It's time for the MacGeekGab, and listener Pilot Pete, that's me, brings you this week's quick tip.
If you have an Apple Watch and it's in the always on mode, it's muted, when you raise
your arm and look at your watch as it comes to light, all you have to do is say 20 minutes,
and it will automatically start a 20 minute timer for you.
Or you could say 1.30pm and it will set an alarm for you at 1.30pm.
I discovered this quite by accident, but it works. Give it a shot.
More quick tips like this plus your questions answered today on the Mac Geek Gab number
One thousand and four for Monday, October 16th, twenty twenty three.
Music.
Greetings, folks, and welcome to Mac Geek. We are the show where we take your quick tips like that one.
We take your questions. We take your cool stuff found. We share them here.
We try to answer your questions.
We pull it all together into an agenda such that we all have a great shot.
We are all but guaranteed to each learn at least five new things.
Every single time we get together, sometimes we even play that ding when we learn something
especially good. I love that intro.
Quick tip, Pete. That was fantastic.
Love it. episode include fastmail.com slash m g g where you can go get 10 off your first year of the email.
Service that i use and have been using for a long time clean my mac x uh you can go get five percent
off of that at macpaw.app slash mac geek gab of course the links are always in the show notes
and we'll talk more in depth about that in a little bit for now,
Now, here in Durham, New Hampshire, as far as I know, I'm Dave Hamilton.
And here in Leed, New Hampshire, it's Pilot Pete. Good to be back and looking forward to seeing you at hockey tonight, Dave.
I know. Hockey kicks off. Unbelievable. Yep.
Boy, time is going fast. Time is going fast.
Our next quick tip comes from listener Tony, who says, it's been about a year since Apple
added the unsend feature to mail.app on the Mac.
And he says, I always got flummoxed getting to the unsend link at the bottom of the mailbox sidebar quickly enough in order to unsend a message that I want to send.
And you can set the the timer to off or 10, 20 or 30 seconds.
I'd like more. We'll talk more about that in the episode. I've got I've got a solution, perhaps.
Tony continues, though, he says, instead of having to hunt for that little unsend little link.
I discovered yesterday that command Z will also unsend a message as long as it's invoked,
of course, within the specific time window.
The message doesn't get sent. It just goes into a queue.
It waits the 10 to 30 seconds and then, and then it's actually sent.
And at that point you can't unsend it because that's kind of impossible, but, uh, but yeah, thanks for the tip.
That's good to know. Yeah. At the risk of going down a rabbit hole in quick tips and making this a slow tip, I found
that I will send a message and then immediately I'm back at my list of messages and then if I'm
too quick to pull the trigger, say I'm deleting, oh I don't need that message and it goes into of the trash bin.
And I go, oh darn it, I want it back. And I hit Command Z. I unsend the message, which hasn't gone yet.
So that's frustrating.
So if there, if I'm understanding what you're saying correctly,
if there is a message in the send queue. In the queue, yep, it's in the outbox queue.
Command Z, regardless of what you've done since you triggered that message to send,
Command Z will take priority to unsend the message. It won't just undo the last thing you did.
Correct.
I can see that being good and bad it is yeah That's a good thing, but then you have to go hunt your trash for what you deleted right?
But it's I don't like I'm not convinced. It's a good thing undo.
Should I as a user I expect undo to at the very least?
Undo the very last thing the most recent thing I did and in many apps and perhaps
This is a bonus quick tip if you keep undoing it will undo in series from the most recent to the second most recent.
Very good point, I use that a lot. Frequently I'll go back seven or eight undo's to get there.
So yeah, that, but I have found it to be very frustrating.
It's like, darn it. I wanted to undelete the message, not unsend the previous message.
Right, yeah, that would be two clicks of the command Z.
So with any luck, Apple, if you're listening, maybe you could make it command U to unsend a message.
Works for everything and command Z could then take priority to the last. I don't
have mail running so I can't check this but I think command U marks a message as
unread but I might be wrong about that. You may be right, command something else.
I don't know. I may be crazy. All right. How about we do another quick tip and get out of this rabbit hole. Sure.
Listener Mark M says, after hearing the notes discussion in MGG 1002 made me
think about my notes setup one complaint I've had is by default Apple notes names are not very
graphical to fix this and he's talking about notes folder names though I suppose you could do this
with the names of the actual notes too. He says to fix this you can add emojis to the names of
your notes folders to add the icons uh you just go to iMessage click the oh he he says so he
He describes using iMessage to invoke the Emoji Browser and copy it to the clipboard and paste it there.
You can also just invoke the Emoji Browser.
While typing or renaming a note with control, command, space bar, when you are
typing text anywhere, almost anywhere,
perhaps I should say, the control, command, space bar invokes the emoji browser from a keyboard.
See, I have my function key set up to invoke the emoji browser, but control, command,
space bar, also very good.
And to answer your question, yes, you can rename a note because if you go look in our
shared notes, we have a listener, Joe, with something later on in there and I went next
to his name, I invoked it and I looked for coffee and you'll see a little coffee icon next to Joe.
I see the coffee, it's, it's synced right down to me already, Pete.
Yup, absolutely. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So that is cool. Never thought of using that in names. No, it's really smart.
I, I've already added it to a few of my notes folders because they are, it's, I don't know.
I'm with Mark. I'll fix it up better. It's, it's hard to find them sometimes.
And it's because I choose not to let them, thy folder names are sorted manually.
I think that's true for all of us because you can set the order and which I, which is
good, but, but it, you know.
It's funny how the eye picks up on the emojis faster than letters or words that you're looking for. Yeah.
We get blindness to these sometimes. So yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yeah. My friend Jeff, who works with us at Backfeet Media, we were talking about managing our
email and I mentioned to him, actually to everybody in a staff meeting, what I mentioned
here on the show, I don't know, four or six weeks ago, that I've really become very bullish
on signing up for email newsletters, because for a while for me.
Facebook and Twitter and all of that became my way of following, I'll say brands,
it could be whatever brand, it could be, and a lot of it is like bands too,
like without the R, bands that I want to follow, I want to know when they're playing,
but I know, okay, I'm following on Facebook, I'm following on whatever,
I'll see their posts, because I've chosen to follow them.
Well, the algorithms have decided that they don't want to show me those posts from brands
unless the brand pays to show me those posts, right? And many other factors, but paying is
one of the things that will like surface, even though I'm choosing to follow it. Like if you're
following Matt Geekab on Facebook, you may or may not see everything that we post because.
Facebook gets to decide what you get to see. And so I got sick of that. And I have started
signing up for newsletters and I'm managing my news folder. I use Sane News, SaneBox to put
things into a news folder and then I can manage that similar to the way that I manage spam. Well.
Well, Jeff.
Came up with a different way of doing this he said he created a completely separate gmail account,
Just for his newsletters,
and so He used and he has that linked in his mail client and stuff so he can look at it
However, he wants he could certainly look at it on the web on gmail too,
But this way whenever he signs up for a newsletter He uses this completely separate email account and it serves the same purpose in that it compartmentalizes
mentalizes all of his newsletters into one spot,
which means he is intentionally going to a spot,
to read the newsletters.
They're not showing up just in the stream of his inbox.
For me, seeing newsletters in my inbox is a waste of time. I will delete them every time
because I'm not in the mind space where I want to read newsletters.
I'm triaging email, right?
So he's solved that problem by just having a separate email account that newsletters go to.
And then he's good to go.
So I, I'd like the idea and that's why I'm sharing it.
I don't know. Yeah. Okay. Well, I like that better than even my, my own solution to this then.
Okay. But I still like my solution in the sense of this works for other things as well.
Okay. Because I use it to find out if I'm getting spammed by a company.
DuckDuckGo email. Yeah. Go to DuckDuckGo, go, easy for me to say DuckDuckGo.com slash email.
I think it's slash email might be. We'll link it. We'll link it in the show notes. Yeah. And set up,
set up an account using your primary email address. Okay. That it will automatically forward to and
then you can generate infinite numbers of email addresses that will forward to your inbox and
And at any point in time, if you're getting spammed by that.
Company or email you can turn that email address off and then it just goes to the ether. It doesn't get to you anymore
God, it's so and then what I would my additional portion of that solution That would be for newsletters to come in and to go into a separate,
Email box or so in if it's cheap if you're using a gmail it would go to a separate. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, right
Yeah, but yeah, I get what you're saying
Yeah, so it gets it gets filed for you and then you would intentionally go to that that email box to get it
But I, I have been using duck, duck, go email.
To great success.
I absolutely love being able to turn off an email addresses, you know, Hey, sign up and
get 10% off. Okay, here we go. Thanks very much.
Now turn that email address off. Yeah. Don't want to hear from you over and over
and over. I like that idea. That's good. Yeah. Huh. Yep.
Yep. Yeah. There's a lot of ways to, uh, to skin this particular cat with lack of a more correct.
Oh, now we're into animal cruelty.
Cruelty I see Dave. Well, because we're having so much fun pronouncing DuckDuckGo today, Chicago Tom
shares, he says, I typically browse the internet with Safari in private browsing mode. Among
other things, the private windows prevent sites from tracking your browsing in other open tabs. I think that's
also true in regular open tabs too, but
fine. He says,
iOS has allowed users to to select their default browser for some time.
That is true. He says.
You can switch your default from something like an and you can also switch your default search engine in safari and they've allowed that for some time so you can switch the default search engine from something like google to something like duck duck go which doesn't track you as much i'm.
They're still using Bing as their engine.
So there's some question about whether Bing is getting the ability to track you via DuckDuckGo,
but we'll leave that for another discussion.
However, Chicago Tom says, did you know that with iOS 17,
you can also define a separate search engine
for private browsing.
This can allow you to use DuckDuckGo only when browsing privately to add that extra layer
and Google when you're not.
Or however else you want to do it. And you do it in settings Safari on the iPhone.
So you launch the settings app on your iPhone or iPad, go into the Safari section and you can set search engine
and now private search engine.
And Safari 17, not to be confused with iOS or iPadOS 17, but Safari 17 on the Mac, which comes with macOS Sonoma,
but is also something you can download for prior versions of macOS and update to.
Safari 17, if you go in to, uh, preferences or settings, however,
it, it appears for you and go into search, you can also set a main search engine and a private browsing search engine in Safari on the Mac as well.
So, yeah, there you go. Thanks Chicago, Tom.
That's slick. It is slick. It is slick. Do you have anything to add to that Pete before we, uh,
I haven't downloaded Safari 17 yet, but I'm about to. Oh, interesting.
All right. Should I do it right now during the show? See if I can.
That's a great idea. Yeah.
Okay. See you guys next week. Okay. Thanks Pete. Yep. Thanks for being here.
Yep. Good luck. I may not be back. Good luck to you. Yeah.
Uh, Pensacola, Craig brings us our next quick tip. And, uh, he's, he points out that he says, uh, I was managing.
I have, I have iCloud and Hotmail email accounts configured on my Mac.
And I can see and process both of them in one place, which works very nicely for me.
Says, but I rarely use my Hotmail, so I don't notice much about the traffic in that account,
but that one gets a lot of junk mail, and I've started paying more attention to that and clearing it out.
What I discovered, he says, which really surprised him, is that if you right-click,
and choose the option for erase junk mail, so you right-click on the junk folder,
You choose erase junk.
It erases junk for all accounts. Since I was clicking into the specific junk mail folder
for my Hotmail account, and it erased junk on all the accounts.
And the same happened, right clicking on the trash folder and choosing erase deleted items.
This removed them from the trash in both my iCloud and Hotmail accounts.
I did not know this. I don't know how long it's been like this, he says.
But I wanted to make sure everybody knew I treat that as a PSA.
Thank you, Pensacola, Craig. That's a good one. Yeah, that could be a bad thing.
I mean, cause you haven't gone through to make sure you don't have something you want in another folder.
I'm surprised it doesn't pop up and like warn you that like that just seems to be
one of those things where I don't know, I guess, I guess enough people have not been
burned by this or haven't noticed they've been burned by this such that Apple hasn't
deemed it necessary to warn.
Hey Dave, I want to go back in time here, just ever so briefly, Jim Dowson put in Facebook
a comment, you could use your email address, the plus sign and a tag at domain.com to also.
That's a good way to get email filters.
Although if you have a human back there on the other side, they'll learn to take that
tag off and sell your email address anyway. Doesn't even need to be a human.
So, because it's a really easy thing for a computer to parse a plus sign to the left of the at sign.
So what Jim is correct, there is an official standard, it's an RFC out there about email that says,
mail servers should, and most do, iCloud does.
Gmail does, most of them do.
If your mail, if like my mail is like, you know, Dave at Dave.com, it's not.
But if my mail is dave at dave.com or me at dave.com, whatever, I could put in, if I have that account, that address.
I could put in a plus sign between the email name and the at sign so it would be
Dave plus send spam to me.
Right, exactly. It'd be Dave plus send spam here at Dave.com or you know, I have
DaveHamilton at Gmail.com, that is actually an address of mine. I can't use it for anything
because so many people in the world think their email address is DaveHamilton at Gmail.com
And so that really it all it has is an auto responder that says you didn't reach the Dave you're looking for,
Um because I figured I can do a public service with this So and it's not just one guy like it's lots of people so it's not like I could even say hey, man,
You should have this address. No, there's too many of them. Um.
I get bank login stuff. Like it's really it's a it's a good thing. I'm a generally, uh, ethical human really honest
Yeah, generally honest I don't know if that's the showtime generally honest.
Yeah, but I could do Dave Hamilton plus mgg at gmail.com and you know,
sign up for the Mac keycap newsletter at Mac keycap.com with that address and then I would know that anything that came into Dave
Hamilton plus mgg at gmail.com.
I could filter by that and and do whatever I wanted, but I would know that if spam started coming into that address it came from those guys at
MacGeekGab and maybe they're not as generally honest as they say they are right you know but we don't sell your email. But if then and then let's say you
did sell that email address to Google. Sure. So they could sell it to millions
of other people. Yeah. That was my point is they could then go in and just go well
we'll remove that tag and send it to David. Yeah because it's an RFC because it is a standard, it's very, I mean, it's like, I even, well, I was going to say
even I could write the regular expression to strip that out, but chat GPT in about four
seconds could write the regular expression to strip out the plus tags of email addresses.
So, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
I think they call it plus addressing. So I will link to something about that.
Lou in Vermont shares the, uh, the next quick tip here.
He says, uh, we're cruising in the Mediterranean right now. And my wife and I are on T-Mobile, T-Mobile and love it.
Love it. Oh man, V's and B's.
Uh, love it at home, but especially when traveling internationally with free high
high-speed data and texts and 25% 25 cent per minute calls, no SIMs or eSIMs to deal with.
He says, but I can kick myself when I forget to put my phone into airplane mode
after returning to the ship at the end of a day in port.
As a cruiser yourself, Dave, you know that if you're not in airplane mode,
the phone will automatically connect to the ship's cell tower after it pulls out of port,
running up an exorbitant phone bill.
That's true if you leave roaming on, which you would because you're a T-Mobile customer
and you get the included things. So this makes sense.
More than once, he says, I've forgotten to activate airplane mode and I got caught.
After we embarked a few days ago, I decided to investigate whether there might be a way
using shortcuts to turn airplane mode on every day automatically at a set time.
I'm not sure if you already have this shortcut working for you, but for fellow cruisers who may not,
you can just, you create a shortcut.
The action is, of course, set airplane mode to on, and then you run it with an automation of time of day,
and you select the desired time, and you're good to go, and it will work, and that's it.
It just turns airplane mode on at a certain time. you could have it turn it off at a certain time.
And that should do it and of course airplane mode remembers its settings from the last time
you used it which means that if you have enabled wi-fi while in airplane mode then when airplane
mode turns on with the shortcut wi-fi will remain enabled for you so if you're on if you're choosing
to be on the ship's wi-fi then or your home wi-fi if you're using this for a different purpose
then, uh, then, you know, you'd be good to go there.
So, yeah. Thanks. You could probably geofence it too, if you wanted to get really fancy.
Yeah. But the ship's in a different spot every day. Well, maybe it is, maybe it isn't.
Okay. That's fair. That's fair. Maybe. Sure. But yeah, sure.
So, um, yeah. And I remember the horror stories back in the early days of the iPhone and
mail and traveling overseas, remember, you know, people getting thousands of
dollars bills for, you know, if that stuff working in the background.
Yeah. Low data mode, folks. Low data mode and keep your, unless you have specific reason not to, the general advice
is keep your phone's main plan with data roaming turned off.
And then that, those two things should really, that's what I do on my phone and it really
helps compartmentalize me and keep me from getting caught.
But for those of you that need to do it another way, lose shortcut.
We've also had people use a similar shortcut
if they are in a week, like if they're on a data limited plan
and wanna ensure that they are not using any cell data
while at home, they do geo-fence that, right?
Because they know that their phone will connect to wifi at home in general.
And so they geo-fence it so that when they get home, it turns off, it turns on airplane mode.
And when they leave home, it turns off airplane mode.
So you could, you could do that too. Like, yeah, yeah.
Shortcuts and automations, they're weird in that they're.
You know, their own sort of paradigm to think about, but I'm finding shortcuts handier and handier every day.
So we even moved our notes creation script. We had this script that we used in AppleScript for years
to take anything, a PDF or an image,
and create a note that goes into our shared folder.
We used it with Evernote for a long time. Earlier this year, we migrated over to Notes.
Apple Scripts Notes support is.
Wonky at best yeah yeah that's good word for it like the dictionary looks clean and clear and then you invoke it and especially with attachments it just gets super it's adding double attachments which literally causes notes to crash it's crazy i rewrote it as a shortcut and it works flawlessly so you know think about think about shortcuts versus apple scripts when you're doing things if you're having trouble with one try the other you might i wish i had
I had thought of that six months ago
because it would have saved me, I don't know,
probably 30 to 40 hours of head banging with AppleScript.
Yeah. I noticed that flat spot over your forehead. Yeah, yeah.
Head banging with AppleScript, man. Yeah, that might also be the title of the show.
One last quick tip comes from Todd who points out an interesting thing.
Have you ever been to Amazon and they have all the images, right,
for the product that you're looking at on Amazon, but you want to copy that image to share in some way.
And Amazon doesn't make it easy because it's all very JavaScripted, right?
You pick the, you know, there's maybe five images in the little carousel.
You pick one of them.
And when you float your mouse over it to copy it, it goes into like zoom mode.
Well, Todd figured out the trick.
He says, go to Amazon and find the product, hover over the image,
you know, choose it on the thumbnails and then hover over the main image, right?
And then he says, right click on the image. This will bring up the contextual menu.
Within the contextual menu, or sorry, while the contextual menu is on the screen.
So you're just bringing it up. You're not selecting anything from the contextual menu.
But while that's on the screen, move your cursor over the larger image.
So away from the contextual menu, right, click again and select open image in new tab and it works.
This is how, this is how you trick safari into stopping the JavaScript thing that it's doing to like zoom in on the image, but is by right
clicking and opening up the contextual menu, then you can right click on the image and have it like act like safari normally does.
So, so quick question. Yeah, man.
You got a trackpad right click is it the two-finger tap I can't I can't seem to get it to work
you.
Yeah, I yeah, I was able to do it in my office I do I actually have a mouse up here in the studio, but but yes
I was able to yeah, cuz it's the two finger double double finger tip. Yeah, yeah the double finger tap yes
Yes, or you could control click like that is always like the right click is control click. Yeah, that's what I thought,
Did that not work?
Well, I'm just, I haven't tested today.
I haven't tried it with a control click. I, I did it the other way.
So it's possible that, uh, that control click doesn't work, but we'll test and we'll find out.
All right. Look, when it comes to managing emails, we all crave simplicity,
efficiency, and above all privacy, right?
I mean, in the ocean of emails, we navigate daily. Having a trustworthy and adept email provider is not just
is not just a want, it's a need.
Well, enter our sponsor, Fastmail, right? Fastmail isn't just another email provider.
They've championed privacy for over two decades. With Fastmail, you won't find ads cluttering your inbox
or sneaky trackers monitoring your every move.
And this is why I've been using Fastmail for the past like five or six years, or is it more?
Time flies when email is this good. And if you're like me and value productivity,
Their masked email, scheduled send, and snooze features are game changers.
With custom rules and various nifty features, Fastmail practically rolls out a red carpet
for a seamless and productive email experience.
So are you considering making the switch? Well, with Fastmail's easy import feature,
transitioning from another service is a breeze.
I did it with Gmail overnight. I gave Fastmail a login to my Gmail account,
I just like logged it in, and then it just did it.
It slurped it all in, it was fantastic. And then you can enjoy security like never before
with masked email, protecting your logins and real email addresses.
And for my fellow customization enthusiasts, you can use your domains for bespoke email addresses
and tweak FastMail's features, including folders and labels and themes,
and even custom swipes to your heart's content.
So what's the email experience you wish for? With FastMail, it's probably already a reality.
To learn more about their service, Visit fastmail.com slash MGG to get 10% off your first year,
and you can follow them on all the socials, Facebook, X, Mastodon, LinkedIn.
Our thanks to Fastmail, again at fastmail.com slash MGG for sponsoring this episode.
Next up is our sponsor, CleanMyMac X. Our beloved Macs are indispensable, right?
We rely on them for work, education and pretty much everything in between.
But like us, our Macs need regular checkups and a little decluttering to stay in peak performance.
Well, developed by the wizards at Mac Paw, CleanMyMac X is like having a personal trainer
for your Mac, keeping it fit, fast, and free of unwanted junk.
Now CleanMyMac X isn't new to the game, right?
With almost 15 years under its belt, it's not just an app, it's a veteran, pioneering
the art and science of Mac cleaning.
And it isn't just us singing its praises, though. We do, and we use it often.
Has notarized the app and the Mac App Store team gave it a shout out with the words, we love it.
With 30 tools packed into its sleek interface, CleanMyMac X prevents malware, keeps your
Mac from overheating, speeds up its performance, and unveils those hidden junk folders that
are secretly hogging all your space.
It's like having a Swiss Army Knife for all your Mac's needs.
And did I mention it recently bagged the Red Dot Award for the Best Design Mac App of 2021?
For those who like staying in the know, listen, the newly updated Menu app from CleanMyMac X is your go-to.
With six detailed monitors, it provides invaluable info about your Mac's health, storage, connected
devices, protection status, CPU performance, RAM, battery, and even network speeds, all for free.
Yes, that's right, the Menu app is free for all Mac users. And then, if you want to unlock the full experience, you can get CleanMyMac X today and enjoy our
are 5% off because you're a Mac Geek Gab listener
by visiting macpaw.apps slash Mac Geek Gab.
Now, that 5% off is only available for the next two weeks. So go now, macpaw.apps slash Mac Geek Gab for 5% off,
and our thanks to Macpaw and CleanMyMac X for sponsoring this episode.
That's awesome. All right. So Dave we got a letter. It's time to move to questions. I've got a letter from in not cute,
I'm just don't talk just don't talk or just read just read innocuous. Oh, and he asked
How do I migrate my photos library to a new disk? He says my,
950 gigabyte photos library said all.
That's a wow. Wow. That is a line was like 300. Wow. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I'm impressed
Kudos to you sir. He said that 950 gig library lives on an external 2 terabyte
hard drive attached to his 2018 Mac Mini. I recently turned on iCloud syncing and
opted to retain the original photos and videos locally on my external drive.
Now I'd like to replace the five-year-old external drive with a new SSD.
Searching the topic online I've seen posts saying that this is as easy as is copying the photos library to the new SSD,
then pointing the photos app to the new location.
Other posts suggest that changing this location this way will cause photos to perform
some sort of reconciliation process, matching each photo or video with the version stored in iCloud,
one by one, which could take weeks.
They further suggest that it's better to start working with an empty new library on the SSD
and then sync everything back down to the SSD from the cloud.
Any thoughts on either of these approaches?
Many thanks, and Akuoso, I think I got it right that time. I think you did, yeah.
So I've done both, and this was a thread in our Discord. Listener Ben advised taking the first approach of just copying
the library over to the new drive and then telling photos that it's there, and you would tell photos that it's there.
Well, if you unmount the old... So the process would be quit photos first.
And really even like it would be even better to sign out of iCloud Photos because it keeps running
a process in the background but you're kind of going to be okay because I've done it this way
and haven't really worried about it. So quit Photos though, copy the Photos library from
you know one drive to the other. Then unmount the old drive right so that you know that it's not
there. This is where things might get tricky because with iCloud Photos running in the
in the background, it might not let you unmount the old drive.
So, yep.
So you, you might, you might need to shut down the Mac and unplug the drive and.
Then start it back up at that point. You're going to be fine.
And then once you launch photos, it'll say, I can't find your photos library.
Do you want to point to a new one?
However, you can avoid some of that headache by relaunching photos and then immediately, immediately pressing the option key.
This will bring up the browser that lets you, I think it's the option key that does
someone in the chat will correct me if I'm wrong, that will let you pick which photos library you want to launch.
Choose the one on your new disc, you're going to have to go and like point to it, which is fine.
Then once you've launched photos, go into photos settings and set the current library
as the quote unquote system library.
That's what will make iCloud photos use it.
So that's the path.
The other path, of course, is as he said, just start a new library, which you would also do
by launching photos with the option key down and then just say create new library
and have it save a blank one on there.
Then you would just log that into iCloud, set that as the system library, and have it pull everything down.
I've done both of these things, and I will pick you in a second, Pete.
But I just wanted to share. I've done both of these things recently.
I did the latter one, not because I thought it was a better path,
But because I wanted to see on Lisa's computer if pulling a fresh copy of her photos library down from iCloud,
would.
Result in a smaller Library on her Mac. I have it download all photos right because we want to keep a local copy of it
So all that's there she We did that with her machine. We had it slurped down,
The fresh library it was I think she's got almost 500 gigs worth of photos It was like 480 something,
The new library was within five gigs of the old one. So photos does a really good job,
And either does a really good job of pruning out old things and keeping the library managed or it does an awful job and syncs
All of the cruft up to iCloud and back down again, so I don't know which it is
I'm guessing it's the former though. So either way doesn't matter. That's her iCloud photo library. So I yeah
Either one of these is fine. If you've got unlimited bandwidth and you want to potentially, you know, deal with any cruft that's there, the latter is fine by slipping it down, but otherwise just copy it over. You're good to go.
So, my question is, can you do the first method without creating incredibly difficult headaches for yourself by naming the new drive identical to the old drive?
Probably not because I because the drive recognized. It's a different drives have unique
Identifiers right and so I don't know so the computer is going to use the identifier not the neat not the drive it might
Yeah, but really this like what we're talking about here is not an awful headache,
If when I have done this the path I have taken is quit photos.
Copy right do the copy copy, then launch photos with the option key down, point it to the new one and tell the
system that's the new iCloud library.
Say that the copy takes a full day.
Uh, if during that time I take five pictures with my iPhone that auto sync to the iCloud library,
I don't know if they would have copied over right because it depends on when the finder copied things
Sure, right and so with that I but it doesn't matter because photos will figure it out
Once I tell it that this new library is the iCloud photos library
It is going to compare it but I haven't seen that take a lot of time or processing power and then it'll be like
like, Oh, I don't have these three of these new five photos, so I'm just going to slurp
them down from iCloud. All right. Everything's good.
Like it's just been fine. So I would take the, take the easy button. Yeah. Yeah.
My, my, my suggestion don't do it. I think you're asking for more problems.
More problems with what? Well, we're trying to identically name the drive.
Oh, don't do that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I agree. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Um, I had a thing about this and I don't know what I did to myself with it.
I created a little note for myself and everything. Oh, yeah.
Um, speaking of copying things and this started in, um, Monterey, believe it or not, and I.
Was copying a bunch of data this morning in, in, in a sense, like a photos library, right?
A big folder of gigabytes of stuff. And it was across the network even. For whatever reason,
it stopped halfway through. I got the, you know, could not complete this operation,
error negative 8004. And I'm like, come on. So I went to where the destination was to erase it
so that I could, you know, bring it back in from scratch again. And I noticed that the, uh, in the
the finder the icon for the folder that was like the half successful copy had a
little like arrow in a like a circular arrow in it. Like a clock. Yeah. Okay.
Almost like the time machine thing but not quite. Yeah. And so I clicked it and
it said copying of this folder name has paused. You can finish copying now or
or keep a resumable copy and finish later.
And so I said, great. And I chose finished copying and it immediately resumed from where it was.
I checked the contents of the folders against each other. Everything was identical when it finished all good.
I had no idea that this was there. I, so I would presume that I might not be the only one.
Somebody at Apple figured it out. Yeah, but evidently this has been there since Monterey.
So like it's, it's not, it's not, um, not new, But there's there's like your bonus little quick tip for today. So yeah, yeah. Yeah.
Let's go to Gino. Shall we Pete? I will I will we shall we shall yeah This one probably a quick question, but a good one, especially as we're you know,
My role in the transition phase. Yeah, exactly exactly,
Gino says I backed my 14-inch MacBook Pro up to an external drive before updating to Sonoma,
He says, now I'm not sure if I am okay to back up the present data to the same drive.
This is my first major update and I could use your advice. So this is a time machine backup and yes, absolutely.
Time machine will let you use the same drive across operating system upgrades and it should just be fine.
So especially since you just started this backup, there's no, I don't think there's
any reason to say, well, wipe it clean anyway or start with a different one. I wouldn't
necessarily wipe it clean. The only reason you might not want to is if there's something
about either Sonoma or that backup that you want to preserve in time, but otherwise, yeah,
But I would just back up to the same drive for sure.
I don't know if you have, no. Yeah.
Are you bringing cruft over? That's the only question, right?
Yeah, exactly. And I would say probably not because you don't back up time machine
doesn't back up the operating system. Yeah, you're just your data. Right, right.
Okay. Yeah. So, yeah.
PC Unix has yeah, PC Unix has a really interesting. I'll share it as a public service announcement.
And he says, my Apple TV 4K was hooked to an LG TV.
Initially, all was fine. Sometime in the last year, I started experiencing problems
where the LG would not turn on when the Apple TV turned on.
The fix was simple. Wait 30 seconds, then turn off the Apple TV,
then turn it back on, and then the LG would turn on, always.
I bought a new LG TV. It does the same thing.
That's interesting. I swapped in a new HDMI cable, same thing.
I know other people that have LG TVs. I'm one of them, don't have this problem, same setup.
So he says, it has to be the Apple TV box.
And he said, he went to the, somebody else posted, Matt1 posted and said,
I had similar issues, called Apple support.
They scheduled a genius appointment for me. I brought the Apple TV in and their solution was to swap it out
for a replacement Apple TV, that solved all the issues I was having.
So a fascinating little tale of, yeah. So some Apple TVs don't sync properly with some LG TVs.
I like, that would be the, yeah. So there you go.
If you're having this problem, try a few other things, but know that you might just need to swap out the Apple TV.
Evidently, Apple knows about this. Yes. Yes, they do. And it's cheaper than a new LG TV.
You're right, right, right.
So. Yep.
Next question. Yeah. Crazy Ninja Papa. Yeah.
Crazy Ninja Papa says, I have a Synology disk station, a DS918+,
he says that I really only use for Plex download station via VPN and a home file server.
We are an Apple-only house and I'm thinking of replacing it with a Mac Mini. Any advice?"
So my advice is, you know, 10,000 foot view, general advice. You'll find that most things
require the same amount of effort or difficulty to set up on each. But in that you already are
comfortable with the Synology operating system, right? If you're having to learn that for the
for the first time, then there's that sort of level of difficulty.
It's not hard, but if you don't know what you don't know, right, yeah, exactly.
Some things, some engines will be easier to set up on one versus the other, but in general,
it's just gonna balance it out.
However, you will almost certainly find that your Mac mini will be way faster
than almost any disc station that you would choose to buy for your home.
You might need the one thing, and I don't know that this is necessary, but just think about this,
a lot of the things that we wind up running on our disk stations, especially over time,
are things that aren't available as native Synology packages, and therefore we run them
in Docker containers. So, but Docker can run on the Mac just fine, it's all good, and again,
it will run faster than it would on your Synology disk station. That said, we were talking about
about this in the pre-show and Tennessee Papa commented that his Mac mini runs
his channels DVR server, an AdGuard home DNS server.
It all, it does run Docker, but I want to come back to that.
So we'll forget for a moment that it runs Docker.
So channels DVR, AdGuard home DNS server, a wired guard server, home bridge for
home kit, and he says it barely uses more than 2% of the CPU.
And I asked how many of those engines needed to run inside a Docker container.
And he said, he really only has one thing running inside Docker.
And it's a custom little thing that he really, he didn't even mention here.
So I'm not even going to confuse things with it.
So all of those things, plus I know for a fact that Plex can run as a native Mac app.
So all of these things can run without Docker.
That's interesting to me. So if you've got an extra Mac mini laying around, maybe, maybe.
I think, yeah, and my observation on that, Dave, was that a Mac Mini may be substantially
cheaper than a Synology in many drives.
Explain that to me! Because for me the... refurbished Mac Mini for probably about 600 bucks.
And by the time you do a Synology and four drives or three drives, you're coming up on a grant. For sure.
Okay. But the Mac Mini doesn't, like, if you're just gonna, if you're okay not having...
If you're just gonna run channels and Plex and...
Well, but if you're okay not having redundant storage, fault tolerant storage.
So, right, exactly. Again, it depends on what your usage need is, right?
I want to have be able to have a drive fail and not lose my photos library Well, I don't keep it on that on my NAS, but right now you could create your own.
Raid on your Mac and and and then manage a time machine back up to my Synology, you know, and that's something that I want to be reliable,
but but and I'm just gonna point this out is that you have a Mac mini and And a Synology disk station.
Well, Dave, now you're splitting hairs. Well, what I'm saying is you have the fault tolerance because you have all those drives.
And if you were to, like, the price of a disk station empty versus the price of a Mac Mini that would run all this stuff,
you're right that there's not much of a difference there.
But the Mac Mini's probably going to be a little more expensive, but as soon as you start adding drives, no.
The Mac Mini does come with one drive, you can't buy a bare metal Mac Mini, at least not from Apple.
Maybe somebody will sell you one. But you might wind up adding some drives to it.
But I think your point is valid here in that the cost delta of the hardware between the two.
Is going to be mostly negligible. You may choose, you could run your Synology with just one drive as well.
Sure. people do.
You could do it like and get all the functionality. You just don't get the fault tolerance.
So and what I have done is off my Mac mini. I've hung a 5 terabyte solid-state drive and that's where all my channels DVR
recordings go and where my Plex media is and you know, what if I lost it.
You know, so so be it that can all be replaced.
That's interesting. So you're running channels off of a solid-state drive and not beating up
your array in your, like, like a, yeah, that's it.
You're beating up a solid state drive, but like, you know, yeah, yeah, yeah.
But it's a, it's a five terabyte solid state drive. I'm sure I paid less than $200 for it.
Five terabytes? I'm 99% sure. I'll verify that. No, there's no way.
A five terabyte SSD. First of all, I don't know of any of those.
Hang on. Well, I can't. Like I know an eight terabyte, you can find an eight terabyte one,
but it's like two grand or something.
You don't have a five terabyte. It may be a spindle drive, but I don't think it is.
That would make more sense.
That, cause like, like a two terabyte external SSD, it's going to be somewhere.
But we just talked about it in the last episode. It was like, you know, it's going to be somewhere between a hundred.
And you're right.
Yeah. So, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
But still like that, that's an interesting thing. I hadn't thought about that for the, the, like,
especially channels where it's just constantly recording and deleting and recording and deleting and recording.
That's terrible for an SSD, right? It will wear out an SSD. Yes.
However, for a hundred bucks for a couple of terabytes, like fine, you know, it's going to last you five
years before you wear it out.
So yeah.
Huh. Now you've got me thinking. Cause like I run a, for a different business that
we have, I run a Bitcoin node on my, um, on my.
Disk station and I initially, uh, I knew that I shouldn't do this and I didn't
think I was doing it, but I made the mistake of not pointing the docker container for, you know, Bitcoin D at an SSD that I have hanging off of my disk
station.
I just let it do the default and it pointed at the, the, you know, the, the main array in there.
And it was like, why are these drives just crunching all the time, all the time?
It was like, we forgot to point it at the SSD. So we copied it over and we pointed it at the SSD and now it's quiet and everything.
Everybody's happy.
But I, again, I know that it's going to beat up the SSD, but it's fine.
I just, you know, I can like the, the Bitcoin network lets me sink that down again.
So it's totally fine.
So, well, here, here's a quick question then. So I'm looking at my, at my drive.
It is five terabyte drive.
Is there a way to tell using disk utility, whether it's spindle or SSD?
I don't think there is.
Um, no disk utility, um, in the name of, I don't want to launch disutility on this machine, um, but it's certainly, I think I've seen it in like system information.
So you could look there, but yeah, you should be, it'll know whether it's rotational or not. Yes.
Yeah, okay, but this isn't a big like I think there's a bigger conversation if we've gone down a rabbit hole here
Sorry, I know I'd like this rabbit hole in that it like my in my brain,
SSDs are are these super expensive things and they are still more expensive than spindle drives for sure,
But they're like the actual dollars difference isn't all that huge right because we know you can get a USB
you know, two terabyte drive for like 119 bucks.
We just, you know, we just talked about that. So like thinking about SSDs as kind of the drives.
The temp storage drives, just like, oh yeah, we can wear that out.
That's fine. It's small. So that's fine.
It's a different paradigm. And I don't know that I've ever stopped to think about this before
until we started answering this question.
So like, this is why I love doing the show we get to dissect these things together and we
learn stuff. Like, you know, where's the, there it is. Like, you know, yeah.
I taught myself a thing by rambling.
Hey, there you go. Well, I can tell you this. It's a Western digital easy store two or
five terabyte external drive, which tells me it's a spindle. That is a spindle.
I was, I was mistaken, but that's okay. It opened up the door.
Like we're here. I like it.
While we're talking about USB and Thunderbolt, But Walter has an interesting anecdote to share, and we need to parse this properly.
He says back in the last episode, 1003, you talked about booting a Mac mini.
Somebody had bought a Mac mini with a tiny SSD, and you talked about booting it from
an external SSD, and that advice all sounded good.
Said, except my personal experience says that this might be a path of woe.
He says, I don't recommend it. He says, I attempted this for many months
with lots of headaches and many calls to Apple support.
We're gonna share the details here, but I will say he found a way of doing this that does work reliably
but there are a couple of paths that don't.
He says, with Apple Silicon, he says, it seems they fundamentally changed a few aspects with security.
First off, this is only possible to boot externally with a true certified Thunderbolt SSD,
not the ones that you might buy that are Thunderbolt compatible,
like the USB 3.2 or whatever those are.
Amazon listings can be very misleading. You need to buy an actual Thunderbolt SSD to do this.
He says, don't do it with a USB SSD.
And he said at boot, It seems that the device, the Mac mini,
in his case, locks down the IO ports, but due to the handshake between Thunderbolt ports,
Apple can leave this open and bootable.
He says, I had many runarounds trying to figure this one out
and had bought quote unquote Thunderbolt SSDs online.
And so I was confused.
Also during this time, I found out that Apple Silicon needs wired
or Apple supplied keyboards and mouse at boot.
If you want to control things, I've certainly found that to be easier.
Although I have gotten it to work with a wireless keyboard, but maybe that's different.
But so as not to confuse the issue, the Thunderbolt boot from,
if you want to boot an Apple Silicon Mac from an external drive, make it a Thunderbolt drive,
not a USB drive, at least based on Walter's experience.
So I wanted to share that and contextualize it.
I have only ever tried it with Thunderbolt, You
drives and it has worked fine so I have not tried booting an Apple Silicon Mac with an external USB.
But I thought it was doable like I thought I always would have thought it would hold the option key and it would
yeah it would see it and and there you go so but is that... it didn't work for him
yeah but like that's not auto booting right we're holding down the option key
we're getting a step in like I don't know I've I've certainly done it with a USB stick and that has worked.
So the question is, would it work with a, you know, a drive just plugged in and let it boot? I thought it would.
Evidently it doesn't with some, and maybe he's talking about an M2 Mac mini, and maybe there's a difference.
I've, I've only ever tried it with M1 machines. I think I can.
So maybe there was a difference in the security between the M1s and the M2s.
I don't know, but just be aware if you're having trouble getting it to boot.
And it's a USB drive. You're not alone. Other people, AKA Walter have experienced this
and I wanted to share it.
So, but I am currently booted, um, my Mac studio in the studio, which is really weird for years.
I have this, the room that I'm in is the studio, you know, and, uh, it's the podcast
studio, it's the music studio, it's the studio.
The previous Macs that were in here were all iMacs. So their names on my network were iMac studio.
Now you've got a studio studio. Now I have a Mac studio studio.
I have a studio Mac studio, so it's very strange figuring out how to name this.
And I don't know that I've gotten it right, but yeah, but anyway, uh, this is the first Apple Silicon Mac that I've had in the studio.
And so I decided for this week to try using Mac OS Ventura here.
I can't run Sonoma in the studio.
Cause the Thunderbolt drivers for my personas quantum interface aren't there yet, um, for Sonoma, but they are certified for Ventura.
So I am running in Ventura, figured I should give Ventura a shot on the, uh, Apple silicon
machine up here, see how the core audio bug works.
I've, it definitely still exists.
It seems knocking on wood to be not quite as bad, but we'll see.
I'm I reserved the right to go back to Monterey.
So, but anyway.
Cause cause you like beating your head against the wall. Yeah, I do. Well, yeah, yeah.
Uh, Jed has a question for us, pilot Pete, and I swear, I'm going to find it here.
I, I, our new name. He wants to know about email clients, as I recall. Yeah.
I, our new naming system of our notes is I I'm not used to it yet, but I, it has
some fundamental flaws that we might need to talk about, but in any event, I I'm, I'm here now.
He says, um, I have three different Gmail accounts and keeping them.
I like keeping them checked, but separate.
The one difficulty he says is I don't use or like apples mail app okay that's fair.
Says i use the gmail app on my phone i use the web interface he says here's my question i'm on to volunteer boards and have a separate email account for each i could have gmail or apple mail combine the accounts with my personal work email but i'd rather keep them a little separate to prevent me from responding or sending from the wrong email.
So I could use three different email apps, but is that crazy?
I'm curious as to your thoughts on how to manage this. So I have a lot of thoughts because I've been thinking a lot about email recently.
Just last week, we did an email hangout and I've made some changes to my life based on this conversation.
We've had which I'll share in a minute.
You have a lot of options here. I know you don't like Apple's mail app, but it's important to acknowledge that Apple's mail app could handle this for you and it would do it very well.
Apple's mail app lets you have multiple accounts and you can see the inboxes separately
or you can see a unified inbox.
And then of course you could use smart folders to see a customized view of whatever you want that to be.
So for that, like you're gonna be, like Apple's mail could do this.
Apple's mail is also fantastic at replying from the address to which the message was originally sent.
So the chances, because I have lived in Apple mail like this for well over a decade.
And the number of times that I have replied from the wrong address, I can count on one hand,
and 100% of those are when I was like BCC or a mailing list and mail just couldn't tell what it came into.
However, I'm using one email account and multiple aliases, whereas you're using three different email accounts.
So for you, mail would know which address it was sent to, even on a BCC, because it came into that one account.
So it will use the default address of that account, which for you is gonna be the only address
because you're not gonna have aliases, and it's gonna get it right 100% of the time.
I really, I feel confident saying that.
So Apple Mail would do this, as would pretty much any other email client
that supports multiple accounts.
They're all really good at this particular thing.
So like you could use multiple email clients, but I would use if you don't like Apple Mail fine,
but my default would be to recommend Apple Mail for this. Just put all the things in there and
then you can, you know, use it and compartmentalize it to your heart's content. If you don't like
Apple Mail or if you do like Apple Mail, but like me, Apple Mail is now in Mac OS Sonoma missing
lots of features that you rely on,
aka support for plugins and things.
What were they thinking?
So I, I, Pete have moved to a new email client. Okay.
Okay. I started thinking about all the little apple focused email clients out there and spent a lot of time trying to figure
out why the folks at spark or the folks at reedle want to force me to use threads in order to use spark.
My, my brain doesn't work in threads. I'd like to manage email without threads.
It's fine if you do like to use it with threads, but Spark forces me to and, and their,
their support team is like, well, if you can give us an example as to why you would want to use it
without threads, uh, then we're happy to consider making this feature change.
And so I, I was like, well, the reason I want to use it without threads is my brain doesn't
work well that way. Like it's you, you say it's inefficient for you to use it without threads.
I say it's inefficient for me to use it with threads.
That's my reason. They have all kinds of support articles about why they think threads are the best and so it's like you people know this is a problem.
Anyway, so I can't use that. And then, thank goodness, because it made me realize that there's another mail client that I have on my Mac.
And it's a mail client that I use for, like, anytime, mostly, I've used it for anytime a
staff member, like, leaves the company, I still want to check their email, but I don't want to
integrate it with my main email, right? Like I, so, and this other email client, and I'm
intentionally being cagey about this, lets me set up multiple profiles. So when I launch it,
I can choose, oh, let's go check Greg Snyder's email. Cause Greg, you know, I bought him out
of Backbeat Media. He was my partner when we started, I bought him out over a decade ago, or,
you know, check John Donahue's email or whatever. And I can choose and see their entire account,
but only their account and switch between the profiles.
Of course, you can have a profile load at default and the email client I'm talking about is Thunderbird.
It is built by the Mozilla Foundation, the same people that bring us Firefox.
They've been developing Thunderbird for well over a decade, if not more.
It is cross platform. It's not going anywhere.
This is my big concern with changing my email world to a new client is I want something that I'm pretty sure is going to remain in active development.
And I'm pretty sure Thunderbird is going to remain an active development.
History is a good indicator of this.
They just released a fairly sizable paradigm shift update back in June or something that they call Thunderbird Supernova.
So I was like, wait, why don't I try Thunderbird? Will it solve all of my problems?
And the answer was yes. They let me manage my email aliases with so much granularity, it's ridiculous.
In fact, I don't need plugins to do all of the things that I was doing in mail except one.
But the good news is Thunderbird has great plugin support and oh, it's also cross-platform.
So plugins that are developed for Thunderbird work in Thunderbird.
It doesn't matter whether you're running it on a Mac or a Windows machine or a Linux machine.
So again, lots of community support.
The one plugin I run, it's called Send Later because I want to be able to control when messages get sent
and I can completely sew.
I have moved everything to Thunderbolt, Thunderbolt. Thunderbird in the last three or four days, and I'm in it.
So do you need a Thunderbolt cable for that, Dave? Or is that... Sorry.
I knew it. I knew it as soon as I said it. As soon as you said it.
Pete's going to make me pay for this. Roll on.
So I actually have, and that's good. That leans me hard into looking at Thunderbird as my replacement.
So for Jed, I would all, if you, especially if you don't like Apple mail, go to Thunderbird.
Like it's, it's yeah.
Yeah. Or here's one I need to play with a little bit more.
It's been out for seven years now.
Yep. So there's, it's got some stick to it in this. Okay. Yeah.
It comes with set app and it's called canary mail. Okay.
And canary mail, it looks, I just opened it up to take a look, see at it while you were talking.
It now has an AI responder built in, right?
It uses side, you call it AI sidekick. It uses AI to write your emails for you.
Try now or later, you know?
And then it also does the red receipts and that sort of thing.
I don't know the degree to which plugins may or may not work, but, so I need to play
with that a little bit more.
But Canary Mail seems to be a fairly solid client. I don't know if it's as powerful as Thunderbird or not.
Or not interesting way with that, but yeah.
Um, I'm I'm now I'm curious to see if there is there one, there is, it's called AI anywhere for chat GPT and
it's a Thunderbird add on.
So I'm going to have to mess with that too.
Yeah. Y'all. Yup.
Yeah, interesting. I don't know what it does, but like this is the thing about Thunderbird. It's been around forever.
So, like there's things about it. I remember Thunderbird dating back to my Windows days as a client. So yeah, it's been around 20 plus years.
I will say that it took me probably an hour or two to finally get it, get the user interface tweaked to the way I'm used to seeing mail.
It starts up in this cards view for the message list and I'm like, nope, I want columns.
And so it took me a little bit to figure out how to turn on the table view and turn off the cards view.
But once I did, it was like, okay, it's fine. And that's the thing.
My experience with email clients, especially third-party email clients,
is that they are written for their authors first and often only.
Right? And my experience with the team at Readdle about Spark is very much that.
They're like, well, we believe, okay, whoa, whoa, whoa, like, but you say that Spark is
an email client for everyone.
So it's great that you believe this, but if you have users that don't, well, now you're
excluding quote unquote everyone and that's okay, but you should market it that way.
Like this is an email client that works with our experience.
And that was true with Eudora.
That was true with Mailsmith, which I used in the past. It's kind of true of a lot of these, you know, I'll call them indie dev shops that make email
clients.
They make them for themselves. The paradigm is one paradigm and it's theirs.
Apple Mail is clearly built for the masses.
It's missing some things, sure. And now it's missing more. And now it's missing more.
Some of them will come back by way of extensions. Like it won't surprise me if a year from now I'm back on Apple Mail, right?
But for now, Thunderbird does it, but Thunderbird is built for the masses.
And so it does take some customization to get it to where it's like, OK, this doesn't
look garish and awful anymore. This is a functional email client for me.
The folder that I copied earlier?
Was my Thunderbolt Thunderbird folder from my Mac downstairs.
Pete's doing his best not to step on this.
And my tongue bleeding. I was copying it up to the studio so that I wouldn't have to a re download all the
mail, but B retweak all my settings because your profile has everything in it, settings and all.
So I just copied that up and now it's like, oh yeah, okay, here's my mail.
It's good to go. It even copied the plugin over, which I was shocked.
I'm like oh crap it's gonna freak out because my settings refer to a plug-in that I haven't installed here
And it was like wait the plugins already there. Oh, you're gonna have to learn me how to do that
I'm gonna bring my laptop over. Okay. You learn me. Okay. Yeah. I'll happily yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah
Oh, or we can do it as like a hangout sometime and and walk everybody through it together anybody that wants to
Right like if we're gonna do it We might as well do it or at the very least you know publish like record it and publish it on YouTube
So we could, how about we do this?
I come over and well, well, there's a way to do it, to get all the passwords out and that kind of thing.
But do a screen capture, a screen recording of me doing it and then publish that.
That's what I'm saying, is essentially like that.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Okay, so speaking of these sorts of things and learning, we talked about it pre-show.
What do you think, is this a good time to talk about my new toy that's coming today? It's not a toy.
I want to take a quick minute and thank everybody who all of our premium subscribers who have contributed in the last week.
Again, it's always at Mackey cab.com slash premium. Uh, we had $10 come in from Cal in Russell Vale.
I'm looking down the list here. Donald in furlong, Chris in Chorleywood, Peter in Auburn,
Scott and Bourbon a Neil in West Hartford,
Abel in Santa Rosa, James in San Antonio and Mark in Coopersburg.
And then we had $25 come in for each from Kurt in Tawanda, Robert in Westford,
Andrew in Bellingen, Andrew in Edinburgh, uh, Susan in Honolulu, Rob in South
Huntsville, Colby in Otis, Donald in Jamaica Plain, George in Natick and Robin
in Andover and we had a $30 contribution come in each from Sandro in Garnet Valley, Garnet Valley, sorry.
And Anthony in Middleborough and a hundred dollar contribution from Steve in Oxnard.
Thank you to all of you. You rock. Nice. Uh, and I won't even DAX you today, folks.
I, yeah, I say it every time it is not mandatory.
It is appreciated.
Whatever you can do to support the show.
And that includes and starts with simply listening to the show,
sending in your questions to feedback at Mackey cab.com.
All of that good stuff really makes a difference. Of course, if you're a premium listener, premium at Mackey cab.com is where
you get to send in your questions. So you've heard all of you.
Feedback at Mackey cab that's what he said. It is what I say. I mean, it's a key kid
So we're going to we're at an hour and ten here
Yeah we're gonna skip our cool stuff found for the week because Pete you're gonna you're about to get your new iPhone and you want to
Talk through a little bit just just the steps. Yeah, because I seem to recall,
My son recently got an iPhone 13, okay, and he's now decided he wants a 15 as well
So I'd like to not go through the pain that I went through, switching him off of the iPhone 8S Plus,
into the iPhone 13.
Going to eSIMs and all that stuff.
And it was a headache. I eventually got it, but it was more start, restart,
oops, that didn't work.
So what are our basic steps to switch over from my iPhone 12 to my iPhone 15?
Yeah, are you on an eSIM? I am not.
I need to first go to Mint and say, I want an eSIM. No, no, don't. There you go. Yep.
Like in theory, with many providers that could work, but there are some providers where the eSIM can't transfer from one phone to the other.
And Mint, it turns out, is one of those, or at least it was when I did my phone.
So, no, I'd say leave that alone.
We, when I was, when my iPhone was arriving while we recorded the show,
uh, whatever that day was,
I talked about how I was going to use a USB cable, you know, a C on my iPhone 15 Pro,
to a Lightning on my iPhone 14 Pro to copy everything over.
That didn't work as well as I wanted it to.
And the reason, in fact, in that it didn't actually do it, It did it over over it did it wirelessly between the two devices and it was because the iPhone 15 Pro showed up needing a software update in order to transfer data from my old iPhone.
So going through that process kind of bypassed the.
The cable thing and the way that I know I left the cable plugged in during it but then once the migration finished it had to then download all my apps from the cloud from the app store which tells me that it did not copy them over the cable
So I know that my phones talked wirelessly.
And you know what it works okay I am eager to try the wired version of this sometime, and I know that it does work for some,
That day it did not work for me. I don't know what's gonna happen for you when you do this Pete, so,
You certainly could try it with a cable But but I would you know it either way the one problem with a cable is,
You're going to have one phone charging another and so one phone's battery is going to drain
way faster than the other.
I bear that in mind as you make your decisions. If I were going to do it again right now,
I think I would just like leave phone, both phones plugged in like to their own chargers,
and wirelessly and wirelessly do it.
Yeah, it was fine. You know, if you're on a, if I, and I, I really, I like the idea of doing it over a cable, but...
There are too many. I would currently my advice would be do that if for some reason you're on say a data limited connection and you don't want to or can't afford the data to download all the apps from the cloud right and you want to try and get them from the other phone like that option is there but for simplicity the tried and true option of doing it wirelessly between the two devices is the way that I would go and and then for you on mint.
So you will need the mint app on your new iPhone, which will eventually download, right? Yeah.
In order to go, you're going to have to go into the app and say, get a new e-sim and then it will install that e-sim on
that device and you're going to be good to go and it will render your old sim useless at that point in time.
That's just how the cell networks work.
But let's say you have a hundred apps and mint is not one of of the first ones that your phone in its
infinite wisdom decides to download and you have to wait.
Well, you can go and while all those, you have to go find it, which is the, the trick
because it's, because it's not downloaded.
It's not going to, you can't search for it.
If you know where it is on your phone. And so this is one step that you could
make your life easier. Okay.
Put mint on your home screen before you transfer over, because this way you'll know where to find it.
If you forget to do that, you can go to the app library and scroll alphabetically down to M and find it there.
However you find it, long press on it and choose Prioritize Download.
And then it will go and get that sooner. We've talked about that before.
Exactly. Yes, great reminder. Thank you. Thank you. Yep, you bet.
Yeah, so that's the, that's where, I mean, that's where I would go with it. Yeah. Yeah.
And then any extra tricks or anything to do with the watch to get it to, do I need to
unpair it from my old phone first? Do not unpair it from your old phone.
By migrating your phone over, it will see that a watch was paired with the old one.
And I believe it asked me when I launched the watch app, if I wanted to pair with the
the new phone, it may have just done it, but it was, it was relatively seamless.
What I do, I like, I have no memory of having to jump through a lot of hoops with that. Sure.
I think I just launched the watch app on my new phone and it was like, Hey, do you
want to? And I'm like, yeah, uh-huh.
Yep. Good call. And it was like, great, I got you. And then it just did it.
I think all that happened was I watched my watch face, like do that, that slow,
like it looks like a slow stopwatch going around the, you know, that thing.
And then it was like, okay, yeah, you're good. It's all, all set. Okay.
Now, for the million dollar question on this, I have two authenticators.
Does that mean I get $2 million if I answer? You do, yeah, if you get the answer right, right?
Yeah, I'll write you a check today. Great, perfect. I'll cash it immediately.
Yeah, I'm sure you will. I'll attempt to cash it immediately. There you go.
So, well, you can draw interest on it for those three days it's sitting in your account
before it comes back, right?
Yeah, maybe not. The bank will take that back, though. They will, jerks.
Yeah. And then they'll have a conversation with me about why they've closed my account
and terminated our relationship. But you know, that's different.
Well, there's that too, but you know, yeah, authenticators.
How do you set up your authenticators not to go stupid on you?
Right, and by stupid, you mean not having the data that you need on the other side. Yes, sir. Right, so.
Some authenticators like one password is an authenticator in addition to being a password. Yes vault.
The data is not trained. I don't think the data is transferred over but it doesn't matter because you're likely syncing your one password data with,
Their cloud or iCloud depending on it, you know, whether you're right and that lives on my Mac anyway
Exactly. So that data and and therefore the authenticator data that's with it
we'll get there. Some apps do not sync the authenticator data. And, and some of them believe,
in not doing that for good security reasons, right? Like you, it's only one device. So this
is actually makes it two factor. Whereas when you start syncing things and showing it on the same
device, it's less two factor, far less. So look in your authenticator apps before you, certainly
before you, um, disable, disable and wipe the old phone,
but also look at them on the new phone. Like my, my path with this would be do the migration and then on the new phone,
launch all of your authenticator apps and see, does it work? If so,
you're done. If it, right,
like no reason to go through the steps if you don't have to. Right. Right.
And then for the ones that don't have any data that just say,
Welcome, you know, do you want to start fresh and you have that moment of panic go to your old phone that you still haven't wiped and.
Figure out if they can migrate Some of them might have a one-time backup. You know you export it to a whatever,
Restore it on your new phone. You know jump through whatever the hoops are I know Google Authenticator now lets you do that and those sorts of things,
but I had one app that is for a bank account so a corporate bank account and we use it for wire transfers and.
That would not transfer there. It was like zero opportunity for it to leave that phone
So what I had to do was go and log into my bank and tell it.
Disable this thing that they call it a soft token. Cause I'm using an app to do it.
So disabled this soft token now enabled this soft token and it does it with its
process and I enabled it on my new device and now it's working fine over there.
So, but just check them all before you wipe that old device, just in case you like,
like you're almost certainly going to need it, you know?
So yeah. Oh, absolutely. And the one is for work, I don't get into my work without.
Without it. Without it. Right. And that. Yeah, exactly. Yeah.
Um, PJ did have a question about the migration. Would Qi charging work if one phone gets low and cables are connected?
It did not for me. Oh yeah. Yeah.
So, cause, cause the phone that was, I think it was my new phone,
the 15 pro decided it was the charger and my 14 pro became the chargey.
So my 14 pro, you know, was, was doing great. Great. So I put the 15 on the, on the cheap ad and it,
it did not help the scenario for me.
Maybe it was charging. It seems like that may be a slower charge anyway than the cable.
Exactly. And also the phone was, you know, this was iPhone 15 pro on release day.
So it had the heat issue that was solved later in 1703.
So it was like super hot and putting it on a cheap ad like the phone might have been like, yeah,
No, like too hot to chi charge.
And also I was like, I really want to like put this thing. I want to put it in an ice bath really, but you know.
So, um, but yeah, I almost ran out of battery on my 15 pro doing it that way.
Yeah, it got, it got close.
Like it was down to, you know, I mean it, I got it at like 70% but I was down well
below 20% when it finally finished.
Like I was, I was monitoring it like, okay, what, what am I going to do if this
gets like, at what point do I take drastic measures?
Cause I, at that point I didn't know that it wasn't actually using the cable.
So it was like, at what point do I just pull the cable and, and move on? So. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. I think the wifi may, or the, yeah, the wireless just makes sense anyway. Yeah.
Yeah. It'll, it'll work. It'll work. It should work. So I'm excited to get this thing.
It, uh. Yeah, man. It's going to be great. So you got, which phone did you get?
I got the 15 pro max. Oh, so you got the, you got the good cameras too. Yeah.
Yeah, and I didn't splurge for the one terabyte storage because I'm at 300 gigs on my current 512.
Yep, yep.
And I thought, well, I can. You can live there.
You know what, the other thing I think I may do is thin it down.
I, how many hundreds of apps do I have?
Well, look at where your storage is used. It's probably used up by Overcast
or the Podcasts app or something like that. Yeah, oh yeah, Overcast is a lot of it.
That's where, and Overcast will manage that based, Like it will fill up the storage that it has, right?
So you might getting rid of good show. So like this one, like this one, I know.
Subscribe folks. That is, uh, if you are not already subscribed to the show, make sure you,
you are subscribed and subscribe everywhere, subscribe to our newsletter
at Mac geek up.com so that you get the, uh, show notes in your inbox once a week.
That way you have clickable links for all the things that we mentioned in the show,
and it makes life really easy, you won't forget.
So yeah, go check it out. Join us on Discord for the live chat.
Join us there, for sure.
Check out Pete's other show, So There I Was for aviation enthusiasts.
I do two other shows. I do Business Brain for entrepreneurs,
and Gig Gab for, oh, I stopped the music.
What was I thinking? I hit the wrong button. Wrong gig.
They're off to another gig. That's right, I'm gonna get fired from this gig.
It wasn't listening to the gig gab. Gig gabs for working musicians.
Make sure to check out our sponsors here. Of course, you can always see those at macgeekab.com slash sponsors, but for this episode, fastmail.com
slash mgg and macpaw.app slash mac geek gab.
But really please subscribe to the email, to the show, that way we can stay in touch with each other.
Music.
Don't read what my shirt says, I mean you can, but also read what your shirt says if you would, please.
Well, you say that your packets don't get lost, which means you haven't, and I hope as I transfer over my phone that I don't lose any packets.
Because if I do, I'll know that I have gotten caught, and my best advice that I can give to you and everybody is,
don't get caught.
Easy for you to say.
Bye.