It's time for Mac Geek Cab and Porthos John brings us our quick tip of the week
by saying if you are in iPhoto on your Mac and you don't see your recent photos
that you took on your phone, assuming you're using iCloud Photo,
it might be due to the fact that syncing is currently paused on your iPhone.
I have all the options set to allow cellular data, etc.
But still, I find my phone seems to pause photos syncing a lot.
But one reason it seems is that if I use quick camera access from the lock screen
without unlocking my phone, those don't want to sync until I unlock my phone, Wi-Fi or not.
The quick fix is to go into photos on my phone and at the bottom of the library,
I see a little line of text telling me whether or not syncing is paused and sometimes even why.
And a small link to resume it. Now, more quick tips like this,
plus your questions answered today on MacGeekGab 1029 for Monday, March 18th.
What is the day? Oh, I know. I pulled it up. It's National Sloppy Joe Day, folks. 2024.
Music.
Greetings folks and welcome to MacGeekGab, the show where you send in your quick
tips like that, you send in some cool stuff found, you send in your questions,
we try to answer your questions, we share your quick tips and your cool stuff
found, we put it all together into an agenda,
so that each of us, every single time we get together, will learn at least five new things.
Sponsors for this episode include linkedin.com slash
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rule them all we'll talk more in depth about each of those in a little bit for
now here i almost said that i was at home but i'm not in rainy austin texas
at least as of this morning while we're recording i'm dave hamilton and here
in south dakota i'm adam christiansen.
And guten tag all from landstuhl germany
it's pilot pete good to be back with you guys in
spite of my internet which has been atrocious at every stop on this trip it's
been horrible so hopefully i'll hang in for most of this show yeah i'm getting
blistering upload speeds like 0.8 megabits a second oh that's nice pete that's
great yeah 1024 milliseconds ping times.
That's uh that's nice yeah
so if i digitize everybody will now
know why you couldn't possibly have planned
it better to digitize during the word digitize pete
so that's yep there you go i
planned it i'm still stuck on sloppy joes
and dave's made me want one now and i probably haven't had
one in years yes same i can't even remember the last time
i had one well right when i was a a kid for sure the
thing is having a sloppy joe if you haven't had one in
a number of years could be like an awkward
moment maybe you've forgotten how to eat it maybe you've forgotten
how to make it and the good news is though in addition
to being national sloppy joe day it is
also awkward moments day so perfect
yeah i think so yeah i gotta do
it now so one of my earliest memories in life it was
an awkward moment when i was eating a sloppy joe i was
at another kid's birthday party i was probably about four and
i was horrified because i didn't have a napkin and i was covered
in sauce and it was it was like
i couldn't i was frozen until this kid's mother came over
and cleaned me up i might have been three or four what sort
of horrible hamburger burger is this wow no i
didn't form it right it's falling apart that's um
aptly named i wonder i wonder i.
Wonder if these two things are related pete uh maybe it's
all about you um yeah all
right uh so i'm here in austin for
south by southwest as i typically am
every year at this time and we've got a couple things
to talk about that i have found here uh some great
stuff it you know south by for those of you who don't
know is a conference for creators
uh it is a tech conference it
is a music conference it is a film conference
it is an education conference and
there's all kinds of things going on in addition to being there being sessions
about all of those topics there are
also those things that musicians perform films are
premiered tech is shown it's
all just all in one I joked to them that they created this conference specifically
for me once because it like hits all of the things that I kind of do I don't
make films but they make films about tech and music and so like that yeah.
It's been good. But I've I noticed something this week. Right.
And it's a quick tip. Like I'm going somewhere with this. They the you know,
we have our notifications on our phones. Right. As one does.
And I noticed that while I was out and about, like attending sessions or doing
things, many of these notifications I want to get.
I want to know when there's, you know, like I get a text message and I want
to know most of the things.
In fact, I don't want to be in do not disturb.
However, there were a series of notifications that I started getting that I
realized I wanted to ignore.
And I created what I now call my conference focus mode.
And specifically what I have turned off. I have used that focus mode to silence
notifications only from specific apps.
And those specific apps are things like home, my ring cameras,
my vacuum cleaners, all of those things that I don't need to know about in real
time being that I'm not at home.
You know, I'm not concerned, overly concerned. I mean, I always I'm always a
little concerned, but I'm not overly concerned about people being at my house
when they shouldn't be or whatever, you know, and but I don't need to know when
the garage door opens and closes.
I don't need to know when someone's in the driveway.
You know, I don't need to know when the humidifier in the bedroom runs out of water.
Like these are not things that are relevant to my life here in conference,
you know, in conference mode.
So I've been in conference mode all week and it really has worked out great
because it's let me get the things that I want to get that allow me to be productive
and focused on what I'm doing here.
So think about these things. You know, it at first I put myself in do not disturb.
And I'm like, I don't really want that, though. I want something more granular.
And i am i am constantly reminded
of the first time on this
show john asked me you know it with the ios
betas whatever version of ios it was that had conference
um i had focus modes in it yeah
and he was like you know what are those like are you using them i'm like
nah they're stupid it's dumb i i don't think it's going
to catch on whatever and obviously i i prove myself wrong every single single
day i i have a few set up but i have not really used them but i see the value
for a lot of a lot of people i mean part of my problem is i work from home i don't travel.
A lot so not a lot of scenarios where i actually need
that i think i have a work one and like a after work one yeah
um that i've played around with but i haven't really done a
lot with it but for for it for people who
you know really want to control that stuff and really want like i think it's
a really cool feature and the fact that they all sync and yes you know turn
things on and off and like really hunker down i mean i i i think it's a great
idea it's just you have to be that that type of person where you're disciplined
to like set them up and use them.
So I think for those people who are like that, and that's just not me,
I just recognize that's not me. But for people who want that,
like it's a really cool feature.
And that's why I thought it was going to be dumb for me, because I am generally
not that person, Adam, right?
But it's, I will create them. I do get frustrated at times, not all the time,
But I do get frustrated when my phone starts notifying me of things that I don't
want to be aware of in that moment.
Right. I'm trying to focus on one thing.
I, you know, may resemble some of the list of symptoms that describe ADHD.
Right. You know, so certainly there are there are times when I don't want to be distracted.
And so it's in those moments that I create my new focus modes.
Like I use, I use that frustration as the fuel to create one.
And one of my favorite ones, I've talked about it on the show is the one I call
nuclear, which just has only allows notifications from my nuclear family.
And that's it. And, you know, and a couple of other like very specific apps
that sort of are related to my, my family. And it works out great.
Like I, I turn that on. Sometimes I'll have that on all weekend, the nuclear mode.
Yeah. One thing I know, and I'm sorry, Pete.
So one thing I've known, I may be describing this improperly,
but I'll do my best with the focus modes.
I found that there seems to be no way to only exclude unknown callers.
I could be could be wrong.
I could be doing it wrong. I've tried several different ways.
But it seems to me that once I'm in any focus mode and the lock screen is on,
only the people I allow can get through.
And I haven't found one that allows all people in my contact list.
I could be wrong, but it seems to me that that's a.
Couldn't you just go into and I might I'm using my phone as my camera.
So I apologize for not being able to dig in. I'm traveling.
I don't have my spare phone camera set up.
But can't you just go into whatever that setting is in iOS?
There is a setting in iOS that says block unknown callers.
Yes. That's in the phone settings. Yeah. In the phone settings.
Thanks, Adam. Yeah. So that may be it.
But then I don't think that that blocks texts from Joe Biden and Donald Trump
and JFK and Margaret Thatcher and everybody else who's running for something.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. So.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I tried to cover every political.
Yeah, you did great. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
The problem with that setting is I sometimes forget to turn it off when I'm like I've had to do.
Yes. You know, get people to do work on the house or like, you know,
like and then I don't get calls.
And for whatever reason, a lot of times these days, it feels like I don't know
why people don't leave voicemails.
Yes. You know. Yeah. And that's not granular enough because you can turn it
on for an hour or until this evening or the end of this event.
I'd like to be able to, you know, turn it off in two hours and 26 minutes or something like that.
But I wonder, is there is it possible to automate that switch with a shortcut?
The answer is probably no.
Sure. But if it is, you can run a shortcut when you turn on and off a certain focus mode, right?
You can have a shortcut triggered by a focus mode.
You can. There you go. You can.
In fact, when I had it at one point, the StreamYard, I automatically turn on podcasting focus.
Right. Exactly. Cool. Yeah, exactly. There you go. Yeah. Yeah.
Grumpy Mike comments in real time here that he's pretty sure that JFK and Thatcher
are not running for office at this time.
And that's only because time is this relative thing. Like we live in all of the times, Grumpy Mike.
So it's all the same. It's all I was going to say, JFK Jr.
And then I didn't. And then then so I had to include Margaret Thatcher.
Of course. Yes, I got you. Who knows? They may be running for something else
somewhere else. That's the thing.
Parallel universe. Or just, you know, at a different time in our same timeline.
If you believe in it. Yes. Right. Yeah. Yeah.
All right. You want to take us, please, Adam? Yeah, to R and Doug.
For the love of all that's good and pure. Oh, please.
R and Doug says, I've set a yearly reminder to clean up my macOS catastrophes
system logs that Apple's developers
never saw fit to do because they invisibly eat up your disk space,
causing you to run out of disk and to be forced to delete stuff you really want
or buy a new computer here are the infinitely growing ones that I've found,
there are others no doubt others and it's these are log files that build up
in var logs from the root of your system the area in a hidden directory and
it's It's like core capture D, FSCK APFS log,
FSCK HFS log, the install log.
So all these different log files that would potentially build up.
And you might have different ones. Not everybody's going to have the same ones.
It's going to be dependent upon, I think, what you do on your system, right? Yep.
And we have a link in the show notes to a list of these files.
Do we give folks the dangerous tip, the keyboard shortcut, if you're in Finder?
Yeah, go ahead. Command-Shift-Period to toggle on and off invisible files in Finder and folders.
Just be careful because you don't want to be messing around too much or deleting
certain things, especially at the root system level on your Mac.
But you could go in and find these. So if you want to find these without having
to go through the terminal, You can pop open your computer's hard drive and
Command-Shift-Period, and you will see the VAR folder, and then you can go into
the logs folder and see which files you have there.
So you're right about this, that you could navigate there that way.
And I love the reminder of the quick tip of Command-Shift-Period to show hidden files.
Files uh the way i get there is
i go to the finders go menu and i choose go
to folder which is also command shift g and type
in slash var slash log you don't even have
to have hidden files turned on for that
to work so that that would be the other way to get there
so yeah i like it i like it
um for some
reason my fingers on my laptop don't
know my archive shortcut and i
i need to relearn that uh so but there you go uh pete you want to take us to
the next quick tip from from ben and porthos john yeah i'll do that uh so both
of them uh wrote in about this and porthos john writes it's probably been said
but it's worth saying again because i use it every.
There's a much faster way to attach photos to email or to upload to Discord, websites, etc.
On your Mac, as opposed to the old way of opening photos, dragging them out,
or exporting them to a folder on the desktop or somewhere else where you know where they are.
He says when you get the upload dialog scroll to the bottom left
sidebar and you'll see a media section
that has photos under it it also has movies
and music i think but tense media so if
you click that it will show your iphoto library and allow you
to select images to upload easy as pi no duplicating
slash exporting necessary and then
been followed up with and if you find it
easier to locate a picture and photos you can drag it from
there to the attached dialog in the other application so without having to export
you can just drag that thumbnail over to the export dialog and boom you got
it yeah so yeah and those came to us through discord Matt geek gab comm slash discord,
Mackie cab comm slash discord that's right yeah yeah yeah or you could send
Send something to us in feedback at feedback at macgeekgab.com.
Wait, did you say feedback at macgeekgab.com?
He heard me, Adam.
Yeah, feedback at macgeekgab.com. Yeah, that's just what it is.
All right. We have one from My Face is Too Big.
Love these call signs. In Discord. Yeah, they're great.
It's a time-honored thing. I know in, obviously in your world as a pilot,
the call signs are a thing and online, like when we were on bulletin boards,
nobody used their real name.
Like it's, everything was a sock account, folks.
It's how it was.
My face is too big writes,
Someone was recently expressing frustration about how man pages in the terminal are displayed.
Did you know that you can actually view any man page, and I'll put an asterisk
on that, some man pages, in their own separate windows with the default terminal app?
Go into terminal, simply click help, and type in whatever man page you are looking
for and click on it. Plus, they appear a different color, making it simple to
distinguish them from your active terminal window.
This is also searchable with Command-F.
And it's interesting.
I tried this, right? And it only works, it seems to only work for things that are built into macOS.
I'm not sure why that is but it
is so um but uh
the the other option is
well there's two other options one is to use a command called tldr uh that from
the terminal you have to install it so it would be brew install tldr and then
that shows you oh it's the right way to describe tldr It shows you, well, the TLDR,
the synopsis of how to use a command with some examples.
So it really distills the man page down into its essence that most people are
going to need. And then...
Porthos John says there is a TLDR app that is built for the iPad,
but because it's built for iPad and not restricted, it will work on any Apple
Silicon Mac in its own window.
So you can use this TLDR pages app
to pull up all of your TLDR pages in a separate window on your Mac, too.
So lots of lots of interesting ways of going about this. I think I mentioned
this last time, but I'll mention it again, because I just love this app and
I use it for way more things than just man pages.
But the dash app is an app for all documentation and for different languages, for different things.
I have there's there's an ascii character set one i think
there's a regex one and it's an app that
you can choose to download different types
of uh basically documentation
and have it locally so like the i have
the entire php command library locally in
here and i can search it and pull things up not only
that it has a little um section in
it where you can put code snippets and scripts and
things like that and fire them off with keyboard shortcuts and
stuff so interesting great great little app and
it's on set up and of course so if you have
set up you can get it and what remind remind us again say the name of that app
one more time out of dash dash yep the dash app and for those who are new to
the show and there's a couple of you after keep keep join yep man page means manual,
You know, not trying to insult anyone's intelligence.
All right, folks, let's talk tech and tacos. Well, maybe not tacos,
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All right. Adam, should we do some questions? Yeah, let's do some listener questions.
We have one from Michael. He says, Dave, Pete, and Adam.
Welcome, Adam. Adam, I've listened to both Mac Geek App and Mac Cast since the
beginning. I guess that makes me old, but I've never been caught. That's a good thing.
I need your geek wisdom on adding my desktop and document files to my iCloud
drive. My first question is, do any of you use it?
Second, my main Mac is a work-issued M116-inch MacBook Pro with a 500-gigabyte internal hard drive.
I use Dropbox and store almost all my documents there except one work-specific
folder I store on the hard drive on the MacBook Pro. Pro.
We also use Google as our system at work, so much of my work-related stuff is
on a company Google Drive.
I backup my photos in iCloud Photo Library.
What would the advantages and disadvantages be of turning this feature on in
my situation? Thanks for all you do!
Yeah, I I use the the desktop and document syncing on all of my Macs years ago
after upgrading to the two terabyte family plan,
which last week I mentioned I might need to upgrade past it because I figured,
well, I have more storage than I need,
which is getting to be less true. I thought, well, why not?
Right. And but I am not using Apple's documents folder as my main document storage for that.
I use Synology Drive, but that's kind of a material, you know, use Dropbox, whatever.
But still having whatever is in my documents folder synced everywhere proves
useful every now and again, especially with the files app on my iDevices.
Yes, there are integrations for Dropbox into the files app and Synology Drive into the files app.
I haven't found anything that is as seamless as Apple's own documents folder in the files.
Yeah, exactly. Exactly, like this is, so when I need to get something to or
from my, mostly from, like if I'm saving it from my phone or something,
I will put it in the documents folder and I just know it's gonna work.
I don't have to like clunkily re-log in to my services and all that.
So that works fine and that's convenient.
Where this syncing really pays off for me is that I love having my desktop folder be the same.
All of my macs you know i use the
my laptop obviously when i'm traveling i have a mac
in the studio i have a mac in my office and just
knowing that whatever i put into my
desktop folder or a subfolder thereof is just
there i use my desktop folder
for a lot of the i have a subfolder
of my desktop folder that i use for a lot of sort
of in progress files like like
the the agenda document uh the for
the show notes where i actually track the time stamps and all that
that's in my desktop folder so it's always synced
uh the the some
of the way i do like the ad preparation and all that stuff and by the way i
keep meaning to say i've been using chat gpt to write my scripts for the ads
to keep things kind of interesting so if if you have been if you are someone
that if you say oh well i already know about say linkedin jobs or i already
use factor or I don't need to listen to the ad,
give it a listen because you might actually, I get a chuckle out of the scripts that, uh,
I started getting bored with the scripts that I was coming up with because it
was the same me and oftentimes the same talking points. So I would just wind
up saying the same thing over and over again.
So I let chat GPT help, help me, uh, make it funny.
And yes, that, that is literally part of the prompt.
Make it funny. and and incorporate the
phrase don't get caught into the ads so
that'll be in every ad if uh if i can make it
happen but but yeah having that that desktop folder be that sort of active kind
of things that i might need to touch quickly and just having those there all
the time i have a folder on my desktop here's another quick tip and yes the
caffeine is kicking in uh because i had I had about three and a half hours of sleep.
But I have a folder on my desktop called Kill Me, and I know that at least in
the moment that I put something in that folder, I do not need to keep it forever.
And then I have a Hazel rule that deletes things in the kill me folder that
are older than like 60 days or something.
I can't remember exactly what it is, but this way I know it's just being purged
constantly and I can throw things in there and be like, yep, I want to put this there.
I want it synced on all of my Macs, but I don't need it long-term and I might
not even need it past this very moment in time, but I want to save it there.
That that little tip I
think is one of those sanity savers too so yeah I
also use desktops and documents I
don't have a lot to add there I think like you covered a lot of it for me
a big advantage too is just having access to that
stuff from my iPad or iPhone when I
need it yeah right it's not downloaded there obviously I use
the optimized storage on those devices but doing that
and then the other tip that I would have because he mentions the work situation
situation is um i have my
icloud connected to my computer at work but really the
only feature i want there is the copy
paste because i have to copy and paste urls for testing to
like my personal iphone and stuff like that but i
i turn off i go into icloud and i turn off every other
every other syncing like i don't sync my contacts i don't sync my i just use
certain features on that computer so i don't it sounds like he might want to
do more than that but like be aware you know you can and go into an individual
machine and really control what's syncing via iCloud and what's not syncing. Fair. So yeah.
Anything more on that or are we uh we good
to move on to andrew here pete yeah so
andrew wrote in with a question for us um and here it is okay he says i've been
listening to the mac geek gab and the mac cast for years and i've got to say
i'm enjoying listening to you all together thank you andrew anyway my question
is about backing up ios devices adam especially is a passionate passionate advocate of backing up.
And I follow your advice, Adam, religiously for my Mac.
But I'm running out of available iCloud space and looking for ways to save a
bit of space because I'm a cheapskate.
All right. I'm sorry. I got to editorialize here.
You're not a cheapskate, Andrew. You're a frugal pilot.
And I don't want to pay for storage if I don't have to.
So I was wondering about all my iOS devices and whether they really really need to be backed up?
Email, photos, music, social media, data, notes, UpNote, books,
etc., etc., etc., are all cloud-based anyway, and apps can be re-downloaded.
Is there a compelling reason to back up anymore?
Looking forward to hearing your thoughts.".
Yeah. I turn on iCloud Backup and I use it.
For my iOS devices, that's my main backup. I know people who will religiously also back up locally.
So that gets backed up by other backups, right? You can go into the finder and
you can set up your iPhone to back locally and sync like it did back in the
old days. I just mostly use iCloud for that.
And, you know, I would say I'm kind of with you.
I'll say what I always say about backup. Backup has to be a personal thing, in my opinion, right?
I am fanatic about it. I've had losses. losses, you should have some form of
backup, especially for important things.
But like what we were just talking about with documents and if you're syncing
your documents and folders somewhere, right, and they're being backed up on your Mac.
It's OK to probably not have those downloaded to your iPhone and backed up.
Same thing, like if you're using iCloud photo library.
So, yeah, I your point is well taken.
Yeah, you don't need to probably back up everything, but you probably should
think about the things that are really important to you and maybe adjust your backups for that.
Yeah, I think an important thing to discuss here is,
you know, Andrew mentions mail, photos, music, all of those things are cloud-based
and don't need to be backed up. That is correct.
Apple agrees with you and doesn't back that stuff up separately in your iPhone iCloud backups.
So you are not duplicating and double dipping into your iCloud backup space.
The only things, as I understand it, that are being backed up are bits of data
that are not otherwise synced to Apple devices.
And actually, even Dropbox, like I remember when all of this kind of was developing years ago,
Apple lets app vendors flag data as should this be backed up or is it something
that can be gotten from somewhere else?
Like, is this a cache essentially that doesn't need to be backed up?
Or is this the only place that the, at least the app thinks the data exists?
And so, yes, it should be backed up.
And so even like if you're syncing Dropbox files locally to your Mac or to your
iPhone, that's not going to be backed up in your iCloud backups either.
So like the things that
it's backing up are the things that you would need to get yourself to the point
where you could then sync back down from the cloud everything else including
all your app binaries if you were to have to you know get a new phone or or
what what have you so yeah and of course the.
The piece of software that comes up all the time, if you don't want to back
up to iCloud, but you do want to back up to your Mac, is use iMazing, which you can do.
But you can also back up your iPhone to your Mac with the Finder, too.
Like, that functionality used to be in the iTunes app. Now it's just in the Finder.
And so you can do it Apple's way. You can do it iMazing's way.
IMazing lets you be a little more granular and more reliably wireless about it, I'll say.
Yeah so i don't know remember the
days when you used to have to plug your iphone in to sync it and
back it up yeah what's wrong with that pete don't you
don't do that just for just for the sake of uh for
the sake of doing like neanderthals i mean there
there still is one reason to to do it that way and
i will typically do that one time before i
do like an upgrade of stuff and that's because if you
do the manual sync and you turn on the encryption option
it will back up your health data and
other data that normally would not be part of that backup oh that's
right the locally stored encrypted stuff
that is only on the phone yeah yep
typically about that I forgot about that yeah so
but you know one other thing
to add on this is like if you're running out of backup storage space
to dave's point that you know it documents like your apps do not get backed
up just the data for your apps gets backed up because apple knows we can re-download
the apps and then attach the data to it so a couple of things i know i have
turned on recently the option in apps to allow it to.
I forget what it says like when an app has been not used for a long time you
can offload the app app itself and just keep the data.
So I do that. And then if you need to use that app again, you just tap it,
it redownloads and away you go.
Um, you know, obviously that's not convenient if you don't have internet at
that point. So that's where you can get caught with that one.
So take that with a grain of salt, but yeah, I use that.
And then the other thing is like, I tend to find what mostly eats up my iCloud
backups are my iCloud photo library and my kids, uh,
messages messages because they get videos and
photos and like everything so you might
look at like cleaning up that data maybe backing up the
things that are important say like if you have 10 years
of photos that you know people have sent you in in messages and back up the
download and back up the ones that you want to keep and like maybe purge off
the ones that are just like you know a picture of i don't know a meal you had
or something i don't know what Silly cat videos Tacos Yeah.
Random memes random memes that got shared with you
that you could go find the meme again if you really needed to yeah i
so i i want to circle back and i'm hoping as i'm
vamping here that i'll remember what i want to ask you about and i do um because
i don't have i usually have a piece of paper where i can like write down
the hey remind me you know remind myself to ask
adam about the off the automatic offloading of
apps because i i i think
it's on by default at times i have found it enabled
on my phone in the past and i've gotten
caught right it's i'm in one of those moments i want to
launch whatever the app is and it ain't there
and i you know i'm either on a
weak cellular connection and can't download or whatever right so my question
about that so i have that turned off and i like i anytime i notice it turned
on i'm furious right so right my question is you use I use it still.
I have not used it in a long time.
Is there a way to flag specific apps and say, no matter what,
even if I haven't launched this since the day I installed it,
never offload this particular app?
Is there a way to do that? not that I am aware of but that doesn't mean it doesn't
exist because I haven't gone in in a long time the reason I haven't turned on
is frankly I'm lazy about cleaning up apps on my device like especially since
we got the new app launcher space you know they're like.
All my important apps live on my home screen, but like every other app is often,
you know, purgatory and a little search menu.
So like I never go in there and see, and when I do, I'm horrified.
I'm like, I downloaded this app, you know, as a flyway, cause somebody mentioned
it and it's been sitting here for, you know, and especially with like games,
like in games have a lot of data, a lot of times like hundreds of megabytes,
although that data would still stay there.
So this is mostly about saving local storage on your device.
It's not going to really help you with this backup thing that's fair
yeah it's a little bit of a tangent yeah yeah yeah yeah and a
quick easy way to do that is to type storage and go
into settings and pull down that left menu and
type storage and it takes you to you can get to the storage manager
there it allows you to choose it shows you what i think
it sorts it by the most data used yeah and then
you can go into there and yeah yep
cool all right so that's a little bit of
a geek challenge like is there a way to flag an app is a
please save this on my phone so feedback at macgeekgab.com i
have another personal geek challenge i
i've been in a hotel room for i think this is my sixth
day or something here uh which is fine i i
like to stay in these residence in so i have a little like efficiency kitchen
and i can make hotel room nachos at night when i get back
which i really like um sure judgment if
you want they're delicious um i and
i'm in and out of my room all the time right like especially
during conference days i'll go over to the convention center i'm
really i always try to get a hotel that's close to the
convention center and i'll be like you know i have some work to do i'm
just going to go back to the room i have my separate screen i have my fortress
of solitude here where no one's going to bother me and i can like heads down
and get some work done i would love to know if housekeeping has come and i started
thinking Because I was sitting in the convention center in a session.
I'm like, all right, when this session's over, I've got like 90 minutes.
I don't have anybody to meet with. I think I'm going to bounce back and get
some work done. But I could stay here and do it like in the media room or something.
And if housekeeping hasn't come, I'll stay out of my room, you know,
for this. And so I started thinking, well, what would it take to do that?
All of our hotel rooms have Wi-Fi.
Is there some and of course, anything we're looking for would need to be able
to use like the captive portal, at least for configuration in a hotel room in an easy way.
Couldn't we just have a motion sensor to trigger that? Yes, there's motion in your hotel room.
And then I could just use that and say, OK, well, if there's been motion in
my hotel room, I'm going to choose to believe that it was housekeeping.
Like, you know, could be anything.
But then it's like, all right, great. And has that most when was that motion
most recently detected?
Was it detected, you know, two minutes ago, in which case they're still working
and I want to stay out of their way? Or was it 30 minutes ago or two hours ago?
And I'm like, oh, yeah, I'm good to go.
Like it is possible. Like the world exists in such a way in our timeline currently
anyway, that this would be possible.
And I feel like I and maybe this is just something about me and I need to talk
to someone about it, but I'll talk to you guys.
You know, I find myself wondering this often.
Like oh has housekeeping come you
know and then and then i know whether
to detour around or whatever i don't know
i don't know you could
bring like a eufy doorbell with you dave and set that up
and no you know what grumpy grumpy mike in
in our discord says bring a travel router
like your barrel thing or whatever that that would bypass the
captive portal part of this so then any
iot motion sensor would work yeah oh that is what i tell you i have no idea
what what they're doing here in this hotel in germany i was an hour yesterday
screwing with it and i could not get a login page for the hotel's wi-fi unless i was directly,
could not get the router to repeat it to me and get on the barrel i'm thinking
here's the thing this is comes from living in a state now where like hunting
is a big thing i'm thinking there's got to be like a cellular enabled like remote
game camera that can like notify your phone.
Right yes yeah because they get those out in the woods
you know to like detect game in certain
certain areas they they have to have those that would just like probably come
like some of pete's devices as you mentioned that just come with built-in cellular
you know plans or whatever when you buy the device you could just point it at
the door and it just anytime there was motion yep and it'd send you a photo
yeah i don't know if that's a violation of privacy but.
Yeah you're right like that's a yeah i don't
necessarily need to watch they have a reasonable expectation of privacy
in your rented room though right i have a
reasonable expectation of privacy in here yeah yeah yeah
huh that's interesting but
yeah no the travel router thing that would probably be the
least expensive way to get there especially over
time and with the relative infrequency.
That i travel i wouldn't want to be paying for you
know cellular service for this device just for
like this purpose but you know yeah yeah but
i like your idea of a game camera like oh we've spotted
the wild housekeeping staff you know right huh
yeah that's okay all right
there's a solution here i i know that like i obsess about weird
things they were atypical things i don't want to say they're weird
like but uh you can say they're weird you can say it about me
it's fine yeah oh yeah and
porthos john says a raspberry pi with a wired ir
motion sensor right that way oh
my son just got a raspberry pi
that he's playing with so maybe i need
to um i need to get him working on
this i have a i have a toy called
little bits that has a mini raspberry
pi thing and you can set it up with all kinds of sensors you could do trip sensors
you can do motion sensors you can do IR sensors and there are these little snap
together it's like a science toolkit for kids it's like the modern version in
my opinion of the old Radio Shack electronics kits oh yeah sure yeah.
All right. So you could build a little contraption with those,
even like to physically detect when the door opens and then cloud send you a notification. Yeah.
All right. Yeah. No, no, no, no. This is, this is, um, this is good.
I will, I will think about this.
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All right, let's continue with questions, shall we? We've got a couple of good
mornings left in the queue here.
I got Michael here, and he says, My wife and I just finished hosting a Josco
Stefan and Sven Junbach, two guys, for a house concert with about 50 attendees.
They came from Germany and do Gypsy Jazz and Jazz Minoche. It goes by various names.
Great stuff. I have a mixture of attendees wanting to post short videos of the event.
The main guy doing this uses Apple, so he sent me an invite to add to his album Fine.
Of course, this limits who I can invite to view the album.
So we have so far and possibly contribute more.
I'm mutilating that. Sorry. This is a very informal and private group, of course.
And we're not looking to publish it online we just want a
way to share those who share with
those who attended and actually there was an
incredible jam afterwards some of the young musicians who came asked for vids
from this from the jam as well should we Google Drive it Dropbox some other
way you keep using Apple using the Apple world we of course do not want to get caught Michael huh Huh.
I, um, I have thoughts on this. Um, I don't know, I don't know of a perfect
solution for this, but if I were in this scenario, I would probably create it.
I would probably put it on YouTube, um, with a private, uh, marking by marking
the videos private, right.
So that only, um, people, I don't think you can do a password on YouTube,
but you can do, uh, you know, unlisted or something so that you get a playlist
and you can, you can share it that way.
You may run into YouTube's content filters that will identify any songs that
they played, which are copywritten, including their own songs.
If they've, if they've written their own songs, it will identify those, um.
It shouldn't be a problem, though. It will just notify you and say,
hey, this is a version of a copywritten song.
We're going to put ads in this, but you're not going to get money.
You're not going to get money from this.
The rights holder for this song will get the money from this.
Other than that, there's no friction.
YouTube is not going to like, you know, put a naughty flag on your account or anything like that.
There's no strikes generally for this kind of thing. So that'd be one way to
do it. The other way to do it would be to upload it to Vimeo.
And that does allow a password protected link to be used.
And so you could do this one of, you know, one of two ways.
I'm sure there's more than two ways. So I'd be curious if either of you or any
anybody out there in the Mac eCap family knows.
Pretty sure rumble allows you a private portion channel
too that only those with uh with
the password can get in yeah yeah i was
thinking similar with the with the vimeo i mean obviously dropbox
is uh probably a good option too although that's
more of a download i don't know it depends on what
functionality you're looking for are you looking for them to be able to just
you know sort of view it and stream it right there
in their browser or app or whatever or i can't
remember if dropbox will actually i guess it probably depends on
the video format but not really set up
for streaming right dropbox is more about uploading and downloading
files yeah but you're right
adam that dropbox will show like it for it given the right type of file it dropbox
will let you play in the browser i've certainly done that yeah yeah yeah but
for like a it sounds like part Part of this too though is maybe there's different people,
that need to be able to upload or want to upload clips.
So that's where it gets challenging, right? So like the Vimeo thing's great
because I guess they could all send it to them and then they could put them
all on Vimeo for everybody to access.
Looking for that more collaborative thing where anybody can kind of share in
the like uploading to a directory you know i mean obviously you can do that
with apple like photo shares and in iCloud photo library which would be really
cool i'm trying to think if there's any like.
Cross-platform and the other thing that i can't remember is now
if you do have an apple share can't you invite you
can invite windows people i think they just have to go through a web interface face
right uh yeah i
think that's right i think that's like an icloud an
icloud shared folder yeah and stuff like that cool yeah i
think that's right yeah yeah interesting
that's maybe a geek challenge i i've you know i don't unfortunately
i don't work a lot with windows anymore so i don't
get a chance to test a lot of these things but i'm fairly certain
apple's sharing of icloud stuff stuff with windows devices
is opened up a little bit but you go through a just a web interface yeah you
know you don't get a nice desktop integration yeah right yeah exactly yeah huh
yeah we'd be curious if you folks have a solution to this obviously feedback
at macgeekup.com because it.
It's not it's not that all that off
the beaten path to want to do this right right
like this is this is a thing and then what
i what i really want maybe this does exist would be
an app that takes all of those videos and
i and certainly for your house concert this would work but where this would
really see more sort of general appeal would be you know any kind of party a
wedding that sort of thing where lots of people are taking photos and videos
all of which are time stamped And of course, geolocated. Right.
And if they all shared these things with one library,
why couldn't a tool go and stitch all of these together,
creating a multicam video in, you know, by using the it probably be a little
bit of AI magic that sort of helped sync things up.
But by using the timestamps of when all these things were taken,
why couldn't it create like this multicam video of your wedding that was sort
of crowdsourced, right?
That's brilliant, Dave. I can't take credit for the idea. No, but still, that's...
You know, one of the guys in Fling, my friend Aaron, who's this genius,
he's our keyboard player.
He has these ideas like this. And he's like, wouldn't that be great at a gig
when people are like taking pictures and videos?
Like to just stitch that together. He's like, why isn't this possible?
And he said this, I don't know, five years ago to me.
An app could do that, too. Obviously, AI now makes it even easier for that app to function.
Yeah, to really kind of sync things up or whatever. You've got all the pattern
matching. It's kind of like being there without being there. That's awesome.
And you get this multicam, you know, amateur given. Sure.
Right? So, I don't know. I don't know.
Didn't Boinks have an app sort of like that back in the day? Sort of, yes.
Yeah, but it wasn't. It was like part of the way there. It was part of the way there. Party Snapper.
Party Snapper. It's still there. yep yep that's right
you could create a video wall i think you know
like on your apple tv and then anybody at a
party could be snapping photos and it would in real time i think throw those
up on the tv yes dangerous yeah right yeah no aaron had asked me about this
right about the time that party snapper came out and so i i remember sharing
this idea with our friends at boinks like saying Hey.
This is like you're you're this is adjacent to to what's going on right now.
So, yeah. And they were like, oh, that would be interesting.
I mean, it would be a lot of work, I think, to create that app,
not just the stitching together of it or the correlating of it.
But then there would need to be an interface where you as the final arbiter
slash editor of this could go through and say, OK, well, not this video.
This is terrible you know this is yes it was taken
at the time but it's of the inside of someone's pocket like maybe
not so good you know what i mean like so there would need to be some human review
capabilities and that's where things start to get a little crazy but if you've
already got that because you've written it for an a video editing app for iphone well okay now Now,
you know, I don't know.
I feel like this is something where Apple could shine.
Like a first party app could do this. It wouldn't be perfect.
It wouldn't be as granular as we'd want, but they could get it done.
And I did look up shared iCloud drive folders will work on Windows with iCloud
for Windows on Windows 11.
So you can, you know, obviously the challenge there is your Windows folks are
going to have to get, I think, an Apple ID, which you can get for free and install
Windows iCloud for Windows.
But then you can share it says you can share a folder with any compatible app,
make changes if you give them permission to edit.
It so you could create that collaborative folder there if you wanted to yeah
interesting interesting,
um i i will i will ask and answer tom's question here at least i'll start things
off uh because then i've got a cool stuff found that i think that i saw here
i stumbled onto here at south by southwest that i will um share about it but
he says i'm in the market for some new small small speakers for my Mac.
And I have a general question about what speaker interface I should use that
would give the best sound quality. Knowing that that's subjective.
I'm looking at either my Mac minis output audio jack or wireless speakers that support Bluetooth.
Any thoughts on which interface or speaker brands, the speakers are just going to sit in my office.
So wireless versus wired is not an issue in terms of those logistics. Okay.
It's a great question. it is worth noting that bluetooth
is still a compressed audio format so
it is loss lossy meaning
you will lose data there will
be less data making it to the speaker in most cases
than there is in the original audio source of
course if it's a very you know like it's a 128k mp3
or something you're going to get it the full thing on bluetooth but
most of us are not listening to things like anymore right because
um yeah whether or
not bluetooth bluetooth compression
causes you any perceived quality
change loss or improvement is subjective as you said but it is there the other
thing that bluetooth does is it introduces a delay of somewhere between let's
say 40 milliseconds on on the very best case low end all the way up to,
you know, 250 milliseconds on the high end. And so, you know,
You're not going to want Bluetooth speakers in your office. Zoom calls on Bluetooth speakers are terrible.
Zoom does a pretty good job of managing the echo, but you will get more and
more echo on this if you wind up doing that.
So there's no reason to go Bluetooth. There's no reason to compress that.
I would go with something wired. Now, for small desktop speakers,
I still really like Audio Engine's offerings.
The Audio Engine A2, they're the speakers that I have in my office.
They're about, I think they're like three or four inches tall. They're small.
Maybe they're five or six inches tall, but they're compact is what I should
say. They are wired and they sound great.
They're full. You can add a subwoofer to them if you really want some full sound.
I listen to music at my desk all day on just these audio engine A2s.
Now, the audio engine A2 is not available anymore, but the A2 plus is.
And in my office, I discovered something because I was told to test this and
the folks at audio engine were right.
They said, oh, you're just plugging this into the audio output of your Mac.
Try plugging it in to our d1
digital to audio converter and
i thought okay fine so you plug this d1 into your usb
port on your mac and then you just plug the speakers into the output on
the d1 the difference was night and day it sounded like i like the stereo field
widened i i was i was shocked i really didn't expect much much of a difference
and i normalized for volume levels i I checked it with a DB meter to make sure
that I wasn't getting the it's louder,
therefore it sounds better, you know, thing.
Because that's like that is fairly universal.
If you turn it up to a certain above a certain point, obviously,
we might disagree on these things.
But, you know, you add a few DB to something and it sounds better because you hear more.
I normalized for all of that. No, that wasn't the issue.
It really is the discrete power supply in these decks and the quality of the
deck, the deck that's in our Mac.
It's not, you know, it's not engineered to be the very best,
whereas like the D1 is one of the best that's out there.
So I say all this because you don't have to buy the audio engine A2s and a separate DAC.
You can buy the audio engine A2+, which for $269.
It is the audio engine A2s and it has a USB input, meaning it's got an external
DAC built into the speakers.
So you could also plug it directly into your mac and
do your own ab testing and maybe that's fun but uh
you're probably going to wind up just using that so
for 269 bucks you get your um you
get your you get your speakers and
they sound fantastic so nice
that that's yeah that's where
i would would go with it there are many many many many good
options out there so Dave I
hate to break in with this but my company has
said they're not gonna pay me if I don't go to work I've unfortunately hit
my heart out everybody so I am gonna say goodbye
to everybody be safe and we'll chat with you next week don't
don't get caught we'll see you Pete thanks for
hanging out as long as you could yeah man thanks blue skies
man yeah thank you um so
what do you do you listen to music at your desk adam i
know you are in an office where you like you're the only
one in there so you could be playing games out loud i do all the
time but i just use a homepod mini that's another
good option for someone in this scenario yeah yeah
i would prefer speakers if i was doing more with
audio but i for zoom meetings i just use my airpods
pro um i don't really need any.
Other audio coming out but you know depending upon what.
You're doing i mean the home pod's really only good for music um which is mostly
what i just listen to when i'm in the office so i'm not playing games i'm not
like i wouldn't want to watch a movie with the home pod mini sitting behind
me right if i had a stereo pair maybe in front of me then yeah Yeah,
I guess I could set them up that way.
But yeah, I think you can stereo pair minis now, right?
Yes. Maybe not. No, yes, you can. Yes, you can. Okay. Yeah, yeah,
yeah. For a while, you couldn't. You had to use the big ones. So right.
Right. That's right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No.
Yeah, that's yeah. The HomePod mini would be great.
HomePod minis connect using AirPlay, right?
Essentially, it's Wi-Fi, not Bluetooth. So you get lossless sound to them.
In a sense, like there's, I believe you get CD quality sound.
So if there's something that's higher, it will sort of dumb it down a little
bit, probably not in a way that matters to most of us.
Yeah but like i said if it was movies or games i might i might prefer something
like what you mentioned the a2 pluses or something yeah yeah the a2 pluses though
it's a it's a great thing and i was stoked to find out that they baked in that
dac with it so yeah yeah yeah yeah.
Here at south by southwest i uh
went to the expo center you
know and went to their expo that
shows all kinds of cool tech and stuff and all that
and i was like roped
into a demo by a company called brain audio they're actually an austin company
b-r-a-n-e audio and they have the brain x which is a smart speaker it does the
a lady i believe it also does the g lady,
it is bluetooth if you
want it to be it is airplay if you
want it to be you can pair them together to be stereo it is actually a stereo
speaker all by itself it has multiple tweeters in it so that it you know creates
a stereo field which is quite impressive they they knew that people needed to
to experience this thing.
So they built a room within the convention center that was fairly isolated sound-wise.
So we could go in and demo this and they were comparing it against the JBL speaker, the Sonos Move.
And I, of course, was like, well, I need to hear this. So I went in,
And what they told me before I went in was that they figured out a way to put
a subwoofer into this that moved 10 times as much air as a subwoofer of that
size using normal technology.
They use this whole like floating magnet thing that keeps the speaker suspended.
And so that when air moves, it was like, okay, like the tech sounded very cool and is very cool.
It's like, what's it sound like? So I went in and listened to this thing and
I had to use the DB meter on my watch to confirm that it wasn't like six DB
louder than the other one, you know, than like the Sonos move.
The sound from this was full.
It was really, really impressive. It's about 20% more. I think it's a $500 speaker.
So not cheap at all, but they're onto something here. There's some tech.
I'm sure they've got it all patented and all that stuff. But my guess is we
will see people licensing something like this from them or other people developing
their own versions of this.
But it's it was a really, really smooth low end is is the way I would describe it.
So, yeah, brain audio and it is the brain audio X speaker.
Speaker so you know cool yeah maybe that's
an option for uh for our friend that
the tom who needed an external speaker with
his mac so yeah we have
any more cool stuff found to go through adam it's just us yeah yeah
i got one from uh two short planks he
says so on mac geek gab mac geek gab yeah
these names right they're awesome on mac geek
gab 1027 you had discussed had a discussion
about finding devices on your local network one thing
that you didn't mention was bonjour aka zeroconf the
protocol that allows you to use the name of a
device instead of its ip address this is
built in and enabled by default on all apple devices and is supported on most
printers and other internet connected devices there's even an option to enable
it on a synology How this works is everything effectively gets a .local DNS
entry that only works within the local network.
So instead of typing the IP address of my Mac, I can type marx-macbook-air.local,
which always points to whatever IP address my Mac currently has.
On a Mac, Bonjour broadcasts out.
Two devices on your local network whatever name is set
in the local host name section at the
bottom of system settings general sharing so you can
change it if you don't like the default name apple
chooses for you this is a great way to find a particular device if
you know how to remember its dot local name but apple doesn't provide
an easy way to browse for devices the solution is
to use a free app like flame from the ios
or mac app stores this app shows all devices
on your local network that are using bonjour and whatever it
knows about them what the what ip address they're using and even what services
they are advertising running so you can tell if it's a computer or a printer
for example that's that's cool i didn't know about this at all yeah i you know
we had mentioned flame on the show i think someone sent it in as a cool stuff found years ago.
Uh but i obviously completely forgot about it
but yeah yeah yeah yeah that's uh i
mean i i knew the bonjour part i know the bonjour the whole
thing but i did not know there was an app that would display this
it's funny that that's not even just built in somewhere
i mean maybe it is it's probably look up
a bully and i would assume system information maybe yeah
yeah that's fair yeah yeah yeah
yeah i could see that i think so i think
you would think so but who knows i don't want to to
launch it my my max cpu has been freaking out right
we've been doing this this morning chrome is
i don't know why but it it is so
there you go but uh maybe i'm
maybe i'm asking too much i don't feel like i'm asking too much of my computer
but perhaps i am you'd think i'm just doing a podcast um yeah but yeah flame
yeah yeah good stuff i yeah i wonder i wonder if there's there's an Apple developer tool or something,
you know, is there something in Xcode that would do this too?
I don't know. Yeah, I don't know. Yeah, I don't know.
Uh, where are we on time? I, uh, well, I will, I will share maybe,
maybe this is part of my issue here, but I, I like to,
when we're, when I'm at home in the studio, I have, I've mentioned that I have
an all digital setup. I mean, it's analog. My voice is analog.
So obviously there's analog and so are my ears. But my mixer that I use as we're
doing the podcast live is actually Logic, Apple's audio recording suite.
And Logic is not meant to be used as a mixer, but it can be.
It's a little wonky to do it that way. And it requires me to use aggregate audio
devices and those things that, you know, Apple has not done so well with,
at least in the way that we're using them, causing some occasional car core
audio hiccups and those sorts of things.
And as I was planning for this trip, I thought, you know, I can just use my
normal setup, which only uses audio hijack. And I say only audio hijacks, fantastic tool.
But i like to have an external interface to control the audio so that it like
when we're playing a comment or the the music or if one of us gets too loud
or too soft i can just go grab a,
physical fader and adjust it in real time i
don't need to dig through four windows to find you know where i
can click my mouse to slide the the volume adjustment and
so i have one of these that's portable that i've
had for years and it's called it's the korg nano control studio and it is you
can plug it in usb you can plug it in bluetooth it's very lightweight it's flat
it's perfect like it is built for travel it's exactly what i want so i threw
that in my bag and i I thought, all right, let me,
you know, if I have a moment, I'll mess with it. So it turns out I had a moment.
And so I started thinking about, you know, what can I do here?
Uh, do I, do I really want to use logic again? And I thought,
you know, this is kind of ridiculous.
There should be, what is there an app for the Mac that turns my Mac just into a mixer.
I don't need all of logic. I don't need it to do recording because I actually
want to use audio hijack for the recording for various reasons.
I just want to mix things, send it to somewhere and record there or do whatever I want with it.
And it would be an extra bonus if I didn't have to use an aggregate audio device
to pull all of my things together.
Like with with logic, logic sees one input device and one output device.
I don't have just one. I have you guys on a virtual device. I have me on a hardware
device because it's a microphone.
I, you know, I have the, the theme music on another, you know, virtual device.
And so I have to use an aggregate device to pull them all into one.
Wouldn't it be great if it's totally possible? An audio hijack can do this.
The one thing audio hijack cannot currently do is support a control interface,
with MIDI to, to, you know, control faders.
I'm like, all right, has someone cracked this egg? And, and,
It turns out the answer is yes. There's a piece of software from the folks at
Loud Lab called Sound Desk that is built to do exactly what I described.
Nothing more and nothing less. And it's super configurable.
It really didn't take me much time at all. It's a $40 app.
And it is what I have used to mix this show today.
So I know our sound is different today because I'm in a hotel and all of that
stuff. But I'm excited about the possibilities and I can put effects in the,
in the chain, just like you can with logic.
I can route things any way I want.
It's really flexible and customizable. And obviously it works with my control surface.
And so I can, you know, control things and all that good stuff.
So I'm excited about the potential for the future.
And assuming you folks are hearing this episode, then it worked.
So, yeah, that is, that is super cool. And 40 bucks.
I mean, what a deal. i know yeah they they need to charge more
for it i would think you know but uh yeah
yeah so i'm stoked it
it seems to work maybe however maybe
that's part of my cpu issues maybe maybe sound
desk uses more cpu than logic did i don't
know i gotta that part i need to dig into so it seems like it's chrome that's
kind of chrome and safari actually i think i think actually some of the windows
that i had open in safari like for the i think the brain audio had some active
things happening in javascript that might have been causing issues i don't know so yeah.
That's what i got to see papa to tennessee papa in discord chat says what about
loopback do you want to kind of yeah yeah this because i think it's a little
bit different yeah loopback is is is um very much part of my workflow loopback
is an app from audio hijack that creates,
virtual audio devices so when i mentioned that
i have you guys coming in on a virtual audio device or i have my you know the
theme music coming in on another virtual audio device those are loopback devices
so you go into loopback you tell it create a device and then it it creates an
audio device It can be a pass-through device.
You can send audio to it from one app and have it output to another.
Or it can be a capture device or both, but a capture device saying,
let me point it at that app and grab that app's audio and turn it into a device.
And when I say a device, I mean, this shows up in system settings,
uh, sound as either an input or an output device or both, depending on how you create it in loopback.
So that is still, I'm using that very much here, uh, to, to,
to route into and out of sound desk.
Now sound desk has its own, uh, loopback ish.
Component to it that uh i haven't
dug into but i did notice it as i was pulling this together i
was like well i already have all my loopback devices set up so
i'm not gonna i'm not gonna reinvent that particular wheel for
this but but yes they have that too
which was which is really i was it
warmed the cockles of my heart when i saw that because it
means that audio that you know audio
hijack and and loopback and those tools
that we podcasters so heavily
rely upon from rogue amoeba it means they have
competition and that's a great thing
for us i think it's a great thing
for rogue amoeba and for loud lab too right like they having
competition validates the market it it means that
we're not stuck with if if one company
chooses to stop developing a product we're not like oh
no please don't you know it's like well i'm i
wish you wouldn't but there is another option right so
yeah anyway so yeah yeah
so the big difference here is you know loopback's not going to do the mixing
part it's doing the input output part and you wanted something to allow you
to control each one of those things individually in real time sliders and with
yeah in real time correct so and and there's a world where audio hijack could do Well,
Loopback plus Audio Hijack could do all of this.
And that's how I record episodes on the road up until this particular one.
It's just that Audio Hijack doesn't support the external control surface.
So I can have little sliders in there. It has like the ability to be a mixer function.
I have to go and dig and like you know slide my mouse around a
great yeah it's not the interface isn't optimized for that
bill that's exactly right it's not optimized for that
but sound lab sound desk certainly is yeah yeah yeah
yeah cool i know all right yeah i'm uh
i'm stoked about it um i'm eager to
uh i'm eager well now i get to since
the the show is about to uh to end
i get get to fade the band in all by
just sliding the fader look at that yep there they come love it i love it thanks
for hanging out with us everybody and uh thanks to cashfly for providing all
the bandwidth to get the show from us to you anything to add adam before we uh,
before we play it all out no i think
this was a good one i agree yeah i hope i hope the
recordings all worked uh it would
be it would be a shame if they didn't that's right yep thanks again folks make
sure to check out our sponsors linkedin.com slash mgg coda.io slash mgg factor
meals.com slash mgg 50 of course you can go to mackiecap.com slash sponsors
and see everything listed,
i'm glad pete made it for most of the show it was nice doing our first little.
Music.
Little segment of an episode together, Adam.
Yeah. Do you have, uh, do you have three words of advice to,
to share for anyone out there?
Absolutely. Don't get caught.
Music.