Welcome to Mac Geek Gab and our quick tip of the week comes from listener Rod L in our
discord who shares that iOS 17 adds a new composition setting in the camera setting.
So if you go in to the settings app, go to the camera section, scroll down to the composition
section therein, there is a new level, or as photographers seem to like to call it,
a spirit level setting. And if you turn that on, what it will do is put a little white
line or a little line in the middle of a thin white line in the center of your picture.
And as you are tilting your phone, it will go yellow when the phone is perfectly level.
And that way, and this will happen in both, I believe, both portrait and landscape mode.
And this way, you know that your phone is shooting a level picture.
You can also turn on grid here, which is really helpful for aligning things and other composition options.
More quick tips like this, plus your questions answered and maybe even some cool stuff found
And today on my, easy for me to say, on Mac Geek Gab 1003, for Monday, October 9th, 2023.
Music.
Greetings, folks, and indeed, welcome to Mac Geek of the Show,
where you send in quick tips like that, questions, your cool stuff found.
We share your quick tips, as we've done.
We share cool stuff found.
We share your questions, and we also try to answer them. Sometimes we even have questions of our own.
We string it all together into an agenda that kind of makes sense and really is engineered
to keep us all engaged so that we each learn at least five new things every single time we get together.
Sponsors for this episode include BD Edit from barebones.com, one of my favorite apps
that's always running on my Mac and Private Internet Access VPN where at piavpn.com slash mgg,
you can save like 83% off your VPN service plus four free months.
You actually get a better deal than I did and it's the VPN I pay for.
We'll talk more in depth about each of those in a little bit.
For now, here in Durham, New Hampshire, I'm Dave Hamilton.
And here in Lee, New Hampshire, it's pilot Pete and listeners, I want to tell you something.
That spirit level on the iPhone. I've known about it for weeks, months. However, I have no idea.
You have things like that that you know about, too, and it just doesn't even occur to you to
share them with us. You know what you should do? Share them with us. Right to it. How would they
do that? Back at Mackey gap dot com. Did you say feedback at Mackey gap dot com? That's what I
I said, Dave, you heard me the first time, feedback at me, get me, get cab easy for us
both to say new lips, apparently for both of us, feedback, add Mac, eat gab.com.
Oh, dear God help us. Oh man.
It, it has, it has been a show already.
We probably, this might have been certainly one of, if not the longest pre-show we've
ever had sorting out a technical issue that was exacerbated, at least on my part.
It was a tech issue that neither one of us caused, at least on our local computers, with audio.
But I had a weird audio issue happening before we even got together today, Pete.
And so that was what led me down a bit of a wild goose chase of like, oh, it must be
related to this. And it turns out, nope.
It's totally different. It's totally different. Absolutely different.
All the folks that were watching on YouTube got to, uh, and discord got to watch paint dry.
I don't know. They got to see the troubleshooting process in action.
They were able to tell us whether or not they were hearing that, that, uh, clicking and popping
that was ruining our, our day or audio. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Yeah. It's fascinating. Fascinating.
So yeah. Joining the, if you join the calendar at Mackey cab.com slash, uh, uh, calendar,
because, you know, that's what it is, then you'll get, you'll see in your calendar,
because it's the same one we use, when we're going to be recording the show.
And you can join our Discord or watch live on YouTube or Facebook.
And so...
And if there's other places you'd like to watch live, tell us and we'll stream to there too.
I actually, we stream to LinkedIn as well.
And there's a small subsection that, yeah, yeah, yeah.
All right. Back to quick tips, Pete, you got some for me? Yeah.
So Keith wrote in and this is a long one, so I'm going to truncate it some, but he writes in,
he said, Hey guys, I have a tale of a lost then found iPhone.
Recently, I was on my way to work on public transit here in Ottawa,
Listening to podcasts on my way to work while playing some Pokemon go on my personal phone
I got off the bus and into the LRT station when my podcast yes,
Coincidentally, it was the Mac geek gap stopped playing. I went to reach for my work phone and immediate really realized,
It had gone out of Bluetooth range and I'd left it on the bus. Oh,
Ouch, right. Yeah Since I turned on lost mode with my personal number and proceeded to call the transcom transit company to see if they could help,
Well, when I got to the office, I checked Find My and discovered something.
First, it showed my iPhone was seeming in the downtown core, not back on the bus route.
Maybe someone found it and brought it with them. I quickly changed the message to indicate that I was available to meet downtown.
Tip is here. Secondly, I noticed that Find My shows the route the lost device is taking from the time
I turned on lost mode.
And I followed anxiously and saw that it just kept going away.
Then I realized that the bus driver had changed routes and the phone was still on the bus.
Maybe someone had given it to him to keep.
A while later it was on the move again on a different route and eventually though it
started back towards the downtown core.
I once again figured out the route and determined that he would eventually stop a block away
from where I was working.
The bus pulled up, I saw that he had changed the sign indicating he was probably at the end of his shift, so I acted quickly and ran up and asked if he had run my route earlier and asked if someone had turned in the phone and he stared at me oddly not wanting to let me on.
I told him to wait a second, I turned off the lost mode, pinged my phone, and he said, oh, I hear it, and he let me go get it.
It had fallen between the seat and the side of the bus, so you had to be looking for it.
Anyways, the useful feature was, that I wasn't aware of, that appears to work with air tags as well.
So once you put it in the lost mode, he could still see the route that it was taken.
So I think there are like about 14 quick tips in here, but the big takeaway for me is that Keith knew
about all of, he didn't know the one that was new to Keith is the one he wrote us
about, right? This is, this is to your point before all the things that we already
know about, we don't think to share, right.
But so the new one to Keith was that it showed him the route and that's cool.
But what was even more important, or equally important, is that Keith knew how to use all of this tech, he knew it existed.
He knew that in order to show the bus driver, for example, that the phone was still on the bus, that he had to turn off lost mode in order to ping the phone.
Well, if he didn't know that it was possible to ping the phone, and if he didn't know that you had to turn off lost mode, because I didn't know that until now because I've never been in that scenario.
Like, it's the awareness of these features that made that story end in success.
Right? Absolutely. And there were some new things Keith learned during the process, and thank you for sharing those with us.
But the entire process really speaks to a big part of what value I think this show brings,
certainly to me and I think to a lot of you, is hearing a story like this, my iPhone currently
is not stuck on a bus somewhere.
Right? It's right here. my hand like, you know, I shouldn't be holding it while we're doing the show, but it's here. However.
This story's gonna, you know, swim around in the back of my brain,
and then the day that I do leave my iPhone on a bus somewhere, and in a panic moment,
need to convince a bus driver to open the door for me, or whatever my analog of that might be,
I know what to do, because we've talked about it on the show.
So, yes, feedback at MacGeeKev.com, please send in your stuff, it really, this is, this is.
This is why we do what we do, and the value that I think we all get out of it,
of it or at least one of the values that we get. Absolutely.
Yeah. Alright, next up is RNDoug from our Discord shares, just an FYI in case anyone else runs
into this, after updating to Sonoma, all of the windows would go off to the sides if I
left clicked the desktop.
So just a normal click on the desktop would scatter all of his windows off to the side.
The cause of this was a setting under stage manager that somehow became enabled after the update.
You can find it in the settings, a system settings app, desktop and dock, and,
then desktop and stage manager, and then click wallpaper to reveal desktop change
from always to only in stage manager.
That's interesting. Yeah. And he says, for what it's worth, I've never used stage manager on this computer.
So yeah. Good tip. Yeah, that is good. I'm not a stage manager user. I guess that works, you know, obviously people have different workflows and that sort of thing works well for them. Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, that's something important to know because that would be particularly frustrating, right?
Right, right. I don't want my Windows back. Where'd they go? go.
Another frustrating thing, and this might also fall into the PSA category, comes from
listener Scott, who says, if anyone has iOS 17 and has custom ringtones, don't look at Hit them!
Or change them, or do anything with them in settings, as they will go away if you do.
When he wrote this in earlier this week, he was on 17.0.1.
No, 17.0.3 just came out just before we recorded this episode.
He says, 17.0.1 doesn't or didn't recognize custom ringtones that are actually loaded
on the phone. If you have one set and have not looked at it in settings, it will work just fine
Until you look so this is like Schrodinger's ringtone because when you when you when you look at it
It messes up the experiment, right?
Uh, yeah, but uh Yeah, in fact, gosh, I scott I need to give you credit for this great minds
Think alike his next sentence is it's heisenberg's bug. So there you go. Yep. It's heisenberg's ringtone. Yeah, sure either one
one. Once you look, it will now be set to vibrate only or default depending on
where you look at it. And he found a Reddit post that talks about this, um,
any, and, and this list or this user on Reddit, uh, tested it that there is a
way to bring them back and it is quite an involved process. So I will, um, I
will, I will leave that as an exercise for the listener, but there is a solution look in Mackey cab.com, uh, for the show notes for 1,003, or you can go directly to them
at, uh, mgg.fm slash 1,003. So thank you for that, Scott. Good, uh, good heads up. Yep. I don't want
to break that. Let's see. Uh, you know, uh, well, go ahead. Do you have something on that?
Or can I take this to Steven? You know, mentioning Schrodinger is always the, uh, one that, uh, brings me to ask the question.
Did Schrodinger's cat get killed with Occam's razor? I'm just asking for a friend.
I would appreciate that.
It's going to be one of these shows. Oh, it already is. Sorry, not sorry. Yeah, it just is, right.
It's just how it is today. Yeah. You have tuned into the Smart Alec Geek Gap.
Yeah, well, it's been a punchy morning, that's for sure. Yeah, man.
Steven shares a sort of the quick tip, I think the quick tip that might have started them all or at least started us calling them essential quick tip
It's an essential quick tip. It is definitely a revisited quick tip We go through this about once or twice a year, but what Steven shares is.
He says and I'll share it as he wrote it I know many of us know this because we've talked about it on the show.
Uh, he says, there is a tip that works for both iPhone and iPad to quickly move around in a text box.
Push down or hold down on the spacebar on the virtual keyboard.
And after a moment of keeping your finger down, it turns into a trackpad where you can move the cursor anywhere within that text block.
He says, this is great when working on emails and other long documents. Boy, howdy.
Howdy, I couldn't agree more. This is that quick tip where if you show this to someone who has not seen it before, they
will never forget you and will look at you like you just made fire for the first time
for them.
And I know that there are some listeners out there for whom you're hearing this for the
first time, so the long and short of it is in a text edit field when you have the keyboard
up, hold down the spacebar, just push on the spacebar for half a second.
The key. Well, when all the keys go blank. Yeah, exactly.
The letters will, will go blank and then you can just drag around like your, your
keyboard is a track pad and watch what happens. The cursor just moves. It's amazing.
Works on iPadOS too. Yep. It's awesome. So thank you for that, Steven.
It's, uh, it, it, it is, it is a good one and I am happy to revisit it as often as
we do because I use it constantly.
And I would hate for anyone to go too long without knowing about it.
Martin brings us our next one yeah and says um.
You were talking recently about tags inside notes, or tags in general, and notes being one of the places.
Take note, tags can cause problems with different, especially older versions of macOS.
If someone is using Catalina, and a tag is placed in a note on something later,
the Catalina machine will not see that note until the tag is removed.
So, syncing for these things, syncing something that's using new features,
sometimes excludes it from appearing on the machine with old features.
So, yeah, thank you for if you're having trouble with a tag syncing to a machine
that's stuck on Catalina or even older, check to see if it's got a tag in there.
So, yeah, thank you for that. That's just bizarre.
Yep. That shouldn't happen, you know. I mean, we saw it with calendars when they changed and added features to calendar.
To calendar like it it I like we say it on the show often syncing is difficult syncing is hard,
and you have to make at some point you've got to make compromises harder yeah well it's you're
syncing data that doesn't exist and so here's the question right like if if the Catalina Mac,
has no way of accounting for these tags then how is it if you make an edit to
that like so say the Catalina user makes an edit to that note that should then
sync back to the other Macs well what's gonna happen to that tag it's gone right.
It's you know it can't send it back or if it could like what would that mean
yes right and if you're using smart folders now you've got a real mess on your hands. Yeah, exactly. Right. Assuming you're counting on the tag to make that
smart folder work.
Correct. Correct.
All right, we're plowing through these. I love it. Listener Rob brings us our next one. He looked at his iphone,
Recently, he says I'd done this a while back and forgot about it until apple showed me again in the iphone event that the iphone's phone,
supports voice isolation for phone calls and he says this is not a new feature in ios 17 or even for iphone 15
But he said, so I'm not sure why they chose to highlight it or showcase it in the keynote.
But thankfully, he says they did. It reminded me of it.
The problem, he says, is enabling it can only be done during an active phone call.
And so when you're in an active phone call, go to Control Center, select Mic Mode up in the top right,
and then select your option.
You have options for standard, voice isolation or wide spectrum.
Whatever you choose will be the setting for future calls until you change it.
But you just have to remember that you can't change it during, you can only change it during a call.
You can't change it, like now would be the time I'd wanna change it.
Not when I'm trying to talk to somebody on the phone.
Right? Wait, I can't hear you. Hang on while I'm playing with my settings.
Or you're having trouble hearing me.
It's not so much about them. It's, I mean, it's not about their audience.
Well, right, but you're saying I can't hear you because the phone's away from my ear
while I play with my settings. Well, I try to make it better for you.
Yeah, it's a janky user experience.
I'm surprised.
If someone, I was going to say, I'm surprised that Apple has not given us a way
somewhere in settings or wherever to adjust this. Maybe they have, and if they have...
Or maybe in the phone app settings somewhere.
Something, or somewhere else. There's sound settings now.
So if you know of a way, of course, feedback at MackeyCab.com, because we wanna know.
So Dave, forgive me if I mentioned this last week. I may have or I may not have,
but I'm old so my memory fails me.
But I use the AirPods frequently for noise reduction, but the problem...
I had them set up when I try to have a conversation it kills the noise reduction and,
That's another setting that you can go into your air pods and and turn off the it's called the transparency mode
I believe yes, right and oh and voice voice sensitivity or something like that
So when you start talking it takes down what you're listening to be it,
even if you're listening to nothing it turns it into the transparency mode, which,
completely obliterates the or obviates the noise reduction function. Yeah but
that's not that that's not true when you're on a phone call. That's only true
in person. I just wanted to share because we were just talking about phone calls I wanted to make sure we were articulating that that yeah it's it.
It knows when you're on a phone call not to take your act of talking as as an
impact to your to your noise cancellation settings, but yes, otherwise when you start talking it assumes that you want to hear what other people say
I don't know why people I don't know why Apple would think that what makes them think that just because I'm talking I want to
Hear what anyone else has to say. That's right. I mean, they know me. Come on Apple,
Podcasting for over 18 years about Apple like you think they would know this about me,
right on One last one here in the quick tips section for this week another brilliant one. This is super brilliant,
Gavin asks hey you ever been trying to clean your iPhone screen But are frustrated that the screen keeps waking up
Preventing you from seeing all if all the dirty marks in that reflection that you get on a dark screen,
He says and you don't want to turn it You know he says you could go into settings and turn off the raise to wake setting or or you could power off your phone,
But that's annoying to just wipe down your screen that makes it take like way longer says here's the trick,
Lock your phone so that it's not like awake and in an app and then turn it upside down and.
You can wipe the screen all you want and it won't wake up,
But if it's right side up with the screen facing up it immediately will wake up when you start touching the screen
It's brilliant. So all you got to do is wipe your phone off with the screen facing downward and
this not the screen facing upward and
and everything is golden.
So thanks for that one, Gavin.
Thanks for everybody for all your quick tips today. This is, I love this section of the show.
All right, hey, did you know that over 30 million people have signed up for our next sponsor?
Did you know who our next sponsor is? Did you guess it?
It's Private Internet Access or PIA. PIA is the VPN that I use here.
I've paid for it. I am a happy customer And it's because PIA understands privacy
and they take privacy seriously. Not only does PIA hide your IP address,
it encrypts your entire connection.
And this then protects my internet activity and yours from everyone, right?
Your internet service provider, either at home or when you're out and about, right?
Network admins when you're out and about at like coffee shops and hotels.
You don't know who has access to the stuff that's seen on those networks or really any hackers that are out there
just kind of itching to steal things.
PIA is also the world's transparent VPN. They never record or store user data.
Never record nor store user data. This is a big deal.
And their no logs policy has even been verified in court.
Plus you also get endless entertainment options. Not only does PAA work with all the major streaming services, but it's one of the
few VPNs that supports P2P file sharing too. I know.
So you can download just about anything you want and nobody needs to know.
You can connect to over 83 countries using their world-class servers.
And there's a server for every single U S state. So you can kind of narrow it down and yet still be separate
from where you actually are.
You got to check this out. I love it, and I really think you're gonna love it too.
Right now, go to piavpn.com slash mgg to get a whopping 83% off your VPN service.
You're gonna get a better deal than I did.
Plus, you get four free months with a two-year plan.
It comes out to just over two bucks a month, and there's a 30-day money-back guarantee.
That's piavpn.com slash mgg for 83% off private internet access,
piavpn.com slash mgg, and our thanks to PIA for sponsoring this episode.
Next up is BBEdit and look, BBEdit, it's one of my favorite apps.
If you've listened to this show for any length of time, you know it's running on my Mac.
How do you know that?
Because it's always running on my Mac. It's part of my start my day script
and it's because I use it for all kinds of things.
Yes, when I'm in nerdy programmer mode, I use it to do all of my coding because I love the way that it just works
and gets out of my way, but it also just kind of sits there
and ever so slightly highlights the code just on the screen,
doesn't change the disk.
Highlights my code in a way that allows me to see where functions begin and end, where variables are.
It just, it's so smart. And speaking of variables, when I'm going to like type a variable.
It knows the names of the variables in that project and will suggest them for me as soon as I type like the variable delimiter,
like a dollar sign or whatever it is in that language.
It's really cool.
But it does more than that, too. And I use it for simple stuff all the time because it is a text editor, right?
So I get to use it for text. Sometimes I'll copy text from a website and then go to paste it into an email.
And it's like trying to import formatting from the website and screws it all up.
No, no, I paste it into BBEdit.
That strips out all the formatting because BBEdit's a text editor then I can copy from there and put it in.
I can use it to count the number of words in anything, a document or whatever it is that I open up.
And I can use it to compare documents which is a really valuable thing.
I'm using all kinds of things in BBEdit all the time and I think you will too.
You've gotta go check it out. Go to barebones.com and you can download a 30-day eval
which you can test out all the features And then after 30 days, some of the features are paid only, and a lot of them remain free.
Check it out, figure out what features you need, buy it if you need those features.
My guess is you're probably going to want to buy it anyway, because it's great software
and you'll support it.
Again, barebones.com and our thanks to BB Edit and the team at Bare Bones for sponsoring this episode.
So Dan Thurston writes in with our next quick tip, I realized that if you double tap with
two fingers on an app in the dock of a Mac, and I'm assuming that's a trackpad
because you can't do it on the screen of most Macs,
laptops, it brings up all of the available windows of that particular app or program.
Probably a well-known thing to most, but not to me, and that was our point earlier.
A lot of things we just know and understand and assume everybody else knows it too,
but that's why we share it here. So yeah, double tap on the window,
are on the icon in the dock and you get to see what windows are available to you.
I like that one.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's a good one.
Yeah. And that nice bonus little quick tip. Let's, let's go into questions.
Cause we've got a bunch of questions this week, Pete.
So you want to, you want to take us to G Burley? What's your question?
Which one do we want to start with? And you already said it.
So G Burley wrote in, I think is the, that's the, that's the one.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So this is a, I purchased G Burley, right?
Purchased a Mac Mini M2 and got the base SSD size internally.
Now I need help choosing the best external SSD option. I'd like for this external SSD
to be potentially my boot drive. I'm considering a two terabyte SSD
and I want to keep my overall cost under $250.
I've seen some YouTube videos where people are using SSD enclosures that paired with some SSD drive
that can achieve read and write speeds that equal or surpassed the drive built into the Mac.
Or into the Mac mini. Any help out there on suggestions for the hardware to achieve my goal?
And Dave you answered this. Yeah, so my gut, because you're going to be booting from this,
my gut would say to make this a truly Thunderbolt SSD, right? I mean you've got Thunderbolt ports,
you could go with a 10 gig USB SSD and they certainly exist and are less expensive because
you're not paying the Thunderbolt tax, but you're also not getting the speed that you can get with
a Thunderbolt connected drive. And again, because it's your boot disk, it's going to be using it for
swap as well. I think you're going to want Thunderbolt. That's what I would do. And so with
that, I would go with the OWC Envoy Pro FX. A two terabyte is $279.99. So, you know, a little bit
outside of your $250, but you're gonna get that Thunderbolt speed. If you don't want to go that
far, and you do want to keep it under, uh, you know, under 250, you, for 136
bucks, you can get the, uh, Samsung T, uh, T7 SSD.
And that one is, you know, it's USB. I think they say it's USB 3.2 is what we, uh, what we call that,
but it's a 10 gig drive.
I've got one of these 10, two terabytes in storage, 10 gigs in speed.
Uh, so, you know, you're, you're, it's going to be, it's going to be fat, you may not
notice a difference between this and Thunderbolt.
I, again, I would go with Thunderbolt, but you know, the difference between 136 and 279
is well, it's, you know, it's darn near double. Isn't it Pete?
So it's almost exactly.
It's more than double actually, but almost exactly. Almost exactly.
Yeah, exactly. So I like, I, yeah, that's, that's where I would,
That's, that's where I would lean for it is, is that G Burley.
I think that's the, I think that's the way to go.
And boy, that's a nice little machine.
Yeah. These, these minis. Yeah.
They're killer machines. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I looked, I looked at the mini pretty, I,
assumed that I would be buying a mini when I, when the iMac here in the studio, when the
screen died, you know, and it was like, well,
and then as I started looking at pricing, It was like, well, I can get this M1 studio on refurb for less.
And it's more, more juice, less money, or about the same money.
And, and, and then I actually, you know, as I mentioned, I wound up getting
a new one for the refurb price.
So that was even better, but yeah.
But yeah. Yeah. And my mini just.
To share it with folks. Yeah, I run it in the basement. I run it headless and it's my Plex server
I run channels DVR on it. Yeah, it's just a nice little piece of gear that I can connect to from anywhere in the world,
Yep, and that's great. Thank you. Tail scale. Yeah, right. Yeah, exactly I know man tail scale makes life way easier,
while we're on the subject of,
SSDs and all of that Listener Dick wrote in and says I'm struggling with cabling between Thunderbolt 4, Thunderbolt 3, and USB-C.
He says I have the same M2 Mini and I have it plugged in to my OWC Thunderbolt 3 dock after having too many problems trying to keep my external SSDs, two of them, up and running using USB hubs, both powered and unpowered.
It says, I have one SSD plugged into the empty Thunderbolt port on the dock,
and I would like to connect another using a Thunderbolt cable with USB to plug into one of the USB 3.1 ports, but I'm not sure if I need a different cable
with the two ends or if I can use an adapter to fit the USB port.
And so, OWC's Thunderbolt 3 dock, the current iteration, has two Thunderbolt ports,
One, and he confirmed this by way of asking his question, one that goes upstream to the computer,
one that goes downstream to the.
In his case, to his SSD, right?
And it could be a Thunderbolt capable SSD, a Thunderbolt capable SSD, I'm not sure.
You didn't mention, Dick, whether your SSDs were Thunderbolt or USB,
and you may not have known, you may not, until this moment in time,
realize that there was a difference.
It's good, if you don't know by looking at them, you might see the little Thunderbolt logo.
If you don't see that, it's probably not Thunderbolt, but there's no guarantee.
So, you know, look up the model number online to figure that out because the.
That Thunderbolt 3 dock that you've got from OWC has two Thunderbolt ports and six USB ports.
There are two types of them, though. There are five USB-A ports, four on the back and one on
the front, and each of those runs at 5 gigabits per second. And then on the front there, I believe
I believe it's on the front.
There is also a USB-C port that runs USB 10 gigabit USB.
And so that would, it would be worth looking and knowing are your SSDs, what is their maximum speed?
Because if the maximum speed of your SSD is five gigabits, then certainly you could get a cable that connects from USB-A to USB-C.
Make sure it is a USB 3.1 capable cable. Otherwise, it might dumb the connection down to USB 2,
which is like, you know, 480 megabits or about half a gigabit-ish, and you don't want that.
But if it is a 10 gigabit, then you would need to plug that in to,
again, with a USB 3.1 capable cable
into the USB-C port on the front so that you get full speeds,
and then it would be a C2C cable.
But again, as we've talked about on the show, not all cables with the same ends are the same, right?
They're not all made equal. You can have a C2C cable,
like the one that Apple ships you with your iPhone
that will only support USB 2.
It'll support 100 watts of charging if you want, but only supports USB 2 speeds.
So you gotta be really aware of the speeds of the cables and all of that stuff.
So the fact that you are confused, Dick, you're not alone. It gets very confusing. Amen. Yeah. Because, you know, standards
and protocols. Who needs them? Yeah, who needs them? Yeah, exactly. Well, we have them.
They're just not very good at articulating that in the cable.
Yeah, label, like you said, you may or may not have a Thunderbolt.
Icon on the cable right and it's a thunderbolt cable well And as we found recently during doing all the tests that I did a cable that is USB 4
capable will work as a thunderbolt cable as.
Well Full speeds 40 gigabits a second passing a hundred and one hundred watts of power
I have a USB 4 cable that passes 240 watts of power and does you know full thunderbolt capability?
But it doesn't say Thunderbolt on it.
And I only paid 30 bucks for it instead of paying 60 bucks because, you know,
that's how that works.
Oh, well, you got to get a link to that up and it is in there. I will,
I will link to it, but I will also link to the episode where we recently talked about that. Um,
because that, I think that conversation was important.
That's probably, that's probably a better place.
Yeah. You're going to want to, you want to, you want to listen to that,
that segment of that show. And I forget what, what number episode it was.
It was sometime in the last 10 episodes or so, but I I'll find it.
And, uh, and, and we'll, I'll put that link in there so that you can really
not just go buy that one cable. Although in the end, that's probably what you're going to do, but you're
going to know why you're going to buy it, which I think is important.
Moving on to our next question. Gray writes in and says my 2017 iMac running Ventura 13, five, two will no
longer pair with a Bluetooth keyboard or trackpad. Both input devices are fully charged and are
usable when connected with a USB cable. I have tried the sophisticated troubleshooting option
of turning the device off and then on, but I haven't had much luck in further troubleshooting.
Any ideas, Pete?
I got no idea. New computer, Gray. All right, just kidding.
So, yeah, I came up with a bunch of ideas and actually a pretty long email detailed back to Gray,
and I will read the highlight points here of things that you would want to do.
Probably not likely, but check for interference. If you're sitting there with your keyboard next
to your computer, the likelihood of Bluetooth frequency interference is going to be pretty low,
but I referenced back to the fact that we had an LED light bulb interfering with the ability for
your garage door opener to work on a recent episode and that's a whole nother question.
Well and we know that some USB 3 hard drives will interfere with the Bluetooth connections on a Mac
so it's possible. Possible, not likely but possible. Yeah I mean I think it would pair
but not not be as usable you know it would be intermittently usable but I think you get it to pair like so yeah yeah so the next suggestion I have is
reset your Bluetooth module so hold down the shift option and click on the Bluetooth icon in the Mac OS menu bar you should see a debug option in the
drop-down select that and click the reset the Bluetooth module and then and restart your Mac.
Yeah, I forgot about that. This is kind of extreme, but delete all your Bluetooth preferences.
They're easy to get back.
So, you know, navigate to Finder, press Command-Shift-G, bring up the GoTo folder, type in Library
Preferences and hit Enter, and find com.apple.bluetooth.plist, move it to the trash, and restart your Mac and get them back.
And I think he said this was an older Mac, an Intel Mac, so...
2017, it's Intel, yeah.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. So, then try resetting the iMac's PRAM and VRAM.
Yeah, and the SMC. Yes, absolutely. Oh, yeah, I don't have the SMC in it.
No, because when it sounds like hardware, sometimes it's not hardware, it's the SMC,
right? The system management controller. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So try those. Remove and repair devices. It kind of sounds like you did that with the power off and power back on, but removing
them from your Bluetooth.
You're doing that above with your Bluetooth preferences plist by eliminating that, but that may help.
I got this one when I called Mac over my syncing issue.
Just update the operating system. Make sure you're up to date,
and sometimes that can fix Bluetooth issues.
Sure. That's kind of a lazy one. I agree, he was already up to date.
Like, you know, yeah, yeah, yeah. So, the likelihood, that's not likely,
but it's something to think about.
Safe mode, try booting your Mac into the safe mode by holding down the shift key during the startup,
and it'll only load the essential software and such, and see if you get your Bluetooth issues there.
External interference. We kind of talked about that already.
So let's see, the next one was, oh, test on another user account.
And again, as I stated before, my machine, I have my name is my one account.
My other account is Shooter as in troubleshooter.
I like that. That's better than test, which is an obvious username.
So, and listen, whatever you do,
If you create that test user, make it a password you can remember, but don't make it test.
And I swear my test user accounts passwords are not test.
I swear. Please don't check that for me though.
Right, exactly. And then I would give that troubleshooting account admin privileges.
That's why you don't want to make it test. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah.
Yeah. You want full admin privileges on that account because you may not, you may need,
Like what a lot of the things you share to recover other information and a lot of the things you shared are I mean
They're good troubleshooting for this problem, but they are also simply good general,
Troubleshooting steps and there may be a time when you need to use that test user account because you can't log into your main user account,
You know there might be some some startup item or something getting in the way that's causing a crash
and so now you need to go and like touch it from the other side and
And so it needs to have admin privileges, but, um, you don't want to make the password test.
So, yeah, yeah.
She may be test exclamation point. I don't know. Just, I know make it password. Oh, there you go.
Or monkey. Yeah. Monkey.
And finally, a hardware check. Uh, it, you know, if, if all those other, uh, steps above that I've just talked
talked about don't work for you, then consider taking it into to the Mac
Genius Bar and have them troubleshoot it and and see if there's something wrong with it there.
There but it sounds I mean so I would.
The other things I would add to this are try the keyboard and and mouse trackpad whatever it is on another Mac,
Now the fact that it's two devices which?
Simultaneously stopped working in this one specific way Tells me it's probably not either one of the devices right but testing them on another Mac
Especially if it's only one if you only had say, you know a Bluetooth keyboard and a wired mouse or vice versa
There's, you know, something, you know,
testing on another Mac just to confirm, isolate,
like that's honoring the troubleshooting process.
So certainly you doing that wouldn't be a bad thing, but I think we know what you're going to find,
that the keyboard and the trackpad work just fine over Bluetooth with any device except this one.
And that tells me you've got a Bluetooth problem. If, you know, the software test, the SMC reset,
all of that doesn't solve it, you know, for less than 15 bucks,
you can buy a USB-A Bluetooth adapter
to plug in to your Mac.
And I've tested these on a lot of different Macs.
TP-Link makes one, but they are like, so do brands who have names you've never even heard of.
Look on Amazon for a Bluetooth receiver, dongle, whatever you want to call it.
You can upgrade yourself to Bluetooth 5 by doing this.
And more often than not, you just plug it in and the Mac recognizes it as your Bluetooth receiver.
That may be the simplest answer. I had a Mac years ago where the Bluetooth chip went.
You know, went kaput. And so I, I spent whatever, 13 bucks and bought one of these things and
plugged it in and never even thought about it again. Like it was like, oh yeah, my Mac has
Bluetooth now. Yeah. You know, it was, yeah, it just, it just worked. So.
What about, uh, so I'm going to hit it. I'm going to hit you with a stump dummy question
then real quickly, Dave. Um, so Bluetooth 5, I didn't realize we were up to the fifth protocol.
Yep. Do you recall some of the features that have been added? Is it just speed? Is it better
encryption? Let's let's look here. I don't know the answer to this off the top of my head.
But, Bluetooth 5 is faster in theory than Bluetooth 4 was. Bluetooth 4 maxed out at either
1 megabits per second or 25 if you were using enhanced data rate. Bluetooth 5 doubles that to
two on Bluetooth LE and 50 on enhanced data rate.
The range also. Holy smokes, the range. Correct. It goes from.
You got to be in the same County, I guess, but that's about.
Yeah, it goes from 200 feet to 800 feet. Um, again, you know, real best, best, best, best case conditions.
Power requirements are lower with Bluetooth five.
Um, and so like for what you're doing, it doesn't matter whether you have probably Bluetooth 3 would be enough for your keyboards and all of that stuff.
But if you're going to bother to buy a Bluetooth adapter, no reason not to make it a Bluetooth 5, um, you know, so, yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. I'll tell you what, though, the problem with that is, um, now I'm.
It escapes it escapes me the gents name that we just read about the the bus,
Excursion it's gonna take him a lot longer to realize yeah,
Keith yeah, yeah your phone's gonna make it halfway across town before you realize,
That's fair well, but I mean it can look at signal strength
It would be interesting to see if Apple is just using a binary sort of can you see it or not?
Versus you know something more like hey this is far away from you now because
it can know those things so sure yeah that'd be interesting yeah in fact that
yeah what is fascinating to me is the technology on keys yeah for automobiles
like if you if you leave the key on the roof of your car it won't start right.
But if you bring it in the cabin it'll start how do it know that's not That's not Bluetooth, that's just RF, but even still, how-
It's different, yeah.
But yeah, how does it- That is fascinating.
I wonder if it's, you know, that's a really good question.
I wonder if there are multiple sensors in the cabin and it is triangulating to see whether the key
is not just nearby, but where nearby.
Because if you put, what, three sensors in there, I think three would be enough,
four would certainly be enough to give you exactly, Like which direction is it and therefore is it in the cabin?
That's a, somebody knows, let us know in the chat at, you know, at MattKeyCab.com
slash discord or feedback at MattKeyCab.com.
But you're raising the level of complexity, like crazy. Yeah.
But in a car, you'd really want to know. Oh, absolutely. You don't want that key on the roof of the
car or you're hosed. You're hosed.
Yeah. That's the nice word for it.
Yeah, exactly.
Yep. Um, yeah, it interesting.
Oh, I don't like that question. I wonder how we wandered down this rabbit hole.
Sorry. I don't know. It's fine.
Um, Gary brings up a, an interesting question. He was talking about name drop.
And he was, which is the new feature in iOS 17, where you can, you know, get your phone close to somebody else's and then it'll ask if you want to like share your contact information and that sort of thing, which is great.
But what if you don't want to share all of the details in your contact record?
Because you might have lots of stuff in there that you want to have for you in your contact record,
but are not the kinds of things you want to share.
And so Gary was saying, maybe you need to create a minimal contact record,
but of course, then you might not get all the benefits that you want.
Like it's not going to see your contacts for various, you know, services like messages and things like that.
So here is the thing that many of us don't know about contacts.
You can do this on your iPhone, you can also do it on your Mac,
but on your iPhone, if you open contacts and you go to my card,
which is the one listed at the very top, scroll all the way to the bottom of your card
and tap the share contact option.
It's not gonna start sharing it yet.
The first thing it's gonna do is present you with all the fields
that are in your contacts record, your contact record,
and it's going to give you check boxes next to every one.
All you need to do is make sure the check boxes are on for the fields you want to share,
and off for the fields you don't wanna share and then click done.
And then at that point, it brings up the share sheet to share your contact record.
It'll do this every time that you share your contact on your iPhone,
but it will remember what you chose the previous time.
And near as I can tell, NameDrop inherits that setting.
So you can be selective with what you share with NameDrop.
Yeah, that's nice. That's a nice feature because I used to have to go, I, I think he had originally said,
you know, do you need to, I need to create a duplicate with less information.
Right, right. And, uh, it's like, oh, the name drop, uh, choosing fields is awesome.
Yep. Uh, yep. So you get to, you get to pick and, uh, and yeah, you're good to go. Yep.
Um, listener Richard has another, uh, one of these sort of curiosity questions.
Richard sent us a screenshot of his iPhone, which had a dialogue over the top that said,
Diagnostics are in flight. Perform the following. Send feedback. Ignore.
And he said, what the heck does diagnostics in flight mean? And we have an answer for you.
This is part of the share your diagnostics.
For lack of a better term, share your app logs and activity with developers, right?
And so you can share analytics with developers,
when an app has a crash or at other times to help them, right?
Apple does confirm that uh that this is in fact a um you know shared anonymously but but you know
it doesn't yeah you may you may choose to turn this off and and certainly you can and uh and
yeah there you go so it's settings and privacy and then you go to diagnostics and usage and you can
and choose how you want to, you know, how you want to do that.
Yeah.
Oh, sorry. Not diagnosis and usage analytics or analytics and improvements.
I think, how is it in iOS 17?
It's a, let's see settings, privacy and security.
And then we scroll down to analytics and improvements, and then you get to choose
how you share all of this stuff with Apple and also other developers.
So yeah, you get the share with app developers. So if you turn that off, then you won't, then
your diagnostics will never be in flight. Right.
Well, unless you're actually in flight, but that's. Well, that's different Pete. Yeah.
This has nothing to do with airplane mode. Yeah. Right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Absolutely. Yep. Yep.
So Barb wrote in with a crazy problem. Yeah.
She, her junk mail said, going into her grocery ads, assuming she has a folder named grocery ads, all her junk mail started going in there.
And she's trying to look for any suggestions. Why or how did my junk mail start going to the wrong folder?
Yeah, I can only guess as to why this is happening, but.
When you set mail up, when you set an account up in mail.
You can go in and specify which mailboxes are used for things like the archive or the scent box
or the trash or the junk mailbox.
And you can change these. If you go into mail on your Mac, you go into accounts or settings first,
then to accounts, pick the account in question.
And then there's three tabs across the top. The middle one says mailbox behaviors. That's where
you set all this stuff up. Go and look there to see if the junk mailbox is set to grocery ads.
If it is, change it to something like the junk mailbox and then hopefully that's where these
things will go. You can do this on your iPhone as well. It's also in settings. You go into settings
and mail. And then once you get that up in mail, you go into accounts, again, choose the account
in question. And from there, you can tap. It's a little bizarre. You tap on the account name,
which is usually just your name. Then you go to advanced. And there you get to see the same
list of mailbox behaviors and you can choose. So hopefully, as you peruse this setting on all of
of your devices on one of them, you will find it set,
that it's putting junk in the grocery ads and it will change it, hopefully.
Hopefully, yeah, yeah, yeah. The, the, the weird thing is, is when that
stuff sort of starts happening, when you have
no recollection, you haven't been playing around in your mail settings, but every now and then,
you know, some stray Tron gets swapped out.
Yep. Yep. And sure.
Um, you know, I got that iPhone 15 pro Pete, and, uh, and I've been using it.
So how did you drop it or what, what happened?
So, yes, I did. I did drop it. But how did I know that because you say in the notes that the titanium is soft
The titanium is soft Pete
So I decided because this is titanium and Apple talked about how strong the titanium is and how great it feels in your hand and
All that I'm like, well, I'll forego a case on this phone So as soon as I got it, I put a tempered glass,
Screen protector on the front because I still feel like I need to do that I don't know if I need to do do it or not, but I'm fine with it
So I did that the moment I took it out of the box and pulled their little protective thing off,
put the tempered glass on there, and that was it.
You know, I used my MagSafe accessories. I popped a little MagSafe pop socket on there
because I don't have a, I didn't have a, what should we call it?
The O-Snap case, the Snap 3 Pro or whatever.
And so it was fine. Like I could use my wallet, I could use that.
Great.
Second day I had it, I was walking across the driveway, the phone hopped out of my hip pocket,
landed on the driveway. I thought, oh man, okay, great. So I pick it up.
I can tell you where it landed. It landed on the corner of the phone
because there's a little nick now in the titanium
where it landed on my driveway from a three foot drop out of my pocket.
And it's like, well, guys...
WTF? Like, it's titanium, you told us not to use it with a case.
Now since then, of course, Apple has said, oh yeah, by the way, the titanium will discolor if you use it without a case,
the titanium will blah, blah, blah.
It's soft titanium is soft, folks. I wonder if it's because Apple recycled this titanium 37 times
and maybe it lost some of its tensile strength.
There you go. I mean, that's supposed to be a very hard metal.
That's why they make jet engines out of it, for goodness sake.
It turns out that it's more about being lightweight, which, which definitely the 15 pro, like I noticed that as soon
as I got it, but it's more about it being lightweight than it is about being strong.
Steel is stronger than titanium based on the bits of research that I've done.
So, so now my phone is in a clear spec case, so I can, you know, admire the titanium color that
I bought, but not, not risk damaging.
I mean, it's a. Don't let that horse back in the barn, Dave.
It's such, it's a, it's such a minor little Nick, but it was just like, guys, like, come on, man. Yeah. Like.
I had a heartbreaker this week too. I actually dropped my MacBook Pro.
Oh. About three feet. It hit the corner.
Nice big dent shaved up on the, I actually wound up taking a, it was jagged.
I wound up taking a hasp and filing down that corner a little bit. Now it's shiny. Yeah.
But yeah, it did hit the tile and it dented. Now, the beauty is, right, with SSDs, that doesn't seem to be an issue anymore.
Wow. But, uh, unfortunately it didn't crack the screen or have anything up there.
And it did, it, it would have been worse, I think, had I not had my clear plastic protective case on it. Right.
But it, it hit hard on the tile. And I go, man, it's heartbreaking to have a, an otherwise pristine machine get it to,
you know, it's the first scratch on your new car, right? Oh yeah.
No, that, that sucks.
Yeah, yeah, absolutely, absolutely.
What are you going to do? I mean, I'm going to put a case on it like I always have and I'm not going to worry about it.
But it's just like, guys, like, come on, come on, don't tell us one thing.
And then like, yeah, it's a bummer.
I want to take a minute, Pete. We have some cool stuff found to go through.
And before we do that, I want to take a minute and thank everybody who is a premium subscriber and whose contributions came in during the past week here.
I say it every week, or at least I try to say it every week,
the way this show survives is by a mix of a lot of different revenue streams.
You know, our sponsors are certainly a part of it, and you, our premium subscribers, are also a part of it.
This is absolutely an optional program. It was created because you asked us to create it.
Uh, you, you asked us for ways to, uh, get to, to support us directly.
And so we created this premium listeners get, uh, in addition to the warm,
fuzzy feeling of supporting one of your favorite podcasts is you also get access to a, uh, priority email address, which is premium at Mac geek gab.com.
And if you are, there's premium is a, a generalized term. Yes, it includes those of you whose names were about to read that have submitted to
us directly.
It also includes anyone who is a subscriber on Apple podcast.
We don't get to know your name.
So we also don't get all of your money. Apple keeps 30% of it, but we also, we understand the convenience factor there.
So whatever way works for you works for us. It's totally fine, but we just don't get any visibility into that whatsoever.
So just please know that, but feel free to use premium at Mackeycab.com as well.
In the last week, we've had premium, uh, contributions from, uh, let's see, we had $50 from John in Studio City,
uh, and then we had $25 contributions from, let's see, Mike in Raleigh, Roger in North Charleston,
Chris in Windsor, Craig in Pace, Jeffrey in Windsor as well. Is this the same Windsor?
Are we looking at the same Windsor? No, different Windsors, different states.
Michelle in Quebec, Jonathan in Woodside, Paul in Pomona, Ralph in Bangor, Bruce in
Decatur, Jimmy in Cushing, and David in Troutdale.
Those are all $25 subscriptions. Actually, that's not correct.
That the Jimmy in Cushing was a $30 contribution.
And then we had $10 contributions in the last week from Stephen in Costa Mesa,
James in Melbourne, Olga from Bellevue.
Nick in Mount Clemens, Tony in Middleborough, Robert in Columbiana, Jason in Charleston.
Thank you to all of you who have contributed this week and at any time to MacGeeCab Premium.
Really, it makes a huge difference in allowing us to do what we do.
And then we did get, we also support the new Value for value is what it's called. I mean, I think what we've always done is value for value, which means we do the show, you send us what you think it's worth, and that's fine.
The whole podcasting 2.0 value for value, which currently happens with crypto payments, we got 2,000 Satoshis from Squeegee this week.
So thank you for that too, that was done, I believe, with the Fountain app.
So, if you're interested in that.
You can go check that out. We'll put links to all this stuff in the show notes because that's how you do it.
And those are always at Mackeycab.com.
Now it's time to talk about some cool stuff found, Pete. Oh yeah, man. Oh yeah.
Let's see. Did you do all the tell, folks? Well, not necessarily for all of this.
Not too bad this week.
No. There's some good ones this week. Rod L. Rod L. was the MVP of cool stuff found.
I'm really of other things. I think we covered, we opened the episode
with that spirit level tip from Rod as well.
So you're crushing it this week, man.
Onyx for macOS Sonoma is out. And that is important.
Onyx is smart. It won't run on an operating system it's never seen before.
And it will tell you this when it launches.
So if you had tried to launch Onyx to do some troubleshooting on macOS Sonoma,
prior to whatever it was, I think Wednesday or Tuesday of last week,
you would have gotten a message.
You got to go download a new version and now you can go download that version.
So we'll put a link in the show notes to where you can go get it.
But yeah, Onyx for Mac OS Sonoma is out and I am happy about that.
Rod also sent in recently.
A cool stuff found for Revolver, which is a plugin for Chromium browsers.
So for like Chrome, of course, or Edge, He says, we just set up 40 cameras for a manufacturing facility.
They wanted a couple of big, like 75 inch TVs that could show all the different camera views.
We set up a Mac mini running Edge. We open the tabs that we want with all the different camera views.
Okay, so you're using something that, you know, puts the camera views in a browser window. Okay, great.
Opening each camera up in tabs and then you run this Revolver plugin,
which automatically rotates through your open tabs.
And we have Revolver rotate through them at whatever interval we desire.
It'll works for different kinds of real-time dashboards and that sort of thing.
He says, and now we just have a rotating thing where you can see the cameras
because we have them up in browser windows.
My guess is if your camera, you know, your security software allowed you to have say,
you know, set up multiple views where you had four cameras on one tab
and four cameras on another and two on a third,
then you could rotate through that because revolver is just rotating through the tabs.
So I like that. That's one of those, again, it sticks in the back of your head until you need it.
And then you're like, wait, There's a way to do this that's simple.
I like it. That's cool. And Rod's about to hit his three cool stuff found limit.
I think that's right.
You're right. Rod also shared with us this week, Tresorit, T-R-E-S-O-R-I-T, and more specifically, send.tresorit.com.
He said, I was listening to MacGeekUp 1002, where Dave, you were talking about sharing
a 200 meg file with the live chat that was in the post show, but I did share a 250 meg
file with, uh, with the songs that you hear throughout Mac geek camp.
Uh, and he says, I thought I would share something I use and have good luck with.
And it is this Tresorit, the send functionality of Tresorit.
He says is a great way to send large and confidential files.
You can password protect them, uses end to end encryption, and you can send for
free files up to five gigs in size.
So dang. Yeah, I know. So I don't know that any of the things we've talked about so far here on cool stuff found are,
Are gonna cost anybody anything Pete no coin yet. No, that's about the change yet. It is it's fair,
We were talking about mice and not the not the you know, not the bad kind of mice,
but the mice that you might use with your computer.
And Targis, I recently got a chance to check out the Targis EgoFlip, Ego? No, not EgoFlip.
You're not gonna flip your ego around, that's a different thing.
ErgoFlip, EcoSmart Mouse, easy for me to say, which is, it's built from eco-friendly materials, recycled materials.
It is built to be ergonomic, it's got like a nice curve to it so that it sits up on one side,
So when you put your right hand down on it your hand is at the right angle and you you know
You're not like twisting your arm, of course if you were to put your left hand on it though Pete
If it was somebody say like you who's left-handed or like me who often likes to use the mouse with my left hand anyway.
It would be awful for your hand right? No, this one is magic the base of the mouse is
separate from the top of the mouse and you simply pull it off it's connected via magnets you pull
it off you turn it around you drop it back down and now it's perfectly suited
for your left hand it's amazing 60 bucks yeah so we'll put a link to that in the
show notes. If you buy one of these this is the one time you can honestly say you
have mouse. Yes that's right that's right. Because nobody has mouse. Nobody has
has mouse. That's right. That is correct. But this time you do this time you might,
unless you bought it, unless you're buying it to like replace another mouse and then
you'd have to throw out the other mouse. Um, right. But yeah, nobody has mouse. That's
correct. That is correct. Um, I'm trying to think of other, uh, other cool stuff out.
Yeah. So, um, we talked back in episode nine 94 Pete about parking solutions. And I mentioned
ParkWiz for, you know, booking parking for like airports or other things like concerts
and things like that.
Lou in Vermont and and that's that's actually lose Handle that Lou goes by I'm and I'm assuming it's true,
says Says I checked it out with a dummy reservation And I need to tell you that on-air parking will do much better for you price-wise than Parkways
We've used on-air a couple of times in New York City the last two years for a one-week stay and didn't pay more than,
$110 for the week Yeah, which is which is really good because you can find parking for 110 a night in New York. Oh easily. Oh, yeah
Yeah, so yeah for long-term stays,
on-air parking is a great one,
since this came in I was going to a concert in in Boston and.
Booked parking late I Normally book parking when I buy my concert tickets because it's you know
It's how I work and I did not for this one and the show sold out It was at a small theater and it was in like Brighton,
So there's not a ton of parking like public parking lots that you can reserve in advance there
There's street parking, but you know, we were gonna be running tight on time
I think as we were getting there and I did I wanted to know where we're gonna park,
So I looked at park quiz. Everything was sold out other than something that was like a mile and a half away I was like, yeah, no,
On-air parking nothing and then I would for whatever reason I don't know I started searching and I saw spot here
I'm like, well, let me try spot here. I forgot something about spot here. Oh Pete park whiz and on-air parking are using.
Parking lots that are parking lots like as a business. Oh venture, right?
Spot hero is like the gig economy of parking spaces gonna say so it's more social engineering in there social
media in this yeah it's it's like you know the Airbnb of of parking spaces and,
sure enough I found on it was a duplex or a triplex or something an apartment
building ish maybe a five-minute walk from where we were going so closer than
any of the lots that I would have bought through the other things and I paid
$13 for my spot the other lots would have wanted 25 and they you know they were very clear about it. It was like, look, there's six parking spaces around our building.
You can only use three of them. The other three are used by other people. So here's
where you can park and they had pictures it was super clear really easy
you know, pulled up to the house and I drove behind it. I'm like, I hope this is right.
And sure enough, I get back there and it all looks right. And everything worked out.
So spot hero is probably what I'm going to try for a lot of things.
I know. So it's the, it's the Airbnb of parking spots.
That's cool. Yeah. Because someone has two spots at their house and they can give
up one and make some coin on it. Correct.
Yeah. Make a little bit of coin. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
All right. While we're here, we've had some cool stuff found floating for a little while and listener Ben said back in 987 you were talking about different find
my things to use for your your wallet or whatever and he tells us about the pebble b card which of
course we'll link in the show notes and it has a rechargeable battery because that's what we
were looking for in 987 and he says the rechargeable battery lasts 12 months the charger is proprietary
So it's not as elegant as a chi charger and you got to not lose it for the 12 month period.
This is going to be the key, folks.
Take a picture of what drawer you put it in and save it with the name battery charger in notes
or, you know, Pebbleby charger, which was a quick tip we got a couple of weeks ago. Yeah, exactly.
And he says it's better than a card that must be disposed of every, you know,
couple of years or whatever. So yeah, thank you for that, Ben. That's great.
I like it.
The question is, and you may or may not know, is it Find My?
Yes! Oh no, that's the whole point. It's Find My. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely.
Sorry, I should have articulated that. No, no worries. That's what I was asking, so it's not a separate app.
Yep, no, not a separate app. And then listener Jed tells us we've been talking about a lot about shortcuts lately.
It says, I was poking around for a way to schedule send, uh, schedule sending text messages like you
can for email. And although I'm not there yet, it led me down a rabbit hole to a pretty geeky
tool that seems perfect for cool stuff found it. And it is data jar for, uh, shortcuts.
This provides persistent storage for shortcuts. It's an app. You download the app onto your phone
and then you use shortcuts to populate data into it and pull data out of it.
It's synchronized using iCloud, so it's now on all of your devices. It understands JSON,
which is a very standard way of sending data around, and it's built for shortcuts,
and it works fine right inside your shortcuts. It's got integration there.
It is free with a tip jar. So if you down, I would say, download it, mess with it,
And if you start using it, well, by all means, send them some coin.
Uh, and it is because it syncs with iCloud. It's sort of naturally built to support offline storage.
So you have access to your data, even when you're in airplane mode or otherwise not connected.
And then as soon as you're connected, it'll sink and push what you put in there up and grab what other devices have pulled down.
So yeah, if you're doing stuff with shortcuts, data jar may well be the,
uh, the magic little thing here.
And I can see why he would have found this looking for scheduling a send,
because if you have one shortcut
that takes the message that you typed and says, puts it in there,
and then you trigger another shortcut by a different means to send something,
well, now it's gotta go get the data from somewhere, but it's a bit of data that the other shortcut could see.
Shortcuts only have local storage.
Now with DataJar, that first shortcut can push this into DataJar.
The second shortcut can go and retrieve it because it knows how to do that.
And you coded both of them so you know what you called the variable
and boom, you're in good shape. So, yeah.
Yeah, and it looks like it's really easy to use. You know, I mentioned that it uses Jason.
It does, but it is really built to be used inside shortcuts.
And so you're going to have an easy time integrating this, even if you've never even heard of Jason before.
JSON, JavaScript Object Notation.
I don't know, something like that.
Sounds good to me. Sure. Sounds great. You know, that sounds good, Pete.
The band? You got it. Oh, how did I know? I know.
I see Jed's been struggling with what I've been struggling with for years, too, because
it was just almost a throwaway line there in his email.
What's that? I'd love to be able to schedule text messages to go later. Yep.
If I'm on a jump seat at three o'clock in the morning, I'd like to be able to send a
text that arrives at six, which is before I land, but after somebody, you know, wakes
up so as not to disturb them in the middle of the night.
Shortcuts wouldn't do it because you aren't online, right? Your phone would need to be online.
It's gonna need, in order to accomplish that, it needs somebody to be able to tie in
to all of the phone network, but to have a server to grab that message,
store it, and then send it as if it were from me.
So you would need an account, all kinds of things. All kinds of hurdles to be hurdled.
So there are most SMS addresses.
Which would be like your phone number, also have, most providers offer an email address that will go to SMS.
But if someone replies to that, they would be replying to whatever email it was sent from.
But you could schedule an email send from an always on device somewhere,
and have that send, and then it will send a text message,
but it's gonna be a little, people aren't gonna receive it, it's a little different, that's all.
But it'll be received as a text. It would be received as a text, yeah.
Oh, that's brilliant.
I mean, it's a workaround. There you go. Yeah, I could put mail butler on my server in the basement
and send a mail. Yeah, exactly.
Exactly, yeah, yeah. So, I don't know. There you go. We've just solved another one for you, folks.
That's as close as I'm going to get.
Man, it has been a morning of troubleshooting, Pete.
Woo! Oh, I feel good, though. Like, this kind of thing energizes me,
even though it wears me out, but it's fine.
We've had enough troubles for one day.
Ah, nobody knows the troubles I've seen.
Uh, except everybody who was watching in, um, in, in, on YouTube and in Discord with
us because you, you played along.
So thank you for playing along, whether you did it live with us or, uh, for all of you
who listened, we recorded it for you since we, we, we, we saw you weren't all here.
We recorded this and that's why we're pushing it out.
Go back and listen again. Yeah, that's right.
Thanks for hanging out with us. Thank you for subscribing to the show.
If you're not, if this is just your first time listening, or if you listen as a one-off,
please subscribe to the show.
That way you're always gonna get it. And then share the show with a friend.
Please, please, please.
Thank you to all of you who have already shared the show with your friends.
Thank you to all of you who are a part of this MacGeekGab family that we all get to be a part of in any way.
Even if the only thing you do is listen, you haven't yet sent in an email or anything,
totally fine. We're happy to have you and are very thankful to have you. It's not even happy. I mean,
it is happy, but it's a it's a happy thankfulness. So thank you so much for listening. And thanks to
Cashfly for providing all the bandwidth to get the show from us to you. Thanks to our sponsors,
of course, PIAVPN.com slash MGG, where you get all those great discounts on your VPN plan,
and to Barebones at barebones.com. Of course, you can learn about all our sponsors.
At MattKeithGab.com slash sponsors.
Music.
Pete, you gave me a new shirt recently and it says something on the front.
Can you read for the folks who are just listening what it actually says?
I'm squinting, didn't know there was an ITF today.
But I think it says, don't get caught.
It does. May not. It does. Thanks for hanging out with us, folks!
See ya. Thank you.