It's time for Mac Geek, Gavin. I will bring us our quick tip of the week. When you are
doing a screenshot, you can use command shift three. But if you use command shift four,
command shift three gets you the whole screen. Command shift five gets you the whole new
interface that was brought to us recently. But command shift three still works. So does
command shift four. What's cool about command shift four is it brings up the crosshairs
where you can draw on the screen and pick an area and that that's the area that will
be screenshot. However, if you do command shift 4 before you start drawing, hit the spacebar,
that will change it from crosshairs into a camera and that camera as you float your mouse over
different windows will let you pick an entire window from which you want to grab a screenshot,
click it, boom, you've got your screenshot of that window isolated from the rest of the system
with a little bit of a drop shadow. It's perfect. More tips like this.
Plus your questions answered today on Mac geek app, nine 94 for Monday, August 7th, 2023.
Music.
Greetings folks, and welcome to Mac Geek Gab, the show where we take quick tips like that
from us and from you.
We also take the questions you send into feedback at MacGeekGab.com plus some cool stuff found.
We try to answer your questions. We share the quick tips and the cool stuff found.
The goal is we put them together into an agenda such that we each have the best opportunity
to learn at least five new things every single time we get together.
Sponsors for this episode include piavpn.com slash mgg, where you can save 82% off your
VPN service plus for free months and ZocDoc.com slash MGG where you can sign up for free and
find and book a great doctor today.
We'll talk more in depth about each of those for now here back here finally in Durham,
New Hampshire. I'm Dave Hamilton.
And here in Lee, New Hampshire, it's pilot Pete. Good to be back.
It's time to get into the rhythm of things again after a couple of weeks off.
I think this is the long, I know we did an ep, we released an episode last week, of course
it was the one that we recorded at MaxTalk, and I'm glad that we had that, and did that,
and it was releasable, and we've heard from so many of you that it actually worked.
I was worried that, you know, it was an atypical episode for us, so I wasn't sure how it was
going to be to listen to. Obviously we did some, quite a bit of audio processing on it, and even, yes, some editing.
I think I spent more time, you know, listening to the show than I did listening to the show.
Putting that episode together post producing that episode then i do recording and producing
an episode like we do today and i need to knock on wood because otherwise i'll have to spend like
four hours post producing this one because of the karma gods but yeah no it was like i woke up early
last friday morning in my hotel room in new york and probably spent four or five hours um you know
pulling all that together but but i'm glad we did it and i'm glad it paid off uh it so many of you
you've written in and, uh, and said how, how you did enjoy listening to it, which is great.
We'll talk more about max stock in a little bit, but, um, but because of that, I think this is
the longest break in 18 years that I've taken.
From doing Mac key cap, although I know that's not true, it feels like it, but I've taken more
than two weeks off in the past.
I don't know. It just felt like a long break.
It's the longest I've done it. You certainly paid the price for catching up.
I did. Right? With all the emails.
Yeah. Prepping yesterday. Discord.
Yeah. Yeah. But that's fine. It's the price of time, but really, like I have, I don't, I enjoy it.
It was more that I paid the price with all of the work that I have to do because I was traveling.
And so I had, this week was just a lot of catching up with everything, including our
listener questions in to feedback at mackeycab.com.
Of course.
Wait, where did they send them? Feedback at mackeycab.com. That's what I've said.
It's feedback at mackeycab.com. Yeah, man. Okay.
If you say so, they can also get them there in a discord at mackeycab.com slash discord.
Come join us live during the show.
And live in between shows too. Yeah. There's a lot of help to be had in there. Yeah.
It's a, it's a great community. It's really, and, and yeah, yeah.
I mean, Mac stock, we get to see a, a, a slice of the Mac e-cab community there, and it's
equally as, as wonderful.
So yeah, but we do have, so we have a bunch of quick tips to go through.
This is half of what was in the queue.
So let's see what we can do. Donna brings us our next one.
And reminds us how valuable it is to long press on our iPhones,
long press on, I would say, all of your apps,
but certainly your frequently used apps, the ones that you're using and making use of most of the time,
because most apps, if you long press on them, will give you options to get directly to specific features,
and it might just be the features that you want.
Donna shared example, she has a folder of her dine and shop apps and and she sent us
screenshots of a lot of these things and it's just different apps that she uses for dining
and shopping and a lot of them when you long press you get to you know jump to the reward
section or viewing nearby locations or ordering uh you know with a um you know a mail app that
that she uses, you can get to the inbox of things, all kinds of, but very specific to that app.
Whoa. It's crazy. Yeah, so. So I was doing apps here that don't have particular functions,
but here's a good example.
Dunkin' Rewards, press and hold that, and it comes up, scan and pay.
You don't have to open the app and wait for it to boot and.
Bingo. Boom.
Press and hold it, bang, zoom. Yeah, right. And that's the kind of thing that's super fast,
is if like, and my guess is the Starbucks app would do the same thing.
I don't shop at Starbucks, because yeah, it's not my thing, but.
Donna. Donna. Nice. Yup. Chicago, Tom.
Tells us or reminds us and that's the beauty of quick tips is you know the things that we all do,
Automatically that when someone else sees it,
That doesn't do those things goes. Oh my gosh, right like that And and I feel like doing this
Show has trained me to be more aware of those things and my guess is in fact
I know based on the fact that we have more quick tips than we can know what to do with it's trained all of us,
To be more aware of those things and you folks are sending them in too, and it's great
So Chicago, Tom says, I've heard a lot of hand wringing over the organization
of the new system settings app in Ventura.
I kind of laugh whenever I hear this, he says, because it's been many years
since I spent much time digging through the menus in the settings app for my
Apple equipment, no matter which version of the relevant OS I am using.
Did you know that you can use spotlight to search for anything in the settings
app and the entry will pop right to the top of the spotlight list, then you simply press
enter and it opens the settings app to that preference pane.
For someone like me, he says, who is constantly adding keyboard shortcuts, this is a wonderful
convenience. I think that even veteran Apple users who know that this is the case, forget to use
this feature. I, you are a hundred percent right.
And this does work, so long as you have this selected in your spotlight settings,
because you get to pick what's in spotlight.
So he's right. If you, by default, you know, command space bar,
bring up spotlight, type in a sound, you will see the sound settings pane appear.
You hit enter and boom, it brings you right to sound. Of course, we talked a few weeks ago.
Another way to get to sound is the option and the volume keys.
But if you want to get to, it doesn't matter. They're all there.
Energy saver, you know, accessibility, notifications, network, they all will show up.
So I've got a question when you're done with your thought. Okay. Along that.
Yeah, what I wanted to share is.
System preferences or system settings allows you, Spotlight allows you to configure
what appears in Spotlight. By default, it's everything.
However, if you go into system settings, system preferences and go into Spotlight,
there is a search results column tab and you can choose which things will and won't appear,
which categories will and won't appear.
And one of those is your system settings.
So you can make sure that that's there, but you can also turn things off.
Like if you don't want your calendar events and reminders showing up in Spotlight searches,
remove that and it will clean up those results for you, making Spotlight even more valuable.
So that's the bonus quick tip.
What's your question, Pete? Okay, so for example, you talk about keyboard system settings.
Sure. When I go to Spotlight and I start typing keyboard, I have keyboard clean tool app,
then keyboard system settings, then keyboard maestro.
Is it the frequency with which you select something that moves it to the top of that list?
Or is there a way to get my system settings to the top of that list?
I believe it is decided by the OS and we don't get to pick.
Figures. Yeah, I'm looking here, I'm still, of course, on Monterey here in the studio,
but in Monterey's spotlight preference pane, you can't drag the order of categories.
You can choose which ones of here. I always assumed it was the frequency with which I chose.
I believe that is correct.
Yeah. If I'm always choosing keyboard cleaner over keyboard system settings, then that's going
to come to the top. Yes. I believe that is correct.
Yeah. Okay. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah. Yeah. But yeah, I have experienced that too.
I don't know. I don't know if it's just the frequency.
I have a feeling there are multiple factors, different heuristics that Apple's using to
pull it all together. a Tuesday, whether it's an odd month, those, those important things.
Yes.
Well, but that might actually not be so far from the truth.
If you have calendar events in there, it might prioritize those that are coming up. Right.
So, and, and a joke becomes reality. Yeah.
Yes. Speaking of jokes that become reality, you had a, uh, a lot of people like to make
jokes about chat GPT, but you had it solved the problem for you, didn't it? I did.
So everybody just sit down and relax. About 30 minutes, I'll be done with this
story. Just kidding. This is the quick tip. So yesterday morning I published my show Cool, and...
I noticed, oh, look, I've got two plugins that need updating.
I'm like, OK, update them. You know, when I hit the little button and they updated.
And the next thing I got was this website has experienced a critical error.
So you're talking about in WordPress? Yes, I'm in WordPress.
Yep. For your so there I was, there I was. Yes. OK. So, yeah.
So you broke your website by updating plugins.
Yes, I did.
Yep. And no matter what I did now, when I went to my website,
there was no way to log in, no way to do anything except get this little error screen. I'm like,
ah, crud. So fortunately, I have FTP access. And so I FTP'd in there and I looked at it and it's,
I think it said go to the forums or something. So I went to the WordPress forums and it's like,
there's a lot of reading to be done there. They're not good.
So not in this amount of time. That's right. Yeah. Yes. Yeah. I got stuff to do.
Yep. Also your website is now down, not just for you, but for everyone.
The world, and I've got a brand new show out, so there I was is, there it went.
There it went, so there it went.
So, so now what to do? So I went, oh, I got a brilliant idea. I'm gonna call Dave.
Now it's 7.15 in the morning. Next brilliant idea.
I mean, you could have called Dave. My phone would have been on Do Not Disturb,
because 7.15 in the morning is the middle of the night for me.
All right on so Chad GPT. Hey, I got this error when I updated some plugins. What should I do?
Oh, well, you should go in via FTP. Go to your plugins directory. Find it this way. Disable all
the plugins or the plugins that you suspect. And I guessed right on the first time, which was two. I asked which one.
And I renamed the directory and it allowed me to go back and log in and then I said,
okay, good. Now, how do I restore it?
And it went, follow these steps and restore to yesterday's good, boom, done.
Under 10 minutes, I was back up and running.
Thank you, ChatGPT. So you shared that story with me and even said, I don't know if we should mention this
in the show. I'm like, oh my gosh, yes. Like this is exactly the benefit of ChatGPT.
And here's why- Private tech support, baby. That's why I know we are good to mention it in the show.
Because you're right, most people aren't going to find themselves in your exact scenario.
Although I would venture to say you're not the only one here that needs to do these kinds of things.
But after that, I needed to go and fix the problem that many of you have noticed over
the last few weeks, that the ads have been super freaking loud, right?
And it's because of a workflow change that I did the way we produced the show.
I used to record the ads and then record like a video.
Now I don't record the video. I just do the ad pre-record the ads. I edit them.
And then I merge them in as to a movie with a, a single pane.
And I use FFmpeg to do that.
And I realized, Oh, okay. If those ads are coming in super loud, it's because my, my old workflow was
helping to reduce the volume of them by about 50% and the new one isn't doing
anything with the volume, it's just taking the audio file and essentially playing it
through StreamYard into the show.
And so I thought, wait a minute, Pete just used ChatGPT to solve his problem, let me
use ChatGPT to solve mine.
So I just asked ChatGPT, hey, I'm using the command line FFmpeg, which by the way, several
weeks ago, it, ChatGPT helped me build to begin with, because I don't have all the switches memorized.
And I asked it, I'm like, hey, I want to reduce the volume on a thing, uh, you know, on a,
on this workflow. How do I do it?
And it was like, sure. Here's how I would reduce it. 50%.
Of course it was like, make sure to change that number to whatever you want.
I'm like, no, actually that's the number I want, believe it or not. And that was it.
It just works. So hopefully today, uh, when we talk about, uh, you know, PIA VPN and ZocDoc, you'll hear
it at an appropriate volume that matches the rest of the show.
So yeah. Chat GPT to the rescue. saves, not only, you put it in the, the title you put in the agenda was Chat GPT Saves the
Show.
Not only did it save your show, but it saved our show here too.
Right? Yep. Private tech support.
It really, and it's, the nice part about it as tech support is even when it gets it wrong.
It's, um, you can tell him, yeah, here's how it didn't work or here's the error I got.
It goes, oh yeah, okay, well then this is what's happening or exactly because it is iterative.
It knows, you know, what it's doing and, uh, and what it, what it has done. So yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yeah. Although I do have a fist shake for them too, and I haven't gotten to it real, just real
quickly is, uh, when I was using Mac GPT all of a sudden on August 1st, it says, Hey, you
You used your quota, you're done. I was like, wait a minute, it just paid today.
You gotta put your API key in, yeah. Oh, maybe that's it, I need to regenerate a new one. Okay, all right.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yep. I also used it last night. I was helping one of the local theaters,
the Rochester Opera House, with tuning the sound for their production of SpongeBob.
And they use this mixer, the Midas M32. It's a pretty common mixer.
It's the same as the Behringer X32.
And it's a fine mixer and very flexible, but that means that it's, uh, you know,
there's a lot of features and there's many things about this that I don't know.
And one of them was routing.
And I was like, ah, let me look this up. And so I started on my phone.
I was working with the house engineer and I'm like, we can figure this out.
And so I started on my phone, like typing in, like to Google what I would search for him.
Like, wait a minute, hang on. And so I just went to the chat GPT up on my phone.
I typed in how do I on the m32 do what I need to do and it was like oh great go to this
Same settings pane do this do this it was like oh, holy crap like there. It is it's right there.
So yeah, this is like the internet all over again It is like had a way to look something up well now if we only had a way to,
Make something work that we just looked up. It's true. It's true. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,
Greg back to quick tips reminds us as a little bit of a PSA says I was texting in the messages app on my phone and,
Wanted to move the you know you can hit the little apps icon so you can get all of the apps that you have he says
I wanted to move the third app
That I had there which is the one I use the most often I wanted to move that all the way to the left
And I was surprised that I could not
because the photos app and the app store icon app that are in the first and second position
appear to be permanently in those positions. And I had no idea that this was the case.
And so when I got your email, Greg, I went to check it. And sure enough, Greg, you are correct.
You cannot reorder the first two left most apps in the iMessage or messages app, a little list there.
Those are permanent. The rest can be reordered. So maybe there's two quick tips here.
There's Greg's PSA about the first two can't be reordered.
And then there is the quick tip about, but you can reorder the rest of them.
And that's a good thing to know. I didn't know that either. Right, exactly. Yep. Bye.
So yeah, good stuff Stuff. Oh, yeah, well then Gary wrote in to us He says hey mgg crew
So I did my weekly restart of my Mac my iMac m1
Running Ventura with Ventura 13.4.1 and I noticed that clean my Mac 10 or X,
Sorry clean my Mac X menu bar was displaying a notification with the message time to juice up,
And say Gary's magic keyboard is running low on battery and showed I had 19% battery left,
I did not even know or was aware that this feature existed,
When did Mac paw add that this is an interesting and good surprise to start my Sunday
I think it Apple should have done this instead of waiting till your battery is at 2%,
Fair and saying device battery is very low Right just thought I'd sure this interesting little find and not sure if it'd be considered a quick tip or cool stuff found
So it's kind of both because it's a quick tip with a cool stuff now, which is clean my Mac 10 or X
Yeah, in either case. Enjoy. Keep up the great work says Gary. Thanks, Gary,
Yeah, that's um, I agree that Apple's battery notifications are not Early enough. You're right and as a little bit of a PSA.
They have, they have changed, they have removed our ability to see the battery life left in our air tags.
We used to be able to see those, we used to be able to see where it was.
Was it full? Was it half? Was it a quarter?
Now you just get a notification when it needs to be changed.
And I think you can ask the S lady what it is though, and she'll tell you.
Oh, is that right? I believe so.
Oh, interesting. During the ad, I will.
Okay. Try that. I'll go. I'll try. Yeah, okay.
All right. Yeah, but that almost, yeah, the notification is way too late.
It almost reminds me of the, for those old enough to remember the early 70s Bill Cosby
routine about driving around in the bump signs, you know, he said, you want to be helpful,
you should say, put a sign up that said, you just hit a bump.
Yeah, right, right, yeah, exactly, right, yeah, there's the bump sign, yeah, yes.
So my advice to all of us is to keep a stock of CR2032 lithium 3 volt coin batteries around
because when Apple gives you the warning that your AirTag battery is low, it's time to change it.
They're not kidding. Yeah. Yeah. I got one. like at the airport while we were, when we like,
the day we were leaving for our like trip to Italy was like a 10 day trip where we were back in January.
And it was like, are you kidding me? Like, I didn't bring one of these with?
Yeah. And it was fine.
It did last the trip, but like, I knew that it was time.
So yeah. Quick tip on those batteries. I think it's the EverReady brand.
They put any of them, Duracell does it, that have the bitter stuff on it
so that kids won't swallow them like pills. Yeah.
That also prevents making a good contact. So if you take a little file and file.
Just scratch lightly the edge of the battery where when you put it into your air tag,
those little metal things touch.
Yep. It will allow that battery to be a successful replacement because I put in a brand new battery
and the air tag wouldn't respond. It was dead.
And I went on the internet and said, oh yeah, if you got to scrape off the bitter taste.
And once that's gone, it'll make good contact. And it did, it worked like a champ. That's all.
Okay. Yeah, yeah. Crazy, crazy.
On the road to Maxtok, and I mean literally in my rental car on the road,
driving from Chicago North to Woodstock, I had the pleasure of bringing Allison and Steve Sheridan with me.
And so it was about an hour drive or 50 minute drive or something like that and we were chitchatting and you know we're nerdy people and so we were having essentially this kind of discussion and allison of course does the no silica cast over pod feet.
And allison said hey i got a question for you she says i was trying to sync a new book to my kindle.
And I can't do it with the hotel Wi-Fi because it, you know, requires the captive portal and the Kindle doesn't do that the right way, or at least she couldn't get it to do that, you know, the right way.
We had already checked out of the hotel that we were in Chicago, we're moving to Maxtox, so it didn't... there was no hotel Wi-Fi to, like, try that and troubleshoot with.
She's like, and I can't seem to get it to connect to my phone's hotspot.
And I was like, well, that's weird. Okay. And of course, I'm driving, right?
So like, there's no looking up of things for me, at least not safely, and I chose to be safely.
Let me look. Yeah, let me look. Right, exactly.
And so, you know, we're just chit-chatting about it. And Alison says, hey, I got it.
And I was like, really?
And she was like, yeah. I turned on the in, in,
when you go into enable the hotspot on your iPhone,
there is a setting there that allows you to toggle called maximize compatibility.
And this is in settings and personal hotspot on your phone.
And as soon as she toggled it on, boom, the Kindle could see it.
And so we were speculating as to what that did.
And my speculation, which was dead wrong, was that it changed it from ad hoc mode
to infrastructure mode, which is the way a wifi access point can advertise its capabilities.
I thought, well, maybe the Kindle ignores ad hoc things and only associates with infrastructure things.
I'm like, that would be kind of a weird choice for Amazon to make, but who knows?
That's not it.
What it is, is Maximize Compatibility.
Shares the hotspot over both the 5 gigahertz and 2.4 gigahertz radios Whereas without that on it shares it only over the 5 gigahertz radio, of course
The Kindle has a 2.4 gigahertz only radio in it. And so here was the solution
So if you want to turn on your phone's 2.4 gigahertz radio as its hotspot It's on for connecting to Wi-Fi networks if it has to use that of course, but for sharing
It's only on when you turn on maximize compatibility.
It will burn more battery according to Apple, which is why they default it to off.
But yeah, there you go. Talk about stumbling off across the right answer, right?
I love that stuff. Love, love, love that stuff. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. All right. What else we got? Well, Todd wrote in and he said my younger. This is brilliant.
Just brilliant. Todd writes in. This is my younger son rented this truck and he showed us a
a picture of his U-Haul truck and a trailer yesterday. And he says, we had some challenges lining up the hitch
and the trailer the first time.
Finally got smart and started a FaceTime call with him. I stood at the back and held my phone
showing the trailer hitch and the trailer.
And he used his phone as a backup camera. Worked like a charm. Dude.
I love this. Yeah. The only thing, folks, if you're gonna do that stuff,
obviously put safety in mind. Don't stand between the trailer and the truck.
Right. You know, that kind of stuff. But that is, Yep.
I've, I just, you know, I've used it to film things, you know,
like behind the boiler when I needed a serial number, you know, that kind of stuff.
Yeah, yeah. Yeah. As a FaceTime call to line something up.
I love it.
Now my son and I, we did that recently with something where I needed to be in one part of the house and he was in the other part
and we used FaceTime.
I think it was with the boiler to like, I was, you know, adjusting the water pressure in one spot
and he was, you know, reading the gauge in another spot.
And I'm like, wait, we can talk about this, but let's turn on our, you turn on your camera
so I can see the gauge too. And maybe I can catch it before, you know, there's the sun.
Yeah, it was the same kind of thing.
But I don't know that I would have thought to use it for a backup camera. That's really smart.
Yeah. Also think about the fact that, Learn how much of a lag you have on any given FaceTime call if you're trying to time things because you just hit a bump
It's you just hit a bump,
That's really what it is. That's the title of the episode, isn't it? Yeah, right. Yeah.
Yeah, yeah, I thought it was going to be so there it went but you just hit a bump. I like that
Well, it seems to be their theme.
Yeah, just hit a bump is a theme. It is a theme.
Alright, in our discord, my face is too big, that's the person's name, not, uh, not, uh,
I don't know, yeah, yeah, yeah, I can't back up, uh, said, uh, you mentioned in episode
991 about having some of your finder woes, uh, having the finder show you exactly what
you want, uh, depending on the context is super helpful.
I found the keyboard shortcuts to change the finder view modes very helpful.
Command 1 through 4 will switch through the view modes respectively.
I'll generally be jumping between the list and columns mode depending on the context.
A few other finder shortcuts I've found helpful. Command shift period will toggle showing hidden files.
And command control 1 through 7 will adjust how the finder sorts your files.
So command, this is all in the finder, command 1 through 4 changes your view mode between
list and column and icons and whatever the other one is and then command shift period
shows or it toggles whether you're seeing hidden files in the finder and you can if
you're a Unix nerd you can remember that hidden files in Unix start with a period so that's
how you remember that one and then command control and one through seven will adjust
the sort of your Finder files.
I stumbled on another one accidentally just the other day.
I use ListView most of the time in the Finder. I hit Command plus and my ListView went from taking up
one line per item to having the height of two lines. The icon on the left got bigger.
There was no additional information other than a larger icon,
but it just, it adjusted the line spacing, if you will,
to be double in list view and then command, and I say it's command plus, I'm sure, excuse me,
I'm sure that would work, but it really, I'm just hitting command equals without,
you don't need the shift key, command equals, which has the plus above it.
Enlarges it, command minus shortens it.
What's fascinating to me is when you do this in the finder on both Monterey and Ventura.
I see the... let me make sure I'm saying this correctly... Yeah, I see the View menu flash when I hit Command-Plus.
And that tells me that it's using a command that I could choose manually from the View menu.
Except, there is no command with plus or minus in the View menu that is visible by me.
And so I have no idea,
What it's doing when it's flashing that view menu, but certainly it works It seems like it's a hidden command in the view menu and even the option key doesn't make it appear so,
So I've got a quick question in that yeah, man Do you remember what you were trying to do when you accidentally discovered this yeah? I I didn't have the fine
That's a great question Wow.
I didn't have the fight. I didn't realize I had the finder up front I I had it up front on one, you know, I'm one monitor on my other monitor
I had I believe it was a PDF up and I wanted to zoom in large I was trying to zoom in on the PDF. So yes, there's the bonus quick tip that Pete you were digging for is,
What else does command plus or command equals and minus do and in I believe it would work in preview
I'm sure I was in PDF expert
But, but I know that it works in preview command equals and minus or command plus and minus will zoom or, or out zoom, uh, your, your, your thing.
So yes, that, that is what I was trying to do. Thank you for asking that.
That that's the hidden tip.
That's the thing. That's the beauty of these quick tips. Like here I am talking about this thing.
Didn't even dawn on me to share that by the way, here's a hidden quick tip.
So that's why you have the local moron on the show. Hey, We never say that Pete.
All right speaking of things that were accidentally discovered
listener Glenn Shares with us. He says I just Accidentally discovered that on Mac OS if you quickly move your cursor back and forth several times the mouse
pointer on the screen will grow very large temporarily. This is handy for large monitors and older eyes or multiple monitors when you can't find
the tiny little mouse arrow. This reminds me of vigorously moving an old
old rollerball mouse around on a mouse pad.
And listener Ben pointed out that this has been there since 2015 when macOS El Capitan
was released. You can disable this feature in accessibility. You can also increase the size
of your mouse cursor by default, which can also be really handy if you have a large monitor setup.
But yeah, go shake your mouse and you'll see it get larger. It's pretty amazing.
All right, look, we all know that our ISPs know literally everything we do online, right? It's true.
We might as well be handing our laptop to strangers and letting them open up our browsing history.
This is why having a VPN is awesome, because it protects you when you're doing all the
things that you're doing.
And it's also great for when you travel, all of those things.
And I want to tell you about not only one of the best VPNs out there, but the one that
I choose and the one that I even pay for, PIA.
PIA stands for Private Internet Access, and they take privacy seriously.
Not only does PIA hide your IP address, it encrypts your entire connection.
And this protects your internet activity from everyone, your ISP if you're at home, network
admins if you're at work, the folks who run the whatever network at like the coffee shop
or the hotel or any of that stuff. And PIA is the world's transparent VPN.
They never record or store user data and their no logs policy has even been verified in court.
PIA is available for all platforms across all your devices and just one membership can protect up to 10
of your devices at the same time.
Right now, go to piavpn.com slash mgg to get a whopping 83% off your VPN service
plus four free months with a two-year plan.
It comes out to around two bucks a month.
You can't beat that.
And there's a 30-day money back guarantee. That's piavpn.com slash mgg for 83% off private internet access.
Piavpn.com slash mgg.
Get the VPN that I use and our thanks to PIA for sponsoring this episode.
You know that feeling you get when you finally find the thing you've been searching for on the internet
after spending hours researching and reading thousands of reviews,
you find it, this thing, whatever it is,
maybe you need like sparkly shoes to go to a fish concert like we were just at or maybe you need
some kind of hat to stand out right you like it it checks all your boxes and it has five stars oh
it arrives in like 48 hours too so why is it that you can get the most random wonderfully reviewed
thing from around the world in just two days but if you want to see a good doctor it can take
forever to get an appointment not to mention how do you know if they're even good thankfully there
There is a way and it's called ZocDoc,
our sponsor for today.
A place to find and book great doctors who actually have amazing reviews,
many with appointments available within 24 hours.
ZocDoc is a free app where you can find amazing doctors and book appointments online.
We're talking about booking appointments with thousands of top rated patient reviewed doctors and specialists.
You can filter specifically for ones who take your insurance are located near you and treat almost any condition
you're searching for.
They all have verified reviews from actual real patients, not bots.
I've used ZocDoc and you can too. It's really amazing and it works so well.
So go to zocdoc.com slash MGG and download the ZocDoc app for free.
Then, find and book a top-rated doctor today.
That's zocdoc.com slash mgg.
Zocdoc.com slash mgg. And our thanks to Zocdoc for sponsoring this episode.
And hey, while I've got you here, I have another podcast recommendation for you.
Leo Laporte, who we all know, is the host of a show called This Week in Tech,
probably one of the longest running tech news shows in the world.
They started This Week in Tech in 2005, just like we did here with Matt Gietgeb.
And in the 18 years since, They've covered every major tech story with some of the biggest names,
the smartest people covering technology every week.
It's always a different round table, a different panel of experts talking about the week's tech news,
and they have a lot of fun while they're doing it, while we're doing it,
because I join them sometimes.
It's very informative, and you'll go away after every episode
knowing a lot more about what's happening
in the world around you.
They deal with some of the biggest issues in the world today,
not just computing and Windows and Mac and Linux, but AI and Twitter and X and search and social and on and on and on.
Of course, it's all for you every week, this week in tech, find out more by going to twit.tv and subscribing to this week in tech.
If you would please, and our thanks to Leo and the team for doing this swap with us.
So, Siri is a little less than cooperative. Sorry, I just might have activated a bunch of people's equipment.
She will not tell me anything but the battery level on my phone.
And maybe I'm just asking it wrong. I asked, you know, what's the level on my air tag for my wallet?
What's the battery level for my wallet?
And everything kept coming back to the same number. And I thought, oh, good. I'm at eighty nine percent.
Oh, no, that's actually the number on my phone.
So, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, someone has a better way to ask her. I don't.
Yeah, I don't, I, yeah, I, I don't think it's doable. So just go to Amazon and order some, some CR2032 batteries.
I need to order more. I just used my last one recently.
So I'll, I'll put a link in the show notes to whatever I find and order.
And, and we'll, you know, we'll go from there.
So, right. And one other real thing quickly, Porthos John in discord put something up about,
But for cleaning battery terminals, he said his dad taught him to use erasers, pencil
erasers. Pencil erasers.
Sure. Yeah. That does a nice job of cleaning off the terminal if your terminals aren't good there.
I don't think that'll take the bitter off the batteries to make them work, but I don't know.
I haven't. MN Searcher, also in Discord, says that rubbing alcohol will remove that bitter coating off of batteries.
That's probably safer to do that than. Scratching it with metal.
Scratching it. I would think so. And what could go wrong? You know, you see you.
I, um. You short circuit the battery. I had an issue when we were in Philadelphia.
So I want to talk about Max talk in a minute. We were, we were at Max talk.
And then from there, I went to Philadelphia and actually met Lisa sort of on the way.
We drove down to Philly, saw a couple of fish concerts in Philly, and then went to New York and saw a few more
fish concerts before we came home. and.
One day in Philly, we decided to do a food tour. Because those are fun. We like food.
We like food tours in different cities. It was something to do during the day.
So we did this. It poured. I mean, like it poured like you read about.
But really, it only poured while we were walking the 20 minutes from our Airbnb to the starting point of the food tour and then walking back.
It rained during our food tour, but it did not pour. But it was fine.
I, you know, if you've never walked around in a city in a pouring rainstorm,
I highly recommend it. And we had our raincoats, so like, you know, we were protected-ish.
Like, they only protect you so much, as you know. Right.
But it really, I love the experience of walking through a city in the pouring rain. I don't know why.
Maybe it's just, maybe I'm weird. Our whole family has come to really like it.
I mean, we don't choose to do it, but you find yourself in these scenarios, and then you do it, and then it's like, actually, that was really kind of nice.
So, we had that experience. It was fine. We went back to take a nap or whatever before the fish shows, and I plugged my phone in, and I woke up from my nap with an alert on my phone saying,
It like it was like an emergency alert and it said cannot charge because the lightning connector got wet.
You need to wait several hours In order for it to dry out and I was like, okay
Well, I mean that holds up like it checks out the way I put my phone in my pocket
It is like top down in my pocket So if there was water that got in it would have been right there on the lightning connector
It would not have dripped out. So okay fine,
So, whatever, like I had enough battery, it was fine, we went to the show, came back from the show, plugged it in, same thing.
Like, okay, this is not good. So, I found, I dug in my bag, I keep a, like a MagSafe battery pack in there, that was fully charged, so I used that to charge my phone overnight, then of course I just charged it the next day, you know, on the stand, and so I was like, that was fine.
But then the next day, a full 24 hours later, no, like still bad and I'm like, uh-oh, this is a problem.
So, the first thing I did was schedule the Genius Bar appointment for when we got to New York,
because I knew that I'd be able to get a Genius Bar appointment in Manhattan.
Yeah. Hoping that I wouldn't need to use it. And.
I started thinking, I'm like, okay, well, wait a minute, you know,
lint gets into my lightning connector on the regular, and I will dig it out.
I usually use, like, a little, like, toothpick or something to dig it out.
I didn't have the right toothpicks with- I had toothpicks with me,
but they were too thick to, like, get all the way down.
So, I did the thing you're not supposed to do, and this is why I was reminded of this.
Uh, I used a paperclip.
Do not do this. It- I- My phone survived this, but, you know,
Putting metal into your lightning connector, especially if there's water in there
Like I don't know that this was the smartest thing for me to have done and I dug out a ton of lint
And I was like, okay, this is gonna solve the problem,
Same message like okay Well, maybe maybe now it actually needs to dry like now that I've gotten the lint out of there because the lint was holding water
You know, etc, etc
So I got the lint out but it still didn't help and then I went on YouTube. Oh my god
How do I fix this and somebody was like, Oh,
take some cotton and like mash it in there and really pack it in, then dig it out, leave it
in for like a few minutes and then dig it out.
I'm like, okay, I can do that. So I didn't have cotton, but I had like, you.
Know, like toilet paper or whatever, which is really thin and I could mash in there. Really absorbent.
Yeah. Very absorbent. Exactly. Right. And so I shoved, I mashed that in there.
I left it in for five minutes and then I used my handy paperclip of course, to actually, I
didn't even use a paperclip.
I think I was using a safety pin because I didn't even have a paper clip with me like I was just doing all the
wrong things I already had a Janie Sparr appointment like I had already kind of punted on this and,
I still have the same phone folks because digging out that cotton problem was solved immediately,
So whatever sensor was wet.
Needed to like dry out and maybe after pulling the lint out it would have eventually dried
But putting the dry cotton in there or the dried toilet paper in there really kind of did it
But that will teach me to make sure in my travel kit I keep a plastic something,
That will fit into a lightning port to clean it out because I don't want to be in the position where I am convincing myself,
Again that it's okay to use Safety pin to do that could go wrong. Well, I would have tried another method. All right,
To go into the bathroom and pull the hotel hair dryer out and put some, you know, blow
some warm air up in there for a little while.
Yeah, yeah. Maybe, maybe not. Maybe. Yeah. I could have tried that.
There was a, there was a hair dryer in our Airbnb. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
But that wouldn't have gotten the lint out. So it's a good thing you got that out anyway.
It's just a lot of fun.
Correct. Now take that safety pin and go for your belly button, Dave. Wait, what?
It's fun. It's just fun. It's just a lot of fun. It's just fun. It's just fun.
It's just fun. It's just fun. It's just a lot of fun. It's just fun.
Get all the lint out. Oh, no, Pete. No.
It's just fun. It's just fun. It's just fun. It's just fun. It's just fun.
You know what? I'll do your belly button at next year's Mack Stock when we're together there.
How's that sound? Hey, you're a nice-looking guy, Dave, with a hard pass.
It's just fun. It's just fun.
It's just fun. It's just fun. It's just fun. It's just fun. It's just fun.
So we, I did want to share- Oh boy, this show just took a horrible turn.
Let's get out of here.
I did want to share, you know, I shared a little bit about Mack Stock and the
It's just fun. It's just fun.
Vibe at Mac Stock in the intro to the episode that we recorded there, when I realized I
had to introduce our guests because I didn't introduce our guests on stage, at least not
initially, because everybody already knew who everybody was.
Mac Stock isn't a conference where the attendees and the speakers are separated from each other
and the only time you see a speaker is when they are introduced on a stage that you can't
be on and you know all of that.
That is not the vibe at Mac Stock at all.
Everybody is equal, everyone is, you know, we're all, we all eat breakfast and lunch and dinner together for the most part.
We are together, like, all the, even as a speaker, and I spoke twice at MaxTalk, we did our session, you know, that you heard,
and then I also did a session about Synology and network storage and, like, fun things that you can do with that.
But other than when I was on stage presenting, I was sitting in the crowd like everyone else,
learning from the other presenters and learning from the other attendees.
They really did a great job with the schedule this year. I thought, Pete, where they had
a 15 minute break between each session. That was nice.
Is for us to like decompress. Of course, if you needed to get water,
you need to pee or whatever, that was fine. But really those just became.
Ask questions of the presenter and wait a minute or other people like that you know every sessions would would you know sort of spur a conversation and then you know, and then you would just chit-chat and I.
I Mentioned how I was really behind on work this week. I Knew that I would have some pockets of availability to work,
you know while I was with Lisa in Philly in New York because,
she needed to get some work done too.
And so we had a couple of mornings where I knew we were just going to carve out and get some work done.
And that was fine.
I had planned, I had assumed that I would also be able to, that by the time I got to Philly,
I would be caught up on everything at that point because I'll be at Mac stock.
I'll be alone in a hotel room. I have plenty of time to get work done.
I couldn't have been more wrong from Thursday afternoon when I got there and went to Barry's barbecue to Monday morning when I woke up at the crack of dawn to drive us to the airport.
I had zero time to myself and that really speaks to how immersive Mac stock is I mean we would like I said we did breakfast lunch and dinner and the conference to the conference provide with your conference ticket included lunch.
You would get breakfast, most of us would get breakfast at the hotel.
Most of us would also choose to just go to the same place for dinner.
And then we would go back to the hotel lobby after dinner. And tear that place up.
And tear that place up until we were just utterly exhausted.
And I would go to my room and I'd be asleep like barely by the time I like opened my door to my room.
And it was just repeat for three days.
Which is awesome. Like I love that. Now, when I got to Philly, the first thing I said to Lisa
was I kind of already, like our first morning here, I sort of need time.
She's like, actually me too. She's like, I didn't really get anything done this weekend at home.
I'm like, perfect. Cause- Let's work.
Yeah, let's work. And we were both so much happier to do that.
And then, and then, like I said, we did our food tour in the pouring rain.
It was perfect weather in the morning while we were working in our hotel, of course.
But, um.
But yeah, so I don't know, this was your first Mac Stock, Pete.
It was, yeah. So I did manage to attend Barry's Barbecue at his home many, many years ago.
The first one. I want to say probably 20. Was it the first one? Okay.
Yeah, so it was like nine years ago, I think. Yeah, so I happened to be on a layover in Chicago and was literally down the street
from O'Hare Airport, got in an Uber with my first officer and we came down and I think
We guested with Gaz and Guy and had a great time,
but that was only the after hours or pre-hours social time.
So I didn't get to go to Macstock itself.
This was my first Macstock.
I didn't know what to expect in many ways. And I gotta tell you, like you put it before,
it's like family and getting there, except family that treats each other nicely.
We found, or I found that the intimate environment that we were in, there were, I think, 75 people,
certainly less than 100 at most.
And I found it to be really enlightening and a warm welcome from everybody
to get to meet so many people that are listeners
and shows that I listen to, and I actually found some new shows to listen to.
I am just, I don't know what to say except thank you to the warm welcome to everybody for the warm welcome
I received being there.
And it was fun making new friends and seeing old friends and being on stage with everybody.
What a warm welcome we got as a Mac Geek Gap Caucus.
And like you said, there was, it was equals. People from the audience were up on stage asking questions
and interacting with us. It was.
Yeah, the best, one of my favorite parts about Mac Stock, and of course this is true everywhere in life,
But, you know, it is especially.
Now it's true at Mac stock, but it's also like welcomed at Mac stock is no one is the smartest person in the room or at the very least I am never the smartest person in the room.
There is always something to learn from the people on all sides of you, you know, just turn to the person to your left, your right, the person in front of you, the person behind you doesn't matter if they're on stage or not, they have something to teach me and I, you know, I'd love that part of Mac stock.
It really is. And let me add this for those. And you and I both know there were a couple of people there that were clearly
the smartest people in the room.
Yes. You never made to feel that way. No. Like there's none of that.
Yeah. Yeah. There were some very smart people there. This is true. Yeah.
Yeah. There was no question. I was not the smartest person in the room.
That, that was the, which is, I love, like, I love being able to learn from
people and especially when somebody teaches me something, I didn't expect that person to teach me. I love that, especially so.
Right. Yeah, I know it's great. And one last thing you commented on this, and I had no comparison
because it was my first expo, was the presentations.
They were all outstanding. I was just blown away by the fact that not one of them was substandard or,
well, OK, you know, that didn't get that everyone was as good as or better than the next.
It was amazing to see these presentations come off and go, I'm just going, wow. I agree.
And, you know, there was a nice.
Accident that happened. The venue that they did this at, the Wi-Fi there worked great for your iPhone,
and would not hand out an IP address to laptops.
I don't think this was intentional, but by golly, I would make it intentional next time.
And this is part of the- the fact that I- part of the reason why I didn't get any work done while I was there, because
I couldn't just sort of half check out of somebody else's presentation, there was no quote-unquote multitasking, exactly.
Because I couldn't, I mean I could use my laptop but not on the wifi, certainly if I had an emergency I could have like connected to my phone and tethered and all of that stuff.
But I didn't and so I didn't.
And it meant that I had a much easier time engaging with the presenters and my guess is that was true for most of us there.
Uh, and I really, what a, what a wonderful serendipitous
scenario that, that could easily be.
And I'm sure for some was Mike Potter, if you're listening, make it happen again,
make it happen again. Well, or just remind people, like remember how great it was when we didn't have our laptops.
I mean, it's easy enough to just leave it.
Like my laptop was away most of the time, you know? Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. Unless I was taking notes on it. I tried to take notes on it, but that's the other thing.
He handed out books, little notebooks with the package.
And I wound up, uh, I wound up writing a bunch of notes in that.
I used it. It was great. I do have a travel related quick tip.
I mentioned that I drove Alison and Steve, uh, in my rental car to max stock.
And then of course you and I took the rental car back to the airport, uh,
with Roger Harmon, who did all the recording for the, uh, caucus episode and.
I did not you know you get into the rental car and there's like the little toll thing on the on the on the windshield and you can flip that open and then by flipping it open yeah you pay but you pay a per diem that's usually like thirteen bucks a day just for the privilege of using it and then whatever the tolls cost you.
You don't have to do that because most of the easy pass or whatever automated tolls will do pay by plate.
And they will bill your rental car company and then your rental car company will bill you with with their surcharge built-in,
But you don't have to do that because what I do is I take a picture of my rental cars license plate,
And I make sure I have that in my phone and then I put a reminder in my phone for the day
I get back to log in to whatever state's toll system is there and.
Most of these toll systems will allow you to register a car to your account for a
a period of time and it's specifically built for rental cars and of course, Illinois does this.
So I registered the car I had for the period of time that I had it and put in my credit card
and it was like, yeah, we don't have any tolls for you yet. I'm like, that's fine, you will,
because it takes their system a little time to catch up.
And just last night I got an email from the system. It was like, your card was charged and I looked
and it was like, oh yeah, yeah, yeah, okay.
So I paid like the $2.50 or whatever it was instead of $13 a day times four days, plus $2.50,
plus probably another $5 of surcharges from the rental car agency.
So that's my travel quick tip for rental cars. Always do that.
I've been doing that for years. I did that in 2019 at MaxDoc,
and I've done it in other cities.
So like it works, every state I've tried it in in the United States over the last,
certainly five years and probably more would be the way to do that.
You just use their pay by plate system and you should be fine.
The other thing, Pete, I ran into, when we got to New York,
our wifi in our Airbnb was awesome in Philly, which is great.
We got to New York, we stayed at the Residence Inn in Times Square.
We checked in. What's that? Yeah, I've been there. Yeah, it's fine.
It's an old hotel, but it's in a great location, especially for concerts at Madison Square Garden
and theater shows up on Broadway. It was kind of halfway in between,
four blocks to either place. Perfect.
I made a rookie mistake Pete. We got to the room, we brought all our luggage in, parked the car.
Unpacked everything. I'm sorry for your wallet. Yep. Yeah, oh yeah. New York. Yeah, yeah. Use
ParkWiz. It's as much as the room. It was, yeah, it was more. But use ParkWiz to find parking in
New York ahead of time. You will save money. But so we got there and you know it was a,
as a residence in it has like a fridge and a little cooktop and stuff so we brought a lot of
the groceries that we had from philly there so that we'd have like little snacks for when we
got back late after the shows and you know those sorts of things was great had a little more room
which was nice we unpacked everything the last thing i did was set up my laptop and that's when
i realized the wi-fi in our room was awful and i got on with their tech support uh who was useless
They're like, oh, well, you're not connecting to the right network. I'm like, nope. This is the only network that's here and,
I looked in Wi-Fi Explorer and I saw that I had a very weak connection to a
2.4 gigahertz access point and I could see the 5 gigahertz access point for that.
Network the Marriott Bonvoy network or whatever it is, but it had like a 1% signal strength
So I wasn't going to attach to it Oh, yeah
And I'm like, all right, so I took my laptop and I went out in the hallway and I found on the other side of the floor was the one access point they have on the floor there.
And I'm like, are you freaking kidding me?
This sucks. Like, I need to get some work done. I needed to download, you know, all the audio from the Mac stock thing.
Like, there was no way this is gonna, I could like, oh my gosh, what have I done?
So I go to the front desk and they were very nice. The staff at this hotel was awesome for everything, not just this.
And they were like we can move you to another room like well i'm gonna check the wifi and another room first so meanwhile leases packing up everything that we adjust unpacked packing everything up and you know so that we can move rooms.
I go to another room and the wifi there was good but like the couch that we were gonna sit on like at night when we got back from the shows was literally falling apart and like okay well unless they're gonna put a new couch in here when i gonna take this room.
And I checked another room and the Wi-Fi was like, ish, you know, it was like, okay.
And I'm like, all right, well, I guess we moved to that one because it's better than this one.
We packed everything up.
And then I'm doing my dummy check, Pete.
And I open the drawer next to the bedside table. There's two drawers, there's, they're next to the bed,
in the bedside table. The top drawer of course has the gift from the Gideons.
And then the second drawer down has an ethernet cable in it.
And I thought, wait a minute, wait a minute. There's an ethernet jack on the wall in this room.
Hang on. And so I pull up my laptop and my dongle. I plug in 100 megabits, bi-directional,
clear as a, you know, perfect, right?
Like, no, it has been so long since I've needed an ethernet port in a room
and even longer since one has actually worked
that it did not even dawn on me.
I had an ethernet cable. I travel with an ethernet cable,
But I just do I, I don't have an ethernet port in my computer.
Well, I have one in my dongle. I have to do the whole, you know, yeah. Yeah, yeah.
I like it didn't even it had been so long it didn't even dawn on me to try this and I'm like we're staying here,
And it was in that moment that I wasn't sure whether or not Lisa And I were gonna need to hire separate attorneys because the look on her face after packing up the room.
And then being told we were not going to be moving was not my favorite look to get from her but
but we got through it and and everything worked out great, and so I used the
the internet access sharing on my Mac to share the ethernet signal over wifi
to all the other devices in my room.
And I just told my, oh, I gotta tell my laptop that it's okay to go to sleep now. That reminds me.
But I told my laptop, don't sleep when the display is asleep.
That's how you tell it, don't sleep. It's a weird setting and energy saver.
But I mean, I did that.
And then that was our, I created our wifi for the weekend.
I knew I wouldn't have any interference with the Wi-Fi piece.
Right. Yeah.
But, but yeah, try that Ethernet port. I was just shocked in 2023 that A, I needed to augment the hotel's Wi-Fi because that
just hasn't happened for me in so long.
It's been so good everywhere that I, I stopped checking when we, when we would check in.
Right. But clearly I've learned my lesson.
So. And not that long ago, that was the only way. It was the only way.
In a hotel. Yeah. was little, what's it called? It was that little cube.
It was an airport express.
Little travel router. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. So, all right. So that's what I got. We do have time for a couple of questions, Pete,
unless you've got more to add to your, our Mac stock travel segment.
No, let's, let's, let's do them. Let me find Chris.
Yeah, let's go to Christopher. Yeah. Yeah. Bye.
Chris wrote in, hey, a scam protection. My wife is not very tech savvy.
OK, speaking of divorce attorneys. Yeah, it occasionally winds up on strange websites that exist for nefarious reasons.
Recently, while we were together in our office, a huge warning alert popped up on her screen.
You know, the one threatening all sorts of harm and to call the number below.
A news article today described an older couple being scammed out of 30 grand.
I cannot believe what they asked these people to do, but they did it anyway.
Any one of the requests to me would have sent up red flags. Where is the common sense?
I got a personal story about that one, too.
Stay the phone with me, ask your husband to sit in front of the computer, go to your bank. Yeah. Yeah.
My concern is how to protect her from these scams. Do you have any recommendations?
I installed CleanMyMac 10, ran a malware scan and nothing.
And nothing. Then I installed Malwarebytes. Nothing again. I considered limiting her to
using the iPad only, but I've seen similar warning message there. Any thoughts? This
is definitely one for don't get caught. And Dave, before you answer, I'm going to say
this falls into our show from a few weeks ago. Beware the Conware.
The con where yeah absolutely yeah yeah so what you're describing here chris is most of it will
fall into the realm of cleverly coded pop-up windows right with the pop-up blockers that
exist in safari get most of these but there are definitely ways of of coding things to get them
through it's a cat and mouse game right apple puts up the walls the coders get smart and figure it
out if only everybody use their powers for good, but we don't live in that world.
But there are other ways. And one of the most common ones is leveraging safaris local notifications
websites with permission. Websites can send you notifications that appear like the native
normal notifications in notification center on your Mac. And because you're used to trusting
things in Notification Center, we are more likely to trust those things because they
are in Notification Center.
You will be asked for permission to enable these, but that permission can also be done in a misleading way
where you're like, of course I want this, and then you do it.
And I've seen some of these notifications where the website will use the icon of like system settings
so that you are even more likely to trust the little thing coming in.
To see these, to see what you've allowed on your Mac, go into Safari, Settings, Websites, Notifications.
That's where you can see where these are configured. It will have a list of websites
where you have either allowed or blocked for on a website by website basis. You can also set some
global options. There's a checkbox, allow websites to ask for permission to send notifications.
Disabling that might help. It will keep legit websites from asking too, but maybe that's okay.
Then, there is also a checkbox there for share across devices that can help to, you know.
Kind of share those settings amongst all of your devices.
These kinds of notifications are not possible on iPhone or iPad to my knowledge, but hopefully
somebody out there will tell me if I'm wrong.
Another setting, again, it's desktop only, is the pop-up windows setting, also in Safari
settings websites and it works similar to the notifications one where there's a list
of websites that you can you know that you have either allowed or disallowed specifically
and then you get some global settings as well.
One of my favorite is the wrong word but but one of the more the most clever implementations
of malware, especially in Safari, is extensions.
I have seen people with extensions installed that are definitely malware.
Now, these are things that usually I would expect like CleanMyMac or Malwarebytes to catch,
but you can look to, again, Safari settings, this time go to extensions.
This will list all of the extensions you have installed and there will be check marks by the ones that are enabled.
If, and this is worth looking at no matter whether you think you're having a problem or not,
even if you're not having a problem, and even if there's no malware installed,
simply knowing what extensions you have allowed in Safari can be a really helpful thing just to
see and be like, oh wait, I don't need that one anymore. Let's take that out, you know, or.
Or, oh wait, I forgot I had this one. I should re-enable it. So yeah, that's, that's not a bad
thing to take a look at, you know, every now and again.
So, right.
Yep. Now I consider myself at least on the edge of being a power user.
I would agree with that.
I would say I have one website in Safari notifications that I allow to send me
notification notifications, and that's drive.google.com because I want to know
when a file changes, it goes up and otherwise I don't even, I don't use those notifications.
Now, you may need them for your work or for whatever reason, and that's OK.
So as long as you know what you've got there and let that happen, that's good.
There's a setting in there that if you talked about it, Dave,
I missed it while I was looking this up. Yep. Under Safari settings, websites, notifications.
At the bottom, there's also allow websites to ask for permission to send notifications.
I did mention that one. Yeah, you did. OK.
Yeah. All right. So if you uncheck that, they can't even ask.
Can't even ask. That's right.
Yep, you can still set websites like if you know that you want a website to send you notifications
And you have to know that the site wants to do this because with that checkmark off you wouldn't know this,
You can right-click on the website in the URL bar in Safari and go to settings for that
Website and then you will see you know whether it can actually I guess notifications doesn't appear there.
You get pop-up windows there, but no, you don't get notifications there. All right.
You can control the rest. Christopher, I would go in and uncheck even allowing Safari to ask your
wait for notifications.
Yeah. And then the other thing, anybody at Walmart or Target or any of the big
retailers, if you're listening, please don't let people buy gift cards.
It's self-checkout. That will solve 50 to 70 percent of it.
Oh, yeah. Make that a cashier, you know, because someone wants to buy a four hundred dollar
gift card and go, OK, you're not doing this for computer support, are you?
Because you do know that you can't get computer support there.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, my mother-in-law got another call from someone purporting to be Apple support,
And she kept him on for she goes I know it's the scam so she kept him on the phone a while and dragged him along and then she was gonna call Apple
Back and mess with them some more and I'm like you do know that wasn't Apple you're not.
Well, you know she she did the important part Pete yeah Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Well, she did get hit once before and she did go to Target and kept them on the phone
and she didn't realize it until after she'd given them the first three or $400 gift card number.
They said, oh, well, we found another problem. You need to go back in the store and get,
and that's when she realized. But the other problem they did is she allowed them,
she gave them her Apple ID and she allowed them to control her computer screen.
So we went, there's no telling what they've got. And we went and shut down all her bank accounts,
her retirement access and all that sort of stuff. so that, and then rechange all those numbers and passwords.
Because there's no telling, they could have drained her entire retirement account.
Yeah, maybe. Yeah, yeah. You don't know.
That's right. Once you've got access to your passwords on your computer,
you could be hosed. So never give someone access that you don't trust.
Yeah. Yeah, yeah. And know personally, maybe. Yes. Yes.
Yeah. All right. We have time for, I think, at least one more.
Pete, Adam wrote in and asked, Can I use a dock that normally supplies power to a laptop?
Can that safely be used with a desktop Mac like my M1 Mini? I don't want to start pushing power into a port not meant to accept it,
But I do like the options for expansion.
So, Adam, here's what you have to do. Go get a paperclip or a safety pin and start sticking it in there and see what happens.
No! No! No! No? Do as I say, not as I do, Pete!
Ha ha ha! What could go wrong? Now, so I answered Adam in this way, and again, you know, maybe this is bad practice.
I have used a powered hub slash port on both my iMac and my laptop.
These things seem to be smart enough to figure out which way to send power, how
much to send. I mean it's pretty astounding that I can plug my iPhone into an 85 watt power supply or a 5 watt power supply and it knows not to to burn
it out. Yes. That that you know when you stop and think about all the different
sizes of cubes and USB ports and all it just works and so they Apple has done a
good job in their engineering department to keep things from overvolting and
and over and under current.
So, Adam, I don't know what to say, except I have used without penalty of death to my computers,
the various ports and hubs pushing power in both directions.
Oh yeah, I have powered hubs and docks on all of my desktop computers.
Yes, I wouldn't hesitate for a minute. Yeah, I agree 100% Pete.
Yeah, yeah, the devices power delivery is a protocol.
A negotiated protocol, right? And so that both sides of the equation talk to each other
and decide whether power needs to be sent. And if so, in which direction it needs to be sent.
And how much.
And how much, right? Yes, that's right.
Just, yeah. That's one of the beauties of all these pieces of equipment anymore.
Just works, be it your AirPods, your phone, your whatever.
So, but no, I just, it's made us lazy. I mean, even more so for me, I traveled a little
internationally, often I'm in, I've got 220 versus 110.
I just plug that stuff in and trust that it isn't going to burn my stuff up.
Yeah. Oh yeah. Yeah. The power supplies are all adaptable, adaptive,
whatever the term is, but yeah.
Yeah, no, it works out great. It works out great. Yep.
One last question, cause we're right here. Arthur asks, how do I permanently delete an email account from my Mac?
When I go into settings and delete one from the list from it,
when I go into mails settings and delete one from the list there, it magically reappears in the list.
So these do sync via iCloud and they are also seen.
And I'm using air quotes here, system-wide. The place I've had the most success with deleting them,
although I've have seen them sometimes come back when iCloud syncs it back down to my Mac
and then you have to sort of do the dance and I'll tell you what the dance is,
but where I've done it with the most success
is in system settings, or if you're not on Ventura, system preferences,
and go into the internet accounts,
preference or settings pane.
That's where I would delete these things And that should do it.
When iCloud pushes one back down, you can just try deleting it again.
That might do it, right? That might, you know, by iCloud pushing it back down,
now it says, okay, everything's in sync.
You delete it again, and then it says, it pushes that change back up instead of pulling it down.
If it does push it back down, go to another device. It would be your phone, your iPad,
another Mac, if you have one on there,
and remove it from the internet accounts there, that eventually it will, I promise you,
eventually it will go away.
So, yeah, that's the trick there.
At least as I found. But yeah, it's weird that you get to see these in both locations.
And it's because an account can be not just a mail account, but also a contact server account
or a calendar server account or a notes server account.
Right? All the iCloud stuff. All, yeah, right. Well, not just the iCloud stuff,
but even just like internet type stuff. Yeah.
And so it's those internet accounts is where those, that's sort of the parent,
the umbrella parent of that, which appears in mail and other places.
Yeah, I noted one, which is real quickly semi-related. So my son got a new iPhone.
We came off his eight. Okay.
And I decided, well, I could use that as a camera. And that way I can check things on my phone during the show
instead of having to have my phone only as a camera.
And yesterday we were at dinner and I went.
Did you send me these did you take these got all these pictures of been he's doing some stuff at work of all these tool
bins and nuts and bolts and washers,
What had happened is we never reset the phone. I just logged him out and logged my apple id in,
Well, guess whose pictures are now all on my phone,
Not only his phone but mine because you kept a local copy of all of his pictures on his phone
And then it synced that when you logged in,
Oh, that sucks Yeah, now i've got hundreds of pictures that i've got to get rid of yep.
I wonder if you filtered down by and I I'm saying this without knowing exactly where and how to do it, but,
Like I wonder if power photos would do this if photos won't but photos might you might be able to create a smart album,
Of pictures only taken on like an iphone 8 right? Yeah, and then And sort that by a date range so that you're not killing your pictures from back when you
had an iPhone 8.
Because that used to be, well, that used to be my iPhone 8, yeah.
Right, but there's a date at which... Yeah, the date range became his after that.
Oh, that's a great idea, I will do that.
That might do it.
Folks, if you have a suggestion for Pete, or a quick tip, or a cool stuff found, or
a question of your own, please send it in to us at feedback at macgeekgab.com because
we really want to hear it and we want to answer it or at least share it or whatever it is
we're going to do with it.
We want it. Right.
Yeah. You write the show. Feedback at MattKeycap.com. That's what he said.
Feedback at MattKeycap.com unless you're a premium subscriber, in which case it's premium at MattKeycap.com.
That is correct. And you can learn more about MattKeycap Premium at MattKeycap.com slash premium.
I'd like to thank all of you who are premium supporters. Your support really helps make this whole engine work.
It is a vital and critical part of it. It is not mandatory, but if you have the means and you would like to participate, mackeycub.com
slash premium allows you to support us directly.
Otherwise, or in addition, simply visiting our sponsors. I always say it's our job to encourage you to visit them.
It is their job. It is between you and them as to whether or not you then go and buy.
But simply visiting our sponsors makes a huge difference. It means that we're doing our job.
And that definitely helps us, so in terms of like renewals, which obviously is a good thing for long-term.
So thank you all for that. Thanks to everyone who is listening.
Simply listening is really the best thing you can do, so that, thank you.
And thanks to Cashfly for providing all the bandwidth to get the show from us to you.
Thanks to our sponsors for this episode, of course.
PiaVPN.com slash MGG, as well as a Zocdoc.com slash MGG.
Make sure to go check out Pete's other show we mentioned. So there I was for aviation enthusiasts.
I got two other shows, Business Brain for entrepreneurs, Gig Gab for working musicians,
And thanks for hanging out with us. You know, I didn't do this at Mac.
I didn't record this when we were at Mac stock and I'm sorry I didn't because back in 2019 at Mac stock,
I did record this and I loved getting it when we were all together.
We said this when we were outside filming your drone photo, but of course your drone only films video.
No microphone. No microphone. So we did do this at MaxDoc, but we didn't record it.
However, in 2019, we did. And so I will share that.
Don't get caught!
Music.