All right, folks, it's time for Mac Geek Cabin. I'll bring us our quick tip of the week. I had a badge on my messages app on all of my devices that said I had one unread message. But when I went in on my phone to the unread messages, there was nothing there. I scrolled through my messages. I found nothing. I couldn't find a little dot to press to make the badge go away. I did a little searching, frustrated, and someone suggested the answer. I asked the S lady, read me my unread messages.
And sure enough, it told me, hey, Jeff sent you this video back in December, which was true. And I had marked it as unread because I wanted to come back to it. Of course, that failed. So, but at least it got rid of it and it got rid of it on all my devices. So if you can't find an unread message, let Siri find it for you. More quick tips like this, plus your questions answered today on MacGeekEd 1035 for Monday, April 29th, Viral Video Day 2024. Music.
Greetings, folks, and indeed, welcome to Mac Geek of the show where you send in or we provide tips like that. You send in or we provide cool stuff found. You send in or sometimes we provide questions that we all endeavor to answer here. We string it all together into an agenda that gives us each the best shot at learning at least five new things every single time we get together. Together, our sponsors for today include Ecamm.Live, the all-in-one streaming and video production studio.
And you can use promo code MacGeekGab at Ecamm.Live to get one month free. We'll talk more in depth about that in a little bit. For now, here in Durham, New Hampshire, after a quick down and back to New York, I'm Dave Hamilton. And here in South Dakota, I'm Adam Christensen. And here also in New Hampshire is Pilot Pete. Good to be back with you after a week-off hiatus. Yeah. And my check ride, I passed. I get to fly for another nine months.
Nice. That's good. They let you fly the plane, huh? That's good. Yeah. We appreciate the check rides being part of the process there. Well, there's that. Yeah. That's a good thing in the big scheme of things. In the big scheme. Yeah. It might be a little bit of a pain in the neck. It keeps you out of the show for a week, but you know, like it's good. Yeah. To prove I'm still semi-competent to. Yeah. Yeah. It's all about fake it till you make it. Right, Pete? Yeah.
Fake it till you retire right is that what it is exactly all right hoping to get paid to do nothing soon but in the meantime let's uh let's do some quick tips yeah, You got one from Paul, I think. Oh, I do. Yeah. I think you're up on that. I think that's you. I'm up first. You talked about this in the last unopinionated software episode. Great show. I'm sure you got this same tip from other listeners, but just in case, when you're driving, you can say, hey, yes, lady, take a note.
And that's a reliable trigger. The other phrase I use, as we all do, is very often, remind me to. So if you use remind me to you'll get a transformation of what you say apple system will truncate after 10 to 12 words omit words and identify some words as meta words like today or appointment or using artificial jankiness aj which is ai run amok. Love it it's trying to convert what you say into some sort of a reminder so sometimes um this is is what you want.
But given the abilities of the current S lady, that's rarely the case. So if you say, take a note, you can dictate a longer note that doesn't transform what you say. And in both cases, though, a significant pause in your speech ends the reminder or the notes. And he puts in here the editorial, given the pace of other technologies, I'm shocked at how slowly Stanford Stanford Research Institute is originated. Siri has progressed over the last 10 years.
Even the low hanging fruit has not been picked. And you are correct, sir. I, I, I agree with all these things, but I'm now fully distracted by, I did not realize that Siri came from the Stanford Research Institute. Is that where Siri's name came from? I'm wondering the same thing is I, I learned that as, as I was reading it.
It yeah i used to know that i used to know this way way back when but i honestly don't remember okay yeah i didn't know that it came out of that place sure area yeah huh yeah i use iris spelled backwards so that it is yeah i for some reason i thought i mean i remember siri being a separate app on on the iphone yes for a for a you know hot minute there but rather than integrated Yeah. Yeah.
And then Apple, of course, acquired it. And the rest, as we say, is current technology or supposed to be current technology. We'll see if they can enhance it to make it compete. But yeah, I don't know where the name came from. So either. So someone hopefully will tell us either in the live chat while we're recording this or at feedback at MacEcab.com. There you go. Wait, wait, wait. Feedback at MacGeekGab.com. That'd be the place to send it, I think.
I think so. Yeah, he said feedback at MacGeekGab.com. That's right. All right, shall we move on to Joe here?
We should i think that's you does that mean i am up i think so yeah i got joe's right here he says i was listening to the latest show this morning and you talked about a couple, different tips yeah we do one was related to getting the bookmarks to show up on safari on my phone i tap the search bar or web address bar it brings up or when i do that it brings up a list of bookmarks, just like when I open a new page. You can also swipe left on a full page Safari window, and it will open a new tab.
With regards to reminders, Dave talked about telling Siri, S-Lady, sorry, the date you wanted to remind you about something when you're using Siri in CarPlay mode. One of the things that I also do is say, remind me to do XYZ when I get home. It will pop up every time I pull into the driveway, being in outside sales and driving around. So a good reminder every time I get home or when I get home that day to complete whatever task it is. I mutilated that last part. Sorry, but you get the point.
Yeah. You can tell the S lady to remind you when you get to a known location like home, or some people might have office or specific place. And the little geo fencing thing will kick in. Yeah. Yeah. Remind you then. That's pretty cool. Yeah. And going back to the the his first sort of follow up tip. He's right. You know, last week we talked about the fastest ways of getting to your Siri. So your Safari bookmarks on iPhone. And we we completely neglected his his which I think is the fastest.
You just tap the URL bar and your favorites come up.
So yeah i don't yeah i i mean i see it there every time i do it until joe's note came in i never even thought to use that to get to my favorites i i've i've had blindness to it ever since it was brought there but there it is my my favorite one is to scroll down a little bit and i always use the one where it's like you can get uh links that open tabs on your other devices yeah, oh yeah yeah the iCloud tabs feature or whatever yeah yeah yeah right yeah they're
all right there if you do you Siri bookmark syncing I think that's required right yeah yeah, I've been using that for years because I always I'll bring something up on my phone and like leave it and then I'm like where was the what was that thing and then I'm sitting on my Mac and it's like oh yeah it's right there yep yeah that that is a handy thing the.
The iCloud bookmarks or yeah iCloud tab syncing I guess it's not even bookmarks tab syncing yeah it's the tab syncing and it just tells you what tabs are open on your other Macs I've it's it's even cooler when you discover that you can close tabs on your other devices wait what I forget how to do it now so I probably just killed myself but yeah I know at least on the phone there's a way to like you can say close this tab from another device yeah let's see.
I can, I just did. Yeah. I went to the list of tabs. Like I, uh, you know, I found a tab on my, um, MacBook air and I just like long pressed on it and it, I got a, you know, a menu, the option on iOS on iOS. Yeah. So in theory, I don't know how you do it from the Mac. Oh, maybe a right click on the Mac. I tried that. No, it didn't work. Oh, yeah, I guess we have Macs in front of us. We could try these things. Close other tabs? Right-click, close other tabs?
Oh, no. If you just float, like if I pull down in Safari, click on the little cloud icon, which pulls the iCloud tabs down. If I float over one, I see a little X by it on the right, and that's where I click, and I am closing all kinds of tabs on my iPad as we speak here. So there you go. Cause I, I don't need the stub hub links for fish tickets at the sphere anymore because that, um, that went away, that, that, that, that expired that already happened and we did not go.
So there you go. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I don't get the little hover thing, but I get right click if I do it from the main, you know, start page. So that works. Huh? What didn't work was doing anything from the dropdown from the.
Really? The little dropdown. down if you float over if you just float your mouse cursor over one of them you don't see a little x on the right no huh weird all right yeah i mean i believe you i just yeah wondering why mine is different being buggy yeah if it's well i don't know you know go figure yeah yeah um speaking Speaking of buggy or pesky devices, I have found that I have some older technology that likes to, especially smart home-ish devices, that fall off my network on the regular.
One of them is my MyQ garage door opener, which I don't recommend. You can't really use it anymore. I have the special HomeKit bridge that they stopped selling, so it does link that one garage door or that pair of garage doors to HomeKit, which I love. You can't buy that bridge anymore. I don't know why, but anyway, it's flaky. Maybe that's why you can't buy it anymore, and it falls off my network occasionally, but what's weird about it is I can still access it and use it from the MyQ app.
I cannot use it from home kit and all I have to do is Unplug the power from it and replug the power and then it's fine for a couple of days And then it goes sort of wonky again well. I have smart plugs, you know, and so I put a smart plug on this thing and at 5 42 AM every day, I have a little routine. I, I have standardized on the a lady to do my home automations. I know we've talked about other platforms. It's all fine. I minor there right now and it's fine.
But you can do this, you know, basically every platform will let you do this. And so So I have it at 5.42 a.m., it turns off, I have the script then pause for 20 seconds, and then turn it back on, and everything is good, and it's been great for a couple of weeks on that one.
So um yeah yeah i also have found i tried doing this with my my sonos play threes are also being really flaky for me and they do occasionally more than occasionally need to be power cycled and i was doing this the same way it's not helping like because sometimes they just go offline during the middle of the day there's something there's a whole thing on the sonos forums about how there was a software update that came out i think this past summer that,
i think causes some out of memory errors on the play threes so uh but certainly putting them on smart switches makes the restart process simpler but the scheduled restart every day didn't help those as much but it has definitely solved at least so far the issue with my uh my my q garage I will say, though, that I have become a huge fan of the Moross HomeKit compatible garage door openers. I know we talked about them on the show here. I I those are freaking amazing.
I put one of those. They have a couple of different versions. Make sure I'll link to the right one. But put the you get the one that's HomeKit compatible. incredible, And they make one that is a one garage door unit, and then they make another one that is a three garage door unit. Based on your feedback, most people say the three garage door one gets a little janky. It, um, it will expose three doors, whether or not you have three connected.
So if you buy the three and you only have two, it will, it will expose a third door to home kit that people say they can't really hide.
You could unfavorite it, I suppose. but just be aware of that but um yeah the morass thing works great i've got that on on lisa's garage and it's been absolutely fantastic so and rock solid so do do that it's cool you don't it works with your existing garage door opener you don't have to replace anything um it just plugs in it's actually got two leads that plug into terminals on your head unit for your garage door
and then it just like it no and you know it just triggers a open or close so yeah yeah yeah it and it was like 40 bucks or something so that was. Pete is trying to talk, but actually I think Pete is talking, but Pete has muted himself. And so, yeah, well, I was, but you know, you know, there you go. I was like, maybe you could set up to open a neighbor's garage door with that third door. Well, I think they all have to be in the same.
They have to be on the same Wi-Fi. They have to be in the same garage. Like, like at my house, you know, I've got two in one building and one in another.
Other i don't think the three pack would work for me because you've got to be able to wire them all into the same head unit so gotcha yeah yeah yeah but that's not the uh you had you had uh prepped a uh cool stuff found from uh from alice and pete when we were last talking about garage door openers that we had yet to get to so i think now is a is as good a time as any so i'm i'm vamping for you here. Yeah. Thank you. Sure. Yeah. So new listener, Alison writes in.
She says, I'm the one out of 10 who isn't going to recommend Moross for fixing that idiotic Chamberlain lift master fiasco with smart control of garage doors.
Nothing against Moross. I love their switches, but the sensor for the open closed looked too flimsy and small to make me question the reliability also feedback from listeners on it anywho we chose the tailwind IQ 3 because of its huge magnet sensor combo and how the sensor mounts to the J channel for the rollers of the garage door uh and of course I wrote it up and thanks for asking Allison and and Pete said send it to feed bag at Maggie
cab.com but I'm writing to that but writing to that address was denied so dave i don't know interesting i guess that that was out folks don't write that only for allison is it denied yeah she said she was one out of ten i wrote back and said well you're two out of ten because listener james also wrote in and and uh even it. Looked like they were sitting next to each other, copying and pasting. Yeah, their emails were the same. Almost identical.
It's interesting. I don't, I know what she's saying. It is a, so when you wire in the Moross garage door opener, like I said, it's a small little unit, you know, maybe smaller than your iPhone, right? And so it has three leads coming off of it. One, there are three sets of leads, one that goes into your, you know, garage door opener unit to trigger it. As I mentioned, one that is power, it's actually USB-A power, but it comes with its own little brick. So you can manage that the way you want.
And then the third lead is the one for a sensor that you put on your garage door so that you know it knows whether it's open or closed. And it is a small little sensor. It's basically one of those sensors like you would see on Windows and stuff to, you know, like with a with a home alarm for the security system. Yeah, it's that kind of a thing.
It's, it works really well. I was, I just kind of threw it up in, in my garage and, and didn't really spend a whole lot of time lining it all up the right way and all that stuff. And it works the proximity. It just needs to be close. It doesn't need to be nudged right up against it. Like we're used to with the security things in our homes or whatever this, as long as it's close, it just, it works flawlessly.
Honestly we haven't I mean I probably had it in for six weeks now and it's it like I haven't thought about it until we started doing this episode let's put it that way yeah yep yeah so well that's not true I thought about buying another one for my garage door so that I didn't have to deal with this flaky chamberlain thing but then I actually am using a morass smart switch.
To solve the problem of the my q garage door opener going offline so you know like there you go yeah yeah yeah it's cheaper well in that i had the switch and it wasn't yeah deployed anywhere right yes yeah yeah yeah exactly it's cheaper because i had it yeah as we know it's always easy to throw money at a problem correct correct yeah and and and you know for like 40 bucks those morass garage door opener things like it's probably the right decision for me because that 40 would just
save the headache and i'm done however i i'm a nerd i'd like to like i do this show i like to come up with fun little solutions and so you know yeah i'm inspired you know for about four bucks you could get one of those little metal handles screw it into the front of the door and get out and lift it i don't i don't understand what's the fun of that i know what what i don't getting out of my car like i don't even want to have
to having to walk all the way across the living room to change the channel on your tv you know i get it now what i have failed at though.
Is i wrote a shortcut that would uh open my garage door when i got close but your phone has to be unlocked for that shortcut to run but i got like before i realized that i went way way down a rabbit hole because i was like look i don't want my phone to open i don't want this shortcut to run unless i'm the one driving like if i'm in lisa's car with her i don't want my garage door opening just because i'm near the house right right and so i uh wrote a secondary shortcut that,
It saves essentially a one or a zero to a note that says, am I on CarPlay or not? And that shortcut is triggered by when I connect to CarPlay and when I disconnect from CarPlay. And so when I connect to CarPlay, it rewrites a note and puts a one in there. And when I disconnect from CarPlay, it puts a zero in there.
And then when my other shortcut runs for the proximity of the garage door, which, of course, doesn't work because my phone's not unlocked, but be that as it may, it reads that note and will only continue if the value is one, not zero. Nerd. I know. Isn't it cool? However i i and i thought okay well i could probably you know people are like well you know.
Rewire it so that it you're so that home kit thinks it's not a garage door but thinks it's a switch and then you can have it turn on a switch that happens to be a garage door you know they were like do all this and trick it and i was going to do that but then i realized you can first of all just ask the s later while you're driving with carplay to open your garage door and that's fine like it won't do it automatically but it will do it that way and then you know there's that
um when you're in carplay you can have like the full screen view of your app or you can have the half screen view of your app right where the you know like the map is on the left and then on the right you get like a series of widgets my favorite view okay well i don't use that view often but uh i believe it was listener andrew in our discord hipped me to the fact that that view as i get close to my house the very bottom widget changes to
be my garage door and it goes to the garage door that you most recently opened from that phone so uh so it just shows and i can just tap it on the screen i don't even have to and it it you know it it pops up when i I'm, I don't know when I'm in the neighborhood. So it, it, it like, it's the perfect timing. I just tap it in the garage doors open. I haven't met messed with my, um, my automation, which still runs every time. It just fails because it, you know, it's can't unlock the phone.
So I know I'm nerdy. What can I say? But that is kind of ahead of ourselves. That is kind of a cool view. I know we're way ahead of ourselves. We're going to stay here for a second because we might as well finish this little segment on garage doors because because we're here. Uncle Jamie in our discord says, thanks to Mac Geek. I learned what Home Assistant is, which is great. He says, I had assumed incorrectly that it was associated with one of those big companies like Google. No, he says.
But it's not. It's a cool open source platform that plays nice with other platforms as desired. Oh, I'm sorry. I'm getting I'm reading. Anyway, he says, I was wondering why when you talked about garage doors, Rat GDO was not mentioned. He says, I have one and I'm happily controlling my garage door and light from HomeKit HomeBridge with no involvement whatsoever from MyQ's app or cloud. And, uh, yeah, rat GDO is this cool, like he says, open source.
Um, it's a control board. It's kind of like what I was talking about with the morass thing where you, um, it's built to work with, uh, Chamberlain or lift master garage doors. It might work with others. I don't know, but it's a, you know, nerd community kind of created thing. And you can buy the little bridge and it connects to your door and it will work with home kit or any of the other, uh, the other things. So we will link to the rat GDO thing. If you want to go that route for controlling
your garage doors, especially if you got burned by the Chamberlain fiasco. Yeah. Dave, how about we finish in the garage door theme with Tim? Yeah, go. Does it work? Sure. I love it. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. We're going to beat this garage door horse to death, and here comes the last one. We covered it. What did the horse do to us? So 1033, the only thing that Jim might need to change on his, this is listener Tim writing in, Jim might need to change on his network is the garage light.
Cheap, super bright LED garage light bulbs and shop lights are notorious for creating EFI interference that can slow down your Wi-Fi and interfere with some garage door remotes. And I think we covered this on the show some time back. Yeah. I had LED lights actually in the garage door opener itself. And often it would interfere with my ability. If I walked out and got in, if the car wasn't in the drive and I walked out,
or if I backed out, the light would come on, right? Because it tripped the little sensor. Yeah. And then I couldn't close the garage door with my remote. I was like, what the heck's going on? But come home, I could, it would work. So whenever the light was on, I was getting interference and the remote wouldn't work. I replaced those with incandescent, which don't work even with a good bulb now, but that's a whole nother story on a 25-year-old remote.
But I did put a shop light in the main garage door, or garage light, and that seems to be working just fine. Okay, so it's close proximity is the problem with the LEDs and Wi-Fi. It's not Wi-Fi. It's the LEDs and the RF for the remote for the garage door. So if you go with one of these HomeKit things, you could use LED bulbs because it's not controlling it remotely as long as it's not. Some of them do. Like the MyQ ones that I have do.
It's still a remote. The, the, uh, rat GDO and the morass one and the tailwind one all wired directly in. So that's, yeah, that's right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Fun. All right. So, Adam, I know that April 29th here is Viral Video Day, but Tuesday is another special day you were telling us about. Yeah, April 30th. So there was a Gimlet podcast, great podcast back in the day. It's no longer around, unfortunately, called Reply All that I loved.
Oh, yeah. And the hosts over there, this isn't something I suffer with. I'm pretty good with my email, but I know a lot of people out there, you know, you have emails that come in and sometimes there's one that you get that you either just forget about, like you meant to reply to, and you just literally forgot about it. Or maybe you're not sure what you want to say at the time, and then you forget about it for whatever reason, right?
You end up with this email that you meant to reply to, you never ever did. So they were like this and what they invented was Email Debt Forgiveness Day. And this is a little bit different than Email Amnesty Day or the one where you just like, you know, look at everything in your inbox that's there and just dump it, right? That's another one.
The idea behind this one is you get to reply on April 30th to any of those emails that you just left sitting there and you get to reply as if you it just came into your inbox and so you're forgiven for not doing that and so you just link you know you throw the link to this the page we'll have it in the show notes um and it explains everything to the person you're sending it to and you just you don't even have to say anything you just
reply as if i just got the email and all is forgiven and then you can relax and you don't have to stress about that email that you're looking at and it's like, I meant to reply three months ago. I can't reply now because they'll think I'm weird, you know. All right, folks, look, have you ever dreamed of running your own TV station but thought, no, too much hassle? Well, with our sponsor, Ecamm, it's like having a full broadcast studio right on your Mac.
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Because in this digital age, it's not just what you say, it's how awesomely you say it. And our thanks to Ecamm in Ecamm Live for sponsoring this episode. All right. Wait, wait, wait, wait. Yes. Can we get a show title from an ad? I think so. It was said in the show. Why do you ask, Adam? Don't get caught with your tech down. Don't get caught with your tech down.
So as as you as I've mentioned on the show, I let chat GPT write most of the scripts that I use for ads because sponsors generally give us a version of free reign. Right. They give us talking points and then we just read. And this was absolutely inspired by by what you do, Pete, over it.
So there I was, but I realized that I had gotten into a rut, you know, while they give me free reign, ours free reign, my interpretation of the same script winds up sounding kind of the same over and over and over again. And then Pete, you, you told me, you're like, oh, I just feed the talking points into chat GPT. Tell it, make it funny. Tell it, make it a thing. And so I I've, I've hit the theme. Yeah. I have a little theme. Right.
And I tell it like, make sure you include, don't get caught in the, in the ad read, keep it funny, you know, yada, yada, yada. And, uh, and so this week, yeah, sure enough, it said, don't get caught with your tech down. So you go, it just made me laugh. I don't know why. Yeah, same. Oh, it made me laugh too. It made me laugh when I read it. I've gotten to a point where when I do the ad scripts, I generally don't read them before I record them. I do pre-record them.
So like if there's something in there that's like, oh my God, that's totally incorrect or there's no world where I'm going to let it make me say that, you know, I can deal with it. But but it is it generally is a first take and a first read for me. Often I am reading it while chat GPT is like spilling it out. So I have no idea where it's going to go. But yeah, that was a good one. Don't get caught with your tech down, folks. All right. What about upside down food pantry?
Pyramid oh sorry upside down food pyramid why did i say yes i don't know yeah so upside down food pyramid has a question for us and i don't know that i have the answer she says do you have a good or he they say do you have a good solution to sync iphotos with google photos uh um i i i I think so. I, um, I know that the Google, Google, Google photos. Yeah, sure. It's easy for me to say chat to BT didn't write this for me, so I can't read it.
Uh, but I, I think the Google photos app for the iPhone will, will do this.
I mean, it, if the idea is that you want your Google photos and your, uh, you know, I cloud photos, your iPhone photos to be the same using the google photos app on your phone will do it and i also think that there's some version of this that google drive the app for the mac will also do uh but that that's where i would go with this otherwise i mean i think i think that's the only answer but what do i know yeah i don't i i don't we were talking about this earlier i try to let google have too
much of my stuff they obviously have a ton of it but photos is like a line for me yeah we got to draw the line somewhere i mean you know so yeah yipper all right uh pete you want to take us to r stanley.
I could do that uh so he wrote in and asked so my 2019 imac has a one terabyte fusion drive and runs very slowly i'm thinking that moving to an external ssd would be the easiest way to speed it up it's already been upgraded to 40 gigabytes of ram dang my question is would i be okay running off a 2000 megabit per second usbc 3.2 sand disk i've seen some comments that this particular imac Mac doesn't support USB-C 3.2, and so would default down to less than 1,000 megabits per second.
Those commenters recommend using a Thunderbolt 3 drive to get the best speed. But would I really need to run that high of a speed? I wouldn't be moving large files around just trying to run Mac OS and ideally improve performance of VM Fusion for my son, who is trying to use Fortnite and its design program. SSD prices seem to have jumped since I purchased it about eight, since I purchased about 18 months ago.
And anything that's Thunderbolt compliant looks to be double the cost of anything that's just USB-C. Thanks for the advice for any tips or recommendations. Um, yeah. Yeah. I, I, I think you're going to be fine. Um, it's certainly worth trying and it's definitely going to be faster than your fusion drive. Right.
So like there's, there's no world where this is is going to be slower than in my opinion it's going to be slower than what you're currently doing um the biggest and i know it's been years since we've had this conversation on the show anyway but the biggest benefit to me that ssds brought us or bring us when it comes to using as like a boot drive is the latency basically goes away right so you're not waiting for the heads of the hard drive to seek around and i know the fusion drive was built to
sort of bring that to the the the more affordable pricing of spindle drives right but it didn't really uh work out all that well so yeah i think you're going to do better with this the only time the raw speed is going to make a huge difference is when you're doing large amounts of data, either reading or writing boot up time. I think is more about reading a bunch of small files than it is reading big ones. Although Apple does some caching there so it can read things all at once.
But even still, my guess is even if you plugged in this drive as a, you know, 3.2 drive versus a 3.1 driver, whatever the 20 megabits versus 10 megabits or whatever, I don't think you'd notice a huge difference and you could if you have a Thunderbolt dock connected and. That Thunderbolt dock might have a USB 3.2 port on it that you could plug this into and get faster speeds, but I wouldn't recommend it.
If it's going to be your boot drive, I would, if at all possible, plug it directly in to a USB-C port on your Mac or a Thunderbolt port, which will be USB-C. Just so that you're not, if there's some power issue with the Thunderbolt dock or whatever, you're not just having your boot drive just fall offline, right? Right. That, that would be, that would be my only thought about it. I don't know. What do you think, Adam? No, I, I'm in general agreement with all of that.
I mean, the only other, the only other option, and it sounds like maybe not comfortable enough doing that would be to, you know, put it in an internal, um, but opening a 2019 iMac, I know I understand can be daunting. I mean, you got to fix it in a bunch of resources where you could get the instructions and, but you have to be comfortable doing that sort of thing.
Yeah it's not it's not a fun process it's not as easy as it used to be i think the 2019 imax i think have glue around the screen it's not even just put the suction cups on and pull the magnetic screen off so oh yeah yeah if you have to break the seal and put a new seal in yeah exactly probably not worth it this is much easier and you know i guess the thing is is you could you could get it um try it and if if it's not working turn that into some other drive and then still get the
yeah fair go get a thunderbolt one later right yeah yeah exactly it's like we can always use more drives i mean again budget considering i don't know what kind of budget they have but i mean worst case scenario is you know it were best case scenario is it works worst case scenario is you have a good ssd drive that you can use for something else yeah well and and and maybe you You know, if you roll to this and you realize. Okay, it could be faster, but it's still better than what you came from.
You've got this as an interim solution and it either works and is fine as an interim solution until that machine is eventually replaced. Or at some day down the road, you're like, yeah, I'd rather move this to a Thunderbolt drive. Maybe prices have come down. Maybe, you know, whatever finances, you know, open up a little bit and you go that route. So, yeah, I like it. Dan wrote in and asks a question. Is anyone else having trouble getting messages to sync between iOS and Mac OS?
It used to work seamlessly, but lately I'm noticing that messages, in particular SMS messages, are not updating on my two Macs. I made sure the obvious, same Apple ID, allow text message forwarding from the iPhone, restart everything. I even deleted the messages folder in the library folder on my Mac and let things sync. The syncing worked for that moment in time. Okay. Interesting. But messages since then from the phone are not showing up on the Mac.
Before I contact Apple support, I thought I would see if anyone else is experiencing this with Sonoma. It's a bit of a geek challenge or a discussion point. So I have some thoughts, but Adam or Pete, do either of you have any thoughts?
Not just a sonoma thing i'll just say that like it's just a thing that happens yeah yeah yeah sadly i've noticed it happening too uh my solution and i know he didn't didn't work for him i sign out sign back in and it seems to force the re-sync yeah yeah um yeah and uh the other one and i don't know if it's self-inflicted or what when i've used my uh e-sim overseas i find it really starts getting things going stupid because it's trying to use another
number yeah and all that so um and i think i think the solution to that is use the mentor national going forward oh yeah right it's it's now more affordable yeah right right right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I, I have certainly run into this before. I am not currently running into it, though. I am seeing Kiwi Graham in the live chat saying finding intermittent message syncing issues recently. There is the whole messages in the cloud part of iCloud too,
which if you have that enabled might be part of this. It shouldn't be. Obviously it all should just work, but we know how that goes. So if you go into messages on your Mac, go into preferences and go to the iMessage button at the top. If you have enable messages in iCloud checked, then you also have a sync now button that you can click. And that might be the thing to trigger. Hey, wake up, buddy, and go ahead and do this. We've also seen this take on like a new install.
All we've seen it take a couple of days for people's messages on their max to sort of fully populate from the cloud so bear that in mind too although that doesn't really sound like dan's specific issue but figured i'd bring it up while we're while we're having the conversation yeah yeah.
And he did say he already checked things like the messages settings and make sure that i can be reached at because i'm wondering if specifically because he's saying it's sms if, if it's a phone number thing like is that phone number on all devices like all right yeah. Because if it's not on your mac then yeah then you would expect that it would never sync And it sounds like this is just intermittent syncing issues.
Well, that same page of the preferences where you can click the sync now button on your Mac, there is also the list of all of the addresses, phone numbers and email addresses that are attached to your iCloud account. That would absolutely be the place to make sure that you can be reached. Yeah, make sure it's checked there.
Yeah, because I've gotten that one with people who are like, but the way that usually surfaces is like, they sync to every device except this one device right right right or i never get the message on this one device but i get the message on all these other devices i had this with a friend recently and i'm like well you don't have your you know your iphone you don't have the phone number attached and people are sending to the phone number so it's never going to get
there it's never going to get there right yeah exactly yep as long as we're on that settings page i want to mention something too down at the bottom of that settings page and i message on the mac there is a checkbox for send red receipts i uncheck that because you can individually enable send red receipts for for people you don't have it isn't an all or nothing thing right so right so for the most part you know i send it to friends and
family but generally speaking i don't send red receipts to everybody yeah i i i also have that off i am i'm fairly judicious with who I enable it for. But I like to be able to enable it just so I know who's, who's getting red receipts. I, I, although I, like, I wouldn't be opposed, I, I, I get why Apple has this ability to turn this off, but I wish it were on by default.
Like i i think i think our hour and i realize this goes counter to what i currently do like i get that but i think texting in general is better when you know that a message has been delivered and read and and all of those things like for all the people that i communicate you aren't bugging people hey ping ping ping hey have you seen this have you seen this like i know you've seen it you're choosing not
to reply to me that we might have another conversation about that you You know, but that's okay. Like, it is good. I find that the red receipt's really helpful. And probably. Would opt. I almost certainly would opt for that as the default. I like WhatsApp. I have a bunch of people that I communicate with with WhatsApp these days. And it's you know, it's the default there. It's it's weird because it's like you get one checkmark when the message is sent to check marks when it's delivered.
Delivered and then the check marks the double check marks turn blue right when the message is read so you have to know how to decipher these things but once you do it it all makes it's like very easy and at a glance you can be like all right great max read that message awesome i i know he's seen it i know he'll reply later but at least i know he's seen it and i don't need to worry about that yeah so it yeah it i i yeah anyway that's yeah yep yep all right so i just
check something because i was curious because i had had that checked and i was curious what happens if i uncheck it now do i have to go back in and opt everybody back in or do i opt them out and it looks like anybody that i've already messaged at least that i've just checked it's opt out and i'm assuming new people i don't know if it would be they're automatically opted in and i have to opt them out one by one or is it do you guys know like if i got a new message from somebody who
had never i messaged me before now that i've unchecked that i'm assuming they're not going to get a re-receipt until i opted them in yeah okay but uh that would be my guess and and just for clarity you just confirmed that you had it checked you unchecked it and went back and looked and the people that you've already had a message history with remain on send red receipts Yeah. Got it. Okay. So that checkbox is. If you want to send me a message,
you can try it, you know, right now. And I can tell you, or you can tell. Yeah. But Pete, that you're not new with Adam. You're in my list. Right. Yeah. Well, that's what I'm saying. That I would be legacy. You've already tested each other. Yeah. Yeah. Which is great. So no, that's good. Cause I was worried, you know, cause I think I've always had it on. So I was just worried.
This is my family. If I turn this off, suddenly going to not get receipts anymore and I have to go opt everybody back in, but no, it all looks fine. It all looks fine. Yep. Interesting. Okay. Yep. So that checkbox in a sense is applies only to newly started conversations. I would assume so. Yeah. I wonder what the reverse is. Like if I were to go and turn that checkbox on, what about the conversations that I have where I haven't been sending red receipts to people?
I don't know. Yeah. I wouldn't go back. I don't know. Rabbit hole. Yeah. That's it. Well, that's what we do here. Yeah. Huh. Interesting. All right. Uh, great. You want to take us to Mike, Adam? Sure. Rabbit holes. This isn't too much of a rabbit hole. Maybe. Well, maybe we'll see. He's Mike says, hello, gentlemen. I was so disappointed that the, when that the Mac cast went dark. Oh, sorry for that. But overjoyed with the addition of Adam to your band of brothers.
I'm disappointed. However, that with the addition of Adam, you haven't upped the number of things. I'll learn. He's got to be worth at least a couple more things, right? Sorry. I guess. I missed Pete's comment.
What did you say? Pete packing. or send p packet oh i see and then we can just keep it at five i got you so it used to be three things that we would uh learn and then i i forget when we raised it from three to five, i don't i don't know like should we like this is this is not a decision just for the three of us like this i think is a community decision so let us know how many how many things do you learn each episode.
See, I got to push penguins off the iceberg to learn new stuff anymore. You know, don't get old. Oh, same. Oh, yeah. We learn. I'm excited about learning new things every week. It definitely means that I forget the old stuff, but that's OK, because then I'm super excited when I learn it again. Right. It's totally fine. It's actually really nice. You know, the good thing. And I say this often.
And we are all and I mean, all of us that are listening and sort of alive in the world today, we're really fortunate because as we get older, you know, studies have shown that the way our brains work and the things that our brains are good at changes as we get older. Right. When when we're younger, our memories are fantastic. Right. Relatively speaking. And as we age, our memory gets deprioritized.
I'm choosing words carefully here in favor of our brains, enhanced ability to process big picture items to see and think of things as a whole and really kind of have that that that perspective and ability to really process.
Process and i say we're lucky because we have these devices that we're attached to all the time that have nearly perfect memories so we don't have to remember things anymore they do it like these devices do it for us now can the devices do the big picture processing for us well clearly that's being worked on it's not quite there yet if i if you know so i'm glad that things have have worked out the way that they have,
that we have these devices where the memory on them is, like I said, nearly perfect. You know, you back it up and now it might actually be perfect. Right. But yeah, there's, there's, there's holes in this, but not, not huge ones. So I'm, I'm, I don't know. I kind of like it. So there's your rabbit hole, Adam. Yes. The answer was, well, I mean, so how, how far are we from just plugging that always on thing right into the, to the brain, Johnny mnemonic style.
And then it is, we're, then worry about when your hard drive gets full yeah yeah yeah i i know i like i yeah it's great i i uh i i'm eager to see where we go with all this tech but it's i'm glad we're where we are. Especially given where i am with my age and all that's like it's great so my hard drive filled up years ago yeah that's all i gotta say you know i used to really pride myself on my memory like i I could see a group of numbers and just remember them forever and things like that.
And I don't even try to do that anymore. Like, I don't care about that anymore. And I think part of that is informed by the fact that my memory isn't as keyed into those things as it used to be. So I've let it go. But also it's like, well, I didn't let anything go. Like, I've already got all that data. And I'm, you know, I'm still functioning. Let me offer this though. And I'll tell you, right, especially if you're in your twenties and thirties and you have a hard picture laying around.
Get the back of that and write down the names of the people on there. I was looking at a photo the other day. It turned out a guy we had on the show this week, it turned out we had the same drill instructor. We didn't go together, but we had the same drill instructor from hell that made our lives an absolute misery. And I'm like, is that Staff Sergeant Gladstone? It sure is. I used to be able to go through all 30 people and name every one of them.
And I can name two people on that photo anymore. I'm like, oh, you've got to be kidding me. Those are names I never would forget. I mean, the hell we went through together, established a brotherhood. Yeah. And it's gone. And it's like, oh, you gotta be kidding me. Yeah. And so those sort of things, if you have that stuff and you remember, write it down.
Yeah. On the back of the photo somewhere. Things like that. I encourage people that are younger to back it up while you still have it, because I guarantee you're going to forget it. I guarantee it. Yes. And one other super quick story. I went through training to become a first officer on the MD-11 when I was about 39 or 40 years old. And I would just read it, retain it, and do it. And the guy I was going through training with was 58, and it just kicked his backside.
And I'm like, dude, this isn't that hard. Come on. He could fly an airplane like nobody's business, but he could not retain the interface of the computer. And then I changed airplanes at age 59. Oh my God. I went, Oh, now I know. Yep. I used to be able to just read this and do it. And now I can't, I have to read it, write it down, think about it, ask questions. So it definitely, your, your brain's processing changes. Yeah, for sure.
Yeah. So Beck, you know, just verifying what you're saying, but. Yeah, no, I, I, it's why I'm such a fan of telling the S lady, Hey, remind me, you know, later to do this thing or remind me about this thought that I had. Like, I'll be driving in my car and have like a spectacular idea. And I, and in the moment, like you with the, you know, the picture of the, the people you went through, uh, all that with. In the moment, you're like, there's no world where I will be able to forget
about this. And I feel the same way when I have some, you know, epiphany about something. It's like, oh, my God, I'll never forget this. Ha, right. Yeah, hold my beer and watch out. Right. Yeah, it's not. I definitely will forget it. And so that's why I use that all the time. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So bringing Pete's thing about the photos, the physical photos and writing people's names on the back, back to tech, I have to ask, because I use this religiously with iClub Photo Library.
Do you guys use the facial recognition thing? Like I got really fanatic about tagging people and even like really distant relatives that I see every 20 years at a family reunion or something like that.
I will tag those people because sometimes, times you know it's a cousin of a second cousin and you're like same kind of thing 20 years later you're like you can't remember their name right yep that's a great idea so i have really obscure people in their abilities and there's only like one or two photos for them but you know they're not my favorites or anything they're way down the list but at least like that's sort of in my mind the digital version of that that's
brilliant yeah they're that the i mean you're essentially making the argument that tagging the faces of the people that aren't as like common in your life is more important than tagging like your kids right like i mean it's easy to do and so there's no reason not to but chances are you know if you're seeing someone regularly you're not going to forget who they are whereas someone that you've stopped seeing regularly it's like who was that that person oh yeah yeah yeah
you know even cool people i've met at conferences and stuff like that yeah you know yeah and it's helpful too sometimes in the moment because it's like you know 10 years later and you met him at a conference and you you know had a drink one time yeah and you had a great conversation and maybe you exchanged cards or whatever but you really haven't communicated since and so like i can even like sneak up like oh what's their name yeah oh there they are.
Yeah cool you know what's funny about that pretend like i actually have a memory, yeah what's funny about that is we're talking about it though of all the pay all the faces in there there were three staff there was a staff sergeant a sergeant and a captain who was our platoon commander i couldn't tell you the other two but staff sergeant gladstone i'll go to my grave with that well there are there are some things you won't forget that's true i can't if i I wanted to.
And I don't want to forget to thank everyone whose premium contributions have come in and we do have some cool stuff found to talk about. So I want to take a quick minute and do this. Again, it's all at mattgeekub.com slash premium. It's not mandatory. It is very much appreciated and it definitely is. Helps us do what we do here. It's been a couple of weeks since we've done this. So we had a $5 contribution from Bob in Lafayette.
Thank you, Bob. We had $10 contributions from Frank in Tunbridge, Stephen in Plainfield, Joseph in Marietta, Warren in Gloucester, Bill with an APO box, Jeff in Chesterton, Barry in Des Plaines, Timothy in West Windsor, Kevin in Edison, Jonathan in Plainsboro, Matthew in Forked River, Paul in Lawrenceville. Michael in Robbins, James in Amity Harbor, Santiago in Palm City, Frank in Voorhees, Brian in Southbury, and John in Wake Forest. Thank you to all of you.
Eric in Southfield sent us a $12 contribution. Bob in LaFesh sent us a $15 contribution. And then we have $20 contribution, $25 contributions from Gene in Denver, Scott in North Little Rock, George in Natick. Doug in Centerville, Andrew in Durham, Jed in Jersey City, Michael in Wake Forest, Robin in Andover, Charles in Kobe, Keith in Edmonds, Robert in Pontusbury, Peter in Rochester, Brian in Johnson City.
And we had a $30 contribution from Seth in Tucson, a $35 contribution from Anders in Vostras, $50 contributions from Patrick in Little Rock, Edward in Manhattan Beach, Joseph in Aventura, a $100 contribution from Harry in Luz, a $150 contribution from Brian in Glendora, and a $500 contribution from James in Pleasant Prairie. Thank you to all of you so much. And James, I believe you now, uh, hold the record. So, uh, thank you to all of you, but really, but really it's not, it's not a competition.
Um, we, we appreciate every bit of it. And, and absolutely. Thank you for all of that. It's amazing. Absolutely amazing. Hey, I've got an idea though. What's that? Those that can't afford to contribute money. You can contribute by sharing the show.
Absolutely. that's a friend yep yep that is the uh that really and just listening contributing you know by listening and like you said share the show that's the great stuff i'll give i'll give you one more yeah uh review is also always appreciated oh yeah yep those five-star reviews are awesome yep not three stars don't do it that's right you can go to macgeekup.com slash reviews and that That will get us as close as we can get you to reviewing on Apple Podcasts.
So, yeah, please, please, please. Those are great. Let's do some cool stuff found, shall we, Pete? We shall. You have a story to tell us? Yeah, I do. A quick story. The other day I was playing with ChatGPT on iOS, and I noticed a little headphone icon in there. So I tapped on that, and then I wound up, you go in, and you can set up what voice you want it to reply in, and the speed, and all that kind of stuff. It's really cool. This is like Star Trek.
Computer, do this. computer what's the state of that it was amazing and here's where it got really cool for me i switched my wi-fi to the hero 6e router and for some reason it knocked all my sonos off and i could not get it to recognize no matter what i did well i've got sonos play one i've got sonos one i've got a bar a sound bar the original one the sub all that stuff they're all different to get them to reset all right so i just went i went to chat gpt in ios
i tapped a little headphone and i said all right tell me how to reset the original sub and give give me step-by-step instructions pause after each step and ask me when i'm ready to continue she goes okay you know here's what you do push this button and i go no no wait a minute that's not the button that i have in front I have this button. Oh, I'm sorry. You have the original sub. So push this button, hold it. Wow. Let me know you're ready to continue. Yeah. And we went through everything
step by step. Okay. I'm ready to continue. It just sits there and listens. And it is, or the other things I've used it for, Hey, give me a quick review on Shakespeare's Taming of the Shrew. Oh, okay. okay, these are the characters. This is what it is. You know, give me a recipe for that. All right, here's a good recipe to make.
The most interesting part about this, Pete, is the most interesting part about this is without thinking about it, as you were telling this story about working and resetting your Sonos stuff, is you said, we went through it step by step. There you go, yeah. You're right, yeah. Yeah, that's that's the part where it starts to become so fluid and seamless that it feels like you're interacting with, you know, that you're actually having a meaningful interaction here.
And you were having a meaningful interaction. No doubt about it. Yeah. You know, that's fascinating. I got to check that out. And that's just really cool. That's in the, like the first, I say first party, in ChatGPT's app on iOS, not some third-party app that taps in via API or something like that, right? Right, no, yeah, it's ChatGPT's app, and I do pay the 20 bucks a month. Okay, yeah, yeah. But I'll tell you what, I have found that 20 bucks a month
is some of the best money I've ever spent. Sick. It has been great. Yeah. And, uh, you know, right down the road, ask you questions, chat about what's. Yeah. Is there a car play? Interaction? Interaction? Oh yeah. Integration? Really? Yes. Oh, I got to mess with this. Okay. So. Yep. All right. You want to take it to Chicago Tom, Adam? Yeah.
Chicago Tom says, hi guys. I was just listening to episode 1027 and my ears perked up when I heard Adam have mentioned that he uses the program Marked to convert his Markdown files to Word. In relation to that, I thought it might be timely to remind listeners of a program called Pandoc.
Pandoc is a somewhat standard Unix command line program that can convert between numerous markup and word processing formats, including, but not limited to, various flavors of Markdown, HTML, HTML, LaTeX, and Word doc X. This is an incredibly versatile and useful program for converting all kinds of document formats back and forth. For instance, it not only converts Markdown to Word, but also converts Word to Markdown.
It is unfortunately not part of the standard Mac OS distribution, but is easily installed via your favorite package manager. I use Homebrew. I use Homebrew also. That's my favorite one on the Mac, but yeah, very, very cool.
Huh i'm a command line nerd so brew install pandoc p-a-n-d-o-c that's i just issued that command and i now have pandoc installed in my terminal so wow i would not be surprised if you know who knows what marked is using but yeah oh that's fair right yeah right why not yeah yeah yeah huh under the hood i don't i don't know what's going on but yeah very commonly a lot of gui apps are just really using underlying stuff interesting interesting interesting huh
i like it cool very cool um pete you mentioned um getting some new euro hardware and i wanted to take a minute and kind of talk about some new euro hardware that we've both been playing with i wound up uh after we talked about it on the show the and and i said well i'm not sure why anybody would need Wi-Fi 7 right now, Iroh said, we want you to find out. So, I've got a three-pack of Mac 7s in the house. Now, I was coming from the 6E, so the most any of my client devices can do is 6E, right?
So, I have no Wi-Fi 7 client devices. The only Wi-Fi 7 devices that I possess are these Eero access points, right? So... Color me surprised when, and I know that this is why they wanted me to test it out because they knew, when my speeds were, you know, 100 megabits faster with Wi-Fi with the Eero 7s than they were with the Eero 6Es, 150 megabits faster here and there. It's like, okay, wait a minute. And I did the test over and over and over again.
And, you know, I'm getting like in my house where I would previously get 600 megabits a second, I'm getting 750 or even 800 megabits a second. And again, I know all our homes are different. I know 6E is capable of these speeds. But where I was testing from, I was not getting those. And so there is this. And I want to talk about it. There's also the fact that backhaul with Wi-Fi 7 is so much better. I have one location in the house where I can't do wired backhaul.
And I need to have an access point there because it's the only way I can get through the concrete to get out to my back patio and get Wi-Fi out there.
It's the whole thing. and uh with 6e to the patio i was getting like you know 119 megabits per second with seven i was getting 275 megabits per second to the patio and again just using the backhaul of wi-fi 7 what wi-fi 7 lets you do or lets the technology do is use all of the bands simultaneously Simultaneously, not just picking one band at a time. And then there's some different signaling that happens. But I asked them why my 6 and 6E client devices got faster with the Eero Wi-Fi
7 access points. And the engineers said no. Three things. On Mac 7, we were able to get our transmit power closer to the regulatory limit so the client would be getting more power and thus more throughput in the same location relative to the access point. OK, that's one. Also on the Mac 7, ironically, the antenna gains are lower, which allows us to increase the total power delivered to the antennas.
Uh he says on the max seven the four antennas give the receiver on average three db better receive performance relative to an access point with two antennas and uh they they also kind of, talked a little bit here and said people think because they've been told that antenna gain improves performance that's really only true when you're operating at long distances and have directional antennas that concentrate the energy to and from the client devices in
indoor settings you want to put as much energy as you can into the space more antenna gain reduces the total amount of energy which is interesting so there is there are some technological improvements that ero made from the 6es and the 6s to the 7s that actually make your client devices your non-wifi 7 client devices already operate faster. But I also moved my son in his apartment from the 6s to the 6Es and we saw his backhaul performance double to about 600 megabits per second.
He was getting like 250 to 300 and now he's getting about 600 on those 6Es, which is what you have now, Pete, right? You've got the 6Es. Right. I've got the 6Es that they sent me and I've got to tell you, it's, Yeah. I'm speechless. I'm speechless. Look, so here's the deal. I was running the TP links before and those did good. They bathed the house in Wi-Fi because my daughter's room was not even getting Wi-Fi and that was particularly frustrating. So that's why those TP links solved.
And on a given day, I would do a speed test and with gigabit ethernet, I'm sorry, Sorry, fiber. Yep. And then converting to Wi-Fi, obviously. I was getting, with everything going in the house, streaming, television, sun gaming, that sort of thing, 200 megabits, 250. And were these TP-Link devices Wi-Fi 5 or Wi-Fi 6? I think they were 5. Okay. I'm certain they were. They were old. Okay. Well, but a lot of people out there are running Wi-Fi 5 stuff because
it's fine, right? You're getting 200 to 300 megabits. It's fine. Yep. And for the vast majority of what I do, that worked great. Yep. Well, but with these, I just ran one. Well, you were talking. We're streaming back and forth and all that stuff. I went ahead and ran one. I'm getting 358 up and down, and I'm 40 feet away through two walls to the nearest access point. And the back hall is Wi-Fi on that access point. Oh, wow.
Okay. Yeah. Now, if I'm in the same room with it, even with my son gaming and doing all that kind of stuff in the house, I'm getting 850. Wow. Yeah. Smoking speeds on the 6E. And again, I think it's down because we're streaming back and forth video. My son's in the basement gaming. Sure, sure. And I'm 30, 40 feet away through two walls. So that's why it's terrible performance. You've got rock solid connection. And as you just proved, more headroom than you need.
And that's really what it's about. Yeah. Yeah. Interesting. So, so I, I, I, I stand corrected there. There are some improvements with the wifi seven. I still think the six E is probably, if you're looking to buy today, I think the six E is a, it's a good choice, but you know, there is always the, how long are you going to keep it future proofing thing to keep in mind.
And if you can find the Wi-Fi 7 stuff at a price that works for you, we know that eventually Apple will add it to their devices and so will everyone else. And in the interim, you get Wi-Fi 7 backhaul without any congestion. So that's not so bad. Yeah. Yeah. Thank you, Hedy Lamarr. Yes, that's right. You guys know the Hedy Lamarr story? I do, but go tell it. Yeah. So there's a documentary if you want to watch it.
I re-watched it recently, a great documentary called Bombshell, the Hedy Lamarr story. But Hedy Lamarr, actress, you know, in the World War II era, 30s, 40s, is believed to have or did come up with a lot of the ideas behind frequency hopping. And the reason was to drive torpedoes towards Russian submarines.
Right in a secure manner and german german subs oh sorry what did i say russian world war ii german did i say did i say russian i meant german yeah yeah german summaries thank you we were talking about memory earlier memory yeah but the point is is yeah she, laid the groundwork for that her and her and another guy and i'm blanking on his name but yeah it's a fascinating thing to find out that like this actress this starlet actress She just kind of came up with this idea that then drove
forward a lot of the wireless technology that we use today. It's crazy. It's awesome. I love it. Yep. It's great. Yeah. And I think she got the idea from an early remote for like a Philco radio or something like that. It's in the story because they had this thing where you could have this remote box that connected to the radio and you could change the dial, right?
Right. So you would, it had like a phone dial on it and you'd spin it and then it would go to, you know, 900 frequency and then you'd spin it again and it would go to 1300 frequency. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And so supposedly that's where the original thought came from was this Philco. Amazing. So amazing. I love it. Love it. All right. We have maybe a minute or two. We were talking about nerdy stuff. And so I wanted to share Paul's cool stuff found that he sent in.
He says, I often want to paste my upcoming calendar items into a journal like day one or into a weekly plan dot TXT or send plain text to a colleague or something to this end. He says, I came across an old terminal program that has been taken over by the programming community called iCalBuddy. It, like the other thing we mentioned, installs from Homebrew and has a man
page. A don't get caught tip is that if you're once you have it installed, you have to type man space iCal buddy with a capital B. That's only true for the man page. The command invokes with a lowercase b. So yeah, it says the man page is long and there are plenty of options. The command that I like that I've put into text expander is.
One, I'll put it into, uh, into the, the, the show notes, but it's, uh, he's got a command that only lists the dates and times and title of the calendar items in the next 14 days. And it's really a nice little, like it's, it's nice. I, uh, yeah, I like it. So yeah, pretty good. Yeah. So thank you for that, Paul. Fun stuff. Love the, uh, love that.
And i i think we need to do elliot as well pete because otherwise we're just going to keep hearing uh from all of this and and it's from everybody about this and it's great but we know now and we want to share so go ahead take us okay i'll do it so uh actually in the notes uh what he actually wrote is gone and i don't know why or how but that's okay and allison had a follow-up But he wrote in about a program called TouchRetouch.
That's an iOS program, TouchRetouch. It was designed to remove a line, like a power line or a telephone pole, those sorts of things from a photo. And it does it really quite well. The app was designed for this problem, among others. After installation in Photos, tap on Edit and then the three-dot menu in the top right. And you'll see TouchRetouch as an option. And then you can open it as an extension of photos, and one of the things is lines. So you can pull lines and objects out of photos.
Now, the one I covered this as a cool stuff found several months back, the one I use, but it's not an iOS one up front. It's on my Mac, but I use the HitPaw at HitPaw.net. Yeah, you mentioned that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And here's the weird thing about it. It does all these other things that I didn't realize.
Wise i i got it as a photo enhancer that's what i bought it for sure and as i speak today it is on sale for 26 instead of 37 i think but that could change in any minute sure but not only does the photo enhancer it will do background remover and then what we're talking about object remover so a telephone pole telephone lines that sort of thing it is an ai generator similar to of Dolly. It will take a, you give it three photos and it will create your portrait.
You can get it any style you want, uh, in the portrait. And then the other thing it'll do is you can take a, just a headshot of you and turn it into a photo ID for your passport, those sorts of things that, and it says you, you pull the country.
I want it for Japan or I want it to UK or the United States and it will send it to you with all of those two by two inches whatever the yeah yeah standards are that they need and then while I was on hip pod net I also found it looks like I'm gonna have to go spend some more money they've got video editors.
Video enhancement all that kind of stuff too so they're really big into the photo manipulation when you first told us about hit pod and i remember having this conversation it seemed like one of those sort of janky pieces of software that i wouldn't want to install but clearly they have worked really hard on turning this into a like it's something that it's a very useful tool so yes yeah yeah that's great yeah scratch repair i have like a neat photo of my
great grandfather father who was the head swimming coach at the university of pennsylvania for 40 years okay but it the photo was taken in the 1890s and it just beautifully restored it to the focus and it gets scratches out and takes away the sepia amazing things like that yeah amazing well the time has come my friends oh to talk of many things oh actually to stop talking of many things. Adam, did that remind you of the song from Alice in Wonderland? About the oysters?
I don't know if I know that one. I've only seen that movie. You're talking about the Disney film, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. The Disney film. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think I've seen that one time in my life. The time has come, the walrus said.
Yeah, yeah. Yep. All right. Well, no ceiling wax for us, but we do want to thank Cashfly for providing the bandwidth with to get the show from us to all of you of course thanks to all of you who contributed to the show either you know with your questions or your tips or your cool stuff found or in discord the conversations I love when I go into discord to you know catch up on things and answer questions and I see that there's you know like a thread 20 posts long
where you folks are like helping one another like it it's amazing I absolutely love Love it. And if you want to join our Discord community, of course, it's just macgeekgab.com slash discord. That should get you a link in. So go check that out. Thanks to our sponsor, of course, ecam.live, where code macgeekgab gets you one week for free. And you can learn about all our other active sponsors and even deals from inactive sponsors.
But the deals are still active. That's all at macgeekgab.com slash sponsors. And sign up for the email list and the show notes. You get them in your inbox. Pete, we missed you last week. Do you have anything to share with us? Well, I had a check ride and I took the advice that I'm about to give to you. Don't get caught. That's good advice. Later.