Welcome to Mackie Gab episode 935 for Monday July 4th. Happy Independence Day USA 2022. And welcome to Mackie Gab, the show where you send in your questions, your tips, your cool stuff found. We take all of that stuff, your questions, we answer them, your tips and cool stuff found, we share them. Our tips, our cool stuff found, sometimes even our questions, we share those too. The goal is for each and every one of us to learn at least five new things every single time we get together. Sponsors for this episode include a couple of fantastic podcasts from the twit.tv network Mac break weekly, where you get to dive into everything apple related every week. And this week in tech, you get there no holds bar deep dive into how big tech influences our culture in our lives. And sometimes I'm actually on both of those shows but we'll talk more in depth about them a little bit later for now here in Durham, New Hampshire. I'm Dave Hamilton. And here in Fairfield, Connecticut. This is John Brown in here from the remote studio in Pensacola, Florida. Pilot Pete, thanks for having me guys. So you call it you're welcome. It's great to have you here Pete. It's great to have all of us here. I love this. This is like one of the highlights of my week. You say the remote studio in Pensacola, Florida, aren't we all in remote studios and we're not together? If you want to split hairs and get technical, I guess we are. I've been with as pandemic lockdowns began two years ago. We've been doing this remote thing with Mac Keekab for 17 years and then with Mac Observer and Backby Media. We've been running those businesses for 24 years ago. We started all that stuff. And for the most part, always been remote. There have been offices for each of those businesses for short stints of time when it made sense. But we've always been remote. And then when lockdown started, this whole word virtual started being used. We're having virtual meetings. We're running a virtual office. Let me tell you, I don't get to pay virtual taxes. And the people that I am meeting with are real people. They are not. AI created frigging simulations, right? So when people say they're having a virtual meeting, it's like, well, aren't you putting in your time with other people? Isn't that a meeting? Does it matter? Like did we call meetings virtual when they happened on the phone? And the answer is no, we did not. They are remote meetings. They might be remote meetings with video, although I have thoughts about how video for those kinds of meetings starts to become counterproductive really quickly because of the distraction of seeing not just other people, but seeing yourself. The word virtual, I like that. And I know language evolves and I'm totally okay with it. It's part of how society works. But I liked what the word virtual used to mean and it has changed. And we no longer have a word that means virtual anymore, right? Unless you're talking virtual reality hits, you know, and that's virtual. That's that's what I'm saying. That's virtual. What we're doing here is not virtual. This is real. That's three people in real time. Actually, more than three people. There's, you know, lots of people listening and watching while we're doing it. And then there's the time shifted element when the rest of the audience listens. And that's always great. And if you want to join us live dot Mackie cub dot com is where we get together. That's the easiest place to find us. And but you can you can sign up at the calendar at Mackie cub dot com slash calendar so that you know when we are getting together. So when we're doing the show, there's a live chat at Mackie cub dot com slash discord. Thank you for reminding people of that too. Yeah, it's good. All right. Well, there's my soapbox moment for the day. I just like language matters. Language does evolve, but I I I'm I always lament when words when we lose words, the meaning of words. Yeah. But I'm kind of with Pete and that when I hear virtual, I think virtual reality, which to me is not in a physical location with other people. But that's just my brain. Yeah. Right. Right. Yeah. And then that's I mean, you're right. Like you're yeah, we are all informed by the examples that we see. And so yeah, no, it's none of it's wrong. That's just yeah. There you go. Well, the pandemic has caused us to be pedantic. Sorry. Oh, I like this.  There's there's there's 15 years of proof of that as the recordings of this show. Oh, right on me. Hey, I got an idea. What's that, Pete? I think there's an agenda with quick tips on it. Oh, you're right. Mace has a fantastic quick tip. He had asked the question, can you rename Bluetooth devices on the Mac? And the answer that we and I evidently others gave him was you can't do this any longer. But we certainly gave that answer. Accidentally he says this morning I found that if you go into system preferences Bluetooth, while the device is connected and this is the key part of this, if you control click the name of the device, the little pop up there allows you to rename it will only appear if the device is connected. If the device is not connected, you don't get the rename option. So it is possible to rename how your Mac sees a Bluetooth device or displays a Bluetooth device. And it is in Bluetooth preferences, Bluetooth system preferences, right click on a connected device to rename it. Yeah, very good. Thank you, Mace. I love it when we find these things. It's wonderful. I think it could be dependent on the device. I seem to recall some devices I've renamed and they'll show up on another device with that name in them. And then others don't. Interesting. Okay. Yeah. All right. Okay. I'll buy that to you on each device. Oh, for sure. Yeah, this doesn't store a great point. This doesn't store anything in the device and yours I can tell it doesn't store anything in iCloud either. So there's there it is that one machine's name for that device changes it is a let's call it a nickname, maybe a machine specific nickname. But I think my point was being that like I think it was my Skullcandy or Bluetooth headset. Okay. That came up when I changed it on the Mac, it came up on my iPhone with that new name as well. So maybe you write it to the device, maybe it well or it wrote it to iCloud. Maybe it is thinking the iCloud. Okay. All right. I wonder where it is. That's a good we'll find that out. Yeah, I doubt it would be writing it to the device. Yeah, just based on how that that works. But iCloud makes sense. So, okay, I stand corrected. Yeah, so it is it is potentially sinking that via iCloud. I like that. Yeah, that makes sense. I mean, that's a very Apple thing to do if they're going to let you rename it. They're not going to like they generally tend to go the extra step. Well, if it stands to reason if you wanted to rename it here, you'd want that name on all your devices. Hey, good news. We have a way of making that happen.  Hey, this sounds like a good candidate for something to sink via iCloud. You've got to get somebody to approve that because otherwise it would be feature creep all over the place. Oh, I heard stories. I'm not sure if I'm supposed to say the person's name, but this was this was a an engineer that that had done that had many public credits to their name in terms of like automation and things like that. And I probably said enough. But I'd heard that that there might be things like when there was a bug fix or something that needed to make it into an otherwise frozen upcoming release of, you know, macOS, whatever, 12.5 or whatever, you know, whatever it was going to be, they freeze the things, they test them, they make sure there's no problems. But if they wanted to get it in, you know, maybe four tickets to the quarry warrior's court side might appear on the decision makers desk. If the if the thing was was included in the next update, things like that. Yeah, you know, hey. And I'm convinced this is what happens. Remember, Apple hasn't screwed up in a while. But, um, but I'm almost certain that this scenario happened before it failed for more update.  Can you sneak it in? Sneak it in. It's like, no, we finished testing.  I'm sure you're right. Yeah. I'm sure there's precedent for why there's like there's use. Every policy is usually founded on a mistake. It's that way in aviation. Yeah, man. See the flight manuals are written in blood. No, you know, it's yeah. Yeah. See, that's the thing, right? Like, you know, we think that what we're doing with computers is is like critical and important. And then you mentioned that's how it works in aviation.  Exactly. Thanks, Pete. Hey, Kiwi Graham noted in the discord that the in the chat that the name is stored in the Apple device. I have connected clients mice and they show the client name on my machine. Oh, okay. Okay. So he says it is stored into the Apple device. Okay. I've connected clients mice and they show the client name on my machine. Oh, it's stored into the if it's an Apple mouse is what he's saying, I think. Yeah, I think so. I argue that might still be stored in iCloud. And and all devices get to sync that database potentially. He's saying yes. Okay. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, the way to test that would be to disconnect from the internet, rename a device, unplug it, go plug it into another Mac. If the if the name comes with, then it's absolutely being written to the device. If the name doesn't come with, well, then, you know, it's an iCloud thing. And the only reason I say this is I know that like the AirPods is the most popular example. Apple is using a major hack to make it seem like they can auto pair your AirPods with your Mac. It all has to be done with the the MAC address, not the address of your Mac, the MAC address of the Bluetooth device. And they they have a database that pumps all of those MAC addresses in so that you can auto pair when it's not really auto pairing, it's pre pairing them. So, so I wonder if they're also using that same mechanism to do this. I don't know, but that would be a good test. We can't do that test right now, though, because we are online doing this show. So instead, John, you want to take them to Mike's quick tip? Yes. So Mike says, so instead of running and fedamine in my menu bar all day, I use this terminal command. Caffeinate space dash D I S U space dash T space. And then don't worry about reading it. We'll put it in the show notes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Of course, tell them what it does. Yeah. Well, it will keep your Mac from sleeping for the number of seconds that you put at the end. So he did 86,400, which of course is 60 times 60 times 24. But you can put any value hours for anyone following along there. Yep. So this will tie up that terminal session for the day, but you could open as many terminal sessions as you want. So no big deal. So okay, thank you. Trying to figure out what D I S U is, because I've only ever so caffeinate, I am certain is the command that is at the core of amphetamine, which is the the graphical interface for this because why wouldn't it be looking at caffeinates man page? I've only ever used that dash T. So you say caffeinate, and then dash T in the number of seconds. And it works fine. Or you can just issue caffeinate. And it will sleep, it will not sleep until you terminate the process with command control C. D I S U is D prevents the display from sleeping. I prevents it from idle sleeping. S prevents it from sleeping entirely, which I think I and S are happened by default. And then you indicates that the user is active. Oh, okay. All right. Interesting. Yeah. So just be aware of what those options do, because you may want to let the display sleep even though the computer itself is not sleeping. Yeah. And again, the way to get that is go in the terminal and type man space and then something. And if that's something is a command, then you'll, you'll get the low down. Well, yeah. Yeah, I love the caffeinate command. Good one. Nicely done. All right. What's well, I found this out by accident. So what I've been doing as of late is when I run my Twitter client on my Mac, I don't like distractions sometimes. And you can do command option H and that will hide everybody else. Well, by accident, I was in the Finder and I thought I had hit that, but I didn't Dave. I hit command option G, which I just discovered is Google Drive find feature, because that's what came up. So it's like, oh, that's, that's nice. So this is the Google Drive app that you run on your Mac. Right. You have to be running their app. Oh, okay. But it's like a specific, you know, it'll only search the content on your Google Drive. So maybe handy. Right. Hey, nice. Ross would say a happy accident. Is a happy accident. So many quick tips come from happy accidents, right? Like that one I mentioned a couple of weeks ago where you command drag things, you know, to drag windows without changing their space and the hierarchy. And if you didn't listen to that episode or you missed it in that episode, well, here it is again. Go back to your homework. Yeah, that's right. But we've gotten so much feedback about that. People are like, oh, this is life changing. It's like, yeah, I know. I use it all the time now and now that I've remembered it's there. Yeah, it's great. All right. Shall we answer some some questions, John? Yeah, let's go to Greg. He has a head scratcher here. I have what I believe to be a geek challenge. I'm using a late 2013, not the year, 27 inch iMac running Catalina, though this issue predates that OS on what seems to be random intervals from days to months. The iMac will stop opening or saving files, opening files or print dialogue boxes in any program. If it is exhibiting this behavior, it will also be unable to open any of the pains in system preferences, but it will open system, but it will open system preferences. Interesting. A reboot will correct the issue again for an indeterminate length of time. Frequently, when attempting to reboot the system, there will be an error that the system cannot reboot because of an operation with iOS. I do have an iPhone and iPad Pro, but they are not plugged into the iMac for charging or any other purpose. I'm not familiar with troubleshooting Macs to properly employ Google Foo and have been unable to find a hint of something that might help or any mention of someone else having this issue. As with any problem, Dave, it could be hardware or software. That's a great start. That's my answer. But I would say so, looking at the vintage of that machine, which is 2013, so that's pretty old. I did look in Mac Tracker and there were several options with a rotational or hybrid drive. So to me, one thing is that it could be a failing drive. I mean, it's about time, 10 years. That's a good run. Otherwise, since it seems like a low-level system problem, I would say that you may want to reinstall the OS. I think something screwed up somewhere. And you can do that through recovery. But giving your thoughts, because... Yeah, the first thing that I would do is I would... I would take the error message. Whatever that message is, and I see users do this often. In fact, it was kind of a thing where I would see people do it when I was going and consulting at their house. They'd bring me in, they'd say, oh, yeah, the computer's doing this weird thing and say, okay, show me. And they would sit down to show me. And the first thing they would do is they woke the computer up or whatever is click through like 15 warning messages. Like, oh, I just need to dismiss these. And it would always be like, stop, take your hands off the keyboard and mouse. I want to read every single one of those because this might be informative. And so when that error message comes up that says something about an operation with iOS, take the exact text of that error message. And sometimes in an error dialogue, you can even highlight with your mouse and copy the text in the dialogue box. But if you can't, write it down or memorize it or whatever, and then search for that specific text in Google. So you were asking Greg about Google Foo. This is one of those sort of, you know, key pieces, key tricks that we troubleshooters use is typing the exact error message inside quotes into Google. And it will find you web pages that mention that exact string of text, or it will tell you no web pages with that exact string of text exist. So that that would be the first thing I would do. You're right, John, that it could be hardware or software. I mean, we don't know. I would think that a failing drive would exhibit other symptoms. So and it wouldn't just be this specific. A failing drive generally will, when it's hardware, whether it's a drive or something else, it happens seemingly inexplicably. Whereas Greg's description is very specific. It's happening with, you know, this part of the operating system and this part of the operating system, which tells me that it's software and not hardware. Again, I could be wrong, but hardware errors rarely are super consistent with where they appear, unless it's a temperature thing, in which case, you know, every time I run Photoshop and do this crazy transform my system locks, it's like, okay, well, let's look at the CPU. And are there any other times when you use a CPU like that? No. All right. Well, then this might be a hardware thing. So that would be my thought. I don't know. Well, the other thing, I don't think I mentioned this, but if you have a clone, try your clone. That would eliminate hardware being an issue. Potentially, it depends if you've cloned the problem. It depends on when, if you have a clone from before the issue appeared, first appeared, then yeah, that would be a good way to do it. Thoughts, Pete? Yeah. I jumped out of there inadvertently. My wife, I died and I went away and came back. Welcome back then. Thanks. The one thing, I inadvertently closed the questions right about the time before the show started. So I don't think he mentioned error messages in the question. He said he got an error that the system cannot reboot because of an operation with iOS. Right, right, right. And so that's why I was saying search for that specific error message. Yeah. So, because, but, but I agree with the main thing is I think there's a missing one or zero somewhere in there that's critical that can never be found in reinstalling the operating system is the. Yeah. I think that's the only because there's other problem, right? Well, there's no problem worse than an intermittent problem, which it seems like he says sometimes it stays in weeks between. Yeah. Yeah. Which is, which is where I agree that, you know, let's not rule out hardware. Like I said, my gut says it's not just because of, because of the sort of location in the operating system where it happens and nowhere else, but the intermittent part of it, the infuriatingly intermittent part of it definitely smells like hardware. So, yeah. But you know, like Apple's got some infuriating the intermittent things in the operating system now, specifically with waking from sleep. It's become a, like we were talking about this, we did a, well, we'll talk about it in a couple of minutes, but we did a hangout in our Discord group about Plex and we were talking about that kind of thing in there too, not about Plex, but just about Max where it gets infuriatingly intermittent with the waking from sleep. But Kiwi Graham, speaking of our Discord room, Kiwi Graham in the live chat says that his first step would be a safe mode restart, which is not a bad idea. That will, that's restarting with the shift key down. That will, I believe, did that change on M1? I don't think it did. Anyway, we'll put a link in the show notes about how to do a safe mode restart in just in case we aren't remembering it right here. But safe mode restart will do a bunch of under the hood cleanings of caches and things like that. So that is a good sort of way to, without fully reinstalling, you're not reinstalling the OS, but you are cleaning out some of the more obvious cruft that the operating system itself creates. And that can be, certainly can be a cause of things like this. So yeah, I like that idea, the safe mode restart. It's an easy way to get that stuff done. Yeah. And if you want to, will Onyx do that as well? With, I was just going to say, yeah, Onyx has a whole pile of cleanup options for caches and other things. So that would be, yeah, that's, that's the more granular way to do it. But yeah, yeah, yeah. I like it. All right. Let's see, where else are we here? What's on the agenda? Christopher. All right. Let's let's see what Christopher says. Christopher says, I'm digging my new setup. He's got a 27 inch iMac as his studio display for his new M1 Mac studio. And says, I am now duplicating that for my office setup. Okay, great. Here's my question or perhaps challenge. How do I sync all four of my computers to mirror one another, specifically the files? And he gets a little more granular because there's, there's a couple of easy answers that I think he's going to try and take off the table for us, but we might try to put them back on. Christopher continues, I know if I use the desktop for storing files, iCloud can automatically sync that to all of my Macs. But the desktops will look like my windshield during lovebug season in Florida, very, very messy. What is a better option? I see chronosync express on setup. Is this a good option? I know there's always iCloud, which is what would be syncing your desktop. And the documents, which is where I file the majority of my files, except my downloads and a couple of files that I have in the sidebar for quick access. This is where syncing and continuity becomes really important. How to mirror between the four Macs. So, yeah, iCloud documents is certainly the easiest way if you're using iCloud storage or you have enough iCloud storage, even with the free plan to do what you want to do. But it doesn't work on all folders, just those specific ones, desktop and documents. In fact, I think it's called desktop and documents syncing when you click that checkbox in there. Chronosync is one option. Another one is called Resilio sync. This used to be called BitTorrent sync, but they changed the name because, because, well, people weren't using it because they're like, oh, I don't want to use torrents. I don't want to get in trouble with that or whatever. This is, there's enough, there's no trouble to get into here. BitTorrents are peer-to-peer, BitTorrent is a peer-to-peer protocol, which means you can, you don't need a server in order for multiple computers to coordinate sharing data with one another. That's really the way to sort of zoom out and say it. And so Resilio sync takes that technology and lets you sync a folder or multiple folders between multiple devices. It doesn't all have to be Macs. It's very much a, you know, cross-platform thing, Linux, Windows, you know, FreeBSD, obviously Mac OS. And there is a free version that might do what you want. And then there's paid versions where you can, you know, either, I think it's a one-time license for the paid versions. Yeah, it's 35 bucks. Well, it's 99 bucks a one-time license for a family or 60 bucks for a one-time license for one person.  But try the free one at Resilio sync, because that it's essentially like setting up your own Dropbox with multiple folders without using a server at all. All the computers become, it's just a peer-to-peer thing. So everybody's the server, if you will. So that's what comes to mind for me. I realize I might have overcomplicated this. Anybody have any thoughts? Well, if you have a Synology, there's Synology Drive. For sure. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I mean, that would be the obvious answer. Yeah, if you have a Synology, Synology Drive works great. Yeah. That's what I'm using. And that's why I forgot about Resilio sync, because Resilio is great. But, you know, he mentioned the other thing. And like you said, we're going to put a free option back on the table. My idea to quote-unquote hack this one would be to put one folder on your desktop, name it, you know, AAA or something like that. So it's easily fine. Put subfolders in that, drag that one folder even over to your left sidebar and find her. And that'll give you instant access to all the subfolders and files that you could put in there. That's kind of a, it's a free hack. No, that's the, that's, yes. Or you can, and you could do the same thing with your documents folder. Absolutely. Yeah. Any of the folders that, that iCloud syncs automatically? Sure. The only issue would be downloads, right? And so you could set your default downloads look, you could change your default downloads location to be inside one of these synced folders for sure. Or you could use something like Hazel to watch your downloads folder and move the, you know, the files that appear there over to some other synced folder. I would caution syncing the downloads folder. And I think there's a reason Apple doesn't do this. And that's because we wind up downloading a lot of things that may quickly fill up our iCloud storage without us intentionally doing anything, right? I know I realize downloading things is intention, but we're not saving them to a folder that we know is synced.  And my guess is that's why Apple isn't, isn't doing that. But, but you know, you can, there are ways of redirecting the downloads folder. Safari lets you set it and other, other browsers do too. So that would, that would be, you know, another way of like you said, the free hack if you're, if you're looking for that. So yeah, yeah. And you mentioned Hazel. I love Hazel. Like I have her look for my bank statements, my credit card statements and all that. And she can read PDF files and put them in folders for you. Rename them and put them in folders. Yep. I don't, I forget what Hazel does for me, Pete. Like, yeah. It's, it's one of those things where you get very used to it just running and then doing things in the background. And you can have it do quite a bit. I have it watch a folder into which either John or I or you, Pete, you know, can, it's a synced folder and it watches that folder and it's, it's a folder that we save audio comments into. And that way, once we save an audio comment there, it puts it automatically in our Evernote. It removes it from that folder. It does all kinds of processing to make sure everything's good and you're good to go. And I forget that like all this hinges on Hazel running and continuing to run. So it's happy to, yeah. It's, it's one of those things. And it has a nice feature now too that it will, you can preview. Hey, is this good? I've written something. I want it to look for this file. Yeah. Will it affect it? And you can get a preview. Yeah, it will. No, it's not going to, it's going to ignore that file. Wait a minute. That's the file I wanted to look at. Why? And you can figure out why. Change your criteria. Right. I forgot about that. Yeah. Because I was having a hard time writing, not, not being a programmer. I was having a difficult time getting it to do what I wanted it to do. And now, since that feature's in there, I can go, oh, okay. It's not looking at that folder. Let's sort of file. Let's find out why. Let's find out why. Yeah. It's made it a whole lot easier. Oh, that's great. Yeah, real time feedback on the, on what it would and wouldn't catch. I like it. That's good. We've got a couple other from, I believe Brian Monroe in the chat, but certainly from someone in the chat. Sync thing at sync thing.net. There'll be links for all of these would be is a continuous file synchronization program. And I think that's what we're looking for here. Then there is at free file sync.org, which is open source file synchronization. Yeah. Creates and manages backup copies of all your important files. File sync determines the differences between a source and target and transfers only the minimum amount of data needed available for Windows, macOS, and Linux. I like it. And one last one. C file, seafile.com. File sync and share solution. This is a for pay thing. So, but multi-platform. But evidently, oh, okay. So it needs a server. You can pay them to use their server. However, three users up to three users is free. And then from there, it goes up. But you could run your own server if you want as the community addition. So, oh, I like this stuff. All right. See, we're learning new things. Everybody trying to put Dropbox out of business. Well, I mean, listen, I don't know trying to put Dropbox out of business. This shows that there is healthy interest in this thing. If you're in business and you have no competitors, solve that problem first. That's right. Yeah. If you think not having competitors is not a problem, think again. Yeah. Yeah. It means there's not enough people that want your thing. Now, I do know of some businesses. I know one person who listens to the Small Business Show, and I can't remember the name of the business, but they were telling us. They're like, yeah, there's a market of literally 500 potential buyers for my service. And they're like, I have 150 of them. So it's like, okay. Well, and the other people just aren't using his service. There's no one else that makes the service. He's like, so yes, we don't have competitors, but you know, it's like there's a reason for this. It's an extremely niche market. So anyway, yep. All right. More on this, John, or shall we move on to Kirk? Kirk. Captain Kirk here. All right, Captain Kirk. Let's see what we got here. I'm sorry.  All right. Kirk writes, I recently attempted to create a port map for a client who uses a Comcast Business router, the Technicolor model, and it didn't go well. Let's say I got caught. The goal was to allow FileMaker Pro, now from Claris, traffic to pass from the outside world into a Mac mini server with a static IP address on the LAN to port 5003, which is the port that FileMaker uses. In preparation, he says, I set the DHCP pool to be dot two through dot 150. Okay, great. And I assigned the Mac mini server an address above the DHCP range to dot 155, so as to avoid a possible duplicate IP address. Okay. Next, I logged into the web interface on the router and went to the port forwarding settings and tried to create the port map so that external port 5003 would map to this IP address 155 on port 5003. That's how you do it. That's how it works great. In creating the port map, though, the router complained and wouldn't allow me to save the settings. I deleted the port map and recreated it, power circled the router, yada, yada, called Comcast Business Support, and eventually got to a real human. The tech initially couldn't figure it out either until they suggested that the router wasn't allowing the port forward to be saved because the IP address was above the DHCP range. I changed the IP address of the server to be dot 150, the last address in the DHCP pool, and the router immediately allowed the port map to be saved. As expected, the port map allowed FileMaker Pro traffic to pass from the internet into the intranet. Perfect. He says, in my experience, this breaks some basic rules of networking and avoiding duplicate IP addresses. He's right because he is statically assigning just on the Mac mini an address that now is inside the DHCP pool. The router doesn't know about it and it could choose to assign that to another device. How to solve this problem? I've seen this. I've actually solved this. This is not a theoretical thing. One thing I've done is to leave in this scenario, leave the Mac mini on DHCP, but set a DHCP reservation for outside of the DHCP pool. DHCP reservations are supposed to happen outside of the pool. This way, the router knows about that device. I think this is the issue. A lot of routers won't let you set a port forward to a device that the router is unaware of. This 155 was outside of that range, but if you set a reservation to be dot 155, then it should work. Now, it is possible that the router will not let you set a DHCP reservation outside of the DHCP range. This is incorrect. It's supposed to allow you to do this by all the RFCs and all that stuff, but I've definitely seen some routers. In this case, set the reservation to what you've done to 150, but at least that way, the router knows that it has assigned 150 to that Mac mini and it won't assign 150 to anything else. One side effect of this that is a wonderful bonus, because I had exactly this problem with a FileMaker server that we were hosting years ago. We had an extended power outage here at my house slash office. We were using the FileMaker server for the business, so I had to move the FileMaker server somewhere else. I was doing exactly what Kirk is doing here, and I had manually set the IP address on the Mac that was running the FileMaker server, and I brought the FileMaker server over to my dad's house because it's only, you know, whatever 10 minutes away, and I plugged it in and it was like, right, this isn't going to work on this network because that IP is hardcoded for my network, and I didn't bring a monitor or a keyboard with me because this machine runs headless, so I had to go back home and I had to retrieve a monitor and keyboard, or maybe I cannibalized it from one of my dad's computers or something, but it taught me the lesson that if I had left that on DHCP and let the router manage it here, as soon as I plugged it in at my dad's house, the router there would have given it an IP address, and I could have done it all without needing to ever plug a monitor or anything in the machine just would have come up on the network, so since then I have left all of my machines in DHCP mode and just let the router do the static assigning of the addresses in this way. It's all managed in one place, I don't need to manage it in 15 different places, it's a better way to do it, so hopefully that helps with your client, Kirk. I don't know that, but one part about this that I don't have experience with is the Technicolor router, and so it seems like it's got some limitations that might, you know, you might have to navigate around, yeah, so there you go. Dave, you did exactly what I would have done, so. Is that right? Perfect, I'm glad to hear your opinion. The other thing to consider, because I think we do this for one of our databases, Dave, is maybe get someone else to host your file maker. It looks like there's a few people that do that sort of thing. Fair, yeah, yeah, I mean, for this very specific thing, yes. Now, the issue with that is, A, you're paying for someone else to host your file maker database, and even us with our very limited lightweight use, I'll call it, we're using FMP host, and they are fantastic, but I think it's still like 60 bucks a month, so not non-trivial in the end, especially when you're going to do that for years at a time. But they do a good job, and that because of all the power outages here, that's why we did what we did and moved it out there. I also didn't want to have to leave a Mac running all the time. There is now a Linux version, a very limited target Linux version of FileMaker server, so that might be an option for hosting on, you know, on the not Mac box or not Windows box. The other issue with hosting FileMaker somewhere else is if most of the users are in one location, you get speed benefits of the lower latency of a connection that's right there, as opposed to everyone having to go over the internet to connect to the FileMaker server. If it's something that you're hitting all the time, there are benefits to having it running locally that I definitely saw. None of the other people in the company saw, because they were connecting to it remotely, whether it was at my house or it was at FMP host, but I definitely noticed that it got a little bit more sluggish just because of the introduction of the internet to the equation. But yes, you are correct, John. Yeah, hosting somewhere else would solve the FileMaker problem, but it doesn't solve the forwarding problem. They were connecting remotely, not virtually. Sorry. See what I'm saying, Pete? See what I'm saying? See. Right up. Yep. All right. Let's see. And everything comes full circle. I appreciate that. That's good, Pete. That's your magician training there. Hey, as a magician, I think you are amongst the elite and select group of people who understand how you can have a cable or a rope in the case of a magician. And for people who don't know, pilot Pete is a studied magician. You can have a piece of rope or cable where both ends are being held, say, for example, a power cable. One end is plugged into the wall. The other end is plugged into your, let's say, your Thunderbolt dock or whatever. So both of those ends are committed and never change state. They remain plugged in.  How does this happen? Because I've always, I've always assumed that magicians were the only ones that knew the answer to this. Maybe you can't share. I don't. It's, I think that's called the Gordian's knot, right? See. Yeah. What is, wait, what's the name of this? Gordian's knot. G-O-R-D-I-O-N. Gordian's knot. Okay. I think that's what that's called. All right. Yep. Gordian knot. Yeah. Okay. All right. We'll put that in the show notes for anybody who's, you know, who's last minute and a half we've wasted here. Brian has a networking, thank you, Pete. Brian has a networking question for us. He says, I think it would be useful for your listeners to hear your opinions. Oh, wait, wait, wait. I have a question. We've already answered the first part of it. He says, would you have a discussion about what open ports are, how to create and manage them, what the related security issues are? He says, the reason this comes up is that whenever I've looked for such information, most writers spend the bulk of an article talking about how open ports on your router create major security risks and therefore should be absolutely avoided unless super necessary, yet they seem to be part and parcel of running a NAS, a file maker server, routers, et cetera. Can you shed some light on this? So, yeah. In general, if we're thinking about our routers as firewalls, and most of us that are running routers where we get one IP address from the outside world and then share it with, you know, a bunch of things on the inside world, which is exactly what was happening in Kirk's scenario, right? We had traffic coming into the main IP address of the office on a specific port, and we're routing that to a different IP address internally that can't be seen from the outside otherwise. And that's the key part of where I want to dig here. That effectively creates a firewall for you until you poke that hole, right? Because traffic coming in, if the router doesn't have specific instructions about what to do with that traffic, it's simply going to ignore it. So, the default behavior is effectively a firewall. Now, it's not technically, and I'm sure there's network security folks out there, High Scott, it was great to have lunch with you, who will tell us that that's not what a firewall is, and that's not, you shouldn't be telling people to think of these as firewalls, and you're all correct. But in a sense, that's exactly what's happening. It's just not letting that traffic in. And so, when you do open a port, like, for example, with Kirk, we open port, or he opened port 5003 to point to their FileMaker server, that creates a potential security hole. Because now, if people in the outside world know that 5003 is FileMaker, they can target that server. And if they know about any exploits that are specifically available on FileMaker servers, maybe FileMaker servers that haven't been updated in six months or something like that, then they could try those exploits on port 5003 on your network and potentially get in. Whereas if you didn't open that port, they couldn't get in. So, this is where network security experts will correctly state that all else being equal, open ports create security risks. Because it's just, like, I equate it to our houses, right? We could all choose to live in houses with nothing but brick walls, right? And that would be pretty safe from people trying to get in from the outside. But it would also mean you can't get out or in either, right? So, you create a door, right? Okay, well, now that there's a door, you can get in and out. Super convenient for you. Sure, but what about all these people that want to intrude? Well, they can use the door too. And, you know, well, now you want to add windows because they're nice and convenient and pretty and they let light in. Well, okay, people might be able to see in through your windows. And that might be a security risk, right? So, this is the way to think about this stuff is you need to do some of it in order to live on your network and make your network work for you. Just be aware of what you are doing and why you are doing it. And maybe audit your port forwards once every few months on your router. Just to make sure that you don't wind up with some lingering ones that you don't need anymore and close those down so that you're, you know, you're being intentional about what ports you're opening. So, I hope that helps. I know we've gotten this question a couple of times and I've actually been saving Brian's question for several months here and it seemed perfect to kind of put it after we talked about Kirk because that's the, you know, that's the flow through here. That's the reason you would want that. I don't know. What do you think? Now, there are, there's another way to audit this sort of thing, Dave. Okay. So, there's also, so you may not know this. It's like a secret, but devices may create a port map on their own and they use a protocol it's called a UPNP, I think. Yeah, yeah. Which basically a device says, hey router, can you create this port map for me temporarily or hopefully temporarily? And yeah, there's a little utility called port map where you can interrogate your router and say, hey, you know, has anybody created any port maps? You may want to, you may want to eject ones that you think have outlived their usefulness. Great point. Yeah, both UPNP and then Apple didn't use UPNP. They use NAT PMP, right? But they, you're right, either one of those protocols lets devices open their own ports on the routers. As a user convenience, right? You don't want to have to do it yourself, so it does it for you. And we, I mean, most of us likely have these that are open. Your VoIP software will do it. Skype was one that did it for a while. I think they still do. Plex will open one if you don't explicitly do it. You can, in most routers, turn off UPNP. And if you do, then devices can't create their own port maps. And so you have to do it yourself. But that is a more secure way of doing it. So yeah, no, I'm really glad you brought that up. That's, yeah, that's a great point. Yeah, and I've had a few things. And a few programs can alert you. Yeah, I found this out the other day. So I was installing some new smart bulbs. And all of a sudden, I got a warning from Eero saying, hey, somebody created a port map because they had to go out to their server and do the cloud thing and all that. So that was kind of nice. Thing desktop, I think you may have to get the premium version. We'll also interrogate your router and tell you what's going on there. Yep, yep. And Brian Monroe reminds us of Shield Up from GRC. I think it was Brian Monroe. Maybe it was you, Pete, somebody put it in the show notes. It was you. Okay, great. Thank you. And that is a utility that will, it's an online utility that will interrogate your router from the outside and tell you what ports it sees open, which is very handy because you can compare that with what your router thinks are open. What you think you have open. Exactly. Right. No, that's a good one. I like it. I like it. I like it. All right. And on a little tangent, Dave, check this out. This shocked me. So these are a newer line of bulbs from GE called CYNC. It used to be just C, but now it's CYNC. I didn't even realize this, but when I activated these bulbs, they just worked. And I'm like, wait a second. After the fact, I looked at the box, Dave, and it said 2.4 GHz only. Now you know what a nightmare that's been for some people because a lot of times devices aren't smart enough to go to the 2.4 version of the frequency, but in this case, they did. Great. That's good. So they must have increased the smarts in the bulb or their software. Right. Yeah. It's usually the software is the issue because when that happens, like when you're when you're connecting one of these devices and you're using the app on your phone to do it, the dumb way is that the app looks at the Wi-Fi access point, not just the network name, but the very specific MAC address of the access point that your phone's connected to and says, share that with the smart bulb or whatever. Problem is if your phone is connected to a 5 GHz access point and it tries to share that with a device like this sync bulb that only has 2.4, the device is going to say, I tried. I can't connect. And of course it can't connect. It can't even see the radio. What it should be doing and what it sounds like GE is doing with the sync bulbs, at least now, maybe they've always been doing it. I don't know is looking for the network name, which is the smart way, because then it will find not only the 2.4 GHz connection, but it will find the closest access point if you've got multiples as you might with a mesh network. So yeah. Oh, that's good news. I like that. It's good. Fun. This became a networking show. Yeah. I love the networking shows. We had to we had to put an internal moratorium on networking shows for a little while a couple of years ago because we became network geek out. But I don't know like like this stuff is not only is it. I mean, we find it fun, John, but like it's it's there's so many specific little nuances to the way it all works. And so we'd like to help feedback at Matt geek up.com is where you can send in your networking questions, even if or even when we there's no more moratorium, by the way. But even when there was, we were still answering the questions behind the scenes. We just weren't including them in the show. But did you say feedback at Matt geek up.com? I think I said feedback at Matt geek up.com. You're both right. That's right. Yeah. All right. We got more questions, a couple of tips to share and good news. We still have time to do it. The next thing I would love to do is tell you about those couple of podcasts that we mentioned earlier in the show, if that's OK with you, John. Very good. All right. Hey, I want to take this time to tell you about two great shows from the twit network here. The first is Mac break weekly. Get ready to join the podcast all about Apple from uncovering the latest Mac's iPhones, iPads, Apple Watches and Apple TV, plus new innovations and rumblings inside Apple. The Mac break weekly podcast covers it all. You can go behind the curtain with twit.tv's Leo LaPorte, Rene Richie, Andy and not co and Alex Lindsey as they dive into everything Apple related. Sometimes I even joined them over there. You get a new episode of Mac break weekly every Tuesday evening. And you can subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts. Mac break weekly or thanks to Mac break weekly for sponsoring this episode. Next up is twit because when it comes to covering all things tech, boy, do we have a show for you because every week this weekend tech gives you a no holds bar deep dive into how big tech influences our culture and our lives. Join twit.tv's Leo LaPorte and their ever changing panel of journalists and experts every Sunday. And sometimes that includes me as they and sometimes we break down and often disagree on the latest in tech. It's a really fun show. I have a blast every time they've had me on there. It's always a great panel and the conversations really are fantastic. Subscribe to this week in tech wherever you get your podcast and our thanks to this week in tech and twit.tv for sponsoring this episode. All right, John, you want to take us to Dieter's? Sure. All right. Dieter says over the past few months, my wife has been complaining about overnight battery drain on her iPhone 13 mini. I told her she was holding it wrong. Pro tip. Don't do that. Don't do that. But it had worked me.  I'm not sure that would work for him at home either. Lorraine does not seem like the type who would suffer that type of foolishness. But remember that that iPhone 4 antenna? Of course. Yeah, antenna gate. Of course. No, he told the world that. I'm just saying. And it almost worked telling the world that he didn't tell his wife that. Just the rest of us. You got it. Yeah. All right. So he says I configured a shortcut automation to turn off her cell data at 12 a.m. and turn on her Wi-Fi at 12 1 a.m. for emergency phone calls, etc. This did not resolve the problem. Recently we were traveling and staying in a hotel in which the phone could not receive any cell service. We both noticed that we were losing about 20% battery each night. I checked and the phone was constantly trying to make a cell connection. I was surprised. I read the fine print and it appears that the cell radio is still active when cell data is turned off. So I modified the shortcut to turn on airplane mode at 12 a.m. Wi-Fi was still activated at 12 1 a.m. I wrote another shortcut. So at 7 a.m. I turn off airplane mode bingo problem solved. So the message here is turning off cell doesn't turn off the radio. So use airplane mode. Yeah, I mean, so there's a couple of things to unpack here. Everything you guys said is absolutely correct. When your phone is at the fringe or completely out of service range, it will consume more battery than when it is within healthy range. And that's because when it's within healthy range, the radio really only needs to wake up periodically to check to see if phone calls are coming in or text messages are coming in or data, whatever.  And so it can be super efficient with when the radio is actually live. And I mean, yes, it's happening probably multiple times a second, but for the majority of the time, the radio is actually off until you're using it. When the phone does not have a signal or has a weak signal, it is far more active with the radio searching for that missing link, so to speak. And that is what will chew up battery. So it makes perfect sense that you'd want to turn off the cell radio in the scenarios that the Deeders mentioned. But we have to remember what the option is called. It is called cellular data, not cellular radio. And just like we've talked about, in fact, a lot with our travel and eSims, when, you know, when I was overseas, I got a SIM to use in Europe for data, the data only SIM to use in Europe. And so I turned off cellular data on my Mint mobile SIM because I didn't want to be using Mint data. But I did not deactivate my, or I did not turn off my Mint SIM, which you can do once you have two SIMs on the phone. And the reason I didn't turn it off is because I wanted that radio on. I wanted to still be able to receive and send SMS messages, which are not related to cell data. I wanted to be able to send and receive or make and receive phone calls, which are not related to cell data. So when you turn off cell data on your phone, SMS and phone calls will still be able to come in over the cellular radio. And that's the important part to remember is that the label says cell data, not cell radio, and that I think is the key. But as Deeders found, airplane mode does turn off the cell radio, mostly. I've heard some reports from folks we know, folks in the know, that sometimes the radio is actually back on for brief periods, which probably doesn't make you pilots happy, Pete. But you know, what else? Well, they've done the engineering, I think, finally on it. They have. It doesn't interfere. But no, it doesn't. You're right. It doesn't interfere. If it did, they would confiscate our phones on the planes. The other thing I would offer in the unpack is it depends. What's your purpose for doing that? And if it's to not be disturbed, the focus moods now are so granular that you can set it so nobody can bother you, except, you know, one person or two people that you can set up individual people in your context. So even in the most silent mode, I guess, that is the word I'm looking for. Yeah, I still allow my 96-year-old mother's calls to come through. Right. No, because she doesn't call me unless she needs something. So yeah, three in the morning still is a valid time if she needs to call you. Absolutely. And it happens. Well, the good news is, you know, I mean, for Dieter, he was solving the battery usage problem, not the interruption problem. But if you have enabled Wi-Fi calling, you very likely will still be able to get calls in SMS over Wi-Fi with the radio off. Yeah. But maybe I went to, you know, he's doing it between midnight and 7 a.m. It's more of a do not disturb thing was what I was reading to. Yeah. So, you know, could be misreading. Yeah. Yeah. No, it's interesting. Yeah. Yeah. Why were they losing 20% each night? Like, you and I make the assumption that people charge their phones while they sleep at night. Yeah, I do. He also did not, like, in fact, very clearly he's not charging his phone. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, all right. Interesting. Man. The only other thing that I noticed the other day, maybe this is consuming battery and maybe it's not, is my phone, it's an iPhone 12 mini ran all the battery ran all the way down. When I plugged it in to start charging, it was like, oh, by the way, even though I'm off, you can still find me. And I'm like, well, then you're not really off. Are you? Well, is it sending its final location before it powers down? Or is it actually somehow staying connected even though it's otherwise off? That's what I'm wondering. I don't have that information. Right, right. Yeah.  Here's the Hail Mary. You know, we'll send one last. Here's where I was. Here's where I was.  Yeah. All right. Should we go to Bart? While we're while we're on the, we sort of entered the travel realm. Yes. All right. Bart asks, looking for a good way to get internet on the road traveling in an RV, I would need a router that would support a SIM chip from a cellular company that would provide unlimited internet. Any ideas? Okay. One is use your phone and get an unlimited plan. If it'll let you hotspot to it. Right. Many unlimited plans that. Earlier, some people, unlimited data doesn't mean unlimited hotspot. Bingo.  And I found a nice little write up over a PC magazine called The Best Mobile Hotspots for 2022. So they kind of give it. So a hotspot is its only purpose in life is to provide you with typically Wi-Fi to cellular connectivity. Yes. I'm going to call that a hotspot. Yeah. No, I, yeah, I like that definition. Works. Yep. But yeah, read the fine print because unlimited data may not mean unlimited. Really. Or doesn't mean unlimited hotspot though it can. Good. Brian Monroe, I think it was Brian. Again, it could have been you Pete, but mentioned Starlink for RVs.  And you've got coverage throughout pretty much all the US and Europe. So that's interesting. Then you can check avails and all that stuff before you before you go. Starlink for RVs provides the ability to pause and unpause service at any time and is built in one month increments. Aha. Well, that's yeah. Okay. So if you're only RVing, you know, from in the months of June and July, let's say, and that's the only time you really need this, well, then you turn it off for the rest of the year. Huh. That's not too bad. All right. I mean, it's not inexpensive, but let's face it, neither are RVs. So. No. And if you want, it was Brian that definitely said if you want reliable service. Throughout the continental US, then that, you know, it ain't cheap, but it's it's going to be worth it. It's going to do. Yeah. I mean, if you're not going to be missing cell towers in a valley here. Yeah. Yeah. If you bought an RV and you want to like, you know, take your your virtual job remote for the summer, you know, you could you could use this and then you're good to go. So I like it. It's been a virtual job. We're doing real work and see. Sorry. I did. It's my smart. It's my smart a personality, Alex, smart Alec personality. No, I was waiting for it. I'm like, wait, wait, this didn't land yet. Uh-oh. What I do. Well, it takes me a while sometimes. That's okay. It's all good. Uh, yeah, let's go through some cool stuffs found here. The first one up is one that I say I found it. I found it in my email box because Brian over at Fat Cat Software told me that Power Photos 2.0 is released. This is one of those pieces of software that certainly for troubleshooters is mandatory to have. And really, I kind of think anybody that uses photos on your Mac will find use for this from time to time. One of the big features that jumped out to me in Power Photos 2 is it now has full iCloud photos support. How, you know, previous versions of Power Photos were only able to see photos that had already been downloaded from iCloud to your local drive. And if you had optimized Mac storage turned on, that would mean that Power Photos couldn't see, you know, the bulk of your library. Well, the Power Photos 2, you can now see and work with any photos in your iCloud photo library and will automatically download any photos from iCloud as needed. So that to me, that's the like that makes this mandatory, this upgrade mandatory just out of the box. And then they've added some more exporting and library groups and merging and a better or new and better, both duplicate search engine. They've got a new comparison algorithm that can find more duplicate photos, which are not quite 100% identical, such as scaled down copies of photos and things like that. So I'm eager to make a backup first and then run this on my iCloud photo library and see how many dupes I've accumulated, messing with things over the years. So yeah, thank you for that, Brian, for letting us know about that. And for for writing it. He's the one. Yeah, yeah, exactly.  The gigabytes and gigabytes of photos that most libraries have. I'm I think I'm over 200 gigs of photos. Yeah. But maybe I can slim that down if I can search for the you know, the right duplicates. So John has us both beat. Yeah, I bet you do, John. What was mine? I think no photos library, 140 gigs. Haven't been taken many pictures lately. Oh, wow. Or just on the iPhone. Yeah, I used to go out with my point shoot, but haven't done that lately. I really should. Yeah, here you go. It is the season. All right. Yeah. All right, Pete, not Pete. John, you want to take us to Patrick? Yes. So Patrick kind of has a tip embedded in an evaluation here. So since I moved to the country, my best option was T-Mobile Home Internet Service. It's 5G cellular, no limit, no caps, no contract, 50 bucks a month. The Gateway modem is made by Nokia. It must be placed in a window if one can orient it towards the closest T-Mobile cellular tower. It must be placed in. Oh, wait. Yeah, got that ready. I use www.cellmapper.net to determine the closest cell tower for T-Mobile and direction thereof. It was faster in the winter, but since trees have leafed out, I like that leaf out, man, it is slower. My speeds are abhorrent. Down would be good if between 15 and 30 ups sucks at one to two. That's what the Gateway modem receiver at a window pointing to cellular tower a few miles away and plugged into an Eero mesh home network. Again, the trees are obstructing signal as it was best in the winter. Okay, I'll buy that. Yeah, I knew that with satellite and directional Wi-Fi that trees would make a difference, but I didn't realize they made that much of a difference with cell signals. I would not have presumed that, but obviously I would have presumed wrong. Well, it's microwave, right? Yeah, it's the same. You're right. Yeah, I don't know why I wouldn't have presumed that, but it's good to learn. Yeah, I'll offer. We had AT&T cell service for years and years, and in the house it was always terrible. And we bought one of those little mini towers that they eventually quit supporting. Sure. And that was special where you got to use your own internet and they charge you for your minutes used back in the day on your internet. Did they call that a micro cell? Yeah, that's what it was. But they eventually quit supporting those, got rid of those, and we had terrible cell service in the house, even with Wi-Fi calling on. And once I switched over to Mint Mobile, I used that very service to find where the towers were because I was going to buy an antenna because initially it was kind of rough. And then I turned on Wi-Fi calling and it worked. Turns out, apparently AT&T has Wi-Fi calling enabled on their plans, but their servers are not really giving it much priority. And so our cell service in the house, we would have to go stand by the front door and stand on your left foot with your right hand in the air to get a decent signal. I can't tell you how many times calls dropped in the house. With Mint Mobile, that is gone completely. So the Mint Mobile antenna is in front of our house at about three miles, but through the trees and it's bad. But again, that's where Wi-Fi calling helps. Yeah, Wi-Fi calling is the key. Yeah, yeah. And Mint Mobile supports it where it's AT&T, fish shake. Yeah, I looked a lot with CellMapper in our area here, Pete, in the New Hampshire Seacoast, and I was surprised to see that T-Mobile, especially with 5G towers, has far better density than either AT&T or Verizon. 4G, Verizon does fairly well. AT&T does probably just a notch below them here in New England. But for 5G, T-Mobile really seems to be... And I've noticed that too. Like I get 5G all the time on my Mint Mobile. I use Mint Mobile, but they use T-Mobile's towers, which is why I was looking for those big three. But yeah. Yeah, they whack it out of the park. They really do. They really do. Yeah, yeah. It's great. Yeah, and Verizon is trying. Within the last several days, I've noticed that the 5G indicator comes on on my phone instead of LTE. So they're fixing something. Or they're installing more 5G. Yeah, that would be it. I guess it's not all there yet. They're just adding it in. Cool. All right, we have time for some cool stuff found here. We're running low. Maybe one left here. I noticed that Guy Rambo, a fantastic writer and IOS or a programmer, not just IOS programmer, posted the other day that he has released VirtualBuddy, which is an open source virtualization app for Apple Silicon, M1, M2, Max. It is experimental for sure. But it does provide the ability to boot any version of macOS 12 or macOS 13, including the betas, virtually on Apple Silicon. It's got a built-in installation wizard. You can boot into recovery mode. It's got networking and file sharing support. It's got clipboard sharing. There are some other features that he intends to add. It's mainly built, well, it's built for him. As a developer. So beyond Guy, it is meant for developers. But it can also be used by those of us for other purposes. If you just want to test out, say, a beta operating system, this might not be a terrible way to do that, especially if you've got an Apple Silicon Mac. So very cool stuff. And I wanted to make sure we got that in there before. Under the wire for all of you folks. Yeah, I'm always amazed when it's like, you know, one dude in his house who builds something that we would have expected to come from, say, parallels or VMware. But, you know, it's all fine. Everything's fine. We're all fine here. How about you? Yeah? Oh, who's that? That's the band. Yeah. The band. It was tough getting them out of the hot tub, Pete, but I convinced them they came in. They're going to play. Now there you go. You have to learn me how to do that. The hot tub? No, not that. No, sorry. Oh, it's easy. It's totally easy. TMI. No, how to put the band in the show. So I don't have to do it in post in that little show I do. So there I was.us. Yeah. So Pete's little show that he does. So there I was.us, your favorite aviation stories. Seven episodes out now. How many? Seven. Seven. Okay. Yeah. Amazing. The way I do it is I have the theme music. I have the vamp in Farago, which is a piece of software from Drogameba. And it this one I created before this vamp that we're using, I created before Farago existed. So I created a nine minute file, a 10 minute file rather in hopes that I wouldn't run out. There have been shows years ago where we ran out, but it's just the same thing. I just looped it, dragged it out in GarageBand and made the loop. For every other show that I do, aka all the shows which were created after Farago was released, I only put the little loop into Farago and I tell Farago to loop it for me. Yeah. And you can have fade in durations on this and all that. So yeah, Farago's been using Farago and I love that. Yep. But it's I got to say, I never thought much about it until just now, but somehow it seamlessly loops into the final riff. Yeah. Well, no, it doesn't seamlessly loop into the final riff, Pete. It does to the ear. It does to the ear because I have the vamp set to end. I have the outro music set to end all other things, including the loop. And I try to time it so that when I hit it, you don't hear the cut over. And so I usually do it while I'm talking or while one of you is talking. You know, I don't always get it right. But I'm glad to hear you say that it loops seamlessly in because. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's awesome. I'm happy to share my tips and tricks with you. These are the kinds of things, you know, we did this. So we didn't talk about it in the show because the schedule came together too quickly for it to have been of value. But anyway, on Sunday night, we did a hangout in our Discord group for Plex. We hung out. It was planned to be about an hour. I think we actually went about an hour and a half just because we were having so much fun. And I don't know. There were, what, 15, 20 of us there. It was definitely an experiment. And the next one will also be an experiment. I treat every one of these episodes as an experiment. So, you know, we're just evolving together and it was open to anyone. But we really the only place we promoted it was in the Discord group, although we'd sent out a tweet maybe an hour before it was like, okay, if you want to know, here, let's do this. But it worked out really well and it was just like a Zoom hangout. Like that's effectively what we did. We did it in the Discord room. We might use Zoom for the future because Zoom seems to be better with bandwidth and screen sharing and all that stuff. But we'll coordinate them all in our Discord group. And it was just a hangout. It was not a presentation per se in that everybody was able to talk. So it wasn't just me and John talking. It was all of us talking. It was just a hangout. And I thought about John, you know, when you go to a user group meeting, there's the presentation portion of it. But most user groups have the pre, like the opening segment, just be people getting there whenever they get there and doing tech support questions for one another. And I thought, what a cool thing for us to do with the show here, people can bring in their questions and everybody can help answer them. I mean, we're doing that in the Discord room asynchronously anyway. Wouldn't it be fun to just hang out every now and then and do that? So we'll probably do one of those. We'll do a hangout on Synology for sure. That is, I think it has to be the next one. But because there's just so much demand for it. But yeah, so join our Discord group, join our mailing list. We didn't send this one out on the mailing list. Again, it was, you know, the first of them. And so it was a, we should have been doing them all through lockdown. Like, and that's my fault that we just didn't do it. That would have been a great way to, you know, hang out together when we couldn't hang out together. I don't know why we didn't do it to be perfectly honest, but whatever. If the best time is yesterday, the second best time is today. So join our Discord group, mackeycup.com slash discord. And or just go to mackeycup.com. Sign up on our mailing list. We will send out things when we're doing these. And we'd love to have, you know, if we wound up with 100 people there, that would be, you know, more than that, I think I need to increase my Zoom account or my Discord account. But that's fine. We will do that. We'll accommodate everyone. I think it'll be a blast. Anything else, John? Before we, uh, well, we thank him and say goodbye. No. All right. There was, I love the, uh, I love the pregnant paws. It's good. Uh, yeah. So Dave, are you getting ready to say dog suckers? Sorry. There's Faragal. There's Faragal. I like it. Uh, yeah. So thank you everybody for listening. Thanks for sending in all your tips and your cool stuff found. You know, we, we couldn't and wouldn't want to do the show without you. So it's fantastic. We couldn't and wouldn't want to do the show without the bandwidth that cash fly provides us to get the show from us to all of you. Make sure to go check out MGG merch at mackeycup.com slash merch. We've got shirts and stickers and fun stuff. Mr. John F. Braun. What do you got for us, my friend? What do I got? I don't know. Oh, one thing. Don't get caught.