It's time for Mac Geek-Gab and listener Ufasa comes to us with our quick tip of the week
saying I just found out that if I hover over a corner or edge of a window and see the little
arrows the ones that would let you drag or you know to resize the window get to that
point and then double click it will expand the window to the edge of the screen depending on where you click.
So if you click on the top edge that goes to the top right edge goes to the,
right, the top right edge goes to the top, right?
More quick tips like this. Plus your questions answered today on Mac geek out
nine 81 for Monday, May 15th.
Wait a minute, five 15 out of my brain on a five 15, 20, 23.
Music.
Greetings, folks, and welcome to Mac, the show where
we take your tips like the one that you sent in and share them.
We take your cool stuff found and share them. We take your questions that you send in your questions and we try to answer them right,
here on the show. We string it all together into an agenda to make a little sense of it, but also
to ensure that we reach our goal. It's more of a system where we make sure every single one of us
learns at least five new things every single week when we get together. Sponsors for this episode
include private internet access.
We're at piavpn.com slash MGG. you can save 82% off your VPN service plus four free months.
BBEdit is our second sponsor for this episode, my favorite text editor.
It's open right now on my computer because it's always open on my computer.
We'll talk more in depth about both of those things a little bit later here in the show for now here in Durham, New Hampshire.
I'm Dave Hamilton.
And here back in Fairfield, Connecticut, this is John F. Brown.
Ed Gudentag from Köln, Germany. It's Pilot Pete. Great to be back with you guys.
And I got to say that quick tip you just shared instantly in my workflow, right?
Right. Yeah. Like I need my fingers to learn that because I want to be able to do it all the time. So I tried it a couple of times and now I'm doing,
I found myself just doing it yesterday. Naturally. Yeah. Yeah. That's great. That's great.
All right. John, you got, uh, you got a quick tip from listener, Jim, I think.
Yes, we do. So Jim says, in your most recent episode,
you talked about smart folders for Apple music that got me to thinking of something I've been doing in the photos that might be helpful to others who,
like me, insist on having albums for all of their major trips and events.
Yeah, I got to keep up with that, man. Same. Same. Going through going through old photos is sometimes painful
because it's like, which one do I get rid of? Yeah.
And if you don't get rid of it, then you're going to consume all space, which is what computers do.
So anyways, I create a smart folder for each year to identify all of the photos that are not in an album.
The folder parameters are that the photo is not in an album and that it falls within a year-specific,
1 January through 31 December date range, one for each year in my photos library collection.
I then periodically review that smart folder and move the photos that should be in an album to the appropriate place.
That makes sure that I always have all the photos I want in a specific album in the right place.
That's probably an obvious thing. No, not really. But it sure saves me a lot of trouble. Huh.
Yeah, okay Like I this solves that problem That that you just articulated John where it's like I got to go through things.
By not by by showing that but that smart album and Having the key of it not being in any other album is,
Effectively, I mean it's an unfiled photos album right I love this. That's actually pretty cool
I hadn't thought of doing that.
I, most of mine are, you know, our photos, generally speaking are in chronological order.
Okay. Yeah. You know, at least that's the way my photo album is.
So I do have some that are weirdly, you know, 15 years out of sync.
It's like, no, wait a minute. There's no, you know, my son was 17 at the time.
There's no way that, you know, here it is 10 years later.
Yeah.
And it, when he was five, right, right, right. Okay, 12 years later do the math.
But yeah, so but that's pretty cool I'm gonna play with that a little bit Yeah, I like this idea. This is good. Yeah, I I... so... um...
Yeah, knowing the other thing that you mentioned knowing which ones to delete I find that my iPad is the right device for me,
To triage photos and I have it on my calendar to do it once a month for the previous month because that way it's not too overwhelming,
But my iPad because the screen is it's bigger than my phone so I can actually see some detail there,
Like like I could on my laptop or certainly on my you know desktop or whatever,
But being able to touch the pictures and like moving around like that user experience on a larger screen than a phone,
But still with the touch interface is really the right way because I can just swipe back and forth really easily,
And see okay. I took four pictures here. Yeah, two of them are crap. Two of them are great
All right, delete delete good to go. But then once I'm done with that,
Going through and like filing them Um, this is the great tip I wish there were.
And I know Apple's like Apple's got ways. My guess is with more and more, you know, AI or machine learning or whatever we want
to call it, like it will get better at saying, okay, here's the 16 photos that are basically the same thing.
Pick, you know, I'll let me help you pick the ones that you should keep and we'll jettison the rest.
Like, you know, get rid of the blurry ones. That's that kind of thing.
I'm curious how you folks do this because I think they clearly all three of us.
Like this resonated with all three of us instantly.
So I think this is, you know, we always say we put things in the show that hit the 20% rule that, that, uh, by, by, by that, I mean, it's relevant to at least 20% of, of you folks listening. Right.
Uh, I think this one probably hits the 90% rule or at least the 70% rule.
Absolutely. So I'm curious how you folks do this. Feedback at Mackeycab.com.
Let us know. post and discord at mackiecup.com slash discord.
I'm certain he just said feedback at Mackey cap. No, no, no, no, no.
He said feedback at Mackey cap.com. Okay. Interesting. Okay. Interesting.
Now just put keyword managing on the iOS devices so we can do that with photos.
That's that's asking for too much. I'm sure nitpicking. Isn't it? Yeah, I know it.
I love me some keywords. Yeah. Yeah. It helps. Yeah, for sure.
All right. Uh, you got a quick tip from Martin Pete.
Oh, I'm coming. I'm coming. Okay We've moved our workflow from every note to notes if you hear some hiccups here, that's why I'm not happy about notes though,
Because if there's no obvious easy way to export notes I can export as a PDF, but that's not what I would want if I want to move to a different notes app
I want to be able to export in like ENEX format So I need to see if there's like clearly there could be an Apple script that someone's written to do that
I just got um just briefly,
porthos John,
Mentioned something and now I don't see it in discord. I'll have to go back to it
He he mentioned in notes after he likes so I'll have to look back at that in a second
But so I found it. I'm sorry. I just was behind the obsidian he says.
So no, I can wait wait. Wait, we're gonna we're gonna have this conversation
conversation, there's no way that I'm moving to some obscure note-taking app.
I got thought a lot about this. This is, and I actually had a conversation with one of you, a listener, uh, called me
this week. We had this conversation.
If, if I am going to store just like with mail, I don't, but mail's a little different
because mail's now all IMAP. So you could use some obscure mail client and not risk losing access to your stuff.
You just have to move to a different client, right?
I got, he, what he said when he initially said is, Hey, this store is at a markdown.
Still, custom format, like if I'm going to use a note-taking app, it's either going to be the one that Apple provides so that,
when operating system updates happen, they are likely, in fact, almost guaranteed to be up-to-date unless they just jettison notes, right?
So it's either going to be Apple's or it's going to be the market leader, which of course is
Evernote, and Evernote doesn't work for us anymore because they don't support AppleScript.
So, this is why it became Notes.
Like I've thought a lot about this. I don't want to use some I as good as any of these other solutions might be,
If it's developed by it, you know, it's solopreneur or a small development team or something. You could get left hanging
I left hanging the the other option would be Microsoft OneNote,
Although Microsoft has been known to leave people hanging to despite being a very very large company
But I don't think they're gonna leave OneNote hanging. I think enough people use it
So maybe one note is the, the option here, right?
So anyway, this is that there are thoughts that go through Dave's brain sometimes. There we go.
So, all right, well, we're off of that detour now and then back on.
Which I created by the way.
Yeah. So we got a, a, a quick tip from Martin and he writes, you probably already mentioned it, but I thought I'd send it anyway, rather than having
to go to settings to connect to Bluetooth devices, you can go to the control center,
and long press on the rectangle containing the Bluetooth icon.
This brings the whole rectangle forward, including cellular, Wi-Fi, personal hotspot, et cetera.
Long press the Bluetooth icon and it brings up the list of Bluetooth devices
you've connected in the recent past, touch the device you'd like to connect to,
like wireless earbuds, and it connects.
The same goes for the Wi-Fi icon. Much faster than having to go find the settings icon,
open it, scroll down to the, used it.
Uh, that's the second one. Like the, like the first one in the show opener, I have used that,
all week long and I'm loving it.
Yep. Very cool, Martin. Thank you.
Yep. Yeah. It's pretty much anything in control center. If you hold down on the icon, interesting things will happen.
Like the flashlight, for example, if you hold down on it, you will get a selectable brightness.
Right. Yeah.
Yeah, I like, I like this, this network Bluetooth thing because you can keep, like you said,
you keep long pressing and it goes even deeper, right? Like that's, yeah, drills down. Yeah, yeah.
I like it. Yeah. It's good. Instead of having to search for it, but you can, that's the other one.
And I thought, I know I shared this a long time back. If you do go into settings, pull down briefly and you get a search window at the top and
you can write in the search, the setting for which you are searching and it will quickly get you. Yeah.
Rather than having to scroll down you know fifty apps looking for something yeah yeah yeah yeah fair yeah yeah.
Sorry i had a i had my brain doesn't seem to wanna stop this morning we were talking about notes no and one problem with one problem that we noticed this morning was that if one is not.
Very aware of what the focus is in notes. If you could be in a scenario where you think you're deleting a note,
but instead you're actually deleting the note book.
And both of them have confirmation dialogues that look very similar,
and that's dangerous.
And so I got to thinking, it's like, wait a minute, what if we wrote a script that only would delete the note?
Like, even if you were selected on a notebook, it would go through.
Like you could do this with user interface scripting with Apple script.
And then what if we use something like keyboard maestro to intercept that delete key stroke when you're in the notes app and not institute the, or not
fire the notes delete function, but to fire a different delete function, right?
Like, I think there's, I think there's a world here where that's doable.
I, sorry.
Evidently, I'm on tangent mode today.
I'm trying to start learning more scripting because I'm beating my head against the brick
wall, even with chat AI, uh, yeah. But which we'll talk about more later in the show. I think so.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's yeah. Well, it's, it's given me scripts that work and it's
given me scripts that don't work no matter how many times I ask it and how many different ways.
Fair, fair. Yeah. We've got a, we've got something coming up a little bit later that,
I think it would be good for that.
But yeah, we will keep moving on here. Listener Tim has a quick tip for us.
He notes, no pun intended, that if you, he says, I found this by mistake, but it's pretty cool.
If you're in Safari on the Mac and you press Command-I, it will create a new email message
with the web page you were on and a link to the web page. So it actually embeds the web page in the email and puts a link to the web page that you were on.
This can be handy and I don't disagree. Like these are good quick tips.
Yep. That one I don't know. I've done this accidentally too, Tim.
I don't know that my fingers will ever remember it. They might now that we've actually talked about it here.
But I know that it exists, right?
So I know that I can be in Safari and go to like the file menu you and find, you know, the share email, this page.
Oh, it's command. I okay. But I could just choose it from there.
Like I, I know that the functionality is there, so I'll, you know, I can do it.
I don't know why it's command.
I probably, cause the others were taken because like command M is minimized,
but you could change that, you know, right.
You go into settings keyboard and you can start monkeying with all that stuff per app or system wide.
Yavel, you got you got another one from FAD? Follow up maybe to last week's thing, Pete?
Um, I kind of do. He wrote and...
Was it last week? Whichever week it was, I've lost track. I've lost track of it.
The point is, um, we were talking about- What is time anyway? It's just this abstract concept for our feeble human brains.
Right? We just, it's, it's not linear. If you're-
No, linear time is absolutely something we made up. There's zero question of that.
Well, we're not smart enough. Like, like our brains don't have the capacity.
I don't want to say we're not smart enough.
Our brains don't have the capacity to truly, like, see time for what it is.
We came up with linear time. It's fine. It works. It's a good construct.
We all got here in sync with each other at the same moment in time to do the show.
And that's a wonderful thing.
Speaking of doing the show, did you have something from Thad?
I did. And, uh, we'd talked about previously or, or in the future, we're going to talk about it,
depending where on the timescale you are.
Why, why didn't I go to, I could not remember why I did not go to an e-sim in my phone. Right.
Oh, right. And yeah. And I was like, you know, I know there's a reason, but it escapes me what it was.
And he wrote in and said, yeah, here's what it is.
And I think he was off by one number, but iPhone 12 and earlier, you can have a physical SIM and an eSIM and that's it.
And if you go to an eSIM, your only other option is to have a physical SIM.
So when I travel, I would no longer have the ability to use an eSIM.
So that was the reason. Thank you, Thad, for reminding me why.
In fact, I didn't go to the eSIM option because I am on a 12 pro max.
And for those of you on thirteens and fourteens, you, uh, I think the 13 day
view in the reply, you said as both a physical SIM and two eSIM slots.
Yeah. So the 13 sort of lives in both worlds, right? Because with the 12 and, and earlier, but not all the way earlier, I think
eSIMs began with the 10 R right.
And in those scenarios, from the 10R up through the 12, you have the ability to simultaneously use two sims
as long as one isn't a physical sim and one is an e-sim.
The iPhones 14 and further, at least those released here in the United States,
do not have a physical SIM slot. So you can use two SIMs at a time, and by nature of physical
limitations, they must both be eSIMs because those are the only kind of SIMs you're going to use.
The 13 lives in both worlds. The 13 has a physical SIM slot. You can use the physical SIM slot with
one eSIM or you can use no physical SIM slot and two active eSIMs and I insert
the word active there because I think you can have and it really depends and
no one really has seems to have a specific answer on this but I think you
can have up to about 10 eSIMs loaded on your phone at any given point in time
only two can be active though two SIMs total can be active so with the 13 it
It could be two eSIMs or a physical and a regular eSIM
and then, you know, moving forward with the 14th.
So yeah, we took a very simple thing and over complicated the heck out of it, but you're welcome.
Yeah, right. When I first got my 12 mini, I called Verizon and I'm like,
hey, can you make this an eSIM instead of a physical SIM?
Well, first, when I got the phone, I put in a 5G SIM and then it's like, or I put it, it had my old SIM
and it's like, no, you gotta get a 5G SIM, go to the Verizon store.
And then after that, you know, a couple of years later, I got curious and I'm like, I
wonder if they have their act together and called them up, got to a certain support person
and they're like, what's your IEMI or something like that.
It's on an eSIM.
I don't know, just because. I still have the old sim if I want to go back to it.
No, generally speaking, once a sim is retired in a carrier system,
it is, like, there is no world where it can be reactivated.
So, my guess is that sim is, is, is and should be trash.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's, every carrier that I've ever been with has explained that to me.
They're like, oh no, once we deactivate it in our system, it's never coming back online.
But they could make me a new one that has my same number if I go correct to right. Oh, absolutely. Yes. Yes
Yes. Yeah, you're it's not like you're losing your number or anything. No, it's just that physical sim is is you know?
And then what I do is run the T-Mobile test drive. Yeah, the problem is you got a manually switch between,
Your your different lines, which is what I did until the trial ran out
So only if you want to like you're the iPhone especially now is,
Pretty good at having two active sims like when I'm in you get to decide.
What sim is used for what purpose so When I'm traveling, you know elsewhere,
That that isn't the United States or somewhere that I need to use a another sim
I'll put an eSIM in but I'll tell it only use the eSIM for data for phone calls and SMS still use the
the physical, you know, my main sim, right, and not my travel sim, but I can, you can control it per,
contact too. I could say when I call John, because he's in the United States, use my US sim,
but when I call, you know, my daughter, because she's in Italy, use my European sim that I'm here
for, right, like you can, you can do all that. So it's fair, and you can even tell it, switch
automatically choose for data, choose the SIM that is workable and doesn't force me to roam in
whatever environment I'm in. Doesn't really help if, if like your case, you've got two SIMs that
are both built for the U S but you just set it. And then when you, when you deactivate that SIM,
it'll say, do you want me to go back to the other one? It's like, yeah.
So, and, and the other cool thing about that is that at least what I, I did when I've switched
over to Mint Mobile, I put an eSIM in my phone and I tried it for a week to see do I have the
connectivity I want. In other words, I don't want to get this service if where I live it's going to
be crud. And so I did that and that was nice. So people realize if you're thinking of switching to
somebody else, try an eSIM in your phone and make sure you're getting the service you want. Once you
realize you've got the service, it'll give you the service, then you can use my reference link.
That's true. That's fair. Go to, um, yeah, we, we, I, we actually will, I'll round Robin, I'll include you in the
round Robin of that.
We, if you go, uh, Mint Mobile used to be a sponsor for years, but it's been a number
of years since they have obviously Pete and I still use it because it's the least expensive
thing, but they do often have like a, like a, you know, a referral deal where the person
who referred you get something, but so do you.
Right. I have a link set up called macgeekgab.com slash Mint Mobile and I think that's right.
Uh, uh, making sure it is, and it is set up on a round Robin to, to give those of us here
that use mint mobile, the referral credits, uh, when you're signing up.
So, uh, I will add, give me your thing, Pete, and I'll add you to the, uh, to the round Robin on that too.
Yep. Thanks. Yeah, man. Of course.
Um, just to wrap that up, um, uh, let me make sure I have these links, right.
Just to wrap all this up, the advice that I would give is if you are on a 12 or earlier,
iPhone 12 or earlier, I would, generally speaking, there's always going to be asterisks to this,
if you're on a 12 or earlier, I would keep your main carrier on a physical SIM and leave
your e-sim available for your traveling, you know, for flexibility when traveling.
Because like the e-sim when traveling is absolutely the way you want to go.
You don't want to have to mess with that.
However, if you have a 13 or later, I would absolutely move everything to e-sim
because that way you don't have to deal with physical sims that are getting out of date
or going bad or any of those issues.
You just get to completely walk away from that. Obviously if you have 14 or later, you don't have a choice in this matter,
but 12 or earlier, keep your main service on the e-sim, uh, or on the physical sim.
So that you have the e-sim as an option when you travel and then 13 or later,
just go e-sim all the way and you're good to go.
So I'm waiting for the 15 to upgrade. I phone 15 is coming soon. Five short months.
Five. Yeah, I think that's maybe even less, maybe four short months.
Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. Uh, what's next, John?
And why is that what he's really saying is that they're constantly making improvements to the
Facebook Messenger app. Sure. Well, one of the enhancements is going to be if you identify a
message as disappearing, which I think other platforms can do as well. If somebody takes a
screenshot, you will be notified. Oh, sure. That's actually been in that's been in Facebook
messenger for years you can you can do private chats that yes are disappearing like snapchats
or whatever and oh okay and so like snapchat they're gonna tell people that you screenshotted
their their message yep okay that makes sense yeah that's fine sure so um yeah and it actually
Larry makes an interesting speculation.
What if I take a picture of my iPhone screen with my iPad? Well, that's the that's the analog attack.
Yeah, that's the workaround. They're not going to know you're taking a physical picture.
At least I hope not.
Yeah. Yeah, that would be interesting. No, they wouldn't. Apps can subscribe to,
an API that essentially fires, an event to them when a screenshot is taken when the app's in front.
So I've seen it a lot in like beta apps that I'm using.
If I'm testing something for someone, if you take a screenshot, it says,
oh, do you want to submit this screenshot as a bug report?
It's like, oh, what a handy little thing. Like, yes, I do. And you know, off you go. So.
Anyway. Interesting stuff. Yeah. Yeah.
But yes, good to know that they're doing that. My guess is it would tell you that you are,
that the other person is now knowing that but,
which I think snapchat does but maybe snapchat doesn't or snapchat does
well, it tells the other person but if like if you and I are
are on snapchat and I screenshot something you sent me,
does it tell me that it just told you that or does it only You know what I mean? I forget.
Cause I know, I get it. It's something that I know happens.
So I, I forget if it actually tells me.
Yeah. I don't remember. Cause I, I don't think it does because I do remember taking, my
daughter was sending me some stuff and I remember screenshotting it.
She goes, why are you screenshotting that? And I told her I'm doing this and you know, you're in trouble now.
And, uh, but, uh, I'm like, well, I, you know, I wanted that information.
So thank you. And I, that'll allow me to save it. She's like, oh, okay.
Right. But I don't remember it telling me that. So I think yeah, maybe not, huh? Yeah interesting,
All right One last little quick tip ish. We started talking about it earlier in the in the quick tip section here. So I'll happily,
Share it Patrick says he refers us to a recent episode of
the accidental tech podcast where they were talking about.
Current day AI and basically saying that it's a these chat bots are a tool that,
can scrub a gigantic data set a large language model and,
organize that in a way that we can understand very well and.
It seems like it's talking to us or communicating well with us in our language of choice
but that it can't actually, the engine can't actually think for itself.
And I and there's that's a good way to think about it. I've had two friends share things about along these lines recently with with a I chatbots which again I'm very bullish on we we use them constantly here to produce the show and and get stuff out and it's really helping do a lot of the grunt work if you will a good friend of mine.
Chuck Schatten, friend of the show as well, described these AI chatbots as Dunning-Kruger implemented in software.
Dunning-Kruger meaning, implying that it is an entity that speaks confidently without knowing whether or not it is correct.
Right? So, it doesn't have enough knowledge to vet what it's telling you.
So, it could be strong and right, it could also be strong and wrong.
There it is Dave. What's that? Show title. Strong and wrong? Often wrong, but never in doubt. Often wrong, but never in doubt.
Yeah, right. Yes, exactly. Yeah, strong and wrong.
Which, you know, is a thing. Another friend, actually, David Sparks, right?
From all that he does for Mac Power users and Mac Sparky and all that stuff,
described these AI chatbots as a fantastic intern, right?
And and so I think they're both correct. Like, these are good ways to think about it.
And if we combine those two and sort of go all old school on it,
I would describe these AI chatbots as fantastic temp workers.
Right. Because every day someone new shows up at your office that has some skills that you can leverage,
but you have to give them all the instructions of what to do.
And then you have to vet their work To make sure that it is what you wanted them to create and that it is accurate, right?
For example, I use the these chatbots to I use chat GPT to take the agenda And I'll do it after we finish this episode, you know
I know what we talked about because we have the agenda items
I feed that into chat GPT and I tell it please make me a blog post based on this and it does it
You know instantly I have a seven paragraph blog post,
I then read that and I tweak the things that it got,
Incorrect it might say on this one for example It might say Patrick asked the nerd the eater favorite geeks or whatever to describe the current state of AI chatbots,
Well, that's not what happened Patrick. No, it definitely will because you just said that.
Literally, I'm just giving it the agenda So I'm not giving it very much to begin with and therefore it doesn't know if Patrick asked or Patrick shared,
Right and and so I do or at least I will when we finish the show and I can go quickly and, you know, clean that stuff up.
The fact that it wrote seven paragraphs for me way easier to edit than to write from scratch as evidenced by,
Almost 18 years of never writing these things from scratch. So You know that like that bingo,
Yeah, yeah bingo.
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One of my favorite apps that's installed on all of my computers is BBEdit.
In fact, it's running right now because it's part of my start the day script.
I know this sounds crazy that a text editor is super important, but it is.
Now, obviously, if I'm going to be doing some programming, well, BBEdit's where I go, right?
That's not the only thing BBEdit does. In fact, it does so many things with text.
We were recently talking about how great it is with regular expressions.
It's find and replace is fantastic. You can do things in multiple files at the same time.
I use BBEdit. I was just using it yesterday to compare two documents.
There was a change to the software that builds our RSS feed for this podcast, and I needed
to make sure that the software changed things properly with an update.
And so I pulled down a copy of our old RSS feed, and I pulled down a copy of the new
one, you know, before and after the change, and then I pulled them into BBEdit and had
And it's show me, not just line by line, but character by character where the changes were. It makes it so easy.
All this and more, you gotta go check it out.
Go to barebones.com.
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All right, we had gens24 in Discord asked, asked, I've changed hard drive icons on Macs before.
But today I used the procedure I always use which is to copy the drive icon to the clipboard
and then go to get info of the drive. So highlight the drive in the finder and this is a quick tip
for those of you who don't know how to do this. You get a picture on your clipboard and then you
go to the finder, highlight the drive, go to get info either with command i or file get info and
then click in the upper left-hand corner, paste, once you've highlighted that, Command-V will paste
what's on the clipboard, so hopefully the image you want, in and usually in the process it converts
it to the drive icon and does what it needs to do and, you know, Bob's your uncle, everything's good.
Gens 24 says that doesn't work anymore any idea why and so my question starts with what were you copying from what was on your clipboard because I I'm guessing that there is some sort of you know data filter that says well if it's just some text obviously we don't want to put that there so it just ignores the paste and does nothing right that would be my guess
So, I would say, what's on your clipboard?
And you can answer this question for yourself. You go to Finder, in the Finder, go to the Edit menu and choose Show Clipboard, and it
will display to you the contents of the clipboard, or if it can't display them to you in a quick
look type format, it will, at the very least, describe as best it can what sort of data is there.
And maybe, that's what I would do. You know, we approach a lot of these questions
with the, if I was there, what would I try next?
And that's what I would try next is, okay, what are you trying to paste?
What is it seeing when you say Command V and go from there?
Another way to test this would be to grab a known good icon.
How could you find one of these you might ask? Well, go to another folder or an application and do the reverse.
Get info, click and highlight and do command C to copy it to the clipboard.
Then try pasting that in on your drive icon just to make sure that the functionality
is still working on your computer.
And then you know it's a data issue. And so whatever format you have the image in,
try something else. I know that PNGs have worked for me in the past.
So that would certainly be a way to go.
It could be that you might have say, you know, a live photo or something on your clipboard
when maybe that paste functionality hasn't been updated to use that? I don't know.
But that's, you know, that's where my brain goes on that stuff. How about you guys?
You got something, Jack? I do. Um, I like the clipboard tip and I just looked at it.
So for example, I have in the lower left-hand corner. Yeah, it says text.
Okay. It's on there right now. So that's neat. But does it show you the actual text? It should.
Oh yeah, it does. Okay, great. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. Right.
No, I think you're right. If you try to paste a movie, it's like, I don't know what that is.
I don't know how you want me to convert that to an icon file. Right. Yeah.
I mean, I, my guess would be, you know, just take the first frame,
but maybe that's not a good guess. I'd love to try it.
Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah, exactly. We don't, we don't know. Yeah.
How about you Pete? Well, so my, my multitasking, I may have missed something here in the question is you,
because as you started talking about it, that went, I didn't think so, but okay.
So as people may know, I named my various drives after military aircraft.
It just helps me keep, you know, so my main hard drive, uh, as one might guess is Harrier.
Well, what are the odds?
Right. So. Is that now, is that, is that always the name of your main drive, regardless of computer?
Yes. Interesting. Okay. Yes. So when, yeah, when I buy a new laptop, I'll, I'll call it a
Harrier, but like, you know, Cobra was one of my Drobos.
Um, uh, you know, I've had Phantom intruder and all, all, all the different military jet jets and helicopters and that sort of thing.
But no, see, I like, I like this because I named, I named mine after Miles Davis songs, but Miles Davis is no longer
with us and therefore no longer writing songs.
And so there is a finite list of options for me. And I decided years ago that I would never name two drives the same.
And so I'm moving on to a different paradigm. Oh, interesting.
So your main laptop drive changes names every time you change.
Correct. And if the drive in my laptop or my desktop were to die and I were to replace it, the
new drive would have its name.
Like, I don't know, you know, it's just me. Like, I mean, I'm not saying that my system is
probably far more complex than it needs to be. Cause I like yours.
I can't, I can't migrate to yours obviously, because I can't like,
there's no way that would work for my brain to have two drives with the same
name, but I love that it works for your brain because it makes your life easier than mine.
Well, you, you could, if, if, if, if your main laptop is always your main And so, and so here's where I've, I'm not sure
if I missed something or not.
I hope I didn't, but what I did, uh, as you might guess, I, I do have a couple of pictures of
Harriers on my aircraft or on my aircraft, on my laptop.
And so I went and pulled, I did a, a quick view.
And then I did a quick screenshot of it. Then I went to my main drive and which I hadn't
done this before on, on this particular machine.
I went to the drive, I highlighted, I hit command I, and then in the little icon up there, I
did a quick screenshot of it. And then I went to my main drive and I did a
I clicked it with the mouse and then or the trackpad and I hit command V and it changed.
So, did I hear in the question you can't change it anymore? Oh, you can. He, whoever it was.
That's what I missed then. Okay.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Gens24 was just saying they can't change it and we're asking why.
And so, you absolutely can. Yeah, yeah. Now, if the drive is mounted read-only, then you can't change it, right?
If you don't have administrator rights to the drive.
Yeah, for instance, yeah, if you're running a, uh, which is a good security thing to do, right?
Have, have a two accounts, one's an admin account and run your life from a non-admin account.
So that forces you to put in your password to make admin changes. But you would think
it would ask if you want to do this, you need an admin password or not.
Yeah. Right. Right. Right. Right. Yeah. I don't know. I don't know.
We'll find out. I got nothing else. We got nothing else, that's right.
John, you want to take us to Joe?
Yes, Joe, thank you. Joe says, I took my first long three-week trip to Europe
since the early days of the pandemic. And after hearing Dave's recommendation of ESIMDB.com,
bought a 10 gig eSIM for the trip.
Using the app from the eSIM provider, I was surprised at the quick rate of data usage.
At home, I rarely go above four or five gigs per month.
After checking and setting cellular, I realized that the culprit was photos.
In the US, most of the photos I take are at home or nearby, and I don't take that many.
But as a tourist, I take a ton of photos, and I like to take raw photos.
Before I decided to check, I used almost five gigs of data sending my pics to the cloud.
As you can imagine, I turned off cellular data for photos and for overcast, another heavy data user.
And then I sent him a follow-up. So yeah, setting cellular shows you the data consumption, right?
Now the thing is there's something on the bottom of that screen that will show the amount of data used per period, right?
Now you may ask yourself. How long is a period? And I found an article that addresses this and the the answer is it depends,
You can either do it manually and I found it at least on my phone the last time I did it was
2020. Okay. Probably reset it. Sure. But they claim that certain carriers will reset that
statistic as well. I think they have the ability, but they may not do it.
Interesting. The, um, it is different per sim, like your, your data consumption,
like in, in Joe's case, cause he, you know, he said he had his, his two sims.
It will show you your current, currently selected data sim, but it does keep track
on a per sim basis, so you know what you're using on each of those sims. So for him, putting a new
travel sim in the current period was probably days or maybe a week, right? Because he had just
added this sim to the phone. However, Photos was still taking up all this data. So it was actually
Photos using this, not just looking at the, you know, grand sum total of three years worth of
of data or something misleading him.
And this brings up a piece of advice that I'll share, that I certainly follow but have never thought to share on the show.
And that's when I'm... I do this for all of my sims, including the one that I have in there currently as my standard sim.
But I make a point, when I go and add a new data sim for, you know, for travel or whatever,
I go in to settings, cellular, cellular data option.
And I go into data mode and I set low data mode because that way it would keep many apps from doing this.
Photos is certainly one of them. It will not send, you do your photos syncing
in the background over your mobile data. It would wait until you were on wifi to do that.
Overcast should respect that choice. In the past, there was a bug where it did not,
but I think it's back to respecting that choice now, which is good.
And Overcast also has some granular settings in the app where you can tell it what to do on cellular
versus not cellular, we'll call it.
But yeah, and I wish there was a way to tell my phone to do this by default, to use low data mode
when I put a new sim in or something like that would be handy, uh, but there's not, and there's, you don't even get a warning
like, Hey, you put a new SIM in, would you like to enable low data mode on it?
You don't get that option. So it's just something we all have to remember to do manually
every time you add a new E-SIM.
And as someone commented, you know, with bandwidth nowadays, you can go through
an entire month's data in about two minutes, so, Oh yeah. Especially if you're doing speed tests, man.
Like, yeah.
Yeah. Speed tests on 5G will chew, chew, chew data.
Yep. BOOM!
Yeah, just bear that bear that in mind. That's that's Yeah, so with with joe it was less about the the period the definition of a period it was truly that photos was just chewing
up his data, um because it was on his his new travel sim, but,
Unfortunately, that's kind of how it goes. Thankfully.
We and I I know joe's from the united states we here in the united states have,
One of if not the most expensive per gigabyte data rates in general
Obviously you can, you know, you go with the major carriers like AT&T, Verizon, or whatever, you pay a fortune for it, even with the, you know, the discount carriers like a Mint or, you know, Xfinity Mobile or any of those.
Like, they're way less, less than half the price of what you're paying with the majors, but they're still ridiculously more than everybody else in the world pays.
And that's just how it be.
So I say this because I've always thought well if I'm traveling and I screw this up and you know wind up using way more data than I anticipated and need to re-up at least I'm not re-upping at U.S. rates, I'm re-upping at you know European rates or Mexico rates or Mexico is actually pretty expensive at least compared to Europe.
Yeah.
Probably because of its you know proximity of the border to the U.S.
I remember the first few months of the iPhone, though, back in 07, there were people coming back from overseas with, you know, $3,000 bills.
Oh, yeah. Remember iJustine? I mean, that's how iJustine gained her, like, first bits of notoriety was she did a what we would now call like a YouTube video.
Video, it might've been YouTube, I don't know, whatever it was, but she did a video.
She published a video showing her, you know, a 5,000 page phone bill after her
first month with the iPhone because they were, uh, AT&T or singular at the time,
was detailing line by line every time you use data.
And I was like, yeah, that's not so good.
Not so good. Don't. Yeah, exactly.
All right. Moving on, Fernando has a question and I hope maybe we have an answer.
Fernando in Discord asks, in Apple Mail, I keep seeing a mailbox named
recovered messages iCloud in parentheses.
So it's recovered messages, parentheses iCloud.
And I see this on my Mac routinely, and it is completely empty when I click on it.
I delete it, and it keeps coming back no matter how many times.
Does anyone know what might be happening or how to fix it? And there was a discussion,
JamCycler commented correctly, at least as far as I know, and said,
normally recovered messages mailboxes are created when the process of you or your Mac
moving messages between mailboxes fails for one reason or another.
And it stashes them there. It says, look, I was trying to move these.
Something happened. I don't want you to lose these messages.
So I'm going to go put them here.
You figure out if they wound up getting moved to where you wanted them or not.
As Jam Cycler points out, if there were any messages in there, you might be able to figure out when and where that failure happened.
But if there's no messages, you don't get to know.
He does recommend rebuilding the iCloud inbox. And that's an interesting piece of advice.
So you can do this in mail.
You go into mail, highlight a mailbox, go to mailbox and choose rebuild.
I think you can also right click on a mailbox and choose rebuild.
That will, depending on what type of mailbox it is, if it's an IMAP mailbox,
the rebuild means that it will essentially wipe out the contents,
the local cache of that mailbox
and re-download it, treating the server as truth.
You might need to do this for multiple of your mailboxes.
And I would also do it for if I see a recovered messages mailbox and it's empty,
I would rebuild that too, because that would reload it from the disk.
There might be an issue with your mail index that is causing it to not see things
And you can, you can delete your mail index too.
Um, you can, Onyx does this fairly well. Uh, if you don't want to have to go into the finder, but, or go into, you
can do it in the finder too, you quit mail and then go delete all the, into,
the mail, like you go to home library mail, and I think it's like V10 now.
Cause that's the version we're up to.
And then in there might be one folder deep. I'm doing this from memory.
There are envelope index files that store mails index.
You can delete those and then relaunch mail and it will rebuild them but the good news is and the reason I don't remember it is that you don't have to
Onyx does this and you can choose to have Onyx
just tell those files to rebuild or to delete them and force mail to recreate
them in most scenarios I would choose to recreate because if there's damage to the database there's no reason to,
to mess with that so,
Um, but yeah, it seems like there's something missing out there.
I don't know what that is. I don't know.
You guys have any thoughts on this?
Seems like nothing, nothing, all right, Dave, yes, we jump ahead in time or go back in time,
actually go back in time, John came up with on the last topic we were discussing, yeah,
you can create a shortcut to set low data and put it, create an automation on that.
I Didn't realize that was a scriptable option,
Cuz not everything is Create a shortcut to set low data mode. Oh.
Yeah Putting in automation put it in automations and have it automate, you know once a day. Yeah that 4 a.m
Every day set low data or even geolocate when I'm not home. Oh You know, all kinds of different options.
Yes.
Oh, that's brilliant. Yeah. Brilliant. Porthos, John. Thank you for that.
Oh, I love that. Oh, this is why I love doing the show live.
This is great. It sometimes gets distracting and sometimes it means the agenda has to
flow and you know, it has to flow circularly, but that's okay.
It's fine. We learn things. I love learning things like, especially like that.
I think the timeline timelines is not being linear.
You'll be fine. You're totally fine. No problem whatsoever.
Um, circling back yet again, uh, to using Onyx to clean things up,
I was having an issue on my Mac Mini in the office, which is running Ventura.
Where, once, let's say once an hour, my CPUs, now this is an M1 Mini, so it has eight cores,
four efficiency cores and four, you know, high performance cores.
Once an hour, all eight cores would peg for 90 seconds, maybe a little more, and like, I could do nothing.
If I was on a Zoom call or something, I would completely go, like, you know, all jittery, like, my computer was not mine to use for those 90 seconds to 2 minutes or whatever it was.
If I was fortunate enough to have launched Activity Monitor or something where I could see what processes were being used beforehand, I would see that it was, you know, Core Spotlight or MD Worker or something just going nuts.
And this seemed like a lot and what I also would notice was right before this happened,
I would see busy Cal if it was visible even if it was in the background kind of flash and refresh and
So it was clearly something about,
Spotlight, you know, maybe related to the calendar. I couldn't quite figure it out and,
I mentioned to John Gotow the author of of the proprietor of St. Clair Software.
So the author of like default folder, but also the author of App Tamer.
We were emailing about something else. And I said, yeah, it's ridiculous that I'm using App Tamer on my M1.
I shouldn't have to, but I have to keep Core Spotlight D or whatever it is under control,
because otherwise I lose my computer for two minutes an hour
and I don't get to pick what those two minutes are.
And, you know, like any of us would do, he starts throwing out ideas and solutions.
And one of the things he suggested, which I had already done,
but not the way he suggested it, was he said, have you rebuilt your spotlight index?
I'm like, well, of course I have.
But it didn't help this problem. But I rebuilt it using ONIX.
So I don't actually know what command it ran.
It did do the whole thing where it, after I chose to rebuild it, it then re-indexed things,
like I saw the re-indexing happen. So something happened, but it did not solve this problem.
And John said, because he was, he's a helpful dude and a smart guy. He shared the three.
Command line commands that he would issue to fix this using the MDUtil command,
Turning off indexing on all volumes, all volumes, erasing indexing on all volumes, and then,
re-indexing on all volumes, and re-enabling indexing on all volumes. And,
so, you know, of course being at my wits end on this, I'm willing to try anything.
It's like, yeah, I'll do that. So I did that. And the problem, I don't want to say the problem is
is completely gone, but it is 99% gone in that I still see it once an hour do something,
but the spike lasts for maybe a second, not 90 to 100 of these seconds.
So livable.
The other thing John said was or suggested was rebuilding the index on my time machine
volume and that could be that could explain the once an hour thing and all of that, right?
But I thought it was interesting that whatever Onyx is doing was different than these commands that John shared with me.
So, I reshare them. They will be in the show notes.
You just issue them one after another and they will be in the show notes for this episode, MacGeekEB981,
which you can find at MacGeekEB.com or go straight to mgg.fm slash 981.
Have you guys seen either of this on any of this on your Ventura machines, by the way? I have not.
Okay. It sounds terrifying. It sucks.
Yeah. Yeah. It's like, oh, here we go again.
Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. It sucks. So it's mostly better now, but I'm still not real bullish on Ventura for a variety of
of reasons this being added to that list.
Ventura, Vista, what's a few letters among friends. Dude, ain't, ain't that the truth.
I, you know, I wish for the days when Apple did not feel obligated to release an entirely new version of its operating systems annually.
And it's funny because Apple bailed out of Macworld Expo because they didn't like one of the things.
I mean, there were a variety of reasons that gave them the flexibility to do this.
The internet being one where they didn't have to go and meet their customers face-to-face anymore.
You know, you go to their website and learn about the products.
But they didn't like being tied to the schedule of having to release products at Macworld Expo every year
and make a big splash.
But all that happened was they shifted that from January to June.
Cause now they got to release new operating systems, four of them or something, maybe five, you know, every single June and then developers get
to spend the summer working on it.
It's like, could we have one year, like this year, I would really don't have to release, you know?
No. In fact, patches, like stability patches, just that don't worry about the new features, just stability.
Release a new operating system every couple of years, every three years, you know, but this every year thing and look at the new bells and whistles we added.
Well, yeah, you broke the stuff that actually matters to us.
I don't know. That's my... I mean, the nice thing is that you can specify security updates only.
And I think I have that on a couple of my machines.
Well, for auto updates.
Yes. Yeah.
Correct. If Apple keeps updating the operating system, there are apps and things that, like all these
features that they do add, now my devices are out of sync. There have been times, it's not current,
but there have been times where you couldn't sync calendars between the old version of, you know,
last year's Mac OS and this year's iOS. Well, if I buy a new iPhone, I'm forced to use the new
software. Or if I buy a new Mac, I'm forced to use, I can't roll a new Mac back, right? You got
you gotta use the current thing.
But like having to keep every, having, I understand having to keep everything up to date
and in sync, I just wish the updates were a little more thoughtful
instead of just based on a calendar year and Apple feeling like they have to do this.
And maybe they do have to do this to remain competitive. Like, I don't know.
But macOS, macOS doesn't need to be updated every year to remain competitive.
IOS might need to be.
Or at least having features at it, you know, like there's different competition markets here,
but macOS, dude, Monterey is great.
Monterey is great. My biggest gripe with Ventura is somebody felt the need to change the UI, majorly, like settings and all that.
The settings you are. Where's the thing that I used to know where to go to fix or...
They did that though to more coincide with iOS. So it was the same terminology across, right?
Yeah. I mean, that's still makes sense. They ported settings from iOS to the Mac.
Right. This wasn't new. It was just... Yeah.
Significantly different. Yes, it's different for sure. Yeah.
Yeah, Monterey's great. I don't know. It could look getting it on a new M2.
Oh, you won't. That's the thing. Like if I if if Apple doesn't fix the aggregate device,
issue that Ventura has, I cannot use anything newer than Monterey for the podcast,
without either changing the entirety of my workflow. And I don't even know what that would
look like in order to do the show live.
Like, I think I have to use aggregate devices, but maybe not, maybe, maybe there's a, you know, a way that I could engineer things and, and not do that.
Or I have to keep buying max. Like if I want to upgrade from Intel in the studio to, uh, Apple silicon, the,
M series M one series is the latest I can go.
None of the M two chips run on machines that will run anything earlier than Ventura.
And so I would need like an M one mini, or I think the max studio,
because that's the M one family, like the M one pro and the M one max,
that will run Monterey.
So, but it's like, you know, that's it. The list of computers that I can run Monterey on is now fixed.
You know, it's, there is not a, um, well, now you have to go buy a studio.
I might. I've actually thought about it just to just to buy myself time.
Because eventually Apple will change core audio again and break something different, but fix this, you know what I mean?
And so it's like, okay good. I can I can jump but Ventura ain't it and I'm not convinced that whatever they release,
You know this this year will be it so So, but maybe, who knows?
Anyway, John, um, speaking of hardware and Apple and all that, you want to take us to Tom?
Okay, I guess we have a few minutes. Um, you want to wait, you want to save Tom and just do some cool stuff found?
Let's do that.
Let's do it. Let's save, let's save Tom because that's probably a longer conversation. It's yes. All right.
All right. Um, I will, I will share my, uh, my cool stuff found for this week, which is the, uh,
Sonos Aera 300, I mentioned it at the end of last week's episode, this is, this is a fascinating speaker.
It's really unlike anything I've ever experienced from Sonos before.
First of all, just the way that it looks is, it's kind of like somebody took a, an oval,
three-dimensional oval speaker and put a belt in the middle of it and cinched it up.
It's kind of got this hourglass kind of shape to it.
And what's interesting is the, the, it sort of sits on its side.
So when you're facing it, you see this oval view.
You look down and you see the hourglass. The front of it is a speaker grill.
And then the back half of the hourglass part is also a speaker grill.
And this thing's got a ton of different speakers inside it because as a single speaker it is,
built to do like multi-channel sound it will play Dolby Atmos music and it's fascinating
I you know when I started using this I you know the first thing I played was an Atmos
version of Tom Petty's Free Fallin', which starts with that kind of chimey acoustic guitar,
And it sounded like that was coming from behind the speaker.
It was like, oh, wait, this is really interesting. And then when the band kicked in, that was in front of the speaker.
And this thing's tiny. It sounds way bigger than it is.
Standing five feet away from it, it sounds very deep. Like the depth of where the sound is coming from sounds much farther away,
than the speaker where I know the speaker to be and can see with my eyes.
Ten feet away from it, it sounds like there are two speakers ten feet apart, right?
The way that it sort of sends sound out to the side and you can set the height of it.
As out of the box the low end of this speaker wasn't huge It was it was kind of tame and almost lacking a little but sonos has this thing called trueplay where you tune the speaker to your room,
with the era That with with the initial version of trueplay, which is what exists on most of their speakers,
You use your iphone and walk around the room like waving your phone up and down like it's some kind of
like a crazy person. Yeah. Yeah. Right. Like it's like I'm looking for water,
you know, whatever, with my phone up and down for for 60 seconds. It's a fascinating exercise,
but it's in. And during that time, the speakers like sending all sorts of sounds out, right?
You know, and your phone's picking them up and it knows that it's moving around because your
iPhone has a gyroscope in it. And so it tunes the speaker to your room and that works great.
It's it's amazing you can do that with the era 300, but you can also let the speaker tune itself to the room
So I thought well Let me just do that because it like the home pod you know it has
Microphones in it for Sonos voice and and a lady and all that stuff so I let it tune itself to the room it,
It did that and then suddenly the low end was exactly where I wanted it to be.
It was great.
It's so like really interesting speaker, and like I said it does have voice control,
It can be used as your rear speakers if you have like a sonos arc or something for in your living room
But by itself it is not a speaker that can be used.
Easily with your TV you could probably route things around and force it to be but it's certainly not meant to be used that way
Uh, but as I have, I don't, I only have one of them, so I can't try it as rear speakers,
but, um, I, it would be cool to, to, to use it as rears and see how far away it makes
like the, the, the rear sound.
So I might, I might have to grab another one. Yeah. But it's, it's really interesting.
It's, you know, where they've got speakers sort of all around this thing.
Um, it's 450 bucks for, I'd have the price right on that. 449.
Yep. In the U S and, uh, and you can order it. answered my question that's awesome yeah you pre-answered my question that's awesome yeah because
i was out of the yard about three days ago with the move and i was like and that was you know six
or eight feet away from me and i'm like that is an amazing speaker the low end on that is awesome
but this sounds like it's even more more technologically advanced it is i but you wouldn't
you could use it outside i don't think they would say that it's waterproof i'm pretty sure they
They haven't, although it might be.
They say it's humidity resistant, which is important.
Wee!
Where's the move you can drop it can rain on it and all that stuff, right? Well and the move is also.
A battery powered speaker. This is not this needs to be plugged in So it's it's a little different where I would where I would use this is in,
like a bedroom or A an office or some, you know some or in your kitchen, right where you're going to be listening to music a lot,
And you want to have?
Put one speaker in and have it sort of fill the room. That's where this is, is key to me.
Is that it could go in the living room if you using something different to watch TV, you know,
and you want this as your, you know, music listening kind of, you know, in the study,
the family room, that, that sort of thing. Um, it's, it's really, it's a, I'm impressed with
this thing. Yeah. Yeah. It, it, I didn't know what to think about it. And, and then I pressed play
And I was like, Oh, okay.
That's pretty cool. So yeah.
Yet again, Sonos kind of impresses me, which I didn't know, I didn't know that they could do. So yeah.
Sounds like it's, uh, taking the, the Bose wave technology and crushing it on top.
Well, not, not taking their technology, but improving upon what they were doing.
Yes.
Yes. And making, making it more, more better. Yeah.
Yeah. So. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, for sure. Yeah, yeah. John, what do you got?
All right, this is the first time I've seen this at Pepcom. It is the Scosche.
Scosche. That's how they pronounce it. Yep. Sorry, Scosche. That's her name. PowerVolt Travel 30.
Okay. 30 watt USB 2-in-1 home and car travel charger.
And I can show you. So I'm holding it here and Dave also has a picture up,
but look at this thing. It's the palm of my hand. You gotta describe it
because most people are never gonna see what we're seeing.
It's a square about two by two, two inch by two inch.
And it's square and here are the two parts so this is the car part nope what's the car part john
this is the car part the car part you know what put it down put it down and just describe it
as though someone can't see it i'll put it's a socket that plugs into your car energy or cigarette
lighter great and the other one is a two-prong uh that plugs in your wall outlet oh amazing,
and and it is a hundred 100 through 240 volts so it is truly a travel charger so
if you can get the adapter from the flat blade to whatever the country or in uses
it's it's a true travel travel charger and what is it what kind of power does
it output 30 watts 30 watts a single port yes there's one USB C port got it
Ah, cool. What's the price on that? Oh, I see it here.
$44.99, you can probably get.
Yeah.
I just thought it was nice. I mean, it's really light. It's really small.
And I even hooked it up to my MacBook and looked in the system info power and it's like 30 watts.
I'm like, okay. So, you know, so you could use it to charge your laptop.
Oh, yeah. It'd take a bit longer than other devices, but hey, it's small and easy to travel with.
Well, it depends on your laptop. Like the, the MacBook air is almost built to be used with a 30 watt charger.
So yeah.
Interesting. That's great. Ah, I like that.
I like the, kind of the two in one little deal. Pretty cool.
Yeah. That would be good to have, like you said, for, for the car, especially traveling.
Cause you plug it into a car and charge, you know, rental car or whatever.
Ah, or. Yeah. The only thing I can't figure out is, uh, no, nope, that's not it.
How do I replace the fuse is there a fuse in there? Well, there should be.
I mean, any any device that I know that, you know, has a car charging port has a fuse in there in case.
Well, is it a fuse or is it a circuit breaker like that resets when you pull power from it or something?
I could be right. I mean, my experience has been any of these car chargers have
have a fuse of some value in there to protect you.
Did you ask him about that last night when you saw him?
No. All right. Well, now you know what to ask him.
All right. Okay. Well, uh, let me jump in real quick then with, uh, because he was talking
about the international part here and we'll, I'll put it in the show notes,
but I found one on Walmart for nine 36 and it will plug into Europe, China,
uh, UK, universal, um, and so just it's, uh, I found it on Walmart, the Velotoy all-in-one travel plug adapter, universal worldwide,
US, UK, Australia, European union.
Um, and I, I use something similar to that. I take with me and plug right into, so I'll put, I'll put the
link real quickly in the, in the show notes. I think we got it for you, Pete.
We're, we're, we're, yeah, we're a real-time operation here, man.
Full service. Yeah, man.
So because he said, yeah, it's international. Yes, it is. It will go international.
It looks light and so.
Um, Interesting. Yeah. All right. Well, I'll put the, uh, Vella toy in there. That's great. That's great. Um,
We have time for one more thing and I, I, I have had this on the cool stuff found list for probably weeks. I.
Should have had it on the cool stuff found list for a year and it is the specifically the cat link,
robot litter box Talk about a life-changing piece of technology.
And we, we bought this for ourselves. In fact, after we bought one, we very, very quickly bought a second one.
I had reached out to the Litter-Robot people, sort of the, you know, the name brand of that world.
And they were like, yeah, we don't have any review units to send out.
And I was like, okay, no problem. Like, you know, that's fine.
They will rue the day, because what we realized is that by having to go through the process and, you know,
like buy it like like we all do for things we realized that the little robot is not worth what
they charge for it because you can get this cat link for probably 20 to 30 percent less than the
little robot it has an app links to your wi-fi will tell you when it needs to be uh you know
emptied or whatever but it's amazing the cat goes in does its business leaves you can set the amount
of time that it waits. We have it set to three minutes. Three minutes later, the box rotates
around empties itself and it's perfectly clean for the cat or cat's next visit. And so we've
got one upstairs and one downstairs in the house. We've gone from having five litter
boxes to just these two. We could probably get away with just one, but you know, um,
we didn't want to test that theory when we had four cats living at the house, our three
plus our son's one. But yeah, this thing's amazing. We have the, we have a model that
doesn't that they don't sell anymore. They were selling for like $4.99.
That was like the Catlink regular versus the Catlink Pro. However, there is the Catlink Lite,
which is on Indiegogo right now, and you can get for less than 400 bucks.
I think 359 or 379, depending on where you go with that. And it's, they've kind of made the thing work
and a little more economically. And so it's, uh, yeah, there you go.
So anyway, couldn't help but share because these, this thing is amazing.
If you've got cats, you, I already know that you, uh, dislike having to empty the litter box all the time.
And so, and of course, if you don't keep up with it, your cats will choose to go elsewhere sometimes.
And that's never good.
This is one of the least fun parts about owning a cat.
And this thing takes it away entirely.
We maybe go and mess with the thing once a week now. And yet our cats are always using perfectly clean litter boxes.
So unless you enjoy the smell of ammonia, right? Yeah, exactly.
Yeah, there's no more smell. Like it just it's, you know, we had our son's cat, um, for
whatever reason, he does not feel the need. He was never taught to bury, uh, before he leaves the box.
And so that was fun, you know, and I think that may have been sort of the straw that broke the camel's back because we've been talking about these for a while is finally like, all right, well, we got to fix it. Like this is this. This is not okay.
And so yeah, no, it's it really if you've got cats get a robot litter box, you know, whatever one you get.
You're probably going to be equally as thrilled about it as what I'm talking about here.
Don't discount the cat link just because they are discounted on the price. It really is,
Fantastic and it's been working for us for probably six months if not more Yeah, probably more probably more like seven or eight months. So,
Good stuff Yes, who's that in the background the band it is the band I thought maybe a cat had walked in here
It's like oh, I've never brought my cat over to the studio. I used to I used to bring one of my cats to the office,
Nope, it's just the band hanging out here in the studio with us on this 80 degree day.
I'm going to go check out Tideline House for lunch, Pete.
So that's the new food truck pod thing that opened here in Durham.
Really stoked. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
All right. You got anything else to tell them or is it time to go?
I think it's time to go. That silence speaks volumes. Thanks for hanging out with us, folks. Yep.
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Music.
John what's my shirt say? If it flies, it spies. Alright, good.
What's Pete's shirt say? Don't get caught.
I think I had it going. Almost got caught on the sound. I made it.
It's good advice, folks. It's good advice folks. Later!