We're Just Here For The Free Wi-Fi

It's time for Mac Geek Gab and Mark M brings us our first cool stuff found for the week when he says, look, in the last episode, you were talking about putting the Shazam widget on your iPhone to determine the song that's playing. My watch, he says, has a complication, which is often easier to trigger than pulling my phone out of my pocket. And the added benefit is that if it recognizes the song, it will give me the choice to play

it locally on my phone or save it to a playlist. We've got this shortcut for your Apple watch linked in the show notes at macgeekab.com. More cool stuff found like this. Plus your questions answered today on Mackey cab 998 for Monday, September 4th, 2023. Music. Greetings, folks, and indeed welcome to Mac Geek Gab, the show where you send in cool stuff found like that. You send in your quick tips, you send in your questions. We share your cool stuff found in your quick tips.

We answer your questions. We try to string it together into an agenda that not only makes sense and is entertaining and informative to listen to, but along those lines of being informative, we try to, make it so that we can each hit the goal of learning at least five new things every single time we get together. And indeed, I, we have a bunch of cool stuff found to get through in here in Durham, New Hampshire. I'm Dave Hamilton.

And here in jolly Cambridge, England. All right, I'll stop with the Disney British accent. Greetings everyone, Pilot Pete from England, and I will be home tomorrow. Oh, nice. You really don't sound, you don't sound any different at all. So, to me, Pete, you know, the whole English thing, you know, two countries separated by a common language.

Common language. That's right. And for those watching on YouTube, I did manage to change the banner from 997 to 998 after Dave mentioned it and I looked down and saw the wrong number. Oh, that makes it fun. All right. That's cool. Yeah, yeah. Thanks for doing that. Yep. I said we had cool stuff found. We do. We have a bunch. Walter brings us to our next one and he,

says it's a cool stuff found from our friends that make ChronoSync. He says, I have a home studio, where I do some music recording and then I have an actual music studio about a mile or so from my my home where I also do recording. He says, I work in logic in both places, sometimes multiple times a day. Ever since Dropbox changed to using Apple's file provider infrastructure as their syncing engine or their detection engine, he says, I've been having real issues syncing my logic files.

Some wouldn't sync or when I would force things, the files would be corrupted and that's not so good. Of course, Dropbox support pinned the blame on Apple, but that's just how it goes. He says, then I went to a logic forum that I frequent and they said, don't do this with Dropbox, it's not gonna work. And so they offered some advice, he says, but I dug deeper and once I did, I found the answer.

He says, I've been a long time user of Chronosync from econ technologies and it's quarter chrono sync is $40. He says, but they also have a little add-on for $15 called Chrono Agent that allows you to easily and quickly sync files, including a two-way sync directly between two Macs locally or remotely. So, right, so this is like, you know, we talk about how Synology, you know, running like Cloud Station is like your private cloud.

But everything is syncing to your disk station, but it is your disk station, it's not like Dropbox's server. This takes it one step farther, where it's literally just syncing between the two Macs, there is no server,

your Macs are, it is peer-to-peer, right? So, kind of like ResilioSync or what used to be called BitTorrentSync, but different, like the tech is different, and he says that he's been using this now, he says I have it set automatically to two-way sync a folder that has all of his logic files between his MacBook Pro at home and his Mac studio at every morning. And he says, if I've done work on a session at home, then later that same

day, I want to work on it in the studio. I only need to click a button and it will run the full sync immediately. No weirdness with Dropbox or any of that other stuff and much less chance for things to go wrong. So I knew about. Cause sync is so hard. I mean, that's the thing. It seems like it shouldn't be. Yes. But then when you go, well, if I delete something on this machine and I don't necessarily want it to be gone from that machine and yeah, it, it gets ugly fast.

It gets ugly fast. Yeah, it exactly. Yeah. No, this is, this is pretty interesting. This Crono agent. I'd never heard about it before. It's 1499. You can get a free trial from the folks and you can use it. Um, yeah, you can use it across the internet. You can hit, this is, yeah. This seems ideal for people who have a desktop machine but have a laptop for on the go and need.

I mean, for most people, I would think that like iCloud syncing, you know, iCloud Drive or Dropbox or Synology would do the magic here. Magic here, but clearly, uh, it's not the math like, like for certain use cases, you need something that's a little more robust and a Crono agent is the magic answer. Pretty good. That's awesome. Yeah. I like it. It's pretty good. Uh, our next one comes from listener Andrew, who, uh, he lives down in, I think it's Australia or New Zealand.

Now that I'm saying it, I think it's New Zealand, but this does apply to us here in the States and I think many other places. He says, my previous fiber internet service provider provided its own router which included a LTE 4G backup. If the fiber went down so similar to the Xfinity wireless, you know power save whatever it is the the storm connected thing that we talked about the last episode.

There's a name for it. I'm going to come up with the name because somebody asked a question storm ready wasn't it storm ready Wi-Fi. Thank you. Yeah, so this was built in says I recently moved to a new ISP and I'm using a netgear or be as my router and neither of course has a backup using the cell connections says. However, I also have a spare SIM thanks to my Apple watch and the way we get things here in Australia,

So I guess it's Australia. So he says so I have 300 gigs per month on his fair shared family data plan Yeah, we definitely don't get that here in the United States. Not not not at, Podcaster salaries anyway, I get three gigs a month. Yeah, exactly Exactly. He says, however, I saw that Netgear has this 4G, we'll call it a modem device, that you can plug into your router and it's either for people that just want to use 4G service, but it has the capability to do failover to 4G service.

And indeed, that's what he's doing. There are two devices that Netgear makes. There is the L, and I've linked them both in the show notes here at macgeekab.com. The first is the LM1300, which is USA only, meaning it only works with USA carriers, and I think it will work with Verizon, AT&T, and T-Mobile. That's $85 on Amazon today, as of the moment we're recording this. And then there is the LM1200, which looks remarkably similar to the LM1300, except that.

It is for the USA, Europe, Australia, and New Zealand. So depending on where you are, you might need this one. And this of course is $150 because it has presumably different radios, more radios in it. But it has a little web interface and you set it up. You would put it in between your cable modem, you know, whatever is coming into your house for your wired broadband connection. You would plug that into this, and then this would sort of be a pass-through device before ahead of your router.

And it decides whether you have a, if you have your primary connection, well then great, it doesn't need to fail over to LTE. And if your main connection goes down, it fails over and he said he tried it, he tested it just by unplugging the cable and it failed over and he even gets a little text message about it, that it did its failover thing, which I love. My Synology routers have failover in them and I have used it in the past.

I had to build a very custom notification thing in order to even begin to have a hint that there might have been a failover. So I like that this automatically kind of has that built into it. But yeah, that's a pretty cool thing. Like it's not, it's not the data service isn't included like it is with the Xfinity Storm Ready Wi-Fi, but it gives you that capability. It's not battery powered, but of course you could battery power it with a UPS and, uh, right. You know, yeah.

And one, one piece of advice that I will share, if you're going to do something like this, or even if like fiber connections here in the U S like they're, they're more stable during power outages than say, um, coax connections are. But if the line comes down, the line comes down, like, yeah, when a tree hits the line, the light ain't going across it. That's right. Yeah, the physics limitation still exists, but if you are going to do this and you want to have your.

Connection preserved in a power outage, whatever your connection might be. I highly recommend getting a separate UPS just for your router, which probably has a Wi-Fi access point in it, but if it doesn't, your router, your wifi access point, your cable modem or your point of entry device, your ONT if it's fiber, and that's it, right? Because those things take up very little power compared to say a computer or a network storage device which has to spin discs and fans and all those things.

I've had my router and my cable modem or my ONT for fiber run for a day on UPS battery power because that's the only thing, on that one UPS. So yeah, so just bear that, like think about that as you're architecting your network if you want to maintain your connection. And I will say, you know, we have plenty power outage is here so I'm a decent test case.

I think in all, we've been here over 18 years. We moved in here like literally right at the same time that we started MacGeekGab, like I think we moved in here two weeks before we launched MacGeekGab, maybe a week. Okay. So we've been here 18 plus years and I think I can count one, maybe two power outages where we lost our broadband connection during the power outage and none of them have been with the fiber. Of course, now I need to do the knocking on the wood. You done did it now.

Yeah, exactly. But, and that's not entirely true because I had a weird thing with a fiber connection that was sort of surfaced by a power cycling, but that's separate. But yeah, it was with the cable, but most of the time, even with coax cable, the power would be out for hours or sometimes days. And as long as I could power the cable modem, I had broadband connection. You know, it was only, only if the literal pole with the cable line, you know, coming in was down and, and broken.

And there was one storm I remember where I could see it across the street. It was, you know, 150 yards from my house or something, but I, I know which path my cable line takes and I like saw it on the ground. And it's like, yeah, there it is. It's right there laying on the ground, but. You know, it doesn't matter. Still send a signal. Yeah, exactly. Nice. So yeah. Yeah. So thank you for that, Andrew. I didn't know that devices like that existed.

And again, if you've got like a Synology router, it can do that for you automatically. You need to provide the device that will give it the second connection and it can be a USB-based, like you can tether an iPhone to it, which is interesting, via USB. There you go, yeah. And pay through the nose for the data in the States. Yes, that's correct. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Uh, alright, we have more though, and so we will do that. But wait, there's more! But wait, there's less.

Uh, TNPapa in our Discord channel shares that, uh, he says, my new work from home situation requires me to use both a Mac and a PC to support the teams that I have to support. And up until recently, I was using two keyboards and two mice. This was clunky, and I did not want to use a KVM switch, as the mice and keyboards are Logitech wireless. Oh, yeah. Good point.

It says I came across a really neat piece of software called share mouse simply in it was a simple installation on each computer and the computer's self discover each other. Now when I move my mouse off of one screen to the next control moves autumn magically to the proper computer. That's pretty cool. I have no how do it? know. I know. And cross platform too? Oops. Like that's pretty amazing. I like this. Yeah. It's, they say that it's similar to a network KVM, but, but way simpler. Wow.

Wow. What do you think of next? That is a, that's outstanding. I think so. Yeah. Thank you for sharing that. That's amazing. That's amazing. Huh. I love it. Same. Yeah. Of the of the of Uh, Pete, I want to blow your mind a little bit here. All right. The of the of the of the of the of the of the I, uh, I, and thank you, Tennessee Papa for that. Actually, sure. Mouse is pretty much, so keep it coming. I'm just going to keep it coming here. Have you ever wanted, you are a pilot.

I, it turns out last time I checked. That's right. Yep. Of the of, the of the of the of the of And that means getting my wallet says so. That means when, when you're in the cockpit of the plane, you get to see lots of data in front of you. Sometimes, perhaps too much. But one of those pieces of data that you

get to see is the weather. And when you're in the cockpit of your car, there, I have all, I don't know about you, but I have always wanted to see a weather map when I'm in the cockpit of my car. And I finally found a CarPlay capable weather map, Pete. I know. And, uh, yeah, it's it, Like I if you're interested in this I would recommend going to get it now.

Because I Don't know how long it's gonna stay in the store Like I'm I always presumed that there were no car play, Capable weather maps because Apple did not want to allow this in the store, but I always wondered well Why doesn't some third-party like navigation provider that can show you a map in the car? Why don't they just add a weather overlay? Right. And so that's kind of what this app that is called Car.Play Weather Navigation.

It, it, it, like it is, it shows up as a navigation app, but it will show you the weather. You can download it for free. When you use it for free, you see weather on a two hour delay. So that's how they, that's how they encourage you to do the in-app purchase. But even that is just enough to be like, oh my gosh, this is what I've wanted for all these years. If in fact, it's something you've wanted for all these years. And if you haven't, well, then, you know.

No, I can see it. Because use case, we drove to Florida in early July. Exactly. And we spent a day in the storms and coming, going, is it gonna end? Is it not? And it was really nice to be able to go, at least on my phone, to go to other apps and look and go, okay, here's where the weather is, you know, and, oh, it's going to get really bad. Now's a good time to stop and get lunch. And yeah. Let's get lunch before. Yeah. So let's, let's not get out of the car. Oh yeah, exactly.

Exactly. Yeah. Lisa and I were driving back from somewhere the other day and it just started pouring. She was like, you know, I, I was kind of thinking to stop to pee, but I don't want to get out in the pouring rain. She's like, forget it. We'll, we'll just go home, you know? And I was like, okay, like fine. You know, but, um, but yeah, having this would have been really kind of handy in those scenarios. So, but it's, it's weird. The screenshots show like navigation instructions on it.

It is called weather navigation for CarPlay. Like, they're very... I it's janky, it appears janky. So like, hopefully I'm looking, I want to look at the version history. So it appeared in the store in May of this year and it's been updated several times without, and the updates are the risky part when you're an app developer, that's when Apple comes to you and says, oh, by the way, you're breaking our rules. You can't have this app anymore. So, um.

With, if you update too frequently or not enough. No, when you update your app is reviewed So if you're doing something that might run a foul of Apple's rules, it's the updates that are the riskiest moments because you're calling attention to yourself again. To the entire app. Correct. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I had a thing with the Mac geek app in the store. We, we pushed it and it had been in the store for years, right?

We pushed an update and I got a note from Apple saying you're using an Apple trademark in the name of your app. You can't do that and it was like, okay, I'm going to do it. Fine. So I replied to the email and was like, you know, Steve Jobs is the one who approved our podcast suggested, not just approved, recommended that our podcast be included in the directory on day one of the iTunes podcast store.

I would, I would call that an endorsement, but if you want, I can write to Steve again and ask him. And the phone rang, and it's weird, with Apple's like app review team, you have to put their, their phone number in your phone as, as favorites, and like can break through all do not disturbs, because when that phone call comes, you have to answer it.

So, you know, a day and a half later on some random Tuesday afternoon or whatever, my phone rings, it's Apple, I pick it up and they're like, hey, we just wanted to let you know, you're about to get an email. Your app update was approved. Everything's fine. We've put a flag on your account. We're really sorry. This is never going to happen again. It's like, okay, great. Thank you. You know, yeah. Okay. Okay. Thanks. So I'm going to assume this occurred before Steve passed.

I mean, could be wrong. Yeah, that's a safe assumption there, Pete. Okay, good. I can write to Steve again, you know. Yeah, right. Yeah. Don't make me do it. Don't make me do it. Yeah. No, I couldn't, I couldn't pull that card today. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But, but I, you know. Yeah. It's just one of those. You could still say, you know, Steve did approve this. Correct. I would, I would just word it differently. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Oh man.

Yeah. Yeah. That was another interesting thing. Like, you know, when we started the show, We started the show. Two weeks before the iTunes podcast store was, or the podcast directory was added to iTunes. But it was announced in like March, right? March of that. That they were gonna do that. That they were gonna do it. And it was clear that it was Steve Jobs who announced it at the March whatever event.

And it was very clear that this was like a pet project to him. He was super bullish on podcasts. And so I was like, all right, I want to make sure that we are in the directory when it launches like, like, first of all, I want to be in the directory. And secondly, it's like we're the right, like that, that initial audience is the right target for what we're doing here. I just want to make sure they know about it.

And so I started writing to all the friends that I knew at Apple and every, of course, this was when Steve was there and running things and none of the people I knew were the ones that were in charge of the directory and therefore also didn't want to, you know, risk being fired by, you know, introducing me to the wrong person. Because Steve was there, you know, and that's kind of, there was this culture of, well,

you know how it is. If I tell you the wrong thing, I can't, I'm like, yeah, but this is crazy. Like it's his project. And so I got more and more frustrated as I got this same answer from more and more people. And finally, one day I was sitting here, I was like, this is what a stupid way to run a company. The CEO literally has this pet project and we have a thing that everybody, even sort of objectively agrees would be good for the CEO's pet project.

And yet no one wants to risk upsetting the CEO by introducing me to someone. I'm like, if I ran this company, I would never let that happen. And I thought, you know what? In fact, I'd be angry about that part of the culture. Exactly, but it's his fault, right? Like he created this culture. So I was like, you know what, that's it, screw it. I'm writing Steve. So I wrote Steve and I'm like, I didn't complain about his company culture because I know you get more flies with honey, right.

But I just wrote him a quick short email as every email interaction I had with Steve was, you know, I knew. And so I just wrote him and I'm like, hey, it's Dave from at the time from the Mac Observer. We just launched this podcast, Mac Geek Up. I think it'd be perfect for inclusion in the store. Been trying to get in touch with the right person. Don't know who that is.

I figured you would, if you can help, great. You might know. Yeah, yeah, yeah, you know, and I also know that, like, if you are that person in middle management somewhere, right, let's say a colleague that I knew was willing to introduce me to this person. Right. So or or Steve. I know that if you're that person in middle management and you get an email from a colleague or even someone who is like reports to you, that email has a certain level of priority.

And then if you get the same email from someone above you, your boss, or in this case, the CEO, that has a different level of priority. I also know that someone who is the CEO has probably learned how to delegate. And if they know that this request can be handled by someone else, They're not going to hem and haw about it. They are going to pass it off immediately because that's right. Right.

So like all of these things are true. So this is why I sent this email that I, you know, this has informed me, uh, in, in many interactions since then. So maybe there's a tip in here for, for us start at the top. Um, because that person knows how to delegate chances on the chain of command. Right. Forget the chain. Well, I don't work for the company, so I don't need to respect the chain of command. Exactly. Correct. Right. Like I'm not, the company works for us.

We pay them money. So exactly, I'm a customer. Exactly. Yeah. So, uh, 20 minutes after hitting send on that email, my phone rings and it's, like, Hey, this is Keith, uh, in the podcast directory, we got your email here as the way he said it was as though I sent it to him, we all know how it got to him, like, there's no bones about this.

Uh, he's like, yeah, we got your email here. And, uh, I just wanted to let you know, we already had you included in the the directory, but taking another look here, we're going to feature you on day one and yada yada. And and that, folks, is the reason that I'm the host of this show and not someone else, because my initial plan was to get like everything else we did at TMO was to figure out how to get it launched, launch it and then let somebody else run it. Delegate, correct.

Well, we went the day the iTunes store launched with podcasts. We went from having about 500 to a thousand listeners, which already was great. To having about 25,000 and then we started doing this Q&A thing and Questions started coming in and it was like oh, this is awesome with one Yeah, and I call it a caveat, but I'm really thankful for it like I love hosting the show But it was like obvious that was like oh, I'm gonna need to be the host for a little while longer here, so I.

Was seventeen and a half years later. Yeah Thinking about sticking around for another years. I'm thinking about sticking around a little while at least yeah Yeah, that's right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So anyway, so that's a story time with Dave and Pete. There you go. There you go. Yep. Um, I didn't get that banner up. Sorry. Speaking of, speaking of interesting things and bringing us back to cool stuff found and really kind of nice things about our community here.

Indie developer Alex Hay passed away back in March, uh, after a long battle with cancer. And he was, he made a bunch of apps. So many of them focused on shortcuts, right? He had toolbox pro, uh, which was indispensable for people developing shortcuts, logger for shortcuts. So that makes development easier because you get, uh, you know, easier debugging not a mate.

Well, those three apps have been taken over by, um, by snailed it it development, which is a Rosemary Orchards company, you know, Rosemary from all the other podcasts that she does, the automators being one of them. I couldn't be happier about this, that, that these, not only that these apps are going to be tended to and developed and all of

that, but, but like, I can't think of a better person than Rose to do this. So I'm, I'm super stoked and, and she worked with their family, with Alex's family to, you know, to, to make sure that this is handled the right way and all of that good stuff. So. Oh, that's awesome. Yep. To keep that legacy going. Exactly. Yep. Yep. And, uh, and I, of course, uh, love the name of, uh, Rosemary's company, Snailed It. Snailed It. Yeah. I love it. Yeah. It's good.

So. Speaking of legacy. Yes. That's our next cool stuff. Oh yeah. That's nice. Uh, nice little, uh, segue there. Yeah, Jeepster brings us to our next cool stuff found. What's happening with my, my shortcuts weren't working there for a minute, but now they are. Okay, great. Jeepster brings us to this cool stuff found called OpenCoreLegacyPatcher. He tells us this lets you install newer Mac OS versions on Macs that don't support that version officially from Apple.

He says, I'm pretty sure I tried something like this called DOS dude years ago and I don't remember it working very well. Today, he says, I have an extra 2017 MacBook Pro that I use as a non-essential machine around the house when out and about. I wanted to take the beta of Sonoma for a spin. So this is like super advanced, right? But 2017 is the cutoff, so it won't support Sonoma. I now have, with OCLP, OpenCore Legacy Patcher, I now have dual boot enabled with Ventura and Sonoma.

I tried both a clean install and also it upgraded a clone of my Ventura when the latest beta of Sonoma release came out a few days ago, it updated successfully. The OCLP app that supports Sonoma is also a beta, but it seems to work very well. This is amazing. I'm stoked about this. Wow. Yeah. Like I've used, I used DOSDUDE when we first heard about it a couple of years ago, a number of years ago. And I agree with, with the Jeepsters assessment. It was like janky.

I would never have bothered to like do it more than once. But this sounds amazing. Amazing? Amazing. So, yeah. So now it sounds to me like you have to have an operating, operating system on, on board in order to install this or does this? I don't know. How do I get started? Does this work at the booth? No, you- Because we've got a question later in the show about someone who has a machine they're trying to get

I think it was snow leopard on and we'll get to that. Yeah. No, this is that well I'm reading the instructions here and it says, Check our supported models page. That's page. That's step one. So, okay There you go fine step two is download and build the Mac OS installer, then Run the patcher on the installer. So it's it's the installer that's being Modified. Modified. Tricked. To go, yeah, hey, don't worry about what model, just go on there.

Yeah, just go. Right, yeah, exactly. And then you reboot into the installer and do its thing and yeah. Okay. Interesting. Yeah. Cause, cause, cause, um, Jeepster said they did a clean install. So yeah, you didn't need to have this there. That's really fast. Cause I have an 11 year old MacBook pro at home that is, you know, it's limping along right now. Shall we say, right, right. And this sounds ideal.

I'll say, huh. I like it. All right. The, uh, the next one up that I have is a continuity camera I long have used an iPhone here, long before continuity camera was even announced, I think, but certainly before we could have it, I've been using an iPhone as my webcam here in the studio because it is the best webcam you can get for your money and potentially the best webcam you can get.

Like I, it's- Right. Yeah, I like, but certainly for your money, don't waste your money on like, if you're gonna buy a $75 webcam, great. But anything else that you buy, like if you want to spend 300, 400 on a webcam, in my experience, the quality is going to be exactly the same as that $75 webcam. And, uh, you know, a used or a refurbished iPhone SE is going to blow all of them away because it comes with Apple's camera smarts.

I use camo from reincubate, uh, to do it because I like the control that I get. But of course you can use continuity camera because that's built right into the OS and it's a fine place to start and it might be perfect for you. Uh, but you need to get them out. And I have been, I actually found a mount that I really liked years ago. I'm trying to see if I can find it. He's turning around, there he is. No, no, so this, I had this like a gooseneck style mount.

That I would clamp onto the stand of my iMac and then it had a grip mount for my phone, that would hold it. This doesn't work all that well with my new setup that I don't have an iMac anymore. And so I needed to find a continuity camera mount that works with the monitor that I have now, this ViewSonic monitor that I have in front of my new Mac studio, because my iMac is across the room dead. And I found it. It is the Sodi, S-O-D-I continuity camera mount.

And what I like about this is that it lets me angle the camera down. I can tilt the camera without it falling off the monitor. It is well-balanced and it's MagSafe. So I'm using it with my iPhone 13 mini and with it being mag safe, I can also tilt it in that direction. I cannot swivel it. So it is, you know, oriented the way the monitor is facing. But, but I can, I can control it in the two acts, the two most important axes.

There are moments where I wish I could also swivel it, but you know, I'll, I'll live, but if you know of a mount that can swivel spin and tilt, let me know. But, uh, but yeah, I bought this, uh, Sony Continuity camera mount, what, two weeks ago. I'm looking at it on Amazon right now as we're talking about it on the show. I bought it for about 25 bucks. It is.

Currently unavailable. So of course, of course it is The cottage industry of continuity camera mount strikes again But there are a few showing in the like also related to this that might work for you, The stout she continuity camera mount is slightly different But looks like it would probably do the same thing and that one might actually answer my other question And I think this one will, this one will tilt. Will it spin?

Do it. I don't think it spins. Okay. No, it doesn't spin now, but it does tilt. So there's another one there. I'll, I'll put this one in the, in the, the show notes too, because, you know, because that's how, that's how life works. So yeah. Right. All right. I am, I am not seeing mine. I have one and I know we've shared it on the show before, but I'll try and get to it again. I know I got it on Amazon. Yep. Mine's just a little three-legged flex tripod that comes with an iPhone mount.

And I think I paid 15 or $20 for it on Amazon. I'm not seeing it right now. I just, for whatever reason, my Amazon foo is dead today. Yeah, yeah, exactly. So, but that one obviously swivels and it will mount in all manner of ways to a table lamp, to the TV, to the, you know. All right, yeah, when you find that, when you find that in your Amazon search history, Let me know, I'll add it to this. I'll spend some time looking during when we talk about the show spot. Yeah. Okay, cool. Cool.

Um, the, we have a couple of cool stuffs found left. The next one is from Paul. I've heard a lot of people talking about this since Paul sent it in. Paul says, uh... We were talking about apps and ways of finding details about movies and shows in, uh, in our

discord channel at mackiecap.com slash discord. And Paul Conaway in discord reminds us that Casey Liz from the accidental tech podcast has an app that he creates created, uh, and continues to maintain called call sheet, which is, uh, built for exactly this trying to find out, you know, know who the actor is, the liner notes, if you will, for, uh, for movies and, uh, and things, and you can have it hired spoilers and all sorts of stuff.

So, uh, yeah, once you told me about this, Paul, I downloaded it and I've been using it a ton. It's, it's great. Like it makes life way easier than trying to search the internet in that moment when we're trying to just be on the couch watching or enjoying a movie or something. So thanks for sharing that, Paul. Yeah. Yeah. So Dave, I found mine and I will. I want to mention it now because today only, if you're watching on YouTube with us, it's 44% off. It's $11 and 29 cents.

The tripod, let me, I guess I could present my screen. Just tell us about it, it's fine. Most of the people are listening anyway. Yeah, yeah. There you go. That's true. So it's the Aureday, A-U-R-E-D-A-Y phone tripod, flexible tripod, iPhone and Android cell phone, portable small tripod with a wireless remote. Oh, I forgot it came with that. And clip for video recording.

Vlogging, selfie. Wait, what does the wireless remote do? It's actually a Bluetooth remote that comes with it that will work with iPhone and Android to snap your shutter. Oh! Because if you don't have an Apple watch, which you can do that, by the way. Amazing. You can control your, there's a camera on your phone. Yeah, yeah. I'm sorry, a camera app on your watch to control your phone. You can do selfies from across the room with that. Fascinating. So don't forget that, but yeah.

So you just, you just, Oh, you found it. You just grip this on this. Yeah, this is like those, oh, there was a company that made these tripods that had like, They were like socket, ball and socket. And they came apart on me. Well, but this, the legs of this are, are like, like gooseneck style legs. Yes, they're flexible, but grippy. Grippy, and you can wrap them around things. Oh, that's interesting. Yes. Yeah.

Nice. Nice, nice, nice. Cool. So, you may remember at Mac Stock, I showed that time lapse video. Yeah. That was shot with an iPhone that was hung from the ceiling behind my head. Interesting. In the cockpit. And it just, it was the place to put it up. Yeah, you just, you just gripped it up. Oh, I like that. That's pretty cool, man. That's great. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Fun, fun, fun.

Uh, awesome. All right. Uh, one last one from listener Rod, who says for the people using Microsoft edge, have you tried its new split screen view? He says, I rolled my eyes when Microsoft announced it. However, after using it almost daily on my MacBook Pro, I have to give Microsoft credit for this one. When you only have one screen, this is a game changer.

I have not used this yet, but I definitely understand feeling hampered when browsing the web with just one screen, which is part of the reason I travel with an extra screen, because I like to be able to split things out. This is fascinating and you can really have both of them kind of active, huh, fascinating. Oh, that's a great idea. Yeah. I use it all the time on, not this, but I use that function all the time on the iPad. Right, you can do this on the iPad, that's right.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's built into the OS for the iPad, so yeah. Yep, yep, fascinating. Thanks for that, thanks for that. The cool stuff found everybody. This is, I love these segments, of course. Um... I want to take a minute, we had several of you this week that reminded me that it has been, we got out of the habit of specifically thanking premium sponsors, premium members, not, I mean, it's all sort of the same, like, you support us, so it's the same.

But it had been a while, and we've gotten out of the habit of that, and so I wanted to change that. I want to say up front, the MacGeekGab premium program is completely optional. It was created for those of you who had been asking us if there was a way how to support the show directly. Certainly, if you want to and you have the means, we couldn't possibly be more thankful and more honored that you choose to do this. It's true.

If you don't, or, or, uh, don't have the means or don't want to participate in the premium program, there is no, um, there's no obligation or anything listening to the show. It really helps a ton like that, that, that is the primary thing. Right. Yeah. But there's a way to support us without supporting us financially. There's two ways actually. Okay. One is it visit the sponsors and use the The codes that we give you, just if you visit them, and especially if you decide to buy, use the code.

That helps people that support us financially that way, go, oh, okay, we're getting through, and they'll want to come back. The other way is, there's this cool little app on your iPhone, it's a phone app. You can make a phone call, tell somebody about the show, or share the show on your social media. Share the show. Share the show. That's how you support us. Yeah, you're not wrong. Yeah, you're not wrong. That being said, I do want to call out the folks, I can't, uh, we don't have the time.

I was getting ready to dox them, Dave. To call out everyone, uh, that supported since the last time we did this on the show. So I'm just going to start in the last week here and, and we'll go from there. Uh, and we will continue to do this if not every episode, maybe every other episode. But I, I just want to go through quickly and thank, uh, Matthew from Forked River.

Uh, a $10 contribution, Bradford from Sparta for a $50 contribution, $10 from Jeff in Chesterton, getting that right, $25 from Mark in Centennial, $25 from Alan in Montgomery, $30 from John in Dana Point, $10 from James in Melville, $25 from John in Henrico, $10 from Joseph in Marietta, 10 from Jonathan in Plainsboro and from Paul in Lawrenceville and from Gary in Babylon, Walter, uh, $60 from Walter in Kansas City 10 from Steven in Plainfield 25 from Russell in Jeffersonton.

Yep, that's a mouthful Uh, 25 from William from I don't know where 25 from Ed in Vancouver and also from Wesson, $60 from Rich in Peachtree City, $10 from John in Vienna, $25 from Stuart, from I don't know where, from Michael in Bristol, and from Kirshen, and from Martine, and from Peter in Sudbury. And if I'm not listing your location, it's because you signed up so long ago before we had to capture your location when we did this. We capture as little data as we are required to these days.

We are required to capture a little more. So there are those of you that have been with us a very long time. We didn't have to capture your address and so we don't have it and that's okay. It's okay by us. Yeah, 10 from Nick and Mount Clemens and 25 from Jonathan from I don't know where and thank you to all of you. I was going to thank Dave from Durham for the $11.

That's me. Uh, I have, I, I subscribe to just to make sure it works and I, and I do 11 because I, I think I'm, this is going to change now. I think I'm the only one that does 11 so I can find it easily in the spreadsheets and all that stuff. All right, everybody starts sending in $11 donations. Thanks to me. That's right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But thanks to all of you. Seriously.

This is, um, it, it really means a lot and my apologies. I also want to, we also allow, you know, we have many different avenues for support. And for value for value, right? You get to pick the amount. And to that point, by the way, it really is up to you how much you send in. You do get, in addition to the warm fuzzy feeling of supporting your favorite, one of your favorite podcasts. I don't mean to say that we're your only favorite

podcast. You also get access to the premium at macgeekab.com email address where you can email us. And we do prioritize the emails that come into that. Although you all know, we try to answer everything that comes in via any channel, but this value for value thing is something we believed in for a very long time. You know, you pick what the show is worth to you and support us however you can and it's all okay. Like we said, we are supporting all the podcasting 2.0 paths to

support us. And so you, that means you can send us a booster grams, which is a micro payments via crypto. And so I want to thank, thank squeegee for two payments over the last couple of weeks of 2,000 Satoshis each. A Satoshi is a very small fraction of a Bitcoin. So thank you, Squeegee, for both of those and the booster grams. You rock. So. Very nice. Yeah, thanks all. That's great. Um, the next thing I want to do, Pete, is we talked about the new operating systems in the pre-show a little bit.

I do want to get to some questions, so I don't want to go too long here, my friend, but um, but there are a couple of things. What are you saying, Dave? Well, I know us. I'm not that long-winded. But, you know, it sounds like, I am running the betas on- Hold my juice and watch this. I'm running the betas on my on my phone my daily driver from my 14 pro and my watch which is a series 5 I'm not running it on any of my Macs yet. We can talk about that in a little while

But but I am running it on my phone and and my watch and of last week. I am too. Okay Yeah, yeah, and and so about the same time you and I you and I did this Yeah and I the I in, General and very happy with things my Siri voice changed the it's a different set it now It's a different woman that answered me the other day in the car in Syria, and I was like who dat, you know.

I I am on Siri voice 2 or I was on Siri voice 2 the Classic Siri voice which is what I had previously is now Siri voice 4 so, I don't Siri voice 1 is a guy Yeah, I don't know so I don't know if this keeps changing with different betas I think it did. I think it changed with the most recent beta that I just put on like two days ago. So, uh, but anyway, I just share that because I noticed it. You might notice it too. You might

like the new voice. I kind of did, but it was jarring because I'm very habitual, you know, being a human being and all that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I noticed the layout at the bottom of the phone for phone calls changed a little bit. That has evolved during the betas. The hangup button didn't was moved for a little while. And now the end call button is back where we would expect it in the middle. Back where God meant it to be in the middle. Exactly, yeah, exactly. So, yeah.

Okay, yeah. And I noticed, um, the, it changed the, Picture that's allowed. Well, you can your profile picture and info is you can go nuts with that Yeah, it's it's spread across it and and yeah, I I figure I I've been I've been logging I didn't prepare a whole lot for the segment like I said I didn't want to go too far with it, but I. Have been preparing things for a segment like this that we can do sort of just before the releases come out where we can

Just sort of detail that not only the things that have changed, but the things you might not notice have changed But for now, I just figured we'd talk about our initial impressions. I like both the, the, like the generic, the general list of changes and UX enhancements, uh, both for the phone and for the watch. I am, I am here for all of it, especially on the watch. Now, pre-show Pete, I think you feel differently about the changes. Yeah.

Not, not a huge fan because the, um, well there's, they did a couple of things. First of all, I use the Wayfinder face, but I have the Apple Watch Ultra. Right. And what I used to swipe up to do. I'm sorry, what I used to, yes, what I used to swipe up to do, I now have to hit the side button to do, and what I used to hit the side button to do, I now have to swipe up to do. Okay, that's fine, I'm good with that.

What has driven me nuts is that when I turn the watch crown up, it takes me to a list of apps, And what I used to get when I did that was changing my watch face from full color to a muted red for a night mode. Yeah, because you get your widgets now when you roll the crown. Right, right. Right. But if I, and I'm trying to do it, we won't do it now because the room I'm in is too light. But if I darken it, if I put my hand over the watch and darken it,

no, it's still not doing it. But it automatically goes to a muted red mode at night. Interesting. Okay, that's cool and thoughtful, except Apple, did you ever think that maybe there's times during the day when I want to be in the muted red mode, or at night when I want my full color because I, you know, work often at night in the cockpit. I would like to be able to look at my watch and see.

Color. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah your full color. So interesting. That's a little frustrating Um, but I can see that yeah, I would what I haven't done and it may be possible to go into settings and modify and mod Yeah, I I will say that I find I always found it confusing I could never get to control center when I wanted to I could never get to the things that I wanted to get to I Had to like swipe in six different ways.

It like, it just never became, even though I've had a watch since day one, it never became part of, like my fingers never knew what to do. That changed when I put the new OS. Yeah, you said that last week. Yeah. And it worked, you know, so I get that. Yeah. But the other thing is like, if I push on the watch crown, it shows me the icons for all the apps. Yeah. Except it doesn't, it only shows me the top, I don't know, half or third, cause I have a bunch of apps on my phone.

So I have to then turn the watch crown to scroll down to see them all. I used to have them almost all available, but I knew where they were relative to the clock position in the, you know, I had one up here at about 10 o'clock was my altitude, and over here at nine o'clock was my time. Those are now I have to search, where are they again? I will learn, I'm trainable. Sure, I've been in list mode for my apps for a very long time.

I can't do grid mode, that's too much, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I can see why people don't do grid mode. I probably should go to list mode and simplify my life because at least I know alphabetically roughly where it is. And I can quickly get to it. Yes, that's it. And you can have it surface favorite apps to the top, which is really nice. So yeah, yeah. So that's good to know. But so I found it to be frustrating, but you know, as you know, Dave, change is bad.

Change is terrible for us humans. Change is bad. Absolutely, yes, of course, of course. Of course. All right, look, while we're here, I've got a show to recommend for you. You know how I like to sort of wax poetic about the whole linear time thing being just a construct for our feeble human brains. Well, Midnight Burger is an audio drama about the adventures of a time-traveling, dimension-spanning diner.

I know. But the show starts with this woman, Gloria, who took a waitressing job in a diner outside of Phoenix and didn't realize she was now an employee of Midnight Burger. Every day, Midnight Burger appears somewhere new in the cosmos, along with its staff, a galactic drifter, a rogue theoretical physicist. You need one of those when you're doing this kind of thing. Ascension, old-timey radio, and some guy named Casper.

No one knows who built Midnight Burger or how it works, but when it appears, there's always someone around who could really use a cup of coffee. I know, go check it out. I think you're gonna love it. You can find and listen to Midnight Burger anywhere you listen to podcasts, or just go to, I love this, weopenatsix.com. That's six spelled out. So w e o p e n a t s i x.com. Thanks to the folks at Midnight Burger for doing this swap with us.

All right, Pete. Yeah. Greg has a question for us. He says, how do I move to the very first or last email in a list? I'm running an M1 desktop on Ventura. I have a smaller keyboard with touch ID in the upper right hand corner and the function key in the lower left. I've manually scrolled to the top every day when I check my email, which I know is a waste of time. How do I get to the first

or last email in the list? Well, there's two ways to do it, Greg. And the way you're doing it is is certainly one of them. And, you know, depending if you have a few thousand emails, well, that isn't, is sufficient. You are correct. It is a waste of time. So your other option, pun intended, I guess, is to hit option, command, and then your up arrow or down arrow. In the Mac mail client, that will take you to the very first or the very last mail. I like it. In the list, yeah.

Yep, it's great. Cool. Mr. Ed, I have nothing to add to that. So Mr. Ed has the next question. He says, I am trying to boot a 2006 MacBook Pro from an external USB stick so I can get all the personal info off of the drive before recycling. The internal drive won't boot, the folder icon with a question mark in it. I have found several websites that offer a full OS download of macOS Snow Leopard, but they seem sketchy. Do you know of a safe place to get the download?

So, uh, I think Dave may have that answer. My, my initial answer is a safe place to get a download is you're going to have to buy it, uh, somewhere. Snow leopard, I believe was sold. And I think that's why you're not finding free downloads from Apple, but, but, but keep going. I've got, I've got a snow leopard may have even been back in the days when they still charged for the operating system. That's what I mean.

That's why you can't find it. I see what you're saying. I thought you were saying they sold the rights to that or something. No, no, no. It was sold by Apple. I'm back. I was gone for a while, Dave. I'm back. So, but the thing that you said in your letter is that you want to get the data off this thing, off this machine, so that you can then recycle it, which tells me you are not looking to use this machine going forward.

So, a simpler version to do, way to do this, I believe, would be to disassemble the machine, pull that SATA hard drive out of there and then use, I put a link in the letter back to him. For a product that is a SATA to USB cable that's available on Monoprice. I think it's for about $20. Then you can then plug USB into one end and plug the SATA connection into the other end of that hard drive and it's just a USB drive. Just mount on there and pull the data off of there.

Assuming... That you weren't using FileVault and then this drive is encrypted, in which case your macOS may recognize and ask for a password? What do you think, Dave, about that? Um, yeah, that, I mean, if it's encrypted, that should come up right away when you start up, even before the operating system loads or doesn't load, right? Like the FileVault encryption will happen. Yeah, especially, but, but I'm trying to think how FileVault worked with Snow Leopard.

Like, I'm not, like, it's not the same, like, there's no T2 chipped and there's no, like, I don't, I forget. It's been more than a couple of weeks back, so yeah, no telling. But I also, I did put in a note to ifixit.com, which you can go in there, you can fix your washer, your dryer, all that kind of stuff. But ifixit.com, and I then searched for teardown of a, I think it was 2007 MacBook Pro, and it took me right to it. Here, here's how you take this machine apart.

Yeah, that's I fix it does a nice job. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. The other way to solve this problem would be to. Boot into target disk mode because that makes your MacBook Pro the case for your external, USB or Thunderbolt like depending on you know, what the connectors are and so and it does not require an operating system

That's built. Okay, so that was my I was gonna suggest target disk mode But I thought well if you can't boot yeah, you can't boot into target disk mode So what do you think hold down the option key when you power up?

Remember this I think you're a geek no my fingers say that it's either T or command T But I think it's just T hold on T and boot it up and that, Would get that machine into target disk mode so yeah, then you can just USB to USB across the correct Yeah, then you just machine then it then that Mac just becomes a a previously very expensive,

USB You know case external drive. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So and if you have a fairly new machine You probably already have the cable laying around which is an old USB a to USB C, right? Otherwise, you're looking at USB a to USB a which is a very uncommon cable Yeah, we used to use to keep them around for that reason But you could also do it over the Thunderbolt port which I think that computer has, and that would be way, way faster.

So, but yes, I mean, you know, one way or another, like just trying to grab some data off it before you go. And then, um, I and then the other thing is I will destroy. Well, you're going to cycle, I would pull that hard drive out anyway, if you're going to recycle it, I would not send that back with data on there. Here's why, I don't know, I'm not saying anybody's doing anything nefarious, but you've got social security numbers, bank records, bank account numbers, that sort of thing.

Destroy hard drives. I found an 80 gig and a 60 gig hard drive this week when I was cleaning out a closet and I went, I'm not just going to throw those away. I, so I smacked him a couple of times with a sledgehammer in the, in the driveway and. That's fun. And then sent them off, you know, just. That's fun. Yeah. So. Yeah. Fun. All right. Seems like the security thing to do. I don't disagree. I don't disagree at all. All right. So. You want to take us to Keurit, Pete? I can do that. Great.

Keurit wrote in and said, Dave and Pete, after the last show, I got very excited about Xfinity Storm Ready Wi-Fi, internet backup for network and power outages. So I went to the Xfinity store and bought it. After coming home, I tried to install it, which is to plug it in, to power it on, and it is supposed to show up in the Xfinity app, and you have to follow the instructions.

However, my Xfinity app did not show the device menu. After all the troubleshooting attempts, I contacted Xfinity tech help. Finally, I found out that because I use a router and have a modem in a bridge mode, this will not work. They want Xfinity to be the prime gateway. It's too bad because it was a great deal or a great idea while it lasted. My question is, can we have both? Use Xfinity box to transmit its radio and also connect that to the router for that network? I suppose not.

It's one or the other, but can I get another modem from Xfinity and run that as a gateway for a second alternate internet in the house? Your thoughts? Yeah. Love the show. Never miss it. Yeah. You can do this, Kirit. You're right, the Xfinity gateway would need to be the first thing and it would need to be in router mode, not bridge mode.

Bridge mode essentially means that it's just passing the connection through and it's not doing any routing, it's not assigning IP addresses, it's kind of in dumb mode, if you will. So you need to put it not in dumb mode, it needs to be in smart mode because that's Xfinity's, That's what they've decided.

Once you've done that, you could then take your existing router, you don't need to get anything new, and leave that right where it is, hanging off of the Xfinity gateway, and let your existing router route your network. What will be happening is what we call a double NAT scenario, NAT being Network Address Translation. But really what it means is you've got two routers running on your network, one behind the other. This used to be very much something we did not advise.

It's still something that if you can avoid, it's not a terrible idea to avoid it. But it's not as bad as it used to be. Network gear has gotten a lot smarter, the way things get to pierce firewalls and like do all of that stuff is a lot better now. And most people running what we call double NAT scenarios have zero trouble at all. Even if they're running a, you know, like a private cloud server, like a Synology drive or whatever, things find their way through. The real issue is.

Your router that thinks it's a gateway is actually not the gateway, right? You know, your Xfinity router is the gateway. So it talks to the Xfinity router as though it's talking to the internet at large, and it's not talking to the internet at large. But again, things have gotten a lot smarter. It's not as bad as it used to be. You can, and I would advise trying this to see how it works, and test all of those kind of server-y things that you do.

If you have a disk station, if you have, you know, whatever, people, a Plex server running, make sure people can still get to that. One thing that you could look into doing, and I think the Xfinity gateways support this, it's been so long since I used one, so forgive me if I've got this wrong, but the Xfinity gateways, or most routers, allow you to set what they call a DMZ, stands for Demilitarized Zone.

It's a terrible term because it doesn't really describe what you're doing, what it really is, is it says take all of the inbound packets that you would normally ignore and send them to this specific device on my network, I'll deal with the security from there, right?

And so if you DMZ to your router, right, from the Xfinity gateway, everything that comes into that that it doesn't know what to do with, send it to your router, that will really help deal with any of these things because your router thinks it's going to be the one fielding all of those requests. And by DMZing it, you are making it the device that's fielding all of those requests. So that might get us there. Okay. Yeah.

Well, that actually brings up a quick personal scenario once you started talking about Dumblenat. So I went down last week to move my daughter into her apartment and they have open wifi. And she asked, would you please bring my Sonos speaker that I could never get to work in my dorm room? I would love to have that. And so I did. Well, there's open Wi-Fi. Guess what doesn't work on an open Wi-Fi system? With no password. Really? Sonos requires a password for the Wi-Fi network? Yes. And I guess

it's so other people can't jump in and start using your speaker or something. Interesting. It's the only way I can think about it, but yeah. So what she does have is an Ethernet port in the wall. So I said go, and I was going to do it for her, but they were out of stock that day. So she.

Bought a $40 router. And I said, I think you just plug that into the wall, create your Wi-Fi, and put it in the bridge mode and it will pass through or should she okay it will pass the ethernet it's going to create a little wi-fi network this wi-fi router she's going to plug in ethernet right into the wall yes and now does she need to put it in the bridge mode or can she leave it in the oh no i definitely wouldn't put it into bridge mode i would i would i would leave

that in a double NAT scenario and then connect to its Wi-Fi network. You're connecting the Sonos to its Wi-Fi network and then also it, like the phone, to that Wi-Fi network and control the Sonos that way. Yeah, yeah. That's what I would do. Right. And actually I told her once she did that, it wouldn't be a bad idea to use her laptop on that cute little network that she creates as well. Now she's not out there with the firewall open on the company, so to speak.

Yeah, no, that, that's, yeah, I would, I would use that router as her only wifi, right? I mean, if obviously if something goes wrong, she can connect to the other one, but, but yeah, that would be the primary wifi network would be that one because she won't be able to control the Sonos and yes, absolutely put it in router default mode. Not you don't want to in bridge mode. No.

You want that. Interesting. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Interesting. I did not know that Sonos would not work on a passwordless network. I mean, I've never tried it, you know, but we've talked about- After three or four failed attempts, I finally gave up and called Sono support and talked to a nice gent over in the Philippines. And he said, no, you can't do that.

I'm sorry. Fascinating. Fascinating. Yeah. But it makes sense because that way people can't jump on your speakers and start controlling them. No, it makes perfect sense. I, I'm just, I'm more so it, it like the logic here is sound. I'm, I'm impressed that they did it. It, I just am surprised that how long have we been talking about Sonos on this show? And how have we, like this never came, we never got somebody that was like, I can't

get my Sonos to connect to my network. You know what that tells me? That tells me every one of you out there that, at least those of you that are using Sonos, has a password on your Wi-Fi network. And so I feel like maybe we've done our job. Partly, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's good. But speaking of unsecured networks. Yeah, man. So my, and another personal story here, but my wife had a VoIP phone for her, for her work.

Sure. And last week they decided to do some firmware updates to it and guess what doesn't work. So in, in the process of dealing with it, she gave up, you know, her screen joined this support and they're looking at it a million different ways, trying to fix this phone. And he's looking at our IP address and saying, okay, you're with Fidium, Fiber, all right. No, couldn't figure out why, you know, are they doing something or did you change your network?

No, none of this happened. And then just for grins, he put in my public IP address on Fidium. Sure. And lo and behold, my Synology router responded on port 15,001. Well, it actually responded on port 80 and redirected to port 15,000 or whatever it's set to. Yes, that- Because I moved it from 5001 to 15,001, so it would at least be, you know, someone would have to be hunting for it. But what I'm shocked is he didn't put in, you know, .xxx colon 15,001. He didn't put the port number in.

My router just responded, hey, what's your username and password? And I'm like, whoa, he started typing in admin. I'm sitting there watching him do it. I'm like, oh, no. I said, guess what? Yeah. I said, I can get you into the router so you can look at the DHCP tables and the port forwarding and all that stuff. But there's no admin account on this router. Boy, am I glad because that takes away one piece of information.

First of all, I was not aware and all this time, I wasn't aware that my router was just going to respond on my public IP address without a specific port number being typed into it. Well, it's because it answers on port 80 and then redirects, but yes, that's correct. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, you're right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So that surprised me, but years ago, a couple of years ago now, Synology came out and said, you know, we would, if I were you, I'd disable the admin account.

So I followed their advice and I did. So now to get into my router, you have to have both my username and my password, not just admin and my password. So it's, it's double hanky. And I went off, I went a step further. We've talked about this before as well. I set my router up to automatically deny any IP address permanently that has three failed attempts in 24 hours. Oh, nice. Yep.

So. Yep. Yep. That's good. Yeah. You could also go into the firewall of your router and block requests on port 80 if, if You don't want it to do that redirection. Right. Well, the question then becomes, if I do that, can I still get in via my quick connect ID? Yeah. Yeah, you can, it like, you know, quick connect will get you in, but you could also get him with the port directly.

You're just like what, what surprised you, I think, if I'm hearing this correctly, is, that he tried on the default port 80 or maybe 443, but you know, one of the, the normal ports that you would connect to a web server, and what your router did, which is the default, is it took that request, it answered on port 80, told it redirect to port whatever you've got it set to, 15,000 or whatever, and then, you know, showed the login page.

You're in again. I think I'm understanding this right your expectation was that. You thought that people needed to know the port number in order to get to that login page. Yes. So you could go into the router's firewall and block all requests on port 80, and then it would not do, I don't think, I haven't tried this, it would not do that redirection.

But your point about disabling the default account named admin, whatever the default accounts are, if you can, and not every router lets you, A lot of routers have just a, a hard coded username and that's the end of it. But yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And if you do that, if that is your case, then have a really strong password. Yes. Cause people can wreak havoc upon the. Change it regularly. Yup. Yup. And Brian, or sorry, uh, Mark M, Brian Monroe has given a lot of great advice

during this episode, uh, and I don't think I've, I've thanked him yet. So thank you, Brian. Uh, Mark M for this specifically, he says, yes, it's good advice to change your admin account names on a lot of things, your router, if you can, your, your network storage devices, like a disk station, if you can, and also your WordPress by default, it used to be, it's no longer this way, but it used to be that your default WordPress username was also admin.

So change that too. Yeah. That's right. Yeah. I forgot about that. It is. Yeah. They've, they've fixed that. That's no longer the case with new WordPress installs, but if you've got an old one, I do have one where I still log in as admin. And every time I do, I'm like, I know I got to change this, but pain in the neck. I don't want to have to do it. So, uh, Gary has a question and we still have some time.

Gary writes, I brought home a business card from an event last night on it is a QR code to sign up for notifications for the life of me. I cannot figure out how to turn on my max camera on my iMac. I don't want to fire up FaceTime and I don't see another path. It's likely right in front of me, but I'm stumped! Can you help? I can help, but I want to before that mention that Gary got a hold of us through feedback at MacGeekGab.com. That's how he wrote to us. That's feedback at MacGeekGab.com.

That's what I said. Feedback at MacGeekGab.com. Don't talk too fast. My suggestion was Photo Booth app is native to the Mac. That's how I would turn on the camera. It will do all kinds of cool things for you. I'm not sure I understood completely what he wanted to do, maybe take a picture of the card with his Mac or will the camera, I haven't tried this, just thought of it now, will the camera on the Mac recognize it as a QR code and let you go to, no.

No, it won't. You need to use an app that will do that. And there is one, I found one, called QR Scan. It's available, I believe, for free in the Mac App Store and it will use your or Mac's camera to read and even create some QR codes. So, yep, scan, read, generate QR and barcodes. So I'll leave that link in the show notes at mackeycab.com. Okay. And then almost a, maybe a bonus cool stuff found. I may have talked about this one before or not. I use IQR. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

To create my QR codes and it allows me to embed little pictures in the center of them and that sort of thing. Oh, nice. Yeah. Cool. And that's a Mac app. Is that right? No, I'm sorry. That's an iOS app. Oh. IQRs. No, I'd take that back. It's a Mac app. IQR is a Mac app. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Again, I was gone. I'm back. You're back. It's the time zone differences game. I'm catching up slowly. I can barely hear your accent. It's totally fine. Yeah. It's, it's almost 5.00 PM in, in the United Kingdom.

Yeah. Bye-bye. I'm trying to think of where to go from here. I, I, I. Andrews is good. Yeah, let's do Andrew. I'm just looking at the amount of time we have. So Andrew, uh, Andrew, right. But we'll do it. We're going to do it. Andrew says, I'm having issues with my Apple TV and I wonder if it needs to be replaced or if there is some external issue. I was watching my Apple TV and it seemed to become unresponsive and glitchy.

I restarted it when it came back and could not access any media or content from my Apple TV plus nor anything from any other Application. Okay. I restarted it once more same outcome went to the network in the settings on the Apple TV And the error showing up was that there was a problem with the network and should try again later Okay, the IP was self-assigned beginning with 169. Okay, I disconnected it from my eero network

And then reestablished the network connection still no success. I rebooted my eero No success, but other devices in the home were accessing the network without any issue iPhone iPad, you know, max No issues whatsoever. I, Reset the Apple TV and went through the setup process again Make sure you know the passwords for your network and apps so you can log into them again. Yep. Okay,

He says that did the trick and the Apple TV was functional again But wait the next day the same thing and the same process and the same outcome. This is a, This is not the latest version, but it's the one just before it. So it's a 4k Apple TV, but not the 4k Apple TV version two or whatever we're supposed to call that.

Pete, do you have any thoughts? I, yeah, well, I, my first thought was, I was wondering if this is the same sort of thing that was having my, my iPhone would not, it's a similar iOS. Um, it would, wouldn't join my home network, at least on my 5g one. It's like, oh, so, uh, I tried, I would say, tried logging the Apple TV. The Apple TV off, taking it off and leaving it off for 24 hours, and then logging it back on.

That was one suggestion. And what I wound up redoing, or doing with my phone to finally make it work, because there's several attempts at that didn't work, I renamed it from the capital letter at the beginning of the network name to the network name in all caps. But then that, of course, led to its own issues, right? You have to relog all your Internet of Things onto the new network. Don't do that. So, yeah. You hate doing that if you don't have to. Right.

But then I found an article. Now, this article is 10 years old, so it is a previous issue, same issue with another version of an Apple TV, and he brought it to the Apple store, and they said, oh, yeah, it was a firmware update that we did, and we're seeing this issue, and we can't seem to fix it with the engineers working on the new firmware updates. This is the new Apple TV. Wow. So, yeah. So, even though it was long out of warranty, you know, this guy got a new Apple TV out of it.

And I said, would that link, we can put that there in the show notes as well. That was a Macworld.com article back in 2013. So it's been a week or two since that happened. But yeah, Apple, when they do something, when they break something, even if your thing's out of warranty, they'll fix what they broke. They will. It's true. Yeah, it's true. Fascinating. Huh. The other thing you could do, and this is more of a sort of punt, it

doesn't fix the issue, it bypasses it. You said that you have some Eero's around. If you have an Eero close to your Apple TV, many Eero models have Ethernet ports on them that we forget about. But you can plug into those, even if it's your satellite Eero, right? Like, You know, you've got your router Eero that's across the house and you've got some satellite ones because that's the mesh points doing their thing.

Those mesh points, if they have ethernet ports on them, which most of them do, you can plug into that and then that device is just connected to the network via the Eero's backhaul, so it's not doing wifi. But it's fine and it works and it can even make your network a little more efficient, theoretically. So bypassing the wifi issues, just plugging an ethernet cable from your Apple TV into that hero could just solve the issue entirely and bypass it.

Yeah. And I like my son just set up his, uh, his new apartment and he has his own wifi network. We got him. I gave him a bunch of heroes cause you know, we had to get him set up. So first of all, you know, with great power comes great responsibility. This is his first, I told him, I said, well, you're really sort of graduating into adulthood here, Lucas. I said, you know, You're managing your own Wi-Fi network now. And as soon as we got to his house, we joined his network, of course.

Lisa and I went over to visit him on Sunday. And then, I don't know, we did a bunch of stuff, helped him around his house, helped him try to put this air conditioner in. I got a big lump on my head from the window falling on me. We did all this stuff. And we were talking about where to go for lunch, and Lisa was like, I was just having trouble pulling up the menu. And Lucas was like, Oh, I might have, uh, I might've disabled your, your wifi access.

He's like, I just went through Lucas. He's like, I just went through it and turned off all the unknown devices. And I'm like, man, you can't please. He's like, well, I don't want my neighbors getting on my wifi. I'm like, you know, that's not how it works. Lucas. Like they need your password. The only devices that are on the wifi are ones that you've given the password to. He's like, yeah, but they weren't mine. And so I just turned him off.

In the last 90 minutes while we've been helping you with your stuff?" Very small fee, mom and dad. You too may join. Exactly! But I did tell him, like, look, if you put one of these zero mesh points on your TV stand, plug everything into it, and then that way you're not dealing with, because he's in an apartment building, and so there's going to be some level of Wi-Fi congestion, you know, he's in a downtown

area. So, like, I'm like, just put, you know, use that. And I even gave him a switch, like an old gigabit switch or whatever, a non-smart switch. Cause it turns out we have a bunch of those now that I've replaced all my smart, all my switches with smart switches. I'm like, just plug them all in. He's like, wait, that's a great idea. I'm like, I know that's why I gave it to you. Like, like there are, I, I, it turns out I, I'm not entirely clueless all of the time, you know?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, you know, dad. But yeah, I couldn't believe he just sort of silently went through and just disabled all our devices. I was like, thanks, man. You know, next time you're at the house, I can do that too. You know, you'll notice I have yet to, but, uh, yeah, with great power. My son actually has a sign on his desk that says I'm just here for the free wifi. Yeah. Yeah. Well, that's why I was at my son's apartment was for his free wifi. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

It turns out it wasn't free. I, uh, I had to buy him lunch. So, uh, yeah, it wasn't free. So there you that's why he lets you back on and I still have this lump on my head from the from the from the window Man, that's extra. You're lucky. You didn't charge you extra for that. Yeah, no kidding

So hey, here's one that that was in there and we won't read the question But if you're getting a notification on your watch that you have health issues get it checked out. Yeah, he's the guy's life it did it saved saved a, Mackey kept listeners life. Yeah. Yeah. Thank you for sharing that story with us Kenny for sure. Yeah. Yeah, and I'm glad, obviously. I'm very glad that it worked out. Yep. Yeah. Yeah. Your watch probably isn't erroneously

telling you that you're having irregular symptoms with your heart. And it's easy, if it's easy for you to get that checked out, please do. Yeah. Yeah. You know what? Even if If it's hard, get it checked out. Yeah, that's fair. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Because the alternative may be permanent and not in a good way. And not in the way that we would want. Right. Yeah, exactly. All right. Thanks for hanging out with us, folks. This has been a fun one.

The next episode that you will hear from us will be episode 999, because of course this was 998. 999 will be the episode that we do after Apple's keynote on the 12th. So there will be one episode that week, and it will be the Keynote Reaction episode. And I'll tell you the reason we're doing this. Pete can't do the Keynote Reaction. Pete screwed it up. No, he didn't screw it up. Apple screwed it up. Pete can't do the Keynote Reaction video with us because of timing, right?

Yeah. And we wanna have Pete here when we do MacGeekGab 1000. So we're gonna have a special guest or two with us. Wait, 1000's coming up? I know. So Pete will be here for episode 1000. will not be here for Episode 999, which will be the keynote reaction video that we do after Apple's announcements on the 12th of September. But so instead of releasing, we'll release this on the 4th, as you're probably hearing.

And then we will not be releasing an episode on the 11th. We will be releasing an episode on the 12th. So, yes, we are playing with the schedule to keep the numbers, these arbitrary numbers, some of which are important to us. 999 is also important to us. We were thinking about it before the show. It will be 112 episodes before we get to do that again, where all of the digits are the same. But we get to do 999, which is cool in and of itself.

And then we get to do 1000, also cool and a fantastic milestone. And then we get to do 1001, which is like a very cool palindrome that we get to do. So, you know, so yeah. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. All ones and zeros, and zeros and ones. Zeros and ones and a couple of nines. Well, three nines thrown in there. Well, I'm saying in 1001. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Right, right, right, right. Yeah, yeah, we will have a couple of those. But, um, but the palindromic episode numbers, that will be.

I don't I don't want to sound like we're speaking permanently or whatever here, but that, 1001 might be the final palindrome episode of Mac geek app because the next one, Would be oh no no no the next one would be one, 111 Yeah, right because this which is 112 away. Yeah, but it would always have to be ones ending in one so that yeah Yeah, that one will happen, yeah, so it won't be the last one. Yeah, no, no, no. Okay, all right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I don't think so. Anyway, I don't know.

What the heck do I think? Yeah, well then, yeah. 101, 1111, 1221. Right, right, right. 1331. But those are starting to get up there in the- That's many more years. This is a few hundred away. But yeah, but a few hundred away is, like, I can imagine that we would still be doing this then. You know, to think of, I was, for whatever reason, I was incorrectly thinking that 2002 would be the next one. It's like, oh man, I don't know that we're going to make it to that.

Like maybe, who knows? I have no intention of stopping. Another 18 years. Yeah. Right. Another 18 years. Come on, let me move my walker out of the way so I can. Yeah, that's right. You know, I used to, when we first started this show, I stood up when we recorded and really the only, because I found my energy and attention was better when I was standing.

The only reason I stopped is the alcove when we moved upstairs, once the construction on the studio was finished, the alcove that I record in, there is no- You're really allowed that. I can stand in it, but I can't have a desk up high enough because it's in, like, if you've seen the videos, it's like there's the ceiling is- It's in like a dormer. It's in like a little dormer. That's exactly. I'm going to mess with my camera if I try and show it. But anyway, I did mess with my camera.

Okay. Well, anyway, it is like a little dormer kind of thing. Yep, this is great. I really did a nice job. You done did it now, Dave. Again. Sure did. That's twice today. That is, um... So I haven't stand, but I even behind me, I have an adjustable desk like I could I I like the idea another another 20 episodes. I I might want to be standing then. So there are another 20 years of episodes, not just 20 episodes because I keep the blood flowing and all that good stuff.

Anyway, yes. Lots of fun numbers coming up. Thanks for listening, folks. Thanks to the folks at Cashfly for providing all the bandwidth to get the show from us to you. Thanks to everyone who sent in questions and cool stuff found this week. Thanks to you for listening and as Pete said earlier in the episode, share the show. That is our ask for this week. Thanks for hanging out. Thanks for checking out our sponsors. You can always do that at MattKeycap.com slash sponsors.

Thanks for making the time work with the craziness. Music. In England there, Pete. Yeah, I can do it. While you're there, traveling home and all of this stuff, I want to make sure that you take care of yourself, you have all of your stuff and all of that. But for the most part, the most important thing I want to make sure, Pete, is that you don't get caught. Yeah! Music.