It's time for MacGeekGab, and listener Jeff brings us the quick tip of the week. He says, keep your luggage air tag batteries fresh. I think one thing that should be mentioned in addition to putting an air tag in your luggage is to make sure that the battery is fresh so it doesn't die before the bag gets back to you. More quick tips like this, plus your questions answered, on today's MacGeekGab 1020 for Monday, January 15th, 2024. Music.
Greetings, folks, and welcome to MacGeekGab, the show where, indeed, you send in your quick tips like that. We share them. You send in your questions. We try to answer them. You send in your cool stuff found. We share that, too. We share some of our own quick tips, cool stuff found, and questions as well. Because the goal is we're all in this together and we each want to make sure we learn at least five new things every single episode. Sponsors for this week include BB Edit 15.
Yes, a brand new version of BB Edit. So we will talk some about those features, the new features, in a little bit. Make sure you listen for that. Back here in Durham, New Hampshire, I'm Dave Hamilton.
In the frozen tundra of south dakota i'm adam christiansen and here in the path of that freezing cold air and leading the answer is pilot pete good to be back all together guys it is good to be back all together yeah it's been uh yeah we made it we made it through vegas pete so far anyway it seems like we did it looks like you're alive yep it feels like it yeah i actually feel pretty good Good today. Yeah, we flew back yesterday and it all it all worked out.
Make sure you check our YouTube channel, Mackey cab dot com slash YouTube for all of the videos that Pete and I assembled. We did like these short days. I don't know. I'm getting there. I'll catch you. It's going to take me a day or two. You know, these these sort of two to four minute videos highlighting specific products that are new that we found in in Vegas at CES. So when we go out to CES, it's we don't see it as our job to cover everything.
In fact, that would be awful not only for us, but especially for you. We see it quite differently. We see it as our job to curate and sort of.
Filter the fire hose so we go out and exhaust ourselves by letting the fire hose sort of just pour on us and then uh and then we find the things that we think you would actually want to know about and then we share those with you so so yeah we but we found a lot of cool things and uh i'm really stoked that i could be wrong but i think if we were to go out there to cover everything the show would have to take about two years oh yeah and you know at a minimum oh it would be yeah.
Thousands of exhibitors. Thousands. There's a lot of stuff, but I mean, a lot of it's probably not relevant in the context of, you know, what we do here. Macs and computers and technology, right? Like, there is a lot of extraneous stuff that would just be like, cool, there's cool stuff, but you know. Yeah. And we did that on one of the earlier shows that was published.
We covered a couple things that, you know, just kind of doesn't matter to us in the sense of you can't go buy it, you aren't going to be able to use it, but it's cool tech that's coming. Yeah. Right. That was neat. Like, one company has reinvented the barcode, for lack of a better way. Yeah. Barcode of the future, they called it. So, that was kind of cool. I thought that was the QR code. Well, sure. Yeah, but if your QR code is chewed up, the computer can't read that either.
Yeah. So, this is a radio frequency sonic. I think we did it in 1019. So, just go listen to the last episode. Oh, we'll check it out. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. All right, let's, so thank you folks for, you know, checking all that stuff out. Let us know what you think, obviously. And so really what I wanted to say is it's, we did those two episodes from CES, which you've probably heard if you're listening to this.
But also make sure you go check out our YouTube channel at mattkekeb.com slash YouTube. That'll bring you there. And that'll, there's lots there that I think you're going to enjoy. And it's all bite-sized, so you can just kind of consume it. It's not like you need to carve out two hours to listen. And you get to see. We're looking at the Silly Cat videos. Go look at this. It's good stuff.
Yeah, and you get to see the stuff that we did. Like, we filmed video either in our hotel suite or in the – we should have done a video of our suite, too, Pete, to show people kind of how we – what our command center looked like.
All right, next year. uh but most of it in fact is from the events and the show floor showing these things right there so yeah go check it out uh speaking of quick tips you uh you have a quick tip to share from listener jed adam that i wish i had before last week all right hold on i got. Sorry. That's okay. That's all right. I was, uh, I was on a different one from Jed. Oh, got it.
Might be a different Jed. Even might even he's, he says, uh, so everyone I know is complaining about the fact that whenever you pull out your phone and are on a, on messages, it starts audio recording and sometimes sends. Honestly, I don't know anyone who uses this feature except my teenager. And more often it's annoying or could even, be embarrassing. So I think turning it, turning off raise to listen should turn it.
I think turning off raise to listen should turn it off according to multiple articles I read like this one and he links to an article. Um, but he says just a good way not to get caught.
And what was interesting to me about this is it felt not only like a quick tip, you know, turning off the raise to listen feature, but also it's kind of a cool stuff for me because I said, I don't even know know this was a thing did you know this was a thing well so i mean yes i knew it was a thing a because i my my daughter she's not a teenager anymore but she will often send me instead of typing a big long text she'll like send me a one or two minute uh
audio message to to listen to it's essentially the replacement for voicemail these days right you know it's that kind of thing um but i also knew about this race to listen thing because several times this week i looked at my phone after you know i would have like a little text chat either with pete or we had a group of. It was a group of sort of Macworld Expo refugees who are at CES every year.
Right. And so we had that group going and I would pick up, you know, I would finish texting in that group, put my phone in my pocket and then pick up my phone a few minutes later and see that it had been recording ever since in that group. And it would be like, oh, man, like, do not press send no matter what you do. Like, I have no idea what I said in the last two minutes. I probably said stupid stuff. off and uh and so it's like oh i hit the you know there's a little x there that you can hit.
If i knew if i had seen this quick tip if i had been reading mac geek gab email while i was gone i would have seen this and turned it off immediately because it happened probably three or four times thankfully i didn't realize that that's how you could turn it off yeah i didn't know yeah i mean i knew it was there i see that occasionally it's like pushed i didn't record anything but you can do the push to talk or push to record too right yeah yeah yeah so yeah
so to disable it so people know just go into settings messages and there's a raised listen raised to listen toggle and you can just toggle that off and that'll disable it from automatically happening so when you it's it's the proximity sensor right so it's normally the way it's supposed to work you raise it to your head the proximity sensor sees it's close to your ear yeah it starts recording Yep. It can happen, I guess, in your pocket or even if you just maybe put your thumb over that sensor.
I don't know what else triggers it, but obviously it's triggering it. It's never happened to me, luckily. I have a feeling if there's an Android user on the other end, you may not be able to unsend it either. Oh, yeah, good point. Yeah, yeah. Well, I don't know that it would do it. Probably wouldn't work, yeah. Yeah, I think it's only. Oh, I think it's just sending a little audio file, right? Correct, but it's only in iMessages. It's a messages feature, I think. Yeah, it won't do it on an SMS.
Okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's just for iMessage. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So I had to try it immediately. And I was like, oh, that's pretty cool, actually. But I've never had a trigger accidentally, which could be very scary. Yeah, right. Right. Right. Yeah, exactly. All right. Yeah. Good stuff. Thank you for that. I have now turned it off on my phone as of this very moment. And I think my life will be will be better for it.
Todd brings us our next quick tip, which is a follow up to episode 1013, where Todd says when you were talking in that show in that episode about the doubt using the downloads folder as an archive of sorts, which, of course, you can like things that are just stored there and and you can delete them automatically with an app like Hazel or something. He says it's worth noting that iCloud Drive does not sync your Mac's download folder.
So don't assume that things there are preserved if you were to lose the drive on your Mac. So, yes, thank you. And he's right because there are two downloads folders, right? There's your Mac's downloads folder, which is in home downloads. And then there is a downloads folder with the same name in iCloud Drive.
But that's not where your max saves downloads it is where your iphone or ipad would save downloads but not where your max saves them so i can see why someone might be confused about that and i'm glad yeah i'm glad that todd highlighted this i i never thought about it that way i suppose because Because the max downloads folder has been there for so long. It essentially predates any of this type of iCloud syncing. I don't know. I guess I just knew.
Could you just change that? Like go into Safari settings and point Safari at the iCloud one? I see absolutely no reason why you couldn't. There you go. That's an interesting tip. Another quick tip. Yeah.
Twofer yeah because there if you go into iCloud drive there is a downloads folder and it is all of the things that I've downloaded on my phone so yeah I see why Mac or why Apple does that though generally speaking I don't want to sync everything I download right yeah a lot of it I grab and and use like a DMG installing software and then, I don't even want to waste the bandwidth on it. You're not like my wife and use the downloads folder as a storage location for everything on your Mac?
Or mine who uses the desktop as a storage location? Yeah. I'm sorry. Well, okay. We both have to pay for divorce lawyers now, Adam. This show is getting expensive in more ways than one. This is not a surprise. This is a complaint of mine. It's not a surprise to her, even if she heard this and she won't.
Yeah, I don't think she'd be mad. we've we've had this discussion yes openly in our family yeah yeah as have we but making it public is uh not as it's different isn't it not as conducive to marital bliss so i i will i will admit to using my downloads folder as a permanent archive only out of omission in that i don't go and manually prune my downloads folder on the regular i will if you know my mac is running running out of storage or something,
I'll go and like sort my downloads folder by the, you know, largest file or largest folder and, and, you know, kill those off. But, uh, I have, and I think this is where this came from. And I mentioned it in 1013 and just now too, but I'll, I'll dig in a little deeper. I use a Hazel rule to prune my downloads folder that anything that's been there, I think I have it set to 30 days. If it's been there for more than 30 days, go and delete it. I'm totally fine with that.
You know, it's I, so I don't think of it as an archive, but it has, it had become a de facto archive because I wasn't doing, I had not implemented anything to change that. So I can see why people. Would start even relying upon it that way. But I think of my downloads folder is essentially a trash folder. It is, it is temporary storage only. And on my desktop to that same point years ago, I created a folder called kill me on my desktop.
And well, it was a note. It was a note for myself knowing that if I, if I put something in there, it's truly for transient storage only. It's like, Like, I'm going to, yes, I'm going to save this here, but I do not, I don't, in the moment that I'm putting it there, I don't expect it to last. And so I also now have a Hazel, but it did last, and my Kill Me folder also just bloated up, because of course it did. So now I have a Hazel rule that also goes and prunes out my Kill Me folder after
30 days or something like that. So, you know, it's just, this falls into the category of learning how to live with yourself, I suppose. Yeah. I wonder if you could set Hazel, like I use Hazel, I put it in a tidy folder for my desktop and my downloads. And then I wonder if you could get Hazel to go, hey, this has been here. Do you want to get rid of it? Yes, no. I don't know. I've never used any conditionals. I would like to get eyes on it one last time.
I think he either file it properly or go ahead and pitch it. Yeah. My, if I were going to, and I don't know if Hazel could do that for you. Right. But if I were going to do that, I would do it differently. I would create a calendar event, you know, once every two weeks or something like a to do on my calendar, just to remind me to go in there. I, I do that with my spam folder. You know, I've mentioned, I prune through my spam folder once every two days.
The way that I remember to do that is I have a to do a recurring to do in my calendar. That's every other day. And it has a link to the web interface for fast mails for my spam folder on fast mail. So I don't even have to think about it. I just click it and it brings me right there and their interface is fine. It remembers that I sort my spam by from address, which we've talked about on the show before. And it just brings me there and I can prune through my spam and,
90 seconds or less if I'm doing it every two days. Boom. Yeah. So that's how I would do that, Pete. With Hazel, you could do a set of countdown folders if you wanted. You could have like, this is going to be deleted in 30 days, and then at 25 days, take everything 25 days older and move it to, this is going to be deleted in five days, and then a one day. Oh, that's true. You could monitor it that way too, right? Yep. Like, boom, boom, boom. All right, it's countdown.
Down and could and i i i'm hesitant to start messing with hazel while i'm recording a show but, could you go wrong could could hazel when it puts something in a folder could it open that folder right does it have that ability to to cause the finder to open that folder because if it did that would be an interesting way and if it doesn't you could have keyboard maestro open your. Your five-day, you know, it's going to be deleted in five days folder every morning for you. So you just see it, Pete.
Right. Yeah. And just review it. Just review it. Yeah. Move it back. Hazel could almost certainly open a folder though. I don't know that it can. That's why, that's the question I'm asking. Yeah. Okay. I just don't know that it has that functionality. Like you say, now is not the time to experiment with it. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Have those Discord people do it. Yeah, it's possible that someone listening. Listening, uh, would know better than us. Yes.
Peoples. Peoples. Yes. Yeah. Someone will let us know. And someone on Mark M wrote, you know, cleaning your downloads folders with Hazel is for, and I think that's how it was developed. I agree with that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But if you know the answer and or have a tip or a question or anything for us, feedback at macgeekgab.com is the place to go for that. Whoa, whoa. Dave, did you say feedback at macgeekgab.com? I think so. I heard him. Feedback at macgeekgab.com. All right.
Good news, though. Paul Conaway in the chat says there is a show in Finder option in Hazel. So we're all good. There's our answer. There's the answer. Thank you, Paul. Thanks, Paul. All right, you want to take us to our final quick tip here, Adam, from Jim? Yeah, Jim has a question about adding a website to favorites on an iPad. He said, I wanted to add a new website to the menu bar in Safari on my iPad. For the life of me, I couldn't figure it out at first. Since this was a site
I visit a lot, I wanted it visible in the Safari menu bar. Of course, you did all the time. So I tried dragging the website address into the menu bar, as I'm able to do on my MacBook Pro, but no luck.
It didn't work. then I remembered to click on the share icon and add the bookmark to the favorites and sure enough it appeared in the excess list where you can see when I click on the ellipses at the far end of the Safari menu bar I have all my favorites but it was at the bottom of the list and I wanted it at the top drawing on years of Apple experience I tried and often used rearranging technique and clicked on the new shortcut and tried dragging it up the list and nothing happened there
a bit frustrated I closed Safari, opened a brand new blank page, and of course it showed all of my favorite website shortcuts with a new site at the very end. Then came the aha moment. I clicked on the icon for the new website and dragged it to the top of the screen and dropped it as the third item in the array. It's stuck in Safari and the Safari menu bar now shows the new shortcut right where I want it. Not sure why it's different on the Mac than the iPad, but it is.
So maybe this will help someone save a few minutes trying to get their website shortcuts visible on their iPad Safari menu bar. Nice. Yeah, that makes sense. Now that he says it that way, it makes sense. Yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure. Cool. So I don't know that this got me playing around though. Uh, cause I thought this was a great tip. Um, and I was like really baffled by the fact that there wasn't a drag and drop way to do this on the iPad.
Well, the first thing that I had to realize was that the favorites bar on the iPad is not always there. You have to go like turn it on in Safari settings.
So if you do use a favorites bar, so first I turned it on and you know, I tested it cause you know, that's, that's just me and yeah you can't just drag a url from the url bar into right into the menu bar like you would on the mac but that got me thinking what happens if you drag it over to the little icon where you would open up the bookmarks menu and sure enough i drug it over there i hovered and it did the whole spring-loaded thing and then i could go to my favorites
folder and it spring-loaded the favorites folder open and then i could drag it anywhere in the list and drop it and then it It appeared in order in, in the bar, right where I wanted it. But what you have to drag onto is the little, you know, you know, the sidebar bookmarks icon, and then you can, and that works on the iPhone as well. So.
Ooh, what a tip. Okay. So it is possible to do with, I mean, I'll call it one step, but it's really one drag operation because you're, yeah, you're, there's many things that have to happen in there, but, uh. It's the spring loaded thing, you know, that Apple likes to do. You know, you can spring load drag and drop on your Mac. So you can spring load drag and drop in Safari. And I think this kind of works for other things too.
You know, they have this thing where you can drag and drop onto, you know, folders or little icons and things happen. So I, you know, this is another one of those. I always called it Apple's hidden UI stuff, which I'm not a big fan of, but there's tons of it, especially on iOS. Yes. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Um, I'm trying to think if there's anything else that comes to mind for that, but no, that's, that's great. Yep. Thank you, Jim. Thanks, Adam. That's cool.
Uh, thanks to BB edit for sponsoring this episode and BB edit just this week came out with BB edit 15. Anybody who's listened for any length of time knows that BB edit is always open on my Mac. I use it for simple text editing, for things like the chapters for the show notes when I'm processing those after we finish the episode. I also use it for programming and, of course, everything in between and things just like counting the number of words in a document or comparing two documents.
They've added some cool features. features one for us programmers out there is what they call a mini map palette which if you've got a document that's super long which a lot of uh programming you know you code some documents will be you know many pages long what the mini map does is it shows you an overview of the document you don't see the text it it collapses it down so you just see kind of the layout of the document But visualizing this makes a lot of sense when you have these long documents.
What's cool is if you select text in the document, it shows the selection in the mini map. If you select text in the mini map, it shows it in the document. Right. So you can really kind of move and you can use it to move around in the document, too, which once you start programming, you kind of get a feel for, oh, yeah, that's down here somewhere. somewhere really handy to be able to get there without just having to scroll page, page, page, page, page.
You scroll on the mini map and be like, yep, that's where I want to be. So that's, I love this feature. The next one I want to share for today is that they have added functionality by way of a new worksheet, which essentially is a text document that has extra features and extra functionality buried behind it. This time a chat GPT worksheet.
So you can can interface with chat GPT right inside BB edit, which also means that when you get responses from chat GPT, you can, they are treated as text in BB edit and you can copy them and do other things with them, just like you would any other text. And it just happens right in line in that worksheet document. I will definitely be using this for processing the show because I would take texts that I had the chapters that I would.
You know, sort of massage in BB edit. And then I would copy and paste those over to chat GBT to have it help me summarize for the show notes and come up with, you know, the little, uh, description tag and all of those for our, our search engine stuff. This way I just get to stay right inside BB edit.
And I know that I'm getting unformatted text, which is much better to paste into WordPress because then it just inherits WordPress is formatting instead of bringing and formatting along and all of those things. So these are two of the many new features that are here in BBEdit 15. Go check it out. You get, even if you've used it before, you get a new 30-day full function trial period that you get to try out all the features of the app. You get that fresh eval period.
And then after 30 days, some of the features go away. Some of them stick around, but of course, that's when you would go to bare bones.com slash store and buy yourself a copy of BB edit. And there's upgrade pricing and all of those things, depending on which version you're coming from. Of course. So bare bones.com slash store and our thanks to bare bones and BB edit for sponsoring this episode. And Pete, what's that? I said, Dave and Pete, you guys were just at CES.
We were just at C. Did you swing by the Apple booth to check out the vision pro? Adam, there's no Apple booth at CES. Wait, what? Dave, you missed the Apple booth? I was there for two days. I missed that. I spent all my time there. That's right. Catch this week, Apple being Apple. So yeah, Apple, for whatever reason, doesn't want to do the CES thing, but they definitely like to steal the thunder because every year, or almost every year, I think it is, they wait for a big press announcement.
So did you notice this week that they announced announced when the vision pro is going to be able to be uh be purchased yep right during ces they like to steal the media thunder it's classic apple was classic monday monday morning was when this announcement came out so like the beginning of the the effective beginning of press days for ces when all these companies are going to push out their press releases actually a lot lot of companies waited until Tuesday to push out their press releases.
Media days at CES are Sunday, like half of Sunday and all of Monday. But every press release you get says embargoed until Tuesday morning. Not apples. Apples came right out on Monday and announced that the vision pro goes on pre-order next week and, or this week. Yeah. Yeah. The 19th. Yeah. Yeah. So that's, that's this week in terms of when this episode is released, but yep, they sure did. Didn't they, they, they stole everybody's thunder. It's a lot of, not a lot of details about it.
Like, you know, they, they announced that when we knew the pricing 30, 34 99, um they announced the prescription lens and reader lens pricing so those ice lenses are 149 if you need prescription ones which i was surprised that was the price i thought they were going to be a lot higher that's lower than i thought yeah i agree and 99 if you need if you need readers um but i'm a glasses wearer i'm obviously going to need the prescription lenses.
What i don't know is you you need a prescription so i don't know what the process is going to be at least in terms of pre-order because early on there were rumors that you were only gonna you're gonna have to go in store to buy it i don't know if you're still gonna have to go in store to pick up like i don't know what's going on and i haven't found a lot of details on what the buying process is going to look like online like can
i just say i need the prescription ones and then am i gonna have to go to an apple store to get pick it up and get fitted and because you know You've got the light seals and all that stuff. So it sounds like there's two different. And the question that comes, is that only yours? In other words, my wife wears contacts. Could you take the prescription lenses out and let someone? I believe from what they showed when it was released, the prescription lenses were kind of a drop-in. A drop-in insert.
Yeah. I didn't remember that. Okay. I'm assuming they'll go in magnetically and you can pop them out. And so you could have different, if you had two people with different prescriptions, it's, I'm pretty sure you can pop them in and out or if someone only needed readers or something like that, you could pop them in and out or just take them out completely if you didn't need.
My guess is that it'll be something like ordering glasses from Zenni Optical or iBuyDirect or whatever online where you just key in your prescription. Those sites really don't even... You should have a prescription from a doctor, so they say. But you can just key in your prescription and they will make you the lenses for that. Oh, they don't have to validate it. No, no. I remember buying from... One site and you had to like upload your, you literally upload your prescription.
Some of the, some sites will let you do that, but I certainly, I know with Zeni, you can upload it, but really they just want you to type in the, you know, the OS and OD or whatever the things are and your, your, your pupillary distance and all that stuff. So I, we, we will find out on the 19th, right? Yeah. Well, that's my concern, right? Because pre-orders are always crazy. And I'm like, I don't want to get caught off guard and be like, I don't have my prescription here handy.
I don't, you know, I recommend keeping a PDF of your prescription in, you know, something on your phone notes or, or even just in a synced folder, like in your iCloud drive documents. Yeah. I'm pretty sure I know where it is. I'm pretty sure it's in paperless. If I went to go look, there you go. Yeah. Yeah. I actually need a new prescription. And so I'm going to be going this week to, uh, to get my eyes checked just in advance and, and prep of a pre-order just in case Apple does weird stuff.
Not a bad idea. Not a bad idea. Right. Yep. Yep. Uh, usually it has to be within two years. I think for them, that is want to verify it. If you want to verify it. Yeah. And, uh, Mark M in the chat, uh, in discord says, I can confirm that no confirmation is required for glasses.
Uh, he says in Pennsylvania, Pennsylvania only contact lenses need to be confirmed so yep interesting interesting yeah yeah for sure well there's Apple being Apple yeah yeah trying to steal the feel to see if they just need to go I mean you guys should have been to be like what a place to show off vision I mean they had units right they right have given them to press and they must be close enough they could have brought some there and what a buzz they would have generated if I mean they probably
did They probably were that, you know, a team. Yes. Privately. I would be shocked if a team from Apple was not there. You know, CES, the reason we go is that CES provides gravity, right? It, it, you know, pulls a lot of people into one place and make it makes things really efficient.
Inefficient uh yeah pete and i you know usually at ces i gotta come up with a new term i've always said at ces i avoid the show floor like the plague well i've had covid like three times so i'm not all that good at avoiding the plague it turns out but um thankfully fine every every one of those times but uh we generally avoid the show floor because it's inefficient and usually people. People don't want to talk to press on the show floor.
The show floor is for those kinds of meetings that you would have with Apple, right? Where it's the strategic partnership meetings with, you know, resellers and vendors and that kind of stuff is what a lot of people, at least traditionally, have. Gone out of their way to get booths on the show floor to attract. You're selling. You're selling. Yeah. Yeah. You're either. Yeah. You're either selling your, but it's not, you're selling to one-on-one. It's you're looking for distribution channels or.
Right. You want to talk to Walmart and Amazon. Yeah, exactly. And I can't tell you how many times I had meetings, even with companies that like I had deep relationships with. And it would be like, all right, I'll see you in your booth in the South hall. at 11 a.m.
On Wednesday and I would get there and be like oh yeah sorry Brian's in a meeting with you know Walmart just showed up and and so I don't know when he's going to be out it's like cool and that just happened over and over again so much so that I wrote off the show floor I would I would agree to go meet somebody on the show floor but only after like some sort of vetting process right where I felt confident that they would not be wasting my time but even if they they
weren't even if once I got to the booth, they weren't wasting my time getting to and from booths on the show floor is such an epic journey that even from one booth to another is an epic journey. It's not so bad now that the South hall is closed. They have not refilled the South hall since. Yeah, but how about a feature request for the CTA app? You let the navigation in your phone actually work. They tried it one year. It's a little better this year than it was. No. You know.
No, you don't. They, they, they, maybe they could try it again, but like six, seven years ago, they tried to use directional things in there and being in a concrete jungle. Okay. It, it was a nightmare. So that's, I think that's why they did away with it. The EPP got better this year, even over last year. Yeah. Well, getting from booth to booth, but yeah. But this year I was surprised when we did wander up to him because we did do a little bit of booth time.
Of course, we we do most of our most of our content comes from these evening press events. We've talked about Pepcom on the show here. There's two others. One's called Unveiled. One's called Showstoppers that happen at CES. And they're like four hours long and it's just speed dating with the press. Everybody has a little table and that's it. You know, it's so there's no wandering from booth to booth. You just kind of, you know, you can really be efficient about it.
But we did spend some time on the show floor this year, Pete, and we were I was pleasantly surprised. People wanted to most almost everyone was happy to talk to us once they saw our media badge, which is atypical of the show floor. We did get one, didn't we? Yes, we did. We stopped at one booth, and it literally had pretty lights, and we were kind of looking at it, and the guy came right over to us. Hey, gents, how are you doing? What could I show you?
We said, oh, you know, here's who we are, and here's what we're looking for cool stuff found. Smoke was coming out of his heels as he turned around and left.
He only forgot to flip us off. that's I was shocked at how fast he turned his back on us and walked away he didn't say goodbye nothing no it was bizarre yeah Pete spent some time in the military of course and I don't think you ever saw somebody doing about face that efficiently no no no I wonder if he was just concerned about being videoed or being you know interviewed and quoted or something or just maybe Maybe he's just really uncomfortable about
being on camera or being. We weren't camera. We were just asking questions. I know, but yeah, like he's been there all day. Right. So how many times has he had someone come up and say, can we do an interview? Here's a camera. Here's a microphone. Here's a fair. Sure. And I always did ask, you know, do you mind if I record that sort of thing? But yeah, the, uh, as Dave called them, the, the looky loos were out in force this year.
And, uh, that made it more difficult to quickly get from one booth to another. Other, but most people, 99.9% of them were happy to see us and chat with us and tell us about their stuff. Great. Super atypical compared to previous years. Yeah. Which was great. Don't get me wrong. I was, it was pleasant to, to, you know, have people interested in sharing their products with, with us and with all of you.
So yeah, it worked out while we are on the subject of CES. Yes, I want to take one more time to thank all of the sponsors who made that trip possible for us. And those are, of course, Carbon Copy Cloner at carboncopycloner.com slash mgg, Mac Updater at corecode.io slash mgg, and Collide with a K, k-o-l-i-d-e.com slash mgg. Those three companies, not only do they make fantastic products, and of course I use Carbon Copy Cloner and Mac Updater.
Thankfully, I don't run a huge business, so I don't need to use collide, but I, I have recommended it to, to many who do and many who manage and they love it too. But Mac updater and carbon copy cloner apps that I use all the time and love them. So please go check them out. We'll put links in the show notes as always. But, uh, yeah, thank you to all of them for, for making this past week possible and doable and, and all those things. So, yeah.
All right. All right. Shall we go and do some questions? We shall. We shall. Yeah. Yeah. So Rob writes, y'all, I only heard about your podcast from Adam, and I've been a consistent listener since Adam joined the team. Thanks, Adam. I'm a big Audible listener, and the option to download and ddrm my purchases really hit a chord for me. However, I downloaded Libation, and I'm a bit reluctant to run the command line required to turn off the warnings and allow the installation.
I install non-app store software pretty regularly, but I've never had to run a pseudo command to do so. Do any of you have experience with libation? I don't want to install anything I'll regret later. Thank you. My best, Rob. Yeah, that can be a little bit scary, and I'm always leery of that too. And thanks for sticking with me, Rob. Thanks for coming over. Glad to have you here.
But um you know i'll say i personally haven't used libation yet but i did go look at what commands they wanted you to run and it looks like it's specifically running the spctl command, that's essentially the gate the gatekeeper subsystem so the same thing when you go into preferences and you change sort of your options to like hey allow me to install everything um so So there's a great CNET article that we can link to that goes through a lot of the details of this if you really
want to better understand everything that's going on with this command. But for Libation, the command that they give you, if you look at, they're actually running a series of commands.
There it looks like what it's doing is temporarily disabling gatekeeper so it can add a rule that will allow libation to launch and run on your mac and then it re-enables gatekeeper so to me it looks pretty pretty benign obviously deciding what you want to do comes down to do you trust the code from the libation developers a nice thing is that's on github you could go review that if you wanted um i you know in and i would assume at this point a
lot of people i've heard about libation from a lot of people if it was doing something nefarious in that code you would probably know about it um typically apps made by developers need an apple signing key not everybody wants to do that so those also come with rules and i would assume in the case of libation uh because it's dealing with copy protection and drm and you know bypassing that that they might not even be able to get an an Apple developer, like, like they might not be able to do that.
So this is the road there, you know, the road they kind of have to go down, unfortunately. But again, yeah, security is always a personal thing. I've always said that. So you just have to decide what you're comfortable with, what you're not comfortable with. But with this one, from my perspective, it looks, like I said, relatively benign as to what it's doing. I have installed libation and I've used it. And I mean, I was the one that brought it and recommended it on a recent episode.
I don't think I had to go through this because I already have Gatekeeper set to allow all third-party apps. But I do remember when you go to launch it, it doesn't launch. And I think this is why they have these instructions for folks is to get them over this hump. Even once you go into your security settings on the Mac and tell Gatekeeper, stay as far out of my way as you're willing to. to I'm good, I'll take responsibility.
Even with that, apps that aren't signed, when you go to launch them, the finder simply says no. However, you can bypass this either by doing what gatekeeper does and sort of, or what Libation does and pre-installing that rule, or you can cause the rule to be installed yourself by right-clicking on the application, choose open, And then the Mac will say, hey, are you sure you want to open this app? We can't verify anything about it.
And you say yes. And when you do that, that same rule or an analog of it is installed. So I think they they created this script to do it for you so that you could just have a one click operation and you're done as opposed to, hey, by the way, you need to go and right click and like all the things I just described. So they've automated that process, but I think that's all they're doing with it. Yeah, I mean, that hidden interface, the right-click open thing,
a lot of people just don't know. Just don't know. Right, exactly. Yeah, right. Exactly. So if you didn't know that, there's yet another quick tip for us for the episode. But yeah, Libation runs great, and it does what it does. I will also say that Libation, the way you authenticate with Amazon, feels equally as weird. They tell you, all right, look, go click this link. It's going to open a page on Amazon where you're going to
log into your account because Amazon owns Audible. That's how this works. And then you're going to be brought to a page that says this didn't work. And they say it actually did work. What you need to do is copy that URL from your menu bar into Libation so Libation can use the key that's sitting in this URL bar to authenticate itself. It's just the way it works. Like Adam said, this app is probably not supposed to exist, but I'm glad that it does. I don't know. I like, yeah.
Yep. I mean, it's supposed to exist. It's just Apple has their rules. Right, right, right, right. You can't knowingly like allow a developer to build an app that's going to bypass Amazon's theory. Like that just brings all kinds of stuff they don't want to deal with. Tim doesn't want that call from Jeff. Let's put it that way. Exactly.
Basically what it comes down to. to that's what it comes down to yep uh all right what's uh what's next here you want to take us to jed adam jed oh i'm failing today it's okay uh he's got the printer reset issue so jet says why does one mac cause my printer to reset he says i'm trying to help my parents with their printer and i'm stumped it's an hp it's hp and networked uh one laptop and an iphone and an ipad all print to it a laptop i'm struggling with because the printer restarts
every time i've deleted and re-added the printer i've reset the printer services too he's stumped so he wants to know do we have any ideas i have some ideas um you know it's hard to know because we have of exactly the information that that you just read right we don't know what kind of printer it is we don't know what you know what's happening or what's said on the printer you know on the printer's display when it restarts but when we're in these scenarios and it's time to answer a question
the way i approach it is if i were there what would i do next to try and suss out what's going on. And my first thought is to compare the two computers, right? You've got one Mac that's not causing the printer to restart. You've got another Mac that is. So what's different about these two computers? Are they on the same OS? Does one of them have the manufacturer's printer driver installed and the other is using the one baked in to Mac OS?
And I don't even have speculation as to which one would cause it to restart. Actually, I do. My speculation is that the manufacturer's drivers would cause it to restart. But I might be wrong about that. But the fact that your iPhone and your iPad don't cause it to restart tells me that Apple's drivers are probably OK and they are shared between the Mac and the iPhones. So, you know, it's, it's looking at, at these things, what's different.
And if you really, if, if you think about these questions and dig a little and you still can't find something different, I would then look, you know, what to do next after the first next, I would look at each Mac's local cups interface cups being, I believe common Unix printing system. And you get there by going in Safari to the URL of localhost colon 631. So you're looking at port 631 on your Mac to see what's there. This link is in the show notes.
You don't need to remember it. Just go to MackeyCab.com and look for show 1020 or mgg.fm slash 1020. It's right there in the show notes. And if it's the first time you've gone there on this Mac, you might be told to issue a terminal command to fully enable the cups web interface. That's also in the show notes, but it'll be right there on the screen. You just open terminal, you type this one little command and then it, or you could paste this one little command and you're done.
And then you can really dig in and look at what driver versions are being used on each computer and really dig and compare. And you can reset the, the cups printing system there. Uh, so this is where I would, uh, that's where I would start with this. Hopefully somewhere in there, you would, there would be that aha moment. Like, wait, this is different. Ah, well, let me change, you know, one computer to match the other and then see what happens. Yeah.
That's good advice. I would also, as Silzian sounds, I know he says he's deleted and re-added the printer. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm pretty sure that several years back, Apple bundles some printer drivers with the OS, but depending upon the age of this printer or what model it is or whatever it might be, it might be worth checking the manufacturer's website.
So even if you're up to date with the operating system, There's no guarantee that HP has been delivering drivers to Apple to include with the operating system. So you might want to check and make sure, you know, there's not a new set of drivers or something on, like, and this sucks because I hate going to HP's website because it's impossible to find these things. But there could be updated, like, drivers. I think you're on to something, Dave, because, again, he's saying the iPad,
the iPhone work fine. That's going to use Apple's, whatever, you know, Apple's system is. Yeah, right. And likely at one point they installed the HP software on there, that Mac, it's got some version of the driver, no guarantee that that has ever been updated or that it was delivered, you know, along with an OS update. So I would check that too. Yep. And I know Jed mentioned that he reset the printing system. So I'm pretty sure he did what I'm about to describe. But for everyone listening,
there is a semi-hidden feature in system settings. So, and, and this also exists in system preferences. If you've got a, you know, pre Sonoma Mac. Or Preventure, whenever they made this change. I can't remember anymore. I'm lucky I'm awake. So you go into system settings, you go into printers and scanners, and in the list of printers, right-click, and you will see one of the options, the one at the bottom of the list, is called reset printing system, dot, dot, dot.
And that means that there is going to be a confirmation dialogue. And when you click that, it says, are you sure you want to reset the printing system? This will remove all of your existing printers, scanners and faxes and all their pending jobs. It does a full reset on that cups system that I mentioned earlier and can make a huge difference in solving problems just like this. Obviously, Jed already did this, so this didn't solve Jed's problem.
There's more to it than that. But but that would be that that would have been my first step as well is. is all right, let's just start from scratch with this and see. And since that didn't work, then it's like, okay, well, let's compare the two and go from there. So, yeah. Fun stuff. Oh, did you have more to add, Adam? No, I just said good stuff. Yeah, good stuff. I noticed something interesting. We did two episodes from Las Vegas. And, of course, I was on my laptop, which is an M2 MacBook Air.
So plenty with, with, you know, 24 gigs of Ram or something, cause that was what was available the day I had to buy a laptop since, you know, we had all those computers blow up with lightning, um, over the summer. And yet, the first episode that we recorded, as soon as I opened up Chrome. Which is what we use here to connect to StreamYard, which is the engine that connects our voices to each other but also does video, my video was stuttering.
My computer, my CPU was pegged, and it was like, what's going on?
This is sort of at least a more powerful machine than the max studio i have in the studio because this is an m1 max like it's at least on par with it it should be able to rock and roll here what's going on and uh finally got it to sort of settle down and we were able to record the episode my video stuttered a little bit but fine whatever and uh the next day i was using ecam live to do some of the the locally recorded videos that that we put out on our youtube youtube channel and i
was noticing at times that it was stuttering there too like what is going on like this shouldn't happen i wasn't even using an external camera i was using the max built-in camera because i forgot to bring a stand for my continuity camera thing and it was just driving me crazy and then you know walking around the show floor there's always these things like you know percolating in the back of my my head and i said to pete i'm like wait a minute i have my laptop set to go
into low power mode when on battery and the way we had things set up in our uh like suite we had like two bedrooms in a living room and in the living room there was a uh you know the common room essentially there was a table where we had our computer set up but no power at the table but there was no power at the table so we would charge up our laptops elsewhere and then you know just work at the table because Cause it was nice to have like a big work surface that we could, we could be at.
And that's fine. You know, the, the Apple Silicon max hold their charge quite well. You know, I had an external monitor plugged in, which uses some GPU ish stuff. And then, of course, I was using my camera and streaming video, which uses some GPU ish stuff. And I thought, oh, wait a minute. And so that day when I got back, I just plugged my Mac in and, you know, I strung like a series of cables across the floor. Really unsafe.
Thankfully, neither one of us tripped all over it in the middle of the night or something.
Thing uh but you know and then it was fine i thought okay and then i tried it with turning off that low power mode went on battery option which is in system settings battery on your laptop and the problem totally went away so low power mode can cause you some problems in terms of the performance of your mac or at least anecdotally based on my one test case it caused me some problems so just be aware of that i had forgotten all about that low power mode thing and
that's the reason it just didn't spring to mind as soon as i started having those issues but again you know kind of walking around it's like well there is one difference between the mac and my studio and the mac on this table here and that's that this this one doesn't have power applied so clearly it's more than just a monitor dimming yeah exactly right oh yeah for sure yeah Yeah, it cranks things way down. Way down. Yeah. Which makes sense. I mean, of course it does.
However, you know, I would have thought when asking the Mac to do more, it would crank things back up. You would think. And maybe it thought it was, right? But, you know, if Chrome wasn't the front most app, maybe it was using that as a signal to, like, deprioritize it. And of course, when I'm recording, Chrome is rarely the front most app. It's, you know, it's managing the connection, but I've got, you know, the agenda up. I've got notes up. I'm doing different things.
I'm, you know, got audio hijack going. So I'm constantly moving around. So anyway. Yeah. I noticed something similar on my, um, on my iPhone because I, you know, I'll watch videos or whatever at night and, um, got up one morning and I was watching something on YouTube and I'm like, man, the quality on this is really, really bad.
It's like 240 but my battery was at 10 percent oh yeah so same thing it had cranked i had gone into low power mode and in low power mode it's like okay we're only going to deliver you low quality video because that's going to save save battery yep which made sense and it's like oh okay i get it yep and i couldn't even change the options i think this is more of a youtube thing but it wouldn't even let me change the options and it's like oh i gotta plug it in plugged it in and then i could yeah
everything was fine yeah and to be fair you know i mentioned i was using an external screen. It was that ViewSonic 4K OLED gorgeous screen. Without my Mac plugged into power, my Mac was not only driving the graphics on that screen, but it was providing power to that. So the Mac's battery was being used for both of these things. So, I mean, I really was taxing my Mac, but that's why I bought it. So I could tax it. Like, you know, but I needed to tell it, I want to tax you.
And that's where that setting, you know, that was definitely on me. Yeah, it was in the way. Yeah. Yeah. So you don't, you don't carry around a, you don't travel with a 25 foot, uh, grounded power cord. I travel extension cable. We did have an extension to a power strip to plug us into. So I, I, I do in fact travel with a short extension cord with power and then also a 10 foot USB C power cable.
So, yeah. Oh yeah. No, I always have a short one, you know, with multiple outlets or whatever that I used to travel with.
It but uh yeah not like a big you know get across the room fortunately we didn't trip over it but that wasn't the danger the danger is the uneven floor in every room in that hotel yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah at least those at least those types of rooms that the conjoined rooms with the with the you know are you sure it's i think it's so when you're drunk you can walk straight without any Any problem. It's compensation. Yeah. I can confirm, Pete. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
It's we've been in a, you know, we've, it's the same type of suite we have, we've gotten every year. And so I've probably been in four or five of them and yeah, the floor in them is not even close to level. Like, like it is immediately noticeable by everyone. I presume it's to ensure water runs, you know, there's a big bathtub in the thing and stuff. So my, that's been always been my guess is it's like, we want to know if there's
some sort of, you know, overflow issue here. The water's all going there. No matter what. I wonder if it's even set up for it. Like, I wonder if there's literally a drain. So that if that water overflows, I bet there is to go like under the carpet or whatever. Right. I bet there is. I would do that. Yeah.
Yeah. Cause you know, some idiots going to leave the, and you know, we might be those idiots by the way, but we didn't, we weren't this time, but you know, somebody is going to screw something up. You've got hundreds of thousands of people traipsing through your building every year with the ability to turn on water and leave it on and walk away. And walk away. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. There's some forethought going on there probably. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. All right. Oh goodness.
We have, uh, you want to take us to Wayne, Pete? One more question. Yeah. Yeah, this week from Wayne. Wayne writes in, guys, I really enjoy your show every week. I think Adam was a great addition to the crew. I'm noticing a theme here, Dave. I know. Yeah. I agree. I absolutely agree. So do I. This has been awesome.
I have a question that I want to run past you guys. Could each of you give me your two cents on which router each of you have or would get today to replace an aging Apple Airport Extreme? I am currently still running the Xtreme because it just works, but would like to update to a current faster router. I currently have an M1 Max Mac Studio along with my current iPhone 15 Pro Max. I really appreciate all the terrific advice you guys give your listeners,
and we'll look forward to hearing what each of you have to say. Sincerely, Wayne. Amazing. Thanks, Wayne. Yeah, the first, I'm happy to share what I use, but the first question I asked, ask myself in any environment where I'm setting up wireless.
And so I would ask of you or have you ask of yourselves is, do you need or want the ability to have multiple access points, AKA a mesh system, or is your home such that you can do fine with just a single access point to broadcast and reach all the corners of your home? And that question, you may not know the answer to that question. My guess is you probably have a sense of whether you need that and you may already have mesh or you might be wanting to go that route.
So if it's just one router, I really, really like Synology's offerings. The RT6600AX and the WRX560 are the two that would be sort of the ones that I would recommend right now. The Synology web interface on their routers is full-featured, and when I say that, I can't stress enough just how full-featured it is. It's fairly easy to use if you're just setting it up and going, but if and when you want to add inbound VPN, great, it's got it right there.
You can do all kinds of, you know, DNS tweaking with it. There's all sorts of stuff that remote access to it is very robust and simple and smooth. It's just a great interface. And the routers are not underpowered. In fact, that's the wrong way to say it. The routers have plenty of horsepower to do everything you would need to do. So I'm a huge fan of these Synology routers and have been since they got into the router business. I wondered initially, I don't wonder this anymore.
But when they released the first router, the RT1900AC, it was like, well, this is sort of a departure for Synology. Is this a one-off kind of thing? Like, it was great, but I was really hesitant to, you know, go all in. And obviously it's not. They've now released, what, five different models of router over the years. So, yeah, that's where I would go with it. If you need mesh, it turns out the Synology mesh is pretty good. I switched back to it recently and was pleasantly surprised.
It doesn't suck. And you know what? It used to suck, especially for Apple users, but it doesn't anymore. And that's a good thing. They released it. Every mesh went through this, by the way. This is not unique to Synology. When Eero first came out, it kind of sucked. They needed to get it out into homes and gather data and learn how to get these things together. Orby was the worst when it came out, like it, you couldn't do half the things you needed to do.
And heaven forbid you took their advice and wired your ethernet for backhaul between the mesh points. It would just crater your host, this whole system. It was awful, but they've improved on it. Right? Like, and so this is how mesh goes. This is how a lot of tech goes. You, you know, you build it in the lab, you test it, You have maybe a group of 500 customers, maybe 1,000 customers to do your beta testing, but it's never enough.
You need more. And with wireless, no one gets to see what's in the way. And so troubleshooting is really kind of just, you need lots of data to build something that's robust. So Synology's mesh is there. If you want something simple that is going to work and you aren't interested in geeky features or anything like that, the Eero mesh is absolutely fantastic as well.
The TP-Link Deco model or line of routers, we talked about this last week from CES, they are budget-friendly, high-powered mesh system. It, I don't, I I'm careful with how I talk about their pricing because their pricing does not match everyone else's. They are half the price or less of everybody else and their quality and, and the, the feature set is on par with everyone else. So they, they just have a way of keeping things inexpensive. So that's, that's my thoughts on this.
Adam, what do you, what do you think on, on all of this? I agree with everything you said I will say well and especially like on the you know because I had Eero system back in the day I think it was a second gen system so it was pretty good sure I switched to, an Orbi Wi-Fi 6 system that I'm using now and I absolutely love.
I felt like it was mature enough at that point and it had you know pretty good reviews and stuff like that and I've had great success with it and found it very easy to set up. I think that's what it came down to for me too, was like, I just wanted something, plug in the, you know, the base unit, I plug in my internet connection. I set up the, you know, the satellite ones and boom, there I go.
Was not cheap. And then, you know, it was like 700 bucks at the time for the base and two, two, you know, remote units, but I had a lot of area I needed to cover it, cover out here. I got to cover all the way across the yard. So, and it works great. I have gigabit and, you know, even out here, which is not the best connection.
I'll typically, you know be running 600 megabits up and down from from here so i was shocked when i found out that you were on a wireless you know backhaul back and back and forth to the house i i had no idea if i had an idea i probably would have freaked out about the idea of like having you as a regular part of this show with that it's like oh man this is just gonna be a nightmare but we were several weeks in before it just came up in our pre-show
chat and was like wait what no that's not allowed. But it works fine like it's great yeah i would agree too like i mean if if really performance is your thing you got to go wired right if that's your number one priority like that's your only option but i mean if you want simple setup and you know the the orbi has worked great for me um but i agree i've looked many times at the sonology stuff uh you know i i agree with your assessment of the Deco stuff.
Like if you're looking to get something really solid and not spend $700 on a system. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. And then, um, in the, uh, in the chat, listen to Rod L suggests the new unify express from ubiquity. It's $150. It is a standalone router, which is not always what you get as part of the unified line. It's a, that's a very sort of a piecemeal mix and match thing where you get to build exactly the system you want.
This is its own gateway router and wi-fi six access point for 149 and it is full you unify capable so you can add other access points and mesh this thing and all of those things so that i i have not yet tested one of these but it's time so i i will but yeah talk about go talk about going high end if you want to do mesh i i did some work for a guy who had a unify like system throughout his house it's amazing commercial grade it's commercial grade for your
for your home or your office no they they really i and i ran unify here for quite some time as well um their inbound vpn was really the reason that i went back to synology uh because at the time anyway it was kind of janky in terms of what i wanted out of it and uh and so i went back but But, yeah, no, I've got some, in fact, I've got some Unify switches on my network now. Pete, I skipped over you. Yeah, no, you didn't skip to me. We're just, you know, third in line today, and that's fine.
But I cannot justify getting rid of my RT2600 by Synology yet. That thing has been cranking in my basement corner for years now. And as I told the Synology people last week, look, I'm up in the attic. attic. I'm in a finished attic in my third floor of my home. So that's three floors away from me and across the house.
And, and that's what I'm on right now. Now I also have the TP link decos because the only room in the house that doesn't get great wifi is my daughter's bedroom, which is below me, oddly enough. So how it goes through her bedroom and gives me great strength and great throughput. I don't know, but it does.
So that's the thing about wifi is you, you like, you don't get to see what's in the way yeah yeah yeah so it's in that sense it's it's a little weird but it it cranks throughout the house i love that router and i will say that it was uh out of warranty and we were having a hard time for some reason it was throttling and we couldn't figure it out dave spent a lot of time working with me on this router and we couldn't figure out why it was just.
Stopping and slowing down and not making things work right. So I wrote to Synology and said, hey, I'm going to buy a new router. I would love to get this into your hands though, so you could troubleshoot it and figure out what it's doing wrong. And instead, they just sent me a new router. And that's the kind of customer support that they give. They support things that are years old, years out of warranty. Will that happen forever and happen for everybody?
Probably not, but I've had great experience with them. And like you said, Dave, that the versatility of it takes it away from having to jailbreak your old SysLink or Linksys router. Yeah. You know, and having to put the DD word aftermarket software on it or firmware on it. And you don't need to do that. Once you've got a Synology router of any from the 1900 on all all the way up to their latest offering. You can do anything you want with those things. They're incredible.
So I love the Linksys. And then as Dave said, you know, we saw some of the TP-Link routers. You love the Synology, right? You said, you said, I love the Linksys. Oh yeah, no, I said Synology. We just came back from Vegas. I just wanted to make sure I, I like, I didn't want, I didn't want to leave that comment hanging. Yeah. Thank you for stopping me there. Yeah. And, but I did want to say, we, we did see some amazing routers from, from TP link that, that are also coming out.
So it's obviously, this is a very personal thing, right? What do you need? What meets your needs the best. But yeah, I don't think you can go wrong with, with Synology. It may, it's a little different in that it's so robust. You, it's going to be a learning curve. A little, I mean, only, only if you want it to be.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Well this is a common question that comes up because of this like i've had so many people say that they want to they move away from their uh airport extreme which was discontinued how long ago i held on to mine forever too because it was just the easiest thing in the world to set up and it just worked yep there's so many people that wish apple would get back into this game but i don't think they
ever will no i i think once like ero came once the the mesh world appeared And, and I really do think Eero was a, a driving force in Apple's decision not to head down that path because they did like they, they are as easy to use as the airport extreme was right. And so I think that's, that's where Apple was like, you know what? Somebody else is doing this better.
We don't have to be in this business. They had to be in the router business when the iBook came out because they were the – I believe they were the first consumer-targeted Wi-Fi router, right? There was none. So if you wanted to buy this iBook that had this magical wireless internet capability, well, how does that work? Well, you also need one of these. Okay, well, we'll sell you one, right? They were forced – I mean, they forced themselves into the router business,
and I think they were just as happy to get out. Oh, yeah, for sure. And it's funny, you mentioned the, you know, the Apple Airport Extreme and all that. And I still have an Airport Express sitting in my armoire, which I rarely, in fact, I never take it with me anywhere anymore because it's hard to find Cat5 Ethernet plug-in in most hotels anymore. But I did bring with us to Vegas that router we talked about a couple of weeks ago, the Barrel X by GLInet. By GLInet, yeah.
Yeah. And we played with that a little bit. It was a solid performance. Solid piece of gear. We did come off of it because when we were both on it and both trying to stream, it did throttle. Not to the point I don't think it would have stopped us. No, the problem was, and I never thought about this ahead of time, but the problem was that hotel, like many hotels, throttles each device.
One device. Right. So each device at that hotel got about, let's say, 20, 15 to 20 megabits down and about the same up. Well, if all of your devices are going through your one router, then all of your devices are throttled as though they are one.
And and that router makes life super simple especially for things like your kindle and and your you know your roku stick or whatever that can't do the captive portal and get on a hotel network they just make it super easy but they did throttle so as soon as we realized that it was like well pete and i are both going to be uploading video you know from here we don't need to. Intentionally put ourselves in a box like that. Cut our bandwidth in half. In half at best. Yeah.
So for that reason, which is not something I thought about. So it was nice to have that real world experience with it to be like, ah, okay, here is the one downside of doing it this way. We also found some added latency doing it that way, which of course makes sense because, you know, that's how that works. You know, when you're relaying a Wi-Fi connection, it's going to be,
it's going to have that. So the other, the coolest part I thought was you can then name it so that your computer doesn't know it's not home. Right. You know, I named it the same as my home network. All my stuff just joined. Yep. Yep. Yep. Yep. Yep. All right. We are almost at our limit here. So I think we've done a lot of cool stuff found in the previous episodes this week. So we'll save our cool stuff found that we were going to talk about this week for next week's episode.
I do want to take that minute that I love to take and thank all of you who are premium subscribers for your recent contributions. And you can learn more about the premium program at macgeekup.com slash premium. It is, of course, not mandatory. Tori. It's not even expected by us. It is. However, very, very, very much appreciated because all of your premium contributions really do help us do what we do. And so I want to thank those of you.
We'll start with the $10 contributions that have come in in the last week or so here. Here, thanks to Jeremiah from Edgewater, Cal from Russellville, Donald from Furlong, Chris from Chorleywood, James from San Antonio, Scott from Bourbonnaise, Mark from Coopersburg, Abel from Santa Rosa, and Neil from West Hartford for your $10 contributions. You rock. And then we have $25 contributions. The first five or so we don't have address info for because they have been with us for so long.
They've been with us longer than we started capturing that data, but longer than we had to capture that data, I should say. Joel, Craig, Dan, John, thanks to all of you, Richard from Quakertown, Greg from Los Angeles, Bruce from Alpharetta, Karen from Chagrin Falls, Terrence from Avon Lake, Corey from Kenmore, Warren from Fairview, Jeff from Del Mar, and Paul from Tunbridge Wells. Wells. And then so for your, thanks to you for your $25 contributions and then a $30 contribution.
Thanks to Dennis in Chapel Hill and a $60 contribution. Thanks to John in Switzerland. So thanks to all of you. You rock. It is true. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Um, yeah, that's, that's good. I think, I think we wrap it here cause otherwise we're just going gonna go and go and go and we've already you know used a lot of time this week so we'll uh we'll take it thanks for listening folks thanks for hanging out with us thanks for all your questions thanks for your quick tips and thanks for your cool stuff found we'll just you know roll those forward we've got some cool good ones too like something about
time machine a cool stuff found for time machine that i have i didn't not i didn't know existed and i am 100 gonna install it on my mac now that i'm home because it's so we'll learn about that next week i promise thanks to cash fly for providing all the bandwidth to get the show from us to you thanks to uh well like i said everybody that made everything possible for this past week make sure to check out our sponsors for this episode of course
barebones.com and then mac updater ccc backup and collide for our ces ES coverage sponsorship. Follow us all on Twitter and Mastodon. Links are in the show notes at MattKeyCab.com. Music. Adam. Sir. Do you have anything left to say? Maybe Pete's shirt is inspiration. I don't know. Don't get caught. Music.