It's time for Mac Geekab and listener Mark brings us our quick tip of the week.  The Vision Pro battery power indicator has a motion sensor on it and only comes on when you move the battery. More quick tips like this plus your questions answered today on Mac Geekab 1026 for Monday, February 26th, 2024. Greetings, folks, and welcome to Mac Geekab here on this wonderful National for Pete's Sake Day. We're the show where you send in questions, tips like the one Adam just shared. Cool stuff found. We share all three. We try to answer your questions. Sometimes we bring questions of our own that we hope to get answers for as well because the goal is every single time we get together for each of us to learn at least five new things. Sponsors for this episode include Trinom.com slash MGG. This is yummy food for your pets. And you can get 50 percent off your no risk two week trial there at Trinom.com slash MGG and betterhelp.com slash Geekab. You can give online therapy a try and get on your way to being your best self. We'll talk more in depth about most of those most of those. No, both of those in a little bit here. But now here in Durham, New Hampshire, I'm Dave Hamilton. And here in South Dakota, I'm Adam Christensen. And greetings from Maastricht in the Netherlands. It's pilot Pete. Happy National for Pete's Sake Day there, Pete. There you go. Right on. I don't know. I like that. It's been fun learning about what each of our release days for the show is because, you know, that there's there's weird little things that we have lots of them. It's not only National for Pete's Sake Day, by the way, there's there's lots of things. I put links to a lot of it in the show notes at MacGeekab.com just because it's fun. So what is it the day this show comes out? National for Pete's Sake Day, the day the show comes out February 26th. Yeah, yeah, yeah. OK, I went back in time and was thinking that the next one was President's Day. But that was last week. That was last week. Correct. That's correct. Yes, we do record these timeshifted some more than others. And this one, for sure, is the timeshifted we're recording this a full week out just because of some some travel and all that good stuff. Let's go to let's keep doing quick tips, shall we, guys? Yeah, can I can I add something to that first quick tip, though? That's really interesting with the battery. And I didn't realize this. I think I watched Nassie Lab's video and he did a really good job sort of breaking down some things that I hadn't heard about the Vision Pro before. So that battery, that tip is really cool. You pick it up and, you know, the power indicator like comes on, but a lot of people are like, why can't I just plug a USB-C power, you know, like right into the headset? Like, why do I have to have this battery pack and that cable only does power? Like that it has a USB-C connector on the battery. It is power only. You cannot get data through it. If you need data, you got to get that expensive developer thing that's USB-C to I think we talked about. But a lot of people were like, well, why do I have to go through this battery for power? And the reason is that the headset takes or the battery takes 13 volts, which is really, really weird number. And then I haven't found out exactly why Apple is doing 13 volts. But you have to go through the battery because they're going to have to regulate that stuff because 13 volts is not a standard PD power step voltage. It's off. It should be like, you know, 12 or 9 or, you know, like certain step voltages you have to use. Yeah, they were doing some sort of smarts in there to kind of manage that. So that then allows you to use any, you know, any PD wall plug to go into that. And then the headset's probably kept safe from any issues because it has weird stepping. So, huh, that is bizarre. OK, well, good to know. Like, OK, yeah, we'll find out from Apple engineers someday why why that ended up being the way it is. But yeah, it could be a myriad of reasons, apparently. And again, it goes in a good detail about breaking down about possibilities. But we'll never really know until we know if if we are ever told. That's right. You usually my experience is that those things usually come out at like a bar near WDC at about 11 14 p.m. That's that's been my experience Pacific time. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, that's that's where you learn the things that you need to know. That it it's not like they're divulging anything that they that would be bad for it to be out into the world. Like I've never had anybody do that. But no, like the things that are helpful for troubleshooting and and just super valuable for the nerdy things that we need to know. Like Apple is tight lipped about it until they're not until you get the right person and they're like, oh, yeah, you should definitely know how this works. Like, yeah, a lot of it's an engineering reason. Sorry. Yeah, for engineering. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like a lot of the core audio troubleshooting that we did a number of years ago was thanks to one of those kinds of conversations. So yeah, it's interesting. All right. Rick, he says. You were talking a few episodes ago in a segment about a person who using Apple Mail was not able to find some messages that someone sent them. I had the same problem a while ago and wanted to offer an alternative thought. In my case, I was on a support call. They sent me mail twice. I couldn't find them anywhere, including junk mail. Later, I realized that I had characters typed into the search field in mail, which is an immediate and active filter. It was persistent and I didn't see it there. After I removed that, of course, both messages showed up just fine in my inbox. I don't often use search in mail. So I didn't notice that there was anything there. It sounded like an errant character. You know, you put one character there, if you put like an E there, it's going to find a lot of messages and make it seem like it might look like similar to your inbox. But no, it's not not your entire inbox. That's a good tip. I got caught by that. Yep. Same. Same. And it's not just mail. I mean, there's other apps that behave the same way. Like, I think I've gotten caught by that in Visual Studio, you know, what I'm developing, doing programming stuff. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. All right. What's next here? Shall we go to you want to take us to David, Pete? I can so do at this time. He says, hi, Mac. Keep gap, guys. I'm another fan of Adam who followed into this new venue. Well, welcome, David. We're glad you're here. Same. I was recently on a business trip in Europe and narrowly avoided disaster with my iPhone. When I travel, almost all of my critical travel information is on my phone for convenience and efficiency. And I would be in dead in the water without it. Two weeks ago, I woke up in a hotel in Italy. And I was supposed to be in Ireland. Just kidding. And on the travel day with only a little time left before having to leave for the airport, only to find that my iPhone screen was dead no matter what I did. And all of my ticket and flight info was non accessible with literally minutes to go before I had to be ready to leave. Major panic. Then I realized, hey, Siri, still work. So I was able to call my wife back in the States and woke her up after midnight and had her do a brief search on the issue. Turns out this issue is not at all uncommon. And even though I had never heard of it before, black screen of death. The fix to press the volume up button, the volume down button, then hold the power button on the right until the Apple logo appears as the phone restarts. After the restart, everything worked normally as I was able to make my and I was able to make my flight and not miss some very important meetings. Enjoying your show, David. And I've been caught by the same thing, David. And it goes back at least to the iPhone 8 because that's where it happened to me and I had a screen. And I thought mine was with the screen that was on and it was completely frozen. I thought, well, I'm going to have to wait a week for the battery to die with it not doing anything, at least a day before it'll restart. And I wandered into the Apple store and told him, hey, something's my phone is broken. And I've tried everything.   What magic is this? I had it was UDP real quick. Just before I forget UDP up volume down volume power button. And that's how I remember it is because it's not TCP. It's UDP, you know, but that's a nerdy way of doing it. I learned this on a bus. I was I had flown to Florida a day before podcast movement because I had been invited on this, I mean, truly once in a lifetime behind the scenes tour of the entirety of Kennedy Space Center with NASA. Like it was amazing. It was it was for podcast movement, organized it for a select group of podcasters. And we talked about it on the show here. Like it was absolutely amazing to be able to do this. But get on this bus. We're stopping at the first thing and my phone goes into like wedge mode, whatever. Yeah. And I'm like, are you kidding me? Like my laptop is not here. Like, how is it possible that the one time my phone decides to do this is the time where my phone is the only connection I have to the outside world to research how to fix this, you know, and I'm like, here, I have like this opportunity to take all these these pictures and video of this behind the scenes and I'm not going to be able to do any of it.  And so we get off the bus and I have my phone in my pocket and it's just getting hotter and hotter. Like it's clear that this thing is very, very busy and I can't stop it. And, you know, so we go through the thing and the first thing building and I couldn't take any pictures and we get back on the bus as they drive us to the second one. And it dawns on me. Wait, my iPad has it was whatever iPad it was. It was the one that you could buy with a T-Mobile cell SIM in it that you got like 250 megabytes of free data every month for the life of that SIM card or that that iPad. And so I'm like, oh, wait a minute. And so I, you know, choose your data wisely. I searched and I found this solution in the UDP thing. And it was like, save the day. So, yeah, it's a good one. It is a good one. It's no longer a paperweight. It's no longer a paperweight. Well, it was a hand warmer, Pete, because I needed that in August in Florida. In Florida, right? Yeah. All right. Uh, unless you have more on that, Adam, you should move to porthos John. All right, the tip.  So strap in because we've got a few here. I found that activating control center by accident that I'm act. I was activating control center by accident a lot. And I can agree with this, especially in some games. If you go into settings, control center in the Apple vision pro, you can move the little care activator for control center up much higher in the display. So you have to look up farther to bring it into focus.  So you can control how far up you need to look to activate that because it is it is easy to accidentally activate that as posted in the MGD channel in discord. If you have optical inserts, don't buy the Apple vision pro travel case because there's nowhere to put them. I just found this new case, which is smaller and has dedicated storage for everything. And that's the Waterfield Designs shield case for Apple vision pro, which is is gorgeous. It's much smaller and we'll have a link to that. So that's good. But yeah, Apple advertises their cases having that storage. And it turns out it's a lie.  I mean, unless they unless they're counting the little pouch that you put everything in, but that's not going to protect your your lens inserts at all. There's no protection for that. So I don't know what they're thinking. Hopefully they changed that. That's just a typo in their documentation or something. Right. If you want to be able to carry your Apple vision pro optical inserts now or just store them safely, look up a lens filter case on Amazon. There's hundreds made to store things like this. So I am looking for something for optical inserts. I've just been using the original packaging. So I just kept the original package and they came in and when I pop them out, I put them back in that. But that's just, you know, a cardboard bolded kind of thing. So yeah, right. You nice to have something a little bit softer to protect those, you know, not so cheap lenses. Multi-port GAN chargers seem to limit the amount of power that the Apple vision pro gets. Tested this with a cable that reports wattage. Even though my station offered 90 plus watts of PD, the Apple vision pro was only pulling about half of what it took from a dedicated Apple USB-C port brick. Note that this was to charge and use the Apple vision pro at the same time. Yeah, I think it's I think it's regulated. I want to say it's around. Well, he says half. I thought it was around 60 watts that it would call max. And obviously, the charger that comes with it, I don't think he's even a 60 watt charger. So sure, you can get it. You can get a bigger one. But yeah, I think people have been doing some testing with those little things and, you know, it'll vary. It'll it'll vary what it's pulling. I think it's also as every as every device will. Right. Yeah, I think it's also been proven that Apple is being a very, very delicate about the battery. So the power cells that are in there, it actually has a lot more capacity than is advertised on the outside. And the theory is that Apple is only taking charging up to about 80 percent to extend the longevity of that battery. Like they're being very delicate on the Apple Vision Pro battery and not stressing it. And I think the idea is they're they're thinking a lot of people are going to use it plugged into the wall a lot, probably. So they don't want to be over overcharging it. Smart. Yeah. Yeah. OK. Yeah, I like it. Apple Vision Pro beta one point one is available. You have to turn on beta updates with the attendant warnings and has some significant improvements for the persona beta imaging. I think that might even be out now because I just is it out now? Yes, update.  I know one point two is is on the way to. So maybe they're rapidly making improvements. And I think that's not surprising. Yep. You got a couple more. Yeah, two more. When you're tapping, be careful not to make a fist with the other three fingers of your hand as Apple Vision Pro can see this as a long hold and not see that you released your tap. Yeah, tapping is a little bit tricky. And if you talk with your hands a lot, like I noticed this. Don't do that. Like if you're talking to other people, like I was demoing some things for other people with the iPad, you know, because you can mirror to an iPad or whatever. And if you start waving your hands around, you'll get false positives on your taps and stuff like that. So there's some improvements that can make there. And then finally, the but there's a quick tip in there that if you are tapping and make a fist intentionally, that now is a long hold. A long hold. Yeah. Yeah. Or you can I mean, I just tap and hold. But yeah. Oh, I see. OK, so you can do it with just a tap and hold. Yeah, you can just pinch your fingers together and hold them as well. And yeah, that will work. But OK, that can sometimes be tricky. So maybe actually making a fist might actually be a little bit. And this is a fist with your with your non tapping hand, right? Yeah. Yeah, it sounds like. Yeah. Interesting. Good quick tip. Yeah, exactly. Finally, if you have kids, note that the Apple will not do demos and does not recommend use for anyone under 13. OK, I would guess that's there's myriads of reasons, health reasons as well as just size reasons, I bet. Oh, yeah, that's right. Yeah. And even think about the size thing. That's probably the most obvious one. They don't want to have to figure out. Although there's adults with small heads, too. So does I honestly don't know this? I mean, because obviously they have the little adjustment built in for inner pupillary distance. So when you first put it on, it has you hold the digital crown down and it will has motors that will adjust the inner pupillary distance. So does that change as you get older? Or is that I honestly don't know, like, is that set? Got to be a certain point.  I mean, as your as your face is growing, certainly, I don't know if like I don't know if it's changed for any of us in a couple of decades. But yeah, I know that it hasn't changed for me in the last 15 years. But yeah, where that's sort of locked in, you know, maybe there's a certain point in development. So yeah, I know they're very concerned about everything because like if if you have the wrong light seal, like the distance for the lenses to your eyes, it will warn you. You know, it is like very particular about distance of things. Well, I guess all that is is essential to giving you the experience it gives you, though. I think they're probably being super tight on managing that experience and ensuring as best they can that everyone has this minimum level of consistent experience. I think we'll see that loosen up over the next, you know, three to five years as as this product line matures and becomes more accepted. But the last thing they want is that thing to come out now. There's already complaints about it that are already for primetime unfounded. But right. Yeah, exactly. There there are there are, you know, there's not enough apps. Like there's those things that are like, well, that's a legitimate thing right now.  Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Cool. Karsten brings us our next tip. Karsten says in recent episodes, there were discussions on how to message people when they were sleeping to tell them they made it home or whatever without disturbing them. I highly recommend, says Karsten, the using the encrypted messaging app called Signal. Signal provides a ton of features. You can add signal to your focus mode and manage it from there. My family creates groups in Signal and have some notifications disabled and we check them when we have time. He says, I am a huge cybersecurity person. So not only our signal message is encrypted, you can expire them. Our entire family uses Signal exclusively, even though we all have iPhones and we all have auto message expiration set to four weeks or less. If an account is compromised, there is no message history to go through. Bonus feature, you have a default signal group called Notes to Self and you can add links, images and more to that group, which is then available on all your devices that you have Signal. And you can use Signal for phone calls using your data connection. So when you travel international, people with Signal can call another Signal person. I know WhatsApp can also do some of this, but Signal, he says, is way more secure. Technology is convenient for anyone to stay secure. You must limit your digital footprint. Why use third party web services to add a reminder? Oh, which over time can be sold to a data broker. Stay secure, use Signal. Hope this really helps. Thanks. I appreciate that, Karsten. Yeah, that's that's good to know. Like it's tough getting. The world on a new message app that especially is not the default. Although it clearly, you know, most, if not all of Europe uses WhatsApp as the default and that like works out really well. But but to just get your family group on Signal might solve your your issue. Pete, if you can, you know, I think you were you were the one that was that posed that that query initially, which was how do I send a note back home without being concerned about waking people up? Right. Yeah. It's bright. Karsten has a nicer answer than me, which is let this be the opportunity for them to learn about do not disturb.  Winky, winky. Teachy, teachy. There you go. Learn from pain, my wife, it was a week at two o'clock in the morning and woke me up here in Europe at eight o'clock in the morning. It's like, wait a minute. Wait a minute. This doesn't work this way. Yeah. You want to take us to the next one from Ben, Pete? I can do that. Ben wrote in and said, well, looking at the get info window in the finder, I inadvertently pressed command. I again, it disappeared as this new inventor of Sonoma looking at the finder's file menu when I when an info window is active, the get info command is replaced by close info window and carries the same keyboard shortcut. Cool. So if you're looking at a file, if you have highlighted a file and finder and you hit command I, it opens the get info window and thusly closes it. I took it a step further and went to use option command I and it opens the inspector. And if you use control command I, it opens the summary info. The question I now have in my mind is I don't see much difference on most files. All three of those windows appear to be pretty identical. Although I will say I use the get info window. If I want to change what program opens my PDF file, for instance, I'll highlight a PDF file to get info and say open with this program always, that sort of thing. So that's how to quickly change it. Two for one there, folks. And I have, I have a three for one for you, Pete. Because the get info window and the get summary window are limited to persist with the file that you selected.  You could then open a new one for file B and have multiples and all that good stuff with the, what's the other one called? It's get, it's the command, the inspector, right?  But then when you select file B, that inspector window follows you and shows you the information for whatever file you just clicked, which can be really handy if you're trying to get info on multiple files, you know, kind of in, in series. So that's what that is. And if you select three files or more and hit command I, you'll get a separate windows for each to open up at once. Yes, but if you, but if you do with the control key and get summary info, then you get the summary of those three files. Same with the inspector too. So if you do the option with three files, you get an, you get an aggregate view instead of separate windows. There you go. That, that's the difference. Yep. Yep. So they do all look the same if you do them for one file and don't change anything else. Yeah. Click nowhere or command I to close it, right? As, uh, as Ben just taught us. So, and, uh, Matt in Discord replied that, uh, he's got a machine where he's still using Monterey. So Mac OS 12.7.3 and it behaves the same. So these go back at least that far. So, yeah, good stuff. Todd brings us a tip from our, from our tip in Mac eCab 1024. This one, this one has generated a lot of follow-ups. I shared that tip about adding a name to your, adding an entry to contacts for people who SM for companies and brands who SMS you and, uh, and Todd says, uh, I take it one step further, I copy or screenshot the company's logo from their website and add it to that entry in contacts. My, I will see the logo much more quickly than the name. Um, however, Apple's contacts Apple not let you paste the image in, but you can drag the image file in from the desktop over the round contact picture icon and it will add it. So that's good to know. Thank you, Todd. Good stuff. And one more on, uh, from that same thing was, uh, was Andrew. Uh, he says, uh, it occurred to me to do the same thing that Dave, you suggested years ago. Uh, I've gone one step farther as well. He says, I get many reminders for appointments from my doctor, my dentist, my barber, my vet, et cetera. Here's what I did. I created a single contact called appointments and I put all of those phone numbers in this as, uh, multiple numbers for this same contact says, I don't know how many I have in there, but there's a lot when a new one comes in, I just save that number to the existing appointments contact. And this way I just get a text message from appointments and I can, you know, do the confirmation or whatever it is, I guess it goes back to the right number. I, that, that would be the, the one thing, right? Like, but I think, I think it would reply to the correct number, because a lot of times you'll get the, you know, press one to confirm, press two to cancel or whatever, but I don't, yeah, I don't know how that all works, but, um, maybe sending the word yes to 10 numbers. Yeah. Yeah. I don't, I don't know what you're confirming at that point, right? Like, or, you know, if you choose cancel, does it now cancel all your pending appointments? I don't know. No. I would assume it's an SMS is coming in from the number that, yeah, sent it, right? You're going to reply to the number that sent it. You know, what if you get three in a row before you reply to the first one? What happens? Yeah, you might miss it. That's it. That's it. All right, folks, this episode is sponsored by better help. If I could code extra time into our day, I'd vote for more gratitude, but since we can't yet download extra hours, why not enrich the time we do have? I'm in therapy. I've mentioned that and it's been like upgrading my mental OS, learning to focus more on gratitude lately has been truly a game changer for me. It's not always about those major overhauls. Sometimes it's the small updates that really enhance our lives and that's where better help our sponsor comes in. Imagine having access to therapy that's just as flexible as your favorite streaming service. No waiting rooms, no software updates, just help when you need it. 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I replaced an old PC with an M2 Mac mini, which is great. Do I need to get a second external drive for the mini for a time machine? Or do I even need to bother backing up at all? Adam, you want to take this hot potato? Maybe the most opinionated person here on backup. I think I've talked about this, but I got burned many, many years ago with a photo library.  And so ever since then, I have been fanatical about backup. I follow the philosophy. If it's done three places, it's not really backed up that whole thing. And so I went all in on backup, and I've been that way for years and years and years and years. So my personal opinion is, yes, you need at least a backup. And I've said this on my show. I think time machine, if you're not doing anything else, get a time machine drive. My general rule is to get one double the size of your internal drive, because that'll give you enough little history in there. Plug it in. It will ask you the question, do you want to use this for time machine?  Obviously with time machine, if you're direct connecting, you've got to do it for each machine. It's a little bit more difficult. I have this problem with my family, right? They use laptops. They never plug them in. I have time machine drives for them. It's like, I have to remind them, have you plugged in your time machine drive recently? Once a week, plug it in.  But I think, yes, you want a form of backup. And how far you take it, that's maybe the other part of this discussion in my opinion. Yeah, I don't disagree with you. If your data is not in two places and there's that whole 321 philosophy, which is you want three copies of your data, the actual copy, and then essentially two backups. And the one of them should be in the cloud or off-site, you know. And I do appreciate the sentiment and agree with the sentiment behind that. The question is to whether users, we as users need to take any steps that one would call backing up. I'm not convinced we need that anymore. And, you know, your family's scenario that you described where they all have laptops and so you can't just plug a drive into their machine and expect it to be plugged in again later without pestering your family. That's common for most people now, right? Most computers are laptops. And then we have these other things that are computers called phones and iPads and Vision Pros, right? And so, do they store data on them? Yes.  I don't know. Do you? Like you can back up to iCloud. Is that enough? I would say that most people, if you get a Mac or an iPhone out of the box and you set it up, you connect it to iCloud and you use it as default with, maybe I say as default. If you use it with document syncing turned on and I don't know if that's the default anymore. No, I think you have to turn it on. I think you have to turn it on. So not default, but if you turn on iCloud document and data syncing, which almost certainly requires a paid iCloud plan to get enough storage to do that, then I don't, like then I think you're fairly well covered. I'm not saying that choosing to add another layer of backup is bad. It's never bad. I do. But that is what most people are doing. And I think that that's enough for most people to be covered in most cases. You could certainly outsmart yourself by saving things outside of your documents or desktop folder, even once you have syncing turned on. It will warn you though. Your Mac will warn you if you drag a file from your documents folder to somewhere else. If it's being synced, it'll say, Hey, do you sure you want to take this off your iCloud drive, which is good. So I lose it if. Yeah. Yeah. So there are steps to take, but if you're syncing your documents via some syncing service, and I know people argue sync is not backup and I agree with that, but it is a form of like it's another copy of your data until you delete it. So yeah. Yeah. That said, I absolutely still make sure I use time machine at least on all of my Macs, including my laptop. So yeah, you know, especially for the valuable data that you cannot replace. You know, I had neighbors that lost all their photos years ago because it was on one hard drive. And I mean, you know, kids' photos gone and they didn't have the one digital copy of it. No, it does suck. And it's yeah, please, you know, for that data that's like that, absolutely. Three, two, one. Well, but iCloud photo, do you need if you have iCloud photo library? Yeah, this is this is fair enough. That was pre iCloud photo. Exactly. I'm wondering does they, you know, does a ransomware get in there and and hose you because it's connected? Yeah, no, so having one that you can disconnect. Well, and you're putting a lot of trust in Apple, right? And not to say that they don't have backups of backups of backups. I mean, right?  So if iCloud works one day for whatever reason, you know, because they're not a target of them. You know, yeah. Apple's not a target. But they have it in multiple. I like I trust that they're probably they probably have a robust system enough now where there's they have their own backups. There's multiple locations. Like, I'm sure the engineers have thought of this. But again, you are putting your faith. Yes. In iCloud, 100%. So if you're OK with that and you think that's that's good, then I like I just prefer the my mental even just mentally knowing that. Yeah, they have a copy. I have a copy. So if I screw up, I can use theirs. If they screw up, I can use mine. Like, yep. No, I do the same thing. I do exactly the same thing. I would bet. And I suppose owning some Apple stock, I do bet this money. I would bet money that. Apple has gone out of their way to ensure that. Any given users photos will never get comp get lost or damaged or whatever with iCloud. Because all it takes is once. And then it makes the news and spreads like wildfire. And that's it. People like the world doesn't trust Apple with their data anymore. And that would be awful. Yeah. But remember, Apple, the music library thing happened, right? Where yeah, iTunes music library worked a bunch of people's like uploaded audio. So it did. But but as terrible as that is. And that was that was like. The most hamfisted thing we've seen Apple do, right? Was that for most people. The audio that they lost was audio that was recoverable in some other way because it was recorded by someone else, right? These are songs, right? Whereas your photos, you made those. There is no other like. Oh, well, that sucks that I have to go through this major headache. But I can still get that song again. Like, I know there were some people that lost original music in that like that's awful. But most of the people that were affected by that, it was, you know, songs that were commercially available. So I mean, it's but not a disaster. Inconvenience, not disaster, right? Another one that I'll throw out that, you know, I do, I download, make sure I on at least one Mac, I download all my Apple purchased videos and create a backup of those because those are not guaranteed to be licensed for forever. That's right. People should be aware of that. Like Apple can make that go away. If you still have the file, it will still work. But if you don't have a copy of the file and they've removed it from Apple servers, you're never getting that file back. Yeah, yeah. Brian, 8944 in our Discord at live.mackykev.com shared a very important add on here, bit of advice related here. And that is test your backups and make sure you know how to restore because a backup is nothing if you can't. It's not a backup if you can't restore from it. And I don't mean that it cannot be restored from that would also call it not a backup. But if you don't know how to restore your backup, it is far less valuable to you. You don't want to have to call in help in that moment just because you haven't, you don't know how to restore from your backup. This is something you can test. You can, I recommend you do this regularly once every six months, go to your backup, pretend you need to restore a file, go through the motions, and every backup is different. Time Machine has their thing where you can enter Time Machine, carbon copy cloner, you just mount the drive and look in the folders. If you use something like Backblaze, go online, restore a file by downloading, copying it from their system down to yours, just have a working knowledge of that restoration process so that when you are in a panic moment, you're not panicked about that. You're like, ah, I know what to do. I can do this. Another kind of tip related to this because you mentioned turning on desktop and documents and just using iCloud in general. Yeah. Not only is it good just you have essentially another copier files that are in the cloud, if you are especially all in the Apple ecosystem like a lot of us, it just makes upgrading and getting new devices and just like doing anything just so convenient. So my daughter is in college now and she had this really old 12 inch MacBook Air and she called me just last week and she's like, it won't start. My machine won't start and I'm like, and we tried a bunch of things and it basically had died. It just died and it was really old. I had asked her before she wanted if she, when if she wanted a new computer, she said no and I'm like, you think you should have a new computer? But anyway, she called me so I'm like, all right, I bought you new, I bought you new M2 MacBook Air.  So she restored from time machine backup, but she also had iCloud.   And you're done. And same thing with iOS devices or like setting up my Vision Pro, like it's worth having that, especially if you're in the ecosystem and you're okay with Apple, iCloud, just turning that on and paying for it. It's paid for itself in my opinion over and over. Yes. Yes. I have plenty of iCloud storage. We buy two terabytes for the family and I think we've used, I mean, a lot of it, mostly photos, but we're probably at 1.3, 1.4 terabytes or something. Like we've got a lot of headroom. Years before that was like a thing, I moved away from Dropbox for doing this, syncing to Synology Drive because I own the storage and I didn't want to have to pay Dropbox every month and so I just did that. I think if I had iCloud Drive, then I don't know that I, I think I would have just continued to pay for iCloud Drive like I do and stored all of my documents there because you're right. It makes it so easy. Yes. Synology Drive integrates with Apple's Files app on the phone and you can get any app that supports Apple's Files thing for loading data or whatever on your iPhone. You can see into Synology Drive, but it's one layer removed and it's not all right there in the prettiest way. And for things like for things that I know that I'm going to use on my iPhone or iPad like scores for musicals or whatever, those I store in a folder on iCloud Drive because I don't want to have to deal with the, oh yes, Synology Drive is weird and it doesn't always save the favorites right. And you know, can I get to my data? Yeah. But for those kinds of things, I just like it to be where I expect it to be. So yeah. No, iCloud Drive is great. Yeah. Yep. Yep, and it's off-site in that sense because it's the cloud. Right? Right. Yep. Tony had an interesting little anecdote and I figured I would share it here. It's a tip but not so quick. He says his main machine is an M1 Air and it's connected via a CalDigit Hub to Ethernet and then also to Wi-Fi so that when he disconnects he still has, you know, internet when he's wherever he is. Doing a random speed test, I noticed my download speeds were less than half of what they had been. I got 350 megabits per second whereas I usually get 900. He says I turned off Wi-Fi on the Mac and speeds jumped back to that 900 megabits per second. Maybe not what most people would expect. He says I know you know what comes next. Go to system settings, network and hidden in the lower right corner is the action pop-up. Choose set service order and when I went in there he says somehow Wi-Fi had been promoted to the top of the list. The Mac will use the services in the order listed from top to bottom cascading down. So whichever the first one it finds is that's the one that it will use for your internet connection. We'll actually use all of them simultaneously for local network connections which is really handy. But the first one it finds is what it uses as your default gateway for your internet connection. Since I reactivated Wi-Fi moved it to the number two slot just below ethernet and now my problem solved. When I'm plugged into ethernet it uses that for internet. When I disconnect from ethernet that connection doesn't exist so it falls back to Wi-Fi which is number two and everything works fine. What's cool about it and he's totally right by the way like doing this makes perfect sense and if you are on a computer where you're switching back and forth absolutely go check that and my advice would be to do exactly what Tony did and put ethernet as the top one so that you have you have that you know the fastest speeds available there where I use this a lot is if I'm testing a new router or something I want to stay connected to the internet I want to connect to this router that I haven't yet connected to the internet and so I connect via Wi-Fi to the router I'm ethernet connected to my network here and I can get on the internet I can download firmware updates for a router or whatever and still connect to the router via Wi-Fi because it's two different IP subnets when I put in the subnet you know the address for the router it knows oh this subnet is routed to Wi-Fi internet routed to ethernet because of that set service order thing and you can do it all and you feel like a networking master when you do these things so you too can be a networking master by set service order I don't know yipper so thank you for sharing that Tony good stuff I like uh I like making sure that everybody knows how to manage their networks thoughts on that? any? nope nope yeah it is a good tip all right uh uh Antony has a uh and he sent this in as an audio comment which we will play and it's a couple of minutes long but he has such a he articulates a problem that I know all three of us have experienced and I think pretty much everybody with an iPhone has experienced and then he proposes a solution and I'm curious to see after hearing his solution if any of the three of us have a better idea because I don't know that we will so take it away hi uh I have an iPhone query but before I get to that I wanted to just say that I love the podcast I haven't come over with Adam it's great to hear how you all interact and bounce off each other uh you are now my go-to Apple podcast and uh long may it continue so I'm Antony from the UK and when I use my iPhone I have notifications appear as banners when the screen is in use and I often find myself in an app let's say use the notes app for for example I'll be in the note I want to press the the back to notes button in the top corner and when my finger begins to descend in a millisecond or two before it makes contact I might get a message will appear as a banner say an iMessage or well what's that message and my finger will press that which then not only takes me out of notes which I don't want but will then open the message app and open the message itself and potentially return a read receipt to the sender for a message that I didn't even want to read from visual stimuli a quick response time for the eye to send a signal to the brain to process it and then for the brain send a signal to the hand I love this is about 250 milliseconds then there's a travel time from the finger to the screen so let's say hypothetically the finger is actually just hovering above the screen so and that's that's safe for argument sake that the travel time is virtually instant see but you've still got a 250 millisecond gap between seeing something and your finger then responding and pressing so even so the phone knows that I press that banner within say 20 milliseconds of it appearing it would therefore be impossible for me to have meant to have pressed that even if I was actively waiting for the banner to appear yes it would be impossible for me to react react and press it so quickly you're not a kid therefore it'd be great to have an additional optional feature in settings which when activated would ignore any key press within say 200 milliseconds instead it would trigger the item directly below it and and this could be customized I don't know say from 100 milliseconds to 300 milliseconds to suit someone's timing or response time and obviously it would be optional to turn it on or off and it could call it something like realistic react time or something like that there is a feature in accessibility that could potentially help a little which is accessibility touch touch accommodations but nothing in there that I can see that does what I need the nearest could be the one called tap assistance gesture delay but I've not really had much joy with that one anyway I thought it'd be interesting and I wasn't sure if anyone else had come across that or if there was an app even or a work around that would allow for something like that to happen but I just thought it was interesting thank you all the best and I look forward to the next episode thanks Anthony yeah this is like I don't know what else yes I have experienced this yes it's super frustrating every freaking time I experience this and it I know like Apple engineers must suffer this too right you would think you would think yep yep or maybe they have 20 millisecond cat light reflexes you know and can the worst part the worst part is when I know it's happening like I can't stop my finger from hitting that freaking notification banner and I know it's gonna happen and and then it happens like it I'm aware that I am unable to stop myself from doing exactly what I don't want to do it's yep and he's right about that responsible react time like that's what why isn't that coated in there I assume you've experienced this too Adam right um I don't know but I think it's main well I think it only might be because I don't know that I ever use because this is where the tap target for that like back to another app is right like up in the right hand corner yep or upper left you know that I use that feature very much to be honest what's happened to me like going to put my finger into a search switch thing or whatever from the bottom when I'm jumping between yeah that's going back and forth like I don't I always forget that that feature is even there so I'm not tapping up in what's happened to me Adam when I'm going to put in something in a search window you know I'll go to put you know that's at the top and as I put it in there and the notification comes up and hits it's like oh come on I find it in mail when I'm like navigating back to a you know the the mailbox above or something or back back to the mailbox if I'm in a message I want to go back to the mailbox without archiving my mail so that's in the upper left and I just I go to hit it and it's like there comes the notification it's like I'm sure that's this is when daddy swears yep yeah I'm very sure that it's happened to me yeah I don't remember it happening to me that frequently interesting and I don't know why I mean I also I hate notifications so I have my notification styled way way down and I don't like I especially don't like the persistent one you know the one that is like it's going to stay up in the corner until I deal with it no yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah so that is the currently that's the answer you can put your phone you can either disable all of those banner notifications when you're using your phone and just have them show up on the lock screen or in notification center when you go turn them into pull notifications in in that sense right not push when especially when you're interacting with your phone but I kind of want there are certain things that I want to notify me yeah and and I probably have more things turned on for that then then I normally would like I think if I did go into manage notifications and turn off the banners for certain apps I'd probably be okay with it you know but I that requires time and thought Adam I don't want it's a pain in the butt like yeah really actively manage it and you know when you update every new app yeah yeah you have to like be on top of it but they annoy me so much that it's like I only want certain ones you know I want messages from my family you know important emails like I'll even dial them in I think you could do some things with VIP I forget all the things that I've done yes you know yes yeah like every other message I don't care about yeah right yeah there's a hidden quick tip in there then too Adam is that you turn off the persistence of notifications yeah you have to dial it in yeah yeah it takes forever like who wants to do it but yeah yep yep I agree can you swipe away a persistent notification on your iPhone using your watch only I don't know I don't know that oh if you dismiss it on your watch does it does that cascade to your other devices I think yes I think so yeah yeah this does bring up a vision pro question because this happened to me the other day so vision pro has notifications too and the way it works is a message comes in and then you'll get the app icon sort of floating in your okay vision so you get the ding and then there's like the app icons there I need to go into settings I haven't messed with it too much but a male one came in the other day when I was watching a movie or something like that and it persisted and I didn't know how to make it go away other than to tap on the icon basically and then that pulls up the message and then you've got to like look at it and then dismiss it I'm like I just want that to go away like you don't want to interact with it yeah everywhere I'm looking it's like following me I'm like I got to find that setting so I'm sure I'm just missing a setting I'm sure this is a me problem but maybe somebody can help me point me in the right direction on what I'm doing yeah yeah that was super annoying it's like okay I knew a male came in I don't want to deal with that male right now I'm watching a movie like just go away and I waited I thought it would like fade away and it's like no it's not going away okay how do I dismiss it I don't know what the gesture or the magical incantation is to like swipe it away you know I I think the the gestures I would try in that scenario is I would put a fist up right and then I would start experimenting with one finger at a time put my thumb up does that do it no put my like you know and just go through your fingers and and at the very least with it with one of them you'll feel better even if it doesn't solve the problem back to the phone thing though you you mentioned the watch so you could set your notifications up so that they don't come in when your phone is awake you know or you're in use but do like only show up on the lock screen on your phone but do tap your wrist with your watch and so that would be another way to get around this you'd have to like to do that you would have to be someone who's wearing your Apple watch most of the times that you would want those notifications right like obviously but otherwise yeah it's going to get and it's going to take time to get through all the apps that will notify the thing because then you have to turn off the mirror my notifications from my iPhone settings on the watch and go manage them all there too like this becomes an exercise and frustration but yes anyway shall we go to our our next question from cruiser Pete we can do that I have the technology and I'm engaging it at this time cruiser says I'd love to get some thoughts on a strategy for the drives in my sonology I have a DS 916 that I bought in mid 2017 with four eight terabyte western digital drives that have been in the unit from the beginning I shook the drives from the wd easy store enclosures bought at different times so I don't expect they were from the same manufacturing lots but this in this means all four drives are about to hit the seven year mark the only blemish on the drive health reports is that one drive has had a few reconnection attempts but that count hasn't increased in over a year the units in clean condition and good temperature range given the age of the drives I'm wondering whether I should start replacing them over time one by one the total volume is 20 terabytes with about five terabytes free so I don't have an urgent need for additional space but I'd probably replace them with say maybe 12 terabyte drives I'm worried mostly I'm worried given the vintage age of the drives that if I don't start replacing them might see multiple failures in close succession however there's also not really any use in trying to guess which one will fail first or next so that essentially leaves me with the option of replacing them all one by one or of course waiting until a failure occurs which then takes me back to the first point above the concern that the second drive may fail shortly thereafter even during a rebuild any suggestions on how to think about this yeah you know in a corporate environment and I realize that's not you but what generally happens is there is a planned replacement schedule right you know you buy drives and it's like okay we're going to replace these in four years and you do one drive every three months or something and and you know get yourself moved up and all of that good stuff and by doing that you can budget for it and most of the time you'll do that in sync with the warranty of the drive so when the drive is out of warranty it's either being replaced or has been replaced so you can you know really carefully and easily predict your budget on these because if one happens to fail early well it's under warranty you're good to go so that is one strategy to take it is not the strategy I take but it is one strategy to take I replace drives in one of two scenarios if I need more space I replace the drive and I'm always bummed when that's the reason that I replace the drive because my preferred time to replace the drive is after it has failed I have I keep I use a five bay distation is kind of my main distation and I use four bays for volume one and then bay five is always a hot spare so and that hot spare is usually larger than any other drive in there and that's how I expand my storage is I let those hot spares when they have to take over for a smaller drive that died well now I'm good to go I've you know my storage slowly kind of just increases over the years that's the beauty of shr sonology hybrid raid you can do you can have drives of different sizes and it'll do all the things sometimes when you put a larger drive in you won't be able to use all the new storage on that drive until you have another drive that either is equal or matching to it all of those things but yeah that that's my strategy it works well having a hot spare makes me feel okay about it because I have one drive fault tolerance set up on my distation and when a drive dies I you know I'm good it can instantly whether I'm home or not I don't have to touch it the hot spare thing just kicks in and I'm good to go but recently I had to add a drive and pull out a perfectly good working drive that was too small and it really kind of it bummed me out but I mean it's nice that drives last so long like I should be happy about this but it's like well now what do I do with this drive it's I can't oh it sucks it's still good but you know it's fine I think my drives are eight years old in my sonology yeah so yeah okay yeah I still have the ones I think you sent me Dave and they're still running great yeah they spindle drives last a long time and you usually get some warning that it's on its way out you'll get errors showing up you'll get things showing up and at some point your distation will just be like okay I'm done with this thing you can like if I see that a drive is you know the error count is going up every week or something because I get you'll you can set your sonology to notify you about drive failures or drive errors when I see that number kind of going up every month or every week or whatever it is I will sometimes be like okay the time has come and then really all I do is just yank the drive out and then the hot spare is like hey we lost a drive I'm gonna do this and I take the drive and throw it away and get to go and put and then I put then I order a new drive that's larger to put in as the hot spare and we're off to the races so I have a personal sonology question issue yeah go yeah follows up on this little bit I don't know what why but my sonology the drive doors the the drive doors have started failing so I have a little go really yeah where it just popped out and it won't it won't stay in anymore the trace click lock back in no so one failed and then two weeks later another one failed so my sonology sitting there it still runs and it still works but I can't I can't push those things in anymore like the little tabs I don't know if they've just over time heated enough that they just won't stay anymore or whatever and I don't know what to do about it like I guess I can contact Synology and see if they'll send me new trays but well that's the question is it and you would only be able to know this if you turned off your disk station and and tested this but be really careful that you keep the drives in the right order okay you know but my my curiosity is is it the tray that has the problem or is it the latch on the disk station itself that has the problem oh that no it's definitely the tray because I had an open bay and so the when the first one failed I took that out I shut it down yeah took that out took the one drive out yes that popped open swapped the drive into the new tray and swapped them okay and it worked fine yeah and it was so it's the tray not the not the uh okay you can get you can get new trays and if Synology won't send them to you let me know because I probably have some like spare leftovers from old disk stations that I don't have it was just the weirdest thing I'm like oh when the when the first one went I kind of blame the cats I'm like uh maybe the cats were bumping it because they'll walk around it sometimes you know like are they bumping up against it and I thought it just popped out for that reason and I'm like did they somehow break it and then again two weeks later huh another one's another one's flipped out and I'm like okay wow um again it runs fine it just looks bad and probably more dust is getting in there now than should but I found a reddit article as I was putting this in the show notes my drive caddies won't close and I suspect it's due to a faulty clip I ordered replacement ones so you can buy replacement clips okay yeah so that that would be the uh that's the little part that I think failed yeah yeah totally uh and somebody pointed at an ebay listing for you can buy 10 latches for 13 dollars and 49 cents on ebay so I think that's you use four and sell six yeah right yeah yeah all right I've been I've been wanting to get a new song algae anyways sure that might be the ultimate solution it's because the one I am is really old I can't okay yeah yeah yeah yeah all right well that's uh there you go that's uh that's some cool stuff found it's Synology Replacement Tray latches let's uh I do want to do a couple of show stuff cool stuff founds but I also uh want to do uh a little bit of show business here I know the whole thing is show business right 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appreciate that absolutely share the show share the show do it now uh mackeykeb.com it's easy you want to take us to cool stuff found from john adam yeah yeah so this is really neat uh we were doing on sunday our hangout that was on february 18th and the subject was web browsers uh basically at mac web browsers and that naturally led into a discussion about ads and ad blocking and a bunch of other things but ultimately someone brought up the point that hey I you know I go to websites for like cooking and bringing up recipes and things like that and a lot of them have just a ton of extra junk around the recipe so it can make it difficult to see the recipe or if you want to you know so I saved that off somewhere it's got all kinds of extra data and stuff like that and uh john said hey I use this site called just the recipe and it has recipes on there and it's just the recipe data so you can find search for that stuff and all you're going to get is the pertinent information that you want and then that also led into a bunch of us talking about third-party apps because I mentioned that I wanted I want to offer a slight correction for just the recipe it is a site where you paste in the URL of another recipe and it strips out all the clutter and the ads and gives you a recipe that you could print or do something with so that correction yeah of course yeah it's it's like a url shortener kind of thing yeah it's like you all clean url it shortens the content yeah exactly and you get the image and you get all the ingredients and everything broke yeah and so it was very similar to some of these third-party recipe apps I use one called pestle and it can you can either copy and paste in the data or put in a url or whatever and it will basically put everything into the app and give you the image and give you the ingredients and give you the instructions and it separates it all out and formats it and like makes it look really really beautiful and this makes it look like one of those one of those things that we get from like the meal kits that sponsor us sometimes right like it takes a recipe and turns it into those you know step-by-step instructions which makes life really easy yeah yeah and you can even you can print it out if you want if you you don't want paper copies and stuff like that it'll format up really really nicely it does conversions so if you need to you know if it's a six serving meal and you can just say I need a three serving version and it'll convert everything for you yeah yeah and then a bunch of other people really recommend and share play pestle supports share play so you can have two people or multiple people working on the recipe together I'm just seeing that sorry I keep interrupting with cool things finding it's got a ton of great features I absolutely love it and a bunch of people mentioned paprika which is a similar app that one I play around with a little bit too it looks great and then I guess there's one called recipe keeper and one called Mila so there's a bunch of third party ones and there were a bunch of cool stuff founds recommendations in there like I said I I've been using pestle I found that to be my favorite I did play with paprika I think that developer I think had a beta for a while that was on test flight and so I think I played around with that early days but um yeah so there's a bunch of great ways to get recipes without all the junk yeah yeah it's handy look at the ads the first time then save the recipe without all the junk yeah exactly very cool I gotta check out that pestle thing I and the reason is that whole share play integration we I I love the the meal kit stuff that we get because it makes it really easy for us to just collaborate in the kitchen and work together as opposed to one person driving the bus so yeah so on that you could either go to the url because I know a lot of those meal sites give you the url for that stuff yes pestle also and I think a lot of the other apps will do OCR so you can use your camera and just point it at because like especially if you have old hand written recipes yeah yeah relatives or like my wife has a big book and we've scanned a bunch of those in and it will just pick that stuff right up and again fill everything out for you oh yeah okay I know you've mentioned pestle on the show before I I I didn't it didn't sink in for me the first time how how much I probably want this in our lives here it'll I cloud sink and yeah all your devices you can bring your iPad into the kitchen or whatever interesting interesting interesting now they just now they just need a vision pro version that puts my recipes up over my everything that I'm cooking along with timers and yeah and and the bonus of the vision pros when you're chopping onions you'll uh your eyes maybe won't water as much because they're you know sort of sealed in a littleish maybe I don't know if that's a good idea have you uh calculated the delay between what you see like if you clap your hands do you see them clap the moment you feel them clap like okay so you would you feel comfortable with a knife latency is under 200 milliseconds which we talked about earlier yeah there you go yeah so you probably won't cut your finger much yeah much yeah exactly I don't know joanna stern did did a whole cooking in it and a bunch of people done cooking and said the number one thing is the timers you can affix you can bring up multiple timers just in apple's regular timer app and fix them above each item so like wherever you look that timer for that thing is right above oh that's cool oh that's cool right and it just stays there I actually I I have some experiences with this not with a vision pro but with a blindfold that Lisa and I our daughter gave us one of these like books for date ideas you know and so and you can narrow it down in the book it like you pick do you want to go out do you want to stay home you know do you do you want to have like you know you get all these categories and but you don't know what the activity actually is and then you pick okay you know I we've got a couple hours so we can do this or whatever and so we pick this one and then you know you tear off the page and find out what it was and it was like you're going to cook a meal together but uh the person doing the cooking is blindfolded and the person uh the you know the other person is is telling you what to do and so uh I was the one that was blindfolded with Lisa you know it was a trust exercise while making dinner and and I did I I did chop like onions and stuff that way and it was totally fine I've chopped onions before it was not my first time chopping onions but like I know what to do I know how to use it like it was it was it was fine so I was I was more deliberate with it than I would be if my eyes were on the subject I still got all my fingers feet yep that's right the one the one thing with the vision pro is you make sure you have a well lit kitchen because it does not do really great with low light like the pass through and low light is pretty grainy and bad yep yep yep um Matt had a while we're on cool stuff found uh Matt had a great idea for cool stuff found and it's cooking related he says actually Matt says it wasn't his idea it was his wife's idea he says we attached a magnetic car mount mag safe car mount for iPhone to the inside of one of our kitchen cabinet doors where right near where we cook since upgrading to the iPhone with MagSafe I found a simple flat MagSafe disc on Amazon and added it to the car mount or so you could use a MagSafe car mount or you could do whatever you you know however you want to do it and he says we both share our recipes using the paprika app but I've moved to the Mila app more recently all of which are linked earlier but he said by putting his phone putting you know sticking a MagSafe thing to the inside of his cabinet now he can have his phone up with the recipe on it or his favorite podcast or both and it's up where his eyes are going to see it he doesn't have to worry about his phone like you know on the counter with spills and you know getting covered up by stuff so really brilliant idea I like that um using MagSafe inside the cabinet I gotta huh yeah even just a MagSafe stand on your you know kitchen counter just to get the phone up even if it's not inside a cabinet just you know something like that one from we talked about recently from Zag maybe under the Mophie brand that uh that telescoping stand I'll find the link for it and put that in the show notes too because that as well was was pretty cool so yeah if you could run it into power even some way and route some cables and oh yeah that's right yeah yeah exactly it this would be a great great use for an old iPad too just perm them out yes yes for sure yeah but yeah that that telescoping stand would be the kind of the key to this so yep yep her yeah my wife uses her MacBook Air in the kitchen and it always makes me nervous yeah yeah yeah occasionally Lisa she's usually with her iPad but um but this telescoping stand I mean it's not cheap it's $150 so but it's char it's a three in one charger with you know you're watching all that other stuff but some kind of telescoping stand or um something I have a uh you just get a clip stand that with a gooseneck that he clips onto the kitchen counter and then you know you just put it wherever you want it so I know they make like make mounts for like uh your refrigerator you know like it just magnets the her deer but that's less convenient because most people you're gonna have to turn around or turn around refrigerator to see the the recipe that's fair this idea of it being right you know like above the stove or next to the stove at eye level yeah exactly exactly yeah yeah that's a good idea fun stuff I like all this this is uh this is why we do the show so we can learn all these cool things yeah all right uh thanks for hanging out everybody thanks for sharing the show 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