¶ Mac Geek Gab 1094 for Monday, June 16th, 2025
It's time for Mac Geek Gab and Boy Max shares a thing actually that I found on Reddit.
¶ BoyMax-QT-Hold your finger down after drawing a circle with MarkUp, and it will make it a perfect oval/circle
A great little quick tip. When you draw a circle on a screenshot using the markup feature on your devices, if you hold your finger down once you finish your version of a circle, your phone will correct it so that it's a either perfect circle or a nice tight oval or something that actually looks professional as opposed to something we just sort of scribbled out with our finger. I had forgotten about this one, so thank you, Boymax, for reminding us.
More tips like this, plus your questions answered today. I'm at Geekab 1094 for Monday, June 16th. Take your cat to work day 2025. Greetings, folks, and welcome to Mac Geek Cab, the show where you send in your quick tips like that, your cool stuff found, your questions. We share all of it. We provide context where we can. We answer the questions we're able.
We talk through the troubleshooting process. Really, the goal is for each and every one of us to learn at least five new things every single time we get together. Our sponsors for this episode are BB Edit from Bare Bones at barebones.com. Surfshark at surfshark.com slash MGG or use code MGG at checkout. That gets you four extra months of Surfshark VPN. Yoink from Eternal Storms, that little temporary shelf app that I love. And fireflies.ai slash MGG.
You get two months free of this cool AI that joins your meetings and summarizes things and creates action items. All very cool stuff. We'll talk about each of them in a little bit in more depth. For now, here in Durham, New Hampshire, I'm Dave Hamilton.
And here in South Dakota, I'm Adam Christensen.
And here also in New Hampshire, Pilot Pete, may I be the first to say on this show, happy birthday, Dave.
Thanks, yeah. The day we are recording this is the 13th of June of 2025, as I mentioned. The 13th of June, 2005, is the day that we released episode number one of what was to become Mac Geek Gab. The first episode was called TMO to Go. And then my wife said something like, you need a better name than that. Why not just call it the Geek Gab? So here we are.
There you go and it's a high energy show folks let me tell you if you haven't heard it go listen to it
Oh episode one yeah i think it starts i should have i should have teed it up i well do i have it i i have i have teed it up in the past but i don't think i have it here to play it's not like in my little farrago which is like a cart app no um yeah but it uh it starts out with something like welcome to tmo to go from the mac observer yeah it was um it's.
Like national public radio only quieter
Yeah exactly you.
Don't even want to know what the first episode of the mac has sounded like
Right yeah so yes adam so i get to join you in the club of people who have been podcasting for more than 20 years now so yeah 20 year club the 20 year club yeah i don't i no longer have for the last year what i've been saying is i'm in my 20th year of podcasting now i get to say that i've been podcasting for more than 20 years it just changes we got to get.
We got to get a pin or something like that
We do need pins yes i don't disagree yeah yeah yeah we did have some t-shirts made up we had a little gathering here uh at the house my wife and daughter uh get full credit for conceiving of when organizing uh this party and we even had uh four mg we had like my family here and and four listeners we had uh andy uh will uh doug and chris came so we had a little you know a little little thing out on the patio the weather was nice and it was you know it was good it.
Was fun we missed you adam
Yeah yeah yeah.
Sorry i didn't i didn't see the message
I gave you the wrong date adam you did well i gave everybody the wrong date a couple of weeks ago at the end of the show, but I said it was in July. No, July will be in the thing.
Um hey yeah that opening tip yeah uh i believe that trick works for other basic shapes if i'm remembering correctly too so if you do a square and then hold or a triangle and hold i think it will also oh i think you're right like you try to fix it for you nice
I didn't that i need to try i didn't i did not know that it would do more than just shapes that had curves in them so yeah.
Yeah as long as you get reasonably close i don't know i yeah again i know square triangle circle i think that's about it i don't think it's going to do like an octagon for you or anything like that maybe yeah
Yeah yeah possibly yeah yeah interesting so.
Hey one other thing police code 1094 is street racing i think we should street race into some quick tips
I love it oh i thought That's what we were going to do after we finished recording the show, Pete. We could just street race through my neighborhood. That would be really wise.
They love that over there. They take that so well. I think it's funny.
I'm also going to share that this morning turns out to also be a time when some very important concert tickets, some fish tickets for September go on sale. And that happens in the next five to ten minutes. So there might be a moment where I am multitasking here while my wife and I independently collect.
Adam and I are going to have to carry the show again.
Listen, after 20 years, I'm done. That's it. That's it. I do want to say something that's coming up here. We talked a little bit about it in the pre-show, but I do want to say something here that we –, Uh, the ad load for this show for a lot of shows has been pretty soft over the last 18 months. This summer is looking, uh, different. There, there are, we're back up to, you know, episodes that actually are sold out. Now, what does sold out mean for this show?
Usually a maximum of four sponsors. There will be, if the schedule holds due to some scheduling, I don't want to call them snafus. It was two sales literally coming in at the same time for the same episode and us deciding, let's try it. So I think there's an episode in August that we'll have five.
And we do our best to balance this. I know that ad load is much less than many other shows out there, but that doesn't mean I want to get up to a point where we are at the level of many other shows out there. We respect your time and we appreciate it. And as I always say, our job is to encourage you to visit the sponsors page or link or whatever it is to learn more. And whether you take it farther from there is between you and them.
So that is our job. We try to keep the ads efficient and using up only as much of your time as is appropriate. But we welcome your feedback, positive and negative about this. So I just wanted to throw that out there.
Would they send that feedback to feedback at MacGeekAb.com, Dave?
That's where I'd send it.
That's where I'd send it, feedback at MacGeekAb.com.
You heard them, feedback at. MacGeekGab.com.
Now, street racing into even more quick tips.
¶ Bill-QT-Use Apple Mail to Quickly Reduce Photos
Bill sends in the next one and says, Apple Mail users can quickly reduce photo file sizes for saving in folders by selecting the image size option on the right side of the from email address. So in the header, there's a thing across the right. This retains the original file name. To do this, open a new email message, drag photos to the body, and select medium, for example, on the image size. Drag photos now from that email to a folder by holding down on the mouse button. So click drag.
Drag multiple photos individually. And then once, or you can, you know, control, shift, command, select.
That sometimes works but not always file size options are limited to small medium and large this is a quick and dirty way to reduce file sizes and retain file names which is interesting, i have a so i appreciate the the tip that is certainly one way to do it and it's an obvious way because you get to see it happening and you're using apple software to make it all happen um but i have a feeling that we each have other ways of doing
this and adam i kind of saw you um nodding your head how how would you go about reducing the size of an image uh multiple ways yeah yeah i.
Might use preview but that's a much more manual you know procedure um i believe photos you can just export and pick sizes like i would select a bunch of photos but But I don't know if that retains, I think part of this tip is the retaining of the file naming.
Yes.
So that's, that one I'm not sure of. The other tool that I use, and that's just more for compressing, I guess it does resizing now too. There's a utility called Squash, a software called Squash. It's part of SetApp. And it has all kinds of options for batch resizing, renaming. I think you can control how you rename it. You can retain the original name or add things. It's got a bunch of options for...
You know a bunch of different things yeah originally started out just as a um like an image optum kind of compressor thing but it it's gone far beyond that
Well i'm glad you mentioned image optum because that is another one of these that will keep the dimensions of the image the same but it will uh strip out unnecessary metadata including like thumbnails to make it image optum is built for images you're going to put on the web so it's stripping out all the things that you wouldn't necessarily need on the web does keep the file name the same and you can have it recompress the
image keeping it the same dimensions but often the file size using image opt-in drops precipitously without the visual quality being negatively impacted so yeah and.
Squash does all that stuff and you can turn squash has a nice sidebar where you can turn on and off all the different
Like settings.
So you can have it remove metadata or not remove metadata you can have it compress or not compress you can have it rename or not rename and you just set all the settings and then drop a bunch in there and it then hit the button go and it
I
Think there's another one called pen pen pen mutate i can't remember the name of the other one it's like a little robot icon
Permute permute.
Is that what it's called yeah i think
Yeah yeah i use permute each week i have to take the flack audio file uh which is an uncompressed audio file and for one of the services that we use it doesn't take flack uh it only takes other things so i use permute to convert that to m for like aac or something for audio files but i forgot that permute would do images too and permute i think.
It does i'm pretty sure it
Doesn't know i think you're right and set.
Set dimensions and stuff
I've used it to convert uh videos as well and permute is absolutely part of setup uh i believe it is yeah absolutely yeah.
No it is yeah
So yeah yeah interesting.
And then just years ago, I did Automator. I created one that would resize images, and I dragged, I made it into a, not a workflow, but basically an app. You can save it as an app. And then I dragged that app icon to my Finder toolbar. I select all the photos I want. It grabs them, it resizes them, and throws them in a subdirectory for me to grab and throw on my email.
Yeah, I'm pretty sure you can use shortcuts, too.
Oh, yeah. shortcuts would be easier now yeah yeah
Especially now if you want like with with the 20 mac os 2026 or mac os 26 whatever we're going to call it yeah uh the right yeah tayo that's right thanks uh but we could you could you could set a folder as being take an image in this folder and you know shrink it down to whatever and yeah so that that but we don't we don't get that unless you're running the beta or until they release it this fall so yeah lots.
Of ways to resize images
Yes should.
We go to a tip from uh joe here
Yeah i'm about 47 people away from being able to buy tickets but i think my wife is ahead of me in line so this might all this might all work out great all.
Right i'll go slow
¶ Joe-QT-Hide Distracting Items to read (some) paywalled content in Safari
It's totally fine joe.
Says hey team a friend invited me to read an article on a website but it was behind a paywall. He suggested using Safari's hide distracting items feature, and it worked. Not sure if it works everywhere or if the website was poorly designed, but it seems to have various uses. For example, Macworld's website is horrible for invading or invasive inline videos, advertisements, and sidebar items that annoy you. I turned on the feature, hovered over the irrelevant areas, and clicked on the
blue outline. Poof, gone. You can do as many areas as you want. Click done in the URL area and continue reading. It's amazing. Never notice this icon in the left corner of the URL box. Click it for options. First one is hide distracting items, which is wonderful. I don't know how long it's been there, but it's a game changer for annoying advertising websites, especially those that constantly change content and bump the text you're reading up and down on the screen.
Nice. Dang. I got to try that.
Yeah, it's pretty cool.
Yeah, I'll be back. Pete, no.
Yeah, it's a pretty cool feature. The other thing I think we've mentioned previously, but I'll bring it up again because it's kind of related with the paywall features is some paywall sites you can get to the content by using the reader view that's built in. Again, generally, if they're poorly designed or not, if it hasn't paywalled strongly enough.
Yeah yeah yeah it it all depends um it it yeah it depends it depends on how the the site is coded up for sure yeah sorry you're half distracted because my wife and i both have the tickets we want in our cart so i'm just waiting for her to finalize so i can not worry about this anymore so.
Yeah uh keeping this going like the distracting items feature is is really nice again especially for, you know, again, you want to support the sites that you enjoy. So if you enjoy Macworld, obviously that's how they, how they make their, their money, but I'm with you too. Some sites don't understand that sort of balance.
And especially when you're throwing up, you know, ads over top of things and you got one at the top and one at the bottom, and then it throws a video in the middle and now you can't even see any of the content i think
Your key phrase there was adam you want to enjoy the site
Yes yes yes it's.
The site you're there to see oh yeah advertising's fair but
Yeah i mean it's interesting we have we're having this conversation after we talked about ad load in the podcast but it's related like when we ran mac observer obviously we could have put way more ad units on the page but we always like we wanted to read the articles that we posted like you know and and so we were readers of the site first and made sure that there was a balance there that you could it but the most important thing was the content,
and and so we we chose to make a lot less money at times because we didn't want to just you know turn it into times square as we used to call it internally uh.
When exactly did that yeah i think i think the term that gruber often used was d
Bars d bar well that's yeah we never added one of those to the site but yes yeah but it was tempting i mean it from a strictly financial standpoint it was like wow we could like you know add 40 to our revenue if we did that like that that's that's Real money, you know, but it was like, at what cost? Like, we care about our audience. So, yeah, it's interesting. Yeah. Yeah. I know it's atypical, but whatever, you know. Uh, great. Wife, Lisa has the tickets, so everything's good.
All right.
I'm going to need to take some days off in September, guys. I'll just tell you now. Okay. There you go.
Awesome. All right. Well, I want to take a quick moment to give you a quick tip on something that popped up on me and drove me nuts for a long time until
¶ QT-Night Stand Mode Clock on UTC - Fix to Local
I finally went, all right, I got to figure this out. At some point, the nightstand mode on my iPhone moved me from local time to Zulu time, universal time coordinated, UTC. I'm like, how do I get rid of this? Well, you have to go into the standby mode, or I'm sorry, to the nightstand mode and press and hold your clock widget and delete the clock widget. Then go back and hit the little plus sign in the upper left-hand corner and re-add it to local time and add that widget.
So for some reason, at one of the iOS updates, it defaulted to UTC. So delete the UTC one, go back to local time, and you will have local time on your nightstand mode. Because I don't care what time it is, UTC, in the middle of the night. I'm not ready to do. As I often say when I screw it up, my Zulu converter is broken. And in the middle of the night, my Zulu converter is off.
It's offline. Yeah. Yes.
Yes. So I don't need to be doing math in my head at 3 a.m.
No, no.
Or 7 a.m. UTC.
Yes. That's almost as bad as doing public math while recording a podcast. Great.
Exactly. So if you find yourself with a UTC in your nightstand mode, you got to go in and delete that widget and re-add it as a local time.
I'm curious about how this might have happened. And gosh, as soon as I say that, I realize the the the rabbit hole that I am opening up because I know to whose phone this happened. At the risk of going too deep on this, you have always told me that even when traveling the world, you keep your devices fixed at Eastern time.
My laptop.
Your laptop. Okay. Yes. So is there a world where you would have set your phone to UTC for some reason and then that sort of cascaded into the nightstand mode but for some reason didn't come out of it?
I highly doubt it. I highly doubt it. And in the Apple discussion forums, there are people shaking their fists wildly at Apple over this, going, why did you do this?
So, fix it, leave it alone.
So, it wasn't only, I'm not the only one, that's why I brought it up as a quick tip. I'm not the only one who found myself looking at UTC on my nightstand going,
What? And when you came out of nightstand mode, your phone was still in Eastern time. Local time. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. okay so it wasn't like the whole phone had shifted somehow there was a just that night span nightstand widget that had gotten fixed to zulu okay all right yeah great nice find because i don't i i that would your solution would not have been my first instinct no.
I had well i found on an apple forums i couldn't figure it out
Right yeah yeah so yeah.
In defense of the developers time is hard it is in programming oh it
Is why is it so difficult.
Yeah so many variables so many variables i mean you've got you got daylight savings time to deal with you've got you know all these things and you're having to do all these conversions and then you have the places like you know arizona where they they don't do ds you know states that don't do dst in india easy to screw things up then
There's the language barrier if you go from new york to chicago do you gain an hour or lose an hour asking for a friend
So you know interesting yeah they've had i mean think how many times apple's had problems with this i mean the dst bug came up and a few releases yeah what i remember oh yeah people didn't get alarms you know like the next day their alarm didn't go off at the right time because it was screwed up so and people are late to work and i like those things have material impact you know yeah it's not intentional it's annoying but
Anytime i'm coding and needing to use time it's like oh what a pain in the neck yeah yep all right uh you want to bring us to shannon.
Adam yeah this is a little follow-up i think to something
¶ Shannon-QT-1092-OnyX can delete Snapshots en masse
we were talking a question we had on uh becky keb 1092 yep i believe we were talking about uh the apfs snapshots um somebody i think had one that they couldn't figure out how to delete it was taking up some space and um so shannon wrote in and said onyx to the rescue onyx was able to delete the snapshot created by the asr utility i have no idea when and how the snapshot was made unless it was made when i first set up the mac i have never had to restore this mac also based on a recent episode
i checked my podcast apps and discovered that it was saving all kinds of episodes that i was not expecting so now i now i've reclaimed roughly 600 gigabytes of space wow that's good both i and my mac are breathing much easier now thank you and your mgg compadres i am always listening i always learning rather something new from the shows shannon love
That uh that's uh onyx yep there and there is there's just a tab right there in onyx to to show you all the things all those snapshots. Huh. That works. Yeah. That's great. Fun.
Dan answered my question.
What's your question?
Going to Chicago. As for Mac stock is all gains. Nicely said, Dan.
Uh we will be speaking uh we will do be doing a mac geek up live at max talk speaking of max on uh the evening of saturday july 12th the time of it seems to be nebulous and that's fine i would have thought we would be doing it at like 7 30 or 8 p.m it's in the max talk schedule at 8 30 all of that doesn't really matter once we're all there and we figure out what time it makes sense to start MacGeekGab once we get out of the room and back into the room after dinner and all that stuff.
But it will be that Saturday evening at some point before we all go to sleep. And you can save 50 bucks on your MacStock registration at MacGeekGab50. So it's Saturday, July 12th. And- Go ahead.
Sorry, it might get more entertaining the later it starts.
It, I, you might not be wrong.
It's for us anyway.
You might not be wrong. That is true. Yep. Yep. Of course, the later it starts, there's a there's a curve where the entertainment increases and the release ability decreases, you see. And the goal would be to be able to release the episodes so that we don't have to record another one.
So, yeah, it'll just be the first time you have to use that tag.
Oh, the explicit tag. Yeah, we did. We did 20 years of the show without ever having to use the explicit tag. So maybe maybe I don't know.
I can change.
Yeah, no, we have no interest in, in changing that. It's, um, it's just, there's, there would be no benefit and I know it would exclude many segments of our audience for a variety of reasons. So there's, it would be no, no gain and, and a loss for all of us. I think so. Yeah. All right. Uh, one last note came from, uh,
¶ Jenn-QT-Space Lens is BACK in Clean My Mac
Jen, one of our friends over at Mac paw saying that a space lens is back in clean my mac version 5.1.0 so space lens is the feature that we used to have in clean my mac and then it went away and clean my mac 5 and now it's back that lets you see where all the storage is being used on your mac and it gives you a visual way of seeing it all and it sorts folders by the size most used at the top so you can dig and delete things and manage all your space so if deleting your snapshots with
onyx isn't enough then uh you can dig in and find out where all of your storage is being consumed so i'm stoked that that came back that was one of my favorite that was one of my most frequently used features of um. What do we clean my Mac? So, yeah. All right. We have actually we have our follow up on focus modes. You we asked and you answered and we have lots of custom focus mode ideas from you all to share. So we will do that in a moment.
Next, though, I want to talk about our first couple of sponsors, because if you're like me, some weeks you're just swimming in meetings,
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¶ Randy-Custom Focus Mode: Church
All right, focus modes. Yeah. You want to kick us off?
I can do that. We got a nice note from Randy who has a cool focus mode. He says, my most used focus mode, church, is triggered by our church location. I can still see notifications on my lock screen, but they don't buzz my watch or phone. I can allow notifications if needed, like when we were on call to watch grandchildren for a pregnant daughter. But the downside is that my friends may text me to see if I can usher and I don't get the notification if I'm already at church.
I find church focus is a great option to manually set in similar situations.
So, yeah. Cool.
But there's more. There is more. But wait, there's more.
But wait, there's less. You want to take us to Derek, Adam? Uh-oh. Did we lose Adam? We might have lost Adam. All right.
Welcome back, Adam. You going to take us to Derek and I'll get the next one?
I'm not sure where Derek. Oh, Adam says he needs to reboot.
¶ Derek-Custom Focus Mode: No Politics!
So we will keep on trucking here. No worries, Adam.
Sounds like a plan.
I will take us to Derek. Derek says, I recently created a focus mode called No Politics that silences alerts from unknown numbers in messages. This is especially helpful while working because I can now tell if a notification on my Apple Watch is from someone in my contacts or just a random solicitation. I'd love for Apple to add an option to iOS for messages similar to the phone where you can silence unknown callers. I'd also like to see silence unknown messages as an option.
Adam is unable to, he said he lost his audio interface, which is why Adam's unable to speak.
But he did leave a note for us. here to share so adam says uh you can silence notifications from unknown senders in settings notifications customized notifications at bottom turn off unknown senders under allow notifications so maybe that will do it but certainly the features that we saw coming in uh ios, 26 would allow even more control over this, the filtering and, uh, and recategorization of, of things. So yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Very good, Derek.
Somehow someone enabled silence,
Adam, but somebody enabled silence, Adam. Yes, that's right.
Let's, let's fix that.
Yeah.
Anyway, well, I can take us to Brian and his, his tip if you like. Yeah. Yeah. So Brian 1092 writes in triggering work focus mode by time and location.
¶ Brian-1092-Triggering work focus mode by time and location
In response to your inquiry on listeners sharing focus modes, I'd like to share an interesting way I implement my work focus. I limit the people and apps that come through, select solid colored home and lock screens, and enable two ways to trigger the focus. The first method is by time. It goes into focus from 7.30 a.m. to 4 p.m. weekdays. It also is set geographically, so it triggers while at that location.
Both.
Continue both conditions ensure i'm in focus when i'm in the office longer than usual and i've attached screenshots so um i guess we could put those in discord and or
No i i don't we don't no no no no we won't share people's screenshots without their permission oh.
It's it only has his uh bank routing number and account number dave what's the problem
But we but you are welcome to share your own screenshots in in discord for sure obviously we do that all the time but yeah it's it's interesting and a good reminder that you know you can set a schedule and a location and and and right like so all of these things kind of can work together but uh but yeah i i like that one that's that's pretty good i like it i'll take us to uh it will take us to harvey next and uh harvey shares that oh now i lost it i had it uh harvey says.
¶ Harvey-1092-Use Focus Modes with the Action button...and when watching Live Sports
I use sleep mode to avoid unwanted calls and school alerts at inconvenient times. After 7.30, I can be reached. I also set up a focus mode called meeting mode, triggered by the side button on my iPhone 15 Pro. It blocks calls and notifications during meetings, doctor's appointments, or eating out wherever I want. Family and certain friends are in the list of allowed to get through if needed. And finally, he says, I use a focus mode inspired by my cable company.
They convinced me to switch from cable to fiber optic streaming, but their faster service is problematic because during live events like a baseball game or a hockey game, their stream is 30 seconds to a minute behind real time. And the inconvenience happens because I usually watch the games on my iPad or iPhone and also on those devices, I receive notifications from sports apps.
So I've created a live TV focus that turns off notifications from sports apps during live events so that I'm not notified of a score happening before I get to see it live, so to speak. He says, I turn it off when the game ends. I like that. That's, you know, for a lot of these, I'm wondering, is there a way to automate it?
Like, could you, and this is where I want like more granularity with shortcuts because it would be great to say like, okay, if there is a game happening for this team and I'm in the, you know, whatever, whichever app he's using to watch the Fubo app or something, you know, whatever, whatever app you're using, YouTube TV. Then enable this focus mode. And like, I don't know that, I don't know. I can't think of a way of making shortcuts do that on the, uh, on the iPhone.
So, oh yeah. Yeah. But not yet.
Not yet. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Yeah. But maybe, maybe someday. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Uh, I guess Steve is next here, huh?
Yes.
Okay. Uh, Steve says I have a personal mode that blocks work related notifications.
¶ Steve-1092-Using Focus Modes to manage notifications and let me know what mode I'm in
This is my favorite. I use it when I power on my phone on the weekends. I use a no nonsense mode for mowing the lawn and housework. It only allows phone calls, texts, and smart lock alerts. That's interesting. I recently set up a mode for only phone calls from my wife and children. When I'm traveling, I want them to be able to call me at night. But I don't want distractions. This works perfectly. It was a bit tricky to set up, but thanks to Google, I found my way.
For each mode, I have a different color home screen, so I know which mode I'm in. Oh, I love this. Yep, this has also helped me when I connect to my VPN. I used to forget to turn off my VPN. Now, when I see the bright yellow screen, I know I'm still connected. I turn my VPN on and off via a shortcut that also manages the wallpaper changes. That is brilliant yeah.
Yeah huh i i actually do that so when i go into podcasting mode so when we're doing the show only you and adam can get a hold of me yeah i have a big microphone as my home screen picture yes so when i look at it later i go oh yeah i'm still in podcasting mode
Super smart i need that visual cue oh same yeah having having visual cues for each of my focus modes by using the lock screen is hugely valuable without that i i would be in i would i would be stuck in podcasting mode especially because that's other than sleep mode podcasting mode is certainly the most restrictive mode that i would go into during a work day and it and you know if i forget to come out of it i i have like that's a problem you know because people will
be texting me family other people at work or whatever and it it takes a little while for me to you know to realize oh hey dum-dum you gotta get out of this focus mode but thankfully i have i have many visual indicators if you have ever watched the live stream the purple lights that light up behind me are also enabled when that focus mode comes on and disabled when that focus mode comes off and that i've used keyboard maestro i think to do that no okay no no this would
be a shortcuts automation on my phone yeah it's a shortcuts automation on my phone that's triggered by the focus mode, And, uh, that way, if I'm leaving the studio and I still see like this corner here, glowing purple, it's like, oh, wait, wait, wait. You still haven't turned it off. Even though it's on my post-flight checklist to turn off the focus mode.
But yeah, that's why it's a checklist.
That's why it's a checklist. That's right. Yes. All right. We have two more.
Yeah. Yeah. So, uh, wait, but wait, there's more.
¶ Henry-1092-Focus modes for night vision, inspiration, sleep, and more
And it really, really catches fish. Henry writes in, focus modes for night vision, inspiration, sleep, and more. Gents, you asked about focus mode usage. I use it mainly for two things, enabling do not disturb and changing my iPhone's lock screen and background images. During the day, I display pictures of my family, dog, and nature to reduce eye strain from bright screens at night. My daughter impresses me with her extensive use of focus modes.
She has one for school that hides distracting apps when she's at school. And, you know, games, things like that don't come up. Another for sleep and one for soccer that displays motivational content and relevant apps. She rarely lets me see her phone set up, so I don't know about the rest. Good for you, Henry's daughter. Don't get caught.
That's right. We had a deal with our kids. Uh i haven't tried to to uh to to use this deal uh in in recent years mainly because they're both well over the age of 18 but we had a deal with our kids that look you know your your device is yours um but at any point in time if we ask to see it you have to show it to us um and it was rare that we that we um used that uh but it it it set the right for our house it set the right tone yeah yeah yeah yeah so i i share that
there are many correct ways of parenting there are many incorrect ways of parenting most of us uh do a mix of both it turns out and uh so i share and you just factor that in just you know there.
You go same here yeah once once our kids turned 18 i went that that's it i'm not you know i'm no longer going to demand to see your stuff we've given you the best guidance we can
Yes you're.
On your own we'll support and help you when and where we can but uh
If you want if you still want guidance ask for it that's right yes yeah yeah yeah so.
I offer it anyway but i get turned down
Yeah of course of course be.
Quiet oh yes ma'am yeah
Yeah.
Especially when we're flying the airplane together like this, this very morning, Becca and I went flying and you know, I'm giving her information.
Hush. Okay. Hush.
Fair enough.
Adam, did you, did you make it back with audio?
Uh so far but things aren't looking
Good oh no oh no although.
It it seems to have now calmed down but yeah so i started noticing everything
¶ Adam’s Audio Issues…Continue
running really really slowly and then saw beach balls and then i went to launch activity monitor and that's what killed everything
Of all and.
Then when when activity monitor finally opened my uh kernel task was pegged at 400 so cpu usage for whatever reason
Fun all right you know that uh that that mac os 26 is the last one that's going to run on any intel max and so maybe apple's trying to tell you something adam well.
I think this is the first i think this is the poorest upgrade yeah they they've done something now to hobble my machine to make sure that i upgrade
I i will say i was uh notes is not the most efficient app specifically when it comes to syncing i was sitting yesterday out on our patio organizing the show notes and and really organizing the agenda and because of some of the things i was doing i was making very minor edits to the notes we highlight some parts of it or whatever each edit we and we have each of your questions or tips or whatever in as a note and it's a synced folder obviously synced for all of my iCloud but it's
a shared folder too so it's synced amongst everybody's any edit i made to any note would peg one of the you know cpus or or threads i should.
On my m2 macbook air for 20 seconds uh and notes would beach ball and then once i got the note set we have two folders that we share one is a prep folder and one is the live show folder and i once i got it all set i would move it to the live show and that then took another 20 seconds of notes being completely unresponsive during the show we are reading from your notes and then also filing them once we read it so it's no longer in the live show folder and i wonder if that might because
i've had it even on my mac studio here which is very much not an intel mac uh where notes goes you know beach ball in the middle of the show and we have to like vamp a little bit or something before i can get to the next one did you lose things adam, Oh, no. Adam's audio died again. Oh, man.
That hurts.
Huh.
I can see your lips moving, Adam. Hold on. Speak very slowly and clearly.
What a fascinating thing.
And I've noticed the same thing with notes, Dave. It drives me nuts when it'll just beach ball. It's horrible.
Yeah.
Yeah. It's crazy. Fish shake. Fish shake, Apple. Fish shake. It shouldn't be that hard to move some text around.
Yeah, for sure. Yes, yes. This should be doable for all of us. Yeah. Yeah. All right. I will take us to our final focus mode sharing here, and we'll see if Adam can sort his audio enough to get us back to the show.
¶ Darrin-Custom Focus Modes: Morning, Daytime, Evening, Sleep
So Darren says, I have four focus modes, morning, daytime, evening, and sleep, all automated by time of the day. Each has a unique lock screen, home screen wallpaper, and each has its own single home screen. Ah, with different apps. Okay. For example, morning's home screen is a large widget stack with the podcast app, the stocks, and news, things I look at in the morning. Daytime has different content as the others. I find this setup works great for me.
I love that. I don't know that I would be able to spend the time to customize it the way I would want it, but... But yeah, I don't know. Yeah. So, yeah, there you go. We've lost Adam again. Hopefully we hopefully Adam gets to come back because we we miss you when you're not here, Adam.
Well, plus he's got questions he's answered.
Yes, that's true. Yeah, we're going to have to talk about adjusting the agenda on the fly. We're going to if Adam can't make it back for the rest of the show, we're going to have to we're going to have to fly by the seat of our pants, which is not entirely different from how we normally do things. Well, Adam sorts that out and we figure out which of your questions we're going to answer. I want to take a minute and talk about our next couple of sponsors.
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Well, they reworked the internals, making big file editing and multi-file grep faster than ever. You'll feel it. Seriously. Markdown fans? Headings now fold by structure. Git users? Better controls. Want to convert accented text to plain ASCII? There's a one-click tool for that, too. Plus, chat GPT worksheets are still there. Your favorite AI, now living inside of BBEdit. Don't get caught with anything less. Try BBEdit free for 30 days at barebones.com slash store.
And if you're upgrading, discounted pricing awaits. BBEdit, it still doesn't suck. And now it's so good, it might actually be cheating. Go check it out. And our thanks to BBEdit for sponsoring this episode. All right. Oh, hey, Adam's back. Are you actually?
Yes, I think I'm here.
All right. Sweet.
We'll see if it stays this time. I don't know. I just reset my audio interface and also rebooted my Firewire interface or whatever.
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. All right.
That thing's pretty hot right now, so I don't know if it's overheating or what.
Oh, interesting. Okay. Well, then I will go back to what I wanted to do next on the agenda here, because I wanted to have you here for this conversation, if possible, is Tom had a question about focus modes. He says, I use focus modes sparingly because I can't set them up specifically. For example, I want to block all calls and notifications for an hour starting at 8 p.m. On the first Wednesday of each month. None of my Apple equipment settings allow me to select only the first Wednesday.
I also have similar issues with the calendar when creating recurring events. Sometimes I can select a specific day of the week and month and sometimes I can't. So any thoughts on how he might set focus modes more granularly?
I don't actually know if I actually know. I'm one of these people that don't use a lot of focus modes but you can tie them to calendar events though, right? Yes, correct so could you trigger it that way?
¶ Tom-How do I set more-granular focus modes?
Although he was saying he still struggles with that even in calendar, right? So like, you know,
Yeah, exactly.
Some kind of recurring calendar event.
I mean, I think the Mac is going to need to be involved with this. Right. Thankfully, the focus modes can sync amongst all the devices. So and I think the Mac is going to need to be awake at the times that we want these triggers to run. In theory, calendar would be the way to do this because you can trigger the Apple script from right from the calendar.
But keyboard maestro would also be a way to to do this and the nice part about keyboard maestro although i guess you could accomplish this with apple script too is you don't like i i was thinking of it in the calendar with two events right one that starts on the odd wednesday at 8 p.m and then another that starts on the odd wednesday at 9 p.m an hour later right but with keyboard maestro and maybe even with apple script you could just say okay do this on wednesday
at 8 p.m wait an hour and then undo you know and have it all as part of one sort of script if you will.
Right yeah i don't know that's a that's a tough
One yeah i know i know there are third party, shortcuts uh extensions add-ons things that people have found very creative ways to extend the functionality of shortcuts so if you know of something that even would get us close or even might do something different with shortcuts uh let us know feedback at mackeycub.com because i i know at least i'm missing out on some of these third-party shortcuts add-ons and i i you know we like to know
about stuff here and you've probably told us that it's been 20 years folks we're we're we've forgotten a lot of things and also you know our memories aren't what they used to be. Thankfully, search functionality works. All right, shall we go to Judy, Adam? Pete, you want to read that for me?
Yeah, I can do that. I will read Judy's question here.
¶ Judy-Using alias' and question about keeping Messages...
She writes in, says, Hello, all. I was a listener for a long time with you, Adam, and have listened to MacGeekGab for a long time as well. As I am now 74 years young, not old. Not all the topics are of interest to me, nor am I able to be as geeky as I used to be, but I still enjoy the show immensely. Well, thank you. I'm working on my family history and have large documents and books that I want to keep on a portable SSD.
I created generic aliases for them and stored them on my M1 1TB MacBook Pro. When I plug the SSD into my MacBook Pro, it says the alias copy can't be open because the original item can't be found. Can I redirect all the generic aliases to the original on the SSD. Second question, in messages, I have my sister's texts between us. Will they remain there until I delete them? She passed away last December, and those texts are important to me.
I want to keep them until I'm ready to delete them. Will they still be on my phone until then? Thank you for all you do. Have a great weekend, Judy. And let me say, Judy, I'm sorry for your loss.
Yep, me as well. Me as well. On the alias thing, you know, my first question would be, I'm curious how you created those aliases. I'm assuming they were just done in the Finder, sort of in the typical way. If you did it that way, I mean, they should work as long as your external drive is connected and mounted properly. So you could try doing a file get info on the alias to verify that the original path, that it's still pointing to the original file on the external drive.
Because if, well, one, if it's not connected, it's not going to find it. But two, if you moved the original files on the external after creating the alias, that could break it. If you renamed the external volume, that could break the alias or you rename the file. I mean, there's a lot of things that could actually break that. If you check all those things and it's still fine, I would say just try recreating the alias and see if that fixes things. So, you know, remove the alias and just redo it.
So those are all the things that I would try with related to the alias itself. I don't know if either of you have other tips for that.
Yeah, I know. I mean, recreating it would be the way. Yeah. I i don't know it's an external drive right correct yeah so yeah.
They're pointing to an external
Drive you don't want to how you could create a soft link from the terminal with ln-s, um i don't i don't know that i i would try recreating the alias first before making it more complex than necessary yes judy judy already said she's not i got that super geeky yeah yeah Yeah, right.
Well, and even for me, like, you know, I'm, I'm comfortable with LN slash S, but like there's, there's times when you don't want to have, you don't want to have a, an important piece of your system with that at its, at like as part of its infrastructure, if you will.
So yeah, exactly.
Yeah. All right.
And then on the messages thing, that should be pretty straightforward. I would just go into settings on your iPhone under apps messages. And make sure the Keep Messages option under the Message History is set to Forever. That should allow you to keep them until you're ready to remove them. Another thing is if you want to remove them and want to keep them, that I would recommend is iMazing.
I put a link to the actual article on how to do this, but iMazing has a feature that allows you to export messages to your Mac from your device in text or PDF format. So you could archive those to either of those formats and then keep them forever off of iMessages or the cloud once you're ready to remove them. That way you can have that archive as long as you want.
Yeah. Yeah. I, I, yeah, I have so many things to say about Apple's, um, lack of attention to the fact that so many of us have tens of gigabytes of messages that we need to store on all of our devices right now in order to keep them, um, without being, without using something like I'm amazing to archive them off. But it's ridiculous that – maybe it's so that they sell larger and larger capacity iPhones to us over the years.
There you go.
Well, I need to look at this on iCloud. But I think because of the California laws and the GDPR laws and stuff like that too, I think most cloud services are supposed to have a way for you to be able to export all your data and take it with you. So I would imagine, actually, I haven't looked into this, but I would bet that iCloud has a way where you can offline all that stuff.
I don't know what format it would be in. But I'm assuming you can go in and download that stuff from your iCloud.com account, potentially.
Yeah. Huh. Now, here's something interesting. And I need to look this up on my Mac now, too, because I'm finding an inconsistency. On my iPhone, I only have 5.13 gigs of storage used devices. For messages uh and now i know that there are like 40 gigs of messages stored in iCloud yeah on my mac i have 42.27 gigabytes of storage taken up by messages so evidently it is syncing all of my message history down to each of my macs something i would deem unnecessary but my, my iPhone is not doing that.
And I sure wish I could tell my Mac not to do that too. That would be really, really nice.
Seems like that's, yeah, redundant storage.
You know, there is a setting in iCloud messages that I saw just yesterday I was looking at this where you can turn off syncing for an individual Mac, but I don't know what that means. I don't know if that means that you don't then get messages there or does it just mean that they're not actually syncing?
Oh, yeah. Good question. Yes, I don't. I could try that because obviously I have more than one Mac, as I mentioned, and so I could turn it off on this one. You know, this is a Mac that has a 512 gig internal SSD from which I boot. So being able to free up, you know, 37 of those 42 gigs to get this down to five, that would be wonderful. It would save me, you know.
It'd be better to have that take up 1% than 10% of your hard drive.
Yes, right. Yeah, because I don't need, like if I'm syncing my messages to iCloud, which I am, I don't need it on every one of my Macs. Candidly, I don't necessarily need it on any of my Macs if I'm to trust keeping it all in iCloud. I would probably choose to keep it synced to one of my macs and not all of them if i had that granular choice but yeah why is the iphone like there's no choice on either device it's just yeah this is what we've downloaded so um you know you're good to go your.
Choice has been made for
You yeah yeah.
You know i'd also like to say judy you're kicking butt you're 74 years old there are people in their 50s who can barely spell SSD, let alone create an alias when they plug it in. So don't sell yourself short. This is great.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Uh, all right. Where are we now? Where are we going now? I'm the one that's all over the place. Oh, we're going to JP. No, let's. Yeah. Speaking of messages. Yes.
Um, yeah, well, of course, I was busy. Give me just a second and I'll call it up. I was busy, uh, looking at the question and listening instead of getting ready. So JP actually has a short question. So he writes in The gents can't figure
¶ JP-Why can't I search in Recently Deleted Messages?
out why the search box in recently deleted messages window never allows me to search for anyone in the list I wish to recover. Any ideas from the Oracle?
Well, the Oracle has the day off, but I'll take a stab at this. Right on. um he he he sent a picture a screenshot of messages on his mac and he went into recently deleted and there is a search bar at the top and you can click in that i tried this on my mac you can click in that box you can tap all over whatever you want to do the cursor never appears there so So I think he has found a user interface bug. I don't know what Apple's intention is with this, whether it should not be searchable
or it should be. And for some reason, that is just not exposed in the right way in the in the UX. So I would suggest, you know, sending this to feedback at our Apple dot com slash feedback. I don't think feedback at apple.com works, but apple.com slash feedback would be the place I would suggest sending this. So, yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
It's just grayed out, isn't it?
It's just, it's, yeah, it's effectively. Yes. Right. It's, it's grayed out in, in, in terms of functionality. Yeah.
Looks pretty.
Yep.
Totally useless. They're pretty general, but can they fight?
Mike, I feel like we need to move along before too many of Pete's military euphemisms
¶ JT-What is 5G Standalone and do I want it?
start coming into play and no better than JP to lead us down this next path here. Hello guys. I just wanted to chime in because I know you guys are both mobile users, well Pete and Dave that I know of. I have a new setting because i've just switched to mint mobile called standalone 5g apparently it offers lower latency better network efficiency and improved upload speeds.
And some advanced features which i don't really understand fully and then of course it's a long time a long-term feature as it's noted but what i do notice is that some cons to it is it's limited coverage. So being in somewhat rural Idaho, I don't know if this provides me the best use case scenario. It may be inconsistence at times. It may have some limitations due to SIM, which I don't think is a problem with the iPhone.
One thing that's concerning to me is one of the cons that I was able to discover is battery drain. It's a little bit more power hungry than your LTE.
And then of course you could have voice call issues. Anyway, I want to just see what your guys's thoughts were on this and chime in on this as you guys both dave and pete as i mentioned before both have mint mobile anyway thanks keep up the great work and i look forward to hearing your answer so this is interesting thank you jp sorry jt there was a jp earlier uh i didn't realize that this was even a thing but but he's absolutely right if you go uh and it is
carrier dependent but if you go into settings cellular and then if you have two sims pick your sim and then go into cellular data options and go into the voice and data section where you would choose you know between lte 5g auto 5g on there is a 5g standalone slider there and uh and then once you turn it on uh voice over 5g standalone at least for me also comes up and uh anecdotal reports indicate that this should help improve battery life um what it what it does is it.
That's the right way to say this um in 5g standalone what this means is that the phone and and the network are no longer using lte slash 4g as the core communications protocol right even when your phone is connected to 5g uh a lot of sort of the the fundamental signaling is evidently happening over lte which makes sense right as as things are migrating to 5g you still need the phone to be able to talk to all of the towers and do its thing and,
this turns that off and says nope if 5G is available use 5G for everything and. It might save some battery life. What it really does is actually lets our devices start taking advantage of all of those 5G features that we started hearing about a couple of years ago. The lower latency of 5G, the network slicing and segmentation that can happen with 5G.
And while this stuff doesn't really give us a real world, a feelable and noticeable impact on our phones, it is necessary for things that would be coming down the road like connected auto, medical devices, right? Those kinds of things where that low latency is a baseline requirement in order for these things to work the way that we would need them to work in near real time and all that stuff.
So I have turned this on on my phone and we got this email from JP or I saw it from JP, I don't know, five or six days ago. And so I haven't noticed an issue with battery life. I haven't noticed any issues at all. I've been mainly in my home area. Candidly, I've been mainly at home, which means I've been on Wi-Fi. But I have left the house and been on, you know, not Wi-Fi and haven't had any issues getting messages or calls or, in fact, things have just worked fine. So, yeah, it's interesting.
There are some articles that we can link to here about why this matters. There's actually a good one at Verizon that I read. So I'll put that in the show notes if you want to do some future reading or some self-guided, uh discovery on this but yeah it's interesting 5g standalone didn't even know it was a thing so uh.
My only question on that so it does not impact the fallback when you're out of 5g this is only something to improve when you're in 5g
Areas correct correct it based on my you know single digit day limited experience yes i i have seen my phone on lte and obviously it's worked so yeah it's not saying don't ever use lg lte it's it's saying when you're on 5g use 5g, from the from the full stack from the from the top to the bottom which i always thought that's what it was doing like i didn't i didn't know there was there was this interim step and i i would assume eventually this switch goes
away because it becomes just the default for things right uh but you know not yet so yeah yeah yeah interesting stuff it was jt just it was jt i yes yeah i i did correct myself right well.
No then you went back to it
Oh then i said i.
Don't want you getting more emails
Okay i can't help myself we went right before we answered jp's question about recently deleted messages so juliet.
Tango not juliet papa
There it is yeah we're gonna have to start using the nato phonetic alphabet that's right right all.
Right let me take us out of this with i think is our last uh last question from from mike here yep
¶ Mike-Will adding an IOT network solve my headaches...or add more?
Mike says, gentlemen, and the other guy, it's the season to address my network issue. Hey, I heard that.
I can hear you.
It is the season to address the network issue. Six months ago, I upgraded from my Synology Mesh to the TP-Link Deco 3 unit. It wasn't much of an improvement. I've had a variety of Internet of Things devices, computers, a Synology disk station, phones, Apple TVs, iPads, and a partridge pear-shaped tree. I received a recommendation to try Eero, so I bought the 6e Pro 3 unit and set aside the decos. Eeros are great and make managing the kids and media easier.
Now the question. Can I set up the decos to manage the IoT devices while keeping the other items on Eero's? I don't need a VLAN on Eero, but I read that I can connect the main Deco to the main Eero and assign it different IP addresses or subnets. Is this possible? I'm considering this, but I value your advice before making a decision.
Yeah. The short answer is yes, you can do this. The question would be why. And even even if we can answer why, is it the smartest thing to do? And because the issue is managing things so that the Wi-Fi radios from both the Eero and the Deco are. Aren't interfering with each other and making your Wi-Fi worse in the process. So if you're going to do this, you would use something like Wi-Fi Explorer, which is part of Setup, and a great little app to show you what channels are being used.
Eero doesn't really give you an option to control channels, although I think if you reach out to Eero Support, you can have them fix channels for your network if you need that from them. I think in the Deco, you do have a little more granular control over the channels. But another solution would be to just use the guest network on the Eero. And that way, it's all using the same radios, but segmenting it at a different layer. I was going to say in software, which is sort of true.
But again, I want to come back to why. If security is a concern, but as you said, you're opening things up to let your main network devices and the IOT network devices both see each other, then you're effectively bypassing that security anyway. Right, right. Because if you're allowing things to see each other, then what's the security? And so that's where anytime anybody asks me about setting up a separate IOT
network, that's where I kind of stop. It's like, well, what's what's the benefit and what's going to be the headache? And certainly adding more Wi-Fi radios isn't necessarily always a good thing. In fact, often it's a bad thing. And then also, you know, where is the where where and how are you segmenting the network so that you're actually getting some of that security that you're going for? So I based on what I know, Mike, I would say I don't recommend it. But you could do it.
I'm just not sure why it would be a net positive. Yeah yeah agreed.
All right anything to have there all right you're here
Uh yep there you go uh we have a we have like i don't know two more minutes uh i noticed some uh things coming and i'm looking to see if i if i had moved this over i don't know that i did uh but there's some new features coming to the apple podcast app and i can't find my note about this uh in in podcasts in ios 26 uh here we are right now i found it um apple podcasts will add an enhanced dialogue
¶ New features coming to Apple’s Podcasts app
feature similar to what like pocket casts and overcasts offer to amplify voices for clearer listening it offers playback speeds from 0.5 to 3x and like you can in other podcast apps you can save your preferred speed per show so if you like listening to mac geek ab at 1.5 but like you listen to say strong songs and you want to hear music at its normal speed you can set that one to one and you don't have just an app wide setting anymore um the browse
button is renamed to new uh to discover new and popular shows uh themable icons suggest that apple's podcast might not be the purple app uh anymore although it probably will be by default. And newer airpods will support that studio quality audio recording uh which uh we talked about in the last episode that would potentially help us all as podcast listeners so uh.
Yeah so there you go so those are yeah those are the new features for uh for apple podcasts that are in theory coming in uh in the in well or in the betas so there you go yeah.
Yeah hey i have a quick audible here go um i think i said that i would uh i did end up installing uh vision os 26 yes
¶ Adam installed visionOS 26
um and i set up my new uh persona unbelievable the the quality difference of that oh really cool versus the original like it is leaps and bounds in my opinion uh i actually look like me uh this week i got this week i this this week i got on a i got on a zoom call with a co-worker didn't tell them and they didn't say anything and i asked them at the end and they said well yeah it was kind of a little weird but they didn't just not a
lot weird they didn't immediately notice that it was that i was a virtual me not a not a real me
Wow okay okay.
Huh so and then the other thing is widgets are awesome okay
So they're as good as we saw yeah.
Yeah i mean i had a had an issue with my clock widget where it went bad and I had to re re put it back on the wall. But, um, you know, it's beta, that's fine, but no, it's really cool. And what's really cool about it that I didn't think about is, um, it sets up a sense of space since they're fixed in a space. So it's really neat now that when I put my Vision Pro on in my living room, that I've got a photo widget over there, and I've got my clock widget on the wall over there.
It adds to the space virtually and creates this fixed environment. And I would imagine as you put things in different spaces, then it it adds to that i didn't i never thought how that would actually feel but it was pretty cool that makes sense experience okay
Yeah so you're you're getting these become virtual environments as you said right.
Virtual parts of your real environment which is really cool it's like additive to your to your actual environment you know it's a thing that you could only experience in the vision pro but it actually adds to the experience you know because it's like oh this is kind of cool yeah my you know my photo widgets there and i have it rotating with my favorite photos so there's a new photo on the wall every time i put my my vision pro on to do something
in my living room yeah and then oh what time is it well then i can just look over at the wall and there's the clock and
There's there it is right i i'm curious and i and i realize what i'm about to say would require you to be using your vision pro on the regular but maybe these kinds of features will will cause that.
But once
You are using it on the regular and you used to for example seeing a clock on the wall over there and now you don't have it on you know how often are you looking at the wall to see what time it is only to realize that there's no clock there you know.
I haven't done that yet i haven't done that yet i know what you're talking about yeah yeah absolutely i also got an opportunity to uh with uh listener barry and and george um we did uh a game called demio which is kind of like a miniatures uh uh dungeons and dragons style game um and then we also played some apple game room games yeah um and that was that was super fun i didn't get a chance to do that experience yet and that is definitely an experience um
that's perfect for the vision pro and and it was a lot of fun so that was a new experience so i'm try to use my vision pro a little bit more now yeah um so yeah i
Like that okay all right all right i i was gonna say there's hope for this technology but that implies that i thought that i didn't think there was before i i've like.
Yeah i
There has always been like to me this is a um, you know, public beta test of the, of the, not just the hardware, but the, the technology and the concept for Apple to just get this out there and learn and start doing things. And I know some people are using your vision pros on a daily basis, but it's not many of you, right?
Yeah. Yeah. And the other thing, the new, the new photo thing, I forget what they're calling the new photo thing that now works on the phone, um, to make spatial style photos, but it's a different, it's not a spatial photo it's it's called something different it's very deliberate because when because the vision pro you can take a photo and make it a spatial photo when you make it a spatial photo the depth kind of comes more out like out from the frame so it's more toward
you yeah this other style of photo is more like 3d movies on the vision pro or uh what you get you know on your lock screen where it kind of it's in it goes in the depth goes into the frame so the background kind of goes further away and foreground stuff is still on that flat plane of your of your vision you're
Reminding me of when i went to the theater to see avatar because that was the first 3d movie where it went like it things didn't come out of the screen so much as i looked into a a virtual or a 3d environment and.
It's like you're looking out the window at the
Yeah or something yeah yeah.
Yeah it's more than so okay it does both and they are two very different things i think i like the spatial photos a little bit better but the fact is this other version will work on a 2d device because of how it does it right how it's doing the depth stuff and we
Got to see that a little bit at the the little 20th anniversary gathering that we had here at the house last night rn doug from uh discord was here and had put ios 26 on his phone and was showing us some of those pictures and it it was the best version of that kind of 3d thing that i've ever seen on a 2d phone right we've seen other apps that can do it but ain't nothing doing it as well as Apple's baked in tech. Interesting. Yeah, cool. Awesome. Well, that brings us to where things wrap.
Thanks for listening, everybody. Thanks for the first 20-year block. Here's to the next one. Thanks to the Sonaflow folks, the OneMore folks with their Sonaflow headphones,
¶ MGG 1094 Outtro
for partnering with us for this month's giveaway at MacEcub.com slash giveaway. So make sure you go join that. Thanks to Cashfly for providing all the bandwidth to get the show from us to you. If you didn't hear enough of Adam today because his audio cut out a couple times, make sure to listen to the Debut Film podcast and you'll get all the Adam you like and more. Pilot Pete's, so there I was for aviation enthusiasts and, of course, my business brain and gig gab.
Thanks for hanging out with us, folks. Thanks for, seriously, thanks for, you know, 20 years and counting. It's pretty cool.
Zoe is quite the optimist.
It is all of you.
She looks forward to the next 20 years, 40 years, 60 years.
I mean, maybe.
I hope my knee holds out that long.
Yeah, exactly. But it's pretty cool that we get to do this with all of you. That's, I can't, I can't emphasize that enough. So I'll just say thank you. And yeah, thanks. Do you have anything else to add? Are there three words? I don't know.
I would say, don't get caught.
That'll work. Made on Mac. Thank you, thank you.
See ya. Happy birthday.
Later.