It's time for Mac Geek Gab, and I have our quick tip of the week.
I noticed this week I had told my iPhone to download a bunch of updates for apps, and
then there was one app that I wanted to launch, like, well, 50 updates or something were going in the background.
And of course, the app that I wanted to launch was one of the ones in the queue.
So I long pressed on that app and it allowed me to prioritize the download of the update.
I know you could do this when setting up a phone through like migration, you know, initially,
but which is why I tried it, but I did not know if it would work and it does.
More quick tips like this, plus your questions answered and some cool stuff found too today
on Mac geek up 983 for Monday Memorial Day here in the U.S. May 29th, 2023.
Music.
Greetings, folks, and welcome to MacGeekGab, the show where you send in your quick tips,
like the one I just shared, your cool stuff found, like we'll share in a little bit, your,
questions, which we will try to answer.
We take all of that stuff. You send them into feedback at MacGeekGab.com.
We take all that stuff. We string it together into an agenda.
And the goal is that each of us learns at least five new things.
Every single time we get together.
Sponsors for this episode include shadyrays.com slash MGG where you can go and use code MGG.
When you buy one pair of Shady Rays, you get a second pair for free.
And notion.com slash MacGeekGab where you can go and for a limited time, try Notion AI for free.
We'll talk more in depth about each of those in a little bit.
For now, here in Durham, New Hampshire, I'm Dave Hamilton.
And here in Fayetteville, Connecticut, this is Jonathan Prada.
And here in Lee, New Hampshire, it's Pilot Pete. Pilot Pete, wringing his hands right in front of the
microphone for everyone to hear. Thanks for that. We love that.
We love that. For a limited try, you too.
Now he's over my chin. And he's screaming into his microphone.
This is going to be great. I can tell it's going to be great.
Make it stop. I'll go away. Make it stop. Please. Alright, where do we go first, Mr. Braun?
Let's start things off here with a few announcements. Okay, sure.
Okay, I've got a few of them here. So, the first one is, I am going to be retiring
from podcasting to focus on other interests.
This is, like, obviously I knew this coming in. This is a surprise for our listeners.
Yeah, well, I will miss doing the show with you. I will miss getting the opportunity to hang out every week.
Um, when.
We were creating this show almost 18 years ago. You know, we had Mac Observer running, podcasting was becoming a thing.
And I was also, right at that time, about to move from Connecticut to New Hampshire.
When I had moved to Austin, about six years before that, you know, you and I met when we were, when I was 15.
I won't share what your age was.
I think you're older than me.
Yeah, I mean, I think you were about 20 at the time, right? Like, but whatever, like we're about five years apart.
And, uh, and obviously we, we, you know, live near each other and hung out a bunch.
And then when I moved to Austin, we kept in touch, but it was like every,
you know, couple of months or whatever. It was certainly less frequent as often will happen when people, you know, don't live in
proximity.
And then when I moved back to Connecticut, uh, we started hanging out regularly.
Again, we would watch X-Files or whatever it was together.
And, uh, and so when we were moving, when I knew we were moving to New Hampshire, it was
right at the same time we were starting this, you know, this show or a show at Mac Observer.
And I was trying to figure out what the show should be. I thought, well, wait a minute,
if John and I do this show together, that gives us a reason to, you know, stay in touch more
regularly, even though I'm leaving. And it has served that purpose for obviously quite well. So,
So, um, so, so, you know, that, that part of this is, um, is, it is what it is.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Well, from a listener perspective, I came in to listening to you guys when it was Dave and John.
So you'll be missed, John. This is a special thing you guys put together and built.
And I. Thank you. I'm honored to be part of it. Yeah.
And I reflect on when we started the podcast, We thought people wanted to hear what we thought about things.
And then it morphed into a more tech support type deal. We also talk news and all that, but the news space is kind of crowded,
whereas the troubleshooting space, I think, is less crowded.
I don't know if that's entirely accurate, but.
But no, the show's evolved, and it's evolving again, so. Yeah.
Yeah. Where, um, so, we have, there will be no, there is no replacing John F. Braun.
I don't need to say that, but I'll say it anyway.
We will, obviously, the show will continue on, Pete and I will do our level best to soldier,
and there there are a list of people who have been guests on the show and some of them will continue to join us at times
but there there is no like and waiting in the wings is person X as you know the John's replacement there is no John's replacement
it's but but when Pete can't make it there will like this is not a show I would ever do by myself
And so, when Pete can't make it, there will be other people and sometimes we'll bring in a third person even with, you know, when it's just me and Pete too.
So, or when Pete can make it, I should say, because if we brought in a third person, then it wouldn't just be me and Pete.
You know, that's just how logic works. I don't get to control that.
So, where can people keep in touch with you and find you and see you?
Um, so there's Twitter, John F. Braun, um, I'm on Facebook, you know, search for John F. Braun, uh, LinkedIn, I don't use it that much these days.
Are you on Mastodon yet?
Uh, I'm sticking with Twitter, even though they're ruining it. Okay.
In my humble opinion, it hasn't gotten better. Sure.
Um, yeah, I was very sad when my Twitter-ific client all of a sudden stopped working because I really liked that client. Yeah, yeah.
OK. But there's Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn. What else am I on? Instagram.
Yeah. You know, I publish pictures there.
You know, I publish pictures there. So if you want to keep in touch, any of those venues would be fine.
Um, and then to round things out here, um, Dave and I will be attending max stock conference and expo in July.
So if you're in the Chicago area, come by and say hi.
And if you're not come to the Chicago area and come by and say hi. Absolutely.
And we think, we think, I think if, if the schedules all work, I think Pete,
you're going to, uh, be in attendance there too.
That's the plan at this point. Yeah, I'm going to do my level best to be there, assuming I can get off of work.
There's that work thing.
There you go. There you go. It interferes with my social life and my podcasting.
Well, you got to fly the plane. Somebody's got to fly the plane and they don't let me do it, Pete.
So yeah, I want my stuff, man. Where's my stuff.
Yeah, there's that people want their stuff and the company doesn't pay me if I don't go to work.
They're so cheap. I don't get it. It's funny how that works.
Yeah. All right, John, you want to take us into quick tips, my friend?
Yeah, we got a quick one here from our friend Bill, who says in MacGeekGab 982, there was
a reference to changing the scrolling behavior by pressing the option key.
Dave and others seemed excited about using the option key to scroll to the spot clicked in the scroll bar.
If this is truly the preferred behavior, a better option, pun intended, is probably to
change the behavior directly in the Appearance setting in System Settings.
At the bottom of that screen, you can select the default behavior for when one clicks in
the scroll bar, jump to the next page, or jump to the spot that's clicked.
Choosing the latter does just what was discussed on the podcast.
It should be noted that the Option key merely enables whatever choice is not the default.
Jump to the spot that's clicked is the default using the option key makes the scroll bar move
page by page and vice versa. So thank you very much, Bill. I question them putting this in the
appearance settings. I don't think that's really an appearance thing, but what do I know? I would
not think that would be there. No, and I don't know that I was even aware that this was, I mean.
I mean, I don't know that there was any point in time where I was aware that this was an option that you could choose.
Clearly, recently I wasn't, because I was so happy to find out that you could, again no pun intended, click the option, or hold down option and click and jump to that.
I may, I may make this change on my devices.
Um...
Yeah, I don't know. That's, yeah, that's, yeah, good to know it's where it is. I guess. I guess.
Let's see, Patrick has a quick tip for us.
He says, maybe everyone knows this, but when searching for a particular email in Apple Mail,
you can put in multiple search terms. For example, you could search for an email from Dave to John,
or you could search for an email from, you know, director of finance and also about inventory.
And this is true. Mail searching is weird, or I guess like it's searching,
but it's also really filtering is what you're doing.
You kind of have to give it time. There's no, I have found no way to say.
This is the end of search term one.
Now, here is search term two.
The way I do it is like if I wanted to, you know, look for an email from Dave to John or from John
that also included to Pete, right?
Because in theory, you know, like, yeah, I would have to put in, I would type like John F. Braun
and wait and the little menu would drop down, magically appear and show John F. Braun and then
I would choose John F. Braun and then I would choose from on the little thing and now I'm done
with first criterion. It's going to start, you know, filtering by that. Then right next to that
in the search box, I could type, you know, pilot Pete and wait and hopefully it shows me a drop
down again and I would choose pilot Pete and then I would, you know, next to his name, I would choose
two and then if I wanted to look for something that had, you know, a word in the subject,
I would type another word and wait and then hopefully be able to choose subject contains x.
It's a little weird but you can do it and I appreciate Patrick sending this in to remind us
all that it is a doable thing it's just not I haven't found a way to make it
clear that like you know this is the end of one search term here's the next one.
Can you... Could you... could you use something like and?
I don't think so. It doesn't seem to let you, no. No.
Okay, it's probably the worst. Or like put it in quotes and separate it with an and, would it be smart enough to parse that properly?
Not, I don't, I haven't tried that.
Um, but, uh, let me, let me look to see. Uh, no, because. It starts trying to do a new term.
It starts, yeah. word and. Yeah, it doesn't. Looking for the word and.
And if I, if I put a thing in quotes, it says subject contains quote, a thing, quote,
like it's, it's looking for, it doesn't understand that I'm trying to give it a term
with, you know, with quote, no, it doesn't,
it doesn't get the hint.
Mail doesn't get the hint.
It's really what it comes down to. Yeah. And it makes it so hard to find things.
And then the strings are so.
They're so weird. Uber. Yeah. Yeah.
When you're trying to look through it, like I tried to print out an email
today from one of the listeners and the question that got answered and I could,
print either his last answer or the first two, but it wouldn't print all three.
Amazing. You know, his first question and my answer. Yeah. Right, right, right. Yeah.
Yeah. It it's, um, yeah, yeah. I mean, what's happening with mail is it's trying to be smart. It's trying to guess what you want
And so it's like while you're typing it's furiously.
Feeding that into spotlight in some way and trying to say ah Are you looking for email with this subject line that contains part of the text that you typed? It's just a little
it's a little, it's trying,
I wish there was a way to say, stop guessing.
Like I appreciate your attempts at guessing, but please stop guessing and just let me choose
the criteria I want to search by. Right.
And I guess the way to do that would be to build a smart mailbox.
As crazy as that sounds. Right? Like, I mean- That way it's always there, man.
It's- you're right, it's a permanent thing. I mean, you can delete them.
But, like, that would be the way to- to- to truly dictate the criteria,
would be a smart mailbox.
That's such a great idea. I know, I haven't thought about that until this moment,
and now that I have, it's like, well, obviously what I'm gonna do is I'm just gonna have one smart mailbox that is,
you know, kind of my catch-all, or my- my- my morphing one, and it'll be like,
like, all right, well, now I want the smart mailbox to be this.
Yeah, just edit the terms and it searches. Just edit the terms.
Yeah. Oh, I love doing this show. It makes me sad though, because the, the find capabilities in the finder are much more powerful
or flexible.
Flexible. And I don't know why they don't, they don't use the same interface.
Yep. I agree. I agree. Yep.
Yep, yep, yeah. Cause that's what I want. Spotlight. Finders using spotlight, right?
Yeah. As, as is mail. Yeah. And then there's more notes.
Find any file. We've mentioned them before, but that, that does really good.
I haven't looked to see if that can get down into the mail database.
I bet it can.
Oh, interesting. Yeah. Yeah. I have not gotten back to them.
I told him I would look at trying to do a video, some tutorial on that.
I need to get off my backside and do that.
There you go.
All right, shall we move to the next? I mean, that became far more than a quick tip, but I like it. It's good.
All right, this one should be pretty quick.
The title of this is Tip, Expensive Lesson Learned from Jay Kearns.
Hi, guys, your good info and banter are most eagerly awaited addition to the enjoyment of more than just my tech life.
So thank you. You're welcome.
My tip. The day I got the ship notice from my replacement Wright AirPod Pro 2nd Gen was,
of course, the day I found it. Where was it hiding out of range of find my?
In the RFID protection section of my purse.
Now, while probably everyone else in the current universe knows better,
I did not and pass this on to the few remaining people in my situation.
I suppose I should also refrain from putting my air-tagged car keys in that same passport section.
Since I had to pay for the now-redundant RitePod, I guess I kind of got caught.
Interesting. Yeah, now first off, I didn't know that they, because I don't have a purse,
I didn't know that they made a special compartment.
Backpacks have this too. The Shield RF. Okay. Like the passport pocket in a lot of the passport
pockets that exist in backpacks are RFID shielded.
So that people aren't able to, cause your passport has RFID in it now.
And so the passport pockets are just built to be RFID shielded.
A lot of them, not all of them, of course.
And so thinking, oh great, you know, I'll put my wallet in there with it.
You know, like if your wallet has an air tag in it or, you know, your airpods could potentially fit in one of those pockets. Like, yeah, it's a good reminder that RFID shielding works.
I mean, it's like, does it's job.
I've heard some people suggest if you're uncomfortable with that, the other thing you
could do is smash the RFID chip. On your passport? Yeah. That would make life really
difficult and interesting when traveling. I mean, most countries, and I don't travel nearly as much
as you, Pete, but like most places I go, even overseas, I'm using my RFID passport, like
getting into Germany, I was in Germany and Mexico.
I was able to like fly past all the people waiting in line because I was able to use my RFID passport.
Right.
Are you getting the same thing when you travel around too, Pete?
Uh, no, well, we're sorry.
No, well, we're treated differently. Um, we, you know, because we're air crew, we get right to the front of the line.
And because we're cargo air crew, we get right to a booth where they only deal with cargo air crew often.
Um, but that being said, when I, when I do travel on company business, I, I go to a crew line.
I can't remember the last time I traveled on tourist status.
Sure. Yeah, of course. Of course.
No, I, yeah, I would listen if I didn't have to travel on tourist status, I would not.
Yeah.
Yeah. It's very nice. I'm going to miss it. Yeah. Yeah. And I had to upgrade my passport a couple of years ago. Yep.
So I got not only the book, but I got a passport card, which you gotta pay a little extra for.
But the last time I traveled, when I came to TSA, I gave them that instead of my license.
I'm like, I wonder if this will work. And they're like, yep, come on through.
Absolutely. I don't think the passport card is usable everywhere.
I think that's only for land borders to Mexico and Canada.
I'm pretty sure Mexico, Canada and Virgin Islands or some territory.
Makes sense. And maybe, maybe cruise ships like ship and bank.
Maybe.
Yeah. Cause cruise ships. Sandwich girl isn't here to ask. Okay.
Yeah. Cruise ships won't take like your real ID, which is about the same as a passport card.
I think I've always, yeah, I was, I, when I had to go get my license, I did, you know, whatever, whatever this was, you
know, a number of years ago, I did the real ID thing just to have that. And they're like, you need to bring your passport and all these other forms of,
you know, these are the things to prove you are who you are.
And it's like I said to him.
My passport is, like, the real ID driver's license can do a subset of things that my passport can do.
But my passport can do all of what that can do and more.
They're like, right, other than you driving. I'm like, right, but we've already established the fact that you're going to let me drive.
So, I'm like, why do you need more than my passport then?
Because my passport, I don't need a real ID if I'm willing to carry my passport everywhere.
I don't know. Like, it's just, it's one of those weird things.
It's it is strange, but quickly back to the air pods.
I'm wondering if she can't get her money back for the air pod.
I would think maybe you'd be able to return that.
Yeah. Within time. Sure.
Yeah. I think I have over 30 days or so. Yeah. Yeah.
The other one. Excuse me.
Wow. Excuse me. Was I just wanted to relay that I had to delay in one the other day.
I'm air pods turned on. Find my can find them. Yeah, they're far away.
They're far away. Looked all over the house and I went, oh, I know where I left them.
Went right down there with the phone.
Could not connect to find holding them right against the phone. Nice. Refused. Yeah.
Yeah. It's, it's not perfect. Every now and then it's just like.
Yep there's something we are aware that there's something going on with pete's mike today of your cutting out like occasionally people got what you were saying but there's there's there's something on your mac that's that's you know what i'm gonna do audio hijack for now and i just think that's the extra new oh yeah maybe. Sure sure.
Um, I noticed this morning I was, uh, actually cooking eggs in the kitchen and Lisa was there
and she had a timer running for, uh, she had a timer on her watch running for, uh, like
watering the, the grass or whatever it was.
And then, uh, she told her watch, you know, Siri set a second timer for some other thing
that she was going to do. And it was like, okay, second timer for some other thing is set.
And I was like, right, you can do that on the watch.
You can't set two timers on your phone, not with Siri and not with the clock app.
If you launch the clock app, you'll see there's interface for one timer.
If you ask Siri on your phone, set a timer for like I was cooking eggs.
So I said, set a three minute egg timer.
And it was like, great.
And then I told it set a three, a five minute, Pat the cat timer.
And it was like, do you want to replace your other timer that's going?
And it's like, aha, you can't do it.
Can you, so the watch is able to do multiple timers.
The phone is not.
And, uh, you can do it on the watch with, uh, our favorite S lady, or you can like,
and we've mentioned that part before you can do it in the, in the timers app as well.
So it's just one of those things. It's yeah. You know, it's just one of those things.
It's just one of those things.
Um, speaking of the watch in discord this week, PC Unix said, uh, I have a, it was in a discussion about long watch passcodes, which of course mean that unlocking your watch with a passcode means you have to like, you know, tap lots because if you've got a long passcode, PC Unix said, I've, I've noted before that unlocking your phone will unlock your watch when you've just put it back on, but that sometimes it is is slow to do so.
That's true. Sometimes it just doesn't do it when you want.
One trick, he says, I've found is to call up the watch app on the phone.
That usually wakes it up and unlocks the watch.
So if you don't wanna bother typing in the passcode and your unlocked phone hasn't automatically
unlocked your watch, just launch the watch app and sometimes that'll do the trick too.
So thanks for sharing that PC Unix, I like it.
What else do we got? Pete, you got another one for us? I do, at the risk of running a Verizon commercial first.
Could you hear me now? I can hear you now. Yeah.
Alright. So, Scott writes in, he says, I use the handy function known as Silence Unknown Callers
to manage my calls and prevent many, but not all, spam calls from getting through to me and disturbing my workflow.
Sometimes, however, I need to turn it off when I'm expecting a call from someone I don't know their number,
and they're not in my contacts so that they can get through.
He said, so I've created a shortcut that I can vote by telling the S-Lady, silence unknown callers off.
That prevents me from having to open settings and use find to locate that setting.
I created another one called silence unknown callers on to allow me to re-initiate once the caller has reached me
and I can block spam calls going forward without, uh, without risk of missing that important call.
And then unknown number, um, to which I replied that that's a great idea.
I hadn't considered doing that.
I've been using the focus mode, uh, which gets you substantially more granular to do that.
But not everyone wants to play with the focus modes. People I've tried to educate about it.
Some are resistant. Some are like, oh, that's cool. Show me how.
So, uh, the, the focus modes, what I've been doing, but that shortcut idea is one and then a pre-show.
All right. I'm gonna stop you Pete because you're whatever you changed didn't help. You're still like cutting in and out,
But this is killing me. Yeah, I I would say,
In a little bit here. If there's if there's some time We'll have you just unplug your mic and replug it because it's yeah. Yeah, it's I'll do that
Well, you're talking next. Okay, great. So great. Yeah, I found I have two quick tips about,
I just want to mention for filtering.
Spam, if you are a Verizon customer, they do have something called call filter,
which goes against the database of known spam numbers.
So just to add that, it's like another layer of protection.
Interesting. Yeah. No, that's yeah. No, that's good to know.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah.
I noticed two things in the recent updates that we have seen here with Mac OS and iOS. iOS 16.5 adds Siri commands for screen recordings.
So you can tell it to start a screen recording, stop a screen recording, super handy, much better
than even the previous shortcut to do that, of course, which was in Control Center, because
that's something you can add there. But yeah, so those little commands for screen recordings,
go check them out. And the other one that I found was something we've talked about here on the show.
Which is that macOS 13.4 solves the slow Bluetooth issue that we have experienced here
here at Mackey Cabin and a lot of you have experienced too.
So if you haven't updated to both of those yet, please go ahead and do that.
And hopefully all of your problems or at least those very specific issues will be solved.
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All right, John, you want to take us to Michael's question? Yeah, this is going to be a rough one.
So Michael says, long time listener, I have an old guy challenge.
OK, when I put on my watch, the notifications from my phone stop making sounds or flashing.
As someone with low sensitivity, I cannot feel or hear my watch all the time.
Is there a way to enable notifications on both devices simultaneously?
If not, I would continue to rant at Apple for this slight inaccessibility.
I don't know if I have a good answer for you here. I did find an Apple support article titled,
Can I get notifications on both my phone and my watch?
And someone in that thread gave a pretty detailed analysis of what you can do. Okay.
And about the only thing he could come up with is if you go to the watch app on your phone,
and then go to passcode, there's an option, wrist detection.
And the person who posted this said that that may do it.
Here's the bad news though, Dave, if you, and Pete, if you try to disable that feature, here's the bad news.
If you turn off risk detection, your Apple Watch will not lock or unlock automatically.
Fall detection will not automatically start emergency SOS.
There's like one, two, three, four, five, six things.
So I don't think it's worth it. So I'm with you, continue to rant at Apple.
Yeah, well, there might be, I agree with you, first of all, that there should, it would be better
if there was a way to just say, give me my notifications everywhere,
I'm okay with getting duplicates, because that's what Apple's trying to avoid here, right?
If for anybody who uses Slack, there is a way of saying to Slack,
be more aggressive notifying me on my phone,
but I or and I accept that I might get duplicate notifications on desktop versus phone. It tries
to be smart about it. It tries to deduce whether you're active on your desktop and then it doesn't
notify you on your phone and vice versa. And you can, like I said, you can change that setting.
I would love that kind of granularity from Apple, even with the caveat of, yeah, and I get that
I'll get multiple notifications. We don't get that from Apple. It's really not Apple's way.
However, one thing Apple does do is allow you to increase the force of those haptic notifications which happen on your watch.
On your watch, go into Settings,
and then go to sounds and haptics you get to scroll down a ways and then scroll down a ways
once you're in there and you'll see in the haptics section you can set the haptics to prominent this
will make them far more uh you know forceful on your wrist the other thing to do is to make sure
you're using a watch band that can get tight enough that you'll feel the haptics but won't
have your watch just jostling around on your wrist. I noticed when I use a loose watch band.
I either miss notifications or I get miss notified just because my watch is bouncing
around and I think I've had like a phantom tap kind of thing. So, um, but maybe that prominent
thing is enough to sort of get you over the hump here, Michael. I don't know, but that's,
it's something worth trying. So I don't know. How, how are the haptics Pete on the ultra?
Oh, they're, they're awesome. And I do have the same thing, prominent make, I can make them prominent.
Do you, or do you just, I just did. I'm I'll see how that goes.
So you might jump out.
Yeah. So many times, like I said, on an earlier show, I I've learned to ignore that bump
on my wrist, you know, am I, am I ignoring anything?
You know, I was like, Oh, I had text messages an hour ago. I needed the answer.
I didn't notice. Yeah. All right. well, you know.
Yeah. So that's why I tell people, if you're trying to get in touch with me and I'm not answering,
just keep bugging me. I'll tune you out if I need to. Yep.
I promise. Yep. Yep. I, I, I am a, I'm the same way. I'm a, I'm a very happy user of various
do not disturb modes.
And I do it to, I mean, I do it to everybody. My family gets it sometimes too.
We have a group, you know, like I think most families do. We have a group, um, text or an iMessage
group for the four of us.
And sometimes, and I'm guilty of this at times too, but sometimes, you know, two or
the other three people will just get going and it'll just be message after message, after message.
And it's like, yeah, I'm in the middle of like a thing right now.
Maybe I'm recording a show, although that's automatically turned off, but you,
know, maybe I'm just in the middle of like doing some work and it's like, Oh, yep. Okay.
I'll go and do not disturb for an hour. I got no qualms about that. Yep. Yeah. Exactly.
Hey Pete, your audio sounds better, which is. Oh, that's good.
What are the odds? Ain't nothing like a reboot in the backside of my computer. Yep.
That's a Ventura thing. We saw that. Oh, and by the way, folks stick around.
I have something good to say about audio and Ventura in a little bit here.
But. If you can't say something nice, sit next to me.
Me, but, um, but that's something we saw with, uh, Ventura from my end to, uh, specifically into Chrome.
And I think I, you know, you might've just been able to restart Chrome because in, when
I was having that issue, that's exactly what I did.
And I wish I had thought about that, but, uh, Oh, interesting.
Because when I did reboot, everything came up, even things that I didn't want coming up, you
know, all the log in items. Sure, yeah, of course. Except Chrome came up and then was non-responsive.
I had to first quit it. Well, you know. And restart it because, just because it was
angry at me, but I need to put that on my checklist, just reboot everything once before starting a show.
And. Do you have your computer set to reboot automatically once a week?
I don't. Oh. There's another one, right? Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yep. I have, we record on Fridays. I have it reboot on Thursdays, just, I don't know why I chose Thursdays.
I, you know, it's like 24 hours before we do the show and that's generally good enough. Just to be sure.
I was just thinking that I bet my audio was good on the, uh, on the commercials too.
Yes. You sounded fantastic on those. Yes. I may imagine.
No, it was fun. It's better to sound good. You know, I will share something.
Obviously, uh, you just heard the first time that we did, uh, sort of tandem commercials,
or at least the first time in a very, very, very very long time. I can't take credit for any of what I'm about to tell you. This is
It was all Pete's idea, even just doing the tandem commercials and tandem sponsor spots.
Their commercials I just never said that word before I at least not to describe them I've said the word commercials before but I,
Pete had the great idea of taking the talking points that we get from our sponsors.
And instead of just kind of reading them down and and riffing on them on our own pizza on no
paste them into chat GPT and tell them to make a script and make it funny.
And so you as the listener get to decide whether or not it was funny and that's
why you were laughing or you were laughing for the other reason.
So dead joke, funny, dead joke, make it stop. That's right.
Funny. How like how, like a clown, like a clown laugh.
I entertain you. Do I, do I amuse you? I'd love that scene. And I think he ad-libbed that he, uh, is that right? I don't think it was in the script
I think he just yeah. Yeah, it's one of the great scenes in that movie. Yeah. Yeah,
All right Pete you got a question for us from from Nick. I do Nick wrote in and he said I,
Edit and proofread papers for multiple family members Nick. I feel your pain brother
And I come across a repeated item that I don't have a good way to resolve.
Since the typing is not on my computer, and I was wondering if you have any tips addressing a specific problem.
There are spaces added between the words and the punctuation,
rather than the punctuation being appended, added, or immediately next to the word.
This is, for example, a space comma, list comma, list space comma, that sort of thing.
So, word, space, and then punctuation.
He says, I've looked into, I've tried to build snippet and text expander and
autocorrect libraries and I'm not sure it's, he says, it does, it does not save
due to the leading space. So the text expander mode doesn't work and I also
tried it in Rocket Typist and I couldn't get it to fix. Is there a minimally
invasive way to do this without installing the software? I played with it with Rocket Typist as well.
The only thing I could come up with was in Pages and Word, I used the Find and Replace.
So I went in there, in Pages it's Command plus F, and then there's a Replace option at the bottom.
So I just went in and put Command plus F, and then I put space comma and replaced it with comma.
And it went through and it replaced all of that. And it took that space out
from in front of the punctuation mark. I did the same thing for the period.
And so it's not quite as efficient as maybe a text expander would,
but it gives you the option to replace them all.
For instance, if it's 10, you can do them all at once if there's 10 in that document.
So Nick, I hope that helps.
And if anyone else has a more better idea, Just serve it up, please.
Yeah, I don't, I mean, you know, when It's that leading space that, that text,
expander, rocket typist, even keystroke, you know, I didn't try keystroke, you know, that
you can do keystroke replacements in Apple.
That, that was what I was thinking was, was that. Yeah.
So if you go into either system preferences or system settings and go into keyboard and,
go into text replacements, I think is what they, what they call it.
It's just such a weird thing, but yeah, it's text or text replacements.
And you can put in a phrase and then put in what you want it to replace that with.
So you could put in space comma and then have it replace it with say, comma
space or just comma, you know, whatever.
Uh, that might be the trick.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Cause then at least, and, and you'd get the benefit of iOS doing it too.
But I think autocorrect on iOS will actually fix this stuff.
This shortcut can not contain spaces.
Please provide a valid word or phrase. Dang.
I just tried it as you described it and it got mad at me. Okay.
Thanks Apple. That's great.
Yep. Yep. Okay. Well, it was a good idea.
Um, yeah, yeah. You might just need third-party software.
I mean, it's, you know, it's how it works. And the find and replace is the other.
Right. If you want to do it manually. Sure. Yeah.
But the advantage is it lets you do all 10 at once. You don't have to go one by one.
Oh, that's fair. Yeah. Yeah. Fair. Yep. Replace all.
Oh, and you, you put rocket typist in the show notes, uh, just as a side note
that is available in set app.
Sorry. Now you got to put set app. Sure. I don't know.
There's, oh, listen, we, I, I love well fleshed out show notes.
The more, the merrier in there and you can get those in your inbox, go to mackeycub.com
and just sign up there and you'll get them every week.
Uh, so you, you don't have to miss out on, on ensuring that you know the shows out
and that the show notes are there.
And then you can also, uh, maybe be the one to remind me if I, uh, forgot to change
the show in Apple podcasts from draft to published, you'll get the email.
Well, you'll get the email. You can just reply to the email.
It works right. Yeah. Right there. I'm thinking you might want to write the feedback at MattGeekAb.com.
What?
Didn't I hear that right? Feedback at MattGeekAb.com.
What? I don't know anything about this feedback at MattGeekAb.com.
Is this new? Did you do that too when you did the chat? You should get after it, Dave.
Oh, man. Get after it. It's what all the cool kids are doing. Oh, man.
Yeah. Me too. There you go. There you go. All the cool kids and me too.
Okay. Moving on. on. Harvey has a question here. This is going to be John. I'm going to miss you.
How do I change the name and extension name on a hard drive?
Backblaze stopped backing up one of my drives named Gallifrey because it thinks it is now named
Gallifrey 1 with a space in between. Gallifrey space 1.
In checking the info window on the drive, the drive's name is Gallifrey,
but it is listed under the mount point as Gallifrey 1.
I've tried to change names multiple ways and it keeps reverting back to Gallifrey
as the mount- Gallifrey 1, sorry, as the mounting point, which I think is what Backblades is reading.
Any advice? So, listener Steven in Discord had, I think, certainly what I would do first,
which is unmount the drive, then go into the volumes folder, so slash volumes, you can tell
the finder to go there, you can do it in the terminal, however you want, go to the volumes,
the slash volumes folder and remove.
Gallifrey and Gallifrey 1 and if there's a Gallifrey 2 remove that too.
These should be anything in the slash volumes folder should be empty folders
as we've talked about on recent episodes.
Unix mounts drives at a folder right or at a like they you create a folder and then just tell it
all right that's where the drive should be if that folder exists as it does in Harvey's case
almost certainly it, you know, he has a drive named Gallifrey, macOS says, cool, I'm going
to mount that at slash volume slash Gallifrey. And then it says, oh, nope, there's already
a folder there named Gallifrey. Well, it's not going to overwrite it. So it says, all
right, cool. No problem. Let's try slash volume slash Gallifrey one. And if that fails, it'll
We'll go to Gallifrey 2 and Gallifrey 3 and all those things all the way through.
Get rid of that volumes gallifrey folder and it will be able to mount right where you want it to
mount and then backblaze should see it and match it and do all the magic things that backblaze can
do so that's the uh that's the magic there i hope because i because if that doesn't work i don't
know what else would so could you use you mount from the terminal um you you could like to unmount
to drive because that's what you mount does right yeah yeah but i mean i would i would do it in the,
finder with the eject just just in case the finder does more than because i i think you mount won't
delete i think you mount would cause this problem because you mount doesn't delete the mount point.
Right uh because that in unix generally you don't delete the mount point you leave it where it is
and then you just say go mount here and you're very specific about it.
When you add a drive to macOS, it's trying to do it, you know, in this sort of pretty
and don't bother the user with the underpinnings way.
And so it doesn't mount to the same point. So when you eject a drive, not only does it unmount it,
it then deletes the folder that it was using as a mount point so that it can use it,
so it can create it again. So yeah, I wouldn't use UMount.
I would, I would use eject. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Disk utility will also eject it fine, you know, with unmount, but it'll do it properly.
Yeah.
Right. And kind of as a follow up here, but say you're having this problem with your machine name,
instead of a volume name. Oh, yeah.
Here's the way I found, and they moved it again, of course, because it's Ventura.
But here's where you can get to that value. It's not where it used to be. They moved it again.
On sharing local host name, and you're going to see the local host name of the machine.
And I remember having a problem one time where, you know, something similar would happen to
be like, oh, you're, you know, your machine name is JB Mac mini one. And I'm like, no,
it's not. And it's like, oh, yes, it is. Oh, yes, it is. That's right. It's basically in
the same spot, I think in Monterey, cause I just went, cause I'm still running
Monterey here as, as we've discussed.
Uh, I went to system preferences sharing and it's called computer name at the top of the screen there.
So, I mean, it's, it's got a different label, but it's still in the sharing preference pane.
So, yeah, but, but yes, that is, that is where you would check.
If you notice your max name on the network starts getting the one, two,
three it's basically seeing echoes of itself and I know that's strange to say
but on the Mac when one Mac is alive on the network and awake on the network and
and another Mac goes to sleep.
There will be a handoff as that Mac is going to sleep, and it's the Bonjour Sleep Proxy handoff.
And what happens when this handoff goes through is it says, hey, like if let's say my Mac in the office is going to sleep,
but the Mac in the studio is awake, my Mac in the office will say to the Mac in the studio,
hey, I'm going to sleep.
Will you be my Bonjour Sleep Proxy? And it says, well, okay, what services are you running?
And it'll tell it, ah, I'm running file sharing and printer sharing or whatever it's, you know, whatever sharing services it's running.
And it'll say, cool, I got you, man. And then the Mac goes to sleep and the Mac in the office
goes to sleep. The Mac in the studio says, okay, if anybody's out there on the network
looking for computers, I'm going to advertise not just myself, but this thing down in the Mac
down in the office, because it asked me to do that. And it will advertise that it is file sharing
and print sharing, and then when somebody goes to connect to it, the Mac here in the studio will be
like, oh, okay, well, I can't actually service the file sharing request to the thing in the office,
so I got to go tell the one in the office to wake up and it'll pass a, you know, magic Ethernet
packet along, and it can do this over Wi-Fi too, but it's called the magic Ethernet packet,
I think, I think we still call it that, I don't know, and it wakes it up and then it says,
All right, go answer this request and it will.
So that's how all that works. But that's why this happens because sometimes
the Mac in the office will wake up and there won't be the right,
we'll call it the right unhand off.
And so it will see that the one in the studio is advertising itself as like mini office.
And so the one in the office will be like, well, somebody else took that name.
So I gotta be mini office one or mini office two.
That's usually the thing that causes that problem.
So there you go, final. That, that, that leads to a question that may or may not be worth answering.
How is that different from, or why does it do that as opposed to just wake on land?
Well, it is wake on land. Yeah. Yeah. But, but here's the thing is wake on land, like, okay.
So wake on land means, um, is, is part of that process.
It is the part where the Mac and the, in the office can be woken up by another computer on the land, right?
Right? So that happens.
But if we didn't have the Bonjour Sleek proxy, what would happen is the Mac in the office would go to sleep
and it would no longer appear in the sidebar for anyone.
So you wouldn't know that it had file sharing or printer sharing enabled.
You'd have to just, as a user, you would have to like- To know to go there.
Well, you'd have to know that you first needed to send a wake on LAN packet to that device.
And then secondly, ask it, you know, what services it's having.
So with the Bonjour Sleep Proxy, it gets to go to sleep and still appear in the sidebar for everybody in the finder.
And then complicate things by renaming itself. And then eventually rename itself, yeah.
But does that make sense? Your question was good. Absolutely, yeah.
No, it is using Wake On Land. It's just sort of, it's adding that layer to it
so that the rest of the users on the network don't care whether the computer's asleep or not.
Yeah.
That makes sense. Which is great. It really is a power-saving feature
because if you have a computer that has a resource
of files or printers or remote control or whatever it is.
That you want people to get to, in the past, you just had to tell your computer,
don't go to sleep with Bronzor Sleep Proxy, which has been here for many versions of macOS.
This isn't relatively new.
You just get to, you know, you get to tell your Mac, yeah, sleep whenever you want.
And wake up when you need to, which is great. Yeah, so yeah, good question.
You want to take us to Gordon? Actually, no, you know what?
I'm going to, we will do Gordon, but while we're on this whole thing,
the infamous Johnny B in Discord asked, how is there a way to manage which external volumes
mount or don't mount for specific users?
And that's why I figured we'd do it here in this section. He says, I want to prevent specific volumes
from being accessed by specific users. Permissions doesn't seem to block them from it
when I'm mounting them with all permissions enabled.
And this is running on Ventura 13.4. So first of all, the infamous Johnny B
is right here on this show.
So I don't know who this other infamous Johnny B is. This must be an imposter, John. But anyway, I just.
The way it and several people commented including jam cycler.
Who said you can use an apple script and put the script application in the users login items and and i put a little apple script in there to do this i use an apple script to unmount my.
My clone drive when I start up I have carbon copy cloner unmounted after it does it's cloning but I don't want that drive there I don't want spotlight getting confused or anything like that so I just wrote a little apple script that does a shell script and uses the disk util terminal command it's all right there I'll put a link in the show notes to the,
to the discord thread we have all this but what you could do is.
For each user put in, in their login items, an Apple script that unmounts the drives
you don't want them to see.
They could still launch Disk Utility and remount them, but at least it would be out of sight, out of mind.
And that might be enough for what you're doing.
The one thing I will say though, is if you're using fast user switching,
this isn't gonna work.
Like, because if you've got multiple users logged in at the same time, whoever logged in last
gets to control which drives are mounted or unmounted depending on which Apple scripts ran.
So it could be a little wonky. I guess you could, I don't know, thinking about it,
you could write, you could use Keyboard Maestro.
To intelligently mount or unmount the drives depending on the logged in user
so long as every user was running Keyboard Maestro.
That would be another way to do it now that I think about it.
I don't know. Right? I mean, right?
So, that's my story and I'm sticking to it. And any questions, are we going to Gordon Pete?
I think Pete's muted. Pete's very quiet. And this is rare for Pete because Pete's not usually that
quiet, but... Well, not always, but you know. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, yeah, we can go to Gordon.
Okay. I want everybody that's driving to pull over at this time and pull out your notepad and
write down that Pete got one right. Oh. Note the date and time. File this under even a blind squirrel.
Gordon writes, I hope you can provide me with some help for an issue I'm having with the
Font Book app that is part of the Mac OS.
It appears it has suffered some sort of corruption.
There is supposed to be a Collections category located on the left panel of Font Books app.
On my user account, it is missing. Issues that I know about.
Missing the Collections category in the left panel.
If I try to add a new collection by clicking New Collection from the File menu, nothing happens.
If I try to add a new Smart Collection by clicking New Smart Collection from the File
menu, it opens up the dialog box to create a new Smart Collection, but once I name it,
rules and then click okay, the new smart collection does not show up.
Boy, it's getting stubborn.
Troubleshooting he did. He deleted the preference files and found at this location,
librariescontainers.com.apple.fontbook.data, library preferences, yada, yada.
He says, this is only happening on my user account. I open FontBook on a test account and it works properly.
I've attached two screenshots, one from my test account where it works,
one from my user account where it's missing.
Any suggestions to recover the missing panels, it would be great.
That's really bizarre. Yeah, it was. I wrote back, uh, Gordon, hi Gordon, my
guess, and I emphasize the word guess is that something is possibly wrong with these
files. And I pasted a graphic in there.
Um, and, uh, of course it's in the way of emails.
No, it's in, it's in library font collections.
Home library font collections is where you pointed Gordon on this one.
Yeah, that's where I found it.
I said, make sure you have a good backup of these files, delete the folder and restart font books.
Try it at your own risk." Emphasize, right?
Yeah. So, uh, so Gordon wrote back, uh, uh, thank you, Pete.
You set me on the path to success.
For some reason, my font collections folder was missing in action.
Somewhere in my deep dark past, it got deleted.
Probably with me messing with something I should not have. I recreated the folder font collections.
That's one word with a capital C, capital F, capital C, and the collections
section reappeared in the left panel of font book.
Of course, it did not contain any of the pre-made collections, fun, modern, PDF, traditional, and web,
which is fine, as I did not need those, but if I want them, they are easy to recreate.
And after that, I was able to successfully create my smart collections.
And for FYI, I created three smart collections, handwritten, serif, and sans serif fonts.
Hopefully it won't go to your head, Pete, but you outsmarted Chet, GPT, and many worthless Google
result in getting my problem solved.
In this case, the app was looking for settings that it couldn't find. Yeah.
And then it wouldn't write the file. But it wouldn't create the folder.
It would recreate the settings files, but the folder had to exist first.
That's what a, what a great troubleshooting tip is, you know, first of all,
knowing where it should have been, which is really hard.
Like if something doesn't exist, knowing that it should exist is tough.
And I was able to give that because it did exist.
For you it did. But but if Gordon like Gordon could have looked in the his test account, right like I mean
but again knowing where to look is,
Like yeah, it's tough. But that's really interesting because I would have,
Expected that font book would have been able to create the folder because third-party apps.
Do this right like they do it all the time they create folders for themselves and then populate them
So a third-party app would not have had this problem.
It would have just created it fresh. Yeah.
So in a way I didn't get the answer, but he got it with my hand.
Cause there was no font books and so I'll create it. And so my, my telling him to delete it actually led to disaster.
Yeah. Right, right, exactly. Yeah.
Deleting, but, but like, there's also, there's multiple lessons here because
one of them is what you just said, where best to, in this case, best to delete
the contents of the folder, not the parent folder itself. Yeah.
Uh, although again, with a third party app, I would give the other advice.
So this is one of those, you know, Apple doesn't, Apple presumes that that folder is
going to exist and fails when it doesn't.
And, and that's, it's just interesting that that it doesn't recreate it.
It doesn't recreate it. Yeah. Huh.
Fascinating. All right. Well, you know, it was fun to get one right like that.
Oh, no, that's. Yeah, that's fun. Yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure.
Um, we have some cool stuff found to go through. And so I will dive us into that.
Porthos John in our Discord chat says, I found this great power strip for HomeKit geeks out there.
It is the Meross Wi-Fi 15 amp power strip.
Only 30 bucks on Amazon.
We've got a link there in the show notes, of course.
And I'm going to show you guys
What's cool about this thing is it does it works with HomeKit Google Assistant, SmartThings, Amazon A-Lady. It has.
Four three pronged AC outlets on it, which great and each of those can be individually controlled via any of the.
Previously mentioned assistants and then it's also got four USB-A ports on there. All four of them are controlled as a separate switch so
can be on or off but pretty cool and up for 30 bucks like that's not terrible so
if you need a bunch of switches like I'm thinking you know the Christmas tree
lights and things like that would be this would be great for. The one thing
that is an asterisk here is that it requires,
it is a 2.4 gigahertz only device.
And it's one of the dumber 2.4 gigahertz devices in that you have to have your phone on 2.4 gigahertz when you set it up.
So, you know, the whole, you know, if you've got like Eero, you can tell it turn off five gigahertz
for five minutes or 10 minutes or whatever. And then you'll do your thing.
If you don't have Eero, then, you know, You have to change the name of your 5GHz network temporarily, do this, and then set it back up.
So it's got that little pain in the neck because they didn't write smart software inside the...
Probably in the app would be my guess, but anyway. Other than that, then once it's working, then you can turn 5GHz back on, that's all fine.
So yeah, pretty good. I like it. I like it. You got one for us, John?
Yes, I do.
Patrick writes in a quick story each year. I buy my wife and kids the same gift for Christmas one year
Everyone got air pods then global entry Etc. This past year was the aura frame.
The things that sold me on the frame was unlimited photo storage without an ongoing subscription and the best part is we have access to
each other's Frames see the screenshot, which you can see the screenshot if you go to their site,
We can add photos to their frames and they can add to ours You can see recently added photos and copy to your frame. Basically it works just the way you'd want it to work.
So, thank you Patrick. Yeah Yeah, nice. I've tested one of these or frames a number of years ago and,
It looks like they've gotten way more options out there and at at different price points like you can i seem to recall them being quite expensive in the like three to five hundred dollar range when i tested them initially but now you can start for like a hundred and forty nine bucks,
which is great.
The we have we used when we bought a bunch of these we kinda did the same thing and it's great with our kids sort of living all over the world now.
Being able to just put stuff on frames in our various homes. We used skylight frames when we did this and that's what we still have.
But it sounds like these Aura frames have gotten a lot better since I, in a lot of ways, not just pricing but in terms of being able to send around and all that stuff.
That's pretty good. Yeah.
I will tell you, life-changing to be able to just send pictures to each other or even just to your own frame.
Like, you know, so much of our lives are, you know, on our digital devices now to be
able to just say, oh yeah, you know, we were like, we were at Foo Fighters the other night,
which was great. It was like, oh, let's put some of those pictures we took up on the frame
so that you just see them in the kitchen. It's like, oh, that was fun, you know, whatever. So,
it's good.
Yeah. The only thing that concerns me, yes, sir. Looking at the features here,
One thing they highlight, and I don't know if they should,
Unlimited storage, no fees, share photos and videos worry-free with no storage limit. No memory cards.
Hmm.
I would have expected they could have tossed the memory card reader in there.
Why would they need that though?
I mean, it's Wi-Fi. Well, if you want to take your SD card out of your camera
and plug it into a frame and look at all the pictures.
Yeah, this is more for like, take pictures with your iPhone.
Right, I mean, like that's it.
Oh yeah, yeah, you use their app to upload it. Yeah, exactly.
And it's all cloud-based, I would imagine.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's, the whole idea of, cause I've done it, like when we're on vacation,
I'll sit and, you know, maybe one night or whatever, you know, in the Airbnb, I'll queue up a bunch of pictures
and I'll just fire them off to the skylight frame.
And then when we get home, it's like, look, our vacation pictures are already just in rotation here.
And it's, yeah, it's great.
That's pretty good. Yeah, I got to dig back into these Aura frames.
They, this looks like it's evolved quite a bit.
Very nice. Very nice. I like it.
All right. I promised that I had something nice to say about Core Audio.
I know, I know. Things happen, man. All right, pull over again, folks.
That's right. Mark it down. Yep. So I was looking at the release notes for Sound Source,
source, which is a piece of software that Rogue Amiga makes, and it's great.
It lets you control the volume on if you've got like an external set of like
an external audio device on your Mac that doesn't, uh, have like let your Mac
do volume control, it'll do that.
It'll let you send the audio from one app to a certain output device and another app to another output device.
It makes life. It's great.
Like once you once you start using it especially if you have multiple audio devices it just becomes
second nature and it's great. I was looking at the release notes.
And they mentioned that they added support for the AU Sound Isolation plugin.
Now, I know that AU means an audio units plugin.
And when it starts with AU, that generally means that it is an Apple provided plugin.
And indeed, AU Sound Isolation is a plugin that is included with Ventura.
And it does some magic stuff. it will, it is built for voice.
The way it's set up, you, they might be able to add, or they might add other things in the future,
but currently, it is built to take your voice and isolate it from background noise.
And so, I tried it with a really good mic that I have down in my office,
and it was like, oh, that's actually pretty good. There was like a guy mowing the lawn, you know, outside,
and it was able to cut that out.
And I thought, wait a minute, let me try it with my crappy webcam,
And because those microphones are awful and they pick up all the bounciness of the room plus every sound in the background and all of that good stuff.
And I made a little recording, but I'm on my webcam mic, which is awful, picks up all the room and I'm sure you're hearing that weed whacker leaf blower or whatever it is outside, right?
Let's turn this off and see what happens.
He doesn't even have that thing fired up, but actually does.
There is going nuts with it. Can you hear it?
It's right next to my office. Let's, let's turn a, you sound isolation off.
So now it's just idling out there, but I bet it's louder than it was before when he had it fired up.
Let's try it again with this, uh, with this back turned on. I think this is a pretty cool little plugin.
Nice for Apple to include it.
I like that. It's eye-watering how good that is. And, and, and there are like, you, this is on its default settings.
You just set it and forget it and just use it.
Uh, if I was on Ventura here, I would have this in my workflow for the podcast feed.
I'm not, because for all the reasons we've discussed, but it did remind me that iZotope's
RX, uh, has a similar plugin.
And so I, I do have that now in the flow here. I don't have it turned on today.
They've got a plugin as part of RX called Voice Denoise.
Now of course you have to pay for that.
Um, but it does, it does kind of the same thing. And so if, you know, if like Pete, if you're
in a hotel room ever where there's like noises or whatever, I can just kick that in.
And, uh, you know.
You're to be fair, you're paying for the Apple one too. It's just, it's included.
That's fair. That's what you're buying. But yeah, yeah. That's fair.
Let me ask you to do this though, Dave, would you go through what you talked about?
You, you educated me yesterday on it and I thought it was a great education.
You talked about the wet and a hundred percent and why you want 100% and why you don't and all that.
So when someone looks at those settings in the AU sound isolation.
Yeah.
So first you have to put this in line wherever you would put an audio plugin in line.
And if that doesn't make sense to you, there's a deeper path to go down and probably one that's better to do like in Discord or whatever with us.
So MackeyGab.com slash Discord. But you would put this in line in say, like Logic or Garage.
I think you'd probably do this in GarageBand. You know, let's see why you couldn't,
but I could be wrong about that. It's been a long time since I've used GarageBand,
but you'd put it in Logic.
You could put it as a block in Audio Hijack. It appears there.
You can put it on the output in SoundSource, which is a little weird
because SoundSource doesn't let you do input stuff,
but it does support it on the output.
So wherever you would put like a reverb plugin or a compression plugin or whatever,
like that's where you would put this.
And then as Pete mentioned, There are two settings when you pull up the plugin
in one of those places.
One is what you want to isolate. And as I said before, you get one choice and it's a voice.
So there's really no setting there, but you can see it's a dropdown that could be populated with other things.
The other is a slider between a hundred percent dry and a hundred percent wet.
Now, what that means is dry would be...
The signal you are sending it. So in the case that I played for you,
the very loud, boomy, crappy sounding microphone.
Wet is the result of the plugin. You could slide that slider around and get
some of the dry sound with, you know, some of the wet sound.
Where the wet dry thing really makes sense is with reverb. You would very rarely want to have 100% wet because all you would get is the
reverb and none of the main signal. That would sound very weird.
There's times where that might be desirable, but with this you want it 100% wet, but like I said before.
Just leave this plug-in at its defaults. Don't even worry about wet versus dry. Just leave it alone
See this is what I deal with with Pete folks,
because this is why Pete's audio adjusts itself and all this stuff because Pete goes in and messes with all the settings and,
I do And so it is Pete that asks questions like this. I love these questions, but when I say leave it alone,
there's a reason for that. I would... Fair enough. Fair enough. I'll grant that. Go
ahead and finish because I actually... No, I'm finished. Oh, okay. All right. Well, so you mentioned
GarageBand and guess what? So I opened GarageBand. I've been editing my show in
GarageBand a lot. I'm switching over to another program, but I still like
GarageBand. Once you have your audio tracks up and in there, if you hit B, a
a little, the letter B, a little window comes up at the bottom, and you click on the output
tab in the center, and then go over to the master tab on the left, and there's plugins.
And if you pull down on the plugins, go to the very bottom, it says Audio Units, then
over to Apple, and the very last plugin at the bottom is Audio Sound Isolation, built in the garage bin.
And opening GarageBand while we're doing a podcast is like something that would petrify me. That's right.
Well, not to worry, Dave. I'm on Ventura. Right. I will say this is not new in Ventura.
It is, I am newly aware of it, but it has been there since, you know, since the betas.
Because as soon as I started searching online for this, I was like, what is this magic?
You know, and it might even be something, I don't know this, but you might be able to
grab that plugin from a Ventura machine and put it on a Monterey machine.
I don't know though, like it might take advantage of some frameworks that only exist in Ventura.
It's hard to say, but I have seen people take other plugins from one version of a Mac OS
and move them to another.
They're just audio units plugins. So unless it's leveraging some secret framework or maybe not secret, but something that doesn't
exist in Monterey.
I should, I should try that. Cause that would be interesting to see, for academic
reasons, to see if it works.
So, y'all have all, well, gentlemen.
Where? It seems like, but yeah.
Gotta behave, there's gentlemen in the area. And I use that term. Yep.
Uh, the time has come much as we might not want it to. The time has come here.
John, you got anything to share before we get out of here? I mean, I know there's going to be some advice I ask you for in a few minutes, but just,
you know, before we get to that.
No, it's been a great run. I agree. I agree, man. Yep. Absolutely.
Well, thank you, John. This has been a great run indeed.
Thank you both for doing today's episode with us.
To Cashfly for providing all the bandwidth to get the show from us to you.
Thanks to, well, thanks to you, all of you for buying merch.
We're going to talk about Pete's shirt in a little bit. You bet you'd find that at MackeyCab.com slash merch.
Check out Pete's other podcasts. So there I was, and I have two other podcasts as well, Business Brain and Gig
Gab, the latter being for musicians or people who are interested in the kind of
conversations that happened backstage, which might not be as exciting as you
think, but you might find them interesting if you're into live music.
Thanks to our sponsors for this week, as we discussed during the show,
shadyraze.com, slash MGG and notion.com slash Mac geek gap.
I did go through this week, the list at Mac geek up.com slash sponsors.
All the deals there are up to date.
Music.
Do me the honor, would you do us all the honor of reading the shirt that Mr. Pilot Pete has?
And this advice is for all of you, and even though I will not be here in the future to give
it to you, the advice that I have now is don't get caught. Made on a Mac. That's good advice.
Later!