It's time for MacGeekGab, and listener Todd brings us our quick tip of the week. If you're in a folder in the Finder and hit Command-F, the default is to search this Mac. I almost always want to limit the search to the folder I am in. To change the default, which I do on every Mac I use, go to the Finder, Finder Preferences, Advanced, When Performing a Search, and select the current folder.
Now you can hit Command F, type what you want to search for in a list that's displayed for the hits in that folder. More tips like this, plus your questions answered, today on MacGeekGab 974 for Monday, March 27th, 2023. Greetings folks, and welcome to Mac geek gab, the show where you send in your tips, just. Music. Like that one that Todd did. You send in your questions, you send in your cool stuff found. We share your tips, just like we John just did. We share your cool stuff found.
We share your questions and hopefully are able to provide some answers. Of course, you send all those into feedback at Mac geek gab.com. We take everything that you've sent in. We take our answers. We take some of your answers, string it all together every week into an agenda with the goal being that every single time we get together, each and every one
us including me. We each learn five new things. Sponsors for this episode include Notion at Notion.com slash MacGeekGab where Notion has added Notion AI to help you start your ideas right there in Notion with help from AI. It's amazing. ShadyRays.com slash MGG because what's better than getting one pair of Shady Rays and not worrying if you break or lose them?
Too. And that's what you can do at shady race dot com slash m g g. And also honey at join honey dot com slash m g g. The tool that scours the internet for promo codes and then automatically applies them. We'll talk more in depth about each and every one of those a little bit later in the episode here. For now. Here in Durham, New Hampshire. I'm Dave Hamilton. And here in Fairfield, Connecticut. This is John F. Barne. How are we today, Mr. John F. Bond?
Not bad. Not bad. Not bad. All right. Getting by we are. I'm happy to be back here in the studio, man. It was fun traveling. Don't get me wrong. Had a lot of great experiences. We'll talk a lot about we've got some more stuff. In fact, to talk about from South by Southwest coming up. If not in today's episode, certainly in next week's, but but it's good to be home. It's good to be back in my standard recording environment, hopefully without network issues. Hang on, must knock on wood.
But a network that I get to control at least far more of than I could in hotel rooms. But I did, I'm exhausted today, John, because I stayed up super late. We had finally, after 18 years, I finally had Ethernet run to the north side of my house, which means that I have a whole lot more options as to where and how and what I do with the various devices.
So I actually moved, I'm gonna move my router back over to the house so that it's protected by the standby generator that we put in this summer, last summer, whatever. But I need to have my fiber moved for that. So that hasn't happened quite yet, but I did put a little rack together last night and put all the disk stations and those various things over in the house, moved them from the house, from the office to the house.
It's fascinating to me that, and then of course I did all kinds of ping tests and speed tests to make sure that, you know, everything was working as I wanted it to, and it is. But what's really interesting to me, John, is how little impact an extra switch in the way makes. Extra switch in the way makes for for like ping times I mean in fact I tested this morning from the studio here so the studio is in the same building it's a It's on the second floor above my office.
Which is where things used to be and then obviously, you know, the house is across the driveway all connected via, Well, the house is connected via direct burial Ethernet and then and then regular Ethernet throughout the house now, but I. Did a ping test and I noticed that pings to like the disk station all the way You know across the driveway completely on the other side of the house We're like, you know point eight milliseconds or something and then I did a test to my Mac Mini
which is sitting in my office right underneath me, and that was like 1.2 milliseconds. So, I think it's more about the device that's responding than it is about the cabling in between, at least when it's all self-contained like this. So, I'm excited to not have to worry about the network devices if and when there's a power outage. So, it should make life a little bit easier for us all here. Is it time? Shall we get to more quick tips and such? Sure. All right.
So, let's start with Christopher. Take us. Thank you, sir. Have you ever had a Finder tab that you wished you could just move to another Finder window to have it part of that Finder window instead?
Instead, I love using Finder tabs, but sometimes I over-organize myself and realize that I want a particular Finder tab, not in Finder window A, but in Finder window B. Well, believe it or not, place your cursor on the tab that you wish to move in Finder window A, click and hold and drag it into Finder window B. Okay. Yeah, yeah, it's sometimes that simple. The same works for multiple Safari windows. You can drag tabs to them.
Probably anything else. I haven't tried it with mail. Um, I do use tabs and mail often, but I don't generally have multiple windows open in mail. So I don't know, but I would presume, I presume it works kind of anywhere. It certainly works in Safari and Chrome and edge and all of that. Yeah. I like it. I love tips like this, the things that we do that amaze us. Uh,
Well, I mean like that's the beauty of it. I in line at South by Southwest for like, movies or events or whatever you know you talk to each other you find out who each other is and and, Occasionally, you know it'd be like so what do you do? And why are you here? And it's like, Oh, I do three podcasts and the set and the other thing. Most people of course have iPhones, and so I would share like a quick tip with them about their iPhone.
And one of my favorite ones to share, which comes up every few years, and we'll share it again here, is the spacebar turns your keyboard into a mouse trick. If people don't already know that, watching the look on their faces when they see you do it for the first time is, I love it, I love the feeling of like seeing the light bulb go off.
And so if you don't know what we're talking about, get out your iPhone, get into some sort of text editing scenario where you have a block of text and a keyboard up. And it's better if you have multiple lines for this particular demo. If you want to get to a, so you've got, you know, three or four lines of text or eight to 12 or 40 lines of text, whatever. If you want to get to a certain spot to edit, You know, you can tap in on the text and hope to get your finger in exactly the right spot,
but that's often an exercise in frustration. What you can do instead is push and hold on the spacebar and now your entire keyboard turns into a trackpad and you can drive the cursor around and you're good to go. So try that out if you didn't know that you could do it and, yeah, fun stuff. So I showed that to a lot of people. That's good. John, we have one more from the Finder. More Finder. So Joe writes in and says, For years I've used color tags in macOS to help me identify
types of files easily. The only painful part was clicking each file button by one to set its particular color, especially when a number of these needed to be the same color. Imagine my surprise today when I curiously clicked on the tags word below the tag selection window window and found I could do them all in one sweep. It's also handy to clear tags from a group regardless of color or tag name. Probably has been there since tags were added, but I never had seen it or heard about this before.
And sure enough, and if you look in the Finder window, we learned this last time or even before that, you'll see tags, dot, dot, dot. What does that mean? It means that there's more to come. Right. Oh yeah, right. That's a good one. Yeah, I use tags a lot. Sometimes I'll double tag something if it's like really important, just to organize my pictures. So I'll do like an orange one and a red one. Okay. And you're, you're tagging your pictures in the finder? Yes.
Okay, now I'm really curious. How are you storing pictures, like, not in the photos app, but like, do you have folders of pictures for various reasons, is that- Yes. Interesting. Mm-hmm. Cool. What is one of those reasons? I'm just curious why you would store pictures outside of the photos app, that's all. Um... Get closer to the mic. We want to hear you.
Yes. Um, just because. Okay. I mean, is there a use case you can share with us just so that we can start thinking about why we might want to do something similar in our lives? No. Okay. Fair enough. We will leave it at that then. Great. One of the quick tips that I learned recently was from Stephen Robles who does the Apple Insider podcast. He posted this one to Twitter and it blew me away.
You know, when you are in messages on the iPhone, we have reactions to those messages and you can press and hold on the message and it shows you the reactions on the top of the message, above the message, I should say, and then a menu of things below the message to, you know, for various things, reply and that sort of thing. And that's great, but you have to press and hold and wait a beat for that to all change in the user interface.
If you just want to pull up the reactions, you can double tap the message and the reactions bubble appears immediately and you can choose one very, very quickly. So pretty cool. Just, and this is, again, it's on the iPhone. I assume it would work on the iPad too. I haven't tried it there, but double tap a message on the iPhone in messages and boom, you'll see the list of reaction options appear magically across the top of the screen.
Uh, so thanks to Steven for that. And we have a different Steven, a listener Steven, who brought us our final quick tip of the week, John. Yeah? Yeah, here's a sneaky one. This is a follow-up to our, I need to figure out how to type a lowercase I on the iPhone without turning off autocorrect. I like it.
So, to type the letter I in lowercase, just create a text replacement with the shortcut such as II, two small I's, and replacement I. You could have first do a shortcut I, but then that would bypass the capitalization that you probably would normally want to happen. Sneaky. I like it. It is sneaky. Yeah, I love these kinds of things. All right, so hey, look, there's been a lot of buzz around AI lately, but maybe you're not sure how it fits into your daily workflow or your daily life.
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This is a limited time offer. Try Notion AI for free right now at Notion.com slash MacGeekGab. And our thanks to Notion and Notion AI for sponsoring this episode. Next up, our sponsor Collide has some big news. If you're an Okta user, they can get your entire fleet to 100% compliance. How? Well, if a device isn't compliant, the user can't log into your cloud apps until they fix the problem. It's that simple.
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Collide.com slash mgg to learn more or book a demo. That's k-o-l-i-d-e dot com slash mgg and our thanks to collide for sponsoring this episode. All right, uh, let's do some, uh, well, some questions and some, some not quite so quick tips. Jeremy found a good one for us, huh, John? Yes, he did. Um, while looking for an earlier version of main stage to download because the current version is so dreadful, I clicked on a wrong download button and it inadvertently
allowed a virus onto my Mac. I got caught. A quick Google reveals there's plenty about this particular malware which manifests itself as a frequent pop-up notification about my Mac being infected, etc. etc. Most of the advice points towards something like Malwarebytes to find the offending bit of code and a room of it. But neither Malwarebytes, CleanMyMac.
Onyx fail to identify and remove the malware. However, I can triumphantly announce that for any of those who are similarly infected, here's how you get rid of it, and it's stunningly simple. In Safari, go to the settings, then under the websites tab, scroll down and hit notifications. For me, the offending malware was sitting there, old as you like at the top of the list, supporting a macOS system. Settings logo, but with no text next to it. Simply delete it. Problem solved.
What an interesting vector for this, right? Because most of the time, like, when we think of malware, we think of an application, like a program that's running on our computer. Even a browser plugin or extension or whatever, like, we've certainly seen those. But that's code that's running on your computer.
All this is doing is using the Safari website notifications vector as, or functionality as it's vector to send you these notifications and hope that you click on one of them which would bring you to their webpage, which I presume is supposed to look like something official, and then maybe that would get you to install the next thing. Thank goodness listener Jeremy didn't didn't get caught the second time right so,
That's pretty good. I like I mean I like I don't like it I don't like that people are doing this, but you know I have to appreciate the cleverness of, Thinking of using that but it is good to go in to your Safari Notifications every now and again and just see what websites you've given permission, to to give you those notifications that. Because you might decide to remove some of them. It's also good to take a look in Safari preferences extensions as well.
For the same reason, just see who has access to things in Safari and do you still want it to be that way, did you intend for that? And even if you did, do you still want it to be that way? So, that's a pretty good one. Interesting. Alright, next up we have a question from Xavier. He says, at my school, it appears I can't use IMAP email. When attempting to connect to Gmail on the web, it works just fine. But when I use a program like Apple Mail to do it, doesn't work.
The IMAP access setting is turned on. Is there a way to make it connect to the Gmail IMAP server? I figured out that connecting to a website at any other port than the standard port is also forbidden. Is there anything I can do to make this happen anyway or suggest to my IT admin?" Says, I know it sounds off topic. Oh, not at all. No, this is great, Xavier. So I don't know what school you go to, but I experienced something similar when I'm on the UNH network, John, nearby here.
It's the University of New Hampshire is right next to us. And we go there for hockey games all the time. Of Wi-Fi throughout the arena. We've got Wi-Fi, you know, the campus is bathed in Wi-Fi. But I can't check IMAP email when I'm there, unless, unless, I'm on a VPN. And once I'm on a VPN, I can do whatever I want. The trick for you, Xavier, is going to be using a VPN on one of the standard web browsing ports.
Because clearly, they are only allowing that to go through. There might be other things that they allow to go through, but it's entirely likely that they are blocking the standard VPN ports. Thankfully, most good VPNs have lots of different endpoints where you can hit them and often, they will also include the standard web browsing ports.
And I say ports because there are two. There's port 80 for insecure connections, for plain text connections, and then, or unencrypted connections, I should say. And then port 443, which is for all SSL connections, the HTTPS with the little lock in the thing. So, uh, I would try private internet access. They are a former sponsor of this show, but are very much my current VPN. PIA has been great. I'll put a link in the show notes to it.
I think there might even still be a MacGeekGab deal on that, even though, even though they aren't an active sponsor, but piavpn.com.mgg I believe is the link for that. So, but a VPN that will let you connect on the, you know, the web browsing ports would be the one to check out. But start with, you know, PIA or Nord or something like that and see. Most of them will.
If they fail on the standard ports, we'll try on the on the next one. So hopefully that gets you there. When my kids were in school, local school here, you know, at the high school, they and all of their friends used VPNs all day long on the on the school's network because it would block things like Instagram and that. And they were like, I need to be on Instagram to communicate with people. So, yeah. Yeah.
It's good. Yeah. I did the same thing. Our local, the grocery store that I go to the most. Yep. Offers free wifi as does almost everybody. But this is the thing I found funny when I tried, so I connected to their wifi and then I went to the Connecticut lottery page because they sell lottery tickets. Sure. I tried to go to the page and it said blocked. And I'm like, why? Or it gives the reason. I think it was a Cisco product, a Cisco firewall. And it's like blocked because it's gambling.
And I'm like, but you guys sell lottery tickets here. So why are you prohibiting me from going to the Connecticut lottery? But yeah, I did the same thing. I connected to my VPN and voila, I was able to get wherever I wanted to go. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's good. TN Papa in our Discord chat, John asks if Apple's private relay would solve this and no, it would not. Private relay is really only built. It's built for two things. It's built for websites.
If you are a paid iCloud subscriber and you have private relay turned then any websites you visit will go through Apple's relay, but it's still all gonna happen on port 443. If you are a, if you are anyone, not paid iCloud subscriber or a paid iCloud subscriber with private relay turned off, there are still some things that go through private relay, all known trackers, any, any web tracker, you know, pixel tracker, whatever that Apple knows about is shoveled through their private relay as well.
So that you aren't tracked by the known trackers. Uh, a lot of people don't, don't realize that, but yeah, Craig Federighi talked about that at the, um, one of the WWDC events that year, when all of this came. Out, um, the other time that private relay is used is if an app, Apple or third party attempts to connect to an HTTP resource. Uh, this is not safari. This is a third-party app, like on, on iPhone, you know, the, if you've got an app, if it's connecting to HTTPS, Apple lets it go through.
No problem. It's connecting to HTTP. Apple says it's going to be secure and routes it securely through its private relay. It's insecure from Apple's relay out to the website, but between you and the relay all secure. So, uh, but for, for email, it's the private relay doesn't get in the way. Uh, for, uh, especially for IMAP email. So that's not going to solve the issue there, but it's a good question.
And I'm glad you asked it. And I'm glad we, we had a, this is what I love about doing the show live. There, there are certain things I don't like about doing the show live. Um, but, but mostly I like it because it allows for those kinds of questions to come in, in real time, which is great. So, uh, yeah, so just doesn't, it just doesn't, it, it, private relay doesn't impact IMAP mail. So, yeah. Um, alright, Joe has the next question up, John. He asks.
My question is related to international travel and how you manage your iPhone when traveling. I know of the eSIM database and I'm good with the data portion of this, but I recall on some fairly recent episode where there was also an aspect of voice calling mentioned. I think Wi-Fi calling is active as long as I'm on Wi-Fi and all is good with no surcharges, but I can't find documentation on that. But what if I'm not on Wi-Fi and need voice cellular? Seems like you
mentioned a database for that too. And as a bonus question, how do you handle international calling from home when setting up your travel? I have consumer cellular and they aren't cost-friendly on international rates. It seemed like Wi-Fi calling might work, but again, can't find actual info. So you're right that with most carriers, when you're international, but on Wi-Fi calling, then you get phone and SMS, I won't say for free, but it probably is for free.
It's certainly included in your plan, but by all means, check with your provider before you go. Don't make this assumption. I did it recently. I checked with Mint Mobile, which is my provider still, and they confirmed, yes, if you're on Wi-Fi calling, any SMS or or phone calls that you receive or make. Included in your plan, which with my plan is free.
And when I was in Italy recently, I did a lot of SMS receiving on my Mint Mobile number and the ones that came in and out when I was on Wi-Fi calling were not charged to my account balance. The ones that came in and out while I was, when I was off of Wi-Fi, definitely were charged. And for me, with my plan, it's five cents each for SMS in and out. It could, that can add up, you know.
As for calling intern so it so check the eSIM database they they and that's at eSIMdb.com and we'll again put a link to this in the show notes if you need a plan you know internationally that will allow you to have voice and or sms on it you can get that uh it eSIMdb is not just for data only sims though certainly there are lots of them in there they also have uh you know regular like full full full featured sims with voice and minutes and all that good stuff so you
can you can find all that at eSimDB if you need it for travel. As far as for calling internationally from home, FaceTime or WhatsApp you know some sort of um data based communication app is the way. Um, I rant about how we haven't embraced WhatsApp here in the U S like it is abroad. Um, but it, you know, that's how it, just how it is. Uh, but yeah, any, any VoIP app, right. And FaceTime audio is a VoIP app.
So like when we, when we're going to call our daughter in Italy, uh, if we're going, to do a, you know, with, with voice, we use FaceTime audio. Um, and you know, it's, it's a little bit, you just need to be intentional when you're making the call to choose that as opposed to just calling the number.
Number but but then then you're just using a data connection now make sure you're either on Wi-Fi or that you have enough data as part of your plan to to cover whatever you know audio you're gonna do but yeah that's that's the way is make sure you do it that way and then and then you're in good shape so.
Thoughts what what do you have to add to that I'm gonna say I need to learn to stop asking you yes or no questions John because I set myself up for it I will Our friend Martin, who is from Europe, tried to communicate with me using messages, and I think what worked for him, so if he tried to use his phone number, my phone, he couldn't reach my phone, but I think when I gave him my Apple ID, that did work for him, so.
Interesting, is your phone numbers attached to iMessage? to iMessage though it like it should have figured that out interesting huh yeah right yeah yeah, Interesting. Yeah, and making sure that not only you have all of the right things attached to iMessage in your settings, but that the people that are contacting you have the right things so that
they will get to you via iMessage if they are Apple users. If they're not, then you've got to use WhatsApp or Telegram or Signal or something like that. And you let me know about this one time, and that I had to do a restore on my phone for some reason. And then all of a sudden, when you and I tried to message, you're like, are you sure you have that checkbox checked? Yeah, because you were a green bubble person for a little while. Yeah, and it was on one device.
I was able to message, or when I compared the preferences for each device, they weren't the same. So that's why that didn't work for me. Interesting. Wow. Really? Because your devices, like I mess, I message preferences should be the same from device to device. I guess not. No, you can. Yes. Yeah, you're right. You said it individually because I have some devices that have certain email addresses that come through and not others. So yeah. All right. Yeah.
Fascinating. While we're on the subject of security, Mr. Mr. Braun, you want to take us to, Lee has a question about security keys and then you might have some experience with some security keys. Well, he has a rant, I think. I can tell you right now, a security key dongle option is never going to be one I employ. In the past, I had to professionally rely on dongle-based protection for several applications and plug them in usually very expensive applications.
It's true that the dongle allows the user to move seamlessly between installations and platforms until the seams come apart. There's no end to the ways dongles vanish. Not just bad scenarios like death, fire, flood, but all the things that happen to keyring, a common safe place for a dongle, like lending them to someone going on a cross-country jaunt, toilets, washing machines, rivers, lakes, or just putting them down somewhere.
Bags, pockets, drawers, USB ports, and other safe places aren't much better either. Have you ever found out where those missing socks go? And where are those spare house keys? Alright, so he makes, rant taken, Lee, right? When you add another physical device to your authentication path, you create a scenario where you can't lose that device, otherwise you lose your authentication.
It's like losing your password, which isn't a physical device, but if you lose it, and, that's the key to the encryption, then it's lost. But Apple mitigates against this with security keys now, correct, John? Correct. Go! To enable a security key, first off, so a security key is a physical device like a. Yubico device. But I only had one of them, so I ordered another one. Then I was able to deploy security keys on the phone. Now here's what Apple does though. You need at least two, right?
And they actually ask you, and we have a dandy little article from them, they actually will let you add up to six. So they knew enough not to let you just use one key, because as was pointed out, if you lose it, you're in big trouble. Yeah, yeah, for sure. So you have at least two of these YubiKeys now, John, and you were able to set up your security key, how do you like it? It didn't work as expected. I have to do more investigation here.
So both of these keys, so one is USB-A and NFC, and one is USB-C and USB-C. Wait, USB-C, there's two USB-Cs on it? No. Okay, so you said one is USB-A and NFC, and you said the other is USB-C and USB-C. Did you mean- Oh, I'm sorry, USB-C and NFC. Got it, I understand now. Okay, I'm with you. Right, okay. So what did you expect and what didn't it do?
I got to find out why it isn't... So if I use it on the phone and hold it up to the top of the phone, which is where the NFC is, it will authenticate to my Apple ID. The thing is, I can't seem to get it to work on my Mac. Well, your Mac doesn't have an NFC reader, so that would make sense. You would have to have a USB-C port. Make sure to stay on the mic so we can hear you. So, but I got the one with the USB-C port, which my Mac does have. Okay. So why didn't that work?
I guess my assumption was that the serial number of the key is shared between the connections, but I guess that's not the case. Oh, so you think, have you contacted YubiKey support about this, by the way? No. Okay. Do, please do that, because it would be, that would be helpful for this conversation. So actually, I'm going to, there is a, you have a theory that I don't want to put words into your mouth, that US, that the, you would need to set the key up twice, once NFC and
once USB-C. Is that what you're thinking? Yes. Have you tried that? Well, I can't do the... Couldn't you start the process on your Mac or no? I don't, I'm gonna try that. Okay, great. All right, well, so circle back with us on that because that would be fascinating. Because it did list them in both locations. Yeah. So when I looked, so you give it a name when you add it and when I added both of them on the phone
I looked at the same section on my Mac OS machine, it was like, oh yeah, you got two security keys. . Oh, okay. All right, but it but it plugging it only knows them. Yeah, again, maybe it only knows them, on the machine that it was, configured on All right We'll finish that process this week and circle back because we want to we want to know great, Make sure to stay on the mic as well when you talk. Uh, we can't keep reminding you of this. So, um.
I had a weird issue about uh, 15 minutes ago here with the show. In fact, we had to I had to reboot my mac, Suddenly, I started hearing the audio in a very crackly way, so all of that wood knocking that I did at the beginning of the show failed, clearly. But, I started hearing audio with stutters. It sounded like everybody, including me, was talking while someone was beating on your back. You know how it makes you sound stuttery and weird when someone's doing that on your back?
In fact, that's what it sounded like. I'm like, well, I can't do the show like this. But John, you weren't hearing it that way. No one on any of the streams was hearing it that way. The audio recording was not that way. It was literally only the audio that was making it to my ears. So I did some troubleshooting. I did the normal things. I power cycled my audio device, which is a Thunderbolt Quantum 2626. No, I quit and relaunched Logic, which is the app that I use to sort of be my mixer.
No. I did play the audio through my Mac speakers. Yes, that was fine, including the audio coming in through my Thunderbolt device. So I thought, well, I could move my headphones to my Mac and like just deal, but this seems like a problem that might not be a good idea to just ignore. And I finally, you know, looking at all of those signals and such, I reasoned, I think I have a Thunderbolt problem.
Because my audio device is thunderbolt everything else on them. You know connected to the Mac was working fine, so I shut down my Mac, just for, to be thorough, because I wasn't interested in finding out exactly what was going on, I was interested in getting it fixed. I power cycled, not just my Mac, but all of my Thunderbolt devices, then I brought my Mac back up, and, you know, more wood knocking. We've been good for the last 15 minutes or so here, since we've been back for the show.
But, uh, it's fascinating. It's, uh, it's just, I've never experienced that particular thing before. No, I mean, I was gone for two weeks. I, but I've, I've, I've recorded like three shows and in the studio since I've been back. So it's not like this is a, a, a first time at it, but it's just one of those weird things that it was only audio out, not audio in and not audio recorded.
I don't know, some weird interrupting thing and I tried like I said, I tried resetting the, the the device so that it would. You know re-sync itself and no didn't matter it was something something who knows something in the chain maybe but, I'll fix now our last question comes from listener Scott and, I If the audio is to behave, Scott, take it away. Hello, John, Dave, and Pete. Scott here from Palm Springs. I have a quick question about updating my 14-inch MacBook Pro to...
Ventura from Monterey and What the process would be if I wanted to roll it back? I've got two legacy apps that were great in Monterey. They are no longer in development.
But I'm not sure if they're gonna work with Ventura Normally, I would just roll it back to a disk image that I created in carbon copy cloner I don't think you can do that with Apple silicon, Is the only way if I had to roll it back to Monterey back up with time machine and, then Restore the entire system and then restore from my time machine backup. Seems like a bunch of steps, but didn't know if you had any other feedback. Thanks so much, Yeah unfortunately Scott that would be the the way,
And I don't like that would be the best case. I don't even know that that Monterey, a prior version of Mac OS, is going to happily read like the- let me say this a better, more concise way. I don't know that Migration Assistant in a prior version is going to read data from a Time Machine backup from a future version. However, Kiwi Graham in the Discord might have our answer for us.
He says, uh, carbon copy cloner tells you to first reinstall the old Mac OS and then restore data from your carbon copy cloner backup. So that would be the way to do it is yes. Shoot a carbon copy cloner backup. Then if you need to roll back, do it that way. And, and you'll bring your, you'll, you'll bring your, your, data over in the right way. Yeah. There's a, there's a consensus forming that migration assistant probably isn't I'm gonna be too happy about what you are proposing here.
But carbon copy cloner would be sort of the way. So, John, what are your thoughts on this? Would virtualizing your old environment make sense? Uh, how would you do that? I don't know that we can virtualize macOS on Apple Silicon these days. Yeah, I was looking. I thought Parallels had released the M1 version, but maybe not. Maybe not. Yeah, I don't know that it'll do it with Mac OS, maybe, maybe. Yeah. I mean, yes, I like the, I would agree that, that virtualizing it would be the answer.
I just don't know that there is a way for us to do that, but otherwise that's a great idea. Um, but yeah, because then it, it just compartmentalizes it and it will always be whatever you want it to be, regardless of what hardware it's running on, but. Yeah, our virtualization options on macOS are. Sadly lacking these days and and I'm not overly happy about this, but it is it is the way.
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All right, let's do some cool stuff found here, John. The first thing that I want to share comes from listener Alex S. in our Discord, and, It's Mac Whisper, which is a Mac app that uses Whisper's AI to do transcription. So it's native Mac OS app, leverages the Whisper AI, which is one of the sort of standard now AI transcription engines, and does it right there on your Mac. So yeah, pretty cool stuff. It's like, I am using AI a ton here in my both work and personal life.
I want to, in fact, we'll save this for next week when Pete's here. I want to do a segment on how all three of us are using AI, because I think we can learn from each other and start that conversation. But yeah, thank you, Alex, for sharing. Mac whisper. Good stuff. And while we're on the subject of audio. I found a piece of software called Hush, John, that is sort of purpose-built for removing, again, using AI to clean up recorded speech.
So it'll pull out like background noise and like, you know, hums and hisses and things like that, and hisses and things like that without, they say, without. Changing the timbre of the voice quality in the original. It's super automated and of course it's a native Mac app. It's called Hush. So we'll put that link in the show notes. But a little bit of AI for your audio needs, which makes things fun. Yeah, I'm super happy, at least currently, to be living in an AI-driven world. It's good stuff.
You want to take us to... You have a cool stuff found from listener Roger, huh, John? A cool stuff found revisited, really. Yeah. So Roger says, if Libby does not work, Libby being a service that lets you. That gives you a virtual library. So he said, if Libby does not work, this will use the hoopla app from your Apple TV to view loans of music, TV or movies through your local library. Each month you get eight loans, which worked for a six episode of a TV series we recently watched.
It takes a while to set it up, but we got it to work well. And I was like, huh, that sounds really familiar. And so I went to hoopla.com, Dave, and guess what? I have an account. So I think it's hoopladigital.com, not hoopla.com, but just so people know. The link will be in the show notes, so you can click it from there. And if you want the show notes in your email, go to mattgeekup.com, sign up. Every week, we automatically send you the show notes so you get all the links.
But were you, did you get up, did you, did you get up, did you set up the Apple TV app? Like, were you able to get that rolling? Oh, okay. I will. Yeah. Okay. I thanks for letting us know because yeah, but you can do it through the browser Which is what I did in the past. Yeah, I um after we talked about it in show 968,
I I went and looked and it's like I went to sign up and it's like, okay. Well you need to, activate your library card this way or whatever and and, I was like, okay And it like my public library was on the list And so I guess I had to get a pin for my library card or something. And so I called my library and they gave me the pin. And then I was able to, to get Hoopla set up. I had, I, I'd been using Libby for years.
Libby, I know we talked about it recently, but Libby is awesome for, for renting books or borrowing books from the library. Um, and you can link them straight to your Kindle app if you want to read. In fact, you don't have to have to put them on the Kindle app.
I read them on my Kindle Paperwhite, which is awesome. But, uh, I had not until we talked about it in, in nine 68, I hadn't really, I wasn't really aware of how hoopla worked and I haven't used it yet, but I've got it all set up. I haven't set it up on my Apple TV. I don't even think I knew that there was an Apple TV up until this very moment. So, so we will, uh, more, more on that. But yeah, it's cool stuff. Fun.
Are there any, do you use Libby with your library, are there any other things you use, John? No. Okay. Guys, you gotta stop asking me those questions. Well, actually, no, there is another, there is, um, okay, here's another one that I think I do have the Apple TV app for, Tubi, T-U-B-I, watch free movies and TV shows online, okay. That's cool. Are there things that you watch in Tubi, like specific things that you've used Tubi for?
I'm just I'm just curious if like what kind of content is is out there in to be like to whom would it be valuable I guess is the the you know. The question I'm looking they say thousands of titles browse titles let's browse some titles here. Shattered, Columbo, Divorce Court, SUPER BAD! Oh, well, then it's great. If it's got super bad, they've got The Matrix. Okay! Ah! Huh! That's not- Wow! Alright! Huh! Okay. Three movies and TV, fewer ads than cable. Ah, that's the catch. Okay.
Yeah. That's pretty good. Alright. Yeah, there's- I mean, there's- Like, you could probably find something on here to- to pass some time. I don't know. Fun. Cool. All right. The next thing up is Camo, which is an app that I use every week. I've been using it since last year to allow me to use my iPhone as a camera. Now, of course, as a webcam. Apple came out with continuity camera earlier this, or late last year.
And that's fine, but it doesn't have nearly the features that camo does in terms of being able to control like how the camera looks and like zoom or any of that stuff it's just sort of you know here's your iphone we know best. And for somethings like they probably do. Camo now expands things. So instead of just being that link between your camera and your phone and having all those great feature, your phone camera and your Mac and having all those great features.
Camo 2 now works with your webcam, your built-in camera, your continuity camera. So it all of the cool, Any of the cool camo features that could be used on a given camera that you might have can now be used on that camera. Doesn't mean that you get Apple's magic of like portrait mode on a webcam that has no smarts for portrait mode because camo isn't doing portrait mode. It's simply leveraging the iPhone's ability to do portrait mode. Those are two different things and it's awesome.
But so a lot of the smarts that are built into Apple's cameras are only there for Apple's cameras but you get to leverage them in Camo now, regardless of how you are connecting the camera up. So I'm pretty stoked about what Camo is doing and Camo works wired or wireless. Here in the studio, I leave my iPhone 13 mini just sitting on top of the computer in the studio. And when I say sitting on top, We've talked about this. I have this like clamp arm mount thing
cause it's a pain in the neck to do this. It should be way easier, but it's not. So maybe there's more. I've got to try more mounts, but we'll get there. I should have brought one with me when I traveled. It would have been a better camera to use. But anyway, camo makes life easy. I like the camo. What, what webcam are you using these days, John? Uh... Get closer to the microphone! Logitech? There it is.
Dude! Why is this- Wait, wait, wait, I gotta ask now, because this is like the seventh time that I've mentioned it, and then people in the chat have been screaming about it too. This is different today. This is a new habit for you. Is it because after the last show, there were some background noises that you were making, like, you know, rubbing your hands together and stuff. So we had you turn up yourself in your ears.
Is the reason that you're not leaning forward a byproduct of you being louder to yourself and not thinking that you need to be louder for the listeners? Okay, alright. So we got to fix that. Maybe we need to put a lift on the back of your chair so it's just constantly leaning you forward. Yeah, yeah. Okay. Yeah, I have the Brio. Logitech Brio. Okay. I I bet can't I I want to hear how camo works on the Logitech Brio because that would be a great little test
So you got to test that out for us and let us know next week. It's good. Okay fun. Um Oh. Here's another thing that you could test out for us John the next cool stuff found comes from, listener cam alien and, I'll pull it up here, but I know what it is. It's fantastic He says, I set up several HomePod and HomePod minis around my house today. When setting up the Home app, it asked me if I wanted to turn on and use intercom. This allows you to use the HomePods as intercom devices.
You can even send the audio to iPhones, watches, and AirPods. Makes it even easier to tell the kids dinner is ready and it can be activated by Siri. That's pretty cool. Huh, you've got two home pods, right John? Mm-hmm. Oh, you gotta set this up and test this for us too. I don't have any home pods. So, you're the one, but I'm curious how that works. Like, setting it up and then having it message your phone or your watch? That's pretty good.
So you just, once you set it up, you say, Siri, intercom, it's time to wake up. Or Siri, ask everyone, has the dog been fed, or you can be specific about it, you can say, Siri, announce upstairs, the movie is starting, Siri, ask the kitchen, what's for breakfast, I wish my kitchen would make me breakfast. Uh, and then you can use Siri to reply as well, you can say, Siri, reply, you know, I fed the dog in the morning, or Siri, make your own breakfast, uh, that's pretty good. Uh-huh.
Fascinating. Oh, what's going on? Is this my freaking, you know, I didn't use the H word. Why is the why? I didn't use the H word. I swear you heard me. I recorded it. Why did it listen, man? That's weird. Like I thought we had to say, hey, and then after that, say the word Siri in order for her to listen. Clearly, she's listening more than I wanted. This isn't good. I don't know man. I don't know. Siri's listening more than I wanted.
More than I realized. Yeah, I've noticed that as well. Is that right? Oh, yeah, I'll be watching a TV show or a movie and all of a sudden something will trigger her and it's like, yeah, we get with the Amazon thing, anything that has like the licks sound in it, right? Because that's in the a, Lex, uh, right. You know, but if it, if there's like a sound that has like a vowel and then the,
the, the, the, the X sound that, that often. And what sucks is in our living room, you know, we use the Sonos arc as our, as our like sound in the living room and it has, uh, the a lady enabled on it and so it means that the sound from our movie that just made that trigger sound like gets reduced while it waits for the next command and it's like nope you literally made the sound yourself like it came out of you why don't you know this it should
Anyway, yeah, we need to put a limit on John's chair lean back. I agree. I have a little bit of cool stuff found to share, John, and perhaps even a little bit of show-and-tell with the next one. It's a company that, well, we knew about them before CES, but we ran into them at CES. It's a company called Rolling Square. And they make a lot of cool things, but their InCharge cable is my new favorite, and it comes in all different sizes.
I have this really short one that if you're watching the video, you'll see but I'll explain it The only reason I have the short one is because they sent me three, three lengths this one that's like a foot long and then a two meter and a three meter and The other people in my house quickly commandeered the two and three meter versions. So. When you look at this cable one nice part is it magnetizes itself together?
So so it it like it fits nicely in your bag and the larger versions come with a nice little case that you can just roll them up and put it in, which is great. And when you first look at it, it's a USB-A to Lightning cable, which is cool. But let's say you needed a USB-C to Lightning cable. Well, you just pop the end off and it has this cool little hinge thing. And now there's a USB-C tip to Lightning. And what if you needed USB-C to USB-C? Well, it'll do that too by popping off the other tip.
So now you got USB-C to USB-C. And lastly, if you wanted USB-A to charge your USB-C things, which as John learned, doesn't really work well for your laptop, but it would work for like your. Well, your next iPhone certainly, or your iPad would even charge this way.
Boom, you got it, you're good to go. So handy little cable, it's perfect for travel and a great thing to leave in your travel case because you've always got all of the things that you would need, A, lightning, C, and C, And that's the, uh, rolling square in charge cable with all self-contained. It doesn't have like, you're not going to lose the adapter to go from C to lightning because it's built into the cable. It just swings out of the way.
It's pretty good. And, uh, as Brian Monroe in the chat points out designed in Switzerland. So, uh, I believe him makes sense to me. I know, I know that they, after CES, they left and went back to somewhere in Europe, so I think that tracks, but they have, they have all different sizes of these in-charge cables. So you got to go check it out. As Brian Monroe says, oh, I like it. The Swiss army knife of cables. Yeah, yeah. Super efficient. It's just simple and smart.
So I like it. I like things like that because it makes our life better. We got a couple more cool stuff's found. Yeah, John? Sure. Cool. Um, Alex again in discord, man, showed us another cool thing using AI. This time it is called warp and it is well, first warp is just a, uh, a terminal app for your Mac, right? So you can download that and use it as a terminal, but they added warp AI to it, which includes an AI engine right there in the terminal.
And what it's great for is things like saying, I need to convert .7z files to .chd. And then boom, it comes back and says, you can use the chdman tool from the main project to convert these. Here's an example command, and it shows you the code and you can even copy the code and paste it right into the terminal. And then of course, because it's using a transformative AI, which means that you get to interact with it based on previous answers.
You can ask the question, hey, can I make it recursive? And it's like, sure you can. Here's the code to do that. I asked it, you know, how do I convert three audio files from FLAC to MP3? And it's like, you can use the FFmpeg command line tool to convert these. And it gave me a command. And it's like, make sure you have FFmpeg installed on your system before running this command. You can install it using Homebrew by running brew install FFmpeg.
So like, this is one of the killer use cases of AI is being able to, like, it's a much better search engine. It's funny, Lisa and Emily, our niece who lives with us, and I were on the couch the other night and talking about AI and Lisa hadn't installed, you know, hadn't launched ChatGPT yet, so.
She did, and we showed her a couple things, like I asked her, I asked ChatGPT to come up with, well the first thing I did was, I was like tell me, help me convince my wife that we should only have cats and not dogs, right, like, you know, fine, because we were having this conversation, she's like, I don't want to have cats anymore, I just want to have dogs, and I'm like, well, let's go the other way, so, so I did that, and it was like, okay, great, and then I said, well, add to it, you know, something about, you know.
Traveling and how cats are easier so it rewrote it and did that and then I said okay now write it as a limerick and it did this awesome limerick for for me to read to Lisa which I didn't she wasn't super happy about it but later that night I found Lisa was using it like a search engine now chat GBT isn't the best search engine because it doesn't have current data its data is about 18
months old but with what Bing is doing with what Google's doing leveraging current data and letting an AI, like that's, that's going to be another key thing, but yeah, having it, I've had it write a lot of code for me. I know I said we were going to do this in the next episode, so we'll, we'll, we'll, I'll, I'll, I'll back off now. But, um, but if you haven't played with chat GPT, definitely check it out. So it's, it's fascinating to me and it
makes life super easy. Uh, you know, it, it takes a lot of the friction out of the creation parts of things so we'll talk about it next episode uh unless you have anything to share about it now john i tried to sign up and i never got activated so all right we'll sign up again and then start playing with it yeah it's fun that's good yeah at least i had no trouble signing up the other night so you might have just tried to hit it at a time or maybe or check your spam folder like it might
I'd have sent you your email in there. Uh, alright, let's see, one last cool stuff found? Sure, I'm not sure, I'm not sure this hits our 20% rule but it's a good one for people who need it. Listener Jeff tells us about Creators Best Friend, which he says is, I struggled for a few months trying to grab the timestamps of chapter markers for my YouTube videos in Final Cut Pro and then finally found Creators Best Friend. I've been using it for many months now and couldn't be happier.
The app works in Final Cut Pro and Adobe Premiere. Once you have your video completely, once you have edited your video completely and before or even after you render it, all you need to do is click the icon in the menu bar of Final Cut Pro and copy the clipboard and paste it into anywhere And you just boom, get all of the chapters magically through, right from Final Cut Pro.
Right there, so that's uh, that's pretty good if you're if you're doing if you're doing anything in Final Cut Pro I'm publishing to YouTube or any if you're publishing anything to YouTube, Where there are segments to your video putting in the chapter timestamps in to YouTube is awesome And it you don't like there's once you get the timestamps. There's no magic to it You just put the timestamp in the description And you can see how it's done on our MacGeekGab channel.
If you go to youtube.com slash at MacGeekGab or simply macgeekgab.com slash YouTube brings you to the same place. If you look at our full length, you know, episode videos, we put the chapter timestamps in there, but when YouTube renders them, you can click them and it jumps you to that point in the chapter, but it also shows the video with those chapters broken out in the timeline and it will give you the names. And it's a pretty cool thing. So, uh, nice that they make a tool for that.
You got anything else for today, Mr. Braun? No. All right. Well then it's time to bring the band in. I don't really know where we are on time. Actually, I do have an idea. I think we're, I think we're at about 110 right now, maybe 109. Uh, we had to chop the recording into two because I had to reboot my computer, but it survived the rest of the show. So, I will chalk that up to the gremlins that lived in my studio while I was gone,
even though it's been fine. And even though my computer rebooted yesterday, like, I don't know, man. But, whatever. Whatever. Here we are. As we often say on this show when troubleshooting, if the problem only ever happens once, don't spend too much time thinking about it, because you might never be able to replicate it to know if you've figured out what it was
or fixed it. So that's where we're at. That's where we're at. Yo. Our thanks to Cashfly for providing all the bandwidth to get the show from us to you. Make sure you check out the shows that, uh, that we do that isn't this one, Pilot Pete's So There I Was.us, my GigGabPodcast.com and also MyBusinessBrain.show. We would, I say my, that's wrong. I do a show at giggabpodcast.com. I also do another show at businessbrain.show. There's no my in front of those URLs. I was speaking.
I knew what I was saying. Most of you probably knew what I was saying, just for clarity. There's no my in front of those URLs. Thanks for hanging out with us, folks. Thanks for checking out our sponsors. Of course, we mentioned them in the episode, but check out collide, K-O-L-I-D-E.com slash M-G-G. Notion.com slash MacGeeKab for some AI goodness. That's really cool what they're doing with it. shadyraze.com slash mgg2. Music.
John, if you would be so kind as to lean real close to the mic and tell people those three, three words in your sultriest of voice, we would appreciate it. Don't get caught. Made on a Mac. I love it. Later!