It's time for Mac Geekab and listener Tony brings us our quick tip of the week with a tip He says he wanted to add his iPad an app to his iPads dock And it wasn't a new app just something that he's recently started using again And he had no idea where to find it in his never-ending list of scrolling screens And he thought something would work and it did he did the usual swipe down to pull up the safari series It's not the safari search the series search on his iPad and type the name of the app And of course it appeared in the list like it does anytime we search for an app hopefully and then he held his finger on it and Dragged it down to his dock and to his delight it worked This also works on the iPhone and on the Mac as well more quick tips like this plus Your questions answered and cool stuff found today on Mac Geekab 10 16 for Monday January 1st Happy New Year 2024 Greetings folks and welcome to Mac Geekab the show where you send in tips like Tony did you send in Questions like you'll hear in a minute. You'll send in cool stuff found we try to answer your questions We share your tips we share your cool stuff found all With the purpose of Ensuring that we each learn at least five new things every single time we get together Sponsors for this episode include linked in comm slash MGG where you can go and post your first job for free We'll talk more about that in a little bit for now here in Durham, New Hampshire on this new year I'm Dave Hamilton and here finally in snowy, South Dakota Adam Christensen and Pilot Pete is somewhere in New Hampshire with his yes, which on Well, you know when I go to sniffle I went in I was being kind I muted while you're reading the opening quick tip I sniffled and then I didn't unmute so Dave I should just open the window and shout out the window really loud really happy new year everybody pilot Pete from New Hampshire Yeah, I'm glad you got snow Adam, but I guess right. That's a good thing. Okay at a white Christmas nice Oh, that is kind of nice. Yeah. Yeah, that was good. Very cool. Very cool. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah All right Well, we have lots of quick tips to go through today Pete. You want to bring us to yours? Yeah And told us he said there was a recent discussion on MGG The episode before Christmas where a listener wrote in and Talked about sending automatic notification to his family about food being on its way and to set the table He said to me the easy way to do this is to have a message group set up and To do the hey Siri. Hey, yes, lady. Sorry everybody cancel Send a message to X group blah blah blah and there are some notifications You can send and receive the people as long as you are sharing location with those people like you do on a family plan For example, would my now adult daughter's in town and pass the local post offices, which is a local landmark I get a notification that she's just passed the post office. Ah But it gets a little different here, but he says to a former love interest. Okay. I don't know if you're stalking or she's stalking But I think this was maybe while they were Interested in each other. Okay. All right. Oh, yeah, he says I used to say I used to say the important word there I used to send notification to her that I was in her neighborhood Well, so how do I do that? Go to find my go to people and choose a person under the notifications click add Choose notify yourself or the other person and then set the parameters. It works pretty cool This is for example, you could use it to notify someone that you've left work or you're 10 minutes from home or work You know by choosing on in mark. That's thus far away. Yeah, that's sort of thing So it's a it's a really cool way of using geo fencing to automatically send notifications to people When and where when and when you will be in the neighborhood, huh? So, yeah, I Had used that occasionally You know to stalk my family like let me know when my wife is leaving the gym or whatever so that I you know would get but Now when you do that and this started a couple of years ago It says, you know, if you do this the other person's gonna know that you did this, right? And and then that felt that made it feel a whole lot creepier that I was doing this. So I stopped but Actually, it seems less creepy that they know It is less creepy that they know but if they would know I was being creepy about You know about about stalking them But you know, it's it's it's handy like I would want to know when my wife's leaving the gym So it's like oh, I've got 20 minutes like so that I can be wrapped up and ready to like make dinner together Whatever when she gets back like this would be great. So honey, I really wasn't home get the boyfriend out. That's right That's right. Yes exactly This is have you had good luck with geofencing and this is the thing I've played around with this and I felt like sometimes it worked and sometimes it didn't but I more wanted to use it for Automations like I used to have a in one of those Q garage door opener things. Yeah, then you could ask Siri to do the garage door or whatever. Yeah, and It never quite worked a hundred percent for me so I I use an automation to automatically turn my Wi-Fi back on and join my home Wi-Fi when I get home. Yeah Yeah, that that work. I have the same one and that works for me And I yeah, and that is a geofenced, you know Automation, I don't know that I have any others Geofenced in fact, I I can confidently say that I don't but yeah, yeah I don't know if it was a geofencing or just the product I mean, maybe part of the problem was the product itself But you know, I was I had this dream of you know, I would drive Into my neighborhood and drive near my house and my garage door would automatically open. Yes. Yes I I well if it was like the Chamberlain my Q stuff or whatever Yeah, they've they've gone out of their way in recent months to really break that like they I think they end of life their home kit integration product and then they also Like broke the API so you can't use it with With home bridge anymore I don't even know how I would control it anymore like I I have a Wi-Fi Garage door. I think I have two of them But like I don't I don't know how I would control it I guess I would use their app and only their app which is like well cool But I I used to use it just you know manually like a caveman. I would tell Siri to sorry I would tell the s-lady to Open my garage as I got into the neighborhood like I I would be my own geofence You know and it was great like I loved it, but you can't do that anymore They got I meant to tell Pete earlier. You don't have to you if you're up to date on your s-lady stuff You don't know how to do that. Hey part anymore. Correct. That's right. That's which is why I I Apologized for saying that the word anyway. Yeah, I said the word and nothing happened So I've been noticing that that that's actually gotten smarter. I think The s-lady is more self-aware. Yeah, I I yeah, and I don't know that that's Yeah, every now and then you can give a command remember It was a quick tip some shows back that you can just hold up your watch and say 20 minutes and it'll yes It'll set a timer. So you didn't even say your name. That's right. That's right. Yeah. Yeah that I have to give that a shot It's cool. It's great. Yeah. Yeah I about the my cue thing. I am seeing Two comments in our discord chat at Mackie Cub comm slash discord and of course you can you can join the livestream When we're doing it and if you want to know when we're doing it Mackie Cub comm slash calendar allows you to subscribe yourself to it the exact same calendar that the three of us used to coordinate the show So it it is almost guaranteed to be accurate Because if if we're not here, then we're not live streaming the show But it reached W says because of that I had to drop my cue and ordered a morass system Instead and he says he plans to install it this weekend. So I did not even know that morass made a Garage door opener system. Yeah, so rich you're gonna need to follow up with us and tell it tell us how it went Yeah, all about it. Yeah, how to please and then Paul Conaway and also in the chat says I'm using I smart gate and I don't I don't even know what that is But we're gonna go. We're gonna take a quick look here. Is this like a It is it its own garage door opener or is it a Interface an interface. Yeah. Yeah, it looks like I Can't tell if it's it's is it its own is it like the entire opener or does it work? Does it just remote control other openers? It's just an interface. Ah Okay, this is very interesting Yeah, yeah, yeah Interesting and what's this? Let's look on Amazon here and see what the They need to tell me the price. Okay, just get me to the I smart gate pro like I just want to go Show me the money. Oh, it's less the less than 50 bucks. It's perfect. It seems to be. Oh Okay, this might be the oh, well, no, the sorry the pro is 200 bucks. So, okay, so we'll we'll I don't know what the Difference should be an issue.  That's kind of fair. Yeah So you didn't break up the and plus you don't want to break the trend of us Immending really expensive things right got to cost you a lot of money hurted in any fun You might be able to get away with the smart gate light The mini probably not for for us, but that the light. Yeah, the light is gonna be 150 bucks So it's 150 or 200. So yeah, the pro and the pro can control two doors He says so yes, actually it can control three doors Which is kind of magic probably not in my house since two of them are in a different building from the other one But I digress. All right Yeah, we will we will dig more into that. That's fascinating. I'm glad we had this little tangential Conversation side Yeah, well the tangents are often where the you know the gems are found right the gems are found. Yeah, exactly Yep, this is what you know, I say it all the time. These are things. I love about doing this show is I get to learn to and Grumpy found a oh He made a garage door opener and and a home bridge plug-in for or he got a garage door opener and put a Built a home bridge plug-in for it. So yeah, our discord is full of really smart people way smarter than me and It's awesome. Like it's a really great community Mackie cap comm slash discord. All right on to One of the actually many smart people. I think we had this comment from Bruce and Paul and and several others And then there's there is a discord component to this But I will share in the last episode We talked about delaying sends and Adam you were saying you wanted something that you know allowed you to delay more than 30 seconds I think it was you maybe it was me Bruce writes to delay sending an email in Apple Mail for more than 30 seconds just go to the send icon at the top and Click the little down arrow which will give you several options send now Send at 9 p.m. Tonight or send later dot-dot-dot and that dot-dot-dot means that there is more to this option And when you click that it lets you set a date and time for delivery He says I use this often to send out a reminder to a group every Monday morning Reminding them of a Tuesday morning group meeting. Don't overlook Apple's email client. Yeah, I had forgotten about that Maybe it was UP. I don't know we had the discussion Well, yeah, you know I did it because I want to be able to send something a text to my wife's phone And then we talked about using mail to text and later dot IO This would work for me with one minor exception once I turned my phone off because I'm on the airplane It isn't going to send that that mail at that given date and time. That's correct. Yeah, but I Had no idea that was there how many you know, that's things right in front of your nose How am I expected to see that? Yeah Well, it gets even better because Ben in our discord created a script He wanted every email to be sent five minutes later not just 30 seconds later And so it which you used to be able to do with the mail plug-in called mail act on That plug-in does not work with Sonoma mail And so Ben wrote an Apple script that uses user interface scripting to trigger that send later thing and Queue it for five minutes from that moment in time and he has published that script in our discord The link is in the show notes at Mackey cab calm Or at mgg.fm slash 1016 because this is episode 1016 or in your email box If you sign up for show notes in your email at Mackey cab calm so Or if you're in discord, you can just go there, but uh, yeah Yeah, it's a it's a decent little script and he's iterated on it a few times as one often does with well any Coding not just Apple script But it seems like he's he's polished it up pretty pretty nicely. So yeah, that's awesome. Yep. Yep. I love thanks, Ben Indeed indeed and I think you can trigger it with Like keyboard maestro or or whatever speaking of the s lady. Did you know that she knows how to do the laundry Pete? What? Well, I love to hear that. Well, but Todd You're gonna haul it up and down stairs and fold it is she mmm. No, I don't think so. Yeah Todd writes and he says not really but Siri does know I did it again Does does know how to interpret the logos on the cleaning instructions of a clothing label and Todd sent us a Picture, you know that that he had taken of the clothing label and it has like all the weird Hieroglyphics that we've all learned to ignore or at least I certainly have and then like you could with a photo of a pet And it'll tell you what kind of dog or cat it is or whatever you go into photos You swipe up and then there's an option there that says look up laundry care And it gives you a key to tell you that like the triangle with lines through it means bleaching with non-chlorine Agents or the the one with the square with a circle in the middle tumble drying maximum 60 degrees Celsius like that tells you all the things to do or not to do with With a you know with the the the laundry instructions right Yeah, so there's a lot baked in there into the old the old s lady They keep adding more to that that photo recognition stuff, so I think yeah, we'll keep discovering things like this That's really cool. I didn't know about the laundry thing. Yeah. Yeah, I don't I plants all the time because it does plants too, so oh Yeah, does it do birds? I would imagine it does not know if it does bird species or not Yeah, and now I want to know all right feedback at Mackie come calm Let us know if you know because Even think of trying that I saw a bird the other day, and I looked it up But basically had to describe it and okay, okay, there was that app for a while from Cornell I mean, I think the app probably still exists. I think I use their website to determine it Yeah, just the odd I think I know there's an Audubon app that does that too, okay? Yeah, yeah, yeah because I was hoping to upload a picture and look but I just had to describe it Look like a blue Robin turns out to be an Eastern bluebird for those curious. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, it was called Merlin or something I don't know if it's I don't know if it actually exists anymore Yeah, yeah, anyway Merlin bird ID. Yeah, maybe it does Cornell lab. Yep. There it is. All right. I'll put that in the We're all over the place today, but That's fine Shall we talk about Alan in some yeah male and links? Yeah, so this this is this is a good one because you know male got all fancy and You know when you put a link in there basically it wants to turn it into this, you know beautiful Preview image thing and you've got that feature in there, and I don't know when this was added and Alan says and maybe it was added Inventure, I don't remember when it was added either Alan He says because of that he likes to just send the plain text link So he would be constantly clicking on the little arrow and selecting convert plain text link Yeah, and do in that thing, but he says actually there's a there's a better way and he says he's a little slow I don't think you're slow Alan. I think a lot of people probably missed this so same Yeah, he says I figured out you can change the default behavior to show the plain link by unchecking the option in male settings Imposing add link previews. So just turn that off and now you'll have always plain text links And I would assume or hope you could probably right click on that and then Flip it back the other way man. Yeah, rather than kind of switch the behavior I would guess but I haven't tried that yet. Oh, yeah, it does make sense that yeah You're setting the default and so the alternate becomes the other I would hope but one would just that out right now But when Alan sent that he said if any if it's even possible for anyone to be slower than me I just replied with an avatar with the hand up Yeah, we all miss these things it's impossible for any one of us certainly it's impossible for me I don't mean to speak for everybody But it's impossible for me to like even remember all the things we talked about on the show I you know, there's there's times where it's like. Oh, yeah Now that you say that again, it sounds familiar, but mmm. Yeah. Yeah, it's like so I Just just checked it.  I know how to do that once. Oh, yeah, there's my show notes.  It's like if it Like I I need the I need the article that's better than this I don't Helpful to me. Yeah, I need I need the what I need something that works not something I did the fifth edition of this article Yeah, yeah, exactly.  How come they have an update in it? Yeah, so yeah alright Andrew I think Technically that is correct. In fact, I believe Today or was it yesterday Was the anniversary of when we launched Mac observer I think it's well, we're recording this on the 29th of December and so I I'm pretty sure that that's the That it was the 29th. I don't know why I don't have this on my calendar anymore, but but yeah, and And it turns out that was the day that we announced the the sale to it just it just worked out that oddly that way anyway I Andrew shares that iOS 17 to add some new widgets to the iPhone and He says for example, there is now a very useful digital watch face as opposed to analog and And it it has like the time and in big numbers and second hand It sort of goes around the square rounded square bezel It says but it's worth flicking through all of them. There are some other new additions So if you are once you are up to iOS 17 to and I highly recommend you do that There's some security updates in there, too, then go ahead and and Check those out. Do you guys use widgets a lot on your phones? No, I'm being honest. I mean I have I have them I have a few I mean, I guess I have a couple on the phone that the one I use the most is just a photo one Mm-hmm, you know surfaces Yeah photos and I have that on my home screen because it's fun to get it Yeah, I was usually like when good ones come up and share them with my family or text them It's good for memories and stuff like that. That's probably my favorite one, but I guess I kind of do Now I take it back. I'm thinking about it because I also have the carrot weather widget on my home screen I was gonna say I used I use the arrow weather and so that gives me the aviation Yep, whether for a given airport, which I recently found out for all you pilots in the audience is Really cool. It's not only there. It's on my watch And so when I tap an airport you can scroll down to the frequencies for tower and ground and Really, yeah, that's kind of handy. It really is When you're flying along and you're going along on the ground and you forget that they're already in your GPS too. Oh I use I use carrot weather because I like the verbal abuse Yes. Yes carrot weather is is good, especially when the weather is not Pleasant out it gives you some it gives you someone to commiserate with if you go. Yeah Also in Iowa 17 to lock tutor notes that You know those annoying spin dials you have to use in the calendar on your phone to set the start and end times Lock tutor says I just installed 17 to and found that if you tap on the time It gives you a pop-up keyboard to enter the hours and minutes, which is much faster I wonder where else this feature might appear. I know we've had other like granular ways of doing this But I don't think there's ever been a keypad before I think this is new for 17 to so That's that's nice. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, that is new. It's about time. Yeah, right. Yeah Yeah, and even if it's not it's new. Yeah, right. Yeah, yeah pun acknowledged. Yep Even if it's not new like it's good to talk about these things because I didn't know that this was there Yep Yipper Bruce has a Timely tip for us. He says a number of years ago Apple introduced the ability to purchase Apple care on an annual basis. Yep Our Apple care plus I guess however when I purchased my M1 Mac mini I paid for the old-school multi-year subscription earlier this month I got an email stating that my Apple care plus subscription would be expiring shortly I figured that since I'd purchased the fixed term plan I would soon be on my own Several days later I was surprised when I saw an alert that I had until the end of this month to renew my Apple care Subscription, so I immediately took advantage of that offer and now I am good on that Mac through 2024 He says have a happy new year and remember don't get caught without Apple care. Yeah I am not an extended warranty person in general However Apple care and now Apple care plus are kind of the exceptions to that rule in my world It has paid off many times. I think Same Yeah And I know like an extended warranty is is just a profit center for the company's offering it like I I know They wouldn't offer, right? Correct. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, like I know that the the law of Averages and and everything says that It's not worth it. However in this case. I really kind of find that That it is so I don't know I don't know you you Adam. You're in you're an Apple care person as well. I I presume Yeah, the the you know this new option and I generally take the new option to do the you know month to month now Especially with like iPhones and iPads and stuff like that. Um, yeah But you know now I have to start thinking about because I have some older older devices And this was the first year I didn't update my iPhone I would imagine there's a law of diminishing returns at some point. So I have to start thinking about that I think yeah, we have to do the person if I have three years if I'm three years into that or four years I have a device that's four years old. I'm probably at the point where if it breaks I'm just going to replace it. So why am I paying for Apple care at that? Yeah, right. So it's like there's a cutoff somewhere. Yeah, we put it on our Macs But we do not put it on our iPhones. It's expensive on the iPhone and we've found You know and we do kind of rotate iPhones through the family And I always just keep the most recent one I sell off, you know, so if there's four of us that that are using phones I keep five and That's cheaper for me than paying for Apple care on all of them. And if somebody's phone You know suffers the event. It's going to happen. It has not yet happened and you know, right? I'll knock on some wood there, but um It you know, it's going to happen at some point where somebody's phone just gets destroyed and then it's like, okay Well, now you use the spare and even replacing the phone at this point would Be less than having paid for it over the years So so I guess I've proved what grumpy in the chat said about Apple care and extended warranties in general, which is the house always wins, which is correct You know, it's like, of course We had the biggest next week. That's right. Yeah, that's right And I hate to say this but you know, if you do have a problem The the other thing that apple care gives you that you don't get with a lot of other plans, right? Is usually with an extended warranty plan.  Yes And I hate to say that. I mean it shouldn't be that way but That's reality it you I agree with you but that that is the reality you get more than just the I I broke it and the the repair is covered under warranty. You you actually get support with it too, which yeah, it's a smart they They're not fools over there in Cupertino. It turns out It's like they've done this before it's like they've done this It's like they've survived many many many opportunities for the company to go under So many that you might think it's not an accident anymore. So, right? Yeah, yeah Uh, I want to take a minute and talk about our sponsor here, which is uh, linkedin at linkedinjobs at linkedin.com MGG, right? It's the start of the new year and I know as a small business owner I'm asking myself this question. You're probably asking yourself this question What's the one move I can make that I'll take my business to the next level in 2024? And linkedin jobs our sponsor here knows that your success all depends on the team That you surround yourself with that I couldn't agree more with that And that's why linkedin jobs has created the tools to help find the right professionals for your team faster and for free We've used linkedin jobs here. You know, my my favorite story to tell is saty that does all of our uh promotions and You know all the promos stuff that we do for the show and our social media management and all that stuff We would never have found saty without using linkedin jobs and It really like their tools that they have that the questions that you can answer people in the screening questions and all this stuff It's really fantastic And it's because linkedin isn't just another job board linkedin has a vast network of more than a billion Professionals which makes it the best place to hire and hiring is easy when you have that many quality candidates, right? So easy in fact that 86 percent of small businesses get a qualified candidate within 24 hours And this is the key to achieving your 2024 mission by having the right team member to help you do that And this is why small businesses rate linkedin jobs number one in delivering quality hires versus leading competitors And linkedin knows that as a small business owner We're wearing many hats and we don't have the time or resources to hire and linkedin Makes the process intuitive quick and easy. So post your job for free at linkedin.com Slash mgg that's linkedin.com slash mgg to post your job for free Terms and conditions apply and our sincere. Thanks to linkedin jobs for sponsoring this episode Uh, all right. I want to jump to well jp. He'll take the the next question. I believe the feet gap The day this is jp calling query I use bluetooth speakers for my television sets Some are marshal some are bows Even at one time I had an apple device But my question is are there any, uh, factory devices that come to me that are not Uh, pre-ordained to compensate for audio quality And thereby being so basic In their uh, in their playback. I've noticed all of these things Just muffle the crap out of everything because You know the old mp3 days That's what manufacturers did to help make music sound better when it went to streaming And people were ripping cds and having compressed music So, uh, but I find it impossible to uh, sometimes Hear the dialogue Well because the uh, you know the stereo pairs that are being Uh simulated through the speaker are always boomy and bassy And uh, and often muffle the dialogue track. So I often have to unplug the, uh Uh device and just go with the television speakers Which offer me, uh, you know a crisper higher end even though I really don't want to do that so, um I just wonder is there are are there any Bluetooth speakers that exist today that do not Uh purposely compensate for you for an old, uh Audio quality system, you know from back when People were ripping cds and listening to mp3s now that we have such high quality audio files I just wonder I'm just dying. I wish I had the ability to like crank the bass down when I'm especially when I'm watching a football game All right adam you want to uh, you want to kick us off with this? I mean Yeah, I I don't I don't generally use bluetooth speakers for a lot of this these reasons. I mean My solution for this years ago was to just Fight the bullet and buy a sonos It's there's that it's been wonderful. I mean it was like a simple setup You know set it and forget it It's got you walk right that feature you walk around the room I forget what it's called right now or You know analyzes your room and it tunes all your audio for you and they have also a great feature in the app for One reducing loud sounds and then two enhancing voice dialogue, which works great So that solved a lot of the problems from from this perspective How about you p you got any thoughts on this? I was going to say I thought I had the most expensive solution But adam you beat me. Yeah with that But boy is it amazing. I will give him that so Yeah, I actually have a problem. Yeah Um, I I actually have a partial solution. It isn't bluetooth But it does have the eighth inch audio jack and or the optical Okay input and it's they're available at sound fun dot net and I first saw this speaker And I thought it was out of production because I was looking for it and the speaker I first saw And they sent us a demo unit last year I first saw it at ces and we were in the big hall with Dozens of dozens hundreds of people around if not thousands of people around and so the low din made it very difficult to hear anything and so what they did was they put a Uh A dialogue on and you could hear the speaker was Making noise you could hear somebody was talking but That was it and then they put this piece of uh, I think it was plastic and they bent it at a 90 degree angle Away from the speaker and the dialogue Magically came in loud and clear crisp high end. I was like, oh my gosh that that shouldn't work. It was like real live magic and Now they've done what appears to be the their latest mirai speaker on their website is It appears to be two of those laying on their side. So now I think it's stereo and it really is The most incredible if you haven't heard one of these I don't know how to explain it It is for particularly for people who are hard of hearing I have a difficult time hearing if there's any background noise people talking in the kitchen I can't hear dialogue on the tv with those The it it brings the dialogue very crisp and clear right to you and uh, and right now on their website soundfund.net It's 20 off on the top right corner if you click on that and then I was sitting there looking at it this morning And it came up and said, hey, if you give us your email you can get it at 30 off. So instead of 299, it's uh, 209 for for one of these speakers. Wow, uh, if if you are Someone who suffers from tinnitus tinnitus. However, you choose to pronounce it like I do Man, let me tell you that is an amazing Solution to this so while not cheap and not bluetooth. It is a it is a dialogue enhancing speaker That sounds amazing He how much did they how much did they run did you say I missed it if you didn't regular prices 299 And right now on soundfund.net. There's a thing up in the corner says buy now 20 off And then while I was sitting there looking at it after I had clicked on that it came up and said Hey, give us your email. We'll give you another 10 off. So you can get it as low as 209 Right now on soundfund.net. Yeah Yeah, I mean the other thing I was gonna say is like if you want to there's a couple other cheaper solutions I mean apple tv has that enhanced dialogue feature and I know that's supported with home pods Yeah And I think just any speakers that you can pair with your apple tv, you know Get connected to your apple tv, but There's specifically home pods But then the super cheap solution that I use most of time and my daughter hates this is I turn on close catching right That's interesting that your your daughter Doesn't Use closed captioning. I I find my kids Will often use it to have it on and you know the one thing you can do If you're watching something through your apple tv Is you can press the button on the remote and ask the s lady Right, what did they say and it will rewind you 10 seconds Play the last bit of dialogue Show the closed captions For that 10 seconds and then they go away. Yeah, which is That's a great tip another jam Dave, right? You didn't know that one. Yeah, that's that's been a feature for a while It's yeah, it's pretty nice. I can't tell you how many times I screwed up and hit the wrong button and completely backed out of the Show when I was just trying to back up for 10 seconds No, just hit the little the you know the s button on the on the remote and ask What are they because you don't even have to say the the lady's name because you've already triggered the thing and you say What they say and it jumps back and I've noticed it will jump back like if there's been a pause Like if there's a line set and then there's you know a pregnant pause or something Usually during which we as the family are asking each other. Wait, what did they say? What did they say? And it will rewind back to the last bit of dialogue like it's it's smart enough to to know Yeah, it's it's pretty good and it works with plex like it's not just limited to Things that are you know through apple tv plus or whatever So I think I think I've had it work with the netflix app like yeah, I know it's it's great um I I agree that home pod or sonos Would be the right answer here if You know jp's using an apple tv. I did want to address a uh sort of a foundational inaccuracy in the the I want to reject the premise here of of jp's statements about bluetooth Speakers being built to compensate for compressed audio Because of mp3s bluetooth speakers are built to deal with compressed audio But it's not because we used to use mp3s Using uncompressed audio now doesn't change this because bluetooth Doesn't have enough bandwidth to send uncompressed audio. So anytime you're using bluetooth You are hearing sound That it has been compressed digitally now. There are some fantastic codecs out there That really help kind of keep things and and apples got you know their own aac codec That that does really well and other manufacturers can support it apt x is another one that does really well So like there's some there's there's a lot of smarts in these codecs But you are still if you're using bluetooth you are hearing compressed audio Whether you whether you're sending it from a compressed source or not that said Jp you also mentioned that one of the speakers that you were using is a bows bows Their whole sound signature is about low end, right? Like it's you know, it's it's it's um You know the joke was you know all highs all lows must be bows um The They kind of tuned their speakers that way. So it's possible that whatever you're using Has been sort of overtuned on the low end I've had good luck with jbls Like the the flip speakers. They're little, you know pill shaped bluetooth speakers. I've had good luck with sonos is uh, rome and move speakers, which are wireless both wi-fi and bluetooth and they're battery powered so that might be a way to go and they're both Airplay capable Which will give you the ability to have uncompressed sound because it's going over wi-fi not bluetooth So You might be better even if that even if a you know a sonos rome or whatever is the only sonos speaker you have You like you might be fine with it. And I I didn't play this part of jp's thing. He says he's not a soundbar person uh I would argue that maybe you are like everything else you said in your comment Makes me think that you want to become a soundbar person because They are engineered For exactly what you're talking about and like adam said the sonos soundbars and they're not the only ones But you know many soundbars including sonos Have a feature where you can turn it, you know on enhance the diet the clarity of the dialogue or Decrease the bass or both, you know, so like I would I would I would really I would advise checking out soundbars even though you think you're not a soundbar person Hey one last And a question and a comment is one last idea is if you're watching it alone And you have the apple tv you can use the airpods You can use two pairs of airpods though now, right? Can't correct. Yeah, okay. Yep And that's pretty amazing. I watched a before Sonos had added Atmos sound For apple tv um I it was one of my it was like the first south by southwest that that was like, you know Semi post covet lockdowns where some of it happened online and some of it happened in person I watched a movie. I forget the name of it. I know I talked about it on the show but it was a movie about This whole Show that you could go see where you would wear headphones and like hear sounds and the movie was built in you know spatial audio and I was able to watch it in my living room with airpods in and get the full spatial audio thing going. It was really actually Very cool. Yeah, yeah so Another thing with airpods that I thought about just now was You know, it has a couple of those modes where you can I think through accessibility set them up basically like hearing aids and use live listening so You might be able to play around with that and see if you can get better sound through that and I know Like in my case, I even did because I have tonight is to Pete um You can get an audiogram app or you can actually take an audiogram with your airpods Get that profile and add it to your airpods so that they're fine tuned for your hearing and your range very nice Yeah, and then the other feature that I know that is uh, I think live listen but then there's the other one where you can use an iphone as a listening device so you could put your iphone closer to your bluetooth speaker And then oh, yeah that pick up the sound and transmit that to your airpods. I don't know how that would sound It might not sound great, but yeah, right. You might be over here voices better Few options with airpods. Yeah, one other thing i'll throw out there is With bluetooth because of the compression You are adding latency. You're a delay to the system and and you know, even the best bluetooth is still going to be You know over a hundred milliseconds probably closer to 200 milliseconds and one second is a thousand milliseconds So a 20th of a second Doesn't seem like a lot or sorry 20 percent of a second one fifth of a second doesn't seem like a lot But it kind of is Uh, and you'll notice a a gap between when people's mouths move And when you hear the dialogue Not a big deal for a sporting event when you're where you're rarely seeing the announcers You know on video and so that that you know, one fifth of a second doesn't really matter, but But yeah, just bear that in mind, you know as you're kind of doing this the apple tv will compensate for that The sonos stuff will compensate for it, but but that's all doing it with Wi-Fi and hdmi so it's a much tighter It's pretty phenomenal how much number crunching is going on on the fly when you think oh, yeah, it's crazy. Yeah, it's crazy. Yeah all right Let's go to mike mike told me about a feature that i told us about a feature that i didn't Really knew no existed Yeah, he says um I recently came across this new feature in i message called contact key verification And it's it seems like it's part of seven ios 17 to mac os 10.2 Sorry macOS 14.2 watch os 10.2 and the idea is that it adds a layer of security and identity confirmation So that the person that you are i messaging with Is the that you think you're i messaging with is actually the person you're i messaging with and I haven't been able to turn this on because I have one ipad that runs an old version of mac os that my apple id is signed into ipad os sorry that my apple id is signed into but um You you turn this on and It it does some Verification sort of automatically, but then you can also Get together with someone and share and compare The unique id numbers and say yeah, okay that person that's the id that i know of as pilot pete great I you know let me know if when i'm talking to pilot pete It's not that kind of like the old key signing parties that we had with you know open pgp back in the days but um Have either of you guys are you like like this was new to me? I it you know it's totally new to me Yeah, yeah Yeah, not not for messages. I mean I used I used to with email do the the whole pgp. Yes. Yeah, that's right thing right Yeah, I think I've got sounds very similar to expire in about 10 or 12 years, but Yeah, i'm guessing a lot of this was added Because of all the nation state hacking that was going on of like journalists and stuff like that. Yeah fair Yeah, right yet to turn this on you go into settings or system settings on your mac You go into your you know iCloud apple id stuff by tapping on your name And then scroll down and below everything Is contact key verification and and that's where you can enable this so it's yeah That's nice. Let's I yeah, it's cool. Yeah, I'm I'm curious to hear from folks who have used it because I obviously I have not yet and I don't know when I will bring myself to to do that Because I really kind of like my iPad being able to sync other things even though it can't run iOS 17, but It's it's one that I use on stage for like different things so yeah Yeah, interesting stuff. Yeah Yep seems fascinating Yeah, well, we've got another question harby from charm new york wrote in and he wrote hi dav pete and adam I've been playing around with the new journal app that came with 17.2 I have no problem writing entries But one thing that I would like to do and can't figure out how or if it's even possible Are the things that you write in your journal searchable for instance Suppose I remember I wrote something about an event I was at during one of my trips, but don't remember which one Is there a way to search the whole journal? Using the keyword of the event's name knowing that it is in one of the texts that I wrote If that is not a feature of the journal then it should be To quote the erstwhile co-host of the mac geek app john f brawn No I'm just saying he's right. It should be you can't do it Yeah, now so I in theory There should be something here that works and When I saw this email, I went and immediately tried this and I don't know if it's just a Indexing thing I hadn't used the journal app yet. So I went in and I wrote I opened the journal app I wrote a journal entry I like you Pete no search inside the journal app none of the hidden, you know Pull down and there's a magic search box hidden under the Under the top and I found that right nothing there but in theory Every app on your iphone has the ability or potential to be searchable So spotlight because if you go it if you go in exactly if you go into settings Syrian search, right? You have the full app list If you tap on any one of those apps you get a ton of different options. So there's the option to Make the app surface when you're like searching for apps. You can actually turn that off People might not know this right you can say Don't have this app show up when I search it here. One of the options is search the apps content So you would think that if it was searching the apps the content inside the app Which there is a setting for the journal app that that would make it Hop up in that search I turned it on it didn't seem to work for me I searched specifically for the title of one of my journal posts and it didn't come up But it might have been indexing I haven't had a chance to go back and try it again That or my other thought on the why that may not work is the journal is supposed to be something that's Private private. So yeah, they do password protect it, right? You can't Password on it to protect it. So I don't know I don't yet have a password on my journal and uh, I am looking for the I am searching for text that is in the one journal entry that I put in there so far And it has been in there for a week And it also does not come up. So I I think pete you're spot on that the journal even though It says it in the you can like turn it on and expose it It does not expose itself which kind of makes sense from a privacy Yeah, that's a nice feature request for the journal within the app itself. There should be a searchable Yes within the app itself, but Most of that is fueled by spotlight like apps that take advantage that that show you search Using the spotlight database just narrowed down filtered down by the results for that app So if the journal data is not being put into spotlight at all, they would have to write a bespoke Search feature for journal inside the app. Yeah inside the app that was Self-contained not terribly difficult mind you like Like for for a company that already has like they would just need to like take some of that code and say, okay Well, build a separate index and do it this way. So right. Yeah, there's some pretty smart coders over there I bet they could figure it out. I'm getting I'm guessing I'm guessing Yeah, and I bet he's not the first one to ask them for it Yeah, yeah, send it in feed. What's it apple.com slash feedback or whatever it is. So yeah Yeah, but that that a series search thing is good to know about I wish there was a way to more globally Set the options in there because basically every app Do I think is on by default and you have to go app by app and turn things off? But I like to turn a lot of things off because there's like a lot of apps like I don't care To get contents results from, you know, some game that I Or whatever like I don't even know if it would ever surface anything or like There's a lot of apps that I just don't want showing up when I'm searching for apps because I just don't care I don't use them frequently enough. Yeah, right, you know, I'll go in and go to the the regular app search screen and pull it up that way, but You can declutter your series search by going through all those apps and messing with all those settings that are in there Yep Yep, and I would think in the in the meantime if you if that's something that's essential to you I'd use a separate folder and notes and make my journal entries in there And that would be searchable Yeah Yeah, the journal apps really nice really nice though because it does, you know surface photos and music and Make recommendations and suggestions and it's pretty neat It is a cool app. Yeah. Yep. No doubt about it. Yep. Yeah All right Jean has a question for us And he says, uh, I am in the head Exploding process of starting to get some smart devices for my house I wondered if you might be able to give some advice as to where or what to start with Perhaps an older episode or something else So I throw this out to us Because I know we all I mean we've talked about it in this episode haphazardly Right, you know where Is a good place for one to begin with smart home adam you want to you want to start with this Get one of those little simple plug-in things for like one lamp or one device You know and mess around with that like That's a really simple place to start and get familiar with how home kit works and stuff like that and it Doesn't cost a lot. You think you can get these things for like probably 20 bucks now. I would guess I haven't gone out to look for them Um, when I did my house Uh, I started with or another one would just be a smart bulb Uh, that has those features built in I They're more expensive, but I really liked the lifex bulb. So I used a lot of those I still have a bunch of them that I haven't even plugged back in Um, they have some great features, but I know prices have come down on that too So get one simple device like I would start with a light either the little lamp plug-in switch where you plug in a thing Or just a a bulb a simple smart bulb And yep play around with those, you know, and then It it will take off from there. You'll want more and more things I feel like You need a killer app For yourself like not just something that you're gonna Play with But something that that's gonna have a meaningful impact on your life because for me I had all kinds of stuff, you know people would send us things or I would buy things and it was like Oh, yeah, look I can turn on the christmas tree with my thing and it's like, okay Well, that's cool. It's you know three weeks of the year or something It wasn't until I bought a set and this was you know 100 years ago So it was it was 200 dollars to buy a set of four Phillips hue bulbs. Yep Uh now they're much less expensive than that any kind of smart bulbs And I put them all outside, which you're not supposed to do with the Phillips bulbs I can tell you this was 100 years ago. The bulbs all still work again knock on wood um, but Just setting them up So that the lights in my you know on the way front door and my driveway Came on its sunset and went off at midnight every night Was a game changer Like we didn't have to think oh, yeah, it's dark. You got to go turn on the light or oh before bed You got to turn off the light or even better. We've been out all day. It got dark We come home and the freaking driveway is you know dark And now it lights up like it does every night. And so that for me was The the the light bulb moment if you will the right where it was like, oh, okay, wait a minute I get this now I see and and then it was like all right. I want other things I want to eliminate this friction in my life by doing this with other things So yes, there are still some things that I have that are just sort of cool and geeky But I think it's important to find a thing and and your example of a light bulb out of them I think is a great one because there are those lights that that we just sort of naturally turn on and turn off at at routine times Save yourself the routine. So yeah, you know Yeah, I I would agree with that too because when I I did my lights, that was the other nice thing is like Yeah, I'm getting older and inevitably, you know, you you'd head to bed and then you Kind of think oh did I turn off all the lights or not?  I think I had an automation that was like go to bed and it just turned everything off in one statement Amazing Yeah, so in our discord chat grumpy mic suggests the morass outlets He's stating that, uh, you know, that's a great way to start things to control regular plug-in lights So you don't even his smart smart bulb. Sure outlet and control that I started with the hue bulbs as well and absolutely love them. We have them in I think four or five rooms in the house and my son loves it He you know The colors and the dim settings and one of the actually one of the really nice things in in the master bedroom We have one and I can whisper into my watch at if I have to get up at 3 30 3 45 in the morning I'll whisper into my watch Turn on the master bedroom light to 10 percent And it gives me just enough light to get up and not stub my toe, but it's not so bright that it wakes my wife up And yeah, huh And so, um, yeah, so that's that's how I use the lights The other two things that I've got that I have really liked over the years Uh, we have a town home in Pensacola. I have one of the nest thermostats And boy is that great. I can set the the Temperature in that town home and I leave it in a wide range So it isn't trying to keep it super cool in the summer or super warm in the winter But if I know someone's coming ahead of time, I can turn it up So when they get there, it's comfortable temperature Uh, when people leave and we have somebody come in to clean it before anyone else comes in I can set the temperature down so that the lady that cleans the place isn't doing it in 90 degree heat Yeah, and and then but when she leaves, I don't have to say don't forget to turn the thermostat down I can reset it to our away mode and go from there And the other thing that we have is a slage deadbolt Yep, and I can you can put in codes. So I have family members. They have their own codes to that door lock They can put their codes in to let them in let them out and I can control add codes remove codes remotely And that that's also a really nice feature um And because it Here was the other cool thing. We got a real hardware store right down the street from there. I was able to take the key from the doorknob, which was also a slaged doorknob and say Make it work in the deadbolt before I install it. So I've got one key that works all the externals on on that town hall All right, so folks clearly like this is this is the beginning of this conversation because I I think finding the entry point And it's going to be different for each of us But finding that entry point is is going to be the key if you're not already on smart home And even if you are like, you know, if you were on lights like me and then heard Pete talking about the smart locks It's like, oh, wait a minute. That's actually kind of cool So I would love for each of you to write in feedback at mackeygab.com And tell us what was your entry point to this and we will obviously share that in future episodes Hold on where you want a great day feedback at mackeygab.com Yep, he said feedback at mackeygab.com. He did. That's right We I'll go ahead adam I just have one one other little thing I think again because this is like where to start out kind of question and I know we've mentioned a couple other devices I think this is less of an issue now. I've kind of not Drove back into the whole home automation thing But I mean if you're an apple person I would at first at first Very much try to stick to home kit and home kit compatible devices It's better you can do the home bridge thing and all that other stuff to get other devices that are not And I think there's with thread and all the other things that have come out since there's war support and compatibility, but I would try to stay in that You know It's a home kit device world if you're an apple person because it's just going to make your life easier at first And then you won't have to do a lot of the geekery That's fair. Yeah limit the friction To start out. I like that advice. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yep. Yep uh, we are uh next week heading to ces and I We wouldn't be able to do it without our Uh ces 2024 coverage sponsors So I I just wanted to take a minute and thank each and every one of them Mac updater from core code one of my favorite apps I was just using it last night before I did the most recent update to mac os It's like I always it's nice to just know my apps are always up to date And we really appreciate having mac updater on board as a sponsor carbon copy cloner from the folks at bombic Another uh it and and now sort of we're calling it ccc backup Because it's doing more backups than cloning these days and I am ever so appreciative for it I've been using ccc for years and It's fantastic. And even though we don't do much cloning anymore. I still find ccc a valuable tool and collide At kolide.com Amazing support for all of the enterprise stuff that they do and managing all your devices in different ways Go check that out too. And we've got links in the show notes, of course for All of these sponsors and Again, our sincere thanks for being able to make this trip work and and being able to bring you folks all the coverage that That we're going to be able to do pete and I'll be out there adam will be manning the fort back at uh Back in the snowy tundra And uh, yeah, you'll become mackey gabby east instead of west. That's right. That's right. Yep. Absolutely all right, let's uh So thank you to all of our our sponsors. It really it makes a huge difference Pete you want to You want to start off cool stuff found for this episode? Yeah, so I had uh seen years ago You don't know jack a game. Oh, yeah game. That was fun You know and I knew they had expanded some well, of course My sister was here and my nephews were here for Christmas and my my daughter's home from college and my son's here And the other night after uh christmas we sat around and we played some jack box games At jackboxgames.com It's really cool. You once you have the game on your computer. You uh, at least the how we did it my nephew Did an airplay to the tv And then we all go to I it tells you what website to go to and what code to enter and we all play from our smartphones of trivia Quip lash where it'll ask a question and you have to put in a silly answer and the person with the most votes For the silliest answer winds up winning It what a fun way to spend a few hours with family just laughing our butts off So jackboxgames.com that was a great way to spend an evening And I think they have an app for the apple tv like I I don't think you even needed to airplay Oh, even better. Okay. Yeah, all right I've never I played you don't know jack. I I Somehow made it through covid lockdowns without using it without ever playing jackbox games And i'm not quite sure how that happened right, but uh, if you're you're a game playing household adam. Have you played? Oh, yeah, yeah, okay. This is great too, especially You know over the holidays when people are getting together and stuff like that. It's super super fun We also do it a lot at conferences because you can have everybody just on a device In ipad an iphone or a computer and just sit around in a circle and and play these games too. I mean I played this a lot with our friend Barry.   Yeah, yeah Oh, yeah Huh, that's another great one. But yeah quick lash Fibbage and uh, you don't know jack or probably my favorite ones They have a ton of other stuff a lot of them. I haven't played like they add new things all the time But I would definitely recommend any one of those to start out with and then you can kind of expand out from there cool cool awesome You mentioning Barry reminded me that Barry is And and we'll always have the distinction of being our First and because he continues therefore longest running premium Supporter here at Mackie keb and I would be remiss if I did not thank Barry for his ten dollar contribution in the last couple of weeks It's been a couple of weeks since we've thanked our premium supporters So thank you Barry for your ten dollar contribution and also ten dollar contributions from Warren in Gloucester Uh, Brian in Southbury Santiago in Palm City John in Wake Forest Kevin in Edison Michael in Robbins Matthew in forked river bill in uh, I think he's got an apo box Uh, Jeff in Chester sin James in amity harbour joseph in marietta paul in laurenceville Steven in plainfield jonathan in planesboro gary in babelon John in vienna. Thanks to each of you for your ten dollar contributions. Thanks to bob and lapesh for your 15 dollar contribution And thanks to the following for your 25 dollar contributions richard in melbourne Kenneth in new lambton dug in rochester curt in princeton Joe in kingsley Antonio and bret in lands unknown phil in santa fe Richard in sands point jeffrey in a la magordo I think I got that right john and laverne And wane in coon rapids and berry in delray beach different berry And then thanks to ben and berkeley for a 36 dollar contribution walter in rochester for a 40 dollar contribution and chuck in boulder for a 50 dollar contribution Thanks to all of you for your support if you want to learn more about mackey cab premium It's at mackey cab.com slash premium And I want to take a minute and talk about a cool stuff found that I found that might well I use I I like listening to audible books sometimes driving around in my car What have you and recently I started listening to the book uh by getty lee the the singer and bass player in the band rush And it's been fantastic because he put out a book which has some great pictures in it But the audiobook is read by getty lee and I thought you know I'm into Liberating all of my content like I've paid for these books. They are mine But I want them I want to be able to like listen to them my way not just with the audible app And so I searched a little bit and I found a piece of software called libation At get libation.com and it is meant to liberate your audible library into either m4b Or you can convert them to mp3 if you want And uh, and then those m4b files can be played with lots of different things including apples books and you know At plex it turns out listener mark said I and and this is brilliant. I immediately went and did this mark says I I liberated all my books and then I went And created a separate music library in my plex that I named audiobooks And I just pointed it at the folder of my m4b files And not only does it play them, but it pulled in all the metadata for them from whatever Magic plex does to do that. No, yeah And it it just works great knows that they're audiobooks and it sort of treats them differently and all of those things And then he says I use an app called prologue at prologue.audio and all these things are linked in the show notes, of course, uh for Playing audiobooks from plex like it is a purpose built app to do that so that you've got all the support you need for maintaining your spot in the book and Pointing at the right library and just being the more book experience including carplay support. So that's amazing And then um robster also in our discord chat Suggested open audible Which it does sort of the same thing that libation does Just a little bit differently So you can check all of those out if you want to free your audible library. I love me some open audible In fact, I think I used it as a cool stuff found once a couple years back Once I heard about it. I was like, oh, wait a minute. This might be something Yeah, yeah check with your local laws if you wish before heading down this path I I don't know. Yeah, I'm telling you your content you bought it Use it. Yeah, you know, don't give it away to other people. That's correct. That's not what it's for listen to it on your On my terms. Yes, the dmca man Worst law ever yep Yep, because copyright allows for format shifting but dmca undid all that Because there's encryption. Well, because because it's protected, right? It was the why we couldn't do dvds or You know, that's why you were allowed to make mix tapes back in the day Correct But because you could format shift because it was your content and you bought it But the minute they added protection on it that law said So you could still legally make the copy But it was illegal to break encryption. So Because the encryption key was copyrighted. That's the that was the trick to that right they copyrighted the actual key It was one key used for every dvd It had to be in order for manufacturers to be able to make a dvd player, right work Correct But that key itself was copyrighted and therefore needed to be licensed To someone using it, you know printing a dvd and then also to making yeah, so things don't You could go and like there were t-shirts for sale With that encryption key on them if you really wanted to be a lawbreaker That's funny. Yeah, it was ridiculous. Is it dss john or whatever he was? Yeah, the dss john. Yeah, exactly. You know, you know I forgot about that. That's ridiculous Uh, I think we have time for one more cool stuff found if you if either of you have one Take it if you don't I've got one for us all I think go man All right, it's gonna be me. So rod shared this in the chat and it has in discord And it has been one of the more popular threads that we have in discord. It is the mt 3000 From gl dot inet it's or it's the gl dash mt 3000 pocket sized wi-fi six travel router And what's cool about this is a couple things one it's built to travel with so if you need to bring a router with you to You know your air bnb or whatever you've got it But the other thing is that it has built-in tail scale integration So you can join it to your tail net and be home no matter where you are Which I think is pretty cool Uh, so this that is awesome. Yeah, it's pretty cool and uh, it's available on amazon for Well, it's it's a hundred and ten dollars Minus a twenty five dollar coupon if you want to go down that page and it it's built to work with captive portals In you know public networks or hotels or whatever and you can connect with wi-fi So it it like it's built to be your thing Yeah, exactly like because i'm looking at the back of it the the picture that you have up on Screen for those watching and it's obviously it's cat five cables going it, but if it'll connect via wi-fi too Yes, and that's that's what I am sold network. Correct. Oh That's brilliant. Yep. Because I actually still have one of those little airport expresses that You have to carry around but good luck finding a cat five connection in a hotel room anymore. Yeah, exactly Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I'm pretty sure from the discussions. I don't have one of these but I'm pretty sure from the discussions That's what it does. We need to get you one of these Pete so you can test this for us. Yeah Yeah, yeah, it's pretty cool. It's pretty cool. I mean last year earlier this year I found out that the ethernet ports and a lot of hotels still work to connect to their Internet you guys are all ready to move. Oh god my Adam lisa almost like i'm lucky to have survived this we got to a hotel in new york And we both had a lot of work to do And but we were there on like a it was right after max stock. In fact, you know, we we I flew to New york, yeah We went to philly to see a couple of fish concerts and then new york to see a couple of fish concerts And when we got to new york We had an airbnb in philly was great. We got to new york. We both had like You know a solid days of of real work to do and we unpacked everything in our hotel room And that's when we realized we were in the corner of the hotel that got almost no wi-fi Like there was no world And so i'm like crap and so i'm like walking around the halls with my laptop finding Which rooms and there was one access point per floor And it was actually one access point per every other floor At the courtyard merry at times square great hotel otherwise perfect location I would stay there again And so I went downstairs and i'm like we got to move and they're like, okay And so we go to other rooms and we're like bouncing around And it's like we find one room that's like, okay It's got like a the couch is kind of messed up and it's like whatever we'll deal And so we pack up all our stuff And I go and open the dresser drawer by the bed to make sure I didn't like put something in there And there's an ethernet cable in there And I have this moment of thought and I'm like wait a minute We like this room the best like other than the wi-fi and I plug in it's like Yep, works perfectly. Yeah. Yep. At least it's like we're staying here, aren't we? I'm like, yep. She's like okay I specifically Recently put a Cat5 cable back in my laptop bag. I didn't have one for forever Yeah, this exact reason because I would get to hotel It would have bad wi-fi and then I'd be like, oh, there's an ethernet port there and I don't have an ethernet cable You know in a lot of cases I'm in places where There's not a best buy around the corner or whatever like I don't like I can't just go get a cable Well, not only was I asked the front desk they might give me Not only was I in Manhattan where I could walk, you know 18 feet in either direction and buy an ethernet cable But I do travel with one and I had at least one with me and just never thought to try it. So That'd be a lesson to me and all of us Thanks for hanging out with us everybody fun stuff indeed. Yeah indeed. So real quick From the there's a nice discussion going on in discord and Grumpy Mike says I love my barrel This is the the the the router thing that we talked about. Yeah. Yeah the ery l says it has all It works with other vpns. He has his set to use with private internet access account And it connects via wi-fi and then Grumpy Mike says my big trick Is to set the wi-fi to the same as my home wi-fi ss id and password And then once the barrel is online your device is connected. I think they're at home You don't need to run around putting all your devices on Oh, that's brilliant. Oh, yeah, I gotta get one of these two. Okay. Yeah, why not, baby Why not just yeah the home wi-fi thing Oh, yeah, I like that Nice. Thanks Grumpy Mike Amazing amazing amazing. Thanks for hanging out with us everybody. It's been a blast as it always is Uh, thanks to all of you for listening. Thanks. Take a minute and share the show with a friend or on your social media or something We would love that It'd be thanks to cash fly for providing all the bandwidth to get the show from us to you Uh, thanks to our sponsor, of course linked in jobs at linkedin.com slash m g g And uh, yeah, happy new year everybody. Thanks for thanks for hanging out with us Yeah, um Adam Happy new year aren't the only three words That we like to say Yeah, three others that maybe come to mind Don't get caught Made Let's go and get caught in Japanese, wasn't it Pete? It was indeed Later


Welcome to our presentation day three operations new region and new services in this talk we would like to highlight a little bit our view on how to organize the future of the public cloud and how we at the open telecom cloud see that. My name is needs Magnus and together with my colleague, Sebastian, I'd like to give you this short overview. My name is needs Magnus I'm an architect for the open telecom cloud and I'm also acting as community outreach manager. And well, with me is Sebastian would you like to introduce yourself as well. Thank you, my name is Sebastian winner I'm the chapter lead for the engineering of open telecom cloud. I'm doing Linux and open source since 20 years and more and yeah I'm with open telecom cloud really since the beginning and started this whole endeavor which we would like to introduce to you and then talk about how we do operations and how that evolved over time. Yeah, could you outline a little bit how we all started our collaboration with open stack. Yes, of course. So, as said I'm with that since the beginning. We started in 2015 to build up a cloud based on open stack. The target was to to bring a public cloud to the market in European governance in German governance, obeying data protection and privacy laws. But also on the other hand side being open and giving the power of open standards to the end users like open stack is doing that. So we started in 2015. And finally I dig out from the archives, a PowerPoint slide with our initial start of services what we had or set of services. As you can see here really infrastructure as a service with a few additions. But if we look at what we have today it is really evolved a lot to what is now available on our cloud. From that beginning between 2015 and 2016 when we launched open telecom cloud and see it until now and then this is from May this year, you can see a lot of things have changed and then things evolved from Yeah, I said infrastructure as a service with a few things to a whole set of portfolio. What we do bare metal machines that we manage containers that we manage on the other end of the scale. The databases big data upcoming artificial intelligence really ready made functions to to just use and then leverage for your business that you want to run. But to do that also not only did the cloud and the technology had to evolve but also we as a team had to evolve and this is what is widely discussed throughout the last year as they to operation so also having an agile team and and whatever is needed to not only set up a cloud but also run a cloud. And to give you an idea, not only in terms of service what we are doing but also in terms of size what we are doing some some facts and figures here around open telecom cloud. So you can see we scale this thing beyond the normal limit so 500 nodes for a typical neutron installation. Well, we did that by factor 10 and more. So these six and a half thousand servers this is pure compute power available to to the end users, nearly half a million of vcpus and more than three petabyte of Ram. This is virtual machines from small to to big object storage block storage additional services as mentioned before connectivity really in 300 gig and also equinix cloud exchange where we are available, but also as as really a unique thing in the market. We also have a hybrid cloud so if you do not want to run this as a public cloud or you want to have a mixed setup. We can put a hybrid cloud to your premise installed that they are in T shirt sizes from small to large, whatever is needed we we can offer that for you. As I said to run that really we we needed to make changes to how we work and what we work and follow the the agile principles to to get that all installed and ready. This is, as we said, day two, but we are talking here about day three operations and day three is then how to make the next step, not only to have a single side one cloud, but really how to grow further how to adapt to these challenges how to move your technology also forward to be ready for 2020 and whatever is coming beyond. So how to grow that that was one of the topics also for us, as you could see in the numbers before we really scaled it beyond the usual limits but is the way just to to grow further in that limit. Because is no just yet another availability zone there is not the answer to to everything. So it had to be a new region and we were looking into Frankfurt we were looking into Amsterdam I said public cloud what do you need internet, where do you find internet is Frankfurt or it's Amsterdam the two largest cloud or not cloud internet exchange pops in the world. So, after a bit of back and forth we decided for Amsterdam. And yes, climate is changing waters rising we are well aware of that and we picked a data center provider which is also aware of that and is well prepared. Nevertheless, we are doing everything also to do our part of the job to protect our climate and then not to use too much energy. I will come back to that in a minute. But growing is not easy. It's not just as you can see here, putting a few servers in a wreck. Sometimes you are surprised by some challenges which you do not think about. For example, SFPs as you can see here we deployed like 12,000 SFPs. One of the problems was they were all coming in a separate package so it was just boxes and boxes and boxes and even more boxes. So we had to unpack like 12,000 SFPs. What we installed in Amsterdam as you can see here is around about 2000 devices, 1400 servers 500 network devices and all kinds of other stuff. A few more pictures also we had some stacking problems, even they were not related to open stack. As you can see here also logistics company thought it was a good idea to stack servers on servers turned out to be not a good idea. Yeah, and also for the tech guys amongst us this is my let my engineering hard beat faster to see a bit of cable porn here. So clean and nicely this is all installed. And this is really one big part of the story. You need partners which you can rely on because what happened. 2020. Well, nobody thought about that and everybody was complaining that the game of Thrones finale was the worst thing. Well, we had 2020 and we have Corona and COVID-19. So we installed a data center if you can't go there. That was faster question. So the answer, not the chicken or the egg was first really the raspberry was first and to give you also a bit of technical insight how we tackle modern modern problems. We had a data center. And as you could see before we had a lot of switches and servers and cables and everything that was installed. And we had a good partner to make that according to our plans but how do you then do the next step if you're not allowed to travel and you're you can't go there and the data center folks won't do the installation for you. So luckily we had some Wi-Fi which is connected to the Internet. We set up a virtual machine on our existing cloud and put a open VPN on it. And we sent a pre configured raspberry there which was able to connect to the to the Wi-Fi and through the Wi-Fi made an open VPN connection dialing home to our virtual machine that was running there. So we had out of band access real out of band access so we could from our home from our office access the raspberry which was sitting there. We pre loaded it with a repository so it had all the software firmware whatever was needed to do the first provisionings. We installed software for zero touch provisioning to do the network stuff but also some pixie stuff to to provision the servers. And with that one, we are sitting there as said in your office, we could make the connection through the VM through the Internet through the Wi-Fi to the raspberry and then start provisioning so we really could do the first switch painted in magenta. But also the first servers and then one by one we worked our way through the infrastructure. So that we could install software deploy the first operating system and then really have modern provisioning tools at hand to then layer by layer deploy our cloud in the data center where nobody of us was able to go. So this was really a challenge to achieve this but by this simple solution it really worked and as a side benefit. Also we put a serial cable or a USB to serial cable on it. We had a mobile serial console for all these devices. Yes. What else. What did we learn a lot. So many many small things matter like the color of light. So SFP is not SFP even we had so many of them cables you need enough of them more than you think communication to stay in touch with all your people with also the data center folks and their willingness to to use something like WhatsApp just to check a cable on SFP really helped to stay ahead of the installation. Also on the other hand side excavators seems like summer is excavator season we lost so many fiber cables. Really but also having backup solutions in place on redundancy turned out to be very necessary. I'm here I want to mention I said before we also try to do our share. We are not only using x86 but also arm they are much more energy efficient. And just to deploy some standard management notes whatever they are perfectly fine so we we really deployed large scale arm hardware. And they do the job really great to to run our management zone and then everything else where we can use it. Nevertheless, also, we were talking about day three operation. It's also the tooling and modern solution that are important. We had triple round for quite a while we have open stack based installations for quite a while container based open stack installations for quite a while. But putting that all together really is also a large part that we adapt to the technical challenges to have seamless upgrades and then deployment methods and then really a lot of things that we needed to adapt from just hand deployments automated deployments to the way or the point where we are today to run a cloud of that scale. At that point I would hand over to needs to really talk a bit about the surroundings and then also the implications of of doing day three operations. Thank you, Sebastian. Indeed, setting up and managing our infrastructure for scale for growth is one thing. We have also a lot of services on top of this infrastructure and this these services are ever growing and evolving. And if we look a little bit in the past of information technology, we see one pattern that reduces step by step the details of your it setups and at the same time, the abstraction layer increases or the amount of abstraction increases. So, when you in the past, often configured specific snowflakes that are unique, unique setups. We see more and more pre configured pre defined and bundled solutions that come shipped readily to use. And to explain this, I made up a small example. Think of DBA 10 years ago. So when you had an IT project, which was focused on setting up a new database server, and you walked over to your DBA guy. He probably asked you a lot of questions. So what kind of hardware would you like to deploy for that. What drive technology should we pitch is our spinning disk like as sufficient or do we need SSDs. Do we have a storage network dedicated to that or do we need to set up one. So what kind of database engine do we need. We want to use my secret Postgres Oracle Maria DB and so on and so on. There are back ends in terms of the different databases. And if you remember the configuration files for for databases there are long files with lots of options and buffer sizes and configuration options. Okay, this is different. So DBA in 2020 just issues something like an OpenStack database cluster create or something like that. So here in OpenStack we have a trove for example, in the OpenTelecom cloud we have some additional database services as well, but the idea is the same. So today we have pre configured setups that fit many needs and still can be configured if necessary indeed. But the overall time to market is much decreased and it's way easier also for simpler setups to bring a service like a database cluster configuration manager or some other components into into place. Could you turn off to the next slide. Of course. What I've prepared here is the CNCF landscape and the CNCF landscape lists more or less all projects that work together or help support setting up Kubernetes cluster and Kubernetes framework overall. And that leads to two interesting questions. First is where do these setups run. And we've seen often the idea that, okay, let's define something like Kubernetes or some other container management platform as a management platform for for any IT workload. But the question still remains where do these clusters run upon. So what is the the infrastructure layer. Of course you could just use say a bare metal service for that. But even those bare metal servers need to be managed in some way. And especially if you are talking about scale, you always come back to all the nitty gritty details that Sebastian explained to us a few minutes ago. So summarizing this all day free operations mean means making a balanced and informed choice and to summarize the principle of day free operations. We learned that it's starting with the day one operations and configuration tasks as we've seen setting up everything that is often the fun part. The two operations are made about maintaining and keeping everything up and running. But we still have to think about growth and adapting to new technologies about a different cloud scenarios about innovation. How does it fit to business and so on optimization and so on. And that is what we call day free operations. And this is something that we take great care about. And that's already that already concludes our presentation on this strategy. Let me very briefly point out to our open stack scavenger hunt as service that we are a small riddle that we offer here in the light of 10 years of open stack. You have to search a few websites and then you can win a cool gadget price in a raffle. So if you're interested in that go to the mansion website and find your way around. Thank you very much for watching. In case you have any questions, feel free to ask them right now after this presentation or send us an email to Sebastian or me. And with that. Thanks for watching and let's see if there are any questions. Thank you very much. Bye bye.


What's it gonna be? What's up everyone?  Today, in this box, I have 10 Vitamix accessories, 10 things that can help make Vitamix owning better, easier, less wasteful. Here we go, I wanna show you. First thing, chef's knife. You need a really good chef's knife. It's not worth your time to be messing around with a throwaway chef's knife. It makes the whole experience of preparing your green juice, of chopping vegetables into golf ball sized pieces, of getting your accoutrements ready for dipping with a proper chef's knife. This is the Mac knife, the Mighty Mac knife. It was recommended to us by the Wirecutter as the best knife for most people. You only need one knife. This is the one and to go along with it, knife sharpener, get these. Next up, something to hold your lemons. You might not use the whole lemon in your green juice or in your salad dressings that you're making. Don't use a plastic bag. Get a little lemon holder like this because if you put it in a Tupperware or whatever container that you cannot see through, you're not gonna know it's there. You're gonna end up throwing it away.  We use all three, love them. Next up, mason jars. In these eight ounce mason jars, we like to put pesto, nut butters, or queso if we're making baby food. Onions, pickled onions if we're making Jeffery tacos and we want to get real fancy with it. Pretty much everything goes in these leftovers. They're see-through, they're great. And the tops on these are compatible with the 32 ounce mason jars. We use these almost exclusively for green juice. We make green juice every other day, 64 ounces and we store half of it. And I bring these down to my office and drink out of these mason jars too. So 32 ounce mason jars, eight ounce mason jars, lids that are compatible with both. And speaking of green juice, if you have children, get them started early. This one from OXO, this baby cup. Fill it with green juice, we love it. Next thing you need. Neither Shalva or I grew up with an ice cube maker in our fridge. We made our own ice in ice cube trays. We are very grateful to have an ice cube maker in our fridge now, and we have two other kinds of ice cube trays. One, these, these little teeny tiny ones. They are great for leftover coffee. To make tiny little coffee cubes, you can pop them out by pressing the button. Pop, pop, pop, or a coconut milk. Put it in here for making ice cream. Another one that's actually helpful for baby food.  And this is for soup. So these are, what are these called? Super trays, super, whatever. I guess we'll put the link in the description. These are for soup. They are 250 milliliters each, and they are great for making a giant batch of soup, putting it in here. And since they're made of silicone, they're easy to get out. You kinda just push, wiggle, wiggle. These are not cheap, but there's nothing like them, and we've found them to be really useful and worth the money. So you made soup, and what are you gonna put with it? A nice salad, a homemade salad dressing. If you're bringing it to a party, you probably don't wanna put it in the 20 ounce container with the to go cup. So, get one of these little guys.  I hate to ask, could you hit the thumbs up button? It really helps us get found, and it's just really helpful. Thanks, really appreciate it. Ding. All right, next up, dessert. Make ice cream and your vitamins is the best. Nice cream, every time we make it, we're thrilled that we do, get a scooper. One of these scoopers like they have in elementary school to scoop the mashed potatoes, another OXO brand. Something also about the stainless steel hitting, if you have on, the stainless steel container, quite satisfying. What's it gonna be? Next up, a brownie tin. Yes, if you're making brownies, we have a black bean brownie that's really good. Put them in here, ready-made brownies, you don't have to cut them. Every piece has an edge, which are the crunchy, crispy parts that are the best. But also for ice cream. When you're making a huge batch of ice cream in your Vitamix, it's nice to have it right then, but then also to pre-portion scoops for later. So you take that ice cream scooper, wherever it went, right here, into the container, and then scoop yourself, go, one, two, three, four, five, six, and pop them in the freezer. When you're ready to have a little scoop, take it out, pop off that one scoop that you want, and then let it sit on the counter for five minutes, and you have a ready-made, perfect, little serving of ice cream. Next up, pancakes. Pancake squeeze bottle. You'll have to make pancakes on the weekends. And if you want to get really special with it, make some pancake creatures, or animals, or characters, I guess is the word for it. My favorite one that I've ever made is Maui from Moana. I was really proud of that one.   You'll be super dead with one of these. They're like really cheap, five bucks. Guys, the last one, it's not in here. It's empty. It is a scroll brush. It's got the brush and a thing you can put soap in the handle and give it a little squeeze to get soap out of it. So the containers these days are dishwasher safe, but you don't always want to put it in the dishwasher, but sometimes you need to, and the wash cycle doesn't always do a perfect job without a tiny bit of pre-cleaning anyways. This is the best brush that you can get, or best tool that you can get to keep your Vitamix clean. Scrub brush from OXL. Link in bio. Subscribe to our channel if you haven't already. Hit that bell to get notified, and if you appreciate videos like this, accessories and tips and tricks about Vitamix, thanks for Vitamix owners, hit that thumbs up. Thank you so much for watching, and we'll see you in the next one. Bye guys.


If you start to detach from everything and say, I'm not this suffering, I'm not this I'm not that. And then at one point you're in such an exalted state, you're like on the moon, you know, with a moon suit. And then suddenly capsule has to crash because of this reason or another. There's no fuel or there's no, whatever those reasons could be. And then suddenly you're back here and you have to deal with this in a much, much more demanding way. Then if you're already in a disness state of discernment. So it's not about, oh, how do I hold on to this state? It is rather, how do I deepen into this? Ah, okay, I'm here. I haven't fallen from anywhere. Two actions arose from the ego. There was a bit of suffering. All right, let me just tune in again and move with the truth again. It's very, it's a doable, very much here thing. It's not like you're somewhere and then suddenly you fall. It's more like, ah, okay, let me just move into truth again.


Pennsylvania's modern high-speed highways, carriers of millions of vehicles daily, linking city to town, town to countryside. But once out in that countryside, you can find other types of roads, carrying far less traffic, but just as important to the people who use them. Today, we will look at methods for effectively maintaining those low-volume roads, how to intelligently blend time, money, and materials to maintain these important links in our road system. Let's begin by determining just how much road we are talking about. Of our 45,000 plus miles of roadway, 8,500 or almost 20% is classified as low-volume, one in every five miles of our system. These low-volume roads range from the Type 10, the unimproved road, to the Type 20, the stabilized road, to the Type 30, the improved or pie crust road. This program will concentrate on the maintenance procedures for all types of these roads with the accent on the pie crust or Type 30 road, which makes up the great majority of our low-volume network. We will look at the differences in the procedures used, as well as the similarities. And we will especially consider the procedures necessary to maintain these roads in the best possible condition for the traveling public. As with any maintenance task, we first begin with the planning. Low-volume roads scheduled for maintenance should be inspected by the assistant county maintenance manager responsible for the area and the highway foreman whose crew is responsible for the work. Items such as permission to leave waste material, permission to enter upon private property, those things should have been done in the office along with the normal work planning. But out on the road, discussing problems like shoulders, ruts, drainage, and agreeing on why they occurred and how they should be corrected, ensures that the same deficiencies are noted and a mutual solution is agreed upon, one that is both adequate and economical. The key to highway maintenance, low or high-volume road, drainage. Lack of proper drainage is the root cause of 90% of the problems you will encounter. So any plan that you have should begin with drainage. Drainage correction procedures could include slope reshaping, ditch clearing, installation of drains, removal of poor material and replacement with new material, inlets and under drains must be cleaned out. But whatever you use as a method can only be determined by that on-site inspection. Only when the drainage problems are corrected can the remaining maintenance activities begin. Depending on the type of road, this could include grating, scarifying or reshaping, patching, stabilizing and rolling. Let's first talk about grating. If there is an essential piece of equipment for low-volume road maintenance, it is the grater. Just as essential as the grater itself is the experienced and knowledgeable operator. Here the grater operator is clearing the ditch on a type 30 or pie-crushed road. His first pass serves to pull the accumulated vegetation from the ditch. Note the careful pass around the inlet The final cleaning of the inlet and the inlet area is done with hand tools. Now the grater makes a second pass, smoothing the ditch line and pulling the material out to where the belt loader can get at it. The foreman uses the grade stick to check the shoulder slope. This periodic checking ensures that the ditch line stays at the slope agreed upon between the foreman and the operator as best suited for this road. The belt loader begins to pick up the material. Once again, be sure you have the locations for dumping your waste material agreed upon beforehand. Now is not the time to be wondering where or where. The key to belt loading efficiency is the presence of the truck under the loader. No truck, no production. The number of trucks needed is determined by the hauling time and the volume of material. Plan ahead. Where guide rail is in place, side dosing could be needed. Here again, that pre-job inspection by the assistant county maintenance manager and the highway foreman is required. If the width of the shoulder is greater than the stroke length of a side doser, or if small washouts are present, then manual work must be provided. More planning. Depending upon the availability of the equipment, you may get a chance to realign and or adjust the guide rail. As you can see, standard maintenance procedures for Type 30 roads are much the same as for any paved road. But when we start dealing with un-paved roads, there are some significant differences. The road that we have been working on adjoins a section of Type 20 or stabilized road. So let's examine the procedures for the Type 20 and compare and contrast them to the Type 30 road that we just looked at. As I said, Type 20 roads are stabilized. Stabilizing is defined as changing the quality of the soil by mixing it with material that will increase its load-bearing capacity and resistance to weathering or displacement. In short, it makes the road harder. But before that stabilizing material can be added, a lot of work needs to be done. Just as with the Type 30, we begin with the drainage, clearing and shaping the ditches. An essential part of reshaping the road with the grader is the establishment of a road crown. The ideal crown is shaped like a flattened letter A in that its highest point is at the center of the road and its lowest point is at the parallel ditches. It's important to maintain a crown like this because motorists tend to straddle the middle of the road and cause ruts to wear on both sides of the existing crown. This rutting allows water to stand and eventually deteriorates the surface of the road. Graded material is carried back to both edges and not allowed the windrow. Windrows can give you soft spots. These soft spots are generally caused by the lack of proper drainage. If you have, as was suggested at the beginning, done your drainage work, then the soft spots once corrected will not recur. Repairing soft spots is much like repairing potholes in that the old material is fully cut out and new material is put in. Properly placed material of suitable quality and compaction will add immeasurably to the wearability of the roadway. As the grading occurs, small rocks will be brought to the surface. These should be removed and the material put in their place. Sometimes normal grading is not sufficient. That's when scarifying is needed. The scarifier is attached to the motor grader. The scarifying is done when the surface material is still damp. Usually, along with the scarifying, is the addition of new material which should be thoroughly blended by grading before compaction is begun. You will find it necessary to roll the road. The surface should be rolled until the material is thoroughly compacted. The addition of a stabilizing agent helps, as I said before, to make the road harder as well as keeping down the dust. Calcium chloride, sodium chloride, or bituminous materials are most commonly used. Some success has been gained by using fly ash, which is a residue from power plants. As was mentioned earlier, type 10 roads are non-stabilized natural earth. The maintenance procedures used in type 10 roads are very similar to those that are used on the type 20 with a couple of differences. Here, the grader is making his path along the shoulders, pulling the material from the shoulder and pushing it towards the center of the road. Note that the roller is coming along immediately after the grader is impacting the graded earth. With type 10 roads, material is not normally replaced, but is indeed reused. The grader pulls the material into the center of the road and using the blade breaks it down. Soft spots are corrected as with the type 20. Cut out, new material put in, and compact it. As with our type 20 roads, the establishment and maintenance of a road crown is of paramount importance. Here, the earth pulled from the shoulders is being shaped by the grader operator so as to establish that road crown. The crown is checked with a string line. The accepted rule of thumb of one half inch of drop per one foot of roadway is a good rule to follow on unpaved and non-stabilized roads. Final compaction is done as was done with the type 20 with the roller. Proper compaction is important if you're going to get the road surface to last for more than a matter of days. Let's take a moment and go through what we talked about. We looked at the planning that went into low volume road maintenance. We recognized the grader, the grader operator, and the essential part they play in this operation. We looked at the similarities in the maintenance procedures for these roads, type 10, type 20, and type 30. As we said at the beginning of the program, the key to effective low volume road maintenance is drainage. It cannot be overemphasized that if drainage is not done, there is no purpose in doing the rest of the work.  Intelligent and common sense advice from the assistant county maintenance manager will help to form an and his crew to correct and maintain our low volume road network. Every road regardless of type is a vital part of our road network, a link from city to countryside. Emergency vehicles need these roads to provide essential services. Remember, every road, no matter how small, is important to someone.