This is MacGygab 917 for Monday, March 7th, 2022. MacGygab, the show where you send in your tips, your questions, your cool stuff found. We take your tips and share them. We take your cool stuff found and we share them. Sometimes we share cool stuff found in tips of our own and then we take your questions and we try to answer them. Sometimes we offer questions of our own, hoping for answers. We're stewards of this community here, funneling all this information back and forth and back and forth because the goal is for each and every one of us to learn at least five new things every single time we all get together, which is usually once a week. Although this week we're going to get together twice because Apple told us to. Well, Apple scheduled an event on Tuesday. So we'll get together right after that and offer our hot takes on whatever it is Apple chooses to share with us and maybe we'll share our hot takes on whatever Apple chose not to share with us to. But that will remain to be seen for Tuesday for today. Sponsors for this episode include MacUpdater at corecode.io slash MGG, where MGG Q1 is the coupon code that saves you 10% on your order.  New Relic.com slash MGG gets you signed up and 100 gigs of data free forever. No credit card required. And finally, ZockDoc.com slash MGG. That's where you go to sign up for free and download the app and start figuring out which doctors are the ones that you want to see. We will talk more in depth about each of those shortly here for now here back here in Durham, New Hampshire. I'm Dave Hamilton. And here in Fairfield, Connecticut. This is John Fruin. Hey, John Fruin, the last we spoke, the last two heroes were together. You were having some sound issues with your MacBook Pro in that it was not making them. You were able that you did a reinstall, which happened during the show. But that yes or no, that didn't solve it. I don't believe so.  But did you get it solved? Yeah, well, you gave a suggestion is looking to audio MIDI setup. Yeah. And so what I did is went into audio MIDI setup, selected my internal speakers and fiddled with the format. OK, all right. So I switched it from. So normally it should be 44, I think. So I switched it to 48 and then I switched it back and that seems to have done it. So amazing. That's great. Yeah, audio MIDI setup. It is like neither one of those is universally right or universally wrong. Like either one is fine. Forty four, one or forty eight. But what I like to do is have all of my audio devices set to the same. Whatever that same might be. And that might be more superstition than logic. But the logic for me is I don't want to put my Mac in a scenario where it's got to be doing any more sample rate conversion than necessary. And and it, you know, that that seems to work. But it sounds like your issue wasn't a sample rate mismatch. It was simply maybe a corrupted preferences file somewhere that just needed to be rewritten and by toggling it back and forth. You did exactly that. So that's bueno. That's good. I'm glad that wasn't a hardware issue. And I'm glad it was a relatively easy solution. That's great. Yeah. Cool. All right. Well, should we more more on that? Or should we dig into our quick tips for the day? No, I think we're good. All right, Carl, let's start with Carl. So Carl says, I wanted to let you know that I got my mom a home pod mini to help her hear phone calls better when she receives a phone call or iPhone, all she has to do is hold the phone near the home pod mini and the call automatically switches over to it. It works great. And let's see, they're on sale now at Costco. But maybe not anymore. OK. Yeah, I think the normal price is 99 bucks. And but I got mine from Best Buy for 79 bucks. OK. I also got a coupon code, so even less than that. So well, that's pretty good. But it's neat. Yeah, so I confirmed this, so I did a phone call with my phone. And if you hold it near the home pod, all of a sudden, a little, I don't even know what to call it, but it says transfer from iPhone. So I had to actually press on that. So maybe if you hold the phone next to it long enough, it'll just automatically switch it over. Oh, so it's like a little notification that comes up on the phone that, yeah, interesting. That's pretty cool. I like that. Wow. All right. And John in the chat room at live.mackycup.com, which you are welcome to join anytime we're recording. And of course, mackycup.com slash calendar will tell you when we're recording. John in the chat room says that works with any audio, not just phone calls. So if you were playing music or a podcast through your phone, put it near the home pod and you'll get the same notification. I like this. That's really interesting. Huh. I wonder would that work? I know the Apple TV. Uses Bluetooth for some functions. I wonder if I could put my phone near my Apple TV and do the same thing. Probably not. I'm guessing that's a no. But that's because I don't have any home pods only because I have lots of son of stuff, which we'll talk about later in the episode here. Interesting. Interesting. Cool. I like it. That's that's pretty good. All right. Listener Ben has yet more to say on our message tap backs. He says, following up on my previous share regarding tap back shortcuts on iOS now, he says, I'm used to long pressing on a message in messages to see tap back options, the tap back options, meaning that, you know, the thumbs up the heart, the thumbs down, the exclamation points, whatever, and other message commands like reply and things like that. He says, I just discovered that you can double tap on a message to see only tap back responses. Additionally, when double tapping on an I message, the reply command is also available. And when double tack tapping on a link, there is a pin option. Although he says, I haven't been able to determine the point of pinning a link. I'm kind of the same way. I'm not sure where they pin to. Maybe they pin in that chat. So they're easier to find in the sea of links for that chat later. I don't know. Maybe somebody will tell us feedback at mackeykev.com. How do you use pinning? We'd love to know. But this is great. Yeah, because sometimes it is faster to double tap on a message to get those tap back options than holding down on it. And the nice part is by double tapping. And I know this is going to sound like super like nit picky, but I'm an efficiency maniac. And so by double tapping, my finger is already, my thumb in this case, most cases, is already up so that it can then go back down to hit the appropriate reaction. So if I hold down on it, then I have to lift once they appear and hit it. Whereas if I double tap, I'm already up again. Maybe this is a drummer in me. As I'm doing this with my fingers while we're having this conversation, I'm realizing that this is exactly what I was trained in practice with drums. You hit the drum and then you let the drum do a little bit of the work, but you do sort of lift the stick off to get back up to start the next stroke. And maybe I'm thinking the same way. But there is an efficiency in this. Trust me, nine out of 10 drummers agree. So yeah, nice, Ben. Thank you. Good stuff. Good stuff. See the things we learn. I didn't realize I'd learned something about myself. Actually, I probably did. Yeah, that's okay. I'm gonna take us to Kent, John. Yes, so Kent did some good detective work here. For about two weeks, if I did a Google search on my iOS devices or my iMac and tried to click on one of the first results, I would get the message Safari cannot open the page because it could not establish a secure connection to the server. Of course, the first two results are almost always ads and clicking them sends you through Google ad services before routing you to the link, sifting through the results of my Googling the issue. Is that circular thinking? Yeah, I'm starting to. It's not, but I... Google the problem with Google, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's just the ubiquity of Google is the problem, yeah. Most suggestions centered around clearing caches and or search history, none of that helped. Finally realizing that this problem happened across all my and my wife's devices, I thought of our mesh wifi setup. We use plume pods supplied by our ISP, which are controlled via their home pass app. Sure enough in the guard screen was an ad blocking setting labeled labs, which was enabled. I believe this was added in recent update as I did not specifically enable it myself. I turned it off and immediately all was well. Just the head up, heads up if anyone else is scratching their heads as to why their searches are being disrupted. Even if they don't have a plume system, other routers or mesh systems may implement a similar feature without notifying its users. And he's absolutely right. And actually I've had a similar problem on the Eero Dave. So they also have a labs setting in their app, go to discover and then Eero Labs. But it's clearly marked as beta and they claim in an article about Eero that they won't be able to feature without your permission. I actually had some issues with their WPA3 implementation which I still don't think they got quite right. Many Mac users did, yeah exactly. Yeah, so yeah he's right. On the guard screen I have this disabled on mine, but I can see that ad blocking is labeled with labs and for sure. Cause I'm currently using plume in the house here. I go back and forth with a few of them, but yeah, I can totally see where that would break it. That makes sense, makes sense. Fascinating stuff. Yeah and WPA3 in Eero still not working for you as of your last check, is that right John or has that been fixed? I'll try it again. Okay, okay yeah. Yeah and the symptom is all of a sudden like my Mac will disconnect or drop that connection and then maybe it'll get re-established, maybe not. Right, oh yeah no that's what it is. It's the, it, near as I can tell it's for devices that roam, right? When you roam from one access point to another for whatever reason Apple devices and Eero's or maybe Apple's implementation of WPA3, like that's an incompatibility there and when you roam from one to the other you'll see it connected. Like it's not like you lose Wi-Fi signal or anything which on a phone is even more of a problem cause at least if it lost the Wi-Fi signal you'd have cellular to fall back on or mobile data I guess we're supposed to call it. But you don't, it thinks it's connected but no data passes. So yeah, interesting. All right, well, that's, you know this is why we do the show, help people out, I like it. I will leave that feature disabled on mine. Patrick has a, well it's something we've, we've probably revisited in the past or revisited, we visited in the past and we are revisiting today. Patrick has a PDF tip, he says the other day I needed to combine multiple PDF files into one PDF. I wanted to, the way I would usually do it is that I would open up the thumbnail pane and then drag and drop thumbnails into the thumbnail pane of the main PDF. I do the same thing and it works great. You can rearrange and all of that stuff. One weird thing about that is as you're doing it page numbers will stay the same. It will inherit the page number that the page had in its original file but as soon as you save it then it reenumerates and the new file is just one file with pages in the right order. He says, open up your main PDF but he says I found an easier way to do it. Open up your main PDF file in preview and go to the edit insert and then choose page from file. You can then choose not only one file to combine but multiple files to combine into one. This can not only be used to combine multiple PDF files together but you can also combine PDF files and image files into one PDF document. This is one of those features that might have been obvious to a lot of people but it's these little discoveries that make life easier. Yeah, for sure. Oh, I like this. Yeah, that's good. That is good. All right. Why in the world are my PDFs not archiving? Speaking of PDFs, like when we do the show I archive PDFs off and oh, it did there. Okay. Ever know it's being weird again. We gotta find something better than the old old version of ever know. We gotta find something Apple scriptable. Maybe Apple's notes is our answer or maybe Synology's note station is our answer. I don't know, but there is an answer out there. Want to take us to Jamie? Indeed. So this is a good trick from Jamie. So Jamie says I'm currently listening to your talk of creating shortcuts to remount network shares on the Mac and it reminded me that I've been wanting to send in this quick tip for a while. No, my finder toolbar has been slimmed down and I removed some of the buttons like view, air drop, et cetera, but this works regardless but may clutter up a default toolbar setup. And here are the steps. So mountain network drive in the standard way which is go connect to server from the finder. Then open up your computer in the finder. Open up the computer. Let's see, Dave's Macintosh or in my case, Odin, the root listing of all connected drives local and shared. No, this is not the network list. When you go to go connect to server, you'll see all of the servers out there and so you're gonna choose the one that has the drive that you want to mount. Maybe your Synology disk station, maybe another Mac. Like I think that's step two here, right? And then step three, drag a network drive icon up to the finder toolbar. I would have never thought to have done this. While holding down the command or option key, you'll see a green plus and you'll be able to add the drive with the icon up in the toolbar. Without the modifier key, it'll only show an alias arrow. And then if that drives ever gets unmounted, the icon will disappear but a question mark will remain in its place. Clicking the question mark will remount the drive. This works for both local and network drives. Option driving a drive in the toolbar allows for reordering an option drag off will remove the icon. Oh, that's really interesting. Huh, huh, all right. I never would have thought of that. But Jamie is absolutely right. Like that finder toolbar is yours to customize for sure. And you can put documents up there. I've seen people do that with things that they're constantly opening or whatever, folders, whatever you want, you can put up there. Yeah, very interesting. I like it, that's a good one. Cool, let's see, you wanna take us to Jim? Yeah, yeah, so Jim, I think this is a fish shake. After installing Grammarly and trying it for a few days, I decided it was not for me and turned it off. It took a few more days before I realized that spell check and auto capitalization were no longer working. For some reason, Grammarly disables spell check and check and auto capitalization. Deleting the Grammarly app does not re-enable it. I finally found a website with a solution that did it for me by using a one line terminal command. And we can list the one line terminal command default write sg nsa ns allow continuous spell checking bool true. It's in the show notes. Copy pasta, or copy paste, really, it's not copy pasta. Yeah, so that's rather rude. No, it makes sense that it would turn it off.  So yeah, it makes sense, but I can, I mean, not. It's one of those things that once you know, you know. And until you know, then you don't know. So yeah, all right. All right, Gary actually has two quick tips for us. He says, for people who wanna use AirPods Pro in only one ear, but still use noise cancellation, this can be enabled in on iOS in settings, accessibility, AirPods, noise cancellation with one AirPods. What an interesting thing. He says, this might sound strange, but sometimes I wanna be able to hear my podcast clearly whilst walking near traffic, but don't wanna block out everything. And I find transparency mode isn't good for this use case. No, it's terrible for that because it lets in all that noise, but one ear sealed, one ear not sealed, that's really interesting. I kind of like this. He said, by default, AirPods Pro require both earbuds to be in your ears to enable noise cancellation. That's true. Yeah, for sure. Interesting. All right, thanks, Gary. That's a good one. And then another from Gary in the PDF realm to round out our quick tips here. He says, although it is no longer possible to use Save as PDF in the preview app via the print dialog to remove a password from a protected PDF in Monterey, the option is grayed out, it still works in Safari. So open your PDF in Safari and print and save it from there and it will be stripped of its password-ness. I always, I get my tax returns from my accountant and he always puts in a password in the PDF because it's got not only our social security numbers but lots of private information. I totally get it. What I do not want though is in four years to have to go digging through whatever files I have to figure out what that password on that PDF is. So I always strip passwords out and this is gonna be a handy way to do it. So thank you for that, Gary. I appreciate it. I had lost my ability to do that. All right, well, I have a bunch of cool stuff found and sort of travel tips to share from my trip to Mexico last week. 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That's N-E-W-R-E-L-I-C dot com slash M-G-G and our thanks to New Relic for sponsoring this episode. All right. So I was very fortunate. I was able to travel to and from Mexico last week. We went and saw a bunch of fish concerts at a resort in Cancun. And it all, everything worked out great. And there's many things that I did while traveling. And I'm guessing more and more of us will be traveling as we go forward. So I figured I'd share some of the things I learned. The first is sort of the obvious one. But now that we have air tags everywhere, if you're checking a bag, throw one of your air tags in the bag. You don't need to leave it there full time. Like that's kind of a, unless you're traveling all the time, that's a pretty luxurious use of an air tag because it's gonna be pretty infrequent. But throwing one in each of our checked bags when we left was, it's great. I did it on my last trip to Portland too. It is just nice to know. I've always done it with a tile, John. And that worked. But there are, as we've learned, the network of devices that can sense air tags is much, much, much, much, much larger than the network of devices that can detect tiles. So having an air tag in luggage was a great way of knowing, yep, okay, the plane lands. Sometimes even mid-flight, you can find it with your phone, depending on where your seat is compared to where your bag might be stowed away. But yeah, man, so that's my quick little tip. Yeah, go ahead. Yeah, some airlines, I think it was the last CES I went to. Delta, I believe it was Delta. I actually got a notification on my phone once they put my bag in the plane. I was like, well, it's pretty cool to tell me all about that. Yep, we flew Delta to and from Mexico because they had nonstop flights from Boston to Cancun. And it's the same thing. Yeah, you get the notification, which is Andy. Even if it's not correct, it's, you know, it gives you a nice, peaceful flight. If your bag's not gonna make it, you know, no sense spreading about it during the flight, just figure it out when you get there. Because you remember a pass trip, yeah, it was a disaster. And then I got stuck in a Philly because there was ice. Well, you connected through Philly. I mean, that's how it works. Yeah, but the thing is, I then had to rebook my flight and I actually did it myself. I, you know, broke out the computer and I'm like, okay, can you do this, this, and this? There was, it was like three legs. But the problem is my bag didn't make it until the next day. Fortunately, I got a nice T-shirt. You give me an extra T-shirt. Oh, all right, well, there you go. Cirque du Mac T-shirt. Ah, right, the Cirque du Mac T-shirts came in handy. That's right. Ah, yes. Don't forget about your Mac E-Cub T-shirts. Go to macecub.com slash merch. I definitely wore one of those, one of the nights of the concerts. People love the don't get caught on it, even if they didn't quite get the reference, you know. While I was gone and using my Sonos Rome, my friends at Sonos let me know that there was a new version of the Sonos Rome that came out. So the Sonos Rome is their, you know, I'll call it pill-shaped speaker. And it, it's absolutely my favorite travel speaker, you know, bar none. Like they know exactly how to make things sound good. I don't understand how they do what they do with this speaker because I have other speakers of the same size and the Rome is like, has the best roundest sound that I've ever seen on any of these. They released the Rome SL. Now the Rome and the Rome SL are normal Sonos speakers. They connect to your wifi when you're at home and they participate in your Sonos network just like you would expect them to. When you travel though, the Rome has Bluetooth functionality. And so it can just be, you know, your normal Bluetooth speaker, if you will. And it's fantastic. Works super easily. It's my favorite travel speaker. The Rome SL now drops the price to 159 bucks. I don't know why the website that keeps coming up for me here, even though I'm in, you know, New Hampshire USA is giving me prices in, I don't even know what those prices are. Anyway, it doesn't matter. It's 159 bucks. It still has wifi and Bluetooth, but it doesn't have any microphones. So the normal Rome has microphones that are used for being a smart speaker at home, you know, the Amazon A-Lady or the Google Assistant. And also the microphones provide the speaker with the ability to do automatic true play, which is Sonos' way of tuning the speaker to sound right in its environment without microphones. I can't do that. So there's no microphones and so therefore, you know, no automatic true play, but lower price. For a travel speaker, that's what I would get the Rome SL. So I was gonna talk about it anyway, but then they announced the new one. So it was like, well, perfect. So there you go. Yeah, I think that's a Euro symbol. I don't know why it's listing euros. Same, doesn't matter. It's 159 bucks. For my travels this time, you know, I'm a Mint Mobile user, which means I save, I think about two grand a year over what we were paying AT&T, but it doesn't come with any, what lots of people like to call free international roaming, like say AT&T and Verizon do, but of course you pay for that even if you're not using it. That's really what it is. So I looked at, you know, we talked about eSIMDB in the past. I wound up using GigSky this time for data to use while in Mexico. And I got a 15 day plan because I wanted to sign up. We were gonna be gone for seven days effectively. I wanted to sign up, you know, a couple of days before we left. I didn't wanna sign up for an eight day plan, but I also wanted more than a gig of data. And I think the way the plans worked, I got like three gigs for 20 bucks or something, you know, in a 15 day plan, which was great. But I obviously didn't start using it because the data was only good in Mexico, or so I thought, until we landed. And what was cool was my 15 day timer on my GigSky plan, even though I bought it on a Sunday didn't start until I landed in Mexico on Wednesday, which I thought was pretty good. Now, unfortunately coming back, like once the timer starts, it doesn't stop. Like it's not like I get 15 days to use whenever it's you get 15 days that start whenever you start and then that's that, you know, you go from there. But I think I'm also able to use the data for on that particular plan back here in the US.  But the whole dual SIM thing on the iPhone man has been fantastic. It really like, and I used it, that GigSky was an eSIM plan, John. So it made life super easy and I could, I was able to leave my Mint SIM on for voice calls and for SMS inbound SMS was free. I think in Mexico voice calls on my Mint plan cost me like six cents a minute or something. So it was no big deal, but you could also do them on WiFi calling and that appeared for us not to charge us. I wasn't sure if WiFi calling would charge us internationally. Like sometimes they get you anyway, you know, but we did make a couple of phone calls, which just fine. And our, we topped up our, you know, we added like five bucks to our Mint accounts for international, whatever that we might have needed, you know, their data prices are super expensive. So we didn't go, we didn't use them for data, but it's, you know, the iPhone makes it super easy to choose which plan to use for voice and SMS and which plan to use for data. And you can even tell the phone to, you can give it permission to switch back and forth between data plans based on where you are. Because like it, without data roaming on for my Mint plan, it wouldn't, I could set that to be the primary. I just wouldn't get any data. You know, I have to enable roaming. And so to have both of them enabled and it's just like, oh, you're in Mexico. So we're going to use this plan because that one's going to give us data here. That's pretty cool. It's a whole lot different than it was even two years ago traveling internationally to be perfectly honest. So yeah, it's pretty cool. I don't know. But I'll put links to all these things in the show notes. I also, I get, you get five bucks off of GigSky if you use my code. So factor that into your pricing, but the code is like Dave191 or something. It gets us both five bucks, but obviously, you know, use it if it makes sense for you. I'll leave it out there. What else do I have? Oh, so I was hoping to talk about these for CES. I got these for CES, these Kizzik shoes, John. Have you heard of these things? K-I-Z-I-K. I think I've seen some Instagram ads. OK, yeah, you're right. Yeah, that's that's almost certainly where you've seen them. They are slip on shoe. They're laced up slip on shoes. I got the Vegas model because that seemed to make sense for CES. Plus it's a nice leather upper and and man, it's whatever they've done to the heel, the heel sort of like breaks away when you slip your foot in. And then it's super strong once your foot's in there. And it's super comfortable. Great for a travel day. I've got pre-checked. So we don't actually have global entry, so which makes life ways. You're coming back to, by the way, but which includes pre-check. So I don't take off my shoes getting on the plane. But once I'm on the plane, I definitely take off my shoes.  I don't like to have shoes on on the plane. But I do want to put shoes on before I go to the restroom.  And I won't share any more about that. Yeah, so having these shoes to slip on and off, super comfortable. Good stuff. I it's magic. I've never had a parish. My kids are laughing at me because they're like, these shoes have existed for a while here. Like, yeah, but this is life changing. They're like, OK, sounds great. You know, but I like them. It's good, good little travel thing. John, I think I'm pretty much a doctor now. I I think so. When I was, well, let's let's let's tell the story the right way. About 10 years ago, a a traveling friend of of of mine and of ours, a frequent traveler, advised me that it would be a good idea to travel with superflaxen in my travel case, which is an antibiotic that is often used as the primary line of defense for food poisoning or traveler's diarrhea or whatever you want to call that. And so I had, for whatever reason, like a couple of years even prior to that, I'd had a script for it for something. I forget what they gave me more than I needed. I had like three of them left. And so I threw it in my travel case. And I forgot about it. And fast forward 10 years until Sunday night. And after waging an heroic battle in the wee hours of the morning and finally realizing that this was not going to get better, it dawned on me. I have Cipro in my travel kit. And so I took one of these and within about 90 minutes or less, I was, you know, back to like 90 percent. It was it's amazing how well this stuff works for exactly that. I know somebody's going to hate me for telling the story, but I'm telling it anyway. But I really saw it was like, great, vacation saved. Like this is amazing. And I got some more sleep and, you know, things were mostly fine. I was ginger on on the old gullet for the rest of the day, for sure. But everything was under control. But I did realize that I would run out of my limited supply of Cipro while I was there. Now, I didn't want to spend all day at the, you know, of our vacation, especially as things were winding down to the end. I didn't want to spend all day at the, you know, the resort's medical facility, although they have one there. So I went up, but I figured, well, let's find out what the story is.  And the woman said to me, do you know exactly what you need? And I said, I do. I need Cipro flaxen. And she handed me what what I now know, I guess, is a prescription pad. It's it's that's what we we we newly minted physicians, I guess, call it. It's it's it's square and yellow and and you peel it off.  And so I wrote Cipro flaxen on a post-it note. And I handed it back to her and she picked up her phone and she made a phone call and she pulled her phone away from her from her ear. And she said it's going to be 35 bucks for 14, 500 milligram tablets. That includes the delivery fee. Does that sound good? And I said, that sounds great, because I knew that's what, you know, what the dosage was that I already had with me. And so I was like, yep, we're on the same page. We're moving down the right path. And she said, great, she got back on the phone. OK, I've got the phone. Great, it'll be back here in two hours. Give me the 35 bucks. So I gave her the 35 bucks and a tip for helping me. And then I went and lounged by the pool for two hours. And and once the two hours had elapsed, maybe three, I went back and I picked up my my prescription. So I wrote myself a prescription for for a Cipro. Nice. Now, huh. So I think that means I'm a doctor now, John. I don't know. I guess. No. No, are you sure, though? If you show me your medical degree. I wrote a prescription that should count, right? Yeah. Oh, I remember, man, our family went on a trip to Mexico. The only advice I have is don't drink the local water. Yeah, well, you're right, as we went out to a restaurant. And back then, both me and my sister knew enough Spanish where, you know, we could order sure in Spanish. And the bad news is that we also drink the water that the restaurant provided. And I think it's, I don't know, microbes or something. But the thing is, if we're not used to the local water, you're not used to it. Right. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, this is this was our our second time at this particular your advice is absolutely spot on, by the way, drink bottled water. That's the only way to go. This resort is the second time we've been there. It's the the fourth time that we've been to one of these concert events at a resort in Mexico. It was the first two we went to or at a different resort, but same kind of thing. And these resorts have like they cater mostly to people from the US and the UK. And they have their own water treatment plants on site. So the water that you get served there is generally speaking going to be fine. This was, you know, out of those four trips with the two of us. This was our first experience with with anything like this. It probably wasn't the water. We have a lot of theories.  If you're traveling to a resort, bring a big insulated, coverable drink cup with you. We you can get them from like like we got ours from RTIC Arctic. But you can get them from I think I forget the company that charges more. But you know, it has a stronger brand name. It's not strong enough for me to remember igloo. Maybe I don't know. Anyway, you know, we had those.  They water down all the drinks at the at the resort, which is great, because you don't really want to be hammered in the pool. You just kind of want to have something cold or whatever. But the strawberry stuff as I as I, you know, we rinsed them out in our room at night, but you can only do so much in the, you know, in the room sink. So we would rinse and shake it and all that stuff. But when I got home and like got in there with soap and stuff, there were some of that strawberry stuff that had had like started to fester in the lid of the cup. And when I started scraping it out, it smelled terrible. So it's possible that was it. In retrospect, I said, at least I'm like what we should have done. The room had a, you know, dispenser with like vodka and tequila and rum and whiskey or something.  So next time that is what we will do. But and maybe just bring a dish brush with us. Like it wouldn't be a terrible thing to pack. But yeah, yeah, it was it was not a fun Monday morning. I'll put it that way. But but thankfully, you know, I was I was saved. One other thing we did, John, was we had it was lovely. We have like a hot tub in the room that we could fill up and had jets and stuff. And so after the shows every night, we would, you know, kind of decompress and hang out in there and let our old muscles and bones soak in it. And we would I would do there were a couple of nights where there was like the Bruins playing or whatever. And so I wanted to watch, you know, we just put it on a TV or whatever. Now we couldn't use Fubo because we were in Mexico because Fubo only works for me in the United States. I think it only works for anybody in the United States, but definitely did not work for us in Mexico. So we, you know, I have that channels DVR. Channels doesn't do the greatest job at transcoding for a remote thing. It does OK, but Plex does way better. And I have Plex pointed at my channel's library even. And it can even see things that are like recording in progress and just catch up and play along with them. So we use Plex. But the cool part about using Plex is that I was able to use of Jenny Chirpock's remote for Mac to control. I would plug my Mac into the TV using the, you know, the HDMI cable and all that with the television. And then on my phone, I can use the remote app to control Plex on my Mac from across the room. That was key. So it's, I, when he first told us about remote for Mac, I was like, I don't know, like, what's the use case?  Like, right, totally makes sense. Now your phone is your remote makes great sense. But mine is not, right? So it's one of those things that I don't use all that often, but traveling, I use it like religiously. And I always make sure I have it set up before I go. So I'll put a link to that in the show notes. But yeah, remote for Mac is, it's a great little thing. And it's so, it's like, it's so perfectly engineered. I mean, he engineered it for himself to do exactly all of this. But, you know, you get to, you just get to pick what it does. And it can control all kinds of different apps. Plex, obviously, it can control all the Apple TV apps. But it, you know, it does, it does what you need. It's, it's great. It's good stuff. You install a helper app on your Mac and you, you get the app for your phone and on the way it goes. Pretty good, right? So we're, we're in a full agreement that I'm a doctor now, John. Is that right? No. Okay. Just checking. Just figured out, see if I could get that past you. We have questions to answer, John. Let's get back to the meat of this thing. And I would love to answer these questions. The next thing that I would also love to do is talk about our next couple of sponsors, if that works for you. Okay. All right. Hey, look, no one knows what you're looking for in a doctor better than you. And no one is better at giving you the tools to find the perfect doctor than our sponsor, ZockDoc. They made booking a great doctor, surprisingly pain free. ZockDoc is a free app that shows you doctors who are patient reviewed, that take your insurance and who are available when you need them. So you get to read up on your local doctors. You get verified patient reviews to see what other real humans had to say about their visits with these people.  You can find the doctor who is right for you and book an appointment that works for your schedule. And every month, millions of people use ZockDoc. I'm one of them. I've used it and it's amazing to be able to go in and you can even sort of litmus test it by looking at reviews for an existing doctor that you have so you can get a feel for, wow, yeah, okay, these make sense. I would have said that thing about my doctor. It's great. And in the chaotic world of healthcare, you can let ZockDoc be your trusted guide. You let us be your trusted guides for your tech stuff. Let ZockDoc be your trusted guide to find a high quality doctor in a way that is surprisingly pain free. Go to ZockDoc.com slash MGG and download the ZockDoc app for free. Then start your search for a top rated doctor nearby today. Many are available within 24 hours. That's ZocDoc.com slash MGGzockDoc.com slash MGG and our thanks to ZockDoc for sponsoring this episode. Next up is MacUpdater from Core Code, one of my favorite apps. I know it's crazy that I'm excited about updating apps, but I totally am because I bet I'm like you in this regard. When I go to launch an app, that's not when I want to find out there's an update for it, right? I mean, it's great that apps can do that and say, hey, there's an update. You want to do that? That's fine. But I'd much rather have the app already be updated when I go to launch it. I want to use it. That's why I launched the app. I didn't launch it to check to see if there's an update. Well, I launch MacUpdater and let it run on my Mac and it finds all these updates for me and then it can do most of them in one fell swoop. It's actually pretty amazing. The 6,000 most popular apps for your Mac, and this is a growing number, by the way, can be updated directly inside MacUpdater with a single click. And they have version information for over 60,000 apps. That number is growing too. MacUpdater is a one-time purchase. There's no subscriptions. They've got support for all kinds of software. 2.1 even added support for Adobe plugins. It's super flexible and you can save using coupon code MGGQ1 when you go to corecode.io.mgg. So make sure go to corecode.io.mgg and then use coupon code MGGQ1, and that way you get our discount and you support these great people that make this great software and you make your life easier in the process. Our thanks to Corecode and MacUpdater for sponsoring this episode. All right, John, you want to take us to our first question from Bob? Yeah, this is kind of a wacky one.  He claims that his wife was talking about a bizarre physical item. Really wondering what this bizarre physical item is. While her iPhone was nearby, then a short time later, she had an advertisement pop up. Not sure if it was Facebook for that bizarre product that she was discussing. I trust that Apple is concerned about my privacy and security, and I told him I didn't think that was possible. Am I wrong? I don't think so. And here's what I found, Dave. So we all know that Apple takes privacy very seriously and they actually have a dandy article called Ask Siri Dictation and Privacy that goes into a lot of detail and they explicitly state Siri data and your requests are not used to build a marketing profile and are never sold to anyone. But then I read the article further, Dave, and here's something that I did not know about. The odd thing is that they do make some suggestions on how to disable certain apps from learning. Specifically, go to Settings, Siri and Search. And they do have a section that lists the various apps that can interact with Siri and Facebook is one of them. So I just want to clarify, because of the language, the order of the words that you use, you said apps from learning, that's not the case. It's Siri from learning from apps. So Siri's not providing data to the app. Siri is gathering data from them to better answer your queries in the future. And that's from a privacy standpoint, like that order matters there. So I just wanted to make sure we had that right. Oh, okay. All right. All right. So maybe that's not the answer. I mean, it could be. You may not want Siri to have information from, say, Facebook or things like that. You may want to shut that down. But this is, I think, the option. I think you have a quote in there. The setting is learn from this app, not teach this app. Right? I mean, that's kind of the key there. So I just wanted to make sure we had that right. Okay. I mean, my only guess is that someone may have searched, someone in the household may have searched the web for this bizarre physical item, and that's why it came up. Yeah, I mean, I mean, I noticed this with, is that a lot of times if I search for something on Facebook, and then I go to Instagram because they, you know, they're part of the same club is that I'll see an ad for the thing that I looked at on another platform because I think there happened a little discussion. Oh, yeah. Oh, well, Facebook and Instagram definitely. But Facebook and everybody, you know, this is the whole tracking thing, right? If you go on your iPhone, and I'll try and get it up here while we're talking about it. But if you go on your iPhone into privacy, you can control what apps get to see what you do in other apps. And that is the, like, this is the whole point of this, right? So if you go to settings, privacy, tracking, and then you have a list of apps that have asked to track you. This is asking to track you when you're using other apps. So for example, you know, Facebook is here. They want to know what I'm doing in other apps on my phone. Of course, Facebook is going to be able to track me when I'm using the Facebook app. It's their app. They know everything that I do in that app. I assume they collect all that data. And I don't have to assume they've told me. They do, right? And they use it, like you said. The trick is, you know, do you want Facebook to be able to see what TV you're watching in the Fubo app? If you do, turn on tracking for Facebook. That's what this tracking here is all about. And if you're watching the video, you can see that I have yet to find a reason where I want one of these apps to be able to track me in other apps. This is not about location tracking. This is, you know, because some apps, it's super handy to give location. That's set in a different spot. This is about tracking what you're doing in other third-party apps. Craziness that this would even be something that could be allowed. Like it just doesn't make sense to me. But that's where we're at. So, yeah, go in there and turn that off. As far as it suggesting the bizarre physical item, it's important to remember these companies, like think about, let's talk about Amazon, right? Because they're in the business of making sure that they have the items that you want close enough to you to deliver within one day when you want them. And their predictive, you know, machine learning-based algorithms are top-notch and constantly being revised and improved.  So, for you to get an ad for a thing that seems unique to you and seems bizarrely coincidental, might be, you know, the result of tracking like this, for sure. It might be, you know, that you've got some device listening that isn't being responsible with the audio data that it's getting. But it's also possible that these algorithms, that it's not, it might be unique to you, but your scenario is not unique. There's someone else like you that may be a week and a half ahead of you on whatever the schedule is. And they bought all the same things you did. They did all the same things you did or enough of the same things.  Let's go and suggest it to these people because they might not even know it exists. And maybe they'll buy it from us. And oftentimes we do. So, yeah, it's an interesting world we live in, not necessarily in a good way all the time. Most of the time it's good. It's good. All right. We did get a note while I was doing the ad reads from Martin Brooks in the chat room where he said he's just bringing denture cleaning tablets with you to sterilize your cups. So that's a, that's interesting. I never thought about that, but there you go. So I like this. Also, while we're on the subject, like I said, we had a hot tub in the room. It was advised to us to bring either hot tub cleaning tablets before, you know, to use when you take over the room or if you don't happen to have those and don't want to go by 20 of them, bring a dishwasher cleaning tablet and use that. And in fact, we did. We brought three of them just to have two for good measure in case, you know, whatever we wanted to clean it twice, maybe. And it made a difference. Like there's some, you know, gook that comes out of there or whatever. And so it's good to get it clean and then run it rinse it, obviously, before you get in because you don't necessarily want to be cleaning your body with dishwasher tablets. But, you know, your choice. Thank you for that, Martin. Uh, you want to take us to Barry, John? Yeah, here's a mystery that I think I solved. But all right, let's see. You have some of that. Sure, yeah. I found two copies of this in music. There are a few others that are similar. Everything appears exactly the same except for the file size. Any idea where this would be? And he showed a screenshot of the two files. And they're not quite identical. Okay. So I noticed one thing. So it lists the kind and peg for audio. It lifts the size. And indeed, the sizes are different. One of them is 1.5 megabytes and the other is 406 kilobytes. That's a big difference. The location is the same. But here's the thing that I noticed. The date is different. So the smaller file has a date in 2007. And the larger file has a date in 2020. But the only thing that popped into my head, though I don't use it, well, actually I do. I get a free trial. I'm wondering if Apple Music decided that it was a good idea to get a higher resolution file, which I think this one is. And you can actually find out a lot of information. If you go into music, you right click on a song. And you can say get info. And then there's a file tab. And it can show you things like the bit rate and the sample rate. So I would look at that. For sure. No, I would be nearly certain that if you look at the bit rate, it would be much higher on the larger file. The sample rate is actually shown in the Finders Get Info. Both of these files are 44.1 kilohertz. But the sample rate or the bit rate would almost certainly be higher. Now, you're right that Apple Music will pull down. Now will pull down larger versions of files. Now that Apple is sending out lossless files and even Dolby Atmos encoded versions of files. But if you have them downloaded, it will play whatever you have downloaded. And if that's the old version that's not lossless or Atmos, then that's what you'll get. So you have to tell it on download, you know, remove from device and then redownload or just stream it. And you'll get the Atmos or lossless version. That's not what's happening here, though. And the only way I, the only reason I say that is by looking at the folders where these files are, these are in the iTunes media music folder. Apple Music's cache is in the Apple Music folder because they are special files that will expire when your subscription to Apple Music expires. Whereas these files are not expirable files. They are files that listener Barry owns. And I think these are the result of iTunes match. So what Apple Music does, or you can do it with just iTunes match, which you pay 25 bucks a year for. But if you have Apple Music, it's automatically included, is it will let you upload your entire library and then match it with Apple's much higher quality versions of those same songs. And then you can slurp those higher quality versions down. And it looks like Barry has, you know, the old version and the new version. So my guess, my guess is that this is going to show up to be, you know, some maybe 64K BPS, you know, file on the old one, on the small one. And then a 256K AAC file on the large one. That would be my guess. But you're right. Doing the info in whatever, I guess in music. Yeah, you would have to do it inside music or inside QuickTime Player. You could open them in QuickTime Player and that'll give you more of those details. So yeah. But yeah, no, I think you're right. I think you're right. Cool. More on that? We're good. We're good. All right. Tony, AKA PC Unix has a question for us. It says, I have randomly been finding my battery nearly depleted when I log in. But when I check activity monitor energy, nothing is currently acting up. A friend alerted me to the applications in the last 12 hours from the view menu. I never noticed that. Maybe he says I can find the culprit the next time. This happens. That might tell you it might not. It's not the most complete list. Let's put it that way. There is a command that I learned about when I went through this a couple of months ago. In the, there's a command called PM set that does a lot on the Mac with power manager. And you can pull a log from PM set. And then you can parse that log for wake requests. Because if you've got a sleeping Mac that wakes up or that is depleted or has lost lots of battery when you wake it up, I guarantee you that's not the first time it woke up since you put it to sleep last. It's been waking itself up, which Macs will do and are not supposed to do every minute. They're supposed to do every hour and change. My guess is that you've got something waking up your Mac throughout the night to do some task, whatever that task may be. And wake requests with a capital W and a capital R is what you want to search for. So there's a command I'm not going to try and spell it out in the show here, but I will put it in the show notes that lets you parse that log and only show you wake request events. And those wake request events will also come with process names. That should help with the searching. So go to macgeekyab.com, look up show 917, and you will see the command there that you just paste that into the terminal and it will tell you what has happened. It might be, you might see days worth of this stuff. So make sure you sort of focus on the time period that matters, but you'll get there, yeah. All right, you want to take us to Daniel, John? Yes. So Daniel says, I've been getting repeated warning messages from Tech Tool Pro and clean my Mac 10 that my one terabyte SSD was running out of free space, yet the finder was telling me I had 270 gigs free. I was just starting to write a question to you when I spotted a quick tip in the notes for show 951, use carbon copy cloner to look at the space being taken by snapshot files. Sure enough, carbon copy cloner showed me several snapshot files, including one from two months ago that was over 250 gigs in size. The finder doesn't show these files as taking up space. I deleted the big snapshot file, and now all is good. So, okay, cool. And yeah, I ran into something similar in that my free space on my MacBook Pro went to hundreds of gigs to like tens of gigs, and I was like, what's taking all this space? And then I also recall that we were talking like this. And I found a snapshot. It was like hundreds of gigs. Yeah, about the same thing he saw. And I think the reason this happened is that Apple has an article about time machine local snapshots. And they specifically say that when you do an OS upgrade, which most of us have recently done, it'll create a huge snapshot just in case you need to revert to a prior OS version. On the other hand, Apple claims also in this article, your Mac counts the space used by snapshots as available storage, even though even so, time machine stores snapshots only on this that have plenty of free space that it automatically deletes snapshots as they age or as space is needed for other things. And they specifically mentioned another snapshot is saved before installing any Mac OS update. You run it out of space, check your snapshots. Yeah, it doesn't count space used by snapshots as free space. That's a total lie. I mean, if that were the case, we wouldn't have talked about this in MaciCub 915. It was 915, as you were saying this thing. He's like, I looked at the show notes for 951. I'm like, I would love to see the show notes for 951. I want to learn what we're going to talk about. He said it, but he meant 915. And I pulled that command forward, too. So that command, and it's just in Carbon Copy Cloner where you go and look. You can also look in Disk Utility, although we were looking pre-show at that. And it wasn't entirely obvious for me, at least on my Mac, how to delete things in snapshots. And I'm going to pull it up here now. Okay, so it just took a while. It had to sort of parse through all of them. And now I can right click on one and delete it or rename it. But it shows you, yeah, if you go into Disk Utility, highlight your drive and go to the View menu and choose Show APFS Snapshots. You can see them there, too. So if you don't have Carbon Copy Cloner, this now in the current builds of Monterey, the release builds of Monterey has this snapshot browser. And yes, you can go and delete things. And man, I wish I could sort the, there's shows you the name, the date, the tide mark. I'm not exactly sure what that is. The highest block referenced by a snapshot, which cannot be moved and limits shrinking. Okay, cool. Don't know what that, why I would need to know that, but sure. But it won't let me sort, and then it has size and kind. What would, oh, we have Time Machine Snapshots and then Carbon Copy Cloner Snapshots. But I can't sort by size, but looking in here, I mean, there's several that are over 100 gigs. This seems, I don't know, like these sizes aren't right, because there's definitely more than a terabyte used on my drive. So maybe they're inclusive or they share data. But anyway, you can delete them here. I'm not sure how helpful it is. I find the Carbon Copy Cloner interface a little more clear. So, all right, where are we on time? Oh, we still have some time. I like this. We're being efficient today. This is good. Yeah. All right. Let's go. Are we done with this one, John? Okay, cool. Let's go to listener John then, who has a, it's a follow-up, and we'll call it a cool stuff found. He says, we were talking about things to use when Google's workspace, the free version, goes away for those of us that have Google's workspace for free. And he recommends Pobox.com that he says he's got a free account for grandfathered there. That's no longer how it works. He says, but they have plans $50 a year and less for just doing email. And he says it works out great. They are a good service and even at their most expensive are less expensive than Google. There's even a $20 a year plan, which does forwarding only, which maybe all you need. You link up your custom domain to them. There's forwarding only. You can forward up to five different destinations, which is handy. Obviously, use your own domain. And they provide outgoing SMTP access, which is the key. Forwarding mail coming in is great, but you want to be able to send mail from your domain and you're going to need real SMTP access to do that reliably. So for $20 a year, you might even be able to get a full family in there if having five accounts is enough for you. So another good option. We are compiling a list of all of this here to share. Once Google makes their sort of final decision, we mentioned that they were asking folks to fill out a questionnaire that's open for another month or so until I think April 15th. After that, I think, and it was a questionnaire specifically targeted at people using Google Workspace for personal use. So I think we're going to see some middle ground plan come from them to cater to people that don't want to pay whatever it is, you know, $10 a mailbox a month or $5 a mailbox a month or something like that. So I'm eager to see what's happening there. Shall we talk about David, John? We still have time. Let's do it. I've heard you discuss the pros and cons of SSDs for several years now. I understand that when those drives fail, they can be expected to just stop with little to no warning. And yes, I've had this happen. Yes. Some of the initial ones. I remember you said that they are good for a certain number of write cycles, and that is true. My question is, now that SSDs have been standard equipment for Max for quite a while, have you begun to see any patterns as far as actual failure rates go? Is there any method to assess just where a solid-state drive is in an expected lifespan? I'm curious about OEM drives in Max as well as things like external SSDs. I don't mind replacing something when it's time to do so, but I don't know much about just how a certain number of write cycles translate into average daily use. Do you? Oh, here's the answer, Dave. You can get this, you can determine the lifetime of an SSD, but I don't think there's an Apple tool to do so, but there are two that many of us use. So the first one is iStat menus, and they have a drive widget.  Used, free, purgeable, and then SSD lifetime left. And for example, I'm looking at my Mac mini and it says 98%. So that's good. All right. And the other thing, you could do a diagnostic tool like Drive DX. It also gives SSD lifetime left indicator. So there you go. Interesting.  Like, I'd be curious to hear from anybody. Feedback at maciekev.com if you've seen this get down to like 20% and yet, you know, it's still fine because 20% is more than zero, right? Like, it should be something that declines steadily over time, I would think. But my guess is that it's just reading some parameter from the drive. My guess is it's not as reliable as we would want it to be. But I don't know, like, that's an interesting thing. Huh. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We'll reach out to the vendors of these apps and ask them, you know, what what they're reporting from because that would that would tell us more about what's going on, maybe. Yeah, I should have looked through. I think it's probably a smart parameter. So the drive is reporting itself. Right. It's a it's a it's a self reported thing from the drive would be, I mean, it would have to be. So yeah, I don't and and I'm wondering what it's reporting because as he correctly pointed out in his question, the first thing in theory that will happen to an SSD is you will simply stop being able to write to it, but you will be able to read from it. Of course, that's not necessarily what everyone experiences you and me included, where, you know, the drive has been working for both writing and reading, and then it stops working for writing and reading and even identifying itself as a drive, right? It's just like today I am no longer what I once was. It goes through its metamorphosis. It's maybe it's like a butterfly caterpillar, you know, the drive, the drive, maybe it liquefies inside and your data is gone and it no longer identifies as a drive. And that's just how it is. I don't know. Yeah, like mission impossible, you know, right, right. But in that case, it was it was magnetic tapes that were. Yeah, I think they changed that in the newer movies. There were like platters or something, right? I mean, I think I don't know, man, like it's like those newer movies are not new anymore. So yeah, I'm surprised we haven't we haven't seen maybe we have. Oh, I can't remember. But yeah, I'm not sure. I mean, I'm not sure what it like. I don't know that you get to know that's and maybe that's the it's certainly that's certainly that's been experientially what we have gone through ourselves and what we've heard from most people out there is that you really don't get any warning on the lifespan and what the path I take is I rely on my backups because I know that that SSD is going to is going to fail someday. And if it starts acting wonky, that's all the warning I need. I'm out, you know, I'll replace it as quickly as I can at that point. But, you know, you don't get a drive that's making noise. You don't get reports of, oh, there were bad blocks, but everything I recovered and everything's still OK like you do with some rotational drives with an SSD. It's just like, yeah, today it's like I said, I'm no longer a drive. I no longer identify as a drive. Maybe that's what it says. And that's it. And then you're done.  Like it's as though there's no drive attached, even though you can physically see a drive attached like that's what happens. So yeah, I don't know. I don't know. I think that's what we got for today, John. It's going to have to do it for us. We did good, though. We made it through a lot. So this was productive. I like it. We should take we should take time off more often, not this week. This week we get to do this twice. But, you know, it'll be fun because we'll be able to just talk about whatever happens with Apple. Yeah, I'm curious to see, you know, that whole peak performance thing. Most people will probably hear this episode after the Apple announcement. But it's I mean, it's a plan words and all that. And that's fun. But what like, what does it mean? That's kind of the key. I mean, I think it's maybe I have something to do, something visual. Maybe a new, you know, new displays is kind of the, you know, the working theory if if one tugs on that thread. The AR. Like that could be the headset, but I like if that were to come out, that would be the best kept secret. Like, I mean, everybody knows they're experimenting with it and may or may not release it, you know, but certainly they aren't ignoring that world. But we haven't heard of any production of any of that. I don't know. Who knows. I hope we see. I don't think we're going to see it, but I'm keeping my fingers crossed for the new M1 iMac large screen, whatever that is, you know, iMac Pro, iMac 27 inch, iMac 32, whatever that is, because the studio needs a new iMac. I mean, it doesn't really. This one's a 2019. It's it's actually really good. It's fine. As long as I run. What's that? What's that app? Turbo TurboBoo Switcher TurboBoo Switcher Pro is actually what I use. That is the key to making it so you all do not have to hear fans in my iMac. When we do this show, I don't know why my CPU with TurboBoost Switcher Pro disabling TurboBoost is only at like it's like 80 percent idle. So clearly it doesn't need to turbo boost and heat itself up. And yet it does. If I don't turn it off. So it's a handy little tool.  It seems right. Just give me the gigahertz, man. And let it run cool. Like, you know, I want I want performance per temperature, per degree. There you go. Is it performance per joule? Would that be the right way of thinking about it? Performance per watt? Maybe maybe. Yeah, maybe. Right? Oh, all right. Let's go. We're done. Thanks. Thanks for hanging out with us. Make sure to, uh, like I said before, check out the merch. And I'll say it one last time. Feedback at MacGeekUp.com. There. That's three for the episode. I think I heard you right, dude. Feedback at MacGeekUp. It is. It's feedback at MacGeekUp.com. Check out our sponsors. We had four in this episode. All with fun stuff. DrinkTrade.com slash MGG. New Relic.com slash MGG. ZocDoc.com slash MGG and Corco.io slash MGG. Corco.io slash MGG. Hey, listen, uh, if you're going to play a doctor and notice I put an A in there, if you're going to play a doctor in Mexico, be very aware of what you, what prescription medication you are permitted to procure down there and bring home with you because the last thing I would want for anyone to do is have any trouble, which is to say, please don't yet.


Live from Atlanta, Georgia, it's theCUBE. Covering Ansible Fest 2019, brought to you by Red Hat. Welcome back to theCUBE, everyone. Live coverage here at Ansible Fest. Two days of coverage, day one, wrapping up. I'm John Furrier with theCUBE. Stu Miniman, my guest co-host today. Our next two guests, Dennis VanVelzen. It's me. Okay, welcome to theCUBE. You're an engineer at ING Bank and Robert DeBock, product owner, engineer at ING Bank. Hey guys, thanks for coming on. Thank you for meeting me. Great to have the practitioner on. Well, first of all, we have a lot of great feedback from the practitioners here and also people in deploying Ansible and other cool DevOps tools and automations at the top of the list. Yes. More efficient, getting things done, focus. You got satisfaction in job because things go away. Time savings. Time saving. Security drives the conversation. Yes. A lot of these are cutting edge things. You guys are doing it. Take a minute to explain what you guys do. What in ING Bank? Yeah, I work in a team that provides redhead images for other teams in ING to consume, to use, to instantiate. We also deliver some playbooks, some Ansible code and roles to manage those things. ING is very scattered, which is sort of decentralized, which is a good thing in my opinion. It's ready for scaling in that case. I used to work with Dennis a lot in the tower team. Yep. So take it away. Okay, so I still work at the Ansible Tower Squad. What we do is we make sure that the Ansible Tower service keeps running 24-7, and we also ensure that we provide updates. And next to all this, we also have an Ansible community where we basically support our end users, which are there a lot. So from some numbers I heard, we have like 1200 application teams that are using our service. And they all have Ansible playbooks, Ansible roles, questions, difficulties with anything. And we are basically there to support them as well. So 1200 teams are using Ansible inside the bank. Yes. It's set up very decentralized, and I think what I hear from Ansible Fest, that is not very common. I still think it's a very good thing to do. We try to basically give these teams all the tools they need to do their stuff. And what I hear here mostly is that there's a central team of administrators pushing the buttons for them. Tower's great, Ansible's great in that case. I think for our case it's really a perfect fit. I guess Dennis, to help explain, is this, do you provide, you said it's not centralized, but is this, here's best practices, here's some playbooks, how do you end you support them? Walk us through a little bit those relationships. Okay, okay. So what we do is we basically have all the roles in Git, in a Git lab. So it's an on-premise Git environment. And you can search in this Git for roles. Not, like all roles are easily to be found when searching for them. So that's why there are these communities to share what you have made. Plus these teams, they can themselves pick and choose. So some will try to rewrite everything, that's fine. Others can benefit from existing code. So it's just a good trick to enable all these teams to participate. Yeah, and it really differs. Some people make it all themselves and others. And next to this, so we basically have these 1200 teams do their own thing. But next to this, we also have a self-service portal where they can choose from generic things like OS, patch or machine, add new disks, so new capacity, CPUs, memory. That's all being done through a portal. So they don't need to do anything on their own for this. They can, but most of them choose the easy way of using this portal. This portal basically does an API call to Ansible Tower which executes a Ansible playbook and some other stuff, maybe some APIs. And this is one of the things you guys create and manage these playbooks. And if you go back in time, so the alternative way, which we happily got rid of, is to do it ourselves. I think it was before we worked together. We had patch weekends, for example, and it was very, very difficult. You had no life. Oh, man. Working on weekends. Weekends, and for example, we used a patch machine, some 10,000 or so. And we were not aware what was important or what not. So you'd stop the whole patching. Oh, this machine has a problem. Let's stop everything and focus on it. Yeah, it's not important. It was like a complete order. And the other way around also, this machine, I guess it's not that important. Let's just continue. Monday morning, oh my God, everything's broken. Can you give us a little flavor of the spectrum of solutions that you leverage Ansible on top of? Yeah, I think what we see most is for Linux machines. So patching is a big one. We call it second-day operations, so there's a few of them. The deployment also depends on Ansible. So if you order a new machine, Ansible is involved somewhere to make it happen. Yep. And the network is onboarded. The Windows teams are very interested. I'm not sure if Windows is onboard yet, to be honest. No, no, we did some POC in the past. So a couple of months ago, using WinRAM, and you needed to set some policies there. But you can see that the networking teams are getting more momentum. F5, there's some software-defined switches, but I don't know the... Never mind the name, but you can see some momentum in the networking departments. A lot of configurations going on in the network. Networking for the actionists. That's for the actionists and the network. Yeah, yeah, and there were some cool talks also here on F5 and workshops. So you can see there is some attention on these modules and integrations as well. What's your guys' goal here for this show? What brought you here? Obviously a big user. Yeah, so one of the things was sharing our own thing. We did a talk this morning regarding mob programming. Really cool. We wanted to share this behavioral thing and... What was it you talked about? Take a minute to explain. Mob programming. So basically it's programming with the whole team and making sure that you get something done with all the knowledge in the team so you don't have to align afterwards or if your colleague basically says, you can do better using this thing. It's all done during the session. That's basically a good way to get a team up to speed. So in a team, there's probably a few people that are very quick and understand the concept and a few starters or so. So you guys decentralize, which makes sense for scale, I get that. So this sounds like you can operate decentralize, but with Ansible you can still have that common playbook or thread. People can switch teams, for example, so it used to be very specific. Each team would have their own type of code. Now that more Ansible is used, people can switch a little easier to another product or service because the languages have been shared. Still, it's quite difficult. People are happy with this, right? Yeah, I am. You're happy. I'm really, really happy with that. You're not working on the weekend. That's good. The good thing is that you have one generic way of working. So this playbook is readable by all engineers and if you want to learn this thing, you just do the Ansible course. So you know what this thing is, a task and role and it's all a profession. We do see horrible codes here. Yeah, we do, still, still. Oh, come on. Don't throw your colleagues under the bus. I'm going to ask you a tough question because here's what we've been hearing. I want you guys to test this. We hear that there's a lot of time savings involved with Ansible, true or false. That's true. Yeah, absolutely. Order of magnitude. What kind of savings are we talking about? I think it depends on the thing because we saw a huge, I don't know, extract numbers, but this OS patching that really, really saves. If I would guess now, OS patching was two people working on it at full time. So basically collecting who needs to do what, when and then for a weekend, 10, 15 people or so. So that's reduced now to sort of nothing. Some maintenance to that playbook and role, but I mean, yeah, it's difficult to express, but massive. So no one's getting phone call. Hey, come in on the weekend. So 15 people on the weekend jam. And then two full-time people just managing it. All go away. Yeah, not needed, but not needed, but they basically, they can do something else. So these people are still there, but now they're not doing OS patching and doing all the Excel sheets and keeping order of these systems are important and this should be the first. And then they, because we are basically doing the thing they know better, this application team knows their dependency. So they know that first they need to patch the database machine and then they're doing the front end or and it's difficult to do this. So they do it themselves. That's DevOps. That's the way it's supposed to be, right? Yeah. So you've matured these deployments over time. As you look back, what key learnings do you have that maybe you'd recommend to your peers to, you know, how things could run a little bit smoother next time? Give it a good amount of time. So there's tools, that's not the problem. So Ansible's great, but there's others too that are great. Give it time to sink in with the people. So you start something and you have to have a pretty strong team to do the long stretch with it and give it some time, maybe a year or so before everyone's on board it. In our case in the beginning we spend lots of time on this community model where we basically organized small meetups or get togethers to show things or to hear problems and try to express them. That really helped. That helped a lot. And by now it's starting to get normal, more normal. So all the teams do Ansible basically and problems are slowly disappearing also. So one of the things that will be better probably in our scenario was keeping metrics. So what are the improvements over time? I don't know how to measure this, not in all aspects, but it will be better if you had like better numbers. Like we did here very good or this is something like what did the community thing bring? We know indirectly what the results are because the engineers are doing things, real things. They're really patching their application and they're really restarting their own machines for example when there's something wrong, whatever. But are these related to our community thing or are these really related to Ansible Tower? Plus I think we are very technical focused so we like it as a nerd so to say to do things. But what the business value is for example we're not so interested or less interested so we typically like the technology. So it could be good to have someone on board in your team that says yeah, but this is the problem. It's cost this amount of money and that's solved now or improved. Well you assume the applications are doing a good job so you guys help those guys out. They get to do their own thing. They do the heavy lifting, they're doing the coding anyway. For those guys that were coming in managing full time and the 15 or so on the weekend, what are they doing now? Most are spread across all the application teams. So they go back into there. But the other side there is now a tower team that was not there so that's a price you have to pay and that's a serious team. I mean it's six people now I guess. Yeah six people. And a hundred machines or so so it is a serious amount of time but it makes it at least much more constant. So people are not surprised by machines being patched and Monday they come back in half broken or so. So it's a lot more control now. So I don't know if you can express it in a price but at least it's more stable. Yeah, more consistent. Right, well one of the things that we hear here and I want to get your thoughts as we wrap up is as you go forward, you got Ansible, 1200 teams using it. You got a lot of collaboration. The work cultures change. Sounds like the tower teams service everything else so there's some scale building out. What's next because as it becomes a platform you have to enable something. There has to be value there. Technical nerd value and then business value. Scaling. Because we continuously see this thing growing. Like more application teams are adapting Ansible and Ansible Tower. So right now we have like a cluster. We have different clusters running. Not going too much detail but we can see that the load is getting higher and higher. So we need to scale. And this is sort of difficult but Red Hat is really supporting in this because they're going to change some things at the application level to allow scaling even better. Plus also for most teams, they're starting their configuration or everything as code process. They're not there yet. As soon as they discover the power of it, I'm sure that it's being used a lot, a lot more. Plus there's other countries that are going to be connected so you'll have a lot of work.  Yeah, so what else do we do? What's the coolest thing you've done that you've automated?  Pick your favorite child. During Ansible Tower and with Ansible, let me think about this. I really like the patching, that saved us so much work and I think also one of the next goals to make much more simpler. So, as a company we are complex and the people also like complexity and that's wrong. We should change that. I think the power of Ansible is the simplicity so we should really use that. You don't want any open holes in the network obviously and the systems. Yeah, and about your previous question, like I have sort of a finger in all these small things so it's sort of what I did, it's more like in a team thing. Like we created the OS patch playbooks, the configure stuff, the second day ops. So we did this as a team. It's kind of like sports, put the playbooks together, run the offense, play some defense on security. We're doing more programming so you're doing this as a team, which is very cool. How's the scoreboard look? Good? You guys winning? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, we're looking at the graphite thing but it's cool. Final question, how you enjoying the show here? Having a good time? What's the vibe here? What's it like here? Share for the people who aren't here. What's going on? What's the vibe? What's the conversation? It's great. We went to some sessions yesterday, really technical stuff with developers and this was really amazing because you heard details that are not in the talks today and tomorrow. Yeah, it's great. It's a great community. It's just, I really enjoy it because you can have one-on-one conversations, go into depth. I was showing something I created and this guy's like, wow, this is really great. It's cool. It's just, it's really great. It's really cool, really. Yeah, for me also. It feels like coming home so I know these people and I think the first day, the collaboration day, what's it called? I'm not sure. Community day. Community day. It's great because it's a bit rough and unpolished and today it's more polished and more presented and prepared. Both are great. Rep is good. You get the hard feedback. Yeah. Unless you meet all the people. So for example, I use Ansible a lot and then on GitHub, I see all these names. Like, who would that be? And they're walking here. So you shake them hands. They're like, oh, that's quite impressive. You shake out the guys. Yeah, like your code looking good. Yeah, yeah. But contributor summit is what it is. Contributor summit. Okay, sorry. After advice for anyone that goes to Ansible, visit that day too. It's just great. It's great to see people face-to-face that you know online through their digital identity or their code. And you can complain about stuff without, and you know that you don't hurt them or something with just commenting on Git. Like, I have this issue and this issue and this issue. Then you can see them in person and then you... Give them a high five. Hey, sorry if you insult you. Or hey, good job. Thank you. It's really cool. Really cool. Really cool. Guys, great conversation. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. Thanks. Dennis, appreciate it. Robert, thanks for coming on. Cube coverage here. Day one of two days of live coverage here inside theCUBE here in Atlanta, Georgia for Ansible Fest. This is theCUBE. I'm John Forrest. Do a minute. Thanks for watching.