Beware The Robocalypse - podcast episode cover

Beware The Robocalypse

May 13, 20241 hr 27 minEp. 1037
--:--
--:--
Listen in podcast apps:

Episode description

This week on Mac Geek Gab 1037, Adam Christianson and Dave Hamilton have packed the episode with indispensable tips and updates, starting with one from listener Ben about using Option-Space in Finder for a full-screen Quick Look. Then it’s on to swiftly moving between tabs in Safari with Control-Tab, and […]

Transcript

It's time for Mac Geek Cab and listener Ben brings us our quick tip of the week by telling us. He says, I learned from an outdated Wikipedia article that you can press option space in the finder to instantly preview a selected item in full screen. I know it's crazy. And he continues. Continues, he says in the full screen, you can page through a multi-page PDF using the space bar.

Additionally, you can select multiple items of one or more kinds first in the finder and then use option space to present a slideshow. The same kind that works invoking normal quick look and then manually toggling it to full screen, as reported by Kent back in episode 1031. Very cool. Cool. More tips like this. Plus, your questions answered today on MacGeekGab 1037 for Monday, May 13th, Top Gun Day 2024. Music.

Greetings, folks, and indeed, welcome to Mac Geek Cab, the show where you send in and we share tips like that. You send in and we share your questions, hopefully with some answers for you. And you and we contribute cool stuff found that we share. We string it all together into an agenda that is organized such that we each have a great opportunity to learn at least five new things. Every single episode we get together.

Sponsors for this episode include BB Edit at barebones.com and coda.io slash MGG where you can go sign up for free. To create the one doc to kind of rule them all and bring all your text and tables together. We'll talk more about both of those in a little bit. For now, here in Durham, New Hampshire, I'm Dave Hamilton. And here in South Dakota, I'm Adam Christensen. And Adam, we're missing Pete this morning because he didn't have room in the plane to fit his microphone.

That's only sort of a misinterpretation of what happened. He flew his small plane somewhere and repacked his luggage for weight and in the process wound up forgetting his microphone for today. So we don't have Pete for today. We tried to find a new schedule to make it work, but there was no schedule. But by the time we knew about it, it was too late to find it another time. Too late to call it audible. Yeah, I was going to say. One day, maybe we'll get back to having three people on the show.

Yeah, I was actually looking. I was thinking yesterday. I was like, oh, this is going to be nice. We'll have all three of us. And someday we'll find out what the show is like without me here. But today is not that day. I know. Maybe, right? I mean, we could. Let's not get crazy. All right. But let's do go to Troy here, who has a quick tip for us that he recorded and sent in. So we'll let Troy share this one. Hey, Dave, Adam, and Pete, or Dave, Pete, and Adam, or Adam, Dave, and Pete.

Or if you want to go in reverse order, we could do that as well. I have a quick tip for you. I can't believe that I did not know this. If you are in a browser and you have a lot of tabs open and you want to move from one tab to the next, Control-Tab will lead you to the next tab. Control-Shift-Tab will go back one tab. This is a lot like the application switcher, which is Command-Tab or Command-Tilde, which will take you back and forth.

I do presentations and a lot of times I want to go from one tab to the next tab and this really helps. Obviously you can use command and number to go to one through eight or command nine will take you to the last tab in a window. But the control tab going to just the the next tab is really powerful. I use a laptop and an external screen, and sometimes my external screen, I can see a lot more tabs than I can on the built-in.

Laptop screen and control tab has saved my bacon because i can get to those tabs and move around those tabs very easily thanks for all you do really appreciate it have a great day and this time i did not get caught very nice thank you troy uh i so i didn't know about control tab in safari i i guess i have some recollection of the you know command one right it's command one no yeah command one two three i i'd forgotten that

but i i like i had heard that before the command nine though to get to the last tab that i didn't know that was new to me i just assume nine would go to the ninth tab not the end tab that i like this this is good yeah yeah and it and the command one through eight will go to your pinned tab starting like command one is your first pinned tab it's not it so just bear that in mind too so and this is in safari yes yes i just tried it in edge and it did work in edge i'm wondering how many apps like.

This is consistent in it's going to be consistent i bet in a bunch of apps until you have that one app that it yes doesn't work it because some developer did something different outside you know right right apple's built-in stuff yeah interesting and i also like it was super distracting listening to that because there were several things that i didn't know obviously i I knew command tab would go forward in the application switcher.

I also, if I want to go backwards, I used command shift tab because I had no recollection or idea that command tilde or really command back tick that the, the, the key above the, the tab key on most keyboards, certainly Apple keyboards would go backwards. I, I don't, I don't think I ever knew that. So. Yeah, I always just did the shift version of that. Yeah, but it actually is easier to just pop your finger up one, I think. Yep. So, yeah, man.

Well, I'm at my five, so I think it's time to bring the band in. No, wait. No, we got more to show.

Mike brings us our next quick tip, and he says a relatively new listener, and uh but he's been listening he's a new listener for this show he's been listening to you for over 15 years and he says he has one of the original mac cast members metal id cards yeah yeah number 67 he says nice yep so thanks for being a member absolutely that's crazy so he shows up to mac stock with that he still he gets a free drink oh is that how that works uh interesting huh i will

still honor those folks just anybody out there who has them and we will be at max stock this year so yeah cool all right is it one free drink for like the entirety of max stock per event per event okay i just wanted to know it's up to 10 bucks oh there you go all right there you go yeah it says it says on the back of the card it has all the it has all the no it's i love this that's awesome i love that uh all right he says i love using apple reminders app and all the

cool tie-ins and functionality it offers me especially speaking simple reminders into my apple watch but one feature i have tried and been completely unhappy with is the proximity setting for reminders. Picture this. My town does street cleaning on the side of the road that I generally park on on Friday mornings. So after several $60 tickets, I decided to set up a Thursday evening reminder to move the car.

No biggie, right? Well, occasionally I need to run out for an errand after the reminder goes off. And inevitably, when I return, my wandering 50-something-year-old mind doesn't remember to not park in my usual place. So I tried setting up a proximity reminder when When returning home to remind me to move the car. The problem is that it goes off when I'm actually home. Sometimes not until I've walked in the front door. This is not when I want to find out about this.

I've often wondered if there was a way to adjust the distance from the location. And I almost wrote in and asked a question, but I figured it out. When you set up a location-based reminder, do this. Set up the reminder, give it a name, and then click the little I in the circle to see the details. Once there, turn on the location toggle and choose the location. Side tip, clicking on a location a second time will toggle between arriving and leaving that location.

Oh, that's a nice little bonus quick tip. Once you do that, click the eye that shows up next to the arriving location name command. And this is where you will see a map with a circle around the location.

The circle has a dot that allows you to resize the distance and my problem is solved he says so thank you for that mike amazing i that i love this stuff it's great yeah yeah what got me wondering um because you can use i think you have to be pretty close you can use an air tag as a a beacon basically and you can trigger uh all kinds of shortcuts and home kit things with an air tag i don't know if a lot of people know this or not but i'm wondering if you

had an air tag in the car if it works you know if you move away from it but i think you actually kind of have to tap it it works more with the nfc so you actually have to tap it on something yeah i I had one set up where I just had it on a table in the living room and I could put my phone by it and it would, you know, turn on the TV, the Apple TV and then set the lights and. Yeah. Huh. Huh. Amazing. I did not. That's. Huh. All right. Now I got to play. Yeah. Okay.

I thought I had an extra air tag that I was that I've been trying to like give away to one of my family members like don't you need one in your thing they're like nope got one got one got one and now maybe that's not an extra air tag maybe it becomes the proximity air tag so yeah, I like it. Cool. I wonder if I could have it like auto launch my studio. Like I'm in the studio. Turn on my focus mode. If I put my phone down, right. Oh, yeah.

Just tap it on the way in the door. You can. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. All right. All right. Cool. Next up. Yeah. I got David in, in Missouri. Actually, my mom's, my mom lives in Missouri. So cool. He says, I sometimes want to change out my desktop wallpaper based on the season, and I will fall down a rabbit hole trying to find the exact type of image that I have in mind. Usually I settle for something close enough from one of those spammy wallpaper archives.

A couple of weeks ago, I thought I'd try using ChatGPT's DALI integration to create a photorealistic landscape that fit what I wanted rather than searching all over the web. It took a few tries, but I did get just what I wanted. And I was even able to create two images that roughly line up across both my monitors. So it's an ultra panorama. That's really cool. When my mood changes, I can swap it out. I can control the amount of detail. So my desktop icons aren't lost in the clutter.

It's not life changing, but a small use of an AI that I'm I'm really enjoying. Cool. Yeah. Yeah. The idea that it could create two images that are stitchable is pretty, pretty nifty. That is nifty. And they, I need to play with it more, but you know, I use the chat GPT's Dolly integration to create most of the episode art that you see for this show. And, and even some of the others that I do. And.

Now they have a like a refinement editor in there where you can highlight a section of an image and say, change that, leave the rest, change this, which was a problem with it. Because if I told it like if there were moments where it would create an image and I'd say create an image of three nerds like doing a thing or whatever, and it would create an image with four nerds and be like, cool, leave the rest alone.

Just change the number of nerds you know and it would be like great and the backdrop would change like it would it would be a wholesale change and it would maybe go to two nerds and it's like nope three odd numbers are okay it's gonna be all right you know yeah so yeah yeah yeah that no but i like that idea create your own desktop wallpaper and his point about you know the the amount of the level of detail so that you can still see icons and they pop off of the, the,

you know, the page and all that, like that. That's often what becomes the deciding factor in whether something could be desktop wallpaper for me or not. And the same is true, like on the iPhone as well. Like you could use this to create iPhone wallpaper. I with, with chat GPT, I routinely tell it create a wide aspect ratio image, and then give it, you know, my description instructions. You can tell it to create a square image. I believe you could tell it to create

a portrait image too. So think about that as well. Yeah. Very, very cool. Yeah. Send in your prompts to us. Either share them in our Discord at macgeekup.com slash Discord or into us here at feedback at macgeekup.com because I think... And seeing how we each craft prompts for any of these AI engines for images or other things, I think would be would be helpful.

In fact, I think discord be an even better place. But if you're not part of the discord and you don't want to be then feedback at Mac geek up.com.

We'll we'll share it over in your discord for you. you so uh so i did a thing adam i i made a decision based on our conversation that we had in a recent episode about red receipts and i went into my messages settings yesterday and turned on send red receipts with the global setting uh just because i find it it's simpler life is better with I'm okay with the, it's like, to me, it's not a privacy thing, but when I turned it on, I paid more attention to the details of what I was enabling.

And it says, when this is on, people are notified when you have read their messages. That part I knew the next sentence was the one that stuck out to me. This enables red receipts for all conversations. So if you've gone into a conversation and like turned it on and then turned it off, it's probably going to turn it back on for you. Yeah. And I went through and spot checked a handful of conversations after I did this and found all of them had send red receipts on.

Oh, are you still there, Adam? Yeah. Huh I have lost Adam so I will see if I can get him back, I've got him back. I don't think Adam was the one who left. I think it was me. I think I lost my internet connection briefly or something. I don't know what happened, but we're back. And as Hallways says in the Discord chat for this episode, now we see what the show is like without Dave. It was a premonition. It was a premonition, yeah. Yeah, but I back to this red receipt.

Hopefully this is this is a one time premonition and not a revisiting one. But I do. I am going to get a ping window open just to make sure that I see if and when I lose my connection again. But I did find one chat that did not have it on, which I thought was weird. But I couldn't find any others. So I don't know what the rhyme or reason is, but I can say that most of my chats, all but one had this turned on wholesale.

So I don't know what the, I have no, I don't have enough memory of the specifics of, of that one chat. And it was with one person. It wasn't a group chat or anything. Cause that you don't get red receipts in group chats yet. I would love for that to come to things. But anyway. Yeah, so I wonder, so point there is if you do go enable that global setting, you probably want to run back through and check any individual conversations you want it off on. Correct.

If you have those. And you can turn it off on those, like that's not an issue. Yeah, I guess what I could test with, I didn't think about it until you and I started talking just now, but I could go to one of my conversations, turn it off, then go turn the global setting off, then go turn the global setting back on and see if the one that I had manually turned off stays off. Off because maybe that's what happened with this other chat.

Maybe I had turned it on at one point and it was like, nah, I don't want that person to know. And I turned it off. I don't know. Like I, yeah, so that, that might be the, the, the case, but yeah, go, you got to spot check them once you, once you do it.

I, the more I think about this, the more I wish Apple would make send red receipts enabled by default only because every other chat app does it's become the norm like you know whatsapp certainly it's enabled by default facebook messenger it's enabled by default you know the ones that i think telegram it's enabled by default signal as well i believe so it's just People are used to it and it really does facilitate conversation, I think.

But I do get that Apple's stance on privacy probably is what informs them to leave it disabled. Whatever. Sure. Yeah, it's fine. All right. Andrew has another follow-up from that same episode, 1034. We were talking about Bob's complaint with contacts app freezing, and he says he had similar issues a number of years ago. And he says he worked with Apple support, and the culprit turned out to be putting too much text into the notes field of contacts.

Contacts a few words in just a few contacts seems to be OK, but the contacts at contacts app seems to be buggier than most of Apple's other apps. At one time, he says, I had over twenty five hundred contacts and developed a habit of putting extensive text into the notes field. After working with Apple, they found that removing that or finding ways of migrating it to other fields in the contacts app made contacts way, way faster.

So I I messed with this. I saw this while I was on the train back and forth to New York for Pepcom earlier this week. And I went through and removed notes from a bunch of my contacts. I had a lot of notes that were left over from when I imported into Apple contacts from now contacts years ago. Go it would that's going back yeah but it what it would do is it when you did that import.

If there was it would you know match up the fields and and populate the things that it was supposed to populate but if there were fields left over and now contacts that didn't have a home yet at that point in time in apple contacts it would just put them in the notes field and say okay here's you know you're on your own uh thankfully it labeled it with this came from now contacts so So I searched my notes for now contacts and sitting on the train,

trudging along from Boston to New York. I manually went through each one. Select all, delete, select all, delete. I probably could have written an Apple script in about the amount of time that it took me to manually do those. But I didn't. So but we'll see if it's faster. You know, it's only been for me. It's only been like 24 hours. So I don't know yet. But it stands to reason it feels like an indexing problem is, is what it feels like with contacts.

Like even before I knew about the notes field thing, just the way that it was, it was like you edit contacts and it would just like the entire system would just munch. It was like, man, something is inefficient here. And maybe they're not indexing the notes field or maybe they're over indexing the notes field is something about it. So. More likely not, not indexing it. Yeah, exactly.

Yeah. So we show in it, it forced, you know, spotlight to update like my Mac after I edited and it was probably a hundred notes that I, that I pulled this out of, um, my max CPU was just pegged for probably 10 minutes. With notes and suggest D and, you know, the MDS and all the spotlight stuff. Like it was, it was very, very busy after I did this, but it was fine. Like it was okay. So anyway, that's what I got. One last quick tip, Adam from Dan.

Sure. Yeah. Dan has a tip about time machine and slowing down mounting of your drives. He says, I wrote with a question about why at startup, up, my Time Machine disk would mount slower than my other drives, and it would also slow down the mounting of my external SSD drive that contains my Dropbox folder. This would cause Dropbox to not find the folder and throw up an error. This happened with my previous Time Machine drive as well.

I had just started a new Time Machine backup on a new drive, so I decided to reformat and start all over. I formatted as macOS Extended Journal this time instead of APFS since it's a spinning drive. The problem went away. Then I added encryption to the drive, and it got turned back into an APFS volume, and the issue was back. So I again reformatted to extended journaled, but let Time Machine format the backup. But yeah, let Time Machine Format the backup when it first was set up.

The issue still came back. So I gave up on encryption, redid the drive, extended journaled it, and everything mounts as it should. Just thought I should share my experience. And that's Dan. He says he's another happy MacCast refugee. Huh. I wonder. Yeah, go ahead. Yeah. I was just going to say, I don't know why encryption on APFS. I mean, I run my time machines like that. I've never noticed an issue, but, and I'm also curious about why Mac OS extended journaled for a spinning drive versus APFS.

Well, I, I, I mean, APFS was built for with SSDs in mind, and I think we found some benchmarking at least early on showed that hfs plus or as we call it extended journals was faster uh than apfs i think and i think it was even faster than apfs on ssds as well but certainly on extended journal drives apfs brings with it a whole suite of other features like you know snapshots and all that other stuff that make it worthwhile and the speed differences weren't

that weren't that much on ssds but yeah i it i i can see where where this makes sense i what i would be curious is if can you run apfs time machine not encrypted is it the encryption or the apfs that's causing the mounting to be slow yeah it sounds like it's the encryption and i don't think you have to have encryption turned on. I recommend it for time machine drives just because again, that's all the stuff on your computer, you know, and, uh, if someone were to come in and nab your drive, uh.

They've got all your stuff data's exposed yeah exactly yeah yeah yeah so kiwi graham in the chat says time machine does not require encryption of course it warns but it's not necessary and also uh kiwi graham runs a consulting business and says i now recommend ssds for time machine for most of my clients uh speed offsets costs there i can see that yeah yeah yeah i mean you're dealing with lots of small files uh and now time machine will leverage some of the features of

apfs we are told and and and i think i believe that's been confirmed by you know folks like like you know howard at eclectic light and things like that so yeah huh yeah i guess i've never really worried about speed with my time machine drives obviously if it was somehow affecting my mounting and mounting in a way that was described here where it's like drop boxes throwing errors because Because it's interesting that it's slowing down other drives. Right.

Well, it seems like it's... It's a system, too. Yeah, it's like serializing the mounting of them. Like, oh, no, we're going to mount the time machine drive first, and we shall wait for that to come up before we mount the other one. I didn't think that... That's news to me that that's the way that it works, at least some of the time.

Yeah. Interesting. Yeah. All right, folks. Folks, have you ever found yourself lost in a maze of documents, spreadsheets, and apps, feeling like you might need a GPS just to navigate through your projects? Well, I've been there, too. That is, until I found our sponsor, Coda. Now, I use Coda with a few of my other ventures, and let me tell you, it's like having a command center right at my fingertips.

Coda brings together everything I need into one platform, so I can say goodbye to that dizzying dance of tab switching, and so can you. With Coda, managing workflows feels like conducting an orchestra. Everything's in sync and everyone knows their cues. Whether it's setting OKRs, sharing roadmaps, or just getting everyone on the same digital page, Coda handles it with a maestro's touch. Plus, their vast gallery of templates is like having an endless supply of productivity

hacks right at my fingertips. tips so don't get caught in the tangle of traditional tools. Whether you're running a podcast, a startup, or just trying to organize your chaos, Coda is your all-in-one solution to streamline, collaborate, and truly unify your work. So if you want a platform that empowers your team to collaborate effectively and focus on shared goals, you can get started with Coda today for free. I know. Head over to Coda.io slash MGG.

That's C-O-D-A dot I-O slash M-G-G to get started for free.

Coda.io forward slash mgg give it a whirl and watch your productivity soar and our thanks to coda for sponsoring this episode all right have you ever wondered how we keep our podcast episodes crisp and precisely marked with those handy chapter markers well the secret's out folks i use bb edit our sponsor and my go-to text editor to manage and massage those and it's not just for coding but for managing all those time stamps that guide you through our tech talks bb edit isn't just any text editor,

it's like the Swiss army knife for anyone who juggles with text. Its new mini-map feature? A game-changer for navigating through complex documents, like having GPS when you're deep-diving into dense code forests. And for those moments when I'm wrestling with markdown or need a quick command reference, BBEdit's expandable cheat sheets are my backstage tech crew, always ready to hand me the right tool at the right time.

It's like having cheat codes for text editing, making sure I don't get caught in a coding bind. Whether it's crafting code, wrangling words, or pinpointing those podcast particulars, BBEdit boosts my productivity like a turbocharged engine in a race car. And with its robust support for everything from language server protocol to anaconda environments, it's as essential as my microphone. So don't get caught with your script down. Let BBEdit lift your text handling to the next level.

Head over to barebones.com to see how BBEdit can sharpen your text tactics, too, because in the world of podcasting and coding, precision is just a BBEdit away. Again, BBEdit at barebones.com. And our thanks to BBEdit for sponsoring this episode. So there was an Apple event last week, Adam. Yeah, I caught that. Did you? Dude, all 37 minutes of it at 10 in the morning for me anyway, which was pleasant. Yeah, I caught the replay, but yeah. Yeah. Yeah, new iPads and stuff.

New iPads and stuff. So the thing that jumped out to me more than anything were the new features coming to Logic on the Mac. Right. That was interesting that the new sort of AI, you know, musician, for lack of a better term, features, you know, AI instrument playing features, which make life easy.

Easy even as a drummer sometimes i'll i'll use the the the drummer in there just to mock something up and get an idea and it's like okay now i'll go sit at my drums and like play it but it it can be really handy for the creative process to to be able to do some of that so i was excited to see. Updates coming to logic like that regardless of what they are that's a good thing uh what did you what, what jumped out at you? Uh, that I was not in the market for a new iPad.

And then suddenly I am in the market for a new iPad. I mean, I was somewhat in the market for a new iPad. So I have an iPad, I have an iPad pro 11 inch. I don't even remember the generation I've had it like for forever. Okay. Um, I'd have to actually double check it.

Um, and recently I, I didn't noticed this for a long long time and i think i mentioned this on a previous episode but um down in the like lower left corner there's like a crack in the glass like hairline crack it's it's not really noticeable unless i'm looking right at it but it's enough to kind of bother me a little bit sure and um so i've been thinking about getting a new ipad for a while and yeah and when i saw those new ipad pros and how thin they are yeah and lights and sexy it's just

like oh maybe it is time for a new ipad pro there you go uh but then i thought i just can't really pull the trigger on on the the cost because like i just don't i mean i use my ipad a lot i used it a lot more when i was you know doing the mac cast got it full time or yeah yeah pretty much full time yeah right right That's my job. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, but now like when I sit down, yeah, I don't have a need as much anymore. I'm more at my computer.

Um, so I still enjoy my iPad, you know, and I have an iPad pencil and I don't use that quite a lot. So like when I really try to justify it, it's like, no, I just want it. Cause it's really, really cool. I've got a little, I've got a crack in mind and mine is like four generations old. So, you know, I could justify buying one, but I probably don't need to spend that money.

Yeah i i i don't use an ipad enough to keep it up to date either and and i like the ipad mini form factor uh bait well i say i don't use an ipad enough to keep it up to date i use an ipad all the time behind my drums it it is if i if i'm gonna have notes or you know sheet music or I'm doing a run of a musical called Spring Awakening right now, and I am reading the music on my iPad Mini, and it's great.

Sometimes I'll use a larger iPad, and I also use an iPad to control my audio mixer, like the one that we'll use live when we use bands or to mix my in-ears or whatever. But the iPad Minis are great for that, and even older generation iPad Minis. I mean, I keep a stack of iPad minis here, uh, just to be able to run those apps and they don't need to really do anything else. They're, they're sort of purpose, you know, purpose built at this point for me.

And, and then I have the six gen, I guess it's six gen, the current generation iPad mini, whatever that is. I did upgrade to that. And that's sort of the thing that I'll watch movies on, on like the train or the plane. And it's the thing that I use in bed when I probably should be reading on my Kindle is also what the iPad mini does for me. I don't, yeah, I don't need the latest and greatest there. It's not, it's not a productivity tool where speed matters.

You know, the page flipping when I'm on stage is kind of the thing. So, yeah. Yeah. And that's the other thing is like, I don't do anything real performance oriented. So like as cool as, you know, it is that they have an M4 now and all that fun stuff. I don't, I don't know that I can really justify that. Brian in the Discord points out something that I had heard, which is, I think, I don't know if ironic is the right word, but just interesting is that the iPad

Pros are now thinner and lighter than the Airs, the new Airs. So I don't know why. Can you still call it an Air if the Pro is thinner and lighter? Yeah, that's a good question. Let me pull up a chart on Apple.com. I mean, I believe that could be true. Let's see. Let's get to the... I've heard it from a couple sources, so... Yeah. Yeah. The iPad Pro is 5.1 millimeters thick, thin, as Apple said in the thing. They did not use the word thick. They said it's 5.1 millimeters thin.

And the iPad Air, these are the 13 inches, is 6.1 millimeters thin. Yeah, 1.28. versus for the Wi-Fi versus 1.36 pounds. Yep. And the same with the iPad Pro. 11-inch is 5.3 millimeters versus 6.1 on the 11-inch Air and 0.98 pounds versus 1.02 pounds. So the difference of 18 grams, folks. Huh. Yeah, and they did add a 13-inch Air, which I guess is good for people who like that form factor.

I mean, honestly, if I was going to buy one, I probably should just buy an air because it's much less expensive and would be a huge upgrade from what I have. Yeah. It's still got an M2 in it. Like, yep. Yeah. But the pros just look really sweet. So, um, speaking of expensive toys from Apple, Adam, how, how I want to check in, how goes it with the vision pro these days? I still love that thing. I absolutely love it. Yeah. But I mean, it's been relegated just because of like use cases.

It's really been relegated to an entertainment device. I mostly just watch movies on it and occasionally play some games. I'm not using it as I thought I might for very many productivity things. Yep. And that was another interesting thing about the Apple event is cause Tim opened up as he does talking about, you know.

Things outside of what they're going to talk about at the event and obviously uh vision pro was like a big one of those right he and he showed a bunch of use cases and i think what we're seeing at least with this version of the vision pro is these very specific market verticals so it was like science and research and like doctors i think they showed a stanford doctor or somebody using it it for, uh, I stuff and, and visions and people using it for training, uh,

you know, onboarding people and training and, and, you know, showing how to do things. And I think it's doing really well in that space. And I think that's where you're seeing app developers, maybe gravitate. It was very interesting because if you remember the original announcement, they kind of showed all those business use cases, right? You're gonna use it for zoom and you're gonna use it as your virtual displays. And I think people aren't using it like that.

And so they didn't really show any consumer level uses of it. It was like very, very business vertical focused. Yep. And I think that's where it is kind of right now. I'm just waiting for that sort of killer app to come out that gives me the real use case to have that on my head for a long period of time. I do still need to probably more firmly dive into the using it as a display. And see if I can actually make that go for work.

I played around with it a little bit, but I haven't really given that a really good shot. And that's only partially because my desk setup isn't set up for that, really. Like I need a clear space in front of me to put my laptop. I use two screens and I use it in clamshell mode and I'd have to like rejigger my whole desk environment. So I've just been avoiding that. Oh, I can see that. No, the rejiggering of the work environment is not something to be taken lightly.

Like, yeah, yeah, I've I've always kind of dreamed of the day and I don't even know what to me the word, you know, retirement means. But when it's like, oh, I could completely re envision my work environment and spend several days sort of getting into a new flow. Oh, when I moved the podcast scenario around it, it, I, it, when we started this, well, when we started at this, this room wasn't finished being built.

So I was downstairs, but then I moved up, but I was 180 degrees opposite of where I am in this little alcove in my studio. And even turning that around was like, oh man, like this is, this sucks. So, yeah. Cause the use case for the vision pro using it in that way. I mean, essentially you wouldn't have displays. You just have your laptop, right? and then the virtual displays become your displays. So... You know, and I just don't have that kind of an environment. And yeah.

And the idea of rejiggering that all that stuff to try something and then potentially finding out that that's not a good workflow, then I got to put everything back. That's yeah. So I need like a test environment. Right. Yes. That also it like doesn't mess up your work environment, but also doesn't take time away.

Like you need magic. you need magic realm to be able to go to yeah yeah i thought about just trying to like set up at like my kitchen table or something for a day and see how that goes that's probably the right way to do it yeah find a day when your family like isn't around in the house or whatever and and just be there because i i would be very i would almost certainly have gotten one if i was is traveling more than i currently am because i can totally see where like on

the train back and forth to new york it would have been awesome to have it to you know have my workspace right there without needing to like spread things around and certainly in hotel rooms and and all of that so yeah yeah yeah i mean the the other hope really i think is that again i think people are still trying to figure out what to do with this and the reality is is like i think just like the mac pros Pros, the Vision Pro is going to be its thing in its current form factor for many,

many years. So there's like years for things to develop. I think there'll be a consumer version, obviously, it's going to trickle down more quickly than that. But I think, you know, you're going to have the Vision or whatever Apple ends up calling it, be the device that's kind of iterated. And then the Pro kind of every few years gets iterated, just like they did with the Mac Pro would be my I guess. Yeah, it sounds right.

I had an interesting conversation with a friend who recently was diagnosed as as having ADHD. They probably had it for longer, but it's certainly become something that's impacting their their life. You know, I've actually never been diagnosed with it, although I don't think I need to be. But, you know, I like I've I've been aware of my distractibility for a very long time and I've learned to live with it. And I've in some ways have learned to kind of make it a superpower. Right.

Like it's I've organized my life around it and I'm OK with it. And I'm fortunate that I was able to do that and unmedicated and all those things. But this person is sort of learning about it and and how it's impacted and impacting their life. And one of the things that they noticed is it's like, oh, I never watch a movie without my phone in my hand or doing something. And I wind up missing huge stretches of like the dialogue in a movie or the concepts in a movie because I get distracted.

Distracted and they have a vision pro and they told me i watched a movie in my vision pro and it was amazing i had no opportunity to be distracted i watched the entire movie i didn't have my phone in my hand i was in the immersive environment they and certainly they could have had many windows open in the vision pro right but they went into like whatever it's called you know immersive theater mode and just watched it like you like you might in a movie theater And they're like,

this is kind of amazing for me to help me focus and then started talking about, well. I could also use it for when I'm doing work in a certain way. And and just going into that world kind of forces the to leveraging the sort of hyper focus aspect of ADHD that that exists.

And uh i thought that was a really interesting thing now that's a really expensive way to do it you could probably get away with some version of that with like you know the meta quest at 500 bucks uh right but but you know i i it was interesting hearing them like singing the praises of this it's like wow that's fascinating it just never dawned on me that but that's part of how that works yeah.

Yeah. You'd still need to turn it, put it into like a do not disturb mode or whatever, because you get notifications and it's actually really distracting when you're watching a film because the way the notification comes in is you get the icon at the top of the screen where the control center would be. Yep. You get the icon for whatever app that notification came in for. And then obviously if you look at it, then you can interact with it. Right.

But, uh, Yeah, they had it in do not disturb mode. Yeah. It hovers there for a while. Got it. Got it. I wish it would go away sooner. Yeah, sure. Especially like if you were in full environment mode, you would hope, and I might need to play with this. Maybe it does if you're in full immersive, you know, 100, 360 environment mode. I don't know if you see those or not. I'll have to test that, but I think they still come in. Got it. Got it. Yeah. Makes sense.

All right. Well, thank you for the check-in. I just, you know, curious about this.

So yeah, folks, send in your check-ins, feedback at mackeycap.com i i think this is another one of those things where the more we learn about how each other is using it will stumble on to those killer apps i i don't think there's going to be one killer app for this that is universal i think it's going to be a series of them that sort of touch our lives in a way that means something individually so yeah i definitely want to hear from people who are uh who are doing that yeah for

sure uh gill has a question separate from all of this moving moving into our our next realm he says uh. Hello good to see and hear adam is well integrated into the show indeed mother's day in mexico is uh well he's coming soon from when he emailed it was may 10th is always the day so i want to surprise Surprise my wife with a new M3 Air and retire her 2019 Intel. Since I'm a loving husband and the geek of the family, I'll do the setup for the new one.

I see two options regarding the backup, but if I'm mistaken, please let me know. One, use her time machine backup and go from there. I have time machine setup on Arsynology since 2020, so there's a lot of data there. And then that would be one option. Option two, start fresh without the Time Machine backup and re-download all the apps. But here is my concern. What will then happen to the old backups? Would I lose them? And which path would you recommend separate from all of this?

Hope you can shine some light on the pros and cons. He says, we do have an Apple One subscription as a family where we share the storage and all of that. So not sure if that factors in. So thoughts on this, Adam? Yep. Um, I, I mean, I think it's always easiest to do the migration either from Mac to Mac or from time machine or from some other clone backup or whatever. That's, that's my preferred methodology.

The only, the only time I ever recommend sort of setting up fresh is if you know the machine that you're migrating from is having weird issues that you can't, you just can't solve. Like if it's just something is wrong with this machine and that's why I'm upgrading. That might be a good moment or time to think about doing that in terms of what I would do with the time machine.

If I was doing that is I would not connect the time machine back up until you've kind of completely, if you did do it, you know, fresh system, completely rebuild the thing and then reconnect time machine.

I, I think the way time machine works, works if i'm remembering right is i think it kind of sets up a new system but you still have a previous backup is that right or i forget what they call it but no that that would be right like it wouldn't know that it it should even think to replace it right i mean these are two different macs at this point and so time machine would just set up something new you would be left with a lot of storage consumed from that old time

machine backup my favorite thing to do in those scenarios is to shoot a disc image of the mac that i am retiring and save that to my sonology or whatever and basically put it in cold storage and just leave it there in perpetuity and that way that that just gives me the freedom to reformat that old mac right away as opposed to saying well i I probably should leave it around for a little bit in case I forgot to get some data off it. It's like, Nope, I've got a disc image of that data.

I'm good to go wipe and go do whatever you need to do. So, uh, but, but otherwise I agree. I mean, obviously there is some benefit in the, the nuke and pave method, you know, option number two for, for Gil, but that's a lot of, it's a lot of work that unless you're having issues. Nuke and pave becomes more of a troubleshooting step, uh, it can be a proactive step against needing to troubleshoot in the future, but because it removes all that cruft by sort of its very nature.

I don't know. I'm I'm, I get lazy with it and I migration assistant works so well, but that's what I do. So yeah, you're going to, you're just going to spend a lot of time for probably no, no reason. Like Apple handles all that stuff really, really well. Um, and I like what Kiwi Graham put in the discord to like Mac to Mac is the way to go. If you can do it, you know, Thunderbolt cable between the two machines and, It'll be much quicker than from probably time machine backup.

You know, if you're like me, your time machine backups are old USB spinning drives or something like that. So, yes, that's fair. Right. Because, yeah, yeah, yeah. Don't if you can avoid having to migrate from a time machine backup, you're going to be better off in many cases. Yeah. Yeah. And then then you could inherit the old backup, though. So if you migrate, yeah, then you're good to go. Yeah, I like that. Yeah, it'll say, I forget what it says. It's something like, do you want to inherit?

Is that the word they use or whatever? I think it is. Inherit this old backup. Yeah. I often don't worry about time machine backups. I'm like you too. A lot of times what I'll do is I will take my current time machine drive and just use at the same time I got the new Mac, get a new time machine, set up a brand new one, and just archive the old one. Because you can always pull that back and use time machine to read that.

Yeah, drive if you need to get files off of it. I very rarely find that I need to do that, though, because if everything has migrated over, and you're, you know, running a system, it's gonna, you're not gonna have the history. I have very rarely and I asked people about this a lot, because people worry with their time machine backups about losing that history. And I often ask people, how many times have you used that feature? Like I haven't used that feature to go back and grab a file in.

Maybe a decade like it's happened occasionally there's been one or one or two times but very rarely it's more often the scenario where something's gone wrong and i need the whole backup right i mean right i need like the time machine backup not just that oh i i accidentally deleted a file you know two weeks ago and i need that file back or yep that that is i i have i have To answer your question that you didn't ask me, I have done that once, and it saved my bacon.

I've shared it on this show. Somehow, I deleted the entirety of my presentations folder, which had every keynote from every Macworld Expo, whatever it is, CES Mac stock, user group.

All of those things was just gone. gone and i have obviously no recollection of choosing to delete it but you know i mean i i did and time machine was i believe the the best place it may not have been the only place that it existed but it was the most recent place that it existed so it's like oh yeah i mean if you have backblaze or something like that it's probably in there it would have been there yeah and i i you know i've talked about this on the show in the past too i have my um chronosync

that i have set up to not sync deletions so that's like my yeah that's good yep that you gotta have a safety net i i i like to have a safety net for sure yep yep all right should we move on to jeremiah yeah. So jeremiah has some issues with the time on his mac he says every time i log on to my macbook pro 2019 the time is wrong set time and date automatically is turned on I've tried turning this off, but the next time I log in, the time is still incorrect.

The only way to fix it is to toggle that setting off and then on again, and it resets to the correct time. But again, I have to do this every time I use my computer. Any advice? You cut out a little bit there, Adam. Well, you paused. I think there was some Wi-Fi issue, perhaps. But we got the question, so thank you. Okay. OK, yeah, the so the time is set using NTP network time protocol.

It theoretically it should do this when the max starts up but clearly it doesn't my guess is that if you left it on for 24 hours it would correct itself because it does check in periodically with that uh ntp server it's odd that it's not doing that so you by turning it off and on again Again, you are forcing it to do that NTP check in, you know, in the now you could write a script or set up a cron job or something

or a launch D thing because we're supposed to use launch D now not cron that ran the S and MTP. SNTP sorry sorry the SNTP app and I'll put a command in the show notes that sort of walks through doing that you have to run that command as sudo which means you have to run it as root because it is impacting the you know administrative portion of your system the time and then you can tell it which time server to sync with. And, you know, I generally use time.apple.com. So that would be a thing to do.

Setting up a script that runs automatically as root is doable and is also a little bit of a trick. I would take a look at Lingon, L-I-N-G-O-N, to be your special friend there. That is an amazing app that not only lets you do things like this and configure things like this, but it's also a great troubleshooting tool because it lets you see all of the, I'll say, startup items and automated items that don't appear anywhere else. So, yeah.

I'll put links to both of those. I'll put a link to that in the show notes and then also the SNTP command. Man, it's hard not to put the M in there. You want to say SMTP, SNTP. Or I want to say SNMP, which is Simple Network Monitoring Protocol, which has nothing to do with what we're talking about. Yeah. If it was back in the day and he was on a desktop, I'd be like, oh, you need to check your PRAM battery.

Yeah that's the part right it makes me think that his battery is problematic and it maybe yeah my check battery actually might be something to check battery health yeah but it's a it's a it's a laptop it's a 2019 yeah so it should be that's weird it makes me wonder if something is setting the time incorrectly on startup or on login, which Lingon would be a good tool to use to troubleshoot that too because you can see where LaunchD is running all of those things. So, yeah, that's a weird one.

Yeah, I can't figure out why that would be happening. Huh. All right, well, maybe there's a geek challenge part of this. Feedback at MacGeekUp.com, folks. We'd love to hear your thoughts on why this is happening. All right. Any more on that, or should we move to Jed? We can move to Jed. Great. Jed says, oh, he wants to say a bad word, but he says, since it's a clean show, I'm going to avoid wordplay. He wants us to say a bad word, is what he wants. And DKIM definitely punched me in the gut.

I use Cloudflare email forwarding, and I love it. I have a catch-all email that goes to my Gmail, works great, and the price is great. So starting today, my emails, the emails I send from that address are getting bounced. Now, if I had a Google Workspace account, I could do all sorts of DKIM stuff that I don't fully understand. But since I don't, any ideas except give up. Thanks. Trying hard not to curse, Jed. Yeah. DKIM is a four letter word for sure. Maybe that's the episode title.

So DKIM is a convention, a standard that allows you to control things about your domain in terms of email. Things like should. This server be allowed to send email as me should, you know, where should email go? It it works in tandem with some other things to help keep email from being spoofed is really what what DKIM does.

Does now the problem is if you don't understand exactly how dkim works you can paint yourself into a corner where no one can send you email or no one will get email that you send i guess it's more more the latter but but you could probably get yourself to do the former as well uh i certainly have painted myself into that corner i i'm almost hesitant to share this but i i will share it There are DKIM generators.

What you do is you go and you create a text record that you add to your custom domain in the DNS setting. So like where you would set where your website is or where your mail servers are. You would go and add a text record to that DNS entry that then anyone can read and specifically any mail server will read to see what your DKIM settings are. And I should figure out what DKIM stands for so that maybe we can talk about this domain keys identified mail.

Sure. Yep. So but you go and you configure this and you put a one liner in there that that has all kinds of little switches and and and code and all sorts of stuff that instructs mail servers what to do and when they receive mail from what appears to be you and whether to treat it as good or bad based on whatever criteria you set. Right. But if you don't know what you're doing, and I can't stress this enough, you will almost certainly screw it up and you will be in a world of hurt like Jed is.

It sounds like you already have a DKIM record set up for your custom domain, Jed. So I would use a DKIM record generator. D Markley has one. I will put a link to it in the show notes. But just that is not enough. Once you generate that, and it'll ask you some questions, right? It'll be like, where do you want to allow mail from? What do you want to do? And all that stuff. And then it'll create this line of text. And it'll say, great, go put this in your DNS and you're good to go.

You are not good to go. So until you understand every character of and the implications of every character in that line, because this is your email we're talking about here and you don't want people to stop receiving email from you for Mike. I have set up DKIM on some of the domains I have, but for like my business domain, like the BackBeat Media stuff and the MacGeekEb stuff, I don't because I don't understand it well enough.

To trust that i'm going to get it exactly right and that no one's going to bounce mail and what doesn't help is that every mail server is sort of evolving on this front and doing things differently some mail servers don't pay attention to dkim at all so you could screw it up and send yourself a test message and be like oh great it worked i'm good to go and you definitely want to send yourself test messages after you make these kinds of changes.

But just because they succeed doesn't mean you've succeeded. So, yeah. So it's a it's a whole thing. And it really it's something planned to spend several hours thinking about this and and being very, very meticulous. It a lot of tech out there that we deal with. It's kind of cool to have a little bit of knowledge, you know, know enough to be dangerous and start using it and then deal with the problems when they come up.

Email especially sending email is in even receiving email it's insidious you don't get to know when your email hasn't made it through necessarily right yeah yeah i mean i think overall unless you're sending a lot of bulk email like we use these at my job or like our clients because i do i do e-commerce work right so the clients need to send like transactional emails and bulk emails and things that are really important to get through.

But like you said, configuring and setting up these technologies, and there's actually three of them. So like DKIM is just one. There's also something called SPF that's Sender Policy Framework. And then DMARC, Domain-Based Message Authentication Reporting and Conformance. Ooh, that's fun. Yeah, and overall, most people should not have to mess with these.

I did post, there's a really good article over on Cloudflare that I put in the show notes that runs through exactly what all these things are and what they do if you want to learn more about them. But I think in general, most people should not have to mess with these things. No, but a lot of us are running our own custom domains specifically for email these days, right? And iCloud makes that really easy to do. But don't, I would say, don't be tempted by the existence of these things.

Use them if you find that you need to. But don't don't just use them because they are there and and that advice will evolve over the probably the next you know months or years because at some point you will want to use these because they are there but like i use spf records on a lot of things but it's because i really i can read an spf record and basically tell you what it's doing and that's why i'm comfortable using, But I the DKM and DMARC stuff I've tried to dig in.

It's like it makes my brain hurt. I don't understand this well enough yet.

And I don't want to just I don't want to do it knowing enough to be dangerous. So. Cool all right uh where are we on time here i think we should jump to some cool stuff found out yeah we should get to some cool stuff great all right you want to uh take us to our first one from dom yeah dom says hey screen time is a great idea for managing your kids and your own devices but it has so many limitations and holes it becomes nearly useless one area we wanted to

help our kids with is managing the temptation to play Minecraft for hours on their Macs instead of doing their schoolwork. Minecraft on the Mac is a particular problem because the launcher is a regular Mac app, but the program itself is a Java executable. So screen time can block the launcher during certain hours, but not the program itself.

And since screen time gives you the option of just one more minute and it doesn't take that long to launch minecraft from launcher it was useless i'd been pulling my hair out trying to find solutions until i remembered that there are productivity distraction free apps out there the one i settled on is called one focus and it's in the mac app store you can set it to block certain apps and certain websites of your choice during particular hours.

On the pro version, $2 a month or $10 a year, you can set up repeating schedules, example, Monday to Friday between these hours. It has varying levels of hardness, i.e. how much you can lock it down, but the higher levels make it progressively harder to work with. So I've blocked the Minecraft launcher, which launches, but remains hidden in the background.

So far so good huh it's a great idea yeah huh i never thought of using the you know focus apps the productivity apps the adhd management apps as parental control type apps but obviously you know it's a tool it can be used in many different ways yeah it's that's interesting i wouldn't have thought of that application either but smart yeah i don't know i like minecraft so.

But i get not letting your kids uh play a minecraft during yeah you should be doing homework everything needs to be kind of managed right yeah yeah yeah for sure for sure all right uh let's see the next one comes from james who started asking a question and and then solved it by finding the answer of those yeah he says i am one of the many users myself included that suffers from the.

I started looking for a command line string that maybe I could put into an automator action or other way of automating that just renames my Mac on startup or every 24 hours back to what I want it to be without the numbers after it. And he found one, right? He found an article actually at the University of Illinois that describes how to use the SCU till command to do exactly this. And you can set your host name, your local host name, your computer name. Which is probably what we're talking about.

Out and then of course uh you use ds cache util at the end to flush the the the uh dns cache and and you're good to go so all these commands are there they are sudo commands so like we talked about earlier with the uh s n t p command uh you would need to run these as root so automating it gets a little bit tricky maybe lingon is your friend here too but i like this idea of kind of uh coming up with this set of commands to do and then put it somewhere and

automate it so that you can reset your mac to not have the numbers after its name this is good nice nice find james and this happens when your mac goes to sleep another mac will take over kind of answering requests for it and advertising it on the network or another device it doesn't have to just be a mac i think your apple tv can do this too uh and that's all fine and it's supposed to hand off and hand back on when your

mac goes to sleep and wakes back up and all that stuff but sometimes your mac will wake back up and won't do the hand back properly and it will see another mac on the network with its name, advertising its name, because there was another device on the network advertising its name. And so it says, oh, well, I'm now MacBook 2. It's like, nope, you were always MacBook. Stay that way. Don't change.

I just had to spend too much time trying to figure out where this setting got moved to in the new stupid system settings. So it's under general sharing local host name, and then there's an edit button. So if anybody else is looking for that, I'm like, where did that thing go? I knew it was always in the sharing section, but I didn't know where sharing landed. It is in local host name. Nice find. Yup. God. Yeah. They bury things. We can search in, in system settings. So is that how you found it?

No, I just, I didn't even know what I should have just typed sharing because I knew it was in the sharing area, but I didn't know what the thing itself was called. I couldn't remember. It was called local host name. Yep. Kiwi Graham asked, does sudo actually execute as root or just with elevated privileges of admin users? I am pretty sure that when you run sudo on a Linux box or a Unix-ish box, that it runs that command as the root user.

I could be incorrect about this, but memory tells me that I'm not.

Because when i if i am on um i think this is on my mac too but certainly if i'm on you know logged into a linux machine as me a not a non you know not a user not named root and i type sudo i guess i could do this on my mac we'll do this in real time so well i i pulled up the man page in dash real quick okay sudo allows a permitted user to execute a command as the super user or another other user as specified by the security policy yep all right well i just i just did a um i did

sudo and then space and then touch which touches a file it will create it if it doesn't exist it will update its uh like last modified time if it does exist i said um create a i did sudo. Touch test for KiwiGram. And that file did not exist before. And on my Mac, it is owned by root. So the answer to the question is sudo does execute as the root user.

So question answered. Yeah. Uh as root and the answer is yes so now it's in the show notes too uh i was at pepcom last night and i met with the narwhal people they are not narwhal people they are people that work for a company named narwhal i want to see the narwhal people i know the horns coming out it doesn't Doesn't look like the thing from Elf or anything. No, they are actually very nice, kind people that look just like people,

as you might guess. Or maybe you wouldn't guess based on my description. Narwhal makes robot vacuums, among other things. And you know how much I love robot vacuums. I've been testing one of theirs, one of their newest ones recently, the Narwhal Frio X Plus, which is a $400 vacuum and mop, which is kind of cool because getting a vacuum and mop for $400 is usually kind of a trick.

Uh now this is the you know for 400 bucks it is definitely the budget more friendly model um it the all it is self-contained meaning it doesn't empty itself it it the water tank is all internal to this which means you have to manage the water tank more frequently but it will do I do mopping and vacuuming in the same pass, and I've been using it on a floor of my house now for a couple of weeks, and it works better than any other $400 vacuum that I've ever used,

let alone one that also has mopping capabilities. And the mobbing capabilities are pretty good. I found that with robot vacuums, the best thing for vacuuming is to have it do it every day so that it is not having to do any monster task. It is just maintaining the state of your home. And it's awesome once you have this because your house is vacuumed every day. Like I wouldn't vacuum my house every day, but the robots happy to.

So and it works really well. One thing all of the narwhals have is this amazing brush brush. They call it their certified zero-tangling floating brush. And after using this thing for several weeks, I can attest to the fact that it does not collect hair. The way the brush is shaped, it moves hair along it and then up into the dustbin. It's truly amazing. I went and looked at it again this morning, and it's like, how come there's no hair rolled around the brush?

Which not only is nice just from a maintenance standpoint, but it makes the vacuum work better when the brush isn't just covered in hair that's been rolled around it. And the 399-1, this Frio X Plus, has that. It's got like 7,800 PA. What is that? I don't know, whatever it is, monster suction on this thing. And it, it, you know, it does very well and it will mop things up.

You do have to manage the dirty water. It is sealed inside of the vacuum, which means you don't smell the dirty water until you go and empty it, which is key. And of course it's got all the smart mapping and all that good stuff. So that's the Frio X plus. And then they have the Frio X Ultra, which the list price is a full $1,000 more than that at $1,399. You can get it on Amazon. I'll put a link in that drops $300 off it, so it's $1,100. And this is absolutely an $1,100 vacuum for sure.

It has all of the features I just mentioned for the Plus. And it has its base station with water tanks in it so that you can, it will refresh the water, keeps the dirty water in one tank, refreshes with clean water, which makes, especially for larger mopping operations, makes life way easier. And what's really cool is it will periodically go back during the mopping operation. It will go back to the base to exchange the water. Right. Because and keeps the mops clean and all of that stuff.

Well, what's really cool is that as it is. Refreshing the water, it does like a a pattern matching on the dirty water that it is bringing into the the the, you know, back into the base. And if it notices that the water is exceptionally dirty, it also knows where the vacuum just was on your floor.

Floor and so it will go back to that spot and rinse it again come back check the water is it cleaner nope gotta go back again and it will keep doing that same spot over and over again just like you or i would do adam if we were mopping on our own we would do the spot over and over until it's clean and then it moves on but it doesn't have to redo your whole floor because it's smart enough to know oh it was just in that one section and so which i thought was really really smart i it kind of

yeah right like that's cool so um so that's the the the freos from narwhal um i i love i love seeing the evolution of the tech with these the the the the especially the evolution of the brush i can't stress how big of a deal that is that's as big of a deal to me as the lidar sensors were when those were first introduced to robot vacuums and the smart mapping and all of that like the mapping on this is great it it's they're great vacuums and for a 400 vacuum that narwhal

free ox plus that that's that's worth a look uh even just as a vacuum even if you don't need the and the mopping's good but it's you know it's not as good as it is in the in the ultra for obvious reasons. Have you pulled the trigger on a robot mower yet? Man, I am so... It's the robot snowblower that really is tempting to me. But if I got that, it would also be a robot mower.

So I'm like really close because the idea, you know, like I said, with the vacuum doing the vacuuming every day, you're just in maintenance mode. Well, the same is true with the robot snowblower and the robot mower of your yard. It's not like it only does it after the storm with the snow or once a week on your lawn.

It's doing it every day. So you have this constantly manicured lawn or with the, with the snow blowing, it's just like, it's just removing a few inches at a time and then goes back and it charges and it comes back an hour later and gets the next couple of inches. So, yeah. Yeah. I don't know. I don't know, man.

There seems like such a higher liability with something that has that kind of, uh, those kind of blades like roaming around outside your front yard like people walking by with their pets and stuff like that if it goes rogue if the apocalypse happens the robot the robocalypse. Beware the robocalypse yeah yeah yeah it that would be bad that would be bad that would be Or like a child comes by. Like I just, you know, the thought of an unattended device in your, especially like your front yard.

I guess if you had it contained in your backyard, maybe it's a little bit better. But like I have an open front yard, like a child or an animal like walking up

to that thing. Just, I know it would, presumably detect it and do whatever it needs to do to like yes i don't know if it shuts down or how they operate but man yeah there is a liability there i'm not gonna lie like i've talked with the yarbo people yarbo are the folks that make the um the the robot snowblower and lawnmower and other things like the robot the outdoor robot if you will uh and they say that there's as soon as.

It detects a human uh in its path it stops and it will not resume on its own it requires you to intervene and turn it back on so like and they said we like and that that's a software issue and and like you know business decision so like absolutely we've we've.

Also had it in the lab and stuff you know set up to where once the once it's free and clear it goes and it has been a hundred percent fine however they don't want the story told that you allude to potentially being told about their products so they're like nope once it detects a human a human could be that one could be a different one or a pet or anything any sort of you know thing that would be an issue you it's like nope you've got to now come out and touch a button on it to to

make it go right so yeah yep i assume you get an alert yes like hey i stopped yep and then you know the yarbo they've got a couple of models and the the less expensive one is not does not do like auto mapping you have to drive it with your phone but it has cameras in it and all that so for like the snowblowing operation you could drive it from your phone while sitting in front of the fireplace with hot cocoa you know and that's not so terrible

is it yeah so like that that also would be an option that you could you know do that hopefully even if you're driving it if it senses a human it stops with it doesn't let you go after the neighbor or the or their dog so yeah.

Yep all right uh i know we're we're later than we usually are do you have time to do anthony adam or should we yeah we can do we can do one last one so anthony says hey guys i just finished listening to their most recent episode where he talked about services to send tax stocks and other sensitive info a bit of a shameless promotion but i can help. But I can't help but recommend my team's product, new.space. New.space is the URL. For another way to securely send sensitive documents.

I know you prefer, you too prefer Synology because it's self-hosted and feature rich, but new.space has two big advantages over most of the other products you recommended. End-to-end encryption and no signup required. I think these features will make it a perfect solution to your listener Matt's issue. As you two said on the episode, file sharing is pretty much a solved problem, but we think we're building something new. It's not just end-to-end encrypted file sharing.

We also have link sharing and notes with much more stuff on the way, including a native iOS app that is currently in test flight beta. So you can get the app from their website, anew.space.app. Thanks for another great episode.

Thanks for another great episode, guys. yeah amazing that's pretty cool I love this when we hear stuff that you folks are making and working on and all that good stuff so yeah thank you for that, very cool alright thanks for hanging out everybody it's been, it's been a blast as always and thanks for sticking around a little bit later with us I know we aim for the hour 15 minute mark I realize we've been letting it stretch again end the hour 30 there's

just so much good content mostly from you that we just don't want to miss out on sharing because it's cool stuff.

Thanks to cashfly for providing all the bandwidth to get the show from us to you, make sure to follow us on we've got our links on like Twitter and Instagram and Facebook and Mastodon all those things in there and, yeah that's that's it make sure to check out our sponsors coda.io slash M-G-G and also barebones.com, and if there's anything that you remember from a previous episode or want to make sure you didn't miss go to macgeekup.com slash sponsors and that we have. Music.

Everything listed you won't miss out on deals. Adam you got three words to share before we go on with the rest of our days and let them go on with the rest of their days oh I think I think Adam's muted. I believe there's a mute thing happening. Did you get caught, Adam? I just, I did the thing I'm going to tell you not to do. Don't get caught. Made on Mac. Thanks, folks. Later.

Transcript source: Provided by creator in RSS feed: download file