Tab-itis Is Real...and It's OK!

He says, I often use Siri to set alarms during the day before a meeting or a call to ensure I don't get heads down and miss something. That's not bad advice, Todd. This creates a lot, lots of alarms in the clock app. No big deal, but I thought I should clear them out. Long swiping to the left deletes an alarm with no prompt. But again, there are a lot of them. So I told Siri, delete all alarms.

Much to my amazement, it worked. I was prompted to confirm, delete all alarms, yes or no. I tapped yes, and they all disappeared. As I tried this on my Apple Watch and again, received a prompt, tapped yes, and they all disappeared. It's really nice when the S lady actually does as requested.

Thank you, Todd, for that. Get more tips like this, plus your questions answered today on MacGeekCab1090 for Monday, May 19th, either May Ray Day, celebrating the rays of the sun, or National Devil's Food Cake Day 2025. Greetings, folks, and welcome to MacGeekCab, the show where we take tips like that and share them. We take cool stuff found and share them.

We take your questions and share them and hopefully share answers along the way so that we can each learn at least five new things every single time we get together. Our sponsors for this episode include a new one, Quince.com slash MGG. You can elevate your closet, get free shipping and 365 day returns at quince.com slash MGG. I'm wearing a shirt from them that only cost less than 30 bucks.

This stuff is, and it's like quality and great. We'll talk more about that in a little bit, including talking about the Insta360 X5 camera, which is this very cool 360 degree camera and BB edit. One of my favorite apps that's running all the time on my Mac. We'll talk more about all of them in a little bit. For now, here in Durham, New Hampshire, I'm Dave Hamilton.

All of that will be in the show notes, too, at MacGeekGab.com. and if you visit macgeekup.com you can have you can sign up for the mailing list which really just means you're having the show notes delivered to you every week so you don't have to go and hunt them down you get all the links to the things we talk about and all that stuff and of course our monthly giveaway for May an Eero Outdoor 7 I think they're giving away a few of them not just one nice make sure to enter I know I want one

yeah great well enter the giveaway Adam macgeekup.com slash giveaway that's how

So I came up with this one myself. I won't go into the whole long story, but essentially my daughter gets Amazon packages to a central delivery device or box. And I get the notices because it's my account. but frequently they come.

And all you have to do instead is when you get a message like that that you need to forward from your watch, press and hold the message like you're going to give it a thumbs up or or a happy face or something like that and then scroll it up scroll the icons up off the screen and right below that it says share message tap that and your contacts come up for messages and i just tap my daughter's face really and and there it goes yeah so easy way to

share a text message from your watch to somebody else that that needs it that.

One frustration with finder is that my file names have gotten longer and more descriptive, but the default column width hide the end of the file name. I know you can drag the handle to make each column wider, But I have just realized that it's possible to make those changes carry over to a future finder window. Just hold down the option key while dragging the handle between columns and the column width will remain the same the next time you open a window. David. So David had that tip.

this too quickly. We did cover this on a previous show 16 years ago. But you need to go back and listen to all of them, folks. John writes in, hey, surely this has come up in previous years. And maybe I forgot I knew this. I finally reached my limit of frustration when trying to click the mail icon in my dock, but accidentally kept clicking another app icon. It was pages in this case, and it screwed up his workflow.

So this morning, I turned to my trustee, although not always trusted, sidekick, ChetGPT, and asked if there was some way to insert a spacer into the dock. And, well, there is. So we'll put the – it's a terminal command, and we'll put that in the show notes, unless you want to pull over and write it down right now.

but certainly will put an end to my misclicks. Or is that Ms. Clicks? Very clever. For those more adventurous, perhaps there's a way to adjust the space or tile dimensions. I looked for a way, and I do not see one. And trustee but not trusted, ChatGPT also agrees there's not a way to adjust the dimensions. And thanks for many, many years of invaluable info. Great conversation and generally keeping me company on a lot of commutes. John.

John, thank you for listening, and thank you for that excellent quick tip. Yeah. I thought we started to discuss it last week and I remembered seeing it.

but it definitely made a difference, is in ChatGPT settings, personalization, customized ChatGPT, you can give it a, there's a section where you get to put in what traits should ChatGPT have. And we've talked about this before, but one of the ones I've put in is overall, tell me what you think is correct and accurate without prioritizing what you think I want to hear. It's OK not to know. And it's OK to say you might be wrong.

Tell it like it is. Don't sugarcoat responses. I realize that I've been very redundant with what I'm saying to Chad GPT in here in hopes that one of these phrases is the one that sticks and they it it has. So, um, yeah, so it's often wrong,

I set up an Eero LAN in a friend's house. All was well until a guest showed up and asked for the network password. She used the LAN constantly, but of course, never had to actually enter the password and forgotten it, as had I. Solution? Open the password app And there is a menu called Wi-Fi, which lists all the networks that your phone knows about with their passwords. Kind of a special case, but a lifesaver.

Of course, it was written down, but where? Well, I hope it wasn't written down anywhere, Mac. Hopefully it was in a different password manager, but we'll see. Anyway, cheers, Mac.

It just seems to me that would be one you would want on a five. Yeah. It's wifi. But what I actually wound up doing that is putting it into my, an ethernet cable into my Eero and into that back of that cable box to get rid of that hassle. So um uh and then uh.

of like guest networks and all of that uh plume is one of the mesh wifi companies they've they i mean you can still get their stuff uh and it's good stuff it's uh but they've more targeted the enterprise um like the the corporate b2c kind of thing where they like i think comcast xfinity's mesh is a plume thing so they've they've kind of gone that route but you can still buy a direct and and all that and they were the first consumer grade Wi-Fi where I saw the ability to designate

Which network somebody was on the main network, the guest network, a restricted network, whatever, not based on SSID by choosing, you know, Dave's Wi-Fi or Dave's Wi-Fi guest, but by the password people use. So it would be Dave's Wi-Fi and I would use one password and get access to everything. And I could give my guests a different password for the same SSID. And that's how it delineated which network to put them on. And I mean,

it all makes sense. It's all on the same radios, just like a guest network. And I'm pretty sure I can do that with my Unify 2. I have not, as I mentioned, but I'm pretty sure Unify lets you do that. And I know so does a lot of the sort of enterprise-grade ones are built to do that for sure.

But um we had a problem down at tideline where the sonos was connecting to something based on a password that seth had set up to restrict things and it caused a problem for like two months but anyway it was that network is massively over-engineered but but i digress um

does that he actually the quick tip is twofold. One is he figured a way to use the technology to his benefit or his parents. A well-known quick tip is that you can merge calls on the iPhone to conference a call. I've known this for a long time, but didn't realize I needed it until recently. I call my parents once a week on their landlines so they can use both extensions to talk. Remember those days? Yeah. But my dad is hard of hearing and always struggles to hear.

However, his hearing aid is linked to his cell phone and he hears fine with it. The obvious solution, once it occurred to me, was to call their landline, then add a call and merge his cell phone to the call. Conversations are so much better this way for all of us. His parents are 90 and 91. And the bonus tip is, and I wholeheartedly agree with this, Tim, call your parents regularly while you still can. Thanks for that, Tim.

This new Insta360 X5 camera is exactly that. Talk about cool stuff found. This is their flagship 360-degree camera, and it's packed with everything you'd want. 8K, 360-degree video, next-level low-light performance, user-replaceable lenses. Is these things are built tougher than my studio desk, which is saying something. And here's the magic. You take this thing, you hit record, and the X5 captures everything around you.

Then, later, you frame the perfect shot using Insta360's AI tools, kind of like a time-traveling director with an edit button. And the invisible selfie stick effect, it's real. It makes it so that you just don't see the selfie stick, and it seems like it's kind of like a drone's following you, but without any noise or a license or neighbor complaints or anything like that.

And it's waterproof to 49 feet. It's got a battery that lasts up to 185 minutes, and the new InstaFrame mode records both flat and 360 video at the same time. So it's perfect for fast sharing, so you get stuff right away, and then you can do your high-quality editing and slicing and dicing later. Don't get caught filming like it's 2010 and to bag a free 45-inch invisible selfie stick worth another $25 with your Insta360 X5 standard package purchase. Easy for me to say.

Insta360 X5 standard package purchase. There it is. Head to store.insta360.com and use our promo code MGG. So it's store.insta360.com. Use promo code MGG to bag that free selfie stick. It's available for the first 30 standard package purchases only. See, I said it. Go create something epic. And our thanks to Insta360 for sponsoring this episode.

All right. Jerry asks our first question this week, says, I wanted to ask a two part question in the house that I lease with another person. We both experience issues with Apple TV. It freezes and then starts playing. It doesn't matter what you show or you're watching. He says, I'm wondering if it is because it's an older house and the Wi-Fi signal is weaker as it travels from one floor to the other.

Also, I'm wondering, would a booster for the Wi-Fi help? If so, are there any reasonable ones to look into purchasing? Thanks so much and apologize for the long question. That's not a long question. It's a perfect length question. Adam, do you have a perfect length answer?

Right. So you can do that kind of location testing and just validate that, hey, am I losing signal to the upstairs? It sounds like the Apple TV is upstairs and the Wi-Fi, I'm assuming, access point is downstairs. I have a question regarding that because I had been told for years, and I don't know if this is true, I just took someone's word for it, that at least with a standard Wi-Fi router with the antennas and stuff like that, that the signal travels better downward than upward.

But I don't know if that's true or not. That was just an old wives' tale someone had told me.

But, um, but yeah, I mean, it could be anything. I would assume, and maybe there's no good reason to make this assumption, but I will continue to make it because I'm strong in my convictions, strong and wrong, is that something built to sit on a table would have an antenna array engineered to go up and out so that you're not giving the table the best Wi-Fi experience it could have.

And also, most internet connections come into a ground floor of a house, just because that's how that usually works, a wired internet connection anyway. And so the assumption would be, okay, the router's got to be where the internet connection comes in, and so let's go up and out. But again, I'm, you know.

And then he when he perhaps while he was working there but certainly even after he left he created a tool that we all used for a long time called i stumbler uh i believe he has stopped development of that now and it's been decades and and wi-fi explorer is the app that we all use uh now at least the one i go to but he this was in the 2.4 gigahertz days He said oh if you've got two antennas on a 2.4 gigahertz router the best way to do it is to set them perpendicular from one another do one

straight up and down and one straight you know parallel to the to the ground but that was with 2.4 gigahertz antennas and a dipole and you know all of that stuff and all of that is is in the past because now we have you know more than two antennas on every router and more more frequency ranges and so leave it up to the manufacturer there's

even have or use? And then same thing on the routers and things like that. I would say if you're at the point where you're looking for a booster, I've personally never had good experience with those. The improvement that I got was moving to mesh. And I would say like maybe it's time for a Wi-Fi upgrade to like a mesh system or something like that. If that's truly the problem is getting from one point in the house or a space to another point.

But I mean, I know people use boosters. Again, I've never had personal success with them, but maybe there are good ones out there.

But the issue is people put the because of the guidance i don't want to make it sound like you know people are just doing something for no good reason that the guidance is oh if you need a better signal in your bedroom put a booster in the bedroom it's like well if you need better signal in the bedroom the booster's not going to get the signal to amplify it right so you're going to have a great connection to the booster and the booster's going to have the same crappy connection

back to your main Wi-Fi that you previously had. And sometimes that's not true because it's powered and they're able to do some things with the antennas and maybe eke out a little bit of extra signal strength or whatever. But by and large, that is true. And so the trick with boosters and with mesh points is to put them sort of along the way so that they can take a signal and a good signal from a spot where there is a good one and expand that, extend that.

And if you do that with a range extender slash booster, it can work. I mean, Mesh really is just a bunch of boosters that all know how to talk with each other and coordinate with each other. Right. I mean, at the end of the day, that's what's going on there. There's not there's not a lot of magic, except there is magic in that when they know how to talk to each other and they can coordinate and do all the things and give you advice like, hey, this one's too far away.

We know because we see both ends, you know, that kind of thing. So, yeah. So boosters boosters got a bad rap because they were the sort of the consensus of instructions on them was was misguided. I was like yeah just put it in the bedroom yeah yeah you got a great signal here it

okay, yeah, I'm getting my full gigabit there. So I know everything coming into the house is perfect. Now I know my issues somewhere on my network.

But yeah, so 15 megabits is, but 15, you don't need 15. Like three for Netflix anyway is going to be fine. And I would say three for most things is going to be fine. My daughter had, when she was in Italy, their connection to our house was...

Not the fastest she could get a decent connection to netflix she could get a decent connection to like apple tv plus to stream but in terms of getting to our plex server here she had to set things to about three megabits sometimes two to get a consistent thing which which sucks because she had a super fast connection there and you know we have gigabit fiber here and so i was like yep it's just something in between if we could tell it how to route differently maybe we'd get better

But anyway, and she was able to watch things fine at two or three megabits per second. It all comes in pretty good with the tech that we get today.

And you can set it for when an app is opened and when an app is closed. And the phone app is choosable from the list of apps for that trigger. So I wonder if using that might be the trick. The other thing, of course, is if you have it on your calendar that you have a phone call coming up, often, not always, often the system will ask, hey, do you want to go into Do Not Disturb for the next, you know, for the duration of this upcoming event? And that's always nice.

But you might be able to, this app trigger, that's the best I could come up with. And I did ask the robot and it also said, yeah, that's the best. so so what

That's what happened with the gear I picked up recently from Quince. I'm literally wearing their 100% European linen short-sleeved shirt while recording this episode. It's super comfy. I'm convinced it's quietly optimized for podcasting because it just, like, sits and hangs just right. It's got a little bit of stretch to it. It's super comfy and feels way more expensive than a $30 price tag. It's crazy. I also grabbed their Ultra Stretch 24-7 Smart Chinos. Those were under $50.

And a three-pack of cotton modal tees for less than $20. All in, I revamped like half my summer wardrobe for $100. It's just slightly less than $100, in fact. It's wild. Quince makes luxury-level essentials, linen, silk blends, organic cotton, but without the price markup. They work directly with top factories. They use premium materials. Skip the middlemen. It's smart, ethical, efficient, economical, Basically like the Mac of clothing, if you will.

Don't get caught sweating through cheap clothes or overpaying for your basics. Elevate your closet with Quince. Go to Quince.com slash MGG for free shipping on your order and 365-day returns. In fact, the pants that I got, I ordered the wrong size, and they made it super easy. That's Q-U-I-N-C-E dot com slash M-G-G to get free shipping and 365 day returns. I know. Quince dot com slash M-G-G. And our thanks to Quince for sponsoring this episode. All right. I think let's go to Javier here, Adam.

I no longer needed. I ended up deleting about 400 gigabytes. However, when I went to look at the available space, the RAID array was still reporting that I only had about 45 gigabytes available. I have looked all over the internet for possible reasons why this is happening. However, I can't find anything particular relating to this device.

I saw some suggestions that maybe the drives were failing. However, I have run through offline testing and the application drive scope tells me the drives are functioning properly, even if they are up there in age. I have taken measures to back up everything from that array to an external hard drive in case I need to install new drives into the device.

However, I worry that if the problem is with the enclosure itself and not the drives, that the problem will reappear in short order, even with brand new hard drives. Any thoughts? Thank you. And don't get caught.

And what takes that extra little bit is the system calculating how much space is used by each of the snapshots. And once it fleshes that list out, you can see. And, you know, I mean, I have some snapshots with, you know, most of them are a few gigabytes.

But there were some with you know there was one with dozens of gigabytes and if you would if i had just deleted a massive amount of data i would also get that so um yeah i think i think my guess is that's what's going on here i hope because it's easy because right there in disk utility you can highlight a snapshot or more and delete one so that's my thought anyway adam i don't know

but now it's a visual concern or is it actually it sounds like it might be even popping up saying hey you don't have space to do things yeah

I know Time Machine is somewhat involved in this too, because it you know time machine will do it like the hourly snapshots and then and then once it backs up it kind of purges those out because it knows it's done its backup but in terms of this kind of stuff uh i think it's when the system deems that it needs space but if you're running into an issue where you have deemed you need space ahead of when the system does then you You could delete it this way.

I think that's, that's my, that's my story. And at least for the moment, I'm sticking to it. So any other thoughts on this before we move on to Christopher?

birthday this year, I'm thinking about making the most of my time and continuing to engage with my geeky interests. I'm still working full time and have no plans to retire. In fact, I enjoy it so much I'd keep going if I could. I reached a crossroads regarding my equipment. Instead of investing in two separate Macs, I'm considering the idea of getting a single powerful M4 Max Max Studio with 64GB of RAM and a 512 SSD.

My thought is to use it for both home and office, transporting it the short 2-minute commute between locations as I spend about 8 hours on the computer in each place. Initially, I considered an M4 Mac Mini with 24 gigs of RAM for home and an M4 Max Mac Studio with 36 gigs for the office. However, I often find myself with a large number of YouTube tabs open. I've had as many as 130. Ouch. For various reasons, and I'd prefer not to have to constantly manage RAM usage

and interrupt my viewing experience. Are there any flaws in my thought process? Best regards, Christopher.

So this is a real thing for a lot of people. And if that's your workflow, then yeah, you got to, I think you adapt, you know, your needs to your workflow. If that works for you and you can afford it, go for it. I mean, you're never going to be upset about having tons of RAM, I don't think.

Um you know i i have max with my my daily driver in the office is a 16 gig um m1 mini my laptop is a 24 gig m2 air and this thing in the studio is i believe it's a 32 gig mac studio yeah it's a 32 gig max studio on all of them i find that safari gets bloaty and it gets you know it doesn't seem to matter how much RAM I have now I do max out at 32 I don't have 64 would it be better not sure don't think so um but I but it might be but I you know I I what I find helps immensely

Is making sure I quit Safari at least once per day so I start the day with a fresh launch of Safari and that seems to keep things at bay and of course I have it set to keep my tabs open so it's not like I'm losing anything but it's not activating those tabs it's not it knows what those tabs are and it has kept them in their right order but it doesn't load the content for those tabs until I go to the tab and pull it up and that seems to help

and I'm not convinced that it's just tabitis causing this because i i have my own version of it uh maybe not as bad as christopher but maybe also as bad um so uh it but it doesn't like quitting and relaunching safari seems to be the magic and and so much so that i use a free app i've mentioned on the show many times uh called quitter from marco armand and this app knows when you last interacted with an app so not just how long it's been launched,

but how long it's been since you last brought it to the front and touched it. And it, I have it set for 180 minutes, right? So three hours of, you know, if it's been three hours since I've touched Safari, it quits Safari.

Really what that's built to do is quit it when i haven't when it overnight right because it if i'm at my mac and i don't use a web browser for three hours that's kind of impressive for me um so the three hour thing is great but i start the day every day with a fresh launch of safari which of course is part of my begin the day script like lots of other apps that i have in keyboard maestro but uh but it is a fresh launch of safari so maybe try try that actually there here we go before you place

your order implement that strategy because that's free and and quick and see how it goes for a few days and see how your youtube ram usage is because i i just i don't know carting a mac back and forth between the house and the office it seems cumbersome but i mean maybe not you know it's not that many it's not that many cables uh it's an unplug and re-plug but i don't know

I've been enjoying this show after following Adam over, and I've learned a lot. I know you are fans of Synology NAS units, so I thought you might be able to help me. I use the Synology Assistant app to connect to my NAS. At some point in the past, after a software update, Synology Assistant has started to display the error message shown below.

In order to be able to continue to connect to my NAS, I have to click the show details button and then get a message saying the certificate is not trusted. I am able to continue to the NAS by clicking on Visit This Website link. I could also probably tell Safari to always trust the certificate. However, I'm curious, what do you think is the proper method to no longer get this message?

Should I set the certificate trust to always trust, look for an updated certificate and where, or simply continue to click the Visit The Website link? Like, any explanation as to why this started happening and any guidance you can give would be appreciated. Regards, John, a.k.a. NASA Nut. And just quickly, I answered this question wrongly. Mostly wrongly. Well, I had an answer, but Dave's got a much better answer than me.

John has done is visited his NAS using its local IP address. Okay. And he has visited it attempting, at least, a secure connection. So HTTPS colon slash slash 192.168.whatever. And I know that I don't know what his certificate has in it. It might be like a Synology wildcard or his own custom domain or something else. But what I do know it does not have in it is his local IP address because certificate authorities will no longer issue SSL certs for IP addresses, only for DNS names.

And so if you're connecting to the IP address, whether it be a private one or even a public one unless you've created your own certificate authority i don't think your certificate is going to offer end-to-end green light security for that connection it will encrypt the connection using the certificates that's there but it's going to give you this warning saying hey wait this is not what the certificate is not for the website you're visiting because there is no certificate

for an ip address like a 192.168 or or really any other uh so the solutions the solutions here are i i can think of three of them right one is you could create your own self-signed certificate that does Map to an ip address but don't bother with that that's that's not important uh but you could and then you would have it but you'd still have to go through this because it wouldn't bind to a certificate authority because it's self-signed and you'd still have to authenticate

it or get tell it you know just never ask me about this again um you could connect without https you could connect http to the thing on your local network and then though the connection is not encrypted it's also not going to yell at you um the other option would be to connect to whatever that domain name is so you know if it's your you know my nas.sonology.me or what you know whatever that cert is for connect to it that way but that's going to most likely bring you to your router and

If you bring it to your router then you need to make sure your router is port forwarding whatever you want to use to your synology the nice part is if you do that it also gives you the ability to access it externally the exact same way although anyone could access it that way assuming they know your password which they probably don't so that's the issue you can ignore it you could tell it just let this happen and uh all would

be fine there is one fourth option though pete and maybe this explains something that has become a long running um bit here on the show because one I recommend this with great caution is you could edit your Etsy hosts file and put in whatever the address for that, you know, whatever the domain name is for that to map to your one nine two dot one six eight.

So it won't what that will what happens when you edit your Etsy host file is you are telling your system, hey, when someone looks for my NAS dot Synology dot me, don't ask the DNS servers on the Internet for this.

I know the answer and the answer is this ip address so use this one and that would then just point you there and this certificate would work because safari says yes you're visiting this in your url bar and the certificate name matches so you know it's all coming up roses yeah but my guess is that you you did that for probably this exact reason once and that's what threw you off when you were traveling because you couldn't get to the local IP address.

you said you changed the default address of your disk station uh for security reasons so that you're not port yes the port sorry yes yes thank you for the correction You change the port on your disk station, the default one, because you for security so that you people that are looking to get in on the outside were probing are at least not seeing it on the default port. Not a not a bad practice. Yeah, but I have an advice for that.

It is when troubleshooting, it is often great to have something like that on its default port. If it was like the day that you run into trouble with something. And so but I but I also like the idea of the world at large not having access to that. But that's where the beauty of port forwarding comes in, because you can you can port forward from the outside world a different port.

You can say, okay, instead of it being 5,001 from the outside to 5,001 on my NAS, I'm going to port forward 15,001 from the outside to 5,001 on my NAS. So you don't have to change your NAS's default port. You just change the port forwarding rule. And that, to me, has always felt better because I'm leaving my NAS ports on their default. So if there's some app I need to run on my local network that's going to look and help me troubleshoot, it's all right there.

workflow so much so that you almost forget they're there. Well, for me, that's BBEdit, right? It launches with my begin the day script. It's part of my start podcasting routines. And candidly, I don't think I've gone a day without it in years, decades, perhaps. Lately, I've been loving BBEdit's projects feature. It's so fantastic.

It keeps all my related files grouped together, ready to go, whether I'm editing podcast notes, It's tweaking code for like the BBM privacy prefix thing or writing a pitch, right? And the new chat GPT worksheets are incredible. You can interact with AI directly inside BBEdit to generate text, brainstorm, or even massage your Markdown without ever leaving the app. It's got Markdown cheat sheets too, which makes life easier for people like me.

It's built for folks who work with text, whether it's HTML, scripts, config files, or, you know, obsessively rewriting show titles until they're just right. and that's what those ChatGPT worksheets are good for. There's a 30-day full-featured free trial, no subscription required, and upgrade pricing is super reasonable. Don't get caught editing text in anything less. Head to barebones.com slash store and download BBEdit today. Check out the free trial. It doesn't suck.

It's BBEdit. So go get it. And our thanks to Barebones and BBEdit for sponsoring this episode. All right. Let's do some cool stuff found before we run out of here.

I want to share one that I have been using today. It is the center cam 2.0. If you watch the video for this episode, it is the camera that has lived on my, on my, well, on my screen and is the one that you would see for the entirety of the episode. It is a tiny, tiny little camera that hangs down over my screen.

There have been a lot of people that have gone to solve the problem of I'm using my computer with a camera and it, you know, I have a top down view of me or a bottom up view or a side view or something because I'm staring at my computer. This one solves it by actually hanging the camera down over the middle of the screen. But it's such a tiny little camera that it it really doesn't get in the way at all. And you can adjust where it fits.

It works pretty well. I've I've been I've been impressed with it and it looks pretty good. The software that comes with it is pretty good and certainly allowed me to tweak it and make it usable for the show. There's a zoom function in the software that doesn't function for me. So I can't do any panning or tilting because I'm just getting the full width of the thing because that's how it works. But it's like $113 or something on their website right now. So Center Cam version 2.0.

And it's really not in the way. It's an interesting thing. I don't know if I'll keep using this or go back to using my iPhone, but it's the first camera that makes me think maybe I won't use an iPhone for what we're doing here, which is saying a lot. So yeah, and for 113 bucks, yeah, it's pretty good. It would travel well because it's very tiny. It's on a little gooseneck, so you can kind of angle it and set it as you want.

And then it hangs and it stayed there pretty good. So that's the center can be two novel.

Do you care if we're sometimes, anyway, looking at you? I mean, other times I got to, you know, look at my notes and, like, do my thing. But is it nicer to have the camera more aimed at the things I'm looking at versus just kind of, you know, the bird's eye view, if you will? I don't know. Let us know. We had three follow up cool stuff's found from the last episode. 1089.

Scott has a quick one. He says there was a lively discussion about syncing doc preferences. I waited, hoping that you would mention an app that I've offered as a solution for situations like this in the past. But alas, no love. It's only because we forgot about it, Scott. He says, while I don't sync or even use my dock, I do sync other items that require the constant transfer of updating a plist file. While with one of my favorite utilities, sync time, it's easy.

Just point the sync to the right file on each of your Macs. And whenever anything in that file changes, it will sync the file to your other Macs. After a two-minute setup on each Mac, you'll never have to think about it. Again, it just works. And a bonus tip for Keyboard Maestro users, you can easily set up a watcher for a particular file.

Whenever that file changes, it will trigger an action, which in this case would be the terminal command, killalldoc, with a capital D. And that reloads the doc with the new file that just got updated, so it's super automation, two easy steps. I love that, Scott. Thank you. we will yeah good stuff that's brilliant yep it is it is i'm gonna implement this i have not yet but i but i will We also talked about UPSs, Pete, in the last episode. Yeah, we did.

So thank you for following up with us, Pensacola, Craig. He said, I started thinking of if somehow using a smart plug can help. I use several KASA, K-A-S-A, smart plug solutions, especially for non-smart devices. These are actually TP-Link smart plugs, but KASA branded and are controlled with the KASA app.

It was already known to me that some models of the smart plugs will power on in a last known state, which is to say that if an outlet is off, and power is lost and restored, it will power on staying in an off state. But that really wouldn't solve the problem since it would need the UPS in an always on state in order to operate normally. And I learned that Kasa has some interesting smart plugs that have energy management monitoring built into them.

That was new to me, and I wanted to learn more, even a fun-related problem needed to my problem needing resolution, then while watching a YouTube video, one of these energy management special TP-Link smart plugs, I happened to notice one of the setting screens had an entry labeled default state. Aha. Immediately going from one AMZ.

Your UPS won't power up. It'll just run till the battery dies, which is not good. Not a problem because I set up my smart schedule where every hour that plug is turned on. So I load on a particular UPS, the 90 plus minutes of battery backup power, and every hour it turns the plug on.

You want to make sure the schedules for each of your ups is to turn on are not all at the top of an hour uh you want them to be different because otherwise you're just going to delay causing the same hammer yeah so i liked i like that one uh and that i that works regardless of whether the ups are all plugged into the same outlet or not right because you might have multiple outlets on the same circuit mark's

solution is all based on a single outlet but is equally as clever he says um in pro sound reinforcement we use rack mounted power sequencers and he found one that he linked to on amazon which we'll link to it's about 90 it's i don't know it's like 100 bucks or something and it's got eight plugs in it and the whole idea is you tell it to turn on and it turns on things in sequence so that nothing overloads the system because in pro sound the same kind of thing happens

where you know you you have a circuit but you're turning on speakers and all these other things that are going to draw a big load when they come or power amps when they come on but then go way down unless you're overrunning them at which point you know you might blow a 50 amp fuse like mick jagger said uh so like the same logic applies it's just turning them on in sequence waiting for them to power up before doing the next

One so you could certainly do that if they're all on the same outlet if they're not then the smart smart plug solution is the right one so yeah

going to let the router come on to turn the router on so right good point yeah yeah you know just things to think about but yeah i like it these are good solutions All right. Do we have anything else? I think we're good for today, right? Great. Amazing. Let me see if I can find the band. Look at that. They've been playing the whole time. They just vamp on this the whole time we're doing the show. That's why it's so perfect every time.

MacGeekGab50 saves you $50. Check out all of our sponsors that we mentioned. Check out Pete's other shows, So There I Was, Adam's other show, the debut film podcast, my other shows, Business Brain, GigGab. And, yeah, thanks for hanging out. Thanks for all your questions and tips and cool stuff found and follow-ups.

I love the conversation we just get to keep having it's awesome thanks to everybody in the discord for doing all your things pretty amazing oh thanks to the guy who sent in a one star review too we'll read that on the next episode oh I love it Adam you shouldn't