It's time for Mac Geek Cabin. Listener Marty brings us our quick tip of the week by saying, hey, if I have a doctor's appointment or other short duration event, I can choose a do not disturb focus on my phone and all of my devices and then select until I leave this location or until this event is over. And this is a really great way to make sure that I don't forget to change or disable the Do Not Disturb focus when I leave.
It's great for those short use focus changes and you don't want to find yourself stuck in a focus mode later in the day. Love this tip. More tips like this, plus your questions answered today on MacGeekGab 1050 for Monday, August 12th, IBM PC Day 2024. 24. Music. Greetings, folks, and welcome to Mac Geek Up, the show where you send in tips like that. You also send in your questions and hopefully we answer you, send in cool stuff found.
We share it at all we do our level best to organize it into an agenda such that we are each best set to learn at least five new things every every single time we get together no every single time we get together bbedit at barebones.com is our sponsor for this episode we'll talk more about them in a little bit for now here with my voice mostly back and intact in durham new hampshire i'm dave of Hamilton. And here in South Dakota, I'm Adam Christensen.
How are things this morning? There's no Pete. No. Yeah. No Pete. I was wondering when he was going to chime in. Oh, he's not here. He's not here. Pete's not here. That's right. We miss him. He said, it looks like he's having fun though. He's having fun. Yep. From his socials. It looks like he's enjoying his travels. I think, I think these are a little bit of like recreational travels, which is nice for him given how often he travels for not recreation. Yep.
I almost got caught when you did that, that intro.
Euro ibm pc day because i wanted to reenact that somewhat famous steve jobs photo like that was first thing that came to my head which somewhat famous steve jobs photo the the ibm photo i i'm i'm forgetting you're not aware of well so he is standing below the ibm sign at the ibm building somewhere i think might be new york or someplace giving a one finger salute oh really illy you've never seen that photo no uh yeah huh nope i haven't but i have now, that's great for ibm pc day i love that.
That's i didn't know if we could make that gesture on the uh on the streams because i know i got caught the other day with uh using similar language ah yes that's right yeah yeah Well, we we've generally chosen not to use salty language in this podcast, by and large, because there's no reason for it. And it would. Well, I'm sure it would gain some affinity with with some of you out there. And that's fine.
It would also I think the flip side of it is that it would alienate some folks, especially people who like to listen with their families and things like that. And the subject matter of the show just really, it doesn't require it. It doesn't warrant it. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Typically, unless it's Steve Jobs giving his opinion about IBM. That's right. That's right. Yeah. But then years later, they partnered. Yeah. Power PC was a whole thing with IBM.
Right? Right. I have that. Well, yes. And then Intel. Yeah. Yeah. Well, but Intel wasn't with IBM. That was just with Intel. No, no, no, no, no. But I mean, like. Yes. They have this great history of, you know, having longtime rivals and then suddenly they're not rivals anymore. Correct. Yeah. Yeah, they're rivals right up until Steve tells you they aren't. Yeah, that's right. Or, you know, they need Microsoft to save the company. Yeah, yeah, that's true.
I know, I mean, I know that that was a pivotal and necessary moment for Apple. I also know that Steve Jobs wishes he had done it differently because Bill Gates couldn't be there at Macworld Boston for that announcement. And so there was let's see if I can find this picture while I'm talking. But but it the way that it worked was that Bill was on the screen looming over Steve and and Steve did not like that particular, you know, the optics of that were not fantastic.
Well, it's the full 1984 vibe. It's the full 1984 vibe where Bill is, you know, 15, 20 times the size of Steve at Steve's event that not so good. So, yeah. Yeah. But had he been there, he probably would have pelted with rotten fruit. So it would not have been so great anyway. No, I mean, in the moment, Steve handled it very well because he's a showman like that.
But, but he does not like the fact that the picture that we just showed on the YouTube stream exists that, that I think it was more that like, oh, if only there was no record of this. Cause it sends the wrong message when you're not there. Yeah. Well, and it just had to probably sting more that what. That was required for was not steve's doing yes right that was him yeah yeah yeah repairing a lot of damage yes yes but he did it i mean he did what he had to do like and that.
I mean i know this isn't business brain which is another podcast i do but like that is necessary i was going to say it's the sign of a good leader it's it's the sign of a leader i mean good or bad like sometimes you just got to do the things that aren't fun i you know letting people go is another one of them like like it's a huge one it sucks i hate it i really there are a few things in life that i use the word hate about and that
is one of them i really really don't like it at all but sometimes it's necessary yeah oh it's absolutely necessary and you know i just I tell people, you have to understand the, it depends on the situation though, too. Yes, this isn't always the situation, but the one that gets me the most is just when you have a leader that's just doing it because they want to be a nice guy.
I've been at companies where people should not be there because they're bringing all of their coworkers down and not contributing. And that's my biggest pet peeve is just like, Like, why are you here? You obviously don't want to be here. You don't want to do the job. And the leadership's not...
Taking care of this person you know it's like move on but yeah so yep yep understand in certain situations it's necessary because you're actually impacting your entire organization if you don't yeah yeah yeah anyway yeah we don't have to go on the business stuff let's do some fun stuff let's do some fun stuff you got a tip from grumpy to uh to get us back into that mode.
Yes i hope so uh except somehow i didn't mark it so let me why didn't i mark it i don't know i apologize i'm gonna vamp here for a little bit and try and find it. Why am i not finding it do you want me to just read it i'll do it yeah if you've got it ready to go sorry grumpy says uh i love it when i learn something by accident for a long while now Now, iMessage has supported replying to a specific message in a thread.
Normally, I need on my phone to press and hold on the message or on Mac OS, control click and select reply. Today, quite by accident, Grumpy says, I found that swiping right on the message will immediately enter reply mode for that message. Who knew? Some of us knew and some of us didn't. And that's the beauty of the quick tip is the thing that once you learn it, you do it automatically. And then, but when somebody sees you do it, it's as though you have, have conjured a spell.
Yep. Yep. And this is a great one. Yeah. The other, the other half of this tip is swipe, uh, to the left, right? To the left, to get the timestamp. Oh, that's right.
Yes that's right so you know when someone actually you know replied or you sent that message i've had to show my family members that a few times because they're like, when did that message come in where's the where's the stamp yeah where's the date time yeah, yeah i like that yeah i didn't know that i didn't know this tip either that's and it's it feels much quicker than the tap and hold. If you just do a quick flick and reply. And it does work on the Mac, too, if you have a trackpad.
Obviously, if you have a mouse without something to slide on, then there's no way to give your Mac that gesture. But with a trackpad, yeah, you can do that swipe. Who's still using a mouse? You know what's funny? At the moment, I am. I have a wired Razer, R-A-Z-E-R, mouse that I have had in the studio for a very long time. And for some reason doing the show.
I like having the mouse i have a magic trackpad somewhere like right behind me i'm sure the batteries are dead in it at the moment it's one of the the like you replace the batteries in it uh ones but i don't know doing the show i i just i like being able to grab the mouse, oh yeah no no for gaming it's funny because i i don't game heavily but i and another apple user that I know we all kind of are on this server that a friend of ours runs. We have been for years.
And the two of us use our trackpads for like gaming for Minecraft. Everybody else is like, are you kidding me? It's not good for gaming. You need a good gaming mouse usually. It's very tricky, but we've just mastered it. It's like, so we make fun of everybody the other way around because it's like, why are you using a mouse? Yeah. Oh, I see. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, well, I mean, for what I'm doing here, a trackpad would make more sense.
And again, I'm just totally used to it in all of the workflows that I do on this computer that I don't even think about it. In fact, when you started saying it, it almost didn't register for me that, wait, I am, you know. Right, no, no, I was mostly doing it just to be controversial. Well, but like doing audio, like editing and mixing and things like that, the trackpad is so much more functional that it's strange that I don't at least have both actively like working in here.
Here i i want to say back in like 2020 and 2021 when i was doing a lot of recording here like we were mixing the macworld all-star band stuff i might have had the trackpad going up here then i'll have to ask skylar my daughter because she was doing a lot of that with me if if we were using a trackpad or just the mouse but anyway yeah all right well we get a lot and then you got then they got the trackball people i don't want to take us down another rabbit hole but.
Um that's john f braun i guarantee you he's still using a trackball like he's not like this mouse is old this mouse might be almost as old as the show um but john would routinely you know buy new trackballs he loves the kensington whatever it is yeah a lot of people love that um yeah i think jeff gamet does that sometimes too i don't know if he still does or did yeah yeah i think it's also good for people like i've heard it's good if you have like carpal tunnel or something like that,
interesting it can help yeah it could be yeah yeah i don't know like the angle on that where you're you're you think it'd be worse yeah i would i would think maybe it's because you're not, moving as much i don't know yep all right while we're while we're on this tangent though i will ask how many people have taught themselves to be um ambidextrous with their pointing device like how good are you with a mouse with your left
hand versus your right or a trackball trackpad with your left hand versus your right. I taught myself to use, when we, you know, like with my Mac SE30, I think, you know, the first computer I had with a mouse, I realized that I was a better one-handed typist with my right hand than my left hand. And so doing work, especially a lot, I was doing a lot of page layout work back in those days.
And I noticed that I was just bouncing my hand back and forth, my right hand back and forth between the mouse and the keyboard. And my left hand was doing very little. I was like, well, this is super inefficient. So I spent a Saturday playing Shufflepuck Cafe, which was essentially like shuffleboard with the mouse. And I spent a Saturday playing Shufflepuck Cafe on my Mac SE30 only with my left hand. And after that point.
My left hand, I can use, even to this day, like I was, where was it that I recently did this? I think it was at Maxstock. The way they had their setup, they had like a mouse there, but it needed a trackpad on whatever the surface of the table was. This was like the production thing that Roger Harmon was primarily using, and I was helping him deal with the audio delays that we referenced during our show there.
And it was like oh he's like yeah the mouse you just got to fight with it and i'm like nope and i grabbed it and moved it over to the left because there was like something there that was a better you know makeshift trackpad and it was like yeah it's fine he's like oh that's good you can use it with both hands i'm like yeah it's just a thing it's really not that hard i like you could train your left hand to use the mouse pretty
well i i think i bet yeah yeah yeah and it was super helpful with clients if i got to a you know when i was doing a lot of field work if somebody was left-handed and their setup was like they're like oh you can move the mouse over i'm like no it's fine i'll just do it over here so yeah i used to switch i don't know why i haven't switched in a long time like i on my own setup i would you know go six months one way six
months another i don't know anyway tony has a tip for us in our episode of tangents he said uh i found on my ipad I went into the files app and found two download folders, one that was in my iCloud drive and synced to iCloud drive and another downloads folder that was just local on my iPad. And he said, so I fixed the confusion by renaming the one on iCloud to be called iCloud downloads.
And he's like, now I never get confused. confused i thought what a brilliant thing to do this is pc unix in our in our discord chat posted this and i i immediately went and did the same thing because on my phone i've gotten confused too like wait which downloads folder is this like it's i don't i don't know why we have both of them i'm sure somebody at apple decided it was a good idea to have a downloads folder that would be synced, but, um.
Great tip. Wait, there are two that are different? Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Yep. Oh, yeah. Look at that. Uh-huh. Yep. You get two. So change one. Change the one that's on iCloud Drive from being called download. What is the one that's on iCloud used for? This is one of the questions, one of the mysteries of the universe. Because I'm looking at this and the one that's in my home folder is the one that is obviously in the iCloud sync settings.
That's the one that should sync because I use desktop and documents, I think, right? Yeah, I'm pretty sure that's the way it is. I don't understand what this extra iCloud one is for. Yep.
I know. It's ridiculous. ridiculous it doesn't make sense to me like it that folder does exist on your mac simply because it's synced via icloud but your mac never exposes it to you in a way that you would choose it you know um so so mackey pie in our live discord chat at um live.mackeycap.com i'm pretty sure that's where that is says the iCloud downloads folder is used for Safari downloads on the iPhone and iPad so that's the default location of anything that Safari downloads.
I don't know that I like. Oh, so do those downloads folders not sync? I guess maybe not. Well, the one in iCloud syncs, but the other one does not. The local one does not sync. Right, because it's just at the root of your home folder. It's not part of the documents folder or the desktop folder. Interesting. Yep. I agree. Interesting is the right word.
Confusing is another word. Yep. well you know i just noticed something about this that may make sense with like the local mac one because that's like my default downloads folder and i noticed like there's a dmg installer in there you know and obviously i wouldn't need that on ios like so if i download an app from a website or something like that like i don't know maybe that was the thought process behind that Oh, I think on the Mac,
syncing your downloads folder would be, yes, it would potentially fill up your iCloud drive very, very quickly. And I suppose the presumption is on iPad and iPhone, you're not going to be downloading things quite as large or maybe even as often. I mean, I get it. Or just even things that are compatible, you know what I mean? That that was kind of my thing is like that dmg almost has no value on my on my ios device fair.
That's right that yeah yeah unless i just want it as a backup i i don't know yeah yeah i had no idea yep cool all right shall we go to joe yeah let's go to joe joe says today i was listening to an old episode and he gave a quick tip about cleaning your screen by turning your phone upside down so it doesn't wake up. I've used the same feature of turning the phone upside down to recommend for people who have a problem with pocket dialing or texting or updating Facebook, etc. unintentionally.
My wife was one of the perpetrators of this habit. I recommended to her that she puts her phone in her pocket or back pocket when she puts her phone in her pocket or back pocket to put it upside down so that if it is locked when it goes into her pocket, it should not wake up, let alone unlock, and allow her to do things by accident.
I know if you have a good passcode, it should prevent it. And sometimes the problem is just that somebody has failed to lock their phone before they put it in their pocket. Somehow, my dear spouse managed to do this all the time. It has resolved most of it since she started putting it in her pocket upside down when she's at work. So the question I would have here is, does she not, does she one of those people that doesn't use a passcode or lock her phone?
Because I think we were kind of discussing this earlier. And yes, when your phone is upside down, I guess it won't face on, it won't face ID unlock, right? So if it, it wakes up, it's not gonna. So that kind of makes sense to me. I never quite understood pocket dialing or butt dialing anyway, which is like, I couldn't figure out how that even happens.
Because like i lock my phone before i put it in my pocket like i literally click the button before i stick it in my pocket but even i butt dialed you know butt dialed somebody before and it's like how did that even happen my guess is that it happened because you didn't it was one of those occasions where you didn't press the button to lock your phone when you were putting it in your pocket that that like and i think i'm like you it it is part of my muscle memory to lock my phone as i'm putting
it in my pocket i do put it in upside down meaning charging port up and part of the reason i do that is because is well that way when i pull my phone out it's at the right orientation exactly but also it gets less pocket lint collected in the in the charging port over time right uh yeah yeah but lightning bunnies we used to call them on the mac cast bunnies although now it's usbc bunnies i guess but yeah yeah we used to talk about clearing out
the lightning bunnies what is your favorite way for clearing out the lightning bunnies adam. Toothpick yeah yeah i i use a plastic toothpick i i i have i i am not too proud to admit that i have done it with a metal paper clip before i i do not recommend this is to do as i say not as i I have done, uh, if I can avoid anything metal, obviously that is, is what I'm going to do. But I like, I think I was traveling once and couldn't charge my phone.
Cause you know, all the lint had just gotten impacted. Right. So it was like, well, like I'm, I'm just going to risk it and do this. So, yeah. You just reminded me. So I don't know why I didn't think of this. This like literally I think was last night or the night before. So we have, uh, a cord that we can plug in from a chair in our living room. And my wife goes, Oh, I think this cord is broken. Cause when she would wiggle the thing, her phone would stop charging. And, um.
And I'm like, I've never had an issue with it. And I plugged it in and mine was fine, wiggling the cord and stuff like that. And I said, you know, I wonder if your port's broken. Now I'm realizing it's probably just got crud in it. So I need to go see about just clearing it out. It's just not making a good connection. That's probably more likely than the actual port is broken.
I mean, port could be broken, but. it yeah yeah it's probably just the the the lint the lint i'm sure it is absolutely yeah yeah yep it's at least a thing to try before before i take it to the apple store to try and if you haven't done this before i i will advise like you really have to dig in there like this lint is impacted and yes as you're putting the cord in your yeah you're you're shoving it in there right Right. Exactly.
And so when you go to dig it out, like really dig in there, which is why it's way better to do this with something plastic. Of course, you have to be careful that the tip of your plastic toothpick doesn't break off and add to the crud that's in the bottom there. So, yeah. Yeah. Now I'm curious because I don't know if I've ever really done this.
You know i said lightning bunnies because lightning was pretty easy because there's nothing in the middle right the contacts are on the outside yeah but now with usbc. It's got to be harder because that's a tight space and it's got the the thing sticking out in the middle right yeah yeah yep yep yeah i don't think i've ever i don't Yeah, my guess is it would be less of an issue because there's that thing in there. But you're right, I haven't de-linted my USB-C phone either.
Yeah, man, I don't know what to do if I need to, though. I need something. Yeah, I don't even think a toothpick would fit in there. And you definitely wouldn't want to, like, go heavy. Because you bend that thing. Because I'd worry about bending or snapping the little thing in the middle. Yeah, yeah. All right. Uh, last week we announced, and it's, it's still the case, uh, our giveaway, uh, for August, which we're giving away.
Uh, we partnered with the folks at reincubate who make camo and we are giving away with them five licenses of camo. And many of you went to sign up and many of you were able to do so, but a lot of you had I had a problem signing up at MacGeekUp.com slash giveaway because Apple's iCloud private relay was causing a problem with our giveaway provider. I think, and it's just a service provider that we use to manage the engine for the giveaways, which is great.
I think there were two problems happening. The good news is it's solved. One problem, I think, was that our giveaway provider was flagging anyone that was coming using even Safari's tracking protection as using a VPN and they weren't letting you sign up. The second was that Apple's iCloud Private Relay had an outage recently that also was contributing to this problem. Both of those things have been addressed. We worked with our survey provider,
and of course, Apple fixed their problem without us having to work with them. But yes, all good. And we're back in business on that. So if you have not signed up, please go sign up. And even if you have, you can refer other people and you can get additional signups in there and register to win one of those five licenses.
When was that private relay outage? Because I'm now wondering, we had that last episode question of somebody who said, you know, in Safari, none of my images are loading, you know, like everything's broken. And I had recommended turning off private relay stuff, but I wonder if that was only an intermittent outage. I think you're right. Yes. And we had several people write in about that too. And I believe you are correct that that was the solution.
I think I might have also got caught by that because that week too, I had a couple instances, and I think I brought this up on the show as well, where like Safari just wouldn't load anything. Like it just like died. And I ended up like rebooting my phone completely because I couldn't click on anything. It was just became non-responsive. So. Yep. Yep. I think, I think we all kind of ran into our own versions of that. So, right. Yeah. Yep. So my apologies for all of the craziness with it.
It was, it was a perfect storm of events that were timed with our launch of our first giveaway, but you know, all good things have to have a little bit of a, you know, nothing ever, nothing good ever works out smoothly in the beginning. You got to have like a little, you know, just some, some little hiccups. Yeah. We love the hiccups here. Um, I mean that just before we move on, that's just a good general tip.
Again, Safari has all of these privacy protections, all these things, which are great things. Yes. But if you ever run into an issue using Safari on a website, just a good general tip is try a different browser.
Yep. um especially if it's like you know i've had it with all kinds of um e-commerce sites is another very common one that i run into where safari sometimes just doesn't work because, unfortunately they want to have all that tracking and all that other stuff so yes right and it can break things it can break things yeah exactly yeah yeah yeah and and.
Uh and i like to have that tracking protection on uh me too yeah my first safari but sometimes it's just like i just need to get this order in or i just need to get this government form filled out you know it's like i need to get this done gotta get it done i can't i can't mess with this yeah yeah i guess they the other tip is i think in safari too you can temporarily just disable that I want to say from the URL bar, like right-click and do website settings for that specific site,
and you can control that. So that's probably another little tip. You can just disable or change the settings. You can disable content blockers, but I don't know about tracking protection. Is it only content blockers? It's possible I don't have tracking protection enabled on this computer. No, maybe I just thought that was the same thing or similar things.
But um mackie pie says that it is in the page menu i'm not sure where the page menu is on my mac i don't have a page menu reduce privacy protections is the option okay i don't but i don't know where that is i'm not i'm not seeing it on my mac so we will we will continue to We'll have to follow up. Yeah. We'll follow up on that. I am speaking of new things that Apple's doing. I mentioned I have been running iOS 18 beta on my daily driver, iPhone 15 pro.
And I took the option to jump up to 18.1 so that I could get in on the Apple intelligence beta. And I will say that this is all still a beta. So I, I don't want to spend time complaining about bugs and something that obviously is known to have bugs and all of that. When the Apple intelligence does what I would expect it to do, it's much better than what Siri has been in the past. But it's currently inconsistent where I'll ask it a question.
Like I asked it how old we were driving home from a concert or something. And I asked it, you know, how old, we went and saw Green Day. So I was like, how old is Billy Joe Armstrong? And it answered. And then- I asked, how old is Mike Durant? And it was like, I can't show you that information while you're driving. It's like, okay, cool. But like, I know that it's going to get better. It has to get better. Otherwise, Apple's out of this particular game, right?
So that's what I say when it, when it works and when it's doing the things and when it can, and I've asked it more complex things and had it synthesized data together and give me answers and things like that. So that that part of it, it work in progress. And we all know that. But the glimpses that I have seen of it show hope. And it's important to note that the chat GPT integration is not there yet,
even in at least in the betas that I get to run. So, so like there's a whole other door waiting to be unlocked here. So that part's great. But I, I did notice two things that I wanted to talk about. Number one, the flashlight on I with, again, this is my same iPhone 15 pro that I have had for a very long time.
Well, you know, since the fall when I could get one, the flashlight, when you bring it up it has a new interface and the interface has uh the ability to set the brightness of the flashlight like we've always had and then also you can set the width of the beam of the flashlight i don't know how this is possible uh like this functionality clearly has been there in the phone since it was built and I never noticed it in iOS 17 but it's certainly there in iOS 18 you can set the
beam width to be wide or narrow and then you can set the intensity and the interface is much smoother than than it ever has been before so I like that's a cool thing that I think is coming to iOS 18 and I and I liked it, Do we know if the beam width feature is limited to certain hardware? I would imagine that it is, but I don't know that. Yes. Yeah, I'd be curious if that's only an iOS or iPhone 15 thing or how far it may or may not go back.
Yeah. Well, if you know, feedback at macgeekup.com, let us know. I'm curious to know because, yeah.
What was that? i think you said feedback at mackeycap.com i said feedback at mackeycap.com that's right yeah gotcha okay cool porthos john in the chat says uh also running 18.1 and this might work on previous versions of ios 2 when you get that i can't show you that information in the car thing porthos john suggests uh retry the request with read to me the results of this and uh He says it works some of the time so that I will I will remember that in my
moments of frustration my blind rage at Siri I will ask her to read to me yeah yeah the question is can you do that is just a follow on statement or do you have to say. Read to me the age of, you know, what is the age of so-and-so? That whole request. Yeah, I will try both. It will invariably come up. The car for me is where, you know, you get into that default mode network where you're sort of like on autopilot and your brain just kind of like does stuff in the background.
And invariably, I come up with like little things. And that's why I leave notes or reminders for myself and because I know I'll forget them. But also, you know, I have these curiosity things. And when I'm driving alone late at night home from a gig to stay awake, engaging, having a conversation with Siri, it's often a great way to sort of re-energize myself and make sure I don't fall asleep.
Sleep and and so i will i will certainly have an opportunity to uh to test this out very soon so i will oh yeah porthos john says i think siri rage is more dangerous than road rage while driving you're right it's certainly more common yeah yeah um the other thing that is coming and is there for For many, but not yet me, in iOS 18 is the RCS messaging support. It is carrier dependent. And what's really interesting is I found a Macworld article that talks about this.
People with the major carriers, T-Mobile, Verizon, AT&T, if you're running iOS 18, you have RCS messaging support. This is the rich messaging that makes essentially texting with Android people far more like iMessage with the rich messages that you're able to send back and forth. It's better than SMS messaging. And if you have one of the major carriers, it's there.
If you have one of the MVNOs, the Mobile Virtual Network Operators, like Mint Mobile, I'll say Visible, although I'll come back to that, Xfinity Mobile, those kinds of things that don't have their own towers, but instead lease space with others. Many of those, in fact, initially, all of those did not have RCS support. And the reason I thought it was just because the carrier hadn't turned it on. And that's by and large, that's correct.
But it's not that the carrier hadn't turned it on for iPhones. It's that the carrier hadn't turned on RCS at all. When someone with an Android phone does messaging, you know, and has, say, Mint Mobile and messages another Android phone, that's using Google's RCS backbone, similar to Apple's iMessage backbone. That's very different than the carrier directly supporting RCS. On iPhones, it's only carrier support that works.
So I know that since iOS 18 has been in beta, Visible has enabled RCS on their network, and therefore it's now open to iPhone and Android users. We're hoping that Mint and other companies will do the same thing.
But this is it's not just and i need to enable it for the iphone thing it's they need to enable it thing which is which was an interesting distinction to find that out it's like ah this makes yeah that's interesting to know yeah i have to imagine that will get resolved even before ios 18 launches officially oh yeah unless it's really difficult for a carrier to turn it on but my guess is hopefully it's not right yeah hopefully it's not yeah exactly yeah yeah um yeah yeah yeah so we'll see
i'm i i remain ever hopeful and i swear i'm not obsessively checking to turn this on by the way uh the place i'm not obsessively checking is settings the settings app go to apps because Because your app settings are now not on the main screen. So you go to settings, apps, and then choose messages. And in there, right where you would find the turn on the SMS messaging and other switches like that, if it's capable for your provider,
you will see a new line item for RCS messaging. And you can go in and turn that on. That's the that's the way it works. All right, folks. Have you ever felt like your text editor is just a glorified notepad? Don't get caught in the digital Stone Age upgrade to BB Edit. I use BB Edit all the time to count words, compare documents, track timestamps for our podcast show notes, and even, of course, do a bit of coding.
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And our thanks to BBEdit and Bare Bones for sponsoring this episode. You know, Adam, while we're here, we just obviously thank BB Edit because we love our sponsors. We also love our premium members. And I wanted to take a minute and thank our premium members whose contributions have come in over the last couple of weeks. Because we always get to the end of the episode and then it's like, oh, I really want to do this. So I'm doing it now because...
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Uh so ten dollar contributions came in with thanks to from and with thanks to uh gary in babylon jason in charlestown robert in columbiana steven in costa mesa jeremiah and edgewater donald in furlong nick in marquette james in melbourne cory in midlothian cal and russellville Bill Mark in Vero Beach and John in Vienna. Thanks to all of you. We had $25 contributions come in from and thanks to Tim in Bright, James in Chester, Joseph in Furquay, Verena.
I think I'm pronouncing that right. I'm probably not. Glenn in I'm going to say it my way because I know I will mispronounce it in your language. Glenn in Munich, Mark in Roslindale, Joseph in Shorewood, and William in Verona. And then thanks to both Everett in Dover and Anthony in Rockville for their $50 contributions. You all rock. And thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you for everything.
It's amazing that we get to do this. and simply listening to the show is is the fact that all of you listen and engage in all of that is super humbling and and this is the icing on the top so thank you for supporting us and it's really it really is important and if uh if you want to learn more about that of course mackeycup.com slash premium awesome thank you. Yeah, thank you. All right, shall we do some questions? Yeah, Andy has a question for you, I think.
He says, on MacGeekGab1049, Dave mentioned that some ISPs are starting to offer home internet connections that are more than a gigabit of bandwidth. That got me wondering, how much bandwidth is actually useful to pay for? What kind of use would a connection of even one gig really make, or what kind of use would a connection of even one gig really make a difference for?
My thought has been that in most cases, whenever I've looked at download speeds, it never comes close to saturating even a 250 meg connection. My assumption is always been that there must be upstream bottlenecks outside of my house.
So when is it worth paying for more? I'm wondering if any of you have thoughts or experiences on that topic obviously as a geek i want the bigger number on the bandwidth but i would also like a smaller number on the invoice yeah me too yeah i i pay for a gig and it's not cheap here yeah so i also have a gigabit connection here um. I think about this a lot, right? This is a great question, Andy.
When I got to the point where I had 300 megabits per second down at my house, and this was still with a cable connection, so I think it was 300 down and like 10 or 12 up or something pitiful. I remember thinking on the downstream, this 300 is enough. I wish I could have the upstream to match, but at the time that wasn't an option.
And and then i did uh my cable company which in our area is xfinity allowed me to move up to a gigabit down and a whopping 40 megabits up or 35 or whatever it was and it was like okay so i paid for the 35 up and it happened to come with a gig down but since that moment in time i have not noticed a real functional difference in downstream speeds since I moved from like moving up to from wherever I was before moving up to let that whatever
300 number was at the time that I noticed it like made a difference when I was downloading you know disk images or updates or things like that. And then when fiber showed up they had it's all symmetrical right so my gigabit down is also a gigabit up, I thought about going with the 250 up and down when fiber came, but it was like a $10 a month difference between the two. And so I was like, well, I mean, for 10 bucks a month and I get to say I have
symmetrical gigabit fiber, well, I'm going to do that. Right. But if it had been half the price, I would have absolutely just gone with 250 up and down and probably wouldn't notice a difference.
I think if you told me today hey look we've been lying to you we artificially, inflate your speed test numbers because that's the only time when I really see like you know full bandwidth back and forth we artificially have been inflating your speed test numbers but everything else has been at 250, I'd believe you like be like yeah okay because so many other things where I really want more speed is on my uploads.
And like when I'm uploading the show or whatever even uploading the video or not the video the audio of this show i can't upload the video to apple uploading the video or the audio of this show to apple it rarely goes at gigabit and apple is like the best one out there it's usually more like half a gig is the speed that i get when i'm uploading when i upload the video of this to spotify it goes at like maybe 300 300 megabits per second.
Like, you know, there's, there's other things on the internet that slow this stuff down. So, um, yeah, yeah. I, you know, I do notice to answer the question, how much is enough? I can certainly only answer that for me when I'm at a hotel that has like 50 megabits per second or slower, I notice it. But above 50 when I'm getting to that it gets close to 75 or 100 megabits or above at a hotel, it just feels normal to me it's like yep it just works so but I love having more speed.
Yeah, I'm like you. I mean, being a podcaster, the upload was much more important to me than the download speed. Because I wanted to get on with my life after getting a show done. It's like, I just want to get it posted up there. I want to get it done. But I don't think a lot of people need the upstream bandwidth. I mean, maybe more another thing where it's another area where it's important for me now is because I work from home.
So I'm on zoom calls all the time. So I don't want my, you know, zoom video stuttering for other people and all of that stuff. So, or doing things like this, right? Like doing this, I want good upload speeds just as much as I want good download speeds. So that's the main reason I pay for it, but not everybody has that use case.
The only other thing I can think of is, uh, and I may, this may be a red herring and me not understanding how download speeds were, but when I had four people in my house and everybody's watching streaming video in 4k on a different device on a different service it just felt like we didn't run into those issues where like we were running out of bandwidth so for sure yeah during during covid when everybody was you know streaming or online or
doing all the things all day i mean it was like we were running a small office at our home right yeah i mean in a sense we we actually do run a small office at home. I will argue, though, that it's more than just us podcasters who want upstream. I think with all the photo, like all the syncing that we do. Syncing, yeah. Syncing and back online backups.
But, you know, and I realize that we could and have had the conversation about that sync and backup are similar enough that we can probably call them the same thing for most people and in most cases. But that that syncing of photos, I would notice it when I was on my whopping 10 megabit upload connection.
If we went out to somewhere where all of us were taking pictures and then we got home, as soon as our phones saw the Wi-Fi connection, they would all start like barfing all of those pictures up to iCloud. That's just how it works. And if I sat there, my wife sat down at our computer to check our email, it would be slow for the first, you know, 10, 15 minutes that we were home while the upstream was just soaked with all of that.
So I think upstream matters. The symmetrical nature of fiber is, I think, the best part about fiber. Even if you buy the lowest speed tier, you're going to see a huge difference. Even if your speed tier is a lower download speed than you used to have. Like if I had gone from 300 to 250, uh.
I think i still would have experienced a better internet experience than i did with with the you know limited upstream with cable we have heard from xfinity that they are rolling out something either symmetrical or closer to symmetrical for people because they have to compete like with fiber otherwise like people are going to do what i did i have what three fiber providers at available at my house now and and then cable so and i live like it's weird for me to like
i you know i'm yeah there's a university here but that covid is why we have what we have not the fact that there's a university yeah yeah you have um i bet you have good better pricing that that's my only complaint here i we've got one provider and it's not cheap for a gigabit oh yeah yeah at all Yeah, I was paying, I think I was paying 109 a month or something to Xfinity for their gigabit down connection and 35 up.
And now I pay, well, I'm paying Fidium, which is consolidated 79, no, 69 a month for our gigabit symmetrical. But I could be paying BreezeLine 59 a month for symmetrical gigabit. But they just had that problem with their IP addresses and I couldn't buy concert tickets, which is a disaster. You don't even want to know what I'm paying. What provider do you have out there? I have, well, I don't know if I want to say it because it will dox me.
Okay, that's fair. All right, fair enough. A local, a very local provider.
Got it. But it's the only one that has gigabit fiber and i pay 175 a month and that's symmetrical yeah okay yeah and they just came out with they just came out with their uh now i can get two gigabit if i want but it's i think 240 and i'm like no i don't need it yeah i i didn't feel the need for the two gig connection until we were at max stock and listener Dan showed us his speed test numbers and it was like, oh, look at that. Like you get 1800 up and down like that's amazing.
I need that. I don't need that. You don't. No, no. In fact, it was kind of funny because Dan, as with many homes, most homes, in fact, doesn't have ethernet run throughout his house, but. And so, you know, from his office to get to his network rack, which is where his like Synology disk station is and stuff. It's a wifi connection.
It's a pretty good one. Like he's getting, you know, he's using wifi 60 or whatever, and he's getting, I think a thousand or more like gigabit or, or faster, but he said, you know, I have a faster connection to my disk station from my office because of my two gig way, you know, fiber connection than I do from like his office, his remote, like the office that's not at his house than he does from the office that is at his house. And it was like, oh, that's really frustrating.
You got to run some ethernet cable. He's like, I know. Right. Right. And just so nobody gets really sad about me for my internet connection. Uh, again, I work from home, uh, remote and I, my company does give me a, a monthly stipend for internet access as part of my compensation. So So it takes some of the sting out, not all of it, but a good portion of it. Oh, that's a good idea. Huh. I like that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. All right. Good. Well, yeah. I mean, they don't have a giant
office that they're paying for. Right. We got some additional benefits. We also get a certain amount of money just for home office supplies and stuff like that. Right. Huh. If I need a new desk or I need a new monitor or something like that, some of those things are covered. I like that. I never even thought about that. And that's on me. All right. There might be some changes here coming at BackBeat Media in the next couple of weeks. Great.
You can use that in Business Brain. I'm going to use it in Business Brain, but I think I'm also going to actually institute it here at BackBeat. Like, yeah, why not? Yeah, put your internet connection on the corporate card. Like, sure. Makes sense. Yeah. I like it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. All right. Makes good sense. Go. Speaking of internet connections and devices and routers and all that stuff, Chris, we got actually a couple questions. We'll start with Chris.
He says, hi, guys. Seems like I'm getting caught here and I need some help. Meros, Meros, Meros? Meros, let's call it Meros, yeah. It is useless, as is TP-Lynx. Well, sorry to hear that. I decided to fix my non-existent problem by upgrading my Nemesh network from an older Eero to the TP-Link Deco AX3000 Wi-Fi 6 mesh system. It's supposed to be pretty good. Yeah. I set the same network name and password. So all my IoT devices would theoretically just connect.
Well, this worked great for everything except my Meros smart outlets. I'm living like a cave person and I need to get back to the future ASAP. app. I've gone into the settings in the Deco app and I've done everything I can think of. I have added the IOT network. I have changed the frequencies. I have removed the password entirely. I have changed security types. I have stood on one foot, held my breath, and chanted in Latin.
I think this is what used to be called the rubber chicken process by Yes, yes, yes. Certain people, yes, wave the rubber chicken. I keep getting the error that I need to reset my router, and I really don't think that I need to do that. So what's going on? Yeah. Okay, so thinking about sort of all of these data points that Chris sent in, and I love this, like lots of information, we get to synthesize it and process it.
I think that your tp-link deco is working fine and and the reason is if all of the other devices just connected to it without fail without hiccups without fanfare then it means that you set the same ssid and same security and authentication and they all just saw it and they were happy to jump to it. So I don't think, I don't think, could be wrong, that the problem is with the DECO. Operating under that assumption, let's look at what did change.
So the SSID didn't change, the password, the authentication method, all that must have remained the same. What did change? Well, the hardware changed, right? You swapped out the Deco for the Eero, fine. But that also means that the Mac address changed. Not the address of your computer, the Mac, but the MAC, the media access control address, which is a unique identifier that is theoretically unique to every Ethernet and Wi-Fi device that's out there.
So your Wi-Fi access points have different Mac addresses. And it went from being whatever the MAC address of your Eero's radio was to the MAC addresses of the radios in the Deco. And so, again, operating under another assumption is that the morass devices, instead of bonding to the network name and happily migrating to the same network name on a different MAC address that they bonded to the MAC address and they are looking for that and not finding it.
And so my next step would be factory reset your Moras devices and re-add them as though your network is new or that they are new to your network. And hopefully that does it. Hopefully there's not like some thing where it's tied to your Moras account. I mean, it's HomeKit, I believe, these Moras devices. So they should inherit what your phone tells them to inherit. That's kind of where I go with that. Yeah.
The only other thing that I can think of, and just because it wasn't mentioned, but I would presume that this was already tried, but I'm just going to throw it out there just in case it's like, oh, yeah, firmware updates for the Moras. Was that checked to see if there's a firmware update that got missed? That's a great idea. Yes. Yeah. Who knows? Right.
It could very well be something where the, you know, the morass, whatever the unit is, whatever Wi-Fi chip they put in there is somehow incompatible with whatever TP-Link is doing. I have even saying that out loud. I feel like I have to walk back that statement because it would be so atypical for those two brands, especially to not be using stuff that's standardized enough. I mean, they're so widespread.
And I have a bunch of Moras devices. And I want to say that I have some Moras smart switches. And I change networks here all the time. And I think they hopped back and forth in my recent test bouncing between Eero and Synology. Again, same SSID, same authentication that they bounce back and forth just fine. So I don't yeah I don't know I don't but the factory reset would not the morass would be the thing. Dave, I have a premonition. Go. I feel an Allison email in our future.
Uh-oh. What's the Allison email going to be about? Just because we're talking about morass and issues. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, that's right. Allison doesn't like morass stuff, right? I don't know why. She's going to have an opinion. She's going to have an opinion about why this is happening. I love that. I welcome it. Feedback at mackeykev.com. I want to know. I'd love to learn these things. Yeah. Yeah, no, me too. Yeah, it's great. Right.
Just baking that prediction now, but I could be wrong. You're probably right. Yeah. Thank you for all of your feedback. Everyone and Alison. Yes. So, uh, I might have a, I might have a problem. What's your problem, Adam? My problem is, uh, notes has become unresponsive. Okay. I think it might've come back. Oh, it was being unresponsive. Well, that's bad. That's bad. Well, is notes responsive enough to take us to cliff?
No, that's my problem. Okay. okay oh i'll hear i got it here good i sure no it's like literally not responding all right i i will read i'm gonna quit and restart it but yeah you can read it i'll read cliff's question for for us of course uh yeah cliff writes and says uh let's see yep yep yeah i got it you got it yeah but now i'm trying to figure out where i i think it's it's cliff's second topic in his his question. Yeah, about IoT devices, right? Yeah, go ahead. Yeah, I got it right here.
Sorry, I just had to quit and restart notes. I listened to the pod while commuting and this episode had two topics that compelled me to respond. One, the question regarding unmounting drives when using your home setup for a work computer. My answer is don't do it. This may fall under the category of don't get caught, but in general, your employer owns all the data on your work computer, and that can extend to data services mounted by your work computer.
And I realize we want to talk about the second part. No, but that's a good thing to bring up. Like, it is, make sure you understand your employer's policies before you connect personal data to your work devices, for sure. Yeah. Yep. And then he says, that leads me to my second topic. You had a question regarding upgrading from an Eero to a UniFi, which I want to hear much more on.
Per the above rant, I would love to have separate networks, VLANs for my home use, guests, IoT devices, and work computer access to keep security clean.
Can you extend your response to discuss the best options out there unify etc which make it easy for a non-network geek to set up separate channels for your wi-fi needs i actually need the answer to this question too because this has been daunting me thanks as always for the fun and useful pod and i hope pete's daughter made it home yeah cliff i i believe everything worked out okay with with all those flights that were going on during the last episode. Yep.
So looking for the non-geek way to set up VLANs for IoT devices, my advice remains, there isn't one, don't do it. But in fact, I would expand and use that same answer. I mean, there is ways, there are ways to do this, of course, but my advice would remain the same to people who want the very geeky way of doing this and that is don't do it. IoT devices often need, you need to connect directly to them for management or like a printer, for example, you need to connect directly to it to print to it.
I've seen more headaches caused by segmenting one's network than security issues or, you know, disasters avoided.
Voided it's very rare that we hear of an i especially these days now of an iot device you know running rampant on your network and doing all the bad security things and all that stuff i i so i don't i don't run separate vlans i know many of you do and and i i like not only welcome but encourage the feedback about this because if i'm missing something i definitely want to be educated on this, but it, it just seems like more trouble than it's worth to have to,
to choose to manage separate networks for your IOT devices versus other things, especially with all the home automation stuff that we do. It's just so handy to have everything all on one network. So that, that's my advice and answer.
It might not be what you were looking for. right but but that said it you know if you have a uh a router that will let you set up a separate wi-fi network like a guest network or something like that you certainly could connect your iot devices to the guest network they are going to be segmented and and protected on that and and really if you must that would be the non-geek way to set up another network for your iot devices is to just put them on your guest network and be done with it. So-
That would be, that would be one non-geek way. The other non-geek way would be to set up a, just add another router and have them all connect to that and have that compartmentalized off of your network too. So I don't know. What do you think? If you do that, if you, well, okay. So I have a question about that. So I think that's, that's great advice.
I I'm curious how that works. So if I put all of my IOT devices on my guest network, I'm assuming because there's a internet access point say for my at least for my home kit i just don't know how this works with other other devices like can i still control those devices from my main that my phone and my home pods and stuff that are on my main network you know through s lady and all that other stuff or am i having to switch networks to right to control my iot devices i guess that's that'd be
my question that's the headache i'm talking about avoiding right so the answer is it depends with home kit i think they it if they're wi-fi devices then they need to your whatever device is talking to them needs to be able to talk to them right because home kit is a local connection uh and and certainly you can have like an apple tv or whatever or a home pod that's acting as the network gateway for those things. Yeah. Right. But it's still talking to them locally on your network. Now,
if they're Bluetooth devices, that's different. Um. For your cloud-managed devices, which a lot of IoT devices still are, not – well, HomeKit devices can also be cloud-managed by the vendor's apps. It's not like HomeKit prevents them from being cloud-managed, right? It's just HomeKit works differently. But the cloud-managed devices would still work fine if you put them on a guest network because you're never talking directly to the device. You're talking out and back via the internet. Right.
Unless you're using something like Home Assistant, which is built to bypass the latency that is inherent in going out and back to the Internet. And it sort of just knows how to talk directly to your devices. And that's one of the things that people love Home Assistant for is that it's so fast to access your devices because Home Assistant runs on like a Mac or a Raspberry Pi or Synology or something locally.
Locally and it's only talking locally to your devices it's not going out and back to the cloud so you get that really responsive thing which can matter with like light switches and things like that if you get a smart switch you push it you don't want to have to wait even half a second feels weird until you're used to it for a light to come on you know you touch it and boom it responds right away so i yeah yeah i i think you're going to create a headache it create it if you want but be very aware
and make sure everyone in your house is very aware that there might be weirdness and this might be why there's weirdness right yeah i mean i i solved the inconvenience security factor a different way which is i made the conscious choice that i was only going to buy and use home kit devices okay and then i'm okay with them all being on the same network because of Apple's posture with home kit on security and all those things.
Like I don't worry about a home kit device doing something weird or rogue. You know, and I'm not going to go buy some off brand third party Chinese cheap camera, Just because, like, I don't trust that company. I did, you know, but that's kind of how I chose to do it. So can I burst your bubble? Yeah, burst my bubble. So the issue is the false sense of security that HomeKit devices bring.
You are absolutely right that the HomeKit protocols are local on your network and therefore very secure and all of that. But as we just mentioned, devices that support HomeKit can also support web-based, cloud-based control from the manufacturer, A-Lady control. The Google Assistant control, all those things. And so you can have a device on your main network that is HomeKit capable and HomeKit linked, but also talks out to the internet via its own thing.
So and and this is why buying brands that you know and trust would be the way to mitigate this sure you could also set up your and again this now gets geeky and might cause problems but you could buy home kit devices and then on your router set up a profile that says don't Don't let these devices talk to the Internet.
Only let them talk locally on the network. And then that way they can't leak your data out to the Internet because they're literally not allowed to talk any to anything other than other devices on the local network. You might cause problems with some devices doing that. Don't know. Sure. But that would be the way to sort of mitigate that. I know. I'm sorry. I burst your bubble. I just I didn't. No, no, it's fair. I should have thought it through more. and now you've made me think it through
more. That's what we do on this show. Yep. For better and for worse. Yep. So, yeah. Cool. Yep. We have lots more, but, you know, we're at the hour 13 mark here. That's where we usually try to end. Is there one more question you want to go through or do we call it for today? We could do one more. All right. All right. You want me to you want me to take us to Felix? Is that is that the one you want to do about that? I think that's a good one to close. I agree. Yep. All right.
Felix asks, I'm having trouble with my photos library because it's on an external drive, which obviously means I need to have that drive connected every time I want to open photos. And of course, uh, even if you don't open photos, iCloud photo library needs that drive attached no matter what. So you can't even quit photos and eject it.
He says, I originally moved the library to the external drive to organize my photos, but I ended up adding a lot more photos and the library has grown to about 500 gigs. I want to move the photos library back to my internal drive and use the optimize feature to save space. But my internal drive doesn't have enough room to bring 500 gigs back to it. Can you guide me on how to move the library back to my main drive? I am using Mac OS 14, AKA Sonoma on an M one max MacBook pro with gobs of Ram.
Thanks Felix. What do you think? Yep. Yep. Well, well, I thought I had the simple answer to this, which is just like, you can just move the library and, and set it back up and you'll be fine. But he threw in the curve ball of now my library on the external is too large to bring back to, to my Mac. So in that situation, I think you have a couple of options, um, because you are using iCloud photo library in, well, not in theory, In actuality, you could set up and enable a new library on your Mac.
And then set it up for optimize in terms of how you're going to have that library, which means, it will download as much stuff as it as can fit and leave other stuff in the cloud. So you're not going to have your full library local, not the full 500 gigabytes, but as much of it will come down and then it will like manage that, right?
If you've got new stuff, the new stuff's going to to come in older stuff that you're not looking at it's going to stay in the cloud and that should all work and it should just populate now you what you want to do is you want to set this up, and then you know leave your your external one until all the syncing happens so depending on your connection and all that stuff it may take a while what i don't necessarily like about this solution
is then you have to and i know there's some debate on this we talked about earlier is Is syncing backup or not backup? You know, I'm one of those people like, especially with my photo library, I want a local copy that I can then completely back up. And obviously your local library is now not gonna be complete because you have had to do the optimize because it won't all fit on your drive.
So the other option that I would think you might be able to go with is cleaning up the library before you just move the whole thing, i.e. Use a tool like Power Photos on the external one to break the library up into stuff that maybe you want to archive and back up. Maybe you can clean out some of the, you know, blurry, not as great photos and sort of make the main library smaller with like the really good photos that you want to keep.
So that does get small enough that you can literally just move it back to your Mac and not have to keep it optimized on your Mac. But that's going to obviously require you to do a lot more housekeeping. And I get how that is, you know, inconvenient for some people. Some people just want, you know, I just want to dump everything in there. I don't want to have to think about it. I just want it to sync. So it's going to kind of depend on what you, but on what you want to do.
And I've had this with, with my wife's library. We've had to move hers to an external drive because it's just got huge and she has a MacBook Air and it doesn't have a large drive. So I got her, you know, a large external SSD. But now when she wants to use her photo library, she's got to plug that in. Yep. Right. When she wants to sync things. So you're trading, you know, different kinds of inconveniences and management depending upon what you want to do.
But I'm a, I always want my iCloud photo library local and I want it completely synced on my Mac because that's the one that has all my backups. ups. So you have some options here, but. That's what I would think. I don't know about you, Dave. Yeah, I have some thoughts. My first thought on the sync versus backup thing with iCloud Photo Library specifically.
I think it ventures into the backup realm, simply the cloud backup realm, because it retains deleted stuff for 30 days or something like that. So it's not like if you delete it, it's gone from everywhere instantly.
Constantly you've got a little bit of a safety net there and and to me that's where backup kind of the difference between sync and backup happens and of course if you're using optimize that's not sync because sync implies that it's in at least two places and when you turn on optimize it's only in one now apple has yet to lose anyone's photos if they do we would hear about it and it would be terrible for apple so i think they know this and they take a
lot of precautions to make sure that that cannot happen still i like to keep a local copy of my photos but i have an idea and i did this for a client years ago and i think they're still operating under this uh this scenario because their main computer is a laptop so like felix they want to have the flexibility and portability of having access to their photos without having to have a drive dongling off of it And of course,
because of iCloud Photos, if you've got your iCloud Photo Library on that drive, it just needs to sort of be connected all the time and that's a pain in the neck. So the solution was two user accounts. Same iCloud user, right? So you create your primary account and that you have the Photos Library local on your drive and it's set to optimize. So you can go anywhere you want. And when an account is logged out, iCloud doesn't sync. And that's the iCloud photo library doesn't sync.
And so the second account is the account logged into the same iCloud so that you get the same iCloud photo library. But that one, you connect an external drive and sync the whole thing down. And then put it in your calendar that once a week, maybe on Saturday night, you plug your laptop into charge. You log into the alternate account, plug in the drive, let it sync everything down. Overnight, you wake up on Sunday morning, you log out of that account. Now that syncing process stops.
Log back into the main account, eject the drive. You're good to go for the week. It kind of gets you the best of both worlds without having to drive yourself crazy. It's a little bit crazy. So two Mac user accounts, but same iCloud. That's, that's good. Yeah. Yeah. That was my solution for them. And they were like, Oh wait, this is going to work. I'm like, yeah, I know. I'm pretty good at this. Yeah. It's like, it turns out every now and then I have a good idea. So yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yeah, that was my, that, that was the recommended solution for my whole, uh, work. Uh, I need a dev developer, iCloud account and like two Mac accounts in this case, different iCloud accounts, but same kind of thing. Like I never thought about using separate Mac accounts. Right. Separate. You can have two and I've confirmed this. I've, I've done this. You can have two accounts on the same computer and you can also have two accounts on different computers logged into the same iCloud account.
And that's where this particular bit of magic sort of all comes together when you start thinking. I mean, take it one step further. I like, I like that second option, maybe even better, which is if you have an old Mac, just set that up as your local iCloud, like yes, backup whole system.
Right. And you could just leave that one logged into that account with an external drive connected to the i and that's the one that syncs yes i mean i've got a old mac mini sitting here that i never reconnected you know that's like my wife's old old you know mac mini and it's not doing anything right now that could be my iCloud you know backup whole system and it wouldn't be that hard to set up so all right so now i have to uh keep us going here because i've held this cool stuff found for,
well, this particular one for about a month and a half, but the same thing has been in cool stuff found sort of pending for a while. And it is something that listener Paul wrote in. He says this conversation seems to come up. But having your iCloud photos downloaded to a local spot so you don't lose them is sure a nice reassurance. And he says with network storage devices that have enough storage, it's pretty easy to spin up a Docker container to do this daily using something called iCloud PD.
And he says, I've got this going on my Synology and backing up, uh, then to my other Synologies, you know, all those things. And he says, I have my photos downloading. I have my wife's photos downloading. And, uh, he says, then I'm also going to run an engine called image to do photo recognition, but he's not quite there yet, but yeah, it's this thing called iCloud PD. It's available on GitHub, but you can find it in, in Docker repos for the Synology too. And, and all of that stuff.
And it stands for iCloud Photos Downloader. And it's a little bit nerdy to set up, but it's not terrible. The worst part is that once a month, you have to go and re-authenticate the token for this because you can't give it your, I mean, you can give it your iCloud password, but it needs the two-factor authentication. And that expires after 30 days from Apple. And so you need to just, you know, go in once every 30 days and sort of reauthenticate it. But I have it running.
It works like it's it's pretty amazing. And it just does the thing. And now that's that's another sort of best of of the world kind of thing here, too. So. I know we might have set this up on my new sonology. See what I mean? Yep. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's why I had to bring this up. So yeah, I cloud PD and I know there's a couple of people on the discord that are excited about it. So I put the, the link is in the show notes. Thank you. Listener, Paul and everyone who has written in about this.
Um, and, uh, and yeah, it, it had to come up. So yeah, that sounds awesome. Yep. But now I really think it's time to end the show, Adam. I think, I think we must. Yeah. So thanks for hanging out with us, everybody. Hopefully you learned many things. Hopefully five. I hope. I hope. Thanks for listening. Thanks for sending in all your stuff. It's you that makes this show possible for all the reasons. Without your questions and tips and cool stuff found, we'd have to do a different show.
I'm sure we'd figure something out, but this is way more fun and way more educational. We get to learn and enjoy. So thanks to all of you. Thanks to Cashfly for providing all the bandwidth to get the show from us to you. And thanks to all our sponsors. You can go to macgeekup.com slash sponsors and see all of the current sponsors plus any deals. We check it about once a month and prune out and add deals so that there's always stuff there.
And then, of course, there's our giveaway at macgeekup.com slash giveaway. Thanks for hanging out with us, folks. Thanks for everything you do. Thanks for continuing to allow and support us in doing this. It's one of my favorite parts of the week. It's awesome. Music. It really is. I say I lead a charmed life. Perfect example. You got any advice for anybody out there, Adam? Yeah, I would advise everybody out there, be safe, be healthy, be happy, and don't get caught. Music.