It's time for the MacGeekGab, and listener Pensacola Craig brings us our quick
tip of the week with, Well, many folks do not opt for Apple to engrave their
newly purchased devices,
even though it's free, because it may impact resale value down the line.
I've been using a technique of branding the device specs in place of personalization.
I find it helpful downstream when selling and remembering exactly what it is
at a glance. For instance, he would put on the engraving, iPad Pro,
11-inch, 4th generation, M.2, 256 gigabytes.
More quick tips like this, plus your questions answered today on the MacGeekGab
number 1027 for March 4th, 2024.
Music.
Greetings, folks, and welcome to MacGeekGab, the show where you send in all
kinds of stuff to feedback at MacGeekGab.com. Quick taps?
Sure. Quick tips, too, like Craig just did. Cool stuff found, like you'll hear later.
Questions, which we try to provide answers to. Sometimes we bring questions of our own.
Quick tips and cool stuff found, as well. Well, the goal being that each and
every one of us learns at least five new things every single episode we get together.
Sponsors for this episode include a couple of new ones.
Parallels.com slash MGG, where code MGG15 gets you 15% off.
Backblaze.com slash MGG, where you can go and get a fully featured, no risk, free trial.
And linkedin.com slash mgg where you can go and post your first job for free
we'll talk more in depth about each one of those in a little while for now back
here in durham new hampshire on international dungeon master or game master
day march 4th i'm dave hamilton,
And here in South Dakota, I'm Adam Christensen. I'm going to have to jump in
on that D&D thing. I have not done that in a while.
Yeah, right? It's, you know, it's something.
And here from Pensacola, Florida, it's Pilot Pete. Are you the key master or
the gatekeeper, Dave? I'm asking for a friend.
I don't know. I don't know what I am. Oh, my God. I'm back from Mexico. That's what I know.
Right on. There you go. Yep. Right. Hey, one more follow-up on that quick tip.
Pensacola Craig wrote us back again and wrote to you. You answered it.
It was hilarious. It was a great idea.
Remember what I'm talking about? I do, yeah.
When he got his Apple Pencil 2, he engraved it, number two pencil.
Brilliant. which is brilliant yeah i agree yeah yeah
yeah we gotta have fun with this stuff but i like that that
i liked a lot yeah yeah yeah pilot b
had to bring up uh key master look at
this oh there you go adam's got his oh yeah
i got my new trono wand this week so i'm
ready to bust some ghosts let's go let's go let's go yeah
this is the reason you want to watch the youtube folks is
uh is to be be able to see that that's
i saw him getting up and right away and going somewhere i'm like where's
he going where's he going yeah hold that
up i won't do it i won't do it now but it has full lights and sound oh
yes awesome we ain't afraid of no ghosts here uh all right andrew will take
us to our next next quick tip uh he says uh i had forgotten that hot corners
existed it's in system settings,
desktop and dock, hot corners in the far bottom right.
And it makes getting what I want, getting to where I want quicker. And he's right.
I'd forgotten about these two. It can be really handy for, I have used hot corners
to keep a screen from going to sleep while I'm doing like recording or something.
Or you can use it to, you know, do the quick note thing.
You can have it put your screen to sleep you can have it you know bring you
one corner bring you to your desktop all that good stuff so um so i yeah hot
corners thank you for the reminder because that's it's good stuff,
I use it and get caught by it, so be careful out there. Yes.
That is fair. Yeah. There is, like, I believe, if I'm not mistaken, yeah,
you can, if you don't want to get caught by it, you can have a hot corner only
activate if you hold down a modifier key, right? Probably what I need to do, yeah.
That's good advice. So if you go into the Hot Corners settings,
just like he said, system settings, desktop and dock, scroll all the way to
the bottom, and then you'll see Hot Corners, dot, dot, dot.
And it will come up. And if you have multiple displays, your corners are not
at the corners of your display.
It's at the corners of your entire virtual desktop.
So it gets a little weird. But if you pick from the menu what you want it to
do, and if you hold down a modifier key like control,
shift, option, or command,
you can choose to have that hot corner require the command key to say,
do the thing, whatever the thing is.
Is so that, that is a good way to keep from getting, um, getting caught. Yes. Yes.
Uh, and it seems like I am. Oh yeah. You can disable screensaver.
That's, that's the one that, that I have used, uh, in the past, but yeah.
Yeah. So yeah. Thank you for that. Good stuff, Andrew.
You rock feedback at Mac e-cab.com is where Andrew and, uh, and Craig and I,
most of the folks here have, uh, have sent these in to, uh.
So Pete's muted. So he's, he's trying to join in on the fun here,
but he just can't. It's just not going to happen.
Did I mute you, Pete? No, you're going to have to just do it.
You're going to have, okay, I'm back. You're back. That's nice to have.
I pressed the unmute button three times that it wouldn't play.
But I was saying, I think he wrote the feedback at Matt geek cap.com.
That's where I think he was.
Oh yeah, for sure. Feedback. I'm at geek cap.com.
Easy for you to say. Yeah. Uh, Yeah, Pete, sometimes we use the Stream Deck
to control our StreamYard thing, browser interface.
And sometimes if you have your cursor in the chat window in there,
any command sent from the Stream Deck will just appear as chat.
Yes. Yeah. And that's where I was actually over on the agenda.
Oh. Instead of, yeah, my mouse was over on the agenda instead of on the StreamYard window.
Wait, you don't have your StreamYard macros set to like bring Chrome to the front first?
I should. I would agree with that.
I wish it could like go and do things to Chrome even if it was in the background, right?
That would be even better. Well, and that's how it does it by bringing Chrome
to the foreground first. Yes. Then put it back.
Then put it back. Just know what I want and do it for goodness sakes.
That's the thing. This is not hard Apple. Yeah. Read my mind.
Yeah, exactly. What's AI all about?
Well not that but but you know
that's what it's becoming yeah computers do what we
want not what we tell them yes yes you're not
wrong yeah yeah all right uh are we uh you want to take us to harvey yeah yeah
yeah so harvey says here's this cool stuff found that i didn't i don't know
how i've ever heard on your show i've become a big fan of the slide to type
on my iphone that's on on the iPhone keyboard.
You can slide to type, and wondered if it was possible on an iPad.
There's no setting for it on the iPad. However, when the keyboard pops up for
you to use to type something in most apps, if you locate the keyboard symbol
at the bottom right of the keyboard,
press and hold it, a pop-up appears and lets you choose floating.
That brings up a movable keyboard.
Just drag that to the middle bottom of your screen and
then you can slide to type on that so huh that's
the little uh that's the little like i want to use my
ipad one-handed kind of trick too right you know where
you can kind of more use it like an iphone and you can
get it down in the corner a smaller version of the keyboard but yeah
then you can use the slide to type so i think apple feels like slide to type
is really something that you just want to do on a smaller keyboard and if you
have a full keyboard board you should tap things out i guess but yeah i get
that but i can't tell you how many times i've tried to slide my ipad and go
oh yeah i can't do that here do you slide to type on your phone.
I do. Interesting. I'm so much faster than the da-da-da-da-da-da. Yeah.
Slide to type. And I've got to say, I'm impressed with how intuitive it is most of the time.
But for those who want to do not, of course, you shouldn't be reading your phone
while driving anyway, but you will break a rib laughing.
The damn you autocorrect is gone, and that was in a big legal fight and all that.
But if you google damn you autocorrect and find some of those they
are how out loud funny uh some
of the mistakes oh yeah gone back and forth i think i think
there's a facebook group that i've i'm part of that just like
where people post those and occasionally i'll see one like you know come across
while i'm doom scrolling or whatever yeah i mean months later i still laugh
about some of them that's good oh where i was surprised this slide type doesn't
work is on on the Vision Pro. Oh.
I think it'd be really in there because the air pecking is much more difficult.
It'd be easier to just wave your finger around and...
Huh. Easier for you to do, harder for the program. Yeah, maybe.
And that might be why it doesn't work. It might be hard to track the finger that...
I mean, the tracking's on it. It's pretty good. So, I don't know. Yeah.
Interesting. Yeah, yeah, yeah. yeah okay yeah
that's yeah yeah does
it need the tapping motion to happen
in order for it to know that you want to type and you're not just
randomly moving your hand around well you'd
only activate it when the keyboard was oh that's fair right right
right yeah yeah i don't know i i'm i
i'm i'm not it turns out i'm not the lead engineer on that
project adam it was just
it was just a weird thing because i was like everybody was talking about how
a little bit awkward it was to air type you have to you can really only do the
hunt pack you can't do like home row typing on it very well and i was like well
why doesn't they have the slide to type thing that you know it's like the workaround
for that yeah yeah yeah interesting.
All right, Pete, you want to take us to listener Peter's thing.
And I will preface this by saying you did not know of either of our new sponsors
before you prepped this one.
So this is this is not a a a like, right?
This is not a thing, but it's a good segue to the ads. Yeah, it's really not.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, yeah. So listener Peter from Auburn, Maine writes in and
says, great discussion on backups on the latest episode. I tend to be with Adam
on the more obsessive side of backing up.
I love Backblaze, and a feature that has saved me is being able to get large
amounts of restored data on an encrypted USB drive.
They charge $189 for this. But wait, there's more. But if the drive is returned
within 30 days, they give a full refund.
So it's effectively free. I got caught when I accidentally pointed Carbon Copy
Cloner at the wrong external drive.
Ouch! and hosed several hundred gigabytes of data.
I had everything back within two days and was refunded within a week.
It was a good test of the ability to restore.
That's my story, and I'm stuck with it. Actually, he says I'm sticking to it.
So that's cool. Backblaze, I didn't realize that was a semi-free service.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it makes sense that they would want to be able to
recoup their costs if you choose not to send it back to them.
But yeah, it makes sense. I like it. It's good.
I came back from Mexico and the only Apple watch that I brought with me with my was my ultra two.
I still have my series five that I use occasionally. Actually,
I use for sleep most nights, but I use the Ultra 2 for everything while I was
there and had to track my sleep.
I would just put it on charge for like, you know, 30 minutes a day.
And that was generally enough.
And one thing that going into the trip I thought would be great.
And then it turned out it was a little bit much is the the depth app.
Right. The Apple Watch Ultra and Ultra 2 have the depth app,
which shows all kinds of things.
It basically is a dive computer for your Apple Watch, and it shows the depth
that your watch is and also shows the water temperature.
So that was kind of cool, you know, floating in the pool and being like,
oh, what's the, you know, what's the temp?
However uh the way it is set by default which
is cool is once the apple watch as soon as the apple watch detects that it is
submerged it jumps into depth app mode puts the screen at full brightness because
that's what you would want if you were using it that way and shows you this
data and updates it in real time and that kind of thing folks burns your battery.
So, uh, I thought, well, this is like cool.
And it was fine for the first day and it was fun to see, oh,
the pools, you know, 88 degrees or something, 86 degrees, whatever it was. It's nice. It's fine.
And, uh, but then I was like, okay, I got to turn this off.
So I found a cool setting that I will call the casual swimming or the floating,
or as we did in Mexico, the flinking setting.
Cause we were floating and drinking is really what was happening because there was a swim up bar.
Uh so the flinking setting on the
apple watch ultra is go into settings on
your watch general auto launch
and that'll be in the depth section and
it'll be threshold when submerged and
you can change it to at three feet and
this way it won't kick in the moment the
watch is submerged it will only kick in when you when you
go below three feet so if you're just sort of
flinking there and your watch is
going in and out of the water as you are raising your cup
i highly recommend cup floaties and a straw if you
really want to flink like a professional but uh yeah then then you know my watch
just stayed in like chilled out mode and the battery lasted a whole lot longer
so so dave when you did uh put that up into the agenda of course i went into
that that in my watch to do that setting, too.
And I actually found another setting in there. I was shocked to see background app refresh.
It go into uh settings and and right below that you'll see background app refresh,
tons of apps yes are refreshing in
the background whilst you're and i went in
i turned off almost everything some weather data you know
location data that kind of stuff i kept but um you know
i write korean airlines once every three or four years but you
know so i turned that off i mean obviously if you don't call it
up it shouldn't be refreshing in the background but i found several other
apps that that would be called up and i
don't want those refreshing in the background and and working on
my battery at all ever so there's a
bunch in there worth turning off i think maybe in my
humble opinion maybe i mean i you're you're not
wrong obviously an app that's refreshing in
the background will take up some amount of energy like this is just a fact however
apple is really really smart about the way it allows apps third-party, especially,
and probably first party, although the first party apps likely get to break
the rules, but third-party apps for sure wind up getting coalesced background, uh, updates.
So it, it will, it will
wait until it knows that several apps
need to do a thing or one app needs
to do a thing at a very specific time and then
it will be like all right who else needs an update let's go
we're gonna get online we're gonna do these updates
we're gonna do the the you know energy what expensive things
and and then we're and then we're gonna be done and and we're gonna turn off
the the you know the we're gonna go back into lower power you know power conservation
whatever not low power mode but but yeah like I guess my.
Question slash caution would be test it. See what your watch is like for a day with everything on.
See what your watch is like for a day with all of these things off.
Obviously, you're not going to use your watch exactly the same.
There's no way that you're going to get, unless you really lab test this thing.
But otherwise, you're going to get a general sense of,
did it make enough of a difference for me to bother to go and manage these things
and potentially leave myself in a scenario where you know i go to launch the
korean airlines app and now it needs to do some updates and i don't get the
data i want right away i don't know yeah fair enough yeah adam what do you have any uh.
Yeah i mean i think it's a it's an opt-in opt-out thing in in my mind but i'm
with you like everything kind of opts in.
So I think Pete's advice is good. At least go look and see what's opted in.
And this goes for notifications.
And you can use the background refresh thing on your iPads and your iPhones and stuff like that.
But it's that balance, right? It's the balance of, if I turn this off,
knowing that next time I go to launch that app, it's not just going to fly up
and have information for me ready to go.
Or with a watch, it's even more, right? If you have a complication tied to it
or something, You want that data immediately there.
You don't want it to have to do a network call depending upon where you are
and all those other things.
So you got to be aware of what you're setting.
That's what it comes down to. Yeah, that makes sense.
All right, folks. Well, you know how we're always diving deep into the tech vortex, right?
Well, there's one abyss you never want to get caught in the data loss black hole.
That's where our sponsor Backblaze beams in like the superhero of the digital cosmos.
Adam, Pete and I have all used Backblaze to shield our Macs.
And trust me, it's like having your own data guardian angel.
For just $99 a year, you get unlimited cloud backup for Macs,
PCs, even your entire business, making sure your digital life is secure and,
more importantly, recoverable.
Because let's face it, losing data is more terrifying than accidentally calling
your high school crush while trying to delete their number.
Deploying it? A breeze. And if disaster strikes, like a ransomware attack or
a coffee spill on your keyboard, Backblaze offers rapid recovery options.
You can even access your files from anywhere or get a hard drive shipped to
your door with all your data, return it within 30 days, and it's like it never
happened, except you have your data back.
And that's super important. It's so important.
Can I say that again? It's so important. Over 55 billion files restored says it all.
Don't be the one wishing you could turn back time. head to backblaze.com slash MGG.
Matt Kekab listeners get a free trial to see why backblaze is recommended by Inc magazine.
Go to backblaze.com slash MGG and start your no risk free trial because in the
world of tech, backblaze is the best way to get a free trial.
Caught without a backup, visit backblaze.com slash MGG.
And let's keep those bad times at bay and our thanks to Backblaze for sponsoring this episode.
All right. Now, have you ever felt like finding the right team member for your
tech venture was like searching for a rare vintage Mac and a haystack?
Well, that was me before our sponsor, LinkedIn jobs.
I've talked about Sadie on the show, our social media and promotions ninja, right?
Three years ago, I tapped into to LinkedIn jobs, vast network,
over a billion professionals strong.
And there she was a perfect match.
It's like finding that hidden setting on your Mac that suddenly makes everything work better.
Using LinkedIn jobs. Wasn't just throwing a post into the digital void,
right? It was targeted intuitive.
And honestly, it's kind of fun, right? Their tools are so easy to use that it's
like the difference between coding and assembly and Swift.
You can do both, but one is is just so much easier.
And get this, 86% of small businesses find a qualified candidate within 24 hours on LinkedIn Jobs.
We did, and now Sadie's been with us, boosting our show for three years.
It's like upgrading your RAM and feeling the turbo charge.
So don't get caught in the slow lane of hiring. Post your job for free at linkedin.com slash mgg.
That's linkedin.com slash mgg to post your job for free.
Terms and conditions apply. Your Sadie is just a post away and our thanks to
LinkedIn jobs for sponsoring this episode.
All right. We got a quick tip from JT after the last episode.
And in fact, we'll let we'll let JT tell us about it.
Gentlemen, in reference to episode 1026, you mentioned the UDP method to save
your bacon with your iPhone.
One other thing this does or as apple calls it as a force restart i was experiencing
an issue where within the app library in my social media folder app icons were coming up blank.
To remedy this i was able to do the force restart
the udp method and the icons came back
to life just another handy
tip for that particular set of uh
button presses yeah thanks have
a great one thanks for that jt that that's interesting
to me because that tells me
that it's doing more than just shutting
down and restarting your phone like it almost
like clearing all kinds of stuff yeah it's
a hard reset a cash cleaning you know
kind of a safe but it's not restarting into
in safe mode or anything but but it is doing
some of the stuff that like we know our
macs do when we restart in safe mode doing you know what whatever some maintenance
whatever that maintenance is we don't know uh but that yeah that's interesting
yeah hey one other thing though And that's holding the power button down until
you see the Apple logo when it does that.
Correct. One other thing, we've talked about this a long time ago.
I'll bring up, if you do up, down, and tap the power button and don't restart,
that does disable your biometrics.
So either your fingerprint or your face ID, you're going to have to put your password in in order to.
Remember, that's the mode that. But that's the way to, you know,
make it so your biometrics won't open, unlock the phone whilst in your pocket.
Right. Yeah, don't get caught.
Don't get caught mode. Yeah, it's don't get caught mode, which is good.
You know, I probably should have done that as I was like going through security
in Mexico or something, you know. Yeah.
Also remember, you don't have Fourth Amendment rights out of the country.
No, no, you don't. No, you don't. It's true.
Yeah. Yeah. Even though you think you do. Yeah.
Yep. Yep. You do have Fourth Amendment rights. They just don't exist there.
You have them in the United States. Yeah. You have them until you don't.
I just bring a little jar of U.S. soil for me to pour down and stand on. There you go.
And that'll get you arrested by the agriculture police you know yeah,
yeah a little jar of u.s soil right i wonder if anyone's ever tried that,
like i like you know like i i would love it if i was say in an airport or something
if you know foreign airport and somebody was having their not their perceived
rights violated like yeah And they poured their little soil. I am now, you know.
On U.S. soil. I'm on U.S. soil. This is sovereign land.
Carry your own sovereign land.
I'm sure they'll bring you a broom and a dustbin. You say, get to work.
Yeah, get to work. That's it.
And when you're done, come with us to this little private room.
Yeah, and then we'll escort you. don't come with us. We'll, we'll bring you
there. That's right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Uh, also from episode 10, 26, Todd had a comment about our recipes discussion.
Yeah. And he says, uh,
I gave up on all the recipe apps. They seem to change over time and stop doing
things the way I like them.
When that happens, transitioning from one app to another is always a pain, of course.
Because of this, he says, I have standardized on the Notes app.
I have a folder in Notes called Recipes. I often add a tag such as dessert,
appetizer, Thanksgiving, etc.
All recipes come down to ingredients, directions, and notes about the recipe.
I copy and paste the recipe from one of those god-awful sites full of ads into
BBEdit, do a little massaging, and paste that into a new note.
Sometimes I add a link to the original source if I want.
The recipe folder is shared with my wife and two sons.
When we are somewhere and someone
wants a recipe, Notes makes it very easy to send or just pull it up.
Best of all, I control the recipes. No worries about an app or website shutting
down. A little upfront work, getting the recipe in a new note pays off in a
big way. I like this idea.
It is how we do things in our house.
Basically, you know, we've always just used the notes app for recipes and sharing.
And I love the idea of a shared recipes folder that we didn't do.
However, I will offer one tip from 1026 that I think could make Todd and everyone's workflow better.
And that is resurfacing the quick tip we mentioned which is called just the recipe.com,
because there you go pete everything all right over there
you are okay i'm back sorry i didn't hit the button
in time that's correct the view button is
kicking my backs backside this morning
i'm sorry gents that's all right uh but that just the
recipe.com it automates the process
of doing what he talked about with bb edit copying and
pasting into bb edit to remove all the extraneous formatting
so um so try that out and maybe that plus notes is the magic answer so yeah
good stuff yeah i'm a i'm a markdown guy so i do everything in ulysses but that's
only because i don't i don't use i'd like to write everything in markdown i
switched to that workflow a long long time ago.
And syncs through the cloud and I have it on all my devices and there's a Ulysses
app for, well, it's in beta, it's
in test flight, but the Ulysses app for Vision Pro I was excited about.
Oh, interesting.
I've tried to become proficient in Markdown a couple times. That's tough.
Does Ulysses help you do that?
No, I mean, it does all the formatting for you and stuff like that.
And yeah, there's shortcuts, but I know how to write it. So I just write it
and then it converts it it into like, makes it look pretty and then you can export it.
And I also use marked, um, you know, obviously for converting.
I know the basics, but I've, I've seen some amazing, uh.
Uh what are your tables and you know shading and titling
yeah that's extended markdown i mostly basic
markdown but yeah you can do basic tables and things like
that but the reason i moved to that flow it really inspired a lot by david sparks
which is like with the other tools i can create a word document from that i
can create a pdf a formatted pf from that and my core files are are now all
in just text. So they will always be accessible.
It does not matter what application changes happen, what, you know,
it's a text file at the end of the day. And text is always supported.
Yeah. So I understand Ulysses.
You explained that well. It's an app that you can put text into and it understands
Markdown and it syncs and all of those great things.
My question is about the marked, You said, and obviously, I use the Marked app.
Why? Oh, yeah. Probably not obviously.
Yeah, Marked is this great app from Brett Terpstra.
Okay. And it is a very simple app.
I think it's in, I want to say it's still in Setapp. It is. But it lets you
open any Markdown file and basically convert it.
So it has templates you can build, and you can do all kinds of conversions.
So there's pre-built templates. And so it just...
You can also use it for live display so if you just have
a markdown file and you want to see it formatted really
pretty as a word document or a pdf or whatever format
it does that real time so when you make the change in the
markdown file that you've pointed it at it will do
the formatting for you interesting yeah it'll save
it it's amazing everything right oh yeah yeah no
yeah you can convert markdown into everything so
that that's what that's what i love about it is you have just a
text file once you learn it you have just a text file and i
use it at work all the time to because everybody wants
word documents so i write everything in markdown
all my notes at markdown and send everybody a pretty word doc and
you use marked to to do that conversion for
you to preview it yeah yeah you can do it also in ulysses but
i like marked just because it has a lot of options and you
can build templates if you want so you could customize you
know how you want the fonts to look and how you want eight
you know yeah rules to look and the different different levels
so it's basically like the styling for your
markdown file yeah control in there yeah i i need to get i i had started using
markdown for like even just putting things in wordpress because it like it it
will support that um i guess i need to have your help adam because our mac At GeekGab WordPress.
Everything borks when I turn on Markdown editing.
I don't, and I don't, in the, in the WYSIWYG editor, like it just won't show things anymore.
So, uh, yeah, there's some, there's some JavaScript like, you know,
thing, butting heads together, I'm sure. But, uh, but yeah.
Interesting. All right. Yeah. I got to get back into Markdown for sure.
So you mentioned David Sparks. I believe he even wrote a field guide on.
I think he might have a Markdown, Markdown field guide. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
So, which is a digital book that will teach you all kinds of things.
I put it, I put a link to all of these things in our lovingly handcrafted show
notes, which are available at macgeekup.com.
We do not write them in Markdown, at least not currently.
I'm starting to think all the formatting that we use in Google Docs,
WordPress also hates that.
So if I can get Markdown working, if we can get Markdown working,
then we just do the show notes in Markdown and we're good to go.
Uh but well and it notes kind of converts some
of it too i think you know does it okay yeah uh
but they're all there and and if you go to macgeekup.com you'll
see them you know organized by episode all the show notes they are searchable
and if you want them in your email box simply subscribe to our email we promise
we don't spam you unless you consider getting the episode show notes spam in
which case we absolutely spam you uh every week every week yeah like clockwork
now especially Especially that,
thanks to Allison Sheridan for nudging me on this.
I fixed the thing that caused the show notes email to be delayed.
It was a caching of the feed that is used to pull those.
And I just needed to fix that. Then I did.
As those of you who are subscribed now likely know, they actually come on time.
Dave, one other term you mentioned for most people know, many people know it,
but for the up and coming geeks who aren't quite there yet, WYSIWYG,
what you see is what you get.
Yeah, that's what you get with us. And we're sorry about that.
We are indeed. We humbly apologize. We're sorry.
At this point. For those of you that choose to watch us, what you see is what you get.
And you have our deepest. And in this case, hey, what you hear is what you get. Sorry about that.
How about I take us to Jim and get us out of there? Yeah, ripcord.
Yeah. So Jim writes in. He says, hi, guys. I recently rearranged.
Let me back up and say this particularly hit close to home because this sounds
exactly like something I would do to myself and then have to go to Dave and go, please help.
Hi, guys. I recently rearranged my desk and in the process disconnected my Synology
NAS 718 from both power and ethernet connection.
And when I reconnected, I tried to log in from a bookmark I had previously created.
No luck because the IP address had changed from what it previously had been.
I did a quick search and came across a Synology knowledge base article entitled,
how do I find my Synology NAS via web assistant or Synology assistant?
The simplest and quickest quickest way for me was to type find.synology.com
into my browser, and in a few seconds, it had located my NAS.
I noted the IP address, updated my Safari bookmark, and logged in and on to the next task.
Thanks to all of the MGG crew for all you do. I started listening sometime before
episode 10 and have listened ever since.
You can't go back and listen to the first nine? Come on.
This is what you may have cost me a few bucks here and
there to buy some new toys you saved me a lot more money and time
than i can measure with your quick tips cool stuff found and answers
to listener questions rat gox rock
do you know what rat gox means pete it's a
term that jim came up with i i feel like
we workshopped it together but this is definitely a jim thing it
is reasonable and trusted geeks of
choice that's us
exactly yeah yeah that's
it and so i obviously i wanted to uh
bring that along to everybody uh as well
and and the other thing you can do obviously is put tail scale that'll help
you find it though that isn't a good local local thing but you can put tail
scale on your sonology the other thing i did is i went into my my router and
took the MAC address of my Synology drive and hard assigned it an IP address,
so that no matter what I did, as soon as it sees that MAC IP address,
it brings me back to that 1.2.
Got it. Yes, that makes sense. Yeah, of course. Yeah, so a DHCP reservation
essentially is what it is. So based on the MAC address of my drive.
Yeah, I do that for all of my devices on my router.
Yeah. Just because I like to know where things are. Do you do it for your phones,
Adam? I do, yeah. Really?
And I have a document, a Markdown document.
There you go. It tells me where each one is. Oh, yeah. What each one's IP address
is. I have a spreadsheet.
This is, oh my gosh, how have we gone 1026 episodes without ever having this conversation?
I have the same thing in a spreadsheet, which I like because I have the IP address
that I assigned to it, the DNS name of the device,
because I want to assign it, you know, like, yep, yep, the name, correct.
Correct, and I want that to be the same no matter what.
And then I have the Mac address in there, and then I have a notes field.
And so it's all, you know, a spreadsheet lets me keep it in columns and all
of those things. But yes, absolutely. I have the same exact thing, yeah.
Yeah, absolutely. I need to update mine. I haven't done it in a while,
but I find it really helpful to know.
Like, I'll assign Debbie, you know, .10 through .19 and me .20 through .29, that sort of thing.
And I'll know that my computer is, you know, and hers is 11 and mine is 21,
my phone is 22 and hers is 12 and such. So if I ever head to SSHN.
I know where they are without even having to go look it up. Yeah.
I do that part too. I have all mine in ranges.
So like my media devices are all in one range. My networking equipment's all
in one range. My iPhones are all in one range. My Macs are all in one range.
Yeah, that's how I broke it up. Yep. Yes, I did the same thing. Yep.
Yep. And I'll re-ask the question that I asked a few weeks ago.
Is anal retentive hyphenated?
Well it's it like but this is super helpful um
it is yeah it's a great way to know where your
stuff is yes you'll be able to access it
in the event your computer locks up and you want to ssh in
from your iphone you can do it yeah i don't
i only i don't do it with my iphone and
and the umbrella statement for that is i don't do it
for devices that i would never
want to connect to as like
a server or a network resource so and that's
only it's not that i have anything there's nothing
bad about doing it for your iphones it's just that that's
more work uh you know and
so i don't need to know what ip
address my iphone uh is on like it that doesn't matter to me i'm not saying
it's bad if it matters to you it's just for me i'm okay but i want all of my
desktop macs I even do it with my laptops because I will sometimes want to connect to those.
So my Macs all have reserved IPs and my disk stations do, you know, those kinds of things.
Obviously my router, but that sort of goes without saying.
And some other things that get, like printers for sure get their own IPs.
I'm trying to think if there's anything else that, like I give them to,
I mean, I guess I could bring up the spreadsheet and then I could tell you.
While you do that, I have a question. Am I the only noob who uses Synology Disk Assistant?
Because going back to the original question, that's often how I find my Synology.
Is that the little app you run on your Mac?
Yeah. Yeah. And then it just launches the IP. Yeah.
There's nothing wrong with that. Oh. I didn't know the app existed.
Oh. Yeah. I don't run it. I mean, I have it. Because I'm a noob.
I'm a noob. Yeah, there's nothing wrong with that.
It's like being a noob is like that. We are all noobs about certain things.
Like nobody, none of us, none of the three of us here and none of us listening
can be an expert and knowledgeable about all the things, even all the things.
Apple, it's just not possible. There might've been a day where it was, but that day is gone.
All my switches, my, my smart network switches get, uh, IP addresses.
Is those however i hard code into the
switch i do make a reservation for them but they
are hard coded into the switch so that this if
the switch comes up even if my router is down i can still connect to the switch
at the ip address that i know it will be at so oh that's good that's good advice
yeah yeah yeah so one other quick question though dave along those lines as
you know i was I was trying to do some troubleshooting here at our Florida place this week.
And what I couldn't determine was whether my modem was good or not.
Do you remember that? Is it that one dot 100 dot 100 dot one?
What is generally the standard modem interface?
Where is it? 192 dot 168 dot. Yeah. So for a DOCSIS cable modem,
this is not the case with any other fiber ISD, whatever, nothing.
Why was I going to say ISDN? Does anybody have an ISDN connection anymore?
I've got a 300 baud modem. Yeah, thanks. That's great. I've got an acoustic.
Old radio stations, maybe? I've got an acoustic coupler. Yeah.
It's 192.168.100.1 and
i i will even put a link to this in the
in the show notes but um yeah yeah
yeah it's the doxys so my modem was definitely bad then
because i could not i was trying that and i couldn't get
it and yeah you know they were trying to send a recess signal and all that which
ultimately i just finally gave up and went over to t-mobile and did the home
internet gateway and so let's talk about that i mean this shows off the rails
already which is great like we're all learning things it's like off the rails is relative term um but,
you texted me while i was in mexico and you started sending me speed tests,
and and you're like this is on t-mobile i'm like oh did you
move from like mint mobile to t-mobile
for your international travels and you're like no no
no i still meant this is my home internet it in
at your house in florida and uh
i was like oh that's cool that's great and i'm
you know in mexico i'd probably i didn't have
my phone with me while we were out flinking but i probably had just
finished flinking so you know i had a couple of cocktails in me or whatever
um i found this this this year i really liked drinking mezcal and soda with
lime um yeah yeah adds a little flavor to it through there yeah and carbonation
if you order tequila soda and lime at the at the the pool bar,
you'll get bottom-of-the-barrel tequila.
From the well.
But Mezcal, they don't have that in the well. So that's got to come off the shelf.
It didn't dawn on me until yesterday. I'm like, wait a minute.
Pete's going to be doing the podcast from Florida, and he's on that T-Mobile
connection. It's no longer wired.
Is this going to be a disaster? Sure.
I knock on wood counting on Pete. But we're 40 minutes, 45 minutes into the recording of the show.
We're an hour and 20 into our connection here. And again, I just knocked on wood, but it's fine.
Yeah. Knock wood. It has been rock solid all week long. It's just crushing it.
I'm streaming a 4k video.
Mac was playing on his iPad in his room. The, the computers were going full steam.
It, it, you know, do me a favor,
open up, open up a terminal window okay and
just type ping space www.apple.com i
just because i'm i'm curious how consistent how low
and also how consistent your pings
are now you're on a wi-fi connection yes so there's there's also that which
is you know oh i forgot to tell it i forgot to tell it to stop okay control
c will tell it to stop yeah but the highest that i've seen is um hang on did
it go I'm just curious what the range that you're seeing is on that.
The lowest is down in the 36 milliseconds.
The highest I've seen is 47 milliseconds.
Oh, okay. Oh, there's a 51. Sorry. Okay, but it's not jumping up into the hundreds.
No, not even close. That's really good. Oh, man.
Yeah, this thing is rocking it.
And if you put it on it's 65
a month but if you put it on auto pay like of
a debit card or out of your checking account it's 60 bucks a month yeah of course
and it's unlimited data up and I think it advertises up to 500 megabits up and
down but or uh down and I think I forget what the number up is but it's look
I uploaded uh I recorded so there I was and I uploaded a a.
The gigabyte show um i forget
how many may i think about a gigabyte show in in
under three minutes yeah that's amazing like
that that that really i mean we knew
that when 5g came out that what you just described was going to be a reality
like a workable reality eventually and and you know we also knew that this was
about the timing of it so like and it's not available in every area when When you go to their site,
you have to put in your zip code and your address and it'll go, eh, not yet. Yeah.
So, and I suppose you could put it in your RV and travel around with it,
but I think they would shut you down.
Because you're going to start crushing other people's areas with that if it's
not up to, if their network isn't up to snuff there. Yeah, right, right.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I do know of people who use it in RVs and I mean it,
you know, you don't tell them that's what you're doing.
Don't get caught but um yeah huh that's pretty good so yeah what was that pete
i was i was gonna i was gonna tell him about no it's fine i think it was a delay
from my internet yeah no no that was on me that was on me go ahead oh yeah yeah
it's fine no i was just saying so yeah just agreeing i'm out of the way.
All right, folks, have you ever felt like your Mac was a superhero with one
hand tied behind its back because you couldn't run your Windows apps?
Enter our sponsor, Parallels Desktop, the tech equivalent of giving your Mac a utility belt.
I've zipped through the Parallels setup faster than a quick reboot.
And let me tell you, it's like watching your Mac flex muscles you didn't even
know it had. Suddenly, Windows-only apps appear like Power BI.
And yes, even games like Fortnite are running smoothly without ever having to leave macOS.
And for those of you craving the unmatched prowess of Excel or PowerPoint on
Windows or itching to dive into Windows-exclusive gaming realms without betraying
your Mac love, of course, Parallels Desktop is your secret passage.
No more carrying around two laptops or sinking nightmares. None of it.
It's like having your cake and eating it, too, with a side of extra frosting. Mmm.
You ever just eat the frosting? That's kind of like what Parallels Desktop is.
Web developers, imagine coding and testing across platforms without the desk clutter.
Students, picture running Office 365 and AutoCAD without begging your budget for mercy.
Don't get caught wishing for what could be. unlock your Mac's full potential
and save yourself 15% with code MGG one five at parallels.com slash MGG.
That's code MGG one five at parallels.com slash MGG to save yourself 15%.
And with a 30 day money back guarantee, it's like trying on a new tech suit with zero risk.
So why wait? Give your Mac the power to do it all. All parallels.com slash MGG
code MGG 15 saves you 15% and our thanks to parallels for sponsoring this episode.
All right. Chris writes, uh, after at least 10 years of following,
uh, of listening to Mac cast, I followed you over to MGG and I'm enjoying the
tips and tricks. Amazing. Okay.
I have a question, he says, about using the Apple 27-inch Thunderbolt display on a Windows laptop.
I absolutely love these displays, and despite their age, I think they're some
of the best displays out there.
None of the PC monitors seem as crisp and clear as these, which is why I bought
three of them. Good for you.
One on my 2012 Mac Mini and another used to run on my 2019 16-inch MacBook Pro.
Unfortunately, I changed jobs, and now I have to use a Windows laptop for work.
It's a Dell Latitude 7440, which, according to Dell, has two Thunderbolt 4 ports
with DisplayPort, Alt Mode, USB-C, USB 4 power delivery.
I tried with the Apple Thunderbolt 3 USB-C to Thunderbolt 2 adapter,
which I used on the 16-inch MacBook Pro, but I'm not getting any picture,
and there isn't a power button or indicator on the Thunderbolt display.
I would think that the TB4 port is backward compatible with both TB2 and TB3.
Do you have any tips for making this work adam
he followed you here you want to try this yep yep yep
well first of all chris thanks for coming along for the
ride we really like having you here and i like being here so that's great we
can all come together um thunderbolt 4 definitely should be backward compatible
with thunderbolt 3 and thunderbolt 2 that you're absolutely right there so this
baffled me a little bit as well i did some googling and i found a thread over on dell's website,
and it's possibly related to an update they did to their Dell firmware back
in 2021 that is causing the displays to no longer authorize with the system.
It seems like it's still unresolved, so who knows if they're ever going to address it.
I would imagine, I agree with you on those displays, amazing displays.
My guess is like Dell probably probably doesn't care too much that it broke
a really old Thunderbolt display, but that's just my opinion.
Yeah. Huh?
That's too bad. Um, I mean, it sucks.
Did it break? I guess my question is, did it break all Thunderbolt displays or just Apple's?
No, it sounds like it broke a bunch of Thunderbolt displays. Okay, okay.
I don't know if it's only a certain era or not.
Well, we know that Apple sometimes does things, you know, a little bit different than the standard.
I would have been surprised to learn that they did Thunderbolt different from
the standard because they've been really good about that. In fact,
Apple has been sort of the shining star of following the Thunderbolt spec.
We wouldn't need Thunderbolt 4 if everybody followed the spec like Apple did
with Thunderbolt 3. But, you know, be that as it may.
Yeah. We'll link to the article. You can read through the full thing.
I didn't fully read through it, but it was very obvious that it broke Apple's
display. So I don't know.
I would assume it broke multiple Thunderbolt displays. And maybe with specific
controllers or, you know, who knows? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Huh. Interesting. That's too bad.
That's too bad. I'm wondering, like, is there, would there be a reason that
putting a Thunderbolt dock in the middle, right?
Between, you know what I'm saying? Like a dock that has passed through.
Yeah, maybe if it had its own controller or something like that. Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. I don't know. I mean, like, I realize the display has its own Thunderbolt
dock in it because it's not actually a Thunderbolt display.
It's a DisplayPort display that has, you know, that's on the other side of a
Thunderbolt dock. Right. So, yeah.
Huh.
Huh. I don't know. It's just something to ponder.
Feedback at MacGeekUp.com if you know the answer or you have any tips or anything
like that. Or you can join the Discord at MacGeekUp.com slash Discord.
Love to have you in both places.
Time to go to Mace. Let's do it. You want to take that one, Adam?
Yeah. Actually, I interrupted. I know. Adam's going to read it for you.
Oh, I knew that. I'm going to read it for you. I knew that. Got it right here.
All right. Mace says that my wife got four suspicious emails in rapid succession this morning.
My question is about her iCloud, at iCloud.com email address.
Us. I wanted to change the password to it, but I couldn't find a reference to
that password in LastPass.
Do you get access to your iCloud.com email via your Apple ID password?
Is that the Apple ID password that I would want to change?
Absolutely. That's it. So what you need to do is go to your Apple ID account
page, and that's appleid.apple.com, and sign in with your current Apple ID and password.
And under the sign in and security section, click on password.
And you'll be asked to enter your current password, then a new password, and confirm it.
And after changing the password, you'll need to sign back in with your new password
on all your devices that use your Apple ID. And if you've turned on stolen device
protection, you have now more problems. More delays, at least.
Yeah, more delays and hoops through which you must now jump.
So remember, it affects all your Apple services that use your Apple ID,
not just your iCloud email.
So you need to update your password on the other devices, as I said.
And then you're going to have to go in here.
The note says, because stolen device protection is turned on,
some of your account information can't be changed on the web.
You'll have to go change your password and use it on other devices,
be it your phone and that sort of thing.
You can't just change. You're going to have to change it on those devices as
well, is my understanding.
I think the simple solution is turn off stolen device protection.
Wait it out, accomplish the change, wait, wait out the weight and then turn
it back on it. That would be the simplest approach.
I do want to add something to this. Everything you said is correct, right?
Like if you want to change your iCloud password, that's your iCloud email password
is your iCloud password.
All of that stuff is true. There's an asterisk there. If you're using like an
IMAP client to connect to it, you'd have to create a less secure password for that.
But that's a whole different thing. Um, however, receiving
spam or phishing emails into your email address is not necessarily just the
receipt of them is not necessarily cause for alarm enough that I would go change my password.
Like, if I clicked on a link and it asked me to log into my iCloud account and
I realized, oh, my gosh, I just typed my password in to not Apple's website, then, yes, 100%.
But just because you received a piece of email, spam, phishing,
legitimate email from the folks at Feedback at MacGeekUp.com,
just receiving a piece of email does not mean that there has been any security risk.
Even if you get that email from your own address, if it appears to be from your
own address, it, it could be that someone got access, but that's the hard,
hard, hard way of doing it.
The easy way is to just spoof your email address and send an email as though it were from you.
And if someone sets up their own mail server, then that's what they get to do. So, um, yeah.
Yeah. Spoofing is surprisingly easy to do.
Oh, yeah. Yeah. It's getting harder with all of like the the SPF and DMARC stuff
that you can put on domains, which is good.
Yep. It and and iCloud domains are Apple does do a decent job of protecting
its iCloud domains with those pieces of tech.
So like it would be less likely to get phishing emails from an iCloud domain.
Or if you did, they'd probably be marked as spam because they're not matching
the SPF or the, the, the DMARC stuff or whatever it is. So, yeah.
I got a surprisingly effective phishing email this week myself,
and it was ostensibly from Dick's Sporting Goods.
Take a survey and we'll give you a, uh, this cooler, you know?
Okay, great. I took the quick survey and I'm like, all right.
All you have to do is pay a $7 shipping fee.
Okay and then started looking at it and then i
went oh yeah i should have probably checked out the
url yeah long before i got to this point but
what they're all going on basic human greed yep
always is it always is so um
yeah but uh so frustrating
yep like oh almost got me be diligent
out there yeah and and you know
you mentioned the first thing they did was ask you to fill out a survey be careful
when filling out surveys that you are filling them out for the source that you
believe has asked for that data because with enough information from you from from multiple sources.
Anything you might divulge seemingly innocuously in a survey could,
potentially be used to, you know, as a social engineering attack to get someone
to change your password on your behalf or, or whatever. So just think about that.
Yeah. Yeah. Building quite the profile for them. Yeah. You're building,
right. You're letting, or you, yeah, yeah, exactly. Yep.
Any thoughts on that, Adam, or you want to take us to Michael? No, we're good.
Let's go to michael right because he's he's got a very weird
weird audio bug okay
uh and it was something that uh it was over on he linked us over to uh article
at mac rumors but apparently there's this long-standing audio bug with the balance
on the audio where it can just randomly randomly fade,
you know, so the left-right balance in your sound settings on your Mac,
and it could just randomly fade.
And I guess this bug, he says, has been around for about...
12 years now, and Apple just hasn't addressed it. Yeah, so he was asking us
about that, and I basically said, well, that's odd to me and interesting at the same time.
I've actually personally never experienced this bug in 10 years,
at least that I'm aware of.
And so the bug is, Apple says, in some cases, audio balance may unexpectedly
drift toward the left or right channel.
This can happen if you rapidly press the volume up or down button keys while
the computer's microprocessor is under heavy load.
So it's like a very specific set of circumstances.
So like your Mac has to be cranking and then you have to be physically using
the volume up and down key on your keyboard and pressing that very, very rapidly.
So yes, it's odd that Apple has a bug that's been out there for 12 years,
but as a developer and knowing probably the massive list of bugs that Apple has,
my assumption is this happens so rarely and to so few people that it just keeps
getting bumped down the list.
You know, they have a list and they prioritize that list. And they're probably
going like, yeah, this is really annoying and we'd like to fix this.
But, you know, we've got bigger fish to fry.
That's really weird. I'm going to, it's probably, it probably has nothing to
do with core audio, but I'm just going to blame it on Apple,
still not quite getting core audio quite right because I can.
Um there is an app mentioned
in that mac rumors article from tuna belly called balance
lock and so if you experience this
or if you just want to you know play it
safe go get balance lock it's available for free in the mac app store and uh
the folks at tuna belly are are trusted they are are rat gox as well reasonable
and trusted geeks of choice and so uh i i haven't used this app but i have no
issue with them but yeah that's interesting.
I actually see this now as an Easter egg. Like, I want to see if I can make
this happen. Yeah, exactly.
But good luck on it. Like, I was thinking, I bet this bug has moved even farther
down Apple's list with Apple Silicon because it's less likely for us to be.
Good luck loading up that chip. Right.
Pixelmator. Every time I launch Pixelmator, I have it opening like six documents
that each have hundreds of layers and images.
They're all the episode images with a little bit of foreshadowing to the next
question unintentionally.
But all the episode images. So, you know, it has all of the historical data in there.
I archive them off like once every few years.
But they're big. and so i even on
my mac studio here when i launch pixelmator my cpu's
peg for you know five seconds
or something while it which is great i would if an
app needs to use the cpu by all means okay i think that's
what it's there for so that might be a way
but of course i don't use an audio device
on this that the mac has control
over the balance on so i would never
have have experienced it here either uh yeah even
even if like i don't even think i my volume
i don't have my volume knobs working if another tip
you use external uh you know non-inbuilt audio devices like you know an external
interface or whatever and it does not support the max volume controls But you would like it to.
You can do that with Rogamiba's SoundSource, which is an awesome little app.
It does that and many other things.
In fact, you can have it where alerts, you could do this on the Mac too,
so that's a bad example, but you could have it where one app has its sound go
out one device, another app has its sound go out a different device.
You can have the balance of apps be different with SoundSource.
It's a great little utility.
But kind of the main thing that brings most people in is I want to be able to
use my max volume buttons on the keyboard with a not inbuilt thing.
And SoundSource will do that. Those forks over at Rogue Amoeba,
they kind of understand sound.
Yeah. I wish Apple would listen to them more than they already do.
I'm sure they do. But about the core audio stuff, I had an issue.
And it like, it happened during an episode. I'm sure it will happen again,
unless Apple has just fixed it without acknowledging it again,
but where everything resets core
audio wise, and that throws logic for a tizzy, which I use as my mixer.
So that's why, I don't know, it was three or four weeks ago where I had to like
reset logic to come back online and audibly.
And, uh, I mentioned it to Rogan me because I thought it had something to do
with loopback or, or, or something else. and they're like, oh yeah,
no, we see this too. I'm like, oh, that's cool.
I'm like, keep reporting it to Apple. I'm like, yep, same.
Okay. Well, I'm wondering if either of you have experienced this or any of our audience has.
This is on the Mac, but it's on the iPhone. I listen to a podcast or two.
I don't know if you guys do or not, but I have noticed recently for no apparent
reason, I'm not touching the volume buttons or anything like that,
the volume will go up on me or down on me. And it's not ambient sound with my
AirPods in. What app do you use to listen to podcasts?
Downcast, usually. Occasionally, Apple Podcasts. Usually, it's Downcast.
I can't figure out why it's doing it.
I can't reliably replicate it, but it happens frequently.
That's a geek challenge. There you go. Geek challenge. I don't think I've experienced that.
I mean, if I have, I probably, without even thinking about it,
would just grab my phone and push the volume down.
You know what I mean? Yeah. I'm wondering if I have some setting somewhere down in there.
But the ambient noise has not gone up, therefore causing my...
Volume volume increased but yeah who knows
um maybe i just thought i'd ask if you
had that so and one other thing folks i
want you to understand that it's a.
Thing of beauty to watch while talking about rogue amoeba's sound
source dave was updating the show notes types
out sound source goes to the web page grabs the link and
puts it in there all without missing a beat it's it's a
thing of beauty to watch producing producing the
show whilst uh talking on the show I will
I did I did all those things except one of them
I didn't go the order was different
I typed the word sound source google docs has a
cool thing and this is a quick tip I highlighted the
word sound source and then I hit
command k and it google docs
that command k is the shortcut to add a link to text
but if you're logged in in addition
to having the option to just type or paste a link
in it will search google for the
text that you have highlighted and in most
cases this being one of them it like sound
source from rogue amoeba shows up on the list so i just get to select it
so that's how it happened then i clicked it which opened
in my web browser and that's what you saw
and you put up on the screen for folks who are watching so there you go
so there there are shortcuts to my madness here
um google docs is cool yeah but to
be able to talk and type and do all that it's yeah
it's a thing of beauty to watch yeah sometimes though i realize
either i have no idea what one of you said.
Because i got into that like you know the multitasking myth right yep other
times i have no idea what i just said because i've been doing that and both
of those things are scary when you're releasing a show that goes out to tens
of thousands of people Right?
I can't tell you how many times I've gone back and listened to one of So There
I Was and go, I totally missed that while I'm editing the show.
I missed that because I was doing some production thing. And it's like, oh, that's awesome.
All right. Well, since we're on
the sausage making, you want to take us to Jason's question? I can do so.
Longtime listener and love the show as always. It would be awesome to see the
prompts that you use to create the show album artwork.
The artwork captures the show and the title so well.
Perhaps simply just including in the show notes, I
consistently see the artwork and wonder what was
was the prompt they used to create that the latest egg
and chicken problem the best reverse engineered prompt
i could find was painting of a teacher and a
chicken in a classroom creative vfx science poster funny cartoonish identical
prime lens no yellow color eggshell color uh hisham hibachi this kind of smart
epic diptych uh in a lab reduce duplicate content very nerdy doesn't seem to get it right.
Are you all using Dolly 3 via ChatGPT Plus for creation?
And because I love to create more work for Dave, I promised all the listeners
that Dave would put in every show note, every prompt, every...
You know, it's a good idea.
It's totally fine. It was interesting reading this because I often do when I'm
inspired by something we've said in the show that I think, oh,
this would make a good title.
Let's see what with the artworks is I will create in real time that the artwork
while we're doing the show, because of that, the prompts are much shorter than you might think.
But I, but I, I consider in this instance, it's not that I have an image in
mind that I am trying to get chat GPT to draw for me.
If that were the case, I would give it, you know, a paragraph full,
like, you know, like Jason said, yeah.
And then it will ignore half of them anyway. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
exactly. It doesn't, and it especially doesn't iterate on artwork well at all.
Like if I tell it, oh yeah, what you just made is awesome. Make this one change.
What you get next is remarkably different. It's almost unrelated.
So the one for last week for 1026, all I said was I'd wanted,
I wanted two options at once.
And i did i yeah uh well you're
showing this week's pete so no never mind it's fine but it's fine you can leave
that out because because this is probably what will be this week's image but
last week i wanted just two options and i didn't want to have to go back and
tell it make me another option so i said make me two wide aspect ratio images
that illustrate the egg and chicken problem,
humorously different from the chicken and egg problem right
i i wanted it to be the reverse first
of that make it nerdy if you want and definitely make it
funny and that's that's what i said and
uh and and that's it you know and and i got i got the first thing that i got
was the image that we wound up using with the the two eggs being nerdy in their
respective laboratories and was like well that's kind of what i asked for but
you know what that's good enough and so i thought Well.
It's my next prompt was great.
Now make just one image. And it did.
And that one you folks didn't see. But if you're watching the video,
I'm scrolling through it now and on chat GPT.
And this looks like the Senate, you know, like the Senate chambers of old with
chickens and eggs as the people.
And it's it's weird. You know, I thought about using that one.
And then I said, make one image that looks more like the right half of the first one.
And it kind of did that for me. And I almost did that.
And this was a chicken with an egg floating in the air and a laboratory with
beakers and that sort of thing.
And by that point, I was like, all right, I have three choices.
I'm going to pick one of these. And I wound up picking the first one. And off we went.
So that was last week. This episode, which at this moment in time has not yet
been published for me, but at this moment in time for most of you listening,
it has been published for you. So you will know what image we have chosen.
But I thought, oh, this idea of rat gox, like that's kind of funny,
like reasonable and trusted geek of choice.
So I said, create a wide aspect ratio image of rat gox and make it funny.
And then in parentheses, I put for reference, that means reasonable and trusted geeks of choice.
And uh it made me probably
the image that we'll use with a bunch of people in a room
some of them nerdier than others it's a very cluttered room
and it says rat gock at the top and
it actually spelled it correctly it spelled rat gock correctly the text underneath
it if i leave it in there is absolutely not even close to right but it's gibberish
it's gibberish right uh but you know it's it's got the vibe and i said amazing
make another please which i've learned and they just keep telling it to iterate.
And then we get this one of like a scientist with his head in the clouds and
a couple of dogs. It's like rat ears too almost. Oh yeah.
Yeah, maybe. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So let's see, make it rat ear.
So I don't know what they'll happen with that. It takes, I don't know,
it takes about 30 seconds for it to make an image.
So I don't know what's going to happen with this. But yeah, I'm using Dolly...
I am not, again, I'm using chat GPT or Dolly as a collaborator in this,
not as grunt work, right?
And there's a difference because I'm willing to kind of go with whatever it
might show me within reason.
And that's unlike where if I tell it to, well, I know what image we're using.
The rats just came, the nerdy rats just came up. And these, of course,
are the ones that you're going to see on the episode show notes.
But if you want to see the rest, you can watch the YouTube video of this segment,
and it'll have it in there.
But, yeah, I'm willing to just kind of, like, you know, let the process evolve,
and whatever happens, happens. Gosh, that's freaking brilliant.
Right? The cheese and everything. Cheese floating.
Nuclear symbol on the balloon. Oh, yeah. It's great.
My favorite still is go look at episode 1009, folks. folks. That was where you have our permission.
And we've mentioned the term goat rodeo and oh boy.
Yep. Yep. Almost broke out laughing like this. Yeah. Mid episode. Yeah.
Cause Pete can, Pete and Adam can see my screen, my shared screen all the time,
even if it's not on the screen, it's in like a little preview window for,
for those of us, you know, recording the show.
And yeah, so it's, you know, what, what was that? 10 Oh nine.
You said I'll link to it in the show. so that's now
linked in the you have our permission in the show notes yeah yupper
so you know there was
uh we didn't get to any cool stuff found other than
the things that we kind of casually mentioned that's all
right we'll do cool stuff found maybe we'll start with cool stuff found for
10 28 yeah anything else that uh either one of you wants to mention if there
is a cool stuff found like now now's the time we're at the hour 15 16 mark so
we're technically kind of ready to a wrap up, but you know, if there's something cool,
otherwise we save it for next week. You let me know anything.
Well, I'll mention, you know, I, I got from, uh, Mirai, M I R A I.
Yep. The, uh, the next generation of their speaker that, uh.
That crispens the audio, the voice audio for the people that are hard of hearing,
uh, what little I've done playing with.
I'll, I'll do a full review obviously for the, uh, for the channel,
but I've have found that maria murray m-i-r-a-i
uh speaker is those things
are just fantastic they for someone
who's trying to lose his hearing when there is ambient
noise i find it so difficult to hear the spoken word and these speakers just
make them so crisp and clear amazing audio is fantastic so uh if you know if
you have someone in your home who is uh starting to lose their hearing what
my the first one i ever got i've got on my mother's tv in the nursing home and it makes it.
It makes it so she's able to hear that's great
her hearing isn't horrible but it isn't great and
she's able to hear so my speakers are fantastic so
there's a cool stuff found for you yeah all right yeah what's
solved that hearing thing for me with movies is
the vision pro or using my airpods pro
that's how i resolved that but that's not very uh
that's not very social like you can't you
can't be right you know be right so this is a great option
for that yeah protect your hearing folks uh do
do everything you can to to
protect your hearing when you are and i i use
on my apple watch and this is
not just available on the ultra it's available on um certainly
the series 5 and later maybe even before that uh
right on the as a complication i have
the db meter and that db
meter on the apple watch is astonishingly accurate
i've compared it against pro level db meters and
it's usually within one or two db that's a
pretty big variance don't get me wrong but it's
close enough that uh it you know you'll know are you in the danger zone or not
and you know if you're in anything above like 88 db for an extended period of
time it it will take a toll on your hearing and,
you know, earplugs are inexpensive.
They are, uh, you know, and they're easy to keep with you.
I mean, you can get, you can spend, I don't know, whatever 150 bucks on custom
fit earplugs that are super comfortable and, you know, make the sound just sound
like you turned down the volume and they're amazing.
But for, you know, between 15 and $40, You can get universal fit earplugs that are fantastic.
A lot of people like the eargasm, uh, earplugs that, uh, that are available
on like Amazon and, and the sort, uh, what are they cost now on Amazon? They're $42.
People really, really like these. Um, you know, there's, there's,
there's all, all kinds of great earplugs out there, but yeah, just protect you.
I'll put, I'll put more in the show notes. I will flesh this out with, with more earplugs.
I've, you know, I always use the little foamies and double hearing protection when I fly in Harriers.
And the problem is everybody, all my buds who flew Harriers are in the same boat.
We all have this tinnitus or tinnitus, whatever your pronunciation is, that it, it's horrible.
Even wearing double hearing protection, that's that high bypass turbofan engine
that has a really high pitch sound.
Level to it and and that seems to
be where we're all stuck yeah that ringtone yeah for
me for me my mistake was going to
i didn't even think about it at the time until it was too
late um we did we went to a civil war
reenactment and they shot those cannons and
i didn't even realize it but about two weeks later i woke
up in the middle of the night tonight full tinnitus and i've had it ever since
and i'm convinced that that's where the damage
happened at least put you over the edge yeah yeah
yeah the um there's another ear
plug that i actually tested out and used while we were in mexico at those
concerts it's about in the price range ish
of the custom fits it's not custom fit
it's universal fit it's it's called the minuendo and it's
from a company called soundbrenner it's 170 bucks on amazon
what's cool about these very comfortable
very small they basically disappear into yours but
you can remove them it's not like it's a problem uh they have
a an adjustment slider on them
where you get to control how much it's
blocking and it goes from 7 db at
the lowest to 25 db at the highest
and that's pretty cool um to be
able to kind of dial that in you know i 25
is a lot and at an outdoor concert
and the band fish really really they respect
their audience i mean they they probably were at about 92
db most nights which is something.
You want to protect yourself from but it's not 105 db which i've seen some bands.
Do right uh and uh which is crazy because every 3 db doubles the amount of sound
so think about that right but uh you know even 90 yes i didn't know that it's logarithmic yeah yeah.
Okay. So that's why earlier when I said, you know, the difference of one or
two DB is, is substantial.
It is most humans can't hear a one DB difference, but most of us can hear a two DB difference.
Um, yeah, but, uh, you know, being able to adjust it and dial it in like,
oh, I only need like half down.
Okay. And looking at my watch and being like, all right, they're at 92.
So if I'm blocking about 15, that's great. And
15 is a good amount to block
for most concert goers um i
i yeah what about the frequency does
do all the frequencies get through because i find that you know obviously it's
with the sponges and stuff you lose a lot of the lower end and you
lose the high end you get i mean you get the lower end you keep the
lower end yeah yeah these the minuendos are
acoustically balanced so like the eargasms are
and so you you really get the you get
a decent sound okay um there was
another brand called loop loop earplugs and
i think they're still making them they are these my
family went nuts over these loop earplugs
uh for a long time lisa used them up
until she finally got custom fits uh but they
again they kind of have a little bit of a um
i don't know a like fashion bit
to them i don't know yeah yeah earring they
look like a little they're a little loop inside your
ear yeah it's um yeah so you
know but they they work really well they they sound good um so and matt straub
on x points out he uses his airpods pro and dave i know you've seen me at the
hockey games wearing my airpods pro for two reasons one is is the noise reduction
which is great yes and then the other is I can actually listen to the radio announcer's call.
About a minute and a half later, you know, what was that penalty for?
Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And you're right. Anything that seals your ear off, you know,
like regular AirPods are not going to protect you from outside sound.
AirPods Pro, which seal into your ear as long as you have a good seal,
will protect you from outside sound. and I'm being very careful to articulate this that way.
It's the same with like what I'm wearing to do the show, which are all clear in-ear monitors.
They will protect me from outside sounds. There is nothing other than,
you know, my own will that will protect me from not turning the volume of the
speaker up too loud and hurting my hearing, which you can also do with AirPods.
You can protect yourself from all the outside sounds you want and still damage
your hearing by cranking it up.
And I've heard you know people
in the music industry say oh yeah in-ear monitors are not a
form of hearing protection it's like that is so technically true and yet so
misleading because when used correctly they absolutely can help save your hearing
sure but if you turn them up to the same level that you're used to hearing without
them in uh maybe that's a bad idea it's It's actually worse, probably. It's worse.
Yeah. And like the folks at Sensophonics, Michael Santucci, Sensophonics makes in-ear monitors.
Michael Santucci is an audiologist and sort of very well-known and respected in the industry.
But they have a device that will measure what you are delivering to yourself
via your in-ear monitors so that you know. Yeah.
Yeah. It's not cheap. It's like 500 bucks.
But, you know, yeah. Yeah. So I don't remember what the name of that device is.
Um, plus the regular AirPods don't have active noise canceling, which is also helpful.
Well, you can't have active noise canceling unless you are sealing your ears
off from the outside. Correct. Yes.
Yeah. So, um, yeah.
All right. All right. Now it's so evidently. Yes. We had 10 more minutes of
stuff to talk about. It's time to go.
Thanks for hanging out with us everybody adam i'm sorry if we made you late for work today,
no we're good okay cool uh thanks to
cashfly for providing all the bandwidth to get the show from us
to you thanks to our sponsors of course parallels.com slash mgg with code mgg15
for 15 off backblaze.com slash mgg where you can start your no risk free trial
linkedin.com slash mgg where you can post your first job for free.
And thanks to you for listening.
That's really, like, of all the things that you can do to help us,
that is step one. There are more, but that's really step one.
Music.