Yes, I think now they could remove the Dock as a feature and I wouldn’t notice. I never see it, I use Alfred on one machine and the native search thing on the other and hide the dock on both, I never even run the cursor round the bottom of the screen so I never even see it ‘accidentally’ now. No badges either, I have never used them,
I’ve heard discussion about people accessing their Mac from their iPad on this episode and some other podcasts. What are people finding the best app and/or service combination for this use case?
Jump Desktop for ios.
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Screens from Edovia. It seems to be updated frequently enough and serves our needs.
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I use Screens and have found it really reliable and intuitive.
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I’m using Jump Desktop. For some reason Screens was unable to allow me access from outside my network (even moving countries and changing ISP didn’t help!), but Jump Desktop doesn’t have a problem. I did troubleshoot when I first encountered the issue, but when I needed a solution recently I just went with Jump Desktop.
I used Screens for years until I found Jump Desktop. Like Rosemary, I found that there were situations where Screens (or Screens Connect) could not connect for some reason, but Jump Desktop/Jump Desktop Connect could.
Jump Desktop even has a feature now where it can route audio from your remote Mac, and a recent update made the feature completely built-in to Jump Desktop, so you no longer need a 3rd party audio driver.
I also use Jump Desktop. I tried Screens, but getting the Mac’s resolution to look decent on my iPad was fiddly.
Jump Desktop just handled it.
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now you guys have me doubting myself, I will have to look into Jump Desktop
Just a quick update, I managed to connect my Philips Hue Meeting Indicator spotlight with my Google calendar through IFTTT. So now when I have a meeting scheduled the light automatically turn on Red and then turns off after the meeting is over. So chuffed with this (silly I know).
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It was a great episode! Thanks to @RosemaryOrchard 
For quite some time I am looking for 34LG ultrawide-flat. My neck strains are my “excuse” to justify my need for this monitor😅.I am not that tall(178cm). Is the height of the monitor enough for someone like me? Is it adjustable?
I’ve just started listening to this episode, and I’m happy to hear that there is some coverage about Plex. I too am interested in setting up a Plex server, I’ll be using my new M1Macmini. I’ll probably be the only user, there a possibility of one other. I don’t expect it to get heavy usage though.
I’ve saved all of the Plex/ripping links from the show notes, but am also interested if you have a blog post that does a start-finish walkthrough of setting up a Plex sever.
I’m mainly interested in watching movies and my pictures, it if there’s a way to get my iTunes music library playable in Plex, that would be great too.
Do you think the lifetime Plexpass is worth the money?
Thanks
@RosemaryOrchard I’d be really interested to see a breakdown of your complete workflow to get DVDs into Plex and which tool does which job 
I’ve got a stack of DVDs and never play them - but I’d love to be able to get them all into a Plex system on a spare Mac Mini that I have so that we can play them elsewhere in the house.
There’s really not much to Plex, and tons of how-to articles and videos. You basically rip all your movies and TV shows into folders (using their naming/folder structure), point Plex to those folders, and Plex will populate with metadata and artwork. The key is having everything named properly, but if you follow their guide you should have few problems.
MakeMKV and Handbrake are 2 free apps you’ll hear a lot of. MakeMKV bypasses encryption and rips the data (does not compress), where Handbrake will handle the compression (it can do the ripping too, if set up correctly). You can set up queues in Handbrake, so you could rip all the discs first, then process with Handbrake 2nd. There are apps that help with naming, but I always did it by hand with no issue.
Tip: Have separate folders for ripping/compressing and only when the file is finished put it in your media folders. Sometimes funny things happen when Plex tries to ID the file but it isn’t finished processing yet.
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I’ll add a note about something that I’ve learned in the past week, as I’m having to re-encode the files I ripped earlier: a Raspberry Pi 4 makes a good Plex Server. It can serve files with no problem.
It doesn’t have the power to transcode well, though. So if you’re using a Pi as a server, be sure you rip your media to a file format that your devices can handle natively (I’m finding that Handbrake’s preset for Roku at 1080p doesn’t work well, but the Roku 720p preset seems to be ok).
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Meaning Plex’ or the rippers? This seams to be the biggest problem with getting Plex to work, from what I’ve read.
I must’ve missed that line. Oops. 
There’s not a whole lot to it! I’m using these tools in this order:
- MakeMKV to rip the DVD to my internal drive.
-
Don Melton’s video transcoding with
transcode-video --quick --no-log [file_path_and_name] - Sonarr to organise TV shows, and Radarr to organise films.
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I think people who have problems getting Plex to work are people who have acquired many media files that they don’t own and just expect it to work without reading the guidelines. MakeMKV will just use Title(1).mkv, and it’s a little hard to find, but you can change it in MakeMKV before the rip or in finder after. I grab the Movie(year) from imdb every rip and never had a problem.
You had asked if the lifetime pass is worth it. It depends how deep you want to go. I use many of the features, so I’m happy with it but it’s easy to start out to just stream your media locally for free. I use parental controls, DVR+commercial skipping. The Plexamp audio player is awesome! If you were using iTunes to organize your music and it’s DRM free, you’ll have no trouble pointing Plex to your music folder. I’m happy every time I can hit Skip Intro, since Plex added that feature for pass holders.
That said, the company has its issues. They’re extremely tight lipped about any future development. For some things that’s fine, but they should tell users in the forum if they’re planning on fixing Camera Upload (basically broken for many in iOS). They just released Plex Arcade, which sounds cool, but it’s an extra monthly paid sub Plex Pass or not. And it’s basically in beta.
Overall, I’m still happy with my investment. Development continues to fix bugs and add new features, though they aren’t always the bugs fixes or features I want.