Leo [00:00:00]:
So, Gary, how's life in Denver this week?

Gary [00:00:04]:
Pretty good. Cold, wintery, and all of that.

Leo [00:00:07]:
I'm just very calm down. Out of our snow and cold. It's back to, moderate, mild, and wet. Wet space. Pacific Northwest. 1 of the measures, of course, is how how how wet are the dogs when they come back in from being outside, and it it's back to being being soaking wet because they're so low low to the ground. So we were talking before we started recording about, the search on our own site, the searches we use on our own site. Yes.

Leo [00:00:37]:
And halfway through, we realized that, gosh, this would be really interesting for for other folks to listen to.

Gary [00:00:42]:
Mhmm.

Leo [00:00:43]:
The the top the the reason it came up is that, on Ask Leo, I have struggled, for years to come up with a really good search solution. I push search hard. If you ever go to one of my ask a question pages, like, there's a paragraph right in front of the field that says search first. In fact, it's almost annoying in how strong it says that. And I I honestly say in that text that half the time, the questions that people are asking me are already answered on the site if they would just search

Gary [00:01:15]:
for it. Yeah. That's half price for me.

Leo [00:01:18]:
But the problem, of course, is that that has the assumption that the search engine is you search whichever search engine you're using is actually going to find the right piece of content to be in an article or a video or whatever. And that's where things kinda sorta tend to go off the rails. For a long time, I was using Google, both their, their revenue generating product, right, where you run the search query through Google, you display ads with your Google search results, and, like AdSense, you get a little bit of revenue. I went to I think I went to generic Google for a while, which was okay, but it was still Google. They were inserting ads, and it was sometimes misleading and so forth. I went to a a third party solution that's available for WordPress sites. It's called Algolia, and it allows you to basically set up, your own, quote, unquote, search engine. They basically maintain the data off-site on their servers so that when you do a serve a search on my site, it sends the search query out to them.

Leo [00:02:19]:
They run it through their database much more quickly and get results. Either I don't know how to use it well or I just wasn't able to tweak it to my satisfaction, but I was never really satisfied with the results. So I dropped back, to using WordPress's built in search. I have I think everybody knows that Ask Leo is built on WordPress, which, you know, gives me tons of functionality, one of which is a search. The search is I don't wanna say basic. I think there's more to it than that. But, in a few examples, it's better. In other words, I go looking for something on my own site, and before, I wouldn't find it even though I knew it was there.

Leo [00:03:03]:
And after, of course, I would using the WordPress WordPress' own site. Now I suspect a part of that is a side effect of a difference between, me and, presumably, you, Gary, and a, quote, unquote, normal person in that we search based on the keywords we know. Right? If if I want to find an article, about, you know, using OneDrive for a specific purpose, I know the keywords to throw at the search that will get me that article because I've already written it. I vaguely remember the titles and that kind of stuff. Real people don't search like that. They search randomly. They pull in entire questions into the search field. And, of course, the results of them vary depending on, just exactly how flexible the search engine is.

Leo [00:03:57]:
And the thing that we we were coming to just before, we started the show was that wouldn't it be nice, if AI were doing a better job of helping us solve this problem? I don't know if you wanna describe the steps that you're going through, offline when you answer questions, but I think it was an interesting, I wanna call it a triple jump to an answer. Right? It's it's do this, do this, do that, and then poof, you know, some search results come out that you can then share with your, with whoever's asking your question.

Gary [00:04:30]:
Yeah. I mean, I've had a similar, journey as you. You know? My site's also WordPress. And it, I I I've never been able to use the WordPress search though because of an odd thing about how my site, MacMost.com, works. And that is that my like, each video I post mostly videos. And each video is basically a database entry and a custom database. Because I've got, you know, where's where's the video located? Because it's on a, you know, video serving site. And where where's the YouTube video and what's the title of video and all that stuff that's not typical WordPress post stuff.

Gary [00:05:11]:
WordPress posts are usually all this text. Somebody would write a bunch of stuff. And, and one of the things is the description. So instead of actually putting in the post the description, I have that in my database, and then the post itself is just a little tiny piece of code that says, this is video two fifth you know, 02/2012. And it then my code then goes and gets the description and the title and everything from that. So when WordPress goes to search, all it sees for that post is just this one little number. Doesn't see that it's about iMovie or Keynote or whatever. It so it doesn't it can't grasp on to what's there for searching.

Gary [00:05:54]:
So I experiment with using Google just like you were saying. I I never really liked it, and then kept changing it over the years and everything anyway. So I built my own, which just goes directly to my database and really takes, like, the search terms and then goes to the database and tries to do a kind of database SQL query type of search, which isn't great because it doesn't do all the things that, like, something like Google will do, interpreting the language, figuring out what the key words in the question are. None of that. It's just looking at each word and it's saying how how frequent how frequently are these words appearing in this thing. I was able to tweak it a lot and say, hey. Words in the title matter more than words in the description, you know, that kind of thing. But it it it's a search that it works and produces a nice list of videos that are results, but the the results are sometimes good and sometimes not.

Gary [00:06:53]:
Like, sometimes you'll search for if you search for, like, iMovie transitions or something. And and if there's a video that's got iMovie transitions in the title, boom, it's gonna be number one. Especially if it's a recent video. It that's not a thing is it prioritizes age too. So it won't try to show like a ten year old video that is a great keyword match over a one year old video that is a okay keyword match. Yeah. So it it it kinda works, but I know it's also kind of not working sometimes. But I don't have another good solution.

Gary [00:07:24]:
Like, one of the things that I've done, in the past, I don't know if I'm doing it now, to be honest, is, is I provided, like, a little link where you could do a Google search. Like, so you search for on my site for it. And in addition to, like, getting the results, there's a little, like, oh, you could, also ask Google this. I don't think I am doing it now. But, yeah, because that would show Google Ads. It'll be at Google's site on that, for that. It's the typical thing. If you go to Google and you type, like, sitecolonmacmost.com space and then your search term, then it's telling Google, yeah.

Gary [00:08:03]:
Do a search, but only give me results from this one website. And the and the search results are really good, except you have all the ads. Maybe I should revisit that, but maybe I should revisit using, like, DuckDuckGo or something.

Leo [00:08:15]:
I was gonna say some of the some of the other alternative alternatives to search results.

Gary [00:08:21]:
Like, yeah, sleep a little better at night, maybe throwing people over to DuckDuckGo or Ecosia or something like that rather than Google.

Leo [00:08:28]:
The other thing is to see if you could encode was it the UDM 14 parameter? You've seen UDM14.com, right, which basically gives you, you know, uses Google. Still. It's a front end of Google, but it gives you the the traditional, you know, 10 blue links they call it. That might be an interesting approach to see if it that gets you something cleaner.

Gary [00:08:47]:
Too. Yeah. Now now this led before we started the video, it's such an interesting thing that's because another aspect of search for me is when I search my own site, which is something you have to do if you've been building a site for as long as either of us have.

Leo [00:09:00]:
Yes.

Gary [00:09:01]:
It's like we number one, we can't always remember what it is we've done articles or videos on. Number two, we certainly don't know where they're like you know, we can't get to them that easily. Right? So somebody asks us a question, it's very likely we're gonna say, I I did something on that. I want to send that person the link. So what's the fastest way for me to get from, here's the question, I'm gonna paste the link in. So one of the things I've got is most of my questions cover up over on YouTube. I've got a little keyboard to my stroke shortcut on my Mac that will take whatever text is selected. So a person asked a question, and during the question, they say, iMovie transition.

Gary [00:09:38]:
Right? So I highlight iMovie transition, and then I, hit this keyboard shortcut. It takes those words and performs a search in my web browser on YouTube in my channel specifically. So it's just building a URL and it's putting the, search text as iMovie transition. So my result is the same as if I were to go to YouTube, go to my channel, say I wanna search it, and then type that in. And then hopefully, the first result is a link right there to the YouTube video. And if it's a YouTube, you know, question, then I could just copy and paste, and I'm done. But sometimes it's not as simple. Sometimes somebody will describe they're looking for something, and they're not using the right words.

Gary [00:10:20]:
And I know I've done a video on that, but searching for the words they're using is gonna help. So I started using AI, and I built a thing where it, I highlight, you know, select the words I want from their question. Then I run the little keyboard shortcut that runs an actual Mac shortcut. And Mac shortcuts have you know, it's the it's kind of the scripting thing you can do on a Mac. One of the things you can have there, if you have the chat GPT app installed, did you get a little chat GPT action, and you could just feed it a prompt. So I take that text, and I don't feed it directly. I actually add a bunch of text to it, and the text I add is something like, you know, a user has asked me a question that that follows. Look on my, instead well, first, I had look on my YouTube channel and tell me which video most best matches this.

Gary [00:11:17]:
But ChatCPT wasn't really good at that. If it was a really popular video at my channel, it would work. But in more obscure video, it wouldn't come up with the right video. So I said, look at this question and come up with a five to 10 word search term for a YouTube channel that would come up with the correct video. So it takes what they said, comes up with this, you know, a short search term, And then it and then I take that, and then I do the search. And that nails it most of the time.

Leo [00:11:48]:
Awesome.

Gary [00:11:49]:
And it just takes five seconds or so for it to do all that, you know, call chat, GPT, and all that. It was interesting because I never thought I would have a use for those little mini models. You know, chat g p has has a degree where you can choose a model and it's like, oh, yeah. So I'm like, why would I not choose the biggest, baddest, best one to give a result? Well, because they're a little slower, but I'm always like, well, if I'm but if I want the right answer, I'm gonna wanna wait two more seconds. But here, I'm just asking it for for it to come up with the search query, not the answer. So I said, yeah. Give me give me the mini model of this because you'll be faster doing it. Anyway, if you don't need

Leo [00:12:24]:
the reasoning that's in those bigger models either. It's not like they need to reason an answer. They just need to essentially do what boils down to a form of translation.

Gary [00:12:32]:
Translation. Yeah. And and also take it takes you into account. Oh, so this is the YouTube search on a YouTube channel Yeah. About this. I mean, it's gonna know, you know, if somebody's asking how do I do a video transition from this to this. You know, it's gonna get the idea that, oh, it's talking about Macs, talking about probably iMovie, that kind of thing. So, yeah, it works really well.

Gary [00:12:54]:
It's not the kind of thing, like, you know, I could build out to be on my site. Like, if I put it on my site where somebody did a search and it actually the prompt was somebody searching my site come up, improve on their search query to to get a better result. Well, then I'd have a whole API issue. Right? I have, like, 300 people a day searching my site.

Leo [00:13:16]:
Right. Right.

Gary [00:13:16]:
Right. Be querying it, just had GPT all those times. So it's a very different process if it's just you doing it. And I'm going to do it, you know, six times a day or whatever as opposed to building it for your site, And it's gonna be done hundreds of times a day. But it was an interesting process and an interesting use of AI that once again does not it has nothing to do with plagiarism. It's got nothing to do with deep fakes. It's got nothing to do with, you know get the facts wrong. And it's just it's just basically saying, improve this and make it a search query.

Gary [00:13:48]:
And it's, you know, works really well.

Leo [00:13:51]:
What I'm wondering is at some point I mean, ChatGPT, we think of as, a large language model that we ask questions of and get answers. Mhmm. They've introduced this concept of searching the web over the last few months.

Gary [00:14:05]:
Yes.

Leo [00:14:06]:
But they're still I I can't really think of them as a search engine yet.

Gary [00:14:12]:
Yeah.

Leo [00:14:13]:
However, sites like Perplexity, they're search engine first with, you know, the LLM and and other, AI models, you know, built in later. I'm wondering if something as simple as a site colon operator added to, an AI based search engine like perplexity, might get us closer, might get us a lot closer to, getting the answers on our own sites, more directly.

Gary [00:14:42]:
Yeah. I definitely I hope it's one of the reasons too that I'm not spending too much time on this now. Like Oh, yeah. Like, how can I improve my search? I'm like, I think I I feel the strategy now is wait and see what tools come up in the next, few months.

Leo [00:14:58]:
Yeah. Because you know that there are some good tools coming down. They're really hard. Given just the the velocity of the changes that have been happening in the space, it's pretty interesting. Yeah. But, yeah, I mean, I I've act you've given me some ideas of things to try, that I haven't been. So we'll see what if I can end up improving what goes on on Ask Leo. But you're right.

Leo [00:15:19]:
I don't want to engage with an API. I don't wanna have it automatically engage with an API every time somebody asks a question. That's just not, not not tenable. So you mentioned videos. Yes. It's in it enters it enters another aspect of what it is you and I do that, on one hand, it seems uber geeky and very, you know, very focused on, you know, entrepreneurs that host their own websites and do their own things. But I also know that a lot of people are also, insanely curious at times about exactly how some of that stuff goes on in the background. So what I wanted to talk about was a little bit of the the way that I've I've changed some of my video hosting Yeah.

Leo [00:16:08]:
And then, as a side effect, some of the server moves that I've done for a couple of my other clients. I am currently using on on Ask Leo. If you go to a, one of my sites or one of my articles that has a video, down at the bottom, there will be a link to I'm sorry, an embed of the YouTube version of the video for that article. Unless, you are signed in to the Ask Leo site and you're a patron of some sort. You've purchased ad free Ask Leo. Well, I can't guarantee that YouTube videos are gonna be ad free, so I then display an embed of the video hosted out on Vimeo. I know that you have, do, still used to use Vimeo, quite a bit.

Gary [00:17:03]:
For my courses, I use it. Yeah.

Leo [00:17:05]:
Yeah. Yeah. And I'm right now, I'm using it. Like I said, right now, it's the primary stuff for folks for folks that, are signed in and patrons. It's just my way of avoiding giving them ads when I promised I wouldn't. However, what I've started to do, again, for my courses, I just finished the switchover yesterday, is I'm now hosting the videos on essentially an online storage service. Now this boils down to there being actually two different ways to to host videos online. You can host them like any other file.

Leo [00:17:48]:
It's just a file, like you host your images, like you host your other stuff. It's just a file stored on a server somewhere. And when the video is referenced, it's that file that then gets downloaded somehow, and then streamed to the screen. The other kind of hosting, though, is literally video hosting, which is what YouTube does, which is what Vimeo does, And as it turns out, what this other provider also offers. Video hosting is ever so slightly different. You end up uploading your video to the service, of course, but then they run a bunch of transcoding in the background so that in fact they store multiple versions of your video. The versions are selected then either at the beginning of a play or even can be switched during the play based on the quality of the Internet connection. So if you're on a slow, horrible Internet connection, then you'll probably end up with a lower quality video because the lower quality video means that they have to push fewer bytes down the line.

Leo [00:18:56]:
Like I said, that's how YouTube works. You can always you've probably seen it on YouTube videos. You get to choose the quality. It tries to do a good job of guessing what you want at the beginning, and I think it can change along the way. But like I said, there are several different qualities. I'm not doing that. I've decided for the courses, at least, as the experiment to, just post them as files. I don't have a fancy player.

Leo [00:19:23]:
I'm using, HTML five, the embedded, video tags, to generate what boils down to a very simple bit of code that displays the video, displays the thumbnail, gives people the opportunity to hit the play button. They can go full screen if they want to. They can do all sorts of those kinds of things. But there's not this overhead of some cumbersome player that is adding all these other features and functionality that isn't being used. So far, I've actually been really pleased with that. The one thing that I did learn is that I've been producing my videos at too high a quality. By that, I mean that when they come out of my video editor, be it either Camtasia or DaVinci Resolve, they're actually pretty big. They're nice.

Leo [00:20:14]:
They're sharp and good quality and all that kind of stuff, but they're overkill for what really needs to get delivered online. So I've been running Handbrake to basically transcode them to the same format with different quality settings and then uploading that. So that basically also means that the files themselves are smaller than they originally were. It's been an interesting approach. The the service that I'm using is called bunny.net, b u n n y Net. There's no e. I'm using them for a couple of different things, but one of them right now is just plain old storage. It's just a place to put bits.

Leo [00:20:53]:
It's the kind of a thing that we could do on our own servers if we wanted to. It's the same kind of thing you could use Amazon s three for if you wanted to. There's a bunch of different things you can use this with. But like I said, there's no there's nothing complicated about it. It's just a place to put files, and it seems to be working well for me. Now I know you've been down some of these branches, some of these paths before, and I'm I'm kinda curious how this all sounds to you.

Gary [00:21:17]:
Well, I I'm actually also using Bunny.net, but I'm using what what you talked about before. I'm using their streaming Right. Service. So their player, they're they are transcoding it, and it's all it's all like a separate little service they've got. You know, when I log on to buddy.net, there's, you know, exactly what you're using there for storing files. And I'm just using their I'm going over to the video streaming portion of it, which works out great. It gives me a nice player. I'm able to upload, the transcript to the players.

Gary [00:21:48]:
There's closed captioning. Mhmm. I, set a lot of things up for the player to look good and all of that. And I get, I I it's it's been really good. Actually, I've used Vimeo in the past, and I still am using them for my courses. It's I I haven't really gotten any had any issues with people having trouble in probably the last year. But for years before that, I would get occasionally people having trouble, which the whole point of using something like Vimeo was I didn't want any trouble. Like What kind of trouble? Just people saying that, the the the video would stop in the middle or that the quality was bad or, you know, there would be things like the typical things you would think and it's like, oh, I want Vimeo to handle this and it not be an issue for me.

Gary [00:22:35]:
And it wasn't that often. You know, 99% was perfect. And then it was just but enough to be an issue, especially with with courses when people are paying for something.

Leo [00:22:45]:
Right.

Gary [00:22:46]:
But come to think of it, I have not it's been a while since I've gotten a complaint like that, and I've had a whole, you know, big force launch and everything like that. Never really so they've just probably gotten better and better and better. Bunny.net problem with Vimeo is the pricing model doesn't work for the volume for my regular videos Right. Which I've talked about before. They have It's it's great

Leo [00:23:07]:
for up to a certain threshold, and then it just loses all all sense. Yeah.

Gary [00:23:11]:
Yes. Yeah. Because they used to be basically unlimited. And then they were like, oh, it's unlimited, except if you use a lot. Like, you know, that was it's basic technical term, use a lot, you know, which apparently I was. But the, the then they then they, you know, there's a lot of outcry, so they were like they put numbers on it.

Leo [00:23:31]:
And I

Gary [00:23:31]:
think I think it's, like, five terabytes a month or something like that. It was some amount that if I started using video for my regular videos, I would cross that threshold. Not by a lot, not by order of magnitude, but I would go, like, 20 or 30% over it as I was even at the time. And the the the funny thing was is I just expected, well, that's okay. The prices are good. I will just pay whatever the overage cost is. Well, they didn't have any overage cost. It was simply, if you go above this, talk to us about enterprise solution, blah blah blah.

Gary [00:24:04]:
And then I was like, you know, that's fine too. I'll talk to you. But I would expect, like, for instance, just let me pay double for double the amount of bandwidth, and I'll be fine. Like, that's the price is still good for me, and it'll be fine. And they were like, no. No. They we don't have that. It's going to cost, like, 50 times

Leo [00:24:25]:
more. Yeah.

Gary [00:24:25]:
Like, it was, like, ridiculous. So I was like, wait a minute. I could just have two separate accounts. I put odd numbered videos on one account and even numbered videos on another account, and I'd pay twice as much, and it would be fine. It would just be a little pain on my end. And they were like, I guess you could, but we're still gonna charge you 50 times the amount if you just wanna do it normally. Yeah. So I was like, fine.

Gary [00:24:45]:
So I looked for a while for another solution. And I did actually what you did for a while. I just had plain videos that were just served up on my site. But, but then I, you know, I I eventually I there are a lot of services that were kinda circling around the solution. Like, it was like, oh, your guys are almost there, but not quite. And and bunny.net was the first one that I was like, this looks actually like what I want. And I tried them, and I've been using them for well, it's been well over a year, maybe two years now. And it's good.

Gary [00:25:14]:
I pay a reasonable amount.

Leo [00:25:16]:
Yeah. They're not they're not horribly expensive in comparison. They're actually really good.

Gary [00:25:19]:
I have not really had any problems. It's been really good. So matter of fact, I still I got a somebody complaining today about the YouTube video looking people's like to use the term out of focus when what's really happening is it's low resolution. Right? You know, their bandwidth has been detected as being you know, slow, so they get a low resolution version. It's not like the video can be out of focus. Like, oh, you're getting it out of focus version of it. Like, the projector at YouTube isn't working correctly. But, the, you know, I've never gotten that with any of the videos that have been served up through funny.net.

Gary [00:25:54]:
So that's really good.

Leo [00:25:56]:
And

Gary [00:25:56]:
I do

Leo [00:25:56]:
have a question.

Gary [00:25:57]:
Happy with it.

Leo [00:25:57]:
Yeah. About what about the transition you described here a moment ago, you went from, you know, plain just post the file and embed the file versus using their, their streaming. Why'd you make that change?

Gary [00:26:11]:
Well, I never made the change. But Bunny.net, I was always streaming.

Leo [00:26:15]:
Oh, okay. Okay.

Gary [00:26:16]:
I I was using another service

Leo [00:26:18]:
Okay.

Gary [00:26:19]:
To do just to host the files while I was trying to figure out figure things out. Sure. Yeah. Bunny.net, I looked and I said the streaming service is what I want. I wanted a nice player. I wanted the player to have features and all of that.

Leo [00:26:31]:
So here's the problem I have with it's not bunny.net's streamer. It's it's Vimeo's and, heck, it's YouTube for that matter. And I'm actually encountering it right now. If I just host the files

Gary [00:26:46]:
Mhmm.

Leo [00:26:48]:
I put them behind my own domain name Yeah. Which means then that I can move those files

Gary [00:26:57]:
Mhmm. Anywhere

Leo [00:27:00]:
without having to change anything else.

Gary [00:27:02]:
Right?

Leo [00:27:03]:
All I really need to do is say, you know what? The files that were at bunny.net right now, well, the my domain points to their server. Now we'll move them to, say, s three, and I'll just change the domain to point to that. What I'm discovering now, of course, is that as I make this change out of Vimeo, because these courses were hosted at Vimeo, I'm having to relocate the original videos. I'm having to reupload them. I'm having to do all that stuff. And the references that I put into my site are not my identifiers. They are Vimeo video numbers or YouTube identifiers. Yes.

Leo [00:27:44]:
Whereas if I'm hosting it myself, the identifier that I'm using is file name, and the file name is not gonna change, again, regardless of where I end up posting this in the future. So that's what's kinda driven me to the solution I'm playing with right now is that I want that flexibility in the future. It's it's I'm reluctant to once again tie myself to, another specific video streaming service simply by the nature of, you know, how the embeds work.

Gary [00:28:15]:
So it's funny that you bring that up because this ties back to our previous discussion about the searching of the website. And remember I mentioned that all my stuff's, like, kind of in my own database. Yes. So I foresaw this issue because when I started in 02/2007, YouTube was not even it wasn't a clear winner at all. Right? It was one of many services. Matter of fact, I think my first videos were uploaded to six different video services, like Blip.tv and Fiddler. And, I mean, there's all these

Leo [00:28:48]:
I remember those. Services.

Gary [00:28:50]:
So when I came up with this, I'm gonna do a database idea, I basically I wanted to get around that. And so the database contains all of these references. So, like, right now, I actually upload to three places, YouTube, bunny.net, and archive.org. Mhmm. And archive.org, I'm purely doing it now for just archiving, you know, permanent archiving. But I did, in the past, have, like, a podcast feed and that link to those files and stuff. And so, basically, everywhere I'm uploading it to, I'm putting a database entry in there. So all I need to do is look at, like, my entry for video 03/2015.

Gary [00:29:33]:
And I've got all those in there, including the name of the original file, like the file that it is on my drive, and I archive it to my you know, and back it up and all that. So I know the original name of the file was something. I know that the bunny.net ID is this. I know the YouTube ID is this, and I know the full URL to the one at, archive.org is this. That's all there, and I actually have code for each one of those. So if I wanted to say, instead of showing, you know, a video is being at bunny.net, I wanted to show it at you the YouTube embed. All I need to do is change one line of code. And all of a sudden, all of the videos at MacMost Mhmm.

Gary [00:30:18]:
Are gonna all of a sudden be YouTube embeds. And or I could change them to be showing the video from archive.org.

Leo [00:30:26]:
So I'm kinda there except without the database. Yeah. The way that I embed videos into askleo.com is not by using the YouTube embed code or even the Vimeo embed code. I have a short code. Short code. WordPress short code.

Gary [00:30:42]:
What I used

Leo [00:30:43]:
to With code that I've written in the back that says, okay. The parameters you pass to it are YouTube ID, the Vimeo ID, and, eventually, now it'll be something else that we'll use for the, for the bunny.net ID. But, so I can make all those same kind of changes. It's just that the the database, I guess, is distributed throughout my content.

Gary [00:31:03]:
Yes. And, actually so there's a way if I was gonna start today, I would instead of using my own database system, I would simply use the custom fields in WordPress. Right. And so and, actually, I have used the I do use the custom fields in WordPress, like, going back to say, maybe the last 1,000 videos. I use them for a lot of stuff. It doesn't go back all the way to the beginning like my own database does. But, like, there are things that are in those custom fields. So if I was to start over again, I would just put all of those things to sort of like the the, IDforbunny.net or the, YouTube, I you know, ID.

Gary [00:31:45]:
Just put those in the custom fields and use them like that. Or even just have, like, a field in, a custom field that is like a list of line by line of different IDs because they all kind of can be recognized. Like, the YouTube IDs look like YouTube IDs. Yes. You can even just do a you can even just do a full URL. It's just youtube.com slash, you know, and then whole thing. And then just put that on the line, and then you just have code, like a short code that is basically like, the short code could be something like a display video. And what it does is then it goes to your custom code and says, oh, so you want so your favorite right now is bunny.net.

Gary [00:32:25]:
So I'm gonna look in the the custom fields, find a bunny.net ID, build the code, the HTML code that needs to go into a bed it, and do that. And then you can have in your code, but the fallback is there's no bunny.net ID, use the YouTube one as the fallback Right. And display that. But then you could go and change it later on. So if you start saying, oh, I've discovered a great new service, so that's gonna be priority one. And if that's not there, bunny.net is there. Or maybe don't use bunny.net anymore, but go to YouTube. So you could still do everything I'm doing now without my own custom database, just with the, the fields, the custom fields in WordPress.

Gary [00:33:06]:
And that's Interesting. That's how I would do it now. I already have the database. It's already kinda nice, and I use it for a whole bunch of other things.

Leo [00:33:13]:
Right. And I've already got my shortcode as, you know, with all the parameters that it takes. And so

Gary [00:33:19]:
So yeah. So there's so, anyway, lots of cool behind the scenes stuff on how our sites work today.

Leo [00:33:24]:
So in another piece of behind the scenes that has absolutely nothing to do with Ask Leo or MacMost, it's just server geeking out. One of the things that Gary and I have both done over the years is, moved. We move from one hosting company to another, for one server to another, for one server operating system to another. It happens. It's just one of those things that is I wanna say it's the cost of doing business, but it is the reality of hosting a website like ours, out on the Internet. And I've I'd also maintain websites for, a couple of well, one's technically a client volunteer organization that I that I volunteer for, and the other one is something just completely off the wall. But, I ended up doing a server move for both of these in the last six months, and I thought it was kind of interesting. I had been hosting both of them in separate accounts out at In motion Hosting.

Leo [00:34:25]:
They're virtual private servers, which means that they look like a complete server, you know, from from, you know, start to finish. You boot it. You reboot it. You do all those kinds of things. Even though you might be on shared hardware, everything else is is completely is is completely unseen. You just look like you're using a a dedicated machine. The contract was coming up, and I decided to look elsewhere for something cheaper. And, we discovered, Contabo is another posting site that we ended up doing this, cheaper, equivalent hardware, you know, great stuff.

Leo [00:35:08]:
So the reason I bring it up at all is because it's a server move with a change embedded in it. There's a there's server management software called cPanel or WebMIM, but cPanel is the name that it usually goes by. And even if you ever if you've ever yourself done shared hosting through, Bluehost or GoDaddy or any of those others, typically, what you're looking at when you manage your own website is an interface that is a variation of or a subset of cPanel. The problem, if you will, with cPanel is that, it's closed source. It's, costly. It's an added cost, and, they raised their cost not that long ago. So that actually was one of the contributing factors to the original cost that I was trying to move away from. There's an equivalent server management package called webmin or virtualmin that allows you to manage your server and your websites on that server through a web interface.

Leo [00:36:17]:
I've been using it on Ask Leo, for, like, at least two, three years, if not longer. So I decided to make that change. But, it's one thing to move servers, but it's one thing it's another thing to change the server management software out from underneath you as you do that. One of them, basically, you can bundle up a cPanel backup, and Webmin knows to suck it up and basically replicate everything in its version of the world as compared to how cPanel organizes things. And that worked, like, 99%. The 1% was interesting because even though they were, quote, unquote, the same operating system, in this case, I went from Ubuntu Linux to Ubuntu Linux, different versions. But, but each of these packages assumes certain software. Now they can assume things like Apache for web servers.

Leo [00:37:20]:
Great. Not a problem. Translate's easy. But they had different assumptions about mailers. CPanel likes to work with Exim, e x I m. Webmin likes to work with postfix. Same same idea, but a completely different approach, a completely different solution. So it had to do some of the translation from x in configuration to figure out the correct equivalent postfix configuration.

Leo [00:37:52]:
And, again, 99%, ninety five %. But, of course, I did end up spending, a fair amount of time, ironing out some of the differences because, you know, forwards didn't work exactly the same and accounts were held a little differently. So the one server, it had, like, a handful of email accounts and forwarders, and that actually transitioned pretty well. The website itself went well. We had some issues with the various email configurations because this is an organization of people that interact with each other and we've got different ways we make ourselves available publicly. So that took a fair amount of work. Then the other one. The other one was both simpler and more complex.

Leo [00:38:34]:
It's simpler in that it has a tiny website, but it has a thousand email, accounts. And migrating a thousand email accounts is nerve wracking at best. When you're doing this kind of a change, it's actually quite nerve wracking, but it actually went relatively smoothly. The the one that moved, the the thousand email account one is a server or a service for ex Microsoft employees. One of the things you you kind of are known by, especially if you were there early, was your email address. For example, my very first email address ever was leon@microsoft.com, and people knew you by your email address. When you leave the company, of course, it would be nice to be findable somehow. So what this service is allows, ex Microsoft employees to come along and say, hey.

Leo [00:39:29]:
Here's my old email address. Can you give me that alias, Leon, on this other domain? And that's what we do. And we've got, like I said, a thousand people, who are doing that. But, it's interesting. I learned a lot. And in fact, one day, I woke up, and one of the servers, I think it was the Microsoft one, decided that it didn't want to do I p v four anymore. It was I p v six only. For some reason, I have no idea what happened.

Leo [00:40:05]:
The configuration for I p v four went away, but that what that meant is that it was functionally unreachable, from just about everywhere because I p v six just isn't quite as, ubiquitous as we might want it to be. So I learned a lot about Linux networking that day. But, those servers are up and running and solid. And like I said, using webmin slash virtualmin to manage their content, it's been a a very good result. I'm really, really happy with where we are. And now all of my servers I have four servers that I manage myself, two, Ask Leo, my personal server, and then these two other ones. They're all being managed by the same, server management software, and I'm not dealing with cPanel anymore. Anyway, I just thought that was kind of an interesting thing for people that are are curious about what goes on in the background.

Leo [00:40:57]:
Even when it's not necessarily related to the business, we're still you know, I, at least, am still playing with this stuff, you know, almost twenty four hours a day.

Gary [00:41:05]:
Yeah. I, I went the opposite direction the last time I moved servers, which was probably less than a year ago. It just got down to the server I was using. I had wrote it out its whole life. Like, I don't know if it was five years or seven years or something. But, you know, I got it when it was, like, I moved once a rich to another and got the latest, greatest, newest

Leo [00:41:25]:
Mhmm.

Gary [00:41:25]:
Everything. And, and that eventually got to the point where and I was using, I am still using Liquid Web, where they said, yeah. It's it's, you know, it's gotta go. You need to move, you know, to so I decided even though I'm paying more than I could be paying, I decided to just go straight from like to like, stick with cPanel, and just go straight across to a new server stuck with liquid web. Just try to make it the easiest path possible. Right. I don't I'm at the a weird amount of time I spend with servers is, like, I I don't use them often enough, that I or I guess I use them just often enough so I get used to things like how cPanel works and things like that. That it would be hard to transition.

Gary [00:42:17]:
And I don't use them often enough that it's like I would come up to speed really quickly on a new one. I would probably go months without having to do something. And then when I tried to do it, I'd be like, well, this is all new, and now I have to dig into it again. So I just felt more comfortable just spending the money and and going. And cPanel now is like a license. Right. And and and, like, one of the annoying things is is that the way the license works is I pay extra because I have more than 10 websites.

Leo [00:42:41]:
Yes.

Gary [00:42:42]:
10

Leo [00:42:42]:
That's what did me in on them originally when I actually, what I also

Gary [00:42:45]:
have on Liquid Web. Like, literally 11 accounts. And the thing that sucks is that I don't need 11 accounts. I could probably do it all with just one account, and probably a better number would be, like, three. You know? And then just have some you have some of those websites under those accounts. Right. But in order to do that, there's work that needs to be done. So, I yeah.

Gary [00:43:11]:
So it's like, okay. I've got 11 accounts and 11 sites. Actually, I think it's more like 11 accounts than, like, 15 sites or whatever. Mhmm. It's like I need to take some of those other, CAC sites, move them as subdomains, and then there's always some issue with one or the other that I'm like, some other time when I have time. So so yeah. So I'm just I just continue to pay. It's not I wouldn't say it's a premium at all.

Gary [00:43:33]:
I'd say it's a moderate amount, not a bargain for Liquid Web, just do everything I want. And I'd it just did show off some moving things. Like, we were talking about, like, you know, it's not my sequel anymore. It's what MariaDB

Leo [00:43:46]:
MariaDB. Yep.

Gary [00:43:47]:
You know, and unfortunately, that was painless, right, to go, from one to the other. I had no problems whatsoever. Yeah. But and so there are a few things. I think my biggest problem was that, some of my sites send out emails. Like, for instance

Leo [00:44:02]:
Mhmm.

Gary [00:44:02]:
If I were to somebody were to ask me a question at a back post, and then I respond to their question, they get a little email that sends out and says, hey, there's a response to your question over here. And the server sends that out Right. Via a script. And, and those kept working just fine, except that there were all these weird things that you need to do to set up email, reverse DNS, and all this.

Leo [00:44:31]:
Reverse DNS, DKIM, SPF, d, Demark. Yes. I'm all So these are all reversed in those. Yes.

Gary [00:44:37]:
Yeah. Anti spam stuff. Right? So the idea was that, you know, more than half of the people would just get it normally. Right? The server just says send it out. They get the email. It all works fine. But then some people, their email service provider would say, hey. This email says it's from macmost dot com, but I thought macmost dot com was at this IP address.

Gary [00:44:57]:
And it's actually this IP address, and it looks suspicious, and I'm just not gonna bother delivering it or telling anybody that about it or whatever. So I can get people that were like, I never got the email for like, I signed up for a course. I never got the email with the login or whatever. And so it just took a while to, like, remember where that stuff was and make all the changes that needed to be made and let that propagate. And that was One

Leo [00:45:21]:
of the one of the problems I run into is, of course, when you move servers, you end up with a new IP address for that server.

Gary [00:45:28]:
Yeah.

Leo [00:45:28]:
Yeah. And, it's kind of a gamble because you're also at least initially inheriting that IP address's reputation

Gary [00:45:38]:
Yeah.

Leo [00:45:38]:
Yeah. Which, especially for email then, can be very significant. As it turns out, the, the server that we have for the, nonprofit, Microsoft email servers do not like me. Just period. I can send whatever I want from that server to anybody else, but Microsoft servers will bounce it because they don't like us. And, that is one of the other things you end up having to deal with when you when you do this kind of stuff. It doesn't matter that I've got all the the the the the SPF and the DKIMS and the DMARCs and and the, you know, the the PTRs all set up correctly, don't matter. That IP address, Microsoft considers to be evil.

Leo [00:46:24]:
So what I ended up having to do, was when sending to a Microsoft domain and only when sending to a Microsoft domain, route it through a different email provider, which, like you said, okay. I've done that before. It was about two years ago. I had to relearn how to do that, because it is possible. One of the complications, by the way, that I'm facing with these is that, my personal organization is very simple. I wanna ask Leo to have a dedicated server. I want that thing to be as beefy and as strong as it is appropriate for that site because that's the bread and butter. I've probably got thirty, forty other websites, but they're on a separate server, so they're shared with all that kind of stuff.

Leo [00:47:10]:
The Microsoft one and the nonprofit one, they're on each their own server, And that's very intentional because, if something ever happens to me or if there's you know, if something ever changes, I need to be able to hand off that package without having to disentangle it from, my own existing infrastructure. So that's why they get their own, their own setup.

Gary [00:47:38]:
Yep. So it's just part of the life of running websites and stuff. Of course, so many people that deal with that that are our competitors or more likely our peers, really, not competing. Don't even deal with this anymore. Set up a YouTube channel. Go with a podcast service. Right. Go to Patreon.

Gary [00:47:55]:
Go to Substack. Right? And they've got their whole online like, some so many times I see interesting people on social media, and I'm like, oh, they have interesting content. They write some interesting stuff. What's their site? They don't have to

Leo [00:48:09]:
say it. Which worries the heck out of me, especially I mean, the the we talked about this a couple weeks ago with, with respect to the TikTok band. All your eggs are in somebody else's basket.

Gary [00:48:21]:
Yeah.

Leo [00:48:22]:
And even if I were posting on, Substack or, you know, some of the other platforms, I know that I do I do host my videos on YouTube, but all of my videos all of my videos are also on Vimeo. So if I were to ever lose my YouTube account for whatever reason, like you said, you just go in and you change a little bit of code on the back end of the server, and all of a sudden, all your videos on your site are still being displayed from, you know, from a different source. It worries me that people are relying so heavily on third parties without building their own base, but we'll see. Yeah. We shall see. So Where do you wanna go next?

Gary [00:49:11]:
Yeah. Well, you know, we should just go right into ain't it cool, really. I mean Okay. Sounds good. We got. Yeah. We've

Leo [00:49:21]:
Well, actually, I wanna get off my lawn first.

Gary [00:49:23]:
You want to okay. Let's let's let's yell at

Leo [00:49:27]:
some people. So one of the things that I've been dealing with for, honestly, months, but it's gotten worse lately, is Microsoft pushing features in Windows that people don't want. The canonical example right now is that they are pushing Copilot, their AI offering, very, very heavily. It's showing up in the operating system. It's showing up as an application. It's showing up in the browser. It's showing up, in Microsoft Office. And, you know, the big challenge for me, of course, is great.

Leo [00:50:02]:
I get to write articles about how to try and turn it off everywhere. But it got me to

Gary [00:50:08]:
thinking. Would it be novel

Leo [00:50:13]:
if Microsoft and other companies that feel the need to push their their features? Wouldn't it be novel if they just made their features so good and so compelling that they could offer them as a choice, and people would want to turn them on. They would want to engage with them. As it is, the fact that they're ramming it down everybody's throat honestly makes me believe that they don't have enough faith in their own product to be assured that people would in fact choose it. Like I said, just make it good, and we'll use it. If it's not good and we don't want it, you're losing reputation and causing a heck of a lot of frustration by forcing it on us. I don't know that we'll ever get there. I think for a lot of these companies, they're too entrenched in their ways, but it would be nice. Yeah.

Leo [00:51:17]:
It would be nice.

Gary [00:51:20]:
I wanna revisit a complaint here that you you originally had and I agreed with, but I've just seen it a few times recently. The whole thing with getting a question that's basically a why question. Somebody asking why. Why does Apple do it this way? Why is this why does it work like this and all that? And it's a weird question. I I hate getting why questions because what I wanna scream back is, like, what difference does it make?

Leo [00:51:47]:
Yes.

Gary [00:51:48]:
It's like knowing why knowing why is not going to to change how you know, that's not what you want. What you want is either you want a better like, think of a how question. Like, how can you get around it? How can you do it differently? How can you make this work for you? Whatever it is. What knowing why doesn't help. But at the same time, it's okay to be curious. Like, if you want to know, like, wow. Why is it like this? Why does this app why do all video editors have a timeline? Like, why? Why is that the way? You know? And there are answers to these things sometimes, and sometimes the answers are fascinating. And maybe that's the only purpose of the person asking why, is they're just curious, inquisitive.

Gary [00:52:31]:
But often, I I I feeling most of the time it's not. They're actually at they're actually just complaining.

Leo [00:52:37]:
Exactly.

Gary [00:52:37]:
Instead of saying, I don't like this, they're saying, why is it like why is it like this? It's like, I'd rather you say, I don't like it like this. I wish they would do it some other way instead of saying, why do they do it like this? Because it's like, oh, I don't know. Do are you asking me, like, should I be researching this and coming up with an answer? Maybe, you know, you shouldn't care, and maybe you don't. You've just phrased this poorly. So it's a really it it's it's the kind of thing. It doesn't make me angry to get the questions. It stops me in my tracks. It does.

Gary [00:53:08]:
I'm going through, like, okay. 50 new YouTube comments. Let's get through them. And I get to number 25, and it's like, why is this like that? And I'm like, dead stop.

Leo [00:53:16]:
Oh. Oh, no. I'm the opposite. I'm the next next comment. Just move on.

Gary [00:53:22]:
I mean, you know, it's like, should I try to interpret should I try to take this as a how question or, like, reinterpret it? Should I try to give them an an sometimes there's an answer. Should but do they care? Are they do they really asking because they care? I it's a very tough thing. So it's like, oh, I just wish the why questions would just not appear in the first place.

Leo [00:53:39]:
I think that sometimes, it's it's certainly the minority of times, but sometimes the why question may or may not be legit or or genuine. Right? They may just be complaining. But sometimes, the answer can help them accept Yeah. What they're faced with. Right? Generally, when they're complaining, that's not the case. But sometimes it can.

Gary [00:54:05]:
And and I don't wanna miss those opportunities. Right. Exactly.

Leo [00:54:08]:
Which is why we read the questions. Yeah.

Gary [00:54:10]:
Yeah. Why we and why sometimes I want but sometimes it is like, I don't know if I don't know the answer offhand of a how question, I can, you know, be like, I don't know what buttons you hit for that. But give me give me one minute here, and I find it kinda but the why question, it's like, oh, do I really wanna start? Because I might be able to find the why in one minute, or I might be the next hour. You know? And Well, and some of them are unanswerable.

Leo [00:54:35]:
Like, why is Microsoft pushing Copilot so hard? I think that's a that's a very, very deep, complicated, and honestly unknown answer. Right? That boils down to philosophy and marketing and business practices and god only knows what. And that's a quest honestly, that's a question I am getting from time to time is why are they doing this? I don't know. My usual answer is it doesn't matter why they're doing it. It is what it is. What we need to focus on is what we do with it.

Gary [00:55:07]:
Right. Exactly. Yep. Yeah. A lot of times too, it's like, why why is this why doesn't this feature exist? You know? Or why isn't this an option? Mhmm. And the answer comes down to, well, if that's an option, then maybe there are hundred other similar things. Like, a simple thing would be like, why can't I export in these four video formats, but not the fifth one that I want? Mhmm. Well, okay.

Gary [00:55:30]:
But then there's the fifth one. What about the sixth one? What about a hundred others that other people want? Like, why is yours more special than other people's? Maybe you have a good answer for that. Maybe you could say, hey. It's the third most popular video format. It should be there. But it's like at some point, it's like, oh, okay. So maybe Apple should build out instead of four export options, a control panel with all sorts of different things, you know. But at some point, it's like, well, now this is going to delay the product and this is gonna confuse people And this is gonna get people asking other why questions, like, what do bits per second mean? Things like that.

Gary [00:56:03]:
So, you know, it it so, yeah, you'd see that's a the what I just went through was a really good example of why it's hard to answer why questions.

Leo [00:56:10]:
Yes. Exactly.

Gary [00:56:12]:
Exactly. Ask us what six times seven is instead of instead of a why question so we can answer and

Leo [00:56:19]:
But why is

Gary [00:56:20]:
know the strengths.

Leo [00:56:21]:
Yeah. On the flip side, and it cool. So I was really hoping to be able to come in here today and to be very, effusive about White Lotus. The first episode of the third season aired last night or the night before. And we watched it, and we will continue to watch it. I was disappointed. And it dawned on me that the reason I was disappointed is that so far, there's not one character I care about, which for me turns out to be actually important as I watch, these various shows. So I'm hoping that that'll change.

Leo [00:56:56]:
So in the meantime then, what I did enjoy that just wrapped up was the latest, Dexter series, The Original Sin, which is basically Dexter's origin story. And, it's good on so many levels, so many levels. One of the things I don't know. Did did you ever watch Dexter?

Gary [00:57:19]:
No. At once.

Leo [00:57:20]:
Okay. So, Dexter is, he's a a a police blood spatter analyst. In the original series, he's a police blood spatter analyst, except, he's also a serial killer. And he has a code, so he's only killing people that deserve it. And certainly through the episodes, you end up agreeing that, yes, that person deserves it. So this is, like I said, his origin story. One of the things they did that's really hard when you travel back in time for characters that are established like that is coming up with actors to play their younger versions, and they nailed it. They managed to get, like, two or three, actors who are who have managed to capture, the expressions, the mannerisms, the approach that the original actors had in the original series to a wonderful, wonderful degree.

Leo [00:58:21]:
It really is believable that, yes, this actor who's playing Dexter today is in fact, you know, is representing the Dexter of the future. So, anyway, if you if you like serial killers, if you like serial killer murder mystery type things, Dexter actually was Dexter, origins or original sin, I think is what it's called now, is highly recommended, for those who are into that kind of thing. I enjoyed it.

Gary [00:58:46]:
Cool. I gotta go with, for this week, the, Saturday Saturday Night Live fiftieth anniversary stuff. It was a whole weekend filled with stuff. Actually, weeks leading up to it with documentaries and everything. I'm a huge SNL fan. Been watching it since I was a kid. I don't seem I I'm not old enough. I should not be old enough to have watched, like, original season stuff, but it turns out I am because, I even saw one of the episodes of the original season.

Gary [00:59:17]:
I think, a a a distant memory, I broke my arm when I was a little kid and returned from the ER late on Saturday night and be and was allowed to What? As, like, you know, deal. It's okay. You know? I was allowed to stay up and watch, and I believe it was one of the very first episodes of Saturday Night Live. I I had no idea what was going. You know, no idea what it was about, but I I it seemed funny and everybody seemed to be laughing at it. And then I just went through childhood watching it and adulthood watching it. And I, so yeah. For me and my wife too, it's very, very important show that we've always enjoyed.

Gary [00:59:55]:
So seeing all this stuff, I thought the music concert on Friday night was fantastic, that they had, on. And then the the show itself was, you know, was good, but it was great it was great to see, like, you know, bits of history and, people that were there and stuff like that. So, anyway, it was a fun it was a fun weekend.

Leo [01:00:15]:
We we watched the, the what is it? Four hour episode Yeah. Live episode, which, again, we enjoyed. It obviously, it had a hits and misses. But, yes, being, ever so slightly older than you, we were watching the original series when it first came out or at least watched it occasionally. It hadn't quite hit cult status at that point, but we were definitely paying attention. The the thing that cracked me up the absolute most about that episode, was, Sabrina Carpenter and Yeah. Paul Simon.

Gary [01:00:50]:
Yeah. Yeah.

Leo [01:00:52]:
They did a fine job on their song. But her comment Her joke. Yeah. She hadn't been born yet, and her parents hadn't been born yet. That made me feel well.

Gary [01:01:03]:
Well. I think that was a that was a great joke because it worked on many levels. It was funny as a joke. Right. But it was also poignant

Leo [01:01:11]:
Yes.

Gary [01:01:11]:
As, like, a statement having to do with the fiftieth anniversary.

Leo [01:01:16]:
Absolutely. The longevity of the show.

Gary [01:01:17]:
Yep. Special. So so it was great. And, and, yeah, it was just, so it was a fun weekend. So that definitely dominated my cultural, and media landscape, this weekend. So I I'll make it my ain't it cool.

Leo [01:01:31]:
Cool. Yep. Makes sense. See. Self promotion. So the question that I think I mentioned a couple weeks ago was, should I upgrade to Windows 11? The flip side of that is, what happens at Windows 10 end of support? It's askleo.com/14597one. It is an article that I recently updated as we're getting closer to that date in October. And honestly, the answer is nothing.

Leo [01:02:01]:
But it's a complicated answer because, yeah, you can keep using Windows 10. It'll be fine, but you do need to pay attention to a few more things that, honestly, you should have been paying attention to all along. Now you just need to make sure you're paying attention to them. So, anyway, what happens at Windows 10 end of support?

Gary [01:02:19]:
Cool. And I have, got a video this week on how and why to use safe mode on a Mac. Safe mode is basically you reboot your Mac, and it doesn't load any third party extensions. So it's a good troubleshooting technique. If something isn't working right, the first thing Apple support is going to ask you to do is reboot into safe mode and then see if it's still not working right.

Leo [01:02:43]:
Right.

Gary [01:02:43]:
And that's a good test to see if it's something with the operating system or something you've installed. And it also does a bunch of other stuff too. There are actually a bunch of diagnostics that are not done during a normal reboot because they would take too long. Mhmm. But they are done during a safe mo mode reboot as, like, a second thing. So sometimes just boot the safe mode and then immediately reboot into, normal mode, but we'll fix actually some things.

Leo [01:03:10]:
Interesting.

Gary [01:03:11]:
Anyway, I've got it it it's changed how you actually do the reboot because, you know, Apple went to its own processors and everything like that, and that really changed some of the basics behind, the hardware. So it's different now than if you have an older Intel Mac, how you actually boot the safe mode. It's just as easy. It's just a different sequence.

Leo [01:03:29]:
It's interesting because Windows has had a safe mode forever. It's probably similar, same idea. Basically, it doesn't load a bunch of stuff. The frustrating thing about it is that, they made it incredibly difficult to get to. It still exists. Yeah. In your case, it's probably a matter of, you know, click click here, reboots into safe mode, and you're you're there. With Windows, it used to be the case where you would reboot your machine, hold down f eight, I think it was, as it was rebooting, and it would boot into safe mode instead of normal.

Leo [01:04:03]:
Now you get a kick out of this. You have to interrupt the boot process three times in a row. So, basically, you start booting,

Gary [01:04:15]:
Yeah.

Leo [01:04:16]:
And you hit control alt delete or you turn off the power. And then you repeat that two more times. And that third time that it comes up, it'll be in safe mode. I don't know why. I'd may maybe this belongs up in in get off my lawn, but I don't know why they did this. And to actually tie it further, why ask why? It is what it is. This is how we get into safe mode.

Gary [01:04:39]:
So

Leo [01:04:39]:
Yeah. They've done a good job of hiding it for some reason.

Gary [01:04:42]:
Interesting. Okay.

Leo [01:04:44]:
Anyway, well, that's another week. And as always, we are very grateful that you are here listening to us, all one or two of you, however many there might be. We appreciate it. As always, thanks for listening, and we will see you again or hear you again or talk to you again real soon. Bye bye. Bye.

Gary [01:05:07]:
Alright. So Good. That went pretty well.

Leo [01:05:10]:
That went longer than I expected, and that's good. So when we've saved the

Gary [01:05:13]:
We saved some good topics for next week. Next week will be, after next week, we'll be on break for a while. I I leave for my trip to New Zealand, a week from Thursday. So and then I will be gone until March 24. Won't be up for an episode of March 25.

Leo [01:05:38]:
Imagine that. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, so basically, month of March off is what you're saying.

Gary [01:05:42]:
The whole month of March. Exactly. Well and, yeah. I guess it will. For our show. Yeah. It does fall out exactly the month of March. So Okay.

Gary [01:05:49]:
So yeah. So we'll get a good episode of next week. We already got a few topics. And Yep. And then we'll take a month off and all that.

Leo [01:05:58]:
Okay. Good. I will talk to you again next week. Yep. Alright. See you. Bye.