It's time for Mac Geek Cab, and I'll bring us our quick tip of the week. I noticed on my iPhone that my personal hotspot in settings, personal hotspot, allow others to join, was turned on. And what that does is it broadcasts an SSID from my phone. Anybody that's logged into my Apple ID account or my family's account can already see it, whether that switches on or not, this was broadcasting in SSID. And based on a little research, I think it at some level negatively impacts battery life.
It might not have a huge impact, but it certainly impacts it somewhat. So my recommendation is, and what I've done and what my family did, because everybody's was on for some reason, is to turn it off. Now, if you need to connect, say, your Kindle or something like that, then you do want to turn it on. And specifically with the Kindle, you also want to turn on Maximize Compatibility because that allows 2.4 gigahertz devices to connect, not just 5 gigahertz devices.
More quick tips like this, plus your questions answered, maybe, but definitely some cool stuff found today on Mac Geek Hub 1067 for Monday, December 9th, National Pastry Day 2024. Greetings, folks, and indeed, welcome to MacGeekCab, the show where we share quick tips like that. We share cool stuff found. We share questions with answers.
We really try to arrange things so that each and every one of us, me included, him included, him included, all of us, learn at least five new things every single time we get together and sometimes that means 15 new things because if you well anyway sponsors for this episode include onepassword.com slash mgg that's where you can go and learn more about one password extended access management because that solves the problems that traditional iam and mdm cannot and also bb edit from barebones.com,
my favorite text editor we'll talk more about both of those 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 here also in New Hampshire, it's Pilot Pete and learning five new things. Dave, I think we need to codify that and say, but you can't forget seven new things or old things. Because I seem to be pushing more penguins off the iceberg every time than I'm gaining anymore. But hey, show 1067, pretty cool thing. Two codes on that today that are really apropos. The Windows error 1067 means the process terminated unexpectedly.
And the 1067 code, at least for Walnut Creek, California, is a person calling for help. So if you're calling for help, we're here to help you. Get this done. I like that.
Why did you pick that city, Pete?
It's the one that comes up all by itself. There's police codes and police codes for Walnut Creek in the Google search. So there it was. I went, I have to use that one.
Where I grew up.
Is that right? At risk of doxing myself.
I still have family there, right on Walnut Avenue. They bought their home for a really low price in the 1960s, and it's worth a little more today than it was.
About the same thing in the 70s, but yeah, yeah.
Wow. It's worth a little more now.
I had no idea that you guys both had ties to that very specific area. Interesting. That's funny. You're right. Yeah, you both did just dox yourselves. That's okay. We do it every week here on the show.
One more thing about the opening quick tip. If you are going to broadcast that SSID, I used to have a little fun with it. I put a political statement on mine, and then the password was, I agree.
That's about the closest to politics we get on this show.
So there you go. So no longer is that the case. I don't have that, but you know.
I have a non-political question since Dave said it was National Pastry Day, and now I want a pastry.
Yeah.
Do you guys have a favorite pastry?
I, I kind of do. Um, it's, it's, it's not, it's going to surprise you, but potentially it is a Dunkin' Donuts coffee roll. I love me a Dunkin' Donuts coffee roll. It is, um, yeah, yeah. It's definitely a guilty pleasure. Although I really don't feel all that guilty eating it, but you know, it's fine. Yeah.
How about you, Pete?
I don't need any right now. what's my, you know what I like is that pan au chocolat that those chocolate croissants.
Oh, yeah. Like the clear things. Yeah, the croissant things. Yeah, whatever those are called.
Yeah.
I have a question. Is it, does a muffin count as a pastry? Is that a pastry?
Oh, that, now we're asking existential questions. Would a muffin be yours, Adam?
Yeah, blue, I love a blue, a good blueberry muffin, but I don't know if that counts as a pastry. Outside of that, I'm not, I don't think I'm a huge pastry person, if that doesn't count because i'd probably just go with a really good uh croissant okay that's definitely a pastry right yeah i would just a plain plain one i don't like all the gunk on those things right
Right that makes sense all right well um you you can let us know at feedback at mackycub.com if a muffin is a pastry or any other questions or tips you might have that it's good for anything.
Where was that? Feedback at MacGeekGab.com?
That's what I heard, Pete. Feedback at MacGeekGab.com.
I'm hearing some kind of percolation happening.
I'm just going to have to mute myself. I'm right below a drainpipe and apparently someone decided to start taking a shower. So I'll mute when I'm not talking. How does that work?
I like it.
Welcome to Basement Studio.
I want to congratulate Bart Pfeffer, I believe I'm pronouncing that correctly, Bart, and if I'm not, my apologies for winning our OWC giveaway last month in November. Woo-hoo! Congratulations, Bart. And this month's giveaway is copies of Marked 2 from our friend Brett Terpstra. So, yeah, check that out at macgeekup.com slash giveaway. And with that, I think it's time to go back to quick tips, Pete. You got one for us to bring us back into the fold here?
I do. I was racking my brain going crazy, and it's right there in front. It's one of those things that you just should know. So here's one to learn, folks. Just know this. If you need to type to Siri on your Mac, iMac, laptop, Mac Mini, what have you, just tap the command button twice, and it should come right up, and you can type right into Siri. Because I couldn't. I was looking all over for it. I forget how I finally found it, but that's my quick tip.
If you need to type to Siri, hit the command button twice, and you should be in business.
Nice. I like it.
Cool.
I just have to laugh about the—we will stop calling attention to it. Probably once it stops happening, but maybe sooner. All right, you want to take us to the next one, Adam?
What's that, Adam? I blame it on the rain.
Who will stop the rain, though?
Troy has a tip for us, and I'm going to edit this a little bit because it says control panel, but I think this is something different. Hey, do you use the screen mirroring button in the control center on your Mac regularly, or maybe the focus mode or anything else in Control Center. You can easily put these into your menu bar. Just open up Control Center and drag them into the menu bar where you want them.
If you change your mind or just want them available while you're doing something like a presentation and want them out of the menu bar, no problem. Hold the command key down and click and drag them out of the menu bar. yeah thanks for all you guys do you rock well thank you Troy for the tip
I you know I clearly had forgotten that one I have done it though because I have my focus mode in the menu bar here on the iMac in the studio and I'm always frustrated on my Mac mini in the office because i can't find it and now as soon as i read troy's tip i was like oh i know why i can't find it i never put it there so it's there now yeah yeah it's handy it is handy yeah for sure you want to take us to bill pete pete's going to be.
Muted i can do so at this time you have to hit the mute button before you switch off that page to actually read the quick tip
But that's true
Learned another new thing well that's an old thing bill writes in i was using pages tonight and i went to save a document using the save as command the last time i tried it i had to press the option key so the file duplicate duplicate command would change to file save as no more in pages numbers and keynote the save as command is now always present above the duplicate command And Apple finally surrendered to common sense. So we pick a fist shake away from Apple for this one.
That's true. Yeah, that's a negative fist shake. I like it. Yeah. It's good.
Jazz hands.
Jazz hands. You got another one for us, Pete?
Oh, I do, actually. And a quick problem that I had, no matter what I did, the only way you could text me, and I would get the notification that you had texted me, was to either turn off Bluetooth or disconnect my Apple Watch. Because if my Apple Watch was connected, I'd get a little tap, that little haptic tap, and that was the only notice that I got. Well, if you're out moving around, you may not feel that. I was getting hours later finding messages on what's going on.
So I called Apple Support. They tried to tell me, well, you know, you don't want people to be able to see your notifications if you leave your phone on your desk and walk in. I'm like, no, this isn't right. So I reinstalled the operating system. That's what I was all leading up to with this. I really reinstalled iOS on my phone. But I'm like, well, how do I do this? You know, what's it?
That was going to be my question, is how did you reinstall iOS on your phone?
So you plug your phone into, in my case, my MacBook Pro. And when you used to do it, it went up into iTunes. And that's how you back. Well, that's been gone for years. I haven't plugged my phone into a laptop for a decade or more. Sync it. You plug it in. It shows up right there in the sidebar of Finder. and there's a beautiful interface to do all kinds of really cool stuff with your phone including creating a backup which now will load much faster than one over iCloud
Huh yep you're right no idea i yeah if you would i mean now that you say it it makes sense but if you had asked me well i mean clearly i asked you wait how do you do that yeah yeah.
It's also how you it's also how you sync podcast to your 40 gigabyte uh ipod well
That that is true do you still sync podcast to your 40 gigabyte ipod adam.
Uh i didn't but my i gave my old 40 gigabyte ipod to my daughter and she started using it she worked at a job where she wasn't allowed to have her phone or other devices she couldn't have a device with a camera for security reasons because it was a hipaa thing and yeah so she needed something to listen to music and so it's like here you go but
40 gigabytes i mean who would ever need more than say five gigabytes what a waste what
A waste that's right yeah i had 35.
Gigabyte one but it died and then i i you couldn't get replacement drives back in the day now you can now or you could for a while i don't know if you still can get those weird the little tiny i forget what i can't even remember there's a 1.8 inch hard drive i think that apple had in the original yeah
Right it was smaller than right I forgot.
About that. It was a spinning drive, 1.8-inch spinning drive.
You could feel it. You could feel the centrifugal force if you...
Yep.
The point is that your iPods will still work with your current Mac, and you can still sync them and sync photos to them, and you just do it in the finder, just like Pete said. You just... Beautiful. You can find a cable.
Yeah. Right, right, right. Yeah, good luck. Yeah. I still have some 30-pin cables here. uh.
I have one left
Yeah okay yeah yeah yeah.
But i mean we'll need it it's a testament to apple really that like those old ipods will still connect and still sync and
Like that is fantastic my son uses them he uh well he does it a little bit now but he used to be a essentially a counselor counselor at a summer camp and they had a no phones rule and a very tech like limited technology allowance even like for the campers obviously he could have his phone and all that stuff but um it so he would load up iPods are all our old iPods with music that he wanted to play on like a Bluetooth speaker at camp so that he wasn't using his his phone to play to play music so.
It's got my little shuffle here.
Oh, yeah. The nice little button shuffle.
It's just a desk ornament. The problem with this one is I do not have one of the little docks that you need for this. Because these would plug in through the headphone jack. There's no.
Oh, I thought that 30-pin cable worked on those. It doesn't.
That's what that thing is. I have one of those docks. Yeah. I don't know where it is, but I remember seeing it recently being like, what the heck is this again? Yeah, if I can find it, I'll ship it to you. Yeah.
Okay, cool. That's awesome.
You want to take us to our final quick tip here? Final for the week.
Sure, absolutely. Final for this week. This is Kurt. Kurt says, See specific forecasted temperature and precipitation in iPhone weather app. Hey, perhaps you might not have noticed when your cursor enters the graph of today's predicted temperature or precipitation in the Mac version of the weather app, you get a vertical line with a readout of the value of temperature or percentage precipitation.
But did you know that you can get the same functionality in iOS or the iPadOS version of the weather app? Just tap the day you're interested in within the list of upcoming days to get the graphs, then put your finger down and hold it in the graph area. Now, as you slide your finger back and forth, you'll get that line and readout. I find this really helpful, especially in the hourly precipitation amounts graph to find out when the rain is going to really,
when the rain is really going to get serious, rather. For me, it would be snow, but yeah, yeah.
Right, yes, yeah. That's, I, doing it now, as you were saying it, like it makes perfect sense and it works. I don't think I ever knew that that was there, though. So, yeah, yeah. Cool. Yeah, Pete, that shower's still going, huh? You got that?
Oh, I'm sorry, yeah. That's all right. It's actually, it's not a shower. It's my water softener to the side of the cycle.
If I put my finger on Pete and press and scroll, Will I get the precipitation amount?
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BBEdit doesn't just handle text. It masters it. It's like I get to have a Swiss army knife, but for words. And one of the blades is inexplicably a laser. One feature I've been loving, the cheat sheets, whether it's markdown tips, shortcuts, or your personal notes, they're right there at your fingertips. It's like BBEdit whispers, hey, don't get caught Googling basic commands during a live recording.
Yeah, That's good advice, actually. And with ChatGPT worksheets, you can interact with AI directly in BBEdit. Generate content, debug code, or even ask it which pizza topping reigns supreme. I mean, why not? Like, spoiler, it's mushrooms, obviously, AI confirmed. BBEdit is packed with tools to supercharge your productivity. Don't get caught with an editor that only scratches the surface. Head to barebones.com and try BBEdit for yourself today. They've got a great trial period.
Your text and mine deserves BBEdit. Go try it out. You're going to love it. And our thanks to BBEdit and Barebones for sponsoring this episode. All right. I had a conversation with a new listener, Allison, the other day and and from Podfeet. So go check out Nocella Cast, too. And she pointed out something. It related to a conversation we had in episode 1066 about shared family passwords and in iCloud specifically and all that.
And she said, remember that any password that you have stored in Apple passwords and then shared with family or anyone else is only protected by the strength of the worst password of a passcode rather of a phone that anyone in your family owns. Right. So if somebody uses, you know, nine, nine, nine, nine is their phone's passcode. Well, now that's the barrier to entry. Of course, getting the getting that person's phone is also required to get in.
But the point was well taken that like in Allison's example was maybe store your Hulu and Disney Plus passwords there for family, but don't store your bank or health information, at least not shared. And zooming out a little bit, this, of course, is true with any shared password database. The person with the least effective security is the hole into all of those shared passwords.
So it's a good reminder because, like, you know, my wife and I do share bank passwords in a vault that's just for the two of us in one password. and it's like okay yeah i like i trust that her password her password's probably better than mine to be quite candid but uh you know so uh it but it's just good to remember so you know as we start our don't get caught segment for today uh i figured that was a good way to good way to get ourselves into it, Yabble. Very good.
Very good.
You taking us to KiwiGram?
Yeah, we've got that. If I can get to my proper place now, I was trying to look up something because related to KiwiGrams, don't get caught. KiwiGram says, just a PSA for those of us who like the Space Lens feature in Clean My Mac X, I think that's how it was, that the new version that is now just called CleanMyMac version 5 with its fancy new UI does not have the space lens feature where you can visualize what is using your disk space.
Wow, that's good to know because that feature is a feature I love. He said, I spent 20 minutes searching for the feature one day and finally caved in to contacting MacPaw support. They provide 24-hour chat. Yeah, they're a great company. We like them a lot. And they responded with a bit of copy-paste text saying that Space Lens is now on the future development list. I couldn't find any support article that had those specifics.
Although you can still download CleanMyMac 10, I don't think this fits in within a SetApp subscription. I reverted to using Daisy disk which it should be noted and when running the free trial does not provide the hidden space and run as admin features yeah I did not know that clean my Mac had updated of course I have it through setup and it updated itself so I got caught with this one too
It drove me crazy. I was trying to help my daughter while she was home clean up, actually update her computer, and we needed to clean some stuff off. And I'm like, oh, she's got a setup subscription on there, so we'll just download CleanMyMac. And I spent, like, you know, 10, 15 minutes hunting for Space Lens. I'm like, how could this feature not be here anymore? It makes no sense to me.
Gone.
It's gone. It's the feature that I use the most in CleanMyMac. uh so yeah but i went and used daisy disk obviously because i gotta use something yep.
There you go daisy disk is good stuff been using it for years
Yeah so.
But i did like space lens i mean that was kind of cool yeah
But hopefully it's coming back that that i did not know so i was i was glad to see that they at least are saying that it's on the development list so yeah.
Yeah i want to know so what i was wondering is if there was some sort of ui revolution going on there over in the Ukraine for some reason. Cause like they totally went outside the box with this new UI. It's like all pretty and blah, blah, blah. And that's exactly what happened to, um, my spark mail app. Right. We talked about this. Like they went totally non-standard on the UI.
I think clean my Mac was always kind of a little bit non-standard anyway, but like, is there some, is there something happening over there where they were just like rejecting like standard uis and just we're going to do our own thing like there's a artistic revolution or something i don't know
It is pretty but man i'm thinking it's got to be taking some overhead resources although it's minimal by today's standards anymore but yeah yeah i'll give them it's pretty yeah pretty colors yeah
That's interesting yeah i i don't i i don't find the new clean my mac is functional well i mean it it objectively is less functional it doesn't have a feature but uh yeah well hopefully it'll come back but daisy disk is great so there's always alternatives competition woo love that.
Okay should i take us to andrew yes please andrew kind of got caught he nuked and paved his machine and noticed that it took out his web applications and so he just moved them back to where they needed to be and they didn't work and he's wondering why Basically, the web apps that you create in Safari are tied to the system's config files and settings. So just copying them back into the tilde slash applications is not going to automatically make them work.
So the quick and easy way to do that is to grab your previous ones so you know exactly what they're named. Then you open Safari and go to each website you want to restore as a web app. If you don't know what a web app is, let me give you a quick, easy one to do. go to D as in Delta, R as in Romeo, calculators.com, drcalculators.com. A zillion financial calculators there. Go to one of those and then open your Safari menu bar and go to file and add to doc.
And that calculator will now become a web app for you. So that's how web apps work. There's your cool stuff found buried in there today.
It is singular. Dr. Calculator.
DR Calculator.
Not calculators. Oh, did I say calculators?
Yeah, drcalculator.com.
We'll have the right link in the show notes. Yeah, yeah. Yep.
And so anyway, assign the same name, go to your old web app page, assign the same name to it, and then click add to doc. Then go into your tilde slash applications folder.
Tilda slash applications is your applications folder in your home folder for people just to translate that. Yep.
Yeah. Not your applications folder. Not to confuse the two, although it could be done. So then delete all your old web apps from there. Then drag the ones off your dock into there, because that's how you get the new ones into that applications folder, and then drag them back to the dock if you want them on the dock. So they'll be there for you, but to get to them if you want them on the dock.
So you've got to delete the old ones, else when you try to drag the new ones in there, it's going to say, hey, one already exists. What do you want to do? That just gets rid of your confusion right then and there like that. So um i hope that helps andrew uh i i love web web apps
I i um i used to love web apps uh well mac os 15 broke them for yeah certainly for me because i i create web apps for google docs and because of the way we talked about this in a previous episode because the way the scopes work now every google doc that i try to open goes into a web app to google yeah so i'm looking at both with Unite and Confluence from BZG apps to solve that, but I'm not quite there yet, but.
I want to mention, because I do this at work, since you guys mentioned the applications folder in your home folder, I use that on my work computer because we do not have admin access to our machines. And so a lot of apps I can install into my home folder, the way our permissions are set up. I don't know if this would work for everybody. and they will just run because they're running under my user account, not under the main account.
So depending upon the app, I don't think all apps will work like that, but a lot of apps do. That's actually how I have set up on there and all of those just install under your user account. So if you have a locked down Mac where you don't have admin permissions, you can sometimes run apps from that user folder, just drag them in there instead of the main applications folder and they'll run under your user account permissions.
Yep. Smart. Ah, I never, I, that's like, that's like, I never thought of that sort of hack workaround. That's a great idea. Yeah, it's good.
Uh, you want to take one from Gary? Yeah, he has kind of a don't get caught. Uh, PSA. I actually saw this news article and I think I misunderstood it. So I'm glad Gary brought this one up. It is that the FBI is warning iPhone and Android users to stop sending texts. U.S. officials urge citizens to use encrypted messaging. I'm assuming encrypted messaging apps and calls whenever they can.
So I think this is related, you guys told me, and I didn't realize this, to SMS and now RCS, which I think we have support for now, finally?
Sort of. On our iPhones? Some of us do. RCS support is based on the carrier. And many carriers have turned it on. Some have not. Mint Mobile being one who they have to In order for RCS to work the right way, it has to be fundamentally ingrained in the carrier's system. And a lot of carriers had chosen not to do that because you could sort of work around with an app on an Android phone that did the RCS-ish kind of stuff without it actually being RCS.
RCS, the issue, as you're pointing out here, is that neither SMS nor RCS are encrypted at their core. Google's implementation of RCS is encrypted.
Oh, that's why I was confused.
Correct. Yeah, the implementation between like Google phone to Google phone using RCS with an app is encrypted most of the time, as long as you're using the right app that's doing it. But if you're just using RCS through the carrier, which is what iPhones do, that is not encrypted. Apple's talked about we need to add encryption to RCS, yada, yada, yada. I mean, I think if this keeps up and the, and, you know, the FBI and, and, and various lettered agencies start saying, don't use this.
I mean, I think WhatsApp is probably going to become the default here in the U S like it is everywhere else in the, in the world. Most everywhere else.
Yeah. Does Microsoft own WhatsApp? No.
Is it Facebook?
Facebook, that's right.
Or Meta. Yeah, yeah. Meta owns WhatsApp.
Okay.
I knew somebody bought it, but yeah, that was my question to you. You pre-answered it. What do you think will become the default? Will it be WhatsApp? And since the rest of the world's using it, I bet you're right.
Yeah.
Yeah. I mean, there's, you know, there's Signal. Go ahead.
Telegram. I've used Telegram.
Yep.
Yeah. Interestingly, though, things like WhatsApp, great for messaging in the United Arab Emirates, But no phone calls allowed.
Oh, interesting.
You cannot make a voice call in the UAE with WhatsApp. You blocked it.
They can't hear you if you do that.
Cryptid texts are okay and cryptid conversations, not so much.
Yeah. Yeah. My guess is it will be WhatsApp. And we are sort of one of the major countries that's a holdout on this. And it's not like it's a policy. It's just the way things evolved here. We use SMS, RCS now, hopefully. And, you know, iMessage is what our defaults are here. But like when my son was over at Reed, all the kids, he never used iMessage to communicate with anyone on campus. Everyone used WhatsApp. It just was the on-campus default.
Because it was easier to create groups and things like that, right? Correct. That would be my transformation.
And a lot of international students, too. Sure. Right. It was both, but yes, the groups and all of that. He's like, oh yeah, WhatsApp was the, I mean, as soon as you walked on Reed's campus, done. And, you know, my daughter in Italy, she's like the only people I use iMessage to communicate with are you guys. So it's like, yeah, makes sense.
Doesn't it also, does WhatsApp also have the self-destruct message thing too? Like, I think that's a thing. I don't know.
Oh, I don't recall.
Do they have that feature or am I thinking of something else?
I'll look that up when you guys are going.
Yeah, yeah. Next. Yeah. So let us know what you what you what do you currently use for cross platform messaging? Like if you're if you're in a group with Android people, are you just using SMS or RCS, whatever kind of works? Or are you intentionally going somewhere else like WhatsApp or Signal or Telegram or or Slack or, you know, any of those tools, too? I'd be curious. Feedback at MacGeekCab.com. Be good.
Um, on that front, Doug also reminds us that, uh, that he almost got caught during, uh, the Thanksgiving holidays as I visited several people who are on one of my group chats. While there, I decided to rename the group chat. And to my surprise, the name of the group chat changed on everyone's devices, not just mine. He says, I would have thought that naming the group chat is a personal setting and should not impact the other group members.
And he says, I was about to change the name of several of my other group chats with names that would have been very embarrassing when the other group chat members saw the name. Yeah, don't get caught. It is. And that now, with whatever they're doing in iOS 18, the group chats that I have with Android people, even just SMS group chats, are able to be named. And the Android folks see them. And I put an image in, and they see that too.
So, yeah. Yeah. But it is a widespread. It is for everyone in the group. It is one name.
And I think anyone in the group can change it, right? It's not like locked down to the person who created or started the group or anything like that.
Yeah, no, it's just, yeah, it's, you know, if you're in the group, you can change the name. Yes, yes.
Okay. Well, and while you were talking about that, I was able to look it up. Yes, WhatsApp does have an auto-destruct message option called disappearing messages. you just open the chat tap the context name or the three dots to the right select disappearing messages and tap continue and i'm sorry my water softener is getting louder so i'm gonna ride that mute button with like hard
Yep it's all good uh i will take us to cool stuff found uh randy walker in our discord brings us a a timely one called at at festivitas.app of course everything's linked in the show notes at macgeacab.com and this adds Christmas lights that dangle off of your Mac's menu bar and your dock so fun stuff it's available for, I think it's you choose what you want to pay they suggest that you pay I think 4 euro for it but yeah I think you can you can choose to pay more all that good
stuff so yes Festivitas from Simon Stovering so, Uh, fun stuff.
Everybody's getting into the spirit and, uh, here's a side one. Did you know Tesla does that too? You can set your Christmas so that when you turn on your turn signal, you hear jingle bells from the, you know, sleigh bells and that kind of stuff.
Sure. Why not?
I don't have a Tesla. I have a friend who does. And I saw that. I was like, oh, that's pretty cool.
That's cool. Yeah. That's cool.
Very, very cool. Uh, Porthos John has one for us. he has he says i happen to be an au natural kind of guy when i with my iphone me too i go caseless yes
You are you are naked and unafraid adam.
Naked yeah we talked about this on oh yeah that's right uh but he says but i just ordered this new case which isn't really a case i think they've been around for a little while but i'm getting one now and they seem to be well built for what they are with fairly decent protection, and it is the Arc case. And I'm trying to remember what this one looks like.
It's the Arc Pulse.
Oh, sorry, Pulse, yes,
Arc Pulse. I've got it up for people watching. It's the best way I would describe it is it's kind of like a thong for your iPhone. I don't know. It covers...
Again, TMI.
It is the one that I thought.
Yeah, it covers the top. It covers all four corners, but it's like it's almost maybe like a sling is is better and i'm really sorry that i said thong first because now i know what images you have in your heads but that's what this thing is for your phone it just sort of fits over the camera lenses yeah and the edges too the four corners are protected the corner.
It's yeah the corner protection style case yeah it looks like it's metal right is it
Actually metal well yeah i think there's metal ones or rubber ones based on what i'm what I'm seeing here.
It's got like a shock absorber layer I think between the metal and the
Yes yeah yeah yeah it looks like it's yeah there's.
Like a little rubberized or gel yeah thing and then yeah
They call it essentialist design that's pretty cool how much are these things i'm looking here let's say i have an iphone 16 how much is this it's going to be 60 or 70 bucks depending on whether i want the rubber or the um or.
A matte black or silver oh man
Less material more money
Silver sold out oh they have different colors too to match
Uh no oh.
You can just view it
You can view it with your phone's color and they.
Have pro and non-pro
Versions yes yes for sure well because the phones are all different sizes now so.
One different cameras
And different cameras and different colors so yeah yeah although the colors of the case or oh no the um you can for a 16 pro you can get gold and bronze and uh black and silver black yeah for.
A cool 110 benjamins or uh want
George's or for 300 bucks you can get one in titanium onyx black so yeah you got it y'all oh that's like christmas gift yep that's that's the big one.
Yeah so do you get a do you get a like base can you get a base level Apple Apple
Watch for around 300.
350 bucks these
Days yeah so.
You can either get an Apple watch to go with your phone or you know a case
Nice sure why not. Uh elliot tells us about an app called launcher uh he says i accidentally discovered that with this i now have a quick launch toolbar on my iphone's lock screen in addition to all my other icons and he says this is a done by launcher putting a live activity up so they're using the live activity functionality of ios to uh to give you interactive buttons and one of them those buttons can be your um the apps to launch which is pretty darn
cool um and right there on the launch screen it's clever yes clever is the right word yeah yeah yeah i think i have launcher somewhere um I think I've had it in the past, so I got to I got to check that out because that seems interesting. Instead of just having the two buttons that Apple gives us, we get, you know, more. So cool. Yeah. Nice find, Elliot. I like it from Chromulent Labs.
And of course, there's always links in the show notes. And if you go to MacGear.com and sign up for the email newsletter that we send out, it's really your emailed show notes every week. so we take the everything that's in the show notes and we just deliver it to your inbox so you don't even have to come to the website and seek it out we we will bring it to you so yeah.
Uh this one has made the rounds bruce certainly wasn't the only person to send this in it's called mist and it is the mac os installer super tool uh it is a utility that will automatically download firmware and installers for your mac and it just takes the guesswork and the hunting work out of finding the links to you know any version of mac os that's available for download and you can even filter it by what is uh installable on the current machine that you're running on so fun stuff
and then there is also a um mist mist command line tool that will do that from the terminal if you'd rather do it from the terminal instead of from a gui so you can it's free you can install it with homebrew or or you can just download the binary directly so yeah it's nice yeah you're taking us to uh to expenses are we just going to listen to pete's toilet run i i know it's not a toilet i i just i it sounds like.
One it's exactly what it sounds like yes because it's one of those j j drains and i'm sorry everybody thank you for your patience this week
It's fun. I mean, we're having fun with it. I think it's great.
Is that a toilet? What is that?
Sorry, Pete. Bob does have the thing for us and kind of for me because he says, Hey, Adam, I don't have a Vision Pro. It's because I'm the only one on this panel with Vision Pro. But I use an app called Expenses Spending Tracker by Blue Comet Labs. It's a very good basic checkbook-type app that runs on iOS, Mac, and also works on Vision Pro. It has a very limited trial version, but a non-subscription one-time purchase of $10 that works on all these platforms.
The app syncs beautifully across my devices in iCloud. It's super easy to use. I only had an issue getting CSV data from another app to import. I contacted with the developer and was amazed at the quick and thorough response. One day, I never got the CVS import to work, but I'm pretty sure that his response would have helped, I'm assuming, if I was more of a geek. I don't know if this would be any value to you, but for some reason, I felt compelled to let you know. Well, I appreciate it, Bob.
I think I have heard of this and seen this app before i've never personally tried it out but be worth maybe even just checking out to see how it works on the vision pro so thank
You it appears to be in setup adam uh.
Well even better yeah
So uh and i don't know if like the vision pro version is available with setup i'm not i.
Don't know if there's a setup for the vision pro well yeah i've
Found like there are apps you You can install on your iPhone that are in SetApp. And the way it works is you install the app and then you use SetApp on your Mac to...
Like enable your account and then you log into your account and that's how you get access to it i use that with the um uh is it headspace is that the app that no headspace is the meditation that's the meditation app yeah what's the other one that that summarizes book headway summarizes books for me i i like i love it it's great and i they've got a car play thing where it'll read it to me in the car so that's a uh that's a bonus cool stuff found is is headway um i'm loving that so,
um very cool yeah anyway so i'll share that that's that uh yeah i think that's headway makeheadway.com so and it will be in the show notes i promise uh let's see where are we next rn doug in discord tells us about a very cool deal that's happening that we just didn't want to miss that we didn't want you to miss out on and that is that my favorite pdf editor pdf expert is uh right now available on stack social has a lifetime license at 79.99 along with a holiday a 20 coupon
code for another 20% off. So, um, yeah. Yep.
Yeah. That, that plays into the conversation we had either last episode or the episode before about, uh, PDF pen, right. And alternatives since that kind of went upscale.
So, yeah. Uh, hang on. Pete's going to talk.
If you missed this sale and you have access to a dot edu email, uh, it's a 50% off. They're normally $129 lifetime license.
I like that.
Yeah. So for $1.30, it's $70 what it comes down to. So I think it's, yeah, $139.99. So $70 for a .edu if you missed this holiday discount. But I'd go grab that because you don't need a .edu to get this discount.
Oh, it's true. It's true. Good stuff. and the last thing that I have in our cool stuff found is something again that Bruce and many others have sent in and that is the iCloud passwords extension for Firefox, and it is by Apple Inc. So this is not some third party hacked in.
It's first party hacked in. No, it's a Firefox extension from Apple so that you can use your iCloud passwords on that browser which I think is great I am very tempted to migrate myself to Apple passwords but I don't know like it feels like a big move maybe it's not.
Well, I think it is just because there's so many other things that 1Password still does that passwords does not yet. For instance, I store all the IDs with pictures of our driver's licenses and passports and that sort of stuff in 1Password. If you can do it in passwords, I'm not aware of it yet.
I haven't delved that deeply into it. You can do it in notes, though, and make it an encrypted, secure note. So there are – I've had the same thought. Like, there are workarounds. i i don't i'm not sure how i feel about having my passwords locked into apple's ecosystem but of course as i say that i think that's only because dave.
I know you want to get away from apple
Someday right well right you're.
Working that way
But i think that i think it's i think it's a false friction in my head right because i and i think the reason for it is i started with my passwords not in apple's ecosystem because apple didn't have a functionality for that right so it was one password they were the only game in town or at least you know the the the first ones that really did it and.
Then the only secure game in town for a
While and then the only secure game right so like i think i'm i'm just i'm i'm overthinking it so the next time i have free time maybe I'll migrate my passwords over to a Apple password.
You've got to schedule for 2026. I'm sure.
I had to just check. Cause I wasn't sure if it did a one-time passcodes, but it looks like it does. So that's a key feature for me. Like it has to have that password manager these days. It also, of course looks like it supports pass keys. Oh, I know it supports pass keys. So obviously.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So yeah, it's, interesting. I need to really think through all the devices that I would want that on and am I limiting myself? Do I use my passwords on the old iPads that I use for gigs that don't have Apple passwords because they can't run latest versions of iPad OS and I do use one password on those? How often does that even come up is it relevant like i these are the things i i just need to well.
And you're gonna have your phone with you if you need that password
Exactly so exactly yeah i just need to i will start today i am committing to start today to be aware of where i'm using passwords and could apple passwords work just as well here if so maybe by the time my one password subscription in in july comes around maybe i won't renew the family subscription there i don't know i probably will it's just let's just be honest about that it's my security blanket guys same yeah, All right. Should we? We've got time.
We've got time for some questions. Yeah.
We blew through all that stuff. I'm proud of us. Look at us go. Boom. You know what it is, Adam?
It's that Pete keeps muting himself,
So we're not getting off track. Maybe.
There you go. Sand now it comes out.
What's interesting is the way the gating and noise processing and all that stuff works, when you're talking pete it is it's it's there but it is less present than when you are not talking but unmuted it it and i and it's because there's like some compression and so it brings up that low level whereas otherwise it's really not as loud as it actually sounds when you're not talking so yeah anyway we could tune the compression to fix that by uh well we would
we would tune the noise gate slash expander to raise its level and then and then that wouldn't feed the compressor your data which would then bring the level up so yeah.
And i needed a phillips screwdriver to turn the process off and i just don't happen to have one here in the basement it's up in the garage and i tried to get it during the ad but uh it just mutes just easier to ride today
That's it that's all right it's all good it's all good it makes it fun uh randy walker asks is there a way to sync mail accounts and settings across macOS, iOS, iPadOS, so I don't have to type the same IMAP and SMTP settings multiple times for each device. Adam, do you have any thoughts? I have thoughts on this, but I'm happy to defer.
Syncing mail for any device? What's the mail app? Sorry, what was the mail app?
Well, that's it. Is he using mail? Apple mail. Can he sync his settings so that he puts them in on his Mac once, and then they just work on his iPhone and iPad and all that good stuff?
I mean, yeah. I mean, am I losing the track here? I use iCloud syncing for that, which I think syncs everything.
I have used that, too. Yeah, if you go to system settings, your name, iCloud, and then enable mail there for syncing, I think that's what does it. it might or is it in iCloud Drive? I can't remember which switch it is because I don't want to turn it off.
Right. No, I'm pretty sure it's in mail settings, but I'm just wondering does it do something weird that I don't remember? I mean, I just have all my mail accounts set up on all my devices, so I did it so long ago that I don't I don't remember if there was any trick or like, I think it just works. I think you just turn it on and it should just sync everything. Yeah. I don't want to be misremembering, I guess.
No, it, it, it would appear in, um, settings, internet accounts, at least on the Mac. Right. That's, that's where that shows up.
Correct. Yeah.
Um, what I will say though, is if you go into settings, iCloud, there is an iCloud mail setting.
that one you don't need to have on that's whether your iCloud mail account itself is enabled in mail so if you're using something else and you're not using your iCloud mail you can have that off but if you go in to look at all of the apps using iCloud that's where you want mail to be on because that's the settings sync not just enabling your iCloud mail account on that device am I does that make sense what i'm saying i hope i.
Think so yeah yeah
That's that's the trick there so hopefully that helps it is it is something that's doable but i have seen it where i have all those things on and one account just doesn't sink there doesn't seem to be a way to say hey you know go try this again so yeah yep there it is uh kershin asks another mail related question i'm not sure we'll have an answer but we will try my partner has an issue with mac os mail on her m2 mac mini running mac os 15.1.1 so current as of the time that
the note was sent She receives a newsletter and has made the origin email address a VIP. An email from this address consequently shows up in the VIP smart mailbox. OK, however, even when the current edition has been read, there's an indicated unread count on the badge kind of of that mailbox for the newsletter. And she has searched in mail and did not find any newsletter messages which were unread.
We've tried removing and re-adding VIP status for that origin email address on both her iPhone and Mac Mini, and still the unread count of two shows up on her Mac when the newsletter email address is a VIP. Her iPhone does not show any unread count for the newsletter email erroneously.
i've tried using onyx for mac os 15 and ran the onyx maintenance rebuilding spotlight index and males mailboxes but that did not resolve the issue and the unread count still shows on her mac head scratchingly yours kershyn you got any thoughts adam, i
Think that might be a stump the geek
Um yeah i i i have i i've seen similar things with apple mail i don't know that i've seen exactly this right but i've seen it where mails will badge a mailbox erroneously and it's like why is that there and you know i the first thing i do is i go In this case, it would be the VIP mailbox, and I do a select all, and I mark all as unread, and then mark all as read. So turn it off, turn it on again. Clearly, I think it's safe to assume that this is a problem with that instance of mail on that Mac.
Like if you set up another user account and set it up the same way, I would assume that this problem wouldn't happen. There's just something in mail's database that ain't right.
right yeah um i would also onyx's default when cleaning things up is to rebuild the mailboxes in mail and that's fine however there is an alternative option in onyx to delete the existing index and what that will do is let mail itself rebuild them from scratch including the database files themselves so in this case if the select all you know unread red thing doesn't do it i would try deleting the index just because i mean it's not going to hurt, and then the other place i would look is contacts.
Contacts is weird um i always notice no matter how fast my mac is how new it is if i go make an edit to a contact that's synced to iCloud my core my CPU cores like run at full tilt for a little while it seems like it's way too ingrained in the system like.
It's rewriting the whole thing
Yeah and and so I would go and look clearly in order to set it as a VIP I'm assuming you've added it as a contact I would look at that contact record see if there's another email address attached to it so it's not just that one email is there another email or something and maybe delete that contact, then re-add it and then add it as a VIP. Maybe that's part of this. I don't know.
Does Apple Mail do anything specific when you force like a synchronize, like right-click on a mailbox and then choose the synchronize option?
I think...
Like, is that worth trying?
Isn't that called rebuild? Is there a synchronize option?
Yeah, when I right-click on a mailbox, I get synchronize the mailbox name, take it offline. I can also edit it. um and then there's the handy you know get account info which will show you how much storage is in each box and how many messages are in each each box and all that stuff and how close to your quota limit stuff you are uh but yeah no i only just see synchronize i don't know that they have a rebuild is under the mailbox i was gonna say very bottom that's right and
Rebuild on an imap mailbox i don't know what it would do on a on like the vip mailbox it might not even be an option but on an imap mailbox rebuild will wipe out the local copy and re-download the contents from the server so.
Oh yeah the vip yeah i get a rebuild option under the under the menu for a vip box oh
Well then that would i i like that option that's that's something i would do yep.
You do not have the synchronize option with a vip box though but you do have a rebuild so oh
Yeah i I would rebuild that right away. That might go to the top of my list. Nice find. Yeah. Interesting. Interesting. Uh, Scott has a question also about mail.
Is it about mail?
It is.
It's a mail kind of day.
So mail is a problem here. Just delete mail and go to Thunderbird and you'll be fine.
I mean, you'll be different. I'm not sure.
There you go. Well, fair enough.
Yeah. As someone who's been living in Thunderbird and not mail for what, several years now, um, or well over a year, I would say, uh, it's, it's fine. It's fine. It's not. You trade one set of issues for another. It's fine.
Or you could delete your mail application and get a pen and paper and some stamps and use USPS.
That sounds great. And you can mark those as red.
So if you have a question for the show, put it in an envelope and put a self-addressed stamped envelope with your return address inside it. And mail it to feedback at MacGeekup.com. Yeah.
Write it on the back of a hundred dollar bill though.
That's right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's right. Yeah. Yeah. We take all requests on a hundred dollar bills. That's right.
On American currency. Yeah.
That's right. I don't know. I mean, I can exchange currency. It's really not that big of a deal. It's, you know, there's a, there's a cost involved, but you know, if it's a net positive, it's fine. Right.
Oh, and on that tip too, if you're, you know, British post, if appropriate, or Australian post, or insert your favorite international post-it system.
You could even FedEx it to us. I don't know. Just an idea.
Keep those cards and letters coming.
All right, but what's Scott dealing with?
Oh, yeah, Scott. Sorry. Right. So Scott says, my 2020 Mac Mini M1 and iPhone 13 are up to date on their respective operating systems. However, when I execute a search in mail, the yield of results on my Mac far exceeds those on my iPhone. And I'm curious as to why. Is it a syncing issue, an iCloud issue, or something completely different? Adam, you got thoughts on this?
Searching for mail yields different results on my Mac versus my iPhone. I think I mean correct me if I'm wrong maybe I'm wrong I thought search would only search locally will it actually go in an IMAP account and search like stuff that hasn't been like pulled down
Uh, yes, it does on my, on my iPhone, it, it will, and on my Mac as well. Yeah. I, I, I, I think that's a fair yes to say. Yeah.
Okay.
So if they're sitting there next to each other, your phone and your Mac and you pulled up the inbox, say for your main mail account, shouldn't they be the same?
Yeah, that's Scott's point. So why are they different? Yeah, I mean, that's the only thing I can think of is something that's not synced where your Mac has synced to the mail and your iPhone hasn't. So either the index or whatever doesn't have the same content. I'd be curious to know, I'm assuming the messages that he's looking there, if he just went to that wherever they were stored, whatever box they're in, and just checked them that they're both on both devices, right?
Yep.
So you would think in theory, the same search would then find those messages. So no, man, this is a stumper for me. I'm not a huge, knock on wood, I get these kinds of questions all the time about all these mail issues. I don't often have these same mail issues that people, I don't know how I'm immune, but.
I've seen this on my iphone searching for stuff and i i think it's, searching in mail on the iphone is weird because it tries to help me too much um right you know and so it's i mean you want to make sure that you're searching all mailboxes and not current mailbox assuming that's what you want to do if you want to search your entirety of your mail store but um it does say like i just searched for messages from mint mobile right and i've been with them for four years in fact
they just sent me my you know four-year mintiversary note or whatever nice yeah yeah um. I look and I've got several pages of email from them. I'm looking at my iPhone at the bottom. So, you know, and the oldest email, this is sorted by date. The oldest email that it's finding is from 2019. And it says some, oh, it said some results may not appear. Mail downloads and organizes messages when iPhone is locked, charging and connected to Wi-Fi. Large accounts like this one might take longer.
And when you heard me say, oh, what was happening is more messages were coming in and I couldn't read the thing at the bottom because the list got longer. So it is as I'm sitting here actively kind of parsing through whatever mailboxes on the server it hadn't yet parsed through. so i i think that's part of this is yeah yeah let it sit longer maybe i i don't i don't know yeah.
Yeah it's funny because when searching for contacts and mail and all that stuff i have to default to just using on my ios devices the spotlight search and not like the individual search within the app interesting i don't know if it yields different results or or what have you but oh
Look at that i yeah oh this is kind of a mess um.
It is i mean you have to go in and manage you can go in and turn on and off in your ios settings like things that it searches tell what it tell and if you leave it on defaults it's it's worthless because there's just like too much there's so many things yeah i've filtered down and then we're gonna organized in order you can And I also, I think, changed the order from what I remember so that, you know, if you're often more searching for contacts or mail or you want the Safari items
up higher and stuff like that, or you used to be able to do that. I don't know if you still can.
Right.
Since they redid some of the settings stuff.
Right, right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Well, and just, Dave, I have to mention it just because you, and I think, I don't know if I mentioned this once before or not, but you mentioned Mint Mobile. And I was in BJ's and they're guys standing there trying to sell, you know, new cell phone plans to you as you're walking by. Hi, can I ask you what carrier you have? See, I got Mint Mobile. Oh, have a nice day.
Yeah. Oh, yeah.
They don't even try.
No. It's like, oh, yeah.
We can't beat that.
But, like, you know, Mint still hasn't added support for RCS, although maybe if the FBI keeps up their stuff, it won't matter. And also, you can't add an Apple Watch to a Mint plan. So, if you have Mint for your phone, you will never have an Apple Watch on cellular.
Right.
Correct. Yeah. Yeah. So, that's.
You know, there are limitations.
That's why I have a Wi-Fi Apple Watch. Yeah, there are limitations. I think the iPad as well. I don't think you can put an iPad on mobile cellular unless they've changed recently.
No, I think you're right. But you could put your iPad on a different carrier and still have it as part of your iCloud ID. With a watch, the only carrier you can put your watch on is the same carrier that the phone is paired to. And by the way, your Ultra is a cellular-capable watch.
Oh, that's right. Yeah, the Ultras are automatically that way.
You just can't use that feature.
And then my workaround is I just tether a Wi-Fi iPad to my cellular, and there you go. Now I've got a cellular iPad.
Yes, exactly.
Go ahead, Adam. Remind me who the underlying carriers for Mint are. Is it still T-Mobile and AT&T?
It's T-Mobile. Pure T-Mobile. Well, it will it will roam onto other carriers in those areas where it's necessary. And roaming is the wrong word because you don't have to turn on roaming to do it.
But but I ask because I'm kind of locked into Verizon here where I live because there is no other carrier.
Towers basically oh out.
Here in the middle of nowhere and my town area too so yeah because i had t-mobile and i i loved them uh but when i moved here i had to switch and i also had atmt at one point and still that was no good or from what i understand isn't great here
Either so there are it would.
Be like visible i
Think visible would be one um boom mobile is another one that's kind of you know mvno for verizon and if i forget who you have for your um home internet but if you have i have.
A local telco
Got it okay if you have xfinity for your home internet you can get xfinity mobile which also is an mvno of verizon yeah yeah but yeah you're right i was visible is the is kind of the one and.
I think they're owned by
Verizon they are it's just like well it's just like Mint Mobile is now owned by T-Mobile, right?
Oh, they are. Yeah.
In fact, I get a bill that says your T-Mobile bill has been paid when it comes up. The other cool thing about that, and I think I told you everybody before, when I used to go to Hawaii, my Mint Mobile would work. When I would go to Alaska, it would not work. It wouldn't even roam. I couldn't get nothing.
And I happened to land in Anchorage the day that T-Mobile officially took over Mint Mobile, forgot, turned on my phone, and it worked and i went oh yeah it's not supposed to work but now it's working so it works in alaska now nice when it didn't used to before so that's one of the nice benefits of yeah yeah
Yeah there have been a couple of nice little benefits and no drawbacks yet that i've seen um for the move for the acquisition yeah.
And i've actually found on my last two international trips i just bit the bullet and bought the t-mobile minter national pass and and man it was great and i never used all the data and it did the phone just worked as if i was home so yeah nice
Nice that's great.
A little more expensive, but not much than, you know, than the, I forget the name of the device now that I was using on my little Wi-Fi device. So, oh, it kicked off. Woo-hoo, victory. Now we can end the show. My water softer stopped.
Nice.
Nice. All right. I have one last thing, and I think we have time to talk through it. Yep. Yeah, this is fun. So Father John wrote in, and I'll share Father John's question as verbatim as makes sense here. Hi, guys. A long time ago in a galaxy far, far, far away, I used Windows 98. Mea culpa. There was and still is a printer program called FinePrint. It would configure the printer to print out booklets.
I just had to set it up once, and when I ran it, it asked for the file to print PDFs, TXR, doc, whatever, and then TXT, I'm guessing that's what it was, but maybe TXR, it's a format I don't know. Anyway, it then printed in booklet form. I have searched for a way to do this on the Mac and have not been able to do it. I know I can create a booklet in pages to print, but is there any way to print an existing multi-page PDF as a booklet?
Please, please help. So this is one of those questions that would almost never make it to the show because it's so specific and and not really relevant to most of us right like printing booklets is a very specific thing and and and then also wanting to print them from a pdf like it's a very very niche thing in fact father john you might be the only listener that wants to do this so i would never make it to the show but we like to help and so if i have an answer if any of us have
an answer we will send it to you you know via email, Or maybe now with the new policy via, you know, smoke signals or snail mail or something.
But a hundred dollar bills,
A hundred dollar bills. There you go. However, I thought I don't have an answer for this. Like, I don't do this because, as we've just pointed out, Father John is is unique in this way. He's the only one in the Mac Geek app community that does it. Go with me, folks. Just bear with me. And so I thought, well, I could research this or I could take Father John's message verbatim, paste it into ChatGPT and see what it says.
And sure enough, it says you can absolutely print a multi-page PDF as a booklet. And it gave me several options. One was using free software, Adobe Acrobat Reader DC.
When you choose file print there in the dialogue in the page sizing and handling there is a booklet option and there's even booklet subset options there's another app called cheap imposter that is a mac app designed for creating booklets and then it acknowledges that the built-in tools in like preview are limited functionality but you could do two-sided printing and that whole thing and print a booklet that way and then if you can virtualize windows you could still use fine
print on that so those are the options i came up with which is much better than the options i could come up with because i don't know the answer so it's just one of those things where um chat gpt can help now i have not vetted any of those answers it could be you know i've said it before Or ChatGPT is like Dunning-Kruger. At your own risk. Well, it's like Dunning-Kruger in software. It is strong and wrong. It'll be super confident until you tell it, I can't do that.
It'll be like, of course you can't do that. That option doesn't exist. It's like, yeah. So I just wanted to share this as kind of a, you know, here's one thing that we can use these LLMs for. I was talking with a friend this week. And he says his favorite question to ask chat GPT is, are you sure? And every time it says, you are smart to question my judgment. I have researched this and yada, yada, yada gone on.
So now that's what the new model, the old one model is supposed to do is it's supposed to get an answer and then confirm that it's correct before it delivers it to you. It takes a little longer and you have it with a chat GPT account. You have limited like like slots to use that. But but it does kind of in theory go a step beyond.
So chat GPT will punk you in a heartbeat.
Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. You got to confirm that what it's saying is correct. Absolutely. But, you know, it gives you a starting point, right? OK, acrobat reader, cheap imposter. OK, great. Now I know what to look at to see if it's going to do what I want to do.
Now, Dave, I did something weirder and more old school. I decided, because I don't do booklets at all either, and I said, I wonder what the App Store would say. So I just searched for booklets on the App Store, and there was an app called Create Booklet 2. It's $20 on the App Store. It has 164 ratings with a 4.6 star rating review. So again, I've never tried this. I just pulled it up in the Mac App Store.
Sure.
But it does have some good reviews. It looks like it would do what you want it to do. It also says, CreateBooklet has been the most used Mac Booklet solution for the last 10 years. So it sounds like it's been around for a while.
You went to the App Store instead of searching chat.
Well, and then my favorite part of their marketing thing, too, was, let me see if I can find it. Never created a booklet before? No problem. It will guide you through the process. Help setting up your printer, and then it's a single click for your booklet. Nothing can go wrong, according to them.
Oh, boy.
So I don't know, maybe there is people out in our audience that have used this. If this has been around this long, you know, it's possible someone could vouch for this. So it looks, I mean, it looks nice. It's the Mac App Store. That's awesome.
Nothing can go wrong.
Just throw your 20 bucks at it and see.
I mean, I think that's the title of the episode, Nothing Can Go Wrong. I'm certain of that. Now, I was going to come up with a title that had something to do with Pete's water issues.
And because I created an image for the title that has one of the three nerds sort of suffering from toilet overload even though i of course your problem has nothing to do with the toilet pete i can't help myself so uh but fair enough nothing can go wrong fits this image to a tee that's right perfect yeah yeah so that is uh that is what we will do so yeah.
If we can all sit here in silence for the next 10 minutes we'll get the uh the tornado siren from adam so just you know i have
To go before then this time
I think we're.
Going to spare everybody
That we'll spare you all that yes thank you for hanging out with us thank you for sending in all your questions and quick tips and cool stuff found and uh yeah it it means the world to us to be able to uh to do this every week and and that's thanks to all of you so um and thanks to cashfly for providing providing all the bandwidth to get the show from us to you and And don't forget, MattGeekUp.com slash giveaway. Many, many copies of Marked 2. So go check that out.
Go check out Adam's new show, new-ish show. It's been around for a while now. Months. Month. Right?
Yeah. Yeah. We just released our third episode of the Debut Film Podcast. And you can get that on your favorite podcast app. And we're doing Sam Rockwell and Sam. Surprisingly, his first movie is one of my favorite movies, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles from 1990. Wow. So that was a fun episode. I enjoyed doing that.
Cool.
Yeah.
Fun. All right. Check out Pete's show, So There I Was, Great Aviation Tales, for sure. And then, go ahead.
Vietnam vet the last two weeks with some amazing tales of buffoonery, bravery, all of good stuff. Awesome. We're having a ball with this, too. Yeah.
Awesome. so blessed I'm trying to think, last week when this comes out, we had Parthenon Huxley on Gig Gab, he is the guy who plays the role of Jeff Lynn in the ELO part two, the orchestra band with other members of ELO and other folks really fascinating episode, he even wrote us a little theme song on Gig Gab right at kind of impromptu at the end, so it was a fun little conversation Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yeah, it was cool.
So check out GeekGab. Check out Business Brain. Thanks for hanging out with us. Thank you for everything you do. Thanks for simply listening. Don't forget about those reviews. MacGeekGab.com slash reviews. We love them. And share the show. Share the show. Share the show. I want to know if you're still listening. Send us a note. Where, if you listen to MacGeekGab habitually, tell us where and when you listen every week or whatever your schedule is. I want to know. I want to know.
Adam, do you have any advice to share before we let everybody go?
Yeah. Your toilet is running. Don't get caught.
Made up. Can we hear it one more time, Pete, before we...
It's stopped.
It's done. It's stopped.
Stopped.
Later.