It's time for MacGeekGab and listener JMM brings us our quick tip of the week with hey fellow geeks I just discovered that one of the recent iOS updates the files app now let you scan documents with a long press all you have to do is long press the files app icon a menu pops up with the option to scan right at the top so you can scan your document right then and there no need to open the app and dig through menus anymore.
More tips like this, plus your questions answered today on MacGeekGab number 1074 for Monday, January 27th, 2025.
Greetings and happy Bubble Wrap Appreciation Day and welcome to MacGeek. We are the show where you send in your tips like that. We share them. You send in your cool stuff found. We share that too. You send in your questions, we try to answer those, as well as sharing the questions. Really, the goal is to put all this together so that we can each learn at least five new things every single time we get together.
Our sponsor for today is Otherworld Computing, and we'll talk a little bit more about their new Thunderbolt 5 hub in a few minutes. But for now, here in Anaheim, California, right next to the Anaheim, sandwiched between the Anaheim Convention Center and Disneyland, I'm Dave Hamilton.
And here in South Dakota, I'm Adam Christensen.
And here in New Hampshire, it's Pilot Pete. Good to be back with you guys today. We're police code 1074. Like I said, Dave, they're getting morbider and morbider. This is an unattended death. Hopefully this show won't kill you and we won't die on here.
I'm pretty sure 1074 is also a smoke report. So maybe we'll go with that one. let's.
Go with that because uh there's there's plenty of that where you are these days dave
That's true that's true yeah hearts.
Go out to all the people suffering
No kidding yeah just devastating yeah it's.
My mind went to a better kind of smoke but that's okay
Right on they have there's a lot i've i've encountered more of that here uh than i have the other kind of smoke here in anaheim anyway but yeah no there's i mean there are people who have obviously lost everything and it's yeah yeah it's terrible it's terrible yeah i'm here for the nam conference that oh now i i'm putting myself on the spot and uh north american music merchants conference but really what it is is it's just mecca for the
music industry the annual conference here in anaheim and so there's so many people from la in that business and so many of them have just lost so much but yeah it's um yeah it's crazy yeah it's.
Terrible terrible yeah and again i mentioned to you guys that it was one of the it was one of that bullet items on our list for why we a lot of people ask why we left california and dealing with the fires it's a real thing it is a real thing and it's a real part of life in california there now so especially southern california
Yeah yeah for sure yeah, Uh, yeah. I don't know how to transition from that. Uh, yeah, that's a real downer. Sorry. I mean, there's, yeah. Yeah. No, it's really like, I know people who have lost their homes. Um, so yeah, everything, anything we can do to help them and maybe just kind of doing what we do and giving, giving everybody a sense of normalcy would be a good thing.
So that is my transition yep uh make sure though to register for the monthly giveaway um with our the hat that we're giving hats that we're giving away this month at macgeekup.com slash giveaway and with that kershin uh reminds us tells us about it i don't know if it was a reminder um tells us we had a our mac geekup hangout uh in the past week i can't remember what day it is that's it it was Sunday afternoon.
It was Sunday afternoon. Yep. And Kirshen reminded all of us in the hangout that if you go to the terminal and you type last reboot with a space between last and reboot, so all lowercase, the words, the way they sound, it will show you all recent shutdowns and reboots that have happened on your Mac. So if you're wondering, okay, well, you know, how recently have I rebooted? You can do that with just one command called uptime, which will show you how long your Mac's been up.
But if you want to see a history of recent reboots, last space reboot will show you shutdowns and reboots. So, and it will articulate the difference between the two of them.
Now, Dave, correct me if I'm wrong. Did we validate that you had to be admin to get that to work?
That is correct. You have to be an admin user in order for that to work. Yes. You don't need to use the sudo command to see it, but you do have to be a user who could, I think, is really where that comes from. Got it. Yeah.
Cool, cool. Yep.
You got our next one, Adam?
Yeah, so this is something that took me far too long to figure out. And this is for any of you out there who use a password manager, like a third-party password manager. I use one password, but I think you can integrate a number of them into your browsers and things like that.
And you maybe also use Apple's now. They call it password, but this was an issue under iCloud Keychain or whatever it didn't matter so if you were using both of them i you know you'd be in i'd be in a browser and i'd be trying to log into a website or something like that and basically both dialogues would pop up so i'd get the one password dialogue and then right on top of that the apple dialogue and i was doing this caveman thing where it's like well i that i want the one
that's in one password because you know some websites i have multiple different logins for and what have you And so a lot of them are in 1Password, not all of them are in Apple Password. So I'm doing this weird jigging thing and I'm trying to like scroll underneath and find the one to click on and it's really difficult. Well, I finally figured out all you need to do is hit the escape key and the Apple one goes away and then your third party one is there.
Like, I don't know why it took me so long to figure that out, but that's a little trick escape.
I have a tip to add to that because in addition to passwords getting in the way of the 1Password thing, there's also a scenario where Apple's autofill wants to autofill one of my email addresses, not from my passwords or 1Password, not from any of those, but just from my contacts.
Like you know my my my contact it wants to fill that out and that gets annoying too what i have learned to do is instead of putting my cursor in the field for my email or username when i want to fill out a password i put my cursor on the password field and then it doesn't try to give me an email address there because it it knows that an email address doesn't belong there and at least at that point all i'm contending with is which password
manager do i want to let it use and if you're only using one password manager then this would then make your life even easier because you go to the password field and now all you're getting are options for passwords not some autofill thing trying to trying to overdo it so yeah yeah yeah i think.
I'm gonna get myself in trouble now because i think there is somewhere in settings right where you can tell it which ones you want so So you could even, if you know you have everything in a single password manager, I forget where that setting is now, you could like literally, it's probably under, uh, uh, Touch ID and passwords, maybe? Or privacy? I can't remember where it is. That's like I said, I'm getting myself in trouble. But I know there is a setting somewhere where you can tell it,
hey, I have these password managers. Use Apple's. Use one password. Use both. There's checkboxes somewhere in the system.
Yeah, certainly on your Mac, if you go into Safari, Preferences, Autofill, here there is an option for usernames and passwords. And that is Apple's usernames and passwords. So like on my laptop, I currently have that turned off. So the only thing that functions is one password. And then the way I get one password to function is with the extension in the same settings panel. Well, you move over to the pane for extensions and I turn that on or off and then that usually works.
But yeah, you're right. on your phone there's a different place and i can't look it up because a i'm using my phone as my camera and b i've had like three and a half hours of sleep so you know 9 a.m 9 a.m eastern recording sounds really good.
When you're on the east coast that's
Right that is correct oh boy.
But at least you were only up till three so you
Know uh i mean yeah eastern three eastern that's right yeah exactly right yeah that's kind of how it works those things that's okay.
So real quick before we move on to the next tip then i want you both to look into the future and tell me will passwords apple's built in ever sherlock one password because i'd love to wean off one password but secure notes and identities and credit cards and all that are so convenient in one password Well,
So a lot of that has already been, to use the term Sherlocked, a lot of that already is in Apple passwords, right?
I just haven't played with it enough. Correct.
Your credit cards for sure are in there and those fill very well. Okay. Okay. Notes you would have if you want secure notes you'd have to use the notes app for that, but in terms of most of the stuff that one password does apple passwords has it the identities thing is probably the one that you're yeah that i don't think because like i have an analog for photos.
Of my driver's license attached to identities and my passport all that in there so that
I mean you could do that in a note right yeah there's enough you could you could certainly approximate that and i know plenty of people who have so yeah um and i and i think keeping a copy of your passport a picture of your passport and a picture of your driver's license on your some device some system that is synced with your phone so that you just always have access to it i can't imagine it would ever be a bad thing it might not save you the
way you'd want it to save you if you forgot the actual document but i can't imagine it would be a bad thing to be able to show that and say well here's this can we work with it.
Yes i can tell you i know from uh friends who have lost their passports in foreign countries those that did not have any documentation as to who they were were in a real bad sandwich and those who had a photo of it, were at least able to demonstrate to the consulate, really my picture, that's me. How about helping me out here? And things went much smoother for them.
So, um.
Yep. So there's your quick tip. Keep a photo of your driver's license, passport, all that on your phone. Even if you get, how many times you've gone out without your wallet? You're not without your phone though. Right. You pulled over by the cops. You go, whoops. Yeah. But here, here I am. You know, will they let you go driving without a license? Maybe, maybe not.
Right. But it's not going to make it worse. It might make it better.
It's not going to make it worse.
Yes.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, all right. So I want to go on to our next quick tip. And last week I was trying to fill in or create a new account and it wanted a password and it let me cut and paste because I was using one password and I had this really long, complicated, random password generated, good to go. And then the confirmation field almost threw my laptop out the window. It would not let me paste. And how are you going to get a more accurate confirmation than by pasting what's up there, right?
I mean, you're going to make a mistake typing it far over pasting. So, happened to wander across Stephen A's tip in Discord that says full websites that block pasting data such as passwords. I'm like, oh, he read my mind. um and i i don't can we put the photo of that in the uh or the screenshot of that in the show notes dave is there a way to do that uh
No but if if steven posted in discord we can uh we can link to it we can link to it.
That's how we'll do it yeah we'll link to that then so he uses keyboard maestro to type a data field uh type into a data field which is which was brilliant so what you do is you paste you know your password into that it comes up and says hey what do you want to put in there and you you paste it into that field and keyboard maestro then types what you've pasted into it into that field and then porthos john goes oh you can
also do it with a shortcut in apple script so that's also in that same theme i and me being i don't know belt and suspenders kind of guy. I created the shortcut and I also created the keyboard maestro, uh, because with keyboard maestro, I think I did comma V as the key stroke to pull it up and, um, option command V for the shortcut to get it to come up because command V is paste, right? So option command V is the shortcut version and a keyboard maestro is comma V to get it to come up.
So I am I have a, an addendum or perhaps an enhancement of this i oh right on instead of at having it ask me for what text i want it to type as opposed to paste i have it do it i have the similar keystroke, that takes whatever is on the clipboard and types it out into the text field so it's already right there i.
I do too that's what that does for you i forgot my my bed there you go it's already in there
Okay yeah got it all right yep yeah.
So i'm so new to it i haven't figured it out yet that's what i'm actually doing i
Think i.
Don't i'm stuck
With it i don't i have memory of this being a default macro in keyboard maestro when i first got it like this whole type clipboard thing was an example macro in there i don't i don't have recollection of creating it but it's certainly there and it's called type clipboard but maybe i created it i i don't know what i've had about three and a half hours of sleep don't don't listen to me uh says the podcaster please listen to me please subscribe right on
uh yeah but but yeah that the other thing that sometimes works if command v won't let you paste in those fields is right click in the field or control click in the field and choose from the drop down paste that will sometimes work in those scenarios too, yes, Moving on.
Yeah, Gary has a great tip for us. He said, I hadn't ever thought about it before last night, but I was recording some video of my buddy's band performance. I set my iPhone 16 Pro Max on a tripod and stepped out of the way. I knew which songs to record. As I was about 20 feet away, it came to mind I'd heard something about using Apple Watch to control the camera app. So I scrolled through the apps on my Apple Watch and lo and behold, I found it.
I was able to start and stop the recording, switch between front and back cameras, and I was seeing what the camera was seeing. How cool is that? And I would say that is very cool. This is a feature that I have actually personally used as well from time to time. And it's great. You know, it's easy. It's one of those ones that I think is kind of a little bit easy to forget about.
When i usually remember it is when it's same situation i'm trying to i'm out with my family there's no one around to ask to take a photo of us and i want to prop up the thing or find a tripod or whatever and then you can bring that up and you know stealthily you know with your arm down just tap the little button on your apple watch and take the picture rather than having to do the whole timed thing where you're trying to like hit the button and like run around to get set up second
Default yeah when you hit the button to give you three seconds to drop your arm yeah or get into your
Muscle set it up different ways yeah it's it's super it's super handy and then you can make sure your shot's framed and the way you want it and you're not having to be like looking back and forth yeah so it's kind of nice that's
Great nice although i will say i've tried to use it recently and the trigger still works but i am not seeing the picture on my apple watch and i don't know why really yeah huh i've had two or three times lately so i'm gonna have to troubleshoot that a little bit and see what's up yeah so
If you know, if you know, you know, feedback at MacGeekGab.com.
Hold on. That's a great idea. Send it to feedback at MacGeekGab.com if you've got that answer.
Easy for you to say. It's feedback at MacGeekGab.com. So.
Fair enough.
Yep.
So. All right. How about I take us to Jendal and his method. This was cool. I can't tell you. I've got a 64 gig iPad. And when I go on the road and I have a lot of movies on it and stuff like that, because on a 14-hour flight, there's times when you go in the back for several hours, watch a TV series, watch a movie, something like that. And when it comes time to update some of the software, it goes, oh, no, no, no, you don't have enough space.
Not for you. And I'm deleting pictures and movies and stuff like that, defeating the purpose. Brilliant idea, Jendal puts in the quick tips this week, is use a cable for software updates on iOS and iPadOS if the space is a problem. I wanted to update my iPad Air for the generation M1 to iPadOS 18.2 to get all the new goodies, but the iPad informed me I did not have enough space to upgrade.
I had about 12 gigabytes available out of 64. I connected the iPad to my M1 Mac Mini, and when it appeared in the Finder sidebar, I clicked on it and selected Update. After some security verifications on the iPad, my Mac downloaded the iPad software, unlocked it, and then sent the upgrade to the iPad. I've used this technique in the past with my iPhone as well. I thought this tip might be useful to others as well as the Apple intelligence upgrades keep coming and there's never enough RAM.
It's never enough storage, but yes.
Well, storage, yeah, yeah. But yeah.
I forget about this.
Well, there's never enough RAM either.
There's never enough RAM. No. I forget about this too. them. Because I have very low storage iPads that I use like on stage for things because it doesn't matter how much storage they have. They just need to run the app until they also need to, you know, do an update. And it's like, OK, I'm trying to make Sophie's choices here. It's like, do you want me to offload unused apps? And it's like 100 percent never do that. Like, I need all these apps on here.
You may need that.
Correct. When I don't have a Wi-Fi connection at a gig or something. So it's like, no.
You know how to guarantee you need that app?
Yeah. Offload it. That's the way. I know. When they first rolled that feature out, it was on by default, and I get to a gig, and I'm like, oh, great. I just used the Allen & Heath app. Wait, why is it not here? Where did it go? Or not. Yeah, or maybe today not. Yeah, exactly.
Yeah. But the other advantage to that, I think, is it's a quick way to get a hardcore backup to your Mac. So if things go hinky you've got a good backup of it right there without having to use wi-fi to restore so yep that's fair yeah yeah
My only recommendation on doing those backups is if you want your health data and your password data and all that stuff also backed up make sure you turn on the encryption and put your encryption password key in your password manager so you have it next time you need to grab that yes
That's a great tip it is the without your backups being encrypted your health data does not get backed up yep yep.
Yep i
Forgot about that that's a great point oh yeah
Yes be careful yeah
Don't get caught.
All right scott has a follow-up for us a little follow-up tip. He says, gents, in episode 1073, Pete mentioned the silence unknown callers function. It is, as he said, buried deep in the settings. He said, there's a better way to get to it. I created two simple shortcuts labeled block unknown callers and allow unknown callers. They are simple one-step shortcuts. I added a second step with a notification saying it is now on or off.
And he sent us a screenshot of that. And that I think we'll probably link to, I would assume. Why is this better? Easy. Rather than digging into settings, if I want to allow unknown callers, like I'm anticipating a callback from someone not in my contacts, I just use the S lady to say, S lady, allow unknown callers. That's it. No need to search find scroll or tap i use it a lot and once you've installed it i'm sure you will too huh
Yeah yeah all right i like that nice yeah yeah for sure, Uh, one last quick tip, I believe from Ferrer's here. Uh, this also came from our hangout discussion that we had. If you are using a mouse that does not allow horizontal scroll, many mice have vertical scroll wheels. Nowadays, a lot of mice have horizontal scroll, but not all.
And so if you're like me and you have a mouse that does not do horizontal scroll if you hold down the shift key and do the vertical scroll guess what happens you now have horizontal scroll i had no idea about this it's life-changing for me in the studio i don't know why i still use an old mouse that it's just how things are up there and uh but there's times when i need to do horizontal scroll it's such part and parcel of how our max user interface works these days that some you know you need to
do that and so right yeah uh so thank you for solving that problem for me and maybe for some of us out there i.
Went trackpad and i never went back
I i i'm surprised that i haven't in the studio i'm i'm trackpad at my desk in the office i'm obviously trackpad on my laptop because that's what's right there and i i have a first gen magic trackpad the one where you have to replace the batteries and i have one of those you know within arm's reach of me in the studio and for whatever reason i just haven't worked it into my like podcast workflow up there which is ridiculous um but it's yeah yeah there's.
Controversy uh i play down a Minecraft server with some friends and there's two of us on that server who are Mac users and trackpad users. And we play Minecraft with the trackpad and the rest of the group is just horrified. Absolutely horrified.
Because you're not using a mouse. Is that what they're horrified about?
It's probably not the best input for games and gaming. Yes. Like you have a multi button like gaming mouse or something that there's much more functionality. You could do things a lot faster you can assign you know things to auto switch that you know it's a it is arguably a better way to play minecraft but we're we just we're just trackpad people that's what we have that's what we play yeah
Well in a in an certainly in an audio studio environment the trackpad is so much better than a mouse um because of all the horizontal scrolling that happens that it's yeah utterly ridiculous that i'm not using uh the trackpad in the studio oh.
Yeah zipping through the timeline i use it for expanding and collapsing the timeline like yeah
Yeah with the pension how i have lived without horizontal scroll or or knowing how to do horizontal scroll is also just flabbergasting to me, but, uh, it is, uh, yeah, it's just, I don't know.
Yeah. Our minds are weird, right? Like, um, it, this reminds me of a scenario that I encountered many times when I was consulting, I would, you know, I had probably hundreds of clients throughout the city of Austin when, certainly when I was down there and, And occasionally I'd be driving somewhere or someone would call me like, oh, I'm having a problem. Okay. Tell me what you're having. And I can't remember what my password is for this thing. Do you happen to remember?
And what I learned was in the moment that they asked me the question, I was like, I don't know. Like, you know, you're one of 150 people that I've saw in the last month or something.
Like, I don't have no idea. but what i did learn was if i was driving i would pull over and i would say all right i'm going to close my eyes sit down at your computer and describe the environment you know tell me where the keyboard is what's on the wall this that and the other thing and as soon as i got like a visual memory of their environment i'd be like oh wait i know what your password is like yeah okay, we're good to go so our minds are weird there you go yeah minds are weird.
You find it in that rolodex man
Yeah that's right yeah yeah yeah yeah the virtual triggers yeah yeah yeah yeah yep, Uh, I don't know where I was going with that.
So, yeah, well, how about I take us to this week's don't get caught segment?
I like it. Let's go.
All right. So, uh, Ron rakes in, uh, and he's talking about, uh, a situation that happened to him. And I think this is more of a workaround than anything else, but, uh, here's, here's what he wrote. Since installing Sequoia, I've noticed the passwords has become extremely problematic when I use autofill or attempt to change a login password. It's been an annoyance, but not severe enough to warrant immediate action.
However, since Sequoia, it appears to be aggressively blocking the suggestions provided by 1Password. Even when I accessed the 1Password suggestions, I was unable to save the changes I made in the 1Password Save dialog box. My 1Password extension was functioning correctly, but I simply couldn't save anything. Since I generally rely on 1Password as my primary password keeper,
I decided to reach out to them for assistance. They properly responded within 24 hours and suggested that I disable autofill for the usernames and passwords in the settings. Since implementing this change, everything has been working flawlessly. It seems that there has been a conflict between the two password apps since passwords was introduced. I thought I'd share the solution in case anyone else is experiencing a similar issue.
So yeah, he'd change it and go back and it wasn't saved. and by disabling autofill
I i'm i i am assuming, and i might be misassuming or misinterpreting this that he disabled the passwords, not one apple passwords autofill not the one password autofill which is the setting that we happened to mention earlier right in in safari uh yeah uh the autofill settings yeah that would make sense that's why i did that on my laptop too uh because i was just sick of it getting in the way but yeah yeah yeah yeah i've thought about moving everything away from one password but.
Safari autofill can be somewhat problematic though. The thing we run into a lot just with, you know, where I work for an e-commerce company and we have a lot of instances sometimes when autofill will just like freak out and put autofill garbage in the wrong field.
And some of that is web developer problems because it's looking for specific like classes or IDs on fields and things like that to kind of indicate or what kind of field it is um but sometimes too it just like really screws up and we'll get like complaints about it put you know the state in the in the address line and somebody didn't realize it right and then they submitted the it's like we can't ship the thing because we don't know where it's supposed to go
That's fun that's fun.
Yeah always double check the point is when you're placing orders online always double check when you get to that review screen that it has the right i've made that mistake i think that's another don't got it just to add don't get caught i've gotten caught sending something as a matter of fact a co-worker did this i got makeup at my house one one day and i thought oh my god did one of my daughters accidentally send it you know because that happens because they're away now they've gone off to
college and i thought maybe they sent it here and i was like looking at it and i'm like no and then i got this random text like a week later from a previous co-worker and she goes did you get a package of mine because they had they had sent me like a a like thank you gift for something i had done and it was on shopify and that was the address that was last the last time she used shopify and then like years later she just placed this other order with another Shopify
company and it just auto-filled and got sent to me. So always when you get to that review screen right before you hit purchase, check your shipping and your billing address and make sure everything is okay.
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All right. Shall we do some questions here?
Yeah, I think Andrew has one for us. He says, my question relates to the laptop battery management app Al Dente by App House Kitchen and whether it's worth installing. Or is it better to rely on Apple's own battery health management? Both claim to improve battery longevity by allowing the battery to discharge and waiting till you need it to fully charge it. The theory behind not leaving the battery charged at 100% is not in question, just whether Aldente does it better.
I've read online conflicting reports by users. Some say it has preserved battery health. Some say it made no difference. And some say it made their battery worse. Well, that's super helpful. The problem is that if a person has only one MacBook Pro, it's impossible to know whether al dente was helpful or not or useless or harmful. It's hardly a controlled experiment. Any wisdom you can provide would be really appreciated.
Uh so i can i can double your set of anecdotal evidence andrew because i do i have two laptops that i manage uh here in the the the hamilton household i mean there's more my kids both but they manage their own laptops mostly. Um, my laptop is not my daily driver. It is one that I use clearly here when I'm traveling. I also use it on the couch. I probably do use it every day, but it is not my primary machine. And then my wife has a laptop that she has made her primary machine.
When she's at her desk, it is plugged into monitors and keyboards and all those things. And then when we travel, she just grabs it and takes it with her, which she really likes. But hers is certainly at greater risk of battery overcharging because it's plugged in all the time, except for when we travel. And that's a really bad time to find out that you've done terrible things to your battery right before you go on a trip.
So on hers, I use Al Dente on hers and I have it set to stop the battery from charging at 70%. It so that it it i don't know how the magic works but even though it's plugged in the mac says no i'm done charging it's 70 and al dente is doing that apple's tech doesn't let you be that um.
Restrictive about things it's it's a little more fluid in the way that it manages stuff and i feel better using al dente to stop it at 70 and then of course i can set it before we go on a trip you know we change it and say okay now let it go to 100 and it'll charge up to 100 and do it for the trip and then when the trip's over you uh you know we pull it back so.
I can say that on hers battery longevity has been good and i can also say that on my laptop without running al dente battery longevity has been good i don't know if this is helpful I think this is the problem, right? There is no, as far as I know, and maybe the folks at AppHouse Kitchen when they hear this will have more things to say, but I don't know of any truly long-term controlled experiments other than the wide set of users using Al Dente as one big data set.
But I don't know if or what type of data AppHouse Kitchen collects on that, if there's any sort of aggregated data. So I don't know. But that's what I do.
I can maybe speak to the other side a little bit, and then I have a question for you guys. So I can tell you that I basically use my laptop like a desktop. And I think I mentioned it's an old Intel machine, 2019 MacBook Pro, I think, 16-inch, if I'm remembering the year right. But I leave mine plugged in all the time, and I can tell you my battery life has been obliterated. Basically. Yeah. So let's see. It's a 16 inch 2019 MacBook pro.
Now Mike, here's my question because, um, I went to check battery health and Apple says it's normal. Um, it's definitely not normal. Like if I unplug that thing, it will last. I'm lucky if I get an hour, hour out of it, probably hour and a half. Yeah. And I'm not doing anything heavy. I'm not doing, you know, it's like, so I know it's, I know it needs a new battery. I mean, age of it also, it just needs a new battery. It's freaking 2019 machine, right?
Yeah, right. But the battery has been destroyed for a long time. So I just, I always use a plug-in, so it doesn't matter. So I can say that. My question is, is the Apple's battery management, because I went into the battery settings, I looked at options. I don't see that I have any option to limit. Is it just automatic, supposedly, that Apple's managing your battery life? And that's why we need a tool like El Dente?
Kind of. It's different for every Mac.
Okay. That's, that was, yeah,
That battery preference pain evolves, adapts to whatever type of Mac you have and what battery smarts are in it. But I have seen, we have all seen options go away. Like you might, when that 2019 came out, you may have had more granular options in whatever, you know, energy saver or whatever it was called at the time. But the predecessor of that preference pane probably had more granular options for you when you got that Mac than it does today in Sequoia.
Like if you go back to the Mac OS 15, if you go back to the version of Mac OS, you probably have different options. However... Go ahead.
I may have found it. I think it's a buried thing.
Okay. Great.
I don't know why. So that little battery health thing that says normal next to it is the little eye icon. I click that and I get additional options and it says battery condition. And then it says optimized battery charging, which is on manage battery longevity, which is on. So there you go.
Okay. So see on mine, I don't get managed battery longevity. I get battery condition, maximum capacity, which mine is telling me is 90%, which isn't terrible, but not great. And I get optimized battery charging if I want that. And then that's that. So, yep. Yeah.
So it is a little bit different, but yeah, it's hidden under that little norm. I hate the new system settings. They're just so terrible.
I would be curious because optimized battery charging is the, you know, it's sort of one size fits all switch to do effectively the same thing that Al Dente does at a much more controlled and granular level. I would be curious. So what that does, the optimized battery charging Apple's, is it gets you to 80% and then waits until it decides you need to charge up to 100 before you're ready to go for the day. And it presumably uses some sort of historical data about your usage of your
Mac to make that decision. All this makes sense.
What i'm curious is for someone like you adam that has a machine that's plugged in all of the time, how frequently does it go to a hundred percent is it still going like once a day like our phones would right you know our phones get to 80 overnight if we have optimized charging on and then you know an hour before we are going to wake up it tops us off to a hundred and we're off to the races, That makes sense for a phone where you're actually using it on battery every day.
But if your computer is not being used on battery every day, does it know to only maybe go up to 100 once a week? Somebody out there knows this answer, right? And that would be helpful to know.
I can tell you in the last 24 hours it was plugged in and at a hundred percent battery from midnight till 3 a.m or so and then it started to go down uh oh no that was yesterday yesterday afternoon so at 12 noon yesterday it was at 100 plugged in and charging then it went down and i It was plugged in the entire time because it was sitting on a shelf plugged in. So that it looks like it let it drain down until about 6 p.m.
Fascinating.
And then it charged it back up. Likely because during the day, I'm not using it. I'm at work using my thing. And then I'm likely to come at night and start using it again.
Right?
So it's probably watched my pattern of usage and decided, because I think that's how that feature is supposed to work. It's supposed to. Oh, he might pick up and unplug his laptop at around 6 p.m. So, or 7 p.m., 8 p.m. I'm going to charge it up and then it'll be ready to go.
The other thing I'll mention about that other setting that you said you don't have to manage the battery longevity, that may come up as your laptop ages, I'm thinking, because that's the one where as your battery gets older, it will reduce the overall max capacity so my battery will not actually charge to 100 of its full capacity it it starts lowering so 100 is not 100 which is probably also a condition of why it doesn't last as long as
It's not using as much of the battery right yeah yeah yeah yeah interesting there you go yeah yeah so i'd be curious what that graph looks like for someone who truly just leaves it plugged in all the time and i as i'm saying this i realize you know dave you could do that experiment with Lisa's computer because what better computer to experiment with in your house than Lisa's and your wife's can.
You spell divorce attorney
Nope the only time I would need to do that well the the only time that's a realistic version for us where I would need to do that is and she's made it very clear if I ever book a surprise party for her make sure that um two divorce attorneys are the first two guests on the list she does not like surprise parties so bring two divorce attorneys and anybody else you'd like to invite so yep but that's okay we learn how to live with each other it's it's wonderful right i know
this see i'm like you know you're trainable we are all trainable yeah absolutely yep absolutely uh yeah i don't know where we are on any of this i now now i'm lost because i valentine we're gonna go to valentine's question yeah yeah go ahead, valentine valentine yeah yeah i don't know which way it is i got it oh i think it's we can't. Long-time listener, I found your advice incredibly helpful over the years. Yes, amazing. Thank you for saying that, Valentine.
I wanted to reach out for some guidance on choosing the best Thunderbolt hub available. I previously used a CalDigit TS3+, which unfortunately broke after four years. Currently, I have the Anker 14-in-1 hub, which is more budget-friendly and offers similar functionality, but I've noticed that only one of the USB ports is high-speed. I'm wondering if you could recommend a more reliable Thunderbolt hub that offers robust performance and maybe more high-speed ports.
Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
So I answered this and now my new answer is go back a couple of minutes and listen to the ad.
OWC's Thunderbolt 5 hub is probably not the thing for this part of, valentine's thunderbolt management the thunderbolt five hub is more for distributing out all of your stuff and then connecting things with more ports to it from there.
Uh right so but my answer my answer back to him was that uh first of all he you know he talked about his budget and i said you don't mention what budget friendly means because one man's budget is another man's extravagance But in that light, I offered, look, there's, I've never had, knocking some wood here, a bad product from OWC along those lines. And they've got a Thunderbolt 11, 11 port Thunderbolt dock that's, I want to say it was $279.
Now I've lost the price point on that, but we'll put the link in the show notes. Three Thunderbolt four ports four USB three ports Ethernet audio and a card reader and it looks like Something that might do the job for his question. Thoughts, Adam, Dave?
Yeah, there is also, and I just want to say, obviously, OWC is a sponsor, it turns out, of this particular episode and certainly has been a sponsor of the show for a long time. That has nothing to do with, the only way that our recommendations are related to their sponsorship is in reverse. They decided to sponsor the show after we had been recommending their products for so long. The recommendations are and have always been our recommendations and are not anything anyone has purchased.
That said, there is also a 14-port Thunderbolt hub from OWC that has, I'm looking at the speeds of these ports.
There was something about that that I didn't recommend that. I don't remember what it was.
No, that makes sense. Yeah, well, because the 11-port one.
Maybe the price?
Uh yeah i don't know i didn't even look at the price the 11 port one has the ability to do thunderbolt for hubbing whereas the 14 port one is about thunderbolt pass-through but again if you don't need hubbing and you and yet you need more ports to do things with, and you know using the 14 port one as the end of the line might be what you want you you really and this is why i love you know the dongle world that we get to live in now where we each get to choose the dongle
and and i realize that a thunderbolt hub is sort of a fixed in place dongle but it's a dongle nonetheless that we just hang off of our mac we each get to pick what ports we're going to have and we could all go by the same mac and then set them up very differently because with dongles we get to use you know our own subset of ports so it it really depends i i I would agree with you, Pete. OWC is a great way to go. And look at their offerings and pick the one that makes sense for you.
And it might not even be a Thunderbolt hub. You might want just a USB hub if that is going to serve your needs. There's no wrong answer here other than the answer that doesn't serve your needs.
Right. Exactly.
Yeah, to that end, I might have something to add. And keep in mind, I am a huge fan of Anchor. And I know he mentioned he had one of the versions of Anchor. I think he has the newer one. I had the Power Expand Elite 13 and one Thunderbolt 3 dock. And it's been mostly great. The one thing to consider about stuff like this is... The orientation of the dock. So the OWC one is a nice long one that sits flat on the desk.
This is one of the more vertical ones. And I don't know that I would ever go with a vertical dock again. And the reason why is the strain it puts on specifically Thunderbolt cables. So the cable comes out and then hangs straight down, which tends to want to pull the cable down.
And so i've had issues where i bumped the desk and it literally is enough there's enough leverage on that because there's enough play and one thing i you know in the usbc connector that i don't like is versus what we had with um firewire back in the day is there's a lot more play in that connector so a lot of times it's just enough to just for a brief moment disconnect the connection and then all things go haywire and then everything kind of comes back so i'm on a zoom call and my video goes
away or i'm you know doing an audio thing and my mic goes away like it becomes super annoying luckily owc has a solution for that that did help uh they have these little i forget what they're called they're little stick-on screw-in attachments that basically lock your your usbc cable in place and so i bought those they got a little 3m sticky on it you put it around it trying to remember what they're called it's
Called the owc cling on c-l-i-n-g-o-n yes.
Yeah so that kind of solved the problem but just something to consider when you're looking at that orientation i think the usb you know obviously the wider way i think they're a little more supported than the vertical way in terms of just wobble and wiggle and play so That's interesting.
I have a CalDigit doc somewhere in my setup that is built to be, stood up vertically like you're describing and i also have the anchor one somewhere in my setup i think i have that uh one of those in my office and i also have found that same issue where they they want to fall out sideways kind of um but with the two that i have you can lay the docks on their side.
Yeah i don't know i think this one has i've looked at it and you probably could but i think it has cooling vents on got it either side of it so i worry about because it does get also super hot that's the other thing that i often wondered if it was actually overheating because it will get really really warm and i don't know if it has fans in it or not which may be another thing to think about got it um so got
It yeah i.
Mean another solution is part of the issue is i have it right at the back of my desk because i have a like a standing desk thing like you know just one that sits on the top so all the cables do hang all the way down basically it can go all the way down to the floor i bet you if i moved it over to you know something where the cables went down but were still supported at the bottom i could take some of that pressure off those cables too so
That makes sense yeah that checks out, All right.
Shall we take us to Bruce?
Yeah. No, let's do Phil. Okay. You want to read Phil, please, Adam? I know I'm jumping. I'm jumping around.
Yeah, let me make sure I got that. I don't know if I had that one queued up. Oh, no, I did. Okay, cool. Yeah, Phil's asking about, sounds like ad blockers. He says, which ad blocker do I use to replace vinegar? So I guess he's using an ad blocker that's no longer supported or has run out of utility, whatever it might be. But he was using an ad blocker called Vinegar. What do we recommend as an ad blocker?
So I answered that one, and I came up with a couple. There's uBlock Origin, which is for macOS only, and so all of our listeners can use that. It's a free ad blocker and it's available for Firefox, that's easy for me to say, and Chromium based browsers, but not Safari. And for Safari there's AdGuard, it blocks YouTube ads and other web ads without needing additional extensions. And as always remember that ad blockers can break the site.
And most of them are anymore it seems to tell you, hey you need to turn off ad blocker. But if your site appears to be broken for no apparent reason, remember that you might have an ad blocker on. So disabling it may help fix that. And then without trying to be a judgmental SOB, content creators rely on ads for their revenue and that sort of thing.
That being said, Google Ads was so aggressive on our site that after I reached my initial threshold to get the first check from them i disabled google ads because it was so intrusive and so nasty on our website that i went i don't want that to be um you know it ruined the experience for for visitors to the site and so i disabled it
But i wouldn't blame google ads for that um i would i would blame.
Okay i
Would you well in that you get to control how google ads displays on your site now you were probably doing it with a WordPress plugin and left it to default settings.
And, and I a hundred percent agree that that is way more aggressive than anything I would ever want to see on a website, but you could, a, you could use that plugin and, and temper it, but also you can just take the code and build it into your templates exactly where you want those ads to appear and do it in a way that in my opinion can be done tastefully and so even as you know someone who certainly made a good chunk of my living from display ads on the web for a very long time uh,
I, the ad blocker thing is, it's not cut and dry for me because I, I have one, I use, I use one blocker and I don't have it on all the time, but there are certain sites where I have to turn it on because otherwise it's non-functional.
The site's broken with the ads.
Now, I also understand, I don't want to get too far on a soapbox here, but I understand that it is up to the content creator how they choose to deliver ads to their users. And then the user's decision is either accept the content with the ads that the creator put in or don't accept the content with the ads the creator put in. Because we always used to say at Mac Observer, you know, the site's not free.
The price to read our content is to look at the ads we choose to show you or to at least let us display the ads we choose to show you. Whether you actually look at them or not, that's a whole other conversation. But and so I get that there's nuances here. I mean, it's the same with the show. People ask me routinely. They're like, you do chapters for your show, right? I'm like, yeah. And by the way, if you didn't know, we do chapters for our show.
So if like you don't want to hear this discussion, you just skip this chapter and boom, you're on to the next thing. And you're welcome to do that. People are shocked when I tell them, well, yeah, of course I put chapters around each of our ads. Like they're like, well, doesn't that let people skip them more easily? Like, yep, it sure does.
Because that's the experience I would want. Not that I'm going to skip every ad, but if I've heard it before, if I already owned, of course I couldn't because it's not out yet, but if I already own the OWC Thunderbolt five hub, well, I don't need to hear an ad about it. So I'm sold. It worked, you know, so I can skip and move on.
It's fine i it like i i like as far as i'm concerned you folks are welcome to do that of course if pete and adam disagree then we have to go have a conversation and come up with a new um a new set of instructions for.
Everyone let me offer something i i can't tell you how many times i still listen to say a one password ad yeah because i learned about new features
Exactly in.
You know so i yeah i listen to the ads and then you know your ads and i try to do the same thing on my show is is make them clever make them funny make them engaging so that people want to listen to them
And informative like you know i love it when we have ads that can just be content or content adjacent we'll never try and hide the fact that someone is sponsoring the show at least we never have i can't imagine we would ever any of the three of us would ever choose to make that decision. But except I can see Adam over there shifting in his seat. I think he's been paid. No, I'm just kidding.
Well, I'm shifting in my seat. Cause I, I do have some things to add to this. And I think you guys are hitting on the key point where, especially for content that is ad supported, there is a contract between three parties. It's the advertiser, it is the content creator, and it is the consumer of said content, right? And we all have to be respectful of each of these contracts and each of these relationships and not take advantage on any given side of it,
right? So there's an exchange between all of us, basically. And I think where people want to start to use ad blockers is when that any side of that relationship is being abused, most specifically, like the content side, like we're delivering you content in exchange, we're going to give you as much as possible, relevant, useful ads, we're not going to put 27 of them in a 30 minute show.
You know that sort of thing and so the websites where i end up using blockers and i agree one blocker is one that i love and just to give another recommendation on my wife's computer i think we used ghostry for a long time which is another great one um i think that one might even be open source if i'm remembering one blocker um has a free option but they also have a paid option so i i think i actually purchased one blocker i can't remember if it's a subscription or not
But doesn't matter there's a there's a lot of options but when i enable those is when i get to a website like you were saying pete where it's just so egregious that it's actually detracting from the reason i'm there which is to consume the content right you know i think um uh During fireball john gruber had a word for this like when they're throwing up d bars and i'm you know doing that family friendly but basically a million ads where there's more ads than the content or the ads are blocking
the content i'm blocking your ads because i'm there for the content right i have left so that's the contract that's the relationship is just like don't be a jerk i'm happy to see a couple ads and let you get your revenue but if it's actually taking away from the main reason why I'm there, then you screwed up, you know, and that's your fault. And I don't feel bad about blocking your ads.
Yeah. When 40% of your show is ads, not interested anymore. Sorry.
Yeah. Yeah. Only 30, only 39.5 feet. That's, that's our limit here.
Right on. But when it's the same ad week after week after week, without even changing the content of it, you know, I had a podcast I loved and I left it. I just like, I can't do this anymore. Right. What are you going to tell?
We're going to move on to David's question.
They could have added chapters and let you skip it, and then maybe you would have stayed.
Right? Yeah. So, okay. David's question. We can do that. David has some fist shakes, as I recall.
That's correct.
I have two fist shakes, both fists, at Microsoft. Could you tell me how to delete fonts, Aptos and MS Copilot? But I asked for neither, and I hate, oh, that's a strong word. I hate both of them.
Wow. Thanks, David. We want to help you remove hate from your life, David. So let's see if we can get there.
Hate is not welcome here.
No, no, it really isn't. Yeah, but we're going to help you. So go launch the, there is an app on your Mac called Font Book. I believe it's in applications utilities, but I, candidly, I don't know. I just, you know, fire a spotlight and look for font book, find launch font book, filter for the fonts in question. I mean, or you can just scroll through the list and find them. It doesn't matter. Right click on the font there. And if the remove option is not grayed out.
You're off to the races, remove it and you're done. If that option is grayed out, however, there is another option that will help you. It is show in Finder that will pull up the actual font file. In the Finder, and you can delete from there. You might need to reboot your Mac afterwards, see if it just magically disappears from FontBook when you do that. But that should do it. And if you have trouble deleting from there, let us know what your Mac says. Feedback at MacEcab.com and we'll help.
The terminal is your friend then.
Yeah, probably the terminal is your friend then. Yeah, exactly.
Yeah, I don't know if there's ever a situation where... Deactivate is an option where remove isn't I would imagine they're always both there so the difference there obviously is one's going to actually remove or delete the font from your system entirely if you just want to temporarily disable it thinking that maybe someday I want to get this font back you can deactivate the font in font book and then at some point come back and reactivate it if you want yeah
So I haven't looked in a long time how much space does a font take on average is it a few kilobytes a few megabytes uh i
Think it's a few megabytes yeah.
Okay
They're not it's gonna depend on the font set and how many variations it has and a number of factors because i mean they're collections a lot of times because there's
Tons and tons and how many does anyone ever really use i mean it if you're going to be creative you're going to want to be able to go through 50 60 80 fonts 100 fonts
But well maybe i i mean think part of the problem is is like if you have an egregious list you know like 500 fonts it
Makes it harder
That little drop down menu can be hard to like get through and it also can take some time to load if it's like actually rendering the font so like you know font management is a thing like it's like if you don't need 300 fonts you know you might want to turn off a bunch of them if you know i only use 12 fonts on a regular basis because all i'm doing is writing emails and doing you know some simple word documents then yeah yeah you can get crazy i
Will point out that they're back right yes you can add them back i i will point out that there are some fonts the two he mentioned are not system fonts but there are some fonts that are system fonts that you cannot remove or at least cannot easily remove and we don't recommend that you figure out a way to but but these third-party fonts like these two Microsoft fonts you mentioned are not they're not on my system so I can
fairly confidently say that they are not system fonts and you should in theory be able to remove them so but yeah if if it's a system font maybe don't remove that you might you might live surprised.
Yeah I'm actually surprised clean my Mac doesn't have a font manager in it
Yeah, I think we're allowed to say that CleanMyMac, that Space Lens is very high on the list of features that they are looking at implementing in the new CleanMyMac. I think that's accurate based on what we saw at CBS.
My impression was they were kind of surprised by that. Was that your impression, Dave?
You know, it could be. I wasn't sure. How to read them either because we're talking to different people and not necessarily the engineering team but it seemed like they might have been caught flat-footed by that yeah which is odd oh this.
Yeah this is far more used than we thought so but
But don't they have data on that like i would assume i don't know i like i would assume there'd be aggregated data but maybe not here's.
It's one of those things dave i think that you know when things are going well no one says a thing and when things go to crap people write in and go hey
Well but that's the thing if is that the data or do they do they actually have data on how we use the app like if they do then they would have known how many people use space lens but i don't know anyway um hey a.
Couple a couple more really quick tips for font book um so i think you were talking about system fonts versus non-system fonts there is in the sidebar something called my fonts which i'm pretty sure are the ones that were installed by you and not the system. So if you want to see a collection of just the ones that you've added, I think you can use that My Fonts tab. And then the other tip is...
Font book also has the ability to create collections so like out just think of it like an album out of your you know photos where you're just taking a subset of certain fonts i think there's some default ones like i have one called fun modern pdf traditional web i think those are recreated but you can create your own so if you want to create a set of fonts like you know hey i have a set of fonts that i used for this one project or something like
that you can create a collection throw them all in there and then you can right click and deactivate a entire set. So if you know, I'm only going to use this a few times a year. You know, when I'm doing Christmas cards, it's a bunch of Christmas fonts or comic book fonts that I did for some project, fun thing. You could throw them in a collection and then deactivate them when you're done with them and then they won't be showing up and everything.
And then when you need them back, you can go activate the whole collection.
Yeah, they're right there in the sidebar. Right click it and deactivate fonts in font. It's the name of the group. You know, whatever. that's cool adam
Good stuff brilliant yeah i like it sweet do we have more on that i feel like we've got a couple minutes.
Left that's all i got i mean there are smart collections too if you want to get really really crazy like i created one for mono spaced fonts because i use those for programming so i just want to be able to find and see all my available mono space fonts to turn on and off and those work just like smart albums where you can set up a criteria of font properties like italic or bold or monospace or whatever you want and then it'll automatically put those into a little collection
There you go there you go cool, Where are we on time?
CSS.
Yeah, we got time for cool stuff found. I wanted to point out that Sonos now supports lossless streaming of Apple music. So in order to do this, you go in, I'll put a link in the show notes, but you have to go in and turn off Atmos streaming so that you just get the lossless stereo stream of the. Of the music. So that's, they've now added that to Sonos and there's a list of players.
It's basically not the super old players because they just don't have the capability of doing lossless audio, but otherwise, yeah. And I'm, I, Sonos also has a new CEO of Tom Conrad as of, I think, last week. And I've known Tom for a long time and I think he's a good person to kind of take that team and lead it back to where it needs to be so i'm i'm i'm hopeful of sonos's future reliability, we'll see nice yeah we'll see when we get nice yeah.
I'm wondering is there a website that you could go to to compare lossless versus compressed
I mean you can do it in apple music you can just tell it oh okay um oh okay yeah yeah you you probably won't be able to hear the difference between 256K AAC and lossless 24-bit sound. And there's a lot of reasons for that that include... The speakers you're listening on the way the music was mixed and mastered. Um, so much stuff, the way that it's mixed is it is mixed because it is built to be streamed with compressed audio.
So like there's, there's a whole lot of reasons that it's very, even, even for me, I've trained myself to hear the difference, but I, when I say that, I don't say it globally.
There are specific sections of specific songs where i know okay i can hear there's a little more tale of the reverb on the uncompressed version versus the compressed version but i can't say that it's better i can just point to it and say i know that is you know so spotify i can tell spotify sounds awful and i don't know why that is no it's weird because it's 320k You have.
Something nice to see, Dave.
No, it's bizarre. They've somehow gone out of their way to make it sound worse than it should because it's 320K MP3s, which should be undetectably different. Correct. And yet, they've figured out a way. It just sounds flat. It must be the compression algorithm that they're using is just not one of the better ones, I guess. I don't know. It's bizarre to me, but I can tell when I'm listening most of the time. Again, not globally, but it's like, oh, yeah, is this Spotify?
Yeah, that makes sense. Okay.
Yeah.
Yeah, I don't know.
I got one. Go. Yeah. So my spoon is too big. Wrote in with a story about basically, they think, saving their dog's life. It was well below freezing, and the dog wandered off as a rescue, which is why they got it. And even though Apple recommends not attaching an AirTag to your dog, there is now an AirTag dog collar mount. And these are the points. We'll put the link in the show notes for it. But secure and comfortable, IP69, so it's waterproof.
Dogs can swim with it. Works with any width, collar, or harness, and up to 0.2 inches thick or 5 millimeters thick. So if the collar is thicker than almost a quarter inch, then it'll be a problem. But that's still pretty thick. Durable composite construction. Fits dogs and cats over about 10 pounds, smaller than that.
Uh it's it's pretty big on their neck but but it'll still work um it doesn't dangle so that's that's the main thing that's the through the collar design it keeps it from dangling um and then uh front screws let you change the air tag battery without taking it off the collar and here's the big one unconditionally guaranteed for life any issues and they'll make it right so uh
Yeah this is from elevation lab this is.
Um yeah we've
Talked we just talked about their stuff i think in a cool stuff found in the last couple of weeks somewhere but yeah.
Yeah yeah because they have a they have like a stick on fabric one that you can put inside a bag or inside a jacket and were they
The ones that also made the 10-year one too or am i confused.
Oh that's right we brought that one up too that long-term battery yeah they have a external battery for an air tag i think i brought that one up i mean go to that website they have air tag things for everything they have bike mounts they have specific tool mounts like they even have a specific one for like if you have specifically makita like drilled in saws and stuff like that. It's like color matched to their red color. And like, so they have air tag solution for everything.
Huh? Cool.
Cool. Awesome.
Yeah.
Including your pets.
Including your pets. Yeah, no, they're, yeah, they're, they make good stuff. Um, all right. I heard, uh, my friend Shannon that I do business brain with, I asked him one day, I was like, what webcam are you using? Because he looks really good. I was like, are you using continuity camera? And he says, no. He said, I found this thing called the Insta360 link camera. It's 180 bucks at Amazon right now. And it's got, it's got smarts in it. They call it AI smarts. Okay, fine.
But it, it will do the face tracking and all of that.
The, the image quality of it was really impressive uh you know i've been saying for years that really the best webcam you can buy is a used iphone and use either continuity camera reincubates camo or something but this one seems to i haven't used it personally other than with him to do shows but it looks really good it's a clear picture that and it's a 4k camera no i don't know that that matters for a lot of things right now but um yeah i was impressed for 180 bucks it's pretty good it's.
Cheaper than a phone is
Exactly.
This is that company that makes, they like make really like high-end cameras and like action GoPro style cameras. I think the same company, right? I think you're right. So we're getting the benefits of that. Does it do that globe thing? Because people do that. I think they have that globe effect too, right? Where it makes it look like you're on a planet. Yeah. That effect. Like everybody does where you put it on a stick.
He said he likes the software for it. I haven't, I haven't dug deep into it, but yes, I think it has all those effects too. Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah.
Like I know they have a professional like VR cameras that do like a full 60 like VR for like VR headsets and stuff like that. They're like, they look like a thing out of star Wars, like one of those star Wars drones with like cameras all the way around and stuff like that. Yeah. Cool company. So it's not surprising. They make a really good web, a webcam.
Yeah. Well, you're right. Now that you mention it, the fact that they have these higher-end cameras means that they're able to spend, like Apple, is able to spend more money on R&D than someone who is only making a $179 camera could, right? Right. And if they let that tech trickle down into all of their products, well, now that's why the iPhone is such a great web camera, because there's millions, hundreds probably of millions of dollars put into the smarts of that camera.
Yeah, it's hard to compete with that.
Well, they care about the lenses and the optics and, you know, so they're on that higher end of.
And all the computational photography, right? Like, so both of those things together. Yeah, exactly. All right. I think that's it. I think we, I think we succeeded. At least I hope we succeeded. I hope we recorded this. This was a pretty good one.
Oh, did you hit the record button, Dave?
No, I thought you were doing that, Pete.
Oh boy.
It's okay. Dave's got the local recording.
Oh yeah. We have local recordings. That's right. Yes. Yes. Thank goodness for that. Thank goodness for all of you. Thanks for listening. Thanks for sending in all your stuff as you always do. Thanks for being a part of the Mac Geekgab community. It's really an amazing honor that we get to continue to do this week in and week out. So thank you for that. Thanks to Cashfly for providing all the bandwidth to get the show from us to you. Make sure to check out the other podcasts that we do.
Adam's got his debut film podcast or the debut film podcast. It's not called The. Pete's got So There I Was. And I've got Business Brain and Gig Gab, which is the latter being the reason that I'm out here in Anaheim at NAMM in the first place. So thanks for hanging out. And yeah, we'll see you next week. Next week's show will be released one day late. It's just because of our travel schedule. But it will be out Tuesday the 4th is when it's coming.
You got a mouse in your pocket? I'm not traveling.
Maybe I do. I don't know. I haven't checked my pockets. I've been doing this show. But check your pockets because if you have a mouse in your pocket, don't get caught with that. That's bad.
Maybe.
I don't know. I've never had a mouse in my pocket. What do I know?
Mice. A mouse.
Nobody has mouse speed.