It's time for the MacGeekGab and listener Kiwi Graham brings us our quick tip of the week with,
for those who are trying to be paperless but still receive
occasional physical documents or receipts and invoices the files app on your
iPhone or iPad has a scan document feature even better is that it has a shortcut
which can be added to the home screen to give it a one-touch ready to scan.
It's not all that complicated of a setup.
Open shortcuts, scroll down to the list of apps that have shortcuts until you get to the files app.
Tap and hold on the scan document icon and then choose to add it to the home screen.
More tips like this plus your questions answered today on on MacGeekGab number
1033 for Monday, April 15th, Ouch! Text Day 2024.
Music.
Greetings, folks, and welcome to MacGeekGab Indeed here on April 15th,
which in addition to being tax day is also national anime day here in 2024 sponsors.
Oh, well this show, cause I almost forgot to tell you what we do here on this show.
We share quick tips like Pete just did. We share your questions.
We try to answer those questions. We share cool stuff found so that we can all
learn at least five new things.
Every single time we get together sponsors for this episode include Koda.io slash M G G.
That's where you can go and sign up for free to bring all your text and tables
together and backblaze.com slash MGG, where you can, yes, go get a fully featured,
no risk, free trial of this fantastic backup software.
We'll talk more about both of those things and a whole lot more in a little bit.
For now, here in Durham, New Hampshire, I'm Dave Hamilton.
And here in South Dakota, I'm Adam Christensen. And here also in New Hampshire is pilot Pete.
Good to be back with you guys after a week's hiatus flying horses all over the country.
You were actually, I, yeah, I wasn't sure if I could mention that last week.
You were actually flying horses across flying show horses. Yeah.
It's very cool. Beautiful animals. Um.
Well, you know, if you're going to spend the kind of coin to ship a horse on
an airplane, it's probably a beautiful animal.
I would love to know what that number is. My guess is you don't even know what that number is.
I asked, but in the interest of. Yes.
Yeah. It ain't free. I'll tell you that. Yeah, I know. It wasn't as much as
I thought. I've shipped a horse by, by, by, you know, by land,
by truck, by truck before, uh, from Texas to Connecticut and,
and the other direction, I believe too.
But yeah. I bet that wasn't free.
Also not free. Yeah. Yeah. It turns out. Yeah.
It's cheap. It's cheaper to relocate your stuff cross country and a car combined
than it is to, uh, relocate a horse across the country. Yeah. Yeah.
So it's pretty cool. They have them in these modified AMJs, and I don't know
what AMJ stands for, but it's these huge cargo cans that fit on an airplane.
They're kind of quarter pie shaped. They're rounded on the side that goes against the fuselage.
And then there's two stalls in there. They walk the horses into those stalls, close the back door.
So it's much like a trailer, a horse trailer. It's a horse trailer in the sky.
And I bet you appreciated having the extra horsepower on the plane there, Pete.
Oh, almost as bad as my spam joke a few weeks back.
Always extra horsepower here at MacGeekUp. In fact, you have some extra horsepower
to add to that quick tip that we started with, don't you, Pete?
I do. I actually like to use or have been using for years, although I'm going
to play some more with the one that Kiwi Graham gave us.
I use an app called Genius Scan. It has both a free and a paid mode,
and that's how I get most of my documents, paper documents, into PDF format.
You can put it in folders. You can share it via PDF.
Numerous apps so you use synology drive or you can
text it to somebody that sort of thing so i used to
use genius scan and pdf scan
i think was the app from smile to do
this especially where i really started using
these things was years ago scanning the paper score like the drum chart for
theater shows because i wanted to get it into my ipad i was like the first guy
I hear the first musician here on the seacoast of New Hampshire using an iPad
on stage now or in the pit.
Now, everybody uses an iPad in the pit.
But it was ridiculous.
Even as recently as 10 years ago,
you couldn't get PDFs from the companies that you, you know, you rent.
When you put on a theater show, there's these companies like MTI and others
that you license the show from them.
It's like assuming you didn't write the show, you know, somebody else wrote,
you know, whatever, you know, Rock of Ages or Sound of Music,
whatever. Yeah, whatever you're doing.
And and you you license this and you pay a fee based on the size of the theater
and the number of seats you have and probably many other factors that go into this.
And then as part of the license, of course, you get the like the libretto,
which is the thing that tells the actors what to speak and sing.
And and then you get books scores you know one for the conductor that has everything
and then the drummer gets the drummer score the guitar player gets guitar player
score etc etc and they always came as paper books.
And you had to write in them and then you had to erase them at the end of the
show before you send them back.
Otherwise, they would charge you for this, which was ridiculous.
And so as soon as I did a theater show after I was in iPad world,
it had been like 20 years since I had done theater.
And then I got roped into doing a show for a friend and was like,
all right. So I converted it to iPad with this.
And now you can get PDFs from from the various licensing houses because they've
realized it got to catch up with the times.
However i used to use pdf scan and genius scan
to do this we even talked about it here on the show how amazing it was because
you could like hold it up to a page it would auto scan the page you flip the
page it auto scans the next page so i didn't have to press any buttons on my
phone that scan functionality in the iphone now has all of that it will auto crop the page.
It's crazy right yeah it just it just knows
and you can do the same thing you're just flipping pages and
it really does a great job of straightening
things and getting it right correction all of that
i love that yeah yeah um and ironically
the show that i did when i first
scanned it uh it was a show called next to normal
and there was there's no longer there was a website where
people would share these for free you know no one
was charging for it but if you scanned a book you'd put it up there so i
uploaded it because i couldn't find it you know when i i first went but those
apps initially didn't do a great job at straightening and all that and there
was one page in the score that uh it was like a little funky for me but it was
fine i knew it and like whatever you know it was fine i did that same show two
years ago three years ago and the.
Music director sent out the pdfs that he had found for everyone and he literally
sent me the pdf that that I had created like 10 years prior.
Like Andrew, I made this. He's like, what are you talking about?
I'm like, well, so yeah. I can tell by that one screwed up page.
By that one screwed up page. Yeah, exactly. He's like, that's really funny.
Yeah. Yeah. So, but yeah, I never thought about using the, a shortcut to like
create a button to do that. I always just like do it.
I do it inside the, yeah, inside the files app, but yeah. Yeah.
That's what I used to. Yeah.
Yeah, which is nice because then you have a spot where you like I go to the
folder where I want to save it and then it just it just does it.
But yeah, it does a great job, right? So, yeah.
Should I take us to Larry? Yeah, let's do some questions. I know we always start
with quick tips, but I like, yeah, let's start with some questions, please. Okay, yeah.
So Larry said, I went out of town this past weekend and stayed at a hotel that
I had stayed at many times over the years.
This time I took my 14-inch MacBook Pro M3 instead of my 10.9-inch iPad Pro.
I also took two iPhones. iPhones. The first thing I do when I get to the room
is to connect my iPhones and iPad to the hotel Wi-Fi, usually with no problems.
This time I had no problems with the iPhones, but lots of problems with the MacBook Pro.
The procedure is to connect the phone or the MacBook Pro to the Wi-Fi and the
web page opens in the browser for me to accept the service.
Everything went well with the iPhones, but not on the laptop.
When I enabled Wi-Fi, I did not get
a browser page asking for me to accept the service instead i got
nothing but a note on the wi-fi page saying the wi-fi was
unsecured and the macbook pro did indicate
that the computer was connected to wi-fi but when i tried to access a web page
i got a notice that i was not connected to the internet i tried everything i
could think of to no avail i rebooted a couple times into safe mode no change
i removed all the extensions from my browser firefox with no change change browsers
to safari and chrome still no internet.
I'm at a loss as to what I need to change. I'm running Mac OS 14.4.1 with 16
gigs of memory, 512 gigabyte SSD, and I have connected to a local community
Wi-Fi with no password with no problems.
This is the first time I've taken this MacBook Pro on a trip and tried to use it in place of my iPad.
Any suggestions to help would be very much appreciated. I have not contacted
Apple support yet in the hopes that one of you fine podcasters will have the
answer. Dave, I think you have the answer. I could be wrong.
Well, I don't know if I have the specific answer for Larry, but I know what
I would do if I were in Larry's shoes, which is sort of my default.
It's our default way of approaching your questions when they come in.
If we know the specific answer, we'll answer it. But otherwise,
it's here's what I would do next if I were there.
Air so i oftentimes this happens because as soon as your computer starts to connect to the internet,
it's as soon as it realizes it has an ip address it starts trying to load all
of the things that it needs on the internet and that includes you know your
your mail your whatever right whatever apps are open or whatever things are
running in the background includes your browser too,
Every web page these days is secured with, you know, we see HTTPS,
we see the little lock in the in the in the tool in the in the URL bar and.
When you visit one of these captive portal pages for the hotel,
the way or the way the hotel delivers that to you is it sees that you're trying
to load another Web page and then it redirects that page.
It says, no, I'm going to hijack this lookup for this page and show you my captive portal page instead.
And in a sense, that's what we want to have happen. We normally we don't like
it when our browser stuff is hijacked. But in these scenarios,
that's what needs to happen.
And the nice part about this is this way, you don't need to know what the magic
URL is to load the hotel's captive portal page because it's going to be,
you know, it might even just be at an IP address slash, you know,
whatever. Like, you don't know.
So this hijacking auto redirects you to the hotel's page and you don't need to know.
It just says, oh, I'm going to take you there. Great. The problem is your browser,
it doesn't like it when a secure page is hijacked because it sees the security
certificate doesn't match with where you have been brought and it stops.
And that's the end of that. You get a nice blank page.
You sometimes or you get the or no page or you get the warning that,
you know, it's unsecure or whatever.
Right. And so the way to get around this is to ensure that you load a non-secure
page, if in fact that's the problem.
And this might not have been Larry's problem. We'll talk about other reasons
that this might happen too.
But if in fact this was Larry's problem, the way you get around it is you load a page that's not HTTPS.
Of course, none of the places that we visit are HTTP anymore.
Everybody's using HTTPS, and that's a good thing. So I always type never SSL.com
into my browser toolbar.
And as you might guess by the name of the website, it is never SSL.
That means it's never HTTPS. It's never secure. It's always sent in the clear.
And therefore, your browser is okay redirecting to whatever the captive portal
on the hotel, on the plane, all of those things. So that would be step one for
me is to visit NeverSSL.com.
It is always going to be HTTP colon slash slash never SSL.com.
It's, it's never HTTPS and, and Apple tries to do this in the background too, right?
They have, is it captive dot apple.com? Do either of you know?
Okay. I remember that. Yes. Okay. Yeah. PJ put it in the discord. Ah, there it is. Yeah.
Yep. Yeah. So if you remember captive dot apple.com, that also would work. Yeah, exactly.
And I, I think NeverSSL predates it, or at least in my memory,
it was the first thing baked in there.
So that's what I type, and it's easy to remember because it's NeverSSL.
So that's one way that you get around it. Go on.
A lot of browsers now will force things back to HTTPS, but that won't happen with these?
It doesn't, no. At least I haven't had that issue. you. I, you know,
usually I'll go to my browser URL bar and type never SSL.
And because I visited it before it knows that it was HTTP, right?
And so it works just fine.
Um, if it's your first time visiting it, you might need to type in the full
HTTP colon slash slash never SSL.com and hit enter just to, to sort of cement
that in your browser's history. Yeah. But.
I forget where I was recently, Singapore or Dubai, but I went to one hotel.
You know, I've got that little GLI MT3000 travel router, which is nice because
some of the hotels will limit you to two or three connections, that sort of thing.
So if you take that router, you've got all the connections you want because
you only have one. Yeah, right.
Portal. portal but this one it i
forget which hotel it was and i wish i had remembered now because
no matter what i did i tried captive.apple.com and
never ssl and all and it would not get me
to a login portal i could get there on my laptop and i could get
there on my iphone but the router would not let me
have it and and that's what i've used on that
router at other hotels right so that router's
weird i i don't i love the idea of that
barrel ax router the implementation of it
i i don't know like when we
were trying to use it in vegas it was like all right well this is slowing us
down massively that's a bad idea yeah 20 megabits per second i think or something
oh that's right when we were doing it in vegas um because most hotels and and
certainly the hotel that we were in there did this.
Will limit bandwidth per connection, right?
So that no one person or no one device is, you know, chewing up all the bandwidth
and it leaves room for other people. Like it's really smart.
The problem is if you have that barrel router connected.
You've got one connection. It is one connection, right? So 10 of you get two each.
Yeah, you get to share that one connection. And plus, we also it like it added
a hefty amount of latency.
Like, I want to say it was 50 or 60 milliseconds of latency versus just connecting
directly to the hotel Wi-Fi.
The nice thing for me was, though, I'm able to watch it.
I was able to use.
The VPN on it. Right. And appear to be coming from home and able to watch my
TV services through that.
So the router itself has a VPN connection?
Yes. And then, of course, it's died on me. I've got a support ticket in on that.
Of course. You know. Yeah. It's a good idea. I like it. Yeah.
So. Go ahead, Adam. If this is a certificate issue, like a non-matching certificate,
SSL certificate issue, I might have another tip because I have to use this with
web development all the time because I do self sign certificates for different
like local development and stuff like that.
So there's a trick in Chrome when that white page comes up that you're talking
about, Pete, so you try to hit something right and it's like blocked by SSL.
And then there's usually a link on in Chrome, at least if you use Chrome,
I know the date says go by bypass it. That even doesn't always work.
So if If you're still stuck on a white page, Chrome has this thing where you
can type, this is unsafe.
Just while you're on that white screen, there's no input box,
nothing to tell you this. You just type that all one word.
I think also maybe bad idea, all
one word works, but I always use this is unsafe and that will bypass it.
What? Yeah. Like there's no, you're like, you don't see that it's a developer thing.
You just have to know it. yeah you just have to know you can type this is
unsafe all one word lowercase it's
lowercase okay that was my question yeah i found a
stack overflow post yeah oh what
i had no i love this now i want chrome this is a chrome thing yeah yeah yeah
whoa oh i like that i'm glad i did this i'm glad i woke up to do the show today
this is great wow yeah right that's definite yeah that's right yeah Yeah,
I if it's not this.
It could be your DNS settings. If you've got some weird DNS.
And actually, I have another thought as to what this would be,
but I'll stay on this track here.
If you've set some custom DNS in your Wi-Fi settings, remove that. Let the.
Hotels dhcp server give you its
dns address because you might need that to
get to the captive portal some of them it depends
on how it's set up but yeah you'd go into you know system settings
wi-fi uh where is it buried in there it's they change it all the time system
settings wi-fi details and then i think it's yeah dns remove your custom dns
servers from there And that might be the magic answer for you.
So that's number idea.
Number two, idea. Number three, turn off your VPN.
If you've got I've had this problem with with PIA VPN, where it tries to protect you.
And so it doesn't let traffic pass until the VPN is connected.
Right. Right. And the VPN can't connect if you haven't broken through the captive portal yet.
And so you wind up in this chicken and egg scenario and it can be a trick to
convince PIA to stop trying to connect and blocking you.
So, right. Like, be diligent.
I think once I even like fully uninstalled PIA to bypass this because it was such a PIA.
Yep uh no pun
intended pita pita maybe sure
um yeah so um
yeah so like be be aware
of your vpn that may that might actually be what's going on with larry here
now that i'm thinking through all this yeah yeah it could be yeah the other
the other thought that i had although because Because I'm going to say this
probably wasn't it because iPhones or iOS devices connected just fine.
Does technologies like private relay potentially cause any issues with this?
If it's like masking your IP, like do certain captive portables act differently
and be like, you're not really part of my network and I'm not going to like let you do this.
Right. Maybe. Yeah.
Yep. Yep. And Porthos John points out that tail scale can also get in the way
of this, especially if you have it set to use an exit node like as the as the default.
So, yeah, I think these are all. Yeah, these are all great ideas. Yeah.
But it's this is the way you got to kind of get your brain into thinking like
what's in the way between me and the what have I put in the way between me and the Internet?
Ask that question. Right. Right.
Um, because you know, like, uh, what was it?
John had a problem years ago with what was that app that would like tell a little
snitch with a little snitch. Yeah.
It could, you could have it tell you what was going on, but you could also have it block things.
Uh, so yeah.
Um, yeah, it's good. So, all right.
Well, that was, uh, about 14 minutes on, uh, on the first question guys. So, uh, question.
There's a lot there and it is yeah it's i love digging in like this though i
do i do wish you'd gotten to the whole pia thing earlier in that question because
if someone stopped listening,
that's huge go back and find that yes getting
rid of pia yeah i've had that block me before and you're like oh no wonder i
can't get on the portal yep yep yep so all right well should we stick with more
networking go because i have something from jim great jim says i have comcast
cable in the Santa Cruz Mountains, and I have fairly good Wi-Fi speeds in the house.
Until recently, I also had adequate speeds in another room off the freestanding garage.
Now, the indoor speed remains good, but there is very little transmission to
the garage room outside.
I have a Netgear Nighthawk router, which is over five years old,
but appears to be functioning well.
I suspect loss of transmission distance may be related to having too many devices
hooked up to the internet.
I would assume the distance has been compromised by too many units using 2.4 gigahertz.
Do you think this problem can be managed with the router or should I just switch over to mesh?
Yeah. $700, do it.
Just throw money at the problem. Right? Well, you got to throw the right money
at the problem. You want to start with this, Pete?
Yeah. So I know you answered Jim's question here as well.
Yeah, I got some thoughts, but go ahead. Yeah. My first thought on this was,
has anything new been added to the network?
Some kind of a bandwidth hog, like a 4K streaming TV, a teenager gaming.
Gaming something like that um but again
it it's weird because this whole question was about in inside
and and uh I think like a shed or something
nearby and so the 2.4 band
gigahertz band is good at getting through walls
but it's more subject interference you know
as soon as someone turns on a microwave or what
we couldn't do I assumed that he was kind of isolated
saying he was in the mountains but does he
have a neighbor nearby and so it's consider
changing the channels on your 2.4 gigahertz
band yep there's another one and uh
i i think he wrote back and said we talked about getting a uh wi-fi extender
or repeater and i think he wrote back and said he tried that but it it was uh
not not fruitful so and then the other the other suggestion i had was consider,
before going mesh, just try getting another router. That's wifi six.
You know, those, those are my initial suggestions to try.
And the other one was, you know, Hey, pull everything off the network,
add it back one at a time and see what the culprit is.
But, but that could get real difficult.
There's a lot of things on my network.
Oh, that, you know, but, but there is like, I like this idea of isolate and troubleshoot.
Right so so one thought is to to kind of tack on to that pete is rename your network,
and then just connect one device to
it right your phone whatever something that that
you know your your mac would be even even better because you
can run like wi-fi explorer and and see what's going on
sure but that way you you will at least rule out or rule in this theory that
maybe it's because you have too many devices connected to the network i mean
all your other devices will temporarily anyway fall off the network if you change
the name of your network but that's sort of the point right then you walk around
with the one device that you connect to the new network,
test things confirm refute log capture data and then you know from there you
can kind of go and test other things.
But that actually, that was not.
On my radar at all, but I love this idea of like, let's just make sure it's
not the Wi-Fi having trouble itself, because if it is, that's one direction.
If it's the multiple devices, that's a different direction to solve.
And I think if it's multiple devices and that's the problem.
Which I with that router, I yeah, I don't think so.
But again, like this is a five minute test to rule that out.
It costs you nothing other than time. time so and just
make sure other people in the house know that they're going to fall off the network uh you
know but um but you
know there there you go yeah porthos john in the chat saying
you can even try a guest network and use only
the five gigahertz radio or only the 2.4 gigahertz radio
right like you can i in many routers not
all you can isolate and turn off one radio
or turn off the other or give each different ssids and test
them different ways and so leverage the features
of your router to test multiple ssids and
multiple or multiple radios with only one device and
see what that gets you um that that would
but but it is wi-fi is a guessing game
um but my feeling is
if it used to get enough signal outside and
now it doesn't i don't think it's
the wi-fi the number of wi-fi devices um you know i i like to your point pete
it was there a neighbor that added a new router right that's like getting in
the way and same channel yeah Wi-Fi Explorer is my current favorite app.
To and it's part of set app I'm pretty sure but yeah Wi-Fi Explorer is great at looking at what is.
Around you it because you don't get to see that with with Wi-Fi so it can it can help help you.
Um, you know, and, and then just think about what else changed.
Yeah. I mean, a five-year-old Nighthawk should still be cranking pretty good.
Yeah. Five is not that bad.
Yeah, I'm trying to think. He said, I don't know.
I don't know what it's. I mean, it's not going to be 6E, right?
It's probably going to be Wi-Fi 5 if it's five years old, you know,
but it'll be using 5 gigahertz and 2.4 gigahertz.
Um and in theory
you know the question is what changed and i
suppose it could be that something happened
to the radio in your router like did the antenna come loose like could be one
of those things too i don't know did one transistor burn out go ahead adam i
said or it's the stack of cordwood he put up against the freestanding garage
yeah i mean yeah yeah it could be a lot of things Yeah.
Did you put a new joking? Well, did you, you know, did you put,
did you build a Faraday cage around your garage?
Did you put a new refrigerator in your garage that wasn't there before that
now is blocking signal or, you know, something else?
Um, I, in our house, we, you know, our, the foundation is cement.
Our house is kind of a, the basement is walk out on, on one side.
Right. Um, and that one side is where we put in a patio a couple of years ago.
It has been an interesting experience
getting wi-fi to shoot through either
the window or the door because
it ain't shooting through the cement that surrounds everything else
just to get wi-fi on the patio so that we can you know
listen to music because there's rebar in there correct yeah
yeah yeah you have a faraday cage i do yeah it's crazy like how well it works
to insulate that like I yeah yeah yeah it's been it's been a learning experience
but that's you know that's what we do here so yeah that's um yeah so hopefully
hopefully that gets us somewhere,
all right uh shall we move on from networking to to not networking.
Yeah, keyboards. Okay. I'm going to take us to Dean, Adam, I think.
Right? Or am I reading that one? No, you're reading that one.
I forgot. I got Dean. Right? Yeah.
So Dean says, is it possible or is there an app in which I can reprogram the
function row key, the FN row key, on a magic keyboard?
For example, I have use F1, F2 keys, et cetera, as standard function keys disabled.
So when I press F4, it actually triggers Spotlight.
I'd like to reprogram this to either run a hotkey for or launch Raycast instead.
Not sure if this is possible or that critical either. It just came to mind and
I figured who better to ask?
As always, keep up the hard work. Love the show. Thanks, Dean.
You know, I think anybody who's listened for even a short period of time to
this This show knows what I'm going to say.
And it's keyboard maestro is, is where I would go to do this and it will do this.
I'm certain there are other apps that will also do this, but the one that,
that I have installed and that I use this keyboard maestro and yeah, absolutely.
You can, you can use it to remap just about anything you want.
So. Well, I have a question. Will it, will it do that even when it's in the
nonstandard mode, like he has it, or do you have to flip it back over to non-standard
mode so Keyboard Maestro sees that as an actual function key? Like...
Uh that is a good question i because
i'm wondering if the nuance of this is he wants to be able to do that but
still maintain say the other hot keys so like maybe he's
not using the spotlight one but he still wants to use his volume and media controls
well i think what it's worth testing this but what i would do is swap them around
and then program keyboard maestro to capture and trigger all of them.
And so when you hit the volume up key, it's really hitting whatever, you know, function 12.
Right, yeah, yeah, yeah. You
know, and let keyboard maestro capture function 12 and make it volume up.
And then you could even do, do you want it to be a normal volume up?
Do you want it to be a half increment of volume, which is a thing you can do,
right? Like, so, yeah, like, yeah, yeah.
But that's a good question. Yeah, you might have to, it might be an all or nothing
kind of thing. So, yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. I would add also if you, you may already have better touch tool.
Yes. Yep. Another great app for re for remapping. Yeah.
And that might even be, it might have a simpler interface to do this.
I don't know. I like, I'm too used to keyboard maestro at this point.
And the beauty is right. How many YouTube tutorials out there?
Yeah and to use either one or both of those that's fair
so that's fair yep yeah yeah they're they're
you know it's it's like we were talking about i can't remember we're talking
about in the shower before i don't even remember oh yeah in the show i think
um you know some apps aren't intuitive out of the gate but you you know once
you learn them then then they're then they become come intuitive to you. So, yeah.
Yeah. So, better touch tools in setup.
Oh, I didn't realize that. Yeah. I just found that out. And it looks like there's one called.
Key smith in there create a shortcut for any action
all right yeah i just
typed in keyboard remapping yeah in
uh better touch tool and i mean in
uh set app and it looks like a half a dozen options popped up yeah yeah it's
right there's a there's a jillion of these out there so yep pick pick the think
about which one you might already have installed and be using and stick Stick
with that would be the first step.
Keep it simple. Keep it simple. You got it.
All right. You want to take us to Porthos John here, Pete?
I can do so. All right. Well, I type it into notes really quickly.
While you vamp? Yeah, exactly.
He, which one was it? It's the last one. Still get through. Can I still get
through? Yeah, that's the one. The airplane mode.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yes. Okay. Yeah. Oh, there it is. Okay. Okay.
Porthoshan writes in and asks, does anyone know if there are any other negative
effects to running in airplane mode with Wi-Fi and Bluetooth enabled?
Obviously, when I'm at home, is anything besides cellular disabled? Do I miss SMS messaging?
So this was a, I was sitting on the couch when I saw this question come into
macgeekup.com slash discord.
And my first thought was, I don't know. I haven't tested that.
I was like, well, no better time than the present.
So i put my phone into airplane
mode i waited a minute to really
make sure that it was actually in airplane mode and then
i logged into our uh google
uh voice account for mac geek
cab that we have uh which is 224-888-geek we
have a phone number that you can leave voicemails at you can
can also leave text messages and so i did
the reverse i had it send me i sent
myself a text message from us and sure
enough it showed up uh on my phone
i made sure that airplane mode was on wi-fi calling was had activated itself
in airplane mode and that's that's the trick here in and once it did that yeah
it was registered as though it were with the cell network far enough Any way to to get SMS in and out?
I was able to reply to it and the SMS went out and and this tracks right because
when I've traveled overseas and I don't have roaming service for phone or SMS as long as I'm on Wi-Fi.
It will, it will work. I'm also told I have, I need to test this,
that if you have a secondary SIM,
like an eSIM, a data only eSIM, it will use that in it, like in a,
in a wifi calling esque kind of way. It won't say wifi calling.
I don't think it might. I don't think so, So but it will use like your your
like if I have my Mint Mobile SIM here in the US and I go and I get like a whatever SIM in Europe,
it will use the whatever SIMs data to send and receive SMS.
Messes i can't confirm that because i haven't i may have
tested this inadvertently and not realized it in the past but
uh it will use that data now
i'm told it will use that data as kind of
the the backdoor wi-fi calling ish to
to let that through which makes sense i mean
it's data is data like it doesn't matter if it's
wi-fi or something else it should be able to like piggyback on
that and it sounds like apple has has made that
work so what what i found interesting is be now i wouldn't try this on some
because you're going to get some wild international charges okay to yeah meet
you but on mint because it's a prepaid if you don't have international.
Debt if you haven't paid for international yep i've actually learned that uh
if i just try to to do Wi-Fi calling from a hotel Wi-Fi,
frequently I'll get, oh, you need to turn cellular on or some error message
that won't let me call out.
I turn the cellular on and the Wi-Fi calling picks up.
So if you're overseas and you're on Mint where you won't get billed or some
other prepaid, then go ahead and turn on your cellular.
Let it connect to a cellular network using that SIM.
And the Wi-Fi calling will pick up and work. I don't know why that does that.
It should be able to do it without the cell on.
It should be able to do Wi-Fi calling. But for some reason, it doesn't.
And then along those lines, Dave, I don't know if you, I just saw it yesterday.
Mint International, they just cut their price in half. And it actually looks like a fair price now.
I'm going to start using it. I agree with that. Yeah. Yeah. It's the Mint International
is Mint Mobile's newest international data, international plan.
It's data, phone call and SMS. You can't piecemeal it anymore.
Right. You used to be able to. And they were charging a fortune for it.
It was like 40 bucks for 10 gigs for 10 days, which is like,
no, but now it's 20 bucks for 10 gigs for 10 days.
And then and then there's other shorter plans with less data that are also similarly priced.
Priced and 20 bucks for 10 gigs is
more expensive than you
could find in for data only in most places however it's not that much more it's
you know maybe maybe it's double right maybe it's 10 more but for the convenience
of it i'd probably just use that and i think they know this and if If you're going to Mexico,
there ain't no way you're going to get 10 gigs for 20 bucks.
That's going to be more like 30. I don't know why Mexico data is more expensive
than everywhere else I've ever traveled.
But so I, I don't know why, like, it doesn't make sense to me,
but it's, it is what it is.
So, um, yeah, I, uh, I, I will almost certainly use this when I travel now that
they've brought the prices in because in addition to the data,
you get, I think 500 texts and 500 voice minutes or something,
you know, to use internationally, too.
I thought I saw it was, on the one I was looking at yesterday,
that it was unlimited data, but, you know, like...
10, 10 gigs of, uh, 5g is what it was, you know?
So, but then after that, well, of course, you know what their unlimited data,
if, if you're on like a 10 gig plan and you use the 10 gigs,
you're the rest of your data is unbelievably slow.
I didn't, I didn't see that, but I didn't, I didn't look deep enough at it to,
uh, to, to see it didn't, it looked trying to call it up. Yeah.
It looked like, um, yeah, there it's not being, yeah, here it is.
Unlimited data with 10 gigs of high speed data. You're not wrong.
And the three day plan is unlimited data with three gigs of high speed data. Yes. All right.
Yeah. That's interesting. Okay. So you, even once you hit your limit,
you still get like, you could still get a text message, you know,
a WhatsApp message through like, you probably not going to want to surf the
web, but you could, you know, You've got something. Huh.
All right. Nice catch. Wow. Yeah. And three days for 10 bucks.
Yeah, I could do that. I did.
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All right. Some of you will be old enough to get this reference.
Okay. I almost renamed S lady to razor.
Go ahead, Pete. I'm listening. And all she would do was listen.
She would not respond. It was really bizarre. No matter what I did,
I had that little floating ball at the bottom of my iOS screen and S lady would
listen and listen and listen and and never give a response.
Beat my head against the wall a few times and then finally went and looked it up the answer.
Disable Siri. Oops, S-Lady.
Disable her, reboot the phone, and then re-enable.
You're going to have to set her up again and say, you know, all the 10 phrases
that it asks you to say to set it up.
And then it worked great again. At first I thought it was, I've got,
I bought one of those little CarPlay modules, wireless CarPlay.
And I thought, well, that's just not connecting right. But I'm like,
no, it's, I've got the little ball there that says it's listening and it wouldn't respond.
So I thought that was the issue at first. And then I realized,
no, it's every time I try to use it, it's not working.
So disable Siri, reboot the phone and re-enable, reset it up and things work great.
I have no idea what stray bit got in there to turn off the response.
Yeah so if you're having yeah listening issues
go ahead i'm listening yeah right yeah
go ahead it's all i'm gonna
do is listen yep that's right yeah yeah yeah yep um which was no go ahead sorry
which was you know i think i talked about it at one point my wife asked why
i was whispering i said i didn't want the a lady in that you know to over I
didn't want Jeff Bezos to hear me or something. And my wife laughed.
A lady laughed. Siri laughed.
Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Anything to add to that one, Adam, before we move on here?
No. Yeah. I was wondering if you do that.
You don't, I can't remember if you lose the training or not.
Like Siri learns stuff about you over time.
I don't know if that gets reset or not.
Interesting. probably i would i would
think it would but you never well it's connected to your
account right it's tied to icloud yeah so you might not it
might be totally safe yeah yeah huh well you're
worth considering yeah you'll find out if you need to do it yeah right i've
i've done it before i've reset that done the same thing pete i've had it happen
to me years ago and just same same trick right i saw i found the same thing
turn it off reboot turn it back on you retrain it and you're You're back up and going.
Uh steve has a bit of
a psa for us he says i've run afoul of
a little known rule uh at least to steve and
and me i didn't know about this concerning apple's family sharing system every
once in a while the family sharing preferences panel gets wonky with incorrect
pictures and owner family member designations and the solution for that has
always been to quit family sharing log out of it straighten out the errors in
the two accounts between me and my wife and re-enable family sharing.
Last week, he says, I was met with an error that I could not use family sharing
with my wife for another 162 days,
evidently having violated the rule that says you can only establish family sharing
with another Apple ID account once every year for the second account.
This is a costly problem for me as I have all the licenses for our software tied to my Apple ID.
I dug around And one suggestion was to see if my wife could initiate family
sharing from her account.
Share with me, then the stuff I have, what's mine is hers, and all that was good.
And we figured maybe that would work since she had not done this before.
But going through it, we got the same error message.
Her account is essentially locked out of family sharing as an organizer or guest for now.
It's starting to look like the best remaining option to solve this problem is
to open a brand new Apple ID for her on her new computer computer and initiate
family sharing with that new account and then share it,
you know, with with Steve's account.
And he talks about, you know, that then it's like, OK, well,
if I do this, am I what do I need to think about in terms of syncing data?
And, you know, what am I going to lose? And and the answer to all that other
stuff is you're not going to lose anything. The other account stays where it
is. You're not deleting the other account.
You are simply creating a new one.
You might want to create a depending on what you have synced.
You could either add your wife's old account as her secondary account or because
you can have a secondary iCloud account. You don't get everything.
You don't get documents and data, but you do get contacts and calendars and things like that.
Or create a new user on her computer and log her into that. And then that user
will have access to all of her stuff.
And you can sort of manually, you know, it's a headache.
But I had no idea about this once a year thing with family sharing. I mean, I get it.
But yeah. Yeah.
I think it's designed to, because you have that six-person limit,
so I think it's designed to help avoid adding people temporarily and then removing
them and then adding them again and swapping around accounts and stuff like that.
Yeah but i mean it's it's again it's
one of those things where it probably mostly just catch catches people like
this somebody who's legitimately using the service and it just becomes a giant
pain in the you know we had there's a million of these kinds of things in our
lives and it just frustrates me to to heck that it's like most of the time you're you're,
putting in checks and balances that are going to get the
legitimate people caught and the people who really want to bypass it
are going to figure out some way around you're going to figure out it another way right yeah exactly
yeah yeah it uh i you
know he he came up with a list like this email was was four pages long and uh
after reading through the list my i had advice from it didn't work for him but
i i still think it you know it might work for somebody else so i'll i'll share share the gist of it.
The gist is that people, we as people, not, you know, all of us like to avoid pain.
And, and so my thought was take this, and what I told him was take this email
that you wrote me here and put it into a bullet list, like all the tasks that
will need to be done, you know, in terms of how to get your wife's data in the right places.
If we have to sign up for this new account and like make a big long list and
book a genius bar appointment and go to the genius bar and show them the list and say,
if you don't have someone at Apple that you can call to reset this lock on my wife's account,
look at what you and I are going to get to do this afternoon together because
the genius doesn't want to have to spend all that time with you.
The genius's manager definitely doesn't want the genius having to spend all that time with you.
And so that incentivizes. They get to pick the least painful path,
which I was hoping was, hey, I know somebody I can call.
They call. The unlock is done.
Problem solved. You get to walk away. You make your problem their problem.
I always said when I was doing consulting and I like still think this way,
whenever I'm helping somebody with their computer, you always want to be on
the same side of the desk as the customer.
Well, it's also true as the customer. You want to be on the same side of the
desk as the as the person who's helping you so that, you know,
they they'll stay with you.
And you're doing this side by side. And by pulling the genius to your side of
the graph and by the scruff of the neck, your side of the table.
Exactly and show them the pain that
you see and make that pain their pain
and uh and he did try this and it it there was no magic um that magic button
that anybody could push but at least he found out that there was no magic button
right that anybody could push so i i don't know i guess i guess the last step
is t cook at apple.com and share the story with him and be like.
Would you want to go through this? That's legitimately. That's a, you know what? Yeah.
Steve, take the email you sent to us and, and like loop in Tim.
Yeah, absolutely. Like Adam said, T cook at apple.com. Somebody in,
I don't, I, unlike Steve, I don't think Tim triages a lot of his own email,
but he has people, but someone does.
And, and they, they do take this stuff.
They do look at this stuff, whether they're going to, they do.
Yeah. Yeah, they do look at this stuff. And this is one of those things.
I like that idea, Adam. Yeah. Talk about going right to the head shed, huh?
I mean, you know. Take it to the top. Why not? It's dumb.
It's dumb. And the more people that say this is dumb, this is really inconvenient,
you know, and Apple does really care about that.
They care about processes that are just, well, just even dumb stuff.
And they're willing to admit mistakes when they make mistakes.
At the very least, you know, maybe they add a policy where you can go to the
genius part and there is like an override exception thing, you know,
what you call AppleCare in extreme cases. You know, they don't have to turn it off completely.
But to Dave's point, there should be somebody at some level that can be like, OK, this is legit.
Like, yeah, this person should not be going through this. Let's reset that.
Yeah. That limit on this one account. On this one account.
That's right. Right. And they could put in like software based checks that say,
OK, yes, he removed this user from this account.
He didn't add anyone to the account in the interim.
That account, the secondary, his wife's account wasn't added to a different
family sharing plan in the interim.
He's just adding it right back the way that it was.
And nothing about either of these two accounts has changed with regards to family
sharing other than this one thing. let it through don't even make it subject
to the 180 day or the one year limitation or whatever it is like yeah anyway.
I have a question for you, Adam. It comes from listener David.
Not me, but I actually am also curious as to your answer on this.
He says, my wife plays a lot of games on her iPad.
She has a non-game app called Happy Color. While in that app,
she got a pop-up telling her that her iPad needed cleaning.
She immediately brought it to me, and I just turned the iPad off and back on.
Note, I am a retired accountant and took away her Windows PC and replaced with
a Mac, and I also converted to a Mac.
He says, I figured by making us Apple users with Macs, iPhones,
and iPads, my tech support days might be over. Turns out, no.
His question, should we be concerned with this pop-up on her iPad?
And is there a malware app for the iPad that you would recommend we use?
He says, I do use and love CleanMyMac for our Macs, which includes malware detection and removal.
Is there something similar for the iPad, and do we need it?
What do you think, Adam? them i mean
the short answer on the antivirus you know
stuff no there is not one and i'm of
the opinion we probably don't need such a
thing um mainly because the
way ios has been set up from the very beginning everything
is so extremely siloed and you know the
one thing i might do is delete that one game app you
know like get rid of that it you know
i think obviously there's some sort of phishing ad
is what it feels like and the reason that
can still happen is because with ad supported apps apple does allow third-party
like ad services to be plugged into that so depending depending upon whatever
ad service the app developer partnered with a lot of those,
or I shouldn't say a lot of them, but there's times when an ad service like
that is so automated that they're not really paying attention to the ads that
get injected onto the network.
They probably will catch it pretty quick and probably ban that person from the
ad network that was throwing that ad in there. Right. Right.
Um, but stuff slips through. We see it on the internet.
You know, know, with internet banners and stuff like that, legitimate websites
will get ads injected that, you know, are scammy or beta-y or whatever you want to call it.
So, you know, and there's so many third-party apps and so many coming out of
places like China and stuff like that.
It's just stuff can slip through, even with all Apple's, all of Apple's checks
and balances through the app store.
You know, it could be even, again, a legitimate advertising service and somebody
just just slip through the system for, you know, a couple seconds.
That's all it takes, right? Your wife happened to be on there for the five minutes
that that ad was on there and they didn't catch it and it popped up. So,
Yeah. And you know, and a lot of these games can like, there's a lot of junk
where on the iOS app store, I think that's a bigger problem.
I think that's the thing that Apple needs to probably address is like quality
of quality of content and apps.
And I know they go after it and it's probably almost insurmountable,
like task, those people that are tasked with like vetting all that stuff.
But yeah, there's a lot of weird games out there.
Yeah. I'll say about that.
And they So it falls in that same category of like, we would talk to people
on the Mac is like, know where your software is coming from,
know who's writing it, know who's like, and so yes, iOS does have that problem.
But again, because of all the gate, how gated it is, that app's going to be
so isolated to not be able to do anything outside of the app itself.
Probably the best thing to do is just dump that app, you know,
just go bad app, you know, throw it away. Yep.
I, I really liked everything you said up until the last part there,
which was know who's writing your software and where it comes from.
That's hard for a lot of users. Not for us, because we're into this.
But I think the average person who just wants to use their phone and their computer, that's hard.
And I guess the only answer to that is I don't disagree.
I just think it's hard to do unless you've got a major company or something
that's, I don't know. So what are your thoughts on that?
If, if the, if the game or the app is like set up in a way where like.
To advance you have to be constantly like buying gems
or yeah timing out or waiting for
something to happen or like unless you don't
wait then you buy buy this or buy that if it's got a crud ton of in-app purchases
and you go look i mean every app on the app store will say who the developer
is if you click on that and the developer has 57 100 to 3000 apps exactly like
like this one in different variations,
like these are hints that like, this is, they're only after this to get you
to do it. And then I did. So yeah, you're right.
Yeah. And this is why, I mean, to, to your point about know who develops your app.
Well, Apple knows who has developed the app, every app in the app store. In their app store.
Yeah. And, and, and so there's that. And so you can, in a sense,
offload that to Apple, Although, as we've said, it's not perfect.
And I realize that's what you were saying, Adam. But the other thing is to to
to sort of address the point of all of those games that want you to buy gems and then,
you know, pay or wait or like all of those things that add friction to the experience of playing a game.
That's what apple arcade was developed for what
right in part was to give you games that
aren't allowed to have any of that
if they're going to be part of apple arcade it's nope they're
already being paid because it's a subscription and take the money and or don't
but you know this is the rule this is the the policy for being included in apple
arcade and so like i think I think that that's the answer there.
Yeah. Fair enough. Okay.
And let me be fair to those junkware games. They deserve to exist.
Like they are a thing and they're not, and I don't want to give the impression
that they're coming from malicious, bad or not legitimate developers or companies.
They just have a business model that's set up that way.
And again, part of that business model also involves injecting ads from third party ad services.
And again, Even if they're legitimate ad services, stuff can slip through.
It's not going through Apple's, you know, Apple, I don't think it has their
ad thing anymore, but, um, you know, that stuff's not as closely vetted,
you know, in terms of it's being piped into that app from some third party place.
And you're going to encounter that more
with those kinds of apps i guess is what i'm trying to say so
you're more likely to see something like this happen with that
style of app than you are say with an app from you know a developer that's just
hey this is my game it's $4.99 pay for it you know and that's their model and
play to your heart's content and you're done yeah yeah yeah Yeah,
fair. Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
Absolutely. Um...
Apple put out a press, they put out a lot of press releases this week,
Adam. We don't talk about every one of them, but one of them reminded me of you.
When Apple said that spatial computing is coming to business with Apple Vision Pro.
What are your feelings on that? that?
I have some, a lot of immediate, immediate reaction is they're in a place right
now with vision pro where they sort of,
I think they were hoping they'd throw it out there and there'd be like all these
use cases that sort of surfaced, you know?
Yep. And I think that hasn't happened yet.
And it were several months on and people are still kind of wondering,
what am I going to do with this thing? You know, what is this thing actually for?
And so I think they're putting out some PR to try and make this use case for it.
And actually looking through this article, I get where they're coming from on
this, because I think this is a legitimate place where at least early on,
early adoption, they're looking at verticals. And this makes sense, right?
This is like business verticals that are like, hey, we can do remote training
and remote learning with this thing.
We can do specific kinds of
collaboration like i think they talk about porsche engineers using
it to collaborate on stuff so
like these use cases in the early days and
especially with the cost of the device it's more likely as if you can build
these experiences and they work for productivity within business and you'll
notice too i as i was reading through it a lot of them too are because because
I think one of the challenges with the current version of the current technology
is it's just not that comfortable to wear all day long.
You know, I can wear mine two to four hours and about after that,
it just starts to get really like, you know, heavy.
You know, you really start to notice. So, you know, this idea,
like that original idea they showed in the keynote where I'd be at my desk every
day and I'd have all these virtual screens and I'd be sitting there or eight
hours a day with it on, I don't think that's it.
But yeah, if you're trying to collaborate on a thing that you're building and
you can create these AR experiences, and I think I heard...
Uh, that they are bringing like a big thing that was missing.
And I don't know if this is talked about in this, in this article,
but a big thing that vision pro did not have that restricted this sort of thing
that they're talking about here was you didn't have shared AR VR experiences when it launched.
Yeah. Apple is adding that. So like there's that, there's the great app and
I'm I can't remember the name, uh, jig space.
So jig space, you'd have the ability to like bring up this airplane engine, right.
That you could then burst apart and look at the mechanics or like an F1 race
car, like life-size sitting in front of you.
And it's incredibly realistic and incredibly immersive.
But if Dave, you and I wanted to look at that today, or when it launched,
you would see your own, you'd launch the app and you'd see your version of it.
And I could see my version of it, it and we could talk about it,
but those were independent.
Apple is adding the ability for developers to make that shared.
So like you're standing over there, I'm standing over here. We're both looking at it in our own space.
But if you go start picking it apart, I'm going to see that come apart and I'm
going to see, you know, so you can truly collaborate and that in a kind of business
to business environment,
especially in the remote world that we're moving into, who I think,
yeah, could be incredibly powerful.
So I get where they're coming from on this.
Is it really going to happen?
We'll see. But I get why they're making this use case because,
you know, they can justify the cost.
Yeah, makes sense. And they do talk a lot about collaboration in this.
But I think it's like coming real soon now, you know, or at least it will be
evolving, which is fine. Like, yeah, this is this is a public beta of this thing.
Essentially, they they I think they have another.
Option like they they have another swing that they can take at the general public
with this technology as a, you know, here's here's what you'll want, right?
As opposed to here's what the early adopters are going to want as they experiment.
They'll iterate on that and then they'll launch, you know, the Apple Vision.
Maybe it's not the Apple Vision Pro or the Apple Vision Mini or,
you know, some cute Apple name that describes the new thing.
And i think they'll have enough that they can do like the another launch of it if you will,
yeah yeah i mean like there's a great thing in here they're showing like
hvac unit you know building systems
training right and so you have your training app you're reading
about something and then you literally hit a button and then
it overlays the entire system in your space and now
you can see the sprinkler system and the
hvac system and you can click on it and you can get more information and
like you know remote training those sorts of
things so like these are going to be i think
the early things and i totally agree with what you say
about public beta i've talked about this for years i think apple has a bunch
of products that they often bring out that are i've always called it public
r d where they're looking to do public r d and i think the vision pro is one
of these you know i think the original uh like i always talked about the the g4 uh.
Little tissue box computer what was that the cube i can't remember what was the cube,
yeah the cube the cube was what enabled
in my opinion apple to develop thinner laptops
like they had to really like figure out thermals and
and cooling and passive cooling and like they learned
a lot from that product and it had a lot of issues a lot
of people bought it you know and i think same thing with like the
original uh macbook air which was really funky
and had all all kinds of issues but that's really interesting i never
thought about the cube as like perhaps
something that really helped pave the
way to apple silicon right i mean all the problems that the cube had we could
point back and say well you know fundamentally the cpu had to run too hot in
order to do the things that we would want a computer to do and therefore it
you know even with all of of Apple's thermal solving,
it wasn't enough, right, for a lot of things.
But, you know, is that part of the path to Apple Silicon?
I think it is. It's not the only path to it, of course, but it's certainly,
you know, you can point at that and say, well, Apple Silicon in a cube would
have worked a whole lot better.
Here's a problem to be solved. Yeah. These are technologies,
in my opinion, that Apple puts out because.
Other companies maybe aren't pushing the needle far enough forward.
And so they look at this and they go, we're going to bring this thing out.
We know it's kind of ridiculous.
We know it's overpriced. We know we're not going to sell a ton of them,
but we want to see, you know, because up until the vision pro really AR VR has
been mostly about just games.
If we're really honest and what I like about this article is they're saying,
okay, okay, this is a different thing.
We see more in this technology.
We built the hardware to push the needle in that direction.
Even we don't, they'll never say this, but you know, I think even they don't
really know what the application is. No, they don't, yeah.
But they wanted it in the marketplace so they could see where it goes and that's
how they iterate the next version.
And they push everybody in that direction. So if you've noticed,
like, Like now all the other companies are like, wait a minute,
you know, so they're creating a new market space to compete in.
And by having competition there, everybody moves forward and all the technology
moves forward more quickly.
And I, again, the cube, I think was the same thing. Like the in light laptops,
even the iPhone do certainly real, though.
I don't feel like the first generation iPhone was a public R and D project.
Like that was very well thought out for the most part, I guess the app thing
we could talk about, but it became that. Yeah, but I don't think Apple knew
that it was going to be that when it launched.
No, but I think they knew that smartphones could be a bigger thing than they were.
Yes. And that one of the technologies to push that forward was going to be multi-touch, right?
And not a keyboard. And like these radical ideas. And so Vision Pro has all
these radical ideas in it.
And they need it in the market space to push everything forward. Makes sense.
More quickly, you know? Did you know that the guy who invented multi-touch lives in your town, Pete?
I, yes, you told me that actually. Yeah. Dean Rubin.
He invented it when he was a grad student, uh, at MIT, right?
No, he, he got his undergrad from MIT.
He got, he was at Carnegie Mellon for his graduate work and he developed it
cause he's a keyboard player and he had this idea of playing music on a computer
screen, but you needed multi-touch to do that.
So you can find a thing. We published a thing at the Mac observer years ago about him.
I know Dean because I've played in bands with him.
You would you would never know but
dean's work was the reason that
apple lost their suit against samsung
because samsung went and dug up dean's old
work and said nope prior art somebody
else had it before you apple and uh
dean had to like hire his own attorney to be represented and all this stuff
and and he doesn't have a patent on it either neither does cmu nobody at the
time nobody Nice to do something and wind up having to pay money in the future
because someone else is in a lawsuit that doesn't involve you.
That doesn't involve you. It dragged you in. Yup.
But anyway. Thinking of other parties still involved in this,
I just wanted to mention something. It's kind of in my wheelhouse.
The other augmented reality that's
going on right now in the world is a military use, which is the F-35.
They've got that augmented reality helmet. If you want to see what's below you,
you simply look down and you look right through your own legs,
through the aircraft, and it's all projected right onto your visor.
So wherever the pilot looks, he sees.
He sees. It's like flying in a clear bubble. I'll put a YouTube video to that
F-35AR helmet so that you can see what the pilots see. Yeah, that's pretty cool.
You too can own one for a mere 300 large. Look, suddenly the Apple Vision Pro
doesn't look too expensive. That's right.
Go ahead. Hey, I don't know if you guys can hear it. My tornado siren is going
off and it is not first Friday. Uh-oh.
So it's completely sunny outside, no wind.
Yeah, you're probably fine. If you need to disappear, Adam, that's okay.
If I disappear, I'm just letting you guys know right now.
If I suddenly run away, that's what's going to happen. Okay.
So Dave, Joe has a question and Adam just blew away. Yeah.
Yeah. Let's hope that doesn't happen. Ari has an interesting little thing.
And I know we're kind of getting to the end of our time together here anyway.
We're getting punchy. Yeah.
But Ari found a different thing and he confirmed this with Apple.
He says, he describes it as a bizarre quirk.
The m3 chip in a macbook air
can support two external displays
as long as the macbook air is in closed lid mode
right so macbook air can support two
displays one of them if the if the computers open you get the internal display
and one external display closed lid mode two external displays the same type
with the lid closed oh sure the same chip inside a macbook pro Bro,
can only support one display in closed-lid mode. It cannot do the two displays
like the MacBook Air can.
So put that in your hopper and smoke it.
It's just good to know. So thank you for sharing that, Ari, obviously.
I know we're towards the end here.
It has been far too long since we've taken a minute to express our detailed
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i think we're at the end thank you i i think we uh i like it's we're at the 120 mark we gotta,
we have to let these these fine people move
on with their days so it's uh it's time
to find the banned my mouse is being oh I have a piece of hair underneath my
mouse oh throw it off the lasers yeah I mean this is a big piece of fur like
right on the I'm surprised it worked at all that's that's quite a bit there
all right oh look at that so much better.
Thanks for... Siren turned off. What's that? The siren turned off, so I think I'm okay.
Okay. Did they accidentally run it? I mean, it was... I think they may run it
randomly occasionally, too, to make sure people are paying attention.
Keep you on your toes, maybe. I have to double-check that.
Yeah, I would double-check that. I would think running it randomly would get
people not to pay attention. That's right. No, they're just running it again.
Send in your questions to us at feedback at macgeekup.com, folks.
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think he said feedback at macgeekgab.com that's
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Music.
Got any advice for him adam well if there's a tornado coming or for any other
reason don't get caught yeah,
see you later.