It's time for Mac Geek Cab, and I'll bring us our cool stuff found in our gift guide for the week. I like to have a pop socket or some sort of handle on the back of my iPhone, but also sometimes I need to charge my iPhone while I'm out and about. And this is why I like the pop socket battery pack. It's got a pop socket on it. It is MagSafe, sticks to the back of my phone, and I can still hold the phone with the pop socket on it. And that way I can charge and yet everything still works great.
And right now that's available for one penny less than 40 U.S. Dollars at Amazon.com. We'll put a link in the show notes. More cool stuff found in our gift guide like this. Plus your questions answered today on Mac Geek Gap 1064 for Monday, November 18th, Mickey Mouse's birthday. It's also Minnie Mouse's birthday And there are a couple Is this like Allison and Steve? I don't know 2024! Folks, and welcome to MacGeekCab, the show where we share cool stuff found like that.
We share quick tips like that, yours and ours, also yours and ours with the cool stuff found. And we share your questions and we try to answer them. We string them together into an agenda so that we all have an excellent opportunity to learn at least five new things every single time we get together. Our sponsor for this episode is incogni.com slash MacGeek, where you can use code MacGeek to get 60% off an annual plan of their data removal and monitoring service.
We'll talk more about that in a little bit for now here in Durham, New Hampshire. I'm Dave Hamilton.
You almost forgot who you were.
No, I almost said something about the weather and then decided not to, but it did sound like I forgot who I was, and that's also not false.
It happens to us as we get older But I am Adam Christensen here in South Dakota And here.
Live in Dubai Which beats the alternative? It's Pilot Pete 1064, crime in progress or subject-wanted property found? Not sure which one this is I'm thinking property found since we're going to be doing some cool stuff found That's
What I think, yeah, that sounds appropriate I'm a gift guide today Yeah.
Yeah, yeah, yeah I like it Good stuff. Yeah. Don't forget about our giveaway, folks. MacGeekUp.com slash giveaway. This month we're giving away the OWC Express 1M2. So go get your – and you can enter more than once. There are ways that we've actually carved out for you to be able to enter more than once. So you can up your chances for that fun little thing. So, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's good stuff. Love it.
Shall we – we said we would do some gift guide-y things. Shall we keep going with our gift guide-y stuff, Pete?
Yeah, absolutely. There's a link in the show notes. I don't have any of these with me, but they are rechargeable LED flashlight gloves. And, man, could I have used them last week. I put in a transfer panel for the portable generator to go to our home. Home so if you know we get a power out it's just turn flight light up the generator plug it into the house and then you know run things like the furnace and the refrigerator that sort of thing.
And I had this really cool little neck LED flashlight, but my hands were still casting shadows and it was hard to see into the electrical box. These have little LED lights on the thumb and the fingers. Avoid that whole shadowy thing. So it's pretty cool, whether you're working in the dark, under the sink, in the car, dark spaces, what have you. Yeah. The one size fits all. They're stretchy nylon. And for about $14 on Amazon, you can get yourself a pair. LED flashlight gloves.
Interesting.
And your index finger and your thumb are what kind of hold them. That's where the lights are. But your fingertips are through and, oh yeah, they're waterproof for the most part. You can get them wet if you're working on plumbing. And I don't know that I would submerge them.
Sure. I've never been a fan of wearing gloves while I play the drums, but this might look really cool on stage. So I might have to get them wet.
Oh yeah. Right?
I don't know why that's the first place my brain went with this, but it is.
It's kind of what you do, Dave.
Well, yeah, kind of. Kind of. Kind of. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. I'm going to get a pair and find a place and a way to use them. So, yeah, fun stuff. I'm reminded of John Bonham, the drummer from Led Zeppelin, at the beginning of Song Remains the Same when the stage is black. And he starts the intro to rock and roll with light up drumsticks. And the kit is his Vista Lights, which were clear acrylic drums. Oh, yeah. So it's like, okay, is there some thing where that makes sense to
do? So maybe. The answer is maybe. But also handy for all the purposes that you just described. This to me, I like to get every year, I like to get a kind of a handy, and I don't mean hands, but this serves both purposes, but handy like tool, gizmo, gadget thing that I give to everybody. Something they'll wind up using around the house. And this seems like me.
Right.
Maybe it could be that.
Yeah. That was pretty cool. Funny you used to say that. Last year, mine was the wool hat that had a little LED battery headlight, which is good for walking and, you know, that kind of stuff. Which now just became my second.
I was just going to say, yeah.
It's got a little flat LED headline in it.
Oh, look at that. There you go. Yeah, look at that. Something like, just like a beanie with a headlamp.
Yeah, it's a beanie wall hat. It has a little rechargeable, USB rechargeable. Light, isn't it? Excellent for walking. Excellent, again, for seeing what you're doing. But I like the gloves better as far as casting shadows. My hands cast shadows when you're doing fine work, like putting twisties on your electrical wires in your main house panel. It's good to see that that's secure.
All right, well, we've got links for both of these things in the show notes. No, this is great. Pete, you just want to do the whole episode, or should I? Yeah, I got you.
You guys come back in an hour, and I'll be done.
Sounds good.
Uh, listener Craig sent in a, uh, a nice little catch that he found on Amazon. When, when I prepped this, the, the four pack of air tags that Craig sent in was $69 and 99 cents. Right now it is $79 and 98 cents. Uh, that's still a pretty good deal on these things. That's, that's, you know, 20 bucks an air tag instead of 25 bucks an air tag.
I have been known to buy a four-pack or two and then just drop an AirTag in each person's stocking so that they have an extra one in their world to do with as they please.
For stocking. S-T-A-L-K.
For stocking. Oh, yeah. I see what you're saying.
Oh, no.
Maybe not so much that. Maybe not so much that. Remember before when we were muting your microphone, Pete? Yeah.
I'm.
Sorry i'll be back no it's all good
I i got some stuff for you guys let's let's do this um and this is i think good because you know you've got the holidays coming up and you might spend time with family so this might even be some things you want to pick up before the holidays um my family we're huge into board games i've got a giant board game collection um so we love sitting around and playing board games especially around on the holidays and stuff like that, what family get togethers.
But what I thought I would pick for you all is some versions of board games that I definitely recommend the physical board game, but that also have a really great iOS version of the game. So you can play solo on your iPad, you can play pass and play some of these have some of these have networks, so you can play across iPads, or even if you aren't physically together, you might be able to play these games. So some of our favorites are Settlers of Catan, which is a really, really great fun game.
I would highly recommend, and there's a very good... Ios version of that game uh ticket to ride uh which is also amazing all kinds of expansions and and add-ons and things that you can get um so we love that one that one comes out quite frequently uh and then there's another game called dominion which is also excellent um and super fun so any of those I would recommend. And again, they're all recommendations as pure tabletop games or also just the iOS versions.
And you can get them obviously on either platforms too, Android and those sorts of things.
Yeah, it looks like there were Steam versions of these.
Yeah, a lot of these are really good on iPad.
Yeah. So now that you mentioned, I just want to take a quick diversion on Steam because it used to be, I thought, only a Windows thing. And my son had it on his computer years and years ago. And it's basically, Steam is not something to be afraid of. Download it, install it. It's, I guess, would you call it a shell program?
No, it's an app game marketplace. Yeah, it's a marketplace for games. And I don't know where Apple is with their thing, right? They're changing some of the rules. Apple has banned these sorts of things on iOS, right? Because they want you to go through the Mac App Store. And I know there's been some changes, I think, over in the EU where they've had to open it up a little bit. I don't know. They're kind of changing their policies on some of these sorts of apps.
So it'll be interesting to see what happens moving forward. But, yeah, no, it's an app store for video games. Yeah, for downloadable video games, basically.
I guess what I was going for was that Steam is an operating system for these games on which to be a platform to work.
In other words you can't work.
The games in macOS
They have the stream deck which is a product which allows you to play games from, steam and i think that i don't know what operating system a steam deck is based on i'm not in deep in that in that world but yeah they do have like handheld devices or a handheld device i know that's like a mini computer but i don't know oh interesting it runs their own os or it's a very android.
Or when steam runs on your mac it's not running a different operating system it is it is it is the app store for the game to get to you yeah it's just in the past the games that were in steam were all for windows or mostly right it it wasn't always a cross-platform thing is where i think you're you're going with this p and yeah i
Guess i guess that's it and you know and i you know we like play the jackbox game jackbox games you can get those you know on steam those are fun And probably another cool stuff found then, I guess, the Jackbox games, because you can sit around. Everybody has their iPhone, which is their controller device, and the main game is broadcast up on your television. There's trivia games and all sorts of things that are a lot of fun.
Yeah, I mean, they also have that for tvOS, so you could just play from your TV or just with a set of iPads and iPhones. Yeah, Jackbox is amazing.
It's fun. I agree. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Fun.
Yeah.
All right.
And Paul, sorry, Paul did confirm the Steam Deck device runs a Steam OS, which is based on Linux. So that's where some of the confusion may come into play, too, because Steam, the app store thing is one thing. And then there's the Steam Deck, which is a computer, you know, like handheld gaming system that runs Steam operating system. Yeah.
So I think we've confused everybody more than we've.
Oh, no. No, Pete, I couldn't possibly have planned this if I tried. But my next suggestion here for our Cool Stuff Found Gift Guide is also in the steam category. It is a smart humidifier. We have one of these in our bedroom. We live in the land where heat is a thing.
Like we heat our homes and uh and that dries out our homes and so we are big fans of putting humidifiers throughout the home especially in our bedrooms and having a smart humidifier we've had this thing the dreo smart humidifier d-r-e-o of course there's links in the show notes at mackeycap.com for all this but this thing we've had it for about a year and it is one of the best smart home gadgets that I've ever had because it takes for me that the reason I say that is because
it takes a headache away I don't have to think about it anymore I program the thing to start a couple hours before we go to bed and it does its whole thing and then it goes into dark mode at about the time we go to sleep it runs while we're sleeping and then it stops in the morning it will give me a notification if i need to uh refill the water and i it just it becomes a reactive thing instead of a proactive thing where it's like oh i gotta go up and turn on the
Humidifier you know before we go to bed so that the bedroom's this and it's like oh and otherwise you leave it on all day and then you just burn through extra water and so having this smart humidifier it's 90 bucks and it does a fantastic job and of course it's it's smart in many ways including you set the humidity the desired humidity of the room and then it it regulates that it's not just kind of going nuts you know the whole time so i i this thing's
been great for us i really like it so yeah yep yep very cool yeah i say prices
That price is good.
I agree i'm
Thinking i had to buy just a you know a humidifier you know because you run them when you've got like when you're sick or whatever, right? Yeah. And I want to say that was at least 40 or 50 bucks that I had to pay for one of those things. And it's not smart. It's just, you know, plug it and turn it on. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah.
Wow.
Nice. I know. It's a good thing. Yeah, yeah. Yep. What's next, Pete?
Well, here's one that, you know, you could probably, gents that are listening to the show, you could probably give this to yourself, and it'll make your wife happy. Ladies that are listening to the show, you've got that drawer with a million batteries in it and a screwdriver and a book of matches and that kind of stuff. The battery thing was a constant thing around our home until last year when I actually bought one of these for myself. And I'm like, man, where have you been all my life?
And it's the Ontel Battery Daddy Battery Organizer Storage Case. And it comes with a tester to tell you whether a battery is good or not to throw it away or keep it. And it holds, I think, something like 180 batteries, AA's, AAA's, C's, D's, 9 volts, button cells.
And that battery drawer is no longer the bane of our kitchen existence because that thing sits it's it's a little it's about one foot by maybe 10 inches sitting in a little plastic suitcase with a clear cover so you can see how many batteries you have left of any given size down in the floor of our pantry out of the way and when i need a battery guess what i know exactly where they are i go right to it i get it yeah
You don't have to dedicate a drawer to this anymore oh right
And honey said wait a minute where'd all the triple you know once that battery blister pack is broken where'd all the triple a's go i know they're here everywhere yeah yeah yeah whoa
I you know what i have worse i don't have a drawer i have a shelf and the batteries are like falling off of that thing.
And rolling
Onto the floor and i i'm ordering this now.
Yeah when you go sit on santa's lap i'm probably
Ordering two of them yeah.
Yeah that's great
It has been it's one of those things that you you kind of buy and you go okay this will be cool and you go whoa I didn't realize I needed this as bad as I do.
Yeah.
Can you go back to that screen, though? I have a question, because it looks like the $181 one is almost $30, but then they have a $151 for $15?
Yep.
That is correct. What's the difference?
It holds less batteries.
But, I mean, only by $30 for half the price, if I'm reading that right, or is that $2857?
No, it's $14.98 and $28.57. $14.98 for the $150 battery one.
So I'd almost get two of the $150s.
Oh, yeah.
Right, then you get $300 instead of $100. Almost double.
Yeah, that's interesting.
Twice the price.
Pricing on Amazon is always a little weird. Yeah, it's how it is. I'm looking to see.
But maybe it doesn't have the tester. I don't know. Maybe there were some features. That's what I was wondering.
There's another one that holds 93 batteries for $25. so yeah like the prices are all over the place it's just yeah it's just how it'd be
I like the one that pete was showing there because it's got the little handle you can carry it around until.
One i is the one i have and i really like it and and you know what that little battery tester is so much more accurate than i don't think people know you can test a double a and a triple a by wetting your finger and still putting it to your tongue and you'll taste a little salt you go okay it's got it but you'd have no idea you know unlike the nine holes remember you touch those to your tongue and you go ah yeah
I still do that yes i
Still do that that's still how i test them yeah that's how i learned when i was a kid yeah.
Yeah yeah all right what's next so
All right i got one for you again i'm trying to i i'm sticking in the in the fun realm i like toys and games and stuff like that i'm also as people might may or may not know i am a developer and something i've always been envious of is people who can do electrical circuits and electronics and stuff like that. I'm always trying to find ways to learn that. This one is called the Adventure Kit. Uh, 30 days lost in space. It's now from a company called crafting table. They used to be inventor.io.
Uh, but what this is, is this is a little, it's, it's a little kit. It comes with, uh, raspberry pie hero, just a version of a raspberry pie, and then a breadboard and all the circuits and LEDs and lights and, and all the bits and pieces and components.
Um, for those of us as old as I am, you might remember, you know, it's like the, it's like the modern version of the Radio Shack electronic kits you used to get as a kid where you'd put the little wires under the springs and there'd be an LED that you could light up and stuff like that. This is the modern version of that. It's, I think, $97. But then what's great about it is it comes with a QR code link to a series of videos.
And basically, the concept is you're lost in space, your spaceship has kind of gone down and you need to like start fixing circuits and stuff like that so they walk you through like you know starting with the basics like programming a blinky light and then moving on to all kinds of more advanced things where you're working with potentiometers and and lcd panels and and you know building a lock code uh with a you know a 10 pin panel and it's just really really fun great for
kids who are interested in maybe learning programming and stuff like that um you know you plug it into your mac and you use the standard you know raspberry pi yeah uh ide and stuff like that to to uh program and it teaches you to program and also teaches you to build the circuitry and teaches you the science behind it and it'd be great for again kids and it's a tiny little kit it comes in a little case it's all self-contained so you know
a great stocking stuff or actually if you're looking for something like that because it's a really small little kit but it has all the bits and pieces and components you need to get going huh.
That's cool gamifying i bought
One as an adult and i've been running through it and i love it yeah yeah you know it's never too late to learn too if it's something that you're interested it's good you know for yourself too yeah absolutely.
Yeah it is never too late to learn i i just talked on gig gab uh and the episode won't be out until early December, but I talked with a guy who just decided to become a songwriter in his fifties, like, which is a typical. If you like, to me, people start writing songs in their late teens and early twenties. And if they don't start, then it, I, I, I think he might be the first person I've ever met that started in his late forties, early fifties.
And, and now like turned his band from a cover band to an original band. So it's never too late to learn. That's a long, It's a long-winded way of saying that. Huh. Cool. My next addition here is the Sonos. Sonos just put out headphones for the first time and people have been clamoring for the headphones from Sonos for a long time.
These are you don't have to be this could be your first sonos product right you don't have to be in the sonos ecosystem to use them these are excellent headphones the quality of them is like audio quality is exactly what you would think no active noise canceling uh there is a cool feature where if you have a sonos sound bar um they have a thing called tv audio swap where you can have the sound from your tv just automatically go to your um to your sonos which which it's
similar to what you can do if you have an apple tv with airpods right the um one of my favorite parts about these is the case of them it it is super thin which i love for like putting in my you know my travel bag or whatever and then uh you know and then it it opens up and the earphones are in there and they're just ready to rock like so i i don't know why more headphone vendors aren't making cases there and when i say super thin
it's maybe an inch and a half thick like it's not a big bulky thing they um you know they they fold flat in the in the case and then Pop them and turn them on they are bluetooth uh and they have all the you know all the latest bluetooth tech they they sound fantastic and they're not they're not cheap they're 449 which is 100 bucks less than apple's 549 for airpods max so uh yeah and
You know think for that extra hundred bucks you could not get a case.
Oh that's right oh yeah that's right or whatever apple
People call their case their little...
Yeah, that's right. Yep, 30 hours of battery life.
What a novel idea, Dave. Really expensive headphones, and you provide a really nice case that probably costs you about 20 bucks to make. That's right. Maybe even less. That's not a knock on the quality of the case, but the point is we know how manufacturing works, right? You can make something pretty decent for not a lot of cash.
This is a decent case, and they found a way to include it at a price that's $100 less than Apple. Well, you know, you're not paying the Apple tax. But, yeah, super comfortable. Obviously, high-end travel headphones is where I would put these in the realm of things. But, I mean, they live up to that promise.
Uh i've been i've used them i used them actually on my train trip down to pepcom and back and it was like oh this is so nice so yeah and and um they've got the the um the atmos head tracking you know all of those things too so you get you get that full real space it's spatial audio right it it works you know it's great yeah so
So i've got a quick question and it may have been a bit of a verbal tick, but it sounded like you said no. No active noise canceling
Oh i'm glad you i'm glad you said that it there it does have active noise canceling okay it does yes
Sounds good i think you were going down one path and then switched to active noise canceling i think so it sounded like you said and no active
Thank thank you oh
Yeah okay cool yeah so yeah my son donated a pair of beats to the airlines last summer on our trip so maybe this would be a good yeah
That case would be a good thing to put an air pod or an air tag in rather so right yeah that's a great idea it it charges with usbc it also allows you to play audio over usbc so you can get lossless audio to these over usbc you can get lossless audio via bluetooth but you have to be using it's not available on ios yet the the the um the codec that's required for that is like the snapdragon aptX thing or whatever it is it's only available on some android devices but it wouldn't surprise me if
eventually apple gets there with ios because okay you know lossless over bluetooth it would be a wonderful thing and i'm sure it is i've never experienced it because i don't have an android phone that supports the snapdragon aptX thing but you can get lossless over usbc and of course you can uh go from like a three and a half millimeter jack to usbc if you need to plug in on the airplane or whatever like it all those things are supported and all that stuff.
Nice.
Yabble!
All right. Well, I'm going to take us to one that this is kind of a repeat from last year. We covered it when Rod L wrote in about it, and I bought one and used it some this year. And then I had some difficulties with the VPN, and it was out of favor, but they updated their firmware on it. It is the GL-INET Barilax, that's B-E-R-Y-L-A-X travel router. And it is a wonderful little piece of gear that I have created the SSID that is the same as my home SSID.
So when I get to the hotel, I turn it on, and I use my computer screen to log in to the hotel splash page. And then all of my devices, my iPad, my iPhone, my laptop, automatically connect as if I am at home. So that's one of the many good features of it. Let's see what else. Like I said, it supports several commercial VPNs, NordVPN, PIA VPN, all of those automatically. So it's easy to get those in there. It operates on the open WRT firmware Lucy.
So you can get in there and really get granular on how you want it to perform. It's got a two and a half gigabit WAN port, a gigabit LAN port. And when I was looking around for some information on it, it came up with a great idea. You can power it with a battery pack on an airplane, and instead of having to pay, you know, 40 bucks or 80 bucks to get your entire family Wi-Fi connected on the airplane by one Wi-Fi connection, And your entire family can use that network on the airplane.
And your Kindle will get online because it knows your home. Like that trick, I want to re-shine that light because this is a great trick. Giving your travel router the same SSID password as your home network is the key to this. Because then you just connect this and you're done. And this sounds we tried this in you got you had this last year and we tried it in vegas and it was with mixed results sounds like they've they've upped the game of the firmware on this substantially over the last year
I i think so and i was looking at uh a video of a guy who was using it now i remember we were capped at about 20 megabits in each direction but i think that was the you know that was like the hotel cap and therefore as we began to use it each one of our machines came down a little bit so so that was there but yeah uh i saw a video online of a guy using this and he was getting easily 900 megabits okay up and down yeah because he connected it to his home router well
Sure yeah connecting via ethernet versus connecting it was the wi-fi relaying in our scenario that was not so great
Yeah and that video he did the same thing in the wi-fi repeater and and he was still up in the three four hundred range um that's great so it it was yeah i think the hotel was limiting us to 20 megabits per second oh sure on top of it but yeah in which you know we could each get 20 on our own machines if we went to the router we were down to 10 that that's
Right it was that the hotel limited each wi-fi device to 20 megabits and because this was seen as one we were sharing that pipe that's right that i remember now yeah but
Still a wonderful piece of gear yeah it just makes it nice i'm able to watch youtube tv in dubai
Because because you vpn into your
House vpn into the house and you know i mean you could do that with others but then you're turning is the vpn on is it off and that that sort of thing and you know it's still a pain now it won't let me watch the local networks because the laptop and the ios devices all that youtube tv demands to know your location yes
Yeah yes they have to I think that's part of their license. So, yeah, yeah.
Exactly.
Interesting.
Interesting. Don't watch the networks that much anyway.
Right, right, right. Yeah. I watch the networks through channels, no matter where I am.
It works great. I do the same. Yeah, I do the same. Yeah. But the TV everywhere doesn't let me watch, then, the movie channels. I don't get those. Correct. In channels.
Oh, great. Good point. Yeah, so you've got to bounce back and forth. Oh, yeah. That makes sense. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yep. Cool. Awesome. Great. My my next contribution, which I think is my last, at least as far as I have on my list, is something we have had for a very long time in our house. And as our kids moved to their own homes on the other side of the state and on the other side of the world, we made sure to get them these. This is the Skylight frame.
It is, I've tested a lot of the different digital photo frames. It's Wi-Fi connected photo frame that you can, there's an app you can use to send photos to it. You can also just forward photos to an email address that you set up with Skylight and that also works. So whatever, whatever way you want to do it. And it's simple. It just works.
When new photos come in, they just get part of the rotation and it will expire old ones out, you know, but it supports, you know, like 8,000 photos on the original one, which is what we all have. The 10 inch original. They do now have a 15. The 10 inch original is available for 140 bucks. They have a new 15 inch frame that is, I think, about 189 and maybe a little more. And then they've got the Skylight Frame 2, which supports video and some other things, like sort of baked into it.
But so there's different different versions and sizes. But we all have the 10 inch versions in our in our respective homes. And it's awesome. It's a really cool way. A, we just get to see family photos or whatever photos we want. For us, it's mostly family photos just on rotation in the kitchen. If, you know, our daughter in Italy takes some pictures and she can just forward those to the frame and now we've got those and it just appears for us.
And it's like, oh, there's a little gift. Like a frame shows up. It's like you have no photos. Tap the thing on the frame and it shows us the new pictures. It's like, oh, look, there's there's sky. And it's cool.
So that's awesome.
Yeah, it really, it's one of my favorite uses of technology to just kind of bring us all closer together in a very low friction way. Just send the pictures and you're done. And I'll often sit like in my hotel room at night, like when we were at Disney, I would sit in my hotel room at night after I took a bunch of pictures and be like, all right, I'm going to send these off. And then we get home and there's like, you know, 40 new pictures from all the
days that we were at Disney kind of pulled together. And it's like, oh, yeah, look, we just got back and now we can see those photos. It it makes that process just and it's on all the time in our kitchen, which which is kind of part of the thing I love. It's just there like a photo would be so.
That's awesome. Yeah, we gave our daughter one similar to that when she went off to college. And so, you know, the problem is you got to remember to put the photo mail, the photos to her. It's actually, that's how we do it is we email, send it to an email address. Yeah. And so very cool. Yeah. Okay. Well, I think we've talked about some version of this before or not. The one I have is the Wonderboom. I've got the Wonderboom 3,
which is a little portable speaker. It's about the size of a softball. The Wonderboom 4 is now out, which is USB-C, as I recall. This one is a micro USB.
Okay.
Charging thing, but many, many, many hours on it. It is parable with the other Wonder Booms, so you could do a stereo setup. My first question is, I'm walking up the stairs of the airplane to my first officer as he's about to do the walk around, is classic rock or country? And he's like, what are you talking about? And then I have this set up. So we have nice music. I use my SiriusXM app on my iPad and play music while we're doing the setup.
Sometimes you're sitting there for an hour, hour and a half waiting to go. And so you've got a nice little music feed. And the sound on it is fantastic. The plus and the negative on it, those are actually volume control buttons. Cool. So Bluetooth and I
Describe for people how big it is if they're not watching the video again,
Probably about a little bigger than a softball, but not much. Great. Totally waterproof. It, uh, you could, you could toss it in water and it would be fine. It's got a little bit of a, uh, uh, I guess they call it a harness or a tether. It's, it's elastic.
Oh, okay.
But, man, it is strong. I hang it on the outside of my backpack with a carabiner. And so it isn't taking up valuable space inside my backpack. And it, you know, I think pause and continue, power button on the front, pause and continue in the center, and a Bluetooth pairing, forcing pairing mode in the back.
And this is from, I mean, Ultimate Ears, which is now on my Logitech. Yeah. Yeah.
So I think, yeah, Ultimate Ears. And then what I did is I took some gold Sharpie on the bottom with my phone number and my contact information and all that so I could get it back. I actually had a different speaker, not the Wonderboom. I had a different speaker go all the way to heavy maintenance in China once, and it got back to me.
Oh, nice.
Took about three months, but it got back to me.
Very cool.
Probably could use that loop to hang one of those AirTags off of.
Thank you. That's not a bad idea at all.
Oh, yeah.
Not a bad idea at all. Yes.
Oh, then you'd know where it was while it was making its way back to you. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Interesting. Well, I glued an AirTag using that rubber case thing to the back of my Kindle and got to the hotel room one night and went, man, it had fallen down in between the seat and the bulkhead on the airplane, and there it sat. And fortunately, I was able to go back and get it. The airplane had not left as yet.
That's good. That's good.
Yeah. Yep. Nothing like trudging out to the airport at 1 o'clock in the morning.
You could glue an air tag to the bottom of that. Somebody makes little pouches, I think, that you can get for your air tags that have double sticky, super strong, 3F double sticky tape on them.
Yeah, it's actually one of those little rubber pouches that I glued, and then I'd stuck the air tag in that. So to the bottom of the Kindle, but I use a E6000 glue. It's that glue is amazing. It ain't coming off.
Cool.
Cool.
Yeah. Well, folks send us your, I, and I, well, first of all, I will include the elevation lab sticky adhesive air tag mount in the thing. There's it's available for 13 bucks on Amazon. So I'll put, I'll put a link to that in the show notes. Yep. Yep.
And that looks like it's, I don't know if it's waterproof. Is it waterproof?
It is.
Yeah, waterproof AirTag stick-on holder, so it completely seals in the AirTag.
Yeah.
That's cool.
People say to surface-mount it on your bike or your paddleboard. Somebody's got it on just to show that. Actually, that's pretty. The picture of the paddleboard is the origami paddler, which is the foldable kayaks that Lisa and I have. But, yeah, put it on your skis. Oh, what a great idea. Oh, yeah. Huh. It's got a screw top design. That's how it stays waterproof. Huh?
Huh?
All right. Yeah, I'll put a link to that in the show notes. That's a bonus one. That's great. Folks, if you've got stuff to add, feedback at MacGeekGab.com. We will be doing, you know, it's the time when we all kind of start thinking about these sorts of things. So, yeah.
Please. No, don't send it there. Send it to feedback at MacGeekGab.com.
That was feedback at MacGeekGab.com, Dave.
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Wait, is that? Wait, never mind. Brian and Jason, with a casual 50 years of internet industry experience, have been podcasting for over a decade with more than 650 episodes under their belts. These guys have seen the information superhighway go from the shiny Star Trek dream of teleporting to work to, well, Dystopian nightmares straight out of some William Gibson novel, complete with legless avatars and more vaporware than you can shake a USB stick at. Flying cars? Ha!
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Get to some questions. Yeah, I can start us off. Shana has one for us. Says my nearly new to me laptop suddenly has virus pop-ups but no virus scan is finding what it is help please uh.
I think i know what this is um okay Go into Safari, Settings, Websites, Notifications, and look at that list often. And it's usually at the top of the list is a site with no name, so it doesn't list like a URL or even an IP address. And the icon is often like systems, the same icon as system settings.
That is usually where these kinds of things that act like they're a virus but aren't actually a virus and they're trying to get you to click the link to bring you to some website where you're going to wind up you know eventually giving up your data or you know whatever right and usually it's i mean you agreed to let this website show you notifications but man like i wind up doing that all the time because we're so used to agreeing to cookies now that it's you see
the little pop-up come up and you're like yeah just allow allow allow just move on move on i wind up going into this part of safari probably once a month just to clear out the things that i accidentally said yes to but uh but when you see those things and a virus can't find them safari notifications look like system notifications because they are system notifications and they can try to trick you into this so my guess is that's where this is that's my guess
Conware rears its ugly head again it conned you into
Yeah believing
Believing something just ain't so
Yeah i just so could
This also just be should you also probably check to make sure somehow you haven't allowed a certain website to do just like pop-ups like could it be a standard just like it could just be like pop-up window like.
Oh i see like pop-unders or pop-ups like that kind of yes it could but then the site would have to be open for that to happen like in one of your tabs i've
Seen it where uh god so where i've seen this happen on legitimate websites is legitimate websites use ad services. And ad services often are now pretty much automated, right? So it's like an ad network where people just go bid for ads and that sort of thing. And hackers or con people will inject bad ads with bad code into ad networks. So you're on, I don't know, CNN or whatever website, legitimate website, a ad loads, and then the ad runs that malicious pop-up code.
Yeah. Yes, that, yeah. Yeah. So, yeah, that could be it too. Yep. Yep.
Just another. Yes. I think you're probably onto the notification thing is probably more correct, but I'd also check, you know, make sure you haven't accidentally allowed some, because maybe you wanted a legitimate site to give you a pop-up. And at some point in the past, you're like, yeah, you know, like this Apple website that I go to every day, I want to see a pop-up for whatever reason.
Yeah, I have, there are some in there that, in that list that are on, and I leave them on. But I find for me, I wind up saying yes, and it's the yes.
Yeah, that makes sense.
The allow click of regret.
Be careful about the folks. Read those pop-ups. Don't fall victim to pop-up fatigue or notification fatigue or whatever we're going to call it.
Yep.
And it's only gotten worse.
Dave, I'm sorry. Did you say delete those? I was trying to look, because we've got the agenda. I'm looking ahead on the agenda. Of course. So I missed. Did you say delete those or did you say put deny? Because I have several listed in my notifications that I have deny. I don't want them coming back.
Well, that's the thing is usually, yeah, if you hit deny, then it won't ask you the next time you go there, which is probably a better way to do it. But yeah, I often wind up just deleting them. So, you know, just to keep the, it's, I don't know. But you're right. Like that wouldn't be a bad way to, to do it. And then that way, when you, you know, if you, if you go, if it is a website that you visit on the regular, yeah, not too bad. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. Good stuff. And I'm, I'm even finding them on this. Now I'm getting distracted because I'm looking on this computer here and finding things and it's like, yeah, I don't really want those. Like there's, there's, thank you. I just denied Apple newsroom. Why did it come back to allow? Okay. Now it's gone. All right. Great. I just not on this computer. I don't want, this is my podcast machine. Don't, don't need the news. No, right. Yeah. All right.
Now I need to get out of that so that I can find Dan's question for you, Pete. Right. Dan asked, he says, I love the show. And the three of you have brought a nice newer spin to it too. Great. I'm glad to hear it. Thank you for saying that, Dan. We're always looking to kind of keep things moving forward. Dan says, Because I have a 2019 27-inch iMac, the last of the Intels. I use it only for personal use, documents, media organization, surfing the web.
My last iMac I kept for nine years. Is there any advantage for me to upgrade to a mini M4 now? I go back and forth in my head whether to try to get the money together now and pull the plug or just ride this one out for another couple of years and then get the newest then. thanks for any advice
Okay, Dan, take out your notepad and write this down because here's your clearing answer. It depends. Sorry, I had to do it. It depends. So, and it does. I mean, this is the most personal of questions. And he says what he uses it for. And the one that kind of caught my eye is media organization. Okay, are you doing handbrake and that sort of thing?
Then maybe you do want to upgrade. And when I wrote back to Dan, I told him the story of why I upgraded from my Intel Mac to my first MacBook Pro with an Apple silicone chip in it, which was my nephew showed up at the house with a base MacBook Air M1. And that thing absolutely smoked the benchmarks on my MacBook Pro.
I'm like, oh, my, this is amazing. So, I upgraded right away because I wanted to be able to use Handbrake to convert MKVs to MP4s and do that sort of thing and do it quickly and efficiently. So, if all you're going to do is web surf and email and write some documents and pages and perhaps use numbers for spreadsheets, that sort of thing, I'd keep that beautiful 27-inch iMac going as long as I could.
Um and you know and what a beautiful monitor i mean i you know i'm of the age when the largest tv you could get in your home was a 25 inch 480 line colored console that was a heavy piece of furniture now you've got this ultra high definition beautiful monitor that you could convert that into eventually i so uh i love that i love that machine and i would keep it if that's all you're using it for.
If you're going to do any heavy crunching, yeah, you will not be disappointed with the M series of chips that Apple puts out. So how's that for a clear definite maybe?
I agree 100% with Pete. I am rocking right now a 2019, you know, what is this, a 16-inch? I can't remember what the size. MacBook Pro. And I am going to ride this machine until it dies, dies, before I'm going to replace it. I mean, until it's just completely obsolete, but it runs the current operating system. It does everything I need to do. I can still record and edit podcasts on it, which is probably the heaviest lifting I do these days.
Yeah, I mean, until you have a need for it, I feel like you're really better off waiting. And then the answer is, when you do need a machine, for whatever reason, a new machine, buy the machine at that moment. Because another question that comes up with this is like, should I wait? Because there's a new one around the corner. No, buy the machine when you need it. buy the most of everything that you can get, because that's another common question. How much storage? How much RAM?
Buy what you can afford, the best machine you can afford for the time that you need it, and then move on with your life. And that's like legitimately the answer, in my opinion, every single time. Don't wait. Don't worry. Don't go, what if there's going to be something better around the corner? Get the machine you need when you need it. When you need it. And get the most machine that you can reasonably afford. Like, don't go into debt to get, you know, extra stuff.
Get the best one that you can afford and then enjoy it until the next time you need to do the same thing.
I i i also agree in fact i can sort of speak more specifically to this because that computer that dan is talking about is exactly what i had in front of me up until that lightning event in our neighborhood a year and a half ago and it still says
You got hit by lightning in your neighborhood yeah
Shocked yeah i know yeah uh and it turned and i'm super protected here like i've learned so much living in this house that the the direct buried cable taught me a lot uh ethernet cable taught me a lot about how lightning works but that event taught me more about how lightning works and it doesn't matter that everything is surge protected both dc and ac if the lightning is close enough to the device it just fries it through the air and there's nothing you could have done about
it so uh and that's how i bought two max in one week And and then a lot of ramen. So but like that's the computer that I had here and it still sits on the floor of my office because I mentioned recently, you know, I have this like I believe that it will come back to life. I know that's it's ridiculous. I just got to get rid of it. But it's crazy because the hardware in there, the it's the monitor that died on that one, the backlight for the monitor.
If I shine a flashlight at it, I can actually kind of get it to work.
It's not really optimal for like work. or anything else but it was optimal for getting data off of it so that was good but um and i think i did one show once i got it set up i did one show right with the imac that imac right here with the dead screen and then a monitor in front of it that was mirroring the imac screen so that i could function on this thing while i was still trying to get the mac studio that i replaced it It was a whole thing, but I would still have that Mac.
Like I would not have replaced it yet. I did not need to until it stopped functioning. And then it was like, okay, well, I could pay a bunch of money to replace the backlight on this, or I could just buy a new computer. And it was like, A, I'll upgrade to Apple Silicon.
It's not the worst thing to happen to the studio. and B, I can do that and be done by the end of the day versus the iMac repair would have taken longer and I would have had to kind of come up with a new workflow for doing podcasts for a few days and like all of that. So I was like, yeah, I don't mind. I'll just bite the bullet. So yes, keep it. Your advice, Adam, and yours too, Pete. I'm right there. Keep it until you have to. And then when you have to, go nuts. So yeah. Yeah.
And you will like the Apple? m1 chip and chips
Absolutely oh
Yeah they're amazing.
Yes it's amazing yeah yeah yeah it's a whole different world it really is and i will say especially on a laptop like do i notice the difference between apple silicon and intel here in the studio sometimes but not like functionally it all is just kind of the same. It's like that machine was faster than I needed it to be also. This one's even like way faster, but it's rare that I'm pegging the CPU for any length of time. So it didn't really matter. But on the laptop with battery life,
Oh yeah that's where it's gonna make a huge difference for a lot of people yeah.
Yeah yeah it's it's shocking it's shocking yeah yeah it's almost unbelievable right yeah
It's like different battery technology even though it isn't
Right yeah because it's just more efficient yeah
I have i have to run my intel plugged in like i'm lucky if i get two hours two and a half hours on battery on that thing now i mean it i probably needs a new battery but i'll get a new machine before i get a new battery.
That's the thing it's like yes and so perhaps what you know what i was saying about the screen replacement and you're saying about the battery replacement like that is at least how i don't want to say it's the right way it is our way of thinking about these things like it's fine it works there's no need to replace it but i'm also not going to put money into extending its life right but would i do that with an apple silicon machine or would i have done that five years ten years ago five years
ago well with an intel machine to extend its life probably yes like that that is the differentiator knowing that i had apple silicon to go to from that imac versus just spending whatever it was going to be you know 700 bucks or something to get the screen working again five years ago i 100 100 would have just spent the 700 bucks and done that but now it's like well i can make the jump and now i'm all apple silicon and that's great
That's a good point, Adam. I like that. All right. Yes, sir. Moving on, Pete.
Yeah, yeah. Yeah.
So, Roger in the UK writes in and says, why does the return key on the Mac send a message in messages, but it doesn't on the iPad or the iPhone? It's so easy to accidentally send a partly completed message. Roger, I feel your pain. I hate when that happens. Thank God there's an undo set now. But it's so easy to send a partly completed message as a result by accidentally hitting the return key instead of backspace. I know, I would love to know if there is a definite solution.
This keyboard maestro doesn't appear to be the answer. Great podcast and tips. Thank goodness you guys produce it. Roger.
So I think keyboard maestro might be the answer. I had never thought about trying to solve this problem.
I just work around it. shift return is the thing on the mac that will give you a return key inside of a message similar to what tapping the return button on iphone will do so i am i try to be aware but i fail sometimes where i'm typing a message it's like oh yeah i gotta have shift return it requires extra mental cycles and so i started thinking about keyboard maestro and what if i said a thing where in In Keyboard Maestro, I have not tried this,
but in Keyboard Maestro set a macro that only works inside of... Um messages so it doesn't do anything when messages is not the front most app and it captures it uses the return key as a trigger and sends shift return to messages and then use another macro same setup except its trigger would be shift return and it sends return so It was essentially swapping the use of those two keyboard, you know, keystrokes.
Yeah.
I think that would work.
What about, I've never tried to remap in Keyboard Maestro, but Better Touch Tool will also allow you to remap.
Yeah, yeah, Keyboard Maestro is not the only one. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yeah, but that's just an idea, but yeah. Okay. Yeah, like you say, you know, I never thought of trying to solve that problem. I just knew it was a problem, and I can't tell you how many times I've used the undo send, which I like. Yeah. Which is also sometimes difficult to get that menu to come up, but I think it's there because they never expected you to need paragraphs within messages. Wasn't it 142 characters limited when it was first designed?
No, that was Twitter.
I know that was Twitter, but I thought Messages was also limited when it was first.
Oh, like SMS maybe back in the day? I don't know if SMS had a text limit or not. But it's funny. I use the shift return, soft return, whatever it's called, all the time in all kinds of places. So I'm just conditioned to use it. I immediately use it in most messaging apps. So that wasn't a hard muscle memory for me to learn.
I use it a lot, but I still manage to forget it and send a half-baked message sometimes. And if you send it to someone with an Android phone, they got it. You aren't pulling that one back. You're not going to unring that bell. Dave looks deep in thought.
Yeah, well, I'm looking in Keyboard Maestro right now to see. I thought, and maybe I'm just, obviously I'm doing too many things at once, but I thought there was a way to say only, yeah, only, oh, you can create a group in Keyboard Maestro that only... Oh, no. Yeah, you say available in these. Yes. When you create a group, which is the far left thing, it's like a folder of macros. So I will make a group called the messages group.
And then you say in that available, not in all applications, but available only in the messages application. Nice right okay and then inside of the group i would make those two macros that that change the the way the the thing works so yes that's that's how we do this right right so it's not trying you have to make sure god yeah
And then you have to make sure keyboard maestro is one of your login programs or that you start it before you try doing this so that so that it's there and functioning for you
Well i mean no it yes and no keyboard maestro will um it runs an engine in the background full time it right so you don't need the app running the app is just to configure and control your macros but then you quit that and the app the engine runs in the background all the time now certainly you need to let it run the engine yeah but that's sort of an automatic thing you don't need to go out of your way to do that keyboard maestro is is running all the time on on my macs the
engine is that the app is only running when i'm like you know distracted and and and doing things that i shouldn't be doing but uh while i'm podcasting but i really kind of wanted to try it but anyway um so i might uh i'm gonna ask but if you have ideas folks feedback at mac geekup.com like like you said pete you're you know keyboard maestro is not the only app to do this uh it roger mentioned that he had it so i think that would be the way to to think about
this and i know that got kind of nerdy but i mean we're mac geek out so right that's okay yes In pre-show, Adam, Paul Franz in the chat asked that, he said, we'd love an update on your Vision Pro usage. How is that going? Are you using it, Adam?
Yeah, it's an easy question to answer. It sits in a box next to my chair, and I kind of look down at it and go, that's really cool.
Okay.
And yeah, that's my usage.
That's it. Mostly these days. All right.
That's great. I'll give you 50 bucks for it. Take it out to show to friends. I have no interest in selling it. Again, I want to be very clear. I absolutely love this device. I've been waiting for updates, and I know the beta for the 2.2 that does the wider screen, virtual screen thing. I definitely want to play with that. I haven't done it yet. Again, it's beta. It's taking a long time for Apple to kind of put updates out for this thing.
We already talked about the fact that i think there's not enough support in the developer community for this but it's the chicken and egg thing it's like well not enough people have them for developers to want to do anything with them and and vice versa like people don't know what to do with them because there's not enough apps for the things the technology is amazing it's still by far my favorite way to watch movies i do i do watch movies on it i haven't recently just because
there hasn't been a movie i've been really interested in like submerging myself into recently that's come out recently um i guess maybe i could try deadpool and wolverine but i saw that twice in the in the theater already so yeah um but i'm sure i'll do that at some point uh i am trying to get back into exercising so i talked about the cool i can't remember the name of the app now but i did download it and i purchased a year subscription for it for it's like one of those punch
beat apps where you play music and you you know do virtual boxing thing and that blew me away like it is an amazing amazing piece of technology i think it's again still the best. Ar experience you can get in anything that's on the market right now as far as i know i haven't tried a lot of the other stuff but just from i watch a lot of people who talk about this stuff and try all the kinds of headsets and they all kind of say that so i believe that to still be true.
Um, although, you know, people are catching up. So that's a good thing though. Cause I think what it leads to is whatever the next generation is. And the next generation is down the line. I bought this device knowing that I was going to be an early adopter and all of these things were going to be true. That it was probably going to sit unused a lot of the time, but I love the fact that I have it. I was able to afford it.
I didn't buy an iPhone for a year so that I could have extra money to put towards this. Like it was a conscious purchase and conscious all the way through to knowing that, You know, there's been many times in life where it's like, I want to have the very first piece of an Apple technology. You know, this is like my, I'm at the age now, like, had I been at the age where I could have afforded the very first Mac, I would have bought one of those things. And they were like, what, $3,500 in 1984?
Like, that's crazy. And they didn't do much. Let's be honest. They did not do a whole lot of stuff.
It's true. You're right. I love that analogy because the first Mac that came out, you could do work on it, and certainly you can do work on this, but most of the people, even the companies that bought them, were buying it for what it could be and the vision of what it was. That's interesting.
This is my supporting and early adopting technology that i just and it's cool out of the gate and the mac was cool for this time out of the gate like it was amazing piece of technology and so i just i was at a point in my life where i'm able to do it and it's like i have it like if i was really smart i would bought two and left one in the shrink wrap and then 20 years sell it for like a couple hundred thousand dollars right because you know that's coming because not a lot of people bought these,
they're going to be super rare. I probably should. Like if I'm smart, not a bad investment. Probably.
Probably.
Yeah. But no, I mean, again, I, and I, and again, like, here's the thing, this version of it is not going to be obsolete in three years. So when it does go mainstream, right.
Yep.
And I think it's still going to be good. Like, I don't, I don't see it's going to have features in it that the inexpensive version will not have for years.
Right.
Yes. So they're going to be taking things away when they make it cheaper. It's going to be the first versions will be that the less expensive versions will be less than. But in terms of the some of the technologies, like it's going to have a better processor and some of those things, but like it's not going to have some of the other features. Right. We know that they have to take certain things out to get the cost down, at least in the short term.
So I'm talking a year, two years, like what the next version or next version might be.
But those are the versions that will then bring more developers and more apps and more functionality and i'll have the thing to already i'll just use my thing until you know five years ten years i replace it with whatever the next cool thing is just like i do with my mac so you know i don't feel like duped or or bad about it it's just you know and again i don't have the other thing is i don't have an m1 mac so the the screen thing it works with my intel one but it's very slow
and kind of choppy so when i upgrade my mac which i eventually will do I will probably use that feature more too so I do have my work one so I will try that you know with the beta now that the beta is out I just haven't yet and I'm sure that's going to be amazing and that's probably going to change my initial experience of it with trying to use it as a for work you know it it was kind of limiting and and how the screens were set up and really I if I am going to use it for
work I kind of need to reorient how my desktop setup is because I have two monitors in front of me now and it's really weird to have a virtual monitor in two You know, like there's a whole thing that has to happen, right?
Yeah, your work environment would adapt if you were using this full time or, you know, much of the time.
Well, I mean, really the way that's designed to be used is I have my laptop in front of me and I open the screen and now I have screen real estate. It's not the way I have it now where my laptop's over here, clamshelled, and I have two displays in front of me. I'm not going to want to overlay a display over my other displays. It'd be weird.
Yeah, cool.
By way of evidence, look at what the Apple TV was. It came out as a pretty wonky media server, and now it's ubiquitous. I mean, there's Apple TV apps on the Fire TV stick and the Roku stick, and the Apple TV itself. The 4K is an amazing little piece of gear. So I'm sure that that Vision Pro is going there.
Yeah. Yeah, it makes sense.
Yeah, it'll get there. Just again, but I just want to be honest when people ask me, am I using it? I'm not using it hardly at all.
Yes, fair. Sure. Yeah, yeah. All right i have we have two things in the don't get caught uh segment for today the first and i wanted to make sure we get to these because uh well here the first one is from listener scott he says i had a chance to test messages via satellite over the weekend and uh he says it really turned out to be a hassle and i figured out why once we were at a cell coverage but i had a view of the sky i got the prompt on my phone if
that i could use the satellite offering me messages find my and roadside assistance as well as emergency sos he said uh however tapping the use messages via satellite button did nothing other than the button responded by highlighting so i knew it was getting my button press going into the network uh settings control panel i realized that satellite was still off. I thought though I clearly indicated an up down carrot, it was not a pull down menu. Tapping it brought me back to
that same screen. So he tried to turn satellite on and it would not work. No amount of looping around would get it to initialize the satellite connection screen. My hiking partner was able to connect and send a message while five feet away from me. So I knew it was something about my phone. I finally figured it out. I I run TailScale as an on-demand VPN all the time. TailScale, leaving it on-demand, leaves the VPN switch on in settings. You can guess where this is going.
Disabling the VPN allowed the satellite connection to initiate as normal. So if you are someone who runs a VPN often or all the time on your phone, know that at least right now, messages via satellite, for one person anyway, way, did not work with the VPN being active. I've used messages via satellite. There's a, my son lives about two hours away on the other side of the state.
And there is a, there is a stretch of road right before his town where for about 15 minutes, we don't get any cell service. We're kind of driving through the New Hampshire, we call them mountains, but they're hills. And yeah. And, and so a couple of weekends ago, Lisa and I were driving across.
She was driving i was in the car and i saw the satellite thing come up i'm like oh great like my son is nerdy like us and so i was like i get to test this with him and it it worked and it worked at 60 miles an hour i was kind of shocked that it you know it was able to hang on to the connection it wasn't just have to stand in one spot obviously i needed to get it near the window of the car but um but it was fairly trivial to make the thing work i was i was pretty impressed and i was
able to get messages back from him like we were able to communicate which was pretty cool and that was i think that was when it was oh no maybe i was running the beta i don't think it's i don't think it was a beta feature at the time it may have been but i don't think it was but yeah worked out yeah yeah fun well
Gps hangs with you at 600 knots so 60 should have been for slime
But yeah but gps is one way like you know you don't yeah but you're right you're right and gps was also being used via satellite in the car to tell us where we were. So, yeah, that's fair.
It's like looking at the moon. See how the moon moves with you? It's in relatively the same place. Yeah, that's fair. It's so far away. So, but yeah, I just, yeah, I got that prompt the other day in the airplane. I was jump seating to work and I looked down and it's like, oh, hey, you don't have any coverage. You can send messages now. And I'm like, oh, And it's, but it's free for now. They're going to start charging for now,
For now.
Yeah. No, my guess is that at the frequency that we three buy iPhones, it will probably be included for us for a while, for a long time. Yeah.
That's my guess. My guess is that it gets rolled into the top end Apple iCloud premium plan or whatever it's called. Right.
Right. Now I agree with you. Yes, you're correct.
Because satellite bandwidth ain't cheap. Real quick story. I was over central China the first time we had sat phone coverage in our airplanes 20 years ago. And I was a relief pilot. And the captain's like, well, you need to play with it and see how it works. And that's when I discovered that once you put your home phone number into the satcom systems on our airplanes, it's in there.
And there's no way to delete it it's like oh great yeah and then a couple a couple days later that same captain i both happened to be in instrument ground school and they were like you know don't make calls on these phones because they're like five bucks a minute all and i'm like oh so i went to the chief pilot and said you know mea culpa sorry about that and he actually was really good about it he goes that's okay you learned how to use the system and now that you've told me about it,
I don't get surprised in a meeting, and I'll take care of it. Don't worry about it. Don't ever do it again.
Yeah, of course. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's great. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
But yeah, I mean, that satellite bandwidth is not cheap stuff. But other communication problems I had this week under Don't Get Caught, Dave, is I was using PIA, Private Internet Access VPN, And I kept notice that my tail scale, whenever I'd log on to VPN, my tail scale would alert me that it wasn't logged into the system anymore. And I noticed that I couldn't send messages and I couldn't send emails, but I could web browse and that kind of stuff.
And I'm like, what the heck is going on here? So I did all kinds of troubleshooting. I tried using the split tunnel saying, hey, you know, let mail go through, let messages go through, and it still wasn't working. And I did stumble across the answer by turning off the kill switch, which you then turned around and found that as a known issue.
Had I just done a Google search instead of, you know, use Google Foo, instead of trying to troubleshoot using chat GPT interactive troubleshooting, I probably would have found that issue a whole lot sooner. But for whatever reason, the kill switch in PIA VPN, when you enable that, it works.
Yes. Yes.
There is zero leakage, and for whatever reason, messages in mail and tail scale are seen as leaks by PIA, and therefore, it kills it. It does not let those communicate. So once I turned the kill switch off, I was still connected to the VPN, but I got everything back. Tail scale, mail, and messages works. Just fine. I can only presume and assume that it's working. Oh, and the other thing that it was screwing up was DNS. I could only use my built-in ISP's DNS. It would not even use PIA's DNS.
Interesting.
Which doesn't make sense to me, but, you know...
Were you actually, or was it capturing that and routing it to PIA's DNS?
No, it was saying it would only use my ISP's DNS, which is Infidium there at home. And if I said, hey, use PIA's DNS and then try to go to Yahoo or Google or any website, like nothing. Apple, no. It would just sit there and spinning beach ball.
I have found that, and every different VPN has a different version of Killswitch functionality, and I have found all of them to cause me more headaches than I believe it is worth. I understand the value of not, and if I were somewhere where it really mattered, you know, in a place where, like, the government is checking everything.
I mean, I know that probably happens here, but it's different. uh the consequences are are less uh apparent let's put it that way yeah uh but you know if i was somewhere where i felt like i need to be a hundred percent sure that nothing leaks then of course i would turn it on but as a as a default i i have found it to be a headache and that's especially true when traveling and on different weird network like i don't know so i don't leave the kill switch on but i will use the vpn and
in theory the kill switch is supposed to only impact those moments when the vpn isn't yet running right it shouldn't be doing like once you're connected to the vpn you're connected to the vpn the kill switch should be out of the way as i understand it like it shouldn't be doing anything once the vpn connection is established But yet yeah and yet that is not how it works still yes so that's why i turn it off it's like i just make sure the vpn's on and then it's like
it's done it's like it conflicts with itself that's the part that kind of makes my head go haywire so maybe i'll i'll send this segment to the uh private internet access folks that are friends there and and let them know that you've got at least two nerds who experience exactly the same issue with and and lots of other people on the internet to your point right about searching on google versus chat gpt i have found i recently because i have a paid chat gpt account i recently got the and
you probably did too chat gpt now has search built into it right so but i have found that i need to tell it to search the internet for things like i use it when i'm bringing guests on gig gab or whatever you know if i don't just know what to ask them i'll ask chat gbt like hey i'm having so and so on the show give me you know we like stories on the show give me you know are there any good stories that this person has told or alluded to before that we might
be able to get and i'll ask that question and it'll come up with like very generic answers and then i'm like right and i tell it search the web to find any uh same
Question do it
Again same question do it again but this time also use your web search and in like a hundred percent of the time it comes back with oh well there's this story and this story and this story it's like okay but why why didn't you do like to me is the as the user there's no different i don't care that you have weird walls in your logic it's like get rid of it just you told me searches there go ahead adam
So what I want to know is after you do that and it's gone out and slurped the internet for that information, if you ask again what happens without the search, the web part, has it learned or is it allowed? More importantly, is it allowed to learn?
I mean, certainly it's allowed to learn in that it just slurps data all the time. But it routinely tells me that is not in my data store that was up to date as of October 2023. So, like, I have to tell it.
But by you asking, yeah. What I'm curious is by you deliberately asking because maybe it didn't, you know, it didn't slurp in. But now you've deliberately told it, go out to the internet, look for information about this individual.
Yeah.
Consume that information, process it, and give it to me, right? So now, presumably, it has gone out to the internet if it hadn't as of October. It has now as of the date you asked it the question.
Right? Of course. Is it just for that session, or does it become part of the general knowledge? Yeah, I'll have to explain. It's a great question. I don't know the answer to it. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
You would think it would become part of the general knowledge if it was going to eventually slurp that anyway, right?
Yeah i
I i have found myself rethinking how i write queries so that i prompt it to do that right the first time then right is you know my version of right yeah yeah so yeah yeah
So i want to circle back real quickly to a comment you made at the beginning of this adam which is about you know government surveillance and such so um i think i'm now on five of the yeah well you know Governments that are watching you or whatever. Dave may have said it. So I just finished reading book four, I think it is, of the Jack Carr thrillers. He was a Navy SEAL who decided he wanted to be an author, so he wrote a book, and he got it published.
And then he had Chris Pratt act in the terminal list on Prime. And, I mean, everything the guy touches turns to gold, and it's fantastic. But book four is in the blood. Talks about AI and quantum computing and where the government is. And he doesn't give any details, but he did essentially say, knowing what I know of what this government knows about us, I never want to send another email or search a website ever again in my life.
And I'm like, you know, he knows an awful lot of stuff and his books are so accurate because he's been there and done that. And I get the feeling that, you know, somewhere at some point, he kind of got a glimpse of what's going on and went, oh, they got it all. And then some.
Hey, if we have this technology, they have this technology. You know, several years in advance of us getting it. So, yeah, I'll just say that.
Yeah, that's right. No, it's true. I had that. I've talked about it on the show, but I had that experience when I crossed the border from Canada into the U.S. On the Rainbow Bridge. I think the Rainbow Bridge. No.
Yeah, I think so. With only your driver's license or something.
With only my driver's license or something. And they said, all right, well, and this was this tiny little shack in, like, obviously, you know, northern New York.
Because it was niagara falls where we were and uh the woman's like fine she got frustrated after a long thing that i'll spare you all from and and said what's your uh name and place of birth city of birth and i told her and she taps it and she's like yeah you're good and i was like this was 1995 and i was like you have access that fast to every human who is a u.s citizen And I'm sure far more than that, because she was like, yep, I see you.
It's like, but there's there's a lot of us. Oh, man. OK. You know, I just moved on. I didn't say anything. But, you know, it was it was the same kind of moment. Like, uh, I don't know.
You wonder how you got on the no fly list.
Yeah, exactly. Yeah. That was the day. I do want to. So on that note, on that positive note, I do want to share that.
My keyboard maestro macros for swapping return and shift return worked and i put a screenshot of them in our or of one of them and you can just flip it in our discord uh for the live chat so you can go see it there but it is exactly as i explained it works and i sent a note to adam and pete and tested it and it's it's freaking amazing so thank you for all of your questions and contributions to our gift guide and of course your quick tips too we will share
those uh in an upcoming episode because it's what we do thanks to cashfly for providing all the bandwidth to get the show from us to you thanks to uh all of our premium contributors at uh mackie cub.com slash premium make sure you check out adam's new podcast that he does with uh his daughter kenny uh the debut film podcast we've got a link in the show notes for that pilot pete you have your so there I was aviation podcast. I mentioned my gig gab earlier. I also do business brain.
Any wooden nickels there's i feel like there's there's maybe one thing we could say that sort of encapsulates everything i've said and then some uh pete what is uh what is what is what is your shirt say well
I can read it says don't get caught
Made on the back thanks for hanging out with us everybody we will see you next week later