It's time for MacGeekGab, and listener Brad brings us our quick tip of the week
by saying, I recently had an application that stopped generating its sound and banner notifications.
I resolved this by visiting the Notification System Settings pane and right-clicking
the targeted application and selecting Reset Notifications dot dot dot.
A further note of interest is that the notifications actually configure and
are found in a P-list, which we'll put in the show notes at macgeekgab.com.
I had no idea that this reset notifications per application even existed, let alone how to find it.
Right-click in system settings on the app in the notifications list.
More quick tips like this, plus your questions answered today on MacGeekGab
1015 for Monday, December 25th. Merry Christmas, 2023!
Music.
Greetings, folks, and welcome to MacGeekGab. Indeed, we are the show where you
send in your quick tips like that, your questions that we sometimes answer,
hopefully answer, your cool stuff found correctly. Correctly.
Well, that's, you know, you let us know.
That's the beauty. You send all this stuff into feedback at MacGeekGov.com.
We assemble it. We string it together loosely into an agenda such that we each
have a great chance of learning at least five new things every single time we get together.
And here on this cold Christmas morning here in Durham, New Hampshire, I'm Dave Hamilton.
Oh and here in south dakota not quite uh snowing yet i'm adam christiansen,
in here also in southern new hampshire where it's i don't know if it's colder
or warmer than south dakota it's pilot pete gonna be back i don't know the weather i just fly him,
you fly over the weather pete that's right that's my goal that's that's how
it works yeah yep yeah that reset notifications thing did you did either of
you know about that no clue Oh, I saw that.
That's brilliant. This is what I love about doing this show.
One of the things, there's many things, in fact, that I love about doing the
show, but that's like, like routinely we've been doing this 18 and a half years.
I know that feature hasn't been there for 18 and a half years,
but like it's been there for a while.
Do you know it's not been there 18 and a half years? Well, I know that system,
that Mac OS has not had a notification center.
So, so yes, I, I, that I do know. Yes.
And system settings wasn't there. Correct. 18 years ago. But I bet,
I bet that's been there a couple of OS versions.
At least. Right? Like, of course. Yeah.
Per app. That's brilliant. Yep. Yep. It's per app and you get little choices
when you go in there and, um, actually let me open open it up because there
was, there was something,
uh, uh, uh, if I go into notifications and I right click on reset notifications.
It is hopefully not going to break my computer.
Uh, I see my CPU pegging. Oh, there it goes. It asked me, are you sure you want
to reset? The app will have to request permission to send notifications.
You won't receive notifications from this app until then, which is great. Great.
It's an interesting thing to go
look in your notifications list and system preferences, system settings.
I found one at the very top of the list that had an icon that also looked like
system settings and was like one of those websites that tries to scam you into,
you know, installing their antivirus software or whatever.
So, you know, fascinating to go look in there and see what you've got. More Conware.
Conware. There you go. Is that, you don't fly for Conware, do you?
No. I was going to say, is that Nicolas Cage movie? Con Air.
That's right. Yeah. No, these are the people that try to get you to,
like you say, put their crappy software on your computer and ruin your day.
And ruin your day. Yeah, exactly. But like they make you think that like by
using the system settings icon and it appears in your notification center,
like it looks legit. So, yep.
Yep. All right. Pete, you got a quick tip for us?
I do. I've got a two for today, Dave. Oh, let me get two quick tips in one.
First of all, you can put or create a list or a smart list in context,
which is really nice. I prefer a smart list because, for example, holiday cards.
So I create a new smart list called holiday cards, oddly enough.
And then all you have to do is somewhere in that list, I put the word holiday in notes.
So anybody's contact that I've put the word holiday in notes,
they show up on that list.
All right. Well. Wait, that's brilliant.
Yeah. I mean, I've done smart things in like Mail and Finder and never even
dawned on me that that could exist in contacts.
Yeah, so that's what I do. And you could do it other ways, you know,
it could be, you know, like I have one for medical and the smart list is anyone whose title is doctor.
What? So aside from you, Dave, my other doctor. Dr. Dave.
Yeah. What a callback. That's brilliant. Yeah.
So, but yeah, so you can create all these really, you can get really.
Granular. You can drill down and set up, separate people in your contacts in
really great ways using smart list or a regular list.
I mean, you can, you can manually add them in list. I prefer SmartList. Sure, sure.
But then, like for my other show, I created a list of people who donate directly
to the site because I didn't have a way to contact them easily.
So I've created that. And then what you do is you right-click on it. Here's tip number two.
Right-click on that SmartList and select Send Email to the name of that SmartList.
And it will create an email and put all the people in that SmartList in the address bar.
You can also print envelopes from
contacts nowadays so you could print envelopes
from a smart list that you put holiday in the notes and
okay yeah yeah save a bunch of time so uh i would i would caution that when
you do send an email to a smart list it's going to put all those email addresses
in the to window instead of the bcc window so if you don't want to share everybody's address,
then put a, you know, drag them down to the PC, BCC Bravo Jar.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But, uh, yeah.
So that there's your two for, for Christmas morning. Happy Christmas,
everybody. I like that. That's good. Yeah. Yeah.
Do you have any ways you use SmartList? Or is this a new feature for you too, Adam?
No, I mean, I think we talked about a couple episodes ago how I will sometimes
use it to archive photos in Photo Library.
So I'll go in and make a Smart album, right? And say, give me everything from
the past year and then make an archive of that.
And then that's my, I now save to delete last year's photos if I want like the
blurry ones and not so great ones from my existing photo library so I'm not
taking up space with photos that are not really great but I still want to save. Yep. Yep. Cool.
Todd has a quick tip about email for us. He says, you know, sometimes you copy
text out of one email message and paste it into another and sometimes if that
text is part of a reply chain,
you get all of the quote bars,
the vertical lines that show you all of that.
All 17 of them. Yeah, you can remove those one at a time by highlighting the
text and or you could highlight the whole email and it will start.
It will just remove them from everything in the email.
And then I think it's it's in one of the menus.
But but Todd says you use the option command and the apostrophe key and that
will start removing quote lines.
If you remove the option key from that and just do command apostrophe,
it will add quote lines so you can control these back and forth if you like. Yeah, it's a good tip.
It's one of those things that I use routinely and never thought to share here on the show.
But it's super helpful that, yes, you can take those out and you can get them
all the way down to nothing. Yeah.
And you can also go to the message menu and choose make plain text.
Uh, if you wind up pasting in something that has like weird formatting from
a previous email and it will remove all the formatting from that message and
truly just make it plain text for you to ship off to whomever you want to.
That's how I've always gotten rid of those is just make it plain text and then,
and then put it back in and reformat it as needed.
But that's so much simpler. Very cool. Yeah.
There's another one for me. Yep. I love it. No, it's great.
We talked last episode about creating apps from webpages a little bit.
And I mentioned the apps from BZG Apps, Coherence and Unite.
And I also mentioned that I had never used the new thing in Sonoma where you
can add to dock and essentially just create a Safari. Safari,
you know, an application based on a Safari window.
And so I went and messed around with that after we finished the show. And it's great.
We have a Google Doc that we keep all of our like running agenda in.
If you're watching the live stream, it's at macgeekup.com slash show notes.
You can see us editing it. And it's just a Google Doc.
I save that into a, I went to the file menu in Safari and I chose add to doc.
And now I have it there in my doc and you can even go into the preferences and give it a little icon.
It saves these things into your doc,
um, home applications folder is where those live.
So you can go and delete them and manage them and all of those things.
They're not like buried in the system somewhere that never for you to see.
And it works great. And it works the way I would want it to work.
When I click a link inside this app, it opens it in Safari.
It doesn't like open another tab in the app, which I like, you might want that.
It doesn't do that. It opens it in Safari, Sorry, but handy and very like very
reliable and all that good stuff.
And what's funny is later that day.
I was lamenting how there was no Mac OS app for threads, the new social media
network or whatever from from Meta.
And I was like, yeah, whatever, you know, it's fine. And then in our chat,
uh, unprompted by me, listener Andrew says, uh, as I've left Twitter and moved
to threads, I was lamenting the fact that there was no Mac OS app for threads.
So I created one with add to doc and I'm thinking, how come this didn't dawn
on me when I had exactly the same thought moments after using the add to doc
feature for different purposes.
And what's great about this add to doc thing for something like threads is once
you've created this web app there,
you can scroll, you can resize the window and take advantage of threads formatting
as though it were, say, on an iPhone.
And when you, you know, you make the window sort of narrow enough,
it gets rid of all the extraneous stuff and formats like you're viewing it on
an iPhone and makes it really feel like an app.
So, uh, think about that with, I mean, use it with threads, but also everything
else that you might, um, that you might run all the time.
Good, right? Have you guys done anything with these yet? I haven't, but nope.
That's something to play with. It is something to play with. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Where are we here? Oh, you know, yeah.
Back in episode 1011, we, again,
we're talking about the maneuver that we all do and might wind up doing after
the holidays here as we get, you know, new toys and gizmos and all of that that
need to be plugged in underneath our desks.
The maneuver that we do when we have something under the desk,
a cable under the desk, and we need to kind of loop it up and over the top of
the desk without it falling.
And Ed shared a name for this.
He says, I think maybe it is called cable-nastics because sometimes it seems
like gymnastics to get it done.
I like this. This might have to go on a t-shirt. it that's that's
cable cable nastics ed is good right we
did get a bunch of comments about this
though do you have a you weren't here for episode 10 11 adam so
i like you know you know this maneuver of which we speak yes no yeah i know
exactly what you're talking about mostly it involves me lying under something
and trying to fish a cable up and then somehow precariously hook it on the edge
of the desk and hope it doesn't fall and then uh it always does it always It always does.
Yeah. It involves, you know, some form of, of, uh, religious deity based,
um, uh, please to, to keep that cable hanging ever so precariously.
And all the spiders down there are no help.
They are no help. That's right. Yes.
The spiders, the land of spiders and dust bunnies. Um, but, uh,
soccer dad says, uh, has a, it has a tip for us and says attaching your cable
to a straightened metal coat hanger has frequently worked for me.
I even use this method for running cables in conduits and that's kind of brilliant.
Oh yeah. Oh yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So that made me just, that made me just think of something that seems obvious,
but I don't know. I didn't think of it till just now.
Yes. Don't they make like special tools for fishing cables through like walls? Of course.
It's called a fish tape. Fish tape. Yeah. Yeah. Why wouldn't we get one of those? I know. I know Adam.
Because we're that work. I mean, you don't have to be going through a wall.
You could go. You don't have to be going through a wall. That is correct. Yep. Yeah.
Yep. Or we could follow listener Bruce's suggestion where he says,
I suggest using a common bean bag.
You can fit the bean bag into the palm of your hand.
Use your thumb to hold the cable in place on the bean bag.
Then reach up and place the bean bag on top of the cable on the desk so that
the bean bags now holding the cable.
You can safely let go, come around to the top and retrieve your thing. I, this is smart.
I can't always like, depending on how much room you have, a lot of times you're,
you know, kind of trying to do the hook thing, but, but if you've got the room,
the beanbag thing makes perfect sense. So thank you for that, Bruce.
Um, yeah, that's good. That's good.
My favorite, I think, comes from Teresa,
who really embraces the fact that the first time that you do this is definitely
not going to be the last time that you do this in that location.
Anyone who has set up computers on a desktop has had this annoying experience.
If the desk is against a wall and you're alone, it becomes a trial of wills.
Will the wire win? Dave mentioned he was having fun in games getting wires to
his desktop, and I remembered having to stop and leave this tip, which may help others.
Depending on the wires in question, check out the various sizes of 3M Command
Strip Wall Hangers for pictures.
It's very easy to stick them on the back of the desk near the top,
making sure they are sideways.
So normally you would hang a Command Strip vertically.
This is sticking it on horizontally. And if you've never used command strips
before, oh my gosh, these things are amazing.
They save you from having to tack into your walls often. It's awesome.
Uh, so, uh, you should be able to wedge the wire into the hanger because they
are plastic and will give a little, it will stay there while you get to the
top of the desk, reach over and grab it to plug it in where you need it.
And they're also clear and are little visual clutter.
And of course they're on the back of your desk.
So yeah, they, yeah, yeah.
They're just little, they're sticky pieces. They're pieces of plastic with sticky
backs that have little hooks on them.
And the idea here is you have the hook sideways and you just use the hook as,
you know, sort of a V shape and you sort of wedge the thing into the hook and you're good to go.
And you can even leave it like that if you really want so that if you unplug
the cable, like if it's something for your phone where you're not always plugged
in, the cable doesn't fall.
It's just waiting there for you the next time you need it. Yeah.
And then Allison wrote with a hint too. Yeah. Yeah. Honey, can you help me with this, please?
Right. Yeah, yeah. There is that. If you're not alone.
I mean, if you're not alone. Yeah, most of the time you are,
though. That's the problem. Why is that?
Like, why is it that it's rare that there's anyone there?
I know why. Because you don't want to pay the divorce attorney when you try
to set up a computer with your wife or your husband.
Exactly. Oh. The other one is I tend to get foul-mouthed and frustrated,
and my family doesn't like to be around me when that's going on.
Right. But if you could solve the problem of having to perform cable gymnastics,
you might be less foul-mouthed and frustrated. Well, there's that.
I want to comment on the command hook thing.
I just did this recently for when we
set up our Christmas tree because we had to put
it or we wanted to put in an area where it's nowhere near
an outlet so i had to run like a an electrical cord
along the wall and i used these command strip uh hooks
yep cord clips to route that
cable so what's great about that tip is
not only can you use those for getting the
cable up there but they're great for just routing cables
around your wherever you need to route them yeah oh yeah
pretty inexpensively too like you're not you
know putting in panduit or or fishing wires through
walls or yeah yeah i mean it's not
quite as you know clean as the conduit stuff
if you get the long you know pieces of that yeah of
course of course it works and uh what's great
about the command strip stuff right is that has that little pull tab so
it's not going to like ruin your wall or your surface or
whatever like that when you need to go remove it when you you need to remove it yeah
they're great for tape paint with you yeah i i did
not know about command strips until we moved my
daughter into her dorm room at her freshman year
of college and she's like oh yeah we just got to get a bunch of command strips
and i'm like how's that what's that and she's like i'm like oh yeah you just
tack into the wall and then when you move out you take the screw out of the
nail out of the wall and you put some toothpaste over it and you're good to
go like everybody else does and uh which is another tip if you don't know of that one yeah yep uh.
I only do it if you're not planning on moving back into that
same place because it doesn't actually like you
know that's it's not like spackle where it just
hides it visually but uh and she's like no command strips i was like what and
they they really they work amazingly well and like you said adam they have this
little pull tab that releases them with generally without stripping the paint
off the wall yeah yeah so you have a decent paint job yeah bad paint job Yeah,
it might strip the paint off of dorm room walls because, you know,
it's like one thin, thin coat, you know.
So, well, and I've got one other kind of tip, a techie tip, whatever.
You mentioned conduit, which brought me back to when we put our pool in many years ago.
We had over 150 feet of conduit. Well, how are you going to get the line through that?
I watched the electrician and the way he did it is we laid the conduit and he took twine.
Uh they put the twine in on one end and he
ran the shop vac on the other and it sucked the twine through and
then he tied it to the to the electrical cable and
we were able to get it started that way so that's how we got i never yeah you've
blown my mind here like yeah i i've i've known about like keeping string in
conduit right like you always want to leave string in conduit so that You know,
you can pull a cable through or whatever and it's how do you get it there?
But how do you get the string there in the first place?
Vacuum used to shop back. Of course. Yeah. Yeah.
Dude.
Yep. Yep. That would do it. Tie it on the other end.
Tie it on the other end first before you suck with the shop vac.
Because otherwise you need to bring the shop vac to the other side.
You're going to have a ball of string inside your shop vac.
Right. That's right. Yeah.
Whoops. Yeah. Huh. Brilliant.
Oh, I love this. Very cool. Great. That's good. Yeah. I think we should get
on to some Christmas questions, Dave. Okay.
John asks, I'm upgrading my
home Wi-Fi network from a Wi-Fi 5 Deco setup to the Wi-Fi 6E Deco setup.
And he says, well, my password for my Wi-Fi 5 network was and is excellent.
I've been hesitant about changing it periodically because I have about 4,500
IoT devices, all our HomeKit or Matter devices or whatever. I may have embellished there, folks.
I think he said 45, but it becomes like 4,500 when you have to change the Wi-Fi
credentials on every one.
He says, but I know it's going to be a huge pain to migrate them all to my new
network if I use a new password.
I also have dozens of automations, et cetera, et cetera. I figured before I
do anything rash, I'd ask your opinion on whether it makes sense to change the
SSID and password with my new network or make the new one exactly the same.
My current password is 20 random alphanumeric characters, but it's the same
as I set up almost six years ago.
I use one password to store all these things. What do you guys think?
Adam, you want to, can I put you on the spot? Do you have advice for this?
I just keep the same password. Oh, yeah. Same. I mean, here's the thing.
I'm assuming he's like me, and when he set it up, that password is only on that
Wi-Fi network and has only ever been used on that Wi-Fi network.
So unless that's been compromised in some way, which seems highly unlikely.
I see very little risk to not changing. I mean, I know the best practice is
change your password frequently.
That is one area where I tend to not to, because, again, I've moved to the practice
of not using the same password everywhere. I have different passwords.
They're very long. I use 24 characters random with one password and,
like, good luck. Yeah. You know? Yeah.
Good luck. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it also depends on the threat environment you're
in. You know, if you're on two acres...
Alone you know you're nowhere near as much
as in an apartment building uh or everybody's network
that's fair yeah yeah no true too my
yeah my advice matches yours adam is absolutely
leave the leave the password the same dear heaven like i can't even imagine
what my life would be like if i had to change the password every time i like
tested a new wi-fi system or something i always Something about foul mouth and frustrated.
Talk about foul mouth and frustrated. Yeah, exactly.
Yeah. Uh, yeah, no, no, thank you.
Um, I, years ago, the, and I'm curious what you guys use for your wifi passwords.
I use, uh, the, the minimum for the original, like WPA, like the, the WEP rather,
um, was it required a minimum of
10 characters and so i standardized
not just for myself but for clients that i was
working with at the time because i knew they needed to
have a password they would not forget because they were going to need it for
their devices in the future and when a friend arrived at their house like all
those things so for myself and all of my clients i standardized Standardized
on something that we all know that is 10 digits long.
And that is your phone number with area code in the, in the U S anyway,
seven digit phone number, three digit area code.
And so this was back in the days, of course, when everybody had like a house
number, that's less common these days, but, but like the practice works.
And so that that's our password is our, well now old house number,
but everybody knows it and it's fine and it works out great.
And, uh, but that's always been it. So, yeah, yeah.
Dave, you taught me that, and it's still mine. Is it really?
It's 17 years later. Yeah, it's still my old landline number. Yeah.
Makes it so much easier. How about you, Adam? Do you have a terrible to guess and communicate?
I guess terrible to communicate would be the password. Oh, yeah.
No, you would never guess my wife.
Fascinating. It's randomly generated, 24-character long.
But, I mean, now with what Apple's built in, if someone comes over,
it's like, tap the thing.
I also just, I have a guest one that's not as difficult, but with the guest
one, I also, uh, well, I don't have it in this house. I had it in my old house.
I printed it out as a QR code and stuck it on the wall and it just said guest
wifi and you could walk over and scan the QR code and it would,
it would get you on the guest wifi network at my house.
Yes. So no one ever had to type the password. Yep. Yep. No, here in the studio, I have, um, uh, a QR code.
I put it on the beer fridge, um, because I figured that everyone will see that
comes over to rehearse or podcast in the studio.
So, yep. And I do have, I do maintain a separate guest network for my home network.
Yeah. Yeah. I, I probably, only family gets the home network.
Yeah that's smart i probably should do
that i i haven't i just give everybody my home network it's
fine yeah um speaking of my home
network my general setup is that
i have a synology router these days it's
the rt6600ax and then i often will leave the most of the time i leave the wi-fi
on that disabled and i use whatever my you know favorite wi-fi mesh du jour
is for a long time it's been Eero and that's kind of been my default just because
it's so smart and great at doing things.
But it had been a while since I tested Synology's mesh.
And I thought, you know, I need to give this another shot.
The last time, the last couple of times I tested Synology's mesh, it did not go well.
It was immature is probably the right term to use.
So I did, I moved over to Synology's mesh.
And my, my way of doing this is I set up, you know, the secondary mesh with
a different name, same password, by the way, but different names.
So, you know, it'd be my network name dash Synology or something.
And then I use it only on my devices and for a day or two and make sure everything is seems okay.
And then I rename it to match my main network name and then and go into,
in this case, the Eero setup and change that network's name to something else.
So all of my devices just naturally flow to, you know, the network that I want
to test as the primary device.
I have to say the Synology meshing has truly matured.
Not only is it super reliable and we've had absolutely zero problems with it,
but the entire setup process of it is so much better than it used to be.
I remember doing it in the past.
I had to log in manually to each of the mesh points and update the firmware
to match the firmware that was on my main router.
And I thought, okay, well, you know, I've got some time, like I'll do this.
And it did it for me. It found the mesh point and it was like,
hang on, I got to update the software on this. And it's like, oh, look at you go.
Like, of course, you know. So really, like my opinion on Synology Mesh has has changed.
And this is thanks to a lot of you who have been using it and said,
you know, you should give this another shake. And and so I did. And it's it's been fine.
Truly, we haven't had any issues. It are the back of our house,
the patio that we have, which is on the ground floor off the back of our house,
is interesting because the way our house is, it's on a little bit of a slope.
And the front of our house appears to be two stories.
The back of our house, because of the slope, appears to be three.
Our finished basement sort of comes out on the back.
But what that means is the back of my first story, my basement story,
is all concrete other than like doors and windows.
And Wi-Fi does not go through concrete at all.
I would assume that concrete is probably surrounded on three sides by piles of dirt as well.
Piles of dirt. But even on the one side where it's not surrounded by piles of
dirt, the concrete and, you know, Presumably the rebar in there that's holding the sign.
Yeah, there's a charity cage going on, bouncing things going around.
Correct. Bouncing signals all around.
Even with a door there, if I get perfect line of sight through a glass door, I'm okay.
But otherwise, it is no bueno. So finding the right place to position a mesh
access point to get to the outdoors, because I like to have Wi-Fi on my patio
for Sonos and things like that, is always a trick.
So we're, you know, refighting that particular trick, but other than that, no, no issue.
And that, that has nothing to do with sonology that has everything to do with just physics, you know.
Yeah so my trick on that dave is i actually have
the uh the mesh router sitting on a windowsill
up on the third floor on the back of the house yes i was
going to tell you the same thing so i'm using uh orbeez
yep i used to use ero as well but i switched to
orby when we came over here with and um to get
to my office it's a little distance but i
have window to window site of my daughter's
room so there's like one in the window over there and one window over
here they just yeah that's what
i need to do i they we have a perfect window
to put it in but it's in our perfect window for wi-fi location but it's in our
living room right yeah and it's like a bay window and it's it's really kind
of a visual uh you know like it's a thing and you don't want to block that yeah
Yeah, it's like, oh, what's that?
Oh, it's my wife. You probably need to get, I think they make outdoor ones now.
They do. Could you sit at least like outside?
But I need to get signal to it somehow. Like I would need to run Ethernet to the outside.
Like that's the problem is getting, you know, my problem is getting Wi-Fi to
the outside. It's not a very long haul.
It's just a tricky haul is what it is. Yeah.
Yeah. But yeah. Yeah. I got to, I got to think more about this.
There's maybe even just putting it up near a window upstairs in the house would be enough to do it.
Yeah. So, yeah, if I was really smart, the old owner here had run a bunch of
ethernet over the roof in the other house.
Oh, um, it's really poorly done, but there is an ethernet cable that sits out,
goes from inside to outside.
Yeah. And I could probably just bury a cable over here to the,
uh, yeah, take, take a trench and, you know, a shallow trench.
It doesn't need to be very deep if you get they make
direct burial ethernet cable and i've
i've we have it here the previous owner did it here and
i i did it with my father-in-law uh at
his house he he wound up he had this house on an island and he wound up buying
the neighbor's house and he want he didn't want to pay for two internet connections
i'm like yeah obviously and so we buried it maybe four inches maybe uh on the
on the parts that you would walk over Right. The parts where he wanted grass.
And then there was woods in between the two houses. We literally just laid the
cable on top of the leaves in the woods until we got, you know,
to the edge of the woods near the second house.
And, you know, they buried it for as long as we needed to. And that was that.
And it's fine. That direct burial cable will deal with, you know,
ice and snow and all of those things and then survive very, very well.
Uh, so yeah, no, that direct burial cable is no joke.
I will say though, put something on either end of that cable to insulate you from lightning. Yeah.
Because otherwise, any lightning strike close by, that becomes your lightning
rod, if you will, and blows up things on either end.
I use the APC ProtectNet adapters, and they're inline Ethernet surge protectors is what they are.
There are ones from Ubiquity, and I can't remember the name of it.
Somebody was talking about it in the, I think in the, in discord,
but, um, but ubiquity makes them too.
And, you know, they're somewhere between 10 and $25 a piece and,
and put, you know, get two of them, one on either end, please, you know, but yep.
Yep. Cool. Yep. Cool. I think, I mean, honestly, my mesh wifi with gigabit ethernet works.
Yeah, really? You're able to get gigabit, um, gigabit, you know,
internet connectivity. We have gigabit here.
Is that what we're on right? Is that what you're on right now doing our,
our live streams and all that?
Okay. Wow. If you had told me that's what you were doing, I would have freaked out.
But so, you know, I do zoom calls all day and it works. It works great.
I mean, honestly, what I'm getting out here is probably more like 300, 400 at that point.
I'm not getting the full 900, but yeah.
Well, you don't need that much. Like, you know, right now, I mean,
I'm streaming video out for this show and I can see that my upstream is about 240 K.
So it's more about the latency, excuse me, the latency of it,
which clearly is not an issue. So, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
I didn't realize that Synology had mesh routers.
They have for quite some time. Yeah. Yeah. You can.
Right by me. yeah you can mesh with
everything except the the
1900 ac so okay the
6600 can be a router and or a mesh access point the 2600 can be a router or
mesh access point and then there's the the mr 2200 ac which really truly was
built to be an access point but i think you can also kind of use it as a a standalone
router if you really wanted to. Wow.
And then there's the WRX560, which is the newest one.
And that also is a router or a mesh access point.
So yeah, no, it's very smooth and slick. I've been impressed with it.
In fact, it was getting your VPN set up last week, Pete. Right.
Sort of dug me back into SRM, the Synology router manager.
I was like, you know, I'm in here now.
Not like I didn't add it to yours. I added it to mine. But it was like,
ah, you know, my head's in this. I might as well just kind of keep tugging on this thread.
So it really wasn't that difficult. They made it easy.
I don't know. Where are we here? Kirit, I think. Kirit. Thank you.
Yeah. Kirit has a nice little networking tip.
So I'm writing about the second internet service in my house,
which may not apply to 95% of the audience.
I'm not convinced of this with most of us relying on our home internet connection
for some portion of our jobs.
I think what Kirit shares with us is relevant to more than just 5% of us.
He says, I have high speed Xfinity service in the house, which is spread in
our rather large home with a router and multiple access points.
Generally, we get eight to nine hundred gigs down and is very reliable.
The problem is we are very much Internet dependent household.
Our two daughters frequently visit and work from home. And I also do a lot of remote work as well.
Two to three times a year because of weather or some construction,
the Internet goes down for several hours and sometimes a day or two.
It's not frequent, but when it happens, it feels catastrophic.
So I wanted a backup plan, but it was very hesitant and to do something that
was expensive and high maintenance.
Whenever I looked, I got a T-Mobile home Internet box for 50 bucks a month.
I installed it myself at a great location.
There's an app on the phone that helps you figure out where your best reception
is. Then I hooked up five Eero Pros on sale at Amazon on Black Friday.
So the cost was 500 bucks for the Eero Pros and 50 a month for the T-Mobile box.
And it is amazing. I get anywhere, everywhere in the house, I get 600 meg download
speeds and both internets are independent from others.
So I can jump from one Wi-Fi network to the other.
Mine is an expensive solution, he says. But if someone like me doesn't want
any blackout times, it's perfect.
So this works. There are a couple of ways to make this less expensive.
One of them, Curate, is definitely not going to want to hear because Xfinity
in most locations offers their own version of this, which is much less expensive.
And it automatically kicks in when your cable internet comes out.
You may not have this available to you, Kirit, so perhaps this wasn't an option.
But yes, it's doable.
The other thing is some routers, and the Synology routers are amongst them,
will allow you to set up not one but two internet, like WAN connections,
and have them either do a load balancing or fail over.
And you pick the primary and the secondary. And when one fails,
it just automatically cuts over.
You don't have to switch wifi networks, et cetera, et cetera.
Obviously your solution is robust because you can pick which one you want to
be on that. You don't quite get that with the others, but yeah.
Have, have either of you messed with like the T-Mobile home internet?
I was going to say, I actually appreciate it when my internet goes out because
it means I get free time off.
You could have this. Sorry, my internet's down, people.
I can't work today for the next five hours. All right.
You could have this. You could have a backup connection that is private and
yours and no one knows about.
So when your primary internet goes down, you can still Netflix yourself. Yeah.
I mean, I can still Netflix on my cell phone.
Connection usually like usually if my internet's down my you
know yeah ryzen isn't down or whatever
yeah so you know i in a
pinch wi-fi hot spotted or whatever and that's enough for me but i mean he's
talking about a whole family you know with multiple people meeting you it's
not a one-off thing right yeah uh but yeah i know it's it's it's a good thing
i mean and i think we've already talked about this in the past the other thing
that you would want to support that and i'm assuming I mean,
he's got it is battery backups for your routers. Yep.
Yep. And I recommend a, a battery backup that is dedicated just for your router
and your wifi access point.
Well, initially I put one on like my whole network rack of things, but when,
when you're also running, you know, uh, uh, a Synology disc station or three that have,
you know, spinning hard drives in them that battery power
doesn't last very long you might get 15 20 minutes out
of it whereas if you're only running your router
these are very low power devices you get you know hours or sometimes days depending
on how much battery power you have and and that can be a game changer uh so
yeah yeah get get two ups's and dedicate one for the low power stuff.
Yeah, that's good advice. I like it. Yeah. You can, with the Synology routers, you can connect,
you can tether your phone to them via USB and have your phone's Wi-Fi or your
phone's hotspot, it's not Wi-Fi from your phone, but shared via your,
you know, Synology router too.
Obviously you know you may wind up using lots more data on your phone than you
normally would so you know be prepared for that but that it does work in a pinch yeah.
All right shall i shall yeah you want to take us to david yeah yeah to date
i bring my ip he says to date i bring my iphone 15 oh i let me start higher
sorry because i am a one carry on i set up for failure. Double traveler.
Yeah. So this is it. He's traveling. He's got one duffel bag.
He says, today I bring my iPhone 15, USB-C, AirPods Pro, and my tiny Anker Nano charger.
The phone charges overnight the AirPods while I shower and eat breakfast.
I will need to travel with my M1 MacBook Pro from time to time,
but don't want to lug that huge charger.
I'm thinking about it. I don't need to fast charge overnight is fine.
My AI engine informs me that the M1 Pro can run indefinitely at 30 watts.
So I'm thinking about getting the Anker 47-watt 2-USB port charger,
which folds and it's a Gallium.
A Gallium 9-tried, I think so. Yeah, a fast charger, so it's super small.
And he says, I assume that running that overnight, night, the charger will adapt
to push the full 47 watts to the laptop when the phone tops itself off.
You think this is sufficient or should I bump up to a larger 65 watt charger for more headroom?
I think the 47 watt is going to be fine. I basically do this now. I do it with an M1 Air.
Sorry, now an M2 Air. So it consumes less power than a MacBook Pro.
But I did have that M1 MacBook Pro for a short stint, and it charges fine.
Like you said, it will even charge on a 30 watt charger.
It's not like the Intel days where you... I think the Intel,
like the, the, the 16 inch Intel
MacBook pro, I don't think 30 Watts was enough to even hold a charge.
Like it would, it would delay the inevitable, but I think that was it.
No, that's an, I mean, I have, that's the machine I have. It's a 96 watt machine.
Yeah.
You're right. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Right. Exactly. And I know this because I
have a dock that supplies that, but if, and I have it, have it plugged in now
because if my battery is totally dead and I connect it even to that,
that anchor dock that should supply 95 Watts, I've got a bunch of other stuff
plugged into it. It doesn't provide enough power.
I have to plug him at least to get the battery up enough where the machine will
come on and then it can kind of hold the charge and it'll charge it slowly. but.
Nope. Yep. But the new machines, they don't require a ton of power.
No, they're super efficient. I, you know, I was thinking about you the other day.
I don't, oh, I was packing to just go overnight to Boston and I don't even think
I brought a charger for my laptop with me.
I'm sure I had something that could have done it, but like I was going away
overnight and my laptop was charged.
Like there was no world where I was going to need all that juice that was in
it. Remember the old days when you couldn't do that?
Correct. And I was thinking about those old days and I was thinking about you,
Adam, because I know you aren't yet on an Intel laptop.
And I thought, you know, that I've learned to take for granted.
All right. You weren't yet on an Apple Silicon laptop.
I've learned to take for granted the, you know, 15 to 20 hours of actual battery life on a laptop.
Laptop and i think if you were in a
scenario where you were traveling more that would probably be
the thing that tips the scales for you know
for someone like oh i'm close i of course you're close i
understand this machine i'm trying to remember is it 2018 or 2019
yeah i remember which it is i think it's 20
it's 2019 okay so it's the last last of
the intel i think yeah so santa didn't bring you
a new laptop this morning is what you're saying i mean santa
could bring me a new laptop i've just chosen that you
know this has actually been serving me and continues to serve me
so i don't see a real need like dave is saying if
i suddenly was traveling more you know and i have
an m1 for work so that's right i forgot that you're yes i could do that but
i mean that's not my that's not my machine that's my work machine right right
okay so you're you right so you yeah you've experienced it that's the word yeah
exactly yeah yeah i mean Honestly,
I've often thought about replacing this with a desktop machine because I don't
go anywhere with it anymore.
And when I do travel, my iPad works great.
I'll probably get a new M-series iPad before I get a new iPad.
Laptop to be honest that's interesting yeah i
use i love my ipad with it with the keyboard and um
the only problem now is that i have i can't
even remember which generation i think it's a second gen yep 11 inch ipad pro
um and the only problem there is somehow it now has a little tiny hairline crack
down in the lower part of the display oh and part of the pixel have gone out
So it's, it's starting to die,
literally die to the point where like, I'm like, I should probably just replace this.
So, so I, I, I mean, I know of, of people like you that, that when you travel,
you are comfortable leaving the house with just an iPad. iPad.
What is that? Like, I, maybe I should ask a more specific question that I hadn't
really sat down to prep, but my,
my fear, my concern in doing that is I would need to do something.
That is difficult, if not impossible to do on an iPad, like,
you know, a server would go down and I would need to like SSH in and, and work with it there.
And I know that there are, I mean, I have the prompt app from panic on my phone
and my iPad, like with the keyboard on your iPad, it are things like that functional.
Like, could you really, okay.
Okay. Yeah. The, the only thing that I can't do on it.
And again, I'm not generally traveling for
work anymore is the only thing that I can't do is as you know as a web developer
i set up i like having set up a local dev environments i run apache i run sure
i'm ria db and everything locally on my laptop when i'm doing development.
That you can't do on an ipad obviously yeah um
but that's just me being lazy though because like
there's so many web based i could
set up you could set up a cloud-based dev server
like most people do that's right yeah yeah yeah
yeah yeah so that's just me that's just a me thing i just
haven't wanted to change my my workflow but i mean
honestly it'd be probably better to set something if you
did that s3 server yeah yeah yeah
exactly if you did that or linode or something um yeah
could you then from your ipad if the dev
server was was living on a different machine somewhere
could you do most of
the development or at least in a pinch do enough from
your all of it i've got ftp client you know i've got yeah transmit still ftp
client still works so like all that stuff super simple you know like like you
said ssh i mean honestly i could set up my server environment on my synology
i just haven't done that oh that's right using docker yes yes of course.
Or just set up straight. Like there's a million ways to do this, to solve this problem.
But yeah, that, that accepted, you would be, you would be able to be functional
with your job and, and everything else just on the iPad.
Yeah. I, I need to, I need to open that door again for myself.
It is so tempting to do that, to try that.
Yeah. Because I have, my biggest thing has always been recording my other show. Yeah.
But I have, because StreamYard, the way it works, it takes the file up.
We've had several guests record from an iPad and
the microphone on that is
even really good yeah and you can obviously you
could take a hub and plug it into the iPad so I can use these nice microphones
there's no reason not to do it and it's certainly lighter than my MacBook Pro
60 inch yeah and that's the thing I've always had like a small MacBook Air so
it like the difference for For me,
between an iPad with a keyboard and a 13-inch, or now I guess it's a 14-inch
Air, I mean, there's a difference.
Don't get me wrong, but it's not a massive difference.
Yeah. You know, so. But the keyboards now for the iPads come with trackpads.
Oh, yeah. And, you know, you set up the hub and. Huh. Yeah.
I'm pretty sure if I'm not mistaken that Jason Snell still does a lot of his
entire podcast production flow on an iPad pro.
Totally. That's right. Yeah. Yeah. He does. That just cost me a lot of money. Son of a gun.
Yeah, that's true. We teach you how to
spend a lot of money to make yourself feel
really good about a marginal
gain of something yeah that's right
lighter backpack a lighter backpack that there
you go that's right yep yep yeah all right this is um this is good i like this
adam oh i also wanted to mention i told you guys earlier so anchor i love them
like these nano chargers are all their chargers are incredible and i love their
cables too and so like Like I maintain, because my family is constantly,
oh, I need a new cable.
I just started maintaining a store here behind me, an anchor store.
I like buy like batches of cables in like 10s or 20s.
And chargers, I have extra nano chargers. And yeah, inevitably one of my family
members is going to go, oh, I need a new charger.
And it's like, yep, all right, come to the store. Do you make them pay you? No.
Well, I mean, you know, there's a convenience fee as well. In addition to the
cost, like, you know, it's right here. Same day delivery.
Part of their problem is they like those long 10 foot cables and those things.
I mean, anchor makes great ones and they're not too expensive,
but they don't, they don't last.
No. Any 10 foot cable. They'll last about a year or so. Yeah. They're just too long.
Yeah. They're too long. Right. And too much strain on them when they're pulling them around. Yeah.
Yanking them around. Yeah, exactly. Yeah.
All right. Um, let's see. I want to, let's do, yeah, let's do yawn here. Has, uh, has a question.
It says over the years, I've had multiple personal and work max and multiple
time machine backups for each computer on separate hard drives.
Some of these hard drives are quite old and I'm worried they'll stop working
at some point. Yeah, that's not a worry.
It's a, it's a win, not an if, uh, Can I consolidate the data from each of these
time machine hard drives onto one new drive, an SSD or rotational?
For example, can I just copy and paste the latest time machine backup from each
time machine hard drive onto the new SSD?
Will all of the files move over?
What do you think, Adam? Yeah, I mean, this is something that came up in a similar
way on the Mac cast back in September.
I had somebody who just wanted to know i'm
getting you know i have a time machine drive it's 500 gigabytes i
want to move to a larger one i'm getting a five terabyte drive can i
migrate all that stuff over and when
i did the research for it what i found was an article from our friends at clean
my mac 10 um yeah i have we'll get a link to it but link to it in the in the
mac cast from the 918 episode if you want to look for that too you can find
the i'll put links to It's all of it here, yep.
Yeah, but also in the show notes for MacGeekApp, obviously. Of course.
MacGeekApp.com slash show notes.
But yeah, so they had a process where you could do this, but it's an older article,
and you definitely could when it was macOS Extended Journal partitioning format.
So there's a whole process for doing it. You have to kind of modify some of
the permissions, the ownership of the drive, so that you can move things around.
And you can move the file over the backups.backup.db file and then reset it
back up and it should just work.
I haven't personally tried it or done it, but I would presume that it does and
I think it used to work that way.
I was unsure about the new APFS system only because I'm pretty sure APFS has
a special way of handling data and linking, at least from the research that I did.
Um but the one recommendation i thought you could do is you could probably.
Set up the new drive as you know and just let it do its thing and it might actually
bring over that historical indexing i seem to think that i did that one time
with a drive yeah um you know for me like i i've always felt that the last thing
i'll add to this is for me personally i.
Because I have other forms of backup that maintain an archive,
specifically, you know, some of the things we talked about with how I'm using
ChronoSync and other things.
I've never had this attachment. People have a strong attachment to their time
machine history for some reason.
Yes. And I very rarely have ever had to go back in my time machine history to
like get something every once in a while.
But my theory is, you know, if I deleted it three months ago,
then I deleted it for a reason. and it didn't get accidentally deleted.
I'm not expecting that file to be there. It's great that Time Machine might
have that file, but I'm not attached to my Time Machine history,
so I just would get a new drive, plug it in, and just let it do its thing and
start from that point forward. But that's just me.
That seems to be where I go to. Yeah.
Same. I would start new. I would not attempt to move my Time Machine around.
Round but i i and i'm like
you i i am of the belief that if it
if i deleted it three months ago and i haven't needed it
in three months like it i'm i'm good
however there there is an exception that i experienced to this exact rule and
time machine i believe was the thing that saved my bacon i had not done a like
a speaking presentation for several months it might have been like six months
or something, just the way a schedule worked or whatever.
And then I had one coming up and I'm like, yeah, I'm just going to redo,
you know, I'm going to do the one on wifi.
I need to update it, but you know, I'll start with the bones of, of what I had.
And I went and looked and my presentations folder, the entirety of it was just
not there. And I'm like, what?
And I looked and I looked in recent backups and I can't remember if it was time
machine Or if it was like a clone of an old drive or something that where I
finally found it, I must have accidentally deleted it at some point.
And because it wasn't something that I needed to access regularly, I just I lost it.
But thankfully, I was able to bring it back and everything was good.
So, I mean, I do get that there is a value to this and that's what backups are for and all of that.
Time machine is so darn unreliable for me that I've learned that I can't keep a time machine backup.
Like if I keep one for a year, that's long for me.
You know, I, once it gets corrupted, I just wipe it out and start from scratch.
It's like, yeah, whatever it's done. So if I were in, uh, Jan's scenario here,
I would just like you said, Adam start on the new drive, but don't throw away the old drive yet.
Correct. Yeah. Right. Right. Like that's your archive and and let it sit.
And someday, maybe a year from now, you say, OK, well, I don't need that around anymore.
And you let it go. But all that said, I think copying a time machine backup
folder, if you will, is especially if it.
Well, yeah, this is we're talking about on a on a direct attached drive.
I know John used to, he would back up, he has two disk stations,
so he backs up his Mac to one of them, this is John Braun.
Backs up his Mac to one of them, and then uses like Synology's Hyper Backup
or something to copy his backup from one disk station to the other.
And then when it would get corrupted he would just
copy it back and resume backing up
to the restored backup of his
backup right and so he was able to maintain a very long history by
by doing this but time machine is very
different when it's backing up to a network drive in
terms of what it needs on the disk what you
said about needing the right file structure and all of
that when it's direct attached i i believe you are
right so that's just from the research that i
did i think apfs works differently under the
hood with how it connects things up so i don't know if you
can just direct copy there might be a way to clone it right yeah
that stuff no because require more research than i was able to figure out what
time machine does for a network drive is it creates a disk image and then within
that disk image it does all its magic and all john was doing was just restoring
the disk image with all its magic intact because that's how disk images are.
So, yeah. Yeah, because I'm looking at, I mean, I'm looking at mine right now
and I have, I don't know how many different files on here going back to 2022
and each one of them have a back-to-back HD data thing in it and...
I don't know. Maybe it would work. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
No, because like with, it uses hard links is what time machine relies on,
which are kind of like aliases, um, in a, in a sense, but at one level deeper, I'll say.
Uh, it, a hard link.
When you save a file on your drive, it saves it to wherever it saves it.
And then it puts in the directory, a link to the, where that file actually lives.
Like there's the, there's the directory entry that says, you know,
here's Dave's test file dot HTML or whatever.
And, and then it points to where the actual data for the file lives.
So there's the directory entry, and then there's the actual data for the file with time machine.
It creates another entry in the directory that points to the same file.
And that way, that's how it rolls
things forward without making multiple copies
of the same thing it only makes cop you know
new copies copies of new things or change things and and
so migrating i think if
you were to copy a time machine folder
to a new drive it would take
up infinitely more space because it
would copy every version of that file forward
word right so yeah yeah yeah yeah i
i i think i gave yon bad advice of
just yeah copy it you'll be fine i think you i mean it's worth
testing maybe fair yeah me yeah fair
maybe the finder's smart and it's like oh this is a time machine volume hold
my beer let me you know right yeah i don't know i just honestly never tried
it and i couldn't find any definitive answers in all the research that i did
yeah well and the other thing that i'll add is i I have three time machine backup locations.
I have a little thumb drive. Then I have another little, uh, uh.
Oh, gosh, don't get old. It's bad for your memory. Solid state drive, SSD. Yep.
That's, I think, two terabytes, something like that. And I use that,
and then I have my disk station.
Yep. So I have it rotate through three different places.
So with all the opportunity for cruft and corruption, I'm hoping that one of those will work.
Yeah. In the event I need something. I just use a different,
like I said, a different strategy for what I call archive backups.
Backups like we've talked about i use i have my chronosync that goes
to my drobo and doesn't delete you know is set to not delete so it keeps anything
that i've ever deleted yeah yeah yeah and same thing with then i have also backblaze
which does the same thing it has its own history and i that's where i've recovered
that scenario that you described dave i've done it through.
Backblaze i've just went oh right now there's that
presentation i did or like i've had to recover whatever
like old old client websites like some client
contacts me but again i also though generally have
those on my my drobo as well so yeah that's
interesting just doing a sync that never a one-way sync that never deletes that
never carries forward a delete i like that all right pete you want to think
okay yeah i was just going to say the last thing about that the thing about
drobo i would be careful about is i had a power supply go on my drobo and not now i'm hosed,
you know because they've got that some of them have different little power supplies
and i didn't have anything laying around yeah you don't have a new in box drobo
3 just sitting on a shelf that you never fled i see one on the store shelf behind
you there maybe you could send me.
There's a convenience fee for adam's store recently added yeah that's right,
yeah but i mean that that's even going to be dead here in a few months we talked
about that too I'm moving everything over to a new synology soon here, I think. Yep. Yeah. Yep.
Yep. That's where I'm going. So. Yep.
You want to take us to Mark, Pete? I do. We had a geek challenge answered this week. Oh, man.
And you know what? I can't tell you, Mark, why didn't you write me five years
ago? I've been trying to figure out.
Why didn't Mark read your future mind?
Yeah. There's an app for this or I want to create it. I'm going to create this
app, and it'll be brilliant. We'll make a billion dollars. And yeah, no.
So my problem was I wanted to be able to send Debbie a text.
Right now, it's 3 o'clock in the morning. I'm on the airplane.
We're taking off on time. I'll see you in the morning. But I didn't want to
wake her up at 3 in the morning. She gets a little cranky.
So 7 a.m., 7.30, when she gets up with our son to get him off to school,
I want that text to arrive.
How do I send a text later? Mark writes in.
Uh, and I lost it. There it is. Uh, I have not done this for some time.
All right. Long and short of it. That's it. Yeah. Okay.
I have not done this for some time, but pretty sure you can still send an email
to a text, a cell phone number.
You need to know that format format. For example, AT&T is the number at txt.att.net.
And I found a list, Pete, that I put in the show notes.
Thank you. That translates most,
I don't want to say every, but many phone carriers' email to SMS gateways.
So that's in the show notes, you know, at macgeekup.com. So, yes.
Right. Yep. And, yeah. And so you can do it. Even Mint Mobile is on there.
And all of those. Yeah, they're all there. And he gave me one,
and I clicked on it, and it turns out the website has changed a little bit. It's now later.io.
So set up an account. They have several pricing plans. It's free.
You can send up to 30 emails a month, 10 maximum contacts per account,
10 maximum recipients per email, and you can send up to a one-year in the future.
It goes all the way up to enterprise, which is $83 a month.
But for $40 a year, $33.33 a month, you can create 1,000 emails per month,
10 000 maximum contacts per account
500 maximum recipients per email 100 megabyte
attachment per account 20 i'm sorry
uh yeah for account i think for your purposes pete even the free account the
free account is going to be just fine absolutely totally with the with the paid
one you can send a text to somebody up to 25 years hence that gets creepy pete
yeah yeah that's creepy i know right Wait,
my dead uncle Bob sent me an email or sent me a text.
But it isn't just one and send it later this morning. You can send them on a recurring basis.
Every Saturday morning, I want it to remind me to do this.
So you get a text, obviously, from an email address, but later.io.
Yeah.
So cool. And it works with any email address. So, you know, have fun with your duck.com email.
I like it. Yeah, no, I would, I think the free one would solve this problem.
Cause you, you know, you're, it's probably going to be a handful of people that
you would be sending these to and you just load them up and,
and then you're off to the races.
Later.io. This is brilliant. Yep. Somebody else's server.
That's the cloud. Yep. Yep. And, you know, I just didn't think about creating
it as a web side server function. Yeah. Yeah.
Cool. Another fortune passed up Dave. Cause I just didn't think of it in time.
You know, here's my, here's my thing.
I always say, if you want an idea to be worth a hundred dollars,
write it on a hundred dollar bill because by themselves, ideas are worth nothing.
It's all about implementation, right? You got to execute and you,
and, and you really need to just grind it out.
So just because someone has already implemented
this idea doesn't mean that there's
not a better way to do it a better you know implementation
i mean look at you know we weren't the
first mac podcast adam was or maybe
sean king was but you know like and we certainly
weren't the first mac website with mac observer we weren't
you know but it didn't matter like you you know you you you you do it your way
and any business can can thrive you don't you don't need to wait for the best
idea you need to have a decent idea and you need to be willing to put put your
nose to the grindstone and ignore all the naysayers and just grind it out.
And of course I will, I will say this because I know it from personal experience.
The worst naysayer is the one that sounds just like me in my own head.
So yeah, look where zoom ended up. Yeah. Yeah.
Right they weren't the first not by
a long shot not by a long shot yep no
microsoft slash skype squandered the
first to market lead by like somehow
i don't know how they were dumb they were dumb yeah they were just dumb yep
i agree they got too complacent like a lot of people do yep yeah that's it yeah
you think because no one else is you know you just because you can't see your
competition in the rear view mirror doesn't mean you think, oh, they're fine.
I've always said, you know, the new company has to move much faster and have
far more momentum to catch up to where the market is.
And then if they're a company that's used to working at that speed,
they will keep moving at that speed when they catch you and then they will move past you.
And Zoom is a perfect example of that. There's no better example of this than Apple, right?
Right? right ipod iphone yeah yeah
yeah i mean i guess we could argue that they
were first to market with their first product right
like they the pre-built ready
to go out of the box works for you mostly personal computer i think apple like
we could an argument can be made pretty succinctly that that they did that first
it was not the first personal computer but it was the first for the the every person.
But then again, that's kind of what Apple does is they're the first for the
every person. Yeah. Right. Yep. No, you're right.
Ask Blackberry about how the, right, right. They had the market cornered. Yep. Yep.
Um, Adam, you cost me money.
Yeah. Yeah. But thankfully not, not, not a terrible amount.
Uh, because I bought this, um, on a black Friday sale, but months ago before
you joined the show, like, uh, you know, full time.
Uh, you mentioned the wireless car play adapter from car link and it's like
a car link kit or whatever.
So I bought the 5.0 car link kit 5.0 on Amazon black Friday.
And I was going to like give it to myself as a Christmas present, but I couldn't wait.
Because i needed to see if it was going to work holy cow it works ridiculously well it like,
it just you plug it in you you pair up with
your phone and then it's fun and there's even a little
web interface on it i don't know if you knew about this that you can update
the firmware and tweak some settings and like all those things it's fun and
it works and yeah it takes a second to connect i mean it's yes super fast but
i've heard the same thing about built-in wireless card carplay I don't know
how it compares, but yeah, it's like magic.
Once you've got it set up and plugged in, like I've mentioned,
for me, it works 90% of the time.
And occasionally it'll quirk out, but usually that just involves unplugging
it for a couple seconds and plugging it back in.
Yes. Yeah. It's really amazing.
And I was concerned with battery life, right? Right.
You know, because I'm used to using CarPlay when my phone is plugged in for
obvious reasons and charging.
So I was like, well, what's this going to be like? I had a shortly after I got
it, I had a rehearsal down in Massachusetts, which is about a two hour drive each way.
And I, so I used, I used this for that whole day and I looked at my battery
strength when I got, you know, got in the car and it was at 83% when I got home.
So this is after driving down, driving back and at a, you know,
three hour rehearsal where my
phone is like, you know, also sort of like burning its battery as it does.
And, you know, I was like using it and I'm sure I checked my email when I got
there and I probably checked before I left and all that stuff,
20% of my battery was used.
That's it for four hours of driving and, you know, two to three hours of just normal phone time.
That's not terrible. And what I realized as I dug into this is that Apple demands
of people like manufacturers who are putting CarPlay in as a like,
you know, from the manufacturer thing, wireless CarPlay.
If the car has a GPS antenna in it,
CarPlay must be given access to use that GPS antenna when wireless CarPlay is
active so that the phone's battery isn't being burned down and also so that you're not relying on,
you know, the phone if it's in somebody's pocket or whatever,
like they want the experience to be good. So they mandate this.
The CarLink kit, at least the version 5.0, is one of the few of these aftermarket,
you know, sort of hacky janky CarPlay wireless things that uses the car's GPS if the car has it.
Not every car does. Yeah, my car does.
And so I think that's a big part of why it's not chewing up so much of the battery.
Battery and i had no idea about any of this until after i bought it because
then i started researching i'm like okay why is this working and it is interesting
i parked my car in a garage.
And uh it i can
guarantee that it's not using the phone's gps because
it takes my car play far longer
than it used to to triangulate my position as i'm
driving out of the neighborhood i mean it you know it takes a minute it's
not a huge deal but it used to be exact like
i would drive out of my garage and i would show where i was like on
my driveway and now it's like you're somewhere
in this vicinity and it's like oh it's not using the
phone's gps it's truly relying on the cars
and the car has had first of all the car's been off
so now it's got to sync up and it's garaged so yeah right yeah yeah yeah yeah
it's a great little thing i mean they're really quirky but i i mean just the
fact that they work is pure magic it's magic so now for battery though You don't
have one of these janky, in-car...
Wireless charging mats because i have one of these and my wife has one in her
car i don't know if anybody experiences they don't they don't work like they
have to be so precision aligned,
and you're driving so the phone's like bouncing and
then the phone mine the phone moves over and it suddenly starts
stops charging to the point where i won't do it because
there's no way i'm putting velcro on the back of my phone sure but
like where i've wanted to just like velcro like put
velcro strips so that it would stay in the
exact right like if it's off by a millimeter that
thing doesn't work i wonder same thing in my wife's car i wonder
if you could get like so i'm thinking magsafe here right yeah one of those little
rings just a ring with a with with a with a with you know sticky tape the magnetic
ring yeah the magnetic ring on the charger part yeah correct because i think
you can get those i think that would work well i've seen them for like um um,
phone cases that don't for phones that don't have their own mag safe.
You can like sort of retrofit your phone with mag safe or whatever.
And so I, I, yeah, I think you could, they may not sell it.
Somebody's actually going to sell it to you for exactly what this purpose.
Yeah. I think that I would do that for sure.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No, my car doesn't have that.
My car doesn't have that. Yeah. It's not worth it. I mean, I don't know.
Maybe people can have different opinions or certain cars are better than others,
but because it doesn't have the MagSafe alignment thing and maybe it works better
with Android phones. I don't know.
It's been two cars. One's a Honda and one's a Ford. I think it's just whatever
cheapo-chee charging mat they put in there. But I think mostly the problem is you're driving.
Of course it's going to move around. The car is vibrating and your phone is
going to move around. Absolutely.
It starts out great and then eventually just moves off the pad.
And you can see it on the heads-up display. It's like, stop charging.
And so you move it over charging oh this
sounds safe yeah that's terrible yeah well
i actually have a mag safe charging you
know vent mounted you know it plugs into that so
that would charge my phone and then i can uh i but
i can either plug it into my phone or plug it into the mag safe
charger if i'd like to be able to plug it into the mag safe charger and
then do wireless yeah car play yeah that's
the way to go no this thing is great and i i did use velcro once
i proved that the car link kit adapter worked you
know like you said 90 i would even say like 95 percent of
the time like it's fairly reliable occasionally like i think
twice since i've had it in the last month i've had to do the little you know
unplug you have the 5.0 i think i have a 3.0 ah right okay yeah maybe it's better
one piece of advice i read and i immediately ignored this of course was they
said if you get it and once you get it to the point where it's working never update the firmware.
Unless you have a reason to don't update the firmware for the sake of updating
the firmware. Cause you're a nerd.
And so obviously the first thing I did was I updated the firmware cause duh,
but that does sound like good advice. Like, you know, so yeah.
Yeah. I haven't touched mine. I think I did update it when I first got it because
it was just out of date. Sure.
Whatever the current version was. And I want to start at the current point,
but I have not updated the firmware since. It's probably smart.
Yeah. If it ain't broke, fix it till it is. all right
thanks for hanging out with us everybody it's been
uh we we we i we i thought we
we had so many other things we were going to do and yet
did here we are already running it
an hour and 20 minutes so i gotta circle back one quick thing
okay rodell and discord said he you
know he'd been using later.io he uses reminder guru.com
also oh we will put that link in the show notes notes
too okay yeah reminder guru i like
it yeah reminder guru somehow somehow we
will get there yeah reminderguru.com okay great thanks for
hanging out with us folks it's been as always it's been fun it's been real it's
been real fun it has been what a way to spend a christmas morning of course
we record this before christmas as you as you might guess but it will be released
on on Christmas morning and you can listen at your leisure whenever you like.
We recorded it just for you again.
Thanks for hanging out with us. Thanks to cash fly for providing all the bandwidth
to get the show from us to you.
Go check out. So there I was Pete's podcast about aviation.
You can check out business brain and gig gab, uh, with the shows that I do.
You might hear me do my first ever solo podcast episode coming up.
Music.
Up maybe even this week on GigGab.
Stay tuned. I know. Times, they change.
Adam, do you have any lasting advice for everyone to hopefully last them the week?
Yep, just like Santa, dropping off your gifts, don't get caught.