It's time for MacGeekGab, and in lieu of a quick tip today, I want to tell you about something that we are starting new here in August, and we are planning to do it every month, and that is we are doing a MacGeekGab giveaway. You go to MacGeekGab.com slash giveaway, and that's always where that will be. This month, we are giving away five licenses to Camo, which is the app that I use and that Pete uses to make our iPhones into even better web cameras than continuity camera does.
And we're going to get Adam on camo. I swear. Uh, no, it really, it's absolutely, it's a total game changer and you can win one of the five free licenses just by going to Mac, e-cub.com slash giveaway and entering our giveaway that we're doing in partnership with camo. I'm really stoked. Our priority with these is to bring you something great to give away every month.
And we by saying it out loud here i am making that commitment in public so now we're gonna do it no it's it's happening the machine is running it's all good so macgeekup.com slash giveaway, and once we get to this show we will have tips plus your questions answered and cool stuff found today on macgeekup 10 49 for monday august 5th national dash cam day so maybe we'll talk about that later in the show 20 24.
Music. And welcome to Mackie cab the show where we share like I said your quick tips your cool stuff found your questions we even try to answer your questions Sometimes we have questions, quick tips and cool stuff found of our own. We string them all together into an agenda that is organized, giving us all the best shot at learning at least five new things every single time we get together.
Our sponsor for this episode is coda.io slash mgg. That's where you can go to bring all your text and tables together onto literally one page. It's an amazing tool. And you can sign up at coda.io slash mgg for free. We'll talk more about that in a little bit. For now, here in Durham, New Hampshire, with most of my voice back, I'm Dave Hamilton. And here in South Dakota, I'm Adam Christensen. And aloha from New Hampshire. It's Pilot Pete.
I had you there for a second. And now the giveaway is four, because if we're going to get Adam on camo, then we're down to four giveaways for the month. I think I'm already good. I'm already good there. I just need to get on it. It is an amazing program. Yeah, it's a great tool. And that's why I reached out to them as the first ones to do this with, because it's one of those tools that I love it. You don't know what you don't have until you then have it, and the cool stuff
that it will do for you. Yeah. Zoom and follow. It just makes, it's not Sidecar. What's the name? Continuity Camera. Continuity Camera. It just makes Continuity Camera look weak. Like, yeah, well, it is, right? I mean, it's like Continuity Camera Pro. On steroids, yeah. And that's what third-party developers are there for, right? Like, you know, we have BusyCal and Fantastical, and Apple still makes Calendar, right?
And Calendar works great for a lot of people, but for the people that want more, that's why BusyCal and Fantastical have thriving businesses.
So, yeah. So, Dave, I want to put you on the spot and ask you a question before we get into quick tips and you can tell me never mind or we'll talk about it later or go away and that's okay but how are you going to decide to whom you're going to present these licenses oh we're using a platform to do all this for us i can't remember the name of the giveaway plus sweep widget is the platform that we are using for for that so it
and i am i certainly i am aware of it i i'm very involved in selecting things but sadie is running point on this so uh i think Sadie will actually be the one that goes in and presses the button to select the five winners at the end. Yeah. Okay. Cool. Oh, I'd be interested to do it. Because we thought about trying to do something similar on my show, and I couldn't figure out, well, how will we determine to whom we would give something?
I mean, in the past what I've done— It sounds like they've got a randomized fix. Yeah. In the past, what I've done when we've done things similar to this, you know, with whatever is I pull them into a spreadsheet and then they'll, you know, let's say there's 500 people that have, you know, given. And so then I will just I mean, now I would go to chat GPT and say, pick me a random number between two and five hundred because row one is usually like the header row. So I don't want to pick that.
And and then it picks me a random number and it's like, OK, well, there you go. or pick me five random numbers between two and 500. And it's like, boom, okay, that's them. Good to go. That's it. So that's how I would do it. What were you going to say? But are they truly random? Probably not. Very rarely are computers' random functions random, as we've learned. I'm sure you've found that too, Adam, right? Yeah. I mean, depends on a lot of factors, but yeah.
Random is random, I guess. Well, truly random is just hard to do, but yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Should we get to Mike D, give him a little respect and read off his quick tip? Let's do it. Yes. Mike D says, each morning when I get up, I do my morning routine with coffee and my iPhone while I wake up. I call it my morning surf. I like that. One of these things I do is head over to the App Store to initiate whatever updates are waiting. This typically is no problem because you usually only it's
only a few apps, but once in a while there are a ton of updates. 31 today. All the apps queue up and take their turn. But what happens if I want to use an app that is waiting to download and the icon is gray? I tend to be impatient in the morning. Well, if you press and hold the gray waiting icon, you are presented with a list of options, the first of which is prioritize download.
This is super cool. Choosing this will move the app to the next available download position as soon as one of the current downloads finishes. This app will begin, sort of like cutting the line. That's a great tip because I did not know you could do the press and hold to get options, you know, the long press. I always would just go tap the application that I want to launch and then it immediately becomes the next item. So I skipped the line that way, but two ways to do that.
I'm curious now what the other options are, so I'm going to be playing with that. Yeah, I... I always do it with the prioritized download thing. As soon as you mentioned that you could tap it and do it, I have some memory of seeing that happen too, but I'd forgotten about that one. But yeah, it's super handy to be able to do that. I have a different, I do a very similar thing.
I usually do it, I don't do it first thing in the morning, but when I do all of my app updates manually on my iPhone, because I'd like to read the release notes, not for everything, but I like to see what's coming and some of them I'll read the release notes for. And as I'm sort of scanning through it, choosing what release notes to read, that's when I will be like, oh, well, I know that the next thing I'm going to do is open this app.
So I tap that one to update. And I basically queue up the ones that I want first and then hit update all and it goes and gets the rest. So Brian in the chat asks, why not set your apps to just auto update?
That solves the problem. him he he's right except that then i don't have a reason to go i don't have a reminder to go and look at the release notes for all of the apps and i i like that and but that's because i'm a nerd but also because we do this show and sometimes you know something in the release notes would be like oh we should talk about that on the show or whatever so that's why i don't auto update my apps. Yeah. I don't know. Nice. Anything more on that or we're good on that?
No, I'm trying to think of why I don't auto update my apps. Um, i would think that was turned on but i do have to go in and check them so i must i need to check my settings yeah i i don't either and i i've just always thought there are certain times i don't want them to auto update i know that just because you know it it screws it up but yeah reading the release notes up front go well it's not something i want to do i think and you
also talked about the other options i think one of them is to not download the update and or delete if you long press the down the gray i think you have the option to delete the i think you have to swipe left on the update listing to delete the app yeah which is super handy for an app you forgot about and it's like oh i don't need that anymore kill it yeah i don't want to update that junk yeah yeah of course the the bigger problem there i and i do i use that as like my way of,
sifting through apps that i've installed that i don't want when i see an update come through for For an app that I don't use regularly or at all, I'd use that to delete it. But if there's an app that hasn't been updated in a long time that I don't use, I don't know to delete it. And I really wish Apple would show me apps that I haven't opened in six months or something. I bet you could make a shortcut to do that. I don't think you have access to see that data.
Yeah, not on iOS. You can do it on the Mac. On the Mac. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Clean My Mac does it on the Mac. Sure. Yep.
It's super handy super handy yes super handy all right how about i take us to alex he writes in with a quick tip he says hello adam dave and pete i'm fairly sure this has been shared on the show already but if by chance it hasn't maybe you'll see it as useful all the best alex and i'm going to read it rather than try to describe it because i'll screw it up if i just try to talk about it Look, so there's a built-in gesture to bulk select messages,
emails, notes, and more across Apple's stock apps. And rather than using a submenu to put the items in select mode and then ticking the circles that appear in each row, you can just swipe two fingers down the list to select the item in the list. What? Every item in the list that your fingers touch. Yeah. And I tried this with notes. It's super cool. Cool. I know you could do it with photos, but you do have to put it in the select mode to do it with photos.
I didn't try it with photos using this two-finger gesture. I didn't think about that. But it goes on to say, I only learned about it when developer Jordan Morgan tweeted to complain that more third-party apps should make use of it. So apparently it's available in the API. So although it's a feature that's available to all apps on iOS and iPadOS, you'll find it mainly in Apple's stock apps. From poking around, it seems to be available in messages, mail, notes, and reminders.
But there are almost certainly more. And I think, Dave, you're putting the link in the show notes to the Verge article. Yeah, exactly. I will do that for everyone to be able to read. And you can get the show notes at macgeekup.com. So, you know, you sign up for the mailing list and you're good to go. question on that. So if you're doing that, that feels like it's somewhat the equivalent of like a shift click select on the Mac, right? Where you're selecting a batch or a range.
Yes. And or I liken it more to command click to select because you can skip over items in the list. Oh, so you can. So like once you've initiated this, that was where my question was going. Yes. Can you actually? So then you can lift with two fingers and then go down and go down two or three items and select another one. And it doesn't deselect the ones on top of it. It's, and then you can scroll with one finger while you're doing it.
Here's why have I not been using this? Oh, it's amazing. Yeah. Huh? So thank you, Alex. That's a great one. And yeah, this is so much better. What I used to do to, to, to do the same thing. You put it in select mode. And if you run one finger down the column of check marks, you can do that. Right. But it's a very narrow path. And if you veer off the path, it goes kind of, you know, it goes silly on you.
It goes stupid. Yeah. Right. So this is using the two fingers and using them, you know, one finger in the wider column that has the data, whatever the data is, scrolls.
Two fingers in the wider column selects so you really if you just leave your your fingers over the wider column and use one or two it's a much more fluid thing huh i like this yeah as soon as i tried it and went oh this is way too easy right right yeah exactly yeah yeah yeah huh who knew like i mean i guess i guess somebody knew well jordan at the verge did but yeah yeah exactly.
All right. You know, Jordan at the Verge should have written into feedback at macgeekgab.com and given that to us years ago. Just saying. What address? Was that feedback at macgeekgab.com, Pete? I think he said feedback at macgeekgab.com. Yeah. Got it. That's what I said. You heard me. You want to help my mom? Yeah. So, as happens, my mom called me the other morning.
And usually when it's not the weekend because we usually talk on Sundays uh I know that she's got a computer problem tech support and she she only has an iPad which has been great like she does not actually own a computer she just has a iPad with a cellular connection because she can't get internet where she lives basically um and so that solves her problem but she called me and she she She goes, um, my email's not working.
I now, every message, everything that, every message I open up, at the top of the message, it says, your network preferences prevent content from loading privately. And then there was a button that says load content directly. And then if you tap that button, then it would load. So the way this manifested itself is suddenly she was getting, you know, she was on group group message message messages with a friend or males.
Sure. And, uh, was not getting pictures. Like all the pictures were just question marks. Right. So it was like blocking all of the content. And I thought the message was confusing to me because it says.
Your preferences are preventing content from loading privately and i i'm like this feels like it's related to apple's mail privacy protection yes and disabling that would actually make the messages less private so that the the message is infinitely confusing to me i don't i don't know why it's worded like that but anyway sure enough i said let's try this go into mail preferences into the privacy tab uncheck mail protect mail activity
and then uncheck the hide ip address and block all remote content buttons and we turned it all off and lo and behold everything totally worked so yeah yeah and but then i told her i'm like you're actually making your mail. Less private, not more private by disabling this. So, but she prefers to see the content. Well, yeah, I said, I explained to her, like, it's your choice. You know, you get to decide.
You can either have to click the load content directly every time, which is going to do, you know, basically remove the protections just for that one email.
So you can see the content because obviously, you know, whatever site it's coming from is, is blocking because you're hiding your ip or for whatever reason yeah i don't really know what's going on but it's like you're actually making it less private i don't know why the message because i'm assuming that message comes from apple this is she uses the mail app from apple so your network preferences prevent content from loading privately because you turned on mail
privacy protection yeah so i'm looking at apple's page about this that talks about mail privacy protection and it explains the things that that you just talked about where if you let it load directly. Then the, then it's not private.
Well, the person, and what they're talking about is, you know, images that are, not sent along with the message but images that are linked from within the message right so right you know you open the message and then your computer downloads the image from not your mail server but some web server at that point right yeah and yeah and then that web server may be embedded in there yes you're well it's almost certainly is you know that web server gets your ip address
and knows things about you and protect mail activity does two things first it can um. Route through Apple's tracking protection servers so as to obscure your IP address. And then the second thing that it does is it downloads all of those images in the background as soon as mail arrives.
This is what it's supposed to do. And that way they don't know whether you've read the message or not, because otherwise they could know, oh, this person, you know, if it doesn't download everything, thing then they know it don't you're only downloading it when you read the message and so they can track you that way i hope i'm making sense on this yeah and so like the privacy protection when you turn it on does both of those things it obscures
your ip and downloads it in the background so that you know the mail just arrived whether you've looked at it or not it's downloaded all the assets and nobody can track you so i don't even know why this button exists for For Apple, like why does this error message have to exist unless mail agents are blocking Apple's privacy servers? That would be my guess. Yeah. That like they're getting wise to this and they're like forcing a way to make people have to turn this stuff back on.
Yeah. Well, I've I've noted that when I'm using Apple mail in Mac OS, you know, I get that message that, you know, it's prevented from loading. Loading, but if I turn on PIA, Private Internet Access VPN, it loads. Right. And I think that's because once you turn a VPN on, I think it turns this stuff off because this is this would otherwise it would essentially be two VPNs fighting with each other. And I think Apple engineered knows that. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.
Yeah. And you're already obscuring your VPN. I mean, your IP address. Sorry, Adam, didn't mean to walk on you. No, no, no. I was just going to point out, too, that this is a purely Apple app feature at this point. I mean, I don't believe there's any APIs or anything for third-party apps. So this only exists in Apple's mail program in Safari, I think.
I would love for there to be an API for it, because what I would then do is build a podcast app that downloaded the episodes via one of these things. And then we could put the audience counting on there without it actually tracking who the audience members are, because it'd be really nice to get like industry approved metrics for the show. That'd be great. But the only way to do that right now is by essentially giving up all of your private information or at least your IP address.
And I don't want to do that. I don't think any of the three of us want to do that to you. so uh so we don't but it means that we there's like ad campaigns that we miss out on and things like that because you know the sponsor says well i need to use this tracking whether they actually need to or not as a whole other conversation but they believe they need to and it's their dollars so then they just don't buy with us so it'd be great to be able to say yeah okay look you can you know you can
count the audience but you can't know who they are that's right yeah so So I've been thinking about this a lot because using Apple's engine to do that. I mean, we could set up our own engine to do that. And I'm actually thinking about that. So that might be an upcoming project, Adam. All right. We'll figure it out. We'll figure it out. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, all right. Next one. Yeah. Yeah. So I'll, I'll take us to, uh, D David.
He, he wrote in and hold on just a second here. Everybody listening. If you're a terminal Luddite like me, go ahead and raise your hand. Hold it up there. Let me see. Okay. I got y'all. Well, this is where it works great for me. Look, last week we talked about finding the path to a given file, and you could click on it and do all these different things.
Copy path to item, yada, yada, yada, and David writes in and reminds us of something that I have done for years, especially with terminal, and it works for other places too. But he says, you know, you gave a few tips about viewing the file paths.
This is of course you if you have a two button mouse or a magic mouse with the secondary click activated you can access the menu with the right click or two finger tap but he goes that's not my tip if you have if you need a file path in terminal script editor or many other apps so there you go besides terminal you can simply drag the file into the apps window and the path to the file will appear in the cursor i had completely forgotten about that when we were chatting about that
last week but I have used that over and over and over again especially if you've got a NAS drive or something like that yeah, Yeah, I do that all the time. There's your complicated path. I don't want to have to type it out. I don't even, there is a thing in most shells, and I think it's in ZShell, which is the default terminal for, on the Mac now, called tab completion, where you can start typing a folder or file name and hit tab and it will complete
it. And then you can, you know, kind of keep it going down. Even with tab completion, I don't want to have to type out. Sometimes it's several options. Yeah. Well, and it might be, you know, six folders deep. It's way better to just drag it in there. I love that. Right. Yep. Yeah. I use that all the time. Now, Pete, since you're a terminal Luddite, do you know how to do the opposite? So you're in terminal, you've navigated somewhere, and now you're like, where am I?
Oh, that's a good question. Well, I'd assume, I've always assumed it's at the prompt. But it's not. Depending on how you have your prompt set up, maybe, maybe not.
But yes if you ever need it there's a command called pwd and it will just output your current path in terminal that that is i believe it is print working directory that's how i remember it i that could be wrong in fact let's look yeah it always confused me i'm like why am i typing password password to find my path that makes more sense dave there you go okay perfect and then the And the way to get back, of course, is just CD enter, right? Back to your root. Back to your home, usually. Yeah.
Your home. Well, no, just CD enter will take you to the root. If you need to get home, it's CD tilde to go to your home directory. Right. Although I think on the Mac, CD brings you to your home. Your home is your default directory. Does it? Yes. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. All right. So we got PWD from terminal to display the working directory. But how about if you have navigated somewhere in the terminal and now you want to be in that same place in the finder, right?
Wouldn't that be great to be able to open a finder window right there so that you don't have to like do the commands from the terminal?
Well, you can do that. the terminal command open and then dot and open space dot the period and that will um period is here where we are right now dot dot is one folder up from where you are right now if that matters but yeah if you type open space dot it'll open a finder window with whatever term whatever folder you're in in the terminal so okay fellow light eights here endeth the terminal lesson for the day okay all right i think unless you want to keep going these are great yeah i had no idea
these but but that's why i call myself a terminal and i used to be a dos god but you know that was 40 years ago i think. All right, folks, have you ever felt like coordinating your team is like juggling flaming torches while riding a unicycle? Don't get caught in the chaos. Use our sponsor, Coda. I've been using Coda for a couple of my other businesses and one of my projects, and it's a game changer. Imagine a platform that combines the best of documents, spreadsheets,
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And our thanks to them for doing this swap with us. Nice. All right. Well, let's get into some questions for the week here. Terry writes in. Hang on. I'm pretty sure it was Terry. Yeah. Okay. There we go. Terry writes in. Hello, Dave, Adam, and Pete. Blue sky question. I am repeatedly getting caught. My studio display plugs into a CalDigit T53 dock. I have three SSDs for various purposes hanging off of that dock. Backup, video processing, and miscellaneous.
I've also got an SSD on the studio display as a time machine volume. When the monitor plugs into my personal computer, my M1 Mac's a 15-inch, all of those drives do their work as expected. When I plug in my Pearson work, M2 MacBook Air, I actually would prefer that none of those drives mount. The company locks down installing any software that is not blessed by the company and generally only software available via the company portal is allowed.
So are you aware of anything in the operating system that would allow or that would stop all of the externals from auto mounting? When I put the work computer into the studio display, which I do daily as I switch between tasks, I typically have have to go to a three to four minute tedious process of unmounting all these drives by select, eject, and 95% of the time that moves into a force eject routine, which involves two clicks per each of the four drives.
And only after that can I get to work often on a virtual meeting with a faculty that I'm trying to help. Any insights would be greatly appreciated. Thanks for all of the great info you folks have provided over the years. Much appreciated, Terry. Yep. So I looked into this a little bit for Terry and hold on. Cause I lost the, the answer because the answer was a little bit complex. So I didn't know if there was a way to do this or not. And, um.
And what I found out is there's actually a way to do this via the terminal. Now, I'm going to give this with the caveat that when I looked into this, I would not do this. And if you choose to do this, make sure you have backup, backup, backup. So what you need to do is... It's not what he says, it's not what he does. Yeah. What you would need to do is edit a file called the FSTab file. And this contains static information about your file system.
Now, to edit this, you actually must do it with a special version of the VI text editor called VIFS. I'm assuming VI file system or FSTab.
I don't know know what fs tab stands for actually but what you do then is you you go into the terminal you type vi fs and then you need to add a line to the fs tab file for each volume that you don't want to mount using its uuid its mount point its file system type and the mount options now there's a way to get all those details we're going to have a link in the show notes to an article that walks you through exactly how to do this process. My guy wrote up a nice article over on GitHub.
So you can do it. And you basically in the mounting options, you tell it, hey, don't auto mount this volume, don't auto mount this volume. I wouldn't do that, though. I think an easier and safer way to do this would be, just to set up a shortcut to eject the disks on startup or on log in that you don't want mounted so let them mount and then just have an automation that actually ejects them for you yes it'll take a little bit longer but much much safer so um.
That you can when you create the shortcut, so there is a disk utility shortcut called eject disk, and then you just pick the disk that you want to eject. So it'd be an easy shortcut to set up. And then you can create an app. So if you right click on the shortcut, there's an option to put it in the dock. And when you put the shortcut in the dock, it creates an application that will be in your home applications folder in your home.
So there's an applications folder in a home folder, you'll find it there then you can just add that as a login item in system settings and then it will run at login and eject your disks so i would do it that way i i um well first of all when it comes to modifying fstab and this certainly betrays my ignorance and lack of experience with But I am reminded of a knowledge-based article from Mac OS 10.4, I think, that was talking about the sync services folder on your Mac.
And the knowledge-based article read, as if it were a swarm of bees, you should stay away from the sync services folder. I think of the FSTab file as if it were a swarm of bees. Don't mess with this. I don't think you could lose data easily by doing it, but you certainly could create a lot of headaches for yourself by mucking about in there and potentially lose data. I don't want to promise that you couldn't.
There's a lot in there that could go very very wrong and potentially render your system unbootable or unusable upon boot i know that there are utilities for like to do this for you written for mac os i want to say one was called mountain um it was but i i don't think i have that, right somebody yeah i was looking for a utility or an app and i couldn't find one but if anybody does know of one that would be great but i just use to do this because i have external drives like my
time machine drives that i don't want mounted all the time or my clone drives in fact actually the time machine drives are a little easier to deal with but the clone drives i wouldn't want mounted all the time and so i wrote a little um automator app that really just ran a terminal command that did the eject terminal command the disk util eject command and it just you know it i have that thing run maybe it's an apple script
i can't remember if it's automator or apple script i think it's apple script now that i mention it and it just runs and runs that terminal command I have it in my login items in Wacos, and that's it. I bet ChatGPT could help you write that. Yeah, or shoot us an email at feedback at macgeekup.com, and I'll send it to you. You heard him. Yeah, yeah, yeah. There are, is that my phone ringing, or is that your phone ringing, Pete?
I don't know. Okay. Well, it was a text, if anything, but I don't have a text message pop up on my computer. No, I was hearing your phone buzz is what I was hearing. A phone buzz. Yeah, so some kind of alert. Yeah, I'm pretty sure it was mine. It's in the tripod right there. Oh, that's why. Okay. Yeah. I'm looking to see if there's anything...
Uh in in set app for mounting or unmounting discs but i don't see them so yeah there was a cloud mounter which was in set up but that's not your nas drive no i i know there was there was an app i want to say it was called mountain but somebody will write it in and then we will share it uh and and if we get it in time i will put it in the show notes for this so that it's just like there but uh There you go. Yeah, yeah. I know there's apps to do it, but you can write an easy Apple script.
In fact, I think the Apple script is so easy that I could put the Apple script in the show notes and then you could just save that as an app and you're good to go. And you could use the prior trick to get the path of your external drive, right? That you're going to, because you just do this in the terminal. Tell it to mount or unmount. Yeah, exactly. And then you put that in an Apple script and you're good to go. See, it's all coming together. Yeah, man. That's what we do.
That's what we do. It's almost like we planned it that way. We didn't, but it is almost like that. Occasionally, every now and then. Dave, man. That's right. That's right. Give away our secrets. But avoid the FS tab as if it were a swarm of bees, and life will be better for you, I think, Terry. All right. Are we ready to move on?
I am. Okay. Great. Brian has a question here, says working from home 95 percent of the time, I find the Apple Watch feature to automatically unlock my Mac based on close proximity to be a great convenience. However, on the occasions where I head into an office or other more public space, I habitually hit a keyboard shortcut that locks my Mac. But because my Apple Watch is nearby, the Mac automagically unlocks again as soon as I start to walk away.
What am I doing wrong here? I want the best of both worlds, but proximity doesn't know whether I am coming or going. Any suggestions or ideas? Um, I, I actually had an idea and I, uh, unfortunately I didn't have a whole lot of time to suss it out. I, I played with it a little bit and I didn't get it to work, but I think it will. Um, and, and so I think this may turn into a full on geek challenge. If the, if either of you has an answer, then, then pipe right in with it.
But my idea is that you turn off the auto-unlock feature on your watch and then create a shortcut whereby your watch asks you if you want to unlock your Mac. So it goes to do it, but you have to affirmatively respond on your watch, yes, just a little quick, you know, tap. Yep. And, and, but I haven't been able to make that shortcut work for me as yet. So, either you got an answer for Brian or. I don't, I don't know that a shortcut could be used to turn that off.
I don't, I don't know. I don't think so. Well, here's why I think it, here's why I think it could, and I don't know, but like I set up a smart deadbolt on my house, right? And there's a shortcut in there that, you know, whenever you leave or whenever you come home, do you want it to unlock? When the last person leaves, lock the door. And the shortcut comes up and says, do you want to run this? Yes. And I'll say on my watch, yes. Right. And when I come home, hey, when anybody leaves.
Whenever anybody comes home, do you want to run this, unlock the deadbolt? And if you ignore it, it doesn't unlock it. If you tap it, it unlocks it. So that's how I got down the path of thinking that this may be able to do the same thing for your computer as it does for my smart deadbolt. But your smart deadbolt is a smart home device that HomeKit knows about and therefore is triggerable with shortcut actions built for HomeKit.
There is to my knowledge there is no shortcut action for unlocking a mac and and so i think that's the issue that that's all just controlled on the mac you don't even control it on your watch right it's in like system settings oh right right you know if i look for watch unlock where where is that yeah uh i think it's in login login password yeah you go into uh i don't know where it is i can never find anything yeah login password that's right
and then you you turn it on there so i i think your best bet you might be able to use user interface scripting in apple script to open up.
System settings and turn off the apple watch unlock right like you could automate that so that the computer isn't unlockable with your apple watch but then you'd have to go turn that back on and that's kind of a process so i don't right i don't know i don't yeah and and you know i turned turned that feature off some time ago because I find it my finger unlocks my Mac just fine and so that's almost as convenient as my watch so.
You know, obviously he's got a different use case than I do. Right. But. Right. Yeah. Right. Any, any geeks out there, geek challenge? Yeah. There might be another way to solve this problem. Yeah. And we're just not thinking of it yet. Yeah.
Yep. Yep. Yep. I'm not seeing anything in, um, in the, in the show notes or in the live chat here, but But I do have, Paul Conaway suggested EjectBar at EjectBar.com for the previous thing, for the previous issue with Terry's issue of wanting to eject drives. And you can set a schedule for EjectBar to eject drives. It just lives in your menu bar and you can eject them sort of, you know, manually up there or you can set a script to do it. So that might be a way to get it done. So, yeah.
Yep. uh hang on i'm gonna bring adam back in hi adam sorry i had brought you out because i thought you had to leave for a work thing so oh okay you're but you're back now no no i'm i'm multi i'm multitasking great okay i just pulled up this laptop and yeah i'm so i'm the work thing's fixed now i believe i'm just keeping an eye on it okay cool all right this is avoided great great there was a time sensitive thing and i i blew it i forgot that i was supposed to be on
call this morning ah yep all right no problem uh you but you were saying something or you had something to add there and and none of us heard you so oh i was just saying that that's awesome that the eject bar thing yes that's great yeah yeah yeah yeah it's good stuff and i also um we need to we need to help um kent here because he got caught okay yes all right kent says i got caught i have an Epson WF4834, gotta love printer names, multifunction printer, which I use mostly for scanning
and occasional printing. I have been using remanufactured ink cartridges, which have worked flawlessly. Recently, I'd been getting a pop-up prompt on the printer that a firmware update was available, and I resisted doing so, but in a weak moment, I installed it. The printer immediately informed me that it did not recognize the cartridges and they needed replacing. I've known that printer manufacturers would do that, but I had escaped getting caught until now.
So if your printer offers a firmware update and you're using remanufactured, refilled cartridges, be aware that they probably won't work if you install the update. Don't get caught. Wow. So, yeah. You know, for those printer manufacturers, they want you using their official expensive inks. And if you deviate from that, you know, they have sensors or things in their cartridges that they can tweak. And this has been a long running sort of known issue.
I don't know that all manufacturers do this or it happens all the time. But yeah, it is a thing for sure. It is a thing. Be careful out there. There is, in certain commercial settings, and perhaps even at home, there is good reason to use only things that the manufacturer has certified are going to work with the device, right?
If you're doing very specific color matching, the manufacturers on the hook, they sold you a printer that was great for color matching, and now you're using this off-brand ink, and they have no control over that, so that changes things. And also off-brand ink, I've had off-brand toner cartridges go sideways and make a very big mess sometimes.
Times right so i get that there is some practical reason why you as a consumer might want to be protected against these things but me as a consumer would like to be able to decide whether i want to be give me a warning and then get out of my way right you know don't just enforce this on me but tell me about it sure make me jump through a hoop or something but yeah no that That practice of, especially after the fact, pushing a firmware update to do that. I don't like that.
I don't like it. Well, the coffee machines used to do that too, right? Like your Keurigs and they would insist that you have only the official brand cups. They had like QR codes or other things on those things that they would like. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, you're right.
We try to go organic. So luckily they don't do it anymore because I use the little, I fill my own little cups cops with organic coffee that we buy so uh we we went um i don't drink coffee regularly but when our we had the tasimo for a while and uh that was great because it had a real pump in it it was like a real espresso machine but it used pods and similar to the sort of vhs beta wars um you know keurig won out on that battle and killed off tasimo and so you couldn't buy
pods for it anymore and it was at that point that i decided i wanted to go open source with our coffee i did not want to be stuck with anything and did the math and it was like wow you know if you're just buying beans you can you wind up saving over a relatively short period of time yeah so we went with a super automatic. You know espresso machine that you just put beans in the top it grinds enough for one cup.
Pumps the the cup of whatever and and of course you can you know you can get them we we've been through two of them and again i i know far more about this than anyone would ever have expected me to because most people know i don't drink coffee but um but the phillips i think it's the i want to say the 4000 or the 4000 series is what we have now i think um we've been through a couple of these and you know over the last 20 years or something 15 years and it like it's
it's great i this thing's awesome i'm it's a gadget i'm super happy to have and i'm super happy it gets used each day even though i don't use it um personally but you know every now and then i'll make myself a cup of coffee or whatever so pete we got to get you some kind of uh uh insulated base for your phone or just go into do not disturb mode and then your phone wouldn't do that anymore i could do that too but what's the fun of that and she calls
me back it's my daughter calling me it's like yeah i i love my my podcasting focus mode that only lets texts from you guys through yeah i i was not smart enough to put that on yep oh so i well she's texting me that it's urgent so So if you don't mind, I will drop out for a second. All right. I'm sorry. No, we'll go to Neil. I hope everything's okay. Yep. Yeah, thanks. All right. Yep. You want to take us to Neil, Adam?
Sure, I will try. I didn't think I'd have that one tagged. It's a big, long question. But, yep. Let me. It's about Wi-Fi. So we love that. Oh, would you recommend migrating? Yes. Here we go. Yes. And there's that word again, gentlemen. I don't know where those guys are, but we'll try our best. I'm currently using an Eero network, and up front, I will note that there isn't anything at all wrong with my current network.
This definitely goes into the category of MGG's second most favorite saving, saying, If it ain't broke, fix it until it is. It just may be time to start breaking things. I have three Eero 6E units and two 6s. Sixes, almost certainly overkill for the coverage area, but the house has a lot of walls with plaster, steel mesh, and there was a dead spot. The three 6Es are connected with wired backhaul over Cat 5E. The two 6s, is it 6s or 6s?
I'm assuming it's just 6s, right? The 6s, yes. It is plural for 6s, correct. Yep, yep. They're not like iPhones. Just want to make sure I'm getting that right. Yeah, no, it's a great question. Yeah, yeah. Those use wireless backhaul. With that as a background, I'm thinking about changing to the UniFi system.
My plan would be the new Cloud Gateway Max for its ability to support 2.5 gigabit Ethernet with an attached switch that will let me wire three of their new Wi-Fi 7 access ports, which have also 2.5 gigabit Ethernet ports along with one or two UniFi switches.
All of this, of course, dependent on figuring out how to run Cat6a to support the Ethernet speeds above 1 gigabit and power over Ethernet, which itself is a major challenge given the construction of my house, but hopefully a problem I can solve. In any case, all of this is entirely unnecessary at this point, but I have the itch to break things and would like to have greater control that the Unify system provides, including potentially creating VLANs for or my IoT devices, and so forth.
I was wondering if you had any experience with or thoughts about the UniFi and benefits drawbacks compared with the incredibly easy-to-use Eero and similar mesh systems.
Similar mesh systems. Easy for you to say. Interesting from a cost standpoint, the hardware for this upgrade will be about the same as upgrading the Eero 7 units with the best discount they have offered, which seems to crop up periodically and significantly less than the usual selling price for the 3-pack of Eero 7s and maybe about the same as a 3-pack for Wi-Fi 7s from TP-Link. So if I'm going to do this, the cost is not out of bounds.
No, I've been... Yes, a lot in there to unpack. There's a lot here. It probably won't come as a surprise that I've been thinking a lot about this too as of late, largely because we all, not all, Many of us now with fiber connections and even the faster cable connections that are coming are being given at least the option of having Internet speeds that are faster than one gigabit per second. And most of our older routers have one gig per second, you know, gig Ethernet ports on the WAN side.
And so you you can't you could pay for that connection, but you can't take advantage of it. And even the router that I love to use, which is the Synology, it only has one 2.5 gig port on it. So you can either use that for WAN or for the LAN. Without two of them, you can't, like, doesn't work. So I've been thinking about, should I move to a UniFi? Should I move to the Firewalla, right? Which is a router. And I've been trying to get in touch with the Firewalla folks to get some questions
answered. So I'm going to keep on that. But, you know, some of these geekier routers, I'll call them, and what UniFi has been doing, especially with you know like neil mentioned the new unify cloud gateway max that kind of looks like a perfect uh option for folks that want to be geeky with their networks like us but without having to like really go nuts um i have run unify in the past and i even have an older Unify dream machine currently up and running as like a second network in my house,
mostly because I wanted to re familiarize myself with the now much more refined Unify software. And for nerds like us, and even for if you're interested in doing more with your network than the sort of stock pages of the Eero app give you, then Unify isn't really terribly difficult.
Difficult um it's pretty straightforward and i wouldn't say that it's intuitive you have to learn it it doesn't learn you but i i would say that about ero too like as soon as you get past the most basic features of the ero it kind of gets weird it's like oh i have to remember what path is it that i take to find that advanced setting to tweak this or whatever and the same is true True with Unify. So, and you can do a whole lot more. You know, you're not kind of locked into a box there.
I, I, I think Unify is pretty clearly laid out. I think it's a good option and, uh, and it gives you a lot of options too. If you go into that Unify ecosystem, but in theory, you know, you could run the Unify cloud gateway as your, as your router, and then have, you know, Eero's as your, your wifi mesh, if you want, but you could also buy the Unify mesh stuff and have it all controlled in the same, you know, the same app.
So yeah i i think i mean if you're looking to do it i think it'll be fun i am certainly looking to do it i i think i don't know where synology is in their development of their the next sort of iteration of their router i haven't heard any rumors about it that doesn't mean that it's not in development it just means that i haven't heard any rumors um but like without having multiple Multiple ports that are faster than 2.5 gig.
You're not going to be able to do the things that you want with the faster ethernet or faster WAN connections that we, that we have. So I don't know. Does that, does that help? Are you, are you, are you back with us, Pete? I am. Yeah. So sorry, everybody for those. My, my daughter's trying to get home so we can all take a flight to Europe and her flight canceled. Oh, fun stuff. Yeah. Yeah, so, you know, we're fighting with the airlines again.
You're working it out. Yep. Yep. You're going to have to go pick her up. Exactly. But she managed to get, I actually, it turns out I did have the do not disturb on, but I have it set so if you call back within 30 minutes, and that's what she did. Okay. Well, that's good. It worked. That's worked as designed. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Uh, yeah, your plane's not done being painted, so you can't go pick her up.
No. And that would be a multi-day affair anyway. That'd be a long, long, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Although she is, is she rated on your plane? I mean, if, if, if your plane was ready, could she just go fly at home? Uh, she could. Yeah. Yeah. Uh, but actually the way here's, here's the thing is, is you may all know, and, and this is not a pejorative. Everybody.
Debbie is a retired sandwich girl from Delta airlines. lines and she says this in Pete's phone folks yep yep yep she she had her passenger call her sandwich girl one time and she made the mistake of telling me and it's been her call sign for 25 years so sandwich girl you forgot me um so yeah so Debbie's status as a retired sandwich girl gives her some passes but boy that you're way down on the totem pole to get an empty seat you You got to have an empty seat coming this way.
So, and we had a ticket positive space, but this is not the airline geek gap. So, right. There you go. So let's go back to wifi mesh. I, yeah, like there is the simple mesh and a hundred percent of the time I would, I would still recommend Eero and then, you know, Deco and Orbi, just like we talked about last week, kind of in that order. And for various reasons, if you need to go long stretches of wifi backhaul, Orbi kind of, you know, that's their stock and trade there.
You know, what we talked about last week absolutely still stands. If you want to have a more granular control over things, Unify is definitely something to consider. If you just want a geekier router, then like the Unify Cloud Gateway Max is one or the Firewalla would be potentially another.
Other i've never used it so i i can't i can't speak you know uh with personal experience about it but uh we're trying to fix that so yeah you all have way more time to mess with networks than i do i set up my orbeez and i did the rompo peel style yes forget it yeah it's like done and done it works right i'm moving on yeah if you don't i love people geek out on on network stuff because I learned so much. Yeah, yeah, and that's the thing.
Like, you know, Orbi, Eero, Deco are great if you want to set it and forget it, because they are built to just kind of do their thing on their own and you don't have to worry about it. My, you know, when we talked about Deco last week, I meant to mention my uncles, did I mention this, that both of my uncles are still running the OG Deco units from like. I mean, a long time ago. Hang on. I'll pull up the app because I am the manager on one of them.
And it tells me how many days his network has been protected. And 2,561 days divided by 365 is just over seven years. That's about seven years and change, isn't it? That's correct. Holy smokes. Seven years. And they are still running these OG Wi-Fi 5 decos in their houses in Maine.
And it works great for them it's like and it software updates still come like so there's a lot to be said for those deco units too well clearly they don't follow our advice which is if it ain't broke fix it till it is well that's that's the part you missed pete was he neil actually said that in in the beginning of the question that's right oh okay yeah there you go absolutely acknowledge that yeah i set up my circle i set up my orbeez here two and
a half years ago and i haven't touched them since the only problem we ever have with them is they're plugged into a bum electrical wall outlet that if you accidentally bump it it will it's kind of i need to get an electrician out to take a look at it but it'll it'll turn off that's not yeah you might yeah yeah if you're not if you're not comfortable with electricity on your own then then bring somebody out because that that's the kind of thing that can lead to heat build
up and then fire in your walls so potentially potentially yeah yeah yeah you don't want to get caught that way well it was really bad too because we had the uh we had the the robot vacuum like next that and then there was a point where it was like every time the vacuum would dock it would hit it enough that it's like my wife's like the wi-fi is out i'm like check the plug. You know, I want to offer a bit of a PSA slash correction.
This reminds me, I have talked, I use UPSs throughout my office and home for all of our electronics, not just our computers. I have them on the TV and everything else. And I gave a recommendation for the Amazon Basics UPSs because they're way less expensive than the others. I have two of the 800 volt amp ones, ones here, here in the studio, ones behind our TV at home.
Both of them suffer from what I'm about to describe. And there are comments on the Amazon basics review, like, you know, listing that also described this. And I don't, I will not be buying any more of these. And because the problem is when the power flickers a lot, they just turn off and then they don't come back on again.
And it's it's not that they've run out of battery juice right it's like it's not even if we've gone on the generator for you know hours and then somehow it dies or whatever like it's you know the power flickers there's lightning or whatever and it kind of does its thing back and forth for a little bit after two or three of those it it just turns off and you have to go turn the ups on and i'll notice it well when i come in the studio the computer won't turn on or won't wake up
and that's a hint and then the other is that you know we go to watch tv at night it's like wait what why doesn't the remote work it's like stupid things off again so to me that's sort of the opposite of what a ups is supposed to do i mean yes it's protecting my gear but there's a better way maybe use the battery inside you you know um i don't know it's just a bit i wanted to i wanted to share counterintuitive yeah yeah so so don't buy the amazon basics.
Ups's if you if you don't like that feature so yeah yeah yeah yeah so uh we got time for another question here paul asks uh i've had my head underwater for the last year or so on my max and i am an os or two behind should i upgrade now or should i wait until the next release in a month and a half or so and jump two os's forward i'm currently on mac os 13.4 and not a heavy user of custom apps that might have compatibility issues and this is on an um 14
inch macbook pro with an m1 max pete oh i can answer that yes okay now my smart alec answer is out of the way yes you should wait and yes you You should do it now. Generally speaking, and I know you guys at Leech have opinions on this too. Generally speaking, I upgrade to the latest technology.
Operating system and or version thereof as quickly as it comes out if for no other reason than for security um that being said not so on the beta if you know i wouldn't jump right to the betas right away and we've talked about that on the show before too you can you can quickly find yourself um truly being a beta test bed and you may or may not want to be that um but there are some pretty cool things on Sonoma that you're going to enjoy on your computer.
Interactive widgets on your desktop are cool to play with. More options for continuity camera to make that more powerful. Although if you go to macgeekgab.com slash giveaway, you may get your camo license and you don't need your continuity camera features because this is going to outdo that callback. And then Safari has profiles instead of tab groups to do. Those are just two or three of the cool things that are on Mac OS 14, Sonoma.
Sayonara is next. I don't know. I don't know what's next. One of them is next. Mac OS 15 is next, Pete. That's what's next. Yeah, there you go. I wouldn't wait on a major one like that. There's too many cool things and security updates for you to go now. I mean, I think. That's my opinion. I think Mac OS 13 is still getting security updates. That will happen for a little while. Sure. Yeah. So I think they give it, it's at least two years, but it might be longer than
that. At least two years, yeah. Yeah. And you could install Safari 14 in Mac OS 13 to get those Safari-specific features. But all that, that's just me being pedantic. I agree with you. I would upgrade to Sonoma, Mac OS 14. I don't. I don't upgrade the studio machine until I know that the drivers for my external like audio devices and like all the audio software is going to be happy with it.
But otherwise I, yeah, I upgrade my, my sort of daily driver max to, to the latest when it comes out or, or you've got a show to produce and you had, you had a real horror show at one point with core audio. Yeah. Many times. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's kind of a known thing that, you know, especially external audio devices or audio in general, you know, it's, it's a, you're doing real time stuff. And so minor changes can have major impacts is, is the reality.
Yeah. If you go into, you know, pick a recording studio in Manhattan or LA, that's running a Mac running probably pro tools or logic, you'll probably find them on, you know, Mac OS 12 or something.
Like they they just don't upgrade they treat it like a tool it's like do you need to upgrade the operating system of your hammer no i swing my hammer it hits the nail it works it's a tool i don't need it to be on anything most of these computers aren't even connected to the internet you know or they're air gapped or somehow so yeah yeah yeah this is uh this is the one exception in my life that we've talked about uh i do not make my
wife upgrade or upgrade my wife's machine because when things change.
She hates it. Yeah. And, and, the anger comes my direction and you can't afford the door flare yeah that's right nor does he want one adam i think genuinely likes his wife yeah he likes her yeah i love my wife and i want her to be as happy as she can be and she's happy when things are working the way she likes them and she's got them set up and you know i've had this with a client too like i had this with a client and i got to the point where it's like i got to just tell you you know
until that two-year type timeframe, you know, you're not getting security updates anymore, then you're going to have to upgrade. But if you're happy where you are, and everything's working, and she was a professional photographer, and it drove her nuts when she had her workflows, she knew how everything worked. And then, you know, Apple would move a button somewhere or move a feature somewhere, you know, it's like, I now don't know how to use my computer.
She wasn't a real computer literate person. You know, and she's like, I know how everything works. It can't be breaking on me, you know, This literally affects my business. So there's weird exceptions like that. Like the music thing you're saying, Dave, right? It's like, it's a tool. Do not mess with it. I know how everything works. It works great. I can't afford anything to go wrong or lose my efficiency or anything because you made some stupid change that I don't care about.
That I don't care about. Right. Yeah, that's really what it was. Yes. My desire to upgrade to whatever the OS was that that caused problems with here was to sync focus modes. Right. Because I love being able to put this machine in podcasting mode. All my devices go into podcasting mode. That triggers a shortcut on my phone that turns on the lights behind me. It turns off the air purifier. Right. Like all of those things. That was a desired improvement to my workflow.
And boy, did I pay for it. But, you know, now like things are good. So I'm not in a hurry to upgrade this machine. It's all happy. Yeah. And in Discord, Soccer Hallways, I think is how he pronounces it, agrees with you 100 million percent, Adam. And he also confirms that iOS 13 or OS 13 is still getting, yeah, Mac OS 13 is still getting supported with updates.
Yeah. And I agree with that advice. If somebody asks me, I'm thinking about update, like, you know, like, like Paul did here, I'm thinking about updating. Is there any reason I shouldn't? I'll answer the question honestly. And I think for Paul, like, yeah, if you're thinking about upgrading, you want to upgrade, it's your decision. Absolutely. I support it or, or I don't support it. Like if Paul said, I'm using a lot of custom apps and I have all this custom
hardware and everything works and should I upgrade? I'd be, I don't think so. But, but he's not. And so, yeah, I think upgrading is good. But, yeah, I'm not a thou shalt upgrade type of person. Not usually, anyway. Yeah, there's exceptions. Again, like, once you're not getting security patches, then you probably are, you need to at that point. But as long as you're getting security updates, you should be fine. Yep.
All right, Adam, I've got a question to call us back, potentially, to much earlier in the show. Chris says, I have a MacBook Air with an issue in Safari. There are no images displayed whatsoever. I can't find any settings to turn images on or off. And a reinstall of Sonoma Mac OS 14 has made no difference. What am I missing? Please help before this MacBook Air becomes an unidentified flying object. I guess it's just living up to its namesake at that point. Yes, I guess so. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yeah, my first question back to him, and I don't know if we've gotten an answer yet. I haven't checked email. But, you know, are you using any content blocker apps? Like, I use one blocker in Safari, and, you know, that can block things because that's what it's supposed to do. So depending upon trackers, you know, mostly it's supposed to block ads, but yeah, the C and the, in the discord, uh, Mackey pie said the same thing is an ad blocker present. So that that's first question.
And maybe you installed one and just forgot it was there. You know, it's easy to do. I've done it. We've all done it. I mean, Dave, I think we've been on, uh, looking at things on, on site development and I'm like, Hey, the ads aren't, aren't loading. What's going on. Oh, Adam, do you have your, do you have your ad blocker on? Oh, yeah. Sorry. Yep.
So there's that. The other thing, though, going back to kind of what I was helping my mom out with in our conversation about, private relay, private relay settings, which is a supported feature, privacy feature in Safari, if you go under Safari preferences, and look at the privacy tab, you have those same sort of checkboxes, you know, hide IP addresses from trackers and websites. So in that case, you have a couple options for where to hide IP addresses.
So my first suggestion was maybe try... I think the default is hide your IP address from trackers and websites. Try changing that to just trackers. So you still are blocking any IP tracking, but the website can maybe see your IP address and see if that maybe makes a difference. So I would try, you know, messing with some of those settings and see. Maybe that's what's going on. I would also look at, I mean, check all of those things first. Those are the easy things to check.
Then look at what are you using for your DNS server? Are you inheriting the default one from your router? And is your router inheriting the default one from your ISP? Maybe try changing your max DNS to like Cloudflare 1.1.1.1 just to see, does that solve it? But if so, then at least you know what path to to head down. And then sometimes us nerds do things that we forget about. And there was no.
Oh, Pete, like an Etsy host file or something. That's actually where I was going to go with this was there for a long time. There were people and I think this still happens. People publishing lists of known like image servers or ad servers that people would want to block. And the instructions were to copy this big long list of thousands of entries or whatever and paste it into your Etsy host file. And it would, instead of like doing a lookup, it would tell it, look at local host.
And of course it would fail and it wouldn't load the ad or the image or whatever.
So take a look at your file and you can just look at, if you go to the terminal and type cat slash ETC slash h-o-s-t-s that file by default has one two three four five six lines that at the top that start with um a pound sign the number sign the hash mark whatever you want to call it those are just comments and then there are three lines in that that all look at either local host or broadcast, local host or broadcast host and that's it so if there are any more than three
lines there it has very likely been modified and you want to look at what those lines are and try and remember why they're there because that might also be causing a problem for you. That's what I got on that. Yep. I can't believe anyone would do that and then forget about it. Same. Same. Same. Yep. Yep. Dave, you're turning red. Are you okay? Oh, I'm fine. I think my beer light's on, Pete. Yep. Yep. This is, these are the things. Yep.
Yep. Yep. Do we have time for a couple of CSF? I think we've got time for a CSF or two. Yeah. You want to do a couple of cool stuff's found, Pete? Yes. Yes, I do. I mean, if you don't, it's fine. We're kind of right at the end here. So Graham was the first one that I wanted to get to. And while I vamp and try to get my daughter's text to stop hitting where I'm trying to put Graham's name in.
There it is. So this is cool. Cool. So Dave saw this and said it to me because a couple weeks ago I talked about 10minutemail.com. Not 10 minute. Right. Just 10minutemail.com. Yep. Don't write anything else or you'll get to another website and you don't want to go there. Hi, folks. Pilot Pete mentioned a service for providing a temporary email address. So I thought I'd add a service that provides a free temporary SMS phone number in the U.S.
Textplus.com. TextPlus also provides longer-term subscriptions, but I use the free number, which stays valid for seven days for accessing a US service that had a silly requirement to prove identity and nothing more by receiving a text message. Their support team suggested this hack for their international clients. Regards, Kiwi Graham." That is awesome. Think how much spam text you could stop. Go get a new phone number today.
Don't give it to anybody and then use this service so you don't get constantly spammed. Oh, man. Yeah, that's pretty cool. I like it. And evidently, it's available as an app. So that's kind of how that works. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's great. I like it. I love that. Thank you, Graham, for sending that one in. Yep. Very cool. Very cool. Cool. You got another one for us, Pete? I do. Jenna sent one in. I talked about my little...
I call it squeeze. It's a, it's a automator program that I wrote about, uh, making my image files smaller and Jenna wrote in and said, I was using the compressor, new lips, compressor tool you mentioned on your page here.
And, uh, and it does a good job, but I wanted to share about another tool that I think looks like it may be better after some exploring, I found this other tool and I wanted to suggest it if you show it along with that one and it's the website is we'll put in the show notes it's but it's called image hop them no image optimum is the tool dimension so I'm sorry yeah yeah so it's web I'm sorry I got it backwards it's website planet
comm slash web tools slash image compressor one word tool allows you to press both JPEG and PNG files in each Each picture can be up to 50 megabytes in size. So Image Compressor is the name of it at websiteplanet.com slash webtools slash image compressor. So, yeah, I have not played with that yet, but 50 megabytes is a whole bunch of raw. Yeah. Well, I guess that's a different format. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. But yeah, to take a JPEG down or a PNG down. Yeah, yeah.
That's pretty good. Yeah. Cool. So I have a kind of quick tip to go along with this a little bit because these web tools are great, but also free, right? So there's often a little bit of an exchange. And so oftentimes when I find these, I like to go just check what kind of trackers are they using? What are they doing in the background? And a great way to do that in Safari is you can go in your Safari menu and get a privacy report.
And it will show you which websites have trackers and what trackers they have and what's been blocked because Safari blocks a lot of that stuff. So this one came out pretty clean. So I think this is a pretty decent one, but you know, sometimes these things are loaded with ads and trackers and those sorts of things. So just be careful out there with some of these web-based tools. I'm always a little, and there's a lot of them for coding and stuff like that. That's why I bring this up.
Like it comes up very often where, you know, you're doing, uh. Uh, URL encode decode or a regex thing, or, you know, there's a lot of these little tools that people have built And some are good, and some are a little on the outskirts, I will say. That's why the horn goes off in the background for you, Adam, right? Sorry, yeah, it's First Friday, folks. They're checking the sirens. They just let that thing go for a long time. I'm hearing a mosquito buzzing in my ear.
It's doing a nice job of keeping it down to a minimum. But that mosquito buzzing is not real. No. That's the horn. That's Adam's horn. That's right. Well, Adam's town's horn, I suppose. Yeah. Yeah. Well, it is time for other sound to come back into things because we are at the hour and 21 minute mark here. So we are going to rock and roll. Thank you for hanging out with us, folks. Thank you for all your questions, all your tips, everything.
It's amazing. Thank you for listening to the show. Thank you for sharing the show. Join the giveaway. MacGeekUp.com slash giveaway. Thanks to CashFly for providing all the bandwidth to get the show from us to you. Thanks to coda.io slash mgg for sponsoring this episode. Of course, you can always go to macgeekup.com slash sponsors and see what deals exist with our sponsors, whether or not they are current. We try to keep them all up to date for you.
That's what I got. Yeah, well, you know what? Life happens, man. In this show, life happens a lot. Life happened a lot during this show. Thank you for your patience, everybody. Yeah, thank you, thank you. Because I got caught. Did you get caught? Adam got caught. Yeah. Dave, don't get caught. That's good advice. I like it. Thank you. Have a good week, folks. We'll see you next time. See ya.