 The Mac Observers' Mac Geek Gab, episode 773 for Monday, August 5th, 2019. Greetings, folks, and welcome to the Mac Observers' Mac Geek Gab, the show where you send in questions, tips, cool stuff found. We take all of that stuff. We mash it together into an agenda. It's like, it's kind of like mashed potatoes, but really it's more like shepherd's pie, right? Because that way you get like all the tasty goodness and it's hearty and fulfilling and it lasts an entire week, which is awesome. This episode is more about tips and cool stuff found than it is questions. Although we've peppered a few questions in there. Sponsors for this episode include Eero at Eero.com slash MGG, PDF Pen 11 from Smile at Smile Software dot com slash podcast and Kaptara at Kaptara dot com slash MGG. We'll talk about each of those URLs in a minute and we'll talk about why you've already visited them in a minute, right? Because you visit them because that helps and then you learn. And if you want to buy something, that's great. If not, that's fine. That's between you and the sponsor. It's our job to wet your whistle as it was. So thank you for visiting. For now, here in Durham, New Hampshire, back in Durham, New Hampshire. I'm Dave Hamilton and here back in fearful Connecticut. This is John F. Brown. Yeah, so thanks to everybody who came out and saw us at MaxDoc last week. Thanks to everybody who listened. I was actually really impressed with how well that that all worked. The audio and everything for Mackeykeb 772 was was actually quite nice. I think the having the the the, you know, the live audience. There was there were there were actually very quite a few cool moments. So for those of you that don't know, we had we talked a little bit about it during the episode, but we had some audio issues, some technology issues, really getting things rolling that day. Now, we tried to use a new mixer, the road podcaster, but it turns out the unit that we got was a dud. So a new one is on its way. And then, of course, my Mac, as I mentioned during the show, restarted because it had to do an update. And so get to wait an extra 20 minutes. But, you know, whatever, we were amongst friends. A fun show was a fun time was had by all throughout the weekend for Mac stock. So yeah, it was good. It was good. I'm ready to get to some tips. We have two tips from two different Scots to start with if if we want to. And and but if there's anything to add to things here, John, you know, certainly, otherwise, we'll jump to Scott number one. Let's jump jump. Scott says, man, this question, we're starting. You know, usually you're supposed to wait, save your hits for the end, right? Like, like, I think of the show, like organizing the agenda like a song list, right, like a set list for a band. You're not supposed to just start with your hit. This might be the hit of the show. You might learn all of the five things that we each try to learn every single time we get together here, just with Scott's little tip. But anyway, this morning, Scott says, I discovered a keyboard shortcut on my Mac completely by accident. It makes perfect sense when you think about it. I just never used it before. In other words, Scott, the epitome of the quick tip, being a shortcut and keystroke fanatic. He says, I hardly ever use the trackpad. I'm really surprised not to mention a little embarrassed that I had been aware unaware of this one. No embarrassment required. It's one of those little step and time savers that I'll use dozens of times a day going forward. Most users, but not me, Scott. Probably know that using a shift option and arrow key will select the previous or next word, depending on whether you use the left arrow or the right arrow. Additionally, using shift command and left arrow or right arrow will select an entire line. I didn't know any of this. There's other ones that I knew that Scott haven't mentioned, but we'll get to those in a minute. What I didn't know is that using the option delete key will delete the previous word and command delete deletes the entire line. Also on an Apple keyboard using option forward delete. That's the key to the left of the end button. If you have the expanded keyboard, the enhanced keyboard that has the numeric keypad, the forward delete key lives above your directional arrow keys on that sort of between the keyboard and the numeric keypad. So using the option forward delete and command forward delete will delete the word or line after the cursor. Wow. He says 30 plus years of using Max and being a keyboard shortcut nut. Who knows how many times I could have used that combo instead of option shift arrow to select a word followed by delete. To remove it, you learn something new every day. Or as Scott says, at least once every 30 years. I like to think we learn five new things a week, John. And I use none. I to say this is not true. I used none of the keystrokes that Scott mentioned. I do now use some of them, but I do routinely use two others. Shift and up arrow. So Scott's keystrokes, we're all talking about left arrow, right arrow. Shift and up arrow or shift and down arrow will select entire lines, either the line before the cursor or after the cursor. And like those I use, oh, man, you know, dozens of times a day, especially while composing emails and that sort of thing. So. You might want to take this segment and re listen to it with with a keyboard in front of you and a nice way to remember that you are able to do that is to go to MacGeekGab.com and sign up for our email list because you will get the show notes and all those little links and reminders and that sort of thing right there and right there in in your email box. So yeah, crazy stuff. Any thoughts on this, John? Yes, good. I'm going to link to a knowledge base article called Surprise Mac keyboard shortcuts. Oh, nice. Cool. And I think they yeah, and they go over some of these plus a whole whole bunch more. Oh, that's good. Yeah, I know about some of those. Yeah, yeah, the trick is the trick is teaching my fingers them, right? So that it just happens without without me having to think about it. But that's, you know, that's one of those things that you just need to that you just need to do, right? Repetition is the key to all of that. In fact, at Macstock and then and then after I was having a conversation with Allison Sheridan, the host of Podfeat or NoCillicast at Podfeat and she was asking, she knows that we're big fans of or I am a big fan of a some sort of clipboard manager. And she was trying to find the killer app for her. Because she she hasn't quite seen the light on this yet, right? But she knows that it can be a valuable thing. You know, there's several of us that talk about them all the time. And, you know, with if you if you can find that killer app for a clipboard manager that truly like the moment you use it the first time you see the benefit, that's great. I am not convinced that there is that app for most people. I think a clipboard manager really shows its benefit once you start using it. And then you can kind of see how life is just different. It's so fundamentally different from just having a single clipboard that it's really hard to explain. And and it's it's one of those things that's sort of frustrating for me when people say, oh, I don't need that. It's like, well, have you tried it? Because if you haven't tried it, I'm not sure you can say that you don't need it. It's sort of like, you know, it kind of reminds me of when broadband started, you know, coming around, right? And and people on modems were like, why would I need an always on internet connection? It's like, right, for your current use case, you wouldn't, right? Because your entire use case is designed around the limitations of the type of connection you have. So for the things that you're doing, there's you don't need an always on internet connection. Of course, as we all know, once you have one and it's higher speed and all of that stuff, you start actually doing different things. And so then you could never imagine going back. It's the same way with a clipboard manager. And it's one of those things where you just, you know, having an open mind and and Allison definitely has an open mind on this. It don't take this as an implication of anything other than that. But it's just one of those things that, you know, it's it's such a fundamental difference having not having a big part of a clipboard manager for me is not having to worry about when I put something on the clipboard. Because when you put something, if you're just using the normal clipboard in Mac OS, when you put something new on the clipboard, that data is gone forever. There's no backup of it. There's no nothing, right? Whereas with a clipboard manager, you get like this. Not only do you get the history that you can obviously choose from. And and that can be really powerful. But you also just get this backup of things that are just there. And and that, too, can be very powerful. So I highly recommend using one. My my clipboard manager of choice is sort of functionally dependent on the fact that I use Keyboard Maestro for so many things that I use Keyboard Maestro's clipboard manager because it's right there. There's I don't need to run a second one. But there if you don't use Keyboard Maestro, well, first of all, that's another one of those things that sort of is a fundamental shift. But if you're not using Keyboard Maestro yet and you want to just try out a clipboard manager, I think there's quite a few available for for free out there that you might want to use. And in the chat room at mackeygub.com slash stream Kiwi Graham says his clipboard tool is called paste. And he uses it a lot for pasting plain text. So. So there you go. Do you use a clipboard manager yet, Mr. Braun? No. OK. I highly encourage you along with everyone else who doesn't use one to to install one and and just start living with it. Because I think the fundamental change is is pretty remarkable for most folks out there. Yeah. Yeah. My clipboard manager is my brain. I just remember everything. So. But your brain is not efficient like like your computer is. Right. I mean, that's like that's the that's the trick is, you know, and being able to just put whatever you want on the clipboard. I am looking for an example of of where I. Where I was using one the other day and shared it with Allison. But I don't know. I can't find it in our text trail here. But oh, yeah, I use. I use authentic, which is a web-based app to to manage and process the audio after we record the show. Right. And so I have to put into there the title and, you know, descriptions slash teaser for the show and several other things that I need to put into authentic into that web page that I also need to put into WordPress, which is what we use to publish the show. And my entire workflow of that is entirely dependent on having a clipboard manager, because what I can do is I can actually just go to whichever one I'm doing first. And and honestly, it depends on on how I do things for Mac. I do WordPress first for the other podcast to do for Small Business Show and for GigGab. I actually do Alphonic first, but it's just entering the basically the same data into two separate web interfaces. Well, the nice part is with a clipboard manager, I can go to one of them and compose and I'm not interrupted by, oh, I just wrote the title. Now I need to go paste the title into these other places where it needs to be. I just write the title. I hit Command A, Command C. Great. It's on my clipboard. I don't need to worry about it. Then I write the text, you know, the blurb of text that you're going to see in like the, you know, the show notes and the feed and all that stuff. And when I'm happy with that, Command A, Command C. Great. Now that's on my clipboard. And there's a lot of things that I can do. Great. Now that's on my clipboard. And there's a few other things too, you know, the length of the show and that sort of thing. And I just, when I put it in Command A, Command C. Great. Now I can go to all the other places I need to put this and I have it in my clipboard history so I can just invoke it from there. So the entire workflow is is fundamentally dependent and created because of a clipboard manager. And it really allows me to maintain focus. And honestly, now that I'm saying this out loud, that is the biggest part. The biggest benefit to me is I don't have to derail myself back and forth with this inefficient shifting of focus because we humans do not multitask. We trick ourselves. We lie to ourselves. We think that we can. But really what we do is we're really good at spotlight focusing. And if we can not distract ourselves, we can be really good at that stuff. So so anyway, so there you go. There's there's my my spiel on clipboard managers. John, I don't know if that I don't know if that changes your mind or it or leads you to any questions about clipboard managers, my friend. No, no, he says, all right. Well, we promised to tip from a second Scott. So we will do that now. The second Scott says after four and a half years, my iPhone six plus died. And he says, thankfully, I was able to get it working long enough to make one last backup using iTunes after attempting to reset the touchscreen entirely stopped working. I replaced it with an iPhone eight plus. He says, which was fine. My original six plus had 64 gigs of storage that was nearly full. I decided to replace it with another 64 gig model and use that as the incentive to offload apps and delete apps that I'm not using. When I plugged the new iPhone eight plus into the iMac to reload from my old backup, I was expecting an error that the phone was full. But to my surprise, after all was said and done, I had 14 gigs of free storage space on my phone. I don't know how Apple is managing storage, but to gain almost 14 gigs on what is effectively a new can pave leads to this not so quick tip. If your device is filling up or seems sluggish or flaky, consider a new can pave and restore from backup. It did not take long with the iPhone eight plus. I don't know if the snappy feeling of the phone is because of the upgraded processor or the cleaned up system or both, but gaining 14 gigs when you're almost full is worth the effort. I'm still going to get rid of some apps, though, Scott says. Thank you for sharing this, Scott. Man, like, yeah, preach on, brother Scott, because this is one of those things that drives me crazy about iOS. We have no way of cleaning up that cruft that builds up and build up it does. Sometimes that happens on our Macs. We've talked a lot about that on the Mac, but we haven't at least not recently. We haven't talked about it on the iPhone. John, have you noticed this, too? Like when you, you know, when you do a restore for your someone else's iPhone, that it just comes around and it's like, man, where did all the space come from? Where was it being used before is my question. Hmm. Now I really haven't. I haven't approached the limits of my. Storage, right? Yeah, it's it's it's it. I wish there was a way to run onyx on my iPhone. And, you know, there's like you can do some stuff with I'm amazing. But, you know, the reality is Apple just doesn't open those doors enough. Well, oftentimes the fastest way to get there is just to nuke and pave and restore. So that's sometimes what you got to do. It's crazy, though, that we have to do this. Yeah, I haven't had to do that in a real long time, which is good. Is it though? Like I'm I'm wondering if perhaps this should just be a routine part of, you know, every six months you back up your iPhone, you nuke it, you restore it. Like I'm I like you're right that generally we don't do those sorts of things unless there's some, you know, very pesty symptom. But I'm wondering if I like I'm going to try this with my phone. My phone's been it's been weird with the battery. It's not full, you know, but it's been weird with the battery and all that. So I think I'm going to maybe I'll wait until after I travel. Now, why not? I'll do it before it's fine. I'll back it up and nuke it and restore it and see how see how it does. Because I like, yeah, I wonder if this is something we need to have on the list of, you know, all the times list. Well, I did have to. Yeah, I did have something weird and cycling power. Should I get down and then turning it on fixed it? But I was in camera and took a picture and it crashed. The camera crashed. I had that happen, too. Just recently, I started having that happen. And I wonder wonder if there's a bug in the latest update. Oh, when was our latest update? Yeah, but to be fair, I haven't I haven't restarted my iPhone in a while. And that's one of those other things, too, that, you know, we don't think about it, right? With our Macs, I feel like it's easier to be aware of, oh, yeah, I need to restart my Mac less so now than it was a decade ago, but still easier for me anyway, to be aware of that than it is with my phone. As soon as you said, oh, I restarted my phone and everything got better. I was like, right, why didn't I think to restart my iPhone? So yeah, it's craziness, man. It's craziness. So I just restarted my phone, you know. Yeah, but having one of the built-in Apple apps crashes is concerning. Yeah, exactly, exactly. Yeah, yeah, I would take a picture. The phone would like lock up and then the camera app would crash. I had it happen several times and the picture would not be taken. Was the picture taken with yours or or did you know? No, OK, same. So same scenario. Yeah, that's fascinating. Huh, interesting, interesting, interesting. All right. Neil has a completely unrelated quick tip, but but I like it. He says, I was troubleshooting my misbehaving Logitech Bluetooth mouse and stupidly turned off Bluetooth, leaving my iMac Pro unable to talk to the Logitech mouse, which was my only mouse. Also, I couldn't talk to the Bluetooth Apple mouse or the Bluetooth Apple keyboard. Of course, I don't have a wired mouse anywhere around. And for reasons I don't know, the Apple mouse would not work when connected via a lightning cable. Of course, with the charging port on the underside of the mouse, it's pretty much unusable anyway. However, the Bluetooth keyboard does work when connected via a lightning cable. So in that situation, I used command space bar to invoke spotlight and then type Bluetooth and launch the Bluetooth file exchange app. This app, when launched, shows a dialogue indicating that Bluetooth is disabled and the button to enable Bluetooth is the default. So hitting return automatically turns Bluetooth back on. This may prove a useful trick for someone else who gets themselves into the same pickle. Thanks for sharing that, Neil. That's that's a good tip, and I like that. But we rely so much on Bluetooth these days that it it's interesting that it's still so easy to disable it. You know, I almost feel like, you know, with all the protections and warnings Apple puts into the OS, John. I'm surprised they haven't put one in that says, wait a minute, you know, the only mouse or the only keyboard you have connected as a Bluetooth keyboard. Are you sure you want to turn off Bluetooth? I feel like that wouldn't be a bad thing. But anyway, Neil's Neil's tip if if you can get the keyboard to work, which lightning cable seems to work with, so that's good. Right, good. Good, good. We have all kinds of cool stuff found to share, John. But first, I would like to share something about our first two sponsors, if that's OK with you. Cool. All right. Listeners to this show know that years ago, we had to solve all of our horrible Wi-Fi problems by like cobbling together multiple routers from different vendors and creating, you know, what we now call this quasi mesh system that was a bear to manage and never really quite work the way we wanted it to work. And then the Euro came into our lives and we are so happy that Euro both exists and that Euro is a sponsor of this episode. Euro blankets our whole homes with fast, reliable Wi-Fi. 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That's E-E-R-O.com.mgg and then code MGG at checkout to get your Euro delivered with free overnight shipping. You have to use the URL to receive the offer. So it's ero.com.mgg and then code MGG or thanks to Euro for sponsoring this episode. We know you love cool stuff found. That's what this episode is all about. What if you're looking for cool stuff found for your business, specifically software to run your business on? Well, good news. That's what Capterra is for. They have over 950,000 reviews of products from real software users so that you can not only discover what you need for your business, you have the information to make an informed decision about what's going to work for you because you can read these reviews from other people. That's the best way to know without having to try them all yourself, of course, and Capterra has taken care of all of that for you. They've got more than 700 specific categories of software. Everything from project management to email marketing, really, whatever you're going to need for your business, they've got you covered and it's free. Did I mention that it's free? Go to Capterra.com slash MGG because it's free. C-A-P-T-E-R-R-A dot com slash MGG, the leading free online resource to help you find the best software solution for your business. Join the millions of people who already use Capterra each month to find the right tools for you. Our thanks to Capterra for sponsoring this episode. All right, John, we have more cool stuff found than we can shake a stick at. So let's start with Aaron, shall we? Surely. Nicely done. Aaron says he was having RAM problems and he uses Firefox as his default browser. His RAM problems were related to having many, many tabs open. He found a piece of software, a plugin for Firefox called Autotab Discard, which keeps idle tabs from consuming RAM while Firefox is still open. I think Safari tries to do this by default now as of like Safari 12, I believe. But but if you're not using Safari and you're using Firefox, that's that's a good little thing to have. So thanks for sharing that, Aaron. Good stuff. Yeah, John, good. Thoughts, thoughts before we move on. Yeah, I. Sometimes my tabs get out of control. Do you I'm curious about that. Do you like actively go through and manage them or do you just like punt and close them all at once? Yeah, when when when it gets to be too much, I just close them. Yeah, OK. Yeah. Well, I ask because I'm curious how the there's a feature in iOS and iPad OS 13 where when the first time you start to close multiple tabs, the OS will chime in and say, hey, I can now do that automatically for you. And it can do it after like a day or a week or a month, I think even. And so I'm just curious how well that's going to be received by people. Like, I know some folks get really finicky if their tabs get lost because they use it as a type of a backup or or reading list type thing or something like that. So I'm just I'm just curious. I mean, we all use our computers differently, which is which is the beauty of it. Right. So. All right. Tannel writes in and says, I know that Devon think has come up a few times on MGG. They have now released version 3.0 public beta, which is now free to use for the entire beta testing period. So it's a good time to test the more expensive pro and server versions if you're at all interested. And of course, Tannel gave us a link, which we will put in the show notes. This is why you want to be subscribed to that email, folks, because there's lots and lots of stuff right there. Let's see, Andrew has any thoughts on that, John, before we before we move on. People may be like, what is it? Oh, hey, that's a good question. Yeah, that's right. Let's see what they say. Devon think keeps your documents in easy to back up databases and presents them to you in a variety of ways. OK. That's a that's a bad. Yeah, I mean, I guess that's true. It's it's a I'm not sure their description. I'm not sure I would I would describe it that way. It's it's, you know, a note and and idea organizing app, I think. You just but you can you can throw anything you want in there kind of thing. So there you go. Yeah, yeah, I would I mean what you said is accurate. I don't know if that's like if it describes the use case for people, right? You have stuff that you find you throw it in there like, you know, your tabs and things and stuff you download, go throw it into Devon things so that you can sort of organize it and keep it, you know, somewhere as opposed to just loose on your desktop or whatever. So yeah, so yeah, go check out that public beta. Good. Thank you, Tana. Good stuff. And thanks, John, for reminding us that we need to tell people what things actually do. It's good. So Andrew has something that he wants to tell us what it does. And we mentioned or he says you spoke last week of traveling with microphones and so on for your live show. He says, I've got a Sennheiser PC seven USB headset that I use for tech support work I used to do. He says it sells for less than $50. I used he says people used to comment on the quality of the audio that I had during my tech support sessions. He says later I was a candidate for elections here in Australia and took to using it for live to air interviews and for recording audio grabs for use by radio news. It was more than good for both. I liked it for this purpose as it kept the mic a consistent distance from my mouth. It also has a volume thumbnail, thumb wheel and an on off switch and folds up really well for travel. It says and it works with the iPhone and iPad with Apple's USB to lightning adapter. So we'll put a link to that in the show notes. That's a great one that that might I'm always hesitant like for for podcasting to have a mic that is right up on anyone's mouth because most people don't stop to think that like breathing or sniffling or any of those things will, you know, also be captured by the microphone. Whereas most people do, you know, sort of naturally back away from a microphone when they're when they're doing those things. So it's, you know, but but as you heard me mention to my friend and co-host here, John F. Brown, a couple of times, you know, you got to remember to stay up on the mic for podcasting too. So yeah, it's and not something that packs up nice for travel and doesn't need a stand, not such a bad idea. So yeah, thoughts on any of that, John? Oh, yeah, I got that little stand. You got me. Oh, good. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, Guy Cyril from the My Mac podcast loaned us two of his portable microphone stands or travel microphone stands, I should say, and and they allow the mic to get higher than we would want when sitting on a tabletop, which super great. I will put Dave and John's new travel mic stands in the show. And I promise I will add a link to that before I publish the show notes and send out the email, because they were they were like, I mean, it was like 15 bucks or something and it's a great stand. So yeah, so there you go. Versus the cheap little, tiny little stand, the mic low end mics come with. Well, they're not low end mics. I mean, those audio technicas that we use, they're they're low cost microphones ish, right? They're low cost. Yeah, we use I mean, sort of. They're not that low cost. The the AT 2005 USB is what we generally use for travel and is what we used last week during the show. And I think they sound fantastic, you know, especially given all the scenario and all the noise in the room and everything. I think they do a really good job. And what's also cool about them is they are both USB and XLR. So you can use them with a traditional like mixer with XLR inputs, which is your sort of a normal microphone cable, or you can USB direct into your laptop, which is awesome. But, you know, and I think they're like 60, some of the somewhere between 65 and $80 now used to be able to get them for like 30 or 40, but the price went up because they realized people love these things. But it comes with a it's a functional stand, but it's short. You've probably seen me post, if you've looked on Twitter over the years, you've seen me like get really creative and use like a paper towel roll or a water bottle to, you know, or an ice bucket in a hotel room to elevate the base of the stand up high enough so that I'm not, you know, leaning over the desk. But yeah. Yeah, so we'll put a link to that in the show notes, too. Why not? Hey, while we're talking about gear that we've used, anybody who's listened to this show for a little while knows that I am both a big fan of and a regular user of Sonos' gear for my in-home audio and and not just music listening or podcast listening, but also for my home theater and all of that stuff, they like they do a fantastic job. They've never been inexpensive. You know, they're certainly one of those. You get what you pay for brands. And they partnered up with Ikea and have put speakers into different shaped and different form factored things with Ikea. And they just launched their sim or Ikea just launched what they call their symphonic brand, S Y M F O N I S K because Ikea. And there are two units in this. One is a bookshelf speaker and the other is like a table lamp with a speaker in the like bulb base of the lamp. I'm going to be honest. What the price of so the price of these, I'll get to my thoughts about them. I don't want to bury the lead here on the bookshelf speaker. It's ninety nine bucks. This is a fully airplay to. Fully sonos. Decent sounding speaker for ninety nine dollars. This is unheard of, folks. This has never happened before. It's very cool. It sounds very good, especially for a ninety nine dollar speaker. Go try to find an airplay to capable speaker for that price. And you probably could, but you're not going to find them for much less than that. And you're definitely not going to find one that can either add to or be the beginning of your sonos system. This changes everything to steal a term from the wise people. This democratizes, you know, the technology here no longer do you, you know, like this is something that a college apartment could have for ninety nine bucks. And yeah, you could buy two of these and pair them together into a stereo pair. You could even pair them with a sonos sub. That starts to get a little interesting, you know, from a price scenario. But you but it's doable, right? These are fully fledged sonos devices. Airplay to capable so you can stream to them from your Mac or your iPhone or whatever. Ninety nine bucks. The table lamp sounds a little bit better. It's got a little more low end. But these, you know, the bookshelf speakers are good. The table lamp sounds like a sonos play one. Our sonos one, I should say. It is not a sonos one. It is the, you know, symphonic table lamp. So it can be paired with other symphonic table lamps, but not with a sonos one. It can be grouped with a sonos one, though. So if you have room, you know, audio in multiple rooms, that's totally fine. But if you want to do a stereo pair, it's got to be two of the exact same model speakers can be different colors. That's the only difference and they come in black and white. Really, the lamp is weird, though, because while the speaker is, you know, fully addressable via Wi-Fi and all of that stuff. The lamp is a oddly sized LED. It's not your normal, like, you know, standard US socket for the lamp. So you've got to buy a custom bulb. It can only be an LED bulb. And there's a switch on it that turns the lamp on or off. So you could buy one of IKEA's. I think it's their trod-free bulbs or something to put in this lamp. And then that would also connect to your Wi-Fi and be its own smart lamp. But the lamp itself is just a lamp. And then the smart part of it is the speaker, also AirPlay 2 and all that stuff. And also 179 bucks, which is, you know, very aggressively priced, especially compared to other sonos stuff out there. So and you can use two of them paired together so you could use those as like, you know, for example, if you wanted to use those as rear speakers in your living room and, you know, have lamps behind your couch or whatever, like this now starts to become a thing. But 99 bucks for that bookshelf speaker leaves no questions for me. That is an easy purchase for pretty much anyone that wants to, like I said, start or add to their sonos system or just wants a good AirPlay 2 speaker. So cool stuff found for sure. That very cool. And this partnership with IKEA is smart for sonos. You know, I wondered when they became a public company, what would happen? Would they, you know, become risk averse right now? They've got shareholders, you know, public shareholders that they they're accountable to and all that stuff. But this partnership with IKEA lets them experiment with some things without diluting the sonos brand, right? Because this is an IKEA. These are both IKEA products, not sonos products, although they have sonos's brand name right there on the front. But it is not sold by sonos. So sonos doesn't sell a ninety nine dollar speaker. IKEA does, right? Sonos doesn't sell a speaker with a cloth grill that's removable. IKEA does, you know, very cool, very smart, allows them to sort of market test without having to it's this is good stuff. It's fun. I like this stuff, John. Any thoughts, any questions on this, Mr. Braun? No, no, OK. While we're on the subject of sonos, I said there were a few questions and Raymond has one. He says, I currently airplay to my amp, my sonos amp, and would like to use the play three as well simultaneously so I could have music in the main room and music in a remote area like a gazebo, perhaps says I have a sonos play three in a sonos connect. Is it possible to airplay to the sonos play three? It appears that it's not possible via the sonos connect and found that the play three does not appear to support airplay two. Besides purchasing an airplay to compliant sonos device, is there any way to do airplay to a sonos play three? Possibly with an adapter or a Cluj or something. So no, the short version is that the airplay two is not well that the sonos play three, which is the oldest speaker in their lineup right now, is not a an airplay two speaker. However, if you have an airplay two capable sonos speaker like one of these symphonisks or any other of the newer speakers that are airplay two compatible from sonos and most of them are anything new from sonos is but the the sonos one is the I think the new play five is a link to a list. The play bar and the beam so the beam is the play bass is the play bar may not be. But I'll put a link. It has to do with when they changed hardware inside the speakers. But if you have like, let's say you spent ninety nine bucks, you went and bought one of these symphonis bookshelf speakers and you airplayed from your phone to that, you could then group the play three to that speaker and it would get your airplay music. So that definitely works. In fact, I've done it with exactly that. I have a pair of play threes in the kitchen and I have the symphonisk in another room and I airplayed and did exactly that and it worked just fine. If you're willing to do some hacking. Well, hacking is sort of the wrong word. But there is a piece of software that can run on your Mac called Air Sonos. And I will put a link to that in the show notes. That essentially creates an airplay gateway on your Mac for. Sonos devices so you can airplay to Sonos devices that don't support airplay. It is not for the overly faint of heart, although setting it up really isn't all that difficult. In fact, Jason Snell did a great article over on his Six Colors blog and that I'll link to because it talks through the steps and it's really not all that scary. So I'll link to that. I don't know if you could run. You probably could run Air Sonos on like a Docker container. I don't see off the top of my head. I don't see any reason why you couldn't do that. And if you could do that, then if you have a Synology Disk Station, you could do that too. Oh, you doing any stuff in Docker, Mr. Braun? No, no, I thought you were. No, OK. Now, I did their VM, which is kind of neat. So oh, running a virtual machine on your Synology. Mm hmm. And what kind of virtual machine did you run? Windows 7. Oh, OK. And and you connect to your browser? Like, how's that work? Uh, you connect. Yeah, through the browser. And you. You know, I loaded up a VM file and recognized that I had to jump through some hoops to do that, though. OK. But that's because you you were coming with a VM file from a different like you didn't set it up natively on the Synology. You built your VM with some other like Mac. It was a it was a Parallels VM. And then I actually had to run to convert it to a format that they like. I actually had to run a tool from. Yeah, from VMware converted into the format that that the Synology then likes. That makes sense. Yeah, OK. But once you did that, then you were able to take that that same VM. And you truly just interact with it. I've never done this. You have a DS, what, 918 plus and I have the 1019 plus. So same CPU and capabilities. I suppose I could I know I could do this, but I've just never done it. So you like you get a browser window that is your Windows desktop sitting over there on that other machine. Is that really? And you can like type and click and do all the things that you could do on Windows. Can Windows? Yeah. That's actually kind of cool. Huh. Yeah. I mean, it's when I did the performance benchmark, you know, it didn't come in as a. You know, a high performance, but. Yeah, of course. You know, I mean, you're running Windows on a NAS. I mean. Yeah, right. Right. Yeah. Yeah, it's right. Those NASs, at least the Synology CPUs are not overly powerful for this in those types of units. Right. Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, my other one, the yeah, it won't even. It's not even an option on the other one because it has a. On my. What is 7 713 plus that doesn't have enough room to. Right. Right. Right. Run it again. Huh. Fascinating, man. Yeah, I got to try this. I got to play with that. That's pretty cool. Huh. I like it. All right. We have a lot more cool stuff found and then some more quick tips and keeping an eye on the time. But I do want to take a minute and talk about our next sponsor, which is PDF pen from the good folks at Smile. In fact, if you visit Smile Software dot com slash podcast, that's where they want us to send you. But I actually want to send you there because right at the top of that page is a video narrated by someone near and dear to all of our hearts. Jeff Gamut used to work here for us at Mac Observer, did our daily observations podcast for years, also was our managing editor and many other things. Now is working at Smile, doing some fantastic work for them. This being one of those things. And he walks through many of the new features in three and a half minutes. He walks through how to use how to invoke and how to use split view mode for editing in PDF Pen 11, how to use the new font bar for expressive font control. This is amazing. Like I've used PDF pen for years. I have PDF Pen 11 watching this video. I was blown away. It's like, whoa, split view mode is awesome to be able to have like multiple pages from the same PDF up so that I can sort of compare and contrast and I can see how changes are going to happen and all of that stuff. It's great. The font bar. I've always been knowing you can edit text in a PDF. What I didn't know was that you could change the font type and all that stuff. Like like this is how like how you learn, right? PDF Pen will use the continuity camera, which means if you want to add something to your PDF, you can add it directly from your iPhone, like you're on your Mac. You go to, you know, add from or import from continuity camera. You then pick up your phone. The camera is live. You take the picture of whatever you want to scan and boom, it puts it right in there. You can add page number locations in a customized way. Like I said, three and a half minutes, three hours and 50 seconds, three hours. No, three minutes and 50 seconds will get you there. And you can learn how to do all of this and more in PDF Pen 11. Go smilesoftware.com slash podcast. This is where you're going to learn about all the great new things you can do, even though you're already a PDF Pen user. Of course, if you're not also a good place to go. Smilesoftware.com slash podcast. You got to check it out and our thanks to Smile for sponsoring this episode. All right, John, more cool stuff found. Ready? No. No. Yes. Oh, OK. Good. Joseph B. P. Says, I travel a lot with my MacBook Pro and dealing with the winding of the power cord is always a hassle, says I found this cool device at fusereal.com called the Sidewinder that keeps my cord wound and nice and flat for easy slipping into my computer bag. So he sent us a thing. It's like 30 bucks or maybe less. And it's just a creative way to keep the cord and everything just like totally coiled the right way and in your bag and as flat as it can be with the charger right there. So it's awesome. So thank you, Joseph B. P. Good stuff. Yeah. Mr. Braun. Nice. Good. I have four things to share that all came from watching Brett Terpstra's presentation on I mean, he's just an efficiency kind of person. And he gave a great little presentation at MaxDoc last weekend. And I was furiously writing down or logging, capturing these these cool stuffs found the first one is called Hook. And Hook is from CogsciApps.com. And and hook or you actually just go to HookProductivity.com is where you want to go. Hook supply with what here's what they say about it. And I think this description works. It supplies the missing links in Mac OS so you can instantly access documents that are relevant to one another. You can take two things, two documents or a web page and a document. And if they if in your brain, they are somehow linked together. Hook is the tool that you can use to tell your computer they are linked together. So when you're going out and doing research on something, you know, Brett used it in the context of writing a blog post where he does some research first and then goes and creates the you know, the post. And he wants to have all of this stuff sort of, you know, the unrelated stuff as it exists naturally. But in the context of what he's doing, it is going to be related. And Hook is this very, very cool app that lets you link these things together so you don't have to rely on your memory because our memories are flawed, our memories are like there's your brain is not as good as a computer at remembering things. And the faster we humans accept that fact and just embrace that the computer can do these things for us to better off we each individually. And then, of course, as humanity are. This is one of those things that the computer can do really well. And Hook adds a feature that I've never really seen before. Very, very cool. So you just link information together. So that's that's the first one that that jumped out at me, Mr. Braun, any any thoughts on that one before I before I move on? No, OK. The next one that that he mentioned is called Search Link, potentially not as useful to as many people. But if you're doing things where you're logging stuff, especially if you're someone that uses Markdown, which WordPress will support, Search Link is it adds itself as a system service in Mac OS and will search multiple services and then generate a Markdown styled link for what it finds. You type in a phrase, you invoke this system service, which you can do with a mouse click or you can assign a keyboard shortcut to it, of course, and then it will go and find you like, you know, the link that Google would give you for that for that topic. It's a lot like if you've ever used Google Docs, which we use for the show notes. What's really cool about Google Docs is you get to type in whatever you want, like you could type in Search Link and then you highlight the text and instead of going to another window and searching in Google and then getting distracted by all of the things that you see, it just shows you as soon as you hit, you know, Command K in Google Docs to add a link to something. It shows you the Google search results for that piece of text. You can actually add to the text just for the the the purposes of searching and narrowing down your search. Then you find your link, you hit enter and boom, it's added right there. I can do this while I'm talking to you because it's not a distracting thing. Search Link adds this capability to everything in Mac OS and lets you pick your search engine so you certainly could use Google. But I think it also works with like DuckDuckGo and search engines that maybe aren't as creepy as Google might be. But it can also search the Mac App Store, Wikipedia, a dictionary link, Bing, iTunes, Amazon product searches, very, very cool. And it keeps you from getting distracted by those things. You just boom, you do it and you're done. So Search Link, handy. This is what we love Brett Terpster for. There's two more. Is that OK, John, or do you have anything to add to Search Link here? Keep rolling. Rolling I shall. So the next one is one that Brett created called URL Preview. And he is a distractible person. He knows this about himself, so he built himself a tool. And URL Preview is a system extension. And when you have a URL, you can use it as the thing that will show you where that URL will go, but doesn't allow any clicking in the pop up window. So the temptation for distraction is eliminated. You just get to see where does the URL go? And then you close it very handy, very efficient, which we like. So these are good things, John. Did you see Brett's talk? Were you in there for that? I thought you I think you were next to me. Yeah, yeah. The the last one on this list is something that Matthew Palmer created. We've mentioned some of Matthew's tools before. We're big fans of of something to manage our menu bar. And we talk about bartender a lot on this show. Brett showed us something that Matthew Palmer created at Matthew Palmer net called vanilla, which hides your menu bar icons in a different way. And in some ways, it's arguably more efficient than the way bartender works because bartender, essentially, you have your main bar and then an alternate bar. And where that can be frustrating is when something's not in your main bar and you click to display the alternate bar, you can't see what was in your main bar unless you set it as something that's always available in both bars. But that can be sort of frustrating if you wanted to use something in your menu bar and then use something else and you're like, oh, I got to click again. With this, it hides some or shows all with vanilla. So it's it's quite a bit simpler in that sense. And and I like this idea. So so there you go. This is good. Yeah. Right, John. Yes. Right. Right. Then one last thing that I've had actually floating for a couple of weeks here. Pixelmator is one of my favorite apps to use. It's way easier than any like Photoshop or anything like that. I just find it super easy to wrap my head around. And I can I'm not an I'm not a photo editor kind of person, but I wind up needing to do a lot of image creation or image manipulation. You know, for like the images that will be at the top of the part of the show or whatever, you know, those kinds of things I need to create. And Photoshop is like horrible for me for that pixelmator I love. Now Pixelmator Pro 1.4 adds to their it adds an extension that lets you get all of that functionality right in the photos app. So that's pretty cool. You can just, you know, boom, it's a photos extension. You get to go. So I'm always excited to see that kind of thing happen, especially with one of my favorite apps. So there you go. Good, Mr. Braun, any thoughts about any of this stuff? Any cool stuff founds on on your list? Yes. Good. Yeah, I'm I don't have to think how to quantify this. All right, I like I like things that start that way. That means we're going to it's going to be interesting. I'll just spit it out. OK. We saw this at CES and they set me up with with the unit to look at. And it's called Quilt K W I L T. OK. If you want to check them out, you can go to my quilt dot com. What is it you may ask? And if I had to encapsulate what it is, it's your own personal media cloud. OK. So so another twist on the private cloud concept that that we've sort of been discussing for years on the show here, right? Another another contender. Oh, that's yeah. And these guys did a it links to all sorts of different things. So here's the gist. So it's a box and you can pull your media. It's geared towards pictures and movies, but you can put any type of document on it. So you provide your own drive and your own storage so you can have as much as you want. The unit they gave me actually came with a small USB stick to start with, but you can plug in more drives. So it has an SD card slot. So you can pull pull stuff off of those, which are typically you. Most cameras use use SD cards. You can plug a USB drive in it and pull things off of that. You set up a cloud account. I actually sent you a while ago a link. So you set up an account with them. Yeah, right. Yeah. And I sent you a link. So it actually redirected. So created a shared link where I could highlight photos that are stored on this device. And that's really. Yeah, it does. So it's kind of purpose built private cloud, so perhaps a little easier to get started with than, for example, buying a disk station where you could certainly do all of this stuff. But you're more on your own in terms of getting it up and running. Whereas the quilt is it only does this and here you go. Right. But there's some other neat things you can do, too. So so it has an app that you run on on iOS. And you can use that to manage, you know, you can copy photos from your iPhone. And you can also it also links to let's see here, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Flickr, Google Photos, PhotoBucket, Tumblr, and it also links to various cloud services if you do that. So, for example, I, you know, have it, I can see my Facebook and my Instagram media posts as well. Oh, that's interesting. Oh, and will it slurp those back down to your device as like a local backup or something? No, as far as I can tell, no. So so it it provides so you can provide a pointer or a shared link to your stuff on on the other platforms. Oh, I see. Oh, it goes the other way. Got it. Got it. Got it. OK. Huh? Right. Yeah, that that I scratch my head over a bit. It's like is it really pulling my so it's not really as far as I can tell, it's not copying your media from Facebook or Instagram or whatever, but it can see it and then you can again give somebody a link. That's cool. Wow. Yeah, it really what else does it have? Oh, you can actually use the device itself so that they they had a bug where it didn't initially work, but it also has an HDMI port. So you can actually use it to you can hook a screen up to it and then have it display via the app something on your monitor too. Isn't that kind of neat? So is it would you could you put a movie on there and play that? Right. I mean, that's what it looks like. It's got video out. There's three models of this, right? From 69 to 149 and all of them say they can do 4K at 60 frames a second. So, huh? Yeah, and the difference between the two. So the quilt, so this is something new, I guess. So the quilt go on the quilt too. So that's, I would say their low end model has I think USB 2 instead of USB 3 and it's only 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi instead of 5. OK. So they sent me the three, which is the high end one. I'm thinking if you're doing video, maybe you want to opt for the for the three instead of the two. Yeah, I would think that's the only situation where you need a little more. You're just going to be doing pictures and just displaying things. Then I think the two probably would would do you well. Huh, that's pretty cool, man. Yeah, but it does. I feel like I'm not. I'm not I'm doing a disservice to him by not saying everything it does. I mean, you can it'll display, you know, like here I'm looking, you know, there's different views here, like, for example, it shows, oh, well, you know, here are some pictures that you took in Europe on here, some of you took in North America so it can peek into the media as well. Got it. Let you view it in different ways. Oh, that's either either by date, by location. What else? Yeah, you can again link to your your cloud services and then even do like a custom, like, for example, here they have a search feature and it says, oh, you can combine dates and places for your search. For example, you can request photos from San Francisco May 2015. Oh, that's cool. So it really lets you so it really lets you organize and search through your media and also freeze up, you know, so you can copy stuff off of your media and so it can free up space on your other memory devices. Oh, right. Yeah, of course. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Huh, cool. That's great. That's great. Oh, that's been and for that price, that's that's pretty good. I like it. Cool. How have you have you put any number like a significant number of pictures on there? I'm curious how long it takes to to like do that processing to get you to the point where you could say find me pictures from, you know, San Francisco in May of 2015 or, you know, or whatever. Because I've used like Synology's moments, you know, which does all of that. And perhaps more, you know, maybe the quilt does this too, but it'll like do face detection. And, you know, if you say, find me all the pictures I took of cats, like it'll do all of that locally on your, you know, on your distation. But it took, you know, a couple of days putting a large photo library at it, you know, to to finally get through all of that stuff. And then the incremental stuff happens pretty quickly. But so I'm just curious how, you know, how the CPU in the in the quilt takes advantage of that. But, you know, that's pretty good. Yeah, I don't I don't think they're yeah, I mean, they're they're looking at the, you know, either the location data that's embedded in a lot of photos or they're, you know, they also know some other things. They're just indexing metadata. Got it. Got it. OK, so that's that's a little more that's a little simpler. Got it. Oh, yeah. So that probably happens pretty quickly. Huh? Yeah. So, you know, if you want if you want flexibility in dealing with your media and providing your own private cloud. So, you know, someone else is fiddling with your your content. Yeah. Then you may want to check these guys out. They give you everything that you need in the box. You know, they give you a they even included an HDMI cable, which is like, oh, well, that's that's nice. Right. Right. Right. Oh, that's good. Yeah. Yeah. Cool. That's great, man. Sweet. Um, all right. We have some APFS stuff to talk about, John. It's time. We started talking a little bit about APFS and Fusion Drives in the last episode when listener Brian, an attendee, Brian, asked a question about how he took the few what he said was he took the Fusion Drive out of a Mac Mini and was trying to, you know, do something different with it externally and was having some trouble. And Charles and San Jose happened to be in the room and and wrote in last week's show, Brian had this mini where he removed the one terabyte Fusion Drive and put it in an external case. He found after reformatting it that it was stuck at 128 gigs. The details didn't add up, Charles says. So I grabbed Brian and asked extra questions after the show ended. Fusion Drives have two parts, a small SSD and a large hard drive. What Brian had done was to remove only the SSD part. The one terabyte hard drive is still inside his Mac Mini underneath the logic board, where he didn't see it. Once the SSD drive was out of the Mac Mini, it still said it was a one point one terabyte Fusion because Fusion keeps its entire file directory on the SSD. But the Mac marked it as damaged because the hard drive part was now missing. After reformatting it, the drive correctly reports itself as a 128 gig SSD only. It's perfectly usable with HFS plus or APFS formatting, but that's all he has. The good news is that the original one terabyte hard drive is still in the Mac Mini. It's currently unreadable since it was the back half of a Fusion Drive and it's missing the front half with the directory. Discutility can reformat that to a fully functioning one terabyte hard drive in HFS plus or APFS to go with his newly installed two terabyte solid state drive. Technically, Brian can fuse the one terabyte hard drive and his new two terabyte SSD together, but it's a very unsupported configuration and strange crashes or data corruption could result better to keep them as separate internal volumes. So yeah, thank you for that. That's that that was the bit of confusion that sort of left the question mark hanging was that he did not extract. There is no such thing as a physical Fusion Drive. It is, as Charles points out, two drives, an SSD and a hard drive. And then via software, they are fused together in that sense. And Mac OS then sees them as one thing. And Mac OS actually sees them as two separate things. Core storage fuses them together. And to you, Mac OS presents one thing. So thank you for that, Charles. Great stuff. Thoughts on this, John? Well, I didn't know they had the drive from you. Well, I don't I don't know that it's intentionally hidden. I think it's just, you know, they put it where they could put it, right? They put the SSD here and the the rotational drive there. And Brian saw the SSD and yanked it out. And that was the end of that. So, yeah, yeah, it's good. Any anything else on that, Mr. Brown? OK, in on the topic of taking an APFS drive and returning it to APFS, which also came up. Listener Andrew provides a great or a link to a great blog post actually over at the World Computing at their blog.maxsales.com about how to revert back from APFS to HFS Plus. And it's it's there's a few steps that you need to take to make sure that you are not just creating an HFS Plus container inside of APFS. And if you want to get to just true, you know, HFS Plus with no remnants of APFS, there's a couple of steps you need to take. And and this post takes care of that for you or teaches you how to do that. So thank you for that, Andrew. Very, very good stuff. On still on the topic of APFS. Tom wrote with an interesting thing. John, he says, I've been using carbon copy cloner for many years to create a bootable clone of my main hard drive. I have an iMac Retina 5K from 2015 running Mojave. In the past, I've used carbon copy cloner to create the clone to an external WD USB hard drive formatted in HFS Plus. I end up with a clone of my internal drive and, of course, it's bootable. Recently, I decided to format the external as APFS to match the formatting of my internal drive. I now have ended up with a clone that is not bootable, even though I can select it as bootable in System Preferences Startup Disk. Is this an expected limitation? A booting from a USB drive with Mojave. He says, I thought I would just go back and reformat it with HFS Plus, but he needed the link that that Andrew provided, which we gave to him. He says, I also have an external GTEC drive that with a Thunderbolt interface, if I move things around and use the Thunderbolt drive for APFS, would I expect that to be bootable? So you should be able to boot from Mojave on an external drive that is APFS formatted. So either there's something wonky going on with the drive or the way that it was formatted or the way that it was, you know, System Preferences sort of blesses the boot volume in a way. And maybe what's happening is it's not spinning up fast enough and the machine's timing out and going to the next boot drive that it sees, which is what Mac OS or what a Mac will do. And and and actually I went through some of this with Tom and and it turns out that it was a timing thing. And once he got it to boot once, I think then it then it was booting fine. So maybe there was just something about the way the drive was was set up that needed needed a little extra time to get to get rolling, you can sort of force your Mac to wait for you to tell it which drive to boot from by holding down, I believe it's just option, right? When the Mac starts starts up, it will show you all of your bootable volumes slash partitions and just wait for the for the one you want. It might take a little longer than some of the others. And then hopefully you can choose it and boot from there. Any thoughts on that, Mr. Brown? Yeah, they call that startup manager. Startup manager. Thank you. Yeah, there you go. Yeah. And it is option, right? Correct. Oh, let's see. Stronger. Pretty sure option key. Yeah, OK. All right, cool. Cool. Oh, all right. Well, let's see. So let's go to let's go to Jed. Jed's actually got it's hard drive related. So we'll take it in this segment. He says. I have 10 plus archived hard drives with older, but kind of important stuff. Important enough to keep for years. I have looked for a good catalog type program to keep track of what's on those drives. I've tried a few over the years, but many set themselves up to run all the time, which is a bit overkill. And even if you disable, I've found that every time you run the app, it resets itself to run on startup and continuously, etc. So I used to just take a screenshot of the directory and maybe keep that with the drive name somewhere, maybe to Dropbox or Evernote or whatever, and then print that out to put with the drive. But there has to be a better solution. So yeah, there's one that I used years ago called Disk Catalog Maker at diskcatalogmaker.com. It is up to date for Mojave. I don't know if the current version wants to run all the time. It might, because I think a lot of these things are built for with the idea that you're going to be putting in lots of different sort of external media, either flash drives or optical media or something like that, where you just want it to run and keep catalogs so that you can find things in its one searchable database. But but. You can download a trial from diskcatalogmaker.com and check it out. John, do you have any any thoughts on ideas for Jed for indexing his hard drives? No. OK. All right. Yeah, we'll put a link to that one in the show notes. If anybody has an idea of feedback at Mackeygov.com, we would love to hear it. We'd love it. I'm not sure I heard you right. Did you say feedback at Mackeygov.com? I did. I said feedback at Mackeygov.com. Absolutely. Yeah, we'd love to we'd love to we love geek challenges, because that way we get to sort of, you know, we all get to learn together. That's that's a good thing. Um, oh, yeah. A nice little follow up from show 771. We had a geek challenge speaking of where we were actually a listener was asking, is there a way to have to start editing video on iOS and then also, you know, kind of finish it on the Mac? And other than iMovie, I guess we had a couple of options that we threw out. And listener Greg says that Adobe's Premiere Pro can now open and edit files that were created in iOS on Adobe's Rush projects. And he thinks that might be what listener Mike was looking for. So we will put that in the show notes because it's what we do. But that's pretty cool. I like that idea. It's it makes sense to start editing, you know, while you're mobile and then sort of, you know, put the project together back on your Mac when you've got the bigger screen and, you know, keyboard and mouse and more things conducive to editing and that sort of thing. Oh, we have lots of tips that we're not going to get to. But that's normal. No problems there. There's one question that we got, John, that I kind of want to talk a little bit about as we as we sail out of this episode. But the first thing or the next thing I want to do is I want to thank all of our premium listeners whose contributions came in over the last couple of weeks. And so we will start with while there was a one time contribution from Ken in California for 50 bucks. So thank you so much for that, Ken. Again, you can find out about all of this at MacGeekUp.com slash premium and it really is there for those of you that want to support us directly, certainly listening to the show, as I said at the beginning, you know, visiting our sponsors and learning about their products, whether you buy or not, as I always say, that's between you and them. We're not part of that. But certainly it's our job to, you know, build awareness. And if part of that awareness gets you to go and visit their website, that's actually a great thing that helps sending in your questions. All of that stuff really, really, really helps us. But if you want to do more, MacGeekUp.com slash premium is what we've created for you. So on the monthly ten dollar plan, Mike from Iowa, Mark from Florida, Racer in Utah, Dave from Chicago, Scott from Illinois, Clive from West Sussex, Jeff from Indiana, Joseph from Georgia, Robert from Alabama, Frederick from Tennessee, Gary from Babylon, Tony from San Francisco, Elizabeth from Virginia, Robert from Clearwater, Steven from Costa Mesa, Joan from Sarasota, Ev the Nerd, Olga from Bellevue, Jason from Charlestown, Steven from Plainfield, Ward from Mesa, Ken from New South Wales and Nick from Mount Clemens. Thanks to all of you on the monthly ten dollar plan. And on the twenty five dollar by annual plan, we have Tony C. and Michael E, both of whom joined that program before we needed to capture addresses so we don't know where you're from and that's OK. Michael from Rochester, Scott from California, who is on his own custom created, which you can do on the website. You don't need our help, but he created a $60 every six month plan. So that's the ten dollar a month plan, but broken into two annual payments, which is which is great. Actually, it saves us the per transaction fee. So thanks for that, Scott. Mark from Massachusetts, Brett from Florida, Ralph from Massachusetts, Tim from Indiana, William from Kentucky, Dionysio from Oakland, Joe from Wisconsin, Mike from West Victoria, Dan Bach, the math jock, Jim from Virginia and David from Seabrook. Thanks to all of you as well. All right, John, now what do you have to say about Ken? Oh, did I lose Mr. Braun? No, no. Oh, come here. All right, good. Let me get him. Let me get him up here. OK, Ken brings up an interesting topic here. So Ken says that he has a master's in electronic engineering, which is cool. We are radiated by lots of stuff like Wi-Fi, cell phones, cell towers, electricity, sunlight, radio waves, x-rays, heat, alpha, beta, gamma, ionizing radiation and infrared. So I wonder, can some devices that have batteries in them be charged with those that radiate? Am I crazy? No, he's not crazy. No. I mean, he might be crazy, but this is not an indication of that. That's right. And I've got a bit of doubly knowledge myself and have experimented with various forms of energy that he talked about there, mostly RF. And I think we're already doing it, Dave. She is a great example of, I would think, think she is inductive energy. OK, yeah, right, right, right. Yep. Yeah. But yeah, so that's inductive with many phones. Now, I also saw it, CES, Dave. I did see them use infrared to power things, which is kind of interesting. Yeah, I was like running a little train or something like that. And I was like, wow, you got enough energy out of infrared in order to power that. And I've seen in the past exhibits at various shows where they show what I'll call a parasitic charger is that it's absorbing the energy that is surrounding us. And and I saw that it had a certain level of current, of course, current time voltage equals power. But it was really tough to. It wasn't getting a lot of energy that could do anything useful, but I think people are making advances here. I think right now, you know, UV, IR, RF. Having something that's tuned to a certain frequency, I think is pretty much the way it works right now. I don't know. Let you toss your hat in the ring here. I think people have been looking at this problem of how to get free energy to charge your stuff. Yeah. Well, yeah. So free energy, that's that's difficult, right? Because it's not targeted or focused. I mean, I mean, solar, certainly, right, is is an obvious one, right? That we're actually making use of because there's enough energy from it, right? There's enough energy from the sun that it can burn you, right? So the issue is from all these other devices. And this is a good thing. There's not enough energy coming from them that it can burn you, which also sort of sort of means there's probably not enough energy coming to charge your devices in any meaningful way. Yeah. And it was it was why charge that I saw. I think they were you're right. I think they're the ones you saw at CES, John. But I saw them at South by Southwest, but they were the ones that were running the train and they had a little Amazon Echo unit that they were powering with infrared, right? And it very much was like an infrared beam that was, you know, focused on on these things and it was capturing that power. And like, that's that's great. I'll put a link to the little blurb I wrote at at South by Southwest about this. Energus is another company that we've talked about here and and we've tested, you know, sort of in in in test environments. They their technology, they call it Wattup, but it it's using, well, you know, they've gone and hired a lot of Wi-Fi engineers is what Energus did because Wi-Fi is doing exactly this, right? It's sending power over the air in a focused, targeted way. And we talk about beamforming and all of that other stuff. So Energus is using that to charge your devices. And the nice part is it doesn't have to be, you know, you don't have to have clear line of sight to it. Obviously, if you put something in the middle that's going to reflect radiation, then maybe it won't work so well, but you can put them like inside a battery compartment of a device and it would still get that focused thing. Now, with Energus's tech, they can do. I've seen it charge like a TV remote from 10 feet away, which is pretty cool. Their tech is intelligent in that it's sort of in it in the style of Bluetooth. It it pairs with the charger. So the charger is not just blasting out radiation all the time. It's not doing like what Ken was asking with, like, like you said, parasitic charging, just sort of capturing the stuff that's in the air. This is more like it's going to use beamforming, for example, to send power to this device because you're going to lose a lot through the air. So the more focused you can make it, the better off we are, just like with Wi-Fi. So so Energus isn't doing the parasitic thing, but and neither is Y charge, right? And I'm not sure there's enough other than solar. I don't know that there's anything that we could use parasitically that would deliver enough power to be meaningful. And I think that's by design, like the FCC sort of make sure we don't have devices that are going to cook us in our homes. I hope. Yeah, I remember, man, it was ages ago where I was up at MIT. We had the company I worked for had a partnership with them. And we got to check out one of their labs and they did have. I think it was microwave. They were showing a thing where, hey, yeah, we can transmit power from here to there. It's just don't get in the way. Don't get right. That's exactly right. Yeah, people that used to be my answer, my favorite answer when somebody would say, how come we don't have wireless power? I'm like, we do. It's called microwave. But, you know, I don't know that you want it in your house, at least not outside of the box, so to speak. But yeah, yeah. Yeah. And especially if you're. They make you aware of this and test you on this if if you get an amateur radio license. Oh, yeah, right. That makes sense. Yes, of course. Because depending on the amount of power you're outputting, you can you can knock yourself out if you if you're not careful. Absolutely. We aim that stuff. Right. Right. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Yeah. So yeah, it's interesting question. I mean, I like the concept. You're right that there's all this stuff in the air. Is there a way to to just capture it, though? Like that the thing is it's so focused intentionally that I don't know that there's enough. But I like the I like the conversation. It's good, man. Yeah. Anyway, you know, that's that's where that's where we're at, Mr. Braun, it's I think it's time to to bring in the band. It's time. Here we are. Any lasting thoughts you want to share with our our listening friends? No, no. No, cool. I want to say thank you to everybody. Thanks for everything. All the questions, all the tips, all the cool stuff found listening, visiting sponsors, those of you that are premium members. Thank you. Thank you to everybody. It's like we always say this, but it really is true that this is this is a team effort here. We don't do this if you're not part of it. It's just it's it's just not as fun. John and I would still talk about tech and, you know, we'd probably argue about some things and have some fun with that. But, you know, in general, this you folks are the ones that actually make this possible. So thank you. Really makes it it makes a big difference. It's like one of the most enjoyable things I do every week. And I love that we get to do this every week, John. It's pretty cool. So, yeah, send us in your stuff. Give us a call to two four eight eight eight geek, which John is four three three five. That is correct. Thanks to cash fly at cash fly dot com for providing all the bandwidth to get the show from us to you. And thanks to our sponsors, as we mentioned in the show, Eero at Eero dot com slash M.G.G. coupon code M.G.G. Smile software dot com slash podcast cap Tara dot com slash M.G.G. Other world computing at max sales dot com. Barebone software at a barebones dot com. Yeah, lots of great stuff. So much great stuff. Love it. Go to experience dot com slash M.G.G. Go to Mackie com dot com slash sponsors to read about all the deals that are active, whether the sponsor is active or not. John, last week, everybody said it. We all said it together this week. I got us into this mess. Why don't you get us out? Do you have anything to say? I have one thing to say. And that is I know, too. No, you know, don't get caught.