It's time for Mac Geek, and listener Andrew brings us our quick tip of the week. He says, a few weeks ago, I shared about the ability in Apple Reminders to group lists into categories or folders with names of your choosing. Apple Notes, with lots of notes, can be pretty unwieldy. Yes, you can have folders for notes, but lots of different topics or folders, too, can become a jungle. Did you know you can also group folders of notes into categories or folders with a name of your choosing?
Just create a new folder and give it a name and then drag other existing folders into it and they will become subfolders. Better still, call these top level folders with the same names as the folders for your lists that you have in reminders. So your brain has to do less work ongoing when organizing both notes and reminders. That's a really good idea.
More tips. Thank you, Andrew. More tips like this. Plus your questions answered today on Mac Geek Hub 1082 for Monday, March 24th, National Cocktail Day 2025. We'll be right back.
Greetings, folks, and welcome to Matt Geekgab, the show where you send in tips like that, you send in cool stuff found, you send in questions, we share it all, we try to provide answers to the questions, or at least a troubleshooting path, and we organize it all into an agenda that generally is built to help each of us learn at least five new things every single time we get together sponsor for this episode is owc with their new thunderbolt 5 portable ssd the envoy ultra over 6 000 megabytes
a second we'll talk more about that 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 we don't have pilot Pete today, Adam. No, no Pete. He is he is piloting finally for the first time in a while. He's able to fly his plane that Pete and I dropped off to get painted after Mac stock. Today is the day that the day we're recording it, I believe, is the first day he has seen it, let alone flown it since then. So, you know, I can't wait to see pictures of the paint job, which I'm sure he'll share with all of us.
Hopefully it all will get put back together. Okay.
Uh, let's hope. Yeah. I think, uh, I think he told us this morning he was putting the wingtips on and was going to, I'm going to fly it for its annual inspection.
So he went with a mechanic though, right? Oh yeah. He had to do an inspection and all that good stuff. Yeah.
Yeah. No, he's, he's in good hands down there, but yes. Yep. It's a fun little plane. I like that thing. hopefully it's I can't wait till it's back in New Hampshire yeah yeah yeah uh shall.
We get into some tips or did we do it oh we didn't do our police code oh reserve lodging 10 82 reserve lodging
I don't even know what that's more like.
A vacation thing
I know I guess police have to take vacation too so that's okay there's nothing wrong with that like I mean we all take vacations just because the police officers weird to have a code for it I'm sure it means something else. If you know feedback at MacGap.com, tell us.
Yeah, you can hit feedback at MacGap.com. I wonder if it's like, you know, Mayberry, where the drunk would just come up. He has reserved lodging at the jail cell and just put himself in.
Didn't he? What wasn't his name? What was the name of the town drunk?
I don't remember. I didn't watch that show too much.
Otis. Otis was the town drunk.
Otis, yeah. Otis. He'd just like wander in.
Hey yep all right well it is national cocktail day i'll take.
Care of myself
Yeah i got it myself i'll just lock myself in yeah i i said dinny because our our neighbor in the house that i was in for uh a large part of growing up like middle school high school and college um our neighbor everybody in our little village called like that had lived there far longer than us called him Otis because he was the town drunk and everybody knew of this that. So it's funny that I, I went to Dinny as the, the name from Mayberry, not Otis. Yeah.
Yeah. It's not really that funny, but you know. All right.
Now we can get into some tips.
I think some feedback. I got one from Todd. MattGeeCup.com is where Todd sent that to.
All right. So you said feedback at MattGeeCup.com. We'll just do that one more time.
One more time. Todd says.
Todd says, when your iPhone is locked and you use Siri to create a reminder, the result will show on the home screen. You can tap the result and edit it prior to committing it. So you can actually edit the entry on the lock screen before it actually gets saved, apparently.
So you need to add to it.
Append it, adjust it. yeah i think i wouldn't i seem to remember you can kind of do that with some other things too but i'm not 100 sure
You're probably right yeah interesting yeah speaking.
I know i remember sorry i was just saying i remember being able to there was something about being able to edit like if you ask the s lady a question right and it pops up and then you've got that dialogue that you can tap it and sort of edit it if if the phrase that you said was misinterpreted or didn't get exactly she didn't get exactly your ear exactly correctly yeah and then you could get that the result that way as well huh i've never done it though but i think you can do
It yeah i think you i think you're right i think you're right yep um speaking of the lock screen i uh the episode of gig gab that comes out today is with my friend josh rosenberg and he uh wanted to use his iphone as his you know as his camera he's like oh my web camera is kind of crappy he's like do you you know tell me what to buy i'll just go buy a better web camera i'm like you've got one in your pocket man like you don't have to buy something and he's
like oh really how do i do that i'm like you just select it like it's it's there like you have to turn off continuity camera if you don't want it to work and you can you can go into uh settings and i think it's airplay and continuity and turn it off right so uh yeah where is it airplane continuity i know it's somewhere maybe it's settings general yeah settings general airplay and continuity and you can turn continuity camera on or off but he hadn't done that he checked it was on
he's like i don't know what to do i guess I'll just use my webcam. And then like 10 minutes before we recorded, he texted me and he's like, I figured it out. The only thing I changed was after reading the instructions for StreamYard, which is the platform we use. He says they told me that I needed to put the phone in lock mode. He's like the whole time I thought I had to unlock my phone to get it to work as continuity camera.
No, no, no, no. It's exactly the opposite. It needs to be locked so that you can invoke continuity camera. Otherwise, it won't show up. So thank you, Josh, for sharing that with us. Yeah, good stuff.
Wait, so one of the things you just said there, I think, is an opposite tip for me. You said you can actually manually... Activate continuity did you say that no
You can manually disable the phone from ever offering itself as a continuity camera.
Uh okay yes yes but i wish there was an ability to like force it into continuity camera mode same but yeah but you know locking it because sometimes it doesn't come on and it's like can i just turn it on yes yes
Yes i i've been there.
Too no even when it's locked i you know i've been or it's in lock mode happens with zoom for me all the time it's just like i have to toggle on and off the the one solution i found that's most reliable is turn off wi-fi and turn wi-fi back on interesting uh because i think it i think it does the initial handshake with bluetooth and then but actually does the like video feed through like local you know like a peer-to-peer wi-fi i think that
Is correct i i think you're right it's doing bluetooth bluetooth for discovery and then wi-fi kind of like carplay wireless carplay does yeah right exactly um uh soccer hallways in the chat in discord at mac geekup.com slash discord says uh you can in a sense cause uh car of a continuity camera to you can force it to happen and just plug it into the Mac. Once connected, you can unplug and put it somewhere else. So interesting.
I didn't, okay. That is one, perhaps one way, but it's still not like, there's no button you can press to say, go be a continuity camera right now. And that's- That's exactly.
Yeah. Like to put it into that mode, like when it goes in the mode, the screen changes, everything changes, right? I want to put it in that mode manually.
And maybe even pick which computer it goes to.
That'd be nice too. Yeah. So Terry says, hi, Dave, Pete, and Adam. Well, hello. You might already know this, but if not, when you are connected to your network, you can go into passwords, Wi-Fi, tap on your network, and right there is show network QR code. I didn't until a friend showed me. I took a screenshot and posted it in my kitchen. Now, whenever anyone comes in and asks me what the network password is.
I direct them to the QR code and it works on Android and of course on iPhones seamlessly. Been loving your podcast since about 2004. Well, that's about as long as we've been around. So that'd be from the beginning. So thank you. He says, I think, and I have learned so much. Thanks for the tips and the stories from you and my fellow listeners. That's true.
Yeah, we do. we have uh right your fellow listeners send in more tips than we do yes that's for sure yeah we are all fellow listeners here so yeah uh yeah.
I did i did that qr code thing years ago and it was great i just had it posted on the wall in my living room and when people would come in it's just like now i use the tap thing more frequently i just like the whole you know boop the phones together as michael johnston used to like to say
Yeah yeah that works yep.
I think just get them near each other and you connect to wi-fi
I think there's a a lag today between us adam because i can tell we're we're stumbling when one of us starts to speak when the other is speaking i i think there's about a half second lag i don't know that there's anything we can do about it i just figured i'd acknowledge it aloud so a we both know but also so those of you listening are aware that we're aware that this is feeling a little disjointed it's fine yeah sorry.
It might be me i had my notes i have my notes over the video so i'll
Try to pay no i think it's an audio i think it's a like a a voip lag uh i don't i don't think it's a video lag i think it's just the way we yeah yeah yeah it happens sometimes it's you know technology i found a quick tip this week when i go to a conference especially but there's other times when i do this i and another time would be uh if you want to put a sports team schedule like on your calendar uh you can download like a lot of times they will offer hey download this ICS file and
import it into your calendar. And that's a one-time import. And that's okay, but like for a conference where I might be going in and changing what favorites I have or whatever or a sports team where like things might change or evolve on the schedule, that one-time import can kind of be a liability. There's a solution. Instead of downloading the file, copy the link that you would use to download the file, the exact same link that you would click to download.
Just copy the link and then put that link, go into your calendar and subscribe to a calendar and paste that link in and tell it update every hour or every day or however often you want to have it update.
And then it will download it and that effectively makes it a uh a subscription and you're good to go so and then the calendar will stay up to date with whatever the you know the server has whatever the conference or the sports team or whatever so even if they don't offer a way to subscribe if they offer a way to download that is a way to subscribe it's the same freaking thing and i don't know why it It took me until yesterday to think to try this because I'm going to podcast
movement in a couple of weeks. And it's like, is there, there's got to be a way. I'm like, well, what if I just put it in? It's like, yep, that works. Like, oh, I wish I'd thought of this 10 years ago. Alas, that's how we are.
Nice. Yeah.
What's next? Should I?
I got burned. Burn. He has a tip about the Apple Watch crown. He says, if you're looking at your Apple Watch in the working face mode instead of the always on face mode, rotating the crown downward takes you to the notification section, which is at the top of the watch's stack. From the top, you can rotate the crown upwards and go back to the main screen.
If you continue rotating the crown upwards, you move through the series section, which by the way is editable followed by the all apps section to the bottom of the watch's stack this single simple moment movement of rotating the crown which covers all of the watch's sections except for control center accessed via the button below the crown and the face editing accessed via a long press on the face is great a great bit of design which would be nice to have an equivalent of in the other OSs.
For example, wouldn't it be nice to hold a modifier key and with one finger dragged down across your laptop's trackpad to move through all the sections of a series of app functions or a series of apps or file systems or menu options or web interface options? Well, now he's just getting crazy. Or shortcuts or whatever you'd like to string together. Kind of an ultimate scroll or stroll through all your options. Burn.
Huh. I, uh... I, I, I know that I have invoked the things that you just walked us through, but as you were walking us through them, I did them intentionally. Like it was like, Oh, let me go up. Oh, that's how you get there. Then I went down. I, I, I think part of the issue for me is that I've used an Apple watch since day one and the UX, the user experience has changed in terms of how these things work. Right.
So I like whatever was in my muscle memory is not what my muscle memory needs to be for the current UX. So this is fascinating. But I really, Adam, I like the idea of of what he described, like on our Macs and stuff. Right like that would be that would be interesting is there a third-party utility that like like like you said hold down a modifier key and now your scroll wheel becomes that or your or your you know your trackpad scrolling whatever yeah.
I feels like one of those things that would be cool and then i would never use
I don't know like how comfortable are you with how notification like how to invoke notification center by clicking in the thing in the upper right and then scrolling through do you find that clunky i do but yes oh.
Absolutely yeah yeah
Okay no.
I i totally agree with that yeah no i i never go in there is the reality of it right
Right right okay so we're on the same page there yeah um, uh yeah yeah.
So i so the idea would be i could invoke some thing and it would just go in there and i could scroll through all that and
Yeah yeah yeah yeah i don't know it's um i maybe there's maybe somebody knows of a third party utility let us know feedback at mackie cab.com we'd love to hear about it uh we'll run for fun sent in the next quick tip not to feedback at mackie cab.com but to mackie cab.com slash discord that there are some important plex updates happening here in 2025, the big one is that there's an upcoming plex pass price increase wow that's something i
should have rehearsed plex pass price increase there it is uh it's happening on april 29th the current price of a lifetime plex pass is 120 119.99 us after april 29th it will be 249.99 so if you don't yet have a plex pass now is a good time to get a lifetime pass um so uh there's also some changes uh. If you are, it changes with how remote playback works.
So if you have a Plex Pass, then remote playback will continue to be available to you without interruption from any Plex Media server, even after these changes go into effect. When running your own Plex Media server as a subscriber, other users to whom you have granted access can also stream from your server without any additional charge, not even a mobile activation fee.
Beginning on april 29th though users will be able to stream from servers on a remote network in one of two make two ways you can upgrade to a plex pass subscription uh which is a great option for server owners or remote users can buy a new subscription called a remote watch pass so really just solve this problem now get your lifetime plex pass stop thinking about it like it's 120 bucks i bought mine for 79 i think a number of years ago this is not the first price increase it's just
been the first one in probably 10 years uh more than 10 years they said um so but yeah it's time go get your get your lifetime plex pass if you're test it out you've got a month right so if you've never installed plex you've been thinking about it now's the time install it test it if if you see value to it immediately get it because for both remote streaming and the plex pass is also required for downloading uh to your devices for offline viewing but you can install it and test it without paying
a dime so and you can run a plex server on your mac you can run a plex server on your nas you can run a plex server i think jeff gamut still runs a plex server on his raspberry pi.
This is true. And it's great advice. I mean, it's Pete's advice too. And I, I bought one so long ago. Um, you know, when it was 80 bucks or less, I can't remember and never, ever regretted it. So yeah.
Right.
Right. Yeah.
It's a good thing. It's a very good thing. Uh, we got one more left, right?
Yeah, we got Porthos John, who says, In the before times when I wanted to run an app installer that I downloaded that wasn't signed with an Apple cert, I simply right-clicked it in the Finder and selected Open. A nice dialogue would pop up telling me that I could still run it if I really, really, really wanted to, and it ran. Now in Sequoia, it doesn't pop up that Notice dialogue. I was about to run screaming, and then I thought, what would Pilot Pete do?
That had me shaking my head because I couldn't conceive of getting my pilot's license only to be able to practice barrel rolls until I was sick. Instead, I opened system settings, privacy, and security, and sure enough, at the bottom was where you can select where to allow applications from, was a pop-up warning saying that someone had tried to run this app and it wasn't secure, but did I want to allow it anyway? Problem solved. So the right click open thing doesn't work anywhere.
Why would they take that away?
Dude, they took a lot away. Yeah. I don't know. It's a great question, Adam. I don't know.
Yep. But at least now we know where to go i i wish there was a way this happens not just with apps but sometimes you get like a um an extension or something that needs to run and you don't really get a warning that you have to go and you only have 30 minutes before that expires right and then you got to like trigger it again somehow so yeah i don't i don't know like they give us too many warning dialogues for security stuff that we don't want to see in
mac os 15 and not the ones that we do i right.
I don't know yeah i mean would it would it kill them to just in the dialogue that pops up that says you can't run this have a thing that says run anyway and then when you click that another thing that says are you sure and then you click it again and then it runs
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Look, folks, don't get caught without solid backups and reliable storage, fast storage for your data. Go to MaxSales.com and check out the new Envoy Ultra. You're going to love it. Thanks so much to OWC for doing what they do and for sponsoring this episode. All right. I think we need to do some some don't get caught here, Adam. We've got we've got a few that have come in and perhaps worth sharing. Russell has our first don't get caught.
He says, after hearing about fast mail on Mac Geek Hub, I gave it a trial and then decided to use it as my mail app with a paid subscription. Everything was apparently working fine. And I didn't notice that a few messages went missing from my main Apple Mail account that I had forwarded to my FastMail because I was just using that as my primary. Not enough messages disappeared that it was obvious, and I really thought that everything was sorted.
But before long, some important emails did not get delivered, and it caused me to miss a couple of deadlines with real financial consequences. That's not good. Even though I had stopped using the Apple Mail app and it was not being launched, it turned out that quite a lot of junk mail and some, of course, not junk mail was being filtered and appeared in the all junk folder of the mail app.
And of course, also on iCloud in the web on the cloud, because that's where the filtering was actually happening. But it did not get forwarded to FastMail for it to filter. I have definitely got enable junk mail filtering turned off and also the faded out setting of mark as junk mail, but leave in my inbox set just in case. But on iCloud, there are no rules which have been set.
So if you are using a third party mail service for Apple Mail and forwarding your Apple Mail account there, it's a good idea to check the junk mail folder on the web interface of the forwarded service or by opening your mail app or something that's subscribed to that account. This is not just limited to mail to iCloud mail. I've had this issue with forwarding Gmail accounts to somewhere. I've gone in on Gmail and made a rule that says if junk, do not move to the junk folder.
And Gmail will even warn you and say this is going to pass through all the spam. And also, I think it warns you. And even if it doesn't, I will warn you.
This will make it a forwarded message is very is more difficult for engines like to see as spam so for example if i'm forwarding from gmail or icloud to fast mail that makes that extra layer there removes the ability for fast mail's junk filters to see all of the things that they would want to see and so you you wind up getting more truly for more false negatives and false positives um because because it's missing some of those signals that it's it's not hearing
directly from the mail server but it you know that's better at least then you only have one junk folder to check i don't know if icloud has the ability to say like send all junk along i i should check that though, because I, I do something similar. So, yeah.
I don't know either. I use SaneBox. Yeah.
Right. But but SaneBox, does SaneBox see your iCloud account directly?
Yeah, actually, I don't use it with iCloud. That's fair. This is really about iCloud.
Well, it's more about a cloud, a mail service that you're not checking directly. And it really doesn't matter whether you're using like I use Apple Mail and Thunderbird. I kind of use them both nowadays, but I don't have iCloud Mail enabled in either of them. The only place iCloud mail is checked for me is on the web. And so, yeah, but, but it forwards, like I have it forwarding to my fast mail, but I'm, I'm looking to see if there's any way like mailbox behavior.
Like, I don't know that I can change the junk behavior on iCloud. There's no way to turn off junk filtering. that's really interesting can.
You do it in the account settings and in just on the client
Well that's that's what i'm talking about i'm i'm in oh i see in the account settings in map apple mail no because he he did that he has it turned off there and it doesn't it doesn't matter, um yeah this is really interesting like if i go into junk is there like no there's no way Huh? Yeah. Mail forwarding. No. Okay. Rules. Can I add a new rule? Can I say is junk? Nope. Nope, there is no way to do this.
So what would you want to do?
Well, so my scenario is a perfect one to use here. I have an iCloud account like most of us do. It winds up being used for some things. Either I've signed up with it for something because it was the easiest email address to give someone at the time.
Or it's an app like an apple thing like it's related to my calendar and so calendar invites come to and from you know with this address whatever there's a few things but not insignificant things that come into my iCloud i have gone in on the web uh to iCloud's mail settings and said um forward all my mail to the email address that i my primary email address for my fast mail account okay so cool i don't have to check my icloud mail i have it turned off in my mail clients
they do not see it sure not even on my phone uh but i get the mail in my main inbox which is where i want it anything that icloud the server and again this could this is also true with gmail, Anything the iCloud, the server, deems as junk does not get forwarded. And now I'm on the web interface for iCloud, and I'm seeing 18 messages over the last month that were junk. And i can tell you one let's see two three four.
Five of those 18 are messages that from mailing lists that i actually want to receive, and i and and this is only for the last month because of course junk older than a month just gets summarily deleted so how long have i been missing messages i'm i i have talked about it on the show i have it on my calendar to remind me to check my spam every two days it is like religious and i and it allows me to take 60 seconds and scan through my spam and it's great but it's
one spam folder that i look at i need to look at two spam folders and this is the other one because i have no way of telling this i mean i can go in manually and say you know not junk how do i even say not junk on icloud i guess i just move it to the inbox there is no like flag this as good so i gotta move it to the inbox i'm curious to see if these as i move them to the inbox will you know find it'll trade it yeah will it well will it will it forward these when i move them,
you know that's that's the other question is do these do these get forwarded so i'll have to see, not good i was.
Just goog sorry i was just googling um Does iCloud have a way to whitelist sender emails? Yeah. I think you have to add them to your contacts, I think is what...
That would make sense. Yeah. Yeah.
I think that's the methodology, if I'm remembering correctly. And that's what Bing intelligence says, AI says.
Sure. Yeah, there you go. Yep.
I guess you could do that.
Interesting. Interesting, interesting. Interesting. So thank you for that, Russell. Now you've got me, at least now we're aware, like check all of your spam folders, not just the main, your main one. I guess that's the, that's the lesson here. I don't want to check two. I want to, I want to check one. Geek challenge. How do we just tell it? Because like I said, on Gmail, you can, you can create a rule that says nothing is junk. Plow it all through forward it all and like I said yeah.
This is what I was getting at is what if you changed the mailbox behavior can you only do that locally with your accounts so like with my iCloud account locally right I can go into the iCloud settings into mailbox behaviors and I can make junk not go to junk I can it can go to my inbox if I freaking wanted sure I don't know why you'd want to do that but right No,
You couldn't make junk go to your inbox. You could make junk go to another folder, but you can't have junk sent drafts and trash and inbox point to that. They all need to be unique in an client because all it's doing is it's mapping what the server says to, you know, something else. So the server says, here's the junk folder. Where do you want, what local folder do you want this mapped to? And you can't point them all at the same thing.
Oh yeah, you're right.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I just wish there was, I'm just looking, it's surprising that there's just no, there's nothing about junk in the settings on iCloud. I know.
Feedback at MacGeekApp.com.
That's going to be it. ed has a don't get caught that is it's about tail scale lock which is a a new feature uh on on tail well i don't know if it's new um he says uh i use tail scale all the time i use it to access my channels dbr remotely access my nas and other things on my network recently after updating my mac mini to an m4 model i was doing some security housekeeping i have a bunch of old devices that had tailscale IP addresses that weren't being used.
And I also wanted to give tailscale lock a try to increase my security. When new devices are added, I've been adding and removing devices a lot this past year, and it seemed too easy a process. And I'd been putting off the tailscale lock feature because it's in beta to let the dust settle a bit. As you may or may not know, tailscale lock gives only certain devices, the ability to approve new devices. Okay. That makes sense.
It's like two-factor authentication using trusted assigned devices on your tail net. Okay, so this is similar to you're logging into somewhere on Apple, you know, with your Apple account. It says you got to go agree on a different device, and sometimes it shows up on the same device.
And so I'm never really sure how secure that is. But anyway, he says, in my case, I was using my Mac Mini and the Tailscale admin console, and I was easily able to add that, my Air, or my iPad Air, and my iPhone as trusted devices. You need at least two to set this up. That's a good idea. Yes. Here's where I got caught, he says. When assigning your trusted devices, you need to be aware that you need one of these to be able to run the Tailscale terminal client interface.
IOS and iPad devices cannot run a command line interface. I was fumbling around a few days ago, and I logged out of my Tailscale account on my Mac Mini, thinking it was a trivial process to log it back in. This was not the case, and I had a panic moment. I wound up having to remove my Mac Mini as one of the trusted devices from my account entirely, and then add it back in. That part was trivial. Where I got caught was the Mac Mini could no longer become a trusted device
anymore. You need a device that is both trusted and has the ability to run terminal commands in order to add another trusted device. This was disturbing to me to not have my Mac Mini as a trusted and be able to issue those commands. Down the line, I didn't want to be in a position where I couldn't fully administer the tail net. The only fix I could find was to disable tail scale lock completely and then re-add those three machines from scratch.
I did it and it was trivial as long as you tucked away the disablement secrets that are generated when you first set up tail scale or tail net lock. Oh, this sounds like advice to avoid tail net lock until they sort that out, because it sure seems like while they have the limit in place to require you to use at least two devices in order to set it up, they don't have a limit in place where they require you to make sure that at least two of those two devices are command line compatible.
So interesting. Yeah. So tail scale lock seems cool. Be aware. Eyes wide open. That's the, I don't know. That's, that's, that's the thing. Shall we, yeah, don't get caught. Right. Shall we move to questions, Adam?
Sure let's move to questions
I think i'm reading the first i have.
One yeah you're reading the first one for me for ron
Yeah i can't find it in here do you have it oh i see it oh yes i see it now i just was looking in the wrong place adam ron asks after listening to and cogitating about a discussion on dual cloud backups in a the last week's episode i realized that i use both icloud and backblaze while i'm not aware yet of any issues does this count as a percent potential source of double trouble and and of course if you didn't hear last week's episode or didn't hear the segment we were talking about how
having two syncing services like icloud and dropbox or iCloud and Synology Drive pointing at the same folder can cause a lot of trouble. So his question is, does having iCloud Drive and Backblaze on the same folder cause this trouble?
Yep, that's a pretty simple one. The answer is no, because Backblaze is basically a backup service, it's not syncing things, it is taking stuff from your Mac and backing it up to the cloud.
So it's a one directional thing and that's what we mentioned last time too is like one way is going to be fine so like we talked about the example where i have a bunch of folders and things that i have set up using um chronosync to do a one-way sync where i'm not syncing deletions i'm not it's not a two-way i'm going from one location to another location as a backup quote-unquote so
Yep that's it it's the one way if you just don't want to have two two ways or or more than one two-way sink i should say three would also be bad i don't just want to stop it too, yeah yeah yeah.
Because if one thing's sinking one thing and then the other thing's trying to sink it back and they get conflated that's when you run into trouble yeah
For sure yeper all right Moving on.
Moving on, we have a question from Kirshen. He says, Adam, Dave, and Pete, does anyone have any recommendations for a pay-as-you-go VPN service to use while on vacation? We'd be looking for a one-month pass, maybe twice a year. Our concern with signing up for a typical VPN provider is that we would not be able to sign up and cancel repeatedly when we need the plan. Thanks, Kirshen.
Yeah this is a i didn't know that if if there was a an option here so i i did the easy thing i asked chat gpt to go and look and then i confirmed its answers and it turns out that nearly every vpn that i could think of offers a monthly plan now it is monthly in that you would need to sign up and then cancel before your month is up um so that may or may not be the way you want to go you know the two that came to mind to to actually check and
and confirm but i will put a link to the chat gpt chat that i use that explains all this and lists all of the um the various uh you know the various things and what their prices are and and even give some advice because I've taught ChatGPT to be opinionated, which is a great thing, by the way. I think we talked about it in a previous episode, but it's great because it always gives me its opinion at the end, which is wonderful.
But the two that I thought to check were private internet access, which, yes, will let you sign up for $11.99 per month. Or $57 for two years. So your use case, Kirshen, of one month twice a year, so that's $24 twice a year. Technically less than $57 for two years, although if like they're not currently a sponsor, but PIA VPN dot com slash MGG still goes to a page that gives you two years plus four months for free.
So it works out to be two dollars and three cents a month, but you're paying for, you know, 28 months or whatever that is. So public math, don't do it. But, you know, you're you're really close there to, you know, you're you're what?
Seven dollars shy of of hitting that because if it's 12 24 48 so you're nine dollars shy i i i would again man i can't believe i did public math twice in the same episode uh i would i would say just buy the two-year plan of that one uh expressvpn similar it's 13 a month uh and again you'd have to go and cancel um before they bill you for the next month but again express vpn's mac geek abdiel gives you two years and four months free but their price
is uh 13972 so more than double what express we put what private internet access is at the moment so you know there you go choose wisely. That's, that's the answer. So, yeah, I mean.
I don't know if we want to devolve into this discussion or not, but I know that, you know, you can run your own VPN, right? You can set up and run your own VPN. Essentially. I think maybe, I think you and Pete even do it. If I'm remembering correctly through like Synology. does anybody just make an appliance like something i can just buy and configure and just plug into my network
Well yeah it's called the router um that in that many routers now offer like that's where i run my local vpn is i run i previously had a synology router now i have the unify cloud gateway macs and both of them offer inbound vpn so and and you can use it as your you know you can send all traffic through there's a little switch on your iphone or your mac when you connect to the vpn you say send all traffic then it sends all traffic through however you know we just talked about tail
scale and you can install tail scale on your mac at home right or even better or not Not even or. And you can also install it on your Apple TV at home, a device that is on your network and always on. And not only can you connect to your device, what tail scale that it does many things.
And I'm about to share a second thing that it does. But the primary use of it that certainly that we talk about here on the show is that each device that is connected to your tail scale account becomes part of what's called your tail net. And when you are on a device that is on your tail net, you can connect to other devices that are on your tail net directly. As if they are local to you, regardless of where you actually are.
So if you can easily screen share to your Mac or file share to your, to your, you know, from your laptop to your desktop Mac while you're at home, if you install tail scale on both of them and log them into the same tail scale account, and it's free, by the way, for what we would use it for, it's free. Of course, there's a free me a mopper offering. If you take that laptop and go to, you know, a different city, I was going to name a city, but then you might be in that city.
And then that gets weird. Go to a different city, go to a hotel, connect to the Internet. And as soon as you log into Tailscale, which could happen automatically, you can also connect to your computer at home as long as it's on and file, share and screen share and do all those things. Of course, you're limited to the speed of the Internet connection between you. So that might be your home Internet being the thing or the hotel Internet, depending on which is faster.
But other than speed differences, it is as though they are local. That's how tail scale works. Also, tail scale has the option to denote certain devices as exit nodes. And once you so I have I have said that my Apple TV is an exit node. And now when I connect to tail scale, I go in the little menu and it says, oh, do you want to use this exit node? And as soon as I do, I am effectively VPN through my house via my Apple TV. Okay.
So now the last question I have, because I was looking at tail scale, because it's obviously a, it's got a free level for personal use. Yep. It says limited to three users, 100 device. Oh, 100 devices. That was, I just answered my own question because it said add-on devices are 50 cents per month, but that would be over the 100. Yeah. I would assume.
I mean, I have more than 100 devices on my local network, but I think I only have maybe 10 devices logged into my tail net. You know, each of my Macs. Yeah, each of my Macs, my iPhone, my iPad, my Apple TV. I think that's it. Oh, my disk stations. You can log your NAS in. And I just, I, I, my NASAs are both also set up as exit nodes, but I've done some speed tests and I found, believe it or not, that my Apple TV is the fastest exit node that I currently own.
I guess I could set up my Mac mini as an exit node and that might be faster than the Apple TV. I never thought about that now that that's always on because of another thing that I have to do with it, but I should try that.
All right. Sorry for taking us down that rabbit hole,
But I feel like for Kirshen.
This is her solution because I know she's nerdy enough to figure this out.
Yes, right. Oh, yeah. It really, I mean, it's hard to say. Like, I think it's fairly easy to set this up. They will walk you through it. You never once. I know we talked with Ed about tail scale lock and you need to use the terminal. You could do all of the things that I've described and never touch a terminal prompt ever.
It is not necessary for tail scale at all um so as long as as long as your mac is logged in, then you're you're fine but like your apple tv it automatically does it it's like you know and that's part of why i have an exit node set up on that is because i know even if the power goes out and comes back the apple as long as the apple tv powers up and that could be a question but that's a whole other that it's a whole other issue amazon's uh amazon basics ups's uh have
an issue where if the power like flickers too many times in a short period of time they just turn off it's like no don't turn off until your battery dies that's it well that's you you have one job I don't know. Anyway, that's a tangent. Your thing about tail scale exit nodes, that's the way to set up a VPN at home because you already own the hardware. It's either a Mac or an Apple TV or a disk station or a QNAP or whatever. It works on all of them. Tailscale changed my whole like thing.
And now I can invite other people into my tail net. So I invited my son into my tail net and he now from his apartment is able, he has his TV, which is his Apple TV, I guess, is tail netted into ours using our Apple TV as an exit node. And the reason is Fubo lets you, I know it's against the terms of service. Probably. I haven't read them, so I'm not certain of this, but it might be.
Anyway, don't get caught. Fubo allows you to have 10 devices playing from your account, at least with the account that we have. And they can be in different locations. That's totally fine. TVs, and there are certain devices deemed as TVs and certain devices not. TVs all must be in the same location. So if we're not watching from our TV, but say we're watching from our laptops on Fubo, Lucas can watch on his TV at his apartment.
But as soon as we try to watch on our TV, it'll start telling, you know, the other one, oh, it started watching from a different location. You're done. You're done. But if we have two TVs in our house from the same IP address, those are fine. You can imagine there's a case there's a case where there it's impossible for fubo to know what which where that comes from if tail scale is involved perhaps just want to share that so there you go don't get caught.
Well i need this because i we got caught recently because i have hbo max and the other day i was trying to watch something i think my wife was on and then it's like you have two people watching you you can't watch this now and i'm like what the heck is going on it was my kids i had to call them and tell them to get off yeah
Right exactly exactly yeah yeah.
My adult kids, let's be clear. So they're not paying for it. Right. I'm paying for this. I get to, I get priority.
Yeah, you get, yeah, you get priority. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Soccer Hallway says, I sense an update from Fubo coming. And like, maybe, but I don't think there's any way to do it because the Apple TV, unlike our iPhones and iPads, Our Apple TV has no way of determining its location by itself other than using its IP address. Like there is no GPS in there. I suppose Apple could build an API to determine location that, in addition to IP, also used local Wi-Fi networks.
If they have location attached to their Mac addresses, it could scan for those. And it does have the ability to do that. So there is a technical possibility. But Apple would need to be the one to implement it, not Fubo. And apple has not implemented that yet and they've got every tv app in the world building actively building you know apps for apple tv so i don't think they're incentivized to do this i sure hope they're not.
It's rare that this happens occasionally yeah uh yeah i got one for you charles asks in the photo library on the mac uh titles have prominence on the iphone and shared libraries there are no titles only captions i've searched in vain for a tool to copy titles from photos to captions and keep them in sync so that i can use this on both platforms apps such as exifer e-x-i-f-e-r do not seem to function at least not directly in the photo library stored on iCloud all right they don't sync the changes
don't sync interesting ai code generators always seem to produce scripting errors i've tried apple script and shortcuts javascript and shortcuts shortcuts alone automator terminal although i have to say i am not tech nor code proficient there may be solutions that work in some photo libraries but i don't want the hassle of down local photo libraries that's the word But I don't want the hassle of downloading from the iCloud and re-uploading to iCloud. I want it to just sync.
Any suggestions on how to batch copy titles to captions working directly in my photos app on my iCloud photos library? Yep.
Yeah. So I looked into this a little bit. First of all, highly annoying. I don't use titles or captions all that much, but highly annoying that on the Mac, you can go in to your photos, and if they have titles, you can choose an option in the view settings to show the titles under, you know, when you have your thumbnails, you can have titles under those. There's no way to show captions. You can add captions to your photos, but that's part of, I think, the EXIF data.
So it's in the, you have to get info on it or use the little side panel or whatever. On iOS photos, you can't see titles at all. I don't even know if that data syncs. I don't know if it's only stored locally in your Mac's photo library or why that is. But of course, on iOS, if you hit the little info button, you can then see in the information, you know, panel, the captions. So you can have captions. So that's kind of what he's talking about for people who haven't gone down this
rabbit hole, because I hadn't. And I was like, well, that's super weird. Like, why is that?
Yeah.
So like you said, what he's asking here is like, I have titles on my Mac, I would like to have those also copied into the caption EXIF data automatically, quickly so that when I'm on my iOS device, that stuff will be synced and I can at least pull it up, you know, there on my iOS device.
And I did the research. There is this app called PhotoExifer that lets you do a bunch of things with photo metadata, EXIF metadata, including it has a automation for copying title data from your photos on on your Mac into the Caption EXIF data, which is great. Sounds like the perfect solution. What Charles found out though, is that for that to work on your Mac, you need to have all your photos stored locally. And it sounds like what's going on is he's using iCloud syncing.
So most of his photos on his Mac are not actually on his Mac. They're not downloaded. So it can't work with that. And he doesn't want to go through the hassle of having to download all his photos, run the program, get all the data updated, and then, you know, sync everything back to iCloud. So I understand that. My question would be, and this goes into my whole backup thing, is like, I am a very firm believer that there should be at least one Mac Mac.
That you have set up with your photo library, where you use the photo library setting, download originals to this Mac. And the reason is, if you're not doing that, you're also not backing up. If you're doing local backup, Time Machine, any other local backup, and you're not downloading your entire photo library to one Mac, you're relying entirely on Apple in the cloud for your photo library.
So what I would advise is at least set up one Mac where you just use the option download originals so the originals are always on that single Mac and then you presumably could use PhotoExifier to do what you want and then that would sync up to the cloud. So that's what I would set up for two reasons. One, it solves this problem and two, now you can set up that mac with a complete backup of your photo library to make sure that your photos never ever go missing
Yeah that yes okay that makes sense because when i when i saw his question come in i was like well photo exit for like isn't this what it does but you're right it has to be able to touch the photo not just see that it exists elsewhere to to do it it needs to be there because it's it's doing it locally yeah yeah that the.
Xf data it's my understanding is a sidecar in the photo form basically a side sidecar is that what they call it side
It's part of i think it's in the resource fork adam okay it's not yeah.
What i don't understand fully but it's part of the file data like it's part of the photo file so It needs to be able to manipulate that. And if it's just a pointer to something that's in the cloud, obviously can't do that.
Right. Right. Yeah. We need to use ResEdit. That's what's going to solve this problem.
I loved ResEdit. Yeah. Bidding icons and stuff.
Right. That was the resource fork versus the data fork, right? That's what it. Correct.
Yeah. Oh, yeah. You could do all kinds of fun stuff on your Mac back in the day with ResEdit.
Oh, yes. All kinds of tricks. ResEdit. We loved the, it's just not a thing anymore. I mean, because the files aren't it made sharing files with non Mac people very difficult because the files were two files, but also sharing files that that was like resident goes back to a day when sharing files between computers, even if you didn't have an issue with the formats of the file itself. It was like, well, even if, you know, how do you get a Word file from this computer to that computer?
Well, my Mac writes in, you know, was it HFS at the time, probably? And Windows was writing in, you know, fat or something. It was like, well, I can't read fat on the Mac and they can't read, there was third party utilities that sucked that, you know, so it was a whole thing. So the fact that a file had a resource fork was not the limiting factor for most use cases. But it was fun. Editing. Yeah, you could really edit icons. You could change
all kinds of things. Made you feel like a rock star. Yeah, it's fun. Alas, you know who makes us feel like rock stars, Adam? All our premium listeners. Really all, to be fair, all of you make us feel like rock stars. Our premium supporters, those of you who are both able and interested in supporting us directly. It's icing. I say it's icing on the cake and it is. It's also a very integral part of how and why we're able to continue to do this show, you know, here almost 20 years later.
I know Adam's been podcasting for more than 20 years, but, you know, I haven't yet. So this show hasn't yet. Soon. Like we're what? Three months away? I think less than three months away from from that day. But in any event, we want to take a minute and give a shout out to all of you who have contributed in the recent past. And it's been a little while. So if I make some changes to the flow of this for efficiency, it's only for efficiency. It has no bearing on we still love you all the same.
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Thank you.
Yeah. Thank you. Thank you. Um, I'm going to find a way, a workflow to, to do that where it's not just me reading everything. Let's change that for next time. Habits. I, you know, I just get into habits. I talk too much. Uh, speaking of this cool stuff, let's go.
Cool stuff. Russell has something. Russell says, developer Zenwheel has a cool and very minimalistic IP app for the menu bar.
It doesn't splurge along the menu bar and take up a lot of space with the actual address like most others, but it's a very small cloud symbol with either a tiny checkmark, padlock, circle arrow, Refresh, or when you're refreshing it, or an exclamation mark to show connected, connected via VPN, refreshing or not connected, etc, etc. A click on the symbol shows a drop down menu with IP address, copy address function, and geographical location.
There are lots of IP address apps for the menu bar, but this is super lightweight, takes up very little space and at a glance shows if a VPN is in use or not.
The VPN at a glance indicator is valuable for me a quick check to ensure that a vpn is in use i now use pia vpn after hearing about it on mac geek app great but also a private vpn service so need an indicator for any vpn and not just pia so this is pretty cool yeah you can just get your uh so it's not just an ip address thing because i was going to say like i always use um ipchicken.com which i've used like for sure but more and more i think i just type in google what is my ip you know
and then it just intelligence thing happens but yeah this is this is pretty cool it does a lot more than just give you your ip address yeah
I i like the that um a menu bar like at a glance way to see if you're connected to a vpn and especially if you're using multiple different vpns for for different reasons, you know, you have to look in three different places to see, is this one connected? Is this one connected by looking at this? It's like, boom, it's connected. I wonder if being connected to a tail scale exit node.
Turns it into yes you are connected to a vpn mode it should and it probably does because if it looks at your public ip like it can see that it acts like a vpn to the operating system so yeah it should work right yeah yeah interesting i like it i like it a lot um when i was at south by southwest I met with the Moft people, M-O-F-T. They're the ones that make an origami stand slash, it's not a case, it's MagSafe.
It connects to the back of your iPhone, obviously like MagSafe things do, and you can use it like a holder, kind of like PopSocket or OhSnap-ish, where you can put your finger through it.
But you can also like origami fold the thing out to turn into a stand and things like that they have a new thing uh that is their most snap note stand and it has it's a similar kind of thing it snaps onto the back of your iphone it's all mag safe and you can it has a notepad in it like with with paper and it has a pen and the pen sort of folds flat and then when you want to use it you can roll it up so that you actually have some something to hold and then write your little notes and close it.
And I use this one day at South by while I was walking around the conference. They have an expo floor where there's like things like this, you know, little booths and that sort of thing. And it was like it was it was really nice having something to just write with to make quick notes as opposed to typing. I've gotten very used to typing into the notes app while I'm talking with someone.
But it that's still more distracting for me than just writing uh and of course i don't have a stylus for my phone i guess i could i guess i could do it that way too but um i feel like with that i'd still be looking at my phone to make sure that it was capturing what i was what i was writing because the apple pencil doesn't work with it so you'd have to use one of those third party things that sort of approximates a finger and you know all that stuff um with with writing I could just write
and look at someone because I know like you can even feel when the pen, like if the pen were to have run out of ink, which it didn't. But, you know, we know what that feeling is like still. We still retain the ability to sense that. But yeah, pretty cool little thing. So that's the Moft Snap Note Stand. And it also folds out and can be a stand. And the notes are all little sticky notes. You just peel them off and you can put them.
If there's even a place inside the the case to like put your priority notes and things like that it's a really i don't know it's a it's a it's a fun little thing more useful than you might think even though it probably has steve jobs rolling in his grave.
I presume it doesn't do pass-through charging because of the paper and stuff like that right yeah
It's a good insulator against that yes yeah yeah.
Yeah uh i'm this immediately got me thinking like i don't need all of that functionality but i like this idea of magsafe attaching a like little notepad to your iphone yeah i might diy this oh with some of those little magsafe stickers you can get like on amazon or whatever and just like stick them into a little uh i use field notes a lot i'd have to find the right sized little notepad but if i could find the right size shape
one i could just have a notepad always available just stuck to the back of my phone yeah
It's called the snap flow i'm i'm learning i wrote down the wrong thing i called it the snap note stand but and it is but you know it's the yeah it's the snap flow it's 39 bucks and i and.
It's really cool yeah
Yeah i'm wondering if you could you could probably build this yourself for less than 39 bucks well not not this but.
Well not all this functionality just
The notepad part yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah.
Interesting i wouldn't even be close to this it's not not a stand it doesn't have the built-in little pen you know like right this has a lot more functionality but i'm just thinking like you know i take i take physical notes all the time i i mean i have i have one right here right now yeah um i always have one on my desk so the idea of having one always just there with my phone the only other thing i'd have to figure out and again i probably just use some
sort of magnet thing is something to keep the uh you know the cover closed when it's attached to my phone so it's not flopping open all the time but again some really thin magnets would solve that problem so this
Is interesting they have the note stand which was the thing that they were showing me and gave me a sample of it south by but they also have just a notepad uh without the stand so it's a little thinner and then they also have a thing called the note flip so the notepad opens uh left to right the note flip opens top to bottom in terms of the orientation of the related to the note it opens on the note flip opens on the short side up for most of us and the notepad opens, um,
on the long side of the note. That's interesting.
The flip is the flip is if you're a cop or a cop, private investigator or whatever, it's the kind of thing they, they open up.
It's so true. That's the image I had in my head. I love that. Uh, I, I got, I got one more cool stuff found from listener bill. Uh, we were talking about AI and he says, uh, I actually had to put a post on Facebook. I'll link to it. I just, I posted a little bit about how I've been using AI and asked people, you know, to share how they were using it. And some of this stuff is blowing my mind. We'll, we'll, we'll mine through
that and share a few of the things. Like some of the ways that people are using it is just amazing. And Bill shares that he says, I've applied different AI stacks across various applications. Some were fruitful. The one I wanted to call out was job that was draw dropping for me is using Claude code. So Claude is Anthropics AI and they have a code and code assistant engine. Claude code with Sonnet 3.7 as an assistant for app development.
I've been applying it to my app, and the results are impressive. Unlike other solutions such as GitHub Copilot or Kodi, use its VS Code extensions, Claude Code can understand your complete code base and make broader changes. The others seem better in smaller scope, changing a screen, adding member functions, whereas Claude Code can take on broader prompts. I encourage you and anyone listening that codes to give it a whirl. It works well in the Max Terminal, And I've just scratched the surface.
My understanding is that MCPs, which are kind of like plugins for AI engines so that they're portable across others, is that MCPs open up Claude to external APIs such as Supabase, Firebase, etc. Interesting. We will check that out. Thank you, Bill. Good stuff. Yeah, it's fascinating. The conversation on Facebook has been has been really interesting because it you know, no one has found utility in just, you know, telling AI, go build me this thing. Let me know when you're done.
Right. It's it's, you know, it's everybody's using it as an assistant. I don't know. I've been thinking about this. It's a shame that we've already burned the term virtual assistant, because to me, that's what AI is like. That's how I use it. And it seems like that's how most people use it. And, you know, we use the term virtual assistant years ago to talk about, you know, remote assistants or remote workers. And I never liked it even then because it's like, well, these people are real.
Like, why do we call them virtual? Like they're they're real humans doing this work. They're just, you know, location shifted and and all that. So like chat GPT is my virtual assistant. But but I I have found one of our listeners said to try perplexity and and it it does seem to be in for some things it seems to be better than chat GPT for like pulling.
If you're doing research and want accurate information perplexity seems better than chat GPT for me chat GPT is great as that virtual assistant role. Like I give it data and tell it to do things with it, that it, it kind of excels at. So they're all, they're all there anyway.
Yeah. I need to, um, I'm interested in GitHub co-pilot as a coder, but I also recognize that, um, I need to find a new job in about 10 years, I think.
Okay. Oh yeah. I mean, yes, that's so like maybe yes. Maybe i think i don't see hopefully i'll be retired right yeah well yeah that's right yeah for people like you know me um maybe i don't know how i can retire like that's a whole other question but anyway that that's my problem to solve uh.
I don't see chat somebody posted on on the thing you know what there was lawyer jeff posted on the on the um on that thread and he said something about you know i don't see a world where ai at least in its current implementation would replace lawyers however lawyers using ai are going to replace lawyers that don't right and i and i think that's where it it it's it's moving to and and i and i think programmers are absolutely the same way like you are going to become more efficient using
ai but right now a lot of companies are still banning the use of any llms uh specifically for their programming teams which i i understand like you don't want to you want to create a scenario you don't want to create a scenario where you're sharing your your company's intellectual property with the llm just for the sake right i get that but you can't like you need to solve that problem and be able to still use these llms like that
that is the the thing and the companies that figure that out are going to get ahead of the companies that don't so well.
I mean the solution is you build your own in-house and you have it on your own servers and yes do your own thing that But that's what you do. And it sucks in your code base and is fine-tuned to your environment and your business. And yeah, I mean, that's the answer.
And not only is that more secure and maintains privacy, it's better because it's using your stuff. It knows you.
Yeah, exactly. But yeah, no, I mean, I get what you're saying there. Here's the reality, though, is like what I see is how fast it's going. So it's easy to say, like, it's not going to replace that in the short term. And I 100% agree with that. Like right now, like that the key phrase and what you just said was in its current form. Yes.
That's why I use that phrase. Yes.
Evolving is the right word so rapidly that I honestly think it's not out of the realm of possibility. And I know this sounds crazy and I'm not trying to be conspiracy theory or anything like that, but it is entirely possible that we as humans are creating the next generation of silicone based life form that will be the dominant life form on the planet.
X
Number of years from now you can debate on how many x number of years but it might be an eventuality
It might be.
They'd be adapted to survive a lot of the other junk that we've done to our planet too so
That's fair yeah it good luck well but but like there's i i agree that we are creating something right you know a an intelligence a life form a something right like um however it that doesn't necessarily mean that we humans become deprioritized it we we could create a world where yes there is this dominant thing in terms of productivity and. And like grunt work, the intellectual stuff, like coding at some level, coding is grunt work.
Right. Right. You know, and and at some level, all the things we do are grunt work. Now, it's skilled grunt work for sure. Like, you know, I don't mean to be dismissive. I'm a coder, too. I'm not a very good one. But. But if if we do it right, we create a world where all the grunt work is done by the robots that are great at grunt work. And then we get more time back for ourselves to enjoy what we like to do to create art.
And there will be some art that AI can create and we can we can debate whether we should call that art or not. And I'm I'm fine having that debate. I'm a musician, all that stuff. There will be things that I create that are mine. And that's an amazing thing for me. Even if I don't share it with anyone, the ability to sit and create things that like art and the art could be software. The art could be music.
The art could be paintings. It's like all of that stuff. So freeing us up from the grunt work to do the things that we want to do as opposed to the things we have to do.
That to me is the sort of that's why i'm optimistic about this and i realize i'm i'm i default to optimism about things and and yes i you i don't mean to be dismissive about well that's one path dave but there's another one yes i know i'm aware i just choose to focus on the on the one that i like because i don't know it's easier to sleep at night most of the time now.
I mean here's the The reality is what I'm talking about as a timeline that like, I'm not going to have to worry about it because I'm not going to be here when whatever happens, either of those paths probably end up happening for reality. Maybe? I don't think. Maybe it'll happen faster.
I don't know how fast it's happening.
Well, that's part of the scary part of it. Yeah. But yeah, no, it's funny because I can't remember where I heard it.
It was like on a podcast or something like that. there was a kind of a short story that played out your scenario of it which was basically it was about um everything has evolved and now everybody on the planet except like one guy lives a life of leisure and there's the one guy that has to go around and fix like the the robots and things that break down that when they can't fix themselves he's the most it's not a very you know big job there's not like a lot to do but he has the one human
with a job and everybody else is just like off having fun and creating art and going on vacations and,
You know, a lot of stuff. Back in L, yeah.
That'd be great. I hope your vision of that is the correct one because maybe that would be great. I don't know. Would we get bored just not doing a job?
We as humans get to, like, guide this, which is why I like to share that vision. And it's not mine. I mean, other people came up with it. I just like it. But but like we get to guide this thing. We're we're the ones creating it. Not you and me, but, you know, we. So why wouldn't we all want that? There's a world where that. I don't know. I know. I know. I know.
I'll tell you, I'm starting to use it more in my coding, and it's definitely helping me. I was running through a problem just this morning, and it's just like I didn't, I was having some trouble understanding some bitwise operators, and I was like, well, let me just ask ChatGPT to unfurl this for me, and then it's like, oh, okay, that's how it works.
So it was great for my learning, too. I actually learned something from the AI, because I was having trouble just from reading it, like understanding what this bitwise function was doing from a piece of code that i was reading it's like explain this to me it's like oh okay now i get it
Yes that's that is one of my most valuable uses of ai today is explain this to me because it can and and even i will often say look Here's three websites or here's a PDF about this thing. You synthesized all of this down into, you know, a three paragraph or one paragraph digestible chunk. And that is where it's valuable. And look, I get that these AIs were trained on data that they did not have permission to obtain.
That's just how it'd be. I have two thoughts on that. Number one, Pandora's box ain't going to close. Number two, right or wrong? And there are some wrongs. I think it's right and wrong, right? What was done to create these. Number two, I am one of... The humans who has put more out on the internet, uh, than most. And so my data was used more than most of us to train these AIs and they didn't get my permission. They didn't pay me. You're the same way, Adam.
They like you did a podcast for 20 years that, you know, they slurped all that stuff in and they didn't pay us for that so and they're not going to right you know so i could spend my time trying to get them to pay me uh and and there's a world where i might have success but i think it's a very slim chance or i can choose to just take reap the rewards of the work i put into this ai and just use it and so i've chosen plan b you know well.
Yeah also because how much time do you want to figure out fig spend figuring out who are they yeah to find they in this
Well the problem is they everybody right right yes we have a class action suit of all of humanity against some nebulous thing yeah so yep yep better to just lean in i don't know my choice i don't want to say it's better or worse for me it's better to just lean into the positive than obsess about the negative because i you folks get the positive version of dave there is that the obsession that i have about things can go dark and uh and it can drag me into it and i Certainly,
it's happened more times than I'd like to count, sometimes for years at a time, and I just play the role of Happy Dave. I'm actually in Happy Dave role these days, which is great. But, you know, I can obsess about stuff, and I have to be careful what I choose to obsess about. Yep.
Anyway, that was a good conversation.
AI therapy today. It's good. You can use AI for therapy. Just don't, you know, speak as with every piece of information you get from it. Evaluate it on your own. Yeah. So thanks for hanging out with us, everybody. Fun. That was a little bonus segment, if you will. And now the band, speaking of things I created that are out on the internet.
More songs thanks for hanging out with us thanks to uh unite or to bzg apps for doing our giveaway this month for a unite six mac geekup.com slash giveaway you still got another week or so to get in on winning one of five free copies of unite six i am using it right now in fact reading the agenda as we are wrapping up the show thanks to cashfly for providing all the bandwidth to get the show from you from us to you check out adam's debut film podcast check out
my business brain and gig gab and of course check out pete's so there i was all that stuff is linked in the show notes as is a link to review the show mackey cab.com slash review is where you can go to review the show and we love that too that's like yet another way to kind of just help keep sharing the mackey cab love Share MatKeeCab with a friend, please. That's really the best way to share the show, is to share the show. Share it on social media.
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I would share, like we heard a lot of in this episode, go out there and don't get caught.