointments. Things like that. So it turns out he was driving my my mother earlier this week and they put it together that he's an MGG listener and my mother was surprised. Wait, what? You're on the radio? Well, kind of mom. Not exactly. But why didn't you tell me? I said, you didn't ask. She says, well, we're on TV. I said, no, she goes, well, I'm asking. So but thank you to Ray for providing that service to people out there who are otherwise less mobile than they used to be and feeling a little bit shut in. Amazing. Yeah. Thank you, Ray. Yeah, absolutely. Thanks for being a listener. Thanks for doing Yeoman's work out there. It's good stuff. Happy to be happy to have you in the MacGycob family, Ray. Yeah, 17 years. It's you know, this show started before the iPhone existed. Like there's a reason that it's called MacGycob. And that reason is credited to my wife. The first episode was not called MacGycob. It was called TMO to go. And you can find the first episode, if you want, at mgg.fm slash one, because that's how it works now on our new site. So any episode number you want is mgg.fm slash whatever episode number. And that will get you there. And you will hear episode one and it's called TMO to go. I think it was I think it was the second episode where we called it MacGycob and that was Lisa's. She's like, I should call it the Geekgab. And I was like, oh, and then, of course, I was the one that put Mac in front of it. She was much smarter than me and still is. Because if we had just kept it at Geekgab, it wouldn't have been so, you know, pigeon-holed into one product that Apple has of many now. Dave, Dave, I'm sorry you opened the door, man. I'm going to mention you said mentioned pre-show or post-show, but I'm going to mention it. Lisa's smarter than you. So I ran across this thing today as a comedian by the name of Don McMillan, search for him on YouTube. He has boolean proof as to why your wife is always raised. So just search for Don McMillan, M-C-M-I-L-L-A-N. And he's a comedian, but he has a chart that he fills out and proves theologic through and fall. Also, why your wife is always right. So the link is in the show. You don't even have to go that far. It's already there. No, it's actually it's really funny. They guys are former recovering software engineer, maybe or hardware engineer, perhaps even. But yeah, he walks everybody through everybody through boolean logic in a actually very humorous way. I liked it. That's good. All right, let's get into some quick tips because, you know, if you have any questions about what we've done over the the last 17 years, you can ask us, but you can ask us literally anything. That's what we're here for feedback at MacGeekApp.com. Did you say feedback at MacGeekApp.com? You said feedback at MacGeekApp.com, which also wasn't the email address that we used 17 years ago. But things have changed. One thing that I think probably did work 17 years ago, but I stumbled onto it again and put it in the show here as a quick tip is if you grab a window, you know, you have multiple windows up on your Mac and you grab a window with the mouse, it becomes to the front, right? That's just how that works. Well, if you command and then click and drag on a window, it will move the window, but it will leave it wherever it is in the stack of windows. So it doesn't bring it to the front. It doesn't push it to the back. It leaves it right where it is, but you can move it around. So command drag a window to keep its background position. If it's the front most window, it will remain the front most windows. Well, of course. But yeah, it's one of my I love that little tip and I love doing that. I forgot about it. Very useful, I guarantee, because there's times when you want to move a window. Yeah, so you can get to it quickly, but but you still want you don't want to kill what you're doing. Yeah, you've you've built this stack, right? And you like the way it is. But it's like, I just want to nudge that thing over to the left so I can see a thing. Yeah, it's though. It's great speaking of command clicking. I accidentally did something in mail the other day. I was on my let's say my inbox. It doesn't matter. And I command clicked on another mailbox and mail sidebar. And the view changed to a consolidated view of those two mailboxes. And so I tried a third and it says at the top three mailboxes. So if you you have multiple mailboxes that you want to see the results or the contents of and then because of the way mail works, you can search and it will only search those three mailboxes if you unless you change the focus, really handy little thing. I've already used it a bunch of times. So, you know, and I had a question about that tip pre show. And I'm like, well, Dave, what do you mean? I command click on a mailbox and it doesn't do anything for me. Oh, it's when you want to select more than one mailbox. The second one. That's right. Reading through the tips. And so I asked the question question, well, what if you shift click? Well, so if you want to get three, it's like selecting any folder or file. If you shift click, you can select consecutive mailboxes on the left hand side too. So that's right. Yeah, there's nothing special about this in terms of all the standard selection rules apply. That's right. The ability to limit your search to say three mailboxes or five instead of the four hundred that I have. It's huge. Yeah. Because for me, it's either prior to this, it was searching one mailbox or all mailboxes for a smart mailbox. If I wanted to search, you know, multiples, that's how I would have done it in the past. And now it's like, no, no, no, dumb, dumb. I can just do it this way. So like, yeah, yeah. Listening to this show doesn't make us smart. Creating this show doesn't make us smarter. Listening might make you smarter. I don't know. But it certainly adds knowledge to our, you know, handy little tips. So it makes us seem smarter. And that might be the most important thing. Bob says, not something you would use often, but would be useful. Perhaps if you are charting your kid's growth, if you open the measure app on your iPhone and point it at a person standing and center it, if you are far enough away, it will tell you how tall that person is. And you can take a picture of that person with their height shown right on the picture. I had no idea. Now, there was some, I haven't tried it with my phone. This tip just came in like it was, you know, hot off the presses. So I haven't tested it. I don't think it requires a phone with a LiDAR scanner in it, but it might. So it might be limited to those phones and iPads that have LiDAR. But I don't think it is. I think it'll work for anybody. But we will test. Pretty cool, huh? Just, I don't think it will work for anybody. I just was playing with it as you were talking about it, David, another cool thing it has in it. In the measure app, this is? Yeah, yeah, in the measure app is a level. Super handy. I completely forgot about that, yeah. Yep. Yeah, handy stuff to remember as we head into our summer projects here. I wonder if, I wonder how that level works. I wonder if there's an accelerometer that does that or I'm wondering if it could be an artificial attitude indicator. Oh. Not that I would ever apply instruments that way. No, but if that was the only instrument you had left, I would use it, yeah, in a pinch. Oh, you got to let us know, Pete. Yeah. I wish I had thought about it earlier this week because I spent way too many hours on an airplane on Monday. Yeah, exactly. But if you're at a 60-degree angle of bank level turn that brings you to two Gs, if it's accelerometer, then that would indicate level. You're at two Gs, but level. Right. But if it's somehow got another way of sensing it, I'll be interested to find out. Yeah, because there's a gyroscope in there, but. Yeah. Yeah, huh. I'll deal with that. All right, yeah, yeah, please do report back safely, of course. We will assume whatever answers you give us are only found when you are a passenger on a plane and certainly never when you are in charge of flying the big, huge piece of metal in the air. Yeah, so, yeah. Actually, I would never do that on the heavy stuff. Right. My little airplane, you can do that stuff. That's true. Yeah, yes, that's right. Fair, fair, fair, fair. That's right. All right, anything more on that before we move on here? Cool. Listener Brad says, let's see. He said, if the need arises for someone to restore a previous version of something from a network drive on a Mac, you can do so. You can do this on a Mac by adding the tilde snapshot immediately after the SMB path. So if the SMB path is, you know, SMB colon slash slash IP address slash my folder, then you would add to the end of that slash tilde and the word snapshot in all lower case. And you will get a window of all of the snapshot folders on that volume with dates and times that can be expanded and you can dig in and pull things out of those snapshots. Awesome. I love it. Awesome. Right? Yeah. Yeah. Like, that's pretty cool. That's pretty cool. From the way Brad worded things in the longer version of his email, I think this construct of using slash tilde snapshot at the end is common to windows as well. But I don't have a Windows machine to test it, so I might be misinterpreting that. But certainly worth trying if you want to do the same thing to a Windows server. Obviously, a Windows client can do that to a Mac because SMB clients are SMB clients. But I think it goes the other way, I think. You can quote me on that as long as you add the, I think. Yeah. Hey, I got a quick tip that just came up. Go. As we were doing the pre-show, I was trying to figure out how to put the banner in. And I couldn't get it to space properly. OK. I was putting spaces in front of it and it kept justifying left. And Barry Kay in the chat room said, well, try a hard space. And so we tried what he said, control space. And he came back. He said, no, I misspoke. I misspoke. It was option space. And it works. Option space will put a hard space in something that is trying to justify left on you. So probably a very limited use, but it worked here. No, I can see that because there are times when, you know, I want to use a mono spaced font in order to know that five spaces are going to be the same distance regardless of where they happen to appear because a non-mono spaced font, the spaces can get, you know, manipulated. I don't know what. Yeah, they can get wonky. That's a technical term. That is a technical term. That's right. Yeah. So, all right. So option space puts a hard space in. Hard space. Yeah. So thanks, Barry Kay. I like it. Wow. Nice. I love it. All right. You know, I have been looking for the right MagSafe charger for my bedside, right? And currently I am using the Belkin Boost Charge Pro 2-in-1, which has a MagSafe thing for the phone and then a little sort of Cheapad in a tray that really is built for AirPods. I'm not sure what else it would work with. You might be able to lay a phone over it, but you're adding some distance there because it's got like a little divot for your AirPods case to sit in. I'm eager to try out the 3-in-1, which adds up the ability to charge the watch on there. But having MagSafe next to the bed is the only way to wirelessly charge reliably. Too many of us have woken up with uncharged phones because they weren't sitting right perfectly on the Cheapad that doesn't have MagSafe. So MagSafe has been great ever since I moved to that. But like I said, I'm looking for the 3-in-1 and I don't have one of the Belkin ones, so I was searching all over Amazon and there's tons of them and you can find them for about, I don't know, 40 bucks, maybe. But all of them have a light on the bottom that shows you when things are charging. I don't want a blue LED or a green LED or really any color LED next to my bed while I'm trying to sleep. That's bad. That's bad for me. It's bad for all of you because then I get crazy when I do the show if I don't sleep. Listen to Craig. That is my excuse. You don't want to hear the song that I made up about the cat that woke me up at 5.30 this morning, Pete. It's not safe for the show. Let's put it that way. Not safe for the cat, I'm betting. It's definitely not safe for the cat. That's right. This is not my favorite cat that woke me up. It was, of course, would have given him a pass because that's what you do with your favorite cat. This was not my favorite cat that woke me up howling for 10 minutes at 5.30 in the morning. It did allow me to get through all of the questions that John didn't go through while I was away and so we're caught up. So, you know, sure. But I wrote a nice little song for the cat that I will not be sharing here on the show. Craig, however, has a solution not to my cat issues but to the LED light shining in your face while you're trying to sleep issues. He says, what if you took an NFC tag and stuck it and placed it over the light and this way you can kill two birds with one stone or two cats, I don't know. Cover up the light and use the NFC tag to initiate any sleep shortcuts that you want to run every time you go to bed. Right? I loved this for a variety of reasons. One of them is just as a reminder to me to use those NFC tags that I have because I bought like a packet 20 of them. I don't know, it cost like six bucks or something on Amazon. But they can be super helpful. You can embed your Wi-Fi password in them so that guests can just like tap it in your network, you can have them do shortcuts or all sorts of different things. So handy little NFC tags. Thank you for the reminder, Craig. I've never used NFC tags, but that's brilliant. Yeah, you definitely want to get something. Yeah, we'll find a pack of them on Amazon or something and put them in the show notes just so people can have an easy place to start. Let me look for that while you move on. All right, sounds good, perfect. Any thoughts on that, John, before we move on, though? No. Okay. I just needed tea. Oftentimes, I will ask that question, hoping for more than a one word response so that I can actually swallow my tea, but it's all good. Listener Corey sent, and of course, Corey is a listener, and he's also the person who is responsible for creating and maintaining our Makikab iPhone app. Corey heard us talking on a recent episode about Hoobs, which is an engine that allows you to add home kit, add devices, add non-home kit devices to HomeKit. And Hoobs is based upon Homebridge, which is sort of the core tech that lets you do that. Hoobs added a graphical interface to it years ago that was much easier to manage. Hoobs has gone from version three to version four, and there is no docker way to do Hoobs four on my Synology distation yet, so I had not moved to Hoobs four, and he heard me talking about that. And he said, you know, I know you like Hoobs, and you've used Hoobs, but you should go back to Homebridge, because Homebridge now is so much better than it used to be, it has a graphical interface, and it's actually, in his opinion, better than the one in Hoobs, and he is correct, even better than that, or adding to that, is that there is a package for Homebridge on DSM7 for us Synology users, so I don't even have to mess with docker for this, and I was able to get it installed very quickly, I moved all my things over to it, and it has been fantastic. The nice part about the new Homebridge, which carries over to Hoobs version four, is that you get to run a separate bridge for each family of devices that you are running, instead of just one bridge for all of them. This sounds like technical mumbo jumbo, and it is the net effect, though, is that if you have one type of device that is causing problems in Homebridge, the old way, when there was just one bridge, it brought everything down. Now it only brings that device down if you do a separate bridge for each one, so it's a whole lot more stable, and it has been great. I've had it running for probably a month now, so thank you, Corey, for that heads up, and if anyone out there is interested in it, that's the way to go. We'll put a link in the show notes. Well, also, we're going to be doing, now that I'm back from my travels, my, you know, May's worth of travels, we're going to be doing some hangouts, if you will, in our Discord Room, or Discord channel, at mackeygub.com, I think the first one that we're going to do is about Plex. We'll just get together and talk about Plex. I will happily lead the conversation, but hopefully I don't have to lead it for very long, and it just becomes a collaborative kind of thing, and everyone will be invited to that. So you can, if you join our Mackeygub Discord channel, that's where you will find out about these things as we sort of experiment with other ways for us all to interact. Go ahead, Pete. Yeah, one of the neat things about Plex, as you know, is that you can share your library with others, and that might be a place for people to go, oh, you know what, here's a good way to... Yep, here's a good way to find people with whom... We're willing to share. Yeah, that's right. Yep, absolutely, absolutely. Yep. All right. Anything more on that before we move on to our last two quick tips here? I guess not. I've got none. I didn't even get a single word answer that time. Amazing. Brad shares a handy little, albeit geeky, terminal quick tip. He says, if you need to kill all command from the terminal to generate a crash report, add a dash three to it. So you would do kill all dash three. Kill all, one word, lowercase, space dash three, space, and then say finder, the word finder with a capital F, because that's the name of the app. It would kill the finder and generate a crash log for that quick, which is great. I love it. Thank you. These are cool things. Yeah. Yeah. The kill all command I like a lot because it means I don't have to look up the process ID of the process that I'm killing. Of course, if there are multiple instances of a given process by name, well, you can guess what the kill all command will do to all of them. Yeah. Right? That's perfect. It is perfect. I like it. Last quick tip, then we'll, we've got some questions to go through and we'll tell you more about our sponsors. I promised I would tell you more about New Relic and even a new thing maybe about BDT that you don't yet know. But first, I want to share a thing that I saw on Twitter, I believe, from Jeff Gamet. He's been running the iOS 16 and iPad OS 16 developer betas. And he points out that you can see the password for the current Wi-Fi network now. You can expose this in iOS. This has never been something that you could see before. There was the, I was in a, I went to a Sonos event years ago and it was for, I don't know, they were releasing some, I forget what they were releasing, they set up a Play One in each of our hotel rooms, right, so that we would get there and it was set up with an iPad so that you could get to the room and you could play whatever you wanted, you know, on this Play One in your hotel room while you were there for the weekend. It was a really good, you know, smart move for a press event. Great, great idea. And I was like, well, I want to connect to this from my devices though. I don't want to just use their iPad, like, but I can't get the password for the Wi-Fi network out of that iPad because it doesn't show until you have iOS 16 and this was in the past, it's not the future, so I didn't have iOS 16 yet. And then I had an idea, John. I was like, okay, wait, if I log this iPad into my iCloud account, my Apple ID, it will then sync all of my known Wi-Fi passwords back and forth, bidirectionally. And sure enough, as soon as I logged it in, the Wi-Fi password showed up in the list on my Mac and on my Mac, I can go into the key chain and see it. So I was able to get the password and then log things in, but it was a little extra to have to do that. So now you don't have to do those sorts of crazy things. Yeah. Good find. Mr. Gambit, I like it. A recent guest, a recent two-time guest on the show. Yeah. Yeah. You're saying he's a two-time? What? I think the appropriate thing would be that he is a many-timer. Jeff appears on many, many podcasts. Yeah. All right. Yeah, we've got your questions. Maybe we'll have some time for cool stuff found. John, if we're good with all the quick tips, the next thing I'd love to do is tell everybody about our two sponsors for this episode. Sounds good. All right. You know what? 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Check out BB Edit. You get a 30-day fully functioning trial to check out all the features of the app. And then after 30 days, really, trust me, you're going to want to buy it. But if you don't, a lot of the features, stick around even after the 30-day trial. So just go download at barebones.com, BB Edit 14. You're going to love it. Our thanks to Barebones for sponsoring this episode. All right, John. You want to take us to Bill in his question? I'm going to take us to Bill. So Bill says, I'm looking for a way to dislodge myself from Comcast by substituting a cell provider for the Gateway's Internet input. Some of Eero's blurbs gloss over installing a cell SIM card but don't provide many details. Am I wasting my time pursuing this course of action? I would say no. Because these days, Dave, with 5G, which is supposed to be fast, it's feasible to use 5G or cell, as was mentioned, for home Internet. How do I know this? Because I'm getting stuff in the mail and Verizon even came to my door to try to sell it to me. And they call it 5G Home Internet. And they're not the only ones that offer this. And the pricing looks pretty good. I think when I looked at it, so they advertise speeds that can approach Gigabit. Really? Yes. Okay. 5G, depending on the flavor of 5G Internet, you could get up to that speed. Yeah. Yeah. Read the small print. Sure. I looked through their materials. You may not get it both up and down. I think you'll probably always get it down. The potential is there for down, but maybe not upstream. But it looked pretty inexpensive. I think it was like 25 bucks a month or something. Yeah. And no data caps, which is a nice, that is an issue with Comcast in a lot of places right now is they are putting what I would consider unreasonable data caps on people's connections. If you're doing online backups, you will almost certainly hit some of these data caps or get close to them. Especially that and people are streaming TV and cable cutters and streaming their TV over there and that's just a ton of data. It can be. If you're doing 4K, that can really start to add up. You'd have to watch a lot. Well, I don't know. Maybe not. Yeah. It's worth paying attention to your data caps. That's interesting, huh? There's a couple of comments I want to make. The first one is his comment about referencing some nebulous Ero article about putting a SIM card in. To my knowledge, there aren't any Ero devices with SIM slots, so I don't know that that would work. But you can get their gateway, whatever you want to call it, and then you could detach your Ero to that via Ethernet and let the Ero do your Wi-Fi. It looks like they've got two... I'm trying to think of what the... Yeah, it looks like it comes with a Wi-Fi 6 router, but it's probably not a mesh router. In fact, it's almost certainly not a mesh router. Yeah. All right. Okay. I like it. Yeah. I mean, in the past, what you could do, so they have a device, was it called the MiFi? Oh, that was years ago. Yeah, that's been... Which? I mean, that's been obsolete, but this is effectively the evolution of that, right? Yes, exactly. Yeah. The MiFi, I think, did LTE, which probably is not what you want. But I think these 5G things, and we're going to link to this article, so CNET actually had a little... Okay. Diddy here, Verizon 5G home internet versus T-Mobile home internet, which is best for you. Oh, nice. Okay, great. But the good news is that there are multiple options as well. Now, it depends on where you live. I mean, if you live in the sticks, then you may not be able to get this. Yeah. Yeah. That's right. Yeah. And what else? I think Brian mentioned this. There's another thing called Starlink that is up and coming. It's out. I mean, I know people that have it. Oh, okay. Yeah, it's the satellite version of all of this. But it's high speed. Like, the speeds that I have seen from people with Starlink are impressive for what it is. I mean, it's SpaceX, right? It's one of Musk's companies. And it's low latency. I guess that low orbit satellites is really what it is. But I think the low latency is in the 100 millisecond range, or maybe a little less. So not terrible. Yeah, I think that's the general concern because I've dealt with people that had a satellite. And the problem with satellite is not so much as, as you pointed out, not so much the speeds, but the latency. But that's different with Starlink. Like, the blue wave satellites were, you know, hundreds, if not thousands of milliseconds, you know, 10 years ago. Starlink gets you, I'm looking at an article from Mashable which says that they tested it at 88 milliseconds, which, you know, that's different than the 18 milliseconds I get now. Certainly 88 is, for almost everything, except maybe some really twitchy gaming, 88 milliseconds would be fine. Yeah, you frequently see more than that on the commercial VPNs. Correct. Yeah, correct. That's right. Yeah, fair, fair. Yeah, interesting stuff. I like it. And I liked it. And I think T-Mobile is the same way. But check, you know, obviously check. But I like that Verizon's 5G Home Internet has no data cap. Because the MiFi in the past, you bought a pack of data with it every month. And if you either couldn't go over or if you went over, you would get overage charges. And so you don't want that. But yeah, this is good. When we were in Athens, Greece, we rented this Airbnb, an apartment in a little neighborhood just kind of south of the main part of Athens. We were able to walk to sort of the main section in about 20 minutes. But it was a great little neighborhood, great little apartment. The one thing that sort of stood out to me in some of the reviews as a potential problem was that people said, you know, the Wi-Fi might be enough to check email. But if you need to do video calls or something, like it's not going to fly. I'm like, OK. You know, so I asked the guy about it. And he's like, yeah, I'm going to get fiber put in. It wasn't able, like the appointment kept getting screwed up or whatever. He wasn't able to get the fiber in before we got there. So he had this DSL connection in this apartment. And when we got there, and it was like, you know, I don't know, we landed at like 2 p.m. Athens time. By the time we got there was maybe 4 p.m. And it was weak. He had a DSL router, which had a, you know, an access, a wireless access point in it. And then he had a, the apartment was all like concrete walls and stuff. So he had a repeater, network extender halfway down the hallway just to get to two of the bedrooms, which like all of that worked sort of. But the connection was like awful. It was, I would get packet loss, even just to the router. And it was just like, OK, what's going on here? And the next morning, I woke up about 4.30 Athens time, a.m. because, you know, we were still messing with jet lag and all that good stuff. And I thought, OK, well, you know, I guess I'll grab my laptop and get online. And I did. And it like, it wasn't blazing fast. It was DSL speed. So we were getting about 15 megabits down and maybe about 2 megabits up. But everything was glorious, right? Like ping times were in the 20 millisecond range. Everything was good. I'm like, OK, hang on. So I dug in and I realized a couple of things. Number one, his router and extender were 2.4 gigahertz devices only. They did not have 5 gigahertz. And using Wi-Fi Explorer, I could have used iStumbler or whatever, I realized that his building was, like, infested with 2.4 gigahertz Wi-Fi. It was everywhere. And so I reasoned and like, this is still my working theory. I could be wrong. But in the middle of the night, or at fourth, you know, early, early, early in the morning, no one is using the Wi-Fi in their apartments. And so I had plenty of airwaves to use and things were fine. I'm like, OK, well, this guy needs 5 gigahertz here. He also needs a fiber connection. Like, let's be fair, if he could get a fiber connection, it would solve all these problems. But I was like, all right, well, for us here, we're going to be uploading pictures as we get back and stuff. And then we had to do telehealth COVID tests before we got on the ship, and actually then the ship told us we couldn't use telehealth and we had to go to in-person to do a test and it became a disaster, but we didn't quite know that at that moment in time. And so I'm like, well, we got to solve this problem. And we all had data on our eSIMs and stuff. So we could have just punted and used that and it would have been fine. But you know me, I like to solve a problem. So I put my laptop. I connected my laptop via ethernet to the DSL modem slash router and things were fine. And I tested it later that afternoon and things were fine. Even when the Wi-Fi was terrible, ethernet was still good. So it's like, okay, it's not the DSL connection that's bad. It's just Wi-Fi that's a problem. And so I used internet sharing on my laptop. So this was my not quite yet obsolete M1 MacBook Air. It's obsolete now, of course, because there's an M2 Air. But this was my not quite yet obsolete M1 Air. But for the four days that we were in Athens, was plugged into the router via ethernet and then sharing over Wi-Fi. Now, here's the thing. You can do all of this if you go into system preferences, sharing. You turn on internet sharing. But I had to go into Wi-Fi options because by default it wants to share 2.4 gigahertz. I'm like, well, that's not going to solve the problem. I had already tried moving channels around and all of that on his router didn't solve anything. I even tried changing the password on his router to see if maybe there was a neighbor that was like stealing Wi-Fi from him. Because you figure an Airbnb, that password kind of gets around. That wasn't the issue. It was just congestion. So, but you can in internet sharing preferences on your Mac, you can set it to share over 5 gigahertz. What you can't do is have it share both 2.4 and 5. So if you have devices that are 2.4 only, that's probably why Apple defaults it to 2.4. But I was able to change it to a 5 gigahertz channel and for the rest of the week it was glorious. Now, I couldn't use my laptop anywhere other than this little end table in the living room because everybody else was relying on it. So if I needed to do something on my laptop, I had to bring over a little stool or sit on the floor while everybody else could bask on the couch or do whatever they wanted. I didn't spend a lot of time on my laptop anyway, it really wasn't a big deal. It was actually probably good for me to have it in a super inconvenient spot. Would you have like a 24 inch cat 5 cable? Yeah, thankfully I traveled with an ethernet cable, right? Yeah. I don't know why I didn't throw a little travel router in my bag. I knew we were going to have problems with the internet because I knew it going in and I often throw like a little travel router or something in my bag. I did not for this trip. So my laptop sufficed, but I would have left the guy, the travel router in the apartment just to keep the Wi-Fi running. But I'm like, I got to take my laptop with me, man. And he's like, no, he was super appreciative, obviously. And I told him, he's like, do you think the fiber, what would the best solution be? I'm like, well, if it were me, which is how we answer all of your questions too, if it were me, I'd just jump to the fiber. They're going to put a 5 gigahertz router in here anyway when they do that and then all of your problems are gone. He was like, thank you, thank you, thank you. Favorite guest. That's always my goal on Airbnb. Favorite guest. There you go. But it was fun. It was a little thing. And then of course the Wi-Fi on the cruise ship was awful. We have an issue going on with one of the other businesses that I never talked about here where I felt like I might need to be connected. It turned out I really didn't need to be, but I wanted to buy the Wi-Fi on the cruise ship and it was, it's a good thing we didn't have any issues. Let's just put it that way. Atrocious at best cruise ship Wi-Fi. I think I paid... At least it's expensive. Yeah, I think I paid the same... It cost me the same as my Wi-Fi at home. A year's worth of Wi-Fi at home was the same price as a week's worth of Wi-Fi on the cruise ship, so at least there was that. Yeah, but at least it sucked. It encouraged me to not be on the Wi-Fi, which it wasn't a bad thing. Yeah, totally fine. All right, shall we get any thoughts on any of this? I just like your technical term. It was infested with 2.4. Dude, that is the correct term. I mean, I've never seen... I've seen congestion with 2.4 before. This was well beyond... I'd never seen it where I couldn't even reliably paying the router. Wow. I was getting 80% packet loss. Like during the daytime hours when... Yeah, yeah, no. It was like, what is going... Like I said, it just didn't dawn on me that it was too many people because I've never seen it that bad. And plus with concrete walls, I figured, well, you know, like we can't get Wi-Fi from the front of the apartment to the back of the apartment. How much could anybody else's Wi-Fi be interfering here? Well, turns out quite a bit. Well, then go around a couple of microwaves just for grins. That's the other thing, right, is potentially this wasn't Wi-Fi causing the 2.4 interference. It might have been, you know, maybe somebody next door just runs a microwave from 9 a.m. to 10 p.m., man. Right on. Yeah, maybe you don't want to stay in that apartment for too long. So, yeah, yeah, yeah. Anyway, it was fun. All right. I guess we're moving on here. Let me figure out where we are here. I don't even know where we are. Lauren has a question for us. And Lauren says, I'm wondering if you have any recommendations for programs or other ways to remote from a PC to a Mac without the Mac user having to do much of anything more than just hitting say yes or accept. My father is having problems with his 83-year-old dad needing help with everything he does on his Mac. It's an older Mac. Not sure what OS it's on, but I would guess that it's at least two versions back. What we really need is something that my dad could open on his PC and my granddad would only have to accept or something very easy. Even opening programs is hard and we are hours away, so we can't just go over and help. Is there something we could install? So I'm going to treat this as a geek challenge because I certainly don't have all the answers here. My knee-jerk response is would Zoom be the answer? And I ask that because Zoom's it's great at traversing firewalls. It's great at, you know, all of these things. It makes it easy. And these days, most people are fairly comfortable using Zoom, even grandparents, right? The lockdowns and all that from the pandemic have made Zoom calls with family and all that fairly commonplace. So if he is comfortable with Zoom, that's what I would jump to because it's all right there. Barring that, I don't know. John, what do you think? Do you have any ideas? It'll come to me in a moment. Okay. I mean, there's, you know, the solution from that I can't remember the name off the top of my head. I don't know why. But there's things like join.me sort of thing, but do those offer control? That's the other thing that might be nice, not just sharing. Oh, no, you need control. That's right. Yeah, it has to be. I mean, you know, iMessage will do it, but from a Windows machine, no, right? So, you know, log me in would be another one. Like somebody, I think it's Brian Monroe is typing in our chat room here that you could go with Google's remote desktop, which might be a good way to go. You know, something where once it's set up, your grandfather doesn't have to do anything. You can just take control. Now he needs like, it would be good for him to be aware that someone can just do this any time they want before doing that. Obviously, there's privacy concerns and all that that should be highlighted, but setting up something that's just always on as a server, if you will, might be a good way to go. So, yeah, Google remote desktop. I like that idea. I like that idea. Team viewer? That's the one in the past. That's the one I was trying to think of. Thank you. And I think they still have a free option, though if you overdo it, they may cut you off. That's been my issue with Team Viewer as well. They treat me like I'm a criminal every time I go to use it with someone. They're like, you're getting paid for this. How do you know that? Whether or not that's true. How do you know that? I think they do. I think Team Viewer pulls the recipient of a call afterwards. Was this a paid thing? And if they get enough yeses on that, that's how they flag your account. I don't know. I would say Google remote desktop is probably going to be better, but Team Viewer works really well and it may be worth it to this family to pay for Team Viewer if that's the best option. All right. Well, folks, let us know it's called Chrome Remote Desktop I guess is what Google calls it, but if you search for Google Remote Desktop or click the link in the show notes at mackeykev.com, you'll get there. But let us know, feedback at mackeykev.com if you have any thoughts about this. Good stuff. Nice. Yeah? Good? Amazing. Do you use anything, Pete, to help your family members with their computers? Well, I am tech support from my mom, who's 96. The problem is getting her to even open messages on the iPad so I can help her is sometimes a challenge. Yeah. But I often do get the call or an email actually from her. So I get these two lines between my keyboard. What am I doing wrong? Okay. Need a little more information than that, mom. Yeah, that's right. You've got close proximity. Yeah. So there's those challenges too that sounds like the ideal thing is somehow to get him set up the first time. And then be able to control it. And then that's it. Yeah. All right. John, do you have any thoughts on this or do you want to take us to Larry? No, I gave him my thought. Perfect. Larry. So what Larry says, I read somewhere that APFS should only be used on SSDs and not other drives as it can cause problems. Well, I didn't know this before and I got a couple of regular drives and since it was the new shiny thing I decided to format them with APFS that I make a mistake in doing this. Maybe. I'll direct you to an article here. So Mike over at Carbon Copy Cloner did an article about this and you can read it and it's called an analysis of APFS enumeration performance on rotational hard drives. And pretty much the conclusion he comes to is don't do that. If I had to encapsulate what he said in the article. He's right. APFS is designed for SSDs and maybe lacking on rotational drives. So. Go ahead Pete, what was that? You're saying that's interesting, but why? Why? APFS is even slower on SSDs than HFS Plus was. It's not as efficient as this system. It's less noticeable on an SSD because the inefficiencies are not amplified by the fact that there's all this latency to move heads around the drive and things like that. But. Yeah, APFS is built to have snapshots it's built to have a variety of all the other features that we have and it's not slow by any means, but it's not as fast as HFS Plus was before it. At least on the tests that I've done and that I've seen. But I absolutely would still recommend it for SSDs especially these days. You know, I don't I agree with you, John. If you are out for speed HFS Plus is the right thing to do on rotational drives. However, if you want the flexibility of APFS you can do it on a rotational I don't I don't think it's going to kill you know, I don't know. It's hard to say. Yeah. That brings me to a question of what is the most universal file system the most across all platforms? Because we were talking about multi-platforms before but you know is it XFAT is it? Yeah, that's the most universal across max and then what's the most universal across all platforms? I'll give you an interesting data point. So remember Dave we got that Samsung external SSD Yep. T7 I think it was it shipped as being formatted as XFAT. Yeah. And I did a benchmark on it and the benchmark was really really good. Then I was like you know let me reformat it as APFS and see what happens. When I did the benchmark after reformatting it it was I would say in the tens of megabits lower so it was actually faster using XFAT. I can believe that. Sure. On the Mac. Yeah. Interesting. Yeah XFAT I would say XFATs would be my answer to your question too Pete is that that's the universal I mean you know they all use air quotes here and you can see the band aids that I got from trying to slice bread this morning after my cat woke me up way too early and I was too to asleep to properly slice bread. We used to cat didn't give you the band aids. Yeah. The wrong creature got the band aids let's put it that way Pete. Right on. Oh man. I love cats. Cats are my favorite pets really truly. I love cats that's this particular one being he's our main coon cat he is not he's not my favorite today they're loud they're like I mean he's loud but I think in general they're you know they like to how he comes into bed and he just howls at us it's like dude it's just doesn't this this is grounds for eviction at best wrong room wrong time wrong room wrong time you got it yep when it's dark or quiet that's how it's going to be good thing you don't have a husky I've I've seen some videos as of late online and huskies howl mm-hmm and boy do they howl yeah we had a we had a dog that was like a besenji cross mutt kind of thing a little dog man that thing it was like that was no good no beagles howl yeah beagles howl too yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah she barks when we're around when we leave her it's so fun all right this is the barkie she's saying different things Pete that's right I know we have a beagle in the neighborhood because when the fire truck goes by I will hear the beagle will howl in in unity with the fire engine thinking maybe it's another another beagle I don't know yeah I can I can see that sure why not yeah yeah yeah enough about beagles yeah Jamie sends us a a note that I was very happy to see Jamie says in MGG 930 Dave you said that you didn't think the Synology RT 6600 AX was actually available to ship well Jamie says I ordered one from B&H photo on May 11th and they shipped it on May 25th and he received it on May 31st said I ordered this primarily because of the VLAN features and because I want to isolate my IOT devices I'll let you know how it goes I'm glad to hear this I am also glad and I'm super happy to share that while I was away I had reported you know I mentioned in this show that I had some issues with the RT 6600 AX specifically with regards to top speed it wasn't getting any more close to the gigabit speeds that my connection is capable of well while I was and I had some other wonky things but that was the sort of the main one while I was away Synology issued a hot fix for SRM 1.3 which is the software that the router runs and as soon as I got back I put the the RT 6600 back into service I didn't want it in service while I was away because I wanted to be able to VPN into my network if necessary and I didn't want to be relying on something that was brand new and already proven to be a little flaky at least for me but I've had it in service for the last five days here four days and it is running right now while we're doing this show it has been rock solid I should find some wood to knock on but I really don't think I need it like it feels good everything has been really smooth like no issues at all since I updated the software on it which is great you know that's the I mean when things are new and haven't really been in the hands of consumers yet there's found to be some things that are found and I found at least one of them it sounds like other people found them too so yeah I've been super happy with it I have not yet messed with the VLAN on it I really just wanted to kind of test it and make sure that it was going to be reliable for the network before I started breaking things because I'm sure I will break things as I add VLANs because I don't really know what I'm doing but I'm really I'm just being honest yeah exactly but I'm eager to check it out and I like the way the Synology interface for VLANs looks like it's the best I've ever seen you know my switches and stuff will do VLANs but and the ubiquity stuff will do VLANs but it's like it makes my brain hurt even just looking at the interface and the Synology stuff looks pretty straight forward so I'm eager to try it and start playing around with it so I will let you all know as that progresses those guys are pretty responsive it's amazing and I don't know if you remember right before you left I wound up with an error on my Synology disk station I do remember I wrote to them or chatted with them with customer support and he gave me the thing to upload the logs I uploaded the logs and they said access looks like there's a fatal error on one of your files I set up the access for them and they went in and fixed the corrupt file and put me back together and that whole thing that whole process probably took maybe 48 hours to start to finish wow that's pretty good what's really amazing to me is that's a 7 year old disk station yes they went oh yeah okay here you go we'll fix you up just for a fee or any of that yeah there wasn't that well as a one time exception to our 2 year policy we will help you just we'll help you that's true I never thought about it that way but they make devices that have a longer shelf life than most technology right it's not an unlimited shelf life nor would I expect it to be but I mean look the RT2600 AC the router that I used up until Tuesday is what is 6 year old router right and it's still except for the fact that it's not tri-band for the wi-fi and it's not you know it's only wi-fi 5 only wi-fi 5 other than that it's still the most capable consumer grade router that you can buy other than the 6600 which just came out right so Dave I don't know if you recall several years ago now two or three years ago I had a problem with mine and I don't even recall what the problem was but there were some hiccups in in the throughput on that router and it was causing issues with Debbie's VoIP phone for work and a couple other things and we tried to isolate it and never could but we were able to find that there were some issues and I sent those to Synology and I said how about a deal can you give me a new router at cost and I'll send you the old one for troubleshooting figure out why this is they wouldn't accept that deal they just sent me a new router and said send us the old one wow my second 2600 but they wanted it back so they could figure out why it was doing what it was doing and I got a new router out of the deal and it was well past warranty oh yeah oh for sure they were curious as to why it was doing what it was doing far past things that's a man that's great that's good it doesn't surprise me I will add to clearly what now has become a Synology Lovefest that how focused they are on ensuring that we Apple users have the apps that we need on our Macs and our iPhones and our iPads to truly have seamless integration with the routers and disk stations and Synology Drive and Synology VPN I don't feel like I'm a second class citizen because I'm trying to do this thing on this device with an Apple and it's never been the case even 10 years ago when there were less Apple Apple was even less it wasn't quite as popular as it is today as any listener knows we've been very happy with the Synology stuff and now I am happy to say that I am happy with the 6600 which is great I was super bummed when I first got it and I had problems I'm like oh come on I've been excited about this so I'm really excited that it's just worth think about it which is great that's how it should be you're into the Synology yet yeah that's right they did not pay for this that's right alright any more thoughts on that John on Synology in general or the router or you want to take us to David I will take us to David alright David says I'm looking for a good PDF editor that is free or one-time payment my needs are small and before you say the built-in preview app that thing sucks um yeah depends on what you want to do so yeah my reflection as well is that preview doesn't always get it quite right at least so every now and then I will use PDFs pretty much for my taxes and I've tried to use preview and it doesn't always get it quite right but you know what does get it right I mean how about the people that made PDF so one recommendation is there's something called Adobe Acrobat Reader DC which is free and I've had better results with that so that's not really a PDF editor though right like you need to go to the full version that's why I said yeah I don't know if I'm interpreting editor properly if it's filling out forms got it then that would be my choice because preview has better editing capabilities and markup capabilities probably limit it to markup versus editing which I think is I don't consider preview to be a PDF editor but it does let you do markup on a PDF which is quite nice yeah so yeah so it's not yeah so maybe I misinterpreted it yeah it's not quite an editor but with the free options you can fill out forms so that's what you want to do that would be my recommendation if you're looking for a PDF editor then I would say PDFPan is the way to go yeah it is the way that I go do yeah but I feel like I had reason to edit some PDFs actually several times recently and I wanted to change some text on them and PDFPan will do it but even though I use it for this regularly enough to know exactly what I need to do in the software like I understand the functions of the software to do it it's still this super janky process and as soon as I start editing things the PDF just goes like all wonky and I'm in an edit mode even filling out forms frankly in PDFPan is like sometimes like I don't know it's not I I feel like the people who maintain it because it's changed hands several times it feels to me like the people who maintain it don't use it or at least don't use it for the purposes that I use it for like because as soon as I do anything in it even just adding like text to it like when I travel we have you know our workflows here right at Backbeat and one of our workflows still relies on printing out the insertion orders that come in and I do it because that way I can I there's like a five step process that we do internally to process the order and I like to be able I write the five steps on there like just one word for each of them and I can cross them off and I know it's all been done but when I travel and I was traveling for more of May than I was not traveling I would do these as a PDF and so I would use PDFPan to put those five words on there and then just draw lines through them but as soon as I get like finished with a text box I click out of it I'm like not in text edit mode anymore it's like or if I want to go back to a text box and edit it I have to change modes intentionally and and then tap on it just like I always feel like the software has no idea what my intention is and maybe I'm being picky in fact I'm definitely being picky I certainly didn't get enough sleep last night but I have used this software for years and it's just clunky I feel like I'm always fighting with the interface of the software to get it in the mode that I want and then it either stays in the mode too long or it doesn't stay in the mode at all it's never in the mode that I want it in let me put it that way that's my TLDR on this I'll give you that you know you double click a tool and it's supposed to stay there and then it doesn't feel a little frustrating sometimes right it's like what's going on here you know I just highlighted text and I hit the edit button don't you think maybe I want to be in a text mode to like type some things like I don't know what the heck else would I be doing you know I take those things so I would love to find a more a PDF editor that is more in line with how I how my brain works because clearly I haven't been able to adapt to PDFPEN despite ten years of use right there's two versions of it too though there's PDFPEN and PDFPENPRO and I forget what the difference is between those I haven't used PRO in a long time PRO is mostly the difference is mostly that you can create PDF forms but in terms of the editing and those things there I mean they're they're effectively the same at least for what I need to do with them because I have PRO but it doesn't I don't know if PDFPEN is available in SEDAP it was I don't think it is anymore no I I'd looked okay really because I'm still using it interesting yeah and I yeah and I looked at the the so the copy I have I think I got it from SEDAP speaking of SEDAP that's another suggestion so the nice thing about SEDAP so SEDAP is a software subscription service so you pay monthly and then you get access to a whole bunch of things but the thing is they also have a search tool so you can go and type in PDF and it'll list all of the titles that do something with PDFs so that's another suggestion I am looking here I see Nitro PDFPRO is inside SEDAP and is listed as a PDF editor so I'll try that sure but I'd be curious for for anybody out there to share like what maybe what I'm experiencing with PDFPENPRO is just the way PDF editors work maybe there's something fundamental to PDFs that there's a limitation and Dave you're hitting the walls and quit being so unreasonable or maybe there's something better and I would love to know that they've pulled that though I'm shocked shocked Brian Monroe in our Discord chat at live.mackiekeb.com says that Libre office will edit PDFs and so I will check that Barry K is advising that we check out PDF expert so we will check out that yeah so we've got some options here and there's one Barry K also mentions about PDFPENPRO for OCR and in SEDAP there's one that says that OCR is everything like scan an OCR with Prismo scan an OCR in the document Prismo's awesome and then the one I'll mention because remember a PDF is basically an image of a document well not really though no okay well maybe I'm misunderstanding it it can be an image and if it is then OCR is your friend but no a lot of most PDFs to make them efficient they put the the text in there and then they embed the character only the necessary characters from the font that was chosen are also there to keep it efficient so if you're you know if you only if you only have like the word heat let's say right they would only put three characters from that font in there the p the e and the t and and that way you know it's it's not embedding all the letters that you're not using from that font I I'm sure I'm over simplifying and getting it wrong but yeah well where I was going with that is I've had some success and in that certainly not with editing the text and that sort of thing using acorn which is an image editor right you know if you need to get a line you know like it wouldn't sometimes I found using PDF pen and I'll type something in and it'll shift the line in a form down a little bit yeah back at acorn and you can put that line back across where it belongs and yeah I mean that's really granular and slow and you're clunky and yeah for sure it works yeah yeah no I get it yeah yeah yeah it works right right all right cool well I'm I'm eager to hear what people say and even just this conversation has sort of sparked me to because the only thing I I the only time I think about editing PDFs is when I have to edit one and that's not the time to go and research other pieces of software it's like well I know how to use this one I know it can do what I need to do I'm gonna hate the next 20 minutes of my life but it's gonna be productive like I'm gonna get it done you know and so that's that's how I that's how I feel every time I open pdf pen pro to edit a PDF and that's probably not the right way to approach an app for like as a user I'm not saying they're doing something wrong they're just doing something that's different from how I would you know how my brain wants it to be speaking of how our brains want things to be Allison Sheridan over at no still cast at pod feet dot com dug deep and she wanted to pick out a VPN she says I've been trying to figure out how to assess VPNs ever since I found out that my current one was set to end of life I found that consumer reports did an exhaustive study on VPNs from a security practices and privacy perspective nothing about usability price availability of servers etc she says I read most of their 48 page report it's amazing that they could do a 48 page report on this and not mention usability price availability of servers that's that's deep yeah she says they named their top four out of 200 they called it to 50 and then called it to 16 that they really investigate she says so I bought all four that they rated at the top and I did my own requirements analysis and picked one which turned into only a 6000 word essay which of course we will link for you at the very beginning she says buy one of the ones advertised by your favorite tech podcaster or choose from one of the many top 10 best VPN provider lists the first option isn't a terrible way to go because if you hear about a VPN from a tech podcaster it is reasonable to assume they've used it themselves and done some sort of evil but do you really know so she did her research and the TLDR is she came down with private internet access PIA as her choice they have a deal right now 79 bucks gets you 39 months of private internet access so I think that comes out to like $2 a month or $2.03 a month or something like that so I went and bought it because I've been using ExpressVPN ever since they were a sponsor and kind of left it on autopilot they're 99 bucks a year so private internet access and mine like expires at the end of August or something like that and I was like well I can wait till August to do this or I'm thinking about it right now and I can stop thinking about it for 39 months and it was like this is the time to buy so that's you know Dave that's the one I've been using for years but I found it'll auto renew if you let it and then I went in there and I found it was difficult to find a way to cancel and I thought man I don't need this AOL hassle and all that which one are we talking about PIA private internet access I bought it this morning and within 10 seconds of signing up I was able to go in and turn off the auto renew yes but I didn't do that but I couldn't find it so I went in and did it and let it expire because as I was researching it I found that as a new customer I could get a lower price then as a renewal so I let it expire and two days later I went back in and bought the three-year process it's so much cheaper when you do buy it over the course of the three years yeah yeah yeah yeah and the leak in the show notes is Allison's reference that gets her some extra yeah that's right that's right but I will point out if you use a referral key this I tried this morning because I figured well this is Allison's referral key we're not the referral key brings you you know it redirects through as it as those do and it brings you to the homepage and you get to choose this you know one of three options and the one they highlight for you is this you know three years plus three months great okay I click that and the item that's in my cart is two years plus two months for $57 and I and I saw I chatted up their support because you know I was up super early this morning I don't know if I mentioned my cat won't be up yeah and I chatted with them they're like yeah if you use the referral then you only get options to do the two-year thing if you if you want to do the three-year thing you just go to the homepage and choose it from there and then you'll get the three-year thing in your cart I'm like well you should make that clear on the page so that I'm not clicking one thing and finding another one in my cart but they're like okay sounds good like they're not gonna make any changes so don't necessarily use the referral link in our in our show if you want the full three-year deal so they interesting yeah well I listened to her show when she talked about it and she did say that she and her husband went went separately to it and got different prices and and they brought that to their attention it was only a nickel or something but they and they're like yeah we're aware that we're fixing that too sorry yeah yeah yeah but I haven't really tried it yet because I had this show to do and of course I didn't want to do the show over VPN but I one thing I really like express VPN will let you have I believe three devices signed into any one account active you can have them so you can have as many as you want signed in but three active connections on one express VPN account private internet access gives you 10 connect active connections so like you know you could have all your devices on it yeah exactly so yeah yeah yeah I was excited to find one that inexpensive and you know passes not just consumer reports muster but also Allison's muster because she here's a lot more about security than me and I don't say that I just say that as a as a as an observation so hey if the price is right and it fits her metrics it's definitely gonna fit mine there you go yeah yeah how are you John are you are you using any commercial VPNs or do you just VPN into your house and that's it I use the Synology VPN server so you VPN into your house yeah yeah on occasion though as far as a paid solution the one that I like best Dave is tunnel bear are they still even in business I thought they had wow all right oh yeah oh there's definitely oh okay mistaken huh yeah and I'm looking at a page here so it seems pretty reasonable so if you get a paid plan and you get the three-year plan it's 120 so that's not too bad it's like three bucks a month yeah but but private internet access is 79 for the three-year yeah just giving an option yeah for sure yeah yeah but they don't have any data caps five devices logged in and they have apps for Mac windows Android iOS so do they have the ability to connect via what I'll call standard VPN connections so I know I can connect with tunnel bears app but if I want to get my disk station say logged into a VPN is there any or a router logged into a VPN is there anything yeah no it's well they say limited support for Linux I think that's a client I don't think that's a I don't think that sorry I do know the answer to that because I think the answer is no okay I think I think the answer is no that it won't you have to use their app so it's it's it's limited in terms of what you can use because I like to have one of my disk stations logged into a VPN in a variety of ways so and PIA is perfectly acceptable with that so amazing I love it when these things come together all right one one last thing because we've got so much you know it's summertime and lots of people are going to be traveling and more and more of us are able to travel internationally coming back into the US you have to go through passport control of course you have to do that in other countries too but as a US citizen you have the ability to sign up for global entry which is like it includes precheck but you know I'll call it precheck in reverse it gives you the fast lane when you are coming back in through immigration control into the US through passport control if you do not have global entry there are two other lines available to US citizens one is the cattle call line that everybody else gets in and it's long and therefore slow not that the people that are processing it are slow but there's just more people in line to be processed and then between the global entry line which is short and fast I didn't even have to give my passport this last time Pete I just like they took my your global entry card in a little machine I didn't know were you it scans the barcode on your global entry card it scanned my face you don't need your global entry card for flying you need it for land crossings but your passports in it I guess my retina scan that was the end of that here's your receipt go to the front but there's a short little line in between the cattle call line and the global entry line and that is for people using the free to use mobile passport app I mentioned this to my son because Lisa and I have global entry we do not and he as we were getting off the plane walking down the corridor of the plane and then the corridor in Boston Logan he put both his passport and his sister my daughter's passport into the mobile passport app processed it said yep we're here did all the things walked right up to the front they were almost through faster than we were with global entry so we go through the whole global entry interview process yep yep anybody can do it it's free it doesn't cost any like there's no you don't have to do anything in advance clearly you just you know as soon as he had data on the ground he was like I'm good to go okay scan the passport and you're done government enters the electronic age I know so I wanted to make sure to share that I know we're we're a little over time here whatever that means these days but super handy if you're doing any international travel and I wanted to make sure we everybody knew about it any more any thoughts on that any more thoughts on anything before we it's funny because so I just renewed by passport yeah when you so number one the process is a nightmare you mail in your materials and they have three separate mailings to mail back to you your passport your passport card if you want one of those and I got one and then your original document but it's three separate mailings I'm like can you put it all in the same envelope and I guess the answer is no well it's all processed by different departments yeah but um but they do warn you and I think this was a feature even on my last passport there is an RFID chip in it oh yeah I don't know why I couldn't just hold up your passport and let them scan it oh well you do I mean the machine does that for sure yeah and your iPhone will do that with the mobile passport app it scans the they call it is your passport a biometric passport that's the term that's used in the app I yeah but yeah it has it has that little chip and you put your it shows you where to like lay your iPhone on the passport and it scans all the data and you're good to go get your picture all that good stuff yeah pretty cool that's cool that the iPhone can do that right so yeah and actually that's um that feature is coming for driver's licenses not quite there yet well actually some states yeah but Maryland and Arizona I think or something right right so if you go on the wallet app and you uh and you click add and then you click on driver's license you'll see if your state has it mine supposed to but it's not listed yet so it's actually called mobile pass thanks Pete I think that's right I think that's right I've had it I've used it okay I will offer this one caution from my recollection and and they may have changed this if you have global entry and you decide to use mobile pass you if once you start the entry point for that given day airport etc yep you can't use global entry you have to use the mobile pass oh interesting remember getting there and then going okay this is the mobile pass line is longer than global entry and so I went back and tried to use global entry and they rejected me I had to go back to the back of the line and mobile pass I don't know that it's called mobile pass okay no it is you're right it once it's on your phone it's called mobile pass in the app store it's called mobile pass port okay because there was a different app a couple of years ago that we used to do this that was far less automated and far more janky but yeah no yeah so that is the new one once you have it on your phone it's called mobile pass you're absolutely right yeah that's interesting to know it makes sense I mean if they you know if you get if you're in one bucket or the other my guess when you know when I went up and it took this awful picture of me it and still identified me at global entry at the kiosk I thought okay they must have a bucket of people that they know are landing in Boston now yeah right and so it wasn't that they had to pick me from one of everyone it was probably one of 40 right so that would be my assumption because there's no way it would have gotten right from the stupid picture I saw on the screen it's like that doesn't like that could be anybody here ones do transmit a manifest of the past exactly yeah to the government rights which I think I don't remember what the requirements are but I think it's 24 hours prior we can't just walk up and go hey I'm gonna jump seat from cologne to home oh two hours from now interesting you have to have that done 24 hours prior to the manifest that makes sense sure and if that's changed I'm not aware but it's been that way for a long time no my guess is that's probably right I mean my guess is as a paying passenger you might be be able to get a tighter shorter yeah exactly yep yep alright thanks for hanging out with us folks thanks for all your questions all your tips all your cool stuff found thank you for 17 years this is amazing we don't have any any plans to stop anytime soon either but like take a minute and say thanks for 17 years it's amazing yeah never thought we'd be doing this this long that's John can I mean can you believe it 17 years man no that's have you trademarked that yet the the pause no no all right make sure you listen to a podcast that is barely 17 days old that is pilot Pete's new aviation podcast called so there I was because that is how every great aviation story begins so thank you through episode four now have a lot of fun and and lots lots of people visiting and a lot of people from this show coming over and visiting and making comments so thank you come listen to some of the fun and the crazy hijinks and I promise you soon we're going to get into some of the more poignant and in some cases tragic tales of aviation but got some people lined up and I think we're going to enjoy it awesome thanks for all your help Dave you've been so instrumental in helping me get the website set properly and the hosting thank you my pleasure you're part of the Mackie cab family man like yeah absolutely absolutely speaking of the Mackie cab family go to Mackie cab dot com slash merch get your t-shirt get your stickers John we've got to pick the winners for our ticker contest here and yeah thanks for hanging out with us folks make sure to check out our sponsors course and do relic dot com slash barebones dot com you go to Mackie cab dot com slash sponsors to see all the current deals that we uh that we have for you even if it's not an active sponsor the deal's still there we leave it there right up alright Pete well John got us into this I've been talking a bunch through this episode you got to help us get out man what's what's it going to be well I got to say that I'd like to change things up but after 17 years the rule remains don't get caught you're right and and you know what's even better is when everybody says it together and I remember a time not that long ago but too long at max stock when I got to hear this don't get caught thanks for hanging out folks don't make me mute you Pete the video says otherwise John you're being too crazy today man I didn't do it