Welcome to Mac GeekGab 934 for Monday, June 27th, 2022. Folks, and welcome to Mac GeekGab, the show where we answer your questions. We share your tips. We share your cool stuff found, all the stuff that you send into us, and if you want to send stuff into us, feedback at MacGeekGab.com is where you're going to do that. And the goal is by taking all of these things, our questions, your questions, our answers, your tips, your cool stuff found, we mash them all together into an agenda with the goal being that each and every one of us learns one, two, three, four, five new things every single time we get together. Sponsors for this episode include Otherworld Computing and their new MiniStack STX, the Thunderbolt 4 hub that you want for your Mac Mini. And then we're also going to talk about one of my other podcasts, Small Business Show here at BusinessShow.co. So we will talk more about those in depth in a few minutes for now here in Durham, New Hampshire. I'm Dave Hamilton. And here in Fairfield, Connecticut, this is John Ubrun. And here in LA, sometimes referred to as Lower Alabama. That's called Florida. Pilot Pete. LA on Eastern Daylight Time. Pilot Pete. You shared with us a quick tip in the pre-show that immediately made it to top billing. Would you please share that with us again? If you insist, sir, yes, I will. So the backstory behind it is I found myself having to replace my modem and my router when I got to our place in Pensacola. I don't know if they were hit by lightning or what, but I was having really cruddy service on my 2.4 gigahertz band off my router. And I'm going, what are the apps that we use to scan and figure out what's best, what's not best? And I stumbled across this really cool thing that's built into the OS, the Mac OS.  And then click on open wireless diagnostics. And you get that little help wizard that comes up. Ignore that wizard. Instead, go to the top left and you'll see the menu bar. And one of the words up there is window. Click on window and a dropdown will come up. And among other things, it'll have the assistant, which you're already looking at, info, logs, scan, performance, sniffer, sidecar, diagnostics monitor, yada, yada, yada. Click on scan. And scan will tell you all about the networks all around you. And it'll tell you which channel is best to be on for your which channel to set your router to for the best 2.4 gigahertz and 5 gigahertz channel. Yeah, this is the amazing part, right? So it shows you everything. And then, yeah, on the left here, we'll give you a, you know, the best 2.4 gigahertz channel, the best 5 gigahertz channel. It takes a minute for those last two items to show up because it's doing its scan, right? This is amazing. Now, this is what I'll call a myopic view of things. It is not the best channel for your entire house. It is the best channel for that Mac in that location, knowing nothing else about what's going on. So if you're going to use this, you know, do it on a laptop if you can and bounce around your house, rerunning this in a few different places so that you can truly get a feel for, okay, yeah, what it's telling me. It tells me channel 11 in one place and channel 6 in three places. So I'm going to go with 6 on 2.4, you know, that kind of thing. But then it's built into the operating systems even better, right? How have we not known about this before? Like you didn't find this by Googling. You found this by sniffing. Is that right? Yeah, I was just puttin' with the thing. And, you know, we always say, hey, hit the option key and see what comes up. Yeah, yeah.  Yeah, I don't know, man. I don't know how we've missed this for all these years. Yeah, even a blind scroll as I always say. Amen. I'll finish that. Thank you. Appreciate it. Yeah, that's Pilot's Lingo, folks. Pilot's Lingo. Yes. Twice a day. It's amazing. Amazing, amazing. Thank you for sharing that good stuff. That's assuming that you can set the channel on your wireless. Fair point. Many mesh systems do not give you that option. I hadn't thought of that. No, they don't. Yeah. I can't on my router, so, you know, set it on your router. And some meshes will let you do it. I think Orbi will. I think Iroh will not if memory serves, right, John? I have not found a way to set the channel on Iroh. And I don't think you can on plume either. That said, I found them to do a pretty good job at figuring out which is the best channel.  They probably have already done this for you and you don't need to run around and do things. So, yeah, they know stuff, which is good. Yeah. Amazing. Amazing. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I'm excited. I like it. All right. Thank you, Pete. I appreciate that. Larry tells us another one. He says, I learned about this trick just today. Like many of you, I'm sure I scheduled my whole life with calendar. And if it was not written down, I would just be sitting at home staring at the wall. Case in point. He says I had to create a calendar event to remind me to write you folks this. Oh, I think Pete, you just cut me out, man. He says, when my van is in the shop, I utilize the para transit service here in Orange County, California. And when I make an advanced request with them one to three days in advance, they check their availability and tell me the time. But because they have to accommodate everyone, they give me times down to the exact minute that their pickup window will begin. He says, this means that sometimes they will tell me we will put you up at 10 12 a.m. Calendar only likes to offer options in five minute increments unless you long press the minutes in calendar on your iPhone. And then you get a 10 keypad where you can enter the exact time with whatever you want. He says, now, if only they could allow me to add more than two reminders, give me more options, et cetera, et cetera. He says, I would actually use Apple's calendar. He says, instead, I use Fantastic Cal and that's the reason I use busy Cal. So yeah, it looks like we've got noise outside everywhere today, John. I think Pete and I are we're upping our game to match your outdoor noises today. But, you know, makes it makes it fun. Any thoughts on that? Have you used that, John? On occasion, yes. Or usually I schedule it on the Mac, which lets you type in. Yeah, anything directly. But yeah, the iOS interface is less forgiving. Yeah, I had I don't know that I ever knew about the long press thing. So pretty cool. We've talked a lot about eSims and international data and all of that good stuff. I have found in many cases when you buy a data only eSIM, especially a prepaid one, which is what most of us are going to wind up doing, you know, we go to eSIM DB, we figure out our plan, we get the QR code, we add the we buy it. Of course, you get the QR code, you add it to your phone. And in quite, I don't want to say many places, but certainly in quite a few places, we found that the data might still not work. We are all super trained correctly. To be very wary of enabling the data roaming option on our default plans, because if you do wind up roaming, depending on what your, you know, your plan with your post postpaid carrier is, you may wind up finding yourself with lots and lots of surprise charges at the end of the month. So we generally leave data roaming off on your prepaid plans, especially these international ones where you're, you know, buying a plan that works in multiple countries. Feel free as we have found to turn data roaming on, because that is often what's required on these prepaid plans to get it to work in specific countries. Like when we were traveling through Greece, I think we were fine in Greece with whatever plan we were on. And then when we got to, I want to say Croatia, it didn't work. And, and we're like, Oh, what's going on? Like, and we looked at the list like, no, this is on the list. And I was like, well, wait a minute, we've already paid them a flat rate. Like they have no way of charging us. Let's turn on data roaming, see what happens. Boom, sure enough, everything was fine. So I would say with those prepaid plans, turn on data roaming, you know, if it's data only plan that you're buying for a fixed amount of data for a fixed period of time, just, just turn on the data roaming and then you won't have to worry about it. So, yeah. The corollary to that is to turn off data roaming. If you're just on your regular phone and you're over there and you want to use the phone, turn off your data roaming unless you do want an outrageous bill. That's right. Yeah, or turn off data altogether. I mean, that's the beauty of the dual SIM in the iPhone is, you know, you get to pick which SIM is going to be used for phone calls and which SIM is going to be used for data. And, and you can tell it, okay, you know, use my primary SIM for phone calls and SMS because my, you know, my data only SIM doesn't even have those features and then use my data only SIM for data. And the iPhone makes it super easy. There is a toggle in there where you can turn on automatic data switching or something. I can't remember the, the, the accurate name, but you'll see it right there on the screen where you choose your data. And you, in most cases, I would say, you'd probably don't want to enable automatic data switching if you're using one of these there. So, but yeah, yeah, absolutely. Yeah, the phone really, like Apple has a lot of these things covered in a way that makes it super easy to use, which I'm stoked about. So, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I got my roaming on.  Why? I think that's how it came. You know, I always leave mine on when I'm in continental US. Really? Yeah. I ran into a problem with that near the Canadian border. Yeah. Oh, that's good. That's a good point. Yeah. You could wind up picking up stronger signal out, but Correct. But I found like when I had an old legacy plan with it, with another carrier, when I got up into the deep woods of Maine, I was not getting the service. And so if I put it on roaming, I would pick up another, another service. Interesting. Interesting. Yeah. I mean, that makes sense. But the question is, are you paying extra for that? I would, I would check with your carrier before you just, you know, randomly turn on data roaming for your, for your, for your postpaid plan.  I actually meant mobile is, they are not technically a postpaid plan. They are a prepaid plan. So unless you've added money to your account for international or for data roaming, let's call it, you could turn it on as like, they don't have a way to charge you. You might not give you any data on these when you roam to these things. There's that. Yeah. Exactly. But, um, yeah, I would, I would be careful of that, John, on a Verizon plan. Well, along with Pete, I've never had an extra charge. So. Right. But we, we back things up even though we've never had an incident where we've lost data.  Right. Like, I mean, there are things that we do because we know they are a good practice, not because we've had the, we've had the experience that requires it. Yeah. Yeah. I would, I would be very careful with that when you're, especially when you're traveling your borders or, um, when you're traveling in rural areas because you might pick up a carrier that is not, you know, one with whom your main provider has a peering relationship and then you're going to run into charges. Yeah. I'd be careful with that. Well, I never have. But, um. I understand. Now, another thing to add is if the people that you get service from have an app, get it because, um, at least with Verizon, they will install a little data widget that you can see in a control center, I think, um, that tells you how much data you have left. Nice. Always nice to know. That's, yeah. Yeah. Also, and at least Verizon, and I think most others, if, if you are approaching your cap, they'll, they'll let you know. They'll alert you. Yeah, for sure. Yeah. I get those texts from Mint Mobile. In fact, we talked about that a couple of weeks ago when I went overcast, decided to just consume all my data in a 10 minute car ride. Oh yeah. It was great. So good. So good. Yeah. I think that was, we talked about that on the show. You were not here, Pete. It was the one Alison Sheridan was here with us. I believe. All right. Uh, we got to get her back sometime. She was good. All right. Anyway, uh, moving right along. Gominick goes back a few episodes to episode 929. He says, you wonder how you can tell how well a Qi charger is charging your phone? Well, he says, because I was asking, you know, when you're because if your phone is connected, uh, wirelessly to your Mac, well, then you don't get to see the diagnostic data that you could get when you're plugged in. And of course, if you're charging over Qi and you plug in, you are no longer charging over Qi. It will switch to the plug because that's much more efficient. He says, however, if you have I'm amazing, it will tell you, place your phone on your Qi or MagSafe charger. Then in I'm amazing, select the iPhone in the left hand column and click on the battery symbol at the bottom right of the window. A pop up appears telling you, among other things, what the charger is rated at and what the iPhone's current charging rate are in Watts. And he sent us a screen shot and sure enough, it shows that the, you know, the charger is there's a one voltage and the phone is charging at another. Yeah. So this, this will answer the question of efficiency of your Qi charging system. Now it is also good to remember that your phone will intentionally ratchet down the amount of juice it pulls in as you approach a full charge. So if you really want to see this, you know, get it charging at like a 20 or 30% on your phone and give it a minute to ramp up to where it needs to be and then do your measurements or do your measurements all the way through, but just be aware that it will fluctuate through the process. But yeah, thank you, Dominic. That's, that's the answer to that question because we've never really been able to get that before. So I like it. I'm amazing. What a great. Those folks know what they're doing over there. All right. Um, Craig, there have been a lot of issues. I think Monterey has, uh, in this, I say this anecdotally, because it happens on many of my Macs. I think Monterey has wake from sleep issues. We've seen it very specifically with Thunderbolt Thunderbolt devices. Uh, we've also seen it sort of randomly on Macs that may or may not have Thunderbolt, but there, there are wake from sleep issues with Monterey and they've gotten worse, not better. I think 12 three was where they really started to, to, you know, shine. So, uh, Listener Craig has a tip though. He says, on occasion, my new Mac studio, uh, will not wake from sleep. This has happened to maybe two times in the last month. Uh, I can bang on the keyboard or mouse all I want, but no joy. He says, I was pleasantly surprised and also presently surprised to find that instead of having to force a shutdown on my Mac studio, uh, by pressing and holding the power button, just a quick press on the power button would cause everything to wake up and come back alive and fully operational. So try that first. If your Mac is in a state of what appears to be not waking from sleep, tap the power button and see if that wakes up the screens. I have dug into this on mine. My Mac mini, especially in the, well, my, the, uh, Intel Mac in the studio suffers from the, I won't, it doesn't want to like re enumerate thunderbolt device devices when it wakes from sleep. So I don't let this Mac actually go to sleep. I'll let the displays turn off, but I can't let the Mac go to sleep because otherwise I can't use it when I wake it up after reboot. My Mac mini in the, in the office, my M one mini, I have not done that yet. But I'm pretty close to it because I have this issue where I will mash on the keyboard. And what's interesting is it seems like it's only the displays that don't want to wake up or the user interface doesn't want to wake up. Maybe that's a better way to say it because I also can't VNC into it successfully in those cases. But I can terminal, I can SSH into my Mac in those cases and it's fully responsive via SSH. There's nothing that's, you know, like sluggish or any of that. There's no processes running a muck. It just doesn't want to wake up the user interface. And so at least from there I can, you know, issue a shutdown command and not just have to hold down the power button.  Please do. Is, is perhaps the Bluetooth also sleeping. I'm assuming it's Bluetooth mouse and keyboards. And so that's, that's sleeping until you touch the power button. Okay. All right. Yeah. No, it's a good conjecture. Ignoring congesture. Well, ignorant because I didn't share details of my setup. My keyboard is wired in. It's a USB keyboard. I was thinking about the question. Yeah. With the Mac studio. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. The Mac studio might, it might be, yeah, all wireless and then all that. Yeah.  It's frustrating. I'm not, I'm curious to see how this evolves as we, you know, as we get into the new OS and all that stuff. Well, in the ancillary to that too is, I don't know about you, but it drives me nuts on the Mac laptops that if, if you have it in the sleep mode or you have it off and you want it off and you want to clean the keyboard, the darn thing turns on. Oh yeah. You know. Oh yeah. The power button is for turning my computer on. Not any other key laptop. Well, correct. I agree with you. I also completely understand why Apple has made it so that any key wakes up your computer. That way one key failure doesn't. Well, but also we're so used to waking our computers with the space bar or whatever. Okay. If it's turned off and we start hitting the space bar and nothing happens. Well, now there's a support call. Right. But if we make it so that the space bar and any other key also starts up your computer. Hey, we just eliminated, you know, some percentage of support calls. The shake. I'm sorry. I'm not. I don't disagree with you. Yeah. But I do understand why Apple might choose to do something exactly like that. Go ahead, John. I found sometimes. I have to jam on the touch ID or the power key on my MacBook Pro in order to wake it up. Interesting. My expectation is that the first time I put my thumb or whatever finger. Yeah, I think I use my thumb. The first time it doesn't get it. And I'm like, no, come on, wake up. Hmm. Interesting.  Well, either by opening the lid or just by hitting the space bar, you shouldn't need to hit the power button or touch ID at all. I mean, unless it may be after the fact, right, like once it's awake, it might want you to log in and then you'd use the touch ID. But yeah. Oh, yeah. There's something. I assume it's running Monterey, correct? Yeah. So OK. Yeah, that. Yeah. It's fascinating. I don't know. I don't know what Apple has done there, but there's clearly some issues for those of you because I know some of you are going to ask if you are the type of person who would want to stage into your not sleeping but also not responsive Mac to shut it down the right way that the shutdown command and you don't have to write this down because I've already put it in the show notes is sudo shutdown dash R. Now it will ask you for your password. Make sure. You are in the right terminal window connected to the right computer before you issue this command because whatever computer you do it on this will cause it to restart effective immediately, but it does like quit all your apps and flush all the disk caches and do all the things that you would want to well most of the things that you would want to be done. It unceremoniously quits apps so it doesn't give you the option to save things because you're not in that user interface, but it is a nicer shutdown than simply holding the power button for 10 seconds and letting it literally pull power from the motherboard. So yeah. And you got to put sudo in front of it and it will ask you for your password because generally speaking, you need to be root to force a computer to do a system-wide thing like shutting down. One last little tip that showed up in our Discord group and then we'll have then we've got some some follow-ups and we'll talk about NFC is a little bit we've got we've got all kinds of things. We'll share some information about our sponsors and it's going to be great. So who Todd in our Discord channel at maquicab.com slash discord says with regards to a you're do not disturb focus. He says I have a bunch of contacts in the allowed people and some apps in the allowed apps and then it hit me that I would hate to have to recreate those lists if something went sideways and I got caught. He says so I've taken screenshots of all of my focus groups and I've saved them to a note that synced with iCloud. This is super smart. I mean obviously if you're just migrating from phone to phone or restoring from a backup or something it should pull these things in but it never hurts to have those backups in a visual way so that you can you can compare and be like oh right this other app that I want to have in my exclusion list boom there it is so yeah good call Todd. I do that a lot with when I have to migrate routers or something where there's just lots and lots and lots of settings I will just go through page by page and take screenshot after screenshot and works out I mean why not right like at the very least you can go back so where does one set their focus groups well this would be in settings good question and I think isn't it just in general I forget where I set all my focus stuff oh no it's just settings focus yeah right there settings focus and you can add as many groups of focus as you so choose and they can each be tweaked differently it's a wonderful thing so yeah at least that's what I do on my phone and on the Mac I'm trying to think of where so on the Mac it's in notifications and focus inside system preferences and it's the second tab there so you can fire that up as well and you can see all your I see these groups notifications and focus yeah yeah it's and then you can add different things I talk about my nuclear group where I have just the people just the four of us in our family and I have my podcasting group where I have you guys and Paul Kent and Shannon Jean with whom I do the giggab and small business show podcasts and then you can also set apps so I have discord and Mac as apps that are allowed to get through when I'm in podcasting focus so yeah it's pretty good I like it it's the way it works oh yes okay yeah I see oh I actually set some at one point yeah so you're in in the group yeah important people are in the group yeah yeah and I have a keyboard maestro macro that puts me into that I did like I trigger when we're going to do for example this show it launches all the apps that I need launched quits apps that I might not want to have running and I have it now put me in my podcasting focus mode so that I know that the the interruptions that I get will be desired at least theoretically desired interruptions and then of course from there I have an automation on my iPhone that turns off the air purifier in the studio when I am in podcasting focus and then another automation that turns it back on when I'm out of podcasting focus so you know it manages it all I automation is man it's pretty cool what these computers can do pretty cool should do a show about what computers can do I think that would be fun yeah people might tune into that I think so alright let's tell them about our sponsors if that works for you Mr. Braun sounds good today is other world computing at maxsales.com with their OWC mini stack STX so this is stackable storage and thunderbolt hub with expansion the mini stack STX is shaped just like a mac mini and it's built for your mac mini to sit on top of it so you can add a mix of up to 5 thunderbolt devices 3 USB devices and 2 displays and you can use with thunderbolt or USB equipped max PCs, iPads, Chromebooks, Android tablets virtually anything that supports external storage this thing's got 4 thunderbolt ports on the back of it and then you can just use them any way you want one goes upstream to your mac and then from there you're good to go inside it you've got the dual drive dynamo there's a universal SATA drive bay that holds a hard disk or an SSD and then when you need to support low latency instant access operations the NVMe M.2 SSD slot has everything covered for you so put what you want inside it connect what you want outside it this really is your thunderbolt hub with storage you can get one for $279 empty and then you can go all the way up you can get right from them you can get an 18 terabyte drive in there and an 8 terabyte SSD or anything in between you know you want a 2 terabyte drive and no SSD no problem just go mix and match get what you want and you're gonna love it go check it out the mini stack STX from OWC at maxsales.com and our thanks to maxsales.com for sponsoring this episode next up well it's me not me here but say me Dave I'm the co-host of another podcast called The Small Business Show I do it with Shannon Jean who has direct ties to our Apple community here Shannon was the co-founder of both Techrestore and Mac Rescue he's a Mac guy and Apple guy just like the rest of us and Shannon and I have run several businesses together over the years seven years ago we decided to start doing this show and at first we thought we were doing a show for small business owners hence the name The Small Business Show what we realized from our listeners what the show is about is thinking with your business brain so just like here you know the show is ostensibly about being a Mac user an Apple user but really what we talk about is using your troubleshooting brain to enhance your life right and then other things like you know cool things that we find and the same is true of The Small Business Show we're just using a different mindset to approach solving all kinds of problems it's that business brain mindset of always looking where are the angles what can you do to make sure you're living that charmed life taking advantage of things we're huge fans of credit card loyalty reward programs that's a big key to living the charmed life we're always talking about things like managing how to budget for stuff and how to increase your productivity without driving yourself nuts without having to rely on discipline we've got all kinds of these tricks and stuff that we talk about we answer people's questions similar to what we do here if you're into learning how to think more with your business brain or if you're someone who thinks with your business brain and you want to join a community of like-minded folks business show dot co that's where we are every week the Small Business Show with Shannon Jean and me business show dot co check it out and yeah thanks for checking it out we appreciate it thanks for everything alright John you want to talk to us we got a bunch of follow-ups about NFC's you want to take us there we'll do what is NFC you may ask near field communication and it's basically the wireless technology that your phone uses to talk to other things but we explored this a while ago so you can and I didn't know this I thought it was just a read thing but apparently your phone I think 13 and beyond or maybe 12 and beyond maybe 11 and beyond I thought it was 10R could write NFC's but I may be ascribing a feature that didn't exist back then yeah so the cool part is your phone has the ability to write to NFC's but you need an app to do it so I found one a while back and mentioned it so anyways John says I checked out the NFC writing app you mentioned on episode 933 called NFC QR code document scanner it does all sorts of things it does the scanning for free but writing to NFC tags requires a subscription of $3 a month or a $70 one time fee which I did not find to be the case with my version of the app I use a free alternative that does writing for free and I think the functionality of the writing and address card is actually better in the free app the alternative is NFC 21 tools and I checked out and it's it's good I wanted to describe what I consider better about the free app you can choose your address card using either of the NFC apps but only the free one NFC 21 lets you remove some fields before you write to the tag I wanted to do this because the address card I have for myself and my phone includes my home address NFC 21 let me remove any fields I wanted before I wanted to bring my address cards to NFC nice huh cool that's awesome yeah that's what we need yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah pjmickles in the chat at live.mackycap.com or mackycap.com slash discord because they kind of go to the same place ish points out that the app that you mentioned last week also enabled him to write for free so yeah whatever the limitation is the two of you didn't hit it but listener John did so but good to know about NFC 21 tools for sure yeah good stuff anything more on that or you want to you want to answer Terry's question or address Terry's question I guess not really I don't think we have an answer I think I do well we'll see alright so Terry says um alright so he took the the app that I recommended and he says I have tags and programming is easy when I program a tag for a UL URL or a contact it works when I program my Wi-Fi I get nothing when I read the tag the Wi-Fi name and password is there but my phone won't read it my friend's phone won't read it either on an iPhone 11 pro not critical now I'm curious could be the tags should I buy different tags um my experience has been no I don't think it's the tags um for whatever reason I don't know but Apple's parser doesn't seem to like all data types and I did a little experiment so I took one of the utilities and I wrote out I think it was a text field so you can just write a bunch of text to the um to the tag um you can write some other things too but I found that unless you run the app it will not read it could you run an Apple script to launch an app um huh not sure but um yeah what and so here's the experiment I did a short cut Pete uh but and that does work you can because there's no Apple script on iPhone right uh but but shortcuts yes there there are and you absolutely can write a shortcut to do a thing when it senses an NFC tag and for that you don't even need to write anything to the tag you just take the tag and then you know during the setup process of your of your shortcut you you know tap your phone near the tag and it the ID of the tag and then okay great I know what to do everything's great but that is a very intentional thing right like I can do you have to have the shortcut on your phone your guests would have to have it on their phone and they weren't they aren't going to they aren't going to but that's exactly right but yes you can do that but in yeah I think so go ahead John the uh you wrote just generic text out to an NFC yeah so I tried to so the thing is the the NFC apps will have templates for various data types as mentioned before there's a business card um I wrote I tried two data types so one of them I wrote a telephone number you can write a telephone number and when I held held up the phone not running the app it read it just fine I'm like okay that's nice um but if I wrote a text string I had to run the app in order for the phone to recognize that there was something it should be reading so I don't know the that that's my answer is yeah you got to run the app I had um I swear I have memories of being at a Mac tech conference and they had written I say they it very easily at Mac tech you know nobody is the smartest person in the room right not the conference organizers not the speakers not the like everybody smarter than everybody else and it's like I love it it's great so when I say they did this it could very well have been the conference organizers but it also might just have been an attendee but uh there was a bunch of NFC tags stuck outside of a few of the different conference rooms and you could just tap your phone on it and they had the Wi-Fi credentials right there and connect to the network so I swear that I have done this however this was many many years ago I remember having an iPhone 10 r at this event so that can perhaps normalize the year for us or at least identify the year for us and it's possible that Apple has removed that functionality from current versions of iOS I don't know why Apple would remove that one and maybe my memory is flawed well my memory is definitely flawed maybe in this instance we are seeing that flaw surface but uh I swear that it worked for those of us that had phones because I think the 10 r was the first phone that would read NFC without you needing to do something to tell it to read NFC I think the 10 r was the first one the 10 would not the 10 r would the 10 you had NFC but you had to put it in a mode where it would read but anyway I definitely have seen this happen before I know Android phones can do it so it seems to have been a choice for Apple to not allow Wi-Fi credentials because it seems like an odd choice to me Dave I seem to recall at the last Mac world there were NFC tags though being used and I don't recall whether it allowed you on to a given Wi-Fi network but they were using it way back then so um but for some reason I feel like it was to get you on to a given Wi-Fi network and NFC was becoming retail so that as you walked into a store they could tell what rack you were spending time at well that was the whole beacons thing that was different I mean similar similar technology different actual implementation correct yeah I don't know someone out there has an answer to feedback at mackeykev.com wait feedback at mackeykev.com I think he said feedback at mackeykev.com I did I did I did indeed um yeah all right yeah let us know we'd love to know good stuff uh listener Jonathan has a question for us and I swear I'm gonna find it yeah Jonathan says I've been having some strange things happening when using my browser on my Mac on my iMac specifically although I don't think that matters it seems to happen across all safari brave and chrome I mainly use brave but I have seen this on others it does not seem to occur on phones the issue is that I have been a getting lots of capture challenges to I got a SSL version or cipher mismatch when trying to go to amazon of all places and I got another one that says your connection was interrupted a network change was detected any advice on chasing this down so I'm not I'm not entirely certain we are answering Jonathan's question with this but I have seen very similar behavior and I've seen it happen with iCloud private relay uh every time I go to my bank's website I am told that I'm connecting from a different place and I need to you know tell him my uncle's name or the name of his favorite cat or something I don't know but I really I think private really only affects safari I didn't think it was impacting everything else but it might be depending on how these things are doing what they're doing so I on a few of my devices I have turned off iCloud private relay and I you know I'll try it again every few months and see how it goes Apple is working very hard to make it seamless in every way but your IP address is changing as a byproduct as the intentional byproduct of iCloud private relay and so yeah I am an avid user of the brave browser and I haven't noticed that I have noticed what you said every time I go to log into Amazon or something like hey you're in a different place yeah okay I realize that and I'm using private internet access VPN those sorts of things so you know hey you're logging in from a different place so I even quit trying to save cookies to it but I don't think it's the brave browser I find that to be an actually an exceptionally well accepted browser yeah oh yeah no I don't think it's the browser I think it's the something about the network connection you said it was a cross browsers but sticking up for brave here no that's great yeah do you use brave as your primary browser Pete uh switch between chrome and brave interesting but you know what's funny is I'd noticed recently that I still have safari as the default so if I click on a link it comes up in safari right but I find that to be more uh here's a technical term for snickety it is it's it's it's less accepting of a lot of things that people are trying to do on the server side uh then then brave and chrome for sure yeah yeah like like we couldn't do this we you know with this I mean is string which is how we connect to each other yeah the whole web RTC thing and safari is is but still evolving but but it could be for listening to Jonathan the issue could be that his ISP is changing his IP address frequently I mean you know I I ascribed it to iCloud privately relay because it that's what it does but that if his ISP is constantly renegotiating his lease and giving him a new address you know when I moved from Comcast to Consolidated I started noticing that too and that's without iCloud private relay and it's because Consolidated you know gives me a new IP address a couple times a week and and you know and they're all over the place I'll get one in Massachusetts I'll get one in Vermont occasionally I'll get one in New Hampshire which is where I am you know but it is fast so there you go expensive right so and I I've alerted them to this and they're like oh we never thought about the lease times affecting people's banking sessions I'm like yeah yep sure does they're like no makes perfect sense they're like we're gonna take a look at that like great sounds good keep up the good work you don't have control over the lease time in the modem it and no because it's a PPP oE connection and even with cable modems you don't have control over the lease time the the lease time in with well if you're using DHCP which I'm not yet with with Consolidated but DHCP lease times are controlled by the server so but like on your router you can control the lease times for your internal network but not you know the address your router gets is is up to you know whoever controls the upstream so which I don't think I thought it was for some reason I was thinking down they you know <IP_ADDRESS> go to your modem interface so that you could set your lease time in there no okay no unless your modem is your router and then but then you'd be setting your internal internal not your external yeah I get that the ISP should be the one having control over the amount of time you get on a given IP the good news is with DHCP that even with a short lease time most of the time when you renew your lease you keep the same IP address so even if you only give it an hour lease as long as the connection remains up if it's you know renewing the lease every hour it's just going to keep the same IP which is why cable modem customers you know generally have an IP address for you months or years or yeah exactly are you are you IPv6 or 4 on Consolidated? Consolidated does not have IPv6 okay so yeah so I've had to turn off IPv6 on on the Comcast side of my connection I mentioned recently I still have both so that I have a backup but if I leave IPv6 on on the Comcast side traffic just randomly goes that way because it's like oh if we're going to go IPv6 we have to go this path can't go the other one even though it's primary so it's like alright let's turn off IPv6 over there thanks alright um Michael has a fantastic follow up for us from recent episodes about VPN and we'll let Michael take it away Hey John, David, Michael in Long Beach uh you guys were talking about I think it was the last episode maybe the one before that about VPNs and you know private internet access came up they have a very good deal going on it's like $79 for three years something like that very expensive and I had been a customer of theirs for a while but I always found the speeds very slow and I moved to Express VPN about a year and a half ago two years ago and their speeds were incredible but in doing my research uh the other day when you're talking about how cheap it was now um VP Express VPN and private internet access are owned by the same company they also own ghost VPN it's a company called CAPE Technologies K-A-P-E uh so that's interesting I don't know what they're doing um maybe they'll all roll up into one thing eventually unfortunately but uh yeah same company on both so interesting alright bye yeah thank you for that yeah and you're right CAPE seems to have acquired many many of the big name VPNs so um yeah I'd let the buyer do their research I don't know that there's anything we as consumers can do about this because it seems like the good VPNs are um are we still oh he's Michael still running in the background yeah he's still gonna get a butt dial from Michael in the background yeah yeah yeah but uh yeah it's interesting CAPE seems to have picked up like uh like he said private internet access Express VPN ZenMate Cyber Ghost and they're spending a lot of money to do this so in the conspiracy theory world is CAPE VPN better known as NSC or CIA VPN yeah or you know the Russian VPN CAPE is CAPE is what kind of a company is CAPE like where are they located um CAPE Technologies not sure I had a feeling I have some memory that they are not a U.S. company but I don't have anything in front of me that confirms that so they may very well be but I thought they were not a U.S. company when I was shopping around again I was I was looking for it because I heard somebody on a radio at one point going you know you know all these these VPNs and they're owned by and they can access yours you know like I kind of look for it but I couldn't really find much of anything and I would I would imagine anyone owning VPNs and wanting to look at your stuff would make it difficult yeah along the same conspiracy theory line right right but you know yeah it's encrypted I use it just to bounce my IP around to keep my ISP from targeting me in ads that's that's my main reason and then my secondary reason is when as I'm overseas I'd like to be able to watch some of my television content totally and but depending on your router you can just VPN into your house and and do that right but I was at Comcast and I was worried at that point I was worried about hey I'm using a couple terabytes a month and they were going to limit me and then you were kind enough to let me borrow yours yeah use my VPN all you want I've got more bandwidth than I need and it's completely unlimited so yep no problem I tell anyone who connects to my Plex server to at least attempt to do it with unlimited no transcoding because by default if you're a Plex user and you connect to someone else's like a Plex server over the internet it will use it will stream at a lower bandwidth because the presumption is that most people don't have a decent upstream to stream to you but I do and so I'm always very happy to encourage people to go you know because that way my server doesn't need to transcode anything it just barfs it out just like it does to my TV here at home so if you're downstream and your internal Wi-Fi is fast enough to handle you know a 25 megabit per second 4k stream by all means enjoy that's what it's there for right yeah yeah I remember one time you were peeking over my shoulder and you were like you're streaming this at low res why don't you kick it up much I had to set it on my end correct yeah it's I can control the maximum that well any of us that run a server a Plex server can control the maximum that we allow people to stream from us but you the client has to choose how much to to ask to pull down so yeah yeah yeah and it's in Brian Monroe I think is asked in the chat room is asking where that setting is in Plex I think it's in it's different in every client so you know on the Apple TV version of Plex is going to be slightly different than the Roku version but it's generally in the quality settings inside the settings portion of Plex yeah go take a look all right you we got some feedback on T-Mobile wireless internet speeds from listener Jonathan you want to share that John sure so he says I made TMO I'm like I didn't know they offered home internet T-Mobile that's there that's your stock ticker yeah yeah and I have been since it was in beta three to four years ago was originally 4G but then moved to 5G it's been great but proximity to the cell tower is important I'm only two blocks line of sight from my tower probably why they asked me to be in the beta and I get about 550 to 750 megabits down depending on time of day and 100 up reliably now your mileage may vary based on your proximity to your cell phone network's tower a good proxy is your cell phone performance if you get good performance on it you'll probably get good home internet performance because it's the same thing they asked your address when you sign up and they won't offer the service unless you get adequate performance that's nice that's all for a flat $50 a month unlimited regardless of whether you're an existing customer or not Verizon has similar service but their advertised price requires a qualifying cell phone plan Verizon is greedy I think Verizon is the greediest of all the US carriers could be look at their prices yeah so 50 bucks what you see is what you get my other choices are Comcast and DSL and there's no way I would get those speeds for that price if at all think 15 megabits per second down and maybe two up wow and we don't match on Comcast in my house 15 down and 2 up would be DSL speeds just to qualify that for folks yeah that makes sense so if you're in the boonies it's probably not viable but if you're not getting Comcast or fiber out there either maybe DSL if it's available I would check into Starlink out there but it's significantly more expensive last I heard it was going to $135 a month plus the equipment fee of $600 yeah unless we have a business case for symmetric internet I can't see any reason why someone would stay on wired internet even fiber at this price wireless well wiped out the landline phone business yeah I think it did I think it's also going to wipe out the wired internet business building towers as expensive as it is is way cheaper than running any kind of wire yes my question for Jonathan or anyone using 5G internet to the home whatever you're choosing to do would be latency and consistency of that when I am on my fiber connection here and I ping say www.apple.com I see very consistent results and they're all in let's say the 20 millisecond range but it's every result comes in and is within one millisecond of the others it's all this very tight consistent pattern and that's really important for things like video chats and that sort of thing and voice calls and anything that requires gamers care about this a lot especially the twitchy gaming if you've got some lag it's going to throw you off and you can be able to compete so I'd be really curious to hear what kind of ping times you get from the T-Mobile 5G especially in a sort of perfect world scenario that Jonathan's in so yeah hopefully we'll hear some follow-ups from folks feedback at macicap.com because we would love to know just how like it certainly from a speed standpoint you know 900 down and 100 up or 800 sorry he's saying 600 down like that's amazing right that's better than you're going to get from Comcast especially on the upstream and that upstream is super important these days and unlimited bandwidth you know you're not being throttled or you charged more if you upload your backups and things like that like Pete was talking about so yeah interesting but I think if the latency is within I'd say if it's 50 milliseconds or less and is pretty consistent then yeah man I agree with Jonathan's presumption that wireless internet will outpace wired pretty quickly which is great you know I like it no cables no cables to fail it's good just got to have power so yeah fun yeah yeah I was having some weirdness the other day with my wired service normally as he pointed out wired service is a lot more predictable or at least it should be but I was streaming something on Netflix the other night and all of a sudden I got the spinning wheel of pain what's going on man so I tried to ping test the apple and I was dropping packets right and left and I'm like oh great so I power cycled so I've learned the way to solve this and we found this I was just going to say this problem plagued us last week when we were going to do the show right yeah I may have to get another cable modem or jump to fiber now's the time man yeah everybody's offering it in my area now cheaper faster yep I'd do it I just have to figure out how to get it into this room that's up to them just call them and order it it's up to you to get it into the room they will do that that's part of their service this is not your problem to solve they know how to do it they do it all day long every day you're going to be good I wouldn't stress about that man you have many outdoor walls on that room right it's a corner room you're golden that's a 10 minute job to pull through the wall the hard part the part that took the longest when they put fiber in here was getting the fiber from the street to the outside of the house because they needed to be very meticulous about and wire it all up and do it the right way and make sure the bends are at the right angles and not too tight but once the guy had done that then they did that without me needing to be here because it all happened on the outside of the house it happened to be here but it didn't matter and when they came back to do the appointment for actually installing it it was just like oh yeah I'm just going to draw right through here is it cool if I hang the ONT inside I'm like yep that's good and I came back 10 minutes later and he's like yeah we're pretty much up and running sounds great thanks for your time yeah I would just call don't have to sweat it that is a solved problem alright we had a contest last week folks well maybe not a contest homework assignment for because we need a term for that maneuver that we've all done when you take a cable from underneath your desk and you are underneath your desk and you want to hang that cable gingerly on the back of the desk so that you can then climb around quickly but carefully and grab that cable before it falls back down and so we had many many contributions here Jose will lead us off this is a possible phrase for the cable dangle how about the over under used in a sentence I had to do the over under to plug in my charger behind my desk used in a sentence man that is super efficient I could see myself using that obviously there's like bedding terminology that also uses the over under so maybe this doesn't stick but I like it it's not a bad contribution and I could see myself using that that's good Karen wrote in and says it's desk and dangling so maybe it's deskling the cable these are terms of efficiency that's how language evolves that's how language evolves the listener Michael his butt dial comes back most recent episode talking about that maneuver with the cable under the desk just enough to grab it I would call that the dangler dangler dangler that fell better luck next time love the show I had a dangler and it fell I mean that's the show title whether or not that term sticks around for us John I don't know but but for sure that's a good one thank you Michael Bjorn wrote in and says you complained about this lack of a standardized term as soon as I heard your request for an easier way to explain this it came to me you are not table level you are not table cable able put that into circulation and it should soon be obvious to all and sundry what you are talking about table cable able all right okay but that has to be more that's not the maneuver that's more about the the person like oh I did it I was table cable able you know I like it all right sure fun last one for today keep these coming in last one for today is almost a cool stuff found in fact it is a cool stuff found he says listener Scott writes in he says you wanted a word for the hanging cable I was thinking along the line that it is a dance between you and the cable that's fair says so I looked at word combiner dot com John I've never heard of word combiner dot com and he says I told it to find possible words for dance and cable and the one that came up that Scott personally liked was dancel d-a-n-c-l-e a dancel you got a dancel so it's like a dangler but a dancel or a dancel all right sure I like it I like it and also I like word combiner I could see many hours being I don't know if wasted is the right term but I think it might be the right so I just use duct tape is that seriously how you do this you put some duct tape on the back of your desk so that you can stick it there and then pull it up huh I have done that smart huh yeah yeah that's interesting yeah why wouldn't duct tape work duct tape solves everything all right my guy from brawn I like it time for a few cool stuffs to be found listener Todd says check out the hand mirror app I'm jumping on zoom calls day in and day out and generally want to know if I look like Gandalf the gray or Gandalf the white before heading into a meeting he says so I use hand mirror which is available at hand mirror dot app which lives in my max menu bar so I can quickly peek at myself before putting fear into my coworkers it works immediately and saves me from having to open photo booth a bonus tip he says you can set it to open with a keyboard shortcut I like this I never heard of hand mirror before but that is that is an app it solves a very real issue to take a look quick quick before you join that call and realize oh my goodness I don't have a shirt on so yeah it's good what that hasn't happened it doesn't happen to everybody else or you're not wearing pants well that usually doesn't matter unless you're getting up and like you know doing a little jig for people on calls which has been known to happen to be fair yeah it does it happens yeah hey I I bought a bunch of these years ago but I recently had to use one you know where you have a wall wart John and you need to plug it into a power strip right happens all the time and you know the wall wart is the wrong orientation or too big and you either have to put it in the power strip and give up another slot on there another plug in the power strip well for and you can you can spend as much or as little as you want on these but on Amazon I bought a 10 pack years ago of these short little they call them outlet savers really what they are just three pronged extension cords that are you know eight inches long or something and you just plug one of these into the power strip and then dangle your dangle your dongle off of that man boy if we didn't already have a title for the show you could dangle your dongle all day long and it it works really well now my power strips all have these I keep a couple in my I call it my just in case it's a case of things that I bring with me to gigs for when you know something goes wrong which is pretty much every gig and so I keep a couple of these in my just in case for gigs too and and it like they're life savers because you just plug it in and then you're good to go it doesn't matter the orientation of the power strip or the wall wart everybody's happy so I'll put a link to the ones I bought in the show notes but obviously you can you know it's Amazon you find a Jillian these things so that's good yeah another nice thing I found so some vendors but not all will actually design their wall wart to be thin yes and also I've gotten some power strips that have extra space on like the last plug which is also another thoughtful thing but I like yours too because then you can turn any any outlet doesn't matter the orientation yeah because I'll have a power strip where things are you know oriented one way and the wall wart tries to be thin but is oriented the wrong way for that power strip and it's going to take a multiple outlets anyway it's like I appreciate the thought but alas so that's a great piece of gear I want some yeah well if you need one well I was going to say if you need one today you can come get one Pete because I have a few extras but you can't be there in 24 hours exactly Amazon will be there likely faster than that and to get them to your house in Florida it would take you 48 hours I could give it to you in 24 but then you'd have to keep driving I don't think that would be such a good idea be along two days Pete that's how we count them with the 24 and the whole there's this thing called UTC Zulu time I'll explain pilots use it it's one of these things we'll look that up maybe a Mars day or a plutonian day who knows John you want to you want to share Dominic's fist shake here yeah it's a good one you said something about querying and interpreting a smart data are not being able to Howard Oakley recently posted an explainer or perhaps a fish shake on the subject at eclectic light his fish shaking point is that somebody looking at you Apple needs to step up and use Mac OS's new frameworks to write a user land driver that can retrieve smart data from external USB drives as Apple has with good reason made the aging smart driver the only thing that can currently do this only installable of one downgrades one's security yeah yeah I love Howard Oakley and I think he's right to shake his fist at this yeah but I'm pretty sure some third party tools will install this yeah drive DX from whatever call can actually do this or I think they include that driver when you would say okay okay but but now with Monterey does that you have to reduce your you know whatever your Mac security to do it yeah yeah alright well good stuff thank you Dominic Dr. Dream sent in a cool stuff found for an app he says I'm working it's an app called duplicate file finder he says I'm working on multiple messes on my iMac much of the issue is my own bad practices and I'm trying to improve I found this app duplicate file finder and I'm very impressed with it and he sent us a screenshot and he it's does what it says it looks and finds duplicate files of all types and kinds and all of that good stuff and so there's many apps that do this and I'm glad to know about yet another one thanks for sending that along Dr. Dream always good and always good to hear from you too listener Wayne shared this Johnny says I use this app called Parsec to remote into my windows machine from my M1 Mac it's designed for gaming so the latency is super low and he says I prefer it over team viewer plus it costs less if you purchase a license but that's not necessary Parsec can be installed on the remote machine as a host it will run in the background and not cause much of a fuss when you need to provide support to someone just connect to the host and you can take over immediately so in the remote access tech support department low latency might actually be a really good thing because sometimes trying to control somebody screen with zoom can be a little bit herky jerky there's a little bit of latency there that can be frustrating so Parsec dot app I like it it's good on stuff yeah anything on that before we keep trucking we've got a couple more we're gonna do it remote remote control so to speak yeah yeah listener John also back to episode 932 says as I was listening to 932 this morning when you were talking about the magic of the measure app on the iPhone says I immediately thought of I measure a free iPhone app which will help get the correct measure measurements for ordering prescription progressive glasses from online sellers like you know Zenny or warby or I by director any of those he says it came in handy for me when I bought frames recently the prescription I got from my doctor did not include the measurements for the distance between your pupils called the pupillary distance he says which is a required piece of data when ordering well he says when ordering progressive lenses it's a required piece of data when ordering any lenses because some frames will put the lenses too far apart and you need to be able to sort of focus it on where your eyes are so that you don't wind up with weird vision issues or headaches he says so I downloaded the app and had the measurements as soon as I opened the app no signing up for an account or any nonsense and it's called I measure and we will put a link in the show notes and and this is one that you're gonna want to go to the show notes at mackeycap.com and click because John shares one word of caution about finding the app if you simply search for I measure in the app store two apps will come up one is I measure and the other is I measure pupillary distance the one just called I measure is the one that is free and has a privacy policy that says they collect no data about you the other one does track you and has a monthly or annual subscription we don't want anyone getting caught thank you John for helping us not get caught good good stuff one last cool stuff found I have is sonos voice the you know sonos for a long time has been making speakers that can either be your a lady or your Google assistant they recently added to those voice control now if your speaker is on a lady it can do both sonos voice and a lady if you have it on Google assistant it can only do Google assistant or sonos voice so just bear that in mind but what what's cool about this is well a couple of things number one it allows you to do so much more than the voice integration with you know with a lady or or or Google assistant does specifically regarding what you can do with your speakers so like the other day I walked into my living room something was playing in the kitchen and I simply said hey sonos join the living room to the kitchen and boom instantly the sound was coming out and that's the other great part of this is not only does it have all of these features that are missing from the other services everything is happening on device it's not being sent to the cloud so there's no privacy issues but there's also no processing delays it hears you and it responds on device locally in your house and it is immediate so makes really all of this stuff really just like instantaneous and it's been wonderful I've been super stoked with sonos voice so I just wanted to make sure everybody that is a sonos person knows about this that that whole on device you know locally responsive thing makes a huge huge difference and it's on any any sonos speaker with a microphone is capable of doing this and so you can just you got to go into the shop and enable it on your specific speakers each specific speaker I should say and then you're good to go so yeah that's awesome to know about then because I've been using the it's I think it's the sonos one yeah has the a lady built in to start in early on those work and then I found myself on a network at work that had a bit of a firewall on it and I could go hey a lady what's the latest news here's the news from a P worldwide right crickets oh interesting well you're not like this is the hey sonos is only for controlling your speakers itself yeah it's it's not forgetting it there is no external connection so this is for play pause grouping I mean when I say there's no external thing like I can tell it to play a certain song from Apple music and it but the processing of the voice you know I haven't tried to say hey sonos tell me the news I don't think it's built to do that okay well I'd be interested then to see if it was but because the other the ancillary to that was my daughter took one of the sonos one to her dorm and I was never able to get it to connect I don't know no it is that the university is done but she she's like well because she was I really like the speaker but I could never get it to play my stuff now sonos in dorm rooms is a is a disaster usually because and may just be a non starter and that's generally because you need to connect your sonos directly to the Wi-Fi right it's not a Bluetooth I mean some of them are blue tooth now but but for the for that functionality it needs to be connected to the network and most college networks require authentication and your sonos won't do authentication and also the school might not want you to the only way I've heard of people doing it at colleges is calling the IT department and having them put in an exception for the MAC address of that speaker so it doesn't so it gets to bypass the authentication you know they'll tie it to your account or whatever you know but and some schools are accommodating for that and some are definitively not now if your dorm room has an ethernet jack some do many don't you can get a router and plug in your router and then you could connect sonos to that which would be a better way of doing it anyway because if you connect your sonos to the the campus wide Wi-Fi well now every sonos speaker on that campus wide Wi-Fi is one sonos family and that might not be a good unless they VLAN your dorm room or something which maybe I don't know I can imagine the disaster that at 2 o'clock playing in you know wake up to some good grunge at 2 a.m. exactly right yeah exactly yeah yeah my favorite is to wake my kids up early in the morning with Tom Jones what's new pussycat what's new pussycat I can't remember the comedian's name look forward on Spotify it's John Malaney and it is the best lunch he ever had that's where I got the inspiration yeah that was John Malaney what's new pussycat it's a scream I am not proud of this Pete I guess I'm gonna share it anyway you might have done it I may have done this in a place that had like one of the jukeboxes you can control with your phone like you buy credits or whatever and you control with your phone and so we did this and they finally power cycle the jukebox because it was driving him crazy appropriately so and then my son said well okay we shouldn't play that again he says do you have any more credits and I said yes and he said alright well now we want to get the most bang for our buck with our credits he says see if you can play rushes 2112 which is an entire album side as one song and sure enough 2112 came up and it was like alright great 22 minutes for a one credit yeah that's fun but yeah we might have done the John Mulaney thing hey if you there's something you want to listen to and it's not what's new pussycat on repeat it is going to be so there I was a podcast all about aviation and it is from our friend and your friend pilot Pete and Fig and Fig yeah Fig's on there we're up to six episodes now Seven's actually been recorded six and seven the same gent who we not in the disparaging way all you had to do was pull his handle once and he was off to the races he talked for about 9500 minutes without coming up for air let's have a party I love you there you go that's chatty catty there it is you pull her string it's good to go but a great raccoon tour of aviation a fun listen and we're going to have him back for more future for sure but come listen so there I was US looks like about 150 people are listening amazing show that you are like right on the cusp of being more popular than 99% of all podcasts well help us out here MGG listeners share with your friends if you're not interested in stupid aviation stupid pilot tricks and aviation stories pass along to a friend who might be there you go thanks for listening folks thanks for hanging out with us John do you have anything to share not at the present time okay thanks to cash fly for providing all the bandwidth for us thanks to other world computing and the small business show for sponsoring this episode I know I'm thanking myself there but you know it's okay it's how it works thanks for Pete for managing to figure out how to join us despite all the issues well and how to get you to enjoy this in the middle of a question sorry about that that's all good hey it's fine it happens Pete what advice might you be able to share that's not only relevant for this audience but also relevant for the audience of so there I was the best new aviation podcast on the planet well unlike what I tried to do earlier today all I can pass along to you folks is don't get caught may not


Dear Doug Ford This is what happens When you open up things that are not run by a private company like Seer Fair and Canada's Wonderland and other places and Allow people to roam free without proper security guards social distancing stickers and Other things that help prevent situations like this This rate here is Exactly why our cases are climbing in Ontario The funny thing is you don't see the media reporting on this The funny thing is You're not allowing places like Canada's Wonderland to open up that actually have good measures in place The security guards are ready and trained to social distance using their apps and Google They have stickers. They will be dispersing crowds They won't even be allowing people near each other in line like you saw here or riding the attractions This is absolutely insane. By the way, masks aren't required here Masks are required at Canada's Wonderland, but masks aren't required here Nope. In fact, there's a lot of people here not wearing masks and what's weird is I honestly thought Canada was doing really well Wearing masks in my hometown Aurora in York region everywhere I go. There's people wearing masks here very few This is how wave 2 starts But there's been no mention of it. There's been absolutely no mention of What's going on at Niagara Falls. The media like ignores it There'll be like an outbreak at a farm with like 23 farmers that get it and the media is all over it But the media isn't all over this and This right here Look at it This looks worse than before what is going on in the world right now This is crazy Like I The funny thing is the person who filmed this for me. Thank you so much Cole by the way The person that filmed this for me told me it was bad and I literally didn't even look at the footage I was like, oh, yeah, it's bad It's just probably a lot of people but social distancing still taking place. No, this is bad Like this is bad and there's kids and there's elderly and there's there's just everyone everywhere It's insane You can't hear the sounds. You know what after my voiceover I'm gonna put the raw clips to for you to just take in because I feel like you just have to take it in It's crazy. Like I'm literally sitting here in shock. I was in discord I was like guys, I gotta go make a video. This is so bad Especially that clip with the go-kart track like no one like there was zero space for the go-kart track the queue for the Ferris wheel a Little more space, but the go-kart track area. Oh my goodness Look at this the arcades are open the haunted houses are open. They're scare actors touching people It's bad and you're telling me Doug Ford and health people inspectors Professionals that a place that Canada's Wonderland can't open With 10,000 to 15,000 capacity there is easily over that here and by the way go to the falls. It's worse but Wow I'm telling you right now that it spread just in this night alone I'm shocked comment down below how you guys honestly feel about this This footage and yeah I'm just really disappointed and there's definitely this is why probably like honestly the beaches and everything It's gone crazy. You see I'm talking about the beaches You need private companies to open up that can have security and stickers and watch over it not places like this Anyways, I'm not gonna say I hope you enjoyed this video. Just hopefully this was an eye-opener wear your mask social distance Stay safe guys. Bye


Hey everyone, this is Christian Buckley doing another MVP buzz chat. I'm talking to you with Smesh. Hello. Hi, Christian. Hi everyone. It's great to have you on and I love talking with brand new MVPs and so I love to hear about your journey. So for folks that don't know you, who are you, where are you and what do you do? All right, so thank you for having me and this was with this interview. So those who know me and those who don't know me, I am Smesh Pathak. I'm an MVP in Enterprise Mobility. I'm living in Stockholm, Sweden from basically from India. So at four years in the Sweden I've brought from home and I'm working for Tata Concertancy Services that is TCS, one of the largest IT consulting company and providing support for customers in across different domains. So I'm someone who is passionate about workplace services. So I'm at it today like I'm supporting customer work with services solutions. Intune is something which I'm fanatic about it. So people know me that yes, if it's something iOS or Android guy then yes, it's Smesh and that's the passion and that lead to me this MVP. So married and with the four year naughty son living in Sweden. Yeah, that's what that's that had to be an adjustment just moving up and having those long nights and long winters. It was not an adjustment. It was crazy because when we actually came in summer from India to Sweden and it was in May 2019. So from 44 degrees Celsius to 10 degrees Celsius and then the first night, oh my God, why is not getting dark here?  And for like for my son who was like not even a year old, he like he took a long time to adjust that I'm not gonna sleep until it's dark. So it has been a journey, difficult journey. You have to block out that. Yeah, for those that don't have small kids. I mean, yeah, you have to the having it get dark early is sometimes a real benefit to young parents. The kids don't know and basically you have to block out all the light. Well, it was very cool and enterprise mobility is really just a very broad category. I know that I have friends that were in kind of back in the 90s, you know, desktop support kind of stuff and just which could encompass so many different topics. So what areas do you specialize in? You mentioned Intune as well, but what's your area of focus? Precisely that enterprise mobility being a broad term in which we have like in tune, we have AVDs and everything. So my specialization is again like Intune is on mobile devices, which I've which led me to go deep dive and those which I sense and getting more involved into those troubleshooting sales and this whatever this new comes in this mobile management world is something which I have a passion for as I'm curious for. So this is my focus area for into enterprise mobility. Well, it's interesting. And what was your path to becoming an MVP? Like, did you have other people that it's really advocated for you or you've been involved in the community for a long time or kind of how did how did you hear about and what was your journey? I would say like we since when I started working around 14 years back was I know that you are MVP you have any SharePoint so you have a SharePoint MVP and I started my journey at the SharePoint and like at that time it was MOS 2007 and there was 2010. So when whenever we had troubleshooting calls and going Googling and those things we turned out to MVP. So if those blogs are something from MVP, these were at miles that these are the persons who are top notch in technology. And when moving from a SharePoint to 365 when I came there the transforming myself to this enterprise mobility. Then five years back I started learning and then Adam and Adam and Steve's show that's everyone know for Intune for the YouTube channel that we watch. I started contributing so first for the learning phase then I started contributing to the community. I am highly active on LinkedIn and like Discord and Facebook and technical community. So the time was that I should now give back to community what I have taken from them. So following certain MVP's Rudy Oms I always admire him and like Andrew and the MVP is an enterprise mobility. So that motivated me that yes we if we if I have contributed more to the community then it's actual work that we are doing. And then one of a Microsoft employee nominated me and then that that day I came to know yes I have been nominated and then that email that congratulations on being an MVP. Yeah. Yeah that's so following the footsteps of the MVP's like you and other like that's inspired me to be there. Yeah it's it's a I don't get a lot of questions I'm sure now that you're you become an MVP you'll start have people come up and say well how do I get underway what's the process around that. So what what is your guidance what are what are the some of the things that that people that want to become an MVP like they should start doing. Absolutely so this was the first question that people came to me like wow you are an MVP or how should we also become. So I would say that first thing is community the more you are involved to the community see MVP is everyone knows it's an award it's an it's a contribution from Microsoft that we do for the community. If I've seen people like who are much more technical and strong who are like sword in those things but if the moment you start contributing the community is the moment you see that yes you have the passion and people will notice you. So I would say there's only one thing that that being an active contributor in the community teaching out to people helping them is what is the ultimate journey towards being recognized. Yeah it's it's a and how people get involved there's so many different ways. Some people are like you know I don't have time to to do to the level of other people it's fine you know there's a lot that you can do and benefits from participating in the community whether or not you ever achieve the MVP award yeah it's fine there are benefits. In fact I've had people that have sought after the MVP award who have said you know hey you know I that was a goal of mine for a long time I've not been able to achieve that but I've I've just made so many connections it's helped me like personally as well as my company and my role and so they see the benefits of participating regardless of the award status but it's there are definitely some things that you can do to increase your chances raise your visibility to earn the award. Right yeah so we have to decide a visibility and it's something that comes to the notice then yeah. Yeah so what kind of what how are you involved in the community what kind of activities are you involved in? My primary involvement is like a question and answer helping people for example we have a very good channel coming platform is on discord where like Eunice and Andrew and other guys they are managing it and we have channels for there for example different platform queries read conditional access air protection policies enrollments those things then I'm also actively involved in a LinkedIn group which is for MS endpoint manager 26,000 plus users in which Andrew Garcia is managing it so like there's the same thing like involved getting involved being on top of it people ask questions to respond to them and it could be that my question is answer is not correct it's not up to their solution expectations but yes helping out so I'm Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and discord these are the basic platforms where I'm active plus I'm also writing my own blog where I share my because basically what I'm sharing is the day-to-day challenges that we face that are unique that we have not faced anywhere else that I try to share on the social media. Yeah it is do you need to have a blog anymore I mean so much is that it's out on video I mean what's your feeling of blog versus video? I prefer blog because I'm not that compatible with the like yep see people nowadays I prefer videos because it's give them the look and feel what they want like they see and then they implement it but yes I prefer blog because writing down on my thoughts taking a sometime to write down okay I face this issue and this could be something issue so yeah blog is also people also look forward and I prefer blog but yes look forward for having my own YouTube channel also one day. Yeah there's something to be said as like I don't have you know I envy the people that have those that really lovely environments or they go through or even using the Microsoft the demo sites to go through but to meticulously go through and and and demo on the features where I'm like I understand that some of my best red blog posts are when I do a technical walkthrough of a problem so some of the years I say here's the issue I see questions are out there let me walk you through and do screenshots and actually highlight hey here's where you need to look here's the each of the features and so even now I've written articles blog posts that were published three four years ago that are still in my top three on my site with the new content which is kind of frustrating when you're writing a lot of new content that that old content still achieves but hey people find your your site do the content that they that they want but well interesting well so any other suggestions for somebody who is interested in becoming an MVP any other best practice your takeaways from your experience yes one more thing like be curious be passionate about technology that you I think that's what so Microsoft simply say that three things be known be can be known what you are doing and like be curious passionate about the technology so speaking on platforms or contributing to platform is one thing but if you are not curious here we're not having your own solutions to the problems that you are people are struggling with then you are not that one who's differentiated right looking into solutions trying on their own getting into like technical deep dives things will help you to when we have and I'm contributing when you're contributing to platforms then people look up to you that you know the technical answers for it right so be curious be passionate about technology that's what I feel that helped me there because when I am talking about reading what in tune I go endless blogs endless topic Microsoft documentations and those things so have that deep knowledge yeah well I get anything it's obviously people need to be thoughtful about hey what is my role what what you know what am I there's what I'm passionate about I do a ton of stuff in the community that's on my time it's evenings it's weekends because it has nothing to do with my day job yeah when you can find that that blended view where it fits in what you're doing with your day job like that's a great thing to have especially if you're with an organization that supports a lot of the activities but yeah I think that's another important thing is that people need to realize that we're not awarded our mbps for what we do with our day jobs it's the things that we do above and beyond all of that yes and that's a difficult job I would say like having a family and then eight to nine hours of work like sticking stealing out some few hours from the midnight from the night sleep from the family and then writing own blogs sometime we get split from the family also but this is what what they as you precisely said they're taking out the time and then doing your own stuff yeah now I think that's that's an important point that people need to understand too well so much really appreciate your time people want to find out more about you get in touch what are the best ways to reach you I'm always available on linkedin discord twitter these three platforms I'm 24 seven every level and to reach me through my blog also and that's the way I'm nowadays more active so you can find out for me easily and reach out there well I'll have all the links out on the youtube and out on the blog post as well so so much really appreciate your time and great to meet you hopefully I'll be over sort of in your neck of the woods later this year but hopefully you get to meet in person one of these days yeah for sure yep thank you very much