 Or perhaps the last time this year, the Mac Observers, Mac Geek, have episode nine, oh, seven for Monday, December 27th, twenty twenty one and welcome to the Mac Observers, Mac Geek, have the show where you send in your tips, your questions, your cool stuff found. We take all of that stuff. We string it together. We try to have some answers for your questions. We try to have our own cool stuff found sometimes to share our own quick tips. The goal is, no matter what we do and how we do it, that each of us gets to learn five new things, at least each episode, each week when we get together. Sponsors for this episode include imperfectfoods.com. You save 20 percent off with promo code MGG, truebill.com slash MGG, saving you thousands per year. You get your first five grand managed for free for life at wealthfront.com slash MGG. And we'll talk about other world computing's new mini-stack STX, which is a very cool thing. We'll do all that shortly here for now here in Durham, New Hampshire. I'm Dave Hamilton. And here in Snow, Leiden, Fairfield, Connecticut. This is John F. Braun. How are you? Is the snow like you're supposed to get lots today? No, it's it's melting away. Oh, OK. OK. But now we got a little dust thing in a way, you know, it's kind of nice for the season. Oh, yeah, for sure. White Christmas and all that great stuff. Right. So this comes out on the 27th. But as most of you know, we record on Fridays, usually. So we're recording this on Christmas Eve, the 24th. And you can always join us for the recordings at live.mackykeb.com. We would love to we'd love to have you there. If you go to Mackykeb.com slash calendar, you can subscribe to the very calendar that we use here. And and, of course, if you just go to Mackykeb.com, you can subscribe to the mailing list that will send out the show notes each and every week. We string really work hard to make sure that our show notes are super valuable for you. You can have an email to you, as I said, like going to the site, Mackykeb.com. But they all we also put in chapter markers and timestamps in them so that when you're listening in your car or on your phone or wherever, most podcast players now let you skip around by chapter. So if we start talking about, say, something about an Apple watch and you don't have an Apple watch, no problem. Skip forward, go to the next one. It's totally fine. Yeah. So so we do that for you. I don't yet have one, but we'll talk about something else that I just purchased from Apple coming up. Coming up and cool stuff found. Yeah, for sure. Yeah, man. All right, let's do this. Let's let's get to some quick tips, shall we? Indeed. Ben Ben shares when he says, my partner wanted to share her password to log into a particular service using my Mac where I was logged into my user instead of hers. Instead of manually dictating or transcribing from her device with the stored password to mine, I thought, wait, we can use live text. I captured the text string using my iPhone camera, copied it and then pasted it on my Mac. So easy. I like it. This is not flawless. I have tried this after I got Ben's email. I was like, this is amazing. And I was doing something last night, which we will talk about later in the show as well, that required copying something similar to a password the same way. And it like it turned. It was weird. It like it turned a lowercase o into a capital O and there was something. Oh, and a G into a Q or vice versa. But there were there were two things that were wrong. And it was like, thankfully, we weren't doing password so we could see what we were pasting in on on both sides. And it was like, wait, wait, wait, wait, let's compare. This is a problem. It's like, can you copy that and text it to me instead, which is another way of doing it? Slightly, slightly less secure because you're well, if you're using iMessage, it's end to end encrypted. But this is a good thing. It is worth trying. It just, you know, it's not a flawless technology. But I love this idea. It's fantastic. So it's good. Let's see, you got a quick tip for us to share from from that, I think, right, John? Yes. So that says in Mechicab 902, you mentioned that option command power button will sleep a Mac. This command has actually been part of Mac OS for a long time. And for Macs without a power button on the keyboard, option command eject does the trick. So thank you for that. As long as your keyboard hasn't eject. Yeah. Well, not all of them do anymore, right? Because most Macs don't have, I mean, Macs don't come with. Adjectable drives, you know, there's no removable storage anymore. And I mean, it's USB drives are removable, but you get what I'm saying. It's different. Yeah, cool. That's good. Yeah, fun. All right, let's let's see. Ben, I think it's a different Ben who has one for us from 904. It says in 904, you said you couldn't find a way to quickly toggle, do not disturb in Mac OS Monterey. Maybe this episode or your experience happened before Mac OS 12.1, where you can now option click the clock just like you could in Big Sur. Additionally, if you click Control Center, you can click the crescent moon button to toggle, do not disturb, which matches the behavior in Big Sur and iOS 15. I tested this. He's absolutely right, which is amazing. It either one of these for me set, do not disturb that specific focus mode, do not disturb until 7am the following morning. That was what it did for that. So this is a temporary thing, which I like. That's great. So thank you for that, Ben. Very cool. This is what we love Quick Tips for is like these little things because they are somewhat life changing when you learn them. And that's why we do it. Speaking of life changing, my son, we were looking at something. We have a couple of shared notes, which are a really handy way to to do things. We do them with all kinds of things. We do them with menus like for Christmas Day, right? We're having people over and so we're planning a menu and things like that. But we also do it when we travel. I have an Airbnb shopping list, right? All the things that I want to buy when I check into an Airbnb at the grocery store. And so I don't check in at the grocery store. It's all the things I want to buy at the grocery store. When I check into an Airbnb, I reverse the way those clauses were. But I'm guessing you folks figured it out because you're a discerning audience. The the well, if you selected this show, you're a discerning audience, maybe not discerning enough, but discerning nonetheless. So anyway, we have these bunch of shared notes and they're great because they do update like on everybody's phones in real time. But there was something where it was like, who put that on there? You know, I like, I don't remember having the conversation, but I remember putting it on there and my son went and found the shared note history so that we knew who put it on there and when. And you can get to shared note history by going to a shared note. And then and then you there's the there's the shared people in the upper right. And if you tap on that, you can say, show all activity. And it will show you, you know, on December 19th, it says, I made edits on August 7th for this particular note. My daughter made edits. So, you know, it's it's handy. You can see and then you can if you tap on that, then you can see which edits it'll highlight, which things that person either added or removed or changed. I don't think I've ever done a shared note. How do you make a shared note? Excellent question. So you let's say I want to share this note that I have that's not shared. So I would go in notes and open the note and then at least on my phone in the upper right, I tap the three little dots in a circle. And from there, there's an option share note and you can I send it via messages. And that way I can choose, you know, how people are sharing it. But but you could send it via mail or anything like that. But yeah, I send it via messages and then and then the share options are people that you're sending it to. You can set their permission to review only or that they can make changes. And you can also choose whether the people you're sharing it with couldn't share it with new people. So I could share with you and say, but John's not allowed to share with others. Like it just, you know, I want to be in control or whatever, you know. So yeah, you know, shared notes are awesome, really great for this kind of thing. So, you know, we're not seeing it. Um, I'm not seeing anything on notes on my on your Mac Mac mini. All right, well, let's see, because I'm I'm not on Monterey up here in the studio either. But shared notes has been a thing for a long time and this is a good one. So yeah, if you open up a note on your on your Mac or just you don't even have to open it, just like select it so that it's displayed in the three pane view. And then the in the upper right, you have the little people with the plus sign. Ah, OK, OK. And that's where you choose where to share it. Oh, look at that. OK, share note. All right. Yeah, it's a great. I love this part of it. And it's fun, like on our Airbnb shopping this room, messing with the kids. Well, I'm going to I'm going to share this story. I don't know what it'll say about our family, but it's fine. The you know, we had this Airbnb shopping list note. And then for some reason, like we we were using the family. We have I have two of these, actually, one that's just for me and Lisa, when it's just us traveling, because there's no reason for the kids to see that shopping list. And then and then there's the one that we have amongst the four of us. And for whatever reason, we were using it must have been like after we dropped my son off at school or something. But, you know, we we dropped him off and he was so he's part of the trip at the beginning and then he wasn't part of the trip at the end. And so it was just Lisa and I. And so I put after, you know, the kids had sort of departed from we'd split apart. I put at the top of the Airbnb shopping list, the big bag of weed so that the kids would see that and be like, oh, what's going on here? Like, what's the matter with our parents? So I never heard anything about it from the kids. They know not to give me the satisfaction of a reaction when I do things like that. So it's smart. Like, I don't blame them because look at me, you know, you don't want to encourage this sort of behavior. So now you know more about our family. OK, I don't know what that says to anybody. But anyway, Tony has a quick tip and he is going to save us from this silliness that is happening here. Let's see where I've got to find it, though, because there's lots of stuff in here. There's we have lots of Tonys that listen. Tony reminds us that, again, quick tips, if you don't know, then it's not a reminder. You get to learn a new thing, which is amazing in iOS. Tony says, I never realized I could trash from mail just by holding my finger on the archive button a moment longer. And what he means is if you have it so that the default button in mail when you're reading a message is archive, now you could have the default button to be trash. You can choose between the two, whether it's, you know, the button is archived or the button is trash, whichever one it is, if you hold down on it, it will give you a little menu and you can choose the other one. So if it's archived, you can, as Tony says, you can hold it down and it changes and it'll let you choose trash. And of course, if it's trash, you can hold it down and choose archive. And that's a super handy feature. I love that about mail. I love being like iOS mail for triaging mail. It's not as efficient as doing it with a mouse and a keyboard on my Mac for sure. But it's not bad like it's doable, especially with swiping. And you can swipe left to delete and swipe right to to archive or vice versa again, depending on how you have those options set up. But but yeah, it's it's pretty good. So thanks, Tony. I like it. Good stuff. Yeah, I've been having to use the junk feature as of late. So my bank supposedly keeps sending emails saying, oh, your account's been suspended, blah, blah, blah. Sure. And I'm like, oh, not again. Well, it's because I mean, look, like obviously, like they know that now they once they figured out who you were. Obviously, they suspended the account. Like, I mean, that's what that's what happened. But no, what would include me in is that the text of the from has bogus characters. Oh, yeah, sure. To avoid the spam filters, I think, because I'm like, well, first off, it's from Citibank. They don't really go by that name anymore. Say, what is it? They just go by city. Is that right? Yes. OK. Yeah. I mean, I have accounts of Citibank. And they're like, oh, it's from Citibank. And I have Citibank accounts like you probably do. And I do. I used to work there. They I think some of my accounts are still free because I worked there. Just nice. Like my kids did not know me when I worked there. That was a long time ago. But yeah. All right. Let's we've got we've got more tips and questions from you. More tips and questions from us. Cool stuff found from us. And we have some sponsors, which I'd love to do next if if that works for you, Mr. Braun. OK. All right. Hey, look, it's time to talk about other world computing and their brand new mini stack STX, which is the world's first Thunderbolt for certified storage and hub expansion solution. So this thing, it's the same size as a Mac mini. In fact, it's they call it the mini stack for a reason. It's built to stack your Mac mini on top of. And what it gives you is a Thunderbolt for hub with four total ports. So one of them goes upstream to your to your Mac. And obviously it could be a Mac mini. And then the other three are there available for you to connect to, you know, millions of Thunderbolt, USB-C and even future USB for devices and accessories. But that's not all because inside is a universal hard drive or SSD Bay and an NVMe to M.2 SSD slot so that you can configure it with storage. You can buy it empty or you can, you know, buy it with storage direct from from OWC. And it can even be combined in a raid one configuration, right? So you've got all these options up to 770 megabytes per second of storage performance. This mini stack STX is great for things like, you know, bandwidth intensive stuff like video editing, photography, audio, virtual machines and everyday data backup. And what's cool is this now could be your boot drive even from your Mac mini, right? You know, so you got a boot drive that didn't quite have enough storage. You can either boot from the Mac mini drive and then just have your your big stuff right here and go the other way around. This is fantastic. And the way that they've done this, it makes sense. It's no surprise, right? It's OWC. They know what they're doing. We say this all the time. It's no surprise that they would have figured out how to do this. So you got to go check it out. It's the mini stack STX from OWC at MacSales.com and our thanks to Otherworld Computing for sponsoring this episode. Next up is Truebill. How many free trial subscriptions end up costing you hundreds, if not thousands of dollars, long after you've forgotten to cancel? Like, do you really need all those streaming services now that you're back in the office, right? The pandemic almost required us to have like 12 different streaming services, but maybe you're not using all of those anymore. Well, welcome to our sponsor, Truebill because Truebill is the new app that helps you identify and stop paying for subscriptions you don't need, don't want, or that you simply forgot about. On average, you know, people save up to $720 a year just by using Truebill because companies make subscriptions hard to cancel. Truebill makes it incredibly simple. You just link your accounts and Truebill will cancel your unwanted subscriptions in one tap. And your Truebill concierge is there when you need them to cancel unwanted subscriptions so you don't have to. I've been using Truebill for a couple of months now and it's amazing on top of all of this, which I can attest is true, it works. Truebill, no surprise there. It also monitors my spending and it'll tell me, hey, last week you spent more on this category of things than you usually do and it's a nice little heads up to just, you know, have that data coming in in a filtered way. It's really fantastic and I highly recommend you check it out. So don't fall for subscription scams. Start canceling today at truebill.com slash MGG. Go right now, truebill.com slash MGG. It could save you thousands a year. Truebill.com slash MGG and our thanks to Truebill for sponsoring this episode. All right, let's go to Larry here. Larry says, I'm getting buried in emails with what seems like hundreds arriving daily. I tried hey.com and that didn't work for me but I did try to replicate its approach and I set up rules to send messages to a variety of mailboxes when they came in to file them into a variety of mailboxes. I currently now have 70 individual rules but it's not enough. It's also super slow, awkward and time consuming to set up and manage these rules. I love the concept of mailbox zero but it ain't gonna happen this way. I also tried to keep track of items by clearing unread and deleting them or archiving them but it's just too much. I need help. Are there any tools I can add to mail.app to assist me in managing my mail? Help me guys. You're my only hope. All right, Larry. Let's see if we can help. I am like you. I get piles of email more than I could ever have imagined but it makes sense and it's fine but I definitely could not just manage it willy nilly. I needed a system and the system that I have standardized on is Sanebox. S-A-N-E-B-O-X.com and I'll put, actually I have a little sign up link because it gets you free month or something. I don't know. It is, I couldn't live without Sanebox. We've talked about it on the show before and I've often said and it is true if Sanebox were to close up shop the next thing that I would do is go write my own little Sanebox engine or find someone else doing the same thing because it is so critical to my workflow. What Sanebox does is it monitors my inbox via IMAP, right? So it logs in like an IMAP client into my mailbox and it looks at all the things that come in and then it decides which one's staying in the inbox and then which ones get filtered to other boxes and they set up a few by default but you can set up your own. So I think one of the default ones is called SaneLater where it will put things like receipts and things like that that are to you but not like, hey, Dave, this is John, I have a thing to talk about, right? Of course, I also, for managing email, do not use email for an inter-office or even inter-family communication. Email is for outsiders. No, no, no, email is super inefficient because it's like Slack or even Messages. Messages is a little unruly to manage but Slack is great, like all the bands I'm in, we use Slack, we don't use email. Obviously all the businesses use Slack. It's fantastic for compartmentalizing things and keeping it out of the mess that is email but the SaneLater thing, any of the Sane boxes are great. What's cool is they have some of their own sort of default rules but then you can tweak it and it is 100% customizable by you meaning if it puts something into SaneLater where I'm like, no, no, no, whatever that is, I want that in the future to show up in my inbox and not leave, all I have to do is move it to my inbox and it will remember that training for me. So yes, it starts with some generic rules but the specific rules are 100% reliable and the reverse is true. If something keeps coming to my inbox, I'm like, no, I want future things like this to go to SaneLater, I just put it there. I created a couple of other folders for myself, one that I call Sane watched, which is like not quite as important as my inbox but also something I kind of want to see and Apple has trained us about these focus modes. I will say that the ability to not have to shift focus when I am looking through email is hugely valuable. My inbox is stuff just to me, stuff that I want prioritized but then when I go do look at like SaneLater with all of my whatever like the receipts and all those other things, I can be super efficient about it because everything is sort of the same and I don't have to think about what category it's in. I just sort of look at it and I can move quickly. They have a Sane News box for the same kind of thing for mailing lists and all of that. And again, it's super efficient to be able to look at mailing lists all at the same time as opposed to mailing lists interspersed with an email from one of our vendors it's like this task shifting is inefficient. So, SaneBox, I love it. The other tool that I use for mail to keep my life straight is Small Cube's Mail Suite. Now, I use Mail Acton which just lets me file mail with keystrokes. It's not, there are more things it can do but a lot of people will use mail tags to and Mail Acton together to assign tags to an email and then put it in different places so that later when you go search for things, you have them not just filed and searchable by where they are or who they came from but also things that you have assigned to them. I never got into that but lots of people love it. I think it is their most popular portion of Small Cube Mail Suite. So, that's how I do mail and I recommend it. I mean, I recommend it because it works for me. So, I don't know. Yeah, I'm still in the Stone Age and that I have my mail rules stored locally and not on the server and that's something that you can do with iCloud. iCloud, Gmail, Fastmail, yeah, most of them have rules on the server. The nice part about rules being on the server or in the case of Sanebox, I would call that more in the cloud because it's a service that's coming in and doing it but yeah, you're right, yeah, rules on the server. The nice part about that is they will filter for your iPhone. So, you know, my Mac can be asleep and my mail is still getting filtered. It doesn't matter. I have no rules on my, actually that's not true. I probably have three or four rules on my Mac that do some specific things but by and large, all my rules have moved to the cloud and it's or to the server. Yeah, it's way better, way better. That's on my to-do list. We found out from another listener and I don't have their question up but they said that they had like 600 mail rules or something crazy. Yeah, but you know, I mean, these things grow over time and they found out recently that Apple evidently has capped and enforced the cap at 500 rules per account. So, there kind of this particular listener was in kind of a pickle because they're like, I can't add any more rules because I'm 109 over Apple's limit or whatever it is. So, you're not good. Speaking of email, John, I did something last night with related to email. Years ago, I bought domains for each of my kids and my son is starting to use that domain now and we talked about different ways of doing it and I said, well, iCloud Plus, like let's start there, let's see how it goes. And so, we're obviously, maybe not obviously, on a family plan for iCloud Plus. I'm the master account and then everybody else has, you know, they're adults, so they're adult accounts but they're sub accounts of the family and we have an Apple one subscription so not only iCloud Plus, but it gets us everything else, the Fitness Plus and Music and TV Plus and all those things. And so that meant that, you know, we're all open to being able to have this and I did a little, I looked into it, obviously before we started and realized, okay, the way Apple has it set up is pretty smart. Anyone in a family share can add a custom domain and when that account adds a custom domain, it can choose, are you adding it just for yourself or are you adding it for the entire family? And it's not just limited to the admin account, it's not limited to the master account. Any account can do it. So what we did was we had my son log in to his account and assign, you know, add the domain for only him because it's, you know, his, he doesn't need to share it with the family and it was super easy. The first thing it asked you, which is really smart is, okay, what email accounts do you already have set up at this domain and where do they point? Like, so if we were sharing it amongst the family, you know, do we have like Dave at and Lisa at and et cetera, et cetera, right? And it wants to know that before you start making any changes to your DNS. And that's so when you do make those changes, your existing accounts don't get lost in the shuffle because you want it to be able to get them either in the old place or the new place. You don't want this, you know, gap in the middle. Now he had never used this domain before. So we just said, well, there's no, there's none. It's fine. And then the next thing it had us do was log in to our DNS provider, which for that particular domain was Cloudflare, but it could be GoDaddy or Hover or whatever. And I get the feeling from reports that we've gotten that doing it with GoDaddy is more seamless, but it was fine. We had to put some MX records in the domain and then a couple of like text records for SPF and domain security. And that's actually where I tried using that live text to share Ben's tip about passwords, the SPF key or one of the key, the DKIM key or something that we had to put in was just long. And so I'm like, hey, we'll do it this way. And that's where it like transposed to G to a Q or whatever. I was like, hey, can you just copy that text to me? So I pasted it. So we did that. It took maybe five minutes for the domain changes to propagate, which is great. I love that these days. And Apple won't let you move forward until it confirms that you have put all of the right things in your DNS. So their servers check, and if they don't find it, they'll say, hey, go look at your SPF record. Go look at your MX record. Go look at your TXT record, whatever it is, it'll tell you, go make sure this is right. And that's how we, I thought it was just taking long time to propagate. And that's when we realized, wait, there's a mismatch here. But we got it together and we did it. And then we, you know, and then he added his own accounts to it. As soon as he did that, they were magically there on his Mac, so he could go on his Mac and say, okay, I want to send from the amount that's, the account that's at my custom domain as opposed to the account that's, you know, that Mac.com or me.com or, you know, whatever he would use for his iCloud mail. And then we sent some test messages back and forth and they shut up where they were supposed to show up and everything was fine. Like Apple made it super easy. Changing your DNS is a bit of a nerdy thing. Like there's no avoiding that unless, like I said, that Apple's got something linked in with GoDaddy where you can just authenticate and it just populates it. It sounded like that was the case. This domain is, I do have domains at GoDaddy. This ain't one of them. So I can't test it, but it sure seemed like that, so. But it was a seamless process, really, and just worked. Now, I'll report back in two weeks if there's, you know, something about it that doesn't just work over time, but I think it's gonna be fine. Yeah, they made it super easy. So highly recommend it. Okay, so in a nutshell, iCloud Plus lets you bond your iCloud to a domain that you have already reserved. Yes, correct. Yeah, I mean, you don't have to have it, like you can go buy it today, a domain, and then just point the appropriate DNS records over for your iCloud Plus mail. Yeah, and it just works, it's great. So that way you get all of the benefits, including all the storage that you have with iCloud Mail, but you're not giving out your mac.com or me.com, you're giving out the address at your custom domain, which means if you ever leave iCloud Mail, you get to take that domain with you, which is great. So, yeah, it's good stuff. I was glad to see, I mean, it took us maybe 10 minutes and a lot of that was because we had the wrong entry in, the record, so, you know, can't really blame Apple for that. So that was on us. All right, you wanna take us to Barbara, John? She had a quick question for you. I will take us to Barbara. So Barbara asks, I have an error tag that I wanna put in my car. I remember that you put one behind your rear view mirror, but don't remember how you attached it. Please remind me. And here's the reminder. So I got a mounting strip. So one that I use, Dave, is the Scotch Extremely Strong Mounting Strips. That's literally the product name, I love that. Yes, it is, yeah, and it's great. The ones I have are rated at 30 pounds. Yeah. So, you know, your tag's probably not gonna fall off. You know, it weighs way less than 30 pounds. Yeah, and you're not gonna be applying 30 pounds of pressure to it, so yeah. These are actually a neat product for, if you wanna mount anything and it's less than 30 pounds, then, you know, get these strips. You can get them at a Home Depot. That's where I got mine. Amazon has them. We'll put a link in the show notes for that so you can just have them shipped to you, folks, but yeah, five bucks for a, these are the 12-pound ones here that Amazon. And they have the 30-pound ones, but they absolutely have not fallen off. The only thing I would mention, so I mounted mine on my rear-view mirror so I can see the Apple logo. The only point I would make is that the AirTag speaker is on the other side of the Apple logo. Got it. So the thing is, that's not a big deal for me because the thing is I don't really worry about the sound output from it because it's in my car. Sure. And I get the separation alerts. So anyways, that's... Yeah, that's great. That's what I would recommend. It's a good product and other people make these as well. Yeah, yeah. Gorilla's got, I've used similar stuff from Gorilla and I like the Gorilla stuff. It comes in like little squares. It looks like these might too, where it's just like super easy and once you do it, like it's done. So yeah. Yeah. I still get a thrill out of... So the separation alert still thrills me is that I have it in my car and now in the latest iOS or macOS, I guess, also, but you get a notification when you deviate from the position, it's like, oh, I can't see your car anymore. I got a kick out of... The first time that happened, I just got a kick out of it. It's like, oh, John, you're not in your Saturn anymore and here's the address of where I last saw it. And to me, this is just a fantastic feature. If you Bluetooth to your car or carplay, but it works for me with either one, your Maps app will have a pin auto-dropped where it last saw your car. And I'll tell you, we were somewhere, what did we do? We went to an air show this fall here at P's, which was amazing. Like, you know, the Thunderbirds did their thing but I actually like the little planes, like they're the little biplane, little sport planes that they have. But anyway, we spent all day there and the parking lot was a runway, right? Like literally a runway. So there's no strips or, you know, I mean, there's no real way to locate your car. Like when we... And it's just massive, right? And so as we were leaving the car, I'm like, okay, I know what the trees look like when I am... There's like this little cut out in the trees. Okay, like I can remember this, I can remember this. And we got out there and I was like, yeah, I mean, I guess I can remember this, but like, it's just a sea of cars. And I'm like, wait a minute. And Lisa had driven and her car doesn't have car play, but it does have Bluetooth. And I'm like, pull out your map. And sure enough, it had the dropped pin for her car. And it got us, I mean, it got us to her car. And John, it was like just people wandering everywhere, hitting their remote buttons, hoping amongst hope that their car would respond with its alarm or whatever. Because like everybody had lost their car and we just made a beeline straight to our car. It was perfect. So definitely remember that one. That was super helpful. Yeah. Now, one thing I've seen in the media that kind of concerns me is I've seen reports of people having air tags attached to their car and it's not them. Well, and you'll get alert about this. Well, I mean, Apple, Apple solve for this, right? Like they, if I put one of my air tags with you, you will get an alert on your phone saying, hey, you're not with Dave anymore, but one of Dave's air tags is with you. Like if my, if Lisa leaves her purse in the car or whatever, right? And I grabbed her car because it's the one in the house garage. So it's, you know, it's just right there. And it's, you know, warm. If I grab her car to go like run and get some at the store or pick up Chinese food or whatever, I will get an alert on my phone after I leave the house saying, hey, you know, Lisa can track you. Which is also true cause she and I share our find my locations with each other. And so she could track me anyway. But like, yeah. So it doesn't surprise me that people are trying this with cars, but if you have an iPhone, you would be alerted. If the driver of the car has an iPhone, they would be alerted to the fact that they were being tracked, which is good. It should be. So yeah, it's not good. Not good when people are tracking people without their, without their knowledge. We don't like that. Agreed. Right? Yeah. Yeah, without the consent. Yeah, exactly. Hey, Allison wrote us about a thing we mentioned in last episode. We were talking about back plays and we were talking about whether or not you could ship them a drive to seed your backup. And Allison wrote in and reminds us that her friend Pat, she says as a certified Apple consultant and tested the process of back plays shipping you a restoration drive. So if you need to get your data from them, they will also ship you a drive. She said they shipped her a drive with all of her data on it. She waited a few days, sent it back and they were funded her 100% of the cost of the drive. So they aren't charging you for the drive assuming you don't keep it. But if you would choose to keep it, then you've paid for it. But I think that's pretty cool. So works in both directions. It's like a loner. It's a loner. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But especially if you have limited bandwidth, which not everybody in the country has broadband, then that's probably a better decision. Way faster. Yeah, unless you've got like, well, for downloading, you know, most people are on asymmetrical connections with faster downstream. So for downloading, it's not perhaps as necessary, but again, it depends on how much data you have or how much bandwidth you have and if you have a data cap, right? Cause if you've got it, if you're with Xfinity, they are enforcing those, you know, one, it's not quite one terabyte. It's not, it's a little more than one terabyte. It's like 1.1 terabytes a month or something. But that's their limit that they're imposing on. Yeah, I thought I heard that they suspended that. And at least hats off to my company now, which I'm perfectly happy with. And you experienced it when you were down here a while ago. Optimum is, does not have any data caps that I don't think they ever will just. I thought we looked into this last time and they said that they were putting them in online data cap, but maybe I'm wrong, but I thought you and I had this conversation. They've never yelled at me. Right. So I think I'm okay. Okay, so they enforce an excessive use policy where they get to decide what your, what excessive use is. Let's see, Optimum, but they don't have, the data cap is officially unlimited. Yeah, Xfinities is 1.2 terabytes. Let's see if there's other popular ones here. Cox is also 1.2 terabytes. AT&T is 1 terabyte. And with, I know with Comcast, sorry, Xfinity, you can pay, I think it was 35 bucks a month or something to release that cap, which made a lot of sense. I was definitely gonna head down that path until Consolidated showed up, which has no data cap and is symmetrical gigabit, which I'll take, it's very nice. But yeah, you're right, Xfinity, well, they've been enforcing it nationwide for a while except the Northeast. For whatever reason, the Northeast was always excluded from Xfinity's data caps. And then they said, but in the middle of last year, we're gonna turn them on and people got pissed. Like you're doing this in the middle of a pandemic. Like that's not cool. And I think the States pressured them to back off. So I think you might be right that here in the Northeast, they may still not be doing their data caps, but they'll be coming for sure. Like this, if we're still on the reprieve, it's a temporary reprieve and the end is in sight. Yeah, the other thing I gotta look into is, so Optimum has been sending me emails saying, hey, would you like Gigabit up and down? And I'm like, yes, maybe. Yeah, makes a big difference for online backups, I'll say, you know, being able to just blast it full speed. Yeah, so they have different tiers now. So the tier that I have, they don't offer anymore, which is 200 down and 35 up. Sure. But as far as I can tell, the Gigabit up and down plan is symmetrical. Right. And they give you all sorts of goodies and stuff like that. And I think it'll work with my current cable bono. So that's usually it would be fiber would be the way. Well, I think that's yes. Yeah, so that doesn't work with the cable. They will have to give me a fiber modem instead of a. Yeah, it's an ONT. It's the optical network terminal or whatever it is. But yeah, you would. Yeah, yeah. I mean, cable modems can go that fast, but the cable infrastructure I don't think is built out anywhere in this country to do it. So it's the fiber is is the way that that sort of happens. So yeah. But it's interesting that they're offering that tier of service because yeah, I'm used to. Yeah. Right. I also have who is it? Go net speed, I think is the new kid in town and they they offer similar service. Sure. Sure. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Cool. We're up and down. Yeah. Cool. But you know, I got to say, Dave, I'm I'm OK with. Two hundred down and thirty five up. I mean, it works for the podcast, right? Works for my streaming and stuff like that. It's like, do I really need more? So so the where I will caution that line of thinking is I will rewind us back just a little bit to the dial up days, right? And no, no, no, but but hear me out on this, right? Because we all experience this and it's it's something we all have some perspective on. And so I think it'll it'll help this where people, you know, you like those of us that got cable modems early, where, you know, saw the the the magic of them. And and we're like, yeah. And then most of us were so excited about it that we became evangelists for this. And we would tell our fans, friends and fans, if we had fans, but friends and family that, you know, oh, you got to get this, too. And the response was was almost a choir of people saying, why would I need that? What I currently have serves me just fine, which is exactly what you just said. And where I cautioned that is, well, yes, because you're not attempting to do any of the things that that new technology would open up for you because you can't. Like imagine saying, oh, yeah, you want to join my Zoom call? Do you want to do a podcast with me? Like those would be impossible for with someone who is on on dial up, right? Most of the things that we do right now are with our computers are impossible to do on dial up, you know, want to update Mac OS? Good luck. You know, it's 12 gigs. Have fun with that. Like, you know, even like the basic boring stuff can't be done. Checking email is the painfully slow browsing. The web is was doable on dial up, but not with today's web, right? So that's the only thing. The only time where I cautioned that that line of thinking is it's like, well, yes, in the box that we live in, we can't imagine living in the other box, right, because because we don't because we can't imagine it. So that's where. But but that said, I actually agree with you, like for what you do, two hundred down and thirty five up, it's not it's not revolutionary change to go to gigabit up or even 200 up, right? It's it's incremental change. And and depending on what you're doing, like if you're if you're doing online backups, then that change from 35 up to absolutely 200 up or a gigabit up is monumentally life changing and might even be considered revolutionary. Like and that's why I did it. You know, my downstream I had about the same connection you did actually. And then I went to gigabit. I had two hundred down and ten up and then I went to write from me. Yeah. And I called Comcast and I'm like, is there anything I can do to get faster upstream? And they're like, well, you could go to gigabit down and that gets you 35 up. And I'm like, OK, do it. But I was totally fine with the two hundred down. And I think I'd still be fine with the two hundred down. You know, but it was going from ten up to thirty five up that made me bump the other part of the tear up. And then to get above thirty five, the only way I could do it was to jump to fiber. And and that thirty five is limiting. Uploading the podcast every week is way faster. Obviously, now that I'm not limited to that thirty five. And and then, of course, online backups or streaming Plex to, you know, my kids are all over the country and all over the world. All of that stuff is just I don't even worry about it anymore. Everybody just uses it. So it's great. But yeah, yeah, depending on what you want, you it's not quite the same as dial up versus versus broadband. But, you know, I always just I always check myself when I start saying, well, I I I don't need that because I'm you know, everything I do fits in this little box. And it's like, well, yeah, by definition, it fits in the little box. Dave, that's that's what I have to remind myself. I still remember having to upgrade my analog modem to nineteen nine. Was it ninety six hundred? I think it was. Yeah. Or fifty six fifty six K or fifty seven six, whatever it was. Yeah. Nineteen two in the middle there. Then we had twenty eight eight modems. Remember? Mm hmm. Yeah. Oh, that predates this show for sure. Well, again, by definition, we could not be doing this show. It wouldn't have even dawned on us to do something like this if if we were all on dial up. In fact, my guess is we don't have any listeners on dial up because downloading a podcast over dial up in the neck, it would be super slow. From what I hear, Middle America. Oh, I'm not saying people don't have dial up. I'm saying they're not listeners to this show. Oh, that's too bad. I mean, you know, how many hours would it take to download this episode? Right. Like, it's just not going to happen. Right. Not going to watch videos on YouTube. You're not going to stream Netflix. You know, all of those things that we do don't happen over dial up and didn't even those companies didn't exist when dial up was king. So, you know, hey, speaking of movies and all that, Andrew writes, he says, I recall mentioning that you owned an LG TV and the Sonos arc. Will you share your opinion on the sound and or if you thought a different product might be better? I just purchased an LG C one sixty five inch OLED screen and I'm now deciding upon the sound bar. Yeah. So that is the same screen and same size that I have. You might have the year newer because I have a twenty twenty LG C I think mine's actually the CX, but it's the OLED screen 4K HDR. All the wonderful stuff airplay to and the Sonos arc. You know what? I've had that for a year and a half, too. In fact, I got the LG TV as we talked about here on the show because it had the switch box in it that let me do the Sonos arc stuff that didn't have any other way of getting that switch box. So had to do it with the TV. So we were happy with the Sonos arc when we got it when it came out, you know, a year and a half ago, whatever that was. And and it does do Dolby Atmos sound. It always has the, you know, and it really does a stellar job in the living room. I will say this, the recent updates to the software and the configurability of the Sonos arc make it even better. I'd like it like we were watching last night. We watched that new Matrix movie and watching it in 4K HDR. First of all, is like it changes the viewing experience for some movies. It like the James Bond movie was the same way the new James Bond movie watching that in in 4K HDR is like, oh, wow, this is amazing. And then having that Atmos sound. Now, we don't just have the arc to be fair. We have a sub and then we have two Sonos speakers as rears as well. So we we have kind of the true surround. But when we when we tested it and I occasionally still test it without any of the rears of the sub, just to remind myself what the arc is like. And when when Andrew's email came in, I did I did the same. And it's it's stellar. And there's now controls in the Sonos app to you can turn up the height volume, volume relative to the to the the center volume or whatever. The end like listening to that Matrix movie and hearing things come from not just behind but above and down. It like it's amazing what is possible with a sound bar these days in your living room and that Sonos arc is like it's a reason there's a reason it's it's their flagship product and and that's it like it's it's spectacular. And the combination of the two. The only thing was when we got that TV, we had the choice between the sixty five and I think the seventy eight inch, I want to say. And I just told LG will send me whichever one you have. And they really would have sent me either one if I had made a selection. They chose the sixty five to send me. And last night, Lisa was like, you know, we really should have gotten the bigger TV. And I'm like, yeah, I know, I think I think that regularly. I just don't say it out loud. But, you know, I live in we could shorten our living room is the problem. Like our living room is like, I don't know, twenty five feet long or something. And and we probably have twenty feet from the couch to the TV. And, you know, so like if we're sitting in front of the fire, which cuts that about half, then the TV is like super immersive visually. But otherwise, it's, you know, it's that picture over there and the bigger TV or shortening the living room. So maybe we'll really I don't know. But but, yes, the Sonos arc, frigging amazing. It really, you know, if if you are inclined to head down that path, you will not be disappointed. That's my nice. Yeah, man. Now, may I dare to modify the agenda here to talk about my sound experience? I think that would be a great thing to talk about. But first, what I want to do is talk about our next two sponsors. If that works for you, Mr. Braun. Excellent. All right. You know, a lot of investment apps make it easy to start trading, right? But just because it's easy to do doesn't mean we know what we're doing. And that's what makes our sponsor Wealthfront different. 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They want to start things off with maybe a Southwest salad kit or a Buffalo Ranch salad kit. Then on to the main course, grass-fed beef or smoked salmon and then for dessert, who doesn't love dessert? Maybe some organic dates or some double chocolate brownie bites. We said quirky. How about organic cashew milk mozzarella? Maybe I'll make a pizza. It's all great stuff. Right now, Imperfect Foods is offering our listeners 20 percent off your first four orders when you go to imperfectfoods.com and use promo code MGG. Again, 20 percent off your first four orders. That's up to an $80 value at imperfectfoods.com when you use the promo code MGG. Don't forget imperfectfoods.com and use the promo code MGG. And we'd like to thank Imperfect Foods for sponsoring this episode. All right, John. So you got some you got some new toys here, didn't you? I did. So in in our last episode, I think it was our friend Dave. Not you, but another listener Dave. Yeah, that's right. Yes, listener Dave. And he was like, hey, you know what? The HomePod mini is on sale. Instead of the normal price of ninety nine dollars, you could find it at many places. I found it at Best Buy for seventy nine dollars. And I'm like, you know what? Let me check it out. And so I ordered a pair and, dude, these things are amazing. I should have gotten them sooner. So I'll say that, though. That's great. I'm I'm stuck. That's awesome, man. The setup was amazingly easy. So you basically kind of like air tags. It's the same experience with a lot of Apple products now. But the thing is, so you plug it in, you take your iPhone, you hold it next to the device and it's like, oh, hey, I see a home pod. You want me to add it to your network? And I'm like, OK. And it did. And then I held the phone up to the other one. So I got a stereo pair. Yeah. And it was like, oh, all right. I see another one. Would you like it to be the right or the left channel? And I'm like, OK, sure. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Now, they don't have to be a stereo pair, right? You could have them in different rooms and just have them be separate, correct? I assigned them to the same room. Sure, is my entertainment center. But and they also do some weird kind of like with the iPhone set up some weird optical thing where when you hold the phone up to it, it looks at the LED on the top. Yep. And and then pairs it and it appeared. It's now I have two more devices in my iCloud list. It was just like effortless. Awesome. Setting it up. The thing is the sound on these is. For the size of this thing is, I got to say, truly amazing. Yeah, it's now a streaming source. So it shows up on, you know, either my Mac or my iPhone as a streaming source. And it actually shows a little icon that shows two little mini mini versions of it. And it's like, yeah, you want to stream to this? And I'm like, yeah, sure. Um, between that. So I've I've streamed. So I, you know, I'll play videos on my my MacBook Pro a lot of times. And so I stream to it. And it's just, dude, again, the sound is amazing on these things. Yeah, I agree. I tested I've tested both the HomePod, you know, the original large one and then the HomePod mini when it came out. And and yeah, the sound on that mini is is spectacular. I agree. I didn't keep it because because we're a Sonos household and it just like, you know, one ecosystem versus the other. Although with everything supporting airplay now, like there is a world where you could you could integrate them. And if we if we were not already standardized on the A lady as our, you know, smart home out loud kind of interface. And we, you know, we didn't have a voice interface for our smart home. Then the HomePod, even integrating with our Sonos network would would probably have been the the thing. But but we, you know, we are. But I agree with you sound on those spectacular. And then yeah, the setup, it's like the watcher, like you said, the air air tag or whatever it just, you know, just works. Yeah. I mean, the other cool thing was I got an alert on my iPad. Saying, hey, do you want to maybe download the user manual? Or would you like some tips and tricks? And the S lady is also I'm pretty impressed in in its ability. Yeah. Yeah. That I'll ask it, you know, questions and and it answers. Or, you know, like even saying like, you know, tell me a joke or what's the temperature or what's the weather? And it's a it's really good. I was not a big S lady fan. But with these in the room, I'm using it more and more. So it's just a big, you know, fantastic product. And no, that's it also came with. So here's here's where they they try to pull you in. They set their hooks. Well, it came with. So it's like, hey, would you like an Apple Music subscription? I'm like, OK. Apple TV, though, didn't work because it's only for new subscribers. And I already you exhausted your trial on that. Yeah. And then I think I'm going to renew. There's enough compelling content on Apple on their service. I agree. To convince me to pay, continue paying them. Yeah. So but but it's an interesting strategy in that, you know, they're like, OK, here's this device that, you know, is really cool and let's rope you in. Well, and here's all these cool things you can use services. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. No, I you know, it's it's interesting. Obviously, when they came out with the first home pod, I very much interpreted it as we want to be in the premium speaker business. Right. I mean, it was it was a four hundred dollar item. And yes, it had had, you know, the Siri Smart Assistant in it, obviously. But, you know, it was very much this premium listening experiences that they were going for. And and then, you know, now that they've kind of that that that flopped for them, you know, I mean, we should all be so lucky to have a flop in our businesses that matches the success that Apple had with the with the original home pod. But, you know, I mean, I mean, I mean, but, you know, for them, it was it was kind of a flop. It sort of fell flat and and they realized what people wanted was a a Siri assistant that was, you know, that had some version of premium sound, but not for four hundred bucks, but for a hundred bucks. And obviously, that's what the home pod mini is. And I think they knocked it out of the park with that. And and it's interesting that you say that, excuse me, having that home pod mini now you're using Siri more, it makes perfect sense because it may they make it so easy. It's just right there. This will may also encourage you to consider your Siri and smart home integration, a home kit. And so you might want to install like home bridge or hoops on your disk station so that Siri has access to all of the non home kit devices you have in your house. I like I've been super happy with hoops. Hoops and home kit both use home kit. Hoops is just one graphical interface for it and home kit now. Sorry. They both use home bridge and home bridge is this technology that's existed for a little while. You run it on your disk station, your Mac mini, your Raspberry Pi, and it home bridge links your non home kit devices with home kit. Then. And home bridge used to be this thing that you had to configure with like a series of arcane text files, and it was fine, but it was like this very sort of temperamental setup that had to be just right. They have now added a graphical user interface to it to make configuration and management way easier. And in the interim, Hoops came out H O O B S with their own interface that they put on their own boxes so you could just buy an all in one solution if you want, or you can download Hoops, the open source version and put it. I don't know if it's open source, but the free version and install it on your own hardware, which is what I've done, but either one home home bridge, the current version, which has its graphical interface or Hoops would be the way to go for you on your on your disk station. And you might like I have it in a docker container and it's it's rock solid. It's great. It's so much easier to just like I want to install this world. So the thing is, the home app sees. It sees the home pods. Yeah. And it sees my Apple TV and one other device. But my only disappointment is that. And I think I told you, yeah, you know, we got that a smart alarm clock. Yeah, the Google one. Yeah. That was a much better experience in that it had a button saying, hey, you want me to import your setup from your other smart device? Right. Right. Whereas this it's going to be a bit more effort. So, you know, I may consider. I put a link in the show notes to a YouTube video that is the one I use to walk me through setting up hoops on my disk station. And, you know, it was about a 15 minute video. And it's it's, you know, at the time. I mean, and I think it's still relevant. I'm trying to think that if that was pre DSM seven, but Docker didn't change for the way hoops works, it didn't change all that much. But yeah, getting that set up really, you know, give yourself a half hour and watch, you know, have the video in one window and your, you know, your DSM interface in the other and, you know, pause and resume the video as you're going and it'll walk you right through it. You'll you'll have hoops set up in the end. It works great. I'm really impressed with. Yeah. The only hitch that I ran to ran into is that at one point. It was only playing audio out of one speaker. And I'm like, OK, time to reset everything. Interesting. And they make it pretty straightforward. Yeah. You know, you got to start it up. You hold as a touch sensitive contact on the top. Yeah. But now are you using these? You're not using these with your entertainment center as you're like TV speakers or anything. You're just you're just using them with your Mac and your iPhone. That was offered as an option during setup. So I may enable that to make it a. Yeah. Yeah. So no, I didn't and they offer that during this setup. They're like, hey, would you like to make this a target for? For, you know, your Mac stuff. But I'm like, not now. Not now. Yeah. No, that makes sense. But I can air play to them. Correct. Which is primarily what I do. Yeah. Well, that's kind of what would happen if you said let my Apple TV use these as a sound. I mean, you just go in and set it up in the in the air play menu in your Apple TV. It I am I'm spoiled. Let me let's say that first. I always find it a little weird listening to TV without a center channel having and I know that like with with the magic of of audio processing, you can have speakers to your left and right that will create what they call a phantom center channel where you really hear the sound in the middle and then it it splits the stereo out of phase in a different way and like it's cool, but it always sounds a little ghosty to have the sound from the voices on the TV coming from, you know, over there as opposed to where the TV is to me. But a, I'm super picky and B, I'm super spoiled and I have center channels. And I like, you know, but I know people that use home pods with their TV and like it, but just be aware that you might find that. Although you I don't think you have a center channel on your TV currently, right? So you're all you're already used to hearing the phantom center, right? Yeah, you know my setup. So I have I have a Sony tuner, right? And I have two rear and two front. So yeah, I don't I do not have a center. Yes, so you'd be fine. OK, so then you'd be in great shape with it. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. OK, there you go. Yeah. But the thing is the sound out of these, it almost sounds it almost feels like surround. I don't know what they're doing in the audio space. But it just sounds really good. Yeah, well, this is in a in a way, I guess this is your first experience with smart like speakers that are thinking for themselves in terms in terms of tuning themselves to the room and and that, you know, Sonos did that with their true play number of years ago, other manufacturers do it in their own ways. You know, Apple and Sonos certainly aren't alone in that world. But that whole thing of having a speaker that's properly tuned to your room and with the HomePod, you know, a speaker that's built to send sound sort of in in lots of directions, not just in a focused single direction like a like a traditional cabineted speaker. It makes a big difference, you know, to. So yeah, right, it will sound like it's just sort of sound everywhere, which is amazing. Yeah, it's good. It's cool. Yeah. And I think they actually call it the it's a feature in one of the menu soundcheck, I think they call it where yeah, the speakers are smart and they kind of figure out, OK, you know, which what should I do to sound as good as possible? Yeah. Yeah. Soundcheck is different, right? Soundcheck is the one that normalizes the sound from different song to song or whatever. I think I think I don't think Apple is calling their room tuning thing sound check, but you're right. It does it. Yeah, it's a it's a thing. And it's smart enough if you move it to just redo it. It's cool. All right, we got time for a couple more cool stuff found here. But this is great. Joe in calls us back to the last episode where we were talking about robot vacuums, and he says, I thought I should mention that our friends at Wyze also have a smart vacuum. It too has LIDAR and does LIDAR mapping and everything else that you mentioned. He says it currently is two two hundred ninety seven dollars. And he says when I bought it when it was introduced, it was one ninety seven. That's a great price, right? Because that Nido D 10 I think is like six or seven hundred bucks. So he says I've only had one other smart vacuum vacuum before, so I might not be the best judge of performance, but I find it great at cleaning and seldom has issues navigating. That's pretty cool. And so I'll put a link to that in the show notes. That's a great deal, even at three hundred bucks, the current price like that. If it's doing LIDAR mapping and you can sort of map out, you know, no go and go zones like, which I'm sure you can because they're the folks at Wyze and they're they they're smart at this stuff. That's pretty good. So thanks for that, Joe. That's I might have to buy one of those for a different floor of the house. Huh. All right. Yes. Good. Good. Good. Good. How are we doing? We still have room. Listener Russell, we were talking about the demise of Namebench recently. And and he says. This this solution relies on a subscription to something you mentioned often thing. He says, but thing has a DNS benchmark function that does what Namebench used to do before Namebench met its demise. He says, I started using thing and bought a thing box after hearing about them on the show thing has a pretty good DNS benchmark function in the paid for tools on the main menu, you go to tools DNS benchmark and it'll tell you what DNS services, you know, are going to be the fastest for you in all of that. So, yeah, no, that's good to know because you're right. A lot of us have thing boxes and or pay for the thing service. So that that it's not too esoteric at all, Russell. I think we've we've defined it to not be esoteric. That thing box is a fun little fun little thing to have on the network. I am finding like I get less and less utility out of it just because I have other things like my my Synology and my Eero will tell me when they see new things on the network. And so most of the time the thing box is telling me things I already knew, like I already already got alerts for. But I do have a couple of devices that were falling off the network on a not desired basis. One of my smart thermostats nest made an update to it that got it flaky. And then Sonos had that that Rome speaker that was awful with staying on the network because it would lose its battery and all that. And so I set up my thing box to alert me when those devices come on and off the network, so I would know if, you know, if something was a problem. And so, yeah, I guess I do still rely on it. So I lied. I just, you know, this is the thing with tools and automations of any kind is you forget how valuable they are to you. I'm actually going to be on an episode of Automators with David Sparks and Rosemary Orchard shortly here. Maybe later this week, I think it comes out and in prepping for the show, I had to go through all my automations, my, you know, my ift recipes and all of my smart home, you know, automations. I was like, whoa, I forgot that I'm doing this all the time. And yet these are things that if they stopped working, I would know immediately. So you can hear about that on automators. And we'll we'll share that when when the episode's out. Yeah, it's cool. Yeah, I got a. I have a thing box, but something failed on it. I still have to talk to them about replacement. Not good. But but no, I use their end. For those listening. But no, I actually the last time you should run a DNS benchmark every now and then. First off, name bench, they were talking about an update, but I've never seen it. I think you can still run it from a package manager. Oh, can you install it with like homebrew or something? I think so. Yes. Oh, interesting. But but no, their their branch mark is good. Now, as mentioned, yeah, you got to you got to throw them a few bucks. And, you know, they were nice enough to give you and I a premium subscription. Yeah, yeah. But I'm charmed lives, but it's always good to run something like that every now and then to make sure you're getting the best performance because, as we know, network problems are always DNS related, right? Often, I mean, yeah, a lot of them are for sure. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, you're right. I just did a brew install name bench and and yeah, it it installed name bench. And I just typed name bench from the terminal after it installed it and boom, off it goes. So name bench still exists. I don't know what the results are going to look like because they're not finished yet, but, you know, I'm famping for time here. Maybe they'll show up before the show ends. Hopefully they won't crater my connection somehow. You want to share Donna's quick? We've got we've got like 90 seconds left for for Donna. 90 seconds. OK, well, quick. If anyone is looking for a clear case with subtle bling, I recommend the Spigen liquid crystal glitter case, which I'm using on my iPhone 13 Pro in crystal quartz. I've had one before. My mom has had the same case on our iPhone for a year or two. It's slim and has a nice feel, not tacky, like some cases. There are no fingerprint issues because of the glitter. It offers adequate screen and camera protection. And it has good reviews on Amazon. So that's good. Speck also offers something similar, but they're out of stock. So I don't know. All right. Yeah. So for the glitter crowd, go with these guys or check them out. Spigen, I've had some Spigen cases in the past. I think that's I don't know. That's how I've always pronounced them, I don't know. But yeah, that I've and I think one. I think my daughter used one of their glitter cases for a little while. So yeah, cool, very cool. Yeah, that's, you know, I will point one last thing as we're on our way out here. Canva is a tool at Canva.com. I needed to make an edit to of an InDesign file that I had and Canva won't open InDesign files. But I had exported these InDesign files as like business cards or whatever as PDFs years ago, and I wanted to make an edit to them. And because it exports as a layered PDF, I pulled that into Canva, which is an online design tool and boom, everything was just like right there. So it made life super easy for me as opposed to having to start from scratch and all that. But even if you did have to start from scratch, they've got templates and everything and and so much of it is free. So highly recommend. I know I'm probably telling many of you something you already knew about, because lots of you already know to use Canva. But I was new to it. So there you go. Enjoy. That's what we got. Anything else to tell them today, John? Feedback at MackieGab.com. I think you said feedback at MackieGab.com, my friend. I absolutely said feedback at MackieGab.com. Unless there's also premium at MackieGab.com. If you decide to want to contribute to our effort to educate and possibly even amuse you. There you go. Infotainment. There you go. Yeah, that's what we got for today. Happy. This is our last one of the year. So happy New Year, folks. And we will see you on the other side. Most likely we will not be seeing you from CES. I can't imagine again, I said we're recording this on Christmas Eve at this. But I've decided not to decide until next week, because it doesn't really make a difference. But I can't imagine that things are going to evolve in such a way that I will choose anything other than to cancel my travel plans. Mainly, I don't you know, it's balancing the value of being there and engaging with people, which is the value of CES, it's huge with the potential risk of having to, you know, quarantine in a hotel room for 10 days before I'm able to come home if I wind up testing positive, because they're going to have us testing while we're there, if we go to CES, which is great. Like, you know, it's all vaxed, it's all test every day and all that stuff. Yeah, that surprised me, that communication there that they're like, oh, we'd really like you to take a test before you walk into our venue. And they're providing tests for people and like, it's great. But, you know, I would not, in good conscience, I would not be able to bring myself to go to an airport and get on a plane home if I had just tested positive. So the idea of spending 10, 10 days in, of course, things could be even worse if I wind up getting a bad case of it or whatever. But the the realistic risk is being stuck in a hotel for 10 days. So I mean, Bob's not, but we'll see. We have almost a week before that decision will be made. So maybe things will change, but I doubt it. Yeah, I mean, it was it wasn't too weird. So I my friend Barry came out here. He he came out here to see Billy Joel. Yeah. And so I took the train. I took the subway. I think the most uncomfortable part was taken the subway because it was packed. Yeah, yeah. But the train was fine. That's good. That's good. That's actually good to hear. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So yes, stay safe, folks. Have have fun. And don't do anything we wouldn't do. OK. Yeah. Happy New Year. I'm not sure that's a pretty short list, John. I know I'm not not asking too much of people. I'm just trying to think of what would be a good way to wrap up the year with with something for the people. You know what? I have an idea. We we you're wearing your Mac stock shirt while we record this, John. And I'm reminded of something we all did together at Mac stock and something we all said together at Mac stock. And I think maybe that advice is what we're really seeking here. As we as we blast off out of twenty twenty one in to twenty twenty two. So crowd at Mac stock, take it away.