It's time for Mac Geek Cab and listener Tony brings us our quick tip of the week with a tip.
He says he wanted to add his iPad, an app to his iPads dock,
and it wasn't a new app, just something that he's recently started using again.
And he had no idea where to find it in his never ending list of scrolling screens.
And he thought something would work and it did. He did the usual swipe down
to pull up the Safari search on his iPad and type the name of the app.
And of course, it appeared in the list like it does anytime we search for an app, hopefully.
And then he held his finger on it and dragged it down to his dock and to his delight, it worked.
This also works on the iPhone and on the Mac as well.
Well, more quick tips like this, plus your questions answered and cool stuff
found today on MacGeekGab 1016 for Monday, January 1st. Happy New Year 2024!
Music.
Greetings, folks, and welcome to MacGeek, the show where you send in tips like Tony did.
You send in questions like you'll hear in a minute. You'll send in cool stuff found.
We try to answer your questions. We share your tips. We share your cool stuff found.
All with the purpose of ensuring that we each learn at least five new things
every single time we get together.
Other sponsors for this episode include linkedin.com slash
mgg where you can go and post your first job for free we'll
talk more about that in a little bit for now here in
durham new hampshire on this new year i'm dave hamilton and here finally in
snowy south dakota i'm adam christiansen and pilot pete is somewhere in new
hampshire with his music on well you know when i I go to sniffle.
I went in. I was being kind.
I muted while you were reading the opening quick tip. I sniffled and then I didn't unmute.
So Dave, I should just open the window and shout out the window really loud.
Good morning. Happy new year, everybody. Pilot Pete from New Hampshire.
Yeah. I'm glad you got snow, Adam. I guess. Right. That's a good thing.
Okay. We had a white Christmas.
Nice. Oh, that is kind of nice. Yeah. Yeah.
Cool. That was good. Very cool. Very cool. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
All right. Well, we have lots of quick tips to go through today.
Pete, you want to bring us to yours?
Yeah, absolutely. So Andrew wrote in and told us, he said there was a recent discussion on MGG,
the episode before Christmas, where a listener wrote in and talked about sending
automatic notification to his family about food being on its way and to set the table.
He said, to me, the easy way to do this is to have a message group set up and
to do the, hey Siri, hey yes lady, sorry everybody, cancel.
Send a message to X group, blah, blah, blah. And there are some notifications
you can send and receive to people as long as you are sharing location with
those people like you do on a family plan.
For example, when my now adult daughter is in town and passes the local post
offices, which is a local landmark,
I get a notification that she's just passed the post office. this.
It gets a little different here, but he says to a former love interest.
Okay. I don't know if you're stalking or she's stalking, but.
I think this was maybe while they were interested in each other.
Oh, while they were still a thing. Okay. I get you. All right.
Oh yeah. He says, I used to send, I used to, the important word there,
I used to send notification to her that I was in her neighborhood.
Cool. So how do I do that? Go to find my, go to people and choose a a person.
Under the notifications, click add, choose notify yourself or the other person,
and then set the parameters.
It works pretty cool. This is, for example, you could use it to notify someone
that you've left work or you're 10 minutes from home or work,
you know, by choosing a landmark that's thus far away, that sort of thing.
So it's a really cool way of using geofencing to automatically send notifications
to people when and where,
when and when you will be in the neighborhood huh so yeah i i had used that
occasionally you know to stalk my family like let me know when my wife is leaving
the the gym or whatever so that i you know would get but.
Now when you do that and and this started a couple
of years ago uh it says you know
if you do this the other person's gonna know that you did this right and right
and then that felt that made it feel a whole lot creepier that i was doing this
so i stopped but um actually it seems less creepy that they know it is less
creepy that they know but they they would know i was being creepy about,
you know about about stalking them uh but you
know it's it's it's handy like i would want to know when my wife's leaving the
gym so it's like oh i've got 20 minutes like so that i can be wrapped up and
ready to like make dinner together or whatever when she gets back like this
would be great so yeah it really wasn't from home get the boyfriend out that's
right that's right yes exactly.
This is have you had good luck with geofencing this is the thing i've played
around with this and i felt like sometimes it worked and sometimes it didn't
but i more wanted to use it for automations like i used to have a one of those
q garage door opener things yeah you know that then you could ask Siri to do
the garage door or whatever.
Yeah. And, um, it never quite worked a hundred percent for me. So, um,
I use an automation to automatically turn my Wi-Fi back on and join my home
Wi-Fi when I get home. Yeah.
Yeah, that worked. I have the same one, and that works for me.
Yeah, and that is a geofenced automation. I don't know that I have any others geofenced.
In fact, I can confidently say that I don't.
Yeah. Yeah. I don't know if it was the geofencing or just the product.
I mean, maybe part of the problem was the product itself, but,
you know, I was, I'd had this dream of, you know, I would drive into my neighborhood
and drive near my house and my garage door would automatically open. Yes. Wonderful.
Yes. I, I, well, if it was like the Chamberlain, my Q stuff or whatever,
they've, they've gone out of their way in recent months to really break that.
Like they, they, I think they end of life, their home kit integration product.
And then they also broke the API so you can't use it with HomeBridge anymore.
Oh, no. I don't even know how I would control it anymore.
Like, I have a Wi-Fi garage door. I think I have two of them.
But I don't know how I would control it.
I guess I would use their app and only their app, which is, like, well, cool.
Cool but i i used to use it just you know
manually like a caveman i would tell siri
to sorry i would tell the s lady to open my garage as i got into the neighborhood
like i i would be my own geofence you know yeah and it was great like i loved
it but you can't do that anymore they and i meant to tell pete earlier you don't
have to you if you're up to date on your uh s lady stuff you You don't know
how to do that. Hey part anymore.
Correct. That's right. That's which is why I, I apologized for saying that the word anyway.
Yeah. I said the word and nothing happened. So I've been noticing that that
that's actually gotten smarter. I think,
This lady is more self-aware than she used to be. I, I, I, yeah.
And I don't know that that's a good thing.
Uh, yeah. Yeah. Every now and then you can give a command.
Remember it was a quick tip. Some shows back that you can just hold up your
watch and say 20 minutes and it'll set a timer. So you don't even need to say her name.
That's right. Wow. That's right. Yeah.
Yeah. Didn't know that. I have to give that a shot.
It's cool. It's great. Yeah. Yeah. Um, I, About the MyQ thing,
I am seeing two comments in our Discord chat at mattgeekup.com slash Discord.
And, of course, you can join the live stream when we're doing it.
And if you want to know when we're doing it, mattgeekup.com slash calendar allows
you to subscribe yourself to
the exact same calendar that the three of us use to coordinate the show.
So it is almost guaranteed to be accurate because if we're not here,
then we're not live streaming the show. show.
But, uh, it reached W says because of that, I had to drop my queue and ordered
a Moross system, uh, instead.
And he says he plans to install it this weekend. So I did not even know that
Moross made a, uh, garage door opener system.
Yeah. So Rich, you're going to need to follow up with us and tell it,
tell us how it went. Yeah. Tell us all about it. Give us a how to. Please.
And then, uh, Paul Conaway and also in the chat says I'm using iSmartGate.
And I don't even know what that is, but we're going to take a quick look here.
Is this like a, is it its own garage door opener or is it a- An interface.
An interface. Yeah, yeah. It looks like-
I can't tell if it's, it's, is it its own?
Is it like the entire opener or does it work? Does it just remote control other
openers? It's just an interface.
Ah, okay. This is very interesting.
We're going to have to do some research. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So interesting. And what's this? Let's look on Amazon here and see what the,
they need to tell me the price. Okay, just get me to the iSmartGate Pro. Like, I just want to go.
Show me the money. Oh, it's less than 50 bucks is what it seems to be. Oh, okay.
This might be the, oh, well, no, sorry, the Pro is 200 bucks. So, okay.
So, I don't know what the differences are. That shouldn't be an issue.
Everybody got a bunch of Amazon gift cards for Christmas. Go blow them.
That's kind of fair, yeah.
So, yeah. You didn't want to break up. And plus you don't want to break the
trend of us emitting really expensive things.
Right. Got to cost you a lot of money for it. And it'd be fun.
You might be able to get away with the smart gate light.
Uh, the mini probably not for, for us, but the, the light, yeah,
the light is going to be 150 bucks. So it's 150 or 200.
So yeah, the pro and the pro can control two doors.
Uh, he says, so yes, actually it can control three doors, which is kind of magic.
Probably not in my house since two of them are in a different building from
the other one, but I digress.
All right. Uh, yeah, we will, uh, we will dig more into that.
That's fascinating. I'm glad we had this little tangential conversation. Little side.
Yeah. Well, the tangents are often where the, you know, where the gems are found,
right? Gems are found. Yeah, exactly.
Yeah. This is, you know, I say it all the time. These are things I love about
doing the show is I get to learn too. And, uh.
Grumpy found a, uh, oh, he, he made a garage door opener, uh,
and, and a home bridge plugin for, or he got a garage door opener and put a, uh,
built a home bridge plugin for it.
So yeah, our discord is full of really smart people, way smarter than me.
And, uh, it's awesome. Like it's a really great community. Mackie cap.com slash
discord. All right. Right.
On to one of the actually many smart people.
I think we had this comment from Bruce and Paul and and several others.
And then there's there is a discord component to this, but I will share.
In the last episode, we talked about delaying sends.
And Adam, you were saying you wanted something that, you know,
allowed you to delay more than 30 seconds.
I think it was you. Maybe it was me. uh bruce writes
to delay sending an email in apple mail for more
than 30 seconds just go to the send icon at
the top and click the little down arrow which will
give you several options send now send at 9 p.m tonight or send later dot dot
dot and that dot dot dot means that there is more to this option and when you
click that it lets you set a date and time for delivery he says I use this often
to send out a reminder to a group every Monday morning,
reminding them of a Tuesday morning group meeting.
Don't overlook Apple's email client. Yeah. I had forgotten about that.
Maybe it was UP. I don't know. We had the discussion.
Well, yeah. Yeah. You know, I did it because I want to be able to send something,
a text to my wife's phone.
And then we talked about using mail to text and later.io.
This would work for me with one minor exception.
Once I turn my phone off because I'm on the airplane, plane,
it isn't going to send that, that mail at that given date and time. That's correct. But.
I had no idea that was there. How many, you know, those things right in front
of your nose. How am I expected to see that? Yep.
Well, it gets even better because Ben in our discord created a script.
He wanted every email to be sent five minutes later, not just 30 seconds later.
And so it, which you used to be able to do with the mail plugin called mail
act on, uh, that plugin does not work with Sonoma mail.
And so Ben wrote an Apple script that uses user interface scripting to trigger
that send later thing and cue it for five minutes from that moment in time.
And he has published that script in our discord.
The link is in the show notes at Mackey cab.com or at MGG dot FM slash 1016.
Cause this is episode 1016 or in your email box.
If you sign up for show notes in your email at Mackey cab.com.
So, um, or if you're in discord, you can just go there, but, uh, yeah, yeah.
It's a, it's a decent little script and he's iterated on it a few times as one
often does with, well, any coding, not just Apple script, but it seems like
he's, he's polished it up pretty, pretty nicely. So yeah, that's awesome.
Yep. Yep. I love this. Thanks Ben.
Indeed. Indeed. And I think you can trigger it with, uh, like keyboard maestro or, or whatever.
Speaking of the s lady did you
know that she knows how to do the laundry pete what well
not we're just gonna love to hear that well but todd uh
she ain't gonna haul it up and downstairs and fold it is she no i
don't think so uh todd writes in
he says not really but siri does know i did it again uh does does know how to
interpret the logos on the cleaning instructions of a clothing label And Todd
sent us a picture that he had taken of the clothing label.
And it has like all the weird hieroglyphics that we've all learned to ignore,
or at least I certainly have.
And then like you could with a photo of a pet and it'll tell you what kind of
dog or cat it is or whatever.
You go into photos, you swipe up, and then there's an option there that says look up laundry care.
And it gives you a key to tell you that like the triangle with lines through
it means bleaching with non-chlorine agents or the one with the square with
a circle in the middle tumble drying maximum 60 degrees Celsius.
Like that tells you all the things to do or not to do with with a, you know, with the the.
The laundry instructions. Right. Cool. Yeah.
So there's a lot baked in there into the old, uh, the old S lady.
They keep adding more to that, that photo recognition stuff.
So yeah, we will keep discovering things like this. That's really cool.
I didn't know about the laundry thing.
Yeah. Yeah. I don't like for plants all the time because it does plants too.
So, oh yeah. Does it do birds?
I would imagine it does. I do not know if it does bird species or not. Yeah.
And now i want to know all right feedback at macgeekup.com let us know if you know
because that we yeah i didn't even think of trying that i saw a bird the other
day and i looked it up but i basically had to describe it and it's like oh okay
there was that app for a while from cornell,
i mean i think the app probably still exists i think i used their website to to determine it,
yeah isn't that just the odds i didn't have i think i know there's an audubon
app that does that okay yeah yeah yeah because i was hoping to upload a picture
and look but i just had to describe it it looked like a blue robin turns out
to be an eastern bluebird for those curious yeah,
yeah yeah it was called merlin or something i don't know if it's i don't know
if it actually exists anymore um yeah yeah anyway merlin bird id yeah maybe
it does cornell lab yep there it is All right, I'll put that in the,
we're all over the place today, but that's okay.
That's fine. Shall we talk about Alan and some mail and links?
Yeah. So this is a good one because,
you know, mail got all fancy and, you know, when you put a link in there,
basically it wants to turn it into this, you know, beautiful preview image thing.
And you've got that feature in there.
And I don't know when this was added. And Alan says that maybe it was added
in Ventura. I don't remember when it was added either, Alan.
But he says, because of that, he likes to just send the plain text link.
So he would be constantly clicking on the little arrow and selecting convert
to plain text link, which you can do in that thing.
But he says, actually, there's a better way.
And he says, he's a little slow. I don't think you're slow, Alan.
I think a lot of people probably missed this.
So he says, I figured out you can change the default behavior to show the plain
link by unchecking the option in Mail Settings composing Add Link Previews.
So just turn that off, and now you'll have always plain text links.
And I would assume, or hope, you could probably right-click on that and then.
Flip it back the other way manually rather than kind
of switch the behavior i would guess but i haven't tried that yet
oh yeah it does make sense that yeah you're setting the default
and so the alternate becomes the other yeah i
would hope but one i'll test that out right now but when
alan sent that he said if any if it's even possible for
anyone to be slower than me i just replied with an avatar with the
hand up yeah that
would be me yeah we all miss these things it's impossible impossible
for any one of us certainly it's impossible for
me i don't mean to speak for everybody but it's impossible for
me to like even remember all the things we've talked
about on the show i you know there's there's times
where it's like oh yeah i i now that you
say that again it sounds familiar but yeah yeah
it's like uh so uh i just
just checked it yes there is a little down arrow that
comes up next to the link in mail and you can go show preview
there you go you can switch it back and forth but yeah that reminds me allison
also often says how many times she's going to look up how to do something and
finds her own yeah oh work oh yeah yeah oh yeah you go to google something how
to do that once oh yeah there's my show notes that's me here's the answer yep.
Yeah, the worst is when I'm having trouble with something and I go to look it
up and I find an article that I wrote like a TMO or whatever years ago.
It's like, yeah, but like I need the I need the article that's better than this.
I don't this is helpful to me.
Yeah, I need I need the something that works, not something I need.
The fifth edition of this. Yeah, yeah, exactly.
How come they, you know, they've had this site for two years.
How come they haven't updated it? Yeah. So, yeah. All right.
Andrew, I think technically that is correct.
In fact, I believe today or was it yesterday was the anniversary of when we launched Mac Observer.
I think it's, well, we're recording this on the 29th of December.
And so I, I'm pretty sure that that's the, uh, that it was the 29th.
I don't know why I don't have this on my calendar anymore, but, um, but yeah.
And, uh, and it turns out that was the day that we announced the,
the sale to it. Just, it just worked out that oddly that way.
Anyway, uh, Andrew shares that iOS 17 to add some new widgets to the iPhone.
Phone and he says for example there is
now a very useful digital watch face
as opposed to analog and uh
and it it has like the time and in big numbers
and a second hand that sort of goes around the square rounded
square bezel he says but it's worth flicking through all of them there are some
other new additions so if you or once you are up to ios 17 too and i highly
recommend you do that there's some security updates in there too then uh go
ahead and and uh check those out,
do you guys use widgets a lot on your phones no i'm being honest i mean i have
i have them yeah i have a few i mean i guess i have a couple on the the one
i use the most is just a photo one.
You know surfaces yeah family photos and i have that on my home screen because it's fun to get it,
yeah you know i usually like when good ones come up and share them with my family
or text them it's good for memories and stuff like that that's probably my favorite
one but i guess i guess i kind of do now i take it back i'm thinking about it
because i also have the carrot weather widget
on my home screen yeah i was gonna say i used i use arrow weather and so that gives me the aviation.
Whether for a given airport, which I recently found out for all you pilots in
the audience is really cool.
It's not only there, it's on my watch.
And so when I tap an airport, you can scroll down to the frequencies for tower
and ground and, and all that. Really? Yeah. That's kind of handy.
It really is. Especially when you're flying along and you're going along on
the ground and you forget that they're already in your GPS too. Oh, yep.
Yep. Yep. Yep. I use care. I use care weather. Cause I like the verbal abuse.
Yes. Yes. Care weather is, is good. Especially when the weather is not pleasant out.
It, it, it gives you some, it gives you someone to commiserate with, if you will. Yeah. Yeah.
Uh, also in Iowa 17 to lock tutor notes that, uh,
you know, those annoying spin dials you have to use in the calendar on your
phone to set the start and end times.
LockTutor says, I just installed 17.2 and found that if you tap on the time,
it gives you a pop-up keyboard to enter the hours and minutes, which is much faster.
I wonder where else this feature might appear.
I know we've had other granular ways of doing this, but I don't think there's
ever been a keypad before. I think this is new for 17.2.
So that's pretty cool. Oh, that's nice. Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah yeah yeah if it is new it's about time yeah right yeah yeah and even if
it's not it's new yeah right yeah yeah pun acknowledged yep even if it's not
new like it's good to talk about these things because i didn't know that this was there,
Yep. Yep. Um.
Bruce has a, uh, timely tip for us.
He says a number of years ago, Apple introduced the ability to purchase Apple
care on an annual basis. Yep.
Uh, or Apple care plus, I guess. However, when I purchased my M one Mac mini,
I paid for the old school multi-year subscription earlier this month.
I got an email stating that my Apple care plus subscription would be expiring
shortly. Importantly, I figured
that since I'd purchased the fixed term plan, I would soon be on my own.
Several days later, I was surprised when I saw an alert that I had until the
end of this month to renew my AppleCare subscription.
So I immediately took advantage of that offer. And now I am good on that Mac through 2024.
He says, have a happy new year. And remember, don't get caught without AppleCare.
Yeah, I, I am not an extended warranty person in general.
However, Apple care and now Apple care plus are kind of the exceptions to that rule in my world.
It has paid off many times. I think.
Same. Yeah. And I know like an extended warranty is, is just a profit center
for the companies offering it.
Like I, I know that. Or they wouldn't offer it. Right. Correct. Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, like I know that the law of averages and everything says that it's not worth it.
However, in this case, I really kind of find that it is. So I don't know. I don't know.
Adam, you're an AppleCare person as well, I presume.
Yeah, this new option, and I generally take the new option to do the month-to-month
now, especially with iPhones and iPads and stuff like that. But, um.
Now I have to start thinking about, because I have some older,
older devices, and this was the first year I didn't update my iPhone.
I would imagine there's a law of diminishing returns at some point.
So I have to start thinking about that. Yeah, we have to do the cost per person.
If I'm three years into that or four years, I have a device that's four years
old, I'm probably at the point where if it breaks, I'm just going to replace it.
So why am I paying for AppleCare at that point, right?
There's a cutoff. Yeah, we put it on our Macs, but we do not put it on our iPhones.
It's expensive on the iPhone.
And we've found, you know, and we do kind of rotate iPhones through the family.
And I always just keep the most recent one.
I sell off, you know, so if there's four of us that are using phones, I keep five.
And that's cheaper
for me than paying for apple
care on all of them and if somebody's phone you know
suffers the event it's gonna happen it has
not yet happened and you know right i'll knock
on some wood there but um it you
know it's gonna happen at some point where somebody's phone just gets destroyed and
it's like okay well now you use the spare and even
replacing the phone at this point would be
less than having paid for it over
the years so so i guess i've proved what grumpy
in the chat said about apple care
and extended warranties in general which is the house always
wins which is correct you know
it's like of course good advice we had to be
next week that's right yeah that's right
yeah and i hate to say this but you know
if you do have a problem the the other thing
that apple care gives you that you don't get with a
lot of other plans right is usually with a extended warranty
plan there's some sort of mail-in or you know obscure you're not going to get
a hold of a person thing apple care if you have it and you call up apple they
will help you if you don't yeah you know less helpful yes and i hate to say
that i mean it shouldn't be that way But no, that's the reality.
I agree with you, but that, that is the reality.
You get more than just the, I, I, I broke it and the, the repair is covered under warranty.
You, you actually get support with it too, which yeah, it's a smart,
they, they're not fools over there in Cupertino. It turns out.
It's like they've done this before. It's like they've done this.
It's like they've survived many, many, many opportunities for the company to
go under so many that you might think it's not an accident anymore. So, right. Yeah.
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All right. I want to jump to, well, JP will take the next question.
Gentlemen of the Geek Gap, good day. This is JP calling.
Query, I use Bluetooth speakers for my television sets.
Some are Marshall, some are Bose.
Even at one time I had an Apple device. But my question is,
are there any factory devices that come to me that are not preordained to compensate
for audio quality and thereby being so bassy in their playback?
I've noticed all of these things just muffle the crap out of everything because,
you know, the old MP3 days,
that's what manufacturers did to help make music sound better when it went to
streaming and people were ripping CDs and having compressed music.
Music so uh but i find it impossible
to uh sometimes uh hear
the dialogue uh well because the uh
you know the stereo pairs that are being uh simulated
through the speaker are always boomy and
bassy and uh and often muffle the dialogue track so i often have to unplug the
uh uh device and just go with the television speakers which offer me uh you
know a crisper higher end even even though I really don't want to do that.
So I just wonder, are there any
Bluetooth speakers that exist today that do not purposely compensate for you
for an old audio quality system from back when people were ripping CDs and listening to MP3s?
Now that we have such high-quality audio files, I just wonder.
I'm just dying. I wish I had the ability to like crank the bass down when I'm,
especially when I'm watching a football game.
All right, Adam, you want to, uh, you want to kick us off with this?
I mean, yeah, I, I, you know, I don't generally use Bluetooth speakers for a
lot of this, these reasons.
I mean, my solution for this years ago was to just bite the bullet and buy a Sonos.
And it's, there's that. It's been wonderful. I mean, It was like a simple setup, set it and forget it.
It's got that feature, you walk around the room, I forget what it's called right
now, where it analyzes your room and it tunes all your audio for you.
And they have also a great feature in the app for, one, reducing loud sounds,
and then two, enhancing voice dialogue, which works great.
So that solved a lot of the problems for me from this perspective.
How about you, Pete? You got any thoughts on this? I was going to say I thought
I had the most expensive solution, But Adam, you beat me with that.
Handling. Sonos is expensive, but boy, is it amazing. I will give him that.
I actually have the problem. Yeah.
I actually have a partial solution. It isn't Bluetooth, but it does have the
eighth-inch audio jack and or the optical input.
And they're available at soundfun.net. And I first saw this speaker,
and I thought it was out of production because I was looking for it.
And the speaker I first saw, they sent us a demo unit last year.
I first saw it at CES, and we were in the big hall with dozens,
hundreds of people around, if not thousands of people around.
And so the low din made it very difficult to hear anything.
And so what they did was they put a...
Uh, a dialogue on, and you could hear the speaker was making noise.
You could hear somebody was talking, but that was it.
And then they put this piece of, uh, I think it was plastic and they bent it
at a 90 degree angle away from the speaker.
And the dialogue magically came in loud and clear, crisp high end.
I was like, oh my gosh, that, that shouldn't work.
It was like a real live magic. and now they've done what appears to be uh their
latest mirai speaker on their website is,
it appears to be two of those laying on their side so now i think it's stereo and it really is.
The most incredible if you haven't heard one of these
i don't know how to explain it it is for particularly
for people who are hard of hearing i have a difficult time
hearing if there's any background noise people talking in
the kitchen i can't hear dialogue on the tv with those
it it brings the dialogue very crisp and clear right to you and uh and right
now on their website sound fun.net it's 20 off on the top right corner if you
click on that and then i was sitting there looking at it this morning and it
came up and said hey if you give us your email you can get it at get 30% off.
So instead of 299, it's, uh, uh, 209 for, for one of these speakers. Wow.
Uh, if, if you are someone who suffers from tinnitus tinnitus,
however you choose to pronounce it, like I do, man, let me tell you,
that is an amazing solution to this.
So while not cheap and not Bluetooth,
it is a, it is a dialogue enhancing speaker that sounds amazing.
How much did they run, did you say? I missed it. Regular price is $299.
And right now on soundfund.net, there's a thing up in the corner that says buy now 20% off.
And then while I was sitting there looking at it, after I had clicked on that,
it came up and said, hey, give us your email. We'll give you another 10% off.
So you can get it as low as $209 right now on soundfund.net. Yeah.
Yeah. I mean, the other thing I was going to say is like, if you want to,
there's a couple other cheaper solutions. I mean, Apple TV has that enhanced
dialogue feature, and I know that's supported with HomePods. Yeah.
And I think just any speakers that you can pair with your Apple TV,
you know, get connected to your Apple TV, but specifically HomePods.
But then the super cheap solution that I use most of the time,
and my daughter hates this, is I turn on closed captioning. Right?
That's interesting that your daughter doesn't use closed captioning.
I find my kids will often use it to have it on.
And, you know, the one thing you can do if you're watching something through
your Apple TV is you can press the button on the remote and ask the S lady, what did they say?
And it will rewind you 10 seconds.
Play the last bit of dialogue.
Show the closed captions for that 10 seconds. and then they go away. Yeah. Which is.
That's a great tip. Another gem, Dave. Right? You didn't know that one?
I didn't know that one. That's been a feature for a while. Yeah.
Yeah, it's pretty nice. I can't tell you how many times I've screwed up and
hit the wrong button and completely backed out of the show when I was just trying
to back up for 10 seconds. No, just hit the little, you know,
the S button on the remote and ask, what are they?
Because you don't even have to say the lady's name because you've already triggered
the thing and you just say, what do they say?
Sure. And it jumps back. And I've noticed it will jump back.
Like if there's been a pause, like if there's a line set and then there's,
you know, a pregnant pause or something, usually during which we as the family
are asking each other, wait, what did they say? What did they say?
It will rewind back to the last bit of dialogue. Like it's, it's smart enough to, to know.
Yeah. It's, it's pretty good. And it works with Plex. Like it's not just limited
to things that are, you know, through Apple TV plus or whatever.
So I think, I think I've had it work with the Netflix app. Like,
yeah, no, it's, it's great.
I agree that HomePod or Sonos would be the right answer here.
If you know, JP is using an Apple TV,
I did want to address a sort of
a foundational inaccuracy in
the I want to reject the premise here of of JP's statements about Bluetooth
speakers being built to compensate for compressed audio because of MP3s.
Bluetooth speakers are built to deal with compressed audio, but it's not because we used to use MP3s.
Using uncompressed audio now doesn't change this because Bluetooth doesn't have
enough bandwidth to send uncompressed audio. audio.
So anytime you're using Bluetooth, you are hearing sound that it has been compressed digitally.
Now there are some fantastic codecs out there that really help kind of keep things.
And, and Apple's got, you know, their own AAC codec that, that does really well
and other manufacturers can support it.
AptX is another one that does really well. So like there's some,
there there's, there's a lot of smarts in these codecs, but you are still,
If you're using Bluetooth, you are hearing compressed audio,
whether you whether you're sending it from a compressed source or not. That said.
JP, you also mentioned that one of the speakers that you were using is a Bose.
Bose, their whole sound signature is about low end, right?
Like it's, you know, it's, it's, it's, you know, the joke was,
you know, all highs, all lows must be Bose.
The, they kind of tune their speakers that way.
So it's possible that whatever you're using has been sort of over tuned on the low end.
I've had good luck with JBL's, like the flip speakers, their little pill-shaped Bluetooth speakers.
I've had good luck with Sonos' Roam and Move speakers, which are wireless,
both Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, and they're battery-powered, so that might be a way to go.
And they're both AirPlay capable, which will give you the ability to have uncompressed
sound because it's going over Wi-Fi, not Bluetooth.
So you might be better, even if a Sonos Roam or whatever is the only Sonos speaker
you have, you might be fine with it.
And I didn't play this part of JP's thing. He says he's not a soundbar person.
I would argue that maybe you are, like everything else you said in your comment
makes me think that you want to become a soundbar person because they are engineered
for exactly what you're talking about.
And like Adam said, the Sonos soundbars, and they're not the only ones,
but many soundbars, including Sonos, have a feature where you can turn it on
enhance the clarity of the dialogue or decrease the bass or both.
So I would really...
I would advise checking out soundbars, even though you think you're not a soundbar person.
Hey, one last, and a question in comment is one last idea is if you're watching
alone and you have the Apple TV, you can use the AirPods.
You can use two pairs of AirPods though now, right? Correct. Yeah. Okay.
And that's pretty amazing. I watched a, A before Sonos had added Atmos sound for Apple TV,
I it was one of my it was like the first South by Southwest that that was like,
you know, semi post covid lockdowns where some of it happened online and some
of it happened in person.
And I watched a movie, I forget the name of it.
I know I talked about it on the show, but it was a movie about this whole show
that you could go see where you would wear headphones and like hear sounds.
And the movie was built in, you know, spatial audio.
And I was able to watch it in my living room with AirPods in and get the full
spatial audio thing going. It was really actually very cool.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So another thing with AirPods that I thought about just now
was, you know, it has a couple of those modes where you can,
I think through accessibility, set them up basically like hearing aids and use live listening.
Oh yeah. So you might be able to play around with that and see if you can get
better sound through that.
And I know like in my case, I even did, cause I have tinnitus too,
Pete, But you can get an audiogram app or you can actually take an audiogram with your AirPods,
get that profile and add it to your AirPods so that they're fine tuned for your
hearing and your range. Very nice.
Yeah. And then the other feature that I know that is, I think, live listen.
But then there's the other one where you can use an iPhone. Right.
As a listening device. So you could put your iPhone closer to your Bluetooth
speaker and then have that pick up the sound and transmit that to your AirPods.
I don't know how that would sound. It might not sound great,
but you might be able to hear voices better.
Interesting. A few options with AirPods. Yeah. One other thing I'll throw out
there is with Bluetooth, because of the compression, you are adding latency, a delay to the system.
And, you know, even the best Bluetooth is still going to be,
you know, over 100 milliseconds, probably closer to 200 milliseconds.
And one second is a thousand milliseconds. So a 20th of a second doesn't seem like a lot.
Sorry, 20% of a second, one fifth of a second doesn't seem like a lot, but it kind of is.
Is uh and you'll notice a a gap between
when people's mouths move and when you
hear the dialogue not a big deal for a
sporting event when you're where you're rarely seeing the announcers
you know on video and so that that you know one fifth of a second doesn't really
matter but um but yeah just bear that in mind you know as you're kind of doing
this the apple tv will compensate for that the sono stuff will compensate for
it but but that's all doing it with wi-fi and HDMI,
so it's a much tighter thing.
It's pretty phenomenal how much number crunching is going on, on the fly.
Oh yeah. It's crazy. Yeah. It's crazy.
All right. Let's go to Mike.
Mike told me about a feature that I told us about a feature that I didn't really know existed. Yeah.
He says, I recently came across this new feature in iMessage called contact key verification.
And it seems like it's part of iOS 14.2, watchOS 10.2.
And the idea is that it adds a layer of security and identity confirmation so
that the person that you think you're iMessaging with is actually the person
you're iMessaging with.
And I haven't been able to turn this on because I have one iPad that runs an
old version of Mac OS that my Apple ID is signed into or iPad OS,
sorry, that my Apple ID is signed into.
But you turn this on and it does some verification sort of automatically.
But then you can also get together with someone and share and compare the unique ID numbers and say,
yeah, okay, that person, that's the ID that I know of as Pilot Pete.
Great i you know let me
know if when i'm talking to pilot pete it's not that kind of
like the old key signing parties that we had with you
know open pgp back in the days but um
i have either of you guys are you like like this
was new to me i i it you know it totally new
to me yeah yeah yeah yeah not not
for messages i mean i used i used to with email do
the the whole pgp yes thing right
yeah i think i've got sounds very
similar to expire in about 10 or 12 years but yeah i'm
guessing a lot of this was added because
of all the nation state hacking that was
going on of like journalists and stuff like that yeah fair
yeah yeah to turn this on you go into settings or system settings on your mac
you go into your you know icloud apple id stuff by tapping on your name And
then scroll down and below everything is contact key verification.
And that's where you can enable this. So it's yeah.
That's nice yeah it's cool yeah i'm
i'm curious to hear from folks who have used it because i
obviously i have not yet and i don't know when i will bring myself to to do
that um because i really kind of like my ipad being able to sync other things
even though it can't run this ios 17 but um it's it's one that i use on stage
for like different things so yeah,
Yeah, interesting stuff.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yep, seems fascinating.
Yeah. Well, we got another question. Harvey from Shoreham, New York wrote in,
and he wrote, Hi, Dave, Pete, and Adam.
I've been playing around with the new journal app that came with 17.2.
I have no problem writing entries, but one thing that I would like to do and
can't figure out how or if it's even possible, are the things that you write
in your journal searchable?
For instance, suppose I remember I wrote something about an event I was at during
one of my trips, but don't remember which one.
Is there a way to search the whole journal using the keyword of the event's
name, knowing that it is in one of the texts that I wrote?
If that is not a feature of the journal, then it should be.
To quote erstwhile co-host of the MacGeekGab, John F. Braun,
No.
I'm just saying. He's right. It should be. You can't do it.
Yeah. Now, so I, in theory, there should be something here that works.
And when I saw this email, I went and immediately tried this and I don't know
if it's just a indexing thing.
I hadn't used the journal app yet. So I went in and I wrote,
I opened the journal app.
I wrote a journal entry. i like you pete no
search inside the journal app none of the hidden you know pull down and there's
a magic search box hidden under the under that that's what i did i found nothing
yeah right nothing there but in theory every app on your iphone has the ability or potential to be.
Searchable so spotlight because if you go if you go in exactly if you go into
settings things, Siri and search, right? You have the full app list.
If you tap on any one of those apps, you get a ton of different options.
So there's the option to make the app surface when you're like searching for
apps. You can actually turn that off.
People might not know this, right? You can say, don't have this app show up when I search it here.
One of the options is search the app's content.
So you would think that if it was searching the app's content inside the app,
which there is a setting for the journal app but that would make it pop up in that search,
i turned it on it didn't seem to work for me uh
i searched specifically for the title of one of my journal posts
and it didn't come up but it might have been indexing i haven't had a chance
to go back and try it again that or my other thought on why that may not work
is the journal is supposed to be something that's private private so yeah they
do password protect it right you can't password on it to protect it so i don't
know i don't yet have a password on my journal,
And I am looking for the...
I am searching for text that is in the one journal entry that I put in there
so far, and it has been in there for a week, and it also does not come up.
So I think, Pete, you're spot on that the journal, even though it says it in
the, you can like turn it on and expose it, it does not expose itself,
which kind of makes sense from a privacy.
Yeah. But that's a nice feature request for the journal. Within the app itself,
there should be a searchable.
Yes within the app itself but most
of that is fueled by spotlight like
apps that take advantage that that show you
search it are right using the spotlight database
just narrowed down filtered down by the results
for that app so if the journal data is
not being put into spotlight at all they would have to
write a bespoke search feature
for journal inside the app yeah inside the app
that was self-contained not terribly difficult mind you like like for for a
company that already has like they would just need to like take some of that
code and say okay well build a separate index and do it this way so right yeah
they're some pretty smart coders over there i bet they They could figure it out. I'm guessing.
I'm guessing. Yeah. And I bet he's not the first one to ask them for it.
Yeah. Yeah. Send it in. What's it? Apple.com slash feedback or whatever it is.
Yeah. Yeah. But that Siri search thing is good to know about.
I wish there was a way to more globally set the options in there because basically
every app that I think is on by default and you have to go app by app and turn
things off. But I like to turn a lot of things off because there's like a lot
of apps like I don't care.
To get contents results from you know
some game that i yeah exactly whatever like
i don't even know if it would ever service anything or like there's
a lot of apps that i just don't want showing up when i'm searching for apps
because i just don't care i don't use them frequently enough yeah right right
i'll go in and go to the the regular app search screen and pull it up that way
but you can declutter your series search by going through all those apps and
messing with all all those settings that are in there. Yep.
Yep. And I would think in the, in the meantime, if you, if that's something
that's essential to you, I'd use a separate folder and notes and make my journal entries in there.
Oh, that would be searchable. Yeah.
Yeah. The journal app is really nice, really nice though.
Cause it does, you know, surface photos and music and make recommendations and
suggestions. And it's pretty neat. It is a cool app.
Yeah. Yep. No doubt about it. Yep. Yeah.
All right. Um, Um, Jean has a question for us and he says, uh,
I am in the head exploding process of starting to get some smart devices for my house.
I wondered if you might be able to give some advice as to where or what to start
with perhaps an older episode or something else.
So I throw this out to us, uh,
cause I know we all, I mean, we've talked about
it in this episode haphazardly you know
where is a good
place for one to begin with smart
home adam you want to you want to start i would say
get one of those little simple plug-in things for like one lamp or one device
you know and mess around with that like yep that's a really simple place to
start and get familiar with how HomeKit works and stuff like that,
and it doesn't cost a lot.
I think you can get these things for probably $20 now, I would guess.
I haven't gone out to look for them.
When I did my house, I started with, or another one would just be a smart bulb,
that has those features built in.
They're more expensive, but I really liked the LIFX bulbs. I used a lot of those.
I still have a bunch of them that I haven't even plugged back in.
They have some great features, but I know prices have come down on that too.
So get one simple device.
Like I would start with a light, either the little lamp plug in switch where
you plug in a thing or just a, a bulb, a simple smart bulb and play around with
those, you know, and then.
It will take off from there. You'll want more and more and more things.
I feel like you need a killer app for yourself.
Like not just something that you're going to play with, but something that's
going to have a meaningful impact on your life.
Because for me, I had all kinds of stuff. You know, people would send us things or I would buy things.
And it was like, oh, yeah, look, I can turn on the Christmas tree with my thing.
And it's like, OK, well, that's cool. Well, it's, you know, three weeks of the year or something.
It wasn't until I bought a set and this was, you know, a hundred years ago.
So it was, it was $200 to buy a set of four Phillips hue bulbs. Yep.
Uh, now they're much less expensive than that. Any kind of smart bulbs.
And I put them all outside, which you're not supposed to do with the Phillips
bulbs. I can tell you this was a hundred years ago. The bulbs all still work again.
Knock on wood. um but just setting
them up so that the lights in my you
know on my front door and my driveway came on at
sunset and went off at midnight every night was a game changer like we didn't
have to think oh yeah it's dark you gotta go turn on the light or oh before
bed you gotta turn off the light or even better we've been out all day it got
dark we come home and the freaking driveway is You know, dark.
And now it lights up like it does every night.
And so that for me was the light bulb moment, if you will. Right.
Where it was like, OK, wait a minute. I get this now.
I see. And then it was like, all right, I want other things.
I want to eliminate this friction in my life by doing this with other things.
So, yes, there are still some things that I have that are just sort of cool and geeky.
I think it's important to find a thing and, and your example of a light bulb,
Adam, I think is a great one because there are those lights that,
that we just sort of naturally turn on and turn off at, at routine times,
save yourself a routine.
So, you know, yeah, I, I would agree with that too.
Cause when I, I did my lights, that was the other nice thing is like,
and I'm getting older and inevitably,
you know, you'd, you'd head to bed and then you've had to think,
oh did i turn off all the lights or not and then you could just be
like s lady yeah go
to bed i think i had an automation that was like go to bed and
it just turned everything off yeah in one statement amazing
yeah so in our discord
chat grumpy mike suggests the morass outlets
he's stating that uh you know
that's a great way to start things to control regular plug-in
lights with the hue bulbs as well and absolutely love them we have them
in i think four or five rooms in the house and my
son loves it he you know the colors and the
dim settings and one of the actually one of the really nice things in
in the master bedroom we have one and i can
whisper into my watch at if i have to get up at 3 30 3 45 in the morning i'll
whisper into my watch turn on the master bedroom light to 10 and it gives me
just enough light to get up and
not stub my toe but but it's not so bright that it wakes my wife up. Huh.
And so, yeah, so that's how I use the lights.
The other two things that I've got that I have really liked over the years,
we have a townhome in Pensacola.
I have one of the Nest thermostats, and boy, is that great.
I can set the temperature in that townhome, and I leave it in a wide range so
it isn't trying to keep it super cool in the summer or super warm in the winter.
But if I know someone's coming ahead of time, I can turn it up.
So when they get there, it's a comfortable temperature.
When people leave and we have somebody come in to clean it before anyone else
comes in, I can set the temperature down so that the lady that cleans the place
isn't doing it in 90 degree heat. Yeah.
But when she leaves, I don't have to say, don't forget to turn the thermostat
down. I can reset it to our away mode and go from there.
And the other thing that we have is a Schlage deadbolt.
And you can put in codes. So I have family members. They have their own codes to that door lock.
They can put their codes in to let them in, let them out. And I can control,
add codes, remove codes remotely.
And that's also a really nice feature.
And because of, here was the other cool thing. We've got a real hardware store
right down the street from there.
I was able to take the key from the doorknob, which was also a slage doorknob
and say, make it work in the deadbolt before I installed it.
So I've got one key that works all the externals on, on that townhome.
All right. So folks clearly like this is, this is the beginning of this conversation.
Cause I think finding the entry point and it's going to be different for each
of us, but finding that entry point is, is going to be the key if you're not already on smart home.
And even if you are like, you know, If you were on lights like me and then heard
Pete talking about the smart locks, it's like, oh, wait a minute.
That's actually kind of cool.
So I would love for each of you to write in feedback at Mackey cab.com and tell
us what was your entry point to this.
And we will obviously share that in future episodes.
Yeah. Where do you want to write Dave feedback at Mackey cab.com.
Yep. He said feedback at Mackey cab.com. He did. That's right.
Uh, um, we, oh, go ahead, Adam. I just have one other little thing.
I think, again, because this is like where to start out kind of question,
and I know we've mentioned a couple of devices.
I think this is less of an issue now. I've kind of not dove back into the whole home automation thing.
But, I mean, if you're an Apple person, I would at first very much try to stick
to HomeKit and HomeKit-compatible devices.
It's better now. You can do the HomeBridge thing and all that other stuff to
get other devices that are not.
And I think there's with thread and all the other things that have come out
since there's more support and compatibility, but I would try to stay in that,
you know, it's a home kit device world if you're an Apple person,
because it's just going to make your life easier at first.
And then you want to do a lot of the geekery. That's fair. Yeah.
Limit the friction to start out. I like that advice.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yep. Yep. uh we are uh next week heading to ces and i we wouldn't
be able to do it without our.
Ces 2024 coverage sponsors so i i just wanted to take a minute and thank each
and every one of them mac updater from core code one of my favorite apps i was
just using it last night before i did the the most recent update to Mac OS.
It's like, I always, it's nice to just know my apps are always up to date and
we really appreciate having Mac updater on board as a sponsor.
Carbon copy cloner from the folks at Bombic.
Another, and now sort of we're calling it CCC backup because it's doing more
backups than cloning these days.
And I am ever so appreciative for it. I've been using CCC for years and it's fantastic.
And even though we don't do much cloning anymore, I still find CCC a valuable tool.
And Collide at K-O-L-I-D-E dot com. Tom, amazing support for all of the enterprise
stuff that they do and managing all your devices in different ways. Go check that out too.
And we've got links in the show notes, of course, for all of these sponsors.
And again, our sincere thanks for being able to make this trip work and being
able to bring you folks all the coverage that we're going to be able to do.
Pete and I will be out there. Adam will be manning the fort back in the snowy tundra.
And, uh, yeah. You'll become Mac eCab East instead of West. That's right.
That's right. Yep. Absolutely.
All right. Let's, uh, so thank you to all of our, our sponsors.
It really, it makes a huge difference.
Uh, Pete, you want to, uh, you want to start off a cool stuff found for this episode?
Yeah. So I had, uh, seen years ago, you don't know Jack, a game, a computer game.
That was fun. And, uh, you know, and I knew they had expanded some.
Well, of course, my sister was here, and my nephews were here for Christmas.
And my daughter's home from college, and my son's here.
And the other night after Christmas, we sat around, and we played some Jackbox
games at jackboxgames.com.
It's really cool. Once you have the game on your computer, at least how we did
it, my nephew did an airplay to the TV. Okay.
And then we all go to, it tells you what website to go to and what code to enter.
And we all play from our smartphones.
Trivia and Quiplash, where it'll ask a question and you have to put in a silly answer.
And the person with the most votes for the silliest answer winds up winning.
What a fun way to spend a few hours with family just laughing our butts off.
So jackboxgames.com. That was a great way to spend an evening.
I think they have an app for the Apple TV.
Like I, I don't think you even needed to airplay. Oh, even better. Okay.
All right. I've never, I played, you don't know, Jack, I somehow made it through
COVID lockdowns without using it without ever playing Jack box games.
And I'm not quite sure how that happened.
But, uh, you're, you're a game playing household, Adam, have you played?
Oh yeah. Yeah. Okay. These, this is great too, especially,
uh, you know, over the holidays when people are
getting together and stuff like that it's super super fun we also
do it a lot at conferences because you can
have everybody just on a device an ipad an
iphone or a computer and just sit around in a circle and and play these games
too i mean i played this a lot with our friend barry oh yeah many many times
um yeah and there's a bunch of different packs um that you can get.
I'd like the, just the original Jackbox Party Pack, which has,
you don't know Jack, a thing called Drawful, which is kind of like a Pictionary
sort of game where you like draw things.
And then Fibbage is another great game where basically they give you a obscure
trivia fact with like one piece of information left out.
Sure. And then what everybody does is they try to fill in
that piece of information and you're trying to fool the others
into thinking that your answer is the correct
truthful answer that's fun yeah so
yeah that's another great one but yeah quiplash fibbage and uh you don't know
jack are probably my favorite ones they have a ton of other stuff a lot of them
i haven't even played like they add new things all the time yeah but i would
definitely recommend any one
of those to start out with and then you can kind of expand out from there.
Cool. Cool. Awesome. You mentioning Barry reminded me that Barry is and will
always have the distinction of being our first and because he continues,
therefore, longest running premium supporter here at Mackey Cab.
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And I want to take a minute and talk about a cool stuff found that I found that might.
Well, I use I like listening to audible books, sometimes driving around in my car or what have you.
And recently I started listening to the book by Geddy Lee, the singer and bass player in the band Rush.
And it's been fantastic because he put out a book which has some great pictures
in it. But the audio book is read by Geddy Lee.
And I thought, you know, I'm into liberating all of my content.
Like I've paid for these books.
They are mine. But I want them. I want to be able to, like, listen to them my
way, not just with the Audible app.
And so I searched a little bit and I found a piece of software called Libation at getlibation.com.
And it is meant to liberate your Audible library into either M4B or you can
convert them to MP3 if you want.
And and then those M4B files can be played with lots of different things,
including Apple's books and, you know, Plex. It turns out listener Mark said,
I, and this is brilliant.
I immediately went and did this. Mark says, I, I liberated all my books and
then I went and created a separate music library in my Plex that I named audio books.
And I just pointed it at the folder of my M4B files.
And not only does it play them, but it pulled in all the metadata for them from
whatever magic Plex does to do that. No. Yeah. Yeah.
And it just works great. Knows that they're audio books and it sort of treats
them differently and all those things.
And then he says, I use an app called Prolog at Prolog dot audio.
And all these things are linked in the show notes, of course,
for playing audio books from Plex.
Like it is a purpose built app to do that so that you've got all the support
you need for maintaining your spot in the book and and pointing at the right
library and just being the more book experience, including CarPlay support. So that's amazing.
And then, um, Robster also in our discord chat suggested open audible,
which it does sort of the same thing that libation does just a little bit differently.
So you can check all of those out if you want to free your audible library.
I love me some open audible.
In fact, I think I used it as cool stuff found once a couple of years back.
Once I heard about it, I was like, Oh, wait a minute. This might be something.
Yeah. Yeah. Check with your local laws if you wish before heading down this
path. I, I don't know. Yeah.
I'm telling you your content, you bought it.
Yeah. You know, don't give it away to other people. That's not what it's for.
That's not what it's for. To be able to listen to it on your, on my terms.
Yes. Yep. The DMCA man.
Yeah. Worst law ever.
Yep because copyright allows for format shifting
but emca undid all that
on somehow there's encryption well because
because it's protected right it was why we
couldn't do dvds or yeah you know it's why you were allowed to make
mixtapes back in the day correct but because you
could format shift because it was your content and you bought it but the
minute they added protection on it that law said
so you could still legally make the copy
but it was illegal to break encryption
so because the encryption key was
copyrighted that's the that was the trick to that right they
copyrighted the actual key it was one key
used for every dvd it had to
be in order for manufacturers to be able to
make a dvd player right it would work correct but
that key itself was copyrighted and therefore needed to be licensed to someone
using it you know know printing a dvd and then also to make yeah so the whole
thing's dumb you could go and like there were t-shirts for sale with that encryption
key on them if you really wanted to be a lawbreaker.
That's funny yeah it was ridiculous the dss
john or whatever yeah the dss john yeah exactly you know
i forgot about that that's ridiculous uh
i think we have time for one more cool stuff I found if you if either of you
Have one take it if you don't I've got one for us All I think go man All right
it's gonna be me so Rod shared this in the chat And it has in discord,
And it has been one of the more popular threads that we have in Discord.
It is the MT3000 from GL.inet.
It's or it's the GL-MT3000 pocket sized Wi-Fi 6 travel router.
And what's cool about this is a couple of things. One, it's built to travel with.
So if you need to bring a router with you to, you know, your Airbnb or whatever, you've got it.
But the other thing is that it has built-in tail scale integration,
so you can join it to your tail net and be home no matter where you are,
which I think is pretty cool.
So this is pretty cool. Yeah, it's pretty cool.
And, uh, it's available on Amazon for, well, it's, it's $110 minus a $25 coupon.
If you want to go down that page and it it's built to work with captive portals
in, you know, public networks or hotels or whatever, and you can connect with wifi.
So it, it like it's built to be your thing.
Yeah, exactly. Because I'm looking at the back of it, the picture that you have
up on the screen for those watching, and it's obviously it's Cat5 cables going
in. But if it'll connect via Wi-Fi too?
Yes. And then create a new subnetwork? Correct.
Oh, that's brilliant. Yep. Because I actually still have one of those little
airport expresses. Yes.
The worst that we used to carry around, but good luck finding a cat five connection
in a hotel room. Yeah, exactly.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I'm pretty sure from the discussions,
I don't have one of these, but I'm pretty sure from the discussions, that's what it does.
We need to get you one of these Pete. So you can test this for us. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
It's pretty cool. It's pretty cool. And last year, earlier this year,
I found out that the ethernet ports in a lot of hotels still work to connect
to their internet. That's right. You guys were all ready to move.
Oh God. My, my Adam, Lisa, almost like, I'm lucky to have survived this.
We got to a hotel in New York and we both had a lot of work to do.
And, but we were there on like a, it was right after Mac stock.
In fact, you know, we, we, I flew to New York. We went to Philly to see a couple
of fish concerts and then New York to see a couple of fish concerts.
And when we got to New York, we had an Airbnb in Philly. It was great.
When we got to New York, we both had like, like, you know, a solid days of,
of real work to do. And we unpacked everything in our hotel room.
And that's when we realized we were in the corner of the hotel that gotten almost
no wifi. Like there was no world. And so I'm like crap.
And so I'm like walking around the halls with my laptop, finding which rooms,
and there was one access point per floor.
And it was actually one access point per every other floor at the courtyard,
Marriott time square, great hotel.
Otherwise Perfect location. I would stay there again.
And so I went downstairs and I'm like, we got to move. And they're like,
okay. And so we go to other rooms and we're like bouncing around.
And it's like, we find one room that's like, okay, it's got like an,
uh, the couch is kind of messed up and it's like, whatever we'll,
we'll deal. And so we pack up all our stuff.
I go and open the dresser drawer by the bed to make sure I didn't like put something in there.
And there's an ethernet cable in there.
And I have this moment of thought and I'm like, wait a minute.
We like this room the best, like other than the wifi. And I plug in and it's
like, yep. Works perfectly.
Yeah. Yep. Lisa's like, we're staying here. Aren't we? I'm like,
yep. She's like, uh, okay.
I specifically recently put a,
Cat5 cable back in my laptop bag I didn't have one for forever for this exact
reason because I would get to a hotel it would have bad wifi and then I'd be
like oh there's an ethernet port there and I don't have an ethernet cable,
and in a lot of cases I'm in places where there's not a Best Buy around the
corner or whatever I can't just go get a cable Well, not only was I,
if I asked the front desk, they might, not only was I in Manhattan where I could walk,
you know, 18 feet in either direction and buy an ethernet cable,
but I do travel with one and I had at least one with me and just never thought to try it.
So let that be a lesson to me and all of us.
Thanks for hanging out with us, everybody. Fun stuff. Indeed.
Yeah. Indeed. Indeed. So real quick, there's a nice discussion going on in Discord,
and Grumpy Mike says, I love my barrel.
This is the router thing that we talked about.
Yeah. Yeah, the V-E-R-Y-L. It says it works with other VPNs.
He has his set to use with private Internet access account, and it connects via Wi-Fi.
And then Grumpy Mike says, my big trick is to set the Wi-Fi to the same as my
home Wi-Fi SSID and password.
And then once the barrel is online, your devices connect and think they're at
home. You don't need to run around putting all your devices on.
Oh, that's brilliant. Oh, yeah. I got to get one of these, too.
Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Why not? In jibs, baby.
Why not? Just, yeah, the home Wi-Fi thing. Oh, yeah. I like that.
Nice. Thanks, Grumpy Mike. Amazing. Amazing. Amazing. Thanks for hanging out with us, everybody.
It's been a blast, as it always is.
Thanks to all of you for listening. Thanks. Take a minute and share the show
with a friend or on your social media or something. We would love that.
Thanks to CashFly for providing all the bandwidth to get the show from us to you.
Thanks to our sponsor, of course, LinkedIn Jobs at LinkedIn.com slash MGG.
And yeah, Happy New Year, everybody. Thanks for thanks for hanging out with
us. Happy New Year. Yeah.
Music.
Adam, Happy New Year aren't the only three words that we like to say.
Do you have three others that maybe come to mind? Don't get caught.
Made on a Mac. That was Don't Get Caught in Japanese, wasn't it,
Pete? It was indeed. Later.