It's time for Mac Geek Cab and listener Ben brings us our cool stuff found of the week. He says in episode 1048, Dave, you shared your frustration that it's difficult to pause your music when a call comes in because the play pause key answers the call instead of playing the music. You might want to use the available for free Mac media key forwarder to solve this.
It tells the system to always control, or you can use it to tell the system to always control the music with the play pause key, no matter what else is happening. More cool stuff found like this. Plus, well, even more cool stuff found today on MacGeekUp 1052 for Monday, August 26th, National Web Mistress Day 2024. Music. Greetings, folks, and welcome to MacGeekGab, the show where we usually take your quick tips and share them. We take your questions and answer them.
And like we're going to do all episode today, we take your cool stuff found and our cool stuff found and share. We try to string it all together into an agenda that loosely thematically makes sense so that each of us can learn at least five new things every single time we get together here, back here in Durham, New Hampshire, after being in Washington, D.C., or right across the Potomac in National Harbor, Maryland for podcast movement. I'm Dave Hamilton.
And still here in South Dakota I'm Adam Christensen and here still in New Hampshire it's pilot Pete and hate to talk about the weather but I can't not man this is beautiful 50s at night 70s in the day occasional light shower and other than that beautiful good stuff and I don't know Dave maybe I have to do it you brought it up national media national web mistress day web mystery pete pete it's not ashley madison thing there's webmasters
and there's web mistresses it's a female web developer i'm pretty sure oh no. Ask it for a friend key cab after dark starts in the morning, Wow Yes mistress Where did we find these people I'm sorry I'm right right Yes you're right I have it up on the screen here National Web Mistress Day Is observed on August 26th Every year as a way of celebrating the invisible heroes Who make and develop your favorite websites A web mistress is a woman Usually an engineer who is
responsible for designing Developing marketing and maintaining A website. So there you go. Well, if it's an other thing for some of you, that's fine too. Nothing wrong with that. Doing the privacy of your own internet. Hey, Adam, you want to take us to... Get you out of here, Adam, please. Get you out of it. I wouldn't mind you getting me out of this. Yeah. Yeah, I think we're going to Doug who has a cool thing for us.
He says, I just came across this secure messaging app that requires no signup and uses Tor and end-to-end encryption. While not feature-rich, I've been playing with it for between my phone and iPad, and it seems very capable. And it's called Session. And, of course, we'll have a link to it in the show notes. Interesting. You guys use private messaging apps? I sometimes use Telegram with people that want to use Telegram, but I've never used this. This, this is, it's at getsession.org.
Send messages, not metadata. Okay. I like this. Yeah. All right. Yep. Interesting. Okay. And I technically, I guess WhatsApp is a similar. Well, I mean, no, I wouldn't say that WhatsApp is similar. It's the same, only different. No. Yeah. WhatsApp is a messaging app, but I mean, it's, first of all, it's owned by Meta.
Uh it is end-to-end encrypted just like iMessage is uh but I think the my interpretation and this is a great time to sort of share this caveats the wrong one just an explanation that like this particular cool stuff found like the one at the intro that I did from Ben came in from one of you and you've used it but it doesn't mean that we have so we're Here, to say that we're learning about it at the same time you are is slightly non-factual
because we've seen these questions or these come in. We've organized the agenda. But other than that, we really are learning about these kind of alongside you. We've curated this list so that it hopefully has stuff that at least appears useful. But what I'm understanding as we're reading through session here is that it doesn't share a lot of your metadata with the person with whom you're chatting either.
So that that's kind of what I understood, like WhatsApp, WhatsApp, as soon as you start chatting, the person has your phone number and they can see your statuses and your real name and all of that stuff, just like with iMessage. Whereas it seems like with this. Yeah.
You know you share what you want to share and and that's it so no phone numbers go ahead i was gonna say with no sign up i mean right they're not gonna have a lot of metadata first of all unless you start giving it to them yeah yeah unless you choose which is totally fine so i i can i can see this being positively used for people that want to communicate with journalists or you know that kind of thing i mean that was the told tour network yeah part of its genesis anyway,
uh you don't know where they are you don't you know each party doesn't know where the other is all that stuff now if you start using this and you start getting information from people or requests for money or things like that make sure you actually know who you're talking to because there's no way for this app to help you confirm that so yeah interesting enough interesting yeah Yeah, I kind of like it. I mean, it's, you know, I like having these options out there. It's good. Good stuff.
All right. What do you got for us, Pete? Well, Lee wrote in. He said, hey, MacGeekGab team. I think MacWhisper has been mentioned in Cool Stuff Found before, but it's time for an encore mention because the recent many updates are just too good to ignore. The app has had several major updates over the last several months, but the new killer features for me are, one, One, the new background live dictation allows for freaking amazingly accurate dictation into any text field in any app.
Two, the super tight chat GPT integration is a game changer. I've configured it to automatically process my dictation on the fly based on predefined instructions, whether that's correcting grammatical errors or making text more friendly sounding. And three, the enhanced WhisperKit engine yields better-than-ever transcription speed and accuracy even on my M1 Mac Mini which only has 8GB of RAM.
Other new improved features include support for auto-translation into multiple languages and video player support for watching videos with subtitles in multiple languages. The developer, Jordy Bruin, is quick to respond with thoughtful answers to my dumb questions. Questions that in hindsight probably deserve more than an RTFM, read the fine manual. I use this app daily. It has become an indispensable go-to tool, definitely worth revisiting. Thanks for the great podcast, Lee. So...
I'm reading here, and I know the description you just shared sort of referred to this, but this is a system-wide dictation that you can use to replace Apple's own dictation on macOS. Yeah, and it looks like it's... Yeah, maybe a lot better. Oh, it's free for one user. Correct. Well, yeah, and then you can go pro, which looks like 39 euros. Yeah, 39 euros to go pro. You're right. And it has that does some batch transcribe.
That's where your support for other AI models like like chat GPT or Claude from Anthropic kind of come in. Yeah. Okay. Yeah, I got it. I'm glad. I love this. This, you know, revisiting a cool stuff found. I think there's a couple more that we're going to revisit in this episode because they've improved so much. Just the fact that we talked about it a year or six or 10 or 20 years ago. Doesn't mean they're not good. It doesn't mean that a new update is okay. So send those in.
And if you want to send in cool stuff found or anything else, questions, tips, comments, kudos, complaints, feedback. Write them on the back of a $100 bill and send them in. That's it.
That's it. Feedback at MattKeyCab.com. What i walked on feedback at macgeekgab.com i think so that's twice i walked on you feedback at macgeekgab.com sorry guys very nice very nice i was trying to show i stole that gay from click and clack the tappet brothers there you go there you go public radio from 30 years ago yeah kids ask your parents uh parents ask yours yeah you want to take us to steven yes yeah he has a he He has a cool stuff found for you. He says, hi, David.
Oh, hi. I hope this message finds you well. Wait, is it my mother or my band director? Because that's who calls me David. You're welcome to call me whatever you want. Whatever you pick, I've been called worse. But David is usually, it's like, oh, is mom here? Right. He says, you had mentioned in a previous podcast what might be available as a TextExpander substitute. Substitute. I've been using this app for a number of years. He's talking about type it for me and find it adequate for my needs.
Better yet, no subscription model. You pay for it once, and that is it. And the latest file, your documents by readable has been excellent. Oh, I guess that's maybe another recommendation.
Documents by readable. Yeah. Okay. Documents by readle which is great too so you get a twofer in this cool stuff found nice i'm busy putting i could not get all the use out of my ios devices without these two key apps and yeah they have this for ios and mac type it for me um i've used it in the past uh and i mean it it is great if you're looking for alternatives uh and again you're not fans of subscription models this is a this is a great option at tori software has been making this for years
and it's a great option for sure and doubly on documents i've used documents for a long long time as well yeah so i um i understand type it for me i realize there are likely features in it that i'm not aware of so i i'm probably going to dig into this uh i'm curious if it syncs across my my devices and things like that and just Just how the shortcuts work. What do you I've been aware of documents by Riedel for a very long time. I don't quite understand what my use case would be for it.
Yeah. I mean, to be honest, it changed for me because I did not use documents and desktops for a long time on iCloud because in the early days, it kind of, it's not great. Yeah. And it caused some issues for some people and I was a little bit afraid of it. So it handled, Documents by Reel handled a lot of that stuff for me. The other thing is you can plug in, you know, like WebDAV and like, it works a lot like files.
It also will just work with files. So, you know, like the built in stuff, it's got the full support for it'll show up as an option. So it's it's a lot like documents and desktops for iCloud. It has some other features. It'll connect to other services, you know, like Dropbox and all the other. I mean, basically anything you pointed at an FTP server and SFTP server.
You know, like all of the it just basically collates everything into that single place where you can just have access to your documents wherever they might be.
So it was also pre files app i think this existed so like before apple had the files app where we could actually get everything in one place like this they kind of pioneered this i believe if i'm getting my timeline right and i think i am so so kind of yeah like a files pro right it's it's a files app for the power user it also seems to have the ability to uh edit pdfs right inside of documents you can fill out forms but you can do like you know so
this might might replace i mean i think they also make pdf experts so my guess is it doesn't replace pdf expert but it might give you enough of that functionality depending on your use case it'll play music it'll you can do markup with images so yeah okay all right interesting thank you that that helps sort of paint that picture for me the files app gets a little weird sometimes for me it gets limited I should say, not weird. So this maybe this is for someone like me. All right. Cool. Thank you.
Uh, speaking of fun little apps, uh, gadget coma wrote in to tell us that iStat menus version seven is now is out. And he says it is a major upgrade with a lot of new customization options. And also remember that it is available in set app. And yeah, I've been using iStatMenu 7 on a couple of my computers here. I try to use like different ones. There's like Stats, which is a free open source one. And so I kind of like to compare and contrast. It is installing iStatMenu 7.
It is a whole different paradigm interface way of configuring things. I guess maybe the best way to say that is, at least based on my experience, things in your menu bar will look different when you install iStatMenu 7. So expect that. And then you can do a whole lot more. And it really is kind of a slew of tweaks to all of the things.
And if you haven't used iStatMenus or Stats or what I believe was the first cool stuff found ever mentioned on MacGeekGab, which was menu meters, if you haven't used any of those, this is essentially a way of taking a lot of the information that you might see in Activity Monitor and presenting it in a very sort of condensed at-a-glance interface in your menu bar.
So you can just look very quickly and see what's happening with my network, what's happening with CPU, what's happening with RAM, those kinds of things. So Dave, you said you only use it on some of your computers. Curious as to which ones and why? Because I use iStat menus. I have iStat menus 7 on this computer here in the studio. I have Stats, the free alternative, on my laptop.
I just like to sort of be able to compare and contrast, mainly because we do this show and I like to sort of be able to, you know, well, for that use case, you probably want this. Why the CPU's pegging? Yeah. One, one thing. And I step menu seven has some, some new, one of the features that both of these have that I think a lot of folks, if you don't dig in, you wouldn't think to use is they have notifications and you can set different parameters for it to notify you.
So i like to know when and i'm trying to find where the notifications are in i step menu seven while i'm talking here which i might not be able to find they call them rules sorry uh in i step menus and you can say all right look show me an alert like when the battery's low or show me an alert let's see uh show me a banner out of memory yeah when memory pressure is above uh 50% for 30 seconds.
It's like, okay, I definitely want that, you know, for my use case, the memory thing is sort of the first thing for me. That's going to go and actually start causing me problems when memory pressure gets high. Oh, well, there you go. But, but like doing those things, um, it makes a difference. Right. And so, uh, yeah. So that, And they all have different types of...
Um notifications that they can do and so digging in this is actually a relatively new one for for i-step menu so i'm curious to see of course this machine has plenty of ram and so i don't usually run into memory pressure but i'm actually eager to go in and set that rule then because what i learned there is you know i've been running it for years yep it's one of those things it's like okay it's cool to look at but i have almost never needed it i need
it but it would be great to know hey, my memory pressure is getting to the point. Yes. Or a disk space is obviously not a thing I manage that pretty aggressively anyway. Right. And with one terabyte anymore on my laptop. But, yeah, getting a warning when you're running out of disk space, that's super helpful. Yeah, yeah. And probably good to get helpful when you're running out of CPU, when those are starting to peg. Uh-oh, what did I just do that's causing that to happen?
So knowing that that's there, I'm going to go set those rules Because like I say, for me, it's just been a cool little geeky widget to have on the side, not something that would be useful to me on a day-to-day basis. So I don't know that it's intended to be necessarily useful on a day-to-day basis, unless you're somebody that really obsesses about that sort of thing and likes to check it.
Yeah um but for me where i where i do find it useful is exactly what dave kind of alluded to which is if i start seeing things like beach balls or something it is a good visual place what i appreciate about it is how pretty it is and i think in this update it got prettier like the themes and stuff i love i love the look of it now but to be able to pop that right down from the top menu rather than having to go fire up activity monitor and activity monitor let's be honest i I mean,
it's very utilitarian in terms of like, it's, it gives you numbers, but I mean, it's got a few little graphs, but it's not, you're not going to see it right away. You know, like that visual and the ability to just hover and drill down to, okay, I want to look at what's going on with my memory, hover over the little memory widget.
And then it gives me which apps and processes are using what and what's wired and how much is free and you know, what swap is doing and all that stuff real fast when I'm actually having an issue. Right when i think something's going wrong i can validate is something going wrong or is it something else so yeah and if and if your machine is locking it up good luck launching a new app yeah right right true right so. Nice. All right. Adam, you taking us to Ben next?
Yeah. Ben says, in episode 1033, Kiwi Graham's quick tip of the week was about using files to scan documents. The result of doing so is an especially large PDF file, which may be difficult to share and or just as a storage hog.
Thus i recommend compressing the document using lightweight pdf which is a free app on the mac app store one hazard of lightweight pdf is that the resulting compressed document replaces the original and there's no way to undo or recover so if you're concerned about the quality of the replacement make sure to act on a copy of the original so that's that's good advice there Oh, Hey, that's pretty cool. Yeah. Oh, I like that. This reminds me of that app. We talked about it.
Uh, the max stock episode, uh, image Optum, same kind of thing. You just like super simple. You throw this a PDF at it. It shrinks it in place. So you, you, you know, it is destructive, right? You lose the original, but yeah. Yeah. Cool. I should have tried to figure this out ahead of time, but what's nice about this is like it's super simple, right? It's just like open the thing, drop it on there.
I'm fairly certain there's some archaic way to compress PDFs with preview, but I can never figure out how to do it. So like that's where something like this comes in. There is. You can build. There is. You export. Yeah. And then it gets you. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, but I think you even have to go into more settings. You do. Quartz filters. Yeah, you build a quartz filter that adjusts the PDF down and you can reduce file size with that. This is better.
PDF export will do it too, but I think it only gives you three options. I don't know how granular it is. It looks like this is pretty granular on your ability to do that. Cool. Yeah, good one. Yeah, very cool. Yeah, I agree. I agree. And most importantly, do it on a copy. Yeah, I mean, certainly at first. So you don't screw something up and now you don't have that file anymore. Yes, yes, fair, fair, very fair.
Speaking about nerdy things to have in your menu bar, Jan Landy wrote in about a Mac app called Public IP. He says that allows me to see the IP address that my computer is connected to and it lives in the menu bar. The reason that this is important to me is that I use a VPN and I want to ensure that I am on when I am online, that I am connected to my VPN's IP address. Very helpful when traveling out of my home region, if I'm doing banking or watching YouTube TV or whatever.
Although, yeah, I guess on your Mac, YouTube TV, that's where it gets the IP address or your location data. Not so much on the iPhone. But yeah, amazing. I love it. this is um public ip which is available on the mac app store and uh i think yeah there it is just sort of pops it right up in your menu bar fun i've been an ip chicken user forever.
Ip chicken ip chicken.com it's just it's a site that's been around forever and it just shows you your current oh great i just showed my current ip address on the show great oh good well i didn't tell you to go there no that's not me what's gonna happen that's not me i don't think it's the first time i've shown my ip address on the show so it's okay. Oh, boy. Lock down your sonology quick.
Oh, my sonology. Listen, the audience of our, you know, Mac Geek family here is the least of my concerns when it comes to my sonology. I am routinely getting hammered by people all over the world. So like I would be surprised if any one of you had a hankering to like I can try and hack into Dave's thing like and even if you did my guess is my hope is and my guess based on how great our community is is that you just poke around and be like I wonder how he set this up.
I wonder how he set that up like you wouldn't be interested in deleting my data. I don't know that's I'm sure there's nefarious people out there I know there are but our Mackie Kepp family is a pretty good family and if you want to join our Mackie Kepp family go to go to discord mackiekepp.com slash discord it is it is a an oasis of, help good cheer and. None of the craziness that happens on the internet it really is awesome you said it I'm going to say it. Why'd you say that? It does.
It's true. Well, I mean, if it becomes a problem, we would boot people out. But other than like the script kitties that, you know, aren't really a part of the Mac eCab world, and even those are very limited. Like I can count on one hand, I think, maybe even one finger, the number of problems we've had. So, yeah, I think it's great.
I love love being a part of this it's fantastic yeah all right and we briefly we had that discussion last week about but people trying to hammer your synology anyway yeah and yeah and you i updated mine after the show and i went from over 80 000 down to less less than 60 000. Oh yeah yeah the address is blocked yeah he's been really good about like tightening that yeah yeah maintaining his list maybe ticketmaster should hire him.
Let it go yeah it cost me an extra 10 bucks a month to deal with that because i can't have the least expensive fiber provider but it's okay all right shall we move on adam, uh sure i think you're you're up with rod l next i'm up i'm with with rod all right well rod Todd says, hey, check out Scroll Reverser if you use a mouse and trackpad both on your machine. Because what this allows you to do, he says it's handy for independently controlling the scroll direction of each device.
So like, you know, macOS, you can only set it once and it goes one way or the other way for whatever device, you know, whatever input devices you have. But if you're one of those folks that maybe uses a mouse and wants its scrolling direction to go one way and a trackpad and wants scrolling direction to go another way, you have more finite control with this. Love it.
Oh, I like that. That's a great idea. And he also mentioned MOS or maybe somebody else did in the thread, which is a lightweight tool used to smooth scrolling and set scroll direction independently for your mouse on macOS. So, yep, looks like there's two. Oh, there's two of these. Yeah. Yup. Yup. Oh, and you can do it differently per app with MOS. Per app. Why in the, I can't imagine a use case where, for me, where that would be something that would allow me to not go bonkers.
But maybe. I'll give you one. Okay, perfect. how about a drawing app or something like photoshop where you want to slow the maybe slow it down you know versus what you're doing in the finder because you want a little more finite control okay there you go up up yep all right that that makes sense okay yeah all right and how come with docusign and things like that signing your name on your trackpad never looks Looks like your signature asking for a friend. Yeah.
Well, you just gave another use case, Pete. You might want to flip it on. It looked like there were toggles in the settings. You might want to flip it on for a PDF when you're signing it. And again, slow down the tracking speed just for a minute so that it's a little more accurate. You have a little more control and you probably could create a better signature. Yeah. Very good point. Huh. Huh? I fell right into that one, stumbled into that one and you picked it up. That's awesome.
Yeah. Interesting. We've had this one on the list for a little while and it, it excites me. It's from Pascal. He says, I stumbled onto something recently called P list watch. It enables changes to P list files to be monitored in real time. And he says, might prove to be a useful tool to experiment with and fiddle with in many cases. Yeah. If you're looking for what settings change happens in a P list, when you check a, you know, check a box or uncheck a box and preferences this,
this would be the, this would be the way to do it. So yeah. P list watch. I don't know. It's a nerdy tool. What can I say? I'm a nerd. I'm trying so hard not to, to use grade middle school joke. Fourth grade joke. Yeah. Thank you for that. Adam. Too funny. I'm holding back. Great. For once. It's not me. That's right. Pete, you want to, you want to, I, it is with great trepidation that I, um, ask Pete, do you have something you want to share? I do.
Uh, and, and this one's one of mine. And years ago, I think I've talked about some of the speed reading apps and, and I'll actually put it up here. I uploaded the, uh, the video and there it is. So Dave, I'm going to start playing the video. Can you unmute the mics as I do that? It's called Outread. It's a speed reading app for the phone and, and actually your app too. So when that goes, it'll mute, let's unmute us. The answer is It's a hundred percent. Oh, you wrong one. I don't know.
That's wrong one. You've done. It didn't come up. Okay. That's, that's all right. So I actually put it in discord. It's a speed reading app and it's called out read and out read. Basically you can do eBooks, websites, PDFs, anything, anything you need to read. And it's going to help you improve your reading productivity by helping you focus on reading small chunks at a time.
And you can either do it by following a highlighter and have it go down the page or just have it put the text in front of you one word two words three words at a time that sort of thing and it's for anyone who wants to improve their reading speed and comprehension useful for students professionals anyone who's got a lot of reading to do and it's like you know I'm never gonna get through all of this it helps me a lot the average person can read 250 to 400 words per minute.
Using Outread, I can easily read 650, 600, 650. And it also claims to be useful for those with ADHD, dyslexia, and other kinds of reading disorders. So I don't know to what degree that may be true or not. They make the claim it's on the internet. It must be true because I think Abe Lincoln passed that act back in the 1860s that if it's on the internet, it has to be true. True. It's free to use and download and use. And then the pro version is $29.99 a year or $4.99 a month.
I've used it for years and I absolutely love it. I can get through an entire novel in three hours. Interesting. And so it's, it's just doing, I found a video on their page that sort of highlights it, but it, it's just like highlighting the words as you're reading them and keeping your focus on things. Is that, is that right? Okay. Or, which is what's playing right now as we're talking on the video. But the other way to do it is it's just showing one word at a time. Okay.
And it's amazing how much your brain will take in if you don't try to sound out the word in your head as you're reading. Oh, interesting. Okay. It just, it just goes there and your brain takes it in much faster. Interesting. If you just, you know, let go and let it work for you. Right. Right. Right. Yeah. Huh.
So, so it's dictating. So yeah, the, the, the, the first mode that they show in the video and that, which is the second one you described where it's literally just showing you a word at a time. So you don't get to control when your eye moves to the next word. You just put your eye on the screen and let it sort of clockwork orange style. It brings the words to you.
Yeah. the words to your brain yeah yes and with the pro version you can change the font you can i don't remember what the speed i think you can go in anywhere from like a hundred to a thousand words per minute thousand is way too fast for me sure but some people can do it um you can change the font the font size the whether it's dark or light all that kind of stuff so it's a super Super, super app for people who need to do a lot of reading.
Yep. And I find it, it allows me to read a novel when I don't even bring my Kindle with me. I can just have it all on my phone. Interesting. Or get through a website, a long website article. You get a 3,000, 5,000 word web article. Yep. Huh. Yeah. That's pretty cool. All right. It's, it's basically the equivalent.
The way I like to think about it is it's almost the equivalent of like listening to a podcast on, you know, two X or three X, whatever, you know, a lot of people do that with audio books or audio content. Yep. Same thing for your written content. Yup. Exactly. Interesting. Yeah. This makes sense. Huh? All right. Cool. Speaking of podcasts, there is Apple Podcasts is now available on the web, which is not a huge deal for those of us that are like Apple users and things like that.
But if you want to use Apple Podcasts and, you know, it allows us to link directly to episodes, I think is how this will, this appears. And of course, you can link directly to the show and all that stuff. So it's at podcasts.apple.com. Of course, when I click on podcast.apple.com on my Mac, it opens the podcast app. But if I force it to open it, then I can sign in to iCloud and get my whole thing here, which I'm not signed in, evidently.
But as I'm looking at it. But, you know, you get your podcast interface and the ability to play episodes right there on the web. So, yeah, that's pretty good. Yeah. Yeah. If you use Chrome or an alternate browser, I don't think it will open the Apple Podcast app. Oh, that's fair. Right. Yeah, that makes sense. That makes sense. Um, while we're, while we're here, I'm curious, uh, what, and Bob actually asked this question.
So maybe this is the, the only question that we get in, uh, the episode about cool stuff found here is, um, Bob wrote in and asked since overcast has been updated, it has become in Bob's words, unusable and unstable.
He says, I know that it's a complete rewrite from the ground up. and uh he says i figured out how to export the opml file which is his subscription file from overcast uh even though that option no longer exists in the new version he says if you can go to overcast fm.com you can export your opml file so he says i imported this into pocketcast which he says he had never used before but is now using and he says i want to try apple podcast but i can't import my opml file
he says uh what other podcast apps are you all using um adam i saw a thumbs up from you when when he mentioned pocket casts well pocket casts is great i will also throw a huge plug to downcast which i used for a long long time um so this is going to be i was the comment i was going to make here is in my old age guys i have just like started to take the path of leaks resistance a lot more okay so i use apple puck like i am so vanilla apple now and i've moved
more and more that direction i used to use all kinds of third-party things and i love them i love third-party developers i am a huge supporter uh but more and more it's just like. Like, and it might be because I'm listening to podcasts less than when I actually had a commute now that I work from home and I can't listen to something that I need to be engaged in when I'm doing my development work. I know some people can, my brain just does not function like that.
So I can do music like background music and, you know, white noise or whatever, but I cannot do a podcast. I need to be focused on that when I'm doing it. So when I do listen to podcasts, It's usually just when I'm going to bed at night and it's just, I use the Apple podcast app. Cool. All right.
I have found the apple podcast app gotten i'm the opposite i found it more difficult to use over the over its changes than it used to be and i will say that when overcast rewrite first came out i was unhappy with the number one thing you had to hunt and hunt and hunt to find out how to get it to shut off at the end of that episode and he apparently got enough complaints about that that that's now right up right up front again okay yeah so you can do that but i like the ability to skip a minute
and 55 seconds for this particular show because that's when they get all the intro crud out of the way and now I can listen to the episode, that kind of thing. So that's the granular thing. I'm still with Overcast. Me likes it. Yeah, I like Overcast too. I've been an Overcast user for a while. The thing that originally attracted me to it and it's part of what keeps me there is that Marco doesn't use Marco Armit who writes Overcast.
Doesn't use Apple's audio playback engine. He wrote his own audio playback engine and therefore can do things like normalizing the sound. We go through a lot of effort on our end before we give you the audio file to normalize our sound. But not every podcast does. And sometimes it's all over the place. And I find myself diving for the volume knob either up or down and trying to ride that while I'm in my car or something.
Overcast does a great job at smoothing that out. It also has smart speed, which skips the pregnant or overly pregnant pauses and smooth things out. And you can, of course, play it at faster speeds. It's got settings per show. I didn't find the update interesting. Much of a friction point at all. And I think the reason for that is my primary interface to overcast is car play. And it really doesn't look any different in car play. So like I am aware that overcast was updated.
But that in terms of my use case, it's like, no, I just still push the same buttons in the car. It all seems basically the same. name. So I have a feature request if you're listening, Marco. So I have a show that I like to listen to, but they break it up into two hours every day. And since the second hour comes out after the first hour, the new day always plays the second hour first.
And then the first, I would like to be able to granularly move episode, you know, hour one to the top of the 22nd of August and hour two below that and then go to the 21st of august hour one hour two but the way it hits my feed is hour two is on top hour one is next i think i have no way to do that other than manually if i don't believe i haven't found it i i well and this was in the old version of overcast i have not tried this in the new one but i had most podcasts where it surfaced the
most recent episode at the the top and and and and would play in that order but you can you can flip it and tell it to play the oldest first the oldest unplayed first oh there you go that's what i haven't been doing yes you can do that i hadn't thought about that because when i do that i tend to keep them go back a hundred years 400 episodes yeah yeah yeah on top of where it really is so okay try oldest Just go through and delete it. That might do it. Yeah. Yep.
And then there's another app that I've mentioned in the show before. It's called Fountain. It's part of the podcasting 2.0 app and information ecosystem. There's a whole extra...
Set of parameters that can be added now to an rss feed and they're called it is called podcasting 2.0 it's evolving it allows us to put chapters in in a very um specific way we can notify you when there's a live stream and it can play the live stream for you right in the app uh it also allows you because podcasting 2.0 allows for this it allows for uh micro payments based on when you're listening and you can actually even earn,
um like credits so that you can send those back to your favorite podcasters without ever actually paying money and so that that part of it's kind of cool and we definitely like we support a lot.
Of the podcasting 2.0 features with mac geek app so and fountain does a great job with with those so i'll put that out there too if you're if you're looking for something a little different try fountain and uh and it's a whole it's a whole thing but yeah yeah so yeah it's fun there's interactions you can actually send us comments in the app about segments and we get those comments in our feeds and stuff so yeah it's pretty cool that's pretty cool hey dave hey adam on
that on that normalized thing i need to go back but years and years ago paul figiani was trying to set some standards for podcasters for that i think even build some tools to help like i remember he asked a bunch of us to send our files and he did a whole like graphing of like where everybody's levels were and like how things are set up i think it never went anywhere but i thought that was a great project it's like oh um it's interesting i searched for paul figgiani and you know
podcast standards and i'm looking at when this was published oh in 2017 daniel j lewis who publishes the podcast called the audacity podcast did an episode about this all about why loudness normalization matters and he references paul's.
Stuff in here and and and how all that works um if you're a podcaster i recommend and i highly recommend a tool called aphonic um to live without it to do all kinds of things it was to process the show to normalize your loudness to do some multi-band compression to help if that's one of the things that we use to help normalize or not normalize but balance our levels between the three of us.
At Podcast Movement this year, last week, earlier this week, whatever it was, I gave a version of the presentation that I gave at MacStock teaching people how I use tools like Auphonic and Apple Shortcuts and a few other things to make it so that basically it takes about 15 minutes from when we finish recording this episode to when the episode's published. And automation is a big part of that. And Auphonic is a big part of our automation. So I had 20 minutes to do this at Podcast Movement.
It was a distilled version of what I did at MacStock. It was a very compressed version of it. And I started into this. And of course, Auphonic's the first thing I talk about. And I see someone in the crowd start pumping their fists in the air with joy. And it was Kristoff from the Auphonic team. I had no idea that he and Georg were going to even be in the United States, let alone at Podcast Movement. They didn't know I was going to talk about Auphonic. They just chose to come
to my session based on the subject matter. Nice. And they came up afterwards. We're like, this is amazing. We couldn't have done it ourselves like this. I was like, well, you know, there you go. Keep making what you're making, please. Got a product that works. Yeah. Gotta use it.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. so i love i love me some authentic it does so many things transcriptions yeah uh it uh, ftps it to your server yeah it's the way it's the way to go all right well we talked about apple podcasts on the web you want to take us to randy adam and and you can pick which randy but but I had one in mind. Oh, right. This is Apple Maps? Yeah. On the web, yeah. So just like podcasts on the web. Randy says that Apple Maps is on the web via beta.
And I'm trying, you might have to help me with this one because I think this came from Discord, Dave, and I'm not seeing which is Randy's.
It's it's beta.maps.apple.com is right what it is yeah and yeah there's no link in here i see ben yeah yeah he says it makes sending uh map links to non-apple users a little easier and the beta supports driving and walking directions oh oh that's cool yeah yeah yeah, Yeah, it's, um, I, I don't know about you guys, but when I'm on my computer, if I have to do anything with maps, I go to maps.google.com. I, I, I don't launch the Apple maps app.
I, I want to stay in my web browser. Like oftentimes it's, I don't know, it's just easier. And so I was super happy to see this. Now, I still go to maps.google.com because my fingers know to open a new tab and start typing M-A-P. And because Apple's URL is beta.M-A-P, I still, it will never come up for me. So hopefully. It will come out of beta. You got it. That's right. All right.
I have an Apple Maps. I'm not even going to call it a tip. I'm going to call it a mandate, a like request for the community. So, you know, I have moved to a small town, right? Right. And Apple Maps in my town is incredibly inaccurate because businesses come and go. They go out of business. Hours change constantly. Da da da da. Google does a pretty good job of keeping up with that stuff.
I have started using in Apple Maps, if you find something that's incorrect, a street name, restaurant hours, anything, there is a button in there that you can click and say, there's a, I think it says something like there's a problem. I don't have it in front of me right now. But basically you can submit corrections or information to the Apple Maps team. And I will tell you, they are incredibly responsive. I usually get a response back within a week. And usually they they've made a
change or an update. So like we went to a brand new brewery out in a small town here. It was in Google Maps. It wasn't on Apple Maps. I just put the location. I gave them a picture. I put in the hours, gave them all the information. Within a week, it was on Apple Maps. So if you're unhappy with Apple Maps and something, just tell the Apple Maps team. They have a ground truth.
They call them a ground truth in mapping. I think they're called a ground truth team and it's the people that so you have like your satellite data and all the automated data but they have a team of physical humans that validate and make sure yes there's a construction going on here and it needs to be rerouted or yes there's actually a new restaurant here and it needs to be updated so please use that if you're unhappy with apple maps and we can all make it better yeah.
Wow. That's good to hear. I mean, I've, I've seen that report an issue button before, but I've always sort of treated it like, Oh sure. Just like reporting bugs to Apple. They've trained me that they're going to yell at me every time I report a bug to them. So yeah. But this sounds like the maps team is different. That's good. Yeah. Yeah, I've gotten notifications back.
It's like, we've updated it. Like they had the Tesla superchargers that are in my town next to our Goodwill in a completely wrong location. Like, so if you were trying to find those, you'd be frustrated. And I was like, no, they're actually right here. And it even pulls up the map and you have a little pinpoint, you slide the map around and you're like, nope, it's here. Yeah, right. Not in the middle of the grocery store. Yeah. You know, like.
Huh. That's why you drove into the grocery store. That's it.
Yeah i swear maps said my phone told me the only one the only problem i'm having with them right now is there's a red box location and again they've got the pinpoint there's a huge like dollar store or whatever there and it's right on top of the dollar store and it's like no the red box like kiosk is way over to the side around the corner from here and i've told them and they keep sending that one back and being like we don't know what you're talking so i think i I have to go take a picture so
they can validate like, no, it's not in the store. It's actually outside over on the side of this building. Yep. Huh? But every other time they've just made the adjustment or added the new thing. And I did this in San Diego too, because we had new breweries that would open up all the time and you know, I'm a craft beer guy. So I'd be like, no, there's a new brewery here. It's on Google. It's not on Apple maps. You know, this is why people keep going back to Google. This is why.
Absolutely. Yeah. When I'm for driving directions, I generally default to Apple maps. If I am in a town, like when I was in whatever, National Harbor, Maryland, looking for something, I went to Google Maps. Like I will not go like it is not Apple Maps is absolutely not my first stop for any of that stuff. So, yeah, interesting. We all remember the disaster that Apple Maps was when it rolled out. It was so bad that even their original icon. Remember that?
What's this? Right. The original Apple Maps icon had you turning left off a bridge. Yeah, it had the entrance to the 280 wrong or something like that. Yeah. I didn't know that. That's outstanding. Yeah, you had to turn left and go right over the edge of the bridge to get onto I-280. That's outstanding. Yeah, no, it's way better. For driving directions, I really like it. I like it a lot. And its CarPlay integration, obviously, is fantastic and all of those things.
And it will update your route if you get delays like Google Maps does. It's not quite as aggressive as Waze, but neither is Google Maps. You know, sometimes I'll play it and Waze against each other if I'm dealing with a lot of traffic or something. Speaking of traffic, I don't know what that segue is about. I want to take a minute and thank all of the people who have contributed on our premium program at MacGeekUp.com slash premium in the last couple of weeks.
This is, as I always say, this is very much appreciated. It is also very much your choice optional.
And uh but it is a huge part of what makes the show work and so thanks to uh those who have contributed including a 50 contribution from bradford in sparta a 45 contribution from larry in baton rouge a 30 contribution from bob in saint charles 25 contributions from the following Elliot in Brookline, Mark in Centennial, David in Farmington Hills, Alan in Montgomery, Jeffrey in North Belmore, Louis Michel in St. Laurent. I'm sure I'm saying that wrong. Margaret in Waukegan,
Joshua in Parts Unknown. Thanks to you for your $25 contributions. Thanks to, I'll leave this one anonymous because this might be, someone fantastic in Kissimmee, Florida for a $20 contribution. Thanks to Bob and Lepesh for $15 contribution and thanks to the following folks for their $10 contribution.
Wagner and Alan, Bill in Parts Unknown, Scott in Bourbonnaise, Jeff in Chesterton, Chris in Chorleywood, Mark in Coopersburg, Barry in Des Plaines, Kevin in Edison, Richard in New York, Santiago in Palm City, Michael in Robbins, James in San Antonio, Abel in Santa Rosa, Phil in Summers, Brian in Southbury, Frank in Voorhees, John in Wake Forest, Neil in West Hartford, and Timothy in West Windsor. Thanks to all of you and thanks to everybody who is a part of the MGG premium program.
Again, that's at Mackeycap.com slash premium and you rock. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. So awesome. Randy, I don't know if it's the same Randy or a different Randy than we just talked about with Apple Maps, but Randy shares something very important that has been true for a little while. And that is that VMware Fusion Pro is now free for personal use.
And that is something that I think could be very cool for a lot of people so just wanted to make sure everybody knew about that VMware Fusion being the. Do we still call it a virtual environment or is it a I guess it's virtualization still yeah something like that I think that's still the right term even though we've changed CPUs and all that stuff but yeah, it's not emulation right It is virtualization. So it's not emulating Intel.
It is virtualizing other operating systems on our ARM processors. Is that the right way to say it, Adam? I would say so, yeah. Okay, great. Well, then you and I will say so together, or separately, but similarly. We talked in episode 1050 about cleaning out your lightning bunnies, but they aren't just lightning bunnies.
They could be USB-C bunnies and those sorts of things, and we got some great comments from many, many, many, many of you, including a cool stuff found revisited, but really enhanced from ben and uh he sends us a link for the pure port which is something we've talked about on the show in the past but in the past it was only uh the pure port was only available for lightning connectors now it's available also for usbc connectors and it's a multi-tool for cleaning those connectors
and it's got all the right uh shapes and sizes to not only clean the port on your devices but to clean the connector on the cables as well because the usbc cables have that little you know gunk collector in the middle of them so it's kind of got it's got it all in one it looks like it's a fun little multi-tool it's available on amazon for 25 bucks and the lightning version is also available on amazon for 25 bucks so you can you could buy both
But then it would cost you 50 bucks because that's how math works, at least in my world. So thank you for sending that in, Ben. Good stuff. Love it. Yep. Hey Dave. Hey Adam. We can't let them get away with blocking all of our charging. If we give in, we're giving into all the cute and fuzzy lightning bunnies in the world. And so Kirit has the solution for us. And that is? He says, I enjoyed your interesting discussion on cleaning lightning bunnies.
At one point, I heard one of you saying that something about how difficult it would be to clean USB ports. I bought this Chinese-made set on Amazon that did the job. And I love this stuff. So I'll explain what this is in a minute, but I gotta give you the title of this thing.
IPhone cleaning kit for charging port, multi 10-in-1 Android cleaner kit, phone cleaning tool repair for iPhone and Type-C data cable, camera, earbud, speaker, speaker electronic screen portable storage case you think they keyword stuffed that title at all Adam love it love it this is a giga giga OJ Gia OJ Gia OJ I don't know it doesn't matter there's there's a bunch of these there's a bunch of these kits this one happens to kind of be cool because
it looks like a little uh AirPods case almost yeah and then within it it has all of these little tools for getting in cracks and crevices it looks like little felt cleaners there's kind of a pen looking like thing that there's a little brushy kind of thing and it you know looks just like a thing for like digging things out of cracks and crevices i might be a little bit careful in some areas on your devices especially with some of these tools so you'll have to figure out what
what the right tool is for the right like place, but yeah. Just a little bunch of little bits and bobs in a nice little case. And this one at the moment anyway, is 12 bucks on Amazon and we'll do both lightning and USB-C with the, the various tips and tools that are in there. So that's, that's a little bit less than the pure port, quite a bit less. If Matt remembers folks, it's for cleaning your gear, not your ear.
That's right. That's right. That's right. Never stick anything in your ear smaller than your elbow. And, and whoever wants to, uh, email me about that, uh, film reference. I started the, the, uh, spot with, and tell me the name of the movie you will win. I won't say a prize, but my admiration. And what email address should they send that to? Is that feedback at Mackie cub.com? Adam. Yep. Feedback at MacGeekGab.com. See, I didn't walk on either of you when you
said feedback at MacGeekGab.com. Yeah, it's amazing. And I think Adam's signal was just out of sync for a minute there, but I think it's all back. You're so brave. Sorry. You're back. No, you're fine. You're fine. Yeah, yeah, yeah. All right. While we're on the subject of the hardware and charging and that sort of thing, Chris brings us the MagnaLink 360 Pro charging cables that also will help ward off lightning bunnies in their own way.
Because what these are for 30 bucks, you get a 360 Pro 100 watt magnetic USB-C phone charger, pack of two, six in one magnet charging cable, fast charging and data works with iProducts Type-C and micro USB forest green. Almost as long as the previous. I know. Yeah. Only one line shorter. That's right. But the idea is there. These are two part connectors and one part lives in your USB-C port on your phone or on your Mac. And then the other and it has a little magnetic nub on the outside of it.
And then the other part is the cable that has a reciprocal magnetic nub and so it just plugs right in so you get essentially mag safe ish and and it'll save your lightning bunnies by nature of the port is always full so you it doesn't it's not open when it's in your pocket and collects all the lint and all that stuff so yeah this is pretty interesting and yeah what What's that, Adam?
Sorry, I was going to say what I like about these, and I have a question about for people who have used them, is an issue we have in our house is that the cables always seem to break right at that point. Point where the cable comes into the bottom of the connector, right? It, it, the wires, cause you turn your phone landscape mode and then the cord pulls down and blah, blah, blah. This has a mechanism that allows it to rotate like 90 degrees.
I'm just curious, is that bet, like, does that hold up better or does it have the same problem where eventually it just wears out because there's probably contacts sliding across one another?
Like have people found that's better or worse or about the same like i'm i'm curious because the only thing that's the only thing about this is it's definitely a system and you're kind of locked into you know it's like the razor blade sort of thing you're going to be locked into this brand of cable right right you're not going to find these cables over at uh at anchor no no you you're on the magna link or whatever other there, there, it looks like, it looks like there, there are many of these
out there and the pictures of them make it look like it doesn't really matter what brand you buy from. They're all using the same, you know, mag magnetic connector. Now, whether you want to be the one to experiment with that on your devices, or if you want to let it be someone else, that's, that's a you decision. Um, yeah, that's interesting. Yeah. Maybe crystal right back Check in and share that with us. All right, we are getting close to the end here.
Yeah, we've got a lot more to go. We do. Lightning round. We just did the lightning bunny round. Sorry. I want to jump to Bruce, because he brought us something called Local Send that I want to start this conversation. This is interesting. Yeah, this looked pretty cool. So he wrote in, there it is. Guys, I came across this very cool utility designed to share files to nearby devices. Here are the cool parts. Free. Open source. Here's the biggest one. Cross-platform. Windows.
Android. All those people who aren't normal, you can now bring them into your Apple fold. Sorry. Localsend.org. It has an iOS app. It has a macOS app. and obviously Android and Windows as well. It uses Wi-Fi. You don't have to be on the same network, I don't think, but you have to have Wi-Fi on them both.
But the review I read said it's slower than AirDrop, but a whole lot faster and more efficient than loading it to a thumb drive or a network drive and then trying to get it off of there and all that. So it's basically AirDrop for everyone. A little slower, but free and open source. I like this. Airdrop for everyone. That's a good way of contextualizing it. Yeah. Localsend.org. Yeah, .org. Localsend.org. Yeah. And of course, there's links for all of these things in the show notes.
And if you want the show notes to be delivered to your inbox, just visit macgeekup.com. Sign up for the mailing list. That is primarily what the mailing list does is once a week, get an email with the show notes. Of course, the link to play the show, either video or audio.
Your choice and then all the links for all the things we mentioned during the episode so yeah very cool along those lines Grumpy mentioned in our discord something called tail drive which is from the tail scale people tail scale allows you to persistently share folders with other users and devices on your tail net so.
Basically becomes a document sharing solution amongst your devices it automatically integrated into the files app in fact if you have tail scale on your iphone and you launch the files app you will see this appear there you have to go turn it on it's in beta or alpha sorry tail drive is currently in alpha and they have steps that you have to go in they don't have just a little switch that you can flip you've got to go on the web and edit your uh tail
scale policy but they give you the thing to paste into your tail scale policy it's not like you're on your own much of the time but um but i can see this being really cool private right we talked about resilio sync recently you know that the way of sharing documents amongst multiple devices well tail scale is kind of doing something similar so i like this that's good good good stuff yeah it's almost like they've thought about this stuff it is like they've thought about this stuff um mackie pie
also had something really interesting in our discord that i don't know it i thought it felt related but mackie pie shares with side loading in the eu being a thing now meaning alternate alternate app stores essentially being mandated to be allowed in the eu some people in the U.S. might wonder, can I do this too? And the answer, says MackeyPie, is yes, with some asterisks. You need to use your Mac with a special application to do it.
You have to resign your apps before a seven-day time limit, or you'll have to reinstall the main tool to reactivate them. Each time a new app is added, you have to retrust the developer, and apps often contain what are called extensions, and these extensions, along with the apps themselves, must register an app ID, of which you only get 10. But with all of those caveats in place, altstore.io, A-L-T-S-T-O-R-E dot I-O, is sideloading for everyone.
Discover the apps that push the boundaries of iOS. And that is sort of the cool part is the apps that are available in this are often going to be things that for whatever reason wouldn't be approved in the app store because they don't live in Apple's fairly strictly defined sandbox. And so, you know, your mileage will vary. Let the buyer or the installer beware. I don't think you buy anything, but but it is a pretty cool thing. It's it's kind of like jailbreaking made much simpler ish.
Yeah. Thank you for that. Thanks for sending that in. Yeah. Life with no safety rails. Right. Right. Exactly. Which is, yeah. I mean. That's fine. Kind of how it's been for a long time. Yeah. Yeah. Or was for a long time and no longer is. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I rode in the back of pickup trucks and didn't wear a helmet while skateboarding. Imagine. The horror. Go ahead. Probably. I could be wrong. You probably did jumping on your bicycle without a helmet on too. Oh, yeah. Yeah.
All right. I'm going to say we have room for three left. So now it is dealer's choice. So, Pete, are you ready to go first on this dealer's choice? I'm going to do Pop Pick.
That one has been really cool for me. I just threw it up in Discord, cord and i'll throw the other one up here right on our show this is a quick portrait shot i took of my son in front of the trevi fountain and pop pick 3ds it for you and it'll take any uh any portrait mode that you do or you can take the shot directly in um directly within the uh pop Hotpik app itself. It's $299 to remove all of the, um, uh, to remove the watermark and to get all the pro features.
And it, you know, it gives you one, which is like back and forth, but it'll rotate a little, go up and down. It'll zoom in and out in a circular fashion, that kind of stuff. And it just, it does a really nice job of three-dimensionalizing a otherwise two-dimensional professional photo. And it's really cool. Easy to share on Instagram and Facebook and into a video anywhere. And once you buy the $2.99 pro version, they let you store in your own little pop pick.
Gallery yeah on on their site for sharing with others as well that's cool so yeah a fun little huh i like a little way of doing it yeah i think and i think i uploaded it to discord did i hit enter i yeah yeah so it's a video there you can share it as a video an animated gif that sort of thing but it when it's actually on your phone all you do is move your phone around a little bit and it senses the movement and so you don't even have to play it as video just interesting huh,
that's pretty cool i like it yeah all right adam do you have uh do you have one to share did you pick one i'm gonna steal one that got sent to pete just because i think this is cool and i dabble a little bit in this i don't know if i'd enter this sort of thing but mark sent us a link to the iphone, Photography Awards. Yeah. At IPPAwards.com and you can go in. They just announced their 2024 winners, but I'm assuming they'll be doing it next year as well.
But it's a competition where people can enter their iPhone photos. Huh. And I don't, I don't, I guess there's maybe some prizes, but yeah. You know what the coolest part of that website to me was? Giving me ideas Ideas for stuff that looks cool to take photos of. Yeah. They have all the galleries there. Yeah. Yeah. So much fun. There's some amazing pictures that were taken with iPhones. Right. Kind of. There's some real artistry. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Huh? Yeah. You're right. There's good inspiration. I mean, there's simple enjoyment of looking at these fantastic pictures. I mean, it's it, you are literally scrolling through an art gallery.
Huh? Yes. Wow. Wow. Wow yeah some of these are okay yeah yeah all right i gotta get it we got a show to do i can't i can't uh yeah yeah one thing one thing i want to do point out i'd quickly check their faq because i know this is one that comes up a lot and they asked about copyright you know do you remain the copyright owner of your photos yes you do but of course you give ipp a awards permission to, post them on the website and use them in promotional images so okay just be
aware of that Yeah, that's pretty standard. Yeah, that makes sense. But I mean, good to know. Yep. I mean, there have been photo services where they say, basically, if you give us your photo, you transfer the license or give us a perpetual license to do whatever we want. Yep. So it's good to know that's not happening. Yeah, some of these are cool. All right. I know what I'm going to do here because I can do a little show and tell, too.
There's a company called Cell Helmet That makes all kinds of different Things for our Phones and one of them, Is the cell helmet mag safe rings and that go on the back of your phone, kind of like a pop socket or a, um, you know, like the snap it or whatever those things are. What's cool about these is they're like gel rings. So when it's on your phone, it's like the part that you put your fingers through is a malleable rubber strap. It's like a rubber ring.
And what's nice is it sticks off your phone. It's very handy. You can spin it around. You can find what's comfortable. And when you put it in your pocket, it just sort of flattens out. It's not an issue. you it's not like a pop socket where i have to move it out and push it back down and so i'll flip back and forth between having this and a pop socket on my phone because i found that after.
About a week or two with a pop socket i start getting my hand like my finger where i would rest the pop socket socket starts getting a little sensitive just from friction you know using it all the time it's like all right so i'll switch to this and then i'll have this on there for a little while and it it kind of goes back and forth so that's the uh the cell helmet it sells for 15 bucks at uh what is it cellhelmet.com so yeah there you go yep fun stuff love it it's
they call it the magsafe ring iphone grip i call it the magsafe squishy grip but it is magsafe so you know it comes on and off just like your just like anything else does so i think it does i'm looking at the one they they sent me does it have like it could i stick it on to it might it might have like a little um like adhesive ring but i don't think so i don't know it it looks like it does it looks like it has something that wants to be peeled off but i've never peeled it off and.
I don't need to so well i mean if you shake it hard enough you shake my pocket hard enough that's gonna come off too that's sort of how it works but um but yeah by and large it holds your your phone so yeah and even though you can go to show notes and find it i will point out for the listeners it's cell helmet is c-e-l-l thank you one word yeah c-e-l-l helmet yep yep you're not selling a helmet it is a helmet for your well to call these cell phones i think is also
inaccurate right because we're not using the cellular network anymore is that right there's some specific thing i don't know it's a i just know that my ios device has a telephone app in it I heard about this. Yeah. I have a question. Can you uninstall that app? I don't think so. No. No, I know. All right. It's time. That was fun. Thanks for hanging out, everybody. Yep. Thanks for sending in all your cool stuff found. Thanks for supporting the show. Thanks for sharing the show with a friend.
That would be my request, our request to you this week is pick your favorite friend that would like something we talked about in this episode and share the episode with them. Or if a quick tip in last week's episode is better for somebody, send that to them too. We would love to see the MacGeekGab audience and the MacGeekGab family continue to expand. And that's something we can all do together. And then that helps us all in a variety of ways.
I'm going to jump in and say it's mandatory. You don't have to send us money, but you do have to share the show. You have to. You have to. Pete said, you know, it's the rules. Listen, you want to listen. You got to share. Well, there it is. That was Pete. That was Pete's Marine voice right there. Oh, wow. If you want to listen, you got to share it. Oh, wow. Well, with that also, it's nice to share. Yeah. Go listen to Pete's show.
I, I highly recommend it. So there I was. You got to, you've got to. That's right. And I do two other shows. I do Business Brain for entrepreneurs and Gig Gab for musicians. So go check all that stuff out. Go follow MattCast on what social platform do you use most these days, Adam, if any? All of them. Again, being in a small town, I am now on Facebook a lot, but don't go there because I won't check things there. I only have to go there to find out about businesses and stuff. It's crazy.
Very cool. X, probably. X, there you go. X.com slash MattCast. Thanks so much for hanging out and x.com slash Mac key cab to Pete. Your shirt says something very interesting on it. It has three words and those words are don't get caught. Don't do it. If Pete's shirt says it, you know, you got to follow it. Later.