The Mac Observers, Mac Geek, episode eight, zero, three for Monday, February 24th, 2020. And welcome to the Mac Observers, Mac Geek. Welcome back. If it's not your first episode, we are the show where we take questions, your questions, sometimes our questions, tips, your tips, sometimes ours. Cool stuff found. You're getting the drill here. We share it. We answer the questions. We do whatever we can to make sure that each and every one of us. And yes, that includes us, your hosts, learn at least five new things every single time we get together, which is generally once a week. That's the goal anyway. Sponsors for this episode include Zappier.com slash MGG, Z-A-P-I-E-R.com slash MGG, MacSales.com, otherworld computing and other in other words, and Linode.com slash MGG. We'll talk a little bit more in depth about each of those throughout the episode. But for now, here, at least as far as you know, in Durham, New Hampshire, I'm Dave Hamilton. And here still in Fairfield, Connecticut, this is John F. Braun. All right, John, let's let's dive right in that. We've got some quick tips and I'm sure you and I have things to share throughout the episode. We'll start with Scott. Scott found a cool thing in the share sheet of iOS. He was going to share an article for future reference because he likes to save a copy because links or articles can change or disappear in the future. And he's totally right about that. But when he did it on iOS, he tapped the little share button and then he tapped right at the top. So it would say in the case of sharing a web page, it would show a little thumbnail of the web page at the very top. This is in iOS 13 or iPadOS 13. And then it kind of has the title and the site where it came from and just right there. So this is above where it's showing you your shortcuts to your most frequently or recently sent to message recipients. Right next to that, right above that, but right next to the site name, it says options. And if you tap that, you can choose what type of file you'll be sending as. And in his example, there were four options, automatic, PDF, a reader PDF. So that's a PDF of the reader view of that web page, which is pretty cool, or a web archive.  But that's pretty cool. And so in his example for us, he changed it to PDF document and boom, there it is. Now it's PDF. Pretty cool. Thank you for sharing that with us, Scott. I had, it's the beauty of Quick Tips. It's been right there. I've never noticed it and certainly never tapped on it. So thank you for sharing that with us. Pretty good stuff, man. I like it. I like it. I like it. I like it. Pretty good, right, John? Yeah. I think it's new. Yeah, it's a new one. Is it new? Is that new in 13? Okay. I'm sure I would have noticed that before. I don't know. I hadn't noticed it until Scott pointed it out. So I don't know. Maybe. All right. Patrick has another one for us. He says, I've been using this for years, but I've never seen anybody talk or write about it. Say one has an email, for example, a medical license or whatever. And not only do we want it, not want it in our receipts folder, but we want it in our, say, medical data folder from Apple Mail. If one holds... Oh, actually, sorry. I'm misreading his note here. There's a lot of double negatives going on. He wants it in both his receipts folder in Apple Mail and his medical data folder. So he wants it double filed in these two folders. Okay. He says, if one holds down the command key and drags it to both folders, it will show up and be deposited thusly. He says, I know we can do that with rules, but this is for those on the fly moments when one wants something that might contain important attachment or whatever, and you want it in several different folders. So yeah, that's pretty good. Thanks, Patrick. I never even thought about that. I never even thought about doing it with a rule, but certainly nice to be able to do it on the fly. So thanks for sharing that. It's pretty good, right? Pretty good, John? Indeed. Yeah. Todd. Todd, we were talking in episode 801 a couple of weeks ago about how I finally, after whatever, decade plus with decade plus, I should say, with Mac OS X and system preferences, I finally realized that I needed to sort it alphabetically because that's the only way I'll ever find anything in there. I just can't seem to have any muscle memory of where things are other than a couple of them. So I started sorting it alphabetically. And Todd said, if you have it in your doc either because it's there or because it's open and you right click on it, you also get a list of your system preferences in alphabetical order. And so that can make it very quick to get to the one you want without even having to go to that main screen that may or may not be sorted the way you want. So I thought that was pretty good. And then similarly, Lewis reminds us, he says, I don't use the alphabetical order in system preferences but I do customize it by going, opening system preferences, going to the view menu and choosing customize to hide most of the preferences and only leave the ones that I use a lot. He says, I can always get the alphabetical list in the menu. He says, but for example, I use trackpad settings once when set up a new machine at most and that's it. He's like, so I hide trackpad settings and I really clean up system preferences. I kind of like this idea. I'm gonna have to experiment with it because it is always there in the view menu. You can always get to them there in system preferences too which perhaps would be an even better way. Just like boom, there you go. But filtering down that view to just your favorites and thinking of that view as not everything but as favorites. Like how often do you go into language and region? Most of us probably not all that often but something like general or network. Yeah, I want that there all the time because I'm in there all the time. So yeah, I like this. What do you think, John? And speaking of right clicking on things, I found this. So yeah, after that tip about right clicking and seeing your list of system preferences and all that, I'm like, I wonder what else you right click on in the doc that'll show you something interesting. So there's a standard list of things that it'll show for things in the doc but some programs add something extra and here's one that adds something extra and it's replicated in. You can do it in both Mac OS and iOS. If you right click on the Safari icon you'll see two choices, new window and new private window. Nice. The thing is, if you go to Safari on iOS and you hold down on the two squares, I'm not sure what you're supposed to call that but if you hold down on that, you'll get the same thing. New tab or new private tab. Huh, yeah, yeah, yeah, sure. And on iOS, you get one more option if you long push, I guess is what we're calling that now. You get show reading list too in iOS. I'm not seeing that on the Mac when I right click on it but I definitely get that on my iPhone. I get new tab, new private tab, show bookmarks and show reading list. So that's pretty good. I like this, see? This is, we're all about efficiency here and that actually is why I wanna talk about our first sponsor, Zapier, John. We have been using Zapier here for a very long time. What Zapier is, is it's an online service and you would go to zapier.com slash mgg to get your 14 day free trial. And I think of it as the glue that ties together all the other online services that I use. So what do I mean by this? Well, let's say every time there's a new episode of a show, I want it to appear in Slack, right? And so I can use Zapier to tie that together. It can parse the show's feed and then when something comes in, boom, it puts it into my Slack group so that I'm, okay, great, that episode's out now. We can go and grab the timestamps or whatever out of it and everything's good to go. For Mac Geekab, we use it to track your premium subscriptions. I used to have to go and manually go through all the emails and parse out your name and your city that you're from and then put that on a list. And I would put it on a spreadsheet. I did this for years. And I already had a Zapier membership and so I feel a little embarrassed that I didn't think about this right out of the gate. But eventually I did and I thought, wait a minute, I can link Zapier with our e-commerce engine. So I did that. I can also link it with Google Sheets. So I did that. And now anytime an order happens, boom, it populates a Google Sheet with exactly and only the data that I want and it all happens automatically. So I can just go to the Google Sheet and I have everything where I need it and we're good to go. So you can do things like this. It really, the world is your oyster with Zapier and that's the beauty of it. No more wasting time on tasks that you know could be automated because that's what Zapier is here to do. And so you can join us and, you know, another four and a half million people who are saving an average of 40 hours per month by using Zapier.  So right now and through the end of this month, try Zapier free by going to our special link that I mentioned, zapier.com slash mgg that's Z-A-P-I-E-R dot com slash mgg for your free 14 day trial, zapier.com slash mgg. Our thanks to Zapier for sponsoring this episode. Go check it out. Our second sponsor is Linode because you're gonna need a server someday. You're gonna want a server someday. Having a server to play with can be fun and you can use it for your business or even your home stuff. Linode makes this super easy because of their cloud interface. Certainly sometimes it's fun to use the terminal for some of us, but even for those of us that it's fun sometimes, it's not fun all the times. And then of course there's lots of folks out there that it's never fun for it. No worries. Linode will let you use the terminal you can SSH into your server if you want, no problem. Or you can just use their cloud manager. And their cloud manager lets you set up your server without ever even knowing that the command line exists. It's awesome. You go to, say you want a WordPress server, you just tell it, you want a WordPress server to ask you a couple of questions like what do you want your username to be and what's the name of your website or something. And then boom, WordPress is set up. You don't have to know that it just configured Apache MySQL PHP for you. You want a VPN server? You run your own VPN? Sure, you don't have to know how to do that. It just sets it up for you. It's pretty awesome and there's all kinds of things. If you've thought of it, they probably have thought of it too and they've got it configured. But if they haven't, all you do is ask them and they might be able to set it up for you because chances are somebody else wants what you want. Very, very cool stuff. All their stuff is on SSDs natively. They've got a 40 gigabit network that everything's plugged into and you can pick from any of their 10 worldwide data centers. Go check it out. Go to linode.com slash mgg. By going there, you'll start with a $20 credit and I'll tell you their least expensive server is just five bucks a month.  So check it out, linode.com slash mgg to get your $20 credit and get started today our thanks of course to linode for sponsoring the episode. All right, John, David has a problem with Apple's podcast app and we're gonna try and help him because what David says is why does the new podcast app on the Mac keep unsubscribing me from various shows? I download through my Mac and sync with my phone and an iPod, which I listen to in the car. At least half a dozen times in the past couple of months I've noticed that I'm not seeing new episodes of one podcast or another. When I look in the app, it will sometimes say that it has stopped pulling down new episodes because I quote unquote, haven't listened in a while. This is in spite of the fact that I sync my devices every week or so. I have to stay current on things like Mac keycap. At most I might get an extra episode or two stacked up but I always manage to listen within that timeframe. It does seem like the podcast app might have to be manually launched to do its job. I think if it isn't launched, it won't pull new episodes in the background even if the music app or the finder are open. So I make a point to run it every few days for that very reason. Well, this time Mac keycap was the victim. I noticed today I hadn't heard the latest episode and after a sync I still couldn't listen. So I checked the app and sure enough it said I hadn't listened in a while and it had stopped downloading new ones. Do you have any thoughts on how to deal with this? I don't like the app second guessing me. I shouldn't have to keep reassuring it that I wanna listen to shows to which I have subscribed. Yeah, man. I run into this too. This quite frankly has always been a problem with Apple's podcast, the podcasting apps. It was a problem with iTunes. It's an issue with podcasts on iOS. And of course, now podcasts on the Mac suffers the same fate or depending on how you look at it has the same feature. I think they think they're being helpful but as you found it's a little overzealous. I agree that it's a little overzealous. So I don't use Apple's podcast app for that reason. I use, I sort of go back and forth between two apps. Overcast is one and pocketcast is the other. I kind of like pocketcasts a little bit better but they're both really popular. And so, A, I wanna stay abreast of them for what we do here at Mac eCab so that when you folks write in I have some working knowledge of the apps that you folks are using. But I also, you know, it's kind of interesting to sort of bounce back and forth and mess with them. But those are two of them that I would recommend. There are plenty others that are also awesome but a third-party podcast app might be the answer for you. And Dave Ginsburg in the chat room points out that he uses downcast. And you can join us in the chat room at macicab.com slash stream. And yeah, downcast is another one that I have on my phone and I use sort of interchangeably with these others for sure. Now, in fact, I don't know why it just didn't pop into my mind. I guess I'd use the other two most recently frequently but downcast is definitely the third that I use. And yeah, so there you go. Yeah, what do you use, John? Oh, Apple's thing usually. You do, okay. That's annoying because I'm looking in music right now and you would think, I agree with you. I always hated that it's like, eh, you don't want to listen to this anymore, right? It's like, dude, stop. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I don't see why they don't make that a preference. You know, and they might be, but I've never, quite frankly, I've never looked for it. I think I gave up on Apple's stuff a while back because I don't listen every day. I don't have a normal, like I don't have a commute other than the walk across the driveway, which was treacherous today, by the way, because it was a little icy out there and now it's snowing on top of the ice so you don't see where the ice is, so you gotta be careful. But other than that, I don't have a commute. So I listen to podcasts sort of at sporadic times, like when I'm driving to go see my chiropractor or go to the store or whatever, that's sort of when I will listen to podcasts. But yeah, yeah, so. Do you have ice skates? You should have put on your skates. Oh yeah, dude, it'd be great to work. There have been some days where that would have been the safe choice for sure. Yeah, yeah. No, it's dangerous out.  But if you don't see it, you just start walking and you can like, it can be a real problem. I hurt myself pretty bad a couple of years ago. I thought I'd broken my rib, but I didn't.  I bruised my diaphragm from falling on the ice, actually doing that, walking across the driveway. So it was, it was crazy. It was a bad couple of days. So be careful out there, folks. Was that from Hill Street Blues? What is this? Who's dog breath? Yeah, let's be careful out there. Yeah. All right, okay. Joe has a question. So hopefully that's helpful there. Joe says, something strange just started happening with one of my IMAP email accounts. And it's one that's hosted with GoDaddy. I don't think that's relevant, but I share that just in case. He says, when I delete an email from my Mac using Apple Mail, it deletes on my iPhone. I see that change reflected. But the other way around doesn't work. I can delete it from my iPhone, but it still stays on my Mac. And if I open up my mail workspace on GoDaddy, I see that when I delete an email on my Mac, it deletes from the server, but not when I delete from my iPhone. So this is a bit interesting. My first thought is if you go on the phone to the settings app, go to passwords and accounts, go to the affected account, if you have more than one and you probably do, go to advanced. There's two options you wanna look at in there. So it's settings, passwords and accounts, your account advanced. And then on that advanced screen, there's two things you wanna look at for this. One is deleted mailbox. Make sure that that mailbox actually exists because essentially what happens when you delete a message is it moves it from one mailbox in, let's say your inbox to another, say your trash mailbox, but it could move it, say, to your inbox. If you have inbox set for deleted mailbox, then it's not going to move it anywhere. And then, so making sure deleted mailbox is your trash mailbox, preferably the trash mailbox on the server, but if you have reason to have it somewhere else, that's fine. And then you wanna check the option for move discarded messages into, because you want this to be using that deleted mailbox. You can set iOS to not delete things, but instead archive them by default. And so that's where this option comes up, right? So you go into your account and you can either have it move discarded messages into deleted mailbox or archive mailbox. And you just wanna make sure that it's doing what you want it to be doing. So this is the first place I would check. You know, there's probably other things to look at. This may not be the end all be all solution for Joe, but. Oh, well, I'll give you another place you should absolutely check. Yes, sir. Where is this on the Mac side? And on the Mac side, you wanna go to mail, preferences, accounts, and then you'll see a list of your email accounts. And if you click on one of them, you will see to the right, there's a tab, mailbox behaviors. That's basically the same thing that you're seeing on the iOS side that Dave just talked about. Check what that is set to and make sure it matches what's on the phone. And I would suspect they don't. Yeah, that's a great. Yeah, use your Mac in Joe's case because his Mac is behaving the way he wants it to sort of mirroring those settings between the two. That's a great idea. Yeah, I like it. I like it. Cool. Yeah, some can get kind of weird. Like for example, Gmail preferences, the mailbox name with the word Gmail and brackets. I don't know why they do that or at least when I set up my Gmail, that's what I had to do.  So they essentially took Gmail's labels concept and turned those into IMAP mailboxes so it can get a little wonky. That's why that happens. It doesn't happen with everything. It only happens with mailboxes that you create from your Mac if you create them as labels on the Gmail side then they don't have that. But yeah, it gets a little wonky. So yeah, but it's good, you know, it's good. All right, I have, so take things in a slightly different direction for us here. Apple recently announced that they were joining something called the Fido Alliance in the interest of security. Essentially, some of this has been couched as Apple, this alliance, this Fido Alliance, so by Apple joining it, Apple, is looking to get rid of or significantly deprioritize the concept of just using username and password or passwords in general. So John, you dug into this a little bit. First, let's sort of go briefly over what this, what the idea behind this Fido Alliance is, replacing password only logins with what? And here's the thing. So most people consider, there are three factors that can be used to authenticate with a system. And they are what you know, which could be a password, what you have, which is something like a token or you know, some, it could be a USB device or it could be something else, but it's something that you have is the other factor, and then the third is what you are, and that's biometrics. So using- By biometrics, you mean? I mean, could be face ID, could be touch ID, some unique thing about you that's physical. Okay. And it's what? It could be a retina scan, fingerprint. Again, face ID is a form of biometrics. Sure. And so what you have could be, you're right that it could be a token like we might get with our, overly secure bank accounts or something like that. But it also could be like the two factor codes that you can generate on your phone or in your one password app or something like that, right? That falls loosely into that category of what you have, correct? Right. Okay. So FIDO is looking to prioritize the latter two of those things and de-prioritize the former. Is that essentially what we're talking about here? It's basically taking passwords out of the equation. Got it. Okay. All right, so, but what you've described is nothing new, at least in concept, right? I mean, these things, we've talked about them on this show for 10 plus years. They've certainly existed even longer than that. Again, conceptually. And there's even some things in the market. In fact, you were talking about one that you have, right? Like what's the name of it? The thing that you were messing with recently? Oh, so actually, yes. So somebody has, all right. So we've got the FIDO Alliance. And with the FIDO Alliance, one thing that they're creating, I don't think it's the only thing they're creating, but it's a new standard called Web Authent, W-E-B-A-U-T-H-N. Got it. Okay. And that has to be baked into your browser. The ability to do that, it's not built in. Now you may ask yourself, gee, who's doing this? And the thing is almost every major browser supports it. And one of the articles that we had here, so Apple was doing stuff behind the scenes here. So the information I got from a ZDnet article actually says in 2018, Apple's WebKit browser team added experimental support for Web Authent. Oh, okay. Okay. And then in December, 2019, Apple added native support for FIDO compliant security keys like the UB key. Got it. To Safari. Okay. So this is a thing that Apple hasn't just joined the Alliance in anticipation of future support. They've joined the Alliance and they are supporting this, which is great. Correct. Now, one device that lets you play with this, but yeah, when the article said like the UB key, I'm like, oh, wait a second. I got one of those that they were handing them out like handy at a CES. Ah, got it. Okay. So I got one of their latest ones. It's the UB key five NFC because it also will talk to your phone using NFC, which is that cool. Ah, okay. But it can be used as a Web Authent token. And so I'm like, oh, okay. Well, let me go to the page. And if you go to demo.ubico.com, there's a few things there that let you check the functionality of the various devices. Right, right. One of them is test Web Authent. So I'm like, oh, okay. Let me try it. So, you know, went to the page, got the device, plugged it into my anchor adapter because it's USB-A. Not USB-C. Sure, yeah, of course. They gave me USB-A. Of course. And what it does is basically it will, you plug it in and it's like, oh, hey, I see you and I'm gonna register this. And then let's go to the next page and let me tell you that I, again, see your device. And it worked. So it's not a full deployment, but it demonstrated the fact that this can be used as a, and they actually say on their page, register and authenticate a USF slash FIDO2 key using Web Authent. Okay, so it probably will work. That sounds like a standard of sorts. So it doesn't have to be a YubiKey, although of course they would prefer that you use a YubiKey because that's what they sell. But that makes sense. Yeah, okay. All right. So if you wanna play with this yourself, one way would be to get yourself a YubiKey, which there are probably other reasons that you wanna get it to. The other nice thing about this particular device is that it can look like a smart card to macOS. So I can actually use this same device to actually log in to my Mac. Interesting. Interesting. Okay. Yeah, so it's definitely what you have part of the equation here. And you can... This is realizing. You can use a YubiKey with your password managers, like one password or last pass, I know both support YubiKey. Oh yeah, there's a... I forget, I'll see if I can find it, but they have a list of all the people that support them and it's really long. Okay, all right. But that's pretty cool. Like this is a thing that you can use, and I'm guessing you'll probably start using yours with last pass, right? Because you still use last pass, yeah? Right? Yes, yeah. I tried it once with their prior model and was never able to get it to quite work. And actually the one that I had before, which was the YubiKey four is actually deprecated, so. Got it, okay. All right, so, all right. Probably the problem is if you lose your key, then now things get interesting. All right, so okay. So we know, we understand the nuts and bolts. The question is, like you pointed out, the YubiKey's existed for a long time. Other things have existed. YubiKey is probably the most well-known consumer facing version of this so far. But my thought was, okay, now that Apple is joined up with this, you know, Apple has had a long history of taking security and making it convenient, right? Because I always sort of pointed out that you get to pick, right? It's a continuum. You get to pick ultimate security or ultimate convenience. And the example I like to use is, well, you know, do you want to have doors on your house? Right, forget about locks and any of that stuff. Do you want doors and windows? Because not having doors and windows really makes your house way more secure. But it also is terribly inconvenient because you can't get in or out. So okay, let's back off of that. Let's add some doors, but maybe we'll put locks on them. And you know, that's sort of a nice sort of overstated example of that continuum. We've had this though, and Apple has been really good at this. Touch ID was certainly a convenient way of adding some level of security to your phone. Face ID, depending on your point of view, arguably even more convenient. I think for most of us, it's way more convenient than Touch ID. So now that Apple has joined this, my first thought was, okay, well, we've had this and it's existed in the fringes. Even with Ubiqui, that's still the fringes. You know, it's existed in the fringes for a very long time. It's never really made its way into, you know, the common culture, but boy, it just seems like Apple might be the right ones to pull that into. What do you think about that? Like, right? Well, you gotta look at who is playing in this market right now and why they're playing in this market. From what I can see, it's good that Apple is joining the club because, I think it's good they're joining the club because they're just making user experience better because as the group points out, passwords suck. Right. From a security standpoint, because, you know, people use the same one on different sites and, you know, people, you know, will hack systems and download the entire password database. Yeah, that's right. Whereas in this case, there is no password. Right. And from what I could read about the mechanics, what's actually happening is you're actually, this is actually using public key cryptography as part of the solution here. And from what I could read of, I'll have to read up more, but from what I could tell, what happens is when you go to a site, your Gizmo or your computer, I guess, generates a key pair and then your public key is actually you. Okay. Yeah. Or it's used as part of the discussion to secure things. Got it. Okay. All right. And that's a good thing because the thing is, a public key, it doesn't, it's public. So it doesn't matter if somebody has it because they're not going to get anything because they need the corresponding private key, which you had hopefully securely generated or your device has. Your device has, yeah, right, exactly. Yeah, I just, I feel like, you know, Apple, we already have a lot of these devices, you know, on our persons for other reasons. And I think that's the key to this is like we want to have our phones with us. Now it could be argued that having our phone be the key might not be the right thing because we're using our phones sort of as the gateway to all of these things. So maybe we want another key. But what about your watch? What about even your AirPods or some future iteration of AirPods? Like, you know, Apple's sort of, well, not sort of, Apple's all in on wearables. So it seems to me like a wearable key and perhaps a wearable that is not just a key so that you actually want to remember to wear it and have it with you. Yeah, the Apple Watch really feels like of all of Apple's current products. Apple, the Apple Watch feels like the one to me that's like, oh yeah, this could be like this. Well, you can already, I still don't have an Apple Watch. I'll get one someday, you know? Yeah, yeah. Maybe this is the year for me. All right. But you can use your Apple Watch to unlock your Mac, right? Correct. Oh, that's right. Okay. Yeah. And it's what, is it using Bluetooth or something? But it's proximity to the computer that will unlock the computer. That's right. And it just happens automatically. If you set it up to happen automatically and you have to opt into that for sure. But yeah, when I open up my laptop, I only have it on my laptop. I don't have it on my Mac in the office. Actually, I guess I do. Yeah, I do have it on my Mac in the office. But anyway, when it happens, I just feel a little tap on my wrist and it's just telling me, hey, by the way, I just unlocked your Mac. So it only works, it's very secure. Well, fairly secure, I will say. It only works if your watch is on your wrist and already previously unlocked. So it's not just like, if somebody grabs your watch and waves it near your Mac, it's gonna open, no. Like you've already got to be in that mode. So yeah, that's pretty good. So there's, but now I just thought about it. So one, I'm like, well, Yuuki of course is in the market because they make devices that speak this authentication language. Apple's play is that they make devices that could potentially be used as a token or an authenticator, because you... I'm assuming you mean... Or technically, I think you could use either Touch ID or Face ID on your phone to authenticate to the computer, right? I mean, that would be my thought. Yeah, I don't know if everybody heard you. You just echoed in the strangest way possible in my ears, but it only lasted for like a second. It was really, I think everybody heard it. So there you go. That was the audio god celebrating this segment. So yeah, all right, cool. This is great. I'm curious to see where this goes. Cool stuff. I mentioned during the Zapier read, our ad read, our premium contributors, easy for me to say premium contributors and how we like to acknowledge all of you during the show. It's been a little while since we've done that. Frankly, it's the only reason it's been, we've had so much content to go through that I keep sort of skipping it and I don't wanna skip it today. So our premium program is available at mackeycub.com slash premium. We've mentioned it several times. We always try to mention it. And it is, it's optional, completely optional. It's for those of you that want to and can support the show directly, certainly listening to the show, contributing your stuff, visiting our sponsors. All of that truly, truly helps. Without all of that, the show doesn't happen. But quite frankly, without those of you contributing on the premium side, the show also doesn't happen. It really is sort of a mix of all of these things that makes it possible for us to continue doing this in what is our, what 15th year almost here, which is pretty freaking awesome. So we have two basic plans. Really three, one is that you can just contribute to any amount you want as a one-time thing and be done with it. Or you can contribute on a regular basis. So on the monthly, yeah, the monthly plan, which is defaults to $10 a month, although there's some of you that choose to contribute more, we would like to thank Tony from San Francisco, Frederick from Nashville, Robert from Columbiana, Joseph from Marietta, James from Melville, Jeff from Chesterton, Clive from Burgess Hill, Scott from Bourbonais, David from Mount Prospect, Barry from, hopefully at home with his family, but you never know where Barry is. Michael from Robbins, Ken from Honolulu, Frank from Tunbridge, John from Wake Forest, Santiago from Palm City, John from Sinking Spring, Jim from San Jose, Dave from Saugerties, Jeffrey from West Haven, Timothy from Hendersonville, Bob from Lepeche, Tim from Des Moines, Philip from Tucson, Chris from Charliewood, Michael from Mission Hills, Ari from Kensington, Joe from El Dorado, Jay from Long Valley, James from San Antonio, Bob from Austin and Working Smarter for Mac users, Peter from Auburn, Abdullah from Reister Town, Reister's Town, Scott from Portland, Neil from West Hartford, Nick from Mount Clemens, Mark from Milford, Paul from Fishers Ward from Mesa, Luann from Albuquerque and Jason from Charlestown. I know it's a long list. It's been a little while since you've done this and I wanted to make sure we got everybody in. That's only half of you, though, because the other half to thank are the folks that are choosing to contribute twice a year, once every six months. Again, by default, that's $25 as you'll hear some folks choose to contribute more. So our thanks go on that plan to these folks. Jeffrey from Alamogordo, Richard from Sands Point, Karen from Chagrin Falls, Robert from Poncebury, Poncebury, sorry. Joe from Kingsley, Kurt from Princeton, Warren from Thompson Station, Terrence from Avon Lake, Brett H, Natonio B, both of them, so early and long time contributors that we don't have their addresses on file and that's okay. Barry from Delray Beach, Peter from Bayside, Richard from Melbourne, Thomas from Shoreview, Chuck from Boulder at $50 every six months, Russell from Marblehead, Stacey from Pine Valley, Richard from Brooklyn, Anders from Vastaross, Phil from Santa Fe, Kenneth from New Lambton, Drew from San Diego, John from Ypsilanti, Larry from Irvine, Deborah from Houston, Paul from Danville, Lyndon from Seven Oaks, Michael from Wake Forest, Charles from Kobe, Gary from McKee's Rocks, Thomas from Chicago, Keith from Kirby Cross, Chuck from Mechanicsburg, James from Charlotte, Dmitri from Moscow, Thomas from Sacramento, David from Farmington Hills, Michael from Milwaukee, Harry from Durham, Kevin S, Richard from Daniel Island, Elliot from Brookline, Jeff from North Belmore, Margaret from Waukegan, Paolo from Mantica, Peter from Sudbury, Joshua O, Louis-Michel from St. Laurent, James from Port Alberni, Peter from Rochester, David from Seabrook, Scott from Calabasas at $60 every six months and Mark from Panama City at $100 every six months. Thanks to all of you. Thank you so, so much for all the support and help and everything. It really, like I said, makes a huge, huge difference for what we're able to do here and it just really, it makes it possible for us to do what we do. So thank you. All right. Again, MackieGab.com slash premium. Okay, now we've got some tips and some cool stuff found. Let's go with the cool stuff found first. In show 801, John, we talked about all kinds of different things, including things to manage and track subscriptions. We've sort of, I think we had answered most of that, but I really love when we get a cool stuff found from a listener that is written by that listener. And so I wanted to kind of come back to this. Matt says, might I suggest a bill tracker like Bill Organized or Buy Money Master? Full disclosure? I wrote it. So I'm a bit biased, but I use this to both track my bills I need to pay by hand and to remind me of bills that are set to auto pay such as subscriptions. So I know when to expect them to be debited from my bank account. Money Master won't automatically find the subscriptions that Apple's gonna charge you for, but after adding bills to it, it will notify you that you have something due that day. He says, I set mine a day ahead if I want advanced notice on something and it will give you a summary of upcoming bills on every Sunday. So thanks for sharing that, Matt. And this is awesome. I love it when we can kind of all support each other. So this is good. We'll of course put a link to this in the show notes like we do everything else. Pretty good, huh, John? No? Oh no, I'm just thinking of what I do, which... Paper file? No. So what I do is I have a calendar entry. Okay. And then in the notes section, I list all of my bills for the month and most of them are due on the same day, which is nice. Oh, that's nice. So I basically do that, check the balance.  Though sometimes I don't, you know, interest in all that. But that's my methodology. It's not really that great though. Maybe, you know, for 299, bill organizer from Matt here might be the right answer, so. All right, so some hardware cool stuff found that I've been playing with here. AU sounds or awe sounds. I'm not exactly sure how I'm supposed to pronounce that now that I'm saying it. I've been using these for a long time, but I haven't said the word. So ausounds.com, they make all kinds of different audio devices. And I've been looking at their wireless AU Flex ANC which is their wireless neckband earphones. They're available on their website for $199.95. These things, like their whole focus is on high fidelity, which you know matters to me. I'm crazy about this stuff. But man, like these things, they have active noise cancellation. So I'm looking forward to using them on the plane tomorrow. They have super high res wireless over Bluetooth. Like really, they're using some tech that allows like three times the data to be transmitted over Bluetooth. And it does make a difference. And then they run it through a hybrid planar driver so that it's actually got, you know, like there's a driver in there that's pushing sound. Man, like these things, they sound fantastic. So it's really worth, if you're looking for like a neckband style earphone, check these out. They've got, like I said, noise cancellation and all that stuff and it's only 200 bucks. So pretty good. So I'll throw those out there. And then one thing that I got to play with at CES, John and now is at least in existence in pre-orders and should be coming very, very soon is the SanDisk Ultra Dual Drive Lux USB Type-C flash drive. And that, it's a long name. I don't know why it goes quite this long, but flash drive is what you want to think about here. We're all used to flash drives, right? Well, they've kind of taken this to the next level. This is a flash drive that works over both USB-C and USB-A, it's a one piece, well, it's a two piece device because it's got a little spinning cover on it, but you can plug it into your USB-C port from one side of it or take it out and plug it into your USB-A port on the other side. I've been able to get, like speeds were pretty good. Write speeds were even like, write speeds, I was getting about 50 megabytes per second. So this is not your old school flash drive. 50 megs a second, write speeds, 150 megabytes per second, read speeds. So this is a serious flash drive and it comes in sizes up to one terabyte and you can get it from 32 gigs for 11 bucks up to one terabyte for 250 or 249.99. So this is cool because really nice to be able to just plug it into your USB-C port and not have to worry about finding that adapter that you were talking about, John, but also hand it to somebody that has USB-A ports and you're good to go. So it's pretty cool, nice little thing to throw in the travel bag, I think, so I share. Nice speeds too. Yeah. I know, it's pretty good. I was really impressed. That's something I noticed, you and I were doing this at CES, but I was like, you know, I wonder where benchmarks I get on the NVMe SSD in my new MacBook. Oh, well, yeah, that's, yeah. About 2,500 megabytes a second. For reads or writes or both? They're close. Okay, wow. Yeah, once a little more, once a little less, but in general, so I was like, wow, that's really fast because it's really fast, yeah, that's good. My old SATA 3 SSD was getting on the order of hundreds of megabytes, whereas here, this is thousands.  I wouldn't expect something that small to be able to go at these speeds. Yeah. Well, why not though? Yeah, well, maybe we'll make one someday. Yeah, exactly, exactly. Yeah, so pretty cool. All right, Mitch said, well, he reminds us of something, but back in show 800, we were talking about ways to keep your network shares mounted and Mitch reminds us of something we've talked about. He says, I use an app called Mountain by AppGeneers for mounting and unmounting drives. In the preferences under custom, you can also prevent unmounting. Nice app for just $5.99, and we'll put a link in the show notes, of course. So install it on your Mac and then you can use it to mount non-mount drives. I think it sits up in your menu bar if I'm not mistaken on this. But as he pointed out, you can tell it not to let a drive remain unmounted so it will remount that drive, which is sort of the whole, that was the whole problem we were looking to solve. So thank you for sharing that, Mitch. That's a great one. Like I said, I think we talked about it before, but never in that way. Two more, well, kind of three more, but two more. I've long been a fan of the Solo Backpacks travel bags, whatever you want to call it, solo-ny.com. At CES, I saw one that I've now finally gotten my hands on. They call it their Grand Travel TSA backpack. Now, the TSA part is something that lots of their backpacks have. And I'll just briefly explain. The back pocket that your laptop sits in has a zipper or a pair of zippers that allow you to unzip it and hinge it wide open so that if you're going through the normal X-ray, if you have pre-check, you don't need to take your laptop out. But if you don't have pre-check, you also now don't have to take your laptop out. You just fold this open and the laptop compartment is left alone. And now you can just go through and then just zip it right back up. So that's the TSA part, which is cool and lots of their backpacks have it. This Grand Travel part is the thing that really impressed me. It is, it looks like a large laptop bag. A little, maybe a little thicker than your standard laptop bag, but not by much. Except it's got the pocket in the back for the laptop as we talked about.  On the sides, it's got water bottle pockets, so that's great mesh pockets. On the back, it's got the little straps that slide over your luggage, so all of that.  It opens up, you know, you kind of put it down flat and open it up and it opens up on its side and it has a little, you know, compartment in there that you can put all your stuff into. It's got straps to, you know, compress your clothes down and it's got a little zipper spot for your toiletries and all of that good stuff. And like those trips that I go to your house and, you know, for PEPCOM, quick overnights, those types of things a weekend away, this would be freaking perfect because it just puts it all into one place. So then it's 100 bucks, 99.99 for this thing, which is great. So anyway, I'm excited about it. So let's put a link in the show notes to it. I am the last cool stuff found for today. I am the type of person that when I go camping, I bring spare tent with me because I like to know that if something has happened or does happen to my tent, I have another one. It won't surprise you then that when I travel, especially traveling with the family where there's four of us, I bring spare phone with me too. I also like to have, because we do the show and we talk a lot about a lot of technology, I also like to have an Android phone around to use. And so I'm always on the lookout for the kind of the right thing to fit both of those scenarios. And I've long been a fan of the DuGi phones, D-O-O-G-E-E. And they've got two that are out right now that really kind of blew me away. The S40 is, I mean, it's an Android phone, runs Android 9. It's got, you know, the base model is 16 gigs of storage which for a spare phone or a test phone is great. Probably great if you're not doing a ton with the phone either, but it's $110 done.  And you've got this dual SIM Android 9 rugged as heck a smartphone with a huge battery has like three and a half days of talk time. Right, I know. Like yes, trust me, I know it's crazy the world that we live in. It's rugged, it's, you know, weatherproof and all that good stuff. So definitely go check that one out, the DuGi S40. And then their S68 Pro kind of takes it up a level from that. That's twice the price at 220. It is IP68, it has a better camera. It has 128 gigs of RAM, sorry, of storage. So, you know, six gigs of RAM. So yeah, it's a pretty serious little phone. But again, serious phone like that. Battery life measured in days, like talk time measured in days and it's 220 bucks. So I'll put links to those in the show notes.  Now you're not spending insurance on your iPhone or anything like that. And you've just got something with you and all that good stuff. Now it runs Android, not iOS obviously. But for some of us geeks, that's actually kind of a nice thing to have around. Even before Apple geeks, I like to be able to experience Android and all of that stuff. And there's some things, no, there's some things it does better. Like Android's gotten, it's gotten way better. You laugh at it, but I will ask you, when was the last time you used an Android phone? Yesterday. Really? Well, I've been a friend of mine and we were talking about Pokemon and I was like, can I get that on my phone? And I'm like, yeah. Yeah. The only thing I notice is that their Google Play, they call it, I guess, is that their app store is kind of like the Wild West or last I checked, maybe they cleaned it up. But downloading something nasty is more likely on that side of the fence. At least that's what I like to see. Fair. Yeah, that's right. No, it's easier, way easier to side load things or load things that are not vetted through the store. And even, I mean, the store does some vetting, but it's not the same as Apple. So yeah, you're right. And Dave Ginsburg points out that on that S40, there's an automatic Amazon coupon for 10 bucks, not automatic, you got to click the box, then it's automatic. So now it's 99.99, which is pretty good. So thanks for pointing that out, Dave. Yeah. Fascinating stuff. I do want to take a minute though and talk about one other cool thing and that's from our sponsor, Otherworld Computing. You know, I think we even mentioned it in the last show, their Mercury Elite Pro dock is so cool. Like, I got to see this thing at CES. It is a dock, a Thunderbolt 3 dock that has seven ports of connectivity, right? Two USB 3.1 Gen 1 ports for all your peripherals. It's got a display port 1.2, so you can add a 4K display on it. It's got a front side SD card reader, right? So you get all your stuff from there. It's got gigabit ethernet and then it's got two Thunderbolt 3 ports on it as well. So it's your dock, right? You have this on your desk. It will pass power, so you're good to go. You just plug in and you're done. But it's also got two drives in it. So you get a dual drive RAID solution there.  Not only do you have ports and power, you also have storage. And of course you can get it in various sizes up from where you can get it empty, zero terabytes all the way up to 32 terabytes of storage. So really cool, nice little sleek design, sits right next to your laptop or you could have it next to your iMac or however you want it. You gotta check this out. But Otherworld Computing is the place that you would go to check out things like this anyway if you're gonna do what John and I do because that's what we do. Anytime we need to expand our Macs or add something to our Macs, Otherworld Computing is where we go. So macsales.com, remember that, visit them first like we do and check out this Mercury Elite Pro dock. I'll put a link directly to the page about the dock in the show notes too so you can see that. And obviously our thanks to Otherworld Computing for sponsoring this episode. All right. Where are we here, John? Oh yeah. We had a couple of geek challenges. Let's see if we can get to them both. Two shows ago, we asked about, well a listener asked about iTunes for PDFs. Ways to manage your PDFs. And I like the idea of iTunes for PDFs. The concept really kind of, a management system, a place to store them all. Well, we got a lot of responses. By far, DevinThink sat at the top of this for sure.  I'll share Zach's answer here. He says, I think DevinThink may be the best out there. It'll handle numerous file types in addition to PDFs. There's a folder structure, but the search functionality is amazing and allows you to easily find those mis-filed documents. There's some pseudo AI functionality that will try to sort documents into folders automatically. And he says it works surprisingly well. He says the system will cloud sync to multiple devices. There's an iOS app available. OCR is built in if your scanning software doesn't already do it. One of the most handy features for financial documents he says is that documents can live in multiple places at once. For instance, when I receive a 1099 from my bank, I can file it in both my Bank of America folder and in my 2019 taxes folder. Only one copy actually exists, but the database allows you to reference it from both locations kind of like sim links, but for PDF. So it really is that, takes that iTunes approach, thinking of the folders as playlists, right? I mean, it really kind of goes there. He says, it's a great system. I'll be with a bit of a learning curve and a non-insignificant price tag, but I recently purchased the upgrade to version three and I feel like it's money well spent. So thank you for sharing that, Zach. That's awesome. Matt also wrote in quite a bit about Devon Think. He says they did a big update to 3.x last year and it's way better for automation. For instance, he says I have smart rules set up to watch specific folders for new PDFs. When a PDF shows up, it sees if it has been OCRed. If not, it OCRs it, then looks at the test and text and moves it into a particular database based on that AI thing that Zach mentioned. He says it's basically like Hazel with Abby Fine Reader and Spotlight on steroids built in. So that's cool. Thank you, Matt. And Adam has two things to mention. He says, there are two preeminent tools in his mind for managing PDFs. The first, of course, Devon Think. The second is Keep It. He says Keep It is new and is simpler than Devon Think, but I had problems syncing between Mac and iOS. Devon Think has been around for years and is rock solid, but if you don't need to sync to iOS, Keep It works fine and is indeed iTunes for PDFs. So thank you for sharing that, Adam. This is good. Two more while we're at it here. Patrick says that he uses Calibre to manage PDFs. It's an ebook manager, which is interesting. And other folks mentioned just using Apple's Books app. I think we talked about that during the episode. I think it came up either, maybe you mentioned it, John, or maybe somebody in the chat room did, but Calibre is an app that manages ebooks and of course PDFs and ebooks are often, ebooks are often, but not always stored in PDF format. Thank you for that, Patrick. And then lastly, listener Dave, not me, Dave, says he likes to use YEP from Ironic Software, YEP from IronicSoftware.com to manage all of this stuff. It's really kind of a file management thing, but most definitely will work with PDFs. And it looks interesting. I haven't messed with it, but there you go. So Devon Think certainly has the bulk of the recommendations from folks. They've been around a long time, but there's a couple others if you either don't feel you need all that Devon Think offers for, want to try something else. So there you go. Any thoughts on that, John, before we move on to the next geek challenge? No, I like Devon Think. They advertise it as a good tool for knowledge workers, I guess you could call it, or like if you're doing research and stuff, because it's got the search stuff kind of intrigued me. And the AI stuff I think is kind of neat. Yeah, that's pretty cool. It's pretty cool. Okay, so I need to point out that normally we, and now twice in three episodes, we'll mention this. Normally we don't talk about when we record these shows. We just talk about when we release them. Because of some travel that I have, we are recording this episode 803, about 24 hours after 802 was released. And in 802, I was sort of an off-the-cuff sort of musing that I wanted some way to manage my TV shows that I watch. Like it's crazy. They're spread around over all these services. I have no idea. I forget that I'm watching certain shows. And then I don't watch them because I don't think to watch them when I sit down to watch TV.  I can only imagine what's gonna happen over the next six days before this episode's actually released. But there was enough, more than enough here to just go through and at least share this first wave and we'll see where it goes. Great stuff too. The first is from listener John, who says that, I wanna start with where he says, he says, with keeping up with shows, I use an Apple TV, I use the TV app, and I use the up next feature of the TV app. Netflix doesn't play nice with it, but he says for him, everything else that he watch is he can get to show up there. And the plus he says is that it will also show me sports that I have told it that I'm interested in. So my first thought was, well, Comcast doesn't have an Apple TV app, so since so much of the stuff that I watch is through my cable subscription, I'm gonna hate this, it's not gonna work. And then last night, I messed around with it for a while and I added every single non-Netflix show that I watch to my Apple TV app because I don't have the Comcast app for Apple TV, but I have apps from every other network and plus Hulu and Amazon Prime and of course Plex, even though, I don't know if Plex links with the TV app, I don't think it does, but I was able to link everything else, CBS All Access, all of that stuff right in there. It was a little bit tedious, not terrible to add each show as it would be to any system. And then I went to the last episode of everyone and I did a long press on the last episode or at least the last episode that I had watched and chose to mark it as watched. It seems like that has now marked all the older episodes as I don't know if it marked them as watched, but it's not surfacing them in Up Next for me. So, you know, the TV app might actually offer an answer for most of us. It doesn't read from Netflix, so bear that in mind, but if I only have two places to look, that's better than who knows how many I had before. So, okay, so that's one. Then thank you, listener John, for sort of nudging me down that path even when I didn't wanna walk it. Awesome, that was good. But there are others. Listener Lauren says, I use an app or a service called TV Time and it has both a web app and an iOS app at tvtime.com. Works really well and I no longer forget about shows for long periods of time. It pulls all of its information from IMDB. So for any shows that are playing overseas and then are coming here later to the US, they'll show up with whatever the earliest release date is. So that's a little annoying and you have to manually enter your shows. It is definitely the best option that I've found that isn't just making a spreadsheet that's crazy big and almost unreadable. So thank you, Lauren. Yeah, I agree, the spreadsheet option is no bueno, but it's better than nothing. But these seem to be better than spreadsheets, so that's good. WatchAid TV Planner is what Brian recommends. It has an app for iOS and an app for TVOS. He says, it lets you track all your shows, even long canceled shows and of course current shows. He says, I believe the app is free. I've tipped the developer who has been terrific at keeping the database up to date. So thank you for that, Brian. Curtis recommends something called Next Episode which is at next-episode.net. It is free, it is agnostic, it doesn't care about broadcast cable or streaming. It has granular notifications and he says it tracks movie release dates too. So there you go. Of course, links to all these are in the show notes. You don't have to remember, you don't have to take notes, but you can if you want. Let's see.  So we will put that in there. And then John D.F. recommends the TV Show Tracker iOS app and we'll put both of those in the, well, we'll put all these links to all of them in the show notes. So good stuff. Thank you for all of the answers.  It's great. In fact, it's more than fine. It's fantastic. I'm just a little worried that I'm gonna come back from this trip to Mexico and find my inbox overflowing with yet more recommendations because most of you haven't heard these by the time you're sending them in. So there you go. Any thoughts on that, John, before we add a couple more tips before we head out of here? Doing a Google search, I think it's a good idea to do a Google search doing a Google search surprisingly more often than not brings up information. I saw the other day on my to-do list, Walking Dead, and I'm like, oh, that's starting up again? Yeah. And if you search for Walking Dead, it actually said, oh yeah, here, this episode is gonna be showing it this time, date and time, and I'm like, oh, excellent, okay. Because every now and then I noticed that TiVo thinks something is new when it's not. Right. It eventually clears it out. I don't know if you've noticed this on occasion. Yeah, yeah, I've seen that before, sure. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I don't wanna have to search Google, because the whole point is, I don't wanna have to remember what show it is. I wanna, you know, the list of shows that I wanna watch, but you're right. I mean, the data is out there.  Oh yeah, and well, now we got a, a laundry list. A bunch of apps that do this. Yeah, I'm curious to see how I like using the Apple TV app. The interesting part about it is as soon as I set it up, I said to Lisa and Lucas, my son, I was like, hey, you know, maybe we can cut the cord here. And of course, Lucas was very quick to point out. He's like, well, where do we get, like, don't you have to log in with your Xfinity account in order to get all these shows via their apps on Apple TV and other than the CBS All Access stuff with like Picard, that is mostly true. So, might not be so quick to, cut the cord, but maybe, you never know, you never know. Hey, speaking of service providers that we love and hate, it's worth checking your cell phone provider's plans on a regular basis. Of course, there's always mintmobile.com slash MGG if you're ready to head down that path. It's like, and I recommend checking it out, but this isn't a sponsor read. That's just off the cuff. I want to make sure everybody's aware of that. But check your cell phone provider's plan once every six months or so. Check the plan that you have and compare it with the new plans that they offer because they change things constantly. Now, sometimes you will find that the plan you have no longer exists, but they'll let you keep it because you're grandfathered in. And sometimes that's cheaper. There's a reason that they've expired it. Maybe it was too good of a deal. But that's the reason you want to look every six months or so, is just go check that out and see, is there another plan that's gonna save you money or maybe for the same amount of money, give you more features or faster speeds? You know, all the providers are adding 5G now. Well, your plan that you have from four years ago might not support 5G. And maybe it doesn't support things like personal hotspot. I was helping somebody with an AT&T plan and they had an older plan. It was grandfathered, didn't have hotspot, didn't have 5G or anything like that. And for a family of like six, they could spend an extra $5 total per month and get faster speeds and personal hotspot and all of that stuff. But AT&T doesn't send them an email saying you should check our new plans that we've rolled out. So you just gotta do it. Just do it on a regular basis and do it with all your providers. Because you're probably not getting the deal that you should be getting. So like I said, Mint Mobile's an ongoing sponsor here at MGG and that's a great option too. But whatever provider you're using, check out the plan and compare it to what's currently available. You might be pleasantly surprised. At the very least, you'll be pleasantly surprised that you have the best deal. And it's like, hey, all right, that's cool, but maybe not. So yeah. Yeah, I was surprised. I think it was about six months ago, but they sent me something, Verizon sent me something saying, hey, you know what? You know that 2G a month plan that you have? Well, for five bucks more, you can get five gigs of data a month. Right. I'm like, oh, okay, thank you. And then they did a rewards now. So they have, I think they call it Verizon up awards. Sure. And every month you get one award point. Well, one thing you can cash it in for is an additional gig of data. So I'm actually at the point now and they do carryover. So right now I have nine gigs of data on my phone. Nice. That's great. Because I kept applying all day. Yeah, I am. So yeah. So yeah, good advice. They're all coming out with new stuff. There's new stuff. They should be. Yeah, exactly. All right. Two quick tips. One, they aren't quick tips, but I think they'll go quickly. Steve says, I saw this shortcut recipe to automatically mute the iPhone volume upon setting do not disturb. It might help those embarrassing sound leaks. So we'll put a link to that in the show notes. Thank you, Steve. It's just a shortcut that you can build in the shortcuts app on iOS and then you're good to go. So thank you for that. We will put that link in the show notes. And then Andrew sent in a note about how he says the folks at OWC recently posted a newsletter with a lot of great tips. And one that caught my eye is a post that shows how to easily put an alias for your iCloud drive into the dock. So we'll link to that as well too. And thank you Andrew for sending that along. Fun stuff. Good episode, you know.  Don't get any ideas, folks. I don't think we can, we can't do like daily, hour long, so it's the show. I don't know that that's a good idea. I only got one day off, man. I know, but now we don't record again for like another week and a half. So we both get a little vacation. This is nice. You could go on a cruise or something. You could. It's a good time of year to go on a cruise. We're going down to Mexico. No, it's not. No, it's not. No, sure it is. Cruise is great. Some people are stuck on their boats because of the thing. The coronavirus. Coronavirus. Yeah. I did buy travel insurance for our trip to Mexico. I mean, I would have bought travel insurance anyway, but it's nice knowing that I have it for this. It's, we're going to see fish. So by the time you all hear this, except for those of you in the chat room, by the time you all hear this, it will, I'll be on my way home. But we're going to see fish. It's like, you know, they play four nights at this resort down in Mexico. And so it'll be a nice little getaway for Lisa and I, but I, for those types of trips or for a cruise where, you know, you're sort of spending all your money up front before you leave, travel insurance is usually pretty cheap and, and worth getting. And especially with, you know, coronavirus and all of that. I was like, yeah, you never know if they're just going to pull the plug on this thing like they did with Mobile World Congress. Did you see that? They canceled Mobile World Congress. It's supposed to start on the 24th, was supposed to start on the 24th. Unlike the 12th or maybe the 13th, they were just like, yep, that's it. Sony and the Amazon had pulled out the day before because so many people that go to MWC come from China. So Sony and Amazon were like, yeah, no, no, no, no bueno. And the next day, it's in Barcelona. That's correct. Yeah. Yeah, that's right. Yeah. I guess, yeah, they just don't want like people packed in a tight space. Oh, totally. Well, and a lot of people from China packed in with a lot of other people in a tight space. Like the risk factor was too high and companies were bailing out.  So my guess is they didn't want to have a showing of like 40,000 people at Mobile World Congress. Better, the optics on that are not good. You know, it's so much better to just say, yep, we're gonna cancel, we'll see you next year. But I mean, A, it screws up all those hotel rooms. It screws up all those people that paid for flights that probably aren't getting money back. Although some of them probably are. And then it screws up the mobile phone industry because there's so many things that we're gonna be announced at this. And now, you know, it's like, well, how do we, how do we generate the press attention and you know, all of the, all of that stuff. So it creates an interesting scenario. So anyway, I just, I throw that out there for, it makes it interesting. All right. Well, that's what we got. Thank you to everyone who listens. Thank you to all of our sponsors. As we mentioned during the show, Zapier.com slash mgg, Z-A-P-I-E-R.com slash mgg, Leno.com slash mgg. And of course, MacSales.com, our ongoing sponsors. Yes, we mentioned MintMobile.com slash mgg. Of course, SmileSoftware.com slash podcast, Barebones.com, Iro.com slash mgg. In fact, you can go to macgeekgab.com slash sponsors and see all of our active sponsors there. And we keep that up to date for you. So go check that out. That's what you, that's what we want you to do. Just go there. Don't worry about anything else. Just macgeekgab.com slash sponsors and go check it out. Click on the ones that interest you. You don't have to buy that's between you and them, but we do try to generate awareness. Dave, I said it once and I'll say it again. In the last episode, I told you. Since you're going down south, that you should do one thing. And the fact that you are listening to this now must mean that Dave didn't get caught. Made. You know, there's no guarantee of that. Cause I'm going to set this to publish before we, before we leave. Oh, I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. Maybe maybe next episode. Maybe next episode in Mexico. Yeah, I don't know. That's, who knows? Who knows? We got some.


Mae'n cael ei fod yn gyrdd 30x yn rydyn diolch. Mae'r gwahanol yn gofyn y maen nhw. Ond mae'n gwybod i'n gweithio'n gwybod yn gyfnodol iawn. Rydyn ni'n gobeithio'n wybod ar y dyfodol. Rydyn ni'n gwybod i chi wedi'u cyffredinol gyda'i pethau a'r pethau neu ddweud ond gennym, ond rydyn ni'n gweithio o'r dig Morganau am y pethau a'n ddiwrnod. Lle'r cwmpaen fydd yw'r cyffredin iawn. Fe yw Llu Voo brand. Y cyfrifio natigur yw Luvu. Ie, a ydych chi'n gweithio'r cyffredin iawn? Felly mae'r cyfrifio ar y cwmpaen yw'r pasiwn ffocreidio, ond mae'n ffusio arall o ddwylliant y ffaswn o'r cyfrifio ar y cwmpaen yw'r cyffredin iawn, Felly'n cael這fyrdd, mae'n gyfrifio atl đểol. Fe ddim yn gweithio'r cyfrifio eitaf yw anodol a'i gyfrifio eitaf y cefnodol a ble i gyfrifio ar y cyfrifio a'r dydd yn cael ei cyfrifio i'w cyfrifio a'u cyfrifio i'w cwmpaen yw'r pwyllgor. Felly mae'r cyfrifio yw'r cwmpaen yw'r cyfrifio ar gweithio. Mae'n cael ei cyfrifio erbyn na ffrifio ar gweithio gweithi gyrfa ac mae'n cael ei gweithio gan gweithio, a wnaeth ei gweithio eu gwneud lot of information here where you can say that these are not mass produced bean bags these are bean bags that are created with passion these are bean bags that are created with quality so they are really building upon the quality of the brand this isn't one of the products which are necessarily trying to offer the cheapest price on everything they're saying they're a bespoke quality brand and this is one of them with their bean bags okay and so that's one of the products that they've got there the second products is is jack school okay and these are perfectly designed products for seating arrangements etc for schools as well so they could maybe go into schools and actually get contracts with major schools to buy their products so there's a catalyst here in this brand but this has got a lot of potential as well jack school is the other brand the next one's a vanna medical and this one's interesting because they could really do targeted marketing for this for the people that obviously would this would benefit so this is a centre point between luxury and functionality the most comfortable and highest quality materials is developed unique designs of top-of-the-bed comfort products that aid with sleep surgical recovery g-e-r-d acid reflux and sleep apnia so they're creating materials and products that are basically trying to deal with some of these issues and trying to have more of a comfy experience so they're building these products that are trying to be more comfortable essentially a much more improved pillars much more improved backrests and all those sorts of products which do have a use they have a purpose there's a market for these products right you get penny stocks sometimes and they will be producing an idea that we don't actually know that the market would buy yet well we know that this particular product there is a market for there is a need for the product and the best businesses are either one they solve a problem or two there's a need for the product right the next one is a vana PPE i won't want to talk about this too much because this is obviously is a good product in the sense that this is in demand at the moment but you know potentially within the next four to eight months there may be less demand in this particular product in terms of a face mask but they're doing gowns as well but i'll talk a little bit about that later in terms of where where this still is a part of what they could be doing they've then also got this thing called creative right where basically brands and entrepreneurs can go to them and say that look we want this product and then they can manufacture it and they can get deals in place so that opens up a lot of catalysts and opportunities as well and you can notice here what we can see is a manufacturing okay so they their manufacturing process is bespoke their manufacturing process is about quality it seems from what i could see they've got a large facility they've got their manufacturing processes in place ready to go to make products so this is very impressive here and this is just an internal picture of what i found of their stuff there i've just got to say before we move on to the next part of the information and my price predictions and all the other benefits and what i'm going to do with the stock i'm just going to say thank you for everybody who's subscribed into the channel this channel is growing massively so thanks for all the support everybody who likes the video is really getting it up into the youtube search results it does help the algorithm i think in a future video i'm going to show you exactly how it impacts the algorithm just to maybe you're not interested in that maybe you are i don't know but it does actually help the algorithm youtubers don't just say that they actually mean it right it does impact us if you can like the video because it gets it up into the search results everybody who's doing that fantastic i did say can we get to 3000 subscribers can we get to 3000 by the end of january okay and i was like 2300 400 what is like three days ago or something and we're already at 3000 in like less than a week so thank you for everybody subscribing it would be awesome if we could hit 3000 subscribers by the end of this week possibly that'd be fantastic so thanks for everybody's support on that so back to the information though so we've got louvue brand's reports fiscal year quarter 2021 results okay so they have actually got a net sales of 5.4 million and remember this is a penny stock and they've got a good amount of net sales um their price to earnings ratio for a penny stock and a penny stock that can grow is actually really good as well uh but based upon some of the figures that we've got so increased 31 percent to 5.4 million from 4.1 million so the sales is increasing okay compared to last year they've increased their sales okay total gross profit of 1.4 million up 351 000 a percentage of net sales unchanged at 28 percent operating expenses where 1 million an increase of 3 percent so they've invested probably more in staffing manufacturing etc um here so what we can see here is that their revenue is continuing to grow which is a positive sign for this company it means this company could have a really good future as long as they continue to grow that revenue grow that sales grow the brands that are under their umbrella okay that is important and also it says here reports record fourth quarter net sales of 5.5 million uh full year net sales of 18.4 million okay net sales for June 30 2020 in comparison to the three months end in 2019 have increased 37 percent the sales 37 percent that's up 5.2 5.5 million so this company is healthy it's growing their revenue I would seriously look at putting some money into this stock we'll go through price targets and an extra an information in a moment so what do they do what is their core mission it's their making products people love these are not cheap products these are products that people are going to love they've got good quality they've got quality manufacturing process them that is their mission making products that people love interestingly enough the leadership team is quite experienced as well uh here so you've got uh Lewis here who's a founder president and chief executive officer and he'd been involved in the company here for for a while and he is in the previous decade before starting the company mr Friedman was a private investor and business consultant in marketing venture capital and ma and then you've got um Ronald Scott who has uh got some experience here but also he was a member of the executive board for something called Sayantech corporation which was a Nasdaq listed company right and they also got his degree in business and management etc okay next up we've got some of the reviews I always maybe this is me over thinking a bit too much I know maybe I do that a bit but I would thought it'd be quite interesting to see what are sort of reviews what are people's thoughts on some of the products that this company's selling and I thought I'd just take a look at one of them here so you've got Jack's bean bags and these were a couple of reviews that we've got here I just thought it's quite interesting they offer a great selection of bean bags they do two different types they actually do more than that I believe now I bought three bags three years ago very well made my dogs love them I put cover in a washer and there was also a well made liner that holds the innards of bag they're a little pricey but worth the money so it was interesting to see some of the reviews there to say that look these it's clearly the product is of good quality here and and it's receiving some good reviews overall um just back to the point where I mentioned the the leadership team one of the leadership team members was and there's many other leadership team members I I can't mention them all because because I just want to keep this video compact but one of them mentioned Ciantech corp right then that they kind of worked here and yeah so it's at 3 3 USD so it's this is a company one of the leadership team used to work for and was in a kind of a senior kind of executive role there so it's interesting that they've got someone that has been involved in this company before um in this particular company now in this louvre company now okay so this is a company that they recently that this the the leadership team used to work for and that was a Nasdaq company I think that this could be grow this this company Louvre brand so let's move back to Louvre brands again okay so what are the benefits so it's got an impressive product portfolio right so loads of different products a diversified amount of products the steady growth okay steady growth in revenue and then this huge upside potential because the stock price seems to be incredibly cheap right now whereby I think that this has got a lot of potential to grow there's massive upside on this again penny stocks are always volatile so there's potential for it to drop but I think that this is a medium to long term hold on this stock meaning medium term 6 to 12 months or potentially 3 to 5 years if you wanted to hold it long term I think there's got a lot of potential um my only concerns okay and I would be wrong for me not to put any concerns I have about the stock is that they will need to pivot on the avana PPE brand right because they're going to have to create new PPE equipment that's just post you know pandemic they're going to have to have PPE equipment and move into different areas of PPE other than sort of masks and gowns so they can make if avana PPE work they're just going to have to pivot a little bit okay so that's my only concern and make sure that they actually do that and they have a plan for that prices need to reduce I think slightly okay so if they want to get mass market appeal they want to get more say for example retailers on board so they can sell these products to retailers brick and mortar retailers so they can have them on either either the store or or also e-commerce websites then to have them in their own e-commerce website so if they're working with retailers they've got to get the price down so that they can offer them a good wholesale deal right so so they do need to reduce the cost but ultimately they don't need to be the cheapest I'm not saying that I'm saying that they do need to reduce the cost there why because they can go mass market now this is going to be done with economies of scale the more products they sell the more materials they can buy at a cheaper price at a wholesale price so this is called economies of scale you know the more they can scale the business up the more materials they can get the more machinery that the cheaper the cost of goods will be in producing the actual goods okay so economies of scale that's what that's called okay and it's really important that's what they can do again look these are the bean bags and you can see the $360 now to me yes I think this should be expensive but I feel that they could reduce the cost of these by at least 10 to 20% and I think it would just be looked more attractive to potential buyers but this one here I absolutely fantastic quality bean bag right it's called the cocoon six inch bean six bean bag forks fur okay massive massive bean bag not six inches and and and and it looks really good quality it's a good quality product but they need to bring that price down a little bit but you can just see the amazing quality right and that's really good another concern I had is that they're not running any Facebook adverts on their jacks bean bags yet you can actually here's a little tip I'm sorry for making this video so long little tip if you're researching a company right you can go on their Facebook pages and you can click on view transparency there's a transparency on the about us section you can click transparency and you can look into the back end of Facebook to see if they're currently running any ads so if they're saying bursting about how many sales they're going to get in the next month okay does this match with their marketing so that they're not currently running ads with this brand at the moment so that is a concern they should be really be pushing out this these bean bags the they were a good product okay and they need to be doing more ads that says to me that maybe they use another social media channels and other marketing techniques but I think Facebook social media and Facebook in particular is a good way to advertise products so I just thought I was interesting it's kind of a side note I do like the brand though I think it's a fantastic company I think it's a fantastic price I'm just saying that you know I like the company overall there is just a couple of little concerns but I think overall it's cheap for what it is what is that so it's at 0.14 okay at the minute has actually had a run up a little bit from 0.10 0.8 0.08 so it has a bit of it's had a bit of a run up but I think that this stock's got a lot of potential to run up even further like say it's got potential to even 30x on its current price in the long term but I certainly think that this is going to double or triple you know within the next three to six months okay I think that this has got a lot of potential to grow this brand I would look at getting in this company anywhere between if you if this dips down if you can get this at 0.10 brilliant but I would start a small position at this price okay and if it dips down buy a bit more so you buy an increment buy a little bit then a bit more and a bit more okay don't buy your old position up here because if it dips you're not going to have any money to buy so buy something here then wait for it to dip buy something there okay and then ride the wave back up to the it's true potential as a brand okay so that's what I've got for you today please leave the video a like and subscribe to the channel if you're new hopefully if you know if you found this anything interesting at all then do like the video it does really help out the channel and I've got to thank everybody for watching and I'll see everybody in the next video


Mark Zuckerberg, even Bill Gates, who doesn't look like a high-testosterone guy. These are extremely high-testosterone driven people. I don't know if they'll score like a dude who's on trend and there's that 3,000 in their blood, you know, but here's the things that make people hyper successful. Number one, crazy levels of physical energy. Then number two, high IQ, third, experience in direct sales. The fourth thing though, high levels of conscientiousness. You have diligence, hard worker, perfectionist, that means can be detailed when needed. That means pre-plan, prudent, which means wise, making good decisions. Next, low agreeableness. Wealthy people, I call them warlords. The last one is high risk takers. Being low agreeable and risk taker is probably high-testosterone.