It's time for Mac Geek Cab, and I'll bring us our quick tip of the week because
I rediscovered that the Finder, yes, the Mac OS Finder with no third-party extensions
necessary, will let you batch rename files.
It's true. It's a little tricky because it doesn't work the way my brain wants it to work.
You highlight all the files, and
then you go to the file menu or you right-click, and you choose Rename.
When you are renaming multiple files
you get a little dialogue that pops up and
it says rename finder items and you can replace
text you can add text you can remove text and you put in the string that you
want it to find if you're replacing text and the string you want to replace
it with and even better it uses the first file in the list as an example to
show you what your end result will look like.
So you actually get to see this in real time.
It's the coolest thing. I love
that it's in there, especially since it's probably not used very much.
More quick tips like this, plus your questions answered today on MacGeekGab
1032 for Monday, April 8th, Trading Cards for Grownups Day 2024.
Music.
Greetings, folks, and welcome to Mac Geek of the Show, where you send in or
we provide quick tips like that.
You send in your questions. We try to provide the answers.
You send in cool stuff found. We share all that together. The goal being that
each of us learns no less than five new things every single time we get together
or we relearn things we've forgotten about,
like that opening quick tip, which I know that I knew in the past because the
find and replace strings were things familiar to me.
Uh sponsors for this episode include
linkedin.com slash mgg where you can go
and post your first job for free and
bb edit from barebones.com with integrated
notebooks chat gbt support there's so much in there we'll talk more about all
that in a little bit for now back here and well rested in durham new hampshire
i'm dave hamilton and here and never left in south dakota I'm Adam Christensen.
And we are flying in the missing man formation, as it were, today,
because Pete is actually out doing the flying.
So schedules were not to work.
So, Adam, you and I are, I think this is the first time you and I are doing
this, just the two of us. I think.
I can't remember. I can't either. I'm getting older and these things escape
me, but I thought we maybe did one. Yeah.
Maybe Pete did swoop in at the last moment. There was one. I know we talked about doing one.
There was one we thought we were going to do solo without Pete.
And then, yeah, the schedule's just magically worked.
So I don't think that's going to happen today. I don't think we're going to
see a surprise Pete appearance. But you never know.
With Pete, you never know.
And I want to thank you and Pete for shouldering the load last week.
I know there's visual and audible evidence that I participated in Mac eCab 1031.
I have very little recollection of it, given the limited amount of sleep that I had coming in.
The one thing I remember about doing this, I do remember doing the show,
was that every 10 minutes or so, I'd feel like, oh, OK, now I'm like awake and online.
Oh, now I'm great. I'm good. and then 10 minutes
later be like no now i'm online it's like no no no
i don't think it was ever online alas thank
you it was uh it was
i listened back it was like i thought there was good stuff in the episode
so oh yeah yeah yeah i enjoyed it yeah yeah
that's good all right even if you don't remember
yeah yeah i remember now like i i
heard it it's like okay i wasn't even like on anything it
wasn't you know there wasn't there was it was just
lack of sleep i guess yeah yeah yeah uh pc
unix in a thread in our discord uh pc
unix mentioned the idea
of having pinned notes in the
apple notes app and steve hammond was
like i didn't even know this was a thing dave you need to put this in
the show i agree if we've never talked about.
Pinned notes in notes before then yes now
is the time i we use
this here right with with mac ekeb
we have several shared notebooks which perhaps is another
quick tip that there are shared notebooks we
have several shared notebooks amongst the three of us and at the top of
two of them the prep notebook and the current show
notebook uh we have some pin notes that
we use for various things and it's
awesome to be able able to just go like i have my i don't
know if i've talked about it on the show but certainly pre-show i have my pre-flight
and then of course post-flight checklist because there's too many things to
do now with all the stuff that we're doing i would forget and in fact we added
a new thing to the pre-flight checklist just this morning because i kept forgetting
thank you zoe and thank you for the bacon uh.
So yeah, these pin notes are, are fantastic. And you just, uh,
I think you just right click a note and choose pin it. Right.
Yep. Yep. I'm sure there's something in the menu and I'm sure there's a shortcut
too, but that's usually how I do it.
Yeah. There is pin notes. There's also lock notes.
Uh, oh, that's so Pete can't mess with them. No, that the locked note is the
password protects it. Yeah.
I wish there was a way to lock it. So Pete couldn't mess with it. That would be great.
Yeah. Yeah. Well, if you don't give him the password, he can't mess with it.
Oh, that's true. That's fair. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But I want to, I want, I want like a now.
Yeah. I know what we're talking about. Like you can't edit it.
I, I, like, it's not so much for Pete, although it is.
Um, but also me, like, you know, sometimes you just like your,
your cursors where you don't think it is and you start typing.
It's like, Oh wait, crap.
I didn't want to edit that. That note, like my pre-flight checklist.
I only want to change that when I want to change it, you know? So yeah. Yeah.
Yeah, anyway, that's the pin notes and other things in notes too, evidently.
Yep. Yep. What do we have next, Adam?
I was going to say, Michael has one for us. He says, your advice is excellent. Don't get caught.
Well, yeah, that's good advice. He says he would also like to add this. Don't get lost.
He says, here's a quick tip about using the iPhone camera as an aid to not get to not getting lost.
Once upon a time. Oh, it's the story.
I was at a meeting at a local hospital designed as a truly enormous maze on five stories.
Our team were meeting in a department far from the main entrance.
We received a message that colleagues who had traveled from another city had
just arrived and were waiting at the main reception.
I was volunteered to go fetch them.
Finding reception was no problem. It was clearly signposted throughout the building,
but I would never ever be able to, would I ever be able to find my way back. back.
And it would be especially embarrassing to take visitors to an interminable
ramble all around the hospital.
So this is the quick tip. On my long walk to reception, each time I passed through
a junction, I would turn around and snap a photograph back down the corridor I had just taken.
Once I had collected my visitors, all I
had to do was step back through the photographs one by
one in reverse order and they guided me straight back
to our meeting our visitors were so impressed that's
that's smart i like it i i have made a in scenarios like that i have made a
habit of as i walk i haven't used my camera to do it but i just turn around
and look because i know that i like the view that i have going the way i'm going
is not Not the view I will have going the other way.
So I use that to just set some visual memory of like, oh, yeah,
I remember this. I remember this. I remember this.
But taking a picture that I actually have and can see.
Would be even better especially given the whole memory thing i
don't know if it if it would work
on multiple floors and this is just coming to
me in the back of my mind and i've never used this feature yep but
doesn't the compass app have like a wayfinding thing in it yes it it yes i i
haven't used it this way either yeah how do you turn on the wayfinding app i
don't remember i think you You can use it with the watch and stuff too,
but I doubt it would work. I think it's just on the watch.
Altitude wise. Right, right. And yeah, is the GPS tight enough to work indoors?
In a building, probably. Yeah, but I think it's just on the watch because I'm
not, I have the compass app up and I don't see.
Oh, maybe it is only on the watch.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I did just notice something about the compass app.
Having it up is I tapped on the screen thinking maybe that'll get me more options.
And I swiped and, you know, did other things.
But if you tap on, if you aim the compass in a certain direction and you tap on it, it'll mark that.
So at the moment I am facing 287 degrees. Okay, great.
If I then turn the compass, it shows me the gap between where I set and where
I was. So I, you know, it's like, it's red.
The gap is red. And it says, no, if you want to aim 287, well, you're off of that now.
Better go back onto it. That's cool. Yeah, I know.
Yeah. There's all kinds of little tips in there. I'm wondering what else. Yeah. The level.
There's the level, but that's not in the compass app. Is it?
No. Is it now in measure? I think it's in the measure app.
Yes, that's right. Yep. Which is perhaps even yet another quick tip.
If you didn't know that it was there.
Yeah. There's that, that level app. And that's a fun game to play to hold the
phone and see if you can make the screen turn green. Yeah. In the level app.
Oh yeah. Lots of things. All right. Yep. All right.
Alex has a, a quick tip for us.
He says, I thought maybe sharing a word of advice about for users of the Apple
Apple Calendar app to help be better prepared for birthdays of their important people in their lives.
Apple Calendar apps provide a convenient feature for events,
the second alert on iOS or multiple alerts on the Mac.
I'd also like to use it for birthdays of the people closest to me to make sure
that during busy days I prepare a nice and accurate gift or message in advance
and to be reminded as well in the morning on the day of the event,
ensuring myself from accidentally and unintentionally recalling about the matter too late.
However, if you go to settings to change the alert of the automatic contacts,
birthdays, calendar, and try to add a second alert for its events,
you'll see that this particular calendar is deprived of the second alert feature.
I have come up with a manual workaround in the calendar app on the Mac.
Double click on a given birthday event, then click the middle gray area of alerts
and a plus sign and a circle will appear.
This will give you multiple alerts on the Mac.
Unfortunately that doesn't work at all on the iphone
you can't add the second alert and the alert
created on the mac doesn't fire on the iphone either
this is truly limited just to the mac um
but uh at least it allows you
to do the second alert which you could set for you know several days
before or whatever you want so i like that that's a
good one that's a great tip yeah it also reminds me of
i can't think of the examples right now but i i
do often run into this thing where there's certain
things you could only do on the mac and not
on the iphone like that disparity comes up yep more often than i i would think
at this point yes yeah i i i especially yes more often today than yes than i
would expect to yeah you're right because why.
There's so much that's shared between the two like
code bases that are shared between the two of these apps why
why do we have these these things and then and then and then we have you know
cool stuff like the battery name in the finder that's like who even knew i think
i think there are multiple third-party apps to do that oh yeah there's a ton
yeah it's right there like,
how many other people don't know how many other people have either don't
know about it or have forgotten about it yeah i mean the classic
thing though is like the thing in the finder is pretty basic i
mean it does a nice job but like if you need extreme
renaming with like a lot of options there's a lot of great third-party apps
for that i mean apple always leaves that little hole
they kind of cover the basics and then if you need more
yep you know yep developers developers right yeah you're you're right because
like they're like it doesn't let you sequentially rename things or at least
not that i know of you can let's see you can add text to it in the finder and
you can change the format.
Oh, you can do a counter. Oh, it will let you do a counter with the format thing. So, okay.
And you could even have it with the date. You can timestamp the files.
That's really... Yeah, it has some nice options. It's pretty robust.
But again, I think there's these extreme runs that just people who just are
dealing with massive amounts of documents need to do weird things. Other things.
Conditionals. Correct. Like, if it's this, then that. You know,
that sort of thing. That makes sense.
It's not going to do any of that stuff. It's not going to do that. but it it's yeah
mess around with it like i i it's this is one of those things that's i believe
good to have a working knowledge of so that when you need to do a thing you
know ah i know where to go and and and i suppose in a meta sense that's kind
of what this show is all about because.
A lot of the things we share aren't like necessary in
the moment but it's like plant the seed in your your head
plant the seeds with us folks yeah yeah uncle
jamie has another seed yes i do yeah
he says drag a document's title
bar icon to move or share like the finder
the small proxy icon appears to the left of the document's title in the title
bar when a when the document is open in the app for purposes of dragging it
has the same effect as dragging the document's icon in the finder this is especially
useful to attach the document to an email message you also have open,
yep yep super handy yeah i i always use the trick too for figuring out the path
by like right clicking on that thing and i think it'll show you the path right
oh yeah it'll show you the path that's right yeah yeah yeah that's right to
where that file is yep yep.
Yep yeah it's uh i love things like this all right yeah just treating that folder thing.
Occurs in a lot of places there's a lot of places where you
can just drag the folder the
represent representation of that thing in an app and it
will behave like you just grabbed it from the finder yep
so i think that's just a good general tip like doesn't even
have to be the title bar folder like you know you're just
looking at a document app or something like that or you're in
files or wherever wherever yeah yeah
kiwi graham in our live chat discord mackeycup.com discord
uh says uh he believes that icon is technically called the proxy icon which
works for me sure i'll call it that um i uh i do this occasionally and the last
time i did it I figured, oh, I need to share this again.
I think we've talked about it before, but with current versions of Mac OS,
we have this whole permissioning thing for where apps get access to things like
your microphone or full disk access or accessibility, especially.
And really those last two full disk access, I can say Mac geek gab in my sleep,
as I proved last week cannot say full disc access without really working on
the enunciation i got to make that funny face that theater people make um and
accessibility those two are often.
In the way and by that i mean i'll go to do something in an app and it'll say
oh you need to re-enable it doesn't say re-enable but i know i've enabled it
before and somehow it got turned So it's like you need to enable this and then
you sometimes you got to quit the app and relaunch it.
And so I have found that when I am in that scenario and I have to go into,
say, you know, system settings, privacy and security, you know,
and then let's say accessibility.
If I have to go in there for one app, I look at everything that's there and
turn back on the ones that I know that I want on because they turn off.
And then while I'm there, I also go to full disk access and do the same thing.
And I have gotten in the habit, you know, talk about alert blindness or security
blindness, because this is such a cumbersome thing in the moment.
I have gotten in the habit of just turning on accessibility and full disk access
for anything that shows up in that list, which means it asked for it.
Now, obviously, I'm looking at the list as I'm doing it.
And if there's something that seems questionable to me, maybe I won't turn it
on or I'll I'll dig in deeper.
But otherwise, man, like no bueno.
I just I wish I could say just grant this like it used to be, please.
Like, I'll take the blame. I don't know.
Yeah, but you're a responsible computer user who knows what you're doing.
I try to be, you know, I try to understand, I understand where this comes from
because it comes from that place of, you know, if, if they don't point it out
to people, they won't think about it.
So it would be nice to have that override, I guess, you know,
somewhere, somewhere, bury that setting deep where most people wouldn't find it.
But yeah, yes. Yeah. Even bury it deep. That's right. Yeah.
Defaults to on, I'll go in and turn them off. Like, I really wouldn't mind,
you know, even setting a monthly calendar thing. And maybe I should do that.
But I find myself in there probably about that often is once a month I'm in
there and it's like, all right, just turn all the stupid stuff on.
Like, because it drives me crazy.
And another tip about that, when you go and, you know, if an app asks you,
hey, you need to turn this on or whatever, and you go and you turn it on.
System settings will almost and
it might not even be almost almost always tell you
okay i've i've made this change but you have to quit
and relaunch you know the app in question in order for it to be aware of this
change that is not universally true system settings does not know whether an
app is is truly capable of refreshing itself enough in that way.
So try it. Usually with accessibility and full disk access, you do not need,
in my experience, you do not need to relaunch the app.
For screen sharing, you absolutely need to relaunch the app.
And that, of course, is the one that sucks the most when you're in a Zoom call.
It's like, oh, can you share your screen? It's like, oh, crap,
that got turned off. It's like, yep, well, I got to say goodbye.
Bye, I'll be back, you know, so.
Well, imagine how fun it is when your IT department is the only people that can change that for you.
Oh my gosh. I didn't even think about that.
Oh, I understand that. That sounds awful.
Is that that? Yeah, and they will not grant it in my case for, is it Teams?
No, what's Google's? google google me google me yeah so i they're like no we're
not giving the browser access to your camera oh because there's no app right right.
We're not granting Chrome like full access to your camera.
Couldn't they? I'm just thinking about like the right way to solve this problem.
Couldn't they give you, couldn't they say, all right, you're going to use.
Or to your screen, I guess it's really. Right. It's the screen sharing. It's the screen.
What if, and I don't even know if this is possible, but bear with me here.
What if they had a, like Microsoft Edge and they designated Edge as the browser
for these Teams meetings, right?
Or Google Meet, you know, whatever. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Google Meet.
Google Meet. And gave you, and this is the part that I don't know if it's doable,
but it sure seems like it might be, gave you a locked down Microsoft Edge profile
that only allowed it to use Google Meet and nothing else, right?
So every time you launch Edge, the only sites that you're allowed to visit with
this profile are, you know, meet.google.com or whatever the URL is.
And then would they feel better about this now i don't
know how to go about building that profiler if it's even possible but it seems
like there might be a browser you could do that with and it's funny because
now that you're saying that i think they did figure out the solution because
i think this came up originally because i was like hey i can't share my screen
in these these uh google meet meetings and they're like oh yeah well no we're
not letting the browser do that and i think my it guy went and thought about
it and i think he figured out a way and i now that that you say profiles.
Yeah. I think he figured out a way to like build some sort of specialized profile.
Oh, it's good. That's good. That's good. Yeah.
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All right. Shall we do some questions, Adam? Yeah.
Andrew's having an issue. Okay. And he needs help. Okay. He says, here's my issue.
Well. I am having odd behaviors on my 2019 iMac, a 16 gigabyte, 3.6 gigahertz Core i3.
It has a one terabyte drive with only about 250 gigabytes used.
There are three or four issues that cause problems. 1.
Attempts to use a Finder search result in the Finder become non-responsive,
causing them to have to relaunch the Finder.
2. Attempts to search in the Mail app result in the Mail app becoming non-responsive
and having to force-quit the Mail app. app.
Number three is attempts to print any document to PDF using the print dialog
box results in the app that created the document to become unresponsive.
I'm seeing a theme here. Yeah, same.
Unresponsive to force quit and restart the app.
A workaround for this problem is to open in preview and then save the PDF file
from there, and that works fine.
Number four, attempts to tag a file with a color marker do not work.
Troubleshooting steps that he's gone through are, um, and have been done to
resolve this issue resulted in temporary elimination of these issues,
but they return in a matter of minutes or hours.
So he's tried safe boot. Uh, he's tried running titanium software,
titanium softwares, maintenance scripts, which is a great, uh,
set of scripts, and reinstalling Big Sur from the recovery partition by starting with Command-R.
He says, I'm left wondering if there could be some corruption in one or more
preference files, but I have no idea which ones might be the culprit.
So my first question is, what other repair actions should I take to attempt
to resolve these issues on the current iMac and OS?
And I think he's also somewhat wondering.
Is it time to upgrade? Yeah, exactly. Do I need a new Mac?
Yeah. And that was that was sort of where the question came in.
And I think maybe the title of the subject of the question was,
you know, is it time to upgrade to M1?
And like, I'll address that first. First, no, not necessarily.
I mean, it's never a bad time, except that it is, right?
Like, you know, it's going to cost you money, all of those things.
I don't, I wouldn't, well, listen,
I had a 2019 iMac Intel here in the studio, similar to what he has.
I think mine was a little faster than his, but not, like, not to the point where
it would make a difference for the things he's talking about.
And I would still be using that if it weren't, you know, lightning striked this
past summer, you know, it's so no, I don't think this is the reason to upgrade.
There's a few things I'd try if this were mine. I know you said you ran titanium
softwares, maintenance scripts, titanium software, the folks that make Onyx.
Onyx, yeah, that's the app. Yep. I would, I would make sure that for this scenario,
especially that I would go into Onyx, go into maintenance and turn on everything.
And that includes rebuilding the mail index.
It definitely includes rebuilding the spotlight index.
There's something, clearly something wrong with spotlight on this computer.
Um, at least that's based, you know, you said you're sensing a theme here.
It was like, yeah, same. Right.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Um, and, and, you know, you already did the big sir reinstall over the top.
That would have been sort of the next thing that I would try if I were there. Um.
Failing all of that or having tried all of that because
it seems like you might have kind of done the you
know the obvious things for us which means either you've
been listening long enough or you you know you learn these things on
your own somewhere uh i would i
you know open activity monitor and sort by cpu by by you know and make sure
in activity monitor you go to view all processes so that you're seeing the entirety
of the system and see what it like,
see what's chewing your CPU in those moments where it's bogged down.
It is not uncommon for me. This is, I mean, I'm a, I'm Dave and I'm a nerd,
uh, to run with activity monitor open just for these reasons.
So I can see what's going on or I use, you know, I step menus or,
or stats or, you know, So one of those things that lives in the menu bar,
but it is sometimes even clicking on the menu bar is impossible in those moments
because things are so bogged down.
So having a window open with activity monitor already running,
sorted by CPU, showing all processes that can be really informative for troubleshooting
exactly this kind of thing.
So that's if I were there, that's what I would do. I don't know. What do you think, Adam?
Uh yeah i mean.
So he says he's done a reinstall of
big sirs that i'd be curious if that's just an
over-the-top like reinstaller is
that a complete wipe and reinstall no
i think that's the extreme yeah that's the extreme option
and i don't know that you're there yet um at
the same time too i'm wondering because i still run a 2019 um
intel mac i mean mine's a 16 inch macbook
pro and i've got a core i7 instead of
an i3 um i'm curious why he's
still on big sir he he explained that
in a part you didn't miss
it i took it out um he's on big sir because he
had some issues with a file maker
database that he didn't want to upgrade or they didn't want
to upgrade at the time but he did say look if if upgrading
to a more recent os is is
necessary as part of this he's like i don't mind the expense it's like
we need to yeah the only reason i'm hesitating on that is because it probably
doesn't if you're having these issues they're not going to go away by doing
an overtop install of another operating system that's kind of what i'm getting
at so like if some of the other recommendations you gave didn't work depending
upon i mean if he's just been doing over the top,
over the top, over the top since he got the thing.
I mean, I fell in this camp where every three, four years, I would generally
nuke and pave and just restart because you just build up crud over the years.
And it's a pain in the butt and I hate doing it and it's not fun.
And I recommend it only in the most extreme circumstances. So I would try some
of these other things like Dave's recommended.
And if there's not a resolution there, then you might have to bite the bullet and try a nuke and pave.
Like do all your backups make sure you've got the multiples and
you know where everything is and you know where all your software is
to reinstall and all that fun stuff but yeah yep i nuke and pave i will say
that nuking and paving today is way less of a pain than it was even five years ago You know,
so much of our data synced to the cloud,
it, it, a lot of more than I, every time I do it, I dread it.
Just like you said, it's like, oh, I don't want to hide.
I don't have a day for this, you know, and it only winds up taking a couple
of hours, you know, and, and I would be there if, if let me put it this way.
Anyway, you know, if I were there on site with you and you were paying me by the hour,
and I learned this when I did a lot of this, you know, on site by the hour,
I would spend the first 20 to 40 minutes kind of trying the quick things, right? Right.
You know, and if we weren't getting anywhere and we were spinning our wheels
like, OK, wait, here we are, 30, 40 minutes into this.
We could stumble on the solution in the next five minutes, and that will remain true.
Until we actually stumble onto the solution, which could be hours,
but we're always potentially five minutes away from the answer.
And we might wind up spending five hours and not yet get there.
So I would always try to balance this with the customer and say, okay,
We know that a nuke and pave is probably going to take about two hours,
you know, or whatever we think it's going to take.
That's a that's a known the where the, you know, looking for this needle in
the haystack is an unknown.
Known so your choice but
i but you know i would i would advise them like if this were my computer
i might spend another 15 20 minutes
looking for the needle in the haystack and then
i would punt on that and just get the job done and there are additional benefits
of nuking and paving that that are that go beyond this one problem right but
i feel really confident in this scenario knowing Knowing what we know that a
nuke and pave would resolve this. I could be wrong.
I've been wrong before, but yeah. The main reason I did it, you know,
again, I would do it if I ran into exactly this situation where it's like this
problem, I'm just chasing it, chasing it. I can't figure out what's going on.
That's one scenario. The other scenario, like I said, was like every fourth
upgrade or something like that, I'd go, yeah, it's really just time.
A lot of that was about just cleaning house. like
it forces you to go through your system and be like oh my
god i've got these apps that i haven't needed forever
i have all these documents that have just been
sitting there let's get those off and archive those someplace else like it
gave me an opportunity to like really assess like oh
my god i pack ratted for you know four years and like 50
of this stuff could go and i wouldn't care you wouldn't
care right yeah exactly yep yep um kiwi
gram in the live chat brings up something that that
came to my mind and left it almost as quickly when
i was first answering andrew's question which was he
he said and i don't know if this was included but
he said he had a one terabyte drive with about 250 gigs used
is that a spinning drive
or is it an ssd i am
not sure if in 2019 you could
still buy an imac with a spinning drive
but if it is a spinning drive that will
have a performance impact negative performance impact yeah on especially on
database intensive operations which is what searching is now right you know
so it but right what size what size is the drive one terabyte.
If he has the base model, that's a 5,400 RPM SATA drive.
Okay. So. I just checked MacTracker. All right. I'm assuming he has the 4K Retina 2.5 inch.
Yeah. I think that's the only one that offered the Core i3.
Okay. All right. So. And it's the early 2019 because they also did a 5K 27 inch in 2019.
Correct. Yeah. I had the 5K here. I still have the 5K. Something in me has hope
that it's just going to miraculously.
I don't think. Yeah. That's a Core i5. So the core I three is the base model 4k 21 and a half inch.
And the base storage is a, is a SATA drive.
The other one terabyte option would be a fusion drive, which is still,
still mostly spinning. Right.
All right. So new advice, buy an SSD, connect it to the Thunderbolt port on that thing.
And, uh, and clone or well, cloning is not, could he clone with big, sir?
Maybe maybe yeah if you can't clone you know reinstall and and migrate over to that uh.
Things are going to get faster and that that will breathe new life into that
machine for you guaranteed yeah i mean you can carbon copy clone or whatever
well but you can't you can't with sonoma like you can't clone to a new boot
drive it ain't quite as easy as it used to be uh yeah Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah.
But still. Or if you're really brave, you know, you can open that thing up and put an SSD in it.
But that's what I had to do with my wife's, you know, we had an Intel Mac Mini
or whatever, and like it changed the world.
Yes. Oh, yes.
Yes. I, we, I, you know, you can go back to the episodes.
It's probably 12 years ago now or something on this show where we started migrating
our machines to SSDs. And it was like, oh, you know, finally our computers would use their CPUs.
Like prior to that, everything was IO bound. You know, rarely did you see your Mac use its CPU.
And then it was like, it got freed up the IO. It was like, boom,
good to go. Yeah. Yeah. Start there. Yeah. Oh yeah.
Yeah. And just do the external thing. Cause it's, it's easy and fun.
And, and Thunderbolt has plenty of the bandwidth that it's no,
you're not, you're going to get.
So much more performance over the spinning drive internally,
even though, cause like people start to freak out about the whole bus thing
and it's not going to be your bottleneck. That's not, that's not going to be
your issue. That's correct.
Yeah. Thank you. This is one of the things I really love about the Mac geek
app community in general, and specifically about having so many of you join us when we do the show,
because these kinds of things come to mind.
And I made the incorrect assumption.
I could have checked MacTracker when I was answering Andrew's question,
but I was like in like blazing through mode.
I'm like, ah, there's no way they released a computer in 2019 that had a spindle drive.
Well, Dave was wrong. Told you I was wrong before and that I would be wrong
again. Who knew? It's going to be right away.
Yeah, that's where I would start for sure, especially since you've exhausted all these other things.
I mean, you know, spending money is spending money. You don't want to do it willy nilly.
And I still think, you know, here's the thing, unless you can clone to that,
migrating to it will naturally cause you to do a reinstall of the operating
system and then migrate things over with like, you know, migration assistant,
which will work almost perfectly in most cases.
So it really won't hurt all that much. But that's not a nuke and pave.
Migration assistant is its own thing, but it will get you there quickly.
That and that would be worth trying yeah right you know it's
just the way to do it just do that yeah install the os on on the
spindle drive let migration assistant take your data over all
right sorry install os on the ss install the new os on the ssd let migration
assistant slurp things over and my guess is that your your problems will be
your life will change yeah you may not solve you may not solve the problem but
you might mitigate the symptoms of it this way yeah.
Hal has our next question. He says, and I'm curious about M1's future.
I have three M1 Macs, a Mac Studio, a 14-inch MacBook Pro, and an 11-inch iPad Pro.
Okay. All M1 with one terabyte storage.
I just use Lightroom for photography. That is all. I don't do any video editing.
My question, how long will the M1 chip handle this basic photo editing and receive
continued Apple support?
Port maybe uh move up to the m3
or the m2 i still have a 2017 intel iMac
uh and it's still going just fine yeah great okay
good uh he says it's a backup only and
adam i'm glad to have you here says hal and i agree with hal yeah yeah yeah
so glad to be here yeah yeah yeah yeah thought thoughts on uh on this adam yeah
so my immediate thought was i don't know how many people know about about Apple's, um,
sort of terminology for either vintage or obsolete products.
So bottom line is, I don't think you have to worry too much about M1 going away
anytime soon because Apple has two things where they have vintage or yeah, vintage products, um.
And um obsolete products yep and
vintage products are basically covered in
terms of like you can take them to an apple store you can prepare
them you can go to apple service providers they're gonna have parts for
them uh for like five years uh
yeah products are considered vintage when apple stopped distributing them for
sale more than five and less than seven right between five and five and seven
years yep and as we know like operating system updates go back four or five
years too so So like you're going to be able to upgrade your operating system
for at least four or five years.
And then, you know, after seven years, that's when things get obsolete.
And that's when I would really kind of start to worry. But, you know,
like M1 is still like a great processor.
And if you were to buy one, I wouldn't even have any qualms about recommending
to someone, especially someone who might be on a tight budget.
You can still find M1 Macs out there and you can get great deals on them.
And they're going to they're going to go for three, four or five years.
You're going to be just fine. Oh, I agree. My opinion, the the Mac studio that
I'm running here in the studio to replace the aforementioned lightning struck iMac is an M1 Max.
It's the base model Mac studio with a 512 gig SSD.
And it's great. I looked in MacTracker to see when this clock would start for
the M1 in general, which I think is an important marker here, right?
So the M1 Mini was sold up until January of 2023, the M1 MacStudio through June
of 23, and the M1 iMac was sold up until October of 23.
So I think for M1 in general, October of 2023 is when this five-year clock is going to start.
I know that there were others that stopped being M1 prior to that,
but M1 is M1, especially with Mac OS, right?
So October of 2023, that means we've got until fall of 2028 before Apple is
off the hook for M1 in general.
I think we're going to be all right for a while. Yeah. Yeah.
I, I mean, I was going to mention, I guess we're going to talk a little bit
later, so maybe I should save this.
I'm going to save it for later, but I'll, I'll talk about some of my technology
that I still use a little bit later, I think. All right. Okay, great.
All right. Well, um, shall we, shall we proceed into later?
Do you want to, do you want to read Jim, Jim's question for us?
Yeah, I guess not that much later. It's not that much later. Here we are.
Yeah. Jim has a great size and it's actually for you, Dave. Dave.
He says, Dave, I'm considering getting a Synology disc station. I can say that word.
With the main use being a backup and to stream media photos,
videos for family and friends.
I take a lot of photos and videos and share them with family and friends and
groups I'm associated with.
I have a few questions regarding this and I'm hoping you can help answer.
I'm sure Dave can. I would like to take photos, videos of events and then post
them for others to view or and or download.
Can I allow access to a media folder with both videos and photos that others
can view if they have a URL to access this folder?
And can you share individual files?
Can home videos be streamed? Would video station be used to stream share media
files? Is there a cost for that software?
Are the disk stations noisy, have running fan, or relatively quiet?
I'm considering the DS423 with four bays, so I would have plenty of room for
backing up files and sharing streaming media.
I could use RAID 5 or 3 on the drives for backup and have one drive by itself sharing my media.
Oh, can I? I think he's asking. Or do all four drives need to be set up on RAID
5? Or is that the best way to set it up?
I currently have a Flickr account where I share my media files,
but home videos are limited to size and length.
I'd rather not pay an annual subscription for Flickr if I can do the same thing
myself with no limit on streaming videos.
Is Synology a good solution for what I'm trying to do, or should I just stick with Flickr?
I appreciate your feedback since you are familiar with the disk stations.
I am all too familiar with the distations. I have a little story to tell about
my 20 minute ordeal on Saturday afternoon that turned into six hours,
but I'll save that with my distation. This was a self-inflicted thing.
Yes. So I think the DS423 Plus, that's the model.
There is no DS423, just for everybody's benefit if you wind up searching for
this. I think the DS423 Plus is a fantastic disk station for most of us here
in the MacGeekGab community.
It's got, like you said, it's got four bays. It's got a decent CPU in there to handle.
Like, you can run some Docker containers on that CPU.
You can run, you know, the things you want to run. It also, it is an Intel CPU with a GPU.
Which means it has the capability of doing hardware transcoding,
which can be important, especially in your scenario where you want to provide
videos for family and friends.
Having the disk station able to do that hardware transcoding if they're on a
bandwidth limited connection back to you, super important.
So there's all like a lot of reasons that I love the DS423 plus really great disk station.
Um, I would, as far as answering your questions in reverse,
I would almost always,
unless there is an extenuating circumstance and nothing you described would
fall into this category for me, I would always set up all of the discs as one array,
one in, and arguably one volume too. I wouldn't split the volumes.
I would make one array of all the discs. I would not have one disc for media
and the other three discs for whatever else you're doing to all four of them
or three of them or two of them. You don't have to fill it out of the gate.
You can put two in two discs in and then add a third when you need more storage
and add a fourth and need more storage. And I would not use RAID 5. You could.
And there's nothing wrong with RAID 5, except that you can't use different size disks with RAID 5.
If you do, if you have, let's say you put two terabyte disks in,
let's say, even if you call it RAID 5, if you just have two disks,
one disk is always dedicated to fault tolerance with RAID 5,
which means you would get two terabytes of storage and you would have one disk for fault tolerance.
However, if you added a third two terabyte disk, you would have one disk for
fault tolerance and now four terabytes available for your storage.
If you then, and we're still on RAID 5, if you then added a four terabyte drive,
you would only add two more terabytes of storage.
Two terabytes on that four terabyte drive would remain unused until you replaced
all of the other three drives with drives that were at least four terabytes in size.
So the smallest drive in the array defines how all of the drives are going to be seen.
That is not true with something called Synology Hybrid RAID, or SHR as they call it.
That gives you the option of using mixed disk sizes within one disk station, within one array.
And for most home users is what I would recommend because it allows you the
flexibility of kind of using drives that you get over time.
And as you replace drives, you start replacing them with larger drives.
And over time, your array will just grow. and that's
wonderful so that out
of the way um for video streaming yep this
device will do it you can use video station or plex even it's
available for free uh could be and you can pay for
additional features but plex i i would use plex to do this but you can run both
plex and video station on the same disk station pointing to the same media library
like that you don't have to keep two copies of your media library you can literally
have one you point both both of them into that folder and it works just fine.
As for noise, so yes, the DS423 Plus is going to have a fan.
And that fan can be set to like loud mode, medium mode, or quiet mode.
The fan is not going to be your problem.
That's relatively quiet and it's nice, consistent, easy white noise.
Those discs that you put in there, however, are going to be a different story.
Unless you choose to put SSDs in, uh, those discs are noisy.
Adam, you, are you, you have experience with this too?
Well, yeah. Cause my sonology sits in our living room and, um,
you know, my wife would be like, what's that noise?
And I'm like, it's yeah.
Yep. Yep.
Yep. Yep. It's the discs are noisy.
When I moved the disc stations last year, maybe a year before,
from my office to the kind of a basement closet in our house,
playroom closet, really, in our house, simply because we put a generator in,
like a standby generator in the house.
And I thought, well, this is now where I want all the network stuff. Right.
It was it took me a couple of weeks to get used to the new, much lower,
much more consistent ambient volume level in my office was like something's wrong.
Like I thought like it felt like the power was out, even though,
of course, the lights were on. Everything was fine.
But yeah, those things are noisy. So if you can avoid putting it in your living
room, that is a good thing.
And and or your bedroom. But you could put SSDs in this and then all you would
have is the noise of the fan.
You'd also maybe have to just eat ramen for a little while to offset the expense. Second mortgage.
Yeah, exactly. But, you know, like the answer to everything is,
yeah, man, this is what a disk station is for.
And it's a great entry point to getting a disk station.
There's so much more you can do with it as I said the 423 plus is super capable
so you will and Synology software Synology software is really where they shine
we actually have a lot of complaints,
comments perhaps about how their hardware is
underpowered it's sort of a known thing in the industry the holy
grail for all of us is Synology software
and QNAP's hardware right that
would would be great and it turns out we might
get something approximating that from
ugreen um the ugreen brand new
not even in the market yet uh nasync n-a-s-y-n-c is uh is coming i've been paying
very close attention to this since ces actually had a conversation with them
last week i've got one on the way but they're putting they the people in charge
of this project have worked They've worked at Synology,
they've worked at QNAP, and they've worked at Seagate.
So they know, like they really understand what people like us want,
and they know that there's a gap in the market.
So I'm eagerly awaiting, like I know right out of the gate the Ugreen one isn't going to be right.
So right now, I wouldn't recommend buying it unless you want it to just tinker with.
Over the next 12 months as the software for this thing matures and everything kind of comes around,
it's going to start getting interesting so anyway that's a
that's a departure the synology software is great it
will you know it will give you as
many saturday afternoons of tinkering fun as you care to spend with it and and
tweak and you can add all kinds of different little server things it's super
fun so i yeah i think i think you're gonna have fun with it As to the last question,
is this easier than Flickr?
No, Flickr is already working for you.
There's no friction, no time and just the annual expense of maintaining the status quo with Flickr.
So I can't with a straight face say, of course, this is better.
No, well, it's not easier.
Whether it's better or not depends on whether like I for me.
Yeah of course i like hosting the stuff
myself i like managing it i like tinkering with
it most of the time uh so yeah but
hopefully that helps you which distation we gotta
we gotta upgrade you right you have a like a 15 13 plus how many discs do you
have in that uh i think four okay there's four because maybe maybe we need to
send you a 423 plus that's kind of what i have two two broken broken drive doors
that we talked about. I get the little lat, I got to order this.
Well, you don't have to order it. If, uh, if we wind up getting you a four 23
plus, cause that might be the, uh, the magic answer here. So I was looking at that exact model.
It was interesting that he brought that up. Yeah. And I run a lot of old technology around here.
I realized, you know, we were talking earlier about when to upgrade to an,
uh, you know, your Intel Mac.
So I thought every time I've been in here, there's a, there's a fan noise.
And I always thought it was my Drobo under the desk. And I went and turned off the Drobo today.
And I still hear the fan noise. And I'm like, oh, I had a spinning...
Backup drive that i use for just like a seagate drive that
i use for and i'm like oh i wonder if that has a fan in it so i unplug that still
a fan noise it's my intel it's my
intel oh of course it is like oh yeah yeah
yeah yeah so there's that um until i
moved here two years ago i was using using a usb
four bay drobo like an original drobo
connected to a uh
intel core duo not even
core two duo mac mini as a
network backup storage facility and
it it was stuck running snow leopard i think
was the last operating system it would run on but i
was running in that up until two years ago and it's sitting in the box here it
would still run i could probably hook it up and still do the same thing i was
using um chronosync and chronosync has i
forget i can't remember what it's called but they have like a networking software
that you can use okay to go across
the network and that works great so you know i am the
king of like holding on to old technology
for way too long and continue to use it but yeah i
mean that synology is running great too it does everything i needed to
do and uh the only complaint i had was i
couldn't figure out plex but then what i didn't realize as we
talked about on a previous episode is that i needed to update the
core software um because i didn't realize it wouldn't tell me that oh you're
on six you can now go to seven it would it did the auto updates up within whatever.
Version it was yes and then it i didn't know i could even download and install
like you can run dsm 7 on the 1513 plus.
That's amazing. That's great. Like Synology, their support is like their support
for their devices. It is amazing.
Like, like the fact that you can run the current operating system on these devices
that are ancient and out of warranty and out of any sort of support.
It it it speaks a lot to how they are as a company and
they if you emailed them for support with that like i
i would be almost certain that they would engage and
answer and help you even though it's way out of warranty like i've i've had
them go and we've heard this from all of you folks too uh you know they go out
of their way for this so yeah it's um i'm running seven seven one one yeah whatever
one one one it's amazing update six that's amazing and that brought my plex back so So now I'm happy.
Like it's fine. Other than the little hardware failure.
Yeah. Right. But that's like physical hardware failure that your drive doors won't close.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And I just took the empty ones and I've swapped them. Of course. Yes.
So they're just the empty bays that are popped open. I had never heard of that
until you mentioned it, you know, whatever, three or four weeks,
five weeks ago, whatever it was.
And then I was doing an inventory of disc
stations that I like old disc stations that I
have here and I was going through one of them
and just making sure I hadn't left like a drive in it
or anything before I gave Pete this this old one that
he's now using for like a data storage thing which is great it's nice to see
it back in service and as I was going through you know I just pop the drives
and put it take it out make sure there's nothing in the tray pop it back in
and lock it and one of them it was totally fine until I touched it and I opened
it up it's like okay okay, great.
And I close it and won't close. And I'm like, oh, that's weird.
And, and then I was like, frigging Adam cursed me.
Like I've never experienced this. I have, I've had so many disc stations over the years.
Now I get this. Yep. Here's the thing with mine.
They did it on their own. Like, they were just sitting there, and they just...
One day, I walked up, and one was popped open, and I couldn't close it.
And then, about a month later, another one did it.
Wow. And I was like, what the heck is going on here? Like, they just failed
on their own. Like, no one touches that thing. No one goes over there. Right.
I mean, unless the cats bumped it and then did it, but I highly doubt it.
I doubt it. Yeah. Yeah, I will share a PSA here about anyone migrating from
one disk station to another.
Something I have done countless times without any issues whatsoever.
So much so that I'm super confident about the process. And Synology makes it easy.
If you have, let's say you have like, you know, three, three bay array and whatever
size disk station it might be. You know, it could be a four bay. It could be an eight bay.
It doesn't matter. Uh, you can take those discs, move them into a new disc station,
fire it up and it'll say, Hey, uh, I see that you're moving this,
uh, from a, you know, whatever you used to have to whatever this current model is.
Is do you want to do that and you say yes and then
and then it asks you another question do you want to start from
scratch with your system but keep your data
or do you just want to basically keep everything
including all your settings and your users and everything and just
run what you ran over there over here without having to do anything else and
so obviously i always choose that and then it says great i'm going to download
the software for it it downloads the software updates updates itself reboots
and literally in like 20 minutes you're back up and running it's amazing right it's awesome.
So on Saturday we got home, we went out to lunch, we got home from lunch and
I'm like, you know, I, I've been wanting to roll one of my disc stations to
a newer one that I have here. I need to test. Okay, great.
I'm like, I told Lisa, I'm not, I don't even know if I told her I'm going to
take 20 minutes, but in my, like I knew it was going to be 20 minutes.
So I'm like, yeah, I'm just going to do this.
And so I go into the playroom. I, I shut down the old disc station.
I had my laptop downstairs already.
I was kind of thinking about doing this and, uh, I shut it down.
I put the you know put
the move the drives and the one thing and I
did this this was not my problem you have to
put keep the drives in the same order so drive one
is drive one drive two is drive two if you mess that
up that's on you so I
was very and I know this I've done this many times I
very diligent okay so I did that came up got the screen answer the question
starts downloading the software the download is corrupted it what okay well
fine whatever all right let's do it again you know so back through download
restart it you know fine come up that starts downloading the download is corrupted.
Okay so i go to the website i download the
software manually because you can you can do that too
you can you know it's all just in a web browser so okay again
one more time i upload load your system volume
is full like oh no i've
heard about this oh no so now
i have there's there's your main volume that
has you know terabytes and terabytes of
data and then there's a tiny little sliver that they
carve out for the system volume and it's put on every disk so
if you lose a disk you still have your system volume it's a it's a raid one
it's a mirror across all of them and uh
that system volume was full
it turns out Synology used to and so therefore my older RAID has this size 2.3
gigabytes of a system volume the new ones if you were to set up a disk station
today it would give you an 8 gigabyte system volume I would argue it should be a hundred but.
Be that as it may, it needed about 750 megabytes to download and unpack,
like unzip the update file.
And, you know, things like, if you know anything about Unix,
var log is stored on the system volume.
The slash user and slash Etsy directories are stored on the system.
So there's like things there.
And there's even some app packages there. I spent
six hours on Saturday and I
by our five and a half to our previous
story I gave up I was
like I cannot solve this and I
texted Lisa I started kind of keeping her up to date
like I'm sorry here's where we are like I
hadn't even like gone upstairs since we got home from lunch and I'm
like I have two more things I'm going to try it's going to take 15 minutes
and then I'm done and thankfully the first one of those actually worked
but it was you know it was just that constant process i had
to i learned on saturday how to hot mount
a synology volume in i built like a new disc station with a single drive to
just get it up and running and then while it's on i pushed all of my discs in
from the old one and was able to hot mount the system volume that way it It was a whole thing.
I learned more Unix than I wanted to learn.
And I knew I was playing with fire, right?
Like I knew that anything I did could be the last thing I ever did with this volume, right?
But thankfully I was able to clear off enough stuff from that system volume to fix it.
My advice to everyone is if you are, if you know how to go and check how much
space is on your system volume, do that before you migrate to a new disk station.
Definitely. You, you, and if you don't know how to do that, open a Synology
support ticket, tell them what you're about to do.
It's going to take a few days for them to reply, have them go in,
look at your system volume, clean out.
They will clean out the things that they know are safe to clean out.
So you're not Not guessing like Dave was on Saturday afternoon and you're and
have them prep you for this upgrade and then and then then you'll be fine.
Like if I had gone in in advance, this would have instead of being a 20 minute
process, it would have been a 25 minute process.
Like it really would have been trivial if I knew how much space I needed and
what to do to get there, which I now know it would have been fine.
But instead, I did not proactively do this.
And I lost, you know, an entire Saturday afternoon.
Sure, I learned some things. And here's a valuable story. And I can go tell
Lisa. No, no, it was good. I talked about it on the show. But yeah.
Be aware is, uh, and, and really engage Synology support if you're going to do this.
So that's my PSA. So yeah. Cool.
Yep. Yep. Um, but don't let that, don't let this dissuade you.
And they, they are aware of this problem.
One thing that I noticed, I have four disks in this array.
Um, two of them have eight gigabytes reserved for the system partition.
Two of them have 2.3. So my system partition is 2.3, as we talked about before,
you know, it's a mirrored thing. So the smallest size wins.
But once I replace the other two drives over time, my system partition on this
array will grow to eight gigabytes.
So, and if you were to start up a new one right now, you'd get eight gigs.
And in theory, that's enough.
Again, I'd like about 50 or a hundred, just plenty of breathing room. Storage is cheap.
Dave, you want to talk about Synology for a little bit? No Why,
do you have A question? No Okay,
Shall we do some cool stuff found, Adam? I think we Should, hopefully.
I agree, I agree Alright Listener Dave tells us about A new thing That he found,
it's called Stash.new He says.
It's a well thought out alternative for Google Docs.
He says you you just go to well you go to stash.new or stashpad I guess you go to either one.
It seems I went to let me confirm this before I do the thing.
Yeah stash.new will bring you to docs.stashpad.com Okay so he says here are
the number of steps to make a new shareable document in Google Docs.
First you got to be signed in second you got to go to google docs create a new
document share make a title for it save it test it go into the sharing thing
change restricted to anyone with the link copy the link and you're done.
So he counted all that out. That's 11 steps. The number of steps to make a shareable
document on stash pad in your browser type stash dot new number to click the
paperclip looking icon in the top and you're done three steps,
including and you're done, which was the 11th step in the other one, too.
So he says the speed of their site is remarkable and the learning curve feels like zero.
I dug into this and he's totally right. It's a very cool alternative.
I, of course, was wondering, OK, what's the longevity of this company? What's the privacy?
Who are they? All of this. And thankfully, Dave from Houston,
but now living in Lisbon, Portugal, had already done some of this work.
And he says, uh, it's an early stage startup based in Durham,
North Carolina, the other Durham, uh, one of the other Durham's the founders
used to be engineers at Twilio and next door.
They're backed by precursor ventures and people who have helped build Twilio
Slack, superhuman GitHub and others.
Uh, so he says their privacy pages looked pretty good and all that stuff.
So thank you for that, Dave. Yeah. Fun stuff.
Stash. Cool. Yeah. Free.
It's or so it seems. So that's, you know, we like that. Free for now.
Free for now. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Porthos John is going to make us all spend some money.
He says, I'm in one of our remote offices today. And when I arrived at the hotel,
I realized that I brought my travel kit to charge my phone, watch and AirPods,
but had forgotten my power adapter for my Mac and iPad.
Off to Best Buy I went. And he says, I found the coolest, lightest,
thinnest power brick with included two outlet extension that I have seen.
He says it wasn't cheap, but it's easy to use. It's the anchor.
It's the A91261F1GAN prime 100 watt charging station.
Regularly $65 on Amazon. He said that day it was $10 off. Now it's at $90 on Amazon.
This thing, I have the, oh, I guess, actually, no, the one that he mentioned
is still that. There's a 140-watt version.
So I have the one he talked about, which is this very cool thing.
It's about the size of an iPhone, including its thickness.
But on its face, it has two three-prong USAC outlets.
And what's cool is when you plug into one of them, the outlet lifts out of the
adapters to make it deep enough to plug into, which is cool.
And then on the end, it has two USB-C and two USB-A power ports as well.
This is what I travel with.
I used this for all of the trips that I had recently, and I love it.
It's exactly this. The 140 watt one that he found, in addition to being 140
watts, has a screen on it that shows you how much power each port is consuming.
And because it's going to be used in hotel rooms, the screen is not on all the time.
It has a little button you can push to turn the screen on and,
of course, off so that you aren't stuck with this glowing, beautiful light of
nerdness that is going to be so delicious.
So i definitely need to upgrade
to this for the screen alone uh for sure
like there's zero question that i'll need this in my travel kit and i'm i'm
bummed that i didn't know about it before i started my q1 travel extravaganza
because i now i don't have a reason to use it for a little while but i but i
will there'll be there'll be more so 89 bucks for the one with the screen on uh.
On amazon we'll put a link in the show notes it looks
delicious that's worth it it's it's first
friday it's first friday yes and
i know this because it's 10 a.m and the and the air
raid siren just went on so if anybody hears that i apologize we do hear that
yeah we have we have not there's there was one time in the past where you mentioned
that it was going off and we couldn't hear it but um this is time we get to
hear it so yeah that anchor thing right though like look at Oh, yeah, yeah.
I had something similar to that years ago, not with the USB stuff.
But just a nice portable thing.
And it was great for carrying around and I could share it with people in Starbucks and stuff like that.
It was great. yeah look at that air raid siren i love
that i love it um we got
time for more another cool stuff founder too listener
ben tells us about our next one
and uh as soon as i find it here i
will pull it up he says my m2 air has the
tendency to be slow to reconnect to wi-fi after waking
from sleep this is odd to me since power nap
works and evidence reveals that it has been connected it during sleep nonetheless
i found some steps in an article uh
to build a sleep watcher automation
that power cycles my wi-fi on
every wake of my macbook air and the problem is solved and so we will um we
will link to this sleep watcher thing it's a sleep watcher is a command line
tool that monitors the sleep,
wake-up, and idleness of a Mac and can be used to execute a Unix command,
which, of course, can then trigger a shortcut or whatever you want from there. So that's...
And we've got links to Sleepwatcher and then also to the script that Ben found.
That actually does the swapping of the... or the toggling of the Wi-Fi.
So thank you for that, Ben. I love nerdy things like that.
See, only one of our cool stuff found today so far is going to cost any of us
any money. So that's not bad.
Oh yeah, that's good. I'm just wondering how long this siren goes for.
Um i will share one other
cool stuff found that i will audible into our ever-growing
list of cool stuff found i was talking to our friend jeff gamet last night and
uh he was talking about text blaze which is in a sense like a text expander
type tool where it but it's got so So many extra things in it.
It's got like templates and scripting. And he says it's like,
it's what he always wanted text expander to be.
So I figured I would share that here too. I have not used it yet,
but it sure looks pretty interesting.
So we will, we will put that in the show notes too.
So yeah, I love things like that. I still use a combination of TextExpander
and Apple's built-in text expansion thing.
I like Apple's built-in one because it's part of my iOS keyboard by default.
But for the advanced stuff, I use TextExpander. I'm surprised that I haven't
moved any of that into Keyboard Maestro.
You know, just because it's always running for me. Keyboard Maestro is.
So, yeah. Yeah, I use the same combo.
I still have the text expander keyboard on my iOS devices and use it a little
bit. I wish Apple would fix that.
Like, I don't know if they can. Right.
You know, the not separate keyboard thing, but I mean, on my Mac. Yes, right.
Text expander all the time. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Right. Yeah.
Text expander is there all the time on the Mac.
It can only be there with a separate keyboard on iOS, or you can launch the app.
And and the app is even more full-featured like
if i need to do a one of those things with fill-in forms or
whatever the app is yeah absolutely the way to go um but
uh and there is no keyboard maestro app for iphone so
perhaps that answers my own question as to
why i haven't moved this stuff in to keyboard
maestro but um but yeah yeah yeah
yeah i i like the apple stuff for the simple
things because it's always right there like you know phone numbers email addresses
those sorts sorts of things i i highly recommend
building snippets for that so all right
for those oh yeah those playing at home four minutes is
how long that i i think if they were actually playing along at home they would
have calculated that already and that's the tornado warning siren so and we
appreciate it yeah and it happens once per once per month just to test it the
first First Friday of every month at 10 a.m. All right.
They run that thing. And it's loud because, again, it's about 200 yards from my house.
So, and it spins around. So it gets louder when it points towards me and then it Dopplers.
Yeah. And it sounds just like a world war two. Yeah.
Raid bomb siren. Is it, is it, is it an old world, like a repurposed world?
Like, I mean, you know, why wouldn't it be right when in, um,
in our town that I grew up in, we had a volunteer fire department and I think they still do.
And so they would you know they
would they would test that occasionally and then
also there were times where it wasn't a test but
i got so used to hearing it that
i like it wouldn't it i
wouldn't even register i'd have a friend over at the house to be like what is
that what do you mean oh that oh
yeah that's the thing they're like what do you mean what do you mean it's like super loud
because again we were about as close to it as it sounds like
you you are to yours but i was like yeah no it's just
fine it's fine yeah it'll be important for us if a real
event happens because we don't have a basement so right uh
we have to go just a block over to the police station basically security center
and they have a shelter there so that's good knock on wood we've not had to
do that the only time i ever hear it is first friday and that's when i hope
i only ever hear Let's hope it stays that way. Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. That house that I grew up in, we also had a bomb shelter in our basement.
It was, you know, the house was built in the forties. So it was like,
they thought that that would help protect against like, you know, nuclear attack.
Obviously we've, we've learned a little since then, but seemed like a good idea
at the time. So we had this little bomb shelter, you know, just more cement.
That's all. out here in i think
it's in a more western south dakota
and i forget where the place is but there is
a company that is now selling we had
the largest munitions storage facility
in the entire united states and
it's now been decommissioned yep and some company bought it and they're selling
out them as shelters because they literally are will survive a nuclear bomb
shelters that's interesting that's interesting they just sell sell the empty
shell and then you can do whatever you want on the inside and they're building
a whole community out there so that's cool.
All right. I guess it's that time. If you need it. Yep. Time to bring the band
in. Thanks for hanging out with us, everybody.
Thank you for sending in all your stuff to feedback at macgeekgab.com.
Right, Adam? Yeah, that is feedback at macgeekgab.com.
It's feedback at macgeekgab.com. Thanks to Cashfly for providing all the bandwidth
to get the show from us to you.
Make sure you missed hearing Pete on the show.
This week so make sure to go listen to his show So There I Was they just hit
their 100th episode which is absolutely amazing and thanks to,
not thanks, well thanks yes, but congratulations,
to Dave Ginsberg for hitting the 300th episode of In Touch with iOS,
that's pretty amazing I know,
yeah it's pretty cool, so go check that out too we'll put links to all these
things in the show notes for you,
yeah that's it, thanks for hanging out we'll see you
next week and thanks to our sponsors of course you can
always learn about our sponsors at macgeekup.com slash sponsors
and that has all the links for everything and today
of course linkedin.com slash mgg and barebones.com so
our thanks to them our thanks to you it really does help
us if you go check them out and uh that's.
Music.
It yeah adam i
know my shirt says that uh i'm routinely disruptive and that your shirt is flannel
pete's not here with his shirt what does his shirt usually say i always i forget
oh man um ah don't get caught,
made that's some good advice,
later.