It's time for mac geek gab and listener dimiter brings
us our quick tip of the week with have
you ever wanted to go back to some previous page while also staying
on the one you already are on
hold command while pressing back and the previous page will be opened in a new
tab in safari i assume that many have tried this and already knew it but did
you know this also works if you hold the back button to reveal the menu with the tab history.
As long as you hold command, when you make the selection in that menu,
it will be open in a new tab.
I tried this and it works for both the back and forward buttons as well as the long press menus.
I was also surprised to see this work on Chrome too, and it works in Safari on the iPad also.
More tips like this plus your Your questions answered today on Mac Geek Gab
1034 for Monday, April 22nd, 2024.
Music.
Greetings, folks, and welcome to MacGeekGab, the show where you send in tips like that.
You send in your questions. We try to answer your questions.
You send in cool stuff found. We share your cool stuff found in your tips.
We string it all together into an agenda that hopefully the plan is that it
gives us each the opportunity.
Opportunity? Easy for me to say. To learn at least five new things every single
time we get together. other sponsors for this episode include ZocDoc.com slash MGG.
That's where you can go and sign up for free. It's the easiest way to find a
great doctor and instantly book an appointment.
We'll talk more in depth about that in a little bit.
For now, here on National IT Service Provider Day in Durham,
New Hampshire, I'm Dave Hamilton.
Easy for you to say. And here in South Dakota, I'm Adam Christensen.
Yeah. IT service provider day. I, it's like, who, I didn't even know this was
a thing. It's like a mouthful. Yeah.
But I figured it was appropriate for the, you know, for our,
our audience here, of course. So yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. You know, I appreciate my IT service providers.
Yes. They keep me connected. They keep us. Yeah. Yeah. Sometimes,
sometimes we appreciate them. Sometimes we are them and it's true.
Necessary either way. Yeah. All right.
Right well shall we keep going it there's no pilot pete
today pilot pete's out busy piloting actually i
think he said he's got a check ride today um so there
was there was zero chance of him uh avoiding that which makes sense we we like
it when our commercial pilots have their check rides um and you know keep everybody
up to speed and all that good stuff so yep yep we miss him we do should we should
we get to nige here let's go.
Nige has a tip he says i didn't hear it mentioned during
your section on file maker standard keyboards
and the lack of an enter key episode 1030
but there's no need to involve carabiner uh
km btt oh carabiner
elements keyboard maestro better touch tool i think is what he's trying
to say yeah i don't i'm not up with the acronyms thank
you for filling that in it took me a second into the fn
return key combo gets you the extended keyboards
enter just as fn delete gives
you forward delete so the function key fn key uh
love the show can't wait for the next awesome great
tip we uh we love that was a great tip yeah yeah yeah we can't wait for the
next either it's always i always forget about the forward delete i i see people
do that and i was like oh that's something i never really got into or learned
it's not in my like habits yeah i think it's a it my,
recollection is that forward delete is more a windows
thing than a mac thing i i like i don't know why i believe that i like i don't
know it i mean we have the forward delete key on our keyboards so uh yeah yeah
but i i don't know i seem to remember from the early early days I think it was
on Windows or DOS machines before,
like it certainly wasn't on Apple IIs, although that's going really far back.
Hey, I have a question. Has anyone ever been to Kansas Fest?
I know this is a talk about tangents. Oh, no, man, I should go now.
I'm closer, I think. Well, here's the thing. You know, Mac stock is happening
in the middle of July, whatever that that weekend is. Mac stock eight.
And I'm planning on being there. I noticed that Kansas Fest has moved from wherever
it was and presumably in Kansas.
But it might have been in Kansas City. So which is not necessarily Kansas.
But I think it was in Kansas somewhere and it has moved to Illinois.
So a little bit closer to Maxtalk. Right.
It's like a 77 hour walk. I looked, but it is only a three and a half hour drive.
So and and it is the week after Maxtalk.
So, Dave, I know, I know.
So, like, I'm looking at the schedule. I think I have a I think I got a gig
like that Thursday night after Mac stock or something.
But even still, I was like, well, if I could just make it to Kansas Fest for those of you who don't.
I think we buried the lead on this kansas fest and we
did and perhaps buried the why the
tangent even arguably makes sense kansas
fest is a fest a festival for apple
2 users i believe it's the only one left so
right yeah yeah or app fans of the
apple 2 so yeah but i
have to i have to pull out my apple 2gs system to
take down there to people do bring their
um their apple twos to
to these things and set them up i know i i don't i don't expect
him to be there but i know was has gone in the past so
yeah i have i have the was model you know with
his signature not it's not a real signature.
But you know it's like stamped on the front yeah it's
i have it and it it last time i brought it
out it fired up just fine so still runs still works
huh yeah i wanted one of those real
real real bad i never got a gs i
i i only ever had the 2c so yeah
i i buried the lead on that one too because i convinced
my dad to buy that machine over a mac
and i don't think
i've ever been or ever was forgiven for it he passed away a
long time ago but yeah yeah yeah
we went from an apple 2c to an se 30 was was my evolution uh of that so yeah
i was a kid i was a kid and it's like i i can't do i don't know how to program
on that mac i don't know how to play games on that That Mac,
like none of the games my friends play are going to be playable on that Mac.
That's right. I remember we had one friend who had a Mac and we kind of made
fun of him because it was like, Mac paint was the coolest thing we thought at
that age, you know, on the Mac. It's like, oh, that's cool. We like Mac paint.
But then the Apple IIgs had a great color, you know, version of basically Mac
paint. Right, right. Yeah.
Interesting. Yeah. We've got off target. Oh, that's my fault. That's on me.
All right. All right, let's talk to Todd here.
Let's hear from Todd here. He brings us back a couple of episodes to 1032. He says...
Alex had sent in a tip about setting up a secondary alert to remind of important birthdays.
Many, many years ago, Todd says, I created a birthday's calendar in my iCloud
calendar account, a manual birthday's calendar, mind you.
I took a few weeks to add all the birthdays that I wanted to track.
I standardized the title for each event, birthday, being first name colon actual date.
So it's got like the year in which they were born as well.
And he says, I set each to repeat annually and created four alerts for each.
An email alert one week before, an email alert on the day of the event at 9
a.m., a calendar notification alert one day before at 9 a.m.,
and a notification on the day of event at 9 a.m.
To add a new birthday, I now drag an existing birthday event with the option key down.
So here's another quick tip to a different day.
So he's copying this event, double click on the new event, change the title, set the correct date.
And add the repeat annually, all the reminders stay intact when you option drag,
but the repeat annually does not. Okay. That's good to know.
And that's also just good to know in general with moving calendar events around.
This has served me well for years, he says, and I often also add the date to
their contact as the calendar app will show me their age on their birthday as well.
Thanks, Todd. Yeah, that's a good idea. I like that. I'm surprised that the birthday tracking,
like this is clearly a thing we've Todd and
Alex's comments were not the only ones that we got about
this this is a problem that like Apple's solution for tracking birthdays is
not enough for many folks out there and I and I would agree with that like I
for certain birthdays I like I want them I want more information I want more notifications yeah.
You guys care more than I do, I guess. I'm just one of those people that just
misses people's birthdays.
Yeah, that same. But we have technology to keep us from doing that if we so choose.
I mean, otherwise, Facebook will tell you 27,000 times when it's someone's birthday.
Oh, I never noticed that.
I never caught that.
All right, you want to take us to Chicago, Tom? Yeah. Yeah, Tom has a great
tip. He says, hi guys, picked this one up from the Mac Power Users podcast.
Great podcast, David Sparks and crew.
I'm a teacher and I frequently have sessions over Zoom.
I like to use a whiteboard, which I can draw on. Most of the time,
I've had to do this by logging into Zoom twice.
I share my computer screen when I need to run a variety of programs that I need.
Then I stop the share on the computer and share the screen on my iPad when I
want to use my whiteboard by drawing with my Apple Pencil.
However, there is a better way. If you use Freeform as your whiteboard program,
you can call the same document up on your computer and iPad simultaneously.
The iCloud sync is so fast that when you draw on the iPad, it will appear on
your computer screen almost in real time.
Now I can just log into Zoom on my computer, and when I want to use the whiteboard,
I simply switch to Freeform on the computer and draw on the iPad.
No multiple logins.
That's cool. Huh. It's really cool.
I might start to need to start to use freeform
i don't i haven't used i've played with it
obviously but i have nobody to really use it with yeah
so same but i never thought of i never
thought of using it as a whiteboard and
then sharing through zoom because in my my at
my office we use zoom for everything right of course
like yeah yeah so and not everybody's
on a mac so you can't really do the whole free form share thing
necessarily right right yeah that makes sense okay yeah yeah yep yep right yeah
if you're not on the mac then the whole yeah right then the free form share
thing yeah i i need to i need to either find or create a scenario where i want to use that and uh.
Yeah interesting all right i gotta think about this yeah i'd love to hear more
from how people People are using free form if they are, because maybe I'm just
not getting the use cases.
Like, that's what I love about this tip is like, here's a use case for it that
I didn't, I never thought of. Right.
Right. Yeah, exactly. All right. Well, then we, we know that's our first ask
here. Feedback at macgeekup.com.
Send us your free form use cases. Like, I want to know. Yeah.
What was that? Feedback at macgeekup.com?
Yeah, it's feedback at macgeekup.com, Adam.
All right. Rob will bring us to the next one.
Although I'm still like Chicago, Tom, how do you log into zoom twice?
That's the other part that I'm wondering about.
Like, how does that work? Well, was it one once on his iPad and once on his
bed? Oh, I guess. Yeah, right. That makes sense.
Okay. Yeah, yeah. All right. I'll buy that. Okay. Moving on. Sorry.
Rob says, I'm loving Adam's addition to the show. Same. Very welcome and most excellent. I agree.
Following from the discussion of Quick Look features in episode 1030,
there was one thing I use often that was not mentioned.
If you use quick look on a multi-page document
so just to catch us all up quick look is the
name for the thing when you're in the finder or even
in like a mail message if if it works there
where you select the file you hit the space bar and it just shows it to you
without opening it in a different app that's quick look so he says if you use
quick look on a multi-page document pdfs tech files and word documents are obvious
examples you can then use page up and page down to scroll up
and down through the document.
Note that on Mac laptops and small external Apple keyboards without page up
and page down function up arrow and function down arrow are the equivalents. Also didn't know that.
That's wow. All right. This is great. Love this.
Lots of tips baked in there. Yeah, that's a good one, Rob. Thanks. Yep. I love it.
Dave. Yep. Dave has some other tips. Dave from Arlington. He says.
Little less intuitive. First, you need to have one of the tabs of the tab group
you want to bookmark be active.
Then press and hold the bookmark icon at the bottom of Safari.
It will then ask you if you want to bookmark all of the tabs in the group or just the current page.
If you select all tabs, it will ask you to select a location and folder name
to place all of the tabs from the group.
Once saved, you can delete the tab group. I hope this helps others keep the
clutter down and things organized.
Huh. All right.
Oh, I like, yeah, I like that. That's good. Nice. Fun. Are you a,
are you a bookmark person?
I know I, I have my favorites bar that I, I absolutely use as my shortcuts and things.
I, I have some tab groups that I have set up for specific activities.
Like reconciling all my bank accounts is a great one.
Opening all of my network smart switches. Right. When I when I need to look
at something on my switches, I have a tab group for that.
And boom, they're all open and I can just go to them. Of course, I have to log in.
But, you know, they're they're all sort of organized there.
That kind of thing I find.
But it's very limited use case for me for tab groups.
It's not something I'm using. I'm not in and out of tab groups all day,
though. So I can see where that, you know, if you are.
Yeah. Like there's, I grok the use case. I just don't have it. Yeah.
Yeah. There's a lot. I mean, there's a lot of people. I'm not a huge bookmark person either.
For a while, I had a bunch for programming, but what happens there is they become obsolete really fast.
So I like it for different languages. I would have JavaScript ones and PHP ones
and different ones for like different things that I found.
And what I found works better for me now is I try to, if I find a good little
snippet or something that I think I'm going to want to reuse.
I have, we've talked about Dash before.
I use Dash and it has a place where I can put code snippets and little shortcuts to trigger those.
Yep so yeah i kind of made that
my my code library because that's the same application
that also allows you to download an offline documentations for
all kinds of languages and programs and stuff like that yep so yep just that
became a more handy place to start that stuff because i would go to the bookmarks
of it that way i can just clean that out but yeah yeah yeah kiwi gram in the
in a live chat at macgeekup.com slash live,
I guess, is live.macgeekup.com or in macgeekup.com slash discord.
There's many ways of getting to us. We like to be reachable.
Points out that tab groups versus profiles gets quite confusing. And I agree.
Even just as we started having this conversation, I had to pause for a second
and think, okay, what am I using profiles for versus is what am I using tab
groups for because I do use profiles also,
occasionally not every day but,
I find it really handy, mainly for separating either Google logins or Facebook logins.
I mean, I have one Facebook account, but it drives me crazy when I'm like in
Facebook and I need to do something, say, on the Mac GeekGab page.
I switch to the Mac GeekGab page. Now I'm like in that mode and it feels like
because it sort of is a separate account, even though I'm logged in just as
me. I have to switch back.
And I really like having a profile that is always in that. And,
you know, one that's always in the gig gab thing.
And it's just easier for me to know, okay, I'm in this profile.
I've got the Gmail account for, you know, the Mac geek gab.
I've got the, it's just compartmentalizing things is how I've been using profiles.
And it really is nice because your logins and all that are kept separate.
Your cookies are kept separate so you can have those things,
you know, so yeah. Yep. Yep.
So the profiles I'm finding more utility for the way my life works than tab
groups, but I'm glad they're both there.
Like it's, you know, that's the beauty of it. You don't, don't have to use it
if it doesn't work for you, but it is worth trying it.
Like you were saying with Freeform earlier, having a – even cursory working
knowledge of it, for me anyway, it allows me to start to think about,
okay, is there a way to take this and actually make my workflow better,
more efficient, whatever that is?
I, I, for me, I, if I don't, if I just read like somebody's review of it or
look at, you know, the feature list from Apple,
that's often not enough for me to, I've learned that I will often dismiss things
for that. Like, like, um, focus modes.
I absolutely dismissed based on Apple's description of it and other people's descriptions.
Then once I started using it, it's like, oh my gosh, like this is the best thing ever. Yeah.
I need to, I need to do more of that too. I set it up a little focus modes a
little bit, but never really fully dove in.
Yeah. And I know there could be super useful.
I like I am I am constantly switching in and out of a few focus modes I have.
There's probably four that I use routinely. There's the well, no focus.
So maybe five do not disturb, which is sort of, you know, throwing the baby
and the bathwater all out at the same time, right? It just turns off everything.
But that's fine. There's times when it's like, that's what I want.
The sleep one, I use my old Series 8 Apple Watch to track my sleep.
And so it's great to have that, but also just not having, you know,
my alerts come through while I'm sleeping is good.
I have a podcasting focus mode that...
It only allows alerts from like you and Pete and Shannon over at my,
like my family can't get through that.
And then the nice part about podcasting focus mode is I have a shortcut from
it that on my phone that when I go into podcasting focus mode,
it turns on the purple light that you see behind me.
If you're watching the video and more importantly, turns off the air purifier
here so that I don't have that noise.
Noise um and then the other one is my nuclear
one that i've talked about here which is right my nuclear
family and i love that on weekends so that
every everything becomes a pull notification except
for things from my family so i need to do
that that would i is what i need to set up so i i
guess i use them more than i thought because i use i do use do
not disturb and i use sleep yep mode for sure
uh but those are kind of the main two and those are just the
built-in ones so right right yeah
exactly yeah yeah but but they're helpful they're they're
useful yep yep i um i
i i've i've really i i
keep thinking about oh i created a conference one i think.
I talked about that here where like i
i turned in instead of allowing
things through i blocked certain things and
most of it was all my smart home stuff like i need
my notifications when i'm at a conference for like most
of my notifications i don't need to know when someone's
in my driveway i don't need to know when the garage door opened
i don't like these things are not relevant to my
life when i am not here so um that
that part has been great i i you know and and just tweaking them and yeah i
like it so yeah kiwi graham says uh he says i have a with a client focus mode
um Um, text-based things can get through,
but no audio. Oh, I like that.
Huh? Yeah. Right. Like all these, these things send in your focus modes.
Cause I, I feel like sharing them is how we each again, kind of open our, our minds up.
One last quick tip from Bill. He says, I started listening to last week's 1033
this morning and found the quick tip about scanning documents with one's iPhone
directly to the Files app quite useful.
Much easier than firing up the scanning function on my HP all-in-one printer scanner fax machine.
I knew about scanning a document into an Apple Note, a hidden quick tip,
but hadn't known about the direct to Files.
It reminded me about two quick tips for the Mac that I've been meaning to share.
Number one, if you want a PDF of a web page in Safari, select the menu option,
file, export as PDF instead of going through all the printing machinations.
Yeah, the nice part about that is you get the web page as it appears as a web
page as the PDF instead of how it would appear printed as a PDF.
And that can be huge. And it also gets the whole scrolling of the web page,
too, which is kind of magical. So I like that.
Number two, he says, when you have the print dialog box open for virtually any
program, you see the little PDF icon or PDF letters and the little drop down menu in the lower left.
For years, he says, I'd click the drop down arrow and select save as PDF.
Right. That's how we do it. It turns out that was a total waste of time.
All you have to do is click on the word PDF to the left of the drop down arrow
and immediately it tries to save a PDF.
All you have to do is name the file and the
location and you're done which is you'd have to do anyway i had
no idea that this is how that worked no idea i
used it this morning like i i'm yeah
blown away yep love these quick tips i have there's another quick tip that came
in and i actually i can probably credit the person because i believe i have
access to it But listener Todd shares that regarding scanning documents,
you can also tell Siri scan a document or simply scan document and up comes
the files app in scan mode. Had no idea.
Oh, cool. Right? Yeah. Yeah, I'll be using that one for sure.
Yep. So thank you for that.
Thank you for that, Todd, for sure. Sure. I love, uh, now I got to add that
to the agenda here because that's, that's an important one.
And I got to take it out of next week's agenda because that's what I had prepped it for.
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Alright Adam should we go to some questions here?
Yeah I think we should Barb I will find us Barb oh I see where Barb is because
Barb has to be down in your queue,
this might be a geek challenge maybe you know the answer is there
a way to remove power lines from a
photo uh that i took on my iphone uh is there a way that's built in is there
an app i can use can i do it on my mac i spent three weeks with a relative who
had uh an unspeakable brand phone and she could do it on her phone very easily
i want to be able to do it on my iphone how do i do this.
I thought I had the answer to this. It might be a geek challenge.
That's why I started that out that way. I found it. Yeah.
I mean, one way is in photos, at least on the Mac, and I would assume this is also on iOS. Okay.
There is a retouch. So if you go, if you open the photo and you go into edit
mode, there is a retouch section and you have a brush that you can adjust size.
And if you just click and drag over spots, it's supposed to do like a removal.
And then you can walk me through this again. So I, I'm I, I, cause I, I got lost here.
Uh, I got a lot going on when we do the show, but I'm, I'm trying to follow here.
So I go into a photo, I hit edit, and in the adjust menu, there should be a
retouch section that you might have to dial open. It's got a little band-aid icon.
This is the part that doesn't exist on the phone.
I don't see, like on the Mac for sure. Yeah, it's on the Mac.
So I didn't know if this was available on the phone and I'm using my phone as
my camera, so I couldn't check this, but I know on the Mac.
Yeah there is a retouch tool and
so when you activate that it works just
like the healing brush in photoshop or whatever so you
can go in and you can just first try just
like removing it and there's a size adjustment so you can
adjust the size and if you need to zoom in really close you
can zoom in really close um and then
you can just you know literally draw over top
of the power powerline and it should find the
nearby pixels and erase that yeah uh
you can option click just like
in photoshop to sample an area where you want to
sort of clone from as well i had no idea that
you could do that on photoshop like i i'm not i don't
clearly photos yeah yeah oh and photoshop oh yeah
yeah photoshop i mean photoshop has even better tools now for
that like yeah i mean photoshop but if you want a built-in way
without any extra software photos
on the mac will let you do that um same
thing you know they have they've had it for years the whole red eye thing right
you can you can do that click on you click on literally click on the eyes of
people to to remove red eye it's it's pretty cool yeah it works it works pretty
well yeah um but yeah and i mean to be fair i'll tell you the thing that's in
photos i've played with it you know because you You could also use it to like
erase people in the background and stuff like that.
It's not great, but it might work.
You know, sometimes it does work. Other times you're like, that's not so great,
but it just depends on what your photo is.
But I mean, it's worth a shot. It's built in. Yeah.
I am a huge fan of Pixelmator, Pixelmator Pro on the Mac.
I actually use Pixelmator to assemble all the episode artwork and things like
that. It just makes that super easy.
Now in Pixelmator, if you didn't know, don't blame yourself.
It's not super obvious, but they just added, again, Pixelmator on the Mac.
You can now edit PDFs in Pixelmator Pro on the Mac.
Um and uh it but it does it it is so great at like building photos.
Layering things retouching photos the whole
i'm guessing i could use the option click thing
in their um retouch tool to to
choose where i want to grab things from which is going to
be hugely valuable because sometimes you use the retouch tool or
the magic band-aid tool or whatever it is and it grabs things
and makes it look worse you know it's
like no i just grab right from here so that it's you you get the band-aid open
and again this is in photoshop or photos but you get the the band-aid thing
open and then you option click to tell it where to where to learn from and then
and then you go and drag is that that's the workflow for that adam say that again so open the
band-aid tool before you start dragging to fix anything you option click right
to teach it to sample and then and then you just drag like normal right you
let go of the option yeah got it yeah and i mean a tip if you're doing this
too is if you want to get a little bit better is.
Sample sort of different close by areas so you're
because it's basically cloning from that section yeah
and so if you clone from
the same section over and over again for like a long distance you're going to
get start to see like patterns or it's like oh that looks the same so sometimes
it's helpful to you know sample a little area brush something out sample another
area close by you know but that's different sample that out yep so you can play
with it got it got it all right
cool makes sense i like it good are we uh i think we've i think we've covered
this okay yeah moving on to uh to darren i guess yeah.
Yeah, Darren wants to know, what's the fastest way to get Safari favorites on an iPhone?
He says, is there a quick way on the iPhone to bring up the home screen showing
the favorites bookmark page in Safari?
For example, I almost always close out of my pages when I'm done with Safari.
I click the rightmost icon, that pops up the minimized pages open,
and I swipe them all away and then see my home screen with all my favorites.
On the Mac, I can just go to the menu and select to show favorites.
I'm wondering if there's a way to not have to not have to swipe closed the page
to get back to the home screen. Thanks.
Yeah, there totally is. So if you click that little tabs pages button in the
lower right of Safari, you know, it's like looks like two pages layered on top of each other.
That brings up, you know, all your thumbnails, as you said, of your open tabs.
You don't have to close anything.
And once you're in that view, the lower left, in the lower left,
appears a little plus icon.
That opens up a new tab.
And the new tab is populated with all of your favorites that you can choose.
You can also start typing in the URL bar to bring you somewhere else.
But that's how I get my favorites up. it turns out
that you can get there even faster if
you're just on a web page if you long press in
the lower right on that tabs pages button you get
a little menu and if you choose new tab from that menu
it accomplishes the same thing there's all
kinds of things in fact you could open a new private tab from there you can
i i don't know i i forget there was a
it was a laundry list of things like you can oh you
can open your tab groups show up there it turns
out and you can close tabs you can move the current tab to a tab group it's
like a whole thing so yeah love it long press the the universal tip for ios
devices isn't that right yeah yeah yeah yeah basically
it long press is the universal tip like
if you take one thing away from this episode go
long press everything and you'll be amazed at what shows up sometimes like yeah
how many different options there are for different things yeah right yeah exactly
yeah it's pretty crazy it's pretty crazy all right we're knocking these down
i like this adam we're we're being efficient uh yeah well Well,
Bob has a question. All right.
He says, I know winter is over, but I have a, I guess he has a problem.
I have a problem with freezing contacts and hoping your three wonderful,
you, you three wonderful guys could help. Well, two of us today.
Sorry. Yeah. We don't have the most wonderful of us. That's right. Yeah.
For the last three months or so, whenever I access and use the Contacts app,
it inevitably freezes and I get the pinwheel spinning beach ball,
which usually lasts for several minutes before Contacts comes back to life.
However, not for long, as it will happen again if I start using the app.
I've called Apple support several times and had escalated to senior advisors last time.
They basically said that this is unsolvable now and that Apple engineers are
working on it and it should have it fixed in a future OS update.
But that has been over for been over three weeks or so since the last contact
with Apple support and still no answer.
I use contacts heavily and I'm always accessing it and adding information on
individual cards or making or deleting cards.
I have over 2150 cards and most of them have a lot of notes about that contact.
I love this app and and I use it to make notes about friends and contacts.
Some notes have several paragraphs in them.
With Apple support, we've done a soft reboot and even done a fresh install of Sonoma 14.4.1.
I've also had Activity Monitor open and see that Contacts is using most of the
CPU and then 100% of it when it freezes.
I'm using a 15 inch 2018 MacBook Pro with 16 gigabytes of RAM,
a 2.6 gigahertz, It's a six core Intel core i7 processor with 500 gig, 500 gigabyte SSD.
And now using about half of that. I'm wondering if you guys have run into this
problem before and can offer any solution as I don't know how long I will have
to wait for Apple engineers to solve this.
Just love you guys and the show. Well, thanks, Bob. That's nice. That is nice.
Um, yeah. Have you run into this problem? Yes, I have a hundred percent.
It sucks. I don't have quite as many contacts as Bob, but I'm close,
like 1,900 or something.
Contacts is clearly not an efficiently written piece of software, right?
And it appears that it chokes when the database gets beyond a certain point.
The fact that you've gotten Apple engineers to acknowledge that this is a problem,
first of all, you automatically qualify for sainthood.
This is a very difficult thing. I think there have been more U.S.
Presidents than there have been people who have gotten Apple engineers to acknowledge a bug.
It's a very it's a tricky thing. When you are working with Apple engineers, you submit a bug report.
They come back. They you know, what they do is they in my experience,
100 percent of the time, they try to convince you why the bug is your fault.
Oh, well, you must be doing something.
This is this. you have to paint them into a corner and
clearly bob has done that and once
you do paint them into a corner then they'll be like oh maybe we have a bug we should look
at that and then they're very happy to do it but it's just weird friction that
that exists so kudos to
you for getting it uh over that particular hump and having
them like all but promise a
fix that's great the fact that it's been three weeks that's
normal like you're gonna like there's there's a
whole procedure even if
the bug was fixed three weeks ago like even
if somebody sat down and figured it out in the afternoon like submitting
it it has to go through all kinds of code review and even once it passes all
of that it's like all right we're gonna slate this bug for you know mac os you
know 14.4.3 or 14.4.4 because 0.2 and 0.3 have already been feature frozen and
it's a whole thing, right?
So it will take a little time, but you have given me hope.
I'm hoping that it's just simply like, maybe they just need to add an index
to the database or something.
Cause it's, you know, making one chain or maybe they have too many indexes and it takes too long.
I don't know, but you've made me hopeful.
But yes, I have experienced this. Is there any way to kind of deal with it?
Deleting contacts feels like a cop-out to me, but...
Having contacts search for duplicate contacts and merging the ones that,
you know, over over time, I certainly collected a lot of dupes and,
you know, merging those makes me feel like it is going to be more efficient,
whether it actually is or not. I don't know.
But but, yeah, I have a cup.
I have a couple of thoughts or questions. One I'm wondering about is I know
for a while contacts you could bring in from, and I think you still can,
from other places like Facebook, right?
It has Facebook syncing and it has Google Cloud syncing.
It used to have Facebook, but yeah, I mean, you can connect to card dev servers and other things.
So I don't know if Facebook's there anymore, but yeah, go ahead.
Okay, because that was really annoying.
I always turned off Facebook because I got a million things from Facebook that I didn't want.
On um but yeah i'm just wondering if that sort of thing like is this only an
icloud you know apple context thing or are there other contacts in there that
are coming from other places that.
Make this i'm also kind of curious what the number is i've just looked on my
contacts i have about a thousand and i have not run into this problem about
a thousand contact cards so is there a limit or is he mentions he stores a lot
of excess data in there too so like if you have a lot of notes,
like you were saying size of the database might be a trigger here.
So maybe that's why I haven't run into this problem.
The only other solution maybe or workaround that I might be able to offer,
unfortunately, it's a paid one, but a good one is I use Cardhop.
Oh, yeah. Which is just a little, but I mean, it still taps into the database.
So I don't know if it would get around this problem or not, but it's a little menu bar app.
I have a hotkey. It's control, and you can change it.
Control option D on my thing. I hit control option D, and it pops up my contacts,
and I can just type the name of a contact really quick and find that record in Cardhop.
So I don't know if maybe bypassing the actual, so if this is a contact app problem.
Then maybe that gets around it.
If it's purely a data database problem, it might not make a difference.
Right, yeah. Yeah, my experience is that it's not the app as much as it is the
underlying database that, like you said, these things tap into.
But maybe, I mean, one way to test that would be maybe there's a demo of Cardhop
that somebody could, you know, you could download and Bob and check it out. See, see what happens.
You know, see if it performs better, because if it does, that's your answer.
I I have. But, you know, thinking about this,
zooming out a little bit and thinking about this, we know that there's a lot
of shared code between the Mac and the iPhone and the Apple Watch and,
you know, all of those things. And that makes perfect sense.
And while I haven't necessarily experienced this issue on my iPhone,
I have run into contact problems chewing up the battery on my Apple Watch.
And it's the syncing of between the
iphone and the apple watch that sometimes causes
it and we've talked about he can go into the apple watch and reset sync data
and that for me has solved
that that issue so i
i think there's there's like a fundamental just like
design flaw in the
the the contacts architecture but hopefully hopefully
apple's actually looking at that now i it's amazing
to me that they hadn't before but
you know like i yeah it's just
yep it's just one of those things but yeah when i look in activity monitor i
certainly have seen contacts the app peek out but i also see i forget what it
is but it's like a dress book db or i don't know whatever Whatever that process
is that's sort of underneath that also just going nuts.
Even when I'm in like, you know, a calendar app or something that links with
it, you know, if it needs to index or look for something in context,
it just like wedges for forever.
Yeah. So I just looked, Dave, and Flexibits, who makes Cardhop,
and I've had, I use both Fantastical and Cardhop because I just have their family
subscription, which I think is like 90 bucks a year for both programs, premium features.
Got it. I mean, it's a subscription service, but 90 bucks a year for my entire
family, up to five people. So I've just, I've had it for years.
But apparently, both those apps are available in limited capacity for free.
So he can try it. there you go that would
that would be the way to uh to test it out yep
kiwi gram has a nice i like this troubleshooting tip
um disconnect from the network either
turn off wi-fi if that's how you're connected or unplug ethernet and
uh troubleshoot to see if the beach ball still happens
with no network connection because sometimes
it can be waiting on a network operation so yeah i like that that's good cool
love this stuff love it love it love it uh you want to share todd's tips since
we're talking about syncing and reminders it's sort of contacts adjacent yeah.
Plugs right in this he's taught excuse me todd said this started a few days
ago each time i create a reminder on my iphone via siri it would not sync to
my other devices if i went to the reminder app on my iPhone and tapped the new
item and created a new reminder,
it would sync, but not if I used Siri to create one.
I went to iCloud settings on the iPhone, turned off reminder setting,
tapped delete reminders at the prompt, and then turned off my iPhone for a few minutes.
After I turned on my iPhone, I opened the reminders app. it popped up a notification
suggesting that I go to iCloud settings and turn on syncing.
I selected not now. Interesting.
I guess the six reminders I had created via Siri in the last few days were there
on my iPhone in the reminder app.
I checked the settings for the reminders app and the default list was reminders.
I went back to the reminders app. I took a screenshot of the six reminders,
went back to the list of my lists and deleted the reminders list.
Then I turned on iCloud syncing on reminders. reminders all seems
well now adding a reminder via siri
which i can do in the which i do in the car all the time syncs
to all my devices again it appears that something happened to change
the default list to a reminder list that was locally
on my iphone odd but fixed before i got caught i love this tip i it yeah those
default lists contacts on my mac i have had issues where where you were saying
you can sync to Google Contacts and sync to other things.
I've had it where my Mac has just decided, oh yeah, that's going to be the default now.
And it just starts populating it. And it's like, well, nope.
I want the one that I set previously.
Let's go ahead and leave it that way. And same with reminders.
That's, ah, yeah, I love that. Love that.
That's a great tip. So yeah, checking those default lists.
That's really smart. I also have a follow-on tip.
If you're going to use Siri to create reminders, all the reminders that I create,
I basically use BusyCal, right?
I live inside of BusyCal, but
BusyCal can read Apple's reminders database just like anything else can.
And I choose to have it do that because Siri is really good at putting reminders
into Apple's database and only Apple's database. So when I'm in the car or whatever, I have an idea.
I put it on the you know, I say, you know, you know, hey, lady, remind me to do this.
Here's the problem. If I were to say that, you know, remind me to call Adam.
It will put it will put call Adam on my reminders list as an undated reminder.
The way I see all my reminders, the undated stuff sits way at the bottom of a list.
It's like two weeks long and I will never see it. I have had to put a reminder,
a recurring reminder on my calendar once a week to go look at my undated reminders
to fish out all the things that I've lost.
However, if when I'm doing a reminder via Siri, if I say, yes,
lady, remind me to call, remind me later today to call Adam or remind me tomorrow to call Adam.
Then it adds the date to the reminder and it's where I want to see it and all
of those things. So it like I have to have the safety net of the weekly task
to like go and look at the at the dregs of the list because I will lose these things.
But but because I forget sometimes I'm driving in the car. It's like, oh, it's a great idea.
Siri, remember you do this. Then it's like, oh, yeah, you know,
I will almost never get a chance to see it, even as great as the idea is.
And and it turns out adam even when
i have a fantastic idea one that is like
blowing my mind and it doesn't have like i
don't actually come up with a lot of great ideas i just hear good ideas and
i like think about them it's like oh yeah we gotta do that but sometimes i
have a good idea but wherever the idea comes from if i like so
amazed about it in that moment i will be
convinced that there is absolutely no way
in the world that i won't remember this
later it's so amazing that I it's burned
into my memory banks forever that is false
I forget fantastic things all the time and so that's why I use Siri to help
me remember those those inspirational moments so yep yeah yep all right would
it be easier just to have can't you have things put into a note.
Uh would it be easier to have like non-dated ideas
and things just thrown into like a running note and then i
like that over at some point you'd have to do that with a
shortcut right or is there a way to instruct our our
our voice assistants to like add to note like what would be the what would the
workflow be to do that i like this i don't know i thought there i thought there
was but maybe i'm maybe i'm just thinking of reminders or oh yeah because you
can do a to-do list right Right. So you can get a list.
That's just a reminders list is what that is. But I mean, I know shortcuts can
append to note that that is like we use that because we use that with our our MGG stuff constantly.
It's in fact, it's the fact that we hadn't that we've only started using that
in the last six months sort of chafes me every time I use it.
It's like years for years.
I opened up a different window and pasted things in. i didn't
need to do this but um yeah yeah yeah i
was just thinking of that because my my idea is source and
it's not as good as like because you i can't do it from inside the
car uh is a markdown list in ulysses sure so i usually have my phone on me or
an ipad or i'm at my mac so one of those ways i can like quickly throw an idea
into that but you know that's manual right right right Right.
Yeah. All right. If you folks have an idea, let us know. Join our Discord.
And if it's easier to type it out, just type it out in there.
And the tip is shared with everybody that's part of Discord.
So that's MacGeekUp.com slash Discord. gordon michael has
a question that is a
question that is asked of us here some version of it
fairly often and this one i think is important enough to go through uh he says
i am stuck and bleeding from the eyes after trying to read all the opinions
on whether i should get a sonology,
DS 423 plus or the DS nine 23 plus says, I know I've heard you talk about the
four 23 plus I'm upgrading from the DS two 16 and using it to back up both my max and PCs.
And I have nearly a terabyte of photos served. I use Synology drive and another
terabyte of Plex movies, hoping you can restore my sanity. Well.
It just so happens, Michael, that I recently built a spreadsheet that listed
all of the disk stations that I either have kind of in my world here,
because I test a bunch of them and wind up with them, or am considering.
And what I logged, quite a few things in this spreadsheet.
But the important one, I think, for us here is I logged the RAM that they have,
which is kind of important.
It is important, but also the CPU that they have and more importantly,
the CPU mark score, which is
basically the speed of that CPU to sort of homogenize everything together.
And then also a flag in my spreadsheet that denotes whether the CPU in question has a GPU in it, a.k.a.
A hardware transcoding engine for your videos, Plex and video station.
And then there's some things in photos that also uh
use a gpu as
well and i happen to have these two in the list i actually i didn't have the
ds923 plus but i had another one with the same cpu so the ds423 plus is has
a celeron j4125 cpu it maxes out at six gigs of ram,
the ds923 plus has a ryzen an amd ryzen r1600 cpu and maxes out at 32 gigs of ram.
Ram wise i think for most of what all of us do with our disc stations i push
mine pretty hard i actually run a business uh on it ish we use synology drive
all the time uh and some other things and it like the cpu never like unless
i screw something up the cpu doesn't go above about 10%.
Um, and the Ram Ram usage also doesn't, um, six gigs max is enough.
I do recommend if the things that you said you were doing, Michael,
you know, spend the whatever $34 on Amazon and max out the Ram and your distation,
it won't hurt and it will only help.
So CPUs are really the difference to talk about when we're, when we're talking
about the four 23 versus the nine 23.
And I like that you selected both of these units.
I know there are a lot of synologies out there.
If someone were to come to me and say, what should I be looking for?
We would be talking about one, perhaps both, but certainly one of these units
and we'll get there. So let's talk about the CPUs.
The Celeron scores 2963 on CPU mark and has a GPU.
The R1600 scores 3365 on CPU mark and has no GPU.
So we're talking about a 13% CPU speed increase raw from the 423 plus to the 923 plus.
I would not trade GPU for that ever.
I would take the 13% slower CPU with a GPU 100% of the time,
and you're going to save a little bit of money doing it.
So that is every single time I would choose the DS423 Plus as the disk station
to go with if you're buying new today.
Unless you need something with eight bays of storage.
But if you're looking for that general use disk station that's going to last
you a very long time, that DS423 Plus is the one I feel good about.
And actually, we've got one on the way to you, Adam, after our conversation last week or whatever.
So yep i'm very excited to do the upgrade yeah yeah
yeah so i i i 100
agree with that now i have a follow-on question sure for
that because i'm curious with the 423 or
the 923 or whatever uh how important
is getting ssd cash
i uh right
so the the the disc stations
allow you to put in many of
them and i believe both of these uh fall
into that yeah they put it allow you to put in an m.2 nvme cache and the 423
plus has two slots for this um i've always put one ssd cache in there I do not
do two. And the reason is.
With one, you can do read caching, right,
where every read operation that happens from the disk station is stored in the
cache and it's I don't know what their algorithm is, but, you know,
they've got some algorithm to make it so that this to make it the most efficient they could. Right.
And I have found that, uh, to, it's been so long since I've run into a station
without a cash that I actually can't really speak to this, but the caches are
relatively inexpensive.
And back when I first had the option to do this, this wasn't always a thing.
It made a huge difference in terms of the efficiency of it.
And it'll even show you there's like in storage manager, there's a little graph that shows you how,
like, you know, what the, what the percentage, it what the hit rate is on the
cash and like it routinely is in the you know 90 plus percent range which tells
me that's great like that's what i want so yeah i mean it saves wear and tear on the discs.
At worst and speeds up things at best.
And I think it really does speed things up. So I, I would put one in there for read caching.
If you put two in, you have the option of doing read, write caching.
It will mirror the two of them together so that if one dies or something, you don't lose data.
However, there have been so many posts on,
you know, Synology and Synology adjacent forums
about people having disasters when
is with issues with the ssd right
caching if you don't turn off your synology the
right way if you have a power flutter that your ups doesn't do the right way
and it just gets shut down people have had you know crashed arrays with this
i don't know if it's still that way right now but like when i had to make these
decisions because at first i was like i'll put two in and i did and then started
reading about it i was like uh nope nope,
don't need that in my life. It's plenty fast as it is.
So yeah, read caching, yes.
Write caching, I don't do it. I don't recommend it. Okay, cool.
Yeah, so good question though.
Yeah, I am obsessed with these things, but they're so handy to have.
I don't know. Yeah. Jeff has a question that now I have Because apparently I'm
new around here, and I don't know what's going on regarding this. Jeff wants to know.
How is Thunderbird? Oh. Has, you know, is Thunderbird working for you? Any update?
I also just downloaded the latest version and was pleasantly surprised.
It's pretty nice. And to be honest, I was like, Thunderbird's still a thing?
Because we're talking about the same thing, or maybe we're not.
Are we talking about Thunderbird, the mail application from Mozilla?
Yes. Is it still Mozilla? Yes.
Yep, we are. The short answer, Jeff, is it's fine.
And Adam, to catch you and anyone who did not hear me rant about this over the summer,
I moved my email on my Macs from Apple Mail to Thunderbird when Sonoma came
out because Sonoma killed off all the mail extensions or the mail plugins.
Now there's extensions, but the extensions are at the, the framework for the
extensions, the APIs that the extensions can tap into.
Don't let mail do anything that's valuable to me.
Uh, so like I want to have it, I have all my mail come into one account, right?
Basically, that's not entirely true, but let's say that that's true.
And on that account i have a bunch of different like from addresses i have you
know my david backbeat my david mackie feedback at mackie you know all all that
stuff right and when i choose,
a different from address which either i choose manually or mail chooses intelligently
based on you know replying which it does i want it to choose the appropriate
signature for that address.
That mail doesn't let you do that. Mail has one signature per account.
So I would have to set up the different accounts for each of these would be
a whole big disaster. I don't want that.
Mail. When I'm when I'm replying from the Mac keycap thing, I want it to auto
CC feedback at Mac keycap dot com so that you and Pete see my answers.
Right. We do that so each other can see mail won't do that.
Mail will do that. But it's it's a it's a one size fits all thing.
You can say automatically CC me every time I reply to a message or never CC
me, you know, but there's no way to do it granularly.
There was a plug in that let me do this. There were plug ins that let me do a few other things.
And I tried working in Sonoma and it was like I was working in mittens like
it was awful and filing mail.
I do a lot of mail filing with keystrokes that I that I was able to use keyboard
maestro to replace the functionality of a plug in because I just tell keyboard
maestro choose this menu item and thankfully all of my mailboxes are menu items
like they are for everybody in mail.
So keyboard maestro fix that part of it. But the other two things I was like,
I don't I can't live like this. I got to be able to have my signatures automatically
kick in and all that stuff.
And so I started thinking, all right, well, what are my options here?
You know, I can choose not to upgrade to Sonoma.
That seems like I can hold off for a little while, but like this is the future
now. So I got to kind of deal.
I also, I don't like the idea of using a mail client that is written by one person or a very,
very, very small team of people for two reasons.
Number one, and I know it's not quite the same now with IMAP,
it's relatively easy to move mail clients. It's not like you gotta move your data around.
But I've found that when I use a mail client that's written by a small software house,
I need to learn to use mail the way the author of the software wants me to use mail. Right.
Whereas with Apple's mail, there's a lot of different ways. Like for like,
for example, I think you and I had this conversation on the show.
You know, there's spark from from Riedel and it's a great client,
but it forces me to see things in conversation.
There's absolutely no way to turn it off. And I've talked to the engineers.
They're like, no, you're wrong if you want to turn it off. It's like,
see, this is my problem here.
You're not wrong, nor am I. Like if you want conversations on term, if I don't want them on.
I'll turn them off. You know, it's fine. Like everything's good.
And maybe I want conversations on in some mailboxes, but not others.
That's also okay. Like it's totally fine.
And so I started thinking, well, you know, here I've been for the last whatever
decade plus using mail app that's written by a huge team of people for a huge number of people.
It's meant to be flexible. And for a long time, it was super extensible.
Now it's less than super extensible.
I'm hoping that mail gets more that the extensions functionality of mail is
expanded, like the capabilities of the things that extensions can tap into is is widened.
And that's a typical Apple thing. So I like there's hope.
In the meantime, though, I'm using Thunderbird because Thunderbird is,
you know, I reasoned. I'm like, well, it's going to be around.
You know, chances are Mozilla is not going away. Thunderbird hasn't gone away
for a long time. There's a ton of people using it.
It's super flexible. It's not built to to force people to deal with their mail in a certain way.
It's built for people to be able to use however they want. there's a ton of
plugins and quite frankly it's awesome except for the part that it doesn't feel
like an apple app that's the part that sucks and it doesn't support apple script which is,
you'd be surprised how much you use apple script with mail even if you've never
ever launched an apple script like dragging from the finder onto onto the mail
icon so that it can open up you you know, a new message with that as an attachment.
It turns out that's a scripting thing.
It, and yeah, and you can't do that with Thunderbird.
So I am constantly frustrated. You can't have it. Like I can have apps sort
of create emails with Thunderbird, but not always.
It's like, it, that's the part of Thunderbird. That's super frustrating to me
is the interoperability with the operating system. But as a mail app, it's great.
Is Thunderbird on iOS? No, no, I use mail on iOS. That would drive me nuts.
I just use mail on iOS. Yeah, I know. Yeah.
I like having the same application across all my devices. I get that.
That's why I have Fantastical. That's why I have Spark.
I like the fact that there's that consistency in my life.
I wish, I wish that spark would like give up on enforcing the use of conversations.
I have tried it. It's just not for me. Like I lose track of emails.
I don't want, if I archive an email out of my inbox, I don't want it to magically
reappear in my inbox when somebody replies to, to, you know, to, to that thread.
It's like, nope, I, I, Dave's brain still works. Okay.
Dave, remember thread. And hey, by the way, most of the time,
the entire freaking thread is in the email.
Like it's all right there. I don't need it to get buried. Yeah. So anyway.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. At least now I'm pretty sure it's kind of hidden.
I don't really notice it so much anymore. Well, you're used to it. History.
There's this history button though. Like it, it's like collapsed.
So, but it is all there. Yeah.
I just always got confused. I was like, I thought I archived this out.
Now, and my guess is if I forced myself to do it, if I let Spark force me to
do it, I would eventually adapt.
Right. But yeah, but I don't. You don't have to. Right.
I don't want to. But I really I'd like everything else about Spark.
So it's like it's a yeah, it's a sad kind of.
It's got a lot of great features. you know and i you mentioned
you're the like you know use keyboard shortcuts to
kind of move things in and out i i got used to the whole swipe thing so i use
the swipe gestures all over the place got it yep we're doing similar stuff you
know i grab it a batch of things and archiving and spark has great organizational
things that are things that tie well into um.
Into like organizing things automatically
like into you know i got a place for all
my newsletters i got a place for like a bunch of things and then there's a
great swipe gesture at the bottom where you can just like grab a little
thing and take an entire you know
folder of stuff like this for like newsletters a lot
like you know just swipe them all
away you know they're all gone in one like big choke
yep so little features like that i find handy but.
No it's absolutely i'm with
you on opinionated apps
and you notice i use a lot of opinionated apps you know
fantastic hell is very opinionated about how you
do calendar spark and i appreciate it
and i just that's what i've learned and i'm used to now
but i can totally appreciate people who that doesn't
work for them yeah like yeah right right
i it and and i i'm sure that
it like if i if i stopped and thought about it that
i use plenty of opinionated apps like you know
but they just happen to match my opinions like it's it's
just fine like you know confirmation
bias if that like this is the right way to do things is
fine when you're when it's you like there's it's
totally okay yeah and i don't think i don't think it's surprising that
you find more apple developers that
build opinionated apps because that's apple
right like yeah people with opinionated apps
you know or just an opinionated like
thing and it's part of the reason a lot of us are mac users right
correct because you know and you see it when people try to over the years fight
the apple way right right yeah all the time apple devices on their own are opinionated
right that's correct very much so So very much so. Yeah.
Yeah. And that's what drives like Android people and windows people crazy.
It's like, what do you mean? You have to do it that way. Right. Right.
Yep. Right. Yep. Yep. Yep.
Uh i i know i know what our uh our episode title is going to be uh is be aware
of opinionated apps or perhaps beware opinionated apps um,
fred we're here in the mail thing i know we're getting sort of to the end of
the uh of our normal time here but i i want to i want to take a minute and answer
uh fred's question because we're in mail here.
So I will read what Fred says.
He says, I've enjoyed MacCast for several years and have followed Adam to MacGeekApp. Great. Awesome.
My problem, Fred says, is that I use Apple Mail's archive folders on my Mac
as a database for my small nonprofit business.
As such, I have around a thousand such folders in various hierarchies and levels.
Four levels, by the way, he says, is the max allowed by mail. Good to know.
Over the last few months, I have tried unsuccessfully to add new archive folders
and found that while I can add via the new mailbox option under the mailbox
pulldown in the title bar.
When I add an email to any of these new mailbox folders, the email just disappears,
never to be seen again anywhere. Anywhere.
Needless to say, this is both annoying as well as a problem.
It took a while before I realized this, but my next move was to assume that
I had reached some kind of application limit.
So I set about deleting some folders that were no longer needed.
I've deleted a half dozen or so, and I still get the same disappearing email
messages when I attempt to add the new message into a newly added folder in the archive.
Archive what do i do i thought about deleting unnecessary folders would work
if but if there's an archive folder limit but clearly it doesn't help are there
other options what can i do,
i have thoughts on this adam but uh do you do you have any any anywhere to go for fred here,
yeah uh i had something i'm not i i
don't use it anymore uh because i
got less worried about sort of archiving and
keeping mail like for forever like i'm okay
with like deleting stuff um but
back in the day yeah i used to be i used to be really worried about mail and
especially like mail living off in the cloud and you know on servers and places
like that and i i like i want a local copy i want an archive i want to know
i can safely delete something from the cloud and still
be able to find it and organize it and get at that data.
And more importantly, also know that that data can be backed up.
To places that I control. Yeah. And so for years,
I used an app called Mail Steward, which basically you can set it up and there's
a bunch of ways to set it up,
but it sweeps through your mail when it's pulled in and downloaded locally and
then puts it into a MySQL database,
basically, MySQL Lite database.
Okay. And it indexes it and makes it searchable and you can store the attachments in there.
Like you can put everything into the mail steward database and it's just there
and it just sits, you know, off to the side from your mail.
And it just, you set it up to run in the background and do its archiving thing
and then you can keep it there.
And it's a local database. And so you can set that up to, you know,
to have it backed up from your Mac to wherever you want to have it backed up.
Sure. And at the end of the day, if you need to get mail out, it's MySQL database.
You also can obviously export out to inbox files and bring them back into mail
and all that sort of stuff. So that's what I used for years.
And then that was sort of the thing, similar to the way that I archive a lot
of my folders and documents and stuff using ChronoSync.
Okay. That was sort of my ChronoSync for email, right? It was like,
I know this thing's just running in the background.
It's going to grab mail from the folders. And you can tell it.
You know, I only want stuff that's in my inbox or stuff that's in these folders
that I set up, you know, ignore the junk mailbox and ignore the trash and,
you know, or you can, like you can configure it however you want.
And so it was super flexible, super powerful. Like I said, what was great is
it builds a search index.
So it's very easy to search through and find stuff.
And it's pretty quick because sometimes like if you have to go through a giant
archive of mail folders in a mail app, that doesn't always work really great.
So it solved a lot of these problems for me.
And Mike, we've talked about Mail Steward on the show before.
Or my concern with this, which I think you sort of addressed,
was what happens when John Seward, the author of Mail Steward,
stops developing Mail Steward?
Let's say there is not a version of Mail Steward that will run on my current Mac.
There currently is. Like I'm just, I'm, I'm, you know, I'm saying in the future,
but if it's stored in a SQLite database, in theory, you can,
you know, there, there is a relatively straightforward way of getting that data out of there.
Yeah. You should be able to just easily. You know, I don't think my SQLite formats
going away anytime soon, but that could happen too.
It could. That's fair. It's not going to, I know I'm with you. Okay.
So that, that addresses that. I, um, because I, you and me are not the same Adam in this regard,
I am still a pack rat and I have saved every email that I've ever sent or received
other than like spam and, and like newsletters and stuff like that.
But by and large, I err on the side of saving things and I never,
at least not intentionally, lose any of that.
But that means I got to store it somewhere and I can't leave it all on an IMAP server.
I, for years, did exactly what Fred is doing, including the thousand plus archive folders.
I did away with that part of it, though, about 10 years ago when I realized
that mail search was good enough.
In fact, that I wasn't even looking in a specific folder for something anymore.
I was just searching for it and finding it right. Right. Search has gotten way
better in the last 20 plus years or whatever it is like, you know,
we've got better algorithms. The computers are faster.
The disks are faster. There's SSD caching and all that stuff.
So and so I have one monolithic archive folder that I put everything in and
then I archive out of that into annual archives just so that if there is ever
like database corruption,
I'm working to fix the database corruption on one year's worth of mail,
not all the years worth of mail.
Right. I figured that's better. So that's what I do. I have archives for sent mail.
I have archives for for received mail. Right. And per year.
And those were all stored in mail until recently when I think it was either
me and John or me and Pete or maybe the three of us having a conversation at
some point last year on the show.
About this and i said well
you know yeah there's this but i just wish that there
was somewhere that i could store my mail on like
an imap server so that it was accessible everywhere but
that i it was my storage and as
i'm saying these words i realized ding
ding ding you know you can run a mail server on your synology disk
station and so i do and i
swore i would never run a mail server again um i i've
broken that but and it is a mail server
it it is like on the internet if
you knew the email address that in the domain that it served you could send
me email there i actually get email there every every day i signed up for like
two mailing lists plus ours just to make sure that like things work but uh and
you can sign up for the macgeekab mailing list if you go to macgeekab.com we
send the show notes out to you every week i know last week's show notes were
a little late there was a weird caching issue it doesn't matter it's problem solved.
But it it's otherwise just for me
to use right nobody actually sends me mail at this
address and i don't send anybody mail from this address but i do run a mail
server on my synology and it allows me to connect to it via imap from anywhere
in the world and so i can i stored i have moved all of my archives out of mail
and that was a tedious process but i have moved them out of mail and over to,
you know, they were in the, on my Mac section on mail. So it was only on one of my computers.
I of course backed it up, but still there's points of failure there.
And now they're, they're.
On my IMAP server, which is itself backed up to the cloud and all of this because
it's on my disk station, but also it's synced to several of my Macs,
the entirety of it and all of that.
And I can access it from anywhere. I can access my email archives from my phone
now, which was not a thing that I could do before.
So I'm really loving the IMAP server as an email archive.
It was slow AF to copy my mail over to this thing.
Um mail is faster than thunderbird it
turns out um to do to do
this kind of operation so it's fine it doesn't matter uh but yeah it works it's
like it's great now now that everything's over there it's awesome i love it
so yeah cool yeah yeah yeah so if you've got a disk station there's mail server
and there's mail plus server i just installed mail server i didn't install mail plus.
Um and you can migrate from
one to the other if i ever want to uh but for what
i'm doing mail server was great and there's no user limit on mail server mail
plus comes with five user licenses for free and then more it's just me but i
figured if my family ever wanted to start doing this why limit myself i don't
need a corporate mail server i just need you know bare bones so so So that's what I do. Yeah.
I think it uses Dovecot is the, the open source. Oh yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. So I have another mail thing for that then later.
Not this time around, but yeah. And just, I should probably give credit.
So mail steward, did you know Tim for port?
I did. Of course. Tim was a Mac podcaster early on. Yeah.
Pioneer. Yeah. Pioneer. Really? Yeah. At the very first podcast expo.
And he was the one who turned me on to male steward.
So unfortunately, you know, Tim's not with us anymore, but yeah,
yeah. He was a great guy and a great member of the Mac community.
And that's, that's why I know about male, male steward.
Totally. Yeah. I love that. I love that. I have, um.
It is time for us to, uh, to, to, to move out of the show.
However, I, because Pete's not here, I missed this YouTube comment earlier,
uh, that, uh, T Andrew Caddick on YouTube commented that Luminar AI from Skylum,
I believe, uh, has a remove power lines feature built into it.
Uh he says i don't use the app so i can't speak
to its effectiveness but uh it
he's like that definitely works so or they definitely announced that as a specific
feature so um i i figured i would i just wanted to share that before we my my
old boss my old boss from nick software where he's at Skylab.
Yeah, right. Right. Yeah, very cool.
And Adam, speaking of, I'll toot my own horn for a moment here because I am certain,
in fact, that when this episode releases on Monday the 22nd,
it will be my 1,999th podcast episode that I have produced in the last 19 years.
Yeah. So Wednesday's business brain episode, I believe based on the math and
all that stuff will be, uh, it will be 2000, but yeah, pretty, uh, I don't know.
I don't know what that says about me, but it is kind of amazing. It's a lot of content.
It's a lot of content. Yeah.
And I really like to do is go ahead. I was going to say what I always like to
do with mine was, you know, like total up the number of hours of content that
is, and then convert it to like days and years. It's like crazy. Oh, yeah.
Oh, I got to do that. Yeah, because that data is out there. Yeah.
Yeah. I just always took an average. I was like, you know, I did,
you know, 881 shows or whatever.
On average, it's probably about an hour over overall. I wonder if I took...
I used Bing's AI and fed it the URLs of the feeds and told it, hey, look,
count up the durations in each of these and tell me how many hours,
days, you know, whatever I've spent.
Chat GBT or some AI would be very well suited to calculate.
Okay, I'm going to do that experiment. That's great. I love that. That's good.
Absolutely. I credit the ability to produce as many podcast episodes as I have
with the one prime directive I gave myself when we started MacGeekApp,
which of course was the first podcast I ever did, was that I needed to create
a workflow where I could publish the show.
My initial mandate to myself was that I could publish the show 15 minutes after we stopped recording.
That's not in time it's more like 25 now really
and there's some episodes where there's been like audio issues that are you
know i'm here for hours or whatever but basically i don't get out of this chair
until the episode is either published if it's releasing immediately or in the
can to you know scheduled to be released you know on whatever day it's supposed
to go out but that that workflow
is is a big part of it and i i'm going to do some things this year sort of.
Diving in and teaching that some of
the things i've learned about that workflow because i i think there's some value in that
for for some folks yeah now you tell me we are very different people we are
different i was told you i i had a artisanal handcrafted podcast and it took
very long yes post after i finished recording that's why i gave myself that
mandate right we started
mgg you know we already had mac
observer going and that was like you know a
lot like a really big focus for me at the time we had backbeat media going big
focus for me at the time i had deals on the web going with shannon jean big
big focus for me and then i was raising two kids and had a family and playing
in probably three bands and i knew i know myself if i allow myself the
opportunity to edit the perfectionist in me will come out and it will never get released on time.
And somehow I knew that consistent release was going to be important for podcasts.
It may be, maybe I knew it as a listener, you know, it was like,
I want to know that on Tuesday, this episode or whatever, you know,
that I get to listen to the new at probably at the time daily source code, you know?
So I was like, no, I have to find a way where I don't let myself delay this.
And obviously that's led to being really obsessive about audio quality and doing
a ton of pre-production.
But deadlines are great motivators, right? Like my pre-production must stop
when we begin recording the episode, by definition.
You know, so, yeah. So anyway, yeah, that's the...
All right, folks, thanks for hanging out with us. Thanks to CashFly for providing
all the bandwidth to get the show from us to you.
Thanks to ZocTalk.com slash MGG for sponsoring this episode.
Of course, you can always go
to MacEcab.com and see all of our sponsors at MacEcab.com slash sponsors.
And thanks for hanging out with us, everybody. Thanks for your questions and your quick tips.
You are the reason that we've been able to do so many episodes of this show,
and we love that we get to do that. So thank you, thank you. Thank you.
You got any advice for him, Adam? Maybe advice for Pete? I don't know.
Well, his shirt's not here, but I see you got to stand in. I think it says, don't get caught.
Music.