He's Mr. Hundred and One! - podcast episode cover

He's Mr. Hundred and One!

Jun 30, 20251 hr 17 minEp. 1096
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Episode description

You’re about to level up your tech game with Quick Tips and Cool Stuff Found that’ll make you wonder how you ever lived without them. From keeping tabs on low AirPods battery via the Today view widget to renaming your Spaces for better Mac workflow, it’s all here. Discover magnetic AirTag mounts, a Zulu Time converter, a portable vac/blower combo, and even a 10Gbps SSD that’s thinner than your AirPods case. And if you’ve been craving better backups, networked Time Machine options from Synology and Buffalo make an appearance, too. Don’t Get Caught without them.

Ever thought of doing a clean install straight from macOS Settings? You can. Migrating from Intel to Apple Silicon? Yeah, it “just works.” Plus, we answer listener questions on fixing autocorrect quirks, exporting text replacements, and balancing podcast audio using tools like Overcast and Levelator. Got a slow-booting iMac? Try verbose mode and dive deep with the Terminal. And if you’re monitor shopping, we’ve got budget picks ranging from Sceptre to Philips. This episode’s packed—just the way you like it.

Transcript

Mac Geek Gab 1096 for Monday, June 30th, 2025

Dave Hamilton

It's time for Mac Key Cab, and listener Scott sends us our quick tip of the week.

n-Scott-QT-Use the Batteries widget in Today view to see low AirPods

He says, for your listener who recently wanted notifications when his AirPods are low on battery, I find it useful to have the batteries widget on my Today View, the screen to the left of the home screen on my iPhone, although you can put it elsewhere if you prefer. This widget gives me the charging levels for my phone, watch, AirPods case, and the AirPods themselves, and I find it super helpful.

More tips like this, plus your questions answered today on MacGeekUp 1096 for Monday, June 30th, Social Media Day 2025. We'll be right back. Greetings, folks, and welcome to Mac Geekab, the show where you send in tips like that. You send in cool stuff found. You send in questions. We share them.

We try to answer your questions. We string them together into an agenda that hopefully not only makes sense, but makes it easy for each of us to learn at least five new things every single time we get together. Sponsors for this episode include Surfshark.com slash MGG, where you can use code MGG at checkout to get four extra months of Surfshark VPN. Constantcontact.com where you can try Constant Contact free for 30 days and it's going to make your marketing easier.

Wix.com and we've got a link in the show notes that lets you start your free trial with Wix. Great website creation. And Screen Float 2 from our friends that make Yoink is Screen Float, the Mac screen capture all-rounder. We'll talk more about all of those in a little bit. For now, here in Durham, New Hampshire, I'm Mr. 101. At least that's how I feel this morning. That was my temperature and my heart rate when I woke up this morning. I'm Dave Hamilton.

Adam Christianson

And here in South Dakota, I'm Adam Christensen.

Pilot Pete

And here in the Witness Protection Program, if you're watching live, is Pilot Pete, for whatever reason, my camera just decided to go stupid on us. So I'll get myself out of the way. Greetings, everybody, and good to be back. Oh, looks, I'm back. I'm back. You're back. Good to be back.

Adam Christianson

I blame Carrot. I blame Carrot. Carrot said it was going to be foggy today, and it wasn't when I woke up, but there it was.

Dave Hamilton

There it was.

Adam Christianson

I saw Pete from the fog.

Dave Hamilton

Well, I feel foggy today. I don't know, whatever I picked up, it's got like, it's probably what we fish fans call Wook Flu, because I went to a couple of fish concerts this weekend, and that was really the only time I've been out. Oh, no. Oh, yeah, that's fine. Thankfully, it's just a headache and achiness and Tylenol seems to deal with it for the most part. But yeah, whatever.

That's good. yeah i i did uh i did the home gadget geeks podcast last night which will be out by the time this comes out we talked about a lot of fun stuff but i noticed like my memory recall was not where i expected it to be so i'm curious to see how how this show goes this morning but other otherwise it's it's gonna be fine yeah.

Adam Christianson

This should be this should be a cool show right that's

Dave Hamilton

The idea let's do some cool stuff found shall we.

Adam Christianson

Well absolutely i can start

Richard-CSF-AirTag Magnetic Aero

us off with richard right he says this week there was some discussion about the magnetic capabilities of air tag i think pete brought that up uh that prompts me to tell you about the elevation lab about elevation lab and their fantastic air tag holders they just released a small form factor case that screws open to hold an air tag and has a nice magnet on it that should work great on vehicles or other metal things that you want to track i bought

a number of their designs including a sturdy key ring holder that screws together as well. Not to be confused with Elevation Labs. I'm not sure what that means. You may have covered Elevation Labs before, but I can't remember. We actually have. They make a ton. If you're looking for AirTag holders, that's the place to go. They have one for just about every purpose. They would be a great sponsor as well. I agree. Thanks for all the good info that I get every week. Well, you're welcome, Richard.

Dave Hamilton

Yeah, that's pretty cool. So this, you actually, like they have a picture where they show it stuck to the, you know, the frame of your car, the, you know, the chassis of your car. Yeah, yeah, that's pretty good. Love it. Yeah. I, of course, Elevation Labs is, are the ones to come up with a solution for that. That's like you said, that's what they do. So yeah.

Adam Christianson

I would assume that's a super strong magnet as opposed to the, you know, speaker magnet that's in there.

Dave Hamilton

That just so happens to be in there, right? Yeah, exactly.

Adam Christianson

Kind of makes it sort of magnetic.

Dave Hamilton

Yep. In our, you see, there it is, Discord, that's the thing.

Ben-CSF-Spaces Renamer to assign names to your Mac’s spaces

Listener Richard was asking about, is there a way to rename desktop spaces in Mission Control so that they don't just show up as desktop one, desktop two, et cetera. And uh listener ben found a cool stuff found called spaces renamer on github and it does exactly that uh and seems to work in the way that you would expect it to work so you just rename your spaces to whatever you want them to be and then that's the label you get in mission control so nice find ben that's great yeah fun there's.

Adam Christianson

No way to do that natively

Dave Hamilton

Evidently not whoa.

Adam Christianson

I thought didn't there used to be

Dave Hamilton

I yeah that i don't always.

Adam Christianson

Just oh well that's that seems like a huge miss

Dave Hamilton

Yeah i agreed yes i mean clearly there is a way like obviously if spaces renamer can do it like right it it's it's doable the app just doesn't expose terminal command yeah Yeah, exactly. It's some kind of terminal command. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So. Nipper. All right. All right.

Pilot Pete

Do I take us to Andrew?

Dave Hamilton

Let's go.

Andrew-CSF-Time Zone Converter for Zulu Time

Pilot Pete

All right. So Andrew writes in. He says, lads, the other week, Pilot Pete mentioned his struggle with converting his home time zone with the time zone he's in and UTC. Let me fix that for you way beyond what most time zone apps do. I'm a ham radio operator, and I am forever converting UTC, GMT, or Zulu – all three are the same – as it is the time standard of the platform.

What makes this app cool and different from most is that you can scroll forward on the clock to work out what time it will be in multiple locations in however many hours and minutes you would like. It sits in the Mac menu bar in iOS and iPadOS. Versions are coming, apparently. For example, if you're flying from San Francisco to Sydney, you can say, I'll call you in New York when I get to Sydney and allowing for customs that will be in 15 hours.

So in the app, spin the wheel for 15 hours and you'll know what time in Eastern Pacific, Sydney and UTC time zones allowing you to inform the other party. Time and date has a similar web version, meeting planner, and the time zone converter app is an excellent value for the money and works well. And it's super handy in the menu bar. And he also hits us with this fun fact. I think I covered this probably 15 years ago. I might have mentioned it once.

But according to Flight Radar 24, and this is true, I can verify it. Zulu comes from the U.S. military, which assigns global time zones with letter codes. And I believe at minus four right now on the East Coast, we're in Romeo. And when we fall back in the fall, we go to Quebec. And that's where, you know, there's 26 letters in the alphabet and 24 time zones. I think we skipped Juliet and possibly India. I don't remember for sure.

Dave Hamilton

That's where that comes from? Yeah. Who knew? I mean, I know who knew. You and Andrew, at least. But yeah, yeah.

Pilot Pete

Actually, when we would finish our flights, we would fill out a yellow sheet in maintenance control. And one of the things you had to do was put which time zone you were in. And it was always Quebec or Romeo for the East Coast.

Adam Christianson

Huh.

Dave Hamilton

Amazing. I love that. That's, yeah, yeah. Cool. I had an interesting experience recently. As you know, I, along with you guys, am bullish on this idea of batteries being things that we can now have in our homes to be sort of generator,

CSF-Ampace Andes 1500 Power Station

either replacements or stand-ins or, you know, something along those lines instead of having a generator for when your power goes out. And that's especially true for people who live in apartments and simply cannot run a generator indoors because that's don't do that. That's bad. And I was testing out this, the portable power station, Andy's 1500 from a company called Ampace, A-M-P-A-C-E. And I got this thing and I started playing with it and was amazed at how powerful it was.

I even used it to run my electric leaf blower because it was way easier to move this thing around my yard than to try and create extension cords to go to all corners of the yard. I just kind of moved it around and it had a lot of power and worked. And then my... My daughter called us one morning a couple of weeks ago. She is staying in an apartment about one town over from us. And there was a point of confusion between her landlords and the electric company and her power was turned off.

Her landlord was very apologetic, of course, and ran a cable up to like, you know, an extension cord up from their house, like their portion of the house downstairs to where my daughter and her fiance live upstairs and to like to get the refrigerator running. But it wasn't going to be enough to do like the TV and this, that and the other thing. And I was like, well, here we go. Like this is literally what this is for.

And so we brought this over there. We plugged it in. and on one charge the power was off for three days and on one charge she was able to run her tv and apple tv and sonos soundbar and some lights uh for the whole time without even needing to think about recharging it i think when she brought it back it was you know still at 60 percent or something yeah it really like we're living in a world where batteries have really leveled up and And this is one of the things.

And this can be recharged, of course, just by plugging it into a standard AC outlet. But it also has the option of being recharged with solar. And the nice part about things like this is, I know it's going to sound obvious, but this also could be recharged by your generator if you happen to have one of those. But you don't need the generator running full time in order to get power to all of your devices. And that is kind of the nice paradigm shift that we get

to live in these days. So I'm stoked about this.

Pilot Pete

2,400 watts. That'll run your microwave easily.

Dave Hamilton

Correct. Easily. Yeah. Peak of 3,600 consistent 2,400 watts. Yeah, I know.

Pilot Pete

Does it provide 240?

Dave Hamilton

No, this one does not provide 240. So, but they, you know, they do have them that do. Sure. For sure.

Pilot Pete

Yeah. I'm just trying to think. I guess refrigerators are 120.

Dave Hamilton

Yes. Yeah. Refrigerators are. Yeah. Yeah. Here they are anyway. Yeah. Yeah.

Pilot Pete

Yeah. It's my water heater and furnace that are on by dipole. Got it. Got it. Yeah. Okay. Yeah.

Dave Hamilton

Yeah.

Pilot Pete

Cool. I like that.

Dave Hamilton

Yeah. And portable enough. Like, you know, one person can cart this thing around. So great, like camping, you know, it changes the game for camping. It makes it less like camping, but that's not necessarily a bad thing.

Pilot Pete

How much does it weigh, Dave?

Dave Hamilton

37 pounds is.

Pilot Pete

That's not real heavy. It's, you know, it looks like it had a handle on it.

Dave Hamilton

It has two handles on the top, so you can just lift it. It's super easy.

Pilot Pete

Nice. Okay.

Dave Hamilton

Yep.

Adam Christianson

I mean, here's the thing. If you're, if you're car camping like people do and they, they take gas generators and those things are loud and annoying.

Dave Hamilton

And annoying. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. So yeah, I know. I'm, I'm, I'm impressed with, uh, with, with this thing. So yeah. Yep. Very cool. I agree. I agree. It's a cool world we get to live in.

Pilot Pete

Well, and speaking of that, I got a cool thing, too, here.

CSF-Scosche Portable Vac / Blower

I have the Scotchie portable vacuum and blower, and this thing is cool. I realize we're an audio show, but I'll hold it up for the people that are watching. It's a 10-inch by 7-inch by about 3-inch thick case.

Dave Hamilton

Okay.

Pilot Pete

Recharges via USB. It's a super powerful little vacuum. It is uh the vacuum itself i would say it's about the size of a 45 a large 45 caliber pistol okay sure you know that's that's it or you know or a small hair dryer yeah

Dave Hamilton

Right that's what it looks like to me it's just a small hair dryer yeah yeah.

Pilot Pete

Although the the pointy end is the is the suction end right

Dave Hamilton

Yes the opposite of a hair dryer right.

Pilot Pete

Yeah but it has all kinds of little tools that come with it to make it like a dust blower for your keyboard or i i took it out and used it as a vacuum on my airplane because i didn't want a bunch of extension cords banging against the new paint job as i got in the airplane to clean it out so excuse me so needless to say it is cordless it has a washable uh two washable hepa filters that it comes with uh it's got the tools to get into small crevices you know between

the seats and underneath and all that kind of stuff. But like I say, you can use it as an air duster. I could also use it to inflate or deflate pool toys or guest air mattresses and that kind of stuff. And it's got the attachments that come for large and small. I think they're called Boston valves on like the pool toys, inflatable boats and that stuff. So yeah, it's a one-way valve to let air in, but not let air out.

So whole thing weighs less than a pound, gets 16 minutes on its turbo mode, you get 32 minutes on its normal mode, and

Dave Hamilton

Can you run it off of USB-C power? Like, is USB-C only for charging? So USB-C is only for charging.

Pilot Pete

Yeah, the trigger is dead when it's plugged in for charging.

Dave Hamilton

That makes sense. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay.

Pilot Pete

But what a wonderful little vacuum that thing is.

Dave Hamilton

That's pretty cool. Yeah.

Pilot Pete

And I don't think my airplane had been vacuumed since I bought it five years ago.

Dave Hamilton

That's not a bad thing. Yeah.

Pilot Pete

It's like, oh, I'll take this out of you.

Dave Hamilton

Boom.

Pilot Pete

So.

Dave Hamilton

Nice. That's great.

Pilot Pete

Now it weighs less, flies better.

Dave Hamilton

That's right. You made it more efficient, Pete. That's right. Cool. All right. We have more cool stuff found that we will go through. It's been a little while since we've done an episode that starts with cool stuff found, but, you know, we figured why not? We'll go through some of that stuff. We do have some of your questions that I think we'll be able to get to.

The next thing that I want to do is talk about our first couple of sponsors because, well, you know that moment when inspiration hits, you've got a great idea for

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CSF-Crucial 2TB SSD - 10GBps USB-C - $121 (about the size than an AirPods case)

All right, Adam, you and I were talking the other day, and, of course, last week here on the show, you shared that you got a new Mac, and so you have some new backup strategies and the migration strategies that we talked about, but you wound up getting some new hardware.

Adam Christianson

Yeah, I decided that I was tired of using my old USB 2.0 spinning drives for my time machine and my carbon copy cloner or CCC backups and decided it was time to get something a little more modern. And so I went out looking for SSDs, you know, figuring I'd get kind of the same form factor SSD. And I did some research. I usually get either the Samsung. Typically, I've gotten the Samsung ones in the past. The T7 series, I think is what they call them or something like that.

But then I saw Crucial had one called the X9. And I did some research. And the X9s had a little bit longer warranty. i think three years versus two years and some other things so uh got these crucial what's it called the x9 yeah

Dave Hamilton

It's the x9 yep.

Adam Christianson

Uh usbc two two terabytes off amazon 121 22 bucks basically but when it came i almost thought they didn't send me it because i also ordered this with a with a hub i think that we're going to talk about from anchor um and it came in an amazon on just like bubble pack. It was like the tiniest thing. And I pulled this thing out and it's I'll show it on the video. We'll have screenshots and links in the show notes. But this thing is super small.

Pilot Pete

It's smaller than a 3x5 card.

Adam Christianson

Well, it's, look at here, I'll put my AirPods Pro in front of it. Wow. It's just a little bit wider and taller than an AirPods Pro case and super thin. And it's it's usb c uh 3.2 uh usb 3.2 gen 2 whatever you know that's

Dave Hamilton

10 10 gigs a second.

Adam Christianson

Right yeah 10 gigabits per second yeah it has a it has a transfer speed or write speed of up to 10 50 sure yeah um just super convenient super small that's outstanding doing the job you know now now my time machine backs up so i'm not waiting on like forever i mean i never wait on them right I never really monitored them, but it's just much more convenient, especially for like carbon copy cloner updates and stuff like that.

It just goes a lot faster and I just don't have to worry about having it plugged in all the time, especially with a portable.

Dave Hamilton

Yeah, right.

Adam Christianson

I can plug it in and know that I'll get a quick backup, you know, even if I haven't had it plugged in for a couple of days or a week or something like that, it'll just catch up real quick and I can pop them out. And yeah, they're just, incredibly portable. So I'll be able to actually take those with me. I don't normally take my backup drives with me on the road, but I probably will take these because you just throw them in a bag and they're not going to take

up hardly any space. I can't believe how far SSDs have come. So I got that. And then I also wanted to make sure that I had a way to plug everything in and get that full speed, that full 10 gigabits. And so I'm like, well, I probably should grab a new USB-C 3.2 hub, and I grabbed the Anker 4-in-1 USB-C hub off Amazon. It looks like they may have updated this, so I don't know if I overpaid because they have a newer model.

So this one's just called the 4-in-1 USB-C hub. There's a new one called the Anker 332 USB-C 5-in-1 hub that has a little bit of different form factor, but kind of the same things. And I think the 5-in-1 adds um hdmi port so okay uh and it's actually cheaper yeah

Dave Hamilton

There you go.

Adam Christianson

The one i got was about 35 bucks oh 26 bucks i guess on amazon right now maybe that's i don't remember what i paid i might have overpaid or who knows but it's it's a great device so it's it's a four-way it's got a hundred watt um power delivery for one port and then three 10 gigabit ports on it so you can hook everything up at full speed and you can also get uh power delivery it looks like on the on the back side of it the power delivery

um is about i think it's a 65 watts like coming up the other side yep so you know that's great plenty enough to to be fast charging and then uh that that one also acts as a um I think you can connect a fork up to a 4k display.

Dave Hamilton

Oh, wow. Yeah. Okay. That makes sense.

Adam Christianson

Yeah. Power delivery. So yeah.

Pilot Pete

Huh. When they're practically giving it away.

Dave Hamilton

So yeah, 27 bucks is what it looks like on Amazon. Yeah. That's pretty good.

Adam Christianson

Yeah. This, but again, this other one might be, is about the same price. And like I said, does and has all the same features and adds that HDMI port. I think it might be slightly bigger. And it's a, it plugs in on the side instead of the back. So take a look at both of them for whatever you might need. Need i i like how this one was oriented because it just comes straight out and then it just looks like your standard old you know four port ports onto your your setup

Dave Hamilton

That's yeah that's really i like that form factor where it's it's yeah that's really nice it's great man um i wanted to share something i had a uh dave the

Partitioning vs. Multiple Volumes with APFS

nerd client who uh local to me called me and i haven't done that kind of work on site in a long time, but, uh, but you know, she still had my number at.

Pilot Pete

Least not for money.

Dave Hamilton

That's right. Yeah, exactly. Right. Exactly. Uh, and, uh, and so, but she, she had an issue. She had a, uh, uh, external drive that had died. And so she worked with, uh, somebody else local and they had set it up for, but it wasn't, She was like, something's wrong. Would you please just come over and kind of take a look at this? Things aren't right.

And so she had gotten this 8-terabyte drive, and –, Whoever set it up had set it up with APFS, but had partitioned it into two four terabyte volumes because she wanted to store two different things on there. But that was the issue is she didn't need two four terabyte volumes. She needed one volume that was going to be maybe one terabyte and then one that, you know, could hold four, five, six terabytes of stuff. And I said, oh, well, no problem. Like, it's APFS. We can just move it around.

Like, no, that's the beauty of APFS. Not with the way it had been configured and formatted initially. This thing was actually partitioned, and you could not change the size of the first four-terabyte partition. It wouldn't go larger. It wouldn't go smaller. So I fought with it for a little bit, and finally I said to her, I said, look, let me just take this back to my house. I'll copy the stuff that's on it off. I'll reformat it.

I'll put it back on. It's going to be way faster for me to do this at my desk where I don't need to, like, burn the clock on you, you know, to do this. And so I did, and I, you know, just reformatted it. But the lesson here is when formatting something with APFS, format it as one big blob of storage and then just add volumes to it. Don't partition it. And I know it's a mindset thing. In days of old and really not that long ago, partitioning is what we did.

And so it makes sense to think of it that way. But with APFS, you can have a blob of storage with multiple volumes and the size of the volumes is just, you can set minimum and maximum sizes on it, but you don't have to. It will just use the blob of storage as you see fit. And certainly there are, I'm sure there are some scenarios where it makes sense to actually do partitioning, but in a general sense, just, you know, let APFS kind of handle it.

And so that's what we did for her, and she's much happier and all that. So as you're getting new drives, folks, just think about, you know, partition only if you are certain that's what you want to do, but don't make it your default. Yes, Adam?

Adam Christianson

I have a question.

Dave Hamilton

Yes.

Adam Christianson

So in disk utility. Yes. When you're looking at this, right? The way APFS volumes, I think, look now is you have at the top level, like, the physical, like, media, I think.

Dave Hamilton

Yep.

Adam Christianson

And then usually inside there, you're going to have a container, an APFS container.

Dave Hamilton

That's the right word.

Adam Christianson

And then under that, you're going to have the volume.

Dave Hamilton

Yes.

Adam Christianson

I noticed that you can add an APFS volume at the volume level and at the container level. Is it the same? Does it make a difference?

Dave Hamilton

I create one container. So when I say a blob of storage, I mean container. Container is the right word. And then add volumes to that container. And that way, the size of the volumes is just whatever data they are consuming, is what they're using of that overall container. So you have one container with multiple volumes. I'm glad you asked that question.

Adam Christianson

Yeah, I'm just curious why the UI has the ability to add a volume to a volume. That seems odd. Like, I wonder if it would still just add it at the container level. Oh, that's a good question. It's just a UI thing.

Dave Hamilton

Yeah, it might. You might be right about that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I always add it to the container, but yes, I think you're right that it would just add it.

Adam Christianson

Okay, so do it at the container level just to be safe.

Dave Hamilton

Yeah, that's where I do it, and that seems to work very well. Yep. And if you don't see containers when you go into disk utility, go to the view menu and choose show all devices as opposed to show only volumes, and that'll get you there. Yep. Yep.

Pilot Pete

So I also have a quick question. Volume cannot be seen unless it's mounted, so you could have two or three volumes in there, right?

Dave Hamilton

Correct. Correct. Yeah.

Pilot Pete

But within that container, actually on the drive itself, that data could be all intermingled, but it doesn't matter. The computer keeps that straight.

Dave Hamilton

Yes, it could be. On an SSD, it doesn't really matter.

Pilot Pete

That's true.

Dave Hamilton

Yeah. So on a spindle drive, there might be an argument to be made for partitioning things for the best performance because that way you're not jumping the heads all over the place. There might be. But even then, I would argue, depending on what you're doing with it, you might just be better off letting it just be a big blob of storage as a container.

Pilot Pete

Yeah. That's true. Nothing has to move around to get that data on an SSD.

Dave Hamilton

Correct. Yeah, it's all over the place. It doesn't matter. Right. Yeah.

Pilot Pete

So how do it know where to go get it? I don't know.

Dave Hamilton

It creates.

Pilot Pete

Just knows. Yeah. So, all right. Well, let me take us to Brian, who asks,

Brian-What device for simple networked Time Machine?

what device is needed for a simple network time machine? He says, greetings, gentlemen. There's that word again, but only because it's true. Well, thank you, Brian. He says, our daughters have their own place and use Apple MacBook Pros with an Eero Mesh Network system for work and general use. They also have an old iMac with a connected USB drive as a time machine destination for their laptops. This iMac will be replaced soon, and I'm researching ways to keep time machine running.

I found the Ethernet connected drives available, but I don't know the sizes. I contacted Aero, who said I could use or I could connect an Ethernet drive to an Aero unit and share it across the network. Do you have any experience with this setup? And he has a few questions about that. Would the Aero need Time Machine software to work? Could Time Machine overtax the Aero processor? Or is any unique Time Machine

data handled by the Mac? Could I directly connect the drive to the Mac if a MacBook Pro needed to be restored or I could buy a time machine-capable router and connect it to the Eero bridge mode, turning off the router's Wi-Fi system. What router would you recommend for this simple task that's easy to manage and not very expensive? I'm open to other suggestions. I find it incomprehensible that no one has created a non-geeky device that solves this problem for most Mac users.

The internet is full of Apple users trying to maintain old airport extremes and time machines for this one task. I want to give our daughters a more modern solution that doesn't involve worrying about obsolescence. Thank you so much. You make a positive difference in so many lives. Brian, what a nice letter.

Dave Hamilton

Yeah. And he had said in a follow-up that, you know, he thought getting a Synology disk station or something like a NAS would be overkill. And that may be true. I do want to point out that anything that is network-connected, Ethernet or Wi-Fi, and has storage in it is, by definition, NAS, right? Network-attached storage. And so, you know, normally we think of NAS like Synology, Distation, or QNAP. The market has been pretty wide for that over the years.

So finding some lower cost and lighter weight NAS is kind of what you're looking for here, sort of. Network time machine backups were never the most reliable thing, even when we were using an Apple time capsule, especially when we were connecting to it over Wi-Fi. And that remains true today. So I think that at least partially explains why Apple let this concept die.

Another reason for the concept dying is that with everybody syncing their data to the cloud, most folks don't really care that much about backups anymore. And this is supported by the fact that Time Machine no longer has its own preference pane, right? It's buried under general. I think less and less people are using it. I don't think it's a bad thing to use it. In fact, I give you and your daughters a lot of credit for continuing to use Time Machine and backup. So we need to find you something.

I think the one device that's out there that would work is the Buffalo Link Station. This is a two, you can get it in various different sizes, but the two terabyte version of the Buffalo Link Station is $140. A 4TB version is $175, and it is a network-attached storage device that does have support for Time Machine. So I think that's going to be your best bet if you're going to do this. And if we're ruling out Synology, that's the option.

Western Digital used to have their MyCloud Home product, which essentially did the same thing.

But near as i can tell that's been discontinued uh at least based on my attempts in finding anything where i could buy it uh so yeah but you know there's there's things like the sinology b station um or or even a sinology ds124 uh which are going to be a little more expensive than the buffalo link station but get you a little bit more in terms of functionality uh or Or it may be less expensive in the end to just get two of your,

of the things you recommended earlier in the episode, Adam, two of those crucials and, and then you're done and you just plug one into each computer and let it kind of do its thing from there. So yeah, that's my thoughts on this.

Adam Christianson

I was about to recommend the same thing. I mean, my, my daughters are both not, now not living at home when they were here. Here, I had set up the Synology because they would never plug anything in to their laptops. And I think that's where the dilemma ends up being. I mean, I told them both when they left home and were at college, I sent them each a little USB-C bus-powered device.

Drive that was two times the internal storage of each of their their macbook pros and said now just plug this in every once in a while you know i told them how to set it up on my time machine i said but then what you have to do is every once in a while plug it in like every week or whatever it is don't forget to plug it in and that's the problem is you have to remember to plug it that's

Dave Hamilton

The key yeah.

Adam Christianson

And i said you know if you need to set a time you know a reminder a weekly reminder on your on your calendar do that um you know but don't get caught without backup yeah yeah but yeah that yeah so the the network thing's nice because you know then it's getting backed up and you're not having to physically remember to plug in it's just kind of happening in the background without thinking about it so that's the advantage of doing something

like the buffalo i'm surprised about the my cloud things um yeah those were nice little solutions and now i think they just have like the expensive pro level series stuff it looks correct

Dave Hamilton

Yes yes i was surprised i i thought those still existed but the fact that i thought they existed and yet we hadn't talked about them on the show for probably a decade uh sort of supports why maybe they don't exist anymore like if if people aren't talking about them and buying them then yeah you don't keep making it right so.

Adam Christianson

Yeah I guess cloud, you know, cloud storage has kind of probably killed that end of the market.

Dave Hamilton

Exactly. Yeah.

Pilot Pete

Yeah.

Adam Christianson

The only other thing, you know, it's not as convenient for restoring, obviously, like recovery, but, you know, backblaze. Like you can get them a backblaze account. They can both connect to it, you know, and, and just let, let it back up to backblaze.

Pilot Pete

Let it do its thing. Yeah.

Dave Hamilton

Yep. Yep. Go ahead. No, that's what this woman that my, my Dave, the nerd client had done. She had a drive there that backblaze had sent her and she wanted to restore from it, but she didn't want to restore only to have to wipe it out again and all that. So she was under the clock. But because they they'll they'll ship you a drive to restore from. But I think she had 30 days to either ship it back or, you know, effectively buy it. Right. Exactly.

Which is fine. Like, you know, but she was she was on a on a clock for sure. Yeah.

Adam Christianson

Or you could or you can call up your favorite favorite podcaster and tell them your story and they'll like recover everything onto a drive for you and then ship it to you.

Dave Hamilton

Yeah, that's right.

Adam Christianson

I had a did you do that once i had a really good listener who had a tragedy uh lost his house in a fire and he said i have everything on on backblaze but i have no way to get it because he was without power without a home you know he was in really crummy wireless area and and he didn't want he's like if i just ship you a drive can you rip you know recover everything and so i helped him out yeah i just like recovered it for him yeah exactly sent it back i mean so like

Dave Hamilton

Yeah yeah yeah there you go yep we do we i know we we say that we do this because we like to help it actually turns out that's true we really do like to help like that's that's a big big part of why we love doing what we do but we all help each other like you help us too don't you know it's yeah It is a two-way street in a huge way. Yeah. Yeah. I learned just as much from, I learned more from all of you than, than I think I share on the show. So.

Pilot Pete

And actually, I just had a brainstorm when Adam was saying that,

What about a WiFi NAS?

you know, he told his daughters, you got to remember to plug it in, actually, to get it to work. So for some, here's a free one out there for some enterprising hardware developer. Remember years ago, and I think they're still available, the wireless SD cards. Someone come up with a little wireless two terabyte drive that just sits in your office.

Dave Hamilton

Well, I mean, that's Ethernet connected, too. Like, that's NAS, right? this.

Pilot Pete

Is a Wi-Fi thing this would go via Wi-Fi too

Dave Hamilton

I bet people.

Pilot Pete

Would buy it

Dave Hamilton

I think the solution is something we've already talked about which is Adam, don't just get the thing you bought, the crucial 2 terabyte also get the USB-C hub and plug the drive into the hub and use the hub as the power for your laptop so that anytime you plug it into charge, the drive is automatically connected and it's gonna do a backup.

Adam Christianson

There you go.

Dave Hamilton

Problem solved.

Adam Christianson

Yeah. That is the exact solution. Cause you just, you know, plug the power delivery into that one port, plug the two drives in the other port and then just tell your daughters, when you plug in your computer, plug in this cable instead of the,

Dave Hamilton

Instead of this one. That's it, yeah. Yeah. And then, and then you're done like that. Yeah. In fact, I, yeah, I gotta, I gotta think about rejiggering some things here because that's like, I don't know why I haven't thought of this before. Maybe, maybe this, this, this fever is, is maybe this whole thing is just a fever, fever dream anyway, but.

Pilot Pete

There you go.

Dave Hamilton

Yep. Cause just call me heat miser. Yeah. I'm too much.

Adam Christianson

Ready to go to darren yes all right

Darrin-QT-Clean Install right in macOS Settings

darren wrote in he says two weeks ago there was a discussion about doing a clean install of mac os i ran into this at the beginning of wwdc i downloaded xcode 26 beta xcode 20 oh xcode 26 beta they they named xcode also 26 everything's 26 adam cool We get

Dave Hamilton

To be 26 again, too. We're all 26. Everybody's 26.

Pilot Pete

This is 2025. Why am I confused?

Adam Christianson

Are they going to do that for all the software? Is it going to be like Logic Pro 26?

Dave Hamilton

Oh, pages 26.

Adam Christianson

God, it is. All right, whatever. Anyway, I digress. He downloaded Xcode 26 beta and ran into a problem where I couldn't accept the software agreement. I would click to accept and nothing would happen. After a full day of dealing with that, including contacting Apple, I needed to start working on my apps. I decided to just do a clean install of Mac OS.

I have an M2 Air and found on Apple's website the way to do a clean install was to just open the Settings app, go to General at the bottom, choose Transfer or Reset, and choose Erase All Content and Settings. So I made sure everything was backed up and did this. I have done clean installs before by reforming the hard drive and installing the OS... This does erase all content and settings, so this is the question, accomplish the same thing.

Once I did this and re-downloaded the beta of Xcode 26 and opened it up, I quickly got past the agreement acceptance pop-up. The iOS-like feature to erase all content and settings was painless to do that was less worrisome than reformatting and downloading the us but i wonder what is the difference love the show and never miss an episode yeah

Dave Hamilton

I mean that that you that's it there it is like ios now you just get to erase all content and settings they've they've made it so much easier and yes it does all the things for you so i that that is the way yeah it.

Adam Christianson

But that's just they throw away the keys right because it's it's all based now on the encryption keys i think that's how that works right so they basically just discard because everything's running through the you know the um i don't know what the current security chip is right t2 or whatever t5 i don't i don't know what they're using currently but i always thought that was why that works right is because they don't actually erase anything everything's

encrypted and they just throw away the keys yeah

Dave Hamilton

I you're you're probably right i never thought about it that way i always just assumed it was like well we'll just blow away the data partition which effectively is what they're doing here by by throwing away the keys like just you know start a new data i say partition a new data volume and uh and and then you're off to the races so yeah.

Adam Christianson

Yeah yeah yeah it's the right i thought that was because i thought that was because we you know with like ssds too right like why why i have to go in and clear all the bits you know yeah

Dave Hamilton

You don't just erase the remove.

Pilot Pete

Wipe the key

Dave Hamilton

Remove the volume create a new volume and you're good to go and that that's what that does yeah.

Adam Christianson

Okay yeah

Dave Hamilton

But but it might do it by throwing away the keys like technically speaking you might be correct i don't know but yeah i.

Pilot Pete

Would wonder does it wipe the key though as opposed to just making it you know on unavailable so that a on a racer type software couldn't recover the key and try and work on

Adam Christianson

Well the key's in the hardware yeah ah it's in the chip that's yeah okay that's how the teach you chips that's why we have this whole weird it boots not into real mac os first and then you have to like get your password and then i got it right yeah if i'm remembering how this works yeah

Pilot Pete

I don't think I realized that until just now. Never thought about it. Didn't need to. It just worked.

Dave Hamilton

It just works. But that's the point, right? Yeah. Yeah, for sure. Yeah.

Pilot Pete

So, all right. Well, let me take us to Peter, who talks about migrating from

Peter-QT-1095-Migrating from Intel to Apple Silicon "just works"

Intel to Apple as well, and brings it up this way. He says, hi guys, I know Adam covered this in MGG 1095, but I know a lot of people are gun-shy regarding migrating from Intel to Apple Silicon using the time machine. So, it bears mentioning again not to be afraid of the process. I just did this a few weeks ago, and I had similar excellent results as Adam.

After upgrading the OS on my new machine, I just ran through the prompted setup, selecting the time machine migration, and let it run overnight. There were some applications that wanted Rosetta, but none of them were critical, so I just deleted them. Brave Browser needed to be reinstalled, as did Dropbox, and you have to claim your existing time machine backup. You're prompted to do so if you want to keep it, but other than those, it was smooth sailing.

All my apps just worked and were blazing fast. Even my Backblaze license moved over automatically, so all I had to do was rename the backup. Apple really does make it easy to migrate, even across hardware platforms. Love the show. Keep up the good work. Thank you, Peter.

Dave Hamilton

Did you install Rosetta on your new MacBook Pro, Adam?

Adam Christianson

Yeah, I ended up having to for something. I don't remember what it was. I know I have old stuff that's not going to get updated, basically. I can't remember which app it was off the top of my head. I mean... I haven't, I'm assuming, I haven't tried to reconnect to my Drobo yet, and I'm assuming that's dead.

Dave Hamilton

I'm able to connect to my Drobo from, well, my network Drobo. I haven't tried to connect to a direct attack.

Adam Christianson

Yeah, I have a direct. But I mean, do you still have access to Drobo dashboard? I mean, that's the piece that I...

Dave Hamilton

I think so. I don't have it on this computer, but I'm pretty sure I was able to get to it. I don't know. It's been a little while, Adam, but I think so.

Adam Christianson

Yeah, I moved on to the Synology. I moved everything over to the Synology. I don't know. I still have a new in-box USB-C or USB 3 Drobo in my garage.

Dave Hamilton

I connected that to my Synology. So my Synology connects to my Drobo, and my Synology backs up things across the USB to the Drobo. So that Synology happily talks to the Drobo. So yeah.

Adam Christianson

Scrawlways says, uh, my mother still uses a Drobo attached. And this is in the discord. Yeah. Uh, but the dashboard doesn't work. I don't know how you would, I mean, without the dashboard, you can't really do anything with it. I guess it'll still connect and mount maybe, but you're not going to be able to like recover if a drive fails. Right.

Dave Hamilton

Right. Yeah. Yeah. That's interesting.

Pilot Pete

Yeah, be careful there.

Dave Hamilton

Yes, yes, exactly. Be careful there.

Adam Christianson

It's time to move away from trouble. Oh, yeah. If you haven't moved away from your trouble yet.

Dave Hamilton

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure.

Adam Christianson

Get on it. Yep.

Dave Hamilton

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TonyB-How do I stop macOS from correcting a single word/name?

All right. Do some more questions?

Adam Christianson

Sure. We got one from Tony. Tony B says, how do I stop macOS from correcting a single word name? Is that the full thing, or am I missing something here?

Dave Hamilton

This is a Discord thing. Oh, here it is.

Adam Christianson

Yeah, sorry. Does anyone know any way at all to stop macOS from auto-correcting a single word? There is a specific acronym that I type numerous times per day, and macOS decides that it's spelled wrong and wants to correct it to a word that is one character off. Of course, the usual all-in or all-out solutions from the Apple community forums don't help. I was able to create a workaround in TextExpander, but I'd rather not have to use a workaround.

Dave Hamilton

Yeah, and there was a great discussion in our Discord where Paul Conaway and Ben both shared that adding an entry to the text replacement section of the keyboard settings would do this, and it will sync to your iOS devices too. So I think that's the answer. I don't know of any others. But Ben does point out, since you have TextExpander, I'd recommend just using that because it's more flexible most of the time. I'll add to that, though. It doesn't sync to iOS the same way that it does,

but it's synced to the custom keyboard. And so, yeah. I would, if it were me, I'd put it in both.

Adam Christianson

Uh so just so i'm clear is that you would then put as the text replacement like the way you want to spell it and then the way you want to spell it like so they're the same exactly

Dave Hamilton

You put the same entry into both yes yes yeah, Yeah, I know. It seems counterintuitive until you do it. And then you're like, oh, that's actually, that makes sense. Okay. Yeah.

Pilot Pete

And then I want to quickly add the bonus quick tip. And I don't remember who sent it, but, uh, uh, if you right click on your text

Right-click on your Mac to export your text replacements

replacement, you can export it. And when you click export, it gets, it takes all your text replacements and exports them as a plist file. And you can take that to another machine that's on a different Apple ID. For instance, I use it on my wife's iMac. So all my text replacements are on her iMac as well as all my machines because she has a different Apple ID in there. So, yeah. So if you right-click on a single text replacement and click export, it exports all of them as a plist.

Dave Hamilton

Nice. And then the same thing for importing it, right? You right-click and you can choose import.

Pilot Pete

Yes, then you turn around and right-click and import that plist file into it. Because when he first gave me that tip, I was like, oh, why would you want to do this? It syncs because I went and checked it out. Oh, it syncs across to iOS and iPadOS. And oh, I can use it on the iMac.

Dave Hamilton

Yeah.

Pilot Pete

Did that right away. Boom. Yeah. So, but be careful not to overwrite your wife's text replacements. If you do this, combine them and then re-import. Export hers, put it all together in one P list and then re-import.

Dave Hamilton

So, yeah. And ChatGPT could probably, if you're not comfortable merging P list manually, I would think chat GPT could probably get you there. Save, save individual copies of both just in case what you wind up with is not what you expected, but your mileage will vary.

Adam Christianson

It's been a while since I looked at a, looked at a P list, but it's just an XML file,

Dave Hamilton

Right? It is just an XML file, but not everybody, you know, thinks in structured text. So, but yes, Yes, it is just an XML file.

Adam Christianson

They should update to JSON. Come on.

Dave Hamilton

Also just structured text, Adam. All right. Should we move on to Hinch's, Pete?

Hinches-How can I balance podcast audio when one person is louder than the other?

Pilot Pete

We should because Hinch's writes in. I know that in Zoom, there is an audio setting that allows you to balance audio so that when you were talking or listening in the conversation, you or someone else, shout out. The computer balances you out so that you sound, uh, the, the, so that you are not blasted with a sudden loud talker. My question is, there's such a setting on iPhone for podcasts.

In certain podcasts, I have trouble when driving, and a podcast cuts to an ad, and the increase in volume means I have to turn down the volume, and then when the ad ends, I can't hear the podcast, so I have to turn it back up. Is there a setting or automation that can be set to resolve this issue? And I'm sorry, Dave, I'm going to interrupt your answer ahead of time and say what I said before the show. and just listen to this show, Adam's show,

my show, and you won't have that problem. Just saying. There's your answer. Just listen to these good shows.

Dave Hamilton

I mean, it is worth it for podcasters to learn about balancing levels and compression and all of that stuff because sound quality does matter. I always said in the beginning when we started this show, the most important thing, the prime directive, was release consistently. The secondary directive, and it was a distant second, was to have good audio quality.

Content quality was never anywhere on that list because we knew the content was going to suck out of the gate, but we also knew that if we did the other two things, we'd have enough time to actually get better at the content. And here we are 20 years later still working on that tertiary directive.

Pilot Pete

We'll get there someday.

Dave Hamilton

Yeah, exactly. But I am happy to teach anyone, podcasters or anybody else, about balancing audio and compression and all that stuff. That feature that you want is coming to Apple Podcasts 26. That was one of the things they talked about during the keynote.

Until then, and perhaps even after that, I highly, highly, highly recommend listening to your podcast with Overcast because Marco Arment wrote an entirely custom audio playback engine that does a lot of different things one of them is exactly this balancing the audio levels and and essentially doing some on-the-fly compression to to tighten everything up because you're right listening in your car when you've got you know 60 db of road noise and suddenly

you know you're you've got two speakers on a podcast that are 10 db different from one another you know you're you're you're you're mixing faders while you're driving just to hear the show and that's that's just it's not no one wants to do that no it's nobody wants i don't want to do that either but overcast it's nothing's perfect i mean if it's if it's really bad it the source material is really bad overcast can only do so much but it does quite a bit so i yeah that that that's

my recommendation certainly for now we'll see when apple podcast 26 is actually out whether it how well it does it i should i should put the beta on somewhere and experiment, but you know, anyway, levelator still exists. Kind of. Yeah.

Adam Christianson

Yeah. I, I, I've been using it. I think it's still on my computer.

Dave Hamilton

Yeah. Okay. There you go. That's why, that's why you needed Rosetta.

Adam Christianson

I haven't, I haven't used it on the new machine yet. I was using it on my old Intel. I summon, I summon Paul Figgioni.

Dave Hamilton

Oh, I forgot about Paul Figgioni. Yeah.

Adam Christianson

I'll, I have a, I just found a link to an article from 2015, but this was his this was one of his like mantras for a while i believe he was trying to get the podcast industry to set up some sort of uh target standard so that all podcasts would kind of target the same uh levels for this exact reason that this person's talking about i don't know if it ever went anywhere i know that he i had sent him samples and he had asked a number of like larger podcasters for different samples and that

sort of thing um and uh so there's an article that he wrote in 2015 talking about a published standard for loudness of audio streaming and network file play payback um from aes this was back in 2015 uh but he basically was saying yeah this is great for like music streaming and stuff like that but it go it goes into some of the details on how voice is different and there's probably some adjustments and if you want to get real technically nerdy with all this stuff well we can

link to i'll throw this article link in the show notes i mean it's old but i mean it'll give you the rough idea what you know the concept that we're talking about yeah yeah

Dave Hamilton

Yeah it it makes a huge difference as we all know uh you know and it's it's one of the things we strive for here is getting balance levels and uh and all that stuff I.

Pilot Pete

Just assumed that 16 luffs was the... Podcast standard.

Dave Hamilton

It might be. I don't know. I forget. I forget what we, what do we publish to? I'm sure I, I'm sure I could tell you.

Pilot Pete

I thought it was minus 16 lofts.

Dave Hamilton

Is it, is that what, is that what Auphonic publishes to? I believe it. Yeah, I'm publishing to negative 16 lofts. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Pilot Pete

Yeah. So, which is loudness units relative to full scale. L-U-F-S.

Dave Hamilton

All right.

Pilot Pete

See how smart I is?

Dave Hamilton

Yeah. Beautiful.

Pilot Pete

Just ask me.

Dave Hamilton

How are we doing in time we're doing okay let's um let's let's go to uh bob are you ready to read bob's i know you were looking up a link there adam yeah.

Adam Christianson

I got bob here okay uh bob says several months ago my wife's 2019 core i5 imac

Bob-My 2019 iMac started booting very, very slowly

with 16 gigabytes of memory and a one terabyte fusion drive, running Sequoia 15.5 became excruciatingly slow on startup, taking as much as 10 minutes or longer to power on to the login screen. Carefully watching the startup bar, I've noticed a couple times when the bar stops moving for as long as two to three minutes or more.

I've done all of the usual troubleshooting, checking the HDD with Apple Disk Utility and clean my Mac, monitoring it with iStat menus, rerunning the most current OS updater, and finally doing a complete nuke and pave, full backup, reformat, restore from the backup, nothing solved the problem. Is there a utility that would allow me to graphically view the startup process either during startup or as a log sheet with timestamps?

Perhaps then I could figure out what is stopping startup and and then work on fixing that. One last question. Is this an example of Apple's forced obsolescence for older hardware? Thanks for any help you can offer, Bob.

Dave Hamilton

So I have I have thoughts on this, but as you were reading it, I was reminded of the verbose mode in startup that Intel Macs have. I don't know that we have that on Apple Silicon Macs. Apple's knowledge base article does not. It indicates that the command V only works on Intel based Macs. But what verbose mode does or did is you would hold down Command-V as your Mac started up, and instead of just having the progress bar, it would show you the kernel logs as it booted.

Or the system logs, I guess, not the kernel logs. And that would give you an indication as to what it was waiting for at any given point, and that could be helpful. So from what I'm seeing here, though, I don't think we get verbose mode anymore, which is kind of a shame. But my gut, and I certainly am biased here because I've experienced this, but maybe that bias leads us to the answer, is that I'm guessing it's the fusion drive.

Those can definitely become problematic if the the fusion drive is you know a large spindle drive and a smaller ssd and mac os kind of just you know decides what should be on the ssd essentially using it like a cache and so when the spindle drive starts to go sideways that can really slow things down, especially if it's got a migrate data back and forth. So in the, if I were there, what would I do next department?

If you have a fast USB or Thunderbolt SSD, something like maybe the two terabyte crucial one that Adam mentioned earlier in the show, I would try setting up Mac OS on that and booting from it. That'll tell you pretty quickly if your problem is your drive or something else on your Mac. So that would be what, that's where I would go with that.

Adam Christianson

So, Dave.

Dave Hamilton

So, Adam.

Adam Christianson

I just found a MacPaw article on how to do this on your Apple Silicon Mac.

Dave Hamilton

Oh, really?

Adam Christianson

Yes. It is a sudo command to force, you can force the Mac to always boot in verbose mode with an nvram command from the terminal. I'm going to link to their article in the show notes. Great. So you'd want to turn this on, do your QA, right? And then probably go back and turn it off because otherwise it's going to boot always in verbose mode.

Dave Hamilton

Which is kind of fun. I don't know. That's great. Yeah.

Adam Christianson

So sudo nvram boot-args equals quote-v. I'm assuming verbose mode is the command. Again, we'll put the command in the show notes. But you do that. Obviously, you've got to put your admin password in and then quit terminal, and then next time you reboot, it should boot into verbose mode. And this would work for Intel and Apple Silicon Macs, obviously.

Dave Hamilton

Right. Oh, that's good to know. Okay, then that would be the first thing that I would do for Bob's scenario, is that. Although, wait, this is a 2019 iMac, so guess what? It's Intel.

Adam Christianson

It's Intel. You can just do the keyboard.

Dave Hamilton

Yeah, there you go. I'm a little slow today. I know. I'm sure it's this fever that I have, or maybe not, but I'll just blame it on that. Uh, yeah, that's, that's, I would, I would boot in verbose mode and look at what, what the line is when it's waiting for something, it will, that's often very informative and feel like have your phone ready and, you know, take a picture of what it looks like. Cause you can't do screenshots, uh, at that point, Mac OS isn't up and running.

So just literally take a picture and just make sure the picture is clear and send it to us and we'll help we'll help you kind of interpret what uh what might be out there yeah good stuff love that, All right, where are we? Should we go to Dan?

Dan-Which 27" Display should I get?

Pilot Pete

Take us to Dan? I can do that. Dan writes in asking about displays. Hi, guys. Love the show and have been listening for years. New lips, I guess, this week, sorry. My current iMac 27-inch is the 2019 Intel. I think at that time, Dave and I bought that model. Just my luck. I usually get 10 years from an iMac. I only use it for personal stuff. I don't create video or anything. I'm wondering if you have any advice for where to watch for display sales or deals.

I think I'd like to get around the same size. Since it's just personal use, I don't need the best display, but I'd also like to be at least a good one that will hopefully last. Are there any minimum specs that I should be looking for? My plan is to keep this iMac going for a little bit longer so I have time to save and search. I hope to eventually get an M4 Mac Mini with 24 gigs of RAM and a 512 SSD. Thanks and appreciate any thoughts. Dan.

Dave Hamilton

Yeah, okay. So I have been in this boat, as you well know. And anytime I needed to buy a display with my own cash, I would have gone to monoprice. But it's been a while, and my research says that Monoprice doesn't really offer displays like this anymore. They have one refurbished 27-inch display. But—, Coming over from a 5K display on an iMac, you definitely want to get at least a 4K or, as it's often called, UHD display. You don't want to get just an HD, which is 1080p.

You're not going to be happy with the way that looks most likely. So you want to get yourself a 4K display. uh and uh and and and and that you know that then that's kind of where things start to open up i did some research i found a monoprice refurbished one for 250 bucks uh i found a samsung one for 250 bucks i found one from a company called scepter that i've never heard of but it has great reviews on Amazon, thousands of them, for $180. There is a Dell one for $280.

And Dell was always known for sourcing really good glass for their displays. They were kind of doing what Monoprice was doing in their own way, where they would source the really good glass and then kind of build a less expensive frame and stand around it so that they could keep the cost down. But yeah, candidly, the Dell one for $280, it's 120 hertz, you know, 4K UHD display, which means it's 3840 by 2160. So that's probably the one I would go with, all else being equal.

But I'd be tempted by that Scepter for $100 less. I don't know. Like... You know, these, these are effectively commodities right now. Um, so like I would be tempted by it and then, you know, see, get it and see how it is. You're going to, the nice part is you've got it next to an Apple 5k display. And so you'll know real fast if it's going to hold up some, some, I mean, I, I've done this, I, you know, I've had 5k displays next to 4k displays and a lot of them look really good.

I've, I had mono price displays. I've had ViewSonic, I've got the Philips. So it is possible to have it look good enough next to it that moving Windows back and forth, you're not like, oh my gosh, this is terrible over here. There are some displays where that's the case, but many of them are not. So, yeah.

Adam Christianson

So this is DisplayPort displays. He's looking for something relatively lower priced, I'm assuming? Yes. Yes.

Dave Hamilton

Yeah.

Adam Christianson

Yeah, because the one thing I've been wanting to get external monitors, but my thing is, is I feel like I want a Thunderbolt one, like Thunderbolt four. And then on top of that, the other dilemma I've often had with Thunderbolt displays, and I've never understood this because, and maybe it's because I like to run my laptop in clamshell mode. So I'd prefer to have, like, I have two, I think, 24 inch displays right now that are just low end displays that I use.

But I was going to upgrade to 5K displays and nobody does hardly anybody does daisy chaining and so you're going to eat up two Thunderbolt ports or have to plug into a hub and use two Thunderbolt ports the only company and I'd love to know if anybody knows of anybody else but the only company I know who does it is I think BenQ, they have their 27 inch 5K designer monitors they're not cheap

But they're Thunderbolt 4, and they have daisy chaining. And I'm like, that's the huge advantage, because I can plug one cable in for the monitor and plug one monitor to the other monitor, and then I have two monitors on one cable.

Dave Hamilton

I'm pretty sure this Philips monitor that I have in front of me here is, I don't want to look around the back, so I'm trying to look it up here. But the Philips monitor that I use here in the studio is Thunderbolt and has multiple ports on it oh cool yeah so uh.

Adam Christianson

Maybe it's changed but for the longest time all these people are making thunderbolt 4 monitors with one thunderbolt port

Dave Hamilton

Yep it's.

Adam Christianson

Like can you just put one more in there please so i can daisy chain these things

Dave Hamilton

I'm pretty sure it's got multiple thunderbolt ports on it i'll put a link to it in the show notes it's the phillips creator series and it's come down quite a bit it's 432 bucks um so and i love this screen this screen is utterly fantastic yeah.

Adam Christianson

I think these ben q ones are you know yeah 50 1500 yeah yeah or i don't even know

Dave Hamilton

Yeah yeah yeah so uh for 430 it's 433 dollars when you round up by a nickel so but yeah i'll put a link to that in the show notes too yeah so that's a good.

Adam Christianson

Price then i know i might This screen is

Dave Hamilton

Amazing.

Adam Christianson

If it'll daisy chain.

Dave Hamilton

I think it does. I could be wrong. I could be wrong. But no, it definitely, they show it daisy chaining. There it is. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Cool. Yep. Yep. So, yeah, there's a picture right there of the old daisy chain happening. So, yep. I'm going to be.

Pilot Pete

More fun for you to bang around on the mic and crawl back there.

Dave Hamilton

Yeah, that sounds like a good idea. yeah yeah yeah yeah uh where are we on time i i think that kind of gets us there uh i mean unless is there something quick we want to do but otherwise i think we've hit the like we've made it through to the end here you.

Pilot Pete

Want to do tim's real quick it's a quick answer

Dave Hamilton

It's really not it's you you think it is that's true it's not we'll do tim next week yes we got He.

MGG 1096 Outtro

Pilot Pete

Got an email, so he knows.

Dave Hamilton

Yeah. Yeah. There's a long discord thread about this that is not, not as quick as you think.

Pilot Pete

Yeah. Okay.

Dave Hamilton

So fair enough. Yeah. We'll, uh, we'll, we'll, we'll bring the band in and, you know, just start doing our thing here.

So thanks for hanging out everybody. Thanks for bearing with my, uh, whatever like my 101 degrees yeah i think i'm probably down from that now i took some thylenol before we started the show so there you go yeah yeah it's all good uh yep uh thanks so thanks for hanging out make sure that you've got uh when this episode comes out i think you got one day left of our giveaway for june which is the one more sonoflow headphones and then we've got a really fun one coming up in uh july

which we'll talk about that in the next episode for sure it's going to be a blast so i think you're going to like it uh thanks to all of you for listening thanks to cashfly for providing all the bandwidth to get the show from us to you uh as pete said earlier in the episode if you want to listen to other things make sure to check out pete's so there i was podcast adam's debut film podcast my business brain and gig gab podcasts and all of those have well-balanced sound

i i will attest to it most of the time we don't always get it right sometimes they really.

Pilot Pete

Do yeah they really are all of the

Dave Hamilton

Secret oh thank you and uh come come to max stock that's real soon now like two weeks away so yeah yeah looking forward to seeing you there less than uh less than by the time the episode comes out that's right yeah for sure that's that's it uh yeah listen uh have a good week and uh don't get caught, see ya later.

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