It's time for Mac Geek Cabin. Listener Ben brings us our cool stuff found of the week. He says, as predicted by Dave in episode 1056, Jordy Bruin has released Amnesia to eliminate macOS 15's annoyingly persistent monthly requests to renew screen recording privacy permissions. And indeed, we will put a link in the show notes to Jordy Bruin's Amnesia. Thanks to everyone who sent this in, Allison, everybody else that sent this in. More cool stuff found like this.
Plus, your questions answered today on MacGeekGab1059 for Monday, October 14th, National Online Bank Day 2024. Music. Greetings, folks, and welcome to MacGeekUp, the show where you send in cool stuff found like that, and we share it. You send in quick tips, and we share them, although I don't think we're going to do any quick tips this episode because we're going to focus on cool stuff found.
But you also send in questions, and we try to answer those, and we're going to try and do some of that today, to all put together into an agenda to all but ensure that each of us learns at least five new things every single time we get together our sponsor for this episode is bb edit from bare bones at barebones.com uh my text editor of choice it's running on my mac right now as it almost always is we'll talk more about that in a little bit for now here in durham new hampshire I'm Dave Hamilton.
Here in South Dakota, I'm Adam Christensen. And here also in New Hampshire, it's Pilot Pete. Good to be with you guys. And Dave, boy, if I could take a, I know it's seasonal and timely, and this show will be out there forever, but I want to take just a quick moment of personal privileges and send out my thoughts and prayers and good wishes to all the people in Florida surviving their third hurricane this season.
Oh, it's brutal. Good luck to you folks down there. I had two family members down there who turned tail wisely and ran. They're home safe. I hope all you folks have family who are safe from this storm. It's bad. Indeed. Yeah. Thank you for saying that. Yeah. Same. Yeah. It's crazy. It's crazy. Yeah. Things are weird. We've been getting the Northern lights here in Southern New Hampshire. This is what the fourth time this, this year that we've seen them.
I've never seen them before in my life. So yeah. Weird things with the weather. I actually signed up for it, and I don't remember when, where, or how, or I would tell you folks, but I've been getting the alerts because the northern lights are caused when solar flares happen. And so we've been getting excess radiation from that big yellow thing in the sky for the last several days.
And I get it from the FAA to say, hey, when you're above certain latitudes and altitudes, you're going to be exposed to greater radiation. So you must laugh, Pete, when you see all of us normies posting pictures of the Northern Lights from our homes or, you know, from the beach or wherever we go at 10 p.m.
To because, oh, my gosh, it's amazing. And it is amazing for everybody that isn't at thirty five thousand feet at night regularly, because the pictures you've sent me of the Northern Lights are nothing like what I'm seeing here. So, I have actually a pretty funny tech-related story related to that. I was on my very first ocean crossing. Once training's over, you go to what's called IOE, Initial Operating Experience.
You can do that for 25 hours with a Czech airman who knows all the standards and makes sure you're up to speed so that when you're released to go fly with a captain who isn't a Czech airman, that you're good. You're not going to leave the guy out there hanging flying solo. And so I'm on my first transatlantic flight after training, after being released, and the captain was in the back in the bunk, and the relief pilot was in the captain's chair. I was in the first officer's chair.
And the most amazing northern lights I've ever seen in my life are flashing across the sky, and we're like, oh, this is incredible. So we turned down every light in the cockpit. And the MD-11 has six screens about nine inches across, and that's all your flight instruments. Well, the autopilot's on and everything. So you can turn those screens down dim or off, as the case may be.
So we turned them all off, every light in the cockpit off, and sat there and watched the northern lights for eight or ten minutes and then went, okay, that's time to go back to work. So we turned all the lights back on, and all six of those screens were black. Oh, no. I mean, I'm getting the adrenaline pumping to the heart. I'm telling this story. I'm getting the adrenaline pumping to the heart.
I've got an airplane over the North Atlantic in December at night, and I've got no flight instruments. Now I've got to go wake up the captain and tell him, all we've got is two little peanut gyros and a computer to interact with. I mean, it's flying along, it's doing what it was told, and it will continue to fly the route as long as there are no changes. You just don't get the information you want. Yeah, if there are any changes, you're kind of hosed.
And about the time I was ready to unstrap the seatbelt and go get him, the screens started to fade back in because unlike leds these are cot cathode ray tubes which take a little warm-up time, why don't you learn that you never forget that lesson after you learn it though no. Yeah it was like oh my god huh what have we done we're, we've got no flight instruments oh we're screwed amazing though yeah so it was but last night went out to watch the northern lights and we were late we didn't
see him my whole family is disappointed, they you know they're they're fleeting they are they're happening they're happening but it's amazing getting to see i mean it's uh i know and i know a lot of us that have never seen them before have gotten several opportunities this year so far to see them which is pretty good hey i i I want to make sure we don't forget these things because we forgot one of them last week. The police code of 1059 is for either a convoy escort or a security check.
So I just wanted to make sure we got that in because we're at episode 1059. So, yeah, I looked that up as well. I show security check or, perfect for this show, malicious mischief. Oh, all right. I'll take it. Yeah.
Yeah i like it yeah evidently these 10 codes are not universal nationwide they they are regional it seems which is cool right uh i also want let's get on to some 10 59 some malicious mischief well i i want to make sure to remind everybody if you go to mackie cab.com slash giveaway this month it's through eternal storms and that is yoink and screen float so uh and i i mispronounced it last week as Screen Flow, but it is Yoink and Screen Float.
And you can go sign up at matgeekab.com slash giveaway. And there's several ways to.
To to to increase your odds of winning and so that's that's rocking along here september's giveaway winners included uh the reverend gary after rob van konings bruggen jeff murphy roger harman and alexander but oh i'm gonna i should have print i should have practiced this in advance because i could have gotten it but dosen off alexander put dosen off it was just throwing me off my reading of it yeah i just had to take a second with it yep so but now i'll get it every time alpo alpo no
no no no let's go back to cool stuff found please oh come on man if i can't hang a call sign on somebody you know all right what am i supposed to do yeah it's fine once a marine always a marine there you go hey andrew wrote in with our it's a sign with love Valpo, it's assigned with love. There you go. Which could quickly get you the call sign dog as well. So, you know. Andrew wrote in with a cool stuff found called ItsyCal. It puts a calendar in
your menu bar. It says, for years I've been using ItsyCal. It puts a calendar in your menu bar, and I'm often looking for dates quickly and being able to see the whole month quickly. And yes, I know with widgets, you can put one on your desktop. He goes, but this way, it's sitting in the menu bar. All I do is tap it, And I can look at the calendar for the entire month ahead as well as see my diary and to do's and it's free. And I saw that.
Yeah, when you tap on that, it comes down and it pulls up all your to do's for the day and the week or month ahead. And that's kind of cool. He says, but wait, there's more. I just noticed it can chime on the hour and the sound is like the old Casio squeak, squeak, great honor in a digital watches in the 1980s. So if you're looking for a way to annoy your office mates.
Check that box there you go so yeah itsy cow it's free in the app store oh fun yeah love that love that is it is it is it free in the app store or just free i think just free from their website i don't it might be in the app store but i got it in the app store you did oh okay so it's available in both places okay great great great awesome amazing nice fun yupple, all right all right guess what what judy has a a pair of cool stuff found for us twofer a twofer,
she says or i assume because i shouldn't assume things but uh hello everyone i want to say thank you for recommending the app eject eject bar it works great i was using another app for that but.
Way too often it would run and run and run so that my m1 macbook pro would get hot the check bar does not do that another app that i don't know if you've talked about is neo finder i use it to catalog my drives it gets updated regularly i think we had that conversation not too long ago about archiving drives and figuring out what's on you know being able to keep track of what's on it So Neo Finder sounds like that would be a good option, according to Judy.
And then also says, I also use Wondershare PDF element. I use it to OCR newsletters and emails. It works great and wasn't expensive. So I've heard a lot of good things about that app as well. Yeah. So if you want to OCR your PDFs to make them more searchable, easier to find things, easier to copy and paste things out of, there's an option there for you.
Amazing. I like it. Cool. fun stuff uh yeah i like the uh yeah neo finder is one that we have mentioned a few times but it it definitely seems to be a favorite out there so yeah thank you for that judy uh in our discord sccr hallways uh writes in that there is a new brave style browser based on firefox instead of on chromium called zen browser and uh.
He shared a little bit more. He says Zen gives a bunch more customizations for Firefox, kind of bringing an Arc browser-like feel, but with the Firefox base. And, of course, you can go and download it for free. All the links for all these things are in the show notes. This one's at zen-browser.app. But, again, just go visit MacGeekHub.com, look at episode 1059, and you'll have all the links there.
Or even better, go to MacGeekCab.com, sign up for the weekly show notes to be delivered to your email box. And then you can just click all these things right in your email box. You will never miss another set of show notes again. And I know a lot of folks archive these show notes. We also archive them at MacGeekCab.com. But if you want to have your own archive of them, of course, go there. And the search engine will also let you find different things in there.
And i i'm i've been toying with um probably chat gpt api based integration to the website to kind of search episodes and even the transcripts so that you can really start to find things we're not quite there yet but it's it's pretty cool what is able but anyway yeah go sign up for the email list that'll get you all this stuff so yeah cool nice novel well and jave i i could be wrong He could write to us at feedback at macgeekgab.com. That's feedback at macgeekgab.com. That's correct.
What'd you say feedback at macdcab.com you got to get with that's what i said that's right yeah, and and the person specifically i want us to is to tell us i i've always just assumed it was soccer hallways okay ccr soccer hall just let us know so write to us there and let us know yeah, yeah or comment in discord yeah yeah i had a personal cool stuff found this week and and And frankly, David, you showed it to me, and we may have mentioned it on the show before even. I don't recall.
However, I had family visiting, and we went down to Boston and did the duck tour from the Science Museum, where it's $10 an hour to park. Oh my God, that quickly adds up. And we wanted to go over and do the Freedom Trail, which was going to be quite a walk over to begin it. And I was like, I wonder if there's any parking over there. And I remembered, oh, and I went to Spot Hero.
Yeah man and I found a spot that was less than three hours worth of parking for the rest of the entire day on into the evening right off Boston Common you know and it was so cool I go oh that's the area I want to park in here's what the price is for the rest of the day you click on it I get pictures and descriptions to go down this alley back in and so people are like selling their parking spaces for you for the rest of the day
among other things i mean some of sometimes it's in a garage sometimes it's you know commercial and all that but it gets really it's it's kind of like uber for parking spots is the best way i can think of it that's a great description yeah, yeah yeah so and it's so much cheaper than the big part now i understand the parking garages when they sell at you a spot it's probably cheaper than their going rate in order to get on the spot here although I don't know but.
I found it to be great. here's the thing. I was in and out for $26 for, from two 30 until nine at night. Yep. And in Boston, for those of you to level set, that's, that's yeah. Yeah. No, it doesn't happen. That's like next to free. Yeah. Yeah. Yep. Yep. No, I, I like, I like spot hero for that. Yeah. Because you are, you're often parking at someone's house, you know, it's their spot that they're kind of, you know selling off for the day or whatever yeah yeah it's great yeah i like it cool yeah.
All right so i have one that something i got just recently and i just started um kind of messing with it it's something i've been meaning to get on for a long time or actually my wife's been asking me to get on for a long time and the latest stuff going on in florida and just around the world made me finally pull the trigger along with a really good deal so it's a solar generator basically uh this one's from jackery um they were having a amazon deals day thing so if this kit is a six
kilowatt hour kit so 6 000 watts of battery power yeah that's gonna be plenty to run much of your home yeah like your refrigerator and stuff yeah your refrigerator your boiler for about six hours or so and then is as it's solar you can charge and the way it is is there's the base unit that has you know all the plugs and the outlets including a 220 and um you know charging ports usbc and regular and you could turn them off off on and off um there's a great little app
that comes with it that you can connect to to monitor it um and then it has two additional external batteries so each one is you know 2 000 um watts or kilowatt hours um so you just kind of stack them up and then they just connect. Together almost with um um you just run them in parallel with uh they look like. The charging cables you'd use for an electric car basically um and you just get these external batteries that are 2000 each, I think you can get up to 12 of them.
So you can have 24 if you want it. So you it's expandable too, which is nice. Same thing with like the solar panels. So I did get an extra set of solar panels. So I think with like four solar panels, one of the batteries will take about four hours to charge if you're getting good solar. So it's very sustainable. Um, again, not cheap, but, um, I would watch because they do have deals. And when they had this Amazon deal going, it was, I got it, the whole setup for 50% off.
It was 50% off. Yeah. So it was half the price that you're seeing there is what I paid. And that's not much more than a gasoline generator. Not too much. At 50% off. So the price that we're seeing online is about, uh, just shy of six grand. And, um, yeah. And they have a thousand dollar off coupon, right now.
Right. Okay. Yeah. There you go. yeah but that's already that that's already the thousand off price but yeah i got it they had an amazon deal at 50 off so just i would watch the website don't pay full price they discount this thing quite frequently it looks like have you gotten it yet adam or did you just oh yeah i got it okay yeah i got it and you know we plugged a bunch of things in because they they tell you run the bag when you get it run the
batteries down so they were about at about 30 yep so i I plugged in my MacBook, I plugged in a lamp and an air filter. It wasn't drawing much power at all, and it ran for about three days, those three things, from 30% to get it down to zero. And then you can obviously plug it in. So I plugged it in and the whole system charged back up in about four hours or something like that, four to six hours for all the batteries to come all the way up to 100%, and then they're ready to go.
I have questions about this because I've been thinking about this for a while. But looking at this, do you know if it can, it looks like it might be able to be plugged in to like a service panel. We call them GenTran. Yes, they have a kit for that. So if you go back to the right below the one that was selected on the page, if you scroll back up to the top, there's an add-on transfer switch.
Ah, okay. So you would need that. yep okay so it will plug it into your right into your panel and and yeah almost yeah it almost looks like a like if you already have a gentran box for and a gasoline generator this might fit into it i'll have to reach out to them and ask because that that would be amazing because then you can power like you know the you you would plug this into the circuit breaker or parts of the circuit breaker is usually how that works you you know and then and then
it can power your boiler and your refrigerators and you don't have to run cables all over creation uh to do that right so oh that's really interesting and then you don't have to worry about getting out and getting gasoline you know three days into your power failure yeah how long would it take you to charge it with solar power where you are so if you get like i like i said one of those batteries i I ended up getting four panels total.
So they're Solar Saga 200 panels or whatever. And I think those four will charge... A single battery in four hours so what i would imagine is if i needed extended i would unhook one battery have everything running on four four thousand kilowatt hours have the other battery charging up and then just be swapping batteries and charging you know sort of rotating yeah because you can plug the solar panels right into one of those batteries got it so if i
needed more than six hours you know like this is really our idea is like you know if we have a extended power outage you know yeah we can keep our freezer you know running or whatever and again it's all going to depend on the size of your devices you know it may be worth getting a smaller right and a refrigerator that doesn't draw as much power that you could emergency plug into we haven't worked out all the details but we just wanted something at this point because we didn't have anything and
you know we're looking at other options for like a natural gas generator or something at some point but this was a you know what if what if they're like literally we can't get services we can't get natural gas or we can't get gas this is solar so you'll at least have something it's not going to be able to probably do.
Everything for forever but in an emergency when you're a few days without power it should get you through it'll get you through yeah well because we did the we did a propane generator at the house um to and it it's a whole house generator powers everything but the office is a separate feed and so i still have my portable generator here but i've really been looking at something like this because this would be enough to keep the office probably better
than limping along it would it would you know it would be great and sure then i don't have to worry about maintaining a generator and all that stuff so yeah well and again you look at what's happening unfortunately in florida right it's like there's places you can't get gas so if you had a gas generator great.
Amazing you know huh all right thank you and thank you for uh the the for affording us this detour folks i mean it's not really a detour it's a cool stuff found and it and you get to manage it with your phone so you know it's all all together that's cool and hopefully it provides the power to your wi-fi access points so that you can connect to it and manage it well the question is is the internet service provider available well hopefully the connection that would be another a
question to ask is the connection from your phone to manage the generator is it cloud-based or is it bluetooth is it's bluetooth ah perfect that's as it's supposed to be very smart okay good all right awesome we yeah if you folks know anything about this stuff let us know i i have a feeling that based on things i've heard from some of you that this might spark a thread that continues on for i think so yeah yeah so if you folks know anything feedback at macacab.com What do you got for us, Pete?
You heard him. Well, for those of you that travel, when you get off an airplane, you're either waiting in line to ask the gate agent, hey, where's the flight to San Diego go? Or you're looking around for one of those flight boards that lists all the flights. What if you had one in your pocket you could look up anytime? There's an iPhone, or I think there's even one for Android, too. But you Android users need to get an iPhone.
These things are great, I'm telling you. So that's a cool stuff found the iPhone. Flight Board is an app that will tell you the gate that you're arriving, the gate that you're departing from, all the major airports, commercial flights throughout the United, throughout the world. Actually, I've used it in Paris and London and India.
And the other thing it'll do is it will, get you flight tracking if you want to know where is this flight that's coming in so it's a there's a paid and a free version the paid i think is 24.99 a year for ad free, frankly i don't mind the ads and i've been using the free version for years i love it, but i can quickly know that i'm going to be coming into gate b7 and i need to get myself over to c35 five to get out and, uh,
I don't have to stop and wait or look around or try and find a board or fight the crowds, you know, in front of the board because everybody parks themselves right in front of the board, right? And you're trying to see and, you know, so I know before I even get off the airplane, what gate I'm going to, and it updates frequently with gate changes. Uh, so yeah, flight boards, my little, it's, it's flight board from Impala studios. Is that the, do I have the right link?
Okay. Yep. It's a yellow icon with a black airplane planform silhouette in it. Yeah. Yeah. Interesting. I'd never heard of this one. I'll have to check this out. I'm a big fan of Flight Aware, which really gives it. It doesn't have the most modern looking interface, maybe is the right way to say it. Boy, howdy, does it give me what I need in the free account with FlightAware gets me. I think I can queue up five notifications of upcoming flights.
And, you know, that's at any point in time. That's all I need. Yep. Trek family coming in for the holidays. When they're going to land. When you need to leave your house. And I get a notification that the flight plan's been filed. I get notifications of delays about two minutes before the airlines send those in. And so if I'm standing in the airport and I get a notification of a delay, I go get up in line before everybody else knows.
And oftentimes I've had them ask me, they're like, no, the flight's not delayed. What makes you think that? I'm like, well, can I just stand here and talk to you for a second? And then they'll be like, wait, the flight's delayed. I'm like, I know. You should get this app. It's cool. I tried to tell you.
Yeah, I tried to tell you. uh the other one that i have used but i but not much but i know a lot of people like is called flighty f-l-i-g-h-t-y dot com and there is an app for it too but um people seem to people seem to love flighty so that's that's one i've been considering checking out as well so i figured i'd mention it here was that under another name before oh good question maybe i don't remember i don't know okay it looks pretty it does that's
the thing i think that's what people like about it is it looks pretty and you get um it uses the the ios i think it won an apple design award um it uses the ios like live actions on your lock screen thing oh yeah yeah so that you can see the progress of a flight and you know that kind of thing so you know yeah yeah it takes advantage of all the, all the stuff. So, yep. I, uh, I need to, I need to mess with that. I'm sure I will at some point.
We, yeah, good stuff. We talked about an app called Lifespan from Micromat as part of a question that listener Larry asked a couple of weeks ago. And mainly he was asking, do I need to worry about the lifespan of my SSDs? And I got a note from Christian from Micromat, the folks that make TechTool and also, of course, Lifespan. And he listened to the episode and said, I agree with the discussion surrounding modern solid state media.
It's likely that you'll replace your Mac long before the internal solid state storage reaches a concerning level for reliable data storage. Their app, Lifespan 2, he continues, is particularly useful for those using removable media, such as SD cards, CompactFlash, or C-Flash. These devices are often reused multiple times and due to their smaller capacities compared to internal SSDs, can show a quicker decline in their lifespan. Ah, now we know what this is for. Okay, yeah, it makes sense.
It says, on the other hand, users with Macs that have internal Apple Fusion drives may experience significant drops in lifespan over time. That makes sense. He says, anecdotally, I faced this issue years ago with my development Mac that had a 128 gig SSD as part of the Apple Fusion Drive config. After building an Xcode multiple times five days a week for a year, I watched the remaining lifespan of the SSD portion of the Fusion Drive plummet to just 5% before I finally replaced it.
So, yeah. And he says to say hello to you, Adam and Pilot Pete. So, yeah. Thank you, Christian. Yeah, yeah. That i mean the fusion drive thing makes a lot of sense because those things are reading and writing constantly because they're small first of all and that's the whole point of the fusion drive right right it's like it keeps the most recent stuff you've been working on on the fast ssd part you know within the operating system but i would imagine it's swapping constantly yeah.
And that's what will kill your SSDs. It was a good idea at the time, right? When SSDs, especially those that one might purchase via Apple, were exorbitantly, punitively expensive. Right. And so the Fusion Drive was that sort of middle ground of, okay, you know, we'll give you some of the speed of the SSD with storage of rotation. I mean, like at the time, it was. It was a good idea. Yeah, it was a good idea. Exactly. Yeah, exactly. That was a fantastic description. Punitively expensive.
Their storage and memory what did i do wrong that made me have to pay this fine here yeah right you decided to be a you decided to be a mac owner living on the bleeding edge that's what it is yeah you're right you're correct adam yeah the bleeding edge of tech is always expensive it is uh i don't believe that that i mean their ssds are good i'm not they are of the upper echelon but i'm sorry they they are overcharging for oh yeah memory and for storage flat out and for storage on
um on iCloud too and on yeah yeah yeah they're making a lot of money they're making a lot of money i mean i don't blame them for making money when they can but at the same time i'm not going to forgive them for what is obviously egregiously overcharging people Pete, I have to say all the cell carriers in the United States. Good point. To tie everything together, Brian 89 44 in our discord chat at live.
Mackie cub.com says, uh, Apple was involved in malicious mischief with those hard drive and SSD prices. Yeah. Well done. Well, 10 59. Well played. Yeah. Yeah. Well, some more malicious mischief. This is a seasonal kind of cool stuff found and fleeting, but from the twisted mind of none other than Tim Burton is the sequel to Beetlejuice. And at the risk of calling him up, the sequel is none other than Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice. Wait, don't say it.
And fun, fun movie. If you're a fan of the first one at all, the second one brings back many of the original characters, Winona Ryder's in it Michael Keaton, Catherine O'Hara uh, Well-written, fun story, great gags. It's two weeks before Halloween or so, roughly as we record this, fun Halloween movie. And if you want to have two nights of fun, go back and watch the original and then watch the sequel. These were, it was a fun, I don't know a better way to say it.
Yeah, yeah. Twisted, twisted mind that man. Awesome. Yes, I agree. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I am, I am always reminded in my band, Bitter Pill, we play mostly original music and we have one song that is, we call it Alone, but it is, it is modeled after the poem in the original Beetlejuice, I Am Alone by Lydia Dietz. And it ends with, I am utterly alone.
It was a great little poem that, that, yeah. There you go. Well, they actually got around the, so the character Charles Dietz in the original, he's passed away. He was the principal in Ferris Bueller's Day Off. In Ferris Bueller, right? Right. And he's since passed away. So they get around that because they have to explain his passing and they claymation how he was done away with.
How that might have happened. yeah yeah and and then he is still a character in the afterlife in this movie but they they cleverly got around it nice by the manner of his death so nice nice cool it's great so yeah cool yeah i'll have to see that yeah for sure that's on the list here we are we are halloween is definitely on the list yeah yeah yeah. I want to take a minute here and talk about our sponsor for this episode, which, of course, is BBEdit from Bare Bones.
So if you've ever found yourself staring at a massive document, wondering if there's some secret spell that could make your life easier, you already had the spoiler. BBEdit, our sponsor, is that spell. I use BBEdit all the time. I use it to count words, compare documents, track timestamps for our show notes. That's how I assemble everything. And of course, even for coding, it's like having a Swiss army knife made specifically for, well, nerds like us.
One of my favorite features is the minimap palette. That's like having a tiny helicopter view of your entire document. No more scrolling endlessly through walls of text like it's 1998 just to find that section, right? You can see the whole thing and find it there. And then they've got these cheat sheets. Forget memorizing stuff. BBEdit lets you create quick reference guides for Markdown or even use someone else's cheat sheet.
It's practically cheating, but in the best way possible because it's part of the thing and you get to do that. Oh, and then chat GPT integration, next level. You can use it to generate text, summarize long documents, or even help brainstorm ideas. and it all is right there inside BBEdit. It's like having an AI sidekick who's always ready to help you with your work. Just don't ask it to fold your laundry. I've tried and I'm still waiting,
but it did help me write this ad script and so we can blame it for the laundry joke. So there's that. Folks, don't get caught wrestling with basic tools. Get BBEdit and become the text editing wizard you were born to be. Head over, of course, to barebones.com, They've got a great eval period, 30-day eval. You can really check it all out and see what BBEdit can do for you. Your documents will thank you. And I will thank the folks at Bare Bones for having BBEdit sponsor this episode.
All right. I will also note that I did that ad read live, of course. I aim to have our ad reads be somewhere between 90 seconds and two minutes. That one was exactly two minutes long. Exactly. I didn't even have to edit it or anything. So, you know, there you go. Yep. Perfect. Yep. Cool. You want to take us to the next cool stuff found? We've got more.
Sure. We got more cool stuff found. This one actually harkens back to, I think, a conversation we were having about secure passwords and creating, you know, memorable passwords and having that one secure password that maybe you're using or just passwords for all your things. And, um. Ed, and I think also Allison probably sent this along because our friend Bart Bishots actually has a website called xkpasswd.net.
So xkpasswd.net, obviously there'll be a link in the show notes, which allows you to generate all kinds of passwords.
It's actually, it looks like it's in beta right now but it i mean it basically does what it purports to do you can adjust the settings if you want or it has all kinds of different uh patterns that you can pick including the xkcd password uh which is a meme or a if you've been in tech circles xkcd did a great thing for how to generate memorable passwords in one of their comics and so it uses that pattern but he has all kinds of different patterns pre-set up and then of course you
can tweak it even more if you want you can generate a certain number of them so you can say i want to see three different ones and then you can pick one um so it's a great place to go generate a really good secure password yeah and uh you're right allison also wrote in about this and uh said that the the uh they uh that they're there it's this beta version of it they are working very hard i think Allison is on the team that's kind of making this happen at beta.xkpasswd.net.
Again, all linked in the show notes. Cleaning up the interface and doing all these presets. Like you said, there's a preset for XKCD. There's even a preset for Apple IDs that's easy to type on an iOS keyboard. So you're not doing a lot of keyboard switching. She says it's technically in beta because they're still modifying the interface and adding new capabilities, like storing your own customized presets. So yeah, I use this routinely to generate passwords. It's great stuff for sure. Yeah.
Shall we keep moving on here keep moving on keep moving on you want to take us to bob, there adam sure sweet yeah bob has a cool stuff found called the plug bug he says make sure you don't ever you don't leave your power behind he says i have no need for this as i rarely travel but I know that Dave and pilot Pete do this handy hand. This handy sounding device could save you from leaving any of your find my items behind in a hotel or an Airbnb.
And it's the 12 South plug bug, which is a great little multi USB port charger adapter. I think it goes on. If I'm remembering right, it goes on your existing power bricks or I think now it's its own power brick. You're, you're right that in the early days it, it used to kind of go on things, but this new plug bug with find my, it's got multiple ports on it and, and it's got find my in it.
So you will hopefully never forget it. And it's, it looks, it's built to be flat against the wall so that if you have to like hide it, you know, behind the bed or whatever in a hotel room, it'll work. Yeah. Right. Yeah. And it's got the ports on the bottom pointing down rather than straight out. And anybody's had to deal with Apple's charger and it's sticking straight out. Then you, you know, you're cranking your cord if you got it behind something and it's going to break.
And yeah, no, that's not good. But yeah, the find my thing is the big thing in here. So yeah, so they redesigned it. The original plug bug though was really, really cool too. Do they still have that one? Cause that one slid, if I'm remembering right, it slid onto your Apple charger. You know how the charger has that little pull-off piece and you could plug it in. And then.
Ports that you could plug into it kind of adapted it so yeah i don't i don't know this is definitely the plug bug with find my i don't yeah i don't know if there's still the original plug bug i'm looking here um yeah i don't know anyway but i mean this one find my built in so that's awesome and i i wonder if go ahead pete i've said i wonder if the find my has any audio to it you know like, the great like the what do you call them yeah because because you know what doesn't is the remote the
apple tv remotes have find my in them and they finally been unlocked but they don't have you can't make them make any noise so and mine still said it was 11 feet away yesterday when i had it in my hand i'm like oh come on it's got to be better than this it doesn't say it does All right. I'm not finding it. It might say I'm trying to do this live here. But what it does say is that the Find My is powered by a button battery. So it does not need to be plugged in for Find My to be able to work.
Nice so yeah and to answer your question adam yes the the original plug bug is uh is still available and that converts your you know kind of brick charger uh from your from your devices any any macbook power adapter to be used globally so that's yeah yeah so uk europe china yep yeah yep pretty good pretty good i like it yeah fun stuff where are we here oh we're going to todd yeah todd okay uh so todd and i'm i'm vamping here because i gotta find it uh todd says in in a recent episode deke was
uh talking about being able to um control all of his home kit and non-home kit devices with a shared ipad uh he says the onvis smart button five keys smart switch does what i need and saves me the ipad he says i have many maras smart switches and plugs to control our lights there are shortcut automations set to turn the first floor lights.
On prior to sunset and automations of course to turn them off our older son visited and was working well past uh That when I set all of the lights to turn off in the house. He voiced some frustration the next morning of being left in the dark. He has his own Apple home set up and is not joined two hours to solve this for him and others. I purchased this on this smart button.
He says, I keep this magnetized on the side of our kitchen refrigerator, and there's a button to turn all the lights on and a button to turn all the lights off. And he says, oh, I think I muted myself on the video. You did. Sorry. I was like, what happened there? He says, the audio is fine, but the video is not. He says, I keep this magnetized on the side of our kitchen refrigerator, and there is a button to turn all the lights off and a button to turn all the
lights on. I have not added other automations as yet, but there are plenty of buttons and combinations left to support this down the road. So it's a little square thing, maybe the size of half of your iPhone, it looks like. And it has four buttons in each, you know, one button in each of the four corners and then a button in the middle, which is the fifth button on this five key smart switch. And yeah, that's pretty interesting. It's compatible with HomeKit.
It can trigger accessories and scenes with thread huh fascinating huh interesting 35 bucks on amazon we got a link for it in the show notes uh yeah i can see this being handy if you don't want to replace like the switches in your walls with smart switches you could you could have these and it saves you probably a bunch of money and the headache of you know rewiring all your all your stuff. Cool. Yeah. I think there's a lot of these little scriptable buttons,
but that's a nice one. Cause it's got a lot of options on it. Yeah. Yeah. Very cool. Ah, I like this. I love doing the cool stuff. Found episodes. Uh, Jason reminds us or many thousands of dollars later into this one. What's that? Well, a lot of this is free. A lot of it. A lot is free, you know, but a lot is free. But, uh, I think you have the all time record on a, on a $6,000 item there, Adam, just saying. I came about three. I advise you wait until it's on a really good deal and get
it for about half off. Fair enough. The wallet buster episode. Some of these things are. It's true. And that's okay. It is. It's how it works. Cool tech is not free. Often. Sometimes. Sometimes it is, but not always.
Jason tells us about Stop the Madness. on mac os he's and and the description on stop the madness says many websites deliberately disable user interface features in your browser that you normally expect to work stop the madness re-enables features like command click and middle click to open a link in a new tab command key shortcuts opening contextual menus selecting copying cutting and pasting of text yes the websites that turn
this off drive me nuts drag and drop autofill complete of passwords emails, Stop the Madness also protects your privacy. It removes tracking tags. It stops click jacking. It stops hyperlink auditing by removing anchor ping attributes on link clicks. Oh, this is pretty cool. It can stop videos from autoplaying. Yeah. I feel like we've talked about this in the past, but man, yeah. I think we have, but yeah, that's...
Huh nice yeah contextual yeah yeah oh yeah i got it okay did you know about this adam no but it's it's it's definitely addresses a big pet peeve that i have again.
I've worked in the web development world for a long long time and i've encountered a lot of clients over the years who think that they can protect their images by you know disabling right click on their website and then no one's going to steal their images falsely and it's just annoying because if you need to if you're a web developer you need to do anything like inspect the page or like you can't you literally can't right click and say you know inspect or show source or
whatever and it's just freaking annoying so i always the tip i will give everybody is if you go into your inspector now on a page like this you're gonna have to go under the menu like turn on the developer menu and go to you know go to the inspector you can go to the network tab you can filter by images reload the page and it will give you a list of every image on that page and you can download it from there so oh yeah right right there's an
easy way around this like it's not hard to get those images the right click is not protecting those images from anything so just fyi yeah don't do that people but yeah this is a great tool obviously for getting around websites that do that which is yeah frustrating yeah interesting huh cool yeah now i want to install this but i have to wait because we still have more show to do uh our our old friend serge sosniak who has been around
in the mac industry for a very, very long time doing a variety of different things. Recently acquired MacUpdate.com that was started by Joel, and I can't remember his last name. I don't know why. It was acquired, I believe, from Joel by Zeolink, which were the folks that made a lot of things, including MacKeeper. And Surge recently acquired it from Zeolink. I guess they weren't doing much with it.
And so Mac update is now back to being owned by someone, you know, here that is sort of grown up in our, our Apple community. And MU Notifier is their app and has been refreshed. It's their app that you run that watches to see what your software, what software needs to be updated and all that good stuff. So, so MU Notifier is out there now and I will put links to all of this in the show notes, but the app actually works again. And it had not for quite a long time.
So that was kind of one of the first things that Serge did. I think he acquired the site back in April, I want to say, and has been working tirelessly on kind of bringing it up to speed. So I'm curious to see what he does. He oval. We're still good, right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. What do you got for us, Pete? Well, you know, here's what you should do, folks. And Dave doesn't like to say you should do this. I'm going to say you should do this. You should do it right now.
Stop the car, pull over, and go to macgeekgab.com slash review and send us a five-star review. When you go to that web page, you'll get a choice to put in a review at Apple Podcasts, Podchaser, Good Knotts, or Spotify. And you can send in a review, say, like this one from Mac Genius. My favorite tech podcast, bar none, I learned something new and more often than not numerous things in every episode. That's Daryl Rhodes from Canada. Or this one.
Oh, no, you're reading last week's one. Oh, I am. You are. We already read those. I am. Do you want me to read this week's? Dave, I do. Yeah, because I don't have Mandy now. Yeah, no problem. Sorry. We got two from the United States to balance the two we got last week from Canada. Dan in San Diego says, my go-to Mac podcast. This is hands down my number one Mac podcast. It's great for learning new things as well as diving into the geekiest things. I never miss this podcast.
I look forward to watching it on the YouTube channel every Monday morning. Dave, Adam, and Pete have always been prompt and knowledgeable when answering my questions. Thanks for providing this. Well, thanks for listening, Dan. Absolutely.
And Steve DTNYC says look no further as an avid listener of MGG for over seven years I never miss an episode and it's always the first thing I listen to every Monday morning on my drive into the office I'll then often finish the show up once I'm in my office and undoubtedly someone will walk in and ask what show is this I need to subscribe because it's that good and that chock full of amazing info week after week MGG constantly delivers The banter between Adam,
Pete, and Dave is engaging and entertaining, and you always walk away with another nugget of Mac or iPhone knowledge that makes you think, that's awesome. Well, your review is awesome. Likewise, my friend. And I should have had those ready. That's okay. It's all good. This is why this is not a one-person show. We all help each other here. Exactly. While we're at it, I want to thank everyone whose premium contributions have come in over the last couple of weeks here.
That's at MattGeekup.com slash premium where you can go. It is not mandatory. It is very much optional. but certainly very much appreciated where you can contribute to the show and the production of things and all of that. We have, Oh, I got to scroll to where I'm supposed to be. I was in the wrong spot. We have a $60 contribution from Steven in New York. Thank you. We have a $50 contribution from John in studio city.
Thank you. We have $30 contributions from Sando in Garnet Valley and Jimmy and Cushing. We have $25 contributions from Doug in Richmond, Wayne in Waipahu, Randy in Westport, David in Troutdale, Anthony in Bournemouth, Stephen in Linlithgow, Michelle in Quebec. Bruce in Decatur, Wesley in, sorry, Sharon in Wesley Chapel. I'll get this right. Ralph in Bangor, Jeffrey in Windsor, Jonathan in Woodside, Chris in Windsor. Are they both in the same Windsor? No.
Different Windsors. that would be interesting maybe we'd have to go to windsor maybe there's a high concentration huge in windsor mackie cab it is uh susan in honolulu paul in pomona mike in raleigh craig in pace robbie in hendersonville kurt in tawanda ed in torrance curate in bloomfield hills colby and otis mark in new palestine andrew in bellingen rob in south hertzville roger in north charlestown all with $25 contributions thank you very much and then
$10 contributions from Jason in Charlestown not North Charlestown uh Stephen in Costa Mesa Wagner and Alan Gary in Babylon Robert in Columbiana James in San Antonio James in Melbourne Mark in Vero Beach Donald in Furlong Nick in Marquette Cal in Russellville and Jeremiah in Edgewater thanks to all of you and to everyone who's a member of the premium program and also to everyone who listens and sends in questions and tips and all the things
that make it so that we get to keep doing this and we love it it's amazing fuel that keeps the show going your questions your tips your cool stuff found it's amazing. Thank you so much. Thank you. Yup. Uh, all right. Where are we on time? Oh, wow. Time is not, time has slowed down. This is interesting. Uh, for me anyway, I don't know about how you feel. It's all relative Dave. Yeah. The whole, yeah, yeah, Linear time. It's BS.
Uh, hopefully I don't have to check the explicit guy who was big in tech who figured that out. Who was that? Einstein. Oh, that guy. I don't know. Yeah. Old school, old school pete yeah yeah fair enough yeah but he kind of had tech figured out long before anybody else though yeah it's true smart dude yep yep he he thunk real good pete he thunk real good.
All right uh tim in our don't get caught i'm not gonna play the theme song this week right we're okay without playing the theme song okay yeah we're okay okay great we're okay all right uh we can play it in reverse hang on no we'll keep it no no we're gonna play it in reverse, oh wait hang on i gotta bring the volume up there we go uh hey that's that's uh from lou years ago lou sent that in uh don't get caught in reverse uh tim writes and says he actually wrote in as a question he says
uh i cannot no matter what i do anytime i go to any google web pages with safari i get the message safari can't open the page followed by the url and the message because the server unexpectedly dropped the connection this occurs even in safe mode and when i've disabled extensions like stop the madness and one blocker uh he says uh i've also checked to see if somehow i blocked it in settings and i haven't i can view google sites in firefox without the same problem apple
mail can also no longer retrieve gmail messages okay so this is interesting because um. Firefox uses its own DNS over HTTPS. So it does not use your max DNS. You can set it to use your max DNS, but by default, it does not. Now, we had him check his DNS. He dug, he dug, he dug. No, okay, that's not the problem. This, that, and the other thing. After further investigation, he continues, I discovered that somehow Little Snitch was set to block all Google.com traffic.
I don't know how that happened, as I certainly wouldn't have done this on purpose. But as soon as I deleted the rules in Little Snitch, the problem was resolved. Sometimes we outsmart ourselves is really what this comes down to. It's almost like editing your Etsy host file or something there.
Yes. Yes, it is. oh is it you can set a rule and completely forget about it but like that's but listen folks if you didn't do that stuff dave wouldn't have anything to do the man wouldn't have a job so keep it up well it is why we do what we do here but but like i've done it to myself too right like we all do this messing with stuff installing things testing, just because i've done it to myself and been frustrated and then you find the thing and it's like don't like i did this
to me it was me i i refer to that as a self-inflicted stupidity wound yeah it's not stupidity stupid well you can't fix i should have worn a different shirt for today uh i have a i have a bright red shirt that says that on it so i sometimes wear it on stage um but it's it's not stupidity it's experimentation and fair enough yeah and it's it's.
Stupid isn't the right word it's uh awfully frustrating when you forget that you've done it to yourself that's the worst of it you make a change and you completely yep it's gone i don't remember making that change well the worst is when you finally figure it out and you're like oh i do remember making that change like that that's even worse than like wow i have no idea like i must have done this accidentally versus oh no i remember specifically doing
that don't my fault yeah like but again please don't let that stop you from trying things learning new things experimenting it's that's how we all got to the point where we are here i mean it like Like I, when I was a kid, there was no one like us. And I, when I broke my computer, I had to figure out how to fix it on my own. And where it stayed broke. Yeah. And candidly, that's what kind of inspired me to, to get to this point.
When I was 15 or something, if you asked me what I wanted to do for a living, my answer was something that didn't exist, but it does now.
I told people, I want to be a computer consultant. like that's that's what i want to do and uh and you know here here we are here we are you know a few years past me being 15 and and we're uh yep so i like don't be afraid i still do it to myself all the time the worst part is when i do it and it impacts like the family or people in the business or whatever, like the stakes are a little higher than they were when I was with my Apple 2C just poking around, but you know, whatever.
Yeah. I still get that occasional question. What are you doing? What are you doing now? Okay. You know, like this is going to affect me, isn't it? Yes. That's right. I swear. I'm just, you know, just looking at some, well, now that's kind of my goals. It's like, all right, how can I implement this new cool thing that I want to do with my network without. Anybody in the family knowing, like, you know, or getting them to go, oh, that's cool. That's so much easier. Right.
Right. That's even better. Yeah. As opposed to, have you got your divorce lawyer on retainer? Exactly. Because you better fix this if you don't. Yep. Yep. Yep. So. All right. One more in the don't get caught section here, Adam. Yeah. Yeah. So Todd has one. He says, I opened my MacBook Pro, which was running macOS 14 Sonoma, and all the files, folders on my desktop were not there. Oh, that's scary. Looking on the Finder window sidebar under desktop, no files or folders.
Checked my iPhone files app desktop. All my files were there. Oh, good. Logged into iCloud.com. All my desktop files were there.
Searched via Spotlight. It found files on my desktop and what opened them this should have been a clue i had not upgraded to sequoia so i gave that a try same result nice clean empty desktop i did some googling ticked through some uh did some googling picked through the cruft and found this page with a terminal solution so we'll have a link to this in the show notes via user andy andy matthews, and it's a sudo command to change the flags to no
hidden on the desktop so somehow I don't know how he would have done that sounds like he set the hidden flag for his desktop folder which was apparently hiding all the desktop files he says voila my files and folders reappeared no idea how that got toggled but back in business. Nice. I bet that like Onyx or something was the thing that triggered this. Cause I think that's one of the features in that sort of laundry list of parameters that you can set in Onyx.
So, yep. It's a two. Yeah. This is one of those tricks I think people use sometimes there, you know, we often get that question. Um, Hey, I have a folder. I want to, I want to make it hidden or private. I don't want anybody to see what's in that, that folder. Right.
So you go and it looks like an empty folder but there are ways to do that but don't get caught, doing that and then forgetting or realizing that you did you know again when the problem is between the chair and the keyboard you know it's a good learning moment it is it is that's really what it is yeah yeah I call my mistakes my tuition and that's how I justify paying for them in both time and money so yeah there you are and thus ended this segment of.
Don't get caught in German. Don't get caught in German. Especially don't get caught in Germany. That's right. I have too many stories about that. You want to take us to Gary, Adam? Absolutely. I think Gary has a question for us. Gary does have a question. It's time to do some questions. Okay. Gary says, hey, MGG crew. I received my iPhone 16 Pro Max this past Friday,
and everything works. Cool. At first, I did the copy from my iPhone 15 Pro Max, but ended up wiping the device clean due to issues with Siri not responding, among other things. Since I started with a clean slate on Tuesday, I also unpaired my Apple Watch Ultra 1 and paired it fresh. I noticed that my battery life had taken a hit even after a fresh start. I know that part of it is due to the age since I purchased it around the time it came out.
I skipped the 2023 Ultra 2 and kept going with this one. I started with the full charge Tuesday evening and around 1 p.m. Today, I am already getting a low battery alert at 10%. Wow. I used to get almost two full days out of it. I'm debating whether to take it to Apple and replace the battery or upgrade to the new Series 10 or 2024 Ultra 2? How much will Apple charge to replace the battery since my AppleCare has run out? Opinions and suggestions are welcome. Keep up the great work.
Yeah, so I jumped in on this one because I happen to have the Apple Watch Ultra 1. So I wrote back to Gary. First of all, he didn't mention which OS he has on his Ultra. And so the first thing I wanted to mention to folks, if you are noticing battery problems, several iterations back now on watchOS, there was an issue with the battery. And Apple fixed that in one of their subsequent updates.
So if you are not running the latest iteration of watch OS on your Apple Watch and you're noticing the battery is hurting, first and foremost, update to the latest watch OS. You have to be on the charger, has to be above 50% charge, and then you have to do all kinds of, you know, hold your tongue right and put in the code to get it to update. But it will update, and that may solve your problem. But assuming he's on watch OS 11, then the issue with the battery should already be gone.
I have the original 2022 Ultra 1. And if you go into the watch and go into settings and battery and battery health, I still see 87% on my battery. I used to get about 60 hours. I'm down to about 48 hours on a battery. So getting 14 to 16 hours on the battery, that ain't right. Something's wrong with it there. To answer your question about battery services, you go to support.apple.com slash watch slash repair.
You'll see what they talk about there. If you're still under warranty and showing less than 80%, they'll replace your battery. But if you're out of warranty for $99, they will replace your battery. Expensive yeah but cheaper than a new apple watch right so especially an ultra um and and i love my ultra i mean this thing is it's cranking um and that being said though the 10 did you get the 10 dave. No, I have the Ultra 2. I bought the Ultra 2 last year.
Right, that's right. So the Ultra 2 and the 10 are, feature-wise, fairly comparable, at least in terms of the things that matter to me. So if I had not bought the Ultra 2 last year, I probably would get the 10 this year, though. Yeah. No, I didn't. So my daughter, who was kind enough to lose her Apple Watch in the Mediterranean over the summer, I've got her a Series 10, and she gets almost two days out of it. Wow. That's great. Yeah.
And I got her the small one, the 42 millimeter, and it's because the display is big on that thing and it's bright, but it is almost the size of her wrist. So I'm thinking women may not love the 10 as much as, well, not just women. Any people who are generally smaller and that I have pretty small wrists, um, for a person, my size and like the ultra two works fine for me, but I'm used to chunky watches cause I wear mechanical watches. So it's a different thing. Yeah.
Right. And she said, it's not deal killer and the profile is thinner. So while the, while the square of it is bigger, the profile is thinner and she does get, like I say, a couple of days out of it. And then there's all kinds of health things in there that are, that are pretty cool.
But so i want to go back to gary's question to me well gary's question yeah i have some ideas for him do you have any ideas for him adam um for solving his battery problem because i think this is solvable um uh not off the top of my head but i'm curious to hear what you have to say yeah so i know what what it sounds like is that something is just actively chewing the battery if he's only getting, you know, hours in the teens.
So one thing that we know, and even Apple knows, we know that he wiped this and started fresh, but that means... His phone needed to repopulate the watch with everything. Oh, right. That initial process is going to chew the battery. Now that shouldn't persist for days and days. The first day, yes. After that, not so much. So the first thing to do is just look at the watch and make sure, and you can see this in the, in the watch app too.
Make sure that all of the apps that you have chosen to download to your watch have finished downloading. If they haven't and there's something caught in a loop, that would be a place to look. Maybe stop that app from downloading from your phone to your watch and restart it or just stop it and see if that helps for a day before you try to restart it. Barring that, go on your phone into the watch app and then settings and then general and then all the way at the bottom tap reset.
And the option reset sync data is in there because Apple knows that sometimes the contacts syncing, they say contacts and calendars, but it's the contact syncing can just spiral and never, ever stop.
And resetting that will cause it to send it send that set of data one more time but then hopefully end and stop chewing your watch's battery so those are the two things i would look at app downloads and the reset sync data um so i but i am and if neither of those worked i would wipe the watch again and start it from scratch and maybe don't maybe turn off the option to install every app on there right and and start it fairly i mean there's no such
thing as a vanilla watch because it's going to be paired to your phone it's going to be yours but starting it without it auto downloading every single app onto the watch try that and see because maybe you've got an app that's misbehaving or or you know confused or something like that.
This is a solvable problem gary you're gonna be all right it is does the uh does the watch have individual settings i don't have my watch with me now so i can couldn't check this but does it have individual settings per app for controlling things like background tasks i know it does for notifications so like i know one thing that i did that i did on my watch i still have a series six i think okay and i get a day worth of use out of it i wear it at night for sleep tracking
so i'll wear it all day all the way through the night and when i get up then it needs it needs a it needs a charge and then i throw it on the charger while i'm getting ready taking a shower or whatever i have a charger in my office in case i forget um but i throw up on the charger in the morning you know takes 30 minutes an hour to get charged back up and then i throw it back on and then i'm good for another day um so i'm not
having battery issues with mine but i do know that one thing i did very early on was i think i managed my apps especially notifications because i was like i don't need every app's notification on my watch like there's only a few that i really care about yep so i don't know if that has an impact on battery life i think even more so the background processing so certain apps like i have apps that i want background processing on for example
say like fantastical so i make sure my calendars are up to date on my watch and um i think also uh my weather app. Yeah, I don't know that you can set background processing on a per app basis on the watch. You can on the phone, but... Yeah, on some apps you can. Like he was talking notifications. You can tell it whether you want just a summary or tap to show the full thing and those sorts of things. But so I think it's on a per app basis whether or not you can set those.
I would also try putting it into low power mode for a day and see if that, like, I mean, I know that's not a long-term solution, but that would at least tell you, okay, you know, it's the background app chewing it up. Correct. And then you can sort of, you know, continue that. That's a data point for our troubleshooting. Yeah. Yeah. And something I glossed over in the beginning there, but I would definitely go in to the settings and check the battery and check the battery health.
If you're below 80%, then your battery is clearly having difficulty keeping up with the things that are going on. And then it's time to make a decision. Do you want a repair or do you want it new? And I don't know if they do it with repair. I don't think this, I mean, this watch was working before he did this. So I think this is a software problem. Yeah, so I don't think it's a battery problem, a hardware problem, as it were.
But um but and for those that do decide to go new remember veterans and military discount for at the bottom of their page so it's at 10 right 10 and that's great so a 399 dollar watch is 360 yeah that's pretty good cool we got anything else for today. No. All right. Adam, I'm a little follow up on the, on the battery thing. I'm just curious real quick. This should be a quick conversation. So I do know that, you know, I got my new iPhone and I got an alert on the iPhone
about, Hey, based on how you're charging. And I think it's probably because I often, I, you know, I work from home and stuff like that. I have my iPhone on a charger a lot, like it's on the charger a lot. So I got the little notification from the operating system saying, Hey.
Based on your, how you're using your battery, we would recommend that for longevity you set the setting so it does you know the max charge is 80 percent instead of 100 and i'm curious if you guys have activated that or do that or i got the same notice this week adam yep and it told me for mine it should be 85 so i was like okay i'll do that now oh interesting i don't generally i don't charge my phone during the day uh i have wireless carplay thanks to the car link kit 5.0
adapter that you made me buy adam and i appreciate i appreciate that you made me buy that um it's awesome but uh so even when i'm in my car i don't generally charge my phone and i've noticed that by the end of the day at like close to midnight which is sort of when i think about going to sleep my phone is in the teens it's like you know 10 11 12 13 now i know that that's enough battery left like it is correct that we are using that amount but it sure seems sketchy to me that you know wow what if
but what if and like i haven't hit the where it ran out yet but i i i need to reset my own internal clock i i do also have an automation that sets my phone to low power mode when it dives below 40. Battery not 20 battery that apple does it's just automatic for my phone if it.
Gets below 40 low power mode but that's been true on my phone since i got it so i i think that's factored into apple's calculations like in terms of how much battery i'm burning so yeah yeah did you turn it on for years adam. I did and um the thing is is this also is a feature on you know the solar battery generator that i just mentioned it has a similar setting that you can say only power everything up to 80.
And it's a to make the batteries last longer so this is obviously a thing with batteries if you're looking to get more longevity out of your lithium ion batteries your your whatever technologies we're using now apparently it is better not to be constantly charging them to 100 all the way to 100 if you don't if you don't need to right i left the it on charging to 100 because i i want that extra power but knowing that hey this is going to be harder long
term on the battery so you're probably not going to get as many years out of your battery if you're doing that so it i mean if people are looking to have their devices batteries last longer and can get by with this like you're saying, I haven't had a problem since turning on 80%. I'm the same way. Like at the end of the day, I'm still at 40, 50% battery, just because again. I'm constantly near a charger.
So I'm throwing it on the charger all the time anyway, which is why I think it recommended, hey, don't go above 80% because you're constantly just, you're not letting it.
We've talked about, you know, this theory about batteries like to have the energy moved around, right it's it's better on the on the battery if you're letting it go all the way down to 10 and then getting it back up and then going all that you know if you're actually using your charging cycles versus doing these little sips where you go it goes to 70 and then you take it to 100 and then it goes to 80 you take it to 100 that's hard on the battery from my understanding mine too yeah.
And so it's interesting that it suggested it that's that's kind of cool because if i'm looking down mine my phone is new obviously so i go into settings battery and then it's under charging is where i found it and then you can set the limit from anywhere between 80 and 100 set charge limit, and uh mine says based on your iphone habits chart limit of 80 is recommended so um i i have it currently set to 100 it hasn't come up and notified me but i'm happy
to set that charge limit and see how it yeah see how it does yeah how it does yeah the other thing for people to know about batteries is if you are planning on dropping something on a shelf like if you're going to stop using an older device or something like that that has a built-in battery you want to make sure that it's not at a zero percent charge you want to have it you know partially charged, probably not fully charged at 100% too.
I've heard like 70% or 80% or something like that before you set it on the shelf for a long, long time so that it doesn't drain all the way down to zero because if it drains all the way down to zero and then just sits, that's really, really bad for the battery. Might not come back.
One interesting thing, Apple's knowledge base article on this charge limit says, if you have it enabled to less than 100%, your phone will still, occasionally charge all the way to 100% to maintain accurate battery state of charge estimates. So it's going to they're doing what they need to do to manage this. I think all of this is great. We used to need third party apps to do this. Of course you couldn't do that on the iPhone because there's no third party apps to do that.
But I'm glad that Apple is baked so much of this into the OS. Yeah, good stuff. That was my last little thing. Alright, cool. Well the band's ready to play. So good news. Thanks for hanging out with us. Let me read this last little note in here. When the charge limit is set to 100%, allow the phone to wait to finish charging past 80% until the time you need to use it. Oh, nice. Oh, that's optimized battery charging, right? Yes. Yes. Yeah.
Yes, because you can turn on one or the other, right? You can turn on charge limit or optimized battery charging. That's right. Yeah. But, you know, yeah. So if you don't, then don't be pulling it off at 60%. Yeah. Unless you need it. Yeah, unless you need it. Thanks for hanging out with us, everybody. Thanks for... Go sign up for the giveaway. MacGeekUp.com slash giveaway for Eternal Storms with Yoink and Screen Float.
Fun stuff. Yoink is such an indispensable app for me. And you could win a free copy. Thanks to Cashfly for providing all the bandwidth to get the show from us to you. Check out Pilot Pete's other show. So there I was. and I have business brain and gig gab. I don't know why I'm saying them this way. All right. Because you can. Because I can. Music. No, no, gosh, no. It's 11 a.m. Five o'clock somewhere. You know where that five o'clock is? They say five o'clock somewhere.
Somewhere is an airport because in an airport, nobody judges you, no matter what time of day it is, for ordering a cocktail. So when they say it. Hey, I don't know. They do when you're in uniform. They might judge you. Fair point. And I would agree with this. That's right. Yeah. Hey, that aside, do you have any advice for people, Pete? And I'll let you read my shirt if there's any issues with that. Yeah. If you're in the airport in uniform and drinking, well, don't, for starters.
Just don't. Don't do that. That's right. Yeah. Yeah. And otherwise, don't get caught. Like Pete with the banners. Made up. Made up. Later.