Is it appleOS 26? Or aquaOS 26? - podcast episode cover

Is it appleOS 26? Or aquaOS 26?

Jun 23, 20251 hr 20 minEp. 1095
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Episode description

Ready to upgrade or migrate your Mac? You’ll learn the smartest way to do it from Adam’s shiny new M4 MacBook Pro to migration tips that help you avoid the dreaded cruft. Whether you’re going Mac-to-Mac over Thunderbolt or restoring from Time Machine, we’ve got you covered. Don’t forget those “On My Mac” Mail folders, and hey—CleanMyMac’s SpaceLens is back. If you’re rocking the MacBook Air vs. the Pro, brightness matters (hint: 500 nits vs. 1600 nits!), and we break it down so you don’t get burned.

This week’s quick tips hit hard: from iPhone Mirroring on your Mac to binder clips as minimalist wallets (yes, really). We’ve got AirTags, Apple Music hacks, and a live activity trick to boost your focus. Need image compression or automation tools? Retrobatch and Lingon Pro 10 make the list. As always, Don’t Get Caught—like we did when our episodes wouldn’t even play on Apple Podcasts in some cases. From Flipper Zero hotel tricks to your iPhone’s audio quirks in the car, it’s all here.

Transcript

for Monday, , 2025

Dave Hamilton

It's time for Mac Geek Cab, and I'll bring us our quick tip of the week.

n-DLH-QT-Setup iPhone Mirroring and get all Notifications on your Mac

I noticed, actually, I say I noticed, my son showed me that if you set up iPhone mirroring on your Mac, and this is done simply by going into applications and launching the app called iPhone mirroring, continuing through the steps, one of the things it asks you for is if you want to allow notifications from iPhone. Even when you're not mirroring your iPhone, you still get to see notifications from everything on your phone. I have found this such a focus helper.

I know notifications usually bad focus. But in this case, when my phone is sitting on my desk, in the past, I'd hear it buzz and I would stop what I was doing, pick up my phone, look at it, only to see that it was some notification I didn't care about. Now they show up in Notification Center. I can glance, realize I don't care about it and move on. More tips like this. Plus, your questions answered today on MacGeekGab 1095 for Monday, June 23rd, International Women in Engineering Day 2025.

Greetings, folks, and welcome to MacGeekUp, the show where you send in or we share. Well, we share them either way. Quick tips like that, cool stuff found that you or we have found, and questions that you or we have, sometimes even with answers or at least a path through the troubleshooting process to try. Our sponsors this week include Surfshark.com slash MGG or code MGG at checkout to get four extra months. Openphone.com slash MGG where you get 20% off your first six months.

CalderaLab.com slash MGG where code MGG gets you 20% off your first order. IDOU.com slash MGG where you get 15% off really cool courses. For, uh, for you and, uh, and then OWC's Envoy Ultra. They're super fast. Thunderbolt five SSD. We'll talk about each and every one of those in a little bit for now here awake. I swear in Durham, New Hampshire, I'm Dave Hamilton.

Adam Christianson

And here, maybe not quite awake, but we'll get there in South Dakota. I'm Adam Christensen.

Pilot Pete

And here also in New Hampshire, I think I'm awake. This can't be a dream. Or can it, it's pilot Pete could be with you gents. I am 1095.

Dave Hamilton

What is that?

Pilot Pete

I'm at my residence. Oh, yes.

Dave Hamilton

Officer's residence is 1095. Officer's residence. Yeah, I think we're all 1095 today. Yes. That's right.

Pilot Pete

Yeah. That's a good thing. So beautiful first day of summer, a bit breezy, but good to be here with you guys. It was slightly in doubt at 2.30 this morning as to whether I'd be here.

Dave Hamilton

It was in doubt 10 minutes before the moment that we are in at this moment with... Lots of things. We might as well address this right out of the gate, Adam. I overslept. You overslept? I wasn't going to address that. But sure.

Adam Christianson

Juneteenth was yesterday. I hate the Thursday haul when you have a day off on Thursday, but then you're back at work on Friday. It's not always the best. So Juneteenth does that to us, And then I have the same thing with Thanksgiving. I don't necessarily get Friday off if I don't take it off.

Dave Hamilton

Right.

Adam Christianson

Regardless, yeah, there was that. And then, of course, I got a new, like I said, I was probably going to, even though I said I wouldn't, I did upgrade my Mac to a new M4 MacBook Pro. Oh, you got the Pro!

Dave Hamilton

We even talked about how the Air would obviously be the right thing.

Adam Christianson

Right. So here's what happened. And unfortunately, I then saw a Linus Tech Tips video where they had switched to Mac. They did that whole, you know, switch to Mac for 30-day challenge. But this was a follow-up video because they both had said they hated macOS so badly that they were going to immediately, on day 31, switch back to their Windows PCs.

They didn't 60 days later they were still using still using max and linus had a macbook air and uh the other guy for who was uh you know some one of the more designer guys had the macbook pro and he brought up the liquid retina display and the brightness and he's like you know the macbook air goes to 500 nits max brightness this one goes to 1600 oh

Dave Hamilton

Is that right is it that much more.

Adam Christianson

Yeah and plus it's got promotion and so i had i literally had bought the macbook air that i wanted and it was right around 1900 bucks and then i priced this with this display and it was 200 bucks more and i went for 200 bucks more getting the pro oh yeah yeah exact same config you know one terabyte 24 gigs of ram in it and uh the only difference was 15 inch macbook air versus 14 inch macbook pro ah

Dave Hamilton

Right okay okay yeah and.

Adam Christianson

But but the pro is also a higher resolution display right

Dave Hamilton

And i yeah okay for my for my money i would actually go with the slightly smaller screen anyway just because it's more portable so yeah.

Adam Christianson

Nice so anyway but then of course going from intel the other so the other elf in the room this morning going from intel to apple silicon oh

Dave Hamilton

My gosh that's right.

Adam Christianson

All the software especially like drivers so like my audio drivers weren't apple silicon like and then too the other thing is it asks for freaking permissions for everything, like everything I plugged in. Everything. Like I plugged into my, you know, my interface. And then, of course, I was in clamshell mode when I plugged in the interface. And so I didn't see the dialog pop up and it's not connecting. My displays aren't coming on.

Yeah, it was fun. It was a fun, fun, panicked morning because I was already late.

Dave Hamilton

I was going to say it. I woke you up. I woke you up with a phone call. That's right. Well, that's fun.

Adam Christianson

So I got caught this morning. This is don't don't get caught. Make sure when you're upgrading, especially from Intel, you've like double checked everything. Yeah.

Dave Hamilton

Well, I mean, it's it's the it's the argument for doing a dry run, you know, before you're in like the. the mode of needing to do whatever it is you need to do with your computer, right? Like, you know, it's, it's, I always do dry runs before I travel. So, you know.

Adam Christianson

And of course this hasn't been wiped yet. So I went and grabbed this. So like my emergency plan was all right. If I can't get this going, I'm just throwing this.

Dave Hamilton

Go back to the Intel. Oh, that's smart. Yeah. So let's, let's go, like, let's talk about this because I think we even have a question later in the show uh about it yeah gary gary had asked us you know what's the best mac to mac migration tool um because he he says uh he he had failing bluetooth and wi-fi on his 2019 16 inch macbook pro so intel to a new 15 inch m4 macbook air so you know similar yep uh and he says he wants to go for a clean install instead of bringing things

over uh but i i kind of want to just talk about it in in general so if we have tips for him about doing a clean install let's do that too but also like i i want to first i want to hear about your process of of getting to this to the you know to this computer yeah.

Adam Christianson

So i have been doing um over the network uh time machine backups to my um Synology okay I think I brought that up because I had gone like a year we we talked about this in a previous episode you can go listen to it I don't remember the episode number but um I had a problem because uh I was having issues with my external drives and my interface and it was too annoying and I just like one day got mad and I ripped out everything

and I still had my back blaze backup but I didn't have really any of my other backups so I wasn't doing carbon copy cloner I wasn't doing time machine. So I had to reset up the network one, but I didn't know how that was going to go. Sure. Like restoring, because my preference is I usually just restore, I migrate from time machine backup. So I grabbed both drives when the machine came in, I plugged them in, I redid both backups.

So I did a carbon copy cloner backup, a full backup, and let it do a full time machine backup. And that took like overnight. It was like a whole day to like catch up because I was so far behind. And then I just use my aggregation assistant with Time Machine with the USB drive plugged in.

Dave Hamilton

Okay, so a direct-attached, separate-drive time machine was the source. You didn't use your old Mac as the source. You used the backup, the very up-to-date backup of it. Yeah, okay.

Adam Christianson

Yeah, and I've done that the last few times, and it's always gone smoothly, and I've never had issues. I've had issues in the past with trying to get the two Macs connected. You know, I know you should just be able to throw a Thunderbolt cable on there, and it should just work.

Dave Hamilton

It should. My experience with that is I am always, I have always been better off starting the backup over Wi-Fi for whatever reason. That connection seems to be much simpler. But then once that started, I plug a Thunderbolt cable in and you can see on the screen the logo changes and it goes to Thunderbolt. And it's like, OK, great. So I share that.

Adam Christianson

I would agree with you.

Dave Hamilton

Yeah.

Adam Christianson

I didn't know you could do that i mean the handshake is always the problem i can never get it to freaking see the dang thing

Dave Hamilton

And start yeah right right so yeah that let the wi-fi be the handshake and then switch to thunderbolt i think would be the uh the unintentional tip here yep yeah.

Adam Christianson

But i always just do a straight across like i i haven't done a i haven't done a you know clean install in i probably it's gotta be at least five six years like i stopped doing that a long time ago

Dave Hamilton

Yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah um yeah i keep saying i need to do a clean install adam um but i anytime i get a new computer like it's the wrong time to carve out a day to do a clean install so.

Pilot Pete

Because you need that stuff on there

Dave Hamilton

Well it's i need my time i need it working right away yeah like when i need you need your stuff i need my stuff right away like the this computer in the studio you know and my and my laptop the last two computers i updated were both done in the same week because of the whole lightning strike that we had a couple years ago here that was that blew things up over the air like it wasn't even over wires but anyway, so I didn't have time it wasn't like I didn't get to plan for it but we never

get to really plan for this it's just like you know you were like maybe I should I don't know and then whatever Saturday morning you texted us you're like uh oh.

Adam Christianson

Well I got permission is what it came down to because I was thinking about it you know this thing's this old and I think it's just time

Dave Hamilton

Yeah, I don't disagree with you. It was, you know, it certainly, it was time. But that doesn't mean that it's the right time.

Adam Christianson

And I get to send this one to my daughter and upgrade because she has my old 15-inch MacBook Pro. I don't remember. I think that was a 2015 or something like that.

Dave Hamilton

Okay. Yeah, yeah. Huh. Yeah, yeah. That's good. That's good. Well, let's address Gary's question about what's the best way to do a clean install. And, you know, I think clean install means something different to each person. It can, you know, there's the hardcore clean install where you start with an operating system and don't even sync documents over.

Right. right until you need them i mean like like that that would be one version of a clean install and certainly people that maybe you know have recently retired and gotten a new computer or whatever they don't need all the work documents they have like there's there's worlds where we've seen, examples of that but in general the first question to ask or to answer for yourself is what do you want to preserve and and you know if it's documents is one of the things on that list.

Then the question is, well, where are your documents? If they're all stored in documents on iCloud Drive, then all you got to do is sign into iCloud and everything's there. Or if it's Dropbox or Synology Drive or, you know, box.com or, you know, whatever syncing service you're using, same, sign in, let it happen.

Otherwise, you've got to move everything over. But even then, you know what happens to your mail and do you have you know it but mail could be the same way mail could be imap right and so you just say great i'm gonna just sync it let it sync from the server and everything's good and then three to six months down the road you're like where's that old email oh i forgot i put that in an on my mac folder right so i i think you,

My general advice is take a snapshot of your old computer, no matter what, whether you're doing it the way you did it, Adam, or you're doing it truly, you know, clean install, take a snapshot and put it on ice. You know, don't be if you can avoid ever needing to erase it. That's great. The way I do that is I put a snapshot on my Synology disk station, and then they just live in what I call cold storage, but it's really not cold storage. It's right there. So, hey, Pete.

Pilot Pete

Yeah, so pick me.

Dave Hamilton

Go.

Pilot Pete

What is the simplest way to take a snapshot, and how big is a snapshot of your… Yeah,

Dave Hamilton

I use Disk Utility, and the reason that I use Disk Utility to save a drive image is because I am reasonably certain that disk images made by today's macOS will be readable by tomorrow's macOS. So I don't try and get cute with how I'm saving those disk images. If i was going to do it to a physical drive i would use probably use carbon copy cloner because there there is no custom format there but.

Adam Christianson

Yeah that's exactly what i do i do the same thing as dave but rather than doing a snapshot to a synology although i might adopt that now that he's saying that sounds like a great way to go right um but uh yeah i i just i do my last carbon copy cloner backup to my, you know, from my old machine. So that one that I did when I was prepping to do my migration, and I will just leave that off to the side for three to six months till I know

I don't need anything that's on there anymore. And then I'll put it back into service if I want. Right now I have really old USB just spinning drives. I think they're USB 3 drives. i'll probably just get new new backups for carbon copy cloner and time machine as ssds yeah you know yeah makes sense

Pilot Pete

Wow so i just a heads up here right so i i've got a lot of cruft on my machine right now i know i had to clean clean off usually i have about 400 gigs free on a one terabyte drive i'm down to it like 208 and change i have never noticed this before i open disk utility and under Harrier volumes Harrier's the name of my drive it has a Harrier snapshot which is 994 gigs um So, yeah. Yeah. Wow. Okay.

Dave Hamilton

It's, yeah, it can be, yeah. Yeah. To answer your question, it's as big as your, your documents are.

Pilot Pete

As big as your drive. Yeah. It doesn't zip anything down, but, uh, interesting.

Dave Hamilton

The thing to think about is your mail. That's an easy one to overlook. Um, and then, you know, the, the things that you have intentionally chosen to put in, I'll call them atypical places, you know, the, oh, I stored this stuff. I'm an external driver. I stored this stuff over here. You're going to probably remember those, but like mail, you didn't do anything to set it up. It just magically put that there. When you said on my Mac, it just put that there.

You didn't ever choose where it was. So that stuff that happens kind of friction free, that's the easy stuff to completely forget about. And that's why you save that archive for three, six, 12, 18, 24 months. You know, just I've, I've had those save my bacon. Not often. I'm usually pretty good.

And, and I usually realize pretty quickly that I don't have something that I need, but it, it has happened over the, you know, the decade or two that I've been doing this, that it's like, Oh, wait a minute, you know?

Adam Christianson

So on the on the on the mail thing i'll just comment um i mean i use imap for everything and um i still if i'm doing a clean install will move my mail folder over from my my library folder on my on my backup just because i don't want to wait for like everything to sync and plus it solves that on my mac issue as well yeah

Dave Hamilton

That's a good yeah i i guess i you know as we're going through this and and there's you know we're just listing the asterisks that we can think about either in the moment or you know as we did our our you know few minutes of prep for this this particular segment, I keep being reminded, but you know, if you just use Migration Assistant, all of this is taken care of for you.

Adam Christianson

Well, and the one caveat quick on the mail thing, if you're migrating it manually, that really only works, I think, if you are on the same version on your old operating system on your old machine. because Apple mail the thing versions every time. You'll see like V9, V10, V8, depending upon what operating system you're running on your previous machine. So if you're upgrading from a machine where you haven't been able to migrate your OS, it gets a little bit trickier.

Like if you're locked out of the latest version, right?

Dave Hamilton

Yeah, but as long as you're going from older to newer, I've had that work.

Adam Christianson

I think it upgrades the database files. I think it has a system to be able to update it. And I think you'll see that happen. I just don't remember the one thing, if it does that, I don't remember if it leaves the old version there and then creates a new version or it will just move it and then clean up after itself.

Dave Hamilton

I'm pretty sure all my experience has not left two versions. Yes.

Adam Christianson

That's good too.

Dave Hamilton

Yeah. Yeah. Cause otherwise that could be a huge amount of storage being used. So, yep. Yep. Fun stuff. And then messages too. If you've got a bunch of messages that you're not syncing with iCloud and you want to preserve those. I know we were talking about that in a pre in last week's episode. Again, there's just this list of asterisks and it turns out Apple has accommodated for all of the ones that have come up so far, not just for any one of us individually, but for all of us.

And so, yeah, go ahead.

Adam Christianson

So to add there, so I've, again, I've started to take the opposite approach, which is, again, do the migration assistant thing, let it do everything, and then use the other tools that are available to me to clean up what I don't want there. Most specifically CleanMyMac. And I literally was doing that yesterday. I fired up CleanMyMac, I started running through the large file thing, I started running through applications, like, what applications are on here?

Because it'll tell you, here's a bunch of unused applications, and I found a bunch of old garbage. And then I use its uninstall tool, because I know that's going to go out and get 90 percent of like the extra stuff that's on there you know so i just start cleaning up that way and it to me it's a similar enough effect it's not going to be 100 as clean as doing a full clean install but a lot less hassle yeah you know yeah

Dave Hamilton

Yeah yeah and and CleanMyMac gets Space Lens back now. So, right, you know, so... All right. This is good. I like it. We have other stuff to do. We have quick tips. We might have some cool stuff found. We definitely have more of your questions. And the next thing I want to do is tell you about our first group of sponsors. Because, you know, these days our computers are portals to everything. Banking, email, streaming, research, even remote work, right?

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Go to Surfshark.com slash MGG for four extra months of Surfshark. That's code MGG at Surfshark.com. URL and code can, of course, always be found in the show notes at MacGeekGab.com. And our thanks to Surfshark for sponsoring this episode. And look, you know how picky we are about our gear, especially storage, right? Enter the OWC Envoy Ultra, the first and fastest Thunderbolt 5 portable SSD on the planet. This thing's not just fast. It's over 6,000 megabytes per second fast.

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P2-QT-...Why?

Pilot Pete

We shall i think so um i think i have the first one i was changing the battery in my wife's air tag last week when i noticed something odd or something I had not previously noticed it's magnetic I had no idea and I thought well it's how magnetic is it yeah because the battery I had the new battery and it stuck to it and I'm here's the thing. You aren't going to stick it on something large and stable like your refrigerator because you're going to know where that is.

You don't need an air take on it, right? So, but what I did think is like, oh, okay, I don't have to tape it somewhere in my vehicle. I can reach up under the dash and set it on top of a metal piece and it will stay there out of sight, that sort of thing. Will it hang on something upside down?

Not once you go over a bump it's not that strong of a magnet uh and my understanding is it's for the speaker that's in it that's why the magnet is there oh yeah and so it's not designed to be a magnet you know a rare earth super strong magnet hold but it

Dave Hamilton

Is unintentionally magnetic because it has a driver in it.

Pilot Pete

Oh this

Dave Hamilton

Makes sense yeah i found a reddit article that says why are air tags magnetic And the answer is they're slightly magnetic, but it's not strong enough to be useful. There's more to it than that, but that's the stuff.

Pilot Pete

Yeah. So it's useful in the sense of if you set it on top of something metal, it should stay there in your car, I believe. Now, I don't think it'll stay underneath. You know, it would fall down when you hit a bump, but it'll keep it in relatively that area there. So you aren't going to have to tape it and deal with tape later and that sort of thing.

Adam Christianson

I think it's still going to vibrate across whatever vertical surface as you're driving and it's bumping, my guess is it's not going to fall down.

Pilot Pete

Right.

Adam Christianson

It'll probably slide left to right or whatever, like if you have it on a metal rail or something like that.

Pilot Pete

Yeah. I have it on one of the metal frame pieces that's under the dash holding the dash in place.

Adam Christianson

Right, yeah.

Pilot Pete

And it seemed like, okay, now I've got my own version of LoJack.

Dave Hamilton

Having an AirTag in your car is a great idea. Don't rely on the magnet to keep it there. Yeah.

Pilot Pete

Right. Especially on the outside of the vehicle.

Dave Hamilton

Never.

Adam Christianson

Yeah. Oh, no, no, no. I'd be calling him. Gone in 60 seconds is what they say, right?

Pilot Pete

Yeah, exactly.

Adam Christianson

Along with your car.

Pilot Pete

And as Matthew says, don't put it near your cassette tapes box. Kids, look it up. It's probably not strong enough to do anything.

Dave Hamilton

But I wonder if it's strong enough to wipe the mag stripe on a credit card.

Pilot Pete

Interesting.

Adam Christianson

Well, people put them in their wallets all the time. There's tons of wallet air tag things. So you would think you would hear about that being a problem already.

Dave Hamilton

We have MagSafe wallets that wipe my credit cards all the time.

Pilot Pete

Is that right?

Dave Hamilton

Oh, sure. Oh, absolutely. Yeah. I think you've seen me when I travel.

Pilot Pete

Maybe that's why my American Express quit working in the fuel ticket, or in the fuel for the airplane.

Dave Hamilton

Correct.

Pilot Pete

Yep.

Dave Hamilton

Okay. Yeah, because we use the chip so much that, you know, it's hard to pinpoint when the mag stripe died. But the ones that never make it to my MagSafe wallet, they never die. And the ones that make it there often die.

Pilot Pete

Great point. Okay.

Adam Christianson

Did I ever give my quick tip money clip?

QT-Use a binder clip as your wallet

Dave Hamilton

Go ahead.

Pilot Pete

Oh yeah. Yeah. You have actually,

Adam Christianson

I think I've given this tip. Yeah. I've used this for years and it doesn't demagnetize anything. I have a giant binder clip that I've been using for years as my, you know, just an office binder clip, a silver one that I've been using as my wallet. So I just stack my cards and then wrap cash around it and clip it. And it doesn't add bulk. You don't have the George Costanza problem and you don't have the MagSafe problem either.

Pilot Pete

Yeah. They're expensive though. I bet they're 12 or 13 cents a piece at Staples.

Dave Hamilton

Lifetime supply.

Adam Christianson

Well, I did find out. I must not be the first person to figure this out because I was then wondering, I'm like, I wonder if anybody makes like a high-end version. I think I did find somebody who's like a, you know, pure like silver, you know, silver one or a gold one. Same concept though.

Dave Hamilton

Yeah, right. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Adam Christianson

Mine looks silver because I just, I didn't get the black, you know, kind. I just got the all silver kind.

Dave Hamilton

Oh, yeah, that's nice. Yeah, yeah. I'm looking Speedle sells. Yes. In fact, for sure. I just found something. I'll put it in the show notes, but you got to know we're not recommending that you spend this kind of money on this thing. So for a hundred bucks, you can get from Speedle, S-P-E-I-D-E-L. I think that's how that's pronounced. You can get a very, I guess, fancy binder clip. I don't know. it just looks like a binder clip like it's it's literally a binder clip folks uh yeah.

Pilot Pete

But it's like you won't have as much money to keep in it that's the upside it's

Adam Christianson

Got carbon it's got carbon fiber and all kinds of different materials

Dave Hamilton

Oh yeah it's targeted at golfers it looks like so uh yeah so yeah sure.

Adam Christianson

I don't know it works it's worked for years and again it won't demagnetize my cards

Dave Hamilton

Fun. So, yeah, there you go. Yeah. What's our, you have our next, our next quick tip too, don't you, Adam?

Adam Christianson

Yeah. One from Andrew here. He said in a recent episode, there was a discussion

Andrew-QT-Use if you're concerned about putting your iCloud account on a work device

about a listener who was concerned about his personal iCloud being used on their work iPhone, iPad, or Mac. The issue was that they didn't want their personal data being subject to monitoring, subpoena, or other related, you know, access related manners. Basically, you know, IT would have access to that information. And if I were this person with a work supply device, I would not put my personal iCloud on this machine. However, to access my personal iCloud, I would simply open iCloud.com and use

Safari in private mode. iCloud.com is now excellent. It's come a really long way, and you can do just about everything on it. That way, your reader definitely won't get caught.

Dave Hamilton

I like it. Yeah. Yeah, iCloud.com is helpful for a lot of reasons. This obviously being one troubleshooting is another because it's the closest view any of us get to the truth of the syncing of things. So if you're having trouble syncing contact from your Mac to your iPhone, look on iCloud.com. You get to see whether it made it there. And then that tells you where the problem is or it helps you narrow down where the problem is. Yeah.

Andrew had a second quick tip for us. I believe it's the same Andrew. Uh.

Andrew-QT-Use Favorite Playlists for Apple Music

Who reminds us that on my Apple devices, I have two types of playlists. One is a playlist I just stream. The other is a playlist I have where I've downloaded all my music files and it updates automatically as me or whoever the owner is makes changes. So I have music when I'm out of mobile phone range. I have about 30 playlists and about six of these are downloaded to the phone and watch. It's great to have tracks downloaded because you have things on the device.

It doesn't use a cellular radio. Now I have a third type of playlist, though, and this is where the quick tip comes in. Favorites drawn from the first two categories. Despite having iTunes and then Apple Music for probably 20 years, I never got around to favoriting playlists that I can quickly and easily access. And it's pretty simple. On the Mac, you right click a playlist and choose favorite.

And then you check the star that appears next to the album name and you click on all playlists and choose only favorites.

Then you will see just your favorites and you can do a similar thing on ios using the little three lines not the three dots and there's a support article about this too that we'll link to but yeah uh i never thought to favorite playlists uh i often in the car just try and tell it to play a playlist by name it sometimes gets it right and often starts playing something completely different so i'm gonna start favoriting playlists and the other reason i like this idea is i've

had car play in my last few cars but my only my current vehicle the 2025 subaru outback has this issue where when my car is in motion i only get to see the first 20 or so listings in a list as soon as my car is stopped even if i'm still in drive if i just you know stop at a stop sign or stop light or just stop in the middle of the road because i chose to, Then the whole list appears.

Pilot Pete

You're that guy.

Dave Hamilton

That's me. Yep. That's who I, that's me. But then the whole list appears. But as soon as I start rolling, it shortens up to those top 20. I'm assuming someone at Apple decided that this was a safety feature. I can prove to you that it's not. Because when I want to get to something that's in, say, the S's of whatever list I'm looking at, and it won't appear on my CarPlay screen, what do you think I'm going to do?

I'm going to pick up my phone and look at it. And that's much less safe than scrolling on my CarPlay screen, in my opinion. But, you know, I don't get to make these decisions, Apple. You do.

Adam Christianson

So.

Pilot Pete

Yeah. Adley, a quick one on that is that in Spotify, because I don't get to use Apple Music because my daughter was Spotify early and won't let me change out of the family plan on that. When you favorite a song, you actually have a playlist of my favorites. I assume it's the same in Apple Music.

Dave Hamilton

Yes, for a specific song.

Pilot Pete

Yeah, that's right. Yeah, so I have a playlist that's my favorite songs, which is obviously much more eclectic because there's country and western in that. Blues Brothers.

Dave Hamilton

We have more quick tips. Michael says, I just accidentally discovered that if

Michael-QT-Tap the Now Playing Live Activity on iPhone to see more detail...and focus!

you tap the image in the now playing live activity on the iPhone home screen, you can change the state of how it's displayed. When you first tap it, it will expand out of the activity bar. And if you tap it again, it will return. I also noticed it will omit lock screen widgets when it's expanded. So if you've got the little now playing thing at the bottom of your iPhone, tap the album cover art or the song cover art, and boom, your whole lock screen

becomes that cover art. So you can dig in a little bit. Fun stuff. Thank you, Michael. I love it.

Pilot Pete

Oh, that's cool. Yeah. Well, you may recall last week I had a problem with maps

Greg-QT-Updating 'Home' in Maps App

trying to take me to my old house when I would hit home. But no one else had that problem. They said they didn't have any problems with Maps trying to take them to my old house. But let's see, who wrote in with that? I'm looking for it. Greg. No, it was Greg. Greg wrote in and said, hey, go to the Maps app and look in library at the top at home. Well, he said look in contacts. And I searched my old address in contacts.

It was nowhere in there anywhere. So I didn't have a hidden contact that thought, hey, this is where you still live. But that was a good place to check. And then go to maps and look in the list on the left sidebar at the top. There's library. I clicked on home and I clicked info and damned if it didn't have my old address in there. And once I changed that, I did that last night.

And then on the way home from the airport last night, I clicked home on Apple Maps and it took me to the correct address. So thank you, Michael, for solving that. And I know, by the way, you can take any other pin and name it and move it up to the library. So you're just limited to home and work. You can name things and put them in your library for frequently used addresses. Yeah.

Dave Hamilton

Yeah. How did you change the – because I'm looking on my phone. I can tap home in the library.

Pilot Pete

I did it in the Maps app on my Mac. I did not do – I did not try it on the phone. And by the way, even then, it wasn't particularly obvious. It was kind of difficult. um i renamed it from home to my new address and then i was able to once that new address populated in there i renamed the address to home and it and it came up

Dave Hamilton

I got you okay.

Pilot Pete

There may be a better way to do that that's how i had to futz with it until it finally

Dave Hamilton

No i think that worked i think that's the trick yeah yeah yeah makes sense and those yeah in carplay those those um you know the ones you pin to the library favorites for lack of a less universal term you know there you go so yeah.

Pilot Pete

Yeah so yeah so thank you greg that's solved my issue now i don't have to go to my old house to find my way here

Dave Hamilton

Exactly uh we do you have anything on that adam did i no okay we had uh we talked about compressing images in the last episode and we had several of you respond

Kirit-QT--Compress Images with Quick Actions in macOS Finder (and Allison)

about this curate being one of them uh, It says, one of the easiest methods I've found to compress an image in the Finder is using the built-in quick actions in the Finder. Just select one or multiple images, right-click, choose quick actions, convert image. You can quickly compress images to small, medium, or large sizes and even change the format. This feature was added recently, Kirit says, and probably with Sequoia 15.

And it includes other useful options too, like converting to PDF, rotating images, and my favorite, removing the background using Apple intelligence. That's fantastic, Kirit. Yeah, thank you for sharing that. Yeah, and thanks to everybody who shared it. I know Alice is one of them too. Yeah, yeah.

Pilot Pete

And even removing metadata. So yeah, I'd never seen the quick actions on a file before.

That was cool. uh and new listener allison as you mentioned did write in with those but i've wondered dave what is it you can change it to large medium or small i wondered to myself what is large what is medium so if i have a you know a huge 4k file and i change it to large is it going to make it bigger so i tried on several different photos and it changed the large is 1280 uh by in my case 960 medium was 640 by 480 and small was 320 by 240 making them easy to use for mail and

other and web applications or whatever you may need but that's that seems to be the standard across all images large medium and small 1280 640 and 320 but then um allison also mentioned another third party tool for doing image manipulation is one from your favorite one of our favorite devs

Allison-CSF- for Converting Images

Gus Mueller of Acorn fame. The app is called RetroBatch, RetroBatch, new lips, and it has a slick drag and drop interface. I have a fancy workflow from RetroBatch in my Finder toolbar that converts any image to the right size for a featured image for my website.

Dave Hamilton

Huh.

Pilot Pete

So, yeah. That's cool.

Adam Christianson

It looks like a nodal-based image processor from the UI. So it looks very much like Audio Hijack for images.

Dave Hamilton

Yeah. I need this. That's great.

Pilot Pete

Yeah.

Dave Hamilton

Yeah, because you can see when Adam says nodal-based, you can see, just go to RetroBatch, it's in the show notes, but you can see the flow that you've built for what's going to happen to an image. That's really cool.

Pilot Pete

Isn't that slick? Yeah. Huh. And I've used Acorn for years. I love Acorn as an image manipulation. It's powerful and intuitive.

Dave Hamilton

What is the price for this? Is it a seven-day free trial? So, okay. All right. So there's a seven-day free trial, and then RetroBatch has in-app purchases, which I'm trying to dig into. It's always fun to try and find those. I know how to do it now. $25 a year for the yearly subscription for RetroBatch. So there you go. That's pretty good. I like it.

Adam Christianson

It looks like, unless I'm reading this wrong, I clicked on the purchase tab, Dave. I see just straight up pricing. I'm wondering if you can choose either.

Dave Hamilton

You're right. I chose App Store and obviously got that. But yes, you can do retro batch is $40 and that looks like, oh, well, there's two versions. There's pro and not pro. So yeah, it's not a subscription. It looks like. Yeah. Okay.

Adam Christianson

Interesting.

Dave Hamilton

You have choices. I love that. That's great. All right. We have more stuff. We have a couple don't get caughts that we probably would be good to go through. And then hopefully more questions. And we can make the time for that. Right now, I want to make the time to talk about our next couple of sponsors. Because you know those mornings where you look in the mirror and you think,

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All right. Gordon sent us some sad to me news that Mac updater.

Gordon-DGC-...what's next?

My favorite update app that I rely on on my Macs to keep everything up to date and not get those messages when I launch an app saying, hey, you haven't launched this in six months and now it needs an update. Mac updater solves that. Well, not after January 1st of 2026. So at the end of this year, Mac updater will be sunsetted as the development team moves on to other things.

I'm pretty sure it's it's a the business is a small business, mom and pop style business, and they're moving on to other things. So thank you to them for doing what they've done. I know that they are interested in seeing it continue. If there's someone out there that would like to continue development and maintenance on it, then you can look at that at, I believe, just macupdater.com or corecode.io. But there are other apps out there.

I know the site macupdate.com was recently acquired by recently in the last year and a half or so recently acquired by a sole proprietor. It was, it had been, I think Joel Mueller, um, had ran it, started it and ran it for a long time. He led it to a successful acquisition with, I believe, Zeo bit. And now it's, it's not Joel that has it back, but it is someone that's just running it for their own, uh, as their own sort of small business.

And they have built a new version of the macupdate.com updater app so that might be worth taking a look at too hey dave hey adam.

Adam Christianson

Is it uh much different or i didn't even know again i mentioned i was doing clean my mac the other day uh after getting my new machine clean my mac has some kind of updater built into it i don't know how it is different or maybe different but it i I let it update a handful of my apps and it has to be intentional.

Pilot Pete

But yeah, there's an applications tab on the left and it checks for updates and unused and how

Dave Hamilton

I'll have to check it out. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I won't derail us with a, with a conversation while we're talking about comparing apps that we're, none of us has used both, but yeah. Okay. I'll look at that and see how that compares to Mac update.

Adam Christianson

Yeah. Maybe somebody in the audience can report back at feedback at macgeekgab.com.

Pilot Pete

That's a great idea. Feedback at macgeekgab.com.

Dave Hamilton

Feedback at macgeekgab.com. Yep, for sure. All right.

Adam Christianson

Andy has one for us. Another don't get caught. He says, hey guys,

Andy-DGC-Check your HomePod's Apple ID after you merge IDs

just wanted to share a quick tip. After using Apple's new feature to merge two Apple IDs, I've had one ID for iTunes purchases, tons of music, movies, and apps, and another for iCloud services as the head of an iCloud family plan. I followed Apple's instructions to merge them via my iPhone. Super quick, smooth process. But don't get caught. All of my HomePods stopped playing Apple music from my account after the merge. Resetting the HomePods didn't help, nor did ChatGPT or forum spelunking.

Everything, including Apple Music, was working properly on my iPhone. The fix? Go into Home Settings in the Home app, tap the ellipses in the upper right, and check the Apple ID listed under People Owner. Mine was still set to the old iTunes ID. I switched to the new merged iCloud ID, and voila, music magically returned. Hope this saves someone the hassle. Thanks for all you do. Love the show.

Dave Hamilton

Huh. Well, there you go.

Pilot Pete

Boom.

Dave Hamilton

Yep. Did you ever merge your Apple IDs out?

Adam Christianson

I haven't done it yet.

Dave Hamilton

Apple IDs out? Okay.

Adam Christianson

I'm paying $29 a month for storage that I don't need to be paying for.

Dave Hamilton

Got it. Yeah, I understand. I'm not proud to say that I understand this, but I do understand.

Adam Christianson

Get there yeah

Dave Hamilton

Yeah yeah yeah.

Pilot Pete

He was waiting to get his new computer it's

Adam Christianson

It's on my list of all the other things i have to do in life um well i just i don't sorry no no just add it's it's because it's kind of related to i don't want to get caught not having time to deal with an issue if an issue arises like this would have been one of them right right you know so i'm glad this is a great don't get caught for me because i would have got caught by this one and then been really frustrated when my home pod wasn't working yeah

Dave Hamilton

Yeah so you're just letting our our loyal listeners be the test bed for this before you take any uh real action yeah okay that's great just just shining a light on it um i i got caught this week adam with the show so So we got an email,

MGG Got Caught: This episode can't be played on this device

actually we got a few, from people saying, when I go to play the show in Apple Podcasts, it says this episode cannot be played on this device. And I'm like, oh no. So I started down a path. Spoiler alert. The path involved dealing with server based caching that is any kind of caching is always really, really fun to troubleshoot. I figured out what was going on.

And the symptom was that it would happen when streaming one of our episodes, but not once you had down, like you could download the episode into Apple Podcasts and play it, no problem. But if you hadn't downloaded it and just tried to stream it, you would often, but not always, get that error.

And it was the result of some i think changed apple logic uh in uh in the podcast app and this is true across certainly iphone and mac i didn't test it anywhere else but it's the same core code so i'm imagining it would be the same uh that and and some logic in our uh privacy prefix the thing that allows us to let sponsors get download data without you giving them your data, and we're pretty proud of having that here.

But there was an issue in how it dealt with things that were cached too, and so it took a lot of trial and error to fix this.

The gist is that when Apple Podcasts goes to play to stream an episode, the first thing that it does is it asks the server for one byte's worth of that show and then if it gets that then it obviously asks for more and then just kind of downloads chunks as it goes through and this is done with http range requests the way our system was returning things much of the time and we're not alone i know of other shows that aren't using our privacy prefix that are having the same problem uh the the

uh the show would the server would often return the full file so apple podcast would ask for one bite it would get all the bites and then instead of just saying i got all the bites let me play this for you dear user uh it would instead it instead not would instead it does instead throws up an error message saying this episode cannot be played on this device which is super unhelpful and misleading and just wrong on so many levels. So we're going to report this to Apple, but we...

We have fixed the problem as best as it can be fixed. There are still times when you ask a server for one byte and you get all the bytes and there's nothing that really can be done about that. If the server decides to return all the bytes, it's going to return all the bytes. And the fact that Apple Podcast dies unceremoniously about that is just bad practice in my opinion, but I wanted to share it here.

If you are seeing it consistently, please let us know. If you see it once and then try to play again and it works, we're aware of that. But if it happens for you, you would be the only listener to whom it happened

based on what I understand. so without getting extra extra extra nerdy that's what's going on thank you for your patience, frustrating super frustrating like yeah why like yeah anyway all right uh let's let's we have time i want to do some more questions should we uh can we jump to jason's question here are you are you for that, Adam?

Adam Christianson

I'm reading Jason's question.

Dave Hamilton

You're reading Jason's question, yeah.

Adam Christianson

I didn't see that one.

Dave Hamilton

That's okay, you want me to do it?

Adam Christianson

Is it unable to get type?

Dave Hamilton

That's the one.

Adam Christianson

Got it right here.

Jason-Unable to Get Type -v- Paste Shortcut working.

Dave Hamilton

Great.

Adam Christianson

So he says, Jason says, back in 1074, you guys mentioned using keyboard maestro or shortcuts to type the contents of the clipboard for annoying websites that won't let you paste into text fields. I don't have keyboard maestro, but somehow have not been able to come over the way to get this to work using shortcuts. ChatGPT has also not been helpful. I would love some suggestions on how to get this to work.

Pilot Pete

So, I played with this a lot and finally got there. You did? Yeah. I worked through it using shortcuts and AppleScript and overcame a few other obstacles in the process and admittedly had to have ChatGPT help me figure out what they were to include getting a terminal command that made it work. But I took screenshots and put it in. Dave, I don't know how.

Dave Hamilton

You're not going to share those in the show. You're going to share them in Discord, and then we'll put a link in the show notes.

Pilot Pete

We'll make it so that way. Yeah, there we go.

Dave Hamilton

Just walk us through the process, though. Are you triggering an Apple script from a shortcut? Is that right? Yes.

Pilot Pete

That's simply it. You do create a shortcut, basically, that says type the clipboard. Okay. I think is what I named it.

Dave Hamilton

Is the apple script just taking the contents of the clipboard and iterating through it one character at a time is that right.

Pilot Pete

That's that's my understanding of see i'm not a scripter so that's my understanding what the apple script is doing and then um uh and then the other problem i had with there was it i had to get a terminal command because i couldn't get system events to let the shortcut work.

Dave Hamilton

Yes.

Pilot Pete

And so, ChatGPT gave me the system command, said, here, you got to do this in order to get it to allow it to happen. So, it was one of those things where you had to put in the terminal command, it still wouldn't work, then a reboot, and it worked. Yes. And was persistent after that so that, you know, it works today after multiple reboots. It isn't something It goes away when you turn your computer off again. It's a permission that you're allowing in system settings.

Dave Hamilton

Right.

Pilot Pete

And the terminal command, the reason was I had to use the terminal command. That option didn't come up in system settings to allow me to turn on the switch and authorize it. The terminal command is what authorized it.

Dave Hamilton

You had to go into that privacy thing and allow that. That's a super pain in the neck. How do you like that stuff, Adam, today? Is that your thing today?

Pilot Pete

Yeah you're coming to a sad realization allow or deny yeah

Dave Hamilton

That's right that's right.

Pilot Pete

One of the best Apple commercials ever, by the way.

Dave Hamilton

Yeah. Yeah, but now it's Apple that's done it to us.

Pilot Pete

Yeah, I know.

Dave Hamilton

I know.

Adam Christianson

It's like Windows Vista all over again.

Dave Hamilton

Yeah, it is like Windows Vista all over again. No, no, it's Apple OS 26. Ben, in our Discord, suggested now that we have Mac OS 26, iOS 26,

Ben-naming appleOS 26

iPad OS, etc. Can we just, as a shortcut, call it Apple OS 26? And I really like that. I'm all for this. Or maybe is it better to call it Aqua OS 26? Is that better? Is that better? I don't know. I don't know. Is it Aqua 26? Because it sure feels like it. It's just David in the Discord and pre-show said, why are we going back to a liquid like OS 10? Or is this just a new version of it? I think that's it. It's Aqua. But anyway.

Adam Christianson

Everything old is new again, Dave.

Dave Hamilton

I know. For Jason, I highly recommend you don't do this with shortcuts in AppleScript. And I especially highly recommend that you simply buy Keyboard Maestro and use that to do this. It is going to make your life a lot simpler in a lot of ways, not just this one.

Pilot Pete

Although I will state that I've used that Keyboard Maestro one and I forget which website even then wouldn't let me do it. And I don't know if it was a system events thing then. That was weeks, months back and... It has otherwise worked for me, the keyboard maestro.

Dave Hamilton

There's two in keyboard maestro. One is essentially a clone of what the system lets you do, which is to paste, actually paste without formatting. So it strips the formatting and then issues a paste command on websites that won't let you paste. That will be the case. However, on the one where it's simply typing, nothing should be able to stop that. And if something does, your shortcut ain't going to work either. So.

Pilot Pete

Right. Fair enough. Yeah. Excuse me.

Dave Hamilton

Yeah. Because it's doing the same thing. It like, you're just writing an Apple script to do the thing that keyboard maestro is already doing. So, yeah.

Pilot Pete

Yeah.

Dave Hamilton

Yeah. Should we go to Larry? Yeah, let's go to Larry. That's fine. All right.

Larry-My new iPhone skips when playing audio in my car's bluetooth

Pilot Pete

So Larry wrote in, he says, I upgraded my 15 Pro Max to a 16 Pro Max iPhone, but I've noticed a noticeable skip when listening to audiobooks and podcasts through my pre-CarPlay car stereo via Bluetooth. It's like the dreaded skips on vinyl records. The issue only occurs with the car stereo, not Bluetooth headphones. It wasn't present with the 15 Pro Max. Nope.

Dave Hamilton

Yeah. OK, so I don't know where what what the issue is. I don't have an answer, but I do know that the 15 Pro Max is Bluetooth 5.3, as is the 16 Pro Max. So there's no difference there and even the the the modem the chip that's in it is very similar but it's not the same so it could be a thing we haven't heard about this from other people um. When an iPhone disconnects, when an iPhone knows that it has disconnected from

a Bluetooth speaker of any sort, the audio is paused. That is just how that works. So given that Larry has described his issue as kind of still playing and he's missing pieces of it, that tells me that the phone doesn't think it is disconnected. So that leaves the car. And as a test, I would put the Bluetooth playback screen up on the car's entertainment system and assuming it's safe to do so while driving.

Look at what it's showing on there when you stop hearing audio to see, does the car think it's still being played and it's just not coming out of the speakers? Or does the car, has the car lost the connection and then the car is getting it back? That would be informative, right? And you could also, again, assuming it's safe, look at the now playing screen on your phone.

Based on what Larry's described, I would think that it's going to think it's just playing all the way through, but nice to confirm that. All of that said, where I would start with this is unpairing and repairing the phone with the car to see if that just solves it. The other thing would be try a different device running the same operating system as whatever you're running and then um uh i'm trying to think of what what else we could do here i don't know you got any thoughts adam.

Adam Christianson

Well i have a question okay sure uh this is an old in-car infotainment system i'm assuming bluetooth yep um is it worth calling the dealership and finding out if there's any kind of firmware update for that because i think dealers can install firmware updates for old entertainment infotainment systems but i don't think they're often something a consumer could install i think newer systems like my my car has a wi-fi connection you can set up so

presumably it updates itself if that sort of thing happens but i don't even know Yeah.

Dave Hamilton

Yeah. Yeah. Good point. My experience with updating the firmware of infotainment systems is if it ain't broke, don't fix it. So in this case, yes, it's warranted. But if everything's working fine, resist the temptation to update for the sake of updating because. Right yeah yeah it i've seen it cause like weird little hiccups and it's like oh why did i do that to myself so um, Yeah.

Adam Christianson

Last ditch effort. Last ditch effort.

Dave Hamilton

Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. But if that like if there is a one and there's a known, they'll have a list of, you know, the bulletins that came out with it. And if, you know, it's essentially the change log. Right. So ask them about that. But but yeah, I'm curious if for some reason the car or the phone thinks it's being muted during this this period.

Is there is there something in the car that is like I've noticed my car has a um it's it's got like advanced lane assist it essentially drives itself uh using cameras like it when it when we can see the road and when it's doing that if it doesn't think that my hands are on the steering wheel regardless of whether they are it will set up an alert and if i don't like take the steering wheel and jiggle it when the alert happens it'll start sounding a chime and it mutes my it doesn't mute it reduces

the volume of my audio to being inaudible so that i can pay attention to the chime but now i don't hear the podcast and i missed that section so is your card choosing to do something that reduces the audio i don't know but anyway well that that's right that's where i think that one goes yep.

Adam Christianson

Yep all right time time for

Dave Hamilton

More i think so. Do you have time for more? You have time for one more? I do.

William-Will my iPhone actually tell me when my AirPods are low?

Adam Christianson

Yeah, absolutely. I got William here. William says, I just replaced my old AirPods 2 with AirPods 4 with noise cancellation, and I have a couple of concerns. One, according to the Apple help pages, when the battery charge of your AirPods is low, you'll get a notification on the screen of your iPhone or iPad. You'll get this notification when charge is at 20, 10, and 5% remaining.

I've been using iPods since first generation, and I have never gotten a notification about battery life on an iPhone or iPad, nor can I find any settings for these notifications. Notifications on iPhone at these percentages would be nice if they actually worked. I do hear the beep on the pods themselves, but it's easily missed when something is playing, and why, oh why, do they happen only at 10% and about to die?

Again from Apple Cell, your AirPods 4 with active noise cancellation charging case plays a sound when it pairs charges and more. The and more would seem to cover a lot of ground, but I can't find anything more specific. I do hear sounds when I put the AirPods back in the case, but there's no indication of what the sound might mean. The internet seems to think that the case will chime when its battery is below 40%, but that seems like a weird, unhelpful number. Who charges at 40%?

Dave Hamilton

Uh, yeah, I don't have an AirPods. Um, I don't have AirPods four. Uh, I have AirPods pro gen two, so I don't believe my case is, is making chime noises. Uh, but maybe I don't think I hear noise when I put things in it.

Pilot Pete

But I don't think so either.

Dave Hamilton

Yeah. But, uh, I know that I've never gotten a notification on my iPhone when the batteries are low that I am certain of this and nor have I had a notification to circle it all back around to call it back to the intro. I've never seen the notification show up on my Mac either. So.

Adam Christianson

You know what I will see? And maybe this is it. But I mean, you'd have to be looking at your device when this happens. The live notifications in the Dynamic Island. I will sometimes see that open up and show my little icon of my airpods and then a red yeah like just circle like showing that they're at a low charge um and i do occasionally hear a chime sometimes when i um put things in my case but i never knew why or what triggered it it's so random yeah

Dave Hamilton

Yeah yeah i i i'd love to learn what the and more is here if anyone knows about an and more feedback at macgeekup.com. All right.

Pilot Pete

It's almost like, what was his name? On 60 Minutes years ago, Andy, he was always Ian Moore.

Dave Hamilton

Oh, Andy Rooney?

Pilot Pete

Andy Rooney, that's right.

Dave Hamilton

He was my neighbor, you know, for like throwing up. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, not right next door, but like down the street. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No kidding. He was exactly the curmudgeon that he appeared to be on the show.

Pilot Pete

How many times did he yell at you to get off his lawn?

Dave Hamilton

It was mainly on the train platform. Like if we were going into New York, because our town had a train stop. The town of Rowey in Connecticut had a Metro North stop into New York. So, yeah, yeah.

Pilot Pete

Did you ever notice?

Dave Hamilton

Yeah. Yeah. Yep. That was Andy Rooney. Kids, ask your parents. All right. Do we want to do another question? Do we want to run through a cool stuff founder too? How's everybody feeling here?

Pilot Pete

I can do either.

Dave Hamilton

All right. Then let's talk about a couple of cool stuff's found, shall we?

DLH-CSF- adds Apple Intelligence and more

Lingon Pro 10 is out. So Lingon is an app that lets you... Control and manage all of the launch agents and more on on your system it lets you see things that other apps that there are no things to see you would have to like go edit plist files and lingon edits those plists for you you can create them and uh and now it adds apple intelligence and more Lingon is one of those apps that there's nothing comparable to it, and I wouldn't ever want to live without it. So I am stoked that it's out.

They've got a new user interface where there's tabs and such, and Lingon will notify you if things are changed. I love it. I love, love, love it. So I'm stoked that the new version is out. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm a big fan. Listener Chris has taught me about one of my new favorite apps.

Chris-CSF-

He says, I heard about this alternative app for controlling your Sonos systems. It's called Click, C-L-I-C. And so far, it seems to work just as well as the native app. It's available for all platforms that Sonos supports with their apps. And it's $14.99 a year or $60 for lifetime.

I uh this app is fantastic i have found it to be more reliable than the sonos app, although i will say that the sonos app has gotten much better in uh in in recent months like they i know we talked about it on the show and you know they are they are moving in an excellent direction but uh but yeah this click for sonos it i i like the user interface on it and it makes life easy to kind of control things and all that. So, yep. Yep. Uh, yeah.

Pilot Pete

Okay. Well, if you think that was expensive at $14, uh, I'm going to move us

Michael-CSF- for hotel rooms

to, and of course now my notes has froze. There it is. It came back finally. Uh, this one isn't free, but I'm going to be getting one. I can tell you, uh, flippers zero for hotel rooms. Uh, Michael writes in when I go to hotels, I've been using my Flipper Zero to control the TV with the universal remote. It has the ability to copy, i.e. Backup, the hotel key so that I can have it in my bag in case I can't have or have an issue with my room's key card.

And there are a lot of other uses for it as well. It seems like a Raspberry Pi in a cool usable interface and case yeah it could

Adam Christianson

Be gray hat or black hat pete or white hat

Pilot Pete

Yeah white hat white hat only there you go uh just yeah maybe gray hat to see if it'll work that way but i mean this thing yeah rfid capabilities all kinds of cool stuff huh

Dave Hamilton

And it's is there a way like i see the form factor here can i can i like hook it onto the string of my hoodie so that it's always there so i can open my hotel room door at max stock there you go when i find myself in the hallway or at least.

Pilot Pete

To cover yourself with

Dave Hamilton

Well there's that if you come to max stock i'll tell the rest of that story uh and we do have a coupon code mac geek up 50 saves you 50 bucks for Mac stock and we will be doing a live Mac geek up at Mac stock, but yes, there is a, a true story that I'm, I'll happily share. I'm not going to waste our time today with it, but yeah. Oh yeah.

Adam Christianson

Uh, I remember that story.

Dave Hamilton

Yep. 199 bucks for the flipper zero. The short version is I wound up in the hallway in the middle of the night, um, wearing only a hoodie and no room key. So that was, that was fun.

Pilot Pete

Uh, I don't know how nice would have been to have a flipper. Zero in the hoodie pocket you got it highly

Dave Hamilton

Highly recommended for every hoodie pocket yes right.

Pilot Pete

Exactly that thing looks cool yeah yeah all

Dave Hamilton

Right fun it's got it you can get a silicone case for it.

Pilot Pete

Yeah yeah all right 30 years ago i used to have this little casio universal remote watch and looks like this will do the same sort of thing but you know i could go to a sports bar and change the tvs to all spanish you know that's fun okay drive the bartenders nuts what the hell is going on yeah yeah yeah yeah you know doesn't surprise me yeah

Dave Hamilton

Yeah yeah this all checks out um uh one last cool stuff found before we go is

DLH-CSF- adds Flashback Capture, Stem Splitter, and ChatGPT writing tools

uh logic pro 11.2 came out in the last month or so here and it has several new features. Again, it's a free update but one of the. The ones that really kind of blew me away is the new stem splitter in there where you can take an audio file and put it in and say, OK, great. Now, like breakout guitar, piano, vocals, drums, and it will just do it. And now you get multi tracks with all that stuff in there.

It's had this before, but this stem splitter is so much more than what it has been in the past.

So uh and it's also got i haven't used this but what they call flashback capture where you can um if you weren't recording logic was kind of recording anyway it's a it's in the recording studio musicians who have been in the studio will will know of of this uh phenomenon where you're getting a sound you know you're getting ready to do a take you kind of mess with something you're like okay well that would

be cool yeah well that was great all right now let's record And of course, when you go to record. You're not nearly as relaxed or inspired or good as you were before the red light was on. So good engineers have learned that the red light is always on, even when you're practicing something, because oftentimes that is the final take that you hear, even with, you know, artists whose names, you know. So this is Logic kind of doing its version of that for you. So, yeah, lots of nice little features.

I just love that, I mean, Apple hasn't charged for a Logic upgrade in, I don't know, 10, 15 years. I mean, you pay for a Mac upgrade, right, Adam? So, you know.

Adam Christianson

Yeah, right.

Dave Hamilton

All right.

Pilot Pete

Yeah.

Dave Hamilton

I don't have anything else. You guys have anything else?

Pilot Pete

I got nothing.

Outtro

Dave Hamilton

That's it. All right. Well, then we'll bring the band. Speaking of performances, we'll bring the band in. This was recorded directly to analog tape probably 40 years ago. I'm trying to think. 35 years ago. Yeah. Thanks for hanging out with us. Make sure to check out our giveaway this month. It's those Sona Flow headphones from OneMore. That's at MacGeekUp.com slash giveaway. As I mentioned, we're going to be at MacStock, so make sure to go sign up and get your tickets.

We've all got our travel booked and all that fun stuff, I think. Thanks to Cashfly for providing all the bandwidth to get the show from us to you. Go check out Adam's debut film podcast to hear how his audio setup sounds when recorded differently. Pete, so there I was for Aviation Enthusiasts. And I do two other shows, Gig Gab and Business Brain. Check those out too. Thanks for hanging out with us, folks. Thanks for sending in everything. Thanks to all our premium subscribers. We all rock.

Oh, we have new shirts, by the way. We did our little 20th anniversary gathering at the house and the shirts finally arrived. Pete so the black okay the black ones say property of mac geekab founding team on the front and then i think 2005 on the back so you can uh you can order those at mac geekab.com slash merch if you want one so fun stuff we'll see it uh let's see it max stock is there anything else i.

Pilot Pete

Have been thinking that it's dangerous until next week you guys should just be careful and don't get caught

Dave Hamilton

Made on a Mac, We made it Later.

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