Hey folks, it's time for Mac Geek Gab, and I will bring us our quick tip of the week
with cellular's low data mode on your iPhone.
You turn this on by going to settings, cellular, cellular data options, data mode, and then
choose low data mode from the list.
This is something I have on all the time on my phone.
It doesn't seem to do anything negative. What it does is it defers some operations from happening while you're on cellular until
later on when you're on Wi-Fi, things like picture uploads in the background
and that sort of thing.
And I think it gives some apps some hints too. So you can save your data by saving your wallet by turning this on.
More quick tips like this, plus your questions answered and some cool stuff found
with a special guest today on Mac Geek Cab 995 for Monday, August 14th, 2023.
Greetings, folks, and indeed, welcome to Mac Geek Gab, the show where you send in your.
Music.
Quick tips like that one. You send in your cool stuff found. You send in your questions.
We share your quick tips and your cool stuff found. We answer your questions and then we string it all together loosely into an agenda that,
hopefully gives us each the opportunity of learning at least five new things every single
time we come together.
Sponsors for this episode include MacPod app slash Mac geek out where you can get 5 percent
off CleanMyMac X today.
Hopwater.com slash MGG, that's H-O-P-W-T-R.com slash MGG where you can get 20% off your first purchase today.
And LinkedIn.com slash MGG, where you can go and post your first job for free.
We'll talk more in depth about each of those shortly here.
For now, here in Durham, New Hampshire, I'm Dave Hamilton.
And here from our nation's capital, Washington, in the District of Columbia, it's Pilot Pete.
How's DC today, Pilot Pete?
It is mostly cloudy and warm. It's going to be warm today. We're heading over to
Arlington National Cemetery in a couple hours. A squadron mate passed about 30 years ago,
and now they're going to inter him with his father, who recently passed. So
it's a bittersweet gathering of old squadron mates and family and friends and all that, but a chance to formally say goodbye to a squadron mate who gave his all
to our country.
So, yeah. My condolences. And I know I don't say this often on the show, but again, thank you for your service, Pete.
Oh, thank you. That's very kind.
I did mention we have a special guest with us today, although it's someone who has been
on the show recently, Adam Christensen. Thank you for joining us, my friend.
Hey, thanks for having me. Glad to be here. Absolutely.
For those of you who don't know, Adam does a show called MacCast, which he's been doing
exactly six months longer than we've been doing MacGeekUp. We figured that out the other day.
So yeah, we absolutely did. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
So you need to go on hiatus for six months and then we'll try.
Well, I think you're, I think you actually end up being a little more consistent than I am.
So I think you've actually done more episodes at this point.
Isn't that interesting? Okay. All right. All right. Yeah. Do you, when, when,
Because we hit a thousand soon. Will you be hitting a thousand?
It'll be another year probably. Oh wow. I mean, I want to say I'm at 880.
Oh wow. I always forget six or something. We did, for a few years, we were doing an extra two episodes a month.
Two shows a week, right? A month, yeah. An extra two a month. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Thank you.
Cool. Well, I'm happy to have you here, Adam. Thank you for doing this with us.
It's been, it's been a long, I mean, it's been two weeks since you were on the show,
but prior to that, it's been a long time, uh, since we've had you here.
So I think it was Mackey cab 300 is the last time way, way back when.
Yeah. Way, way back when.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Back when we were just babes.
Yeah, that's right. That's right. Virtual children.
Yes. Virtual children. Well, maybe something like that.
Hey, for our next quick tip, it comes from listener Ben,
who, you know, we love keyboard shortcuts.
And he says, I discovered an unlisted and undocumented keyboard shortcut in pages on the Mac
to insert a new page in a page layout document. And that is Command Shift N.
He says, I tried it and it worked like a charm. Thank you for that, Ben.
That's, I love quick tips like that.
Command Shift N, it went in page layout mode. All right, cool. Yeah, like these undocumented ones like the unlisted the commands like the one we found with the finder last week to change the icon size and list view,
It's just weird to me that they exist, but there's no menu option for them,
There used to be somewhere and I have...
It was an app or a website. I don't remember which now. I'll have to look for it, but it had
all those keys, strokes, I mean thousands of them available to you, but they play with them,
find them, send them in. Yeah, they haven't brought the doesn't the iPad has that feature
right where if you hold the command key in the app it will pop up the shortcut. Yes, right,
And that's not on the Mac. No, but there's a you're right. So it's so you just that's the hidden quick tip right there
Is it on the iPad if you have a keyboard attached, right? It is is it the command key you hold down the command key?
Yeah, yep, and then it shows you all that all of the available
Shortcuts short. Thank you for that app. Yeah, right. There used to be a there used to be I don't know when like a third-party tool for,
or like app or something for the Mac, but I think when Apple redid the whole system security thing,
that may have gone away.
Isn't that PopCare from Ergonus Systems?
Yeah, PopChar PopCare. Yeah, does that still exist? That's it, yeah.
Yeah, I mean, the website still exists. I can't find a, like a change log.
I can't find something that tells me when the last time it was updated.
But I'll put that in the show notes.
Yeah, because it did the same thing. It would show you the list on the screen
of all the available things.
So, yeah. So, and also hidden in there, in that an impromptu quick tip,
on any program on your Mac, if you go up to the file, the menu across the very top bar,
it had pulled down one of those menu windows.
While it's displaying, just touch the option key and see the changes that come.
There are dozens of changes there for your for your viewing pleasure.
Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah.
But some of these like this one that Ben just highlighted don't happen that way.
And yes, pop car, pop char, whatever we're going to call it.
P O P C H A R.
It's linked in the show notes.
9.5 for Mac was released on May 15th of 2023 of this year. So it full venture compatibility, all the things.
So yes, it is actually pop. It's probably pop care, pop care, like character.
Yeah, that's, yeah, you're, yeah, I think that's probably, that makes a lot of sense.
I would agree with that. Yeah.
Well, when you put it that way, realize that when you read it though, it's, it looks like pop
char, pop char, just saying, call it whatever you want, right? Yeah.
Uh, just call it, make sure you call it. Yeah, that's right. Yeah. Yeah.
Uh, Tony notes that, uh, free form. Apple's app Freeform is now a populated in as a share sheet option on iPhone so you can take things and send them over to Freeform just from the share sheet, which is great.
But it begs the question, do either of you use Freeform?
I have not started using it yet.
I was going to actually comment on this because I work 100% remote, and so we're on remote all day long.
And we used to use whiteboards in the office frequently.
And you'd think this would be a great tool. The problem is our whole office isn't on the Mac,
right outside of a work environment, I'd love to use it.
I mean, we have other whiteboard apps that we don't use either.
Yeah, I forget the one that we have access to at the office. It's...
But, I mean, very rarely do we actually get on it. Yeah.
They're handy though, if you use them, I mean, they're great tools.
Yeah, I guess, like I'm wondering, you know, I gotta think of a use case to just test it out with.
I'm thinking maybe like, the next trip I take with my family or something, this would be
an interesting way to just like start that process, so.
Yeah, interesting.
Yeah. Yeah, I'd be curious, folks, if you're using Freeform at work, or especially if you think
you have sort of an off-label use of it, we'll call it, right?
Like Apple says, use it this way, and you're like, well, yeah, that works, but here's how I'm using it.
Let us know, feedback at MacGeekGab.com, because that would be great.
You heard him, feedback at MacGeekGab.com.
What do you say, Adam? Feedback at MacGeekGab.com. That is correct. That is right.
Yep. All right, what's our next one? Steve.
Steve. Steve writes in, yeah. He says he's not sure if this is cool stuff found
or quick tips. I think it's more of a quick tip.
So he said to compliment Todd tips in 994 on using FaceTime as a backup camera,
which I still think is brilliant. Do you know you can FaceTime yourself?
Okay, first of all, why would you need to do that? But secondly, he says there's multiple usages that I can think of.
If you need to test a wire or lights or you name it, in another room,
well, you need to be in a totally different part of the house at the other end of the wire
or the main circuit or the tin can and string.
You need to look at something not easily accessible. And taking a photo with your phone doesn't help.
Then use your iPhone to FaceTime your iPad and voila, isn't that cool?
But now you ask yourself, how do I do that? By default, if you FaceTime yourself from your iPhone,
it will call itself.
Not very useful. The trick is to configure your iPhone make the call from your phone number and disable your iCloud email address on it.
And on your iPad, you tell it only to use your iCloud email for FaceTime and disable receiving calls from your phone number.
To do so, just go to FaceTime entry in the Settings app and configure accordingly.
Now your iPhone, on your iPhone, you can call your iPad in FaceTime by calling your iCloud email and only your iPad will answer.
So it's a little complex, but it makes sense there if you listen to this and go back through it.
And make sure you mute the call to prevent feedback in audio feedback loops.
And otherwise, it's very useful. And I will also add this quick tip to the end of it.
When you're done, switch it back or you will not be able to figure out why you can't take calls.
Be sure to unconfigure, if that's a word, de-configure, dis-configure.
Yeah, well, we'd have a different word, but we keep the word, we keep the show clean.
So that word doesn't apply.
But yeah, yeah. So I like this idea because if, of course, like the last episode, Adam, Todd and I think his father or something were or his son were one of them was driving a U-Haul.
The other one was in the back with the iPhones, essentially creating an impromptu backup camera so that he could line up the trailer hitch or whatever.
If that person were alone, you could use this and like, you know, aim the camera and then do the same kind of thing.
Another way to do this would be to sign your device into an alternate Apple ID.
Right? So that you're not there. You Pete, I heard you say, I saw you say, oh yeah, but I did not hear you.
So I don't know if your sound cut out on your end, but you know, that would be the other way to do it.
If you have a phone that you use for say beta stuff and it's on a different Apple ID or
something that would, that would be the thing.
So you're still with us, right, Adam? I can still hear you. I'm thinking that there's now a market for MagSafe iPhone backup camera mounts.
Oh! Yeah. Yeah.
I don't know what Pete did to his audio. Pete seems to think he knew what he did.
So I'm going to go and share the next quick tip and then if we need to pause the show
and fix Pete's audio, we will because it's how we do things here.
I can't imagine what he changed, but it doesn't surprise me that he changed something midstream here.
Jim brings us to our next quick tip, and he says.
Just now on my M2 MacBook Air, I held the option key and clicked on the more space icon
And it switched to the resolution list like an external monitor,
so he's in his system settings displays and.
Setting the resolution of the display he option clicked and he option clicked on the more space icon, but he
really you can option click anywhere in that area and he says it changed it from the icons that are just descriptive and say, you know, normal, more space, less space, or whatever they say
to toggle between that and a list. He says, I then held the command key and ticked the show all resolutions toggle.
That expanded the list to show additional resolution options up to 2560 by 1664 for
my 13 inch MacBook Air's display.
I used Switch Res X for years to customize resolutions on my 15 inch Intel MacBook Pro
and five external monitors, but I didn't realize Ventura would natively give me all those options.
Someone out there is going to love this, it's true. It's true.
So the trick is switching to the resolution list, which yes, you can do temporarily by hitting the option key and clicking in there, but you can also do it by clicking advanced down at the bottom and changing the toggle to always using the resolution list, which can be super handy.
So Pete, you're back. Does your, is your microphone actually back?
It, yeah, that was just weird in the middle of the show. It just died.
So I had, I turned it off and unplugged it and replugged it.
Now it's back. So, okay.
Are you, you're not on like a, uh, powered hub or something that's toggling?
Like I had when I was in Austin where my mic would just like die.
Yeah.
Okay. No, it was bizarre, but it, uh, it's back. Welcome back.
I'm glad to have you. Good to be back. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
That last one, I was still stuck on five monitors. like, where do you look? Oh, you don't know where to look, Adam.
I, there is a discussion though in our MGG discord about how people are using their multiple
monitors and there's a lot of talk about having one monitor, if you have multiples, having one,
rotated in portrait mode. Are you a portrait mode monitor kind of guy, Adam?
I don't own that kind of monitor. I've been eyeing some 4K monitors for a while. I have
just these old cheap ones that I bought that I use. I would do mostly text because of programming,
but for programming, yeah, there's a developer at my office that does that and it would be
fabulous to have a vertical monitor. On my original Mac+, I had a black and white one-page
display. What's that company? Radius?
Yeah, Radius. They were the first to really do that. That's right.
Yeah, so I had my nine inch, you know, Mac screen in the right next to that a full page,
but it was, you know, one one bit black and white display. Yeah, that was awesome. Huh?
But I was doing page layout and yeah, like page maker at the time and all that fun stuff.
Yeah, I some people and I'll put the thread in a link to the thread in the show notes
at Mackey kept calm so that you folks can find it easily. But yeah, there's been people
been showing their setups and and this idea i mean i've always known of the idea of of putting a.
Monitor up in uh in portrait mode if your monitor supports the ability to be mounted that way or you
can you know kind of rig up some way of mounting it that way mac os will do the rotation for you
like your monitor doesn't have to natively support doing the rotation mac os you just tell it you
you know, either 90 or 270, depending on what you want the top to be.
And it will happily just do that. So, uh, so your options are, are not as limited as you might, as they, as they
used to be in the, in the old days, Adam.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Um, I, I also wanted to comment on that more options list. because I have found that more space option, right?
On a laptop, on a MacBook Air, there is, if you look in the, you know, if you go into
system settings, or system preferences, either one, displays, and look at the resolution
choice for the display, there's the default one that I never think to change my Air off of.
But I was messing around in there this week, and I saw that more space option, and I clicked it.
And yes, it makes the text smaller, yes, it's not what I would prefer full-time,
but for those moments where you're finding yourself fumbling around with multiple windows
and just trying to do something where you need a little more space, try that.
Because, like for me, it was a game changer. I was like, wait a minute, I can do this
even just for a little bit.
Like if I'm trying to fill out a, you know, a spreadsheet where I also have to look stuff up on the web
and I don't have my extra screen with me, just nudging it up and getting, I think I calculated it.
It's like almost 20% more space. It's like 17 and a half or something.
And it really makes a difference. It makes my screen seem bigger.
Yes, the text is smaller. It's not how I want it full-time,
but you don't have to have it that way full-time.
You just go in, you change it, you do your thing, and then you change back, so. Stage manager mode.
I don't use stage manager, but like, that'd probably give you that 20% extra space you
need for stage manager. Yeah, because that stage manager steals from you?
Yeah.
Yeah? Yeah, I've been messing around with stage manager the past couple of days, too, just
because I hadn't given it a fair shake when it first came out.
It's not as terrible as I thought because yes, it takes up the side of the screen when
it can, but if I switch to an app where I have the window larger than stage manager
would normally leave, it lets the window be full width and then stage manager just tucks
away until I like float over to the right and then it sort of flips back open.
And the, you know, on a laptop, I'm generally only using one app at a time.
I don't have multiple apps open if I'm just using my laptop screen because it's just that one screen.
And, I mean, I have multiple apps open, but I don't have multiple apps visible to me.
So Stage Manager, like, I don't know how much of a difference it actually makes, I guess.
But I have been messing with it.
I don't know, we'll see. We'll see where I get. I think where it might be powerful.
Is you can, like by default it puts each app into its own stage or whatever, but you can
drag a window from, you know, app from, say, mail or something and drag it on top of where,
say, Safari is in Stage Manager and now those two apps will live on their own stage.
So, I can see a world where that becomes valuable because there are times where I want to see,
two apps and I will wind up clicking, you know, five different times to get the layering
right because I'm fighting with the 14 other apps that I have open in the background.
So, now that we're having this talk, maybe there is some value.
I'm the old guy with the, you know, get off my lawn because I just, I'm used to Windows
the way they are and Apple's been trying for years to get us to do this spaces desktop
yes stage thing forever so this is just the latest incarnation of it yes it is the latest incarnation
that you're not wrong about it that you are 100 right about that that yes for sure but maybe maybe
maybe this time maybe it's time yeah uh pilot Pete you have you have a uh yet another quick tip for
I did. You and I had this discussion on the way to the hotel one night at MacStock.
And I'm like, you know, I just got the thing that my server is going to be renewing.
And years ago, I got it, you know, and it's like $3 a month, you know.
Well, that's for the first 24 months or something like that.
Sure. And then they went to renew it.
And it was going to be like $17 a month for, you know, for 24 months.
And I looked at that bill and went, whoa, it's going to be well worth my time.
Started asking you how would you move all of your web server data from one server to another and then it hit me.
I just call them and ask them for a lower price. Oh, yeah. And voila, they gave it to me.
I said, I said, look, I can go somewhere else and I can pay,
you know, four bucks a month or I can stay with you guys if you can give me a little bit better price.
And almost immediately he came back and he goes, look, the best price I can offer.
And it was like six ninety five a month or something.
I go, you know, it's worth the extra two or three dollars a month not to have to move all that data, you know,
gigabytes of data from one doing it. Yes. But, but they also, I hope know that at 16 bucks a month, they were not going to keep
me as a customer. Right.
And, and I think that applies. I think they did know that when you told them that, like, I think they believed you.
Yeah.
Yeah. Yes. And you know, I think that also applies to not, not just web server companies, but pretty
much anybody. Call and ask for a better deal.
A Sirius XM radio is an example.
Yeah. If you're paying more than five or six bucks a month for Sirius XM, you don't have to.
Yeah, call him and tell him.
Do you find, do you find series XM works okay for you in our, our coastal region of New Hampshire? Pete?
Oddly enough, there are times, especially when the trees are wet, not so much. Okay.
However, uh, quick tip number four, whatever it is, here's what I do.
I, I, we pay for it in Debbie's car and then I use the app on my phone and then I Bluetooth my phone.
So that's how I listen to the Sirius XM channels that I want in my car.
Yeah, right. Because you don't need to receive from a satellite.
You don't have to use the satellites anymore. I use my cell cellular data.
Do they offer a cellular like a data only subscription? That's that's less expensive.
I don't know. They should if they don't.
I mean, I don't know. I.
Although I think that may be that may be a higher infrastructure costs for them, sending that bandwidth out than it is up to the, to the satellites and back down.
I guess. I don't know. Yeah. Yeah, which, which is more expensive for them.
But yeah, that's, that's why, like I say, I hate, I hate offering that tip up because when they figure out we're all doing it, they're going to find a way to change it.
So I, I, I found this. Okay, there you go. In real time, folks, we have the answer.
Yep. I found the pricing on Sirius's website and they have a chart of pricing.
You can have Platinum Music and Entertainment or Music Showcase, but you can be you can get your pricing for car radio or,
for streaming only so platinum is $23.99 with car radio and streaming, and it is $10.99 for streaming only.
This is per month, by the way. Yeah. So. Yeah. But that's, that's actually, wow.
Yeah, man. That's worth it. Yup.
That's, that's worth it going platinum because. Yeah. Yeah.
But, and I don't know what level we have, but like I say, I think, I think it's the
base level, but we're paying like five bucks a month plus taxes.
Because if you tell them, look, it's just not worth it to me.
They're like, remember ever, anybody here ever tried to get rid of AOL? Oh yeah.
Yeah. You couldn't, they wouldn't let you. No. Yeah. Like four hours later, you're still going,
no, I just want to cancel.
No, no, you can't cancel. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Sirius is kind of the same.
They aren't nearly as bad about it, but they will offer you the best price they can
very quickly to keep you as a customer.
Interesting.
And get it. Yeah, no, they know that when you're hooked, you will continue to use it.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Sirius is still really pumping the Howard Stern, huh?
Yeah, I would assume so. They paid a lot of money to be able to do that.
It's on their list as one of the premium features, I think.
Oh, it is literally, like, yes, you get news and issues, talk and entertainment, comedy, sports, Howard Stern,
personalized Pandora, yeah, these generic things, and Howard Stern.
You only get Howard Stern with the platinum, by the way. Platinum, yeah, you gotta pay up.
Just FYI. He was expensive. Howard has always been expensive.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Howard, he pioneered the whole, I think of Howard as pioneering the whole Talking Points ad model.
I listened to Howard when I was a kid on WPLJ because I'd lived near New York,
and I can still remember Dial a Mattress ads that he read, you know, the host read ad
kind of thing into the show, so.
Yeah. For sure.
Yeah. What was that movie he did? Private Parts? Private Parts, yeah.
Yeah, that was his biography. That was clever.
Yeah, that was clever. His feud with Don Imus, or I guess Don Imus' feud with him, but yeah, whatever. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
All right, uh, I know we have one more quick tip and I'm, I'm determined to find it. Did I just
screw it up? It disappeared. No, I made it disappear. Oh, there it is, next page. I did my automation too quickly. So there you go.
Jamie says, uh, it's a quick tip. It might not be particularly quick.
It also has a bit of a fish shake.
I have a Mac mini and I'm using a TCL 4K TV as a monitor. It's big and I like it.
However, I have had monitor sync problems from day one. The Mac will fail to drive the monitor
and the TV will say looking for a signal, no signal, is it on?
This used to happen on wake from sleep, but I think I fixed it by finally using a Thunderbolt
to HDMI adapter instead of the built-in HDMI port.
However, the built-in HDMI port on the Mac mini, obviously still using the built-in HDMI port on the TV, just for clarity.
However, in spite of everything, after five years, often when I turn on the mini from a cold start,
it will fail to sync with the monitor.
Still, my only recourse has been to turn it off with the power button and try again.
This works, but it is particularly frustrating because it slowly takes me to the forgotten password screen
where I have to select restart and boot one more time.
Then I can log in and all as well.
Obviously, this is a bug. Meanwhile, he says, I finally found a workaround.
I turned on an option in system settings enabling voiceover on the lock screen.
Voiceover for those who don't know is what blind folks use or visually challenged folks use to navigate on the Mac.
I don't need it normally, but when I can't see the login screen, I can use it.
So today I turned on the Mac mini and the screen didn't sync up,
but this time I heard a little voice which said, username.
I typed my username, then it said, password. I typed my password and a few seconds later,
my screen lit up and macOS logged me in as usual.
I had always suspected that if I could ever get logged in, that the full macOS would be able to do the sync
and the screen would become alive.
That is fascinating to me. Yeah. Yep.
Yep. There's a lot of handy tips around accessibility stuff,
but yeah, it, you know, it's also great if you're gonna run a machine headless
or something like that as a server.
Oh.
Right? You need to reboot it and then boots to the lock screen. Yeah. Oh yeah, okay.
I wonder if...
It's I wonder if FileVault is on on this computer, right? Like I that's the question, right?
Yeah, because like, where is it getting to the to the like Mac OS login screen?
Or is it getting to the FileVault?
You need your password to decrypt the disk screen, right?
And I can load the operating system. My guess is it's the FileVault screen.
And that's why it's not it because it, you know, there's very little that's loaded before
you get to that file vault screen and maybe that's why it's not doing the monitor sync or not waking
up the thunderbolt port the right way you know whatever so adapters matter though too i mean that
that other tip like i had like i said i have these old monitors and they're they're you know dvi
monitors right and i had these really cheap thunderbolt to dvi adapters and they just didn't
work and just getting different adapters um and actually i didn't even get expensive ones but i
I got, I think these are from Monoprice, you know, which makes great cables and adapters
at a really affordable price, but they're good quality.
So yeah, yeah, that made all the difference. There's the whole, um, oh gosh, I forget what it is that like the, the, the bit rate, the
data bit rate or something.
There's like a, a eight bit versus six bit versus 10 bit.
And if you don't have, and I can't remember the name of the term and I don't, I'm not
going to be able to look it up in my email quickly enough, but, but there is a bandwidth
when you're talking about HDMI cables and, and even monitors that support this bandwidth.
And the Mac likes more of that bandwidth than less is really what it comes down to.
I'll, I'll look it up, but yeah, fascinating. Yeah. thing.
Alright, so I love to drink seltzer, but it gets a little boring and sort of plain all the time.
And certainly I'd love to drink alcohol sometimes, but I don't always want alcohol.
And I have really been loving hop water, which is a non-alcoholic sparkling hop water that
has adaptogens and nootropics. One of the things it has in it is ashwagandha, which I really love.
It helps you relax and add some mood boosting benefits. Again, it's hop water, H-O-P-W-T-R.
And it's made from this exclusive blend of hops that give it a crisp, citrusy, piney flavor. It's delicious.
I've been having one of these pretty regularly.
I'll go down to the fridge to grab a beer and I'll be like,
actually, I'm gonna have a hop water instead. It's delicious.
And the best part is that it's purposely crafted without calories, without carbs, without sugar,
but it's refreshing. It's got that crisp, clean taste.
It's carbonated. So you get that sort of carbonation feel in your mouth,
which I really like, and it's full of flavor.
And they've got all kinds of different flavors. Last night I had the mango one, which I had had before,
and I'd forgotten how much I liked it. And then I grabbed it, and I'm like, oh, what a treat.
It's really fantastic.
And Hop Water is the perfect brew to help you unwind at any time.
And I know you'll love it too.
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So, about 10 to, well, maybe 26 minutes after we finished recording Matt Geekab last week,
Pete, if you were here in New Hampshire, you are fully aware that we had the mother of
all lightning storms to blaze through southern New Hampshire here.
It sounded like incoming artillery, to say the least. It was nuts.
I was up here producing the show and, you know, felt the ground rumbling, of course
I don't have windows in the studio and so it's like what's going on and I look at my phone and you know
I turned off like the focus mode that I had for podcasting and saw all the like lightning lightning
It was like lightning struck within a mile of you. It's like what is going on?
So I'm doing all my thing and then finally I Get to a point where I have no internet connection from the studio anymore power still on,
But no internet like okay, so something went wrong wrong. Interesting because you're on fiber. Correct, so it was like time to go outside and
see what you know go back because the office and the house are separate from one another,
separate buildings. So I go out, power's on in the house, internet's fine in the house,
I'm like oh no okay I have direct burial ethernet between the house and the office.
Long time listeners will remember that I've been through this before.
It used to be just a lightning rod there in southern, New Hampshire, correct?
I was the lightning rod in southern, New Hampshire. That's right. Yeah so much so that I put,
APC protect net Ethernet surge protectors on either side of this line and those work really well
I think over the years I've had one of them,
Blow up and save those because what would happen is it would blow out the ports on the switch every time that you know,
a lightning storm would happen on both ends of things, right?
And so I put these APC things in, they've been totally fine.
Everything's been fine. I'm like, well, okay.
And then the power flickered. The power had flickered, but it never like died.
The power flickered again while I was at the house.
And then I noticed the office was back online. I'm like
All right, I'll take it sure So as I'm walking out of the house, I hear Lisa say oh, I guess my computer shut off,
I'm like yeah, okay, you know sure like it's on a UPS, so I don't know why it would have shut off, but okay,
She has her you know 2018 Mac mini and in the house. They're still and so she goes and I can see that she's like
things aren't right. So it's like, okay, well, what's going on here? So, you know, push the power button, nothing.
Hold the power button, nothing. Check the UPS, make sure it's like still providing power, which it is.
Okay. Unplugged the Mac Mini from the UPS for, you know, 15 seconds or whatever. Plugged it back in and,
immediately now the fans spin up full tilt.
Which is normal when the Mac Mini 2018 turns on because the fans by default run at full speed until the operating system slows them down and manages them, right?
So, fine, no light on the front of it, certainly no display on the monitor, nothing.
The fans will stay running for hours if you let them because I did.
Uh, I, I tried- It was warm in the house, right Dave? Yeah, I tried everything, including something I didn't know it, it was, it exists.
And this is a DFU Revive on a T2 based Mac. Adam, did you know anything about this T2 Revive?
No, but I know there's all kinds of fun stuff with T2 chips.
Yeah, so you use Apple Configurator.
It's kind of like restoring an iPhone except it except it's it's it's not Apple Silicon.
You know, still Intel.
But yeah, you you start up the Mac a certain way and it depends on which Mac there's Apple has a
knowledge based article about this. I just had no idea that this was even a thing. But you know,
for the Mac mini, you disconnect it from power for 10 seconds. Then you plug a USB-C cable into
the Thunderbolt port, a specific Thunderbolt port on it, but not a Thunderbolt cable, a USB-C cable,
A thunderbolt cable will not work, but you plug usb-c cable into that and then also into a,
up-and-running working mac that has apple configurator 2 downloaded onto it but is not
yet running on that. There's like you got to hold this is the hold your mouth just right scenario
then you hold down the power button add you know plug the mac mini in continue holding the power
button for three seconds and it should go into this DFU revive mode.
That's for the rest of you. For me, that's not what happened. That Mac mini is dead.
And near as I can tell, it died over it died from the Ethernet port getting fried.
Now, my Ethernet in to the house is protected. My Ethernet into the house never had a problem.
That lightning hit so close that it charged up the Ethernet wires inside my house and fried the Mac Mini's Ethernet port and by proxy, its motherboard.
It fried two ports on an Ethernet switch and I think that's it.
Now, it's been a week.
That's impressive though Dave. Right?
Yeah, there was and and I didn't quite realize what had happened because I was trying to like scratch my head like dude
I'm protected like how did this get in? How did this get in and,
Later that afternoon. I got a text from a neighbor saying hey And this is like a guy about three houses away from me and as geeky as the rest of us.
And he said, you know, he protects all the stuff with UPSs. He's got his own Synology, like, you know, he's like us.
And he's like, hey, do you have an extra router? I can, I can borrow mine got fried during the lightning
storm. I'm like, of course, I have an extra router like that.
That please come take a router for me, you know, and and then I was more than Best Buy does.
I think yeah, probably and so but he was like, yeah, it And then the next day I was texting with him,
I'm like, you know, what of your things were plugged into UPSs?
He says, oh, everything.
And I lost this and this and this. Neighbors, then I posted in our,
we have a Facebook group for our neighborhood and I posted, I'm like,
hey, is anybody noticing things that don't work? I know I'm not the only one.
And sure enough, people were just like, oh yeah, my garage door opener, my this, my that.
But another guy said, oh, I lost two ERO units. And I thought, okay, were they plugged into ethernet?
He says, yes, these are my two that are plugged into ethernet.
The ones plugged into the- They were just wifi. Wifi are totally fine.
So yeah, it was low voltage.
And then I noticed, yes, the office is back online, but no, it's not online at gigabit speeds.
It is online at a hundred megabit speeds. So one of the ports on that switch didn't entirely fry,
but it's sort of fried and, uh, so I had to replace, I replaced the switch, which was the inexpensive part of this.
And then it was coming. Well, no.
So, um, I started thinking about this, you know, it was time.
I mean that making Mac mini was five years old.
It should have lasted another five years, but it was Intel, right?
We had not yet upgraded Lisa to Apple Silicon.
We started talking through different options because now we were presented with options and uh.
And I said, are you at a like, she likes to have a laptop when we travel, but otherwise,
does not need a laptop. And so her laptop is also like old and slow. It's like it's a,
you know, prior generation Mac, Mac MacBook Air, right? The pre M1.
Yeah.
And I'm like, would it make sense to you to just have a MacBook, like a laptop that we connect to
to your keyboard and screen, do all those things with.
And then when you want to travel, you take it with you and then you don't have to worry about
is my laptop configured for travel?
Cause it's your computer. Did I sync that data? Do I have this?
Yeah, well, and sync the applications and the settings.
The data actually syncs just fine these days, but it's the setup of it, right?
She's like, oh, that kind of sounds amazing. I'm like, all right, well, you know,
I have this M1 Air that's like all decked out and would be great for what she's doing.
And I've been eyeing an M2 Air. And I know because at Mac stock,
I used the 15 inch version that John had gotten and 15 inches is awesome, but it's too big for me.
So I know that the 13 is right.
And all the 13 inch MacBook M2 Airs are on refurb now. So it was like, this is a perfect time to buy.
I can't afford not to.
But I had reached out to my local, when my Mac Mini wouldn't work, I reached out to Dan
over at Mac Edge, which is my local, you know, Apple authorized repair shop.
And he was the one who told me about DFU Revive. And so I kept him up to date on this and I'm like, yeah, I think it's time to get a refurb,
you know, M2 air.
I want the 13 inch, the 15's too big. And he says, so I just got a 15 inch air to replace
my 13 inch M2 air with 24 terab, 24 gigs of Ram
and two terabyte drive in the midnight color, which was the one I was thinking about getting.
And he's like, I could sell you my old air.
It's got two and a half years of Apple care left on it. This sounds perfect.
He's like, I just hadn't bothered to put it up for sale yet.
I'm like, well, there you go.
So I now have a new M2 13 inch air And, uh, Lisa has her set up that way and it, you know,
Yeah, it's all's well that ends well, but.
At Mac, the last time the three of us talked on this show, I asked, this was at Macstock,
has anybody needed to like actually restore from a backup recently? Because I haven't.
What's the, you know, what's the big deal about all these backups? Do we even need them anymore?
Well, if Lisa's machine hadn't been cloned daily, restoring to her new MacBook Air would have been,
there would have been some data loss.
Like not everything was synced to, you know, some cloud service somewhere.
So, so I answered my own question and I should have known. Yeah, I should have known asking that question on stage.
Like I was tempting the gods. You did, you did indeed, because what does it take, right?
I mean, pre-show Adam and I were chatting before you got here, Dave, about how,
how creepy the internet is.
You just mention a product and the next thing you know, it's popping up on your screen, right?
So you just mentioned needing to back up and boom.
Now that's creepy. Yeah. The universe is listening.
The universe was definitely listening. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
But yeah, all's well that ends well. When I got the new M2 Air from Dan,
They had wiped it and, you know, all of that.
And they had put its default OS on it, which was Monterey. Of course, I was migrating from a Ventura machine.
So as soon as I loaded it, it was like, oh, I can't migrate from your old Mac because Ventura.
I was like, oh, crap. So now I have to go through this process and I couldn't get internet restore to load on that
machine.
So I went through the create an account, log in, upgrade to Ventura, then go back into recovery
mode, wipe it, reinstall Ventura again, now migration assistant worked. But I am told,
that you can maybe get into internet restore on an Apple Silicon machine by doing essentially a double tap on the power button. So the way you get into.
The options that then lead you to restore mode on an Apple Silicon Mac is on an Apple Silicon
laptop is you just you shut it off and then you hold down the power button until it presents you,
and tells you it's bringing you to options to get into internet restore you shut it down,
you tap the power button and then hold it and that's the secret incantation i'm told it was
i'd learned this too late i was already um deep into migration assistant by the time
somebody told me about this in our in our discord but um but yeah so so there's a link
for that then, right?
To tell you how to do that? No, that's the thing. Apple's website had no instructions.
That I could find it. I was looking, I'm like, how do I do internet restore?
Cause that's what I need. Like I just need internet restore.
No, I found nothing. So you tap the power button once and then press and hold.
And then press and hold. Yeah. Okay.
Yeah, yeah. So I don't know, man. Well hidden. No, it's the only place you can find it folks.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I don't know. Right here. Right here. Yep.
And then I was asked a question. Not only by our neighbor,
who went through all of this, but also by Uncle Jamie.
In in our discord and Jamie didn't really ask it as a question, Jamie made a suggestion and Jamie is correct. He says.
After a nearby strike, you'll likely be continue to find things that will have, you know, problems.
He says, I've read that surge protectors and UPSs should be replaced after a while.
They can really only suppress a few major surges before they themselves are damaged
and no longer provide protection.
Okay.
He says, if you know that you've had a direct or near direct lightning event,
you should probably replace them now.
And the idea of replacing all of my UPSs right now, yeah, I don't like this advice.
I don't like this advice.
It is like my neighbor asked me, he's like, so are you replacing all your UPSs?
I was like, don't ask me that question.
Don't put that out into the universe. So it's actually like the surge circuit, like the circuitry will start to break down.
That's what it's like.
The battery is, you know, correct. Yeah, it's not the it's not the battery that folks are concerned about. It's the the the surge protection circuitry in these things again
I this is just coming from right right like I I
Haven't done any research on this because I don't want to but I know that I need to I don't want to know the answer
Put your head in the sand Dave. Yeah, I'm gonna I'm gonna ostrich this one, man Yeah.
Well, that makes sense though. Right? I mean, that circuitry has been hit.
It did its job. Now it's time to.
But we don't, here's, here's, this is. We don't know that. That's right.
We don't know that because nothing that was plugged for me, nothing that was plugged into power,
even things that weren't protected by a UPS or a surge protector, nothing got fried from AC power.
It was all fried from the low voltage stuff over ethernet.
So.
I don't like my question is should I be replacing my protect net connectors that the the you know the Ethernet connectors on either end.
Probably, but I've had those blow and when they blow you know it
They don't they like they smell that you can smell the magic smoke got let out. You know,
Yeah, like and these are totally fine.
Okay, so well that's not true. I have one. I have two cables going between the house in the office one. They're both
cat 5e cables one passes my network connection the other passes essentially
a phone connection I'll leave we'll call it that and that one doesn't work so I
did order a replacement for for that cert for that Ethernet protect net and,
you've got that in conduit now right Dave no no these are direct aerial cables
yeah yeah they've always been got some more buddy I mean am I that's true they're shielded and yeah, I guess, but.
Yeah, yeah. They're shielded. It's not like paring copper in the ground.
Well, it is paring copper in the ground. Well, but directly I'm talking, you know, without,
without shielding. Correct.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm not sure that conduit would have, would make a much of a difference with this.
Maybe it would, it probably would actually.
Yeah. It just adds more shielding.
So yeah. Yepper. Yepper. Yeah.
And you know, if you ask APC what they think, they're going to tell you, you should replace your gear.
So just saying yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, of course. Yeah, I did So the UPS that Lisa's Mac mini was on is an Amazon basics UPS,
They don't advertise that they have an equipment protection plan like.
Like a PC does but I've been through a PC's plan and they get very specific with their questions about,
What blue we need to see the UPS we need to show that there was a lightning strike that affected the UPS,
And so they would if I if it were an APC unit, and I went to them they would almost certainly very quickly,
Deduce that no this was a low voltage thing we weren't involved in that Sorry, buddy, and they wouldn't pay up. I did ask I did ask Amazon, and they're like huh yeah,
We might be able to pay for something on that We'll get back to you, and so there might be you know 600 bucks or something coming from Amazon. I'll keep you posted,
Yeah, Adam Well, certainly, if you have any more thoughts on this, great, but were there any, please
share them, but were there, I'm trying to decide where to go in the show here.
Were there any of the questions that we have queued up for the next segment, because we're
not going to get to all of them, that you wanted to discuss while you're here?
Well, I noticed there's a bunch of Wi-Fi things. I have something that I found out about to add to Wi-Fi.
I don't know what kind of WiFi problems people are having.
Better way to get wired connections in your house if you don't want to have to run. We're all ears, go!
Yeah, I just felt, I knew these things existed, but it was, I don't know if you guys follow Snazzy, Snazzy Labs on YouTube,
but he did a video recently talking about alternatives, like how to,
how to get wired connections when you don't want to, you know,
run drops through your house or whatever.
Because he has some old house now. He ran wiring, but so he was testing different things.
And I was a big fan for a while of the phone, I can never remember what they're called,
the phone link ones, right?
So where you plug it into the electrical, or no, the electrical out ones,
home link or whatever, I always want to call it home link.
Power line. Power link, power line, yeah, power line. But the problem with power line is, you know,
it's temperamental and you don't really get great speeds. you know, you're not going to get gigabit kind of speeds and stuff like that.
Correct. Yeah.
Um, so he said, you know, those are no good, but do you guys know about Mocha?
Yes. We, we.
I did not know about Mocha. Yeah. Tell people about Mocha.
It's been a long time since we've talked about it on the show.
Yeah, so this is, and it's especially good now because like, you know,
I stream everything and I don't,
I don't use my coax cable and that's in my house and pretty much most houses already have coax cable running around. So these are adapters, network adapters,
that use your coax cable line in your house, and they work just like the phone things.
You plug one in by your router to the cable, plug that in, you know, ether that into your
router, and then on the other side there's a receiving one. You plug that in, you pair the two things,
full gigabit connections through the copper that's already in your wall.
You don't have to run anything else.
Yeah, they're a little pricier, I think, but they're not too bad.
And yeah, he was able to get basically his full gigabit speeds, you know,
through these little adapters. That's awesome.
Yeah, and like I said, most people already have, you already have cable running through your house,
so you can, and then you can split them. So if you need to run a TV and something else on the same thing.
You just throw a splitter in.
And so I'm going to start playing around with these because, you know, I'm out in this remote office
and I'd love to have a wired connection to this office rather than, I mean, I have mesh,
and mesh is great too for Wi-Fi.
But sure, you know, I can go router to router straight into, you know, a switch in here through the cable.
So I'm definitely going to give this a try. Mocha is awesome.
I ran it in my house to get ethernet to my, essentially from one side of the house to the other
where I didn't have ethernet cable up until February of this year
when I finally paid somebody to run ethernet cable to the north side of my house.
But yeah, no, Mocha is great. And what's cool about it is...
It's not just point to point, it is it's own mesh, so you could plug, you describe plugging
one in at your router and one in somewhere else, you can do that, and then you could
add a third one, and it will all, they will all talk to each other and share the bandwidth,
and yeah, I've seen, it really depends on the quality, on a lot of things, but the quality
of your coax cable, which for most of us is awful because it's been in our homes for decades.
But even with awful coax, like my, I know the coax in my house is probably, it's certainly
older than my kids. It's, it might even be older than me.
But I get, you know, 800 megabits per second over it with good, low latency and consistent connections.
You'll want to, if you are not using coax from the street.
Like if you're not using cable for a cable modem anymore, or for your TV, just disconnect it from the street,
so you have no interference coming that way.
If you do have to use it from the street, you wanna get a P-O, is it a P-O-E?
Crap. What is it called? Oh, there's a, I want to call it PoE, and it might be, but it's a, it's an inline filter.
And I will look at my Amazon orders here and see if I can find it. I think it's a PoE filter. Yeah.
And while you're looking for that, I'll mention that MoCA is spelled M-O-C-A. It's in our show notes, but M-O-C-A is.
And another thing is, because he was bringing this up too for people who might be renters or in an apartment
or something like that, and he didn't mention if you're going to do that, you have to get,
I forget what it is, something to block, Basically lock your door.
Place from like other people who might be on the same, you know, because they all routes
down to the same central point. The POE filter will do that.
It will stop the MOCA signal from going in or out of your house.
And that's what stops the interference from coming into. But yeah, it's it is called the POE filter.
When I see POE, I'm thinking power over Ethernet. Yeah, right.
And I don't I forget what POE stands for, but it is a POE filter.
You can buy it for nine bucks on Amazon. I'll put a link to the one that I bought years ago out there, but put one of those in.
I've watched my speeds go from like 300 megabits per second to 800 when I first installed this filter.
Yeah, obviously it's not going to be as good as running, you know, cat cable, but it's
almost as good option.
It's almost as good and you don't have to, you just get the, you get the adapter.
Oh, and the other thing is, unlike the Powerline stuff, apparently these you can just make,
it's a standard, so you can mix and match.
You don't have to have the same brand. Correct. Oh, right, okay, that's good.
Correct. I actually don't, Go ahead, Pete. I was gonna say, I don't have cable in the one room
that I need it, so I do use a Powerline bridge for, but it's just a Debbie's work VoIP phone.
Yes. So that has plenty of bandwidth for a phone. A Powerline bridge should work just fine.
But that to get get that kind of speed up to the third deck with Ethernet would be really nice
I've got cable up there. So one thing I will share is.
Mocha power line it suffers from this too mocha doesn't pass a hundred percent of,
The packets that would go across an Ethernet link I don't mean to say that it drops packets,
It filters certain types of packets to keep the connection,
you know, unencumbered for lack of a better term.
Some of those packets that some of these mocha implementations filter are the,
loopback detection packets that things like a mesh network might rely on To not start to cause network loops,
so if you wind up putting say You know a mesh point like an euro or something like that on the on
You know at the tail end of a mocha connection so that it is you know?
Ethernet backhaul instead of wireless backhaul If you start running into weird problems, it is your mocha connection unplug the Ethernet cable from your from your
you know from your eero or whatever that is at the far end of the mocha connection and
And Sonos 2 does not like to be on a mocha connection So just be aware just be aware of those things that like there's quirky thing it acts like Ethernet
that, except for certain, except when it doesn't, and yeah, yeah.
He also did point out that these are, compared to the, you know, the phone ones, I kind of
made it sound like it's just plug and play. They're not plug and play. You have to set
up some sub, there's some networking things you have to do and you have to like, you have
to configure them a little bit more, it sounds like. You have to like, at least he was saying
like you had to plug in, because they don't have just a web interface right off the bat,
like you have to plug them in initially and kind of set them up on a computer, no?
Yes, if you want to access their web interface, they have a fixed IP address and you need to set your computer to whatever IP range it is.
It's that whole sort of, you know, like custom network fiasco.
But they that's only if you want to.
Change the default configuration on them you can add security to them which if you're in an apartment you might very well want to do,
But otherwise no they are plug-and-play based on my experience you just plug them in and it's like you'll watch it sync up,
And and I would find that once every two weeks or more frequently or less frequently,
That one of them would lose its sync And I just had to power cycle
One of the adapters and that headache was sort of what got me to the point where it was like you know what?
But I'm just going to have ethernet. I found a good electrician.
I'm just going to do this. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
And it is better now. Cause now I can rely on that connection
and I have a generator in the house.
That was the reason for, for doing it.
But for, for getting rid of the Mocha was just because I wanted, I didn't want my entire network
running on it. It's great for those satellite locations. I still am using it.
In fact, in one spot of the house where I don't have ethernet and it works great.
It's, you know, it's really.
I would only advise it for people who are like, I want a wired connection and I really just can't
or won't install ethernet.
It's great. It's great.
It's way better than power line and in most cases better than wifi.
Because nowadays, wifi is probably faster than power line in most of our homes. Oh yeah.
Yeah. With the mesh systems. With the mesh system. Yeah, exactly.
Yeah, yeah. Incredible.
Yeah. Interesting. Interesting. Interesting. Well, I'm glad you brought that up. That's good, Adam.
Yeah. Um, we, we've essentially jumped over questions, uh, and, and gone into cool stuff found, which
you started with mocha, which I'm super glad you did.
No, uh, poor those John, uh, in our chat room during this episode suggested a, uh, a cool
stuff found called better snap tool and better snap tool he brought it up when we were talking
about having different screens connected to our Macs for for different things better snap
tool will set up as he says screen areas that are based on which monitor you are on and
so do you're shaking your head Adam do you I don't know but I'm very familiar with
what I mean the tool right it snaps all your windows you can kind of configure everything
right? That's one of those tools that lets you put windows here and windows there and
I want them sized, you know, this one's on half the screen, this one's, I think, right?
Yeah, no, that's it. That's it. Is that not a, I thought that was a sub-function a better touch tool.
I think there's a few of these that do this. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I know if I drag a window to a certain part of my monitor, it will resize it and put it in a certain corner
or throw it in the lower corner for me.
Yeah. And then you just move it again to undo that.
But, yeah, but I think I always thought that was part of my better touch tool and it sounds like it might be the same folks.
It's, um, is it or is it not? Yeah, what's, I don't know.
Yes, it is the same folks. Yeah, only Bora dot AI.
So that's in the show notes as well. Yeah. Yeah. Yep. Yeah.
Yep. Yep. Good stuff. Good stuff. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. So thank you for those John better snap tool has hot keys
and is a companion to better touch tool.
Great. Cool.
Have you guys discovered no pun? Well pun intended Apple music's new Discovery Station.
This is a just heard about it the other day.
Yeah, this, they rolled this out without any fanfare and it is, well, it's their new sort of competitor.
To Spotify's recommended playlist, like AI-based recommendations.
Based on here's what you listen to here. Yeah, exactly.
And you, the place you find it the first time is in Apple Music, you go to Listen Now, Top Picks,
and then swipe to the right until you find Discovery Station.
But once you've listened to it once, you'll now find it, for a little while anyway,
in Recently Played, and it won't be in Top Picks anymore.
So, like, but it's pretty good. Now, my Apple Music knows that I, at least recently,
at least recently, have been listening to a lot of, uh, like, classic rock and wedding band,
music because I've been learning songs for the wedding band that I play in.
So it was a little top-heavy on that kind of stuff, the Discovery Station. It was like,
Yeah, I don't need everything at 120 beats per minute, like, what else do we have, you know?
But, like, it very quickly got into some really great stuff for me that I did not know existed,
some new music, so, and you can like things, on the phone, you hit, either way, when a
song is playing, you can hit the little three dots next to it, and either tell it thumbs
down, suggest less, or love, which means suggest more.
The Mac, the same three dots in the, you know, the title bar or whatever of Apple Music,
and you get love and dislike, but dislike means suggest less.
And so you can tweak it as it goes, but I've liked it. Yeah.
I use Hey Lady on my HomePod for that. I just tell her I don't like this, or I love this.
Right.
And I bet you could, I bet you could Hey Lady play my apple music discovery station.
Yeah, that'd be the right way to do it.
Because this other way is a nightmare. Yeah.
Oh yeah, it's pretty good. I, you know, it's I don't know why Apple hasn't said anything about it.
They just like, I think it was like it was nine to five Mac or Apple insider who I think
were the first ones to just like, they just know somebody noticed it and was like, what the heck is this?
So nice that it's there and then they hide it from you. And yeah, recently played and they continue
hiding it. It's like, oh, I know where to find it. Nope, not anymore.
And I guess I have to remember it's soon to be just lady. It is soon to be just, just S lady.
That's right. Yeah, exactly.
Exactly. I know I have a lisp too, but I said something about a theory the other day and, and she started talking to me.
I said, oh, I said theory, not.
Yeah. Yeah. Oh, exactly.
In theory.
What are you, no. Yeah. That's going to get, I'm sure that'll get so much
better when they take the hay away.
Yeah. I'm pretty sure you're being facetious, Adam. Yeah. No.
Yeah. Yeah. It's going to be a nightmare. What could go wrong? Yeah.
Like, I'm not sure two syllables is correct.
Yeah. I like three, you know. Yeah.
Well, the other one I've had it even go on me is because we used to do committee meetings
at work and we had a, you'd get fined if, if your phone dinged or anything like that during the thing.
So you'd silence your phone and that kind of stuff, but God forbid you.
And someone said, seriously, well, guess who started about four different phones went, you know, go ahead.
Yeah. Yeah. Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. Yeah, exactly.
Yeah. There's a lot of, there's a lot of common words.
It really makes me think about like on Star Trek, why they had a computer and how bad would that life have been?
You know, I wonder, has anyone, now I'm not going to be able to watch Star Trek the same
way ever again, and neither are any of you after I finish talking.
Has anyone gone back to Star Trek and counted the number of times they just said the word
computer and the computer didn't answer, right?
It answered when they wanted it to, but of course it's because it was scripted and it
was an actor named Majel Barrett.
But like, how often did they just casually say the word computer and the whole ship didn't
just light up on them? Exactly, right? I'm here, what do you want?
Maybe they actually fixed her in the future. Yes, correct.
Maybe Apple fixed her by the time they got the Starfleet contract. I'll believe that.
Yeah. I have to imagine they're playing with some of their machine learning AI stuff and that,
you'll hear it and then start to hear additional words and then try to use AI to figure out,
are you actually talking to me or are you just saying something conversationally?
Right. Right. It's hope.
But even, I don't know, man. I don't know, I don't know about the world.
We're going to find out.
We're definitely going to find out real soon now. And then there's the, the other one that's funny.
I got to share this with you guys years ago on Saturday night live,
they did a skit about the a lady for old people. Oh yeah. It was very funny.
You know, it was very funny, but it, it answered to anything,
almost anything sounding like, uh, like, uh, uh, so that hopefully I didn't send them all off, you know,
Well, now that my mother's 97 and in a nursing home and has.
As the a lady there, oh, she can't remember her name to save her life.
And, you know, the different names that she comes up with.
No, it is though. You tell the story in a funny way. Yeah. Yeah.
It's the fact is, you know, life imitates art or art imitates life.
And sure enough, I mean, she just cannot remember A L E X A to save her life.
And, and the names that she comes up with and then gets angry with her for not responding. I love it.
And I feel bad for mom, you know, she's doing her best there, but, oh, dear, dear God, me,
that's a, and it just made that skit all that much funnier because they call it a bunch
of different names, but the computer learning or the AI machine intelligence for old people
picks it up.
Oh yeah, you're talking to me. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Yeah, yeah. Funny. Yeah.
All right, Adam. Yep. Yep. Do you have another cool stuff found for us before we have to pull the ripcord on this
thing?
Yeah, no problem. This is a really cool one. And I have it now because my company finally
approved me being able to upgrade to Ventura. And so when they sent me up with this M1 MacBook
Pro that I have, they gave me this really cheap, you know, HD webcam thing to hook on
on my monitor and they let me upgrade and I realized,
oh, I can use my iPhone in continuity camera, but I need a mount.
And so I went and, look, this is the one that I think they actually sell through Apple,
but you can get it in Amazon, wherever.
But the Belkin iPhone mount with MagSafe, they make a laptop version and this one
that I particularly got because I use desktop monitors is a desktop monitor version.
And it works great. You throw it up there. You put the iPhone, it snaps on to the back, it actually holds on nice and securely.
One downside, it only kind of has up and down adjustment. I don't know why they didn't put some sort of twist adjustment on it.
There's no rotation adjustment. Yeah, no rotation adjustment.
But I think the reason is, is because with with continuity camera,
you have center stage.
So you just turn on center stage and it it centers you.
So like, hey, maybe you don't need it. I don't know.
But now I get all the effects and stuff like that. And then you're showing it there.
They also it also has a tripod mount. So you can actually screw this into a tripod
but it compacts flat, so it'll fit in your bag, you can take it with you, it won't take up a lot of space.
It's a little heavy, it's metal, it's well built.
So, but it works great. The only weird thing is, using your iPhone as a webcam,
I sometimes forget it's up there. Like, I'll put it up there for a meeting,
and I'm like, where's my phone?
Oh. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
You know, so like, a little old man disease there. But yeah, and then I was like, well, what about,
because it doesn't deliver power, I was like, oh, you just plug a cable into the side of it, right?
If you need to charge your phone, right? Yeah.
So, I mean, I'm sure maybe there's ones where you can actually, you know, plug into the
bottom of power cord and it'll do that. But yeah, it snaps on and off pretty easily.
It's not too bad. I haven't had it fall off or anything. So yeah, it's a nice little thing and I'm using it now and it works great.
That's great. That's great. I think when we first, I went through a whole webcam fiasco.
A couple years ago, like trying to find a decent webcam when we started streaming the show.
And the reality is for 500 bucks or less, you can't buy a webcam that's any good.
In fact, the best webcam for 500 bucks or less is like an iPhone SE or, you know,
like and using it this way.
And so I started using it with camo from re-incubate because there was no continuity camera, right?
And I still use it with camo because I get way more control over how I do things.
And it seems to be more reliable for us than continuity camera.
Although your cameras worked fine today on.
But what that meant was I was looking for a way to mount this before Apple had even announced continuity camera.
And so there were no, I want to mount my iPhone on top of my computer mount.
So I have, I went through like a whole range of things.
And what I settled on was a clampable.
It's got like a gooseneck on it. and it, you clamp it onto, I have it clamped onto the stand
of my iMac here in the studio, but it's built to be clamped onto, you know, anything
like a desk or whatever.
And it's got this gooseneck and it's got a pressure mount to put on the, you know, to just hold the iPhone.
It's not using MagSafe, but the nice side effect of that is because of the way that the pressure mount is,
like the gooseneck comes into the center of this pressure mount.
I can hang the iPhone over my screen, like a lip over the screen,
and it brings the camera down to where the camera on the screen is,
whereas most of these continuity camera mounts
raise the camera above, you know, the iPhone's camera is above the screen.
And I like having the camera further down. So I'm looking for, you know,
an over the top of the monitor,
like hang it on your monitor mount, but let it hang over a little bit,
Like and let it be forward a little bit too, because it, you know, it just helps the viewing angle and all that stuff.
Maybe I'm being too picky. This one does have the ability to go, for whatever reason, portrait or landscape.
Sure.
Yeah, right, that makes sense. Yeah, okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
What would be ideal is for Apple to put a camera at dead center in the middle of your
screen but that the camera's looking through your pixels. Yes.
How nice would that be? You listening, Apple? There's been rumors about them looking into that technology for a really, really long
time.
For a long time. Yeah. the show for those watching, you know, we're looking down at the screen.
We'll get over here. We'll go there. You do a good job, David, looking into the camera a lot.
But I try to, yeah. Like I keep my, my video monitor window up right below the camera.
So even if I'm looking at that window, it kind of looks like I'm looking at the camera.
It's closer to it. Right.
Right. But if they, if they could master that technology, then the notch gets to go away on laptops too. Right.
I think way, way back when I read, like there was even companies looking at LCD technology
where the LCD pixels and the camera pixels were just like with each other.
So basically your whole display becomes a video camera, you know, like it's like two way.
Oh, I like that too. That's slick. Yeah.
Yeah. Or even if they just made like the top of the screen, those pixels, right.
Cause they're probably more expensive and you know, perhaps less flexible or something,
But yeah, it's interesting.
All right, well, we have we have we have used up all of everyone's time and this and now I think
we could probably go for another, you know, 75 minutes. I don't think we've used the band's time
yet, though. No, we haven't. Adam, thank you so much for taking your time. This has been amazing.
I love that. Great. All right. Well, we'll do this again sooner than we're not going to wait
like another six hundred and ninety episodes. Six hundred episodes, yeah.
No. Tell people where they can find you in between now and the next time we have you on.
Mine is really simple, it's Maccast, M-A-C-C-A-S-T, pretty much everywhere, Maccast.com and then
all over social media. So if you see Maccast, that's pretty much me.
Sweet. Again, thank you folks. Thank you Adam. Thank you folks for listening.
To Cash Fly for providing all the bandwidth to get the show from us to you. In addition to listening to Matt Cass, check out the other shows
that we do. Pilot Pete does.
So there I was a podcast for anyone who's interested in great aviation stories.
I do business brain for entrepreneurs and gig gab for working musicians.
Check those out. We'll put links to everything in the show notes here, of course, at Mac.
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Music.
Hey, uh, hey, Adam, if you had to share three words and they were the three
words that are on Pete's shirt as a lasting piece of advice for everyone listening, what might those three words be?
Don't get caught, made out of fat. That's good advice.
Thanks for hanging out with us, folks. Later!