MacGeekGab, show 940, Monday, August 8th, 2022. And welcome to MacGeekGab, the show where the goal is for each of us to learn at least five new things. We do that by taking your questions, tips, and cool stuff found that you send in to feedback at macgeekgab.com. Like this quick tip from Skyler that came in last night. Actually, she's my daughter, she just gave it to me. Did you know that if you're in the messages app and you've sent a message to one person, you can hold down on messages and start dragging it. And then with your other finger, you can navigate to another message and drop it in. It's like copy and paste without having to do copy and paste. Tips like that are what you send in, your questions, your cool stuff found, things like that all come in and we stream together into an agenda so that we can learn those five new things every single time we get together. That's what I'm saying. That's what I'm saying. It's right here. We're not messing around. Sponsors are also not messing around. For this episode, include ZockDoc.com slash MGG where you can go and sign up for free. You can download their app and instantly book an appointment with doctors who are easy to find. You're also going to want to check out Collide at K-O-L-I-D-E dot com slash MGG, Device Security that keeps your users engaged via Slack. It's a unique approach to doing enterprise or corporate device security. It's cool stuff. And then also one of our favorite apps, BBE Edit. Now, with integrated notebooks and extended language support, we're going to talk more in depth about each one of those shortly here for now. Here in Durham, New Hampshire, I'm Dave Hamilton. And here in Fairfield, Connecticut, this is John Frock. And here in Get Ready For It, New Delhi, India. Pilot Pete. Pilot Pete. I think this is a record for us. You know, this is a record. And I love it because not only are you on a different time zone from us, but you're off by a 30-minute mark, not just an hour mark as we learned in the pre-show. And you can join the pre-show if you go to macgeekup.com slash calendar. Sign up to the calendar. You'll know when we're doing this. But it kills me, Pete, that for years, the only time you were able to be on the show was when you happened to be home in New Hampshire and would come to my studio and do the show here. And I love that. Don't get me wrong.  Now that we can. But it kills me that we never once thought, hey, we could just send you around the world with a microphone. Despite the fact, John, that you and me have been doing this remotely since, like, episode two? So I don't know. Well, but to be fair, I mean, until recently, most hotel Wi-Fi was spotty at best. Fair. And even if I had a Cat 5 cable, that still wasn't always that good. Fair. But John and I did enough remote shows, especially when it was audio only. So I don't know. Right. I don't know. We had the background noise that they put in, and we had the videos that took that out. Yeah. It's true. It's true. You mentioned the time zone, so I'm going to tell people that's what it is. So I'm in India. If you don't know, India is off by half an hour. And the conspiracy theory is that when the British colonized it, all you would have to do is turn your analog watch upside down in Delhi, and you could see what time it was in London, or in London, turn it upside down. You could see what time it was in Delhi. And it's always worked. So for instance, it's 8.15 in the evening in Delhi, and it looks like about quarter to two in London in the afternoon. I love it. These are the things we learn. I love it. I'm a trippy. You are Mr. Trivia.  It's awesome. How are things for you, Mr. Braun, as we're getting rolling here? Anything exciting happening? Nope. OK. Well, this show is exciting. It's going to happen. We started with a quick tip from Skyler. Let's keep going with quick tips from Jeff, is the next one. He says, have you ever wanted to copy the path to a file to the clipboard? Here's a quick way to do it. And by path, he means the text-based representation of what folders that file is in. He says, open a Finder window and navigate to the location of the file. Right-click or Control-click on the file to display the context menu. With the context menu displayed, hold down the Option key, and you will find that there is now an option to copy the file as path name. Click it. And now on your clipboard is the path to the file. If you don't want to right-click or Control-click, I believe you can find this in the Edit menu when you're in the Finder. Yeah, if you just open up, highlight anything in the Finder, open up the Edit menu, and then as you press down the Option key, you will see it will be copy. Without the Option key down, it's copy with the file name. And with the Option key down, it's copy file name as path name. So that's a pretty good one. I like that. Cool. Thank you, Jeff. I had no idea about any of this. This is what I love. And here's another one that I didn't expect to happen, but it happened.  If you right-click on where you get a copy as path name. Kind of like this. Oh, look at that! But a level higher. Amazing. Oh, right. You're getting the path name to the folder when you do that, not to the file itself. Interesting. And also, like I'm looking, Pete shared a movie with us of a plane that didn't stop turning and crushed a little truck. Everybody was okay. You shared that before the show, and that happens to be the thing, Pete, I did a Get Info on this. John was walking us through this. And in the More Info section, there is Where From. And on this, it says Received Via Messages File Transfer, and then it gives what looks to be a unique ID of some sort. Interesting. There's all kinds of metadata in there that may be useful in court someday. Oh, actually, I'm sorry. It's not some random unique string. It is a very specific unique string. It is your phone number, Pete. There it is. I'm glad I didn't start reading it off. Maybe I can get more calls about my car warranty expiring. Sometimes dumb luck is the best kind of luck, Pete. The fact that I just didn't start reading it because I thought it was irrelevant. Then I realized how relevant it might actually be. There you go. Awesome. That's good. I have the one that we talked about also briefly in pre-show. If you ever wanted to tag the little icon next to your file, for instance, all your PDFs, they all look the same. But if you have a PDF that's about, say, airplanes, and you want to put a little airplane icon next to that PDF, all you have to do and find her is hit, well, let's back up. Let's take a screenshot of an airplane, and that's, so what's that, Shift Control Command 4, I think, and then take a screenshot. You're adding the control key there because that puts it on your clipboard instead of saving it to a file.  Then once you've done that, up in the very top left corner, you see next to the file name that little tiny icon that it's a PDF. If you just click on that, it kind of highlights it. Then you hit Command V and it changes it from the PDF icon to the icon that's on your clipboard, or the picture that's on your clipboard. So I've done that for years with my files so that it's easier for me to visually identify them. That's a great idea. You know, this is one of those quick tips that the functionality I knew, and I think we've probably even shared a show before, but only for one very specific purpose and that is changing disc icons. So if you have some external drive or even an internal drive, and you want to give it a custom icon for whatever reason, aesthetics or something descriptive so that you know, oh, that orange drive is that orange drive. So we've used that exact trick to put custom icons in over the years, but I never even thought on my own, let alone in the show, about doing it for descriptive purposes for individual files. It's brilliant. I like it. I've been using that for years. And in mentioning for drives, I've always used aircraft names, for instance, because I flew the Harrier. The Harrier is my main drive. And then I hang other drives and NAS drives around and it's Cobra, it's Galaxy, it's intruder, those sorts of things. And my daughter uses, she likes dogs, so she names it after dog breeds. And does she put icons of those dog breeds? I don't think she does. I need to teach her that quick tip. I was just going to say yeah, I like that. Yeah. And if anybody ever wants to question Pete's sanity or really anything else about Pete, he just shared the only relevant fact you need, and that's that he flew Harriers books. I would have called those VTOL on your podcast. So there I was, you called them Vistol, Vistol. Vistol, yeah. Vertical, vertical short takeoff and landing. Vertical. And it was really what it should have been called. Yeah, they were called Vistol. But we actually should have called them Stovol which is short takeoff vertical landing. That was more than a mission. You had to be really like to do a vertical takeoff. You could always do a short takeoff, even with a full load of bombs and fuel and everything else. You could get airborne in 300 feet. Okay. But the vertical landing or the vertical takeoff, you have to be very late in order to do that. So it was a short takeoff vertical landing airplane. Interesting. Oh, that okay. That makes sense. Now I understand. Yeah. You might want to share that on your takeoff. You might want to share that on your podcast. Yeah, because you've said it in every episode I've heard and because it's you and another co-host you also flew Vistol planes through flew Harriers. Yeah. So, interesting. See the things we learn folks. Listener John has something Mac related for us to learn and that is where am I here? He says if you have a finder window open and you are deep in the file structure which some of my stuff I might have 20 folders deep. Okay. You can use a trick to quickly save a file to that folder that's open in the finder when you have the save dialogue open in any Mac app if you switch to the finder and hover over the name of the folder so in the top a folder icon will be revealed while you hover. You then drag and then drop that folder icon right into the save window and it will jump you to that location in the save dialogue box. That is very cool. I don't think I ever knew about this I don't know when it started but I've been using default folder for so long that which is a paid add-on for macOS a third party paid add-on and I highly recommend it but it will let you get to finder folders in two ways in default folder. One is there's a little it adds a little menu save and open dialogues where you can see finder windows and you literally just click and select it. The other way is from that save dialogue if you drag your mouse or you move your mouse, not drag if you move your mouse outside of the save dialogue and hover over a finder window it will it will light up and you just click and it brings you there. So I never stopped to think about an apple-centric way of doing this but this is super handy for when I'm working on someone's machine who doesn't have default folder so I like that. Any thoughts on that John? No, like you I'm a default folder. Yeah. Long time user and I love the you know it has the history of where you've been and all that stuff really handy but it's nice they thought about putting something like that in the finder. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, it's I love these little things that are clearly undocumented anywhere. That's why we do quick tips. I'll give you one more. Go ahead John. Yeah. Get info if you do get info on a photograph especially when they've taken with a well any photograph really strip the information out but it will give you the dimensions to make it a camera the model I'm looking at one of my older pictures right now the latitude and longitude also it has so get info will show you GPS coordinates interesting if the camera if they're there camera. Yeah. Yeah, I think on iOS I think you can disable it if you turn off location services for the camera. I believe that's right. Yeah. Yeah, because you may not want people to know where you've been. Yeah, my uncle every now and then sends me pictures from places where he is visiting and then says guess where I am and of course the first thing I do is open them in preview which will not only show you the longitude and latitude but it will parse it and then overlay it on a map so you can really easily see but he's he's a super smart here. You're about four feet to the right of the mean entrance of Yeah, he strips that data out now when he sends me pictures in fact I think he has always stripped it out he's a computer programmer for a living so he gets this stuff so yeah actually I don't know if I should talk about some of the things he's programmed I think I can say that he spent almost two decades out on the Marshall Islands so that you can maybe if you know things about the Marshall Islands you might be able to to do that. He did so as a civilian I will also point out so yeah I didn't get to see him this weekend because it turns out that yes I did have COVID last week well we were doing the show but no longer just a little bit of lingering this so you know it's fun yeah um Elliott actually reminds me of something that I did in my COVID haze last weekend uh Elliott says quick tip if it hasn't been said already do not upgrade your phone to the iOS 16 beta or any beta before your vacation abroad or really your vacation anywhere I'm up to the latest developers beta and battery life remains scathing the low even with all the usual measures like background app update and location awareness turned off for most or all apps or be sure to carry your fully charged power bank with you at all times yeah I did I put the iOS 16 beta on my phone uh in the past week here and there were a few days of it sort of chewing through battery but I in looking at settings battery it seemed like most of that was it sort of reparsing and re-indexing all of my photos which happens on device yeah well you know it's got all the different recognition stuff and so the new operating system has new ways of recognizing photos and so it needs to go back through them and parse them all so it would have been nice for them to set that up to do that well to plug in it it usually does yeah but um but yes the beta is also generally and this is generally I can't speak specifically to the iOS 16 ones but generally they have taken more logs and done things like that which can also um you know kind of incur a battery cost so that's why it's a beta to find that stuff yeah yeah yeah but after a couple of days it's been totally fine in fact I I've really been enjoying it the customizable lock screens are it like really handy and I realize obviously that Apple is the last one to this party of customizable lock screens but yeah it's been great I've been enjoying it of course like three days after I did that that's when I realized oh wait I gotta go to Dallas for podcast movement later this month and I booked my trip so it's like well hopefully the beta is there hopefully it's fine but it has been fine the last couple of days so it's all good I got my watch on it and everything you know that's all that's great I have you guys Pete with all your travel I'm assuming you don't move to betas on your at least on your daily driver phone is that right I don't no I don't I don't blame you I'd like to at times but yeah it would wind up being a problematic yeah when you're not at home yeah yeah how about you John have you moved to the betas yet on any of your devices no because I only have one phone we'll see I'm not going to do that and you know it's unfortunate I don't know if we mentioned this but one strategy a lot of people would use and I did use at the time is touch if you want to run the beta OS sure unfortunately Apple has this continued right the or some love calling it the eye touch mostly to aggravate people that hate that can hate it being mangled like oh hey you know I got the latest eye touch it's not my touch yeah it's sad that they there may be I think I look that I think there's still some in the refurb store maybe I'll pick one up before they all go away yeah yeah yeah well I mean that was a good device you don't the I think there's a lot of reasons the iPod touch went away one of them is that it is that you can get an iPhone super cheap so you could buy a spare iPhone for the price of an iPod touch especially go to the refurb store and grab an iPhone SE right you know that like you're going to pay it starts the delta between what you would have been paying for an iPod touch and and that iPhone SE starts to become negligible yeah so that would be that would be one way to do it for sure but I don't know you know oh yeah and now that you mentioned that that may still even without any kind of a SIM card in it I think the requirement is it allows you to dial 911 with it if you needed it true purpose that's true yes that's right yeah yeah yeah yeah so but I mean I only have one iPhone John and I I mean we have our one iPhone that is a spare amongst the family so I suppose but I mean I've never I've always put the beta on in August at some point you know I rarely is it June or July sometimes maybe depending on what my travel schedules look like but certainly you know by this time in August I've got the beta on and I've never had a scenario where it just like completely craters the phone and if it does you do a DFU restore and you can roll back from the beta to a right right like that's how you do that on both your M1 or an M2 your Apple and on all of your Apple Silicon devices your iPhones your iPads your M1 and M2 Max if you want to roll back from a beta it's with a DFU restore so which is fascinating that your Mac just becomes like a big iPad when when it's time to do that but that's how it works so yeah yeah so I found when it's out of stock but a refurb iPod touch 32 gigs space grace seventh generation which I think is the latest and last 169 so that's not bad all right devices that will run iOS 16 so would does the iPod touch work with the right because that would be the question is I don't see it on the list no I know it does not the iPod touch won't support iOS 16 so if you want iOS 16 don't do that but like the the iPhone SE from both 2020 and 2022 will support yeah so yeah so there's your there's your path to that so and they're like not a thousand dollars like some other phones yeah exactly phones like when when I was looking at webcams here you know and I said on the show I'm like I want a decent webcam this was before we knew that Apple was was moving to the you know to the supporting I can't I can't think of the name of the term the COVID the thing where you can use your iPhone as your webcam for your Mac people you know and I said look if I could spend four or five hundred bucks on a decent webcam I would do that and people were like you can get reincubates camo which I use and buy an iPhone SE third generation because you'll pay like 449 brand new for that or if you can get it refurb less and you get all of the iPhone 13 cameras and goodness and it's going to cost you about 400 bucks and it's funny I had about a week yeah maybe a week and a half before WDC I had dinner with a friend an old old old friend who works on a team at Apple that certainly was very aware of this feature and somehow it just came up at dinner you know we were talking about how Apple's a camera company there were no secrets shared at dinner it's not you know I don't do that to my friends and and it came up at dinner you know that Apple is more of a camera company than a phone company and I started ranting about this and Lisa didn't realize what I use as a camera here because I use an iPhone 10R with reincubates camo and and I said you know I explained what I was doing she's like wait you use an iPhone as your camera in the studio I'm like yeah it's stupid I had to rig up this this weird like stand for it and everything and we all just laughed my friend has the best poker face in the world because he said and let on absolutely nothing about what was coming you know and going to be announced a week later right it was like a week later with 10 which yeah exactly which clearly he and his team had been working on for you know probably the last year and I guarantee you when the patents come out his name will be on so it's like great you know you got a good poker face I like it it's good which is as it should be when you have that kind of job like that you have many jazz about it afterwards go hey nice job I did yeah he just he did not acknowledge which is as those things always go it's just how either confirmed or denied yeah it doesn't like that doesn't even need to be said it's just like I'm going to acknowledge this thing and I don't expect any reaction from you because we both know we both know exactly what's going on here and there's no reason to have it written anywhere no need to say it there's no reason to say it but I'm still gonna say it because I get to that's one of the benefits of you know yeah not having being a broadcaster of being yeah and not having worked for Apple for you know 25 years or whatever it is like you know working for Apple for 25 years does come with some benefits I I'm sure if one were to play their stock options the right way it would it would change a lot of things about your retirement but but there's things you can't talk about either so that's fine it's like you know it's like it's just alcohol oh no no judgment it's great alright one last I'll call it a quick tip it's it's really a PSA from listener Gary that Amazon Drive has announced that it is shutting down and it will be sunset at the end of 2023 so you have a year and a half to go if you're using Amazon Drive the whole photos thing and all of that I as I understand it remains intact but Amazon Drive itself is is is not going to not gonna be a thing anymore that's that's had an interesting evolution Amazon Drive has but yeah so they say the apps that the service will will exist through December 31st of 2023 uploads are going away as of January 31st 2023 and the apps for Android and iOS will be removed from the store on Halloween of this year October 31st for those of you who don't know when how long it is yeah so they've done it the right way like that's a that's a smart way of doing it shutting down you know if they were to just do it all on December 31st of 2023 they would invariably have to come out with some announcement like we're leaving the service up for an extra three months longer than we planned because a bunch of you uploaded stuff on New Year's Eve day you know so like it's whoops yeah exactly so it's smart but yeah thanks for the heads up on that Gary that's that's great stuff good good all right we have some questions of yours I have a a life anecdote to share with some technological enhancements peppered in and we have a few sponsors to talk about John if now is a good time for that for you my friend it is all right first up is Collide at traditional endpoint security tools can make your workplace feel like a surveillance state they can turn your users and the IT team into adversaries and ultimately drive your employees to work on unsecured personal devices it doesn't have to be this way Collide is a device security solution built around honest security their philosophy is that employees aren't your biggest security risk your biggest allies and your relationship with them should be based on transparency and informed consent Collide works by notifying your employees of security issues via Slack and giving them step-by-step instructions on how to resolve them themselves so for IT and security teams Collide provides the right level of visibility for Mac, Windows and Linux devices and it can answer questions about your fleet security that 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24 hours that's ZocDoc.com slash MGG ZockDoc.com slash MGG and our thanks to ZockDoc for sponsoring this episode next up is BB edit you know how much I love BB edit it's open right now on my Mac I use it for all kinds of things I do so many things with text and you know what I bet you do too until you start thinking about it you don't quite realize it but there's so much that we do with text you might be editing a config file you might be taking a piece of data and comparing it to another BB edit can do all of that it can also be your editor for all the programming that you do and one of my favorite things with it is that it has a built-in FTP client that will open and save from the server so seamlessly that you don't even realize that you're not saving to your local disk I go and make edits I hit command s and when it's an FTP file it knows that automatically saves it over FTP back to the server it's amazing it's not just all these things it's lots of others now BB edit has a note system that helps you avoid the clutter of untitled text documents you can create notes from any convenient source the clipboard wherever and notes are automatically named and managed by the app whatever you do with text even if it's from the terminal you can launch BB edit that way and get right into it you're gonna want BB edit go to barebones.com they've got a generous eval model 30 days of fully functioning app to try out and then a fresh eval period for all customers with older versions pre-14 who were running in free mode you want to check it out go to barebones.com and our thanks to barebones and BB edit for sponsoring this episode all right you know we I've mentioned on this show that certainly in pre-show but I think in the middle of the show too that we this year we built a new patio out on the back of our house and you know it was full of all of the things that you think a project like that would be full of the changes to the plans the enhancements to the budget all of those things but it has it has been finished for about a month now and it is spectacular we're spending so much more time outside they I've read somewhere after we did it that one of the best things you can do for quality of life is to give yourself outdoor living space and I can certainly over the last month attest to that one of the things we put out there was a hot tub we did not wind up getting a hot tub with wifi capability and I mean it's fine you just push the buttons on the hot tub when you want to turn the jets on and off it's really not a big deal but that would have been one of those things we did however technologically enhance a few parts about this patio one that I think I've mentioned on this show a couple of times is that we bring our sonos roam outside with us I have yet to put permanently installed sonos speakers outside I don't know that I will the roam is easy enough to bring and the cool part about it is it supports both the amazon a lady and the sonos voice control so I can do all kinds of things with it including controlling all of my lights and things like that which is really nice if we're out there at night I can tell it to turn off the rest of the lights in the yard so that it's handy so having some sort of smart home controller voice controller outside is spectacular highly recommend it and the sonos roam is a perfect way to do that because it's battery power and all those things the one thing that makes a huge difference for us in it's something I've mentioned on the show or it's a company I've mentioned on the show over the years is the mosquito ridding products from a company called thermo cell thermo cell when we first talked about and we were talking about their portable units which is all they had at the time they now and those work great by the way they they use either and it depends on the product either a natural or synthetic of a some type of oil that's in chrysanthemums guys it's and that seems to be yeah it's it it works amazingly well it it not only sort of repels mosquitoes but it also discourages them from being eager to bite if they happen not to have been repelled and I will tell you with these thermo cell things going on our patio we just don't see mosquitoes and even if we do see them we've never been bitten and we live in the woods of New Hampshire like we it's it's a mosquito disaster there every evening every ever since we moved in here we have been doing something and usually multiple things to mitigate mosquitoes and have failed up until we found thermo cell well thermo cell now has what they call thermo cell live which is there I'll call it a permanent installation it's I mean you can move it around it's not a big deal but it's it's it's plugged into the wall it is meant to be outdoors year round you can leave the things out through the winter and because those mosquitoes are bad in January and you just might not want to have to bring the stuff inside yeah yeah but yeah but it we put three of these things around our patio and it's Wi-Fi controllable I can do it with an app on my phone the Amazon a lady does it takes about five minutes for the system to sort of warm up and start doing its thing and it's fantastic now because if you know we're sitting after dinner or something I'd say to Lisa hey you want to go in the hot tub and she says yeah I just tell the a lady hey turn on thermo cell and by the time we get down there and out there the system is up and running and good to go and we just don't have mosquitoes out on the patio and like it's amazing is there any yogurt nope interesting I know it's fascinating it it is like like the the synthetic especially like there is some level of it being a carcinogen I think but it's not putting out anything close to those levels you know from the from the things but yeah it works it's it's absolutely the best thing I've ever seen from mosquitoes and you get to link it with your smart home so like it's it's great can set the colors of the little units and all that good stuff the other night we did an interesting thing in fact this was most definitely and I'm frustrated being you know not being able to go out last weekend with COVID and all that stuff and I thought you know I have one of these nebula capsule 2 projectors and it's from nebula is one of the anchor brands so we love anchor and it's a little battery powered looks like it's a projector but it looks like a one of those sort of tubular portable speakers not all that different informed factor from like the sonos roam it's just one of those pill kind of shaped things and it's got a little tripod mount on the bottom of it and I used it inside and like messed with it over the years but I never I'd always thought wow you know it would be cool to have this outside and last weekend I thought well the only thing I need is a screen so I looked on Amazon and for 60 bucks I bought a screen that sets up in like five minutes super easy that's a hundred inch screen and the other night we put it outside we lit the fire pit and we watched the show out on the patio no mosquitoes the fire was going we had the little projector doing its thing it was spectacular this little projector is amazing it's only I say only maybe I shouldn't 200 lumens it's like 500 bucks I mean it's not a trivial expense but it's also not 2500 bucks like you would pay for a 2000 lumen projector that you'd put in your house or whatever but it's a 720p the speakers in it they're wisely placed on the back of it so it projects out the front and the video out the front and the sound out the back and it was more than enough I kind of expected that I'd have to you know plug in a separate speaker or something but no in fact we didn't even have the volume all the way up we had it almost all the way up but not all the way up and it was totally fine even when the air conditioner unit around the corner kind of kicked in for the house it was still like plenty clear to hear the show over the speakers and this these things are amazing and I know most projectors do this now but it auto tunes itself to the screen so because it auto keystones itself so you know the projector is almost certainly going to be lower than the middle of the screen right because if it was in the middle of the screen it would block your view right so you put the projector lower you kind of angle it up at the screen and then when it turns on or anytime it notices that it's been moved rejiggery puts a little you know its own image on the screen so it knows what it should look like and then my guess is it has a camera in there and it adjusts itself and you can see it and done and it makes ours is the R2-D2 model so it actually does make R2-D2 noises which is great but like it looks like R2-D2 too but it just you know frames it out and you get a square image and it looks great and if you have to move it because you know you're like I want it over here I want it further away so that I get a better picture bigger picture good to go that's awesome I'll have to bring my I don't know what brand I have I have one as well that's about 200 maybe 300 lumens yeah that that means it has to be dark you're not watching it that's correct but I brought mine it's the size of a couple cell phones I brought mine when I was you know locked down in China locked down in Japan locked down down in Korea I'd bring them in so when I was three days in a hotel room in China like I'm setting up the popcorn I'm getting my 5K tonics and I'm gonna watch movies yeah so those things are great and I've done it in the backyard getting ready for Top Gun Maverick to come out buddy of mine came over brought his son I brought my son out in the backyard we played the original Top Gun and used the Sonos move actually you can you can wire that in and make it for that because the music in Top Gun is you want it right I can see that yeah yeah yeah right right which did when someone said well how was Top Gun Maverick you know was was it good was as well it couldn't be worse than the first one at least story wise you know how was the story it yeah it was better than the first but you know that goes without saying but the flying was amazing in the way yeah I enjoyed the heck out of the Top Gun Maverick yeah fantastic movie really well done that was a fun movie yeah yeah yeah I'll need to take Debbie to see that one but the boys loved it that's great so that's great yeah yeah yeah but yeah that's that those those projectors are amazing you get a dark night and put it on the wall I didn't realize the speaker of mine isn't that good so I've used the Sonos move but I've always done it with four or five people not two people so it was well it was three of us and we were okay you know we had this thing I mean we were probably a good 15 feet away from the unit maybe 10 because we were all on the other side of the fire pit and and that was interesting like we went out at about eight o'clock at night it does it but it did okay at about 6 30 Sun sunset that day in New Hampshire here was 803 p.m. about 6 30 it was viewable at eight it was certainly fine it wasn't dark yet but it was you know it was watchable in the in the like noon sunlight you could barely see anything on the screen obviously well you've also got trees whereas mine I have a west facing back wall so I couldn't okay yeah it was clearly down so yeah that makes sense we're on that wall our patio is on the east side of the house so by about four o'clock our entire patio is in shade from the house so yeah that makes sense that makes sense yeah yeah yeah yeah I was surprised because I thought well if we're going to light the fire pit that's going to add quite a bit of light right in our path and I even took some pictures like it like the fire pit certainly added light to the screen I mean it's a white screen that's how that works but it was it was fine yeah even with 200 lumens obviously now I want to check out one of the 2500 lumen ones and see what I can get away with but that's just because I'm a nerd yeah exactly it's just because I'm a nerd that's how it goes yeah fun stuff though it's um you know we intentionally didn't like over technologicalize because that's a word our patio and the TV thing you know the projector thing is definitely you know we watched one show and then it was like oh that was fun and then it was like oh so we watched something else about halfway through the next one it was like this isn't necessarily what I want my patio to become every day but you know for the right movie for watching maybe you know we're fish fans here of the band they live stream all of their concerts to do to watch a concert out on the patio with the music go there you go fire pit right like that kind of thing would be great I could see watching you know Thursday night football or Monday night football or Sunday night football or something out there could be fun you know well in the before it gets too cold obviously but you know right yeah those kinds in January not so much maybe not so much yeah those that we have the mosquitoes won't bother you because you got your that's right that's the mosquitoes won't bother me and I have the thermosel system and in January those two facts may or may not be as related as they are in August that's right there you go that actually brings me to a mini gig challenge I think Dave all right you're talking and here it is it's about the A lady and the S lady and I've noticed recently and I can't I've never written it down but several times recently I'll say hey turn off the living room lamp on my watch and she'll come back and go you can't do that the Google app isn't installed and I'm like what yeah I've never never used the Google app for any of that what's going on there any idea I have heard that to John did you say yeah do you have a thing well I got a thing but I want to let you finish first okay yeah I haven't I have experienced that I don't know why it does that I mean it's smart home stuff like the other night with the A lady I wanted we had left the lights on in the living room and they sort of spill out onto the patio and we were in the hot tub and I wanted to see the stars and so I said A lady turn off living room lights and it said I can't control that and so I said A lady turn off living room and the lights went off these things are imperfect yeah so yep my favorite thing my favorite thing about the A lady oh by the way have you had her do that to you ask her like what's the weather or when you convert you know cups to ounces or whatever yeah and yeah right she'll give you your answer and then by the way and she starts prattling on with some thing that might be tangentially related to what we were talking about but I definitely didn't want to know oh by the way if I could turn that off that's my geek challenge I don't know anyway thinking of one other thing it just came to mind so wrestling with the A lady here's a mini tip so I swapped out one of my I think it was second generation dots for a third generation dot because it has a better sound and it's just the latest thing yep for the life of me I eventually found it but the thing is so I disconnected one and then plugged in another but when I went to the devices page devices page in the A lady app it showed one there but it wouldn't go away it said disconnected and I'm like well yeah how do I get rid of you here's how you get rid of it it's buried deep within the Amazon website so you go to account digital services and device support manage devices it will then show you all the compatible devices click on one then click on one again and there's going to be a D register option that's how I had to get rid of it but it wouldn't let me do it on the iOS app or at least I couldn't figure a way you know I held down on it and you know try to do something that it just did not for it so I mean it was a I mean everything was working but it was just annoying it's like I want to get rid of this device because I don't have it hooked up anymore right it's not yeah it's it's it's uh it's decommissioned huh huh all right nice find that's great man yeah good stuff huh what came to mind and I have no idea how it came in there except ladies and we're geeks and all that kind of stuff but I just wanted to acknowledge that uh we lost Lieutenant O'Hara this week the show just passed so yeah that was sad uh neat gal always uh you know from the earliest days you know it's just women on the flight deck doing what they do it's right yeah and well you know we didn't realize they were groundbreaking we were little kids and that's just the way it was okay it yes I agree Star Trek seemed normal to me yeah yeah which is a wonderful thing yeah yeah for sure yeah so I think that leaves uh Captain Kirk and check off is check off still alive I think he's still alive I think so and Sulu and Sulu right man that's right yeah wow I think that's it huh that's it I hadn't thought about it that way yeah huh time time is going fast it does it well yeah yeah it um it does it's just how it is it's how it is yeah alright um got time for speaking of time and trying to figure out how to transition from that into cool stuff found I'm gonna transition from that into cool stuff found John you found a new version of an old friend yes um do you want to see what's happening on your network well this is the tool that you want to use uh and it's called Wireshark I remember in the battle days to deploy this on a Mac you had to use X window and the results sort of you know issues um with the you know I think X Quartz you had to use it was paying the net well now they finally have a native app um what's nice about it though is that also in the battle days the thing that I remember is that once you installed it um you then had to grant permission to access the network interface and to do that was a pain in the neck and if you didn't do that you wouldn't see any traffic um fortunately this new version when you started up it's like oh well like I got to pick an interface uh to talk to but you can't because you have to run this program first and they obviously include it in the installer and I'm like okay let's see how this works and you know clicked on it um it seemed to do something quit the app and then started it up again um but the cool part about this is that you can learn a lot about how TCPIP works uh basically what you do is you run the program and then you click on the play button and then we'll start capturing all of the traffic that it can see um and you can learn a bit about how networks work for example it shows the destination or the source of the destination of a packet that it sees well that you know that's some good information um it'll show the protocol most of the ones I see here are UDP or TCP where it gets interesting is when the protocol is HTTP because that's typically a browser talking to someone um but we have a link to it you know check this out if you're curious about what's happening on your network you can also capture it and then analyze the data later and you can also filter on a million different criteria because you may not want to see all the traffic you'll be surprised how much is happening on your network within a second um so I have a question about this though it's interesting I was I was diagnosing something with my network recently and talking to the uh ERO tech support folks actually on their Reddit page which last night we're recording this on Friday last night was was hidden and I'm still trying to figure out why um but anyway they they used to provide great tech support and hopefully by the time the show airs are back to that on their Reddit page and I was uh they were telling me not to use any sort of spanning tree protocol on the network with ERO stuff and it turns out I had one switch where that was still enabled and I disabled it and it like since then I haven't had the cascading network failures that I was having leading up to it so I think that that like that's good advice don't don't turn on stp or rstp um but I I said in the exchange I'm like would it be helpful for me to run Wireshark and look at the you know the the packet data and see what I'm seeing when one of these cascades is happening and their comment was well not really because Wireshark will only if you're on a switched network which you are the switches do their jobs and only send traffic to the ports that are supposed to get it they're not sending it's not like a hub where it sends all traffic to all ports it knows okay well this is supposed to go to that device so I'm only gonna send it to that device and and he said so Wireshark probably wouldn't tell you what you wanted to see because it's gonna keep all of that stuff from you by design and I know there's like a promiscuous mode that you can put network devices in that says show me everything does Wireshark account for that in any way that you found John I think it was in one of the preference menus okay I'm guessing it would be so we'll see what we can find and if we can I searched while we were talking here I searched on Wireshark site and I did find an ethernet capture setup screen which I believe talks about promiscuous mode so I will I will put that out there because because obviously that changes things if you get to see traffic that's not meant just for whatever device you happen to be sniffing from so fun wouldn't those spanning tree protocol messages wouldn't those broadcast probably but I think it I don't think the STP messages themselves were the problem I think it was having them on allowed to start passing other data that it shouldn't have been passing and I think it was causing some something approximating a network loop although I really don't know I just know that the problem is now gone and I'm very very very very happy about that so because it was just a pain like all of a sudden for 30 minutes the network would be unusable and I narrowed it down to one segment of the network but it nothing made sense and even that like that one segment did not have was not the one with the switch that had STP enabled but but yes you're right STP packets I think you're right that they would be broadcast because otherwise how would they get to the places they're supposed to get to like that's the whole idea is you broadcast them until you start blocking them so yeah yeah yeah all right um listener Jeff has a cool stuff found for you for you for us I think it might be a repeat of a cool stuff found but it's been a little while he says I had an old audio application that I installed on my Mac a few years ago I eventually uninstalled it and a few weeks ago reinstalled it to play with it again after uninstalling the second time I noticed that it was still listed as a device in my input and output tabs of the sound preference pane I had uninstalled the app with the most current version of CleanMyMac but what was there was clearly still some remnant left over that was registering it as a device I searched on Google and found a few sites that said go into various folders under library and system and to look for a specific kext file I searched and searched and didn't find anything with spotlight or going to those folders directly I even tried to search for the software title and didn't find anything the software developer even had their own uninstaller that didn't do anything and then I stumbled across an app that I'm submitting to cool stuff found called find any file from Thomas Templeman could this be the answer I asked I downloaded the file I installed it I ran it I entered part of the file name of the hidden file and boom there were the results I was able to delete them from find any file directly I rebooted my Mac went back to the sound pref pane clicked on input and output and the device was gone oh the joy if others need this app you can find it at temple.org we'll put a link in the show notes at mackeycap.com for six bucks and it's on the Mac App Store for $7.99 so you can save yourself a little money if you don't want to add to Apple's coffers of note I was able to download the app from the devs website without being asked to purchase the app and the app working but it's definitely worth the money if you need this app on a regular basis and it helps support the developer thanks Jeff yeah man you you avoided getting caught nicely done I like it yeah I wish there was an easier way to tell spotlight look everywhere please when I'm searching for files why is this a thing I know this functionality is built into macOS in fact if you go to the terminal and you use the right incantation you can use the find command from the terminal to find any file you have to figure out what you're supposed to type and where and all that stuff but it is doable why does it why does a third party have to be the one that you know Thomas builds this and we're able to leverage it but Apple is literally gone out of their way to make sure their file find functionality say that 10 times fast is incomplete intentionally incomplete do you think it's to protect system files but now you know the thing is they've put the system as opposed to your data on separate volumes no it's always been this way I think it's intentionally not wanting you to stumble on to system files that you would then delete without knowing what you were doing and I get that that's fine they cost them money they have to then support you exactly correct and it reduces the joyful experience that you would have with your mac otherwise I totally get it but can there be some checkbox that says I want to I need to look for something that you are intentionally hiding and I know there sort of is but not the way you'd want so anyway I'm glad this exists thank you Jeffrey well yeah the way you're talking about is in the finder if you do a command F you can then say kind oh gosh it's gone so there's kind and then you gotta say other I haven't set it up in this machine right and you can say find system looks like they've changed that I agree with you this used to be an easier thing you used to be able to hold down the option key or something and add to this list yeah oh interesting yeah I used to have in the it's still there in the if you command F in the finder and then hover over or click on where it says kind and go to other and then there'll be a huge list on the screen and just filter that down for system and you will see include system files such as preference files and plugins and so now if you do that and come back click on kind again in that menu and system files will be a option and you can choose to include them or not include them so it's still there yeah but I've tried it with this that was not intuitive though because having this click on the first one kind yeah it's just not intuitive no no but I've this does sort of expand it but there are still some things that it hides from you yeah yeah that's nice that find any file has broken through that yeah glass ceiling or that mesh wall that mesh wall yeah the wall that doesn't that shouldn't exist yeah good good good memory John that's great yeah I like that I have a geek challenge because it has happened ten times during this show so I'm gonna go ahead and use host privilege to ask for help we've talked about this on the show before and no one's come up with an answer there's this thing that happens when a window is front most and you go and click on somewhere else in another window instead of bringing that second window forward what happens is it drags the first window to where you just clicked your mouse as though you had grabbed the title bar and moved it and this happens to me routinely on my max and I don't know why and I really want to stop it it's clearly some software thing where it thinks oh he meant to drag that window the buttons not down it guarantee you the buttons not down because it's not coming with it's you know I click and then I click again and now the window is somewhere else and it can be a real problem like when you're trying to do a live show like this and you have your stuff in certain spots and then it doesn't want to stay in those certain spots because you know you it thought you decided to move it so if anybody has the answer to that or even an idea of where to look feedback at macgeekab.com please did you say feedback at macgeekab.com I'm in India but I heard feedback at macgeekab.com easy for you to say that's right alright Patrick has a cool stuff found unless either one of you has an answer for that question but I'm guessing no I'll let the other people solve it for you Dave I don't want it to I don't want to cut anyone out of the pattern that's right I teed up such an easy one you don't want to just take that I could solve it I just choose not to this is so off the chain sorry brother Patrick says a few weeks ago Pete you brought up that it is difficult to clean the keyboard on a mac laptop well try keyboard clean tool from fullyvora.ai there's a link in the show notes which entirely disables the keyboard it's a free download from the same developer of better touch tool and yeah you just click to start cleaning mode and it locks the keyboard so that you can mash your cloth or whatever it is you want to put on the keyboard rub your butt across it you could like Elton John yourself on that keyboard just don't Keith Emerson yourself that's all I have to say then what's the keystroke to get it you use your mouse unless the mouse starts jumping the window all over the place in which case I don't know what to do now you're out of luck one thing I would say is don't add this to your login items so although I don't think it starts well actually there is there's a check box where you can start cleaning mode immediately after starting this app again I'm not sure saving one mouse click is worth what potential headache that could cause so I you know how do I undo this right yeah I mean if your mouse works you're fine so yeah thank you Patrick good stuff John you have a yet another sort of I'll call it a cool stuff found Redox but which we've had now this will be the third one I believe this week but yeah I mean it's been three to ten years since we've mentioned some of these so they are well do for a re-mention so yes so the first one did you know that your Mac is doing all sorts of things in the background to protect you from malicious software but you may not even know that's happening well here's how you can know what's happening it's an app called Silent Night from our friends at Eclectic Light and it basically gives you the the low-down it will show you versions of various security things it'll tell you with system integrity protection and what is SSV I don't even know what that is X-Protect which is there I'll show you the version of that and actually and the versions of some other things but what's really nice the version of Gatekeeper what's really nice is it will show you if a database is not up to date and this actually happened on my system it was like oh dude your X-Protect database is old do you want to update it and it's like okay that's cool so something you may want to run every now and then just to make sure that all your security stuff is the way it should be I now remember you looked before the show to see how recently we had mentioned this and it had been three years I now remember exactly when I found out about this John and you were there and in fact I caused you and me and a bunch of other people great headache there's nothing wrong with this app I highly recommend using this app don't do what I do what I did though we were at max stock in person in I believe 2019 on stage I'm going to guess it was Brent Terpstra but who knows I don't know who it was someone either on stage or in the room mentioned Silent Night and I'm like this sounds amazing so I ran it and it said updates available and I clicked install all updates because I wanted to be up to date you know and it said well for one of these updates you need to restart your Mac I'm like I don't want to restart right now that's fine but whatever later that day you and I had a live in-person Mac Geekab to record and we through the process there was something wrong with the USB interface that didn't want to work and so I'm like well let me just restart my Mac and so I restarted my Mac for the first time since clicking the install all updates button earlier that day in Silent Night uh-oh 20 25 minutes of updating Mac OS happened with a room full of people waiting to see a podcast about how to properly manage your Mac there was so much irony it was dripping from the ceiling folks yeah so you know it was fine it was one of those things where it humanized the whole thing which we love to do here I mean we have problems with our computers just like you in fact it's the fact that we try new stuff all the time and break things that allows us to be able to do what we do for all of you like this is part of how it works and you've got to see the sausage being made in a fantastic way but uh yeah so that's that's when I learned about Silent Night John yeah so be sure that if you click install all updates it truly does look for all updates not just security updates and I guess I had you know whatever version of Mac OS at the time I was you know dot one prior and it was like oh yeah I'll go get that for you no problem so yeah yeah as Kiwi Graham in our chat room says experimentation equals research this is true this is true fun stuff alright uh where are we here oh Lee we had our um we had our our Synology Hangout in our discord room on Sunday night oh man well I completely forgot about that where was I Sunday night I don't know oh I think I had just gotten home that was it I was home for almost 48 hours from around the world and now I'm back out around the world so I was going to say it doesn't seem like yeah exactly well we learned a lot of things about Synology we had a great conversation and we learned one thing about Discord that there is a 25 person maximum in video calls so the next time that's why I couldn't be there Dave I tried I was there you go see if you had just let me finish that's right you could have changed your story but next time we will we will organize in Discord because that clearly is now our home but we will well I'll just drop a link for a zoom room for the next Hangout that we do which is not yet scheduled but it will be and and we'll use my zoom account which has it's a paid account so it has I think I've got at least 100 and if we need to up that we absolutely will but yeah there was no way to add more and I thought we I thought we did so I didn't quite realize it until the end that with this limit was there so my apologies to anybody who couldn't get in however listener Lee shares with us a YouTube channel he found with some great Synology tricks and tips and the YouTube channel is from someone called Space Rex and it's Space Rex will that YouTube of course will put the we'll put that in the show notes there's a second YouTube channel so thank you for that Lee there's a second one that I will also add and it's not just YouTube in fact it's YouTube and a website Marius hosting at I believe it's Marius hosting calm and I believe that website is hosted on his DS 15 22 plus entirely which is kind of cool so that's a that is a fantastic resource in fact I'm thinking it would be good to get Marius on the show here because I've I've learned a ton from his from his his little how to is he's constantly posting things so yeah and Brian Monroe puts puts nas compares out there too and he is correct nascompares.com is another great Synology resource so yeah yeah of all there was one question up in there that we managed to get by but since you're talking Synology question about proactively replacing the Synology Drive uh yeah you know what let's um I'd like to know about that because I pulled one that was that said I may be having problems but then it wasn't reporting any and I pulled the drive and Synology was not happy with me but I don't think I dismounted the drive first so interesting um I don't know why uh I skipped it because I can't play the audio file today Pete okay but um but I'll here so I'm gonna answer the question JP had written in and said look you know I've got drives in my distation that are five to ten years old should I be worried about proactively replacing them and my thoughts on this are are a little mixed we did talk about this on Sunday night during our our hangout and personally for what I do with my distation and I think what most of us do for the distations we use sort of at home and for very light business use I'll say I wouldn't proactively replace things corporate and enterprises often just replace drives in their raid on a regular schedule and and that makes sense you know it helps you budget for it which again if you're a home user and you you know you want to have to budget for them then that's fine too so that you don't have these surprise expenses but but you know other than that no the most but I do one thing that is proactive and I highly recommend if you're able and I keep a hot spare in each of my active disk stations what a hot spare is is it a drive that is at least as big as your largest drive because that's the metric you have to hit when you are replacing a drive in your disk station as it has to be at least as big as your largest drive so it sits in there it sits unused so it is using up a drive base so if I have a five bay unit I have my volume one you know my main volume of the Synology my only volume on those four bays and then in the one unused bay and it doesn't have to be Bay five it can be any bay is where the hot spare lives the hot spare is there it's ready to go and it's unused and I configure it as a hot spare in the Synology manager and when a drive dies it just knows that it can go and use that other drive as part of the volume so and we talked about this on the show recently where I you know I woke up one morning and I got all these notifications that a drive had died and that it had started incorporating the hot spare into the volume when that process finished I pulled out the drive that died threw it away and ordered a new one from Amazon and popped that in and now that is the hot spare and so it doesn't matter what bay it's in the Synology is totally fine with managing things that way but you do have to dedicate one bay to being that hot spare so that may or may not work for you but that's sort of the one proactive thing that I do but and that is my way of not only replacing drives when they need to be replaced obviously but also expanding the size of my disk station because I always buy a hot spare that is larger than my largest drive and then that way I'm just sort of over time letting the volume naturally increase in size and hopefully doing it where the budget means that I'm probably spending the same for every disk I replace because storage gets usually gets cheaper as time marches forward so that brings me to the question whether the yeah it does and it brings me to the question which a simple yes no do can I retroactively change from four drives to three in a hot spare you can what I think the way to do it is probably to tell it hey I need to eject a drive pull the drive that's it and and let it rebuild with what's left yeah that's right yeah one back okay all right don't yeah take if you have a hot spare take it out if you're going to do that because otherwise it will just incorporate it yeah when you when you remove a drive from a volume on the Synology if there is enough space left on the remaining disks one of the repair options you can choose is to sort of rejigger the volume so that it's only you know number of drives minus one now you're going to have to kind of jump through those hoops to do it it's not I mean the hoops are all right there up in front it's not like you have to do anything magic but you do need enough space and I know that's obvious but I'll say it anyway to make that happen so John you want to you want to round out the show with one last cool stuff founder if you have anything to add on this Synology thing no not really okay the last one we haven't talked about it in detail in a while so we're going to do it now time machine editor time machine is great except it gets a little busy if I recall this is still the case but it's going to try to back up every hour and it's going to try to back up everything well that's another story um you can exclude things from time machine sure I think in the advanced but anyways so time machine editor lets you change the interval at which this happens um so there are three options and you know some of these are newer than others but sure um interval you know so every this do that uh calendar interval and when when inactive so be like be really smart because the the thing uh may not be an issue with the super fast machines these days but somehow sometimes I mean this thing would get really busy at the wrong time time machine would and we've had it we've had it mess up some of our recordings like yeah yeah especially back in the old days when we were running on spindle drives before we moved to SSDs for sure yeah yeah so what I do with this is uh so I sleep this machine at night but what I do is I schedule a time machine back up at 3 a.m. in the morning uh if your machine has power nap which this does it will do that in the background and I don't think it wakes up it just it knows it's like oh you scheduled it back up at 3 3 in the morning um it also creates local snapshots every hour if you want probably not a bad thing to do because snapshots are handy and that is a feature of like none of these things are are things that are not features of time machine this just lets you touch them in different ways because like those local snapshots time machine will create all the time if if it's not backing up and then it'll process through them ah yeah I like this 3 a.m. huh all right I like it we're 9 30 in India sorry thanks Pete that's the way to bring it back around I appreciate it you know just saying cool and this works well for you right John yeah one thing I will add is that when you do this it will if you then after you set a schedule in time machine editor if you go into system preferences time machine it will not if the whatever the option is I'll bring it up um it will appear as though it is not scheduled to do backups the backup automatically check box will be turned off in time machine in fact I think it might even tell you to do this and that's because that's only because you are not no longer using Apple's scheduler you are using time machine schedule or time machine what's the name of the thing I can't remember time machine editors schedule yeah it really is still using Apple scheduler it's doing it all through I think it's launched I don't think it's chronic anymore but um but you're not controlling it Apple's way you're controlling it this other way so it is normal to go into time machine and see that backup automatically check box unchecked so I just I just want to point that out to folks yeah because the first time I was like what why is oh wait of course that's why yeah so cool alright anything anything else before we before we make it out of here for today I guess that's a no I got nothing well we went we went a little longer than we normally do I don't want to say we went long because I don't know what that means anymore the show started as a 45 minute show we aim for 75 today we're more like 82 you know it's how it works the beauty of podcast though right you don't have to listen to it all at once if you turn if you go away we're still there when you come back yeah we highly recommend you listen it listen at one and a half speed or use overcast and not only listen at one and a half speed but use smart speed to fill in all the gaps it's good stuff oh man it's great I only have to turn it off for shows that play music that's the it does mess with music it does yeah yeah like what are the the Chip and Dale chipmunks music yeah it can be it can be really really weird alright thanks for hanging out with us folks our thanks to cash fly for providing all the bandwidth to get the show from us to you thanks to our sponsors you can go to mackeycup.com slash sponsors to see all the deals that exist from anyone who's ever been a sponsor whether they are active or not and of course our sponsors for this episode be be edited barebones dot com collide dot com you know I mentioned that incident at max stock when my laptop needed to restart it did end we did the show and at the end of the show something very spectacular happened and I hope that schedules work such that we can do this again next year because we had everybody in the room do this don't get caught made up thanks for hanging out with us folks see you next time


Hello everyone. Welcome to Options with Doug, streaming live daily on Bookmap Discord and the Bookmap YouTube channel at 1.30pm Eastern Time. And before I get started, I need to go through the Disclosures. General Disclosure, all Bookmap limited materials, information, and presentations are for educational purposes only, and should not be considered specific investment advice nor recommendations. Risk Disclosure, trading futures, equities and options involves substantial risk of loss and is not suitable for all investors. Past performance is not necessarily indicative of future results. As a reminder, the focus of my presentation and the focus of the Options with Doug chat channel and Discord is options, order flow, the impact of options markets on stocks and futures, and the influence of market maker hedging flow on price action. I have a two-step process for trading. In the first is planning and I use positional analysis and I look at how traders and market makers are positioned in the options market and how those positions change from day to day to help develop a thesis regarding the expected trading range and volatility for the day and a directional bias. And the second step in my process is execution. And I look at real-time order flow in Bookmap and real-time market maker hedging flow in SpotGamma Hero to confirm my thesis and for setups, looking for entries and axes. And I think this two-step process provides a significant edge over some more traditional approaches like technical analysis or fundamental analysis. And questions and comments are welcome and I will be watching the Options with Doug chat channel and Discord and chat and YouTube. So again, questions and comments are welcome. Okay, what I want to talk about today is, first of all, I'll start with some news items. Economic data, events, and earnings. And then I want to go over a couple of examples. First of all, Meta from last Friday. I posted this in Discord and on Twitter and just want to go over that briefly to make sure everybody understands and then there was a question over the weekend about some of the meme stocks and I want to talk about that briefly. And then we'll go through our positional analysis and then talk about more setups. Okay, so first of all, news items. This is the economic calendar for the week and it's very light. Nothing compared to last week. So there were just a couple of items that I noticed and one is important and that is drone pile speaking tomorrow. And this is showing that at 12.40 p.m. Eastern time. So keep that in mind and check to confirm this schedule. But this is showing it at 12.40 p.m. Eastern time. And then looks like there are a few more Fed speakers during the week. Williams, Barr, Waller. And then on Friday is the Michigan consumer sentiment. 10 a.m. Eastern time. So definitely absolutely nothing compared to last week. The drone pile speaking tomorrow and that's really about it. And then earnings this week, minor, I think for the stocks that I follow most have reported earnings except Nvidia and that's coming up. That's not this week. But this week just the stocks that I look at occasionally, Disney, Uber, Lyft and PayPal reporting this week. And then next week there are some more significant events on the 14th, February 14th, CPI report. And then on the 15th, that's the VIX expiration. And then finally on the 17th on Friday, that's the February monthly options expiration. So that's next week. Again, this week pretty light. Okay, I want to go over meta again. This is from last week. And this is a think or swim chart. And in this sub chart here, what I'm showing is this is comparing implied volatility shown in the red line decreasing all day. So that's the implied volatility, the red line. And the blue line is historical volatility. So that's implied volatility is looking forward. Historical volatility is looking backwards. So the gist of this setup was looking at, so we knew that traders were long calls. Market makers were short calls. They sell the calls. And so they have to buy stock to hedge their delta exposure. And these were calls that expired on Friday. We saw that 32.9% gamma was expiring on Friday. So that's anything over 30% is significant. So that's what we knew. We knew that traders were long calls. Market makers were short calls and long stock to hedge. And a lot of this gamma was set to expire at the end of the day. So what I was looking for was any hint that those calls were starting to, traders were starting to sell calls. Calls were losing value. So there were two main factors for actually more, but for calls actually losing value, there were two main factors. And the first is the drop in implied volatility. And that's where VANA comes into effect. And VANA is the change in delta with a change in implied volatility. So as implied volatility drops, market makers delta exposure decreases and they don't need all those long stock hedges anymore, so they can sell their long stock hedges. So that's the VANA effect that we saw in the previous chart that implied volatility was dropping. So that confirms that. And of course we know that time is passing and options that expire at the end of the day quickly lose value as time proceeds throughout the day. So we know time is passing and we know from the previous chart that implied volatility is dropping even as price was dropping. And so those calls are losing value and market makers can sell their long stock hedges. So here's the setup. And it took a while to play out.  And the price target was this 185 liquidity and the 190 key gamma strike. So it made it down to 190 twice. There was the first setup and then made it down to 190 again and then never made it to the 185 liquidity. So that was the, I just wanted to make sure that everybody understood that and understand how this played out, how to expect something like this and again how it played out. Okay, the next thing that I want to talk about is there was another, there was a question in Discord over the weekend about chasing meme stocks. And beyond, I want to take a look at that beyond meat is one of the examples. So this is today. And let's take a look. I'm going to go back. So this is today. I'm going to go back. Hero lets you go back and look. Look at the past five days. So this is the past five days for beyond meat. And so this orange rising orange line is showing that traders are buying calls and price moves higher. So again, as traders buy calls, market makers sell the calls and they have to buy stock to hedge their delta exposure. But I think market makers learned, learned their lesson a couple years ago with the, I guess early in 2021 with all the meme stocks, AMC and Game Stock, and they quickly increase implied volatility and it makes it prohibitive for traders to buy calls. I posted in Discord that for Carvada, for example, had implied volatility for Friday of 334%. I certainly would not buy an option and I would just step away and selling an option could be pretty risky as well. So let's take a look at today. So remember that they were buying calls and now today they're selling calls and price is moving lower. And let me see if I can respond to... If somebody would just respond to systematic in the chat that the webinar is live now. Okay, so here's beyond meat. Traders are selling calls today and it looks like they're buying puts as well. And price is moving lower. And let's take a look at... Here we go. All right, so here is... This is beyond meat in... Thanks, Moon Walker. So this is beyond meat and this is showing the... It's a day chart just showing the last... I guess pretty much it's the beginning of the year. And notice as price is generally increasing market makers start to increase volatility. That's shown by this... The same thing that I showed in... For Meta. Volatility increasing until it just becomes prohibitive. At least for me it would be to buy a call. So traders start selling calls as implied volatility increases. And now prices move lower. So that's why I kind of urge caution with these stocks. There's a limit to how far or how high they're going to go. Anyway, I found that interesting that you just have to watch all these factors. Okay, so that's... Those are two examples that I wanted to talk about. Again, Meta from last week and then just as an example of one of the meme stocks beyond meat for today. And here you can see that now traders are selling beyond meat, Carvana. There's a couple of stocks from last week. And today they have shifted into like Bed Bath and Beyond Game Stock. Lucid, let's see what they're doing with calls. So they were buying calls in the morning. Coinbase, that's on my watch list. We'll talk about that if I have time. So anyway, that is... That's what's going on today that traders have shifted their attention to some other stocks. Okay, let's get to our positional analysis now. This is a short-term chart. So there's book map. And I'm going to start with a longer-term chart. So this is SPX and a 20-day chart. And these are showing the spot gamma levels. And this is just a simple chart. Again, SPX showing the key spot gamma level. So there's the put wall at 3,900 and the 4,000 level. That is the key gamma strike or the absolute gamma strike. And then the call wall remains up here at 4,200. So far it just looks like a potential pullback in an uptrend. So that is the 20-day one-hour chart. Let's take a look at a shorter time frame. So this is today. And this is pretty much what I was expecting. And I posted this in Discord over the weekend and I'll show my key gamma strike list in a minute. And just looking at that, that was bearish. And I think that may be just more of a consolidation. And this is certainly what I was looking for today in the S&P 500. I'll talk more about why. So this is what's going on today. Looks like the zero gamma level so far has been support. And again, just consolidation, trading in a pretty narrow range. All right, so let's take a look at book map now. And we'll look at Hero in a minute and see how that played into these setups. But long in the morning, divergence short after that and then a divergence long again. And one thing to notice is the concentration of volume here at the SPI 410 key gamma strike. So this is the session volume profile. Again showing that concentration of volume around the SPI 410 key gamma strike. So what I'm showing on this chart, I have two columns of levels. These are the spot gamma cloud notes. These are updated automatically showing SPX levels. So that's SPX 4100. And the numbers are off. The levels are off by a couple of points. Spot gamma is still using a 15 point difference. And then there's the zero gamma level. And then this is my column of notes, cloud notes. Again, there's the SPI 410 key gamma strike. And these are support levels noted by spot gamma and the AM founders note. The shifts in levels really for the indices very few. The SPX put wall shifted down from 4,000 on Friday to 3,900 today. And then the SPI key gamma strike dropped from 420 to 410. And I think that maybe just traders got a little bit ahead of themselves last week taking that key gamma strike up to 420. So now it's back to 410. And then for QQQ, the put wall actually shifted up from 285 to 300. And then the key gamma strike shifted down from 310 to 300. All right, let's take a look at the absolute gamma charts. So here's SPX. And what this is showing is the absolute gamma. This is the zero line, this horizontal line. And above is positive gamma shown by the black lines. And below is negative gamma or put gamma. So call gamma above, put gamma below shown by the teal lines. And prime profits ask, how do you find that ES chart under your add-ons? I can only find the crypto exchanges. Well, first of all, you have to subscribe to the correct data feed. So for futures, I subscribe to rhythmic data. And for stocks, I subscribe to DX feed data. So that's how I get those charts. There's also a question, how do you find the SPX chart on book map? And you won't. SPX is just an index. So there are no transactions in SPX. So if you have rhythmic data or any futures data, you can find ES. And then if you have stocks data, again, I use DX feed. You can find SPI. But you won't find SPX on book map. And that it's just an index. You can trade options on SPX. But you can't buy or sell SPX. So this is the absolute gamma for SPX. And the 4,000 level remains the absolute gamma strike or the key gamma strike. And that's the strike with the largest absolute gamma. And then here's the put wall down below at 3,900 and the call wall up at 4,200. And notice above the 4,000 level, there's still a significant amount of call gamma. And we'll see when we look at the data in a minute that market maker gamma is additional for SPX is still positive, indicating that it is, again, above this 4,000 level is a positive gamma region called dominated. Let's take a look at SPI. And for SPI, 400 is the put wall. And that's a strike with the largest net negative gamma that can be expected to act as support. And there's the 4,000 key gamma strike or absolute gamma strike and the strike with the largest absolute gamma. And then the call wall remains at 4,200. That's the strike with the largest net positive gamma. And that can be expected to act as resistance. So there's SPI. And notice it's a little bit more distinct with SPX. And call gamma above the 4,000 level and put gamma below. Let's take a look at the NASDAQ absolute gamma charts. And we'll just look at QQQ. So for QQQ, 300 is the put wall and the key gamma strike. And the call wall is at 3,000. All right, let's take a look at the data. So I'm going to look at gamma notional. And the left column here is gamma notional for SPX at 371. And gamma notional has shifted down a little bit for all these instruments for SPX, SPI, and QQQ. So gamma notional shifted down. It's still positive, but shifted down from 545 to 371 for SPX and became more negative for SPI. On Friday, it was minus 174. And today, minus 561. And for QQQ, on Friday, it was positive 236 and shifted down to minus nine today. So that's pretty neutral for QQQ, negative for SPI, and positive for SPX. So still, the overall picture is pretty neutral. So what this means, this is market makers position on the gamma curve. And in a negative gamma situation like SPI, this means that traders are long puts, market makers are short puts, and as price decreases, they have to sell futures to hedge their delta exposure. So they're trading with price to hedge their delta exposure. And as price increases, they can buy back those short futures. And then it's just the opposite in a positive gamma environment. That means that traders are short calls, market makers are long calls, and as price increases, they have to sell futures to hedge their delta exposure. And then as price drops, they can buy them back. So always important to know how market makers are positioned on the gamma curve. And then right now, it's pretty neutral. And there's a question in YouTube. May I ask a question? What is the meaning S-U-P in the C-level column? So again, the C-level column is my column of cloud notes, and that S-U-P stands for support. And that is a leveled noted as support in the Spot Gamma AM Founders Note. And I just marked that in my spreadsheet. And then it's drawn, shown on that column on my book map chart. Let's take a look at the banner models. And this shows graphically what I was just talking about. So this shows the market makers, how market makers' delta exposure changes with changes in price. That's shown on the horizontal axis, and delta notion of their delta exposure is shown on the vertical axis. And then the green line shows how that delta notional changes with changes in implied volatility. And that's the current expiration, and that is the VANA effect. Again, a change in delta with a change in implied volatility. And then the black line shows how market makers' delta notional changes as time passes. That's the next expiration. And that's the charm effect. The change in delta as time passes. So we can see the positive gamma environment for SPX. Again, shown graphically here with a VANA chart. And the negative gamma environment for SPI, showing that market makers' delta notional increases as price drops. And they have to sell futures to hedge their delta exposure because of their short puts. And then here's QQQ and neutral. So overall, a fairly neutral environment as far as market makers get a position on the gamma curve. And then let's take a look at... Last thing that I want to take a look at, and there was some discussion about this in Discord over the weekend about all of these shifts lower for the key gamma strike. So what this is is a spreadsheet that I track, and there are others that are doing this as well in Discord. And I'm showing the current key gamma strike for every stock in my watch list. And I'm comparing that with the key gamma strike from the previous day. So that's shown on the far right column. And then the current key gamma strike shows the key gamma strike for today. And I color-code these. So red means that the key gamma strike decreased from the previous day. And so we can see that most of the stocks here are shown in red, meaning the key gamma strike dropped from Friday. That is the only one that bucked the trend in showing an increase in the key gamma strike. Okay, so given all this, my thesis for the S&P 500 was I was looking for consolidation. The shifts in the levels were not significant enough in the S&P 500 to make me shift my directional bias to totally bearish. As well, I was... It just makes sense that after such a big week, last week there would be some consolidation. And so given the... really the lack of change in levels, I guess the normal behavior of looking for some consolidation, plus really the big tone shifts in the indices typically occur around monthly expirations. So it's possible there could be a consolidation or a grind into next week. So we'll just wait and see on that. But again, for today, my expectation was for consolidation. And again, this is what is going on. To me, this makes sense. And now for stocks, it's a different story, but when you look at... So just looking at this, you would think bearish. But when you go in and dig in and look at all these stocks, it looks like there were just some shifts in levels. For example, QQQ, we know that the key gamma strike dropped down to 300, but the put wall increased to 300. Really just kind of reinforcing the importance of that 300 level. So on the surface, this is bearish, but not when you dig in and look at all the levels, not necessarily that bearish. Okay, so let's take a look at some setups now. And the first thing that I want to take a look at is the S&P 500. So this is the... Let me just go back out. So this is ES, the S&P 500 futures. And this is showing the combined signal, hero signal of SPX and SPI. So this is showing options, trades, and market maker hedging flow for SPX and SPI combined into one signal for the S&P 500 futures. Let's zoom in. Interesting, this is showing time a little bit before 9.30. So here's the open. Zoom in on this a little bit. So what I was looking at is, first of all, rising hero here. So this is kind of a choppy area, hard to find a long entry that amounted to much, but here is rising. Price drops, and we saw that big drop in the book map ES chart. And then there's the long setup. Hero continues to rise, starts rising again, and price moves higher. And then here's the short setup, divergent setup, and that takes some time to play out. So let's go back and take a look at book map now. And I'm going to zoom in. So I know this is hard to look at one chart and then another. And again, I emphasize that I have, actually I have two computers, I have two screens on one and one screen on the other. So I'm always looking at hero on one screen on my main computer and book map on the other screen. So I could see, in the morning here, looking at hero increasing, not a lot in order flow to confirm a long or short other than the higher lows. And then this was pretty obvious here. This break at the 410 key gamma strike, break of this trend line, look at all the pink dots coming in there, aggressive sellers. And that's confirmed by the falling cumulative volume delta that's shown by the dark blue line that changes to pink. And that's where it shifts from positive to negative and shown by the falling yellow line. And those are cell stops fueling that move lower. So there was then recall again that hero was falling before this drop lower. And it's confirmed by order flow here. So hero short divergent setup, confirmed by order flow. And I'm not showing it now, but I've been trying that new market pulse indicator that Bruce was talking about. And that thing started clicking pretty loudly right around here as all these pink dots came in volume increased and price started dropping lower. So if you could catch a short right at the 410 key gamma strike, that was a good short. And then recall that let's go back and look at go back and look at hero again. So price falls. Let's see what and actually I'm mistaken. Let's not write what I just said. So that drop was confirmed by order flow, but not really hero. There's just a small drop in hero. So scratch that again just confirmed by order flow but really setting up this long. So sorry about that. That was not clear. But again that short, it was a good short set up by order flow but not not hedging flow hedging flow set up the first long here and then the second long. Set up this short here. So again trying to look at one chart at a time makes a little bit confusing. So let's go back and look at book map again. Okay, so order flow sets up this short if you took it and then couple things to notice again. Hero never really drop down. This rising light blue line is showing icebergs we're buying and some pretty large large buy orders here. This is showing 2127 iceberg orders 17 different transactions and then there's 1500 contracts. It looks like one one trade. Let's zoom out. Okay, so really this long was the best set up this long. And again sorry I made that confusing but it was confirmed by hero and order flow. Look at all the again the buy icebergs green dots coming in buy stops feel the move higher traders continue to buy with icebergs large traders buy stops and green dots aggressive buyers alright and youtube RTRT says so frustrating that hero isn't as reliable for ES and it does the opposite of hero frequently and yes you have to be aware of that but I think that is a huge advantage because it sets up a lot of divergence set up so it gives you a notice in advance that there's a potential reversal so let's look at let's look at this long set up here so we know in hero that hero never really drops traders continue to take positive delta bullish positions as price was dropping so we know that and we know that large traders are in here buying with iceberg orders we see that by this rising light blue line as well as this blue 36 27 icebergs are buying then we see the shift from pink dots to green dots cumulative volume delta shifts from negative to positive same for the stop orders and it fuels the move higher so I think that's an advantage there are plenty of other stocks if you're looking for a one to one correlation between price action and price action and hedging flow like Tesla and we'll look at that in a minute okay so that is the S&P 500 and again this is why I find this to be an advantage okay so there are a couple of other setups let's take a look at AMD look at the full screen and I took this falling call line so traders are selling calls and I took that as a divergent short or I interpreted that as a divergent short so let's go back and take a look at book map now so this notice that traders start selling calls or around 945 even a few minutes earlier and then price drops just after 10 so let's take a look at book map now so here's that shop and then price drops below this rising trend line setting up a short and it does the same here so two short setups let's go back and take a look at hero again and the first setup was more clear more of a divergent setup alright so that's AMD and the next one is Coinbase and we'll see that call buyers shown by the orange line came in around 1030 moving price higher so they really confirm both the short here and the long that's on my other computer if I have time at the end I'll go take a look at that the next one meta still in play traders continue to buy calls and the setup work better first thing in the morning let's go take a look at book map so there's the setup in the morning just straight up there were better setups like Nvidia let's go take a look at hero and it looks like calls driving so up until about 1130 two good long setups as traders were buying calls as it slows down a bit price drops and then sets up another long let's go take a look at book map so first long in the morning couple of pull back entries to this trend line to VWAP reversal higher at 210 up to the 215 liquidity target so this is probably the best of the stocks on my watch list probably the best best setup let's take a look at Tesla let's go take a look at hero and so RT, RT here's your if you're looking for this kind of setup a very strong correlation between hero options trades and price action Tesla is usually worth a look I think market makers hedge options trades in Tesla immediately and that's why there's such a strong correlation between options trades hedging flow and price action so here's that divergence long setup traders start buying calls and price reverses higher a few minutes later so it looks like they started buying calls around 10-20 something like that let's go take a look at book map again so there's the long setup so there's the sharp drop lower ends with a sell sweep into the 190 liquidity buyers absorb that sell sweep some aggressive buyers start to come in shown by the green dots here again remember traders are buying calls and price moves higher towards the first liquidity target at 195 and then notice the all the other liquidity above so price made it almost up to the 197 liquidity chopped around for a couple of hours and then it looks like it's moving higher again and let's see what traders are doing in Tesla right now I'm going to change to a shorter look back period so this continues to look bullish for Tesla with the rising orange line traders continue to buy calls let's go take a look at book map again I'm just going to scroll down so 200 is a very important level up above and a potential price target made me not today but maybe the next day or two 200 that's the call wall and the key gamma strike and that is the highest liquidity above and they're also liquidity targets 197, 198 and 199 okay so the best stock setup in my watch list were Nvidia and Tesla and Tesla there was that call divergence setup for long down at the 190 level and Nvidia long setup as well with call buyers and then the S&P 500 again this long setup confirmed by both hedging flow and order flow order flow iceberg buys then the aggressive traders come in with buy orders shown by all the green dots buy stop orders fuel to move higher and let's just go back and take one last look at hero for the S&P 500 is this back to one day and we can take a look at spy we didn't take a look at that before but this will be very similar to to ES since spy options trades are mostly driving the ES there's that divergence setup long traders continue to buy calls when they start selling puts price increases again confirmed by order flow iceberg orders aggressive buyers any final questions that is all that I had for today so again remember not a lot going on this week as far as news and economic events with the exception of Jerome Powell speaking tomorrow and then next week some big events CPI VIX expiration and then the monthly options expiration okay again that's all I had thanks for watching thanks for your questions and comments and I will see you tomorrow thanks again bye


Here's your dog. Yeah, that's our baby. Honestly, we've got him since he was a little puppy. He's actually very smart Loves the water you can see him there like being calm cool collective there But we ride him on jet skis you run him on the boat and this guy is just amazing I love him and then hopefully he can he can be with us for a while