It's time for the MacGeekGab, and this week's quick tip comes from me, Pilot Pete.
If you need to get into system settings, simply hit the option key and touch either the brightness,
the mission control, or one of the audio up or down keys.
Option plus brightness will bring up system settings and your brightness.
Control brings up your displays and obviously your audio brings up your system settings sound.
No more having to type it, search it out with your mouse. Quick, in and easy. More quick tips
like this plus your questions today on MacGeekGab number 990 for Monday, July 10th, 2023.
Greetings folks, and welcome to Mac Geek Gab, the show where you send in your, we share.
Music.
Quick tips like that.
We answer your questions. We take your cool stuff found. We share those too.
We put it all together into an agenda that has a flow to it, that keeps us engaged, that
maybe has some common threads.
The goal being that each and every one of us learns at least five new things every single
time we get together.
Sponsors for this episode include LinkedIn.com slash MGG, where you can go and post your
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Notion dot com slash Mac geek out where you can go also for free and try out Notion projects and ZocDoc
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Yes, for free and download their app today. We'll talk more in depth about each of those things that you get to do
a little bit later in the episode for now here in Durham, New Hampshire.
I'm Dave Hamilton.
And here for a couple more days in Lee, New Hampshire, it's pilot Pete.
Good to be back, Dave.
Yeah, man. It's good to be back. I, uh, yeah, I like that, that opening tip.
That's, uh, I, I, it is not the first time. It's not the first time I've heard it, but I, I, it, my
fingers don't know it.
So it's, I don't use it as often as I, as I want to. I can't tell you how many times I've stumbled across, you
know, I, I hit command space and I start typing in system settings or I pull down the Apple and I'm trying to, because
I'm trying to get in and adjust my sound settings all the time.
Right. Boom. Right. One quick one. It's up. Oh, yep.
I like it. Yeah, no, it's, it's great. These, this is, this is why we share these quick tips.
Um, it's for all of us. You folks, us included, like it's, we, we all benefit from these.
It's great.
Speaking of Tony has, uh, kind of a little workaround as a quick tip, which I like.
He says, my wife was having trouble making out details at some website.
She was visiting where she was trying to buy a shirt. As she is using an iPad without a keyboard,
I couldn't show her the simple command plus or command minus or command zero.
So I tried showing her the zoom in accessibility. She found that too difficult. So instead,
I had her take a screenshot and then switch to photos and just use the pinch to zoom in and out
on the screenshot and see the content on the web page.
He says, you know, sometimes he says, even the accessibility features are too difficult to do in the moment.
And it's true. And what's nice about the screenshot thing is accessibility, when you zoom in,
will change some of the elements on the page, like text usually, but not all of the elements.
It won't often, and it depends on how the webpage is written,
but often images stay the same size and the text just gets bigger when you use the accessibility thing.
So, you know, there you go. Yeah, I like that tip.
A related tip to that, Pete, that I found out about this week.
I think I read something that John Gruber posted somewhere or something. I can't remember.
But you can go into accessibility and change all kinds of these settings system-wide,
right? So you could do that.
Did you know that you can go into accessibility, scroll all the way to the bottom
and do per app accessibility settings. So you could have one web browser that is set to,
you know, 120% text size, whereas your main web browser is not. So you could set like Firefox to,
you know, larger text size. And yeah, you go in and I should pull up my phone because you
You can do this on iPhone and iPad.
You go into settings and you go to accessibility and then scroll all the way to the bottom and
you will see per app settings in there you add an app and then once you've added the app you get
basically a duplicate of all the accessibility settings that you could set for that would
that would manipulate a given app and you get to customize them just for that app which I yeah
I had no idea, like I, yeah, yeah, right.
I love it. Love it.
Uh, so this is why, this is why we love quick tips. Yeah.
Yeah. Well, let me, let me tell one then. Great. Uh, I wrote in and let me go back a second. There's an old joke.
What's the definition of neurotic? It's the guy who presses the elevator button 40 times, but to close the
door before it actually closes.
So Todd, what are you trying to say about me? What are you trying to say?
So Todd, what are you trying to say about me, what are you trying to say?
It's me. I may be a little neurotic. That's why I like this quick tip.
If you're on your phone and you're trying to get the apps to wiggle so you can delete
them or put them into a folder or move them around from screen to screen, you have to sit there and press.
And if you count, I counted three potatoes, one potato, two potato, three potato before
I got them to wiggle.
Sure. that if you touch the screen betwixt in between each of the icons it takes about
somewhere between half and 0.7 seconds for the icons to start wiggling oh my
gosh yeah it's like two and a half seconds faster so for those of us who are neurotic in or in a hurry to get our ABS wiggling it is it's clearly a
difference oh my god like what yeah because you've got to get through when
when you're, when you're holding down on an app, you've got to get through like the, uh,
you know, the apps, uh, uh, long press menu when it wants. Yeah. Yeah, of course.
If you just touch the screen.
Between the apps. Yeah. About half a second. Amazing.
So for those of us in a hurry.
Oh man, that's great. That's a great tip, Todd. Thank you.
That is a great tip. Yeah. I'll say, I'll say, um, Chicago, Tom, last week I asked how people
were using Siri on their Macs, right. It's something I don't do. I want to learn how,
others do it so they can see if there's a use case for me. Right. I don't just want to presume
There's not one because because I'm not yet doing it right and Chicago Tom says.
He says, you guys might recall that I was the one that was happy to find a keyboard shortcut to activate Siri, right?
Okay. Yeah, he says that's because I use it all the time He says I have type to Siri activated on my Mac so that you can give Siri commands with the keyboard.
As opposed to you know voice and he says I do not have the hey s lady Active and the reason is because I work in a shared office space and the people around me can hear me when I talk
I don't want to disturb them and occasionally I don't want them to know what I am doing fair a good example of how he
Uses Siri on his Mac. He says during a meeting,
I may want to take a quick little note to remind myself to take care of something or do something that comes up during the
Conversation I hit the Siri shortcut on my keyboard and in the little prompt box
I'd type a text replacement for take a note that says so the words that his text replacement.
You know, expands to our take a note that says his replacement is XXNN.
So, you know, but it doesn't matter, right?
And then he types the note. He says, yes, I could use Apple's Quick Notes feature
in the Notes app, but I find when I do, the new Quick Note window steals the focus
and may move me away from, for instance, a Zoom window in full screen,
even when it doesn't take up the screen real estate, my method above avoids all of that.
So, as he's doing this, I'm thinking, one thing I do all the time with Siri in the car,
is as I'm driving, you know, it's that, you kind of get into that meditative zoning
sort of head space when you're in the car.
And I'll think of, like, I have good ideas. So, well, I have ideas.
Occasionally, they're good.
I know that if I even if an idea is the best idea I've ever come up with in my life.
I will not necessarily remember it Once I am in a spot to do something about it, right?
Like i'll think there's zero chance that I will forget about this. This is amazing brilliant
I couldn't possibly forget couldn't possibly forget and yet wait a minute What was I thinking and and yet there will be things that sort of distract you it doesn't make it into long-term memory, right?
So I routinely use siri in the car i'll say Siri, remind me today, and I either say today or tomorrow.
If I don't give a date, then it puts it into my, it will put it into my reminders either way.
But an undated reminder is also something I don't see.
It's like, I have to go and look for them. I don't, because I sort my reminders by day
and the undated stuff just falls to the bottom, at least the way that I look at it.
So I say, remind, you know, Siri, remind me today, and then whatever, and it puts it on my reminders list,
my to-do list, and then from there I can either take an action on it or, you know, put the,
like, if it needs to be something that's more fleshed out, it's just a little, you know, it's a reminder.
That's what it is. And so I find myself wanting to do that in the middle of meetings, just like Chicago
Tom says, for the same reason.
And I will just switch to my calendar app, I use Busy Cal, and I will add a reminder,
but that does bring my focus out of the meeting.
More with the, the, the little Siri window, the bubble that pops up, you could just type it right in there.
So I think this might be the killer app for Dave for using Siri on the Mac is, is I'll come up
with a little shortcut that'll say, remind me today, like, you know, our, uh, RMT or something
and then boom, just type whatever I want.
So I like this. Well, what would be remind me tomorrow? RMT now, wait, then.
Uh, I, I, I don't, I, it doesn't really matter to me for the purposes that I, it's, it, as
As long as it puts it on there, you know, in like where I will see it, you know?
Yeah. Yeah.
I learned a long time ago to try and write those things down too, because like you say, oh,
there's no way I'll forget it.
And then there's, there's a guaranteed way you will forget it, or at least that I will. Yeah. Yeah.
No, yeah. Our memories. I have an, I have an excellent memory for lots
of things, but not for all the things.
And I, you know, and, and I, and that has bitten me before, cause I'm like, oh, I can remember
like every one of my credit card numbers I've ever had and all this stuff.
Like, you know, I, I, I have whatever, however my brain works, I'm good at remembering that kind of stuff.
That leads me to the fallacy that I am good at remembering all the things and that is a fallacy.
And as you know, with age, more penguins jump off the iceberg.
Yes, that is true. Yeah, yeah.
The good news is, the good, I was reading something about this recently.
The good news is, with age, certainly our ability to remember specific things does dwindle.
It's just how it works, but our minds get better at,
perceiving bigger picture things as we age and Here's the Bennett. Here's the wonderful thing about that is as someone who is,
actively aging And and hasn't really been able to do anything about that well,
I suppose there's a way to stop the aging process, but I don't want to do that either
Then you're passively aging and that's very different. Yes. I don't want that at all no
I'm I'm very happy. I lead a charmed life and I want to continue leading it.
But with You know, we have all these devices that are much better than even our younger selves were at remembering,
Bits and pieces of information. So it's like this kid. It's like a superpower in a sense, you know aging,
enhances our minds in a way that
at least thus far, our computing devices, you know, doing things that are computing devices
cannot do seeing big picture stuff. And maybe they'll get there someday. But right now, no.
So every day I get better at that. And every day my computers get better at remembering
the things that I'm forgetting. And so as long as I remember to use them for that,
I'm in good shape, right? Yeah.
And there's billions of them around the world.
And that's the thing. Yeah, for hours for better and for worse.
Yeah. Yes.
Uh, listener Matt, uh, who is also an Indy developer, uh, reminds us that Matt Cory reminds
us that this coming week, uh, Tuesday into Wednesday, July 11th and 12th is, uh, Indy.
What I want to make sure I get the name of this right in the app sales day.
And, uh, and there is a link that I'll put in the show notes.
It's a GitHub page, so everybody should be able to see it. And there's all kinds of apps that will be having discounts.
Some of them are macOS apps, some of them are iPhone and iPad apps.
So there's some great stuff on here.
Matt's the one who makes signals for HomeKit. And I think that's going to be 40% off this week.
And there's actually one of the in-app purchases, the automate in-app purchase is going to be 33% off this week.
So yeah, good stuff. So thank you for reminding us of that, Matt. And happy to share.
So yeah, good stuff.
We have a couple of PSAs to share with you all with you all that that I will I swear I will find here.
The first one comes from, uh, in our discord from someone affectionately called old guy.
Another geezer, just like me. Just like us. Yeah, exactly. Someone who is actively aging, uh, just like the rest of us.
Uh, we currently run our T-Mobile monthly payments through a credit card that offers
phone loss damage insurance. T-Mobile announced this week, last week, that in order to maintain
our automatic payment discount, we'll need to move our payment to a debit card, thus losing
insurance coverage. Any suggestions for plans that are reasonable? And I don't know that there is an
insurance plan that's reasonable for a phone. I suppose that depends on you and your penchant
for losing or destroying phones, but Pogo Kelly suggested it might actually be cheaper for you
to forego the credit card or the debit card discount, continue paying with your credit
card that gives you that loss and damage insurance and pay the delta. That might be for...
Yeah, some of the platinum cards and such often offer that. Yeah.
And that's what he's been doing. And of course, T-Mobile doesn't want to pay those fees anymore,
because that's how credit cards work.
Whenever, you know, your rewards card, the merchant pays for your rewards,
not like your credit card company.
That's not the goodness of their heart. It's literally the merchants who pay those fees.
And T-Mobile clearly doesn't want to pay those anymore. And my guess is enough people are using rewards cards.
So that's why they made this decision. So the debit card, you pay for the fees.
Yeah, that's right. Well, directly. Well, I mean, the merchant doesn't pay, you pay the merchant, the merchant pays, you know,
comes out of their profit. But there's no rewards debit cards, there's no rewards fees on debit
point. That's the difference here is they don't have to pay those. Yeah. So, you know, go ahead.
I was just going to say, and I don't use debit cards, uh, for the security reason that if someone compromises your card, it's out of your checking account until you get it proven.
At least it used to be that way.
It's been many years and I've just always avoided debit cards.
No, I got burned by the same thing.
Uh, over a holiday weekend, it was like a Memorial day weekend.
Somebody, I can't, and now I can't remember if it was the checking account I use or the checking account Lisa uses.
I'm pretty sure it's the one Lisa uses and they you know burned through whatever she had in in that account
And she was like why am I getting like?
Balanced check what's going on here, and it did it probably took 60 days For the bank to finally return all of the money that was spent out of that account
I think it depends on your bank, and it's worth checking with your bank certainly back, then this was you know 10 years ago
Exactly what you said was correct.
It is, you know, you pay for it until the case. Guilty until proven innocent.
Yeah, it's guilty until proven innocent or at least charged until proven otherwise.
Whereas with credit cards, it's the other way around.
And I've heard that debit cards, some of them have gotten better.
But like you, Pete, I just use a credit card for everything.
So that's one option.
The other option is to move it to your debit card if you so choose. news.
Uh forego paying someone else for phone insurance and just self-insure uh that's the path i chose
years ago because managing you know phones for the four of us while the kids were growing up
and all that stuff you know paying whatever it was 15 bucks a month times four very quickly adds
up to the price of a new phone and and keeps adding right and i figured you know that we are
We're pretty good with our phones.
We all keep our phones in cases where we, we, it's been a long time since we've destroyed or lost a phone.
I had to knock on some wood, uh, but, uh, but I know it will happen and, and, and we've
saved more than enough and are, are in a position where if, if, and when, you know, one of us
loses a phone or breaks our phone beyond repair, well, okay, it's a thousand bucks and like.
But, but we've saved that money over the course of the last 10 years or whatever.
It's like, we're, we're in good shape. So we've chosen to self-insure that that
is another option on the table.
Like you need to decide what works for you. Obviously, but yeah, but yeah.
Brian in Arizona and the discord chat mentions that it's kind of a work around.
Get a small checking account, put a small amount in there, get a debit card and you
use your benefit that way. So it's a, it's a workaround.
Yeah. It's a second checking account. I like that. There's no fees on it and all that.
Right. Yeah. You got to find a bank that doesn't like crazy.
Yeah. So, and one other thing about a debit card that I found out just briefly, uh, Zelle is kind of like Venmo and all those others.
I have sent money with the Zelle before someone tried to send me money with
Zelle, guess what you can't do without a debit card, take money for Zelle.
Interesting. So, yeah, I had to, all right, send a Venmo. I mean, cause I'm not, yeah, I had to convert my, my ATM
card into a debit card sometime in the last five years for something.
And it was, it was, I don't think it was Zelle, but it was something where it was
like, okay, fine, fine.
But the bank I'm with city bank still, I still, because I was an employee there a
lifetime ago, I still get some free checking benefits. So I, I stick with that.
Nice. Yeah.
Uh, I don't know when that's going to end. I really, I should get a bank that's closer
to me. Probably the same time your direct TV is going to end.
I don't have direct TV.
I thought you did. No, no.
Oh, oh, the direct TV stream. Oh yeah. That's right. Yeah.
That's right. Yeah. We don't want that to end either. That's, that's been a nice thing.
Uh, yeah, it was, it was good for three months, two years ago, three years ago.
Uh, Alison over at no silicast shares a, uh, an important thing. PSA here.
For Tailscale users who like living on the edge. She says, I got a call today for help from Mr. Ed in our Discord,
who is a listener to both of our shows,
because he was running the Sonoma developer beta and his keyboard stopped working.
Even an external keyboard wouldn't work, and the problem survived a reboot.
Allison says, I found a Reddit thread where people were having the same issue,
And two people said that quitting Tailscale fixed it.
Ed used his mouse, like an animal, to open Activity Monitor and force Tailscale to quit,
since it wouldn't quit from the menu bar, and keyboard was restored.
So if you are using Tailscale, maybe don't use that with the Sonoma developer beta,
or at the very least, just, or either beta,
because the public beta and the developer beta are close enough that my guess is the problem would would persist in both, but be aware of that,
potentially being a problem for you.
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All right, Dave, what do you say we answer a question or two?
I think we should answer maybe five.
Oh, OK, five it is. All right. And maybe we'll learn five new things. Who knows?
So, listener Gary writes in. Yeah, I was watching something on Prime Video on my iPad Air. I tried
to take a screenshot, but it came out blank. Any idea why? It was the Avengers from the early 60s,
and I wanted an image of Patrick McNee and Diana Rigg. Just a still image, not video.
So guess what Amazon prime, and I think Netflix does this too, and probably a whole bunch
of other streaming services.
No screenshot for you.
All right. No screen for you. You're not getting it. Yeah. I think it's DRM blocking it.
I've experienced the same issue. I'm certain with other streaming services.
Um, no, it makes sense. I mean, they, they certainly have the control of, of doing that, uh, when it's happening
inside the app.
So yeah. All right. Yeah. Yeah. that is to take your trusty iPhone out and take a picture,
you know, pause it and take a picture of this.
Yeah. Okay. That, yeah, that would work. Um, if you watch it on your Mac, in a web browser, you,
could take a screenshot of the web browser.
Like that's, that's going to work.
Yeah, maybe I seem to recall and I could be wrong. I seem to recall trying to use capto to record my screen at,
at one point and it would not let me do a screen capture.
Huh, okay. Yeah, they're pretty clever over there, not letting that DRM go down range.
I thought, I thought I was able to take screenshots of those things on my Mac.
And to that end, another thing to try would be launch Amazon Prime in a web browser on
your iPad and try to take a screenshot of that.
Oh yeah as opposed to the as opposed to the client app exactly yeah yeah yeah i didn't think of that as being a worker right i mean it theoretically it should work yeah yeah oh yeah yeah there's always like it's and i'd be curious i'm sure it doesn't work but just because this is how my brain works and i want to know i don't like to assume these things i would be curious what happens if you turn on screen recording on your ipad
And, and then go into the Amazon app and start
playing or Netflix and start playing.
Like my guess is you're not going to get anything, but it sure would be interesting to
know. That's what my guess too.
Although if you do it first, maybe it matters, the order. Right. Right. Yeah.
Yeah. Good stuff. If you know, let us know feedback at Mackeycab.com or if you have a question or a
quick tip or, you know, whatever, that's also a good place to send it.
Whoa, whoa, wait a minute. at where feedback at Mackey cab.com. Yeah.
Feedback at Mackey cab.com or you could do what JT Ray did with his next question
and post it in our MGG help desk over on discord at Mackey cab.com slash discord.
And then not only do you get, uh, the, the, any knowledge that Pete and, or I
might be able to bring to things, you get the hive mind knowledge of everybody
in the Mackey cab family, and that's awesome.
JT asks, as we all know, the maximum iCloud storage Apple offers is two terabytes.
In an attempt to add more, I thought about family share. I'm wondering if I could create more and more iCloud accounts
sharing the data from those to a primary ID.
So, and Brian Monroe pointed this out, because again, the hive mind on Discord,
that the family share.
Pools the data, the storage, you know, together. So adding more accounts doesn't add to the storage pool
in a meaningful way.
You're just paying for one pool and getting it across multiple accounts.
However, when you have an Apple One plan, you can get up to four terabytes of storage
on your Apple account.
So that might be really the way to do it. I but I and it is one way to do it
I'm curious though has anybody out there,
Actually hit this limit of two terabytes and if so, what happens like is there some you know?
Unpublished thing that Apple has where it's like. Oh, yeah, if you need more just just tell us and we'll you know,
we'll charge you this this like hidden thing and and and then then you'll have more like
Like is it really a hard and fast limit that there's no way around or is there actually a way around it?
That I would love to know. That's the million dollar question, right?
Yeah, and I feel like I've just never hit that limit and I'm not close enough that it's
like, ooh, someday soon I'll get to, you know.
So I like, but I want to know, like, so if you know that, yeah, if you don't have the
tube turbo, if you've got the smaller plan that when you, for instance, switch over your
iPhone, it lets you use more storage and then it takes it all away, which shows that Apple
knows that what they offer at the bottom tier is not enough.
So that's a little frustrating, but.
Yeah, yeah. Oh yeah, for sure. Like, like I've seen that happen, but what happens if you're at the top?
Like that's, that's what I want to know.
Oh, I bet. I don't know. I bet you start getting the warnings like Google.
I I'd be surprised if they offer more, I could be wrong.
Why wouldn't they? Right. I mean, clearly they have enough storage to give you
more and charge you for it.
Like, like, you know, this is just simple business to me. So I don't know. I don't know.
There are things, there are things I don't understand. And I do have a fairly good working knowledge of Wi-Fi though.
And the Mac Mommy Melissa over there in our Discord asks, how often do you replace your
router or mesh setup?
My current mesh is a TP-Link that is Wi-Fi 5. Her cable company Cox recently upgraded the network and now my speeds have been doubled.
Yay. And she has a DOCSIS 3.1 modem, so all good there. But must I also now upgrade to Wi-Fi 6?
The reason I ask is because I suspect my router may be causing a bottleneck in the speed,
or it could be all the wireless devices that we have connected simultaneously.
I also wonder if my network Ethernet switch could be causing a slowdown.
I'll retest everything now that the Cox upgrade seems to be complete, but it was looking like
I only get the full speed when connected directly to the modem with Ethernet, and then I get
less than half once I connect the rest of our devices via Wi-Fi or maybe that's normal.
How much should one expect the speed to be reduced when the whole household is connected via mesh Wi-Fi?
So my general advice, we'll go into details here.
My general advice is don't just replace your router for the heck of it.
Even if you can prove that your Wi-Fi is a bottleneck,
that's still not necessarily a good reason in my mind to replace it because,
your Wi-Fi with today's, you know, ISP speeds that we get, I mean, you can,
like many areas of the country and the world can get gigabit speeds to your house.
Very few people are ever going to it with today's technology see gigabit speeds over Wi-Fi.
So your Wi-Fi is always going to be a bottleneck, at least in a theoretical or a test case sense,
like you'll be able to prove that it's a bottleneck.
But, you know, like for me in my office, I have Wi-Fi 6E devices, right?
Like that, you know, I have, I have the Eero 6e and, and I get the same when I test other things and my office is fairly, it's isolated from the house.
There's not a ton of wifi devices. It's not right next to the neighbors and I get six to 700 megabits per second
in both directions, up and down.
When I test on wifi, that's, those are great speeds, but it's, it's not gigabit.
Like my network is capable of gigabit. My internet connection, cause it's fiber is capable of gigabit, gigabit.
But I only see that when I'm connected on Ethernet.
A question to ask, I think, is when do I need that kind of speed on my phone or on my Mac
that's connected via Wi-Fi?
Like, what is, what am I trying to do that is being hampered by, or what do I want to
do that I can't do because my speeds are hampering me from doing that?
And, you know, your Macs might be those things, right? especially if you're doing some a lot of online backups or if you're transferring large files
around in an office setting. And of course, lots of us have home offices these days.
But that's really the question is, what are you doing that's being slowed down?
And what can't you do because of this technical bottleneck?
I you know is like that would that would be the question to answer if you're getting my general
feeling is for most of us is that if you test your speeds and you're getting on your wi-fi devices
if you're getting but you know above 200 megabits per second you're probably going to be fine.
If you wind up if you're getting less than that then it's time to look at why are you getting
less than that? Is it that you have the wrong mesh technology or older mesh technology and,
newer mesh technology would be faster for you? If the answer to that is yes, then maybe that's
the right thing. Or is it that you have way more client devices now than you used to and somehow
that's slowing down your mesh? The number of devices doesn't necessarily slow you down, but it
can. And certainly, as Brian Monroe in our chat points out, you know, newer Wi-Fi standards
support more Wi-Fi devices at sort of native speeds. So that can be a reason, yes, if you've
got lots of devices, for sure. But ask the question first, don't just presume you need
need to upgrade by default, like find, find where your problem is.
Um, one of the, there was some discussion in, in discord about, you know, well,
I don't have any wifi.
One person said, I don't have any wifi 6e devices. So there's no reason to upgrade my wet, my mesh to wifi 6e.
And I think that...
While that is all those things could be true. I think one way to another way to interpret it is that's a great reason to upgrade your mesh to Wi-Fi 6e if you need more speed between your mesh points because if your mesh is speaking at Wi-Fi 6e, which operates on a different band than Wi-Fi 6 and Wi-Fi 5, then you have less interference in that band because you don't have any client devices, right?
And so now your wireless backhaul, which is the connection between your mesh points,
is freer and clearer. I don't want to say free and clear, but less congested.
And that can work out really well. Remember, you know, like the idea of a mesh network
with multiple access points has been around for a very long time.
It was mostly only implementable via a wired backhaul, like ethernet connecting all of our mesh points,
up until 802.11ac hit, right? Wi-Fi 5.
When that hit, that meant that we could have faster speeds for our backhaul.
And, you know, even though Wi-Fi 5 is operating at five gigahertz
and it's not as good as going through walls as 2.4,
the signaling protocols they used for that made it so that you got faster speeds.
And that's what opened the door for companies like Eero and all the others to start making wireless mesh products
for us consumers, and so they did. And obviously it's worked out really well.
But yeah, having greater capabilities for your mesh to talk isn't necessarily a bad thing.
And can be a really good thing.
But more and more devices are, are, you know, doing six and six E, but, um, yeah.
So I don't know that those are, those are my thoughts. Yeah.
No, that's a great point. Yep. Yeah.
So I was actually going to say, you know, when you started talking about they're communicating
betwixt themselves at six E, I went, I was just sitting there thinking, well, that's,
that's kind of like they're wired together.
So, and like you said, the original mesh was, it was wired. That's how they talked to each other.
And then send out the signal.
So yeah, it's perfect sense. Yeah. Yeah, exactly.
No, it it's, it, and a wired mesh is still going to be, if you can
wire your mesh points together, it's more reliable, more, way more reliable.
And it might even be faster, probably is faster, but whether you'll actually notice those speeds, I don't know if it matters.
Uh, it's really the kind of the thing. So yeah, if it ain't broke, don't fix it or do what I do.
And if it ain't broke, fix it till it is.
It is, fix it till it is, uh, because you can, have we ever named an episode?
If it ain't broke, fix it till it is.
I think we just did it.
Well, if we haven't yet, I don't know. I don't know.
While we're on the wifi subject and hopefully someone searches our site to find out if we've ever named an episode that, uh, Jamie asks on the, on the wifi
I think I am adding an access point to my existing unify network, which runs on the Synology RT6600AX.
The Synology, I'm presuming here, is doing the sort of gateway and routing and all of that of
So
The network and then the UniFi access points are the Wi-Fi points. So great. Prior to adding the
new access point, the RT6600AX is the only Wi-Fi router or access point. These two devices,
UniFi and Synology, are obviously not the same brand and they won't form a mesh. That's mostly
true. Um, by the strict definition, I think that is true. He says, uh,
unify access point will be connected by wired ethernet to the Synology, right?
Okay, good. I want both devices to carry the same three SSIDs, my main network, my guest network, and my IOT network. And I know how to configure
all of that as far as the devices and VLANs go, but should I do anything
special to help the devices cooperate and not conflict on the wifi bands?
The new unit will be in the garage, but the devices will definitely have overlapping coverage. I'm expecting my client devices to more or less automatically choose
the stronger signal. Any gotchas here? So I, you know, before Eero existed.
We talked a lot on this show about, you know, what, what we now retroactively call the quasi
mesh or, you know, the poor man's mesh. Although I'm not, I'm not sure that we saved money doing
this. So I think that my quasi mesh might be better. Well, that's what makes you a poor man.
Yeah, exactly, but, you know, I would run, you know, two or three different routers.
I would put one in router mode and I would put the others in bridge mode.
And I would say, and I was even doing this with Apple airport devices at times.
Like it didn't matter. I would mix and match things and I would set the SSIDs to be the same
and the passwords to be the same. So that was devices jumped from one to the other.
It would be relatively seamless. You know, you as the user wouldn't have to do anything.
And what I did then was manually made sure, as best I could, that I was not having the channels
overlap with each other. So I would manually set the channel on one device. If we're talking 2.4
gigahertz, I would try and have them 1, 6, and 11. And the devices that were overlapping with
each other, I would have one on one and one on six if I could, or whatever. And then the same
with five gigahertz you're just finding different channels that that are not in use and um
wi-fi explorer is a great app for that it is part of set app so um i'll put a link to wi-fi
explorer in the show notes but it's a it's a good app to to be able to see where what's going it
literally will show you you run it on your mac and it shows you and by the way move your mac around
the house so that you see what's you know congested in each spot don't just presume one spot's going
going to be the same as the other because it's not that's not how it works.
But but that's how I did it. Now, I will point out that most of the mesh systems,
including the ones we recommend here on the show today.
Do not use different channels. They use the same channels, but they are aware of each other.
They can theoretically adjust the power levels of those radios to get the right amount of overlap without too much
because that's really important.
If you're you having a signal blasting at a hundred percent is part of the problem of Wi-Fi congestion in like apartment buildings.
I remember years ago when we had Alf Watt on the show.
He was in charge at Apple of writing a bunch of the original airport code and all of that.
And then he, after he left Apple, he was the one who made iStumbler for a long time,
which I think the development has stopped on that, which is why we recommend Wi-Fi Explorer now.
But Alf was saying, Oh yeah, you know, you could, you could fit way more Wi-Fi signals
into an apartment without congestion. If everybody would just talk to each other
and set their power levels to what they needed for their own device for their own, you know,
spaces and not just blasting at full, you know, full power. But anyway, most people don't do that.
So that is some of the stuff you can do. I can't, I know the unified devices will let you adjust
power levels. I don't know if Synology has something in the user interface for that,
but you know, I would still, if I were doing what, what a listener Jamie is asking about,
I would absolutely use different channels today because it just makes life easier and you know
you're not going to be interfering. So, but yeah, those quasi-meshes work great. In the end,
whether you have a mesh that's controlled by, you know, all one vendor or one like a quasi-mesh
like this, the final decision as to which access point a client device associates with is up to
up to the client device.
Now, it is, there are protocols for the mesh to communicate down to the clients and say,
please join that one, not this one.
And then they can even block a client by, you know, it's Mac address from associating.
And that will sometimes nudge a client to go somewhere else.
But it really is all about convincing the client to go.
So, I don't know. That's what I get.
Yeah, it makes sense. Yeah. I did. Did I miss something? Anything on that Pete questions?
No, I think that covers it perfectly. Okay.
Actually. Yeah. No. And with, with ice tumbler out, I will say that, uh, I think it was Porthos, John pointed
out that yes, if, uh, if you option click your wifi signal in your, in your bar, uh, in,
in the toolbar at the top, you can get information about your signal strength and that sort of thing.
And I know I shared, this is a quick tip way, way, way long time ago.
If you go to the bottom of that window that pops up and click on Wi-Fi settings.
I'm sorry, that isn't the right one.
It was diagnostics. Yeah. If you click on that open wireless diagnostics, but then ignore that
and go to the window menu, then you can get all kinds of scan information and that sort of thing.
We shared that a long time back. So you option click Wi-Fi, click on open wireless diagnostics.
But rather than clicking continue, go up to the menu and click on window,
and then you can get into a substant log scan performance sniffer.
So it's, it's kind of a shortcut into what's available from wire, wireless diagnostics. Yeah.
I like it. I like it. You can, uh, you can see some of the signal strength stuff on your iPhone.
Uh, it's, it's wonky, but you can do it.
You have to have the airport utility app on your phone first and then make sure you go into
settings. I know this is convoluted. Go into the settings for the airport utility app,
and at the bottom of those settings turn on the Wi-Fi scanner option.
Then launch the airport utility and in the upper right will be this little sort of janky button.
It's really just a text button like it's it's terrible like the ux of it is terror it's not an apple but tap the wifi scan button and then when you're there tell it to scan.
It will take a beat and scan everything and start showing you your all of the access points at sea.
So if you have a mesh network, you're going to see, you know, your same SSID listed many, many, many, many times.
And it will show you what channel it's on. It will show you the signal strength, the RSSI.
I think relative signal strength indicators, what that stands for.
And if it doesn't, I think maybe it should.
And, you know, these are all negative numbers, zero dbm is you will never see that.
I think that's the theoretical maximum or or it should be.
But but, you know, so looking at the numbers, the the lower the negative numbers, so negative,
you know, fifty five is a weaker signal than negative forty nine, if that makes sense to all of us.
OK. Well, I guess it's hard to to use the data is just presented in a terrible format there.
So you're better off if you have a Mac, use your Mac with Wi-Fi.
First of all, I'm surprised they even still are developing that airport because, you know,
Apple doesn't even make an airport anymore, airport utility.
That's fair.
I mean, you got to be able to manage. I would have thought they'd renamed it and given us some of that functionality in there.
But here's a cool thing that Tennessee Papa pointed out in Discord.
What about your cell phone signal strength?
This is style 3001 pound, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 pound, and it will give you your cell phone signal strength.
Really? Okay. Is that on all carriers?
I do not know. All right. Well, I'll put that in the show notes.
You don't have to remember it folks. It's already pasted into the show notes. So yeah.
But, uh, yeah, I don't know if it's on mint or not, but, uh, I can't try it because
I'm using my cell phone as my camera for the show. So yeah, I don't want to make you all sick whilst watching.
If you, if you happen to be watching the video stream. Yeah, exactly.
Uh, all right. Where are we on time? Yeah. Okay. We're doing good.
Good. Um, listen to rich has a question about, uh, sort of related to network
stuff. He says, uh, I have a Synology seven 20 plus doesn't really matter that this is a Synology.
It it's more about time machine to a network, uh, drive, but he's doing it to a Synology.
He says, and he uses that for many things. One of them is to back up his M one MacBook pro to a time machine for shared
folder on the, on the disk station. This had been successful doing a daily backup automatically
and occasionally manually started for six months.
Recently, I saw that I hadn't had a time machine backup for about five days.
So I initiated one manually from the time machine menu icon by clicking backup now.
The process started with connecting to backup disk, but never got farther than that and eventually timed out.
I can connect to the server and the shared time machine folder on the NAS via the Finder,
and that works fine, the username and password works.
I, of course, did all the usual things. I rebooted the NAS, I rebooted my MacBook Pro,
I even restored my network, nothing worked.
I eventually solved the issue by making a new shared folder on the NAS and starting the process over.
What would your troubleshooting steps have been to avoid starting over and losing the previous six months of backups?
Do you think the same old time machine sparse bundle corruption that pops up every now and then was my issue?
So No, I don't think this was the corruption because the corruption Would it you would be able to connect to the backup?
Disk and probably even the backup, you know, the sparse bundle, it just would
have issues and never actually start the backup. But you were stuck in the connecting process and so it sounds like your time machine on your Mac, I
want to be specific about this, I don't want to say your Mac couldn't see the,
the shared folder, but time machine couldn't see the shared folder. Time,
Time Machine stores a different keychain entry than, say, the Finder does.
Time Machine's keychain entries and network connection entries are very specific about
the name of the share and the protocol used to connect to the share.
Time Machine used to only support a protocol called AFP, Apple File Protocol, and for several
iterations of macOS, it has supported SMB, server messaging block.
That is a better protocol to use for a network connection. It's more efficient.
Apple has moved all of their file sharing to SMB and your disk station has,
if you updated your disk station recently, and this is where the disk, it being a
disk station might be relevant, it might have told you, hey.
Apple recommends using SMB. You should probably turn off AFP.
So it's possible that you turned off AFP, but time machine was still very much bound to an AFP connection to your disk station.
And it couldn't find it because it's not advertised via AFP.
Yes, it's advertised. So you just solve one of my problems.
Did you think about I love that? So, so the the trick here it what you did was you connected to a new shared folder rich and,
that,
Made a new connection. It would have seen only the SMB and again I'm making some presumptions here
But if that's the issue it would have seen SMB it would have connected that way saved it in the keychain entry and all is good,
But if you had told your Mac forget this time machine backup leave it out there, the old one, and then just go through the steps of reconnecting to it.
That would have been my first troubleshooting step is just, you know what, Time Machine,
and it might not even be the AFP versus SMB thing. I've just seen it where Time Machine.
Needs to be taught how to reconnect. If the name of a device on the network changed or,
you know, something about your network changed, Time Machine, like I said,
it's very specific about the volume to which it's going to back your stuff up.
And sometimes I just need to tell it, there it is. I know it's the same thing.
I didn't change anything.
Yes, something about my network probably did change. So I probably did change something, but let me just reconnect this and it's all good.
So that would have been, to answer your question, that would have been my troubleshooting.
That would have been the first thing I would do in the, if I were there, what would I do first or next?
That's what I would do is just manually reconnect it to the existing share.
That probably would have solved it for you. Unless you had the corruption issue.
Then you would have gotten connected and then it wouldn't work.
But, uh, yeah, still, yeah. I just know I have that time machine issue where I know the disc is there,
and it's not seeing it, so I need to go in and.
Yeah, I don't know how I'm gonna do that. I actually don't know how I'm gonna do that though
Wait, why it doesn't see the disc does your finder see the disc?
Yes, absolutely. Oh then then what okay then then again in the if I were there, here's what I would do. Um, I would.
Go into time machine and remove that,
Disc from time machine Just so that you're you know, giving it a clean slate essentially,
And then I would go into the finder and connect to that volume volume, get it up and happy.
I know time machine is going to make its own connection to it, but having your Mac and
confirming that, you know, already talking to it, it's, it's actually on my sonology.
Great. Yep. So you get that thing, make sure you can see the time machine volume.
Okay, great. Then I would just go in and add it again and, and hopefully it shows up there, but that,
that would, that would be the first thing to try.
Yeah. Okay.
Yeah. So hopefully, hopefully. Gotcha.
I hate to go back in time, but since time is non-linear, we need to do that.
Uh, I changed it in the show notes, but it's asterisk 3001 pound sign,
one, two, three, four, five pound sign.
And I think an asterisk at the end too, but I also put a link to cool cell phone codes that, uh, Tennessee pop, I think from great put up in there.
Okay, cool. Thank you. No, that's good to have that correction.
That's that's good stuff. Yeah. I'll see you next time. Bye.
Let's jump forward in time. Shall we jump forward in time? You want to take us to Steve's question?
Steve wrote in, hey guys, a question regarding how you handle your photo library. Do you import
all of your non-iPhone photos into your iCloud library? Meaning if you have 100 photos you've
taken with a DSLR from a family vacation, do you drag those into the Apple Photos library on your
Mac so that you have all your photos in one spot? Or is that just a waste of storage space since
Since you're now essentially duplicating all of your photos, the originals and the imports.
Um, thanks for your thoughts and happy fourth by fourth was good.
Hope yours was too Dave. Yeah. Um, super laid back. It was great. Yeah.
So this is a, this is kind of more of a philosophical question than a tech question, but I told him, uh, you know, years ago I started putting all my shots
in and photos, uh, once, uh, first of all, I photo for simplicity sake.
And I, somewhere along the line, adopted the phrase, let go and let, let go and let Apple.
Obviously there are cases where it doesn't work for everyone.
But with iCloud backing up photos library, then you're less likely to have a disaster.
And I was telling him, I had neighbors years ago who lost a hard drive.
And I mean, they sent it to the guys who charge hundreds of dollars to recover
data and everything, and it was trashed and gone. The only photos they had of their children before age 8 was from family and friends.
They lost them.
They had it all on one hard drive and no backup.
It's soul crushing to hear a story like that. So that's just my opinion.
Everything you can into photos and then I think you're okay to delete.
From a separate folder or file on your hard drive, let photos do it, let it take care of it.
All your photos are going to go to iCloud, assuming you don't. Now,
would I make that my only backup? Oh, goodness, no.
Sure. Assuming your iCloud account gets hacked or anything weird like that, right? Multiple layers,
of backup is the only safe way to ensure you don't lose all this stuff.
Period.
Yes, yes. You know, it's the only way to do it. I haven't heard about Apple losing any photos from anyone.
Like there have been zero reports of people saying, I did nothing, Apple lost all my photos.
That has not happened.
If it had, we would be like in a terrible, like that would change everything.
And Apple knows it, by the way.
Like they know that they have to protect that data.
Like their company depends on it because in a sense, it does.
Yeah, it does, absolutely.
There's no doubt. But it could happen, and we need to act like it can if we value that data.
So I do back up my photos, yeah.
Yeah, and my point was, what if someone hacks your account and manages to lock you out?
If you're someone who doesn't have two-factor authenticate, I don't think you can even have an iCloud account
that isn't two-factor authenticated anymore. Not with all the services you'd want to use, no. Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah, I think that's right. But the fact remains they're, they're in theory, it could be a way someone with
access to your machine could change your stuff and lock you out of your account
and erase it all, or, you know, something nefarious like that.
Highly unlikely, but entirely possible. Yep.
So, so like I say, that was more of a philosophical question than a technical question, but I, I think you're better off
just letting photos handle it all.
It's all in one database.
You
And apple scatcher back i agree i do the same thing i you know i do have a copy of my local copy of my photos library i do push that to my sonology so that i can have sonology photos see that same library but it,
like it is it is truly just a copy of my apple photos library everything lives in apple photos for me i suppose.
Yeah, relating it to JT Ray's question earlier in this episode, like if you hit your two
or four terabyte maximum because of your photos, then you've got to think about different things.
But even then, I don't know, I actually be curious, like for those of you with massive
photos libraries, what do you do? Do you archive some stuff off?
And if so, to what do you archive it? Like what apps are you using?
Storage paradigms are you using to keep all those things? Yeah, that would be interesting, um, to know about, well, you know, whether
or not you're hitting your two or four terabyte limit, like, you know, if,
you're not storing all your photos on iCloud and you're intentional about that, where are you storing it?
Uh, where are we here? I don't even know. What's my name here.
Yeah. Right now. We were so, uh, uh, rich was, uh, no, we, I'm sorry.
We didn't reach Steve.
It's time. Mark was asking about travel when dropping from one of the big mobile carriers.
Yeah, so Mark had, and I will pull up Mark's question because I want to make sure I ask it the right way.
He, uh, he says, my dilemma, I've been on T-Mobile with a simple four line, uh, simple
choice family plan for eight years now. And it includes my state employee discount for an all in price of $120 a month.
I realize I could get the same plan for $80 a month on Mint Mobile, uh, and use T-Mobile's network.
He says, there are some T-Mobile perks that I use that makes the $40 in potential savings
a bit less like the MLB package that runs $120 a year and paramount plus for six bucks a month.
He says, so that makes the difference $24 a month instead of 40, but still meaningful.
Now the real issue, he says, I'm going to Alaska next year for a few weeks.
So I checked the mint mobile website and they show no service in Alaska and their site says
coast to coast coverage. Hmm. I can assure you there is no mint mobile service in Alaska.
Brilliant. OK, so that that he talked to Mint and they were sort of they said, you might have service near one of the airports or something.
So that was, you know, and Pete, you might even tell us that that's not the case.
Yeah, no, it's not. There is no Mint service in Alaska. They also claim there's no Mint service in Hawaii, yet there is.
OK, so that was my question. How long ago was it that you how recently have you tested?
Two weeks, two weeks ago.
OK, never mind. So there's no Mint service in Alaska. Thank you, Pete. Sorry.
No, I'm glad to know this is good. So, you know, his thought was, I know T-Mobile will be fine in
Alaska, but if I switch to Mint, what do you think will be the best way to have service in Alaska?
He says, my wife and I have iPhones 13 and 12s right now, and by next year, it'll be a 13 and
a 15. Yep, I understand. I know how this works. My advice would be, you get $24 a month in savings, right?
And so you're going next year. So let's say over the course of a year, you're going to save $288,
right on on all of this. Oh, public math. You're doing it.
Well, I'm letting I'm letting Siri help me, by the way, another quick tip.
And I do this without thinking about it. So I'm glad you highlighted this, Pete.
Command spacebar, bring up the spotlight search. I typed in 24 asterisk 12 and it comes up with.
$288. That's how I knew it was $288. You've always got a calculator at your fingertips,
if you're max right there. So you got $288, a limit of $288 to spend on whatever your solution
is. Now, if you had to spend all $288 of it to implement some secondary solution, that wouldn't
be worth it because you would have the inconvenience of having to figure out and implement the
the secondary solution, but I'm pretty sure that if you're going to Alaska for a few weeks,
let's say a month, you can get 30 days of, you know, data for us data is expensive.
So it's not going to be like Europe data, but still, let's say you pay $30 for, you
know, the data that you would need. It's probably not going to be that much.
It's probably going to be half that, right?
So times two, you've got eSIMs, you just go to eSIMDB, find and do this a week or two before you travel.
Like you don't have, you can look now just to get a feel for what it would be like if you were going now,
but certainly don't buy anything now.
And use an eSIM, they're really simple. An eSIMDB is gonna be your answer,
assuming the site doesn't go down. Another, we're gonna have to, that's the twice.
Yeah. We got to knock on wood again. I don't know what I would do if that site went down.
And I would probably start a replacement for it because it's super valuable.
But, you know, just get an eSIM for your Alaska data and you're good to go. It's gonna be fine.
I really, that's okay. I was going to ask, like you actually do this more frequently, Pete.
So what do you, what would you do?
I do. And I haven't used an eSIM up there yet, but that's absolutely what I would do.
Cause I just bought a worldwide data, uh, last month and, uh, and used it for the
first time, maybe two months ago now.
And, and that worked out great. The other option is, uh, there's a little piece of gear, and I know
I've talked about this before.
It comes out of Hong Kong. It's called a Pokefi, uh, P O K E F I.
And I think it's about 160 bucks and then it's $15 for five gigs.
And I use, and, and essentially you're on wifi, you know, that thing connects
cellular and use its wifi for all your access.
Hiccup I've found on that is often is not my phone, but sometimes it does, and sometimes it doesn't.
It says, oh, you need to disable airplane mode because you know, you don't, you
don't have cell service and you can't make a phone call, even though I have
wifi calling enabled. Yeah, I know.
It comes up and says, no, no, no phone calls for you. So, but WhatsApp and Skype and all that still work.
Sure. So that's, that's my workaround with it.
But, and I've also found interesting. This is the weird part about it.
So you have to have airplane mode off, even if you don't have signal in order for your phone to make a call, make a call on wifi calling.
Yeah. And I found that to be more true since I put the eSIM on the card.
Oh, interesting. Yeah. Okay.
So, I mean, my guess is that that is a, a function of Apple's software, right?
Like it disables the phone when the, the phone app, the phone app.
Yeah, exactly. When it's in airplane mode, it just doesn't function. So I, okay.
Like it doesn't need to be that way. you've proven with like WhatsApp and Skype
because they work. Works fine. It works fine.
Yeah. The phone call over wifi calling would work fine too. So yeah.
So I just told my wife, you know, what I take into doing is just tell my wife, look,
I turn WhatsApp on when I'm overseas, call me on WhatsApp and the phone rings like normal.
Works great. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. But it only uses data.
And interesting, look carefully if you're doing one of those eSIMs overseas.
They, I think you discovered this too, Dave.
They'll break it down. They'll give you like eight gigs of data, uh, sometimes about 15 gigs.
I said five, but I think I bought 15. It gives you like eight gigs of regular data and then five,
gigs or seven gigs of social media.
Yeah.
Some, one of the companies, it was, yeah, I forget which one it was.
I saw, yeah, we talked about that. I saw that plan too. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
But yeah, yeah. Just pay attention. That's all, you know, when you're buying your
eSIM, but you will, you know, you're, you're going to read all the fine print.
Read the fine print. Yeah.
Yeah. And look for discounts on eSIM DB.
Often has coupon codes, uh, for carriers, you know, for eSIM providers.
And like when we went to Montreal recently, it was the eSIMs that I bought for the three
of us each were, I think we got five, three gigs or five gigs.
I mean, I needed, I was three gigs for five days, which was great. And we, I think, I think I used a gig and a half. I think, uh, my niece
used gig and a half and Lisa used maybe a gig. Like we always use way less than you think. Cause
you're like out doing stuff. You're not just sitting around and back at our Airbnb or your
hotel, you're going to have wifi. But, um, but it is good to have obviously data connection when
you're out and about doing your thing. But, uh, we, uh, the, the E-SIMs were nine Euro.
The company we used was YeeSim, Y-E-E-S-I-M. And they were nine euro, but I had a YeeSimDB,
which referred me to them, by the way. And, you know, that's why I would have gone with it.
Had a five euro coupon. So I paid for four euro each. So 12 euro total. And, you know.
It's good to go. It's funny. I bought Emily's, I bought my plan one night, like the day before
before we left or something.
And it was, it turned out to be, you know, $4 and 33 cents or something.
And then we bought my niece's plan the next morning.
And it was like $4. I saw the credit card charge notification come through.
It was like $4 and 27 cents. I'm like, oh, exchange rate helped.
You're good to go. Yeah, yeah.
Saved six cents. You saved six cents? Yeah, the exchange rate between US and Canada is,
well, it's very favorable right now for traveling to Canada.
It's not so favorable for traveling from Canada to the U.S. I would suppose, yeah.
I have one last thing that I've been playing with for a while and wanted to talk about, Pete,
and it is called the Mackie DLZ Creator.
This looks like and is a mixer.
It's 800 bucks, but I'll tell you what it is. It is a mixer built for people podcasting,
streaming, YouTube, all of that.
Uh, it, it really is built to be sort of your all in one solution and it also connects to
your computer, but it has an SD card and it has a USB port.
So you could actually record right from this thing to, uh, you know, uh, either an internal
card or an external device. So you could do it all right here.
It's got four XLR and, and quarter inch. It's got four combo inputs, so you can plug in up to four microphones.
Then it's got two, really three other channels that are sort of assignable to various different things.
You can assign them to.
Um, the, uh, th there's inputs, like more quarter inch inputs that you can assign them to.
You can assign them to a Bluetooth input.
You can assign them to, uh, USB outputs from your Mac. So your Mac could use like your Mac.
It's some audio generated from your Mac could go out to this and you can mix and match those.
And then it has a separate, an additional channel for built-in sound effects.
So you could have like your theme music and your ding sound and all that stuff and there are,
Six soft pads on that channel that you can just use to trigger and there are four banks that you can have loaded there
So up to 24 different sounds as you sort of bounce around this,
It's almost got a mini stream deck built into it and in that sense. Yes,
Um it it auto it it has the capability of auto mixing So you tell it okay?
I want these four channels or these two channels like if we were just having you and me in there
I want these two channels to be.
That the levels to be equal or I want, you know, these three channels to be equal but with one to take priority
So if the host starts talking it ducks the other two, but otherwise auto mix them so that everybody's equal,
You can turn that on or off and it has four.
Headphone outputs and there are four headphone jacks. You can have four separate headphone mixes
uh, where, you know, you, you have, you know, you could like, whatever you want in your
ears is different from what I have in my ears. Or if there's something you want muted from
your ears, you can do that too. Now, where this starts to get really interesting is I
started thinking about this. I'm like, okay, well, so everything I've just described so
far is great for the person podcasting with people in the same room. Like, like it would
be fantastic for that. But of course I don't generally podcast with people in the same
room iPodcast with people who sometimes are literally on the other side of the world.
And so there are more features.
It connects to your Mac, as I said, via USB, and there is sound that can go from your Mac out to it.
So I could grab the sound from your, uh, you know, from the, our VoIP connection, we use
StreamYard, but it could be Skype or discord or whatever, it doesn't matter.
And I could route that out to one of the channels here because there are, there are actually,
two stereo sends from the Mac to this mixer that are assignable.
Great, okay, so now I've got you know a fader for Dave's local mic a fader for Pete's remote mic great.
I have my sound effects fader great
I have another fader from the second stream coming from my Mac that might be say you know
Listener questions that I'm playing from the Mac okay, so now I can mix that so far
We're checking all the boxes right this is this is good my Mac can capture the sound coming back from this
this, uh, either the full mix.
So if I want to use the mixer to actually mix things and send it back, I can do that.
Or it's a multi-channel, uh, capable device. So I could grab the audio from every channel and record it in say logic.
And that includes the channel that's coming from you out from StreamYard to this mixer
back into the Mac, into logic, but processed by the mixer.
And yes, now my head hurts. I'm sorry, but it's like all the things but it's like process covered every base. Oh, yeah, and there's processing. There's there's there's,
Effects like like reverb and delay there's compression on this,
Every chance right like so it's got all the things it sounds good,
Here's the part as I'm going through this. I'm like, okay So the one thing I'm missing though is I need that
Headphone output to be able to go back to you because I need to send you a signal that doesn't have your voice in it
Because it would be on a slight delay and that would drive you batty.
You don't want to hear that.
Well, they have a little feature. Oh, Dave. Oh, contrary. I love hearing my own voice. Can't you tell?
So they have a little feature on the headphone outputs. You can pick any one of them to be sent back to the Mac via USB.
So now I could create a headphone mix, right?
Like they've thought of all the things. I can't like I need to, I need to rip apart my studio and
and record an episode with this, or at least a dummy episode with it, which I've actually
sort of done already.
And I really haven't found the, you know, it seems like they've caught everything.
It's like, it's almost like they listened to what I needed and built it.
And maybe they did awesome. Yeah. Well, somebody who clearly understands yes. Sound engineering.
Yeah. The thought into this podcast needs like, cause I've used like the roadcaster and things like that.
And there's always like a, well, you know, there's the asterisk of,
I can't really get the mix I want back in. So I've got to do that in a different way and it's fine, but, you know,
but like this, yeah.
Okay. Now, so they're not giving this away, but what you've got up on the screen
and your screen share shows a couple other risks. So this is at 799. Yes.
And it looks like there's something up there for 599 and 399.
Are those the same company?
No, not the same company. One of them is the road roadcaster.
Yeah, no, it would be like, this would be, even for me, this would be a little overkill, right?
Because I don't need four Mike Pries. I, you know, I could do two.
So there's a, maybe this is their first foray into this at Mackie.
Um, maybe there's a world where there's the the Mackie DLZ creator mini or something,
you know, two years down the road. I don't know where.
Well, with four, I mean, that could be, you know, it could be a mixer for a band.
Or, um, you wouldn't, yes, it technically could, it's not built for that, but, but
yeah, I mean, it's got all the outputs. So yes, I could, I could mix a band with
four signals. I mean, as long as you were doing like just vocals, which sometimes happens. So yeah.
I mean, in a pinch, absolutely. Yeah.
Yeah. Wow. Yeah. It's a pretty cool, I'm really impressed by this device. So that's why I wanted to take a few minutes and just
talk about it here. But, um, but my few minutes are now up, so I will, I will
keep us all posted as we, as we go forward, as we go forward. It's a pretty
cool little device. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I've been messing with it for a couple of
weeks. I I've been eager to talk about it, but I really wanted to like get into
it and make sure that I understood it. Yeah. Before I, before I started talking
about it, but yeah, no, it's, I'm impressed with this thing.
Thanks for hanging out with us, folks. Thank you, indeed. Great, as always.
Feedback at matgeekub.com. I know we said it many times in the show, but,
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It. Thank you to Cashfly for providing all the bandwidth to get the show from us to you.
Thank you to Meta for putting out yet another social media platform that is actually worth
checking out. It's worth checking out threads if you haven't yet. Yeah, it's worth checking
out. I'm curious to see how this whole landscape evolves. Yeah, it's good. And of course, I'm
out there at Dave Hamilton on threads because it takes whatever your Instagram username
is or was and I mean it remains and it just sort of clones it over there. So yeah, yeah.
So your name is already reserved, I think is how that kind of works.
The problem is I don't have my username on Instagram is not Pilot Pete, so I'll have
to go figure out. Have to go figure that out. Oh, there you go. Yeah, right. Yeah. Go, go, go now. Right.
Yeah. Yeah. Bye. Speaking of Pilot Pete, he go listen to his other podcast. So There I Was. It's a great
one for aviation enthusiasts and I've got two other shows that I do, Business Brain
for entrepreneurs and Gig Gab for working musicians.
Come check those out.
Matt Kekab merch is available. Get your merch now and you can have it if you're coming to Mac Stock, so that'd be fun.
And we will see you at Mac Stock. We've got some fun things planned.
We'll probably talk more in depth about that in the next episode.
And that's what we got. Thanks for hanging out. Check out our sponsors.
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Music.
Pete, for the people who aren't on video, what's your shirt say?
Upside down, it's hard to read. Oh, I'll just look in the camera.
Don't get caught.
Music.