 It's time for MackieGab and listener Graham brings us our quick tip of the week. Within Control Center on the iPhone, you can have the flashlight icon available. Tapping on the icon turns the flashlight on and off, but if you tap and hold, you get presented with an icon that lets you choose between four levels of brightness, whichever level you choose is remembered for subsequent flashlight activations. More tips like this plus your questions answered today on MackieGab 960 for Monday, December 19th, 2022. Welcome to MackieGab, the show where you send in tips like that one, cool stuff found. You send in your questions. We share everything that we can. We try to answer your questions. We loosely string together an agenda of all of these things in some semblance of an order with the goal being that each of us, me, John, P, you, every single one of us that gets together, we learn at least five new things every single week. Sponsors for this episode include PIA, Private Internet Access VPN. We can go to piavpn.com slash mgg. You save 82% off your VPN service plus four free months with a two-year plan. It's like two bucks a month. We'll talk about that in a little bit and masterclass. We're at masterclass.com slash mgg. You can go sign up. They've got a deal where you buy one, get one, and it's great. So go to masterclass.com slash mgg. We'll talk more about that too in a little bit for now here in Durham, New Hampshire. I'm Dave Hamilton. And here in Fairfield, Connecticut, this is John O'Brun. And here in Snowy, New Hampshire, it's Pilot Pete. What a surprise. I woke up this morning. It's supposed to be in the 30s and rain and I got four inches of snow, but at least it's wet and heavy. Right. Yeah. Yeah. I've got the same here too. Yeah. I don't know what's going to happen. We recorded this on Friday the 16th and so, yeah, we'll see what transpires. But I do know what's going to happen because we have all kinds of great stuff. We're still way behind on getting all of these fantastic cool stuff found entries out to you. So Ben will help us get going here with cool stuff found called Meter. Now this is the second product called Meter that we've talked about on the show. The first is M-E-A-T-E-R. That was years ago, but it's a great thing. It's a thermometer like an oven thermometer. I wouldn't call it a grill thermometer because it doesn't do well above about 500 degrees. But that's an oven thermometer. Today's Meter is M-E-E-T-E-R. And that is for all of those crazy scenarios where you have links to various meetings in your calendar and it's a pain in the neck to like dig into the calendar event and find the meeting, click the link, all of that. Meter parses your calendar and surfaces the meeting links from any of the calendars that you want it to check. Then it provides notifications from which you can join a meeting and it also points URLs directly to the apps of choice. So this is like taking our whole thing of the like the URL choosers that we've been talking about because there's lots of those out there that we've discussed over the recent weeks and really targeting it for the calendar because one of my favorite uses of a URL chooser is when I click on a Zoom link in my calendar, I don't want to go to Safari first. I just bring me to Zoom. It's going to be fine. Zoom knows what to do with the link. This thing does that too. So thanks for that, Ben. Great. I love these little cool stuff found things. And I think Meter is free. I could be wrong about this. Try Meter and get Meter. So I'm guessing it is free and offers in-app purchases. So maybe free me. So yeah. There you go. Cool. Yep. I like it. I couldn't have been more excited. You know, I don't do you guys have automatic updates on on your iPhones and iPads like software updates? I do not because a Mac geek once told me, don't get caught. Well that's true. The last thing you need is something to update, especially in my case when I'm on the road and now my phone is a paperweight. Interesting. I mean, I don't mean like firmware iOS updates. I'm talking about app updates. Do you have those automatically update? I don't do that either. I should. I probably should. Maybe. What about how about you, John? Do you do you have apps automatically update? No. OK. And I have to download them, but not install them unless I tell it to do so. Wait, what? On your iPhone? There's no difference. No, no, no. That's incorrect. So so but I do not have automatic updates. And why is that? I'd like to know what's on the update. Bingo. Same. Release notes, which usually and I got a fish shake about release notes, please say something other than both fixes and performance improvements. I'm with you on that. It's just like a placeholder's like, tell me what you actually fixed or added. Yeah. So I do the same thing for exactly the same reason as you, John. I want to see the update notes. I want to know what's in this new app or new version of the app. I looked at Synology Drive's update notes. The second thing there, not the first, the second thing in the update. The first was like, you know, drug fixes and performance updates. I don't know. It was something else. It was something specific, but very vanilla, you know, it was like, OK, yeah, you did a thing. That sounds great. The second thing was adds the ability to edit Synology Drive documents and sheets to the iOS app. It's like, this is huge. Previously, you couldn't edit Synology. So Synology Drive documents and sheets are very much an analog to Google Drive documents and sheets, right? These are web based, you know, hosted on your Synology server, so not on Google, but it's otherwise the same kind of thing. You get a spreadsheet. Multiple people can edit at the same time, all that stuff, but you own it private cloud. It's amazing. The one huge frustration we've had for a very long time is that the only place you could edit those was in a web browser, definitely not on the iPhone easily, maybe on the iPad if you were really like patient and certainly no problem on your Mac or, you know, Windows machine or whatever. And now they've added the ability to edit these and create new ones in the iOS app. And this was the second line on the release notes, like, why aren't they shouting this from the rooftops? We will shout it for you, Synology. We'll help. We'll help. There are some guidance over there, but it's a great thing. I've used it. I made some edits to a spreadsheet on my iPhone the other day while I was out and about. Like, it wasn't just a test case. It was like, oh, I need to do this. And I did it. And it's like, oh, I'm going to start using this far more now that I can, you know, I don't have to use Google Sheets for the ones that I know I'm going to want to edit on the road. So I don't know. Please. Yeah. So that's Pete. You were asking pre-show that if there was something special. Yeah, I could remember what it was again, you know, elderly. And then I guess I could have gone to the agenda for those, you know, I saw it and I went by it and it was like, okay, maybe that's what gave me in. Yeah. Yeah, that's right. Yeah. Yeah. I'm going to go with that. That's my story and I'm stuck with it. I like it. All right, John. How about Ed found a thing? Yes, he did. So Ed says I was looking for a CLI command line interface tool to batch resize my images from my website. I use EXIF tool to get all of the data from the images, but it doesn't resize them, which is hard. And I want thumbnails for faster loading on my web pages. I discovered that the Mac has a built-in command line tool called Sips scriptable image processing system, which is pretty cool. But I found something even better. A guy named Tony Smith created some wrapper tools using Swift that makes Sips work a lot easier. It is called image prepping can be installed using homebrew. He also has written a lot of other cool tools, which he has on his site at smitty, smitty tone.net. Yeah, smitty tone. Yeah, you're right about that. I thought it was smitty one when I first saw it, but yeah, smitty tone. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And I checked it out. Actually, if we do a man page on Sips, the date on the man page is 2005. So this has been in macOS forever, and we never knew it. Yeah. I'd never heard of it before. I love the terminal command TLDR, which is you install with brew, but it keeps a database of the most commonly used, the most common ways that people might use a given terminal command. So I TLDR this and it'll tell you, yeah, re-sample an image at a specified size, image aspect ratio maybe altered. You can just like boom. Yeah. It's pretty cool. Oh, okay. That's where that came from. Yeah. TLDR is awesome. If you are in the terminal at all, and I would even say the less comfortable you are with the terminal, the more helpful TLDR is, do a brew install TLDR, and then just type TLDR space and a command name. So in this case, I did TLDR Sips, and it showed me like five or six different examples of how I might use Sips. Nice. So Dave, help the Neophytes out. What is a brew install? Right. Good question. So in Homebrew is ... I'm a Neophyte. Homebrew is a package manager for the terminal, and package manager sounds like a crazy term that only nerds use, and it's true. App Store is a package manager for macOS, or App Store is a package manager for iOS. It is a way of managing applications, sometimes called packages, because they technically are packages, but that's just nitpicking, isn't it? So packages of software, correct. So brew lets you easily install and uninstall terminal commands just like the Mac App Store lets you easily install and uninstall Mac apps. You could do them a different way, but that manages it for you. So brew, you go to brew.sh, there's a little terminal command you run, it's right on the web page, that installs the package manager, and then from there you just go to the terminal and type brew install space, and in this case TLDR, and now it'll do all the crazy things, you'll see it do them, all the crazy things it takes to install something, a package on a Unix machine, and it'll do it, and then you've got it. But John, I think you've got an even better way. I like, there's a program called CakeBrew. What is CakeBrew? CakeBrew is basically a GUI for a package manager GUI. So if you don't want to go into the terminal, this is a slightly, at least for me, a nicer way to get to all those packages. It's interchangeable because it's just a graphical interface for homebrew. So if you are already using homebrew and you want to install CakeBrew, it will just show you everything that you've already installed with homebrew, it's just got a graphical interface for it. So it's not a separate package manager, it is just, like John said, a graphical way of looking at it, perhaps a nicer way of interacting with it. Yeah, you don't have to remember what to take. I've got to follow up question to that then, Dave, because we'll get more into it in a little bit about, you know, after the hangout last week, I decided, oh, this channel thing sounds pretty good. And I went in there and I was trying to find out how to get Pluto to work with channels. And all the research said, hey, use Docker. So is Docker similar to homebrew? It seems like a package manager of some sort. Is that a fair analogy? I mean, kind of. So what, and this is definitely a rattle here, but that's fine. No, no, don't apologize. This is a good one. So I'm thinking Docker, the thing that is, this is interesting that you asked that question. Because if someone, if you had simply asked me what is Docker, I would say it's like installing very minimal bare bones virtual machines to do one specific thing. And that is true, right? Like you could, if you wanted to set up, you know, a virtual machine manager, like parallels or VMware or any of those free ones out there, right? You know, you want to set up one of those, you could, you put a UNIX operating system inside of it, then finally install whatever you want to have it run, right? Fine. Okay. Like, like, let's say you wanted to set up an iPerf server, right? iPerf being the speed test thing you can do on your local network. So find you install, and this is way overkill what I'm describing here, but bear with me. So you create a virtual machine, you install Ubuntu inside the virtual machine, then finally when you get all of that up and running, you know, an hour and a half later, you go through, maybe you install some package manager or something inside your virtual machine and now you install iPerf. iPerf is maybe a, you know, 200K app and you just spent three hours building a Linux machine that you now have to manage just to have iPerf running. This is overkill, but it is a way of doing it. People were doing this so that they could compartmentalize stuff, and that's how Docker was born. It was like, hey, wait, I need a very specifically configured UNIX environment to run this one little server app, but I don't want anything else to talk to it. So I want it in a virtual machine. You're sandboxing it. You're sandboxing it. Where is that environment? They are very compartmentalized bare bones, usually, I think always, I could be wrong on that, but certainly any time I've done it, UNIX environments that are standalone and sandboxed but not full-featured, they are, you know, very clearly built to do a specific thing. So it's interesting to me, and that's why I always relate them to virtual machines, because that's sort of the evolution of them. But it was interesting to me that you saw a jump from Homebrew to Docker, and that is perhaps the other side of what Docker is, because it's like, well, I need something that's more sandbox than using Homebrew to just install an app, but I don't want to have to like manage a virtual machine, and Docker sits in the middle of that. So really, you could come either way at it, and I thought I knew the origins of Docker, but it's entirely possible. Somebody came from the look, I've been using Red Hat Package Manager, RPM, but I need more, what if we just scale up one level and create a thing? Like, that could also have been Docker's evolution. Oh, interesting, I just knew that I needed to run a command, and I could, it was a Docker command in order to create the container that I needed, but okay. Yeah, no, it's fascinating that you asked it that way, and I don't know the origins of Docker, I thought I did, and now you've made me question everything I know about my life. No, but that's what we love about this show. Yeah, yeah, so that's interesting. Like, yeah, Docker sits between virtual, full on virtual machines and like just commands that you're installing on your Mac or on your device. Yeah. So to pull us back out of that rat hole and go back to what got us into it was the ability to resize images using SIPs, and I just thought I would bring up that what I've been doing for many years is I created a little app. I don't know if people know you can do more than a workflow, you can create an app with Automator, which is what I did, and it was three simple parts of it, get selected, find our items, scale images, and then you can go in and set what size you want and copy to a folder. Those are the three things right there, and I put a copy to a folder so I can easily find it once I've scaled the image. I made it an app and then I take that app and I drag it. I keep all my Automator apps in a folder in applications called Automator apps, but then I take it and I drag it to the top of my finder. So it's up there on the toolbar. Then when I have a picture or of an image that I want to rescale, I drag it onto that little icon and it rescales it and drops it in the folder where I want it. Oh, dude, I always forget. This is brilliant because as you were explaining, I'm like, yeah, that's a lot of work or whatever. But as soon as you talked about putting it in the finder toolbar, sorry, not header, man, it's header, but they call it toolbar, that's the genius part here. And I always forget that that is not infinitely, but very customizable. Yes, yeah, and so I could do it there. And then the other cool thing, and so I don't have a little Automator dude standing up on my toolbar, is I went and I took a picture of a hand squeezing a sponge and I did a screen capture of it. And then if you go to your Automator app and you hit Command-I, it brings up all the information about it. And at the top of the screen, there's that tiny little icon. If you select it and then hit Command-V, it takes the screen capture you've just taken and you've created your own app icon. Amazing. Dude, dude, I need to have a pause. Yeah, that's right. Like we learned a thing right there. Ding, ding, ding. Yeah, man, that's great. Wow. And to wrap it up, when I'd like to resize images, this program has been around forever. Graphic Converter is worth a look. It does. Yeah, it'll resize them, but you can do it. Long has supported batch resizing of images. So you can point a folder at it and have it not only resize them but rename them according to various metadata. Yeah, so that sounds far more granular. Yes. You've got a lot to do. I just do it. When I have to take a five megapixel picture and send it over the email, you know, just send someone a 360K picture, that's what I use it for. Yeah, right. But I finally remember, Dave, you and I, before we had WordPress, we're writing scripts to do image processing before we posted stuff on the web. On a Mac observer. Graphic Converter, not only would it resize the images and make thumbnails, it would make a web gallery, like an HTML gallery of those images. And we would, yeah, you're right. It, like, MacroDexpo or whatever, we would take the images for the day that you had shot, run them through Graphic Converter, and then literally upload that folder to the website and point an article at it and we were done. I mean, I'd say done. It's a lot of friggin' work compared to what you have to do today. You're right. Yeah, WordPress changed that, John. Yeah, fair. There is, speaking of, like, well, in this realm, there's another app I use called ImageOptim, OPTIM, like short for optimizer. And it is built to compress an image losslessly, lossless, not losslessly, compress an image and maintain the same or very, very similar visual quality, but also strip out, like, the thumbnails and, like, an image, especially on the Mac, but probably true of other platforms, doesn't just have the image in it. It's got, like, the icon for it and all other stuff. And when you upload that to the web for, you know, like, for your website, that goes with it because, of course, it does. It's in the file. Well, that also means that when a user comes to your website to download it, they get all that stuff that they will never use, they don't need. So this compresses the image in a better way, strips out all of that stuff and leaves you with a file that you can upload to the web. But this might also help you for your email thing, Pete. I mean, you've solved the problem. This doesn't change the dimensions of an image, but it often will reduce it by a massive amount of space. So, yeah, just an interesting little tool. Yeah, yeah. I don't know. It's all kinds of stuff, man. Speaking of all kinds of stuff, we just did our hangout, our cord cutting hangout for everybody that came. That was awesome. We had a great time. We're gonna be doing a, I think a mesh Wi-Fi one is coming up next. We'll schedule that and put it out. But we did it last Saturday and it worked out really well. What didn't work out was we sent out an email ahead of time, of course, telling everybody that we were doing this and telling you you could join the Discord and get the Zoom link there or just subscribe to the Mackie Keb calendar. And then lots of you, as has happened over the years, told us that the Mackie Keb calendar gave you an error. What we used to do with the calendar up until a couple of days ago was if you went to Mackie Keb.com slash calendar, it would redirect to a shared iCloud calendar. Apple's like the URL that Apple tells you to use when you wanna share a calendar publicly with people. Totally not doing anything that you're not supposed to do, work in the way it's supposed to work. Except it didn't. So I was frustrated about this. Some people could get the calendar, other people would just get like an error. It wouldn't like the server would just decline the request. It's like, what the heck's going on? She and I thought it was me. Right, no, it's not you. So what we have done is I thought, okay, this is untenable. This is insanity. We need to control this widget, but I don't wanna stop using iCloud calendar because we like the way it works internally for us. We just wanna be able to share it, which Apple says we can do anyway. So I put Lucas on the job. In the midst of doing this job, Lucas took the Mackie Keb website offline for a little bit on Monday accidentally, but you know, these things happen, move fast, break things. But what he did is wrote a script to that now pulls Apple's calendar URL once every 15 minutes. And when it gets success, it saves it to our website. So we are caching Apple's calendar and I feel like our server, this is a weird phrase that I'm about to utter, our server is more reliable than Apple's. That doesn't make any sense to me that I'm saying those words, but empirically I have proven it. As have you, you've all experienced it. So if you have been subscribed to the calendar before, let's say, actually it was about a week ago. So it's worth unsubscribing and resubscribing because it does redirect to a different URL. Now, if you subscribe previously, what would have happened is you would go tell it on Mackie Keb.com slash calendar. It then redirected you to Apple's server and your calendar app would remember the Apple server address. That is still the correct address. It just doesn't answer all the time. You can still use it if you want. It's not gonna be wrong. It just might not be fun to use. So resubscribe, just visit Mackie Keb.com slash calendar. That'll redirect you to our cache of it, which is what your calendar software will remember and then you're good to go. Here's the fascinating thing, guys. Now that we have a script running, to do this, we decided to have it spit out a log every time it successfully gets the calendar because I wanted to know, like, how often is it error, like, how much, what do we need to do here to get this to work? The calendar starts answering at 6.55 p.m. Eastern time every day. It stops answering somewhere between eight and nine a.m. Eastern time every day. Between those hours, it answers flawlessly. I don't know what to say about that. Yeah, right, okay, yeah, exactly. Yup, yup. And I've never seen it fail in the evening hours and I've never seen it succeed in the daytime hours. So it's not like there's some overload that you might get through or whatever. It never gets through during the daylight hours and it always gets through during the nightlight hours. So this is like... But Mackie Keb.com slash calendar folks, that's where you're gonna go, subscribe, and then you'll know when we're doing the live shows and you will know when our live hangouts are and all of that good stuff. Oh man, so the other night, I was at the hockey game over at the university and I joined their Wi-Fi network like I always do. And I realized I couldn't get my email to download. Like some of my email, one of my accounts would download but the other one wouldn't. And I turned off the Wi-Fi and they both came in fine. And I'm like, but I wanna use the Wi-Fi because I don't wanna burn my data. And also that's super creepy that they're like filtering by the provider of an email account. I think that, and I don't use sketchy providers for anything. I'm like, you know what, this is creepy. I don't like this. I'm turning on my VPN. And then I was able to check everything. And this is why having a VPN is an absolute must have every time you go online. You don't want people knowing what you're doing. Of course, I get to tell you about the VPN that I used which also happens to be our sponsor. And it's the one that we chose earlier this year is like the top tier one. It's PIA. PIA stands for Private Internet Access and they take privacy seriously. Not only does PIA hide your IP address, it encrypts your entire connection. This protects your internet activity from everyone. Your ISP, network admins, whoever's running that Wi-Fi network and filtering things. I assume they're now knowing what they're doing. I don't like it. And I'm glad to be able to just be able to, boom, push the button and it's gone. PIA is available for all platforms across all your devices and just one membership can protect up to 10 of your devices simultaneously. Right now, go to piavpn.com slash mgg to get a whopping 82% off your VPN service plus four free months with a two year plan. It comes out to around two bucks a month. You can't beat that. And there's a 30 day money back guarantee for you too. That's piavpn.com slash mgg for 82% off Private Internet Access. Piavpn.com slash mgg and our thanks to PIA VPN for doing what they do and for sponsoring this episode. Next up is masterclass. With masterclass, you can learn from the world's best artists, icons and leaders anytime, anywhere and at your own pace. You can learn how to think like an FBI profiler from John Douglas, a former FBI profiler. You can learn songwriting from John Legend. You can learn the art of negotiation from Chris Voss. You can learn cooking from Gordon Ramsay. This is amazing with over 180 classes from a range of world-class instructors like these. That thing you've always wanted to do is closer than you think. That course from Gordon Ramsay, it's awesome. You wanna learn how to make those delicious scrambled eggs of his? Sure, right there. Like there's all kinds of things and they come with these great recipes that are fully fleshed out. It's gorgeous and this isn't like a class where you have to just sit down and do it all at once. You can explore lessons in any order you'd like across your phone, your tablet, your Apple TV, your computer and on the go with just audio mode. And the lessons are all like 10 to 15 minutes in length so they're easy to fit into those little pockets of your everyday life. I highly recommend you check it out. This holiday give the perfect gift of an annual masterclass membership and get one free. Go to masterclass.com slash mgg today. That's masterclass.com slash mgg terms apply and our sincere thanks to masterclass for sponsoring this episode. All right, Ben's got one for us. Or he has a question. Have you all, y'all considered visible as an alternative cellular provider? It's a subsidiary of Verizon, so not a traditional MVNO but similar in that there are no retail location supporters entirely by chat and price is hard to beat. When my family switched in April, the going rate was 40 bucks a month for unlimited data text, talk text and data with an option to join others in a party and pay as low as 25 bucks a month. The rates have since changed but they're still competitive. Okay, and he has an affiliate link which we'll put in the show notes. But yeah, it was funny, I was like, why did he say they're not really a MVNO? And I guess to me, the thing is when you go to their page they don't hide the fact that they're Verizon. They actually branded as Verizon. Most other MVNOs don't necessarily advertise who they're using behind the scenes, right? Actually, most of them will tell you but this is, I believe it's like owned by Verizon. I mean, it's called visible by Verizon. So I think, yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, it clearly is marketed with Verizon. A lot of the MVNOs. MVNO, mobile virtual network operator, I believe is what that stands for. What it means is these companies like Mint Mobile is an MVNO of T-Mobile, visible obviously of Verizon. What it means is they don't have their own network of towers. They use someone else's network of towers and then they handle the billing and however the service is gonna work, they get to decide all of that. So you just bulk using the towers and then however the service and minutes and data and all that stuff is up to the MVNO. And most, not all, most MVNOs are prepaid plans. They don't market it that way. Like Mint certainly doesn't, visible doesn't lead out that way. Prepaid plans had a, there was a stigma associated with prepaid plans that they were only used by people who had no, didn't have good credit or whatever. But really a prepaid plan, the nice part about it is like they don't have to have an accounts receivable department. If you don't pay, they don't give you, like you don't have, it's just super easy. And so there's a huge cost savings for them right out of the gate by being prepaid. But Mint really was the one that pioneered marketing a prepaid plan without using the words prepaid because they wanted people that felt that stigma about prepaid plans to want to use there. And visible appears to be a prepaid plan as well. They, did you look up the pricing on this, John? I think it's pretty interesting what they're doing. I thought I saw the number 30 somewhere, though. Yeah, it is, they've got two plans. It's, they've got visible and visible plus. It's 30 bucks a month for visible. And that gets you unlimited talk text and 5G and 4G LTE data and unlimited mobile hotspot usage. And you get unlimited talk in text to Mexico and Canada. So that's, I mean, that's expensive, but you're getting a lot with that for an extra 15 bucks for visible plus for 45 a month. And these are numbers that include taxes and fees. So you're not paying taxes and fees on top of that. You get all of that, of course, plus you get 5G ultra wideband if that's available in your area. And then there's some other savings that you can get. You get roaming in Mexico and Canada. So if you're traveling across the U.S. borders, the land borders a lot, that might be valuable too. So it's, I mean, it's expensive for, certainly for an MVNO, you know, it's like double the price of cost of entry for most MVNOs, but you're getting what they call unlimited. I don't know if they, if they dig into what actually- If they throw out a left or 15 gigs or something again. Yeah, they don't say anything about that on the page there, but that's certainly a question to answer before you sign up. But yeah, that's not, that's interesting. It's not terrible. If you really want unlimited and I still maintain that no one needs, no one uses unlimited, people use an amount. So learn your amount and then make your decisions eyes wide open, but most people, you know, but if you feel, if you decide you want unlimited and the flexibility that comes along with that, then 30 bucks a month, I mean, that's pretty good, you know. Yeah. Yeah. Are you, you switch into this, John? Well, I just made a switch. So no, not yet. All right, what are you, you're with, cause you're with Verizon. So this would mean you keep the same network. What, what, what are you- Verizon has a deal where if you're 55 plus, you can get a discount on unlimited data. So that's what I did. Got it. Got it. Do you know off the top of your head what you're paying per month? It's about 60, I think. Oh, okay. So you could save a ton of money. But it's less than what I paid before. Of course. All right, so I will say switching cell providers in today's world is almost a trivial process. Certainly there are people that have had, you know, headache processes where you need to get on the phone for an hour and sort something out. But by and large, it's, you know, go in, make sure you get the unlock code and you're done. Yeah. So after, after three months, it's funny that, you know, today the day we're recording, the 16th of December, coming out on the 19th is my anniversary to renew Mint Mobile. There you go. Yeah. And yeah, for, it was surprisingly easy to switch from AT&T to Mint Mobile. And I am paying less than half of what I paid at the big day. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. I mean, especially when I looked, you said, look at the data you use and, you know, what they are, three of the people in my family use less than four gigs. So I have them, I'm paying, I think 10 bucks a month for each of their phones, unlimited talking text and their four gigs, which they never use. And then the other two of us use more. I went unlimited because when I did max out in July when I was on the road, it was like, yeah, this is untenable. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, sure. Yeah. But yeah, for five people, essentially unlimited, it's I think 1200 bucks a month. Right. So it works out to $20 per person. Yep. Per phone. Yep. Yeah. No, it's these MVNOs, you know, this is the. It's amazing. It's the way. Yeah. I'm shocked that that hasn't forced down the prices of the big carriers more. T-Mobile's the best of the worst in that regard. I don't mean to say T-Mobile's bad, but like of the big ones, like, you know, they're, yeah, they're the least worst in terms of pricing. Sorry, I didn't mean to get you all choked up about this, Pete. But yeah, it's shocking to me. I guess the numbers must prove to them that they don't have to, that there's enough people that want to be affiliated with a brand name and are willing to pay double or almost triple to have that affiliation, I guess, you know. And that's where Mint, I think, has really done an interesting job because they, you know, they've made Mint a brand name, right? They've worked really hard. I mean, they, you know, they've brought in, I mean, I know Ryan Reynolds owns part of it now, but like he's part of the marketing of it for that very reason. And he's like, no, I'll show you this, but they've paid the way for all these MVNOs. Like, yeah. So I've got an interesting story. Instead of Sam's Club here, we have BJs in the Northeast. So I was in a BJs six or eight weeks ago. And, you know, the guy's always walking around with the clipboard. He's ready to sign you up for their cell phone. He comes up to me and he goes, may I ask if you have cell phone service? Of course I do. Everybody does now, right? Yeah. And may I ask who you have? I said, I'm with Mint Mobile. He goes, okay, have a nice day. So this is really funny, Pete, because I was in BJs, maybe if the timing is right, maybe three or four weeks before you. And it was the AT&T guy with the clipboard. It's the same thing. And he came up to me and he's like, you know, do you have, I said, yes, I said, Mint Mobile. And he's like, oh, I'm sorry. And I'm like, okay, like you should pick the wrong guy, but okay, like let's go. And I said, you're with AT&T, right? Cause there's signs of AT&T all over him. He's like, yeah. I'm like, look, man, we left AT&T two years ago to go to Mint and I've saved about 3,500 bucks since then. And he's like, yeah, but the service never works. I'm like, this is not true. Like, here's the thing. And I just started spouting like experiential data, but also empirical data at him. Like, no man, like this is how it is. You do this, you do this, you do this. They do this, they do this, they do this. I'm like, it's not, like this is the wrong, you are not, you do not have any arrows in your quiver that will make what you're offering more attractive than what I already have. Like just trust me on this. So clearly he learned. This is good, yeah. He's like, oh, okay, never mind. Have a nice day. Yeah. Yes, have a nice day. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He knew he couldn't beat. He knew, right, right. Yeah, that's great. I like that, that's good. Hey, on the cool stuff found Bandwagon, which I think we're still on here. I don't really know. Listener Jim tells us, he found something. He says, a great inexpensive holiday gift idea. He says, I use my Apple TV a lot and I don't care for Apple's remote. I found an Apple TV button remote from a company called Function101 at Function101.com. That works great. And he sent us a link to it. He says, I really like this remote and it makes using the Apple TV so much better. It's only $29.99 and worth every penny. So when he says it is a button remote, what he means, I mean the Apple TV remotes are button remotes now too with one exception and that is the directional pad at the top of it. Has buttons on the edges of it and the center of it certainly is a button but the pad itself is used for, it's like a touchpad that you can use for scrubbing. This remote does not have that touchpad. And so I asked him, I said, okay, it doesn't look like this, it doesn't seem like this adds anything. In fact, it takes away that one thing. So correct me, please correct me if I'm wrong and B, what's scrubbing like in this new world that you're in with this remote? And he said, he never liked the scrubbing thing. It was always too touchy for him and I might be putting words in his mouth so I apologize if I did, but he didn't like it for whatever reason. And he says scrubbing with this, it's just you get different speeds of fast forward. You know, you get 1x, 2x, 3x, 4x or whatever. And he says he likes that a lot better. So if you are frustrated with the scrubber on the Apple remote, this one's for you. Thanks, Jim. Speaking of Apple TV. Yes, John. Quick tip, I think, even the wonderful stuff bound. But I just ran into this and I couldn't figure it out. So I use the Apple TV for the most part because it does the best job of reproducing surround and other sound fields. So I prefer to use the Apple TV. Well, I was binging something on Netflix and what would happen is I would run the Netflix app. The picture would come up at full brightness and then after like a half a second, excuse me, it would go to like half brightness. And I'm like, what the hmm? So went through the normal troubleshooting. I tried a different HDMI port. I did a restore on the Apple TV, which is real easy because you can set it up with your phone again. And it still wouldn't, it's still lowered the brightness whenever I ran Netflix. And I'm like, what's going on here? Okay. Here's what solved the problem, which was the last resort. I'm like, you know what? Let me reset the TV and see if that helps. And it did. What? That's what fixed it. I thought it was going to do it on the Apple TV, but apparently the TV got confused. So, you know, restarting the TV or doing a factory reset put it back in a state where it understood what Apple TV was telling interest. So. I wonder if this, because I know with like HDR TVs, you can have, you can tell the TV to, I forget what the thing is called, but essentially display it like the director intended, right? And certainly that can mean changing the color balance and changing the brightness and all of that stuff. And I wonder if you gave, I mean, it seems weird that all of Netflix would operate that way, but I wonder if you in the setup of your TV, you gave that permission and then by resetting your TV, you took that permission away. That would be the only, yeah. Because I, because I. Simplink or Simlink, Simplink, something. No. That's different in it. That's different. Yeah. Turn your TV on and off with the Apple TV. Correct. No, this is an HDR like thing where you basically say, yeah, let the director take control of my TV for this one movie. You know, would the problem go away when you left Netflix, John? Like with the brightness would come back. You didn't have to like, okay, so it was you going, and it was the entire Netflix app for only when you actually played a movie or a show. Actually, you know, I think it was any app on the Apple TV. So I have a few different apps. I have, you know, Disney Plus. Yeah, so I think it was all of them, but I started noticing it in Netflix. So I'm like, maybe it's just the Netflix app, but no, it was like every app. Yeah. So I don't know what was happening there, but it was something in the TV. Yeah. Yeah. Interesting. Fascinating. Yeah. Nice catch. I mean, there you go. I've noted that I've had to... Go ahead, Pete. Yeah, sorry. I was gonna say, I've noted that I've had to restart my Apple TV 4K a few times. We said, you know, it'll just go funky. And, you know, it just starts this bit. It looks like a 1960s TV. You know, I just get snow and rolling and that kind of stuff. It's like, it's gone stupid. But if I unplug it and plug it back in, now it's a three year old 4K. So it may be... It shouldn't be... It happens after several hours of not being touched. Like if I put on the TV in the morning and just let it run in the background and then come up to it, it'll be rather... Occasionally it'll go stupid. I wonder if somebody could make an app for the Apple TV that would, you know, slowly get the TV to just shrink down to just the dot in the middle. Like when your tube would fritz out on your old TV. I haven't... Until you started saying this, I hadn't even thought about that in, you know, certainly since I became an adult. Thank goodness. Right, the old CRTs. Just sitting there and watching. I remember the frustration, you know, in the family room or whatever, of like you'd be watching the TV and then it would just slowly start to like the image would shrink from the top and the bottom. And you'd be like, no, no. Like, you know, my dad would go over and like bang the TV on the side and maybe that would like get it back. But every now and then it just went down to a little dot in the middle and it was like, all right, got to turn it off and let it cool down. I'll just... Remember the day you see old vertical hold, horizontal hold, and you end up just those. Get off of my wall. You've got something more slightly more. I know we've talked about it before, but slightly more recent and more technologically relevant that you've started using, Pete. You want to talk about it? I did. And again, I might have even heard it here, but I don't know. It's under cool stuff found. I've got a SanDisk Ultra Dual Drive, a Lux USB-A slash USB-C thumb drive. I was looking for a thumb drive in order to talk about it a little bit, but I needed to be able to have a big enough thumb drive to put Mac OS bootable system on so I could boot a Mac Mini and get it back up and running. And so I looked around and said, eh, you know, I only needed, I think 14 gig or something. But when I started looking at the prices of a one terabyte thumb drive, I went, ooh, you know, I could use one of those. Well, I didn't even notice, Dave, when I ordered it, that it was USB-A and USB-C. So one, that's cool because boy, does everybody need that these days, right? Because USB is no longer standard. It's anything but it seems. So that was really sharp when I got it. It's one and a half inches long. A half inch wide and a quarter inch deep. It is stinking small. So you're gonna need to put a lanyard or something on it so you don't lose it, trust me. And so it's read speed on a five gig file is 156 megabytes per second. It's read speed on a five gig is 36 megabytes per second. And on one gig size file. And this is what, what device is this on that you're? This is a, on my Mac Book Pro 2021 with the M1 in, in right there in the USB-C slot. And then on a one gig file, it'll, it'll rate 70 megabytes per second. That's real world. So what the other thing I'm actually thinking about doing with these now, cause we'll talk about it more in a little bit, but I got a new Mac mini to run as a server. I, I don't know. I haven't done the speed test across it yet, but I suspect I only bought the base model with 256 gigabytes of internal hard drive. And on those Mac minis, you can't change them out. You can't buy one with a 256 and put your own one terabyte or two terabyte hard drive in it. It's not doable. Used to be configurable. So that costs a lot of money, but what I'm thinking now is I could stick one of these in the USB drive and throw my Plex data there and throw it the channel status there. Right now it's on my Synology drive. I'm wondering which would be faster, the USB attached to the Mac mini or leave it on the Synology drive? Oh, I mean, I would assume reading over gigabit ethernet from, I mean, it's going to come down to the speed of the drive, right? Cause you've got gigabit ethernet, so that's already, well. So it's the speed of the drive in the Synology NAS. Yeah, but I mean, you're getting, how fast were you getting? Like hundreds of megabytes or hundred? 156 read. Yeah, I mean. You don't need to be any, you know, probably the max I need to read is probably six or eight megabytes a second, right? You're right, right, right. Yeah, so it's not going to matter. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yep. Yeah, fascinating. Yeah, and I'll talk about why I would consider that. When we get down to that portion of the show, I'll talk about the USB vice the NAS. Yeah, yeah, I want to share that story. In fact, we've got some questions and I don't know that Bruce has a question, John, but Bruce certainly identifies something that leads to potential fish shakes. Yes, so Bruce says, I don't remember you mentioning this in any recent episode, but did you know that Apple has removed the ability to prioritize which WiFi base station your Mac connects to? You're used to be able to drag the order of verified base stations with the preferred ones at the top, but no more in Ventura. Maybe a gig challenge. Yes, I think it is. And yeah, I verified this on my system. So if you go to system settings, WiFi advanced, you'll see a whole list of authorized networks, but they don't have a way to add or delete or reorder anymore. Why Apple? Right. Why did they? I know there's an answer to this one. Unless I'm missing something. I mean, there's a little dot, dot, dot to the right of each one, but I think the only option you get there is auto join, copy, remove. Okay, so you can remove them. Sure. So the GUI gives you a way to remove them, but I don't see a way to add them. No, well, you can, oh, you can add here for sure. I mean, you add just by joining a new network, right? But can you, you used to be able to add beforehand, like when I would go to an Airbnb, they would often give me the WiFi credentials ahead of time, you know, like the day before or whatever, and I would plug it in, that way it syncs to all my devices and I would have it. So that's, I haven't tried that with Ventura, so that's interesting. But you found an article, John, about how, describing how Apple, a knowledge-based article from Apple, describing how auto joining works on macOS, Ventura, and presumably everything else, because you've never been able to set these on iOS. But it says it evaluates set identifiers and scores them, and it tries to connect to networks in the following order. Number one, your most preferred network in quotes. No networks are scored based on your actions. If you manually switch to a network, it's score increases. If you manually disconnect from a network, decreases. The quote unquote most preferred network is the network with the highest score. Oh, sure, that sounds great, Apple. I mean, I get it, like this is a great default, but if we know that something is best, let us tell you that. Private networks are those set up in homes and offices and can include your personal hotspots. So that's number two. So you get most preferred first, then a private network second, and then public networks third. If macOS, Ventura, et cetera, finds multiple private or public networks, it prioritizes each by security level and chooses one in the following order. So EAP is at the top, WPA three, then WPA two, then WEP, and then unsecured. Unsecured and open networks will not be auto joined unless the network was connected to within the past two weeks. This seems like important information. I'm glad we're sharing this. I don't think I'm happy about this, but I'm glad to know all of it. I didn't know until just now, I knew part of what he's talking about. I didn't realize you couldn't even reorder. What's- Yeah, same, right, right, same. I hadn't tried that. What up, Apple? Come on. I get it, you know, they probably spend a lot of time on customer support, you know, okay, is your laptop plugged in? You know, that kind of stuff. I get it. So put it in there. Hey, you're about to make a change. Are you sure you wanna do this type? Yes, okay. No, I don't think- I don't think that's the reason, Keith. No, okay. I like your logic, but I think there's something else that happened with Ventura that forced this change, and it's the new system settings app. We don't have system preferences anymore. So they took iPad OS's system settings and ham-fistedly shoved it onto our Macs. It got better throughout the beta period. It sucked at first. It got better, but it's, there's the functionality that was only on the Mac in the past has gone away. It still needs to get better. It needs, so it might come back. I don't think, based on this article, which is from October 25th, I don't think so, but like it could, like things can change, like, you know, it's fine. I don't think it's coming back. I think they like this better, but I think, I don't think they would have taken it out of Mac OS. Right, right. I think it was just removed as a byproduct of system settings being shoved in there. All right, well, thanks for bringing that up, John. I mean, I'm upset. Thanks, John. No, we did have, actually, I think Brian found this article. There is an article that says using terminal to order SSID preferences and system preferences, but it's seven years old. So I don't know if this price would work. I think those commands still exist. We will, it was an ass-different article. We talked about this not that long ago, like maybe Monterey days, and I think this was the command to do it. So yeah, it'd be worth testing this out to reorder Wi-Fi networks. All right, well, it's in the show notes at macgeekub.com or mgg.fm-960. So you can find it there. If you so choose networks. All right, yep, sorry. While we're on the home network in that realm, Elliot has a question. He says, I have gigabit down cable internet from Xfinity. Says I'm currently using the Motorola M8600 modem, but Xfinity recently told me that it is incompatible with the download speed of my internet plan because of quote unquote filters. He says it supposedly maxes out at 944 megabits per second. The Xfinity message offers different equipment. Some of them he's ruled out, but one of the things is the model up from this or the model number up from this, the Motorola M8611. He says based on the specs, it all looks the same save one thing. Does it matter what's Xfinity saying? And the one thing that's different is the number of ethernet ports on there. The MB8600 has a gigabit ethernet port. The 8611 has two and a half gig ethernet ports. So I get why Comcast is saying this. They're right that you will max out at that 944 number because that's where gigabit ethernet maxes out once you take the overhead out of it and all that. That's what you're gonna get. The gigabit service from Comcast is technically 1.21 gigawatts. No, 1.21 gigabits. Sorry, it is 1.21 though, I will point out. So you couldn't get, like you couldn't pass that amount of data through a single gigabit ethernet port. And so that's why they're telling you it's not compatible. I assume. I mean, he's telling us it's working. The real question is, okay, great, you've got a two and a half gig ethernet port on your cable modem. And I would say if you're buying a new cable modem these days, get it with at least a two and a half gig ethernet port. If you're buying a new router these days, get it with at least a two and a half gig ethernet port on the WAN side so that you can get that data through for future-proofing. But unless you have other devices that are either using more than a gigabit ethernet port on themselves or you're gonna have multiple devices that are going through that one router and you wanna be able to get the, squeak out the extra little bit, I wouldn't go crazy replacing that now. But it is a good reminder that, yes, 2.5 gig ethernet exists. There's also five gig ethernet and then of course 10 gig E, the nice part about two and a half gig is it's much cheaper for the chips and you just use the same cables and so it's all good. I would definitely get routers and cable modems with two and a half gig ethernet now, but I wouldn't throw everything away, if that makes sense. I don't know, if you guys have thoughts on this. I'm still on the crawling service. There you go. But I've had, I've had the Phidium folks with a coiled up cable at the end of my street for 10 months now. They showed up in February and said, when are we gonna get Phidium in our neighborhood? Gigabit ethernet. Yeah, it should be March, April. They didn't say which year, Dave. Right. 2023's your year, Pete, I can feel it. No, it's interesting, like the Synology router, it's weird because I'm using the RT-6600-AX which has one 2.5 gig ethernet port. Here's the odd part. It is not the main WAN port. The main WAN port is a gigabit ethernet, one gig. There is a four port switch on it. Ports two, three and four are also single gig E. Port one is the two and a half gig ethernet port. And the reason they did this was you get to decide whether you want port one to be part of your WAN or part of the LAN. And there's a little switch inside, you know, in the software that you can say, oh yeah, and I'll put my router on that. So you get to decide which way this is gonna go. If you wanted to use it for, you know, your NAS or something on your internal network, if you didn't care about it on the external, great, fine. So it gives you that flexibility, but it's not obvious. Like I had to ask them and they finally were like, oh yeah, no, it's just that one port. My God, your marketing is kind of misleading on this, but that's fine. So I do have my consolidated, it's like AKA Phidium fiber connected to the two and a half gig ethernet port on my router. I mean, I don't have any other devices that can use two and a half gig ethernet. So I don't know that it matters. Like it would be better to have two ports like that. But sure, like fine. And I think it, I think, well, I think that you can pay now for Phidium to get two gig up and down symmetrical. I know there's no reason. I think you're right. I'm not doing that. Oh man. Pete, we promised that we were gonna talk about your trials and tribulations here. You did something that I think a lot of people are gonna do and are gonna find themselves in. You decided that, and you alluded to this earlier, I think, that your NAS was not the right device to run your media server. You wanted to do some things that your specific NAS couldn't do, but you had an extra Mac mini lying around or you procured one. It doesn't really matter. You have one. So you, well, there you go. We're nerds. It's how it works. But you started telling me about, and we actually went back and forth on a couple of elements of this, but you started telling me about this process of setting up what is now and what will be for the next phase of its functional life, a headless Mac mini as a media server. And I think this is an attractive thing to a lot of people because when you start looking at the price of a NAS and the CPU that you get in a NAS and you want just a media server, a Mac mini, especially a used Mac mini, is gonna have way more horsepower and potentially the same or lower price tag. So talk about the headaches and how you solve some of the headaches of getting a headless Mac mini up and running on your network. So briefly, the main reason was I was trying to run channels after the Google hang or Zoom hangout last week that we did with cord cutting. I came into the channel 20 minutes late and said, what's channels again? And everybody did the forehead slap and we just covered that day and go back. So I went and looked at channels and I went, oh, this is really cool. It's essentially a replacement for Devo. I want to run this. I put it on the NAS drive, my Synology NAS drive and it would not grab my TV everywhere stream. So it didn't have the horsepower to run it. I'm like, okay, so some don't. And I forget, I think you need, I forget what it is. You need like a one gig Celeron processor minimum. And my NAS couldn't quite cut that mustard. So I went, all right, I've got an old Mac mini that's laying in the basement, it's been there for several years, but it's not booting right. And a long process I went through and I don't think it's gonna work. So I've prepared a new base model, 256 gigabyte hard drive, SSD, eight gigs of RAM, just minimal. The base one you can get with the 21, 19, 2021 M1 processor. And well, how do you get it up and running though is a server headless. So I needed a keyboard, I needed a mouse and I needed a monitor. Didn't want to buy those. Unfortunately, my son has a Windows gaming rig that he uses. So I got his USB keyboard, mouse and monitor, booted up the Mac mini and went, oh, we're in business. I turned on sharing on all, you know, file sharing, media sharing, all that kind of stuff. That's the first thing I had to do. Then I installed, we're gonna beat this horse to death rate, tail scale. Oh yeah, man. So yeah, put tail scale on it. And boy, this, no matter how geeky you think you aren't, trust me, tail scale is as easy as it gets. You put it on, set it and forget it. And then I installed the channels DVR and Plex and then pointed it all towards my NAS drive, which is where my Plex that is and where I decided to keep my channels data for now. But that's why I was saying, hey, maybe I'll put, I'll just put those on USB drives attached to the rig because I've only got 256 gig. I've probably got two terabytes of media. So that isn't gonna work, you know, on that can't keep it internal. And then the advantage, once that was done, all set up, I was able to unplug all of that stuff, take the Mac mini downstairs, plug it into the router via cat five cable and turn it on. And then I was just able to use the screen sharing app to go right into it. Well, that works for local, but tail scale allows me to get it from anywhere in the world. Yeah. So. Okay, so you needed, I'm curious. And I don't think any of the three of us know of a way of doing this. If we do, please say the word. But if one of you knows the way of doing it, you know, feedback at mackeycub.com, we'd love to hear. It, like, is it possible to set up a headless Mac mini while remaining headless? Like, you had to go through the, you had to use, you had to set up a head. You had to do something to get it up and running. Mac mini, but, but do you have to? Like, that's, that's my question is, what would the alts, there's got to be another way. I think my other option may have been to turn off my wife's iMac and then used her Bluetooth keyboard and mouse, but I still would have needed the, fortunately my son has a separate monitor with an HDMI cable. So I plug in the HDMI cable and I still, I probably could have gotten it to recognize the mouse and keyboard Bluetooth for setup. Because that's what it comes. You gave me a hint though, because if you don't have an extra monitor, let's say you're a laptop only household or you're a laptop and iMac household and your iMac can't be an external monitor, right? So, you know, but you do have the external keyboard and mouse. Okay, great. Screen sharing. Well, no, I mean, you got to, well, I don't think you can use screen sharing as part of the setup process, but I could be wrong about that. Maybe it's there, but most of us have a TV in the house that via HDMI is also a monitor, right? So non-optimal, but if, you know, if all you got to do is spend 20, 30 minutes getting it up and rolling to the point where you can control it headless, well, then it doesn't matter, you're good to go. Yeah, then I use my laptop to set it. The only difficulty I've had with it is when I do system preferences, system settings, and I go into displays on it, I'm having a difficult time. It doesn't give me a drop-down list of the various resolutions, and so I have to squint with my old eyes. So, getting it to readjust, give me a better resolution for, make it look more like my laptop as opposed to a great big monitor all squeezed down small, that's not optimum, but I'm so little time on that that it kind of doesn't matter. I can squint for a few minutes. I wonder if like Switch Res 10 would help there because that will essentially force your Mac to adopt resolutions that the monitor connected or the lack of monitor connected communicates. So I think there's a software solution for you there and it might be Switch Res X or Switch Res 10. I'll put a link to that in the show notes too. Yeah. Yeah, so to answer, I have a thought, I don't know if it's the right answer, about whether or not you should use the thumb drive versus your Synology for your channel's library. Let me give you one more piece of information before you go with that thought because last night I restarted it and I couldn't get anything to work. What the hell's going wrong here, right? It didn't auto-mount my NAS. Right. And it took me 15, 20 minutes to figure it out and I think if I have USB drives, they're gonna auto-mount. It could be wrong. It would. Yeah, you would need to run right and then run an automator action or an Apple script that mounts your drives or use like, what is that? What's that app? Is it Mountee, John? M-O-U-N-T-I-E, I think. Mac, OS, what's it called? Nah, crap. We'll find it. We'll put it in the show notes. Someone hopefully will remember. Auto-mounted. That's it. It was at Mark in the chat room. So thank you, thank you, thank you. So, and there's others too, but auto-mounted is certainly one of them. That would solve that part of the problem and you're definitely gonna want to do that, for obvious reasons. But I would and I would advise doing that because channels is going to be writing and deleting a lot of data because you watch a show, you delete the show, you watch the show, you delete the show, you watch the show, it's or you tell it, only keep five episodes of a show, expire them out. So there's a lot of churn happening. Churn on SSDs is not the greatest. Oh yeah, yeah, good point. You know, I mean, I know we do it with our Macs, but it's not the best. So I would go with putting it on your NAS. Yeah, the spindle drive will handle it a lot better. Yeah. Plus there's failure protection there. Fault tolerance. It will be on a USB, yeah. Exactly, exactly. So yeah, that would be my reason for just- Yeah, usually lose the USB drive in theory could lose all of my media. Yeah, that's true. Yeah, which may or may not matter to you. I mean, it depends, right? But yep, yep. Most people who are using channels are using TV everywhere to get, like their signal over the internet, their content over the internet. But if you were using it with an antenna, then you have no other way of getting that data. Like you could, if you're using YouTube TV or Fubo, you could tell YouTube TV or Fubo to record all the same shows that channels is recording. You just prefer to watch them with channels, but that's a backup. If you're using an antenna, there's no backup. So that may matter. And at the danger of making this another channel's hangout, is there a good method? What I am is overwhelmed with the number of channels. Let's not go there right now. We don't have time for that right now. I'll find it, yeah. I'll find it. That will be another hangout. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Ask in Discord, mackeygov.com slash discord. Because that, because I, you know, John and I are not, John doesn't even use channels. I don't use extra channels. So ask people that do. Yeah, ask in our Discord. That's the place to get those kinds of answers for sure. Yeah. John, you got anything else you wanna do, Rick here? We've got a couple of minutes left, my friend. Yeah, we can do Rick. Though I think he answered his home question. Amazing, we'll share it. I like it. One of my friends has an iPhone, but he does not have a Mac. He has a lot of duplicates in his contacts. I know how to easily fix that on the Mac, but I'm struggling with how to fix it on his iPhone. Do you have any suggestions? I tried my Google foo, but what I got from the Apple site didn't seem to apply. I don't see an option to merge them. And yes, Apple does have an article called Get Rid, that he found called Get Rid of Duplicate Contacts on the iPhone. That sounds correct. Though only part of the article worked for me. And I think, so they have two suggestions. They're like, okay, well, to reserve duplicate contacts below my card, tap duplicates found. And I tried that and I didn't see anything titled duplicates found. However, they have another entry, but it's kind of weird. So if two entries for the same person aren't linked automatically, you can unify them manually. Tap one of the contacts, tap edit and tap link contacts. Then choose the other contact entry to link to, then tap link. What this did for me is it kind of hid the one that I linked to. So it didn't appear in the main contacts list, but it appears on the card that you linked from. So, but it doesn't really remove duplicates. So I'm wondering if, I mean, tell your friend to buy a Mac? Yeah. Well, does iCloud.com have duplicate detection on contacts? Okay, yeah, I don't know the answer to that. I'll pull it up while we're talking about it here. Yeah, the link contacts thing, certainly you can link two contacts that are both in your iCloud library, for example, where that may be more of a scenario where you would want to merge them because they're in the same library. But if you are logged into multiple contact libraries, you've got your iCloud library, your Google library, your Exchange library, the LDAP library at your work or whatever, you might have the same person in two or more of those. And that's where the linking contact thing really has a lot of power because you have these separate contact records that will always be separate. But for your sanity, you can say, yeah, on my devices, treat these all as one person because they're one person is the... Man, iCloud looks different. I haven't been here in a little while. Let's go to contacts. And I'm loading iCloud contacts here. Can I find duplicates? And I don't think refresh contacts, preference doesn't look like there's duplicate functionality here. I wonder if there's just a third-party app for the iPhone. Oh, there you go. Duplicate detection, right? Like, I mean, you can give third-party apps the ability to do that. So why... I'd look, but I'm using the iPhone as my camera so I can't tell. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, I'm not seeing any apps come up when I'm searching for this, but that seems weird. But what's interesting is, I feel like we're missing something obvious here because I think that I've gone into contacts on my iPhone. In fact, I know that I have. And it said, I just found eight duplicates. Do you wanna view them and merge them? So just like photos, it will offer this if it finds them. Now you're relying on Apple's definition of how it finds duplicates to surface them for you. You can't do it manually. But I wonder if I have any duplicates on my phone. Let me look here, because I swear that the phone just sort of does this. So if I go to iCloud, I think I have to scroll, I don't know. Yeah, right at the top. One duplicate found, view duplicates. Can I share this on the thing? Like it says it, one duplicate found and there it is. So again, this is Apple's detection and you don't get to participate in choosing what it calls duplicates. But yeah, found two cards for my friend, Alan. And I bet they are correct. It'll show me everything and it let me merge them. So this is truly a duplicate detection merge. Good to go. Yeah, I found it, I'll put the link in the show notes. There's an Apple support article says get rid of duplicates on the phone. Resolve duplicate contacts or link them manually. So. Yeah, the linking is the one thing. But yeah, if you have more than one contact card with the same first and last name, you can merge the duplicates. Below my card, tap duplicates found and you're good to go. So yeah, yeah. Okay, and doing a bit of Google Foo, I found an article called best apps to delete duplicate iPhone contacts in 2022 and it's dated on the eighth of this year. So I haven't tried any of these nor heard of any of these. Yeah, yeah, I mean, but there should be a third party app that does this. I mean, there is on the Mac, right? Like, you know, so there's gotta be something. Yeah. I wonder if Gemini has that option. Hey, you know, again, this guy doesn't have a Mac, so that's his problem, right? That's the problem. I bet Gemini, which is in set app will, I bet it has a contact. Duplicate contacts remover. Yeah, so there's easy cleaner with 24,000 reviews, five star average cleanup duplicate contacts, 7,000 reviews. So search the iPhone store for duplicate contacts remover. I haven't used any of these, so I can't recommend one, but I can recommend looking for one. There's tons of them. Average five stars is probably pretty good. It's probably not gonna like, you know, kill off your data, but again, without a Mac, you don't have the ability to pull that back up down. So yeah, yeah, fascinating. All right, this is good stuff. I like it. Yeah, fun. The time has come, the walrus said, to talk of many things, but not these things. It is time. So if you have, next week we've got some, I think we got through the backlog of cool stuff found. Finally, maybe. I don't know, I've got some boxes in my, yeah, same. But we do have a bunch of, now we have a backlog of quick tips. So we'll start with quick tips next week. We'll, you know, we're getting there. We're making it all happen. It's all happening at the zoo. Yeah. Join us live. You can listen later on Monday, which is the day after Christmas, but we're gonna record on Festivus, Dave. That's what I hear. That's right, yeah. Mackeygov.com slash calendar. You go there in your web browser, it'll redirect you to your calendar and you'll do your thing. You'll see that we're, that we're getting there. It works for me, Pete. I think, yep. I'm a little late, Dave. I know. I can screw up any of that. But go there and, or join our Discord, mackeygov.com slash discord. But yeah, come join us and we'll do quick tips out of the gate next time. Make sure we get through our backlog of those. Make sure you send in cool stuff, found quick tips, questions, feedback at mackeygov.com. I know I said it once before. Nobody else seemed to hear me, so I figured I had to say it again. Wait, what? Feedback at mackeygov.com. There it is. There is an echo in here. There is an echo in here. Thanks for hanging out with us, folks. Thanks for checking out our sponsors, of course, piavpn.com slash mggmasterclass.com slash mgg. Our thanks to Cash Fly for providing all the bandwidth to get the show from us to you. Go check out Pete's So There I Was dot US podcast. Woo! And, yeah. Oh, that's all I can think of. I feel like I'm missing something though. What am I, what am I missing, John? What am I missing here? Pete has the answer. What you're missing is you didn't tell people don't get caught. Made.