Welcome to Mackie cab episode 927 for Monday, May 9th, 2022, Mackie cab, the show where we take your questions. Well, I mean, you send them in.  But we take the questions that you've sent us and we process through them. We take your cool stuff found and share them. We take your quick tips and share them. We take your questions and we try to answer them while we share them. The goal being that each of us, you, him, him, her, them, me, we all each get to learn at least five new things. We learn things from you. You learn things from us. We're big, happy Mackie cab family. And it's a wonderful thing because we each get to learn five new things. I love it. Every time we get together sponsors for this episode include BB edit at bare bones dot com ready for big sir. You can have multiple notebooks in locations that you choose. It's awesome. We'll talk more about that in depth in a little bit and also hunter Douglas dot com slash MGG where you can go and learn about their fantastic shades and savings. We'll talk more in depth about those shortly here for now here in Durham, New Hampshire. I'm Dave Hamilton and here in peripheral Connecticut. This is John of Broad and here in Lee, New Hampshire, his pilot Pete good to be with you, Gents. It's good to have you Pete. It's good to it's good to be here. I agree with that. I love doing the show. It's fun. Yeah. And I'd love our community in the discord server at Mackie cub dot com slash discord. It's it's been fantastic getting to just keep in touch throughout the week, not just when we do the show place for all the comments during the show. And and during the live show pre and post pre and post. It's all there. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But even just all week long, there's questions and tips being shared and answered. It's awesome. It's great. Speaking of quick tips, John, you want to start us off with Lee? Certainly. So Lee says, you know, when you open up an app like text, edit numbers or preview to quickly manipulate and perhaps copy some data or an image, but you don't want to actually save a new file when done. You're pressing command queue to quit the app. You're presented with a window containing options of delete, cancel and save instead of moving a cursor to click the delete button like an animal. Just press command, delete instead. I've always done command D, the first letter of whatever the option is that I want to choose. And I feel like that's done it for me, but I like this is one of those muscle memory things. I don't know. Try it out, folks. Yeah. That's a great tip. I love things like this that come on. I've actually tried it since reading that. It works really well. I haven't tried the command D, which is where I might have thought to. But quick personal point of privilege, Lee, I know it is from Baton Rouge. So I did Lee and all the Baton Rouge listeners, some of my old stomping grounds is an LSU alumnus, the only real tigers in the SEC that'll make some folks happier. Oh, yeah. Yeah. And it'll make all the rest of the comments. Because the SEC is not passionate at all about their sports, particularly football. But in all seriousness, the other thing that he mentions there, if you're a person who does use the trackpad only or the mouse only, I really encourage try starting to use some of the keystrokes. You will be amazed at the efficiency that you gain by even a few of them. It's just to watch someone struggle with the mouse sometimes.  Say that. No. Yes. Yes. You know, okay. So I agree with you that the keyboard can be your friend. But now I have, well, first of all, we'll take all of your comments that you have for Pete at feedback at MacGeekGag.com. We'll just we'll just send those straight to Pete about. feedback at MacGeekGag.com. All the hate mail from especially the Auburn folks who think they're tigers too. Yeah. There it is. Just twist some nice people at MacGeekGag.com. That's right. However, we're always on the lookout for Quick Tips, as you know, and generally we have no shortage of them, but we like more, right? More are good. We like the Quick Tips are a super popular segment and we're going to get to more. But one way to, I Quick Tips are often hard to identify because I never thought of mentioning this, even though I do it, you know, six times a day because it's just muscle memory. I don't think about it. One of the ways to identify a Quick Tip is when someone is looking over your shoulder and says, wait, wait, wait, how did you do that? That's a Quick Tip, right, right there. And then the other way to identify a Quick Tip is the reverse. When you are looking over someone else's shoulder and you find that every fiber of your being has tensed because they're not doing the efficient thing that you know how to do, that's a Quick Tip. So instead of focus that tension, instead of on that poor person, just tap it out to your phone. Feedback at MacGeekGag.com and send us a little Quick Tip and we'll we'll share it on the show. Like Barry has sent in to us, Barry says, just a Quick Tip. Well, he shares it about a studio display, which is which is a fair way to do this. He says, if you have your studio display hooked to your Mac, remember that your Mac with Monterey will show up on the list of AirPlay speakers. And you can send your music and podcast straight to your studio display or any other speakers that are connected to your Mac. This is not limited to the studio display. But of course, it sounds better with the studio display because that's how the studio display works. But but yeah, yeah, your Mac is an AirPlay destination and it's it's a great way to just leverage all of that, especially if you've got a you know, a Mac hooked up to some some decent speakers or you just want to listen out loud. You can just do that from right from your phone and boom, there you go. It works. It's amazing how well it works. So yeah, good stuff. The next Quick Tip we have is from Joe. And I was glad that this came in because it helped me yesterday.  And there's some big, long 20 digit code attached like the proof of receipt. If you float over that with your camera, you can do it with a picture or you can do it just with the camera. You can copy and paste text from the picture, live text, so that you don't have to type that big, long code in. And sure enough, yesterday we actually had a standby generator finally turned on at our house. We had it installed like two months ago, but it takes months for the town to do its inspections and all that fun stuff. But anyway, we we had it turned on and I wanted to go register it. And so there was the serial number and the model number in the catalog. And I wanted to put it in my to-do list to go register the thing or in the catalog, but you know, in the paperwork that came with it. I'm like, man, I don't want to type that. And I was like, wait, Joe's tip, boom, copy. You don't even have to copy paste. You can just insert it wherever you're typing. There's that little, it looks like two brackets with a big equal sign in the middle of it, right? Choose that just like you would copy or paste.  It's amazing. So it's now sitting in my to-do list to go and register. So it's great stuff. Thank you, Joe. You guys use that live text on the regular? I have not. I've seen it a couple of times. I need to get better at it, but yeah.  There's a database of phone numbers and such here. Sure. Looks like I can grab them if I want. You can grab. That's the thing. Yeah, it works. It works well. You remember to do it. And I think I had done it once when it came out and promptly forgot all about it. And then like I said, prep Joe's thing. And hours later, saw the serial number on the generator paperwork. I was like, wait, wait, wait. Yeah, of course. Something as simple as that takes some, I can imagine there's some serious math going on behind the scenes. Let us not overlook. This is text. This is not a kitty cat. Right. Yeah, no. And the fact that it's doing it on the fly. Yeah, it's freaking amazing. Yeah, our phones' cameras look, the pictures from our phones' cameras look great. The cameras themselves aren't really the most fantastic cameras in the world, but there's a lot of smarts between the hardware and the other, you know, the hardware capturing it and the hardware displaying it. And some of those smarts can identify letters, it turns out. Cool. And languages. And languages. That's fair. Yeah, that's fair. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's amazing. That just blows me away with what we can do. Harvey has a quick tip for us. He reminds us, and I think he learned about this on MacMost, Gary Rosenzweig's show. We got to have Gary back on. He was a good guest. He learned about the fact that the network quality command, which is a terminal command built into current versions of macOS, and it's all lowercase except for the queue. So network quality with a capital Q will do a speed test of your internet connection. Now, there's two ways to run it that he recommends. One is dash V so that you can see the results while it's happening. And then the other one is dash S, which does it in series. So dash V, or the default, dash V means verbose. And we'll put these commands in the show notes. You don't need to remember them. But dash V means verbose so that you're seeing more information. But by default, network quality does a bi-directional speed test at the same time. And that can lead to misleading results over Wi-Fi because if you're sending data in one direction, you might be clogging up the other direction and therefore not getting the fastest that you could get in either direction at once. And so that's where network quality dash S comes in because dash S runs the tests in series. It downloads first, and then it uploads. And so you get some more accurate results by doing it that way. That's why speedtest.com and all those, or speedtest.net, I can't remember. But that's why all those work that way. But now you can just do it from the terminal even having to install speedtestcli from Homebrew. So built right into macOS. Thanks, Harvey. It's great stuff. I love it. I love it. I don't know what servers it uses. That would be an interesting geek challenge. So have you used this network quality thing, John? Yes. But I think, yeah, I had the same thing happen. I was like, those results aren't that great. Why is that? Well, there's a variety of reasons. Results might not be great. There's certainly if it's running bi-directional or something else is running that can influence the results. But the other thing is which server it connects to. There are times where I'll run speedtest.net here. And it'll tell me I get 500 down and 200 up or something. And it's like, yeah, I'm pretty sure my gigabit connection is still a gigabit connection in both directions. And I just have to check and change the server that speedtest.net is using.  Yeah, it doesn't. I wonder if there's a way. I think in his email, he had something about it being, he had a script in order to pin it to the. You're right. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So I'm wondering if there's a way to designate the server or something, too. And that's really speaking of geek challenges. That's above my geek pig. And Brian Monroe in the chat room dug a little bit into this and said that by default network quality runs the test against Apple's CDN. So I guess I could have guessed that Apple had a CDN. I didn't realize that. So there you go. I like it. I like it. I like it. I like it. It's good. All right, we'll put that. We'll put that in a link to whatever you shared in the chat there in the show notes. Brian Monroe, thank you for that. Great stuff. John, you got a quick tip for us this week. Yeah, I stumbled across something by accident. So open messages. OK. And normally what you see is on the left are the people that you recently communicated with. And on the right is what you said to each other. Right. There's also a search field. OK. Click in there. OK. You get a whole different view. It shows people that also people that you recently texted with, but then it has a links view, a photos view, a locations view, a documents view. Very cool. I like it. I don't know you could do that. So that could be handy if you're looking for something specific. Yeah. I also, in a similar vein, if you go into a given chat, either a group chat or an individual chat, and you hit the eye, the little info box in the upper right of that chat, it will scroll down a little. It'll show you the photos and links that are specific to that chat. So if you know that, like, all right, looks in Pete texted me a picture of something, I want to go look that up. If I go into that, I can just go see the photos that are in that chat, which is super handy. Or the links, especially, can be super handy sometimes. Yeah. Ah, I like this. Because otherwise, you're forced to go back months. You just scroll down. Yeah. It takes a while for it to load, but it's on your phone. Well, maybe. I mean, unless you're syncing with iCloud and maybe it's on iCloud, I wish there was a way to archive off old pictures from your phone because, like, that's a thing that will fill up a phone. Oh, sure. Because I'm thinking back to the days of Sanuti. When I used to wander around in there in the phone, you know, attach your phone to your laptop and wander around in your phone and find all those files down deep in the chat. Get rid of them. You didn't need them. Yeah, I wonder if you can selectively do that with iMazing. I haven't even thought to try that. That would be the tool these days. I mean, you know, Sanuti did what iMazing then came to do, right? Right, yeah. All right. Yeah, all right. So we've got, well, it's not a quick tip. It's more we got caught and we'll offer a little mea culpa here that we'll share from Todd. Then we'll share a little bit about our sponsors and then we'll answer some of your questions. We'll let Todd take it away first here. This is ADD Todd out of Orem, Utah. Thanks, Todd. A bit of trivia, guys. You've just been caught. I'm listening to the last 10 minutes of Monday's podcast with, I believe, Dr. Mac is how you build them. Did a refresh on my iTunes to see what was new to put on my iPod. And I've got a complete list of Mac Geek Yab. I was really tempted to download the inaugural and listen to it again. Decided not to, but hey, that's just me. Anywho, don't know what you guys did. Don't know what Apple did, but you've been caught. Keep up the good work. Keep having fun. Goodbye. Thanks, Todd. You are correct. We, I was going through some, you know, we've moved to our macgeekyab.com website. Gives us a lot more flexibility about how we do things and what we do. And over the years, Apple has lifted their limits on what the maximum number of episodes you can have in your iTunes feed, or at least what they will display. For a while, I think it was 100. Then it went to 300. And now I believe the limit is 2,000, but it's possible it's higher than that, but it's at least 2,000. And so I thought, you know, that's fine. Let's just open up. Now that we have all of the shows in one feed, in one place, which was not the case at Mac Observer because we had, they were actually in three different places. And if you did subscribe to the feed that we called the MGG All Feed, it was really a Frankenstein of things. Now, all of the episodes going all the way back, as Todd pointed out to the inaugural episode, they are all in the same content management system, it's WordPress that we're using. And so I was like, why am I limiting this to 300? Let's just open the floodgates, let's do it. And so I did that. And Todd, you noticed it, and we respect your choice not to go back and listen to the first episode. I have been listening to back episodes sporadically here. I did listen to the first one recently. And yeah, things have gotten better. I listened, I think I listened to some in like the 7s and 800s, which actually there were some really good things in those. And some of the interaction in the spark was pretty good. So we're eager to get back to some of that. But yes, it did put all the episodes in the feed. There were a few of you on Twitter that alerted us that your pod catchers started downloading some, but not all of these old episodes. We're sorry about that. That's, I did not mean for that to happen, but I suppose it is one of those things that happens when you put more data into a database at times, but it's over. All the episodes are there. The only episodes that we're gonna put into the feed from now going forward are the new ones that we create. So it should be a one and done kind of thing. So thank you for pointing that out, Todd. And thank you to everybody. Yeah, it's amazing that we're here at 927. It's awesome. I love it. And that's all thanks to you folks. We're getting there. Yeah, I know, I know. It's a little over a year, right? Like that's how that'll work out. I think that's how math works and weekly shows all that good stuff. All right. 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Check it out, go to barebones.com, download your 30 day free trial, check it out, enjoy.  You get discounted upgrade pricing if you're an existing BB Edit customer. Go to barebones.com slash store and our thanks to Barebones and BB Edit for sponsoring this episode. All right, John, you want to take us to David? David. Yeah. David says, I recently discovered something that seems the very definition of a quick tip. I found it because my problem finally frustrated me at the point that it caused me to search for an answer and I was obvious once I knew. Excuse me. I frequently access my desktop folder in the favorite sidebar on the Finder. We're recently not sure what started this maybe with Monterey, maybe before. The desktop folder would periodically disappear. I would add it back by dragging the folder into the sidebar. It would stay for a few days or weeks then we'd disappear. It turns out there's a setting in the Finder preferences to accomplish this permanently. Go to Finder preferences, sidebar and check the box for the things that you want the sidebar. Maybe that box is unchecked by default with one of the newer operating systems and that's why I never noticed that it wasn't there anymore. Yeah. So there you have it. Yeah, I need to check that on my Mac in the office because my desktop folder disappears from my sidebar not as frequently as Harvey or as David, sorry, was saying had Harvey on the brain from the last network, the last little quick tip, but yeah, it happens. And I've attributed it to the move which happened long ago to iCloud Drive, right? Where your documents and desktop are synced and for some reason it just wants to move them around in the sidebar. I don't know. But yes, I've seen this happen. Yeah, nice fix. It's good. Hopefully it does fix it for you. Anymore on this? There's a time to move to Eduardo. Eduardo. Yeah, nothing. Eduardo says, asks, coming from a desktop and iPad Pro setup, I'm now living with a MacBook Pro 13 inch I purchased used and a beautiful brand new Apple Studio display. Very, very nice. I spend most of my time working at home with the MacBook connected to the studio display and the battery status as charged. And when I'm out and about, I rarely use more than 30% of the battery. It simply doesn't come down. The Mac is very efficient at power use. Yeah, for sure. To tell you the truth, he says I've never used the charger that came with the MacBook Pro. It just plugs into the studio display and that's that. I wonder if this intense use with it always plugged in could lead to some deterioration of the battery life expectancy. What are your thoughts on this? So it's a good question. And I think the answer to your question, the short answer is yes, eventually. I think leaving a battery plugged in all the time is not the most optimal thing for a battery. However, I don't think it's the kind of thing we need to worry about as much anymore as we used to because of the increases improvements, I should say, in Apple's battery technology, both in terms of the hardware and the software to manage it. So I think we're okay, we're better off now than we were five or 10 years ago with this, largely because Apple has built software to do these things correctly. What do you think, John? Yeah, my MacBook Pro, I used to charge it up and then charge it down and I was like, why am I doing this? Yeah. What can help, what helps me is that, how do you know the percentage that's left? And I use a program called Fruit Choose to tell me that and I've been over 80% for like a stretch of many months and I plug it in all the time. So, at least for me, what caused it to go down to 80% or slightly above was because I was cycling the battery all the time. That may not be the cause of it, that's rarely the cause of it, right? I mean, knowing what we know about batteries, that's not generally the thing that will cause their life to go down. Like the static charging of it in the past, has been the thing that causes the life to decrease. That said, who knows, right? I mean, any use case of one isn't really enough to, you know, like the plural of anecdote, it's not data, but Apple has really managed this stuff well and we'll put it in the show notes to that. Unfortunately, we won't be putting a link to Fruit Choose in the show notes. Fruit Choose has been end of life. Jeff Lynch, its chief developer, posted on Twitter last week, week before about this and he has stopped development on it. I don't think you can download new copies of it anymore. And that was a piece of software that is near and dear to our hearts here. Its genesis involved discussions on this show that led Jeff to think, hey, you know, in part, I don't want to take full credit for this, but I know that there were some Mackie Cub discussions that led Jeff to think, hey, maybe there's an app to remind people to do this. And as Apple's battery tech has increased or improved, I don't know why I keep wanting to say increased, then, you know, the need for a product like Fruit Choose has become less. I don't want to say it's nothing, but it has become less. You can see your battery capacity in a variety of ways. Fruit Choose isn't your battery, your overall battery health in a few ways. One of them is, I think in system profiler, is that what we call system information? Power, I think the power section gives you sight. Perfect. Okay. And I always use coconut battery to track it. Dave, you just beat me to it in the show notes. Yeah. Tell us about coconut battery. That's fine. I was going to put the link in and I saw it was already there in the show notes. You know, I've used coconut battery, but throughout this discussion I've had up at the bottom, the one I found this morning was it's not an app, but just a link to Apple.com, batteries, slash batteries, slash maximizing hyphen performance. And that not only does the MacBooks, but all Apple devices, iPhones, iPads, watches, that sort of thing. And it goes on to give additional, you know, if you're going to store it for long term, don't store it fully charged. Don't store it fully empty every six months. Right.  Go back to 50%. So to maximize the life of your battery, don't put it to sleep and think you're going to store it long term either. No, it will burn out the battery. No, and that, it is not good to store a battery at full charge. It is far, far worse to store a battery with no charge because I've done that and that's the end of that battery. Guess what meets end of life very quickly when you do that. That's right. You can come back if you leave it for too long that way. But one thing I like about coconut battery is it tracks your, and I think Fruit Juice did this too. Correct me if I'm wrong, John, but coconut battery will let you track your battery health over time so you can see how it, you know, how it has progressed. So the nice part about Fruit Juice is it did that automatically with coconut battery. You've got to remember to run it, I believe, and tell it to go and get that data. I was actually looking at my iPhone a few days ago. I was looking at my iPhone if you just go to power and then, or settings, you know, and then into the battery. And it'll tell you the history. It'll tell you that my current capability is 87%. Yeah. Maximal. But it's also an 18 month old battery with daily heavy usage. That's right. Yeah. Yeah. And I think there's your data point that daily heavy usage is arguably good for a battery is just look at the iPhones and iPads, right? Because most of us do not leave those charged in full time and we are running them down all day and charging them up at night and running them down all day and charging them up at night. And yeah, most iPhones sit well above that 80% threshold for the lion's share of their serviceable life. So, yeah. And unless you wake up in the morning and find you didn't quite set it properly on the G Charger, that's the beauty of MagSafe, right? I won't. I won't use Chi next to my bed anymore unless it's MagSafe. Yeah. I hate that. I've awakened in the morning with 18% going. Yeah. Seriously. Come on. Yeah. Bad news. Bad news. MagSafe solves that problem for sure. Yeah. So I either plug it in or I'm using MagSafe. I can't risk.  But if it's not one of those days and it's one of those days, well, then I want it charged. So, yeah, it's good. And thinking of MagSafe, quick, cool stuff found injection. Yeah. There are, what are they called? The little popsockets on the back of the iPhones. Yeah. Don't work with Chi Chargers and MagSafe and that sort of thing, except go search for a MagSafe popsocket.  So you can pull off the popsocket at night and set your phone on it. Of course. Chi Chargers works great. And I actually happened to find one that was customizable for my daughter for Christmas. So she got a picture of her puppy dog with her at college on the back of her popsocket. But it's a MagSafe popsocket and it's pretty strong. There you go. You've got one up in the share of the video. It is a, that's handy. I really like that. I like the popsocket. I don't know why I don't have one of those on my own phone yet. Because I really like the concept to be able to take that on and off the phone and use the MagSafe to its full extent and yet still have the convenience of a popsocket. And they've got all kinds of permutations of this. Obviously all the different designs that you mentioned, Pete. Plus they've got a pop wallet with MagSafe. So you've got the popsocket and a wallet all in one that MagSafe's to your phones. You only have it when you need it. Oh, wow. I wish I'd known about these before my travel, my upcoming travels to Portland, but maybe before my upcoming travels to Greece, I'll grab one of these. Well, I think I'm pretty sure I've seen some variant of those in the various big box high tech stores in the neighborhood. Okay. All right. I'll keep an eye out. That's great. Very cool. Nice find. Good stuff. I love it. I love it. I love it. I love it. I don't know why I never even, like we've been so gung-ho on MagSafe since the fall, which I realized was a year. We started a year late. That's fine. You know, we can't be on the bleeding edge of everything as much as we try, but I'm surprised that this hasn't come up yet because that seems like a great use case for it. So yeah. Yeah. There's MagSafe chargers for the car that, you know, they put on the vent and it, you know, you clap it to it. It charges automatically and you can use Bluetooth to listen. Yeah. Right. Oh yeah. No. Yeah. No. No. I think you're talking about Lisa's using that now, right? Because it doesn't have power play. Correct. That's like, it's, it's fantastic. I love that thing in her car. It's great. Yep. All right. Paul has a question and a tip wrapped inside an enigma. I don't know. It's all kinds of stuff. But Paul says, I recently had an ear pods pro tip damaged and needed replaced. I air an air pods pro tip damage needed replaced. I knew I needed medium, but I temporarily used the large one until I got a replacement. After doing some internet searches, I resolved that I did like the silicone ish ones from Apple and saw they were actually cheaper than ones found on Amazon. Huh? Shop around. You never know. It did take a week or two to come in, but from Apple, I got four medium sized tips for 799 instead of the $10 or so on Amazon for only two. The real problem that it solved, however, was the amount of wax that had collected in the mesh screen over the past few years. The air pods pro sound so much better now. While we're on the subject, any tips for or suggestions for removing wax other than the mechanical methods, pick or similar, any chemicals suggested for the tips, not the air pods. So this is a great find. And yet the serum and dilemma, right, is the trick here. But I would think rubbing alcohol, right? So I don't. It might be okay. But I still like, I think it's going to. I mean, there are things that will dissolve earwax. Now, rubbing alcohol might be one of them, Pete, but it's never going to be sold that way because so many of the things that you would use for dissolving earwax are things you put inside your ear. And I don't think you want to have to put too much rubbing alcohol in there, although I suppose. Oh, actually, you can use more swimmers here. Exactly. Yeah, fair. Yeah. So maybe rubbing alcohol, right? I think that would dry it out more. Just sharing my medical advice, by the way. Seeing as I'm a doctor too now, right? Sorry, that's another show. That was three weeks ago, Pete. But, you know, I do have some experience with cleaning earwax out of ear pods. And I say ear pods, I should say ear buds or in-ear monitors, the ones that I wear for the show always get, you know, earwax in them, the ones that I wear on stage, the same thing. And there is this thing called an earwax cleaning loop. It is simply a little metal loop on a plastic handle. And it works amazingly well to just sort of scrape out and catch the little bits of earwax and remove it from things. So I would think that that combined with a brush to sort of brush out the earwax might be the key. I looked on, I have a bunch of these because they come with my in-ear monitors. Every set of in-ear monitors I've ever gotten has come with one of these loops. So I looked on Amazon for a couple of things and I found two things. I found this 12-piece hearing aid cleaning tool kit. And looking for things to clean hearing aids would be the path to head down. Though, to be fair, not everything that you would use to clean a hearing aid would be relevant to cleaning just AirPods or even just to, you know, any kind of earphones or earbuds. I would, the other thing that I found on Amazon was just a pack of brushes that have a loop on the hand, or they have a loop with a brush on the handle. You could sort of use the loop to get the big pieces out and then use the brush to sort of brush and clean the rest of it. That's how I would clean these things. But, you know, to each ear, I'm so used to these ear loops that it's hard for me to think of cleaning with anything else. I don't know. I don't know. But I don't know that I would use a chemical. It's kind of, it feels like we might head down the path of damaging things, but I don't know. Who knows? Any more thoughts on that, guys? Pete? John? Yeah, again, I have used Q-tips soaked in rubbing alcohol to clean one. But depending on how much is in there, I would think of actually trying to submerge it in rubbing alcohol. But, you know, knowing that I was probably, you know, it could damage it beyond repair in which case I'd have to buy new. Well, and that is the nice part about having removable tips is you could experiment by just putting the tips in rubbing alcohol. Let them dry completely before you put them back on your, on your AirPods. But the good news is, you know, rubbing alcohol has the benefit of drying very quickly, given, given it's high alcohol content. But, yeah, so I, and even then maybe use the brush to brush the screen of the, of the AirPods Pro itself while the tip is off. Much better. I would think you ought to have a brush than a Q-tip. Yeah. Someone in the, Warren in the chat room says, of course, rubbing alcohol cleans everything. So fair. Yeah, yeah. And then BSD Junkie says, I've heard of using museum wax on AirPods to clean the wax out of them, but do not press excessively hard or you will fill them with museum wax. That's an interesting way of looking at it. Yeah. Okay. Fair. Yeah. Yeah. All right. You want to take us to Tim, John. Sure. Tim says, I have a ton of photos over 200,000 and videos over 6,000 in my photo library. I have that library on an external disc following the perennial advice to save money on Apple's expensive internal SSD. But the delays in processing photos drives me nuts and is a main driver in my desire for what would probably be an otherwise unnecessary upgrade from an M1 to an M1 Pro or even an M1 Max. I understand that part of the speed of the Max is the continuing improvement in the speed of the internal SSD. Am I correct in thinking that the external storage, let's say I'm saying T5 Portable SSD is a non-trivial contributed to the delays. Thanks. Well, first off, I mean, internal storage is always going to be faster. The ports that we have now go pretty fast, but I think it introduces another level of connection level rather than being directly plugged into the PC or Mac. One thought to improve something, now I haven't actually tried this, but can't hurt, cash is always fixed things and make them better, right? There actually is a caching feature in Mac OS. System preferences sharing content caching. I don't want to cash your content to see if that improves the performance. I did look this drive up and the specs, I mean, it was seen fast enough, but the Max throughput on this T5 seems to be about 500 megabytes a second. Okay. That's not slow. No, no, it's not. I'm guessing it's a 5 gigabit per second USB drive, which is why you'd see those speeds. I would... Rarely, I see this a different way. Rarely have I found for photos that the management of it is maxing out the top speed of whatever storage I've put it on, right? It's more that it's lots of relatively small files and indexes that are being accessed back and forth and so the lower latency of an SSD usually is the thing that matters most. Whether or not that's a direct connected SSD or an internal one, there might be a couple of milliseconds maybe or fractions of a millisecond, but I don't know that there's all that much overhead, especially with Thunderbolt, but I think this one's USB. There might be a little USB overhead, but it's not terrible. I would look at CPU usage and see when this is happening is your CPU pegged because if it is, then it's not disk speed that's slowing you down or disk access, and that's perhaps a better term is disk access that's slowing you down. It's your CPU. And if that's the case, well, it's certainly then upgrading to something with a faster or perhaps, you know, exponentially faster CPU will very likely solve this problem. And that's going to be my guess here is that I don't think your issue is going to be solved by a faster drive. Well, he's already on an SSD. So it's not like we're moving so much data back and forth that we need speed, like raw transfer speed. We just need quick access to things and that's where the latency of an SSD would come in. I have found moving photos from a rotational drive to an SSD, be it internal or external, is all that it takes. So, yeah, I don't know. You know, your point about content caching, that's for caching things that are in iCloud and also like software updates and things like that. The idea is to have one computer on your network that you set as a content cache and then the first time any device on the network downloads some resource from iCloud, then it stores it in that content cache so that the next person doesn't have to rely on the internet. It can just happen over the local network. Now, if he's managing his photo library and some of it isn't even on the local disk, if it's set to optimize storage and it's in the cloud, well, then content caching might help quite a bit. But otherwise, I don't think that content caching, I mean, it's for things on the internet, not just local things on your computer. That's a different kind of cache.  If they're on, they're on. And if they're not there, well, then they're not there. So, yeah, I think it's, I would look at the CPU usage. We always approach these things and if I were there, what would I do next from that perspective? And that's certainly the thing I would do next is watch, open up Activity Monitor. If you have iStat menus, just keep an eye on that. And start doing the things that frustrate you and see what portions of your system are being maxed out. Because in Activity Monitor, you can see even the disk usage. And if it's maxing out the disk, then by all means, that's going to be it. I don't think you're going to find that. So, no, I think it is a trivial contributor, not a non-trivial one. It would be my guess. I would say in the email that the one thing you glossed over, but the big red flag to me was if he's got storage optimized and it's in the cloud, that seems to me the first and most likely. Agreed. But I don't recall if it's said in the email. It didn't. But that is good advice. If you're doing a lot of photo management, try that. But of course, that's easier said than done. My guess is he does not have storage optimized because he's putting his photo library on a two terabyte external disk. But he could store his photo library on that disk. Whether he is or not is a different question. And it's worth checking that setting in photos. Yeah, for sure. Yeah. Yeah, good catch. All right. Let's go to... Let's go to John here. Is there more on that one, John? I meant listener John. Okay. Great. We will go to listener John then who found an issue for us. He says, for the longest time, I was unable to log in to hotel and in-flight Wi-Fi networks. So after listening to episode 920, I thought my problems were solved. But that's not the case. I went to NeverSSL.com. That's the tip we talked about in episode 920. The nice part about NeverSSL is you always will connect to it without using HTTPS. You will only connect with HTTP. And then that means for captive portals, you won't get stuck in the certificate loop, which is great. He said, but NeverSSL did not solve my problem while attempting an in-flight nor while attempting a hotel connection. It got me nowhere. NeverSSL would never appear. The captive portal wouldn't appear. Nothing, rebooting, emptying caches. Nothing helped. At my most recent hotel stay, the problem occurred as usual. However, I could connect on my work MacBook Pro as well as my iPhone. NeverSSL did exactly what it was supposed to do there. So I did some Google Foo while tethered to my iPhone and found the solution. For several years, I have set my MacBook's Wi-Fi to point to the custom DNS for Cloudflare or OpenDNS. And this seems to have been causing the problem. When I deleted my custom DNS servers and renewed the DHCP lease and let the DHCP server at the hotel populate my DNS, boom, the captive portal magically appeared. I was able to access the hotel's Wi-Fi and I'm good to go. So John asks, was I misguided in setting my Wi-Fi to point to specific custom DNS servers? Should I do that only on my home Wi-Fi and leave my MacBook's Wi-Fi settings alone? And the answer is yes, great find, by the way. That's excellent sleuthing to sort this out because it is tempting to put custom DNS in on, you know, especially on our mobile machines. But it really can screw things up when on guest Wi-Fi of any variety of things. But what you could do at home is set your router to use either Cloudflare or OpenDNS. And then that way, when your MacBook is at home, it'll get your router's DNS settings and boom, you've got what you need, right? Because your router is going to go through Cloudflare or OpenDNS or whatever you choose, but your MacBook is just going to take the DNS of the active network and you're good to go. So you'll be able to do what you need to do when you get to those hotels or airports or wherever that have captive portals. Great find, John. Yeah, I love this stuff. John Braun, thoughts? Ah, it's funny. One of my local stores upgraded theirs because for the longest time, it never asked me. It must have known my MAC address, I guess. That's true, yeah. Cookie or something. Yeah. Yeah, it surprised me that they asked me authenticated it. Yeah, I bet they store MAC addresses so that, you know, if I were configuring a network with captive portal, I would have it store MAC addresses for a while so that it didn't have to do that over and over and over again. So, yeah, for sure. All right. Oh, yeah. And, you know, I'm guessing this is Brian Rowe in the chat room who points out that the captive portal can cause major issues when you are trying to set up your new cable modem as well because those use a captive portal to redirect you to the walled garden, especially with, like, Xfinity. When you first connect to a cable modem, it's not assigned to your account most of the time, so you need to go through their captive portal and connect and do all of that. And if you have custom DNS settings, well, it's not going to work. So that's another good piece of advice there. So thank you for that. All right. Moving on to Roger. We're heading back into travel season here and it seems like many of us are going to be able to start doing some of that. Roger points out, he says, my wife and I both own iPhone 12 Pro Maxes and are going on a river cruise on the Rhine from Amsterdam to Switzerland. We're T-Mobile users here. What should we consider about getting SIM cards for the trip? There's supposed to be Wi-Fi on our ship, but we'd like to be able to use Google Maps and Translate Apps as well as have location data in photos when day tripping off the boat. Okay. So there's a lot to unpack here because there's a lot of leads that have been buried in this. The first thing that I will share in no particular order is before you travel anywhere, and I would even do this for your home area, put Google Maps on your iPhone. It's free, but it's not on automatically. Apple Maps is on automatically. Put Google Maps on your iPhone and then go into the settings inside Google Maps for offline maps and download offline maps for any of the areas you're going to visit. Do this while you're on Wi-Fi and you can thank us later because this is one of those things that can save your bacon if you are in an area with no service. Your phone still will have a GPS connection, albeit a limited one because it's not being able to use cell triangulation or other things, but it will have a GPS connection and you will have the map data on your device inside Google Maps because you downloaded it offline and life will be good. So that's step one. Step two is that you are T-Mobile users. T-Mobile is known to have one of the best all-inclusive worldwide travel data options as part of many of their plans. I don't think it's part of all of them, but check to make sure that you're not just covered already with your existing data plan. As a T-Mobile user, you might be. If you're not, regardless of your carrier, my favorite place, and we'll be using it before we head to Greece later this month, is eSimDB.com. We'll put a link in the show notes, but it's easier to remember. It's eSimDB. Your phones support eSim as do most newer iPhones and will support it in dual SIM mode so you can add a data SIM while still keeping your voice SIM on the phone. And eSimDB is a great place to be able to narrow down where you're going, how long you're going to be there, what kind of data you need. It sounds like, you know, looking at Roger's trip here is sort of the case study. He's going to be traveling between at least two different countries, perhaps more. My geography isn't perfect for that area of our world, but so he won't be able to get just a Swiss, you know, data plan that might not cover him when he's not in Switzerland, but he could get a European data plan that probably would cover him. And it'll tell you on eSimDB which countries are covered. You get to sort and mismatch and all kinds of great stuff. It's a wonderful resource. I got to look for a way to find a way to send them money to keep them up and running because I want them to keep up and running. It's a really good resource. That's what I have to say about this. Anybody else have anything? You guys may be aware, I travel sometimes. I've heard of this, Pete. I've actually had, as you know, you and I are now both on Mint Mobile and you can pre-buy some of your data and your minutes and that sort of thing with them overseas. And the fact that that is, it isn't the cheapest plan out there, it's still made up for well over by the fact that you're saving roughly half on what the major carriers are charging you. Or more, yeah, with Mint Mobile. But I vaguely remembered what you said, which is you can pre-download on Wi-Fi your Google Maps. There's another app called You Need a Map available on the iOS App Store. And that you can download on Wi-Fi again your apps there and that's also your map there and that's also very interactive. I think you're right, I think the thing to do is to call T-Mobile and say hey, we're going to be in Germany. What are your per day rates and as I recall on another major carrier, it was 10 bucks a day overseas as if you were at home. And if you don't travel, it became prohibitively expensive when I was there all the time. I couldn't do that. And if you're buying once or twice a year, that's not prohibitively expensive. Well, it's not for one person. Well, and I think the AT&T did 10 bucks a day for the first phone and 5 bucks for the second phone. I think. I will tell you with the fact that we have eSims in our phones and this has gotten to be trivial to set up. You can probably get away with $10 for the trip as opposed to $10 a day by choosing the correct SIM. Yes, I've never used the eSIM DB. That looks like a really It's a slick thing to try out. It's one of my favorite things that we've found in the last year. As listeners will know, this is not the first time I've mentioned it on the show. It's good stuff. Yeah, the other thing I have is called a PokiFi P-O-K-E-F-I. Yep. They come from Hong Kong. They're not cheap to start, but I essentially have Wi-Fi wherever I go. It's a cellular to Wi-Fi device and it's 15 bucks for 5 gigabytes. Oh, that's great. Yeah, I use it and it starts getting low. I refill it. Wait, that's 15 bucks for 5 gigabytes and you can use it worldwide? Oh, that's pretty good. Yeah. Okay. Now, you've got to buy the device out of the gate. I assume that's a couple hundred bucks. Yeah, I want to say it was about 160 bucks. Okay. All right. So it wasn't cheap, but it wasn't there you go.  And flat rate. Yeah, and I would when you're doing this research to try and figure out what you need while you're traveling think about your realistic expectations of data usage, right? Because I've done it like when Lisa and I went to Mexico, for example, we were now we were staying at a resort and I knew that we were staying in a resort and we knew that the resort had Wi-Fi in most places, but perhaps not everywhere, but I also didn't want to be caught at the airport or in between the airport and the resort not being able to connect like I it was it was worth it to me to spend a little bit of money to to know that I could connect no matter what while we were there. So I went to eSimDB and I found cheap plans. I mean, I think I think I got us each 3 gigs of of data in Mexico for like 8 bucks for for 15 days or something like that, right? Which was great. Actually, I bought Lisa's in one way and I did mine on GigSky because I had some GigSky credits, but you know, we we figured it out and it was it was fine. I think we each used we were there for 7 days. We each used far less than one gigabyte of data and so think about what you're going to be doing where you're going to be going how often you're going to be on Wi-Fi and don't you don't want to be caught short, but you also don't want to get home and find that you used you know 800 megs of a 3 gig data plan or of an 8 gig or 10 gig data plan like like when my daughter went to Italy for like 6 weeks, I think we bought her a 30 gig data plan that was good for 60 days or something and I think she used maybe 10 of it, you know, but right. You know, so hey, think about it before you travel perhaps more importantly think about it after each trip you take and look and learn what you use when you travel so that you can be better predictive in the future. I don't know. And things that you can do to save on that too to get a lower data plan is go to the lower power mode so when you take a photo it doesn't automatically upload that photo to the cloud and eat up megabytes and low data mode is really the key. Yeah, even better put yourself in a low data mode. Yeah, but yeah your phone calls and audio streaming is virtually nothing. It's so low and you use the phone on data using a phone call is Wi-Fi calling is nothing. Yeah, make sure you're doing Wi-Fi calling or WhatsApp or Skype or FaceTime is the safe way to make sure you're doing that and not incurring charges on your roaming phone. And one last quick follow up to many months ago, I think I mentioned it I was in Alaska and the Mint Mobile did not work so I'm able to use the PokeFi there and act as if I'm on the network. I never leave the network I called Mint Mobile and asked them about it. Alright, maybe I texted back. I think that's how they do their support we're not available in Alaska in Hawaii. Not true. They're not available in Alaska. They do work in Hawaii throughout Hawaii. Really? Yeah, that's good to know. Alright, and they use the towers of another major carrier that ends in mobile apparently. They use T-Mobile's towers. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, for sure. I feel like a fool for not having switched to Mint Mobile years before I finally did.  How crazy is it? How much money did you save by going to them? Let's jump to some cool stuff found here, shall we? The first thing I want to share is from StatsDesk on Twitter alerting us to the fact that Synology DSM so this is the software for your disk station, DSM 7.1 solves a critical bug in a security bug in NetATalk, which is the engine that's used for AFP transfers. Now, most of us are connecting to our disk stations on our local networks with SMB, but you don't want to leave that whole open. To my knowledge, this is not yet fixed in Synology DSM 7 but we are recommending here wholeheartedly to upgrade to 7.1 not just for this reason. It's been solid as a rock for us running it here for weeks and so if you haven't yet upgraded to 7.1, let this be the catalyst. I think you're going to be in good shape with that. Speaking of Synology, next episode MGG928 is a Synology geekab. We got Jeff Gambit to come on with us here and you're going to love it. We dug deep into several aspects of this station. Whether you're a disk station owner or not make sure you listen to 928 that's coming up next week in 2016. Yeah, it's an expensive show if you're not. That's true. The other thing, John, you and me we recently got to look at the Samsung T7 Shield, the portable SSD from the folks at Samsung and for those watching the video, I think, John, you have one at your desk or not, do you? Yes? No? Yes. Okay, great. If you're watching the video, you can see it, but it's the Samsung T7 Shield. It is a portable SSD. It is let's see, it's rubber. It's got these rubberized shock absorbers on it and it I believe it's waterproof as well. Yep, IP65 rating for water and dust resistance. It's drop proof super rugged and John will keep showing it for those of us that are watching the video and we'll put a link in the show notes for people that have not. Yep. It comes in two terabyte and one terabyte versions. The two terabyte version is 239 from Samsung. You can probably find a little bit cheaper on partners. It's a 10 gig. It's a USB 3.2 G2, which means it's 10 gig USB and it's a PCIe NVMe drive. So that means it can actually take advantage of all of those speeds. And John, you gave it a test and you were doing 900 plus megabytes per second?  And then I reformatted it and as APFS because I figure it would be better. Yeah. Within 10, it was a little slower actually on APFS. Not surprising. But still 900 megabytes a second, which means that's close to the advertised speed. Yeah, that's as fast as you're going to get. That's great. Say again, which machine you used to test that? MacBook Pro. Intel MacBook Pro, 16 inch, right? Correct. Got it. Cool. All right. Very cool. Very cool. Yeah, go check it out. The next thing I went to this, I say I went I did a virtual event called Tech Fluence and I learned about this device called the Wow Cube. It's like a take the and this is how it it's Genesis there are how it came to be. One of the engineers, his son said to him, why can't we have a Rubik's Cube with screens on it? And instead of being, you know, a typical what instead of saying what I would say, which would be like, well, that would be way too complex to design. The guy said, yeah, you know what, let's try this and he made it. I got to see these things like they were being used. So the idea is it is eight cubes that are connected together magnetically each corner of this thing. So every every cube is a corner has three screens on it. You're going to want to go to Wow Cube dot com to to check this out or watch the video to see how this thing works. But every corner piece is its own standalone computer with three screens. They have a bunch of magnets in there to connect things together and you can use it like a Rubik's Cube.  But there's also games like the guy that was playing this. Let's see if the if the video will show up here on on the on the on the screen. But if you're watching the video, you definitely going to want to go to Wow Cube and check this out. But it there was one game where the guy had like a rat in a maze kind of thing and he had to keep twisting the cube around to give the rat a way out of its current square. Right. And so it was this constant like adjustments and tweaking and this very tactile thing because you're spinning this cube around. I think it's going to be like 250 bucks there in pre-orders now. It can be this interactive thing. It can be a weather station. It can be like a lava lamp style thing. They've built this charging brick. It's really not a brick. It's a charging stand that it's it's a flat base with like two prongs that stick up from it and the prongs go in between these like fins go in between the cubes and charge everything all at once. But it can be on your desk, you know, on your bedside table. There's like your clock or all the stuff. It's got sound in it and like it looks very cool. But it exists like I know it's in pre-orders, but this is not a Kickstarter thing. This is a like I've seen people holding them and using them. They just need to they just need to take pre-order so they can go make more of them. But this looks like a cool thing. The wow cube. So deserving of its name. I like it. Thoughts on that or you want to take it to lawyer Jeff? Mr. John F. Braun. Yeah, it looks really cool. It does cool, right? Jeff says want to play with the full featured classic 68k Mac in your browser? You can try it out at macOS8.app HTTPS on the web. And system7.app Amazing. I love it. That's awesome. And I went there and the first thing I did was play the games that were on the machines. They had a bunch of Ambrosia games on there and I turned on escape velocity and as soon as the theme music started playing Hector went nuts because she lived in that office when those games were being made. Which is pretty cool. She has interesting, Hector is an African gray parrot whose first owners were Ambrosia software and she lived in the office with them. She knows all the sounds from all those games and they come out sometimes and the first time any of those sounds came out. I hadn't played those games in 20 years. It's like, whoa, that brings me right back. Well, I also remember if you played it in free mode for too long a ship named Hector would come and kill you. That's right. Oh, I forgot about that. Oh, yeah. Okay, I'm going to have to go back and play it. Yeah, this is fun. Yeah, it's free. We've got links in the show notes. The next thing that I found is from Scosh. We were talking last week, I believe, about battery jump starter kits to have in your car and they've got their new PowerUp600 torch which is a battery jump starter flashlight all in one thing and it's pretty compact. It's basically the size of a flashlight. You can charge your phone with it, you can jump start your car with it and you can even use the flashlight as a flashlight which is amazing. So pretty cool thing to keep in your car. It's 140 bucks at least from Scosh and of course you might be able to find it less expensively elsewhere but I figured that was a good one to mention given the timing of everything. So I like these things. It's good to have something like that in your car. Do you have one of those in your car? You weren't part of the discussion, Pete. I don't but I do remember hearing the show and part of that discussion was Scosh or Scoshy and we actually used both and in the aviation the term was all the weather is really Scosh today. It's tiny and it's correct me if I'm wrong anybody out there but I think it's the Japanese word for small or minimal. Very little but it's both Scosh and Scoshy. That is not where their name comes from. Because I noticed that it was a small device. Yeah, I have the story for their name buried somewhere in my email here because they heard that discussion and sent us a note. I'm looking to see, I believe because we would always say and I never knew where it came from but it was also Scosh meaning it's little. It is pronounced Scosh. The company was founded by Roger and Scotia Scosh in 1980 and is still a family owned and operated company. So it was named after Roger, I was assuming his wife won't make that assumption. It was named after Scosh's nickname which is Scosh. Which is a proud Scottish. Exactly, there you go. You quote Wayne Campbell or one Wayne Campbell who said I can't think of the actor's name. John, take us to Dan. Please save us. Uh-oh, John's super There we go. I was muted. Right, Dan says I've started to get an Apple Homekit recently and found something quite cool. I've already bought some products from this range and therefore I'm confident to recommend it. Homekit compatible gear comes with quite a hefty price tag but IKEA has provided a low cost solution. They sell a range of smart home equipment called Treadfree. Um and this all communicates with the Treadfree hub.  The great thing is that the Treadfree hub can present itself to the Apple Homekit environment together with all the accessories you've installed. Lightbulbs, switches, dimmers, controllers, LED strips etc. From then on you can use the individual accessories in the Apple Homekit app or the Home app, right? Without touching the IKEA app. For example in the UK you can pick up a bulb with a switch for 10 pounds which is a real bargain and the other prices are equally good value. Interesting. I don't believe it's matter compatible but at this price I'm willing to sacrifice that. Um So, Dave you got it it's Treadfree Did I get it right? Yes, the Swedish word for wireless. Oh, no kidding. All right, cool. Treadfree I'm sure I'm still mispronouncing it. Yeah. Treadfree Fun. All right, cool. I like it. We're right out of time. There's a quick one, at least one that I want to mention here and that is from Patrick. Patrick says and I'm sure I will bring it up here. We were talking earlier in the show about cleaning your AirPods pro tips and Patrick suggests for cleaning your iPhone. He says I found a Dintec kit in my drawer the other day which is a toothpick kit believe it or not a Dintec flosser and he says this is perfect for cleaning the lint out of your iPhone so we'll put a link to those in the show notes. Thank you Patrick for sharing that. He's right. It's this weird I wish I could get a picture of it up on the screen for anybody watching like it's like a finned tip so it's not just a plastic toothpick it's got some bristles on it maybe that's the right way to describe it which will just grab the dust and yank it out of your power port on your lightning port on your iPhone so it's good stuff. Don't store your iPhone in your navel. I have trouble storing mine in my navel it's not big enough anymore I have 13 mini though Pete so that I can fit it in my navel right that's why you got yours too right John we got to be able to store our iPhones in our navels keeps our pockets free alright folks what's that don't store your iPhone in your navel that's actually not a bad show title I mean it's terrible but it's what was the other one I was going to use the cerumen dilemma on the show I don't know which is worse to be honest it's going to be a toss up getting punchy dude what's that Pete we're getting punchy yeah we don't want to talk about the other things that I saw at that tech fluent show so we got we got to pull the what was it they used to do on the gong show they gave us the hook right they would literally put the hook down on the stage well there was the gong but didn't they I guess they'd hook you if people wouldn't leave after being gong they would hook you right Chuck Berry Chuck Ferris Chuck Ferris who he alleges that he was a undercover CIA operative the whole time right the gong show guy did you there's a whole movie about this oh it's fascinating I don't if this conspiracy is false I don't want to know that it's false I love thinking of I think you're right Chuck Ferris right Chuck Ferris I can't remember what I had in the winters but I can pull up Chuck Ferris out of Chuck Barris Barris Barris close he says he was a hit man right for the CIA I don't know we'll put that link in the show notes too because that's clearly the most important thing we talked about during the episode and Jean Jean the dancing machine oh right that's right yeah I remember watching that one episode where every act that came on saying feelings that's wow wow that brings me back yeah I don't know if I saw that live or a rerun but as soon as you said it it was like oh yeah what a disaster that was I probably did see it live yeah alright which means we admit to watching that oh no we absolutely we're not proud people here it's just how it is I don't know why audio is stuttering all of a sudden I don't know what's going on with my computer it got very it got very upset with me as I started doing things but that's okay it's telling me we're finished and it's correct John do you have anything to share with them before we get out of here any words of wisdom or things that places you want them to find us or anything like that where can they find you if not in discord on twitter jonah fran is me he's Dave hamilton he's pilot eat and the podcast is mechicab find us on twitter find us on discord mechicab.com John will be there someday I swear what's gonna happen I see the stuff on my phone you'll participate someday maybe people are salivating to hear from you maybe maybe because they're so eager to hear from you could you share one final piece of advice with everyone jon maybe of course and that advice would be don't get caught great advice may not


Aloha, and welcome to the Ruderman Roundtable here on Think Tech, Hawaii, a program we host every other Tuesday on good government, environment, and local politics issues. Our guest today is Carl Kampania. Thank you for joining us, Carl. Well, thank you so much. I appreciate being here. Carl is also a host here on Think Tech, Hawaii, if his name and face looks familiar. Carl has over 20 years' experience as a construction and project manager, owner of his own business, Kamaka Green, that provides energy and environmental consulting services. He's also a foster parent and founder of a nonprofit called Olomea, which helps kids who are aging out of the foster care system. Carl has served as the regional chair for the Democratic Party of Oahu, and chair of the Energy and Climate Subcommittee for the Environmental Caucus of the Democratic Party. He's currently working on a resolution and a bill calling for the Hawaii Green Fuels Initiative, similar to the Hawaii Clean Energy Initiative. Carl also ran for the state senate this year with a platform calling for improved education, food and energy security, and prison reform, and is married to Sherry Kampania. Together they have four kids, two of whom are adopted. Once again, thank you for joining us on the show, Carl. Thank you so much. I'm thrilled. So I'm very excited about your work on biofuels, which you've been very involved in the last year or so. Yes. Thank you. I think it's an important topic. I had the good fortune this summer, as well as running for office this summer. I got to work on a specific project through the university, the university applied research lab. And through that, we received a contract with PECOM in order to create at least the framework for a supply chain, a biofuels supply chain based here in Hawaii. So I got to spend three solid months devoted to exploring that, analyzing that, and coming up with what it would look like. So that's really where it got the basis, where I got the basis of understanding for really what can happen and what maybe needs to happen next to help. So let's start from where we are now. Where does Hawaii's energy status currently stand? Where have we made progress? Where have we yet to make significant progress? That's a big question with a lot of different ins and outs of that. So where we are now is finally, as a result of the next-era purchase not going through, which I was definitely not a fan of that one. So I was very pleased with that outcome. We now get to keep our own utility. That's one huge thing where we are now. However, what do we do from here and where do we go from here? One thing, I am involved in PV. I'm involved in the installation of photovoltaics for a number of years now. And I'm now currently working on the about six megawatts worth of construction in PV right now, helping to get it all built beginning in January. However, what that means is as a result of the next-era deal getting finalized so that it's not happening, the utility has now reopened up the opportunity for old fits and old NEMs and old commercial projects and old utility scale projects that were otherwise in the queue waiting. So now they've been released. Now there are opportunities to build them. So projects that I started developing five years ago, we're now about to build. So that's one new good thing. With that comes together the technologies that have advanced in that meantime, where we're including and incorporating storage capacity for that. And some of the, I guess there have been bills and resolutions in the past as far as trying to incentivize that as well. We need that. So we're incentivization for storage. For storage, not calling it batteries but calling it storage because there's a number of means. So where we are now is sort of a new beginning of how to continue down the path towards 100% by 2045. So that was another new thing that happened last year as you are more than aware. Passing that was important so that, okay, great, now we're still moving that way. How do we achieve that? That's where we go back to storage. Storage is necessary. And then also utilizing multiple means of electricity, storage and capacity. That includes electric vehicles. That includes, well, whether or not we want to re-engage the idea of an undersea cable, the idea of the amount of power that can come from a geothermal and be utilized by other locations is something that I think is still very useful and can still use some effort behind. So where we are now on that side is looking fairly good but we're not sure where we're headed as far as what the utility ultimately is going to need. One of the things some people want is to make sure that the utility still gets converted from the nonprofit that it is, we'll just leave it as a nonprofit that it is, a monopoly into a for, I'm sorry, the for-profit that it is into a nonprofit entity so that it's much more about the membership base which are the repairs. So trying to convert that, that's one of the things that's going to be hard to overcome but that's one of these steps as far as what else we can achieve. And full disclosure here, I'm a member on the Big Island of Hawaii Island Energy Cooperative, which is an entity that's hoping to be able to purchase our local utility from Hawaii. And you just received, I believe, your nonprofit status. Of course the big step was the denial of the next air merger. So I'm equally as happy as you are. I'm glad we get to theoretically retain local control over. For some period of time now. Let's see if that changes. We need to keep that. What do you see as the greatest challenges to clean green energy generation in Hawaii? The first challenge in my mind is that the utility is a for-profit entity that does not control renewable energy. They have no ability themselves. On Kauai it's a little different how they're structured. And there are some good things I think in on Kauai and some not so good. But the first biggest hurdle that we have is trying to make sure that the utility is not just saying they're working with us, but actually working with us to achieve the goals. Not slowing us down, not shutting people down because... I heard a story actually, someone who works in your office just told me a story today about his mother who has a system that was installed over a year ago. And now she's being told that may not be able to interconnect it. Well, that puts a heavy burden on someone who was promised something before. And those things can't happen. Is that fair? No, it's not. And we need a better way of addressing that. So I see the still the biggest challenge is what the utility does and how they're doing it. The rest of it is technology, which we can overcome technology. We can implement it. Interesting. Can the costs be easily managed if we transition to more green fuels? More easily? I don't know, but more easily. Because with more renewables in multiple different areas, how it's being done with the EVs and so forth, it can actually become more complicated because you've got more different sources to manage and maintain. So that puts an incumbent on the utility to be able to receive, compile, and manage the grid appropriately. They should be able to do that. There are talks about what's needed in order to make that happen. Some inflated numbers that have been thrown around in order to make that happen. But it's really a control system utilizing what most of the inverters that are used, and just to go through that, you've got the PV panel, you have the inverter, and then you have your home. The panel draws the sunlight and converts it into electricity. The inverter converts it from DC to AC, which you then use in your house. The inverters, many of them have latent ability to do demand response. They just need to be turned on. So adding storage in some areas and a range of storage capacity from circuit to circuit, really on both sides of the grid, goes a long way towards helping to achieve that overall scope. So we're talking right now about more renewable energy and storage capacity on the grid. Do you think there's a place here for microgrids? Yes, yes. In fact, distributed energy, and there could be pockets of distributed energy that still connect and still tie in, but have the ability. And if the system is done the way some suggest it could be done, I don't want to say should, but could be done is you have pockets of distributed energy that if there is a wave of blackout or brownout, you're able to disconnect and they exist without having to be impacted. Like an island. Exactly.  So that's a positive and that's something that is being worked on and some development has happened on Maui already.  You had other locations around the world where you see they're already doing these things. So that's an important thing. As much as we think we're leaders, there's many people who have done what we've already been trying to do. So let's talk about biofuels. What are the obstacles and development of a biofuel supply chain within Hawaii? What are the challenges? How can we make it happen? Sure. Okay, so biofuels, to jump into that, first of all, in rough numbers, in rough numbers, every barrel of oil that is purchased and imported into the state, 30% of that goes to electricity. And that's what we're trying to achieve when we say 100% clean energy. We're attacking 30% of that barrel. We're selling electricity. Electricity, yes. So 70% of that barrel is transportation, which means fuel in one form or another, whether it's diesel for your vehicle, for your farm equipment, for jet fuel, and everything in between all the opportunities. So 70% of what comes in is still going to be for that. So how do we address that? And how do we go after that? And that's what the conversation of biofuels is, or alternative fuels, whether it's hydrogen or whether it is biofuels itself and whether that is done through oils or algae or utilizing plants and plant matter and its conversion opportunity. And there's a range of other possibilities. So the biofuels supply chain requires several steps. First is the growing of the feedstock through one mean or other, whichever category of algae or so forth. Once it's grown, you need to harvest it. And harvesting it can include a processing or a pre-processing of itself. The next step after that would be converting it. Now that we've processed it, harvested it and got it ready for conversion, we now convert it into a fuel. That's a technology. That technology exists in some capacities for some feedstocks and not so much for others or is in development for others. And so as we're looking at each of the paths, those are some of the challenges that we already have is okay, what do we need in order to make it happen? So once we can get it converted, then we get it redistributed, put back into all of the pipelines that we have throughout the island and each island and then put it into all the various places in order for it to be a drop-in, what's called a drop-in fuel. To be clear on that, a drop-in fuel just means no change is needed to your equipment, to your car or anything else. It's just a complete replacement. So you mean the biofuels would be simply mixed with our gasoline at the gas station? Yes. Okay, so there's no separate gas station, separate pump, it's the same stuff. Exactly. But now it's 30% local biofuels or whatever we've achieved at that point. Exactly, exactly. And if you consider H-Cat and what they're doing as well, you recognize that there's opportunity to have, at the same gas station, hydrogen fuel with hydrogen fuel cell vehicles, biofuels, biodiesel, as well as standard, if you really wanted standard petroleum-based fuels.  Do you like that better than, let's say, the vision of electric vehicles or hydrogen fuel vehicles? I don't like it better. You like all the above. They're all necessary. I see. There are actual percentages of what is really subject to, I guess, what we need to learn, but we need all of it. We need all of it. Certainly gonna be a long time before any jet is flying on biofuels or electric, part of the electric batteries. Electric, yes. A long time before a jet would do that, but jets are already, there are already a number of airlines, Hawaiian Airlines are looking into it. Alaskan Airlines is already purchasing biofuel, jet fuel. Really? Absolutely they are. And what they say, their motto is, if you make it, we'll buy it. And that's coming in at all different price points because they're motivated themselves towards that. An important group with regards to aviation is CAFI, commercial alternative aviation fuels initiative. That's a, I'll call it national, it's potentially a global organization that is looking into and trying to find ways of working with USDA on the federal level, as well as all of our Department of Ags and everyone from state to state in order to help the opportunities to develop more biofuel growth from state to state. Very nice. And is Alaska Airlines an outlier? Are there other airlines doing this or are they the pioneers? They're one of the first to really make that strong commitment, but there are several others that are out there that are doing that and they all want it. And the reason is simple. It's always follow the money, right? And the reason is simple. One important number to know is at the moment to get a barrel of biofuel for jet fuel or for ever purposes, it's about $80 per barrel. That's not bad, but it's high compared to what we are currently paying for petroleum fuel, which is about 55. 50% of that. So as you see that gap is not huge, but if you remember a couple of years ago when we were paying 140 per barrel, all of a sudden 80 looks amazing. So what is needed to go forward is a bit more understanding, a bit more guidance, some more education community-wide from all levels, including up into government, understanding what is really at stake, yes, but more what is needed in the way of what needs to be grown, how it can be grown, where it can be grown, how it put side-by-side with food actually can create a more vibrant agricultural and manufacturing sector for both biofuels and food securities. Carl, that's a perfect stopping point because I want to touch on that subject in a little bit of depth there. We're going to take a short break and we'll be back with the Ruderman Roundtable in just a minute. Thank you. I'm Gordon of the Tech Tsar here on Think Tech Hawaii, where we co-host Hibachi Talk, where we talk about technology and bring in all kinds of cool guests. Also, my co-host with me today is Andrew... Andrew, the security guy. Thanks for watching. Thanks for watching Think Tech Hawaii and thanks for watching Hibachi Talk. We also have Angus. How do you know that in lab? There's Angus and bringing in all kinds of wee things. Oh, look, you can see my lips move. Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha. Hi, Aloha, my name is Chris Letham and I have a host of show called The Economy and You. The show plays every Wednesday at noon and on my show I bring on guests who are interested or are working in the technology space. And so I'd like you to come and watch the show and learn with me about all the sort of exciting things that we're doing in Hawaii to build and grow our economy ecosystem. So I'd like to say Aloha and I look forward to seeing you on the show. Thank you. Aloha and welcome back. I'm State Senator Russell Ruderman from the Puna and Kau District on the Big Island. Here at the Ruderman Roundtable, we're talking today with Carl Campania, talking about biofuels and other energy related issues. Thank you once again for joining us, Carl. My pleasure. So we were starting to talk about how biofuels, you know, the demand for biofuels is obviously going to be there. Some people, when they hear the word biofuels, they think, oh, we're going to be growing fuel crops instead of food crops. And we can't afford to lose any more food production land or food production capacity. Whether, what do you say to those folks? How can we address that? It's an important question to begin with to make sure that we're not losing food, but instead finding ways to grow it. One important thing to know is last report I saw we have about, and this is substantiated through Sierra Club as well, we have approximately 250,000 acres of ag land that is not being used. Not being used. That is not being used. What's it doing? It's sitting there waiting for someone to use it. Some of it needs infrastructure to get to it, water and so forth, but otherwise it's just sitting there not being used. So there's opportunity for growth there. As far as food versus fuel, because there's so much extra land, we don't have to worry about that aspect to it. So now it becomes down to, well, if I'm growing fuel and I'm making a lot of money selling my fuel products, my fuel feedstocks, why would I grow food? Well, that's a valuable point, except for the fact that most of the farmers that I have spoken with, and I've spoken with a number of them through the White Farmers Union United, their passion is food. And to them, a biofuels line for them to grow would be an additive to what they're trying to achieve, which is the growing of food. I see it similar to, well, looking at it from the perspective of, if I'm growing this, what I'm doing is creating a baseline revenue. So if I take, if I've got three plots of land, three gardens, and one garden is gonna be for biofuels and the other two are gonna be for food. Well, that biofuels is gonna be sold at this amount and I'm gonna be able to get money which is going to stabilize my revenue source. Same thing comes for, if we're utilizing, we know that we've got the food hub that's being developed out in Oahuwa. We need more of those and we need them on each island. We are, I also know that as a KCC is trying to develop a food processing plant. Well, we need that as well as soon as we do that, then all of these farmers get to sell their seconds, which they currently put back into the ground, giving them another baseline revenue. So if we're giving the farmers baseline revenues, then that means we're giving them incentive and opportunity to grow, not just grow their land, but also to grow more of their food. So that's how you would want it to work and have it coincide with just growing both. You would never want to, and I would actually, if there's opportunity to advance legislation, I would wanna make it clear that you're only allowed, I will call it 30% or whatever, some percentage of biofuel growth compared to food growth. We just wanna make sure that we don't ever lose ground on that. I see, which would be a very welcome control, in my opinion, because when you talk about the passion-based small farmer, which I think we were talking about here, they're gonna grow food.  You got a thousand acre lease and the accountant says you're gonna make money more with biofuels than with food. They're not gonna grow food because they're passionate about it, they're gonna grow 100% or so. So we need some, in my opinion, we need something like the mechanism you just mentioned to prevent the loss of food farmland to fuels. Are there any crops that would do both in the same plant? I'm not aware of any crops that you can grow and at least not in first stage. In second stage you can. So what I mean by second stage is once you have harvested whatever you're getting out of that particular crop, whether it's a fruit or whatever it is, once you've harvested it, oftentimes you end up with trash, you end up with rubbish, ag waste. So that ag waste can be converted and can be sold as a feedstock as long as we have the conversion technology on island ready to receive it and process it. And is that conversion technology, is it fairly simple, is it fairly complicated? Could we have it on each island? Is it ready to go? Is it available? That's one of the areas that needs a little help. There are conversion technologies that exist, a number of them. We've got, I'll do a little bit of plugging here. There's PVT land, they do construction waste and they convert that into energy. And that's excellent. We have a Taraviva that creates, that they have their pangamia trees and they utilize that oil and that oil gets converted into fuels. So there's a number of ways of just harvesting something from that. Then there's the, we need, I'll ask you, can we save the algae, the Kauai algae farm? That is a big thing. That is the, it's one of the largest and one of the two or three algae farms of its size in the world. And if we can save it, algae has a, I guess, conversion process value of 40% greater than every other biofuel feed stock. Well, I confess ignorance about this farm. What are they growing the algae for now? For, for life? The intention was, it was a, it's been a research and study facility. I see. But now it looks like it's possibly going to be lost because the economics aren't there anymore. I don't know why the economics aren't there. There's a number of questions, a number of offers that have been made as far as can we keep it? We need to find a way to keep it. One important thing about algae is it doesn't care what your ag land classification is. You can grow algae on Class D land. You can grow it on concrete. It doesn't matter. It just needs to have the pond and needs to be able to have the process. So this algae farm is a pond. It's not in the ocean. It's in a land-based. It's a land-based pond. It's in the middle of Kauai. Very nice. I need to learn about that.  Now you mentioned legislation. I know you've been working on preparing a bill and a resolution that you hope to introduce this year. Tell me about that. Yes, thank you. Spending the summer learning about what it will take in order to create a fleshed out supply chain for biofuels or alternative fuels here in Hawaii. One of the things that came up over and over and over again in all of our summits and all of our meetings and conferences was we don't have enough friendly local policy to help support it. So the conversion technologies that are kind of there, not quite there, they need a little help. They need a little support. And that comes in the way of incentives or potentially revenue bonds or things along those lines. So what I did was I, we took notes and we wrote up reports and we created this whole thing and I realized, okay, if the one thing everybody says we need is some more local policy, what occurred to me is we already have the Clean Energy Initiative. Hawaii Clean Energy Initiative from 2008, 2009 is still in place and it worked. So why can we not take that type of structure and put it into the biofuels framework? There'll be some changes that need to be made to accommodate what biofuels are and where those incentives can be placed and how many incentives and so forth. But that's what occurred to me. So I sat down and said, well, okay, I'm gonna start writing up what I understand and put it into a resolution format and get it vetted through a number of different groups that make sure that everybody kind of agrees in general with what we're trying to achieve and then see if I can get it presented. And so that's what I did, they wrote it up and it's calling for the Hawaii Green Fuels Initiative. I also like to title it as the manufacturing incentive program because what we're talking about is creating more manufacturing jobs throughout the state as well. Manufacturing jobs would be great, because they stick around, they don't get outsourced and they're good paying jobs. If we want to replace, and this is what I said, if we want to replace the sugar cane industry, this is how we do it. Well, that's certainly a timely contribution. Tell me, why did not the Hawaii Clean Energy Initiative incorporate everything that would be needed to promote biofuels? Because at the time it wasn't very well understood. A lot of this research that has been done has been done over the last seven or eight years. At the time it began, at the time that the Clean Energy Initiative was implemented. So that would be one reason why. The biofuels question has been looked at for 30 some years. So the challenge has been, we understand what we want to do, we don't always know how to do it. So we've been researching and testing and doing all of these things and what products what's the best feedstock to grow and where and in order to get the yield you want. So that's what has been worked on for year after year after year for 30 plus years really. So we are now, I believe, at this stage where just a little extra push, a little extra support here or there. And we can bring that $80 per barrel that I was talking about down a little bit more. And we've got the Defense Logistics Agency, they literally said, I need operational volume, you grow it, you make it available, we will buy it as long as an operational volume. That's huge. That's huge, obviously, if the Defense Department is wanting to buy whatever we can grow, that's almost endless market. And if it's centered in Hawaii, that means that our farmers benefit, our developers benefit, the technology developers benefit as well and the state benefits because all that money stays here. Carl, let me interrupt you about out of time. Tell me if people want to get more involved in the work you're doing on biofuels, how can they support what you're doing or how can they contact you, please? Thank you. Well, first of all, a couple of different things. Yes, we do have a resolution and a bill that is going to be introduced. And I'm very grateful for that. I believe it's going to be introduced in the House and in the Senate. The bill is calling for a pilot project in order to help this along. So I would first ask that everyone who wants to participate or is interested in participating keep track of the bill and the resolution through the legislative process. It's going to be introduced probably in early February and then it'll go through each phase of the whole process, which there are three or four steps of the process and just staying with it, following up on it and submitting testimony for it, either in person or through the internet. You can do it that way. That's one of the best ways to make sure that you are staying on top of it, see what it is and what's going on. Another way, if you wanted to contact me, I can give you my email address. It's Carl.Campania at Kamakagreen.com. That's a whole lot. But that's another way I can make sure to forward you the information, forward you what the resolution is and what the bill is. And I am very open, it's not about me, it's not about my bill, it's not about my resolution. It's about what I've had conversations with farmers, with virtually every stakeholder as we sit down in roundtables and discuss what we're trying to achieve and how we're trying to achieve it. Thank you. And if anyone needs help tracking that bill or resolution that Carl just mentioned or getting ahold of Carl, you're welcome to contact my office, Senator Russell Ruderman. Once again, thank you for joining us. This is the Ruderman Roundtable. I'm Senator Russell Ruderman from the Puna District on the Big Island. We're here every other Tuesday afternoon. I want to thank Carl Campania for joining us today and Think Tech Hawaii for hosting us. We'll see you again in a couple of weeks. Mahalo.