It's time for MacGeekGabin. I will bring us our quick tip of the week with iOS 17's offline maps.
This is going to be something that will save your bacon someday. So do it now.
Once you've got iOS 17 installed on your iPhone, launch maps, tap your picture in the lower,
right, choose offline maps and download a new map or maps if you go into different areas.
And then this way, and you can even set it while you're in there to only do downloads
on Wi-Fi, to do automatic updates, to optimize storage, all of these things that are going
to save your bacon someday when you are out and about and either are in an area with no
coverage or you're out of data or whatever, and you've got offline maps.
I actually wound up using this last week because I had set it up just to test the feature when
I had the beta running and I was so happy that I had done it.
So you can do it to more quick tips like this.
Plus your questions answered today on Mac geek gap 1000 for Monday, September 18th, 2023.
Music.
Greetings, folks, and welcome to MacGeekGab, the show where we share quick tips like that
from us and from you. Cool stuff found.
We also share questions from you and from us. We try to answer your questions,
and we string this all together in a way
that gives us all the best possible opportunity to learn at least five new things
every single time we get together.
Sponsors for this episode include linkedin.com slash MGG, where you can go and post your first job for free.
I have used this. It's fantastic.
We'll talk more about it in depth in the episode.
For now, for the I was going to say for the thousandth time,
but I haven't done a thousand episodes here in Durham, New Hampshire, but for today here in Durham,
New Hampshire, I'm Dave Hamilton.
And here in another part of Durham, New Hampshire, very close to Dave Hamilton.
And it's the pilot Pete, a thousand times, a millennial show.
I know. Real landmark. It's crazy.
It's crazy. Pretty cool. It's crazy. Yeah. Well, we'll do, I, we prepped a couple of
things that we'll talk about, about the thousandth episode.
And I'm glad that we did. I, I, you know, it's not my inclination to,
to pat myself on the back.
Um, like the reason we got here is because we, we, you know, we focus on the content.
We focus on you. The show's about you. It's not about us.
But it is important to take a minute and celebrate this, and we will take that minute in a little bit.
But for now, let's do more quick tips, shall we, Pete?
I think we should, but...
See, using the word should, you didn't even use the word should in the opening quick tip.
You just said, just go do it. Go do it. Go do it.
Yeah, go do it now. Yeah, go do it now. That's right. But we should do some quick tips.
I'm just saying. I agree. I agree. You want to take us to, uh, to Kent here to
do the, to, uh, kick or to continue those along.
Yeah, Kent, Kent it is. He wrote, he wrote in, uh, hi, Dave and Pete.
I don't know if this is a quick tip and it doesn't really fit in the usual cool stuff found.
So maybe it slips in between somewhere. And I, I think he may be right.
But, he says, my wife recently had a medical issue and while she recovers,
her friends on social media and elsewhere want to send her cards of encouragement.
I don't want to publish our address in a general Facebook post, so I've asked anyone who wants to private message me.
In responding using iOS and iPad OS, I've found that if I type our address is.
The autocorrect slash predictive text line just above the keyboard populates with our address.
I assume from my contact card, and it's just a tap and it's done.
He says, it works in Apple Mail, Messages, Facebook Messenger, at least.
And it's saved me a lot of typing already. I wrote him back and said, not only is that a great quick tip, it does work on Mac OS,
or does not work on Mac OS that I'm able to find, at least in Messages.
I said, however, if you want to go into System Settings, Accessibility, Keyboard, and Text
Replacements, you can put all manner of shortcuts in there too.
A poor man's text expander and said, for example, I use comma ST and that puts, that's my abbreviation
for my home address, comma ST.
Yeah, okay. Yeah, whatever you need it to be, right. And then comma FL if I need to put our Florida address in or something like that.
Yeah.
And along those lines, I do the same thing with my cell phone number. Yes.
I think, yeah, I use comma cell and that prints out my whole cell number and then I use dcell
as one word for Debbie's cell phone number.
I need to put Lisa's cell phone number in mine because I do the same thing.
I have, I, yeah, I have a shortcut for, for my cell, uh, so I don't fat finger it whenever
I'm typing it in. I do the same for my email addresses. So I don't fat finger those.
But when I need to give somebody Debbie's cell number, I just type dcell.
I have to give people Lisa's number all the time. That's a great idea.
I just want to offer. Okay. Everybody, Lisa's number is six zero.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah. I should be real happy about that.
Don't kill me, Lisa. Yeah, that's right. Just kidding. If I do that, we'd need to hire separate attorneys. Right.
Um, the, uh, you, you mentioned getting there via accessibility.
That's not how I would go there.
I, I would go into settings, general keyboard, text replacement.
And I, I say that, that way, because you might be able to get there through accessibility.
I've just never gone that way.
I don't think it's there that way. That's pretty much how I found it. Pretty. Okay.
So I will stand appropriately corrected if, if I did. Sure.
Well, you've heard at least one way that I know to be accurate to get there, but you
might've heard too. So yeah, there you go.
Yeah. Uh, what are the odds Apple made two paths to that? It's rare for them.
Um, you know, it's rare, but, but it, but it happens. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. Uh, all right. You want to take us to what might be my favorite quick tip of the week with Steven?
Yeah. It was just great or what?
Just played Mac geek cab nine 97 and I have an add on or two to your tips about music
recognition in the control center.
Tapping on the music recognition button activates the recognition, but if you hold down the
button, it pops up a scrolling list of your music search history.
Tapping anything in that history list opens that track to play in Apple music.
I was, I was blown away by this. Yeah. I had, I had no idea.
And this is why we like love these things. Right. Yeah. It's why we love these things. Correct.
Yes. But also why it's when you've got an extra minute, you know, long pressing on
things, control clicking on things, option clicking on things on your Mac.
There are these hidden little gems that remain hidden until you know about them.
And then, and then they just, you know, kind of work all the time.
So, yeah. And don't be afraid to break it because you know, what's the worst that could happen?
You could wind up with a sinking issue like me.
Yeah, right. Right. That's a whole pre-show, uh, not a joke.
No, no. And it's, it, it persists through the show, Pete, unfortunately. Yep. Yep.
I, uh, I, I'm going to jump us ahead just cause we're talking about Shazam.
I'm going to jump us ahead to a question from JT here because JT asks, he says.
Shazam defaults to Apple music to play the songs that it finds.
I'm a Spotify user first though, and I prefer Spotify for many reasons,
mainly because Apple has messed up music, in JT's opinion, since the iPhone 6 release.
I would like a shortcut that sends it to Spotify. Is there a way to do this?
And actually you don't even need a shortcut, JT, or nor do any of the rest of us need a shortcut.
Go into the settings for Shazam. So you need the full Shazam app installed, which you can do for
free. And then you can connect Spotify or Apple music to Shazam. You can only have one of them
connected, but if you go into the Shazam settings, so iPhone settings, and then choose Shazam from
the list of apps, you'll see that you can connect either Apple music or Spotify.
And if you have one connected and you go to connect the other, it will disconnect the first
one. But you can happily connect it to Spotify, which I was shocked. I don't know what made me
think to go into the settings and see that, but I, I, cause I typed a whole response.
Like now I don't think there's a way to do this, blah, blah, blah. And I was like,
wait, why do I think that I should confirm? And so sure enough, you can, you can do it. So,
So I love answering a question when I get to learn too.
So that's, that's a beautiful thing. Yup. Ah, there it is. Yes.
Yes, exactly. Uh, back to quick tips. You got one from listener Cliff, Pete?
Yeah, this is, I'm sorry, Cliff, fist shake at you. I'm the expert here about flight, all things flight.
No sneaking up on me with a quick tip I didn't know about, but.
I think he did. Well, you know, the definition expert X is a algebraic term for quantity unknown and spurred
as a drip under pressure. So that's me.
All right. Quick tip in messages. If someone sends you text with an airline flight code in it,
And for example, U A as in uniform alpha, space 1449 is recognized by the app.
And if tapped, will allow you to pre-flight the flight info right there on a pop-up screen.
No need to copy and paste and go into flight aware or flighty or anything like that.
Just tap on that and goes right to it. You'd see the progress of the flight, you know, how much longer till it lands, if it
landed, all that good stuff.
I think it uses flight aware to do that. It may well.
It's the backend database, but you're right, it's a data detector is what we used to call
those things. I don't know if that's still the right answer, or the right terminology, but yes, it detects like UA.
You called it Uniform Alpha, which is of course the NATO phonetic alphabet, but we plebeians
think of that as United Airlines.
That. And I played with it, and of course my phone is now my camera.
I think Delta is D-A-L, not D-L, it may be D-L space and then the flight number.
So you're going to have to play with it for your airline to see what you come up with.
For you fellow cargo dogs, I can assure you, UPS and FedEx and DHL are not included in the database.
No, not at least not in the data detector. I think they are in the...
You can get us on FlightAware. Database on FlightAware, correct.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
All right, while we are cooking along, we have a ton of quick tips left.
We're going to save some for the next episode, which has a yet another fun number.
One thousand one, two palindromes and three episodes. I'm into this.
But while we're here, because today, at least the day this episode is releasing is iOS 17
release day, I wanted to go through and share some quick tips about iOS 17.
I know we started with the maps. The next one I want to share is, uh, we get a new widget in control
center, but we have to add it.
It's not added by default when you upgrade to iOS 17. And that is you go into settings, you go to control center and
add the ping my watch widget.
So now if you don't know where your watch is, just like you could ping your, your phone from your watch.
Now you can just, you can go to control center and ping your watch from your, from your phone.
So that's, uh, that's one of them.
Yep. Uh, JT Ray brings us our next one. So JT gets to has been in the episode twice now at the 12 minute mark.
Uh, reminds us, he says in iOS 17, you can set an automation in the shortcuts app now to turn off cellular data based on your location.
This was not doable with shortcuts in iOS 16 and prior.
He says, I've been using this for the past few weeks on the betas and it works like a charm.
Now I can simply use my home or office wifi to make calls and save some batteries.
So you can say, when I'm connected to my home wifi, turn off cellular data.
When I disconnect from my home wifi, re-enable cellular data and then that way.
Oh, that's a great idea. Yeah, yeah. We back up to that previous quick tip.
Sure, yeah, sorry. I didn't mean to jump us off. No, no, I just realized something that I think I saw.
That you can now locate Find My Friends, similar to.
If, for instance, if you're looking for your AirPods, you pull up Find My, and it gives you an arrow
20 feet in that direction, that sort of thing.
I did it in...
The old version of iOS in Ikea down in Florida, but I was just guessing, okay, they're in that
general direction and that sort of thing. But it looks like now under find my, it gives
you the arrow and 80 feet away or.
I think that that is true, but I, but the asterisk is.
They have to be sharing. They have to have a phone with ultra wide band Bluetooth in it.
That just like your AirPods or an air tag does and I believe the only phones that have that are the iPhones 15 right yeah,
so sorry I'm not buying the whole family 15 eventually you will eventually I will
yeah but right now I haven't got five grand to drop yeah exactly yeah exactly
right yeah so yes there there is that but I'm pretty sure like I don't I don't,
I don't think I can do that.
I was able to use find my and zoom in a lot and get a general direction of to
where they were in the Ikea and I did find them, but, uh, but I was thinking,
oh man, it would be so much nicer to be able to have, yeah, they're in this direction for. Yeah.
Yeah. It's, it's the, uh, it's the iPhone 15 thing is, is we're getting in the, uh,
in the chat here. So thank you everybody.
Yeah, that's for great. Um.
On the Mac, we have long used Spotlight to get to specific system settings panes,
right? You want to get to displays. We've talked about it here on the show. You type displays,
right? You get Spotlight open. That was not the case in iOS until we now have iOS 17. So you can
get directly to settings panes by spotlighting yourself there. I will say that the adjustment
to the way spotlight in the more granular data or simply the increased amount of data that you get
in spotlight is one of the things that has thrown me off the most about running iOS 17. So expect
that because I use iOS 17 to launch apps all the time. Now that there is more data in there,
apps aren't the app I want. Isn't necessarily at the top of the list anymore. I have to scroll a
a little to find it because there's more stuff.
So bear that. And maybe I should check this. You type to find it right.
I used to just go into settings and then pull my thumb down a little bit to get a search window at the top.
You can do that in settings, but now you can just do it spotlight wide.
That's correct. That's awesome. Yep.
Um, I want to look at my spotlight Siri and search preferences.
Yes. And I get my, I can't set the order anymore.
Huh.
Well, you know what I should, I should look for spotlight. Should not be alphabetic or. It used to be. Yeah.
And I'll, I'll state this while you're looking at that, expect a lot of things to be broken
or different, be it watch iOS, iOS, that sort of thing.
I'm still hitting the wrong button on the new watch iOS. And I want to.
When I want to look at my, uh, I guess it's control center listing all the apps that I
have open. I hit the side button.
Well, that didn't need anymore. You have to now scroll up. It's they've, they've inverted those two and I, I can years of hitting the side button
now has to go away.
So expect that to break some of your workflows. Eventually I'm sure we'll get it in time for Apple to switch it back.
Yeah. Yeah. You know, Ben in the chat is saying that, uh, running IO is 16.
He can use spotlight to get to the specific settings panes.
So it might be that it was all, it's interesting because I noticed this,
I had it on my list and then I saw a list that Tom's Hardware had published of things
that were, you might not notice in iOS 17. And that was also on their list.
So either we're seeing slightly different things or both the, whoever wrote it at Tom's Hardware
and I did not notice it before because maybe it was in different, a different order.
So maybe it's simply that this reordering of spotlight is what we're noticing.
So thank you for that, Ben. Yeah, we'll have to, obviously we will continue talking
about iOS 17 and how all that works.
So yeah, keep it coming. Feedback at matgeekab.com still works.
Whoa, feedback at matgeekab.com?
Yep, 1,000 episodes. We're not gonna change it now, Pete. Feedback at matgeekab.com.
Although it wasn't originally feedback at matgeekab.com.
It was an address at a domain I no longer own. So I just don't even want to say it in
the show. Cause if you email it, I won't get it.
So, yeah, but yes. I have a question. Yeah. Does feedback at manningcamp.com still work?
Unfortunately, yes, it still works Pete.
And I, I really, you know, I am appreciative of you for a lot of things and I just
couldn't be more appreciative of you for bringing that up.
I can sense that in your voice, Dave.
Yeah, good. Have some fun with it, folks. That's right.
Um, Safari in iOS 17 has even more tracking and fingerprint protection.
I don't, we don't know. We're not talking about your fingerprints that you would
use on a touch ID sensor.
We're talking about a, uh, a figurative fingerprint that is.
Describes how people might pull different heuristics about you not just your ip address.
You know but but not just the cookies that you have installed in your browser but.
Different behaviors that can really narrow down exactly who you are and apple wants to
keep people from doing that to us and so they keep increasing this stuff the advanced tracking
and fingerprint protection on my phone was enabled by default for private browsing only
but now you can enable it for all browsing and you do that by going into settings on your iPhone
and iPad Safari. So go into the Safari settings into advanced and then it is advanced tracking
and fingerprint protection and you can change it from off private browsing or all browsing.
So that's another one to check. Also in Safari, Pete, I noticed a fun little thing. If you're on
on a webpage, you know, once the page loads,
you get in the URL bar, you get the two little A's, right?
That give you a bunch of options, right? You can put it into reader mode and do all sorts of things.
There's a new one on there called listen to webpage and you press that and it will start reading you the article
from the webpage.
You can control the playback in the now playing widget in the control center.
That was a fun thing to figure out by the way, cause I started it playing and then I was like, cool.
Now, how do I shut her out? I don't want it to go for three minutes now.
Yeah, exactly. Yeah.
So yeah. Oh, that is awesome. Now playing widget.
We'll show you the title of the webpage, how long it's going to be for it to read
it, like it figures that out.
Yeah. So yeah, that's pretty good. Here's the thing.
I bet I could be wrong, but my guess is it will then read it.
If you have a PDF pulled up in a webpage, it will read that PDF for you.
I would assume. Oh man, that is a great way to get some reading done while you're driving.
Yeah, I don't, I mean, you would, well, no, it would work, but you would, like, I don't
know, you would have to ask Siri to get that going for you somehow. Yeah.
Like, cause otherwise you're going to pick up your phone and make.
Oh, no, I'm thinking, you know what, look, I know I've got to do some, uh, I have a 30 page
PDF, but load it up and then, and then tell it to start reading and then hit pause.
And then when I'm up and running on the road, just reach up and hit play and go.
So that I, that's a good idea. I have not tried that, but I like that idea. Yeah.
I, yeah, I hope it doesn't, I hope it keeps playing it even after like the screen goes to sleep or, you know, what those, those different things.
Cause last week I had to go to Atlantic city for some training and there was a
35 page document I needed to pre-read and I'm like, Oh, I didn't read it before I
left the house. So after a eight hour drive, which was should have been about a seven hour drive.
Uh, thank you traffic. Uh, I had to then get exhausted into a hotel room and try and read
it without falling asleep. That was work.
That's tough. I actually had to stand up and walk while I was reading so that I wouldn't fall asleep.
Yeah, but you're right. Yeah. Reading that kind of, I like this.
All right.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Huh?
Huh. All right. We're going to play with this again. Send your stuff into us.
Um, one last one that I've noticed, uh, is, well.
I have noted, I did something in the car the other night. We were driving back from Boston.
I wanted to know a fact we had, I had other people in the car that could have looked it up for me, but I was driving and we were talking about, I
don't know, something stupid or whatever.
And, uh, I wanted to, to know something. And so I asked Siri, I'm like, what, you know, what, what, how does
this work or something like that?
And I fully expected. I can't show you that in the car.
Bingo. That's what I expected to hear because it's, and my response is always, I
I don't want you to show it to me.
I asked you about it audibly. I want you to tell me audibly.
Now she doesn't like it when I say that, but you know, that's what I say.
I found halfway through her answer, Pete, that I did not have to say that because she was giving me the answer.
As I would have desired, not as I anticipated.
So like, I know Apple said Siri gets better in iOS 17. I mean, it turns out it does everybody in the car was like, Hey, wait a minute.
She's actually doing it. So, um, I, you know, what amazed me always is there seemed to be no consistency.
Sometimes you would ask it and get it.
And then other times you can't show that to you. We did three or four things in the car the other night and all of them worked.
So it was definitely more than we would have expected in the past.
Yeah. And here's another anecdotal observation maybe. Yeah. I have, I have noticed for years that dictation
works better on the watch than on the phone.
And that's again, purely anecdotal. Okay. But it's been my observation that if for some
reason, I don't know if it's, it shouldn't be, It's the same.
Yeah architecture yeah yeah yeah i would expect the phone to be better at it because it's it's got a better processor although the new watch and i know jeff and i talked about this the other day with the cpu on that thing i mean that it's a it's a remarkable.
Increase yeah yeah learning course yeah yeah exactly.
Uh, Ben in the chat at mackeygub.com slash, oh, sorry, Porthos, John in the chat, uh,
says, uh, there is a new way to make settings deep links appear in spotlight in iOS 17.
You go into settings, Siri and search, and then settings again, and you have to make
sure you turn it on to surface it in iOS 17. You can also reset the suggestions learning there.
Ah, interesting. So yeah, you can, you go into Siri and search and you can have suggestions appear, but yeah.
Oh, now, now my discord thing is scrolling cause I'm reading this live.
And people are quit writing to it. No, no, keep writing, keep writing.
No, it's totally fine.
Yeah. Interesting. So you can have these show content in search.
All right. Yeah. That's interesting.
I like it. I like it. I like it. Cool.
Uh, one last one. Uh, that's probably two. One is that my first of this, these are two about CarPlay.
The first is not new to iOS 17, but because I was messing around with it,
I was reminded of CarPlay split screen view.
I got so accustomed to just seeing, like if I had maps up to just having maps up
in full screen view, but in the lower left-hand corner of CarPlay,
you can press the little button that splits it into split screen and you get,
you know, you're now playing widget and other things appear.
So it's easy to pause things. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. So I just forgotten about it.
And I, in messing around, I was reminded and I'm like, I bet I'm not the only one.
So I figured, share it on the show.
In iOS 17, what we get in CarPlay is what I'll call the Layered View.
When, uh, I am interacting with like messages or something with iOS 16, the map goes away
on the screen, right? The messages thing just comes up with iOS 17.
You can still see what's behind it and get a little bit at least of, of the, the app that
you're actually in while you're interacting with say messages and all of that. So.
And one quick question about CarPlay that I meant to mess with it the other day and I
kept forgetting to do it. Sure. So I had maps on one page and Google maps on another page.
Can you rearrange where the icons are in CarPlay?
Absolutely. The way that you do it is you go into settings, and I believe it's just settings CarPlay.
Okay. Am I, am I right on this? Is, is there a CarPlay setting?
I know it's somewhere.
Maybe it's settings general CarPlay. If I was, if I was smarter Pete, I would search for this,
but I want to be able to tell people how to get there. So it's settings, general, car play,
and then you will see all of the cars listed that you connect to, right?
And so you pick the car that you want to customize, and then once you're in there, choose customize,
and it will show you a list of all of your apps. perfect.
Right. And, uh, and you can set the order of them or remove them entirely.
Uh, from the, you know, from the, from the list there.
So if you want to hold that up again, briefly, I've got you large now. Oh, okay.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So if you're watching the video, you can, you can see my CarPlay apps and it's not
going to focus, right? Because that's just how it be, but yes, you can set that order.
Oh, gosh. Don't hit reset, Dave. Don't do the wrong thing.
Okay. Uh, but yeah, 2000, the camera will focus on your, uh, that's right.
Well, we'll get there. You know, it's like 2000. I don't that's another 18 years. Maybe maybe as my son said the other day
He's like, you know, if you just start doing three episodes a week dad, uh, you're gonna be fine
Yeah, you're gonna you're gonna be uh, you're gonna be totally fine.
All right. Look, you know here at mac geek gab We wouldn't have made it to a thousand episodes without having the right team around us supporting us making things happen,
and that includes sadie who we brought on a few years ago and And she does all of the social media stuff.
She does so much for us.
And we would not have been able to find Sadie without our sponsor, LinkedIn Jobs.
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Then you add your job in the purple hashtag hiring frame to your LinkedIn profile to spread
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All right.
As I mentioned, we hit a thousand episodes, Pete, and it's it really is kind of amazing.
You had the fantastic idea.
You had gone back and listened to the first episode, MGG number one, which was not called Mac Geek Gap.
Oh, sorry. Oh, no, that's the correct response. especially in today's world, right? Like it was not, well,
it was not high energy.
I took a segment out of the intro of it here that I'm just going to play and you you get to compare and contrast to go for
the week of June 13 2005.
Greetings, everyone. Thanks for tuning in. This is TMO to go.
This is the inaugural edition. I'm Dave Hamilton. I'm here with
John Braun. Hi, John. Evening, Dave. And we will come to you on a weekly basis, talking
about all things Mac. John and I are geeks from way, way back. Oh, yes. Bulletin boards.
The bulletin board days. That's right. Yeah. And modems. Yeah. What's a modem, John? Yeah.
They were on apples. They were on apples, apple twos, but apples is...
Yeah, that's how it began. Settle down everyone. It's your hearts.
It's okay. Take a deep breath. It's calm now. But yeah, we called it TMO to go.
Cause of course it started at the Mac observer and, and we thought we were just going to be talking
about sort of the events of the week. And so it was going to be the Mac observer to go.
And it was after we recorded that episode, but before we released it that, um, I was like,
yeah, we got to come up, maybe that name, like, I don't know.
And that's when Lisa was like, why not call it the Geek Gab?
And I was like, as with most things, she's much smarter than me.
And so it was like, oh man, I'm like, well, and this is, see, this is where I ruined it.
I was like, no, it should be Mac Geek Gab. Now, of course I didn't predict
that there was gonna be an iPhone or an iPod
that we were gonna talk about or any of that stuff, right? So yeah, that's on me.
She said, I should have called it the geek gab. And I got, man, I don't think this name is, is bad, but it's like, obviously
we talk about more than max here.
So again, she was smarter and more prescient than me, which just sticks out.
You know, that, that's how it goes. That's just how it is.
This is a fact that I have come to accept in my life. Yeah.
Uh, but, uh, yeah, it's, it's been, uh, it's amazing. I just, I really, it's, it's crazy how to think that I never thought I really didn't think,
I mean, we talked about this. It's interesting. I say that I don't like to write. I don't like
to spend a lot of time congratulating us or even reminiscing because I like doing the content of
the show. However, as we were prepping this, I realized that Pete, you, and maybe you weren't
intentional about this. Maybe you were, but the last several episodes you have navigated us into
moments of reminiscing.
We told the Steve jobs story, we told the Shazam story, and so there's been more of that.
A little bit. Oh yeah. But there's. Which has been good. Exactly.
The, that's the thing though, about this show is there's so many good things about it.
And it, it doesn't hurt to go back a little bit for, for people who are joining us all
the time, which is a good thing.
You're totally right. So, yeah.
No, it's not my inclination, but, but I am wrong, just like I was wrong about the name
TMO to go, there are things I am wrong about.
My bullheaded persistence and my impatience definitely keeps me from stopping and reflecting.
And I mean, I think in a general sense, that's probably a good thing, right?
It keeps me from living in a cardboard box. Exactly. And you're not in your own echo chamber.
Exactly. And that's a good thing. to see that, you know, I.
And this is kind of been mine and it's been just amazing what you and John started and built and invited me into.
Fairly early on and I can't tell you how much I appreciate that and now that John has gone so many well-wishers have come in for him
And that's been a wonderful thing. Yeah
That John's doing his own thing and I've kind of stepped in here. I can't possibly fill his shoes. So the show is evolving.
Absolutely. Absolutely. Absolutely. Absolutely. And I think it's been a wonderful experience show is evolving.
Absolutely. But I'm, I'm, I'm thrilled with the comments we're getting to along here at where the show
is going and, but it, it's only because, and if, and I know you folks will correct us if
we ever get to the point where we're making the show about us with, we do that, the show's
over and, and, but making it about you and the things you send in and that you share
with us and that we, you correct us when we're, we're either slightly inaccurate or
completely off base. or yeah, dead wrong.
Not that that ever happens, but if it were to, I'm sure you'd do that.
It doesn't happen to you, it happens to me.
No, there you go. But no, and so it's such a thrill to be a part of this and to watch it evolve and be part of the evolution is,
I'm just blessed, that's all I can say.
That's the best word I have. Same. Oh no, this is, I talk all the time about how I lead a charmed life,
and I believe that, like I know this to be true.
Now, it's not accidentally charmed, at least not all of it.
I certainly am extremely lucky and extremely fortunate,
but a lot of it is like that bullheaded persistence.
And I, uh...
I have two emails that I want to read that we love these kinds of emails, by the way.
These are the fuel that keep us going. We rarely read these kinds of things on the show because,
again, we don't like to just sit and congratulate ourselves. I love it when you congratulate us,
don't get me wrong. That reminder that, yes, there are people out there and it's appreciated.
But the timing of these two emails that I have from rich and from Kent,
I want to share here as part of this kind of retrospective moment that we're having,
because they really, really hit the nail on the head for me.
Yeah. As you're about to read them, let me say this. Sure. You can see the number of downloads.
You can see people are downloading the show.
These letters prove people are listening to the show. That's it.
Yes. You're listening. And this is way more important to me than downloads. Yes, absolutely.
Uh, this comes from rich and, and we have been really pushing, uh, our, uh, our reviews
a lot and getting a lot of reviews, which is great.
You can go to Mac geek up.com slash reviews. That's the closest we can get you to being able to review, uh, to, you know, to start
your review on the, uh, or even updating your review on the Apple podcast store.
But rich says, um, look, I, uh, evidently there's a character limit on how long a review
can be for a podcast.
So it cut mine off. I wanted you to see the full review.
And so I will read his full reviews from rich, rich W says I do not write reviews.
However, this time I felt like I needed to, this podcast is one of the best I
have listened to in a very long time.
Dave and Pete always strive for the listeners and sometimes themselves to learn five new things on each show.
I didn't think that was possible, but so far they have succeeded over the course of the past few shows.
I've learned something. I didn't think I would from this podcast.
It was not just all things Mac. It was a combination of taking Apple scripts
and other ideas to solve for a problem my friend had.
Well, Dave and Pete contributed to my aha moment. Thank you both.
I've been working on a solution, but did not find a way to fix the issue
without your out of the box thinking
by putting a few different ideas, processes, and technologies together to ultimately help me solve my own problem.
This is definitely a moment, this is the part where if I'm gonna cry ever on MacGeekUp, This is it.
This is definitely a moment of teach someone to fish because of this and all
of your guidance and help through the shows.
I just signed up to be an MGG premium member.
Thank you. Rich W.
Rich, this is, like.
That teach someone to fish moment, you calling it out that way.
It really just warms my, like, this is what we do. This is it, you know? And we learn to fish too,
like, we are in this with you. I said it earlier, like, you know, I forget what question it was we
were talking about or whatever. It was like, oh yeah, JT Ray's thing, like the Spotify thing.
I didn't know that that was possible until I started researching it because JT's question and came in. Right.
So it's, you know, thanks for teaching us all to fish. That's like, we're all in this together. Get your own hook.
Yeah. But it, you know. I can, you can do it. That's it is.
I, I, yeah, I, I, I don't say it on the show often, but, but I, I say it in kind of a PR way a lot is, you know,
you don't have to be a nerd to listen, but if you listen long enough, you will become one.
Yes, you will. Right? You know, so, um, so yeah, yeah. And then I did want to read Kent's message, which I got to
find here. Um, Kent, Kent had, uh, we were going back and forth on an email with a problem that
we would really never dig into on the show just because it's, it's very specific to what Kent's
dealing with now. It's really not that specific. It's, uh, it was an issue with his sonology.
He was trying to get, he was syncing his home folder to his Synology disk station, okay, and.
Wanted to point, uh, the Synology's, uh, music indexing functions at that to be used for like
audio station and iTunes sharing and all that good stuff. So great. And he was saying it won't let me
and it's complaining about things in the folder names.
And so he sent me, I'm like, well, send me a screenshot and he did and I think it was his wife's iMac and and so it said like, you know, Cindy's iMac or something, I don't have it right in front of me and and there was an apostrophe, right?
Cindy apostrophe s space iMac.
I'm like, ah, right.
That's gonna cause issues. I'm like, that apostrophe is probably throwing off the Synology engine that's doing this.
So, there's a couple of things to do, one is literally rename the folder, and then the other would be maybe try escaping it, right, you know, we're putting a backslash before the apostrophe because that's a way of telling, like, databases that it's an all you wants the apostrophe, you're not ending the text field or whatever.
So, he wrote us back and he said,
I've had success, but not exactly in the way we were headed.
He says, I tried escaping the apostrophe, but I got the same error.
I renamed the backup location to from having the apostrophe and the space
to like, you know, Cindy's iMac
to simply iMac, same error message.
So he says, I went into Carbon Copy Cloner, which is what he was using to, you know, copy this over,
created a new backup of just my music media to a different folder on the Synology within the default music folder
simply called media and then Synology allowed me to create the path
He says, um...
Thank you for pointing me in the right direction. And this is that bullheaded persistence, right,
that we talk about on the show all the time.
When I was doing onsite consulting, but even with this, you know,
I would have an idea, right, like this, and it would head me down a path
that wouldn't lead to the solution right away, right?
Like this didn't, but it gets you moving and then you just stick with it long enough
and just keep trying different little things, That bullheaded persistence, that's what
carries you to the end. Right.
And so I was super happy to get Kent's email about this because it, uh, you know, it just,
it, it reinforced that. I don't know.
It meant a lot. It was good. Yeah. Yeah. So thank you. Thank you.
Yeah. Well, so, so this is show 1000, as you mentioned next week is another palindromic show.
Yes. And then, uh, but the big show, so to speak.
Week of any celebration that's coming up in about five months, some change, right? Yeah. 24 episodes.
Yeah, I think so. Cause yeah, 1024 that's MGG 1K, right? Right.
So if you have any ideas while you're thinking to the thinking, listening to this, uh, and
you're thinking, oh, it would have been cool if for the thousandth episode, they did X.
Well, good news because we have MGG 1K coming up. So send in your stuff, feedback at macgeekab.com
Or if you're a premium listener, premium at macgeekab.com.
And while we are here, I do want to take a minute and thank the premium listeners from whom
we have received contributions in the last couple of weeks, right?
Because we didn't do it in the last episode.
So I thank you for your time and I will do this here. So thank you to all of you here,
$10 from Steven in Costa Mesa, A hundred dollars from Steven, a different Steven, in Woodland.
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$10 each from Cal in Russellville, Chris in Chorleywood, and Donald in Furlong.
$25 from Pier Timo, and I forget what country Pier Timo is in, and David in Chicago.
And then $10 each from Neil in West Hartford, Scott in Bourbonaise, Peter in Auburn, Abel in Santa Rosa,
James in San Antonio, Mark in Coopersburg, Frank in Tunbridge,
Barry in Des Plaines, Barry was our number one premium subscriber, the first one.
You're all number one in our hearts, Barry was just first, that's all.
Timothy in West Windsor, Frank in Voorhees, and Bob in La Pesche.
And then $25 each from Bob in Hamilton,
uh, Michael in Woodbine, and Domenico in Holbrook, And then 30 bucks from David in Villa Park. Thank you to each and every one of you. If you want to learn more about the premium program, it is available at Mackey.com slash premium. If you have any thoughts about how to evolve the program, we are always open to it. You have been the defining voice in what that program is.
And, uh, if you really have, we used to give extra content that was behind a
paywall, you said, please stop doing that. We want everybody to hear the content, which really like, you know, after,
this last discussion, you, you already know that warms my heart.
Uh, really what everybody wants is to send us there's everybody that's part
of the premium program has said they want is to send us their support.
And for that, you do get access to that, uh, premium at email premium premium at macgeekjob.com email address
that we do answer first, although we do try to get to everything that comes in.
So if you want other things from the premium program, Please tell us, we will get to it.
And now I want to answer some questions. Pete, can we be done now with the patting ourselves on the back?
Oh, okay, yeah. Ow, my arm hurts.
Okay. Thank you. Seriously, thank you to all of you for, you know, allowing us to,
keep doing this. It's amazing. Yeah, it's so cool.
It really is. It really is. It's amazing. Yeah.
Yeah, I meant to look, Pete, at what episode was the first one that you were,
that you actually spoke on and I, I can, I know how to go back and look this up, but
you were here as a fly on the wall for at least one before you had a microphone.
Yeah. And it's, it's, I want to say it was in the eighties, somewhere in the eighties. Not the 1980s.
Yeah. Well, that, that too, way back when. Yeah.
Um, because I recall being here for show 100 and helping do some production stuff with. Right.
Yeah, I think that's, that's right. Yeah, it was, it was double digits.
In fact, at some point I was the one, I recall who said, Hey, you should do this live.
Not just you and John chatting.
Really? That was your fault? I'm pretty sure, I'm pretty sure I'm the one
that really hosed you over on that.
I'm looking. We should do a live show so we can answer questions live. And.
I'm looking at MacGeeCab100 here and I don't see your name mentioned.
Well, just because your name wasn't mentioned doesn't mean you weren't here.
I, I have a memory of doing a Mac geek up.
It might've been a 200. It was some, it was some, like I remember I was sitting the opposite way.
My desk was on the other side of this alcove.
And I remember being here that night for 100 and we did live stream it.
You, you, so that may well have been your idea.
It's like, that's possible.
I remember, I think I got up and like did a drum roll on the snare drum or something like,
but I have a memory of being the only one in the room, but I, but it could, but it could be
that I'm remembering a different episode than 100. Um, I'm looking to see, yeah,
we just didn't mention who was here for 200, nor did we mention who was here just in the show notes.
I don't think we mentioned who was here for, um, you were definitely here for 300.
Yeah. So yeah, yeah, yeah. We'll find it by next week.
We will. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. All right.
Let's, uh, let's, let's now, now Joe has a very timely question.
So therefore it is time for a Joe says I'm buying the new iPhone 15 pro max.
Nice.
In recent years, I have always set up new phones by bringing my previous phone nearby and letting it wire wirelessly do its thing.
I do back up my iPhone to my Mac with encryption enabled, and I've I wondered if there is any advantage
if I set up my new iPhone from that backup instead of just letting it do the migration from the old phone.
It's a good question, obviously, like I said, very timely. I've always done it as you have, Joe,
at least since we've been able to do that, that isn't something we've always been able to do.
We used to have to do it from a backup, but now you don't have to do it from a backup.
You don't even have to do it from an iCloud backup. You can just like put the phones next to each other.
You scan the one from the camera with the other and then it just kind of magically does its thing.
And it really works. There was a day when those local backups because they were not encrypted
did not include any sensitive data like passwords and health, you know, I don't think we had health data
on there, but certainly not passwords and those sorts of things.
So that's why I defaulted to using either an iCloud backup or once we could just the migration from one to the other.
So I would say that all else being equal, I would use the wireless migration that you have been
You.
Using, Joe. But if you're on like a data limited Wi-Fi connection or not on Wi-Fi at all, and.
But even then, I think I'd still do this path. Because well, I'm trying to think when you do that path, you get all the data from your phone,
You get all your settings, but then it downloads all the apps from the store, but that's going,
to happen even if you restore from a local backup.
It's not going to put your app binaries in that backup.
Does it? It might like the local backups might have backups of your app binaries and it might put those right on.
So, so if you're on data limited, that might be a reason to do that.
Tell you what, buy two phones, send one here.
I'll test that for you and let you know what. what, did you, uh, did you order a new phone?
We're recording this on, on Friday the 15th. So right after phones went on sale.
Yeah, no, I was going to, um, I had it all set up to go last night.
And then I didn't, when I got up this morning, I I'm really jonesing for one because I've got, I've got a 12, 12 pro max.
And I'm like, okay, it's been three years. It's time for a new phone, but man, 650 is the only trade
in that they're giving.
And I'm kind of thinking I could get a little more for that if I sell mine outright.
It's an online, you know, type thing, but it's like a, there we go.
But I'll tell you what, reading in the comments here, it looks like, oh, Michael Erman wrote,
he says, after 90 minutes online, I decided to call my carrier for the 15 Pro Max.
15 minutes later on my six minute hold, I gave up.
He says, I think the 15 is going to be a hit for Apple. I think so, too, with the new.
A processor in it and all that, it's a, you know, that's a good thing.
I think Ken Ray pointed it out a couple of days ago. He says, it just felt like when you were buying the 14,
you were getting the 13 in a new wrapper, you know, because of the processors being the same and all that.
And he goes, I think he used kind of icky. So, nice turn, Ken.
But yeah, I mean, this is borderline revolutionary.
It's evolutionary, but the camera in it is, Yeah, yeah.
You know, I'm more amazing stuff and it'll do the, uh, uh, what's it called?
Don't get old. It's bad for your memory.
So for the, for the headset, it'll do the, Oh, spatial, spatial video.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yes, exactly.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No, it's, it's interesting. Um, to, to run back to the backups thing, Ben
in our discord reminds us that local backups used to have app binaries in them.
They do not anymore. Okay, so I I knew there was something in my head that it was like oh, yeah
No, there was a reason to do it locally, but it that doesn't matter anymore
It makes sense not to not to put them in there So I would just let your two phones talk to each other and unless you want to nuke and pave your phone and truly start
From scratch. I did that two phone versions ago. It was a man. Yeah, man. Yeah, because I.
Had it was after Apple had moved to the the, um, where you really could just have one,
uh, one home screen, right. Okay.
You know, and, and then have the app library.
Once they added the Apple library, I don't, I only have one home screen in the, and then I
just search for apps in the app library or with spotlight to launch them.
I don't have, I used to have, you know, eight pages of apps and folders and folders and all
that. I've got all that.
Yeah. So wiping my phone and starting from scratch allowed me to absolve myself of all my past
sins in terms of app management and organization.
So perhaps this is a reason for one or more of you to choose to do the same thing. Yeah.
I never thought about it with the phone. I mean, I get it on the computer, totally get it.
Because I had the 20, I think it was 18 or 2019, last Intel MacBook Pro 16, and I'll see you next time.
I had more problems with that thing. I was getting the blue screen at death
and it would just freeze up on me and all that. And I even, I took it back to Apple and got a new one.
And the new one was doing the same thing. And I went, oh, something's wrong.
And I nuked and paved and started from scratch. So whatever had gone from previous versions
into that one, it was making a mess of things. And so I, you know, I get it for the MacBook.
I didn't realize that the phone was as...
I, I really appreciated just starting from scratch and I only installed apps that I wanted.
Uh, I think this was my 12. I'd lose 200 apps if I did that. That's the point.
Exactly. I, it, I stopped using Waze because I realized that Apple maps had actually gotten good.
Yeah. Uh, you know, so. Ditto. No, it's the same thing. Yeah.
Yeah. So it, yeah, it makes a difference. When you're using Apple maps, people, please report hazard ahead or hazard here, speed check, that kind of stuff.
It can do it just like Waze, but, but not as many people are using it.
No, not as many people are using it.
Yeah, I agree. Yeah.
Although Siri, once again, Siri, report a hazard at this location.
I can't do that while you're in the car.
Are you kidding me? That's the whole point. Well, you know, I should try that.
My, my, my habits are not to do it with voice, but I definitely should do it with voice.
So I'll try that the next time I see some, something. Yeah, for sure.
Hey, Gary has a question, Pete. Gary says, um, does the photos app need to be
open on my Mac in order for it to check for duplicates?
Or does it do that in the background? Regardless? Gary, here's your answer.
Oh, okay. So I actually looked at that and looked, looked for this.
And I did find an answer. And it says, if you're using Ventura or later, uh, your duplicate photos
will automatically appear in the duplicates album.
And that should happen in the background, and you don't have to do anything particular within the app.
As mentioned in the remove duplicate photos in photos on Mac,
which is a link I sent them, you can then merge any duplicates found by doing
the following in the Photos app on your Mac, click Duplicates in the sidebar.
Select the duplicates you want to merge, click Merge, and the number of duplicates.
And, oh, by the way, if you have, say, two duplicates, or two photos, meaning each one's duplicate,
not one more duplicate than the other, you...
Two sets of duplicates. Yeah, if you delete one of the duplicates,
guess what goes away?
The other photo, because it's no longer a duplicate. Because it's no longer a dupe,
but it didn't actually delete it, it just doesn't show it in the interface anymore.
Yeah, you're like, did I delete it?
Oh, yeah, it's not in the duplicate folder. Oh, that's smart, so it is live updating, essentially.
Yes. Oh, that's good.
So, but yeah, I, I almost had a, I thought a self-inflicted stupidity. Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. Well, things that you delete are in the deleted photos for 30 days. Right. So yeah.
But yeah. And then the other thing that I found that I'm doing more and more, especially
When you get a photo that's like 1.4 megabytes and then 960 K. I delete the higher.
Well, you know, with the 1.4 Meg, leave the 960K because my eye is not seeing the difference.
I know, but these are photos that I'm not going to go make a poster out of.
Right, right. But how do you know that? Storage is so cheap, man.
That's true, but it says it right there in the bottom right of the duplicates folder.
When you're looking at the two photos, it'll tell you the size of each photo. I know.
But, oh, okay, I thought you were asking how did I know that would.
No, how do you know what you're not gonna wanna do in the future?
Oh, yeah. That's what I'm asking. the, for the, some of them for sure.
There's just no way I'm ever, I don't ever want to print that photo.
In fact, I should probably delete them both and be done with it, but that's.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
All right. Uh, let's see. Brian has a question and he's asking about
his Kindle, but really I think this is just
one of those things that's good to talk about.
He says, um, I misplaced my Kindle over two years ago and received a new one last
Christmas as a replacement.
I stumbled across the old one. He found.
That's how, you know, you're going to find it once you replace it.
Uh, he says the battery was dead, but I plugged it in and charged it to a hundred
percent, it lost about 10% in the following week.
Um, he says, which seems a little high for a Kindle that's just sort of sitting there,
but I'm sure the battery, uh, probably took a hit from the long time between charges.
I charged it up again to a hundred percent, but I'm wondering if charging it back up to
a hundred percent from a variety of charge levels might help to recondition the battery.
Um, do you have any suggestions? Yeah. So congrats.
First of all, I'm getting your old Kindle recharged just the other day.
I finally threw out an old Kindle that I could not get the battery to come back to life on.
I know I could replace the battery in it, but it was like, we have enough Kindles for everybody.
And I was like, yeah, no, I'm just not going to do it.
But I tried for months to get this battery to yeah. Cause like the light would come on, it was charging, but it never,
And I went through anyway. So congrats on that.
If it were me, and if my, let's say my Kindle did come back to life or any device I had with a battery and it came back to life after being dead or just being used for a while.
Um, what I would do, and this is just general advice for bringing a battery back to life, you know, conditioning it after you have, I would charge it to 100%.
Then I would let it drain down to zero again, but do not let it stay there.
Like as soon as it hits zero or even 1%, but you really kind of want it to get to zero,
immediately charge it again and get it back up and do that a few times.
That's what's gonna condition the battery. That's what's gonna, for lack of a better term,
teach the battery what its actual capacity is
because the battery is even, the battery circuitry and software is making a guess
as to where it is when it says 80%, it's,
it's making some educated assumptions for
lack of a better term.
And so you want to get that taken, you want to get that out of the way.
Um, you want to, you want to show it, here's what zero is, here's what a hundred is.
And then it'll start to, to, you know, kind of work a little bit better.
So, yeah, I would think, I don't know that, that Amazon puts in there some smart circuitry.
To prevent overcharging.
And that sort of thing as well. So, okay, yeah.
Cause I got someone, mom's 97 in a nursing home and her communication with the outside world is mostly via iPad.
And one of them told her now, you can't leave your iPad plugged in all the time,
it'll ruin the battery. And I'm like, yeah, mom, you're really okay.
Leave it off for a day or two, that's fine.
But it's not gonna overcharge.
There's circuitry in there to prevent it from hurting the battery by.
Overcharging and there's a different reason, you know, not to leave it on all the time,
on the charger all the time.
Yeah. It's not going to overcharge, but it will, it doesn't learn how to, yeah, how to let
those electrons flow.
You know, when, when I moved Lisa over to my old M one air, uh, I knew that she was going
to leave it plugged in 98% of the time.
It, it, you know, replaced a Mac mini, but now she just has one machine.
When she travels, she just brings it with with her and that's great.
I started thinking, you know, do I really want this battery sitting at 100% all the time?
So I did install an app that we have talked about on the show called Al Dente.
And I now understand it because I've used it. You know, it's from App House Kitchen
and I'll put a link in the show notes.
In fact, we will call this our first cool stuff found of the week.
I have a couple more that we'll talk about, But what's cool about it is it,
you tell it like with her, and you can go far deeper and far more granular
than what I'm about to describe.
But what I did for hers is I said, okay, well, what are its sort of defaults
for a machine that's gonna be used like hers?
And it's a great, let it go. I think it said 70% or it said 60 and I chose 70.
It's like, okay, when her machines gets to 70%, even when it's plugged in, somehow,
Al Dente, through its magic, tells the Mac that it is no longer plugged in.
And so it just doesn't charge.
But it runs off of the charger somehow. And I can leave it plugged in to her dock,
which then gives her her keyboard and her large display, like all of those things.
It lets you have the best of both worlds.
And then if you know that you're going to take it and go use it, you can tell it, oh, hey, power up
and it will charge as fast as it can up to a hundred.
And then, you take it with you and it's a hundred and you're good to go.
So, and then you can also do this conditioning that we're talking about here.
So, well, yes, batteries, Apple's battery tech is way better than it used to be.
And they say that this kind of thing isn't necessary.
I don't know. Like if I'm gonna leave it plugged in all the time,
it seems like 70% might be a good place to leave it. So I've been using Al dente on her machine and so far so good.
That's cool. I mentioned that I have, and I'll put a link in the show notes, I mentioned that I have
another cool stuff found to share, and I'm going to do it, Pete, I'm going to go back to episode one.
We said we'd go off on a tangent. Let's take one. Why don't you tell them about MenuMeters, John?
MenuMeters, that's, I've done a, you know, actually, I think I did a Monday's Mac Gadget.
This is actually called, and of course, MacObserver.com.
Oh, absolutely. Can't forget that. I can't forget that. MenuMeters gives you…
My PR guy tells me I need to say that a lot. So there you go.
Okay. So MenuMeters, what it does is it gives you a lot of information about what's happening with your system and it puts it in the menu bar and it does it with, I would say, probably as little real – it's very elegant, as little real estate as possible.
But it tells you what's going on. So there's one for drives. I have it set up so it has a green light and a red light to show reading and writing.
There's another one that shows network statistics like upload and download bandwidth, and that's
very useful. Very handy.
Especially for those of us that came from the external modem days and got used to seeing
lights flicker for activity.
Yes. Yeah. Yes. So this gives you the throughput, which can tell you, you know, is your provider, you
know, or the, you know, the server that you're talking to, you know.
All right. All right. Okay. Well, I couldn't resist.
I did as I was sort of listening through to that first episode We did not call it cool stuff found back then it took probably
I don't know a year for us to come up with that name for the segment But sure enough that that was the first thing that would be considered cool stuff found was menu meters,
That doesn't work anymore on current Macs. It was from raging menace software
I think but there is a fork that I found of menu meters that will work up to Big Sur of course
we use iStat menus nowadays and that is up to date for I think they've even got
Sonoma working under iStat menu so I'll put a link to all of this in the show
I don't know, but I figured I'd, I'd, um...
You know, let us do that. Um, I got a couple more cool stuff's found. Actually, you want to share,
I don't know. We'll do that in a future episode. It's fine. Um, we're in cool stuff found. We'll
just stay here. It's going to be fine. Uh, the, we have one that it's really interesting. So Rob
in our discord at Mackie cub.com slash discord, somebody was asking about, uh, automating the
setup of a new Mac. And Saurabh has created what I will call a cool stuff found or a cool stuff made.
He says, I've got two scripts that automate setting up my Mac, a brew file that uses Homebrew to
install every app I need in one command. And then a shell script that runs the defaults commands
To configure my apps and system preferences to my liking.
And the best part is both of these are available for free on Saurabh's GitHub.
And he says, feel free to copy or use them as inspiration. And of course, I put a link in the show notes.
So Saurabh, thank you for creating that. Thank you for sharing those with us here.
Very, very cool. That's awesome. Yeah, I know. It's crazy.
It's crazy. I have another one that came up in our Discord, Porthos John, someone.
Was asking David Klimkin asked said okay look posted a picture of his MacBook Pros screen or as Matt his laptop screen
I don't know which computer was I think it was a MacBook Pro and it like full of like not only
Fingerprints, and you know all the smudge that gets on there, but very clear.
Representations of the keyboard right exactly and that's because the oils from our fingers gets on the keyboard and then,
the tolerance between the keyboard and the screen when the Mac is closed means that the screen
often touches the keyboard and that oil transfers.
And so there are lots of things that can be used for this. Porthos John suggested one called Ghost Blanket,
which actually looks pretty cool.
It is a microfiber cloth that doubles as a cleaning cloth and sits there.
Now I had used something like this in the past And then the tolerances got so tight with my
titanium power book that I couldn't close it.
Uh, obviously things have evolved since the titanium power book.
And, uh, and lots of folks were saying that these ghost blankets were their preferred,
uh, way to do it. I, I'd not seen these, um, you know, around.
So I was, I was happy to see them kind of back and they've got, yeah, 15, 13, 14 is one
size and then 15 inches is kind of the other side, you know, the other side.
I lose that in a heartbeat. Yes, yeah.
Now you, Pete, you were just showing me here in the studio, you've got one that's like a plastic.
So yeah, it's a, hold it up for the screen, but it's a, it's just a plastic mold of the keyboard
with the cutout for the power button because that's also a fingerprint unlock
on this particular machine. And you leave that on your keyboard even while you're typing on it?
I do, and- So doesn't that then get the oil from that thing onto your screen?
It does, and the oil's getting on the screen either way.
There's just no two ways about it.
But it actually came, and I have a case on my MacBook Pro 16 because...
I travel so much and my other MacBook Pro 13 even though it was in a backpack that's padded
and it has that computer compartment, it was still getting scratched up a little bit.
I thought, you know what, I'm gonna protect this one. So I put a clear plastic case on it
and this keyboard cover came with the case and I thought, well, this is silly, I'll never use this.
I'll put it on and see how I like it. And you know what, I don't even notice it, A.
And B, I'm much less worried about spilling liquid into my keyboard with this.
Okay, so that's to protect the keyboard more than the screen.
More than the screen, yeah. Yeah, that makes sense.
It also came with a screen protector, which oddly enough, I thought I would
use it for a couple of days and rip it off.
I've left it on there and when I turn the computer off, I can see the bubbles and you just can't get it perfect.
Yeah. There's no matter how much dust removal you do before you put it on,
there's going to be a speck under there. Sure.
I don't see it when the screen is on, but when I turn everything off, yeah,
I can still see the imprints of the oil on the keys on the screen.
And you know what? That's OK, because it's on the screen protector.
So I wonder if you could use one of these ghost blankets in between,
because the ghost blanket is a microfiber cloth, but it's built to sit in.
You put it on your keyboard before you close. I bet it would work perfectly.
Yeah, there's no doubt in my mind, because I do have I use special alcohol screen cleaning. Yep.
Wet, dry side, you know, and I use that to clean the screen And then that of course takes the oil.
But I'm just saying like, if you use the ghost blanket, then it wouldn't even get on
the screen in the first place, right? Cause it's, it, it acts as that insulator
between the two. Yeah. Interesting.
Hey, I, um, I, you know, I use zoom a lot. Like I think a lot of us do.
They added a new feature for, at least for free for now that they call the zoom IQ,
which is it listens to, so you have to give it permission to listen to your meetings.
So bear that in mind, but it listens to your meetings, does a transcript of it.
And then does a summary based on the transcript that gives you like a high level summary of the meeting and talks about who said what, and, oh, this person,
you know, like Dave committed to get this part done by such and such a date.
Adam, you know, agreed to do that. Like it's, it's a really handy thing and you can have it sent automatically to all
recipients or you can get it and then publish it, you know, on your own or however you want to share it around on your own.
But it's a pretty cool thing. And I've put a link in the show notes
to where you can go and turn it on for your Zoom account.
You can have it start automatically, or you can just enable it and then turn it on,
you know, case by case for each meeting.
I will say that it is more valuable when you have it on for the entirety of a given meeting.
So think about that because it, you know, It gives it the full context.
And then, um, I got one more Pete from, well, from, not from me, but, uh, but from Andrew
Woodward who talked about this, um, this it's the Maros smart wifi lamp for desktop.
He says, I grabbed one of these off Amazon recently.
I'm very impressed. It works great with home kit with no bridge required.
I use it in my home theater. It illuminates the middle table, but doesn't impact the big screen.
And, uh, yeah, it's, it's a, uh, it's a desk lamp that it's, if you've got to look at the
picture of it, it, it really just looks like two pieces of, of, of two poles.
Uh, but the lamp is in sort of the two poles at a right angle and you can adjust the angle.
So it's not stuck at a right angle, but, um, works with HomeKit and Amazon and Google
and smart things. And, and you can. The LEDs are within the horizontal crossbar.
Thank you.
Thank you. Yeah. Okay. Yes, that's the right way to say it. Yeah.
And you can set the different, um, it's not, it's, it's only, um, well, I'll
say it's not color, but you can set the temperature of the, uh, of the thing.
So yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
So I don't know. I'd never heard of this. I guess I'd heard of morass before, but I'd never seen these, these lamps and it
looks, um, you can control it with your phone or, or what kind of price are they getting for it?
I missed that when you had, um, I, you know, I thought I had it up.
It was up near the top. I thought. Was it up near the top shop?
I'll just click shop. How about, how would I do that?
Shop now.
Oh, they're going to make me. No. Yep. I don't know, Pete.
It's hidden. It's hidden. You're giving it away today. Only today.
Only. Yeah. That's right. 30 seconds. That's right. Oh, that's right.
What do we call it? The smart led lamp for desktop. Where the heck is it?
There it is. Nope. That's the floor lamp.
Pete, I don't know. Lamp was $52. Okay. so it's going to be less than $52.
It's a, I don't know, man, uh, smart. Sorry, I'll quit asking questions.
No, no, it's a, it's a really good question, Pete. This is actually one of the things I like about having you here.
Um, but I don't. You're supposed to only ask questions you know the answer to.
No, you're only supposed to ask questions that I know the answer to. Well, there's that.
Right. Or I've, sorry, I forgot the, forgot the cardinal rule today, Dave.
Forgot the rule, that's right.
Yeah. I don't know, man. I don't know. Um. No stump the dummies allowed.
Yeah. It's like, maybe, maybe it doesn't exist anymore. I don't know.
Um, he said he got it on Amazon. It was, wasn't that what I said?
He says, I recently grabbed one of these off of Amazon.
Okay. Well, I'm not finding it on Amazon, but I'm sure it's there.
So yeah.
Well, uh, that's going to, uh, we will, someone will find it.
Meross. I want to look desk lamp.
It's gotta be there. The smart desk lamp. Exactly.
Kind of it. Yeah. Yeah, 38.96 on Amazon with a $3 coupon. Oh yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Nice find Pete.
Thank you. We will, I will put this into the show notes. Where are you finding it?
Well, you're going to have to put your linking because I found it for 43.51 Pete.
So. Um, I found it for 4,299, but at 3,896 with.
Cool, great, amazing, that's what we're going to do. And for the thousandth time, we're going to bring the band back in.
Actually, it's probably more like the thousandth first, because I feel like there was at least one episode
where we brought the band in, and then, you know, it was like, wait, there's more to talk about.
Let's talk, and then we bring the band in again. So, see, there you go.
Now we're just doing it. But now we're just doing it gratuitously though, Pete.
Now we're just having fun. I've told you a thousand times, Dave, not to...
Of course I haven't, because I haven't been here that long. But if I had been.
That's right. That's right.
I think I am the only person who has been here for all thousand episodes because there
were a few interviews we did with Paul Kent leading up to Macworld Exposed that we published
as you know as Mac Geekabs but they but John was not there was at least two of we did several
of them and John was here for some of them but not not all of them so yeah I think I'm
the only one that's made it for all of them.
My streak remains alive and I intend for that to continue so I'm going to knock on wood
because what would a Mac Geek Gap episode be without me getting superstitious?
Without the geek. Oh no, without me being superstitious and knocking on wood about something.
Well there's that too. The geek in chief.
The geek in chief, yeah there you go.
Alright folks, thank you. I know we said it a lot during the episode but thank you, thank you, thank you.
It's been awesome being able to do this. No plans to stop.
In fact, I feel like in a lot of ways we're just getting going again.
We're really like, you've got a, you know, a different pacing and I'm loving it.
And from what I'm hearing from you folks, you're loving it too.
And it's fantastic. Thank you for the warm welcome everyone that you allow me into your ears every week, so to speak.
Absolutely. And you know, it doesn't have to just be your ears.
One thing that you really can do for us that we'd love to ask you to do is share the show
with a friend. Do it now.
Share it. Just tell somebody about Mac geek. That really is one of the best things you can do. Have you done it yet?
Did you do it yet? P? No, I just don't these people. Have they done it yet? Okay, pause the show right now
Stop go share it then come back and listen to the end of this. Don't make me pull the band out again. That's right.
You know what that's the cool part is you have the option of pausing the band you can control that that's right,
Yeah, so pause the band tell somebody about it, and then then resume it. Did you do it yet?
They're not they did they did it. I think they did it Pete. We got good people here. It's good,
Thanks to all of you. Thanks to our friends at cash fly for providing the bandwidth to get,
This episode and almost all of our episodes from us to you from I think least probably an episode
I don't know right about episode 50. Maybe we started working with them. Maybe even earlier than that,
Good they've been great partners Uh, thanks to all of our sponsors.
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Check out Pete's other show.
So there I was check out my other shows, gig gab for working musicians,
business brain for entrepreneurs.
And if you want some merch, mackiecup.com slash merch. You know, I, uh, there's always something we say we have.
Music.
This is not the thousandth time we didn't start saying this right away, but, uh, but
I, one of my favorite moments that we got on tape, so to speak, was, uh, from, uh, episode
772 that we recorded at Mac Tech before the last Mac Tech before all the COVID stuff kept,
us from going to Mac Tech for a while.
And that's when we all got to say this nice little thing together.
So we'll let that happen again. And maybe the next time we're all together, we'll update this recording.
So have fun, take care of each other, share the show, and don't get caught!