It's time for Matt Geekab and my wife sent in the quick tip of the week when yesterday she emailed me and says, hey, I was reviewing our homeowners insurance with our homeowners insurance agent. And when I mentioned to them that we have a ring camera in the driveway and also a sensor near our water heater to test for water leaks, it saved us $71 on our homeowner's insurance.
So tell them about your smart home devices. more quick tips like this plus your questions answered today on mac geek ab 10 84 for monday april 7th metric system day 2025. Greetings, folks, and welcome to MacGeekGab, the show where you send in quick tips like that, sometimes unintentionally. I love the unintentional quick tips. You send in cool stuff found. You send in questions that hopefully we answer.
The goal being that each of us gets to learn at least five new things every single time we get together. Screencastsonline.com slash MGG is our sponsor. It's also where you will go to get a seven-day free trial of their ever-expanding library of over 1,400 tutorials for our Mac and other Apple devices and stuff. We'll talk more about that in a little bit back here after being at Podcast
Movement in, I don't even remember where I was, Chicago. Back here in Durham, New Hampshire, I'm Dave Hamilton.
And here in South Dakota, I'm Adam Christensen. Sorry. Slow on the uptake this morning.
And Adam's back. All right. And here also in New Hampshire, it's Pilot Pete. I'm usually the one confused about what darn town I'm in.
Man. I was worried it was your connection, Adam, when there was that lag. I know, right? I'm like, oh, no.
He's frozen again. Dead air.
Hey, it's police code 1084. Advise of your ETA. I don't know if you have to give that in metric today.
Yes. Or not. I think so. Okay.
And now that it's metric day, does that mean that April has 10 weeks with 10 days in each week?
No, but we're going to go back to the Swatch internet time. I think that's as close to metric time as we've gotten. Oh, man. Right? Wasn't that a thing? Isn't that what it was called?
Yes, there was Swatch time, and I forget what it was, the marketing term for it. But the idea was everybody was the same. So it was just a running basically 24 hour clock. So yeah, three for me was three for you or whatever the number was. I forget how they did the numbering. I think it was in hundreds. So like 300 was 300 for me and 300 for you.
And yeah, it was a thousand beats per day.
Yeah, no time zone.
A beat was a dot beat. I'm sorry. Let's make sure we're right on that. It was equivalent to one minute, 26.4 seconds. Yeah okay so there's no time zones i but what's interesting is i can go to swatch.com slash like internet time or whatever we'll put a link in the show notes it doesn't tell me what the current internet time is like why what's the i know it's been sort of abandoned as a thing but they could they could it could be cute that they could just do that yeah.
Yeah someone might want to know
Actually i i would want to know like that's what yeah anyway yeah it.
Was a failed idea
Oh big time oh yeah oh yeah yeah yeah yeah nobody.
Was buying it well i told you i told you guys i think i said it on the show but maybe i didn't that uh there's some group of people or people who've come up with this idea of
A a.
New calendar where every month has exactly the same number of days.
Hmm. All right. I can see that, you know, I get the sales pitch. Sure. Uh, this month, our giveaway, welcome to April. It's, uh, clean my Mac. So if you just go to macgeekup.com slash giveaway, you can sign up. We teamed up with the folks at Mac paw. They're giving away five annual memberships of clean my Mac. So, um, yeah, go check it out. Go check it out. I guess we, uh, I guess we're going to move on to more quick tips. Is that, is that the idea behind.
What we're doing? I would think so. Yeah. Do we have a few?
We, I think so. Dan has our next one. He says, I was on a flight back from a spring break trip to Santa Fe recently, flying domestic, and that's important here, or at least a good distinction. He says, and my little Anker 65-watt USB-C adapter would not stay in the power socket on the plane between the seats.
It kept falling out. It occurred to me that since the M-Power sockets on planes are all multi-country, I could use an international plug adapter, which I hadn't brought on this domestic flight, to fit securely into the socket. So I'm going to pick up an adapter, and we will link to the one that he chose later. Take with me in the future. I think that's a brilliant idea, especially for some of those that lock in better than U.S. Plugs, or even if they lock in the same as U.S.
Plugs, certainly on planes that are flying domestic more than anything else they do, the U.S. Plugs might be a little worn out, whereas the international ones are probably nice and stiff and ready to go.
You probably shouldn't resort to bending the tines on your power adapter.
You probably shouldn't, but show of hands, how many of us have done that? I know. Oh, I'm sorry. I know a hundred percent of us producing and listening to the show are raising our hands.
Yes.
Just keep your hands up there, folks.
Push them out. Push them out. So this was the actual just power cord, power cord.
The power cord from.
The wall cord.
Yeah, the wall cord from his thing.
Yeah, yeah. Not the USB-C.
No right yeah.
And i'm gonna wonder aloud that uh you know airlines like southwest probably don't put the international ones on there since they really only fly to but i don't know you were on southwest this week do you recall that i
Don't recall i don't recall on southwest seeing ac outlets they have usbc and usba in the somewhere.
Yeah and
It is yeah it's like 30 watts of usbc So.
Those outlets are not standard to the airplane. They are standard to the airline that orders the interiors.
I know that JetBlue's planes have the multi-country things. And all those planes are mostly domestic as well. Right.
Although they do fly to Europe.
That is fair.
So what I wanted to ask... Sorry go ahead i
Was just gonna say the only other thing is i don't i don't know if the there it's more common on airbus than on boeing so oh
Maybe yeah yeah yeah what were you gonna say adam.
So the kind of follow-on question i i have on this and the reason i was asking if it was the physical wall plug versus the usbc is do you guys find that usbc plugs for me they seem to be looser and like i kind of miss light lightning to a certain degree because they would always lock in and i feel like usbc is wobbly and wiggly sometimes and finicky yeah it's
Not the best standard is it
It doesn't have the same there's like a little nub at the end of a lightning connector that really locks it in that satisfying.
Click yes
Yeah usbc does not have that in fact Well, that wasn't my issue the other morning. I was having trouble sleeping the other night in the hotel, which was weird because the first night I slept like eight hours, which was awesome. But there were outlets on the wall next to the bed, and then there were outlets in the alarm clock. And I noticed that my wall wart fell out of the outlet on the wall.
And I'm like, all right, well, I'm just going to put it on the alarm clock because it's a top-down thing. Like it'll probably not fall out. harder to fall out. Yeah. The whole gravity thing. And, uh, And then at 6 a.m. after I probably fell asleep at like 515 a.m. At 6 a.m. the alarm clock went off because evidently I pushed the button that turned the alarm on at the same time that I pushed the plug into the thing. It was like it was just that particular night of sleep was a comedy of errors.
So, yeah, it was just like, of course, that's happening right now. That's perfect. It's great. Anyway, thank you for that, Dan. Good advice. You got Ben next, Pete?
I do. Ben has a nice quick tip about using notes. He writes, in Apple Notes on Mac, you can press Command and Return to change the keyboard focus between the list of notes and the editor of the currently selected note. This way, you can use the arrow keys to select a note and then press Command-Return to place the cursor at the bottom of the note editor to keep editing. So pressing the shortcut again will move the focus back to the list.
Further, you can use Command-Option-F to move the focus to the search field, and then there are one to three tab stops from there to the list, depending on whether the sidebar is visible and or keyboard navigation is enabled in system settings keyboard. That is, from search, press Tab to move to the sidebar if you have that visible, and then press tab again to move to the new folder button if keyboard navigation is enabled and then press tab again to move back to the notes list.
From there, tab will usually place the cursor in the top of the note editor. Now, I know when you're driving along and listening to all that, it's hard to follow. Get in notes, play with command return and the arrow keys and you will find it. This will start making sense. It's one of those things you kind of have to see, but play with command return and arrow keys. I like it.
Arrow keys or the tab key?
The tab key, but I think the arrow keys work also for, let me look.
I don't think the arrow keys.
Yeah, so if you're in the list, you can now use the arrow keys to go down to the next note.
Oh, yeah, fair. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So, yeah.
Yeah. so.
It's something that's not obvious you know as we talk about it it's like there's a lot of there's a lot going on there but once you do it your hands are going to really like it and a lot less mouse clicking and
You know it's it's interesting that you added that little context Pete because when I saw this I knew that it was going to be valuable but I my brain could not process it but I put it in the list for the show anyway and then literally as you were reading it i was in notes testing it it was like oh this is amazing it works great yeah yeah so what i will do is i will put the the two sort of primary keystrokes here command return and command option f
i will write those out and put them in the show notes so that when you're reading the show notes you know which ones to play with uh and it will make a difference for you yeah for sure thank you for this ben yep and if you want those show notes in your email box how do you do that you go to mac oh i know go what's that go pete feedback at macgeekgab.com actually no we can't sign you up for the mailing list that way uh but you could email feedback at
macgeekgab.com if you wanted just visit macgeekgab.com and sign yourself up for the mailing list because.
I i i hit the buzzer too soon i had the wrong answer to the right question or the right answer to the wrong question i don't know so
Pete just to clarify You do not email feedback at makegeekup.com for signing up for the newsletter, but you can send your questions there and we will do our best to try and answer them. Also your quick tips and cool stuff found and everything else.
All right. Here's another one that is about voice and maybe is easier to digest in an audible form. Andrew writes, as a tip, create gestures that you can trigger with your voice. The iOS accessibility features can replay any series of touch actions when you give a voice command. Imagine mapping out an entire tedious action that you do frequently in an app, such as manually entering information to move through screens or having a command that scrawls your signature or draws a picture.
Go to Settings, tap Accessibility, and then tap Voice Control. Toggle it on, and then tap Commands, Create New Command. Enter your desired command phrase, tap Action, and then tap Run Custom Gesture. Use your finger to create the gesture on your home screen, and your phone will replay it when you say the trigger phrase. He says, as a note, we found that voice control would respond to anyone using the command. It is not voice specific like some of the other S lady commands are.
So maybe turn this one off when you aren't using it. That's interesting.
Yeah, I played with that.
Okay.
It's harder than it seems on its face, at least when I read it, because when you say, hey, I want to do this touch thing, it gives you a white screen.
Oh you have to do it from memory.
No yeah you have to for instance i said i created one that says shoot a video okay and well let's see if that did it um okay good it was face down so it didn't do it but i still have it turned on oh yeah but if i if if i say shoot a video it now hits the camera and then swipes it to video mode so i'm ready to go got it and but i had to know where the camera icon is on my home screen and then once that opens where where to swipe to get to video and but it works but you have to
know where it is i don't know a workaround for that as yet if someone knows that they could probably send it to feedback at macgeekab.com i had to do that
That was the right one feedback at macgeekab.com.
Exactly that's correct feedback at macgeekab.com
Uh all right let's go to ian's quick tip uh ian first starts with a thank you he says i want to thank you for recommending packing an apple tv on vacations we just got back from spring break with an extended family with extended family uh in a shared house i just have to say not having to log into a single streaming service is way way more luxurious than it sounds the in-laws thought I was a wizard it's because you are Ian he says however I have an added bonus tip,
AirPods. I was able to sneak out to the living room after everyone went to sleep and watch TV in silence because it was my Apple TV to which my AirPods were automatically paired. You guys rock. You rock, Ian. Thank you. I love the context of these things and how these tips kind of, you know, the ripple effects. It's great. I freaking love it.
I actually do that at home sometimes in the morning because now our living room is right next to our bedroom i'll turn on the tv and watch with the airpods if debbie's still sleeping so
I gotta remember that i can do that yeah yeah i always forget that the airpods are just auto paired to the to the tv in that sense yeah.
Yeah and now that my sonar speakers are downstairs the sound is so much better than the tv in my airpods so
Sorry right no no no i was just saying I do this all the time and also partially for that reason, you know, I think we've talked to both, I've got tinnitus and my hearing's not as great as it used to be. And, and it's also just easier to listen that way a lot of times.
Yeah.
I have a question. Two, you can do up to two sets of AirPods or more on an Apple TV.
I believe it is two, Matt, a max of two. Yes. Yes. Yes yes all right shall we uh shall we keep plowing through here okay.
Yeah i have one from mike he says for adam and anyone buying an m series macbook and i'm not there yet maybe uh mike says i just traded my m1 macbook pro for an m4 macbook air and i waited for the macbook or I waited for the MacBook Air with 32 gigabytes of memory because running Xcode and other apps gave me low memory warnings regularly. My work MacBook Pro M2 with 32 gigs never did. I travel enough that I use a, that using a laptop on an airplane is much easier
with the smaller monitor size. So I acquired a 13 inch MacBook Air M4 with 32 gigabytes of unified memory and a one terabyte drive. I couldn't be happier. No more memory warnings and just so useful even when running daisy chain to two Thunderbolt 27 inch monitors. So the tip there is get plenty of memory with your new machine. And I think that's, for me, that's a longstanding tip, right? Always get as much memory as you can forward. It comes up a lot.
You know, I think you're never going to be happy. You're never going to be in a place where you're like, oh, I have too much memory. i don't think that can be a thing that's
Like a pilot with too much fuel
Well, you could have too much fuel, though, because of the weight of it, right, Pete?
Well, there's only time you have too much fuel is when you're on fire.
Yes.
And when you're trying to get off a short runway, yes.
Oh, that makes sense.
Too much weight. Yeah.
Otherwise, the weight's really not making a huge difference.
Well, that's, yeah, that's what I mean. Well, it depends on the airplane, right? I mean, even my little airplane, I got 300 pounds of fuel. If I fill that up, it's really hard to fill all four seats.
And still be under your weight limit.
Yeah, and still be under the gross weight limit of the airplane.
Got it.
But yeah, but that's always the joke in, you know, especially in tactical airplanes, as soon as you start the engine, you're low on fuel. And so you can never have too much fuel unless you're on fire.
Right. That makes sense. Yeah. Yeah. And unfortunately, your amount of fuel will decline rapidly if you're on fire and not in a good way.
And the amount of you will also decline rapidly.
Yeah, that is the unfortunate side effect of that. Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, here's to hoping that never happens to anybody here listening or part of it. Yep, for sure. All right. Well, on that subject, listener John had a question. So we'll change gears a little bit so that we can stay on topic. John says, greetings from the UK. I am considering investing in an M4 Air. I currently have an Intel iMac 24-inch from 2017, but I have a couple of questions. What use cases might justify bumping the memory up to 24 gigs or even more?
I'm pretty sure for my current activity, 16 would be fine, but with the pace of AI, who knows? I have a number of legacy USB-A devices, scanners, hard drives, microphone, and I'm not sure whether to invest in a dock or a hub.
Candidly i'm not sure of the relative merits of either or what they are uh and then number three i know the quality won't be as good but would it be possible to hook the macbook air up to the imac purely to use as a larger screen occasionally appreciate a steer uh adam you want to take any any one of those questions to start here um.
Sure i mean we why don't i do the memory thing since i I was just talking about memory. Stick with that, yeah. Again, the thing with the memory is general advice. If you can afford more, buy more. I think you're going to be fine in the short term with the 16 probably, but it's really about longevity and hearing that you currently are on a 2017 Intel machine and this is now when you're upgrading. Seems like you're the type of person who appreciates longevity.
So like, yeah, even if you can't think of anything you need the memory for now, five years from now, it might become very important to you to have some extra memory because that's how computers go, right? We always need more. We very rarely need less as time goes on.
And unlike fuel in a plane, the extra memory does not add weight to your MacBook Pro.
Correct. Does add cost.
Yeah, right. It lightens your wallet. So it does have that effect on weight.
That's right. It has a weight effect that way. Of course, fuel, putting fuel in your airplane, lightens your wallet too, I can attest.
Yeah, for sure. Yeah, I would agree. I would get as much RAM as you can, even though unified, I mean, unified memory has proven to be fairly efficient, especially as compared to the ununified memory that we had prior to the M series. However, you are sharing that unified memory with the GPU and all the other things. So as you add screens and all of that, it will impact it.
I'd be curious on the Andrew quick tip, sorry, on the Mike quick tip about getting more memory with your MacBook, how many monitors he is hooking that up to.
He said two.
He said two, right? So I'm wondering if that that's the part of the memory issue is, you know, as you add monitors, you're eating into your RAM. I don't know. I haven't.
Well, he's also. Sorry, he's also using Xcode mentioned there, too. So, yep, probably developer compiling. That's when he was seeing out of out of memory errors. That's fair. I mean, your use cases are obviously going to come into play. But again, even if your use cases today are not heavy... Like you said, Apple's, there's more AI stuff coming, which is, that puts a lot on your GPU.
So, like you said, if you're sharing that memory, you know, there's a reason why Apple intelligence is not able to go back on older machines, and there's a reason why Apple up to the base memory, most people feel, I mean, Apple didn't say officially, but most people feel it's because of Apple intelligence, and I would concur with that.
I am also on that page, yes. in terms of his question about hubs or docks the way the term there might be some official distinction there but i'm not aware of it the way i differentiate between a dock and a hub is that i consider docks to be those self-powered devices with lots of ports perhaps you know even offering like the you know thunderbolt splitting and all of that and a hub i think of or a dongle you know is generally powered by the computer uh or
the computer's power supply if you if it supports pass-through generally has a smaller number of ports in a more bespoke way and it's a little more purpose-built so that you know i would i would look at what you're doing what you need to connect it to and where you will be when you need to make those connections because it might be wise to buy two things one for your desk at the office you know where it would be used primarily at home office whatever and then one for travel and that way
you only have what you need with you at any given point in time but you always have what you need with you is is kind of the the benefit of of doing it that way so that that's that's how i would approach the the the the add-on you know the dongle world as as i like to say yeah.
I i was getting hung up a little bit on that word um hub is that what we used yeah
He said doc versus hub and what's like yeah i don't i don't really know well it's.
Become kind of uh what's word i'm like nebulous there's a nebulous distinction between those anymore
That.
Sort of yeah because there are thunderbolt hubs which are a very specific thing that's correct so and those are hubs in the true sense of of the word where you're getting you're taking your signal and you're splitting it up and you're getting full you know full bandwidth through that thing that's you know owc has a thunderbolt hub yes and that's very different than a dock and it's very different than what we traditionally think of as like the USB-C dongle
that I have USB-C coming out of my Mac and then I have, you know, six USB-A ports on that thing. That little... I don't...
Right.
I don't... I guess there's... You could call that a hub, but it's not really a hub. It's just like a...
The terminology that I use kind of in my brain, which therefore must come out when I'm talking here on this show, but I can't recall, is I think of things as docks or dongles, right? And the dock is the thing that stays in place, generally is self-powered, and I plug my computer into it. A dongle is the thing that comes with me, and I plug it into my computer. I realize that, you know, I'm adding a very, they are both being plugged into each other in all cases.
You mean exactly what you know,
Though. Yeah, but I mean what I know, which is the dock stays in place, the dongle comes with. And in either case, generally, though, only a dock will have a hub in it. Or like you said, Adam, you can get a separate Thunderbolt 4 and later hub that will be a splitter. And that's why when I was giving my answer, I used the term Thunderbolt splitting, not Thunderbolt hubbing. But really, the correct term is Thunderbolt hubbing. I used an incorrect term so as not to confuse things.
But you're right that the term that is part of the spec is Thunderbolt hubbing. And that was the thing we got with Thunderbolt 4.
So yeah so the distinction that you know really to be made there is because it became confusing when we had thunderbolt hubs because we had thunderbolt docks and a lot of people might conflate those and think they're the same thing but they're not right different different purposes yes explicitly um the only other thing i want to add to this is well two things i have two things to add so you mentioned you know dongles and going on the road um because he's moving
from a desktop system to a laptop and he mentioned some of the accessories like for example a usba mic that plugs in with usba yeah that might be able to be solved with just a cable swap or just a simple dongle like you might not need a whole series of ports you might be able to just get a simple USB A to C adapter and just plug in that way. Or a cable. Those things are like two bucks on Amazon. Exactly.
And then the other thing is I do use, quote unquote, a USB, dongle because i have four or five usb a external hard drives and so i just have one of those ones um what i recommend there is you can get the little self powered ones that get power off the usb c but if you're going to have a lot of ports in there they do have ones that have their own power supply and i find those work better they're more stable when you're plugging in like a lot of things into a single dongle as we might call it
That's a great point yeah if you if you want that thing to also then power ssds and and and the like you want it to have its own bespoke power not be reliant on on getting it up from upstream from your computer yeah yeah yeah yeah great point that will also reduce heat on your computer as i'm finding with a lot of experiments i I, there's a whole thread, there's a whole thread in our discord about what was happening to me when I was recording that show from Austin that we did on my
laptop, where I had a process that was running out of control. I've done a lot of testing since I've been back. And it, there's, I don't, at first I thought I was running into a heat issue. I'm not certain that was the case anymore. more.
However, I have learned how to mitigate heat. And of course, you know, as you start thinking about these things, one of the obvious ones is, well, don't provide so much power to things downstream and it won't generate as much heat, you know, but I don't think my problem was heat related. Uh, but there's, there's more about that in the discord thread and more to add. I'll, I'll put a link to that so that I'm not intentionally being vague. I just want to stay on topic here.
Um, so I've, I've actually got a kind of a quick question then that may take us into his third question, because I don't do this. I was thinking, which, you know, he wants to use his iMac as a display. I would have thought screen sharing, but I used to, back in my Windows days, I had a dock and I would put my big Dell laptop on there and it would go to the screen. I had a separate keyboard and all that.
I think in Mac, they called it clamshell mode. I don't even know if they do that anymore again i'm purely on my laptop so what is the best way to hit that that second larger display um
I don't believe he said it's a 2017 24 inch imac i'm pretty sure by that point in time you did not have the ability to, to use it in target display mode. But that's what that was called. The trick. And some Macs could do it. The 27-inch ones, the 5K ones never could. I don't think that particular 24-inch iMac was old enough to do that, but it might have been. If it's not, check if you can use target display mode. We'll put links in the show notes about that.
If you can't, there is something called Luna Display, from our friends at Astropad that is built to turn either your iPad or a second Mac into an external display, essentially. And it's got their own proprietary thing. I think it's about a hundred bucks. Yep. And you run an app on one device and the little dongle on the other and you're off to the races.
Not a dock, a dongle.
Yeah it's a little dongle it's a little usb thing but it's the display and then that'll get you there um yeah it's 90 bucks and you can you know make the magic happen it plugs into you plug the dongle into the mac that is the um computer that's the computer right and then and then you run software on the second device and that makes the magic happen i believe but anyway yeah you can you can go check it out at astropat i.
Wonder if you can plug that dongle into a dongle if it will still work it should
Oh yeah it should as long as it has it as long as it has display port pass through i would assume yeah yeah so older mac models that support target display mode go as new as 2014 so yes your 2017 iMac cannot do it but if you've got an older one you know it's a potential option anyway so yeah um dumb question no dumb questions here.
What are current prices on a 24 inch just 4k display
The 24 how close.
To a yeah 24 inch 4k display how how close could you get to around 100 bucks because i'm thinking if you're going to spend 100 bucks on luna display are you just better off just getting a new 24 inch 4k display
Huh let's look 24 inch UHD monitor Amazon says oh, Now that's 1080p. So we're just scrolling through Amazon here. ViewSonic has one for 550. That's a higher end color accurate thing. Sansui has one for 160, but it's only 1080p. It's looking like Amazon's overall pick for a 24-inch 4K is 240.
There's one that's 200. There's another one that's samsung's is 27 inch and 200 so for 200 bucks you could get something there and maybe that's better than i don't know you know there's not as much e-waste because you're using your old iMac but the um as fast and and as optimized as luna display is if you connect directly to an actual monitor as opposed to doing it via you know a hardware software secret handshake thing you're going to get a better
um latency and lag with an actual physically connected display so yeah yeah i.
Don't know i just think these things like you know and then always people come up you know will uh will for run in the discord chats like well what panel technology though are you getting for a cheap display
Not great but yeah but.
I mean again it's a it's a 20 what did we say a 2014
2017 2017.
IMac i mean apple used great displays but it's now 2025
Yeah it's eight years old yep and.
And i and i looked also look on mono price there was 249 for a 4k display refurb but you know they've got some good ones yeah i
Can't believe they're still that expensive like it seems like who's buying 24 inch 4k displays anymore anyway
Um i my guess is that they're going to get more expensive in the short term um so oh yeah now would now if you want to buy now would be the time i i would think. All right. So let's be honest. We're always honest here, right? And we all drop serious cash on our shiny Apple gear. Macs, iPhones, iPads, all our peripherals. But how many of us are truly using these things and all the software we have to their full potential? That's where our sponsor Screencasts Online comes in.
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Yeah. Let's do some don't get caught. So I got caught three times this week, so to speak, but I picked these up. This first one is it's almost certainly a bug and I think it's going to get fixed. But Alan wrote in to the Discord help desk and says, I have a MacBook. I have an M2 MacBook Air and installed the Sequoia 15.4 update. When I try to send an email in Apple Mail, the send button turns gray and nothing else happens, including in the activity window.
The Mail Connection Doctor window shows the IMAP and SMTP connections and login to the server succeeded for both my FastMail and Gmail accounts. And I have checked that I can save a draft in Apple Mail and open the FastMail app and send it from there. Does anyone have any suggestions on how to fix this? And Alan Farkas found the answer.
Same Alan. He fixed his own issue. Oh, yeah.
Okay. Yeah. There you go. I didn't even notice that. But yeah, I was looking down at the, because it's like three different in there. But it's an Apple discussions thread. And this doesn't make sense why it works, but it does. And several people in the discussion thread said, yeah, it worked for me too. It's a spell check issue. Toggling spell check off and then back on solves the
problem. So you go into settings, composing, this is in mail, go to settings, composing, check spelling, and change it to never. Send a test email to make sure it sends. And then change the setting from never back to click when I sent. And send a test email with the spelling error to confirm it checks and sends. So... That's weird, but cycling the spell check off and then back on solves the grayed out send button in Apple Mail and 15.4.
I believe it. There's some weird issues with 15.4, aren't there, Adam?
Yeah.
You want to tell us about Dominic's report about 15.4?
Yeah. So Dominic says, Greetings, Geek. you gave a shout out to MakeMKV on MGG1083. With immaculate timing, Apple broke it on the same day with Mac OS 15.4. It turns out that this was identified during the beta cycle, but I don't run MakeMKV on the Macs where I run betas. So I've just had an exciting time reverting my home Media Mac to 14.3.2, which, you know, as you know, is not easy. There are threads on the MakeMKV forums about this, including a note that a
fix will be available, quote, in a couple days. I got caught. So warn your listeners, if it's not too late, hopefully it's not too late, not to update to Mac OS until the new MakeMKV versions appear. And we'll have a couple links there in the show notes I think for those threads.
Yeah I'm looking we're recording this on the morning of April 4th the Mike the person who writes make MKV posted that the updated version for 15.4 will be available in a couple of days on Tuesday April 1st as of this morning I did not see it out there, but I mean you know so real soon now I would expect to see um to see that pop out it's just not there right now and i'm looking to see no it's not it's not out yet but i.
Wonder if they'll fix that spill check bug
Hopefully it's a feature well no no no this would be this would be make mkv is pushing no.
I know i'm just saying it's you know i wonder if they'll fix that too as long as they're fixing other things
Well but that's i think that's i I think that's the part that you might be misunderstanding is that the fix for 15.4 is going to be an updated make MKV app, not an update from Apple. So the spell check error would have to come from Apple. Right. But I agree with you. Let's hope. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But yeah, we haven't seen a new make MKV release yet. But we'll put a link to the download page as well so that we, you know. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Well, Larry wrote in with another don't get caught. And he says, so lately the display panel on my printer has been flashing at me incessantly that my toner cartridge is low and should be replaced immediately. To be honest, I don't even remember changing the toner cartridges ever since I got this printer. It's a really nice Canon laser. But because I'm savvy and I know how to get not to get caught, I printed a test page and it seems I've got quite a bit of life left in this.
I imagine pete's side note here i wonder if it's a time thing in his case now just just just occurred to me as i'm reading this yeah um so uh back to what he wrote i printed the test page it seems i've got quite a bit left in this a life left in this i imagine the average jane or john doe wouldn't know to do this and would immediately run out to staples and buy a toner cartridge And he points out they're not giving those away. I guess it's cartridges caused. There are four.
Cartridges, not cartridge. I guess it's cartridges caused.
There are, because there are four. But still, I have, I love how low they price these things, the printers. It's what you put in them that gets pricey, just like the dealers giving out needles for free. Okay.
Wow.
To necessarily want to go there, but there we are. Um, and I wrote it, I wrote it back. I said, look, that's really good advice. Verify your toner level before, uh, changing out that cartridge. Uh, and I have a screen indicator of toner level as well. And, uh, I don't know. I haven't checked to see if I have the ability to print out actual levels with a print page on my brother. I think I probably do, but my tactic is to print until I get a bad page.
And then I know I'm out of, When I can't get any more blue or black or what have you, now I know I'm out of that toner and keep some on hand.
That was the important part, Pete, when you roll that way, is I always make sure I have a full set sitting on the shelf so that I can run it all the way to where I'm not getting a good print. Because nothing's worse than hitting that point and then not having the cartridge and then not being able to find it.
I will say, though, the prices on that even seem to be coming down. I used to go to, I don't know, some websites. It was like cheaptonercartridges.com or something like that. I just made that up, but it was similar to that. And most recently, I've gotten on Amazon my toner cartridges for probably a third of the price of what I was paying for a set of four. To include a waste toner. I've had this printer so long, I had to replace the waste toner cartridge, which I'd never heard of.
Huh.
So. so there are videos how to empty that and make a complete mess of
Everything no no no not unless not unless it's not unless it's the last thing you're doing before you are abandoning your home because that toner is gonna get everywhere oh yeah no that's like if you leave you know fish like dead fish in your car for four or five days you there are two steps to take after that number one is take it to the car wash and have them wash the inside and hang an air freshener and number two is to take it to the dealer and sell it because you
will never actually get the fish smell out so you will never get toner out of your home if you uh if you if you do that so i looked at he sent us a screenshot of his uh of the you know of that test page and the reason it's giving him this warning is he's got four cartridges, cyan, magenta, yellow and black. Three of them are at 40% and his yellow is at 30%. And that's saying prepare a cartridge. It's saying it right on his test page.
So the test page and the printer are agreeing with each other that a replacement is coming. It's just that the test page gives you, as he said correctly, more information about just how close you are. So he's not at 10%. He's at 30%. And that's the advice here is just, yeah, check that. check check your levels and like you said pete with some printers you get an app to do that and some you you don't but uh yeah but yeah but.
It's too expensive to throw away 30
Absolutely oh 100 correct on that yes.
Um i think this still happens um so i don't know i do this this may just be my own mental thing another thing on saving toner cartridges in my mind with a with a laser printer especially well actually also with an inkjet just saving ink if you are printing out something that is black and white make sure you change your printer settings to black only yes because otherwise it will do what's called a four color black and it mixes to darken the rich in the black color colors
into your blacks so you're wasting color toner or ink when you're if you don't make that switch i think that's mostly the case for most applications yeah
Absolutely i
Love it i'm putting the.
New ink jets are pretty cool my mother-in-law just got one of those ones you get the little bottles and you can refill them and they're apparently a lot cheaper
Yeah, a comment, you're right about that. And those are, ink jets are usually fairly easy to contain the mess. Larry's printer was a laser, so that's a little different. But as far as buying off-brand, you know, third-party toner, I have found that I get what I pay for with that. In terms of longevity of the cartridge, I've bought regular life cartridges from the manufacturer and extended life cartridges from, you know, whatever the off-brand company Amazon recommends.
And the regular life first-party cartridges, toner cartridges, last way longer. They also have far less of a chance of streaking and leaking, which I have also seen with aftermarket toner. Does that mean that I only buy first party toner? No, of course I'm cheap. I buy the other stuff, but I know what I'm getting myself into. And I've learned which brands to stay away from. Kind of, you get a sense for like, okay, that's, that's, if it seems too good to be true, it is. Yeah.
Cheap and worth it. So yeah.
Right. Yeah.
So I a hundred percent agree with that. I got burned by third party things in exactly the same way. I think one time it even was so bad that I had to just basically replace the, what's it, the drum part of it or whatever. It got so corrupted with garbage toner. Every print was coming out terrible. So I just have opted to pay the extra and always get the first party brother cartridges but you pay more
You do pay more yeah um i think i've got a lexmark printer now that's been doing pretty well with aftermarket toner um my hp prior to that was the one where i was like fine i'm just gonna buy the first party stuff or or at the very least you know the the higher end third-party stuff it's it's the remanufactured toner cartridges that wind up being a nightmare uh yeah yeah so yep um on the whole kind of related to the whole 15.4
thing simply because it showed up for all of us this week adam you had a question as we uh were getting together yeah Yeah.
Yeah. And anybody who's on 15.4, I think knows that Apple has brought another one of these wonderful alert dialogue boxes that's constantly in our face now. And it's like every app you open up, it's like asking about using your network connection. And so specifically this one was my browser, you know, we use edge, I use edge and we're using, um, stream yard to record the show. And so popped up Edge on 15.4, and it says, hey, Edge wants to use your network
connection. It needs to be able to do this to communicate with other things on your network, whatever the dialogue says.
Local devices, I think.
Local devices. And I had to give pause because I thought, well, normally my default posture on these is no, because I don't know what it's wanting to do. And so my question is, what is it wanting to do? Did I need to do that? I said yes, because I didn't know if StreamYard maybe needed it for some reason. I'm presuming it probably doesn't. So why would my browser need that?
I think the timing of this has changed. When 15.0 first came out, we all started seeing these new dialogues, and we started getting alert blindness. We even did a segment ranting about that. Fish Shake City. Fine. Great. I still agree with that Fish Shake. I think we've got too much, too many alerts and we're all going to get alert by blindness. But this one specifically about local devices, I like you, I now see it the moment I launch an app. However.
Where I previously saw it, and I think is the informative tidbit here, is I saw it when I would go to a print dialogue. And that's when it would come up and say, do you want to give this app, whatever the app was, access to devices on your local network? And it was so that it could print to it. Now, I don't understand why that dialogue would come up for an app that is using Apple's Print Center because I'm not giving the app access to local devices.
It's using an API to print and then going to whatever printer I've configured through macOS.
So it seemed a little extra. and i guess apple decided to make it extra extra uh and show it to us the first time we launched the app whether we are ever going to print with the app or not just because the app can print that's my presumption uh because it's because it's happening with all kind of the same apps and browsers i mean obviously you can print from a browser but uh that's my guess is is it's asking there because previously
it would not ask until and it's all the same apps it would not ask until i went to the print dialogue and that's when it would ask so that's my presumption on that adam.
Do you think it's related at all also to things like you know i'm pretty sure in my browser especially if it's a chrome browser
Yep that.
Youtube can like if i had a chromecast or something like that i could chrome cast that video from my browser to my something else on my network
Totally or.
Other locations same thing probably with audio that's why and that's why it gave me pause with stream with stream yard but i had to think that through and go well stream yard's not actually going out to anything on my network but i guess presumably i might be able to if i allowed
Well, it's not so much StreamYard, it's Edge, right? And so a browser could go, there's many reasons, printing being one of them, accessing your router, for example. If you want to load up your router's webpage for the management webpage, that's a device on your local network. So it has to, you would have to give it... I guess where my issue comes in with, with what we're seeing with 15.4 is that it's just asking it for us the moment we launched the app.
So there's no context to say, oh, it makes sense. I mean, like, I think it doesn't make sense about printing, but at least I understood what was happening. It was like, I went to print, it asked for stuff on my network. I have a network printer. This makes sense. Or if I went to go to access my routers webpage, that makes sense.
Here with it just like before i ever get to do anything it's saying can you do this like i don't i guess like it i think this is going to lead to more alert blindness um yeah yeah yeah.
The context i think that that's the key there should be context in that dialogue hey this is needed for a b c and d you know even if it's just a bullet list of like we need it for streaming to you know video devices on your network we need it for you know audio streaming and we need it for printing like if it just said that then you could be like okay
Okay great then you make an informed decision as opposed to a blind decision yeah yeah yep yep yep er um they're related to this when we talked about it the first time the one that was coming up for all of us was the monthly uh permissions for allowing screen capture for things like zoom or other you know remote control software there's an app that was written by our friends at gumroad that is called amnesia uh jordy bruin wrote this and it will uh set the timer to many many many many
years past when we would have stopped using these computers so uh you can you can effectively set it forever but that's only for the screen capture access i haven't yet seen one for the local network access but i am i will make a prediction that it is coming because the last time i made this prediction amnesia came out so i want amnesia to expand to more than just screen capture so that would be that would be my.
Preference because i i don't want those things yeah i like i often will when i get the notification that i have to go into the you know system settings privacy and turn on like accessibility access for a specific app to to use you know the app complains i don't have this please go in and do this when i'm in there i turn it on for every app in the list like i mean i'm reading which apps they are obviously if it's some app i don't recognize i might pause but
my default is to just turn it on for everything I've installed the app I'm running the app why would I not want it I don't want to get caught, in a moment where I need it and then it's popping up and now I got to reboot the app to get it to it's such a pain I don't know that's just me, Maybe I'm too trusting.
Why don't computers just know what we want? Asking for a friend.
You know, we're not, we're, we're getting there, Pete. We're getting intent. That's the, that's the thing. And that can work in both directions. Like if the computer can see what we're intending, if it can understand what we're trying to do, what the end goal is, it can help us a lot more.
And that, that's, you know, to go a little bit off the, off the beaten path or off the intended path here i have found with when i'm interacting with you know one of the llms like chat gpt if i ask it how do i do x it comes up with some answers and a lot of times they're not entirely right and that's fine because i can test it and learn which parts are right and go back and interact more where I find I can make that interaction a whole lot more efficient is
by telling it why I'm trying to do something first. And I generally don't type the whole paragraph out. I speak it. I just, you know, dictated or whatever. I say here, this is what I'm trying to do. This is what I'm the, the, the, the goal.
Now I think I need to know how to do x but if you've got a better idea tell me and often that gets me down the path faster it's giving it and and and in a meta sense that's the the idea of giving the llm the more you give it specifically about whatever you're doing the more accurate and valuable the results are going to be asking short questions doesn't work as well yeah well.
It goes back to computers do what you tell them, right? Exactly what you tell them and nothing more. And then large language models, I think, work the same.
Kind of the same. Yeah.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Although it is impressive to watch some of them learn, like the one at those bots at the sphere, those androids at the sphere.
Oh, yeah, that was pretty good.
They can learn. So that was cool.
Yeah.
Be careful, Pete, because we're probably not that far from brain-computer interfaces. so and I think
We're not going to be happy about it when it happens it could be you know
Yeah.
I don't know if i want my computer knowing what i'm thinking because it will probably show me stuff that i really don't want it showing me that
You can't unsee
Um if if you want to do something interesting if you have been using chat gpt for a while and if you have it set to the to the default where it remembers things from session to session and and learns context about you go in and ask chat gpt this is worth a short request what do you know about me and you can even say and what advice do you have for me oh god it's interesting it really it it's fascinating i mean, also creepy but you know.
Oh let's get out of creepy go
All right yeah
So kent wrote in he goes from time to time i use my iPhone, currently an iPhone 15, to scan documents when my desktop scanner is not convenient. It works great with one exception. If the original is US letter size 8.5 by 11, as most of them are, the resulting scan fills the screen of my 27-inch iMac when I later open it. Adobe Photoshop Elements tells me the new image is around 29 by 35 inches at 300 dpi.
Of course, I can resize the image to its true size, but that extra step seems like it should be unnecessary i can't find any settings on the iphone to change the output size and my searching for an answer has not turned up any solutions short of writing an automator script or a shortcut to resize the output do you have a solution thanks ken
Um yeah interesting uh i i i i think so but i've i've found the same as kent the pdf is larger than i want it to be when i scan with the the files app and like it's just how it be um but resizing is is the best solution i guess um i i i guess you could use hazel on a mac oh.
There you go yeah
To like look for photos or pdfs like whatever you know whatever you're doing uh i mean he's he said an automator script or a shortcut yes but hazel to trigger that would be i don't know that would be my that would be my answer yep yeah yeah i don't it is you know So like many things that Apple does, they prioritize both convenience and simplicity. And by not giving us all of those options to tweak it, people don't wind up in situations where they where they don't expect to be. Right.
Actually, I have a fish shake about this, and it's also a request for those of you. Apple does let you change the image size in one place, and that is in mail when you are sending an email that you have attached images to. It will offer to send them at actual size, low, medium, or high, and this exists on iPhone and on Mac. It's great on iPhone because it asks you each time a dialogue comes up and asks you. On the Mac, whatever you used for the previous email with which you sent images sticks.
And sometimes from you folks, we will get screenshots from you that you're sending along to be helpful to try and illustrate an issue that you're having. And we can't read them because they were sent at low quality. And I know you didn't choose to send them that one to us at low quality, but you probably chose low quality for something two weeks prior on your Mac and it just stays there.
So that, but, but that I think is, is a way to illustrate why this thing where you're scanning doesn't have options, because can you imagine if you scan something that you only had one shot at scanning and now you're no longer there where it is? And, and now it's, you know, unintelligible because you had some previous setting that you didn't notice and forgot about.
So, I just tried something while you were talking, Dave. I used Genius Scan on my phone.
Oh, sure.
And scanned a document. And when I opened it in PDF Expert, it was there. It was about 8.5 by 11. I think. The problem is when I hit Command-I on the file itself, I'm not getting the actual dimensions. So, I should try and open it in something else. Maybe preview. review and see what it comes with. But it doesn't seem to be, yeah, even in preview, it seems like a fairly normal size. So, maybe?
I just Googled on this, and guess what? What's that? If you go in the Files app, and you tap and hold on the file in question, you can go down to Quick Actions, open up Quick Actions, and there is a command called Optimize File Size. But i i just tried it it didn't do any like i had a scan document that was 2.6 megabytes sure it compressed it to 2.6
Megabytes okay so okay yeah so it's not the mileage.
May vary but but there is an optimize that's supposed to work with pdfs i i don't know if it's only specific
Pdfs and i i think kent i mean i know we've been talking about pdfs and images i think kent's question was about images images are huge yeah but i mean when if you're when either way we're talking about images it's either sure is it saving as an image or is it saving embedded inside a pdf because it either way it's taking a picture of a.
Pdf is an image of a document yeah
That pdf is an image of a document not all pdfs are images of documents but yeah but that one would be until it was ocr or whatever but yeah yeah yeah i i find the same thing i wind up doing scans most recently for my accountant to send some things along for our annual taxes and i i use in pdf expert i use that apps reduce you know save as reduced file size or whatever i used to use a quartz filter um that i built myself uh that you could set different things with i seem to
recall or i i took somebody else's and tweaked it maybe i don't think i built it from scratch but yeah yeah i.
Would think the shortcut is the way to go and then use a quick action on a shortcut
Yeah yeah and that way you can control yeah and then do the compression inside the pdf yep yeah yep so.
All right uh should we go to kelly has a question pogo kelly has a question about battery optimization for airpods says love my new airpods pro gen 2 anc hearing aid freedom from wires all great
What's.
The best practice for optimizing battery life usual usage i use them for an hour or so before taking them out. Generally, I put them back in the case, even though the battery still has plenty of juice. And I'm now wondering if I should draw down the battery on an occasion or on an occasional, excuse me, or regular basis.
Pete.
So, yeah. So this, this was in the, uh, discord, uh, help desk and, uh, I, I don't have the note up in front of me. I'm sorry. I was looking at something, trying to get to the next one I was going to read, but, uh, but the long and short of it was just use your AirPods, just, just use them. I use and abuse my air pod batteries. And so I guess in that sense, yeah, I do take them down all the way sometimes and I get the little two and it's dead. I'm like, okay.
But in three years or so of this particular set of AirPods pro two, I, they don't owe me anything and the batteries last hours and five, you know, once it does die, I can put it in and five minutes later, it's back up. But I don't think you're hurting the battery if you use it for an hour and throw it back in the case.
Um i these these seem to be and someone in there i recall put it seems to be doing the smart battery management that you know apple is putting that in there um i can neither confirm nor deny that but i found using and abusing your airpods uh does not seem to degrade them adam
Same no i mean i just i just use them as is um the only thing i mean i sometimes will like do just use one airpod depending upon what i'm doing and then kind of swap them back and forth but yeah i've never worried too much about the batteries on my airpods pro but i've also not kept them very long for then replacing them like i think the longest i've ever had a set was probably two or three years
Yeah. I mean, you were the one that I thought crystallized it great, you know, years ago, probably a decade ago, Adam, which was keep the keep the electrons flowing. Right. So as long as you're using and charging and using and charging and, you know, that's the best thing for these current batteries. The worst thing would be to just leave it on charge all the time. But that's impossible if you're using your AirPods.
Right.
So it's a self-solving problem. i i think you'd have to go out of your way to yeah to to to accelerate significantly accelerate any uh degradation of that battery it will degrade yeah the the.
Opposite is also true and this is this is true for any uh lithium ion battery i don't there's other batter technologies i think are coming into play now, but certainly for these another thing that is terrible is to just leave them discharged and just sitting around. So like if you're going to put something into storage or something like that, you generally want to, it's my understanding, put about a 75% charge in it and
then yeah, leave it for a time. So if you know you're not going to be using something for a while, um you know like i have a lot of like a lot of us we have a lot of old apple gear like i have my series two apple watch that i gave my daughter and then she didn't use it and i found it in her drawer and i mean the battery on this thing's gone now at this point because i think it sat around with no charge on it for i
Had years i had my og apple watch that i wound up letting sit in a drawer for a really long time. And I just kept trying. And it probably took six weeks until the watch battery finally came around. I would put it on the charger and take it off and put it on. And there were a few times where it came online and I was like, amazing, eureka! Only to get a Wi-Fi signal and start doing all of the syncing that of course it hadn't had a chance to do in months or whatever.
And that would drain the battery faster than the battery could continue charging and it would kill it. So it was this whole thing, but it took a few months and now I can use that watch. It's amazing. So it might not be as dead as you think.
Not dead yet. Well, not so much dead, but like it does not have the battery life that it did.
Oh, yeah, no.
It's degraded the battery and that's kind of where the point is that that goes back to the earlier statement if you keep the electrons flowing that's what these batteries like they don't want to be 100 all the time they don't want to be zero all the time they want to bounce somewhere in between and that's why that's why that's exactly what apple's battery optimization does right yes make sure you're not overcharging it all the time and you're not undercharging it you know so yeah
that's the key is that bouncing in the middle and cycling it and that seems to be the best practice yep
Yeah because they are lithium batteries i'm i would be willing to bet apple is putting some smart technology in there in order to prevent overcharging oh
You don't have to bet they they talk about it it's there oh for sure 100 oh yeah.
I'm just thinking in the in the airpods pro i'm not talking about you know obviously in the computers the phones oh i
See what you're saying Oh, yeah.
The technology is available to them, so why not put it in the AirPods?
Yeah, I would agree with you. Yeah, for sure. Yeah. All right. A couple of cool things found before we have to say goodbye here. I got an interesting thing, and there's a trend that I'm seeing, which I really like. The interesting thing is this INIU 10,000 milliamp hour magnetic MagSafe Qi2, really, power bank. And it's really thin for a 10,000. It's like the size of most of the 5,000s that I've used.
Uh, it has a little kickstand on it so that you can like use it as a stand for your phone if you want. And it also has a little, um, strap that hangs off of it, which I thought, okay, well, this is a little weird. And, uh, I was in my kitchen when it arrived and kind of handed it around. My family was like, Oh, that's pretty cool. And Lisa, again, to kind of come full circle on the episode here. It's like, wait a minute. She pulls it out and realizes that the strap is a USB-C to USB-C cable.
So what's cool about this thing is it's got 15 watt, true 15 watt charging on the Chi 2, which is, you know, MagSafe. And then also 30 watt, 45 watt, sorry, 45 watt fast charging with the lanyard USB-C cable.
So not only is that enough to charge your phone i plugged it into my macbook air and it was giving it juice now i mean it'll my macbook air will drain 10 000 milliamp hours much faster than my phone would but still having that all right there it's actually a pretty cool little thing and and magsafe so yeah fun and it's 34 sorry 36 right now on uh on amazon normal price is 43 So not, yeah, not a bad deal.
Nice.
Yipper.
All right.
You got one, Pete?
I do. And so I saw these at CES and I'm going to quickly throw, or maybe not. I just, the window went away. I'll put it in after I'm done talking about it. I found some Lutron Cassetta shades at CES. These are window shades. And we moved in June and didn't have window treatments on our picture window. Yeah. And so I asked if I could try these out, and I did. And boy, they're easy to measure. They say, hey, here, you want to install it within the window,
over the top of the window, that sort of thing. So I want to do it within the window. It says, these are your rules to follow. Measure twice, cut once. And so I did that, and I sent it in. The order came. I installed it with a screwdriver. I did use a drill to do a pilot hole for the screws, but they come with actually self-tapping screws. It was, so a screwdriver, a tape measure, and they were super easy to quickly install.
I think you're burying a lead here. These are smart shades, right?
Smart shades, yes.
Okay, so you control them with your phone?
Yes. Okay. Control them, and, or, your voice. This is the cool thing, because now, I can say, hey, A-Lady.
Sure.
Lower the shades 20%. all of them 75%.
And you could have it automate that too. Yes. Time of day.
And yeah. And so you, and the S lady will also do it. And, um, yeah, so A-Lady will do it, S-Lady will do it, and it comes with a little, well, it doesn't come with, you do have to purchase the little remote and the bridge that specifically works with Lutron, but it all integrates into the home app, hence A-Lady and S-Lady will work the magic, but you hit the little button, it's got five buttons, the top button pulls them all the way up, the bottom button pulls them all the
way down, the middle button puts them exactly halfway, and the two buttons either side of the middle move the shades in unison as long as you are uh holding the button down and as soon as you release the button uh it's got and you can get uh you can get these in blackout you can get them i got them in light filtering not light blocking prices
Start at like 400.
Bucks 399 yeah okay for a shade and uh now so for my shades they were uh i've got a about a five foot picture window with two two and a half foot windows on either side of that so all three of those move in unison those uh the the whole thing remote control all that stuff came to 1600 retail okay
I have a question for you because you you shared a video with me of how these work how do you get power to them. It looked like I didn't see any wires or cords.
There are none. This is cool. So, uh, they, uh, when you install them in the videos are actually pretty good. I didn't have them and I was trying to figure it out. And I finally went to the video, you know, when all those fails, the instruments, uh, but, but they, they slide in and out, which turns out to be a good thing because you need them to slide out a little bit. So you can put five D cell batteries in the big one, four D cells in each of the small and, you know,
Oh, those decels are going to run those motors for years. I'm certain of it,
But that's okay. Cause I was looking, I'm like, all right, where are all these ugly wires that are going to be there? Huh? Very cool, man.
Yeah. And they're just, they're just not there. I'm trying to, why is it? I don't want a free trial. Oh, it's, it's, see, that's why I can't upload it to discord. It's a 20 megabyte video.
Oh yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, put the video on YouTube.
I'm going to throw it in discord in a little bit.
Put the video on YouTube for people and we can show them. But, but yeah, no, that's pretty cool, man.
Very cool they yeah they're so nice and then um you know i'm going to talk bad about debbie now because it's what we do here uh so last night i had i had the a lady all set up i'm going look honey hey a lady lower the shades 20 and she's like i i don't want to have to use can i use the remote button i don't want to use my phone i go you don't need to use your phone a lady's sitting over there in an echo that's cool i just want to use the button remote okay that's fine so resistant to yeah
Well i mean it's nice to have all the options like whatever works for you yeah that's great.
Yeah but uh as uh matthew dropkiss is like the like the shades and blade runner at the tyrell corporation they are indeed do
We have time for one more adam.
Uh barely but i have a question on pete's thing all right
Then we'll save the one.
For my wife can they can they be operated manually regularly. Can you just pull the shade?
No, no, not really.
You can, but boy,
Is that slow and difficult. Oh, these are behind a couch anyway. So trying to get up there, you'd have to stand on the couch and pull on them. These are nice because when you can just push the buttons over on the side, push them to where you want them.
But not intended to be manually operated. No, not intended to be manually operated. Okay. All right.
Okay.
All right. Well, then we will save the remaining cool stuff found for next week. It turns out we have to come back next week, guys.
Again?
We get to come back next week. It's really kind of how I think about it.
Yeah, there you go.
Yeah.
It is a privilege and a fun one at that.
I agree. Thanks for hanging out with us. Remember to check out our monthly giveaway. You can win a copy of Clean My Mac, a license to Clean My Mac, I should say. So thanks to Mac Paw for doing that with us. that's available through all of April and there's already a ton of people who have signed up for it. But that doesn't mean you aren't going to win. In fact, I'm certain that you are going to win. So go check it out. MattGeekHub.com slash giveaway.
Thanks to Cashfly for providing all the bandwidth to get the show from us to you. Go check out our other podcasts. Adam does the debut film podcast. Pete does So There I Was and I do Business Brain and Gig Gab.
And you know there's new merch available so go check it out matgeekup.com slash merch thank you so much for hanging out with us everybody we love what we get to do here, and you let us do it we wouldn't have these conversations even if we weren't recording them but, this is so much more fun so much more rewarding candidly we all get to learn together We wouldn't learn as much if you weren't involved, folks.
Oh, I'm asking, you know, would you help me edit my Etsy host file if we didn't have the show? I'm asking for a friend.
I probably would. I probably would. But I wouldn't have anywhere to give you crap about it, Pete. That's true. Yeah. Hey, folks, have a great week and don't get caught. Made on the back.