It's time for MacGeekGab and listener Mac1984 sends in this one for those of you especially who are tech support for all your family. In the continuing vein of supporting relatives, one of the most common maintenance issues with family iPhones is closing the sometimes 100 plus Safari tabs that get left open. I look for a few tips on this but the one I found that work was to to hold down the done button in the Safari tab screen.
It will offer up an option to close tabs, close the number of tabs, which in my wife's phone was 129. Nicely done. That's a great tip. I used it. I love it. I hope you'll get more tips like this and your questions answered today on MacGeekGab number 1058 for Monday, October 7th, 2024. Music. Greetings, folks, and welcome to MacGeekGab, the show where you send in your tips like that, we share them. You send in cool stuff found, we share that.
And you send in your questions, and not only do we share them, And we try to answer them all under the guise and the goal of trying to learn at least five new things every single time we get together. And sometimes when we learn something especially fun, we play that bell. Sponsors for this episode include coda.io slash MGG. It is one doc to rule them all. You can bring your text and tables together. And that link is where you can go to sign up for free.
Also, a new sponsor, Glean, G-L-E-A-N dot com slash M-G-G, which is the work AI platform connected to all of your data. And you can get 15 percent off your first year at Glean dot com slash M-G-G. We'll talk more in depth about both of those in a little bit. For now, back here in Durham, New Hampshire, I'm Dave Hamilton. And here in South Dakota, I'm Adam Christensen. And here in another part of New Hampshire, it's Pilot Pete. Pete, good to be with you, gents. Glad we're all here today.
I'm glad we're all here. Yeah, fun stuff. Some of us barely made it. Well, that's all it takes, Adam. That's all it takes. If the minimum wasn't good enough, it wouldn't be the minimum.
Wisdom that's i prefer much more flair but that's fine if the minimum was it yeah yeah huh all right well you know yeah yeah the plane lands everybody walks away that's good enough yeah exactly it yep all right shall we continue with some actually i want to take a quick second and tell everyone about our October giveaway here. If you go to macgeekup.com slash giveaway, this month is with the folks at Eternal Storms who make both Yoink and Screen Float.
I am a huge fan of Yoink. I use it all the time. Once I sort of grokked it into my workflow, it is one of my most used apps because anytime you're dragging something, It just puts a little dock there, and you can drag it on top of it and then move it elsewhere so you don't have to try and hold your mouth the right way and hop on three legs and all that stuff that you can't do. And you can win both Yoink and Screen Float by entering our giveaway. I think they're giving away five licenses of each.
So go check that out at geekup.com slash giveaway.
That's our monthly giveaway for October. holber and we do these for you so that uh so you know you get a little something extra out of the show it's fun stuff all right now cool shall we go to yeah yeah should we go to marty marty yeah marty's got a great tip uh with the new flashlight in ios 18 he says turning on the flashlight brings up a flashlight icon animation the beam contains a curve which you can use to to widen or narrow the beam by moving the sun icon,
left to the left or to the right. The curve also replaces the squares previously used to make the beam brighter or dimmer, simply move the curve up or down to accomplish the same thing. So, yeah, I've been using that quite a bit. Yeah. That's cool. My son showed me that last night. He discovered it. Yeah. He's like, yeah, I'm not breaking it brighter or dimmer. I'm like, because from across the room, it kind of looked like it was. He goes, no, it's just focusing the beam.
So I have to share, and this is where my experiments perhaps is paying off or perhaps not, depending on your perspective. I went with the base model 16 this time around, not the 16 Pro, which would have been sort of my normal thing, mainly because, as I said on the show, that Apple built the 16 with so much horsepower, I think, so that it can do the AI stuff that it was very close to what the 16 Pro could do minus the cameras.
And the flashlight uh i was running the betas on my 15 pro and i got exactly what marty described here both the brightness and the beam focus however on my 16 not pro i only get brightness i cannot control the beam width so i think the beam width controls are only for pro and i think I think it's because of something with the True Tone Flash or whatever that is, perhaps. I don't know. Okay.
Yeah. Yeah, that's interesting. Yeah, because I was going to say, I think I had it on when I put the beta on my 14 Pro. Right. Even had those features. Yeah. I think. Yeah, right. I need to think back now. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Right, yeah. I'm pretty sure I did. I'm pretty sure I did. It has to do with the capabilities of the LED. Yeah. Okay. Yeah, perhaps. But anyway, just figured I would offer that context here.
So Michael shares, we were talking about the monthly security reminders in Mac OS 15 Sequoia. And Michael found a Lifehacker article that says. Teaches us how to find those and disable them. And essentially what this trick is, is you use the terminal to pull up the list of already set permissions with their expiration dates. And then you also use the terminal to change those expiration dates to a date many, many years or many, many decades or even many centuries into the future.
So that it doesn't try to ask you for these again. So certainly a nerdy way to get around it, but a way to get around it. It is manual though. No one has, at least not yet, written a utility to find these and do it. I wouldn't be surprised to find something like that in say Lingon though, eventually. You know, it's kind of like in that world, I don't know, but it could be written as a utility that goes and parses this data, shows it to you and lets you just edit the dates.
So thank you for sharing that, Michael. The link, of course, is in the show notes at macgeekgab.com. I don't remember who now, but somebody put the old Windows Apple ad in Discord this week, which, you know, the denier allow. Yeah, yeah, yeah, right. You're coming to a sad realization, denier allow. That's, I mean, that's where we are. Yep. Yeah. Yep.
I don't yeah I don't know I share my thoughts on that get back to it it just works just works alert blindness is we I mean I know we've already ranted about this but yeah all right Andrew, Andrew and Jeff both have comments about our conversation last week that we, discussed a listener's need to set up a multi-use multi-user slash multi-use iPad in the kitchen, really not multi-use, just they wanted to set it up for just controlling smart home devices in, but needed multiple apps accessible.
And, uh, Andrew says, uh, from time to time, I leave my house and put it on Airbnb or whatever. And he says, so my guests need access to my lights and speakers. And I also also want them to have the Apple TV plus available on a few Sony TVs, as well as having access to Apple music, music. Wow, man, easy to talk today via a device for playing on speakers in the house. So on my iCloud family plan, I set up a fifth account. This works if you have less than six people already on your plan.
And this is the house account. Importantly, I set this as a child's account, meaning whoever has access to the account or device can't do nefarious things. Number two, I put this child account on the iPad mini as the iCloud account and only put apps on it like home, Apple Music, podcast, weather and third party apps for other appliances. I sign into Apple TV Plus and guests can also use AirPlay 2 for their own audio. And that's his solution. So I like that.
Before we digest and discuss, I want to share Jeff's solution too, because that I think will dovetail nicely with this. He says for this, put all the home control device apps on the first page, right? So you set up your iPad, you move all the things. That makes perfect sense. Put them in the doc if you want, however you want to do it. The second page is where you would move mail, messages, etc. But using iOS and iPadOS 18's new feature to require Face ID to open those apps.
And you can do this on a per app basis. If you long press on an app on iOS or iPadOS 18, you get the option to require Face ID or Touch ID, I suppose, if it's a Touch ID iPad for that app. And the app won't launch without authenticating via Face or Touch ID. That's awesome. I didn't notice that menu item in 18. So that I like that solution a lot. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Brilliant. Yep. I agree. Yep. It, that, that it's one of those features.
They talked about it during the keynote at WWDC and then it kind of got lost, but I, I think it's great if you've got an app that, you know, you just don't want somebody to, you know, randomly launch, you know, if you hand them your phone to look at photos or whatever, you know, so. Yep. But don't you feel like it's about time that we, that Apple does though, just enable multiple users on an iPad? I know they want it to be a personal device, but like really?
Yeah, that's true. It ought to be your choice, whether it's personal or multi-user device. Yeah. I keep, I keep hoping one of these times they'll be like, okay, we can give up that ghost now. It's been this many years. as we don't, you know, people are buying iPads at a lower rate. Like there's a lot of secondary iPads out there. I'm sure people would love to be able to use for uses like this or whatever. You know, I do know. Yeah, I agree with you. I, um, I mean the Apple TV does it.
Right? You launch the Apple TV and it's like, who are you? And you can. Yeah, who's watching. Yeah, who's watching, right? We know it's technically possible. There's obviously a business reason or a justification they have internally for why they don't want to do it. Yep. I get the phone is a personal device, but the iPad ought to be, it ought to default to personal with the option of making it family. Yeah. Or whomever. Maybe it
could be a feature that you unlock with a subscription fee. There you go. Thanks dave yeah you're welcome. If they come out with that in like six months or something then you can all you can all lay spew your hate at me yeah that's right, that seems like something apple would not do but yeah no true but But, you know. You have planted the seed. Let's hope it withers and dies. Do not water this seed. This is not a seed that should be planted in October. Yeah, that's right.
Ken also has a comment from episode 1057. He says, Martin, who provided the opening quick tip about the power button appearing in Control Center, saved me from going to the massive effort of typing that and sending it in. Yes, well, quite massive. However, Ken went through the effort of sending this in. He says, because there's more to the story. When I first noticed the new power button after I updated my iPhone 13 to iOS 18, I pressed it and saw the power off screen, of course.
Since I did not want to turn off the phone at that moment, I pressed cancel, which then caused the phone to prompt me to enter my PIN, my passcode. This, it turns out, is a way to quickly turn off Face ID or Touch ID and require a PIN to unlock the device.
And that's great when you're going through security especially international security where you have to give your phone to someone else and of course they can't force you to type in a password but they can put the phone in front of your face so i know there's a lot of people that like to do that i have always done this and still do it by just holding the sleep wake button and the volume up button simultaneously that also brings up that same screen with the slide to power off.
It also offers to do an emergency call or medical ID. And when you cancel from that, you have to type in your passcode in order to unlock the device. So it, it wipes that, but yeah, either one of those. Great. That's, that's a good reminder of, of how to do that. I like it. I didn't even know the old way worked. Like I didn't know that was a thing. So I learned that today. Yeah. Yeah. There you go. There you go. Uh, what do we have next, Pete? We have some reviews, some five-star reviews.
Count them five. Don't send us three-star reviews. Just send those to some other show. Send your five-star reviews here. And we got our first five-star review from a Mac genius, no less, Dave. And he says, my favorite tech podcast, bar none. I learned something new more often than not, numerous things in every episode. And that's Daryl Rhodes, MacGenius from Canada. Thank you, Dale. And another one, CSF, that's Cool Stuff Found, and Quick Tips. I've been listening to the podcast for many years.
I look forward to listening to each and every podcast. Always something new, be it a quick tip or Cool Stuff Found. Keep it up. Ray C., also from Canada. So, you Canadians have got the Americans beat this week. Jake, Americans, Australians, Kiwis, get on your computers and give us a five-star rating. And if you can't do that, share the show with a friend. Please tell your friends about it.
Just tell them we make it easy to do those reviews mac geek gab.com slash review uh is where you can go to review the show and i promise it works uh it'll it'll bring you to a nice little screen where you can click like apple podcasts or spotify or pod chaser good pods but yeah there you go it's a it's a beautiful little screen in fact so yeah yeah we need more ratings it's it's good I mean, we have like 1,200 of them or something, which is amazing.
We've been doing this 20 years, so not that amazing. But the constant flow of them really does help us. And if you've already reviewed the show, as long as it's been more than six months, you can go edit your review, and then it becomes new again, which is also amazing.
So it's not a one-time thing. i don't have any evidence or proof of this but i've i've heard also that reviews are factored into some of the like surfacing algorithms of podcasts yes yeah they they will tell you they are not however how like active reviews you know yeah it's and which would make sense like if a The show's getting a lot of, like, response, you know. There's, you want it to be shown to people. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yep.
All right. So help the brothers out. Get out there and get a review to us. That's right. That's right. Yeah, just go review the show. You want to take us into our don't get caught section here with Todd? In our new don't get caught section, which is, you know, like you said last week. I can't believe we haven't done this before, but we have a theme song for this. I'll play the same one we did last week, but then I think we have another one. So. Don't get caught. Music.
Don't get caught, don't get caught, don't get caught. I now understand why like morning radio hosts have their own like little jingles and stingers and things like that. It gives them a break from talking. They can get a drink. I get it. Nice. All right. You want to take us to Todd now that we've burned all that time? I will. And just just so you know, folks, you too can send us your don't get caught your quits, tips and your questions to feedback. back at macgeekcap.com.
What was that, Pete? Feedback at MacEcap.com? No, I definitely heard him. Feedback at MacEcap.com. I had no idea. So that's where Todd sent it to us. He says, my lovely wife and I were in the pre-check line at DCA in Washington, D.C. this morning. I'm sorry, Todd. She opened her wallet to get her driver's license out, only to realize it was in another purse at home. Ruh-roh.
We had loaded our Maryland driver's license into her wallet on her iPhone, and while DCA is not advertised to accept it, they did. Quick tip, load your driver's license into your wallet. You never know. Cheers and at the gate, Todd. Nice. It's a great idea. Yeah. There are only seven states currently that allow this. Arizona, California, Colorado, Georgia, Hawaii, Ohio, and of course, Maryland, where Todd resides.
Or at least Todd's wife resides. I don't presume to know anything about Todd and his wife's relationship. I don't want to, but it's, but there's seven states, more coming. I would also, and I do, store a photograph of my driver's license. I put it in one password. I know some people put it in a secure note. Yep, whatever, whatever, your driver's license and your passport. Is it the same as having your physical one? No. But in a pinch, might it work? Yes.
And what Todd said when they were coming home, I he followed up with an email. I forget where they were flying through. But the airport they were leaving from did not accept this ID in in in the Apple wallet. it and and so they had to go through about 20 minutes of of negotiations before they let him on the plane.
Or bring a four-year-old with you yeah is that will that work it did for me one time i was traveling to to visit my mom and i was taking my daughter i think she was around four, okay good probably tsa doesn't want anybody to know or someone else's oh i don't probably doesn't matter uh but yeah no i had i i got i got to the airport i had all my stuff i did and I did not have my, I didn't have my wallet. I didn't have my ID. I didn't grab it.
Yeah. And we were like on our way to the plane. I don't know if it was because we were in the commuter terminal and not the main terminal where we were flying out of or whatever, or if they just took pity on me. I don't know. But I, you know, I had other things with my name and address on it and I can forget. I might've had my credit cards. I just didn't have my ID.
And, um, yeah, the guy let me through surprisingly. I thought there's no way that I just pleaded and, i don't know why they did that or why it happened but it did i i made it through once i told the story on this show and i i told it i i remember you and i talking about it pete at the very first lunch we ever had together so it was like before you were ever even on this show yeah so it was a long time ago but i um yeah i showed
up at the airport without my wallet and i realized it when When I got to like the check-in desk to like get my, uh, just my paper ticket. Like it was that long ago. And right. But it was after it was post nine 11 for sure. And I had a credit card at the time with my picture on it. Citibank was doing that for a little while. They stopped. And so I was able to show them my credit card at the gate. And they're like, yeah, okay, we can give you your ticket.
Good luck at TSA was basically what they said. And so I had enough time. I went up and I was like, there was no pre-check or anything at the time. And I was like, okay, hey, look, here's the deal. Here's my boarding pass. Here's a credit card with my thing. I know that's not an ID. What can we do here? And they, um, it, it, it was, you know, 20 minutes of, they patted me down. These were in the days where they were still patting people down.
Well, you were on the no fly list then too. I don't think I was then. I think that happened shortly after me, maybe related. Okay. Um, yeah, but they, they went through my bags. Like it was, they basically said, we have to treat you like you've been flagged for something you know it was like okay like sure like.
That's that's the cost of entry today i get it like it's my fault and sir we have a room that we need you to go into it was kind of like that yeah i don't know i think they did bring me into the little room and and then it was fine for johnny yeah and i had a table i had lisa fedex my.
License to my hotel thankfully i wasn't renting a car because that could have been a problem almost certainly would have been a problem yeah so anyway yeah yeah but yeah but yeah having a picture of my life i did not have a picture of my license at that point and after that i did um of course i haven't needed it um speaking of nerdy strategies i just came back from disney world uh where we were for my father-in-law's uh he had a big birthday i don't
know if he wants me to talk about how old he is so i won't but he had a big birthday he wanted the whole family to go to disney world so the whole family went to disney world and we knew going in when i say we i mean lisa lucas and i sky didn't make it from italy but um the rest of us did and uh we knew going in that this trip was not going to be the way we would approach Disney world because we were going with family. There were 12 of us, three of whom are under the age of five.
So it was like, we knew that if we expected this to be like a normal Disney trip, we would be super frustrated. So we didn't and, and level setting, but we also planned an extra day at the end so that we could do what we wanted to do just the three of us, and we made it to Galaxy's Edge and Pandora, which are the Star Wars and Avatar worlds that Disney has created. And they're freaking amazing. But that's not my geeky tip.
I arrived late, intentionally, sort of. I had gigs that were booked before this last-minute Disney trip was put together. So the family arrived on Friday night, had a day in the park on Saturday. I had gigs Friday and then two on Saturday. And then I flew. I had a 6 a.m. flight. I was in the park by like 10.30 a.m. on Sunday morning. I had not slept all that much, but, you know, whatever.
And the good news was my family had figured out all of the things that they needed to do to properly strategize through the parks and do all the rides that they wanted to do. Disney has recently changed their fast passes. They have expired the fast passes and they now have lightning lane and lots of regular Disney attendees.
Visitors are super upset about this. and i think that afforded us a fantastic opportunity because what this lightning lane thing does is it allows you to pay for us it was 15 per person per day to use our phones to manage our spots in line so we never waited in a line and you can have three with the lightning lane they have a multi-pass thing you can have three rides booked uh at At any point in time, and they give you time slots when you can arrive.
Once you check in for one of your lightning lanes, that slot opens up and you can book something else. So the idea is you walk onto the ride, scan. You can do it with your Apple Watch, which is perfect. You put it in Express Pass mode. You don't need a magic band. Save your money on the magic band. Buy the lightning lanes instead. Use your Apple Watch or your phone to check you into all the rides.
It works totally great as long as you put it in Express Pass mode, which Lisa and I figured out for her. And then as soon as you check in for the ride that slot's now open you book the next thing. In the morning, we would look and, you know, like on on Tuesday when we went to Galaxy's Edge and Pandora, we actually did three parks in one day and waited in absolutely no lines by leveraging these passes. That's what I'm saying.
And, you know, here's the thing. I know it's an extra 15 bucks a person, but if you're looking at what you are spending in both money and time to be in the park, that $15 is a rounding error. And I know some days it's like $25 or even $30. Still a rounding error. And to be able to not spend my limited time in the park in line and instead do all the things and visit three parks in one day. Don't get me wrong.
We were exhausted. But we had a pretty chill day other than the twenty seven thousand steps we put on. You know, we were able to sit and eat lunch. We sat and ate dinner. We even sat during a rainstorm for forty five minutes and had snacks in the France pavilion and in Epcot.
And those lightning lanes really made it work. but you know we we sketched it out and it was like in a week in advance we sketched out our day at where is at Hollywood Studios which is where Galaxy's Edge is and one of the things the ride of the resistance we couldn't get until 5 p.m. Which was fine okay whatever once we got there at like 10 a.m. after having been. Uh, animal kingdom for three hours already. We were like, Oh, let's see what happens.
And we were on the day of able to move that 5.00 PM one up. So check throughout the day, you can actively manage these things. And like I said, my family figured this out. So I was like the passenger Prince. I didn't have to do any of it. My son and my wife totally managed and drove of the whole thing. It was super lovely. But use that lightning lane. That is my tip for you.
Get past the... I know on principle it sucks that you got to pay extra now to do all this, but the way I look at it is you get to pay a modest amount extra and make the dollars that you've already spent worth that much more unless you really want to spend time in line.
Have you guys done either of these things i said adam i saw you nodding your head when i mentioned i was there well like i i understand i understand both sides of this equation obviously right um because fast pass was free like ever and it was available to everybody you didn't have to have technology you didn't have to pay extra right right and granted yes this day and age most people have a cell phone most people have technology most people
you know most yeah not it's it's not fair to assume that that everybody does that's coming into the park, right? So there's that, there is that aspect to it, right? So I see that part. But the one question I wanted to ask you before you go, Pete, that I'm curious about with the three slots, and maybe you said this and I missed it, those three slots are cross parks. So like you could have one at Hollywood, one at the.
Animal kingdom and one at but it knows like across parks that i've got one here one here one here and you then you're blocked out it's not three per park no it's three at any point in time so what we we did not we planned to do two parks on that day when we realized we could finish you know we finished animal kingdom by 10 o'clock and then took the sky trolley the gondola or whatever to oh no no we took the bus to hollywood studios and then from there we wound of taking the Sky Trolley to Epcot.
But we took the bus at 10 a.m. Over there, and then we were finished. When we realized we were going to be finished early, we started booking for Epcot. And I didn't even know. Lucas was like, by the way, if we go to Epcot, we have a thing at whatever for Ratatouille. And it was like, oh, my gosh. Yeah, let's do it. Why not? We could have done four parks in one day by leveraging the Lightning Lane. That was not necessarily a box we needed to check.
So we didn't. But we could have. It would have been totally. Certainly, the way I would do, if you want to do all four parks at Disney World, the way I would do it is I would book three nights a hotel. I would go to the park, to two parks on the first day, doing what I just said, leveraging the lightning lane. The middle day, you spend at the pool, recover from your crazy day, and then do another crazy day and then go home.
And that way you've bought only two park passes right and you're good to go as long as you're maximizing these lightning lanes.
Nice does that answer your question adam yeah oh yeah yeah yeah i mean it was more about uh that you're locked across park like you don't get to get three and three and three no three and three but you but you but the three never expire well they expire at the end right yeah the parks close that part of it yeah yeah but you can so we we did three in one park and then slowly started migrating it to the other park and it was like okay great yeah so yeah there are some rides however that are not
eligible for the multi-pass with the three and you have to buy a pass specifically for that ride and and that's another 15 bucks so and you can only do one of those a day, no matter where so i mean yeah so we spent 30 bucks a day for that day i don't think we did that on revenue enhancement it is of course it's revenue enhancement but like yeah going to disney world is not something that makes economic sense no in any way shape or form so that being said so my comment
on what you had to say was you know in the sense it's a rounding error i i don't know off the top of my head but it's over a hundred dollars per person per day to get in there and if you spend you know three hours in lines trying to get in and that's easy to do without out lightning lean, I'm certain you've just eaten up, you know, a third of your day minimum. At over a hundred bucks a day, that $15 starts paying for itself. If you know, you set your reservation, you show up at that time,
you see other stuff in the interim. Sounds pretty cool. My question is kind of a segue or a follow-up to Adam's. Not everybody does have that technology. Let's say you show up with Adam's four-year-old. They don't have technology. I'm assuming you can bring your kids with you in the lightning lane. Oh, yeah. Okay. Like, Lucas was able to set lightning lanes for all of us. Like, we had linked our reservations together.
So, like, on previous days, he was able to do it for all 12 of us or 11 because one of them is like a baby and didn't count. Okay. You know, but whatever. Yeah, you could manage everything. Just like you can manage dinner reservations for your whole party, you can manage lightning lane for your whole party.
And we even and then they also have this thing called virtual queue which is free and at 7 a.m 1 p.m and i believe 6 p.m for parks that are open late these virtual queues just open up and you can hop right on but this is like buying concert tickets like if you don't get right on at 7 a.m or 1 p.m or whatever and and then you just reserve a slot in line so instead of waiting in line in the line you just get in line and and throughout the day you know you get a number and it's like okay you're in
you're in group number 102 or whatever and you just keep an eye on it it's like oh they're at you know 95 so maybe we start wandering over there and it'll you know then 102 will be open soon and that is you know free included with the price of your ticket but again you manage that on your phone there is no more you show up and pull the the pass thing out but But again, it keeps you from having to run around the park. Like Lucas was able to book a lightning lane at a different park.
We didn't have to get there, pull the thing, wait, you know, so it, it really like Tuesday was a relaxing day, except my feet are still sore, you know, but yeah, yeah, we. Uh, we used to, we, for two years we had passes to, uh, Disneyland California adventure when the The kids were little and they, cause they were homeschooled. We w we went every Tuesday for two years basically. Yeah.
To disneyland and i remember the fast pass thing like people would line up at the gate and it was like a sprint when when the gate opened you would sprint to the fast passes you wanted correct the fast pass you wanted to pull correct yeah exactly and you and there was a strategy for like okay go in this order because you had to have all of your your cards with you to get the fast yes yeah yeah So it had its own challenges. This is way better. This, this particular one. Yeah.
I moved my lightsaber. I would have pulled my lightsaber out. Cause I have a lightsaber from galaxy's edge that I didn't go. My kids made it for me. I had them, I gave them a money and then they, so they could go have the experience and then they brought me back a lightsaber. It was pretty cool. Yeah. Galaxy's edge. Yeah. I could talk for a long time about how amazing and immersive and the same Same is true with Pandora, the Avatar world.
It's similarly the way they blended like natural flora and fauna with the stuff that clearly is fake because I've never seen it and it doesn't exist on our world. But it all looked that dude. Yeah. Well, it's cars. Cars land is like that. Yeah. They were doing animatronics in the 70s that blew your mind. So it's. All right, folks. Folks, so I recently got pulled into a team project that was already using Coda.
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Visit glean.com slash mgg for information on how you can receive 15% off your first year. That's Glean.com slash MGG for 15% off. Glean, work AI for all. And our thanks to Glean for sponsoring this episode. All right, let's do some questions, shall we? All right, Bob has one. Bob says, I'm not sure if this applies to iOS 18 as well, but on 18.1 on my iPhone, I found that if I search for photos, thumbnails are tiny and I've not spotted a way to resize them. Am I missing something?
Similarly, if I use the select button to select a batch of photos, I cannot make them bigger. Any tips? Yeah, so I answered this one with, it didn't make it into the notes, There was even a little angry face in there, so I'll try to describe it as best I can. I searched it and Googled it. My Google Foo wasn't working. Chat GPT wasn't helpful, and I've pretty much come up to the conclusion that there's not a way to resize the thumbnails in a search with iOS 18.x on the iPhone. phone.
However, in the all photos view, when you see things, when you first pull up all photos, you'll have about the top two thirds of your screen showing thumbnails. And down at the bottom on mine, it says, you know, recent days, people and pets, all that kind of stuff. So if you scroll the thumbnails down a little bit, in other words, get that recent days, people and pets off the bottom of your screen, you can then pinch and zoom and that resizes the thumbnails, but it only works in all photos.
If you pinch, it'll zoom out and you'll get to see all 22,000 photos on one screen. Too small to see. But that's the only way I was able to resize any thumbnails is in the all photos. But the other thing I noticed is I got a little alert saying, hey, you don't have Apple intelligence turned on when I was researching this. And it says you need to go into settings and asked to turn it on. So I did. And I was quickly disappointed that I had to get on the wait list to turn on Apple intelligence.
And about three minutes later, the wait list was up. So yeah. Yeah. Same experience for me too with that. On the thumbnail thing, I didn't know about this, but I just tried this on my phone. I just noticed what you can do is you can pinch on a thumbnail, expand it.
It will zoom that one thumbnail and then if you pinch back down it will close it up if you pinch it too far open though it will open that individual photo so you kind of have to be like tricky about yeah judicious with your pinching yeah yes you can at least scale it up a little bit and then scale it back down i mean you have to do it per photo so that's kind of a little bit annoying but. I mean, it's kind of a workaround. Yep. That does work in search. And I just tested to see.
I changed the size of my thumbnails in the all photos view and then did a search. I was looking to see, does it inherit that size? The answer is not yet. And we're all on the 18.1 beta. That Apple intelligence weightless thing is only if you're on 18 one, either the released, which at least as of the time we're recording, this has not happened or, or certainly the beta, but that 18.1 beta has been fairly solid for me. There was, there were a couple things.
You know, traveling and relying on it for the trip.
Like there was one moment where springboard, the home screen just decided it was time to, sort of relaunch itself and that takes 30 seconds it was like lucas is like why can't you scan in i'm like springboard relaunch he's like oh lovely like yeah so but then it came around like it was fine you know so yeah i've had a i've had a few unresponsive like apps like safari just goes unresponsive i don't know if it's related to the beta or not sure you know just definitely start
the app and it's like what the heck like i'm tapping on things nothing's happening yeah exactly.
Yeah yeah uh let me let me throw in a uh not on the agenda question then real quickly then so go so far i have found apple intelligence to be perfectly useless what what do you use it for yeah because i i like asked it about my photos and it brings up photos stock photos from something else i'm like oh that's not what i'm looking for so uh do you have an answer i have i have answers for pete but yeah no i haven't i haven't used it too much i'm trying to think of
the areas where i have used it i know that i've enjoyed um talking to s lady in more of a conversational way being able to continue and i think that's new right okay where she continues to listen and i can add context or additional follow-on things um i don't know if that's truly part of apple intelligence or it's just you know additional features of s lady but um i've used a little bit of i guess i guess i have used a little bit of that just
like text stuff but i don't know outside of that i my favorite feature is the what happens automatically which is notification summaries. And I've mentioned this on the show before, but we have a group of the three of us that we call the MGG Back Room where we text each other. And if Pete and Adam are going nuts in that group and I come back an hour later after doing something, that summary is awesome.
It's a two-line summary, and it really does highlight the important things, and it gets it right. There was a lot of that. We had a 12-way, well, not 12-way because the kids are under five don't have, but it was like, I don't know, eight people in a group for our Disney trip. And it was like, okay, I can't read all these messages now. What's the thing? Okay, got it. Yep, summary's good and I'm off to go. So I really like that. I like the email summaries, which you can do in email.
You can have it summarize a webpage for you, which is also nice.
So you don't have to read the whole page. page um and then cleaning up photos oh yeah i was gonna say that's that's the one that's most impressive to me the generative ai for doing photo cleanup is amazing yep in most i mean it's not perfect but it's pretty dang good and you can really zoom in on the more like on areas that it doesn't really get very well i found it you know if you just zoom way in and kind of then Because it has the where
you can just like tap a thing and it'll try to figure out, okay, that's a person you want to remove. That's an object you want to remove. But if that doesn't work, especially on tinier things in the background, just zoom way in and then you can select that thing with your, you know, you can kind of get real in detail and be like, okay, I just want this little specific area. And boom, it's gone. I will say that your question is valid,
Pete. The things that I'm using AI, Apple Intelligence, for are the things that are obviously there. I know I'm missing things. And also, this is Apple Intelligence today, which I think is only phase one, right? It's only the on-device stuff. We haven't gotten to the- Right, it's my understanding they've got a lot more coming. Absolutely. We're not using the Apple private servers or whatever we're calling them. And then, of course, there's not yet the chat GPT integration.
And in theory, all of that will just be seamless and it will leverage the things that are necessary for the type of requests that you're doing with your permission, of course. So but I know I'm missing out on things that exist today. So I was kind of hoping the chat might fill up with some more ideas while we were doing this, but it has not yet. and that's okay but feedback at mattgeekup.com please let us know because we would love like this is why we do the show.
Right. It's going to be fun to explain and, and share all these new things it'll do for you. There's no doubt in my mind. Yeah. I just went into email while you were started talking about it and said, oh yeah. So it doesn't, I guess you have to turn on summarize. Cause I went up and then pulled down a little bit and said, summarize this email and it came right up. So, so I like that, but okay. And I want to play with photos, cleaning up the photos. That'll be.
It's awesome yeah it really is like they that they have done very well so it the other thing this show is for is well i mean doing what we just did answering questions phil says um i have a uh four terabyte external seagate drive that i keep my old media on any movie or tv show that i have acquired over the years i was trying to add a 500 gig partition to it tonight and it beachballed my I force quit Disk Utility and then it wouldn't eject.
I shut down the Mac using a safe method. Now, when I plug the drive in, it doesn't even show in Disk Utility or on the desktop or sidebar. And it now makes a clicking noise and then the light on it stays lit and the clicking stops. Am I doomed? Adam, you want to take a stab at this?
I mean potentially yeah clicking is clicking is a bad sign with a spinning drive yeah um, yeah i mean i hate to say it is this is where you go to your backups, and you go i'm so glad i did backups to the cloud and to some other place um uh yeah i don't know So, I mean, if it's not mounting, it's not seeable in disk utility and it's clicking. I don't, I don't have a good option because if you can't mount it, you can't recover.
Well, I guess the option that I know about is not you, you need to have a PC and it was mentioned, I think last week, right? Sometimes Spinrite, I think can get those back enough to get, allow you to get some data off of it. It's rare, but I've, I've heard, I've never been able to use Spinrite because I don't have a PC and I don't think it'll run virtualized from what I know, or it didn't way back in the day.
I mean, I haven't, back in the day, I had really good luck recovering data from, uh, from some beat up drives using spin, right. Um, it, it is amazing in that sense. So, uh, but again, you need a, a DOS capable machine. He includes a little bootable DOS thing within it. I thought it was Linux. I didn't realize it was DOS. Oh, interesting. Yeah. Yeah. But yeah, it's a totally it might even be, you know, I don't know, 8K of data. It's it's incredibly small that what this thing does.
But it's brilliant. I have I have had good luck with there are some alternative methods of getting a drive to spin again. I will say this. If you get a drive like this to spin again, the first and only thing you will do with it is copy your data off of it to another drive. Don't if you if you are going to try any of these methods. Oh, it's fine. It's working again. Right.
Don't be lulled into complacency. If you like be ready when you try these efforts to like whatever machine spun it up is the machine now and you won't shut it down until you've either gotten all the data off the drive or the drive stops working again. Because it has a limited number of spins left in it, and that number may be zero. However, if you get one of them, use it. So the way I have done it is when the drive starts to power up, that clicking, I'm going to explain how I think this works.
I think of those drives like record players. Kids, ask your parents, right? And there are heads and platters, right? Right. And there's a motor that spins the record really fast. And then the heads, you know, the needle moves across the platters and reads or writes the data. That clicking usually means that the drive can't start spinning. And it has been explained to me in the past. I don't know if this is still true. It might be that there's like, you know, grease in there or whatever to keep
things moving and things get stuck after a while. So. Giving it a good solid whack right as it gets power might jar things loose and get that going. I've also been able to rest and I've done that and it has worked for me. I've also been able to restart drives by like giving them a spin with my hand. Like they're all cabled up and everything. So you can't like go nuts with it, but give it a little spin. And then there's the third option that I know of that I have not tried.
But other people have. And that is baking the drive in an oven to heat it up and loosen it. Use potholders when you are removing the drive from the oven. I know this sounds obvious when I say it right now, but I have heard stories. You don't want to be like that guy from Indiana Jones with a, you know, Seagate imprint on your palm. I'm assuming you also want the lowest possible temperature your oven would go to.
Like don't put it on 450 no you don't need to broil the thing but warm but you want to get it up to you know a couple hundred degrees yeah exactly that's it's usually you know what i have read is and i've never tried this so factor all of that into your thinking look at how how many risks i take with my technology and my life in general and then factor in that i have never ever cooked a drive but yeah everything i've seen is like
200 degrees for like 30 minutes to really get the drive kind of cooking but then remember the whole thing's going to be 200 degrees so, potholders folks and surfaces that can hold it yeah the other question i had and want to point out i'm assuming the smacking method when it starts to power up you want to go as horizontally Horizontally as possible, not straight down. So you crash the platters into the heads. Right. No, that's a really good point. I'm smacking the short side of the drive.
Yeah. Yeah. The not tall side. Correct. Yeah. You don't want to drive the needles into the record. Right. Right. Or there's drive savers. Put your hard drive on the grill. And when you're done, smack it with a hammer and everything will be fine.
That's that's one option no well i mean yeah i mean it will it will be fine you you will have now guaranteed that that drive is it the other the other thing and i think your point of like yeah the only thing you want to do if you do get a backup is get your date off, because of that limited number of spins definitely make sure you grab your most critical data first Like I would prioritize, like, I need my photos off that first before you go after, like,
don't try to just select everything and pull everything all at once. I would be very judicious about grabbing the valuables, what you consider to be the valuable stuff first. Yeah. Um, Tennessee Papa in our chat shares, uh, that there is an old wives tale. So I'm taking that to mean he has not tried this either. That if you put the drive in the fridge for a while and cool it way down, you can get one more spin out of it. Sure. I, I, I mean, sure. Try it.
Like get to a point where you are done and then you get, then you're free to try all of these methods, but there is drive savers, right? And he did, with this four terabyte drive, he asked Drive Savers for a quote, and it came to about just shy of four grand. Yep. Yeah. Yeah. Yep. And guess how many backup drives you could buy for four grand, right? Yeah, but you can't buy them retroactively, Adam.
Exactly. no but that's my point is like the answer to this problem is do not put yourself in this situation, sorry like no you're right i've been there and i'm saying this from experience people i was one of those people you know with a photo library and i have lost photos that are never coming back and you don't want to be there and and it the cost of drives these days especially just you don't have to have a fast one it's a backup drive we talked about all these things just
do it please please then we don't have to worry yep yep because you know drive savers the first of all they're using spin right and disc doctor and all that stuff and then if they have to they open it up again they open it up yeah i'm sure but you know i believe i believe they charge you based on what they actually did not based on what they could have done i i believe that's true so fair Fair enough. Yeah, that estimate, I think, is a worst-case scenario. Correct.
You know, it's not. Yeah. Yeah, they try the other methods first, as far as I understand. Yeah. Yeah. Fernando has a question. Pete, he says, I'm a DevOps engineer, and my work has fortunately given me several Macs to use for daily work. An M1 Studio, an M1 MacBook Pro, and a 13-inch M1 MacBook Pro, and a 16-inch. I typically work on this Mac studio, but a couple of days a week, I also work on one of the laptops. So I need a way to keep my files synced between the three Macs.
I've tried iCloud and I've tried sync.com, but they are too slow. Has anyone used Google Drive or Dropbox and had good results? Any other service or way to do this? You want to take a stab at this piece? So, yeah, so that one came through on Discord in the Help Desk channel, which is a great place to go when we're not live streaming to you with all these fantastic answers that.
You know hammers and baking and freezing so i was going to suggest resilio sync which is a great way to sync files across multiple machines including your your nas drives and that sort of thing, but uh as i was doing there were a couple other answers in there our clone sync thing that sort of thing and i went to i said i don't know how i got there somehow i wound up on wikipedia because Because I was looking up Resilio Sync.
I could not remember the name. I thought that's how it happened. And I got there. And I put a link in the answer to him, and we'll put it on the show notes, of a comparison on Wikipedia of all the file synchronization software that's out there. Both freeware, shareware, and paidware. And it looks like Rclone, Syncthing, and Gladinet, G-L-A-D-I-N-E-T, are the three most versatile.
I think Gladinet is a pay one, but they seem to have the most green across all of their matrix of charts as to what their capabilities. I mean, it looks like something new listener Allison would have put together. It was amazing. It's a really good chart. So. Huh. I would go with Resilio. Like that would be my start because it's all local and you only need two Macs, but you can take a Mac with you.
And as long as it has internet, as long as both Macs have internet access, then they will sync with each other. And like that, that would be my sort of default for that because you don't need cloud storage. You don't need to pay for cloud storage to get the syncing to happen. Yeah. Right. They just, they'd look at each other and do the hard thing. They do the thing. Yeah. Yeah. So Tennessee Papa recommends our sink, which is, um, a Linux utility.
It is on the list that, that you mentioned Pete, but, um, I mean, our sink would, would also work, you know, if, if you want to set that up, but Resilio sink kind of makes the setup a little easier. Or I think, but as a DevOps engineer, maybe our sync is something you're comfortable with. So yeah, I, yeah, I'm going to play with the others just to, cause I can't, but, but I, I still enjoy Resilio. I mean, that's, that's one of the, for the things I need across all my machines.
That's what I use. Yes. So what, you know what? I don't know, Dave, here's the question. Does Resilio work on any of the iOS devices? Yes. Yes, they have a client on iOS that'll see your shares. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I've never tried to put one on there. I never thought about it. I'm confirming that it still exists on iOS. It does. Well, there's that. Yep, it does. And I'm looking for when it was most recently updated. A month ago, there was an update. So, yep, it's all right there. Yeah, yeah.
Yeah. Uh, you want to take us to our geek challenge, Adam? Yeah, uh, this is Michael, right? I, uh, he says I'm running iOS 18. Do you happen to know if there's a way to change focus modes depending on a calendar event? I would like to have a class mode in class and a meeting mode in meetings. This would be different than the work mode or just being on campus. Online is not helpful. Thank you.
Huh uh so i don't think there is an automate like a baked in automation that will do this but, can't you have a calendar event fire off an apple script i mean i realize that's yeah you can the problem with that is you'd have to attach the apple script to set the focus mode to each meeting, and then you'd probably have to, you know, come up with a way to turn it off at the end of the meeting. Like so doable, but not, not the best.
See, that's what Apple intelligence is going to do for you, right? Is it someday? Someday. Yeah. I don't know. No, I think someday it would like, you just tell it, Hey, I want to set for all meetings that look like this, set this focus mode for the duration of the meeting. It needs to get there. I think Google will probably beat Apple to that, just candidly, based on where things are. Dave has laid down the gauntlet, Apple. There you go.
I think so. I think we'll see that on Android first. And if Android gets to that level of automation and integration with me before iPhone does, I...
Certainly get an android phone to play with it and would be open to switching like that that kind of integration i think is really the thing that we all want certainly it's what i want yeah i don't know if it's just my google foo versus his but i kind of googled this and found a article or a thing on Reddit where somebody said, try this because they claim they found a solution using shortcuts.
So listen to this. It says, open shortcuts, go to the automation tab and add, create a personal automation. Then select time of day, but choose a time before your normal workday starts or 12.01 a.m. Then add, find calendar events action.
Change that is in the next to today then add a filter and add the calendar that you have the events in then for the filter use the filter to do things like title contains you know you can set the criteria for your filter to find that event that you want and then you add an if action that says change the condition if to if any of these values match and then the final step is add the focus mode action to set to turn on or off the focus mode that sounds to
me like it would work that sounds like it yeah yeah i mean i'd have to play with it i didn't get a chance to play with it i mean it's just off the internet but that sounds plausible i agree because you're basically searching your calendar events for that day to find a specific calendar event yep and then if it finds that calendar event you set the focus mode and could you have it set the focus mode at the time that the event starts.
Yeah, you probably have to match, you probably have to add another step to match the time. Yeah. It could be done with shortcuts. I have to believe there's a way to get this done with shortcuts. And that's probably 80% of the way there. Yeah, yeah. To making it work. Share that link with us, Adam, and we'll put it in the show notes. That's great. Yeah, and Paul Conaway in the chat says, use shortcuts instead of AppleScript and you'll get yourself there.
So, all right. I like it when a when a plan comes together so yeah that's pretty good pretty good uh. Yeah. All right. You want to take us, where are we here on time? Yeah, we have time for another question. You want to take us to Anissa, Pete? I can do so, because Anita wrote in. Hi, friends. I think Anissa. Right? Do I have the name wrong? Anissa. Yeah. Anissa. A-N-I-S-A. There you go. So, yeah. Anissa. Anissa writes in, hi, friends.
My son is currently living out of the country and calls us regularly on Facebook Messenger. I would love to record these calls. I go to the control center and hold down the button to show Messenger, then hit screen record. It records the video, but not the audio. I cannot figure out how to get it to record the audio. Do you know how to make it record the audio?
Thanks, Anissa. so another geek challenge yeah yeah my that's interesting right that the audio is not being recorded I don't know what's happening there and I would be curious well you can record calls in.
Face in facetime now yeah so that would be an option um you but my other thought would be to launch the messenger app on the mac do the call from there and then use screen recording on the mac to record the audio and i'm pretty sure you can you have a little more control over what it's recording and i think it'll get the audio there so that that would be that would be my thought you know ios is you can do what you can do and then there's the wall and that's
the end of that so um but facetime might work if you can use if you can both use facetime. Yeah right because you can well i would certainly use facetime over over uh facebook messenger I know the phone allows you to record calls. I wonder if, you know, if Mac OS does, if Mac OS does. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know. Does well, not Mac OS. Sorry. No, no, no. I know the phone app in iOS 18 allows you to record calls. I don't know if the FaceTime app does.
Gotcha. Yeah. Does, does Zoom allow recording without having to have a paid, paid Zoom? I know you can record with Zoom because we do it at my office obviously all the time, but we have, you know, a full paid thing. And they usually have options to record locally or to the cloud, I think. I think you can record. But I just don't know if you get it with the free, the free Zoom. You do. Yeah. Yeah, you do. Because I know people that have done it and it's like,
oh, we got to finish before 45 minutes is done. Like they've done it for podcasts or whatever. The call recording is not in iOS 18. It is in iOS 18.1. And I'm looking to see here. I believe that's FaceTime as well. Call recording also works on FaceTime audio calls.
Calls not sure if it record if it works on video calls so there you go you making a facetime audio call over there pete i heard somebody yeah i didn't mean to yeah the volume was up more than i want i was trying to see if i could get it to you know make make the call and have a record option and of course it started making noise so i didn't have my my phone on mute or my microphone yeah but i know we've had this audio recording screen recording thing before in a
different context I seem to remember. I think it was video, right? It was like camera video from iPhone camera. Oh, no, that was the, I'm conflating that with the. The video app not being able to use the mics from airpods pro yes yes yeah yeah, your other option is to have my wife stood in on the call and ask her what was said because you know so i'm assuming i swear i want to put a tattoo on her forehead said warning this This conversation is being recorded.
I'm not going to touch any of this. Nope. I do have three words of advice for you, though, Pete. Don't get caught. Yeah. Yeah. Wow. I tell her that all the time. I'm not afraid of that. She knows that I know that she knows whatever's been said. That's good. It's being stored on the hard drive for in perpetuity. Yeah. For future, uh, future evidence. Yeah. Yeah. And that one doesn't seem to have any spindle issues whatsoever. Years and years later.
Oh, wow. Going on there. Wow. Well, instant retrieval. I think we've hit the end of this. I don't know about you, Adam. Does it feel like we've hit the end? It feels like we've, I think so. Yeah. Yeah. I think so. Uh, thank you for all your questions and quick tips. We did not get to cool stuff found. We have some mounding up, so it, um, it will be time to get that. We'll make, we'll make sure to prioritize that in the next week's episode.
We promise. Cause we've got some good stuff out there and, uh, maybe I'll be ready to talk about my new router and stuff a little bit more, but it like, I'm still on the, the unified cloud gateway max, and it's been working great. Like, I really, yeah. Yeah, there's a lot to talk about there. So, talk we shall. Make sure to enter the giveaway with Eternal Storms for Yoink and ScreenFlow. That's our October giveaway. So do that at macgeekup.com slash giveaway.
Sign up there. I think we're giving away five licenses of each. So plenty of chances to win. So thanks for doing that. Thanks for leaving us reviews. Macgeekup.com slash review. I believe that's right. Do I have that right? Macgeekup.com slash review. No. macgeekup.com slash. Oh, yeah. No, no, no. That's it. MattGeekGab.com slash review. That'll get you there. I think reviews will also get you there. I will make sure of that, that both of them go there, but I'm pretty sure they do.
And so thank you for that. Thanks to Cashfly for all the bandwidth to get the show from us to you. Make sure to check out Pete's other show, So There I Was, for aviation enthusiasts. I do two other shows, one for musicians called Gig Gab, one for entrepreneurs called Business Brain. Rain, thanks for hanging out with us, folks. Music. Yes. Thanks for, yeah, thanks for everything. Thanks for being a listener. Love it.
Hey, Pete, what's that advice I gave you? I think it was, you know, my wife was only here, I could ask her, but I'm sure she would say it is don't get caught. May not be back. Oh, man. Stop it, honey. I didn't mean it.