Like a Caveman!

It's time for the Mac Geek Gap and listener Dan brings us our quick tip of the week with, QR codes. Ever get a QR code on your phone and stand there looking at it like, well, what am I supposed to do with this? I don't have a phone to scan my QR code. Guess what? Apple knows that. They figured it out. All you have to do is touch and hold, and it turns into the link that you're supposed to go to, or supposed to use. So, no more looking around for another phone to scan that QR code,

or taking a picture of it and putting it on your other device. That's it. More quick tips like this, plus your questions answered today on Mac Geek Gab number 10-06 for Monday, October 30th, 2023. Music. Greetings, folks, and indeed welcome to MacGeekGab, the show where you send in your quick tips like that. You send in your questions. You send in your cool stuff found. We share quick tips and cool stuff found. We share your questions, too, and we even try to answer them.

We string it all together into an agenda that gives us all the best shot every single week of learning at least five new things. Sponsors for this episode include greenchef.com slash six zero MGG. That's where you're going to go to get 60% off of Green Chef plus free shipping. We'll talk more in depth about their fantastic meal prep kits in a minute for now here in Durham, New Hampshire, I'm Dave Hamilton.

And greetings from Dubai. It's pilot Pete and it's warm here folks in the nineties, I don't recommend it unless you want to Yeah, work on that. Work on that tan or that heat stroke. And Pete, I hear a third voice here today. Uh, do you want to just introduce yourself since you've been here before? Sure. Adam Christensen, uh, from the Mac cast and I am in Chile, South Dakota. I thought you were going to tell us you were in Chile in South America, but you know, that's a little different.

Yeah. Another kind of Chile. That's actually getting cold. There's a city named Chile in South Dakota? Wait, what? Expecting snow in October, which yeah, that's fun. Yeah, yeah. By the time this episode comes out, you may have had snow, Adam. So yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Very good odds. Very good odds. Yeah. Good. It's rare, but it does happen in New Hampshire. I remember four or five years ago, we had that foot of snow on Halloween and it was wet and heavy.

Believe it or not, Pete, I think that was 11 years ago, but. Okay. Uh, but yes, you're, you're right. It like delayed trick or treating, the power was out for weeks. It was, I, I, I bet the listeners, long time listeners of this show might remember, cause I'm sure I talked about it. Today, we'll talk about more quick tips. Lawyer Jeff sends in his tip. He says, using Apple Mail in Sonoma, I noticed a new little icon in the Finder. And he sent us a screenshot.

In his Finder list view, there was a little mail icon sort of to the right of the name of the document. He says, when I double click that little mail icon, it automatically opens the email in from which that document came. So this was an attachment that he dragged out to somewhere. And then as he double clicked the little thing, it brings them right back to the message, a deep link right back into mail, into the messages in Sonoma. I, I, he's, I can see this being somewhat handy at times.

There's going to be times when that's a clever help. Yeah. Yeah. It's like, oh, I want to reply to this email. Like, like a lot of times I'll get spreadsheets from like ad agencies where they're like, fill this in and then send it back to us. And so to, to be able to, you know, double click that and go right back to the email thread where that was like, I could, I could see that being helpful.

Oh yeah, absolutely. Yeah. I don't use mail in Sonoma at the moment because they, because it, it, I, I, I, uh. Told everybody, I think last week, maybe a week before that I've moved to Thunderbird, largely because of Mail's inability to allow me to have different signatures for each alias that I have on my accounts. I had a plug-in that did that previously and that plug-in does not work anymore because Apple disabled

them. So I've been on Thunderbird. It's fine. I hope for a day when I can go back to Mail. That said, I also understand change resistance and the longer I spend in Thunderbird, the more comfortable I will get with it, and so maybe I don't go back to mail, I don't know, but there are still some things about Thunderbird that are just clunky. It's, and it doesn't do like AppleScript or shortcuts or any like Mac stuff.

It's very much like it's a, you know, it's an open source cross-platform email client. And it feels like that. Yeah, yeah. I understand that resistance to change. I've been on Spark for years, so I don't think I'm ever going back to Apple Mail.

Okay, so this is interesting to me and we're already on a detour, but this is great because it's what we do it's what we do so the one thing that I have had a lot of trouble with with with adapting to spark is the fact that it forces me to thread everything like my brain does not work in email threads and I felt like. When I first tried spark it like my inbox for example is is really where the problem is is most pronounced.

I let's let's say the three of us had an email thread going you know we have an email conversation going I when I reply to whatever the most recent email you I would reply all and then I file that email into my archive. And at least my perception of it in Spark was when, like, the next email would come in, it would bring the whole thread back to my inbox. And it's like, well, now I don't know what's going on anymore because I think, I thought I replied to all of these.

Like, I only want to see the most recent one. I don't know. It's just, again, it's the way my brain works. Am I correct about that? Like, is that, that's how Spark works, right, Adam? Yeah, yeah, the thread's all there. I actually like that, that's… Yeah, no, I get that. You're right, it's how your brain works. So you gotta find the thing that works for

you. I'm also, I don't know if you're an inbox zero person, but I'm an inbox zero person, so some of the automations and some of the things that it does for me in terms of that, I think help. Okay. I'm sure I could do it in mail too, but like I said, I've just been using it for so long, so I have everything organized, you know, the way I kind of like it. It just kind of works the way I like it.

Um, yeah, some of the- So I'm an inbox zero person too, but I've got hundreds of mails in my inbox cause I just can't get there. I keep trying, but that brings me to a question. So. Is there a setting in mail that I'm not aware of to stop the threads? Because it's constant. Oh, I was not aware of it. It's by mailbox and it is in the view menu. I believe it's like view organized by conversation. It's something about conversation. I don't have mail open on my computer. Yeah, sure.

And I don't want to launch it because it might mess with my homeostasis here. Yeah, exactly. So there you go. So I'm going to have to go play with that afterwards. I cannot stand when threads start. I'm going, wait, no, I already read that. Wait, I replied. I didn't reply to that one. How'd I miss it? Uh, that's, that's that what you just described, Pete is, is what happens in my brain. Yeah. Yeah. It's like, wait, I missed something.

Oh, so that's one of the things that I absolutely despise about Mac mail. And I may be happy to stay there if I can get rid of the threads. And an Apple mail and, and also Thunderbird like Thunderbird supports threads. It just gives you the option to turn them on and off. And similarly to Apple Mail, you can do it by mailbox in Thunderbird. Like our Mac GeekGab mailbox, I actually like having

threads on there because I get to see that you reply. I get to see the whole trail. And in that compartmentalized scenario, it actually works out great. I just looked at the settings in Spark and there is an option to minimize the old emails in ThreadView but you can't, I don't think you can eliminate them. I'll have to check that out.

I'm shocked that you are the first person telling me about this and the reason I say that is I recently, as I realized I needed to move or wanted to move from mail, I had a long email conversation with the folks at Spark. And they are adamant that threads are the only way of email. And they do say things like, but if you have a use case where you think. You know, threads could be turned off and still be efficient, tell us. And like literally on their

website, they say this. So they're aware that there's a whole audience of potential users that just don't like threads. And I told them, I said, I think you're asking the wrong question here. You've already acknowledged that there are people out there for whom threads, don't like, aren't, are incompatible with their brains. That's the beginning and end of the conversation. It's not that threads are bad. They're great for you.

They're great for me in like one very compartmentalized use case, but in general, collaborating is better, but they confuse the crap out of me. And they're like, no, but threads are better. They're more efficient. It's like for you and it's okay. You know, anyway. That's why we have so many options. That's the great thing. It is. It's weird for a company to... Exclude a whole potential audience, but yeah, that's the part is it's like, I don't understand

why you're this is the hill you're dying on. That's really the, it, it, it seems like the way they've talked about it, it seems trivial for them to allow users to turn off threads. Like, like it's a thing that they've probably implemented and then decided not to surface. I can't say that for certain, but the way they talk about it. It didn't seem like, They didn't Acknowledge it as some major engineering feat that they would have to accomplish. It was more like well

Why would you want us to turn this on for you? It's like because I want it. Let me try it like. Anyway, yeah speaking of user interface User interfaces that are quirky, We use we also use Google Drive here, and there's a quick tip coming folks So, uh, we use Google drive here amongst, uh, us to organize our Mackie cab, like agendas and stuff. And we have a shared folder in Google drive that mostly has Google docs in it.

For what we create one for each episode, yada, yada. It doesn't really matter except that this week and last week, Pete was like, I'm not seeing the Google doc for episode 1006. I'm not seeing it. That's because you need to go to drive. dot google dot com, not docs dot google dot... Well, yeah, that was part of it, but it's a document that's shared with you, so it's reasonable to presume that you would be able to see it.

And Google Drive, even when you're in drive dot google dot com, or google dot com slash drive or wherever you're supposed to go, even when you're in Drive, the things, the folders that are shared with you are not obviously surfaced. But what is easy to find is anything that is starred. And so you can star any folder and any document. So I am constantly managing starred items in my Google Drive.

For example, of course I have our Mac geek app folder that starred permanently and you star it by just clicking on the name of it. And I think going to organize and then say add to starred it's a little bit hidden, but Trust me, it's there. Just just like dig. It's it's in a submenu. But. I also, like I will start right now at this very moment in time, I have our 1006 document starred because that's the current episode.

I also have our 1007 document starred because when we finalize an agenda and sort of move it into the show notes document, we then, I start a new one for us to put things in for next week, right? And although I think the 1007 show is going to be different because Apple has an event on Monday, but we'll get there. So I think the 1007 document will be renamed to 1008 because that's going to have your questions and your tips and stuff.

But I star that. Now, when I create the next one, I will un-star 1006 just to kind of, you know, manage that flow. Yes, it's a little crazy, but really using that start thing and then I bookmark a link to my Google Drives starred items folder and that for me is the home page of Google Drive.

And certainly I can go elsewhere, but starting with those things that I have starred makes Google Drive so much easier and I do the same thing for Synology Drive, Synology Drive is is their sort of self-hosted version of Google Drive. And we do the same thing with that and it makes life great. And I don't even usually hit the microphone when I'm talking about it, but I'm super excited and animated. So, yeah. Anyway, I don't know, have you found, have either of you, have you,

since you, have you starred your Mac geek app folder? Are you finding life easier? I did it right away. And, cause I'll tell you what, I had it in a bookmark in the very top left of the bookmark toolbar in Safari, and somehow, some way, I managed to delete it. I don't know when, why, how, and so that bookmark was gone, and that's why I went, well, I'm just gonna go to docs.google.com because I was brain dead and didn't go to drive.google.com.

And I'm looking around for it, and I'm like, where did it go? And so I'm having to write Dave and go, Dave, the dude about that document, I'm not seeing it. So, the one I've been using for this whole process we've been using for months and months now. Can you help me please? Please, yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like this paradigm that worked for so long is now broken. No, it's Google Drive. It's a weird interface, but... And you may recall, I did it with notes too.

We have a shared notes folder. So when we are preparing the show, we drop things into that shared notes folder. And somehow I managed to delete that folder from my left sidebar. And since Dave's the owner and the one that shared it, I had to go back to him, hat in hand and go, Dave, can you please share that folder again? It's a good thing. Just this once. It's a good thing you're not the owner. Because if you were the owner and you deleted it, I think it's gone.

Yeah. And I don't think there's any undelete. There is recently deleted in notes. Yes. Okay. Oh, well, that's good then. So I guess you could do it that way. But the other thing, and that reminds me just another quick tip. I was looking for it in notes yesterday on my iOS device, my phone. I did something and it all went away and I'm like, oh darn. And I had to look there at the very top. There is a little undo

in notes in iOS. So I accidentally, I had selected a bunch of texts and I wanted to copy it. And And somehow I managed to hit the keyboard with my thumb and changed it to like BB. And I'm like, oh no. And I finally got it to undo. So there is an undo in iOS and Notes. Oh, nice. All right, cool. We have any more on that before we move on to the next quick tip? All right. I get to shake your head loud. I get to see them shake their heads and I should not have taken that. That's on me.

Listener John shares that there are a couple of great little quick tips he uses in the Finder. One is option command I or command option I really doesn't matter. That opens a Get Info window that changes when you click on the next item in the Finder. So if you just do Command-I, that opens a Get Info window for whatever is selected in the Finder and it stays that way. You can move to other things and you can even open several Get Info windows for several different items.

But Command-Option-I opens a follow along Get Info window where the information in that window changes as you click on new items in the finder, which can be very handy if you're trying to look around and, you know, maybe look at file sizes or dates or, you know, something else. Yeah. What does, do you, Adam, do you know what Apple calls that? I'm looking in the finder now. Oh, it, it, so the command I is get info command option. is show inspector.

So show inspector. That's cool. Which looks just like the info window, except you can select new files. That is so cool. Yeah, follows you along. It's like a live, yeah, it's the inspector. I mean, that's a good name for it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then- That's also the one you wanna use if you wanna select multiple items and get the aggregate data for. Oh, I forgot about that. There you go. So, so you can see...

Like the total size of like if you have like five files, so sometimes I might be looking at, you know, something I'm archiving or something like that and select five items. And when you do that, it will open a single panel. Because if you do command I, what it'll do it is open five panels. And that's really fun if you've accidentally selected 25 things. Correct. Or three. Well, and then you do that. Is it command click or option click to close all windows or whatever?

I always do just command option W in the finder to close all windows. So there's, folks, there is already a treasure trove of quick tips here. Yeah, we've hit like 30 quick tips in the last 12 seconds. Sorry, keep going, Adam, yeah. But the aggregate, so with the inspector, it'll open a single window and it will give you the aggregate data.

So it'll say you've selected 25 items, five items, whatever, but then also the way I use it mostly is to get the total storage size for all of those items rather than the individual items. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. And you can, you mentioned for like archiving. You can select multiple items in the finder and choose to compress them and it will make a zip file of all of those items, not just one item at a time, which is also super helpful. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

One more from listener John, who says command shift P opens up the preview pane and the right side of Finder windows, of course, also available in the view dropdown so that you can see a preview of whatever the document or item is. And he also shares that holding option hyphen to make an M N dash E N dash, shift option hyphen for an M dash, and. Option semicolon to make an ellipses. Is that right? Is that how you make an ellipses? Yes. Option semicolon. Who knew?

Oh, not me. I always say it all the time. Yeah. Why wouldn't it be option period? You know what? I wouldn't think. Because option period is the greater than equals sign. Oh, man. I wish I had... Oh, that's shift period. No. Option period... Oh, greater than equal. Yeah, shift period is greater than, option is greater than equals. Oh man. Option comma is greater than or less than equals. I would love. That's just a swag. I would love to have known how to do the greater than equals thing.

I I've, I've used that like in programming shortcuts recently and had to go find another example of it and the copy paste it. I'm not proud. I'll get things done. You know? Right on. Yeah. Yeah. Wow. All right. And he's got a, a link for us, uh, set app actually, uh, shared an article that sort of describes a bunch of these things. And so, uh, we will link to that in the show notes too. They are at mackeycab.com or you can go directly to these show notes

at mgg.fm slash 10 Oh six. And that will bring you right to it because Adam helped. Oh no, I think I did that part of the magic. I was going to give you credit. Adam, most of the magic of the way the site works is thanks to Adam. Um, but, but actually I think I did that a little bit. All right. Brian brings us our next quick tip, which is really. Probably something for me and a handful of people probably doesn't hit my 20% mark, but it blew me away.

He said, I heard you mention that you use the four score app to manage all of your theater charts and other musical, uh, like charts, you know, the, the, the things that the scores and such to follow along. He says, you mentioned that you sync manually using airdrop between your devices. He says, I use it all the time and stumbled upon a recently

added auto sync function that uses iCloud. And sure enough, if you go into its little menu, scroll down enough, there is sync and you just turn it on and magically everything syncs with iCloud, it is magic.

So thank you for sharing that, Brian. And for the rest of, if there are any Foursquare users here, it will probably change your life because I'm finding I often will use different iPads, like I'll have one at the theater and one at home and, or if I want to look on my phone at a thing, it's just nice to have, it's like, oh crap. I made those notes on my iPad. I don't have them on my phone or I don't have them on my Mac.

ICloud syncing. I don't know why it wasn't there before, but hey, it's there now. So thank you for that. Uh, yeah. I've got a kind of an audible call here, only because syncing, it came up for me this week. I started using shared library finally, because I got everybody on the late enough device that I can use a shared library in Photos. So I started it on my iPhone, but there was nothing there. I couldn't figure out why it wasn't there in my Photos on my Mac.

I'm like, well, it turns out that you have to be in the Photos library, and up in the top left And then on the left of the toolbar it had personal library, and it's a little drop down window. And you go to both libraries or shared library. Well, then my shared library was empty. And I'm like, why is it empty? I've created this shared library. It's the same ID, that sort of thing. And I finally hit, well, start syncing. And nothing happened.

It says, well, I'm syncing, but nothing was happening. 22,000 photos, not one is coming up. What's going on here? And then there was, I forget what it was. To do something or import to that library. And I went, it says it's sinking. I'm not going to do that yet. I'm going to give it another day. And sure enough, the next day, all my photos were there. Like 22,000 photos are now in my shared library. So it doesn't come in one at a time and happily go, oh, look, see, I'm getting better.

It just, it was sitting there looking like it was doing nothing, even though it said sinking. So I left it alone. and why it took all my self-control not to import, yes, yes, it took all my self-control not to import 22,000 more photos into this library. Yeah, iCloud photo libraries, slow, sinking, yeah. Patience is the virtue of that. Patience, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. This time it paid off, but boy, it was hard not to, not to be proactive.

I'm gonna force it. Well, the thing is, Apple does a terrible job with giving you any feedback for any kind of iCloud syncing. Like that's if I have a main complaint, it's like, can you just give us a bar or something like every other iCloud-based app that shows like progress? Even if it's lying to us. So I know you're working, but yeah. I mean, they have the little thing at the bottom, but it's really subtle, and I don't

know if that works for shared, but I know, you know. But even there, the amount of information is so lacking, like, you're like, okay, you've done X number of X things, but I'm not seeing them. Yeah. It's easy to panic. Well, and, and like to Pete's point, it's not even panic. It's just like,

oh, well, let me just re add these here. It's going to be fine. No problem. Yeah. Yeah. I, I have, when I add items to an, like from the finder, like music that I've either created from like shows that I've played or like I'm a fish fan right and so I download a lot of live fish shows.

And it's all licensed and stuff but I want to put them in my iTunes or my music library and so I have a playlist that I put them into I sort them and then you know they're good to go and when I drag them in from the finder it first warns me and it says if you drag things into this this playlist has to be removed from iCloud. Fine. No problem. Okay. I know that it will eventually re add it to iCloud when it uploads all the stuff. So it's like, okay, fine.

And I answer that and I watch it add one by one and it goes pretty quick, but you know, it's a chick, chick, chick, chick. It starts adding them all. Once it's added the final one, it's, empty again. And I drag them in again from the finder and then they all appear. They're clearly already there, you know, but I have to do that twice. And it's been this way for a decade. Like it's some wonky thing that I've never even thought to complain about. It's just like, oh yeah, yep.

I just do this and. I wonder if Dave, if you just drag one in instead of all of them in a second time, would you only see the one or would it then populate? I'll try that next time. That's a good question. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It shouldn't have to happen regardless, obviously. But that's a good, yeah, yeah, yeah. So the question is, does it take a nudge or a boot? Yep, yeah, yeah, fair, fair. Yeah, which, do all of them resurface or is it just one?

Yeah, I will say it's easier to just drag all of them again because I already have them selected in the finder. Well, fair enough. You know, it's like, your idea is going to cause me one extra click, but I want to try it. So like, you know, to find out, yeah, yeah, yeah. Huh. Interesting. Hey, let's Dave, just remember that's what I do. I'm here to create more work for you. So that's what we do here as a show. We create more work for everybody to enhance our computing lives.

Yeah, there you go. Information is, um, well, it's information. Uh, speaking of information on October 31st of this year. So, Tuesday, Amazon Alexa service will no longer be available through IFTTT. So if you are using it in any of your IFTTT recipes, you need to, they will either be... Like, um, closed off and, and like shut off because there's nothing it can do. There's certain things with it where it can move to a different type of trigger.

But, uh, I think it moves like to a button trigger or something like that, but otherwise it, all of those recipes are just, they're not going to delete them. They're just going to be rendered inactive. And I wonder what the motivation for that was on Amazon's part. Who knows, but it's, it seems to have come quickly. I mean, I, I got this notification like barely a week before it's happening. So, yeah, that's why it was a, it was a late addition to this episode. Right. Yep. Yep.

Uh, all right. Taha has a quick tip for us. Taha says, I wanted to share, uh, that you can easily convert live photos that that were taken in sequence into a video on your iPhone. Here's how. You open the photos app and locate the live photos that you wanna convert. Select them by tapping on them and then tap the three dots in the bottom right corner of the screen, and choose convert to video.

This will create a video from the selected live photos. It's a handy feature, especially when you have a sequence of live photos that you wanna turn into a short video clip. And so, yeah, there you go. Thanks, Taha, that's great. Yeah, have either of you guys ever done this? I have not. No. No. Yeah. I don't do a lot with like short form video, but I would imagine like it'd be handy for all those TikTokers and people out there. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yep, yep, yeah, I can, yeah.

And my guess is you could do this with just one live photo too. So, and I think I knew that existed as we're talking about it, I have some recollection of, oh yeah, you can take a live photo and turn it into a little video, but I did not know that you could take several live photos and link them together. That for sure is news to me. Oh. Yeah. I mean, I don't even bother to do this, but I would imagine most of the time too,

I want the opposite and I'm pretty sure you can do the opposite. I think you can un-live photo a live photo, right? But, um. Yeah. Yeah, I have a lot of live photos. It's like, oh yeah, I forgot to turn off live photo. I didn't really need that. Yeah, I'm the same way. I'm not a fan of live photos. I think it's a waste of space. If you want, if I wanted a live photo thing, I just hold my thumb on the shutter a little longer and it doesn't burst anymore.

It starts a video, but then you can screen capture what you want. You can burst. I think you. Oh, you can? Okay. Yeah, we shared it. I thought they took away burst. No, we shared it as a quick tip. Recently, um, we will. See, I thought that was video. You just hold your phone on. Is it the hold and slide? I think it's the hold and slide. Yeah. Oh, I thought that's, I thought that started video, I'm so confused. No, it, it's all good. We, we talked about it not that long ago. Um. Yeah, we did.

Because that's the one, I think it was the show where we talked about it. Drag, you drag left. So from episode, from episode 988, yeah, you drag left on the, you hold and drag left on the shutter button in the. In the portrait mode. In any mode. Any mode. If you're, no, if you're in the landscape mode and you hold and drag left, I believe it will zoom in cause you're shooting video. What, no, let me try this. Oh, if you drag left, I see, you might have to drag down.

Yes. Yes. Drag down. So you're correct. You're absolutely right, Pete. It drag semantics. It is, but, but your words were correct. Yeah. Yeah. You have to drag to the short end of the landscape mode. Correct. Drag down in, in the landscape mode. If you drag left, you're going

to zoom in. Yeah, that's right. Which is cool. That allows you to do one handed video shooting was zooming in and not having to select it does here's the thing though if you, do that and and listener cory pointed this out after we had this discussion probably in 986 or 988 or whatever it was uh and i i don't think we've shared it since is that if you do that thing where you just hold on the shutter in camera mode to take a video it only takes the video at at 1080p 30 frames a second.

It does not do your 4K if you have that set to be on. So just bear that in mind. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And all of these things are just the things that confuse my mother because she was here recently. She's like, why do I have all these? Cause she had taken a bunch of burst photos and she had no idea how she took them. Yeah, I had to help her clean those up, show her how to clean those up. Just having to live like cavemen and live with 1080p video is just.

Yeah, I know. Like, yeah, what an error we would have made. PJ shares to your comment, Pete, in our live chat at mackiecup.com slash discord, PJ shares that live photos are mandatory with kids to make sure you get the right facial expression. I could see that. Yep, yep. Like the angry one or the. Yeah, yeah, yeah, well, you know. Or get their eyes open or, yeah. Speaking of photos, tips, Dale has one for us. When browsing the photos library on my iPad,

he says, I'll typically start by tapping on a photo. I say he, I don't know. I have friends of all genders named Dale. So Dale says, I'll typically start by tapping on a photo. Then I swipe left or right to go from one photo to the next. So you tap on the photo to get the full photo and then you kind of go back and forth.

All right. What I used to do when I wanted to go back to the gallery view and start again from another photo was to act like a caveman and go to the top left of the screen and click the back arrow. What I do now is just swipe down on the photo and it takes me right back to the gallery view and that works on the iPhone too.

Swiping up, Dale continues, causes the photo info box to display where you can see all of the details and you can adjust metadata and then you can make that go away by clicking, tapping the X button Or like the first tip, swipe down. Thanks Dale. That's great. Yeah. Good stuff. So I like the way you think Dale, and I have to give you credit. I thought I was being original with the caveman comment, but I may have seen that in the mail when

winced I read through it and it might have resurfaced from there. So I'll credit to you for your wit, Dale. Uh, yeah, well, and Dale credited in, uh, the email that, that, that yes, that of course, John Braun was the one who often referred to things like that as having to be like a caveman.

So yes, he, the credit, the credit trail goes all the way through. Absolutely. Yep. And in fact, In fact, the only reason I didn't say it while reading the email was because you had just said the caveman thing. I'm like, oh, maybe it came from Pete, not John. And then it was like, no, no, that's not it. I think it might've been John. Yeah. I think you're right. It's funny though. I'm going to steal it and use it.

They are a good comedy. You know, it's, it's that we're good curators and that's what we do here. Like we get lots of your tips and we share the ones that, that, uh, they're good. So it's, we're, I, my kids get mad at me all the time for, you know, stealing their lines essentially, because I steal their lines. But I tell them, like, you know, I hear all of your lines. I just select the best ones to use for myself, and that it's because I'm an excellent curator. That's just how it is.

Speaking of curating things, we will be back here on Monday night after Apple's Scary Fast event, because they, surprise, are doing an event in the evening in the evening here on Monday the 30th. So we will release, if all goes well, what's that? Any idea what it's? Macs, yeah, all the. Okay, oh, so the M3 Macs, M3s? Well, there's some fast. They're gonna be scary fast. They're gonna be fast, it could be an M2 iMac.

Oh yeah, okay. Could be an M3 iMac. There's there's a lot of uh, I think like Mark Gurman thinks that it's going to be uh, M3 stuff other people I think Gruber is like well Why would they do M3 in a Mac and then M2 later in the Vision Pro? I I think they'll wait on that. Who knows?

Well, the good news is by the time you're listening to this, you might even know. Yeah, that's right So we will, we will, we will be back here to, to, uh, to talk about that and Adam, you're, you're going to be able to join us again. And I think it's going to be a crossover episode with, with everybody. So yeah. Yeah. The, the weird thing on that. Okay. So two things it's in the evening, which is totally bizarre brand new, right.

But it's right around Halloween. What's the over-under on the executives and people presenting the video being in like full Halloween costume? I know we've already seen Craig Federighi in costume. So like, there's no world where he's not in costume. Interesting. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think so. I think you're right. Yeah.

What were you going to ask Adam? No, that was, that's the, I want to know what the over-under of, you know, Tim Cook showing up in, I don't even know what would Tim Cook dress up like for Halloween, who knows? But... Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It would be great if he was dressed up as, could he dress up as Steve and get away with it? That was exactly my first thought as you asked me that question. I thought, there's no way anybody would do that. Yeah. No, right?

Oh, is my tongue bleeding? Oh, no. No, that won't happen at all. Because, you know, Steve having passed away, you know, it's like... No, no, but but that which that is the first thought that came to each of our minds. We're all sick SOBs, that's just what it is. My first Macworld Expo where I saw Steve present, Noah Wiley came on stage dressed like Steve. And at first I thought, man, he and Noah Wiley really do look alike because I just bought

it. I mean, I wasn't right up next to the stage or anything. And then it was like, wait a minute, no, no. Spoofing him, got it.

Nice. Yeah, um, I don't think they'll do the Steve thing, uh, but I- Will they, I wonder if they'll go, were they still doing the TV show where the, wasn't there rumors they were gonna do a TV show with like classic universal monsters or something like that so they could go that route where somebody's the werewolf and someone's Dracula and someone's Frankenstein sort of thing?

Alright, hey look, we're getting into the fall here, we're spending maybe a little less this time outside, we wanna do some things inside that are fun and engaging, and you know, maybe that actually resulted something useful for us. Like how about dinner, right? Well, our sponsor Green Chef is the number one meal kit for eating clean with dinners that work for you, not the other way around, right?

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Free shipping. So that's green chef.com slash six zero MGG. use code 60MGG to get 60% off plus free shipping. And our thanks to Green Chef, the number one meal kit for eating well for sponsoring this episode. Dave, I've got a question. All right. Well, Paul has a question. Even better. Paul Conaway writes in and says, I'm trying to find a C2C cable for my car. I have a USB-C port near where I'm placing my iPhone 15 Pro Max, good choice, Paul,

in the dash and console areas. What's the best cable for car playing? It's funny, I was recently having this conversation when I talked with the folks at the Tucson Mac users group.

I have been using, like many of us, have been using a cable in the car to charge my phone for a long time, and then of course one for CarPlay, which, you know, means I'm plugging it in all the time, and I want the cable easily accessible, because I don't have wireless CarPlay, but I don't like when a cable is just like dangling all over the place, especially when it's raining, or it's in the winter when there's like snow on the ground,

because invariably, I will get into my car and grab this cable, and the end of it is like sitting in a puddle of salty, slushy snow water. And so years ago, I thought there must be a better way. And I found it in coiled cables. And for anybody who's watching the video, I put it up here. But the Amazon links to the coiled cables of your choice are in the show notes. We've got A to lightning, C to lightning, C to C. Obviously you got to pick the one that works for your car and device.

But having these coiled cables, and I just bought another one recently because I moved from a lightning connector on my phone to a USB-C connector on my phone. Is, it's a game changer, because it's a three foot cable that when it's coiled up, it takes all of about, you know, six or seven inches or something like that

and it stays, like, nice and tidy in the dash. In fact, it's so nice and tidy, I have two USB ports in my car, I have both cables, lightning and USB-C, plugged into my car full time and it doesn't bother me. So, maybe that is the best testament I can give to these. That's nice for those listening and are old enough to remember. It looks like the old telephone receiver cable that used to.

Yeah. Yeah. I think that's where my brain went years ago. It was like, wait, why doesn't somebody make a coiled cable for this? Like that's what I would want. Like, you know, so evidently they do good news. So yep. Yep. Uh, I think the best cable is no cable though. I, okay. Is that what you do in your car, Adam? Yeah, I mean, I couldn't believe it and I might have made this a pick on the last MGG, sort of an audible. This might have also come up.

So I've been using the car link kit adapters that you get on Amazon. And I thought they would never work, but a listener told me about them and said they're great. And it's just a little dongle you plug in. And you put it in the USB thing, and you pair it with your Bluetooth, and you have wireless CarPlay. And it really does work, huh? It really does work. I have very rarely have quirks with it. It is slow to connect sometimes, so you have to be patient.

And I think I have the 2.0 or 3.0 version. I think they're up to 5.0 now. Yeah, they're up to like 4.0, 5.0. And it's like around a hundred bucks. And yeah, I thought it would never work. I saw it on actually nine to five. They tried it out and reviewed it, said it worked. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, I'll give it a shot and it's brilliant because I have the wireless charging pad in my thing so I just throw my phone down, it connects, and I have wireless CarPlay in my non-wireless CarPlay car.

Really? Yeah, it's available on Amazon. At the moment that we're doing this, the price is $85.79 and then there's a $12 coupon. No kidding. Wow. Huh. That is cool. Fascinating. Yeah. I got to, I got to look into this. Like it, I, I looked into one of these early, early on and it wouldn't work with my, I have a Subaru and they were like, oh yeah, but it doesn't work with Subaru.

But I have heard from people that, yeah, that, that it does now, but yes, check, check that before you, uh, before you go and buy, well, either way, I'm going to go ahead and add that to my cart there, just so I don't forget about this. I have one for my Ford and it worked. Yeah. I was surprised that it worked because I thought there's no way. Like, if this works, why doesn't Apple make one of these things or like, why?

I bet they're deal with the car manufacturers, right? Well, and yeah, I don't know. That's a, it's a great question. Why do the car manufacturers in 2023 not support wireless car play? If I can buy this for less than a hundred bucks, why aren't they just like putting it in everything? You do. Cost them five bucks to put it in. Yeah. All right. I'm definitely going to look into this. Okay. All right. Speaking of like a caveman still having to plug a cable into a car play.

Right? Yeah. Yeah. Well, we deserve that. Yeah. All right. Oh man, should we move on to listener Ben? Let's go. Let's do it. So Ben writes in, he says, I've searched the internet and asked Bing, Chat, and Bard, and they've been useless. He says, no good answers. I have two USB-C drives mounted, and when my Mac mini M2 Pro Sonoma 14 goes to sleep. It doesn't eject or unmount the drives properly. So when it comes back from sleep, I get the message, Hey, you idiot.

He didn't write that, but you know, you kind of feel that way when Mac yells at you. You do feel that way when Apple leaves that message, yeah. I get the message that the drive was not ejected properly and could cause damage or something. One of the drives was damaged and needed to be reformatted. Okay, so they're not kidding. Is there a way to configure the OS to dismount and remount these drives when going to sleep and coming out of sleep?

I'm surprised that Apple doesn't do this in their OS by default. One of the drives is used only for time machine backup. Thanks, Ben. You have any thoughts on this, Adam? I have thoughts, but. Yep. Yeah. This came up on my show and I'm trying to, again, I hate settings. I'm trying to remember where it is in settings. Yeah, so if you go into the battery settings and you click on options. Or Energy Saver if it's a desktop Mac. I just, I'm just going to.

Oh, is it under energy save? I'm well on a desktop Mac and it's under battery. Do I don't think I have battery on my desktop? Oh, desktop Mac, desktop Mac. Sorry, you're right. Energy saver, wherever, wherever the energy saver options are. Okay, go into options. And there is an option for put hard disks to sleep when possible. I don't have that on my desktop. You do you have external hard drives attached? Uh-huh. Yeah. But let's see. Hard drive. Again, this is why I hate settings like.

Where these options are like so hidden now that it's crazy. But historically, if you have drives and not every drive supports going to sleep, but I usually set that to never and that can help. I'm not going to say that's going to fix the problem for everyone. But my theory is what happens is is some drives don't handle going to sleep and waking from sleep very well when the Mac is sleeping. Yep. So by turning that off, you ensure the drives don't go to sleep.

You're gonna use more energy, but you can potentially avoid that message. Because I think what happens is it's like the Mac goes to sleep and the drive goes to sleep and they're not like sort of coordinating well. And so, you know, the drive goes to low power and then just disconnects. Yeah, right, right. Huh. Well, I'm not seeing that anywhere in my battery settings, but I don't have a hard drive connected, so that may be you did that.

Yeah, I think you're not on. You will not see it if you don't have external disks. Interesting. Connected, maybe not, I don't know. Again, I'm on, and again, maybe they moved it because I'm on Ventura. So all I know is I went in and I searched for energy. Energy in the search, I clicked on battery, and then there's an options button, so it's hidden under another. Modal and then I have under enable power net power nap, but hard just to sleep when possible.

Minds currently set to on battery only but you can set it to never, Yeah on a on a desktop Mac. There are no options for this So yeah, and I'm I'm looking in you'd be there under sleep, too, Yeah, I would agree with that Maybe it's one of those in Apple's infinite wisdom. They know how to do this better, I wouldn't disagree. They're trying to sell us hard drives, but they're not. The other tip is, you know, try replacing your cables.

Another one is, like, another one that I have a huge issue with is actually I have an Anker dock. Yep. And for whatever reason, and I'm having this trouble now, I had it resolved for a while and suddenly started doing it again. It'll have a thing where I think the power just flicks for just long enough and because I have my drives and my USB hub plugged into that, it will kick my drives off for like a millisecond and then they disconnect and reconnect and it's actually an issue with the dock.

Originally, it was because it's a vertical dock, the USB-C cable pulls down on itself. So if I were to bump the table or something like that, it was just enough to wiggle the the USB connection because those things aren't really great enough that it would disconnect. And so for that, OWC makes a cool little thing called, I'm going to get the name of it wrong,

it's a little stick-on thing that like locks your cable into place. So if you have that problem with USB-C cables, you get these and it's a little sticky pad. Is it called the Klingon USB Type-C? I will link to it. Yep. Live long and prosper, gents. Yes, exactly. So, I mean, check your cables, check your connections. I mean, again, USB-C, unfortunately, I mean, if you plug in a USB-C cable, you can feel it. They will wiggle side to side. Yeah, yeah.

And that connection is very delicate, so, you know, check if you've got strain on your cables, if you can minimize that. That's another thing to try out. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Cool. Um, I have solved this in software by not letting my Macs go to sleep when I have this problem. Some drives just aren't good at that process. Like, the OS, I think, does try to do things such that you won't have this problem, but obviously it doesn't always work.

Work. And I think you could possibly, there's a, I think there's a keyboard maestro trigger. By the way, keyboard maestro 11 just came out this week. I have it running, but I haven't dug into it, but it's got some, some new sort of onboarding stuff to create macros that make life easier. So we'll talk more about that in an upcoming episode, but I believe there is a, a trigger that you can run on sleep and then you could run either a terminal commander, you know, uh, Apple script or whatever to.

Unmount the drive when it's about to go to sleep. That might be the path. If you want to let your Mac go to sleep. Um, right. Uh, you know, I had Monterey was problematic with Thunderbolt, some Thunderbolt devices where it would not gracefully recover them and their connections when waking from sleep. And I had to, like, it would happen up here. Like my Thunderbolt hub would not come back online. And so I wouldn't have like a screen and an audio interface.

And so I just with Monterey up here in the studio, I just told it, don't go to sleep. I'm not running Monterey in the studio anymore, and I'm not running Ventura in the studio anymore Pete. I'm running Sonoma now, Ventura was a major issue here in the studio. You heard me rant about it quite a bit because, Apple broke core audio in Ventura it would,

Well, we didn't well, that's what they said to me as I talked about on the show, right? I I sent in bug reports. I like, like leveraged friends at Apple to get actually get Apple to look at the bug reports because, they they they don't. I didn't intentionally leverage friends. I've ranted about it on Facebook and several of my Apple engineer friends were like, but that shouldn't be a problem. What's your what's your radar number? And I'm like, okay, here's my radar number

and then magically they weren't the engineers on that project. But then like the next day there, you know, magically I get an answer from Apple with all sorts of stuff. But basically Apple's answer was, we didn't change anything, there's no difference. And I categorically proved that wrong. They, like, I changed nothing. In fact, I even rolled back from Ventura to Monterey, as I explained on the show, which is not something I recommend doing. You're not

supposed to be allowed to do that. That was like real work, as I recall. Yeah, well, there was more real work, which I'll talk about here. But. But I proved it on Ventura, core audio was inefficient and would constantly hiccup and I had to like hold my mouth just right to get the show to record without too many audio hiccups and on Monterey, not an issue, all the same hardware. Uh, Sonoma? No issues.

That was me knocking on wood, not someone at your door. But really, I've recorded two episodes of Business Brain yesterday. We've been doing this one. I've tested it. I've literally been on Sonoma for less than 24 hours, but whatever didn't break in Ventura with Core Audio is now unbroken in Sonoma. So, I don't know why Apple has to gaslight me about this. Why can't they just say, oh, thanks, like we found this. Like, cool.

It's like, okay, good. So, not being an engineer, not being a software developer. Not having any clue what I'm talking about, I'm about to say to you, maybe they didn't change anything in Core Audio. Something else. Maybe. In their interface may have changed that affected that. Yeah, maybe. But at least not deliberately. So how's that for an unfounded opinion with no basis in fact whatsoever?

I just, you know, I guess I'm just, I don't know why I would stoop to defending Apple because I don't need to. Why wouldn't they at least acknowledge it though? Like I'm not the only one that reported this to them. I've talked to audio, like software vendors with names that everybody knows. And they've said, oh yeah, we've been reporting this to Apple too. In fact, one of them was like, wait a minute, that's not happening with our software?

Because they thought it was their own software not working right. And I'm like, no, I'm having this without your software. And it was, they were like, oh my gosh. I'm like, yep. So they never imagined Apple would break it in this way. But anyway. Yeah. Well, I guess the reason I'm saying is that I'm sure the engineers looked at it. Yes. It sounds like it. And when they couldn't figure it out, they go, we didn't change anything. And now that they've moved on, they haven't changed anything.

With core audio, it's something else, obviously in the operating system. Sure, sure. That's their BS story and they're stuck with it. They're, they are stuck with it. Yeah. Yeah. I just wish they would anyway. So yeah, it's, uh, it's so far so good. Uh, I think, you know, we'll, we'll see how it goes, but, um, but yeah, I I'm, I'm enjoying Sonoma and it's like video effects and like all of the fun things.

It's good. Steve, you should go to another question and I'll pontificate on that with no basis in fact as well. Well, that sounds like a spectacular idea. Pete Bill asks, I'm planning to purchase an iPhone 15 pro and an Apple watch, probably the series nine in the near future. I currently own and use an iPhone 11 pro and a series five Apple watch. I'm concerned about the disruption and general hassle factor.

If I were to buy both at the same time and try to transition to both new devices at the same time. What are your thoughts on which device to, which device to buy and transition first in order to minimize my pain and frustration? Well, we'll share this advice, but first of all, you do have to understand you will do so only if you buy enough for everybody here on the show. Okay. All right. Just for you. That's fine. So what I would do if I had to make it, I I would buy both.

First of all, up front, I would buy both. But if I had to make the choice, I'd probably go with the phone first, upgrade that, be sure to... I had some issues when I got my new iPhone and kept my Apple Watch Ultra. So I've got the iPhone 15 Pro Max, and it took me three or four attempts to get the watch to go, oh, okay, I'll pair with the phone because I didn't unpair it from my other phone first. It worked, but it took a little bit of effort. So I would unpair my watch, upgrade the phone.

Once the phone's up and running, then repair the watch. That would be the simpler path, I think. And then when you're ready to move to the new watch, unpair the old watch, pair the new watch. And that's where I would go.

But that being said, I don't think it would be any issue whatsoever for you to buy the new phone, get it set up from the old phone, or start from scratch, if you find that's the way you wanna go, and then take the new watch and pair it to it, and it should transfer everything across seamlessly, magically, and without a problem. No flaws, just ask Apple. Thoughts, Adam?

I would, I'm nodding my head, and people obviously can't see that, but I would 100% agree with all the things that Pete just said. That's what I would do is, I'd think you'd be fine to do both at the same time. I don't see any huge issues. The pairing on pairing advice is great. Yeah, and if I were to do it one at a time, I would definitely say phone first and then watch. Yeah, that would be my order, but I would not hesitate to buy both and just plan to do them in that order.

I think the other order would also probably be fine. I can't think of a reason why it wouldn't, But I also would very much lean towards do the phone first, get that the way you want it, and then just swap out the watch and then you're done. Because because the watch is so reliant on the phone right the phone is the hub It's yeah, it's the hub for the watch so you do your you would do your main thing first and then deal with the satellite

Thing yeah, that's a great way to say it. Yeah. Yeah, Yep So hey, I know you want to move to cool stuff found But we did get a comment and or comments great question in Facebook from Mike Lerman And he asked is it safe to move my main machine to Mac OS Sonoma? I think yes

I think so. I mean it you have to look at what your workflow is I was I was waiting here in the studio. I'd already moved this to, Ventura and just sort of swallowed the audio issues And and figured out how best to mitigate them. Oddly messages was the biggest offender if If any sound was made from messages, it would cause a huge hiccup of everything in audio, including, like, you know, when you go and, like, thumbs up a message and it makes the little sound reaction?

No. No, no, no. This was verboten. So, uh, yeah. So, you know, I turned off sound and messages and, like, just figured, well, this is a studio machine, I just gotta kind of, like, go with it, because I need to stay up to date with operating systems. And, uh, and I was waiting for device drivers for my, um, audio interface for my personas, quantum 2626 interface to be up to date. And I noticed people in the personas forums just saying that they were using,

it with Sonoma without issue. And I'm like, well, I'm doing it. And then I just did it yesterday. So yeah. Yeah. But check your, if you're doing just normal things on your Mac and you don't have these asterisks like, you know, an audio interface that needs drivers and things like that, then yeah, I, I, I've been okay with Sonoma. How about you, Adam?

Yeah, I pulled the trigger, and I didn't even check this time around, to be honest with you, because I just figured I'd deal with anything as it came up. Living on the edge, baby. And I did, and I normally don't do that. I'm normally very, very cautious. I'm usually late to update because I rely on this machine for production and stuff like that. Sure, sure. But so far, again, I'm going to knock on wood just like you did earlier, everything has just worked.

I mean, even old stuff that I didn't expect to work, I mean, I get the warning, but I still have a Drobo, and that's not good. What's still working? I'm not expecting it to work in the next version, and I will be migrating. We already had that conversation on my show, so I'll be moving to Synologies and getting all that data migrated. I'm just avoiding it, because I know it's going to be a pain in the butt. Yep. Yep. Just the work of transferring it. It's not hard. It's just the work.

It's just time. Yeah, I get that. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. If it ain't broke, don't fix it. Or, you know, but I was fully prepared for that to not work and deal with it then, you know, so I yeah, but everything's been great. Right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think it's I think it's been fine. Yeah, it's like all things. If you have a super critical workflow, though, you're going to want to investigate that before you don't do what I did and just pull the trigger. I was willing to

to take the risk. You know, that was a conscious choice of like, hey, a bunch of stuff could break. You might have to spend three hours getting your audio set up to record your next podcast. It's like, okay, I'll just deal with that. But it all just worked. But yeah, if you have critical workflows to your research, make sure that those aren't going to break.

We do have some cool stuff found. I'll start with Tony, who says, ever since standby mode was added to iOS, I've wanted to be able to use it without being plugged in to a charger. He says sometimes, you know, just on my desk, I'll want to put it there, whatever, wherever I am. And I found the same thing. It's like, well, can I choose to use standby mode? I have an iPhone with an always on screen. Like, why can't I just do this? And the answer is because that's not how it works, Dave.

However, Tony found a workaround and then I think I have something to add to it. He says, I keep a small stack of little battery packs, like little charger bricks that, you know, to just charge my phone. He says, so I plug my iPhone 14 Pro into the power pack, prop it up with my wallet case, he says, and boom, there it is, standby mode wherever I want it. The only thing that would be better is a charging brick designed to hold a phone sideways for standby.

Steal this idea and make a bazillion. Well, I don't know if somebody's gonna make a bazillion from it, but it does exist. And I didn't even think about this until Tony said it. And I had one of these. Pete, you noted recently on the show when I showed my iPhone in its spec Presidio grip case That I have a pop socket a magsafe pop socket on the back of it, And it's because I gave my old phone with its case with the o snap connector by the way the version 4 just came out.

To my son the o snap connector for people who don't know about it or the snap 4 go I think is what it's called now is is a very very thin.

Magsafe and stick on than a nickel It's thinner than a nickel and it allows you to hold your phone, but you can magsafe charge through it most of the time, But wait, yeah, I had some trouble with that, Yeah, but I know not everyone does, However, I also use a magsafe wallet on my phone, you know when I'm out and about that's where I keep like my stuff and of course Putting that on a phone with the Oh snap connector meant I couldn't use the connector and my wallet at the same time

I would like literally just put my wallet in another pocket and I started thinking do I even want to carry a magsafe wallet anymore? And then I got my iPhone 15 Pro and Realized well, I need to do something and I had a magsafe pop socket in my drawer of toys And so I put that on and it works great. And it's it really it's not as thin as the Oh snap. I have no trouble with it in my pocket, and I like the way it holds the phone and all of that.

For people watching the video, I'm showing it here. The reason I'm having this conversation is because by using a MagSafe pop socket, I can also use a MagSafe wallet with a pop socket on it. So now I have my wallet and a pop socket all together, and there are links for these things in the show. And so I leave, I can, I just swap back and forth if I know I'm going to need my wallet, well now I have my wallet and a pop socket. And then I saw Tony's note and it reminded me of

something that I saw in the box from the pop socket people. It is about the size of a magsafe pop socket wallet. It has a pop socket on the back and it also has the brand name anchor on it And yes, it is a battery pack that when you turn it on, it starts charging your phone and the pop socket can be tilted to use as a stand. And if I do this right on the video, in theory, it should go into standby mode, but I don't...

Maybe too light in the... I don't... it should, no, it's standby should just happen. I thought standby, when it was being charged, happened in a darker environment. Oh, does it have to be dark to see the things that... I don't know. I don't know, I do standby on my desk all the time. So I'm gonna try this one more time and see if I can make it go into standby mode. I can't. Nope, doesn't work. But I have made it work. Like why isn't that working?

Anyway, it does it probably some reason for maybe it's because the focus mode i'm in or something like that i'm in like my podcasting focus mode but anyway it's not it's not a bazillion dollars but it's not inexpensive that it's the anchor mac go. Mag go i think would be the and the right name not maco i typed it wrong in my my little notes the anchor mag go black. And it comes in different colors. I have the black one, but it comes in black, white, grape, and glacier blue, and it's 70 bucks.

So it's not inexpensive. It'll do seven and a half watt charging of your phone. And I am 99% sure, yes, it is a 5,000 milliamp hour battery. So enough to give your phone a charge and really not too thick at all in one's pocket. So, um, I'm pretty happy. That is a great gift idea for somebody who's, whose wife tends to never charge her phone. Yes. Yes. Well, I have another great- I know somebody, just I'm saying for a friend. Sure. She doesn't charge her phone very often. Sure.

I have another great gift idea, Pete, that I saw at Pepcom the other night. So, wait, go ahead. Before we move on, something on this that I just thought about too, so like, as you brought this up, I thought you were going to go the route of, well, I have a wireless charging stand, I can plug the battery into that. And I was curious, because I have like an Anker one.

And sure enough, it's like a five volt, you know, two amp input. So I would imagine you could plug a battery into an existing, into some existing charging stands and just use that as well. Oh, if you have a charging stand, then yes, absolutely. But this was his sort of on the go uh, thing. Like, I was in the float tank recently, and I always put my watch to, you know, like.

Within arm's reach, because if I wind up finishing or wanting to, like, reset my brain and get out of the tank and go back in, I'd like to be able to open it up and see what time it is, because I have no idea, you know, how much time has passed in the tank. And so I have to, like, fumble around and tap my watch. And I was like, well, wait, if I can put my my phone in standby mode, then I can just like have it there.

And I suppose the same would be true with a watch charger as well. So. Yeah yeah yeah so he just wanted kind of the on the go thing the the next gift idea that i saw at pepcom pete is the time porter from our friends at twelve south. What this is is it is a way to. Hold and display your collection of apple watch bands it it's a thin little strip that you can hang on the wall.

The idea is you could hang it like, you know, inside your closet or outside your closet, you can put it wherever you want. And the watch bands just fit with a sort of a pressure mount, so it's really easy to get them in and out of there. And they just, it's about, I don't know, maybe 8 inches long, it could fit, I think, 3 bands per time porter. But what's cool is they are connectable, so you can put them next to each other.

Other, you could buy two of them and then, you know, put six watch bands in. So, very, a cool little thing. They're $29.99 a piece. And so like perfect little stocking stuffer for your. That's awesome. Yep. Hey, another audible, but I've got a cool stuff found here, here, here, you're going to love the price folks, it's free. We like that. And you already have the app, it has to do with the Apple watch and so on.

And I wish I could say, I discovered this on my own. I'm sorry to the gentleman that David Sparks had on Mac Power users. They were talking about the Apple Watch and he said it's the peanuts face. I'm one of those people. I've got all the data in my Wayfinder. I've got weather. I've got walkie-talkies. I've got timers. I've got all kinds of swirl clock. The penis face doesn't have any complications, but boy is it fun. Whenever you raise it, Snoopy goes to sleep whenever it's down.

When you raise it, there's all kinds of interaction. He's skateboarding, he's dancing, he's scaring Woodstock. He's sliding up, you know, doing a skateboard down the arm and interacts with the dial on the face and he's the Red Baron, fighting the Red Baron. It is a fun watch face, very whimsical. I have it on my watch most of the time now because it's just one press and hold to switch back to Wayfinder when I need my data for flying and stuff like that.

So, yeah, so very cute, very whimsical. It's a fun watch face, the Peanuts watch face. Can you add complications to it or is it? No, it's unfortunately none. I mean, it tells me that I'm connected and that's it. Yeah, right, right, right, yeah, okay. Those are my weekend faces. So I'll switch to a simple face on the weekend when I don't need all those complications. And now I'm wondering, and I bet you this works, I bet you you could set it up with focus modes. Probably. Oh, of course you could.

Definitely. I've never tried it. I'm just guessing right now. Definitely. Right? I mean, I say definitely. I don't know if Apple Watch supports focus modes, does it? It did. I used to have that Mac geek app watch face that Sadie designed linked to our focus, to my podcasting focus mode. And it's not right now, which is weird, but I thought, I thought you could, I'm, I'm 99% sure you can.

Yes. Yeah. Cause I mean, it's great to use like the photo. I think the photos ones are similar to, they have very few complications, if not no complications. And so it's fun to kind of switch it up when you don't need all that extra data. Yeah. Focus general mirror my phone. Maybe not. Maybe not. Huh. I would have, I would have sworn that that was doable on the watch.

Now we've got to follow up for next week. You know, a swipe thing is easy when you set up the watch faces, right? You just have my. Yeah. Yeah. You can choose it. Stay in line, just swipe. You do it on your phone in, in when you're configuring your phone. No, that's the confusing

part. You do it on your phone when configuring the focus mode in settings focus, and you can and choose a lock screen for your phone, a lock screen for your watch, and then also a layout too for your phone if you so choose. So, yeah. I have, yeah. So yeah, I like that. Cause I have like a nuclear mode that I, it's not like a bad thing. It's about my nuclear family, but I have a nuclear focus mode where the only people that I let notifications from, you know, come through from are my family.

And that becomes often my weekend thing. So maybe I add the Snoopy watch face to the nuclear mode and then I just know which mode I'm in. Yeah, I like this. All right. I have one last cool stuff found. I wanna talk about, Pete, you had asked me to talk about this last week and I skipped it in the interest of time. And it's the Sonos Move 2. So the Sonos Move has been out for a little while. The Move 2 is, of course, its successor, although you can still buy the Move 1.

The Move 2 is $449, the Move 1 is $399. They are both portable speakers. The Move 2, it really does kind of take where the Move 1 started and bring it to what I'll call fruition here. It now adds stereo sound by adding a separate tweeter, so there's two tweeters on it at the top and they're aimed sort of off to the sides and giving you a little bit of spread. It's kind of like the Sonos Aero 100. It's what they did with that to make that a stereo speaker.

They basically did, in my opinion, they didn't say it this way, but in my opinion it's kind of like that, but for the Move 2. To the speakers are still, you know, inches apart from each other. So you're not getting like a huge wide stereo field like you would if you set two speakers, say eight feet apart from each other, but it's a really nice wide soundstage.

Yes, I listened to Money by Pink Floyd to see if I could hear the intro, you know, the sounds going back and forth and it worked out fine. And you do, you hear it. But just listening, it gives a wider sound field than the Move originally had. And the original Move, I think, has a fantastic sound. It's a nice little speaker. Yeah, exactly. The battery life has increased substantially. They've got a better battery in it,

but they've also got better battery technology. The original Move was 10 hours. This is up to 24 hours of battery life. You can buy the new battery put it in the old move. It is a replaceable battery, but you're not going to get 24 hours out of it. There's other engineering. Um, but, uh, the one thing that I really like that, that it now has is on top of it, there is a volume sort of bar to slide. So you don't have to tap if you want to move the volume up and down.

You just get to, yeah, exactly. You just get to slide your finger and control the volume. It has a USB-C port on it. You can get an adapter from Sonos to do line in with it, which is handy. You can also use it sort of to reverse charge your iPhone or whatever else you have out there. So yeah, and the Bluetooth connectivity is improved over the original move. It's kind of like the Roam now where it just works and you just get Bluetooth.

That's good. Yeah, I've had a couple of struggles with the Bluetooth on my original move, but my biggest complaint about that is the battery life in that if I forget to put it back on its cradle and don't turn it off, I want to use it the next day. And it's like, oh, darn it. You can set it to be more aggressive about its power savings. The battery powered speakers, the Roam and the Move 2. So, yeah. And then they added a color. So it comes in black, white, and then this olive green,

which is actually, I can see that being nice, like, you know, out on your patio or whatever. So. That's uh, that's Sonos Move 2. I'm excited about it. It's become my patio speaker now. It's just like, it's the one that goes out there. And the charging ring is better designed. It's still the same kind of thing. You just drop it in the charging ring and you're good to go, but, it like, it's simpler now. More forgiving. More forgiving. That's the right way to say it. Yeah,

exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. All right. You guys got anything else to add before we before we pull the ripcord on this particular episode here? The address to send that Sonu move is... Feedback at MacGeekCab.com! Feedback at MacGeekCab.com. I think you said feedback at MacGeekCab.com, Pete. That's what I said. I think so. Thanks for hanging out with us, folks. Thanks for hanging out with us. Adam, tell people where they can find you. I mean, it's MattCast on all the social medias and MattCast.com.

That's cool. Simple. And I, and, and assuming our schedules all work, I think you'll be back here with us, to dissect the Apple event. Yep. So yeah, it should be fun. I know what it is. It's a new standard cord that they're going to introduce on Monday night. And it's even faster than lightning or thunderbolt or, you know, because we need more standards in our doors. That's Pete's final prediction. We will see. It's called USB-C. Yeah, it is called USB-C, that's right. Yeah, there you go.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Speaking of, I have done some testing and yes, you can use the new case with your, the new AirPods Pro 2 USB-C case with your old AirPods Pro 2 if you want to move from Lightning to USB-C. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know for whom it's important to do that, but you know, there it is I just use the Qi charger for my yeah. Yeah, exactly. I think I think that's what most folks do, Yeah, even charges on the watch charger the AirPods,

The AirPods Pro 2 will charge on your Apple watch case. That's right as I bang it off the desk, Yeah, that's right. That's right, Again, thanks for hanging out with us folks Thanks to Cashfly for providing all the bandwidth to get the show from us to you. Thanks to our sponsors. Of course, you can always go to Mackeycup.com slash sponsors and see all the deals from current and even past sponsors. They don't have to be an active sponsor for their deals to still work.

And we test those pretty regularly. But our thanks to GreenChef.com slash 60MGG for sponsoring this episode. Music. Adam, do you happen to have three words of advice to generically share with everyone out there for today? Sure. Don't get caught. Music.