It's time for MacGeekGab, and listener Joe brings us our quick tip of the week with, for those of us who have Time Machine on autopilot and may not have looked at the settings recently, Time Machine now has options to select backups hourly, daily, or weekly, or even manually. I've been listening to the MacCast since podcasts were added to iTunes and the GeekGab shortly after After you started, it's a great way to have you all together.
I enjoy listening to Adam slowly and begrudgingly adopt the humor. All right. Well, thank you. More tips like this, plus your questions answered today on Mac Geek Gab 1040 for Monday, June 3rd, 2024. Music. Greetings, folks, and indeed, welcome to MacGeekGab, the show where you send in questions, tips, like that one.
Cool stuff found. We share all of those loosely strung together into an agenda that hopefully facilitates each of us learning at least five new things every single time we get together.
Other sponsor for this episode is linkedin.com slash mgg that's where you're going to go to post your first job for free we'll talk more about that in a little bit for now here on uh this june 3rd which is repeat day interesting is that repeat eat or is that repeat ete i don't know uh in durham new hampshire i'm dave hamilton, And in South Dakota, South Dakota, I'm Adam Christensen. And in New Hampshire, it's repeat. That was my call sign in the Marine Corps. Pilot beat, everybody.
So that's what Dave was alluding to, referring to, and otherwise making note of. Yeah, very cool. Good to be here with you guys as we bring up recollections of the IRS and show 1040. 1040 MGG, as Adam put it. Yeah, make sure you get in your itemized tips as quickly as possible. Yep. Absolutely. Form 1040-MGG for your itemized tips. That's right. That's right. Exactly. And what that means is reach into your pocket, pull out all your money, and send it to us. Oh, no, that's the IRS.
No, no, no. MacGeekUp.com slash premium. If somebody has extra money left over after the IRS takes their share, or the taxing authority wherever in whatever country you happen to live uh then if you would like to share that with us i know we usually say this much later in the show but macgeekup.com premium is uh the engine that we have put together uh to facilitate that as i always say it is absolutely not mandatory but it is very much appreciated and it is a an integral
part of what allows us to continue doing this show so it is appreciated and and important so yeah thank you for that very cool yeah um.
Joe's tip as as you started off reminding me of a cool stuff found that we have mentioned many times adam which was time machine editor uh right which i believe would still work it hasn't been updated in over a year the last update came out in february of 2023 but i i believe it still works with current versions of mac os time machine editor let us do all of those types of things before time machine had any granularity uh any ability to set the the you
know the granularity of of the timing of things i uh i have appreciated time machine editor you know you could because you can set it to back up when idle which i really like in it that way it doesn't i found especially on my podcasting machine that that was a good way to kind of make sure that it didn't back up when i was doing the show now it doesn't matter as much anymore but back when we all had spindle drives and we were saving to the same spindle drive that
it was trying to back up from we would We'd get audio glitches. So anyway, just figured I'd throw that out there too. But it is nice. I was surprised when I saw that thing from Apple too. There's also, I probably look at the man page and I'm assuming that tool is probably using this under the hood, but there isn't there, there's time machine utility, TM util, I think in the command line. So you might check the man page for that and see what options that you have
there. I don't know if that will allow you to adjust the schedule or not, but. Yeah. TM util. I did a TLDR on TM util. And it is the utility for managing time machine backups. I'm looking here to see if you – the TLDR doesn't show any – Yeah, it looks like it can set destinations, remove destinations, add exclusions. So a lot of the things that you can do in the little system preference panel, it looks like. Yeah, you can manually start a backup.
Maybe there's a different command, but – Yeah, I don't see the schedule for it here. It might be like launch D that, um, takes care of the scheduling for it, which I, which is sort of what time machine likely. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Right. Fair. Why would Apple reinvent the wheel twice? I know it's repeat day and all that, but right.
Uh, we on, uh, Monday, which was Memorial day here in the U S all, well, our daughters in in italy so they don't celebrate the u.s memorial day there but uh the time of day worked and so the four of us had a uh we had planned a family facetime chat because we all talk to each other fairly regularly i realized we don't the four of us don't talk as a group i think the last time we did it might have been christmas day like it just doesn't you know we stay we we very much stay in touch we're very
tight-knit but um so we scheduled a thing and i i was like you know i want to try zoom this time on the apple tv instead of facetime and zoom the app on the apple tv worked great used my iphone as the continuity camera and the microphone it was just as smooth as it was with facetime but as we were sitting there uh lisa and i were sitting on the floor of our living room in front of our tv and it kept i think because the pets kept walking by or whatever but continuity camera with
center stage enabled kept moving the the camera back and you know, zooming it in and out. And it was distracting to me. I know it was distracting to our kids. And, uh. So I started messing around with the Apple TV remote inside of Zoom to see what options I had. And not only was I able to disable center stage, which zoomed it way out, but then I was able to, with the remote, zoom and center manually and leave it where I wanted it right there. And it was great.
Yeah. I found it to be a better experience. And I think my kids would agree having to watch this. Uh, I found it to be a better experience than the Apple TV, uh, the FaceTime app. And of course, if you're watching the video of this, Adam is, uh, showing us the examples of zooming and panning and all of that stuff. So yeah, you could do it on the Mac too. You just turn off center stage. And then when you click on the video, you have a bunch of options, including recenter and go to full wide.
Yep. You can, uh, drag to zoom in and out, and then you can like literally drag to position yourself anywhere so i use this a lot in zoom meetings now and also for stuff like this so that i can make sure my head's not cut off and i don't have to adjust my camera i just.
Do it all there i get yeah perfect centering huh interesting oh i did not know that you could you could do that uh with center stage on the mac so it's just you're clicking and dragging essentially to yeah you just hover over it it'll give you all the options once you turn off center So that the key is the first thing is turn center stage off and then you now get all these additional options for manually controlling zoom, recentering, centering.
Interesting. I'll have to try center stage again. I use my iPhone camera here on the, on my Mac, but I use, um, reincubates camo, but I need to try, try center stage again. I've always felt like your video is sharper than mine, Adam.
Them and so i wonder i can't imagine that with the the but you still use your iphone camera right uh-huh yeah yeah i'm using a 13 mini so yeah maybe there's just added i mean maybe they're doing different things like with the algorithms with like sharpening and yeah exactly exactly yeah it's possible so i'll i'll um yeah i'll mess with it see what's next well we got lou Lou, who sent us a threefer, not a twofer, a threefer. Threefer.
That's a three-peat. Yeah, I got you. I see what you did there. So he was talking about the question that came in about what's the best way to receive calls while traveling abroad. And he says, hey, switch to Provider T Mobile, which offers nearly worldwide coverage, is his best suggestion. He says, we travel four months a year, and with that much time out of the country, It's they left AT&T and went to T-Mobile and it's and it's cheaper and they haven't looked back.
For those of you that don't want to switch to T-Mobile, he said someone on Cruise Critic recently suggested using anonym SMS. And the link will be in our show notes. It appears a user would register their true cell number on the website and would be provided a cell number to register with their financial institutions and others. And the text sent to that number are forwarded to your real cell number. He says, disclaimer, I haven't used this service. I went on their website and looked at it.
It's not free, but it is a way to get – I think they do have a free service, but that doesn't look as reliable. It's a way to get it to you without having to pay, I guess. With this forward to – Go ahead, Pete. I was going to say, just starting to look at the prices, I think it may be cheaper just to pay your quarter or message. Yeah, right. Well, and if this is redirecting from this anonymous number to your phone number, you're still receiving an SMS, right?
Yeah. Yeah. So I don't understand. But could it redirect to email instead? And if so, then that would be, you know, a different. Oh, yeah. That's a possibility. And it also looks like it's good for not giving out your real phone number or getting confirmation of your messages when you're signing up for a new service and your data collection. And we had a nice data collection conversation. If we're going to email, then does Google Voice offer international numbers? Because that would be free.
That's what I recommended in the last episode was just Google Voice. Yeah, that's what we do. And like I said, that's what my daughter does over in Italy and it, it works out great. She can get SMSs to her us Google voice number and it works fine. There you go. Yeah. Yeah. And then the last thing he mentioned was Yoink. We talked about it on a previous show as well.
Oh, yeah. Great for macOS. And iOS says at this time, it does not go from iOS over to macOS, but the developer is supposedly working on that. So stay tuned for the developments. Cool. Cool. Interesting. Yeah. Cool. All right. What's next? I got some color stuff from Todd. He says, I wanted to grab the RGB color in part of a logo on a web page. I was about to screenshot it, open it in Photoshop and paste and then sample the color there.
But I knew there had to be a better way. So I googled Mac sample color. And the first hit was for the digital color meter Mac app from Apple that comes pre-installed on all Macs. Next tip, Command-L will lock the color so you can move the cursor around to another app.
So yeah this is one of those super handy apps that's in you know the utilities folder i think i think it's applications utilities right yeah um and there's tons of little like gems in there and this is one of them that's been around forever yeah digital color meter's been, big part of mac os for a long long time and it allows you to sample colors and you can get the hs hue saturation brightness hsb i can't remember all the different you know you can get hex colors You can get RGB,
you can get all that fun stuff. I've used that for years. But I did reply to Todd because digital color meter is great and it's free. I also use an app called, I think it's called SIP, S-I-P. So it's sipapp.io, S-I-P app.io. We'll have the link in the show notes. And what's awesome about this is you can use it to create like palettes. So as a web developer, I use this all the time to sample different colors and create palettes. I think there's a palette library that you can check out.
It auto names the colors, which is kind of fun. It gives them like really cool names. I think you can adjust that. And then one of my favorite features is it has a little tiny like palette sidebar that you can add things to that just sits on the very, very side of your screen. It's very small, doesn't take up a lot of space.
But when you go over there, you can hover over it, it'll pop out your palette, and then you can sample colors and bring them over and it's great for it's great for web development great for artists and um i think this is also part of set app i know we keep mentioning that over and over again so i think that's where i found it and so it's just part of my setup subscription so great little uh great little tool that looks really cool huh yeah i love it.
Yeah. Wow. I'd never heard of that before. I mean, it's not surprising. I don't do enough of that, but like, it's got a contrast checker in there so you can see what, you know, it looks like to have color A on a background of color B and adjust from there. And like, that's pretty cool. Yeah, and that's now really important with, you know, the ambulance chasers on the internet chasing accessibility. If you do not have enough contrast, you can get in violation of accessibility things.
And then these guys will come out and file lawsuits against everybody. It's like basically one or two guys that just go around and file lawsuits against companies. companies so they have to, you know, come into compliance. Most people just pay them off, you know, it's like give them 10 grand to go away. It's almost like that company that was that filed against the RSS folks a few years back. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's really annoying, but I mean, it is important.
Like contrast is important for visually impaired people. So you can use a tool like this to make sure that you're getting enough contrast between your your background and your foreground colors so that that's pretty cool. Yeah. I forget what the numbers are. The there's a, there's certain specs that you need to follow and there's different levels and tiers and stuff like that.
But a lot of sites don't, you know, I'm sure Apple probably is often in violation of this because they like their white and light gray.
Yeah. Yeah. Right. Right. Right. Yeah. Interesting. Huh? Actually, uh, i'd like to call an audible on a quick tip which is if you're ever in pages or i use acorn for photo editing or a pdf expert and you're trying to match the color of a font or you're trying to match a certain other color within i didn't realize it for years and some time back i did and i went oh and i've never shared this pages uses an eyedropper if you click on that little eyedropper,
then you just hover over whatever color you're trying to match and click on it. And that be, that becomes the color that you're now setting in Acorn. It's got a magnifying glass, click on that little magnifying glass and use that hover your mouse over whichever color you're trying to match. And that becomes the color you selected. So, and no more getting close, you're getting the exact color that that given pixel that you're hovering over is. Yeah.
That's a, no, it's a great tip. I use that in Pixelmator all the time to, to grab the color of something so that i can match it perfectly without without having to run out to digital color meter and back yep right yeah yeah very good hope that helps somebody yeah hopefully that's that's the beauty of what we do um mark found something interesting he says um what after i upgraded to ios 17.5 uh. Some of my contacts had their labels changed to one of a various list of things, which he sent us.
He says one had shared photo attached to the end of a thing. He says, I needed to fix all these labels in my contacts. He says, so I contacted Apple using the support app on the iPhone, which is another quick tip in and of itself, because it's a great way to contact Apple support. He says, after turning off and on my contacts per Apple support, because they're stored in the cloud, and then restarting my phone, which didn't work. He passed me off to second-level support.
After a screen share on my iPhone and Mac mini, second level support had me back up my contacts on my Mac mini by opening contacts, clicking on any contact and then pressing command a to select them all. And then clicking on file, export, export card and save.
So that's a good way to back up your contacts. contacts uh he says then he had me go to icloud.com click on my account which is my head in the upper right he says click on icloud settings data recovery restore contacts evidently icloud.com keeps a list of your last 10 backups right there that and he says i clicked on the one from may May 19th, which was the day before the iOS 17.5 release. And voila, my contacts came back. No problem. So that's an interesting thing to remember.
If you did not, he, they had him save that backup of his contacts on his Mac, presumably in case, you know, everything, everything went sideways. But the real magic was in restoring the iCloud automated backup of his contacts right there. and it just magically did it. So that's a great, if you ever have a problem like that, man, like that's the quick tip right there. So thank you, Mark. Thank you for sharing that. Oh, yeah.
Yeah, very cool. Kiwi Graham points out that for exporting contacts from your Mac, contacts has a setting to choose the version of VCF, the older version, which is more compatible with Google and Apple. Ah, yeah, if you want to import over there, right? Yeah, yeah. Cool. Good. What else we got? Well, how about I chat with or talk about what Jeff sent us? He says, and this is cool. I recently made an online purchase using Apple Pay on my MacBook Pro with Touch ID.
I was surprised when I was prompted to double-click the Touch ID and enter my computer password rather than just placing my finger on the sensor to complete the transaction. Thankfully, Apple has a website for testing Apple Pay transactions without actually charging your card. And we'll put that link in the show notes. It's applepaydemo.apple.com. Using this site, I was able to troubleshoot and fix the issue.
The fix can be found in System Settings, Touch ID and Password, and there's a toggle for Use Touch ID for Apple Pay. If it's on, toggle it off and back on, and you'll then be prompted to enter your your login password for your Mac. You can confirm that Apple Pay is working by using that website. The toggle was already on for me, so I turned it off and back on. I'm not sure if it was due to a corrupt P-list or something, but that fixed it.
So two tips in there. If you're suddenly not able to do Touch ID, toggle that setting, and then use applepaydemo.apple.com to check. So thanks, guys. Love your show. Jeff. Look at that. So, yeah. Really? That's awesome, yeah, because is it working, is it not? When Apple Pay doesn't work, is it me or is it them? Yeah, right. It's not me, it's you. I just not paid Apple. Yeah. It's a lot easier than having to do it the developer way, I'll tell you that. Gross.
And you can, evidently, there are two types of APIs that web developers can use to invoke the Apple Pay thing, and this lets you test both of them. Yeah. Wow. Yeah, but if you need to test it on your own website, it is a chore.
It sucks. Yeah. Yeah, you got to get your developer account and then set up a bunch of profile stuff and then you got to set up a fake iCloud account and then you have to add that iCloud account to your Mac or your device you're testing, which means getting rid of your, turning off your own iCloud account and then you got to reattach all of the credit cards the test credit cards when you set up your test account and then when you switch back you got to reset up all your personal credit cards
oh no it's enough to make it's enough to oddly enough it's enough to make you just want to buy another device just for testing apple pay interesting which you could then use as your continuity camera. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah, I got my, I got an old iPhone here now because I had to do it so many times for my job. It's just like, I'm done. I'm done switching back and forth.
Yeah. Yeah. But it's pretty slick once you got it all set up and then you can use, they have test credit cards and you can actually do a real transaction and see the transactions go through and all that fun stuff. Yep. So this is cool though for just testing for personal testing. You want to make sure your Apple Pay is working right. That's neat.
Cool great uh you got one last quick tip for us adam yeah it's from husker diver and he says hey guys love the show and trying to learn five new things every show great well here's a really simple thing but could be interesting for those who use aerial screen savers on their apple tv. Did you know that when it's playing you can set your finger on the select button of your remote not a full press just touch it lightly and a caption will appear telling you where the aerial video was taken.
Nice. I did know this. And it's really cool because oftentimes I'll be watching it and you'd be like, well, that's a really cool place. Where is that? So this will tell you. But did you also know, and I did not know this part, that if you then let the aerial video keep playing, some of them, if you touch and select the button again, will show you a different caption. I realized this while watching one of the aerials that appears to have come
from the International Space Station. It started out with a caption about flying over the Sahara. After a bit, we approached the coast and it changed to something like approaching the Mediterranean Sea in Italy. Then a little later, it said approaching Turkey in the Black Sea. Maybe not earth shattering for a new thing found, but really cool if you've always wondered where you are when the aerial screensaver plays. Keep up the good work and as always, don't get caught. Great advice.
That's, yep. That's cool. I like that. A few other things on this, just things to add. You can also change the location if you swipe on the trackpad left or right. So if you want a new screensaver, you can scroll through them until you find one that you're interested in watching for a while. I think on older devices, you might have to click. The settings are a little bit different depending on whether you have a second generation or a first generation Siri remote.
So I think with second generation, I think you do have to tap. And with first generation, I think you touch or swipe. So just be aware of that. Um, and then I guess this also works for, if you're using the memories screensaver, it will show you the memory that you're viewing, and then you can forward and back through the memories screensaver. I think that's the one, the one that ties into Apple photo memories, right? Right.
So Graham points out, use the the remote on your iPhone if you don't, you know. Yeah, you can use that too. Yeah. My only, Apple fixed this, and I guess they can't because it's probably IR. The remote on my phone does not allow me to change the volume. I can do everything else.
Can't raise and lower the volume oh if it's if it's ir i could see that yeah yes yeah because i'm able to put ir on our phones yeah right yeah sure yeah that reminds me of that that what is it an xk cd comic you know tim cook announcing the iphone that has all the features that everybody wanted and it's got you know the cassette deck in it and all the other things yeah bottle opener Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, I'm a big fan, as I've mentioned on the show, of the NVIDIA Shield.
It is the most capable set-top streaming box that exists. It's the only way I can get proper 4K HDR video with full uncompressed Dolby Atmos out of my Plex library.
The Apple TV won't do it. so i use the nvidia shield but we missed having the aerial screensaver it was like that was the one thing that we kind of loved from the apple tv and one day a few months ago i was like well i mean it's a it's got access to the google play store like because it's an and because the nvidia shield is an android tv device it's like well let's take a look and so i did and sure enough there are 18 different versions of people who have set up uh area the
aerial screensaver it pulls from apple's library but it's you know it's some third party developer just wrote the app and so we found an app that displayed it the way we like and what's.
Cool about the app that we sort of settled on is that it always shows the caption it it shows the the location like you don't have to tap the remote it just shows it so you see it change in real time on the ones like from the international space station and and we actually have it set to as it switches to a new video it swaps and moves the caption to the opposite side of the the screen so that it doesn't you know so it doesn't burn in on our our screen or we don't risk that but um but
you can do this you know yeah you've talked about the i think you've talked about it before where would one get an nvidia shield i mean i i would buy one on amazon that's i i really like that yeah yeah that's that's the place to do it i i'm i've been so happy with that um that that shield let me let me see if i can find it on him let me make sure i'm not lying yeah right i am not lying oh there's the that's the gaming edition i don't need the gaming
edition but yes you you can find them on amazon so i will I will, I will, I will, I will put a link to the NVIDIA shield on Amazon, uh, uh, in, uh, in the show notes, I think. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So I will, I'll, I'll do that. Yeah. All right, folks, hiring for your small business can feel like hunting for a needle in a haystack, right? Well, don't get caught in the hiring haystack. I found Sadie through our sponsor, LinkedIn Jobs, over three years ago.
And she, as you know, has been a rock star managing our social media and promotions ever since. LinkedIn Jobs isn't just any job board. It's the place to find quality professionals, even those not actively hunting, but perfect for your role. With over 70% of LinkedIn users not visiting other job sites, if you're not looking on LinkedIn, you're definitely looking in the wrong place. Here's the kicker. 86% of small businesses get a qualified candidate within 24 hours.
It's like having a magic hiring wand. LinkedIn makes the process easy with tools that help you write job descriptions and find top talent fast. They've got these questionnaires that you can use to really help filter things down. It's fantastic. So join two and a half million small businesses who trust LinkedIn for hiring. Don't get caught without the best team. Hire like a pro with LinkedIn jobs today.
Post your job for free at LinkedIn.com slash MGG. That's linkedin.com slash mgg to post your job for free. Terms and conditions apply and our thanks to LinkedIn Jobs for sponsoring this episode. All right. Ralph has a question. So we'll go there. He says, appreciate you guys so much. Listener almost from the start. Welcome, Adam. He says, I recently replaced my beloved 27-inch iMac with a brand new Mac Studio M2 with 32 gigs of RAM.
And I guess it would be 32 gigs of shared memory. I forget what the term is. Anyway, and a one terabyte hard drive. You know what I mean. Great job. Great machine. He says, it looks like a little nuclear power plant sitting on my desk. Well, hopefully it doesn't have a reactor core breach. He says, I have two terabytes of images on a brand new OWC Mercury Elite Pro Mini USB-C four terabyte drive.
The drive is attached to the studio with a brand new anchor USB-C cable to one of the USB-C ports on the rear of the machine. I move a lot of batches of photos from the internal drive to the external drive. I can get through four or five rounds of transfers at a normal, decent speed, but then inevitably the transfers slow to a crawl. He sent us a little video that shows transfers slowing down to like 400 K per second. Some of these. Yeah. Yeah. 400 K. Exactly. I know.
Yeah. And he says, so it'll take minutes. These will go on for a while and then suddenly things spring back to normal for a handful, then slow again.
End so it's fast and slow again some google foo suggested uh blocking the drive in spotlight to avoid the indexing slowdowns in the background and that seemed to help at first but maybe not certainly not any longer any thoughts about what's going on where is this bottleneck he says i wanted to get a thunderbolt drive to maximize speed but since i need four terabytes of space that made it way beyond my budget so i went with the owc usb c drive
i recognize the transfers will will not be lightning speed or Thunderbolt speed. But the slowing to a crawl does not seem right. You got any thoughts on this, Adam?
Oh i mean could be so many things that's the problem troubleshooting this kind of issue could be a lot of different things i mean we've already he's already kind of addressed some of the things you'd initially think of like okay what kind of connector is it what kind of speed are you getting you know so like the max on there right is what 10 megabits per second i think, they're gigabits per second let's assume it's 10 gigabits yeah that's the interface it's usb so like you it's usbc 3.2 i
looked at the specs of that mercury mercury drive so you're limited to that like so but that's ruled out i mean he says and the mercury delete delivers up to 540 megabits per second transfer speed so you're already there so just by that technology you're at 540 but not 400k k right yeah yeah like i did watch the video multiple times just to make sure Something's definitely wrong there. Obviously, dry formatting, I'm going to assume it's a PFS. But is it HFS? Like, I don't know.
He mentioned he's got a... And a cable from anchor uh i don't know the specs on that cable like which cable from anchor do we have like are they all created equal not all cables are created equal um so that would be another thing to think about but i assume i'm going to assume all those things are not the issue so then you start tracking down okay what else is going on on this system he already mentioned, uh he already mentioned spotlight what about icloud backups or icloud syncing and
things like that uh is that happening do you have backblaze running continuously are there other operations going on that are doing read writes someplace else to your main drive um i would think about all those sorts of things like do you have uh scanning utilities antivirus utilities you know some utility that's watching some other thing like i think you i guess can you i would assume you can pop up and does uh i don't remember if uh system utility
will show you that sort of data but i would maybe want to get a tool that's showing what what is rewriting especially to the main drive, you know there's something else going on while you're doing these that's.
Eating up additional bandwidth i mean you only have that you only have so many lanes you know like there's a lot no i like um activity monitor will show you that and mass right like it it shows you system-wide uh what the read and and write speeds are which if you've only got these two drives attached and you're reading from one and writing to the other then that's kind of enough uh but but um i stat are these coming from photos too i like were these just recently added to photos and his
photos reading off your drive to sync to iCloud photo library at the same time you're trying to copy these over. So you've got a bunch of read operations happening at the same time you're trying to do read writes over here. Yeah, the disk tab in Activity Monitor, which is also with Brian Moreau in the live chat at macgeekup.com slash discord. So the one I was trying to think of was the Blackmagic disk speed test. That's testing your disk speed, though. Yeah, I don't think the disk is the issue.
I think he's ruled out the cables, the disks.
Like i'm just going to assume that drive and the cable he has the theoretical you know maximum part of the time exactly because it's working part of the time so i so i have something else yeah so the first thing that i thought of when i saw his question was is there a like whatever the disc inside of the ssd enclosure is right like we've ruled out the enclosure unless it's just simply malfunctioning right but let's let's say that that's not happening it the enclosure we know
can can uh you know has the interface that can do 10 gigs a second great the uh what's the drive inside certainly at times it's capable of as owc said 500 and whatever it was 42 megabytes bytes per second okay great uh but is there a cache on the drive that is like filling up and then needs to write out to the disk like is is the drive made effectively faster by some caching and then it's got to catch up with itself well this is a this is an owc drive right this is like a full drive
that he bought from owc correct they're usually really good about this yeah and i They don't put junk in their enclosures. I would reach out to them and share these results because they may have some thoughts about it. But as you were talking, Adam, you said, I assume it's APFS. It might be HFS+. And that got me to thinking.
Thinking we know that objectively, and I believe this remains true, but certainly when APFS first came out, that in terms of raw transfer speed, HFS plus was faster than APFS. There are many benefits to APFS that that sort of made us overlook that. And we weren't talking about massive differences, but but it was a few percentage points. So but that's probably not what's happening here. However, APFS supports snapshots.
Is Mac OS creating snapshots on that drive in the midst of this copy operation that's just consuming the drive's resources and therefore not able to let a transfer happen? I don't know, but that would be another thing to look at.
But yeah i would contact owc is is right yeah yeah yeah and then my other initial thought until i saw the video was he's using photos he's actually just transferring files that happen to be photos correct as opposed to the photos app because my other concern initially was, when you're sending a large file it bangs it right across when it has to send a lot of little files that becomes a bit of a bottleneck not not to this level obviously oh you know wait a
minute wait a minute somebody uh who was it let me make sure to give credit to the right person kiwi graham again in the live chat asked is this rotational drive or an ssd we have been it's an ssd well oh didn't he say i thought he said ssd in the email he did say ssd and it is i'm looking on owc's owc site you can get it with a two terabyte rotational drive but he bought the four terabyte which is only available from owc as a solid state now you could
buy the empty enclosure from owc and buy a four terabyte rotational to put in there if you wanted but if you bought it from owc that way then it's a an ssd yeah okay uh now another thing i saw in the spec and i'm i'm assuming again he said it's a usbc cable from anchor i'm assuming he's going USB-C to USB-C? Yeah, the Mac Studio has Thunderbolt ports on the back of it,
so he's... No, but so the spec for Adobe C says, connect universally any USB or Thunderbolt computer or device with the included USB-C with tethered USB-A adapter. No, he's using it, the anchor USB-C to USB-C cable. Okay, because there are USB-A ports on the Mac Studio that are...
No, he's using USB-C. he's not connected to those yeah yeah but those might also be 10 gig ports you can you know they're i'm looking at the spec to usba up to five usba was always only up to five gigabits per second is that right i thought we had like the super even then that's a little faster than 400k yeah fair yeah either way yeah yeah yeah yeah so well hopefully we have given enough to for ralph to go on but really i think in a scenario like this i would call the manufacturer
at least contact them you've you've pulled all this data together they know what they built there and if this is in spec or out of spec so um but yeah yeah also interesting the uh.
It looks like the ports on the front are usb c on the max just so people know two usb c ports up to to 10 gigabits per second on the back you have the usb4 at up to 40 gigabits per second gets 40 gigabits per second yeah and then uh apparently there's also if you're using usb 3.1 gen 2 which is what this drive is it's up to 10 gigabits got it got it. All right, shall we move on to John's, I'll call it a question. Let's have another conversation, shall we? Yes.
John writes in, so I was looking for an email link in messages and discovered a way to filter the search results. Just type the word photo or link, for example, and tap the filter below the search window, and one can see all the results for that criteria. Unfortunately, searching email did not work, so any ideas? And so I wrote him back with a bad answer. But then it brought to mind a couple other things. You know, how do you find something in Messages?
My first thought is, now, and I've lost my messages, there we go, is to go into the search window in Messages, and now I'm talking macOS, and it works the same on iOS, but I would just try maybe the ampersand, or if you remember some of that email address, the ampersand? At sign. At symbol. Yeah. Isn't that ampersand? No, the ampersand is the and symbol. No, the ampersand is the and symbol. That's right. The at symbol. So it's shift two.
That's the one. It's above the two on the US keyboard, the at symbol. Put that in there. If you remember maybe the domain or part of that email, any of that, that may be helpful.
Helpful um and I was also playing a little bit with uh find any file which is uh we haven't mentioned in quite a while um you can you can find things that are in your well they're gonna you're gonna find them anywhere on your hard drive and that's where they're going to be if they're in messages so um that's not a great answer John I'm sorry and I think you're right you should be able able to type email and get all the email addresses that are in there but what i
what i did find is if i type the at symbol um it comes up with all the messages that have the at symbol in there yeah what i'm finding is i typed like at gmail and a couple of things happened it wanted to bring me to conversations with people that are messages like that their address is their phone number Correct. Yes. Using that instead of their phone number. Great. And the first time I couldn't say, no, just find me the messages that literally have the text at G-M-A-I-L in it.
But the way that I got it to do that was I typed at G-M-A-I-L and then hit the tab button. And that closed the search window and actually let the search come up. And it splits it apart into two lists. One is conversations, again, with the people who are using that instead of their phone number.
And then the other is messages that actually have at gmail in them so the tab below that there's links yeah you're right then there's links below that there's photos yes right so so it's it looks like the search in io in uh messages is substantially more powerful substantially more powerful than search in the mail mac mail i hate mac mail search That's interesting. I, you know, I moved to Thunderbird for other features, but when I have to search for things, I wind up going back to Mac mail.
Sometimes if I can't. It's better than Thunderbirds. I'll grant you that. Yeah. I mean, Thunderbirds is interesting, especially if you look at it in list mode, like I can make sense of things there, but I, there are times that I search for things that I know are there and Thunderbird search doesn't surface them and mail search will.
I had that very problem yesterday, Dave. You may remember you sent me a list of all the notes that I had prepared, but nothing came through because, long story as to why, but then I went back to Thunderbird to look for these emails that I knew I sent and I couldn't find them. So I had to go back to mail because it puts them together in a string, your mail string, and that's where I was able to get it. So that's saying something. You can fix that in Thunderbird. I use threaded view for my Mac.
Threads, that's not strings, threads. Yeah. And what's nice in Thunderbird is you can do it on a per mailbox basis. So I have like our Mac geek out mailboxes set for threading and nothing else. So, so that I see the original messages and yeah, it in Thunderbird, it is on the, like, get to the mailbox that you want to do this with. And then go to the view menu and go to sort by and choose threaded or unthreaded.
Unthreaded and this is on a per mailbox basis just to be clear so it's the sort by is where at the bottom of the sort by menu you choose um threaded or unthreaded so yeah. Nice cool okay you got anything to add to that whole sorting searching filtering mess there no i mean other than i will sometimes fall back and try to use spotlight, to see if that finds things more globally. And then, you know, it breaks it into the categories so you can find it in messages or mail or whatever.
That doesn't always work. And then the other thing that I often use is just more advanced searching. This is kind of more for stuff that I know has metadata or I'm looking for specific types of things. I'll go back to Finder, the pure Finder search. Go into Finder and hit, you know, find Apple F. Yeah. And then in the search dialog that comes up, you can either, in the results, click that little, I think it's a plus or a dot, dot, dot, to get metadata options. And there's a gazillion of them.
And if you learn them, you can access them by hitting whatever the metadata word is. So say like kind, like if I'm looking for a specific kind of thing, like a document or a JPEG, or you can say, I think type for like file type is JPEG and then space and then type the name of you. So if I'm looking for a JPEG or a PNG, you can do modified dates. You can look for, um, sometimes there's metadata like in attachments, it'll have the metadata of who sent it to you.
So you can literally look i just did like your name where from colon dave space dave hamilton and it showed me every like attachment you ever sent me that had your like metadata on it like it came from you so you can do all these advanced metadata searches in you can do you can i'm just filtering the search attributes here in the finder by by the word mail and you can do the author email address, the recipient email address that like, yeah.
And I also saw that you could do like altitude and like there's tons of these. Wow. Yeah. And you can also you can also do and or and not modifiers. So you can use your Boolean modifiers to create really advanced searches. And you can then save those searches so you don't have to recreate it again. Yeah, and a minus sign means and not. Wait, say that again. So if you use a minus sign, so whatever a term is, and then the minus sign, the next thing that you type will be and not that.
Oh, right. Right. Not for, not that. And not, and not this. Right. So you can exclude. And not that. Yeah. So you could, you could put in like, you know, uh, Pete at email domain space minus Dave at email domain. And you would get messages that had Pete, but not, and not Dave. Correct. Got it. Yeah. You got it. Yeah. Yeah, there's all kinds of, all, there's an article, there's a guide for this in, on Apple's documentation. Oh, nice. Okay. All right. Yeah, I wish these worked in Spotlight.
I don't know why you can't use them in Spotlight, but you cannot. Okay. This is only done from the Finder search. Okay. All right. All right. Okay. I mean, that's, that's just how it be. Yep. Yeah. There's no way to exclude something, though, right? In using... You say not. Yeah, but if you're doing it using the GUI, you add the little plus, and kind is image, but there's no way to exclude... No.
There's no way to minus and not... Well, I think you could say, and, you know, the minus and not kind is never. Would be my assumption. Okay. I've never tried it, but if I were a better man, I would guess that would work. I'm going to get into a do loop here. You can play with that later. Yeah. Don't do it while you're driving. Trust me. Interesting. Yeah. Fascinating. I love this. And Kiwi Graham in our chat, you're the rock star today, Kiwi Graham.
Yeah. uh says putting mail like in messages search mail to colon name shows him email links to him yeah like mail to colon yeah yeah so nice so that works in messages search evidently yeah nice yep yeah fascinating all right shall we uh shall we move on you want to read you want want to read the next one from pete for pete repeat sure i think i could do that.
So pete says i have a four terabyte external ssd drive i wanted to use as two volumes one for a time machine backup volume easy enough to set up and one for my icloud drive and my one drive folder i got caught i believe because mac os sonoma will not allow me to move my one drive sync folder to the external SSD, and I don't believe I can move my iCloud drive either. As the OS insists, sync folders should be on my root drive in home library iCloud
drive or in home library OneDrive. Any suggestions? Short of installing my OS on an external SSD to make it the root drive. Goal here was to be able to save files to my local iCloud drive and OneDrive folders and have them auto-magically synced to their respective services. But I simply don't have room on my 2019 iMac root drive to do that for both. Now I have to manually keep things synced like an animal. Pete. Like a caveman. And repeat says, my idea is a symlink.
So put the data on your external drive like you want it, shoot it over there, and then use the ln command, which is link and the best way to find out how to use that whole one is obviously uh man space ln uh but dash s will get you a symbolic link that points to your root drive and then tells it yeah it's really over here on my external drive any reason that won't work dave uh i can't think i would steer far I'm far clear of doing that with iCloud Drive.
I don't mean to rain on your parade, Pete. I don't enjoy raining on your parade, Pete. I'm brilliant until I'm not, right? Just ask me. Yeah. What's the problem? Why?
What's it doing too much too much i think there's additional data and things that yeah i i can't kiwigram points out they might be stubs your icloud drives and i don't remember how that works like i think that's part of like the versioning if i'm yeah thinking correctly i've never dove into it here's the thing this has come up for years because people always ask can i move my entire home folder to an external drive and you can but you're just setting yourself up
for a whole world of pain and i have a feeling this would be the same exact situation i mean you're right like i would do that i would move no before moving my iCloud before just linking my iCloud driver somewhere else i would move the home folder to the external drive because at least that That is something Apple officially supports. It does open up worlds of potential pain and they point that out to you.
I don't advise people do it. No, but it is something that is supported and Apple will even give the instructions to do that. But I, in fact, I just found a Reddit. Now, this is from five years ago where someone suggested trying exactly what you just recommended. And they say the comment was, this does not work. the iCloud engine doesn't follow symlinks. Now this was five years ago. So, so I'm, I'm curious, is this an answer you got from your head or an answer that chat GPT guided you towards?
I just went, Oh, that's how I would do it. Same. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But I didn't know. And I think in my original email, I said, they should probably jump in here because there's, I'm thinking there's things I may not be thinking of, but, but that's how I would do it. Same that's how i would start doing it but what kind of pain am i creating for myself that i don't know um i'm wondering if there's uh.
Now for one answer for one drive i would i would do the simling thing i know we were able to do that with dropbox years ago before they let us just actually relocate it um if the one drive app will not let you relocate the uh its destination then a sim link for that i would certainly try you'll know very quickly whether it's going to work or not but um i have lots of backups before you even start sure yeah rule number one but
adam you have a you have a potentially better solution well i think i think we've brought this up before and i was trying to pull up mac tracker really quick to find out if that if that 2019 even was available with an ssd that 2019 i iMac.
I i probably maybe not or a hybrid a 2019 imac would definitely have been available in ssd yes okay so i don't know if he has an ssd i don't know if he has an ssd in that 2019 imac yet or not i yep i don't know if every version was only ssd probably by then yeah yeah well then maybe this maybe this tip isn't great i would just turn the four terabyte external ssd into to my boot drive and move on with my life. Bingo.
Same. Yeah. Well, that's what, you know. But it's going to be slower than an internal SSD if he does say an internal SSD. Yeah, and he did say the goal is to not put the operating system on the external drive. Why, though? So, well, the speed is my guess. The other option, the two other options I would consider are. Wait, wait, wait. Slow down. Slow down. I got to reject the premise on that. What? You just said speed. No? Well, yeah, but this is a four terabyte SSD external that he has, right?
Or is it a four terabyte? So why would- No, you said SSD. Yeah. So why would the speed, like I would think the speed would be better or at the worst, the same if he's got an internal SSD, but the speed would probably be just fine on the external SSD. That's why I was trying to look at the specs of a 2019. Yeah. Lose your external drive in your host, but- Yes, but also- That's like losing your laptop though.
Right, right. yeah okay that's a good solution and then uh i mean it's an imac it's the the drive's probably not going anywhere right yeah yeah i ran i ran my 2019 imac off of an external drive for a little while that's what i used to have here in the studio before lightning stole it from me last summer but uh i i ran it on an external for a little while when i was dealing with like which operating system to run. And it was probably a month and a half where I ran it on the external.
I mean, I would update my reality. What I would do is probably pop that thing open and put a four terabyte internal in there, but that's me and I'm brave and I'm willing to do that. And most people probably don't want to do that with a 2019 iMac because it's a big pain in the butt. It's a huge pain in the butt. Yeah, it is a huge pain in the butt. So I have a question and then a potential expensive solution. But the question is, would an alias work? No, no, no, no, no. Aliases are even less.
Even worse than a symlink. Yeah, you had the right kind of symlink. Yeah, the symlink would be the thing, and yeah. Yeah, okay. But it just doesn't, yeah, there's more to it than that. Well, and then the other option that's far more expensive is. The Synology NAS drive, because he's talking about having the data there. Yeah, but iCloud Drive isn't going to save to your Synology. In one drive, you could use Cloud Sync there.
I'm getting rid of iCloud Drive being the thing, but I'm thinking you get away from iCloud Drive. The point was you can store things on the Synology and check a little box that says, hey, only pull it to my hard drive when I click on it and need it. Otherwise, I can see it all the time.
You can do that with iCloud too. it's called optimized storage on this mac yeah that would be the simpler simple answer yeah well that's the simple answer for him right there then yeah put it all on your icloud drive and only pull it down when you need it yeah did he say what size that drive was that's the built-in drive he didn't too small just too small yeah yeah yeah well okay so yeah then it probably was one of the smaller smaller ssds probably the 256 or the 512 yeah because it
did it came they had fusion drive options and regular drive options but flash storage yeah it came with different sizes and i'm gonna bet it's the 256 which would be way too small yep yep yeah so i yeah i mean at that point i'm with dave like i think using external especially if it's the thunderbolt ssd or yeah You know, it's going to be the similar speed. There's a better answer for you, Pete. So he wrote back and went, oh yeah, of course it'll work. Well, so when it doesn't. No, it won't.
It won't. Maybe it's changed. I don't know. But yeah, just boot from the external. A lot of times I say, a lot of times I say, don't do what I've done because I, because I do crazy experiments, but you've proven it hurts. Right. In this case, it actually works out fine. So, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Kimmy Graham says double side tape the SSD drive to the back of the Mac. I've seen people do it. I've had people Velcro them. I mean, just put Velcro and then you can take it on and off at will. Yeah.
Although a lot of people would probably consider putting anything sticky on your Mac sacrilege. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, fair. It's each their own. Right, right. But they make those cool little... Doesn't 12 South still have those cool little shelves that like locked into the little ring where you run the cable through? They used to. Let's see. Shop by device. I'm sure somebody makes, there's all kinds of little shelves and little like back things you can get. Yeah, there you go. Yeah.
The backpack yes yes the backpack yeah exactly yep that's what you want, brilliant actually i might want one of these here that's kind of cool huh all right anyway and if you don't if you don't like that price i'm sure there's a knockoff one on amazon that's cheaper but i love 12 south stuff it's gorgeous so yeah depending upon your aesthetic and your pocketbook And your budget. Yeah, exactly. Or you can have your high school kid make one for you in shop class.
I'm sure there's a 3D printed version that you could probably make yourself. Yeah. That's right. Now go buy yourself a 3D printer. Yep. Yep. Yep. Shall we move on to Kim's question here? Yeah. For favor. We shall. In fact, here we go. Kim. Kim writes in, I was a follower of MacCast from very early on. And back when Adam was doing three shows a week. Ow, Adam. What are you, nuts? I started at five. I follow him here and really enjoy the energy. And Adam sounds a lot happier. Well, I hope so.
Question. What would you recommend as a plug-in switch to replace a Wemo switch, but that works with HomeKit? And the same question for a replacement for a Wemo wall switch. Which Wemo drives me nuts by suddenly for no apparent reason requiring me to log in, in the middle of the night to turn off my night fan. I'm tired of being infuriated by this and I hope home kit or associated gear will not be so user unfriendly from, uh, a guy named Kim.
A guy named Kim. Yeah. I love Kim. He was a long time contributor to the Matt cast and I'm glad to have him over here.
Um, yeah. So, you know, you guys might have different options or opinions i am a huge fan of any products that don't require me to buy a separate like hub thing yep um so i i love i devices products i had i devices wall switches in my old house um and they do make a um a plug-in thing home kit compatible and no need for any kind of extra gear, they are more expensive because of it.
I also used like lifex bulbs for the same reason and they tend to be more expensive because you don't need the hub so i just find them easier and convenient and they were rock solid um i had before this i had uh some other i can't remember not the lutrons the whatever the first company that came out with support for home kit um and their stuff was garbage oh you mean uh no no was good yeah this would no this was uh i i'm blanking on the name
of the stuff because it was just junk but yeah it required it required a hub and then then what really the straw that broke the camel's back was the version that came out with supported home kit and then it was really buggy and junky and so then they came out with a new hub that was the home kit hub amazing so it's It's like, I'm done. Yeah, right, right, right, right. Yeah. Yeah, it wasn't Philips here either. You know what never occurred to me?
You just had it up there, Dave, in the screen, and it never even occurred to me that there were already smart outlets. Of course there are. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, like in-wall ones, yeah. Yeah, in-wall outlet. That's. Yep. iDevices has those too, yeah. Yep. Yeah. But they also do make the little plug-in one.
I've become a big fan. And if you want HomeKit stuff, the Moras devices have, I've got a couple of their outlets now and obviously their garage door opener, which I've mentioned on a recent episode, but they've, they've really got, you know, I, I don't think they have the in-wall outlets, at least not that I've seen, but the, the, you know, the plug in outlets, the switches, all that stuff.
Um if home kit is not important to you but your budget is then wise wyze would be another place to go oh yeah uh a big fan of of their stuff it's very affordably priced and um nice yeah and and works works really well so uh okay yep yep so and and there's a there is a home bridge plug-in for it so if you're willing to be nerdy about your stuff then of course you can get all of that stuff home kit accessible i will say but yeah i still want to know why when i say s lady
turn off the living room lamp she goes i can't do it you're missing an application plug-in or something like that and then if i go s lady turn the living room lamp off okay click yep. I, my guess is you have a room defined as living room and, and a device defined as living room. And it's the two names. I've seen this with, with various smart home platforms where it, it, you, if you don't say it, if you say it one way, it thinks you're talking about the room and a lamp in it.
If you say it another way, it thinks you're talking about the lamp named that room. So, yeah, it. So I've definitely confused myself if I haven't confused this lady. Correct. Yeah, exactly. Like I, for our lamps that are in the living room, I named them like, you know, uh, knitting table, piano lamp, fireplace corner, things like that.
So that they, if I can say turn on living room lamps and it will turn all of them on, or I can say turn off fireplace corner, set fireplace corner to red or whatever.
Whatever so watch your names and names of rooms because that can be where things start to get dicey potentially like i don't know and i'm gonna throw a quick tip in here right go is too so i like uh often uh my wife works till midnight on sundays okay and i like to be in bed before midnight most nights when i can and so i'll go to bed and turn s lady turn the master bedroom lamp amp two, 10%.
Now I can go to sleep and it's nice and dark, but it's light enough for her to walk in and not trip over the dog. So you can set your lights, your smart lights at any given intensity and 5%, 10%. Or if I have to get up at three in the morning to go catch an airplane, I can turn on the light to that low amount. Doesn't wake her up, but I have enough light to get around. So nice way to use your smart lights as a nightlight. I like it. I like it. Yeah.
Uh, all right, let's, let's jump to some cool stuff found here. Uh, Joe brings us to our first one. Uh, he says the on TV, O N N TV box is, uh, one of the least expensive set top boxes. It is an Android TV streaming box. It's 4k, uh, for 20 bucks at Walmart on O N N. I guess is, is that Walmart's like Walmart brand? Yeah. So $19 and 88 cents for the 4k streaming box. I have not tested this. Uh, I don't think it will do at most audio, but I, you know, things have surprised me before.
So do we get, there's no Atmos. Oh no, there is Atmos on this page. Uh, no, that's a different thing. That's the, the, the TiVo stream box. We'll do that. But, uh, for 20 bucks, there you go. And, uh, It's a great little 4K streaming box, which I like. And then we'll combine that with a cool stuff found from Andrew Woodward. Which I need to find here, which is an app for Apple TV, sorry, for Android TV called Air Receiver, which turns your Android TV into an AirPlay receiver.
Also, it'll receive other things, too. It's not just AirPlay. It'll support all kinds of different things. It's $3. So for less than $25, you can have an AirPlay receiver connected to your TV and you're good to go. So I think that's actually pretty, that's a cool stuff found combo is what we call that there. So I know it's not free, but you know, 25 bucks and you've got. It's kind of a twofer. AirPlay connected. It's a repeat. Well, not really. All right. So that's what I got. You got one, Adam?
Yeah, we got Bart, who has a cool little app. He says, hello, guys. By the way, great to have Adam around, and he's a great addition to the team. I use Reminders all the time, and on the Mac, have always wanted a menu bar to use with the app. Well, look no further. I found one. It is called Reminders Menu Bar. I know... The name needs a little work, but works great on the Mac. Once installed, it puts a menu bar item that can be customized.
It shows you your upcoming reminders and then gives you a list of all of your categories that you've created with the associated reminders. You can add to any list directly from the menu bar, no having to open the app. Find the list and add a reminder. Keep up the great shows. And he's got a link and we'll put that link in the show notes. Yeah, and it's free. Reminders menu bar. Yeah. It's free, as far as I can tell, because it's on GitHub, so you just download it from here.
Huh. I like it. Huh. Very cool. Thanks. Sure. Sure. We have time for one more. We got time for more. We've had this one floating around from JT for a little while, and I am excited to share it. So hopefully my Mac is going to play this correctly. Greetings, JT from Idaho here. Just wanted to let you know, Dave, I purchased the Tempest 512 audio microphone upon your referral via Twitter or X, depending on how you want to view it this day.
Decided to order that, got it in, connected it via USB-C to the microphone, out to the USB-C on my iPhone 15 Pro, for which I'm recording this message, which is nice. An added feature to it. But unfortunately, I did break the stand trying to tighten it to the microphone. But sometimes you just don't know your own strength and sometimes you just get caught. Anyway, thanks and have a great show. Thanks for this, JT. Yeah. So this is a microphone.
I've had one of these from it's from 512 Audio, which is the same company that is that is behind all the warm audio mics, warm audio and not just microphones. They make. So recreations of vintage gear. I have a warm microphone here that is about a, I don't know, maybe a five or six hundred dollar microphone. It's a recreation of a literally ten thousand dollar telefunken microphone. And with the 512 audio brand, they are not making recreations.
They are just making their own stuff. off uh this mic when it first came out we probably talked about it on the show it was a 160 microphone.
Usb comes with a little shock mount it's got gain controls on it it sounds great actually no this one doesn't have gain controls on it this is the one that it has a headphone volume control gain is in software and you can adjust the blend in your ears between what you get from the microphone phone and what you get from the computer which is a really nice touch it is usbc it was 160 bucks when it first came out you can now get this on amazon when i posted about
it in february and when jt got it it was 40 just just 40 not 140 40 it's now 35 on amazon uh so if you are needing a microphone i thought jt's audio sounded great i didn't i would have chosen to roll off a little low end on that but that's you know that's just personal preference to get some nice articulation out of the vocals but he uh he sounded fantastic on it it's a great sounding microphone at that price you can't afford not to buy one of these i know a lot of
them i posted it on amazon and i used an affiliate link um a because why not and b that also let me see how many of them were sold and it was i mean it was triple digits within a day like people saw this and were like wait seriously you've used this like yep i got one i use it at my desk like okay sold and it's kind He's got a cool little blue light. Yeah, that's the shocker here is Dave recommending a studio condenser mic. I know. Yes. I am speaking on a different studio condenser mic here.
The Earthworks Ethos mic is what I use here in the studio and have been for a couple of years now. And it bothers me a little bit to say how much I love it, only because I swore that I would never use a condenser mic for broadcast or podcast work. But Earthworks sent me this and said, okay, just try it. Like, you know, just try it. And I'm still trying it two years later. See, he used to give me junk about using my AT2020. I know. I did. I know. I'm aware. Yes. I'm aware.
I was wrong. I got caught. Why would that be a bad podcasting mic? Asking for a friend. Yeah. This one is not a bad podcasting mic. And what I'm about to say is very much a generalization about dynamic mics versus condenser mics. And they're not all created this way. But, well, this part of the generalization is true. A condenser mic needs power to the microphone element for the microphone to hear sound effectively.
A dynamic mic generally, and there are some that break this mold, but generally speaking, a dynamic mic takes the energy of the sound as its energy to excite the element and then push that signal down the line, the analog line. Yeah. And and so dynamic mics have long been preferred for broadcast slash studio work because they tend to be less active and pick up less reflection.
Now, you can get a dynamic mic that is built to pick up more sound than you would want or more sound, whether you would want it or not, is it depends on the application. Uh in general condenser mics will pick up more room noise uh it but with the correct.
Element the correct polar pattern meaning the pickup pattern like where it picks things up like i'm right in front of the microphone now and it picks me up if i go here you have where i'm behind the microphone it's hard to hear me like it's got a good off-axis rejection it's got a good pickup pattern and so with the right pickup pattern and the right gain staging meaning the the amount of uh signal that you're pulling in from the microphone and all of that uh.
It obviously can sound fantastic. What I was surprised by with this microphone is I used it and it was like, wait, it sounds like me. I got, and they, and they knew this at earthworks. They know me, they know the sound of my voice. They know the sound that I like. And they're like, we think this is the right one for you. And, and, um, they had a USB version of something similar to this for a little while, uh, that had the XLR jack going the wrong way.
So if you put a right angle connector on it, it would like aim down. Mountain. And I called them out on that. And, uh, and so for this microphone, they fixed it and the right angle connector goes the right way. So it heads up towards the stand. And so it's good. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. They, they were like, this is, this is for you, Dave. Like, great. Thanks. Yeah. I mean, again, really, really generalizing. I think Dave hit the nail on the head.
I, the studio condenser, I feel like you need, there's, you need to know more about what you're doing and what the mic is doing. And, you know, it's a little more technical. You got to like tweak it more, more in general. Again, these are generalizations. Cause like Dave said, different mics are different, but yeah, you're going to have to do more tweaking.
If you, again, if you don't have like a nice studio environment that doesn't have a lot of reflection, that doesn't have a lot of like you, you, you're going to more likely find with a studio condenser, you're going to need additional filtering or adjustments or things to get it dialed in. Whereas I think it's a little bit easier with a, with a dynamic mic. It's not easy, Easy, but it's easier.
I think it's the right way to say it. If you put someone looking to start a podcast on a shoestring, you'd recommend this $35 mic. That $35 mic has a great pickup pattern. Yes. Yes. And it sounds good, as you heard. So thanks for that, JT. Thanks for the example. I know. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Can I do one more quickly? One more cool stuff? Absolutely. Okay, great.
It's summertime here in the United States. I like to grill. We wind up grilling all year round, but I like to grill more in the summer because I'm not freezing outside and I don't have to shovel to get to the grill. And I was a big fan initially of the the the smart thermometers that you could like plug into your your deal.
And when when they started getting smaller and smaller, the issue with them was that you could not put the whole element like the whole element now is just contained in the smart thermometer. It's a Bluetooth device. You don't have to have a wire running out from your grill, which is awesome.
But the first wave of these things couldn't take temperatures more than about 500 degrees ambient and i don't know about you guys but my grill gets way hotter than that especially if i'm cooking something hot and fast like like steak right and uh and so i was really uh excited at ces there were actually two of them that two different companies that had uh thermometers that would allow you to, that we're capable of dealing with hotter temperatures.
And one of them is the Meet It Plus that I've been playing with. And it works as advertised. It does all the things. You put it into whatever you're cooking. We cooked a steak the other night. Actually, I cooked turkey tips with it last night. You just put it in.
With this one, you have to make sure that the entire length of the thermometer Uh, the, like the, the metal part of the thermometer is, is, you know, insulated by whatever you're cooking, uh, which could be a problem if you're cooking something that's perhaps not big. Uh, but, uh, but everything I've cooked with it has been, has been big enough. And then, and then it doesn't complain about, you know, my grill being up at seven, 800 degrees and.
Bluetooth to my phone it will you can tell it what you want your target temp to be and in theory it will warn you to take things off the grill you know the eight degrees before that so that it it finishes cooking after you take it off the grill the app has left me a little bit i've i've wound up pulling things off the grill before the app warns me to it it like its time Time calculations have been a little weird, but, uh, but my guess is, uh,
that we'll get better over time and it's, you can buy it from their site, the meet at plus for 59 bucks. So like, it's a cool. Yeah, I know. Yeah. It's great. So I, I've been happy with this. Yep. They never seem to get the app, right? That always seems to be the fall over thing. Like I have this, I have this Ember mug, you know, it's like somebody pointed out, like Like, how hard would it be to just get rid of the app and just have
a dial and a little display on here? Yeah, well, you can't have a display on the thermometer, right? So you need the... No, but I mean, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But I mean, you could get better developers not to knock their developers. Or like, I don't know how these things get built, right? Probably a lot of it's just outsourced to whoever. This app, they're a French company. Pete and I wound up sort of running into them at CES.
And, uh, they, the app that I'm using with it now is a rewrite from the ground up from whatever they had before, uh, with the previous model. And I think they're like, it's pretty good. Uh, but you know, the, the time calculation on it has been, that's the part that's left a little bit to be desired. What's cool is it has the device is Bluetooth and then it has a charging base that is essentially acts as the Bluetooth amplifier.
Your phone pairs with the charging base. The charging base pairs with the unit, I believe. And that allows you to get like I put the charging base next to the grill. Then I can be anywhere I want in the house and I get signal from this thing, which is great. That's cool. Yeah, it's cool. Yeah. I mean, I think what often happens is that, you know, these things need to be cross-compatible and, you know, I get the sense that probably they're not native apps in a lot of cases.
Like, there's probably a lot of financial reasons, you know, not just like to disparage developers, but like, you know, they're using those like translation layers or whatever. And they end up looking like some sort of kind of web app, but in an app form. Yep. Yep. Yep. Yep.
But it's function like the app is very responsive in terms of telling me what the temperature is so if i know yeah yeah all right i want this steak to be 130 degrees so i'm gonna pull it off the grill at 121 like okay great like i just i look and it's like perfect i'm good to go let's take it off so yeah yeah this is just a general iot problem exactly it's like they focus on the hardware and make really cool awesome hardware and then like the app's just a means to an end a lot of
times i feel like it's just like okay it does what it needs to do we're done ship it yep yep and i know they were waiting to get this app to to you know because they they actually gave me the unit at ces and said but please wait until our new app is out to to review it it's like and again this isn't just a them problem it's it's a general iot complaint on my part it's like no they're all like software and hardware has to go together apple knows this yeah yeah like they work
really hard at it yeah a lot of these things are just they're again they're not priced high enough they're not like it's just not a focus yeah well that's the thing right at at what did i say this thing is 59 so you can find it on amazon for 69.90 so depending on what shipping costs you may find it you know i don't know which is going to be but even for 70 bucks like that's that's a fantastic price for something like this. Yeah, that's great. And so, you know, it's like good to go. Yep.
The app looks nice. Yeah, it's fine. I think they're actually showing the old app on the screenshots here too. I mean, I have a Pit Boss Grill and it has an app that came with it. And again, it's like serviceable, but it's not. Well, maybe they'll hear our discussion and be inspired.
Uh because the hardware is great at the end of the day what is it it just has to show a temperature and like you know like what what else would you do to it i think it's more about the ui than anything else yeah it shows the temperature fine it's the calculation of time remaining that that has and i've only been able to use it twice we here in new england we had a ton of rain this spring like it's only been this last week that it's
felt like spring you know right and so so So I've only used it twice. I'm curious to see like how I feel about it by the end of the summer. All right, folks. Yeah, fun stuff. Send in your stuff. Feedback at MacGeekGab.com. We'd like to share. Whoa, whoa, whoa. Where? Feedback at MacGeekGab.com? I think that's what he said. Feedback at MacGeekGab.com. That's it. Thanks to you for sending in all of your questions and tips and cool stuff found.
We all get to learn from each other, and that is my favorite part of being able to do this show. And hopefully you folks enjoy it, too. I assume you do, but let us know that, too. What do you like? What do you not like? What's your favorite thing about the show? What's your least favorite thing about the show? Tell us both of those. Seriously, I would love to know that. That helps us continue doing what we're doing. This is all for us together. So our thanks to you for that.
Bandwidth, thanks to Cashfly. And make sure to check out, of course, LinkedIn.com slash MGG. They're a sponsor for the week And uh yeah thanks for hanging out I don't know Oh check out Pete's other show So there I was Yeah share this show And share Pete's other show So there I was.
Music. Where was I What's your name Who, So there I was Did I not say the name of your show You did I'm just being a smart aleck I don't know Pete I don't remember anything thing it's good it's worth repeating it i know i'm sorry what you did there i'm sorry i'm gonna stop talking now what do you want to say anything before we end this do it yeah don't get caught and don't get caught, see you later.