Greetings, folks, and welcome to Mac Geek Gab. Our quick tip of the week comes from me.
I was having all kinds of slowness in email and in mail on my Mac in the office, but nowhere else.
And then I realized, wait, it's not everywhere in mail. It's only my inbox.
Every time I would file something, it would take like five seconds for it to reply or
respond or, you know, like refresh the interface.
And so I thought I have it. I know what to do, and it worked.
I went to the mailbox menu while my inbox was selected and chose rebuild.
This sort of wipes out the local cache, re-downloads everything from the IMAP server,
and it made it so much better.
So remember this, mailbox rebuild, that you select the mailbox first,
the one you want to rebuild, the mailbox rebuild, it re-downloads it from the IMAP server.
More quick tips like this, plus your questions answered today
on MacGeekGab 988 for Monday, June 26th, 2023.
Music.
And indeed, greetings, folks. Welcome to the show. This is here at MacGeekGab.
So we take your quick tips, like you just heard, or my quick tips sometimes, our quick tips.
We take your cool stuff found that you send in, we take your questions that you send in,
we answer the questions, we share the quick tips and cool stuff found.
The goal is we put it all together into an agenda so that every single one of us
learns at least five new things every single time we get together. Beat me.
I tried Pete, you know. Sponsors for this episode include Notion.com slash MacGeekGab, where you can go and try
Notion projects for free, HelloFresh.com slash MGG16, where code MGG16 gets you 16 free meals
and free shipping, and Collide at Collide.com slash MGG, zero trust security, tailor-made for Okta.
We'll talk more in depth about how each of those works and why you're going to want to
We'll visit them and see if they work for you in a minute.
For now, here in Durham, New Hampshire, I'm Dave Hamilton.
And here, on the other side of the planet, from Hong Kong, Ni Hao, it's Pilot Pete.
Hey Pilot Pete, how you doing, man? Yeah, I'm doing well. And the comment about you beat me,
we talk about timing and strange coincidence.
Quinky dinkies, my son texted me just as you were talking about learning five new things.
Yep. And so I got the tone in my ear, the ding, and I thought, oh, you hit the bell
as you talked about learning five new things. I was wondering what I beat you to.
I was just about to press the bell button. Yeah, and instead I got the thing in my ear that my son had texted me, but I didn't. Awesome.
You know, misunderstandings in life. Sometimes they're funny. Sometimes they're tragic.
You need a podcasting focus mode, Pete. So.
I have one. Maybe I should turn it on and use it. That might not be a bad idea. I, um, I have, you know, my life is all about litmus tests and,
And here we are in our first tangent here, the candle being lit here in my studio, and
today the candle is pink sands from Yankee Candle, but the candle being lit reminds me
or tells me that I went through my pre-flight checklist because it's on the list and I don't,
light the candle until I get to that point in the list, so I know I've gone through our
pre-flight checklist for the show, chances are everything's going to be okay.
My favorite litmus test like that story is, of course, about the band Van Halen.
You've probably heard that they were in their dressing room.
Brown M&M's were to be removed from the candy bowls that was written out in their rider.
That was not just because they were prima donnas. It was probably in part because they were prima donnas.
But, the real reason was they were doing a fairly complex stage show which could be dangerous if things weren't built to spec.
And the specs were also in that rider. And so they knew if the brown M&M's had been removed,
Somebody read the rider and paid attention to the specs and the stage was going to be okay.
If the brown M&Ms were in the candy bowl, they knew they had to go and check everything when they got there.
So the candle's lit, everything's good folks, and we can go to Mark's.
Quick tip, which is he says restaurants are still using QR codes for menus. Often,
it's a pain chasing the little yellow box under the QR code in the iPhone's camera.
There's a trick to make the scan happen in one step. First, you open settings on your iPhone,
you scroll down to command center, scroll down to code scanner,
and use the green plus to add it to your iPhone's control center.
Now, no matter what you're doing, you can swipe down from the top right
to pull up the command center on your phone,
and then tap the QR code box in an icon, which opens up the code scanner, the code reader,
and it jumps to whatever it reads.
There's no chasing it around because it's not just happening inside the camera.
It is literally happening in a bespoke code scanner app that is on your iPhone.
There are multiple ways of pulling this up. Mark is correct that adding it to control center,
I think he, I said command center when I was reading, but I meant control center, my apologies.
So you can add it to control center and then it's there when you swipe down
from the upper right.
You can also simply search for code scanner in Spotlight on your phone, and that also does it.
Yep, it shows right up, little code scanner. And then somebody in our Discord shared,
I think it might've even been Mark, shared, he did, Mark shared a shortcut to do this as well.
And so I've put a link to the shortcut here in the show notes for you at macgeekev.com or mgg.fm slash 988.
As you can always get to any episode you want, including if you must, episode one,
but that's on you if you choose to listen to episode one.
It's a- It's entertainment value alone, Dave. Well, it's something, there's value.
Sure, sure, yeah, sure.
All right, you wanna take a- Well, the show wouldn't be this good now
if it wasn't, you know, growing pains and steps. Absolutely.
Yeah, no, you got to start somewhere. And that is good advice.
Like with anything in life, If you wait until you're ready, you will never start.
Bingo, exactly right. Yeah. All right, Pete, speaking of, you want to share Tig's quick tip?
I do. I just am angry that I didn't think of it myself because I have two separate folders
to do what he does in one.
Whenever I buy a new item, Tig writes, I get a PDF of the manual, parse if available, and
then save them to my books app.
There I open the manual and combine it with the parts and also attach a PDF of my receipt
at the end from where I bought them, but where I bought the item.
That way I have access to all my manuals, devices, and receipts if I ever need warranty repair.
Like I say, I have a manuals folder and I have a receipts folder, but good luck finding.
What a brilliant idea to put them in books and put the receipt with the manual for the item you bought.
Yeah, I love this idea, by the way. Of course, now I'm analyzing it.
Why books and not notes? It seems like notes might be another,
I don't know if it's better or worse. That's what I'm trying to sort of sort out.
I'm going to conject.
Conject, conject away. I'm going to conject that he did this before notes
was off its backside in quality.
Yeah, that's fair. Obviously it's gotten improved recently, so. Yes, yes, yes.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Cause I, cause I would do, I like, I have like you,
a user manuals folder that I store, but I've never stored the receipt.
Like what, that's brilliant.
Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. And when I lose the user manual, I hope that you too have somebody fiddling
with what I need to do, restring the weed whacker. It is so much easier to store the user manual
for a product the day that you bought it.
Cause you can go to the manufacturer, you download their PDF,
But they go away over time. They shouldn't, but they do with a lot of manufacturers, not everybody.
But yeah, storing those user manuals somewhere has saved my life.
So many times and and i will tell you why i created a user manuals folder to store things in it was because i needed a user manual that i could not find like not easily find i probably spent an hour scouring the internet for someone who had the pdf that wasn't behind some you know bs paywall or whatever and uh finally i got it and it was like all right i'm not doing this again i'm putting it in the folder and it was like wait a minute ding ding ding i have an idea yeah yeah i can put them all in there i can put them all in there, yeah.
We're putting it in books and then putting the receipt with it.
Brilliant. I like it. Well played, sir.
Yeah, yeah, that's good. That's good. All right, listener Jim brings us to our next quick tip.
He shares, he says, maybe everyone knows this. No, not everybody.
That's why we do what we do.
That's the beauty of a quick tip. If you think everybody knows this, that's what makes it a quick tip.
He says, but I navigated away from a Microsoft Teams meeting and the shared screen that was being shared in the Teams meeting
moved into picture and picture mode,
taking up the full width of half of my screen, so half the width of my screen,
and covering the thing that I needed to see when I was out of the meeting.
He says, I know you can fling it around the screen and move it from corner to corner.
He says, but instead, I used my trackpad and pinched it and the picture in picture screen shrunk
to a postage stamp size in one corner.
I already knew you can swipe it to the edge of a screen to put it in a drawer with an arrow handle.
But I wanted to share this.
Yeah, and the other thing is, and I don't have anything in picture in picture on my Mac,
so I'm gonna misremember this because I do it differently each time.
It's either the command key, the option key.
When you have picture in picture on the Mac, you can fling it to any corner you want.
You can also with either the command or the option key down,
move it to exactly where you want.
So it doesn't have to be a corner. It can just be, you know, anywhere on the edge.
And you gotta hold down the option key or the command key when you're doing it. I wanna say command.
And like, to me, command is, I am telling you something, listen to me, computer.
And Apple has mostly followed that paradigm. So I think it is command, but I might be wrong on that.
So just FYI.
So there you go. Yeah. Thank you for that. Yeah. Thank you for that, Jim. Yeah.
I really wish StreamYard would put our video picture in picture, because I would like to
have our video floating on the screen while I do the show, Pete.
I might. That'd be nice. I might send this as a.
Yeah. Are you listening StreamYard? Yeah. That's the thing. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
PC Unix in our discord has a tip, quick tip for us. That's why we're here.
It says, I long pressed on a photo in one of the medium articles I was reading and up,
popped the option to show the text in the photo.
That's pretty cool. He says, although the long press is a little funky and erratic, knowing that you can do this helps.
So yeah, he's right. If you've got a, this, you know, kind of works universally across iOS on the iPhone and iPadOS
on the iPad is, is, yeah, you just long press on the picture and boom, up comes the little
thing where you can share, save to photos, copy or show the text, and then it will just
show you the text.
So yeah. And for people that don't remember photos now will find texts, text within your photos. Yeah.
That happened to me this week. You may remember Dave, I sent you a picture of an airplane shadowing on a cloud and around
And that shadow was the rainbow, the complete, but not just the bow, the entire circle around it.
That's the, that's the phenomena. And the phenomena is called a glory.
And I was searching through my photos and I searched for the word glory and I, instead
of doing, because I thought, well, I would have tagged it with that, but I forgot it
was only tagged with aviation, but it found a headstone from Disney world haunted mansion.
You know, here lies Walt Bender, who rode to glory on a fender.
What? Yes, it found that photo by the word searching for glory in photos.
So you can find all kinds, all manner of things, if you know that there's something written
on a sign in the photo you're looking for.
That's amazing. Oh, that's, I love that. I mean, I've seen it happen,
but like finding it that way.
Yeah, man. Yeah. And I don't know, now I've mentioned it, That may be worth sharing that photo in show notes.
I don't know if you can do that or not. Yeah, well you know what, put it in the, we've created a separate Discord in our Discord
group which you can get to at MackeyCub.com.
All are welcome.
It is a fantastic place to be.
We've created in the live chat, we've created a thread for each episode so that if you want to come back and see what was being discussed by everyone who was here live when we were recording you can see that so Pete can pop that in there for sure.
Yeah. I'll share the next tip while Pete's doing that.
Porthos John shares for us a fantastic piece of advice which is install, manually install Rosetta 2 on every Mac you set up.
He says, I found this out because our deploy solution at work auto installs some printer
drivers as soon as a new machine is deployed.
By default, Apple will always require user intervention to install Rosetta 2, and many
times it won't go back to the original install.
So the quick tip is, when you get a new Apple Silicon machine, install Rosetta 2 before anything else.
You can't do it from the GUI, but there's a quick terminal command and it uses the software
update terminal command.
In the show notes at mgg.fm slash 988. I'm not going to read it here.
And and then it, you know, then you've got it. I've run into this when I've used migration
assistant to migrate to, you know, an Apple silicon machine. It could be from another
Apple silicon machine or it could be from, you know, an Intel machine or whatever.
But invariably, there's going to be an app out there that needs Rosetta 2. And it's best if
if you just have it installed, because you won't know.
I've done migration assistant and, you know, launch, you know, reboot the machine
and it's like ready to go.
It's like, how come three things aren't running? What's going on?
And then I realize, oh, I need to install Rosetta 2.
So Rosetta's for, Rosetta Stone for translating languages. Right, right.
So this is a translator for lack of a better understanding. Yeah, it lets you run Intel apps on Apple Silicon.
It is the magic that sits there. Rosetta let you run PowerPC apps on Intel.
Rosetta 2 lets you run Intel apps on Apple Silicon.
Apple, you got to quit switching. I don't know. It seems to work out for us.
Although I do. Yeah, I do like these chips. I don't want them to quit.
So much better than Intel.
Yeah. If the next... These are amazing machines. If the next chip switch, whenever Apple chooses to do that,
is as helpful and remarkable as the switch to Apple Silicon,
I want it to happen. Yeah.
Yeah. Right. The next one is quantum computing from Apple.
Yeah. Right. Right. Right. So.
Yeah. It's so this is a great tip. I love this just to make sure you've got it.
And then, you know, all is is good to go. I wonder how many apps I threw away when I switched over to the M1.
It just never occurred to me to go and look for Rosetta.
Well, it should. Your app developer needs to update this. Well, that's the thing, right?
And if they don't update it for the M1.
Yeah, but they don't have to with Rosetta, too. That's the beauty is it.
That's my point. And it never occurred to me to put on Rosetta.
I said, I wonder how many apps I got rid of and just, well, it doesn't work anymore.
I don't know in theory, the first time you launch an app that needs it, the system will ask you if
you want to install it. The problem comes from the, the like migration installs. Sometimes,
you miss that step. It happens, but you don't see it. Or like Corthos John described,
you've got some scripted installation. Again, you're not there. You don't see it. You don't,
you can't agree. And so it doesn't happen. And then it doesn't ask you again. That's,
that's where the problem is. But yeah, if you were to set up from scratch and do it all from the GUI,
and pay attention to everything, there would be that moment where you went to run something,
it would be like, hey, I need Rosetta 2 for this, are you okay with it? And you say yes,
and then you're good to go. So yeah, for most of us, it is built to happen.
With user intervention, with user approval, but automatically. It just doesn't always work that
way so yeah yeah uh all right we got some uh i think tim's might be a follow-up tip or or certainly
a, um, I thought we covered it, but maybe, maybe we haven't.
Uh, Tim's tip is, he says...
One of my Apple TVs is connected to a soundbar. I have the remote set up to adjust the volume
via infrared in the remotes and devices settings. One day I found I couldn't adjust the volume,
so naturally I thought I needed to reset it in the remotes and devices settings.
I did that. No luck. Then I took the drastic step of resetting the Apple TV. No luck again.
I don't know how I stumbled onto the eventual solution, but did you know that you can restart
the Apple TV remote for sure.
Yeah, it's, it says, and there's an Apple support article that describes how to do it.
I thought I had put the, it thought I'd put it in the notes,
but I will, I will read it to us all here.
So to restart your remote, you hold down the TV control center button
and the volume down button at the same time.
So you would have a hard time accidentally doing this. This requires two hands.
So you hold down the button with the picture of the TV that brings you to control center
and the volume down button for about five seconds or until the status light on your Apple TV turns off
and on again, then you release the buttons, wait another five to 10 seconds
for a connection loss notification to appear on your TV screen,
wait while your remote restarts
and when the connected notification reappears or appears on your screen,
then your remote has restarted and you're good to go.
I don't know when the last time was I restarted my Apple TV remote, but it's been a long time and hopefully, yeah, it's interesting
that these things have their own operating systems and sometimes they just need to be restarted.
So, thank you for that. Batteries in those last a long time.
Did I see a thread somewhere about Qi charging on the new remotes?
No, you saw, I don't think they have Qi charging in them, but you saw a thread that Apple has
finally confirmed that they are Find My capable and have always been Find My capable, but
But we don't get to use that functionality until iOS 17 comes out.
Nice. Yeah. Yeah. Like, what the heck? Why? Why? I mean, why is that the hold back?
Like, what the heck? The good news is that will free up an air tag that I have in a special case
from my Apple TV remote with the air tag attached to it.
So as as maybe maybe we need to be careful here. There was a moment in my the period of time where Lisa and I were raising our kids.
I mean, I don't know if that's ended, but earlier in that period anyway.
It's changed. That's all that certainly happened, but um Where like the kids noticed that we were?
Watching like the second season of some TV show that Lisa And I had been watching it ourselves after they went to bed
We had watched the first season together as a family and my daughter she was like what you're watch that shows back and you guys are watching it without us and,
I was like yep, and she said what else are you hiding from us and,
so The thing was my answer to that question was I will tell you everything I get to pick the order, and I'm gonna start with your conception
Do you want me to continue and her answer was no because she's smart,
We raised we raised the smart of a smart human.
Apple's been hiding the find my functionality in the Apple TV remote from us,
I don't know that we want to ask Apple. What else have you been hiding from us?
Very good point. I don't know a good point. I don't know. Maybe we do. Yeah. Yeah, but like,
I think Apple hides some stuff from us that we don't want to know they certainly hide stuff from us that they don't want us
To know but they also they also hide stuff from us that that maybe we don't want to know maybe and later in the show
we got more about other big tech hiding stuff. Yeah, that's fair. So yeah, that's right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah,
In 986 I opened up the show with the the quick tip about dragging the iPhone camera shutter button and and doing,
Quick videos and that sort of thing from the camera, which is great. And if you haven't done that yet, I highly recommend it
It's it's awesome makes life super easy
It's just quickly for people that haven't heard it, you drag the camera shutter button
up to the to the right two arrows that say you know switch from front camera to back camera.
Yes, you drag it to the right you and that automatically starts video Yep, hold down the shutter and I just drag it to the right that's okay. Sorry for the interrupt
No, that's right. And if you drag it to the left, it does burst mode. So there you go. Yes,
Which was Adrian's tip and so I jumped the gun on that one, but I have another tip for us, too.
Corey reminds us that if you drag the camera shutter button uh, you will get lower quality videos than you get with going to the video portion of the camera and selecting it.
Uh, he said, so it's a great tip, but it's worth knowing that this is probably not the way you want to record videos in general.
Um, because you're, you're, you're not gonna get like full, you know, 4K if you have it set for that or whatever.
So I wish I'd gone back and looked I didn't look and see what resolution and frame rate it gives
But yeah, it's not giving you 4096 at 60 frames a second. Correct, correct. Yeah, that's why it's able to happen so quickly, right?
You know, you notice when you switch from camera to video mode There's a there's a breath that your phone is thinking going on exactly where it rejiggers the cameras and all that stuff
So yeah, so thank you for that Corey and again And thank you, Adrian, for the tip about dragging to the left for burst mode, because that is
also important.
There is one last tip on this, though, and that comes from listener Paul, who kinda blew
my mind with this one, and I wanna make sure I get it right, so I'm gonna pull it up here.
But yeah, he says, adding to the quick tip, while holding the button to record, I'm not always stable.
And one time, I swiped up.
Down and found that it affected the zoom of the video So he says I tried combining
He says the only other way I found to to affect the zoom was to pinch the video once it had started which you can
Also do he says so I tried combining the two once the video had started. I swiped a video momentarily momentarily pressed to start
Okay, great So like in normal video mode,
I pressed and held the record button and was able to swipe up and down to one-handed zoom in and out.
While recording a video.
Very cool, Paul. I had no idea that you could do one-handed Zoom, but evidently.
I didn't either. I wonder if it actually switches to that telephoto lens itself.
Well, the way, yeah, I think the answer is, if necessary,
the phone is, as I understand it, I didn't write this stuff, folks.
As I understand it, though, it's sort of capturing from all sources all the time
and compositing the best version of what you are trying to record.
And so as you zoom, it adjusts the blend of those things.
And that's how, that's how that, yeah, that's how that works.
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All right, Pete, let's do some questions here.
We will go. We can do that. We can, we will go to listener Jim.
I think if it wants to come up here, he has a question about his wifi.
He says, what is, I am facing the daunting task of upgrading my several year old Netgear Orbi mesh router satellite.
And I have two questions.
What's the best choice of mesh system these days? I have a three floor brick home,
and penetrating the brick exterior walls to power security cameras and video doorbells is not simple.
I'm currently operating a two-station system with Orbi, but I really think that for the size
and layout of the house, a three-station system is a better option.
I'm not a power user, but I do want a system with easy-to-implement basic security measures.
Well, Jim, you're going to have to move. That's right. Next question.
That's right. Next. Yeah. What's the question? That's right. I assume you've called a realtor.
Number two, what's the easiest way to migrate to the new Wi-Fi system?
I have dozens of devices connected, including computers, phones, iPads,
Apple TVs, Rokus, light bulbs, switches, and who knows what else.
I'm assuming the devices have to be added to the new network individually,
which will be a lot of work.
So any hints on how to make that even a little bit easier and get done faster
would be greatly appreciated. I'm not sure if this matters or not, and I appreciate you adding this in,
Jim, but I am using Verizon Fios as my ISP, but I only use their router to get the signal into the
house. I have the Wi-Fi disabled on it, and I don't use it to assign IPs or manage the network.
Okay, so this is, that is an important piece of information. So I am glad that you threw it in.
And starting at the top, my still favorite mesh is Eero.
You know, they've been in the game the longest in terms of consumer-focused mesh and wireless mesh.
Yes, there are other vendors who have been doing
like wired mesh longer, but Eero, you know, they really are the ones that figured out
the way to do this for consumers.
And they're clearly committed to staying current, and they also have the benefit
of working the best in all of my tests.
Plume is up there with them.
Plumes marketing has changed a little bit and is more focused on.
I you know like their partnerships with like like I is peas like comcast and stuff there's nothing wrong with the hardware is just,
they they've changed their marketing a little bit i think they're they're sort of going b2b and letting their partners to the b2c part but i think you can still get plume stuff and i would i would recommend that to i like,
The fact that Iroh and plume are cloud managed if that's,
Something that you are not comfortable with then I want you to know that I the reason I like the cloud management is,
Because of all the machine learning that gets to happen they.
Know what works and doesn't work with every type of device You know they know that you know the galaxy 10 or whatever needs to be treated this way whereas the iPhone 14 needs to be treated
that way for handoffs and all of that stuff.
And having that knowledge constantly sort of pushed to my devices is fantastic.
They thus far, neither company has had any privacy concerns or issues, it doesn't mean that they can't,
but I know that the way they've sort of architected things,
it might be nearly impossible for that to happen.
So I feel comfortable with it, but again, I just wanted to share that.
But there is a benefit to the cloud management.
My close second or third to those two, depending on how you want to look at it,
is TP-Link's Deco line.
They are the budget-friendly choice, but you are not giving up much for saving some money there.
It's like there's a net win here. It is not cloud managed, which is probably the reason
that it's not at the top of my list.
The TP-Link DECO line is fantastic, and then from any of those,
pick the right amount of units. So Jim, in your case, it sounds like three is what you want to go
with, and that makes sense to me with what you're describing. And then also your preferred Wi-Fi
type. I wouldn't get anything less than Wi-Fi 6 these days. I'd probably lean towards 6E.
If you really want a bleeding edge yourself, Wi-Fi 7, fine. And go from there. You can always
add more units after the fact, you can't change the Wi-Fi type on the existing units you have.
But like with Eero, you could have Wi-Fi 6 units and then add a Wi-Fi 6E unit and things connected
to that would use 6E. Obviously, the other ones don't update to 6E, but yeah, there's lots out
there. And in fact, I believe it's Brian Monroe in our live chat, just put a link to the TP-Link.
BE33000, which is or the Deco BE95, which is their Wi-Fi 7 mesh system.
So but but yeah, if you if you want Wi-Fi 7, that's it. So yeah, we'll put links to all this stuff in the show notes of course.
But in terms of before you get to the second part. Yeah, I want to alert everybody.
If you've slightly tuned out, tune back in. This answer is brilliant.
Okay, seriously, it's a great answer. and I wish it had never occurred to me
when I was dealing with switching over my wifi recently.
Remember, I had the name kept logging me off my own wifi. I'd come home and I wound up having to change it.
And if I'd have done this, I think I would have solved some problems
about getting all my internet of things
off and back on the network.
And so it didn't end up working. So pay attention, folks. Thank you, Pete.
I appreciate that because I think this is the key advice advice here.
As Jim points out, as Pete points out, migrating every device over to your new Wi-Fi network is
a pain in the neck and you will forget something and the thing that even if you don't forget,
like there'll be some devices that are super difficult to do this, you'll have to download
an app that you don't have on your current phone, all of that stuff. It's an afternoon
of headaches on a good week, right? So my answer is don't. Use the same SSI, set the new system up,
whatever you get, set it up with the same SSID and password that you currently use. And then.
You just, you know, once you get the new system up, you'll have them both running next to each
other. That's fine. It's okay. Your devices will pick one. It doesn't really matter. And then,
then you'll turn off the old system and then your devices will just pick the new
one. There might still be a few IOT devices that get confused by this, the
dumb ones that aren't looking at the name but are looking at the MAC address
of the hardware. Those you will have to reset up. There's really no getting
around that. But the vast majority of your devices will just work. This is what
I do whenever I am testing a new mesh system here too.
I'll set up the new mesh system alongside the existing one and give it a different name
and just test it with my phone.
So I'm not like, you know, changing the reliance of my network to the new thing.
Test it, move around like, yeah, okay, that's cool. I might add my personal laptop to it.
Yup, okay, seems to be working.
Then I change it to the same name that we use for everything else and all the devices start to join.
And then I change the other one If I don't want to just turn it off, I change it to a different name so that it's, you know, like the old network or something and it works out great.
It's the way to do it. So that's my advice.
My sort of second piece of advice, which is probably too late for every single one of us listening, but I'll share it anyway, is choose your wifi network name and password carefully because now, you know, that you're going to live with it for the rest of your natural life.
Right? So, you know, having a Wi-Fi network name is like, you know, that's like, you know,
uh, or be one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, you know, or, or, you know, the random
names that you get from, from Netgear or whatever, you might want to change it to something that is about you. 10.
I will also say, don't necessarily make it tied to your address, right?
Because if you move houses, like Jim's going to have to do, obviously, because, you know,
his Wi-Fi doesn't work. That's what Pete said.
You want your network to make sense at your new house too. So, you know, but keeping the name the same is the key in me.
I'll offer a hint for what I do. My network name is Sharpie,
because there was a Sharpie laying on the table when I was doing it, right?
And- I had no idea. I knew about your Sharpie network. I had no idea. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
That that's why. Yeah, that's how I got it. You know, so I'm laying around.
Frequently when I'm looking for answers to, I use non-secretaries for those security questions
and answers. You know, what was your first grade teacher's name?
Yeah. You know, Panasonic 35. Well, I had a Panasonic TV in front of me.
And so, you know, put them up. Because it all goes into one password.
So no one can guess- Yes. What my mother's maiden name was.
Because I guarantee it's not my mother's maiden name. I can tell you that much.
It's something else. It's something else. Yeah, you can't guess it either.
You gotta store it in one password. No, I have to have one password.
There's no doubt about it, but that's the beauty of it.
And then the other thing I would consider, nothing wrong with it, generally speaking,
but maybe not make it personally identifiable.
Oh, yeah, yeah. Dave's or Hamilton's network, something like that.
Maybe some inanimate object or something along those lines.
Just a thought. Yeah, that's interesting. Makes it harder for people in a congested area
to know who you are to attack you. That's fair.
Yeah, I named my network Dave the Nerd years ago because I had to think of something.
It was like, well, it's not tied to an address, it's tied to me, and so it'll be everywhere I go.
But you're right that that makes it personally identifiable.
Yeah, so.
Yeah. Well, you're also not in a super congested area either.
Correct. Like an apartment building.
Yeah, but I have gotten texts from like my neighbors. In fact, I have, I got a message last year
or something from a neighbor that's probably a good 500 feet away from us, maybe a little more.
And he's like, yeah, you know, I occasionally see your network show up
and he knows it's mine because it shows up as Dave the Nerd.
Yeah, exactly. Yep. So I don't know if that's good or bad, but it was like, wow, am I really broadcasting that far?
It shouldn't, like, I don't, I don't know. I didn't think I was, but who knows?
So, yeah, yep. So hopefully there's some advice in there it's helpful for most of us.
You want to take us to Terry's Safari issues here, Pete? I will do so at this time.
Thanks. Terry wrote in and said, look, I tried Google to find a fix, but I'm stuck.
Safari will log me out of my website after I quit Safari.
And when I open a new tab and go to that website, I tried turning off prevent cross-site tracking in Safari settings, but that doesn't seem to work.
Also, someone suggested turning off the develop menu in Safari, which also didn't work.
Most suggestions about this problem are from several years ago, and it seems to have been happening for quite some time.
First time for me, though, and it started happening a few days ago, very irritating.
Any help would be greatly appreciated.
I sent some basic troubleshooting tips and then got the response back from Terry.
He said, thanks for the quick response. Problem solved. So I did a great job. Let's move on, Dave.
Move on, Dave. Amazing.
Oh, no, okay. All right, well, no, okay. Achievement unlocked.
All right, bingo. Problem solved.
But with all things computer-related, it is still something of a mystery.
I did what you asked, reset all defaults, and then turned off the develop menu,
quit Safari, and restarted the Mac, and the problem still existed.
Okay, so I didn't solve it. Shh, don't tell anyone.
Right. I decided to uninstall and reinstall Safari. Tried using the app cleaner,
didn't have the permissions on Safari to do so, and then I dragged Safari to the trash,
and it didn't seem to go into the trash, but it immediately relaunched with all the logins
and all websites working.
Some I had to re-sign in and others were already signed in. Yeah, so either trashing Safari
or first doing the develop menu thing and then trashing Safari is the solution, at least for me.
Again, thanks for the timely response and what it boils down to.
Dave's response after reading that was bizarre. I seconded that response.
Clearly he trashed some corrupted or misconfigured file in there And so I have some ideas, though. Yeah.
Um, yeah. So.
What it sounds like the what he described is That he is in or his Safari was in private browsing mode like that is what will happen you can log into things,
But it when when you quit or close the browser window like or even the tab if that's it right you're done
Thank you privacy reasons. You've asked it to do exactly asked it to do that and therefore it did it,
I'm going to assume But I could be wrong that he was not in you know perma private private browsing mode
But some people are like I've watched my wife on her iPhone.
For months, I think she was in private browsing modes You know because you get you switch to that mode and then on on your Mac
You might quit Safari sometimes on your phone you never do and so it just stays in whatever mode you're in
She's like oh this sucks. I just have to log in again I'm like wait like it and I could tell because I'm used to the way Safari looks on my phone
I'm like you're in private browsing mode like I could see the color difference or whatever it was whatever visual indicator,
And she's like oh that makes perfect sense and she had like 40 tabs open in private browsing right because that's where there was opening,
Tabs right so it's possible He was stuck in private browsing mode and that was this,
But let's presume at least for the sake of our discussion here and for troubleshooting that he was not,
What is private browsing mode private browsing is effectively a sandbox thing where it doesn't remember?
Remember your cookies or your history, right?
But let's focus on the cookies because the cookies are the the crux of this here.
Well, if we go into Safari settings privacy, there is a checkbox where we can say block all cookies.
It's possible that was checked here and was keeping Safari. Well, Safari was doing exactly what it was told do not save
any cookies, which means when you come back, you know, it'll, it'll start a session.
It's a cookie, but it's not that kind of cookie. It'll start a session identifier where the browser and the website sort of say, yep, we
know, even though there's new pages being loaded, this is all the same session.
You're logged in. You're good.
Uh, but that session cookie goes away.
When you close a window, like even in a normal browsing window, even with everything set
right, session cookies go away.
So his browser in order for you to stay logged in has to store a real cookie, a persistent cookie.
And of course, if you've got that box checked, it cannot.
So, I think it was that or something like that.
Interesting. I didn't wander down that path because I assumed that when you block all cookies, you really break stuff.
No, it would break this. As far as how the website works. It breaks this, absolutely.
But I would think other things wouldn't work either. But now, yeah, now I see how you get a different, a session cookie.
A session cookie. Yeah, the session cookie still happens.
Yeah, because you can go into private browsing mode and log into Amazon or like I use it constantly because I don't have,
profiles yet in in Safari, we talked about that, right? That's coming in the fall.
But yeah, I'll use it all the time if it's like I need to go into like our Amazon affiliate account,
which is different from my regular Amazon account and I don't want to log in,
or if I have to log into a Google account that I can't add to my list that's already logged in.
It's just like, well, fire up private browsing. I have one password,
like it's not that big of a deal to log in. And so I log in and I'm good to go.
The other thing, and I have, I don't experience this with the consistency that some of you do,
but we've had this conversation.
If you have the develop menu open and you go to the, I want to see what the web inspector,
which is done with command option I, to see the way the page is built.
Sometimes, and for some people, all the times are sometimes,
it will wipe out your login cookies for many, if not all of your websites.
I have not experienced this with the degree that some people have, but some people are like,
oh yeah, every time I open the web inspector, I know that it's going to blow away my login cookies,
my persistent cookies for that site.
And I'm going to have to log in again the next time I relaunch Safari.
So bear in mind that even with Safari- So you're saying I shouldn't have done that
on the show notes page. I don't know, Pete.
You're about to find out. Yeah, man, yeah, I love that. This is what this I like I I hope I.
Think you will I hope you take this the right way, but this is one of the things
I love about you is you you will shoot first and ask questions later with with tech stuff on your computer and sometimes it,
It really burns you and and sometimes it burns both of us simultaneously.
This is true.
I'm not afraid to break stuff. You're not afraid to break stuff. That's it. I love it.
It's great. And I always learn things, you know, I'll mention something offhandedly folks, right?
Like, you know, like, oh yeah, you know, there's the Safari web inspector and I won't add in,
but you know, obviously you would only use that if you knew the implications thereof
and how it might work and break things.
I mean, the Safari web inspector doesn't really break things, but it's a- Next time you might want to say, before you open.
Before you, right. And then three days later Pete will text me or call me and be like Dave,
I don't know what I did
But none of this stuff works, and I have to go back through my memory like what did I share with Pete that might have?
Been out of context Taken down this path. It's like oh. Hey. Did you open web inspector? It's like yeah?
It's like oh okay, but then like stuff comes into the show for that so it's great. Yeah, we know that's good, man,
I I I mean the whole reason.
We started including you in the show was because of this, right? Like you, you're,
curious about the stuff, you want to learn, you ask questions. You know, before
we had the live chat, you were the real-time representative of a listener.
You were the guy, right? Yeah, exactly. I know a guy, and now I am the guy. And Pete's the guy.
No, it's, I think it makes the show a lot better. Yeah, yeah, it's great. Thank you.
Yeah, all right. We have Gopher tech in our.
Discord which I've mentioned a few times Says my sister is receiving pop-up notifications on her Mac and wants to stop them,
she ran malware bytes and that it didn't help so I asked for some screenshots of these things and.
They look pretty much. I am almost certain that these are notifications from a website
You know, you can websites can ask you to let you notify them and,
let them notify you rather and And usually those would be notifications you'd want to get but this website,
uses an icon that looks a whole lot like a system settings icon and and the notifications that come through are,
your iCloud is being hacked.
Click here to remove the virus.
Mac OS is infected click here to turn on antivirus, right like and and of course, that's so rude, right?
And when you click that notification, it brings you to the website. The problem is you've granted permission for that notification So it's not malware,
It's just like like social engineering where it's Conway Oh, yeah.
Play your show title, Dave. It's ConWare. Yes, beware ConWare.
You've been conned. You've been conned. There's a Great Bitter Pill song called Conned.
Beware the ConWare. I love it. What's the company that used to do that?
They were horrible about that. It was the other one. It was like, and they were pretty good software.
It was about cleaning up your Mac and fixing it and all that, but their advertising was terrible. MacKeeper.
MacKeeper's advertising was terrible. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. It's terrible. Yeah. Yeah, I've told the story on this show about why they did that there they were.
To really distill it down overnight someone,
Posted to like 800,000 forums on the internet because I don't know where else it would have been I didn't need to add that,
Posted to like 800,000 forums like slamming Mackeeper. They were doing great up till that point,
It just so happened that was at the same day that one of their competition launched, CleanMyMac.
No one has told me that it was the folks at one that did the other, but I mean
They the two companies were started together the person who started clean my Mac
Worked for I believe the person who started Mac keeper and then then this happened
So like I'm just sharing facts with a coinky-dink. Maybe a coincidence. I don't know and,
It really like trashed Mac keepers reputation and they they were in a corner and they were like well at this point
We can't our reputation can't go down
And so they thought we just need to advertise the crap out of this thing Anyway, we can and so they did all the pop under and like all the things that they swore
They would never do because it was terrible they're like well now we can do them because our rip isn't getting any worse and,
And so they did so interesting. Yeah, that's that's that story. However back to this back to the conware. Yes the
To turn off these notifications, go into Safari, Settings, Websites, Notifications, and look down the list.
You'll see, if you're like me, you'll have a long list there of websites.
Some of them will be listed as Deny, and others will be listed as Allow.
These are websites where you've already been asked for your decision and chosen one way or another.
In this case, look at the ones that are listed for allow and you're in good shape.
That's it. That's it. Yeah. Notify me. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I don't want your notifications.
I'll go get the information. Yeah. Right. Yeah, exactly. But that's the, that's,
that's the key is, is take a look in there and safari. And what a crappy thing to do though,
to make it look like system information. I know. Yeah. I wish these people would use their powers
for good. Right. Right. Like they consider it good for them. If you're smart enough to do that,
do something that, but this is a short-term play, right?
Like why not provide long-term value for people? I don't know.
That's the, that's my thing.
So the upper, you want to take us to Todd?
I can do so at this time. Sure. Todd's got a question about eSims.
Here we go.
So Todd writes in, where did it go? I'm getting, where did I?
I'll ask the question, you answer it.
How about we do that? Yeah. Sure. So Todd is traveling somewhere.
It almost doesn't matter and is wondering needs it out of the country,
out of the U S and is going to be using an E-sim for data on his phone.
The question is, can an E-sim be used for can the data from an E-sim be used as a personal.
Hotspot? Can you tether your computer or other devices to it?
Or is that not allowed with the eSIM?
Right. And so he asked about E-SIMDB specifically, E-S-I-M, Delta Bravo.
Which is just a search engine for E-SIMs. For finding a deal to get your data.
It's the right way to go, by the way. Yeah, yeah. And so I told him, I said, look, if this is where you wind up, then yes,
it took me to MobiMatter, which is just one of the deals you can find out there for
for international data.
And right there on MobiMatter's site, let's say that three times fast,
can I use tethering, mobile hotspot tethering on my eSIM?
And they say, yes, mobile hotspot is featured and enabled in all of our products,
except if explicitly mentioned in the product details.
And so that's the thing, go to that one and look and search for either hotspot or tethering,
and it's most certainly gonna be there somewhere in the description.
And the reason I couldn't find it, It was on the second page of the PDF because
mail prints not in the order.
Yes, sir. That it occurred, but in reverse. So my apologies for stumbling.
No, it works totally fine. I'm just looking for it to go.
Oh yeah, look on the second page. Oh, what happened? What happened?
Yeah, no, I have, I have bought a lot of eSIMs over the last couple of years and I'm
about to buy one probably today because we're going to Montreal for a few days with our niece.
And I've found that all of them, I mean with an eSIM, you're just buying data, and so they don't care how you use it up.
When you use it up, what's going to happen? You're going to need to buy more data from them.
So every one of them that I've used has been perfectly happy to let me use it as a hotspot.
The only, there was one, I didn't buy it, but there was one that.
In Europe, I almost bought, it was going to be like 13 gigs for 10 days, which was perfect for us and way more data than I needed, but the price was right.
And but then as I looked in, it was like, OK, well, five gigs is for like any type of data.
And then eight gigs was for like WhatsApp and messaging apps.
And I was like, that's weird.
Now, I mean, I wouldn't use five gigs traveling for 10 days in Europe anyway.
So like, it was almost like, Oh, this is kind of like interesting.
Cause at least that stuff just doesn't count against my five is really the way I
was looking at it. But, and that only the five gigs was accessible to the hotspot, not the full 13.
But, um, I, but I, I, you know, it was like that, that made sense.
Cause that one had, you know, it was compartmentalized. So, um, but yeah, otherwise, yeah, every one of them has been like, yeah.
I used a hotspot in the car yesterday to prep this. as we were moving our son into his new apartment.
He's about two hours away on the other side of the state.
And so we drove a van over with some stuff for him and then drove the van back.
And- Is he living way out West by Vermont? By Vermont, that's right.
Yeah, as my friends in Texas used to pronounce it, Vermont, you live near Vermont.
But I was like, man, if I don't prep the show this morning, like while we're driving,
I'm gonna be up till two in the morning doing it.
And I was like, Lisa, do you mind taking the first shift? She's like, no, no problem.
So I tethered to my phone, just using Mint Mobile.
I didn't have an eSIM, you know, and I was on for about an hour and a half prepping the show
and I used just shy of 400 megs and was, I did put it, I will share this.
I put, once I connected to my hotspot on my phone, I went on my Mac into Wi-Fi settings and into the detail,
like I went into system settings, Wi-Fi,
I chose the details button next to my hotspot that I was already connected to.
And at that point, I was able to check the box for low data modes. Low data mode, yep.
But, when I, I disconnected later and then reconnected, low data mode was turned off again.
And so I had, I don't know if I have to do it every time, but I certainly had to do it the second time.
So bear that in mind. And it did not matter that I already had low data mode
on on my phone, like the Mac doesn't know to inherit that setting.
So you have to go do it on your Mac. I think, I mean, I didn't AB test this, but.
Well, you have to do it on your phone too if you don't wanna use up your data quickly.
Like for instance, you know, my wife and son are flying to Europe tonight.
I'm gonna meet them in Europe tomorrow.
And so, because I'm not there to set up an eSIM form, I went, all right, I'll just suck it up
and get the Mint Mobile, which works out to $200 a gigabyte.
Yeah, don't do that, folks. So I got them basically, I gave them each 20 bucks,
100 megabytes, but I was very clear to say,
put your phone in the low data mode when you turn it on in Europe,
because if you don't, your 100 megabytes is gonna be gone in a snap.
Yep, it's probably gonna be gone in a snap anyway, Pete, but well, there's that, but yeah,
it's just so that mail isn't checking in the background and all that stuff.
If, you know, whatever's in the foreground is what you're, what's using data.
So yes, right, right. Yeah, that basically, that's right.
But they wanted to be able to text me and say,
yeah, we're here, we're there, we're moving. You know, we got train tickets.
We didn't get train tickets. What happened?
So I'm sorry, I hit the table, but that's what was, yeah. So, but it's certainly better to go to eSIM DB
and get your data and put an eSIM on your phone than not, because it's just so much cheaper.
And that brings me to one other quick question now. I've got the 12, Dave.
It looks like I can add a second eSIM, even though I have a physical SIM and an eSIM in my phone.
Is it fooling me? Nope, you are correct. So I've just went through this with my niece, who is on Mint.
She had, when she moved to Mint, we just did it as an eSIM, because it was obviously the easiest thing.
So she has a, she has nothing in the sim tray, uh, but has an e-sim for Mint.
And then I knew we were going to be going to Canada, and she's, she's, um,
gonna be in Greece in the fall, and obviously gonna use an e-sim for that.
We could add, and, and did, a second e-sim for her Canada, for what, you know, for our week in Canada here that we've got coming up.
But with the 12, you can only have one eSIM active at a time. Okay.
Okay, so the 12 and earlier, in terms of the ones that support eSIMs,
and not every iPhone does, I think it's the XR and forward, but for the phones that support eSIMs that have a physical SIM tray,
the 12 and earlier, one, if you can have one eSIM and one physical SIM active.
That's the only way to have two SIMs active.
The 13 has a SIM tray and an eSIM capability.
With the 13, you can have two eSIMs active or one eSIM and one, whatchamacallit.
But you can load, one physical SIM, but you can load up many eSIMs.
Apple says it's about 10.
They're a little less specific than I would like them to be in some of the marketing I've seen about it.
But yeah, you can load up multiple eSIMs, but on your phone, Pete, the 12,
you can only have one active.
So for that reason, we moved our niece over. We paid the 10 bucks to get a SIM for Mint,
even though I had a drawer full of Mint, unused Mint SIMs. They're like, yeah, none of those are gonna work.
So we paid the 10 bucks.
Mint sent us yet another new SIM, and we moved her Mint plan over to the physical SIM in that phone,
and that way she can use them both at the same time if she needs to and makes life easier.
Another piece of advice I will give, hearing you tell your story, I believe I have buffered myself against finding myself in that position.
Because I know how it goes. I'm the nerd in the house, and so I'm the one that does all these nerdy little one-off things for people on their devices.
Like, you're not going to need to know how to do this.
With the whole eSIM thing, I realized they might need to know how to do this.
So, I have never set up an eSIM for anyone in my family.
I'll buy it and I'll send it to their phone and then have them install it so that if I
find myself in the position you're in, I can say, oh, I'm just going to send you some eSIMs,
turn these on when you get to Europe.
You've done it four times before and, you know, there's a good chance they'll succeed. Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, that's a good point. And maybe we can do it when we get there.
But yeah, I was gonna say why not do it when you get there? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, and and then one other quick thing
And just so you know, if you're on Mint, I'm the family head there in my Mint family.
I can't put.
Money on my wife's phone Without logging into her phone account,
What I was I was on with chat support last night, right?
They're like, all right, if you buy it, we'll transfer it over to her phone
But that's not how it works and we don't do that generally in yeah,
And so I managed to get on to one account I created an account for my wife and then I had him transfer them one to my son. Sure
They both got it. But but yeah, they need to have some autonomy You can't do everything for them.
You can't. No, that's right. Yeah.
No, it's, it's better to, uh, better to, you know, teach someone to fish than it is
to give them a fish. Right. Like the whole.
Right. Exactly. Yep. So, all right. Uh, we've got a few minutes left.
I want to jump us to cool stuff. Found Pete.
Please, please, please. I want to take it.
Take us where you want to go, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, Steve go.
All right. Steve, Steve, Steve wrote in. and said, according to Apple, no, that was me.
It seems to having a few issues with my Mac legally specs attached.
I emailed previously some disk repair issues.
The SSD ended up doing a nuke and pave. Okay, I'm on to the next one.
Unsure if this issue is related, but I've noticed over the past few months,
my Mac is hot to the touch. Yeah, slow down at this point.
My Mac is hot to the touch whilst it's sleeping.
This only seems to happen when it's plugged into the power supply.
And I don't remember this ever being the case on previous Macs.
I was convinced the machine wasn't actually sleeping, was something forcing it to stay awake,
but a terminal command found that OS X daily would suggest that it is in fact sleeping properly.
I also tried an SMC reset the other day, however, it's hard to tell when it actually was reset or not.
Is there any way to tell if an SMC reset worked or is there anything else you could suggest
that's causing it to heat up and it's sleep?
So, and that's when I wrote, And don't feel the need to rush through this, Pete.
We're going to give this, we gave everything the time it deserves and it's fine. Right.
So I wrote back, I answered the second question first. According to apple.stackexchange.com,
an SMC or PRAM reset will invoke the boot chime to activate it or become louder.
Also try the verbose mode, command V, and look for the reset message.
And now on to the second question about it being hot. All right.
If Steve's name was Molly, I'd say this.
You in danger, girl.
But his name is not Molly. Steve, I could be wrong and I hope I am.
I think there's something wrong, real wrong with your battery.
Yeah, I'm concerned that that you're the system,
the logic that's causing the battery to charge or not charge or whatever is in there, there's
either something physically wrong with the battery or something wrong with the system that manages
battery charging. And I'm concerned you're looking at a potential fire hazard. Get that thing to
Apple or a certified Apple repair specialist and get it looked at. It should not be getting hot.
And when these batteries go hot, they burn down houses and airliners and all kinds of things.
So, so please get that looked at. Yeah, I agree.
It shouldn't like it will warm up when it's charging for sure.
But if it's hot to the touch and there's no external reason for I mean,
if you wrap it in a blanket and put it on charge, it's going to get and it's going to heat up.
It's going to heat up.
Right. But assuming that there is no obvious reason for that to be happening.
I agree and resetting the SMC is absolutely the first thing I would do and and I'd reset the PRAM as well,
Assuming it's it's an Intel Mac and I think it is an Intel Mac. Yeah, he said it was yeah.
Doing that and then seeing if that behavior continues would be the first step but after that man,
Yeah I'd like it get it looked at if it's if it's if it's still hot to the touch that hot to the touch is is
is that's pretty darn hot.
So yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, no, that's good. I'm totally happy to take the time with that one.
It's great.
I like taking the time with all of these. I just, we run out.
Cause you know, I just, that's one. I just went, that's, that's time sensitive.
It is time sensitive. Absolutely. Yep.
Yep. We were talking about, um, Chi mice. My wife was saying it's weird that Apple doesn't have.
That's the Chi thing I was asking about. Have a- have a chi- Yeah, my wife was like, this is stupid, that there's-
Apple doesn't have a- like a- a mouse that charges on a chi-pad.
Why- like, that seems obvious to me. I was like, oh yeah.
Are there any? And in Discord, uh, listener John said, as long as you don't mind the money,
you can get the Logitech PowerPlay G, I believe is what it's called.
The Logitech G PowerPlay system.
Uh, it works with their gaming mice and select others, and the entire mouse pad becomes your charging pad. So thank you for sharing that, John.
If anybody else knows of any Qi chargeable mice, that would also be interesting. I think
We would all appreciate hearing about that.
It's feedback at MackeyCab.com.
Whoa, whoa, feedback at MacGeekGab.com? That's what I said, feedback at MacGeekGab.com. Yeah.
All right. Yep. Well, that was my confusion earlier when I was asking about Qi
remotes. It was the Qi mouse. I knew I had seen something about a Qi charging device.
Yeah. Qi mouse. Well, while we're on the subject of Qi stuff, I had an opportunity to check out
the Zenz Liberty, which is a kind of like an air.
It's like the, the, uh, the air power pad that never made it to our worlds.
And Amazon's got it for 169 bucks, at least as of the time that we're recording.
It's got 16 coils in it. And it's just, it's a, you know, it's a big pad, maybe, I don't know,
eight inches by four inches or something.
And you just put your stuff down on your phone, your AirPods, whatever.
And it charges, they've got a little plug-in for an Apple watch that sort of sits up in behind it.
If, so you can't just lay your watch on it like Apple promised with AirPower,
but of course AirPower never could exist. So you just hang your watch on this thing
and on a little watch puck and you're good to go.
And what I like about it, other than the fact that it works,
is that you can get it in with a black surface or you can get it with a clear surface.
And even see the coils through it, which I kind of like. I mean, it's nerdy, right?
But I mean, hey, hi, have we met?
I'm Dave, I'm a nerd. It's like a watch with a clear face. You can watch the gears going on.
You watch the gears. Of course, if you see things moving in there or if you see sparks happening,
unplug it and walk away.
But I have not, like, I don't mean to, I don't want to say something untrue about this product.
It's worked fine for me.
But if you see things moving in there They are not supposed to unlike a watch where you you know, you get the that's a good idea Apple
Are you listening? That's a good idea for an Apple watch face. I think,
one Well, I know there's one that you know, like your phone you can see where things are in the you know
The right battery and there's no movement be cool to have fo gears moving in the rights. I would like that
I don't know how many other people with a lot of people would like it Let's be let's be frank about it, but people would think there would be those folks out there
It'd be like, oh no, the Apple watch is mechanical.
You can see the thing.
Okay. Yeah, right there. Right through the glass. That's right.
Yeah, right through the glass. You know what? Sure, why not?
You believe me, don't you? Yeah.
Speaking of seeing things, PC Unix in our discord shared this idea of using stick on
battery powered motion sensor lights inside of a variety of things like, you know, inside
of cabinets and a bunch of other things.
What do you say? He says, I put motion sensing lights in all our kitchen and bathroom cabinets.
Everyone who has opened one since then immediately loves having them.
I recharge them monthly whether they need it or not. And there's tons of these available on Amazon.
I was looking, you know, I found a six-pack for 12 bucks. Like, there's just tons of them out there.
And you just stick them in. Some of these will say that, you know, the battery is going to last for three months.
They use like three AAAs are the ones that I found.
And you can buy rechargeable triple A's. So yeah, that would be kind of the thing
is just look at what the battery types are and of course the form factor.
But yeah, I'm thinking about this in our kitchen cabinets and I think it might be nice.
I insured that one, I think several months back. That was the little light bar that was motion sensing.
Yes. I got it at CES. I think it was the Yee light.
Yeah, exactly.
Yep. The cool thing about that one, and I don't see it on this one or not,
is I actually glue double-sided tape, whatever it is, A little metal piece.
To the top of the, to the bottom of the shelf. And that way it magnetically sticks on.
So that's how it's easy to pull off and charge. It looks like these might be the same. Yeah.
Yeah. They magnetically hold themselves. Yeah. Yeah. It's so nice to have that.
I think that's right. Yeah, yeah. I think you're right.
Yep. Yep. For, just looking at the time, for the HomeKit folks here,
the Eve Weather is a great little sensor. You put it outside.
It's 70 bucks, put it outside. It gives you your, it's essentially a wifi connected weather station
for temperature, humidity, barometric pressure.
And using the historical data that it pulls in in the Eve app, it could start even doing
some sort of predictions and things like that, which is pretty cool.
It's IPX4 water resistant, completely wireless.
I've now got one outside.
One nice part about it is in addition to sending all the data to your HomeKit system,
it also has a display on it. So you get to see the temperature and humidity
while you're outside, which is kind of nice.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
It's pretty good. So yeah. Another argument for HomeKit. It is another argument for HomeKit.
Yeah, now I want to figure out, can I get the data from that and like use it in my non-HomeKit stuff?
I will, we'll see. We'll see if I can get there.
One last one. Speaking of the non-homekit stuff, listener John, I believe, it might've been Porthos John,
I gotta look in the notes here, but listener John, I have it listed as John,
Suggested. Yeah, it was, oh no. Yeah. It was Porthos John.
He says, uh, the brilliant, uh, smart home control system with switches and screens is,
it links with HomeKit, but also talks to things that are not HomeKit. And so you would use these,
uh, to control your devices. He says it links with Sonos. Um, it's the only in-wall wired switch,
uh, John says, he says, uh, it's the only in-wall wired switch that I found where you can set the
the switch part to be virtual for Hue equipment.
For example, I can set the switch to be always on for power and then let the actual slider or switch
control the attached bulbs via Hue command instead of actually cutting power,
which of course takes the Hue bulb off of wifi.
So I'd never heard of this brilliant system before, but if I might be forgiven, it seems kind of brilliant.
So, yeah, like I need to learn more about this, if anybody out there has used it,
let us know either feedback at MackeyCab.com or join MackeyCab.com slash discord.
Cause like this seems like the right kind of switches to put in where it's already working with,
like I said, HomeKit, Sonos, the A-Lady, the Google thing, smart things,
Hue, Schlage, Ring, Kwikset, Ecobee, Resideo, Honeywell, Genie.
Like they've got a bunch of partners here, so.
Yeah. Do you see a price point on that, Dave? You know, I was just going to jump to this.
They've got a bundle.
Two switches, and a panel starter bundle. Those are not free.
No, they're not free. But what they do. But what they, but it's like, it's like 560 bucks,
or 530 bucks for a one switch and a starter panel.
So you get the one switch panel starter bundle for $530 has three switches and like a panel
that's a display that you can kind of like,
It's almost like an iPhone on the wall in a sense.
I don't mean to say you're putting your phone on the wall, but it's that size of a display.
It sort of looks like that and then you can touch the various things throughout the home. Yeah.
So let's so it's really like it's not, you know, then you could add more dimmer switches. I presume.
Yeah, you can you can yep dimmer switch dimmer switch itself is 70 bucks a three-pack of dimmer switches is a hundred
A 10 pack is 600 bucks.
So, you know, you get one of these, you got to have the controller and then, you know,
these things sort of all feed from it.
So I think of the controller as a hub that lives on the wall and you can actually interact with.
So like not, not, not, it's certainly not inexpensive, but for what you're getting, it seems like a pretty.
Nice, pretty cool thing. Yeah, I'm, I'm kind of, I'm, I want to learn more about this stuff.
While we're here i i might as well talk about the next thing cuz i used it in the car yesterday you know we rented this van from uhaul it won't surprise you that this did not have car play.
There's a lot of cars out there without car play the van was actually kinda nice but the.
It didn't have CarPlay, but I knew we needed to have like directions and stuff and we wanted to charge our phones because we were
Going to be there all day and like doing stuff and so I had the iOttie
Velux mini MagSafe air vent mount for car for the car and,
it's fantastic I it's a.
MagSafe connector You know mount that fits on the vent so it's the vent right to MagSafe and
And then it plugs into usbc so i i your power delivery and so i i put a little power delivery thing in the power outlet on the.
On the van and it was good to go charged well lisa's phone while she was driving and i was computing and then my phone on the way home and forty five bucks it just popped right in if your car doesn't have.
Well, if you don't have to plug in for CarPlay, which would sort of negate the need for something
like this, but if you need to see your screen, if you want to magsafe in the car, I loved
this thing yesterday. This was, it was great.
So nice. More cool stuff found. Yeah, yeah, yeah. something that I will travel with.
Just in case i wind up renting a car without carplay like having this would be you know what a built-in way
Because when i don't have carplay in a rental car which they all should buy it by now
But but some of them just don't when i don't have carplay in a rental car i need to see my phone screen like i'm gonna
Use it if i'm in if i'm renting a car i'm in a city i don't know as well as home,
I'm gonna be using it for maps And i need to be able to see my screen this solves all my problems it lets me see the phone screen it lets me
charge the phone, like all of that stuff.
So yeah, I'm, I'm, I'm a fan. Yeah.
Yep. So, and that's the IOTI, I O T T I E Velox V E L O X mini.
Of course, there's a link in the show notes. Cause that's how we do it here.
We try to, you know, we try to help out.
That's what I got, Pete. You got anything else? David sounds like you invited the band this week.
I did invite the band. I always invite the band. Yeah. Yeah.
You know, it's fine. It's fine. It is nice.
Compressing them are you what's that? You aren't compressing them this time. No. I'm not compressing him this I had the wrong.
Pre-show yeah, yeah It wasn't compression. I was running him through that I had the the music running through the the isotope voice thing that that,
Does great on voice it obviously doesn't do great on music Yeah, you know it could like there is a thing there's a switch where you can set it for spoken word versus music
It just was set for spoken word. I think I used it last week when we played that audio comment
It was a mess audio wise like the sound quality was a mess And so I kicked that in quick to try and I left it on so oh well. It's gone now,
Thanks for hanging out with us folks Thanks for sending in all your quick tips and cool stuff found and everything
It's the interaction is like it's what keeps this show home. We love it. We love it. We love it,
it thanks to cash fly for providing all the bandwidth to get the show from us to,
you make sure you follow us on Mastodon it's gotten fun over there I put links
in the show notes because there's no way to just say we're like at Mac geek ab at
mstdn dot social like I could say that and it's true but you don't want to have to remember that just go to the show let's click on the links once you
find the link to one of us there's me Pete and in the show once you find the
link we cross link to the others and so it makes the life easy and you can just
you know, you're good to go.
But yeah, it's some fun over there. So come hang out with us.
I'm still new to Masternode. I need to get a good client.
Do you have a good client? I like Mona, the one I talked about in the show.
Mona, I'll put a link in the show notes. Right, right, right, yep.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure.
Yes.
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Pete!
There's got to be something. Don't get caught! Slash MGG!
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Music.