It's time for Mac Geek-Cab and listener Jeff brings us our quick tip of the week with a CarPlay tip that is true in iOS 17. I thought he said some would enjoy this quick tip in Maps in iOS 17's CarPlay. Maps used to work this way and then they removed it, but now they brought it back. When you have an active route navigating in Maps, there is the box in the upper left corner that alerts you to your next turn. If you tap on that box, it will silence the turn-by-turn directions.
Tap again, and the voice returns. I find this far more convenient than having to pull up the volume icon on the other side of the screen and tap multiple times. I love this tip. That's a great one. We've got more quick tips like this, plus your questions answered today on MacGeekAv1001. Another fun palindrome for Monday, September 25th, 2023. Music. Folks, and indeed, welcome to Mac Geek Gab, the show where you send in quick tips like that.
You send in your questions, you send in your cool stuff found, we share them all. We try to answer your questions. Sometimes we have questions of our own. We organize things such that we build an agenda, giving each of us the best chance possible to learn at least five new things every single time we get together. Sponsors for this episode include greenchef.com slash six zero MGG, where you use code 60 MGG to get 60% off plus free shipping.
We'll talk more about that in a little bit for now here in Durham, New Hampshire, I'm Dave Hamilton. And here digitized from Liege, Belgium. Pilot Pete could be here, Dave. And if I digitize too much folks, it's another hotel. Wi-Fi doesn't seem, but I think we're going to muddle through and we'll muddle through. It'll be fine. Yeah. Yeah. We, uh, you know, we'll, we'll figure it out. So yeah, 1,001. I, I, I love these numbers and we've had three great numbers in a row here.
Dan Bach, the math jock on Twitter said a fun fact about the number 1,001. It equals seven times 11 times 13. Interesting. Dan's Dan box, the math jock. That's why we know this. He says, so if you take any three digit number, multiply it by seven and then multiply the answer by 11 and then multiply that by 13, you might get a surprise. So, uh, I will leave that exercise for the listener, but, uh, yeah. Thanks Dan. And yeah, thanks for, uh, thanks for everything. It's, this is great.
Um, I love, I love the right answer. I'll get a surprise. Right. That's no public math for me. That's right. Yeah. Yeah, public math is terrifying, and yet sometimes we still do it. As pilots, we're often forced to, it's embarrassing. Oh yeah, I guess you do have to do public math sometimes, don't you? Yeah, with the, you know, yeah, write it down. That, yeah, well, and you have devices that can do this public math for you, do you not? We do, we do indeed. Right, so, you know.
But, you know, we're always trying to verify, the airplane computer's telling you one thing and, you know, trust but verify. Trust but verify. Yeah, okay, I like that. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, I'll take that. That. All right, we have a tip from Tony. I figured we had a ton of quick tips this week. You folks sent in absolute great whopping truckloads of them to us at feedback at MacGeekGab.com. That's what he said. Feedback at MacGeekGab.com.
Yes, I said it. Feedback at MacGeekGab.com. We've curated this week's QuickTips collection to be things about either the new OS's that Apple just released or the. Tips that might help you when getting a new phone, just because we had to, you know, we got to make choices, but they are not Sophie's choices, you see, because we've saved those
QuickTips and we will include them in 1002. Moving on to this next one, Tony reminds us, he says, on my series eight watch, I was able to enable double tap to, uh, to do all of the things that I want to do. And he sent us a link to a ZDNet, ZDNet article, easy for me to say, that, uh, that, that talks about how to do all of this stuff. So, uh, we will, we will share that in the show notes, but, um, but yeah, it works.
You can, you can set it all up and they talk through exactly how to do it with with the accessibility settings and all that stuff. Yeah, you go to Settings, Accessibility, Assistive Touch, Enable Hand Gestures, and there are four that you can enable. Pinch, double pinch, clench, and double clench. These are all with your hand, folks. Hands. These are with your hands.
It's not, we're not- Thanks for clarifying that. Because here, Pete, in case it's ever unclear, we are always here to talk nerdy to you. Right. That's right. Not the other one. Not the other one. You got it. Yep. Um, so thank you for that. Tony, while we are on the watch, Dennis has a, uh, a tip for us here because this is a change in, uh, in watchOS 10 and the changes in how we switch from one watch face to the other. It used to be that you would just basically swipe. There've been some
fish shakes about that going away for me. And I understand that. I don't mean to be dismissive of of that. For me, it's a fist unshake because I was accidentally changing my watch face all the time with the simple swipe to change face. So I'm kind of happy that they changed it, Pete. Um, but, uh, but yeah, but it is new. You know, I don't know. I wonder if it was different for the ultra because I've been doing that for a long time on the ultra.
Then the swiping. The long press. Oh, the long press. Yeah. So we didn't, we didn't share the tip yet, but the tip is. Oh, I guess we should. Yeah. How about I read it? The tip is, you got it in front of you. Go ahead and take it. Yeah, go. Yeah. This is after upgrading my watch, I could no longer switch watch faces by swiping from right to left or left to right. The new tip is to long press the watch face and select from your active faces and select
the one you want. You can also add a new one from the gallery. I hope this helps someone. And that's from Dennis Jurgensen. Thank you, Dennis. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Absolutely. So, um, yeah. And, uh... You know what I don't get and maybe it's harder than it sounds, but it sure seems to me you ought to be. Now with complications, you can customize them a lot. You should be able to
design your own. There should be some kind of a frame or a template that you can put these things in how you want them, what you want to look like, set the font, set all kinds, you know. Yeah, you know, yeah, I mean, I don't do that Apple though before you go back to my ability to turn my red light on when I'm in the night mode. I want to be able to turn the red light on without but you know, I know there's another.
Another yeah well Ben Ben shares a quick tip about that in fact Ben says that you can or sorry not not been our end Doug shares a quick tip about that Ben is Ben will be the next one our and Doug says that the watch OS 10's new modular ultra face has a night mode that is triggered by ambient light so if you use the new modular ultra face and the ambient light is such that it decides in it's infinite wisdom that it should be red, it goes to red for you. So Apple knows best Pete.
Yeah. If we're at fist shake here, baby, let me tell you, because on the ultra, it was nice. I could, when I was in only in the way finder mode, uh, face, but I could just turn the crown and it would go to red and I can keep it that way. I could set it when I wanted it red. Yes. And when I didn't. Yes. And sometimes in the airplane, even though I've got the lights on a little, but I still want that to be muted. No, it comes up. It's like, ah. And then other times it's muted and it's like,
no, I really need to see what that says right now. And I used to be able to just turn the watch crown and go, oh, there it is. I see what I need. Yep. So some things are automatic. Probably be nice to have manual control over them again. And I bet, you know, I'm going to go play with some accessibility and see. And I'll come back if I can find a way to remanualize those. That's a new word. Word of the day, re-manualize. Re-manualize, okay, all right, all right.
It just seems to me some of those settings that are automatic, you should be able to have manual control of them. Just saying. Well, but Apple knows best, Pete! Right, I know, right? All right, I hear you. They think they do. Yeah. Just ask them, right? Yeah, yeah. Call their tech line and ask them. They do think they do, that's true. I mentioned that Ben had a tip for us, and it's a good tip. We keep our watches, generally, even us really super nerdy people, keep our watches longer than
one year. I know not all of us do, right? And I know not everyone replaces their phone every year, But, you know, by and large, there's a lot of folks who replace their phones more frequently than they replace their Apple Watches, myself included. And Ben reminds us that it's a good idea to check the battery capacity of the Apple Watch so that you know where you're, you know, how it's doing there.
And the way that you do that is you go on your watch into Settings, General, Battery, health, and then it gives you a percentage number and my, my series five watch, which I've had for, you know, quite a few years now is I think it's at 80, 84 or 86 or something like it, you know, it's not, not terrible. So yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Hey, I'm going to, I'm going to quick call a quick audible too.
So we had a text message come in this week to the background group of, of I don't know, how would you define that group, Dave? It was from Deb. from Deborah. Oh yeah, we have a group of people, we call it the Macworld Expo Refugees Group. It is, folks who used to attend Macworld Expo, like press type people, podcasters in general, that we used to attend Macworld Expo together. And so we have this textbook. So there's a couple dozen people on there. And Debra wrote in and said.
Considering the new watch, wants to be able to wear it all the time and was worried about it getting it wet and you know asked you know is it okay to do it with this particular watch that it's the new one right the series 9 i've lost track of what you did i think it's a series 9 yes series 9 with watch os 10 correct yeah so my point the whole point was yes you can get the watches wet i'm not sure when it starts i know i had a series 8 i used to swim in all the time
and there's a little complication it used to be swipe up now i think it's the side yeah now it's what's the side button, the action button, that you push that and there's a little icon in there that has water droplets on it. You press that and then you turn the crown and that's how you eject water from the watch if you get it wet. They've specifically designed it to sonically push water out of the watch, so the watches are more waterproof than one might think.
So I guess Apple is vague about how waterproof it is, even though I think, there's a rating system on there. Your, your ultra is very much rated as it's a dive watch. It's a dive watch. Right. But yeah, I mean, even I remember even with the series, what we call the series zero now, the very first Apple watch, Craig Hockenberry was swimming daily in the Pacific ocean with his watch and
never had a problem with it. So, I mean, he would rinse it off simply because of the salt, but, uh, but he, yeah, to my knowledge, he never, he never ran into issues with that. So, uh, And a correction, Ben corrected me that to check your watch's battery capacity, it is not inside general. The battery setting pane is right at the top. It is a first-class citizen in the settings app. So it's just settings, battery, battery health. So thank you for that, Ben. Yeah. Thank.
You for the tip to begin with too. And all that's happening in our Discord, you can join when we When we record the show, we live stream it so that you can listen or watch, and we love the real-time feedback that comes in. That's at matgeekab.com slash discord, and you can find out when we're doing it by simply subscribing to the Mat Geek Up calendar at matgeekab.com slash calendar. That's also where we push events for, or calendar events, for our Zoom hangouts that happen semi-frequently.
We are, I'm going to be scheduling the next one. We had a request, and we love these requests. We had a request to talk about email clients. I will say that our zoom meetings. Our Zoom hangouts are truly just hangouts where we just get nerdy with each other, but we've found it helpful to have a sort of foundational topic for those moments when there's not something else to go off on a tangent with. It's nice to come and have an idea,
it's like, let's talk about. And with this, you know, the changes coming in in, um, Mac OS Sonoma with mail plugins, not working anymore. Uh, I, the idea of talking about email clients and how everyone's using them and all of that stuff would be a great sort of interactive hangout conversation. So I think we'll, I think we'll do that. I haven't scheduled it yet, so I can't tell you when that's going to be, but
you can find out Mackeycup.com slash calendar. We also announce it in our discord and all that good stuff. So yeah, it's been a couple of months since it has. Yeah, the summer, my summer schedule was very unpredictable. So it, yeah. And, and right now it's not great, but it's better. I just started another theater show, which eats time in strange ways, but yeah. Uh, when upgrade to moving on with our quick tips here into the, uh, when When you upgrade to a new device,
Gary has a tip for us. He says, you were talking in the last episode about upgrading, migrating from one iPhone to another and how the app binaries don't transfer if you are doing it over the air.
A word of caution, if you use authenticator apps to get into say VPNs at work or to authenticate for your bank account or whatever it is, the company he says, the company I work for uses a ping ID, which is just one of the various, you know, RSA has theirs and there's all kinds of different authenticator apps.
He says, that's what they use. He says, since I am what the company calls a help desk administrator, their version of IT, I get support calls where a caller bought a new iPhone for whatever rhyme or reason.
And even though the Ping ID app will be downloaded onto the new phone when bringing the phones together, most callers assume that the data is transferred and immediately erase the old phone, which means for security purposes, I then have to verify the caller, go into the backend, create the new login. And he says, these codes do not transfer over unless you manually back them up in the app.
Make sure when you migrate to a new iPhone, if you have these kinds of things that you test it on the new phone before wiping your old one. You might be able to save yourself and perhaps several other people. Great big headaches. So thank you for that reminder. That's a, it comes up every year. So, um. Yep. Yepper. Yepper. I did it once. It's not fun. Nope. It's not fun. Yep. I like to refer to that as a self-inflicted stupidity wound.
Well, but like, if you don't know, you don't know. Don't know. That's right. It's like you're not being stupid, but it's not intuitive. It, that's the thing. That's the thing. You intuit that it should go. All your other data migrates over. Why doesn't this? And it's for security reasons that it doesn't. Like it is specifically flagged as data that should not migrate. But... You know, there's nothing there telling you, hey, you're migrating. Wouldn't that be nice?
Remember when you, like when you upgrade Mac OS and you upgrade and there's some significant change that renders an app unlaunchable. You get a folder, used to get a folder on your, you know, on your desktop or somewhere that would be like, these apps are no longer usable.
I forget what they call it, but you know, it was like, and look here, like, why couldn't there be a, hey, we transferred all of your data, except these three things that were flagged as do not transfer, that'd be super helpful. Yeah. Yeah. So, uh, and speaking along the transfer lines, uh, the back mommy asks in discord, does the, you, and I don't know the answer to this day, but I assume it will. Does the eSIM transfer?
That's a really good question. I don't, I'm trying to think if I have upgraded phones since I got an eSIM, I have, And it did, yes, yes. So it, I think it will, but, but you know, like be aware. I think, yeah, I think there's a part. Porthos John answers, it transfers automatically. Yeah. I seem to remember. Okay. Yeah. I seem to remember it doing that, but again, test it before you just go and like wipe your old phone. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Great question. Yeah.
Um, speaking of Sims, uh, listener John has a tip for us. Porthos John, it turns out to be. When moving to a new phone, when moving to a new SIM, even on the same phone, you need to reactivate both iMessage and FaceTime, especially if you are transferring your current number to a new eSIM.
ESIMs are tied to a specific device for security reasons. So when you change your eSIM, it disconnects everything associated with the previous eSIM, iMessage and FaceTime are two of those apps native to the iPhone. Yeah, that makes sense. You gotta make sure you go back in and re-enable iMessage and FaceTime. Make sure your text message forwarding is still doing what you want it to be doing. Check those things because they do get disrupted by those things. So yeah, stuff. I like it.
We opened the show with a CarPlay tip, Pete and I have another one. I've ranted here on the show in the past about how when I am say at the theater at night And I get in my car, and I plug my phone in and it, intuitively Offers to give me directions home right you know because it knows and I said and I tap home it then gives me, The choice between two options alerts only or go Oh, great. If I had gotten directions to the theater and had turned off alerts for that trip...
In iOS 16 and prior, alerts only and Go would be, um, or if I turned off turn-by-turn navigation, alerts only and Go would do the same thing. I would not get turn-by-turn voice guidance, at all. It would be off if, because if I hit Go, it would keep the same mode that it had, which was no, no voice guidance, right? With iOS 17, that is fixed alerts only and go mean what you would intuit them to mean if you choose alerts only, you don't, you only get alerts. You don't get voice guidance.
If you choose go, it turns your voice guidance on regardless of its previous setting, which is exactly as I get. Why, why give me a choice? If they both are going to do the same thing, right? It just didn't make sense. So I was, I was happy to see that, um, remedied. Yes. And one last tip that we have about CarPlay from listener, Andrew, I, and I think this has been there for a long time and I either learned it and forgot it, or I'm learning it for the first time.
Now, on your CarPlay home screen, you have the status bar with the time, the signal strength, the open apps, the sidebar, right? And at the bottom of that, is that, we talked about this in the last episode, that can either be the small grid of eight icons or the small grid that shows you you could go to a split screen view. Whatever it is, if you, instead of tapping it, if you long press it, it will bring up Siri for you.
So you don't have to like try to trigger Siri, you just long press it and you are good to go. All right, I want to tell you about our sponsor Green Chef. Green Chef makes eating well easy with plans to fit every lifestyle. So whether you're keto, paleo, vegan, vegetarian, gluten free, or just looking to eat more balanced meals, Green Chef offers a range of recipes to suit your preferences. I'm eager to receive my first delivery here and I've been looking at these recipes and the menus for them.
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And with a wider array of meal plans to choose from, there's something for everyone. And you can switch between brands like we do here. It's awesome. Again, greenchef.com slash 60MGG. use code 60 MGG to get 60% off plus free shipping. And our thanks to green chef for sponsoring this episode. So Pete, I just got a text message from my son who is working in my office, which is right underneath the studio here. And he tells me that UPS has come.
We are recording this on Friday, the 22nd, which means that my new Apple device. I know you got, I got a tie phone. You got it. I want to call these things Tifones because when we had titanium power books, we called them Tibooks, right? These are titanium phones, the iPhones pro 15 pro anyway, uh, and pro max. So my Tifone has arrived. It is sitting, um, probably about 14 feet underneath my desk here at the, at the moment.
So, uh, Dave, go get it. We'll wait. Yeah. I, you know, I thought about that, but instead of, uh, going to get it, what I will do is share a tip that. Porthos John, who is becoming the MVP of this particular episode. Shared with us in Discord in response to our discussion last week about whether we should migrate over the air like we always have or directly from phone to phone. And he makes the case for using a USB-C to lightning cable to transfer from my old 14 Pro to my new 15 Pro.
And he and there's a couple of reasons for this he says the absolutely fastest way to do this has gotten easier, Because of these USB C connectors because you it's easy to have a USB C to lightning cable That's something many of us might already have and so you just plug it in, You turn on your new phone you choose your language But don't go farther wait until the setup new iPhone screen appears on your old phone and tap continue to confirm your Apple ID
you wait for an animation to appear on the new phone, capture it with the old phone, still with the cable connected. So you're doing all the things that you would do for the wireless transition. But you're doing it with the cable. Wait for it to activate your new iPhone. When it's done, you'll see a message on your old phone that says, finish setup on new iPhone.
That's where you type in the passcode from your old phone and on the new phone, and then set up face ID or touch ID, and then choose transfer from iPhone, and it will start the data transfer immediately over the wire much faster than wirelessly and, and, and it includes your apps. Because it's doing it over the wire. So you won't be stuck with that. Okay, I've finished transferring all your data and settings. Now you have to wait for the apps to download from the store.
No, no, they will transfer over that USB-C to Lightning connection. So that's what I'm gonna be doing. I really would have been great if I had like gone downstairs and like ripped it apart and gotten that set up really quick. Cause I could have been done by the time the show was finished, but you know, the sacrifices we make here, Pete, and thank you poor Chris John for those instructions. Well, that's all for today, folks. Dave's got to go do his phone now.
Is that the band I hear, Dave? Is that the band? That's right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, they, they would be here playing already, so you could go do your phone, except they're opening their phones now. That's right. So when they're done opening theirs, then they'll come and play for us. Until then, I think we've got work to do. We have work to do and it's fun work. I enjoy this. So I'm not, this is not a complaint. That's right. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
All right, we got some questions about migrating to new devices, and so I figure we'll dig into Michael's. You want to read Michael's for us, Pete? I can do that. I can absolutely do that. Michael wrote in and said, I've got, hi there Dave and Pilot Pete, I've got an iPhone 15 Pro coming this Friday.
It may already be there, Michael. And so he says, I've been doing the lightning to USB adapter iPhone migration for the last three phones I've purchased, transferring everything over a wired connection. For the first time since 2012 or 13, I'm considering it starts from scratch, new iPhone, but I'm concerned about the health and data and Apple Watch that I've got. He says he's got a Series 7 data.
Do either of you know if when starting from scratch with an iPhone, one's signed in with an iCloud ID, Apple ID, the new iPhone will also see that there's a history of health data and the Apple Watch will know that a watch that was previously paired to the iCloud an Apple ID and offers less backup from the watch. And from my old iPhone I do not really want to start over with that and you know an Apple watch and I have all kinds of streaks going that
I don't want to lose and data integration. Sure, right? I mean that's the, Streak is a streak a streak streak man. Just because you got a new device. That's right. Yeah. With a bunch of apps for my health that I recognize I'll need to sign in back in if I start over again with the new i15 iPhone 15 Pro but I would want historical data to back up on my iPhone if that's at all possible. And the answer I have is, Dave, you're up. Yes, health data is now securely synced via iCloud.
So as long as you log into your same iCloud account, then your health data will sync back down to your phone and your watch and all of that stuff. Yeah, I did this a couple of years ago years ago when I clean installed, I think it was my 12 mini or 13 mini. I can't remember which one I did that with, but the clean install was great. And I have my health history all the way back, um, to, you know, to whenever that was
whenever health started for me or the last time I wiped it, which was a long time ago. So, yeah. So did, did you have to take any positive steps to specifically even with the health data or did it just, it was automatic? I, yeah, it was, I believe it was automatic. I remember going into settings, iCloud, and just looking at what iCloud features were on or off. I don't use iCloud Mail on my phone, so I turn off iCloud Mail just to give it one less thing to sync.
So that's sort of a normal part of my process to go in, make sure iCloud Keychain is enabled, because there was a point in the time in the past where it wouldn't automatically enable iCloud keychain, so... Okay. Yeah. So. Because I don't know. And I, I just truly wouldn't know that answer. I'm obsessive about a lot of things, but the health data or not the health data, but the streaks, I don't know. Yeah. I mean, yeah, listen, if the streaks are what help motivate you, then, then that's great.
Absolutely. No, that is great. Yeah. So, but yeah, yeah. You, you should be able to get that stuff. It shouldn't be a problem. Yeah. And, and again, make sure it's there before you wipe your old phone. Right. But, but yes, it's, it's all synced there to, to, yeah. Yeah. Should we go to, uh, McKenz P? Oh, we, Michelle. Um, so McKenz writes in, uh, hi, MGG crew. I love the featured photos lock screen available and I O I phone OS 17, but I have near 50,000 photos and I want to know,
how do you find the featured photo? I don't see anything in photos to indicate recently featured on my lock screen photos, is anyone aware of anything that can help? Yeah, if you look on Apple.com in their knowledge base, and I created a, I put a link to this in the show notes, this is all part of what Apple refers to as memories and featured photos, right?
And it says, in fact, on this knowledge base article, the photos app can show certain people, days and holidays less frequently or not at all in your memories and featured photos and in the photos widget.
So you can turn off memories and featured photos entirely in the photos app and the widget, of course, on your home screen, to show a person less frequently, you go into photos or open a photo of the person that you wanna show less often, you tap the little three dots in a circle and there will be an option there to feature this person less And you can choose never feature this person if you also would like that you can,
Also, go to like certain people or pets and things like that and turn off those the same way.
Your holiday memories and your The the entire section of it are actually not controlled in the photos app those are controlled in settings, So to turn off holiday memories you go into settings photos and in there you will see a show holiday events item you can swipe and turn that off and then if you want to turn off memories and featured photos entirely that's also in settings photos and you just turn off show featured content so it's all very clear when you know the answer but it's not entirely
clear at all Mackenz if you're just looking at it because the instructions aren't in front of you it's one of those things where Apple didn't quite didn't quite get us there with the onboarding process, so. Right. is you put the link to that in the show notes of how to do that. So. How would one find the show notes, Dave? What you do is you just close your eyes and what you chant three times in a row, don't get caught, don't get caught, don't get caught.
You click your heels together and I think you have to actually click your Apple Watch to your iPhone. That's what it is. This is the thing. And then in theory, all your devices will just show the Mac Keycap show notes. If your devices are malfunctioning and that doesn't do it, then you can do it the manual way by visiting macgeekab.com.
There you go. And click on that show and the notes come up. And then you're good to go. If you really want to be like, we're talking nerdy today, so if you really want to be nerdy about it, you can go to mgg.fm and if you just go there, that brings you to macgeekab.com. But if you go to mgg.fm slash the number of the episodes, of the episode. So for this one, it'd be mgg.fm slash 1001, just like the numbers 1001, then it
will bring you right to that episodes page. I magically set it up so that that works. Be careful not to type those numbers backwards or you will get to, oh, this show. This episode, it's magic. It's magic. It works even if it's backwards, but only for this episode and the one two weeks ago and others in the past and some in the future. You Are you sorry you asked that question, Pete? I should have, I agree. No, no, it was great. I did not know where that answer was going, by the way.
I, I, yeah, we've never done that schtick before and it's going to stick for sure. Um, all right. Bill has a question. So Bill wrote in, you want to go? Yeah, let's go to Bill. So Bill wrote in, uh, Dave and Pete in early October, I'll be getting an iPhone 15 pro braggart. I know that this phone only has an eSIM here in the US. In the past I've traded phones and never bothered doing anything with my old physical SIM. I've simply erased all the.
Settings on the old phone and traded it in. Should I remove the physical SIM in the iPhone 12 Pro, I'll be trading in. Will it retain any personal data or my old phone number? The world is a
scarier place now than even three years ago when I bought my current phone. I didn't find a definitive answer on the web and um let me take a stab at it i know you answered it but but it seems to me you want to go into general settings and and reset all settings or erase all content and settings and then pull the sim out and there's nothing left on that phone of you, right but the question is is the sim gonna tie back to him you're you're absolutely right that
if you erase all contents and settings the phone is no longer tied to you unless there's an an activation lock, but in theory, that process should do away with the activation lock bonus quick tip, by the way, and I'm, I'm, uh, I'm trying to find it here. It was port those John, uh, earlier in the heat really is the MVP.
Apple recently added that if the seller has forgotten, they can log in to iCloud from a browser and just remove a device from their devices list that will remotely deactivate activation lock. So my guess is that saves a lot. Of support calls. However, back to that SIM, if you're going to move your current service from your physical SIM to an eSIM on the same device or on a new device, your service provider likely will not leave your old SIM active because they don't want you using the same
service on two devices without paying them extra for that privilege. So, the presumption would be if they deactivate your service on the physical SIM, reactivated on the eSIM, then yes, that physical SIM is no longer going to work. And once a physical SIM has been deactivated, as I understand it, there is no way that it could ever be reactivated on any network again. That unique serial number, the IMEI, whatever it is, I forget what the SIM serial number,
It's unique identifier, whatever that it's not IMEI. It's something else. But, uh, that, Is now done like you can't use it anywhere. They've all decided that's how it is, but just to be safe. Throw the sim away, you know in in a in a place that's not the same place that you sort of, Hopefully you're not just disposing of the phone. Hopefully you're selling it. You probably get something for it It's a you know an iphone 12. I think so So, uh, I think you'd be all right.
I, if it were, if it were me, I'd probably upgrade to the e-sim on the old phone and then just let it transfer over. I haven't, I haven't spent any time really thinking about that. So there might be some caveat that I'm, it's not coming to mind immediately. Hopefully someone in the discord, but I like, that might be the right way to do that just to make it smoother. I think, I don't know. Hmm. I have to think about that. Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. I'll be going. I've, I've got the 12 pro max and I'll be going to the 15 pro max. So, you know, I'll be going from a physical SIM to the eSIM. Yeah. And, and so that's, that's a fairly simple, simple process at least. Yes. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But I, I plan to do what I had said, which is, you know, erase all content and settings, pull the old SIM and. And you're done. I don't know. You could cut it in half with a pair of scissors.
That's true. One half and one trash and throw one half down the road. I like, I like, actually, I like that a lot. Yeah. That way. I mean, there's, then you're done. Yeah, that's right. Yeah. I mean, good luck doing something with my old eSIM or with my old physical SIM. Anyway. Yeah. Once it's deactivated on your, on the, on, you know, once mint deactivates it for you, you don't just toss it. Yeah. It's worth it.
Say that and I have a stack of old sims down in my office. I don't know why I'm gonna throw him away today Oh, I'm gonna throw my dear or tomorrow. I can't remember which. We had some networking questions pile up over the last couple of weeks I want to get to those before that though I want to take a minute and thank all of our premium listeners whose contributions have come in in the last week here. As you know from listening to the show we We sort of make this happen in a variety of ways.
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And it's also linked just at Mackeycab.com. One of the ways our premium program works is for those of you that can and wish to just send us money directly, that works. And we are honored and humbled and very appreciative of that.
The folks who have sent us money in the last week through our premium program include $25 from Graham from Glebe, $10 from Warren from Gloucester, $25 from Daniel in Westbury, $10 from Brian in Danbury, Santiago in Palm City, and John in Wake Forest, $25 each from Mike in Tempe and William in Getzville, $10 each from Kevin in Edison, Paul in Peabody, I think it's Peabody. Yeah, because if it's in Massachusetts, it's Peabody. If it's somewhere else, it's Peabody.
Yeah, 10 from Michael in Robbins and Also from Matthew in Forked River and then 25 each from Craig in Costa Mesa and Andrew in Honolulu. Thank you Thank you. Thank you so much. It really truly means a lot to us and like I said, it's it's absolutely not mandatory There are many other things you can do to help the show simply by listening like I said, that's that's that's you know Step one sharing the show with other people,
Engaging sending in your feedback and your comments and all of that stuff. It all works together. We have a great community, Speaking of the community. I know I've mentioned a few times our discord. What a wonderful family like the Internet, Certain portions of the Internet are full of just like people looking for opportunities to yell at each other that doesn't happen in our discord here and like I'm so thankful for that it like,
We're not Dave. Let me finish chewing some, That's right I've engaged in flame wars, too I don't mean to say that I'm somehow, you know immune to this not even close, but our discord community is just one of of people wanting to help each other and people wanting to learn. And I know that comes from what we do here on the show, right? Like this is what the show is all about. We don't yell at each other about things.
We try to help each other learn, you know? And so it, it, it absolutely, it's great. Thank you for all of that folks. All right. And now, uh, I do want to get to some of these network questions that we've had sticking around for a little while. You want to start with Joe Pete? I can, I had Joe's letter right in front of me, so I'm going to read it. All right, gentlemen. Okay, Joe. He's got the wrong guys. You don't listen to this show very much, Joe, but okay.
He says he's alone and he calls us gentlemen anyway. All right. Well, I guess, well, thank you sir. Uh, I'm a long time listener and I've I've learned so much from your show. Thank you so much and keep it work. For the past few months, my family and I have been going over our internet data cap, Cox 1280 gigabytes per month. I can see, so one, a little over a terabyte. I can see our usage by category via the Cox iPhone app, but I'd like to get more detailed information.
On Dave's recommendation, I am using a Synology RT2600 AC PC with two Euro pro six in the bridge mode. I also have a thing box connected to my network. Is there some built in monitoring in any of these devices that I'm using that will give me more detailed information about our data usage? And I'm gonna like this one too, cuz I love my 2600 RT. Yeah. So when the ideal place to see your, from which to get accurate data usage by device is your router.
As long as your router is able to give you that information, right? And not all routers are built equally. The software for each of them tracks things differently. You're in luck with the Synology routers though, because they all track data usage by device. You can turn this off, so you might have to turn it on, but it will tell you when you go. In the web interface for your router, which with the Synology routers is called SRM,
Synology Router Manager. So you go to the web interface, go to Network Center, go to Traffic Control, and then go to the Monitor tab. There's some settings there where you can enable things or disable things, but once they're enabled, on the Monitor tab, it will show you current usage, like real-time usage.
In the upper right, though, you can choose to see usage for the previous month, and it will show you how much data you are using in total, both separated for uploads and for downloads, And then it breaks it out by device and you can drill down. It shows you the top five of each upload and download usage on, you know, the sort of the dashboard screen and you can click show all and dig even deeper. And I did this just to, you know, make sure I had the right instructions to share on the show here.
And I am terrified of how much data I'm using. Pete, I had, I downloaded 1.8 terabytes in the last 30 days. I uploaded 620 gigabytes in the last 30 days and the, I probably really shouldn't say this, but I'm going to say it anyway, the device that is at the top of both of those lists, of course, is one of my Synology disk stations. Sort of the main one that manages all that. There you go. There you go. But the fact is, you're not the typical user. You tend to upload.
Shows yes your shows to you know all these shows go this is all media consumption. No it really is okay either media consumption that we are watching that because the second thing on the download list. Very close to the the disk station actually is your living room is my living room right. Which on the pie chart actually looks bigger than the disk station which is kind of weird I'm not sure how that works out that's funny but but you know the two of them together.
Consume, what about 60%, 65% of our, our downstream bandwidth. So like watching streaming media is a huge amount of that. So if they're using 60% of our bandwidth, it means we're watching a lot of 4k content is what that means. Right. I was going to say, that's, that's the joys of being a cable cutter. Yeah. You're, you know, that usage is going to go through the roof. However, with, uh, fortunately with Fidium, there's, there is no limit and And you've got gigabit ethernet. So, yeah.
Yep. So that's the way to do it. Now, if you don't have a Synology router, um, the thing box, it's difficult to get that information out of it in a, in a meaningful way. I, I need to dig back into Eros app. I don't think it tracks it over time, but I might be wrong about that, Pete. I like, I run either of the link sys or the other routers, some, some of the, I I know the net gears, some of the net gears do.
Um, yeah, they, I, I run eros here. I run Synology as my router and then eros are my, um, they're in bridge mode essentially as just the wifi access point. Cause I like the Synology router. It's super geeky, but I need to check with my, I'll check with my son this weekend to see if the eros do it. Cause he's, you know, he manages his own network with the eros so we can mess with that. Yeah. Yeah. And, and I often say, uh, you know, I can tell when I'm tired because my memory is
the first thing to go. when I search for words. One of the words I'm searching for right now is if you do have the Netgear or the Linksys router. What is that third-party software? Oh, well, yeah, I haven't, we use, it's DD-WRT. I haven't used DD-WRT in a long time. Like, is it even still under active development? Is it still a thing? Yeah. Yeah, that's a good question. I mean, that's... Because you could get really geeky with DD-WRT on your links,
your consumer Netgear and Linksys routers. You could broad, you know, broadcast your signal at a higher signal strength. Yeah. I mean, there's a new, there's a new build of a new bill, the DD word, um. September 8th. So yes. So yes, it's still very much a thing. And absolutely that gave me all kinds of reports and abilities. And I have no idea what features they've added.
I mean, I got away from, we were using DD word before ERO hit the market it because I used 3D work to sort of create my quasi mesh, uh, you know, before we could, we could just do it the other way. So yeah, man, it's been a long time. I mean, 10 years. Well, here's the thing. I don't know how old my 2600 router is, but Synology 2600 routers got to be five or six years old and that thing is still cranking. And I was going to get the new one and I'm like, I don't, I can't justify it. Peace.
The one I've got works too good. Yeah. It looks like there's open VPN and wire guard are now built in. It's I'm just reading from the change log. So these are just the things that they're, that they're, that they've like up made updates to recently it's using ZFS. I forgot about that, that you could put a, you're open, you create your own VPN. That's yeah.
That's why I, that's why I used DD word. I mean, it was, it was Synology's, it was Synology's router OS that finally brought me away from DD word was it was like, okay, great. Somebody has made a cons, you know, a built for consumers. Version of what DD work can do for all of us. And yeah, they did a great job. Yeah. I got jail breaking your router. It is like jail breaking your router. That's exactly right. Yeah, exactly.
Yeah. I got to like, I wonder where I would go to just learn what it would do for me. I mean, their website should do that, but their website was never really great at explaining that. So anyway, yeah, so I'll put a link to DD Word in there. Yeah, get in and play with it and have fun. Do you have, let me ask this though, I used to use it to crank up my signal because my router was in the basement. Yep.
Are you going to do any damage by cranking that signal up? Are you going to burn out the router? I don't know. I mean, technically it would make it generate more heat. I never burned out a router with it, but I I can't, I am, I mean, but I've heard of people burning out routers, not with that, but there are things that you could do with DDWert that would render it useless. Like I loved DDWert. I moved to Synology's SRM because I just couldn't afford the...
Quarterly surprise it's 9 a.m.. And you need to now spend four hours Flashing and you know rebuilding your router because some upgrade of DD were failed and you're you know your SOL, Then your whole network doesn't work until you rebuild this whole thing and that would happen You know once I don't know maybe four times a year three times a year But and it would take a few hours, and I learned a lot And I talked about it on the show, but it was like it got to a point where it was like wait
there's an alternative, I'll take it, yeah. Yeah. Anyway. But if you don't change it, if you don't, last thing, subject, sorry, but if you don't change it, you're gonna be okay. If you get it and you get it set up with DD Word and you leave it alone, or was it, you had automatic upgrades set up?
No, I didn't have automatic upgrades. Pete, the problem is the Venn diagram of people that are gonna install DD Word and the people that are never going to do software upgrades for their geeky router software, it like- It doesn't, they don't intersect. Well, they do intersect like, oh yeah. The never people, they don't, they're not, they get, you don't do one without the other because you're going to see, oh wait, they just upgraded wire guard. It's got the new thing. I got to go do that.
Obviously. Yes. Fair enough. Yeah. Yeah. That's so yes. In theory, you know, Litfa leave it alone and I'll let you fill in the rest of that acronym. But, um, but we're not good. If it ain't broke, fix it till it is. That's right. That's right. Yeah. Yeah. All right. Uh, Craig asks, he says, um. I have, uh, I'm, I'm getting a bunch of new stuff and I have, uh, one of my retirement passions, he says, is collecting older Apple gear. And he's already got like a G3 iMac and a Cube and
a Sunflower and the Quicksilver power, so cool. He says, my goal is to equip them all with airport and or airport express cards. Because of this, it means I will end up with a mix of, you know, you know, 802.11g, maybe some 802.11b devices, and certainly 802.11n devices. I'm concerned about how best to integrate this stuff into my household Wi-Fi network. The question is, will my, these old devices slow down my network?
Because there was a time when that was true, that a device that was say 802.11b or 802.11g would slow down the other devices on your wireless network. Those days are mostly now over. And let me explain. The basis for that whole, you know, BG, even N devices will slow down your network, was based on the concept of airtime fairness or lack thereof. Wi-Fi only allowed, and I say allowed, but with these devices, it's still true.
With current standards of everything's on like, you know, Wi-Fi 6, then multiple devices can talk. But when you've got a BG or an end device, Wi-Fi only allows one client to talk with the router at any given time or with the access point at any given time. And the access point plays traffic cop in that scenario, right? The way it works by default, the way Wi-Fi works by default, is that it allows each client to send a specific amount of data, before moving on to the next client.
So it says, okay, you can send, you know, 100K of data, and then I'm going to pause you, and I'm going to go listen to the next thing, and, you know, go round robin, or however it's deciding to go around. That all seems fine and good, except when you have a scenario where you've got, got say an 802.11b device and an 802.11ac device, both connected to the same access point because it takes the 802.11b device way longer to send 100K than it does the 802.11ac.
And that would therefore cause in many scenarios it to quote unquote, slow down the other devices. It wasn't that it was slowing down your devices. It was just that it wasn't letting them talk as much because everybody was limited to a certain amount of data. But that only would happen if your devices are transmitting or receiving lots of data. If they're just sort of existing on the network, not so much of a problem. So with like IOT devices, not really a concern.
But with computers that are gonna be web browsing and downloading software updates and all that stuff, that could cause problems. And that's why this concept that I mentioned called Airtime Fairness came into being about a decade ago. And he had meant, Craig mentioned that he has an Orbi. I believe Orbi supports this. I don't know if it's on by default in the Orbi, but you can certainly turn on Airtime Fairness. It's one of the options in the wifi settings for lots of current routers.
What Airtime Fairness does is it changes the traffic cops rules, aka the algorithm, from a. Data-based scenario to a time-based scenario. So instead of saying, you get to send 100K, it's you get to talk for 200 milliseconds and then I'm shutting you down regardless of how much data you were able to send. Then it goes to the next person that says, okay, the clock starts now, send as much or receive as much as you want.
And so by enabling airtime fairness, life should be fairly manageable even with those older devices on your network. I would advise, and this is what I do on my networks where I have control of it, a lot of things just do this automatically now. Most mesh systems are using airtime fairness. But my advice is to enable airtime fairness unless you have some very specific reason not to because it just makes the network work better. And I think it is the default for a lot of things.
So hopefully that helps, Craig. And I think the cell networks are doing that too. I noticed at the airport, you know, you don't, you just don't get those huge speeds, but everybody is cramming data. And they must be using some sort of fairness doctrine. For lack of a better word. Yeah, yeah. There's all kinds of different ways and formulas for throttling, you know, data being sent, be it wireless or wired. And yeah, yeah, it's, you can, you can do it in a way where it really, right.
Because what you're talking about isn't even just a time-based algorithm, it is probably both. It's like, okay, well, I'm going to give you a certain amount of time, but I'm also going to limit you to say five megabits per second as your general average throughput. So, you know, and then that way it can just kind of hop around and make life good for everybody. So yeah, yeah, yeah. All right, speaking of slow networks, yeah. Yeah, so I'm going to have a little fun at Scott's expense. Okay.
We have a new definition of horrible here, Dave. Uh-oh. He says, he writes in and says, I'm having a huge problem with my Eero 6 Pro network. I have gigabit Ethernet on Verizon Fios. And in the past, Eero has given me 930 plus megabits per second to my wired connections anywhere from 130 to 400 megabits. On most wired connections. I noticed the other day that my speeds everywhere are about 94 megabits per second. This is horrible. Oh, the humanity, Scott, just go send smoke signals.
Just go send smoke signals. First world problems. Yeah, right. Yeah, right. Yeah, I think my masseuse is a little chatty. I know there's more to read, and I want to read more, but this is interesting. Like, the first thing that jumps out to me on this is, OK, we've slowed down to almost exactly 10%, right? We went from 930, which is the gigabit Ethernet maximum, maximum to 94, which is the 100 megabit Ethernet maximum. So just keep that in your minds as we read along here. Let's see where we go.
You have stumbled on something, I believe. Maybe, but I think Scott stumbled on to something too that you're about to find out. Yeah, so he says if I reboot the network, the Eero network, I get speeds for about an hour and then they drop from- All right, Pete, we're getting- The Eero app is basically- Hang tight, Pete. Your audio is cutting out too much. I'm going to finish reading Scott's thing here, just to, uh, to, Oh, that's fine.
Your, your hotel wifi is, is, is out to get us, but it's done fairly well for the last hour, so I'm not going to complain. Uh, Scott continues. If I reboot the Eero network, I get the high speeds for about an hour and then they drop from gigabit to a hundred megabit speeds. The Eero app is basically useless in resolving the issue. I have replaced the cable from the wall to the router. Same problems. I have switched two of the Eero 6 Pro routers, so that a different one is the gateway.
Smart, you're isolating, I like this. Troubleshooting, he says, same problem. Works for an hour, then slows down. I've put in a trouble ticket to Eero, and I haven't yet heard back from him, at least not by the time he sent us this email. He says, it appears to have occurred in late June, because I looked in my Eero app, and it tracks an archive of speed tests that it does, and since late June it has been in that 93 megabit per second range prior to that it was 930.
He says it would be interesting to know if anyone else in the community is having similar issues. The real reason I'm writing is to get your current recommendations on mesh networks if you are not going to consider Eero. He says the Eero system's been great for the most part but uh given this I doubt it will be another Eero setup. So um I I'm not sure what I'm going to do.
I love this, you know, that we're trying to figure out and we've sort of identified that it's slowing down the Ethernet connection, okay? You've swapped out everything that we can think of. You've swapped out the cable, you've tried different EROs, so different Ethernet ports. But, the one thing we haven't swapped out is the Verizon gateway. And in honoring the troubleshooting process, that's where I would look next.
Because you know this is not an ERO, this is not a widespread ERO problem, right? It may well be a problem with your very specific ERO network, but I truly don't think so. I really think that it's another device, like if ERO were having this issue, it would not, like we would have heard about this, right? So, I think that your answer is going to be that Verizon Gateway, at the very least, swap that out.
Verizon should swap that out for you and then find out. So again, whatever's on the other side of that Ethernet connection, and you said you were going from the Eero to the wall and then from your Gateway Eero to the wall, that tells me that maybe your Verizon device, the ONT maybe is on the outside of the house. Depends on the fiber providers that some of them put it inside some of them put it outside but.
It could also be the cable in the wall right from the ont on the outside to the jack on the inside but yeah but you know and then another thing to test wait while we're here unplug the euro from it plug your mac into the verizon gateway and just let your mac be the only device on the internet for an hour or two. See if it slows down because that will help to tell you, okay, you know, is it is it this Verizon Gateway? But I would either way I would swap out the Verizon Gateway.
That would that would be my first test. To answer the second question, though, there really are, when it comes to mesh Wi-Fi. There are really kind of two schools of thought on it. There is what I call the smart mesh, and then there's what I'll call the, I don't want to call it the dumb mesh,
we'll call it the normal mesh. The, the, um, well, let me explain. So with a normal mesh, mesh system, you have devices in your home, you've got, you know, your access points and your router and, you know, your gateway and all that stuff. And you just set them up and they do their thing and they talk to each other and they figure it all out. But that's it, right? They don't learn from anything that you don't show them, right?
They, they see your devices and they might not even learn from your devices, right? They might just be programmed the way they're programmed and, and they will, you know, negotiate connections with an iPhone the way they know to do that, and with a Samsung phone the way they know to do that, because they're a little bit different, especially when it comes to meshing things. And so, you know, there's that.
With Eero and Plume, are the two that I call smart meshes, they are cloud managed and connected to what we would now call an AI. It's just a machine learning database that takes, you know, anonymized data from all, kinds of different sources and decides, looks at patterns and says, okay, when we treat, you know, an iPhone 14 Pro this way, it, you know, works 80%. When we treat it this way, it works 92%.
So let's push an update out to all our devices that tells it to do iPhone 14 Pros this way, right? So there's this constant evolution of the smarts of those routers, but Eero and Plume, to my knowledge, are the only ones doing this. They're the only ones that are cloud managed for the consumer space.
So they're the only ones that really can do this. If you're not going to get an Eero or a Plume, you know, there's Unify, which is sort of on the nerdy end It's either a professional one or a prosumer one from Ubiquity. I like, you know, I like the Unify stuff. It's not for everyone, but if you're nerdy, it can definitely be for you. So that would be one place to go.
Beyond that, Synology makes their own mesh system in addition to their standalone routers. In fact, their standalone routers just become part of a mesh when you add another one and that can work well. I've had some weirdness with it here. Lots of people have had great success with it. I need to kind of dig back into that again at some point soon and see how it works. But there's the a Synology mess. And then TP-Link's Deco line, if you're, especially if you're looking for a budget
mesh system, TP-Link, it is worth more than you will pay for it. It's, it's, you know, it's not a quote unquote smart mesh, but it sure is a good one. And you know, they're a huge company. So they get to benefit, you know, they, they get to, you know, have all those cost savings because of the factories and everything and, and they pass that along. So. Um, you answered my question before I could ask it then, because I was going to ask you, well,
what about the, you didn't mention the TP link. Yeah. Yeah. Well, you know, yeah, yeah. Um, that's what, and that's another one. That's that system I've been using many, many years now. And I stopped for about a year. Okay. I forget why I pulled it off the network, but, uh, just put it back on the network several weeks ago, because that's what I'm using. I'm, you know, I'm back to using the third floor office, which is three full floors away from my router.
Yep. Which made my, my wifi almost as good as hotel wifi at sometimes. Yeah. And so, but TP-Link fixed that quickly. So. Great. Yeah, no, the TP-Link stuff is, it truly is great. It really, really is. Don't, don't let the lower price when, in the lower comparative price to the other ones, discourage you. It, it like they make good stuff. I really, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. Novel. And then Scott wrote in Facebook, he says, remember to have him turn off any beta setting
on the error. Remember a few years ago we changed that and I went back to the 940. Oh, beta settings in the ERO, you mean? Yeah, ERO, that's what it is. It's a good, good old- Auto-correct. Auto-correct. Got it. Yeah. Turn off any beta settings on the ERO. Yeah, okay. And that may be a thought too. Mike, my other question is, you know, we pointed out the difference between gigabit and megabit. Are there two chips in there or something? Is that what may be causing?
Two chips. Is there a different chip in there? Why is 10% significant? And I thought, I was thinking of their two, two chip sets in there. No, it's Ethernet ports are built to auto negotiate. So they sense the idea is they sense what the, um, Ethernet device on the other end of the connection can do. And they negotiate the fastest speed that the two of them can, can both, uh, you know, uh, use.
Gotcha. Clearly his is negotiating a thousand and then something is happening that's causing that negotiation to renegotiate. I have seen it with a bad cable and I, and clearly he has too. And that's why the F that's the first thing he tried. I had that here in the studio for awhile. I had a bad cable and I would occasionally notice the iMac would be at a hundred instead of a thousand. It's like, okay. Yeah. But, um, but it would go with a thousand for a while.
Uh huh. It would negotiate to a thousand and then drop. It would only do a hundred. Wait, say again. OK. Well, that was it. So it would actually start at a thousand and then drop instead of just only going giving you a hundred Correct. The other thing is, Is it does he have two bad cables? I mean it happens. I would try a third cable. Sure. Not likely
But yeah, maybe worth a third new cable. Yeah, Yeah fair, especially a different brand of cable if you had two from the same box or whatever, you know, whatever but yeah cables. Yeah, yeah anything can it's you know, you don't get to see what you can't see. I agree that's not likely. It happens. It happens. Yeah, yeah. Shall we, we've got a little time. We can finish this networking round with Bob and it's related here. You want to take us to Bob?
I can do that. Bob writes about Wi-Fi confusion. He says, I have, hi Dave and Pete, I have a one gigabyte cable internet tested via ethernet getting 1.1 gigabits. Great. However, the very best Wi-Fi speed I can get using fast.com is 330 gigabits per second with all my other devices disconnected. I know I won't get one gigabit via Wi-Fi, but only getting less than one third of one gigabit seems excessive. That has me wondering if there might be, if
might indicate an issue or is this normal? Um, yeah, so. You know, with this, there's, there's a couple of factors to consider. So ethernet, you're you're getting the right speeds, that's great. And you're smart to test it that way, because there's no, I mean, other than having a bad cable, like Scott might, or a bad port or something, you know, I've seen both. You know, at least now you know where the problem is. The problem is inside your house, not outside your house.
So smart, great troubleshooting. Wi-Fi, the speeds that you're getting, at three to 400 megabit per second. You know, in test scenarios, certainly Wi-Fi is going to go much faster than that. In real world scenarios, that's not atypical what you're seeing.
When I got Bob's email, I dug in a little bit on my M2 MacBook Air, the 13-inch one, which is Wi-Fi 6 capable, connected to my Wi-Fi 6e Eero unit that was maybe 15 feet away in the living room, and that's Ethernet connected to my gigabit fiber connection. So, you know, one Wi-Fi link between my router and the ether- and the Eero in the same room and nothing else and I got 450 down and, 200 up sitting on the couch in my living room. I've seen faster. I've seen slower,
Like in a really controlled environment. I was I've been able to see over Wi-Fi 6e. I've been able to see 800, Which is amazing, but I don't get that consistently There's there's other interference even if your other devices are disconnected. There are still things,
Broadcasting in the air. There's there's, You know other things creating RF interference that aren't Wi-Fi devices We had a really interesting thing at the theater, I told you I'm doing this theater show and there's a moment where the bands on stage the guitar player. One of the guitar players comes across he's he's on stage, right? He comes across to, you know, left of center, sits down with one of the actors and they have a little scene together, the actor's singing, he's playing his guitar.
All week in rehearsals, as he, his guitar was fine, he's using one of these X-Vive guitar, um, uh, uh, wireless things, right? And so he comes across and he's, you know, line of sight, I can see his pedal board, it's right there. He's maybe now 20 feet away and his guitar would cut out. And it was like they were trying to figure it out. They changed the blocking of the scene, the arrangement of the people on the scene Thank you.
to put his guitar on, you know, the right side of his body so that there was no human big bag of, ugly bag of water, you know, between the two, right? And, and it didn't, it didn't solve it. And before rehearsal the other night, I saw him walking around the theater with his guitar.
And he walked like backstage and around and of course I have him in my ears and I can hear his guitar I'm like he's testing this and he's not having any issues right now So like he was able to be under the seats behind concrete and his guitar worked totally fine, And I started thinking because you know, it's how my brain goes and i'm like, all right, what's different?
What is not on stage right now that is on stage once the play is, you know, once the musical is running and it was like, wait a minute, they have these cool wireless lights that are magnetic, they are battery powered, they're remote controllable, and they put them underneath my, like put them on my drum rug, my, the drums that I use in the theater that I happen to be using have clear drum heads, and so they aim them so they shine up through the drum heads, and it looks freaking awesome,
especially to me, because I get to see it. And I'm like, but they don't put them out, You know, they pick them up at the end of the night and charge them, and then they toss them out, you know, before we open the house or whatever. And I'm like, wait a minute, those things aren't here. And they're remote controllable, like they're all part of the lighting system with DMX and all the cool stuff. And so I was like, wait, and I grabbed Sean, our guitar player, I'm like, you're not having
any troubles, right? No. And so I'm like, I went to Zach and I said, can we put out the lights? I think I have a theory. And so we put out the lights and then Sean's like, wait, it's still not causing any trouble. I'm like so much for that theory. And then Sean said, but I also changed my channel from channel one to channel two. And I was like, okay, well now we've, you can't change more than one variable, man. Like, so we left the lights in place. We changed him back to channel one.
Sure enough, the cutouts came in and now, you know, know, so now he's on channel two and it's fine. Hopefully the lights don't wind up changing their channel, right? Cause that can happen. Uh, yeah, but you know, but that's the point is there are other things, um, and everybody was like, wow, you really like, you, know how to do this stuff. I'm like, it's kind of what I do when Dave doesn't bang drum, you know, um, right.
It's kind of my job, which leads me, which leads me. I'm going to solve somebody else's problem. Dave, I guarantee it, my garage door opener quit working consistently. It worked, but not consistently. And when I finally found a suggested answer online, I'm like, well, that's like fecal matter from a bovine. There's no way that this is a problem. And it was. I had put an LED light in my garage door opener.
And for some reason, the LED light is transmitting a signal that interferes with that frequency. Oh my god, I need to do something at the house. Pete, I gotta go. I have a problem at my house. I guarantee that's what it is. I told you I guaranteed I'd fix somebody's problem. LED lights will pair with some radio signal. So I don't know what frequency you're in. Yeah, yeah, yeah. My guess is if I put a different LED. Incandescent back in.
Yeah. Or even a different LED. I should put an incandescent back in. Yeah, a different LED or maybe go look fluorescent. What do you call the, you know, the chlorofluor. And boom, the garage door started working consistently again. Oh. So. Yeah, man. It never, no in a million years. And like, why would a light bulb affect? Because we just don't think that there's RF coming out of an LED. But wait, why was the light on before the...
Was it only when closing the door that you had a problem? It was... You know how you get the little eye that trips the light on? Yeah, yeah, yeah. The little electric eye or the motion sensor. Yeah. You break that and it comes on. And when the LED light was on... Okay. 85% of the time. 85, not always, but 85% of the time. the remote, not in Debbie's car, not in my car, not in my son's car. And it's like, okay, all three of our remotes didn't go bad.
Suddenly what is going on? And then when somebody came up with, I read it on some forum somewhere and I went, no, there's no way that that's a problem. And no, I believe it. I absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. All right. Well, that's, that's, um, that's where we're going to end it today. That should have been tip of the week. Yeah. I'm telling you, that's great. I'm now not convinced it's gonna solve my problem because I.
Think this is happening regardless. I think it might just be the cement But it's I don't know it hasn't been. You know what I need to do I just need to because I like the issue in in the garage that Lisa uses is that there is a cement wall, Essentially between the end of the drive We're aimed between the end of the driveway and where the where the opener is you know halfway into the garage, So I just need to take that little antenna wire, can I just extend it?
Or does that screw up the frequency response? I'll have to look into it, but there's gotta be a way. I want the antenna to be over here, not right at the unit. Try going to a fluorescent bulb or something first. That would be your quickest test. Well, I just unplugged the bulb, but it happens when she's coming home when the light's not on in there. Oh, yeah. So that's why I'm thinking it's not the bulb. Maybe a different one.
Porthos John, again, MVP of the episode, and I've seen a ton of things from you, Porthos John, that he said he had the same problem, and he gave us a link to a bulb called the Universal Series garage door opener LED bulb that we will put in the show notes and they are built specific they must either the controller must operate on a different frequency or it's somehow you know insulated or whatever
so amazing so great yeah even a blind squirrel Dave I know this is awesome Look at that. It's a real problem. There's eight in stock at our local Home Depot in Summersworth, Pete. You can't find that because you're on bad hotel Wi-Fi in Liege? Yes, I am. Liege, Belgium. Liege, Belgium. Normally, we stay up in Maastricht in the Netherlands, but they're all full, so we're in a new boutique hotel. Literally, the front desk is a full bar, fully stocked pub bar.
When this is over, I'm hitting the sauce. That's right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, they got to compete with the Netherlands there, right across the border. Exactly right. All right. Thanks for hanging out with us, folks. Thanks for bearing with the sporadic moments of Pete's iffy Wi-Fi there. We make it through and, heck, thank goodness you were here for a variety of reasons, especially that garage door opener thing.
Thanks for that. Thanks for listening, folks. for sharing the show with a friend that's that's the like, if we can ask something from you for this week, let that be it. And yeah, make sure to check out our sponsors, MattKeycap.com slash sponsors. You can see all of the current stuff plus GreenChef.com slash 60MTG. Music. Pete, if your connection can hold up for just three more words, I'm really curious to hear what you might have learned on all of your travels.
I don't know. Maybe not. Well, he's back. He's back. It's this simple. Don't get caught. We made it. Made on a Mac. See ya. Later.