It's time for MacGeekGab, and listener Mark brings us our quick tip of the week.
He says, here's a fun little fact I haven't seen before.
The Vision Pro battery power indicator has a motion sensor on it,
and only comes on when you move the battery.
More quick tips like this, plus your questions answered, today on MacGeekGab
1026 for Monday, February 26th, 2024.
Music.
Greetings, folks, and welcome to Mac Geek. I'm here on this wonderful National For Pete's Sake Day.
We're the show where you send in questions, tips, like the one Adam just shared,
cool stuff found. We share all three.
We try to answer your questions. Sometimes we bring questions of our own that
we hope to get answers for as well, because the goal is every single time we
get together for each of us to learn at least five new things.
Sponsors for this episode include Trinom.com slash MGG.
This is yummy food for your pets and you can get 50% off your no risk two week
trial there at Trinom.com slash MGG and BetterHelp.com slash GeekGab.
You can give online therapy a try and get on your way to being your best self
we'll talk more in depth about most of those most of those no both of those
in a little bit here for now here in durham new hampshire i'm dave hamilton
and here in south dakota i'm adam christensen.
And greetings from maastricht in the netherlands it's pilot
pete happy uh national for pete's sake day
there pete there you go right on i don't know i like
that yeah uh it's
been fun learning about what each of our release
days for the show is because you know there's
there's weird little things that we have lots of
them it's not only national for pete's sake day by the way
there's there's lots of things i put links to a lot of
it in the show notes at mackeycab.com just because it's fun
so and what is it the day this show comes
out uh national for pete's sake
day the day this show comes out february 26th i'm confused
yeah yeah yeah okay i went back in time and
was thinking that the next one was president's day but that was last week that
was last week correct that's correct yes we do
record these time shifted some more than others and
this one for sure is definitely more we're
recording this a full week out just because of some uh some
travel and all that good stuff uh let's go
to let's keep doing quick tips shall we guys yeah
can i can i add something to that first quick tip that's really
interesting with the the battery and i didn't realize this
um i think i watched nazi labs video and he did a really good job sort of breaking
down some things that i hadn't heard about the vision pro before so that battery
that tip is really cool you pick it up and you know the power indicator like
comes on but a lot of people were like why can't i just plug a usbc power you
know like right into the headset like Like, why do I have to have this battery pack?
And that cable only does power. Like, it has a USB-C connector on the battery. It is power only.
You cannot get data through it. If you need data, you've got to get that expensive
developer thing that's USB-C2, I think we talked about. Yeah. Yeah.
A lot of people were like, well, why do I have to go through this battery for power?
And the reason is that the headset takes or the battery takes 13 volts,
which is a really, really weird number.
And I haven't found out exactly why Apple's doing 13 volts.
But you have to go through the battery because they're going to have to regulate
that stuff because 13 volts is not a standard PD power step voltage.
It's off. It should be like, you know, 12 or 9 or, you know.
There's certain step voltages you have to use.
Yeah, yeah. So they're doing some sort of smarts in there to kind of manage that.
But that then allows you to use any PD wall plug to go into that,
and then the headset's probably kept safe from any issues because it has weird stepping. Huh.
That is bizarre. Okay. Well, good to know.
Okay. Yeah. So we'll have to find out from Apple
engineers someday day why why that ended up being the way
it is but yeah there could be a myriad of reasons
apparently and again snazzy goes into good detail
about breaking down about possibilities but we'll never
really know until we know if if we are ever
told that's right yeah you usually my experience is
that those things usually come out at like a bar
near wwdc at about
11 14 p.m that's that's
been my experience pacific time yeah that's
right yeah that's that's where you learn the
things that you need to know that like and it it's not
like they're divulging anything that they that would be bad for it to be out
into the world like that i've never had anybody do that but like the things
that are helpful for troubleshooting and and just super valuable for the nerdy
things that we need to know like apple is tight-lipped about it until they're
not until Until you get the right person.
And then they're like, oh, yeah, you should definitely know how this works. Like a lot of the –,
For engineering reasons, sorry. Yeah, for engineering. Yeah,
exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Like a lot of the core audio troubleshooting that we did a number of years ago
was thanks to one of those kinds of conversations.
So yeah, it's interesting. All right.
Rick, he says, you were talking a few episodes ago in a segment about a person
who using Apple Mail was not able to find some messages that someone sent them.
I had the same problem a while ago and wanted to offer an alternative thought.
In my case, I was on a support call. They sent me mail twice.
I couldn't find them anywhere, including junk mail.
Later, I realized that I had characters typed into the search field in mail,
which is an immediate and active filter.
It was persistent and I didn't see it there.
After I removed that, of course, both messages showed up just fine in my inbox.
I don't often use search in mail, So I didn't notice that there was anything
there. It sounded like an errant character.
You know, you put one character there. If you put like an E there,
it's going to find a lot of messages and make it seem like it might look like
similar to your inbox, but no, it's not, not your entire inbox. That's a good tip.
I've been caught by that. Yep. Same, same. I get caught by that.
And it's not just mail. I mean, there's other apps that are made exactly the same way.
Like, I think I've gotten caught, caught by that in visual studio.
You know when i'm developing doing programming stuff yeah
you know yeah yeah exactly yeah exactly
yeah all right uh
what's next here shall we go to uh you want to take us to david pete i can so
do at this time he says hi mac geek gab guys i'm another fan of adam who followed
him to this new venue well welcome david we're glad you're here same i was recently
on a business trip in europe and nearly avoided disaster with my iPhone.
When I travel, almost all of my critical travel information is on my phone for
convenience and efficiency, and I would be dead in the water without it.
Two weeks ago, I woke up in a hotel in Italy.
I was supposed to be in Ireland. Just kidding. I had a travel day with only
a little time left before having to leave for the airport only to find that
my iPhone screen was dead, no matter what I did.
And all of my ticket and flight info was non-accessible with literally minutes
to go before I had to be ready to leave. Major panic.
Then I realized, hey Siri, it still works. So I was able to call my wife back
in the States and woke her up after midnight and had her do a brief search on the issue.
Turns out this issue is not at all uncommon, and even though I had never heard
of it before, black screen of death.
The fix? To press the volume up button, the volume down button,
then hold the power button on the right until the Apple logo appears as the phone restarts.
After the restart everything worked normally as i was able to
make my and i was able to make my flight and not
miss some very important meetings enjoying your
show david and i've been caught by the same
thing david and it goes back at least to the iphone 8 because
that's where it happened to me and i had a screen and i
thought mine was with the screen that was on and it was completely frozen and
i thought well i'm gonna have to wait a week for the battery to
die with it not doing anything at least a day yeah
before it'll restart and i wandered into the
apple store and told him hey something my phone is broken it
i've tried everything and you know as i'm doing that he's showing me the phone
restarting i'm like wait what'd you do what magic is this i had um it was udp
real quick before i forget it's udp up volume down volume power button and that's
how i remember Remember, it's not TCP, it's UDP.
But that's a nerdy way of doing it. I learned this on a bus. I was...
I had flown to Florida a day before podcast movement because I had been invited on this.
I mean, truly once in a lifetime behind the scenes tour of the entirety of Kennedy
Space Center with NASA. Like it was amazing.
It was it was for podcast movement, organized it for a select group of podcasters.
And we talked about it on the show here.
It was absolutely amazing to be able to do this.
We get on this bus. we're stopping at the first thing
and my phone goes into like wedge mode whatever and
I'm like are you kidding me like my laptop
is not here like how
is it possible that the one time my phone
decides to do this is the time where my phone is the only connection I
have to the outside world to research how to fix this you know and I'm
like here I have like this opportunity to take all
these pictures and video of this behind the scenes
and I'm not going to be able to do any of it like this sucks
and so we get off the bus and i have
my phone in my pocket and it's just getting hotter and hotter like it's clear
that this thing is very very busy and i can't
stop it right and uh you know
so we go through the thing the first thing building
and i couldn't take any pictures and we get back on the bus as they drive us to
the second one and it dawns on me wait my ipad has
it was whatever ipad it was it was the one that you
could buy with a t-mobile cell uh sim
in it that you got like 250 megabytes of
free data every month for the life of that sim card or that that ipad yeah and
so i'm like oh wait a minute and so i i you know choose your data wisely i i
searched and i found this solution in the udp thing and it was like save the
day so yep it's a good one it is a good one.
It's no longer a paperweight it's no longer a paperweight well
it was a hand warmer pete because i needed that in august in
florida in florida right yeah all right
uh unless you have more on
that adam we should have to porthos john all
right onward we go yep porthos john
is back with a bunch of vision pro tips so
strap in because we've got a few here uh i found
that activating control center by accident that i'm at i
was activating control center by accident a lot and i
i can agree with this especially in some games if you
go into settings control center in the apple vision pro you
can move the little care activator for control center up much higher in the
display so you have to look up farther to bring it into focus so people might
not even know this with apple vision pro to activate control center you look
up and And then it shows a little icon that you then tap on and it brings down control center.
So you can control how far up you need to look to activate that because it is
easy to accidentally activate that.
Um, as posted in the MGG channel in discord, if you have optical inserts,
don't buy the Apple vision pro travel case because there's nowhere to put them.
I just found this new case, which is smaller and has dedicated storage for everything.
And that's the, uh, Waterfield designs, uh, shield case for Apple vision pro,
which is, is gorgeous. It's much smaller.
Um, and we'll have a link to that. So that's good.
But yeah, Apple advertises their cases having that storage. and it turns out it's a lie.
It's like the cake is being a lie.
I mean, unless they're counting the little pouch that you put everything in,
but that's not going to protect your lens inserts at all.
There's no protection for that. So I don't know what they're thinking.
Hopefully they changed. That's just a typo in their documentation or something.
Right. If you want to be able to carry your Apple Vision Pro optical inserts
now or just store them safely, look up a lens filter case on Amazon.
There's hundreds made to store things like
this so i am looking for something for optical sensors
i've just been using the original packaging so i just
kept the original packaging they came in and when i pop them out i put
it back in that but that's just you know a cardboard folded kind of thing so
right be nice to have something a little bit softer to protect those you know
not so cheap lenses um multi-port uh gan chargers seem to limit the amount of
power that the apple vision pro gets Let's test this with a cable that reports wattage.
Even though my station offered 90 plus watts of PD, the Apple Vision Pro was
only pulling about half of what it took from a dedicated device.
Apple USB-C port, brick. Note
that this was to charge and use the Apple Vision Pro at the same time.
Yeah, I think it's regulated. I want to say it's around, well,
he says half. I thought it was around 60 watts that it would pull max.
And obviously the charger that comes with it, I don't think is even a 60 watt charger.
So you can get a bigger one. But yeah, I think people have been doing some testing
with those little things.
And it'll vary. It'll vary what it's pulling.
I think as every device will. Right. Yeah.
I think it's also been proven that Apple is being very, very delicate about the battery.
So the power cells that are in there, it actually has a lot more capacity than
is advertised on the outside.
And the theory is that Apple is only taking charging up to about 80% to extend
the longevity of that battery.
Like they're being very delicate on the Apple Vision Pro battery and not stressing
it. I think the idea is they're thinking a lot of people are going to use it
plugged into the wall a lot, probably, so they don't want to be overcharging it. Smart.
Huh. Yeah. Okay. Yeah, I like it.
Apple Vision Pro Beta 1.1 is available. You have to turn on beta updates with
the attendant warnings and has some significant improvements for the persona beta imaging.
I think that might even be out now. Is it out now?
Regular update and i'm not doing i'm not doing the
beta i know 1.2 is is on
the way too so yeah they're rapidly making improvements and
i think that's not surprising yep you got
a couple more when you're yeah yeah two more when you're
tapping be careful not to make a fist with the other
three fingers of your hand as apple vision pro can see this
as a long hold and not see that you
released least your tap yeah tapping is a
little bit tricky and if you talk with your hands a lot like i
noticed this like don't do that like if you're
talking to other people like i was demoing some things
for other people with the ipad you know because you can mirror to an ipad or
whatever and if you start waving your hands around you'll get false positives
on your taps and stuff like that so there's some improvements they can make
there and then so wait the the but but there's a a quick tip in there that if
you are tapping and make a fist intentionally that now is a long hold.
A long hold, yeah. Yeah. Or you can, I mean, I just tap and hold,
but. Oh, I see. Okay. So you can do it when you see your gesture.
Yeah. Yeah. You can just pinch your fingers together and hold them as well.
Yeah. That will, that will work. Okay.
But that can sometimes be tricky. So maybe actually making a fist might actually
be a little easier. And this is a fist with your, with your non-tapping hand,
right? Yeah. Okay. Yeah. It sounds like.
Yeah. All right. Interesting. Good quick tip. Yeah, exactly.
Yeah. Finally, if you have kids, note that the Apple will
not do demos and does not recommend
use for anyone under 13 okay interesting
i would guess that's there's myriads of reasons health
reasons as well as just size reasons i bet oh yeah
that's right yeah i didn't even think about the size thing that's probably the
most obvious one they don't want to have to figure out although there's adults
with small heads too so does um i i honestly don't know this i mean because
obviously they have the little adjustment uh built in for interpupillary distance
so when when you first put it on,
it has, you hold the digital crown down and it will.
Has motors that will adjust the pupillary distance.
So does that change as you get older or is that, I honestly don't know. Like, is that set?
Gotta be certain point. No, as you're getting older, it's gotta be.
I mean, as your, as your face is growing, certainly, I don't know if like,
I don't know if it's changed for any of us in a couple of decades, but yeah. Yeah.
In fact, I know that it hasn't changed for me in the last 15 years,
but yeah yeah where that's sort of locked in you know
maybe there's a certain point in development so yeah
i know they're very concerned about everything because like
if if you have the wrong light seal like the distance
or the lenses to your eyes it will warn you yep
you know it it's like very particular about distances
of things well i guess all
that is is essential to
giving you the experience it gives you i i think they're
probably being super tight on managing
that experience and ensuring as best
they can that everyone has this minimum
level of of consistent experience i think we'll see that loosen up over the
next you know three to five years as as this product line matures and becomes
more accepted but the last thing they want is that that thing to come out now
there's already complaints about it that are not ready for primetime unfounded,
but right. Yeah, exactly.
There, there are, there are, you know, there's not enough apps.
Like there's those things that are like, well, that's a legitimate thing right now. Uh, so yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it will tell you if, even if you put it on and it's too
low on your face or too high on your face or.
Close enough or too far. Like it, it is very adamant about making sure that
it is sitting exactly where it's supposed to be. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Cool.
Karsten brings us our next tip. Karsten says in recent episodes,
there were discussions on how to message people when they were sleeping to tell
them you made it home or whatever, without disturbing them.
I highly recommend says Karsten the using the encrypted messaging app called
signal signal provides a ton of features. You can add signal to your focus mode
and manage it from there.
My family creates groups in signal and have some notifications disabled and
we check them when we have time.
He says, I am a huge cybersecurity person.
So not only are signal messages encrypted, you can expire them.
Our entire family uses signal exclusively, even though we all have iPhones and
we all have auto message expiration set to four weeks or less.
If an account is compromised, there is no message history to go through bonus feature.
You have a default signal group called notes to
self and you can add links images and more to that
group which is then available on all your devices that you
have signal and you can use signal for phone calls using
your data connection so when you travel international people with
signal can call another signal person i know
whatsapp can also do some of this but signal he says is
way more secure technology is convenient for anyone
to stay secure you must limit your digital footprint
print why use third-party web services to add a reminder or
which over time can be sold to a data broker stay secure
use signal hope this really helps thanks i
appreciate that karsten yeah that's that's good to
know like it it's tough getting the world
on a new message app that especially is not
the default although it clearly you know most if
not all of europe uses whatsapp as
the default and that like works out really well but um
but to just get your family group on signal might solve your your issue pete
if you can uh you know i think you were you were the one that was that posed
that that query initially which was how do i send a note back home without being
concerned about waking people up right no that's.
That's brilliant. Karsten has a nicer answer than me, which is,
let this be the opportunity for them to learn about Do Not Disturb.
You know. There you go.
Weeky, weeky. Teachy, teachy. There you go.
We learn from pain, Pete. My wife that was awake at 2 o'clock in the morning
and woke me up here in Europe at 8 o'clock in the morning. It's like, wait a minute.
Wait a minute. This doesn't work this way. Yeah.
You want to take us to the next one from Ben, Pete? I can do that.
Yeah, Ben wrote in and said, well, looking at the Git info window in the Finder,
I inadvertently pressed Command-I again and it disappeared.
As this new inventor of Sonoma, looking at the Finder's file menu,
when an info window is active, the Git info command is replaced by close info
window and carries the same keyboard shortcut.
Cool. So if you're looking at a file, if you have highlighted a file in Finder
and you hit Command-I, it opens the Git info window and thusly closes it.
But I took it a step further and went to use Option, Command-I,
and it opens the Inspector.
And if you use Control, Command-I, it opens the Summary Info.
The question I now have in my mind is I don't see much difference on most files.
All three of those windows appear to be pretty identical.
Although I will say I use the Get Info window if I want to change what program
opens my PDF files. For instance, I'll highlight a PDF file,
do get info, and say open with this program always, that sort of thing.
So that's how to quickly change that. Two for one there, folks.
And I have a three for one for you, Pete. Okay.
Because the get info window and the get summary window are limited to two.
Persist with the file that you
selected so if you select file a and you
open up the get info window and then in the finder
you select file b your get info window stays with
file a you could then open a new one for file b and have multiples and all that
good stuff right with the um what what's the other one called it's get it's
the command the inspector right so holding down option it looks It looks like
the get info window when you, you know, you select file a open the inspector,
but then when you select file B, that inspector window follows you and shows
you the information for whatever file you just clicked,
which can be really handy if you're trying to get info on multiple files,
you know, kind of in, in series.
So that's what that is. And if you select three files or more and hit command,
I you'll get a separate windows for each to open up at once.
Yes. but if you but if you
do with the control key and get summary info then you
get the summary of those three files same with
inspector too so if you do the option with three files you get
an you get an aggregate yeah you instead of separate
windows there you go that that's the difference
yep yep so they do all look the same
if you do them from one file and
don't change anything else yeah click nowhere or command
i to close it right as uh as ben just taught us
so and uh matt in discord replied
that uh he's got a
machine where he's still using monterey so mac os 12.7.3 and it behaves the
same so these go back at least that far so yeah good stuff todd brings us a
tip from From our tip in MacGeekGab 1024,
this one has generated a lot of follow-ups.
I shared that tip about adding an entry to contacts for companies and brands who SMS.
And Todd says, I take it one step further. I copy or screenshot the company's
logo from their website and add it to that entry in Contacts.
I will see the logo much more quickly than the name.
However, Apple's Contacts app will not let you paste the image in,
but you can drag the image file in
from the desktop over the round contact picture icon and it will add it.
So that's good to know. Thank you, Todd.
Good stuff. And one more on or from that same thing was, uh, was Andrew.
Uh, he says, uh.
It occurred to me to do this same thing that Dave, you suggested years ago.
I've gone one step farther as well. He says, I get many reminders for appointments
from my doctor, my dentist, my barber, my vet, et cetera.
Here's what I did. I created a single contact called appointments.
And I put all of those phone numbers in this as multiple numbers for the same contact.
It says, I don't know how many I have in there, but it's a lot.
When a new one comes in, I just save that number to the existing appointments contact.
And this way I just get a text message from appointments and I can,
you know, do the confirmation or whatever it is. I guess it goes back to the right number.
I, that, that would be the one thing, right?
But I think, I think it would reply to the correct number. Cause a lot of times
you'll get the, you know, press one to confirm, press two to cancel or whatever.
But I don't know. Yeah. I don't know how that all works, but,
um, Um, but maybe sending the word yes to 10 numbers.
Uh, yeah, yeah. I don't, I don't know what you're confirming at that point. Right.
Like, you know, if you choose cancel, does it now cancel all your pending appointments? I don't know.
I would assume it's an SMS is coming in from the number that, you know, sent it.
Right. You're going to reply to the number that sent it. What if you get three
in a row before you reply to the first one? What happens?
You might miss it. That's it. That's it.
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All right. Gene brings us to our first question this week.
He says,
Adam, you want to, uh, you want to take this, this, this, uh, this hot potato.
Maybe the most opinionated person here on backup.
I, and I think I've talked about this, but I, I got burned many,
many years ago with a photo library.
And when you get burned, then you learn, you know, my own fault wasn't backing
up and, uh, lost, you know, precious photos.
And, and so ever since then, I have been fanatical about backup.
Up i follow the philosophy if it's not in three places it's not really backed up that whole,
that whole thing and so i went all in on backup and
i've been that way for years and years and years and years
so my personal opinion is yes you need at
least a backup and i and i've said this on my show i think time machine if you're
not doing anything else get a time machine drive my general rule is double get
one double the size of your internal drive because that'll give you enough enough
little history in there.
Plug it in. It will ask you the question, do you want to use this for time machine?
You say yes, you are done for that machine. Obviously with time machine,
if you're direct connecting, you've got to do it for each machine.
A little bit more difficult. I have this problem with my family,
right? They use laptops.
They never plug them in. I have time machine drives for those.
Like I have to remind them, have you plugged in your time machine drive recently?
Like once a week, plug it in. Like you don't have to get crazy about it like
I am, but I think, yes, Yes, you want a form of backup and how far you take it.
That's maybe the other part of this discussion in my in my opinion.
Yeah, I don't disagree with you, right? If your data is not in two places and
in the you know, there's that whole three to one philosophy,
which is you want three copies of your data, the actual copy,
and then essentially two backups and the one of them should be in the cloud
or off site, you know. And I do...
Appreciate the sentiment and agree with the sentiment behind that.
The question as to whether users, we as users, need to take any steps that one would call backing up.
I'm not convinced we need that anymore. And, you know, your family's scenario
that you described where they all have laptops.
And so you can't just plug a drive into their machine and expect it to be plugged
in again later without pestering your family.
That's common for most people now, right? Most computers are laptops.
And then we have these other things that are computers called phones and iPads and Vision Pros, right?
And so do they store data on them? Yes. You know, do you back up your phone?
I don't know. Do you like you can back up to iCloud?
Is that enough i would say
that most people if you get a
mac or an iphone out of the box and you
set it up you connect it to to icloud and you
use it as default with uh maybe i say as default if you use it with document
syncing turned on and i i i don't know if that's the default anymore no i think
you have to turn i think you have to turn it on so not default but But if you
turn on iCloud document and data syncing,
which almost certainly requires a paid iCloud plan to get enough storage to do that,
then I don't like then I think you're fairly well covered.
I'm not saying that choosing to add another layer of backup is bad.
It's never bad. I do.
That is what most people are doing, and I think that that's enough for most
people to be covered in most cases.
You can certainly outsmart yourself by saving things outside of your documents
or desktop folder, even once you have syncing turned on.
It will warn you, though. Your Mac will warn you if you drag a file from your
documents folder to somewhere else.
If it's being synced, it'll say, hey, do you sure you want to take this off
your iCloud drive, which is good.
You're going to lose it if, yeah. Yeah. so there are
steps to take but if you're syncing your
documents via some syncing service
and i know people argue sync is not backup and and i agree with that but it
is a form of like it's another copy of your data until you delete it so yeah
yeah i i that said i absolutely still make sure I use time machine, uh,
at least on all of my Macs, including my laptop.
So, yeah. And especially for the valuable data that you cannot replace.
You know, I had neighbors that lost all their photos years ago because it was on one hard drive.
And I mean, you know, kids photos gone and they didn't have it,
but one digital copy of it.
No, it does suck. And it's please, you know, for that data, that's like that. Absolutely.
Three, two, one. Um, well, but I cloud photo, do you need, if you have, I cloud photo library.
Yeah, this is fair enough. That was pre-iCloud Photo. Exactly.
But I'm wondering, does a ransomware get in there and hose you?
Because it's connected.
Yeah, fair. So having one that you can disconnect...
And you're putting a lot of trust in Apple, right? And not to say that they
don't have backups and backups and backups. I mean, right?
But you're still relying on iCloud. So if iCloud borks one day for whatever
reason, you know, EMD... Because they're not a target of them. Yeah.
Apple's not a target. But they have it in multiple. I trust that they probably
have a robust system enough now where they have their own backups.
There's multiple locations.
I'm sure the engineers have thought of this, But again, you are putting your faith in iCloud, 100%.
So if you're okay with that and you think that's good, then I just prefer even
just mentally knowing that, okay, they have a copy, I have a copy.
So if I screw up, I can use theirs. If they screw up, I can use mine.
Yep. No, I do the same thing. I do exactly the same thing.
I would bet, and I suppose owning some Apple stock, Doc, I do bet this money.
I would bet money that Apple
has gone out of their way to ensure that any given user's photos will never
get lost or damaged or whatever with iCloud.
Because all it takes is once and then it makes the news and spreads like wildfire and that's it.
People like the world doesn't trust Apple with their data anymore. And that would be awful.
Yeah. But for Apple, the music library thing happened, right?
Where iTunes music library worked a bunch of people's like uploaded audio.
So it did, but, but as terrible as that is, and that was, that was like,
like the most ham fisted thing we've seen Apple do right. Was that, uh.
For most people, the audio that they lost was audio that was recoverable in
some other way because it was recorded by someone else.
Right. These are songs. Right. Whereas your photos, you made those.
There is no other like, oh, well, that sucks that I have to go through this
major headache, but I can still get that song again. Like, I know there were
some people that lost original music and that like that's awful.
But most of the people that were affected by that, it was, you know,
songs that were commercially available.
So, yeah, I mean, convenience, but not disaster inconvenience,
not disaster. Right. Right.
Another one that I'll throw out that I do, I download,
make sure on at least one Mac, I download all my Apple purchased videos and
create a backup of those because those are not guaranteed to be licensed for
forever. That's right. People should be aware of that.
Apple can make that go away. If you still have the file, it will still work.
But if you don't have a copy of the file and they've removed it from Apple servers,
you're never getting that file yeah yeah
uh brian8944 in our discord at live.macgeekup.com shared a very important.
Add-on here a bit of advice related
here and that is test your backups and make sure you know how to restore because
a backup is nothing if you can't rest it's not a backup if you can't restore
from And I don't mean that it cannot be restored from that would also call it not a backup.
But if you don't know how to restore your backup.
It is far less valuable to you. You don't want to have to call in help in that
moment just because you haven't, you don't know how to restore from your backup.
This is something you can test. You can, I recommend you do this regularly once every six months,
go to your backup, pretend you need to restore a file, go through the motions
and every backup is different.
Time machine has their thing where you can enter time machine, carbon copy cloner.
Or you just mount the drive and look in the folders that, you know,
if you use something like backblaze, go online,
restore a file by downloading, you know, copying it from their system down to
yours, just have a working knowledge of that restoration process so that when
you are in a panic moment, you're not panicked about that.
You're like, ah, I know what to do.
I can, i can you know i can do this so yeah yeah another another kind of tip
related to this because you mentioned you know turning on desktop and documents
and just using icloud in general um not only is it good just you have essentially
another copy of your files that are in the cloud.
If you are especially all in in the
apple ecosystem like a lot of us it just
makes upgrading and getting new devices
and just like doing anything just so convenient
so my daughter is in college now
and she had this really old uh 12
inch macbook air and she called me just last week and
she's like it won't start my machine
won't start and i'm like oh and uh
we tried a bunch of things and it basically had
died it just died and it was really old i had
asked her before she wanted if she went if she wanted a new computer she
said no and I'm like you think you should have a new computer but anyway she
called me so I'm like all right I bought you new I bought you new M2 MacBook
Air go to Best Buy pick it up and when you get home just you know flip it on
and when it asks you I had sent her a time machine backup too so she restored
from time machine backup but she also had iCloud so like you turn that thing
on do you want all your stuff back yeah
and it just sucks it all in and you're done and same thing with iOS devices
are like setting up my Vision Pro like,
It's worth having that, especially if you're in the ecosystem and you're okay
with Apple iCloud, just turning that on and paying for it.
It's paid for itself, in my opinion, over and over. Yes, I totally agree.
I have plenty of iCloud storage. We buy two terabytes for the family,
and I think we've used a lot of it, mostly photos, but we're probably at 1.3,
1.4 terabytes or something. We've got a lot of headroom.
Years before that was like a thing, I moved away from Dropbox for doing this
syncing to Synology Drive because I own the storage and I didn't want to have
to pay Dropbox every month.
And so I just did that. I think if I had iCloud Drive,
then I don't know that I I think I would have just continued to pay for iCloud
Drive like I do and stored all of my documents there because you're right.
Right. It makes it so easy. Yes.
Synology drive integrates with Apple's files app on the phone and you can get,
you know, any app that supports Apple's files thing for loading data or whatever on your iPhone.
You can see into Synology drive, but it's one layer removed and it's not all
right there in the prettiest way.
And for things like for things that I know that I'm going to use on my iPhone
or iPad, like scores for musicals or whatever, those I store in a folder on iCloud drive,
because I don't want to have to deal with the, oh yeah, Synology drive is weird
and it doesn't always save the favorites right.
And you know, can I get to my data? Yeah.
But for those kinds of things, I just like it to be where I expect it to be.
So yeah, no, iCloud drive is great. Yeah. Yep.
Yep. And it's offsite in the, in that sense, because you know,
it's, it's the cloud, right?
So Tony had, uh, an interesting little anecdote and I figured I would,
I would share it here. It's a, it's a tip, but not so quick.
He says his main machine is an M1 Air, and it's connected via a CalDigit hub
to Ethernet and then also to Wi-Fi so that when he disconnects,
he still has, you know, Internet when he's wherever he is.
Doing a random speed test, I noticed my download speeds were less than half of what they had been.
I got 350 megabits per second, whereas I usually get 900. He says,
I turned off Wi-Fi on the Mac and speeds jumped back to that 900 megabits per second.
Maybe not what most people would expect. He says, I know you know what comes next.
Go to system settings, network, and hidden in the lower right corner is the action pop-up.
Choose set service order.
And when I went in there, he says, somehow Wi-Fi had been promoted to the top
of the list. The Mac will use the services in the order listed from top to bottom, cascading down.
So whichever the first one it finds is, that's the one that it will use for
your internet connection.
It will actually use all of them simultaneously for local network connections, which is really handy.
But the first one it finds is what it uses as your default gateway for your internet connection.
It says I reactivated Wi-Fi, moved it to the number two slot just below Ethernet,
and now my problem's solved. When I'm plugged into Ethernet,
it uses that for Internet.
When I disconnect from Ethernet, that connection doesn't exist.
So it falls back to Wi-Fi, which is number two, and everything works fine.
What's cool about it, and he's totally right, by the way, like doing this makes perfect sense.
And if you are on a computer where you're switching back and forth,
absolutely go check that.
And my advice would be to do exactly what Tony did and put Ethernet as the top
one so that you have, you have the,
you know, the fastest speeds available there. Where I use this a lot is.
If I'm testing a new router or something, I want to stay connected to the internet.
I want to connect to this router that I haven't yet connected to the internet.
And so I connect via wifi to the router. I'm ethernet connected to my network
here and I can get on the internet.
I can download firmware updates for a router or whatever, and still connect
to the router via wifi because it's two different IP subnets.
When I put in the subnet, you know, the address for the router, it knows,
oh, this subnet is routed to wifi internet routed
to ethernet because of that set service order thing and you can do it
all and you feel like a networking master
when you do these things so you too can be a
networking master by set service order i don't know
yipper so thank you
for sharing that tony good stuff i like uh i like
making sure that everybody knows how to manage
their networks works thoughts on that any nope
no dip yeah it is a good tip all right
uh anthony has
a uh and he sent this in as an audio comment at which we will play and it's
a couple of minutes long but he has such a he he articulates a problem that
i know all three of us have experienced and i think pretty Pretty much everybody
with an iPhone has experienced.
And then he proposes a solution.
And I'm curious to see after hearing his solution, if any of the three of us
have a better idea, because I don't know that we will. So take it away.
Hi, I have an iPhone query. But before I get to that, I wanted to say that I love the podcast.
I haven't come over with Adam. It's great to hear how you all interact and bounce
off each other. You are now my go-to Apple podcast and long may it continue.
So I'm Anthony from the UK and when I use my iPhone, I have notifications appear
as banners when the screen is in use.
And I often find myself in an app, let's say use the Notes app for example.
I'll be in a note and I want to press the back to notes button in the top corner.
And when my finger begins to descend a millisecond or two before it makes contact,
I might get a message will appear as a banner, say an iMessage or a WhatsApp message.
And my finger will press that, which then not only takes me out of notes,
which I don't want, but we'll then open the message app and open the message
itself and potentially return a read receipt to the sender for a message that
i didn't even want to read.
From visual stimuli a quick response time
for the eye to send a signal to the brain to process it
and then for the brain sending a signal to the hand love
this is about 250 milliseconds seconds then
there's a travel time from the finger to the screen so
let's say hypothetically the finger is actually just
hovering above the screen so and
let's let's say for argument's sake that the travel time is virtually instant
see but you've still got a 250 millisecond gap between seeing something and
your finger then responding and pressing so even so the phone knows that i I
pressed that banner within, say,
20 milliseconds of it appearing.
It would therefore be impossible for me to have meant to have pressed that,
even if I was actively waiting for the banner to appear.
It would be impossible for me to react and press it so quickly.
Therefore, it would be great to have an additional optional feature in settings,
which, when activated, would ignore any key press within, say, 200 milliseconds.
Instead, it would trigger the item directly below it, and this could be customized,
I don't know, say from 100 milliseconds to 300 milliseconds to suit someone's
timing or response time.
Obviously, it would be optional to turn it on or off, and you could call it
something like realistic react time or something like that.
There is a feature in accessibility that could potentially help a little,
which is accessibility accessibility, touch, touch accommodations,
but nothing in there that I can see that does what I need.
The nearest could be the one called tap assistance gesture delay,
but I've not really had much joy with that one.
Anyway, I thought it'd be interesting, and I wasn't sure if anyone else had
come across that, or if there was an app even, or a workaround that would allow
for something like that to happen, but I just thought it was interesting.
Thank you. All the best, and I look Look forward to the next episode.
Thanks, Antony. Yeah, this is like, I don't know what else. Yes,
I have experienced this.
Yes, it's super frustrating every freaking time I experience this.
And I know like Apple engineers must suffer this too.
Right. You would think. You would think. Yep.
Yep. Or maybe they have 20 millisecond cat light reflexes, you know, and can.
The worst part, the worst part is when I know it's happening.
Like I, I can't stop my finger from hitting that fricking notification banner
and I know it's going to happen.
And, and then it happens like it, I'm aware
that I am unable to stop myself from doing doing exactly what i don't want to
do it's yep and he's right about that responsible react time like that's what
why isn't that coded in there i assume you've experienced this too adam right.
Um i don't know but i think you say no well i think it only might be because
i don't know that i ever use because this is where the tap target for the like
back to another app is right like like right in the top right hand corner or upper left.
I don't know that I use that feature very much to be honest.
What's happened to me, like going to put my finger into a search window thing
or whatever from the bottom when I'm jumping between apps or going back and forth.
Like I don't, I always forget that that feature is even there.
So like I'm not tapping up in there. It's happened to me when I've gone to put
in something in a search window, you know, I'll go to put, you know, that's at the top.
And as I go to put it in there and the notification comes up and hits,
it's like, Oh, come on. I find it in mail when I'm like navigating back to a,
you know, the, the mailbox above or something or back, back to the mailbox.
If I'm in a message, I want to go back to the mailbox without archiving my mail.
So that's in the upper left. And I just, I go to hit it and it's like,
there comes the notification.
It's like, I'm sure that's, this is when daddy swears. Yep. Yeah.
I'm very sure that it's happened to me. Yeah. I don't remember it happening to me that frequently.
Interesting. And I don't know why. i mean i also i
hate notifications so i have my notifications dialed way
way down and i don't like i especially
don't like the persistent one you know the one that
is like it's going to stay up in the corner until i
deal with it no yeah yeah yeah yeah so
that is the only currently that's the answer you can put your phone you can
either disable all of those banner notifications Notifications when you're using
your phone and just have them show up on the lock screen or in notification
center when you go turn them into pull notifications in a, in that sense, right?
Not push when, especially when you're interacting with your phone,
but I kind of want, there are certain things that I want to notify me.
Yeah. And, and I probably.
Have more things turned on for that than, than I normally would.
Like, I think if I did go into manage notifications and turn off the banners
for certain apps, I'd probably be okay with it, you know, but I,
I, that, that requires time and thought, Adam, I don't want to,
it's, it's a pain in the butt.
Yeah. You have to really actively manage it. And, you know, when you update
or add a new app, you're like, yeah, you have to like be on top of it,
but but they annoy me so much that it's like, I only want certain ones.
You know, I want messages from my family, you know, important emails.
Like I'll even dial them in. I think you could do some things with VIP.
I forget all the things that I've done. Yes. Like, you know. Yes. Yeah.
Like every other message I don't care about.
Yeah. Right. Yeah. There's a hidden quick tip in there then too,
Adam, is that you turn off the persistence of notifications.
I've got some that are persistent. You have to dial it in. Yeah. Yeah. It takes forever.
Like who wants to do it but yeah yep yep
i i agree yep that brings up
can you swipe away a persistent
notification on your iphone using your watch only i don't
know i don't know that oh if you dismiss it on your watch does it does that
cascade to your other devices i think yes i i think so yeah yeah but that's
yeah i do it this does bring up a vision pro question because this This happened to me the other day.
So Vision Pro has notifications too. And the way it works is a message comes
in and then you'll get the app icon sort of floating in your vision.
So you get the ding and then there's like the app icons there.
I need to go into settings.
I haven't messed with it too much. But a mail one came in the other day when
I was watching a movie or something like that.
And it persisted.
And I didn't know how to make it go away other than to tap on the icon, basically.
And then that pulls up the message. And then you've got to look at it and then
dismiss it. I'm like, I just want that to go away. Yeah, I don't want to interact with it.
Everywhere I'm looking, it's following me. I'm like, I got to find that setting.
So I'm sure I'm just missing a setting. I'm sure this is a me problem.
But maybe somebody can help me, point me in the right direction on what I'm doing.
Yeah. I need to go and mess with it. Yeah, interesting. That was super annoying.
It's like okay i know a male came in i don't
want to deal with that male right now i'm watching a movie like just go away
and i waited i thought it would like fade away and it's like no
it's not going away okay how do i dismiss it i don't know what the gesture the
magical incantation is to like swipe it away you know i i think the the gestures
i would try in that scenario is i would put a fist up right and then i would
start experimenting with one finger at a time to put Put my thumb up. Does that do it? No.
Put my like, you know, and just go through your fingers. And at the very least
with it, with one of them, you'll feel better even if it doesn't solve the problem. Exactly. Yeah.
Back to the phone thing, though, you you mentioned the watch.
So you could set your notifications up so that they don't come in when your
phone is awake, you know, or you're in use. but do show like only show up on
the lock screen on your phone, but do tap your wrist with your watch.
And so that would be another way to get around this. You'd have to like to do that.
You would have to be someone who's wearing your Apple watch.
Most of the times that you would want those notifications, right?
Like obviously, but otherwise, yeah.
And it's going to get, and it's going to take time to get through all the apps that will notify you.
Cause then you have to turn off the mirror. Here are my notifications from my
iPhone settings on the watch and go manage them all there too.
Like this becomes an exercise in frustration.
Yes. Anyway, shall we go to our next question from cruiser Pete?
We can do that. I have the technology and I'm engaging it at this time.
Cruiser says, I'd love to get some thoughts on a strategy for the drives in my sonology.
I have a DS nine 16 that I bought in mid 2017 with four, eight terabyte Western
digital drives that have been in the unit from the beginning.
I shucked the drives from the WD easy store enclosures bought at different times.
So I don't expect they were from the same manufacturing lots,
and this means all four drives are about to hit the seven-year mark.
The only blemish on the drive health reports is that one drive has had a few
reconnection attempts, but that count hasn't increased in over a year.
The unit's in clean condition and good temperature range.
Given the age of the drives, I'm wondering whether I should start replacing
them over time one by one.
The total volume is 20 terabytes with about 5 terabytes free,
so I don't have an urgent need for additional space, but I'd probably replace
them with, say, maybe 12-terabyte drives.
I'm worried, mostly I'm worried, given the vintage age of the drives,
that if I don't start replacing them, I might see multiple failures in close succession.
However, there's also not really any use in trying to guess which one will fail first or next,
so that essentially leaves me with the option of replacing them all one by one,
or, of course, waiting until a failure occurs, Which then takes me back to the
first point above the concern that the second drive may fail shortly thereafter, even during a rebuild.
Any suggestions on how to think about this?
Yeah. You know, in a corporate environment, and I realize that's not you,
but what generally happens is there is a planned replacement schedule, right?
You know, you buy drives and it's like, okay, we're going to replace these in
four years. And you do one drive every three months or something and,
and, you know, get yourself moved up and all of that good stuff.
And by doing that, you can budget for it. And most of the time you'll do that
in sync with the warranty of the drive.
So when the drive is out of warranty, it's either being replaced or has been replaced.
So you can, you know, really carefully and easily predict your budget on these.
Because if one happens to fail early, well, it's under warranty. You're good to go.
So that is one strategy to take. It is not the strategy I take,
but it is one strategy to take.
I replace drives in one of two scenarios.
If I need more space, I replace the drive.
And I'm always bummed when that's the reason that I replace the drive because
my preferred time to replace the drive is after it has failed.
I have, I keep, I use a five bay disc station as kind of my main disc station.
And I use four bays for volume one and then bay five is always a hot spare.
So, and that hot spare is usually larger than any other drive in there.
And that's how I expand my storage is I let those hot spares when they have
to take over for a smaller drive that died.
Well, now I'm good to go. Oh, I've, you know, my storage slowly kind of just
increases over the years.
That's the beauty of SHR, Synology Hybrid RAID.
You can do, you can have drives of different sizes and it'll do all the things.
Sometimes when you put a larger drive in, you won't be able to use all the new
storage on that drive until you have another drive that either is equal or matching
to it, all of those things.
But yeah, that, that, that's my strategy.
It works well. Well, having a hot spare makes me feel okay about it because
I have one drive fault tolerance set up on my disk station.
And when a drive dies, I, you know, I'm good.
It can instantly, whether I'm home or not, I don't have to touch it.
The hot spare thing just kicks in and I'm good to go.
Um, but recently I had to add a drive and pull out a perfectly good working
drive that was too small.
And it really kind of, it bummed me out. But I mean, it's nice that drives last
so long, but like, I should be happy about this, but it's like,
well, now what do I do with this drive?
It's I can't. Oh, it sucks.
It's still good. Yeah. But you know, it's fine. Yeah. I think my drives are
eight years old in my sonology. Yeah. So yeah. Okay.
I still have the ones I think you sent me, Dave. Yeah. They're still running great. Yeah.
Spindle drives last a long time, and you usually get some warning that it's on its way out.
You'll get errors showing up. You'll get things showing up.
And at some point, your disk station will just be like, okay,
I'm done with this thing.
You can, like, if I see that a drive is, you know,
the error count is going up every week or something, thing because i
i get you'll you can set your synology to notify you about
drive failures or drive errors when i see
that number kind of going up every month or every week or whatever
it is um i will sometimes be like
okay the time has come and then really all
i do is just yank the drive out um and then
the hot spare is like hey we lost a drive i'm gonna
do this and i take the drive and throw it away and
good to go and put and then i then i order
a new new drive that's larger to put in as the
hot spare and we're off to the races so so i have i have a personal sonology
uh question issue for you that follows up on this a little bit i don't know
why why but my sonology the drive
doors the the drive doors have started failing the little one go really,
yeah where it just popped out and it won't it won't stay in anymore the trace
lock back in huh no so one failed and then two weeks later another one failed
so my sonology is sitting there.
It still runs it still works but i can't i
can't push those things in anymore like the little tabs i don't
know if they've just over time heated enough that
they just won't stay anymore or whatever and i
don't know what to do about it like i guess i could contact sonology and
see if they'll send me new trays but well that's the question
is it and you would only be able
to know this if you turned off your disk station and
and tested this but be really careful that you keep the drives in
the right order like i you know but my my
curiosity is is it the tray that has the problem or is it the latch on the disk
station itself that has the problem it's oh that no it's definitely the tray
because i had an open bay and so the when the first one failed i took that i
I shut it down, took that out,
took the one drive out that had popped open,
swapped the drive into the new tray and swapped them.
Okay. And it worked fine.
So it's the tray, not the, not the, uh, okay.
You can get, you can get new trays and if Synology won't send them to you,
let me know because I probably have some like spare leftovers from old distations
that I don't, that I don't have anymore. It was just the weirdest thing. I'm like.
Oh, when the, when the first one went, I kind of blamed the cats.
I'm like, oh, maybe the cats were bumping it. Cause they'll walk around it sometimes,
you know, like, are they bumping up against it?
And I thought it just popped out for that reason. And I'm like,
did they somehow break it?
And then again, two weeks later, another one's another one's flipped out. And I'm like, okay, wow.
Um, I, it runs fine. It just looks bad.
Probably more dust is getting in there now than it should. But I found a Reddit
article as I was putting this in the show notes, my drive caddies won't don't
close. And I suspect it's due to a faulty clip.
I ordered replacement ones so you can buy replacement clips.
Okay. Yeah. So that, that would be the, yeah, that's the little part that I
think failed. Yeah. Yeah. Totally.
Uh, and somebody pointed at
an eBay listing for, you can buy 10 latches for $13 and 49 cents on eBay.
So I think that's use four and sell six.
Yeah. Right. right yeah yeah all right
well i i've been i've been wanting to get a new sonology anyway
sure like that that might be the ultimate solution it's
because the one i have is really old okay yeah yeah yeah all right well that's
uh there you go that's uh that's some cool stuff found it's sonology replacement
tray latches let's uh i do want to do a couple of show stuff of cool stuff founds, but I also.
Want to do a little bit of show business here. I know the whole thing is show business.
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cool stuff found from john adam.
Yeah yeah so this is really neat uh we
were doing on sunday our hangout that was on february 18th and the subject was
web browsers uh basically at mac web browsers and that naturally led into a
discussion about ads and ad blocking and a bunch of other things but ultimately
someone brought up the point that,
hey, I go to websites for cooking and bringing up recipes and things like that.
And a lot of them have just a ton of extra junk around the recipe.
So it can make it difficult to see the recipe. Or if you want to save that off
somewhere, it's got all kinds of extra data and stuff like that.
And John said, hey, I use this site called Just the Recipe.
And it has recipes on there. And it's just the recipe data.
So you can find and search for that stuff. And and all you're going to get is
the pertinent information that you want.
And then that also led into a bunch of us talking about.
Third-party apps because i mentioned i want to i want to offer
a slight correction for just the recipe it is
a site where you paste in the url of another
recipe yes and it strips out all the clutter and the ads and gives you a recipe
that you could print or do something with so that thank you for that correction
yeah of course i forgot that it's it's like a url shortener kind of yeah it's
like you're shortening the url it shortens the content yeah exactly clean something
and you You get the image and you get all the ingredients and everything.
Yeah. And so it was very similar to some of these third party recipe apps.
I use one called Pestle and it can you can either copy and paste in the data
or put in a URL or whatever.
And it will basically put everything into the app and give you the image and
give you the ingredients and give you the instructions.
And it separates it all out and formats it and makes it look really, really beautiful.
Wonderful this makes it look like one of those one of those
things that we get from like the meal kits that sponsor us sometimes right
like it it takes a recipe and turns it into those
you know step-by-step instructions which makes life
really easy yeah yeah and you can even
you can print it out if you want if you you know want paper copies
and stuff like that and it'll format up really really nicely it does
conversions so if you need to you know if it's
a six serving meal and you can just say i need a three serving version
and it'll convert everything for you and then a bunch
of other people really recommend share play pestle support
share play so you can have two people or multiple people working
on the recipe together i'm just seeing that sorry i keep interrupting yeah it's
got it it's got a ton of great features i absolutely love it uh and a bunch
of people mentioned paprika which is a similar app um that one i play around
with a little bit too it looks great and then i guess there's one called recipe
keeper and one called mila so there's a a bunch of third-party ones and there
were a bunch of cool stuff found,
recommendations in there. Like I said, I've been using Pestle.
I found that to be my favorite. I did play with Paprika. I think...
That developer, I think, had a beta for a while that was on test flight.
And so I think I played around with that early days. But yeah,
so there's a bunch of great ways to get recipes without all the junk.
Yeah. Yeah. It's handy. Look at the ads the first time, then save the recipe
without all the junk. Yeah, exactly.
Very cool. I got to check out that Pestle thing.
And the reason is that whole SharePlay integration. integration
we i i love the the
meal kit stuff that we get because it makes it really
easy for us to just collaborate in the kitchen and
work together as opposed to one person driving the bus so yeah
so on that you could either go to the
url because i know a lot of those meal sites give you the url for
that stuff yes pestle also and
i think a lot of these other apps will do ocr so you can use your camera and
just point it at it because like especially if you have old handwritten written
recipes from maybe relatives or like my wife has a big book and we've scanned
a bunch of those in and it will just pick that stuff right up and again,
fill everything out for you.
Oh yeah. Okay. I know you've mentioned pestle on the show before.
I, I, I didn't, it didn't sink in for me the first time.
How, how much I probably want this in our lives here.
It'll iCloud sync and yeah, you have it on all your devices.
You can bring your iPad into the kitchen or your Mac or whatever.
Interesting. Interesting. interesting. Now they just need a Vision Pro version
that puts my recipes up over my everything that I'm cooking along with timers and.
Yeah. And, and the bonus of the vision pro is when you're chopping onions,
you'll, uh, your eyes maybe won't water as much cause they're,
you know, sort of sealed in a little ish. Maybe. I don't know if that's a good idea.
Have you, uh, calculated the delay between what you see?
Like if you clap your hands, do you see them clap the moment you feel them clap?
Like, okay. So would you feel comfortable with a knife? Life latency is under
200 milliseconds, which we talked about earlier, right?
Yeah. So you probably won't cut your finger much. Yeah, much. Yeah, exactly.
I don't know. Joanna Stern did a whole cooking in it and a bunch of people have done cooking.
And so the number one thing is the timers you can affix. You can bring up multiple
timers just in Apple's regular timer app and fix them above each item.
So like wherever you look, that timer for that thing is right above.
Oh, that's cool. What's being timed. Oh, that's cool. Right.
Yeah, I actually I I have some experiences with this, not with a vision probe, but with a blindfold.
At least and I our daughter gave us one of these like books for date ideas,
you know, and so and you can narrow it down in the book. Like you pick.
Do you want to go out? Do you want to stay home? You know, do you do you want
to have like, you know, all these categories and you but you don't know what
the activity actually is.
And then you pick. OK, you know, we've got a couple hours so we can do this
or whatever. And so we pick this one and then, you know, you tear off the page
and find out what it was. And it was like, you're going to cook a meal together.
But, uh, the person doing the cooking is blindfolded and the person,
uh, the, you know, the other person is, is telling you what to do.
And so, uh, I was the one that was blindfolded with Lisa, you know,
it was a trust exercise while making dinner.
And i and i did i i did
chop like onions and stuff that way and
it was totally fine i've chopped onions before it
was not my first time chopping onions but like i know
what to do i know how to use it like it was it was it
was fine so i was i was more deliberate with it than i would be if my eyes were
on the subject i still got all my fingers feet yep that's right the one the
one One thing with the Vision Pro is you make sure you have a well-lit kitchen
because it does not do really great with low light.
Like the pass through and low light is pretty grainy and bad.
Yep. Um, Matt had a, while we're on cool stuff found, uh, Matt had a great idea
for cool stuff found and it's cooking related.
He says, uh, actually Matt says it wasn't his idea. It was his wife's idea.
He says, we attached a magnetic car mount mag safe car mount for iPhone to the
inside of one of our kitchen cabinet doors where right near where we cook since
upgrading to the iPhone mag safe.
I found a simple flat MagSafe disc on Amazon and added it to the car mount.
So you could use a MagSafe car mount or you could do whatever you,
you know, however you want to do it.
And he says, we both share our recipes using the Paprika app,
but I've moved to the Mila app more recently, all of which are linked earlier.
But he said by putting his phone, putting, you know, sticking a MagSafe thing
to the inside of his cabinet.
Now he can have his phone up with the recipe on it or his favorite podcast or
both. and it's up where his eyes are going to see it.
He doesn't have to worry about his phone, like, you know, on the counter with
spills and, you know, getting covered up by stuff. So really brilliant idea.
I like that using MagSafe inside the cabinet. I got a, huh.
Yeah. Even just a MagSafe stand on your, you know, kitchen counter,
just to get the phone up, even if it's not inside a cabinet,
just, you know, something like that one from, um, we talked about recently from Zag,
maybe under the Mophie brand that, uh,
that telescoping stand.
I'll, I'll find the link for it and put that in the show notes too,
because that as well, um, was, was pretty cool.
So, yeah. If you could run it into power even some way and route some cables and.
Oh yeah, that's right. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. This would be a great,
great use for an old iPad too. Just permamount.
Yes. Yes, for sure. Yeah.
But yeah, that, that telescoping stand would be the kind of the key to this. So. Yep.
Yep. All right. My wife uses her MacBook Air in the kitchen.
It always makes me nervous.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Occasionally, Lisa, she's usually with her iPad, but this telescoping stand,
I mean, it's not cheap. It's 150 bucks.
But it's a three-in-one charger with your watch and all that other stuff.
But some kind of telescoping stand or something. I have a, uh,
you can just get a clip stand that with a gooseneck that you clips onto the
kitchen counter and then, you know, you just put it wherever you want it.
So I know they make like make mounts for like, uh, your refrigerator,
you know, like magnets to the refrigerator, but that's less convenient because
most people you're gonna have to turn around your refrigerator to see the recipe.
That's fair. Like this idea of it being right above the stove or next to the
stove at eye level. Yeah, exactly.
Exactly. exactly yeah yeah that's a good idea fun stuff
i like all this this is uh this is
why we do the show so we can learn all these cool things yeah all
right uh thanks for hanging out everybody
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Music.
Pete you got you got anything to add,
oh right there on my shirt it says it don't get caught but made on a Mac.
That it does. That it does.
See ya. Later.