 The Mac Observers' Mac Geek Gap, episode 899 from Monday, November 8th, 2021. And welcome to the Mac Observers' Mac Geek Gap, the show where you send in your tips, your questions, your cool stuff found. We take your tips and questions. We take your cool stuff found. We mash it all together into an agenda. We try to answer your questions. Sometimes we bring our own questions because the goal is for each and every one of us to learn at least five new things every single time we get together. Sponsors for this episode include a few existing sponsors and a few new sponsors. BB Edit with the new BB Edit 14 from Bare Bones. ZockDoc where you can sign up for free at ZockDoc.com slash MGG. Trade where you can get your first free bag of coffee and five bucks off your bundle at drinktrad.com slash MGG using promo code MGG and Wealthfront where you can get your first 5,000 managed for free at Wealthfront.com slash MGG. We will talk more in-depth about each of those shortly here. For now, here in Durham, New Hampshire, I'm Dave Hamilton. And here in Fearful Connecticut, this is John F. Braun. And? Well, that's true and that's right. We have a very special guest, a summit of the geeks if you will today. Mr. Gary Rosenswig from MacMost is joining us today. Gary, thank you so much for being on the show. Sure, it's my pleasure. Thanks for having me on. Absolutely, absolutely. We'll talk a little bit more about what you do and why you do it, but but we all do similar things here. So it's amazing. What was it? It was only in the last couple of months, I think that we mentioned your stuff for the first time in the show, which just seemed preposterous that we had not mentioned any of the tips you made before because you like you help people the same way we do. It's amazing. So it's great to have you here in the voice and for those of you watching the video in the flesh. So thanks again. Yeah, sure. You know what? Let's get into the meat of this here. Then we'll talk a little bit more about who Gary is and where else you can find him and all that good stuff. But we will start with a quick tip from listener Jeff. We've been talking a lot about pictures and photos and all the new features there. And Jeff says, I just found something cool. I'd like to share. I did a trade-in of my old MacBook Pro when I bought my new one for the trade. Apple provides an empty box and shipping label to ship the trade back to them. After boxing it up, I used my phone to my iPhone to snap a picture of the shipping label. Then I called UPS and they came and picked it up. Later, I wanted to check on the status of the shipment. I thought I would use the new live text features of iOS 15 to copy and paste the tracking number into the UPS website. On my iPhone, I opened the photo of the shipping label and attempted to highlight the tracking number. I accidentally did a long press on it instead. And delightfully, to my surprise, my iPhone popped up a preview with the latest tracking information already. That's pretty cool. I like the added bonus of that. That's pretty cool. We love quick tips here, Gary, because they are the things that are painfully obvious to us once we know them. And up until that moment are generally not obvious. And when somebody sees it over your shoulder, it goes, wait, wait, wait, how did you do that? So... Well, yeah, the live text actually lets you do a bunch of different little smart things. Like, if there's an address, you can go to maps. If there's a phone number, you can call it if you're doing it on your iPhone or you can use FaceTime on your Mac. Right. So there's a bunch of interesting little things that you don't have to do that extra step of grabbing the text, going somewhere, and then using it. It can do it right from whatever you're using to view the image in. Yeah, and it will even do that in the camera app, right? You were telling us just like without even taking a picture, right? Yeah, so yeah, like, yeah, my first quick tip that I brought with me today is that you don't even need to take a picture to use live text. So this, of course, works on the iPhone because you've got camera and the camera app. Let's say you're walking around, driving around, and you see some text somewhere, like it's a sign. Maybe you're shopping for houses and you see like a real estate sign or something like that. And there's a bunch of information and in the past, even today, people will like to take pictures of signs, take a picture of the sign, you get the phone number, you get the name, you get everything in it. You don't have to actually take a picture anymore because when you use the camera app, the little live text yellow brackets appear right there on the camera app before you snap the shutter. And then underneath with the other buttons in the camera, there's a little live text button, looks like the little brackets with some text in it. So the yellow appears and the little button appears. You tap the button and now you have all the live text options, including copy, share, and other things, even like you can do share and then save to file or share and then go to messages. So you see a sign or something and you wanna copy all the stuff down. Maybe it's like an agenda, like you walk in and there's like an agenda of like what's going on in today's meeting or whatever. You can just use the live text, copy the text or send the text as a message or save it as a file or call the phone number right from the camera and you never snap the actual picture to do it, which is convenient. So you don't fill your photos app up with, tons of pictures of signs and things you don't really need anymore. Things you don't need again. Yeah, I equate it to, I suppose the first part of this that we saw was QR codes, right? When you point your phone at a QR code, it would respond without you having to take a picture of it and this just takes that and goes further down the road. It is a little weird. I've had to change my, the way that I interact, especially with QR codes because the little like link now floats around in the image. It's a movie target. You have to chase it around. I know, I'm sure waiters all across the world are having a blast seeing people, suddenly on their iPhones, chasing a little tag around in the camera. Well, you know, maybe if they put drink menus up that way, it's a sobriety test, right? If you can't get the drink menu, then you can't order another drink. You got to chill for maybe 20 minutes. I love it. I love it, yeah. Now I found this out very quickly, but there is a very small subset of live text in Monterey. If you open a picture, yeah, I found an article to talk about secret hidden features and I didn't know about this. So in Monterey, if you open a picture and there's text, hover your cursor over it, it'll turn into the text bar and then you can copy the text or if you right click, it offers to translate. So that's kind of interesting. Yeah, it works in, like wherever the image is brought up raw, so it'll actually work in Safari on a webpage. If the image is just there, it's a regular image tag. A lot of times websites are presenting images as like div backgrounds and things like that and then it won't quite work, you know? But if it's just a standard image, like you're looking at Wikipedia or something and there's like a standard image, you can actually use live text on that image in the webpage. Really? So it's just not reliable because of the way web pages are, but like in the preview app or in other places, I didn't think you could take a screenshot of something and then in the little floating thumbnail thing or at least in preview, if you go to preview with the screenshot, you can do that and grab the text or do something with the text. So you have that option too. Oh, that's interesting. Right, so if the webpage isn't presenting an image enough as an image for it to take it and run with it from there, you can screenshot it and run with it in the screenshot of the image that you just grabbed. Yeah, and if you want to go even further, there's, you know, in the shortcuts app, the shortcuts app has an action for grabbing the text out of an image. So you can actually do a shortcut where you say, get a screenshot and then grab the text from it and then copy to clipboard. And then you take your own little three-step shortcut, do a quick copy of anything on your screen and then suddenly your clipboard has the text in it, even though it was an image that you were selecting on the screen. I like this. Yeah, and it works like it just works quick and every time it's pretty impressive. Have you built one of these shortcuts? Yeah, sure. It's easy. It's just like three steps you throw it together. We're meeting a lot with shortcuts now. So that's probably definitely one of the examples I'm going to be including. Yeah, for sure. All right, well, when you publish that, make sure to let us know and we'll point everybody there. That's, yeah, see, right. When shortcuts was announced for Monterey, I mean, it wasn't a great surprise, right? Like we knew that it was going to wind up coming to the Mac. It was like, okay, you know, I certainly used and still use AppleScript a bunch. Automator, I used a little bit, but it was always a little bit clunky. Sorry, Sal. And shortcuts, it felt like maybe this is the right thing to, you know, because it works so well on iOS. I mean, obviously it was, you know, Apple acquired it because it worked so well on iOS, right? Yeah. Yeah, it's definitely, I mean, you can do and you can do AppleScript and JavaScript and shell scripts in shortcuts on the Mac. Right. Which makes it so much more powerful on the Mac than it is on, you know, the iPhone or iPad. I forget. Just from that. That's a great quick tip in and of itself. I had completely forgotten that we could do even shell scripting in shortcuts. Yeah. Oh yeah. Super powerful. Yeah, I know. Yeah, yeah, yeah. All right, cool. This is great. Gives me something to do in my free time. So yeah, so actually I have some more quick tips as well. Let's go. What's your next one? Yeah. So, okay, so like they snuck a lot of stuff into Monterey. I mean, I've been telling people that Monterey really is, it's all about features just like throwing features at you. And one of the features that doesn't even really make that many lists is if you go to preview, just like before, you can export from preview. And one of the options when you export from preview is a PDF I'm talking about. Sure. Is you can set permissions, right? You can set a password. Well, now if you go to do that, that's all changed because they added a whole bunch of like different things that you could do without the password. So for instance, you set a password. Now you could say, okay, you need the password to print, to copy text, to insert, delete or rotate pages, adding annotations and signatures or filling out form fields. You can specify which ones of those you need the password for and which ones you don't. It lets you get that granular. That's very on it. It's a whole list of checkboxes. That's on Apple-like. Yeah. Well, I think they're trying to probably do feature parity with like the PDF specification, right? So if like the PDF specification is like, you should be able to set a password and here's the things that you could control with a password, you know, Apple's probably just catching up to like, we're now at this level of like PDF specification for what preview can do. But, you know, unless you actually, you know, you know, heard this here or whatever, you might not know that you had this extra functionality in preview. Interesting. Interesting. Yeah. Really handy. Oh. And another hidden thing that doesn't get much attention is now if you go in the finder and you select an image file and then you look at the quick actions, you know, in a little preview or you control click and select quick actions, there's a new quick action that they snuck into Monterey called Convert Image. And it allows you to convert an image file to a JPEG PNG or HEIF and select image size, small, medium, large or actual size, which is the same thing that you had, we've had all along in mail, you know, where you could set those four sizes. Oh, right. Yeah, the little drop down when you're sending images in mail, yeah. So now you could convert it like in the finder, just using this little quick action here. You also have a checkbox for preserve metadata. So you could say, yeah, I'm gonna convert this to a JPEG and strip the metadata out of it, which is important for posting online. Sure. A picture of your dog or something in your backyard and you post it online and suddenly anybody that downloads the image has your GPS location of your house, that kind of thing. So it's a really handy thing and it works even though it converts only two JPEG PNG and HEIF, it will actually accept images of all sorts of types like a Photoshop document or a GIF or all sorts of other things. And then you can convert. So it's handy for like converting, you have an HEIF or HEIC file and then you need to upload it to a website. The website says, I don't know what this is because it's fine the times and you can use this little quick action in the finder to quickly make a JPEG and while you're doing it, make it like the large size which is 1280 pixels across by whatever up and down, to shrink the file a bit, set it to JPEG, convert it, and then you have a JPEG to upload. You never had to open an app. You didn't have to buy Pixelmator or Acorn or anything. You didn't have to do it in preview. It's all just done in the finder without an app at all. So it's fine. Yeah, I don't have a Monterey Mac in front of me but I desperately wanna test this out right now. I wonder if your example of needing to do it in like Safari which uploading to a webpage is a great example because it happens to all of us all the time. I wonder if it can be done in the file dialogue itself. No, no. Okay. It's similar to, there's already like a rotate left action. So this is like one along with that. Now there's rotate left or rotate right or which one it is and convert image is another one. Got it. So super, just super handy. Now I wonder if... Most common questions I get asked is how to convert. How to do that? Yeah. Now clearly Apple was asked that question too and now they gave us an answer. I wonder if there is something that like maybe the folks who make default folder could add so that we could have that right in file dialogues. Like, you know, oh, I need this image. Right. I mean, like it's doable. Just grab the image but don't upload this image, convert it and then upload the conversion. That would be a neat thing. Nice little trick, right? Of course, even better would be for the websites to actually kind of update to actually use. Because it's a standard, you know, the HEI standard. It's not like it's some sort of proprietary thing and it should be something that... You manage a website. You know how difficult it is to stay up to date with just the stuff you need, let alone like... That's true. You know... That's true. Though, you know, I guess it would be added at more of the server level. You know, it would get into like this version of PHP and this version of Apache and then WordPress would add it, you know, support for it and then, you know, there's nothing for you to do. I don't actually have like an image upload thing at my site. See, you avoided the spam. Well, because the spam, it's an issue. If you, like people, you know, if you say, here's, you know, ask me a question and upload a screenshot. I don't want to see what some of the, you know, spam bots are actually going to be uploading. It's a fair point. I've done that with... I've done that with... I've had games, I had it, I have a jigsaw puzzle game site and for a while I had a thing where you could upload your own image to it and create your own jigsaw puzzle from a picture of your family, a nice wholesome picture of your family at Thanksgiving. Now it's a jigsaw puzzle, except that that's not what a lot of the pictures that were uploaded were. So, and unfortunately that has to be on the server in order to work and that's just not, that's not cool to have. You don't, you don't want to be posting that. Anything. Yeah, exactly. I do not want it. So, you know, it's like, you need to send me a screenshot of like a problem you're having on your Mac. Do you use imager or Dropbox or iCloud photos or something? Share that with me. So do you have... And let's, let's, let's, let's talk a little bit about what you do because you've been running MacMost for a very long time. So what, tell us about your history here. Now that we've had some fun talking about geeky stuff, let's make sure people know who you, who you actually are. Sure. Well, yeah. I started MacMost back in 2007. Originally I did web-based games, still have some web-based games out there. That's kind of like how I got into, into everything in the 90s. And that kind of led into like the idea of podcasting, specifically video podcasting, which became hot for like five minutes around 2006, 2007. You know, when they came up with the video iPod, remember that? I do remember that. Yeah. So then I was like, oh, we're already doing like online games. Let's do like videos. And I tried to create like a whole network of shows about different things. And one of those shows was about Mac, MacMost. And that's all the other show, everything else quickly kind of faded back and just started focusing on MacMost as like the video show I was doing. Yeah. And so I started just doing tutorials, you know, every day on Mac stuff. And I've been doing that since 2007. I basically post new tutorials to my site and to YouTube. Just, it's mostly how to, a lot of, there's a lot of focus for other sites on like fixing things and you know, something's broken and all of that. Sure. I focus on like how to get things done, how to use pages to do this, how do you and the finder accomplish this task? You know, and I just keep creating the videos and I've been doing it on a video. Let's see, yesterday I recorded video 2,575. Wow. And yeah, so just been going at it and I've got, you know, I just post to my site, post to YouTube. I do courses too as kind of a support for the rest of it. And yeah, I have a lot of fun. People can go to the site and ask me questions. So I have a little forum and people can ask me questions there and at times those questions, I'll turn into videos. And then just, I have a weekly newsletter. Most people that watch, cause I publish every day. So it's hard to like every day, go and check out what's new. So I publish a free newsletter every Thursday that just sums up the week. And here are the five new videos that I published. And then yeah, Macbos has supported it through Patreon. So I actually don't have any ads at macbos.com. Fascinating. It's just, cause I used to have ads. Sure. And I would hate having like ads that were counter to what I talked about. I'd say, you know, do this or whatever. And then there'd be an ad for something that was, you know. Competing with that or whatever. Yeah, competing or like saying the opposite. And so I hated having the ads. So I got rid of it. I said, if people support me on Patreon, I won't need the ads anymore. Yeah, sure. And people came out and supported me on Patreon. So I got rid of the ads and haven't had ads since 2017. Do you have ads on your YouTube channel? Cause I know you published YouTube as well. Yeah. So people have the choice. If they view the video to the go to macbos.com or, you know, through my newsletter, you'll never see an ad for YouTube. YouTube is going to make money off of my videos, whether or not I do. Yeah. So I might as well get a cut of that. So I, yeah. So if you want to go and view them at YouTube, you can and they're the regular YouTube ads. Sure. Right, right. Yeah, exactly. And I'm assuming that YouTube is a channel that people that serves as like a way of marketing yourself, right? People find you on YouTube when they're looking for, how do I do this kind of thing? And then, Hey, here's Gary. Wait, who is this guy? It's like the, it's like the second or third biggest search engine or whatever. Second, it's the second. So, yeah. So a lot of times people discover me because they're looking for a, you know, how to video, right? And they'll go right to YouTube and search for it. And that's how they'll discover Macbos. So it's awesome. That's great. Ah, that's amazing, man. This is like, I mean, I knew, you know, all of this as an outsider, but it's interesting to hear you tell sort of the origin story of how you got to this point. It's pretty amazing that it was just one, you threw a lot of things at the wall and one of them stuck. So, yeah, exactly. We had all sorts of weird shows, even comedy and all sorts of stuff, but it was the Mac stuff that, and the Mac stuff, it wasn't even like a, like, oh, you know, here's a concept for a show. It was like, you know, we all use Macs and we basically sit around all day talking about like what did Steve Jobs say and what's like the rumors and all that. It's like, why don't we record this? You know, why don't we just like have a show, it's like this would be the easiest show in the world, right? I could just write a script for this without ever even having to do any research because I already know all this stuff. You know it all, right, yeah, exactly. Yeah, that's kind of how this show started. It, like I said, it's, you and I have known each other for a very long time, but it's odd that we've never like, you know, because we help people in very similar ways, I think, which I think is great. Yeah, it's awesome. Yeah. Any thoughts on any of this, John? Mr. Braun? Speaking of ads, I had a dialogue pop up in front of me running Monterey. Okay. Saying personalized ads. And they have a spiel explaining what it is. So just to let you know, you make it this pop it up. Where? It happened when I ran, if you run news, for me it popped up when I ran the stock application because I like playing with stocks and I guess every now and then they serve up ads. I'll link to, but they have a support article explaining what they're doing. Interesting. Huh, all right. Oh, interesting, interesting. I had, I don't know that I've seen that, but I may well have seen it. Are the controls for it in security and privacy, John? Like after the fact, if you wanna tweak settings and things like that? Like I said, I haven't upgraded the studio to Monterey yet. Settings, privacy, Apple advertising is where it is on the iDevice. Right. On Mac, it's, yeah, same place. Security and privacy, privacy, Apple advertising. So if you wanna fine tune your advertising experience. I like it. This is great. Excellent. Cool. We have a bunch of cool stuff found to talk about. We have your questions to answer and I wanna make sure we get to all of those. The next thing that I would like to do if it works for you, Mr. John F. Braun is talk about our first two sponsors for this episode. Fantastic. All right. Hey, do you get excited by a five-star driver rating? Let's be honest, right? Those ratings matter a lot. And when it comes to finding doctors, ratings matter even more. ZocDoc, our sponsor, is an app where you compare doctors by their ratings and read reviews from real patients. 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That's wealthfront.com slash MGG and get started today. Our thanks to Wealthfront for sponsoring this episode. All right guys, let's do some cool stuff found. Gary, you wanna start us off? You were telling us about an Apple Watch Charger you had, yeah? Yeah, well I think last week you guys talked about how easy it is to forget to bring your Apple Watch Charger with you on a trip. Yes. For good reason, because what that cables, what 12 feet long or something that they give you, you know, Apple gives, I suppose it's supposed to be in your night stand or something, you know, and it's supposed to be long. Sure, yeah, no, right, if you're traipsing it from the floor, you know, plug up to your night, so my wife has, I think it's a three foot long Apple Watch Charger and every time we travel, I am super envious of this thing. I could go buy one, it's probably $12, but I never think to, so you have an answer for me, don't you? Yeah, because I thought there's gotta be a better way. So I did look on Amazon and there is like a, hey, Apple Watch Charger with no cable at all. Like it literally is just the USB port and the part that you put your watch on. So, and it weighs nothing, it feels like it's just empty. So it weighs nothing, it's as tiny as could be. It actually works really well. I used to know, I took a red eye flight and I was able to plug it into the USB port under this TV screen in front of you. Yeah. And it actually, it's perfect. It plugs in the right way and then you sit your watch on top of it. The downside is that it's really hard, you know, I have like one of those chargers that has three ports on it or whatever. And if I plug this into it to get the watch to stay on it and all that. So it's not the kind of thing you want to use as your everyday charger, but to put in your travel stuff and have with you, you know, because you only need like a couple of hours charge. I'll be like, if you forget to plug it in at night and you get up in the morning, you could charge it while you're in the shower and you're probably good for the day. So this thing saves you, it's like way better. And I think it was like 10 bucks. Oh, that's awesome. So yeah, so it's definitely like easy purchase and it's in my travel bag and that's where it lives. Yeah, just 100% of the time. Yeah, exactly. 100% of the time, I have to break, you know, regular cable on my night stand and that's where I watch normally get charged. So that was a good find. And I can't believe, like I went through earlier trips this year and I didn't have this thing. Yeah. I was like, okay, I've got it. Yeah, yeah, this problem is over now. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, I, you know, looking at that and for those of you watching the video, you can see it. I, my use case thought was, oh, this would be perfect to plug into a battery pack that has a USB-A port on it, right? Definitely. Oh yeah, it works, yeah. And you know, like you said, it doesn't take much power to charge up the watch, so you're not gonna deplete your battery pack, but you put that, you know, on the counter or whatever, you plug that thing in, you're good to go and then you're off to the races. Yeah, I like it. I like it. It's good. Great stuff. Yeah, you understand what cool stuff found is here because that's it, man. Richard also understands, he says, you wanna hide the notch on the new MacBook Pros? Use this app called Top Notch. Johnny says we will love it because it's free and it is, it's at topnotch.app. And the whole idea is that it makes your entire menu bar black so that you're not seeing the cutout for the notch in the otherwise colorful menu bar. So it doesn't quite deal with some of the idiosyncrasies that the operating system causes because of the notch. We're getting there. I'm not a surprise that we're here a week later doing the episode and Apple still hasn't pushed an update to address the fact that menu bar items just disappear under the notch. I won't overly rant about that, but it does seem a little odd that they let that ship. But I'm guessing certainly by the end of this month we'll see that fixed. I don't know. Do you have one of the new MacBook Pros yet, Gary, or no? Well, I have last year's M1. Sure. Yeah. I'm waiting now. The sad thing is that I bought a Mac Pro in 2019. You could only guess what I spent on it. Well, it was like $9,000, right, for the Mac Pro. And when the M1 Mac came out I ran some tests and it's sad because I think I got like my M1 is even it's an even an eight gig version. And it is, my Mac Pro is faster. I don't buy that much. Like rendering video out, like I would render a video as a test and it would be like a minute and a half. And then the M1 would be like two minutes. I'm like, oh man, that's not a $9,000 bonus there for that. Even some stuff like numbers calculations are faster on the M1 than they are on my Mac Pro. I believe it. So it's sad, but I guess, you know, hold out until they come out with a new Mac Pro. Because if I bought the new MacBook Pro with the M1 Macs in it, I know that next year they'll come up with a Mac Pro and it'll be like, oh, now I got a desk. That's what I wanted. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's what I really want. I need something that's under the desk, yeah. Yeah, right, right, yeah. And I think, you know, when they announced the M1 Macs and M1 Pro-based MacBook Pros, my comment then was I really want an iMac with those because that's sort of the thing that works for me at my desk, both here in the studio and down in the office. And my hope still is that they wanted to get orders for the MacBook Pros out first and with the chip shortage and everything sort of tempering the release of that iMac because you know it's ready to go. It's gotta be ready to go. Yeah, it's probably supply of the screen, right? Because if they went from a 21 and a half inch to a 24 inch for the low end, right? Yeah. So now they're gonna go from 27 inch to what? It's gonna be like a 29, 30 inch screen for, maybe even a 32 inch screen, who knows? For the, and that's probably the kind of thing where they need to place an order and it's gonna take six months for, you know, companies to be able to produce enough screens for. I hear people are dumping containers off of cargo ships, like shipping companies are dumping containers off of full containers, off of cargo ships in the LA Harbor because they don't, they need to like, they'll make money bringing the ship back somewhere else to like go get stuff. Like this is a major problem. It's a weird time. It's a weird time, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I guess, I guess, you know, you get some scuba gear and maybe you can go get some good stuff if you take a dive. Maybe, I don't know. I don't know. You do a deep dive on Amazon. See some of the stuff that's probably in those containers and you're like, who's buying this? Fair. Yeah. All right. Anything on any of that, John? Or shall we keep moving on here? Moving on, please. All right, Mr. Braun's keeping us truckin' here today. Adam writes in, he says, as you know, with a custom domain, most domain registrars want to charge you to set up email. That's one of the reasons why iCloud Plus might be really attractive to a lot of folks because it is free or no cost added if you already pay for iCloud and then you can use your custom domain there. He says, I'm still not convinced by iCloud Plus custom domains, which seem a bit basic. So I did a little bit of digging. Fastmail and P.O. Box allow you to use a custom domain for free if you already pay for their service and it works very well. But almost everyone else wants to charge. Rackspace, GoDaddy, Hover, Porkbun, he says, which I personally use, all charge around $3 for an email account with a few gigs of storage. But there is one domain registrar that gives two free email accounts with three gigs each and it is gondi.net, G-A-N-D-I dot net. He says, I'm not sure how well-known it is in the United States, but it's one of the larger European registrars and has a rather solid reputation. Three gigs isn't enormous, but it might be enough for many folks. Gondi also gives free email forwarding, which is another rather rare offering. You could forward to a Gmail account for free if you are crazy enough to use Gmail in Adam's mind. Gondi isn't the cheapest registrar, but it is not the most expensive either. Another advantage is that data would be protected by GDPR and not available to the US agencies under the Cloud Act. So, thanks for that. I'd never heard of gondi.net. Either, John, did you know about gondi.net for domains? Yeah. It's news to me. It's the cool stuff found. I like it. Good, good stuff. What do you do? Well, I mean, you host MacMost somewhere so that you just have your email as part of that, right? I'm actually using, yeah, I love the whole iCloud custom domain thing, but I already have a solution I've been using for years and years and years, so I'm not kind of willing to switch. It's Google. Yeah, I know you're probably not happy about that, but I mean, it's the Google, the business level stuff, right? So not the vanilla Gmail, but they used to have, well, they still have this Google Apps thing and you could do just mail. So I don't actually use any of their other stuff. I just have their mail servers and I'm grandfathered in because I've had it for so long that I'm not actually paying for it. If you had it a long time ago, it was free forever and now you still have it free forever. If you want it now, you got to pay. Yeah, you got to pay, yeah. But the reason I like it is that, one number one, it never seems to give me any trouble, like years and years and years and it just, my email is up. Before that, my email would go down every once in a while. You know, it'd be like a server issue. So I'm glad to have that behind me. And the other thing I like is the massive kind of spam controls that they have because Google like Apple gets so much mail in that it's easier for them to have algorithms that figure out, hey, a million messages were just sent that are exactly the same. This has probably spammed and I'll never see it. Whereas when you have your own custom server, it doesn't have that kind of. No, we moved, we ran our own mail server up until we moved Mac observer and Backbeat and Mac eCab and all the related domains. We moved them into the Google apps for domains back when it was free. So we're grandfathered as well. And running your own mail server, we had an issue one Saturday afternoon where our admin team decided to update some component of something and it broke everything about the rest of our mail server. And in that moment, I realized I was the only person on the planet who knew all of the moving parts that were assembled to make our mail server. And we probably spent about 10 hours trying to fix this problem and we did fix it. But by about hour two, I decided, okay, we have to get this fixed because this is the fastest path to resolution here and getting mail flowing again. And I know we can, we've wound up having to find like an old build of whatever that particular module was on some random Russian site somewhere. And it was like, I guess this is gonna be okay to run on our servers, but who knows? And it was, but the decision I made was never again, will I run my own mail server? And so we did, we moved to the Google apps for domains. It's, you know, the grandfather plan is great. It's fantastic. I moved my personal mail, we had fast mail as a sponsor either earlier this year or late last year, or it might've been early last year. You know, time has been malleable over the last couple of years, as we all know. But anyway, I moved my, sort of my personal mail, everything that flows to me winds up at a fast mail account. And I, there, they have enough volume there that their spam engines are super smart, but they also are super controllable. Unlike Googles, where you sort of get what you get and you don't have, you don't have the option of saying, no, no, I want that through, even though you're not letting that through for other people, I want that through. Fast mail, they, and they have this scripting language where you, like it's super advanced and you could completely ruin the way your email is processed. Like you can put scripts in and rules in very early in the process of, of where mail comes in there. And it like, tread carefully. And they tell you to, they're like, look, you know, with great power comes great responsibility. You can use the GUI and do it safely or have at it with, with our scripting language and you're good to go. But yeah, fast mail has, has proven to be, I really like them in terms of, you know, if, again, you know, if you're with Google and it's free, it works for, I know Adam didn't like him, but I don't know, man, like it's- Fast mail's great. I used fast mail 20 years ago before I had my own custom server, right? It was like fast mail and I loved them, then custom server and that didn't work out and somehow I ended up with Google. I mean, I, I would love to try out, I probably am going to try out iCloud custom domains as a, like a test, not for my email, but just set up like a domain and see how it works and all that. But if, like Google were to, you know, somehow make me angry or something over their service, you know, I haven't had any problems in years, fast mail would probably be like my go-to. Yeah. Yes. As I, I very much second that recommendation. Yeah, for sure. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, it's good stuff. Yeah, yeah, yeah. All right. John, do you have any cool stuff found for us today or are we just cranking along here? Maybe. All right, Gary, you want to take us to your MagSafe thing and then maybe John, bring us in? Yeah. So I went on a quest before a recent trip where I knew I'd be taking a lot of pictures with my iPhone or a MagSafe tripod adapter, right? Because you've got MagSafe on the current phones. Why am I still like clamping on this, the spring-loaded thing to hold my iPhone in place on top of a tripod? I should be able to use MagSafe to do it. And I was disappointed to find there wasn't really the ideal product out there because the ideal product should be just the MagSafe circle and then maybe like just a quick little joint and it hooks into a tripod. But I couldn't find that. Okay. But I really couldn't find almost anything until I noticed that there was one car adapter that it's really meant for the car. It actually comes with this little foot that you would stick to something on your car and then this slides into that and then you've got a MagSafe mount for your iPhone. Got it. Okay, yeah, for people that can't see it, there's this foot that you would put on your car. It's a flat thing, yeah. Yep, and then the MagSafe disc is on an arm that has a right angle and then goes down into this foot. It's meant for the dashboard of a car. It meant for the dashboard, but they were smart enough in the bottom of the main part to include a screw for a tripod. So you forget about all that other stuff and just take the main part of this, screw it on to the top of your tripod. It even has a little dot for, some tripods have a dotted one end so it stays straight. Oh, to a line to keep it straight. Yeah, yeah. It even has that in it and you can mount this basically on top of your regular tripod and now you have MagSafe on top of your tripod. So your iPhone just sticks to it with the MagSafe, making it so easy to remove and add your iPhone to it. It's really cool, it wasn't that expensive. I forget how much it was, it was pretty cheap. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But I would hope in the future, I'd be able to get something more compact and ready for travel that didn't have this like huge arm on it, it was a much smaller arm. Yeah. Or much more lightweight or something. But it doesn't actually weigh much, it just is kind of a large object. It's just a little bulky for what you're using it for. Yeah, yeah. But anyway, cool thing and it's just something, if you use your iPhone for photography, like I do and whether it's a big tripod or a small just desk tripod or whatever it is you're using, I mean, MagSafe's the way to go. I'd be clamping. Right. So one of those things to your iPhone doesn't make sense anymore. I like this idea of using MagSafe. Yeah, right. Like I I we've talked about this in the show recently, you know, for its first year, I really sort of ignored MagSafe. I didn't see the allure of it. And now, like now I'm where you are, where it's like, wait, I want MagSafe to do all of these things that no one's doing yet, but I'm here. I'm ready for it cash in hand. Like let's go. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Yeah, it's a good thing. Well, I think the market just needs more MagSafe compatible iPhones out there for people to, you know, for inventors because this what you're talking about is very much a, you know, let me mock this up on my 3D printer and then, you know, go to Alibaba and find a factory that it's going to make me, you know, 500 of these. And then I'm going to go sell them on Amazon. Like it's that it's definitely a small business niche kind of thing. But like the world is perfect for that these days. It's amazing in fact, how well it goes. So yeah, very cool. All right, John, what do you have, my friend? I got something that we got at the show, Dave. Yeah. Oh, a PEPCOM. Oh, yeah. Yeah. So it is called. Whoops, happened there. Don't know. It's the Lenovo Smart Clock Essential. Oh, OK. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. So yeah, if you were one of the first people there, you got one of these. So it's a clock. It's an alarm clock. OK. Nice big display for people that can't see very far. Or you can't see without their glasses in the middle of the night. Yeah, yeah. So yeah, it shows the day, it shows the time. It shows the weather. So that's kind of neat because you set it up with the Google app on your iOS device. Got it. Yeah, the thing I like or the thing is interesting about it. You told me to explore this and I'm cool with this. So it's also a Google Assistant, right? And the cool part about that is let me see how hard it's going to be to integrate all my stuff with with Google versus the other things. And it was pretty easy. They have. So I use the SmartThings Hub and they have a during a setup, they have a thing saying, oh, you want to mind meld and download the SmartThings profile? And I'm like, yep. And it's like, OK, here you go. Populated the screen with the exact same entries that I see in the SmartThings app. And the way to control it is the way I'm pretty used to it. Anyways, you know, turn the light on, turn the light off, set the brightness, set the color. So that's nice. It has also a switch if you want to turn off the mic. You don't want it listening to you. Has a USB A port so you can charge some of your stuff and it has a little nightlight. That's handy. You don't go crashing into things like that. And that's pretty good. Yeah, so so yeah, checkers out. Yeah, I know I have one. I haven't I haven't we we have some Sonos devices which you can choose your Smart Assistant so you can choose, you know, the Amazon A-Lady or Google with it. And a couple of them I have turned to Google. So in our kitchen, we can talk to Siri, Amazon's A-Lady or Google. And it's been fascinating experiencing how they each respond. You're right. The smart home stuff is largely trivial. You just, you know, set it up. And even if you have to add a couple of different providers to it, right, like it's still all right there. It's it's and then, like you said, you interacted it the same way where it really gets interesting is asking them questions like research questions. And for me, Google, like far and away wins that battle. Siri almost always tells me you should look that up on the web. And it's like, cool, but I asked you with my voice. The Amazon thing's gotten better over the years. But, you know, Google is a search company, right? Like they get this stuff. And they also understand that if you ask something with your voice, you want the answer back with a voice. So, yeah, that's pretty good. Can you I have a question for you about this Lenovo thing, John. Can you set the alarm on it with your voice? Like, can you say, you know, whatever Google, you know, set me a 730 alarm tomorrow morning? I would. I haven't tried it. OK, I'll be almost certain. Sure, because you can do that with Siri, too. And then the other thing that I want you to try is when the alarm's going off, ask it Google snooze or stop my alarm because I guarantee you Google may or may not do that. I'm curious if this thing does it. The Amazon lady, absolutely the only way you interact with it is with your voice. You have to be able to tell it to stop making its noise with your voice. If you you can set an alarm on your iPhone by telling series, you know, set an alarm for 730 tomorrow morning. When that alarm starts going off, you can yell all you want at your phone. And it will not answer you while the alarm's going off. So you can set an alarm with your voice, but you cannot snooze an alarm with your voice. And it seems crazy to me because it's completely capable when it's playing a song. You know, I can have the music cranking in my car. And if I say, you know, Siri, do something, it answers me. So why can't it do that while it has an alarm? Yeah. Oh, another feature is that if the top is touch sensitive. So that's your snooze. Sure. That makes sense. Yeah, of course, of course, which, which, which, yeah, that's great. It's great. I don't know. And it's not too expensive. I saw it online for like 30 bucks or something. So it's it's about the same price as your other, you know, that's pretty good. Yeah. And it's is it is it? Well, I assume it's a speaker, too. Right. Is it a Bluetooth speaker so you could play music from your phone through it? If you so chose, I'll have to see. I hadn't tried music. I mean, if it's Bluetooth and all of that, you can definitely play stuff through it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's cool. Fun. I like it. I like little things like this. It's good. All right. We have your questions to answer. And we definitely want to get to those. The next thing that I would love to do, if it's OK with you two gentlemen, is is talk about our next two sponsors. OK. All right. Hey, you know, we get almost everything delivered to us these days. 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You're going to love it. Our thanks to barebones and BB edit for sponsoring this episode. All right, let's do some of these questions, shall we? John, you want to take us to Todd's question about network utility? So Todd says that I often had up helping family members and coworkers with their Macs. It was always very helpful to be able to run the network utility app, the Sea of Packets were running across their ethernet and Wi-Fi connection. I know you covered this a ways back, but I can't believe nobody is elegantly replaced this in the utility. I have copied the old Apple Network Utility app to other machines, but sometimes I get an error. So yeah, that's one solution is go back a couple of and this works for me. But then he gave me some bad news, doesn't work on the M1. So I got a suggestion, Dave. Yes, sir. But it's an iOS. But it's I don't know when I stumbled across this, but it's healing of electric hurricane, electric hurricane, electric, so they make something called H E dot net network tools. The thing is, it's only on iOS and Android, but it's basically a GUI to ping and probably more stuff like you can run IPer from it, which I think is kind of neat. So if you want to benchmark your connection, yeah. The good news is that because it runs on the Apple Silicon chip that is in your iPhone and iPad, I was thinking that it runs on. I tested it and it runs fine. They allow it to run on in iPad mode on the M1. Yeah, all of those apps can run on the M1 if the developer doesn't check the box when they publish to say, don't let this download on the Mac. Like Facebook, for example, has has made it so that their app no longer runs on the Mac. I still have a version on one of my my my M1 air of the Facebook app that runs, but it's like a year old at this point because I think they flipped that switch in January or February or something. But yeah, this H E, the hurricane, electric tools, it works great on on my M1 Max, no problem at all. Yep. Yep. So on older Macs, on Intel Macs, I should say you can copy the old network utility over and it will run fine with the newer Macs with the M1 based Macs or Apple Silicon based Macs, I guess was the right way for us to say that so that we be sure to cover whatever might come next. The the hurricane electric tools. Do you have another answer for us, Gary, on this? Do you know of anything else? No, I mean, of course, you could do command line. Of course. Things, you know, if you need to. I miss network utility was handy. The other thing is, is a lot of the things that it used to do, you could just do when like there are various utility websites, you know, if you need to do a quick trace route or something like, you know, a lot of times you can you can search or quickly come up with some site. Sure. From like a routing company, you know, a hardware company or networking company that familiar names and you could do a quick like IP check or trace route or various other things. So it's not like it's totally unavailable to you, but it was so convenient to have it in and that network utility app. Yeah, I'm surprised that no one has like specifically targeted Mac users with an app to replace this. I mean, I know we're a bunch of nerds here or or nerds in training and all of those things are fine. But like we all want this. This is this is a common refrain from the audience here. And even a tool that's better. I mean, because before I could see a company saying, well, we can make this plus some things, but nobody's going to use it because there's a free, you know, network utility comes with the system. Now it doesn't come with the systems. Now it's a chance to come out with like an app called Network Utility, put it in the app store and you even make it look like the old app. Apple won't care because they're not making it anymore. And, you know, charge, charge, you know, five, ten bucks forward or whatever and you get a bunch of people paying for it. Make a bunch of money. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, it's a good it's a good thing. Hey, you're a developer, Gary. You've written some things. I mostly do games. I mostly do games and but I have thought about, yeah, the fact that, you know, it would be neat to develop like a Swiss Army knife tool that just like I just kept throwing things at. Oh, you want a clipboard manager. I'll add that. You want like a tool bar tool bar thing, you know, for the for the notch. I'll throw that in just throw a bunch of stuff into it utility. But, you know, I only have unfortunately 24 hours a day and I sleep for part of it. So why this sleep thing? I don't understand when people talk about it. So I have a request for you or really for anyone listening. And if an app like this exists, please, please let us know. Feedback at Mackie Cub dot com, because that we would love to know about this. Right, John. Feedback at Mackie Cub dot com. It's feedback at Mackie Cub dot com. That's correct. What I want is, you know, when your Mac freezes and you have if all you're doing is using your Mac to solve the problem, your only recourse is hold the power button in for 10 seconds, you know, let it power down completely, you know, just out of the blue. No, no grace whatsoever with this process. And then turn it back on that we've all been there. That that happens. However, if you've already turned on the ability to SSH into your Mac, you can SSH in and issue a sudo space shutdown space dash R space now. And I'll put this command in the in the show notes because it's super, super valuable. And you can do this from your iPhone if you run something like prompt, right, which is an SSH client for the iPhone and iPad. And and it, you know, it can it's not the most graces shut down, but it's way better than just effectively yanking power from the motherboard. And what I would love so that people don't have to remember this command. Obviously, it's burned into my memory. You can tell how many times I've had to do this. But it even for for me, knowing the commander type, it's still a cumbersome process. I have to launch prompt. I have to log in and then I have to painstakingly on my iPhone keyboard. Tap out this, you know, this this command and make sure I don't fat finger it because otherwise, you know, it's not going to work. And then I have to type it all over again. I would love an iPhone app that's just called, you know, restart remote Mac or restart local Mac or whatever. I don't care what anybody calls it. You could call it, you know, Gary's best utility ever. As long as it does this, this is what I would love. And I realize I could probably sort out. I've never, I mean, I've built a hello world app of an Xcode or whatever, but I've never like really dug in. I could probably make it for myself. But like you pointed out, A, it's not in my like the coding that I do every day is not that it's mostly Web stuff with PHP. So it would it would be it would be a learning journey to get there. Not a bad learning journey, but, you know, that free time I do I do require sleep. It turns out so, you know, would be tough. That is a great tip, though, about being able to sometimes log into your Mac, even if it's frozen. I've done that with screen sharing, believe it or not. Or yeah, screen sharing where I've had one account and the Mac is frozen. And I've been like, oh, no, let me get on my other Mac. And I've been able to log into the other account and be live screen share. Even though the Mac seems frozen to its own keyboard and trackpad and screen, I'm actually using the other account and I could like maybe quit some apps gracefully and all that stuff and then shut down the Mac through that. And that's not even the terminal command, but actually like through the GUI. Amazing. Do it. So it's kind of it's a neat trick to be able to do that. Sometimes a completely frozen Mac isn't as frozen as you. Rarely is it as frozen as you think. I would say probably certainly nine times out of 10, but, you know, maybe even 95 out of 100 times that my Mac appears frozen. If I just grab my phone, I can I can issue that command and it restarts. And, you know, then all as well. And I feel better about it, you know, it's definitely a better way to do it than actually using a power button. Right. Right. Right. So, I don't know. While we're at this, a tip that came up the other day because my daughter's iPhone appeared to be frozen and it was not entirely frozen. But, you know, she couldn't interact with it the way she wanted. She couldn't get it into the mode where she could restart it the way she knew to restart it. And I had to relook up how to restart a frozen iPhone. And it's one of these things that I'm really trying to commit to memory because there will be moments where you can't look it up if my iPhone is my only device. And it is with a, you know, with iPhones that don't have a home button. The trick is press volume up quickly and release. Press volume down quickly and release and then hold the button on the other side, whatever we're supposed to call that button, hold it in until you either see something on the screen that you can interact with or the Apple logo comes up because you've restarted the phone successfully. So it's volume up, volume down, hold the button on the other side. So quick press on the first two and a long hold on the other one. So I'm saying it multiple times for my benefit and hopefully for yours. So there you go. Have you had to have you had found yourself in that scenario, Gary? Oh, sure. Yeah. And it's frustrating, too, because it is hard to to look that up. And I've even had family members that have, you know, sometimes they try to fix things on their own. They they'll call Apple support because they'll be like, we don't want to rely on you for every little thing, right? And they'll be like, oh, and I talked to it and it took all this time. And this is what we eventually did. I was like, oh, I could have told you that in like three seconds. But it's it is interesting that it just takes a while to get there. Sometimes the simple restart. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. The first time it happened to me, I was on this was amazing. It was must have been 2019. I was at podcast movement the day before NASA brought us on a tour of Kennedy Space Center. It was maybe 20 of us. It was and it was amazing. And we got to the first stop on our tour where I would have loved to have taken some pictures and stuff with my phone. And my phone went into this like super. It was like I could tell there was some runaway process because it was hot to the touch and I'm like, I have all day. I have this amazing thing that I'm going to experience. And I cannot remember how to restart my phone. But I then I went. So I went into this building. We got back on the bus and I remembered. Oh, wait, my my iPad has a has a data chip in it. You know, a sim in it or whatever. And so I looked it up quick and I was like, right, right, right. And OK, everything is good. You know, we could have used your iPad to take pictures. I could have. I could have. Yeah, I almost I love I love I always get a smile whenever I'm somewhere, you know, touring something on a vacation. And if you look around, there's people taking pictures. A lot of people taking pictures or something. You look around, you'll find a couple of people with iPads doing it. But you know what? I don't I don't think it's that bad of an idea to actually take pictures with your iPad because of the screen. Because if you're if your vision isn't great enough, you need reading glasses or whatever. I mean, the iPad screen is amazing for actually framing your picture and like seeing what it is that you're taking a picture of. So when I first saw people doing this, I was like, oh, that's ridiculous. It's, you know, that's not the right way to take pictures. And then I forced myself to try it a few times because it became a thing. Sure. And I said, you know what, there I'm not going to do it. I'm still going to use my iPhone for it. But there is a bit of an advantage to using a big iPad screen to take a picture if you're into image composition and framing and all of that. Yeah, I for sure. It's just funny because when people started using that, other people were like, that's not how you're supposed to use an iPad. And it's like, yeah, sure. It's got a camera in it. Yeah. I mean, the camera may not be as good as the iPhone camera. I suspect it's not. But no, it's good. No, but it's gotten way better over the years, right? Like, you know, the even well, let's look. I mean, I don't even know what the camera is in my my new iPad mini because I didn't care when I bought it. But it's a 12 megapixel camera with a 5X digital zoom. So, you know, no optical zoom on it. But like, that's a that's a fully capable camera more than what we need for 95 percent of the things that we do, I think. So, yeah. All right. We have a question from listener John that certainly has been plaguing me. And I think anyone were lots of people. We might have some answers here. John says, since moving to Monterey, my Apple Mail has not loaded any images at the top of every message. I see a note, a bar that says your network preferences prevent content from loading privately with a button that says load content directly. He says, of course, I can choose to click this button, but it's there on every other message. I've gone to network settings and I don't see anything that looks like something to load images. Please help. I'm sure I'm not the only one suffering from this. No, you are not the only one suffering from this. This is have either of you experienced this, Gary or John? Sure. Oh, yeah. I could read it. I could read it very easily. Yes. OK. Not exactly. But I have a suggestion on where to look to fix it. OK, go with it. Yeah, there's a lot of different places that we're going to be able to go to to address this, but there's something at the core of it all. I think. OK. But yeah, where would you go to fix it, John? I think it may be a random bit flip. Bit flip. So if you go into mail preferences. Viewing. There's a little check box. Load remote content and messages. Make sure that's checked. Well, so that's not there in Monterey, right? Are you looking at a Monterey machine? No, no, I'm looking at I haven't upgraded this machine yet. Yeah, so this is a specific problem there. Yeah, which which is the first place I went to look it was like because that's been there in the past gone. So Gary, do you have a thought on this? Yeah, so there's OK. So there's there are two or three settings that affect this and in mail in Monterey, there is a setting of trying to remember what the exact. I've got it in front of me, so I'll share it and I'll throw it back to you. It's it's preferences, privacy, and which is a new pain in Monterey. And there are three check boxes there. One is protect mail activity, and if that's checked, then hide IP addresses automatically checked, but block all content, which is the third one is not checked. And then you can, of course, manipulate the checkboxes to choose which if if any of these you want. So and the third part of that is in system preferences, having private relay turned on or off. Now, here's the thing. Normally, you could set these however you want, and you should see your images find in mail. The element that has to be added in for this to break is if your network is somehow a little bit different. So I've seen this in people that are using a VPN. I've seen this in people not using a VPN, but a privacy tool. Right. So it's not strictly VPN, but it's like signed up trying to block tracking and image tracking and stuff like that. And I've seen it personally. The reason I have it is because my network is a bit unusual. I've got a Wi-Fi network separate from my internet connection. In other words, I've got my my DSL modem. It has Wi-Fi. I've turned that off and I've simply connected by Ethernet from my internet, you know, service provider to my own Wi-Fi network. So it's basically doing a double jump. Sure. And and my Wi-Fi network is providing some protection. There's there's a separate like layer. It needs a jump. And I think in every case that I've seen, it's either a hardware thing like mine or a software thing like a privacy protection or VPN. You add that in. And I think the way some email messages use their images, they're using a I'm guessing a content delivery network, you know, so where the image is actually being delivered by like one of these big like server farm type of things where yeah. And like a YouTube email, for instance, I see this instantly in my YouTube emails. There's little YouTube graphics. Oh, you have a comment on this video and it's got like a YouTube graphic and maybe a little icon of the of the of the video. That's of course being delivered by a big network for Google that is serving up images and all that stuff turned on. And it's basically saying I I cannot get this image. So you have to turn all that stuff off basically in or or click the button that that bypasses it for that one message. Yeah, exactly. But that's really annoying if you've got 10 messages. Yeah. And if your idea is I want the privacy, you know, I want. Yes, protect email activity, hide my IP address. I want that. But if I turn it on now, I can't see the images. And it's basically by you saying, I don't want to give away, you know, my my IP address, the email server and the other and says, but I don't know where to send this image. I'm not a network expert, but it seems like it's something to do with that. So yeah, I've I've found this on both of my computers that they're running Monterey and it for me, it very much is dependent on whether or not I have a VPN installed on my Mac. Because all of these things should be able to can happen. Like the things that I want to happen can happen when, you know, all in concert with each other, you can have all these protections and, you know, private relay turned on and the the hide IP address in mail turned on, which is just another way of using private relay for for folks that don't understand that, at least according to Apple. But with a VPN there, or like you said, something that's getting in the way and filtering network traffic in its own way. That's the moment where Apple says, like you said, there's something different about your network, either internally on your Mac or in your case externally, you've got some double that thing going on. It says, I can't help. So I'm not going to. Yeah. And and I the way I've solved it on mine, because I had ExpressVPN installed on my laptop and was getting this is I had to go into network preferences and or do I had to go through and run ExpressVPN's uninstaller and then that freed it up and everything was fine. But I thought, well, this is ridiculous. So let me reinstall ExpressVPN and see if, you know, a reinstall inside of Monterey creates maybe a better path for this. You know, I don't know. And I did that and everything worked. And then I turned on ExpressVPN and at that point you get a message that says, we're not going to protect you anymore because you're using this other thing to protect you, but you're good to go and the images would load. And then I turned off ExpressVPN. And until I rebooted, I was back to getting these messages if I had these settings turned on yet. So they're like it's clearly not intended to work exactly this way. But they haven't created enough of the we'll call it workarounds or use case adaptations, right, to know, oh, OK, well, yeah, we were in this scenario. But now we're back here and this not has been untied. So, yes, we can allow the images to load through private relay and it's all good. So I think this is one of those things that, you know, Monterey point one will hopefully address because it doesn't it doesn't feel like a necessary thing. But I understand once I started digging into it, it was like, ah, I understand why we're here. I don't like that we're here. We shouldn't be here. But, you know, they should have been addressed over the summer. I don't know why I didn't notice it over the summer, though, on my laptop running Monterey. So that's another like this feels like something that didn't come up during the beta at all. Well, I think private relay for a lot of the beta wasn't really active. Not as active as we thought it was. Yeah, because I mean, they have to have a huge number of servers to support it. And I think basically during the a lot of the beta, you had the switch. You could turn it on and it was just like, I'm not doing anything now. You're the traffic just going straight through. No, it wasn't going. We tested it. I mean, I didn't test it every single time I turned it on. But, you know, I certainly tested it on on beta one on iOS, you know, back in June or whatever. And it definitely was going through Cloudflare as the, you know, the egress server. Yeah, yeah. So it was it was there, but I don't know. Whatever is happening now is new as of the end of the beta or, you know, the release. So one other thing about that. If I go to Wi-Fi, I see a setting for turning on private relay. If I go to Ethernet, I have no ability to turn on private relay. Why is that? I know you're not you didn't make this decision at Apple, but well, here's the thing is so I private relay at my office still does not work. Like it does not hide my IP address, probably because of the double NAT. Yeah. And the fact I have a static IP address. That shouldn't matter. And I know it shouldn't, right? And if I use, if I use a VPN, if I, if I turn on a VPN and I could, I could totally mask, you know, so, but it is never during the beta and any right now with the live version of Monterey. It's simply if I go to like, what is my IP address dot com? Or, you know, sites, it knows what my IP address is. It's like, it's not hiding anything. If I go, if I, you know, go through my phone or I happen to be somewhere else and I I'll check out my IP address, I'll turn on private relay and it's clearly working. But it just doesn't, you know, I think the same thing that's preventing this little thing in email from not working. It's also preventing private relay from hiding my IP address with my kind of unique setup. And and I mean, that's OK. I mean, I have a static IP address for certain security things for, you know, getting to servers. So I actually don't want, I don't want it. You know, it's like, I want this to be a static IP address. But right. Right. But yeah, it's it's it's clearly not as robust. And Apple says, and it's said over and over again, this is not a full VPN thing, right? There's a ton of stuff. You know, VPN, you can go and say, I'm in Germany because I want to watch a German TV show. It's only available, you know, that's not what this is for. Yeah, I want to see what my website looks like in New Zealand. Right. So I'm going to say you can't do all these VPN things with private relay. It's a very simple service and it, you know, it's a great thing for when traveling to turn that on and know that, you know, you've got a sexual layer. It's it's simple. But there's one way in which it's it's more complex and more secure, more private, I should say, than a VPN. And that's the double layered of the double layer of the server is set up, right? Because with a VPN, we connect to the VPN server. And then that same VPN server is our proxy, essentially, to the rest of the world, you know, it's the one that's doing all the requests for us. So if that one server were to be compromised, someone could see, OK, you know, it's Dave at this IP address and or it's someone at this IP address that we can triangulate to Durham, New Hampshire, requesting something from whatever Amazon.com or wherever it might be that I'm choosing to go through my VPN or Netflix or whatever, you know, with Apple's private relay, your request is encrypted by you using a public key, not from Apple's server, but from the outbound server. And there are it's broken into two, right? So you connect to Apple. Apple then takes your encrypted package of your request and hands that to what they're calling their egress servers. When I tested it, it was Cloudflare, although I'm sure they're partnering with lots of different companies to, you know, to be those servers. And then that egress server is the thing that has the key to decrypt your request. It goes and makes the request for you, packages it back up, hands it back through Apple encrypted. Apple sends it to you. So they have no idea who you are. And Apple has no idea what you've gone and requested. So there is this, you can you can compromise our servers all you want. You're still not going to get anything valuable, right? You know. So it's kind of like the Tor network with one less hop and and a whole lot more speed, you know, is how I'm looking at the private really. Yeah. Yeah. So it's fun. John, we have another. I know we're past our normal 75 or so minutes here. But do you have another question you want to do you want to take us to before we before we pull the ripcord on this episode? Um, yeah, let me let me jump around a bit here. Because yeah, jump around. Of course. So that I've solved this one. Yeah. Here we go. So I want to do Paul. OK. Great. Because there's something new also. So I wonder if you can help with the question I have about Mac OS Monterey. I just did a fresh install on a new 16 inch MacBook Pro. And after spending a couple of days settling myself in, my enjoyment of my new Mac is being marred by some some of the system animations, specifically the lurching in your face motion of, for example, the bin trash pop up window as well as other animations. I've gone into accessibility and have selected the reduce motion checkbox. But evidently it doesn't apply to this really annoying brush. Look at me. Aren't I fancy braggart of an oh so brazen window animation. Wow. Um, then he talks about back in the day he had a little utility called lion tweaks, which pretty much stopped all this nonsense. So I was like, hmm, how can I solve this? So one, it's weird because on my machine on my MacBook, it doesn't do this. I don't know if it's because it's on the discreet chip set versus the. But anyways, I was like, hmm, you know where I'd look for a solution to this, Dave? I'd look to Onyx. I got kind of nervous because I'm like, do they have Onyx from Monterey yet? And the good news is, yes, they do. I think it's like as of yesterday, you thought so we're recording this on Friday the fifth. I think it came out this week. I didn't see a press release about it. But we had a listener write in Thursday morning saying, I need Onyx from Monterey, and I had just gone and looked and it was like, oh wait, and it's there, like it's problem solved. Your wish has been answered. So Onyx, parameters, MISC options, there's a little check box, show graphic effects when opening a window. I think that'll help. Yeah, that'll do it. Yeah, there's probably a terminal command to do this too. But Onyx makes it so that we don't have to memorize those terminal commands or even have them logged anywhere. That's awesome. That's awesome. Did that work for him? Have you heard back? No. OK, all right. I'm sure it would. Yeah. Have you run into this before, Gary, if you solved it in a different way? I'm not sure what animation this is. Because when I open trash, the window pops open. I mean, I remember a long time ago, right? You'd have, I don't know, if it was a minimized window. It would come back up and all that. But I mean, certainly for opening trash or other things like that, I don't really see. I mean, there's the downloads folder has the little stack that pops up from it. But I mean, you could always change that to, if you change it to list, then it appears as a list. So you don't need to do the little stack spring thing. Yeah, the spring thing. Yeah, exactly. I'm not sure what it is. I mean, I don't really, yeah, maybe it's using a different graphics chipset. And I'm just not seeing that here on my Mac Pro or my M1. Yep. Yep. But yeah. Yeah. I think there's a lot less going on now in terms of these little annoying graphic things than there used to be. There's still some. But you still can't use Misha Control and you go to your next screen and it does the whole slide over, it would be great to be able to have it for some people. I like it because it gives you a visual, like you get this feeling that I've moved over. You've moved, right, sure. Yeah, and it's quick. It's really quick now. But I understand some people's need for having it just switch, like instantly. So it's a lot better than how it was, say, 10 years ago. Yeah, right, yeah. We had way too much of the, let's make this feel like you're in the physical world thing happening. Yeah. But I'm with you on that. And even back then, it was annoying. I found it annoying at times. But it's also super informative. I mean, if we think about, there is what I'll call common knowledge, right? And it's probably the wrong term. But when we started using these things, nothing in the world reacted this way, right? So when you used it on a computer, it was potentially new for lots and lots of people. So having all of that stuff that sort of related to something you already understood may have made it easier to get people here. But now that literally everything's got a touch screen and it's pretty common to use this stuff, if your phone or your computer isn't the only place that you're seeing this. So maybe that's why we can get away, or Apple can get away. I say we, like I make any of these decisions. But we as a people can get away with not including as much of that stuff to make us comfortable understanding what this thing in front of us is trying to tell us it's doing. I don't know. I still have a vision of some of the early Macs, black and white Macs. And I think when you double clicked out of folder, it would kind of. And it was like, OK, that's nice. Not necessary. Not necessary. The one gesture that I always like, I don't know if it's still in there was, if you got your password wrong, it shakes back and forth. And it was like, oh, I know what that means. Yeah, it means no. Now your emoji will actually look frustrated. We'll go like this, you know, squinch the eyes and like look frustrated when you type your password wrong, which is really, really cool. I got to put a me. I still have yet to put a me emoji as my, you know, as my avatar inside Mac OS. I need to do that so that when I screw things up, I can at least enjoy those, those, you know, so, yeah. All right. All right. Well, I think we've we've we've borrowed enough of everyone's time. Thank you folks for spending all of your time with us. Gary, thank you for spending your time with us. This has been fantastic. It's good stuff. It's good stuff. Yeah, of course. Of course. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Folks, make sure you check out our sponsors. Of course, doc.com slash mgg wealthfront.com slash mgg drink trade.com slash mgg and barebones.com for BB edit. John, where can they find us? Mackie got dot com. That'll work. That's a good place to start. No, that's a great place to start. Yeah, Gary, where can people find you? Mack most dot com. Mack most dot com. That's where you're going to find Gary. Absolutely. You make it easy. Well, that's the idea, isn't it? Right? They, you know, they're not here to make it complicated to find us, especially when you need help. And that's kind of what we all do. So it's been an absolute pleasure having you here, Gary. This has been a long time in coming. And I'm so happy we made it work. If you something to say, maybe three some things to say to the audience, Gary, what, what might those be? Don't get caught. Couldn't have said it better ourselves. Thanks again. Thanks for listening. Thanks, Gary. See you next time. Thank you. Bye.