It's time for Mac Geek Gab and listener JG brings us our quick tip of the week.
He says, you know how in messages you can long press on an individual message
and then you choose reply or reaction or whatever you want, you know,
and then it jumps down into that reply mode.
Well, if you just need to reply, you can tug on an individual message from the
left to the right and you just have to tug ever so slightly and then let go
and your phone will be in reply mode to that message. The whole threaded reply thing.
Try it out. It's kind of like how you tug in the opposite direction to see the timestamps,
which perhaps might be a quick tip of its own, but tug left to right on an individual
message from like, you know, the center of the message bubble or whatever,
and you will be in reply mode.
This is, we believe, new to iOS 17.
More quick tips like this, plus your questions answered today on MacGeekUp 1009
for Monday, November 13th, 2023.
Music.
Greetings folks, and indeed, welcome to MacGeekUp,
the show where you share your quick tips and and cool stuff found and questions
with us at feedback at mackeycab .com and then we in turn take those and share
those with the audience. We'll try and answer your questions.
Of course, we'll share some quick tips and cool stuff found of our own.
We string it together into an agenda every week here so that each of us has
a great shot at learning at least five new things every single time we get together.
Sponsors for this episode include barebones .com's BB edit, my favorite text
editor, and linkedin .com slash MGG, where you can go and purse, purse?
Post your first job for free. See how efficient I'm being? I just purse did that job.
We'll talk more in depth about each of those in a little bit.
For now, here in Durham, New Hampshire.
Not get caffeinated and probably going to be. I'm Dave Hamilton.
And here in Lee, New Hampshire, it's pilot Pete.
Good to be back. Good to be doing the show. It is good to be doing the show. Yeah.
Yeah. It's been another early morning for me, but not because we had fun flying. I had to wake up.
I had an electrician show up at my house in what I consider the middle of the
night, 7 a .m. Ooh, ooh, ooh, share with me. How do you get that to happen?
I don't get a guy to show up at your house, an electrician. Well,
that was, that's why I had to wake up for, for a 7am arrival because he told
us I'll be there at 7am and we were like, oh, amazing.
Maybe we shouldn't go to sleep, you know, but whatever.
It's fine. It's getting done and uh, and we'll have actually,
it's all about our kitchen remodel mostly, but there is some fun stuff that
I have the electricians do sometimes and he's doing some fun stuff for me today.
So I'm eager to test out this thing and then I'll be able to talk about it on
the show And, and then the electrician becomes a tax deduction.
So, you know, that's how it kind of how it works.
Um, speaking of the tax deductions that we call our max, Pete,
does Neil have a quick tip to share with us? Neil does have a quick tip and,
uh, it, it, it is awesome.
So he says, gentlemen, I'm probably a day late and a dollar short on this since
I've been behind and listening to the show, but you were discussing the different
key combinations to insert special characters, such as option semicolon to insert an ellipsis.
There is a convenient way to find out all of these different key combinations,
although getting to it is a bit of a pain.
Not really. Once it's done, it's done. You need to set up the on -screen keyboard
viewer. To do this, you need to go into System Settings.
Keyboard, text input, then click on edit and select the item to show the input menu in the menu bar.
Once you've done this, you can select the input menu in the menu bar and show
the keyboard viewer on screen.
Each key is labeled with the character that will be inserted when that key is typed.
So when you have that keyboard viewer. Tell me where to go again,
just so everybody hears that.
So it's System Settings, Keyboard, then Text Input and click on the Edit menu
and select the item to show the input menu in the menu bar.
Then once it's up in the menu bar, you click on it and you show Keyboard Viewer.
You have two options, Show Emoji and Symbols and Show Keyboard Viewer.
So if you show Keyboard Viewer, that comes up.
Then when you hold down, I'm going to do it right now as I'm speaking.
So then when you hold that, you get a picture of your keyboard up in the, on your screen.
And then when you hold down the option key, it shows you that if,
for instance, if you hit option, uh, N you get that little, uh, uh, tilde.
No. Yeah. I think it's the tilde. Yeah. Yeah. Which makes the N Y sound in Yeah,
the ñe, the ñe, yeah, yeah, yeah. ñe, yeah.
Fascinating. Or if you hit the control key, it shows, you know,
what different ones you'll get.
And so it's quickly, my favorite one I think was, yeah, so.
I can't tell you how many times I've looked for that, so I have to hit option
shift on the two key to get the Euro symbol.
Instead of going to another website, searching for the Euro symbol,
cutting and pasting and all that, you can use this keyboard to go, that's how I get to it.
Option shift K lets you type the Apple logo, folks, if you wanted to know how to do that.
No way. Look at that. Yep. Yep. Right. Yeah.
Yep. So it gives you all those ASCII characters that they. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. That were in there.
So he goes, this is very convenient. It worked in the past. However,
in Ventura, I've not been actually able to get the input menu O to show up in the menu bar.
Some Googling suggests you need at least two inputs. You're on Ventura though.
I'm on Sonoma here in the studio. Or Sonoma. Sonoma. Yeah. Okay.
Yeah. Well, I'm on Ventura, so it worked for me. Yeah.
But he said maybe you need, yeah, multiple sources or something.
I don't know, I don't, I don't know.
It worked for me, I didn't even think twice. I didn't read that far to tell you.
I just have the U S source and it seems to work fine. So yeah, yeah, yeah.
Um, I, I, I I've known about that, but I, I like did not have it on and I need
to have it on because it's, there are times like you, I, when I need to find
the, you know, the Euro symbol, or I want to know how to type the Apple logo
and I don't remember, you know, option shift K.
I need to get option semicolon in my fingers, but you know, I'll get there like
that's got to keep saying it over and over again Right rod shares another interesting thing.
He says I've never liked how Mac OS minimizes Application windows to the dock as another icon, right?
You know, you click the little yellow thing and it minimizes down and it adds
that window to the dock he says there is a setting in in System Settings, Displays, and Dock,
and the settings name is Minimize Windows Into Application Icon.
And if you turn that off.
It takes the window and... Oh, Dave, I'm sorry. Let me interrupt just briefly.
Yes. You said displays and dock. It's desktop and dock. Thank you so much.
I was reading tiny text on my screen. Yep.
It's system settings, desktop and dock. Got it. So system settings,
desktop and dock, and then the settings name is minimize windows into application icon.
And when you turn that on, if you hit the little minimize thing,
you'll see the window minimize or sort of shrink down into its application icon,
you no longer get a separate icon for that window to bring that window back.
But if you click... I like it.
It keeps your doc more efficient. It keeps your doc cleaner,
whether it's more efficient or not depends on your workflow.
Cleaner, yeah. Cleaner's better. Yeah, because if you want, if you minimize,
say, three windows from pages, right, you know, and you want to pull one of them up,
if you do it the default, the old way, you You just go and hover over the doc,
you find the one with the name, you click and up it comes.
If you minimize them this new way where you're just minimizing them into the
application, you have to click on them. You're going to get them all back.
You click on the application and you get them all back. But you also don't know
that you have them minimized. Like there's no visual indication of that.
So as soon as I did this, I had the same reaction you did. I was like,
oh, this is amazing. I want this. And then I was like, well, but do I?
Like how much does this bother me? I mean, I get that we all have our own preferences
and that's the wonderful part of this, but.
Uh, yeah, so, you know, test it, see if it works for you.
Great. Right. If it doesn't turn it back off, it's your computer.
You do what you want. It's amazing.
Wait, can you, can you do what you want on your own computer?
I guess. I mean, you have our permission. You do, you have our permission.
But just this once, but just this once it's just cause we're in the,
uh, you know, the pre holiday spirit or whatever it is from henceforth. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, all right, Pete, you've got, you've got a couple
of tips of, of, of your own to share with us. I did.
And yeah, I have the blessing and the curse of having a wife who is not into jewelry.
Same. But that makes her so difficult to buy. Yeah, man. Oh,
same. It does. And I'm like, ah, you know, what do I get?
I can't fall back on a bracelet or a ring or a necklace or, you know.
There's no last minute punting for gifts.
No, it has made me a better gift giver though. I will say like my wife constantly
says, how'd you come up with this idea? It's like, well, I, I had to.
So Pete. Blind ass luck. Oops. Excuse me. That's right. Backside luck. That's right.
But like, let's say that I am without the inspiration for the right gift idea.
You have an answer for us, don't you? I do because you know,
several years ago I lucked out.
I gave her a jewelry box and she's like, I love this. you put some thought into
it, and you know, it's clear that you, and I'm like, woo -hoo,
but I haven't been able to come up with a great gift idea like that since.
And I, so I went, hey, Chet GPT, I want you to come up with some gift,
help me find some gift ideas for my wife.
And I want you to ask me up to 10 questions.
To help me figure out, narrow down, what it is to do. And it asked me,
what does she like to do? What kind of hobbies?
You know, I don't like hobbies. You know, not really reading,
you know. And it came up with some great ideas.
Like, you know, hey, a bed and breakfast getaway with a literary theme.
And, you know, and I said, oh, and stay within New England.
And so it came up with some great ideas by asking me questions about what her
likes and dislikes are. And I told it hey, no jewelry right up front before even asking questions.
I said hey, no jewelry. No tech Because I'm a huge tech I love to give tech
right yeah, yeah, I love she doesn't love to get tech as much Right.
Yeah, you know fair enough. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, that's fair.
Yeah, Lisa Lisa is a like she's she's nerdy It'd be you know in her way.
Yeah, but but she does like gadgets to
a degree Like I could I could easily like overdo
it like she doesn't have as many gadgets as I do obviously
But she's into the you know into the gadgety stuff sure but
this is brilliant my my other way Which I'll share because it it might help
somebody out There is when I have a specific thing that I am shopping for a
gift for and and with this one Lisa doesn't generally like I can't over jewelry
her she does wear like necklaces and earrings and things like that but I have to be careful,
like I can't just like keep throwing jewelry out or it won't land well.
And so we had our 25th wedding anniversary last month.
And so, thank you. And so, yeah, it was 25 years and three weeks ago that Elvis,
sort of presided over our wedding in Las Vegas. It was amazing.
Yeah, yeah, our families were there. John was even there.
But I, so I went, as I often do when I have like a certain occasion that I'm
looking for gifts for, I'll search on Amazon for like 25th wedding anniversary
gifts, not necessarily to buy from there, but just to start getting ideas.
Like I, you know, I just need to sift.
Now you're having Chet GPT do the sifting, which I kind of like, right.
But oftentimes what I do is I wind up on Etsy, especially if I know that jewelry is an okay thing.
And for our wedding anniversary, I actually got her this handmade silver because
it's, you know, it was our silver anniversary.
It's a silver like pea pod like that's half open and it has our birthstones,
each of our birthstones like in the little, there's two peas in a pod and it's
our birthstones and it's got, you know, our initials carved in the back and
like, yeah, I was able to find somebody on Etsy in like London that made it
for me and shipped it to me in time.
But, but yeah, but I like your idea of chat GPT and like perhaps the lead that
we are burying here is something that you mentioned you had,
you instructed chat GPT to ask you questions. Yes.
That is perhaps the most brilliant part of this because not only does that work
for gifting, it works for any other sort of brainstorming kind of thing.
Sure. Oh, that's a great point. Yeah, it absolutely does.
And I just, and, and here's the thing to those that, uh, you know.
Now, fortunately I don't, I don't think Debbie listens to this show. Okay.
So, but I don't want to get accused of, you know, Oh geez, you can't come up
with something yourself. Hey, you know what? I'm sorry.
I want help. It's difficult. I'll take help. You know what? I'll take help.
You know, instead of asking her mother, what do you think? I'm making the effort
to do something thoughtful. And I think that's the key. Absolutely.
And here's the thing, you know, you are.
You are being presented, you are enlisting help in finding ideas, right?
Just like when I search Amazon for 25th wedding anniversary, I just want ideas.
You know, something's going to jump out at me and I consider myself an excellent curator.
And so as I see these ideas come through, my skill is in selecting the best one.
Right. And so, yeah.
So yeah, these had some good ones and you know, it came up with,
you know, does she like things are experiential.
I went, she's definitely more of an experiential person. So that's the direction we'll go.
And, and by doing it now, by the way, yeah, okay. This is the,
you know, the 13th of November is when this show hits the street.
We're recording a few days before that. Do it now for Christmas because some
of these are going to take you more than, uh, 10 or 12 hours to, uh, arrange.
You shouldn't be doing this at like 10 PM on Christmas Eve. Yeah, it's not going to work.
But I just, I don't know, I feel like I, I got smart.
Dude, no, I think this is brilliant. This might be one of the best,
the most valuable tips we've ever shared on this show, so I like that.
You, pre -show Pete, you were telling me about something that I didn't even
know existed in iOS 17, so I wasn't able to prep it for the show, but tell us about this.
So yeah, so it's new in iOS 17 and it's called Personal Voice.
And it's touted, where I found it,
it was touted by a gent talking about people who may have like ALS or some other
condition where you're going to lose your voice, which will help you then be
more communicative in your own voice.
But you go into settings.
This is on iOS. Go into settings, accessibility, and then select personal voice.
And you're going to need 15 to 20 minutes in a very quiet environment. Okay.
And it will have you read 150 phrases.
And then once you're done with that, it'll say, okay, good to go.
Now set me on a charger and leave me alone.
And it can take, it says up to 24 hours.
And by case, I think it took about seven or eight hours. Oh,
so that's still a long time.
It was a long time and it won't do it unless it's on the charger.
Even if you're at a hundred percent, it's not going to crunch.
Yeah. Because some serious crunching, I guess, is going on in the background. I would imagine.
So it crunches down and then it comes back up and it says it's ready.
And you can type in any phrase you type in will sound very much like your own voice.
Now, you can still tell it's AI generated voice, and I think Apple does that
on purpose to avoid deepfake, for lack of a better word. But still, I could be wrong.
But it sounded pretty good, And I've heard other people's voices,
but it sounded very flat tone in their own voice.
And I think the trick is, my recommendation is be very animated.
When you read the phrase.
Be theatrical about it. Be very theatrical and animated.
And I think you'll get a better product in the end. So, and it isn't available
on all, apparently of, I think it was Tennessee Papa just put in the notes there,
that it isn't available on some of the older devices.
I don't know which device it becomes available. I would imagine by the 12 or.
Yeah, yeah, okay, yeah, yeah, yeah, well, let's see, does Apple Personal Voice,
does it say which, create a personal voice on your iPhone, iPad, or Mac.
So, iOS 17, iPadOS 17, or macOS Sonoma, or later, and it is an iPhone 12 or
later, an iPad Air, fifth generation, or later, which gets where we are.
12 and newer for iPhone, according to S .L .A .F.
Yeah, yeah, 12 and newer for iPhone, and a Mac with Apple Silicon will do it, too.
So, yeah, okay, interesting. Interesting. All right. So this, I might do this on my Mac.
Like, I mean, I got this, I got this Mac studio up here, like maybe,
you know, and a nice microphone too. And then you can share across all your
devices. You don't have to do it on each device.
Yeah. Once it's done, you can export it to other devices on your Apple ID.
Okay. So does it like sync across your Apple, Apple IDs? I don't know.
I haven't done that yet. Not. Okay.
I'll do it. It's a definite maybe. I'm going to do it here in the studio on
my, on my nice mic and, and let it crunch. And then I'll, you know,
in a future episode, we'll play it and see what happens.
And I'm guessing that it was, I'm guessing, sorry if you heard that call coming in.
No, we didn't hear the call. Oh good, alright.
The, uh, I'm guessing it'll do it much faster and a much better job on the Mac
with the bigger processor.
I mean, I could be wrong. I would assume. Yeah. Yeah. Well, plus it also means
I get to use my phone. So like there's that too.
Yeah. Yeah. And my Mac is usually pretty good at doing that.
And I'd love to play it for you now, but I can't cause my phone is my camera.
Your phone's your camera. Right. Yeah, exactly.
And I look marvelous. You do look marvelous. If you're not watching on video
folks, you can, you don't have to. we are very aware that this is an audio show.
Uh, really we just started turning on the video because, uh,
several years ago you folks said it would be great to watch you record the show.
So we, we've, we've enabled this very voyeuristic experience.
You can watch two, sometimes three people record an audio podcast and we stream
it to YouTube and Facebook.
Uh, and it's, it, it lives forever out there on YouTube and Facebook.
So you can go watch old recordings and, And then we do chop up segments of it
from time to time and put those out as well.
But, uh, but you don't, yeah, don't feel like you're missing,
unless you feel like you're missing something by not seeing us do it,
you're not missing anything by not seeing us do it, does that make any sense?
Pete, you got one last one for us.
I do. And I got to pull up JF, but he, he essentially asked us, um.
How, here it is, listening to 10 0 8 this morning and here in the Southwest
and after hearing text entry tips with the N -M -shift -option -hyphen and the
proper ellipsis characters,
I wondered how often do the tips that you learn and share on the show stick
and become part of your daily Mac use?
Are you at the stage where these things pretty much lock down?
Or do you find, for example, Dave was talking about Command -K to open the Keyword
Manager in Photos becomes something you start using once you know about it.
And he asked me, what's your example in your Mac use of something you learned and adopted right away.
Could be a fun conversation for you to share.
And then he shared one with us. Shift command slash.
Dude, that's one right there. It became immediately part of my workflow.
Shift command slash opens the help menu.
That's one of the ones that I always had to go and take the mouse and put it
up at the top and click on help and then start typing in the word within the
menus, but if you hit shift command slash, it opens the help menu.
Which slash, the one below the question mark or the one above the return key?
Yes, the one below, forward slash, yes. Forward, so it is, yeah, okay, you said it right.
Below the question mark. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Shift command forward slash,
it opens the help menu and you can start typing.
So you aren't having to move your mouse to the top of the screen, find the help.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Click on it, and I imagine if you've got things maximized,
let me see if that works, my help menu goes away. My top menu goes away.
Right. Well, you can still do that and it does, it opens them.
I like it. That became right away. It became part of my workflow. Yeah.
Immediately. So I will answer JF's question. I will say that when I learned
of the tug left to right thing, the opening quick tip, uh, which,
which I learned about maybe four days ago, three days ago or something.
It, like I, I have, it is become, it has become part of my fingers memory now.
Like it, that doesn't always happen though.
There are a lot of these tips, like the, the command semi -colon option,
semi -colon, whatever it is for the, the M for the dots. Yeah.
Option semi -colon for the ellipsis. Yeah.
I like that one's not in my fingers yet.
Op uh, command shift K or whatever it is to option shift K to do that.
The C I can't even remember what it is for the Apple logo. Like that,
those, I have to keep relearning over and over again.
But some of these where it's something that I, I will use right away.
It instantly gets into my, yeah.
Right. And so that's why shift command forward slash became immediately part
of my workflow as I was prepping the show questions.
I was like, Oh, where's this? Where's that?
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And now I get to talk to you about BBEdit, one of my favorite apps and the text editor that I use.
It's running all the time because with BBEdit, I get to exercise total control over my text, right?
I can apply text transforms that make it super easy to batch apply any of BBEdit's
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So Rand writes in with a question and it's basically can I nuke and pave my Mac?
Yes, you can Yes, you
can you have our permission you have our permission that's correct that's right
today only okay I'm a big fan of OS 10 Monterey and I had it on my MacBook Pro
16 m1 But while doing the recent Monterey Safari update not Sonoma The machine
crashed and would not start for me nor the local Apple genius.
So they sent it off They sent the machine to Apple and it came back with Sonoma and none of my data.
Oh, yeah. And I Nuke and pave and create a new Monterey system on the 16 inch
M1 machine because I have all the backup stuff that I needed.
And so I reiterate, yeah, yes, you can. You are, you have our permission.
Next question. And the answer is yes, you can.
I recently. It's not easy. No, it's much different to nuke, to truly nuke and
pave with Apple Silicon than it was with Intel, right?
With Intel, you go into disk utility, you know, you go into recovery mode and
you wipe the drive, right?
You go into disk utility, you wipe the drive. Yeah, head and install disk.
And then go back, you don't even need the install disk, right?
You go into recovery mode,
you launch disk utility, you wipe the drive, you come back to main recovery
mode, you launch the installer right from there, you point it at your freshly
wiped disk, and you are off to the races, right?
And that would install whatever operating system came with your Mac,
which for RAND is Monterey.
You know, except RAND is running an Apple Silicon Mac.
I can speak to this because I just did it I was You if you remember my sagas here in the studio.
I was running Monterey I decided to upgrade to Ventura but I didn't want to
upgrade my internal drive to Ventura because I wanted to be able to you know
boot into Monterey if it all crashed and burned and So I put Ventura on an external drive,
and it was like this is fine But now I was like well now I want to upgrade to
Sonoma I'm okay with where I was with Ventura.
So I just want to put a fresh install of Sonoma on my internal drive.
And then I'll use migration assistant to pull over my data from my external
Ventura installation, right?
Okay. So like still we're in the realm of things.
So I followed the steps that I knew to follow.
I went into recovery mode, I went to disk utility and I told it to erase my
internal drive. And it gave me this warning that was like, if you do this,
it's gonna erase your everything.
And I'm like, yeah, I know that's what I wanna do.
And I was like, but this is weird. It's like, it's gonna erase everything on your Mac.
I'm like, well, you're not gonna erase my external drives, but I already had a clone. Like I knew.
And I thought, well, wait, I don't even need my external drive connected.
So I disconnected it. It's like, oh, you're definitely not gonna - Just in case.
Yeah, you're definitely not gonna erase a drive that's powered off and disconnected.
So, like, I obviously felt safe. You used to reach every hard drive on the planet.
You're right. Yeah, exactly.
Yeah, if it's that good, well, sorry, folks. It was my fault, you know. Yeah.
I thought I had permission. So, I told it, fine, do that.
Well, that's when things changed Pete, because it was like wiping an iPhone,
which given that it's Apple silicon is not a great surprise.
And so, it was like, alright we've erased this drive, we must now reboot your Mac.
There was no go back to the front and start your installation.
Oh, no, no, I had to reboot the Mac and then it was like, oh,
your Mac needs to be, uh, activated just like your, you know, your iPhone needs to.
So I went through that and then I was able to boot into this like weird recovery mode sort of.
And the only thing I could do was install Monterey. So I was like, okay. Monterey?
Yeah, because that was the default, the base OS that came with this for that machine, correct?
Okay, so I was like crap. So I did that I installed Monterey.
I Had to log in to Monterey to get the machine up and running Yep,
and then from there I downloaded and installed Sonoma and then But you know,
I'd already created a user account So I'm like, how can I do this?
And so I tried again like at that point the wipe and like I'm like well,
maybe with Sonoma It'll launch into the Sonoma installer After I do my hokey -pokey.
Nope. I put Monterey on again I could not get it to boot into internet recovery
mode because of I don't know why okay let me let me stop real quick,
please do did you have a You didn't have an install you're doing a download
over the internet install.
Yes, okay All right. Yes, which is helpful because you have gigabit Ethernet
not as helpful on a 300 baud modem Correct.
I it was so I I was I think I was doing a download over the internet,
but it wasn't Internet recovery in my previous experience would give me the
latest operating system available for my Mac.
Yeah, whereas Local recovery would give me the initial operating system for
this Mac and I kept getting the initial So it it might have been internet recovery,
but it sure didn't feel like internet recovery Okay,
so I like but again, it's hard to say because I'm you know I did have to connect
to the internet in order to activate the Mac.
So like yeah, it was but this was a bit of a You know a goat rodeo to get through.
Finally, I accepted that.
Okay. I'm just gonna have to deal with this. So I put Monterey on I Downloaded
the Sonoma installer again.
I let it upgrade to Sonoma. I did not do any migration assistant yet.
Once Sonoma came up, I ran migration assistant.
And this was when things got interesting because migration assistant gave me
an option that I don't think is necessarily brand new, but it's certainly newer
than the last time I ran it in this way, aka inside of an already running user account.
And it said, hey, do you want to.
Keep the user account that you have on this computer, or do you want me to archive
that off and Replace it with the user account,
accounts from the drive that you're migrating from so that you essentially get
the Fresh install without this bonus user account getting in the way and screwing
up all your user ID numbers and all that stuff and I was Like yes the latter like yeah,
please This is a temporary user account that I had to create to get myself to
the point where I could run Migration assistant the way I wanted to so yes,
please get rid of it and clearly an Apple engineer,
too Has been in that scenario, which is which is why this is working this functionality.
Yeah, exactly Yeah, so so the answer Rand is yes, you can not only do you have
our permission, but you have Apple's Blessing and now you have instructions
to do it So but it's a little convoluted.
It's not it's more like wiping an iPhone than it is wiping uh,
the max that we used to know and love.
Yeah. So, yeah. So I have one other question.
What does a goat rodeo look like?
I don't know. I think Grant's about to find out.
I, yeah, I'm, I'm wondering, I mean, I had already made, uh,
an image of two nerds giving, uh, people their permission, which I thought was
going to be the, the, uh, the episode image.
And it might be, uh, uh, uh, but I, you know, I maybe I need to have two goats giving you permission.
I don't know with two goats giving you permission.
All right. So draw a picture of a goat rodeo with two goats giving you permission.
What about two nerdy goats?
Yeah. There you go. They got to have the broken glasses. You got it.
Pocket protectors. Yeah. Yeah.
On their saddle. Yeah. And I'm like, I'm literally doing this in chat.
GPT while we're, while we're recording here. Right. Because Dave can multitask.
Well, now it's just doing it. So we're, we're off to the races.
We'll see, you will know of course, by now folks, which decision we made, but.
This is true. The, yeah. So I, you want to read Ronald? Yeah, I do.
So we were talking about Al Dente in a previous episode.
Yep. He says, I downloaded Al Dente and set the MacBook Pro to 80 % max charge
and did the same on my iPhone 15.
For those who have never heard of Al Dente before.
It's an app that lets you do kind of what you can do on your iPhone where you
can limit the charging to 80 % of the battery or whatever percentage you want.
In fact, Al dente gives you far more granular control than that,
but it's it's to help keep your battery from overcharging and and potentially,
you know, causing it issues. Exactly.
So it's to help you optimize your battery usage and battery life.
But it's just to my surprise the iPhone's battery began draining like crazy with ordinary use.
He says normally I'd go all day Even on a busy day with 80 % on by 4 p .m I
was down to 20 or 30 percent and had to turn my low power mode on soon thereafter
Or charge it on my way home in the afternoon I also noticed that my MacBook
Pro battery was also draining faster,
but I'm not as sure as I am with the phone.
When I turned 80 % off, but continued with battery optimization,
my daily iPhone battery's life went back to normal.
I also turned Al Dente off. A Google search did not turn up anything.
All occurred directly after 17 .1 was released, iOS 17 .1.
And initially I thought it was caused by that. I never had any overheating problems.
It's all very mysterious to me, but things seemed back to normal and I just
wanted you to be aware in case you care about it more.
So I did some research on my own and after conducting a search I found a place
on GitHub where another user had a similar issue with Al Dente and he mentioned
that his battery health on his MacBook Pro was actually getting worse after
using Al Dente for four months.
And he mentioned that this was only a software issue and does not result in
any real damage and it can be reversed with the calibration mode of Al Dente
or manually cycling the battery between 0 % and 100 %?" I said,
it's possible the battery drain issue is experienced and is related to Altente,
but I said, I'd recommend uninstalling it and observing the battery performance on your devices.
And if the issue persists, you know, consider talking to Apple support.
But here's the thing, and I found somewhere in there, I found the comments too,
and it's my observation.
And some people are, you know, the conspiracy theory theorist in all of us would
say, well, Apple wants your batteries to get ripped up so that they can sell you more batteries.
But I don't think I don't either. I think Apple wants you to have the best user experience possible.
And I think their engineers are smart enough or our device, all our devices
to make the best use of the battery based on your, you know,
some learning going on there.
Based on your usage that it's going to be you know I so I'm saying I think al
dente is probably a superfluous product.
So here's the thing I you might be right I like that was certainly my.
Interpretation of it when I first found out about al dente.
It's like, you know years ago We needed things like this, but Apple's,
Technology the hardware of it and the software of it have gotten so much better
over the years You know a large part of that is just the amount of data that
they've been able to collect about how iPhones like how mobile devices.
And batteries work, right?
Like, there's just so much more out there. And so that was my initial thought about that.
And then, you know, I started hearing from some folks who leave their laptops plugged in all the time.
We're like, yeah, you know, but like it, Apple's tech is way better,
but there's still this thing where, you know, it will charge too much.
And that's why we get to do what we do on our iPhones and limit the charging
to 80 % because your iPhone,
the electrons, you know, to use Adam Christensen's phrase from a decade ago,
the best thing to do for a battery is to keep the electrons moving,
either flowing in or flowing out, right?
And so what happens with your phone is it follows that principle.
Today, when you turn on that optimized charging,
it flows electrons into your battery to get it up to 80 % and then it stops
flowing them in, but your phone is still on, So it's slowly trickling those electrons out, right?
Like so they're still moving and then when it knows that you're,
you know, whatever an hour from waking up Or however long it knows it's gonna
take it blasts your battery up to a hundred percent and then also,
you know You take it off charge and it stops charging.
So It is still honoring that general idea of keep the electrons flowing.
With your Mac plugged in on your desk all the time, or most of the time,
those electrons aren't flowing quite the same way, you know,
and so like... But Apple knows that.
I know, but they've always known that.
So... Right, but that's why I'm saying now, like in system settings,
it's optimized battery charging, you know, reduce battery.
There's an option there to reduce battery aging.
Yep. Your Mac learns. Yep, yep, it does it does I I would I And where it really
came to life for me was when we moved Lisa,
From a Mac mini that died to a map here to the laptop, correct But it's a mostly plugged in laptop.
Sure, and it was that day that I was like You know Do we really want to leave
this plugged in for a couple of months at a hundred percent?
Cause that's where, like I watched it after the first week. It was just keeping it at a hundred.
And I'm like, a hundred, like they tell you not to keep batteries at a hundred.
They tell you if you're going to like store it for a long time,
get it up to like 70 and then just chill.
So I was like, let's see what Al Dente recommends. And it was like,
we recommend you set it at 70.
And I'm like, that fits with, you know, I mean, there's a lot of confirmation
bias going on here. And I get that, but also a hundred percent seemed wrong to me.
So we are still running al dente on her, on her laptop there.
I will see, you know? Yeah. Yeah.
We'll see. So there was a there was a photo on GitHub or a chart.
Yeah, it was a screen capture of a chart that showed what normal battery usage
should be and what his was.
And that's where it was showing that, hey, look, you know, you're you're getting
much worse performance out of yours.
But, you know, in the settings, you've got energy mode on battery,
on power adapter, and it's automatic high power, low power.
And, you know, you get to choose how to optimize. And I think it's,
I don't know, let go and let Apple.
I could be wrong. I could be helping them to charge me for a new battery sooner, but I don't think so.
No, I don't think there's a conspiracy here.
There is another conspiracy that I'm going to talk about in a minute,
but I don't think there's one here. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
But I'm just, I want to see more data and I want to be cautious until then,
I guess is really where it comes from.
Yeah, because she can't unplug her laptop is plugged into a dock that feeds
her monitor and you know other peripherals So she can't unplug it.
Occasionally right because you unplug it and now the docks stops charging pure
laptop mode, then it's just laptop mode, correct Yeah,
like her Bluetooth keyboard at work, but no extra screen and all that stuff
Speaking of conspiracy theories we a bit But please let us know like if you've
got even like all of our anecdotal experience together here really does kind of help inform us all.
So, feedback at MacGeeKab .com. Wait, wait, wait, where?
Feedback at MacGeeKab .com? That's right, feedback at MacGeeKab .com,
unless you're a premium listener.
Then you get to email us at premium at MacGeeKab .com. Premium.
I'm going to make a banner for that. Oh, yeah, that's right.
Why not? That's what we're going to do. I like that.
There was, a couple of weeks ago, this video started making the rounds from
Adam Savage at, at, um, oh, crap, why can't I think of the name of it?
The guys who, like, figure out how things work and all that stuff.
And, um, it was this video that they used this, um, They put a CT scanner on it.
They put a CAT scanner on a, uh, an Apple Thunderbolt, uh, $120 cable.
Yeah, the two meter, $130 Apple Thunderbolt cable, right?
And there were lots of these that, this video sort of went nuts in our community
here. Chances are you've heard of it.
Lots of you shared it with us. And we hadn't really said anything about it until
now. I was like, yeah, okay, that's cool.
We had just finished going through how, in our, again, anecdotal testing.
We could discern no functional difference between a Thunderbolt certified cable and a USB4 cable.
And, you know, a USB4 cable is often half or slightly less than half the price
of a Thunderbolt cable, but worked with all of our Thunderbolt peripherals,
including Thunderbolt hubbing, the USB4 cable passed power, like all of those
things. So, functionally...
No difference. One is certified Thunderbolt, one is not even calling itself
Thunderbolt, but functionally they did the same thing in every test we could run.
We also said at the time, like, if I'm running a mission critical thing here
where I've got something connected to my computer full time for years,
I'm probably going to spend the extra 30 bucks or whatever and just get the
Thunderbolt cable instead of, you know, wondering what my tests missed, right?
So it was with that that I was like, well, this is interesting.
And so I looked at I watched this video and sure enough, you know They did this
CAT scan of Apple's cable and and they go through the connector.
Itself which has like a ton of circuitry in it And then also they look at the
cable too and see how each thing is individually shielded So they did a cross -section of the cable.
Yeah, it's amazing Absolutely amazing and it does show this Apple cable and
if that's all the video did and it just stopped right there I have no issue with it, right?
It was sponsored by the company that was Making the the cat scanners and so
that was fine like they were up front about that.
No problem But what was really weird to me is that they did this whole,
you know cross -section deep dive into Apple's cable at a hundred and thirty
dollars for a two meter cable.
Thunderbolt cable and And then they scanned three other cables,
the most expensive of which was a $13 Amazon Basics USB -C cable.
And they showed how it didn't have nearly the same smarts as Apple's Thunderbolt cable.
There's a little bit of emphasis that I'm sharing here to highlight that there's
far more difference than the price of these things.
The $13 USB -C cable doesn't even attempt to claim that it's doing the same
things as a Thunderbolt cable.
It would not work to connect your Thunderbolt devices.
A USB -4 cable would. An other -world computing Thunderbolt cable would.
Why didn't they compare it against those that are functionally similar?
You know, that's a good point.
I hadn't hadn't considered it in that sense that Yeah, you should have done
it with some others that were obviously much lower in price,
but actual competitive to do the same thing Yeah, correct apples to apples. Yeah, so to speak.
Yeah, pun pun acknowledge. It was sort of it. Yeah Accidental pun.
Yeah, so I That was the part of this. It was like why is Why did they do this?
And why did all of the reporting that I saw about it not mention it was just
like, Apple's Thunderbolt cable is amazing. It's like, okay, yeah, granted.
But can we talk about what we're being like?
This is not a comparison worth doing. Why was it done? Right,
in the sense of, well, the only other, what I got out of it was,
don't buy the $3 cable. Mm -hmm.
Correct. Because they did, one of the ones they did was a $3 cable,
and that USB -C cable was clearly not even going to work, but in one direction.
Yeah. You couldn't plug it in upside down and have it work at all. That's right.
Yeah, if you, that's a great point. If you take the dissection of Apple's cable
out and look at the comparison of the three others, the Amazon Basics $13 cable,
and then all the way down to that $3 cable,
then yeah, you know which USB -C cable to buy, sure.
But yeah, this was two different things. I don't know, it just seemed fishy to me.
I don't want to put tinfoil hats on anybody, but sure seemed like - Yeah,
I wonder if it was just an oversight because I didn't catch that.
I'm glad you caught that.
It didn't even occur to me that, yeah, there were There are other cables out
there claiming to do what the Thunderbolt cable did, including other Thunderbolt
cables. And obviously a higher price than $13, but... But like,
OWC's 2 -meter cable is half the price of Apple's 2 -meter cable.
I want to know what the difference is between those two. Right. Does it matter?
And I want to know what the difference is, and then I want to know,
okay, there is or isn't a difference, even if there is, does it matter?
At two meters, do we really care about whatever extra, if anything,
the Apple cables do? I don't know.
So - Well, I'll tell you what though, I was amazed by the microtech down in
there, the PC board and the microchips and all kinds of stuff going on in those cables.
Like, holy smokes. Super over -engineered. And it's to eliminate interference,
and give you a super clean signal, which again, amazing.
Great, yeah. Great, yeah. Yeah, so anyway,
That was my thing That's that's my that's my rant for the week You have our
permission to yell at me for ranting because we really don't rant a whole lot
here I needed to shake my fist a little bit about that because it just felt
it felt Suspect like you go and look at all of the publications.
I guess I'm not done That that wrote about this and these are smart people many
of whom I would consider peers and and you know colleagues or co -opetition,
like, we know each other and they're smart people.
And not one of them said this, like, what's going on here anyway.
Uh, I think it's just an oversight. I think it's the way your mind works that
you went, Hey, you know, there's other cables here.
You guys think to include, I'll give everybody the benefit of the doubt.
We had just finished going through that, you know, cable.
Yeah. So maybe, yep. I, my, my, my lens on this was different.
Maybe. Yeah. Maybe there is no conspiracy.
Maybe. Or maybe maybe there is maybe there is You want to take us to Paul Pete?
I save us. Yeah craziness.
So yep first was ran now There's Paul Paul rates. We don't do politics on this show. What's going on?
I know our permission to yell at us about that too. That's right. Go away.
Paul Conaway rates in He says I thought I heard that you can customize what
you see in stand by mode on another tech pot. Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa Mr.
Conaway, you're listening to other tech podcast We encourage you to listen to
other tech podcasts, that's how we all work. You have our permission just this once.
But I can't figure out how. I've been able to switch between photos.
Oh, let me back up and read it again because of the interlude there.
I thought I heard you can customize what you see in the standby mode on another
podcast, but I can't figure out how.
I've been able to switch between photos and different clock settings.
What I'm looking for is the ability to add widgets from the iPhone's apps to
one of the screens options.
I haven't been able to find a way of any about this, but is there,
is this a thing? Can it be done?
You ask. It can. Yes. you can definitely customize it.
You aren't going to get all the widgets that you think you want,
or even that you know you want.
There are fixed widgets that are available in standby mode, and there's not
too many of them yet, presumably more coming.
Think of it like your Apple Watch. And if you don't have an Apple Watch,
think of how we've described, say, changing faces on your Apple Watch or adjusting complications.
It is that user experience paradigm that I find most helpful when adjusting things in standby mode.
You can swipe to the left and right to get different sort of macro views,
different faces, if you will.
And then within the faces, you can swipe the different things to,
you know, the different widgets to change back and forth.
And you can also hold down and decide which widgets would appear in that face.
You're going to be limited, but think of it like a watch, press and hold, swipe.
Those are the things. And of course, if you're doing this in standby mode,
don't jiggle your phone too much because it'll take it out of standby mode as well.
And I've found which is super fun. Yeah. And I just want to register my complaint
here with Apple. I don't like the word complications.
Oh, that's not Apple's word, Pete. As a watch geek,
you can have an issue with the term, Yeah,
but it is that is Apple adopted that word from the from horology from from the
watch Lexicon because if you think about where it came from it actually makes
sense But I also get why if you'd have no idea where it came from you would
say this is stupid gosh Yeah, okay, it makes the watch more complicated. Well.
No think of a watch a standard analog watch. Yeah has has one one function, right?
It's just going to show you the time in 12 -hour mode, okay?
And maybe the date and... Now let's say you want the date on there.
Ah, we will add a date complication to the movement, right? Thinking of an analog mechanical watch.
Making the watch more complicated. More comp... You want a second hand?
That is a complication. You want to put the moon phase on there?
That is a complication. And of course, if you're buying, you know,
high -end mechanical watches.
Every complication you add, you could just basically add a zero to the end of
the price and and you know that's that's how they price these things. Yeah.
You want a tourbillon in there to like these are all these different complications.
So that's where the idea because the the idea of these complications is on a
mechanical watch it would show you.
On the face of the watch, the result of the complication, right?
The day or the day or, you know, whatever it might be.
And so I'm surprised they didn't call it widgets. I guess was my point.
You know, that would be a much better term.
Yeah. I prefer an electronic watch. I've, you know, I get it's more complicated
than a mechanical analog.
No, but, but you're like the term fits with a mechanic with a mechanical watch
widgets fits with a, and I mean, we're doing it here.
We were, you know, sharing the answer of how to adjust your,
your standby mode widgets.
I started talking about how to adjust your watch complications and,
and I mean, I think I literally said, think of it the same way.
It's like, well, why are we using these with this literally antiquated term? Yeah. Yeah.
Huh? So I get it. I'm surprised they didn't, you know, Apple's certainly cut
their own path on so many occasions. I'm surprised they didn't on this one,
but I am too, you know, when they, when they announced the Y,
watch, it was a big deal for them and they were nervous.
Like I think they, they wanted it. They weren't sure people wanted wearables.
No, I'm not sure I wanted a wearable when they announced it.
Yeah. And like, I remember going, I was at, uh, that.
Yeah. In fact, that's when we had breakfast in San Jose that.
No, that wasn't that day. Cause this was on Apple's campus.
Oh, okay. I thought that was the watch day. All right. No, this was on,
on Apple's campus in Cupertino. No, where you and I had breakfast in San Jose
was like an iPad event, I think, at the theater there in downtown.
But yeah, they invited me out for that one. They don't invite me for everything,
but they invited me for that because they knew I was like a watch nerd.
The vibe there was very... Like, it was different than most events.
They were clearly nervous, but also just the attendees, I would say.
Maybe half of the attendees were not techie people.
They were people from like the watch nerd world.
And so it was pretty obvious what was coming, right? Like, it's like,
oh wait, you write for Hodinkee?
Okay. Well, I know why you're here. Like, I know why we're all here. Right.
And, and, and the, you know, they, they had like a hands -on thing afterwards or whatever.
And, and I remember you saying that you got to put it on and you got the the
little tap and the haptics, and it was kind of unique. It was,
yeah, it was very different.
But the conversations that I had with Apple employees that I know or whatever
in the hands -on room afterwards,
showed a person who had just been through an ordeal and finally got to breathe was the vibe.
They were all, I think they were all pretty tightly wound about that announcement
and how it might go and would people be happy or would people be,
you know, scratching their heads over, why are you making this thing?
So, yeah, so I, so that's all to say, that might explain why they didn't want
to reinvent that terminology.
They wanted to, to appeal to the luxury watch lovers.
But whatever their path was, it worked. Oh, right.
I mean, fair enough, because I'll tell you, I don't know how many years earlier,
where I had essentially abandoned a wristwatch.
And when I want to know what time it was, I would simply pull out my phone and
look because it was always with me. Yep. And it took a just.
You know, it was almost less work than looking at my wrist.
Yeah, right, right. So for years, I didn't have a wearable.
And I think that was very much their trepidation to create a wearable,
go to the people on one. There's no demand out there.
But the same, by the same token, there was no demand for an iPod and there was
no demand for an iPhone. Correct.
Correct. Well, there was more demand for an iPhone than there was for an iPod
at the moments where they released each of those products. Yeah.
Sure. And they, they wound up coming up with these products that we didn't know
we wanted. And now we have to have. Correct. Lots of them. Too many of them.
Speaking of products that we didn't know we needed until we had them.
Ari writes in and says, I know you stay pretty up to date on the automatic slash robot vacuums.
Which one is your current favorite?
Okay. Uh, I have a couple of favorites here. So I've tested the Euphys from
Anchor, the Neato, and the Roborock.
I've tested some others too, but those are kind of the ones.
Currently, my favorites are the Roborock and the Neato. They just seem to do...
I haven't tested the very latest from Euphy, so bear that in mind,
and I probably will, and then maybe I'll add that in back to the favorites list here.
But you know, the Roborock... The Roborock is, if I had to then pick between
the Roborock and the Neato, I'd probably lean for the Roborock,
but, like, they're both really, really close.
Right now, I'm running the Roborock Q5, and I think it's the Q5 Plus because
it has the auto -emptier thing, which I'll talk about.
And then the Neato D10, which does not have the auto -emptier.
And I wouldn't say you need the auto empty functionality I believe that was
created for people who said well what's the if what's the use of having a robot
vacuum if I have to empty it all the time,
well the reality is you we run ours every day it runs in the middle of the night
except the one in our bedrooms which runs while we're having dinner on a different
floor of the house but you know we run them every day and I find that if I empty
it once a week, that's fine.
It's, you know, it, it packs the stuff into its little container.
And so that's totally fine.
And at least once a week, the vacuum is going to pick up something like a cat
toy or a pipe cleaner, which in our house are also cat toys, uh, and.
You need to mess with it or it gets stuck in a corner that it shouldn't get
stuck in or you know, whatever And so you got to pick it up and man,
they grab shoelaces like there's no tomorrow.
Yeah, exactly, right, you know or backpack Like the straps from a backpack or
whatever like those kinds of things and it's no big deal but you pick it up
and you're gonna put it back on its base and,
While I'm doing that even the one that empties itself I will empty the the container
because why do I want the other thing to fill up any faster than it needs to?
I've got the stupid vacuum in my hand and it's really not that stupid, it's quite smart.
But I've got it in my hand, I dump it out and I also take that moment usually
a couple times a month to take either their, they all come with these like specially
formed like little knives to cut all the hair that's gonna wrap around the roller.
So I'll be like, oh, there's a ton of hair, pet hair, human hair,
whatever it is, you know, on the roller, I'll clean that off while I'm at it.
You know, and then I put it back on its base, it charges and it's good to go
for the next round. But the the feature that really is the game changer,
and I've had vacuums before and after this, is LiDAR navigation.
This is, I will not use a robot vacuum without LiDAR navigation now.
It changes everything about how these things can work and navigate your home
and not run into stupid things.
Dave, that's creating a map of your home and sending it to China.
It sure is. Yep. And if the Chinese, uh.
Some bad actor in China wants to bother to get on a plane or even just ship
the map of my home to someone here in the United States, you can get a map of
my home by going to my town's website for free.
Like the floor plan is right there. Yep.
So it really isn't a problem and it, I love it.
Like it, but the LIDAR mapping is so much more than just having the map of your home.
But that in and of itself is fantastic because you can say oh clean this room
don't clean this room Like on the spot, but yeah, you can put up invisible walls, correct?
No go zones it yeah You could no go zones But it also is seeing things and so
like all those stories and somebody's putting something in the discord about
you know Like a vacuum with dog poop,
you know driving it around the house or whatever that yeah that happens far
far far less often with these LiDAR scanners, because they've put pattern recognition into them.
And so they notice, oh, don't go there, you know.
Well, I have a story about that. Oh, is it with a LiDAR back end?
Those watching on video, you see over my left shoulder, my little girl who's
little, 50 pounds, she's going to be 15 next month.
And last month she got left alone for many hours while we went to a funeral
and came home to, yeah, the Roborock, I think it's the six or the seven.
It has LiDAR and it apparently it didn't recognize. Didn't. Oh, that sucks.
Now, the good news is, is we had taken up all the carpets. We are down to the bare wood floors.
And so much easier to clean up. That's way easier to clean. Much easier to clean
the vacuum. Sure, sure. But boy, was that frustrating.
Just like, oh man, I thought it was supposed to avoid that. I did too. Oh.
Well, there you go. But yeah, these are, these are game -changing things.
I have not yet tried a robot vacuum with mopping capabilities, right?
Like, I think the eight plus has that and I've got one. I'm going to break it
out of the box and I'll, I'll be ready to jump in on the next. Okay, great.
Yeah. Cause I, I, I'd be curious to see, you know, for like a kitchen area,
obviously that, that could also be kind of a game changer.
So, um, yeah, but, but I, you know.
There are lots of good ones out there. We've mentioned three brands.
My guess is that the Eufy's with the LIDAR and all of that stuff are equally as good as the others.
I just haven't had an opportunity to test those yet, but, um,
and if you've got pet hair in your house and it's so much, so much easier to
stay in front of it when it's done every day,
you know, you just aren't going to break out the vacuum cleaner every day and
do the entire house. No way.
No way. And it's, it's really nice if you're going to have people over or whatever,
we can say, all right, you know, we just tell it, you know, from our watch or
our phone, go vacuum the living room quick.
And in 20 minutes, it's done. But you like your involvement in that was to tell
it, go vacuum the living room quick, and then it just goes and does its thing.
It's really nice waking up every morning to a freshly vacuumed house.
And I've noticed it because as I mentioned, our kitchen's been under construction,
so we have not had the vacuum running on the ground floor of the house for almost two months now.
And it's like, you know, the other day, Lisa and I were like,
okay, yeah, like we got to, we got to run the thing, you know,
this is getting ridiculous.
Yeah. Yeah. But I mean, our house is just a mess. It's like, we're close though.
Really, really, really close. In fact, maybe by now the electrician that's over
there, um, will have finished with like one of the last pieces.
You still haven't answered my question. How do you get the electrician to show
up in under seven months? Uh, yeah.
I, I, I told, I gave you the name of the, the, the guy that's here.
So, you know, he'll be here. Yeah. Okay. He said he could see me in May.
Seriously? Seriously. I don't
know how I got him. So I don't know the answer to that question, Pete.
Charmed life, I suppose. Yeah. So I said yes. I think I've got a beat on another
guy before then. But that's a personal thing off to the side.
Let's go back to questions. We're way down a rabbit hole here.
We are way down a rabbit hole. And the poor rabbit didn't do anything to invite us in. No.
Fernando has a question that we've been kind of tossing around for a couple
of weeks here. And I don't know what I did. Oh, no, I have it right here.
Fernando asks, Is there a way to globally disable the command H keyboard shortcut
that hides the frontmost application?
I never use it and I'd like to use command H in my tmux config and The answer
is yes There's a couple of ways to do this,
If you go in to System Settings, Keyboard, Keyboard Shortcuts, yes, yep, and then go to.
Which one is it? Yeah, if you go to App Shortcuts, you can add a keyboard shortcut
for individual applications or for all applications.
In Fernando's case, I would choose all applications, and I would map command
H to whatever you want to map it to
and then it will no longer be mapped to the default of any given application.
Whatever you do here, again, system settings, keyboard, keyboard shortcuts,
app shortcuts, whatever you do here takes precedence over whatever's built into an app.
So you can change things and add things here and that should do it.
So you could map it to nothing.
You could map it to a dummy menu item.
You could put, you know, don't, you could, you could map command H to a menu
item named don't get caught, right?
And then assuming you have no apps with don't get caught as a menu item name,
command H will do nothing. And then that's the end of that. So that should.
Should. I wonder if you could follow your own advice and prevent yourself from
inadvertently pausing the recording Dave.
I can. And yes, yeah, we were talking pre -show that I noticed the recording
was paused, which scared me because that had never happened accidentally before.
And I thought about that. I thought about doing a mapping for audio hijack only
for command B to be something dummy and, you know, routing it into nowhere, essentially.
So yeah, yeah, yeah. The other way you could do this is if you run, say, Keyboard Maestro.
And you can tell Keyboard Maestro to trigger an action based on Command -H.
And you could even have that action be a little dialogue that pops up and,
you know, says, hey, you accidentally hit Command -H. I just thought you might want to know.
But in Fernando's case, you know, he wants to map it to his TMUX config,
so he can absolutely do that.
And you could use Keyboard Maestro to trigger an automation that,
you know, files into that, like all of those things.
So there's lots of different ways Yeah, skin that cat.
Yeah, that's right. We don't like to skin cats here. We're not into animal cruelty,
Pete. Oh, you know. Okay.
Sometimes they deserve it. Wow.
Like, like when you - Not the cats, like the keyboard stroke.
The keyboard stroke, that's right.
That's right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That cat deserves to be skinned.
Get that keystroke to get what you need. That's right. I don't know where we're going with this.
Yup, no politics. We broke that rule.
Yup, we broke the animal cruelty rule, yup. Go rodeos and skin cats. Yeah, I don't know, man.
I do want to take a second and say thank you to all of the folks who are part
of our MacGeekGab premium program, which you can learn about at MacGeekGab .com.
It's only been a few days since we've recorded the last episode because of some
scheduling things, but I wanted to take a minute and thank the following folks
for their $10 contributions that have come in since then.
Cal from Russellville, Donald from Furlong, and Chris from Troilwyood, thanks to each of you.
And then $25 contributions from Scott in Columbia, Peter in Fort Myers,
and Charles in Midlothian, and a $40 contribution from Rand in Portland.
So you all rock. Thank you, thank you. And if you want to learn more about that,
of course, mackeacab .com slash premium.
We have some time, Pete, for some cool stuff found. Pete T. Legarde No,
pick out your wallets, folks.
Rage I wanted to, it seems like, you know, things happen in themes here on Mac Geek Up.
Steve Hammond sent in a pretty cool one that I had never seen before.
It is OWC's Drive Speed for iPhone.
And it's designed for iPhone users who need to monitor and optimize video transfers
between their iPhones and external drives and sure enough, like it's a,
it's an iPhone app that will show you the speed of those transfers and let you
test the speed and make sure that you're getting,
this is super handy. It, you know, it also would run on iPad.
This will let you know, does your, is your cable fast enough,
right? like, which is an important thing when you're, if you're transferring
data a lot from your iPhone or iPad to, uh, you know, an external drive.
So, yeah, I thought that was pretty good.
Uh, I would imagine whether you're cabled or using Bluetooth or,
um, is it doing that too or only on cable?
My guess is that you would only use this for a cabled connection. Okay.
But like, that's, yeah, yeah. Cause how else would you, no, it,
it forces you to point at a disc.
So yes, it's for a cabled connection. Absolutely. Gotcha. Drive speed.
Hence, drive speed. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Related to that, one that I've actually had in the list for a little bit because
it came up when answering a few questions a couple of weeks ago is another app
that you can get for free called Blackmagic's Disc Speed Test.
Now, this is one that we've talked about here on the show many,
many times over the years, and it's essentially the same app for your Mac.
And would not surprise me if this was the inspiration for OWC creating the iPhone
app that we just mentioned because you kind of want it on that platform now
too, that it's super handy to be able to test again is,
like when I when I talk about SSDs on the show that I've reviewed or whatever
and I say yep And it tests out to you know 2 ,400 megabytes a second reads and
2 ,300 megabytes a second writes It's Blackmagic tests that I'm running on those drives.
And I let it run for a long time to get through any caching and all that stuff
and really just lets me see what that drive can do.
Not only does it let you test the drive, it lets you test for whatever weak
link in a chain you might have.
And so, it's a great way to test. Does this cable actually let me send at full
speed? I know the drive tests out with a known cable, so now let's swap the
cable, changing one variable, does it still work?
Another thing that's really interesting is if you're using, say,
a Thunderbolt dock and you have a display connected to that dock and then you
hang a drive off of that dock,
watch what happens to your write speeds to your drive when you have a display
running, because guess what?
That display takes up a little bit of bandwidth. They're going to have to share.
They're going to have to share.
And the display is using it full time. So it's really a handy sort of setup
tool when I'm configuring an environment to say, all right, wait,
where am I putting the drives, you know, physically and logically,
let me make sure I put them in a spot where they can be the most efficient.
And then maybe I'll put the display and like my audio device or something shared
on that port. Cause neither one of them is going to use full speed and you know, that kind of thing.
Fun. So that's those two. And then.
On the subject of speed, one last cool stuff found for today is Robster shared
with us something called OpenSpeedTest,
which is an HTML5 speed test that you can do for your internet speeds,
but you can self -host it.
And he says, I have it running on a Mac Mini connected via Ethernet so that
there are no bottlenecks to or from that particular machine,
then he says, all I have to do is type in the address for that machine server
from any device on my network, and I can see how fast any given device is compared
to its Ethernet connectivity.
So this is simpler than, arguably simpler than setting up an iPerf server and
then having to get an iPerf app for your iPhone in order to test things,
you can do this with a web browser and he says he's able to see full gigabit
speeds when on a connection that's, you know, that would support that.
So yeah. Yeah. So you've mentioned, you mentioned iPerf, now you got to tell
people what that is just ever so briefly.
It is. It's a, it's a terminal command that you can run in either client mode
or server mode. And so the idea behind iPerf is you run it in server mode on
one of your Macs, or I have it running on one of my disk stations.
And then I run it in client mode on my Macs from the terminal.
IPerf3 is the command. And then my iPhone, I had to go download an iPerf app
because I can't get into the terminal on my iPhone and install apps.
And so then I can speed test my disk station, similarly to what Robster just
described doing with OpenSpeedTest. So, yep.
Um, but, uh, but this looks a little easier to set up.
So yeah, nerdy stuff, but you know, that's what we do here. We're nerds.
You have our permission to be a nerd.
There you go. Yep. We have our permission to attend a goat rodeo just this once.
And from henceforth.
And from henceforth. That's right. Yes. Just this once and any other time.
Thanks for hanging out with us folks. A fun one. Yep.
Yep. Send in your stuff. Feedback at MattGeekUp .com. We love,
obviously, we love getting your questions and tips and comments.
Not only do we get to learn, we get to share. We all learn together.
I love our community. And if you are not yet a part of our Discord,
please feel free to join us all are welcome.
It's MattGeekUp .com slash discord. We'll get you there. And there's a link
from the homepage of MattGeekUp .com too. It's a wonderful community.
It's, you know, I, I don't even have to knock on wood about this.
I probably should, but I'm not gonna because I, it's no great surprise to me
how kind and helpful our community is.
Everybody that's ever emailed us over the years, even with, you know,
negative feedback has also been kind and wonderful and it's just an awesome little, uh,
oasis on the internet of people helping each other and I love it.
So that's our discord community.
Yeah. But if you've got negative feedback, give it to another show.
No, we want it. We like to improve.
I think maybe that's part of it is like, you know, constructive criticism, absolutely.
Negative feedback. Yeah. You know? Yeah. Yeah. Fair. I'll take that.
I'm just saying. That's right. You have our permission to give us negative feedback, just this once.
So yeah, thank you for hanging out. Thanks to Cashfly for providing all the
bandwidth to get the show from us to you.
Go check out Pete's other shows. So There I Was for aviation enthusiasts.
Go check out Business Brain, another show I do for business,
small business owners, entrepreneurs, and enthusiasts, and then Gig Gab for
musicians and enthusiasts, all kinds of enthusiasts. What would this show be? Apple enthusiasts.
So, you know, that's what we do. Heck.
The niches are fun. And so we do lots of them. So go check those out and follow us on Mastodon.
I'm getting more into Mastodon again here. I'm finding it to be an easier thing to use.
And we've got links in the show notes where you can find each of us there,
including a link to the app I like to use called Mona.
There are others. Whatever app works for you is great. So, yeah.
Thanks for hanging out. Thanks to our sponsors, of course, LinkedIn .com slash
MGG and barebones .com, go check them out and check out all our sponsors,
mackycub .com slash sponsors.
We made it. Yeah, we did. Yeah.
Starting to feel the dehydration that comes along with not sleeping enough,
so hopefully I didn't lip smack too much during the show.
Pete, you have any advice? Three words. You have my permission to share three words of advice.
Don't. Get. Caught.
Music.