It's time for the MacGeekGab, and I, Pilot Pete, bring you this week's quick tip.
When you're looking for something that has an error tag on it,
you have to go into your phone and open Find My, and wait, you don't.
You just say, hey, S-Lady, and now with the new iOS, you don't even have to say that.
You just say her name, S-Lady, find my wallet.
S-Lady, find my keys, and she starts paying them without you having to do anything
else. More quick tips like this, plus your questions answered today on MacGeekGab
1021 for Monday, January 22nd, 2024. 24.
Music.
Greetings, folks, and welcome to Mac Geek, the show where you send in quick
tips like that. Sometimes we share quick tips like that. You send in cool stuff found.
Sometimes we share cool stuff stuff found and you send
in your questions and sometimes hopefully most of
the time we can help answer them when we
get together because the goal is for each of
us to learn at least five new things every
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We'll talk more about all of that in a few moments here for now here in Chile,
Durham, New Hampshire. I'm Dave Hamilton.
Here in even Chile or South Dakota, I'm Adam Christensen.
And salutations à tous. Je suis Pilot Pete de Paris.
That's Pilot Pete in Paris, for those of you who can't get my pigeon French down.
Greetings, gents. It isn't too chilly here. We're at least above freezing,
although there is snow on the ground. There's snow on the ground in Paris?
Oh, yeah. Wow. Is that atypical, or is that sort of normal?
No, it's sort of normal, but it doesn't stay below freezing long here.
I found that when it happens, it gets in the mid-30s and stays.
And it's windy. so there's that if this
were say you have an iphone 15 pro
right pete uh so if
this were say two two and a half weeks from now uh
you could go outside with your iphone 15 pro and
take one of those cool like not quite
movies for the vision pro like the whole thing and
you could send it to adam because adam you
ordered one of those this morning didn't you i i did
i had been planning for this actually um one
of the reasons why i did not get an iphone 15 pro because
i was going to take that money and use it for this although
i don't know how much the sting out of the the 4k
bill that took yeah right it was hard for yeah so how did the pricing work out
for you like it's 3400 what do you mean 4k yeah 34.99 and then you start adding
on the stuff right and so So you get in there and, oh, guess what?
There's a 256 option, which is the $3499 256 gig storage.
And then, well, do you want 512? That's another $200.
Even though I could go get that for about $50, I think.
Just about any place else. Maybe even less. I don't know. What does a 256 SSD cost these days?
It's around $50, I'm imagining, I think. Or less, yeah, I think. Like, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Ah, but you know, Apple, they love to charge for that stuff.
And then you could go all the way up to a terabyte.
And, you know, I was originally just going to go with the base model and I thought, you know what?
I'm not going to be buying like every version of this thing.
So like my option to upgrade is not going to be like, I'm not spending another
four grand next year for the two or whatever, or two years, whatever it is.
Yeah, right. So I need a little longevity.
So I wanted to give myself a little headroom. So I'm like, oh,
okay, I'll take the middle tier, you know, and then, um, you got tax,
but then the super sting really was the Apple care.
I, I didn't do my research. Had I done this ahead of time, I would have known and been prepared,
but or 99 or Apple care plus 2499 a month, which I went with a monthly option,
you know, cause that allows you to continue till you don't want to pay it anymore.
Yeah. Right. Um, yeah. And, you know, with that.
Price on that device and the amount of
technology that's in there it's like yeah i i need to
have apple care plus on this thing especially in a
v1 product right so if there's any kind of defects or
any other things i just don't want to deal with it yep so yeah i think you get
a year on the hardware out of the box but still it's just like i'm planning
on having this thing for a long time it's sort of like i look at it like i never
bought like really high-end macs for myself like I always was kind of, MacBook Pros,
but, you know, kind of lower middle tier.
Never went for, like, a Mac Pro or a Mac Studio or, like, anything crazy.
So this is my foray into the, you know, spatial computing technology.
Yeah, I'm curious, like, what are you, what drove you to buy this?
Like, what are you going to use it for?
Like, I'm just curious. Yeah. Yeah. So the number one thing is,
you know, I'm very interested to just use this, see if I can use it as on a
daily basis for my work, for doing programming and development work, right?
The idea of having basically infinite desktop is very appealing to me as a developer
and a programmer. You know, I have two screens now.
I've wanted bigger ones for a while. I haven't invested in those.
That's another place like I have really just bare bones screens.
I I don't even have 4K screens. I have just regular screens.
Okay. So I'm looking to see if that experience works out.
It'll be interesting to see with the weight and all that stuff, how that pans out.
But that, and then I like entertainment and watching movies and stuff like that.
So I think that is going to be my other big use case is just entertainment consumption. assumption.
Um, you know, I, I'm frankly the only person in my house, I think that actually
watches TV, like on the TV.
Right. You've said that. Yeah. Yeah. Everybody else just watches on their phones
or whatever. Their phone. Yeah.
So, but I like to sit in the living room and watch TV. So now I guess I can
sit anywhere I want and watch my big screen. Giant screen.
Great audio and have that, that experience.
So I don't, you know, I really don't know. I don't know where developers are
going to take it, I'm just excited to try something brand new,
I think. It's been years and years and years.
I was going to even comment, I'm seeing iPhone 16 Pro rumors right now,
and the iPhone has gotten, unfortunately, just kind of tired.
I mean, it's where it is in the cycle. It's been through so many generations,
but it's a recycle of rumors.
I think the rumor was, next iPhone's going to have two terabytes of storage.
Well, we've heard that rumor for five years. Right. right you're like so what.
Yeah yeah so just excited
to try something new and be i you know again i've
never jumped in on the full cutting edge even with the original iphone i
did not buy the original iphone it was through the generosity of a listener
that i ended up with the original oh interesting they he they wanted me to discuss
the iphone and i was just like i can't pull the trigger on what was it was like
800 oh yeah it was a lot yeah 300 bucks like right after it launched and there
was no subsidies It was like eight,
I can't remember the original price. I want to say it was around 800 bucks and then they dropped.
But remember you could get four, eight or 16 gigabytes if you really pulled
the trigger. Yeah, it was crazy.
So yeah, I'm just excited to like see what this is all about and see if Apple
really pulled it off and you know, it's had nothing but rave reviews in the
media from the people who've tried it.
So I'm just very excited to kind of be on that.
But really the use case is because of the battery life, it'd be,
you know, I can be be tethered here in my office.
I can have it plugged in just right into power and use it for as long as I want
to use it for as long as it's comfortable.
And I'm really curious to see how long it's comfortable.
I've heard people say, even after a couple hours, it can get a little bit heavy, but we'll see.
Well, I'm, I'm glad that you've, I mean, you've taken a leap here,
clearly, you know, and it's a leap you don't normally take.
It's not just like in your wheelhouse to do this so i'm i'm
i'm stoked to hear i i like i
too have heard the opinions of folks that have
used it most of those are quite frankly more like me where they just take the
leap anyway every time no matter what um i'm really eager to hear your take
on this because because you're not like that i did a typically i did not order one this morning uh i i i.
I don't I I believe it would wind up collecting some dust for me given how I
work and what I what I do for work and what I how I engage like we do my wife
and I do watch TV together at home. So like.
I'm not on the road as much as I used to be, which is where I think I would
probably get the most use out of it.
I think this is perhaps the perfect hotel room computer because you can bring
a big monitor with you anywhere you want to go, and it doesn't take up the space
that a big monitor would.
There you go. Now I've got a justification. Yeah. Sorry, Pete.
I'm a couple hours too late here. We are recording this on Friday the 19th, just so you know.
But yeah, so I'm eager. And I may, like many things in my life,
I may realize, oh, I made the wrong decision.
And then I'll buy one. And then, you know, that's fine.
But Pete, did you get one or no? Or did you order one yet?
I did not. And like you said, my concern is that, you know, I was down in the
basement. We're getting ready to move in the spring. And I was down in the basement
cleaning out a bunch of stuff.
And I've already got some very expensive dust magnets I've discovered. covered.
Um, and, and that is actually one of my concerns is the same thing,
Dave, that this may not be used as much as it was a 3,500, no $4,000 piece of gear would require.
So, um, yeah, I, I really want one.
I really, really want one. I could justify maybe 1500, maybe 2000.
So hopefully, you know, like all tech, it's got to come down in price,
but it will. Well, yeah, and this is the Vision Pro, or as they want us to call
it, the Apple Vision Pro.
Somebody texted me that last night because I asked about the Vision Pro.
And I said, look, you know, if Apple either buys my company or writes my paycheck,
I'll call it what Apple wants me to call it. And they know how to find me.
But I don't know that the price is going to be something they want to pay.
But, like, this is the pro version of this product.
What's the non-pro version going to look like in terms of features and price and all that stuff so.
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I'm concerned about it eventually becoming a,
you know, very expensive paperweight as well.
Like that's in the back of my mind. Like this is an experiment.
It could totally fail. Like it could, this could be the only one ever made.
You know, I don't think that's going to be the case. I agree.
But Apple's done that before. I mean, the, I mean, the HomePod's back,
but the original HomePod was like, oh, that didn't work.
You know? Yeah. Yeah. They just killed it off or, you know, there's lots of
things that have been killed off after one generation.
So that was interesting that now that you mentioned that home pod
too that's one that you know was here and went away and then they
did the mini and but not very much uh uh
hoorah about it you know it was just all very quietly done yeah yeah so that
could happen just real quick on the buying experience that was super smooth
i'll just tell you that like um i had a little bit of issue just because it
was early in the morning and i didn't have like all the lighting on in the house But basically,
I did it through the app.
It looks like you could do it through your Mac, and then it'll go connect to
your phone. I'm assuming using the continuity features.
But basically, the first step was scan your head, and that was kind of like
the Siri process where you hold out your phone.
In this instance, you would look left, right, up, down. Oh, the Face ID process, you mean. Yeah, yeah.
So you didn't do the head circle thing. You just did each direction,
and you had to do that twice. So I had a hard time getting that registered at
first, but I eventually got that through and it went fine.
And then it asked all the questions about, you know, do you wear glasses? Do you wear contacts?
All the prescription, you know, and I had my prescription ready.
You know so you do you do need to upload your prescription i guess after you
okay do your ordering so they'll let you go through the ordering and then i
guess you have to upload i didn't have to go through that process because i
ended up finding out that if you use contacts.
Um one you don't depending on
you know how your eyes are this is all caveat but i have you
know normal contacts um not mono vision ones
or anything like that so i just have standard contacts no cosmetic
contact stuff or whatever um so you
can just use the vision pro with your regular contacts now i
also um need a little bit close-up
stuff for my computer stuff so with that i'm
just getting the regular like reader inserts like 1.0 power reader inserts so
i went that route rather than going with the prescription lenses i had my prescription
ready in case i wanted to get prescription lenses and not have to use contacts
but that's the route i ended up going because i I think that's going to work
better for me because that way for normal viewing,
I could just wear my contacts and watch movies and see the distance stuff.
And then for my computer work, I can use the...
Reader inserts because i have computer glasses or whatever
so i went that route so that was that was really smooth other than
the fact that i didn't i didn't see
the question that said oh if you're using
contacts do you want to use contacts with readers and so there was a button
for that i missed it so i was already down the ordering process i'm like wait
it never asked me asked me when i want to get the reader inserts so i completed
my order um and the facial scan is so that they can get you the right light seal and all that stuff.
So it registers your face and it sets all that stuff up. So I'll just go back
and order the reader inserts separately.
So unfortunately, when I went back to do that, it wanted to do a face scan again.
And I guess if you have the reader lenses, there's an adjustment in terms of the light seal.
They recheck the light seal. And so there's all kinds of different light seal numbers.
It's like a two number plus a letter. So when I ordered it without the inserts, it was like 21W.
And then when it re-scanned my face, it's like a 23C or something like that.
So I had to get a new light seal.
The light seal is 200 bucks.
Oh, ooh, that stings.
Yeah. So everything on this is separate. So I don't know if I'm going to really
need both if I'll be able to send the one back.
But it sounds like different light seal when you've got the inserts in versus
when you don't, at least according to the face scan it did. So we'll see,
you know, when it all comes.
But yeah, just be prepared for that. Can't you just turn out the lights in the room?
You know, or you could have just asked in our MacGeekUp Discord at MacGeekUp.com
slash Discord, because Warren said, Adam, I knew you were a 23C.
So there you go. Oh boy, there you go. Actually, I have a question that came up in that.
So you talked about using the app in the phone and then doing the Mac,
and it'll talk to the phone.
What if you're an Android user? Can you not use the Apple Vision Pro?
Is it dependent on iOS or macOS? Or maybe you have to go to the Apple store
and order it. Imagine you'd have to go to the Apple store and have them do it for you, yeah.
And I wonder, like, percentage, I know there's going to be a lot of people where
the process you went through this morning and just described works totally fine,
and then there's going to be some people for whom they get their thing and it's
completely the wrong fit. it.
I'm wondering what the, the success percentage is going to be like comparing
that of people who did it at home.
Like everyone had to this morning versus people who go into the Apple store
and actually get fitted for it there.
I'm curious. Like I don't really necessarily have a guess as to which one's
going to be better because I'm going to guess, go ahead. All right.
I'm going to guess the genius is going to take their iPhone and do this and do the same thing.
Right. It's I was going to say 21C or whatever. Yeah, and that's kind of why
I'm curious because I've had,
I've never, obviously never been scanned for a Vision Pro,
but I have been molded and scanned and all of any way that you could be fitted
for things that go inside your ears, like in-ear monitors or earplugs that are
custom fitted, all of those things.
I've had every method done to me. I've had it done with an iPhone where it's
using the face ID scanner to do that.
I've had it done with a, you know, with the goop that they pour in your ears.
And then I've also had it done with a like bespoke 3D scanner that's presumably
quite similar to whatever the scanner is on the iPhone.
The success of those is equal. It's not, none of them is perfect, by the way.
And I guess the advice that I can extrapolate from those experiences and share
with everyone here is this is, while not a custom fit product,
it is a tailor fit product.
And like my in-ears, and I advise people with this all the time, it's the same advice.
If you get it and the fit is not 100% absolutely
perfect for you call the manufacturer
aka apple and have them fix it
because they want you to have a good experience with
this that's the whole point of this and also you
want you to have a good experience with it so don't be
afraid whether it's a vision pro
or custom fit earplugs or whatever like make
sure it's perfect and you know you'll
probably need to try it four or five times before you know
that it's not perfect because it's going to
be different than the first time you put it
on because you've never used it before but give yourself permission
you know a few days in a week in to say yeah nope i i know this was weird the
first time i put it on but now it's not weird anymore it's just uncomfortable
i've got a full-on hot spot on my forehead exactly yeah yeah so so So that would be my advice.
Well, I'm eager to hear when you get it, Adam.
And obviously we'll talk about it here on the...
On the show? Yeah, sorry. It's going to be a lot of learning. Yeah.
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All right, let's I know we started the episode with quick tips.
Let's let's let's resume doing quick tips, shall we?
Ben shares an interesting one here for us.
And it came out of a question that was posted in our discord where somebody
says, once in a while, I want to open a folder in the app library,
but usually I cannot do it on either my iPhone or my iPad.
Had once in a great while whatever the magic tap is
i can do it and the folder opens but most of
the time either nothing happens or i unintentionally open
one of the apps and listener ben commented uh
in our discord this magic way of doing it and the trick is when you have a folder
in your app library if it has four or less in it you can't open the folder because
there's no reason to the The folder is you are seeing the full contents of the folder.
But a lot of times when there's more than four, what you'll see is three large
icons and then a bunch of smaller icons representing the apps that are not being
sort of highlighted, if you will.
Tap on the group of smaller apps. This causes the entire folder to open up so
that you can see all of the apps on equal footing. And it's magic.
Like I've fought with this for years. I just I didn't think it was possible.
And then thankfully we now know that it is. So thank you for that, Ben.
Great stuff. Yeah.
You want to take us to Todd? Yeah, it's cool. Yeah, yeah. You want to take us to Todd, Adam?
Yeah. Todd says, hey, I use CarPlay a lot to read text messages back to me while driving.
Just noticed that Siri will now tell you there's an image attached and then
describe what is in the image, such as open refrigerator with multiple items or person holding a dog.
And yeah this is an amazing new
feature in siri i'm assuming it uses all the
you know image ai that is built into ios
now and it's really really cool makes it
a lot safer also when you're getting a
text message in the car uh very very
cool um so if you haven't experienced that it's
great um i wrote todd
back because this is also a feature
in the magnifier um
it has a really cool thing uh where
you can turn on image descriptions and
you can point your phone around the room and it
will start describing things to you
you have to enable it um and but once it's on it's really cool and it can do
things even it's it's kind of like an accessibility ability feature too because
it can do things like detect doors and tell you where a door is and what kind
of handle it is and how far away it is if you have the LiDAR features on your iPhone. So it's.
That's a lot of fun to play around with, too. That's mind-blowing.
Have you played with it yet, Pete?
I have not. Dude, when I saw your— I feel like such a Luddite.
Well, you're only about 24 hours behind me, Pete, because I didn't know about
this until Adam mentioned it in the reply that I saw when I was prepping the
show yesterday. And I was like, what?
But you have to go into Magnifier app's settings. There's like a little,
uh, you know, settings widget or whatever, and you've got to enable the point
and speak thing and all of this.
But then once you do, it is magical.
Like I, it lets you do all the cool things that you'd ever want to do to demo.
I can see where, especially, you know, from an accessibility standpoint,
there's a lot of benefits here, but it's just cool.
Like I had no idea that I could, like you can point it at like direction or
like, like instructions and it will extrapolate things out.
Now, you can do this thing where you point your finger at, you hold your phone
like, you know, arms length away-ish from whatever you're trying to read.
And you tap the text that you want
to read with your finger and the phone focuses in on that blob of text.
Yeah, yeah. It's like, as I'm describing it, it's hard to, it's hard to describe.
You got to play with this.
It's really, I was stoked about this. Whoa. Whoa, you know, you know,
there's big brains working this stuff at Apple.
That is astounding. When you think how difficult it is to get a computer to do something like that.
I, I think, I mean, it's crazy.
You know, this is a doorknob. It's a lever doorknob. It's a round,
it's a round knob or here's some text I want to focus in on.
And that it knows that, you know, it's able to derive. That's what you're trying to figure out. Yeah.
Yeah. It's wild. It's wild. I am stoked to try this. Yeah.
Yeah, you just turn it on. And then like once you enable the mode,
there are five different things you can have it do.
There's the point your finger at the deal and it'll do the thing for you.
And then there's text detection where it starts to just like if you point.
At text, it, it shows you it's reading of that text on the screen,
just in real time, as you're just kind of doing stuff almost like the translate
app does, but this isn't translating it. It's just showing you in English.
Um, and then there's image description. So I don't know what happens if I point
this at the screen, it's a screenshot of a computer screen,
uh, a screenshot of a website with text and
images and a group of people on it is what it's
saying as I'm showing like the screen that we're recording on here yeah
and then like if you aim it at the
door let's see can i aim it at the door here
yeah it says uh one door nine feet away and it's getting confused like yeah
it will tell you like you said adam it'll say you know and the handles on the
right it swings in or it swings out yeah it's crazy and then there's a go ahead
like my house has the you you know,
the lever handles versus the knobs.
So it'll describe the type of handle even so that, you know, yeah.
Oh man, I got to move to lever handles in the house. I love those.
Those are much nicer than the knobs. Yeah, yeah. Actually, I guess we did move
to them in the house. I just need to in the office here. All right. Upgrades.
As if I need to do more upgrades. But I didn't buy, I didn't spend 4K on a Vision
Pro. So that's like extra money, isn't it? Extra money for you.
Yeah. Is that, do we get to call that nerd math?
I think we get to call that nerd math. Yeah, I didn't spend.
Dave, you and I just made $4,000 each this month. That's exactly right. Yes.
Yeah, I think that's nerd math. Yeah, yeah.
I've heard of girl math. I've even heard some people say boy math,
but I'm not entirely sure on the definition of these things.
But this, this is nerd math. Well, there's public math, which pilots never try
to do. Right, well, that's right.
I have a feeling your day job requires more math accuracy than mine even, Pete.
Yeah, often it does. Yeah. But you try to never do it in your head while describing
it to the guy sitting next to you, unless you really do enjoy embarrassing moments.
That's fair. That's fair.
That's fair. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I'll give you that.
Maybe, but it's funny how you, real quickly, you know, how everything is with
the clock divisible by six and that sort of thing.
So if I look at 540, I know I'm doing nine miles a minute because 54 is divided by six, nine times.
You know, that's the sort of thing. So those sorts of things you quickly get
and people are always amazed by that. And you're saying, no,
420 is seven miles a minute.
Right. Because you're just dividing by. By nine and six. Divide by six.
Divide by six. Of course.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then there's the zeros that you're chopping off. But yeah.
So 600 knots is 10 miles a minute. 10 miles a minute.
And that's, that's like when you're flying a plane, that's important information
to be able to sort of extrapolate. Yes. How many minutes away from my next waypoint?
Yeah. Right. I'm 80 miles away. How long is it going to take me?
12 minutes and change. Yeah. Yeah.
Huh. But there's public math. there's public
math yeah yeah yeah yeah so i tried this thing i
pointed the phone at myself this is devilishly handsome pilot
who knows all things mac and of course pete
yep i think there's an apple store in paris you better take that thing in there's
something wrong with it all right we're having fun uh you want to take us to
our next Next quick tip, Pete.
I can do so. McKenz wrote in and said, I wanted to correct something y'all said
about messages at the opening of 1020.
Messages can, in fact, send audio message to anyone, including SMS,
and they will receive it and be able to play it.
Because we were thinking that you couldn't send it to someone with some of the
low lives with an Android phone. Sorry. Just kidding.
Don't send me any email. If you've got an Android phone, I get it.
So you can send a voice message to somebody.
And the way to do it is when you're in messages, next to the text box,
the text entry box, there's a little plus sign. And you tap that little plus next to the window.
If you press and hold it, you're going to get photos to select.
But if you just tap it, in my phone, it's about five apps down. It says audio. Okay.
When you tap audio, it starts recording right now. It doesn't bring up,
you know, get ready to record or anything like that. As soon as you press audio, it's recording.
Speak your message, and when you're done, there's a little stop button on the
right. You hit stop, and then you have to send it.
Once you send it, there's a little thing that says keep it underneath,
a little small button underneath the voice message that you sent.
I don't know how long it lasts. If you don't tap keep it, does it go away after
a certain amount of time?
Je ne sais quoi. But that's, I don't know why. Je ne sais pas. I do not know.
So I don't know how long if you don't select keep it, but I do know that you
can select keep it if you want to keep that message in legacy in there. Nice.
So that was pretty cool. Thanks for that. Thanks for that update,
McKenz. We appreciate that. Yep. Good stuff.
Good stuff. All right. One more quick tip left.
Drewski. Yep. Drewski. I got Drewski. Drewski uses for years.
I are, they say. For years, I've suffered from an apparent birth defect known
as lazy shift finger, whereby my pinky finger lingers on the shift key while
my other typing fingers have moved on to the second letter of the word.
Having no solution other than slowly retyping the overcapitalized word,
I wrote an email pleading for an MGG intervention.
But right before sending, I went exploring and found that the setting that is
oh-so-intuitively located at System Settings, Accessibility,
Keyboard, Keyboard Settings, Input Sources, Edit...
It's a setting called Capitalize Words Automatically.
I interpreted that as capitalize the first letter of a word in a sentence when
you forget, which in fact it does.
But I threw caution into the wind, clicked the switch to enable, and voila!
No more capitalizations, even if the word is mid-sentence.
My shift finger is still lazy, but my typing no longer reveals it.
And just as an aside this doesn't apply to typing
numbers and characters however but as
those are few like extra um
you know you come commas parentheses
i'm so bad at grammar i'm i've you
know like extra characters yeah apostrophes yes that's what i want to say um
he says i will just add those as text replacements in the keyboard settings
which that's another tip i think we've discussed in the past where if you have
common misspellings that you just do because you mistype things,
like for me, it's download.
I, for whatever reason, swap the A and the O. I just put that in as the bad
version of it and as a text replacement in the keyboard replacements and it
automatically gets fixed. So it fixes my bad typing.
But he says, hope that helps someone afflicted like me. So great tip.
For those other characters, I'll just add something One thing you might want
to play with, Drewski, is slow keys in the accessibility settings.
So if you go to System Settings, Accessibility, Keyboard, Slow Keys,
there's a setting that adjusts the amount of time between when a key is pressed
and when it's actually activated.
There's a little slider, and so if you linger on keys, you could adjust that, and that might help.
Interesting. Okay. I've got a quick question on this, and I only found this
out recently in a webcast.
Whatsapp text group that i'm in have uh i
was thinking that have you guys heard of the sarcastic mode what's this
oh no no no i'm sure i'm and i swear
to god i'm not i'm being totally serious it's when someone wants to express
sarcasm it's like every two or three letters or every other letter is capitalized
in in a word and i'm going so this guy's always being sarcastic is what it appears
to be if in the in the previous case have you heard of that apparently not no
is that that's It's like all caps yelling.
Yeah. Well, yeah, all caps is yelling, but sarcastic mode is like T capital H I capital N K.
Oh, so I've never, you're trying to express sarcasm. Like, I think this is a
great idea. You know, okay.
You do mixed casing in your, yeah. Mixed case is, is sarcastic.
I'd never heard of that until about two weeks ago.
So I was, I was just thinking, well, you know, maybe, uh.
Maybe Drewski was almost being sarcastic. All right, look, you know how it is.
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All right, let's do some questions here. Ken has our first question.
He says, it appears that I've gotten caught by Gmail.
I had to change my Google password, which went well on my iPhone and iPad,
but not on my M2 MacBook Air running macOS Sonoma.
After changing the password on the Mac, I received an error in Apple Mail, which I use for Gmail.
After consulting Google, I
wound up deleting the account for mail and then attempting to reenter it.
But when I did that, I encountered the error that says something to the effect
of the server cannot process the request because it's malformed.
It should not be retried.
This is a Safari window that pops up when mail is trying to do Google's OAuth authentication.
The next Google search I did showed that I was not alone. I followed some suggestions,
which included clearing Safari's history and cache all to no avail.
Mail uh he says uh i'm
still in the middle of mgg 10 17 where dave
mentioned you mentioned the concept of using a third-party app
for gmail so i downloaded easy mail which seems to be
working that being said i think i would still rather use apple mail do you have
any suggestions for solving this weird login authentication problem i'm now
a bit nervous about using gmail for my user id on various accounts that involve
two-factor authentication i was thinking about creating creating my own domain
and using FastMail for these.
Would you mind sharing your thoughts on that too? Adam, what do you think?
I mean, that's very frustrating. And the issue he's describing,
it looks like there's been instances where like OAuth 2 doesn't work on older Macs.
I don't think that's the case here because he has a brand new Mac.
For older Macs, the trick would be you'd have to go in to your iCloud account
care of your Google account rather.
And you can create a app, what's called an app password,
that doesn't require two-factor authentication, you know, the OAuth thing.
But because he's on a newer Mac, what it looks like to me is that that pop-up
window that comes up, which is Safari, but it's like in its own kind of instance.
So when you're trying to log in, it tries to go to Google and do the two-factor OAuth thing.
I noticed that window was a private browsing window.
So one thing I thought was that maybe it's the private browsing that's getting in the way.
And it may be related to some of the changes Apple made to private browsing.
Because I think now Safari, if you've had a private browsing session before,
and you relaunch Safari, I think it goes back into a private browsing session again.
There's a setting in Safari you can do to change that. But I would make sure that,
you know, launch Safari and make sure Safari is
set up to open up in a non-private browser
window because i'm guessing it's blocking some things and google's
like i don't know what's going on so that was my theory on
oh interesting yeah well when i saw the
private browsing window i thought that
that was intentional by mail to not
inherit any given any logins that and
cookies that might exist and just have a sort
of uh blank slate of safari to
take you to log in to this account for mail but
it's instead of it opening uh you know
a window inside mail they just invoke a private
window in safari because why reinvent the wheel that was my interpretation of
it and i but but i've seen this go both ways so you might be right i you know
i we all kind of bring our own assumptions to the table when we when we see
these things and it there's no way of knowing Knowing which one of us is correct.
So, yeah, but my thought is if Safari.
If you clear all that out and Safari still isn't the right thing,
temporarily change your default browser to Chrome or something and try to let
mail reauthenticate because there might be who knows.
There might be some setting in Safari that is spilling over to private mode.
If if my interpretation is right, that's still causing trouble.
I don't know. What were you going to say, Adam?
No, I was just going to say, yeah, that, you know, it sounds like there's another option.
Just in general on this with browsers and stuff like that recently,
especially Safari with the number of security privacy things Apple has added,
which I am very appreciative of. Yeah.
I run into this a lot more now where certain websites, certain things like I
have my plumbing company that I do work with has a way to pay online.
Okay. But that will not work in Safari anymore because of whatever they're doing
with privacy and stuff like that. So I have to make sure I open that in Chrome or some other browser.
Again, not really happy about probably what it's doing behind the scenes. Yeah, right.
But it's something for people to know. This is just generally a good tip.
If you run into a website where it's not working in Safari, try another browser.
That's just a good general tip, and it might work someplace else.
Just be aware that you might also be having your privacy invaded.
Yeah, right. Right. So there is a thing that's happening this year.
Adam, you suggested using what Google calls their app specific passwords for
less secure apps were LSA in Google parlance.
I believe if you are using one of those for a Gmail account,
so a like an account that is at gmail.com, I believe what I'm about to share does not affect you.
But I've put a link in the show notes for this just in case.
But if you are using a Google workspace account and, and you might even have
one of these as a legacy from your personal domain or something when they were free,
or maybe you're paying for it, but it's where you use Google's mail services for your,
your own domain, whether it's for work or personal, it doesn't really matter.
If you're doing that starting this fall, all,
You will no longer be able to log in with those app specific passwords.
And starting in June, you will no longer be able to create those app specific
passwords. The options will go away.
If you're doing this, you probably got an email from Google recently.
I certainly did because I'm doing it with one of my with one of actually with
one of my Mac e-cab dot com things.
So we need to, you know, those of us that are in this boat need to figure out
how to get around it because there was, there were a lot of things,
especially like with mail where life was simpler with a less specific password
or less secure password or whatever it is.
Well, and then it becomes a problem with two factor authentication.
Do you have to turn that off just to be able to continue to use the Apple mail client? No, no, no.
This is Google enforcing the two-factor authentication is what's happening here.
They are enforcing that you must log in via their OAuth system,
not with, you know, you can have right now these less specific apps mean and
app or less secure apps and app specific passwords.
This is like trying to do public math.
The idea is you normally would log into Google with your OAuth thing and the
two factor and all of that stuff.
But there's some apps like, say, an IMAP email client where the only thing you
get to put in is a username and password.
There is no opportunity to log in with with OAuth like mail actually lets you
log in with OAuth. That's what this whole problem is about here.
And Adam's solution was create the app specific password and bypass Google's OAuth.
If you have a Google app for domains or Google workspace or whatever,
you can't do that later this year.
Yeah, that's a PSA. That's a PSA. That's right. Right. Yeah.
It's just related because you brought it up. That's all. Yeah. Yeah.
Just on the OAuth thing too, Pete, like if you have a client,
like I'm going to go check now.
I didn't know this was going on, Dave, because I think I'm using app specific
passwords for Fantastical right now.
I don't know if it's still required or not.
I would encourage anybody who, if you have an app like this,
that's not supporting OAuth, email your developer and ask them because OAuth
support can be added to an app.
It, you know, I want to ask you about that. Like as a, as a person who writes
code for a living, like how, how good are the libraries that,
that companies like Google offer?
And, and the corollary question is how difficult would it be for any given programmer
in general to add this to their app if, say, Fantastical doesn't already support it.
My guess is it probably does, but... Yeah, there's a lot of libraries out there.
As a matter of fact, I was going and looking. I'm actually having to do this for...
The one that's really difficult is sign in with Apple. Like, they have OAuth Plus.
It's like, there's all kinds of extra steps. You've got to support mail relay.
You've got to do a bunch of extra things.
But, like, standard OAuth 2 stuff is pretty standardized at this point.
I don't know about swift but i would assume there's a library already there
for it or somebody's written a lot there has to be there has for any other programming language php uh.
Javascript you know like everything has you can
find a library and you know it's it's complicated but it's not impossible you
know like it's been around long enough that that was my presumption to support
it yeah like a week's worth of work or less maybe to implement oauth I think
it probably depends on your app and what you're doing,
but yeah, it shouldn't be super, super hard at this point.
It's not a six month project for, for most people. Right. Yeah.
Again, I don't know how everybody's answering.
Well, of course I'm asking you to generalize. Yeah. Yeah.
Right. If you've got a bunch of legacy stuff, you're doing weird.
Who knows? But yeah, for a standard like login, it's become pretty,
pretty standardized. Yeah. Okay. Yeah.
Thank you yeah yeah fun all right i just
i was confused because that's what i use for for like busy
cow and i'm pretty sure my mail client on my phone still
uses an app specific password i don't think i've ever
changed any of that yeah and as long as it's an at gmail.com
account based on the let me read the
language starting in fall of 2024 less secure apps
third-party apps or devices which have you
sign in with only your username and password will
no longer be supported for google workspace accounts
they're not saying google accounts they're
saying google workspace and google workspace is when you're
using your own domain like that right effectively you
know and i have one of those you know and that's the
main yes of course i made one my domain
when i got the email from google yesterday or
day before whatever it was it was hey here's this
thing that's happening here's the timeline the one that i
shared earlier yeah and here's a
text file listing all of
the accounts in your domain okay
that suffer from this problem and so like we each have email addresses at macgeekup.com
right you know sure and and and feedback at and premium at and all of those
are are are considered email addresses of course they they listed one for me And it was mine.
So, you know, and I'm the admin of the domain. So that's why they sent the email to me.
So like you guys don't have to worry about your Mac e-cab.com accounts because
you're not using less specific or less secure passwords or whatever.
Yeah. And Pete from the FAQ at busy Mac.
They ask, G Suite accounts will only allow access to apps with using OAuth.
Does this affect BusyCal or BusyContacts?
No, it does not. BusyCal and BusyContacts already use OAuth 2 to access your
Google G Suite accounts.
You don't use or store your Google account password. So you're fine on BusyCal.
Yeah, and that's the reason for this, right?
Is, you know, when an app has you log in with the OAuth thing,
it never sees your password.
You authenticate with, in this case, Google, and then Google shares a token
with the app in question and then stores that token on their end, too.
So you can go and revoke that one token on the Google side, and it would stop,
in this case, BusyCal from working.
But BusyCal couldn't ever, like, log you in and do other things with your account
because you've only given that token access to your calendars.
It, when it requests it, it asks, and you see this come up on your screen.
Google says busy cows asking for access to your calendars. Do you want to grant that?
And you say, yes, but it can't see anything it hasn't asked for and that you haven't granted.
Uh, and it can't log in other things. Uh, so yeah, so it is more secure.
Like there's, there's good reason for all of this. Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. I like that. Okay. Yeah. Yeah.
All right. Shall we go to, uh, to Jim?
We shall, we shall. Jim writes in, he says, I have a corporate-issued M2 MacBook Air managed by Jamf.
After an inline upgrade from Ventura to Sonoma, everything got real buggy.
Went through a number of steps, but engineering gave up and told me to nuke and pave.
I've been faithfully using Time Machine with an external 2-terabyte drive,
so I figured this is no big deal. In the install iterations,
Time Machine refused to restore the latest Sonoma backup before the downgrade.
After getting a fresh Ventura install, Time Machine also refused to restore
from any of the Ventura backups in recovery mode.
It tells me I have to use Migration Assistant.
Turns out Migration Assistant just hangs at the setting up spinner but never
logs out. If I kill it, wind up with a cursor and desktop, but no other UI elements
forcing me to do a hard reboot.
I have two questions. How do I get my files on the existing Time Machine backup?
And what other backup options should I use going forward?
I'd be happy with an occasional clone that unmounts the drive after completing a daily backup.
I've used CCC, Carbon Copy Cloner, before, but you guys talk like it's less
useful than before. for.
Work won't buy any apps, so I'd like something as close to free as possible.
Yeah. So I've never had great luck restoring to a downgrade.
I've done it. And I talked about it on this show because I wanted to prove Apple
wrong when they said they hadn't broken core audio in Ventura.
But they had. And I proved it. They, of course, never acknowledged it. Good news.
It was magically fixed in Sonoma and they never said anything about it.
So, right. You're welcome, Apple.
I've done it. But what I will point out is like you could force your system
to accept all of this if you really try hard.
But a lot of things, namely Apple's apps like mail and photos and contacts and
things like that won't work because their data stores are from like you can't
run the new version of mail or photos on the old version of Mac OS.
You might be able to run the new version of, say, busy cow on the old version
of Mac OS. So those apps work fine when you sort of downgrade,
but Apple's apps don't because those apps are part of the OS install.
And it's for that reason that trying to do a migration assistant or really any
of that from, you know, newer to older is it's simply not going to work.
So you you need to nuke
and pave and start sort of manually bringing all
of these things in you can open up
your time machine drive right you know time machine backups are navigatable
in the finder and they are navigatable in the finder for this exact reason so
that you can just Just double click on them and open them up and you will see
a list of all of the backup dates.
Pick either the most recent one or maybe even one that predates your upgrade
and try and pull from there if that exists.
But it's going to be a bit of a manual chore doing this.
My advice is to
uh when i when i did this i
realized okay i can't keep my like
there's no way i'm going to be able to recover the mail
from my backup to this machine without a
lot of sort of really manual like extracting
from individual folders and the same would have been true
with photos i use icloud photo library so i
just start i nuked and paved and i start let photos start from scratch and it
pulled it down i use imap mail uh exclusively on this computer and so i just
let it i logged it into my mail account let it pull everything back down from
the cloud and rebuild the library with the you know with the older version of
the os and uh and and that all worked fine.
Like, Adam or Pete, have either of you, would you do anything differently,
I guess, is the question. Yeah, Adam. I have a question.
I mean, I've never had to downgrade.
I've never done downgrades like this. But would the handy-dandy,
hey, there's extra features when you hold down the option key trick work if
you wanted to restore files the time machine way?
Because if you go to your time machine icon and you hold down the option key,
so normally you click on the icon and it says browse time machine backups.
If you hold down the option key, it says browse other backup disks.
So if you have an attached backup disk, you can point time machine at that old
time machine. This is a great way too.
If like we had that conversation a while back where people have said, I got a new time machine.
How do I migrate my stuff over? You know, my answer is keep your old time machine
disk and just set up the new one as new, and then you can always plug that back
in and go back and re-browse it if you need to get something off that old time machine backup.
And that's how you do it. You hold down the option key, you can browse other
backup disks, you can point it at another, and then it gives you the time machine interface.
You can go to whatever folder directory and do the normal time machine restore
that way. So that might be a way to do it.
The finder can be a little bit tricky because it's weird how things are broken up and finding stuff.
I don't like just going in and browsing my time machine disk from the finder
because it's Feels confusing to me, at least. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Fair.
Yeah, yeah. We always talk about that option key, and how often do we not follow
our own advice? I mean, right?
No, that's why I love doing this show, because, yeah, we all learn.
And then here's the other cool thing about that. Holding down the option key
on the time machine icon, you have the option to verify backups.
And isn't that one of the big complaints about time machine,
that the backup is corrupted? Yeah.
It doesn't do as much of the verification as you would want it to do.
Probably not. But it does some. It's better than nothing, right? Yeah, correct.
Correct. Yeah, I think, I think, somebody please correct me if I'm wrong,
feedback at macgeekup.com.
I think if you verify backups, it verifies that the backup is readable,
not that the contents of the backup match what's on your disk.
Okay. So you want to send that to feedback at mackeycab.com?
I guess. Yeah. Feedback at mackeycab.com. I guess.
The other, the other question I had is like, I love, I love how Adam plays into
the shtick, but clearly doesn't, doesn't want to. It's not part of his deal. That's right.
It's no, it's perfect. I love it. I've waited to acknowledge it for several
weeks here because it's just perfect.
I'm the straight man. I know. That's great.
All right, you idiots. I'll play along. Okay. Feedback at MacGeekGab.com.
About downgrading, especially if you nuke and pave, I don't,
I guess, and this may be too long.
Maybe we don't have time to go into it, but feedback at MacGeekGab.com if you know the answer to this.
What about the downgrade, especially if you've nuked and paved,
would cause Time Machine not to operate normally?
It would think you have a brand new clean system and you're just restoring from
your time machine backup.
Yeah, but you're restoring from a time machine backup that was made from a newer
version of the OS, at least in Jim's case here.
That's the issue. Oh, so time machine had already kicked in. On the new one. Correct.
At least that's my working assumption.
Again, you know, I could only go with what I've assumed or what I've interpreted.
So, yeah, yeah, yeah. So there may be another tip there is when you are upgrading
and I, maybe that's why I usually do this.
I don't, I disconnect my time machine and upgrade and make sure everything's
working before reset time machine.
You know, we're in our 19th year of this show.
That I believe is the first time that practice has ever been mentioned.
And yet every single time I'm going, I'm doing an upgrade.
I do one last time machine backup i do
one last carbon copy cloner you know
clone of the data volume whatever's possible in that with that
os and then i physically disconnect the disk to which i'm doing that and i leave
it that way sometimes to my detriment for weeks you know and then finally it's
like oh crap that's right ccc's not running i gotta reconnect it and tell it
to go bow again and all that, you know, like,
but I, but I do it for exactly that reason.
And we've never talked about it. I just never, I never thought about it.
It's the brilliant way to operate.
And I think that the price of drives, it's worth getting an external drive,
doing a CCC backup, getting a Sharpie pen, writing it on there and setting it
on the shelf and go back if you need it later.
I was going to say many times I have just, you know, in advance bought a new
drive. Like I know the new operating system is coming out.
Just buy a new one terabyte drive. that I use temporarily in that week or two
for Time Machine backups.
And the only one I don't change is I always leave my Backblaze running.
So I have Backblaze, if nothing else.
Yeah. Yeah. Fair. I, I, uh, another way of doing this, and I don't do this as often as I probably, uh,
would, would, would think I would want to, uh, is I have a lot of storage on my NAS.
I have a folder in my nas archive folder
that i call cold storage and anytime
i am decommissioning a mac i will
make a a disk image of that
mac and put it in cold storage and i
never delete those and then that way i know
that like if i get a new you know if i i you know
when i got my new laptop and i was going to give my old laptop to my
wife yeah i i migration assistant it over but
i know know that it's possible something might not
be copied so i imaged it and put it
in cold storage and then that way i'm free immediately after
rolling to the new mac to nuke and pave the
old one and give it to lisa right like i have no concerns about well i probably
want to leave that around for a little while just in case nope there's no just
in case it's like i already did the just in case easily could do that same thing
before major version upgrades of mac os and and And that way you're not dedicating an SSD to it.
You don't need to figure out which SSD can I do this on. You just put it on
your disk station if you've got a NAS or some big pile of data drive.
And I just use Disk Utility to create a disk image and save it over there. That's it.
That's great. That's like my carbon copy. Not my carbon copy.
My CrotoSync archives that we've talked about before.
I mean, that's the same piece of mine. I do those for it. But that's a great tip.
All right. You know, when you get cornered by that aunt at a family gathering
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All right, we still have some more questions here, so let's keep rolling with
that. Adam, you want to take us to Steve?
Actually, he's got a great little tip for us, is really what it is.
Yeah, I like how he starts it. I'm a MacCast refugee, and I've been perusing
back episodes of your show.
I like that. That's great. Thank you for that. Thanks for coming over.
In episode 110 at 1257, there was a tip to use Touch ID for pseudo-auth.
1010, just 1010. Oh, sorry, 1010. I didn't want to rewind us, you know, 18 years, so.
10-10. At 1257, Dave started talking about using weak passwords to make it easier,
which I realized was mostly tongue-in-cheek.
However, there's an easy way
to stop sudo from prompting you for the passwords if you're so inclined.
And you edit your sudoers file.
You find a line that reads, you know. We'll put this in the show notes. Show notes, yeah.
Percent admin, all equals, all, all, and all in parentheses.
But you know it's it's complicated basically you go
into that little command you add after the
all equals parentheses all no p
a p a s s w d no password colon and
then sudo will no longer prompt you or any users in the admin group for their
password uh he then goes on to say he prefers a vi sudo command for editing
the sudoers file which is vi you need to know vi this is all all dirty Unix command line stuff,
but it's hard to edit the sudoers file without VI sudo.
You can do it, but you have to be authenticated in exactly the right way.
So like this, if you're using sudo enough that you would want to do this,
you probably either already understand enough about VI to get yourself in and
out of it, or it's time to understand enough about VI to get yourself in and out of it.
Yeah. Yeah. And then I appreciate his last comment here. There are certain risks
that come with this, but I think it's less risky than using weak passwords.
You know, again, both things. Like I said, I'm assuming it was tongue-in-cheek,
Dave, when you said to use weak passwords. Maybe not.
Well, it may have been, but it's what I do.
There's what we do and then what we advise. Correct.
Yeah. Again, I've said this many times. Security comes down to a very personal thing.
What risks are you willing to take or not take? And everybody kind of has to
make their own choices about this.
For me personally, like on this, I don't do either of those things.
I'm happy for the few times that I need to put in an admin password or something
like that to just happily do that. But that's my choice.
You make your choice. Great tip and great comment nonetheless. the less. Yep. Yeah.
All right. We have we have a question from Gary who is asking about what's happening
with the Apple Watch Ultra 2 and Apple Watch 9 and the O2 sensors that are in them.
Now, they're not the only Apple watches with O2 sensors, but they are the only
currently for sale as new Apple watches with those O2 sensors.
And in the news, there's been you know,
they were taken off the shelves just before Christmas because of this lawsuit
from an Italian company that whose patent O2 sensors probably in some way infringes
or Apple's use of it infringes on their thing.
And so Apple has announced some future plans about how they're going to disable
the O2 sensors in the Ultra 2 and Series 9 watches that are sold going forward.
And Gary asks, will Apple issue a software update to remove the O2 sensors from
previously sold models?
Should we avoid updates on our Apple watches? Pete?
So, yeah. So I thought, wow, I'm not going to update.
And then yesterday on Mac OS Ken, we talked about Mac rumors.
To be clear, everything we're sharing is what we know as of the moment we're
recording this, which is January 19th.
And I'm about to muddy the waters, brother, because I just, just as you were
talking on the last question, I said, yeah, let me see if there's any others to back this up.
And now it's saying that so feedback at
mattgeekgap.com or on our
discord channel live chat if any of you have updated the 10.3
watch os 10.3 on can you tell us whether it killed it or not because i found
an article that said it's going to kill it that was a day ago so we don't know
whether it's going to kill the
blood oxygen sensing capability on the current watches with the new OS.
Is it killing it? I know that they're selling the new watches with no ability,
even though the sensor is physically in there and the app is still on the watch.
If you tap it, it takes you to the health app with explanations and other avenues to go down.
And then I just found out in reading that why my son's Apple Watch 8 was broken.
He couldn't get an ECG. and he couldn't get the blood sensor to work.
And we thought, well, that functionality just didn't work in on the watch.
If you're under 18, those apps
won't work for you. What? They're inhibited by Apple. Yes. Wow. Right?
And I kind of understand that the lawyers got involved in that.
Yeah, yeah. We don't want to do that.
I'd be interested to know now that my son is over 18 and he got a new watch
for Christmas. Does his stuff work? I bet it does.
He was 18 when Christmas rolled around, so it probably worked from the beginning.
Okay. All right. But so, yeah. So like I said, I'm sorry. I just muddied the waters. I don't know.
Mac rumors, Mac OS can all said, look, if you've got a watch with that functionality
in it, the update is not going to remove that.
And then I saw a couple article and one is behind a paywall. It just was the teaser.
They need to read further. And I can't read any further. But the teaser was
that the update was going to remove that functionality.
So interesting so warren 10.3
is at this moment in time still only
available in beta and uh warren in
our chat says in the latest beta again
as of this moment he still has that option
so okay we will stay tuned right
keep your eyes peeled on the news and and it like wait to do that update Maybe
take this moment to turn off automatic updates on your Apple Watch so that you
aren't one of the first testing this if you don't want to be one of the first testing this.
Right, because I'll tell you what, especially those of you out there that fly
light civil aircraft, this is a huge function.
Oh, yeah. You're up at 10, 11, 12,000 feet. You can measure your blood saturation.
Would I rely on it to save my life? Probably not, but it's a good indicator.
That, hey, you know, I'm only reading 85%. I'm a little loopy here.
I probably need to descend.
Yep. So it's not, it shouldn't be your primary and sole indicator, but it's a clue.
Yeah, there you go. And, uh, and, and, and in aviation, a clue bird strike will
save your life, sir. There you go.
All right. I know we have very limited time because of, uh, some scheduling
stuff here, but I do want to share a note that, or a, a discord chat that happened.
Darth Sepulba, Sepulba, sorry, uh, asked and said, I have an old Intel MacBook
pro that starts having graphics issues for a few hours after running games.
Has anyone i suspect it's a
heat issue has anyone found a good free piece
of software for showing the internal temps
of the graphics and the cpu and of
course you know i think i stat menus because
that's what i use but that's not free it is
included in setup if you have it but the
chat from this evolved and told
me about some apps that i had no idea existed
the first one if you like the
way i stat menus looks you might even like this first
one better it is available on github and it's called stats it's from excel ban
e-x-e-l-b-a-n on github and we'll of course put a link in the show notes but
it looks a lot like i stat menus and in fact is a little more compressed in its view.
I'm thinking of switching to this on my laptop at least to test for a little while.
But it's very much inspired by iStat menus, which of course was inspired by
a free app, which was our very first cool stuff found years and years ago called
Menu Meters. Remember that blast from the past?
So that's this one. That's ExcelBan's stats, which is of course linked in the show notes.
And then there's one called Fanny,
uh which is at fannywidget.com which
will show you just the temperatures of
your gpu and cpu as well as the
speed of your fans so and i
think you can do some control of the
fan speed so and then and then there's a third one called hot which is available
on github we've talked about this one on the show before where it shows you
it's it's really focused on the uh the the you know the temperatures and the
speeds of the fans and that sort of thing the cpu sensors,
We'll put all three of those out there, but I'm, I'm excited about this stats
thing. And I never heard about that one before. Yeah. Yeah.
Menu meters is dead, isn't it? Oh, menu meters is dead. I think years ago when
we did episode a thousand or nine 99 or something,
I, I went and looked just cause I was feeling nostalgic and there was like someone
that had rewritten menu meters to sort of work again.
I don't know. I have some memory of that, but I don't, I don't know. My memory sucks.
That's why I have computers, to remember these things for me.
I've had iStat for so long, I wanted to go check the price just because I was curious.
It is $12 for a single license and $15 for a family license.
So if you do want to go commercial and pay for one, it's great.
I've been using it for years, and that's not too bad. No. And the nice part
about paying for software is that there's a greater chance of its longevity
is really the way I'll say that.
But, you know, as long as the person who's making stats still wants to use stats
for themselves, then it too will continue, right?
Like, you know, if it's to scratch an itch and stats was last updated on GitHub,
it looks like five days ago. So, you know.
Yeah the same is true for podcasts that is
true i mean you pay for podcasts by visiting our sponsors
yeah and we've got some amazing donors so thank
you to them too yeah yeah that's that's how you keep this show going because
uh if this was coming out of your pocket for 19 years i'm thinking it may not
still be here yes that's that's fair yeah yeah right yeah we love doing it don't
get me wrong but uh but yeah it we need to you know cover cover our time and
expenses and and all of the things.
So, Adam, we got to figure out somehow to get Adam, you know,
to be able to pay for this Apple Vision Pro, whatever the heck it is, 4K. So, you know, 4K.
Maybe that's why the price is what it is. It's so that you know that you're
getting rich 4K value out of it. Yeah.
Beautiful. Thank you for hanging out with us, folks. Thank you for sending in
all your tips and your questions. That is another way that you support the show
for sure. You support the show by listening.
You support the show by sharing it with your friends. All of these things really
do help. And then, yeah, visiting our sponsors for sure.
Whether you buy, that's between you and them. It's our job to get you to convince you to go take a look.
And so hopefully we've done that. And, of course, you can find links to the
sponsors in the show notes at macgeekup.com.
And you can have those delivered to your email. And, of course,
you get more than just the links to the sponsors.
You get the link to everything, including, like, stats that we just talked about.
So I said we weren't going to do cool stuff found, and yet, was that the coolest
stuff that we might have found this week? Maybe. Right.
Thank you so much. Thanks to Cashfly for providing all the bandwidth to get the show from us to you.
Visit macgeekup.com slash sponsors to see all the sponsors from this episode and recent episodes.
Because Adam wrote a cool thing for the website that does that.
So you might as well check it out. See his handiwork, folks. Thank you so much.
Music.
None of us have it on our T-shirts, so I'm just going to have to guess at three
words of advice to share with both of you and all of you.
And that is, folks, make sure you don't get caught. Thoughts made on a Mac.
Ne vous laissez pas pendre. That's five words in French.
Later.