Hey, it's time for Mac Geek Gab and listener Roll 605 from our Discord channel brings us,
our quick tip of the week with the ability to take a full page screenshot of a web page with your iPhone.
So first thing is you go to the web page you would like to capture.
That seems like a good place to start. Scroll the full length of the page.
You need to do this or the capture doesn't get everything. So you scroll all the way to the bottom.
Then click the screenshot thumbnail, then click the screenshot thumbnail in the bottom left corner.
In the screenshot, little app, switch from screen to full page, which is located at the
top center of the screen.
Then click done.
Then save the PDF to your files, select the folder where you want to save it, and now
you should have a full length PDF of the webpage.
So again, scroll the full length of the webpage, take the screenshot, click the little screenshot
thumbnail, and then in that blown up thumbnail, switch from screen to full page, which is
in the top center. That's the key.
Then click done, save the PDF to your files, and you are good to go.
Tips like this, plus your questions answered today on Mac, GeekGab 976 from Monday, April 10th, 2023.
Music.
Greetings folks. And indeed, welcome to Matt geek. You have the show where we share tips like that one.
We share cool stuff found. Sometimes we share your questions.
We try to answer your questions. Sometimes we share tips, cool stuff found, and even questions of our own that we try
to answer together as a community.
The goal is every single one of us learns at least five new things every time we get together.
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Zero trust, tailor made for Okta. We'll talk more about them in a few minutes here in detail.
For now, here in Durham, New Hampshire, I'm Dave Hamilton.
In here, in Fairfield, Connecticut, this is John F. Brown.
Oh, and Pilot Pete muted himself. I love it.
I wasn't even my fault. I did because, ah, and here in Paris is Pilot Pete.
And I muted myself because there was a French police honk, honk, hee-haw, siren.
And I didn't think you wanted that over your intro. So greetings, everybody.
Recorded live in front of a live at home audience from Paris is Pilot Pete.
Thanks for having me.
Actually, good to be back. Yeah. You don't have to be at home to listen to the live stream.
You just can't be here. That's all right.
Yeah. You could be, but Dave doesn't have an extra mic today.
Uh, actually I do. I have an extra mic set up right over there.
It's like, it's been in perm.
Yeah. It's it's. So everybody meet at Dave's next week.
This'll be fun. This'll be fun.
It could happen. It could, it might happen. Thanks for that, Pete. I appreciate it.
Yeah. Glad to help. Yeah. This is Dave's address is we'll do a, uh, you know, it's
really not that hard to find. I mean, you know what town I live in.
So, uh, yeah.
Uh, should we do like a, an outs, an outdoor recording maybe on the patio this summer?
Oh, that would be fun. Right. And, and we could have a live little audience.
I mean, there's quite a few people that live, you know, local to us here, Pete,
we could, um, host them.
And if I ever get my airplane working, we can go to John's and do it at the John's.
Do the same thing. Yeah. We get some pizzas and beer or whatever.
And you know, people can hang on the patio by the fire pit and, uh, I don't know.
Mac, Mac stock east, Mac.
Yeah, something like that. We will be at Mac stock this year, by the way, we did not mention that in the last episode, although we could have.
I don't think we mentioned it, John, did we? But we are doing Mac stock happening in July of this year.
I think it's Mac stock conference and expo dot com or something of the sort.
But, uh, we will be doing a, uh, live Mac geek gab.
With a with a stump the geek thing cuz that's what we love to do when we do it live on saturday afternoon it's like the final session of saturday afternoon.
Which is the first full day of max talk and then i believe certainly i am speaking at max talk by request from several of you we are but what but one in particular we are i am doing a day.
How to Synology session, uh, I think earlier in the day on Saturday too.
So, and John, I, I, I hear tell that you are, you are brewing up an idea to present to speak. Maybe.
Uh, very nice. Very nice. Pilot Pete, hopefully your schedule allows you to make it live. Yeah.
Do that. I have to coordinate with kids at camp and kids coming home from college and you know,
all the life, life happens, but I would love to make it. Yeah. Yeah.
Max talk is fun. Uh, I haven't made it every year. I think John you've made it almost every year right you've made it more than I have yeah almost very yes. Yeah, yeah
Yeah, so if if you're into that we will see you there for sure,
back to the or back to the quick tips Edward has a.
Sort of Solved his own problem He says
There is the option where we don't need a password to unlock our Macs if we are wearing our Apple watches
When I got a new watch earlier this year, though, that stopped working.
I tried repairing the watch. I tried turning off the option, uh, you know, in, in system settings to turn on and off
the option of waking up the Mac with the watch several times.
Uh, I rebooted while turning off, nothing would work.
Settings, touch ID, password, Apple watch, nothing.
He says, today I stumbled on the solution. I booted my Mac into safe mode for a completely different reason.
And when I came back into regular mode, now magically the watch unlock is working again.
I like this. Um, the safe mode does a lot of things on that, uh, on that boot up.
And, and one of them is sort of cleaning through your caches and doing some maintenance of your Mac.
Uh, seems like maybe one of those caches, uh, might have been the, uh,
Might've been the trick. So.
Yeah. So you pre-answered my question, which was something to the effect of it's kind of like,
running Onyx without running Onyx.
And he even said, he sent us a follow-up email, Pete, that said he couldn't even run
Onyx until after he did the safe mode reboot.
And I need to dig into that, but that seemed really strange.
So yeah, there was something quite, quite a muck with his Mac and safe mode remedied lots of it. it.
Wow. Yeah. Yeah. It's a it's a pretty good, pretty good little quick tip for
booting into safe mode.
It depends on what type of Mac you, whether you're silicone or what's that?
Silicon or yeah, right, right.
Okay.
Yeah. And you start in safe mode.
If you have an Apple Silicon chip, you shut down your Mac and and then press and hold the power button on your Mac
until loading startup options appears.
You select the volume that you wanna boot, then press and hold the shift key
and click continue in safe mode.
And if you have an Intel-based Mac, all you have to do is like turn it on or restart your Mac.
And as soon as you hear the chime or even before, hold down the shift key until you see the login window
and that's the point at which you can release it.
So, but we put a link in the show notes at matgeekup.com or mgg.fm slash 976,
where you can get right to Apple's instructions on how to do that.
So there you go. That's Edward. Thanks for sharing that with us, man. Yeah.
Yeah. John? And Scott is going to share something with us that I thought was amazing when it happened.
Maybe everyone knows this. No, we don't. But I stumbled on it accidentally.
When I went to long press the home button on my Apple TV remote, I accidentally double pressed it.
Lo and behold, the apps come up in the CoverFlow format all iTunes and you can swipe left or right
to shuffle through them.
Not all that useful, granted, but it surprised me.
So there is a utility to this. Number one is it's a way to switch apps,
but number two, and perhaps certainly the reason I do this more often than not is to force quit an app,
just like on your iPhone.
Yeah, when you're, when you, you know, on your iPhone, you get into that same sort of cover flow app switcher mode.
And if you swipe up, it will force quit that app. And then the next time you launch it,
it launches from scratch and not just from, you know, the preserved state.
The same happens on your Apple TV. You swipe around, you get to the app you want,
and then on the track pad, just swipe up and you'll see the app do the same thing
it does on the iPhone. It goes up and it has now force quit.
And I've certainly found it. There are occasionally third-party apps that I'll run,
like Plex, it rarely, but it has happened
where it gets itself into a mode where the back button brings me back out
to the home screen of the Apple TV,
but I can't get out of where I wanna be in Plex, like to a higher menu of Plex.
So force quitting it and coming back in, like I said, it doesn't happen often,
But those are the scenarios where force quitting an app really kind of makes a difference.
Yeah, I'm gonna have to try this. I've had issues with the CW app.
Okay.
Where if I try to go to a button to navigate within their app, it doesn't go.
Oh, interesting. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It bounces back to where it used to be. Yeah.
So the way I solved it before was to restart the Apple TV, but this may be a better way.
A faster solution, right? Yeah, exactly. Yeah, exactly.
Yeah, yeah, good stuff. Thanks, Scott. That's great.
Ben shares a quick tip, uh, actually, yeah, I think, uh, it says, um, normally when you're
using migration assistant on your Mac, it only shows the number of files transferred so far.
Well, if you move, if you mouse over the progress bar, you'll see and hold,
you will see a tool tip showing the number of files transferred and the total to transfer.
So you get an idea of how many more files there are to transfer. I don't think I ever tried that.
So thank you for that, Ben. Yeah, very cool. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Fun stuff. Fun stuff.
Steven brings us our next quick tip. He says, since I believe mid iOS 14 or iPad OS 14,
You can use a USB C hub or dongle to plug in an external hard drive,
Use an HDMI monitor via the HDMI port plug.
Essentially what he's saying is you can plug your your iPad has a USB C port on it that port is not just for charging you can plug directly into a hard drive
but you can also plug it into a hub or a dongle to plug into many things at once.
And that includes the ports that are on the dongle. So you can use it for HDMI.
You can use it for, you know, connecting a, if you've got a SATA reader in there,
you know, that'll work. If you've got a memory card, that'll work.
Of course, you can use the USB-A ports on it to plug in to other devices. I've actually
use that to plug into an external microphone from my iPad. Like all of that works. And yeah.
I've done Ethernet. I was like, huh, you know, I have an anchor dock thingy. Yeah.
I was like, wow, I wonder if Ethernet will work on the iPad. And sure enough,
you plug in the dock and you plug in Ethernet and all of a sudden in settings, Ethernet appears.
Amazing. Oh, so you actually see the setting, the Ethernet. Huh. Fascinating.
Fascinating. Same now with...
Yeah, that's, but that, Oh, I didn't. Okay. So I didn't realize that it,
cause I've never tried this. I didn't realize that it, it actually like added something to system preferences there. I mean,
it makes sense. Of course it does. Right. Like, Oh,
fascinating, fascinating.
Makes it tempting to get an iPad pro and take that as my road machine.
But what I really do like, yeah, I really do like my MacBook Pro and what I'm gonna miss is they've gotten rid of the touch
bar. I like the touch bar.
I know some people hate it. I've gotten used to it. Interesting.
So the Pro that you travel with, Pete, has a touch bar on it still? Yes.
It's a 2021 or 2020. I think it's a 21 MacBook Pro M1 with the touch bar, 13 inch.
The thing I don't like about it is the two USB-C ports, whether I need them or not.
Which makes me want to go to the 16 inch and get all the ports back. Yeah.
But you know. Yeah, I mean, well, so let's talk about that because I've only-
Well, because of hubs.
Yeah, well, other than a very short period of time, I've only ever had USB-C based laptops with two ports.
I've only ever had MacBooks Air, right?
I did buy that MacBook Pro, the 14-inch when it came out with the, is it the M2 or the M1 Pro?
Whatever it was, I didn't like it because it was too chunky for me for the way I like to use it.
And so I gave that to Lucas, my son, and I went back to my MacBook Air.
And so when I travel, I absolutely travel with a, you know, a dongle, right?
Which by the way, if you moved to the iPad, as we just talked about,
you would also have to use the dongle.
So I'm just, I'm curious how you, like.
What would you use, how would you use it such that the extra ports would truly make a difference?
And I'm really actually curious about this. So first of all, on the 16,
I believe it has an HDMI port, which is nice, right?
Oh, on the Pro, sure. Yes. Yes.
Now, that being said, my setup right now is I have a hub in there because the stream deck,
I plug directly into the machine.
When I've tried to plug it into the hub, well, in fact, I can't plug it into the hub because
the little hub that I have only has one USB-C input and that's for power.
Right. So I'm powered in and it's got three USB-As and an HDMI and an SD reader and that sort of thing.
Right. But I actually bring that along. with a little cord on it so that it doesn't destroy my ports. Yep.
You know, the ones that have two that plug directly into the side of the machine, you'll
wind up eventually elongating those ports. Yeah, I don't want to do that.
Yeah, I'm not into that.
So I have the little hub, it has three SBAs, and that works out well.
The power goes in and then out of that, I actually use a USB A to C adapter
into the microphone cable, which goes into the microphone I'm using.
And that actually works as long as I set it up first. If I set it up after I've powered on the machine, it doesn't work.
The microphone doesn't work, weirdly. Yeah. But, and then I just, I power the camera.
I use my iPhone camera.
Okay. And so I plugged, looking at it now, I unplugged it during the pre-show to show everybody out the window,
and I didn't plug it back in. So I'll do that on mute here in a minute.
But I run a power cord to that.
And really, that's it. Those are the two things coming out of it.
But only one goes into the power on the computer.
The other one is the Elgato Stream Deck, which goes directly into the computer for...
Okay. I think that's for speed usage. But like if you had the extra port or two, because the, like the, um, the 14 inch
MacBook pro right now has three USB-C slash Thunderbolt ports.
And, and then like you said, an HDMI and a SDXC, but one is on the other side.
So like there is the benefit of that, but short of having the extra one on the other
side, like I just haven't found myself in a scenario where I would need that, but maybe
it's just because I've engineered my travel kit to mitigate that.
Yeah, you know, and I'll say I have now, because I only have two ports, I had to figure out
out a way around it and the dongle hub.
Works, works great. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Lasts a long time. But my other hesitation, like I say,
to going to the new MacBook M2 MacBook Pros is the touch bar. I'm gonna miss it.
Yeah. I like the touch bar. No, I get it. I can quickly adjust the brightness and the volume.
And I heard someone describe on another show somewhere not long ago that you have to hit the little arrow
and then select the volume and tap it. No, you don't.
You just hit the volume and slide it. The hold and slide. Yeah.
It works great volume brightness all that stuff. I don't I don't I Mean, I can't speak for it's what works into your workflow, right? But you yeah, you adapt it
it's Pete I haven't heard of people who hate the touch bar as much as people who,
complain that it's it doesn't have much utility and,
therefore is a waste of space on the keyboard, but,
Better touch tool fixes that there you go. Yeah And Golden Chaos makes it very useful.
Yeah.
Okay. Okay. So, uh, it Golden Chaos makes better touch tool or no?
No, it's a, it's an add on.
Oh, okay. All right. I mean, doesn't Golden Chaos makes a lot of things right?
Or is, I thought they call it Golden Chaos BTT.
Because I think Golden Chaos has made other things over the years.
But we'll put a link to Golden Chaos BTT for sure in the show notes because that looks
interesting. Yeah, yeah, yeah. up.
And that just gives you more flexibility with what you can, more control over what you can do with it. Is that?
Yeah, it gives you more options than Apple does. Interesting.
Apple's, the icons that Apple offers are kind of minimal.
But with Golden Chaos, you get, you know, the weather and all sorts of useful things.
The other thing is about Apple though, is it is contextual. For instance, right now I have Chrome in the forefront and there are buttons there to control,
Chrome.
If I switch to messages, I get emoticons and that sort of thing.
But I think the thing is, the vast majority of us probably don't look at our keyboard
whilst we're using it, so to speak.
Stay on your mic, Pete. aren't looking at our keyboard as we're using it for the most part I mean
occasionally we'll go okay I'm off by a key or two but you aren't looking at the
touch bar to go what options are available to me there now to go to right
but if you know that as you change programs you change icons on the touch tool on the touch bar yeah all right so it's like any tool if you don't learn
its capabilities and and experiment and make mistakes and all that you're never
going to incorporate it into your workflow. Right. Yeah. Get it into your workflow. Once it's in your
workflow. Then you don't want it to leave. When it's gone. Yeah. When it's gone, I'm going to
miss it. I know that. Exactly. Okay. Yeah. That makes sense. That makes sense. Cool. All right.
Yeah, thank you for humoring me on those. Yeah.
Yeah. All right. Great. John, we got a couple more quick tips. Yeah.
Yep. So we got one here from Joe. And Joe says, I am a classical music lover and was excited when,
Apple finally released the Apple Music classical app. However, I was bummed to see the app doesn't
yet appear on the CarPlay menu. Of course, you can add your classical playlist and albums to
to the standard Apple Music app and play that in your car,
but that's a bit of a kludge,
which also shows that the classical app is in many ways, simply a filter on the Apple Music database
and is totally dependent on it.
By pure coincidence, I discovered that you can use Apple Music classical with CarPlay.
When you've engaged CarPlay, simply hit play on the Apple Music classical app
on your phone and it will play in your car.
Then launch the now playing app in CarPlay and it will display what is playing in the classical app.
You can switch tracks, pause, et cetera. But if you want to play a different album,
you have to switch to it on your phone.
Weird, I assume Apple will add the classical app to CarPlay soon, but this is an interim solution.
I hope it helps two or three other classical music lovers out there.
That's a good hack.
And there's a general tip here too. if you're playing audio from any app that doesn't yet support CarPlay,
you get it started on your phone and then use the Now Playing app
to give you control over what's playing as much as it can.
And guess where else it works really, really well. What's that, Pete?
Your watch, the Now Playing app on your watch. Oh, yeah.
Yeah. Because I found like I use Overcast all the time for listening to the podcast. Sure.
If I, on my watch, turn the volume down, for some reason I can't seem to turn it back up.
If I switch to now playing, I can turn the volume back up. Doesn't make sense, shouldn't happen that way.
Right, I agree. Yes, the defense stipulates, yes. Yeah, exactly.
Huh, huh. So yeah, now playing is fabulous on the watch and car play, both.
I like it.
Interesting. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Overcast does have a fantastic car play in integration as well.
Like it is, it is fully native for car play and it's good on the watch 99% of the time,
unless you accidentally turn the volume all the way down. Yeah. Yeah, it's true. Just saying.
Right. Well, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I can see it. At least on my watch.
Right. Yeah. I'll have to test that on my watch. I haven't been wearing my Apple watch during the
day as much, uh, I've been, uh, well, I've been enjoying wearing my mechanical watches again,
cause I really missed those. I like starting in about June or July of last year, I basically was
wearing my Apple watch every day. And, uh, I think, uh, sort of, it was, I wanted to track,
the amount of calories I was burning. Cause I was trying to figure out, like I said, I was trying
to figure out how to retrain myself on portion sizes of meals and all that. So that's sort of,
that's that was the catalyst to being okay well if I if I know how many calories I burn during a day
versus how many I consume I can start to re-engineer these these portion sizes and
obviously it worked you know it was great lost like almost 40 pounds or something and.
Even though weight loss wasn't the goal it was like I said it was a failed experiment I was
hoping to not develop more lipomas that doesn't work but anyway it doesn't hurt to lose 40 pounds
and get my BMI to where it should be.
There you go.
Yeah. And then of course I had to relearn portion sizes starting in about November
because I didn't want to keep losing weight.
But anyway, just in the last couple of weeks, I've been wearing my mechanical watches because I missed them.
I, you know, I like the non-battery technology that is there.
It's, it's, there's a lot of technology in these things. It just doesn't rely on a battery.
But I have been wearing my Apple Watch at night tracking my sleep.
And that's been really interesting.
And I know that I could like the battery. It doesn't burn very much battery at night.
Like I could easily wear it at night and during the day and just charge,
you know, and at the right strategic times, like when I'm in the hot tub,
it's a perfect time to charge my Apple Watch.
But, uh.
But yeah, it's been fascinating tracking sleep with it. It's I do like the feature where it'll say.
Oh, by the way, I'm going to run out of battery overnight, so maybe you should charge me now.
Yeah, exactly. Right, it knows. And so yeah, make sure you're charged up before you go to sleep.
Yeah, yeah, no, I found, I use, it's just an Amazon clone because it costs $8
instead of, you know, like 50 from Apple,
but it's the Solo Loop watch band, so there's no like buckle or anything on my watch.
So I just put it on and it's just a cloth, you know, it's the stretchy cloth band that you just put on.
And that's what I wear on my Apple watch when I sleep. And it really doesn't bother me at all to have that,
to have that on my wrist.
It breathes well. I'll put a link in the show notes to the, the Solo Loop clone because it's, they're great.
Like it works, you know, you just, you just gotta size yourself, but then it's all good.
I hate to, hate to do it to Apple, but yeah, buy your watch bands somewhere else.
Oh yeah. Amazon and Etsy and all those places because they are much, much cheaper.
I have a real, we have like one real solo loop band or whatever it was.
And I think solo loops the right name. If it's the wrong name,
I'm talking about the stretchy cloth one that you buy to the size of your wrist.
And that's that.
Yeah, Pete's got one on if you're watching the video.
So whatever that is, I think it's the solo loop but I might be wrong.
Yeah. And one other thing about the bands, The Ultra is the same size band as the 44 or 45, the large.
Non-Ultra. I thought it was a different band, but it's the same.
Smart of Apple. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
But yeah, like we compared the Apple shipped band with the, you know, Amazon one.
So $40 versus $8 or something.
We couldn't, we couldn't, like, there was no telling the difference between them.
If you put them in a bag and shook it up and took one out and you'd be like,
yeah, I don't, I have no idea which is which.
So like they might even be made in the same factory as the Apple bands.
Uh, would not, it would not surprise me that knowing how things work with those factories in,
in China, you know, you, you hire them to, to make a thing for you and they tool up the
machinery and they say, okay, we're going to work 14 hours a day and make these things, but they
really work 24 hours a day.
It's that the other 10, they make them, uh, and sell them out the back door.
They are now your competition. That's correct. That's right.
They are going into business against you. Yes, that's right.
It's just, and it's just like, it's just how it goes. That's every friend.
Well, thank you for funding our tooling so we can compete against you. Correct. Yeah.
Every friend that I have that like has a business, you know, that, and I won't mention brand names here,
but lots of the sort of indie hardware manufacturers that you know, tell this story to me over and over again,
where it's like, oh yeah, you know, we have our factory in China do this and then they also compete with us.
And it's just, you just know that going in.
It's like, okay, cool. He's like, yeah, it's generally not a problem.
Like we do our marketing, we, you know, we, we further our brand name and, and, uh, and it works out.
All right. Yeah.
It's like, okay, that's cool. Yeah. Uh, we got one quick tip left, John, despite all of our tangents here today.
Yes.
Uh, Jason has a quick tip on iOS. If you need to select multiple items, say in files or photos, use two fingers and drag
across the items and it will multi select.
Okay. Okay.
Yeah, I so know that on the iPhone if you need to select multiple items like files or photos.
Oh, yeah, you get into selection mode, right? Right, right where they have the little radio buttons to select a
file and you could tap them all to select multiples or just swipe your finger and it'll do it.
Yeah, I like it. Yeah, I've stumbled across this accidentally. only.
One time I'm like, what did I do to get the radio buttons?
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Alright, John, let's answer some questions, shall we? Why not? Wilco has a question.
For quite some time now, I have always dreaded to restart my Mac 2019 since it takes such a long time. It has a 1TB SSD replacing the original Fusion drive,
so that should not be a bottleneck. In order to figure out where things go wrong,
I restarted in verbose mode and recorded the screen. First, it learned me that it,
It indeed takes around six minutes to fully reboot.
It should also check some errors on the startup disk, starting in recovery mode
and letting Disk Utility repair the errors failed.
Disk Utility was not able to fix them and suggested to back up and format the drive.
Fine, I can do that, but there were similar disk errors some months ago.
And coincidence or not, a day later, Carbon Copy Cloner started failing with read errors,
on system volumes data, previous system, private, VAR, DB, system stats.
Somewhere in there, yeah. Since this has happened for the second time,
my question is how to determine whether this is an actual SSD failing or an APFS fluke.
Huh.
Well, SSDs are usually very reliable, Dave. When they fail, I found they fail spectacularly.
Yeah, it's almost binary when an SSD fails, right?
Like it either works or it's dead. So, yeah. So if you're getting any sort of errors from disutility,
my hunch is that the drive is shot.
And if a reformatted reinstalled didn't work, I'd say you need to get that fixed.
I don't know if it'd be worth replacing the SSD.
Having Apple do that.
He wasn't clear as to what kind of Mac it was. Right, I'm guessing an iMac?
If it's an iMac, then I would be tempted to just move it to, you move the boot drive to an external.
And that was my suggestion. So it's a 2019 machine, so that means it's Intel, I think. Right.
So yeah, you should be able to boot from an external drive.
Yeah, yeah, interesting. Interesting.
Yeah, I would, yeah, I mean I would try the external drive thing.
This is not the way I've seen SSDs fail in the past. This is how I've seen spindle drives fail in the past, right? But SSDs generally not.
Generally they tend to, like you said, they just die and with almost no warning.
But, DriveTech evolves.
So, there's a world where this is how that SSD is failing, right?
You know, that's 2019, it's 3 to 4 years old.
Old, you know, is there a, like, I don't know, like what's the, let us know.
Feedback at Mackeygab.com. Have you seen an SSD fail this way?
Cause we haven't yet, but it doesn't mean that this isn't how they now fail.
Some of them anyway.
Well, you said feedback at Mackeygab.com to let us know. I think he said feedback at Mackeygab.com.
Yeah. That's what I said. That's what I said. Yeah. Yeah. All right.
Jason has a, it's actually a good question because it's, it's, it's a lot.
He says, based on discussions, it sounds like Dave, you use tail scale,
private internet access VPN and Synology VPN.
Could you expand on the uses for each of these seemingly similar tools and why you might need all three or how you choose among them?
Okay.
So yes, I think I'm going to try my best. Maybe what I need to do is do this whole rap here
and then feed the transcript into chat GPT and have it actually make it concise and understandable.
But I'm going to try to do it live.
So...
Tail scale the the net result of using tail scale is friction free access to,
Specific devices on my network regardless of where I am So that means I can access my Mac mini in the office the same way,
from my laptop when I'm sitting on my couch at home on the same network and,
And also when I'm sitting in a hotel room in Las Vegas on a obviously a completely different network,
And Paris or Paris, right? It doesn't matter where in the world I am. I get the same access to those devices
It's as though there we're all on a local network together in terms of just how seamless it is to connect to these things,
Tailscale only works on specific devices you install it. It doesn't install on your network you install it on specific devices
So I have it on my laptop.
I have it on my iPhone, not to access my iPhone, but so my iPhone can access other things.
I have it on my Macs in the office in the studio, and I have it on my network storage devices,
my Synology disk stations and the OneCune app that I run.
So I can access all the resources on those devices, just like I'm local, without having to do anything.
It's just sort of running all the time and it's good to go.
So that's what that's used for.
Synology VPN is a VPN server running on a device on my network.
You could run it on a disk station. I run a Synology router.
The VPN implementation on their router is much better than the one on their disk station.
I don't know why that is, but it has a whole lot more options.
And so Synology VPN, I run on my router. That gives me access to my entire network from remote.
So if I am traveling and I need to access, say, a printer or some other device that is not able to have
Tailscale installed on it,
I can just join my network here at home and have access to everything like I'm on the network here at home.
Whereas Tailscale creates a second parallel local network of just specific devices.
The Synology VPN is a traditional VPN. it just lets me into the network.
And so I can access anything.
But one nice thing about the Synology VPN for, well, I use it generally to access,
as I said, my local network.
It can be used to relay my connection to the outside world. So I could be in Las Vegas, VPN into my Synology VPN,
and then go out to the internet from there.
And it would be as though I'm coming from New Hampshire.
Great. Where that has been super handy when traveling is when my family was in China and.
China blocks most VPNs, any VPN that they know about, or at least they did, you know, when this
happened five or six years ago. I'm assuming it's the same, but obviously I'm not there. I can't can't test.
But I have my Synology VPN set up on port 443 of my home internet connection.
So it's not part of an IP block that is reserved for a known VPN provider.
And it's also not answering on a known VPN port. In fact, it's answering on the port that all secure web connections go over.
And if an internet provider or even a Wi-Fi network blocks access to port 443,
No one will be able to do anything on the web from their location.
So they have to leave that hole open.
And that's the hole that sits at my house answering as a VPN server.
It's a nonstandard port for it, but it works very well.
And my family was able to be on a VPN when they were in China and do whatever they wanted.
So that's what I use that for.
Private Internet access VPN. This is sort of my default VPN
when wanting to obscure my data or connection,
be it at home or remote.
At home, if I'm downloading something that I don't wanna get yelled at about by my ISP,
PIA VPN is the answer.
For example, transmission on my disk station always runs VPN.
Listen, I'm not proud, but it's just how it runs.
It's also on my MacBook Air, my iPhone, and my iPad for when I'm out and about and I just need a VPN.
It is more reliable at maintaining a connection than the Synology VPN apps for Mac and iPhone are.
I create a VPN connection if I'm on the Synology VPN and something changes about my local connection,
I sometimes will find that I've just dropped off the Synology VPN and I have to manually go
reconnect it. With PIA, they have a more robust app and so it just, if it notices that it
disconnects, it just reconnects you. And so that's the main reason I like PIA VPN is it's just so
robust. It will just, you know, it will be relentless at staying connected, which is kind
of the key if you're really looking to have privacy, uh, you know, when you're out and about.
So that, that's why I like that one. Hopefully that makes sense and why, how I do what they
each are useful for, for me and how I differentiate. I hope. Pete, I think my comment is the tail scale.
Uh, the best word you had in there was frictionless. Once you've installed tail scale,
I do that and then I put it in the sidebar and I use my NAS drive as if I'm at home.
And none of the, and I'll tell you right now, I've had more issues with the Synology VPN.
Every now and then I managed to goon it up and I'm in one of those periods in my life right now
where I've gooned that to the point and trying to get it to reconnect and work,
has been problematic at best.
So I may actually need some geek help with that, David. I got you. I got you, Pete.
Yeah, and then the PIA is great because some of them have started blocking this,
I've heard, but I'm able to watch out of market games.
By saying, hey PIA, put me in Los Angeles. You know, that sort of thing.
Oh, like if I'm trying to run Fubo from, which is the thing I use for TV.
If I run that on my iPad, regardless of whether I'm connected to PIA or to my Synology VPN.
GPS probably reports your location. Correct. Fubo gets my location from the iPad,
which knows actually where I am. It doesn't just use the IP address.
And it's like, yeah, you're out of market. that you don't get to watch this game.
So someone needs to write an app to send false information to your GPS.
Say, hey, I'm Nick. Well, you know, I'm just saying.
Send these coordinates to my GPS receiver. Right, right.
No matter where I am, you know, but then you have to remember to turn it off
or else you're navigating with bad gouge. Yeah, but it's not just GPS
cause your iPad certainly, you know, can do that.
But it also- It uses everything, cellular, right? Well, it knows your local IP address.
It obscures that from the outside world, but your iPad itself still knows that information
and location services uses that.
So while a third party can't see that information, it can tap into the API that Apple provides
that gives it that result of this.
Now, Mark M in our Discord chat at mackeycap.com slash Discord says Android has this app already.
So maybe the answer is to travel and watch out of market games,
get a device that's far less locked down than an Apple device.
Now, I still would want to have most of my important stuff on the device that is locked down,
but for the purpose of bypassing some security, yeah, Android's probably a lot better at that.
Yeah, yeah. Kiwi Graham asked, do devices on your tail scale show up via Bonjour
in the Finder sidebar?
And I think the answer is no.
However.
I do use Tailskills Magic DNS. And what that means is I get to assign names to my devices.
So my QNAP NAS is called QNAP.
My mini in the office is called mini office.
It's not very creative, but it's something I can remember.
And all I have to do is type that name into either the finder,
if I want to connect to a file server or the Safari URL bar to connect to a resource on my
my disk station, cause I run a ton of apps on my disk station.
And in fact, all of my bookmarks for those web apps on my disk station are set to disk
station, colon, and the port number they answer on.
And that way it doesn't matter whether I'm at home or remote.
I go to the same bookmark and I'm there as long as I'm connected to tail scale, which I always am.
And tail scale is so easy. Even I can use it.
I'm serious about that. You know? So if you've got a laptop and a home computer
that you leave on and an iPhone or an iPad, trust me, grab TailScale, download it,
install it on these devices, and you will be astounded.
You can go to the app and you'd click on the name of your device, it's my device,
just click on the name of your device. It copies the IP address.
Then you go into Finder and you hit connect and you throw that IP address in there
and it comes up and goes, hey, these are all the folders you can connect to.
And that's the hard way.
Like what you just described is literally the hard way. You could do it with magic DNS as well
and make it even easier.
Yeah, no. It is so easy, even Pete can use it. There you go.
It's so easy, even Pete can use it. I think we know what the title of the show is.
There you go.
Pilot Pete. Yeah, maybe I should put Pilot Pete in there just so as to not offend anyone.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, sure.
I will say this, you could, Now, TailScale is free for a single user, a single login.
If you wanted to have your family members join your TailScale,
or other people at your company join your TailScale, that's where their freemium model
becomes a paid model, right?
But it's free for up to like 50 devices or something. I don't even use it with 10 devices, folks,
and I'm a nerd, so like, you're gonna be fine.
But if you really wanted to do it the hard way, you don't have to use TailScale.
You could set up your own WireGuard system. WireGuard, I'll say VPN in with air quotes
because what TailScale is doing is WireGuard.
They've just made it super easy and given it a front end that you don't have to know how to set up WireGuard
and all of that stuff.
They run the server, all of that good stuff. But you could set up your own WireGuard server
if you were so, if you wanted to go through the headache of rolling it yourself and having more options
and all that, but that's the underlying tech.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Alright, more questions. John. Alright, I think we got a question here. Alright.
From Todd. My wife has an M2 Mac Mini with Bluetooth, Apple Magic
keyboard with Touch ID and numeric keypad and a magic mouse. Everything works
fine, but I just noticed that on reboot, neither the keyboard nor the mouse
work at the login screen. I have to plug the USB cable into the Mac Mini and
keyboard to enter the password. I have googled but cannot find how to ensure
the Mac has Bluetooth available at startup. I have updated to the VeryList Ventura app and have tried sudo pkill Bluetooth D. Hmm, okay, same result no
Bluetooth access at the login screen. Appreciate any insight. And then we got a
follow-up saying so I solved my own problem the solution was patience turns,
out if you wait 20 seconds or so after the Mac mini reboots the Bluetooth keyboard and mouse and net huh and I think he solved his own problem so I did
find well did he solve it or did he just find the the workaround like because to
me patience is a workaround it shouldn't have to wait that long right right um,
Thank you.
So I found an article, if you can't connect your magic keyboard, magic mouse or magic trackpad,
to your Mac. Okay, well, it sounds like a good place to start troubleshooting. Yes.
And they suggest a bunch of things, which is why I think he may have solved this problem.
Okay. Maybe not. But no, so the advice that they have in the article is turn the device off and on.
Okay. Yeah, fair. I think he's done that. Make sure Bluetooth is on.
Okay. I think it is. Then they say connect the lightning cable, which I think pairs,
the device. So that's why I'm wondering if he may have solved the problem.
By doing that. No, he said he did that because he said he connected the USB cable to it
and that was the only way that he could get it to work, but instead he found that patience was the answer.
So I don't think, I mean, certainly doing that to make sure the device is paired with the Mac is smart,
but it doesn't sound like that solved this problem because he had to do it every time.
Yeah, now the fourth item they have in this article, which I think may be the problem is check for wireless interference.
Oh. So I'm wondering if he's in a bad spot and the devices are just fighting very hard to.
To connect via Bluetooth. I mean, I've never had. VINCENT VERSACE Does he have a USB 3 hard drive nearby?
SIMON You know, I was thinking that. VINCENT VERSACE Right? I mean, I know-
SIMON USB 3 devices can interfere with Bluetooth.
VINCENT VERSACE Well, they interfere with 2.4 gigahertz, right?
And that's where Bluetooth runs. So, like, that would be the,
the, that would be, that would be something to think about.
Is in, and, and it can be as simple as just reorienting where that drive is in relation to your Mac.
Because if it's near the antenna on your Mac, then you might be creating a scenario where there's enough
interference that exactly this problem happens. So, huh?
Yeah. Oh yeah, yeah.
Oh, interesting. It's weird that patience solves it. I mean, I know patience solves a lot of problems.
Listen, I get these folks. I get that.
No wonder I have so many problems. Same, like I get it, you know,
but my therapist tells me I need to apply more patience to things and I tell him I don't have time for that.
Bingo. Bingo, right, exactly. But yeah, I don't know. That's interesting.
Yeah, I would check the hard drive thing, because then you get to avoid the patient's answer.
We don't like no stinking patients here! We want to get the answer, and we want the answer now!
That's why so many of you listen to this show at one and a half speed.
Alright. Mike has a tip for us. It's really the byproduct of a lot of things.
He... Two things here. So, Mike found that, uh...
Putting shortcuts on his watch can be really handy in certain scenarios. And for example,
he built one shortcut that displays an image of the QR code that he needs to scan every time he
gets to the gym. Right. So that when he gets to the gym, he just shows him this QR code on his
watch. He doesn't have to pull out his phone or his wallet or anything. They scan it. They're
like, hey, you're Mike. You still you paid for your gym membership. And so welcome. Right. And
and then that's that.
And that's cool. Don't get me wrong. Like that in and of itself is a great idea. I love it.
What he's also found is he adds the shortcut to his watch face as a complication.
So it's even easier to launch, but he doesn't want that shortcut on his watch face all the time.
So he now has a separate watch face that he uses via a focus mode when he's at the gym.
And when that watch faces up, that has this complication on it,
but the watch face he uses the rest of the time does not.
And so as he explained this to me, it was like the light bulb went off. Like, Oh wow.
Using focus mode based watch faces with complications that are unique to the thing that you will be doing
with that focus mode really helps mitigate the issue of,
okay, well, I can only put, you know, somewhere between three and six complications
on my Apple watch face.
You know, there's like 12 that I want.
And so how do I make Sophie's choice here?
Right?
And now doing it with the different watch faces solves that problem.
So I just wanted to share his thought process on this, because I think we can all, you know, this is,
I love to get these things into my head and percolate.
And now I get to put them into your head and percolate at one and a half speed because you're impatient like me.
So listen faster, listen faster. That's right. Absorb faster.
So if only we could do that with our workouts and make a, you know, 30 minute workout happen
in five minutes because we're impatient.
Time is the one for that. Is there an app for that, Pete?
Because if there is, we're going to jump right
to cool stuff found and you're going to tell us about it. Well, there's seven, what is it?
Seven minutes? Got seven minutes. That's an app.
Seven minutes a day workout. Is that right? Yeah. See, there is an app for that.
Yeah. It's seven, it's called, it's just called Seven. Seven minute workout on the app store.
Huh, see? This is what I love about doing this show is I get to learn.
It'll get your heart going, yeah. All these things.
Right. and if you can't do seven minutes.
Huh. You're just not trying. Sorry. Maybe talking about watch complications on the next, um,
Mac geek gap hangout that we do, which is coming out sometime in April, Sunday in April kind of
thing. I don't know. There was a, there was a, a suggestion to talk about AI. And I certainly,
I think that's also valuable. Just sharing all our tips on that. Uh, but yeah, join our discord
chat at Mackeycap.com slash discord and share your votes for or you share your ideas. Maybe we'll put
it to a vote, but probably not. We'll just sort of go with the consensus ruling out things that,
might not be great for a group discussion kind of thing. But but, you know, I like the idea of
sharing watch complications because that's one of those things where if you looked over my shoulder,
you know, using air quotes and saw how I used my watch, you invariably you go, oh, I never thought
of that. And conversely, I would look over your shoulder and go, I never thought of that. Just
like I just did with Mike's. Right. So like all of us sharing those tips, there's a value to the
brain trust. And those are the kind of conversations I really like to have in our,
our hopefully monthly Mac geek gap hangouts. And I still, every time I say that, I feel this
pang of like guilt and regret. And I really don't feel guilt and regret much in my life.
But the fact that we were not doing these hangouts during COVID lockdowns is my fault. And I'm sorry.
Don't do it again, Dave. Next pandemic.
Okay, Pete. Okay. Okay. Sorry, dude.
Now I need the meditation app on my watch. There you go. Right up.
Gotta go launch Headspace. I'll be back in three minutes.
Yeah. Actually, John was leaning back while you were talking about that.
That. And I think it is said the stand up now, did it, John, on your watch?
No time for you to stand. No, it was something else.
It would have been, I mean, it would have been given the, the, the time.
Oh, well, yeah, it does say that. See, see.
Yeah. Oh, let's just keep going with the questions here. We'll we'll do more cool stuff. Found what we'll do.
Well, I guess technically seven was a cool stuff found, but I love, I love those sort of surprise things.
We'll just keep going with the questions here. We'll do cool stuff found next week. It's fine.
We're gonna, so there it is. We're doing episode 977. It's the show's not ending with 976.
For those of you who were curious, nope, not ending yet.
We're not dead yet.
Jerry has the next question for us.
And he says, I know this may sound like a dumb question. No, no, no, no, no, no, no.
There's no dumb questions.
But I'm wondering, as I still have a physical SIM card in my iPhone, what's the difference of a physical SIM
versus an eSIM and are there complications or is there benefits to one or the other?
And.
In general, the answer is no. Your phone will work the same with a physical SIM versus an eSIM.
There are arguments as to why an eSIM might be better or even worse.
If you're bouncing between two phones all the time, a physical SIM is going to be way, way better for you.
Otherwise, if you've just got the one phone, an eSIM is probably better because it's simpler.
If you lose your phone, you don't have to worry about getting another physical SIM.
You just stick with the eSIM on a new phone and you're done.
The only thing that I've heard about the quality of eSIM versus physical SIM
is related to the fact that physical SIMs can become outdated.
So if you're getting a new SIM every year or something, because you're getting a new phone every year,
you're probably not going to run into this.
But if you've been migrating the same physical SIM forward for four, five, six years,
from iPhone to iPhone and still have that same one that you started with years ago,
you might be missing out on new features.
I know, for example, that when 5G came, was added to the mix of things that we can get
from our mobile providers, that needed to be enabled in the SIM.
And there were some of us that did not have the 5G capability in our SIM and had to go get new physical SIMs.
Because physical SIMs, for whatever reason, seem not to be able to be like remote slash firmware
upgradable. You just had to get a new one.
Whereas an e-sim absolutely upgradable and it sort of follows the tech in your phone.
I think even years before that enabling wifi calling was another thing that needed to be added to the sim.
So that would be the only argument.
If all else is equal, here's why you might want to go with an e-sim.
It just sort of takes that headache away of even needing to think about that
because the capabilities of your phone are gonna be the limiting factor.
And that's not something you can change. Well, without buying a new phone.
Yeah, when I got my iPhone 12.
As soon as I started it up and put the SIM in, the phone was like, dude, I can't do 5G.
You got to go to the Verizon store and get a new SIM.
So that makes sense. I understand that. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I'll go back
to my admonition, which is don't get old. It's bad for your memory. Um, there was some reason
I was going to upgrade my new and Easton and I cannot remember what it was. There was some
limitation. I went, Oh, I'm glad I didn't do it. I don't remember what it is. So, but if, if, if you
remember that, like shoot us a note and we'll put it in the agenda because, because, or if you folks
know again, feedback at Mackeycup.com. Like we really do want to know or share in discord or
whatever. I don't know if it had to do with international travel or what, but yeah, anyway.
But the other thing on that, thinking of Sims and all that, Dave, did you see this week that
Mint Mobile upped their data plan? I did for the second time since I've been with them, by the way.
Nice. Okay. First time for me, but yeah, unlimited goes to unlimited for the same price,
but everything else gets bumped up. Yeah. And they did bump my tethered data from 5 to 10 gig.
Right. For unlimited people, tethered data goes from 5 to 10. And also your data,
your sort of soft data cap for unlimited goes from 35 to 40.
Yeah.
But yeah, they bumped. They did this a couple of years ago too, after I had started with them.
I think I was on like an 8 gig a month plan and they bumped it up to 10 and now they bumped the
10 to 15. So yeah, but yes, that's always nice to see. So yeah.
Yeah. Yep. Indeed.
We didn't talk about this when we were in the agenda, going through the agenda, or maybe we did. Are we, Pete,
do you want to share Axel's issue with...
Yeah, I can do that. Let me pull that up. So Axel wrote and said,
I've been having an issue with my Mac 2020, iMac 27 for the last few months.
It says I scroll down the web pages in Safari and I click on an article.
It takes me right back to the top of the page and I have to click on the link a second time,
and it takes me there.
This happens using a trackpad or Logitech MX Master 3S for Mac.
And it says, I tried changing the settings, deleting, reinstalling, but nothing stops this behavior.
And I'm not sure exactly when I noticed this, but it would say it started approximately last September
or October. I'm running Ventura 13.2.1.
And I tried my Google Foo, and I couldn't find anything specifically on this.
I saw some people had the same problem.
But that, to me, says, hey, go through these troubleshooting tips that has already worked previously in the show.
I forget the gent's name who wrote in, but started in the safe mode and it worked.
So suggest restarting in the safe mode, clears cache files and only loads Apple software extensions and fonts.
The boot up will be slow and it'll take some time. That's normal.
But then I say, does that issue present in the safe mode? You know, if not, there could be something in the main user account.
Yeah. Acting up, you know, and to further isolate this, set up users, guests and groups on a Mac.
I have a specific account on my machine that I call shooter.
Okay, that's for troubleshooter. No, I'm not going postal on anyone.
With apologies to our post office workers.
Then I log out of the main user account, log into the dummy account,
and test it again and see if the issue persists. If it does in the dummy account, then it's a system-wide issue, right?
The whole thing has to be nuked and paved, I guess. Right.
And then finally, I'd say try running Onyx and going through the maintenance and utilities there.
So that's- So Pete, will you do me a favor?
You dove into that quickly. Describe the symptom one more time for us all.
Okay, so yeah, so he said he would scroll down to the bottom of a page in Safari
and he'd click on an article, but instead of taking it to the article,
it took him back to the top of the page.
Oh. Yeah, so- And this was happening on different websites. This wasn't just like the way one website
was coded terribly or something. It was happening on Safari,
but on different websites is the way I read it.
And he doesn't specifically say this happens on multiple different websites, but he's having it,
he's going down to the bottom, you know, clicking on a link and instead of getting
his clickbait article, he's getting taken back to the top of the page instead of being taken to the article.
Right. Sorry, that was a little pejorative. Oh, it's fine.
Yeah. It's clickbait for a reason, right? It sucks you in. Yes, it sucks you in.
You go and you click on it. Yeah, yeah.
But instead of getting his article that he wants, he has to go to the top of the page,
scroll back down, and then get to it. So it's like, ah.
All right, John, I hear you huffing and puffing over there. What's cogitating in that genius brain of yours? Get it, John. Slap.
Update the Logitech software. Ooh. Oh.
Yeah. If there is an update, yeah, yeah.
Yep. Yeah. Um. Well, he says it's right. I've had issues.
Yeah. So I'm pretty much. Well, no, actually, no. So I got a Logitech keyboard.
And a Kensington.
Device and they both have their own drivers. So maybe one of the drivers needs to be updated. Yeah.
Yeah, I would also look at like, does this happen in multiple browsers?
Is this is this a safari problem? Because if it's not a safari problem or if it is, if it's unique to safari, it could
be one of those safari extensions that, uh, that has, you know, that like that's a, a,
an attack vector.
It a virus vector, but, but, but it's sort of, you know, using a malware vector, right.
Uh, is, is that is installing extensions into Safari and that could be intercepting
things and maybe taking clicks that you do and, and, you know, morphing them in some
way that I don't know, but I, like I would.
Kiwi Graham suggests that it may be an ad block issue. Oh, right.
Right. So, you know, turn that off if you've got it on. I like it.
But here's another thing.
The safe modal should set, bring that to light too. It's going to work, not nap and safe modal.
Sorry, John, walked on you. Now, another thing you may want to try is.
In Safari, there's a develop menu. So I think you have to go somewhere else to enable it.
I don't think it's enabled by default, but the develop menu has user agent, user agent.
And you can change what browser you appear to be. I think you have to set that up in Safari settings.
Yeah, you go into Safari settings advanced and at the bottom there's a check mark checkbox
for show develop menu and menu bar. And then you get that.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yeah. So maybe, you know, try to look like a different browser or as you said, just try another browser.
Well, and I would also, deeper in that develop menu, you can disable all kinds of
things, including JavaScript extensions, site-specific hacks.
And so I would, I would experiment with disabling some of those and see, does that
fix the problem? Cause at least then it gives you a path down which to sniff a little more.
Yeah. And I would ask Axel, if you find the answer amongst what we've given you, please tell us what, what solved it.
Yeah. Let us know. We'd love to know, because I know there's other people with a similar question.
And I know this question came in when, um, Mac OS 13.2.1 was current. Now it's Mac OS 13.3,
which did solve a lot of things for people. Um, it also changed some things for other people. Uh,
So it may have solved Axel's problem, but Grumpy in Discord points out that 13.3.
Breaks home folders that are on external drives. You have to disable SIP in order,
system integrity protection, in order for Mac OS 13.3 to see your home folder if it's not,
in its default location on the built-in, you know, boot drive.
So, enjoy that. Thanks Apple. I'm really thinking about going back to Monterey on my on my studio machine here. I mean it's just it's ridiculous how
terrible core audio is on 13. Yeah, that has been a battle for months now Dave.
Oh ever since I upgraded, yeah. The problem is rolling back is gonna be.
A chore. Yeah. But, it's probably worth it.
So, I might just do it. Of course, I know that the day that I do it
is the day that I'm going to hear back from Apple,
with an answer of something to try to fix this.
Because I submitted a support ticket with Apple. You know, I used the developer feedback assistant
and through my developer account and sent that in.
And they asked for a couple of things. they haven't come back to me with anything yet,
but it's been going on months now.
And they occasionally are like, well, can you replicate this all the time?
Like, yep, 100% of the time on Intel, on M1, you know, like it's a Ventura thing.
It's not a thing with this particular computer that Dave has Frankensteined into a studio monster, right?
So I do like the shared focus modes. That's the one thing that I really like
about having Ventura is, you know, if I change a focus mode, uh, it,
it changes everywhere and that's super handy for podcasting, but listen,
I can do that manually.
I have a pre-flight checklist I go through before I do the show.
And if that's all I have to do manually to avoid how many times did I have to
restart Chrome today before we started the show to get rid of the audio crackling and all that crap.
And yeah, true. And while we're recording, I have to hold my mouth just right.
So that audio doesn't like try to reset itself. And I need to be really careful with what I do.
Otherwise audio resets itself.
Let me advocate for focus as well, while we're here. Sure. Go.
Go spend a half an hour to 45 minutes of learning about focus,
understanding what it can do, what it can and will do for you.
If you are sick of getting calls about your car warranty expiring.
All those things, you can get 98% of that fixed with focus.
Or actually 100%. Now you're going to accidentally crank out some other people, but I like I have a personal mode.
And only people on my contact list can get through when I'm in personal focus,
which is where my machine is when I'm not in podcasting or do not disturb.
Yeah, there you go. Right. Yeah, no, it's focus modes are, I love them.
And that's why I was so eager to move up to Ventura once the drivers came out for my audio
device and no, it's not my audio device.
Cause it happens with built-in audio and no separate audio devices on my M1 mini.
But that was my first thought, you know.
Yeah. You could set cool things. Like I do my other show in zoom.
This is in stream yard. When those go, my focus modes automatically go into podcasting.
Well, that's nobody can get through, but you and John, that's it.
No, it's great. Yeah, I know. That's great.
All right. Um, we are running later than we normally do with our 75 minute target, but John, uh,
we've had this held over for a couple of episodes.
Will you share what we learned about virtualizing, um, Mac OS on Apple Silicon Macs from many listeners?
Doug Bruce and Thomas so thanks to everybody who wrote in about this.
All right let's see all right so from Doug just listening to your latest episode I didn't use the
h word where you're answering user questions one came up about rolling back Ventura to Monterey,
for an incompatible app I've been a parallels desktop user for years they have released an,
an update that can indeed create a virtual Monterey OS on a Silicon Mac that is running Monterey or later.
Here's a direct link to the Parallels page.
This is a step-by-step and it is fairly specific, but it should meet the original listener's
needs if he would rather not roll back his entire machine for any number of legacy apps.
I do this all the time with some 32-bit apps on the latest Intel Mac running two or three
Mojave Virtual Machines when necessary.
Cool. So the answer is yes, you can virtualize Mac OS on Apple Silicon. The one caveat that was
pointed out by Robster, I believe, in our Discord chat about this is that you cannot create a Monterey
virtual machine on a Ventura Mac. You have to, you can only create a virtual machine of the OS
that you're currently running. So if you're still running Monterey, create a vanilla virtual machine
of Monterey and stash that away somewhere so that anytime you need it, you can duplicate it.
And then mess with it and still retain that pristine one. And there might be somebody in
our Discord chat that would love to have your pristine Monterey image if you are so inclined
to share. Um, so there you go. I'll put a link to the discord thing in there, but yeah, thank you
for, for ferreting all that out, John. That's, that's good to know. I wonder who would want a
copy of that. It's actually not me. I don't, I don't know. I wasn't, it wasn't asking for a
friend thing. It was literally asking for a friend. Um, yeah, no, I, I saw somebody in there
that was looking for it, but no, for me, I I'd want Monterey running like natively on this. If
If I'm gonna do it, I'm gonna do it the right way.
Well, yeah, so the question I was gonna ask you was, are you still gonna run into core audio problems
if you virtualize another machine?
Probably, I don't wanna ask that question. I just wanna, if I'm gonna do it,
the only thing I do on this machine is podcasting and audio recording,
and this messes with both of those things.
So it's like, I just need to roll back.
It's just how it's gonna be. Maybe I'll do it tomorrow.
I have a free day that was created by Pilot Pete, moving Mac-e-cab up a day in our recording schedule, so.
Happy Monday, Thursday, everyone. Yeah, that's right. So maybe tomorrow is the day.
After I get the show published and happy, maybe tomorrow's the day to do that.
Thanks for hanging out with us, folks.
This has been informative. I learned at least my five new things.
I learned more than five new things just preparing the agenda for the show.
And then we did the show, and I learned about even more, and I learned about how I'm probably
going to do a seven-minute workout every day, because why wouldn't I?
Although I will say that when I go play my drums right behind me, as long as core audio
is behaving, that gets my heart rate up too.
So that's, you know.
All right. Thanks to Cashfly for providing all the bandwidth that gets the show from us to you.
Make sure to check out all the podcasts that we do.
Pilot Pete's So There I Was, My Business Brain for entrepreneurs, Gig Gab for working musicians.
Go check them out. Links are in the show notes.
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Join our discord chat.
But first go to Mackey cab.com slash merch and uh, and find our stuff. Cause there's some cool stuff there.
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So the back of the shirt that you're wearing Pete has the Mac Geek Gab logo on it.
What's the front say?
What's that say? It isn't even mirrored so I can read it.
Just don't get caught. That's some good advice right there.