¶ Rick-QT-Ask Siri to turn off your partner's alarm
It's time for MacGeekGab, and listener Rick brings us our quick tip of the week with, This morning, while feeling a bit under the weather, my wife kindly decided to let me sleep in and did the morning dog routine. Of course, a couple minutes after she left, her alarm went off. Not feeling like reaching way across the bed to turn it off, I said, Hey, S-Lady, turn off the alarm. My phone then stated, would you like me to turn off the alarm on Gail's iPhone 16 Pro?
I said yes, and her phone alarm stopped, and my iPhone stated the alarm is off on Gail's iPhone 16 Pro.
Wow!
Now, if the S lady could actually do the morning dog routine, I would never complain about her again. More tips like this, plus your questions answered today on MacGeekGab 11.05 for Monday, September 1st, 2025.
Greetings, folks, and welcome to MacGeekGab, the show where we share your quick tips like that, We share your cool stuff found, and ours. And we share your questions, and our answers. And sometimes our questions, and your answers. Sponsors for today include strawberry.me slash mgg, where you can use code MGG to claim your $50 credit today. Quince.com slash mgg, where you can elevate your closet and get three free shipping and 365-day returns.
And piavpn.com slash mgg you can save 82 percent off the only vpn i've ever actually paid for at least the only one i've paid for in the last decade and it's because it works we'll talk more about those in a little bit for now uh we will go through the agenda that we have in the hopes of each of us learning at least five new things back here in durham new hampshire i'm I'm Dave Hamilton.
And still here in South Dakota, I'm Adam Christensen.
And I think still here in New Hampshire, it's Pilot Pete. Good to be with you. I'm wondering, though, Adam, did everyone else on the planet named Gail have their alarm turned off and oversleep that day?
Just asking.
So, when I, because I just read that tip or looked at that tip right before we started recording, And I was getting confused because I'm like, my wife, I can't turn off my alarms and I can't turn off her alarms because I've trained Siri and she knows my voice, right? And then when we got into the tip, it's like, oh, I wonder if that only works if you're on iCloud family.
Yeah i would assume it's only if you're part of an icloud family and probably if you're within bluetooth range of the the the phone a ringing phone right there's probably a a set of criteria that all has to be true
I bet you i bet you i bet you it works through find my in the family plan because like i can find that would make sense yeah family's devices now the question is if it works through find my if you happen to know that like my kids are in a completely different state obviously so could i turn off their alarm if i knew it was on but i
Doubt it i can't like there's no way like yeah yeah
Yeah although the a lady is nowhere near as discriminating we had friends over last night and and something came up about it and anytime anyone said the name she was responding it's like stop i almost went over and unplugged the echo.
Oh the the like home pod yeah i don't know um i need to do more research on this i wonder if home pods are just a little bit different uh where they'll recognize your voice and respond with like your information so if i ask about you know specific something on my calendar or something like that but you would think in a shared space like that you would want it responding to not just you yeah
Although i remember a security thing that was mentioned it's been a few years now someone was talking about you know you could scream through an open window hey yes lady unlock the front door.
Right and
It's like oh, right and the home pod or whatever picks it up and lets you in.
You can do that with a lady too through the
Window probably absolutely yeah.
Yeah because when you said that you said you were going to go unplug the echo but I'm assuming you meant home pod
No, no, I have an Amazon Echo. Yeah.
Oh, so yeah.
For the A-Lady, yeah.
When I had an Echo, it was way worse about just going off with anybody's voice. Yeah. If I was playing music or something.
Yeah, that's what I was saying.
Or had the radio on or something like that versus the S-Lady.
Which is, I think, why we started saying S-Lady and A-Lady, because they were so indiscriminate.
Yeah, it was definitely because of the A-Lady, the Amazon stuff, that we started doing it. And then, and then just, because we were getting complaints, I mean, complaints, it wasn't quite the,
You know, look what happened when you look what happened.
Yeah. Yeah. Yep. Alexa, subscribe everybody to Mac geek gab. So, you know, that kind of thing. Yeah. Uh, sorry.
Uh, it looks a cut a check for 50.
Bucks to Mac geek
Gab.
All right. Because I am now back from my summer travels, or at least mostly
¶ QT-Tame Liquid Glass by using Accessibility - Reduce Transparency
summer travels, I went and upgraded my iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch to their OS 26 versions. Beta 8, I believe, is where we are with all of them as of the time that we're recording this here. And for the most part, it's all fine. My son has had his devices on the betas basically since the betas came out, and it's been reliable for him. I'm always just – when I have to do travel, I'd like to know that my phone is going to work mostly as expected.
But the first thing that I noticed was that I – and I know there's change resistance here amongst us humans. I'm curious to see where I am in two weeks when things are actually released and all of that. But the first thing I realized that I did not like was...
Liquid glass specifically on notification overlays because it lets for my taste too much of the background through which is the whole idea behind liquid glass and it it just makes it feel visually cluttered to see this this notification with a clear you know and i'm using air quotes here a clear background floating over whatever the the heck else is behind it specifically on the lock screen on my phone and even more so on my watch and so i looked to see if there was a way to turn off
the liquid glass stuff and and there Sort of is i mean it's still all liquid glass but you can turn off the transparency by going into uh on the watch you go into the watch app on your phone watch app on your phone into the accessibility settings for that watch and in the vision section is reduce transparency and a similar setting on the phone is available too and they don't have to be in sync you can have it turned off on your watch but on on your phone it's all fine and so i turned it
off and immediately liked it better and then decided you know my my human change resistance is coming through so i am going to turn it back on and i realized on my phone when i went into this that i also had turned off like reduce motion as well uh i think the the aspaslaw brothers from uh from ecamm convinced me to turn it off when i was hanging out with them back in march and so i turned that back on too just to get the full experience and see what i like and what
i don't like but if you don't like it once you get the os 26 in the next coming weeks on your devices accessibility reduced transparency is the trick to disabling that
That is great go ahead.
No what was the what was the impetus or reason for turning off reduce motion what was their their argument
Uh that it's a more efficient user interface that you don't you're not waiting for like because they looked at my phone and they're like what are you insane how do you live waiting for things to like pop up like that you don't need that just tap and it's there if you turn off reduced motion it's like oh yeah and they're not wrong they're not wrong i mean the the the severity of their reaction was somewhat surprising but not so much if
you know those guys they're they're that's just sort of how they are yeah funny about that
But yeah i think also there's a battery savings because those animations do crank up your your gpu you know cycles yeah and your screen refresh rate and all that fun
Stuff yeah yeah fair yeah yeah yeah
I mean, I don't think it's going to be a major battery savings, but I bet you get an extra half hour, hour in a day or something like that out of it.
Depending on what you're doing. Yeah, for sure. That makes sense. Moving on. Yeah.
Yeah. So I don't know if I have a quick stuff found or a cool tip,
¶ Mike-QT-Use Croakies to retain the AirPods
but it's definitely one of those. And if it is a cool stuff found, it's one of the cheapest ones besides free you'll ever get here. So Mike writes in, he says, hi guys. Um, uh, just, just a quick learning thing when stuck outside with air pod pros, I needed a way to keep them from flying away. An old pair of croquis in the boat that hold glasses worked around the bottom of the buds. And I put a link in the, uh, show notes there.
I found some for a buck 90 online and, uh, you probably also get them at target Walmart, any kind of store like that. The croquis are essentially just a little strap that, you know, attached to your glasses and And putting them on the tips of the AirPods is a great idea. I hadn't considered that. I generally have, in windy environments, either not used them.
Or I do also have some, and I should probably find them and get it in the show notes, but I have some aftermarket buds that snap on the AirPods Pro that I got from Amazon as well some time ago. And those do a nice job of keeping them in place most of the time. 99%.
I wear my AirPods as earplugs, which we've discussed on the show. I was at two concerts this past weekend in Toronto. We saw Jonas Brothers sort of last minute at Rogers Center, which is the baseball place. And then we saw the anchor for our trip was Oasis at Rogers Stadium. And I wore my AirPods for both of these for the most part. As earplugs. And I have done this before. It shows...
When I forget that I have my AirPods in my ears and I go to like take off my sweatshirt or something, I have sent my AirPods flying and somehow have always retrieved them.
But uh the there is a fix for this and croakies would work for sure and at a dollar whatever that's way less expensive than what i carry with me uh which is the they're they're built for air pods uh just a magnetic uh a strap with magnets in the clips or not the clips but in the things that are built to go over the airpods at the end and it works great it's but they're 25 bucks for the thing i found i i found but it's it comes in a
pack of three of them so i think you can get them for 11 for yeah
I just found some for 998 on the amazon i'll put the link in.
The yeah so so but it works very very well to uh to keep me from doing stupid things the only problem with it is that But because any of these things, croquis or the custom ones, the custom for AirPods ones that I found, go over the stem of the AirPod, which, of course, is the thing that drops into your charging case. And that means it can't be in the charging case with these straps on. So you have to – it's a process of like, okay, pull it out, put the thing on,
now put it in your ear, get it situated right. Okay. So it's not the most convenient thing, but once you've hunted around on the floor at a concert for something that you're going to put back in your ear and been thankful to find it and put it back in your ear after it's been on the floor at a concert, you will happily go through this little process.
So a couple things that I thought of with respect to this tip. Well, first, I'm the same as you, Dave. We saw Bret Michaels last weekend, which was awesome. Amazing show. A lot of fun. And I wore my AirPods for that, too. And they were great as just... Protecting your ears and somebody who already as somebody who already has tinnitus, I don't need more damage to my ears. Right.
Um, but, uh, with the croquis, um, I would think that that would not work with the, with the using your earbuds for a concert noise cancellation, because you're, the croquis would cover the microphone and I'm pretty sure for the active stuff, you would need the microphone to be able to pick up the audio.
100 percent so
There are are croquis that don't work like that they're probably not croquis brand but you can find ones where it just has a loop right a little loop that kind of tightens over the
Yeah like that's what edge
Of your glasses or something like that
Oh yeah that
Style would probably work better because you could slip that up over the stem but it wouldn't block the uh thing and then kiwi gram also points out that definitely any of these solutions is probably going to to block your touch controls if you use that sure
I don't believe it or not the ones that i use uh i'm able to i i'm able to use the the squeeze control through it so it's been it's been engineered for exactly this because i will volume um i don't know because i don't i don't get to control the volume of the music uh but i sort of do by using i use the squeeze on it uh to Change between transparency adaptive and noise canceling mode because you get right different amounts of the the sound through when using them as earplugs
depending on which mode you're in and uh and so i will kind of bounce back and forth depending on what the venue is like that rogers stadium the oasis show that we saw was amazing we saw the one in the rain if anybody has been following it and that was epic but um and i did take my airpods out uh in the rain because the sound got really weird with the wind and all that stuff but uh i mean no this stadium i think i think liam gallagher called it lego land and it because that's what
it looked like to him this it's it's temporary it's been built to be up for like three to five years before until they finish whatever's going on at the toronto waterfront and then and then this place will be torn down Um and so it was kind of janky uh in a lot of ways and being up on the 33rd row of the grandstands was you know was it was a fun it was a fun walk up let's put it that way but you know the wind was swirling around in there and then with the rain and all that so switching between
what i was hearing to let the airpods kind of do more or less of their magic uh really it you know is a good a good thing to be able to do during uh a show so but yeah that that part works fine the hardest thing i have with them is getting them twisted exactly right so that they're not like pushing against my face while the stem is there it's a whole thing but it is fine yeah it worked out great yeah yeah Uh, speaking of things that I do while I'm traveling, I have a shortcut.
¶ QT-Add a delay to the automatic Low Power Mode Shortcut
I've talked about it on the show before. I like to preserve my battery life, uh, when I'm, especially when I'm traveling by staying in low power mode all of the time so that my phone, if I'm out for the whole day, I have a better chance of it actually making it throughout the day, even though I'm using it for like Uber and tickets and, you know, all of the things that, that we now use our phones for. when we're out and about.
And so I have a shortcut, and the shortcut is triggered by when low power mode is turned off, it does one thing, turns it on. And that way, when my phone charges past 80% at night or during the day, whenever, and low power mode gets turned off, it turns it right back on again. And that's great. But I noticed, because I was messing with settings on my phone, there were some things that I couldn't do while I was in low power mode. Of course, that's the whole idea.
And I went to turn low power mode off and change one of these settings. And it, of course, did exactly what I told it to do and turned it right back on again. And so I came up with a permanent fix for this, and that is I have added a second step to my automation on my phone, and that is – well, it's really a new first step. The second step is to turn low power mode back on after it's been turned off.
The first step is to wait 90 seconds and that way if i need to do something on my phone that requires low power mode to be off i can turn it off the automation will begin and i have 90 seconds that i've given myself to do whatever it is i'm going to do before it kicks back on uh and that has been a nice little uh nice little addition to my to my short cutting so i share i've got a Yes, sir.
Could you have put in a step that said, do you want me to turn on low power mode and then default to do it? Because I thought I had that at one point, but then I was thinking, then default to doing it after 90 seconds if you don't answer. I'm wondering if that means...
I certainly could put a prompt in there. I don't know if I can... Off the top of my head, I don't know if you can set a prompt to choose a default after a period of time. But also, I want the prompt out of my way to be able to do things.
Fair enough.
So, yeah, I don't know. And I certainly don't want the prompt to just be sitting there. To just sit there, yeah. Yeah, overnight or whenever it's charging. But that would be interesting. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I don't know. Have you done enough with shortcuts, Adam, to know the answer to that question?
I don't think you can auto accept a dialogue after X number of seconds.
I like the idea, though.
Oh, you know, if someone knows differently, they could send us an email at feedback at macgeekab.com and give us that answer.
Was that feedback at macgeekab.com, Pete?
Yeah, yeah. He said feedback at macgeekab.com. And if you don't want to send us an answer, but you do want to enter our monthly giveaway, you just go to MacEcab.com slash giveaway. And in September here, we are partnering with the folks at Unify and giving away a Unify Cloud Gateway fiber, which is the model up from the router that I've been using for a while. And one of their U7 Pro XGs, which is one of their Wi-Fi 7 access points. So that's your giveaway for September.
So make sure to go to MacGeekUp.com slash giveaway. I know.
Very excited about this. Oh, man.
Yeah.
I want one of them setups.
Uh yeah nice stuff yeah i know i know i was excited when they when they reached out and suggested this so yep fun stuff uh and you know what september 1st also is ginger cat appreciation day so make sure to uh to pat your ginger cat if you've if
You know we lost ours well we i didn't lose it becca took it to florida with her when she moved so oh so she's gone our ginger kitty uh.
That's different than what most people mean when they say they lost i
Had to quickly clarify that didn't come out right but yeah she's only seven months old hopefully won't lose her for another 20 years or so so um arguably.
The best breed of cat around
I agree we we have a we have a we have a ginger a sort of i guess he's a ginger cat i don't know he's he's one of the best we've ever had though for
Sure ours is rare female.
Oh that is your
Which is like 20% of them at the most.
Yeah.
Yeah. So that was.
We'll get you another one, Pete. They have them around here.
Yeah. She kind of surprised. Debbie's like, I miss, I miss mango.
So. Yeah. There's a great book called A Mango Shaped Space. And it is about, well, it's about, I'll put a link in the show notes. It's a fantastic book. Short, easy read. It's about a cat named Mango, if I'm remembering that correctly. Okay. But it's also, and more than that, far more than that, it is about a family with synesthesia that runs through the family. So, yeah. It's a really great book. It's a tender read. I, yeah, anyway.
Well, I may have a Christmas gift for Becca then.
Oh, yeah, for sure. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yep, yep.
Oh. Yeah.
All right. All right.
Yeah, we got one more quick tip from Horse. No, just kidding. Mr. Ed says, I found out something interesting. With my iPhone plugged into CarPlay, I did a screen capture on my iPhone,
¶ Mr. Ed-QT-CarPlay Screen Capture
and it captured both the iPhone screen and the CarPlay screen at the same time. I tried this both in hardwired mode and using my wireless CarPlay adapter, and it works both ways i'm sure some of you already knew this but it was new to me i didn't know this keep up the great work mr ed uh i don't know if it's the famous one or not maybe i
Did hear you singing that pre-show though so you got that earwig i heard.
Yeah yeah i'd imagine it'd be hard to operate a iphone with hooves
Yeah, Mr. Ed did a lot of cool things, though.
He could do it with his lips, probably.
That's right.
Yeah, that would actually work.
Kids, ask your parents.
I have a bonus quick tip that I've done, and I'm sure people have seen me do it and not realized what it is I'm doing. But if I have set an alarm or something on my phone and am on stage and have forgotten that this alarm is on and then it starts ringing while I am playing,
¶ Turn off your Watch alarm with your nose
even if I'm in Do Not Disturb, of course, the alarm starts going. I have successfully turned off my watch alarm with my nose.
So uh you know i gotta time it right because i gotta bring my i wear my watch on my left wrist and so i gotta bring it up and you know tap my tap my nose to my watch it it quickly and not lose the time and the rhythm of what i'm doing with my other limbs and then get that limb back down to do whatever it needs to do so it's a little bit of a trick but uh you can successfully do it and i have done it i've done it when i have like mittens on too you know you can use your nose uh to do that.
Maybe your elbow?
Yeah, you can do it with your elbow. Yeah. What else, Pete?
Hopefully not the same elbow.
That would be a trick.
That would hurt.
Yeah, that would require a different kind of alarm. Yeah, that's for sure.
It seems like you've fallen. Do you want help?
Yes. Yes, I need help. Well, there you go. So, all right, I have, oh, yeah,
¶ Paul-DGC-1103-WiFi Calling might cost you
a don't get caught from Paul follow up to episode 1103 from two weeks ago. It says you were talking about data roaming and you said to turn on Wi-Fi calling in order to make calls over Wi-Fi.
Just so you know my network provider in the uk which he uses ee there will charge me the international call rate if i am using wi-fi calling from a non-uk ip address so i switch wi-fi calling off when i travel internationally but my advice is check with your phone company first so that you don't get caught he says i haven't tried using a vpn to get around this so I don't know if that would work. It might, but your phone does always know your actual location. So if it's, yeah, it would be...
That would be interesting. It would be worth a test for sure. But yeah, I mean, what a, that's, I've definitely used Mint like in Europe to make phone calls to and from the U.S. On Wi-Fi calling and it works totally fine. Yeah. Without charging me anything extra. Not that they could charge me anything. I mean, like it's prepaid. So, you know, there's, there's no bill coming for, they don't let you do anything that you haven't already paid for. Yeah. Yeah.
Hey, before you go to that next thing, though, thinking of data and all that kind of stuff, I want to tell people that are on Mint. I got an email and I almost ignored it, and it turned out to be fortunate that I still had it and it hadn't disappeared. My daughter needed internet in Florida, and for Mint Mobile customers, they sent out an email to people who've been with them, I think, more than 90 days. Okay. That allows that T-Mobile home internet for $35 a month,
¶ Mint Mobile - T-Mobile Home Internet for $35/month
which was, it's unlimited 5G data for $35 a month. So, but you have to have gotten the email from Mint Mobile saying you're eligible for this.
Got it.
Yeah. Huh. So, and when I first tried to do it, I didn't use the email and I tried to go there and T-Mobile was ready to give me $35 a month. I only had to switch one of my lines to their system. I'm like, yeah, no, that's not how this is going to work.
Interesting. I feel like even if you miss the email, there might be a way. I've found an FAQ on Mint's site about this. So you probably could contact them and say, hey, I've had this for years. Can you help me out here? Yeah. Yeah, interesting. But I think if you have basic internet needs,
That's a great price.
Oh, yeah. And, I mean, yeah, for some people, that's the best.
And we're really happy with it at our place in Pensacola.
Yeah. That's pretty good.
Yeah.
Huh.
So, an ad hoc, I don't know, it's kind of under... Quick stuff found.
Cool tip. Quick stuff found. I like it. That's great. Yeah.
An ad hoc one there. Sorry, but I had to throw that in because I know there's some Mint customers out there that may want to take advantage.
Oh, quite a few. Yeah, you're right. It says here you need to have had Mint for at least 90 days. So there you go. But it seems like it's not a limited time promotion. I mean, everything's a limited time promotion. But from what I'm reading, which I'm also doing a podcast at the same time, so take that with a grain of salt.
But i've i've put a link in the notes it seems like you could get mint my quick non-read is that you could get mint today at mint mobile.com slash mgg or mac geekup.com slash mint mobile that the links go to the same place uh and uh and then in 90 days you can add this right yeah exactly
Yeah yeah and my other recollection is too that the price lock was five years it wasn't going up in a year.
That's great so yeah that's which is super smart the whole pricing changing we have to you and i have to deal with that yeah yeah it can be it
Needs to come down.
Yeah well it's going up is what it is so yeah oh
Speaking of which i don't know if this is worth bringing up right now
Yeah we
Probably should have a discussion some point about uh
Apple apple
One and apple services pricing going up again which i read about
Let's let's do it we're here what i did not read this i've been traveling and
¶ Apple TV+ Pricing Increase
lost all summer kind of this is so uh do you have data details on this
Yeah let me see if i can find it real quick i just read it in passing so yeah they're raising prices as of august 28 august maybe it already happened okay current pricing you
Just hit a bump.
Yeah, I read it somewhere. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe I just did fake news. I thought I read this. Maybe I dropped it.
No. No. Apple TV Plus received a price increase. I'm finding an article on Mac Rumors from just days before we're recording this episode on the 28th. And their headline was Apple One just became more valuable than ever. And the reason is because Apple TV Plus received a price increase this week in the U.S. Apple TV Plus goes up to $12.99 per month, up from $9.99 where it was for the last few years.
But that then means that Apple One tiers, I believe Apple One stays at the same, yes, Apple One plans stay at the same price according to this. So Apple TV plus goes up three bucks a month, which now I understand the headline makes Apple one more valuable because it did not yet go up.
So got it. Yeah. So we're not impacted on the one plans, but if you're an Apple TV plus subscriber.
Yeah.
They keeps going up and up and up. You know, it started at what? Five 99. And then it was nine 99. And now it's 12.
Yeah. I think it was six 99, but you're right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yep.
But you know i i guess fair like they've got a lot of great content they've had a lot of great pickup i think of the service so i can understand why they would want to increase it uh you know everybody else has done it so
Yes yeah why not why wouldn't they and and it like by not increasing apple one it will perhaps drive more subscriptions to the full package sure and of course you know how profit margins work that's where apple's i mean it's just how it works it's how it is it's fine
Yeah all the services i pay for that i don't use right i
Mean apple one is still worth it to me
It is oh yeah but
But it you know it's it's always close because i don't use everything that's in there so yeah yeah
I use all of it a little bit i guess is what it is like uh arcade i use i I occasionally have a few games from Apple Arcade and, you know, fitness is probably the thing I use the least but need to use more. And then the one that kind of shocked me that I do actually use more than I thought I would is Apple News Plus.
Yeah to
Get access to you know some of the things that would be normally paywalled like you know uh is it i can't remember you know there's a few things that are paywalled that i'll hit a paywall on the web and be like oh can i maybe i can get this on
Apple news
Plus and sure enough yeah
Yeah it's true it's true i mean we use apple music and apple tv plus and iCloud plus those are those are the big ones that together make it worth worth it even if we don't use the other three at all but we some of us routinely enough use apple fitness plus that that's worth having there i think i think lisa uses apple arcade certainly more than i do um and perhaps lucas does too but and apple news plus yeah is um is is handy uh i don't i try to stay away from the news to be perfectly honest
uh but but like it knows what i want we had an interesting experiment this week uh people are going to hate me for bringing this up and that's
¶ Don’t Get Caught engaging with incendiary content online
fine you send your hate mail to feedback at mackiecup.com we were driving in the car uh from niagara falls canada to some winery between niagara falls and yyz the airport uh in toronto because we had extra time so what better thing to do when you're on the way to the airport than stop for a wine tasting and as we were in the vehicle i
Get in trouble.
For that yeah i bet you yeah i don't recommend it if you're sitting in the very very front most row front row window seat front row window seat that's right uh and Uh, our daughter from the backseat, uh, I mean, our kids are adults now, but she happened to be in the backseat of our rental car. And she said, Taylor Swift's engaged. And it was like, okay. So we talked about this for five to seven minutes and you know, how they, they had just done this podcast together.
And there was like clearly, clearly an intentional media marketing thing going on here as, as you would expect.
Totally fine. It was interesting. and we talked about that for like i said you know let's say 10 minutes ish and i asked her i said wait i want to know something how long ago did this happen and she said 13 minutes ago and i said okay so you knew about it within two minutes of of of this news breaking and she said oh of course obviously it's all over the internet and i'm like great like and therefore i knew about it two minutes within two minutes of it's happening because she
told us and uh when we sat down in the airport i you know i started scrolling through my feeds and nothing about it on my feeds nothing in my news alerts nothing because i don't follow taylor swift right and i and i've told you know i talk often about this not necessarily on this show but like on business brain how I also don't get politics in my feeds because I don't engage with that stuff at all. I scroll past it as fast as I can. I don't click like. I don't stop to read.
Right. And that allows me to have like there is a way to be intentional about how you use your feeds and teach the algorithm. If you want me to be engaged with your platform, you need to show me things that engage me. And so by not engaging with the things intentionally, not engaging with the things that I don't want to see works out great. and uh It was six hours after the news came out.
I finally saw the first post about it, but I wouldn't have known what it was if I didn't already know the news. And it was from a friend of mine who says, well, I know who I'm not picking for my fantasy football team this year. Right. Which was funny. Right. Right. But again, if you didn't, if you it was one of those, if you know, you know things. And I knew. And so I laughed.
But it was the next day it took a full 24 hours for me to see at someone actually say you know that the travis kelsey and taylor swift are engaged and all this other stuff so um it you know it it's in it you can tune your feeds if you it takes discipline though because there's a lot of stuff out there that's intended to be incendiary as we all know and if you engage with it boy howdy will the algorithm learn that very quickly and give you more so anyway that's my that's my advice that's as close
that's the closest we get to talking about politics i think on mackie kept so that's as close as i ever want to get so right
You said the word.
Politics i know now we're done talking and in the same segment said taylor swift too so i'm gonna get everybody upset it's wonderful send
Your hate mail to adam at mackie get.
Who's your buddy adam oh it's not adam's fault this one's all on me i did this all right uh we have some more cool stuff found we have your questions to answer uh the next thing that we want to do is talk about our sponsors starting with our sponsors strawberry.me because look you spend a third of your life working
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¶ Jerry-CSF-LG 27-inch Ultrafine 4K UHD is the best bang for the buck
It's time for some cool stuff found, Adam. And I think Jerry's got one targeted at you.
Yeah.
He wants you to spend money, just less money than less money than I tried last week. So, you know.
Yeah, Jerry says, Adam, so far the best bang for the buck, we're talking about monitors, because I mentioned I have really old, cheap HD monitors. I don't even have any 4K or anything, and I was complaining about the pricing, so this is what you get. He said, the best bang for the buck is the LG 27UP850K-W, otherwise known as the LG 27-inch Ultrafine 4K display. And it's under 400 bucks. He says, I have this sitting right next to my 27-inch Apple Studio display and I have no issues.
In fact, I have had it for about a year and just got my second one for my iPad Pro as an extended display. The color is extremely close. The text is very sharp and USB-C with 90 watts, rather, of charging. Very hard to be a studio display, but for more than a grand cheaper, I wouldn't have gotten the studio display if I hadn't known better. Yeah, there might be some 800 bucks, you know, close to 800 bucks spent here in the future.
It's $379, so it's 20 bucks under 400 bucks, but right now on Amazon, at least, for the usbc version even cheaper for the hdmi
Yeah i'm looking at this it's it's it's a hundred and twenty dollars cheaper for the hdmi version so the usbc version has a usbc and it'll do 90 watts of power delivery and all that fun stuff and then it's got a hub in it it's got two usb ports but it's also got display port and two hdmi inputs so okay now that's for 379 the one for 259 has takes the USB stuff away so you don't have USB-C which means you don't have DisplayPort over USB-C but you still have DisplayPort in the you know the
mega DisplayPort connector I'll call it right you know the bigger one and the two HDMI so for 260 bucks the specs on the screen seem to be the same you're just paying the 100 bucks for the for the hub for the yeah the usb well and the ability to do display port over usb seats which is handy but for what you're doing adam if you if you have the outputs to get to hdmi and or larger display port i mean that you just saved yourself 240 bucks if you're buying two of these well
I'm i'm already using the the large display port because i have two like adapters for my displays and they have HDMI DisplayPort Something else, I can't remember.
Sure.
There's like three connectors on there. So the questions I have about this is, I think the reason this came up, though, is my number one complaint was the lack of Thunderbolt displays or USB-C, whatever you want to call them. Basically, it's Thunderbolt, right? Yep. Thunderbolt displays that lack daisy chaining. And again, this doesn't have it. So it's like, I got to use two freaking ports.
Or that thing we mentioned from OWC in the last episode, right? That'll split. And now, I mean, you're not going to pay $240 for that thing from OWC. I think it was like 30 bucks.
Yeah, fair. Right? Yeah, this may be in my future. This may be my path. So thanks a lot. Appreciate the pointing me in that direction where money flies out of my wallet.
Crack your wallet.
But less money. He's helping you out here.
Right?
$260, that's amazing when you think about that. I need to find out. I have a yearly budget for office supplies for my company, so I could use some of that. I don't think it's going to cover $800. I don't get that much. Sure. It might be like $150 a year or something like that, and I never buy anything.
Yeah.
There you go. I could maybe expense part of it.
Yeah. Huh? All right. We were talking about notes in last week's episode 1104
¶ Bram-CSF-1104-Use Notion instead of Notes
and how it doesn't have some features like exporting easily and re-importing easily. And Bram says, I have an answer. And it's Notion, of course. Any device and or OS works with Notion. And it has versioning. And he says, even the free tier has kept me organized for probably years now. Wow. So thank you for that, Bram. And I think there's still, they aren't a current sponsor, but if you go to notion.com slash Mac Geek Cab, I think there's still like a deal to be had there.
So feel free to take advantage of that, obviously. So that's great, Bram. Yep. Love it. Love it. Love it. All right. What do we have next here?
¶ Donald-I Vibe-Coded California State Landmarks app
Donald, I think, has a tip or not really a tip. It's cool stuff found, right? So he has a thing that he created, which sounds awesome. He says, hi, folks. Special hi to Adam from way back in the North Coast Mac user group, Mac Discovery Days. Oh, cool. Hey, Don. Or Donald, I guess, rather. I thought I'd add my experience using ChatGPT to create an app. I have done a lot of programming in the past, but not for years. I decided to see how well ChatGPT would work to help me with an app project.
I've spent the last 30 years trying to visit every one of the 1,124 California State Historical Landmarks. Cool. And I only have 12 to go.
Wow.
Yeah, that's even more impressive. The app is now on the iOS App Store and is also now in final testing for the Google Play Store. The process was definitely frustrating at times, especially when trying to squash a bug. I would often have to make a change to the code, and when that didn't work, it would have me change it right back to what did, I'm assuming,
did work the first time. Yeah. Way too many hours spent in circles trying to resolve this frustrations aside it was still pretty amazing and we'll have a link to the app in the show notes and yeah it's pretty cool um just comment on this now he's got me thinking that i need to do this because something uh myself and and my family like to do on road trips is we always play the spot the out-of-state license plate game or state license plate game and i've always
wanted a cool app that would like track that stuff and i've never found one i mean there's a few of them as you might imagine on the app store i've never found the one that i really want so i've always thought about making one and just never take taking the time but if i can have a chat gpt basically write it for me that would be awesome yeah
I think the right way i would change one word and write it with you correct i really Really, based on everything that I've seen about people vibe coding and certainly my own experience, and I've vibe coded a bunch of stuff, is it's my grunt, right? It's my assistant that knows an infinite number of coding languages, including ones that I don't know, of course, obviously. But it's my assistant, not just the, here's an instruction, let me know when it's published.
Yeah, it's really about where it's come in most handy for me is in just being able to ask it. Generally about how to do something or how, more importantly often, how something works.
Yeah.
It's like not having to read the manual and having the manual explained to you and then given an example, you know, because the number one thing is if you're just in the prehistoric days before large language models, you know, you'd have to go to all these sites and you You poke around, and you've got to drill into the thread, and you've got to try and find, you know, someone would have the answer, and then someone else would have a
code example, and it's like a lot of time was spent to suss out the answer. So to be able to say, hey, I'm trying to do this thing in this language, and I need something to do, you know, to take this JSON object and manipulate it in some way and do a thing, and it's like, oh, okay, here's how you could go about that, and here's why that works. And then if it's not quite right, right, you can have that conversation. Like, I don't, I think I want to do that a different way.
Or I was thinking about using this function, you know, and like, so like having that knowledge of the language yourself, and then being able to just bounce ideas. It's like bouncing ideas off of, you know, so it is really vibe coding. It's like, you know, same thing when I would get stuck at work, I'd usually go to a coworker. And so like being remote, this has become even more important because now I don't have to, try and get my coworker to join me on a Slack and take time away from their day.
Yep. You know, it's like chat GPD. It doesn't care. It'll give me all the time in the world.
Yes. It's happy to. That's what it's there for. I know it, it's, it's great. And, and it's, you know, especially if it's, you know, two in the morning and you're working on something and you're frustrated and you're like, I just, I know that I need another perspective on this, but who am I going to call it two in the morning? You know, like vibe coders are us. So there you go.
Yeah.
That's pretty good.
And I'll offer just to see if I could do it. I started doing one for the other show I do, and it has come up with a beautiful start to an app that'll go and get the shows and tell me whether they're downloaded or not. All because it's, you know, I asked it to help it. Whereas before, the limits of my programming capability were to start Xcode, get the simulator up and running and get a hello world to run on it. And that was it. And, oh, man, this thing. Yeah, the ChetGPT will do a lot for you.
I like your ideas better in the sense that you use it as an assistant because you have a better idea of what the programming is and is not doing. I think it could be dangerous depending what you're trying to do from a security standpoint if you're putting in bad code in, bad code out. But again, for a program like that or an app like that, not so much. But depending on what you want to do, I can see security vulnerabilities because you have no idea what you're doing.
You can set yourself up for problems. That's fair.
Yeah.
So often it does it, I think, by itself. But I would also recommend, because I know, Dave, you've often given the thing, the advice, you know, like if it comes back with an answer for just general queries that you're doing, you know, are you sure is the kind of thing that you ask about often. What I would recommend for people who are trying to learn a language, or like you, Pete, trying to get further...
When you ask for the the code or the solution or whatever and it comes back if it doesn't explain it to you say can you explain why this or what this is doing yes like why this works or and it's a great learning tool from that perspective i
Would say by the second module i went okay it's writing it for me but and i told it exactly that tell me what you're accomplishing with the code that you give me here.
Yeah and it does a really good job of explaining it it's amazing and another great prompt is that's great is there a different way or another way to do this uh
Yeah oh
Yeah i could see that.
I i am going more efficient i am going to uh there's a conversation happening uh in our uh discord here the live discord between several people zoe and soccer hallways and kiwi gram uh talking about github copilot
Uh yep and
It really is a great tool uh to do all of that sort of live assisted coding i i it's it's great so definitely check that out
Great thing about copilot um that's github which now is owned by microsoft so it's built into or you can put it into visual studio code right even be built in now it is um a vs code editor and so you never have to leave your editor that's that's the nice thing about that is you're not having a you're not having a context switch between your browser and i think you can plug it into all kinds of different llms absolutely
Yes you choose your yep
Into microsoft's no i think microsoft's is the default uh probably maybe not
I don't i don't i don't know that it even is but what it like you're right you can plug it into whatever you You choose whatever LLM you want and you can tie it into your account if you want to do it that way or use the free version of the LLM. Yeah, it's good stuff. So yeah, good vibe coding. Love it. It's been a little while since we have taken
¶ MGG Premium Listener Contribution Appreciation Moment
a minute to thank all of you who's, Premium contributions have come in recently, and so we are going to do that now. Again, if you want to learn more about MacGeeCab Premium, it's MacGeeCab.com slash premium is the place to go. It is optional, certainly, and very much appreciated. And in the last recent period here, we have had $100 contributions from Terry in Killeen, Mark in Oklahoma City, another Mark in South Orange, Harry in Luz.
Thank you each for your $100 contribution. We have had $60 contributions from Walter in Kansas City, Stephen in Granger, Scott in Calabasas, and John in Vevey. And $50 contributions from Kenneth in White Plains, Anthony in Rockville, and Brad in Sparta. Thank you. A $45 contribution from Larry in Baton Rouge. $30 contributions thanks to Thomas in Zurich, Jim in San Jose, Dennis in Chapel Hill, Bob in St.
Charles. And then $25 contributions from Alan in Montgomery, Wes from somewhere, Ed in Vancouver, William in somewhere, Russell in Jefferson-ton, I always like saying that, John and Enrico, Stuart in somewhere, Mark in Centennial, all $25 contributions, thanks to each of you.
Robert in wakefield thank you for your 20 contribution and then thanks to the following for your 10 contributions uh oh shoot i lost i lost my place steven in plainfield john in vienna joseph and marietta kristen shorleywood bill uh in parts unknown barry and des plains timothy in west windsor jonathan in plainsboro Paul in Lawrenceville, James in Amity Harbor, and thank you all for your $10 contributions.
And I'm not sure, I guess I lowered the minimum because Harvey in Rockville, thanks for your $5 contribution. I think that's the first one. And thanks to all of you. You really are a part of what makes this work and allows us to do this work, and we absolutely love it, if you can't tell.
I'm curious. is we'd always set the minimum at 10 bucks simply because you can choose the frequency at which you Contribute and there's transaction fees that we pay that are fixed so we we get more from you we get we get more of your contribution if you send in percentage wise yeah if you send in one ten dollar contribution versus uh two five dollar contributions right that said if having the limit lowered to you know to five dollars or even lower than that would make it easier for for you
to be a part of this and you would want that let us know we can we can lower these limits um it we just always kind of did it it just seemed more logical to to just say well you know do it less frequently with a larger amount so that we're not just giving it all to visa or amex or you know paypal or whomever but i also understand taking friction away so let us know uh feedback at macgeekup.com or if you're a premium member you of course get to
use the email address of premium at macgeekup.com to get your requests in ahead of the queue that's one of the benefits in addition to the warm fuzzy feeling of supporting your favorite geeks so thank you folks yeah thank you very much Very cool.
I think we should do some questions today.
Let's do it.
¶ Ron-My Data Volume is Corrupted...what should I do?
Just my personal opinion. We're here.
All right. Let's do it. Here we go. I'm in.
And then right off with a compliment. Gentlemen, something weird happened to my Apple Silicon SM4 MacBook Pro at a minor glitch when trying to dictate. When double-clicking control, it made noise but no dictate. So I restarted and corrected the dictation problem. I decided to run Onyx and it informed me that my data volume was corrupted.
Ruh-roh.
And he got a little pop-up when it says you need to repair the data volume and then with all the details on that. So I logged into the recovery partition and ran disk utility. My hard drive and the volume below it was fine, but the data volume at the bottom was corrupt and unrepairable. All the years I've used a Mac, Mac Plus was the first, I've never seen anything like this, although we didn't have data volumes back then. I reinstalled the current version of Sequoia with no change.
I put it into safe mode with no help, and it occurred to me that reinstalling Sequoia affected the system, but not the data. So my only thought now is to wipe the drive and reinstall everything, but I wondered if I could wait until Tahoe comes out just so I could kill two birds with one stone. The computer itself seems to be running just fine. I'm having no issues other than what I saw in Onyx saying that the unrepairable data volume is in disk utility. Any help would be appreciated.
And Pete, the Greeks didn't wear togas, only the Romans just saying. Well, that's true.
I can't believe it took two months.
I know, right? To figure out that it was the Romans. I wore a toga to the Mac Greek gab at Mac stock.
Well, I mean, again, we're talking Animal House here. Right.
It was the Greeks. Yes. Yes. It's on brand, even though it's very much off brand. That's right. Yeah. Yes.
Yeah. And I am very much off beat. So I get it. There you go. I know that.
Yeah. The Mac Greek gab. There it was. uh so this is somewhat bizarre right that but but we've seen this over the years there's there's just a a there's file system corruption on the volume you know we uh the way i used to think about this and i think it's still correct sort of is that there's the the data that's out there And the data lives in its pockets and and we'll call them sectors of the media. Right. It used to be spinning platters. Now it's it's just cells of an SSD.
But the data lives in its cells. And then there's the table of contents that keeps track of what is where, what data is in which cells. And from what we're we're hearing here, it's the table of contents that is corrupted. Now, there could be other things corrupted, but we aren't seeing that we are seeing that the table of contents for your data volume is being reported as corrupted. That's what the directory is.
The fact that everything's working well is a good thing, but generally speaking, when there is corruption in the table of contents that is unfixable by Apple's tools, and Apple's tools basically are the only ones that exist to fix this stuff, my advice is the same as it would have been 20 and 30 years ago, which is back up that data immediately.
Now if you want to wait until tahoe comes that's fine but do your backups now and do them frequently because you may your system may decide that you are not going to wait until mac os 26 is out right right i mean yeah that that's the that's it may not
Be your decision.
Yeah yeah you you you can decide to do it sooner uh but if you decide to do it later it may decide to do it sooner than you plan to so just keep doing those backups and and then yes the solution is to you know nuke and pave the drive and then and then bring your data back from the backup and then all of that in theory should be fine but yeah start doing those backups immediately and do them more frequent as frequently as you can't afford to lose data i know
that's the instruction that we give for backups all the time But you are in a different class here because you know that you're going to lose things eventually. So and maybe sooner than eventually. So there you go. Yeah.
Yeah.
So that's that. Those are my thoughts. Adam, do you have anything to to add to that?
Yeah. No.
OK.
Yeah.
Yeah. All right. OK. Well, there we are then. I have a question for you, Adam.
¶ Paul-1104-Is Restart the same as TOTO?
Sure. It comes from listener Paul. Paul says you were talking in episode 1104 about turning it off and turning it on again. Toto, as we referred to it. Paul's question starts with hello, gentlemen, is restart under the Apple menu on a Mac the equivalent of Toto or is there a difference?
In my opinion, it is mostly equivalent, is how I would answer that question. There are certain situations, specifically I'm thinking of like a, I never remember what we call it anymore. There's processes you can go through where disconnecting from power will reset your, is it SMU these days?
Yeah, the power management, whatever it is.
Yeah, but there's a process you have to go through. You also have to press some buttons and things like that. But I mean, essentially, yeah, you're rebooting, restarting is in most cases going to be equivalent with rare exceptions when you're trying to do something a little more extreme, like reset your power management union or that sort of thing.
Yeah the only um certainly all of that is is true i agree with that uh your third party peripherals or even i mean even if you have apple peripherals but the things that are connected to your computer also do a negotiation with your device and they certainly do that negotiation on restart but powering everything off everything not just your computer but all of the things connected to it and then powering those you know external peripherals back on and then powering your computer
on like there there definitely is some start from scratch uh thought process that happens there at least in my head it makes me feel better if i'm if i'm troubleshooting something i'm turn it all off and truly remove you know power but i agree that restarting is mostly the same That's what I got. We got anything else for that one? Go to Dan. I think we go to Dan. Am I up? Yep, you're up with Dan. Yep.
¶ Dan-Mac-Mini 16Gb/256Gb <$500 worth it?
All right, sorry. That's okay. Here we go. Dan has a question for us, and he says, Hi, guys. I've seen the base M4 Mac Mini with 256 gigabytes and 16 gigabytes of RAM on sale on Amazon for $499 a few times recently. For someone using it only for personal use, not for business or any kind of editing, do you think this is worth it? I've emailed you previously with a plan to replace my Intel iMac soon with a Mac Mini, and you were very helpful with the monitor advice.
I had planned to get a Mac Mini with 24 gigabytes of RAM and a 512 gigabyte hard drive for 900 bucks. I usually pay more and then hope to keep it longer. But hearing 500 bucks got me thinking, maybe I've been going the wrong route. $500 for the Mac Mini. And even if it only lasts four to five years, does this make sense? Appreciate your thoughts, Dan.
So I took the liberty of answering Dan's question. It depends. Let's go on to Rob's question. Right so uh first of all dan now i'm jealous because uh i paid full price for my uh mac mini and it may be the m1 so it might be the m2 i don't remember off the top of my head but um, I think, you know, for what I use mine for, and that's, I use it as a Plex server. I use it as a channels DVR. I use it as the exit point on my tail scale network often. And so I am on that thing a lot.
And I've got eight whole gigabytes of RAM and a 256 drive in that thing. And I hung a five terabyte drive on the USB port so that it would store my channel's recorded shows and that sort of thing. And it has not even acted a little bit sluggish for me. So I think unless you're doing really intensive stuff that requires a lot of RAM, be it, you know, and even handbrake has worked OK on that, though I don't use that as a main handbrake machine.
You know, Photoshop content creation where you need a lot of RAM. Your biggest consideration, I think, is how much RAM do you need? Because you can always attach more storage easily, but you can't change the RAM on those things. Once you've bought it, you own it, so to speak. So no memory upgradable options in the Mac minis right now. So it depends what you want to do with it. But if you want to do what I consider some pretty intensive stuff, my 8 gigabytes has been just fine.
And so you may save yourself some money by doing that. i i i'm jealous.
I i i yeah i know 500 bucks it's like yeah yeah i would add to that i don't i wouldn't and you can't buy a computer with eight gigs from apple new anymore 16 is the minimum and that minimum i think was driven by apple intelligence right uh that that was the that That was the general consensus last year when, you know, even base model stuff and iPhones started seeing RAM upgrades and all that stuff. But 16 gigs of RAM. I've been doing Apple intelligence stuff on my M1 Mac mini
in the office for the last year. And it's fine. I mean, of course, Apple intelligence isn't where we want it to be.
I was going to ask. Hold on. Apple has intelligence.
Yeah, that's the thing. It's like, are we there yet? And the answer is no, kids. We're not. But maybe soon, you know, who knows? So, but 16, I think for this and like Dan said, waiting, you know, even if it's only going to last four to five years as opposed to 10, is that okay? Yeah, probs, you know, like it's 500 bucks. Like that's a pretty...
If that is what fits your budget today and it will do everything you need today, I agree with you that it will likely do everything you need for that, you know, four to five year window and possibly much longer. But certainly for that, you can always hang a larger drive off of it and even boot from that larger drive. If you just want to, you know, basically kind of forget that the 256 gig drive that's in there, that's all fine. You know, it's a Mac mini.
It's probably not something you're going to transport around. So you won't even notice that there's a drive hanging off of it. Just hang a fast Thunderbolt drive off and you're good. So, yeah, I think thumbs up on that.
Yeah, they're smoking little machines.
500 bucks, man. That's great. Yeah.
For sure. For sure.
I love it. All right. We got one last question, right? before we call this one?
¶ Rob-What do I do when my MFC won't scan anymore?
Yeah, Rob wrote in and he said, I started to answer this one and then I got distracted. Squirrel, you know. So I'm glad that you did, Dave. He wrote in and said, have you ever encountered a situation with a multifunction printer? He's talking specifically in this case about the HP 9020 where it loses the native ability to scan. This just happened to me when I went to scan a document. No scan button available in the built-in printer dialog.
It was available natively when I unboxed and set up the printer a few years ago, and I never had an issue until just recently. I removed it completely from the system and re-added it. Still no scanner capability. I have resorted to installing the HP utilities in order to be able to scan again. Not the end of the world, but definitely frustrating. Thanks, Rob in St. Louis.
Yeah, I've been there. I had an HP 30. I still have an HP 3055 multifunction printer that I bought recently. When we were living in Connecticut, which means it was before we started MacGeekGab, which means it was probably 23, 24 years ago. That thing's still running. I just put new toner in it again for like $12 or something. But Apple's utilities never worked with this, right? So I was always stuck using HP's stuff. And even HP's stuff stopped working after a while.
I somehow made it work for operating systems that were definitely not supported by it, but that went away and I cannot scan with that anymore with any Macs that I own.
So now it's just a copier. It would be a fax machine if I had an RJ11 to plug it into a phone line somewhere, which i don't anymore i used to uh and it's a great laser printer you know so um that's just how it be view scan that we talked about recently yeah from hamrick.com that is third-party scanner software for exactly a situation like this last i checked view scan did not work uh it did not support my hp 3055 but it might support your hp 9020 so if it
does that's gonna you know that'll help you get farther down the road view scan may support the 3055 now i'd be shocked if it did i don't know how many of those are still in service but um but yeah uh it this is what happens and at some point you know my phrase that i go to is that printer doesn't owe me anything anymore like if that hp 3055 were to die today we'd be sad because we'd like having a laser printer in the house as opposed to just over here in the office but it
doesn't owe me anything like it i've had it for 20 plus years that's a my what other pieces of tech do i have that are still in service after 20 plus years i'm looking around up here in the studio where where i don't change things often and no microphone
It's not even that old.
No no this mic didn't exist five years ago let alone yeah yeah yeah so okay your
Mic stand but that's not tech.
That's possible that that's 20 plus years old yeah that might have moved with me that's possible yeah yeah
There you go.
But yeah and i'm just looking around the studio i i don't know what i have here that's that old
Right i had my original intel core duo yeah mac mini yeah that was in service i don't think quite 20 years but i had it in service from the time i bought it till when two or three years ago we left california so that's pretty good it was a server connected to a drobo that just was used for my chrono sync backups yeah yeah
So yeah i mean yeah
What i was go ahead i'll say what i was able to find out was the uh When I started to answer that question is that it was most likely just the operating system updates. They just started dropping the drivers out of there. And thus, that's why your button went away and ain't there in any of the new stuff. Yes.
But the other thing I found out, just to rule a side note here, is that, and I don't know how I came across this, that all laser, and I think we've heard this before, but all laser printers will put tiny, almost invisible yellow dots to identify themselves, on every piece of paper that you print. So like, wow, I didn't know that.
It's interesting.
And I thought, and did some research. Is this true at ChatGPT? Is this true? Yeah. Yes, it is. Oh, okay. All right. I do want to- Yeah, sorry, I took down that rabbit hole.
No, no. No, I'm going to take us back down a rabbit hole that we were in with, I believe, Dan's question, where I recommended hanging an external drive off it to boot from if your internal drive isn't big enough. And MacProCT in our chat says, I've had problems getting Apple Silicon machines to reliably boot from an external drive.
And KiwiGram said, His response was that one gotcha that he's found is that there must still be a working internal drive, even if you're going to boot from an external. And Mac Pro CT says, yeah, even with that in place, I've had issues. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't, or it works initially and then it breaks. So bear that in mind that it should work. I think Apple would tell you that it will work. but field reports uh aren't quite as as as bullish on this idea so
Okay stupid pilot question then uh what what's the advantage of having your boot system outside that you know as opposed to the internal drive boot from that and well is there any advantage to having an external yeah.
Because uh when you boot from if you've got a 256 gig internal like that's pretty space constrained Right. Once you put Mac OS and some apps on there and then also your mail will be on there if you use Apple mail at which your home directory will be there. And so lots of you can moving photos off to an external and music off to an external super easy moving mail to an external not even close to easy the easiest thing.
And it is still technically supported by Apple, we've talked about it on the show, is moving your entire home folder to an external drive. I've never done it.
Good luck with that.
No, I mean, I know some of you have out there and it works, but like it's technically supported. You can go do it. So, but that would be the benefit is booting from something with lots of space so your home folder can just be your home folder.
I tried the home folder thing I mean granted it was probably like 10-15 years ago and it was nothing but a world of hurt and I said never ever ever ever again I don't care that it works and people claim that it works it was a pain in the backside keyster Dave said
That about running a mail server from home too but I don't think I've ever opened the mail app on my mini ever.
Right. For, for what you're doing, using it effectively as a server, right. Then you're, then you're fine. But yeah, mail to me is the big one, but it's not just mail. You know, you install like here in the studio, I have five 12 in inside my Mac studio.
And i am constantly actively managing storage space here because i'll go like you install logic or or you know something which i i use and it's like great i'm gonna install all of the you know components to this and it puts them all on my boot drive you know with no easy option to put them somewhere else and it's like guys i i can't afford 40 gigs worth of stuff on my boot drive like i i think right now i probably have yeah i gotta
do some management i have 19 gigs available on my boot drive here that's bad uh i gotta figure out it's just not fun if i had a two terabyte boot drive in there i wouldn't even think about it it would just be oh
Yeah it's it's why i paid the apple tax to get a gig i can't live with less than a gig i'm looking at mine now i have 300 gigs free out of, or 300 gigs free out of my one terabyte. I can't live without a terabyte is what I should have said.
I knew what you meant. I had a terabyte in my original, whatever it was, iMac, I guess, in the office. And that was more than enough. The Mac mini that I wound up getting down there was a two terabyte. And I'm like, okay, that's fine. But now I'm using, you know, a terabyte and a half on that two terabyte drive. I still have plenty of room. But when I replace that machine, I have to buy a two terabyte. I'm in. That's right. It was difficult up here going from a one terabyte down to a 512
using migration assistant. Like I had to, I had to, yeah. You know that was when the lightning kind of blew everything up and this mac studio was the computer that i could buy that day you know so
For me yeah yeah for me it's my and e and this is like you said easily movable it's my photo library yeah i just don't want to live with my photo library when i have a laptop on an external if it was a desktop i'd be fine with it yes i'm not taking it anywhere but it sucks when you know you have all your photos on an external although now i could get a really small you know like i have a really small um ssd but back in the day when it was larger drives
it was like that was kind of a pain in the butt too and it's like i don't want to have to
Like haul
My photo library on an external drive with me every time i'm going on a trip or something like that but i want to be able to have access to my photos too but now i guess with iCloud photo
Right it's less of an issue yeah i don't i don't let my photos fully sink down to my laptop although my laptop because it was bought in that same week when everything blew up here also has a two terabyte drive in it so i easily could put my photos on it but uh but yeah yep yes and uh i pete i as we as
¶ MGG 1105 Outtro
we leave here i'm gonna laugh about what will be the episode image for this that pete made and just put in our uh in our discord here i love that it took i'm wearing a t-shirt from the bluebird cafe in nashville tennessee and somehow it decided that my t-shirt is boba fett it got your two t-shirts exactly right but somehow or i guess that is boba fett that's not even the man i mean boba fett is a mandalorian but not the mandalorian that's that's boba fett yeah so yeah it
Got uh adam's shirt and it got mine and maybe you look old and angry stay off my damn lawn.
That's really funny there's some robot arm out there but yeah your computer may decide for you folks and that is uh that's that's the lesson from this episode i think it put a
Human head inside the flight helmet behind me on my desk oh yeah who is that these things are so funny so.
What were you gonna ask i have a
Little postscript to the uh to the cool stuff found about the monitors
Yes so
I decided to go on amazon and add them to my cart. And then I remembered that I have a business card that I get cash back on that I can use on Amazon. And I have enough points With tax shipping everything, well, shipping I don't have because it's prime, but I would pay for these two monitors $178.78.
Adam, have you pressed buy now yet?
No, because I am going to check to see what my stipend from my company is, because if that's $150, $28.78.
Yeah, that's fair. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I like it. Yeah. That's great.
Two HD monitors for $28.
The two 4K monitors, not HD.
Oh, sorry. Yeah, 4K monitors.
And LG. You're getting great glass with that, I would presume.
This is the old ultrafine display. Wasn't this the one that Apple partnered originally and was selling with them? Yeah. Or a version of it, I think, probably.
And Dell was selling this glass in their own cases, too, I think, for a while. Yeah. So, yeah.
I see monitors in my future.
That's good. That's good. You look at them every day. It makes a big difference when it looks nice. All right, folks. Thanks for hanging out. Make sure to go to MacGeekUp.com slash giveaway and register for that stuff from Unify. No.
No? Yes? No, no, no, no. I almost had it shipped to the wrong address. Oh, that's bad.
That's very bad. You can send it here. That's no problem.
I was going to go to my daughter because she shops on here all the time and changes it. That was close.
I had that same problem.
Yeah. Thanks to everybody for listening. Thanks to Cashfly for providing all the bandwidth to get the episodes from us to you, the audio files. Check out, if you need more of Pete, check out So There I Was. If you need more of Adam, check out the Debut Film Podcast. And if you need more of me, Business Brain, as I mentioned earlier, and Gig Gab for Working Musicians. Thanks for hanging out. Go leave us a review I would love that 5 stars
5 stars 1.
2, 3, 4, 5
Like the things you learn 5 stars Well my shirt says Boba Fett So I can't read My shirt doesn't really have any advice What's your shirt say Adam? Does it have any advice on it?
No just you know Flynn's Arcade Ah
There you go Pete, does your shirt happen to have any
Advice on it? Oh, mine does say something really cool. Don't get caught. Later.
See ya.