It's time for Mac Geek Cab, and listener Dennis brings us our quick tip of the week. He says, my wife and I share a calendar where I can see when she is working. It happens quite often that I get 20 new notifications in the calendar inbox. I've learned that instead of accepting them one by one, I recently just held the OK button down on a notification and then a little menu popped up and asked if that OK should apply to everything. Yes, please. That saved Dennis 19 different accept tabs.
I love this tip and I had no idea. More tips like this plus your questions answered today on Mac Geekab 1061 for Monday, October 28th, International Animation Day 2024. 24! Woo! Ah! Greetings, folks, and welcome to Matt Geek of the show where you send in tips just like that and we share them. You send in cool stuff found, we share them. You send in questions and we share those and hopefully can provide some answers or at least march us down the troubleshooting path.
Each and every time we get together, our sponsors for this episode include a return sponsor, Otherworld Computing at MaxSales.com and their OWC Express 1M2 super fast portable drive over 3000 megabytes a second. Anyway, we'll talk about those details. I know we'll talk about those details in a little bit for now here in Durham, New Hampshire. I'm Dave Hamilton.
And here in South Dakota, I'm Adam Christensen.
And we are missing Pete today. he is off uh flying the airplane yep but uh it so i i guess our police code for for today for 10 6 the 1061 police code at least on the list that i looked up says it's either personnel in vicinity or not wanted well pete you are certainly not wanted so this is personnel not in the vicinity maybe if we combine the two of those i.
Was so hoping it was missing person i know yeah
Yeah, that would be good. We will fly in the missing man formation, nonetheless. Nonetheless. Our giveaway for this month is Eternal Storms. If you go to MattGeekup.com slash giveaway, Eternal Storms is giving away five copies of Yoink and Screen Float here in October. So you've got a few more days to get in on that before it tips over to November and we have a new giveaway coming. You can always look once it's the first of the month.
Usually this is still a manual thing that we have to kind of place into position on the first of the month. But maybe we'll automate that too. It seems like something that could be automatable, doesn't it, Noah?
Maybe, yeah.
Yeah, I mean, it's WordPress. It should be able to. Anyway, we'll figure that out at some point. But for November, I'm pretty sure it's still going to be something manual. But once we get that in place, you'll see. And then, of course, we'll talk about that on next week's show, too. Yeah, that's what I got. Anything else before we get into the rest of the quick tips here, Adam?
No, no, no. I say we dive into things. I don't have a lot going on.
Diving. I think so.
I'd like to learn some things.
Yeah, there we go. Listener Doug in the calendar realm continues. He says, I spend most of every day driving between appointments with clients. I've long bemoaned the lack of to-do type apps for CarPlay so that I can remember who to call or message while I'm driving. Don't worry, he says. I never touch or look at my phone while driving. He says, I really don't even look at CarPlay unless I'm stationary. Anyway, I've solved the to-do list problem.
By adding a stack of appointments to my calendar of around 15 minutes in length to the end of my day. These remain visible in the calendar app on CarPlay throughout the day, and those that don't get dealt with simply get moved to the next day. And, as a bonus, if I add a phone number in the location field, then I can simply tap the screen in CarPlay to make an outgoing call for that event. I was prompted to send this because of the comment about reminders in calendars.
Quite a nice feature since I can mark things as done from the CarPlay screen. But unfortunately, it doesn't give me the ability to tap a phone number that I've added as a reminder. What a miss for Apple, adding all of that and then not having the phone number be a data detectors kind of thing. So, yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Can, um, I mean, S lady can do quite a few number of things with to-do lists, right? Like you can add and check off and ask her to let you know what's on your to-do lists and stuff like that. Right. I haven't played with that too much, but I think there's a lot of to-do list functionality or commands.
That's a good question. I don't use lists.
I know you can like specifically add things to specific lists with the right.
Yes.
Cause I've done that with the grocery list and that's great in the car, you know, you're like, oh yeah, I need to go do that.
Oh, I, I do that all the time. I, I just, I, I just tell the S lady, you know, remind me, I find because I don't use undated to do's in my workflow, uh, and I won't see them in my workflow. I have to remember to say, Hey, S lady, remind me today or remind me tomorrow. And then it will put a dated to do in it. And then it's fine. I even have, because of this sort of hole in my workflow, I have a once weekly.
Recurring to do that reminds me to go into reminders and check for undated ones that accidentally got added that way but yeah that's a that's a handy handy thing for sure but yeah this.
Calendar trick for carplay i've never even i didn't even know i don't even think i knew there was a calendar app in carplay but
Yes i.
Mean i'm used mostly only use it for music and maps to be honest
Yep yeah i am there is a calendar app there has been for a little while and it's handy to be able to go and and like see events in calendar the data detectors in it are mostly good, but occasionally like it'll show me the address of an event and not let me tap it to to go to the map most of the time i can tap and it goes to the map but sometimes it's just like yeah look at this these fancy words and numbers you have here cool thanks yeah.
Yeah so uh jim has been trying to sort things in the finder he says this he says perhaps probably it's a sign of old age but recently i found my stuff myself rather stuck trying to rearrange the sort order from ascending to descending file name in a column of files in Finder. I was in Column View, which is my standard, and just couldn't get it done. A quick Google Foo search led me to an answer I probably knew, but forgot.
You can only change the sort order from ascending to descending or vice versa if you are in the List View. Simply click on the column that you want to change the sort order in.
For me it was date added i also was reminded that the way to add a column in list view is to right click on the column header name and click the column you want to add so it sounds like and then he provided a couple of links which we'll provide in the show notes he says familiar skills i had forgotten so perhaps helpful to others
Yeah. And I we confirmed with Jim that once you change the sort order in list view, when you go back to column view.
That persists, which is that was going to be my immediate question, which wasn't part of this tip. So I'm glad you. Yeah. I'm glad you added that. Yeah.
I was like, well, this is great if you're in list view, but like, does it stay? And he's like, of course. Yeah, it sticks. He's like, that's why I sent the tip. And I'm like, I thought so just wanted to.
That's so weird that they wouldn't just let you do it in column view, but I guess maybe it'd be confusion over which column. I mean, but you could right click in the column and it would just affect that column, I would think. You know, that's how I would do it. I don't know.
Yeah, I find column view very limiting for me. I live in list view. What's that? Is it really?
Oh, yeah. Really? Yeah. Cause I'm constantly moving things left to right. Um, and I don't like having to jump up and down the tree.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
I feel like I can move quicker up and down the tree and column view than list view.
All right. So I have another tip for column view while we're here. You know, when, when you're in column view, which I, where I spend very little of my time, there's the little handle at the bottom right corner of the current, you know, right most column that you see, or actually of any column, I suppose. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Of any column that's got content in it. And you can drag the little handle there. It looks like a pause button, really.
But you can drag the little handle to change the width of that particular column. You can also hold down option key when you're dragging that handle, and all columns will adjust their width at the same time.
That's to the same size, right?
To the same size. Yes, yes, yes, yes. Sorry. Thank you for the clarification.
Um, there's another one where if you just double click on the line, it will expand to the size of the longest thing in that column.
Oh, that is life changing. Oh, this might make me hate column view less. Yeah. Cause it seemed like I always, you know, I use the analogy. It feels like I'm typing with mittens on like when I go to column view, it's like, I want to see the file names and i also want to yeah i want to sort by you know date added or whatever can i there's no other oh you can so let's see you can right.
Click in the column and change that
And change the sort view yeah uh i just right clicked and it.
Looks like it changes all columns but yes
Where are you clicking to do in.
Finder just in find i'm just clicking in the middle of the empty area of the column and i have a sort by
I do not this is weird oh i have to click you're right in an empty area but if you've got a full low if you've got a full column finding that little empty area is is requires a little bit more finesse but you're right you also can do it by going to the view menu and choosing sort by uh yeah date modified and then boom there it goes but you're right that changes everything all.
Columns i wonder if uh the tip we just did only does the column that you're in i don't know
Yeah that's gonna be interesting to know yeah that's a good question um yeah hard to say i'm hard to say only because i'm the column i was in was not a good one to test that way you can.
You can also you can also if you want to be totally visual you can add the sort by little icon if it's i don't know if it's up there by default to you know the customized toolbar at
The top oh it it's up there for me i don't know if that was by default or some action i took over the years i.
Mean a handy one that isn't a default one while we're on this subject that some people like is the path So there's a little path toolbar icon, so you can put that up there, and then when you click on it, it's a little dropdown, and it shows you the full path to where you are.
Wait, oh, I thought you were going to talk about the view show path bar, which shows the path of the file at the bottom of the window.
Right, at the bottom, yeah. I use that, but there's actually, in the toolbar, because we were kind of talking about the toolbar.
Yeah, I like this.
So, you know, right at the top, you can right-click, and you can say customize toolbar, and then it gives you little icons that you can drag up there yeah one of those is that is the path bar what
And if i hit that.
It just icon and
Then you can navigate through the path it's interactive like i can go up the chain.
Yeah i mean it's kind of more for visual mouse mousy kind of people i think but yeah
That's true because i would normally be doing this with the keyboard you're right but still oh i want to have that there oh.
Man okay what did i just do now no
I don't know i don't know the answer.
I okay i mean this is must be a new this is a new os thing but what was i was holding down the option key when i drug my window and it's doing the new uh full screen os window thing no where it locks into like half the screen or whatever oh
Yep yep one must be aware and careful of that.
Yeah i did it accidentally it's like cool all right i was trying to actually what i was trying to do is figure out if i could drag i could hold command key and drag that icon out of my uh my toolbar and i could so
So um in our, uh live chat here in discord porthos john says group by is also useful uh and that is a another, uh widget that you can add to the toolbar there uh so that you can group by file type and get the sort within groups or group by you know you can group by date you can group by um what are the other things kind yeah those sorts of things i like that great yeah and then he says that one drives.
Me a little bit nuts but
Yeah it's same it it breaks it out too far for me it's yeah it's hard to hard to look at but but i can see if you're looking for show me all the pdfs that are here that might be a helpful thing uh to see and then porthos john says one that he learned from mgg years ago and have used ever since is command click on the file name and you get the path upward to this must only be in column view is that no command click on the file name, uh i'm not getting that i'm not
i'm missing what the instruction is on that because when i try it here oh the folder name at the top of the window yes right if you commit if you float over the name of the folder in any view in the finder at the top of the window and click it it will show you that same path basically the same thing that's in the path drop down right right yeah right yes yes very nice thank you lots of stuff lots of good stuff extra bonus tips extra we love extra bonus tips it's kind of how things go.
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MaxSales.com, M-A-C-S-A-L-E-S.com. And our thanks to OWC for sponsoring this episode. And while I've got you here, if you're into tech news, security, entertainment, and well, a bit of grumpy ranting, then you need to check out the Grumpy Old Geeks podcast. Now, I know what you're thinking. Oh, great. Two old white guys talking tech. But wait, Sometimes there are three of them over there. This sounds familiar.
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GOG.show. And thanks for doing this swap with us, guys. Shall we go into some follow-ups? We had a lot of reaction to last week's show, and only a small amount of it was the creepy jackalope image, which reminds me of a Super Sucker song, which was Creepy Jackalope Eye. But anyway, shall we do some follow-ups?
Absolutely, and this one is kind of relevant. I have something to add to it.
All right.
So here we go. This is from Steve. He says, just listened to episode 1060 and I heard the question about connecting a new iPhone 16 to an older Mac. I'm in the same situation. I just got an iPhone 16 and I have a 2017 MacBook Pro with Ventura. Yes, I know I'm overdue for an updated Mac. Anyway, no, you're not. I have a 2019 and I think we're fine. Anyway, I digress. And he says, anyway, I wanted to connect my phone to transfer some music and the included USB-C to USB-C cable did not work.
That is correct. And we'll probably explain a little bit why. A few minutes of searching led me to a solution. I used a USB-C to USB-A cable with an adapter to USB-C. Not sure if it matters which side goes into which port, but I put the adapter side on my Mac. It worked. Totally ridiculous. I totally agree. He says also, by the way, I too am a DHCP reservation spreadsheet enthusiast, nerd. His words, not mine.
These are words of endearment, Adam.
I always thought I was the only one. Keep up the great work. Steve.
So this is interesting to me because we're doing USB-C on one side, right? And it's USB-C on the other. So it's what's happening in the middle that matters. And I don't think it has, I don't think it is dependent on going C to A to C in the middle. No. Right? Like that's, okay.
Okay. No, it's your cable. That's the problem. And the fact that Apple only includes a charging USB-C cable in the box is criminal.
I think that's the problem. I think that's it, is that this cable is not capable of data transfer. But yet the one that he went from C to A to C is capable of data transfer. Yeah.
That was probably an old iPhone cable when we were back in the USB-A to whatever days. Yeah.
Yeah. yeah so i i think that's.
Probably an iphone cable but you know it was it was a cable that does that so here's here's where my tie-in comes into place you know how you avoid this you get your usbc cables from owc because they have high quality ones that do the full bandwidth and everything they'll cost you more but yeah i use only owc usbc cables for this reason otherwise you have to do a little bit of your research.
I mean, I do, I have bought cables from, um, oh man, I'm going to blank on the name of that cheap cable place that I always used to use. Uh, it'll come to me, but you know, you can buy cheaper cables, but you have to pay attention to what you're getting because there are literally ones that just do charging,
Right.
Uh, and don't have the data transfer. There are also ones that go at different data transfer speeds. So if you want, you know, full Thunderbolt four, you know, transfer speeds, you have to get the right USB-C to USB-C cable. So this is another thing to be aware of when you're like looking for that stuff so and it's super confusing and it all comes down to the usb spec and how the cable is made and what pins are turned on or not on and it sucks
I did a deep dive i don't we've probably talked about this adam uh i and i i dissected it on the show here but after that there was a video years ago a couple years ago not that long ago where the the how it works guys i I think dug into like Apple's $140 Thunderbolt cable with a CAT scan machine or something. And instead of comparing it to say, Oh, W sees Thunderbolt cable that has the same specs to see like, is there a difference?
They compared it to a $9 cable on Amazon. It was like charging only or something. So it was not an apples to apples comparison. And I mean that in both ways. Right. And so that, that like gave me the idea.
It was like, okay, but I don't have a CAT scan machine, but I do have a lot of gear here and I can test functionally whether the inexpensive cables at Amazon work the same as the expensive cables from like, you know, certified cables is what I should say from Apple or OWC or cable matters or any of those. And so I did. And I found that the, it also, Also, this was catalyzed by the fact that I went on a trip once and grabbed some USB-C cables and found that while I had...
The cables that I had with me all would pass data and, of course, all would charge. None of them would work with my external screen. And it was like, well, this is a bummer. I want to be able to use my external screen. So that's when I dug in and I found a couple of interesting things. USB 4 cables work as Thunderbolt cables. There is no functional difference. Now, is there a technological difference? Possibly. Is there a tolerance difference? Most likely.
But also, there's a certification difference. And on a Thunderbolt 4 cable, you've got to pay the Thunderbolt 4 consortium, you know, Gestapo, whatever it is, to certify your cable, and it costs you money. And so if you're not paying for that, then you wind up with the same functionality, at least as far as I can tell. Again, mine was all real world testing. There was no like, I'm going to test the electrical resistance on this. No, no, no. I just plugged them in.
Does it work? And did it work for a day? That's that was my test. And it was like, yeah, so you can buy cables that are certified as USB for and even cables that are not certified, but called USB for all seem to work for me. Now, I will add a huge asterisk to that.
In my like workflow here in the studio, for example, I don't have any of those non-certified cables because I don't want to have to ask that question when I have some weird audio issue like, oh, is it related to that crummy cable where I saved $24 instead of buying the OWC one? Like I have like either all OWC or all fully certified cables here. Well, the OWC ones are also certified. So I have all fully certified cables in my workflow simply to rule out future troubleshooting questions.
But I digress. I think that's what we do here. The digression. It's part of it.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah. I mean, again, like it's just so confusing. Like, I mean, even USB 4 cable, I just like did some Googling and speeds can range from 40 gigabits per second to 80 gigabits per second, depending upon if you have USB 4 1.0 or usb 4 version 2.0 that's
True that's true.
It's just like yep yep the label that that's been my only complaint with um usb across the board i mean this has been since usb 3 usb 2 there were all these different flavors all these different versions all these different specs and you had to know what you were getting whereas i mean the nice thing about thunderbolt was thunderbolt was Thunderbolt, if version one was Thunderbolt version one, and it worked all the same.
If it was Thunderbolt version one, version two, version, you know, whatever.
So I digress. Yep.
It is. Oh, and, and sorry, that, that, the place where you can get, I don't want to call them cheap. You can get inexpensive, pretty good quality cables, quality cables that I've had good luck with his mono, mono price is the name of the company. And I ordered cables from them for years and they have all kinds of cables, um, and pretty good deals so uh my other supplier for cables is of course uh anchor
Oh yeah there you go yeah yeah yeah we've.
Talked about them in the past
Too yep i i really like um mono prices cables i use some of them on my computers but they are the place that i buy audio cables from to use both in the studio here in fact well this one's a right angle cable and mono price the last time i bought did not sell right angle cable so i probably don't have a right angle cable on this microphone but otherwise every other cable that i have in here is mono price and every cable that i bring with me to gigs that isn't a right angle cable
because i also like right angle cables when i'm playing my drums so that i'm not hitting the cable with a stick um, All of them are monoprice and they are super heavy duty and reliable and all of the things and way inexpensive. Like they're really good stuff. Yeah.
Compared to others places.
Compared to. Yes. Yes. Yes. I mean, compared to other places with equal or equal quality. Right. Like. Correct. I need to. The stuff. The stuff in the studio. I could go with cheap cables here because things aren't moving around at gigs, man. And like, I am not kind to those things. Well, you got to set them up fast. And then at the end of the night, it's one in the morning.
It's like, I want to like GTFO, like, let's roll them and go like, you know, yank them and roll them and put them in a bag and forget about them until the next gig. So, yeah.
Yeah. I just replaced my, so, you know, the Apple vision pro comes with, I think a six foot cable for the, for the charging.
And um i'm like i want something where i can actually like move away from the the wall charger a little bit so okay i ended up getting one of those uh i mean we don't have access to much services in this town and i needed it fast and so you know i went to walmart and i got whatever that their walmart brand is i forget what it's called uh shoot someone in the chat will probably put it in there but i bought that thing that thing lasted like in it wasn't even abused like Like it sat in the
same place for not very long. It lasts like three months and it's like trying to plug it in and use it for my iPhone to charge. And it's like going out and my wife's like, why is this thing's not charging? And it's like, yeah, that's crappy cable. I replaced it with an anchor one. It's great.
That's good. Yeah. The anchor cables are good. I'm not going to put a link to the Walmart cables. Are you talking about RVP? Is that their house brand?
No, they have a house brand. It's called like, yeah,
I don't know.
Go where I can't remember. it's their electronics brand it's sort of like what because
They also sell anchor at least online or.
Whatever yeah that's because they have the Amazon model online anybody can sell through them yes
Right right right FBW fulfilled by Walmart.
Yeah, I'll I'll I'll figure out what it is and I'll fill people in before the end of the show.
Hey, a heads up. And by that, we're recording this on Friday, the 25th. It comes out on the 28th, of course. But Porthos John points out that the iOS 18.2 beta. So you've got to be on the I believe right now, the developer beta allows chat full. Well, I'll say I don't want to say full. allows chat GPT integration and allows you to log in to your paid account. If you have one, I am stoked about this.
Lisa and I went down to Boston last night and on the way back, you know, as, as often happens in the car, we were, you know, musing on different things. And I wonder about that. And how about this?
And so I keep triggering chat GPT and I use the voice mode, but, and I have the voice mode of chat GPT tied to my action button on my iPhone 16 so that I can easily get there while I'm in the car, but it still requires the phone to get itself unlocked and then you know you got to hold the action button and it's not the best experience and even last night lisa was like i can't wait until apple just integrates this with with the s lady and it's like
oh it seems like today is a day so um yeah so um we'll see if i've requested it on mine but we'll see if it comes in hopefully soon.
Yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah
Fun uh.
On with two n's is the walmart electronics brand oh and n it's cheap
Okay stuff all right but.
I mean you if you want a cheap you know tv they have them i don't know who actually manufactures their stuff but
There's a phrase that.
I didn't expect it to be good
There's a phrase that i love that i i can't take credit for and nor do i want to uh but it was used frequently by neil peart of um late drummer of the band rush in all of his prose books he liked to stay at crummy motels uh in between stops on the road he would he would ride his motorcycle around and he loved like you know crummy motels and so uh he would often write in his travel journal if the hotel was especially crummy cheap and worth it, so it is it is a phrase that has stuck with
me all right uh seth has the next follow-up from episode 1060 says todd was talking about shutting off a display while in a focus mode with a shortcut he says uh seth says you can do this directly in the focus mode settings under focus filters there is a filter that will shut off the display while in that focus mode so i like this this is good i will um that so there you go yeah hopefully that that helps todd yeah i don't know i i i did not i was not aware of that but
yep there it is and there it is.
Very very cool yep
All right.
James. James has a little bit of follow up. He says, I am enjoying your show over an evening coffee. Wow. And listening to issues with Apple Notes and its database. More specifically, someone wanting to extract pieces. Some years back, I came upon notebooks by Athlons Schmid. Hopefully I said that name right. And I've stuck with it. The key feature for me is that it does not create a proprietary database to deal with. Rather, it uses a folder on your drive as its container.
Within that are books, folders, and pages, documents. It accepts all kinds of documents such as PDFs, HTML, images, text files. I can create sketches, text files, format docs, and markdown docs, all well, all as well as rather photos, videos, and videos with camera access.
Internally externally external hyperlinks work docs dropped into the folders automatically show up in the notebook a bit of a kludge are multiple notebooks which are accomplished by pointing it at a different hard drive folder multiple copies of notebooks sync up by pointing them to the same shared folder he offers phone ipad mac and windows versions very cool recently with improvements to Apple's notes, I have brought them closer, but I generally use my notes as throwaway scraps of notes,
while notebooks is my permanent book that I carry and use everywhere. Sounds like a pretty cool app.
It sure does. I love the idea of flat file storage as opposed to SQLite database storage.
I mean, this is why I use Markdown for everything and I use Ulysses for notes. Like I don't use the notes app for this exact reason. And Ulysses syncs and everything is just, you know, files and folders ultimately. But, you know, I can easily get things in and out. And I'm also not tight. I use Markdown because I'm not tied to proprietary formats. And I know at the end of the day, it's always just a text file. So you don't fall prey to the issue of, you know, I have it in some proprietary
format that and then that app dies. And now I can't get it out of whatever proprietary document format it's in.
Yeah. Yeah. Okay. I need to rethink my world here because I went all in on Apple Notes.
I used yojimbo was probably the first note taking app that i used and uh from bare bones and then i moved to evernote and was there for a while and and then moved to apple notes primarily because of how we do things for this show and and apple notes has some level of scriptability which is what went away with the evernote updates uh in recent years so i can use shortcuts or or apple script to control things in notes and that's proven very helpful for us for show prep however the storage
of things is not the best so yeah i'm curious note this notebooks app i looked it does sync because you can just store it in in like your dropbox or even apple's iCloud drive because it's flat folders and so anything that can read those folders which includes your iphone and your.
Can and they have iphone and ipad apps as well as a mac app for this so they just all work they do say that you can import from evernote apple notes circus ponies notebook or your good old palm pilot which is also interesting i uh so i'm curious i need to i need to think about this so i i wonder if there is any script ability i know that this notebooks app does support markdown so that's good uh shortcuts is there automation that's the thing i'm looking for i'm not finding
it on their feature page but that doesn't mean it doesn't exist it just means they didn't um surface it on their feature page here so all right well.
I mean if they're just text files i mean you should have some native
Scriptability right right but like a window a.
Folder and read text out of a text file or something like that
Well but like right now i am about to take this note from our mgg current show folder and archive it in the mgg archive folder and i have a keystroke that makes that magic happen i don't need to drag with my mouse and answer the questions i just hit the magic button and it's done and that's done i believe with apple script i can't remember if it's apple scripter shortcuts it's triggered with keyboard maestro for the for the keyboard part of it but it's either one
or the other right and it that scriptability for this purpose is great but like there's a world where we could use notes just for this show and then i could move to something a little more portable for uh the rest of my life you know yeah yeah i'll.
Tell you the other thing about i mean the other thing that's really handy for me with everything being in markdown is just the ability to then use a tool i mean there's stuff built into ulysses um i use brett terpstra's marked okay which is part of setup by the way um which allows you to kind of have a live preview of a formatted version and you can look at it in different styles and stuff like that and not only that it does all the conversions so i can take my marked
file and then if i do want to send it to somebody as a Word doc, I just convert it to a Word doc or a PDF or a rich text file, you know, and it's the same source content, but I can put it in whatever format I want and send it off to somebody if they don't want to deal with Markdown. I do this at work all the time. I, I, I start all my documents in Markdown and then typically share them at the office, obviously in, well, maybe not obviously, but share them in a Word
format because that's most, what most people at the office are used to working with, right? Huh. That's great.
This is great. Yeah. So I will, I will alert all of the aforementioned developers to this discussion. I'm, I'm curious if notebooks or Ulysses supports some kind of automation, either, you know, Apple script or, or shortcuts or both.
I'm pretty sure Ulysses does. Yeah. Have some shortcuts from what I remember.
Would have been my guess. Yeah. So this is interesting. And, of course, Notes' current ability to be able to sync a specific notebook amongst multiple people like we do here is also a good thing. So I'm not eager. Our workflow seems to work for now. But as we've been having these discussions about Notes, I've been getting less and less comfortable with this data that I rely on being – I know it's a SQLite database.
And at the end of the day I could like find or write a way to get stuff out of it chat GPT assist me in writing the commands to turn this into RTFD files, but maybe I should do that and like give it to the world if I can make it work because that would be a nice thing to be able to get your notes out as RTFD files but still. I don't know I don't like being trapped in inside notes there's no good way to export so yeah yeah yeah all right um scott helps us with that though,
Uh-oh. Well, that was weird. My sound cut out for a second. Maybe I do have a crappy USB cable in here somewhere. Scott says, in episode 1060, there was a lively discussion about backing up notes. It took me a while to figure out how to do this, but it is actually quite simple. I use an app called SyncTime to selectively back up specific folders.
I do this with my notes data, my calendar data, and my contacts, although I also run an AppleScript via Keyboard Maestro every week that exports all of the contacts as separate V cards. Very handy. That is very handy. He says, I have the destination on a separate backup drive, which, for notes, backs up the source folder. It's in your user folder, user library, group containers, group.com.apple.notes. And I will put that in in the show notes so that we all kind of have it there.
However, I will point out that what this folder has is simply all of the files in theory required for the SQLite database. And you could, in theory, just pop this into the same folder on a new Mac and then launch notes and it would pull it back in.
I asked scott if he has tried this restore operation and he hasn't yet i agree with him that it seems like this would work but where my head kind of flashes a light is but notes also syncs with icloud drive so i know that there's a cache of that somewhere else and then there's the whole syncing engine that happens that we aren't touching and i think apple years ago had a knowledge base article that says as if a swarm of bees avoid this, you know, this whole sink folder.
So, uh, and I, I believe them because they don't say things like that terribly often. Uh, they are not prone to hyperbole. So. I don't like, I grok that this would, in the end, you could make this work. I guarantee it, right? It's a SQLite database.
It has your notes in it. You might have to go through some steps, like turn off AppleScript syncing of notes, restart your computer, quit notes, put this in there, you know, make, like, make a, let it sit for an hour, make some changes so that the data, like, is updated, then try turning on syncing again, see what happens, blah, blah, blah.
It's better than not having this folder backed up like your data is there i believe that i just don't know how how difficult or easy the restoration process might be and i think it would be different for a lot of different circumstances but thank you scott yes agreed yeah yeah so yeah don't get caught well yeah uh okay what do we have here um let's let's we had more reviews come in i know pete likes to read those but i i love i love all the reviews so i'm gonna i'm
gonna take a minute and as soon as i can find them i'm gonna read them because we had. Uh oh no that's not the reviews wait see pete had this problem last time with uh with the reviews and he found the wrong ones and i was about to do the same thing all right here we got three reviews The first from Virtual Stash in the United States. All three are from the United States. One of the best. I have three favorite podcasts regarding Apple technology. This is the one I would give up last.
Consistently good. The good cheer of the remaining original host. I think that's me. Never wanes and uplifts every Monday morning. Thanks, Virtual Stash.
Thank you. Yeah. Yeah.
MKMCEMD from the United States says, Matt Geekab, love the show since 2012. We love you since 2012. That's amazing. Awesome. And Casey Watt from the United States says, Always on point, this podcast has been a staple in my listening luxury for over a decade. Always useful information and always a weekly listen. Keep up the excellent work. Well, these are excellent reviews and they do warm our hearts.
We are happy about them, but also they do kind of help with a variety of things, social proof and all of the stuff that sort of, I know Apple says it doesn't help the algorithm. I don't know. Every time we've had a wave of reviews.
I don't buy it.
I don't buy it. Yeah, I could be wrong.
I mean, maybe not in their algorithm directly, but I think when people are looking for things to listen to, obviously this matters. And I know that subscriptions and people listening and especially new listeners are part of that algorithm. I know one of the tricks is to like, if you want your podcast to go up, you can take a two month break and then everybody will unsubscribe. And then when you come back, they subscribe again and you go.
Uh yeah the other the you're right that when people click subscribe in apple podcasts that does it direct that is perhaps the biggest signal to the algorithm that uh any that people can do and so i'm certainly not suggesting this but i've heard podcasters tell people please go back in and resubscribe just go click the subscribe button again even if you're already subscribed and that that work. So I'm certainly not advising you to do that, but I'm just telling you what I've heard.
We would never say,
I would never do something like that. That'd be preposterous, Adam. Uh, all right. Shall we actually add some value here and answer some questions?
Yeah. Yeah. Sarah has a question for you. Actually, I got a series of questions for you, Dave. Oh boy. So starting with Sarah, she says, hi, I'm saving photos sent to a Gmail address to drive and renaming them. So far, this is a two-step process of saving to drive and then finding renaming. Do you know of an extension or a hack to do this in one step? A little more information.
This is for an elementary school yearbook. The parents would put categorical data in the subject line and we would have a Google extension that would offer the photo attachments to the drive with the new file name any help moving forward we'd like to be changing the system for collecting photos so just looking for an easy hack to add on or to make this year go faster love the show and any all photo related tips thank y'all okay
So work with me on this here Adam. I don't have like a, I wish I had a, uh, you know, go download this thing and you're good to go. If that exists, feedback at Mackie cab.com. Tell us, we'll tell Sarah. So there's that. I would generally use Hazel or a better finder rename, probably Hazel because of its ability to automate things based on when an item is added to a folder, right? That Hazel delivers on the promise that Apple gave us with folder actions.
And then you can trigger all kinds of things. It has some stuff built into it, renaming being one of them, moving, you know, all that stuff.
But you can also trigger an Apple script and do all kinds of things. so um that would that's where my brain goes but that's not going to um be able to do what you want because it's not going to know anything about the subject line of the email i i don't think when you save an image from uh you know gmail that it adds the metadata of say the subject line somewhere to the image. I'm pretty, if it is, then maybe we can use Apple script to extract that and all that.
So I started thinking about what we do here, Adam, because we use the clipboard as part of that. Like we are automation when like for this question, in fact.
When, before we fire off the reply email we hit you know select all and copy to the clipboard and then trigger the automation to create the note that adam and i are reading from right now and and it's all based on what i put on the clipboard initially and then you know off the automation goes and at some point in the process it grabs the active clipboard and hopefully it hasn't changed in the middle which of course it could but it
probably wouldn't have because it's all happening pretty quickly so my My thought is copy the subject line to the clipboard and then save the file and then have the automation from Hazel rename the file using in part the contents of the clipboard, which in theory is the subject line of the email because you've already copied that there. I don't know if we can make it better than that, but that's where I would, that's step one, you know, beta version one of this solution.
Yeah. I need to get in and probably do a lot more experimentation with shortcuts.
We all do.
I feel like, I feel like, oh, there is not. I was wondering if there was already something in, shortcuts for like getting specific contents of an email and it doesn't i'm not seeing anything when i just did a quick search but man that would be handy right
Yeah and.
You would think it wouldn't be that difficult right like you activate a shortcut you're on a mail message and at least in mail you know even if it was even if it was relegated to just apple's built-in mail
Yeah you should be able to grab the grab the grab subject.
Grab the grab the email address apple's body of the email
Apple script can grab the subject and the attachment in theory uh for sure i because i've i've our current workflow i tried using apple script and apple mail and and making all of that kind of work yeah and and it it where it has trouble is in creating new messages and and then knowing about and then doing things to that new message because mail doesn't really give you a file handle for that but for the existing message that you're on it can absolutely grab the subject line so yes if you if
you could take the have an apple script that took the subject line from the message and stuffed it in a very you know a temporary variable variables sure yeah and then and the attachment save the attachment and then it could it could even stop there and you like you could have the apple script do it all but you could, put that on the clipboard and let the hazel thing i talked about sort of take over from there maybe but probably but i feel like there's a solution here yeah yeah.
Yeah but what you might not be able to do is if you're using the web interface for gmail you might actually have to like add the gmail account to your apple mail and be parsing your mails from the actual application not just you know the web interface or whatever and i know a lot of people with gmail just use the web interface
Yeah so yeah and save it with and because.
I don't i i would doubt apple script's going to let you go into gmail web interface and do any of that stuff
Yep, but i'm.
Just surprised again
I'm thinking about it mail.
Wouldn't be able to parse parts of an email
It can oh apple script in mail just like.
I just mean like why there's not default shortcuts like copy subject copy email body
Right copy.
You know email address from this email like the
So i um line i i will put a link to this in the show notes but i came up with a chat gpt prompt to write this apple script i need to say i have not tested this apple script uh when you go and test it folks you may find that there are bugs in it and and then i encourage you to use chat gpt to follow up with that and fix the bugs but um the prompt that i used was uh write an apple script to take the first attachment of the selected message in Apple Mail and save it with the
file name being the current date and the subject line of the email. Just in case there's, you know, people says, you know, picture of Timmy, you want to have something and maybe it should be a current date and time stamp so that if there's six pictures of Timmy, they all kind of get saved with that.
But looking briefly, because I happen to be recording a podcast at the moment, But looking briefly at the Apple script, it is able to grab the subject of the message as part of a thing and the attachment of the message. And you could we could probably make this far more robust and say save all of the attachments, use an incremental number at the end of it, you know, so that there's multiples like you could certainly do all that.
But I will this is doable with Apple script and the bones of what need to happen are here. I will put this link in the show notes to this chat GPT session for you folks to, uh, to experiment with.
Yep. Yep. Cool.
Yep.
All right. Fun. Uh, so Ian.
Yep.
Needs help with a failing Mac OS upgrade. Hmm. This is not something I've encountered in a while. So let's dig into this. He says, hi guys. I'm trying to get my neighbors. 2015 3.2 gigahertz Intel core. I5 with 16 gigs of memory and one terabyte fusion drive upgraded to mac os 10.14 or from rather mac os 10.14 mojave to This seems backwards. Mac OS 12 Monterey. That's a downgrade. I'm confused by that, but, uh, okay. I ran the Monterey.
Maybe the other way around.
Maybe he's going to Mojave from Monterey.
Let's go with that.
Yes. Cause he says, well, I know I ran the Monterey installer from a Mojave installer. I, I, now I'm, now I'm questioning.
I am too.
Which versions are, which point.
He used the term upgraded. So I think we're going from 12 to 14. Let's assume that.
Let's just use the numbers. So I ran the Mac OS 10.14 installer from a USB memory stick that has only the installer. Things were going well, and the iMac went through the usual operating system install routine with progress bars and restarts. After more than an hour spent on one of these progress bars, it restarted into recovery mode with a message that I'd never seen before. Your computer started up in recovery because a failure occurred during installation.
An error occurred migrating the user data during install. Reinstall macOS to resolve the issue. I was trying to install the operating system again, but as it directs, but I have no faith it will do any better the second time. What went wrong with the install? Do you think that I should start fresh by wiping the internal Fusion Drive clear, install macOS 10.14 on a clean drive, and then restore from time machine backup?
Or is there some way to find out more about what went wrong with the migrating user data during the install?
Ian. Okay. I would... Follow Apple's instruction and try one more time again. Right. Like, let's see if it works, because who knows what happened to your point? Right. We don't know. Like, so I have a guess. Yeah, I. Right. Well, I want to get to your guess because this is this is interesting. But I would try it again.
Barring that, though. Yes. The, you know, install on a fresh drive and then let migration get the OS on there and then let migration assistant do the second step i know that's all what's happening behind the scenes here but at least you're not stuck with a failed install you're just at worst stuck with a failed migration that you could you can deal with in a different way but what's your theory adam.
Well i would boot that installer and then run disk utility because my suspicion on a 2015 imac with the fusion drive is that the drive is probably borked like it's probably got issues with it that's a really old machine i mean that machine's been running for nine years on that drive so and it's a spinning drive and things happen over time so even if it was running fine prior to doing the install when you're doing an install it's doing a lot of
work and it's moving a lot of bits around and it probably has bad sectors or there's probably issues so when it got to migrating the user data just literally probably couldn't copy this stuff so i hate to say that but that would be my first suspicion on a machine of that era you know drives go bad they they just do eventually yeah they get worn out yeah so you could try again and you might luck out you know like like dave said but i would definitely
run disk utility on it because maybe disk utility can actually fix uh what might be wrong with it like there's probably some corruption or some something in there and you know i would try that if you hadn't run it i mean definitely it's worth running especially on an older machine when you're doing a migration like that yeah
I yeah excellent point yeah no i i think you're now that you've said it that seems like the most likely uh issue here so yeah all right.
I like it luckily i think i mean i need to go back and look at the teardown for a 2015 iMac but i mean you probably could replace the drive in there and even if you replace it with a real ssd you could give that iMac brand new life.
Oh, for sure.
It might be worth doing with the cost of SSDs. I mean, it's probably got a smaller drive, I'm guessing. Like, you could probably get a 256 SSD and throw it in there, and it would just be like, boom. Yeah. Might even be worth just doing that upgrade.
That's interesting. Yeah, for sure.
If that person really wants to keep that computer and doesn't want to spend, you know, money on a new machine.
On a new Mac, yeah, for sure. Yeah, yeah.
Huh. But, I mean, yeah.
Yeah i like it all right.
Shall we do that one more for you i think okay right yep uh we are going to i lost my place in my notes it's michael next michael is michael michael's who
I have in my notes.
Next okay perfect yeah so michael has a wi-fi router question this one's pretty straightforward he just says what wi-fi 7 router do you recommend i've looked at the netgear nighthawk and they They have some for $299 all the way up to $699. Of course, the $699 is the one I want. It has the most features and the top speed.
Yeah. Okay. So I need to test more Wi-Fi 7 routers. And I say that, and that's true, but I could also say I need to test more Wi-Fi 7 routers like I need a hole in my head. But for the sake of the show, I do. Yeah. Uh, but thus far, the only ones that I've really put a test to are the Eero max seven, which is five 99 for each unit. And of course there's sales that can happen and all those things. And sometimes the sales are significant of like 20 or maybe 30%.
But, uh, so the Eero max seven, and I've also tested unifies you seven pro max. Those are two 79 each. Okay. The UniFi ones are access points only, so you also need a router. But you can buy the UniFi Cloud Gateway Max for $199, and the price still is way less than the Eero. I've had good connectivity with both of those. The Eero is a 10-stream device, so it's 2x4x4, whereas the U7 Pro Max is an
8-stream device, 2x4x2. uh. With my iPhone 16 testing locally on my network with iPerf, so not doing speed tests so that my internet speeds aren't the limiting factor. And in this case, my internet speeds would definitely be the limiting factor. Sort of. I am routinely able to get Wi-Fi speeds of 1500 megabits per second in both directions. It like Wi-Fi 7 actually delivers on the promise of gigabit plus speeds over Wi-Fi. And it really does work. And it happens routinely.
I have two Eros in my house, one sort of at either end of the house on different floors. And if I'm smack dab in the middle of them, I'm probably getting seven to eight hundred megabits per second. But if I'm in the room with the with the device, it's and I also have one Eero Max 7 in my office. Usually right now it's a Unify U7 Pro Max because I wanted to do some testing. But with the Eero, I'm able to get 1500 with the Unify, sometimes 1500, more likely 11 or 1200.
And that checks out with the different streams, I guess, because my iPhone 16 and the 16 Pro is the same, has four spatial streams, two by two. So I, I, but maybe, you know, it finds the right ones in the, in the stream, in the thing that are negotiates the best unencumbered ones and sends data and all of that. Uh, I did say, and I said, the, the U seven pro max is, uh, the one they also unify also has the U seven pro, which I believe is six streams. Yeah. So, uh, yeah.
So, like, Wi-Fi 7 works. It really, really does what we were promised for it to do. I do need to test some others because, as you can see, there's a massive price difference between the two that I've tested. And I've moved from my Synology router, as I mentioned recently, over to the Unify Cloud Gateway Max. I love that thing.
I moved to it primarily because the Synology only has one port that's faster than gigabit, and I don't understand why you would do that because you want to get data in and out of it, right? It's just a router, so you would want a faster-than-gigabit port to your internet provider, and then also a faster-than-gigabit port to the rest of your network, because otherwise, it don't matter. That's the part. And with Synology, you can use it for one or the other.
The port could be WAN up to the internet or LAN down to your network.
But um once i put the cloud gateway max in has all the same geeky features that i liked with the synology it has an equally flexible interface that is probably confusing for a first-time user but once you learn your way around of course it's fine you you have to adapt to it it doesn't adapt to you but these are routers that there's a you know time honored tradition of them being confusing so it's just how it be but it's fine once you once you spend a day with it you're like oh yeah i know to go
and you can search and all that stuff but with that it has 2.5 gig ports on it my connection from Fidium Adam is a 1 gig symmetrical Fidium, One gigabit Ethernet maxes out at 940 megabits per second after all the overhead. Once I moved to, right, so that's important for what I'm about to share. Because once I moved my gigabit connection to the 2.5 gig Ethernet ports and could actually send data over those speeds. Because like my Mac Studio here also has, well, it has a 10 gig Ethernet port,
but that's enough. I had to move all my switches in the house and the office over to 2.5 gig switches, which of course I did because I'm a nerd. Even on my Fidium 1 gig connection, I get 1150 megabits per second in both directions on a speed test up to the cloud. So it is over provisioned. It's faster than 1 gig. Yeah, which makes sense. I mean, that's pretty typical.
So I share all of this because these are the important factors when buying a router that's going to do Wi-Fi 7 in today's world with faster, with gigabit or faster connections to the Internet. It's not just about the speed of the router or the speed of the Wi-Fi. You need no encumbrances on your connection in the whole thing. And like in my office, the encumbrance is the Mac mini that's there only has a gigabit ethernet port.
I didn't buy it with a 10 gig port. So I can't get faster than gigabit on that unless I add a Thunderbolt device or a USB 4 device that goes 2.5 gig ethernet. And I actually, I think I have one somewhere in the pile of things that looks like I'm a hoarder in my office. And I eventually will find it and plug it in.
I want to know what people are doing with all this bandwidth. honestly uh this comes up i mean when we it's a good question really where this comes up a lot is when my wife and i are talking about like different places we want to live and where we might want to go and especially when you're talking about like more remote areas right yep and um for me it's it was always about the upload speed more than the download speed but that was because i was a podcaster and i was creating these giant
audio files that i want to get up to the internet fast like i never had a problem with stuff coming down sure it was always plenty play fast and like even now with my i know i have gigabit and it's great you know if i really am being honest about it especially now since the kids have moved out and we're not you know all streaming 4k video from different devices to different places all at the same time like the amount of downstream bandwidth that we're probably using between my wife
and i even with the number of vices we have, I doubt it's really even saturating much of that gigabit if I'm being truly honest with myself.
Oh, yeah. That is correct. And that's the reason that I have no... Like, I have no desire to move to two gigabit fiber, which I could have, right?
I can too, yeah.
Yeah, and even the one gigabit fiber, the only reason I've gone with that is because I think it was $5 a month more than the 500 megabit per second fiber or something. It was very clear which one they wanted me to buy.
They were going to i don't think they would provision the line for one gig but they were going to carve out one gig per customer in their world and by golly we might as well just have them buy it you know like you know so it that's why i did it now when my one year comes up with fidium which will mean that the um they're i'm not locked into a contract with them but they have committed to you know my price of 69 a month for one year after that year it's going to go up to 90,
But I could change plans to either a faster speed or a slower speed and pay less than 90. I think I think I would pay $10 more than I am now. So it would be 80 for the two gig connection or, you know, whatever it is, 50 for the 500. So I will move to one of those. I think we all know which one I'm going to move to. Obviously, I'm going to move to the two gig connection. Like, let's just get that out of the way. But I really don't need it.
And after a year, I will move back to the one gig connection. Like I, like, you know.
Yeah, my gigabit is way expensive, but I'm in a, you know, remote rural area or not really remote, but I mean, it just is what it is. I pay way more than I should be paying, but it's a, you know, market number of people actually buying it to probably what it costs. You know, so like there's not a huge number of people to sell to here that are going to pay for it. So it gets divvied up a little bit less than in other areas where they can spread out the cost. Yep.
Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So, uh, but you know, I, I use my upstream for cloud backups for sure. And then it's also really nice to have, you know, faster than 40 megabit per second upstream, which is what I was limited to with Comcast when uploading the show files. Like it's, it's nice not to just have to wait forever for that to happen. Although very few destinations on the internet let me upload at full, even full gigabit speed, let alone faster than that.
When uploading the video of the show to Spotify, that goes at about 400 to 500 megabits per second is the fastest they'll accept that from me. Their servers throttle there. Apple servers, when I upload the audio to them for the premium stuff or whatever the heck Apple calls it, I hate that we have to bifurcate premium with that. It really chafes me. There's part of me that wishes we had not opened that particular thing with Apple subscriptions, but I digress.
Uploading that to them goes at gigabit speed. So Apple servers accept it. But that, you know, that where it's nice is I can tell people, listen, just watch whatever you want on my Plex server. Watch your 4K content. I don't care. Like I have so much headroom here. It's ridiculous. So please use it. You know, that kind of thing is part of it. And then I can tell people and set your Plex client not to ask my server to do transcoding, right?
Like take the full bandwidth. It's better for both of us. So, yeah.
Cool.
Yeah yeah yeah um yeah yeah shall we do a couple of cool stuff found before we call it a day here adam i.
Think so yeah all right raymond's got one
Here but i promise i will test i will test more wi-fi seven stuff like we we need to find um i am now on a quest to find the affordable wi-fi seven solution that will serve a gigabit ethernet connection or and and give you some headroom for something faster like we're gonna find it right now that solution is and and affordable is tough like i really like the euro obviously it's super easy to use but man like it's expensive but everything there is expensive the unify
is is so far the least expensive way i've found to do it And it just shocks me to say those words about Unify. They were always, I mean, they're prosumer stuff. They're also enterprise. I just, I, in my brain, I always accept, expect them to be the most expensive and they're really affordable stuff and quality stuff. Yeah. Yeah. So, yes.
Yeah. Good. So Raymond has something that's a little bit of a follow up to conversation we were having on previous podcasts. I don't remember his last podcast or not, but he says in listening to your last podcast about lifespan to track your SSD life, I wanted to tell you about an app that I bought a long time ago called Drive DX to track the life of my SSDs, which you can download for free to try. And it only costs $19.99 for one user and $39.99 for a family.
If you didn't know about this app, you should take a look. I didn't know about that app, but yeah, we had been talking about SSD and the SSDs and the fact that they have a, you know, expected lifespan and this will allow you, I guess, to kind of monitor that track it and see where you're at.
Yep. I, we have mentioned drive DX on this show many times over the years, but it's been a while. In fact, I think they still have most of our mentions listed under their Mac observer tab, but yes, It's it's every one of them is Mac geek up, Mac geek up, Mac geek up, Mac geek up. So maybe we'll have them replace that logo with the MGG logo. So, you know, it's good. But yeah, I that's a fun tool and and a good geeky tool to remind ourselves of. So, yep. I have a cool stuff found to mention here.
And it is I I am someone who puts a case on my iPhone. I have generally gone for a clear uh you know plastic or whatever the material is case. And i have one of those and then the folks at mujo you know we get a lot of things to review here the folks at mujo i think i'm pronouncing it right m-u-j-j-o sent me their full leather case for the iphone 16 and i put it on to test it for a day, And I haven't been able to bring myself to take it off yet, Adam.
It feels good. It is MagSafe. You can see if you're watching the video for this, you can see actually I have my GigGab pop socket on there now. I have a Mac GeekGab one around here, too. Actually, my Mac GeekGab one is on my wallet. But it's all MagSafe. It works great on my, you know, MagSafe charger next to my bed. And it feels good in my hand. It comes in two colors. It is either dark tan or black.
And it's 59 bucks and i i've had leather cases on my phones but in the past and i they they haven't lasted not not that the leather hasn't lasted but they haven't lasted for me i just have never found one that i like the feel of i i this one like i trust it in my hand to not fall and it it feels good but it also doesn't get like grimy which sometimes for me leather does i have weird sensory things so um i don't know yeah but i this was meant to be on here for a day and it's been on here for
this well you know probably it arrived three days after i got my phone so you know yeah yeah.
Yeah i uh i used to use apple's leather ones okay apple had real leather and stopped when they uh when they stopped making those sure that's interesting to me. Although at this point, I don't know that I can go back. I, I went all last year without a case on my iPhone. My family thought I was crazy and I've continued and I'm, I'm probably going to continue. I love it. I love not having a case on my phone and I feel like Apple's glass and the durability has gotten strong enough.
Now I am pretty good with my phone. Knock on wood. I do not, I don't think I ever dropped my iPhone 14 Pro. Yeah. So
I was going to go caseless when I got the 15 Pro last year. I'm like, it's titanium. I'm good. I'll use MagSafe, you know, like whatever, a pop socket or something to give myself grip. And maybe the night that my phone came, like it wasn't 24 hours old. I had like lounge pants on or whatever. I had my phone in the pocket and I went out to like, I don't know why, but I needed something from the office or the studio. So it was like 10 o'clock at night. My phone's in my pocket.
I'm running across the driveway. And because my pants are not like jeans they're like lounge pants the phone bounces out hits it and that iphone to this day still has a nick in the corner because of it's uh and i'm like you i rarely drop my phone but this was like and i'm like it's titanium it's supposed to be it's like so it was super soft titanium it's like it's not not good oh yeah yeah and so i put a case back on But like I envision a world.
I always put a tempered glass screen protector on my phones. Oh, yeah.
And that either.
Oh, that man. I my family puts them on their phones, too. That has saved our bacon many times. I dropped my iPhone, whatever it was at the time, face down on my friend's driveway. There's a theme here. As I was getting I was going to his house for band practice. I was getting stuff out. I had, you know, 16 things to hold in two hands and my phone and it fell perfectly flat face down on his like asphalt driveway. And I'm like, oh, no. And I picked up my phone and it was spider crack city.
I'm like, well, here it comes. And then I peeled off that tempered glass screen protector. And Adam, it was totally fine. Totally fine. So, I continue to put one of those on. And I put one on my phone last year, too. There's the cheap ones that you can buy for like $9 for three of them. Those work great. I will say I have the Belkin one as well. It's way more expensive than $9 for three. And it feels, you know, we mentioned in the show earlier, cheap and worth it.
The $9 for three, cheap and worth it. But they work. They will protect your phone. they just don't feel as good as the the ones you pay a little bit more money for from someone like belkin so um nope.
Dave i'm naked and not afraid
Well i'm hesitant to use that as our title for the show but i feel like we kind of have to uh i don't know what chat gpt is going to come up with for a picture on this, but I'm like watching a train wreck, Adam. I am eager to see. I won't be able to shield my eyes from it. So if we can make that work, it's probably going to be the thing.
Oh, man.
Why did you do that? Pete wasn't even here. Like, we could have avoided the whole thing.
Because, I mean, that's really what I've become. Like, I always used to have a case and worry about these things, and now I've got over a year, almost two years not worrying about it, And it's free.
Yeah. Let's just say that. No, I believe it. I thought I was heading down this path. And then I was steered away immediately. So, yeah. Yeah, you're making me think, though, maybe I should try this again.
Well, I don't know. I mean, again, the only reason I laughed was because Apple decided they didn't want to do real leather cases. And I loved having a real leather case. And Apple's one was actually pretty good. They kind of got cheaper towards the end, which was a little bit frustrating. My early ones seemed to last a lot longer. A lot of it was the cutouts and stuff like that. Oh, I remember real quick before we get out of here. On that one, how are they handling the camera button?
Right. This is a great, great question. So all of the cases that I have tested thus far just have a cutout for the camera button. It's a giant cutout. I don't have a problem using it. I mean, you do have to like aim your finger kind of right to get down into there and hit the thing. But I don't have a problem using it. Lisa has she never uses a camera button because she says it's a pain in the neck. And I said, all right, so she will be our test case.
I'm going to find her a case that has like what Apple's doing with the camera button where they've effectively raised it up, you know, so that you can get all the functionality without it being deep down in there. For me, it's not a problem, but I totally understand that problem. Yeah, for sure.
It might actually be a benefit for some people. I have accidentally pressed it a few times, just like holding my phone in certain positions, which is really annoying. The other one that I wish, and I get why I can't do this, but I don't know why I keep thinking, I'll activate it and then be like, okay, I wanna get out of the camera, and I wanna press it again to get out of the camera, but obviously that takes a photo.
And I've done it like twice. Oh yeah, I definitely found, like we went out to dinner the other night for our anniversary and I took a picture from the table, And then put my phone away. But I had my phone with me, like, at the end of the meal in the bathroom or whatever. And as I was looking the next day, I was like, well, where's that picture I took of the table before we, it was where we were at the chef's table and I got this cool picture.
Right, yeah, yeah, I saw that photo.
And I was looking and I'm like, wait, what's this picture? I'm like, oh, this was randomly taken in the bathroom. But it was of the bathroom ceiling. I'm like, oh, I know exactly how that happened. You know, I grabbed my phone off the sink or whatever after I washed up, and it took a picture straight up and down of the ceiling. I'm like, well, it could have been worse. Not hot dog. That's right. Not hot dog. That's right. That was one of my favorite episodes
of, or favorite storylines of Silicon Valley. So anyway. All right.
Naked and not afraid not hot dog thanks for hanging out with us folks this has been all too much fun, don't forget about our monthly giveaways they will persist it is I am driven to always have one for us so it's gonna happen, thanks to Cashfly for providing all the bandwidth to get the show from us to you, make sure to go check out Pete's other show so there I was I've got two other shows Business Brain and gig gab i got buck dharma from uh bloister cult coming up on
on gig gab he was a fun conversation really awesome yeah yeah it's cool to talk to somebody like that who's been through that anyway uh thanks for hanging out thanks to all our premium supporters thanks for listening thanks for just being you it's awesome adam what's the uh what do you want to say yeah any anything.
My little bit of advice to all of you is go out there and don't get caught
Thank you again everybody have a good week see you next time later.