All right, welcome to Mac Geek Gab and our quick tip of the week actually comes from me.
You know when you've got those personal automations that you create in shortcuts on your iPhone
and you know, it's like if this happens, do that, like turn on a light or turn on CarPlay
or turn or not turn on CarPlay, but turn off Wi-Fi or turn off my battery or whatever.
And it asks you before it runs every time. And that can be annoying.
A lot of those, not all of them, but a lot of those, you can go into that automation.
You go to the shortcuts app automations tab in the middle there, at least that's where
it is in iOS 16 and and then choose your automation.
And there is an ask before running option.
Turn that off and it will no longer ask you before running more quick tips like this.
Plus, your questions answered today on Mac geek up nine eighty four for Monday, June June 5th, 2023.
Music.
Greetings, folks, and welcome to Mac Geek Gab, the show where you send in your tips like that,
your cool stuff found, your questions.
We take all that stuff in that you send to feedback at MacGeekGab.com,
and we share your tips. We share your cool stuff found.
We try to answer your questions, and we string it all together into an agenda
so that it follows a little bit of a form that facilitates the system we've put together,
ensuring that each of us learns at least five new things.
Every single time we get together, sponsors for this episode include collide
at K-O-L-I-D-E.com slash M-G-G.
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The easiest way to find a great doctor.
Go there, sign up for free and download their app today. We'll talk more in depth about both of those shortly here
For now, here in Durham, New Hampshire, I'm Dave Hamilton.
And here in Lee, New Hampshire, it's Pilot Pete. How goes it today, Mr. Pilot Pete?
Not bad, but somehow we both managed to get the same shirt.
We are both wearing the same. If you're watching on video. That's right.
That's right. Two don'ts don't make a do.
Two don'ts don't make a do. You can get your Matt Gekab shirt at mattgekab.com slash merch.
If you are so inclined.
Uh, I say that we just dive right in my friend. How's that sound?
Okay, Chicago Tom has our next quick tip, and it also is about shortcuts or related to shortcuts.
He shared this in our Discord. He said, this may sound kind of dumb. It doesn't.
There are very few things. I was going to say we never had anything sent into the show that was
dumb. I think if I'm going to be honest, that probably isn't true. But stuff like this, tech
stuff, never. We've had like other things like that aren't related to what we talk about here.
Here's some of that stuff.
Tech stuff, never done. He says, but I always forget to set my alarm at night.
Okay, no problem. Computers are good at this stuff.
He says I was poking around and discovered the automation section in shortcuts one of the triggers for personal automations is sensibly enough
Alarms, so it was a snap to set up a shortcut triggered by turning the alarm off,
That toggled the alarm back on so simple I was ashamed I hadn't thought of it before and this is a great example of what can be done,
With shortcuts turn it off it can you can make it turn back on again?
And, you know, it's kind of, you know, it's not the if this, then that service, because
that's a different service, but it's the same sort of model.
You just build these things and say, great, here's the trigger.
Here's the result.
Awesome. And of course, if you don't want it to ask you, go and do the thing we talked about before to turn it off.
But I'm wondering, and this is clever, and I love this because it means we get to talk
about the good, the things that computers are good at, but I'm not sure it's necessary
Because wouldn't setting a recurring alarm keep it happy?
Like, for example, we usually record Mac Geek Ab at, we meet at 10 a.m. Eastern on Friday mornings.
So I have a time to make the podcast alarm for 8.47 a.m. on Friday mornings.
And it only goes off on Fridays, and it goes off every Friday unless I turn the alarm off.
But when it rings, if I hit stop, that doesn't turn it off. So I'm wondering if a recurring alarm is more.
Is a different type of solution, I don't want to say if it's better or worse
I mean if your solution is working, then you know it's hard to get much better than that, but I don't know like that
That's my thought or maybe using like a subset of Apple sleep functionality which by the way
can be super overwhelming when you dig into it, but.
It is possible to use Apple sleep functionality without like all of the features and you can set
different sleep patterns for different days. I think doctors yell at us when we do that, but
as a, you know, nerd and a musician, my weekends have a very different sleep schedule than my
weekdays usually. And so I set the sleep mode to come on automatically and I can set alarms as
part of that to happen or not happen. And you can change it for different days. So like there's
There's other ways to, to, to solve this problem, but, you know, it's so, but if yours works
for you, please keep using yours.
But there are different types of alarms though on the phone that should be clear that that's
something I just learned recently.
There are alarms that go off tomorrow, but like you said, there's the recurring alarms
and I think one is built in and it's called like the wake up alarm.
That's the sleep alarm. Yeah.
And it like, it's super customizable way more than I thought when I first looked into it.
Yeah, I was able to customize mine and it, you know, when it goes off, as soon as I turn
it off, it'll tell me today's weather, it'll tell me, you know, that kind of stuff.
And the reason it's doing that is because you're having sleep mode and simultaneously
with that alarm going off, right? So it, yeah, it's pretty cool.
Yeah. Yeah. Well thought out. It, it, it is.
Like I said, when I first dug into sleep mode, I was, I did not like it.
But in the end, I, right now, I, like I use it.
It's I use it every day. It's great.
I probably need to configure mine a little more, cause I know that like my watch will
take my temperature at night and that kind of stuff.
Sure. Sleep mode, but I tend not to use the sleep mode because it puts me in a complete do not,
disturb and I want people to be able to get through to me. Oh, but couldn't you set.
I think you can. The sleep mode. Like if you go into sleep mode, you can,
Uh, settings, what is it in general is, no, uh, focus settings, focus and go to sleep.
Don't go to sleep go to the sleep section you can add people who are allowed to get through to you while you're sleeping
Yeah, I just haven't you just need to do but yeah, it is just as customizable as as everything else
So good to know the other thing well You know what I probably need to make sure I change my watch face too because it changes my watch face
And I like the ultra watch that allows me to go into a red only mode Well, you can do that you can have sleep focus customize your
Perfect.
Uh, your watch face and you would set that on your phone. Yeah.
No, I just, I just noticed, it was funny. I was about to say something like, Hey, look what I just learned.
And you asked if it was possible. Even a blind squirrel, Dave.
Yeah, man. Absolutely. But I'm still yelling at Apple. Why can't I turn on my nightlight to red
automatically when I'm in red mode on my watch?
Oh, you can't. You have to be in theater mode for it to go on automatically to red.
Well, you know, there is an Apple event happening mere hours after we release this episode. No way.
Monday the 5th, and they'll talk about the next version of watchOS.
And I had somebody, somebody on like Twitter or Mastodon or something.
I saw it was saying, I really hope that Apple stops with these divergent
version numbers for their three major operating systems soon to be, well,
they, you know, four, if you count Apple TV and five, if you count reality OS,
right? Um, like, can we just, if you're gonna still keep releasing new versions every year.
And I, I, you've heard my argument about how I, I really don't, I, as a user would prefer they
didn't update macOS every year, but if they're gonna bother doing it every year, just call it
iOS 2023. Like, please, please, then, and then we'll have watchOS 23 and macOS 23. And then,
And then you know, like, oh, do I have all the continuity features that work with it?
Well, yes, they're all running the same OS, not wait. So it's Mac OS 13 and iOS 16 and watchOS.
I don't even know what version watchOS were on off the top of my head. And that's crazy.
To say that. I did 16 something, I think, but that's a wild guess right now.
I don't think we're on watchOS 16. I think we're on watchOS 8 or 9. I don't have my watch on,
I took it off. Oh yeah, I'm thinking iOS.
Right, see what I mean? Right, there's the problem. Therein lies the problem.
I've been doing this for decades. I feel like I did during the Performa days of Apple's history,
where people would ask, which model Mac should I buy? And I would throw up my arms and run
screaming from their home because I had no idea what models were even out that
day, let alone which one was the right one for them.
It was a version of Mac tracker and say, go to town.
Yeah. I don't think Mac tracker existed, but maybe that's why Mac tracker exists is because of that. All right.
Quick tips are not happening so quickly today. Okay. Let's go quick.
No, no, no. This is like, we're having a good conversation. I like it.
I was just, the other thing I was going to say then, as long as we're on that is,
you know, who had a good run with that with it was Mac OS 10 for a long time.
And therefore Ken Ray had Mac OS.
Ken, that's correct. Which is still his show. Yes.
But the OS's have moved on. The reference is lost. Yes, that's right.
Ken, you need to change your name, sir. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yeah. He just needs to be a symbol now. He's going to be like the artist formerly known as Mac OS Ken.
I'll let him know that he'll like that. Uh, all right. Uh, great show to listen to a great daily show.
So we'll put a link to that in the show notes.
You want to take us to the next, uh, quick tip?
Uh, that would be Porthos John, as I recall. Yes. So this goes back a couple of weeks to, uh, Nick.
I think just last week. but, er, oh.
Anyway, it doesn't matter. That's what I meant.
Okay. Who wrote in asking about how to replace the space proceeding,
the punctuation in his work.
And, and the best I could come up with was find and replace and porthos John in discord listened.
And he wrote in and said, Hey guys, use regular expressions,
fire up your chat, bought a choice like jet GPT and ask for a regular expression and take that and put it into your shortcuts app and tell it to replace text
and use that.
Go to the show notes. Yeah. Yeah. I'm not trying to describe it.
It would just be pointless to everybody, but no, he has a way to create a shortcut that
will do exactly that.
And it was brilliant. I was like, oh, I didn't even think of shortcuts.
No. Regular expressions, like, this is the thing that regular expressions are really good at.
I am petrified of regular expressions, as you all know, but now we have ChatGPT to tell
me what regular expressions are.
The problem is, of course, because I'm petrified of them, I don't really know how they work.
Like, I can figure it out, I have figured it out, but every time I feel like I'm starting at zero.
And so I just trust that ChatGPT gives me a correct regular expression because it's
so confident. And sometimes it's strong and wrong. The good news is it's not like a dangerously strong and wrong.
I just try it. And it's like, well, that didn't work.
But, uh, I think in this case, the one that, that, uh, is in the discord chat does work.
And so, you know, you get to, uh, you get to do that.
Yeah. Um, the one that worked for me was a quick JavaScript, throw it into a, onto a web
page, and I got it to go and figure out whether it was using iOS or Android and
to take it to the appropriate app to subscribe to a podcast.
Love it. Love it.
All right, so for us non-programmers, ChatGPT can help you learn.
And I'll see you next time.
Oh yeah, even for us programmers, like I've used ChatGPT to write like,
you know, what I'll call the sort of grunt code, the stuff it's like,
oh, I gotta go and write that thing that I've sort of written before,
but I can't just copy and paste from something else.
Like, I gotta write it out. It's like, no, it's great for that kind of code.
It's great for configuration files on servers. Like the other day I needed to write something for a new site for our Nginx or an existing
site, but a new functionality for it on our Nginx server.
And I'd done it before, but again, it's like, well, I don't do it often enough to have it in my head.
So I started heading down the path of like, okay, let me, you know, research.
What does this one do? What does that one do? Let me find examples of things similar and then try and adapt them and hopefully not
break everything.
And one of my business partners, Ryan was like, Hey, just ask chat GPT. I was like, right.
And I did. And it gave me the config file and I looked at it and I showed it to him.
He's like, yeah, that, that looks right. I'm like, same.
And he says, I think that looks right. Cause we were both in the same boat and pasted it into the config file, restarted Nginx and.
Bob's your uncle.
It's good to go. So yeah, it's, it's really, it's helpful with, with the right things.
It is fantastic. And as we've said many times on this show, the trick is finding the right things.
And that's one of the reasons we keep sharing examples of where we have successfully and
unsuccessfully used it because that helps the hive mind.
And if you have examples like this, where you have successfully or unsuccessfully used.
It, feedback at Mackey cab.com.
Whoa, where to us feedback at Mackey cab.com. Yeah. It's an address I created a long time ago, Pete.
I don't know if you were around, but it's feedback at macecap.com.
Okay.
And we'll see that there, I presume. That's right.
Yeah. It comes to us. I even learned how to respond from that again.
I want to talk, I want to talk about that a little bit later. Yeah. Yeah.
Yes, we will. Um, Gary sent in a list of eight fixes for unobjectable drives on your Mac.
Uh, it's from makeuseof.com and it's got, it's got some decent, uh, you you know, decent suggestions.
Some of them are sort of like, wait a moment, then try again.
And that's actually a pretty good suggestion, like, you know, but emptying the trash,
force ejecting the drive, relaunching Finder, using Terminal to do it.
And of course the link for this is in the show notes. So you'll be able to see these as well.
But thank you for sending that through, Gary.
It's good stuff.
I love it. Yeah. I love it. It's great.
Yeah.
One last quick tip. Yeah. Uh, sorry, Dave. It's okay. I lost my place.
That's all right. I got it.
It's from C dub five 59 here in, uh, in discord.
We were talking a few episodes ago in nine 81 about, uh, checking your data usage in the iPhone settings app.
And we were talking about how some carriers will automatically reset at this for you and some will not.
And he, uh, C-dub says, uh, from recent experience, migrating two of my kids to Mint Mobile.
I can confirm a couple of statements. My wife and I stayed on T-Mobile to take advantage of the 55 plus pricing.
And on our phones, the T-Mobile phones, cellular data app resets every month on
their billing cycle date automatically.
Um, he says, because I have to track my kids' data to right-size their specific Mint Mobile plans while on the initial three months of service before
the annual renewal, I had to manually reset their data cycle when the billing cycle reset.
And that's true. Like, if you want to do it that way, that is the way to do it.
The other way to do it, the way I've done it, is I figure, yes, it's good to sort of
audit what the carrier is recording as your mobile data, but your phone is not the definitive source, right?
The carrier's calculation for this is the definitive source.
It doesn't matter what your phone says, you're going to pay what they say.
You're going to pay what they say.
If you want to argue with them, then using your phone is great.
But otherwise, like, you know, so what I do as manager of our Mint family plan is I have
a recurring task, a recurring reminder set up on my, you know, iCloud thing on the last
day of our mint month and I go in to the mint.
Web page or you can do it on the app too and I log what Mint is showing each of us to have used on
that day so there's another 24 to 36 hours left by the time I do this each month but it gets me
close right and uh and then that way I'm able to really kind of uh you know I and I logged it for
every month that we've had Mint and so in fact just last week we reset like the end of May was
our reset point and so I knew that A-Mint had bumped up the size of their plans and
I knew my son wasn't using more than his new, you know, he didn't need the new plan that
he was going to be on so we were able to ratchet him back but, you know, it's nice to look
every year and be like, okay, yep, just as C-Dub said, right-sizing those plans is a
good thing.
You know, Pete, when you see someone who's just so good at what they do, it's like watching
a juggler on a unicycle juggling flaming torches while singing Bohemian Rhapsody.
That's quite the image, Dave. At least they aren't juggling chainsaws because that would be dangerous.
But you're right.
Whether it's a waiter skillfully balancing a tray of sizzling fajitas on one hand or
a chef running a kitchen so smoothly that even Gordon Ramsay wouldn't dare to utter
a word, you just know you're in good hands.
Exactly, Pete. And you know that feeling when you find the right doctor?
You feel heard. You feel at ease.
Well, that's where ZocDoc comes in, Dave. Finding a doctor that's right for you is as seamless as a magician pulling a rabbit out
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All right, uh, shall we take ourselves to cool stuff found? We've got some, we've got some quick, cool stuff found.
I mean, then we might get some longer ones later. You want to take us to Zach?
Absolutely. Yeah. So Zach wrote in, uh, I bet he never thought he'd be heard from again.
He wrote him back in February, going back to show nine 68.
He said, hi, Mackie cab team. I just wanted to chime in on the Apple TV Dolby Atmos thing.
The Apple TV only supports lossy Dolby Atmos, AKA the type of of Atmos streaming services use.
The Apple TV does not support lossless Dolby Atmos at all, and that would require Apple enabling audio passthrough
like the NVIDIA Shield has.
Unfortunately, as you said.
Sorry, it's Plex support for the ATV, Apple TV, for even lossy Atmos that streaming services use
is not well supported.
But you can use the app Infuse as a Plex client and connect it to your Plex server,
and this will allow you to play Atmos on the Apple TV.
I like it, that's really smart. Yeah, Infuse is an interesting app.
It does more than the native stuff that it would point to.
You would think that Infuse couldn't do more with literally the same data,
but obviously the answer is yes.
Yeah, I haven't put that on my new computer yet. I think, I got VLC player on there,
which is also another thing that will play almost anything.
Yes. Yes. For sure. Yeah.
To include M3U files. I didn't know that.
Oh. VLC player will play M3U files. Yes. Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. It's a good way to test them before you add them to like channels or whatever,
using your, the M3U player. Yeah, for sure. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Good stuff. Yeah. Uh, I know. Next up was, uh, who was that?
Was it Pensacola Craig? Pensacola Craig. Yeah, Pensacola Craig sent in...
Something he said dot when looking out to find out the dimensions of a vintage iMac lampshade G4 that I recently acquired,
I stumbled upon this very interesting site called dimensions calm,
Which has a wealth of very professional drawings including 3d on So much stuff, so if you need to know the dimensions of something,
Dimensions calm could very well be the home that you want to visit for this
I mean, there's just all kinds of things you want to like, yeah, mirrors and like toilet,
seats and door handles, like, like, you know, you want to know what an American standard
Maybrook urinal, uh, how that measures out, like that might be a valuable thing.
I didn't, but now I might. Well, like, let's say you're, you know, you're, you're thinking about redesigning your bathroom
or something, right? Like, you know, these kinds of things, you want to know what, uh, uh, an American bulldog,
what its measurements are.
I suppose average measurements because you know. There you go. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yeah, it's fascinating. So. You know, Bulldogs are different.
Oh, that is true, Pete. Yep. That is true.
Uh, so thank you for that Pensacola, Craig, good stuff. And, um, Steve Hammond, this one's been
floating for a while and I, I wanted to stop it from floating, uh, over in the, uh,
the discord group, which is at mackiecap.com slash discord.
Steve told us about something called called docker-icloudpd.
As you might guess, this is the Docker instance. If you're really thinking, you might guess what it does.
It is an instance to use to sync your iCloud photo library to a folder
on whatever device you have it on.
And while the link for this is in the show notes, also in the show notes are instructions to install Docker iCloud PD on your Synology.
So this is, it's certainly for a geeky afternoon of fun.
I have not done this yet, but now that I put it in the show, I won't keep forgetting about it and like, I'll see it at a time where I actually use our
show notes much like you folks do to like look at things that you have mentioned.
I mean, sometimes if it's something quick, like dimensions or whatever, I looked at that before we put it in the show.
I looked at this too, but I haven't gone and like spent the afternoon or the hour
or whatever it is to like dig in and do it.
But I love this idea because right now I am getting my iCloud photo library to my Synology by,
syncing it down to my Mac and Then syncing from my Mac to the Synology and that's fine.
But it requires me to say, you know Download originals to my Mac if I was someone who only had a laptop didn't have a desktop Mac,
That path might not work and I know that involves a lot of you But if you've got a Synology that you would
want to put this stuff on anyway, well, wouldn't
it be better to just slurp it down?
I hope Apple's retirement of photo stream doesn't break this.
I don't think it will based on what I've seen, but I can't, I can't say that for sure,
but it's a pretty cool thing. So, uh, yeah.
So. Can I take us down a quick rabbit hole? Can I stop you? I think we just, I think we just did.
Here we are in this rabbit hole. Yeah. Uh, and forgive me if I've asked this before.
I think I did, but could you briefly describe again what Docker is?
I actually installed it once on my, I think it on my, on my mini to get channels to run.
And you went, yeah, you're doing it wrong, Pete. Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. Okay. Um, I will try. I don't have any notes on this.
I think the last time we did this, I had written notes because it's one of these conversations that can get very convoluted very quickly.
I'm just looking for a brief overview. Yeah, like a shell or a sandbox or a so,
Think of it like a like you would a virtual machine, right?
Yeah, so if you were gonna install a virtual machine, you know on your You know on your Mac, let's say to run a different version of Mac OS,
It would be its own complete full environment that you would install You know Mac OS Ventura into and then you would install apps to it
And maybe you'd have a folder that's shared between your virtual machine and your non-virtual machine so that you could get stuff in and out,
But otherwise, it's like its own thing.
And.
It would take up all the space that it needs to take up for a full install of the operating system
and all of that good stuff, right? So Docker is like virtual machines, but super lightweight.
They are built to be very specific to their task and don't include all of the sort of default
operating system stuff. They inherit some from the host operating system. They also,
so because you're building it to do just like this one does one thing.
So it doesn't need all the resources that it would need to do anything.
But think of it, you know, on your Synology, you're installing this inside of a Linux box, a Linux box,
because Synology runs Linux at its core.
So this would be a Linux docker essentially that you'd be running and it would,
sort of operate and inherit some things from the OS, but lightweight,
low memory usage, low CPU usage.
And like a VM, often you will have a folder that your Docker can see that is also able to be seen
from outside the Docker.
And that, I presume with this iCloud PD, is where you would be saving or it would be saving your photos
so that you could then go touch those and do whatever you want to them from,
hopefully just read them because if it's syncing them down,
you don't want to be deleting them from there.
But maybe you do, I don't know.
But yeah, so Docker, lightweight virtual machine. That is wholly incorrect,
but it's a good way to think about it.
And as soon as you said the words virtual machine, I remembered we have talked about it. Yeah, don't get old. It's bad for your memory.
But like it's a good question, it's just it's a it's easy to get that because there is minutiae and,
And lots of differences that are meaningful,
it's easy to get lost in that but that's the right way to think about it going in and,
And I will say Synology has a decent docker graphical interface for managing your docker containers, otherwise you're doing it just from the command line and that can get very arcane very quickly, but Synology's interface, it doesn't do everything so there are some docker containers that you can't do with Synology's interface, but most of them you can and and you know kind of makes it easy and so you know it's not it's not too terrible.
Like I said, I knew I had asked it as soon as you said virtual machine, but it makes
total sense. And that's good to know. I'm going to play with that one a little bit.
Yeah, it's a great question.
Yeah. Yeah. One last quick little cool stuff found that I want to talk about here is from Bruce this
week sent it in and said, in the last episode, in 983, you talked about dealing with Mac
network names, system name from whatroot.net allows you to change the name of your Mac
OS computer locally as it appears on an IP network and as it appears on a Bonjour network.
And in fact, they address this right on the homepage of System Name. They say,
why not just use the system preferences or system settings app? And they say, well,
that app makes assumptions about the names to use for each component based on the type of machine
you have and your username. You may wish to override these assumptions. And that is what
System Name allows you to do. So thank you for that, Bruce. Yeah, pretty good stuff.
Um, all right.
So there are, um, there is an Apple event coming up. Um, Pete, I would like to, on behalf of the whole Mac eCab community,
extend our heartfelt thanks to you for buying a MacBook pro this past week,
ahead of the Apple event that ensures that we're going to see more powerful
stuff coming out, uh, on Monday.
Yeah. I got a MacBook Pro 16 with the M2 Max and therefore the M3 Max will be out next week.
Actually, I don't think they will.
Based on all the rumors, it seems like what we're, we're going to see.
They had to delay it for something on the rumors I've read. Correct.
I think, uh, we'll know more.
And so we're not going to spend a whole lot of time talking about the rumors.
Cause by the time this episode comes out, there's literally hours between when this comes out and when the keynotes will happen.
And then right after the keynotes, we're going to do a special episode.
We have a special guest coming.
I will, I will actually share who the special guest is. It's get it's Jeff gamut.
So Jeff gamut going to join me and Pete to dissect whatever Apple does.
We will do that on Monday after both the keynote and the State of the Union
because we find that the State of the Union is a valuable thing to try and dissect and apply our nerdy brains to but but we will do that.
We say Monday evening live stream.
It is. Yeah, we'll do a live stream at about 6 p.m. On Monday evening.
Yeah, 6 p.m. Eastern. Thank you. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So.
2,200 UTC. Yeah, there you go. Oh, see, man, I don't do those conversions
in my head anymore, but we will do that.
Uh, so, and I think, I think that the laptop we will see is the 15 inch M2 MacBook Air is
what I believe is coming on Monday.
I know. Yeah, I know.
So I'm just shocked that the M3 Macs didn't come out while I was driving home. Cause usually.
Right. That's right. That's right. Yeah. But, in setting up your new Mac.
You, there are certain things that we use to sort of manage the workflow of MacGeekGab.
And for whatever reason, we didn't get you like up to speed with all of that stuff.
Well, on a couple things. Yeah, but it wasn't, but it wasn't until a couple, like a few months ago, maybe six
months ago, certainly in the last year was when we really got you like into the
email, into the emails specifically, right.
For premium and feedback at Mac Geek Gab so that I could get in and answer questions. But
correct. Yeah. That's the thing is that when I answer a question.
You need to see that so that a, you don't answer the question and B you can correct me when I tell
them, you know, not so much looking to correct that hard drive and you'll be fine. Like it's
a conversation. Sometimes there's like, Oh, I have something to add that might be valuable to
the listener and I don't want to make them wait for the show or whatever. Yep. Uh, and so because
Because we had done, and there is a lesson for all of us here in terms of troubleshooting.
Because we had done this, let's say within the last year, I think it was even within the last six months.
Yeah. But because we had done it, I made all kinds of assumptions about your knowledge level of what we did.
And I'm using we very casually here because it was not what we did.
Well, I watched you do it.
That's right. And I learned by doing and I learned by repetition.
There's no doubt about it.
And to be clear for people, I did not use migration assistant,
which was, I don't know if it was pre-show or during the show last week, when we were joking
about my sound issues and my camera not working, I said, well, I need a new laptop.
So I went out and bought a new laptop. And that isn't the only reason, but I, you know, this,
I've been jonesing for this, you know, Thanks for watching.
M2 16-inch MacBook Pro for a long time with all the ports that it has and the power and the speed and that guy so my 18 month old M1,
With two ports just wasn't quite cutting it for me and I didn't use migration assistant and I went in and I copied all the settings.
Manually, yeah, except I forgot the email addresses from which I was well, I think yeah, exactly
So the the lesson here is I did this on your computer
I mean, I did it over zoom remotely, but it was not I did not guide you to do it
I did it and then I made when when you were asking why isn't this working?
I'm like, oh you just gotta go into mail and add the email address and Like I thought that was enough because you because in my mind you had done it before so yeah, you'll get there
You'll remember this and of course you'd never done it before I did it for you. And there's there is there was a
There was a mantra that I used to have to really follow when, you know, helping people with their computers.
If it was something that they were likely to need to be able to do in the future.
If we were just solving a problem, they didn't need to be there. I could just dive in and I would move at my speed.
I'm a super impatient person. You might not find that surprising if you've listened for more than maybe 10 minutes.
But, you know, I was like, I would be very quick and efficient with things.
Efficiency is great when you're trying to get stuff done, and that's what we did with yours.
I think we probably had limited time. It was like, all right, let me just get you up to speed on how we're going to do this.
And, you know, I just barfed all this stuff onto your computer and it was like, great,
you're good to go. All right, thanks. Bye.
And this time around, you were doing it for yourself, but you had never done it before.
And I made the assumption that you knew what you were doing.
So there was this mantra that we would, that I would say to myself when I was running Computer Nerds,
we would all kind of, we bought into it. It was, there are moments where you need to sit on your hands and guide the user.
Because they need to do it. And if you do it for them, it's not gonna help in certain scenarios.
And it was, of course, up to us, you know, to decide what those scenarios were.
But in retrospect, it would have been better if I had sat on my hands and let you do this
and not just me do it.
But now you have. Like, the next time, you're up to speed. So we followed proper technique, just not this time around.
But I know we have a lot of you who listen to the show who either officially, you know,
as your business, help people, or certainly unofficially, you know, helping friends and
and family members, there are times it would have saved me time if I had taught you how
to do this the first time, instead of doing it for you the first time. Right.
Fair enough. I like, you know, it's just how it goes. But even when you said, go in, just go
into accounts and edit the email addresses, I could not see that that was a pulldown. Right.
Well, if you don't know it's there, like, yeah.
And it definitely wasn't obvious there.
I wish there was a button there going, Hey, edit email addresses. Yeah. No.
Yeah, exactly. They just offer it as the pull down. So we got it done.
Yeah, we got it done.
Yeah. I was like, how is he not seeing that? And I'm like, oh, he's never been there before. That's why.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And I am a very visual learner. So I actually should have picked up on it
when you did it the first time, but I was also probably in the mode of, you know, and
I'm not going to need to do it again.
I hadn't even thought about, you know, not using a migration assistant to, because I,
think that setting would have pulled in.
Oh, it definitely would have, but so would any other settings that you have.
All the stuff that was keeping me from using my iPhone as a camera.
That's right. Yeah, exactly.
Is that working better so far? Like a charm.
I just knocked on wood for us. So that's, that's not somebody at your door folks. That's just me.
All right. Let's do some questions here. Barry sent in a note.
He said, um, I said, um...
Is there any way that iCloud mail can set a rule to automatically delete junk mail?
All I can find is to move it to the junk mail folder.
Spam sieve does not act on anything in iCloud. It does a great job of mail on my computer.
So, this is an interesting one. I think the answer, I think there is only one answer.
I mean, at first I thought, okay, well, can we set up a rule to do this?
But I don't, but iCloud Mail nor Apple Mail let us set up rules on non-inbox folders, right?
Automatic rules. So I don't think that's going to work. Mail Act-On, which is a piece of third-party
software, part of small cubed mail suite, does let you assign rules to keystrokes.
So you could set a rule to do this that's assigned to a keystroke, but you'd have to,
like, go select all the junk mail messages. And the rule could say,
Only delete things that were received more than 15 days ago or you know something like that.
But then maybe you could script that with keyboard maestro like I started thinking about all this and,
As we were prepping for the show today it hit me. You know I think Apple Mail has an,
Answer here, and it does if you go in to to Apple Mail, go to preferences, go to accounts for your iCloud account, and go to mailbox
behaviors on the junk mailbox.
There is a setting for erase junk messages and you can set it to never, after one day,
after one week, after one month, or when quitting mail.
And I think that's going to be your answer, Barry. I don't think there's any other way to do that.
There might be, I would love a creative solution, but I mean, I think that's the, I think that's the answer. So.
I think you might be right. Yeah, I think I am too.
I don't know why it didn't come to me when I was first answering Barry's email.
It's like, oh, like I came up with all these like crazy paths and it was like, no, I actually
just use the setting that's literally built to do this.
What's weird though, and the reason I got distracted from it that I'm going to say my,
That's my excuse and I'm sticking with it, is.
Most mail providers offer this functionality in this on the server side Right like gmail will auto delete junk mail after 30 days
And I don't think you even have a choice in that matter like maybe you do,
Fast mail which I use will do the same thing or but you do have a choice. I can turn it on or off I.
Think and and iCloud does not I that was the first place I looked I'm like oh
Oh, I'm sure you just turned it on an iCloud.
I couldn't find it in iCloud.
So it was at that point that I went down the, well, let's see if we can script this path.
I didn't think, well, Apple mail is the place to do that, but it's just interesting.
And I wonder, Oh, well, you couldn't do it online though. Right.
And you need the Apple mail client. Yeah. But does the Apple mail client only do it locally or with iCloud
specifically does the Apple mail client send that setting up to the cloud and let it happen on the cloud?
I don't. Yeah, because that's the question. Is it going to work on your iOS devices?
Well, if you're on your other laptop.
Yeah. But if you're, yeah. If your Mac runs mail often enough, like
if they're all going to see the same data
set, so all you need is one computer to do it, right.
You know, if your Mac's doing it, then your iCloud, your iPhone rather is going
to see the result of it.
It's not like it's, you know, cause they're are just syncing via IMAP or whatever.
So. But is it, but yeah, but is it doing it locally? I always guess it's the question you asked. Right.
Is, is it, is it deleting locally and then just syncing the changes up or is it telling the
server go do this? And I guess the way to test that would be to set it on one Mac and go check the other Mac
and see, did the change reflect?
There you go.
That would be, my guess is it doesn't, my guess is it's doing it locally, treating it
like any other mail client, but you never know. No, you never know.
Want to take us to Mark? I can do that.
Mark Holt wrote in and said, I hope you can steer me in the right direction with my MacBook
Pro Retina 15-inch mid-2015, 2.2 quad-core i7, and all the rest of the See ya.
Details about that in the past couple of days my MacBook Pro will go to shut down of its own accord
And present the dreaded black and white multilingual screen. In fact, it just happened now in the middle of typing the previous sentence,
Troubleshooting he's gone onyx maintenance He's booted that safe mode disconnected external hard drives and peripherals and none has been efficacious word of the day,
Console shows no crash reports, but I really wouldn't know what to do. If there was one I feel your pain mark
I suppose the next step would be to nuke and pave, but I thought I would seek the wisdom of the oracles
before I take that step.
Now we're oracles, Dave.
Was he talking about us or did we accidentally get cc'd on this?
Well, there may be, I don't know.
You're more oraculous than I am. I know that much. Oraculous!
Speaking of the word of the day.
Oraculous! Yeah. Oh man.
You know, I typed that into the, like the show note, show note, the living show note stock that we have.
And it did not come up with it being a spelling error.
Like this might actually be a word. Ruh-roh.
What? Oraculous, it's in the dictionary, Pete. Like. There you go.
Speaking of words of the day. Does it mean what we think it means?
I would hope so. Same.
Um, it's there. Why doesn't Miriam Webster give us a definition?
Well, Dave, while you're looking for that, I'll finish that, but let me ask you this.
What's another word for thesaurus?
Just asking. Thanks. For a friend. By the way, kudos to you for the wonderful synergy and the informative, entertaining
Mackey Gabb podcast. Thank you for the compliment.
I wrote back to Mark and said, Mark, I may be jumping the gun here, but this almost sounds
like a hardware related issue based on what you've done so far.
I'm wondering if this machine isn't a candidate to take and see one of the geniuses at the
Apple store who can run some deep diagnostics on it.
My first run.
Maybe first run tech tool, which I believe used to come with the physical copy of AppleCare back in the day,
but is available here now, and I sent them a link to filehorse.com, download TechTool Pro.
If you do decide a new can pave, don't forget to make sure you have a good backup in place before doing it,
even then consider reintroducing only the date from the previous system, not all the settings.
I don't know why I said that. Only the data is what you meant. Data, data.
Yep. There you go. Thank you. And so I was trying to say, yeah, just try to, uh, uh, bring back.
Your data, not all your settings using migration assistant. Yeah, for sure. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Um, I agree that, that, like, it, this sounds like hardware that there's,
there's too much going on.
Uh, and you've done all of the things that, you know, when it looks like, I'm
trying to think this is a mid 2015.
So it, right. It's starting to show its long teeth. Well, but it's Intel.
So, you know, he listed the three troubleshooting things that he did.
One thing, two more things would be to reset the NVRAM and the PRAM on that device.
And the SMC, right? So, and I realized that resetting the NVRAM and PRAM sort of means the same thing.
And I think on that machine, it actually does. There were a couple of machines where it
meant something different, but.
Um, Those are always, that's almost like control alt delete, reboot.
If that doesn't work.
Right. Right. Those things. But yeah, SMC is, you know, something we
haven't said it in a long time on this show,
because we've been mostly focused on, in, on, uh, Apple Silicon Macs, which don't have
an SMC in the same way that Intel ones do.
But, uh, that was kind of the, when it seems like hardware, but it's not hardware, how
do you want to fix it?
Um, that, you know, resetting the SMC was the, was sort of the path on that. So.
Which is short for system management controller.
I believe that's right. Yeah. Yeah. It's kind of the, it's really down deep at the
base hardware software interface. Yeah. Yeah.
So yeah. Resetting that might, would be certainly be a thing to try before you bring it in, but it
seems like hardware. So do those things to like rule them out, but I would plan to bring it in.
Dang. I wish I had thought of that. That's absolutely.
Well, that's why we do this together, you know, like, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's that's that's why, you know, when we started the show, I wanted like this.
It needs to always be a conversation.
And to that end, I will miss having John here very much so, you know, I mean, the show's been going a very long time.
This is a natural evolution, right, whose time had come, but I'm stoked that we get to keep doing the show for all of you.
We don't take it for granted.
I never, well, I'm sure there's some where I had, I was, we were having this conversation
in pre-show, but like, I'm very thankful that we get to do what we do.
And I remain thankful for that. So yeah.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, no, there's the things we don't catch and it's nice to, uh, to talk about. So, yeah.
Uh, where are we here on time? Um.
You know what, I didn't set the time. My apologies. No, it's okay.
We're at 49 minutes. I got it.
Uh, yeah, Kentucky engineer had a question. It's one we've answered in the past, but it's been a couple of years.
And he says, uh, I want to move my spectrum landline, a VoIP line, uh, over
to my iPhone, how do you do this?
And there's, well, there's a couple of ways, right? Like it, it depends if you, you truly just want to keep that number and replace
your iPhone's number with it. If you do, then talk to your cell carrier and port into that.
If you just want to save your landline number so that it's always yours,
but you don't want it to be attached to a landline, that gets a little interesting, depending on where you want to go put it.
To me, the best place to go put it is Google Voice, because Google Voice is free and it will likely remain free.
At least I have no reason to think that it won't. The trick, though, is getting it there.
Google Voice definitely allows you to port numbers in.
They do charge for that. It's a one-time $20 fee. Getting it there though, Google Voice,
generally speaking, will only port from cell phones. So, if you want to get your Spectrum
VoIP line, your landline, if you will, into Google Voice, you need a middle hop. And T-Mobile's.
SIM or eSIM is the least expensive way to do it. It'll cost you a couple of bucks
to get a t-mobile sim with that you can port a number to you port from spectrum to your t-mobile sim that you put in your phone,
and then as soon as it is live there you port it from t-mobile into google and then it lives in and then you cancel the t-mobile sim and of course you cancel your spectrum landline too and that's the end of that,
you know it lives in in google forever and we've we did that with our voice line.
That I that started is like a physical line from like frontier communications or something 20 years ago and and we ported in you know to google voice while battle i mean i think we ported it to xfinity first and then from xfinity to t-mobile to google voice and it's live there forever.
The one sad part is what we have used and still at least at the moment use is the.
Uh, it was the, it was from a company called Obihai, but it was, it's a device that was,
they were acquired by Polly and Polly is end of lifing it.
So don't go get one of these, but it's like the OB 200 or something, OBI 200, which was,
I don't know, a $60 device when I bought it.
And it plugs in, it has three ports on it. It's got ethernet, power, and phone, and you plug it into power because it needs that.
You plug it into ethernet so that it can talk to your Google voice number, you program it
up and then the phone port on it becomes a live phone port in your house that you can
plug into the system in your house and now all the phones in your house are usable for
your Google voice line.
Awesome and it was a one-time fee and I think that was the problem.
Because in order for it to work, Obehai needs to keep running this backend system that links to
Google voice and they are shutting that down in December.
So that costs money and yeah, one time fee doesn't doesn't cover it. Yeah.
Yeah. So, um, but I, you know, so like, I mean, we still will get like notifications and we can run
the Google voice app on our phones if we really want it to ring on our, our, you know, our iPhones or whatever.
It's like, it's going to be fine when it goes away we'd barely use it now but it was a nice sort of transition thing to you know to go from.
To to what we're currently using but um yeah you're not gonna you're not gonna get there but
so if somebody knows of a device that replaces the ob200 feedback at mackeygab.com i'll love you
forever but i don't think you're gonna find it like i i've i've looked and a lot of people have
looked and no one has any there's nothing so just as it is i if there's a docker container that i
I can run that would do it though.
There you go. Right. Like if I could just have the software that.
Oh, Baha'i had, like, I mean, I definitely not going to just give this away, but,
maybe like, I don't know, maybe not definitely, maybe not definitely.
I don't know.
Uh, speaking of feedback and follow-ups in the last episode, Pete, we were talking,
about unmounting volumes,
and John mentioned using the umount command, and I cautioned that that might not do it the best way,
the best way that I suggested was doing it in the Finder, because it deletes from,
the Finder deletes that mount point in the volumes folder,
and that was sort of the origin of the question was, you know, we've got these lingering mount points
and they're causing the drives to be, you know, space one, space two, space three.
Well, Rob, and I'll make sure John knows of this because I think he will appreciate it.
Ron Rob says, I wanted to chip in around the U mount command.
I can confirm that it does in fact remove the mount point from slash volumes.
I use a shell script on my home backup server to unmount all five of the backup volumes on
my backup hard drive each day.
And I have one Mac at home that's my carbon copy cloner and he has this whole thing,
but he uses the U-mount command in this and it does absolutely unmount them fully by removing
the mount point as well. So it must be a Mac OS specific version of the U-mount command,
because I know on Linux it doesn't, but that's the beauty. And I really appreciate you following up
with us on that, Rob. So yeah, feel free to use the U-mount command. John had it right,
which is great. Yeah, it's awesome. Yep. Yipper.
All right, one more question before we get into a couple of cool stuffs found at least.
Yeah. So, uh, Drewski wrote in and said, uh, he, let me just read it.
Sure. I've had an ongoing issue with the first two cores of my M one Mac 16 MacBook M six, the M one 16 inch MacBook pro on Monterey
when connected to my JBOD hub.
Just a bunch of drives. That's right. JBOD is. Yeah. Okay. That's right.
They're being occupied by various iterations of MDS, which is Mated Data Server.
It's part of the Spotlight system. Anyway, it's pegging his CPU cores at 100%.
And he said he's watching it via iStat Monitors and it looks like this.
And he showed us a picture and yeah, he's pegged.
No matter what I'm doing, running handbrake doesn't even light up the cores as much as this does.
Monitor consistently lists processes with MD in the name at or near the top.
But the JBOD consists of five external disks on a hub including one time machine which backs up the boot drive to external data disks. He said I
do not create or delete or modify files frequently enough to necessitate this
level of excessive indexing. I took some message forum advice and disabled spotlight via the terminal command before, but that seemed to do nothing
other than prevent me from starting applications
in Spotlight Search and the two cores still ran amok.
How can I better troubleshoot and understand this issue? I've never seen this on my other Intel Macs.
I wrote back and said, look, it may be a little unconventional and I know Dave will jump in here
when I goober this, but try removing all the drives.
And see if it's still happening and add them back one at a time.
And you know, when does it start happening? You may isolate a drive.
I said, I think that'll get you started. and,
So, he wrote back, he says, I think this rabbit hole you sent me down, see that's, I'm good
at that. Yes. Rabbit holes going, right? Got me closer to finding the issue.
It has at least shown some interesting information. I ejected all the external disks until I got down to one time machine disk, and the first
two cores continued to be fully occupied.
As it turns out, this is a six terabyte Seagate, externally powered drive that was split into
the two volumes, two terabyte volume formatted for APFS,
and the time machine is a four terabyte volume formatted for Mac OS Extended Journal.
I haven't the slightest idea how or why this drive was split that way, glorious results of a misspent use
and too many head injuries.
There you go. I suppose I could continue troubleshooting by copying my time machine volume to a separate drive
and reformat the six terabyte Seagate and seeing if the presumed indexing continues.
Still that doesn't really explain why these MDS functions are also active.
Uh, and that's when, uh, uh, I, I run back and said, oh yeah, we're getting close.
That's good. And, uh, and I can, uh, uh, admit to the former head injuries, but, uh, uh, I mean,
the, uh, the, uh, I can admit to the misspent youth, but I can't admit to head injuries.
No, no admissions will be had. That's right. Other than the one that you just made
accidentally, but somebody could easily carve out and use against you.
So. Right. Let's get, get that sound bite up on Twitter right now.
Let's do it right away. That's right.
So, uh, and then he said something else about signature files and my new Mac book.
And I got all that fixed too.
But, uh, then Dave jumped in. I'm looking for where your files was, but it was essentially
don't index your backup volume.
Yeah. When I see MDS issues like this, and by the way, thank you.
18 years of doing this show. I never knew what MDS stood for in all of those, uh, those, you know, in all those process names.
Metadata store server. You are correct. That is, uh, what it, what, at least what, um,
you know, what, what the internet says. So it's gotta be right.
Google foo says it is.
Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So thank you for that. I learned a thing. Um.
Time machine volumes are often an issue with spotlight when they are mounted. Uh, obviously
when they're unmounted, they shouldn't be an issue with spotlight. Uh, so making sure your
time machine volumes are unmounted and even mounting them and then going in and excluding
them from spotlight, excluding them in settings, right? Yeah. Can, can make a huge difference. So,
that, uh, you know, that that's sort of, it might not be the answer to the issue here,
but that would be the, the first thing to try, you know, and that, like I say on the show all all the time.
So much of our approach here if we know the answer will tell you the answer if we don't know the answer,
We will do our level best to tell you if I were there,
Here's what I would try next and so just guessing here Yeah, well, but it's educated guessing and yeah, and it's bullheaded persistence like we talk a lot about the troubleshooting process,
that like I.
Joke about it, but it's totally true. You know that I bought my first house with bullheaded persistence because,
Because that's how I succeed at troubleshooting things and look, it comes from learning as
a kid, you know, I had a computer, we spent, not our last penny on our computer, we did
okay but like we didn't have a lot of extra money, right?
So we bought this computer and it was amazing to have this Apple IIc in our house and obviously
that opened all kinds of doors and here we are.
But there was no one that I could pay to fix it. A, I don't know that there was anyone I could
pay to fix it, even if I wanted to pay. And B, I couldn't.
So I had to learn, like when I broke it, I had to figure out how to make it work.
And often it was just trial and error, you know, like, let's try a thing.
Okay. Well, that didn't work, but I learned something from that, you know, that either
is relevant to this or relevant to the next thing I'm going to wind up working on, you
know, and you just sort of keep digging.
Absolutely. And mine was always, I'm not going to be outsmarted by this piece of plastic and copper and silicone.
That that's true. Yeah. When, you know, like in the nineties, when a
lot of people were getting their first computers
and I was doing a lot of training, like I became, I became the guy that I couldn't find, you know,
the, the person that could go and, and solve people's problems.
A lot of it was just getting over the fear of, well, I don't know what to do.
And so I'm not going to try and, you know, to have me sitting there and you say that to me,
It's like, well, I couldn't be sitting here if I, if I had approached it with that, that,
same mindset, you know, you're, there's very few things you're going to do that are going
to cause irreparable harm.
And so give yourself permission to try a few things, you know, back up.
You're not likely going to, not likely going to break it.
Right. There are some things that you can do that will cause irreparable harm, you know, backup
important data before you start messing with things that you know that kind of like those
practices come from experiences they're not just stuff we made up but yeah yeah so hey
Pete, um, I didn't prep you at all for this, do you use mastodon?
I don't. I need to get on it. I wonder if Pilot Pete's taken.
Well, so here's the thing. I guarantee you it's not.
For a variety of reasons. But the main one is that there is no one central Mastodon server.
So Mastodon is, think of it like decentralized Twitter. It's not Twitter, but it effectively,
when you're using it, the experience feels a lot like Twitter, okay? So, you know, we'll get there.
But it is decentralized in that anyone can set up a Mastodon server, and I might set one up for us,
I'll explain why in a minute, but at the moment I don't. But anyone can set up a Mastodon server,
You stand it up and then you connect it to the network of Mastodon servers through a process that in the Mastodon,
World is called federating right so it becomes this federation of independently run,
servers that all agree to share data with each other and so,
Like I happen my main account right now is at Dave Hamilton at podcastindex.social, which is a server that Adam Currie and Dave Jones run from the podcast index.
When I got back into using Mastodon, I created an account in 2017 on Mastodon.
The server that I created it on has gone away, and so I can't use that account anymore,
and I can't even go and get my followers from it because it literally doesn't exist anymore.
So I had to start from scratch again in, you know, in the fall or whatever,
And was only using it to communicate with folks about the sort of podcasting 2.0 stuff that we've talked about.
And you know, all the new tags and the value for value and all of that stuff.
So it made sense for me if I needed to create an account to just go create one there.
And assuming they continue to run it, then I could stay there.
So I'm there. MacGeekGab is at mstdn.social. So it's at MacGeekGab at mstdn.social.
But, like, once I'm following MacGeekGab, it doesn't matter that our homes are on two different servers.
They're federated. It's instantaneous.
Like, before we did this live stream, I pushed out a thing on the MacGeekGab account
saying you can watch the live stream just like we do on Twitter.
And I immediately saw the notification in my Dave Hamilton account because I tagged myself and it showed up
so like you just have to pick a server and there's all kinds of.
Reasons you might pick one server over another there are servers for musicians
There are servers for but it like some servers have different rules. Some servers have different capabilities,
Some servers are private to have an account, but they're still federated for people who have accounts there,
where the one that most people are signing up on right now is a server called mastodon.social, not mstdn.social.
When I had to create the Mac Geek App account, mastodon.social was overloaded
and you couldn't create a new account there. So I just created it somewhere else, it didn't matter.
But you can always move your account too and your followers will move with you
so long as the old server is up when you do the move. That's why I couldn't move my old followers.
Does that make sense?
You know, that old server was done. So, um...
But this weekend, I decided I need to, like, I need to really, like, have a decent presence on Mastodon.
I noticed a lot of people that I used to interact with on Twitter have moved off of Twitter and are primarily using Mastodon.
And I thought, okay, well, I can maintain a presence in both places, like, that's fine, it's no problem.
And so I sat at our fire pit and I, on Saturday morning, and I got everything set up with Mastodon.
But the first thing I wanted to do was to follow all of the people on,
Mastodon that I was following on Twitter or at least those people who have Mastodon accounts,
And the way that the sort of generally accepted practice is people will put their Mastodon address in their Twitter.
Bio so that or the profile whatever they call it and and so you can go and like manually go follow that or,
Or you can use a service that I found called FedeFinder.
F-E-D-I-F-I-N-D-E-R.
Now it turns out there are two services called FedeFinder. One does the automates the process of looking at your Twitter.
It looks at who you're following. It looks at everybody on your lists, and it can even look at the people who are
following you if you want to follow, you know, like you get to choose, like it's
all broken down. It's great.
That's at fetafinder.glitch.me, and that's the one that's linked in the show notes.
There's another service called Fetafinder that is a dating service for people on Mastodon.
You also might want to use that, but for very different reasons, right? Yeah.
So as I was building the show notes, I'm like, wow, they changed the UI.
Like they must've rolled out a new version of Fetafinder, and I'm like, wait, what the
heck is this? Like, this is not what I meant.
So- And Lisa wandered in the room and wondered what you were doing there.
And she asked me, why are you on Fettifinder? I never saw you on Fettifinder before.
So, no.
Oops. Yeah, right.
Yeah, exactly. Uh...
There are, you can do this on the web, okay, or you can use clients, like client apps.
As you might imagine, available for Mac, iPhone, iPad, right? There are two client apps that have
gotten a lot of press lately, deservedly so. The first one that I loaded up is one called Ivory,
which is from the Tapbots people, and they have apps available for all three of the platforms I
I just mentioned, and they have a subscription or something where you pay 25 bucks a year
to use the app on all of the platforms and all your devices.
And so I started that and I have a subscription to Ivory and I was like, okay, this works.
It's great. No problem. And then I saw somebody mentioned an app called Mona, M-O-N-A, which same kind of thing.
I think their subscription is $15 for the year or something.
So I signed up for that too.
They have free trials for both of these, so you can test them all out for yourself.
And for me, and the way my brain works, Mona is far and away, far more intuitive for me.
It does the things I want to do, the way it syncs amongst the platforms.
They both, if you were to compare- And for a better price.
And for a better price, right. But if you were to compare the feature sets of both of them, it would probably almost
match one for one.
The one difference is on the iPad and Mac, Mona has a columned view,
where as you dig deeper, like if you wanna look at replies or whatever,
you just start getting that in another column,
which really makes sense for my brain.
So I think that's a big reason why I wound up gravitating toward Mona instead of Ivory,
but they're both fine apps, and I would recommend testing them out for yourself
and figure out what you like. And then...
To wrap this up there is a service called topiary that also linked in the show notes that will prune,
Your list of people that you are following,
Based on folks that are inactive or have been inactive for you know 30 days 60 days 90 days again
You get to pick and choose it will show you before you you know commit any of that
So if you know use feta finder get yourself set up follow a bunch of people and then it'll tell you yeah
But this person's never done anything and so you might want to be like well
I don't need to follow them anymore.
And so, you know, you clean it all up.
So that's, that's my, um, seven minute introduction to Mastodon for you.
There you go. And guess what?
What's that? Pilot Pete wasn't taken. And I have it on mastodon.social.
Is that right? Yes. Okay. All right, cool. So now it's taken now.
Now it's taken. Yeah, there you go. So I may set up our own Mastodon server just because, uh, you know, because,
that way I get to own it, but really.
I want to see what it takes to run a Mastodon server on my disk station, because that's
really kind of interesting to me.
Um, because I might be able to do it, like, especially with CloudFlare tunnels,
like there's, there might be a way.
So I'll probably mess with that. I may move my Mastodon home over there,
but I will put, uh, I will put our Mastodon, um, things in the, in the show notes.
So, and, uh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Uh, I had heard of it and I forgot. Yeah. So it's more set up towards your interests
as opposed to just the whole world?
Well, sort of, the server that you choose to be on is, like, Mastodon.social, which you just signed up for, is, um...
Global. It's a sort of general interest. But yes, like, I do have an account on some Mastodon server
that is for, like, drummers or whatever.
And so you can just, you can choose to see only the people you're following,
or you can choose to see only the people on your server that you're on, you know, and and filter it down.
So if I just want to see a conversation amongst drummers, I could log into that account and then just, you know, see it.
So, yeah, I mean, there are the ways that it was built and conceived to be used.
And then there are the ways that is currently being used because people have have migrated there.
Some people have migrated there from Twitter. I will say this week has been great.
I like all the conversations that I've had on Mastodon have been fantastic.
Um, I'm, I'm quite enjoying it.
So.
Nice. Yeah. So there you go. Yeah. Yeah. Yep.
Um, we have, uh, a few minutes sort of. Yeah.
Um, and.
Uh, and there's a couple of things worth sharing. Last week we shared that, um, that AU speech, like cleanup speech thing, right?
I can't even remember what it was called anymore. Oh, the sound isolation plugin, right?
Uh, yes. Audio. Yes, we did. Audio Hijack 4.2 came out this week and it adds its own speech denoise block.
And so I couldn't do an A to B, like an A to A test,
an apples to apples test, because I didn't have an opportunity where there was a lawnmower outside.
But I did do a similar test as I did last week using the same crappy microphone in my office
from my webcam and the new Speech Denoise Block and Audio Hijack, and here we go. All right.
Well, here's me sitting at my desk going through the crappy HD Pro webcam mic.
We, I don't have a lawnmower outside. unfortunately, but I think we'll be able to hear it
because here's Apple's AU sound isolation that we talked about last week.
And now that's on. So we're hearing whatever we're hearing. I guess we'll all hear this together.
And I'm gonna turn that off. So that's off now. Now I'm gonna turn on audio hijack speech denoise
and we'll see what that does. Now that's on.
It says speech is detected when I'm talking.
It says no speech is detected when I'm not talking. So we'll see what this sounds like.
Yeah. So I like, they, they both seem to work similarly, uh, based on, on my ears.
Yeah. Can you stack them?
Yes. I mean, I do have them stacked, like in my audio hijack flow, I just put one after
the other and turned one off and the other on.
I wonder what turning them both on. I don't know that it would be overkill.
It would, it would probably just slow you down for no real net gain.
Yeah. Right. Yeah.
I, you know, it's, it makes crappy microphones sound pretty good. Better.
Yeah, exactly. Where this gets really important is, let's imagine that Zoom adds the ability to tap into this, right?
So, anybody on Zoom can say, clean up my sound. And I think Zoom's already doing some version of this, but, you know, say,
oh, I'm on a Mac, so I can use the AU sound isolation thing that's just like, as part of the operating system.
As long as you're on Ventura, go ahead and do it. And, like, that makes a difference.
Your phone, your iPhone, when you're on a FaceTime call and you're using like the,
the, you know, the microphone on the phone, you can set the microphone mode to use.
Probably this AU sound isolation. It doesn't call it that it, it, you know, it calls it something else, but yes,
your, your phone can do that too. So.
Now, my recollection is that we found it in...
I found it in GarageBand last week, so you can even use it on a post-production. Yes!
And it'll work. Yeah, if you're editing, that's generally how plugins are built to be used, is in post-production.
Here, we use them in real time, and they work fine.
So like, Zoom could do it in real time, and does a little bit.
Discord has had something in it called Crisp with a K for a long time, that does sort of the same thing.
A little more, I dunno, but it's like, it's more noise canceling, not noise cleanup as
much, but you know, it's, it's like, it's fine.
It does, it does it like it's better than what your crappy webcam mic sounds like.
So, you know, that's. And then we talked about it earlier.
Well, we, I don't, we may have just texted
about it, but the authonic.com I, I use that. I played with it on my show and it has
what they call it a de-esser.
Okay. G-E, new word, E-S-S-E-R, which makes my, makes me sound much better.
I don't like my S's, the way my S's sound.
I would agree. And people aren't hearing your S's because I run a de-esser on both of us here.
So I will turn off the de-esser for the remainder of the show.
And you can. And she sells, she sells by the T-shirt, say that 17 times. Yeah.
So I get, I can hear it in my ears that the, that the de-esser is gone.
I'm going to turn it back on.
I don't, I don't like, uh, I don't like, there's a reason we have good audio
quality and I want to stick there.
Um, but yeah, yeah. Like all kinds of things like that can, can make a difference for sure.
Uh, especially for folks listening on headphones, like, well, the, the bouncy
room thing that sound isolation and, and speech denoise cleanup are huge.
I think so. Um, yeah.
So, all right. We have lots more cool stuff found, but, uh, we're not going to get to it because
we're running out of time here and we've packed a ton into this episode, but maybe
next week we'll do a focus on cool stuff found Pete.
That'll be nice after the crazy Apple event. And I don't know. We'll see.
See how many questions come in. Let me check my savings account balance. Yeah, I know.
I know those episodes are expensive, but fun, but we have, like, I have quite a few
cool stuff founds, cool stuffs found.
Yeah. See, this is why the DSer is good. Uh, queued up that are free.
And we talked about some in this episode even. So, you know, it's all good. Thanks for hanging out with us, folks. As I said earlier.
I am so thankful that we get to do this. It's like, I learn a ton. I sometimes feel like I'm
being selfish because I get to learn the most, but, you know, I think we all get to learn together
and that's really the best part of this. So I love our community. And I get to relearn things,
Yeah, well, same. Yeah, exactly.
Uh, hang out with us over on Discord, MattGeekUp.com slash discord.
It's a wonderful place to be. There's a lot of great people there.
It's not just me and Pete answering your questions.
It's everybody in the community answering everyone else's questions.
And so it's a great resource. There's about a thousand people, maybe 1100 of you there now.
I bet we can get that up to 2k real quick.
So come on and join us. It's, it's fun. I promise.
It's not like, you know, the toxic online communities that you see.
We were a good group here and it's amazing. So, um, if you're listening to this show, you, you already know that it's good.
Thanks to Cashfly for providing all the bandwidth to get the show from us to you.
Make sure to check out our other shows.
Pilot Beat does a show for aviation enthusiasts called So There I Was.
I do a show for small business owners called Business Brain and another one for musicians
called Gig Gab, and yeah, make sure you check out our sponsors.
ZokDok.com slash MGG, as we mentioned, and Collide with a K.
K-O-L-I-D-E dot com slash MGG as well, I believe.
M-G-G is it? Slash MacGeeKev.
I never can remember. That's why I have it written. You know, yeah, it's MGG for both of them.
You can always go to MacGeeKev.com slash sponsors and that all of it will be there.
Music.
Yeah. Yeah. Pete, what does my shirt say? So two pieces of advice, one is go to the sponsors and two is read Dave's shirt if you're
looking on video. And if you're not, I'll read it for you right now.
Simple words, folks, don't get caught.
Music.