The Mac Observers' Mac GeekGab Episode 689 for Tuesday, December 26th, 2017. Greetings, folks, and welcome to the Mac Observers' Mac GeekGab, the show where you send in your tips, questions and cool stuff found with the goal being that each and every one of us learns, yes, four new things. It's still 2017, this being the last episode that we'll record in 2017. But we're not yet sure where things are going to go for 2018. Will the number go up from four? Will it go down? Will it remain the same? You'll have to tune in next week to find out here in Durham, New Hampshire. I'm Dave Hamilton. And here in Fairfield, Connecticut, celebrating Boxing Day. This is Jennifer. It is Boxing Day. I think it's also the beginning of Kwanzaa. I think it's also St. Stephen's Day somewhere. And I think it's Proclamation Day also. So I'm pretty sure of those four things, which of course I learned from my day-by-day Dilbert calendar that I keep on my desk down in my office. I think Proclamation, that was the one I couldn't remember. But I'm pretty sure that's it. Yeah, because I was thinking about something witty where I could say I proclaim that it's, the St. Stephen proclaims that it's Boxing Day on Kwanzaa or something. Like, there you go. There. That's it. That's the way.  But hey, the more holidays the better. I thought I didn't pull it off. The more holidays the better. Right. Time to reflect, spend time with friends and family. Things like that. There you go. Yeah. Speaking of friends and family, our friend Larry has a question for us to address. Larry writes in and he says, it seems that every day I get the same authentication window saying com.apple.webkit.plugins.64 wants to use your confidential information stored in your keychain to allow this enter the login keychain password. And you get the window that I think most Mac users have seen or will see where it says always allow, deny or allow. And Larry says he keeps clicking always allow so that it won't pester him again. And yet, every day it pesters him again. He says, like a good boy, I provide the required information. The window goes away without complaint only to arise the following day. I skipped one thing while I was reading the error message because I wanted to kind of focus back on this. It asks for the confidential information stored in v4.services.acrobat.com inside his keychain. And I've seen this type of thing before. The specifics of where it is looking matter only for your scenario but they do matter. What I have found to solve this is to go into the keychain and look for that v4.services.acrobat.com or whatever it's looking at and telling you about. Oftentimes these keychain entries can get, I don't want to say corrupted but they can get their settings not in alignment with the way the universe needs them. And then when I say the universe. I think it's corrupted. Oh, okay. Yeah. Well, but I mean the data's there. So it's like the metadata is corrupted almost, right? The shell. A bit got flipped. Yeah. And I'm totally serious. No, I think you're right. Yeah. It can happen and it will happen. It will, yeah. So what I've found that can solve this is to go into keychain access which you launch. It's inside your applications, utilities folder or you can do what I do to launch every single app on my Mac is I hit command space bar and I start typing the name of the app and then I just launch it from spotlight. But go in there and look for this in this case, you know, the v4.services.acrobat.com and delete it. Hopefully, if you, well, if you don't know the password that's stored in there, then I highly recommend you take a look at that password before you go about deleting it. And then the next day when it comes up, it's going to ask you differently. It's going to say I need the password for this thing. You type it in and hopefully that will resolve it. That's the plan and those environments and those scenarios and it generally works. Any other thoughts on that, John, before we... Oh, yeah. Okay. Here we go. Yeah. So one thought was just a general UI thought. You said that you suspected that the always allow key was pressed but the thing is what disturbs him at this dialogue and I think that they haven't updated keychain access in a while is that typically the default choice should have something around it like a darker border or, you know, the thing in bold or something. But there is no default choice for this dialogue when it comes up. Yeah. So what I'm saying is, you know, is that something that's wrong or is that just how keychain access deals with it? So... Well, remember, this isn't keychain access that's putting this up. This is just the operating system, right, that's saying I need this and can you authenticate me? And I've thought about this before because you're right. There is no default choice. There's nothing that's highlighted. I actually think that's a good thing because they're not leading you in any one direction, right? You know, it's... You've got to read this. You have to make your decision. The problem with the default option is that if you just hit enter it is chosen and you might choose it without being very aware of what you just chose to do. Exactly. That's kind of what I was saying. What happens if you just hit return? Yeah, exactly. But the other thing, and I don't really use Adobe Cloudy type services but it sounds like this is having a problem with it and I wonder if it could be due to an extension or a plug-in that this service expects and maybe reviewing whatever Adobe-specific cloud type plug-ins you have maybe another thing in this case. Because it seems to be... Well, I mean, it's saying WebKit. I mean, WebKit is Safari, probably. And Acrobat is certainly Adobe. So it could be that they're using a service that has gotten confused about... I guess it's storing the credentials locally. We want to try to get them. It's like, well, something's wrong. Can you please? Yeah. Yeah. I don't blame you. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's not another... That's not a bad way to go, right? And then you get rid of the problem. So, yeah. Cool. All right. We're off to the races here. Thanks, Larry. Moving on to Chuck here. Chuck says... Talking about this... What's come out, I guess in the last week, right? Since we last... Spoken. All right. Well, this thing where Apple... Where it was discovered, and then Apple loosely confirmed, that when an iPhone 6, 6s, or 7s battery becomes out of spec, they actually slow down the maximum CPU speed of the iPhone, so as not to overdraw power from the battery that can't provide power, which then causes reboots. The big problem, of course, is Apple doesn't tell you when it's going to do this to your phone, and that's a bad thing, I think. I think the fact that they're doing it is great. I mean, it's great in that they're keeping your phone alive and functional while you have the opportunity to go change your battery. The problem is they didn't tell you that you should go change your battery. Yeah. That's bad. Yeah. I don't think there was any malice involved. They just didn't fully document the phenomenon, which they do for a lot of things, but in this case, they didn't say, by the way, if your battery sucks, then we're going to back off because we don't want your phone to die in an hour. Yeah. My guess is, right, this was introduced in 1021, which was the build released at the end of January last year, or this year, sorry, so about 11 months old, and that's like chief bug fixing time for iOS. My guess is that some engineer or group of engineers came up with this solution and tested it, and it worked. Great. Put it in the build, commit it to the repo, check the box, move on to the next bug. I don't think it ever went up the chain at Apple. I don't think Tim Cook was sitting there tapping his fingers together saying, aha, yes, we can get these people. Yeah, I don't think... I mean, I think Apple made a huge user experience error with the way they did this, but like you said, I don't think it was malicious. I think it was just... No one was ever made aware of it. It was just like, yep, we fixed that bug. All right, great, move on. Well, Charles asked, he says, I'm not concerned about the conspiracy theorist that would portray this as Apple's way to encourage the purchase of a new iPhone, but I do actively manage my iPhone app use and settings to get the best daily battery life for my iPhone 7. An early iteration of this New York Times article that he refers to, he says, pointed to a battery management app for the iPhone. However, when I checked, there are many. So I'm wondering if you guys have a preferred app that allows tracking and checking recharge cycles and other battery conditions in the same way that, say, fruit juice does for my MacBook Air. So that's a really good question. Really, the two that I use, and I'm hoping you have... You can save me here, John. The two that I use are actually Mac apps there, and we've talked about them sort of almost in every episode recently. It's coconut battery and iMazing. They're built to look at, you know, from your Mac across USB or across Wi-Fi perhaps at your iPhone's battery. And that's great, but it would be even better if you could do that from the phone. The problem is the data that's exposed to applications running on the phone isn't quite as robust as the data that's exposed to a Mac that's connected via USB. But perhaps you have something, John, that can point us there. I do, but this is fleeting. Okay. And if you recall in the past, I had an app that did something similar. Yeah, called Battery Status or something, right? But you can't get that anymore. Right.  A lot of them are free. Some of them are like 99 cents, some are like in-app purchase. And I find that they're very fleeting. The ones that I've purchased, and actually one time I bought a pro version, I laid down the 99 cents. And it worked for a while, but then I found that either an OS update, I agree with you in that the iOS apps, I think for the most part, are doing something innovative in order to come up with these numbers versus what I think is a better documented interface when doing it from the computer, right? Yes. Not necessarily over USB, because as we've seen, iStat Mini has like stuff I didn't even know the phone knew. And it has all of the important numbers here. But I did find one, Dave, so it's called Battery Life. In the last round of app, when I was trying out AppSide, I found it and I just checked it on my iPhone 7. And it does have, it doesn't have charge cycles, but it does have capacity and maximum, and then the current charge as part of the current maximum. So mine shows, so it says, okay, you got 1,800 out of 1,960 mAh, so I've lost a bit of capacity, 92%. But hey, that's not bad. And then it says you're charged at this level of 1,800. That's the best I found on short notice. So if you look long and hard, you may be able to find something, but I'm with you in those two apps. I mean, if you don't want to Mac, you can't. Right. Well, yeah, yeah, yeah. Let us know. I mean, I found them, you found them, Dave, but I think you found, as I do, that they're kind of fleeting and that they usually break. While we're here, I want to ask you a question, which I think you're going to give me the same answer to, but that old battery status app that isn't available, at least not currently in the App Store, also gave the maximum possible divided by whatever charger was plugged into your iPhone. And I found that really handy. And what I'd really like to do is test that with my iPhone 10 on a Qi charger, on the wireless charger pad. But I don't have that app on my iPhone 10, and I can't download it from the App Store. So I'm curious, do you know of any app that shows you that data? I see that menu shows you the... It shows a figure when your phone is charging. I think it may show what. So you may have to do some math. I don't think it shows the phone. Oh, I know what you're saying. I think it also... No, I'm almost certain it shows the capacity of the charger. Yes, amazing mini. I'm sorry. I think if it's charging, it will show the advertised capacity of the charger. And it'll show that over Wi-Fi, even if the phone's being charged. Ah, okay. All right, cool. I got to dig into that then. Those numbers, of course, are the numbers that are real. Right. No, but I would like to... I know what you're saying. It's like 2.1 amps, 5 volts. Yeah, because I can see... I think next to my bed, I'm trying to remember which one I have. I have the mono price charger and then some other charger I found on Amazon. They both were about $10. And one of them says that it can do more, whatever more is. And so I think the one that I have by my bed is the one that's supposed to do more. And so I put my USB meter on it while my phone was below 50%, so it was going to take a decent amount of juice or a decent amount of current, I should say. And then it was showing from the outlet to the charging pad that I was getting... It was taking 1.5 amps, right? So, okay, great. But I wonder how much of that is making it to the phone. Like, what is the charger advertised to the phone as its capacity? Because you're going to lose some in the translation. So anyway. All right. You want to take us to Andrew, John? Yeah. I was going to run into the next room and get a cable and verify this for you, but we'll do that later. Because I'm almost certain I saw it. I was like, hey, that's what Dave's looking for in the past. Who are we looking for here? Andrew. There we go. Okay, Andrew. Well, I think Andrew has a... Oh, yeah. I'll play Andrew. There you go. G'day, John, and G'day, Dave. This is Andrew in Belingen, Australia again. Before we get underway, first of all, thanks for everything in 2017. I and a zillions of other people around the world absolutely love having earplugs in our homes and our ears and our cars and wherever each week. So thanks very much for that this year. So I have one more thing for this year. I've heard that phrase before. I'm referring to your discussion a few weeks ago about backups and making sure that your backups actually do work after you've created a backup. So that scared the whatever is out of me. So I started checking the backups I had done for both my MacBook and also my iMac. And they all work fine. But one thing I didn't realize and I would like you to explain why is I was creating a backup of my MacBook Pro to a 128 gig Toshiba USB stick. And I thought I would be able to boot from this and live happily ever after. It's USB 3. I have a USB A to USB C adapter. But it is just way too slow to run my MacBook. And then I checked out the speeds that my USB drive can do or my USB thumb drive can do. And it's only like 100 megabytes transfer whereas a rotating disk is 500 megabytes and an SSD again is around about 5 gigabyte speed. So what I'm wondering is what do they make what are USB drives made of that are different to solid state drives? I would have thought they were the same. Obviously not. If you could help explain it to us, that would be great. Thanks guys. Have a great end of the year. See you in 2018. Bye for now. Thanks Andrew. Alright John, you want to take it? That is a big one. But this is going to be system engineering 101 in a sense because as Andrew observed the drives have different pieces here. One is the memory chip. So specifically for an SSD you have the memory chips and you have the interface that it plugs into. He mentioned USB 3. The thing is you have many levels if you peel the onion here so the first thing is that you may have not one or more interfaces any one of which could be a bottleneck. Either by design or just the limitations of the interface. So for example for the most part when you're talking to a hard drive in a computer the interface is SATA and that's built to talk to hard drives and they're SATA 1, SATA 2, SATA 3 and they have different speeds ranging from 1.5 gigabits per second to 6 gigabits per second. But you can also have a USB interface and as you pointed out USB 3, that's another interface. Well, wait, wait, wait, wait I got to stop you there because I feel like we're potentially going in the wrong direction here. A USB interface could also have SATA and most likely does have a SATA interface between the USB interface and the drive or the chips that are the flash memory that is the drive. It's not just USB to a drive it's USB to SATA to a drive. Right, well SATA is more in the case of an SSD. I don't think SATA you're going to have with a flash drive, with an earth thumb drive. So I'm trying to separate the two as far as the eventual interface. There is an interface but I don't believe it's SATA but I just didn't want to equate I didn't want to compare USB to SATA because they are they are not at the same like you said they're not at the same level they're different layers of the onion you'd compare USB to Firewire and sort of to Thunderbolt but even that starts to get prickly. So to set the stage so the thing we're most familiar with are thumb drives and that's almost always USB so you have the speed of that interface which USB 3 can be I believe 5 gigabits per second and then I'll talk about SSDs in a moment I just want to set the stage by talking about SATA but that's not the case with thumb drive the thing is the thumb drive is going to have an interface USB 3 5 gigs per second but whatever it's talking to is what's going to limit the speed and typically the thing that it talks to is something that we'll call a controller it can be SATA or it could be something else and then it goes to something called flash memory and flash memory is the same whether it's memory in a USB thumb drive or an SSD in that it's memory that you can read from and write to and we'll call that flash memory the thing is the capabilities of those very widely in that kind of you get what you pay for and also you're limited by space I mean the space in a thumb drive is obviously way more limited so you're not going to get the performance because it's just hard to do in a cost effective manner though if you have the money I'm sure you could I think there are one terabyte thumb drives out there if you wanted to lay down a few thousand dollars or ten thousand bucks so that's the other aspect so different pieces of the system are going to potentially limit the speed what you really have to do and this is the thing is never trust the interface speed I guess what I want to say is do not trust the speed of the interface so if it's a USB 3 drive it has the potential to go up to a certain speed but you got to look either in the specs or find benchmarks to find out what the true speed is and they do have these for thumb drives and they may if you dig in the specs although they say yes it's a USB 3 drive well by the way here's the effective speed that you can read from it right to the drive now some sites like any toms hardware is pretty good about this Dave or others will benchmark the drives or the specs will have the true throughput of the drive so it's the same memory it's all flash memory but you have to dig and you know do your research before you purchase the drive so it doesn't disappoint you because yeah I wouldn't want to boot I wouldn't want to run the operating system on a flash drive from a thumb drive yeah yeah it's curious though I mean right it's because not all flash memory is created equal right you've got the class of flash memory that's in most thumb drives that's relatively slow and then you've got the class of flash memory that's in say you know your SSD and that's usually quite fast but like I said I think you're talking tens or what we'd like to call it order of magnitude you may be talking tens of megabytes a second on a thumb drive but hundreds or even more on an SSD right because of the class of memory but you know it does beg the question what you know when we say the word thumb drive or words that's two words don't worry I'll get it right we think of something very specific but the difference between say a thumb drive and a USB connectable SSD is you know that line is blurred because they're both sort of the same kind of thing it's flash memory that you're connecting to your Mac via USB one is just a different class of that flash memory and operates much faster than the other and the specifics of what is so in one case is USB 3 to something to flash memory in the other case is USB 3 to SATA something to an SSD which is flash memory yeah that's what I'm saying is I think if we go back and listen to this episode at the end of 2018 and certainly at the end of 2019 I think this discussion is certainly relevant today but I don't think it will age well because I think that line will continue to be blurred especially as all these components get smaller and smaller I mean I've got a two terabyte drive that's not much bigger than most of my thumb drives and it screams right so like it's all about size until everything's small enough to fit and then you know just sort of shrug your shoulders and say I can't tell without plugging it in and testing it so if you want to test your your drives there's a the black magic speed test that I will link to in the show notes I can't find it here but it's great it really is the industry standard in terms of benchmarking drives and it just makes it so easy so I'll put a link to that in the show notes it's available in the Mac app store it's called the black magic speed test I think that's what it's black magic something yeah black magic disk speed test it's great just run it and it starts doing all kinds of stuff and you can see reads and writes works great go ahead I'll just say if you surf you can find stuff the first thing I found Dave Lexar which I actually have some other thumb drives already Lexar jump drive USB 3 throughput 400 megabytes read 150 write that's pretty fast see what I mean yeah so um but the older ones I mean yeah I have some of their older well especially USB 2 which is a bottleneck in itself right now they look to be out there now I see I see several USB 3 drives Lexar sand disk that have things in the hundreds of megabytes per second some in the low hundreds yeah again you get what you pay for while we're on the subject of drives listener David had this question he says I had two external hard drives attached to my Synology NAS and both for some reason failed at the same time and now neither of them can be formatted read nothing they do mount when plugged in and basic info like partitions and storage sizes are visible when I run basic disc utility it comes up almost immediately is okay but when I try to format the disk it unmounts and fails after the creating partition map message with uh posix reports the operation couldn't be completed resource busy operation failed the drives are 500 gigs and I'm not going to spend the hundred bucks to get the disk fix software because that would be way more than to just replace the drives as new any thoughts or just trash them and move on so um you know there are two external hard drives right so kind of taking the concept that John introduced in the last question there's many layers here right the drive is is at the core of it although although we could peel apart a drive and get even more layers but let's treat the drive as you know its own entity so there's the drive but then there's also the case that comes with an external drive that has probably a database like John said and then also probably a USB bus or you know a firewire bus or even a Thunderbolt bus to get it connected to your computer it's possible possible that the drives themselves are fine and something happened to the inner workings of the uh the the you know the guts the smarts in the case the fact that both of them died simultaneously is sort of curious right um I have had drives in the past especially drives that I got at the same time and ran in such a capacity that they were sort of always running I've had them fail within days of each other that's not rare and when that's happened it's truly been the drive but you might have had a power spike or something that you know flaked out the circuits inside the cases so you could extract the drives from these cases which depending on the case might be really easy or really difficult or anywhere in between and then try to connect them to your Mac some other way either a different case or one of those you know newer tech drive adapters or one of the Voyager toaster kind of things that uh OWC sells and you can actually get from lots of different people I would try that because I'm a geek right I definitely would want to know is it the drive for certain or is it you know is the drive still good but assuming that I took the drive out of this thing plugged it into my little Voyager toaster that I have on my desk and mounted that thing and it still went through all of this once the drive is dead unless you need data off of it and I hope you don't but unless you need data off of it throw it away and move on because it's just it's like even if you could run some software on this drive that somehow magically got it working again I can only assume that you know that's not going to last it's just going to get worse this sounds like a hardware problem with the drive this isn't just you know a reformat will always fix what I call software or directory corruption on a drive but when there's hardware problems with the drive of course a reformat will not and that's where you are I think you're going to wind up throwing these drives away but if you have one of those external drive adapters or a toaster or something to put it in you guys know what I mean when I say toaster it's worth looking online it's a little device that sort of looks like a toaster largely because it has most of them have two drive bays right next to them and you just drop the drive right in the top you don't have to like unscrew the case or anything you just drop it in and it's connected to your mac with either USB, firewire or thunderbolt and that's how you want to do it and you can just mount the drive it's really easy to do it's great for exactly this kind of scenario so there you go what do you think John? the one additional thing I would like to do so I agree with you it could be a power component in the enclosure so put the drive into something else and see what happens I'd be very curious to run a smart utility that I ran whose details that I like and that it seems to be smart drive DX I haven't had to run it for a while because I haven't had any drives fail on me or I suspect are failing but um yep and look at that there's a new version 1.7 I have 1.6 man I'm just out of it but anyways no it tells you it gives you additional information about bad things that the drive has reported or tried to report or has recorded in its own little world yeah I would do that though I'm with you I find it highly unlikely that well no actually it kind of makes sense that the drives failed at the same time yeah I wonder if the Synology itself did the damage ooh it blew the drives up well it could have right because they were both connected USB so yeah I mean it's possible it blew the controllers on the I mean probably not yep but the bottom line is something that can get additional hardware specific information because clearly something sounds like something drive DX or similar smart utility I'll tell you what's up and you know there have been inside of rotational hard drive mechanical rotational hard drive they have some super cool very strong magnets in these things you should take them out and play with them careful though you could lose a finger I'm serious really no I know magnets weird me out dude I can feel them I don't don't play with magnets oh then you'd hate these because yeah yeah it's bad news man bad juju uh all right we'll go to Jeff Jeff writes I don't have a solution for him but let's see if we can get there he says I'm having a problem with iMessages appearing out of order on my iPhone 6s running iOS 11.2.1 during active conversation i.e. sending back and forth without losing long delays sometimes I receive replies directly above my previously sent message messages on my wife's iPhone 6 in the same conversation or in the correct order my other devices also show the same conversation in the correct order this issue has persisted through the past few iOS version updates any thoughts and he has gone pretty deep in testing this so we're going to take his his report at face value this is definitely happening there is a solution that I found on an Apple discussion board unfortunately it did not work for listener Jeff but it's to go into general or settings general date and time and then disable set automatically change the time zone to something else is the advice then go in and force quit the messages app then launch it again at this point it says messages should now be sorted by the time of arrival and then go back into settings general date and time and set it back to set automatically let's hope this works like I said Jeff didn't do this but he did something that sort of came from that I think he might be in good shape but it's a weird one if you've ever seen this and solved it please let us know feedback at MackieGab.com yeah I don't know if I got the order on that right Dave I think you said feedback at MackieGab.com MackieGab feedback at.com I wasn't going to do that feedback at MackieGab.com you're going to have to create a new address now I can't create that address that's the beauty that's why I said it the way I did was so that I do it in the wrong order north feedback right I'll tell you what I think here riddle me this are these messages so these are an iMessage they are iMessages yes could these could this be something that the person whoever is providing the SMS service is doing well that it's not SMS it is iMessage but okay that's the thing is it's iMessage it's not SMS okay because it looked like it was in the messages app that this was happening correct but they're blue bubbles which means it's iMessages not SMS yeah okay yeah yeah alright so it's definitely Apple's fault in that 18th okay yeah yeah it's right it's not it has nothing to do with the carrier yeah yeah because they could for all we know that all of these messages could be going over wifi it doesn't matter there is a weird thing though right remember iOS 11 was supposed to sync our iMessages using iCloud and I think during the beta we talked about this was it during the last episode or maybe post show after the last one in the chat room at macgeekab.com slash stream where I think during the betas of iOS 11 early on this did happen and then it went away so I wonder did Jeff have that iPhone on the beta and is there to your concept before a bit that got flipped that didn't quite go back the way it should have and won't until he either wipes the phone clean or Apple actually rolls out this feature of iOS 11 with iMessage syncing and then it's an interesting question because the thing is who do you trust to tell you the time that something happened or the person that sent it to you and it sounds like in this case maybe the source of the time is the cause of the confusion right yeah but how is it that a message that came in after he sent something is displayed before that one I know it's easy I got stuck in the cache but that's we look we talked about this in the last episode John we agreed to refer to time as a linear construct we're not like we're like that's that's one of the things we do on this show so we can't we can't talk about how many a cache with data before that data exists I mean you and I know that that can be done it depends on your time reference well see that's kind of what I'm trying to say is whose time stamp do you trust is is the one true time stamp it's a hard problem it's a lot harder than people think it is sure I mean although it could just be in the metadata but yeah although you know mail is a great example right because you can set up mail in fact by default mail shows you date received in mail which is the date and time that that particular mail client received that message that's very different from date sent on mail and it drives me crazy that that you know you can you can wind up with a scenario where things are organized by the date that your computer just happened to receive them so whenever I set up mail on a Mac I always go to the view menu go to columns and turn off date received and turn on date sent for those columns because man I don't but you know I don't want like date received is to me is worthless I don't care what time my computer happened to pull that message down that's not helpful to me at least not the way I think about things I want to know when somebody sent it which can also be spoofed of course or even unintentionally if somebody's got their time zone wrong or whatever that messages can appear to have been sent in the future and you know all that stuff I don't know that's my thing right so there's your bonus tip for this episode is taking a look at mail yeah right let's see we have we have a question from James that I that I'll start answering here but you know John you had a great point that this would make really good sense for our small business show that I do with Shannon Jean every every week so I will I will cue some of this up for that episode but we'll start here James writes he says life has set me up in such a way that I'm hoping to move into doing my own thing and support consultancy is something I've long considered I'm a fairly experienced Mac user who knows my way around a lot of common issues and I'd like to say that I'm red hot on good network setups what sort of steps did you go through to make sure you're doing everything right and that you can inspire confidence in your clients I'm aware there will likely be some legal and insurance concerns depending on where you live and what country you're in but what is it that you do to get yourself started in a consulting business and you know we have a lot of people that listen to this episode to well to this episode but to this show in general who run their own you know Mac iOS and even Windows support consulting businesses and many of whom did not do that before they started listening and the show has kind of helped people get there so you know I've I've always kind of done most of this stuff well I'd say it's about half and half I do kind of half of it what I call grassroots or I just sort of let it happen and then half of it there's you know kind of by the numbers things so in terms of by the numbers stuff the biggest advice that I can give anybody that's going to go out and do some consulting is to figure out how to set your business up so that clients are paying you at the time services are rendered consultants are the worst at chasing down clients for payments after the fact and there's a lot of reasons for this one of them is that you're busy serving the next client and dealing with the next thing because you want to have work to do the other thing the other reason is that talking about money can be uncomfortable for people especially the consultant right but let me but it's not weird for the people that hired you right it's if you hire say a plumber right you want to know before that plumber comes out what it's going to cost and you certainly are expecting to pay that person it's not a weird thing but I know when you're in that mode as the consultant it's weird when you get to the end and you say okay yep I just did this thing that I love doing and now I'm going to give you a bill for a not insignificant amount of money for it so figure out how to do that you know it's easy these days with like Stripe and Square and all that good stuff to take credit cards but you can also take checks obviously those are easy and cash always take cash if someone offers it there's no reason not to take cash in your business it's a beautiful thing but you know be upfront about pricing be upfront about how you charge that will make the discussion at the end of an appointment much simpler because you've already the expectation is already set if you say hey you know I charge whatever 150 bucks an hour and I have a one hour minimum but I don't charge for travel time when I come out to see you okay great now everybody's on the same page if they say great I'd like to have you come out great okay I'll see you Tuesday whatever you're good to go and then you get to the end you just stay consistent with that so that's kind of the you know the buy the numbers stuff is about the numbers that I wouldn't go nuts about organizing a business entity right away we'll talk more about that on the on the small business show but get your business started just go out and do it you know obviously you got to be careful then there are some liabilities but you can drive yourself crazy mitigating every single risk just get out there and start doing stuff certifications and what now switching to the grassroots side of things I find them valuable from a marketing standpoint now that doesn't mean that the classes that go along with certifications aren't valuable you're you're definitely going to want to keep learning new things and if in the process of learning new things you wind up getting a certification great but I wouldn't spend all of your available time chasing just certifications they are one way of marketing yourself but they're not the only way you know really what's going to market you is you going out doing good work and either being able to point people to those clients and say look they're happy or even better when those clients because they're happy refer you to other people so you know don't drive yourself nuts with certifications I feel like your work is the thing that matters the most so keep learning keep gaining new skills but don't drive yourself crazy with those just market yourself and market yourself you're out there on your own yes someday you might grow your business and have some other people working for you that's great but be yourself you know I always called myself Dave the nerd that's because clients called me that it was actually one client mark majors at majors jewelers in Austin I walked in one day and he's like Dave the nerd and I thought oh perfect that's great and then I changed the name of my business Dave the nerd that's what I did be yourself you know that kind of that Dave the nerd thing works for me so but you gotta be gotta have whatever it is that works for you unless you're a jerk then market yourself differently don't market yourself as yourself right John you don't want to you know nobody there I'm a jerk I nobody hires the plumber that says right yeah yeah I'll show up and I'll be a jerk to you I'll shame you although you know when we go to the dentist I feel like that's exactly what they want to do they want to shame me every time I walk in there hate going to the dentist because of that I don't want to be shamed stupid I'm paying you to help me with a thing I'm not we just have a conversation when's the last time you flossed it's like yeah you know yeah that's pretty much the end of it because I'm paying them exactly yeah you don't want to be the reminder thanks for the passive-aggressive reminder yeah exactly yeah but you know in the end I think the biggest advice I can give is be committed to your customers like success and well-being because and communicate that in every way you can in fact epitomize that you never want to walk in and inherit the customers problem as your fault because that you're screwed when you do that just you want to go in and make it clear that you're there to help them with their problems and it's you and the customer versus the problem you know if you if you know your stuff great and if you don't don't be afraid to tell the customer hey I'm in over my head you know what I want to do is I want to pause the clock right here I want to go and do some research on my own time although and then come back that's fine there are times though and as you do more and more consulting you will learn when these times are because more often than not that research that you might be tempted to do off the clock is absolutely valid to be doing on the clock you're the one that's the expert you know how to do the research you know how to apply the knowledge that you gain from the research to their specific problem and absolutely that can be very valuable time for the customer and therefore valuable time for you so we'll talk more about this on the small business show I'll circle back once that episode kind of happens and I'll point everybody to it but always like to kind of rekindle this conversation once every few months because I know there's a lot of you out there that are doing it and I think I think most people that listen to this show do consulting in some capacity whether it's paid or for free for friends and family and all of that we all help out friends and family yeah it's just you know it's how it works right yeah I guess the thing to me to focus on just a question in my mind for something to address would be how do you get your name out there when I did this sort of thing the thing is I worked at one point at a computer store so that's kind of how I glommed on the clients was well they yeah they did there and through school you know taking computer courses and stuff you figure out who needs that sort of thing co-op programs helped out to make context as well or at least you know get a foot in the door yep you know there's all these I mean you know could be as simple as Yelp maybe I don't know I'm just trying to think in this day and age if I was launching a consulting business where would I start a local yeah that's no you're right I've talked to a lot of folks who are very actively marketing themselves these days and I am not actively marketing myself I've mentioned my David and her consulting business here on this show and the fact that yes I am open to new clients I'm very carefully not going out and doing what I would normally do which is you know market and blanket and all of that because I need to be careful with my time but I'm very happy to take on you folks that listen here the pacing of that has been great so if you're interested davidner.com or you know you guys know how to contact me feel free to contact me anyway but if I were going to go to the next level yeah Yelp is one place Yelp is sort of a reactionary thing where you're sort of managing the customer reviews but you absolutely need to be engaged there Google especially Google local ads and those sorts of things that's where a lot of folks that I talked to are getting a lot of success if you have a local depending on the size of your town you may have like a weekly paper or even a weekly email newsletter that comes out you'll know your town you know better than I could from here but there's going to be something some way that people get their news about your town like about your town or their town right what's happening have you tried I got something it was probably six months ago postcard saying hey you want to join this thing called nextdoor and it's like yeah sure and it's a basically gets addressed to you by people that are you street wise saying that you're a neighbor and I'm like well yeah I don't know this person I'm in this neighborhood so and it's a community based you know kind of localized message system and they have had I've seen on mind saying hey anybody know how to fix my computer right well and that's it right nextdoor is a great one Facebook too you know a lot of people have neighborhood Facebook groups or whatever and it's like you know it's like anything if you're there and being helpful then when someone's looking for a recommendation it doesn't seem too spammy for you to jump in on that but if your town has that I know it sounds strange to some of you but a lot of towns you know especially those in kind of the you know five to twenty thousand person range have that weekly paper that comes out or even a daily paper right and a lot of people read it especially a lot of people that might be exactly the type of people that would hire someone like you so putting an ad in one of those papers can make a huge difference to your business even still but but I would I would definitely you know augment that and you might find that that you know the Google ads are even better for that because you can do the hyper targeted and all that stuff so yeah yeah because I mean to this day and age probably probably going door to door asking people if they need their computer fix there's probably not the best strategy no it's not the best use of your time much time yeah Warren in the chat room is saying he says next next door was fun for about a week that's been my experience with it here but I know people it just depends on how engaged your particular community gets with it but at the same almost in the same breath more and says I get a lot of work from my neighborhood Facebook page it's you know people going to find a way of connecting with those people around them it's been happening for years it's just we have different tools now find that thing for your area which you probably already know about because a you're a geek and B hopefully you're at least semi-engaged and aware of what's happening in your community and if you're not then fix that right and now be a part of that and you know start offering help if somebody says hey my iPhone has a problem or you know whatever you just like oh yeah go check this out or I need a new router okay great you should buy this one or whatever and then people just get to know you as that expert and then when it comes time to hang your shingle in a more official sense you can say oh yeah yep if you need help with that here I am people say oh right that guy or that woman great awesome sweet so you go so I got yes John two things one plugging my iPhone into my backbook pro yeah charger watch 10 charger voltage five millivolt 5000 millivolts charge our amperage 2. 2100 milliamps so basically I step menus reports the you keep saying I step menus but what you mean is I amazing is that right amazing mini okay great no problem I knew what you meant and just want to make sure everybody's on the same page yep and that's using that for other things yeah that's doing it over Wi-Fi right mm-hmm okay great well in this case it's plugged in but I well no in this case in order for it to be charging I have to I don't know okay the answer is yes I mean it's plugged into the it's advertising the capabilities of the computer itself oh I see so it's it you have it plugged into the computer not plugged into say a wall charger right but I'm certain I've done this before okay plugged into external charger okay word of that right okay it'll tell you I'll dig in all right cool and the other thing is Dave I don't know if I can quite hear you are you having a problem hearing me John well you know I got these headphones here and I don't know if you're you're wearing earphones I am I'm wearing well I'm wearing these crazy things these jh audio laylas which are awesome but totally overkill I say they're overkill I mean it allows me to mix the show in a beautiful way but I think where you're going with this is bringing us into our next subject here John which is all about headphones and Bluetooth and at least that's where we're going to start is that what you meant to do John kind of because I don't know if I have much personally to contribute here okay all my headphones and earphones seems to be working at well that's good that's good but Richard had a question on Facebook Richard asked he says I'm looking for a solution where I can connect to Bluetooth headphones to an Apple TV simultaneously please and and this is an interesting thing right because Bluetooth is meant one at a time and that's how the tech works but I did a little digging and there are little devices that you can buy I found two of them in fact I found one for 40 bucks on Amazon that will take a signal from either a headphone jack or the Toslink which is that optical light pipe with the really thin cable that you usually get out of your TV and you take that you plug that into one of these and then this will allow you to pair two stereo sets of headphones so which is interesting right because if you so it's a Bluetooth splitter let's call it that although is it creating two Bluetooth audio streams out of one well not out of one Bluetooth stream it's taking one wired stream and creating two Bluetooth but yeah that's right yeah okay so they have different so the two pairings occur you pair with one or pair with the other correct and they can obviously happen simultaneously so yeah yeah it's pretty it's pretty interesting and so that one's from Tautronics for 40 bucks and I'll link to the to the Facebook post too take a look I know you spoke before about latency in Bluetooth audio would there be your no I guess if it does the job properly it should be no that's a good one splitting the signal yes okay so yes would splitting a Bluetooth would generating two of the streams is the thing that's doing this going to get overpowered or would you assume that it would be able to you know keep up well that's a good question and it depends as much on the device as it does on the earphones to which it pairs it uses it will use a technology called APTX or aptX as the industry calls it which is a very high quality low latency Bluetooth codec right so it it has to take the audio it has to you know compress it send it across the Bluetooth stream and then your headphones need to take that signal and decompress it and play the audio for you and that process is going to introduce a lag into the stream now the question is can it can the lag be reduced such that to our brains it is not perceptible and aptX is pretty good at that so long as your earphones support it and so long as both earphones can support it similarly enough that everybody's happy simultaneously but yeah I mean I think it should be able to do it yeah yeah there you go it's built to do that you've just got to make sure you have your phones that support what they call aptX or even better aptX low latency which is a protocol a subset of the aptX protocol so yeah yeah that's what I wanted to know that's what we're here for man leave the technology on me yeah the sad part is that Apple's devices the iPhone and the Mac don't support aptX they support an AAC type of thing over bluetooth but they don't support aptX which is sort of sad but you know that's how Apple goes and then there's another one from me audio MEE audio that does the same thing it's almost twice the price at 60 bucks on Amazon both of them have I think about four stars worth of reviews there's some people that are just utterly displeased with these products and then most people are like yeah it works exactly like it's supposed to so you know there you go I don't know if there's a I don't know that with a product like this there's so many things that could go wrong right you know if you've got interference in your house or you've got crappy bluetooth earphones that can't keep up like there's a lot I think both of these things would work just fine given the right things so there you go on the bluetooth audio subject though John listener Johnny had had a question actually he had a solution he says recently I had a problem with my inexpensive bluetooth earbuds that I thought I would share I have some tau tronics bluetooth earbuds that I use with my iphone and ipad I noticed though that when I was at home there was a lot of interference with them when I tried to use them with my iphone so I thought there must be something at home that was interfering with the earbuds maybe microwaves or cordless phones recently when I looked into the issue a little more it was something that was interfering but it was not actually my ipad I had paired the earbuds to the ipad so I could watch an epic 1950s sci-fi on youtube and not annoying my wife too much it seems that the interaction of the earbuds with the ipad and the iphone differ when I power the earbuds on they automatically pair with my ipad on the iphone I have to go into the bluetooth setting and select them to pair them I experimented with unpairing and pairing the earbuds with the ipad and iphone it doesn't seem to matter if I pair them to the phone first they will always pair to the ipad when I power them on also if I pair the earbuds to the iphone I cannot pair them with the ipad but not the reverse once I recognize that the earbuds were paired to both and then remove them from the ipad the interference issue was solved so it wasn't so much interference I guess it's a I guess interference is sort of a good blanket term but it was just that the earbuds were trying to serve two masters and that's never gonna that's never gonna fly that's pretty interesting thanks Johnny I don't know that I would have it would have taken me a while to catch that one too I think it's a fair way to say that yeah pretty interesting huh John I want nothing to do with it you don't use bluetooth earphones at all John? no huh all right nope the only bluetooth I have is what enables the mac and my iOS things to kind of do smart things with each other oh interesting oh that's right you don't have a bluetooth in the car now now it's old yeah well you could I mean you could do one of those aftermarket bluetooth things in the car those actually work really well the things you just put on the visor but I could replace the cassette player with maybe a CD player but yeah all right well listener Scott while we're on the subject of earphones asks he says I have to direct this question to you because you are an earphone dude Dave he says knowing that in-ear monitors or any headphone is a totally subjective thing which have you tried and like this is I've been using a pair of bozes that are no longer available he says my understanding is that where are we here he says trying to get to his question where I don't know what he's basically his question is what are the best earphones for still hearing things around you because he says it's really important to me because the other in-ear monitors that I've tried tend to be so isolating that when talking I feel like I'm yelling in my ears that's why I stopped using on-ear and over-the-ear headphones over the years and he points to the Westone they're a universal fit they call them the AM Pro 30 and they are they're they've got an ambient port in them to let sound in here's the thing those ambient ports are great for what they are engineered to do which is allow on-stage musicians singers you know performers whatever to hear some of what's going on around them on a very loud stage normally earphones like when you put earbuds in them they totally they block 25 maybe even 30 decibels worth of sound which is a lot because of that and it can be very isolating on stage especially if you don't have everything that you want in those in-ear mixes so all these companies started building these in-ear things with ambient ports in them to let some sound in and that reduces their overall blockage from 30 dB down to about 12 dB but 12 dB is still a lot especially when you're talking about conversation so I don't think using if you want to hear sound around you I don't think using one of these fully sealing with an ambient port thing is going to serve what you want I use that that's exactly what I use on stage and if someone's talking to me I have to take one out to hear them it's not enough but it is enough to hear like symbols and things around me without having to mic them up so I think for sort of general day use the ambient port earphones are not what you want to use Scott there are some options though and one would be to use something like Apple's AirPods which don't seal in your ear they'd sit in your ear but they don't seal and frankly for what you're talking about where you want to hear either your music or a podcast or whatever in your ear but still hear what's going on around you the AirPods are probably the easiest ones to use where you're still going to get good sound quality and that sort of thing they don't seal they sound really good and yet you can still have a conversation and hear what's going on around you if you want something that seals that let's sound in though I think you're going to have to do that with microphones and we've reviewed a lot of different headphones over the years that have an option for letting sound in the JBL Everests that we just talked about recently have a little button that you can push and it lets ambient sound in the pioneer rays that John you and I were talking about pre-show have an option to let they've got a microphone in them because they've got a microphone for your speakerphone or your headset thing and they use that sound in while you're still hearing your music so that is an option but I got to be honest with you it's weird hearing someone's voice coming through a microphone that's not exactly where your ears are and it's amplified in an odd way and the EQ is weird because it's a tiny little microphone it sounds like they're talking to you on the phone because they kind of are so I think AirPods are probably going to be the most natural thing if you want that experience of ambient sound coming in that's my thought on that John hopefully that's helpful what are your thoughts on I had these years ago and they were okay Bose quiet comfort supposedly acoustic noise cancelling headphones when I did use them on a plane when I had a pair it kind of seemed to accomplish its purpose the feel was good but it had a noise monitoring thing where whoever was trying to deal with you wanted to talk to you you could hear them and it just kind of seemed to be smart enough whatever DSP or other magic device they had in there it seemed to balance it pretty good but what I wanted to listen to yeah again you're right especially on an airplane where you've got so much ambient noise I think the plane is just creating the engines of the plane and the fans on the plane but I think it's easy noise to filter out isn't it? it is because it's pretty constant it's consistent right yep and that's what you're going to get in different ways with like the Pioneer Rays or the JBL stuff and Bose quiet comfort those active noise cancelling headphones can certainly do it it's weird you're still very detached from people around you I think and of course this is all very subjective but but yeah I mean I've used those Bose quiet comforts I've never owned a pair but I've been on some flights where you know you get the upgrade to first class or whatever and they would hand this is before they had screens in the seats and they would come around and like hand out like a tablet with the quiet comfort headphones and it's like oh sweet you can watch a movie and yeah I mean you can hear what's going on around you it's fine you can tune it and set it at different levels and yeah yeah I mean again I found it weird like if I was going to hold a conversation with the flight attendant in those scenarios I invariably found myself taking the headphones off and just talking to this other human being but in terms of hearing announcements and things like that yeah those that worked really well yeah there you go speaking of announcements speaking Everett actually has a question that sort of went the same same concept but went in a different direction he says I remember ages back and I believe it may have been as far back as the 12 inch power book era one of you mentioning software or a device that you could use to route room audio in to your headphones so you didn't have to keep taking them off when you were talking to someone I'm praying it's a device because my wife leads worship at my church with a wireless in ears she is new to these things so it takes her a while to put them on and needs to be able to talk to people up until she walks on stage and starts the set so no I don't think this is going to do what you want for all the reasons we just talked about that said it was a piece of software that we talked about I remember this conversation that software has evolved over the years as this show has but the name is still pretty much the same and it's audio hijack you can use audio hijack to route audio and do anything with it and so yeah I would and I would do this on airplane sometimes I was going to watch a movie and I could just kick in audio hijack when I wanted and it would just take the microphone on my Mac and I would just have a very simple audio hijack layout where it takes a mic in with audio hijack now it's really really easy in fact we were talking about it earlier you just move things around in blocks so I would take a block that was my internal microphone on my Mac and a block that is my you know built in output or whatever they call the sound output device that you plug your headphones into and you connect them up to each other and now anything that goes into the microphone goes to your ears and there'll be a little delay but again it's the same kind of thing if you want to hear the announcements and stuff you certainly can do that so that's how I that's what we that's what I used to do back in those days because it was fun it was crazy any thoughts on that John? the thought is Dave you know sometimes just take your headphones or earphones off and talk to people for a change I get whatever it's saying though like putting in any ears especially universal fit ones it can be a weird thing where like if I'm walking on stage I've gotten pretty used to it but I've been doing this for you know 15 years or whatever now maybe actually more than that wow it's a weird thing kind of screwing these things into your ears and getting it just right and being comfortable with it oh yeah I know that yeah so learn lip reading it's never too late learn new skill it's actually maybe sign language too you know well then you need everybody around you to alright I'll put a lip reading beginner's guide to lip reading from lipreading.org I'll put that in the show notes for us it does it's already in the show notes it's good to go do you want to be a spy on the side? helpful my son got a lockpick set for Christmas that's actually been really fun to play with is that legal? well maybe he's starting a business becoming a locksmith alright it's illegal to own correct yes it's just a tool with great power right great power I do want to thank our premium subscribers about whom we really couldn't do this we couldn't do it without any of you to be perfectly honest but I do want to take a moment to thank our premium subscribers at the monthly $10 level we have Ken L Clive S Everett who we just heard from Ev the Nerd as we call him David G Nick S David M and Micah P to be at the $15 a month level thank you all of you you rock and at the biannual $25 every six months level we have Barry P Peter P no relation Warren R Joe W Antonio B Joe M Brett H and Terrence N thank you to all of you and a really special thanks to those of you who had to go through the pain of migrating from our old credit card system to our new one Terrence I watched it happen with you as the emails were coming in as it was telling you your subscription failed to process and then you went and came around and did it thank you for everybody that's gone through all of that really we say thanks every week obviously I don't want it ever to sound perfunctory we really mean it so thank you John I think we have time left for at least a couple of cool stuffs found and and maybe a couple of tips ready? ready Freddy starting off with brother Jay who brings us not one not two but three cool stuffs found he says in a recent show you were talking about Ping Bar which I've never tried but what I use is a tool called peak hour it's capabilities are more than simply monitoring ping time but it does that as well one requirement which makes it unique is for routers with which it communicates to have the proper UPNP specification implemented he says unfortunately I've realized that Eero does not have the proper UPNP implementation he says and I've contacted them about this but peak hour is the CSF for that one so thank you he says secondly you mentioned deliveries he says I use parcel which I believe is at parcel app.net and he says once upon a time I used deliveries but I found that parcel supports more couriers I conducted some intense comparisons amongst parcel and deliveries and parcels push notifications at least from my tests were much more timely the one glaring bug Ivan fails to fix is the 50 something character limit in the description field I am a verbose but concise brother and sometimes my package descriptions exceed 50 characters the only way this can be circumvented is to use the Braille screen input on iOS it allows for unlimited characters to be entered but not back spaced strange bug that's a strange workaround I love this stuff I love it when you know there's this aside you can fit more characters in if you use the Braille input never would have thought about that man finally says to delay program launches at start up I use start up hyzer he says it has worked well for the past approximately two years I've used it another one of my favorites to manipulate when programs launch is Lingon X which we love here he says it's very nice because in addition to programs one can launch and manipulate launch agents so there you go cool thank you for those brother Jay that's a it's a lot of stuff right there John we love it it's good John there are it takes a lot this time of year when the temperature is like 20 and later this week is going to be six getting in me yeah it takes a lot for me to think about the beach in a visceral way you know like beat the summer at beach I can think about being cold at the beach but you know that happened this weekend we were playing with you know some stuff that showed up and one of the things that showed up was this new JBL boom box so JBL has long been really my favorite vendor of portable speakers they just they know what they're doing they do fun things with them they have that pulse speaker that has lights they've got the flip speakers they all sound really good and the boom box sort of takes that to a whole new level this thing is a monster it really it is it can I don't want to say it's built to sit up on your shoulder like the old 80s style boom boxes but but you certainly can do that with it and it is that big it's a monstrous thing but it kind of has that look of the flip it's just a huge flip and it's got a handle on it the thing is massive it's got indoor and outdoor sound modes and when you put it in that outdoor mode what that does is it adds a whole level around this to the to the low end to the base of it which is what you'd want outside at the beach and we were messing around with it and for some reason my my son's hockey team they this all came up because he's like hi do you have any speakers that I could use like in the locker room we want something loud I'm like oh I have the speaker for you and and then we started talking about what songs he he plays and they play all this yacht rock stuff like dancing in the moonlight and and escape and all these it's like the hits of the 70s it's interesting you know once it bunch of kids that's what they like to play in the locker room so it's fine but this thing really like it's what you'd want at the beach it's pretty awesome it's not cheap 450 bucks I mean this is a serious piece of hardware but it's got a 20,000 mAh battery in it a couple of USB ports on it that you can charge your phone whatever you want with and it's totally waterproof so perfect for the beach yeah yeah my first thought where's the skin that has the old style you know mid-range speakers yeah I mean that was the whole thing about having the boombox is not only putting it up on your shoulder there to blast your tunes to your neighbors but you saw these very prominent you know powerful looking one would assume speakers right somebody's gonna make skins for this I can tell it's a pretty cool thing I gotta be honest with you it sounds so good it's not light I mean it's you know it's a big monster thing so I'm looking at the features here it should be in there somewhere it should be in there somewhere I don't see specifications but yeah yeah I don't see it right on the website 5.25 kilograms my math is awful on that but thankfully spotlight 11 pounds well 11 and a half yeah split the difference oh right yeah it's pretty cool though it's pretty cool man so I wanted to like I said it takes a lot to think about the beach but as soon as we started playing this thing it was like oh yeah this would rock at the beach I mean you'd have to be there with a group of people that all wanted to hear the same music you had because everybody's gonna hear it but that's sort of the point I guess alright where are we here on time you know I think I think we need to I think we need to call this one John it's just you know it's how it works I think so slowly but slowly is as you like we told you how to email us unless you're a premium customer we thanked all our premium customers but we didn't tell you how to become one mackeykev.com that's how you learn to become one if you are one you can email us at premium at mackeykev.com we prioritize the stuff that comes in there you help us we help you we answer everything we really do try to answer everything that comes in sometimes things get crazy and the stuff that comes into the other box is answered a 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is rocking I'm loving it all the world computing I think we even mention them during the show because they always have stuff that helps the kinds of things that we talk about stuff well folks this is it this is the end of mackeykev for 2017 in terms of recording the episodes I know it's pretty crazy not well we just go to 2018 it's really not I mean it's you know we'll have this moment of fanfare between now and when we do the next show but really you know we've already discussed time is just this linear thing and it just sort of happens whether we choose to celebrate every moment done I told you I told you I agree with you we can't turn this show into the crazy so we have to we have to maintain some semblance of order I think we'll make that decision next year but if you do choose to celebrate this moment of fanfare that will happen when we change from 2017 to 2018 even though it's all just happening right away I'm going to be celebrating it sitting behind a drumset doing yet another midnight performance of the rocky horror show in portsmouth which should be fun we did one last night Christmas night yeah yeah it's pretty crazy but however you choose to celebrate it really is one sort of umbrella principle that I not only implore you to follow but I really want you to follow because I care about you and I care about like you folks you provide us the energy to do this show and in a lot of different ways and it really matters to me and I care about you because we've had this exchange of energy I know we're not supposed to get all woo-woo time linear no question energy exchange sure we can get woo-woo here's the deal don't get caught and happy new year happy new year John


Okay, J.S.P. Madonna here, Mi Amor. What is this stuff? Oh, it's wine? I thought it was rum. Mi Amor. I'm here to try to locate Taylor Dry Sherry, Taylor Wines.  I thought it has to ferment in oak barrels. Handmade, I'm sorry.  Handmade, not homemade. Handmade.  Like I said before, before I miss red. It has to be fermented in oak barrels. Handmade. Okay, let's see if I have any luck here at Home Liquors. South Hackensack, New Jersey. As you can see, they're very well stocked here. What's this? Apothic Dark. Mr. J. Terrio, are you familiar with this company? Apothic, Apothic Red. Crush, smooth, red wine. I don't know. I'm always seeing, oh, I love these guys, 19 crimes. Public Enemy Number One, right? 19 crimes. This guy looks, they probably went into the federal pen. What do you think, J. Terrio? Look at this one. Oh, here's a woman. I wonder if that's Ma Barker, J. Terrio. I wonder if that's Ma Barker. Anyway, let me see if I can locate this. Of course, these are all the whiskeys. Irish Whiskey, Scotch Whiskey, Bourbon. All the Bourbon's. Look at this George Dickle Tabasco Barrel Finish. This is George Dickle Tennessee Sour Mash. I forgot to mention this on the last show about Rye Whiskey. What's this one? Regular Sour Mash. Then you've got the old Smokies. Rocktown, Arkansas Bourbon. They've got a company called Bird Dog. Kilbegan, Irish Whiskey. From the world's oldest distillery?  Yes. 1757? Kilbegan? I didn't even know about this. Interesting. From the world's oldest distillery. Okay, let me try to find... Oh, by the way, this is an excellent room. McCarty Black originated from the east coast of Cuba, Santiago, Cuba, Santiago. And then they fled. Well, they had different locations. They had different locations even before the Revolution, I believe. But they did go to San Juan, Puerto Rico, of course. After Batista left, I digressed, but I think he went to Santa Domingo, Dominican Republic, by any way. Brugal, Añejo, Dominican room. Excellent. Anything that says Añejo is good. All right. Okay. I don't want to digress too much. I'm going to have to ask somebody where the tail of the products are. Look at all this wine. Look at this. Here's your Carlo Rossi. Oh, look at this. Chardonnay, sweet red.  I could have got it here. J. Terrio. Carlo Rossi, Ryan. Chardonnay. Sweet red. Chablis. Paisano. The blush. And you got some sangrias up here. Various sangrias by Carlo Rossi. I could have got the rind here, son of a gun. Oh, here we go. Okay. Now let me see if I'm going to get lucky. With the tailors. This is Paula. This is Paul Masson, my dear. All right. Tailor Masson. No, I'm not looking for that.  Oh, my God. That's it. No, it can't be. The Opeachies are down at Sutter Home. That's a cheap-ass California wine. Fairfoot. Sweet red blend. That's if it really is a sweet red blend, the Paul Masson's, the Opeachie Burgundy. All right. Barberon. Okay, now look at this. What's with this? Tailor Country Cellars. Red. Gallo. Sweet red. White Zinfandel. I used to make homemade white clam sauce with white Zinfandel. Okay. Now, look at this. J. Cheerio. Foxhorn. Foxhorn Vineyards. Foxhorn Vineyards. Okay. Now, back at the task at hand is a Crabari American Massala. The Opeachie Massala. This looks like special Massala, right? It's probably of course. Oh, here we go. Florio. Flimflamflorio. Fine Massala. Dry. Fine Massala. Sweet. All right. I'm a little disappointed. All right. Here's Golden Sherry. Here's Cream Sherry. There's Tony Port. All right. Here we go. Jersey Devil again. Jersey Devil again. Got a Valenzano company. All right.  Presidential Port. Sandman. Fine Ruby Port. Sandman. Tony Port. So, so far I'm getting the Red Port. All right. Tony. Massala. Cream Sherry. Golden Sherry in a large bottle. But no dry Sherry. So, I'm out of luck here. Look at all this Carla Rossi. Look at all this Carla Rossi, J. Cheerio. Look at this. They got the stock up on top. Look at this. Mascato Sangria. Everyone. Everyone. Oh, look at this. Look at this. Look at this. John from Georgia and J. Cheerio. Look at the size of that Carla Rossi. They're all here. Cabernet Sauvignon. Carla Rossi Marlowe. Sweet Red. If it really is sweet. Chardonnay. All in large I guess, galloons, right? There's the Rhine in the gallon. How much? $14.97. Okay. Okay. What do we got here? Burgundy. Burgundy. Hey, John from Georgia. Carla Rossi Burgundy in the gallon. Same price. $14.97 here. Sangria. Here's the Carla Rossi Sangrias. $14.97. Here's the Carla Rossi. Same price anyways. Carla Rossi Chianti. Right? Chianti. The Pizzano. Which is my opinion lighter than the Burgundy. And of course the Chianti to me is very dry. But I'm out of luck trying to find the Taylor Dry Sherry. I'll have to wait till shop right gets it in. Oh well, I tried. It's always good to look in the back. I don't, I don't want a large bottle. Hmm. That's it. Look. Head at home. They have lots of imports.  Here's one. Gulitos. Oh, kulitos. Kulitos.  Kulitos in various, here's one. Thomas Vindanes So I could, here's a German company for you. That's it. I'm out of luck. With the dry Sherry by Taylor. I'm getting out of here now. Oh, what's this? Variety of wines is absolutely incredible. Vina Duval. Or Vina, I'm sorry. Vina Duval. Vianza. That's it. Okay, here's Kikaman. I didn't even know they made wine. Kikaman plum wine. 649. Here's the large one. Kikaman plum wine. This is Momokawa sake. Gekikon, Gekikon sake. Oh, see what we got here. Gekikon Gold Supreme Junmai, Junmai Supreme Japanese Sake. Here's this one for $38. Horin Gekikon Sake. All right, look at that. Here's one Suzaku $28. Suzaku The only plum wine. Here's Gekikon Sake. Then we have the Fukis. Fukis sake. Fukis plum wine. Here we go. Gekikon plum wine. $13. Silver Gekikon. Interesting. Here we go. Haiku. Look at all the different varieties that they make. Haiku Sake. Oh, look at this. Jeteria. Subaru Rashi Kudamono Asian Pair Dessert wine. Oh, price. You can quite see the price. But this is interesting. Product of the USA Alcohol, 20% by volume. It's a sneaky Japanese businessman. I'm trying to save money on imports by having it made here. Asian Pair which is a wonderful temperate fruit dessert wine. Interesting. Too bad it only comes in a small skinny bottle. I'm going to get some plum wine. Okay. Should I go with Kikomon or Fuku? Oh, it's grape with plum. No, no, no. No, I don't want grape with plum. Why would I want grape with plum? Let me check this out. Let me see what's going on here. Let me see what's going on here. I'm going to use my refreshing wine cooler. Two parts. Okay, you know what? I'm going to give it a shot. For $6.49, I'm going to give it a shot. Jeteria and John from Georgia. I'm going to give it a shot. Now, here's a... Now, this one's $12.99. Plum, a geiki con, caramel color added. Now, what's the difference now? One's Kikomon and one's geiki con. Product of Japan. You know what?  A 13% alcohol versus 11.5% by volume with the Kikomon. I'm going to go with the imported one, okay? Now, mind you, I've never tried plum wine before. So, I'm going to get it. I'm going to get it.


Statistics and Excel. Population variance and standard deviation. Got data? Let's get stuck into it with statistics and Excel. First, a word from our sponsor. Yeah, actually, we're sponsoring ourselves on this one because apparently the merchandisers, they don't want to be seen with us.  Like our, trust me, I'm an accountant product line. Yeah, it's paramount that you let people know that you're an accountant because apparently we're among the only ones equipped with the number crunching skills to answer society's current deep complex and nuanced questions. If you would like a commercial free experience, consider subscribing to our website at accountinginstruction.com or accountinginstruction.thinkific.com. You're not required to but if you have access to one note or in the icon left-hand side, one note presentation, 1432 population variance and standard deviation tab. We're also uploading transcripts so that you can go into the view tab, use the immersive reader tool, changing the language if you so choose being able to then read or listen to the transcripts in multiple different languages using the time stamps to tie in to the video presentations. One note desktop version here, data on the left-hand side remembering that in prior presentations, we've been thinking about how we can take our data set and summarize it, represent it in meaningful ways using both numerical representations as well as pictorial representations, numerical representations including standard statistics like the mean or the average, the median quartile, one quartile, three and so on. When we look at pictorial representations, we talked about the box and whiskers or box plot as well as the histogram. Now each of these tools have their uses. However, we want to now think more about the spread of the data around a center point. The histogram does give us an idea of that pictorially. However, we would like to also have more of a numerical representation of that. We've thought about last time an average deviation concept and it's useful once again to think about it intuitively. Let's just give a quick recap of that and then we'll move on to the more standard calculations which are going to be the variance and standard deviation. We have our simple data set which just has negative four, positive six, which adds up to zero. If we take our average calculation, then we're going to get to an average of just zero because if I add these up, they add to zero. If I divide by four, they still add up to zero. That's going to be our middle point, zero. Our average deviation, this is not the standard use formula for this calculation of the spread, but the intuitive calculation we talked about last time would be simply taking each data point and comparing it to the middle point. You can see why that would be useful because that gives us the difference from the middle point of each data point, which makes sense because now I can think about where does that data point lie in relation to the middle point or average. That's the top part of our equation for the average deviation. Then we said, well, if I sum these up though, I'm always going to get to zero, which means I don't really get a meaningful number if I sum up these differences. What I can do is take the absolute value. That means I'm not going to care if it's above or below. I just want the difference from the middle point, and then we get our absolute value numbers, and then I can sum them up to give me 20, and I can then take that 20 and divide by the number of items four, one, two, three, four of them, and I get to five. That's a simple way to give an average distance. You're taking an average of the distances from the middle point kind of average deviation. We have a slight twist. This is the formula for the average deviation. Instead of taking the absolute value because you'll remember this absolute value, the point is that I can't have these negative numbers because then it'll add up to zero. I have to make them positive, so we just take the absolute value, make sense, and then divide it by n. Instead of doing that, the standard deviation is going to take the square of x sub i minus mu, which is represented in the mean, and then divide by n, and then we'll have to take the square root. So look at the difference over here. If I then take, or if I look at my image, by the way, this is a histogram, so you can see basically you've got the data, the middle point being zero, and then the data on the left side, negative numbers, and the positive numbers, if I was to plot out just those four points like on a histogram. So we can now look at the variance and the standard deviation. Now, note that both of these are useful because sometimes the variance gives us information that's relevant rather than the standard deviation. The standard deviation is probably the first thing that comes to mind when you're thinking about this type of calculation to get an idea of the spread of the data around, say, a center point represented instead of by a histogram with a numerical number. But the standard deviation is useful too, and it's kind of like if you're getting, I mean, if you're getting to the standard deviation, you're going to do the variance, right? It's part of the steps. So notice that the variance is calculated with a sigma two squared, and the standard deviation will often be represented by just the sigma, and we'll see that in a second. So this is going to be the variance represented with the sigma squared, and we're going to basically do our sum item if we're going to represent this, and we're going to say i sub one to n. So we've got x sub i, which is going to represent each number in our dataset. We had four numbers minus mu, which represents the mean. And then instead of taking the absolute value of this, as we did last time, we're going to square it. Now, note what that does when I square it. That does what the absolute value did in that it removes the negative numbers, because if I square negative numbers, they will result in positive numbers. If I square positive numbers, also result in positive numbers. So that does the same thing, but it also gives us a problem where now everything is bigger. It's all been squared. And then I'm going to divide it by n, which is the count, which is similar to what we had with the average deviation. So if I look at the standard deviation, we're just going to take it one step further. This entire thing is right here. But now we're going to take the square root of the entire thing. So that's why the variance is often represented with a sigma squared, whereas the standard deviation, just the sigma. So everything under the square root is the same. And you can kind of think, well, yeah, I squared it now. So now I've got this large number. If I reverse the squaring of it, taking the square root of it in essence, then you'd get kind of a similar point. Now, most of the times when people look at this, they say, well, why would you square it? Well, because I'm getting rid of the negative numbers. And you could say, well, why you could have got rid of the negative numbers by just taking the absolute value, and then you wouldn't have to take the square root. Why take the square root? And then, I mean, why take the squaring of it? So it can't simply be, is what I'm trying to say, it can't simply be that the only reason to do that is to get rid of the negative numbers, although it does have that feature, because you would think that taking the square root would still be easier if you were going to do that. So we'll talk more about that in the future, but note the squaring does have that capacity of getting rid of the negative numbers, and then you take the square root, and then you would think kind of to a similar point, but it's not exactly the same over here. So you can kind of compare and contrast the intuitive, which you might do with the average deviation versus the variance and the standard deviation. Okay, so let's take a look at this then. So now we have our same data set, and if I did this in a table kind of format, I would compare each of those data sets x sub i minus the mean, which came out to zero. So I get our same numbers because in this case, the middle point happened to be zero, so the distance is always going to be the same number away from that middle point in this data set. And then the difference between what we did this time and last time is instead of taking the absolute value of these numbers, because I end up with that problem, they add up to zero, that doesn't help me, right? So what I want to do is instead of taking the absolute value, I'll square them. So if I square all of them, six squared is 36, right? So now I get up to a much larger number than when I just took, you know, six, and I made an absolute value of six, right? I just made them all positive. So six squared is 36, four squared is 16, four squared positive, four squared is 16, and positive six squared is 36. So all the negatives get removed in that process. But then when I sum these up, 36 plus 16 plus 16 plus 36, I come out to 104 versus over here, which I came up to simply 20. And so then I can say, okay, that's basically this bit x sub i minus mu squared. And so then I'm going to, I summed those up, and then I'm going to divide by the count or N. So now I'm going to divide by N, similar to what we did before, the count one, two, three, four of them represented here. And so 104 divided by four is going to give us the variance, which is represented by sigma squared 26. And then I can take the square root of that, taking the square root of 26, gets us to the 510.  So you have some more of these calculation tools. So for example, if I took this negative six up top and I said the negative six, I'm going to say negative and then six. There it is. And then I've got my squared item here. So I could say squared is going to be 36, right? So that's, you can calculate that in your calculator. And then down here, we've got the 104, obviously 104 divided by four gives us our 26. And then I want to take the square root of the 26 and that is here. So we get to about 5.09 so on and so forth. So, okay, so notice that that number is similar, but not exactly the same as what we got over here. Usually we're going to get something a little bit larger if I was to do it using the average deviation calculation versus taking the standard deviation. We also get that pit stop along the road, along the way, which is the variance. That's why it's represented again as the sigma squared and then we take the square root to get down to the standard deviation. Now also note at this point in time, we're talking about the data as though it's the entire population. You have a slight difference to the formula when you're talking about a sample. So we'll talk about those differences more in future presentations if we have a sample versus the entire population. But Excel, you can also calculate these using Excel formulas. And this one is calculated using the Excel formula for the variance and standard deviation for the population. These two are using Excel formulas to calculate for the sample. So again, we'll talk about the sample more in a future presentation. Now note, obviously it's nice to be in Excel and just simply put the function in place to say give me the variance, give me the standard deviation and I can basically add these to my set of numbers. But it's also useful to kind of go through this table sometimes because then you actually do get more of a visual representation of the data set to some extent and you might get a better understanding of what is being said by these numbers down here. Also remember that again, these numbers will talk more about them in future presentations, but they can seem more abstract than when we talk about simply the mean or the average of a data set. And sometimes it's useful to compare multiple data sets and we'll talk more about that in future presentations. Now this is, so now I just want to touch back on the question of why we would use this variance and standard deviation, which seems more complex than this. And we saw again, most people will say, well, why do you square the data to get rid of the negatives? Well, why don't I just take the absolute value instead? That would be easier. Well, one reason mathematically that you can argue for using the more complex standard deviation rather than the average deviation is that if I was to pick any other middle point, it gives me a unique number. In other words, if I chose, for example, in our data set instead of to use the mean as the middle point, but I want to look at the distance from point number one. So I use one instead of the mean and then I do everything else the same, right? I take the difference from that point number one and I get my differences. Now these differences are not going to add up to zero anymore because I'm not looking at the differences from the middle point. I'm looking at the differences from just a point that I picked one. And then if I was to take the absolute value of those numbers, then I'd still come out to 20, right? I still come out to 20 and then if I do the rest, I take the 20 and I divide it by four. I still come out to five. So notice I don't have like a unique number here when I pick the mean as the middle point as opposed to when I pick some other number when I use the average deviation. So if I did the same thing using two as my as my number instead of the mean of zero, I used point number two. And I looked at the difference between every point in my data set and point number two, which I just chose randomly. Again, it won't add up to zero. But if I take the absolute value of them, I come out to 20 and I still get five. And then if I do it one more time just to hammer the point home, if I used three, then I still come out to 20 and I get five. Whereas if I did that same calculation using the standard deviation and variance, here's my numbers. I picked point number one instead of the mean. I get my same differences, but then I'm going to square them. And I come out to 108. That 108 is going to be different than the 104 I came out with when I use the mean as the middle point. And so that of course will result in a difference when I divide that 108 divided by four. You get a different number, which would be kind of representative of the variance except we use a different middle point. And then you'd get 520. So now the 520 is different than the 510 that we got to when we used the middle point. So that's one reason that you could say that you get a unique number. If I use point number two, then again the same thing applies. And if I add it up, I get up to 120. And then my end result comes out to 548, which is not the same number as we had when we used the middle point of zero. So that's just an argument because that comes up a lot when you're trying to kind of explain the standard deviation, why you would square it and take the square root. And so it gives you a unique value is another reason that you could say that could be useful, right?


Hi everyone, Joe for Jazmy'scasebrakes.com coming at you with 2022 Panini Mosaic football hobby pack break number 27. Now we've got a few dice rolls happening here. First of all, we're giving away extra spots within the pack break itself. Then we'll do the break, then we'll randomize your names for a third and final time and match you up with the team and that unlocks certified football picker team 5 coming up in the next video. All right, so that being said, big thanks to this group right here. So we only sold 25 spots outright. Top 7 will get extra mosaic pack spots after 7. 7 and 7. 1, 2, 3, 7. So sad times for this group, but top 7, William, Tristan, Nicholas, Tristan, William, Matt and Kevin. Extra spots going your way. It'll buy one, get one scenario for you. Put those little rooftops next to your name so you can differentiate it between spots you bought and spots you want. Now let's do the pack break itself. All 32 teams are in. There's everybody's names again. Let's roll it. Randomize names and teams 3 and 6, 9 times each. 2 and 9, Tristan down on William, 3 and 6, 9 times for the teams, 1, 2, 9th and final time. All right, there's the first half of the list right there. And there's the second half of the list right over there. And let's alphabetize by team print. Then at the end of the break, we'll re-randomize our names and match over the team in that order right there. Now let's flip back over here. Let's gather everybody's or gather this list. There we go. Hot off the presses. It doesn't look like there's an auto there, but what else do we have here? Sauce Gardener, Sam Howell, Peyton Manning, and Kevin Byrne. 42 out of 49 for Tennessee, Joe Montana, and Straight Fire, Josh Allen. All right, not bad. Tennessee, Parallel, Tristan. Sam Howell goes to Kevin. Base rookie card and he's been playing well. Commanders have been playing well the last handful of games, putting up points, looking competitive. Got the Sauce Gardener going to the Jets. That'll be for Tristan. And then the Tennessee, once again, Tristan at Tennessee. All right, now let's see who's going to win teams into certify, which is coming up in the next video. So let's flip back to your names. Just gather up your names again, one through 32, and then after the dice roll we'll match up with the team. After we randomize it, six out of six, full 12 times. So it's going to be top 12 after 12. Good luck. One, two, three, four, seven, eight, nine, 10, 11, and 12th and final time. From 13 through 32, unfortunately, sad times, but I appreciate you giving it a try. Thanks for giving it a go. For the top 12 right here from William Nicholas R. On Up, congrats, you've got teams. Tristan as well, William, Tristan, Tristan, Kevin, Tristan Clifford, Omar, and Tristan. Top 12 after 12, let's match you up with your teams. So Tristan, you've got Atlanta, Omar with Detroit, Clifford with Miami, Tristan with Carolina, Kevin with Baltimore, Tristan with Buffalo in Kansas City, William with the Rams, and the Chargers. Tristan with New Orleans, Nicholas R. with Jets, William S. with Tampa Bay. There you go, gang. And we'll also, by the way, put Mosaic 27 next to your name so you know you won these teams in that pack. We'll do that for everybody. There you go. We'll see you in the next video for the break. Bye. Bye.