A Little Pig Walked Around - MGG 1K

It's time for Matt Geek. Kevin, I'll bring us our quick tip of the week. When I get text messages from brands, you know, stores I buy from, companies I deal with, it just comes in as a number. I like to know who those are from, especially when I'm like in my car and all I get to see is the display. So my quick tip is go in and assign a contact to those numbers and give it a company name. Skip the first and last name. Just give it a company name.

And now on all your devices, because of the magic of iCloud syncing, even though they're text messages, you'll get a contact name popping right up and you'll know who these things are from. And it kind of helps sort things out a little bit easier. Year more quick tips like this plus your questions answered some cool stuff found and a big party here today on mac geek app 1k 10 24 for monday february 12th national clean out your computer day 2024. Music.

Greetings, folks, and welcome to Mac Geek Hub. We are the show where you send in your quick tips like that one, your cool stuff found, your questions. We try to answer your questions. We share your quick tips and your cool stuff found. The goal is for each and every one of us to learn at least five new things every single time we get together. Sponsors for this episode include BB Edit at barebones.com.

We will talk more about that in a little bit for now here in durham new hampshire i'm dave hamilton, and here in fairfield connecticut this is john f brown whoo and here in south dakota and in inner space i'm adam christiansen and here from san francisco california it's pilot pete good Good morning and happy 1K show day, everybody. Everybody. This is cool. Yeah. Everybody, the four, or if you're watching the video, five of us here. Adam is here twice. We'll explain. That's because I'm so nice.

You are twice as nice. And yeah, like to everybody in the MacEcap family here, we made it to 1024. That's pretty, I think it's pretty exciting. Why is 1024 a significant number, Dave? Well, there's this thing. It's double 512. That's why it's a significant number, right? Oh, no. But wait, why is 512 a significant number, John? It's 256, right? No, I'm not John. No, but okay. So, but John, why is 256 a significant number?

Computers speak binary so for example this is the reason 2 to the 10th power is, 1024 so this is the 2 to the 10th episode it's it's 1 better than 2 to the 9th, exponentially speaking, I like it now of course it creates some confusion because.

This was a big controversy a while ago um hard drives are measured in different units oh gigabytes versus gigabytes yeah and as you so 1000 is close enough to 1024 but as you as you start going up the scale they deviate from each other and at one point people are like well hard drive people you're you're ripping me off you're not giving me the space that you said i'm supposed supposed to get and that's oh because we're counting differently right yeah yeah yep uh.

John thank you for uh for joining us for this special episode this is amazing, it's uh it's good to hear your dulcet tones my friend thank you for the invite of course yeah it's a special one so uh i will apologize on your behalf adam because you probably don't realize how loud it is for us when you sip your coffee and that well no it's okay you're you're on a different microphone today do you want to explain what's on what this microphone is for people who aren't

watching the video and we'll apologize to the people as people know last week we were recording right before my vision pro delivery so i have my vision pro on today and and you're hearing me through the Vision Pro microphones rather than my standard microphone. It's also why I'm sideways on the video. We didn't do some pre-testing and realized that StreamYard, because I'm in a mobile app, it defaults to a landscape view, and you have to set the orientation before we go live.

But we were live already, so. I'm sideways pseudo-Adam down there in that window for people who can't see it. It's video. I'm in picture portrait mode when you turn it landscape. On your iPhone and that's how you're seeing virtual me which also looks kind of old and another interesting thing is you know you can add glasses so you do your scan without the glasses you do your you know thing those are digital glasses but for whatever reason they have a ton of frame selection.

But you have to do transparent glasses I don't know why so you can't do, colors like I would make them black because normally my glasses are black but. At least not yet. I don't know if they'll change it. That's interesting. That was an interesting. Can you have your avatar wear a Vision Pro to be like super meta about it? No, you can't. There wasn't a Vision Pro glasses. What? That seems crazy. Okay, so I haven't gone for my Vision Pro demo yet.

I have one scheduled. I'm going to do it this weekend. Pete or John, have either of you done a Vision Pro demo yet? Or is Adam truly the only one here of us that's worn one? I think he is. Okay. So I have questions, Adam, because you've had this thing for a week. Yep. Really, I mean, I have all kinds of questions, but the first one that I have is about one of your stated, you know, predicted use cases for this work. Like you work as a programmer. So how, how has that gone?

On like so i play yeah so that's a that's a perfect question because that's like my my big use case um i still have a lot of things to set up and there were some challenges with work so as you might imagine i work remote so uh one of the big apps we use is um slack right and we all are not slack um microsoft teams zoom zoom yeah right we're on zoom a lot so there's a zoom app for um. And it works great. I did a Zoom call with some of my coworkers.

But one of the features we use in Zoom and we rely on a lot is breakout rooms. So we have breakout rooms. And I cannot figure out how to do breakout rooms in, and I have to be very careful using my hands to talk because things are going all over the place.

But um in in zoom i couldn't find breakout rooms so i couldn't get into we we break into pods so throughout the day when i'm working i'm sitting with my other developers that are in my pod but they're in a breakout room so i couldn't get into that breakout room um now i could do it from my computer um and that worked great like bringing up the the computer display so you know look at my My Mac connect creates a virtual display. I can use my regular keyboard and track pad.

That works awesome. You can throw up, it's, it's, it's a 4k screen. You are limited to one 4k screen. So if you want to do multiple screens, you can bring up other, uh, you know, vision pro apps, basically any iOS app or any vision app you can put up, you know, all around that max screen. Um, so you have to really rely on that. So that works great. Cause I can do email cause all of the office suite is there. So like Outlook, no problem.

I can throw that up there. I could throw up Zoom, but all the features of Zoom don't look like they're quite enabled yet, at least not in the Vision Pro app. I could probably also download the iPad app. I don't know if iPad app supports breakout rooms, but I would imagine that it does. So, but yeah, like, you know, Visual Studio Code was there on my main screen. They don't have a dedicated app for it yet that I would imagine Microsoft might change.

So as more Vision Pro apps you know it's early so one of my very first things impressions is that there's a lot of awesome stuff the you know the iPad apps work, okay. Vision Pro apps are definitely better. They're better optimized in terms of the interface and stuff like that. So I think as more apps become available, I look at it like the original iPhone, right?

When the original iPhone came out, we didn't have apps or there were, and even when we had apps, there was very limited app and it took a while for that to kind of get there. So, I mean, but at the end of the day, it worked. And with the right strap, did I do some? No, Pete just made me nice and big on the screen. I did? You did. Somebody did. So long story short, I think it's workable. There's a learning curve, though. Because the other thing is you have to be

actually looking at a window to interact with it. And the hardest one was typing. So, yes, you can use your keyboard, but I need to be looking at the place where I need to be typing. Right. Which is a little bit different. I can't just, like, have the cursor in the window over there and type. I have to, like, look and type. So that's a little bit different. Okay. All right. But, like, for doing your coding work, like, the not meeting part of it functional?

Yep. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And the other thing is when you're using the keyboard, it will also bring up a little virtual like anchored display. Like when you're using your physical keyboard above the physical keyboard. So you can see if you're looking down at your keyboard, you can see what you're typing. But again, you have to go over, insert the cursor, you know, like start, get it going. And then kind of you can. You can type away. Fascinating. Like first weekend, you're able to be productive

with it and all of those things ish. Yeah. Not as productive as I'm just using my dual monitor setup. But like I said, it's, it's a learning curve. I can see getting there. It's just like, this is a whole new thing. And like, even now when I, I still want to talk with my hands, but if I pinch things, you know, dialogues are coming up and stuff. Yeah. I think, I think be careful. I blamed Pete for changing the video layer.

I don't think it turns out. i don't think it was pete yeah did i do it i think the three of us i don't think john has those controls on his screen because of the way we brought john in today so it it's us oh probably if i look at those little icons down below and then yeah make a hand gesture yes that was probably me yeah like making things go wonky just as long as you don't end the call when he does make a hand gesture puts his hand up in front of his face

and moves his hand it it does it yeah yeah now your Your fingers are invisible when they're in front of your face. They're translucent. I'm using my microphone, which I can't see. Hey, somehow you just turned portrait mode, Adam, on the screen. Well done, sir. I don't know what I did. What'd you do? I just put my hand closer to the screen. I don't know. Fascinating. We fixed it. We fixed it. Woo. Yeah, that's right. Yeah. Yeah.

All right. And we're here to fix your problems too. We're going to fall bass-ackwards into it. The other truly amazing thing, and we were talking about this a little bit in the pre-show when we did the march back and forth thing. The spatialness, spatiality, I don't know how you would say it, of everything is truly incredible, and this blew me away. The first day I got it, I did the setup in my kitchen.

I had gone through the setup, and I set up my Persona, And then, you know, I'd gone into the living room and I was watching Apple TV stuff and checking out 3D video and all that sort of thing. And the next morning I got up and, you know, I grabbed it from the living room and I'm sitting there and I kind of turned around. And back in the kitchen, I had left the persona window open and I could see my persona like sitting where I had left it in the kitchen.

And not only that you can you can see your windows through walls like when i got up to go get the coffee one thing was as i walked away the audio i got further away from the audio and the audio went down but i could still hear it very very softly in the kitchen and if i looked over towards my office i can see the backs of all my windows not only that you can you can use the controls so i could literally if i had wanted to i could have plucked the window from my

office and brought it back into the kitchen. Oh, wow. Oh, interesting. Right. And it scales everything appropriately, too. So the windows were just like way, way tiny, way back over there, and I just moved my window over. Yeah. And for those that either are watching the video or go back and watch the video, we have two images of Adam, your normal camera and this one. Your normal video is frozen at the moment. Yeah, I don't know what happened

there. I know you're planning on switching back, so that might be a little thing. Yep. Uh, so very cool. I, I, I'm eager, really eager to hear how this evolves for you. Very cool. So John, what have you been up to, man? It's good to have you. Not too much. Buy new toys. I'll talk about some of them later. Cool. Cool. Amazing. Amazing. Amazing. Cool. Well, it's, it's, it's like I said, it's good to, uh, it's good to have you, um, It's now a decent time to enter the real world again.

You can re-enter the real world. I'll tell everybody about our hangout that's coming up on Sunday. I know we mentioned it in the last episode, but there was some discussion. We like to have these hangouts anyway, so it doesn't really matter what we talk about. But we always like to have something that's of interest to the community. And there were some questions in our Discord about Mac web browsers.

It seemed to me that that would be a great thing to do as a collaborative hangout on Zoom, because those who wish to share and show how they're using their favorite web browser can do so.

And we all get to look over each other's shoulders. So I think there's a lot to learn with with that from each other there, because even if I know we don't all use the same browser, but even if we did, seeing how other people have their browsers configured and how they use them would be is always eye opening and sometimes frustrating. Like, you know, you're seeing somebody say, oh, why do you do it that way?

There's a much better way. We do that with each other in a productive sort of collaborative way.

So that's uh this coming sunday the 18th of uh of february uh at 4 p.m eastern if you subscribe at macgeekup.com slash calendar you will see it already on your calendar if you are in our discord the there's a thread for it and i will also post the zoom link and password there if you were subscribed to the mac geek out mac oh man easy for me 10 24 still can't say it if you are subscribed Subscribe to the Mac Geek Gab email list, which you can do at macgeekgab.com.

You will get an email this coming week with all the Zoom details. We just can't post them on any social media other than Discord because of the script kitties. And that's just no fun. So, yeah. So there we are. Is it time to continue with quick tips, Adam? Are you back to being? I think so. I'm back. I am back, I think. Oh, yeah. You got it. Yeah. Yeah, that mic's a little more, you've got a little more tone. Yeah, it's richer. That's the word. Yeah, great word.

Yeah, and he changed his shirt, so to speak. Yeah, your avatar has last week's shirt on it, Adam, which tracks. Be careful what clothing you are wearing or not wearing when setting up your avatar. FYI, Apple says personas are beta, so it comes up. It is a beta feature at the moment. So my guess is they're going to address the clothing hair thing at some point. Maybe not in this version, maybe in the next version. because you also get helmet hair, basically.

Right, yeah, your hair is very hairsprayed. It is, yes. Pasted on. It is pasted. All right, well, I guess we will be resuming Quick Tips since we did want to open the show. You want to take us to Saurabh, Adam? Yeah, he's got some Vision Pro tips for us. He says, you know, you can use multiple hands simultaneously to move and resize two windows at once.

That sounds like some ambidextrous like stuff i don't know i don't know if i'm ready to go there i have to try that out moving moving one around at a time i'm used to doing that so uh that's interesting okay all right you can say s lady close all apps to exit all open apps you can bring an app really close to you and interact with it like an iphone or ipad app this one is is actually really cool every all your controls are touchable basically and you can you can interact with any element as that

and not only that um there's a hover sort of thing so as you your finger gets closer you will see a little white kind of shadow and then even with like keys anything that's pressable there is actually a press in obviously there's no tactile feedback back but it will interact like elements will physical or virtual elements will interact with your physical digits which is amazing um i heard from a developer's perspective there's a full skeletal

system on your hands so developers can like play with that so it's going to be really interesting to see what they do with that so apple gives you a them an underlying bone structure for For all year. Oh, wow. Yeah, yeah. You know, what's fascinating is you don't need hand controls. Nothing in your hands to hold. Like the other virtual and augmented reality, you know, some used gloves, some used just taking hand gestures. Have you played, and I'm curious about the latency of the hand gestures.

Have you played any games with it that were the latency or done anything where the latency would matter? And how is it? Oh, yeah. Yeah, they have a great version of Fruit Ninja where you actually karate chop.

Fruit that flies at you and it turns your entire environment into the space that you're playing in like it put a little rocks and grass like all over my living room in the right places not you know on the couch or the chairs like it knows where all the objects are wow little pig walked around and like it that the again the immersiveness of this thing is through the roof and i played with other hands or headsets and stuff like that and it's just it it blows your mind like i would encourage

anybody and multiple people have said this but if you have an opportunity go set up a demo go do the demo yeah uh be careful if you have extra cash though because i know you might get sucked in yeah so maybe leave your wallet a wallet at home just bring an id or whatever you need to like do the demo yeah yeah yeah all right i hope somebody makes a minority report plug-in for that thing it's basically that it basically is that the way

elements like anchor to the the environment or their space is incredible like there's no jiggle there's no jitter like if you plop an object on the on the table it's there or if it's floating in that space wherever you leave it just. Unbelievable um back to sir rob's tips though if you long press on the x button below an app You can use that to hide all other apps. You can double-press the Home button, which is the little...

That's a physical button on the dial the dial oh like the crown the crown on the apple a digital crown yeah the little digital crown thing that's a physical button you also have a another button which is for like the camera features and stuff like that it's also the button you double press to uh confirm like purchases and things like that oh yeah okay yeah but you can double press that home button to hide all apps you can hold that down this is this is a really good tip and

i I didn't learn this for a couple of days and it really helped. So windows can get a little cattywampus sometimes, like when you drag them over there or you like turn or again, like when I was in my kitchen and all my windows were here in the office, you can press and hold down the home button and that will bring everything back to you and recenter it.

So if anything's off, so if I look over here and I have a window over here, I can hold that down and it'll recenter it over there interesting yeah that that's really really helpful one and then finally in the tv app if okay you know i was oh i i already interrupted you what was that word you learned from uh from moving to south dakota that i've never heard you use before before cattywampus yeah i've never i've just never heard you use i know i know it's a word i've just never

heard you use it before so yeah yeah and then finally in the tv app if you look at the top left corner and select your current environment again it will auto place the video further and bigger than you could place it manually note this only works in the apple tv app not third-party streaming apps and the virtual environments don't even get me started like that feature blows me away really and there's there's a couple things about

that yes so i watched star wars rogue one in 3d which the 3d video like 3d 3D movies on this thing. I have always hated 3D. Like when you go to the theater and they give you the glasses and I've tried all the different kinds of 3D. This is immersive, incredible, and they've got tons of 3D movies. Anything that you've purchased in your... A lot of things that you've purchased in your library already, if you've purchased from Apple, they're auto-converting to 3D, so no additional cost.

You get 3D versions. They've got Marvel movies, and obviously Disney's in on it. Almost anything from Disney, but a few other studios. But anyway, I watched Rogue One in 3D on basically a movie screen in a movie environment. but I chose to use, they have the Tatooine environment and some of the environments are just in certain apps. So like the Disney ones are only in Disney plus like the Disney environments. Yeah. And Apple has their own environments and HBO has their own environment.

So they have game of Thrones. Like you can sit in the, in the, in the throne room and watch your movie, but it, it puts the screen out where like a ginormous movie screen would be. But I'm, so I'm sitting in a land speeder. was basically a land speeder drive-in is kind of the environment. There's land speeders all around. But you look down and you're sitting in the seat and you look in front of you and you see all the controls and you look over here and you see that.

And the other really cool feature, because I wondered about this, was like, I finished my drink and I wanted to go get a drink. And I'm like, well, I'm going to have to dial back the environment or whatever. Nope. Stand up, start walking. It takes you out of the full environment, allows you to interact with your space. And then you walk and you sit back down And when you walk back into the space, it shows you where you were sitting and you sit back down and you're back in the environment.

So like little stuff like that is the little Apple stuff they think about, right? They think about, what if I need to get up and go get a drink? I don't want to have to turn the dial or I just stand up and it knows I'm moving and it goes, hey, you can go get a drink now. Yeah. That's so cool. Yeah, the level of detail they've thought about.

But then I sent you some video, Adam, that I shot, and I found it interesting that the spatial video didn't come through when I emailed and or texted it to you. But if I sent it via iCloud Link, you got the full experience. Well, you sent an exported version, though, Pete. Like you exported the video on your Mac and then sent the export. And I think the export process is what, for lack of a better term, dumbed it down. Yeah, exactly.

Well, I think it's similar to what you would get when you shoot live video, right? If you shoot a live video and you share it via text or whatever, it will convert it. Or you try it in certain platforms. If you're not going from iCloud or from iCloud to iCloud. So I think there's something to that. I think it needs to be shared in an Apple way. I did tell photos, Apple Photos, export the full original unedited. Oh, interesting. That's what I tried. But when it was the iCloud Link, he got it.

And then he also mentioned it was kind of like a few dream state feeling in there. And I was noticing yesterday when I was in the Apple store in Honolulu that the edges of the video show kind of blurs. Yeah, so what happens is it's definitely, here's the thing, my opinion on the spatial video stuff, You know, it's really good.

I will tell you the stuff that I shot on and I don't know if it was lighting because the room was kind of dark, but the stuff that I shot with the Vision Pro was not great, in my opinion. Like it felt very grainy, very, you know, 1.0. So think if you go back and look if anybody with an original iPhone, if you go back and look at your original iPhone photos that when you got the iPhone, you were like, oh, these are amazing, like digital photos.

If you look at them now, they're like, yeah, those photos aren't that great. Right, right. Spatial video shot on the device itself, I think the cameras are not quite up to snuff. Sure. Stuff that Pete sent me from an iPhone 15 Pro looked great, but again, when it was in a window. So if you've seen the videos that Apple's put out, you'll see the spatial videos in kind of a little square window. Yep. And they look great in there.

Now, there's a button to like make it immersive. To live in the environment. Yeah. So I called it cheaty, I think, in our text. So when I clicked that button, it got a little bit bigger and then it just fogged the edges white. Wait, the edges of your reality aren't fogged all the time, Adam? No, but it's not like a panorama. Like I have panoramas and panoramas are amazing. Yeah, right. You know, 180 degrees and you feel like you're back in that space. space.

That's what I would have expected the video to be. That's what I would have expected the spatial video to be. It's not what it is. It's a little window that you look into and it's got, it's very impressive, like 3D. Kind of like watching Avatar with the 3D glasses on where you're looking into a world. Is that right? Yeah, you're looking into a window. And I will tell you too, people might have heard that there's an issue with field of view on Apple. I don't know that it's any worse.

I mean some people will say it's worse than some other 3D headsets sure sure you do get a little goggle view so you do sometimes you eventually if you're in it long enough for watching a movie you'll get past it because you're looking past it but it is noticeable sometimes that you have you know yeah you don't get your full periphery goggles like this yeah yeah yeah yeah but you get my point is like it's a little tunnel vision sometimes right

and that's a legitimate complaint that makes sense yeah all right let's go uh let's continue you with quick tips and and this time i promise they're not about the vision pro uh but there but if you have quick tips about the vision pro please send those in i don't mean to be dismissive i just you know it's been 30 minutes um where would you send them dave to feedback at mackeycab.com i guess. Okay. Asking for a friend. Yeah. I would do feedback at Mac e-cab.com. John.

Did you say feedback at Mac e-cab.com? Yes, we did. Yes, we did. Uh, all right. Yuri wrote in with our next quick tip. Uh, use the command key when you are command click on the title in any, uh, menu bar, like, you know, know, the title of a document in a menu bar that will open up a menu that shows the path of the file and all of the subfolders and folders leading to that file.

So you can navigate up to wherever you want, including the, you know, if you just want to see the folder that the file is in, uh, it's right there. It's the first one in the list, but you get to see the path and you can even navigate there. And when you choose to navigate there, let's say you're in pages, you command, click on the title of a document.

It drops down this menu. whatever you choose will open up in the finder so you can see that view of your stuff and this is what i love quick tips for because it's things i used to know and i forgot so it's good here's a follow-up tip yeah if you open terminal. Excuse me, and drag a file or folder into the terminal window, it'll give you the text path to that file. Right. If you drag it from the finder. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Right.

Yeah. And if you, if you put a command in ahead of it, like if you wanted to copy that or something in the terminal, you put CP space and then drag it in and yep, there you go. Yep.

I find that really handy with folders. If I know I need to do something in a folder, uh i will just drag the folder you know i'll say cd space and drag the folder into the terminal and then yeah there it goes yeah it's a good bonus tip i like it i love it all right uh mike brings us to our next one he says in the notes app i have a recipe three cups of this one tablespoon of that when i tap on the three cups a little sheet pops up with all sorts of conversions Diversions.

Three cups is X number of pints and so many liters and so many centiliters, et cetera. No, I'm not going to do public math for you. And it does the same, he says, if I tap on one tablespoon. Of course, I had not seen this before and thought you would enjoy. We certainly do enjoy. Those are the quick tips that we love, the things we didn't know we needed to know. But that's actually a great way that that makes me think that using notes to store and manage recipes might be a pretty good idea.

It so i said it before i will say it again data detectors are cool yep they sure are really are and that's why spotlight i did it with spotlight and i found out that three tablespoons is essentially a shot ounce and a half that's that's that's where that is folks is pilot math i'm just gonna say everything is it relates to a shot that's right there you go yeah they don't do shots in the cockpit nor eight hours leading up to their time in the cockpit i don't want

to i don't want to cast any illusion. Look, and I used to live in Louisiana and I went to LSU, went to Baton Rouge, and people used to say, how far is New Orleans? And listen, I'm not advocating drinking and driving. People who know me personally know I'm very much against drinking and driving. I was just going to say, knowing you, I know exactly how against it you are. But the question was, well, how far is New Orleans?

And the answer is about a six pack. yeah yeah well i that i mean it for pete you know if you're as as old as pete you would know this uh if if not ask your parents uh but but you know before before like before drinking and driving was considered bad it was considered normal like when i moved to texas for the first year you could you You couldn't drive drunk, but you could drink and drive. This was in 1995.

The law had been passed, but it didn't go into effect until January 1st of 1996, where you could no longer have an open container in your vehicle. I'm glad that the societal thinking on this has evolved, but it really used to be like, oh, well, he got into an accident because he was drunk.

You know it was an excuse not a yeah it's fascinating but yes pilot math folks all right uh ben brings us our next one he says uh i recently rediscovered uh that one way to close spotlight is to use the same keyboard shortcut that you use to invoke it which of course by default is command space you use command space to invoke spotlight a lot of times i've learned to use escape to close it. And I wind up hitting escape twice because the first time I hit escape,

it clears it. And then it closes it. Uh. But what he says is if you close Spotlight with command space and then reopen it, whatever query was there persists. So if you're in the middle of doing a calculation and you need to go and find the next number you wanted to add, which is something I want to do all the time for some reason. And I don't know why, but I do find myself in this position. You just command space yourself out of the spotlight window, go do whatever you need to do. Come back in.

And maybe there's some time period after, after which it, it wipes itself anyway. But for those quick return visits, it, uh, yeah. It really, really works. I know. I write. I had no idea about this one. Yeah. That's, that's cool. I never thought about that. Right. The one thing I've noticed, they made a change at some point. So sometimes what I'll do is bring up Spotlight and then do math in it. You know, like when I'm paying my bills and all that. So I'll do, you know, this plus this plus this.

At some point, it truncates it. And then I'll see dot, dot, dot. The result, the proper result is still displayed, but I don't know why they...

What is it truncating just the the calculation is being truncated yes uh just yeah okay i've seen that too and you're right that's new yeah relatively new maybe maybe the last os or two but yeah it didn't it used to just kind of it's you know grow with you yeah that's right that's right yep yep does anybody does anybody use the feature where you can like drag stuff out of it so like if you're doing a photo or like you can like drag and drop stuff out of like spotlight light,

right? Can't you? Isn't that a thing? I thought you could. You may be right. I might be crazy. It's like a clipboard thing. I just went and grabbed the three tablespoons, which equals one and a half fluid ounces, by the way. And it'll let you throw it anywhere.

That's not a shot, Pete. Shots in my house are two ounces. But I. Just thought with this other tip now, you could leave stuff there and if you needed to go open another window or move something around to like bring something over you know that would be handy for that as well i had no idea but yeah you can grab it and drag it that's cool it's three tablespoons 1.5 fluid ounces if i drag this there it is it just dragged it as text and i just put it like in our discord what oh

this is gonna change this actually makes my brain hurt because there's a lot of things that i do i use the clipboard right to do that so maybe here's another tip if you do that calculation right you do three tablespoons equals and then it'll show 1.5 fluid ounces and it's highlighted but any math equation that you do you can just hit command c and now the result of it is on your clipboard and you can go and do whatever you want with it so if you're yeah yeah yeah,

So yeah, Spotlight, Spotlight's cool. Not as cool as data detectors, Adam, of course, but you know. Can third-party devs still create like the data detector plugins? I know that was a thing for a while, but I don't feel like I've seen it in a long time. Yeah, I don't, I don't know. I honestly don't know the answer to that. Yeah, same.

Yeah. Well, if you do feedback at MacEcap.com and if you have examples of third-party data detectors that you find valuable, especially feedback at MacEcap.com, we'd love to know. Just because we've almost done, well, we've done 1,023 and a half episodes, just because we've done that many doesn't mean we're done learning things. In fact, every week, I feel like I come in with beginner's mind. I'm just blown away. Yep. It's crazy. What do you got for us,

Pete? What are you going to blow us away with? Well, I actually have two. I'm going to follow up on that last one with calculations. If you're ever at a point where you've got a lot to type in, that sort of thing, you can go, S lady, what's this number plus this number plus that?

Number and she'll give you the answer yeah so um that i i like to use that as well but here's another one that i found this for years i've been using google translate and there's another app called translate and you have to give it access to your camera and then you point it at some text in a foreign language and it will translate it for you if you know with your data connection And I thought, well, you know, hey, what's this down here? Live text.

So if you point your camera at any foreign text, in my case, my phone is set up for English. So if I set it to another language and then hit live text, which is that little square down in the, usually in the bottom right corner with three lines in it, you tap on that. What will pop up in the bottom left corner is a little button that says translate.

You tap that and it changes it to English, translates it to English, like right on the photo itself, right there on the screen or on the screen of the camera. Yeah. So you don't need the translate app or the Google translator. And it's right there in the camera.

No special app required. Really? I mean, I've done it in the translate app and I find at least the last time I did it, which has been maybe six months, the google translate app i found was more was faster more reliable maybe than than apple's translate app uh but that you know i mean there's leapfrogging that happens all the time in tech so i you know try for yourself but without having to open a separate app yeah i found it pretty pretty nice right there in the camera just point your camera at

it hit live text and hit translate and you get a nice little interesting so like if it sees text oh it would have to be a foreign language i got it yeah yeah of course so you could write down a phrase in a in another language and point it at it yeah amazed at how quickly it comes right up and and uh gives gives you the answer amazing so that's yeah try the um i i from what i recall it also supports a limited number of foreign languages like i was trying it in the uh international section

in my local grocery store And so the kosher section has Hebrew. I think it knows Hebrew. Some stuff has Arabic. I think there's a limited number of languages that it does know and it'll translate for you. So have fun with that. Yeah. Cool. Cool. I think maybe that's why I use the Google app was because it, it, it, the apples was more limited. I mean, no one has all the languages, but yeah, that's right. Yeah. Yeah. Cool, cool, cool. All right. Uh, it's just processing here. There's so much.

We're never going to get to questions. We're, we're, we're lucky if we get to cool stuff found, but we will because we have, we have some good stuff to get to. I expected that this episode would be mostly cool stuff found. I was wrong. Nick says for anyone who wants or likes to customize their Siri voice, but notices that sometimes she goes all robotic and nowhere near what you expect. Check to see if her voice needs to be redownloaded.

I can't tell you why this happens, but on my phone, it frequently loses my Siri voice. I have seen it consistently post-upgrade. Today, it happened after I woke up. To check, go into settings, go to Siri and search, and look at Siri voice. If it says downloading, stay on that page until it is finished. All right. Thanks for that, Nick. Good stuff. Good stuff. Mark. Oh, go ahead. Yep. No.

I was just saying along those lines. I was playing with that yesterday when I was looking at that tip, and I went into voices in settings and it turned out I had a bunch of voices that I had downloaded get rid of those if you don't want them you don't want them many many megabytes that you can save on your phone by getting rid of the voices you're not using yep yep. Uh, Mark in Florida says lots of people can't get air print to work when they're running the latest, uh, Mac OS Sonoma and iOS 17.

Well, I was one of them, but I solved the problem by changing one setting on my M1 iMac. That setting is the Mac OS setting for printer sharing. As soon as I turned it off, I could air print from my iPhone 12 to my Epson ET 2650 printer.

Printer this worked with my iMac and iPhone VPNs turned on even so it finds those local things bonjour style and he says on the Mac go to system settings appearance accessories and internet sharing printer sharing and turn off the slider on the iPhone in my example printing a note from the iOS app from the iOS notes app from the note you want to print tap the share icon tap print and then the printer and off you go now it works perfectly by the way

he says i use printopia with sharing turned on printopia contain the instruction mac os built-in printer sharing is active disable it if not required once i turned it off i could use air print ah so this is a printopia printer.

Printopia is i'll put a link to that in the show notes that's great because that can use your mac to uh to share printers and do all kinds of fun things so i will well that's counterintuitive to turn off printer sharing in order to be able to print yep yep it's yep well i guess if your mac is getting in the way trying to share that printer that's already sharing itself i mean i can see why yeah it would be like let's eliminate

confusion if you're if you're doing some voodoo on your own we'll let you you know it's probably go ahead smart guy yeah right. And our last quick tip comes from Jay Jewel, who says, when sending an iMessage, try long pressing the send button, the blue circle with the up pointing arrow. Yeah, that's right.

This this allows you to send with an effect. The effects include bubbles, slam, loud, gentle, and invisible ink, or screen, echo, spotlight, balloons, confetti, love, lasers, fireworks, and celebration. I wish my daughter a happy birthday today with balloons. And was able to do it this way. Yeah, you hold down on that little blue thing, and off it goes. All right, folks. It is time to talk about our sponsor, BB Edit. Imagine a tool so powerful it turns a mountain of text into a molehill.

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And here's the kicker. BBEdit now includes chat GPT worksheets. Imagine having a brainstorming session We'll be right back. Guess what? You get 30 days again now with BBEdit 15. Step up your text game. Head to barebones.com to see why BBEdit is the choice of Mac geeks everywhere. Don't just edit, BBEdit. And our thanks to BBEdit for sponsoring this episode. All right, John, in the intro, you mentioned that you got some toys.

It is time for Cool Stuff Found. And where better to start than with you, my friend? All right. I have a sad story here. Some of you know I have or had a GCC 12-1200 laser printer that was made in 1999. I was going to say, I think it's older than my children. But here's the bad news. And you can still get toner for it. It's a combination toner drum assembly.

Assembly and at some point i was getting streaks and all that i'm like okay time to get a new one so i got a new one uh here's some advice don't force it because what i did is i kind of forced the insertion and then i heard something snap and then okay and then did you have oh did it break the printer or did you have like toner everywhere i i i broke something in the toner guide assembly assembly so the the printer broke not the toner cartridge correct

got it don't break the toner cartridge either that's a disaster you might have to just move if you did that all right so i decided well let me let me look for a new laser printer so i put out a uh a request on my um my twitter and someone got back to me with um uh a brother unit that we'll uh we'll link to uh and it looked pretty good um it's let's see uh a compact mono laser single function printer with wireless and mobile device printing i'm like oh that sounds

neat sure but then here's what i did that i shouldn't have done or actually i should have done i'm like let me scroll to the bottom of the page because uh amazon typically does a uh comparison yeah and they showed a. So instead of print, it does print, copy and scan. I'm like, that's neat. Yes. Um, and, And what else here? Duplex printing. Dave convinced me, hey, you know, there may be a time that you need to use it. I'm like, okay. And it has an LCD display, Ethernet, Wi-Fi, USB, and all that.

And I'm like, all right, here we go. Oh, so I got the model, Dave, linked to a slightly different one. But basically, it has a paper tray. It has a place where you put in the toner. It has a place where it ejects things. And it also has an ADF and a scanner. And it's a color scanner. You would think, well, shouldn't it be a black and white scanner? It's like, no. No, just because it can't print color, but it can scan color, sure. Yeah. That's great. Yeah.

Go ahead. But the setup was cool as well. So my old printer didn't have wireless. This has wireless and AirPrint or Bonjour, as we were talking about earlier. It was the easiest thing to set up. All I had to do, the most traumatic part was I had to enter my Wi-Fi credentials using their non-keyboard. Yeah, yeah. But once I got that done, I went to each of my machines.

On the computer I just said add printer and since the printer was logged in to just come up at some point saying brother, model, whatever, here's the driver for you it was just very very easy to. Cool. I am amazed. I've had a duplex printer, meaning it can print on both sides of, of, you know, print double sided. I, it's amazing to me that in 2024, I still print enough that I love having the duplex option. You know, there's always little things that I need to print and it's like,

great, you know, yeah, print it on the back too. I don't need to waste two pieces of paper for this one thing. I'm astounded. And it was interesting when I got my duplex printer, the one I have is probably five years old, maybe something like that. And I have a Lexmark. But again, you know, they're all kind of the same. Just look for the features that you want and find the one that has them at the price you like and buy it.

And then don't think about it until you need another printer because the models change faster than any of us change our underwear. It's crazy um yep same same with the duplex i've had a brother uh laser printer for years now i don't have any intention of ever replacing it till it dies yeah i mean they're they're incredible the other feature i use a lot that i was surprised is copy yeah right yeah yeah yeah yeah i have um, the printer that this one replaced is an old HP multifunction.

Apple's Mac OS update. I mean, it doesn't owe me anything. It's not quite as old as John's printer, but it's close. Like probably within five years of when you got that one, I got this one. And the scanner doesn't work anymore. It does. Not with any computers I own. There is no software for them. And yes, I've tried all of the other third-party things.

Nobody makes it for this. but that one lives in the house it's a fine printer the printing still works because it's you know it's just a postscript network printer and it's got an ethernet port on it and it's great and so we use that in the house and but having a copier in the house is awesome we want it's crazy how often we use it and then the the duplex one that i have in the office will also scan with current devices and that's handy too but i

remember when i got the duplex one i I posted something again on Twitter about it. And Jason Snell replied, he was like, I know I'm the same way. It's crazy. I lead this entirely digital life. And yet I don't, you know, you think you do until you don't, you think you do. Yeah, exactly. So as part of this purchase, so the old printer, I would use an Amazon smart plug to power it up and power it down. Okay.

I couldn't figure out how to do this so I had a smart plug that I bought quite a while ago and I tried to activate it. And it wouldn't. I got like some dumb pairing error. It's like unable to configure. Okay, sure. It used to work. Someone from Amazon actually reached out to me and said, yeah, send us the info. And they're like, okay, we credited your account $30 because the new smart plug or your old smart plug doesn't work. Wow, that's amazing. Huh.

Well, go figure. Yeah, I was shocked that they're actually, you know, searching for people mentioning their products and and if they're complaining about it they'll they'll do what they can where did you did you complain about it like in an amazon review or on twitter or something on a twitter wow that's amazing yeah customer service man like that that's the key to successful business and they didn't even have you go to target to buy them gift cards for

that customer oh there is one thing we need to get through that i will make sure because John, I think you'll get a kick out of this, but, um, only related to tangentially to Pete's comment, but, um, yeah, that's, that's fascinating. Fascinating. That's great. Yeah. Yeah. But, but doesn't, I would assume your new printer has like a, a, a dormant mode or a sleep mode or whatever, where it's using almost no power. Right. So you don't need to turn it off. Yes. Okay. Um, yeah. And, and here's a tip.

So the thing is, you know, once I had it on and I press the power button, at some point it would say deep sleep. So yeah, there's a low power mode. I think it draws like four watts an hour or something like that. Not a biggie, but. I just, it was the old way of doing things that I, you know, had to eventually get over. The other thing is I found out there is a way to turn it off. You hold down the power button. Oh, yeah. Like in order to learn that I had to RTFM.

Well, there you go. It wasn't obvious to me. I'm like, if I press the power button, shouldn't you turn off? And it's like, well, not really. This is why, you know, almost 19 years later, this show still exists because we still have to RTFM. Just because we were doing this a long time. Read the flight manual. Read the flight manual. Flight manual. You know what? That, there, hang on, hang on. That deserves a magical, there it is.

I learned something. Because I thought that meant something completely different, Pete. Boy, I should apologize to my mother. All right. Adam. I thought it was read the full manual. Oh, fine, fine manual, the fine manual. Boy, I, I really, I have to apologize to everybody now. Huh? Yeah. Cause when I tell people that I, I, I don't use any of your adjectives. I, I use a different one now. Yeah.

It's a, it's, but every time I tried to type it out before I was 17, it would say, read the ducking manual. And I never quite understood what that was all about. So, uh, Adam, you got a cool stuff down for us. I do. This will be a little bit limited, but it's my attempt to convince Pete that he needs a Vision Pro because I was playing around with it and looking for different apps. And a flight app came up called ForeFlight.

It's actually a Boeing company. company um and they have this app called voyager and you fire this up it they have a bunch of curated airports it puts a terrain like this giant table disc floating terrain on your, in your space you like plop it down and it has the actual terrain like so if there's mountains and hills and stuff like that and it's airports and it will show you the airport but then not Not only that, it shows you the planes.

Actually where they are on the runway where they're doing their approach where they're taking off from with accurate air speeds and altitudes and directions and you can tap on the plane and it pops up the little window right above the the plane and it's not only planes it does commercial jets business jets turboprops piston aircraft flying helicopters and it does does have curated airports but you can look up any airport and i'm in a teeny tiny town, uh 15 000 people and they

have our airport in there like yeah right all the ga airports yeah yeah and it's all with the maybe pete can tell me what the k codes mean like it has extra codes it's not just the three digit it's a four digit so there's iata iata and i don't remember what what that abbreviation stands for, International Aviation Summit. So BOS, Boston, JFK for New York is an IATA code. KBOS is the ICAO, International Civil Aviation Organization. So worldwide, there are four-digit codes.

The United States all start with a K, except for Alaska and Hawaii, which start with P.

I presume for Pacific. pacific um much of europe starts with any some some interesting but that's what it is yeah i knew i mean i knew boss and k boss were the same airport like i i was i was smart enough to intuit that but i had no idea why yeah and it will it will also give you the airport data you know weather and all that sort of stuff so it was like crazy i sat in my living room for way too long and watching little virtual planes hang out. Probably not to be warm while flying.

Although I wonder if there's a world where that becomes your cockpit glass, Pete. You know, it may be. I mean, because certainly... Uh, certainly the military is doing that. And the example is the F-35, right? The, the helmet on that thing. Now, no one's going to go out and buy this Apple vision pro. The helmet on the F-35 is about, I think I heard 300,000 was the number for the helmet.

But if you want to see what's flying below you, you simply look down and the cameras on the airplane that are pointed down project onto your visor what's below you it's truly an augmented reality yeah right situation so you're it's like flying in a clear bubble i mean the late the latency is probably good enough like i can walk around in this thing no problem and i know marquez brown and his review played ping pong with it on and i believe somebody already got pulled over wearing one of these

things of course of course somebody's an idiot like i don't know who would do that i thought i immediately thought of that though i'm like you don't know who would drive in this thing yeah yeah because you can't i mean you could yeah so adam do they uh offer an option to tighten the bolts on the plane before taking off yeah no uh virtually low no but there there is another app and i'm going to forget the name of it i'll have to come back to it where you can put uh 3d models in your

space and i think a bunch of the reviews have shown this where you you put a full size F1 race car in your living room and it looks so incredibly real. They also have a jet engine and you can take that apart and you can see the parts moving and you can disassemble it, reassemble it. Fabulous for training. And a hundred percent full size. I mean, and you can walk up to it and look in and just look at all the little details, like down to the.

Tiniest level and it's just like i can't wait to see where we are in your environment yeah i can't wait to see where we are and i was gonna say a year but even six months as as developers really start to like dig in this is i i you know i have not yet bought one i if i were traveling.

As frequently as i once was i think i would would probably get one both for use on the plane so that i can just like be immersed and and forget about where i am but also like what you're talking Talking about with your, with your office environment, Adam, where, you know, you can, like, if I could bring my multiple monitors set up with me in a headset, that's way more efficient, right? To have everywhere. So like, yeah.

Yeah. Anyway, um, speaking of things to bring with you while you travel, Pete, uh, you want to take us to Andrew? I can do that. I think. All right. So, yeah. Yeah, so Andrew writes, Over the years, I have used various means to watch TV while traveling, using the hotel and Airbnb TV, including taking my Apple TV with me, running an HDMI cable from my iPhone, iPad, or Mac. I found the Apple TV to be too bulky to travel with.

Using other means, I lost use of my phone, iPad, or Mac if it was being used as the media player. In the new year sales, Google Chromecast HD was on sale for $35, $60 Australian dollars. So I grabbed one. It's the unit with a remote control, unlike the original Chromecast. Wow, is it impressive. It is thin and light and easily fit in my travel bag. All of the apps I need are available except Apple Music. It also runs VPN. It's easy to plug into wall-mounted TVs.

I can control it via Google TV app on my Apple devices. The remote is both Bluetooth and infrared, meaning it controls volume on the TV or soundbar, too. And as I said, wow, it's not as snappy as Apple TV, but it's 30% of the price and size. The as-shipped UI or home screen is full of crap. Suggestions. Up next. Continue watching and sundry stuff. However, there is a switch that you can flick that removes everything except the apps on your home screen. This makes it an Apple TV clone.

On the home screen, arrow up as high as you can, right arrow on the settings and click, arrow down to the accounts and sign in, and click right arrow to your account and click and arrow down to the apps only mode. and switch on by clicking. Boom, you have an Apple TV emulation mode. This thing looks sharp, Dave. I have never had a Chromecast, but I think I just got it cost $35. Well, it's only $30 on Amazon today. This is the HD version, which is the one he recommended.

There is a 4K version of it as well that I think is another $10, right? Right. It's the, you know, for thirty nine ninety eight today on Amazon, you can get the Google TV 4K. So if if that matters to you, then. But it's you need a 4K TV in your hotel room or, you know, a lot of them are 4K and hotel rooms and Airbnbs now. So and it of course will work with non 4K TVs, too. So, you know, for 10 for 10 bucks more, you kind of bought your options.

I have a I was going to say confession, but it really isn't a confession.

Um i have been using not i have not been using my apple tv as of late and it's because i got really frustrated that the apple tv plex app would not play at most sound of uncompressed audio audio it the way apple does its stuff on the apple tv it will only play at most sound if the sound is previously compressed right so if if the plex server has to do any transcoding it strips out the at most metadata so at most is 7.1 i'll say that's not entirely correct but let's say it's 7.1 sound right

or 7.2 sound uh with extra metadata that tells you where all of those sounds should come from that metadata gets stripped out anytime there's any change or transcoding that needs to happen and with uncompressed data the apple tv does not play uncompressed data so the plex server is forced to transcode it which strips out the the metadata of data. Could could Plex be reprogrammed to put it back in? I believe the answer is yes.

Have they done that? I am certain that the answer is no. Uh, so I started looking for other options and if you look online and ask about what's the most powerful media streaming player, you don't have to look too far before you find the NVIDIA shield TV pro.

This thing is absolutely spectacular it runs android tv just like or google tv whatever you want to call it uh just like the the chromecast does the interface can be tweaked as andrew mentioned to make it perfectly smooth and easy to use you can remote control it it plays uncompressed audio and uncompressed video it even has some ai upscaling to take things that aren't 4k and turn Turn them into 4K for your 4K TV if your TV doesn't already do that.

If you have one of these or you get one of these, I recommend A-B testing it, which it actually has a button that you can program a button to let you A-B test. So you can see, all right, how good does my TV make this look when it upsamples versus how does the NVIDIA Shield TV Pro make it look when it upsamples? And you can decide which one you like better and then just go with that. But it's fantastic as a streamer. It's 180 bucks.

So, you know, you're, you're paying for what you get and we've had it running for three weeks now, I think, and have not even considered using the Apple TV. I mean, we didn't unplug the Apple TV. It's right there. I could bounce back and forth with ease and we just use the, um, the, the shield at the remote is great. We've been using it stock remote. I didn't, I mean, I did like configure it with my Harmony remote, but it's just, it works great. Can you remote it from your iOS device?

Uh-huh. Is there a remote app? Yeah, with the Google app. Just like, yeah, just like Andrew mentioned. Yeah. So yeah. Yeah. Right. It doesn't, you have to put that app on your device. It's not just like built in. Right. So, so there's that. But wow. Look out. Apple. Apple TV is getting some real challengers in that space. Yes. Let me ask you this. I remember when I used to do business travel, there were special models of TV that would not allow you to put video into them, like HDMI. Yep.

I mean, I looked at this once, you know, I was staying in a hotel and I tried to plug in, you know, my video and it wouldn't work. So I looked at the model number and then, you know, Google that. And they're like, yeah, this is a hotel model TV because rather than you watching your stuff, they'd rather have you buy it from them or rent it from them. Yeah, I think, yeah, it might. It still happens. It's rare, but it still happens. It's rare. It's largely gone.

Yeah, because so many people bring their own devices with HDMI cables. I have found. We had that issue in Vegas. Yes. But we wound up unplugging their input and putting ours into their HDMI 1 or something, wasn't it? Yeah, but that wasn't because the TV was limited. It was because the suite in Vegas has like a set of inputs on the wall that makes you think it's linked to the TV. So you plug your HDMI in. It's like, oh, this must be linked to the TV. No, it's lying. It's not linked to the TV.

So Pete kind of lifted the TV off the wall and I like scrambled underneath and changed the HDMI cable out. I did no such thing. Nobody saw me. You can't prove a thing. But then it worked fine. Yeah. Yeah, I had one. I was down. I was actually in Connecticut last year for a quick overnight, and the –. Um, the, the TV had multiple inputs on the side, you know, but I couldn't change to him. I think it was like, to your point, John, I think it was in, you know, hotel mode or whatever.

And I looked online quick and sometimes there's a, uh, you know, a thing you can do with the remote to, to get it out of hotel mode. That wasn't the case because the only remote that was in the room was for the hotels specific box, right. That was like plugged into the TV. So I didn't have the TV remote. So, okay, fine. But the hotel's little box plugged into the TV with HDMI.

So I just unplugged their box from the TV and plugged my HDMI out from I think it was my iPad in and I was able to watch the hockey game I wanted to watch or whatever. The problem was the TV's volume internal to the TV was set to full blast and the volume knob on the on the remote that was in the room was to control it on the little box, not on the TV itself. So I had to use my iPads volume to, you know, to not like wake up my neighbors or whatever. So, but, uh, but yeah.

Um, speaking of Plex, they now right inside the Plex app on all of your devices offer streaming movie rentals and they have like back catalog stuff, but they also had like the Barbie movie you could rent for five 99, uh, $5 and 99 cents just to make it clear.

Uh so if you are a plex user and you're looking for a movie don't be surprised when you see plex sourced uh movie rentals just show up right there in the app and these come direct from plex or a partnership they have or whatever it is so um i don't know now how how is there you know i've noticed this so i've been using redbox for years and they still have kiosks where you You can get a physical DVD, or Blu-ray. I think it's only $2 now.

My reflection, though, is when I look either at them on their app, on Apple TV, they're... Their pricing is more than the physical media. Maybe it's you're paying for the convenience of being able to stream it or rent it online. Yeah. Aquaman's $20.99 to rent on Plex. It's because they're still... I don't know if it's the case here, but I've seen this even with Apple TV now.

All of these movies, a lot of them are still in the theater, so when they first hit streaming, streaming the purchase price is usually around 25 bucks and this and the like rental price is usually around 20 bucks it will eventually go down like you can see barbie's already down to what six bucks it looks like there yeah but it takes it takes weeks till it's left you know weeks or months after it's left the theater before it hits that so i've learned like if i

want to buy a film uh i will usually wait till it's been out of the theater for a month or two and then you can get it for like 10 bucks or five bucks if you try to buy it in the first month it's usually 20 25 bucks yeah so yeah so check just check it out in in plex i mean it it it's just there it's it's pretty pretty impressive in the in the movies and shows on plex section of your library so um i want to uh i want to take us i i don't know i know we're kind of pushing our our time uh but i

i did want to to share a story from listener patrick and and i have a story of my own to to share along with this and i wanted to make sure we did this while you were here john because i think you would appreciate uh this so patrick shares he says uh i subscribed to kelby one for my photography i thought it was at kelby training which i think was an old site and when i visit that when i I visited that URL.

Uh, I got a screen that told me I had a problem with my firewall and, you know, all of those things, uh, that come up from the scammer sites. Uh, he says, uh. I, you know, I've learned to be careful of these. Unfortunately, this also happened to my wife when I was not at home. When she saw it, she was scared and called the numbers on the screen and then proceeded to withdraw $5,000 in cash to go in place in a Bitcoin machine at some seedy retail outlet.

And they told her, don't answer calls from your husband while you're doing this.

She would not answer my calls or texts. texts luckily the bitcoin machine would not take her five thousand dollars and while she was on the phone with these hackers they told her to go to another site and try it blah blah blah luckily she got frustrated and hung up on them finally she then answered my phone call as i was tracking her on find my and i told her to hang up the phone don't answer it unless it's for me and come home with the five thousand dollars he says i

was worried sick uh but uh obviously you know this This thing happens. And he says, my son is an attorney in Denver and handles clients who have lost money due to these scams, which scare the heck out of computer illiterates. So it is a real thing. He says, of course, I reported it to the FBI cybercrime site and didn't hear anything and don't expect to. So thank you for sharing that story. I have one to share, too, and hopefully Lisa doesn't mind me sharing this.

She does all the accounting for our businesses. Right. And a few months ago, fall, I think this was, John, she slacked me and casually said, hey, the bank said that wire transfer didn't go through and is asking if I should resend it. Do you want to reach back out to the vendor and make sure that everything's okay? And I was like, what wire transfer? And she's like, you know, the big one from a couple days ago. And I'm like, I don't, and you know, this is in Slack, right?

There's a, I got a million things going on, transacting me. So my frustration level is like quickly rising. I'm like, treat me like I'm five and start at the beginning. I have no idea what you're talking about. And she's like, yeah, you emailed me that invoice from that consultant the other day that you needed paid immediately.

And, uh, and you gave me all the wire information. and i was like i no what if you had another guest yeah i'm like nope and so i i went to her computer with her and she showed me the email that said it was from dave hamilton but the reply address was not me right and uh and so when she replied asking you know a clarifying question she got an answer from me seeming and uh and proceeded to file and submit the wire transfer with the

bank without ever talking to me because she thought we were already talking and thankfully i don't like to say anything good about the banks i really really don't but bank of america saved me 25k last year. Like, you know, she wired it out and and and the banks, you know, had figured out that this was a scammer and blocked the transfer. But and, you know, as soon as she was looking at it objectively, she's like, I can't believe I fell for this.

She's like, you would never have emailed me like this. You would have slacked me. She's like, we don't do email for these kinds of things. I'm like, you're exactly right. Like, yeah, but it's really and she's very literate on a computer. But it's really easy. And I see it constantly. I get, in fact, I just got an email yesterday from, you know, Lisa Hamilton, except it wasn't saying, Hey, I need you to change the direct deposit details for my next paycheck before the next pay cycle.

And I was like, yeah, and I've gotten it from, you know, from other employees too. And I, I now just respond and say, Say, yeah, I can do that as soon as you pay back the payroll loan that you took from us. Here's our PayPal account. Put that $1,000 back, and then I can change your payroll things. And thus far, they haven't sent me the grand. But, you know, I'll keep trying. Have you seen anything like that, John? Yeah. Oh, yeah.

No, I get phishing emails that appear to be invoices for a product or service that someone provided to me.

Yeah and although people will tell you not to click on those sometimes i just have a little extra time and i want to mess with them because if if they're messing with me they're not scamming someone else exactly the typical thing the typical thing is oh gosh your computer is infected with 100 viruses and um you know go to this site or let us get into your computer so we can fix it for you and I'm like ha ha and usually the conversation ends,

when they try to do log me in or whatever remote service I'll then cut them off. I um you know what comes I even talked to one one time voice and I was like you know you should really make better choices with your life, I'm like it seems you know something about computers but scamming people I'm like you're gonna get caught And they're like, no, we're not. And I'm like, yeah, I think you will. Because they're using a public phone number, you know, 1-800 number.

Yeah, but that's a fake number. Well, they may be. Yeah. But I'm sure if you get the right people on the job, you can find out where they're really calling from. But often they're from a foreign, like they're not from the United States. So that, you know. Their English was good. So I suspect they were in this country.

But no, you're right. A lot of times it could be. because you hear this you know you'll hear they're in a call center and there's all this noise in the background and you can you know sometimes hear other voices and all that so um. Yeah, some of them are convincing, though, is that they'll have the logo of my bank is correct. The reply address is usually correct, though not always.

This is a big tip for me, is if you look at the address that they're sending it to, if it says undisclosed recipient or someone else's address, I'm like, you don't even know me. Yeah, right. Yeah, exactly. I have a fun story to tell, which I will not share on the show here, A, because it would take too much time, and B, because it's probably not entirely family friendly.

What I did to one of these scammers once, I kept them on the phone for a very long time, and I made them look at something that was very upsetting to them after a while, and they were upset with me. But come to the Hangout on Sunday, and if somebody remembers to ask me, I'll wax poetic about it then.

In john before we go though uh i want to you had one more cool stuff found that you wanted to tell us about with a little bit maybe of show and tell it even on the for those watching the video but describe it uh close enough to the microphone so that all the folks on the audio can can hear it too so all right so if you're on video you can see this this is my ipad uh fourth generation air.

Um see that thing on the bottom there describe it for the folks who i got what i got is so someone online was like oh you know i'm getting a new ipad what case should i get i'm like well you could get the folio case which is a very basic case it has a tilt and stuff and magnets so it'll turn off, and that worked that worked for me for a while but when this person asked me i was like you know know what?

Let me see what's out there as far as keyboards for the iPad. And so I got, Um, I got the iPad Apple magic keyboard. Dude. Yeah. You like it? Remember, remember we were, we were at a show a while ago and I was trying to use the iPad and the pencil to like take notes and all that. Yep. Cane in the neck, not a path that I would take. I would say the only reason you want to get an Apple pencil is if you can, if you have drawing talent, but in this case with the backlit keyboard and the trackpad.

I'm actually using my iPad during the day instead of my computer because even that older iPad Air 4th generation, I can typically get at least a day out of it. And the other thing that's neat is that you can do split screen. So my normal operating mode is I'll have Reddit on the left and I'll have Twitter on the right. Okay.

Um the only thing that gets kind of weird is navigating away from or navigating two different apps and the best way that i found to do that is you do uh man tab i think command tab just like on the mac is that yeah it is that yeah is that i'll choose command tab and then it'll show the icons of of the apps that are running and there's one that's kind of like the finder and so i'll typically switch to that if i want to run another app that makes sense yeah huh but

but it it's a nice keyboard it's backlit and um and the trackpad some navigating some things is kind of weird like sometimes it'll get the wrong focus in a text field or something like that yep um it doesn't have function keys i was hoping for function keys there is another vendor i think kensington or i forget who it was that actually have function keys this one does not okay so cool cool i like it i'm glad to hear that yeah adam yeah

what else do you have one of these i do i've been using mine for years with my 11 inch uh ipad pro i think i have a first gen second gen i don't know it's old but um yeah i absolutely love it i love the the charging although i will admit the charging.

You know on the keyboard is slower than if you just plug it into the side and but you can do either either got it right you could plug right into the side of the ipad it's not blocked or anything like that and um for for the app thing john i would recommend just using your spotlight launcher so all the same you know shortcuts work so just hit command spacebar and type the name of the app and hit enter and boom, you can open up another app. That's a good idea. Just like you do on your Mac, right?

Yep. Oh, I like it. That's cool. I'm glad to hear that. I, I, you know, I've, I've used them. I've tested them. I've never really lived with one. Um, but that's fascinating. I, I, I've watched my family use, uh, the Apple pencil and none of them use it for draw.

I mean, I, I suppose they have used it for drawing, but for the most part, like Lisa Lisa uses something, I think it might be Goodreader, on the iPad with the Apple Pencil to track when she's knitting, making notes on the knitting pattern so that she knows where she is and all of that stuff. And my kids, when they were in school, both high school and college, loved taking notes on their iPad with the pencil because you get that tactile experience of taking the notes.

And they said it really helped them with retention and things like that.

So um the the app that you use for taking notes i think makes a difference i like notability a lot that's what they were using sorry not good that notability that you're right yeah yeah but i think there's other good ones that's just the one i fell on yes apple notes can be okay but i just some of the features with notability it has some features where you can create kind of a larger writing area So you can put your, you know, that's what cursors track along and it's got shortcuts for,

you know, going to the next line and doing, you know, so yeah, kind of really need a good note taking app app, I think to really use the pencil with notes that, yeah. And my family said exactly the same thing. They tried using Apple notes and they were like, this is untenable.

They you know their friends or someone quickly told them maybe i told them because somebody on the show told me i don't know but you know they quickly moved to notability and then that was it they were like oh this is now completely functional as a note-taking device and it's amazing it's the way it should work yeah exactly exactly well it's also just for better for like managing your notes and things like that yeah i'll set up different folders for

work things or your personal things and i don't organize everything and it can all sync to your other devices and yeah the other thing i'll say about that the apple magic keyboard is it is heavy it does add a lot of weight but it's very easy to snap on and off so i'll use it you know depending upon what i'm doing i'll snap it on use it as the keyboard thing during the day to work and then snap it off at night to just sit around and lounge and browse and read stuff yeah cool and

if you want to know what's going on behind the scenes on your ipad i'm linking to this it's a utility about a while ago but never really used it that much until i got the keyboard then i wanted to see you know how's my uh ipad holding up here it's called system status pro hardware monitor and it shows you your battery cpu consumption memory use uh everything you ever want to know about what's happening in ios which kind of surprised me because usually they they kind

of hide that stuff so i don't know what these guys did to get all those graphs i used this a while ago and and like removed it because because it stopped being able. To get data i see the last update was in may of 23 does it work with ipad os 17 uh as far as i can tell wow 17 aren't you on 17 now isn't that what we're all on. Right yeah if you're on the latest yeah yeah yeah yeah 17 3 is what my phone's on so i assume i yeah okay okay, huh?

That's great to know. All right. Yeah. It will link to that. Obviously that's yeah. Cause I remember buying it. We probably mentioned it on the show 10 years ago, John, like, you know, when it, when it was a thing and then there was a period of time where it was not a thing. So, huh? Great. Cool. Apple didn't want you looking. They don't want you looking Pete. It's just how it is. I know it's how they are. Well, real quickly before you go close and jump back to this scammer's thing.

Now it's the phone call. Not for an email, but a Porthos John mentioned in there, a paid a P A T E dot AI as an app that will, it's an interactive chat bot that will answer phone calls and engage scammers. Oh, this is why we love technology. Oh, that's outstanding. All right. Yeah, we will, uh, we'll link to this. Oh, wow. Wow. I just rely on Scammer Payback to do that for me. YouTube channel, I'm addicted to it. It's all right.

I don't know about this. It's called Scammer Payback. It's just this guy and a group of people that they just go mess with scammers all day long. He's really good too. They will reverse the screen share connection and they have relationships with the screen sharing that they all use. And they will get on the computer and start just deleting files.

They will download and delete files. house and then they they work with the they work with the fbi and local law enforcement to turn these guys in and shut down oh man i had no idea call centers and stuff this is great yeah so they expose these guys and shut them down they're friends with the glitter bomb guy too and they actually want to go into india and and putting mice in their building yeah i heard about that that's right that's right yeah yeah feedback's a b word

yeah yeah yeah yeah fascinating so all All right, well, all good things must come to an end. We're at an old time here. We're almost a minute and a half in. A minute and a half? How about an hour and a half into this? You know, time is, what did I do? Linear, not linear. You sure you don't want to go eight more minutes? Uh, why would I want to go eight more minutes, Adam? Cause it's 10 16 for me right now. And then we'd be 10 24. That's awesome.

Uh, no, I think we'll bring the band in. Yeah. I hear music. Yeah. You know, it's time. It's time. Thank you for hanging out with us, folks. Not just for this episode, but for a full 2023 previous episodes. Yeah. And this one. So now we've, yeah, we've done it. 1024. Yeah, it's amazing. I'm stoked and having a blast. So, John, it's been good to have you here. Where can people find you these days if they want to hunt you down and talk about Reddit and keyboards and printers?

I would say Twitter is probably the best. I'm almost always monitoring that.

And that's at John F. Braun. on i'm also on facebook and instagram uh same username as far as i know so uh if you're looking for me you'll find me uh thank you for joining us yeah this was a blast to to just hang out and have some fun uh thanks to cashfly for providing all the bandwidth to get the show from us to you i'll put links in the show notes for of course john on his twitter account and the rest of us on Twitter and Mastodon and all that stuff.

And I will also put links to the podcast that Pete does called So There I Was. And I'll link to my shows too, Business Brain and Gig Gab. And yeah, that's it. That's what we got for today. Yeah, here we are. Are you on Mastodon yet, John? Messing around with that? No, I'm still wrestling with Twitter. All right. Music. Hey, do you have any advice, John? Maybe Pete's shirt might provide some inspiration for those watching the video stream.

Do you have any advice for people that are wrestling with Twitter or really just doing anything? Some generic advice, maybe three solid words? I think those three words, Dave, would be don't get caught. That's some good advice. Thanks for hanging out, folks. Later!