It's time for MacGeekGab and I'll bring us our quick tip of the week with changing the color of your lock screen widgets. I was messing around with my phone. I put a new picture on my lock screen. I actually like, I take a lot of pictures at concerts because I go to a lot of concerts and I always pick one as sort of my main lock screen for my normal focus mode and whatever one I picked, for whatever reason, I couldn't see my widgets anymore.
I have like the weather and the stocks up there, you know below the clock and all that and the time was fine But I just couldn't see the text on my widgets and I went into the widgets I'm trying to change the color of them the place that you change the color of your lock screen widgets is by tapping on and Stylizing the clock whatever color you set the clock to is what your widgets will inherit
it. More quick tips like this. Plus your questions answered today on Mac Geek Hub 1008 for Monday, November 6th, 2023. Music. Greetings, folks, and welcome indeed to Mac Geek Gab, the show where you send in your quick tips like that, your cool stuff, found your questions. We try to answer your questions. We try to share your quick tips and cool stuff found.
Share as many of them as we can in an order that makes it such that we are each most likely to learn at least five new things every single time we get together. Sponsors for this episode, again, sometimes we'll even play that sound when we learn something especially exciting, at least exciting for us. It might be exciting for you too. Hopefully something is. Sponsors for this episode include fastmail.com slash MGG.
That's where you're going to go to get 10% off your first year of the email provider that I've been using for five, six, seven years. I don't know how long. We'll talk more about that in a little bit here for now. Back here on Terra Firma in Durham, New Hampshire, I'm Dave Hamilton. And here in Lee, New Hampshire, it's Pilot Pete. And that opening quick tip, Dave, if you'd asked me how to do it, I couldn't have told, you, but I already did it.
Yeah, I had done it. I must have found it, but yeah. I had done it in the past, but I and so I knew it was doable But I was like man, I guess maybe I'm gonna have to find a different picture I'm like, this is stupid And so, you know I just kept tapping around and and then hit it and as soon as I tapped on the clock the whole like color palette You know, it was like, oh, this is where you do it. It's just super obvious. And so yeah, yeah
Yeah, you can change the font in there and everything. Yeah Pete. 5862 is the number,
Okay, got it. Yep. That's the number is gonna be I'm gonna be tested on it later. No, no, That's the number of days that it took between, The day that I met pilot Pete and the day that I actually flew in a plane With pilot Pete at the cockpit at the at the controls I think we may have flown in a plane like like a commercial plane to or from a thing at one point I think so too, maybe but yeah, but with you in the controls Uh, that was earlier this morning, uh, we're,
we're recording this on Friday the 3rd. So, yep, it was 500, 5,862 days. Cause we met. Well, let's not wait another 58, 62 to do that again. Yeah. That's a long time. Yeah. Um, I brought Dave along because, uh, you know, I, I wanted someone to be able to take over in case I didn't remember what I was doing. That's right. Yeah. He showed me a couple of things just in case. That's right. Yeah.
The tech, well, I think, uh, you were duly impressed with some of the technology that is available to pilots even in small airplanes anymore. What's available on an iPad, the information that is just there at your fingertips is astounding and it's so much easier than it was 40 years ago when I was learning to fly. So I've flown small planes before with an instructor. I've also flown a helicopter with an instructor. I don't, I've never, it's fun, man. Uh, I really liked it. Um, they,
the guy said something, he handed me each of the controls. There's three controls in the, in the helicopter. He handed me them one at a time and then he would take it back. And you know, then he gave me two at a time and then he's like, I think maybe, and we're, we're not hovering at this point. We're, you know, at 3000 feet going, you know, a hundred knots or something like that, like, you know, we're moving. And he, he handed me all three. He's like, I think you can do this.
And I didn't and then he asked me wait. Are you a drummer? And I said, yeah. And he's like, that's it, man. I don't know what it is, but drummers learn something about like coordinating because you're applying pressure with your hand and your feet sort of counter to each other. You do that in a fixed wing plane too, but not nearly to the degree that you do sort of constantly in a helicopter. And he's like, it's something about drummers that
you learn how to feel that. He's like, I always have an easier time teaching drummers. But anyway. I don't know where I was going with that. We were, we were talking about tech. Oh yeah, we were up at oh dark 30 this morning. So it's been a long day already. I have always maintained an interest in aviation. And, uh, though I haven't been doing it much lately, I used to play flight simulator all the time and I would plan like, you know, I got the
yoke and the rudder pedals and all that stuff. And, uh, and I was actually using X plane, not flight simulator, so we'll put X-Plane in the show notes. And I would, you know, plan these, like, you know, cross-country trips or whatever and, you know, fly the waypoints and all of that. And I would go and download from ForeFlight the plates for each of the airports that show you
the approach path and all of that stuff. So when you started doing that in the plane today, it was like, oh my gosh, like, not only do I understand at a basic level what you're doing, Like I've literally used those same plates before. Right. You know, I would print out, I would download them as PDFs and print them out, but you had them on your iPad. And then what blew me away was it showed your plane overlaid on these plates.
On the approach plate, yeah. Yeah, and like, yeah, these are approach plates that show you the orientation and location of the runways. And then they also tell you what frequencies you need to tune your radios to, and they show you the approach path, like get to this waypoint and then come in at this heading and do this, and you want to be at this altitude here, and all the instructions are right there.
And but so I was like intimately familiar with these things and especially I I flew to Lebanon Which is where we went today from Pease and Rochester many times So this was a flight that like I had done, When you were looking back and forth at the plate to put in the waypoints I almost just told you what they were because I knew, Like feet I used to do this all the time But um just it was blew my mind to see how integrated it all is and then it shows you all the planes around you
And this is just on a normal ipad, Right. With the ForeFlight app, correct? Exactly. That's exactly it. Yeah. And the ForeFlight is a, it's a paid subscription, but for what you get, it's not very much. I want to see. 140, 150 a year or something like that. I think it's even less than that. Cause I downloaded the app yesterday and it gave me like a month free. Uh, I had never downloaded
the app before and it was like, Oh my gosh, like I can, this is amazing. Yeah. And the, you know, it tells you, Hey, look, you're about, you're approaching certain airspace or you're You're approaching terrain ahead. You know, you're too low, you've got rising terrain. And then I had, you also saw I had the Sentry, S-E-N-T-R-Y, which is, it gives me AHRS, A-H-R-S, which is Attitude Heading Reference System. And ADS-B, in other words, traffic around me.
It gives me the traffic around me, the altitude, that sort of thing. And then finally, the most important thing, carbon monoxide detection. Oh, well, there's that too, as sort of a bonus, right? Yeah. But that thing was cool, because on your iPad, which you're able to affix to the yoke, the steering wheel, for those of you.
Yep. He had his iPad right there on the yoke. And so there's this digital screen, obviously, because it's the iPad, in addition to all the normal instruments that you'd have in a plane that are kind of affixed to the plane. Then there was a, we saw a plane kind of crossing in front of our nose. I mean, it was a safe distance and altitude. It wasn't a problem, but we saw it. That's our story and we're stuck with it. You got it. And nobody else has to know any different.
And you just tapped on that plane, which appeared on your iPad, you know, crossing in front of us. You tapped on it and it told us heading, airspeed, type of aircraft. Like, you know, it's like you got the blood type of the pilot. Right, exactly. It was pretty cool. Loyal pressure in the number two engine. Yeah. So, so we had, yeah, we went over for, you called it a breakfast, the time of day. The jarhead breakfast. The jarhead breakfast, which refers to Marines.
And so it was mostly Marines and you were kind enough to include me in it today, which was great. But you, you Marines call that breakfast. At that hour, we computer nerds and musicians call it a midnight snack. It started at 7 AM and it's a 45 minute flight and it's a 20 minute drive from my house to the airfield. So you folks can do the math and figure out why I've been up since 4 AM and so has Pete. So yeah. Yeah. But yeah. Sounds a lot of fun. I was glad you could come along and. Yeah.
And uh. 5,862 days of pre-flight is, is what this morning was. So yeah, yeah. Exactly. Pete, you gotta, so like there was, there was like, it's interesting how much of the tech that we all talk about on this show and obviously use day in and day out, has these purposes. And I was. Peripherally aware that you could use an iPad in a plane. I just never, it blew me away. How? Yeah, in fact, we call it, at the airline, we call it EFB, electronic flight bag.
Right. So if you remember 15 years ago, pilots walking around with those great big leather cases. Yeah. They had all their gypsum binders in there that in that case could weigh, you know, 50 pounds, 50 pounds. Yeah. With all the paper in it. And that has all been supplanted by the, by the iPad and the Jepson app and there's, um, Wait, what other app? Just so I can put it in the show notes. It's Jepson, it's flight deck pro. Oh, okay. By Jepson.
Yep. And, um, I'll put that in there too. Yeah. Yeah. And then there was another one, but, uh, yeah, being tired, the name escapes me. We used another brand for a while and it was, uh, He was quite alert behind the yoke there. He was, it was all good folks. Right. We're in the lab. But it's amazing. This little iPad replaces that entire huge bag, so now we have room for all kinds of other crap in our backpacks, which are just as heavy as those flight bags ever were. Yeah, yeah, exactly,
exactly. But mine includes now like a podcast microphone and stand. Yeah, the important things. Great big MacBook Pro. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it was fun. That was really fun. All right, You got a quick tip for us, Pete? I do, and of course my phone I'm using is my camera right now, so I can't describe it as I do it, but if you press and hold a the globe at the bottom of the iOS keyboard. Okay, so I'm typing a new mail message. There's a globe in the lower left-hand corner. Yep.
Press and hold that. It should come up and you should be able to see basically a little left, center, or right icon. And so by doing that, if you press, say, the left one, you can hold the keyboard shrinks itself to the left side and you can type or swipe with your holding the phone in one hand. Right. And type, so you aren't having to reach all the way, especially if you've got a, like an iPhone 15 Pro Max or any of the Max phones, you need either really
long thumbs or you got to hold it with two hands. And this allows you to pull the screen over to the left or the right, and you can type the entire keyboard with your thumb. Amazing. One-handed. That's, yeah, I knew about this, I've gotten my phone into that mode recently and I forgot how to do it. How did I do that? Yeah, how did I do it? Exactly. Yeah.
And more importantly, how do I undo it? Well the good news is, and I think this is new, but it might not be, when you put it into that mode, if the keyboard is on the, if you choose to put the keyboard on the left side, or you accidentally put the keyboard on the left side, on the right side will be a little sort of right-facing carrot that you can, or chevron or whatever that we're supposed to call that thing, like a greater than sign, that you tap and it reverts it to a full-size screen.
So there is an obvious hint right there on the screen. You don't need to know the magic incantation. But this is one of those reminders of hold down, you know, tap and hold on things. Don't just, you know, tapping does one thing. And hold can do another and that can be kind of fun. Henry has our next quick tip for us. He says, it's a little convoluted.
If you use photo shuffle for your iPhone's lock screen and you see a picture and then want to know where it is in your photo library, here's how to find it. Go into customize mode by holding down on the lock screen image and then clicking customize. Okay, so like we were talking about at the beginning of the show, right? You're gonna customize things. Then select your lock screen on the left, tap the button in the lower right corner, the round one with three dots. Ah, okay.
This brings up a menu and at the top is the option show photo in library. Tap that and it brings you two photos right to that picture. So simple and intuitive, says Henry. Be careful not to alter any of your lock screen settings as you navigate through this. Don't get caught. Yeah, man. That's, oh, that's, I've, I've wondered about that because you know, if I have my phone in like, you know, lock screen shuffle mode or photo shuffle mode, it's like, oh wait, where's that from?
And it's not like the, I'm used to my Apple TV where I just, here's another quick tip by the way, if you're on the screen saver on Apple TV where a drone flies you through, you know, various locales around the globe, if you want to know what it is, just tap lightly, don't click, but tap lightly on the center of the directional pad on your Apple TV remote. And at the bottom of the screen, it will float up and show you details about the location where that footage is from. Nice. Yep.
So thanks. Yeah. Fun. So. Press and hold then is also a good thing. And then the other, along those lines, you can set your photo to change based on your focus mode. Yes well your whole lock screen change on your right focus mode yeah yeah yeah yeah so that's nice because you can look at your phone and tell whether you're. In the mode you wanna be in or not i feel like i've just had this conversation on this show so it must have been.
Was it with you in a pre show or post show or was it with jeff and adam on episode thousand seven i don't know i feel like you know i'm having deja vu was it was the last two minutes cuz i listen to everything but the last two minutes i got home and went, Maybe it was with you, I don't know, but yeah, and the handy part about that is you can also change your watch's face to do the same thing.
Oh yeah. And then you really just know, and it's a good reminder that, oh yeah, you're still in podcasting focus mode, Dave, so you might want to not be in that, because podcasting focus mode basically makes it so that Pete can get through to me, that's it. Pete, Shannon, Paul Kent. That's it. Those are the people. And there's somebody else. But definitely not my family. Yeah. So yeah. Kent has our next quick tip.
Kent says, I suspect this is something that has affected only a minority of iPhone owners, but after upgrading to iOS 17, my wife's MyCard somehow changed in contacts to a different contact. A bug for sure, but how does one go about changing it back? One would think you would go to the contact card for yourself and just tap make this MyCard. That's kind of how how you do it on the Mac. There's a menu item and yep.
But on the iPhone, it's different. You have to go into settings, like the settings app, then scroll down to contacts, go to my info. And from there you can pick your entry, uh, in your contacts list. So I, I, this is another one of those things. Like it's a perfect quick tip because, man, sometimes you don't know, you know, it can be done, but where is it?
And thankfully, sometime back, Apple got on board with, so you didn't have to have two cards that are, you know, one's my share card and one's my regular one. When you go to share a contact, even like if I wanted to share Dave's contact information with somebody, cause they wanted to talk to him about Beck Beat Media, I can, you know, take off his, his wife's birth date or, you know, whatever. Whatever you want. Yeah. You get to pick. You can deselect items. Yeah.
And it remembers that. I don't know if it remembers it for another person's card, but certainly for your card when you go to share that.
It remembers what you have selected as the things you want to share and, The next time you go to do it all those same things are selected You can obviously change them if you want, But it does remember them and this is really handy for the new feature That I cannot remember the name of where you tap two iPhones together or whatever and they share contacts it It honors those settings. So yeah, it used to be bump, but that was a separate app. That was a separate app. Yeah.
Apple seemed to, I think they acquired it. Sure and pull that in let's go with that. Let's go. Yeah. Yeah, all you have to do is, Smack the two phones together at the top and yep. Yep, and then you can start sharing things. One last quick tip for For now I was gonna say for this episode for this segment, Is that in Mac OS 14 point one? So I'm saying this right right? Yes, Sonoma 14.1. Yes. Okay. I just get confused at iPhone iOS 17. Like it's like, dude,
can we all just started going to cities in California? I couldn't keep up the cats for some reason. I could keep straight. The locations in California, Sonoma 14.1, the latest released as of the moment that we're recording the show. They have brought in the messages app. Tap backs are now front and center. It used to be that you had to right click on a message. If you were going to do it with your mouse, mouse, you'd right click on a message, choose tap back, and then pick the tap back that
you wanted to send. Now you can do that. The option is still there, but right above it. Are the graphics of all of the tap backs. So you just right click on a message and right at the top, you will see, you know, you can select from the heart and the thumbs up and the thumbs down and you know, the ha ha and all this stuff. I wish they would let me customize those, like every other messaging app lets me customize those, but you know, we're getting somewhere and, um, and I like it.
It's uh, yeah, moving forward. I love it. All right. Look, in our hyperconnected world, the importance of a reliable, secure email service can't be overstated. So when it comes to choosing an email provider, wouldn't you want one with a stellar track record for prioritizing privacy? Enter our sponsor, Fastmail. For over two decades, Fastmail has championed email privacy. The best part? It's completely ad-free, ensuring your personal space isn't invaded by pesky ads.
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Discover the Fastmail difference. Visit fastmail.com slash mgg to get 10% off your first year. Don't forget to follow him on Facebook, X, Mastodon, and LinkedIn for updates. Again, fastmail.com slash mgg to get 10% off your first year and our thanks to Fastmail for sponsoring this episode. And while I got you here, I want to share a great podcast for you. Leo Laporte hosts a show called This Week in Tech, one of the longest running tech news shows in the world.
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Not just the computing, Windows, Mac, and Linux, but AI, Twitter slash X, cybersecurity, privacy search, and so much more. So visit twit.tv slash twit to subscribe to This Week in Tech. And thanks to Leo and the team over there for doing this swap with us. Dave, you should send some questions over to them, the tech questions. Ah, yeah. You know what, actually, I bet you could answer it yourself. Bill wants to know about his new computer. Should he nuke it? Should he migrate? Which of these?
Yeah, Bill says, I intend to buy a new iMac once updated models are released, which was this email came in just prior to Apple's announcement the other day. He says, my 2017 iMac is long in the tooth. I have always simply used a migration assistant to set up a new Mac and I've never ever started with a clean slate or nuked and paved or any of those things. I don't use many third-party apps as I've dumped Microsoft Office. The most important third-party apps I use are attack software,
and printer scanner software for my HP all-in-one. Because of persistent Wi-Fi and Bluetooth problems that this iMac, I think I have a hardware issue, but it might be a software issue, so I don't want to inherit that if in fact that's what it is. Quite frankly, the thought of not using Migration Assistant is quite unpleasant to me, he says. In addition to dealing with the above items, I'd have to go through settings and preferences to
put everything back the way they're set up now. So, what do you recommend? So, here's the thing. It's relatively easy to punt and start over if you don't like the path you've chosen. And I say relatively because with Apple Silicon Macs, if you wipe the internal drive, things start to get really funky in terms of restoring it and getting things back up. It's doable. Apple has a path to walk down, but it's not quite like it was with Intel.
But you still can do it. I just did it on my Mac Studio recently, so it's doable. I do think it is a good thing to occasionally, and you know, maybe once every five years, maybe once every ten years, but certainly at least once every ten years, I think it's a good idea to start over from scratch, to do the Nuke and Pave.
Not only does it clean out all the cruft we can't see, right, the weird settings and preferences that might have gotten, you know, tied in knots over the years, it also cleans out the cruft we can see, right? Specifically all those apps that we have, you know, emotional attachment to, but we don't ever actually run anymore. It's nice to clean those out too. And my experience has been that the Nuke and pave takes a lot less
time than it used to. And for me, it's maybe an afternoon of getting things back up and running because, I wind up installing half of the apps that I think I need. Basically, my philosophy when I do a Nuke and Pave, and I've done one fairly recently. Is to only install the apps that I need when I need them. Now, I know going out of the gate, okay, well, if I'm going to be podcasting on this machine, I need, you know, audio hijack and various other things, like whatever that's going to be.
But other than that, and I do the same thing with a phone when I Nuke and Pave it, I just wait to install an app until it's like, oh, I need that. I'm going to put it on here and it keeps things cleaner longer. I will eventually fill it all up with crap again. It's who I am,
but it's nice to know that I'm starting from scratch. So there's that, but just as much it, and the thing is with nuking and paving, yes, to build to your point, you're going to have to go through and tweak all your settings again. That's not necessarily a bad thing either because there's probably some options that weren't there the last time you made the decisions that you made about how
you want to have things configured. So this gives you an opportunity to kind of think about those and be a little more intentional about it instead of just taking momentum. Sinking and I talk about you know sinking being iCloud drive certainly right but also.
Whatever mail client or mail service you use is likely to be a sinking type engine right it's all stored on the server your clients just connect with think about you know it's like i got a new phone i just you know logged into my mail account all my mail was there
Well, the same thing's going to happen on your Mac, right? So, you know, if you have things in the on my Mac folders, those you would need to manually move over, but you, you know, like so much of our data is synced with the cloud now that you wind up pulling a lot of that stuff around. I would though, I would move my mail folder over. Uh, I would in home library mail, I would move. That whole folder to a new machine and then launch mail. It'll see it, it'll upgrade it.
And that way you have everything, including all of your mail settings. If you don't want to have to go through setting all that stuff up again. Similarly, I would move my photos library over and point to that. I would move my music library over and point to that. And you can do that with a computer connected with a Thunderbolt cable.
You can do it with a computer connected over a network, like whichever way you want, um, as, as simple as nuking and paving has gotten because of all of these things, migration assistant is also pretty darn good these days. And I don't recommend against it at all. In fact, I wind up using it more often than I would like to because I'll wind up getting a new compu- like this year, when I wound up having to get two new computers right away.
You know, like, lightning strike, surprise, go spend a bunch of money, you've got two new computers. Well, I would have liked to plan for that and have done a rebuild from the ground up. I ain't, like, I'm not a patient person. Nobody has time for patience, Pete. And so I just migrated over and it was fine, like it works great, it's super efficient, so... If it's been more than five years, I would strongly consider nuking and paving. Well, he said in his letter, never.
That's the part of me that says props. Yeah. Yeah. I, I, I, based on that, I would do it. And I think I told this story before on here, and I think it's been about five years now since it happened to me when I bought that 20, I think it was, yeah, it was 2018, 16 inch MacBook Pro Intel. Yep. Great machine. I absolutely loved that machine until the M1 MacBook Air came out and smoked it. But we won't talk about that here.
We might talk about that next. Glenn's got a relevant question. Right, there's that. But the thing is, I actually had two of those machines because it was so gooned up, I wound up taking it back to Apple and they swapped the machine out for me. And it wasn't until I did a nuke and pave that all my problems went away. Ah, the heavens opened up and the angels smiled and my computer worked again.
It just, it would, I'd get the blue screen of death, it would lock up, the kernel panics, all that stuff. And it's like, what is going on here? And as soon as I got rid of migration assistant and went to a nuke and pave, everything was fine. So I was bringing something over from my old system. And so you, you, you're eliminating problems too, potentially. Yeah. I mean, in addition to cruft.
Yeah. You are causing yourself a little bit of, uh, you're inheriting some headache with that, just short term, because you've got to do the work to get it set up, but it's not as much work. It, at least it's not as much work as I convinced myself. It's going to be, I did not, I used migration assistant when I moved to this max studio. I probably... Did that because I convinced myself that a Nuke and Pave was something I didn't have time for.
The reality is, I did a Nuke and Pave on its predecessor, last year, year before, and, you know, it was like a morning, and then I was done. So, it's just not that bad, especially if you got a backup, again, that you can just copy things.
That's probably the easiest way to copy your mail, your photos, your music, is to, back them back up the whole drive right you know your data drive with like carbon copy cloner and then plug that drive into your new computer and and copy the things over that's going to truly be the simplest way to do that bill did ask about you know his all-in-one printer and that sort of thing you just gotta check the drivers from the manufacturer think he said it was an HP
so I'm in and they may or may not be compatible with the new OS like it it that's, that's the, the issue if, if they're compatible at this, you know, if you're running Sonoma on your old computer, then they're going to work with Sonoma on your new computer, most likely. But I, you know, I, I hit, I years ago replaced my HP all in one because I couldn't get Mac drivers for it anymore for the scanning portion. It still works great as a printer,
but I'd had the thing for like 15 years. Like it didn't owe me anything, but it still works as a printer and a copier and it's over at the house and we love having a laser printer at the house like you know so like yeah yeah these things are just how it goes yeah yeah glenn. I mentioned asked a question he says um i've got uh an intel mac running uh with with 1.5 of its two terabytes available. So he's using half a terabyte of storage. He's been on this machine
for two years. Great. He says, I use this machine for work. It's my small company. And I run with two HP 27 inch screens, the Mac open on a pedestal and my iPad as an extra screen. In addition to that, I keep a lot of apps open while working. QuickBooks, Outlook, Slack, Fantastical, Apple mail, ScanSnap, OnePass, etc. etc. while bringing up other apps as needed like Excel, Word, or PDF Elements.
Looking at all of this he says I'm trying to decide between an M3 Max MacBook Pro so one of the ones just released this week and a. You know I don't have a trackpad on this computer so I can't scroll to the right or at least not easily and a an M2 Max Max studio and, he says I go to the office one day a week and I need a laptop when I'm there because everybody else runs on a a PC, and occasionally I need the laptop for other things that the iPad is not suited for.
I've never tried to keep two machines in sync, which would potentially become more difficult if one of them is an Intel chip, he says. I don't think so. All the syncing engines are platform agnostic at the moment. He says, I think it would be a simpler choice if the Mac were, you know, an M1. He says, it's nice to save money, but I'd rather make the best decision for the next three and a half, three to five years, uh, for my thing.
So, uh, I think I, based on what he's saying and he needs a laptop, I think going with the laptop is the right choice. Uh, As, as I said, as far as syncing really everything works quite well these days, um, keeping them in sync. You know, we just mentioned that documents and mail and all of that are sort of naturally syncing. If you're using a third party app like Dropbox, that's going to also do your syncing.
Uh, if you've got two Macs, keeping your apps in sync is not something that happens automatically. But I love the app called Mac updater from core code. It's so great. You know, I run three Macs on a regular basis, right? The one here in the studio, the one in the office, and then my, my laptop, my air and by having Mac updater on there, I can keep all the apps up to date so that when I go to run something that I haven't run for a while on one of them. It's not woefully out of date.
It, you know, it's not telling me it's time to update. I'm already done and it's good to go. So, yeah, I think even if you want to keep the Intel machine going alongside your M1, whatever, sorry, the M3, the Apple Silicon machine, I think you're going to be fine in terms of the syncing. He asked if he should get a one terabyte drive or a two terabyte drive.
He has a two terabyte now as he said he's only using half a gigabyte half a terabyte. Sorry 500 gigabytes. I, Would go with the one terabyte. I often have gone with the two terabyte just because. I almost went with the two terabyte in my current machine, but you know, I just, if, you're even a little bit careful, you're going to be just fine for the most part. Well, it's, it's everybody's individual, right? It's the use case. But if he's only using a half a terabyte now.
I don't see that jumping. No. Especially once you do a nuked pave and you don't bring all your crud over. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, no, I. That's a hundred gigs right there. I'm the same way. I I have two machines that have two terabytes in them my air and my. Mini in the office and it's because I did not spec out those machines They are machines that I effectively bought used from another person a trusted person
But another two different people in the from each machine, but you know, it was like I have this used machine. That's perfect for you Great. Yep. I'll take it. Good to go. Like I'm, I'm, you know, off to the races. They spec'd it out with two terabytes. Obviously it's not going to be a problem. The same kind of thing happened when I bought the Mac studio here. Uh, it was, it wasn't used, but it was old stock of the M1 Max Mac studio.
And it was base model. So it has, uh, I think it's got 32 gigs of RAM and a 512 gigabyte drive. And you know what, it's also fine. Like I it's a Mac studio, so I'm not carting it around. I have an external drive that I'd save all my audio to and all, all that stuff anyway, and it's Thunderbolt. So it's going at, you know, 2,400 megabytes a second or whatever. It's totally once I configured everything, I don't think about the, the limited size of the internal drive.
So yeah, I think you're going to be fine with it. And I'd say you guys had a nice discussion on 10 0 7 about that very subject as to to which. You know, what do you need? Go, go with the lowest you need and you'll be, these machines are so amazing. You don't need much, you know, they're the base machines are just rocking anymore. So going with an M1 and yeah, I wouldn't chintz on the size of the drive to less than a terabyte, but that's just me.
And maybe go with 16 gigs of memory, but even that is a lot. You know, the base model machines seem to it depends what you're doing right if you do a lot of video and that sort of thing then you're gonna want Want more memory and I don't know I I this is where I would, And I know I've said that eight is enough and it most people prove that it's enough and I agree with it Except the day that I'm buying a computer and that's when I buy with a minimum of 16,
I just can't bring myself to do the eight because I keep computers and I repurpose them and I even if I'm not using it it's handed down to a family member and so you know a 10-year shelf life for of a 10-year service life of a computer is pretty normal for me and so that's why I buy the 16 at them as a minimum for fair enough yeah and I will say this I'm looking forward to the m4 chip already so Glenn if you'll go buy an m3 today The m4 will be out next week for all of us.
It's true. It kind of how it works speaking of memory issues, and I just want to I. I'll link to the thread that I started in our discord about it I have been having issues with I've been really happy with Sonoma as I said on the last episode.
I've been having issues with safari chewing up memory like crazy I think it started with 14.1 but I can't say for certain but I'm pretty sure that it did and slowing just like making it so that even if I'm in another app typing my computer is just like slow af and then I quit safari and everything's fine I relaunched safari and it's fine but it's using you know four five six gigs
of memory. And so I'm curious if, and if so, how many others out there are seeing the same thing, or if it's like, do I have a problem with my mini that I need to troubleshoot and solve? So it, it's, it's been a little interesting and obviously frustrating. I'm quitting and relaunching safari once or twice an hour, which seems like a lot. Yeah, it does. Okay. Yeah, yeah, I think I think we can agree. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Um, so I don't chrome Dave.
Um, I could, you know, it would take a lot. It would take less than I'm telling myself it would take, but it would take a lot. Um, so I don't know, like maybe, but I want to figure it out. I want to know if this is a systemic problem with 14.1 or if it's just, I have something going on and maybe it's time to Nuke and pave that computer. I don't like the idea of it, but it's not as bad as I think, I just need to take my own advice. Right on. Yep. There you go. Yep. All right.
Yep. Shall we go to Neil? Let's do it. All right. He writes in, gentlemen, a question. Despite the two mini Macs I have owned over the years, I have never used migration assistant. Always preferring to, wait, did we just cover this? No, kind of. Okay. I put all these together because they're related. I understand. I'll back with you now. It's like, it's three questions to have a migrating to new Macs discussion. It's deja vu all over again. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, I argue, I thought about reading all three of these questions and then just having a discussion, but you know, six to one. Yeah. Yeah. Then, and, but always preferring to set up a new Mac by hand, installing and configuration each, uh, applique.
And configuring each application and configuration. As I am now faced with a relatively rapid migration of a MacBook Air that was only recently acquired, but is being adopted by one of the kids to another MacBook Air, I was thinking Migration Assistant would make sense as there's little cruft to be cleared out in the new setup. What I was wondering is whether Migration Assistant is safe to use with things like Synology Drive.
Pretty much everything on my MacBook Air is synced via Synology Drive to, obviously is my Synology as well as my desktop Mac Studio. Can I expect things to just work or would it be better to perhaps migrate only apps and then let Synology drive, bring down the data from the Synology on its own? Yeah, I think we can stop the question there. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, because we've sort of covered the rest of it. The, thank you, Neil. Yeah, and thank you for reading it, Pete.
Yes, the answer is it's a non-issue. It were Intel, Apple Silicon, Synology Drive is, it's just gonna do its job. And the same is true for Dropbox and all the other third-party syncing agents that we've encountered over the years. It's just gonna be migration assistant. It moves the folder of data over. It also moves the app over and it moves the app's preferences over and it looks and says, good to go.
I do remember a time, and this may still be true, where Dropbox would throw up a flag and say, Hey, I noticed that the serial number or the identifier of the drive that I'm syncing to changed. Please confirm that you want me to resume syncing to this folder on what appears to be a new drive. And you would say, yes, you saw correctly. Everything's good. But that was the extent of the friction. And it was very...
Upfront it wasn't something where it was like you know three weeks later you realize oh my god i'm not sinking this is a disaster no it's not a disaster it's fine so yeah no the answer is yes sonology drive and every other third party sinking engine that we've looked at. Is totally fine at surviving a migration assistant migration. So, yeah, clearly a lot of big brains spent a lot of time to make this work, going from Intel to.
Apple. And that too, right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But even, even just like, yeah, just, just from Mac to Mac, regardless, it really is a non-issue. Yeah. So yeah. Good question. Uh, lock tutor in our discord at Mackie camp.com slash discord asked, has anyone found a truly awesome program to organize years worth of photos. I'd love to be able to browse through my photos and use a hot key or something fast to quickly tag a photo as I'm going or group of photos as I'm going through.
Do you know of anything? Pete? Pick me, Dave. Yes, Pete. I see you over there. I got it. You may have heard of this. It's called photos. I know it is. They do an amazing job with this. It's the Apple photos app. If you go to the window menu at the top, go to window and then keyword manager, when you've got photos open, or you could even hit command K and that will bring up the keyword manager. Then type, type a new keyword or you there's down at the bottom, you hit edit keywords.
And let's say I have a son named Mac and they see, go figure. Is a word we all know. Yeah, so that's one of them. You type the keyword back and it comes up and boom. Well, but how to make it even faster? Well, you drag it up to what's called a quick group. So from the bottom of the keyword manager, you drag that tag up to the quick group and then the M
becomes the quick key in order to quickly take. So any photo you select with the keyword manager open then go into select five photos of my son and I just then hit the M and it tags all five of those photos with. The keyword Mac. This is amazing. I, I, um, I, I've never, you, you had queued this up, in the agenda last week or something. And I was like, I don't know what the heck he's talking about. Yeah. Because I didn't know what the heck you were talking about. So we're looking at your
screen. So take family and drag it up to the top, drag it above. I can't know that you're looking at an article I found on, I download blog about this because I wanted to visualize it. Yeah. So So in order, if you were to do it, take that tag and drag it up above the word keywords. Yeah, no, it's like a just a- And then it becomes one letter. In this case, it would probably be the letter F. F for family, right.
And if you had another one that said friends, then it would probably default to R being the next letter in the word to quickly tag friends. And then you just start typing. And then, yeah, select 20 photos, hit the letter M, and those photos of Mac are all tagged with Mac. Which of course you don't have to do because photos would detect his face and probably do that differently. Well, sure. But maybe he had his back to me in that particular photo. But I know it's him anyway. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
But yeah. Disney Vacation. I was blown away. I didn't even know about the Keyword Manager. Like that's where I'm starting with this. The quick tag thing, like that makes perfect sense if there were to be a Keyword Manager. And it turns out that, Pete, you just conjured up a keyword manager in the Photos app on all of my Macs. Because until you mentioned it, I had no idea that it existed. So we ring the bell. Yeah. Bing. Yeah. Yeah. I've been using it for years and love it. Absolutely love it.
They've done a really nice job. So. I'm really glad that you put this in the, the agenda. Like this is, and, and, and, and like lobbied for it to be in the show. Like I just, yeah. Yeah. Amazing. Yeah. What do you ask to have it? I'm like, well, yeah, this is, this is what I use and it's great. I know. This is the beauty. And you, and you put it in as a quick tip. And now I understand why,
because it's one of those things that if you know about it, well, it's super easy. And if you don't, Then it's hidden from you forever until somebody shows it to you. Yeah. Yeah. All right, cool. Uh, I think we got time for one more question and we'll do some cool stuff found and all that stuff. You want to take us to DJ Pete? We could, I can so do, I will do so at this time, the problem is, uh, hang on, where did it go? You want me to take us to DJ?
Wait, wait a minute. I'm coming, Dave. I'm coming. Where did I hide it? Was it notes? There it is. There's DJ. He says, I'd like to be able to, well, in, In a message, hit a button and have a task set in reminders to reply to this email. Perhaps there's a better workflow than this, but I tend to drive my day from reminders. A, I'm interested in if this is possible, and B, I'm interested in hearing how others manage this, perhaps entirely within the email client.
Thanks for any feedback. By the way, I'm evaluating the postbox client, and this was one thing I was looking for and didn't find. Okay, I know that there are relatively straightforward ways of doing this in mail. Do I have mail open on this computer? I don't, and I don't want to launch it for fear of screwing up my audio. But it really does depend on the mail client, and you're saying that Postbox does not
do this. So, I start thinking about shortcuts, right? What is the hour? Well, really what I I start thinking about is how is this app integrated with macOS frameworks? Does it directly support shortcuts or AppleScript? If it does, then you could probably trigger something to take the data about the highlighted message and or script something to take the data about the highlighted message and then create a reminder from that.
That would be doable with either Apple Script or shortcuts or even a combination of the two. Triggering such a thing is not built into macOS. We don't have a way of like pushing a button to trigger a script like we do on say iOS. However, we do have third-party apps to do that. and I use Keyboard Maestro all the time to trigger shortcuts or Apple Scripts or even just other things inside of apps. So you could, I would look at this from a technologically
agnostic way. So making sure that you can do whatever you need to do without it needing to rely on the app integrating with the Mac, right? So you create a workflow where you copy something to the clipboard, the subject of the message, whatever you want it to be, and then use Keyboard Maestro to invoke whatever you've created, and what you would create is a shortcut that, will create a reminder with the text from the clipboard.
And this is pretty simple, you use shortcuts, you say, get the contents of clipboard, and, then create reminder and pump the contents of the clipboard into the reminder note and like, you're good to go. If your mail client lets you copy a URL to the link to that message, which you can do in like mail, but I don't know if you can do in postbox, then that could be in your reminder as the URL. And then you would just click it and it would bring you right back to the message.
But that depends on whether the mail client allows you to do that, and then you just trigger it. And it's very similar to what we do here to process the show. In fact, DJ asked this question in Discord. And so what I did, I posted a little answer in discord to get the conversation going. And then I took a screenshot to my clipboard of DJ's question. That's what Pete just read.
Once I knew it was on my clipboard, which I did with, you know, if you do screenshots, well, if you use the manager, the command shift five, that lets you decide where you're going to put it. That's, that's the easy way I do it with like, um, command control shift four. And that puts it on
on the clipboard. There's a million different ways of doing it, but I got the, I got the screenshot on the clipboard and then I used keyboard maestro to, invoke a shortcut that builds a note in the Mac geek gap prep notes folder. And what does it populate the note with the contents of my clipboard? So now I have DJ's thing in there and then also my answer, cause I copied and pasted both and it was good to go. So this is, it's pretty straightforward to do these kinds of things with shortcuts.
And once you've done one of them, It's really like drag and drop in shortcuts. If you've never done it, I welcome you to try it because it's, I encourage you to try it because it's going to open up the world for you in terms of how you get to think about solving these kinds of things. Once you understand, even at a very basic level, how shortcuts works, and then think about the idea of triggering a shortcut with a keyboard maestro, you know, keyboard shortcut.
Now you can do all kinds of things just really quickly. And it can be really fun. And if you're new to all of that and it, you just don't grok it and it seems undoable. There's this chat GPT thing you can ask and it will tell you, Oh yeah, do this, write it this way, set it up. It's an amazing instructor. Yeah. Yeah. You're not wrong. So yeah, you're not wrong. Uh, I want to jump to doing some cool stuff found if we may. Let's do it before we do that, though.
I want to take a minute as we have been doing as of late and thank our, uh, everyone who has contributed to our premium, uh, Mac, ECAB premium, uh, contribution system, donation system. I forget. I don't even know what the right term to call it a support system, uh, in the last week and, and change since we've recorded here. So, uh, and you can learn about it at mackeycap.com slash premium. It is of course not mandatory. It is very much appreciated.
Simply listening to the show is an amazing way to support the show. Sharing it with other people is yet another step you can take. Sending in your questions and stuff to feedback at Mackey cab.com is, you know, yet another way. Feedback at Mackey cab. It's feedback at Mackey cab.com. That's right. But if you are able and interested, We also will happily take your contributions directly and that can all happen at Mackeycab.com slash premium.
In the last week-ish, we have had $10 contributions from... Oh, I got to get the screen up the right way. Paul from Lawrenceville, Steven from Plainfield, Gary from Babylon, John from Vienna, Steven from Costa Mesa, James from Melbourne, Olga from Bellevue, Nick from Mount Clemens, Robert from Columbia, and Jason from Charlestown. We have had a one-time $24 contribution from Glenn in New York.
And then we have had $25 contributions from Gary in McKees Rocks, James in the Scoresby Charles in Mechanics Berg really it's Chuck in Mechanics Berg, Janes from Charlotte Chris in. Nailsworth Stroud, I like these names Laura from Spokane Valley Steve from Santa Fe Ken from somewhere in the land, Thomas from Chicago and and Jurgen from Velderstad. I think I've got that right. And then a $30 contribution from Barbara in Hanahan and a $50 contribution from Richard in Salem. Thank you to you all.
And thanks to everyone who is a premium subscriber. It really does mean a lot to Pete and I and the team here. It helps us do what we do. Our sponsors also help us do what we do. Visiting our sponsors absolutely helps, Whether or not you buy from them is sort of between you and them, obviously. But simply, you know, our job is to convince you, encourage you, entice you to visit them and learn more. And hopefully we can do that and that, you know, you can help us that way too.
So it all works together and we get to keep doing what we do here. And I love doing what we do here because we get to share quick tips, we get to answer your questions and we get to do cool stuff. Now, if you aren't donating to the show, we're about to cost you some money. That's right. Yeah. Some of these things are free. Some are. Yeah. And, uh, uh, the, the first one comes from Andrew who says, uh, I know you like BB edit for removing formatting from copied text, Dave.
There's an app that I use all the time for this and have done for years and it's so cool. I felt I had a moral obligation to share it. It is called Plane Clip from BlueM.net. Of course, everything is linked from MackeyCab.com. Plane Clip is a faceless app. When you run it, it removes formatting and other stuff from the text on your clipboard. Oh, nice. To invoke it, you can click on its icon in the dock or call it up with Alfred or Spotlight or however you like to launch apps.
However you invoke it, when you do, you don't see anything happen at all. But then when you paste, all the formatting is stripped out. You don't need to have plain clip running. It quits itself instantly. Ah, so this is a one and done. So it's a good thing because I'm thinking, you know, you want to copy over, you need that formatting and it's gone. Where'd it go? So it's okay. So you put something on the clipboard, you invoke plain clip and then you go and paste.
Now I'm thinking I could set up Keyboard Maestro to have one keystroke that launches plain clip and then also pastes. Yep. Oh, right. So. Absolutely. Sexy. I like it. Okay. Good. Thank you, Andrew. Good stuff. I like this. This is, see, these are things that I like. I could probably also convince Keyboard Maestro all by itself to take the contents of the clipboard, strip out all the formatting, replace the clipboard, and then paste it
too. I think that's probably also doable. I gotta now... You have to hold your tongue just right to get Keyboard Maestro to do it by itself. This is one of those things where I kind of like holding my tongue in that way. You know, I'm a nerd. I'm that kind of nerd. So yeah. Um, Jed tells us about something that is going to cost us some money, or at least that was his warning. He says this is a very cool stuff found, but it costs some coin. It's called Texts,
and it's from Automatic, the company that makes WordPress. It consolidates WhatsApp, Messages, Slack, Instagram, and other DM type messaging engines into one app for your Mac OS desktop.
It doesn't have an iOS companion yet. He doesn't think the good part. He says I'm finding it's helping me with focus, Instead of leaving slack and messages and whatsapp open I have one app and it's really working for me Obviously results may vary consult your physician the bad it is in beta and it's a subscription at $12 a month.
He says they don't have Google chat yet, though. They say it's on the way I got a test test this out like I the I trust the automatic people to build a quality product, right? I mean, obviously WordPress is, you know, very stable and it's been around for years. And so, yeah. Huh. Yeah. Jed's going to cost me some money. That's this for sure. Yep. Yep. All right. Thanks Jed. That's how it happens. It's fine. It's fine. Yep.
Uh, Pete, you got one? I do. Uh, I got this on Amazon and I'm really stoked. It's a, it's a two in one wireless charger for my iPhone, my Apple watch and my AirPods, even though it's only two-in-one. Okay. It will do obviously anything that does magnetic g-charging. It will charge. So but it charges two devices at a time, but you could use it. I see. I got you. Okay. Yeah. All right. So we would call that a two-in-one. Yeah. Yeah. So it comes with a,
an electrical adapter and then an A to C USB cable. Uh, the, the C end plugs into the adapter, adapter, adapter into the charger itself. And the A plugs into the wall wart that they give you. Yes. Got it. Yes. Got it. And then it can lay flat. It can be held up as a pyramid. The, if you lay it flat, you can flip up the little part that charges the watch so that in order to, let me pull it up for those watching on the screen, you can flip up the part for the watch.
All right. So this. It lays flat. This reminds me of kind of the old Apple thing that they don't make anymore, where there were like two circles and one of them did your watch and one of them did your phone, right? Exactly. And, and, but this takes it to a different place because the part that does your phone has a magnetic ring. So while I'm sure, how much is it? It's on sale on Amazon and it was when I bought it and it still is today, 1999.
Okay, so it's definitely not mag safe in Apple's terminology because they'd have to pay the Apple tax and then this thing would be a hundred bucks. Right. But it is magnetic. It's the size of a coaster. Yeah. Folded up. for travel. Slip in the bag, super lightweight. Yep. And then a little piece pops out of the
bottom of the phone, one, and then it magnetically holds together. So there's your... So you can hold your phone and your watch up and it forms like a little pyramid on the bedside of your hotel bed, but you're not... But, but, but it just travels super flat. It does. Oh, dude. It really, the size of a thick coaster. Dang it. You're going to cost me money too. I know. Right. But, and I got, I got a few of them. There's some stocking stuffers heading my family's way.
Oh, these are great stocking stuffers. Yeah. Yeah. So it, input is five volts, three amps or nine volts, two amps. And then the output is 10 Watts, seven and a half Watts. Yeah. Five Watts and two and a half Watts. And so far, I love it, it's been a great piece of gear. The one caution I will give you on this is this one says it is not for Samsung slash Android products. It's just don't use with, and I don't know why it wouldn't work.
Maybe they don't wanna support it, but when you open the box, there's a warning right there. Hey, send it back. Wow. If you're using it with an Android, send it back. Not any Android, but Samsung only. I think, I think that's what it said. I think it said Samsung in the, in the, on the card that you showed me. With Samsung branded devices. That's correct. It says warning, not compatible with Samsung branded devices. Please apply for return before use.
Wow. All right. Send it back. They know. Yeah, that's fine. I mean, yeah, sure. Yeah. Huh. So, um, yeah. I'm super pleased with it. And it replaces probably about four cables. Yeah, no, for travel, like one. Yeah, yeah, yeah, man. No, this is an effect that it'll do 10 Watts. That's great. Like that's, you know, it's not the 15 that you could get from mag safe, but it, also is not going to, you know, overheat your phone and like it's for overnight. It doesn't matter. Yeah. Yeah.
Uh, Porthos John shares our next cool stuff found. He says, uh, well, a lot of the, uh, mesh systems like Eero and Unify and others claim to be able to plan your wifi network for you and adjust it. Net spot just came out with net spot version three. This is now my go-to software for looking at wifi networks, both home and in the office.
You can use it on the Mac out of the box. He says, I uploaded a map of my house that I had I had previously created and then walked around with my MacBook Pro and clicked on the map as it recorded all the wifi info for each location that I was standing in. The recommendation it builds after you map are awesome. It says they now have an iOS app too, but you need to buy their WiPride dongle to make it work because it can't see the data about wifi in that way.
There's a free trial in the Mac App Store, but you can also go to their site by the full desktop app for a $49 home license. And they offer a perpetual upgrade option as a $19 add on. I've used NetSpot before, but this sounds like it's doing more than just giving you information. It's now making recommendations and that's cool. I also asked Porthos John, what did you create the map of your home with? Because that is something I don't have.
He says it was a while ago, but he says, I think I started trying it in some home layout software and got really annoyed. So I went back and tried Omni Graffle and did it there. So we'll put a link to Omni Graffle. He says, uh, I did resolution to one inch on my measurements of my house, and then just output the floor, each floor as a PDF from Omni Graffle.
Okay. What's interesting is he says and obviously that's going to take a little bit of work to go around your house with a tape measure and you know measure it out although you know your iPhone
is going to get close the measure app on your iPhone is actually very cool. I wonder wait a minute the iPhone can do this if you know of an app that you could run on your phone and measure your house let us know feedback at macgeekup.com and if you don't know of that app let us know and we'll try and convince somebody to make it because I would pay for that like that's gonna save me hours of trying to
Like build this and omni grapple not that I'm new grapple is difficult, but it's it to to sort of wet your whistles about this He says I did that a while back along with vertical renders, So that whenever we do any project in the house if it involves the size of the floor or wall space I have all of it already calculated at my fingertips. Having just gone through two kitchen, two bathroom remodels and still in the midst of a freaking kitchen remodel, I want my kitchen back.
We haven't had a kitchen since September. So it's been a little while. It's been a minute. I would have loved to have these measurements somewhere where they're just stored. In fact, I know we had the kitchen professionally measured because you have to when you're, you know, buying cabinets and specking it out. And I need to take that and capture it somewhere so that we like, you know, we have it, but I need to do it for the whole house.
Well, you were talking, I went and I looked and it looks like there might be a couple. Okay. That one's called magic plan says it's the number one residential contractor app for the field instantly create and share floor plans, field reports, and estimates on site. And then another one looks like room plan. Okay. Which is more of an augmented reality. All right. Swift API that utilizes the camera and LiDAR scanner on the iPhone and iPad to create 3D floor plan of a room.
Room plan looks to be an Apple developer framework. Is this an app or is it the framework of the app? I think it's the API framework. But then there's room planner below that. That was just a quick Google. Yeah, no. Yeah, yeah, yeah. for those in the, yeah, Room Planner is the 3D interior design app. Okay. Yeah. So it would be, I'm really curious, we'll mess with some of these and, and, and you can too, and let us know.
So. I did note, I had one and I forget the name of it now because it made me delete it when I went to the iPhone 15, cause the camera on that thing is amazing by the way. Yeah. The 15 Pro. Yeah, yeah. But it was kind of, it was a cool camera app. I could take a picture, it would stitch It would just have you stop, you know, move a little bit, stop, and you could do a 360 overhead down to your feet and turn around in the middle of the room and.
And then when the picture was done all you had to do was move your phone around it was like you're standing in the room looking around and yeah but it's gone now it's they've stopped development on it but i wonder if there's any more like that yeah yeah let us know if that doesn't give you the measurements it's got me there's all of these things i are are technologically possible so uh let's say jim jim has fun in discord says uh at my work we have this 3d camera that makes walkthroughs and lays out the rooms of a building as a floor plan
And it uses an iPhone app called Matterport, M-A-T-T-E-R-P-O-R-T. So, we'll put a link to that in the show notes too, simply so. I feel like we've mentioned Matterport before, it sounds familiar. I would have thought Matter had something to do more with the whole... Yeah, I think this app has existed long before the term Matter was applied there. Oh yeah, there you go. All right. I have one last cool stuff found.
It's something I found at Pepcom, I was there about a week ago, and it is the new GE Sync CYNC bulbs, that have dynamic effects, these are smart bulbs, and I've got one of the just sort of normal size bulbs, it's 20 bucks for the A19 bulb, I think it's an A19, whatever your normal bulb is. And it's a Wi-Fi bulb, you launch the Sync app and connect it up to your Wi-Fi and then you can control it with the A-Lady and all that good stuff.
But these dynamic effects bulbs, and they have a whole series of them, they've got light strips and all kinds of stuff. You can display up to four colors at once on the same bulb and have the bulb in and of itself play like a light show and sync to your music.
And so I've actually got this one sort of outside it in an enclosed thing, like it's, it's weatherproof, but it's out by the hot tub and it's actually really kind of cool to have, you know, like different patterns and stuff happening on the, uh, on the patio out there. So, uh, yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah. It's cool. It's, it's weird to see multiple colors coming from the same bulb. Like they've done a good job with this.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So I wanted to make sure we shared that. And the, the, that bulb is 20 bucks for one. So it's not, you know, very fairly priced for that kind of thing. Yeah. Considering we did the Phillips Hughes weren't, weren't they like 40 to start? They're down a little bit, but. They were more than that, Pete. It were like 50. I remember, I remember buying a four pack of Phillips Hughes. Oh, you had to buy the little, the base for it too. Like this is all wifi. You're good to go.
But, um, buying the Phillips Hughes in a base and it was like over 200 bucks, but this was a long time ago. I mean, the price has come down. Yeah. Yeah. So it's, it's all still. Yeah, man. Pete guess what? Oh I'm thinking the band may be wanting to knock on your door. Yeah yeah because we made it through the show despite getting up at oh dark 30 to fly to your midnight snack,
meal at the diner on the other side of the state where we made it through the show. Hopefully I will remember how to publish the show uh before I pass out from exhaustion and then everybody else else gets to hear it too. Hopefully I pressed record. It looks like I did. So yeah, I have my setup here in a lot of ways, idiot proof, it's almost impossible for me to be here with the podcast set up going without it. Automatically just recording for me.
Right. So it is, and it's also part of my pre-flight checklist. Now, worst case, if you did forget, StreamYard's recording it anyway. We use StreamYard as our VoIP engine. It's how Pete and I connect. Also, we connect over video too. You can watch the video either while we're recording, go to matgeekup.com slash calendar. I know today's got messed up. It's because Apple doesn't like to sync things, but I fixed it again.
But that'll tell you when. Or you can just go to macgeekup.com slash YouTube and all of our shows are there and you can watch them there. But also, like this one is episode 1008. You just go to mgg.fm slash 1008 or macgeekup.com and click on the one that says 1008. That brings you there and we've got the YouTube embedded right in the article for the show so you've got show notes you can click on and it's all, we try to do this for you because, you know, yeah, we like to help.
It's like the whole point is to learn something and be able to click on links and go and do stuff and so we like to make it as easy as we can for you. In fact... My ask of you for this week is to go to MacGeekGab.com and sign up for our newsletter. We do not spam you. We simply send out the show notes as an email every week so you don't even have to go to the website. The links are literally right there in your inbox to all of the stuff.
You get to pick which ones you're going to go and click on and research. I said before, you can visit our sponsors. Our sponsors' links are in the show notes, so therefore they are in the email right there. Makes life super easy. The only thing we don't do is open your jaw and jam it down your throat. Yeah, because that's not our style. But we get them right to you. No. Yeah. But we get them right to you. All you have to do is open your mouth and eat them, because they come right to you.
Served. Served. Served right up. So please, go sign up for that newsletter. And we do keep you posted about things like the Hangouts that we do every, let's say, weeks. That seems to be about what the schedule is. Whenever we do them though, you'll learn. About them there. We try to keep you posted on that kind of stuff. But it's low volume and no spam. We promise, we promise, we promise. It's not... But I like spam.
Well, you can eat... I like spam in mine. You want me to come over and shove spam in your mouth, Pete? Spam, spam, spam, spam. Oh boy, folks, we've done it now. Thank you for hanging out with us. Make sure to go listen to our other shows. I do two other shows. I do a show called Gig Gab for Musicians and a show called Business Brain for Entrepreneurs. Pete does a show called So There I Was for Pilots, Aviation Enthusiasts.
Aviation Enthusiasts. Yeah. And I got to sit with a lot of Pete's fans this morning at our midnight snack. So, thanks for hanging out with us. So go check those out. Those are also linked from the the show notes and uh, yeah, and thanks to fastmail at fastmail.com fastmail, not.com. Maybe it is also.com, but I think they told me to say, what did they tell me to say? Fastmail.com. Yes. Music. What else, uh, what else should they make sure that they do or don't do, Pete?
You share the show and tell someone what a great show it is. Make sure that they understand that you had nothing to do with it so that you don't get caught. Music.