It's time for MacGeekGab and I will bring us our quick tip of the week. Despite whatever's going on with my throat here, I noticed I had an app I wanted to share with somebody and it was an app that was installed on my phone. And I could have certainly gone to the App Store and searched for it and click the share link there. But I tried just long pressing on the app icon. And listen, this works in the app library, on your home screen, and even in spotlight results.
Long press on it, you get a share icon. You can choose that. Boom, you send it out. It gives the App Store link to whomever you send it, however you send it. Amazing. More quick tips like this, plus your questions answered today on MacGeekGab 1022 for Monday, January 29th, 2024. Music. Greetings, folks, and welcome to Mac Geek of the Show, where you send in tips like that. You send in cool stuff found. You send in your questions.
We answer your questions. We share your tips. We share your cool stuff found. We share our own tips and cool stuff found. The goal being each and every one of us learns at least five new things every single time we get together. Today, I'm going to learn if throat coat tea is enough to keep my throat going through the show. Sponsors for this episode include a new one. Try nom dot com slash MGG where you can give nom nom a try. Try great custom sort of formulated pet food.
And you get if you go to Trinam dot com slash MGG, you get 50 percent off your no risk two week trial and better help dot com slash geek gab. I know it's a different URL, but that's what they told us we have to use. So it's better help dot com slash geek gab. You give online therapy a try. We always put the links for these things in the show notes so that you don't have to remember them. You can just go to the show notes and click.
You can get the show notes at macgeekup.com. You can also, while you're there, sign up for our mailing list that will deliver the show notes straight to your inbox so that you have them and you don't even have to think about it here in Durham, New Hampshire. I'm Dave Hamilton. Here in South Dakota, I'm Adam Christensen.
And here from osaka japan is pilot pete and i've got a suggestion dave you just keep talking and we'll change the title of the show to the max squeak gap man you're having a rough day yeah holy cow there is there is uh a a point in my range that i'm finding above which things just squeak and there it is ouch yep glad i don't have to sing tonight so although although a tip, Tip, if I didn't, if I'd thought about this before the show, I probably would have done it too.
Advil tends to be a nice way of mitigating the laryngitis. It doesn't solve the thing that caused the laryngitis, but it does, you know, reduce the swelling. It reduces the swelling. Yeah, a friend of mine is a physician in the Boston area, and he's also a sax player, and we played gigs, and I remember showing up years ago to a gig. And he said, you know, I'm like, I don't know that I can sing all that much tonight in this in this band. I only sang harmony. So it wasn't a big deal.
He's like, oh, you should have told me I could have brought you some prednisone. I'm like, what? No, I wouldn't. And he said, no, he says we do that for opera singers that come into Boston. If like his office is the one that would get called to go. And if somebody's got laryngitis, they give him a shot of prednisone. Boom. That's it. You know, anti-inflammatory, you reduce the swelling in the throat. Not that I am recommending that you just take prednisone willy-nilly or even Advil willy-nilly.
Make these choices. Dave, it's okay. We're doctors. Only in Mexico am I a doctor, Pete. That's right. And me in India. And you in India. That's right. Adam, are you a doctor anywhere? I am not. Okay. Okay. All right. Well, you'll get there.
Be part of this show long enough, you'll become a doctor. an honorary doctor of macology i guess there you go that's right yeah that's right hey doctor of macology do you want to take us to our next quick tip yeah i have a quick tip from uh kent he says i just learned about and used this on a recent flight if you have a flight number and an i message in my case i sent myself a message containing the airline and flight numbers your phone will recognize it as such tap the
flight number and you'll get a pop-up with two Two choices, preview flight and copy flight code. Tap preview flight and you'll get information including flight status, terminal, and gate number. Yeah, data detectors are cool. Data detectors are cool. That's right. Yeah. They are. And let me jump in on top of that. I completely forgot about this, but in... Oh, boy, do not get old. What's it called? The search. Spotlight. Spotlight. Thank you. I wanted to call it Searchlight.
You can call it Searchlight. You could. If you launch Searchlight, Spotlight, with command space, put, for instance, DL83. That's Delta Airlines 83. And it comes right up. It says it's from Paris to Atlanta. Oh, look at that. It's on time. Yeah, it'll recognize stuff. Yeah. I just showed this to my wife when we were taking, I think we talked about last time, we took my daughter, she was flying back from college or back to college from being home.
And we were checking flight stuff. And again, my only comment on that, and you explained why, Pete, was that they start moving the plane the minute it leaves the gate on the map line. Right. Right. Just based on like, I think what they have in terms of, hey, it's supposed to arrive here. So they just kind of like, they do the math. Oh, yes. Not really like tracking the plane in real time with a satellite or anything like that.
Yeah, it isn't until the airplane is actually airborne that the ADS-B system kicks in and starts doing it. And then here's more information is I just found out. So I had DL83 in Spotlight, and I hit the Enter key, and it comes up with a nice little window that has even more, including a little map to the side, and then it says Open in Maps. So I haven't done that yet, but let's see what that looks like. I mean, this works for package tracking numbers. Sure.
If people don't know, like if you have a tracking number for any large carrier, carrier, UPS, FedEx, USPS, phone numbers, obviously everybody knows, addresses to bring up maps. Sure. It's their Apple data detectors. I don't know how many, it'd be cool to find a list of like every data detector that Apple has built in, but they have a ton of them. Yeah. But so I hit it, it brought up opening maps, it just brought it right to terminal one in Charlottesville.
The developer docs for Apple data detectors, uh, relevant domain specific information from matches of the following types, calendar events, email addresses, flight numbers, web links, amounts of money with currencies, phone numbers, postal addresses, and shipment tracking numbers. So, okay. So we got most of them. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's right. Currency conversion. I did not expect to be able to find that list that quickly.
And in fact even as i pulled it up i was like oh it's not actually going to list this and i was like oh no here we are there you go love it yeah it's good you know what else i love perhaps the longest quick tip ever oh i don't think so i don't think so okay i don't think so uh erica points erica with a squeak uh erica points out hello gentlemen i just i don't know where those are uh i just got done listening about the ultra watch no longer going to have the blood oxygen Just to let you know,
I bought my Ultra 2 watch on January 14th, so before the cutoff, and recently updated to watch OS 10.3, and I am still able to use the blood oxygen sensor without any issues. And yes, I can confirm this as well. I haven't mentioned it on the show, but I have an Ultra 2 that I've been wearing since Christmas. Santa did decide to bring it to me. I loved the idea of having contraband under the tree because at that point in time on Christmas Day, the Apple Watch was not for sale.
The Ultra 2 was not for sale in the United States. You scofflaw. I know. It was great. I have to say, though, I really was on the fence about whether to get the Ultra 2 or just stick with my Series 5. Like, what would the difference be? Would I really care? This Ultra 2 is the best Apple Watch ever. It is the, it, it, for me, it is what an Apple watch was meant to be. It's got super long battery. Like, you know, if I'm going to have this Dick
Tracy computer on my wrist, let's, let's embrace it. Right. The nice flat screen that makes a huge difference compared to the rounded edges. Of course, it's a larger screen, which is fine. Let's put a large screen on the wrist. I want to be able to use it. I want to be able to see it. It's got a Mondo battery in it. I went, I woke up Friday morning. We did this show. I put my watch on. I did not take it off until Sunday night when it was at 17% battery.
So it tracked three days and two nights, three days of activity, two nights of sleep. It, I was in the hot tub for a couple of hours with it. And of course it, as soon as it senses water, it goes into, you know, it's, um, it like dive computer mode or whatever.
So it shows me that I'm one foot deep in the hot tub or whatever, which is stupid, but it does like, Like, and it shows the temperature of the tub and it's, you know, it says, oh, it's 102 degrees or whatever, but, but it, the screen's on the whole time it's underwater. So it's burning more, you know, more battery and still, you know, doing that. I had a band rehearsal where it, it noticed my heart rate up.
So, you know, cause playing the drums. And so it put itself into exercise mode, which tracks your heart rate more, more frequently and all of that stuff. So like, you know, three days and two nights of, of sleep tracking with all those activities. and it was 17% on Sunday night when I finally decided to put it on charge. That's incredible. That's even more battery life than the Ultra One, I can tell you. And I feel badly that I didn't properly express that about the Ultra One a year ago.
A little over a year ago, I got my Ultra One. And what a fantastic watch. The Ultras are amazing. It really, yeah, it's what it's supposed to be to me.
Like i and and i have kind of i i have pretty pretty small wrists and the the ultra 2 does not feel you know overly massive on my wrist or anything so yeah anyway just figured i'd share i realized this i was reading question on the question on back to this this tip um yes i didn't we talk about they said the ones that were already out there were grandfathered or something like Well, when we talked about it in the episode,
we weren't certain, but Apple did clarify that in like a little asterisk on the Apple Watch page on the site. So yes, this is in line with what Apple promised. This follows my question then. Do you think that anything that was already manufactured and out there is grandfathered and this might hit?
New ones that are produced yeah because it is a different model number i think it is only a software change like i i think the ones that are being sold now still also have these sensors they're just turned off um so presumably that's my understanding too yeah when the lawsuits settled they can you know just issue a software undo it yeah yeah yeah yeah but yeah you're right like the ones that were in boxes on on the shelf somewhere or in a warehouse
or in a warehouse Or in a box on the way from China. Like what is the. Yeah. How do they manage that cutoff? That's interesting. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know. Well, I don't know. Interesting. Can you still get one via sources other than Apple? I bought mine from Amazon. Well, I'm sorry. Santa got mine from Amazon. But prior to the cutoff. Well, prior. Yeah. Black Friday deals. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So. Yeah. Yeah.
While we're talking about new Apple OS features, do you want to take us to Todd, Pete? I can do that. Todd wrote in and sent us a couple Wall Street Journal articles, and they are behind the paywall, unfortunately. But he sent us the PDFs if we needed to look at them. But it says basically, hey, just saw this. Turn on your iPhone stolen device protection now to secure your money and your photos in the iOS 17.3 update. update.
And we'll put the link in the show notes as to what the stolen device protection is. I had forgotten that that was coming along, but it essentially, you go into settings and you can just even search stolen device and it'll come up with the setting. By turning it on, you prevent someone who has misappropriated your device in case you've colossally lost it.
Reference there, inside joke, sorry. If someone has your device and they know your passcode, they can't make critical changes to your account, particularly if it's away from a known location like your home or your place of work or someplace where you regularly are. They need your Face ID or your Touch ID biometric authentication.
So some actions, such as accessing stored passwords, credit cards, require a single biometric authentication with Face ID or Touch ID with no passcode or alternative fallback. So only you can access those features. And there's a security delay as well. Well, some security actions such as changing the password require you to wait an hour and then perform a second face ID and touch ID authentication so that it can't just be changed right away.
Again, when it's away from home. This solves that problem that we were, you know, kind of talking about a year ago or so, right? Where people were snatching phones and then, you know, stealing iCloud accounts and hacking into things. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, so it's designed to prevent a thief from performing critical operations that gives you time to mark your devices lost and make sure your Apple account is secure. So when it's on, Face ID is required for passwords and passkeys.
Payment method saved in Safari. You can't turn off lost mode. You can't erase all content and settings. You can't apply for a new Apple card. That's good. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, you can't view the Apple Card virtual number. And we just do this in settings on the phone. Nice, great. It won't stop them from gaining access to email and photos and other unprotected apps, third-party apps. So if you have a two-factor authentication on those apps, that's the way to go.
But stolen device protection, even more better security than before. Wow. Great stuff. Cool. Lasts a long time. It doesn't impact using, and there's a couple of things on this. One, it's important to note that it only kicks in when your device is away from your common locations, like your work and home. In the next cubicle over, probably far enough away, no. Ah, no.
But I mean, that's good because that's convenient. You know, if you're at home, it's going to assume you have control of your device. So it's a little bit, it's got a little smarts in there. But, um, was one of the things you can still like use like FaceTime or whatever, because my only concern on this was like the number of times I'll be somewhere, just not FaceTime, um, Apple pay. I'll be wanting to use Apple pay and it just doesn't recognize my face ID just fails.
Yeah. And you need to go to passcode, right? When this kicks in, right, you have to do biometric authentication. You can't, you don't, it doesn't fall back to the passcode. No, it's almost the opposite. It works in the opposite direction, right? Yeah. Like you've already done the passcode and because you have this feature enabled, it says, yeah, we should also make sure Face ID that it's actually you, which is a shift, right? Right.
Up until now, Face ID and Touch ID have been convenience features, right? Like, you know, you would unlock your phone and then you could use these to sort of casually unlock your phone, I'll call it. But not after a restart, not after all of that. Now, Face ID and Touch ID are actually being used as the second factor of security, which is interesting.
You know, it's a bit of a shame. And I'll remind folks that you can also put the setting on in there so that if you have an Apple Watch that is unlocked and it doesn't recognize your Face ID right away, you've got, as long as it's within range, it'll go, oh, yeah, that's you just trying to unlock it. But it'll tap your watch. So if, like, your wife takes your phone to go look at your emails and unlocks it, it'll go, oh, your phone was just unlocked. Yeah.
Hey, give my phone back. Give me my phone back. That's right. You might see what Santa ordered from Amazon. You don't want to see that. That's right. Porthos John has a pair of quick tips for us. The first one, now that it's getting really cold here in New York City, he says, I found that setting the Express Transit card in my Apple Wallet settings makes my life super convenient when I'm riding the subway.
Since the card for transit is automagic, now I don't have to take off my gloves or even pull up my winter coat sleeve. I walk up to the subway turnstile, I tap my watch through all the clothing, and it lets me in instantly. It even worked for me when my watch was dead one day or near dead in low power mode. This also works with the iPhone 2. No unlock, no face ID, just tap your phone
and you go through. He says, I really didn't think much of it when Apple announced this feature, and now I'm an evangelist for it. I've used this, and I don't live in New York City like Porthos John does, or at least work in New York City. I don't know where he lives. But anytime I'm there and I use it, it's great. When they were first rolling it out, it was available at some turnstiles but not all.
And I got myself in trouble once going down to Pepcom because it was available at the turnstile to get on the subway at Grand Central.
Central but it was not available at the turnstile to get on the subway down at like you know uh, like on the one train at 18th street or whatever so it's like well now how do i get back in because i didn't have to get a card at grand central and reload right because i'm not doing this all the time so i didn't have a subway card and it was after hours so i had just jumped the turnstile i had to find a creative way in pete let's say let's say that let's
use that term let's use that You asked the police officer standing by to let you in. That's correct. That's correct. If there was one there, that's what I would have done. I mean, if there was a human there, I would have had the conversation with the human, but there wasn't, at least not obviously. So I was like, well. You scofflaw. I don't know. I didn't get caught, Pete. Right on. I don't know. If you didn't get caught, is it illegal? Did it even happen?
Speaking of credit cards, Porthos John's second tip. Says, I was reminded of my standard protocols now as he was getting ready to order his Vision Pro, you know, or as he was reading about all the Vision Pro finance decline stories. I don't know if you ordered a Vision Pro or not. He says, what I used to do before a big purchase and would still do.
He says, well, what I used to do is call the card company and tell them that a big purchase would be coming and ask them to pre-authorize that merchant up for a given amount.
Out i had to do this this summer when we uh made an order for all of our our new kitchen cabinets because it was like whatever 20 grand worth of stuff you know and and they even told us they were like if you don't tell them in advance they will decline this and i was like oh good to know okay great porthos john continues now that every card company has an app and they have temporary card numbers to help protect your account from fraud including the apple card which is in the the wallet app.
What I do now is I go into the app for the card I plan to use and I create a temporary card number for a few hundred dollars more than my upcoming planned purchase. Some apps will even let you specify a merchant that it can be used for. This seems to bypass the regularly aggressive fraud checks and I've never had it rejected since I started doing this. He says, oh, here it is. I used it for my Vision Pro and it sailed through and it also did for for iPhone purchases last fall.
This can't be used with the Apple card finance option for obvious reasons. Of course. Yeah, no, that's, I, I like this idea of, cause then you don't have to like call them and wait on hold or, you know, do all of those things. So I don't know. I don't think I knew that, that a temporary card numbers were in there years ago. I had a USAA mastercard that you could do temporary numbers all day long and they were great. I mean, I could set up like one year of monthly payments on a given,
you know, that sort of thing. Yeah. That was fantastic. And I didn't realize the Apple card had that. I don't know that my. Bonvoy MX does. Do you use that, Dave? Do you know if it does? I know. Yeah, I am a prolific Bonvoy MX user, and I don't know if it lets me do temporary card numbers. Yeah, I don't know. Yeah. Yeah. That's a great feature. It's a good tip. Yeah, for sure.
All right, folks. As you know, this episode is sponsored by BetterHelp, and today I want to chat about something as intricate and evolving is the latest iOS update, relationships. You know, relationships are kind of like trying to solve a complex coding problem. They require patience, understanding, and sometimes a little expert help. And that's where our sponsor BetterHelp comes in.
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And you are still going to be hard pressed to keep up, folks. I'm telling you. I mean, this is amazing. So he writes in, he says, I've got a pretty extensive smart home setup. And, well, there's no one entry point. Maybe this will give people some ideas. It's given me a bunch of ideas and how to empty your wallet in one day quickly.
All the lights in the house, every single light switch, interior and exterior, is powered by a cassette switch in the wall, meaning I can control any light in the house for whatever reason. The most expensive part, and I didn't do it all at once. I basically picked up a room and did it one room at a time until it was all complete. He says that's consented by, by Lutron, I think. Right. Yeah. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. I'm sorry. I should have mentioned. No,
no, no. I'm just, yeah. I'll fill in the blanks here. Yeah. No problem. Yeah. Great. So the central controller is home assistant. Everything feeds into HA. I'll say it quickly like that for now. And automation is all run in HA and it's the main brain of the house. HA exposes everything to HomeKit, which has a great spouse approval factor, SAF. Plus, it's just convenient, and especially when you're out of the house. We have an alarm system in the house that really manages the state of the house.
When we leave and set the alarm for away, all the doors lock after a delay in case we forget to lock the back door or something and all the lights turn off. And then it goes on to say when we get home, if it's dark out, opening the garage door causes a few lights in the hallway to turn on where the alarm keypad is. And once it's disarmed, more lights around the house turn on and the fountain turns back on.
Pretty much when we're ready to go to bed, one button and the whole house is off and ready. Here was a cool one for me. And I'm assuming it's a shortcut through maybe IFTTT, IFTTT, or something like that. He says, my wife has a Shopify store where she fills orders for customers that buy things from her. If she has an unfulfilled order, a lamp next to her desk turns on so that she knows she has pending orders to take care of. And when those orders are filled, the light goes out.
That's slick. Yeah. Home, is there more for you to read? I don't want to interrupt. Yeah, just a couple more real quick and then I'll bang out. I have things to add. Yeah, yeah. Okay. So the other thing I do is occupancy detection in a few rooms. My office, my wife's office, have sensors and track presence, and they also have temperature sensors that attach to the Nest thermostat so that HVAC in the house controls the room temperature when it senses there's air.
Here's another cool one he gives up in the morning. The Apple TVs are also on there. So when I turn on the news in the morning when I'm in the shower and getting ready, when I go into the bathroom, I have one button on the wall which turns the TV on and launches the channels app and pre-selects the news. Turns on a few lights in the house that I use in the morning. Not too bright, which I think I mentioned that on another one.
I like to use my smart lights at 10% when I have to get up at 3 in the morning and want to let Debbie sleep. But there's, you know, last but not least, cameras. He's got a unified camera system. And, you know, I just won't go into it. There's so much more. But that's just scratching the surface of the cool things you can do. And some of that I never even considered. Yeah, so Home Assistant, have either of you messed with Home Assistant, Adam? I have not. Have you? No. Okay.
So I have had, Home Assistant is an engine that you can run on like a Raspberry Pi. It runs in a Docker container, so you could run it on your Mac. I have it running on my Synology PC. I do not use Home Assistant like Corey does to manage my home. I know a lot of people do. I had just installed it a year ago or so because somebody mentioned it and I thought, oh, I should learn about this.
And immediately it just like you install it and it goes and sees everything and sort of inherits all the things that you have in your house, or at least makes itself aware of all these things that you have. And what a lot of people really love about Home Assistant, and there's a lot of things people love.
The thing that I have heard people sing praises about most is that it's running locally and talking to all of your devices locally, including devices that otherwise would need to go through the cloud. So you get much faster response time on things, especially if you're pushing a switch to turn on a light. If that would normally have to go out to the cloud and back to get the light on, there's a little bit of lag there. With Home Assistant, it is built to to go and talk to these things directly.
And it does like it. It's pretty amazing. And I had messed with it a little bit this weekend, though. I realized I had use for home assistant. We we'd like to have fires in our fireplace in the winter. And sometimes that means going outside at night to get wood out of, you know, you know, refill the we keep a little bit of wood in the house and then we have wood racks outside.
Side and those wood racks are kind of near our front door and it's relatively dark out there if the lights aren't on and it's also kind of dark if we have like funny colored lights on our front door like we often do like you know right now we have like yellow and purple or something because they're hue lights and so what i've done in the past is i've manually set these lights to be bright white and then i have to remember and go set them back and uh i said
to lucas my son i was like you you know, there's no way to do what I want to do in HomeKit. What I want to do is have it store the state of the light, whether that's on and custom colors or off or whatever. Store that state. Go turn on bright white for five minutes, and then after five minutes, restore whatever the prior state was, and I don't want to have to, like, figure that out. I want it to just go and get it, and HomeKit will not do this. The A-Lady will not do this.
Home Assistant does this happily. And so we wrote a Home Assistant automation that goes, grabs the current state of the light and you pick what parameters you want to grab. So it's like, okay, is it on brightness and color? Great. And it stores those in a variable. And then you, then we go set it. We have it wait five minutes, you know, set it to bright white so we can go out and get wood with nice bright lights. And then five minutes later, it reverts back to whatever the prior state was.
Was and i mean it took us i don't know an hour or whatever to figure out how to write this script because it was our first time doing it but very straightforward once we sort of learned the home assistant way and then hearing you know you talk about what cory's done with it cory's also the one who wrote the mac geek app for us so cory is is also pretty handy oh he's a geek he's a nerd like He's a geek like us. Full nerd.
Yeah. Geek like us. I knew I recognized the name. Yeah. What do you got? Yeah. And so like this, after we went through this this weekend, I was like, ah, I get it now. I see. And now what I'm thinking is, do I want to remove everything from the A-Lady, everything from HomeKit, and put it all into Home Assistant? And then home assistant will expose what it sees to the a lady and to, uh, to home kit. So you can have all of these things controlled the same way.
Like he said, the spouse approval factor, but with the real time operation and scripting that is available, like we were able to, and, and I, I say this as though it were trivial. The hardest part about this is. Was exposing home assistant to, uh, the Amazon a lady that meant I had to go build a custom skill for the a lady. There are instructions to do it. It's, it's relatively straightforward. It's just tedious to go and like put all these things.
You have to create an Amazon Lambda account and like do all the things it's free, but you know, it was a pain in the neck, but chat GPT would help. Sorry. Oh no, no, no. There there's instructions. Like the instructions are clear. Here, it's just many, many, many, many, many steps to do it is all it is because you basically have to make yourself an Amazon developer and you create your own skill that links only to your home assistant account, which it's fine.
Like it, it, it, it works. It's just, you know, it's just tedious. But once I got it up and running, uh, then you choose what you expose. So I actually exposed the automation to it as a light switch. So now I can say a lady turn on firewood lights and it doesn't turn on the firewood lights. It runs this automation and goes and does its thing. So, uh, and you can do the same with, with the S lady too, with, uh, with the, with home kit stuff. So yeah, this home assistant is cool.
I can see why people get really, uh, obsessed with it. So, uh, you know, be, let that be a warning to you though. I mean, my, my son and I had fun spending, you know, two to three hours getting this all like, working the way we want it on, uh, on Saturday night. That may or may not be fun for you. So choose wisely. Right. There you go. Yeah. I actually, while you were talking, I downloaded and installed it on my mini in my basement back in New Hampshire. Did you really? So, yeah.
Now I haven't said anything. Of course. Uh, I thought maybe do I have that, but I had home bridge, which you would recommend it. Home bridge is different, but animal, but does some, but, but in the, in the end, home bridge is, Purpose-built to connect non-HomeKit appliances to HomeKit, and that's it. It might be able to do some very basic automations, but it's really just built for that one purpose. Home Assistant does that and also then has this robust automation system.
So, yeah. Okay. It's pretty cool. Yeah. Nice. Yeah, it is. It's cool. It's cool. I got to laugh. In our Discord chat, Tennessee Pappas, his wife won't say yes, lady.
Turn on the tv she says hey turn the tv on he goes i try to explain her use just as many words to tell me to turn the tv on as you do so i wrote back i told him hey just change your name to uh s lady oh there you go learner yeah that's right yeah yeah oh pete you got good ideas i like this yeah yeah yeah all right well did did cory's answer or cory's note came in based on our request a few few weeks ago for folks to send in their their smart home stuff and we've got some more we
do have a question from scott about smart home stuff so uh adam you want to want to take us yeah scott says hey i'm an avid user of home kit devices smart plugs smart switches dimmers stats it works during the day i invoke shortcuts and automations repeatedly that cause these devices to do something sometimes these triggers are timers sometimes they're proximity events other times times manually what i'd really like to see is a list
of all the home kit activities that have run during the day week month along the lines of a log file shows an example if you haven't seen a log file but basically you know timestamp what ran what automation run you know just details on everything that ran throughout the day yes do you geeks know where i can find an app or even use a terminal command what's wrong with terminal commands. To see he did call us good events yeah.
Um, so Scott and I went back and forth on this and he actually found the sort of stated answer to this question, which is that there is up to 30 days of logging that happens in the home app. App, but it's only for certain things. It's for things that fall into the security category. So door locks, garage doors, alarms, contact sensors, smoke detectors, doors, and windows. So specifically you'll note that I did not include lights in that list, but you can find a log.
If you go into the home app and this can be on your phone or your Mac, go to the security category, category, and then there'll be an option for activity history. And you can even turn this on and off, but you will see in there, you know, the, okay, the door was open, the door was closed, that sort of thing. But that's all you're going to get.
He did remind me though, or, or our conversation reminded me of, Hey, you know, I just was messing with home assistant all weekend and home assistant keeps logs of all of your devices is that it can see whether it turned them on or not. Like if I use my TV's remote to turn it on, home assistant logs that the TV was turned on because that's a sensor and that could be used for an automation. You can say every time you turn the TV on, you know, set the lights in the room
to, you know, my TV watching mode or whatever. So... So Home Assistant will give you that level of data. Even if you're not using it to automate anything, you could go in and see when certain devices were turned on and off. And that's true for me for the last year. I've had Home Assistant installed. And so like all those logs are there if I want to see them. And it's way more granular than that.
The one thing I used Home Assistant for when I set it up last year was at the time the Sonos app was not making it easy to tell whether I was playing music in or playing sound from a video in Atmos, true Atmos mode. The Home Assistant app can see that. And so I have a dashboard that I built in Home Assistant that shows me is my soundbar, my Sonos Arc on and what audio mode is it in? And it just shows it right there. So it's like all of that stuff is is it's it's it's so granular.
It sees things that like the the vendors apps don't see. It's amazing what it what it can do. So again, geeky, but, you know, amazing. Oh, that's great. Yeah, yeah. Go ahead, Adam. I was going to say, I was curious about this, and I called an Audible on this and found a guy named Laud in the Netherlands, and we posted a link to it. He has a GitHub repo for this, but also an article where he says, logging HomeKit data to Google Sheets for free walkthrough.
And you know i know he said no terminal stuff but it's pretty convoluted it's a very long article but if you wanted to do this he has a methodology for getting all this logged into uh google sheet using shortcuts and triggers uh because you can set up shortcuts on your home hubs, to trigger up home hub application home hub things so yeah oh yeah you want to get really really nerdy and geeky.
And he goes into all the details and he does say now there was an update from December where he thinks because of the matter standard, uh, there may be a simpler way to do this and he will post an update if he figures it out. But it's been a year or so. Right. Oh yeah. Yeah. If you're using all those triggers like home assistant is, I mean, home kit can see a lot of those triggers, not all the same ones as home assistant, but it sees quite a few of them.
And if you just treat that, that and have a third party logger, there you go. That makes perfect sense. Yeah yeah wow something to play around with brilliant and that link is in the show notes folks yeah from craig.nl sorry claude.nl. Cool. That's fun. Yeah. Yeah. That's kind of blowing my mind. Like, you know, just thinking of using these things in these ways. I like it. I like it. Um, one thing that came up and there are so many of you who wrote in about this, uh, that it was worth mentioning.
Questioning craig uh wrote a note to us again about the smart home stuff and i was ranting about how the um chamberlain uh garage door openers no longer work with really any smart home platform at least not to open your door which is just the stupidest thing in the world to me like i still don't i still don't understand their business model right like you have this smart thing. Wouldn't you think that while I was in my car, I would want to say, hey, whatever.
Open my garage door. I'm driving home. No, no. You have to use their app to do it, which doesn't have any voice control. So I just don't get it. Anyway, a lot of people have recommended the Meross, M-E-R-O-S-S smart Wi-Fi garage door openers, and Craig is one of them. And this is not a... It costs about 50 bucks on Amazon. It sits in line. You plug it into those little terminal leads that exist on the back of your garage door opener and it and then into power.
And then it triggers your door to open whatever you have. And like I said, they're about 50 bucks. And it works with HomeKit, A-Lady, Google Home. It's compatible with smart things. So you can do all the things with it. And uh i yeah it like it seems like the magic answer uh near as i can tell and uh and craig said you know he he says uh i installed these in my house and uh. They include a sensor like a magnetic hall sensor that will determine when the door is open or closed.
The install was super easy and there you go. So I just wanted to, uh, to share that, that, uh, yeah, those Maros smart wifi garage door openers. Those are, those seem to be the answer because it means you don't have to replace your existing garage door opener. You can just smarten it with one of these. And I like that. That's good.
Anything else to, to say on that one you you neither of you have those right okay i got nothing yeah no i'd like no probably i had that you know i had uh in my old place that we sold i had the chamberlain ones the q the q1 but i just had to run it through uh homebridge yeah yeah you could up until about i don't know three or four months ago yeah and then it just stopped working and and the nice part was it stopped working slowly it would work like 60 of the time and then
30 of the time and then 10 of the time and then finally they were like the people writing the homebridge plugin are like okay look it's not us please stop sending us bug reports we know we feel your pain yeah okay got it yeah the morass has been recommended by like a gazillion a gazillion geek gabbers at this point so yeah it must be good it's the thing yeah nine out of ten geek gab listeners uh report that this works really well the tenth one is is uh
can't get their internet working yeah maybe that's the problem yeah that's it um old guy wrote in pete you might like this for your uh for your your a solution for your nighttime bathroom trips he says in real life i am an old guy with all the attendant midnight runs to the nearest plumbing facilities that might imply.
Last winter, my lovely wife and I were on a cruise ship, and our cabin had a sensor at floor level that detected movement if someone was up during the night and turned on some low-level LED bulbs lighting the way to the head. When we got home, I decided to replicate the functionality and got a pair of Zigbee sensors and an LED strip light. The lights are mounted under the frame of the bed and the two sensors are on either side of the bedroom.
I then created an A-Lady routine that between the hours of 10 p.m. And 7 a.m., if motion is detected by either sensor, the light strip goes on for two minutes at 20% brightness, colored red, so as not to ruin night vision and wake the other sleeper up. It's been a great solution to a problem some of us have, and the rest of us will have eventually. Those of you who don't need them for my purpose can use the party light functionality.
Functionality and uh and he put some he he sent us the amazon links to some of the things that he did i'll put a link to the discord thread where where he talked about this i think that's a brilliant idea like most of the hotel rooms in asia do that and never occurred to me to figure out a way to do that at home i just because we do have a light under the bed but it goes with the remote that comes with the bed because it's the you know your bed has a remote oh you got
a fancy it was yes you know it's the hospital bed because i'm an old man you know head up feet up lay on your stomach and fold yourself backwards and here you go don't do that that sounds like it would hurt right but you know actually pj figured it out in discord at nine out of ten geeks get it right the tenth one sends it to feedbag at macgeekgab.com did he say feedbag at macgeekgab.com he said feedbag at macgeekgab.com you got to reactivate that email address dave
Sorry, just when you thought you could kill it. It's active. I know I can never kill that email address off of you. You're welcome. Yeah. Brilliant. Brilliant. But yeah, I love this idea. And we'll put links to the sensors and the LED light strip that he wound up using. But again, as long as your sensors and the light strip are compatible with whatever smart home automation platform you're using, it doesn't matter.
Matter and and you know that the a lady platform as old guy points out is perfectly capable of doing that you know sensor turn on wait five minutes turn off i i have that set for my outside lights you know we have our all our outdoor lights are on uh you know on smart home timers because why wouldn't they be your smart home schedules i should say not even timers but after After they go off at midnight 30 or whatever, I have it set that if there's motion detected in the driveway,
it turns on all of my lights outside and orange, not red. I like the orange better in the driveway at night so that when I come home from a gig and I'm walking back across the driveway at two in the morning, I get light, but it's not super bright light. It's just orange light. And that way my neighbors don't offer a suggestion and complain. You. Yeah, please. You should go to red light.
I tried red. Didn't work. No, well, no, I think the issue is my night vision wouldn't have kicked in because I would have been in the garage where it's well lit. I'm unpacking my drums. I'm doing all that stuff. So the red light was too dim for me in those preserve your night vision, but no, it hadn't kicked in yet. Yeah, exactly. My eyes hadn't adjusted yet. So yeah, I figure if you're walking around outside, you don't need, you know, your night vision, like the scientific fact takes
about 30 minutes to get full on night vision. It takes about a half a second to a full second to ruin it for another 30 minutes. Fascinating. So that's why the red lights are like for, for, for, you know, the bedtime lighting, the, the, you know, the, the floorboard runway lighting as you want, might want to call it, you know? Yeah. Yeah. And you can even, you can even set your light strip.
Like a lot of light strips have motion in them. You could, you could set your light strip to, to show those red lights and walk you to the bathroom in case maybe it's been a rough night and you're not sure which way to go. There you go. Well, I was going to say, you remember that Yeelight that I reviewed last year at CES? I put it in my armoire. It never occurred to me. Maybe I—see, you don't even need to get into sensors and Alexa and all that.
Oops, her. That's fine. And—. But just a couple of those ye lights would be great. I've charged mine precisely twice in the year that I've, that I've used it almost daily. I will put a link to the ye light in the, uh, in the show notes too. Yep. Cool. I'm, I'm getting a, I'm getting a sense for a potential, uh, Apple vision pro app that overlays turn by turn directions to the bathroom. When you get up. This sounds like the first app that you're going to have to write for the vision pro Adam.
There you go. No, listen, get off, power it up. If apples lighter, if the app store approved and they did approved fart apps for the first, however, many months of the app store's existence, many moons ago, they will approve your turn by turn to the bathroom directions app. So that's ridiculous. And I love it. Yeah, that's right. Right. Of course, you'd have to either be sleeping with your Vision Pro on or you would need to strap the thing on and, you know, yeah.
No, you'd have to sleep in it. And you'd also need like a 50 foot extension cord to make it there because the battery only lasts two hours. You say this like it's a bad thing. You just need the extension cord. It's totally fine. It's totally fine. I'm going to get one of those track systems, you know, like they have in the hospitals, you know. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Just along the ceiling. Yeah, you're right. That's what we need.
That's all your Vision Pro needs is that track system everywhere through your house. Oh, man, this is brilliant. You don't need battery life. You just need to install track power. Yeah, we've got track lighting. Now you need track power. It's all good. Yeah, like a trolley. Like a trolley. Hey, can you come into the study? No, there's no track trolley in there. I can only stay in this room.
Oh, okay. That's it. Yep. Uh yeah all right now should we answer some uh some non-home uh yeah smart home questions yeah pete you want to read uh you want to read brian's there i do so brian wrote in he says uh hey guys is there a way to extend built-in custom dictionary autocomplete function so it works everywhere. It isn't working for me in web forms, in Safari, or third-party macOS apps. I am currently on Ventura on an M2 MacBook Pro. Thanks for that information.
Always include that stuff, please, when you ask questions. For example autocomplete works in the gmail app on my iphone iphone but not in gmail in safari and mac os likewise it doesn't work in facebook and safari on my mac but it does work in the facebook app in ios it also does not work in the zotero app in mac os i'm using zotero for writing and research and this is really slowing my flow as i'm using it elsewhere to insert certain words words and phrases I type frequently?
Is there a way to extend the custom dictionary autocomplete function so it works everywhere? Is this a job for keyboard maestro or can I accomplish this with the free Mac OS? Yep. And I'm not sure why it's not working for you, Brian. And I'm assuming we're talking about the keyboard text replacements that are built into iOS and Mac OS. And as As long as these work for me, like, so it sounds like you put a lot of these in into iOS and they're not making it over to the Mac because it looks
like they're working everywhere in iOS. They're just not working on the Mac. So my theory is you do need to make sure when you set up your Mac and your iOS devices, one, that you have iCloud Drive enabled and two, that your devices are assigned into the exact same iCloud account. And I've even had issues in the past where like, because I have, you know, at iCloud.com and at v.com making sure that it's actually both the same like they're both iCloud or they're both me and not like mixed.
So I don't know if it's a syncing problem and it maybe it's you know you have to toggle iCloud drive on and off or something like that. It sounds like something's not syncing to me but they should sync. Yeah, I've, I've run into some issues where they won't sink and like any other sinking problem, my approach that has worked has been make changes, uh, either add to it, remove from it, do it on different devices. And at some point it will, you know, sort of flush the queue if you will.
And, and things will start flowing again. So yeah, that would, that would be. But if it hasn't happened in a few hours, then I think one time I had some syncing issues. You said sign out. Sign out and sign in again. And reboot in the middle. Yeah. Yeah. Yep. Yep. Yep. Yep. Yeah. And then I think the other option is a third-party app like Rocket Typist or Text Expander, that sort of thing. Fair. Yeah, Text Expander is great, and I have a ton of my stuff in there.
Then you've got to do the keyboard thing on iOS. us when you're on the iphone or the ipad that's right yeah yeah that's fine it works great that's right it doesn't work on i well it's not native to the keyboard on on iphone thank you apple yeah yeah i get it but also yeah the uh and rocket typist is part of set app oh i didn't know that oh that's good to know all right i just best bargain in software i swear set up is yeah for Yeah,
$134 for the year for the whole family to use all these great apps. Yeah, I love my Setapp subscription. We don't always obsess about mentioning this when things come up, but it is worth mentioning that for many of the things, not all the things that we talk about, my Apple Watch I paid for. But for a lot of things, we wind up getting review units or review accounts. Certainly for Setapp, they have given me a review account since day one. Wait, what? Yeah.
Before we even met, Pete, I think. Thanks. Just kidding. I'm happy to pay your subscription fee. I would pay for it if I had to. Yeah, absolutely. And I happily do. It's worth every penny of it. They gave me a review account as well, but I think I now am paying for it. It expired and I just bought it because it's worth it. Yeah, I expected mine to expire a long time ago and thus far. It's good news. But yeah, I would happily pay for it right away. It's a great value. I have no problem ever.
I mean, people have heard it on here. They've heard it on my show. Never a problem recommending it. You will find the value out of it over time for sure. It's like my go-to place when I'm trying to... Somebody says, is there an app for something, ABC? I check there first because it's like, well, I already have access to this. And they're paid apps. And so they're generally pretty good. and their team does a great job of curating those apps and stuff like that.
So even before the App Store, because it's like those are already paid for and then maybe over to the App Store after that. And I'm trying to see if there's a way to see how many apps are actually in there. Oh, at any given point in time. It does change. They're constantly adding things and occasionally one will go away.
Usually if the developer sort of stops paying attention to the app the setup team like you said they curate it and they don't want stuff in there that's no good so there we go there's an all apps button but um uh well over 100 i'd say yeah. That's great oh and summer yeah ios apps mac apps web apps yeah um so and uh. I mean even cool little stuff like i've i found one called image to icon And now I changed my folder. It's easier to find folders because I changed the folder icon.
Oh, yeah. Rather than all just one blue folders. I want to go, where's my files? Boom. They're in the red triangle. Done. Oh, nice. Yeah. Cool. There are currently more than 240. Oh, there you go. Told you that's more than 100. Told you. That is more than 100. You were not incorrect. Pilot math. Pilot math. That's different than nerd math. We established that in the last episode. You want to take us to Bob, Adam? Yeah, Bob has a question. He says, I know you guys have a lot of travel experience.
Well, I think Pete and Dave do. I have less, but I have traveled occasionally. We are traveling to Europe, Ireland, London, Amsterdam, Luxembourg, and Italy. Wow, that sounds like a great trip. We want to go to Ireland, Scotland, and London someday.
And I have two questions. we will bring a cellular 11 inch ipad pro third generation and two iphone 12s verizon do you have a recommended plug outlet travel adapter that will work in all countries if we need two different ones which ones i know you discussed cellular plans on the show but i did not pay attention because i had no travel plans at the time what is the best approach for getting seamless seamless seamless, rather cellular service on the trip.
I believe our devices are eSIM capable, but can you confirm? Great podcast, and thanks, Bob from Sioux Falls. Hey, Bob, he's a neighbor. Good to see you. Nice. I've got two answers, yes and no. Great. Just kidding. Thanks, Pete. Next. All right. So, first of all, the adapter that you need, there are all kinds of them, but you can get a decent one for $10 to $15. The one I happened to find looks pretty good.
We'll put the link to it in the show notes. It's a universal travel adapter with international power. It has three USB-A ports, a USB-C type port, and it fits both the United Kingdom plugs, the European, both the United Kingdom plugs, the European plugs, the Chinese, Australian, New Zealand plugs, and the USA plugs. Both of those. Both of those. All four of both. Yeah. Pilot math. Yeah. And it handles the voltages as well from 110 to 220 or 120 to 240, depending. Your mileage may vary.
220, 221, whatever it takes. Whatever it takes. So those are, there's a link on the one in there, great little piece of gear. I actually have a couple of those because by the time I'm charging my iPad, my MacBook Pro, my watch, my phone, my AirPods, and all that, I generally use at least two outlets in any given room. So a couple of those cubes are great to have. But the other answer is yes. The United Kingdom, i.e., Ireland is part of the EU, but they're still United Kingdom power.
So that's a different three-prong plug than the two-prong plug that you'll find throughout most of the European continent. So you do need two different ones for that. You can't just bring a British one.
You may also, if you find you've forgotten it or left it in the hotel when you left the United Kingdom and went to the European continent, go to the hotel desk and say, I lost my travel converter last month when I was here, and they will have a prolifically lost one for you to use, I can assure you. As for your devices, I'm 99% sure that your iPad Pro, Pro, third generation, is eSIM capable? Your iPhone 12s are eSIM capable, I know, from personal firsthand experience.
You want to go to eSIMDB.com. So eSIM database, basically, eSIMDB.com. And look for plans that meet the region you want to go to. I am hamstrung and handcuffed to having to buy worldwide data. Oh, you are, aren't you? Which makes me much more expensive because worldwide data always includes, I can't find a plan that excludes the United States where we get raked over the coals royally by everybody who sends data over their cellular networks. It's crazy.
When I go to Europe, my data plans are a third the price of when I go to Mexico too. There's something about, yeah, America in general, you know, North, South, Central. Yeah. Yeah. And, um, here's the thing, even, even men, you might, you love, like he might be able to find, um. You know, like European plans that cover all of these countries, but not the U S and Mexico. And that'll make them pretty inexpensive.
Absolutely. And in all likelihood, uh, this is going to sound weird, but in all likelihood, it's going to be something like, like Moby matter comes out of Hong Kong. So even though you've got a European region, your ESM is going to come out of Hong Kong.
Yep. so be be aware of that and as much as dave and i love mint international data with them i think it's uh two cents for 100 megabytes well so mint mint has minter national now it's relatively new it's 10 bucks a day uh but for a seven day period it with which comes with unlimited data 10 gigs of high speed but unlimited for a seven day period mint is 40 bucks that's still way more than you're going to spend through an e-sim plan you'll spend 15 for maybe yeah
yeah but but the convenience of just being able to have it attached to your existing thing for 40 bucks you know when you do it for one trip right if i i do it every month so it's just that's no and and like we're going to Mexico next month, I'm not going to spend 40 bucks for the international plan. I'm going to spend, you know, whatever, like something obscene, which will probably be more like $12 for, you know, seven days of two gigs of data or something, but at least it's less than 40.
You think Ryan got tired of getting raked over the coals when he went to Rexham? I bet you're right. Oh yeah, that's right. Oh yeah. Like we got to buy another company. We got to expand. This is ridiculous. This is ridiculous. Yeah. The owner of mint. Yeah. I bet you're right. I bet you're right. Yeah. Yeah. Thank goodness he bought Rexham or, uh, cause that, that maybe,
maybe open that door up. Yeah. It's not terrible, but it's, it's still expensive, expensive but it's just a worldwide plan you're not actually compared to what you're paying for worldwide it might not be all that different right i mean you need it for more than seven days is the problem yeah so and that's the thing too right if you're buying it for a shorter time period then then it's even even more cheaper uh i i just looked it up i paid 40 for 15 gigabytes gigabytes,
but it lasts for a year and it's anywhere in the world. That's the thing. Yeah. And they also, they split it up a little bit. So some of it is for social, like WhatsApp and Skype. Right. And then the rest is for email and that kind of stuff. So it works out really well. And, oh, and I forgot to mention this. I did put it in the email back to him that said, you'll find, so you get that new eSIM in there and you're going to get a different phone number when you activate that.
Only if you get an eSIM with a phone number, which you don't have to do. You can get data-only eSIMs. Oh, good point. Great point, then. And then if you've got to get in touch with a parent or a child or a sibling, get them on WhatsApp before you go because that always works. And it's much simpler to do that than try and dial and get dial assist and hope it works. Yep, for sure. All right, let's do some cool stuff now. We skipped this last week.
And I know we've kind of already done some cool stuff. Adam, you want to take us to our first ones? Ones from Richard? Richard, I was not ready. You were not. I know. I didn't get ready. I know. It's okay. He's got the Minix. Yeah. Minix or whatever. All right. He says, I am a relatively new listener to the show. Less than three months. Well, welcome.
And I'm catching up on the missed shows as I travel. recently you got you chatted about power blocks for travel and ios apps for weather radar and i thought i would share some cool stuff that i've used over the last couple years first is the i think it's called minix m-i-n-i-x minix neo p3 which has up to 100 watts of power and intelligent charging as a bonus it comes with adapters that allow use in the uk us uk au and eu well,
There's another answer to the previous question. I was just going to say, I couldn't have planned this better if I even attempted to, and I did not. I've had this for over two years, and in my opinion, it is a must for travel. It handles my 2022 13-inch MacBook Pro and my Mophie charger for my iPhone, Apple Watch, AirPods 2, etc. I've used it during two trips to the UK and Europe with no power issues. I liked it so much, I bought one for my wife's work HP, and I've had five of
my friends buy them all with no issues. So that sounds like a great option. So the second one is Weather on the Way iOS app. As part of my job, I drive through Colorado, Wyoming, Utah, and eastern Montana. This app handles my navigation with ease and tells me what the weather is projected to be along my route. It also handles weather radar that Dave was looking for, and it uses Apple Maps for seamless CarPlay experience. The pro version provides all the features that you get with a free trial of
five trips to determine if it meets your... Oh, and you get a free trial with Five Trips to determine if it meets your needs. Another option I've tried is DriveWeather, which has a bit more data interface, but is still quite good. It also has CarPlay compatible and a bit cheaper. Thanks for the great podcast. I learn new tricks every week. Hopefully five or more, right? That's right. Yeah. That's right. Yeah. Richard. Sweet. Yeah. I, uh, these are all great things.
I, I love it. I, I clearly Apple has made a decision to start approving weather apps for CarPlay because the one that I'd been using, which is like CarPlay weather or something was jankily done and clearly like snuck its way into the app store initially.
But now like i've wanted this for a long time you have this in your plane why can't i have this in my car like i want to see the the radar i want to know am i about to drive into a rainstorm if so maybe i'll stop here to pee so i don't have to get out in the rain in an hour or 30 minutes or whatever so absolutely or you know yeah hazardous road conditions ahead time to take a break yeah exactly andrew in uh in our discord recommended yet another one which it's called my My Radar Weather Radar,
and it just added CarPlay support. So again, I think this kind of supports this. Okay, I have had My Radar for years, and I didn't realize. I was not aware of that. Yeah. That's good to know. Yeah, yeah. He says, you don't need the paid version of My Radar unless you are a weather geek. So bear that in mind. Yep. He says he's using it with CarPlay in his car.
Of course, the screenshot he put in our Discord has all of his apps on the wrong side, because I think maybe he lives somewhere where he drives on the side of the road. Oh, one of those guys. I know. Maybe he lives in Japan or Singapore. I think he lives south of the equator, Pete. Oh. Yeah. Well, there's that. I think that, yeah. I'm not sure. All right. I... I don't, I have a little show and tell to do, guys.
You know, I love my pop sockets on my iPhone because, well, because, you know, I get to, like, hold my phone and it does my thing. And they're MagSafe. Really, it's the MagSafe pop sockets that I like because I can, like, have this and I can put, like, the wallet version of the MagSafe. Well, the PopSocket folks now have their own custom designer available, and you can build a PopSocket with all of your own stuff. So the one that's on my phone right now is actually one for a different podcast
I do. It's called GigGab for musicians. And I put our GigGab logo as like the circular part of the PopSocket, and then the oval part of the base of it. I used their PopSocket AI designer. I said, make some purple drums that would match like our logo colors. And sure enough, it came up with some purple drums. These look, this looks so much better than I thought it would. I thought I'd order these things and talk about them on the show and maybe never
use it again. Like, I didn't know how good it would look. These are, this has been on my phone since it arrived. It's great. But I also had some others made up. And, you know, I mentioned I like to use a wallet sometimes on my phone. Well, I had a wallet case or a wallet pop socket made with the Mac key cab logo. And then I had it do some like space theme behind it. And it looks great and it works great. And I also had a MacGeekGab just circular
sort of pop socket thing designed. And it's got a little blue background that matches the MacGeekGab logo and it all fits. And you can design your own pop sockets really easily. I did this and they were at my house in a week or less. I mean, it was great. Hold on. Did you just change those right in front of my eyes? I changed them in front of your eyes because they're MagSafe.
That's the beauty of it. There you go. So I can, I can take them off and I, that, this is what I really have been loving about the pop socket is I can move to the wallet pop socket and still have the pop socket thing to hold my phone while the wallet is, is there. And I can have like, I, the, the wallet that I use has, I don't know, I've got like four or five cards in it and it, it does fine. So yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's pretty cool. Yeah. They do a good job.
Yeah. Yeah. I don't know where I got it from somewhere from there, but like, yeah, a couple of years years ago my daughter got one with our dog oh yeah yeah you know and all that so i think they've had the customizer available for a little while what what has changed is the um the ability to use ai designs sort of integrated into that uh custom designer that's awesome yeah yeah yeah so you don't have to pay for for open ai right they do
design they do it for you yeah yeah um I have a... It's almost like they know what their customers want. It's almost like they know what their customers want. Yeah. I've got another cool stuff found that I've been sitting on for a little while. Lawyer Jeff wrote in with this thing. We were talking about... Can I like time machine is great when it's great. And then a lot of times it doesn't work and you don't really get any notification that time machine did anything.
Like unless you choose to look at the tiny little icon in the menu bar that you overlook or dig into system settings, you won't see that. Oh, it's been a month since your time machine worked. Well, enter TM notifier. Which we will link in the show notes.
This gets you email notifications for time machine and you can get you can customize how they work and all of that stuff and so this way you know when there has been an issue and it will send you an email with the specific error and all of that stuff so tm notifier they've got a free trial i don't know how long that lasts for or it's seven bucks to to go buy it so thank you to lawyer jeff for that and uh yeah and he also shared i will i will put
this in i will put this link in the show notes i'm not going to read or even relay the whole story but um he shared lawyer jeff shared with me this this uh this story about this guy that did this thing called apple care dispatch Where they are, they were, and I don't think they still exist. Maybe they do, uh, not Apple employees.
They were contractors all over the country that would go out to problematic, like problematic scenarios with customers for on behalf of Apple care to go and fix these things. And it is a fascinating story that this guy who was one for several years relays and just has all kinds of interesting anecdotes. And it's a fascinating thing. I had no idea that AppleCare dispatch was I'd never even heard that term before, let alone learned about these things.
So, yeah, I'll put that link in the show notes for everybody, too. Uh, one more. Can I do one more? I'm going to do one. All right, Bruce, Bruce, um, you know, in the last episode, we were talking about various different ways of, uh, monitoring our max utilities for monitoring max. And I mentioned menu meters, which was the first cool stuff found we ever mentioned on this show.
And Bruce, uh, hell and many of you, it wasn't just Bruce. Many of you reminded us or alerted us that Menu Meters still exists. You can run it on your Mac today. And this is a port of the original Menu Meters, but we'll put a link in the show notes to it. And it works in light mode and dark mode, and you can download it and install it. And I believe it's free. It's all kind of GitHub hosted and all these things. But yeah, thank you, Bruce, for the heads up. And thank you, everybody.
It wasn't just Bruce for the heads up on Menu Meters. It has survived in its own way. Yeah. Anybody else got anything else, or is it time to call it? What is it, Pete? Read the banner, Dave. Play it, Sam. Play As Time Goes By. There you go. It didn't go as time goes by. I didn't know. No, this is a song called The Answer that's playing here now. That's the answer. That is the answer. That's the answer to the question.
You know, I got this cool email. I thought it was going to be cool stuff found. It was this great email. It said, I can teach you how to read maps backwards. Turns out it was just spam. Oh, no, Pete. Oh, wow. Really? Really? You woke up early in the morning to tell us that, didn't you? 14 hours before I flew at Prado.
To lay that terrible joke on us. golly that's a full-on dad joke there man that is a full-on dad joke oh man oh man not it's even worse it's a nerd dad joke yeah it is a nerd dad joke yeah yeah yeah which is what the three of us are so i guess i guess it's bad i guess it, Wow. Well, it seems like my throat has made it. It hurts like crazy. The throat coat tea wasn't enough. We had to switch to higher octane things, but this double IPA from Omnium Brewing seems to have smoothed things out,
at least to get me to the end of the show. What's it called? This is the Tropical Rain Hops from Omnium. I don't know if you can get this out there. Omnium is a local brewery here in the seacoast of New Hampshire. Yeah, I know everything's hyper-local. We got a bunch of hyper-local stuff, too. Yeah, exactly. That's cool. That's the stuff I like. Yeah, same. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. The drummer slash singer in me realized, oh, I just need to numb it is what I need to do.
That's what I do on stage, and it works fine. At least... The one... Sorry, the one bad thing about moving here to South Dakota that I didn't know about that could have prevented me from coming is we cannot get alcohol delivered here at all. So nowine.com, no Grizzly, no Abbott delivered in any way, shape, or form. Yeah, New Hampshire is weird about liquor deliveries. Yeah, it's not. Yeah. It's limited. Most states are. Most states are. It's true.
Yeah. Yeah. Hell, I think you were spoiled in California with that, Adam. Well, even locally, you know, like even within the state, like, you know, like why can't I have some driver drive down to the, you know, thing and drive it over here? Yeah. Why not? Oh, you can't even do it. Like Drizzly. Oh, I hear Drizzly. I hear Drizzly. I think Drizzly shutting down or something. Oh no. Anyway, so it didn't work out. Okay. All right. And you can't even send your kids out for beer anymore.
What's this world coming to? Wait, I can send my kids out for beer. Well, I can too now. Actually, I can. I won't. So, my daughter just turned 21, and she wanted on her birthday to go buy some beer for me. She doesn't drink. It's not interesting to drink. She's like, I just want to do it, you know, like for the novelty of it. She got shut down at the grocery store because she didn't have the right orientation license. Because, you know, here they do the vertical when you're under 21.
They do here. But even though her birthday was on there, they said, nope, we just can't take that. What? I had to go get a new license. It's not a state thing. I think it was just a policy. A policy of that store. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Sure. I'm like, you could go to a bar right now, and they would like. Oh, they would happily take you. Selling you. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Get that license. So my daughter just turned 21 as well, and because she served, she goes, I know that when we go out on my birthday, I have to bring my passport because the paper license that they give you when you renew, Two, they will not accept. No. So you get your card. Yep. My wife hit that when she got here. They wouldn't take hers. And she's like, I am so obviously not older than 21. But they're like, no. Yeah. I still get carded sometimes. We live in a college town, though.
So sometimes it's just policy that they card everybody. No, it is. No, we get it. She wasn't really upset, but she was just like, really? Yep. Yeah, I'm trying to think. We took our son. We were in New York City for his 21st birthday last year. And several places, including Comedy Cellar, I don't even think they carded him. And he was like, what the hell is this? It's like, why did we come here when I was 21? Why didn't we just come last year? It wouldn't have mattered. Right. Yep. Yep.
Yeah. There you go. That's how it works. All right, folks, thanks for hanging out with us. Thanks to Cashfly for providing all the bandwidth to get the show from us to you. Make sure you go check out Pete's other podcast, So There I Was, for aviation enthusiasts. I do two others. One's called Business Brain. The other's called Gig Gab, Musicians and Entrepreneurs. Not in that order. Well, I guess a lot of musicians are entrepreneurs, so maybe it all applies. I don't know.
Check them out if you're interested. Thanks for hanging out with us. We've got links in the show notes for all of us on our socials. And, you know, you can call us if you really want. 224-888-GEEK. I don't know. Text us, Eden. We get it all. That's how it works. Music. Woo! 4-3-3-5. 4-3-3-5. You're right. All right. I've said enough. Adam, do you have three words for him? Don't get caught. Music.