¶ Pogo Kelly-QT-Turn Screenshots into a PDF in the Finder
It's time for MacGeekGab, and listener Pogo Kelly brings us our quick tip of the week with turn your screenshots into a PDF in the Finder. When attending a webinar, I often take screenshots of the presentation. Afterwards, in Finder, I select the screenshots. Right-clicking on one brings up a menu near the bottom. I hover on Quick Actions, which opens a sub-menu where I click on Create PDF.
The newly created PDF shows up in the Finder window with the file name highlighted, ready for me to type in a useful name. Then I can delete the screenshots because they are no longer needed. More tips like this, plus your questions answered today on Mac Geek Gab 1103 for Monday, August 18th, 2025.
Greetings, folks, and welcome to Mac Geek Out, the show where you send in and we share tips like that. You send in and we share cool stuff found. You send in and we share your questions and sometimes, hopefully, often are able to provide answers or a nice path to them. All in the interest of each of us learning at least five new things every single time we get together. Our sponsors for this episode are varied and many.
We have BB Edit from Barebones.com. We have Wix at Wix.com where you can go to start building your website today with their fun drag and drop tools.
Caldera lab.com slash mgg and using code mgg at checkout saves you 20% off your first order of skincare made for you k12.com slash mgg is where you're going to go today to find a tuition-free k12 powered school near you and enroll now and there is still time to enroll for the fall and webroot.com slash mgg, where you can get 50% off of Webroot Total Protection or Webroot Essentials. We will talk more about each of those in a little bit here on National Fajita
Day in Durham, New Hampshire. I'm Dave Hamilton.
And here in South Dakota, I'm Adam Christensen.
And here, also in New Hampshire, it's Pilot Pete, and it is the weather for National Fajita Day. It is sizzling, man, in much of the country.
Well played.
Oh, man. And another well played. I'm going to take us right into our next quick tip, because we got a note from Carl.
¶ Karl-QT-CHiPs taught us some police 11-codes!
And normally at this point, I'd give you what the code is and all that kind of stuff, because I've been doing that throughout the thousands. But now that we're into the 11s, turns out he says, good morning, gentlemen, during the thousands episode, Pete was educating us on the police 10 codes. But now that you are in the 1100s, there's no more. Well, there are 11 codes. Turns out the California Highway Patrol uses them.
Although not all numbers are used, you can at least use them for at least some of the upcoming episodes. I remember this from watching the show Chips. Now, Pete has something to look forward to. And so, yeah, so I asked a fellow AI, does 1103, I went to the website, by the way, which is great, has several of them, but 1103 was not one of them. So I asked, chat GPT, hey, does 1103 mean anything? Yeah. Oh, yeah, sometimes it's a traffic accident without injuries.
Oh, okay, good. Give me a jurisdiction where that is. Well, there are no jurisdictions where that is.
Yep.
Okay, walked right into that one.
The follow-up questions with ChatGPT and other LLMs are the key to accuracy.
Exactly. ChatGPT, were you lying then or are you lying now? Yeah.
Hey, ChatGPT, are you sure? That's one of our favorite things to ask. All right. But we do have some. There are definitely some of these that are documented in a way that we might trust. Right. yeah yeah that's fine um all right uh i guess we'll just keep moving on with our quick tips here kiwi graham has our next one uh,
¶ Kiwi Graham-QT-Apple devices use randomized serial numbers
I was just using MacTracker to check the exact model specs for my iPad and was pasting the serial number into the MacTracker search bar successfully, per an MGG tip from many years ago. However, while doing that, I recalled that this type of search has failed me at times, so I went hunting on the MacTracker FAQ and found a factoid that I was previously unaware of.
That is, Apple has transitioned products introduced after and including the purple iPhone 12 to a new randomized alphanumeric format for serial numbers. The translation, now the only place that has a searchable database for matching a serial number to a model of device is at Apple and they do not share it. And this is presumably some kind of security. We could probably, well, we could surmise and suspect reasons for this, but that's the reality of it.
So Kiwi Graham says, this explains my random search results and seemingly my iPad is old enough to predate the random numbers. So thank you for that, Kiwi Graham. That's good to know. Yeah.
More hidden secrets for no apparent reason.
Yeah well.
I think dave dave got it right or you know the comment it's security yeah
Yeah i guess well i mean if you were to paste accidentally paste a screenshot of your serial number somewhere then now the the type of the model of your of your whatever is now, obscured but i'm trying to think of all the places where a serial number would exist like you know in the about this mac window which you can you can get to your serial number by going i believe still to about this mac and yeah it's right there but that also articulates like if
you were to paste a screenshot of that that window it's going to tell people what the model is because it's right there next to the serial number so i don't like i don't know and.
Heaven forbid you know that someone knows i have a macbook pro and you know if i'm pasting it online then i'm kind of already giving that up anyway well i don't know no but
Let's think about this okay right in safari oh no well the device type is sent with the user agent but but only in an obscured way like you get that it's an iphone not that it's you know this very specific model it's getting.
That it's running Mac OS or iOS.
Correct. Correct.
All right.
Yeah. So maybe it's along those lines. Yeah. Yeah.
Let's go with that.
Let's go with that. Yeah. Let's go with that.
All right, should it take us to Mike?
Sure.
Please.
All right, Mike has a twofer, I think, because I think there's a...
¶ Mike-QT-Files.app document scanning maxes out at 24 pages
I think you're right. Don't get caught in here as well. Mike says, I had a 40-plus page book to scan. I've been using my iPhone instead of my old dedicated scanner for years. This mustn't have been the first time I tried to scan something so long. Whether using notes or scanning directly into the Files app, iPhone's built-in document scanning stops at 24 pages. I got caught. Afterwards, I merged the two PDFs on my Mac, but I wonder why the limit.
As for the quick tip, when cropping, the handles slash circles at the four corners let you crop your scan, but I always found that my finger covered a lot of the zoomed-in area. But you do not have to click on the corners or even very near the corner.
You can tap and hold close to the corner you want to move and the corner moves with the zoom area unobstructed by your finger making more precise crops much easier cool i didn't know that i always struggle with that so that is a good tip to know that's a really
Go ahead i'm.
Just wondering if that works for all those selections that are kind of in tight corners and stuff like that
Yeah you took the literally took the words right out of my mouth that was going to be my question is like now that we know where else can we get away with not having to touch the corner when there's a corner to drag yeah huh yeah i had no i had no idea about that that's that's a is that is that all three of us learning this simultaneously yes that's.
A brand new one for me that's awesome one
Well yeah that's one yeah exactly for sure the i did certainly mike we believe you obviously that that you hit that 24-page limit, I did some searching and found no one else reporting a 24-page limit, i.e. I have scanned many things with my iPhone files app, not with the current iOS 18 family, but certainly over the last few years, I've scanned a 100-page book of sheet music or something that I wanted to put on my iPad and have never hit this 24-page limit.
So I'm wondering why, why you are like, and that, I, I don't know the answer to that.
So, um, is that what the auto, that auto scanning where you scan a page and then you, then it automatically detects the page and scans the next scans, the next scans, the next like that.
That's awesome. But I've done, like I said, I've done it with a hundred pages or certainly more than 25. Yeah.
Is it different if you're kind of, cause can you also do that kind of manually where you scan scan until you tap done or something like that yes can't you also do it manually
Yeah absolutely is.
There maybe a limit on one or the other or
Possibly yeah right yes i certainly we don't know if we were both doing it exactly the same way yeah that's fair that's fair and and maybe color versus grayscale versus like i i you know there's options in there as well so yeah.
I I feel compelled to jump in with an ad hoc cool stuff found,
¶ CSF-Genius Scan (free version)
which is Genius Scan free version, which is what I've always used for scanning with my iOS. I've never hit a page limit. And it stores it within the app, so to speak. I mean, you can pay to have it stored online and backed up and that sort of thing. But it stores it within the app. It's super searchable. And when you do need to crop, it actually creates a little zoomed-in area. So it shows you when you're on the edge of a document and that sort of thing.
But it's very good about picking out documents all by itself and getting rid of the rest and doing a nice crop. Super versatile. So genius scan, free version. been using it for years i think we've mentioned it before we
I'm pretty sure we have but yeah yeah i i would love to know the differences between that and like the files app that's because i mean because again you know files app but great option.
You can scan things to files and of course you know sure obviously you know and share them they did to get that's how i get my pdfs yeah i need an ios scan so nice
Cool nice uh.
Go ahead i have a follow-up tip from Peg, unless you had something to add to
¶ Peg-QT-Scanning using Image Capture
the scanning thing. Yes, right. Because more scanning. I guess on a recent, Peg says, on a recent episode, and this is from our Discord, by the way, which is mackeycap.com slash Discord, if I'm remembering the URL correctly. Is that right, Gabe? All right. It says, in a recent episode, Adam shared a great tip for scanning documents with his brother, multifunction copier, MFC, I think that's the model number. I think it says multifunction copier.
That reminded me while it may not work for all models I found that using Apple's image capture on my Mac lets me connect wirelessly to my brother MFC and scan directly to the folder of my choice and that is true awesome thanks for all the helpful tips you continue to share
I love image capture is an easily forgotten app So here's.
How tired I am. I'm going, why are you connecting to your brother's printer? Sorry. Must be one of those days.
It's definitely one of those days. Yeah, it's definitely one of those days. It is, though, one of those days where you can win a copy of another great app default folder by going to MacGearCup.com slash giveaway for the month of August. And we have some fun giveaways coming up for future months. But for this month, it's a folder, one of my favorite apps. So just wanted to make sure to mention that.
¶ Craig-1101-QT-Most Macs can't support USB 20Gbps
Craig has what I believe to be our final quick tip-ish of the day. It's a correction, an addendum, if you will. Craig says, listening to MacGeekUp1101, when you were talking about Kaz's or answering Kaz's question about how do I know how fast my USB-C cables are, not to nitpick. Oh, no, no, no. Craig, please nitpick. We like to learn things. We like to deliver correct information. We don't need to have been correct in the past. Being corrected is okay.
He says, but I think you let something fly by that should have maybe had the pause button pressed in the context of a Mac discussion. In the intro on this segment around checking and labeling USB-C cables, the listener email included a reference to USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 spec giving 20 gigabits per second as the speed.
It is my understanding, and I believe Craig is correct, that Macs do not support that spec and use of any cables and or storage devices specific to that 20 gig standard will just give 10 gig speeds on your Mac. He says, but please check my work. So, first of all, again, thank you, Craig. I checked your work. I believe you are 100% correct. Well, let's say 99% correct. You were 100% correct to bring this up. Some Intel Macs can do 20 gig speeds.
And there's an eclectic light article that Howard Oakley put together to save all of us the trouble.
Uh so uh while some you might find an intel mac that could do the 20 gig speeds uh the all the apple silicon macs that are being released today uh up through i believe eclectic lights article was from he put this out on christmas day uh this past christmas day christmas day of 2024, and up through the m3 max at least those could not support any it could not to support the 20 You can go all the way up, of course, to 40 and beyond with, you know, Thunderbolt 4 and USB 4 and all of that.
Um with usb 3.2 gen 2x2 you will get 10 gig speeds out of your mac so thank you for that craig fun stuff we like to learn and we like to uh we like to eventually get it right so.
It's good all right yeah yeah we have uh well we have we actually we have some uh cool stuff found we have a don't get caught here and there and we've got your questions to answer the next thing that we would love to do is talk about our sponsors because well you know people often tell me that i look younger than i actually
¶ SPONSOR: Caldera Lab. Guys, don’t settle for drugstore junk or steal your partner’s products—elevate your routine with skincare made for you. Head to CalderaLab.com/MGG and use MGG at checkout for 20% off your first order.
am and while i certainly appreciate that i know that it's not just luck and you know good genes and all that i've actually been putting something on my face every day since i was 17 and while it hasn't always been our sponsor caldera lab i love the stuff that they have now that I've been able to try it. Their skincare is made specifically for men and it just works. I've been using The Good, which is one of their products, and another one called The Eye Serum. And I love both.
That eye serum, especially, you know, when you got those early podcast mornings or long travel days or gigs late at night, it helps me look like I've actually gotten some sleep, even though I really haven't. Caldera Lab combines cutting-edge science with ingredients that I can feel good about putting on my skin. Cruelty-free, plastic-neutral, non-comedogenic, and built to actually improve your skin.
Whether you're starting fresh or upgrading your routine, Caldera Lab makes skincare simple and effective. Don't settle for that drugstore junk or steal your partner's products. Elevate your routine with skincare made for you. Head to calderalab.com slash mgg and use mgg at checkout for 20% off your first order. And our thanks to Caldera Lab for sponsoring this episode. You know, and here we are in mid-August. It's wild to think that the school
¶ SPONSOR: K12 can help your child start reaching their full potential in life now - and give you the support you need to get them there! Go to K12.com/MGG today to find a tuition-free K12-powered school near you and enroll now
year is kind of already here, right? And here at MacGeekGab, we embrace the idea that learning is best when it fits the learner, not the other way around. And that's what I love about what K-12 Powered Schools, our sponsor, are doing. These are accredited, tuition-free, online public schools for grades K-12 designed to support individual learning styles, interests, and schedules. It's all online so your student can learn from anywhere there's internet,
right? On the road, at home, wherever life takes you. K-12 has been doing this for over 25 years with certified teachers who specialize in online education. Plus, there are social opportunities and in-person events, too, so kids aren't missing out on those, you know, key connections and all of that stuff. And I wish I had known about this when our kids were younger. It's such an amazing model, really focused on how your student learns best. I really love it.
Join the more than 3 million families who have chosen K-12 and empower your student to reach their full potential now. There's still time to enroll for this school year. So go to K12.com slash MGG today to find a tuition-free K12-powered school near you and enroll now. That's the letter K, the number 12, dot com slash MGG, K12.com slash MGG. And our thanks to K12-powered schools for sponsoring this episode. And while we're here, you know that I've been using BBEdit forever,
¶ SPONSOR: BBEdit, the power tool for text from Bare Bones Software; now with integrated Notebooks and extended language support.
right? It's always been the Swiss army knife for text on my Macs. And now with BBEdit 15.5, they've kind of added like a rocket launcher to that knife. This version builds on BBEdit 15 with serious performance boosts, editing large files, complex grep searches, multi-file operations. They're all snappier. It's palpable. You can tell. And now, thanks to FTPS support, secure remote file editing is just a breeze. Markdown fans, you'll love how headings now fold and indent by level.
Coders, GitTools just got even better. Writers, the new Apple intelligence-powered writing tools give you inline summarization and proofreading right inside a BBEdit. Plus, Strip Diacriticals helps simplify accented text. I love that. I also like saying diacriticals. I've even got the ChatGPT worksheets running. And when I'm talking to, you know, well, me, it all just kind of works great. BB Edit's generous trial makes it easy to try it all out. So go grab your copy at barebones.com slash store.
And remember, when it comes to working with text, don't get caught without BB Edit. And our thanks to Bare Bones and BB Edit for sponsoring this episode. All right. One quick don't get caught today from Randy Walker in our Discord.
¶ RandyWalker-DGC-Change Out Your CarPlay Cable
And he says, I thought that the iOS 26 beta was causing issues with my audio playback over wired CarPlay. On a whim, I decided to buy a new cable and sure enough, the issues were resolved. I guess my old cable got slammed in the door one too many times. Sad because, as he says, it wasn't that old. It was a Beats cable, and those just came out a little while ago, but it was much longer than the older Belkin cable I was using, and that's how it ended up getting slammed in the door a few times.
I have found that, for whatever reason, wired CarPlay is much more sensitive to worn-out cables than anything else I've ever used. And I don't know why that is, but maybe it's because effectively CarPlay is like an external monitor for your iPhone. So it needs a very reliable connection. And if anything gets a little flaky with it, it just dies. That's just a guess. But I've experienced this to the point where I would keep a spare CarPlay cable within arm's reach, literally, in my car.
I would put it in the pocket behind the passenger seat so I could easily reach with my right hand while I was driving, grab the new cable and swap it out whenever that problem was going to happen because it seemed to be about once or twice a year that I would need to swap out a CarPlay cable.
I have preferred using very short CarPlay cables, and I will find the Amazon link to ones that I use, but I like the coiled ones so that they're not just like dangling all over, but have a little bit of stretch to them if you need the distance.
I've generally found that longer cables also for me, I don't know if this has been your guys' experience, tend to fail more frequently. And mainly because my family loves 10-foot cables because they want to plug into the wall and be all over the living room or all over their bedroom. So I buy them the long. And I buy the good anchor cables. They're good cables. But they will definitely fail more frequently than my six-foot cables just in general.
Interesting.
I think there's more tension and it's more like flex going on and moving around. Yeah, I don't know. I think also you get a little more, maybe because of the length, you get a little more torsion where it's plugged into the charger or plugged into your phone or something. I don't know. It's way to the cable.
Yeah, makes sense. Yeah, yeah. I put a link to the coiled cable that I've used, but you know if you you got to find one that has the right the right um connectors for the end oh that's.
Like the old telephone cables i i was picturing i wanted i want one that is more probably like a spring or a slinky did they make that style of
Yep i'm.
Gonna have to look for that
I like that.
Idea because yeah because i uh my carplay i don't like having you know i'm probably like you at the center console i don't want the cable like just dangling
¶ Wireless CarPlay and GPS Passthrough
The car yeah yeah yeah i do leave cables dangling all over my car for passengers but but the one that i'm gonna plug into is the one in the center console and then i just drop my phone in there and i'm done i'm good to go i only have to pull my phone out when like i need to look at uh uh like i need to find a song that's more than 15 down or whatever in the list and carplay won't show it to me because apple thinks that that's safer and wants me to pull out my phone to look at it.
But, you know, that's fine. It makes sense.
I still love my wireless CarPlay adapter.
Yeah.
Yeah. That changed my life. The funny thing is I saw one recently that looks like it's just like, it looks almost like the old keyboard dongles that you'd plug in for a wireless keyboard. It's just the little... You know, it's tiny. Yes. So I might be doing some investigating, like, into newer technology, newer options, because I bought mine in probably three, four years ago.
Well, let's talk about wireless car plate adapters then. Okay. Sorry. No. No, it's a good conversation to have, because I bought one basically sight unseen.
You came on the show. It was before you were on regularly. you came on the show a couple years ago and you know at we asked you hey do you have a cool like last minute completely no notice like do you have a cool stuff found you were like a hundred percent yes and you told us about the car link kit carling kit yeah uh wireless carplay adapter and i bought one and loved it and it's it i don't need it in my new car but my old car is being driven by my son and he still loves that adapter.
I learned something, though, once I got it and started digging in. Not all wireless CarPlay adapters are created equal. The CarLink Kit adapter, and we will link to the one that both Adam and I use. Allows your phone, I'll call it GPS pass-through. This is my term. But the idea is that when you are using an adapter that supports GPS pass-through, your phone doesn't use its GPS receptors.
It uses the car's GPS receptors, which in theory gives you better reception because it's not blocked by anything. And also maintains your phone's battery life because it's not turning on its GPS stuff. Most wireless CarPlay adapters, as I am led to believe. Don't use GPS pass-through. And in fact, the CarLink people go out of their way to say this and make it part of their marketing. But near as I can tell, they are not lying in this marketing. They are correct.
So be aware of what you're choosing. Choose whatever you want, but just do it. Eyes wide open. That's my.
Hmm.
Yeah. Interesting. Okay.
And the one that i i think i just saw and i haven't done the research on it is called the auto cast o-t-t-o-c-a-s-t like mini or something mini cube
Yep but.
I will need to now research it i bet you it probably doesn't because it's only like half the price i think of the car link it's like 50 bucks i don't remember what the car link is going for these days
Yeah i'm looking to see carlink kit rather carlink kit yeah that one is here on amazon for like 55 dollars so yeah yeah.
They've come down
In price they have yeah yep for sure um cool but yeah i i think i'm trying to remember i think i think the auto one was the one john f braun was looking at at one point and we dug pretty deep whichever one it was i wish i could remember the brand off the top of my head But he wound up finding that the that whatever one he was looking at did not support GPS pass through and would instead rely on his phone to do it. So and that obviously can work fine. It just uses a little more batteries.
To me, that would be the thing to consider.
Yeah. Okay.
But yeah, the Carling Kit one works great. I took, um, I took a little bit of, well, I got, I got some of that, uh, uh, Velcro tape, you know, and I put a strip of it inside my car and a strip of it on the Carling Kit adapter and like tucked it underneath in my center console. Uh, so that the adapter isn't just like hanging out, if you will.
Yeah you know that's just right there and that works out great it stayed there through several summers of heat and all the good stuff so but i can take it out because it's velcro you know so it comes out if you want it to uh have you ever updated the firmware on yours adam uh.
I think maybe one time
Okay i don't recommend it they don't recommend it either they tell you basically if it ain't broke don't fix it till it is yeah exactly don't fix it and i did i i logged into it and the big red update button was just too tempting for me i gotta do it and i did it yeah and i regretted it i roll i had to roll back i was like oh this well.
At least you could roll back
Yeah things didn't work like i i something i forget what it was but yeah something was like, nope, like I couldn't play music the right way or something. It was like, oh, I did this to myself. Like definitely a hundred percent. It was working perfectly. Anyway nice all right are we uh now that we've sort of ventured into cool stuff found are we moving on to that yes absolutely porthos john has our first official cool stuff found
¶ PorthosJon-CSF-uBar, a Dock Enhancer
entry with ubar a dock enhancer this app is awesomely useful if you like to customize your menu bar But also, if you like, reference info, because it can add CPU and RAM usage of each app to it. Oh, I like that. He says, my only detraction. In addition, when you have a multi-monitor setup, you can have each screen have its own bar that shows what is running in that space. What? My only detraction from this one is that it is very Windows-like.
But since I don't use the dock to launch apps, I just take all of that off. And it's a nice app window reference for me. And it is part of Setapp if you have a membership. Oh, that's interesting.
I was just looking for it in Setapp.
Is it there?
I'm not seeing it.
Oh, it might have changed. Well, you never know.
It's U-B-A-R.
Yeah. It was part of Setapp when he sent this in, but it's been a little bit.
Not to be confused with Uber.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Foo Bar.
Foo Bar.
That's kind of cool.
Better than Foo Bar.
Right. Well, there's that, which may be a show title. Foo Bar is better. All I'm seeing in Setup is bartender and browser, or browse the web from a menu bar, which is called menu bar X.
All right. So, yeah, this is no longer part of Setup. And this sits in your dock. This is kind of interesting looking at how this all, huh? Huh? Yeah. It is Windows-like. I'll give it that. Like, it definitely adds to that. But, I mean, that's not necessarily a bad thing. It's just, you know, it borrows from that. Yeah, exactly. All right, cool.
Cool. You want to stick with the bar thing? We'll talk about some of my second
¶ Ben-CSF-Sketchybar to customize your menubar (video instructions!)
favorite kinds of bars, menu bars, and that sort of thing. I have other first favorite bars where I'm usually having a craft beer or something. But Ben says, well, looking for other approaches to Dave's CPU issues when remotely and his, your, Dave's, desire to put his CPU clock speed in the menu bar, not just tucked in a menu, I wondered if there was a way to easily create a custom menu bar item. This rabbit hole turned out to be pretty shallow as I quickly discovered Sketchy Bar.
In this video, and I'm sure we'll link to the video in the show notes at macgeekab.com, slash show notes right
Yep uh oh no just macgeekup.com that that's all you need yeah yeah yeah yeah because then it's per episode and all of that good stuff yep.
Oh excellent okay so macgeekup.com uh there will be a link to this video and he says uh that shows you how to include cpu stats in sketchy bars implementation uh they he also further found another developer who created a system status version where cpu frequency is an available variable so i think this will do the trick for you dave amazing
Huh yeah look at that all kinds of things that you can do with this it's uh yeah god.
Kind of like a developer tool or something like that right almost i mean not a developer tool but it's an app it's over on github and it's like it's got a lot of features You can kind of build your own stuff.
Huh? Yeah. So if you've ever been, you know, frustrated with stats or iStat menus or, you know, any of those things, this sketchy bar is your, your customizable answer. Wow. Yes. This bar project aims to create a highly flexible, customizable, fast and powerful status bar replacement for people that like playing with shell scripts. You know, know your audience. right that's cool uh all right well in the menu bar
¶ Andrew-CSF-Looking Glass for Apple Music (or Spotify) to control Apple Music from your Mac's Menu Bar
realm here we have a recommendation for an app called looking glass for apple music or for spotify from andrew and it is for controlling your uh apple music or spotify directly from the menu bar which is pretty darn cool you get a nice little menu that uh that you can you know play and pause and skip tracks and rate and you know like and dislike all those things right from the menu bar so or and and you can search your music library right from there
too yeah i know for free in the mac app store love that do.
You guys use this kind of thing i'm just curious
Now uh because i feel.
Like for music that's the one area where i really now just 100 rely on s lady and i don't it's probably a it's probably more of a factor to having home pods in my life but i would imagine even on my mac i'd probably just use Slady and ask for switching music and tracks and playing playlists and play pausing and I almost 100% use voice for music
Interesting how about you Pete.
I use, yeah, I don't do any interface at all like that. 99.9% of the music, thank you to my daughter. Don't do Apple Music for starters. It's all Spotify because she was doing that. She was the most into music in high school. And now we have the Spotify family plan. So I've never tried any S-Lady or A-Lady interfaces for the most part with music. We do have an Echo with a screen in the living room, which is kind of nice for some of the home automations.
But I use the app on the phone for the Sonos speakers that I have in the house.
Yep.
And I almost never look at it. And if I want to know what something is, obviously it's Shazam.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah. I rarely use voice to control music. And there's two reasons for that. One is that for quite some time, the Echo to Sonos voice integration was super frustrating and inconsistent. And so we got out of the habit of that. I think it's gotten better again.
I should try it then, maybe. Yeah. Because, you know, I have the...
We could certainly get back into that habit. But on my Mac, I don't use... I have S-Lady turned off on my Mac. And so... But I generally play...
When i'm at my desk i i like to listen to music that will allow me to be productive that i can have the music going on sort of in the background and so uh i know if you listen to atp this will sound like a broken record because marco does the same thing but i like to listen to fish shows the band fish with a p while i'm doing work because there's so many like instrumental passages that are intricate and kind of keep enough of my brain occupied without being distracting,
Classical music works for the same reason. A lot of jazz works for the same reason. But I have a playlist that I just add new music to that I get and I just play it down. And when something has been played, I remove it from the playlist. I know I could do a smart playlist to make all that happen. I don't. It's fine. I'm okay with it. And there's reasons. But it's just the way I like to manage music. I like to see, oh, is this part of a show I've listened to?
Should I finish listening to this show before I go on to the next live show? So that's why. But, yeah, so I don't use, so I probably would use something like this. Yes.
Yeah, yeah. And the last fun thing about using voice is serendipitous discovery when the S lady gets things wrong. Which is, that never happens. Frequently, that gets, well, especially with music, because if you're trying to get, it's harder to get like a specific track or sometimes a specific artist or sometimes I'll ask for a genre or something like that. And she'll kind of get that mixed up. So it's like, oh, what, you thought I said, you know, the name of the song.
And I'm like, no, I want you to play, you know, 2000s pop punk or something like that, you know. Right.
Right. For playlists, I have both Spotify and Apple Music. I pay for both, again, for reasons. I find that Spotify's playlists are, in general, much better than Apple Music's playlists.
However, I also find, and I don't know how they've accomplished this over there at Spotify, that Spotify tracks sound, like dynamically flat the same song played on both i can almost always hear the difference between an apple music track and a spotify track spotify compresses down to 320k mp3 and when i take a track and compress it down to 320k mp3 i can't tell the difference between that and the original so it's not a ubiquitous you know slight on mp3s nor am i trying to
say that i have some uncanny ability to hear things but there's something about the way spotify specifically is compressing things that it takes the life out of tracks and i don't know how or why they are accomplishing this but they are experts at it why.
Is the more uh troubling
Yeah it just it's dude you have access to the the uncompressed originals just like apple does so why wouldn't you like and maybe it's a a size thing right a bandwidth thing they've they've found that if they if they compress the dynamic range of it not just compress the the file size but do audible audio compression and compress the dynamic range they can you know squeeze more into a bandwidth i don't know i like i'm making stuff up here well.
They probably figure they have more people listening on an iphone which either cheap headphones or something like that as opposed to nice sonos speakers or you know that sort of
Thing fair you know yeah yeah you're right yeah crappy, crappy headphones or speakers you wouldn't notice this but i do notice it even in the car even with road noise yeah yeah yeah but but i still maintain that i will choose that it's not that bad right I don't mean to thieve anyone's joy here, but it's noticeable, but not to the point where I would turn it off. And their playlists, on average, are better than Apple Music's playlists.
And they both have, which I assume Apple Music has, but I know Spotify has the ability to create an AI station with a few of your songs, which I was kind of surprised at. My daughter uses that all the time. And it's funny. It even has this, and it doesn't sound like a computer voice, but it has a DJ coming in and saying, you know, now we're going to do some more classic rock from 1975. And then plays a song. You're like, oh, okay. I said, does that? She goes, no, that's computer-generated voice.
That's not someone sitting there putting this thing together and recording. That's a person. Okay, that makes sense.
Quick, speak this so that someone can hear it. Yeah, yeah.
Yeah.
Anyway.
Anyway, how about I take us to our next cool stuff found from Bob who wrote
¶ Bob-CSF-Zip-Tie Cable Labels
in. He says, I was listening to the show. Hey, guys, listened to the show 1101 today and wanted to pass along another option for labeling cables, a cable labeler. Say that three times fast. I've been using these ties for a few years now, and they work great. We'll put the link in the show notes. They're right on wire zip tie cable mark. Right on tags, wire zip ties, cable mark tags, nylon power mark. You can write on the tag, and they're a zip tie that goes around the cable, so you can see them.
They're 200 cable zip ties for $7.99 on Amazon. And that looks actually pretty cool, a cool way to do it. The manufacturers insist on not marking what their cables are and what they're capable of because I think I mentioned it on the show we talked about it is when they put the JPI engine monitor in my airplane, the mechanic was telling me it's really nice. They label the little tiny wires. They label them about every foot. So there's little chance of getting them wrong.
But, you know, how hard would that be? Print it on there, guys. Come on. Fish shake.
There are label makers. we've had several people write in about this that will make labels that you can wrap like that are specifically built to wrap around cables. So, okay.
Yeah.
Yeah. Like shrink. And I think you can shrink wrap them even like, Oh yeah.
And that too. Yep.
Um, those cable ties though. I, I just realized I need those for my, for my pinball machine stuff. There you go. You want to talk about lots of wires, folks, electromechanical pinball. actually every pinball machine if you've ever seen underneath one it's like insane only imagine
Oh that's really smart i need these yep for under my desk right oh yeah yeah add to cart like for sure.
There you go boom done
Oh yeah okay, wow right see.
The show gets expensive for us too
Folks yeah for sure yeah Although $7.99.
Isn't going to break your bank this week, I don't think.
I was going to say $8 for $200, I think. You can forego one Starbucks and probably cover the cost of that depending upon what kind of drink you get.
I'm so glad I don't drink Starbucks.
I don't either. I'm pure straight black coffee, but that was another nice thing about moving to the Midwest is you can actually go to a restaurant and get a cup of coffee for under $2.
Oh, interesting. That still exists out there. I like that. It's nice. I don't drink coffee as I often will share.
I mean, I was in San Diego, and I ordered just a large black coffee, and I want to say it was four or five bucks. And it was like, are you kidding me? What kind of gourmet civet coffee are you giving me? And it wasn't.
I'm so glad that we were able to bring in civet coffee. That's the stuff that cats process, right?
Yeah, well, it's an animal called a civet, yes. But yes, it goes through its system, and then they harvest it on the other end and turn that into coffee.
Yeah, here you go.
Without getting too into the details.
I think we all understand this. Take your own picture, folks.
Funny, my show this week has a story about almost that very thing, only it wasn't a cat or a civet.
Huh well with that in mind i have our next cool stuff found ready
¶ Ben-CSF-Access: Passwords Companion
folks and it comes from listener ben and it is called uh well he says uh i find one password most useful in three respects for people who use multiple web browsers one password is a platform agnostic is platform agnostic and is more consistent in delivering logins to all for people who want to store more than just logins One password does it all, whereas Apple passwords misses a lot of categories, and Access fills that gap.
Did we talk about Access in last week's show? Is this a double-fledged upbound? I think we did, yeah. I think either somebody else sent it in or somehow I duplicated it up.
This one's twice as cool, folks.
It is twice as cool. It is a cool app, but as we're sharing it here, it's like, wait, I feel like the three of us have had this conversation. In the event that we have not the app is called uh access and it is it is to to pair with apple passwords um to store everything else and i know we've talked about this it's deja vu.
All over again
Folks i believe.
I actually read that one but before we leave cool stuff
Found yes i.
Have to note
¶ CSF-Kris Black-Sidebar is a Setapp alternative to Ubar
Awesome listener community over in the YouTube chat. Chris Black mentioned, and this is for you, Pete, Setapp has an alternative to U-Bar called Sidebar. And it looks like almost identical, very similar features, very similar UI. So there you go.
Interesting.
And you know, people, if you've got cool stuff found to share, send it to feedback. at macgeekab.com, and we'll share it.
Pete, was that feedback at macgeekab.com?
That was it.
Feedback at macgeekab.com?
Make it so.
I didn't realize that. Yeah, look at that. Sidebar. I just pulled it up here, and it looks very, very similar. It's multiple screens.
It has all kinds of pinning, out of hiding, live previews, window snapping peek into folders fully customizable
Love that well i'm.
Gonna install it will you go to the uh
Yeah link advertisers link in the show notes and and pete is is correct the next thing that we want to do is tell you about our sponsors because well i've said it before and i'll say it again i love how easy our sponsor wix makes it to go from idea to execution Whether
¶ SPONSOR: Wix puts incredible website creation at your fingertips with their AI site builder. It’s fun and it’s drag-and-drop easy. Go to Wix.com to start building your website today. Click this link https://bit.ly/43XQ3JB to start your free trial with Wix
you're building a website for your side hustle, your band, your podcast, your portfolio, or whatever brilliant geeky thing you're currently up to, Wix puts that power right at your fingertips. You can start with one of over 2,000 designer-made templates or go full custom using their drag-and-drop interface. It's incredibly flexible. And they've got this AI builder, which is like the
chat GPT of website design. You answer a few questions and bam, you've got a business-ready site complete with unique visuals and even a marketing campaign. I mean, that's AI magic right there. Plus, Wix has built-in tools for e-commerce, bookings, email, no extra plugins or weird workarounds. Just works. And with nearly 20 years in the game, the folks at Wix know what it takes to help you build and grow online. You ready to create your own website, folks?
Go to Wix.com. That's W-I-X.com to start building your website today. Such a great thing. And our thanks to Wix for sponsoring our show. And cybersecurity isn't sexy, but protection, well, that's another story.
¶ SPONSOR: Webroot. Get 50% off Webroot Total Protection or Webroot Essentials when you go Webroot.com/MGG.
And that's where our sponsor, Webroot Total Protection comes in. It's your digital life insurance, antivirus, identity protection, VPN, and more all in one lightweight, fast, and easy to use package. And you can get 50% off of this Webroot Total Protection or Webroot Essentials when you go to webroot.com slash MGG. I've set up my Webroot account and I'm planning on rolling it out with some of my extended family because it's kind of like having a geeky digital bodyguard, right?
That runs in the background so I don't have to think about it until I need it or they need it. And then we're all really glad it's there. It installs faster, scans quicker, and uses less memory than its competition. And with protection for up to 10 identities and 10 devices, you can cover yourself, your kids, your parents, your in-laws, whatever you like.
Live a better digital life with Webroot. And like I said, get 50% off Webroot Total Protection or Webroot Essentials when you go to webroot.com slash MGG. 50% is the best offer they're running right now, and you have to use our URL to get it. So again, webroot.com slash MGG. Live a better digital life with Webroot. Seriously, don't get caught without it. And our thanks to Webroot for sponsoring this episode. All right. Mark has a question for us.
¶ Mark-Mail Preview isn't showing text
He says in Apple Mail on his Mac, the preview window is not showing any of the text content correctly. But if the message is opened, then it does show the text content correctly. And when he says it's not showing it correctly, what I'm seeing is mostly a blank window or an empty window. It shows the, you know, to, from, subject, and all that at the top.
But where the text would appear is not text, except for occasionally, and sort of spaced out, a little square where the right half of it is black, and the left half has half of a capital A there. And this is a weird thing, and there's like four or five of them. And then when you open the message, it, you know, the message shows all of the stuff. And it looks like some of these might be where some alternative punctuation would have appeared in the original message.
And so any thoughts on on this, Adam?
Yeah, I had a few things to think about. Um, I know that, let me think. I know that there can be caching issues sometimes with mail that might cause this, I think. I think you can actually go like rebuild your indexes. Yes. And I'm trying to remember the instructions for doing that. I think you can do it within the mail app itself. I think it's like right-click on the mailbox. It's been a while. I should probably just open mail and figure it out.
Oh, no, that's true. You're right. You can do a rebuild on a given mailbox in mail. You're right.
Yeah, I forget where the – oh, so you select the mailbox, and then under the mailbox menu at the bottom is rebuild. And I believe that will force a rebuild. So you go and, you know, you find the inbox or the mailbox that you want to rebuild and then select it. And then from the mailbox menu, go to rebuild. I think you can also do it manually by deleting the envelope indexes, which are in the library folder, in the mail folder. And then there's like a V, a different version for each one.
And then I think it's inside mail data.
Yep.
I prefer to just do it inside the app rather than delete it. And obviously, if you're going to delete them, you might want to pack them up first just in case because I'm paranoid about these sorts of things, but it should be relatively safe to rebuild your index. I've done it before and it's not had any issues.
I think those are two different indexes or two different types of rebuilds. I think so. Okay. And I could be wrong. My...
Understanding is that when you do it inside mail what it does is it erases the contents of the mailbox and re-downloads it all from the imap server and then also is rebuilding sort of its search index at the same time the envelope index thing which you're talking about you know going in the finder and removing it it remove it deletes just the search index if you will of mail and then that needs to be rebuilt but it doesn't it doesn't re-download everything from the the server when you oh.
That's an important distinction so you might actually want to do that first one first i would that fixes it
Yeah exactly exactly yeah and and you can certainly do the envelope re-index from the finder just by quit mail first always always quit mail first then deleting it you go find those files just like adam uh shared or um why can't i think of the tool from titanium software the french company that that we love to recommend all the time that lets you do all sorts of maintenance on your mac and this is one of them my gosh like why can't i think of this onyx thank you wow we.
Hit it at the same time yeah onyx
But onyx will let you rebuild your mail index um it just says rebuild yeah mailboxes in mail so yeah and.
I the other one and i think this is far less likely given the description uh that he is um mentioning is make sure that you don't have block all remote content on, but that would typically only impact images and maybe mail formatting, like HTML formatting and stuff like that. Yep. I think you'd still see the preview, but it's worth checking. So go into mail settings, privacy, and make sure you don't have block all remote content checked.
And then the last thing that I could possibly think of is I don't know if he's using any I don't know what they call them anymore, add-ons, plug-ins, third-party things that might be misbehaving. But again, I think to me what it feels most like is rebuilding the envelope index is probably the thing.
This is what I love about doing this show. My brain went in a completely different direction, and I started thinking about fonts. Right? Right. Because we're seeing it's it's showing mail thinks it's showing something. But it's showing it in the wrong font in the preview window and the right font, if you will, when the message is open. So my thought was I had two thoughts.
One is in mail, go to settings, fonts and colors and just make sure that you're seeing things selected and a suggestion change things to a different font or a different size temporarily.
And you know just to kind of reset all of that and if that doesn't do it there is the font book app on every mac and i i don't have any damaged fonts on my mac at the moment so i i couldn't see what that looks like in the interface but i know i've had font books show me damaged fonts before uh so maybe tell it you know go to file and resolve duplicates just to make it scan through everything and if it finds you know a problem hopefully it'll tell you and if somebody knows the right way to
get font book to show damaged fonts feedback at mackiekev.com please and we will share it with mark as well that that was so that was where my brain went just you know based on what the symptoms so well hmm i know it's tricky that's what i like about these things yeah. Cool. Moving on to J.K. Dawson here. Oh, yeah, we've got time for sure.
¶ JKDawson-How to Maintain Tel. # while abroad for iMessage / AppleID?
J.K. Dawson asks, My daughter is moving to Germany for two years. Her cell phone number is tied to her Apple ID and iMessage and such. She will get a German cell plan and German phone number, but I would like to preserve her U.S. Number and have it still work for iMessage as cheaply as possible. My first thought was to move her U.S. cell number to Google Voice or the cheapest Mint plan if Google Voice won't work?
Anyone have any input on these ideas? I have a lot of input on this, given that my daughter did something extremely similar. But I'm curious as to what you came up with, Pete.
Yeah, so I found a couple different options. And it turns out we've had a back and forth a little bit on Discord over this. But the cheapest option that I found is Tello, because moving your number to Google Voice does not work, and I don't remember all the reasons for that.
It does work not for iMessage. I just want, like, you can certainly do that, but you will probably lose iMessage in the process.
Gotcha. Okay. I remember not the details. I just knew that that wasn't what he wanted to do with it. So the Mint's cheapest option is $15 a month to give you some data, minutes, and text. But Tello is $5 a month, T-E-L-L-O, and it gets you 100 minutes of voice calls and unlimited texts. It's at Tello.com. At one point, he says, well, I think I'm going to stay with Mint, and I forget his reasoning why, and I said, just be aware that...
I think he said something about data. And I was like, just be aware, you're not going to get to use your data overseas with Mint. You actually have to buy Mint data, roaming data, to use it overseas. So, and then he wrote back and said, well, it turns out T-Mobile has still got them under their thumb for a little while. So, they're going to stay with T-Mobile until that portion of their contract
ends. But, yeah, to maintain it, I think for a year or less, five bucks a month to maintain your phone number at Tello is simple. And then, you know, turn on Wi-Fi calling so you can still get calls and texts and that sort of thing to your number when you're within range of a Wi-Fi signal. It does not roam. Right. You're not going to get roaming texts and roaming. Oh, you may get roaming texts, but I don't.
You'll get texts and calls as long as you've got a different data connection with Wi-Fi calling. Yeah.
Gotcha. Yeah, there you go. Okay. Yeah.
Yeah. So my daughter. I meant under cellular.
So I'm sorry.
Yes. No, you're totally right.
Yeah.
No, for, I mean, my daughter went through something, like I said, extremely similar, maybe, you know, a couple hundred miles apart in destination, but otherwise the exact same thing. And. She moved her number to Google Voice. I believe it was a one-time $20 charge to import your existing cell number into Google Voice. And that did sever the tie eventually between iMessage and her U.S.
Number. But all she did on all of her devices was changed her outbound iMessage from her phone number to her Apple ID and told people. If you iMessage me, use my Apple ID.
And that uh i mean it there was definitely an adaptation there but it allowed her to keep her number for you know 20 bucks and she put the google voice app on her phone so that when someone texts her she gets a notification in the google voice app when someone calls her uh depending on how she she has her settings her phone can ring generally she has that part turned off but here in the u.s this summer she's actually turned it back on uh while she's been visiting so that people can call a
local number if they want to call her that that can't facetime you know audio her or whatever and it i don't i don't think it was a huge friction point for her okay once she you know once she uh sort of made the decision you know and she can still get text messages you know for the 2fa stuff from her u.s bank or whatever all just goes to her google voice and it shows up right there and also she has that forwarded to her email and it's all it's all pretty fine so and.
Her european number gives her the data access so that yes google voice
Works correct yeah she and her european data plan i think she tells me she pays 30 30 euro for like 150 gigs of data. She, she's had a real problem this summer. Because she's had to buy high data e-SIM plans because she is just so used to using data willy nilly. You know, like at home, if their Wi-Fi is being flaky, they'll just pair their TV to their phone and stream, you know, Apple TV, like without even thinking about it. It's just how it works over there.
Could you not throw her on your Mint family plan for the summer or whatever?
Return well mint is a mint is a one-year commitment once you're i mean you can do a three-month thing yeah oh i mean i could yeah but it's way cheaper for her to just buy buy data yeah yeah yeah okay yeah because she doesn't need the phone number right.
Right right you know i was just thinking of sam it would give her another number that she would not want to
Deal with yeah well she we could port her number into mint but then we'd have to port it back out again no yeah no no no no that way the the i love mint don't get me wrong but the family plan doesn't come with any advantages other than i get everybody's bill it doesn't there's no discounts there's no you know that's a hell.
Of an advantage i love
That yeah my kids love it yeah it's great um but yeah yeah so i and like i said i love mint um but that you know there's no there's no real benefit it would have been a headache to do all that yeah yeah yeah yeah so i mean if she were to move back to the the states then she would port her number to whatever plan she would be worth it yeah yeah yeah yeah so all right so.
Finally competition among the cell carriers and their prices are
Coming out yeah and uh i i think mintmobile.com slash mgg they're that i there's They're not a sponsor of this episode, but the sponsorship is still active and ongoing. So that'll get you, I think, unlimited for 15 bucks a month for your trial, for your three-month trial period. So actually, you know, that may have been cheaper for her now that we think about it. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Headache for sure, but cheaper.
And they're unlimited is truly unlimited anymore. They aren't throttling.
Yeah.
¶ Which budget carrier makes sense to use?
Question on that. So what about speeds with Mint Mobile? Because here's the thing. I've been considering switching to a Mint Mobile-style plan. Unfortunately, I live in a place where the only carrier that has decent coverage is Verizon. Now, Verizon has Visible, which is a cheaper version. It's not as cheap as Mint Mobile. I think it's like $25 a month for their basic plan. But with their basic plan, most of the coverage is 4G LTE.
If you want 5G coverage, you have to go to the plus plan, which is $35 a month. And then you multiply times, I need four phones for my family, and I lose my, you know, them covering my HBO Max every month. And you start doing the math, and it's like, well, I'm right back where I was.
Yes.
So I don't know if Mint Mobile's the same. Like, do they...
You get 5g
Speeds you get 5g is included with mint mobile i assume not.
Ultra wideband though
No it's not ultra wideband that's correct um it the 5g thing is because t-mobile has the you know t-mobile is the the parent of mint mobile and has always been they've always been an mvno even when they weren't didn't have an ownership relationship but um, t-mobile has the largest 5g rollout in the u.s and so that's why they do this but but yeah i i mean i get when i'm in a city it you know rural here speeds are what you would expect you know somewhere between
30 and 100 you know megabits per second but when i'm in a city where there's like serious towers and coverage i i'll get you know 200 300 i've seen it cranky so yeah.
I'm bringing it up because visible's even more evil because they actually have 5g in in my town yeah but if i pay for their lowest plan they will only deliver me 4g
Lte right yeah of course and you know what in your town it's possible that that's a difference without a distinction or a distinction without a difference which one is it no i definitely.
Have 5g validated speeds on my okay regular verizon plan so i and we and then in in sioux falls it's 5g ultra wideband so
Okay, yeah all right.
Yeah there you go and so again their basic plan 4g lte i think they might and it's just blanket like even in sioux falls where they have 5g ultra wideband you you're only if you're not paying for the higher plan yeah right getting the speed right so that's how they're right i'm sure that's how they're controlling cost yeah of course which is fine but yeah yeah cool i just had to ask for that clarification because i i was honestly i was
like looking at my cell phone bill going man i'd like to pay less but when you start doing the back of the napkin math on everything that you kind of lose it's like it it's almost a wash in price i might say five bucks a month overall maybe 10 bucks a month well
I mean the other thing you mentioned adam was uh you know hbo and they're just to my knowledge i just tried to look and i it said no there's no bundled streaming at all of any
Kind well yeah i wouldn't expect i wouldn't expect it to say it's a budget plan which if you don't need that stuff that's probably a better way to better way to go But, you know, I start factoring in, well, that's $10 a month there on top of the four phones, and I've got to get the plus plan to maintain that and still have my, you know, all that sort of thing. And then I don't even know if they throttle.
I mean, I know Mint Mobile doesn't, but very good odds Verizon probably does because they're disagregious.
Just for clarity, Mint reserves the right to throttle unlimited plans when you use more than 35 gigs in any given month. I wanted to make that correction because, Pete, you said it wasn't throttled. It usually isn't. Well, no, they don't claim that they don't.
Oh, yeah, you're right. You're right. They claim they have the right to do it.
Correct.
But they usually don't. But at some point, a few months back, they came out and said, you know, unlimited. It's truly unlimited. Yes.
Yes, it is. Yeah.
So they don't plan to. I do need to just go into Verizon and renegotiate my plan because here's the other thing, and I think this is probably a good tip. But, you know, we get locked into these plans and we think grandfathering is a great thing. But here's the thing. I made my deal...
¶ Tips for renegotiating your mobile phone plan
When we moved here three and a half years ago. And the deals are always changing, but you don't get to change it unless you go in and tell them you want to change it. So I might be able to get on a better, more affordable plan now than I could have got three and a half years ago. But I just need to go in or either call them or ask them or whatever. It's just like, am I really getting the best deal?
I think I have like, because I'm on a higher tier plan. So I think I have like full international coverage. It's like, I don't need that. Is there plan where i can scrape that off and maybe save five ten bucks a
Month yeah it makes a difference over time yeah yeah especially if you go and you know you come in armed with with data and say look i like what i have here i like the convenience of it if i were to do all this piecemeal i could save you know seven dollars and 48 cents a month so can you save me seven dollars and 48 cents a month and maintain my convenience you know that kind of thing works when when you've got that leverage It makes a difference.
And it's not just your mobile phone plan. I was able to do that with my Fidium, my fiber plan here. What normally would be a $70 a month plan, I am now paying $50 a month for after a renewal. Well, because I told them, I'm going to go leave and go to your competition. And they said, please don't. Like, great, you can make this easy for me. All you have to do is match their price. And they actually beat it by five bucks a month.
Oh, I need to do that because we just renegotiated ours. It was going to 80. We got it down to 50, but took the cut in the data flow to 300 megs, which I'm like, yeah, I don't use much more than that anyway.
No, I maintained my one gig.
Your one gig.
Yeah.
The only thing that'll sting about that conversation is going to be when they tell me, oh, we're going to each phone gets a $15 change convenience fee. It's like, how's that convenient?
Who's that convenient for? It's their convenience, Adam. That's right.
Always liked it, yeah.
Yep.
Got to find some fee. Everyone's got their hand in your pocket. Some way, somehow. It's how the world works.
Yeah, it is. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
It's one time, though. It's only one time.
Yeah, right. We do have, I know we're running short on time, but we have kind of a tip, a PSA from Grumpy Mike from Discord.
¶ Grumpy Mike-1101-WiFi can be enabled but not associated
You want to take that one, Adam?
Absolutely. He says, the past couple of episodes have covered the macOS oddity where the hostname continually gets incremented. Tom recently pointed to sleep as a contributing factor. While I have found this to also be the case, it was not the only factor. I had this problem on my Mac many years ago. However, at the time, I was connected to my network by both wired Ethernet and Wi-Fi.
I did this because in order to get the continual goodness, continuity, oh, continuity, oh, the feature in back west. I did this because in order to get continuity goodness, Wi-Fi is needed. Later, I found out that while Wi-Fi needs to be enabled, you do not need to be connected to the network via Wi-Fi if you are connected to the network via other means. Once I set the computer to not connect via Wi-Fi, my host name incrementing issues vanished. And I still had access to the continuity features.
I think having dual connections resulted in a race condition where the system was confused and believed the host name to be in use as the system was waking and reconnecting to the network.
That's good advice. I do that here in the studio and down in the office Cause I, I want my, uh, yeah, I want the continuity goodness and I am connected via ethernet, so I don't need two connections going to my Mac. So yeah, you can, to do it, you uncheck the, you go into the wifi menu and, and disassociate from your network.
And then you can even go in just by checking the, you know, clicking, not checking, clicking the, the sort of lit wifi icon by your network name that will disassociate you from it, but still leave Wi-Fi turned on and that's all you need. But also go into Wi-Fi settings and tell it not to auto-join that network, otherwise you're going to wind up doing that a lot, at least in my experience. I see you cogitating, yeah.
Well, I'm wondering, could this be resolved another way? Could this be resolved by making sure you set the service order on your networks?
Not for me.
Okay.
I mean, if you are going to connect to two different networks, you absolutely want to set the service order to prioritize, in my case, the Ethernet network above the Wi-Fi network so that it's using that for connection to the Internet. That's what set service order does, right? It tells you, try this one first.
First, exactly. That's why I was wondering, like if the issue is it's connecting to Wi-Fi before it connects to Ethernet, could that resolve this problem? And just so people know, this is a feature you can go into your system settings network and then down at the bottom, if you have multiple networks that you're connecting to, there is a little dropdown and you can choose set service order and that will let you drag around the network order or the connection order, I don't know, network order.
You could basically put your Ethernet before Wi-Fi and in theory, it's my understanding, it should try to connect to Ethernet first and then if there's no Ethernet available, it'll fall back to Wi-Fi. Right? That's how I thought it worked, but maybe I misunderstand the future.
I think there's a very slight, I would make a very slight change to that. I don't think it prioritizes which one it tries to connect to on boot or wake first. I think that prioritizes which one, if both are connected, regardless of what order they connected in, if both are connected, which one is going to be used? You know, if I've got both connected and I want to connect to the Internet, which one is it going to use? And if you put Ethernet at the top, it would use Ethernet, you know,
and so on and so forth. So I, I, I don't, but, but I, but that's, you know, I've done zero research on this. It's just my, my experience, but it, it's, it's a, I remember doing this on, on Linux, boxes where you, because it's, you know, Mac is a Unix box at where you can, from the command line, you can set a priority order, but that, that priority order was for which one is the default gateway to the outside world.
I believe that's all that's changing here, but I only believe that because I choose to, so I could be wrong.
And I can't believe I haven't brought this up before, but I, you know, I saw this, this issue years ago by... Basically taking control of how my IP addresses get assigned. So instead of just using pure DHCP, I would use either DHCP with reservations and set that up on my router so that specific Macs based on Mac address. And actually, really, I would set the DHCP name, which you can do if you're in DHCP mode in the settings.
So I'd give each machine a unique name, And then I'd go into my router and say, okay, this machine gets this IP address, this machine gets this IP address. And then those were just not available for a new machine that would come on the network. Or also when my thing's waking, it's always going to get assigned the same IP. So you're not running into those conflicts where it's like two things, same IP address. And oh, now then we've got a name conflict sort of thing.
Um the one thing i will say is i got caught with this when i did my upgrade because i had my old mac and it i synced everything to my new mac and lo and behold they both had the same ip address and guess what happened to my network name on what i met on my new mac it was dash two yeah yeah Because it's like, I already have that name, and you can't have it.
Yeah, you can't have it.
Even though it's the same IP address.
Yeah, exactly.
But, you know, so that's the one caveat. You can't have two. But, I mean, if you're mapping by MAC address, or even better yet, you can just use manual, you know, IP address assignment too, I think, right?
Without a reservation, you mean?
Correct, yes.
Yeah, I used to do that. And then I, and then we had a, I had it with one of my machines here that was a headless machine that I was using as a FileMaker server years ago. And our power went out for days and people in the office, you know, the remote offices needed access to that FileMaker server. So I was like, well, you know what? I just bring it over to my dad's house and plug it into his network and we're good to go.
Then this is a headless machine mind you well because i chose to use a fixed manually assigned ip address i then had to log into this machine with its fixed manually assigned ip address and tell it nope maybe just use dhcp from now on and then it was fine on his network uh but it did not like it it was fine being on his network with a manually assigned ip address it just nothing would route to it so yeah yeah yeah yeah so ever since then it was like
yeah no more manually no more manually assigned addresses i i might have one with some weird iot device that was like being flaky with dhcp or something but in general like no i and that way if a machine needs to move it's just fine there's no i don't need to walk you through changing all of that stuff. It's better now because it's per network and it's not, you know, you get, you get a little more granular with the settings than you used to whatever
10 years ago when I had that problem. But yeah, that problem sucked.
That was not a fun. Although now too, now I'm just thinking too, with IPv6, I don't even know if that's, is that even a DHCP with reservations? I don't even know if that's an option with IPv6.
Yes. When I was running, I can't run, well, I mean, I can run IPv6 on my network if I want. But my provider, Fidium, does not natively support IPv6 yet, I'll say, with a question mark. But Xfinity does, and they were my prior provider. And so I was running full IPv6 up and down here. And you can absolutely set reservations with, like, it's DHCPv6. I don't understand. I'm getting to a point where I'm telling you more than I know, to quote John Martellaro.
But uh it like that definitely worked and and i was sort of able to map a dhcpv6 reservation to a number that was the same as my ipv4 reservations so i kind of knew what they were it was like oh yeah i know that the dot 15 is colon 15 here colon 0 15 here they're the same thing okay i know what that is so yeah cool i'll.
Have to look into that yeah
Yeah all right, Well, I think we've exhausted our time now with all that extra fun stuff.
¶ MGG 1103 Outtro
Well, we're at an hour 23, so almost.
I think we should do it again next week tomorrow.
Yeah, that's right. Next week's show for us is being recorded tomorrow due to some travel and scheduling things. But for you, for most of you, it'll be out next week. As usual, on schedule, all of those fun things. Thanks so much for hanging out with us, everybody. Make sure to go to macgeekup.com slash giveaway and enter our giveaway for a copy of default folder. Thanks to Cashfly for providing the bandwidth to get the show from us to you.
If you need more of Adam between now and the next time we release an episode. In fact, not if you need. You will love to have more of Adam. When you listen to the debut film podcast, you can listen to Pete's.
So there I was for aviation enthusiasts and some great stories really some great stories always great stories and I have I have two shows I do Gig Gab for musicians and Business Brain for entrepreneurs check them all out if you if you would like, subscribe to this show make sure you do that and and leave us a review at macgeekgab.com slash review it's been a little while since we've had some reviews to read and five.
Stars count them five
Stars one two three four five just like the number of things we learned, i love it there it is i learned some fun things today this is good yeah, did you learn any important lessons that maybe you could summarize into three words and share Adam um yeah don't get caught, later.