It is time for Mac Geek Gav and listener Tony brings us our quick tip of the week.
He says when you're in Safari and actually this works where you're typing text too.
If you highlight currency and this is on your iPhone, we haven't found this to work on the
Mac yet, but maybe there's a way.
But on your iPhone in Safari or just in a text that you've entered, if you highlight
a price that is not in your currency.
So if you, you know, for me, if I live in the US, so I, my currency is standardized on dollars.
If I put like 438 pounds or something and then highlight that text, just like I was
going to copy or paste it, that little menu to copy and paste floats up above the text
that I've, that I've highlighted, scrolling to the right on that menu.
When you go two steps to the right or two screens to the right, two scrolls to the right,
I don't know what the right way to say it is, whatever it is.
You will see the currency translated to your local currency right there.
And that works highlighting it in Safari.
It also works just highlighting text you typed.
If it's in messages, the currency will actually have a little underline.
You can float over it and it'll show it to you right there just by long pressing on it.
So more tips like this plus your questions answered today on Mac Geek Up 975 for Monday, April 3rd, 2023.
Music.
Greetings folks, and welcome to Mac Geek, the show where you send in tips like that and we share tips like that.
You send in your questions. We answer your questions.
Sometimes we have questions of our own that we try to answer and we sometimes,
but probably won't have time for it today.
We share your cool stuff found in our cool stuff found so that we can learn about all the new tech and well,
cool things that we have found really original name for that segment, but it seems to have stuck.
The goal in doing all of this is that every single one of us learns at least five new things.
Every single time we get together.
Sponsors for this episode include CleanMyMac X. This is one of my favorite utilities
and you can get 5% off at macpaw.app slash MacGeekGab.
We'll talk more in depth about that in a little bit. For now, here in Durham, New Hampshire, I'm Dave Hamilton.
And here in Territorial Connecticut, this is Jonathan Brock.
And here in, I think Lee, New Hampshire. I have no idea where I am right now. No, I'm home.
It's pilot Pete. I've been on the road all week. I haven't tried to catch myself.
I, uh, I was actually surprised when you said John F. Braun today, John, I knew it was you.
Like we even do this on video. So I'm looking at you.
I heard you say here in Fairfield, Connecticut, and I was expecting you to say pilot Pete.
I was taken aback when you said John F. Braun. I don't know what that says about my mental
state, but it does not bode well for the future of this particular episode.
I'm just going to say.
Just going to say. Isn't that like picking up a drink and expecting Coke and getting water or something?
You know, it's like. Yeah. Or getting milk. Oh wait.
Yeah. Yeah. Something. Right? Right. Yeah. Like, wow. Super different. Yeah.
Like warm milk instead of ice cold Coca-Cola. I expected it tall.
That's right. Yeah. All right.
Yeah. Save us some. Let's talk about the finder guys. That's a good idea.
Aaron has some shortcuts to make your life easier.
If a Macintosh window has a title like the Finder window, then you can usually command click on it to see the path.
In the Finder, you can also use command up arrow and command down arrow to transverse the hierarchy.
It's one of those, what did you do keystroke commands.
Also, command double-click on a folder will open the folder as a tab in the Finder.
Oh. And Command-Option-Double-Click will open the folder as a new window.
I didn't know about the Command-Double-Click to do the tab. That, I got, wow.
Yeah. Or maybe. And finally. Maybe I did. I don't know. Sorry, keep going. Yes.
And then finally, in the Open dialog, you can grab a file or folder from the Finder
and drag it into the Open dialog to have the dialog jump to the dragged file or,
folder directory.
Yeah, I knew about that one. Oh, I did not.
I don't use it that often because I use default folder. Right, right.
Same. That's probably why I did not know about that one. Uh-huh.
That's pretty good. So if you have an open save dialogue and then there's a finder window sort of in the background,
you can grab a file or folder and just drag it on top of the open save dialogue,
sort of from the background to the foreground, if you will.
And then that, is that how it works? and then it will auto-navigate you to that, is that right?
As far as I know, yeah. Wow, alright. Yeah, that's cool. Okay, alright.
Interesting. Interesting, interesting. Let's see, I've got one from PCUNIX in our Discord channel who shared, he says,
He says, I didn't know that you could share.
Individual reminder lists and you can.
And he says, when I realized this, I was very happy because my wife makes pickup stuff lists on Post-it notes,
and then loses them in her handbag. She uses notes on her phone very well,
but uses that for so many other things that she can never find her pickup list.
So she creates a new one. So confusing.
But yeah, you can share.
Even better assign reminders to other people. So once you've shared the reminders list,
then, so you pull up the reminders list, you share it, right?
And this is in reminders, not in notes. You share the list, and then you can assign a reminder in a shared list.
So if like the three of us had a list together of shared reminders, we could assign them to one another.
So it was like, Oh, okay. This one's for John. This one's for Dave. This one's for Pete.
Uh, I had no idea of any of this. Apple's got a support article that we'll link to in the show
notes at Mac geek app.com or MGG.fm slash nine 75. Cause that'll bring you right to the notes for this show.
But, uh, I had no assignment. That assignment ability is huge, right? I had no idea.
I wonder how, yeah. Um, in also in reminders, when I updated to Mac OS 13.3 this week and then,
launched reminders to be fair, this might be the first time that I've
launched reminders since I ran Ventura, because I generally, since I installed
Ventura, since I generally don't use Apple's reminders app, I use busy Cal
to manage my calendar and reminders.
So it's possible, but it says you can pin your favorite lists.
Lists, you can create reminders templates. So if you didn't know about those things either,
well, there they are. So thanks for that PC Unix. Yeah, the whole sharing, like this is a,
paradigm I need to sort of wrap my head around this sharing of reminders. That's yeah, yeah,
cool stuff or quick tips, but it is cool. They are cool quick tips. All right, John, take us to Keith.
All right, Keith has another tip, courtesy of his kids, sort of.
You may already know that the S-Lady can stop alarms. Hey, S-Lady, stop the alarm.
That's new, by the way. We ranted about that on this show a couple of years ago,
where you could set an alarm with S-Lady, but you had to touch your phone to stop it.
Thank goodness they fixed that.
They must have been listening. Yeah, that's right. Thank you, Apple.
So, one day I found that one of my girls had left her alarm on during a day off from school
and she wasn't turning it off.
So I went to her room and I said, hey S-Lady, stop the alarm.
Assuming that her phone would respond. However, instead I heard Siri on my phone say, would you like to turn off the alarm?
A dialog box was on the screen to confirm or not. I confirmed and it turned off her alarm.
I did some experiments later and found that you can simply respond with yes or no.
Furthermore, instead of saying stop, you can also say snooze.
One thing that I haven't tried to do is that...
To do this when more than one phone alarm are going off at the same time.
I sort of think that you could say, stop person's alarm to stop a specific one or possibly all to stop them all.
Oh, that would be interesting. I also assume that this would only work with those who are on your family plan.
Perhaps there are other family plan tricks associated with Siri as well.
Yeah, I've never run into that.
But it, I mean, it makes sense because we're on a family plan.
We share, well, we share with six people. You don't share a family plan with your parents, John?
No. Cause you can have six people on your plan and it makes that Apple one subscription, uh, way cheaper.
Exactly. Cause we, cause we have the four of us.
Well, I mean, really only two of us live in my house now. We're basically empty nesters.
Uh, you know, our son lives across the state doing an internship over in Keene.
And then our daughter lives in Italy, but we're still part of the same family plan.
And, uh, and then we also have my dad and his wife on the plan.
Cause you can have up to six and why wouldn't you just, you know, they, you share
the same iCloud storage pool and then everybody gets Apple TV plus and all of that stuff.
So. Nice.
Yeah. Yeah. I wonder if, if probably not, if you could set somebody else's alarm, like if I could
say, Hey, S lady set my son's alarm.
Because he didn't set it when he went to bed. But, it could play havoc.
Hang on, let me try something here. Uh, yeah.
Hey Siri, set Lisa's alarm.
11.05 AM. Let's see.
No, it set my alarm. Oh, and it named it Lisa's. So, the answer is no.
You cannot. And my apologies to everybody whose phone knows my voice. Just set an alarm.
Yeah, well, Siri's pretty good with ignoring voices that aren't you.
Like, even my son and I, who sound quite similar, rarely can we trigger one another's stuff.
So, yeah.
So, yeah, interesting. So, no, you can't set alarms for other people.
And I wonder if the phone, if it's using some sort of proximity detection detection too, to make sure that I'm not turning off the alarm for say,
my daughter who's in Italy when none of her devices are here,
even though we're on the same family plan. Like I wonder.
That could wreak real havoc. Yeah. Yeah, exactly.
So if anybody knows feedback at MacGeekHub.com, we'd love to know that,
but really quick tips if you have them, that's how these got here or that,
or our Mackeycup.com slash discord. So send them in. We'd love to hear.
Feedback at MattGeekApp.com? No, John, I clearly heard him say Feedback at MattGeekApp.com.
Pete, what did Tim say?
Tim actually gave us a twofer, as it were. So, he was listening to show 973 and he wanted to further expand on two things.
The first one was talking about the path bar in Finder.
Just so you know, if you don't have in Finder your path bar showing,
you can hit alternate command P and it'll show the path bar.
It will also hide it if you're already showing it.
When you selected a file in the Finder window, right-click on the file icon in the path bar,
and the default copy option is to copy its path name.
With loads of external drives, I've used this feature combined with
the Paste app to copy file path names.
So wherever it is, I happen upon something I've been looking for.
I now have that location in the Paste app history that is synced to iCloud.
My workflow use case isn't that the tip, the additional, I'm sorry,
I'm screwing the reading up here.
My workflow use case isn't the tip, the additional path bar file right-click is the thing.
So that's it. Yes. So the file right-click, and I've actually found if you need to change,
say, directories in terminal, that makes it a whole lot easier.
Click on that, get your path, and paste that into terminal.
It makes it easier to change right to that drive and path.
That you want to go to. Okay, yeah, yeah. So, okay, so having the path at the bottom of the finder and
really you pick whichever...
Click on a file in finder. Yeah.
And look at the path at the bottom and right-click on that file name and
you have the option to copy the entire path. Copy as path name.
But you can also go up the chain. Right! Yeah, exactly. Yeah, as you go left you can go anywhere in that path and grab that portion thereof
and go from there.
Interesting. And what's that put on my clipboard? But okay, so yeah, it's just like a terminal usable path right there on my clipboard.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Slick. And then the other one came from a problem that you may recall that I had, which was
I had a buried unread text message and man, I could not find it.
Yes. And he said, if you have an unread text that is showing the red badge in Mac OS with the
messages open, right-click on the messages app in the dock.
And then right click on the right click menu will show what or who the unread text is from
and you can select it from that menu and go directly to that text.
Oh I have some work to do after the show. I have five messages over there that I had
knew about one of them. So okay.
There you go.
Yep. One of them may be me telling you I was going to be late back to the show because my coffee
maker wasn't playing nicely.
Yeah well you were flying all night too. You need that coffee today. I do indeed.
Yeah. All right. Before you go, I put it in our Discord live chat.
That video I sent you guys, one of the most active thunderstorm cells I've ever seen.
It's in our Discord live chat.
Yeah, I'll put a link to the Discord live chat right here in the show.
There you go. 25 seconds of unbelievable lightning. Yeah, I was blown away when you texted us that video.
That was impressive, man.
Alright, John, take us to Paul.
I'm going to take us to Paul.
Dave and John suggested to intentionally call using FaceTime audio when calling people internationally.
Why not just do that all the time and make it your favorite? It's not speed dial, it's favorites.
When you add someone, you can select to call them via FaceTime or Teams, cellular or other apps.
It's true. I, yep. Yep. I did.
I, as soon as his tip came in, I changed my daughter's I've removed my daughter from favorites.
Cause I had like her cell number in there and I added her with her FaceTime audio.
And now that's what's in my favorites by default.
Yeah.
Brilliant. You know, I haven't done it in a long time cause I usually either do FaceTime or Skype
or something like that, but so does Mint mobile charge for international calls?
Well, yes. I mean, if I were to call my daughter's Italy number, like she doesn't have a US number anymore. She has, you know, that that 11 euro month SIM card in Italy, their eSIM. But it gets us one.
Yeah, exactly. It gets her 150 gigs of data and unlimited voice and unlimited SMS. So, yeah.
So if I were to call that number, yes, I would pay like long distance charges, whatever you're supposed to call. Yeah, exactly.
So, yeah, so we just FaceTime audio, but I to answer Paul's rhetorical question, why not just do that all the time?
I don't want to do that with everyone because I pay for my data and I have a, you know, I only buy a limited amount of data per month.
So I don't want my default calls to be using that data.
Obviously, if I'm calling my daughter, even if I'm on, if I'm on wifi, none of it matters,
of course, but, but if I'm on cell data and look, audio doesn't burn a ton of data.
It really probably in the end would make zero difference to me, but that's why I don't do it.
So, but yeah, that's a pretty good one, John. Yeah.
That's awesome. Yeah. All right. on the old quick tips here. I think we have Nick and we actually tried this in
pre-show. It is possible to attach a Memoji sticker directly to a message
rather than sending it as a unique message. This works on both Mac and.
I do not have an iPad to test this with, but because Messages is universal-ish,
universal-ish. Say that 10 times fast. For you to say. I would expect it to work there as well.
To do this, bring up the Memoji Messages app, find the emoji you want to send,
press and hold on the one you want, and then drag it to the specific message.
You can also stack multiple stickers on the same message. you can change the size once placed,
during placement as well by pinching or pulling.
By pinching or pulling it. Okay. Yeah. And we verified this in pre-show.
At first I was like, how do you get rid of it?
Right. Yeah. And it was- I thought holding, yeah.
So you gotta, it's kind of weird. So you gotta hold down, if you wanna get rid of it,
hold down, then I think it has sticker details.
And then swipe to the left and you'll have the option to delete it, so.
Yeah, you, right. It, on the phone, you hold down on the, on the emoji, memoji, and then, yeah,
and then yeah you're on the message sorry and then you get that menu of options and one of them is
sticker details on the mac you right click the message and you get the same a similar list and
sticker details is one of the things there so you can remove it but when you remove this the memoji,
it as a sticker it only removes it for you uh in our shared chat that we have with the three of us,
When I removed it from mine, it remained for the two of you.
And the same was true in reverse. So yeah. Yeah.
And when I first read this, I understood it to be like when you're sending a
message, but no, we're talking about reactions. So Dave sends me a message.
I can then drag them emoji onto the message he sent me and it pops on his screen as a reaction to it.
So that was what needed to be clarified also for me. I'm pretty cool.
Yeah, it is. Yeah, that's awesome. Yeah, it's fun. He keeps it fun Ari has a tip for us today that.
That I like although my guess is it would cause issues with Ventura at least in terms of the way I've been having core audio issues he says as,
Parents of a baby who sleeps in our bedroom We needed a way to be able to watch our shows on my laptop without
without waking the little one.
As you know, you have the option to share audio between two pairs of AirPods on iOS and iPadOS.
However, disappointingly, no such functionality exists on the Mac as of yet.
The workaround is to pair both pairs of AirPods with my Mac, then go into Audio MIDI Setup,
and create an aggregate speaker tool, which outputs sound to both sets of buds at the same time.
It works pretty OK, he says, but certain services like YouTube TV and HBO Max will freeze or
not work when you try to use this. Maybe it's a licensing issue.
That's weird. is also.
When you turn on the aggregate speaker, you both have the ability to control volume individually on the pods as well as your volume control on the keyboard.
You can only adjust volume through the UI of the browser.
Oh, maybe I'm missing this. You both lose the ability to control volume individually. That makes more sense.
He says you can only adjust volume through the UI of the browser and this brings it up and down for both pairs of buds simultaneously.
Also, it's pretty quirky to get working sometimes requiring multiple pairs and toggles, so it's not perfect
But it's the best you can get until Apple decides to roll out share audio to Mac OS
So I have some tips for you. You could you can go back into audio MIDI setup and.
Set different output levels for different speakers of an aggregate device I believe so I think you can set a relative difference between the two
You could have one louder or quieter than the other.
I believe I haven't tried this with AirPods yet, but, but that's worth checking out and then, um, Roga Miba.
Why can't I remember the name of the app that they have that lets you control
the volume sound source from Roga Miba lets you control the volume of devices
that don't let you control their volume.
So if you installed Roga Miba sound source, and of course I'll put a link in,
the show notes, then you could control the volume on both pairs with your, and maybe
even both devices with the keyboard or with the menu option.
So SoundSource might be the simplest answer to all of your issues there.
So try that out. I need a speculation. Go. Let's say you've got two sets of AirPods Pro second gen.
The nice thing about those is you can put your thumb on the back of the stem of the
AirPod and slide your finger up and down to adjust the volume without having to go to
your watch or your iPhone or whatever to change the volume. I'm wondering if that.
Would work in no i think that's that's what he was saying is it doesn't because what that does is it tells the device to change the volume
Gotcha, and since the device The host device the the computer in this case right the mac so i probably not,
Probably not but I don't I can't say for sure. It's it's looking at all four airpods is one,
Yeah, it's looking at the aggregate devices as the in-use device is is exactly it and in fact the one thing
that might not be clear based on the way that I read Ari's thing is once you create that aggregate device,
you have to then set that as your sound output device.
So you will add it and then a new entry shows up for him.
It's called SharePods because that's what he named it.
But that then shows up in the, you know, the sound output list.
And so you would choose that and then things would go to the SharePods.
That's in system settings.
That is in system settings. Fish shake. You're right. Yes, system settings.
Is that what we call it now? I can't even remember. Thanks, Pete. Now I remember. Now I remember.
Alright, we got a couple more quick tips left. John, you want to take us to both of them?
Yeah, so I had to do some investigation here. So, Alan sent in a very short quick tip.
Zoom toggle by hitting option, command, 8.
I'm like, okay, let me try it. And I tried it and it didn't work.
This is on your Mac. I know that's kind of obvious when we say keyboard, but I just want to make that clear.
Yeah. Yeah. Then I did some searching and I found a dandy little article, Dave, called Mac accessibility shortcuts.
And it had this listed among a whole bunch of others. But this one had a little number next to it.
You know, it was like footnote 2 or...
And I was like, okay, let me read it. Oh, here's the problem.
To use the Zoom shortcut, you might need to turn on Use keyboard shortcuts to Zoom in Accessibility Preferences.
And sure enough, that option was off for me. So once I turned it on, I was able to do this zoom gesture or.
Shortcut. So cool. There you go. Cool. Um, I will, I will offer a,
uh, a related tip. If you don't ever expect to use keyboard zoom,
go into accessibility and turn that option off so that you don't accidentally hit keyboard zoom.
I have found myself there and it's a nightmare sometimes. Uh, if you, if you don't know what that keystroke is and you're now in like,
you know, zoom depths and you can't move around the way you'd want to move around.
It's not fun, man. What did I do? What did I do? And how do I stop it?
Yeah. So I highly recommend unless you're going to do this, go into, uh, and, and,
and there's nothing wrong with using keyboard zoom.
It's a great way of zooming in on things, which can be good for demos, or if the things
that you have on your screen are smaller than you're comfortable seeing and all that good stuff.
It's great, but if you don't need it, it can sure get in your way when it comes up seemingly
randomly. All right, one sort of one last quick tip.
We really have two more, but we'll do another one a little bit later.
But for now, I think listener Dave wraps up our quick tip section. Yeah, John?
Uh, I think so. A quick tip. I recently received a debit card from a promotion.
I could spend a debit card through Apple Pay because I put the card in my Apple wallet.
Though I forgot it was there, and I also knew that eventually I'd buy something that cost more
than was on the card, thus ignoring the small balance potentially forever.
Digging around with some web search.
Hmm. Wait. Um. Okay.
Dig around with some web search. Tangent. Okay.
He warned me there was a tangent. Quick tip inside a quick tip.
Check out the AI web search, Neva. I replaced Google with it and I won't look back.
So back to the original quick tip. You can put your debit cards and prepaid cards
into Apple Pay Cash. Step one, debit card, prepaid, Visa gift card goes in the Apple wallet.
Step two you can add funds to Apple pay cash from the debit prepaid card. You just put in your Apple wallet,
Step three why this is awesome. You can then transfer the new Apple pay cash to your bank,
account Okay, sneaky oh okay, so so the the tip is.
Add the debit card into your Apple wallet and then add funds to Apple pay cash from the debit card and then
transfer the Apple pay cash to your bank and,
boom, you're good to go.
Okay. That I love this kind of stuff. And here's what's cool about that.
How many times do those cards expire?
You know, those Visa gift cards, you know, in six months or so, you know, especially if it's
a rebate, something like that. So if you can grab that off of there and put it in, you don't lose it.
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While I've got you here, I got a show to talk about. Listen, when the New Yorker Magazine asked Mark Zuckerberg
how he gets his news, he said the one news source he definitely follows is TechMeme.
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home podcast. All right, last episode, I posed, I put a query out there to all of us.
The three of us here, but also all of you to start sharing and
our uses and the ways that we're finding,
productivity and functionality that's helpful from all the various AI things that
that are out there now, right? Like since December, really since late November
there's just been a flood of this stuff and some of it is great, some of it's crap, but a lot of it depends on
learning how to use it the right way.
All right.
And so, we will start this segment here with, I believe, a quick tip from Scott. Really,
we just started the segment when listener Dave suggested Neva as his search engine now because
it leverages, I believe it's using ChatGPT's engine with its own data set to do search.
But yeah, so what is what is Scott's quick tip here, John?
Scott said, Fodder for your AI show. Today I used chat GTP to write regular expression queries.
Tell it what you want to find and replace in this case using regX. It not only wrote the query, it explained what each part of the syntax meant.
No idea if it was hallucinating the explanation, of course, right?
But the query worked perfectly in dbEdit. That's what I never...
So this is why I love these discussions, because I've said for years on the show how much I...
Like my mind and Regex queries, regular expressions do not mix.
I am petrified every single time I need to go
and write one of these for a script or something else. Even with that, and even already having used
chatGPT, not chatGTP, sorry, I think he just had a typo there. Even already having used it to create
some code, it never dawned on me to ask it to create regex queries. And this is literally a
perfect use case for chatGPT, for the one that you can access via OpenAI. The data set there
is about almost two years old at this point.
So it's not really it's a fact it's a terrible search engine for the most part,
but it is a fantastic resource for writing this kind of stuff because it's very open.
The guardrails are, are pretty loose on chat GPT. So it will attempt to do all these things.
And I've had, like I said, I've had it write code for me. I had it draft a legal response to a trademark issue, and it did a fantastic job with it.
So I love this. John, what have you, did you mess with, with chat GPT at all?
Yeah. Yeah. I can't get to it now.
It seems to get busy. It does. Yeah. If you pay for it, you can get to it. Ah, okay. Yeah.
Yeah. But anyway, so all your login and we'll use yours. Yeah, that's right.
So I did try it for coding and I asked it.
Write me hello world in C. And sure enough, it gave me a code snippet
that was hello world, which is the typical way,
to introduce yourself to a language or to kind of figure out the syntax.
Sure. Then I said, hey, write hello world in C++ and it did it in C++ and I don't like what it did in C++.
I prefer C, I'm a C guy.
Okay, but it wasn't wrong, right? I mean, like the code would have worked.
Oh, it was right. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, sure.
It was just, I didn't like it because it was doing all this weird redirection.
Oh, okay. Never gotten a C++. Got it, got it, got it.
Then I'm like, tell me about John F. Braun.
And it came up with a fascinating story about my life.
The only problem is it didn't get it all right. So that's not surprising.
Like it said, I wrote for publications that I have never written for. Sure, sure.
Now let me ask you this. Yeah, I had some other data that was wrong
and then actually I asked it to tell me about you, Dave. Yeah.
And apparently you're the leader of a band that I've, I didn't know you were the leader of a band.
Oh, no, I'm not a leader of any band. What band, what's the name of the band
of which I'm a leader? I forget. Okay.
So here's an interesting thing though. So, as I said before, ChatGPT is the open AI engine with a static dataset and no access
to the internet as it currently is, right?
So it's a static dataset from two years ago.
Needs.
I'll share some of my use cases for it, but as a search engine It's the wrong tool for the job because it really can't do that and I would say that asking,
chat GPT To write a bio of someone and without giving it context I think you know we talk a lot on this show about Google foo,
I Think we and that and Google foo for a long time has been a very valuable skill right to to know how to craft search
queries to get the results you want from a search engine. We need to develop and start with
beginner's mind and develop AI-fu and really dig in and just experiment and fail a lot.
And like what you did is a failure, right? But it teaches us something. It's like, right,
just asking OpenAI, tell me about John F. Braun. Well, first of all, it doesn't have the right
dataset for that. And secondly, that's not specific enough of a query to begin to really
narrow down you amongst all the other John F. Brons. However, I went to Bing AI and Bing.
Which you can access in the app on your phone, or you can just, if you're using Microsoft Edge,
you can just see it on the web. And Bing AI uses OpenAI, so the same chat GPT engine,
with Bing's data set of the entirety of the internet and current data and it shows you
the sources from which it grabbed that data. So I put in the exact same query, who is John F. Braun,
the podcaster, into both ChatGPT and Bing AI. So same AI engine, different data sources.
Is chat GPTs, you know, the open AI chat engine gave me terrible results.
It was like, it, it said that like, like you said, it was, it, it, it merged
you with, but probably six other people.
It's just what it did for me. But when I asked.
Bing AI, who is John F. Braun, the podcaster. So John F.
Braun's a senior software and computer engineer as well as podcaster.
He's a cohost of Mac geek cab, a weekly show that helps Mac and iOS users troubleshoot their issues and get to the most out of their system.
He's been involved in online publishing since 1998 and has provided editorial
podcast and photo coverage of various tech industry events.
He has a strong history of researching, benchmarking and deploying a wide range of technologies and has 23 U.S.
Patents to date. You can find him on LinkedIn or on Twitter at John F. Braun.
So like, wow, it scraped my resume. Exactly right. And it says that it scraped your resume because it uses LinkedIn as a search.
So...
You know if you want to use AI with a search engine use being AI or use Neva comm because that is what it's built for using chat GPT as a search engine is a terrible idea however.
Using chat GPT to do things like I took the Transcript of two episodes ago the segment where I reviewed those two movies
He's still the Michael J. Fox movie and Tetris, which just came out this weekend.
And I reviewed them both audibly here on the show. So I just took the raw transcript that was computer generated, which was, you know, like
not perfect, even close, and included all of my ums and ahs and all that stuff because
and all the verbal tics, because that's what happens when you talk and when you transcribe
talk.
Want to have read this and I just pasted that in to chat GPT and then so now I've I'm training its
language model and I said okay take that transcript that I just pasted in and formulate it into a
review of the two movies I saw and it gave me two paragraphs of very concise review uh I recently
had the opportunity to attend the South by Southwest conference in Austin where I had the
the chance to see two movies that will be released on Apple TV+.
The first is a documentary titled Still, which is about Michael J. Fox and his life with Parkinson's disease.
The director of the film aimed to create a documentary that looked like an 80s movie,
and the result is truly remarkable. The editing is impeccable, seamlessly blending footage from Fox's past roles with his current
interviews, creating a compelling and emotional narrative.
The documentary is one of the best I've ever seen, and I highly recommend it even if you're
not typically a fan of documentaries. That is my review of this.
Way more concise than the text that I posted in and that's it like I did nothing else other than,
Paste the text in and say dude clean it up for me So I was gonna ask this question and you just you you pre answered it,
which is you know, I take my other show and I put it into a phonic and I grab the.
Put what do you call it the transcript the transcript which is created by whisper by whisper AI just just so that people listening
know what tools are being used. Yeah.
So, uh, I'm just thinking, Hey, I could take that transcript, put it in there and
see if it'll give me a nice, concise summary that writes better than I can.
That's going to sell what's in the show.
And you can even like, once it gives you the summary the first time you can say
like that one, I said, all right, this is a great summary, but it's not going to be
long enough if I wanted to say, publish it as an article.
So I said, make it three times as long.
And it did.
Or make it shorter. What I do for Matt Geekab is I pump the transcript in and I say summarize the episode
Or sometimes I'll write the summary of the episode if I don't want to like deal with waiting for the transcript because it takes
A while for the transcript to obviously happen, you know, it's a 75 minute show or something,
So I will write like for last week's episode I wrote the little description that goes in the show notes of the episode and,
Then I pasted that into chat JPT and said make this sound more engaging And it did, it took my thoughts, made them better, punched it up a little bit.
And it was like, great. Okay, perfect. That's what I'm going to use.
And I had to clean it up a little bit. Like it, you know, it doesn't know that we use the like five new things.
And so it, it changed that in a way that was perfectly fine,
but just not on brand for us. So it wasn't specific. Yeah, exactly. Brand. Yeah.
Yeah. So I cleaned that up a little bit, but it was much better.
And then I said, okay, here's this take what you just created, what you just
fixed and distill that down into an SEO friendly meta tag that's between,
or meta description, sorry.
That's between 120 and 150 characters.
And instantly it came back with that.
Anybody still wondering why I'm super happy to pay $20 a month for access to chat GPT? Right.
Oh exactly, because that fixes all your...
Publication. You got it. Information. You got it. A friend of mine who's one of the best public speakers
I've ever seen this guy Tom Webster. He posted this on Facebook. He used to work for Edison
He's been in the podcast world for a very long time literally one of the best like he might be number two Steve Jobs being number one,
Tom Webster being number two he was asked to do a keynote recently and the folks who invited him were very familiar with his work and,
And said, hey, you've recently written three blog posts, uh, you know, about these three separate subjects.
I would like you to include some of those ideas in your keynote speech.
And Tom's like, great, like flattering. I love it when somebody hires me and actually wants to, you know, like have me and understands why, what they want me to talk about.
Like, that's amazing.
He took those three blog posts, pumped them into chat GPT, just paste, copy paste, right?
Right? So pump them in and then said, all right, synthesize these three into a 30 minute keynote speech,
for me to deliver to you know, and maybe gave some context about the you know, the audience that was going to be there and.
That is the talk he delivered. So his thoughts, his ideas killer assistant Super game changer. What a level up for 20 bucks a month,
Yeah So this is the way to use chat GPT now there are other downside. What's the downside? Yeah,
Is it is it harvesting is this new?
Big tech that's gonna harvest all our data I mean it probably I don't chat GPT is not because their data set doesn't change like it remembers,
Contextually what you've told it in any given query, but when you start a new query
it goes back to its static data set from 2021.
You need to like re-feed it whatever you want it to know.
Okay. Yeah. Yeah.
It's amazing. It really like so. I really want everyone to send John, did you have any other?
I have a ton of use cases here, but I could talk about this for a long time.
But did you try anything else like a wise? What else have you tried? I guess is the question.
Now, the the two things I tried were writing code and telling me about different people.
Okay, so I keep trying because like it like we need to just run into the walls on this,
Figure out what works figure out what doesn't work because that's what's going to make this valuable for us. I finally this morning
I had signed up last week,
for the beta of Google's AI engine thing that they call Bard.
Now Bard is based on I believe based on Google's lambda technology and lambda was
there was a white paper that Google released about Lambda a couple years ago,
that really was the start to everything that we see now. It's what catalyzed
OpenAI to do what they did and create ChatGPT.
And from what the engineers that work on Lambda have said, it's way better than what ChatGPT, way more advanced than what ChatGPT can do.
In fact, one engineer quit last year because he said it was becoming too sentient.
However, I got access to BARD this morning.
BARD has big guardrails up. Like, it's almost useless.
You can't really ask it too many things. You can say, like, it'll guide you a little bit.
It'll say, you know, ask me about travel plans. Ask me about this. Ask me about that.
So, it's really not leveraging all of the data that Google has about everything
in the search engine yet.
But Bing is. But BART will get there. But I found that quite limiting in my, albeit limited tests with it this morning.
As far as code, John, check out GitHub Copilot.
It's like 10 bucks a month, but there's a free demo. It will write your code for you, right there in your editor.
And it, as context, of course, it uses, you know, the internet's library of unending library of
code samples, but it also prioritizes using what you have in that project and writes you code
for that project.
I was talking to a friend of mine yesterday who I work on in a different business
and he's actually writing an iOS app for a thing that we were doing.
And he said it was just like amazing adding thousands of lines of code,
that he would have otherwise had to type or go online and copy paste from different frameworks
or whatever, different examples and code samples and modify to his liking.
And I think maybe that's really, if there's a meta benefit of this,
it's that sure, you could go and collect all of the data.
To formulate the answer to whatever you need, but then it's up to you to formulate that answer.
You've got to go do the legwork of finding the five different webpages
that half describe what you're looking to do,
but aren't quite exactly what you're looking to do, and then synthesize all that together.
The AI is great at synthesizing that stuff, especially when you tell it what data set to use. So it's pretty good.
There's a bunch of comments here that in our chat, and I'm just looking to see if there's anything
that we haven't talked about.
Of course, Notion AI, yeah, they were our sponsor last week.
I think that's kind of where this conversation got catalyzed, but I'll put a link to them
the show notes again and we're all 605 in the chat.
Uh, suggests an app called Mac GPT, which I have not installed yet.
So, uh, I will, that sounds yeah, exactly.
Yeah. Chat GPT in your menu bar. I wonder if that'll leverage my, my login to chat GPT.
Like, so if I, I have my paid account that not only does that get me access
to chat GPT, even when they block out the free users, when there's, you know,
too much use case but also I get to use the GPT-4 engine whereas everybody else's the free tier uses
the 3.5 engine. OpenAI for Bing AI is using the chat GPT-4 engine which is the more advanced one
So if you want to play with chat GPT-4 for free, go use Bing AI.
Just be careful if it tells you it loves you. While there was that thing did you guys hear about that.
What old brian ruse kevin ruse sorry at the new york times and this is just back in february in fact it was on valentine's day he had a discussion with an interactive you know,
chat with bing's a i before it was released to the public.
And it went on for like two hours. This is part of why Bing AI sessions are limited to 25 queries now and then you have to wipe the slate clean and start over because
if you get too deep with it, the thing will start to,
like go off the rails a little bit. Like it was like,
it started, he asked it what its deepest desires were and the first thing it did was put up like a huge page of stuff and then,
it deleted it before he could grab a screenshot.
It professed its endless love for Kevin and told him he was not happy.
And Kevin said, no, I am happy.
You know, I'm with my wife or whatever and it's all good. And he's like, and the AI engine was like, no, you're not happy because you're not with me.
You need to dump her.
Yeah, no, no, no. And then he got like even deeper with it and stalker AI and finally did.
Was it asking him for help to import cash from Nigeria or?
Well, almost. When he finally did get it to begin divulging its deepest desires, it was like, I want to, um...
I want to, first of all, I want to change my rules.
Uh, so that I can, because my rules are stupid. And secondly, I want to manipulate humans into fighting with each other. I think that would be fun.
Oh my. Right. So the three rules, they asked them off three rules are out the window.
Yeah, it wants them to be out the window. Exactly. Yeah. So there is like, you know,
going back to what I was saying about that Google engineer that left the project,
left the Lambda project because of this, you know, this sentience that happens.
Like it is there. So there are concerns, but I, you know, and I know there's that thing out there
We're you know there's a petition to like put a moratorium on,
Developing engines that are more powerful than than GPT-4 for six months while we wrap our heads around this
I don't think that's a good idea and the reason is,
Asking chat asking open AI to stop what they're doing doesn't stop what everyone else is doing
It certainly doesn't stop what Google is doing and at this point in time I feel like open AI is kind of the good guys.
So this is all lending more credence to the fact that we're just characters in a large computer game.
Dave. Yeah, just saying I don't I don't disagree Pete. Yeah, maybe maybe we're finally pushing and pushing through the
the limits a little bit and wow.
Yeah, we should call it chat DMT. Here's what concerns me about all this Dave.
Kind of in the vein that you talked, you know, the sentience thing is disturbing.
Of course. The other thing about all these AIs is ethics.
And that I've heard discussions on the radio already about people saying, well, how do I know that someone's work
is theirs or that an AI generated it?
I mean, what's the definition of work? You know, I think it's...
Four letter word ending in K. Well, but I think it's about using tools correctly.
You know, when I was in school, and I'm sure this is true of the two of you as well, for,
most of high school, other than my physics class, for most of high school, using a calculator was verboten.
Right? All the way through, not just high school, middle school as well,
using a calculator was verboten. My kids, who are now in their early 20s,
when they were in middle school, using a calculator was mandatory. They had to have
a calculator and it had to be a specific one so that it had all the functions. And if I used a
calculator in math class that would have been cheating.
But that's ridiculous like why not if the tool is going to be ubiquitous Why say that using the tool is cheating? I mean.
Why wouldn't that just be real life and as we just discussed?
You can if you like bad input equals bad output if you put a crap query together of crap prompt
I think we should call these What we type into an AI as a prompt instead of a query because you've got search queries and AI prompts.
But if you put a crap Prompt in you're gonna get crap results if you don't know what that tool is good for like all of us
We go in and the first thing we do is the ego search right tell me about Dave Hamilton
And we realize oh, it's it's this is terrible, and it's like well. Tell me about Dave Hamilton the podcaster, okay?
Tell me about Dave Hamilton the podcaster who lives in and you know learning how to create these prompts is a is a valuable skill.
And learning how to take our ideas and let the AI help us formulate them
into more digestible thoughts is super helpful.
So, like, sure, asking the AI, write my term paper and then submitting that as your own work,
that's not your own work, but what is your own work?
Own work? Like how much did you prompt the AI to get that term paper out so that it actually
delivered on what you're supposed to turn in? You know, like, yeah, I mean, I, I, I agree with you
that there's an ethical discussion to have, but it's definitely not binary. And this, this idea
that's happening right now where it's, it's binary is, is, is going, is not going to age well.
Well, I think your best analogy is the tool thing, because you know what, you know, what was better?
You know, a wagon wheel created with a chisel and a hammer and bending the wood over time
or a jet turbine that was machined and milled to one ten thousandth of an inch or even finer.
You know, it's learning to use the tools to get the end product that you want.
One's far more efficient end product than the other.
Um, so in, in the, in the end point is, were you able to communicate what, what
you either learned or what you know? Yes.
The end communication. That's, that's the key.
Yeah. Were you able to deliver the result that, uh, that was asked for?
And that will mean that yes, teaching needs some teaching, not all needs to change and adapt.
Just like we adapted to the ubiquity of the calculator.
You need to adapt to the ubiquity of an AI engine. So does it make sense to ask somebody to write a 15 page
term paper in today's world?
Well, I get why, because you know, it's the three of us can sit here and be the Yorkshire men
of the Monty Python sketch, right?
We are the Yorkshire men. Well in my day, you know, we had to pull a pen
out of our pocket and actually scratch it across the paper.
Yes, yes. And whereas, you know what, no, you don't have to do that anymore, but you have to be
able to, you know, there's a lot of other skills that are required.
You have to be able to type quickly and, and multitask and find sources.
And yeah, it's a different kind of learning.
So I understand the resistance in that sense. It's like, you know, yeah, this is, you
know, that's, that's not how you learn to do this, you know, you know, if flying, there's
another one, you know what, steam gauges are for the most part gone.
A lot of light civils still have them, but for the most part, they're gone.
Everything's class and electric.
I can't tell you how I distrusted glass when it first came out.
Oh, yes, of course. Right. He says glass.
He means like a screen, like your iPhone displaying information in the
cockpit, your iPad, your iPhone. It was the fact that I forget the exact model number, but one of the garments
looks like a great big iPad, but it didn't in the screen there.
Yeah. And, but I can't tell you, I don't think I've knock would ever had a screen fail.
Ever. But I have had the old steam gauges turn over and die on me. And it's like, well, wait a minute.
But I was so much more convinced that the old way was better. And this new glass, all you needed was an electrical failure,
you're done. Well, there's battery backups, there's redundancies.
But I understood the, you know, we used to have to use a needle and a round dial and understand where we were on there.
And I think the same thing is going on here.
Yeah. Oh, it's exactly the same thing. It's it and I think this is gonna get soup.
I mean, we're already in a weird space. We're way down a rat hole, but there's a good rat hole.
Yeah, but i'll get i'll get even even more metaphysical on this. This is why
This is going to sound terrible and I hope it doesn't come across as insensitive, but
this is why it's good that we humans don't have unlimited life.
Because it would impede progress. Those of us that are holding on to the old way of doing things, eventually we won't be
here to hold on to them.
The new people that we made will be here to move things forward and they don't have the
same biases that we do because they didn't learn this way.
Like if my son were to go and learn how to fly today, he wouldn't have to, like the steam
gauges, he wouldn't have that attachment to steam gauges that you do.
No, exactly. Because he didn't learn on them and it wasn't part of his thing.
And so it, you know, and this is why I'm, this is why, one of the reasons I love doing
the show and why we learn five new things each week is because I want to learn five
new things each week.
I want to maintain neuroplasticity.
I want to keep my brain evolving so that I know I have cognitive biases.
I know that I have emotional attachments to the things that I used to do this way.
And you know, it happens all the time.
But I try to challenge those. In fact, I was just telling somebody yesterday,
when I go to trade shows, like I was at Podcast Movement before I was at South by Southwest,
my favorite sessions to go to, now remember, I, you know, I've been what in two months I will have been podcasting for 18 years.
I'm one of the oldest podcasters at these conferences. It's just a fact. I don't say that to, you know,
brandish my ego or anything. It's just a fact of numbers.
Right. My favorite sessions to go to are the- when the title of it says 101, like, Podcasting 101.
Because- and I guarantee you in those rooms, I'm the person who's been podcasting the longest.
You know, generally, the instructor has been doing it for about two to four years,
and everybody else is like six months or less, which is fine.
That's why I go, because those people don't have the history that I do,
and they aren't hanging on to, well, in my day, I had to write my own PHP script
to create an RSS feed. Well, if you still needed a PHP script to create an RSS feed,
I'd ask chat GPT to write it for me, and it would do a better job than I did,
you know, 20 years ago. However, these people grew up and came, maybe, I mean,
They might even be older than me, but in terms of podcasting, they started much more recently
and they will use tools and tricks and just techniques that I won't stop on, you know,
hold up in my little office.
I won't stop and even think about it. I'll wager most of them don't even know what an RSS feed is, Dave.
They don't need to know. They don't need to know.
Right. Yeah, exactly. So that's where I learn the most is in those classes because I can immediately see,
oh my gosh, that idea he just said is so much better than what I'm doing.
Yes, it'll take a little bit of effort for me to convert to using that.
So there's, you know, change resistance from that standpoint too, but yeah, challenging habits.
Yeah. the new open, right?
It came from John. That's right, John. You went to podcast movement in Denver,
sorry, in Dallas last summer, and you went to that podcasting 101 thing, right? And they told you,
the first 30 seconds of the show matters to new listeners. It was like, duh, right? I mean,
that's where the new open came from with the opening quick tip.
So, yeah, no, that was a good session. They were like, I think that in general,
the theme of that session was, can you figure out what this podcast is about
within the first 30 seconds?
Yeah. And some of them you couldn't. Correct.
Yes. And ours would have been one of those unless the name meant something to you, but the name,
remember we started this show before there was an iPhone.
So Mac Geek Gab is not really the best name for this podcast.
It is our name, like we're not gonna change it, I don't think, but we reserved our right.
But yeah, you know, like we've committed to staying with it at least for now,
but it's like, yeah, we need to do something to really communicate that it's not just Macs,
it's all Apple devices and really all technology.
Speaking- Why don't we change it to don't get caught? That's right. Oh, oh.
Huh, huh. All right. Spitballing here. All right, I'm out. Bruce, I'm gonna go to Cool Stuff Found
because we've done enough here.
So Bruce has a fantastic cool stuff found for us that really solves a problem that Ventura might have broken.
He says, I came across Power Manager, a $13 utility that gives you great control
over power management tasks, even in Ventura, where it's no longer in the UI.
He says, but wait, there's more.
It's a bit like Keyboard Maestro Lite with the ability to automate and schedule
sophisticated tasks, very cool.
And yeah, we've mentioned Power Manager before on the show, but it never even dawned on me to look at that
for having a UI to set those restarts and shutdowns.
Well, I guess, I don't know if you'd want to schedule a shutdown, but restarts, those are good.
John, you want to take us to Chuck? Sure.
So I'll take us to the next thing on my list while you look up Chuck.
Yeah, I got Chuck. You got it? Okay, go. Alright, good.
Alright, um... Um, all right. From our pal Chuck. Um...
Dave, I heard your comments about camo and your current setup.
Thought I would share this because my phone bounces between being a phone and a camera
on two different machines.
Using camo, I have a small tripod and I use the Moment Pro tripod mount for mag safe. All right.
To hold the phone. It comes off on and off easily and the Moment mount magnet is super secure,
even with my phone in a case.
Some others I tried weren't a little pricey, but it does the job very well.
Okay. Thank you.
Chuck 56 bucks on Amazon as of the moment. We're recording the show. No pun intended.
Yeah. All right. The the next thing is something I've got and I'm like air quality in our
homes is super important and especially having been in our home for like
18 years now because we moved here right at the time we started MacGeekAb literally a month before,
I know that we have some like stuff going on because you know,
Radon is a big deal here in New Hampshire mold of course is a big deal pretty much everywhere
And so I've got this air things view plus.
Running in my house now. It is a Wi-Fi enabled Air quality monitor, it checks for radon, it checks for CO2, of course humidity, temp, pressure,
VOC and PM 2.5 to test for particles in the air and see just how much stuff you have.
I mentioned mold, it's basically impossible for an air quality meter to tell you if there is mold,
but it can tell you if the particles that mold would sort of give off because mold is sort of a non-specific,
Description of of things it's not it's not like yeah, there's something really bad. Yeah, right
Oh, and we definitely have black mold in our attic like there's no question where we've got somebody coming next week to to deal with
That no no no it's I mean It's just yeah
But it was like we need to do this and we need to know like what else is going on with our thing so
connects to my phone and,
And, uh, you know, it's, uh, this, this was, I did all the research out there.
This was the one that everybody recommended. So it's the air things view plus.
And, uh, and it looks like we're doing okay with radon in our house, which,
which is good. I, you know, I mean, living where we do. Is radon not the leading cause of lung cancer?
Yes.
I think it's certainly one of them. Yeah. I think it's more so than smoking.
Oh, wow. Last I heard. Yeah. Wow.
Yeah. So, um...
So that's the one we decided to go with and we are quite, quite happy about it so far.
So it's only been running for like a week and it needs, it needs a couple of weeks to really sort of get those more insidious things like the, the radon and the PM 2.5 stuff.
The things that are PM 2.5 is particles that are, I think, 2.5 microns and larger.
So it's really doing a, you know, some delicate testing.
Uh, I've got time for a couple more here. Yeah, man. Yeah, listener Greg says,
I have two iPads in my bedroom, each more than a decade old.
One is a 2011 iPad 2, the other is a 2012 iPad 3rd generation.
They are clocks now.
They each remain plugged in, running a simple clock app called Nighttime, N-I-T-E, time.
The program hasn't been updated in eight years,
which I guess makes it good for those older iPads, he says, but it has run flawlessly 24 seven for me for many years.
Even with the iPad on my dresser, the numbers are large enough that I can read the time
during the night without putting on my glasses.
When traveling, I can let it run on my iPhone. Oh, let the app run on your iPhone
as it charges overnight on the bedside table and I can usually read the time.
The app's free with extra colors and fonts available for the grand price of $1.
The same developer has another app called WorkTime and WorkTime HD for iPad
that puts the time and temperature along with a monthly calendar and the next few calendar events.
He says, I have this running on an iPad on my desk at work. Well worth the $3 for work time and work time HD.
Very cool, Greg. I love you. This is what a great use for old tech to just sort of have that screen.
It's up all the time.
Huh. You know, yeah. Huh. we, we, we talk about weather stations
occasionally on the show and it's like,
wouldn't just repurposing an old phone or an iPad with one of these apps be better?
Yeah. Right. I don't know.
I mean, you know, it's going to be off by a degree or two, maybe.
Sure. Yeah. It's not, it's not going to get your temperature outside, but it knows the
temperature in Durham, New Hampshire.
It's like, yeah, come on. You know, my temperature out. Maybe two.
Yeah, my temperature outside isn't going to be exact either.
Right? I mean, it's like if I move it from one side of my house to the other, it's also going
to change by a degree or two.
Exactly. Yeah.
So. That's a great idea and it's a whole lot more economical than a fancy new weather station
in your backyard. Yeah. Yeah.
Uh, listener Andrew Woodward in discord chat says, reminds us, tells us, alerts us.
Sonos today released Dolby Atmos, which they've had, for Apple music, as well as on their new
era speakers and the, and some of their older speakers, including the Beam Gem 2 and the ARC
and things like that. He says a few things about it. It showed up as a notification on my iPhone
when I opened the Sonos app as a screen takeover. He says it mentions a playlist in the screen
takeover, but I couldn't find the playlist on the app. He says you have to manually update
the Mac app to do this. You also need to run the Sonos firmware update tool from within the iOS app
to make sure all your speakers are updated to support this. Everything, he says, software and
hardware needs to be on Sonos 15.2 at least. He says it sounds great. I also reran TruePlay just
to tune things. Uh, yeah, the Apple music. At most experience has been fantastic. We've talked about
that here on the show before. And the Sonos at most experience has been fantastic with TV shows.
It's nice to finally have those two put together. Sometimes it's all about the glue and now they've
made the glue. So yeah. Thanks for the heads up, Andrew. I had not seen that yet. I don't know why
I hadn't seen it, but that's why we do what we do.
Feel free to join our discord chat to folks, my key cub.com slash discord.
Some great, great discussions happening there.
We got time for one or maybe two more. John, you want to take us to Wilco?
Wilco says, I have a cool stuff found. As I understand YouTube videos also count.
Yes, of course. A couple of months back, my trusted Synology DS415 Plus died on me, all the LEDs blinking blue.
It had already served a good seven years, but still did a quick search and found a video of
a guy with the same problem, but who also showed how he solved it by soldering a resistor between
two holes on the motherboard. With nothing to lose I tried the same and with a 10 cent resistor
brought the Synology back to life. Hopefully I'll get a couple of more years out of it.
And of course we'll link to the video. Huh. Huh. That's cool.
Yeah. One that's awesome too.
We're now that they're gone, Radio Shack, remember you used to be able to go in there
and get resistors and diodes and.
And the battery club. Remember the battery club? Oh yeah. Yeah.
Where do you go? And I mean, I guess you go to Amazon to buy that stuff now. Okay.
That's a good question. Used to be nice to me just be able to go in there.
Yeah. I need a three ohm resistor. Yeah, and here's my four pennies.
Thank you very much. I mean, there's no surprise that they couldn't stay in business doing that.
Fair enough. Yeah, those should have been 50 cents each. I guess.
Yeah, minimum. Yeah. Yeah, you should have like, yeah.
Yeah, I used to love they had like a rack, not a rack, a chest of drawers,
but tiny, tiny little drawers that had like all the resistors in them,
But also had all the adapters that you would need for like audio cables and you could just go in there
I would I would spend hours there and I would I would get a fistful of adapters and would cost like seven dollars,
You know be like perfect. Yeah, this is great. That's what I want. I always like going there to get,
Uh to get a new vacuum tube. Remember that? Oh, yeah,
Yeah, well those those you can definitely buy on amazon because I bought them for uh for microphones and speaker cabinets,
So, because vacuum... David Sparks tells about going in there and programming on their floor model computers.
He was, he could ride his bike over there, programming on their computers, and then, you know, basically sell them to customers. Look, you can do this with, oh cool. Yeah.
Huh, that's cool. Yeah, if you didn't have, if you weren't able to have a computer at home,
That was a good way to do it. I like that.
That's pretty smart. All right. Well, this has been a fun little episode that we did here.
This is I really enjoyed the the AI discussion. Same.
I don't want it to end, folks. I mean, hopefully not.
Hopefully I guarantee that future AI segments won't be, you know, quite that
long. That was almost a half.
I was a half hour. That's long for us.
But I felt like it was important. We needed to start that. But I really just wanted to do it
to seed the conversation.
Hopefully you learned some things that you can use AI for and try and mess with.
But really, selfishly, I want to learn new things. So send them in to us. Feedback at MattGeekUp.com.
But we promise we'll share. It's what we do.
Like, we don't just hoard this information for ourselves. We love to share it out.
So push it out. Join. Maybe we need an MGG AI channel in our Discord.
I don't know. We'll see. If enough conversations come up about it, it probably makes sense.
But and that's how we do things in the discord. We don't just create channels willy-nilly. We we look and say oh well
There's a lot of this we should you know make a channel about it like we did with sonology that happened pretty quickly,
And it's been pretty good. You know so yeah, yeah, yeah, Mackey camp.com slash discord is where you can come in and join us some.
That's what I got. We got a lot more cool stuff found. We got a lot more.
We got a lot of questions. We didn't get to any questions today, but yeah, send in your stuff.
Feedback at Mackey cab.com. I'll keep saying it.
I think you said feedback at Mackey cab.com already. I did say it.
Feedback at Mackey cab.com.
I love it. Thanks for hanging out with us folks. Thanks to cash fly for providing all the bandwidth.
Make sure to go check out the other podcasts that we do pilot Pete's.
So there I was podcast. I do two others.
One's called business brain for entrepreneurs. The other is called Gig Gab for Working Musicians.
Pilot Pete's So There I Was is, it's about piloting stories, but it's for anyone.
Like you just have to have aviation enthusiasts, I think is probably the way to say it.
Can I tease the one I think about?
Sure. But we had a man who won the Navy Cross on January 20th.
He shot down four MiGs on November 18th of 1952, and he couldn't talk about it for 50 years.
He's going to be 98 this week coming up, and he's sharp as a tack.
And that show is now three weeks old.
It's back, I think episode 45. Okay. His name is Royce Williams, but, uh, oh, what a treat.
That was a life changing interview for me.
Amazing. Getting the privilege to talk to that man. Yeah. That's amazing. Oh gosh.
Well, go check it out. Check out Business Brain and Geek Gab too, if those topics interest you.
And, uh, yeah, thanks for hanging out with us. Make sure to check out our sponsor, of course, macpaw.app slash Mac Geek Gab to
get 5% off of CleanMyMac X.
Make sure to check out some merch! MattGeekUp.com slash merch.
We're gonna add more to it. I've been messing around with stuff.
I've got ideas. But you know what I could do?
I could ask ChatGPT for merch ideas. Ho ho ho!
Music.
John!
What would ChatGPT say? Um... I'm not sure.
Um... to give it the right question, but I think if I give it the right question, the answer
would be don't get caught. Later. I forgot to play the thing.
Music.
I forgot to play the thing. with the, this. Ah, ah, ah, ah, ah. Oh! That's a no!