Welcome to Mac Geek Gav, folks, and today, our quick tip of the week comes from PC Unix in our Discord.
He says, a small tip I wish I'd had. I wish I'd thought of years ago, I made a notes folder called Where Did I Put It?
And he puts pictures in that folder of things that he has put in drawers like he has, you
know, clips for the shades and he takes a picture of the open drawer that they are in
and then closes the drawer, puts that note there, and he labels it with what the thing
is in notes. And so now when he puts things in a safe place and years later he wants to find it,
he can find it. More tips like this plus your questions answered today on Matt Kiekeb, 987 for Monday, June 19th, 2023.
Music.
Greetings folks, and welcome to Matt Kiekeb, the show where you send in your tips like
that, cool stuff, found your questions.
We answer your questions, we share your tips, your cool stuff found, we share some tips
of our own. Sometimes we even, often in fact, we even answer questions.
We ask questions of our own, hopefully being answered by the community, because that's
what this show is all about.
All of us helping each other. Sponsors for this episode include PIAVPN.com slash MGG.
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We'll talk more about both of those in a minute here. For now, we need to get to this agenda
so that we can each learn at least five new things and intending on learning at least
Five New Things here in Durham, New Hampshire. I'm Dave Hamilton.
With my mic off mute in Paris. Bonjour everybody. Say your name again because I had you muted
as well. So, Oh, there you go. And here, well, I unmuted myself, but Dave won't let me talk
all the time. So here I am. Pilot Pete greetings from Paris. Pirate Pete. Oh, I was trying
to say, I was trying to say Paris, Paris, and I just need to stop.
Yeah. So, but I'm stoked. I don't know, it's getting better.
I'm stoked. I love, I love it at this layover in Paris.
Yeah. We're going to be in Singapore later this week. And then a few days in Liege, Belgium, actually,
Maastricht, Netherlands with my family.
Nice. They're coming over to visit. Yeah.
That's cool. So Europe in the springtime, it's a good place to be.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. It should be summer when they get here. Dang.
It's coming. Oh, right. 21st. Yes. That's, that's just a few days away. Yeah.
All right. Well, let's get to some quick tips. I need to figure out, I built a new keyboard maestro macro to archive notes.
Uh, you know, when, when a question is done, cause we're using the notes app and I
never tested it up here in the studio.
I thought it would sync up, but, um, no, it did not.
So I need to figure that out. But anyway, uh, let's continue with the quick tip, quick tips, ma'am.
Both of us today. Pirate Pete? Pirate Pete? I don't know who I am today. Quick gut, yeah.
Anyway, Rob shares a tip he stumbled across. He says Bye guys.
I thought this was a fairly obvious, but I heard on another tech podcast asking if there was a way of keeping messages and photos of a message thread when switching phone numbers or emails for that contact, he says, because if you try to message a number or an email from contacts, it starts a new thread.
The old one's still there, but it can get lost or deleted over time.
And the solution is from the iPhone, and you can do this from the Mac, but on the iPhone
he says, add or make sure the new phone number or email is added to the same contact.
Second, leave the contacts app and go to messages and to the message thread you would like to change.
And then third, tap the name at the top of the message and then tap the info tile.
Now long press on a message bubble and select the new phone number or email you would like to use.
So, I'm going to say this again, go into messages to the thread that you want to change, and,
then you tap the person's name, and then tap the info tile, the little info thing, and,
then long press on the messaging bubble and select the new phone number or email you would like to use.
He says this keeps all the history and photos of a message for that contact to one thread.
I've done this many times and it works to switch from phone to email or the other way around.
Works if the contact switches to Android with a different number, all previous photos and
messages remain available.
So this is interesting. I've certainly experienced this before, Rob's not wrong, but.
It sometimes does this automatically. In fact, this week, Pete, you texted me from a number that I had never seen you text from.
And I knew it. It told me it was you because it was like this person shared their contact information with you.
You know, that little bubble on the top. And I was like, okay, so this is Pete. And the message was it was clearly you.
And so I was like, oh, all right. And so I just went in and to this new phone number that's there up in the top.
I clicked on the number, I said add to contacts, and then I chose existing contact instead of new contact.
And this was on my Mac, I did this by the way. Right.
And I said add it to the Pilot Peak contact, and then immediately it merged the two threads.
So messages will merge them.
This was messages on Ventura on my Mac down in the studio for anybody, you know, if there are nuances between say Monterey and Ventura or whatever.
But, but that did work, it just like, you know, all the messages were then together
and merged and happy and all that good stuff.
I know what happened.
Okay. That is my data sim that I used for Europe. So and that's a, so that's a Hong Kong number that you saw.
So you have a data sim with a number, which is not always the case.
Right. Which I didn't realize I had, but let me tell you, I then at some point, so I wouldn't inadvertently
get charged on my Mint Mobile. Yeah.
Said, we'll make that my default voice number and boy, did things go to,
Oh, you don't do that.
No, don't do that. Because it wouldn't let me text anybody. It wouldn't let me receive texts and all that.
Fortunately, I had a WhatsApp as a backup, but it went crazy.
And I finally got it all sorted out and sent it back to the way it was.
But it made my life particularly difficult for a little while.
And there was some other point I wanted to bring up there. So don't get it.
It's bad for your memory.
Yeah, so okay, so that's good to know like from my standpoint. I probably should remove that number from you
I'm not gonna be sending to that number any or from that number Yeah, and if I wind up sending to it, you won't get it. So right well, right and oh, well, well, we wait you
Oh, I might you might because that number is now attached to your iCloud account in Apple's system
So if I send to it as an iMessage, you'll probably get it for a while. No, no, it's not. I pulled it
I pulled it from Apple.
Oh, you pulled it, okay. I did, yeah. I did not want that in there.
But that was the other point, was it's all those scoundrels out there using Android devices.
I couldn't send them anything. Correct.
Yeah, exactly. Right, because you didn't have SMS service on that number.
Right. Right. That's interesting.
All right, cool. All right, well, that mystery solved. That's good. Yeah.
All right. So another self-inflicted stupidity wound. It happens.
I mean, this is why we do what we do here. It's not so much stupidity.
I mean sure we could call it that and sometimes yeah, but it's not so much It's we're trying different things with tech and and often they don't work out,
Exactly like they like in your case right the reason you switch to that number is,
because you didn't want your,
mint sim live when you were not on Wi-Fi and and therefore would start getting charged for inbound,
because Mint charges you five cents for every inbound and outbound SMS.
So, okay, fine, like I get, and, and.
The it served its intended purpose, right? Like you, you did that. However, it had a ripple effect.
And, you know, we, we can't always, this is really, truly this epitomizes perhaps my favorite
thing about what we do here on this show is we teach each other about these ripple effects,
right? Like, and it's handy to know, like in the back of your head, like, wait, wait, wait,
If I do that, I heard about this, or Pete shared, or you know, somebody shared.
And so it's like, oh, maybe I don't want to do it. And so the next time that you're in that scenario, the right thing to do
is to turn that sim off, the Mint sim off during the day.
That's the key to that, is just turn it off. Or if you don't have any roaming credit on your Mint sim,
then you're fine because it won't let those texts in anyway.
Oh, you know, that's a very good point. Can't charge you.
But but you can't you can't just like just you can't tell mint don't like pretend
I don't have any Roman credit if you do so turning it.
And you can turn it even if I leave men on I think you can go in and put Cellular data on that other line and say don't allow automatic switching correct
But that won't change SMS or phone calls because that's not cellular data
So if you want to avoid this the SMS is you just turn the sim off until you get back,
to Wi-Fi because Mint, like most carriers, but it's worth checking with your carrier,
Mint, when you're not in the U.S., if you are on Wi-Fi and have Wi-Fi calling enabled,
you will get your SMSs and phone calls over Wi-Fi and you get, that comes in for no charge,
no additional charge, like there's no roaming charge for that.
All right, that's good like this, this is what we do. All right, I mean, it's a seven minute quick tip, but you know, whatever.
It was a good one. Neil shares, he says, a quick tip, which might be known to everyone,
but I just discovered, no, Neil, I learned this from you this week.
On Ventura, and I think this happens in other operating systems,
when I open a print dialogue, the button that says PDF, which allows you to open a dropdown menu to save the print job as a PDF or save PostScript
or to mail or web receipts or whatever else you put in there.
He says, seems to have a feature I never noticed before.
If you click on instead of clicking the drop down, if you simply click the word PDF in the in that drop down menu,
treat it like a button instead of a menu,
it will jump automatically to the save as PDF dialogue saving a step.
Not the biggest quick tip in the world, he says, but he says,
since I print a PDF a lot helpful, I agree with you, Neil. I think that's a great tip to use.
Right, that is. And then I've got one to add to that. All right.
For those that are not...
So that one you need to use your mouse and click on it. The GUI, you have to use the GUI.
I'm a huge keyboard shortcut guy. Yep.
Makes my life go much faster. So I use this one and I set it up.
It's slightly different in Ventura than in Monterey in previous editions.
But all credit to Sparky, Max Sparky, David Sparks for this quick tip.
I use Command-P-P. So I hold down the Command key and I hit P-P and it brings up my Save as PDF dialog.
The quick way to set it up is System Settings, Keyboard, Keyboard Shortcuts, App Shortcuts, All Applications.
In the menu title window, you have to type Save as PDF,
and you have to do that exactly as it appears in that menu item or it won't work.
So it's capital S, save as, capital P, D, capital D, capital F, and then the ellipsis.
The way to get the ellipsis is the option key and the semicolon.
Because if you just type three periods, it doesn't, sometimes it's smart enough, sometimes it's not.
Option semicolon. I learned a thing.
Okay. There you go. Yeah. That's how you get your ellipsis. Then when you save out of that,
all you have to do is hit command P, P, and it brings you immediately to...
To the save as pdf dialogue without having to move your mouse around the reason what pete's describing is is the,
Like like he said in either system settings or preferences,
in keyboard shortcuts app shortcuts You can create your own keyboard shortcuts for any item that appears in any menu,
and so When you are in an app command p brings you to the print dialogue as I think most of us probably know,
What Pete is doing is adding a menu shortcut for this new menu that appears in the print dialog and
Assigning that also to command P so that he doesn't have to do anything different
He just says command P the first time he does command P It brings up the print dialog the second time he does command P while the print dialog is up,
It chooses save as PDF and you could do this with anything like I have I have that same
Shortcut set to our PDF. We have a an Apple script that we wrote that puts.
That PDF into notes as a PDF and then that's what we share here And by the way, my other script is working now. I got it. I got it working so I can archive notes. Yeah, it's great,
Yeah, you could get it to save as Postscript, correct?
You can choose whatever you want.
Whichever menu selection, correct. And I added a second one there to mail a PDF.
So I can do command P, command M, and it now mails that PDF.
Because whatever's in that menu, you can do. And again, this isn't limited to the PDF dialog, or the print dialog, rather.
Anything in any menu that you use a lot that doesn't have a menu shortcut,
you can add one in System Preferences or Settings.
Keyboard shortcuts app shortcuts. So that's the the the the key there,
Hopefully that's helpful. Yeah, man. Yeah. All right. Let's uh Larry these are these are the weirdest like.
The least quick quick tips we've ever had but it's fine. Sorry. It's not your fault. Yeah, I'm the one that built today's agenda
I'm helping I'm helping stretch this out Fair, that's what we do Larry shared,
He was having trouble sending,
pictures to Android people via messages, meaning his MMS was not working, right?
The multimedia, whatever it is, I don't know, I forget what MMS stands for.
Somebody will tell me. But, you know, he could send SMS's to them.
But anytime he sent a picture, it would, it would, you know, he gets a little red, you know, dot that said it couldn't send.
Fine. He did all the things. He went in and made sure that SMS and MMS were turned on in settings messages on his phone
Like all of this stuff still wasn't working.
He said he finally was able to get it to work this morning He says I first called up Apple and they asked me to check my Wi-Fi settings
I have two Wi-Fi networks at my home blah blah blah and they that didn't work he says then I,
I called, I got sick of dealing with Apple tech support and I went to the Verizon store. Immediately the guy seemed to know what the issue was and that I
needed a, and here's the term, I can't Google and find this term folks by the
way, but he said the guy told him I needed a network sync. He said that it
solves a lot of problems with iPhone to Android issues so it's something to keep
Keep in mind, he said, just call up Verizon tech support and ask for a network sync.
There's probably another term that will show up on the Googles that this is actually, but For now.
Calling Verizon Tech Support, if you're having these problems, calling Verizon Tech Support,
and asking for network sync. Might not be a bad thing to do once a year,
sort of as a matter of course, if you're a Verizon customer.
Yeah, I don't know. Like, I've never heard of this before, but...
And I bet the different carriers call it different things because it would be too
easy to call it the same.
Yeah, exactly. Yeah. But like, I know that there is a way, Like, when I was with AT&T, they would occasionally tell me I needed to download the new.
Version of their profile. And they said the way to do it was to go into settings.
General, uh, sorry, settings, yeah, general, about, and scroll down to the part where you see
the details about your sim or your eSIM. And by going down there, it would like refresh something.
And when AT&T would text me and tell me to do this, I would go do it and then on that screen, once I got down that far,
I would get like a little dialogue that popped up that said,
uh, restart to apply the new, you know, settings or whatever.
And I was like, okay.
Like it was, it was completely, like there was nothing to do other than sort of scroll through this, the about screen.
But that worked. So maybe that's the same thing. I don't know.
But, like, that's also something that's just worth knowing that works with some carriers.
It definitely was a thing with AT&T.
So if you know stuff like this, weird things that are like, don't seem to make any sense,
but actually do have results, feedback at MacGeeKeb.com. We'd love to hear from you.
Whoa, whoa, whoa, where? Feedback at macgeekab.com? That's what we said. Feedback at macgeekab.com. And unless you're a premium
subscriber, in which case you get to use premium at macgeekab.com. And you can learn more about
that at macgeekab.com slash premium. I was on a Zoom call with one of the folks that works for me.
I was actually doing some, I put out a TikTok video with a quick tip this week. I think I'm
I'm going to start doing more of those because it's a great way to sort of show.
Things and and I I'm not a tick-tock expert so but thankfully I have people who work for me who are and so,
Both Sadie and Skylar my daughter showed me all kinds of things to make my video that I had created into something that
Appeared at home on tick-tock which is great, but it was like I want to share my screen with you,
And so the first time I was on a call. I was like ah I know how to share the iPhone screen
And I did the whole dance where you launch QuickTime Player.
You create a new movie, you connect your iPhone first via, sorry, I did this out of order.
You connect your iPhone via USB, you know, lightning, whatever,
and then launch QuickTime Player, create a new movie, and choose your iPhone screen as the camera
from the little dropdown thing. That's just how this works.
And it was great. Like it worked and I could, And then I shared that screen in Zoom.
It was like, yep, there it is. I could do everything I needed to do, it was awesome.
And then later in the day, I went to do the same thing and I saw right there in Zoom screen share
that you could share your iPhone screen either using a USB cable,
like I was doing with the extra step of QuickTime Player or AirPlay.
So I learned a thing and now you get to do it too because it's right there.
Zoom screen sharing window is, it's just cluttered with everything it could possibly share.
Yeah, there it is, the sound.
It's cluttered with everything. And so I give myself a half of a pass for not just knowing it was there,
but that's the beauty of this stuff is sometimes just knowing it's there is the key.
Yeah. So, yep.
Hey Dave, can I, as long as we're on quick tips, can I throw one in?
It's not on the agenda and I promise less than 30 seconds. I told you before pre-show.
There's no way it's gonna be. I terrified myself.
Last week we shared and cool stuff found, keyboard clean tool.
I like to clean my screen with a dark screen. So I used keyboard clean tool, locked out my keypad,
went on my track pad, went into displays, turned the brightness all the way down
and cleaned my laptop and then went, uh-oh.
I have no idea where the mouse is and how to turn the brightness back up.
You couldn't. Quick tip is, no.
Oh, yeah. How would well, wait, let me let me know that your trackpad works.
Yes. It doesn't lock out your trackpad. It locks out your keyboard.
OK, so. So I went into system settings and I went to displays and I turned the brightness all the way down.
So I had a nice black screen and I could clean the keyboard and the screen with my alcohol wipes that are special for glass and all that.
And then I had no way to turn my brightness back up because I didn't know where my house.
Yeah. So you can't use your keys because they're locked. Because they're turned off. The quick tip.
Yeah. Yeah. So the quick tip is press and hold your power button for about 15 seconds.
The machine will power down and when it powers back up, keyboard.
Clean tool is disabled and you can use your keys again.
To brighten your day. Self-inflicted stupidity wound.
Sent a shot of terror because I'm thinking, well, I'm not going to be able to record Matt
Geek Gab later today because my computer's going to be locked and the battery won't die
for about a week on these MacBook Air M2s.
Yeah. Especially with the screen off. I was just trying to think, like, what would you normally do, but your laptop has brightness
keys on it, right?
Like if you didn't have brightness keys, then, then it would be a problem.
Like if it had the touchpad, I think maybe the touchpad may work to bring your brightness back up.
But yeah, but the, but the brightness keys were just as disabled as every other key.
So yeah, a couple of, I have some thoughts about this.
Kiwi Graham in the, in Mackeygib.com slash discord while we're recording this shares,
Would you have used Siri to do it if you had Siri enabled on your laptop?
So probably, right, that's that's one way. Yeah, I don't know if I have her listening or not.
I think I have a double pump the control button. So that wouldn't work.
That wouldn't work. If she'd have been listening.
Maybe. I don't like I don't know. Maybe that would be one thing.
The other thing I mean, these are just ideas that are coming to mind would be if you had,
VNC like remote screen sharing turned on on your Mac and you ran like screens on your iPhone
You could see your screen because your screen's not off. It's just it's just not bright,
So there's that You could also Also, I'm trying to think like.
Yeah, I guess that's it. Really. We, we need, uh, the folks at fully Vora who make keyboard,
clean tool or screen tool or whatever it's called. Uh, and also make, uh, touch bar,
the, the, the touch bar tools, better touch tool. That's it. Uh, what we need is for them to put
this functionality in that app where it's like, it set my screen to dim my screen for 90 seconds
and then bring it back up to full brightness. There you go. Right. Are you listening guys?
That'd be awesome. Right. That would be, that would be the way.
So that'd be one way to do it. Or to say, you know, if you screw this up.
Just hold the power button. Just hold the power button. Yeah.
But I feel like that wouldn't be a, a difficult thing for them to add to the app.
Right. You could write an Apple script that brings the, or chat GPT could help you.
I was going to say, with the help of Mac GPT, I could.
But yeah, you could you could you like an Apple script could bring the brightness back up keyboard maestro,
Can bring the brightness back up so you could set you could create a macro and keyboard maestro or an apple script
That says wait 90 seconds and then bring the brightness to full,
And take it now wait 90 bring it up. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, let it do the whole shooting match for you,
So like yeah, but but again all of these require advanced planning Yes.
Yes. Which I had none. Which right, you didn't do. Which I had none.
Ripple effects are the, uh, yeah, ripple effects are the theme here.
You know, I, uh, oh, and Tennessee Papa says you can shine a flashlight on the screen and see the cursor.
Oh no, you can't. Yes. Oh, is it? I was thinking that because.
I tried. Okay. I tried.
At least, well, yeah. Because I thought. My iPhone flashlight wasn't bright enough.
I thought it was there. I thought about it. Yeah, I thought it was there, just not backlit.
It was just, it was more reflective than anything else.
That makes sense. Yeah, you might be better off not shining a light on the screen, but turning the ambient
light down, and seeing...
I was in a dark room. It was... I tried. Okay.
Well, fortunately, I only tried for about three minutes before I went, well, you know
what, I'm just going to hold the power button and see what happens.
Speaking of three minutes, this 30-second quick tip has taken five now. Five minutes. Yeah.
It's what we do. It's what we do. And sent in a quick tip, uh...
You know, we've been talking a lot about different ways of cleaning up audio and the whole voice isolation thing that you do on the Mac and, you know, all of that stuff.
And Rod says that while you're on a call on your iPhone, you can go into Control Center and select Mic Mode and then switch from Standard to Voice Isolation to mute and suppress background noise picked up by your iPhone's mic during a call.
And there is an article about this and we'll link to that from the show notes a keyboard.
My knowledge base article about it and how to do it But it it the trick is it only shows up during the call,
You can't turn it on when you're not in a call, and I think he did it with his,
AirPods so it like it works with a variety of microphones. I believe but I,
Am I I believe that whatever you set it to?
To sticks and persists, you know, through the next call. That was my question.
Good, that'd be awesome.
Yeah. Okay. Yeah, yeah. Because I use those vacuum pack bags to get everything into a tiny suitcase.
Yeah. And when I'm doing that on a phone call with my AirPods in, everyone's like, what are you
doing? You know, you're crunching rocks with your teeth.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So hopefully that would be something to look at.
Cool. I know those vacuum pack bags are helpful for travel. They are, and I'll see if I can get you,
I saw you put it in the show notes.
Yeah, we'll put a link. I'll see if I can find, I get them at Walmart,
I get them at Amazon, that sort of thing.
And they're really nice. Essentially, I put my clothes in the vacuum pack bag,
seal it up, and there's two different kinds.
Some have the valve on them, some you just roll it until you squeeze all the air out.
But it makes it so much smaller. It'll take what's normally five or six inches,
and it takes it right down to a heavy vacuum pack.
Yeah, so the only drawback to these would be, this is great if you are packing into a carry-on.
If you're packing into a checked bag, this is an easy way to ensure you go over your weight limit.
Right, yeah, but for packing into a carry-on and perhaps avoiding the need for a checked bag,
this is a great idea, yeah, yeah.
And because of what you do, you basically have to avoid checking a bag, so.
Yeah, I'm on a two-week trip in a 24-inch bag, That's amazing, man.
Yeah. That's- that's vo- I feel like-
I like we need we need an episode of so there I was where you and fig share all your packing tips,
Oh, there you go. Seriously
Like that would be something to something to think about the things that are obvious to you
It's just like what we do here like, you know these quick tips,
Every one of them is obvious to some segment of this audience. It might might be you know, you or me
We might have already known about it. It's the things that if you already know it's obvious,
But if you don't know it's voodoo and when you shared this It was like when I saw you doing this in Vegas, it was like, oh, I see the value of this now. Okay. Yeah. Yeah, so.
But I also I also do it alone Because when I have to use that vacuum pack with the valve and I have to suck the air out with my mouth
I don't do that in public. You know, you're not gonna do a YouTube video showing us how it works.
So Rob shared in discord I finally figured out something in the Mac OS mail app that I've been stumped by for a while in most Mac native apps like
The finder you can use option and the up key or the down key to navigate to the top most or bottom most item in a list,
However, which is which is its own quick tip because I had forgot if I knew that I forgot it
So now I know how to get to the top and the bottom of a list and finder
So that's option up and down. So thank you for that sir up. He says but that's never worked in mail instead
I figured out that you need to do command and option and then up or down to go to the
top or the bottom of a mail list.
And he says, I don't know why mail app diverges from the standard keyboard shortcuts here, but it does.
So thank you for both of those tips, Rob. Sir Rob, my apologies.
And we just had Rob and Rod and man.
Yeah. Mars. It's the R day. And you have, you have something to add to Sir Rob's tip.
A quick action to that as well is to take your, hold your option key down.
If you have a email with a string, in other words, several emails back and forth, if you
hold down the option key and tap the up or down arrow, then you quickly move.
To each separate email. That's why you need command option. You answered Sir Rob's question. Yes.
Because he was like, I don't know why mail is different. Mail's different because you're using it to navigate within a thread.
With the option key. And if you want to navigate outside of threads,
even if you're not in a thread, you have to add command to it.
Ah, okay.
I like it. I stumbled across that trying to figure out what he was telling me. Yes.
Oh, I forgot the command. Oh, so this isn't something you knew.
You just, you just found it.
I was trying to look, I was looking at the email going, how does this work?
And I didn't hit command. I just had option and I'm going,
it's just going through the different emails.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I like it. All right.
And that's only if you're using the threaded view, which I believe is the default in mail these days.
Listen, I'm having an existential crisis here. I don't have a lot to share about it other than we,
I think we referenced it in last week's episode that Mac OS Sonoma, at least the first beta,
the mail app in that does not load extensions.
So mail extensions are likely dead for Sonoma. That means that my beloved small cubed mail suite is dead,
come Sonoma time.
So they have, I believe they call it Mail Maven. They have been working on a mail app
that includes all of the functionality that their plugins add.
I'm sure I've said on this show that I never want to use anything other than a first party mail app
because if I get, you know, entrenched in an app that's written by one developer or two developers
or whatever, then when it goes away, and it goes away as they often do,
or, or like when, when small developers
or, you know, single development, small teams or single developers write a mail app,
they write it for themselves.
And I'm not, this is not, like I've learned, I've said, and I believe I'm correct,
that I know more about how Steve Dorner's brain works than most other humans.
And I've never met Steve Dorner, but Steve Dorner wrote Eudora,
the male client that I used early on when it was the only male client to use.
But it was, it was, I had to learn how Steve Dorner used a male client.
And then I got to use the same male client, right?
And then when I switched to Malesmith, which was written by Rich Siegel,
And I believe he still maintains it.
I got to learn more about how Rich Siegel's brain worked than I ever, and I also, I do know Rich in person.
But like, you get a very, and I'll use the word myopic, but it's not in a negative way.
You know, you get a singular vision on how a mail app could work,
and then that person brings that vision to life.
I, so, like, I've loved the fact that mail is extensible, and I can have this sort of generic mail client
that is guaranteed to work at the day of release of any macOS update because it's written by Apple,
and then, what's sometimes not available on day of release are the plugins that I would add to mail to add the little functionality that I want.
But I'm so reliant on some of these plugins, like Signature Profiler,
to pick signatures per email addresses, not just per email accounts,
And the, uh, the, like the, the outbox rules, which is amazing.
Like when we, when I reply from feedback at Mac, e-cab.com, it looks at the
message in the outbox and decides whether it needs to add the CC back to feedback
at Mac, e-cab.com so Pete can see it, you know, and like all of these things
that are just, I don't reply. Yeah.
Yeah. It makes it smart. You see, right.
It's, it's like super and it's super flexible and I'm very reliant on it.
So, like Mail Maven might in fact be the right app for me, but I don't know and I'm going to
spend some time this summer messing around with, you know, the different mail apps. There's Spark
and there's a lot of others. So, stay tuned on that. If you have a favorite third-party mail app,
share feedback at MackeyCub.com, we'd like to know.
Meanwhile, we got two more quick tips to round out the first, you know, 45 minutes of the show.
Pensacola quick Pensacola. Yes, we're just cooking along,
Pensacola Craig Says if you liked the Mac OS OG style system report breakdown of your Mac
It is still available in Ventura and Sonoma,
The way you get to this there's several ways to get to this but the way you get to this is click the Apple menu
with the option key held down and system information will appear right there.
This is one we've shared many times before but it's always worth a reshare.
So if you want that detailed system information report, hold down option, click on the Apple menu
and choose system information.
And you can even watch while you have the Apple menu down, you can even watch about this Mac change
to system information when you press and depress the option key.
And then one last quick tip, which is really a correction from something we mentioned last week.
I'm gonna let Louis, I'm sorry, share this.
Hey guys, this is Louis Block, Block Tech. I sent the tip in this week's show,
986 about the iFrame X Kickstarter project.
You mentioned how expensive it was,
and actually that number is in Hong Kong dollars. So at 379 Hong Kong dollars,
that's actually closer to $48 in US dollars.
So I hope that helps make a decision. For me, that was a low enough number to take a chance on.
Anyway, hope that helps, thanks. Thanks, Louis. Thank you so much.
Yeah, I got caught by that.
Did you? I got caught by that once. Yeah. I was buying some software from a guy
in the store in Hong Kong.
Sure. So I was, I think it was PDF pen is what I was mine and it was
I don't know, $80 or $90, something like that, and gave him the money and he gave me most of it back.
Oh no, Hong Kong dollars. It was like $7. I went, oh, okay. This is probably not PDFPIN authorized.
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All right, Pete, we spent every quick tip we did took about, you know, 14 minutes each.
So let's save some time and answer some questions, shall we?
We can do that.
We can do that. So the first question, excuse me, this week came in from Paul.
He says, the problem, when I create a calendar event, I typically go to month view and then
select date and then go into create.
But I use the list view instead of the hour view for daily views.
I also tend to scroll when I select the date, so I have it one to two inches from the top of my phone.
So if I scroll at all, a different date is at the top of the screen.
For example, this means that I added an event on Sunday instead of Tuesday.
Do you have any suggestions on how to add items to an iPhone in Calendar app to be less
likely to give you the wrong date when creating new events like doctor's appointments?
And I wrote back, my favorite method is to say, hey, yes, lady, create an event on Pete's calendar.
Be sure to tell it which calendar, because I have several. Friday, June 16th at 10 a.m. to go to macgeekgab.com slash discord and listen to the Mac Geek Gab
with there with all the other Mac Geek Gab listeners. And she usually does a pretty good
job of creating that event. Rarely misses, never misses on the date, but then occasionally you have
to go in and edit it from there, but you're going to get very close by using the Yes Lady.
She does a nice job of creating calendar events. Start at 10, end at 11.
Invite others, she'll do all that for you. I like that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
That's yeah. Yeah. I have, I have experienced the same thing that Paul describes and I use,
and it happens not just in Apple's calendar app.
It happens in busy Cal, which is the one I also use on, on iPhone. And I've just learned
to make sure that I go to either the week view, not the, not the scrolling view, but the sort
sort of horizontal view that's either week view or month view and tap on the day.
And then that sort of selects the day even though there's multiple days on the screen.
And that works better for me when I'm scheduling events because I know that it's going to put it on the right day.
So, yeah, yeah, yeah. Interesting.
I mentioned- Questions answered quicker than the quick tips.
Yeah, no, this is great. Um, yeah, all right, we'll, we'll save the mail thing.
There, there's some mail conversation happening in the, in the chat.
I, I, well, I, I've, I've acknowledged it.
Porthos John says, I was talking about, of course, my, my Apple script that I wrote this
week for notes to archive, archive things and Porthos, Porthos John says, yeah, I do
the same thing in mail.
He uses spark email and he says, I hit shift command enter to send an email.
And when I do that, it sends the reply and archives the original, which is kind of nice.
Um, and then I, I wasn't sure what email client he was talking about.
I'm like, oh, is, are you doing that with apple script? And he says, no, but I could either apple script or, uh, shortcuts can interface with
mail. And I thought, huh, I've never used shortcuts for it in mail.
Uh, I've never used shortcuts for mail.
I've used apple script in mail, but it's been a long time, but it makes me wonder if maybe
my world is better like writing a series of Apple scripts to use in mail instead of moving
to a third-party email client. I don't know.
Like I'm, this is, like I said, existential crisis. In the meantime, sorry, Pete, go ahead.
No, yeah, this is, this is bad. This is not a good thing.
It's just gonna change things. It's, you know, but I need to find a path.
Like I am so reliant on being efficient with email that I need to find a way to continue
to be able to be efficient with email.
That's really like the meta problem to solve here. Right, well, just for what it's worth,
I use Canary on one of my accounts. And that's, I think that's in set app.
I think that's where I got it.
Canary mail. Canary, all right. Well, we got it, we'll start it.
I'll start a thread on, in our Matic app discord about mail apps.
Literally, it needs it. And we need it.
Yeah, we need it. Yep.
Steve has our next question for us about network drives.
He asked, do you have a recommendation as to the best way to auto-mount my network drives every time I log in or turn on my Mac?
I see that there are a bunch of apps in the App Store, but I'm wondering if there's another way
to accomplish this, either through a terminal command or system settings.
So, the answer is yes, and you might not want to.
You certainly can run a terminal command to mount a disk, and it would be, I think,
MacDiskUtil is probably the right one to go after on that.
But you're going to want to automate that somehow so that it happens when you log in
and also when your Mac wakes from sleep. Because sometimes these network drives go away when being woken from sleep.
The way to do it when you log in is to mount the network drive and then put an alias of
it essentially just by dragging it into the login items.
And then that will, most of the time, especially if you've saved your password for it, most
of the time, that will do it and just log you in and you're, you know, good to go.
But if it will only do it at login, it won't do it when you, like if your Mac wakes up
from sleep and has lost the network drive during sleep, which seems to happen more often
than not, at least for me, for this user.
And so I had to come up with another way of doing that.
I wrote, I believe it was an Apple script. It might be an automator action.
I can't remember. I think it's an automator action to mount the network drive that I need.
And it, I use Keyboard Maestro to trigger that action both at login and also whenever it notices
that that particular drive is not mounted.
And so if it sees that the drive's not mounted, it will try.
And I have some other triggers on there, Especially for my laptop where it says, hey, if you're not on your local network at home,
don't try this kind of thing because otherwise it would alert me like I tried to do this and
it won't mount the drive. It's like, I don't really want to mount it all the time when I'm,
you know, on some foreign Wi-Fi network that's slow or whatever. But those are the ways of
scripting it sort of on your own, although I realize one of them uses keyboard maestro.
So the other one is to use an app like auto-mounter from pixel eyes and that's P I X E L E Y E S dot co dot N Z.
But of course the link is in the show notes and that is what every time we have mentioned
this on the show in the past, that's the advice that we've gotten is why are you like reinventing the wheel?
Just use auto-mounter. It does it great.
So someday I might even take that advice, but you know, my system, it ain't broke and,
it means I need one less app because I already have Keyboard Maestro,
so I just do it that way.
But yeah, that's kind of the key there, if you will.
Alright, speaking of having your password in the keychain, Jim had a tip for us about
the keychain, the iCloud keychain, and he said, I've recently become aware of the fact
that when I authorize keychain to automatically fill in a password or credit card data on
my Mac, that authorization stays, it lingers for a long time, seemingly until I reboot next.
A couple hours later, I'm not required to reauthorize Keychain access to fill in data on a website or in an app.
The more I thought about it, the more I realized that this could pose a security risk,
even though it's probably minimal.
Not being overly familiar with Keychain controls and settings, I did a web search of how to set the time
and I found an Apple support article that helped out.
In the Keychain access app on your Mac, click login in the Keychains list.
Choose from the edit menu, change settings for the key chain login,
and then change the, or click the lock after checkbox and enter a number of minutes.
If you wanna require a password each time the computer goes to sleep,
select the lock when sleeping checkbox and then hit save.
Says I've only been using this for a day before sending you the guys this email,
but it seems worthwhile as a security measure. He's like, I've got it set for 15 minutes
and it seems to work out okay.
So yeah, I actually like that. That's pretty good. Yeah, I never considered that before. Yeah, same.
Yeah, that's pretty good. So yeah, thanks for that, Jim. That's a good one.
You wanna take us to Gary, Pete?
I can do that. So Gary wrote in, he was having a special time with his computer.
He says, I don't know if this has been an issue with Ventura or one of the latest fixes.
Still, I noticed that from time to time, I will be in the middle of typing an iMessage on my Mac.
Then all of a sudden, the program will close. And when I open it, I am asked to sign
into my Apple ID account.
When I provide my credentials, I get the spinning pinwheel screen,
which never goes any further. I've tried quitting the program and starting it back up,
and that doesn't fix it.
The only way to get it back is to restart my whole Mac.
It seems to occur every week. I notice the, I notice behavior.
I notice other behaviors before it, as my keys advancing and pausing in music, in Apple Music,
and my keyboard will also stop working.
I hope Apple fixes this in the Mac, new Mac OS version, I announced at WWDC.
I wish Microsoft had their phone app in the Mac store.
Mac App Store, new eyes today, I guess, Dave, trying to read, sorry.
I wish Microsoft had their phone app in the Mac App Store or a version I could download to stop me from going on the dark side.
Stop me from going on the dark side. Gary PS, I checked the progress of the program after I got done typing this email, and it still hasn't moved.
And I wrote him this, look, this stuff is always frustrating, and I sent him a bunch of basic troubleshooting options.
The basic solutions for fixing messages crashes on the apps, which I googled, do some Google foo there.
When you're done with the primary solutions, restart your Mac.
I said, it depends. If you've got a Intel Mac, reset the PRAM or the NVRAM, the SMC, that sort of thing.
That's all on the chip now, on the M1 chip and the M2 chip, so you don't do that with the newer ones.
Sure. Some other quick troubleshooting force quit all apps running on the Mac go to the Apple logo force quit select all the apps command a
And then force quit check the critic date and time.
Go to the Apple logo system settings general date and time and set the date and time
Automatically to set time zone automatically using your current location toggle some of this is why would you?
What's the I don't know? Okay. This is my Google food stuff that I said I'm starting to read too deep into it, okay?
And then try booting in.
The other one that was good though, was try booting in the safe mode.
Sometimes this fixes a lot of things.
For the M1 Mac, shut it down, turn it on after 20 seconds, press and hold the power button,
until you see the startup volumes option on the screen.
And that's how you get into the safe mode. Select the startup disk you want
and from the keyboard, continue in safe mode.
Yeah. Yeah. So the main thing here is also that I sent a lot more than I probably needed to.
And this is not a criticism, Gary, but it's it's if you tell us up front, hey, I've got
an Intel Mac or I've got an M1 Mac, then I can go down one one rabbit hole at a time.
Yeah. Fair.
So. But yeah. So hopefully some of these troubleshooting things got in there.
So I think I said lastly you may want to reinstall the OS and I believe that that's not on the mail version in notes,
But I believe he did in fact wind up reinstalling the operating system Yeah, we what we used to call a maintenance reinstall where you're just reinstalling it on top of itself
So you're you're just putting the files back out there.
Putting all the ones and zeros in the right place, yeah, this seems like a a either a corrupted cache file or a corrupted preference file. So I like, I'm just thinking
about like, you know, in the, the, the grand scheme of if I were there, what would I do next?
Yeah. And that I would, I would log my Mac out of iCloud entirely, not just message,
cause it's messages keeps getting logged out. Right. So log messages out manually,
Then log my Mac out of iCloud entirely, reboot, log things back in, see if that helps.
Because that is going to rebuild some preference files and some cache files when you do that.
If that doesn't help, um, then maybe, uh...
Like you said, safe mode is great because the process of booting into safe mode,
Also clears out it runs a lot of the maintenance stuff which clears out a lot of those
You know cache files and that sort of thing if that doesn't help run onyx's maintenance. Yep
Yeah, so like those would those would be the things I would jump to.
But yeah when you sign out It am I correct that it's been a while since I've done that doesn't it ask you do you want to?
To save these things on your computer locally? Do you want to delete them?
Generally speaking, would you want to delete them and let iCloud re-sync them?
I mean, making sure you had a good backup first? Yes, yes, exactly.
With that caveat, yeah, that's fine. Although, do you feel lucky?
It will take you longer to do that because the process of deleting things
is often lengthy when you tell it to do that,
like calendars especially.
So I might skip that. I might tell it, no, I'll just keep the local copies
and then it'll re-merge them when it comes back.
It's gonna, like, it generally does a pretty good job. Sync is hard, but Apple's gotten way better about it.
I mean, if, you know, I think if we rewind 10 years and listen to an episode from 10 years ago,
you'll hear us ranting about how Apple's sync was not so good.
But- The only people that had any idea then, it seems to me, was Dropbox. Yeah.
In the early days. Yeah, because Dropbox was just syncing files,
and I don't mean to trivialize that,
but when you're syncing things like, you know, individual calendar events and contacts
and like those sorts of things, it gets even trickier.
Settings.
Settings. You can't be bothered on the phone, but you can be bothered on the laptop. No, no.
I wanted to cross all devices. Right. So yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yeah, I don't know. It's just how it goes.
Uh, alright, Sarab had another question for us in, uh, I believe in Discord, and I think
we're all going to learn something from this. My guess is you folks are going to have things to send to us, too.
Sarab asked, can anyone recommend a product or service that allows me or you to make phone
calls from a device that has Wi-Fi but does not have a SIM card enabled and therefore no Wi-Fi calling?
Ideally something where you can pay once to make the call.
He says, I recently ran into an issue with the eSIM pin on my iPhone,
where I guess I entered the wrong SIM pin too many times and my SIM card got blocked
and needed some PUK code from AT&T to reset it.
They eventually gave it to me, but it was kind of an issue.
And.
Rod in Discord replied with, my first thought was Skype, because Skype can do this,
and you can launch Skype on your phone, and you can use Skype calling and pay for minutes,
and get a phone number if you want, and all of that stuff, right?
It can work great.
Rod suggested a service called MySudo, M-Y-S-U-D-O dot com,
and of course, there's a link in the show notes for this.
And MySudo, it's a pretty cool service in that it, um, you pay a fairly trivial amount, I think it's like 10 bucks a year.
And it's, they have a lot of different features, there's a free plan where you can get some email addresses from them, and messaging handles, I'm not sure exactly what that means, and private browsers, but then there's the $9.99 a year plan, $9.99 a year plan.
Where you get a phone number with 30 minutes a month and a hundred text messages a month,
in addition to The the other things and you get three virtual credit cards, too
That you can use so you got kind of burner card numbers if you need to use that but for ten bucks a year,
That's not a bad idea.
So So I'll throw that out there Kiwi Graham points out that Skype is if you have Microsoft 365 you get 60 minutes of Skype included per month, which could could be the magic answer here.
But I think that's only outbound calling. I don't think you get a phone number that you can receive texts or messages to with that.
I could be wrong, but I think that that costs a little bit extra with Skype to have an actual inbound phone number because we did it.
We did it with. Oh, right. Are you right? I thought you were talking about with suit, my pseudo.
Oh no. And with my pseudo, it's part and parcel of this $10 a year thing. Yeah.
So you have to pay extra for an escape phone number. I've done it before. We did it.
Our, our Mac geek number was Skype number for quite some time.
Two Oh six, six, six, six geek.
That's not what it is anymore. That was through K seven.
Um, the, the phone number now is two, two, four, eight, eight, eight geek.
And you can leave us a message there. That's a Google voice number.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, but K7, I think K7 still works if you didn't let it expire, which evidently I did.
So yeah, that's on me. But but yeah, don't call that poor person and ask them if they're geeking out or not.
Yeah, probably don't though. Just call us. It's fine. It's much better. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So yeah, hopefully that helps. And you know, this is an interesting thing. Like my daughter,
for example, Google Voice would be the other thing to use. I mean, here we are. Like, why not? You
can get a free Google Voice number. Just mentioned it and didn't realize we had it. Yeah, you can
send and receive texts for free. If you need to make a phone call, I believe you need to buy
minutes, I think, but, but yeah, why not?
But I don't think you need, I don't think you need it to receive.
That may be true. Yeah.
Yeah. So Google voice might be like the top answer here. Like my daughter, when she moved to Italy, she did not need her US phone,
service anymore.
For obvious reasons. She has, you know, service that she pays like, you know, four euro for
hundreds of gigabytes or something over there. or something over there.
But I was like, wait, wait, we should preserve your phone number in case you get like, you know,
two-factor text messages to it or whatever. Like you don't wanna give up this number
that you've had for a decade.
And so we just ported the number into Google Voice. It cost, to port a number in cost 20 bucks.
Google Voice charges for that.
But to just get a new number costs nothing. You just go and sign up for a number
and they'll give you a number. And I think you can even sort of pick your number.
Like we were able to pick one that ended in four, three, three, five, so that we could have it ending in geek.
But, uh, yeah, Google voice. I also presume that she then forwarded that
Google voice number to her cell phone in Italy.
No, she didn't bother. She, no, she just lets the voicemail come in.
She gets an email about it, obviously.
Uh, yeah, but she could have. Her friends locally could call her still for no
charge. Yeah. Right. I mean, they, they FaceTime or whatever.
Yeah. Like, so. Well, that's true. Yeah. You know what? Kids don't use phones.
No, not that way. No, no. Correct. Yeah. Yes. Kiwi gram.
I believe Google voice is only for the U S but, um, but once you have a U S number, you can use it elsewhere. So yeah.
Yeah. All right. Uh, where are we here? Maybe we do some, uh, some cool stuff found Pete and,
and see where we could do that. So we wind up, I have, we have the technology.
I have one that I'm really stoked about it is from the folks at smart ish and,
It is the cable Wrangler.
Which is It's I've used things like this and now and now they have the bigger cable Wrangler,
Which is even bigger what it is is it is something that sits either on your desk or your bedside table
or wherever you might have a slew of cables and,
And it is hea- the- like, we've talked about things like this before, this one's heavy enough, you don't need to use, like, sticky pads or anything, it sits there, and it is magnetic on the top.
You just drop your cable down onto it and your cable stays there until you grab it
So your your cable's not falling down behind the bedside table or behind your desk and you don't have to do that
Hang under the back from remover, you know or maneuver to uh to get it up back on there or whatever
You just 2 30 in the morning at 2 30 in the morning and it comes with,
a uh,
a couple of these like,
These little clips that you can put with clips magnetic clips that you can put on cables that don't have enough metal to stick to,
The you know to to be magnetically attracted to the the pad and and of course you can get more of them
But it works with most of my cables. I think I had one cable that.
Was that did not work and so I put the little the little you know magnetic clip on it, and it works out great
Great. They also have the bigger cable wrangler is the new thing.
They also have cables just cables on their own that they call the crown jewel and
they have they come in in variety of different things.
But but there's one that is the crown jewel. It's USB a on one end and they call it Universal on the other.
It's USB C lightning and micro USB.
So this is, it's super handy.
I'm a fan of the crown jewel. Next to my bed, and when I travel,
I like to have one sort of three-in-one cable with me because that way I always have the ability to charge that,
like, oh, I need to charge this thing that's micro USB.
Fine, all right. So I have that cable and it's like, great, but I don't have to carry an extra cable.
I don't have to have an extra cable by my bed for the, you know, three times a year now that I need to use micro USB or whatever.
But yeah, it's nice.
So, highly recommend.
That. I've been very happy with it, checking it out for the last couple of weeks, so. Nice.
Yep. Pete, I have another audio experiment, but it's in the form of a cool stuff found
that listener Aaron sent to us. It is called the Ultimate Vocal Remover, and this is an,
open-source thing it's available you download it from github i believe it's
cross-platform for everything you know i i obviously downloaded it for the mac
and they have separate builds for apple silicon versus intel they have linux uh,
i believe they have a windows version yes and it is it takes an audio file like a piece of music, and it splits the, it creates two files from that. One that only has
the instruments and one that only has the vocals and it preserves all the reverb on the vocals and
everything. So I played with it and here is a sample of basically the same segment of a fling
song called Botched Amalgamations. It's on our new EP called Uncorked. And so I will play the
original of this segment. It's got some harmonies, so it's like the verse going into the final
chorus and then I'll play the two split outs. So let's see where we go with this.
Music.
All right, so that's as we mixed it. Here it is with just the instruments.
Music.
It's amazing. muted the vocals, like it just took it out. This took maybe, it took two minutes and 18 seconds
for this app on my M1 Air to split this five-minute song apart. And now, here's the vocals.
Took a look around and wouldn't you know, she left me in the dust.
Ain't got no friends and no relations, like I've been led astray.
If you listen deep in the background.
I heard Dave singing back there. Oh yeah, you hear Dave singing the harmony. That's correct. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's
Jamie Bradley singing the lead on that one. I was singing the harmony. But if you listen
in the background, you will hear, we had a horn section that played on this song for us,
and you hear the trombone. And it's not surprising that you hear this very faint trombone,
because the trombone was built to be, to mimic, you know, to instrumentally mimic a human voice.
Correct. And, and so it doesn't surprise me that the algorithm doesn't entirely split that out.
I mean, it's buried, like you can barely hear it, but it is there. And I've done it with other
songs since I created these files where it, uh, you know, it's like the vocals are just alone.
It's so, it's a pretty cool thing. Thanks for, thanks for sharing that, Aaron. It's free.
So my question, in recording, typically, when you do the master, the vocals are on a separate track
and the instrumentals are on a track. In fact, some of the instruments are on many different tracks.
Oh yeah. This was one track and this software pulled it all apart.
Correct. This was the final mix. This eye-watering.
Yeah, I mean, right. I happen to have all of the tracks for that particular song.
But yeah, you could do this with any song that you have, you know, a WAV file
or an MP3 file or whatever for. You just, you know, just put it in.
So yeah, I took the final stereo master, the file that we like was done, done, done.
And we sent to Apple music and Spotify and all of those things.
That's the file that I just chopped apart.
Cause I knew where it was. It was like, what other files do I have?
Like, I don't, well, I have that, you know, I knew I had it cause I created it.
So, so yeah. So I'm pretty sure we chatted briefly about this.
I see two new uses for karaoke is going to be a huge resurgent. Yep.
Because now you've got your instrumental and you sing along. And if...
You put that vocal track in the headset, then someone can use it as a, I guess, a guide or
a learning track to sing along to make sure they sing on key. People like me who don't sing on key
all the time. Sure. Would have a better ability to stay on key when I'm hearing somebody else
singing in my ear. Oh, that's fair. Yeah. Yeah. I like it because, and there are apps that'll do
this too, but I like it because it allows me to hear the vocal melody and the harmonies without
the instruments obscuring it because a lot of times you will intentionally you
know put the harmonies in the background right you know and it's like well if I
need to learn the harmonies on a particular song and I did like there was
there was a part I didn't play it on this song where Aaron another person in
fling saying a thing and I never quite I didn't mix that part of the song so I
didn't ever hear his soloed track and then I did and it was like that's the
melody you're singing? Oh, I had no idea. Okay, great. You know, it's like, all right,
cool. Yeah. Cause he never sings it live. So I've started singing it. It was like,
Oh, I've been doing it wrong, but now I know. So, yeah.
So do harmonies come naturally to you, Dave? Can you do that?
Yes. I mean, well, they do now. I don't, I, they didn't always,
but I, um, I spent a lot of time in college. I actually,
I went to school for, I didn't, I never got my degree by the way,
but I went to school for computer engineering and for music and.
One of the most valuable classes I took was a harmony and theory class I took several of them, but there was this one and we had a,
Site singing lab at 8 a.m. On the other side of campus in the winter semester, right?
So yeah, so I had to get up at like, you know 720 so that I could like be dressed when I had to walk out the door at 730 to make it to this class at 8
O'clock and then I had to sing for an hour with no accompaniment, right?
And and it was all just singing intervals like, you know, first third first fourth first fifth
You know that kind of thing and and just learning intervals and it was at the same time.
That I was also in a band where I was singing a lot of harmonies and so Having the ability to do that three times a week in a classroom and then you know,
Thursday, Friday, Saturday, three times a week at night on stage with a band having a practical
application of it. The combination of those two and maybe some other factors really cemented in
my brain how to see harmonies.
And so, yes, harmonies since then come fairly naturally to me, yeah.
But the way that I learn how to find harmonies in a song is I learn the lead vocal part.
It, I, it's way easier for me to know where to go if I know what I'm singing to, right?
Like if I'm, it's so, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Cause I was, I was, they say, I'm always jealous
of my sister who just could naturally sing harmonies from the time she was a little girl.
She'd sing the song. Someone said, hey, here's what a harmony is.
And she listened and she went, oh, I could do that.
No kidding, that's right. Yeah. Yeah. I have I have I don't have perfect pitch. Perfect pitch is is where somebody can play a note and you tell them and you and someone with perfect pitch can say, oh, I know that that's a B flat and by the way, it's a little sharp, you know, that kind of thing. Like our friend Chris Breen has perfect pitch.
I am very, in many ways, thankful I don't because it would probably drive me a little bit crazy.
But I do have, I have developed very good relative pitch, meaning I know when, like if somebody, you know, is singing a note, I know where the third is, I know where the fifth is.
Again, probably because of that process I went through, but I am very happy having good
relative pitch and not having perfect pitch, because all I need to know is that I'm in
tune with the person who's singing or playing.
I don't need to know that it is in tune with, you know, A at 440 hertz.
So that makes it sound like you're not off-key if you're all singing together. Correct.
If someone's a little off-key and you're singing it together, it sounds better.
And there are certain singers, and I will not name names ever, but there's people that
I have sung with a lot throughout my life. Everybody has different tendencies.
I mean, this is not going to be a great surprise, right?
So there are some folks who will always sing like right on key.
There are some folks who will always sing a little bit flat, but not in a bad way.
There are some folks who will always sing a little bit sharp, but not in a bad way.
And I like sometimes, yes, but whatever.
I've learned that with certain people that I sing with, it's like, oh, I need to sing
because I listen to the bass when I'm singing. The root note like of the chord.
And then that's where I see the rest of the harmonies and I know what to do.
But I know that if I'm singing with person A, they're going to be 10 cents sharp when
they sing this chorus.
And so I can't sing to the bass. I need to sing to them and blend that vocal and make it sound good.
And it's going to be fine.
Both tense and sharp, the harmony fits, yeah, it's sharp from where the instruments are,
but it's okay. Like it's within the range of acceptability and what really is going to sound good is
if we are singing together.
So and I'm not perfect either. In fact, that was the third verse into the third chorus from that song that I played.
I did not.
Segment out the first verse into the first chorus because the first harmony I sang there, we didn't catch it.
I didn't notice it until we did this, but I am super sharp. Like I way overshot that note.
I have no idea how we missed that during the recording process, but we very much did.
So anyway, this is- And that concludes this episode of the Mac Gig Gab.
Yeah, exactly. Kiwi Graham said, welcome to Mac Gig Gab. Yeah, no, that's five minutes of that. Yeah, for sure.
So let's let's circle back and do two mate one Maybe two more cool stuff's found the next one comes from listener Neil
We talked in the last episode about the Kickstarter project that is available for a wallet
sized.
Find my card if you will and And Neil says eufy has a product called the smart track card for this you set it up on your iDevice using these eufy security app and then it can be added to find my as well and it can also trigger your phone to play a tune just like you know it so that you can kind of find it back he says he has a little trouble with that because every time he sits down with his wallet in his back pocket the phone thinks that it's being triggered and so his phone makes a noise but but yeah that's the eufy smart track
card. And I found it on Amazon. I'll check the price again. Yeah. It's 20 bucks on Amazon,
at least as of the day we're recording this 1999, even so not a, uh, not a bad little,
not bad little, little deal. Yeah. Awesome. That, that is awesome because that's cheaper than.
Than an air tech. That's fair. That's right. Yeah. Yeah. And, but I had the same problem with
my tile though. I would always trigger my phone with my tile, my flat tile. Yeah. Yeah. The flat,
Right, the flat tile, yeah. And then we've had this, this will be the final cool stuff found
around for a while. It, it is something that we mentioned in 859, but listener Joe brought it back
and it is a piece of software for our Macs called Al Dente and it is built for advanced
or enhanced battery management on our Macs. It's the charge, they call it the all-in-one
charge limiter app for MacBooks and it will stop your Mac from charging at different points
It's just to keep your battery sort of conditioned.
I am not sure I don't leave my laptop plugged in all the time these days like I have so I don't know how necessary this is certainly in the old days something like this was absolutely necessary apples battery technology the physical technology is gotten better the software that's in mac os is also gotten better but there are a lot of folks out there including listener joe who swear by using this app and I certainly have tried it
I don't think it's going to do anything bad for your Mac.
So, uh, like if you are someone who winds up plugging your Mac laptop in more often than not, then, uh, then this might be a,
um, this might, might be a good thing to have.
I'm looking at what, what Joe said. He says, we know that Apple's tech in this regard is, is lacking.
Um, and he says, you can drag a slider to adjust the battery state of charge.
It also has a button to quickly top the battery up when you know, you'll will be taking it off the charger.
There are all kinds of settings, but the last one he wants to mention is the task of
calibrating the battery and he runs that monthly.
So, uh, so there you go.
So, um, what's the, uh, can you see the price on that Dave?
Cause there's a free and a pro version. Yeah. Good question.
Uh, oh, there is a, yeah. So free has the charge limiter and a
discharge and then for $10, 59 cents, which
Which it says is a subscription license, so maybe that's annually, so it's, yeah, $10.59
a year or $22.29 lifetime.
You get to do all the other things, which include automatic discharge, heat protection,
you can control the MagSafe LED. Ooh, that's cool.
Well, that might be worth the price of admission alone if you're in your bedroom, right?
You know, like you don't want that bright light on?
Huh. Okay. shortcut support, calibration mode, live status icons, and email support.
So, yeah, so if you're going to use this, either the subscription or the lifetime license is short money.
So, yeah, good question, Pete. Thank you for bringing us there. Yeah, man.
And that does bring us to where we need to finally end things.
Why is- To be for this week. Yeah, what's going on here? Why is- Uh-oh.
It's weird, the music- Is the band on strike?
Yeah, they- There they come. Yeah, maybe I was singing out of tune too much.
Right? We're not playing.
Yeah, yeah. Or maybe you stripped the band out of the vocal track here.
Maybe it was just the vocal track of the instrumental.
Yeah, do I have? No, I don't have that thing on there. Because there are plugins and stuff that will do this.
Oh. So, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Thanks for hanging out with us again. As always, folks, we love that we get to do this,
and it really means a lot to us. So absolutely. Having a ball.
And can I say a personal point of privilege? Thank you for all the nice comments from all the listeners.
I've gotten a bunch of comments this week. People are glad I'm here and doing the show with you.
And it warms my heart and I'm thrilled to do it. So thank you, everyone. Amen.
Oh, you, you know, I it your your role on this show.
So, your most important role on this show is exactly what you just, it was exemplified
by what you just did while we were talking about Al Dente, where you asked about the price.
Playing and representing the listener to make sure that the things that we might miss, and
of course, you know, we do this for each other for sure, but you really brought that to this
show when you when you first joined was that that concept of, hey, wait, wait, wait, you
just glossed over something real fast.
What's that again?
You know, explain that a better way. And I know everyone appreciates it as much as I do.
And I also know that you, especially over time, we always say, you know, you don't have
to be a geek to listen.
But if you listen long enough, you will become one.
And I think you also exemplify that, too. So, which is a great thing.
Now I are one. Yeah. Yeah. It's a great thing.
Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah. It's been a fun ride and I hope to keep riding for quite a while.
Keep riding. Eighteen years now, right? Now we're into our 19th year.
This is the first episode of our 19th year.
So yeah. The show is old enough to vote. It is old enough to vote.
I wonder what it cares about. What are the important issues?
I'm thinking maybe that- Make America Great Britain again.
I'm thinking that might be a good discussion
to have at Mac Stock.
Now that the show's old enough to vote, what are the issues, the tech issues,
that are important to us? Oh, there you go, tech issues, not political.
Right, we avoid politics. It's gotta be apolitical. Yeah, we are apolitical.
I'm always thinking about Lowell George's famous song, A Apolitical Blues, which is a great tune.
And if you wanna really nerd out, because we already did the nerding on music thing,
That song has two grooves going simultaneously, it's like this bump and grind kind of blues thing.
And then there's a half-time and a double-time groove going on at the same time, it's brilliant.
If you don't hear it, it's just a great song.
It's just a great song that you can dig in.
We have cookies, Tia and Papa! Absolutely. Thanks for hanging out with us. Thanks for.
Sending in all your stuff. Thanks for listening. If you aren't subscribed, please subscribe. That
way you'll get the new ones. And if you aren't subscribed to our email, which you can do at
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They are sent every single week. We are happy to be able to do that and we're happy to have you. So yeah
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But you also get any deals that have ever been available to you, even if the people aren't sponsors anymore.
We keep those alive so that you get the discount.
Pete, I've been all day. I've been here looking at your shirt and you know, it inspires
me because I think I think it's important that that we we share like we share a lot of specific sort of nitpicky advice and
answers on this.
But if you were to have sort of one piece, perhaps the very best piece of general advice
that one human could give to another, what would that be?
Well, fortunately, I don't have my camera in mirror mode, so I'm not trying to read
backwards. I can see it right on my own monitor.
The front of my shirt has that advice for the world to see.
So until next week, everybody, don't get caught.
Music.