 The Mac Observers, Mac Geek-Gab, episode 879 for Monday, July 5th, 2021. Welcome to the Mac Observers, Mac Geek-Gab, the show where you send in your questions, your tips, your cool stuff found, we take your questions, tips and cool stuff found, we share them, we answer your questions, we share some cool stuff found and tips of our own. The goal is that each and every one of us, you, me, John, every one of us, we all learn at least five new things. Every single time we get together, sponsors for this episode include LinkedIn jobs at LinkedIn.com slash MGG, where you can post your first job for free. Linode.com slash MGG, where you get 100 bucks in free credit just for starting an account there. And then techsexpanner.com slash podcaster, you get 20% off your first year subscription, all tools that we use here. And we will tell you about how we use them a little bit later here in the episode for now here in Durham, New Hampshire. I'm Dave Hamilton. And here in Fairfield, Connecticut. This is John F. Braun. How are things today, Mr. John F. Braun? A lot cooler than it was earlier in the week. It's true. Yeah, things have cooled off, I think kind of like nationwide or beyond. But yeah, things were all nuts. I would have said that we were having a heat wave here. And I guess technically we were, except compared to like the people in like Portland, Oregon and even up in Alberta, Canada, like they were all like in the 110, 120, even 130 degree Fahrenheit. That's hot. So yeah. Yeah, record high temperature. Yeah, yeah. It could be a trend or not. Yeah, yeah, I hope it doesn't remain a trend for this summer. That was that was I mean, although it was kind of nice. I mean, you know, again here, it only hit 100. So and I say only. So it was nice. We have one of those during COVID. We we bought one of those inflatable pools to put in our yard because we figured what the heck are we going to do all summer, not being able to go anywhere last year. So obviously we set that up again. And it was really nice. Like that stupid thing was, I think it was almost 90 degrees for a couple of days, which was, you know, with something to do. And that was at like 6 p.m. when the sun had gone down. So I'd like finish work and Lisa and I'd go like bask in the pool or play beer pong or something. So it was fun, you know, something to do. Empty nesting like bosses. All right, everybody to get to this, John, shall we? Yes. OK. Patrick sends us two quick tips. He says these days I'm helping with the production of a lot of hybrid church meetings, connecting the people in person with the people online. I often have to share my screen so two things can't be shown. Notifications and my messy computer desktop. So the normal way to turn on do not disturb is through the control center. He says a quicker way for me is to toggle do not disturb by holding down the option key and clicking on the date and time that will toggle on and off do not disturb. That is correct. It that toggles it on and off permanently, though. So be like you. I say this to myself. I often forget that I have turned off do not or turned on do not disturb on this particular machine. And then, you know, I'll be here doing something that's not podcasting. It's like, how come I'm not getting notifications? Like, that's why it used to be pre Catalina, right? That's what we're on now. Man, John, I am like Big Sur. Sorry. Pre Big Sur. It would if you did that option, click on the date and time, it would just do not disturb you for 24 hours. And then you'd get it or it wasn't the date and time. It was the little, you know, notification center thing. But but with Big Sur, it it it's permanent. So I often will use the control center and be like, do it till tomorrow or do it till tonight or whatever. But that's my thing. But you're right. Absolutely right. A faster way, Patrick, if you have to do it in a pinch is option click. Just be be aware. His second quick tip. As far as a messy computer desktop is concerned, enabling stacks on the desktop can really clean things up. But the best way to hide is to hide all the icons entirely. There are plenty of apps to do this. He said, I use an app called hidden me. Oh, put that in the show that that's like a cool stuff found. Look at that little bonus. I like it. He says there's a free version and the pro version supports multiple monitor setups. So very cool. Yeah. I am you're right. There's lots of apps to do that. The way I've started doing it is I just I swipe right. I guess that's swipe left. I don't know. I swipe to a different desktop. I'm not into the whole swipe right and swipe left thing. Thankfully, I've been able to avoid that. But anyway, I do the multi finger swipe on my trackpad. And that brings me to a new space, which has clean desktop for me for whatever reason. And that's good. So that's how that's how I've been doing it for presentations is is that, but you're right. Yeah, probably probably safer to use something that's actually going to hide all your icons, because now that I'm thinking about it, I don't know why my extra desktop would have no icons in the on the finder unless it's set that way. I don't know. Shouldn't it just show me everything? I don't know. I think this seems weird now. It seems suspect. My my my anecdotal reliable scenario doesn't add up. So now I got to figure out why. I just try to avoid putting stuff on the desktop unless. Oh, I use the desktop as a catchall for a lot of things, man. Yeah, I've seen you and I have both seen that. Some people like put everything on the desktop. I don't put everything there. But it's like it's the catchall for because it sinks right with iCloud. It's great. Like I create our episode images, right? Like the ones that you see in the like either on the YouTube channel or for the episode, Sadie does the ones for for like all the the other little snippets. But I do the ones for the episodes you see in your pod catcher and stuff. And and I save those to the desktop. But I also have a Hazel rule that clears those out after two weeks and archives them. So so they're not like there. But it like it's just handy our our file, the BB edit file that I store our show notes and chapters and stuff in. That lives on my desktop. So it's again, it's just synced and it's always right right up front. So I mean, I'm sure I could I know I could do that with a different folder. But desktop works. So yeah, it's it's it's a catch. All is wrong. It's a catch specific thing. So then I have a folder called kill me on my desktop. That might have been what no, it might have been one of the best things I ever did because I can put things in there knowing that they are temporary. Like I only need it while I'm focused on it. And then anything else and kill me, I know can just be blown away. Like I I I know that by putting it in there, it is not something I plan to save. And so I don't have to rethink it. I don't have to like calm through things. If I want to blow away everything and kill me, I can blow away everything and kill me. Like I've already pre made the decision for myself. It's amazing, real efficiency booster. I don't know. Yep, you're going to get your five things before we get through Patrick. Although I think we're we're through with Patrick, John, right? Is it time to go to Steve? I think it's time. OK, where is Steve? I swear I prepped this. Maybe I didn't maybe I can I can I can share Steve's tip regardless. So Steve shared with us a great tip that he found elsewhere on the web. He said, you know, how there's that that back tap thing that we can configure now on our phones to do a thing. And we've talked about how you had it set for screenshot for a little while. And I don't know, I just never thought to use it. Plus, plus there's already a shortcut for doing screenshot. Well, Steve says you use it to activate the flashlight on your phone. I can see that being really handy. The only thing is if you're getting false triggers of that back tap, your flashlight might just come on randomly and and potentially stay on. So that might be a bad thing. But but I that might be one of the better uses of backtaps so that you can just grab your phone, tap it. And now you've got a flashlight. You don't have to wake up the screen and hit the button. And you know, again, not that it's hard, you know, quick tips, shortcuts. That's what we do. Thank you, Steve. I did find this question. I just never moved it over. All right. You want to. That's the end of my quick tips. Do you have any anything you want to take us to Ben? Let's go to Ben. Ben says, hi, guys, a client with a propensity for dropping her iPhone, especially while running, will certainly get a solid case and screen protector for her new iPhone 12 mini. However, she wonders if there's any value in adding a lens protector. I hadn't heard of these before and wonder what insight you have to offer. Also, can you remind me which brand of screen protector you refer? So what I got to say about this, Dave, so I have an iPhone 12 mini blue, right? So I'll throw my hat in the ring and say that I really. So the case that I like and it has saved me is the Spec Presidio Perfect Clear. I like that it's clear. And I noticed that a lot of people would be like, oh, wow, is that the new iPhone 12 because they could see it and, you know, see the color of it and thought it was nice. I've never had people ask me about my phone until the iPhone 12 with clear case. So that makes sense. Yeah. Yeah. Cool. So the good thing about this is that this case specifically advertises 13 foot drop protection. So that's another reason you may want to get this case. As for lens protection, I mean, the case does, you know, give you a little bit more distance between the lens and whatever you're dropping it on. Well, I think any case would really do that for you. Sure. But to be honest, I've never had a need to protect the lens. And the current one, what they say is it's a sapphire crystal lens cover. I think is what is on the current phone. OK, so that should protect you. But I've never seen a scratch personally. The thing is, if something terrible does happen, unfortunately, I was not able to find how much it costs if you do damage the lens. But I did find an article over at Imore that. Stated the iPhone rear glass can now be repaired without replacing the phone. Right. That was not the case with previous iterations of the iPhone. But with the 12s, yeah, the rear glass, my guess is if you had to replace the lens on the back, it would be the rear glass. But but that's a way cheaper, way less expensive scenario than than in the past. Yeah, I. As far as lens protection, I mean, I've certainly heard about this. I've never used any lens protection. I always felt like whatever I put on there would be far more likely to get scratched than the lens itself. And then suddenly I'd be taking pictures through a scratched lens because, like you said, Apple uses sapphire glass on those camera lenses for exactly this reason. I don't drop my phone. I always keep a case on my phone. I always keep a screen protector on my phone. I don't drop my phones all that often. It happens, certainly. But it's not something that I make a habit of for whatever reason. I just, you know, I'm not clumsy in that way. I'm clumsy in plenty of other ways. Just not that way. But my family members all have proven that they are experts at dropping their phones in one way or another. And we have never we have seen front glass cracked. We've seen, you know, scratches and or dense being put in the side of the phone, depending on the model. But we've never seen an issue with the camera glass, like with the lens glass from any of us. Doesn't mean, you know, we're an anecdotal set of four people over probably, I don't know, 20 iPhones or something ridiculous. But like, we've never seen an issue with that. It doesn't mean it doesn't happen. But I I don't spend any time worrying about it. But tempered glass on the screen as a screen protector. Absolutely. And as far as brand, my advice, do not buy name brand tempered glass. You will be spending extra money on name brand tempered glass for the name brand. I always buy the, you know, the Amazon special eight dollars worth of three pack for tempered glass. And that way I don't feel like if somebody gets even a slight click, I don't understand this, actually. But like I said, my family definitely drops their phones more often than me. My kids and even Lisa at times, I'll look at their phones and they're like their screen protector on their phone has just like, you know, spider cracks in it. And I'm like, don't you want to change that? Like, no, it happens all the time. Like, no, it doesn't like look at my phone. It doesn't happen. But but the nice part about buying the, you know, three for eight dollar pack or whatever it is on Amazon for that is that you can, you know, replace it easy without thinking about it. It's like it costs a few dollars. So if you even if you're doing it three or four times a year, it's like, OK, well, you know, that's 10 bucks. It's great. And keep your phone protected. And I have had the tempered glass protect me. I dropped my phone once on my friend's asphalt driveway and it landed perfectly flat on the face. And I was like, oh, crap. I was just getting out of my car. It was for a band practice at his house. I had too much stuff or whatever. I was just being stupid. And so I'm like, OK, here we go. And I pick up my phone and it's shattered. I mean, just shattered. I'm like, OK, I finally did it like fine. You know, whatever it happens. I knew it was going to happen at some point. And I went around to the trunk of my car where I was going to get more of my stuff like my drums or my stool out or whatever. And I peeled the screen protector off and the glass underneath was pristine. And it was like, thank goodness. So it does save me, you know, it saved me and it will save you. And that was one of the cheap ones. So don't probably I should say probably people do send us, you know, the the the brand name screen protected glass to review at times. So at times I will have those on my phone, but I'm pretty sure this one was just one of the cheap ones. They they're all basically the same near as I can tell. So yeah, we got a few comments in our chat room here. At nice live dot Mackie gap dot com. That is correct. I think that's where it is. Yeah. So Kansas. Dave says Apple sells Belkin. Yeah. So that's an endorsement of sort for screen protectors. But Jeff brings up a good point from a photography point of view. I would not put he would not put anything over the lens because it could reduce the quality. And he says he doesn't even use UV filters on my DSLR. And that actually reminds me in the in the past when I was into more serious photography, you can actually get filters for things like UV. And I got another one, a polarizing filter is another night. I should see what. What's out there to let you play with your iPhone camera lens? Yeah, for sure. For sure. Yeah. All right. Before we go on to the next thing, John, I'm going to ask you, did you turn on your dynamic compression in audio hijack today? Because I am finding that I need to add a lot of level to you, which tells me that you're probably pretty low on the YouTube channel. Is it all set the way it normally is? It could be something on my end. Uh, I mean, do I want to move this thing to the right? No, no. Is it on? Is it enabled like it normally is for you? Yeah. Yeah. OK, great. All right. Then I'm sure it's fine. I'm like, I don't know. Something probably changed here on my end. I'm just I'm not getting as much from you. But as long as it's working, and I've asked the people at live.mackycup.com to confirm that you sound loud enough in the YouTube because I'd hate for our YouTube clips to be, you know, imperfect. Yeah. All right. Cool. Jerry, that was a good one. Jerry writes and asks, he says, let's see, is there any way to block my work router from seeing what I am browsing? They block sites like Apple. So it's nothing bad, but I want to browse. Is there any way of changing a setting on my Mac to do that? Or do I have to use a VPN? So I think you could try changing the DNS servers of your Mac to use something not being the ones that are provided by your router. So you'd go into your Mac, you go into system preferences, network, whatever interface you're using, either Ethernet or Wi-Fi, go into advanced or just go into DNS. Ethernet doesn't really have the advanced button the same way Wi-Fi does. But get yourself into that advanced mode, click the DNS tab and change your DNS servers to something like 8.8.8.8.8, which is Google's or 1.1.1.1.1, which is Cloudflare's. I think I have that right and not and see if that helps you. If it does, then that's how they're blocking it and they're doing it by DNS. And now you've gotten around it. Whether or not that's copacetic with your employer, I'll leave between you and them. But I think that was going to be my comment is trying to circumvent workplace. Yeah, we're not here to comment. I mean, we can comment on it. We're not here to provide judgment on on you or your employer's policies. But but you should check with them because you don't want to lose your job over this. Yeah. No, that's fair point, John. But I think you're going to need a VPN to do this. And so, you know, if you were going to if you're going to go with a VPN. And it's funny in pre-show, we were talking about this. You know, a paid VPN is going to be better for a variety of reasons. A, you're probably probably going to get a higher quality of service. You're almost certainly going to be able to find a paid VPN that does not track your usage and sell your usage to make money because everybody needs to at least cover their costs if not make some money. And so if you're not paying them, then you are the product, right? It's good to remember. So so the the VPNs that we pay for, you know, Express VPN is not a sponsor anymore. They were a but I found out this week because I signed up for them. Again, is that Express VPN dot com slash MGG does still get you extra three months when you buy a year, which I just did this week. So so that's one way to go. Nord VPN is another great one as far as paid VPNs go. If you don't want to pay for a VPN, there are a few free VPNs that I have messed with and used quite a bit over the years that do work. And and really, I've narrowed it down to two that I will use. Proton VPN is probably going to be the best of these, although it might not get you what you want because they have some limits on how their free VPN works. But they are very much a freemium offering in that they offer a free tear with limits and then an option to pay to remove those limits. So you're you're working with a reputable VPN vendor, right? That's probably not. In fact, I'm almost certain that protons not selling your data. So that's one is proton VPN. And then the truly free VPN where you should expect to have your data sold or at least tracked or something along those lines is list VPN, at least VPN net, but part of the way they make money is ads on their website. And part of the way they get you to go to their website is that you're the free account you create is only good for five days. So you have to go every five days and create a new account. Now, it's really not that big of a deal. It takes all about 30 seconds to go through and create the account. But then you are visiting their website. You are letting them show you their ads. And so they are making money that way. I don't know if they're making money other ways. So just bear that in mind. But but those are the two free VPNs that not only would I recommend again with eyes wide open, but also that I have personally used quite a bit and and they work. But I will tell you that moving from either of those up to express VPN speeds on express VPN are like 10 times what I was getting with the free VPN. So if speeds like if it's just for browsing or whatever, fine, if it's for any sort of downloading or file transfers in either direction, you know, probably worth paying. What did I pay for express VPN? Like a hundred bucks for the year, a hundred bucks for 15 months because I used the old I don't know why they haven't expired it, but express VPN dot com slash MGG works. So hey, it's good. What are you? So the two on my phone. Yeah. So one is TunnelBear. Would TunnelBear work on his computer? Is that I forget? Are they phone only? I always think of them as phone only. No, they have Mac apps. OK, never mind. Yeah. So TunnelBear is a good one and their developer notes are funny. And they their free tier is like you get like 500 megs a month or something like that. Is that right? Something like that. I've never exceeded it. OK. So so I like TunnelBear. And the other one that I like is Speedify. Because what Speedify does that is kind of a nice reminder is that when I get on Wi-Fi that's not secure, it'll come up and say, whoa, your your network connections not secure. Maybe you should turn me on. OK. So that's another. And then they don't know that's not Speedify is not free. They know. Yeah, I think they threw me a bone. They threw they are free for you. Right. But they are not free. Right. OK. But that's another one I could recommend. And lastly, I use OpenVPN to my Synology. Sure. Right. That's actually that's a really good point if you if especially for Jerry, if you have a Synology at home, even your Mac at home can be a VPN server. Heck, our sponsor, well, you'd have to pay for the lowest here, five bucks a month for a Linode instance, but you could install an OpenVPN server there too, or even any kind of VPN server really. So you could do it that way too. Yeah. Yeah, good point, man. Yep. But if you've got a Synology or any kind of machine that's on all the time, you could set up a VPN server on that. I like that. Yeah. Yeah. That's good. That's good. All right. Good. So lots of options. Hopefully that helps. If you have an option, send it to us feedback at MacEatGab.com. You said feedback at MacEatGab.com. I said feedback at MacEatGab.com. Let's do it. So we've got a lot of questions. We've got a bunch of cool stuff found. We have our sponsors to talk about. Let's let's let's do Larry, then let's talk about our sponsors and we'll keep on rolling. How's that sound? All right. So Larry says, I'm sure this has already been asked, but is there a way like a hub to add USB C ports to my computer? In other words, all my ports are taken up. So can I turn one port into multiple ports like back in the USB two and three days? And if so, I imagine it needs power. I just got a ruggedly C drive thanks to Prime Day. And it is ambiportis. I guess a take on ambidextrous. I don't know if Andrew, that's a real word. No, no, he means that it has a USB three port or USB A port and a USB C port is what he means by that. Yeah. And of course, the USB C should be faster. So he wants to take advantage of that. So first, he said he want he wants his USB C and my reply is I want my MTV. That's right. Yeah, I want my USB C to anybody, even rumors MTV. Are they still out there? Yeah, but they don't they don't show music videos anymore. It's not a thing. Um, all right. So I think the proper wording, but then I'll take it back. Is what you're looking for is a dock, not necessarily a hub. But fortunately, there are docs that can give you more USB C ports. If you're a big sir, then the one that you probably want to look at is the OWC Thunderbolt dock. As long as those USB C ports are Thunderbolt ports. Did he he didn't say what kind of computer he has? He probably has a computer that's Thunderbolt ready. But if it's not Thunderbolt ready, then don't buy a Thunderbolt dock. But otherwise, I agree with you. You're absolutely right. Yep. Um, the bad news is that and so that product is 279 and that gives you three additional ports. But they're sold out. So you've got to preorder it, which is a bummer, right? Yep. Yeah, for sure. Yeah, yeah. Then I looked a bit more. But they also have some Thunderbolt three docs. And you and I both have one of theirs, Dave. So that gives you that'll let you extend your ports as well. And they have some. Now, the thing is, is that I don't recall this. I mean, you probably mentioned it in an ad read, but I missed it. But they also have what they call the OWC Thunderbolt hub. That's right. Yes. So the thunder, the Thunderbolt hub from US from OWC is it's what we had Larry on essentially talking about, right? When when he was talking about how you can actually add Thunderbolt ports. So this this may, this definitely goes beyond what Larry stated he was asking for, whether this is actually what Larry's asking for or not. Is is is hard to say, right? Because this stuff gets a little bit confusing to talk about. If you don't use exactly the right terms. But what, you know, what Larry was on the show talking about was how Big Sur enables this feature of Thunderbolt that allows hubbing, meaning taking one Thunderbolt port and expanding it to multiple Thunderbolt ports, something that wasn't possible before. And so the OWC Thunderbolt hub does that and only that, right? It it takes one port and expands it to three, I believe. The Thunderbolt dock that you mentioned is essentially that hub built inside of a dock that has extra ports, including some USB ports and things like that, if memory serves. So so they are in this sense, they sort of do the same thing. One just does a little bit more of the same thing, because it's got like audio in and out. It's got some USB ports. It's got, I think, HDMI on that. I'm trying to look in their things. They've got three USB ports on it, ethernet, no HDMI. Sorry, and an SD card slot. So so that's the the dock versus their hub. If all you want, so so that that is a way to get here. But you need a computer that supports Thunderbolt and it has to be running Big Sur or some flavor of Windows that supports this too. If you just want more USB C ports and you are on a USB non Thunderbolt computer, this actually gets pretty tricky. There's no as far as I understand, there's no technical reason that you couldn't have a dock with more USB C ports, except that as the person creating that dock is the vendor of that dock. You you're in a weird scenario because you don't know how your customers are going to use it, right? Remember, USB C ports are generally expected to be providing power delivery. Well, OK, how many USB C ports are we going to add and how much power do we need to provide to this thing so that our users can use it the way they are individually expecting it to work? And then the same issue comes with data speed, right? You know, if you're using USB C, you could go up to USB 3.2, which I think is 20 gigs a second. Might only be 10. See, it gets confusing. Whatever the limit is, that's only good for one port, right? And so if you give a user a device with eight USB C ports, well, they ain't all eight going to have full speed capable all the time. So the power and speed. Reasons are why we don't see docks with lots of USB C ports, like the the there are some that have more than others, obviously. But really, the way to do it is through thunderbolt hubbing. But again, you need a computer with thunderbolts and supporting hubbing. So it gets tricky. We'll put a link in the show notes to watch Larry explain it, because I probably just made it worse. I don't know. It's it's like Larry's right. Larry, of course, Larry, different two different Larry's. We had a Larry that asked the question. Then we had a Larry a couple of months ago that explained all this to us. But yeah, it like getting more USB C ports. The way you suggested, John, is the right way. If your computer is thunderbolt capable, running big sir, add them as thunderbolt ports and then go from there because you could add another dock hanging off of one of those ports that then has whatever ports you need on it for your devices. So you have to just be thoughtful about. And even once you have one of those things, thoughtful about what you're plugging in where because you have to know that the data, you know, there is going to be a weak link in the chain or a bottleneck in the chain. I should say not a weak link, but a bottleneck in the chain in terms of data speed and power. So yeah, it's crazy. I don't know. Yeah. I mean, the other thing now that I'm looking at the product line here is that so I looked at those drives, drives, Dave, the Lisi Rugged drives. Yep. And their advertised throughput is only is like in the low hundreds of megabytes per second. OK, you could even get away with the USB three port because USB three regular, you know, gen one or no. Yeah, the naming gets crazy. But you start at five gigabits per second, which is about 500 megabytes a second, I think. Yeah. So that's you could even get by with that is that the drive if I identify the drive properly, then even USB three point oh, you could get by with that. So it depends on which which drive he's talking about because there are lots of rugged drives from Lisi. Some of them are much slower than others, but they've got an NVMe rugged drive that'll go 2700 megabytes a second. Right. So it depends like which rugged he's using. But you're right. Some of them will only use what we'll call five gig five gigabit USB C or USB because five gigabit works over USB three works over USB A or USB C. Remember, letters describe. The shape of the connector numbers describe the speed. So yeah, it's it's crazy. It's really confusing to like even for us, it's super confusing. It's all straight. So yeah. Yeah, you got like I think your points valid, though, John, you you've got to look at specifically which devices you're going to be connecting. And like you said, if you've got a drive that's going to max out no matter where it's plugged in, you know, the drive itself is going to max out at, you know, 300 megabytes a second or something. OK, we'll now know that and and put it somewhere where you're not dedicating a fast report to it that could be used for something else. So yeah. Yep. Yep. All right. More questions coming. Cool stuff found coming. I promise if we're ready, John, the next thing I would like to do is talk about our sponsors. OK. All right, look, we're a small business here, right? And we are occasionally looking to grow our staff. You know, we get more productive. We have more things to do. And we recently, as you know, we hired Sadie, who is managing our social media and she is helping us, you know, grow the show. Well, we used LinkedIn jobs to find Sadie. And now LinkedIn jobs is our sponsor. I have to tell you how easy LinkedIn jobs made this. Initially, I was just sort of trying to send feelers out and I got a couple, you know, as you know, a couple of things in. And then I used LinkedIn jobs. I think I spent a total of one hundred and twenty four dollars on LinkedIn jobs. I got seventy two responses. More than half of those were like very qualified. They were all qualified, but more than half of those were like the right people. And then we interviewed them and and then obviously narrowed it down. And and and here we are. If LinkedIn jobs made this super easy and super affordable and worked and you can get started by posting your job for free to reach LinkedIn's network of seven hundred forty million professionals. You can have them fill out targeted screening questions to get your role in front of the most qualified candidates with the experienced skills and motivation you need. And then it's easy, like I said, to filter and prioritize the top candidates that you'd like to interview. LinkedIn jobs will help you hire the right person for your role. Did you know every week nearly 40 million job seekers visit LinkedIn? And like I said, you can post your first job for free by going to LinkedIn dot com slash M G G. That's LinkedIn dot com slash M G G to post your first job for free. Terms and conditions apply in our thanks to LinkedIn for sponsoring this episode. Next up is text expander. You know that I like to do things quickly. I like to do things efficiently. And I really am a perfectionist and I like to get things right every time. Well, text expander makes it easy for me and the whole team here to use the right words for every situations, whether we need to like send something internally or delight our customers with effective, correct, grammatically correct, accurate answers. I can rest easy because text expander has it covered and you can do the same thing. And now with improved web app security to keep your content protected. Very cool stuff. So, you know, one of the things we do is somebody will write in and say, hey, I want to know general information about, you know, say sponsoring this podcast. Right. We have a text expander snippet that gives them that answer. In fact, we have several snippets that we can link together in one email. So it's like, OK, yep, they they're this type of company. They want to know this and this and this and boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. Literally, as quickly as I just described it there, we've now built an email that we can send back to a potential customer. We know that it has all the right information. We know that it is grammatically accurate. And we also know that we were able to do it very, very quickly. And you can do the same thing. Text expander is amazing for this. And because you're a Mac Geek app listener, you get 20 percent off your first year. So go to text expander.com slash podcast to learn more. It's available on Mac, Windows, Chrome, iPhone, iPad. You're going to love it. And our thanks to Text Expander for sponsoring this episode. Next up is Linode at Linode, L-I-N-O-D dot com slash M-G-G. That's where you're going to go to get $100 and free credit to start using, creating, playing with even your next server. We're geeks. We do lots of interesting things. We love doing interesting things. We need servers occasionally. It might be a server to do some development work on. It might be a server to run Plex on, right? It might be a server that runs Minecraft. It might be a server that runs WordPress. What's cool is Linode not only lets you do all of these things, they make it easy for you to do all of these things with their cloud manager because all you got to do is go and select this from their marketplace. Right. And then Linode's engines build your server for you. They install Plex. They install WordPress. They install, you know, a VPN server, whatever you choose from their menu there. It will build your server. It might ask you a few questions like, what do you want your login name to be? What do you want your password to be? Those sorts of things. And then boom, it's built. You don't have to know how the sausage is made on that at that level. You could, you certainly can get to the terminal and do what you want. But they make it super easy. In addition to cloud hosting, Linode recently added GPU hosting plans for machine learning and neural net use built with RTX 6000 GPUs. So if it runs on Linux, it runs on Linode. Visit linode.com slash MGG, L-I-N-O-D-E dot com slash MGG. Click on the create free account button to get started. And you'll get a hundred dollars in credit added to your account to use as you get started or thanks to Linode. Linode.com slash MGG for sponsoring this episode. All right, John, actually, you know what, Brian, take it away. Hi, guys, I got a quick question. I don't even know how to search for this on Google, but I have an M1 Mac mini. And when I go to log in after it's been asleep for a while, this happens about every two weeks or so. I'll go to log into it and I start to type in my password and I type one or two letters and four or five go across the screen. And then I type another letter and another three or four dots. And I can't log in and I'm forced to restart the machine before the keyboard will work properly again. So maybe you guys have an idea of what I could look at. I'd appreciate it. Thanks for your help. Yeah, you bet. OK, so that's like obviously abnormal. Um, I you're on a Mac mini, so that tells me you're using an external keyboard. I would look at the keyboard if you have a different keyboard to use, test with that. But that might not solve the problem if it's a if it's a Bluetooth keyboard, because it could be not a problem with your keyboard, not a problem with the Mac mini, but a problem with the radio waves near or around your computer. Because if you've got a USB hard drive near your computer, that will resonate at similar frequencies to the 2.4 gigahertz range that your USB three specifically resonates in that 2.4 gigahertz range, which is where Bluetooth and also some Wi-Fi live and it can cause interference exactly like this. So I'm wondering if that's the issue, your solution where you reboot and it works. Like it's hard to say without being there, we're not getting that. Like it's hard for our guts to to like truly grok your scenario. But my guess is that you've got a USB hard drive. Simply try moving it to the other side of the computer or something, just so that it's away from the Bluetooth antenna a little bit. And maybe that'll do it. I don't know. What do you think, John? I'm wondering. Here's a place to look. I don't know if there is anything here, but System Preferences, Keyboard, Text. There's a replace feature there. Just make sure that's not. There's nothing there. Yeah, I mean, I have a lot of things in my text replacement. I'm pretty sure you like it's worth looking there for sure. But, like, because I use text replacement all the time. In fact, I'm shocked that yours is empty. Like that's a that's a great little thing to use because it syncs with your phone and all that stuff. Like I use that and Text Expander together to get some text replacements done like my phone numbers and email addresses. Actually those I put in in Text Replacement and then things like I just said about like, you know, the sponsor replies and things like that. Those I put in Text Expander because I can customize them a little bit better. But I'm pretty sure that these are disabled when you are typing in password fields. Like it's not doing this replacement. But it could be. Like it's you're like fair. Go check this. But my guess is this is not the issue, especially in an Apple, you know, login field where you aren't even like logged in yet. It's probably hasn't. It's probably not using that. But sure, yeah, fair. I actually had that same thought, but it's probably not that. My guess is that it's it's it's something. It could just be a broken keyboard too. Right. Like that's possible if the keyboard is just flaking out. But probably not. Probably not. Yeah. Interesting problem. Hopefully it's the USB thing and hopefully you can, you know, you might need to get a longer USB cable to just move that that drive a little bit further away from your. You know, from your computer to that end. A lot of routers these days will use, you know, we'll let you plug a hard drive in, you know, for time machine backups or like lots of other things. Right. Make sure you are aware if that hard drive is a USB three drive. A lot of routers will have a checkbox in their settings to slow that drive down to USB to speed so that it doesn't interfere with the 2.4 gigahertz radios that are right there in your router. You kind of need to prioritize which way you want to go with that. So. Oh, Paul franz in the chat room at live.mackycup.com suggests checking the battery on the Bluetooth keyboard that I could see causing interference. Sure. Yeah. Sure. Sure. Yeah. Sure. Yeah, I'm wondering. Hmm. I'm trying to think when I when I got upgraded by parents iMac. The keyboard that it came with, I think is a wired keyboard or is the wire just charging it? Oh, good question. Yeah, it could. I think it could be either. It depends on what you chose or what was chosen for you if you were buying like a reefer model or something in the box because obviously, you know, Apple sells both or at least has at times. I'm pretty sure they still sell a wired keyboard, but they might not. Yeah. Yeah. Actually, I don't think I don't think there's a wired keyboard because right personally, I don't like Apple keyboards. I have a large attack. There you go. Yeah. I like the here at the podcast rig. I use the Apple keyboard that came with this iMac because it's silent. I can type without it really being captured by the microphone. I have to be careful not to like really mash on the keys, but it's the silent keyboard down in my office. I have one of the things that like, you know, if I even breathe at the key, it makes this like huge loud like clacking sound. But but yeah, yeah, for podcasting. Actually, down in the office, I've started keeping another keyboard around so that if I'm like recording with somebody else, I can, you know, I can be silent. Yeah. Yeah. Remember the IBM PC keyboard? Yeah. Made a racket. Exactly. Yeah. Those are great. I like that. Kansas Dave in the chat room confirms Apple does not sell wired keyboards, but I don't think Apple includes a keyboard by default with a Mac mini. Like it's just the mini in the box. In fact, I know that because the box is, you know, square. There's no room for a keyboard in that box. So there's no keyboard. There's no mouse. You can, of course, buy one at the same time you're buying a Mac mini, but it doesn't. It does not automatically come with one. So. All right. You want to take us to William? Yes. Two questions. William and Joe, very similar. Similar. Not the same. Right. So William has more of a follow up. So I wanted to follow up on a question recently. The problem was my inability to access an external device on my Mac mini. And I remember I was like, what is it? I neglected to say that the device is a Sony HAP-S1 music server. Interesting. You had suggested I check on the security settings, which I did. I then remember that I had already been changed, I think because of Carbon Copy Cloner. What finally worked after I called the Sony was to downgrade to an earlier version of the Sony connection software. I was told that a Mac OS upgrade had broken the device's latest connection software. Thanks, Apple. A lesson learned was twofold. One, contact the manufacturer's support, even if that may result in long waits and no solution to the problem. Secondly, always consider that a problem may be due to an OS upgrade. I now understand why some people stay on a version or two behind on OS upgrades. Yeah. Well, I haven't thought about that. There's HAP players in a while. Again, I guess there's still a thing. Of course, there's still a thing. Yeah. But yeah, for sure. The other lesson may be keep... Don't throw your installers away. Or maybe keep a version back of any software that you rely on. For hardware? Driver software? Religious about that. I always take the things and I throw them. I have a folder on my disk station that I just... I mean, I probably have stuff out there that's way too old to be valuable anymore. But I know that I've always got the most recent and the one before it that worked. So yeah, that's really the key, I think. Yeah. All right, good stuff. Joe? Kind of in the same theme. From Joe, he asks, how do I go about installing an old Mac OS on an external drive? I need to install 10.11 on an external partition or the room set of old Harmony remote software. I have a 4TB external drive with four partitions with one 500G partition dedicated to this 10.11 install. The 4TB disk is GUID and all the partitions are journaled and extended. I'm doing this on a 2009 iMac running 10.13.6. I have the 10.11 package downloaded to both my internal SSD and also to a blank Harmony 10.11 partition. When I run the installer, it gives me only two options, the internal SSD and one of the 4TB disk partitions, but not the blank one I want to use. I tried using the option key and clicking about one of the numerous Google searches trying to find out how to do this, but as far as nothing has given me the option for the Harmony 10.11 partition. I spent a couple hours on this already and have some more ideas, but this was supposed to be the easy part of what I'm ultimately trying to accomplish. So I was hoping you guys have a quick and easy solution for me. One thing I'm still considering, find a small 500G standalone 2.5 inch drive and erase it specifically for the task. This would be different than the partition. I agree. I'm also cloning the 10.13.6 partition to a blank partition, then seeing if I can run the installer and have it downgrade the system, but I don't think this will work. All right. I don't know why it's not visible to the installer either. I've never run into this. I mean, you could remove and recreate that partition. Maybe that'll un-stuck something that's stuck. If you do have a spare drive, I think that's probably the best solution. Though actually, I was thinking of another solution. If you need to run older OS, perhaps a virtual machine like VirtualBox, which is free last I checked, or Parallels of VMware, which are not free, could be another way to accomplish your task. Yeah. I mean, he didn't say what kind of Mac he's on, but either way, the partition should show up, especially if it's good-based. I know he did. 2009 iMac. Oh, there it is. Oh, okay. That machine is fully capable of running 10.11 if memory serves. That shouldn't be a problem. Interesting. I'm also wondering what Harmony software... I don't want to... I do want to derail us a little bit here, but not quite yet. This is a valid question, regardless of his reason for needing to do it, but I will say that I've run the older Harmony software under Big Sur on my M1 MacBook Air, and it runs fine, and actually Lucas, my son and I, were amazed that it worked, like talking to the hardware, and all that. This software was not built to run on this operating system, nor was it built to run on this chip, or this chip type. It was pretty impressive. Anyway, but yeah, I agree with you that this... there's something we're missing here, but reformatting that partition might be the trick about that. Yeah, weird. Weird. We're tiered by Discus GUID based. Yeah, all right. Are we good with this one? I think so. I want to ask everybody out there, what is your favorite universal remote? Because talking about the last question, it reminded me that all the Harmony remotes, Logitech has discontinued that line. I have been a Harmony remote fan and user since they first showed up at Macworld Expo when they were just Harmony. They hadn't been acquired by Logitech yet, and they had the little blue remote that you could get. I think I still have that somewhere, which I probably don't need to have around, but we've been Harmony users and fans for well over a decade here at the Hamilton household. We've been using the Harmony one, I think for like nine years. So like that's long in the tooth, but it works great. So I'm just curious what universal remotes people use. I've thought about like, do I need a universal remote? And I really do. Like being able to control we're not just doing everything with the TV, right? We do have other boxes. And so being able to control everything with one remote really kind of is the key. I understand that the market for universal remotes has definitely gotten smaller with, you know, TVs being smarter and for a lot of people, you know, be the only thing you're using because you can run apps on your TV. So you don't even need an Apple TV box to watch Apple TV Plus, for example. But and with HDMI, CEC and like the control back and forth, there are some things that can be done with your TV remotes controlling external devices, which is great. But there's still to me as a market for for a universal remote. I am certainly a customer for it. And I'm curious what people use because I think I'm going to need to get something new. So I'm curious. Let us know feedback at MackieCub.com. Did you say feedback at MackieCub.com? Again, I said it feedback at MackieCub.com. I'm not going to stop. I'm a wild man, John. I've just resigned myself to the fact that I'm going to have four remotes. Right. See what I mean? Like you are also a customer for a a universal remote. Yeah, I think it's like the market maybe isn't as small as I might have let on. I don't know, man. Like, so hopefully somebody will guide us and I've looked and it's like people are saying, yeah, just go get one of like the, you know, late model Harmony ones. They do say, and I will agree with this, don't bother with the Harmony remote that has the LCD screen on it because it burns batteries and you rarely really take advantage of the LCD screen. So and I would agree with that like one of the non-LCD models would probably be really good for us. So anyway, your thoughts are welcomed and encouraged. You want to take us to James, John? Let's go to James. My company is truly a consulting firm. We sell our time. We don't sell hardware or software although we will make recommendations and guide clients to the best places to purchase hardware and software. I'm going to stop you for one quick second. In the last episode, we talked about consultants and we asked you to send us your thoughts on what you use to track your invoicing so that you can make money and so that you can actually collect money, not just earn the money. And so this is, we've got a couple of replies to this and James is one of them. So keep going, John. Thank you. Yeah. So I think what I find interesting about his comment, I think what he was implying though, we also asked the question, do you warranty your work? And I think most consultants can't. I mean, it's impossible to guarantee that you'll be able to solve somebody's problem is that you're paying for time. Sure. When I did consulting, it was the same thing. It's like, well, I'm going to charge you this much an hour and I'll do the best I can to solve your problem, but I can't guarantee I will. So anyways, we were up against invoicing woes and look at many different options from spreadsheets, my favorite, to Google Docs, the QuickBooks online, the FreshBooks and finally came on a sass software as a service that has doubled our revenue seriously. Six figures doubled. Wow. Harvest totally rocks. I'm willing to them. Harvest makes it so easy to build working the same exactly level of business, but so many things are hard to track, especially when you do quick remote sessions here and there. One tense, then I'll open up the various other ways to build, but Harvest is smart and integrates all sorts of other apps. For odds it's a ticketing system. They have an iOS app, a Mac app, a website and Android. It is so easy to use to connect to PayPal and Stripe. QuickBooks online has robust APIs if you want to build your own stuff. You can send invoices by email for free and USPS for a small fee. It sends non-payment reminders on a schedule you define and has three levels of urging the client to pay. The shame you must be feeling about this pass-through invoice just by making it into our third reminder. You're welcome for that, James. I had to use that this week again and I laughed. Oh, really? Oh, yeah. No, I used that for me. I don't think I've ever gotten somebody, actually I did. I got one person to pay using the shame you must be feeling line, but that is James, you might not want to bake that into your third automated reminder because you might get more pleasure out of it if you can actually send that to the client. So just a piece of advice because we care. And to wrap it up, you can also send a recurring invoices for clients that may be on a MSP Managed service plan? Managed service plan, I guess like being on retainer, right? Yeah. Or some other fixed rate. We do it for our VoIP service that we sell. So, okay. That's a good endorsement. Wow. That is a heck of an endorsement. I never heard of Harvest before. So, that's great to know. Wow. Yeah, thank you James. Good stuff. Thanks, John. And then we have another one, right? And then Bruce, you asked about what consultants use re-invoicing after trying a number of me-centered what that says, yeah, me-centered solutions. I finally switched over to Wave. And we'll link to them as well. While they do have a free model, the paper use works great for me. They take a percentage for credit card invoicing, but anything else, PayMail, Venmo, Zell, check or cash is no charge. I don't use most of the features, but for quick painless invoicing, which I can do with the client's software before I leave, including built-in reminders works great for me. Awesome. So, thank you, Bruce. I'm glad to have, to hear from somebody that's using Wave. I came across it when we were prepping last week's show, but I'd never heard of them before and it seems too good to be true because they do have a free tier and for a lot of people, the free tier is what you need or like what Bruce is saying, the paper use tier where you're paying for the transaction fee, which their transaction fees are pretty, they are as good as what you would likely get on your own. If you were to go and get a merchant account, they are probably getting a much better rate because of the volume that they're doing and, of course, they're making a little bit of money on that which, fine, you know, that's like, that's the best kind of thing. But, yeah, really interesting. So, I'm glad to hear that it works as well as they make it seem like it works. So, that's cool, Bruce. Thanks, man. Anything more on this one, John? Oh, we're good. Okay. I think it's time to jump and do some cool stuff found. You want to share Arvitas or you want me to, John? Go for it. Okay. Arvitas shares that the folks who make IMAZING make a lot of cool free tools and you can see them all at IMAZING.com slash downloads and what's interesting is I had included in my list of cool stuff found this week one of these tools because HOT from DigiDNA is right on this list. DigiDNA, of course, being the company that makes IMAZING, so IMAZING.com is DigiDNA. But HOT is a tool that we talked about probably six months ago that would tell you when your Intel Mac was going to be doing like, like, heat-based throttling of your CPU speeds and things like that. Essentially, they built it so that you could use it on your Intel Mac and then decide, ooh, I want an M1 Mac, right? Well, now they've added M1 Mac support to HOT so that you can see if and potentially when the... you know, your M1 Mac is doing any CPU throttling. They said that when they're compiling IMAZING, it does not do any CPU throttling, so I don't know that they have actually seen it do it, but you can track it. And so they have built a tool that will show that to you. So thanks, Arvitas, and actually thanks to the team at DigiDNA for for, you know, M1-ifying that. That's pretty good. It's fun. It's interesting. You know, it's nice to see that someday we will get to a point with this, John, where M1 Macs are hitting their speed limits. But yeah, I'm curious to see what Apple does next when the, you know, M1X or the M2 or whatever the next chip is comes out. I'm eager to see what the pro version of that thing is like. Would you, are you tempted by what the future holds in terms of that, John? I'm kind of happy with what I got now. Yeah. I will say not having fans kick in is life changing. It really is amazing. I mean, my, you know, my M1 Air doesn't even have fans, but like even the Mini in the office, I never hear the fans rev up, whereas that was routine occurrence on like Zoom calls and things like that. It makes a big difference. Yeah. The MacBook Pro, yes. The fans come on more often than I'd like. Yeah. Do you use Turbo Boost Switcher on your, on your MacBook Pro? Sometimes. Yeah. Does that, I mean, that probably keeps the fans from coming on. Yeah. Okay. And probably extend your battery too, right? Yeah. I mean, on this computer here, I started using it because, you know, when we were, when we were using MIMO live and I was doing all the video processing from here, the fans would be so loud you'd hear them, you know, through my mic. And so, but now I just, I leave it on all the time. Like it's always, or off I should say, like, my CPU never goes into Turbo Boost mode. And I, like, never notice an issue. It's just not a problem. It really, yeah. Yeah. It's, I'm, like, I think you said it, right, when we were talking about this the last time that, you know, Turbo Boost was not really ever a good idea for consumer-based machines. There was, right, you had some, there was some insight you had that it was good for servers maybe or something. Am I misremembering that? Hmm. I don't know. You had, you had something that made me feel good about just leaving it on all the time, or leaving it disabled on all the time, I should say. In this same vein of websites you can visit with lots of cool stuff found all in one place, Mark sends in a note about a link rather to a plainenglish.io page listing five applications you need as a software engineer, but Mark points out that really you don't even need to be a software engineer to like these. The five apps are Moom, which lets you really easily tile your windows in meaningful ways. Expressions which helps like evaluate regular expressions, so if you're like me and you're petrified and confused by Grep and regular expressions, that apps there. GIFox, G-I-F-O-X and he says this next application doesn't have any code, it helps me improve how I can communicate with my colleagues. It takes, it allows you to record parts of your screen or whole windows and save it as an animated GIF which is pretty cool. Pathfinder of course, a finder replacement that we've talked about on the show many times and iterm2 which is a terminal replacement that does lots more than the terminal does. So there you go. Including Split Plane. Split Plane? Nope. Split Please Soup? Nope. Split Pain View. There you go. Okay. Hey, if there's ever an opportunity for me to quote from Strange Brew in an episode like I just was able to do with Split Please Soup, I will take it. How are we doing on time? I got more cool stuff found. Hey T-Mobile released their test drive recently, which is an app. You download onto your phone. If you have an eSIM, go get this app because what you can do with it or if you have a spare phone like me and you're testing you know, like iOS 15 but you don't have an extra SIM card to put in, T-Mobile's test drive will give you 30 gigs or 30 days of service completely free. You don't enter a credit card, nothing. You just sign up. In fact you don't even put your, I don't even think you put, maybe you put an email address in and that's it. Like you get 30 and you can do this, they say currently what they say is, you can do this once every six months. This is tied to your Apple ID because I put it on my spare iPhone, right, that I am testing with iOS 15, got my 30 gigs I'm 30 day clock started running, I'm happy and then I put the app on my daily driver iPhone my 12 mini and it's like yeah, yeah, you've got it. You're good to go. You're, you know, you're already doing it. I'm like, oh, gotcha. Okay. So it is not per device it is not per email address. It is per, I mean it is per email address but it is clearly tied to the Apple ID that is running the app or downloaded the app onto the device. So, my advice is download this, put it on your phone and don't start it yet. Wait until you're in one of those months where you need extra data and then kick it on because what's cool is it leverages the eSIM so you can have run it in parallel along with your, your existing provider and what's cool about the iPhone is you can tell your phone what to use with your primary SIM and what to use with your secondary SIM and so you can say, look, use my primary SIM for phone calls because it will give you a second phone number obviously you're getting second service but you don't have to give that number out anywhere. You can tell it not to associate it with iMessage or any of those things but you can go into the cellular data section and say use this T-Mobile thing for my data and it switches over just for your data so your phone basically runs the same except you're using data from a different carrier and handy little thing man so yeah cool to be able to, you know, use the eSIM and nice to have that as a, you know, safety net so I'm also thinking I've got a trip to Mexico planned next winter in February, John and I'm on Mint Mobile and one of the things that Mint Mobile doesn't offer as part of the plan is international now you know we don't go internationally every month or you know maybe it's maybe once a year so we knew that going in and we looked at what the cost would be you can of course add international options you know temporarily with Mint Mobile and and that's great, right and we'd have to pay extra for it but the savings that we have the rest of the year made it perfectly like more than makes sense but I'm thinking my six months will have reset by February and maybe I just use T-Mobile for my data while I'm down in Mexico and I don't have to worry about it because 30 gigs would be more than enough so I'll have to see if that works out otherwise I'll just payment like I was planning on it and Mint's not a sponsor anymore but just like whatever we were talking about earlier in the episode maybe ExpressVPN the mintmobile.com still gets you the deal so you can use that too anyway alright one thing I like so it's cool how it enhances the UI so I activated this so I got the plan but for example you will now see in the top of the screen you'll see two signals strength meters now because you are connected to two different two different providers if you pull down on the screen when I pull down now it also on the control center it'll show oh T-Mobile is your secondary and VZW Wi-Fi is your primary and it'll show that too so that was neat and lastly if you go to so you talked about how they give you a phone number and I was like wow I want to try that if you go to the phone and then click on the keypad now on the top of the screen it says primary if you want to dial from your primary number and if you tap on it it's like oh or you can dial from your secondary so just for fun I set it to the secondary and then called by landline and it was like oh yeah look at that yeah cool I wonder what would happen if you set it to the secondary and called your primary would you be crossing the streams at that point like right I'm not going to do it now okay yeah maybe not right now that's right yeah it might cause you know a cascading failure of sorts but yeah good to use for you know when you've used up all your data you know a nice safety net to have it took all of about three minutes maybe to set up so it was a quick little thing and if you already got the app on your phone you can just do it whenever you need to the only thing is the 5G data speeds aren't that great where you are for me yeah you have crappy 5G data speeds on both like Verizon and T-Mobile where you are is that I'll get when I did speed tests I would get on the order of like tens of megabits megabytes per second or megabits no megabits yeah yeah I get much that's why I set my phone to connect to a Wi-Fi cause Optimum offers a free Wi-Fi if you remember and the speeds I get with that are like on the order of 100 well it depends on the connection to the Wi-Fi right yeah of course yeah I mean 5G what I've found with 5G is certainly in some areas I get hundreds of megabits per second over 5G and that's not with millimeter wave I'm just talking regular 5G but but not all areas like here at the house you know I mean I'm not right near 5G antenna so I get less in fact I don't get 5G at the house on the other side of the driveway I get 5G here in the office so that tells me that yeah we're right at the edge but really what 5G the problem I think it solves more than speed is density so you can have a lot more people connected to a 5G tower and still get good speeds good latency which will give you effectively faster speeds if you've ever been at a sports stadium with everybody with their phones you've got tens of thousands of people with their phones on LTE you can see 5 bars I can be at TD Garden and see 5 bars of LTE and can't get any data out because the system is just clog well 5G helps solve that problem yeah alright because T-Mobile 5G here in general if I go downtown here it's killer because that's what we have for Mint Mint is just a T-Mobile MVNO so I think that's the right term yeah I'm just kind of disappointed because I remember going to numerous shows trade shows where they were like 5G is going to change the world and you'll be able to do VR the world is not John Centric right? I mean if you go I'm sure if you go downtown certainly to like Norwalk or Stamford or something over to Bridgeport or whatever you would get the 5G speeds that you were talking about I get on our way to the lake I remember and this was on our way to the lake but we weren't quite at the lake I think it was just like Rochester or Somersworth, New Hampshire Lisa was driving we'd gotten our 5G phones and I pulled it out and tested a speed test and it was like 130 megabits a second or whatever it was like oh cool so yeah no the speeds are there just not at your house which is fine they're not really built to be there on your phone at your house I would wonder what 5G speeds would be like on a fixed device like a 5G to the home device if that's available where you are you should check with Verizon and see if that's available where you are yeah we've done stuff folks thanks for hanging out with us folks we've got lots more cool stuff found so we'll just have to do this show again next week what do you say John? you convinced me let me twist your arm thanks so much for listening everybody thanks for sending in all this great stuff all your questions all your tips, your cool stuff found all of that good stuff we love being able to do this I love learning what I'm doing today and by all the things that we get to learn I try to be the one that learns the most every week and I feel like maybe this week I succeeded I don't know you'll have to let us know feedback at MackieCub.com we'd love to hear from you it's good find us on Twitter too at MackieCub let us know how we're doing subscribe to us on YouTube we would love to see you there we're doing a lot of stuff putting a lot of content out as I mentioned Sadie's doing a lot of that stuff for us we have a video on she slipped and snipped out the section we did this week last week on DSM7 from Synology and that's been getting all kinds of views and comments and it's really it's great so go subscribe I think it's youtube.com slash MackieCub podcast but you can find the link in the show notes at MackieCub.com do you have anything else to share with them Mr. Braun I'm staying away from DSM7 can't touch this I won't touch this yeah if you were running any third party packages I would I would breathe a little bit that's not bad advice man I finally got it there I mentioned I couldn't get photos to run and I opened a support ticket Synology support has gotten so much better they replied to me several times a day whereas normally in the past I would expect a week to go by before I heard from them they're a little bit snarky at times because they're not I'm dealing with the support team and I guess the support team should be better at customer service but anyway they reply they are helpful in the advice they provide they're a little rude but that's okay it's not okay I was able to be productive but they found like a damaged PostgreSQL database that was the reason that my photos wouldn't index yeah and then they were like it's because your drive is corrupt how do I run a file system check to see if my drive is corrupt they're like well you really can't they're like well the PostgreSQL database was damaged a damaged database tells you that my drive is corrupt or my volume is corrupt not my drive I'm like it seems like a stretch you might be right but that feels like a leap to me and they're like yeah you should wipe your volume and reinstall everything okay I'll get back to you on that I'll wait until maybe there's a second symptom of this that you know I don't know I think the upgrade from DSM 6 to 7 screwed up the PostgreSQL database but that's just me okay anyway alright let's get out of here John thanks everybody for listening thanks for checking out our sponsors of course linode.com mgg linkedin.com mgg textexpanded.com podcast through your curveball on that one check out matkeycup.com sponsors you can learn about all our sponsors including all those old deals that that I mentioned are still alive I told you we track those for a reason that's for you alright John we got to shut me up do you have any advice for them always but in this case all I'm going to offer is don't get caught may not