The Mac Observers' Mackie Cab episode 906 for Monday, December 20th, 2021. The Mac Observers' Mackie Cab, the show where you send in your tips, you send in your questions, you send in your cool stuff, found we take all of those things, we string them together into an agenda, hopefully succeeding in setting us up for success and success being that each and every one of us learns at least five new things every single time we get together. Sponsors for this episode include BoxofAwesome.com or CodeMGG gets you 20% off your first box, ZockDock.com slash MGG where you can download their free app today, HunterDouglas.com slash MGG to take advantage of all of the stuff they've got going on there and UpStart.com slash MGG where you can consolidate your debt and we'll talk more about each and every one of these in a few minutes here, you know, interspersed throughout the show. For now, here in Durham, New Hampshire, I'm Dave Hamilton. And here in Balmy, Fairflow, Connecticut, this is John Afron. I know, it's like for here, we're recording this on Friday the 17th ahead of a weekend of snowstorm of sorts. He at least predicted here in New Hampshire. But but yeah, it's like it was like what 50 degrees or something outside. So yeah, yeah, very interesting, very interesting. But I'll take it, you know, it's fine. It's fine. How other than the the weather, how are things for you, Mr. Braun? Yeah, just met there. All right. Well, you know, this is the holiday season. It's not always easy.  So, you know, and you know, with the all the craziness going on still makes navigating slightly more complex for many of us. So yeah, you know, it's how it be. Thankfully, the show is still here as much change is afoot. The show is still here. Wait, if change is afoot, is afoot enough to be considered change? I don't know. I don't know. And it's change feet or is change only a foot? I don't know, man. I don't either. I could. I guess it depends. Yeah. All right. Let's let's shall we get into some quick tips or should we should we have fun with no idioms and is that an idiom or is that just a phrase? Could it be an idiom? Right. I don't know.   All right. Save us, John. Well, Robert's going to save us. Robert says you may know this. I didn't. I have my music in Plex. I'm also a Sonos customer. I added Plex as a source for music in Sonos. That works, but I don't like the Sonos search and the way it shows only one album at a time. Here's what I learned. You can stream from Plex to Sonos. Open a Plex on your phone or tablet or their new app called Plex amp, which is dedicated to music. Navigate Plex to your music. In there, you will have various filtering options. I like to show albums sorted by artists in the other hand corner next to the search as a box with some lines. If you click on that, you get a list of devices, which includes AirPlay and Sonos. Pick the Sonos device you want and play music to it. I'm still trying to understand how this works, but I really like the three albums and Rose scrolling interface of Plex. By the way, another quick tip is that it looks like you can use Plex amp to stream from Plex to CarPlay. So this is all I knew about the last one, which is also a great tip. The Plex amp app, which in order to use it, you have to be a Plex pass customer. That's not part of Plex's free offering, but I highly if you're using Plex, I always recommend people start with Plex for free because you can set it all up and truly use it and then decide, you know, if you wind up using it a bunch, then become a Plex pass customer so that you can do things like Plex amp and offline downloads for like watching on the airplane and things like that. And Plex amp works fantastic with CarPlay. I love it. I had no idea about this Plex being able to stream directly to Sonos. I'd done it via AirPlay because many, but not all of my Sonos speakers are AirPlay capable. And so you could just do it that way. But when you put this tip in the in the agenda, I was like, what? And so I launched the app and because I have Sonos devices and I have Plex and sure enough, there's a like link Plex to Sonos, you know, the step that you go through it. It's like any other Olaf thing where, you know, it's like it brings you to the Sonos site and you have to grant Plex permission to do the yada yada. And it takes all of that, you know, 12 seconds. And then all of my Sonos stuff started showing up in that list. And this is this is one of those things that shows us the sheltered box that we Apple users live in because if because Apple music does not let you do this, it will it will you can you can play Apple music from the Sonos app, but you can't play to Sonos from Apple music other than AirPlay, right? If it's AirPlay, it's fine, but you can't control your Sonos with the Apple Music app in the same way that Plex can. But also Spotify happily can and other things can it's just that Apple doesn't want to make that integration happen. That's my interpretation. I don't know that I've heard anything about that behind the scenes. But I mean, obviously Sonos would happily do this if they've done it with Plex and Spotify and others. So I'm guessing Apple's the holdout here. And it's not all that surprising. Apple likes to be super in control of everything. I don't know. Maybe it seems weird. Well, you know what it is. Apple has that home pod thing. So maybe maybe they don't want to, you know, murky the waters as it were. Is murky the waters an idiom or a phrase? I don't know. See. Don't know. Don't know. Yeah, I should get one of those little home pods. Yeah, by two, they're small. I don't know. And then I could do stereo. You can do stereo or you can do multi room. I mean, either like right? Either one. Yeah, cool. All right, we're having fun here. Hopefully you are too. We have a quick tip from from Tony. He says I never thought of this trick with messages, but it works great. When talking to Siri, you can say Siri, reply with audio. And what it does is it allows you to record a voice memo or voice message to send to someone via messages without having to like you. That's the trick to triggering that with your voice. So when text translation messes up as it so often does, just say reply with audio and send someone and your actual voice saying the thing that you want to say. I like that. I never I never thought about it. And and he also points out he says, I can also say Siri, tell my wife with audio, I'm on my way soon. And what will happen is Tony's wife in this case would get a message in Tony's voice saying I'm on my way soon, which is pretty darn good. So I like it. That's pretty cool. I love these little, you know, it solves some of that like texting from the car kind of thing is really where I would I think I would use this a lot because texting like when I I've gotten pretty comfortable with it, like, you know, replying to a text and saying, hey, comma, John, exclamation point, great to hear from you. Period. I'm looking forward to seeing you next week. Period. You know, and like that sort of rolls off my tongue without really even thinking about it. But and then it reads it back to me and it usually gets it right, you know, but that's somewhat pedantic. And if you want to say something long, it's might be better to just actually say the words. So I like it. That's good, Tony. Thanks, man. Okay. What do you got? Look at this. Yeah, in the chat room, our friend, Dave says HomePod minis are on sale now for $79.99. Wow. Oh, better jump on that. That's a good deal. That's a really good deal by three. Seriously, like that's like you could you could deck your house out for way less than 500 bucks. That's not a bad deal. Huh? Huh? Huh? Then they sound I will I I do not I had one and I returned it, but only because I'm not interested in changing platforms, right? Like I don't I have more Sonos speakers throughout the house than I know what to do with truly. And I realized that's that comes across like a complaint. It's not I lead a charmed life. But I just didn't need another yet another platform to have to deal with. And and we have the a lady all over the house. So that's our voice assistant that we've standardized on. And again, it just wasn't, you know, for us. But it like it sounds good. I would I would happily listen to music on that thing.  But now today 80 bucks. I would I would say that, you know, it's well, it's a good speaker with, you know, built-in Siri. So there you go. Cool. All right. And we have a reminder here from Donna. Kind of gruesome. But the iPhone feature to turn on before you die.  And here's how to set it up. We'll link to an article that'll tell you how to do that. Sure. Get on that before you die. Yeah. Yeah. That's that fits our changes a foot theme.  But yeah. Good. All right. Yeah. And we've got a link in the in the show notes for that Apple's page about it. Cool. Back in episode 904. So we had a special episode 905 that released last week with Jeremy Butcher from Apple, which was wonderful to have. And I hope you all listened and learned as much about Apple's business essentials. There it is. I think they're doing a great thing there where they merge support and all that. So a week ago in episode 904, we were talking I was talking about in cool stuff found I was talking about my new Nido D10 robot vacuum, which we're still loving. And I mentioned how I ran it at night at 3am, but only works for people that don't sleep on the same floor of the house that their vacuum is on because, you know, you don't want that thing roaming around in your, you know, in your in your bedroom while you're trying to sleep. Well, Rob has an answer and it might even be a better way of doing it anyway. So Rob says, I'm not sure if this would work with your model of Roboback. It will. And I'll talk about that. But he says with with my Roomba, he says I have it integrated with if I have TTT and have an automation set for when I leave my home geofence with my iPhone, the vacuum runs. And when it notices that I have returned to my home geofence, it tells the vacuum to stop running and dock itself into the base might want to consider doing that. He says our dogs go ballistic at night when we are in the bedroom trying to sleep downstairs and the vacuum tries to run upstairs. Just a thought. Yeah. And what's really interesting is basically the same day the that Rob wrote this. I got a notification on my phone from from the A lady app from, you know, Amazon's Al Exa. And it was offering to do the same automation and geofence my vacuum to do exactly the same thing. So you could do it with if obviously, but the Amazon app will also do a geofenced sort of thing for you. So that's I like that idea run the vacuum when you're not home. Interesting. Interesting. Interesting. Fun. I love this stuff. I love these automations like that just the simple ones that make life, you know, just just a little bit better. The best kind of automations are the ones that you set up and get tweaked perfectly. And then forget about them.  Like, you know, I have no idea, but they run and I love it. So I can see that easily becoming when you just come home and your house is always beautifully vacuumed. That would be amazing. I have I have fully adopted iOS 15's focus into my life and workflow, John. And and one thing that I wanted to share the idea and was that this morning, the morning that we're recording this, my son is on a on a plane while waiting to take off. We just got a text from him saying that he they're delayed by 15 minutes or something waiting for one more passenger, which will be the one sitting in the middle seat next to him, according to him, which sort of stinks. He thought he had it empty. But I like to put my phone on do not disturb when I sleep at night. But knowing that my son had to get up early on the other side of the country and then, you know, get a Uber or whatever and get to the airport with his cat and all this stuff. I was like, well, I definitely want to be able to have him text me and and wake me up if necessary. But I don't just want to not turn on do not disturb. And this is what focus is all about. In fact, I had already created a focus group that I call nuclear it nuclear for the family, not nuclear for like the option. The and what nuclear says is that three people can interrupt me, my wife and my two kids. So our nuclear family and no one else.  I'm like, no, I might want to sleep a little past 7am if I'm allowed.  But but that way, texts from my family can get through and emails from my family, like whatever, you know, it just lets them through text, Slack, it like it knows, which is very cool the way it sort of offers to link a contact. Like I got a Slack message from you the other day, John. And it was like, do you want me to link this to John F. Braun for focus purposes? And was like, yeah, actually, I do. That sounds like a good thing. So so just thinking about different ways of using focus, this nuclear option, you could call it the family options if you know, if you don't like using the word nuclear. But, you know, I figured I'd share. That's what we do on Quick Tips. Have you been messing with focus at all, Mr. Braun? No, I recommend it. It's a, you know, it's one of those things I when you first asked me about it on the show here when, you know, I was beta testing. I was 15. I was like, yeah, it doesn't make any sense to me. I'm not. No. And then, I don't know, I had something come up where I'd like dug into it. It was like, ah, I see the light now. Okay, yes, I definitely want to integrate this into my life. Like I have a podcasting focus and but I can't really use it yet because I have yet to upgrade the machine in the studio to Monterey, but I'm pretty much ready to do that so that I can have my podcasting focus which would actually stop my family from getting through but allow you and my, you know, other co-hosts that I work with like, you know, Paul at GigGab and Shannon at Small Business Show to get through in that way, you know, just keeps things, keeps things from being distracting like I am now with all the messages coming in from my family about my son's flight delay. No middle seat. Taking off now. Good news. See, these these messages are not always terrible to get. All right, um, we have a bunch of tips and questions and then maybe some cool stuff found at the end that I want to get to. The next thing I want to get to, John, though, is our first couple of sponsors, if that's okay by you. Excellent. All right. Hey, who doesn't love to live well to be perfectly at ease in comfort and in style? Well, our sponsor, Hunter Douglas, can help you do just that with their innovative window shade designs, gorgeous fabrics and control systems so advanced they can be scheduled to automatically adjust to their optimal position throughout the day. Smart stuff. Love it. They really like they make it so these shades diffuse harsh sunlight and cast this glow across the room that looks amazing. They make it so that you can enjoy the view outside while protecting your privacy inside. They've got this superior installation in the shades that provide you with warmer feelings in the winter cooler in the summer and they lower your utility bills at the same time. They really know what they're doing and Hunter Douglas has their power view technology, which is what you connect to with your phone and all that so that their shades can be set to automatically reposition for the perfect balance of light, privacy and insulation morning, noon and night. So live beautifully with Hunter Douglas enjoying greater convenience, enhanced style and increased comfort in your home throughout the day. Visit hunterdouglas.com slash MGG today for your free style, get smarter design guide with fresh takes, creative ideas and smart solutions for dressing your windows. That's hunterdouglas.com slash MGG for your free design guide or thanks to Hunter Douglas for sponsoring this episode. Next up is bespoke post with their box of awesome. This winter you can upgrade your daily routine with bespoke post and their new seasonal lineup of their must have box of awesome collections bespoke post partners with small businesses and emerging brands to bring you unique goods every month. I'm looking right now. They have the hibernate box, which are these leather slippers that just look super cozy. That seems kind of amazing to me. They have the parlor box, which is a great way to like showcase your best booze so that you know you get the people coming over the house. You can make it look nice and they've got this weekend or I have one of these things that they sent me. It's a carry all great bag, really strong the way it like they it's got a hinge on it, but it's a it's like a duffle more than a duffle. It's really cool. You got to check these things out because they know what they're doing over there. No matter what you're into box of awesome's got you covered. So from those winter cocktails, like I said to cozy threads and even camping gear essentials box of awesome has collections for every part of your life to get started. It's awesome. No pun intended. You take the quiz at boxofawesome.com and then your answers will help them pick the right box of awesome for you. They release new boxes every month across a ton of different categories. It's free to sign up and you can skip a month or cancel at any time and each box only cost 45 bucks, but it has over $70 worth of gear inside because of the way they're able to do their partnerships. And plus, like I said with box of awesome, you're supporting those small businesses, which is great. Get 20% off your first monthly box when you sign up at boxofawesome.com and enter the code MGG at checkout. That's boxofawesome.com code MGG for 20% off your first box and our thanks to box of awesome for sponsoring this episode. All right, John, let's let's go to Dusty, shall we? Indeed. So Dusty's going to help solve your problems, maybe. I have my problems. Definitely. I'm stoked about this. Yeah. So Dusty says, since upgrading to Monterey, I have had this issue happen twice. The search in mail just refused to search. I would enter a term or email address and no results. I could launch Safari, go to my webmail and search through the webmail interface before we get a single result. The first time I went through several painful steps and something in them fixed that including forcing Spotlight to reindex, rebuilding my inbox and even deleting my mail account. Honestly, I don't recall which one fixed it. I did it again this morning and found this article, which we're linked to and it has several of the steps that he used before, but it had one that I had not shut down the app and relaunched while holding the shift button. This worked. I guess that clears the state, clears the slate and it may never work again. But wow, that was simple. So OK, I didn't know about that. Huh? OK, so I have this problem, I would say maybe once a week. And for me, the solution has been quit the app and relaunched and that usually frees things up and then search works again. Holding down the shift key, if memory serves, that is also the way to tell the app to forget about open windows, right? There was that whole thing that came up. Maybe it was a Catalina, I don't know, a couple of OSs ago. There's this feature where you can be in the middle of pages or whatever and quit pages and relaunch and all your docs come right back up, even the untitled ones, like the ones you hadn't saved. And I think holding down the shift key cleans that saved state out to Dusty's point. So but it must do other things too. So this is interesting. I'm definitely going to remember this for the future. So yeah, this is I love this. I love it. Hopefully it hopefully I get to use this and then never have the problem again. That would be my personal preference. But maybe I'm just asking for too much change. All right. Yeah, more on this or are we good? We're good. I've Yeah. I don't think I've had search issues with mail. If anything, I don't like the latest version because when I do a search, it finds stuff in other mailboxes. It's like I don't want you to do that. So you might already know this, but I'll share it for you or for anybody listening. But when you do a search in mail, the search is I'll say it's live in that once you've put your search parameters in, you can start clicking on different mailboxes and it will narrow the search to only those or you can go to the top of the list and choose all and then it will search everything and it also works if you click the mailboxes like if you've put and maybe this is another quick tip on its own, but you can put mailboxes up in the favorites bar of mail, just like you can in Safari. Very similar thing. And you can click those to do searches, too. So I have like our MGG, you know, regular mailbox for feedback at mackeykev.com. And then I have our premium mailbox for premium at mackeykev.com in my favorites up there so I can bounce around and I often like searching for a thing because not only are your questions in there, but our replies are also archived in there. So it's easy to kind of find that's our way of doing it. Maybe one of the twenty twenty two changes going with this theme will be that we will finally get a way of searching the show notes for all of you. In fact, based on some things that I know about what I think is going to happen with a couple of like infrastructure things, I think that might actually just become a byproduct of that. So that might Oh, I didn't even think about this. Huh. Yeah. All right. So see. See. It's good. But anyway. Yes, you can.  So I don't know. Are we done with that one? Did I get all crazy? OK. All right. I'm back. Elliot needs help sitting in an easy chair five feet away from my Synology router. Why is it that my laptop usually connects to the slower, more distant access point of a Netgear repeater in another room? That is far away and has several walls between us. I use this great utility from into it bits called Wi-Fi signal. I'd never heard of this before, John. So we're going to have to put that in the show notes and he says I use Wi-Fi signal to display my my connection quality and speed in the menu bar. My goodness. How do we not know about this thing? I feel like we need to take a detour under this and he says I've been noticing this change since I started using my new M1 Pro MacBook Pro and Monterey. This is not the behavior of my previous Intel machine upgrading the EOS, rebooting the router, resetting Wi-Fi in network settings, toggling Wi-Fi off and on, rebooting the Mac seem to make no difference. Interestingly, other devices such as iPhone or iPad from the same location connect through the Wi-Fi signal of the Synology router. Thanks for any assistance. So this is frustrating. I dug in a little bit more with with Elliott on this because I wanted to make sure we understood the scenario right, although there's lots to share that's not just specific about Elliott. He has several Synology mesh points as well as the Synology router. And then he has also added a netgear repeater to this. Now with Wi-Fi, it is ultimately up to the client device to make a decision about which access point to connect to. If all the SSIDs are the same, then that decision is is just made based on what it sees about these other devices. If the SSIDs are different, then it will choose the one at the top of the list. If you go into system preferences, network Wi-Fi advanced Wi-Fi, I know it's a lot, but that's where that list is and you can reorder the list. Whatever is at the top, that's what it's going to prefer. You know, it's a top-down kind of thing. So I dug in and asked Elliott if his netgear extender had its own unique SSID, its own unique name, because that way it would explain why if his MacBook Pro had that at the top of its list. Well, it would choose that if it sees it even if it's the, you know, further away than one of the others. It turns out, no, his netgear repeater shares the same SSID as his Synology Mesh Network. So that's where things start to get interesting, because, as I said, ultimately, the the, you know, the client device, in this case, the MacBook Pro is the thing that decides, right, John? However, a mesh network can give hints to the device suggesting that it choose one thing over another. And I'm wondering if having a repeater on the same SSID that the mesh does not know about might be the source of confusion here because I don't we don't know exactly what hints it's getting from the mesh network, but it's possible. It's getting some hints that then don't reconcile with this one sort of rogue SSID. And so the MacBook Pro is like, all right, well, you all can't decide what to do with the other one, so I'm just going to connect to this one over here. Again, it's really hard to say because, you know, we aren't programmers at Synology or Netgear, so we're not exactly certain what these things are telling your devices. So I have a couple of ideas, John. And do you agree with my with my with the premise that I've got going on here? Yes. OK, all right. I mean, if you don't, like that would be frankly would be even better. No, I did. And I actually did this in the past. I had a Netgear extender, but it connected to. Yeah, until I got a beacon, Europe beacon, I actually had an extender because I was getting terrible coverage in one room, but it always connected to that. No matter where you were. When I was close to it. Oh, I see. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I got it. Yeah. So, yeah, I haven't seen this confusing behavior, but I yeah, I think I see where you're going. Yeah, so I think I think this this, you know, one of these things is not like the other which was Sesame Street or the electric company where that that song came from. One of these things is anyway, I think that's that's the crux of this issue here. So there's a couple of ways to solve it. One is to replace it with a, you know, another Synology Mesh Point so that they are all talking with one another. I think that would probably solve this, although that requires spending some money and we like to try and solve things with the equipment we have on hand because that's more fun sometimes. The other thing to do would be to swap and move that extender somewhere else and and and swap its position with a Synology Mesh Point that, you know, you may still run into the same wonkiness, but you know what your, you know, work patterns and life patterns are. So you could say, all right, well, if I know it's going to try and prioritize this thing, why don't I put this thing near wherever I'm mostly M with that device? And maybe that's a way to solve it, right? Like just leaning in, embracing the problem and and going with it that way. So that would be another way. The third way would be to change the configuration of that neck, your extender and set it to have its own SSID, its own Wi-Fi name, so that you can choose when you are connecting to it or not connecting to it. And and, you know, that may or may not wind up being a helpful solution. But like these are the things that we have available to us. It's hard, hard coming up with a, you know, the one solution when we're not there to troubleshoot Wi-Fi because so much of it is is location based. But other than trashing the extender or maybe eBay the extender and, you know, use some of those funds to fuel the purchase of another Synology Meshpoint. Although, you know, we know that Synology is coming with their Wi-Fi six stuff in the first quarter. So maybe we want to wait on that stuff. I don't know. But anyway, those are my thoughts on this. Yeah. Yeah. So if it were me, well, you know, as I said earlier in the show, I lead a charmed life. Wi-Fi stuff shows up at my house. So I choose to use same branded. I like if you're going to have a mesh, take advantage of the mesh. That really is my my like if money is is no object here, take advantage of the mesh and only just live within the mesh that that's going to work better in almost every case. All right. You know, while we're on the the subject of mesh, John, Joe has a mesh question. Let's see. Let me see if I can if I can read this. He says he has a Nokia mesh system, beacon three with four devices. Nokia's beacon three is carrier grade mesh now sold only through carriers. OK, he says in my home network, I have 13 wired connections, 33 wireless on 2.4 gigahertz and 12 on the five gigahertz and likely would have another 15 wireless devices if they would all work at the same time. He says I'm having lots of internet issues as of late, mostly Wi-Fi, but general internet as well. OK, he says I'm thinking about switching to maybe the Euro mesh, but it's expensive and I want to share some details here and and get your advice. Some of his issues are my smart home devices will randomly not work most of the time. He says I can unplug and replug them and they will work again. But that's not reliable. And the same ones seem to be the ones that always go out. There's about six of them that seem to sort of float in and out. It seems unlikely that all of these six would have hardware issues. I agree with that. He says I use home kit devices mostly. And so when the devices do not work, it implies in home connection issues. It seems since home kit doesn't go out to the internet to activate a device like Amazon and Google do, as I understand it. You're right. Your home kit devices might also support Amazon or Google and therefore go out to the internet to activate themselves. But for home kit, you're right. It's talking amongst your network there by and large, unless you've got a home kit hub. And then that might talk out to the internet so you can do things remotely. So I have three Tivo units and often will in-house stream from the Tivo downstairs to the Tivo upstairs. Lately during a two hour long movie, the connection dropped maybe four to six times, requiring us to reselect and restart the movie could be the Tivo's. But along with the other internet related issues, it could be bandwidth or perhaps the beacon processing or something. Airplay from an iPhone works poorly at best. So he says, I know a lot of smart home devices might be an issue and that they aren't working all the time and talk, taking bandwidth. I think both of you guys have Tivo. So maybe you have some experience here, but I'm just looking for specific thoughts before I spend 500 bucks replacing my network. OK, so he also asked, he said, the beacon three info from this this Nokia mesh indicates that it can handle up to 64 devices, although it isn't clear if this is the total number of devices wired and wireless or just wireless. Is this a normal number? What does this limit mean? So those limits are generally ballpark figures that reflect the capabilities of the CPU in an average environment, right? So for every device that you have that's actively talking on the network, especially if it's talking across the internet, the CPU in your main router needs to think about that traffic, process that traffic, route it in and out back to the right thing. Because, you know, when you talk to the network to the internet, every device in your house talks as one IP data that comes back in has to be sifted by your router so that it knows to assign it to the right devices coming in. That's what N. A. T. Network address translation does. And so you need a CPU that can handle it. And when they say 64 devices, that's generally what they mean. Many people have more devices connected if you if you wind up overtaxing the system, you'll see it slow down or things like that. But I don't think you just see devices fall off. And so and with what you added up, you know, before your 15 extra devices, you're at like 63 or something. And so with the 15 extra devices, you're at 78. OK. And this reminds me, John, of an issue that we talked about back in like April post like lockdown when we were when we had our first band rehearsal here in the studio. And my bandmates showed up and couldn't get their iPads online that they could connect like it would see the Wi-Fi network password hadn't changed. You know, everything was all good. They just weren't getting IP addresses. And it dawned on me that I might have run out of addresses in my DHCP pool. And so I quickly, you know, after we finished playing a song or something, I came over to the computer, which is the same one right here and went into my router and opened it up. And instantly everybody was like, oh, whatever you did, that fixed it. That was great. And that explains some of the smart home issues that I was having. They are very similar to what Joe is describing here. So check to see how many it's possible, you know, your DHCP pool is set to 50, right? And that would completely explain all of the symptoms that you're seeing here, including the airplay stuff, although airplay is a little wonky sometimes anyway. So that's where I would start. Check the DHCP pool and either I would just start by expanding it, you know, add if you can, add 50 devices to it or or move it from, you know, a net mask of <IP_ADDRESS>.<IP_ADDRESS>.0 that will open up a whole other. I forget the way to talk about it, but it's like a slash twenty three instead of a slash twenty four because it is the right way to say it or it might be completely wrong way. But find a way to add more to addresses to your DHCP pool. Even even if you just have one, you know, even if it is just three, two, fifty fives and a zero, like that should still allow you a couple hundred addresses in your pool. But it might be that your router is set to only do 50. And if that's the case, you know, open it up to 100. See what happens. Failing that. But I really like that's really where I would start. But failing that, do you have any switches in your network? Like And when I ask this, I'm really asking, do you have multiple switches in your network at different locations? Is anything hardwired throughout the house? Is it possible you've created a network loop? Because what you're describing where devices can't talk with each other, you know, you imply like your gut seemed to be telling you that this was a bandwidth issue. Well, if you've got a loop happening on your network, that can chew up all your bandwidth and cause all manner of, you know, wonky problems. So check to see if you've got multiple switches and I have found even with smart switches that their loop back detection isn't foolproof.  They may be a little more graceful in just shutting off that segment of the network, maybe.  That that's generally not the case. And then when you add a mesh network to it, mesh networks are also dealing with loops. In fact, they intentionally create loops and then block them on the fly so that you get this mesh that all the data can pass through but doesn't loop through. So it's possible your switches in your mesh are not compatible with each other. I don't know anything about this Nokia mesh, so I can't really speak to it. But if it's an enterprise grade mesh, it may be expecting enterprise grade switches and everybody to be speaking, you know, some flavor of spanning tree protocol or rapid spanning tree protocol or something like that. And if you do have switches, but they're dumb switches and they don't support that, that could also be part of the problem here. Are the offending devices connected to or near a specific access point? Joe mentioned there were six, right, that kind of word, the flaky ones. It's possible one of your access points, Wi-Fi is just being flaky. And if the devices that are affected are near that one, that's another thing. I don't know. I mean, I don't know, but those are where I would start. I don't know what do you think, John. I'm with you. I like the idea of choosing the right IP range so that you have enough addresses, though I can't remember. I don't even know how many things Euro can handle. I don't even think there's a setting on Euro for setting the pool. Well, I mean, there's a setting for the size of your DHCP pool, for sure. And I think it's, well, I mean, there has to be. It's, I don't, the way I use Euro here, I don't, it doesn't handle my routing, my Synology Router does. So I can't easily look. Okay. Maybe I can sign into my dad's Euro from here, but that might take a little more time than I want to spend because I do have Euro Pro so that I can do remote network management. Let's see, is it going to let me in? Maybe Euro Pro. I'm going to send a code to my email and yada, yada, yada. So this may or may not get there, but you should be able to find it in, like, the network advanced settings to where you can control, you know, what you've got going on. Brian Monroe in the chat room is helping us out. He says, normally, the Euro assigns IP addresses in the 192.168.7.x network range. So you get 254 addresses in the DHCP pool. Perfect. Okay. Yeah. And looking at my dad's network, DHCP and NAT is in automatic mode, so I can't see it from my remote thing. But yeah, the subnet mask is, yeah, I can't see. It's not, it's not my place to see it right now. So, but Brian Monroe has the answer. So your Euro probably is set to assign, you know, 254 addresses. It reserves the one for itself, the one for the broadcast, and the rest are all part of the DHCP pool, which is smart because it, you know, it limits the scenarios where this kind of thing could happen. So yeah, I, you know, I've had a couple of people ask me lately what my favorite mesh is. And in fact, I had a friend that found my mesh article, my chiropractor in fact, found my mesh article. He was like, yeah, he's like, I found that. He's like, it looked like it hadn't been updated in a couple of years, which is true. But what's, part of the reason it hasn't been updated is it was evolving for a long time. Like I was updating that article monthly. And then it just got to the point where it was like, yeah, you know, all my advice stays the same. So it hasn't been updated for Wi-Fi 6, but the good news is all of the vendors in there, except Synology, but we know that's coming, have updated for Wi-Fi 6. But my advice remains exactly the same, except I would recommend getting the Wi-Fi 6 units.  And the Eero and the Plume sit at the top of my recommendation list. You know, you're not going to go wrong with either one of them. There are nuanced scenarios where I like one over the other. But in my house, I bounce back and forth between using either of them as sort of my primary Wi-Fi, unless I'm testing something where I, you know, obviously going to, you know, do things differently. But otherwise, I'm either running Eero or Plume in the house. And quite frankly, I'd lean towards Eero. I'm not, Plume is, I mean, Plume is rocking, but they really seem to be focused on the integrated market. Like, you know, they've got their deal with Xfinity, which is great. So I'm not entirely sure. Like I get a more consumer-focused feel from Eero than I do from Plume. But that may be an unfair classification. Like, so, and I, like I still, I think at the moment I'm using Plume and it's, it works, you know, it's been great. So I'll probably bounce to Eero at some point in the next couple of weeks, just because I'd like to go back and forth. And as I said, but, and then I'll probably have the Synology thing to test again and, you know, all that's good stuff. So, all right. Yeah, moving along. Yeah, I'm glad you're a fixed that WPA three thing. Oh, yeah, that's right. Yeah, I want to test it with that. That's, that's, I knew I, there was a reason in my head why I wanted to test the, the Eero stuff. So yeah, that's fun. I love, I love digging it. It's been a little while since we've had a little mesh network segment here. And but Elliot and Joe were unknowing conspirators in, in leading us down this path. I like it. It's good. All right. Russell John wrote in with more of a, some more data on this M1 Mac memory leak as it relates to choosing to have a larger mouse cursor, right? Yes, which is still seems bizarre to me, but I'm, I take us there with, if you would please. Sure. So Russell says, I don't usually listen to the live show as I am working at the time. But last Friday I got the chance to join the live stream. And as it turns out, it saved me from getting caught. I love it. I have a MacBook Pro M1 Pro just a few weeks old, 32 gigs of RAM. Yes, 32 gigs. I had been working for a few hours and up comes this morning, you are running out of memory and swap space from clean my Mac. Activity monitor was the next thing you check. And it was showing orange on the memory usage tab. Apple's own spreadsheet numbers was to blame with a lot of, with gigabytes of memory usage. And yes, I was using a large cursor as it works better on my external screen. So I knew the cause immediately. So I didn't get caught. I knew the answer because I heard on the show, but I am not happy that it was numbers that was the culprit for me. That is, I think a full fish shake. Yes. I'm going to propose a double fish shake. At Apple, but their own program caused the issue. It is really shocking that one of the core application programs applied by Apple can blow out the memory on a 32 gigabyte laptop when using the system to change the cursor. Fortunately, I got the warning from clean my Mac before anything locked up solid when I was able to save and quit numbers and restart and continue. Really poor performance from Apple, but the M1 Pro MacBook Pro is a fine computer. Very happy with it in a lot of other ways. Yeah. I hope Apple fixes this man. Like, I mean, I know they will. I, it just, it just seems so bizarre. What a weird thing. I'm assuming they know about it. Maybe, maybe we should make, maybe I'll send them a note make sure like you guys are aware of this, right? Like getting to work on it there. Yeah. Yep. All right. We got a couple more tips and questions. We've got a couple of cool stuffs found. And if, if it's all right with you, we got a couple more sponsors, John, that I would love to tell everybody about. Excellent. Hey, so if you dread looking at your credit card statements, you are not alone. That can feel crippling, but our sponsor Upstart can help you on your path to financial freedom. 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Loan amounts will be determined based upon your credit, income and certain other information provided in your loan application. Again, go to upstart.com.mgg and our thanks to Upstart for sponsoring this episode. All right, so has this ever happened to you? You need to see a doctor. You search and find one that looks good and you wait on hold to book an appointment.  There's a solution. Just download the free app from our sponsor, ZocDoc. That is the easiest way to find a great doctor and instantly book an appointment with ZocDoc. You can search for local doctors who take your insurance. You can read verified patient reviews and you can book an appointment in person or video chat. You get to do it in the app. Never wait on hold with the receptionist again. So whether you need a primary care physician, a dentist, a dermatologist, eye doctor or other specialists, ZocDoc has you covered and you're going to do it by going to ZocDoc.com.mgg to download the ZocDoc app to sign up for free. You get to join millions of people who use ZocDoc every month. I've used it too. It makes perfect sense. They make it super easy those reviews are killer, right? Because you really get to see, ah, okay, this is the kind of doctor I like. You know what? What's the next one say? It's good, man. ZocDoc makes health care easy and now is the time to prioritize your health. Go to ZocDoc.com.mgg and download the ZocDoc app to sign up for free and book a top rated doctor. Many are available as soon as today. That's the ZocDoc.com. ZocDoc.com slash MGG and our thanks to ZocDoc for sponsoring this episode. All right. Hey, you know, we, we have our chat room, John, at live.mackicub.com where we, you get to, we all get to interact together while we record the show. You could interact there at other times too. Nobody's stopping us. It's always open. The door's always open. The lights always on. Brian, listener, Brian Monroe, longtime listener of the show, had some comments about the process that we were talking about with the, the Joe and his mesh acting wonky and, and even actually it was more about Elliott and whether or not he should be using a repeater. And I presented all of the options I could think of with that, right? One of them was replace it with something and keep it in the mesh, but you know, there were, there were others that, that, that go through it. And Brian Monroe was like, yeah, but dude, you know, that the right answer is to trash that repeater and, and put that in, put it, you know, put in something that actually fits the mesh. And I, I agree with that for me in the troubleshooting process when we're doing this show or when I'm dealing with clients, I really think about it the same way. I learned over the years that it was way better for me if I, as the consultant explained all of the options to my, you know, to my client and then said, but if it were my system, here's the one I would choose and here's why, right? And then, but then letting them freely make the choice.  And I do the same here in the show. A, it adds to the conversation, it keeps things interesting, but it also gives you that perspective of, oh, wait a minute, okay, there are, you know, four different ways of, of approaching this problem. This is the one that, you know, that guy thinks is best, but for your scenario, you might have other needs or limitations and, and that we don't know about. And it's like, oh yeah, okay, great. You know, so there it goes. And I know we have a lot of consultants who listened to this show.  I'm one of the most vocal segments of our audience. And it's fantastic. I love it. It's no great surprise.   But, but, you know, I, I, there is a craft to that business. And, and like I said, a lot of it applies to how we conduct the show here. But, but I'm always, you know, working on that craft. The idea for me, it was out of necessity, how I came up with it. I mean, I do like to help people, but I also like to get paid. And I found that if I was letting the customer drive all the choices, then they wouldn't be unhappy about the choices that I forced upon them. Right. And, and then it would make it easier to get paid because I'm doing what I'm doing. I'm helping them, not just fixing their computer without them involved. And that, that engagement I found to be very, well, it was rewarding in not just a financial sense, but it made that part of it way easier. It's also much nicer. As I say often in, in sort of the way I think about it, John, is when I'm with a client and, and I mean, I imply this in other aspects of my life, but speaking in this regard, when I'm with a client, I want to make sure that we are both on the same side of the desk and not across each other from the desk. Like I want to be next to them, working with them to solve their problem with their computer, not them over there and me, you know, them versus me and their computer on the other side of the table where it's like somehow it becomes my fault that they had a problem with their computer that they called me about.   The plumber can leave and go home to their house where there is no drip. So, you know, it's that same kind of thing. Like I appreciate you helping me, but, but as, as the consultants or the plumber or, you know, whatever it is, we can pave the path for that to be there. Like I am here to help you and then just keeping that in mind the whole way through and explaining options is a great way of doing it. So anyway, like I said, I love this stuff. I love the craft of it as much as I love actually doing it. So I figured it was a good little ramble to have. I don't know. Maybe it was. Maybe it was. Yeah. Now, I'm with you. It's better that it's you and the customer versus the problem versus you versus the customer. Yes. Yeah. And it's very, it's very easy to accidentally wind up in the latter scenario. And when you are there, it's super difficult to get yourself out of that like this. How is this my fault? I've had to say that to some people. I'm like, well, we gotta, we need to reset here. Like this problem, I'm here to help, but we both need to remember that this problem isn't my fault. You know, like I didn't cause this. Yeah. Yes. Yes. I always, the other thing I used to say, John, is it was my job to prioritize other people's emergencies. And I didn't like that part of it, but that was a necessary part. You know, you wake up and you got three appointments and then someone calls with an emergency and it's like, okay, how do I address that? And it's all contextual, right? Like what's the, what do I understand as the severity of your, what to you is a critical emergency? Just kind of how it has to be. I would imagine that, you know, I was never saving lives, fixing people's computers. I can only imagine what it's like for people in like emergency rooms having to do exactly that, but with the stakes probably being a little bit higher. In fact, I'm understating that a lot higher. So, all right. Should we, you want to talk about Jamie, John? I'll share Jamie's tip. Sure. So Jamie says, and I can confirm this actually, many Mac mini users, both Intel and Apple Silicon have reported problems getting the display to come back on after sleep. For anyone who has a Mac mini, if you drive your display with HDMI and have wake from sleep problems, get an external USB-C to HDMI adapter. I think any external adapter will work. I am using an anchor adapter. I also use the HDMI adapter built into the OWC Thunderbolt 3 mini dock with good results. I've never needed to turn my Mac mini off with the power key while using an external HDMI adapter. It was happening every day or two using the internal adapter. I spent many hours trying to diagnose and cure my wake from sleep issues, including many hours on the phone with an Apple senior advisor. There was no resolution. So, if a dongle that costs less than 20 bucks fixes it, that's a win. That's a win. Yeah. Yeah. Personally, I had issues too. So, I don't use the HDMI connector on the Mac mini. I got a USB-C to display port for my primary display and a USB-C to DVI adapter for my secondary display. So, I can confirm this. Yeah. I'm fortunate that I haven't seen this on my M1 mini because with two monitors, I have to use HDMI for one of them and then going out the USB-C port for display port for the other. Um, just because that's, I mean, that's the way the M1 chip works. There's no, there's no work around there. You can't do two out of display port. One has to be HDMI, one has to be display port. So, but I'm thinking about Lisa has an Intel mini at the house similar to yours. I think it's actually the same model as yours, John. And she occasionally has problems. I think we are running straight HDMI there. Maybe it's time to replace that and route things differently. So, you're just going out the USB-C port and going to the, going to HDMI that way. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. I like this idea. Yeah. All right. Yeah. And I think the USB-C, it's a Amazon basics cable. Sure. Yeah. Any of them, I think are. Yeah. That's good. Okay. All right. Interesting, interesting. All right. Another follow-up from listener Ken from last week's episode 904. He says, in your recent opening all the doors episode, you discussed the optimizing storage issue. I tackled limited storage by basically copying out. He says, I have a 2015 13-inch MacBook Pro that came with a 512 gig SSD. Last year, I upgraded the SSD to one terabyte with a new drive from OWC and somehow magically filled up a big part of that too. How did I deal with my storage issues? Well, in July, I just bought an M1 iMac with a two terabyte SSD. Now, 1.26 terabytes are still available. Yeah. I've been, I'll say, unintentionally solving this problem that way. Yeah. Yeah. It's, you know, my storage space on my recent purchases or acquisitions of computers has been just going up. And I'm not proud of letting that happen, but it is happening.  No, I just had, I believe it or not, I just had this happen with my MacBook Pro. Yeah. There was a software update for Xcode, which is typically rather large. And I said update, and it's like, you don't have enough space. And I'm like, what? Don't you have a one terabyte drive in there? Yeah. So, um, yeah, I don't know if I have to reinstall the OS or something. One way I found of solving this problem, so APFS doesn't always release this space in a timely fashion. Yep. I found that going into recovery and running this utility actually nudges it to get attacked together. Oh, interesting. Really? So, you can't just run this utility in regular mode, though. You have to run it in recovery to do that. I chose to run it in recovery. Okay. I suppose I could have run it locally as well. Did you have to? I should have run, you know what? I should have run Omni Disweeper. Yeah. I've just found that, again, the free space doesn't appear magically instantly. No. No, it doesn't. It doesn't. I wonder, there was a command in that I used in Unix to free up space called SYNC. S-Y-N-C, and it was SYNC version 8, I would remember. And it, yeah, if you do a man for SYNC, which is also SYNC 8, it is there on macOS in the terminal of forces, a completion of pending disk rights. But that would, at least on whatever flavor of Linux I was fighting with at the time, that would be sort of the regular way of just like, yep, this will clean up. Now, I don't know if that will trigger the finder to display the right free space for us, but, but it, you know, it might still clear it out. Yeah. Yeah, Alex, Alex in the chat room has some advice here.  Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Which Omni Disweeper or a CleanMyMax space lens is probably even better with that. Use Spotlight to find apps that you haven't opened in a long time and delete them and all of their support files and dependencies. I like to use Hazel, but App Cleaner would also do it to help, you know, catch all of the files that need to go along with a, you know, with a, with a deletion. So, so I'll put Hazel and App Cleaner and CleanMyMax. Let's see. And he had one other, oh yeah, move your photos library. Right. You know, on my, on my desktop, I have my photos library on an external drive and I have everything download on my laptop. I have optimized storage turned on for my photos library and that actually works. That's a wonderful way to move forward. So that would be my advice there. Are you doing, are you letting your whole photos library download to your, to your laptop too? Yeah, it's about 140 gigs. Okay. Okay. So big, but not like, you know, it could be big. Yeah, but again, as, as you know, I got a one terabyte SSD. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I don't know how it, you know, got to this point. Yeah. Yeah. Try, I've really, I've really been a, become a fan of SpaceLens inside of CleanMyMax for telling me where things are. It's just, I don't know.  They've addressed a lot of that and it's back to being a little more simple to use. However, CleanMyMax is just, I don't know. It, it shows me what I want to see. I really like it. So let's go, let's do some cool stuff found and get out of here. Shall we, John? Yeah, you want to start us off with Paul? I can start with my thing if you want to, yeah, I'll start with my thing and then we'll do Paul. So, mine is the Electjet Apollo Ultra Power Bank. I am always on the search for the right power bank to have in my backpack, like my carry bag that, that goes with me. And there's a couple things that I want it to be able to do. I want it to have a USB-A port so that I can plug something into it and charge, you know, something simple like a phone or an Apple Watch or something like that. I also want it to have a USB-C port with power delivery so that it can charge my laptop in a pinch. Those are really the two things and, and it's that latter one being able to charge the laptop that has meant over the past couple of years I've needed to get bigger and fatter and heavier power banks to do that, to deliver power delivery. The reality, though, is I've never once actually needed to use one because today's laptops, especially the M1s, have battery life for, you know, 20 hours or 15 hours or something. So, you know, it's, it, I am not finding myself in a scenario where I need, like, to have a few extra sips during the middle of the day. But I still want that as a backup because, you know, don't get caught. Well, the, this Electjet Apollo Ultra is, I mean, it's tiny. If you're watching the video, you can see the size of it. It's about the size of an iPhone, maybe a little thicker. It's about the same weight as an iPhone. So really thin. It's only it, only a 10,000 milliamp hour battery. But it has, it does have USB-C with power delivery. It'll deliver 87 watts of power. Now, it's not going to deliver, it's not going to fully charge your laptop because it's only 10,000 milliamp hours. But it's enough to give you a few sips to get you over the hump. And as it turns out, with my life, that's what I need. And it's super lightweight. So I'm really stoked about this thing. We'll put a link in the, in the show notes, of course, but it's from elecjet.co. And they've, I'm happy about it. The Elecjet Apollo Ultra. And they, they, they say that it's live on Indiegogo right now. So you can, you can get them, you get yours ordered. I will pull up pricing in a second. But I think it's using, I don't think it's using, it's using graphene to, to be the, the metal that stores the battery. I don't know. You know, it's like we've had gallium nitrate and or nitride. I don't remember. GAN, we'll call it. That's all, get it right. But now it's got graphene. And, and so that, I think that helps with the weight is how we're, how we're getting there. But I said, I said 87 watts. My notes were wrong. 80 watts of charging capacity. So yeah, very cool. I'm, I'm stoked about this thing. And looking on Indiegogo, at least at the moment, it's 69 bucks. And you can have it delivered in January. So there you go. That's my thing.  Yes. So Paul says, I found the site, www.rsync.net, cloud storage for offsite backup. It describes itself as we give you an empty Unix file system to access with any SSH tool built on ZFS for data security and fault tolerance. You can back up any other cloud with your rsync.net account. I thought this is something that John would appreciate to me. It's the ultimate in cross platform backup. You have rsync, you have backup. Okay. And their pricing looks reasonable, but it looks like they support more. So, so they list a whole bunch of things here on their page. So in addition to rsync, it looks like you could do SFTP, SCP, Borg, Rclone, Restik. I haven't even heard of some of these things. So there you go. I like this. That's interesting. So their minimum pricing is 10 bucks a month. It's two and a half cents per gig up to a terabyte. And you've got a 400 gig minimum order. Actually, it's up to 10 terabytes. Sorry. And then at 10 terabytes, it drops to two cents per gig. But so 10 bucks a month. Okay. You know, we're getting past the backblaze pricing and things like that. But you do have this flexibility. My first thought was that you could use ARQ with this from Haystack Software. And ARQ works great. I have it backing up to a Minio store on, which is an S3, open source S3 clone that I'm running on my Synology disk station. And that works. I mean, that's flawless and works really well. But this, yeah, I like this option. That's not bad. That's not bad. Yeah, they do. All right. So they do daily snapshots at different levels. Unlimited email and phone support. Okay, that's nice. And the higher tier plans looks like they offer physical media shipment. So that's nice. Cool. Who doesn't, who else does that for you? Does which? Is it backblaze? We'll ship you. We'll actually throw it on our drive for you. Yeah, I think you're, I know they were doing it. I don't know if they're doing it still, but yes, that's right. That's right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Yes. Very cool. Well, I think that's, I think that's going to bring us to the, to the end here. A couple of cool stuffs found and we're on our way. Actually, you know what? Let's, let's throw in on Twitter, Dolce Sita tweeted that T-Mobile is offering a $10 credit on your $10 per month credit. If you are a T-Mobile customer and sign up for YouTube TV. So for those of you cutting the cord and that are T-Mobile customers, you can save 10 bucks a month and get YouTube TV. I think that would make it 59 a month or something. So yeah, cool stuff. I like it. Thanks so much, everybody. As we said earlier in the show, feedback at MackieCub.com is where you can send things in unless you're a premium listener, in which case it's premium at MackieCub.com. I'd love to hear from you either way. Feedback at MackieCub.com. Feedback at MackieCub.com. That's correct. Yeah. Go, uh, go subscribe to our newsletter. Go to MackieCub.com and subscribe there. You get the show notes delivered right to your doorstep or your email doorstep every week. That way you get all the links for all the things that we just talked about, apps and the cool stuff found in the troubleshooting tips and all that stuff is right there. So go check it out. And there's also links to all our sponsors in there too. So you can go check this out too. That's what I got. You got anything else for today, John? Nope. All right. Well, thanks for hanging out with us for, uh, for the last hour and change, folks. Thanks for having fun with us. We got a little silly here with our, uh, or change. Don't go changing. Or do. Change is good. No, it's not. We'll be back next week. Until then, have a good week. Have fun. Made up. See you next week, John. Man. Oh no, you're getting caught. Somebody's like burning down the neighborhood. They've been gone all morning.


Hey guys Thought I'd do another helicoil video now. I did one before I stripped Excuse me, wasn't me the bolts were already stripped when taken out a stainless steel bolt out of an aluminum body and in my case it was a brambo Subaru brambo Caliper the ears the ears of the caliper one of those stripped But and I managed to fix it with a helicoil now. What's a helicoil? This is a helicoil. You have different sizes like these guys here All right, that Total of four sizes so far. So this is a kit It consists of the actual helicoils this tool to Grab it by this little tab here and screw it in once the hole is ready This is a useless tool to knock this little tab off Which I don't use I use just pliers an actual tap which says Over here it says M8 by 1.25 but in it actually is an M10 By 1.25. That's the thread size So this thread is the actual 8 by 1 to 5 As you can see this tap is bigger. It's as big as well slightly bigger than this Drill bit that came with the kit in this nice bag by ST auto From Amazon. So this is one of those bolts that connect the intake manifold to the cylinder head and that the goes right in these holes there Actually, that's the TGV For those familiar with Subarus Anyways, these long ones go through here and these two are stripped This is a good hole As you can see it easily goes in and out all the way But these two the two in the middle Well, this one still goes in This is what I kind of want to well and now it stops I'm sure it's gonna go in can go in deeper, but it's kind of stopped in the middle But these threads are actually coming out and this is this one is just shut. That's it The way when I have noticed is how I was ready to put an intake on and I started to go You know put the bolts in and this would just stop midway and when I took this out it came out with the threads Out of the hole There you go aluminum. So that's the kit and made by one to five thread size or a Tap that's the size but in actuality. It's 10 by One to five. So if you already have a 10 you can use that tab you need to buy the kit I bought the kit for the helicoils. It's cheap. It was 15 or $16. I Bought it really for this bit. I wish I don't have and the helicoils obviously so this is the car I've been working on for I Don't know two weeks now or so waiting on parts, you know the usual Had a lot of issues vacuum leak leaks From the PCV system from the intake on the bottom of the TGV by the cylinder head which the previous mother used these spacers these kind of Separate the heads the cylinder heads and the intake manifold and And Creates a kind of a gap for heat So no get no get no heat gets transferred to the intake from the head to the intake and had a bunch of leaks I mean this this Part of the engine was covered in oil just black. It was black all this was wet from power steering leak fluid leak This hose was leaking the reservoir power steering was leaking man. I got a list. That's the intake there Where's the list? This is the list guys and this a Lot anyway, so since this is a bit more touchy. It's on the cylinder head, you know Who got to be careful?  Maybe double up on the helicoils That's it when we're gonna look at the result You know this car has been neglected. I'm guessing for quite some time. It's got a lot of miles 130 40 50 can remember. I Mean the intercooler wasn't even attached Just hanging in there same thing with the intake the actual filter was resting on top of these ABS lines you can see these are the paint came off the actual lines and the intake now has a hole Missing bolts here and there one of the bolts that holds the starter I actually literally took it out with my finger wasn't tight at all so I mean I Don't know I just I you know I work on these cars like that and It's scary, you know that cars like this are out there No, I should say people about the work do this kind of work are out there and just Messing these cars up any any car, you know, it was actually when I took the inner inner color off Because that Angled pipe this is actually the best mad this pipe because the diameter outside diameter of the turbo is smaller slightly By a few millimeters then the inlet of the intercooler, but this Angle pipe it's you know same size on both sides So it would not fit nicely on the intercooler, but it's as you can see it's It's too big a little bit too big. Maybe I'd say an eighth of an inch two millimeters or so by the on the turbo This guy he used electrical tape around the The turbo just hurts me, you know telling you even this story So this would stay in place, right? Okay, so when I went ahead and took it out This electrical tape actually Was covering half of the outlet. I Kid you not and as you can see it was kind of ripped apart a little bit here and there so Maybe parts of the tape is inside the intercooler now. Hopefully it never went into the engine Probably wouldn't you know like a small piece of electrical tape will probably not damage the You know any parts of the combustion chamber there similar walls and stuff like that But hopefully didn't make it there. Hopefully it's still in the intercooler. All right, so first step to drill this out I'm gonna start with The closest one to me. I need to make sure that I am straight I'm gonna drill it. I'm gonna put it in low speed. Maybe I should put in the high speed final angle Okay, I'd say it's looking pretty good There you go nice clean hole All the way down not through Just all the way down right got this little neat tool For taps there we go and This and attaches to this is by Irving Amazon Ratchet there you go if you don't have a tool like this find the right Not size Tiny bit smaller Something like this any not will work so it's got to be slightly smaller and This will actually probably work and now just knock this in This is hard steel. You're not gonna hurt this set it on a you know hard table whatever and knock it on and you can use in this case a 14 mil socket All right now another crucial step I'm using this right because I can kind of stand it up, you know Make it straight not mess it up the initial You know what I mean? I don't want it to go in an angle. This is aluminum after all so this is should be easy Okay, once in a few threads keep cutting. All right, so now You got a little issue As you can see, it's a it's a bit stuck. I don't want to force it See how it goes back in very easily Okay, there we go.  Take it out fully Use compressed air or a vacuum. Hopefully No, but you know, you have it or even you can use oil Penetrating oil whatever any oil really so those particles will stick to the tap Take it out if you're new quarter in quarter inch of an inch in take it out Clean the tap off the particles the metals The metal will stick to the tap clean that out and go again Don't build up those metal particles inside a hole because those are gonna get wedged and Destroy that new thread Hopefully you can see what I see too much light Yeah, this camera is not very good at close-ups but we got a nice new thread Which is a 10 m10 by 125. All right, so the instructions say to Drive the coils in like that with this tab on the bottom I'm gonna do it the other way so the tab will be on the top Hopefully this works No, probably not gonna work I'm gonna find the the beginning of the thread No Not gonna work come on now Come on now get in there There we go Right So I'm gonna try something here Not gonna remove that tab on the bottom just yet I'm gonna see if I can double up on the on the coils.  Oh, yeah so I Have maybe a thread and a half left Now notice I cannot Drive this out. It's in there once you get it in there You basically have to destroy it to get that heli coil out so as of Now I mean there is a tiny bit deeper now. It's not flush With the head, but this will work. So what I'm gonna do now. I'm gonna take a second heli coil and See if I can fit it. Well, I'm sure I'll be able to Okay, did come out try this again the plan is to See if I can with both in There is a little bit of space in between the two if I can actually drive in the bolt through the Two coils where they meet. I think I have to drive it in all the way. So they actually touch Oh, yeah, I have to remove that tab Which I forgot so Okay Going in There you go. That's it. I can actually see it. That's all the way in. I'm gonna take small pliers These actually will not reach In there these won't either. All right, let's see if these tweezers will do the trick Basically, I just need to break that last piece off, but I need to make the transition from the top coil to the bottom as Smooth as possible. This is just too flimsy. All right, I'm gonna use this useless tool. See the instructions actually say just to push it down Push down until you break the tab. Obviously, that's not working. You can just use this tool to kind of Go back and forth on it. What to do? What to do? All right, let's see if I can just push the Tip of that tab with this pick tool do something with it. Come on break off already I don't think this is gonna work guys because it doesn't want to have a clean break Okay, I think I got it No, still there. Why don't you want to break off? So there's even a little cut Right here first. So the idea is to you know when you push this down From the inside This is supposed to just break But it's not There we go No still in there. They didn't they didn't vacuum it out. And now I have a space like a tiny amount of thread missing Because they're not touching each other. Now I need to drive it in Actually, I'm gonna try the the bolt See what happens. Yeah, I'd say it went through Both coils easy. There you go. So that's why I wanted to use The two coils now there are longer coils But I couldn't just find a you know a set or a pack of Those longer coils. I don't want to be waiting on this for weeks or whatever I can still reach the bottom coil Drive it in more Because that tab is still attached to it. I think that's all the way in now. I should be able to Screw this one in a bit more Check this out I'm gonna cut the excess off Man, this is hard steel. It goes way past the black mark Well, maybe one thread comes out easy. So second time much easier So all right that that was just I was just trying to See if it's even possible to fit two coils in one hole. I'm gonna do the other the other one Maybe I can come up with a different way of doing it easier faster because I realized this was kind of long and you know time-consuming and And boring To watch at least but you know you learn something so if I'm gonna come up with a new idea I'm gonna give you an update after guys the second one Took no longer than eight minutes. I should have showed you the clock before and after but Second time obviously things take take less time there you go All the way in and it comes out. It's a little bit harder once you go in a bit deeper, but that's okay Nothing a ratchet won't take care of you know I think I have all the parts to actually install this intake manifold So I'm gonna drop it in make sure all the bolts go in and I'm gonna show you the result these tore down to 18.1 and And that's it. Voila. No need to panic get yourself a heli coil. They do work great. All right guys, so I guess this was just a Video to show you that you can use and I wondered myself if you can use Two heli coils in one hole and service. Yes, you can. Thanks for watching. See you soon


The Independent National Electoral Commission, INEC, stated that it will be unfair to evaluate it based on the upload error that accord Dorin the presidential election on February 25th and he does not represent all polls. Festus Ocourier, the National Commissioner for INEC, made this comment in reaction to the final report on the general elections of 2023 that the European Union election observation mission presented on Monday. Ocourier claimed that that's part of the difficulties encountered. Many Nigerians applauded the electoral authority for using the bi-model voter accreditation system during the general elections. As far as we are concerned, we are going to present our records, we are going to make our submissions to the court, we are going to present what we know and what we did bring the elections to the presidential election petition tribunal and all the other election petition tribunals and then they will make a determination going forward. But as far as the commission is concerned, there were so many positives to this election, there were also significant challenges and problems with the election. We are going to address those challenges and those problems and if we receive most of the reports from the domestic and international partners, we will harmonize them, take out the actionable ones that have administrative flavor, we will implement them. If there are still challenges with the electoral act 2022 and the constitutional framework, we will also join Nigerians and go before the National Assembly to get both the constitutional and legal framework amended. But let me say this, that as Nigerians we must have faith in our democratic institutions, we must have faith in our democracy and we must continue to work on our democracy because the electoral process and democracy we keep on improving is there is no country in the world that can say it has a perfect democracy. No, you have to grow it, you have to nurture it and you have to keep on nurturing it. Challenges will emerge but the robustness of these institutions will determine how strong democracy will be. He added that the law now gives political parties the right to be aware of what a cause are the polling units. But we must also recognize the fact that the law itself has also given the political parties the opportunity to know their vision at each polling unit. Almost all the political parties or at least five of the political parties nominated 170,000 polling agents. So what that means is that they had primary evidence of the results of the polling units and it is those results from the polling units. And it cannot be correct for a political party to rely only on result appeal in order to get the evidence with which he wants to prosecute his case in court. But as I said, we have cases in court, petitions are already in court. Let the court make a determination of whether the commission did well or the commission did not well. Hello, hope you enjoyed the news. Please do subscribe to our YouTube channel and don't forget to hit the notification button so you get notified about fresh news updates.