 All right, welcome to Mac GeekGab. And our quick tip of the week actually comes from me. You know when you've got those personal automations that you create in shortcuts on your iPhone, and you know, it's like, if this happens, do that, like turn on a light or turn on CarPlay, or turn, not turn on CarPlay, but turn off Wi-Fi or turn off my battery or whatever. And it asks you before it runs every time, and that can be annoying. A lot of those, not all of them, but a lot of those, you can go into that automation. You go to the Shortcuts App Automations tab in the middle there, at least that's where it is in iOS 16. And then choose your automation. And there is an Ask Before Running option. Turn that off, and it will no longer ask you before running. More quick tips like this, plus your questions answered today on Mac GeekGab 984 for Monday, June 5th, 2023. Greetings, folks, and welcome to Mac GeekGab, the show where you send in your tips like that, your cool stuff found, your questions. We take all that stuff in that you send to feedback at macgeekgab.com, and we share your tips. We share your cool stuff found. We try to answer your questions, and we string it all together into an agenda so that it follows a little bit of a form that facilitates the system we've put together, ensuring that each of us learns at least five new things. Every single time we get together, sponsors for this episode include Collide at klide.com slash mgg. Zero Trust, tailor-made for Okta, great stuff. Also, zockdock.com slash mgg. The easiest way to find a great doctor, go there, sign up for free, and download their app today. We'll talk more in depth about both of those shortly here for now. Here in Durham, New Hampshire, I'm Dave Hamilton. And here in Lee, New Hampshire, it's Pilot Pete. How goes it today, Mr. Pilot Pete? Not bad, but somehow we both managed to get the same shirt. We are both wearing this, if that's right. That's right. Two don'ts, don't make a do. Two don'ts, don't make a do. You can get your MacGeekGab shirt at macgeekgab.com slash merch if you are so inclined. I say that we just dive right in, my friend. Okay, Chicago Tom has our next quick tip, and it also is about shortcuts or related to shortcuts. He shared this in our Discord. He said, this may sound kind of dumb. It doesn't, there are very few things. I was gonna say we never had anything sent into the show that was dumb. If I'm gonna be honest, that probably isn't true, but stuff like this, tech stuff, never. We've had like other things that aren't related to what we talk about here, some of that's dumb. Tech stuff, never dumb. He says, but I always forget to set my alarm at night. Okay, no problem. Computers are good at this stuff. Right. He says I was poking around and discovered the automation section in shortcuts. One of the triggers for personal automations is sensibly enough alarms. So it was a snap to set up a shortcut triggered by turning the alarm off that toggled the alarm back on. So simple, I was ashamed I hadn't thought of it before. And this is a great example of what can be done with shortcuts. Turn it off, you can make it turn back on again. You know, it's kind of, you know, it's not the if, this, then that service because that's a different service, but it's the same sort of model. You just build these things and say, great, here's the trigger, here's the result, awesome. And of course, if you don't want it to ask you, go and do the thing we talked about before to turn it off. But I'm wondering, and this is clever, and I love this, because it means we get to talk about the good, the things that computers are good at, but I'm not sure it's necessary because wouldn't setting a recurring alarm keep it happy? Like for example, we usually record Mac Geekab at we meet at 10 a.m. Eastern on Friday mornings. So I have a time to make the podcast alarm for 847 a.m. on Friday mornings. And it only goes off on Fridays and it goes off every Friday unless I turn the alarm off. But when it rings, if I hit stop, that doesn't turn it off. So I'm wondering if a recurring alarm is more, is a different type of solution. I don't want to say if it's better or worse. I mean, if your solution's working, then it's hard to get much better than that. But I don't know, that's my thought. Or maybe using a subset of Apple's sleep functionality, which by the way can be super overwhelming when you dig into it. But it is possible to use Apple's sleep functionality without like all of the features and you can set different sleep patterns for different days. I think doctors yell at us when we do that. But as a nerd and a musician, my weekends have a very different sleep schedule than my weekdays usually. And so I set sleep mode to come on automatically and I can set alarms as part of that to happen or not happen and you can change it for different days. Like there's other ways to solve this problem. But if yours works for you, please keep using yours. But there are different types of alarms though on the phone that should be clear that that's something I just learned recently. There are alarms that go off tomorrow. But like you said, there's the recurring alarms. And I think one is built in and it's called like the wake up alarm or something. Yeah, that's the sleep alarm. Yeah, and it's super customizable. Way more than I thought when I first looked into it. So yeah, I was able to customize mine and it, you know, when it goes off, as soon as I turn it off, it'll tell me today's weather. It'll tell me, you know, that kind of stuff. Well, and the reason it's doing that is because you're having sleep mode and simultaneously with that alarm going off, right? So yeah, it's pretty cool. Yeah. Yeah, well thought out. It is, like I said, when I first dug into sleep mode, I did not like it. Like it was just too much. But in the end, right now, I use it every day. I probably need to configure mine a little more because I know that like my watch will take my temperature at night and that kind of stuff with sleep mode. But I tend not to use the sleep mode because it puts me in a complete do not disturb and I want people to be able to get through to me. But couldn't you set? I think you can. The sleep mode, like if you go into settings, what is it in general is, no, focus, settings, focus and go to sleep, like don't go to sleep, go to the sleep section. You can add people who are allowed to get through to you while you're sleeping. Yeah, I just haven't. You just need to do, but yeah, it is just as customizable as everything else. So yeah. The other thing, well, you know what? I probably need to make sure I change my watch face too because it changes my watch face. And I like the ultra watch that allows me to go into a red only mode. Well, you can do that. You can have sleep focus customize your watch face and you would set that on your phone. Yeah, no, I just noticed, it was funny. I was about to say something like, hey, look what I just learned and you asked if it was possible. Even a blind squirrel, Dave. Yeah, man. Absolutely. I'm still yelling at Apple. Why can't I turn on my night light to red automatically when I'm in red mode on my watch? Oh, you have to do theater mode for it to go on automatically to red. Well, you know, there is an Apple event happening mere hours after we release this episode on Monday the fifth and they'll talk about the next version of watch OS. And I had somebody, somebody on like Twitter or Mastodon or something. I saw it was saying I really hope that Apple stops with these divergent version numbers for their three major operating systems soon to be, well, four if you count Apple TV and five if you count reality OS, right? Like, can we just, if you're gonna still keep releasing new versions every year and you've heard my argument about how I really don't, I as a user would prefer they didn't update Mac OS every year, but if they're gonna bother doing it every year just call it iOS 2023. Please, please. And then we'll have watch OS 23 and Mac OS 23. And then you know, like, oh, do I have all the continuity features that work with it? Well, yes, they're all running the same OS, not wait. So it's Mac OS 13 and iOS 16 and watch OS. I don't even know what version watch OS were on off the top of my head and that's crazy to say that. But anyway, I did 16 something, I think, but that's a wild guess right now. I don't think we're on watch OS 16. I think we're on watch OS eight or nine. I don't have my watch on, I took it off. Oh, yeah, I'm thinking iOS. Right, see what I mean? There's the problem, there in lies the problem. I've been doing this for decades. You know, I feel like I did during the performa days of Apple's history where people would ask which model Mac should I buy? And I would like throw up my arms and run screaming from their home because I had no idea what models were even out that day let alone which one was the right one for them. Give them a version of Mac Tracker and say go to town. Yeah, I don't think Mac Tracker existed but maybe that's why Mac Tracker exists is because of that. All right, quick tips are not happening so quickly today but no, no, no, this is like we're having a good conversation. I like it. I was just the other thing I was gonna say then as long as we're on that is, you know who had a good run with that with, it was Mac OS 10 for a long time and therefore Ken Ray had Mac OS, Ken. Which is still his show, but the OS has moved on. The reference is lost. Yes, that's right. Ken, you need to change your name, sir. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. He just needs to be a symbol now. He's gonna be like the artist formerly known as Mac OS Ken. I'll let him know that he'll like that. All right, great show to listen to a great daily show. So we'll put a link to that in the show notes. You wanna take us to the next quick tip? That would be Porto's shot, as I recall. So this goes back a couple of weeks to next. Just last week, but anyway, it doesn't matter. That's what I meant. Who wrote in asking about how to replace the space preceding the punctuation in his work and the best I could come up with was find and replace. And Porto's John in Discord listened and he wrote in and said, hey guys, use regular expressions. Fire up your chat bot of choice like chat GBT and ask for a regular expression and take that and put it into your shortcuts app and tell it to replace text and use that. Go to the show notes. Yeah, yeah. Trying to describe it, it would just be pointless to everybody, but he has a way to create a shortcut that will do exactly that. And it was brilliant. Didn't even think of shortcuts. No, and regular expressions, like this is the thing that regular expressions are really good at. I am petrified of regular expressions, as you all know. But now we have chat GBT to tell me what regular expressions are. The problem is, of course, because I'm petrified of them, I don't really know how they work. Like I can figure it out. I have figured it out, but every time I feel like I'm starting at zero. And so I just trust that chat GBT that gives me a correct regular expression because it's so confident and sometimes it's strong and wrong. But the good news is, it's not like a dangerously strong and wrong. I just try it and it's like, well, that didn't work. But I think in this case, the one that is in the Discord chat does work. And so, you get to do that. Yeah, one that worked for me was a quick JavaScript. Throw it into a web page and I got it to go and figure out whether it was using iOS or Android and to take it to the appropriate app to subscribe to a podcast. Love it, love it. All right. For us non-programmers, chat GBT can help you learn. Oh yeah, even for us programmers, like I've used chat GBT to write, like what I'll call the sort of grunt code, the stuff it's like, oh, I gotta go and write that thing that I've sort of written before, but I can't just copy and paste from something else. Like I gotta write it out. And it's like, no, it's great for that kind of code. It's great for configuration files on servers. Like the other day, I needed to write something for a new site for our Nginx or an existing site but a new functionality for it on our Nginx server. And I'd done it before, but again, it's like, well, I don't do it often enough to have it in my head. So I started heading down the path of like, okay, let me research, what does this one do? What does that one do? Let me find examples of things similar and then try and adapt them and hopefully not break everything. And one of my business partners, Ryan, was like, hey, just ask chat GBT. I was like, oh, right. And it gave me the config file and I looked at it and I showed it to him. And he's like, yeah, that looks right. I'm like, same. And he says, I think that looks right because we were both in the same boat and pasted it into the config file, restarted Nginx and Bob's your uncle, it's good to go. So yeah, it's really, it's helpful with the right things. It is fantastic. And as we've said many times on this show, the trick is finding the right things. And that's one of the reasons we keep sharing examples of where we have successfully and unsuccessfully used it because that helps the hive mind. And if you have examples like this where you have successfully or unsuccessfully used it, feedback at MacGeekab.com. Whoa, where to us feedback at MacGeekab.com. Yeah, it's an address I created a long time ago, Pete. I don't know if you were around but it's feedback at MacGeekab.com. Okay. And we'll see that there as presumed because. That's right. Yeah, it comes to us. I learned how to respond from that again. I wanna talk about that a little bit later. Yeah, yeah. Yes, we will. Gary sent in a list of eight fixes for unadjectable drives on your Mac. It's from makeuseof.com. And it's got some decent suggestions. Some of them are sort of like, wait a moment then try again. And that's actually a pretty good suggestion. But emptying the trash for subjecting the drive, relaunching Finder, using Terminal to do it. And of course the link for this is in the show notes. So you'll be able to see these as well. But thank you for sending that through Gary. It's good stuff. Yeah, I love it. Yeah, I love it. It's great. One last quick tip. Yeah? Sorry, Dave. That's okay. I lost my place. That's all right, I got it. It's from C-Dub559 here in Discord. We were talking a few episodes ago in 981 about checking your data usage in the iPhone Settings app. And we were talking about how some carriers will automatically reset this for you and some will not. And C-Dub says, from recent experience migrating two of my kids to Mint Mobile, I can confirm a couple of statements. My wife and I stayed on T-Mobile to take advantage of the 55 plus pricing. And on our phones, the T-Mobile phones, cellular data app resets every month on their billing cycle date automatically. He says, because I have to track my kids' data to right size their specific Mint Mobile plans while on the initial three months of service before the annual renewal, I had to manually reset their data cycle when the billing cycle reset. And that's true. Like if you wanna do it that way, that is the way to do it. The other way to do it, the way I've done it, is I figure, yes, it's good to sort of audit what the carrier is recording as your mobile data, but your phone is not the definitive source, right? The carrier's calculation for this is the definitive source. No matter what your phone says, you're gonna pay what they says. You're gonna pay what they say. If you wanna argue with them, then using your phone is great. But otherwise, like, you know, so what I do as manager of our Mint family plan is I have a recurring task, recurring reminder set up on my, you know, iCloud thing on the last day of our Mint month. And I go into the Mint webpage, or you can do it on the app too, and I log what Mint is showing each of us to have used on that day. So there's another 24 to 36 hours left by the time I do this each month. But it gets me close, right? And then that way I'm able to really kind of, you know, and I logged it for every month that we've had Mint. And so, in fact, just last week, we reset. Like the end of May was our reset point. And so I knew that a Mint had bumped up the size of their plans. And I knew my son wasn't using more than his new, you know, he didn't need the new plan that he was gonna be on. So we were able to ratchet him back, but you know, it's nice to look every year and be like, okay, yep, just like, as C-Dubb said, right sizing those plans is a good thing. You know, Pete, when you see someone who's just so good at what they do, it's like watching a juggler on a unicycle, juggling flaming torches while singing bohemian rhapsody. That's quite the image, Dave. At least they aren't juggling chainsaws because that would be dangerous. But you're right, whether it's a waiter, skillfully balancing a tray of sizzling fajitas on one hand or a chef running a kitchen so smoothly, that even Gordon Ramsay wouldn't dare to utter a word. You just know you're in good hands. Exactly, Pete. And you know that feeling when you find the right doctor, you feel heard, you feel at ease. Well, that's where ZockDoc comes in, Dave. Finding a doctor that's right for you is as seamless as a magician pulling a rabbit out of a hat, except the rabbit is quality medical care. Well put, Pete, here's something you'll wanna hear, folks, ZockDoc is the only free app that lets you find and book doctors who are patient-reviewed, take your insurance, are available when you need them, and treat almost every condition under the sun. You know, surprise twists might work for podcasts, but maybe not so much for medical care. With ZockDoc, there are no alarms and no surprises. Imagine this, folks, you get to choose from thousands of patient-reviewed doctors and specialists, browse doctor profiles, upload and verify your insurance information, and get the care you need. It's like having a personal assistant for your health. I couldn't agree more, Dave. So folks, don't wait, go to ZockDoc.com slash MGG and download the ZockDoc app for free. Then find and book a top-rated doctor today. Many are available within 24 hours. That's Z-O-C-D-O-C dot com slash MGG ZockDoc.com slash MGG, and our thanks to ZockDoc for sponsoring this episode. Hey, next up, our sponsor Collide has some big news. If you're an Octa user, they can get your entire fleet up to 100% compliance. Yeah, and the way they do it is if a device isn't compliant, the user can't log into your cloud apps until they've fixed the problem. It's that simple. Collide patches one of the major holes in zero-trust architecture, device compliance. Without Collide, IT struggles to solve basic problems like keeping everyone's OS and browser up to date. Unsecured devices are logging into your company's apps because there's nothing there to stop them. Collide is the only device trust solution that enforces compliance as part of authentication and it's built to work seamlessly with Octa. The moment Collide's agent detects a problem, it alerts the user and gives them instructions to fix it. If they don't fix the problem within a set time, they're blocked. It's so cool, Pete. Collide's method means fewer support tickets, less frustration, and most importantly, 100% fleet compliance. How do you get it? Visit collide.com slash MGG to learn more or to book a demo. That's K-O-L-I-D-E dot com slash MGG, and our thanks to Collide for sponsoring this episode. And while we're here, Dave, they say the average podcast listener has six shows in their rotation. And we've got a recommendation that's sure to knock your socks off. Introducing the Jordan Harbinger Show. Jordan dives into the minds of fascinating people, athletes, authors, scientists, even spies and hostage negotiators. And Jordan, he's got this knack for getting his guests to spill the beans, unheard stories, thought-provoking insights. You name it. He's like a wisdom dentist, Dave. He extracts those bits of knowledge without fail. But instead of giving you a lollipop, he gives you something even sweeter, a more informed worldview. That's right, Pete. You can't go wrong with adding the Jordan Harbinger Show to your rotation. It's incredibly interesting and there's never a dull show. So just search for the Jordan Harbinger Show that's H-A-R-B is in Bravo, I-N is in November, G-E-R on Apple Podcasts. Spotify or wherever you listen to podcasts. And thanks to Jordan for doing this swap with us. All right. Shall we take ourselves to Cool Stuff Found? We've got some quick Cool Stuff Found. I mean, then we might get some longer ones later. You want to take us to Zach? Absolutely, yeah. So Zach wrote in, I bet he never thought he'd be heard from again. He wrote him back in February, going back to Show 968. He said, hi, Macky Gab team. I just wanted to chime in on the Apple TV, Dolby Atmos thing. The Apple TV only supports Lossy Dolby Atmos, AKA the type of Atmos streaming services use. The Apple TV does not support Lossless Dolby Atmos at all. And that would require Apple enabling audio pass through like the NVIDIA SHIELD has. Unfortunately, as you said, Plex support for the ATV, Apple TV for even Lossy Atmos that streaming services use is not well supported. But you can use the app Infuse as a Plex client and connect it to your Plex server. And this will allow you to play Atmos on the Apple TV. I like it. That's really smart. I, yeah, Infuse is a, it's an interesting app. It, you know, it does more than like the native stuff that it would point to. That you would think that the Plex app that Infuse couldn't do more with literally the same data, but obviously the answer is yes. Yeah, I haven't put that on my new computer yet. I think I got VLC player on there, which is also another thing that will play almost anything. Yes, yes, for sure. To include M3U files, I didn't know that. Oh. VLC player will play M3U files. Yes, yeah. Yeah, yeah, it's a good way to test them before you add them to like channels or whatever using your M3U player. Yeah, for sure. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Good stuff. Yeah. I know what. Who was that? Was it Pensacola Craig? Pensacola Craig, yeah. Pensacola Craig sent in something he said, when looking out to find out the dimensions of a vintage iMac lampshade G4 that I recently acquired, I stumbled upon this very interesting site called dimensions.com, which has a wealth of very professional drawings, including 3D on so much stuff. So if you need to know the dimensions of something, dimensions.com could very well be the home that you want to visit for this. I mean, there's just all kinds of things. You want to like mirrors and like toilet seats and door handles and like you know, you want to know what an American standard Maybrook urinal, how that measures out, like that might be a valuable thing. Now I might. Well, like let's say you're, you know, you're thinking about redesigning your bathroom or something, right? Like, you know, these kinds of things, you want to know what an American bulldog, what its measurements are. I'm supposed average measurements, because you know, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, it's fascinating. Bulldogs are different. That is true, Pete. Yep, that is true. So thank you for that, Pensacola Craig. Good stuff. And Steve Hammond, this one's been floating for a while and I wanted to stop it from floating over in the Discord group, which is at mackeykev.com slash discord. Steve told us about something called Docker dash iCloud PD. As you might guess, this is the Docker instance. If you're really thinking, you might guess what it does. It is an instance to use to sync your iCloud photo library to a folder on whatever device you have it on and while the link for this is in the show notes, also in the show notes are instructions to install Docker iCloud PD on your Synology. So this is, it's certainly for a geeky afternoon of fun. I have not done this yet, but now that I've put it in the show, I won't keep forgetting about it and like I'll see it at a time where I actually use our show notes much like you folks do to like look at things that you have mentioned. I mean, sometimes if it's something quick, like dimensions or whatever, I looked at that before we put it in the show. I looked at this too, but I haven't gone and like spent the afternoon or the hour or whatever it is to like dig in and do it. But I love this idea because right now I am getting my iCloud photo library to my Synology by syncing it down to my Mac and then syncing from my Mac to the Synology and that's fine, but it requires me to say, download originals to my Mac. If I was someone who only had a laptop, didn't have a desktop Mac, that path might not work and I know that involves a lot of you, but if you've got a Synology that you would wanna put this stuff on anyway, well, wouldn't it be better to just slurp it down? I hope Apple's retirement of Photo Stream doesn't break this. I don't think it will based on what I've seen but I can't say that for sure, but it's a pretty cool thing. So yeah, so. Can I take us down a quick rabbit hole? Can I stop you? I think we just did. Here we are in this rabbit hole. And forgive me if I've asked this before, I think I did, but could you briefly describe again what Docker is? I actually installed it once on my, I think on my MIDI to get channels to run and you went, yeah, you're doing it wrong Pete. But yeah. Yeah, yeah, okay, I will try. I don't have any notes on this. Like I think the last time we did this, I had written notes because it's one of these conversations that can get very convoluted very quickly. Yeah, I'm just looking for a brief overview. Is it a shell or a sandbox or a. So think of it like a, like you would a virtual machine, right? Yeah. So if you were gonna install a virtual machine, you know, on your Mac, let's say, to run a different version of Mac OS, it would be its own complete full environment that you would install, you know, Mac OS Ventura into and then you would install apps to it. And maybe you'd have a folder that's shared between your virtual machine and your non-virtual machine so that you could get stuff in and out. But otherwise it's like its own thing and it would take up all the space that it needs to take up for a full install of the operating system and all of that good stuff, right? So Docker is like virtual machines, but super lightweight. They are built to be very specific to their task and don't include all of the sort of default operating system stuff. They inherit some from the host operating system. They also, because you're building it to do just like this one does one thing. So it doesn't need all the resources that it would need to do anything. But think of it, you know, on your Synology you're installing this inside of a Linux box, a Linux box, because Synology runs Linux at its core. So this would be a Linux Docker essentially that you'd be running and it would sort of operate and inherit some things from the OS, but lightweight, low memory usage, low CPU usage. And like a VM, often you will have a folder that your Docker can see that is also able to be seen from outside the Docker. And that, I presume with this iCloud PD is where you would be saving or it would be saving your photos so that you could then go touch those and do whatever you want to them from, hopefully just read them, because if it's sinking them down you don't wanna be deleting them from there, but maybe you do, I don't know. But yeah, so Docker lightweight virtual machine, that is wholly incorrect, but it's a good way to think about it. And as soon as you said the words virtual machine, I remembered, we have talked about it. So don't get old, it's bad for your memory. But like it's a good question. It's easy to get that because there is minutia and lots of differences that are meaningful, it's easy to get lost in that, but that's the right way to think about it going in. And I will say, Synology has a decent Docker graphical interface for managing your Docker containers. Otherwise you're doing it just from the command line and that can get very arcane very quickly, but Synology's interface, it doesn't do everything. So there are some Docker containers that you can't do with Synology's interface, but most of them you can, and it kind of makes it easy. So it's not too terrible. Yeah. Like I said, I knew I had asked it as soon as you said virtual machine, but it makes total sense and that's good to know. I'm gonna play with that one a little bit. Yeah, it's a great question. One last quick little cool stuff found that I wanna talk about here is from Bruce this week, sent it in and said, in the last episode in 983, you talked about dealing with Mac network names, system name from whatroot.net allows you to change the name of your Mac OS computer locally as it appears on an IP network and as it appears on a Bonjour network. And it's a pretty cool little thing because certainly you can do this in system settings, right? And in fact, they address this right on the homepage of system name. They say, why not just use the system preferences or system settings app? And they say, well, that app makes assumptions about the names to use for each component based on the type of machine you have and your username. You may wish to override these assumptions and that is what system name allows you to do. So thank you for that, Bruce. Yeah, pretty good stuff. All right, so there is an Apple event coming up. Pete, I would like to, on behalf of the whole Mac eCub community, extend our heartfelt thanks to you for buying a MacBook Pro this past week ahead of the Apple event that ensures that we're gonna see more powerful stuff coming out on Monday's keynote. Pro 16 with the M2 Macs, and therefore the M3 Macs will be out next week. Actually, I don't think they will. Based on all the rumors, it seems like what we're gonna see. They have to delay it for something on the rumors I've read, yeah. Correct, I think we'll know more. So we're not gonna spend a whole lot of time talking about the rumors because by the time this episode comes out, there's literally hours between when this comes out and when the keynotes will happen. And then right after the keynotes, we're gonna do a special episode. We have a special guest coming. I will actually share who the special guest is. It's Jeff Gamet. So Jeff Gamet's gonna join me and Pete to dissect whatever Apple does. We will do that on Monday after both the keynote and the State of the Union, because we find that the State of the Union is a valuable thing to try and dissect and apply our nerdy brains to. But we'll do that. You say Monday evening live stream? It is, yeah, we'll do a live stream at about 6 p.m. on Monday evening. That's what it was. 6 p.m. Eastern, thank you, yeah, yeah, yeah. So. 2200 UTC. Yeah, there you go. Oh, see, man, I don't do those conversions in my head anymore. But we will do that. So, and I think that the laptop we will see is the 15-inch M2 MacBook Air is what I believe is coming on Monday. I know. Yeah, I know. I'm just shocked that the M3 Max didn't come out while I was driving home, because usually that's... Right, that's right. That's right, yeah, yeah. But in setting up your new Mac, you... There are certain things that we use to sort of manage the workflow of Mac KeyCab. And for whatever reason, we didn't get you up to speed with all of that stuff. Well, a lot of couple things. Yeah, but it wasn't until a couple... Like a few months ago, maybe six months ago, certainly in the last year, was when we really got you... Into the email system. Into the email specifically, right. For premium and feedback at Mac KeyCab so that I could get in and answer questions. But that's the thing is that when I answer a question, you need to see that. So that, A, you don't answer the question. And B, you can correct me when I tell them, you know... But not so much looking to correct. Smash that hard drive and you'll be fine. Like it's a conversation. Sometimes there's like, oh, I have something to add that might be valuable to the listener and I don't wanna make them wait for the show or whatever, yep. And so because we had done... And there is a lesson for all of us here in terms of troubleshooting. Because we had done this, let's say within the last year, I think it was even within the last six months. But because we had done it, I made all kinds of assumptions about your knowledge level of what we did. And I'm using we very casually here because it was not what we did. Well, I watched you do it. That's right. I sat there and watched you do it. And I learned by doing and I learned by repetition. There's no doubt about it. And to be clear for people, I did not use migration assistant, which was, I don't know if it was pre-show or during the show last week, when we were joking about my sound issues and my camera not working, I said, well, I need a new laptop. So I went out and bought a new laptop. And that isn't the only reason, but... Sure. I've been Jones for this M2 16 inch MacBook Pro for a long time with all the ports that it has and the power and the speed and that kind of so. My 18 month old M1 with two ports just wasn't quite cutting it for me. And I didn't use migration assistant and I went in and I copied all the settings manually. Yeah. Except I forgot the email addresses from which I was selling. Yeah, exactly. So the lesson here is I did this on your computer. I mean, I did it over zoom remotely, but it was not, I did not guide you to do it. I did it. And then I made, when you were asking, oh, why isn't this working? I'm like, oh, you just gotta go into mail and add the email address. And like, I thought that was enough because in my mind, you had done it before. So yeah, you'll get there, you'll remember this. And of course, you'd never done it before. I did it for you. And there was a mantra that I used to have to really follow when helping people with their computers. If it was something that they were likely to need to be able to do in the future. If we were just solving a problem, they didn't need to be there. I could just dive in and I would move at my speed. I'm a super impatient person. You might not find that surprising if you've listened for more than maybe 10 minutes. But I was like, I would be very quick and efficient with things. Efficiency is great when you're trying to get stuff done. And that's what we did with yours. I think we probably had limited time. It was like, all right, let me just get you up to speed on how we're gonna do this. And I just barfed all this stuff under your computer. And it was like, great, you're good to go. All right, thanks, bye. And then this time around, you were doing it for yourself, but you had never done it before. And I made the assumption that you knew what you were doing. So there was this mantra that I would say to myself when I was running computer nerds, we would all kind of, we bought into it. It was, there are moments where you need to sit on your hands and guide the user because they need to do it. Then if you do it for them, it's not gonna help in certain scenarios. And it was, of course, up to us to decide what those scenarios were. But in retrospect, I would have been better if I had sat on my hands and let you do this and not just me do it, but now you have. The next time you're up to speed. So we followed proper technique, just not this time around. But I know we have a lot of you who listen to the show who either officially, as your business, help people or certainly unofficially, helping friends and family members. There are times it would have saved me time if I had taught you how to do this the first time instead of doing it for you the first time. Right? Fair enough. It's just how it goes. But even when you said, just go into accounts and edit the email addresses, I could not see that that was a pull down. Right. Well, if you don't know it's there, yeah. And it definitely wasn't obvious. I wish there was a button there going, hey, edit email addresses, but yeah. Yeah, exactly. They just offered us a pull down. So we got it done. Yeah, we got it done. Yeah, I was like, how is he not seeing that? I'm like, oh, he's never been there before. That's why. Yeah, and I am a very visual learner. So I actually should have picked up on it when you did it the first time. I probably did it so fast. Yeah, you know, and I'm not going to need to do it again. I hadn't even thought about right, you know, not not using migration assistant to because I think that setting would have pulled in. Oh, it definitely would have. But so would any other settings that you have all the stuff that was keeping me from using my iPhone as a camera. That's right. Yeah, exactly. Is that working better so far? Like a charm. Yeah, I just knocked on wood for us. So that's that's not somebody at your door, folks. That's just me. All right, let's do some questions here. Barry sent in a note. He said, is there any way that iCloud Mail can set a rule to automatically delete junk mail? All I can find is to move it to the junk mail folder. Spam sieve does not act on anything in iCloud. It does a great job of mail on my computer. So this is an interesting one. I think the answer I think there is only one answer. I mean, at first I thought, OK, well, can we set up a rule to do this? But I don't but iCloud Mail nor Apple Mail let us set up rules on non inbox folders, right? Automatic rules. So I don't think that's going to work. Mail act on, which is a piece of third party software, part of small cubed mail suite does let you assign rules to keystrokes. So you could set a rule to do this that's assigned to a keystroke. But you'd have to like go select all the junk mail messages and the rule could say only delete things that were received more than 15 days ago or, you know, something like that. But then maybe you could script that with keyboard maestro like I started thinking about all this. And as we were prepping for the show today, it hit me, you know, I think Apple Mail has an answer here and it does. If you go into Apple Mail, go to preferences, go to accounts for your iCloud account and go to mailbox behaviors on the junk mailbox. There is a setting for erase junk messages and you can set it to never after one day, after one week, after one month or when quitting mail. And I think that's going to be your answer, Barry. I don't think there's any other way to do that. There might be. I would love a creative solution. But I mean, I think that's the I think that's the answer. So I think you might be right. Yeah, I think I am, too. I don't know why it didn't come to me when I was first answering Barry's email. It's like, oh, like I came up with all these crazy paths and was like, no, I should just use the setting that's literally built to do this. What's weird, though, and the reason I got distracted from it that I'm going to say it's my excuse and I'm sticking with it is. Most mail providers offer this functionality in this on the server side, right? Like Gmail will auto delete junk mail after 30 days. And I don't think you even have a choice in that matter. Like maybe you do fast mail, which I use will do the same thing or but you do have a choice. I can turn it on or off. I think and iCloud does not. I that was the first place I looked. I'm like, oh, I'm sure you just turned it on an iCloud. I couldn't find it in iCloud. So it was at that point that I went down the. Well, let's see if we can script this path. I didn't think, well, Apple Mail is the place to do that. But it's just interesting. And I wonder, oh, well, you couldn't do it online, right? You need the Apple Mail client. Yeah, but does the Apple Mail client only do it locally or with iCloud specifically? Does the Apple Mail client send that setting up to the cloud and let it happen on the cloud? I don't because that's the question. Is it going to work on your iOS devices? Well, if you're laptop, yeah. But if you're yeah, if your Mac runs mail often enough, like they're all going to see the same data set. So all you need is one computer to do it. Right. You know, if you're Mac's doing it, then your iPhone rather is going to see the result of it. It's not like it's, you know, because they're just syncing via iMap or whatever. So but is it, yeah, but is it doing it locally? I guess it's the question you asked, right? Right. Is it is it deleting locally and then just syncing the changes up? Or is it telling the server go do this? And I guess the way to test that would be to set it on one Mac and go check the other Mac and see did the change reflect? There you go. That would be my guess is it doesn't. My guess is it's doing it locally, treating it like any other male client, but you never know. You never know. Want to take us to Mark? I can do that. Mark wrote in and said, I hope you can steer me in the right direction with my MacBook Pro retina 15 inch mid 2015 2.2 quad core i7 and all the rest of the details about that. In the past couple of days, my MacBook Pro will go to shut down of its own accord and present the dreaded black and white multilingual screen. In fact, it just happened now in the middle of typing the previous sentence troubleshooting. He's gone on its maintenance. He's booted the safe mode, disconnected external hard drives and peripherals, and none has been efficacious word of the day. Console shows no crash reports, but I really wouldn't know what to do if there was one. I feel your pain, Mark. I suppose the next step would be to nuke and pave. But I thought I would seek the wisdom of the oracles before I take that step. Now we're Oracle State. Was he talking about us or do we accidentally get CC'd on this? Well, there may be. I don't know. You're more oraculous than I am. I know. Oraculous. Speaking of speed in the work of the day. Oraculous. Yeah. Oh, man, by the way, you know, I typed that into to the like the show of the living show note stock that we have. And it did not come up with it being a spelling error. Like, this might actually be a word. Rot-Roll. What? Oraculous. It's in the dictionary, Pete. There you go. Speaking of words of the day. Does it mean what we think it means? I would hope so. It's same. It's there. Why doesn't Miriam Webster give us a definition? Well, Dave, while you're looking for that, I'll finish that. But let me ask you this. What's another word for thesaurus? Just asking. Thanks for a friend. By the way, kudos to you for the wonderful synergy and the informative, entertaining, Mach-E-Gab podcast. Thank you for the compliment. I wrote back to Mark and said, Mark, I may be jumping the gun here, but this almost sounds like a hardware related issue based on what you've done so far. I'm wondering if this machine is in a candidate to take and see one of the geniuses at the Apple Store who can run some deep diagnostics on it. My first run, maybe first run tech tool, which I believe used to come with a physical copy of Apple Care back in the day, but is available here now. And I sent him a link to filehorse.com, download tech tool pro. Yep. If you do decide a new compave, don't forget to make sure you have a good backup in place before doing it. Even then consider reintroducing only the date from the previous system, not all the settings. I don't know why. Only the data is what you make heat. Data. There you go. Thank you. And I was trying to say, yeah, just trying to bring back your data, all your settings using migration assistant. Yeah, for sure. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I agree that this sounds like hardware, that there's too much going on. And you've done all of the things that, when it looks like, I'm trying to think, this is a mid-2015. So it, right. So it's in. Show it's long teeth. Well, but it's Intel. So he listed the three troubleshooting things that he did one thing, two more things would be to reset the NVRAM and the PRAM on that device. Oh, and the SMC, right? So, and I realized that resetting the NVRAM and PRAM sort of means the same thing. And I think on that machine, it actually does. There were a couple of machines where it meant something different, but. Those are always, that's almost like control, ultimately reboot, if that doesn't work, try these things, cause it's simple. SMC is something, we haven't set it in a long time on this show because we've been mostly focused on Apple Silicon Macs, which don't have an SMC in the same way that Intel wants to. But that was kind of the, when it seems like hardware, but it's not hardware, how do you wanna fix it? Resetting the SMC was sort of the path on that, so. Which is short for system management controller. I believe that's right. Yeah. It's kind of the, it's really down deep at the base hardware, software interface. Yeah, yeah. So yeah, resetting that might, would certainly be a thing to try before you bring it in, but it seems like hardware. So do those things to like rule them out, but I would plan to bring it in. Dang, I wish I'd thought of that. Absolutely. Yeah, yeah. Well, that's why we do this together. Right. You know, like, yeah. Yeah, yeah. That's why, you know, when we started the show, I wanted like, this, it needs to always be a conversation. And to that end, I will miss having John here very much so, you know. I mean, the show's been going a very long time. This is a natural evolution, right? Whose time had come. But I'm stoked that we get to keep doing the show for all of you. We don't take it for granted. I never, well, I'm sure there's somewhere I had. I was, we were having this conversation in pre-show, but like, I'm very thankful that we get to do what we do and I remain thankful for that. So yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. No, there's the things we don't catch and it's nice to talk about. So yeah. Where are we here on time? I didn't set the time, my apologies. No, it's okay. We're at 49 minutes. I got it. Yeah, Kentucky engineer had a question. It's one we've answered in the past, but it's been a couple of years. And he says, I wanna move my spectrum landline, well, VoIP line over to my iPhone. How do you do this? And there's, well, there's a couple of ways, right? Like it depends if you truly just wanna keep that number and replace your iPhone's number with it. If you do, then talk to your cell carrier and port into that, right? But if you just wanna save your landline number so that it's always yours, but you don't want it to be attached to a landline, that gets a little interesting depending on where you wanna go put it. To me, the best place to go put it is Google Voice because Google Voice is free and it will likely remain free. At least I have no reason to think that it won't. The trick though is getting it there. Google Voice definitely allows you to port numbers in. They do charge for that. It's a one-time $20 fee. Getting it there though, Google Voice generally speaking will only port from cell phones. So if you wanna get your spectrum VoIP line, your landline, if you will, into Google Voice, you need a middle hop and T-Mobile's SIM or E-SIM is the least expensive way to do it. It'll cost you a couple of bucks to get a T-Mobile SIM that you can port a number to. You port from spectrum to your T-Mobile SIM that you put in your phone. And then as soon as it is live there, you port it from T-Mobile into Google and then it lives in, and then you cancel the T-Mobile SIM and of course you cancel your spectrum landline too. And that's the end of that. It lives in Google forever. And we did that with our voice line that started as like a physical line from like frontier communications or something 20 years ago. And we ported it in to Google Voice while, I mean, I think we ported it to Xfinity first and then from Xfinity to T-Mobile to Google Voice and it's lived there forever. The one sad part is what we have used and still at least at the moment use is the, it was from a company called Obahai, but it was, it's a device that was, they were acquired by Poly and Poly is end of life in it. So don't go get one of these, but it's like the OB 200 or something, OBI 200, which was, I don't know, a $60 device when I bought it. And it plugs in, it has three ports on it. It's got ethernet, power and phone and you plug it into power because it needs that. You plug it into ethernet so that it can talk to your Google Voice number. You program it up and then the phone port on it becomes a live phone port in your house that you can plug into the system in your house. And now all the phones in your house are usable for your Google Voice line. It's awesome. And it was a one-time fee and I think that was the problem because in order for it to work, Obahai needs to keep running this backend system that links to Google Voice and they are shutting that down in December. So- Yeah. So one-time fee doesn't cover it. Yeah. Yeah, so, but, you know, so, like, I mean, we still will get like notifications and we can run the Google Voice app on our phones if we really want it to ring on our, you know, our iPhones or whatever. It's like, it's gonna be fine when it goes away. We'd barely use it now, but it was a nice sort of transition thing to, you know, to go from to what we're currently using, but yeah, you're not gonna get there. But so, if somebody knows of a device that replaces the OB 200 feedback at MackieGibb.com, I'll love you forever, but I don't think you're gonna find it. Like I've looked and a lot of people have looked and no one has any, there's nothing. So just as it is. If there's a Docker container that I can run that would do it though. Oh, there you go. Right? Like if I could just have the software that Obahai had, like, I mean, they're definitely not gonna just give this away. But maybe, like, maybe not definitely. Maybe not definitely. Yeah. I don't know. Speaking of feedback and follow-ups, in the last episode, Pete, we were talking about unmounting volumes and John mentioned using the U mount command. And I cautioned that that might not do it the best way, the best way that I suggested was doing it in the Finder because it deletes from the Finder, deletes that mount point in the volumes folder. And that was sort of the origin of the question was, you know, we've got these lingering mount points and they're causing the drives to be, you know, space one, space two, space three. Well, Rob, and I'll make sure John knows of this because I think he will appreciate it, Ron Rob says, I wanted to chip in around the U mount command. I can confirm that it does, in fact, remove the mount point from slash volumes. I use a shell script on my home backup server to unmount all five of the backup volumes on my backup hard drive each day. And I have one Mac at home that's my carbon copy cloner and he has this whole thing, but he uses the U mount command in this and it does absolutely unmount them fully by removing the mount point as well. So it must be a Mac OS specific version of the U mount command, because I know on Linux it doesn't, but that's the beauty. And I really appreciate you following up with us on that, Rob. So yeah, feel free to use the U mount command, John had it right, which is great. Yeah, it's awesome. Yep. Yipper. All right, one more question before we get into a couple of cool stuffs found at least. So Drusky wrote in and said, he, let me just read it. Sure. I've had an ongoing issue with the first two cores of my M1, Mac 16 MacBook, M16, M1 16 inch MacBook Pro on Monterey when connected to my J-Bod hub. Just a bunch of drives. Is that right? Yeah, that's right. They're being occupied by various iterations of MDS which is made of data server. It's part of the spotlight system. And anyway, it's pegging his CPU cores at 100%. And he said he's watching it via iStat monitors and it looks like this. And he showed us a picture and yeah, he's pegged. No matter what I'm doing, running handbrake doesn't even light up the cores as much as this does. Active activity monitor consistently lists processes with MD in the name at or near the top. But the J-Bod consists of five external disks on a hub, including one time machine which backs up the boot drive to external data disks. He said I do not create or delete or modify files frequently enough to necessitate this level of excessive indexing. I took some message form advice and disabled spotlight via the terminal command before but that seemed to do nothing other than prevent me from starting applications in spotlight search and the two cores still ran amok. How can I better troubleshoot and understand this issue? I've never seen this on my other Intel Macs. I wrote back and said, look, it may be a little unconventional and I know Dave will jump in here when I go over this but try removing all the drives and see if it's still happening and add them back one at a time. And you know, when does it start happening? You may isolate a drive. I said, I think that'll get you started. And so he wrote back. He says, I think this rabbit hole you sent me down. See, that's I'm good at that. Getting the holes going, right? Got me closer to finding the issue. It has at least shown some interesting information and ejected all the external disks until I got down to one time machine disk and the first two cores continued to be fully occupied. As it turns out, this is a six terabyte Seagate externally powered drive that was split into two volumes, two terabyte volume formatted for APFS and the time machine is a four terabyte volume volume formatted for Mac OS extended journal. I haven't the slightest idea how or why this drive was split that way. Glorious results of a misspent youth and too many head injuries. There you go. I suppose I could continue drumming shooting by copying my time machine volume to a separate drive and reformat the six terabyte Seagate and seeing if the presumed indexing continues still that doesn't really explain why these MDS functions are also active. And that's when I run back and said, oh yeah, we're getting close. That's good. And I can admit to the former head injuries, but I can admit to the misspent youth, but I can't admit the head injuries. No admissions will be had. That's right. Other than the one that you just made accidentally that somebody could easily carve out and use against you. So great. Let's get that sound bite up on Twitter right now. That's right away. That's right. So, and then he said something else about signature files in my new MacBook and I got all that fixed too. But then Dave jumped in. I'm looking for what it was, but it was essentially don't make your backup volume. Yeah. When I see MDS issues like this, and by the way, thank you. 18 years of doing the show, I never knew what MDS stood for in all of those, in all those process names. Metadata server, you are correct. That is at least what the internet says. So it's gotta be right. Who says it is. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, so thank you for that. I learned a thing. Time machine volumes are often an issue with spotlight. When they are mounted, obviously, when they're unmounted, they shouldn't be an issue with spotlight. So making sure your time machine volumes are unmounted and even mounting them and then going in and excluding them from spotlight. Excluding them in settings, right? Yeah, can make a huge difference. So that might not be the answer to the issue here, but that would be the first thing to try. And I can say on the show all the time, so much of our approach here, if we know the answer, we'll tell you the answer. If we don't know the answer, we will do our level best to tell you, if I were there, here's what I would try next. And so... We're just guessing here. Yeah, well, but it's educated guessing and it's bullheaded persistence. We talk a lot about the troubleshooting process. That, I joke about it, but it's totally true that I bought my first house with bullheaded persistence because that's how I succeed at troubleshooting things. And look, it comes from learning as a kid, I had a computer, we spent, not our last penny on our computer, we did okay, but we didn't have a lot of extra money, right? So we bought this computer and it was amazing to have this Apple 2C in our house and obviously that opened all kinds of doors and here we are. But there was no one that I could pay to fix it. A, I don't know that there was anyone I could pay to fix it even if I wanted to pay and B, I couldn't. So I had to learn, like when I broke it, I had to figure out how to make it work. And often it was just trial and error, like let's try a thing. Okay, well, that didn't work, but I learned something from that, that either is relevant to this or relevant to the next thing I'm gonna wind up working on, just sort of keep digging. Absolutely, and mine was always, I'm not gonna be outsmarted by this piece of plastic and copper and silicone. That's true, yeah, like in the 90s when a lot of people were getting their first computers and I was doing a lot of training, like I became the guy that I couldn't find, the person that could go and solve people's problems. A lot of it was just getting over the fear of, well, I don't know what to do and so I'm not gonna try and to have me sitting there and you say that to me, it's like, well, I couldn't be sitting here if I had approached it with that same mindset. There's very few things you're gonna do that are gonna cause irreparable harm. And so give yourself permission to try a few things. You're not likely gonna, not likely gonna break it. Right, there are some things that you can do that will cause irreparable harm. Backup important data before you start messing with things that kind of, like those practices come from experiences, they're not just stuff we made up. But yeah, I have some. Hey, Pete, I didn't prep you at all for this. Do you use mastodon? I don't, I need to get on. I wonder if pilot Pete's taken. Well, so here's the thing. I guarantee you it's not for a variety of reasons. But the main one is that there is no one central mastodon server. So mastodon is, think of it like decentralized Twitter. It's not Twitter, but it effectively, when you're using it, the experience feels a lot like Twitter, okay? So, you know, we'll get there. But it is, it is decentralized in that anyone can set up a mastodon server. And I might set one up for us. I'll explain why in a minute. But at the moment, I don't. But anyone can set up a mastodon server, you stand it up, and then you connect it to the network of mastodon servers through a process that in the mastodon world is called federating, right? So it becomes this federation of independently run servers that all agree to share data with each other. And so, like I happened, my main account right now is at Dave Hamilton at podcastindex.social, which is a server that Adam Curry and Dave Jones run from the podcast index. When I got back into using mastodon, I created an account in 2017 on mastodon. The server that I created it on has gone away. And so I can't use that account anymore. And I can't even go and get my followers from it because it literally doesn't exist anymore. So I had to start from scratch again in the fall or whatever and was only using it to communicate with folks about the sort of podcasting 2.0 stuff that we've talked about and all the new tags and the value for value and all of that stuff. So that made sense for me if I needed to create an account to just go create one there. And assuming they continue to run it, then I could stay there. So I'm there. MacGeekab is at mstdn.social. So it's at MacGeekab at mstdn.social. But like once I'm following MacGeekab, it doesn't matter that our homes are on two different servers. They're federated, it's instantaneous. Like before we did this live stream, I pushed out a thing on the MacGeekab account saying you can watch the live stream just like we do on Twitter. And I immediately saw the notification in my Dave Hamilton account because I tagged myself and it showed up. So like you just have to pick a server and there's all kinds of reasons you might pick one server over another. There are servers for musicians, there are servers for, but it like some servers have different rules, some servers have different capabilities, some servers are private to have an account but they're still federated for people who have accounts there. The one that most people are signing up on right now is a server called mastodon.social, not mstdn.social. When I had to create the MacGeekab account, mastodon.social was overloaded and you couldn't create a new account there so I just created it somewhere else, it didn't matter. But you can always move your account too and your followers will move with you so long as the old server is up when you do the move that's why I couldn't move my old followers. Does that make sense? You know, because that old server was done. But this weekend I decided I need to really have a decent presence on mastodon. I noticed a lot of people that I used to interact with on Twitter have moved off of Twitter and are primarily using mastodon. I thought, okay, well, I can maintain a presence in both places, that's fine, it's no problem. And so I sat at our fire pit on Saturday morning and I got everything set up with mastodon. But the first thing I wanted to do was to follow all of the people on mastodon that I was following on Twitter, or at least those people who have mastodon accounts. And the way that the sort of generally accepted practice is people will put their mastodon address in their Twitter bio so that, or their profile, whatever they call it. And so you can go and like manually go follow that. Or you can use a service that I found called Fetifinder, F-E-D-I-F-I-N-D-E-R. Now, it turns out there are two services called Fetifinder. One does the automates the process of looking at your Twitter. It looks at who you're following. It looks at everybody on your lists and it can even look at the people who are following you if you want to follow, you get to choose. Like it's all broken down, it's great. That's at fetifinder.glitch.me and that's the one that's linked in the show notes. There's another service called Fetifinder that is a dating service for people on mastodon. You also might want to use that but for very different reasons, right? So as I was building the show notes, I'm like, why they changed the UI? Like they must have rolled out a new version of Fetifinder and I'm like, wait, what the heck is this? This is not what I meant. So. And Lisa wandered in the room and wondered what you were doing there. And she asked me, why are you on Fetifinder? I never saw you on Fetifinder before. Yeah, right, yeah, exactly. So there are, you can do this on the web, okay? Or you can use clients, like client apps, as you might imagine, available for Mac, iPhone, iPad, right? There are two client apps that have gotten a lot of press lately, deservedly so. The first one that I loaded up is one called Ivory which is from the tap bots people. And they have apps available for all three of the platforms I just mentioned. And they have a subscription or something where you pay 25 bucks a year to use the app on all of the platforms and all your devices. And so I started that and I have a subscription to Ivory and I was like, okay, this works, it's great, no problem. And then I saw somebody mentioned an app called Mona, M-O-N-A, which same kind of thing. I think their subscription is $15 for the year or something. So I signed up for that too. They have free trials for both of these. So you can test them all out for yourself. And for me, and the way my brain works, Mona is far and away, far more like intuitive for me. It does the things I wanna do, the way it syncs amongst the platforms. They both, if you were to compare the- And for a better price. And for a better price, right? But if you were to compare the feature sets of both of them, it would probably almost match one for one. The one difference is on the iPad and Mac Mona has a columned view, or as you dig deeper, like if you wanna look at replies or whatever, you just start getting that in another column, which really makes sense for my brain. So I think that's a big reason why I wound up gravitating toward Mona instead of Ivory, but they're both fine apps. And I would recommend testing them out for yourself and figure out what you like. And then, to wrap this up, there is a service called Topiary that also linked in the show notes that will prune your list of people that you are following based on folks that are inactive or have been inactive for 30 days, 60 days, 90 days. Again, you get to pick and choose. It will show you before you commit any of that. So if you use Feta Finder, get yourself set up, follow a bunch of people, and then it'll tell you, yeah, but this person's never done anything. And so you might wanna be like, well, I don't need to follow them anymore. So you clean it all up. So that's my seven minute introduction to Mastodon for you. There you go. And guess what? What's that? Pilot Pete wasn't taken, and I never have it. On mastodon.social, is that right? Okay, all right, cool. Now it's taken. Now it's taken. Yeah, there you go. So I may set up our own Mastodon server just because, you know, because that way I get to own it. But really, I wanna see what it takes to run a Mastodon server on my disk station because that's really kind of interesting to me, because I might be able to do it, like especially with Cloudflare tunnels, like there might be a way. So I'll probably mess with that. I may move my Mastodon home over there, but I will put our Mastodon things in the show notes. So, and yeah, yeah, yeah. I had heard of it, and I forgot. Yeah, so it's more set up towards your interests as opposed to just the whole world. Well, sort of the server that you choose to be on is, like Mastodon.social, which you just signed up for, is global. It's a sort of general interest. But yes, like there, I do have an account on some Mastodon server that is for like drummers or whatever. And so you can just, you can choose to see only the people you're following or you can choose to see only the people on your server that you're on, you know, and filter it down. So if I just want to see a conversation amongst drummers, I could log into that account and then just, you know, see it. So, yeah, I mean, there are the ways that it was built and conceived to be used. And then there are the ways that is currently being used because people have migrated there. Some people have migrated there from Twitter. I will say this week has been great. Like all the conversations that I've had on Mastodon have been fantastic. I'm quite enjoying it. So, yeah, so there you go. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We have a few minutes sort of. And there's a couple of things worth sharing. Last week, we shared that AU speech, like cleanup speech thing, right? I can't remember what it was called anymore. The sound isolation plugin, right? Yes, we did. Audio hijack 4.2 came out this week and it adds its own speech denoise block. And so I couldn't do an A to A, like an A to A test, an apples to apples test because I didn't have an opportunity where there was a lawnmower outside. But I did do a similar test as I did last week using the same crappy microphone in my office from my webcam and the new speech denoise block and audio hijack and here we go. All right, well, here's me sitting at my desk going through the crappy HD Pro webcam. Mike, I don't have a lawnmower outside unfortunately, but I think we'll be able to hear it because here's Apple's AU sound isolation that we talked about last week and now that's on. So we're hearing whatever we're hearing. I guess we'll all hear this together and I'm gonna turn that off. So that's off now. Now I'm gonna turn on audio hijack speech denoise and we'll see what that does. Now that's on. It says speech is detected when I'm talking. It says no speech is detected when I'm not talking. So we'll see what this sounds like. Yeah, so like they both seem to work similarly based on my ears, yeah. Can you stack them? Yes, I mean, I do have them stacked. Like in my audio hijack flow, I just put one after the other and turned one off and the other on. I wonder what turning them both on would probably overkill. It would probably just slow you down for no real net gain, yeah. Yeah, you know, it's- It makes crappy microphones sound pretty good. Better, yeah, exactly. Where this gets really important is let's imagine that Zoom adds the ability to tap into this, right? So anybody on Zoom can say clean up my sound and I think Zoom's already doing some version of this but you know, say, oh, I'm on a Mac so I can use the AU sound isolation thing that's just like as part of the operating system as long as you're on Ventura, go ahead and do it. And like that makes a difference. Your phone, your iPhone when you're on a FaceTime call and you're using like the microphone on the phone, you can set the microphone mode to use probably this AU sound isolation, it doesn't call it that, it calls it something else but yes, your phone can do that too, so. Now, my recollection is though, we found it in, I found it in GarageBand last week so you can even use it on a post-production. Yes. And it'll work, yeah. Yeah, if you're editing, that's generally how plugins are built to be used is in post-production. Here, we use them in real time and they work fine so like Zoom could do it in real time and does a little bit, Discord has had something in it called Crisp with a K for a long time that does sort of the same thing. It's a little more, I don't know, but it's like it's more noise canceling, not noise cleanup as much. But you know, it's like, it's fine, it does, it's like, it's better than what your crappy webcam mic sounds like. So, you know. And then we talked about it earlier. Well, we may have just texted about it, but theophonic.com, I used that, I played with it on my show and it has what they call it a DSR. Okay, yep. New word ESSER, which makes my, makes me sound much better. I don't like my S's the way my S's sound. I would agree. And people aren't hearing your S's because I run a DSR on both of us here. So, I will turn off the DSR for the remainder of the show and you can- And she sells, she sells by the t-shirt. Say that 17 times fast. Yeah. So, I can hear it in my ears that the DSR is gone. I'm gonna turn it back on. I don't like, I don't like, like there's a reason we have good audio quality and I wanna stick there. But yeah, yeah, like all kinds of things like that can make a difference for sure. Especially for folks listening on headphones. Like, well, the bouncy room thing that sound isolation and speech denoise clean up are huge, I think. So, yeah, so. All right, we have lots more cool stuff found, but we're not gonna get to it because we're, you know, running out of time here and we've packed a ton into this episode. But maybe next week we'll do a focus on cool stuff found, Pete. That'll be nice after the crazy Apple event and I don't know, we'll see. See how many questions come in. Let me check, I see even discount balance. Yeah, I know, I know. Those episodes are expensive but fun. But we have, like, I have quite a few cool stuff found, cool stuff's found. See, this is why the DSR is good. Cued up that are free. And we talked about some in this episode even. So, you know, it's all good. Thanks for hanging out with us, folks. As I said earlier, I am so thankful that we get to do this. It's like, I learn a ton. I sometimes feel like I'm being selfish because I get to learn the most. But, you know, I think we all get to learn together and that's really the best part of this. So, I love our community. And I get to relearn things, you know. Yeah, well, same. Yeah, exactly. Hang out with us over on Discord. MackieCab.com slash Discord. It's a wonderful place to be. There's a lot of great people there. It's not just me and Pete answering your questions. It's everybody in the community answering everyone else's questions. And so, it's a great resource. There's about 1,000 people, maybe 1,100 of you there now. I bet we can get that up to 2K real quick. So, come on and join us. It's fun. I promise it's not like, you know, the toxic online communities that you see. We're a good group here and it's amazing. So, if you're listening to this show, you already know that. It's good. Thanks to Cashfly for providing all the bandwidth to get the show from us to you. Make sure to check out our other shows. PilotBeat does a show for aviation enthusiasts called So There I Was. I do a show for small business owners called Business Brain and another one for musicians called Giggab. And, yeah, make sure you check out our sponsors. Zock.com.com slash MGG, as we mentioned, and Collide with a K. K-O-L-I-D-E.com slash MGG as well, I believe. Is it MGG or is it slash Makgeekab? I never can remember. That's why I have it written. You know, yeah, it's MGG for both of them. You can always go to makgeekab.com slash sponsors and all of it will be there. Go to the sponsors. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Pete, what does my shirt say? So two pieces of advice. One is go to the sponsors. And two is read Dave's shirt if you're looking on video. And if you're not, I'll read it for you right now. Three simple words, folks. Don't get caught. Made out of a bag. So wrong. And we're out. Cool. Hey, wait, that's what my shirt says. Two don'ts, don't make a do.