Don't Forget TOTO!

He says, when typing on iPhone, I found that I can type a hyphen immediately before and after any text string, and the predictive text keyboard will then suggest the strikethrough style with that text. The result is only a little visually odd because the original hyphens are still present. However, it otherwise is a lot easier than manually trying to stylize the text. And then Ventmore in the same chat says, it also seems to work with asterisks for bold and underscores for underline.

Also, if you add a tilde to the end of a word, it'll suggest the ripple effect. More tips like this, plus your questions answered and a healthy dose of cool stuff found today. Hey, I'm Matt Geekkeb, 11.04 for Monday, August 25th, National Banana Split Day, 2025. Greetings, folks, and welcome to Matt Geekkeb, the show where we share your tips like that. We share some from us, too. We share your cool stuff found. We share some from us, too. And we share your

questions. And we share some from us, too. And hopefully we share some answers to those questions all strung together in an agenda that makes it as easy as possible for each of us to learn at least five new things every single time we get together.

Our sponsors for this episode include fireflies.ai slash mgg where you can go to get two months free of the number one ai teammate that'll transcribe your and summarize and interact with your conversations during your meetings owc's envoy uh sorry thunderbolt 5 doc is uh i mean lots of things the envoy ultra is also out there thunderbolt 5 portable ssd is out today we're talking about the thunderbolt 5 doc which we'll talk about more later webroot.com slash mgg where you can get 50 off webroot

total protection or webroot essentials constantcontact.com where you can try constant contact free for 30 days and functionhealth.com slash mgg where you can get all access to all kinds of data that most people never really see about your body and the first thousand of you that sign up get a hundred dollar credit towards your membership it's a pretty cool thing we'll talk more about all of that in a little bit for now here in Durham, New Hampshire, at least as far as you know, I'm Dave Hamilton.

it he says hi geek gabbers I recently had an experience that might be helpful to others I've been listening to podcasts for years using my Bluetooth AirPods and Sennheiser headphones. Recently, the Sennheiser started behaving weirdly with unresponsive touch controls and even saying the call ended when I wasn't on a call. I tried various things, searching online, unpairing and repairing, resetting back to factory, all without avail.

So I purchased a new Sennheiser headphone right away and reset the old one for recycling. To my frustration, the new one I received seemed defective. Touch controls didn't work except the volume. Reluctantly, I returned the unit the next day. But that evening, when I was using my AirPods, I noticed the double tap touch control didn't work. I tried unpairing again to no avail. Then I thought, could it be Maybe the same problem as with the Sennheiser.

I tried restarting my phone, which I had not thought of before. And that fixed it. I pulled the old Sennheiser and everything, pulled out the old Sennheiser rather, and everything was working again. So I have to remind myself the next time, don't forget to try restarting. Regards, Robert.

I noticed that if my Mac is acting wonky in an unspecified but frustrating way, my uptime is in the double digits of days, meaning that my Mac has been powered on and not restarted for more than nine days. So I restart it once a week by schedule, and it works out totally great. My laptop will even restart if it's closed lid, sleeping, the whole thing.

So uh and i'll put a link in the show notes it used to be super easy to do that in um system preferences but that went away when it became system settings that they's the easy way to do it but it's there's a terminal way to to do it still so i'll put a link in there so but yeah our phones there's no way to automate the restart

But that only works well. What I had to do is say, okay, give me a reminder after the show is over to do it. All right. But that doesn't work when I wanted to do something with the lights when I'm going to be asleep. My son comes in often from work after we've gone to bed at night, but I didn't want to turn the light off and have him fall down the stairs trying to get through the living room. So I tried A-Lady and S-Lady, and they both work. A-Lady, at 11.30, turn off the floor lamp.

And lo and behold, at 11.30, the floor lamp goes off. It's a beautiful thing. So ask S-Lady or A-Lady, and I suppose the The Google help assistant could do it as well. Give it a time to turn off a given lamp. And that way, I don't have to turn it off using an automation every night because he isn't out at work every night. But on the night he's coming home, I'll turn it on and tell it to turn it off at a time, half hour or so after he's due home.

And that has worked out great. I'm trying to find all kinds of other things to do along those lines.

on the phone it will it you know it it will let you do a do this wait then do something else and the something else can be undo what you first did you know turn it on wait turn it off so that would be another way but yeah yeah yeah yeah i yeah i haven't

Cause you had to leave the lamp on and then you couldn't use the physical controls and, you know, so I did everything with automated and I just didn't upgrade when I, when I came here, I don't have a lot of automation in my house anymore. Sure. You know, so like, I don't, I don't have a lot of need, but I do have a question about Pete's tip. Do we know behind the scenes how that is being driven and,

She's not actually creating an automation, like a one-time automation, and you're going to find months from now you've got.

in the interface that we could then go and, you know, manipulate in some way. So.

but I learned something here, guys. So I'm going to kind of summarize. There's a lot to this. But he says, over the past few episodes, there's been a discussion about aliases for iCloud addresses. While the actual aliases in iCloud are limited to three, I use two other free native email alias tools to get unlimited addresses. And it's really kind of the first one that I used a lot with this was something that you could also do with Gmail.

And the concept is, you have your regular address, your iCloud address, so whatever, at iCloud.com, you can create an alias by adding a plus symbol after that first part. So whatever the first part of your email address is before the at, you type plus, and then you can type. An alias. So his example was, if I was going to set up something for, say, MGG, I would have my address plus MGG at iCloud.com.

And what that does is that when an email, say you were signing up for MGG newsletter or something like that, when you got that newsletter, the from address would be that address. And you could be like, oh, that's, you know, you can recognize that from the address. The main reason I used it, I used it a lot when I would sign up for services because I wanted to see, all right, who's going to start really spamming me? Or more importantly, who sold my email address to someone else?

Right? So it's like, oh, okay. I didn't give you that email address. And I do the same trick. I put a reference to where I signed up. So if it was, you know, this service, it'd be my address plus this service at iCloud.com. And then when I got an email from another place that wasn't that service, it's like, Oh, you dirty dogs, you sold my, you sold my data, right? And then I could unsubscribe and do whatever. So that one's cool.

The disadvantage of that, you can create a ton of them, you can't reply to that. So if you got that email and we're replying to it it's not gonna it's not gonna come back to your your inbox as far as i know and he mentions that here um.

Or no, you can't use those to send, but you can respond to emails that come in from that address. So you can give that address out. And if someone sends you an email, you can respond, and your email will still be hidden.

So if my name is Dave at Fastmail.com or Dave at iCloud.com or Dave at Gmail.com, on any one of those, if I have that address at any one of those services, I can then at any point in time, instead of like when I'm filling out an email form, instead of filling out Dave at iCloud.com, I can fill out Dave plus whatever I want. Dave plus MGG at iCloud.com. And that will get to me. You don't need to set anything up on your email receiving side. Just do it on the fly when you're filling out a form.

Make it, you know, Adam plus whatever at iCloud.com. And it will get to your Adam at iCloud.com. Now, in terms of hiding from spammers, this doesn't work so well. And Kiwi Graham points out why, and it's because it's so common that... Anyone who wants to, your email address is known in this. If you're, you know, if you put Adam plus MGG at iCloud.com, they know, and it's pretty easy to build a reg. Even I could build a regular expression filter to remove the plus MGG or the plus whatever.

Anything from the starting with the plus up until the at sign can be taken out and you still know you have a valid email address.

So it's not the best for hiding from spammers. if somebody's going to sell your address they're probably smart enough to strip that stuff out i mean if they're not then you know maybe they should discount their sales but uh but you don't want to buy from them but it is for for things that you're getting legitimately it is a nice way to filter because like you said you can filter on if something's sent to adam plus mgg at icloud.com

but you know okay well this is the stuff from the mac geek app folks and i want to prioritize that or deprioritize it. We don't judge. I mean, we do judge. We judge it really hard, but you can do it anyway if that's how you want to hurt us.

And when things start coming to it that you don't like, just turn that email off, and it goes to the ether forever. No more spam filtering. Huh. So.

steve hammond shares our our what i believe is our our final scheduled quick tip for the uh for the the day uh by sharing that one way of taking control of safari's favorites bar and tightening it up is to disable the favorite icons so that it tightens up that bar and you can kind of see things a little more easily i i liked when they added favorite icons to the tab bar and the favorites bar at the top of the screen but if you don't and you want to make if you want to fit even more things you

can turn those off uh and uh it's in um uh i'm trying to think of uh if you have the favorites bar enabled where where is it uh right click on the bar and choose show text only is that right look at that oh look at that you get show icons and text you can have it show icons only too so that you get it perhaps even tighter huh i learned a thing this is amazing i love this that's why we do what we do oh yeah huh creating yeah i need to think about this probably not going to go to icons

only but i i like the idea um i just don't think i'm i'm I think I've got too many things where the icons would be the same. But, yes, thank you, Steve Hammond. Thank you to everybody who sent in your quick tips. It's just great stuff. We have some don't-get-caughts to share, some very interesting ones, in fact. And then some cool stuff found and your questions. And the next thing that we want to do is talk about our sponsors.

Because, well, you know how here on MacGeeCab we always say don't get caught.

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Visit www.functionhealth.com slash MGG or use gift code MGG100 at sign up to own your health. And our thanks to Function Health for sponsoring this episode. And also, hey, it's really important to not get caught with our digital life, too.

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All right. It's time for some don't get caught. And Stephen brings us right into that by sharing. This is fascinating. He put this in our Mackie Cab Fish Shakes channel with the sentiment of Apple. Why can't I delete a custom created station in Apple Music?

And uh randy walker chimed back in and said yes you can't delete can't edit it sucks and he he says i checked the forums that i could find about it i checked all the search engines and a number a number of other sources everything confirmed that once you've created a a custom station and apple music it stays and then he says i called apple they confirmed it too you cannot delete them period so just be aware if you're going to create a custom station and apple music you will have it forever you

i wonder if you need to put that like in your in your last will and testament i bequeath actually that would be a really funny thing because now is apple legally obligated by probate court to move that custom station to somebody else's might be a way to get them back so just fyi yep so now

my iPhone to save battery. Unfortunately, I turned the brightness down to zero and could not see the screen at all to turn it back up. I did a hard reboot, but still darker than a well digger's wallet. Finally, asked Siri to turn up the brightness, and she gladly did so. Wow, everything just got brighter in here. No, I'm just kidding.

And so hidden in there is a bonus quick tip. So for those of you who don't know what the back tap feature is, this is an accessibility setting. So you can go in your iPhone settings, accessibility, touch, and there's a thing called back tap. You can choose to set an action for a double tap or a triple tap. And then you assign it to an action like opening the camera, setting the brightness, taking a screenshot, running a shortcut, whatever you want.

And then like he said there, you just have to do that tap on the back of your phone and that action will get triggered.

and for some reason, part of the note disappeared. I could not find previous versions to recover. I tried the back symbol on Apple Notes and went both ways, lost more data. Ouch. I hate to convert back to another note app, but there are better solutions like OneNote and Evernote. Or am I just plain stupid on how I recover a previous version of a QuickNote in Apple Notes? I went to iCloud and Notes, not one of the options for recovering.

Only apps offered there were files, bookmarks, contacts, and calendar. If Notes is not this robust, is there a program I could purchase to move Apple Notes to another Notes app? And then he says, I found a way to convert to another Notes app, and I'll continue to use Apple Notes. But not for anything critical keep those tips coming love the show david so i wasn't aware you couldn't go back and i haven't played with that

And again, you have to have Time Machine going. and then you have to be using a document-based application in Apple and it has to use the Apple standard stuff. It can't be a funny application that's going outside of Apple's normal API stuff. But don't all document-based apps with Apple Mac OS still have versions where it keeps versions and you can go back in the history?

And then it will keep versions as long as you're using Time Machine. That's the key. Yeah, right. Obviously, it's not going to work on OS, but if you're syncing to your Mac, then you should have those versions. Then it won't, I don't think. That's interesting. It's only going to have versions that you've worked on on your Mac, I would imagine.

Things questions we're gonna have to we're not finished with this episode but i think we're gonna have to do another one next week to uh to see if we can get to the bottom of some of this stuff right in the meantime let's uh let's do some cool stuff found shall we we um i think we've got we've got time for for some of this stuff and see see how far we get you want to you want to start us off there adam uh

and ipad and mac if you want and it was approved And now this app is living in the app store. Steven didn't write any of the code by vibe coding. The vibe coding means just describing what you want to an LLM like chat GPT, having it create the code and then boom. And the app is called Coffee Finder and it works. It's very simple. It uses your location with permission, of course, to find all the coffee shops near you.

And then we'll give you directions to those coffee shops so it's this you know it my guess is it passed apple's utility bar by you know a small margin but that's all you need it like it does a thing and it will it will direct you to a coffee shop if you so choose i mean it'll send you to maps and direct you to the coffee shop but yeah i like it it it worked and he's got a whole youtube video of course explaining how he did this and and and then you can download the app so i put both in

the show notes but i thought i thought you would find that interesting adam that um that it and steven's app i am certain is not the only app in the app store that has been vibe coded obviously yeah obviously yeah so um yeah it's pretty pretty interesting uh and and and you know i mean we could We could go either way with this, but to me, let this open up some ideas. Even if you're not going to submit something to the App Store, just the idea of starting off with it. I love...

Learning and you know i've done this since the beginning when i learned how to code but i love learning how to code by reading other people's code especially when i know what that code does and so the idea of learning how to code by looking at what your idea looks like when translated to code is a really interesting thing so yeah

So before Apple built that into Maps. So they kind of Sherlocked it a little bit. But yeah, it was very much just a simple utility app. and it's just map location with permissions. Where can I use Apple Pay? Huh.

or you can buy it on walmart for 99 99 it's it's the scoshy power up 2000 uh emergency battery let me take the banner down uh emergency uh Battery backup source essentially for your for your car now the cool thing about it is it's not much larger than your average charging brick it's maybe the size of two decks of cards laid end to end and they it has a flashlight in it but the cool thing is it's got several it comes in a little pouch and it has several outbounds including one that you plug in

it's a 12 volt out that looks It's like a cigarette lighter, so if you needed to charge something that way or, of course, it has the two USB-A and USB-C out, charges via USB-C input and has a little indicator, one to four LED lights to tell you its charge status. It also comes with the little plug-in that gives you the red and black alligator clip-type things that you put on your car battery to start it. It's got all the protections in it that you could possibly want.

If you put red on black and black on red, it won't let you do anything stupid to yourself. If you try to touch the two together to see if there's a charge, it won't spark. It tries to prevent a short out and all those sorts of things. But like I say, it fits in a little pouch, sits in your glove box if that's where you so choose to keep it, but super powerful. Charge your phone, charge your iPad, charge your laptop probably.

It'll start a 7-liter diesel engine, it says, or an 8-liter gasoline engine. That's a whole lot of juice, and one of these would fit, if properly laid out, inside a laptop, Which is why I always go back to, don't put these batteries in your checked luggage. Keep them with you.

And they drained their whole battery in their car. And they came over and they said, can you, you know, do you have jumper cables? Can you give us a jump? And I went, I have something even better. And I grabbed that little thing out of my car, walked it over, and they got them all started. And the wife goes to her husband, hey, we need one of these. But the other thing I will say about that is The reason I have them in all my cars is we also, this is another, I think, good tip.

Once we moved to the Midwest, we decided, and I think even outside the Midwest, we should do this. We built, we set up emergency kits for all of our cars. So I just got a tote and we put in a blanket and flashlights and these car chargers and some kind of dry good foods and stuff like that. Snacks and stuff like that. So if we ever get stuck on the side of the road for an extended period of time or something like that, we have everything we need just in case.

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And, of course, as you'd expect from OWC, this thing is rock-solid reliable. I've got two of their previous Thunderbolt docs, like literally in front of me here in my studio. They're absolutely critical to my MGG workflow, and I wouldn't want to work without them. So now that the Thunderbolt 5 doc is out, we need that too. Go check it out. Thunderbolt 5 doc at OWC.com. We'll put a link directly to it in the MacGeekHub.com show notes.

You can go to MacSales.com too, whichever way you want to get there. Go check it out. And our thanks to OWC for sponsoring this episode. And you know how it goes, back-to-back meetings, and by the end,

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Just go to fireflies.ai.mgg. That's right. Two months free. When you go to fireflies.ai.mgg, that's fireflies.ai.mgg. And our sincere thanks to fireflies for sponsoring this episode all right uh more cool stuff found adam you want to take us to uh porthos john

must have a delorean or something like that because he jumps in on a conversation uh that we had last week which was really yesterday but his question his tip came in her his cool stuff found came in even before that so somehow he jumped forward to the future and then back and i don't know how linear time is time continuing stuff, but it follows on from a discussion we were having last week about different cell carriers and services and saving money.

And he says, I found an MVNO for our office that is awesome and just converted our home plan over to them. USMobile at USMobile.com. And we'll have links in the show notes. I will say up front that if you tend to want support by phone, they aren't the best, but their chat has solved every issue I have. The highlights, you can pick to use the network for any of the three major carriers, and for a small charge, you can even switch between them.

You can set up a second eSIM for a small charge that will give you access without a second number to data on a second network without having to switch your primary SIM. They do have Apple Watch plans. Their plans include using the ultra-wide UC bands for the highest bandwidth. It's a prepaid network, and all higher plans are all in pricing, including taxes and fees. The downsides, as I mentioned, phone support can be hard. Their app isn't the best, but works reliably well to get things done.

Initial Wi-Fi calling setup is a little bit of a pain, and you need to have an unlocked phone to get on their plans. There's a lot more on their pages, but that's the simple recap. I'm paying for a year what my old Verizon bill used to be for two to three months and getting the same level of service. So this answers my concern because I was looking at Verizon's own visible plans and I wasn't that thrilled with them. So I am going to be looking into this, Porthos, Sean.

So thank you for traveling forward to the future to give us that tip.

I have a cool stuff found to suggest, and I'm looking right at it, but I can't show it to you because I'm looking right at the new ViewSonic VP2788, which is their 5K 27-inch Thunderbolt display. And this thing is... We talked about this when we saw it at CES, Pete, remember? We were super excited to find that someone else was going to be making this. Now, the price that they told us at CES was going to be about $700, and we were very excited about that.

Perhaps we were excited for a reason that doesn't match reality. So this screen is $949 on ViewSonic. It's out of stock at ViewSonic, but it is available at Amazon right now. But it's got Thunderbolt 4 pass-through if you want it to. So you could pass through to a second display or other Thunderbolt things if you like. It is true Thunderbolt pass-through. And then it's also got a USB-C hub in it. It's got a USB hub in it. It's got a USB-C port and two USB-A ports, if I am remembering correctly.

I love the stand that it comes on. Very easy to set up, as you would expect. The stand lets me raise it up and down, pivot the screen back and forth, like left and right.

So horizontally. vertically horizontally and then you can also uh it will rotate vertically and go into a full like you know portrait mode display and your mac sees that and then you know kind of does its thing uh but what's really nice is you can also use that that rotation if your desk isn't quite level which you know i need to get a real desk here in my studio instead of using this plastic portable table that i've had for 15 years or whatever but it's

got it's got a little sag in the middle and so i i was able to just you know use tilt the monitor so it's flat like the ground instead of angled like the table which is nice uh that this thing's really impressive and dropped right into my setup here i mean i think between the time i opened the box and the time i was up and running was you know 15 minutes total and i never even turned my mac off which was you know kind of a was like am i doing something

bad it's like oh no i mean it's fine like if we're just unplugging thunderbolt ports and you know moving them around but uh yeah really impressed with this thing and at 949 it's still cheaper than what you get from apple or lg so um so there you go

the 4ks have to come down now that we have all these great 5k options like nobody wants the 4ks anymore right i doesn't happen.

you know, more expensive, 400 bucks, 500 bucks to to get that. I will say I've been you've heard me speak very highly of the Philips creator series display that I've had in previously had in front of me here. And I I used to think, well, you know, there's really no difference between this and a 5K display because the colors are so good on it and all of that. And the colors are fantastic on this, you know, on this ViewSonic 5K display. Like, it is built to be used with a Mac, right, which I love.

And then this morning as we were prepping the show, and we've done shows two days in a row, as Adam alluded to when we were talking about the time shift with the U.S. Mobile suggestion. And I did something pre-show that I always do. I pulled up a screen that has like some, you know, tighter text on it than than most. And at first I was like, wow, what have I like? Did I? Oh, it's a 5K screen instead of a 4K screen. So I definitely even even my aging eyes notice a difference with this.

So the 5K does make a difference. But 4K versus just 1080p HD, that's a more important difference than 4K versus 5K for most of us, I would say. But still, this screen's really nice. Go get one. $949. That's like what you'd pay more than that for a refurb LG screen that's 5K, right? So now you can get this one new.

looks delicious compared to the monoprice screen the monoprice screen would look great like it's totally fine but it ain't that ain't the same so like the quality does matter it does make a difference so well

So let me stay there because this is cool. Last week I mentioned Genius Scan. That's fair.

I could not find out on the App Store, thinking of self-inflicted stupidity wounds. And it's because I was looking on my Mac, and it's only available in the App Store for the iPad and the iPhone. But if you're taking the picture of a page of a book and it's got a little curve in it, you know, because you haven't broken the binder on the book, it takes all that out. It flattens it out and does all kinds of magic behind the scenes to make your scan look pretty. And it's free with in-app purchases.

And the iPad version was rated Best Book Scanner App by APAC Awards in 2024. So um i'm excited to try this one because i'm always looking for something that will Quickly and cleanly give me a nice a nice scan um yeah genius scan was good but this looks like it may be more better more better i used to tell us in boot camp i like it cool it's more better yeah yeah

Well, a company called SnapOne makes a product line called the WattBox, which is a network-connected surge protector that lets you control individual outlets via their free oversee service at ovrc.com on the web or from their iOS app. You can turn the power on or off or click one button to cycle the power to an outlet off and then on again. In fact, you can mark an outlet as a network device so it won't let you turn off the power to a device that would knock the watt box itself off the internet.

You can even see the watt box to monitor the internet connection and automatically cycle particular outlets if it can't reach the internet for a period of time.

Now, these watt boxes are usually sold for a fair bit of money to audio and video installers who put them in big commercial systems to allow them to bounce power on a device at a customer site without a truck roll but i found vendors on ebay selling particularly the three outlet ethernet version for surprisingly little coin this vendor seems reliable uh and has units for 34 bucks he has a link to ebay which i'm sure we'll have in the show notes and

i put one in my mom's family room tv setup controlling the tv soundbar and direct tv streaming box. So if any of them misbehave, she can just text me to bounce the power on it from wherever I am.

Ben shares, I bought some Apple Watch bands from Braxley, Braxleybands.com. And of course, there'll be a link in the show notes. He says, these Apple Watch bands I bought a couple of years ago from Misty Stars for my partner and me recently started breaking. They had plastic lugs and stopped handling the strain. We superglued them repeatedly, but are glad to finally let them go, knowing that we wanted metal lugs and natural materials. My research landed on this company, Braxley bands.

Although their more interesting colors are made of plastic recycled, I went for the mostly organic cotton ones instead. Yeah, these, they're kind of these, you know, well, they're cotton. They're, you know, stretchy-ish, comfortable bands. And they're not terribly expensive. You can buy to get one free and they're like 40 bucks a piece or something.

And they've got some fun colors and all that good stuff. He says the pack, their packaging is cute with catchy messaging and they have a bit of elastane in them for stretchiness and comfort. He says, I love how comfortable it is on my wrist and how it always remains the right size without adjustment. Oh, that's good. It's easy to put on and off and take off, put on and take off without losing the size.

Oh, so these are, these just stretch over your hand. You don't have to, uh, you don't have to, yeah, there's no Clasp, yep. Very cool. Yeah. Yeah. Thanks, man.

The metal's getting scratched. The black paint on the metal, it's not anodized, so it's starting to turn silver. It's like, yeah, all right, I'll just get rid of it.

And so I went on the pinball forum, and they said, find this stuff called Evaporust, Okay. And so if you have corroded metal, parts and things like that that have a lot of rust on them, this stuff is like miracle stuff. So I bought just like a big PVC tube and got seals for either end, filled it up with that, dropped those things in there and left them for three days. And it got rid of all the rust. And this stuff is supposed to be fairly benign for some reason.

I don't know what it is. It's still a chemical. So be safe. Like I wore a mask and some gloves when working in it. Some guys say you don't even need to wear the gloves, but I'm a little paranoid about that stuff. So anyway, but it was amazing three days in that stuff and rest. The rest was pretty much completely gone.

listening to a show back in march and heard do ask the question about is there a vpn appliance uh dave is 100 correct oh we were talking about the apple tv working great with tail scale and it does right uh he says uh i recommend that you get the latest apple tv for the best throughput yes we have found that for sure however if you don't want to use your apple tv our friends at gl dash inet make a vpn vpn appliance for well at the time it was $75. Now, $67.

Things do go down in price, Adam, just not your monitors. The appliance can serve OpenVPN, WireGuard, and many others. However, most of these protocols will need your firewall and or router to port forward VPN request to the appliance, which makes perfect sense. He says, or you can simply use tail scale. No router and or firewall configuration is necessary there. Set up the VPN appliance as a tail scale exit node and you are set.

So if you don't have an Apple TV or don't want to use your Apple TV as a tail scale exit node or an entrance node, you know, either one, this thing for $67 will do it. It is normally listed at $80 on Amazon. But, yeah, look at that. Open VPN speeds up to 150 megabits per second. WireGuard up to 355. WireGuard is effectively what tail scale is.

It's just a kind of wrapper to make it more useful uh but but so i would expect you know hefty throughput uh with wire guard i don't get that kind of throughput with my apple tv i get maybe a hundred megabits a second but it's fine like for what i need it's it's you know it's fine uh right yeah interesting And we love the folks at GL Inet.

What what cable what usbc cable is this is it thunderbolt is it power only is it how much power can it carry and all that sort of thing we'll put it in the show notes but it's the tree dicks usb cable tester he was able to go in there and this thing for 40 bucks allowed him to go through he said the couple dozen cables that he has laying around plug it in and this thing tells you what the cable's capability is and

now i've got to get one thanks a lot andrew 40 bucks i could have used that for beer but no no

Those days are over if you got one of these.

this stuff happens on the show like it's rare that We're like, oh, great. We can plan a four episode, you know, conversation about this stuff. It's it's you. It's I mean, it's collect. It's the collective

Uh, it certainly is one of them prior to that mesh routers. We could have been the mesh router geek gab. We easily could have been, and still could be Synology geek gab. Right. So, you know, there, there are topics that we're careful with. And speaking of robot stuff, we are at, we are well, knee deep in summer here and still really happy with that. That Eufy E15 mower. Oh, nice. That thing. Yeah. It gets stuck occasionally and we just have to move

it around. But, you know, I mean, it's easy to manage. It alerts us on our phones. So, yeah. I just figured I'd do a quick follow-up on that.

I freaking love it. It's just so great that there's thousands of people in there and everybody's friendly and helpful. So check that out. Thanks to everybody that makes our Discord that way, which is effectively all of you. Thanks to Cashfly for providing all the bandwidth. Thanks to Pete for creating So There I Was. Thanks to Adam for creating the Debut Film Podcast. I guess I have to thank myself for creating. Actually, I don't have to thank

myself. I did not create Business Brain or Gig Gab. They were not my ideas. They were the ideas of my co-hosts at the time, Shannon Jean and Paul Kent. So I can thank them for the existence of those podcasts. And yeah, thanks for hanging out. Fun stuff. It's good.