It's time for Mac Geek Cab and listener Jim brings us our quick tip of the week. In any browser, you can drag an image from a website over the new tab button to load that image in a new tab. This works with hyperlinks too. This approach is helpful when a web page takes over the contextual menu to prevent the browser's open image in new tab from showing. For hyperlinks, you can also shift-click to open in a new tab or command-click to open in a new background tab.
Lots of quick tips sort of baked into one. More like this, plus your questions answered today on MacGeekGab 1039 for Monday, May 27th, National Sunscreen Day, also Memorial Day here in the United States, 2024. Music. Greetings, folks, and welcome to MacGeekGab, the show where you send in quick tips just like that one. You send your, easy for me to say, you send in your questions. We try to answer them. We try to even speak while we're doing that.
And uh you send in cool stuff found we provide some cool stuff found too we do this uh a because we love it uh we love it we know you love it that's why we're all here and b so that uh hopefully every time we get together we can each learn at least five new things sponsors for this episode include ecam.live we're using promo code mac geek gab at checkout gets you one month free and fastmail.com slash mgg where you can go to get uh you get it free for 30 days and then 10
off your first year of the email provider that i use for my uh my main inbox so we'll talk more about both of those in a little bit and for now here in durham new hampshire where it finally has started to feel like summer i think we skipped spring i'm dave hamilton and here on the winds swept plains in South Dakota. I'm Adam Christensen. It's windy. Oh, there you go. Thanks. Not windy here, finally, for once. And also in southeast New Hampshire, Pilot Pete. Good to be back with you, gents.
Making this a regular thing. This is cool. Yeah, the three of us. Two weeks in a row. What are the odds? What are the odds? Well, somebody could calculate those. Maybe we could even just feed ChatGPT with the URLs to all the recent episodes, and it could figure out the percentages.
Messages uh for us which would be i think it actually probably would right like probably could because we do list the uh like the you know who was yeah in attendance who's here and who's not yeah yeah present account well i'm glad all of you listening are in it then it's that that's what chat gpt doesn't know quite frankly we don't know either we don't track you in any way so i mean we We do count when people download the show, but we don't know. That's it?
Yeah, that's it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But we're glad you're here. We are glad you're here. Absolutely. Because if you weren't here, we wouldn't be here. Yeah, I mean, I'd still want to have all these conversations, but we probably wouldn't. Wouldn't be as regular. If no one else is listening, it wouldn't be as regular. No, you're right about that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You give us purpose. Purpose? Purpose, yeah. Sorry. The Rocky Horror thing in my brain.
State lines and porpoises. State lines and porpoises. Yeah, if there was ever a flipper, what's that? Some quick tips. Oh, yeah. You want to do more quick tips? I do. I got one. Yeah, let's do. You got one for us? Yeah.
Yeah. Mark says, I can't count the number of times I've used preview and a large subset of that use was to rotate a pdf or photo the little box with the curved arrow above it in the toolbar will rotate the file to the left i just clicked it three times if i needed to rotate it to the right, so going around the horn today i found out though that you can hold the option key down and when you do that the arrow moves and will rotate the file to the right amazing
yep yeah they will do that are you kidding me i went and looked at that i'm like son of a bad word he's right you didn't know that it works in photos too wait what fyi oh okay i bet it works in all kinds of different apps, yeah the other thing the other yeah the other thing i'll add is if you use a trackpad too you can do the whole rotate gesture if you haven't disabled that in settings but yeah yeah interesting Yeah, I've done that before. You just use your two fingers and twist it.
I've done that before accidentally at times, but...
Yeah. But yeah. Huh. Yeah. That's crazy all right i was just looking in i was looking on my iphone because you know you can go into it's weird you go edit on a photo and then you get to crop which crop also has like the rotate, arrows on it but it doesn't say crop and rotate but you go to go to that and then you get the little rotate thing at the top of the screen which also goes left there's no like if you press and hold on it it doesn't go right like on the iphone from what
i found you have to go the three times three three lefts do make a right in doing it it's yeah i don't yeah maybe someone doesn't know the trick on on ios but yeah this is definitely a mac tip yeah right right right yeah yeah man like a caveman having to click three times on the phone i've always clicked three times in in preview so thank you but i do think if you have i'm pretty sure if you have a magic keyboard or a keyboard and an iPad, it will work.
And probably if you Bluetooth connected a keyboard to your iPhone, which you can do also, you can do it too on your iPhone. If you really want it to, I've never had much need to connect a Bluetooth keyboard to my iPhone, but you could do it. My guess is you could also USB-C a keyboard to your iPhone if you so desire. That's true.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Huh. I love, I know I love having conversations like this and I love, I love sharing conversations like this because we're, I mean, you brought it up as sort of in a, uh, an absurd extension to the thing we were talking about. And that makes perfect sense. But there's like one person out there who needs to do something like that. And that's going to stick in their brain. And it's like, Oh my God, I never thought about this.
And so like, yeah, that's one of the things I love about doing this show is, is that there's enough of us in the Mac ecap family here that, That the things that are sort of the the extreme logical extensions of a discussion actually are relevant to, you know, a percentage of us. Fair enough. So, yeah, Brian8944 in the Discord chat at live.macgeekout.com said, so many things I learn about the option key listening to this show. It's true.
Try the option key, folks. Like, yeah. That key is everywhere. Everywhere. Yeah. It seems more useful than the control and command keys put together. I swear to God. Not that those aren't useful. You need them. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But the option key does so many cool things. I agree. Yeah. Just go into an app, hold down the option key, and look at every menu and, you know, option on option and see what changes. Yeah. Is a great way to learn. And then command option.
Yeah. Control option and see it change there, too. Love it. Just play with it. Love it. All right. You want to take us to Daoud? I do, because here's the cool thing that I found out. Well, a couple of cool things. So Daoud is from NorCal, and so I'm going to throw some aviation trivia in there, everybody.
Buddy so when you're going into oakland san francisco area you talk to norcal approach because that's northern california when you're going into la or ontario you talk to socal approach southern california so that's what norcal and socal is for those who aren't aware but daoud from norcal writes in and says i wanted to share a quick tip about quickly switching apps on any apple device with a home bar i've tested this on the iphone and ipad instead
of lifting up on the home bar until it shows your recent apps and then going back through them you can just drag the home bar to the right to go back to your most recent app or you can swipe back a few apps until the one you get to the one you were looking for and now it will be the most recent app but not all the apps you swiped between it and the one you started from this is made switching back and forth.
Even when you don't have the the arrow in the top left corner pointing to safari or mail or whatever previous app you were in in the top left corner makes it switching back and forth a whole lot easier and my response to diode was whoa i didn't even know what a home bar was it's that little white bar at the bottom of your iphone screen it's about an inch long when you're in an app It's not there in your home screen,
but when you have an app up and there's a little white bar at the bottom, that's your home bar. It's not your home boy, that's your home bar. Well, and like we're, we're also used to using it because we don't think about it this way necessarily, but it is up until I get all my apps. It is the thing that you swipe up on, even though like we probably don't think of it that way.
But apple thinks of it that way when we're swiping up from the bottom we're actually swiping up on that home bar right and and so that's the it so it does other things but yes just swiping to the the left or well swiping to the right or to the left depending the one thing yeah well the one thing that gets weird is apple's decision as to when it reorders the apps is something that's a little wonky. Yeah. I think if you, if you wait too, if you go back, let's say you have five
apps and you go back three apps right away, that becomes app number one, most recent one. Right. Yeah. Right. But, but if you go, if you go one and then you go two and you wait too long and you go three, it doesn't reorder. It's weird. So yeah, it's, uh, But here's how bad it was. I had to Google Home Bar in iOS. I had no idea what the Home Bar was. You didn't know what it was called? No. That's fair. Yeah, of course. What's the Home Bar? Yeah, what did he install on his phone?
Do you know why it's called the Home Bar? Well, it used to be a home button down there. Right, exactly. So when they replaced the home button, they needed a visual, some sort of visual indication of, like, how do you get home? How do you do the home button?
Things and so they added our home bar huh it just became a natural thing in using ios because ios is most of the time really intuitive it is never knew what to call it you know we complain about the nitpicks of of like you know the timing of the reordering of apps for example but yeah ios is insanely intuitive yeah yeah if you think not hand an ipad to an 18 month old.
I remember when i i'm sure i've told this story on the show before uh we had, a review imac from the elo touch folks so it was a touch screen imac like a bondi blue imac that was that was retrofitted to be touchscreen and it was sent to us uh to test it out and either they never wanted it back or it took them a long time to want it back or whatever so it wound up uh we We wound up kind of putting it in our daughter's room when she was, yeah, like 18 months old, maybe two. I don't know.
And I remember maybe a little older, maybe two and a half. And I remember one day, you know, we set up some games for her on it or whatever, and it was fine. Like, it worked great. And one day she came and she's like, Daddy, I need help with something on my computer. I don't quite understand because I can't read what it's asking me. My differential calculus is getting stuck. Exactly. She's like, yeah, I need you to tell me what the words say.
And I was like, okay. And I realized that she was about halfway through installing Acrobat Reader, which is what we used to use to read PDFs before Preview was there. I guess you still could. And I was like, wait, how did you get, like, what, how did you get here? Like, it was fine. You know, she wasn't, it wasn't. I was I was more impressed than anything else. And I realized, oh, wow, even without being able to read, she knew to click on the yes button because that one was the you know,
in in standard dialogues. That's the one that's highlighted. So she got herself to a point where she could read. And then I think the EULA came up and that did not have a default yes or no on it. So she was like, I don't know what to do here because, you know, she couldn't actually read.
Read and it was like man look how to your point look how intuitive this stuff is it's fascinating, that's awesome yeah yeah it really it was you know it was like we all knew it that it was intuitive but to see it in action like wow somebody that can't read was able to get this far on this that's pretty cool yeah yeah i had a guy actually uh call me a couple weeks ago wasn't there and then i got a text message from about a half hour
later he goes oh uh sorry that was my grandson playing with my phone. Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Uh, and, and, and, you know, the story about Woz with his, his, his favorite prank calls. Oh, so Woz has always been a Steve Wozniak co-founder of Apple computer, just in case there's anybody who doesn't know it. There are people, kids ask your parents about Woz. Um, but Woz has always enjoyed repeating numbers, patterns, things like that. Right. It's just like, it's a thing. So fine. Fine.
When it became possible to get an 888 number instead of just an 800 number, like when 888 was approved as the area code here in the United States for toll-free numbers, Waz immediately signed up for one and got 888, 888, 888, 888, all eights, because he was like, this would be amazing to have this thing. And was nowadays was is a little more difficult to reach but really not that difficult to reach but.
For a long period of time if you called him or emailed him he would answer his phone or reply to your email uh it got to a point where that was sort of impacting his quality of life and and janet his current wife no janet really kind of took over sort of managing that part of it for him because he's just such a warm kind guy and and it it wound up taking no one individually that i know of was taking advantage of.
Him but en masse this wound up sort of dominating his life so but anyway this was back before that had happened and so you know he would always answer the phone when it rang and he had it going to his main phone whether that was a cell phone at the time i i can't remember the timing of things but it was like the phone that was would answer so anybody who dialed 888 or all eights would you know would get wise and uh he started getting a lot of prank calls on this number and would listen
and finally realized and he thought it was the coolest thing but eventually he had to stop uh using it but babies were making their first prank phone calls to waz because they would pick up the phone and just start hitting numbers and until you know like they keep hitting the eight they didn't only hit it 10 times like they did it right you know until was started talking and then they'd be like oh hey you know but but it wasn't until he heard like you know
the the voices of parental figures in the background say hey what are you doing with the phone was loved it but it it got it that that got a little disruptive for him to have You know, prank calls from babies. Funny. Yep. Yep. So, yeah. Yeah. So, anyway. Memory lane. I... PC Unix has our next quick tip. He says, I was being driven crazy. My Apple Pencil was erratic, sometimes not working, sometimes working. I tried rebooting. I tried repairing. I did a forced restart.
Nothing helped. Then I used messages to contact Apple support. Great way to contact Apple support, by the way. They asked, is the tip of your Apple Pencil loose? By gosh, he says it was. He says, all I had to do was tighten it and everything was fine again. This was in our discord at MacGeekUp.com slash discord. And Robster replied, he says, I had the exact same problem with the previous Apple Pencil.
It was working fine for a long time, then just stopped, even though it was still charging. Okay. Took it into an Apple store on a whim with my iPad and their pencil worked fine, but on my iPad, but my pencil did not work on theirs. Then the genius looked really closely and says, it looks like there's a small crack in the tip.
Swap the tip from the apple store pencil and all burst to life so yeah there you go uh randy walker says he visits fidgets with his a lot and is screwing and unscrewing it constantly yeah yeah it can cause this yeah yeah and then the genius sold him a four pack for twenty dollars is that how much that is yes yeah they're about five bucks a piece unless you go to the link in our show notes where Where you can get four for just over $6. Oh, I see a link in the show notes.
Oh, yes, a four-pack is $6.99. A two-pack is $4.59. So, yeah, there you go. It's slightly cheaper than five bucks a pop. And anybody who's had an Apple Pencil and dropped it has gone, oh, son of a bad word. They do give you one originally, or they did. They do give you a spare. That's true. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I've never replaced mine. Yeah, yeah, interesting. Oh, I'm sorry. $7 seems like a right place. A little more reasonable.
Yeah, a little more reasonable. $20 for just the tip is too much, I would think. Well, you get four. Okay. But still five bucks a pop. Yeah. I know, just the tip. You want to take us to Grumpy there, Adam? Yeah, let's move on. Before this goes way off the rails. Grumpy says, I found I was having this issue on my Mac mini some years ago when I had both the wired and the wired Ethernet and the Wi-Fi on the same network. Yeah.
I was doing this to get Apple Continuity Goodness, which generally requires both Bluetooth and Wi-Fi. Then I learned that the Wi-Fi just needs to be on, does not need to be connected to the network if the machine is already on the network by another adapter. Since disconnecting the Wi-Fi from the network, I have never had the naming issues again, and I probably should have started with the title, which says when Ethernet is connected, the issue was enabling Wi-Fi.
Uh yeah so the the issue i'm reading that yeah no the and i sorry i know that's my fault that i named it um the the the issue that this solves sometimes is when you see the name of your mac starting to get those numbers after it in uh right in that when the network preference pane and it can be exactly as he said yeah sorry that that that confusion was on me i was the one that prep this uh question sorry this is a quick tip but but yeah if you're
carrying the lead yeah well it's not on you that's on me uh if you are connected via ethernet turn your wi-fi on but.
Disassociate it from your network and uh and it will still work for continuity and all of those things on your mac the way to do that is if you have the wi-fi menu up simply go and you will if you click on the wi-fi menu you'll see the list of networks and the one that you're associated with will have like the the wi-fi icon next to it will be blue click on that wi-fi icon that will disconnect you from it and i think you
can even go i'm looking here you can even go into to settings and tell it an uncheck the auto join on the little drop down list next to the network so that it doesn't continue to auto join. Of course, you want it to auto join if you're not always on Ethernet.
Right. Bonus tip on Wi-Fi on that one with that auto-join thing is if you connect to public Wi-Fis that often have the same name in different locations, i.e. Starbucks or something like that, uncheck auto-join if you don't want to be randomly joining Starbucks networks as either you're driving around or even when you walk into a Starbucks if you want to be more deliberate about knowing when you're on a public Wi-Fi. Oh, yeah.
Yeah, telling it not to auto-join that. And I've had it try to join, and it doesn't, and then whatever I'm streaming doesn't work anymore. Quit streaming, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I like that. That's a good solution for that. Yep. Um, Bob has a follow-up to something we mentioned two weeks ago in episode 1037 about tab switching and all of the different permutations of doing that. He says, I normalize my tab switching using better touch tool.
I use at least two different web browsers and two different terminal emulators, each with lots of tabs open. And of course, each of these apps has its own unique way to move to the next or previous tab. As such, I have set up BetterTouchTool to associate the same trackpad swipe gesture with each app's command key shortcut for moving tabs.
Tabs i use a three finger swipe but there are one two three four or five swinger finger swipes available in better touch tool and they can be combined with modifier keys if you need to be even more uh unique or differentiate more i don't like to use unique with a qualifier it's sort of binary on its own um but if you need to differentiate it from other swipe gestures because they do need to be unique in order for them to work uh he says this way no matter which app i'm using i can
just swipe right or swipe left on my trackpad and move it to the next or previous tab regardless of which app i'm in that's a really smart thing and and there are other apps like better touch tool that can be used to assign gestures or keystrokes to uh to you know to command key equivalents inside of apps but that i think that's really smart i like that that's good yeah that's yeah better Better touch tool, that's amazing. Do you use it, Pete?
I do, and between that and Keyboard Maestro, between the two, you can come up with all kinds of things. Your classic example that I started using as well is to reset the timer to zero. So you do your show notes. Oh, when I'm recording the show. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Instead of having to hold down shift control option command and then, you know, whatever other key. Yep. Just, you know, use the caps lock key and make that a, uh, a, a mod, what do they call it? Let me look.
A modifier. It's a, it is a hyper key. You'll be using your caps lock as a hyper key is what it's called. So it holds down on. Talk about that. Oh, okay. Okay, so when you use caps lock as the hyper key, it's like holding down shift control option command. Got it. Yeah. And so that way you're not having to, you know, twist your knuckles into a. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Finger jib there. Sticks. We call that. Yeah. Exactly. Interesting. Okay.
Yeah, for that one keystroke, which Pete's alluding to a thing that I created. There's actually an article, I believe it's still up on Mac Observer, that talks through how I do the timestamps in the show. But as Pete says, I need to reset a timer to zero at the same time that I start the recording for the show so that everything's in sync. And when you click on a chapter, it matches where we are and all that good stuff.
Stuff i intentionally have that so that i have to use two hands to invoke it uh because otherwise i will accidentally invoke it and reset things and blow away the recording and like yeah yeah so that that that was built to be difficult by design i see that by the same token how often do you touch caps locks and you know i don't know but i could touch caps lock and z with one hand whereas holding control option command like i don't know yeah yeah it's tougher yeah i make it tough intentionally
yeah yeah okay that's that's a good point it's but that but that's that's a that's a me thing like i i don't i share it because i do it but not because anybody else needs to do it my way it's just yeah yeah don't you don't want to live inside the dave the dave Dave brain here. It's bad enough that one of us has to. So, well, there's the, the, uh, but that, that whole thing with better touch tool, that's amazing. And being able to modify track pad swipes and such. Yeah.
I need to, okay. I need to dig back into this. I tried to not, I tried to standardize on, on just one thing, which is for me, keyboard maestro. Um can you trigger things with mouse swipes in keyboard maestro though oh certainly i'd be shocked if you can't right like um can i let's see no doesn't look like it uh hang on trackpad had USB device trigger, maybe gesture trigger. Oh yeah. Oh, oh yeah, for sure. Yeah. So I might be able to standardize on one app just to, just to keep things
simple. So I don't have to keep multiple apps. Yeah. Gesture triggers and keyboard maestro. All right. I got to learn about that. Yeah. Um, it just scared me because as soon as I pulled up the gesture trigger in one of my actions, like I saw arrows like floating from my mouse cursor and was like, Oh no, not right now. Show's over folks. Glad you could be here. Yeah. Hopefully the recording, hopefully that didn't stop the recording.
All right, you want to take us to James? Absolutely, let's do that before anything else goes wrong. James writes in, he says, as we know, you're able to move windows from screen to screen in multiple display environments, and you can even invoke spaces by dragging a window up to the top of the screen and waiting a moment for spaces to arrive, and you can move around that way. But wait, there's more. It even really catches fish. No, different one. Different commercial.
But wait, there's another way. Today I was trying to copy a photo from photos into messages. Into a messages conversation. But rather than just a simple select command C and then move back to messages and do a command P like a troglodyte, I decided to experiment. I started by dragging the photo out of photos with the intention of dropping the image into a window, a trick that works great when photos and messages are side by side windows. However, these were on different spaces.
So I dragged the photo down to the dock, hovered over the messages icon, and this brought up the messages just window but it would still in its original space and that didn't change so here's the kicker hit the space bar this snaps your working environment into the space or window and you still have your photo outline grabbed you were holding down the mouse button slash trackpad the whole time right i would assume anyway yeah you have to be and then
you can drop it into the messages window and bam instant attachment so very cool yeah huh because i you know you can do it obviously from finder you can drop a photo right in there like that yeah but when you're doing it from photos sometimes it gets a little wonky as to whether or not it lets you it gives it to you yeah and then sometimes it changes the resolution and i don't know when it does i suppose
i could learn and and know whether whether i'm getting full resolution or not or or what but. All right so i have a question um i because this is something i run into scenarios like this often enough that what i wind up doing is i drag it to the desktop right and then i have to go find it on the desktop to drag it into the app that i want to like i move to the app that i want to get to and then I have to drag it in there. And then it clutters up my desktop.
Eventually I'll realize, oh, I've got to go clean that up. I'm going to delete it from my desktop or whatever. I know that there are apps out there. We've talked about them on the show. None of them come to mind by name at the moment. But that essentially give you like a little temporary trough that you can just drag things into and then drag things out of later.
And maybe you have it only hold five things or something. But essentially like a clipboard history for files that I'm dragging around to different places.
Um i bet set apps got some in it i bet you're right i'm curious of those things that any of you out there use what's the one that like which ones do you like i see in the chat kiwi gram is already answering he uses a clipboard switcher called paste and evidently you can drag things into that clipboard um so nice yep and paul conaway in discord says yoink on ios yoink is the one that i couldn't think of by name yes yes okay well here's the other here's what i've always done is i take i'll select
a photo or a group of photos and remember you can use shifts if you want to get them contiguously or command if you want to skip over a photo that sort of thing then i grab Grab the, say, three photos, and then I just use Command-Tab until I get to messages, and I drop them on messages, and it goes that way. But if I don't use spaces, and that's specifically what he was talking about in this one, that that could get harder if you're using spaces.
No, you're right about that. Like, once you've got things dragged, you can use Command-Tab to switch apps. That is a good, like, that's its own quick tip, I think. Yeah, yeah. I use that one all the time. Yeah. Yeah, I used to use way back in the day, and it's still around, PasteBot from TapBots because I just like TapBot apps. And does that do the, like, drag and hold, like, does that essentially do something?
I think that was more, yeah, it was like, you could have multiple clippings and recall clippings, and you could even sequential, build sequential paste clippings, like, so where you stack up a bunch of things and then have them re-paste and sequence, so, like, you could get multiple parts of a document.
Yep. My issue is that some of these things and maybe it's the clipboard manager in Keyboard Maestro specifically, but I my understanding is that when I run into a scenario like this, it's that the clipboard would not work for it for whatever reason. And I have to actually be dragging a file because that dragging a file actually uses different like, you know, frameworks in in Mac OS to get things different places.
But um yeah i don't i like i don't think that this had the tray thing though that you're talking about so i think that's a little off track here no no this is good to talk about i i i think yoink is that yeah it's a shelf for your files that's that's the one yeah and it is in setup as well yeah yeah cool i think that one will even go do the whole between devices thing if i'm remembering it looks like um i don't know if it's on i think you can sync
it through icloud or something like Yoink is also available for iPad, iPhone, and iPod touch. You are correct. Yes. All right. Yep. You may have said this. It's amazing how much you sometimes miss when we're going through these conversations, but paste is in setup if you didn't say that. Oh, I did not say that. Okay. Okay. Yeah. Amazing. Amazing. Cool. So, yeah, I got asked the other day by my wife about, oh, she wanted to put Busy Cal on her laptop.
Yeah. Because she got my old laptop. And I'm like, eh, and I went and looked, and she's like, oh, it says you're all logged into Setapp to your three devices. And I go, oh, don't pay money. I'm like, it's like three bucks a month to add another machine. It's not much. And it's worth every penny. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, no, Setapp is great. Yep, I agree. I'm kind of sad that I can't use it on iOS currently, right? Uh-huh. because if we were in the EU, then that would be an option for us. So yeah. Yeah.
Hey, get your VPN going, showing that you're in the EU. Tell them you want it. Yeah. But the iPhone, we've already talked about this. The iPhone knows I'm not in the EU, even if I have a VPN running. So dang it. I'd have to hack the GPS satellites again. And that just gets so. Yeah. The department of the army gets all upset. Super upset. Like they did. Yeah. Yeah. The airliners landed at the wrong airports. Yeah, it's like war games in my yard again. It's terrible.
I stumbled onto a thing this week that made me super happy. I am subbing for a friend's band later next month, and I have to learn a bunch of the songs that they play, cover songs. And so he sent me a spreadsheet that listed kind of the songs actually in the orders that we plan to play them on this, at least on this particular night. I don't know if they have a set show or whatever, but whatever.
Doesn't matter. uh and it included the name of the artist the name of the song and i think maybe even the key that was in because that that's super important for me on the drums and then uh uh and then it had spotify links for each of the songs which is really helpful sometimes people do youtube links sometimes people do spotify links but to the version that the band has learned right sometimes it's you know the studio version that that's kind of the the default version but other times it's a
live version because you know a studio version where it fades out is never gonna like how we're gonna how do you want to do that on stage i've always uh said that uh tom petty's american girl is like the great litmus test as to whether or not someone has done their homework coming into the gig because if you say to them if you say to a sub hey let us know if you have any questions about like song endings or whatever if you've got
american girl on your set list which fades out on the record every band has come up with their own way to end it and if you don't ask the question And it means you didn't do your homework. So but so I had this list of Spotify URLs and I'm like, great. Well, but it's like, you know, 35 of them or something. I do want to build a Spotify playlist of this. And I do keep Spotify and Apple Music.
And this is the primary reason I keep Spotify is so that so that I can share links with musicians, friends. And I thought, wouldn't it be great if I could just copy that list of links from the spreadsheet and paste it into the Spotify app in a new playlist and have it auto-populate? And you know what? I can. And so can you. Yep, it just works. So I've got a question though. Yeah? And this, we're into the gig gab here,
I guess. Yeah, right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, how do you learn a song oh do you do you listen to it and play along with it do you have okay yeah like the the drum to drum uh sheet music for it depends on the song um you know for for the majority of what we call g beach songs which are general business songs so you know tom petty's american girl sweet home alabama you may be right by billy joel right like the classic Classic rock, canon,
but it's more than just classic rock. You know, it's the GB songs, right? General business stuff that most cover bands play and songs like those. Usually I can, I don't need to read the music for it. I can listen to it. I can hear how it goes. And then either if I know it, well, great. Then I just play along with the radio in my head when we're playing the song like on stage.
But if it's a song that's new to me what i will do is print out uh or i don't print anything anymore i put it on my ipad the uh not the sheet music for the song but if you go to like ultimate guitar whatever you can find chord sheets that list just the chords that are played along with where the lyrics are for those chords they match up kind of the chords and the lyrics and i will grab pdfs of that put them on my ipad and then i've come up with my own sort of shorthand for,
all right, you know, here's where the drums come in. You know, does everybody start together or is there a guitar intro for, you know, how long is it? And I can quickly, in less than the time it would take me to listen to the song, I can chart it out. And so I just sit there on my couch while the songs are playing and I just start charting things. Occasionally I'll need to pause it if there's like a rhythmic figure.
I need to play specifically with the band or something as opposed to whatever phil comes to mind but if there's a rhythmic thing then i will write out my own little you know two measures worth of of sheet music essentially to like here's the here's the figure to play but uh or if it's got a weird groove or something if it's not just like a straightforward groove that i can describe quickly with words i will chart out like okay here's the verse groove and like
play that and then usually that's enough to get me there so when you say rhythmic figure that's the changing of the tempo of the no uh like like the the the rhythms that i'm playing on on the drums so you know if if if the song is is is like uh you know kick snare kick snare kick snare with eighth notes on the hi-hat okay i can write that out i write eighth notes for the hi-hat i write two and four on the snare one and
three on the kick or whatever but usually i don't have to write that out i can just i can just write standard and it i just write standard groove and then i know all right it's It's a two, four group, you know, but again, that's my own shorthand. And I've, I've had people, I subbed for a friend's band years ago out in California, Paul Kent's band. And I, I made up charts for a bunch of the tunes. And then he had another sub a year later and he was like, can you share the charts with him?
Like, well, well, I can, but I don't think they're going to mean as much to him as they do to me because he now needs to learn how to get inside my head. But yeah, it's already crowded in there. And we've already established he doesn't want to do that. So, yeah, that's how that all works. All right, folks. You ever feel like your live streams and videos are missing that extra spark? Well, don't get caught looking like an amateur.
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You get one month free of Ecamm Live using our promo code MacGeekGab at checkout. That's one month free of Ecamm Live when you use promo code MacGeekGab at checkout. Don't get caught without it. And our thanks to Ecamm Live for sponsoring this episode. All right, I've got a question for you. Have you ever felt like your email provider is spying on you more than your nosy neighbor? Well, don't get caught with a creepy inbox.
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My name's Felix. I'm a longtime listener of the show, and I have a question for you about Spotlight search and indexing. So I have an M1 MacBook Pro 16-inch model running Ventura 13.6.6 and the problem is that every time, well, not every time, but annoyingly often, I'm searching for files and I do like the command spacebar shortcut and it can't find a file because indexing isn't running.
And my question is how do I get the system to work but not be indexing all the time, hoping you guys know a workaround I'm aware of the setting or a sort of hack where you go into system settings and you go into spotlight privacy add the drive or the folder that you want spotlight to avoid indexing and then add it and then you remove it is there a better way of doing that And what are the consequences for adding or putting something in there permanently?
Does that mean that if you add a location in there, Spotlight does not search that location or doesn't update that location? I'd appreciate understanding how that all works. Thank you so much. Thanks for the question, Felix. So, and I believe this has changed over the years, but kind of starting with the latter half of this. I believe that the adding to that and removing it from there doesn't necessarily impact the index itself. It just impacts where results are going to come from.
It may stop it from doing future indexing, but I also don't think, and again, this may have changed. I could be very wrong on this feedback at MacGeekUp.com. Uh, I don't think it deletes the index and then recreates it. So, so, uh, yeah. While that can sometimes solve a problem, my proposed solution would be to ensure we are deleting that spotlight index and allowing it to get recreated from scratch because it sounds like it's corrupted.
So I would delete the spotlight index either from the command line with the MDU till command or from Onyx if you don't want to mess with the command line and Onyx is free and it will do it for you and it deletes it and then you know we'll we'll rebuild it but hopefully only one more time. That's that's my thoughts Adam I see you shaking your head or not.
Audio yeah yeah yeah yeah i i thought i thought that uh the whole ad thing did delete but now you're getting me to question it might it did back in the day okay way way long ago but i haven't done it in years oddly i was just saying in the pre-show somehow i've never had issues with spotlight my spotlight got messed up so i'm gonna be doing this exact same thing at some point probably here um the app i think i use and i was just gonna double check that it's in here under
maintenance but i'm pretty sure that it is uh yeah you can i use uh clean my mac 10 oh yeah x excuse me okay okay clean my mac x yep which has a re-index spotlight option, and do we know if that deletes it because i and i asked this because. I know that you can tell Spotlight to re-index and replace the index, but if the database files themselves have some corruption in them, that doesn't always do it.
I know that ONIX deletes the Spotlight index, and you can also do that, again, with the mdutil command. I wouldn't just delete the files outright like that. I don't know what would happen. Yeah, I'm looking at CleanMyMac and it's not clear. It says re-indexing. This initiates a complete re-indexing of your Mac's main search engine. Yeah. Okay. Does that mean it deletes it? Yeah, I don't know. If it's a complete re-index, I would imagine it has to reset it back to zero
and start from nothing. I would agree. Yep. Yep, I would agree. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It doesn't say it deletes it, though. Right. It says a complete re-index. Right. Yeah. But the way it, like you say, though, the, the assumption I think is a fair one because the folks at Mac bar are pretty, pretty smart. It's true. When it comes to, you know, they're going to go, it, it would create more problems, right? Yes. Then it's worth not to. Yes. Yeah. And I, I will find the right spotlight command.
I, I have it in my head. It's like with it, it's got a dash E on it or something. Um, but, but anyway, I'll, I'll, I'll look at the man page for, uh, Or maybe the TLDR page for MDUtil, does that exist? It does. So TLDR is this awesome thing, the command to install into your terminal. Because you can issue what I just typed was TLDR space and then the command MDUtil. And it shows me for this one, the four most common invocations of that command and what they each do.
And MDU till dash capital E with a path to the volume is the one that, uh, that I wanted to, to, to do here. So I will put this command in the show notes to, uh, to highlight what, what it does. I'm assuming that's a home brew brew install. TLDR is installable with home brew. Yeah. Brew install TLDR. And, uh, yeah. I didn't know about that one. That's my tip for this week for sure. Yeah. It's pretty awesome. Yeah. Right after the show.
So I got to jump in here because we talk about Homebrew all the time. Like everyone knows what it is and uses it. I may want a brief description of what that is as well. Yep. So Homebrew allows you to install commands into your terminal easily. The right word for it is that it is a package manager. But if you're not used to using a terminal, then you would never have heard that term before.
So uh so think of it as like the free app store for the terminal you install homebrew and then from there you can install and remove and update other terminal based apps yeah yeah i use it for a lot of web development stuff so i use it to update and install things like apache web servers and MySQL, Maria database apps and all that fun stuff along with a bunch of other things.
Yep. But there's also all the, you know, so there's a lot of command line things that, you know, Apple chooses to add or remove at different points. So that another great one is, I think I use it to install Wget instead of, because that got removed. That got removed. I think curl, which is a utility for pinging or hitting websites, you know, like. Yeah. simplifying it but you know basically it's a way to like hit a url from the command line there.
I'm trying to make sure i see i get credit the right person uh cgh mccc in uh in the discord chat says make sure to mention cake also cake used to be an app that well a mac gui app a a windowed mac app that allowed you to manage homebrew installations install update remove all that stuff i don't seem cake doesn't seem to exist as cake anymore but i did find something called cake brew at cakebrew.com which appears to be the same thing uh so i
i will put a link to cake brew in the show notes, but there you go. Yeah. I used brew.sh. Well, brew.sh is where you're going to go and install Homebrew. Yes. Okay. Yeah. But then once you do that, you have to install and manage apps. Packages. Packages from the terminal. Cakebrew lets you install and manage them from a windowed interface. From a GUI. From a GUI. Yeah. It's great. Graphical user interface. Yeah. So you get to see what's installed. I want to have this on my Macs.
Like it's ridiculous that i know i'm comfortable with the terminal but being able to just see this stuff makes life way easier so sure yeah yeah yeah so i need to install cake brew as well i'm not gonna do it right now i'm gonna i'm gonna wait so thank you so go ahead dave what could go wrong.
Well you want a list uh zark while you're doing it yeah all right should we uh help doug yes please try and help doug here yeah so doug says i present weekly in a church setting setting i use an iPad to control the keynote presentation, which is on a computer in the back of the room. I know that the issue is not related to distance because I have no issues whatsoever when I practice on Sundays. So this is controlling the keynote presentation.
Here's the issue. When I'm speaking, I use an iPad Pro 4 to advance or choose the next slide. Every week now it will hang. What I mean by hang is that I will be very slow to advance or it may not advance at all. The person in the control area often has to advance the presentation. The lag problem does not show itself on Saturdays when I practice.
There are only two things that are different on Sunday. I have a theory that either the lag is due to Bluetooth or Wi-Fi interference from other devices or the act of active streaming do you have any ideas that's because he's the they're also streaming via obs and so he says i would also open be open to other software other than obs which is a streaming app um but you know we're a small church thanks doug and he says ps i came to your show because i i used to be a maccast listener and i
enjoy listening and learning well welcome thanks for coming over there you go awesome i tried to answer this one and but i think he's got it down right it's it's wi-fi and or bluetooth interference when there's a bunch of people twixt him in the control center with their iphones and androids on, there's all kinds of extra noise and as someone pointed out especially if the wi-fi in the church is open and shared with the congregation.
Now it's really slowing things down on probably something that's not even a prosumer level.
Yeah yeah somebody pointed out i think in the chat like if if it was open you know even if people aren't using their devices we have icloud syncing and photo syncing and like you know somebody gets that network and suddenly it's just like so if so the first thing i would say is i i would say get if if you are doing that then take your church router and set that up so that you have a guest network and a separate Wi-Fi on the network that you're on.
You know, the clergy and the lay readers and that sort of thing. And then the other thing I said was have the person up in the control center use an iPad to advance since they're sitting right there next to it. Which is what they're doing. Yeah. Well, I'm assuming they're using the trackpad or the arrow keys on the Mac itself. I see just as a test to use the one in the. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Closer to it is the interference from across the room worse than.
But but yeah, I have to give. I have got to give. Well, I would test it on Saturday with OBS. Right. First of all, just to either to rule that out. Right.
So, you know, one variable at a time. make sure that you know do a stream with obs see if that causes the issue if it does well now you know kind of where to troubleshoot uh the theater that i play at and we'll be playing at twice today after we finish recording this show uh does a lot with wireless technology like in the show in fact that the show that we're doing right now spring awakening uh which will wrap up before this episodes released uh they're using wireless cameras on stage to then
display on a screen there and they're using airplay at times to do it all and they ask patrons no one does this to turn off their phones so that there's not as much in the room but what they don't tell patrons is that they run a separate wi-fi network just for the cast to use um and and oftentimes they They don't do this in the theater, but you'll see this if you go to like venues that have like, you know, big concert venues that have Wi-Fi.
They'll have a network for the, you know, if they have a network for the patrons or whatever, that will be a different network from the one that is for like production or another one for audio. And they're all on different frequencies. So you could try. If you do have a network, you know, split it, maybe offer 2.4 gigahertz for your patrons and then run 5 gigahertz only for you on the iPad, right? And that way you're completely separated from one another.
Like there's near the two shall meet. That might really help. And password off, of course, the one that you're using for your production. So hopefully. What about hiding the SSD? Necessary or not? I feel like that's one of those kind of urban legends that helps. I don't know. I've never. I mean, I guess if you password protected it, that should be enough. That's it. I'm just thinking that if someone sees it and starts trying to hack
the password, now the router's trying to pay attention to that. Okay. Although not enough. Someone would really have to be hammering it. Yeah, and I feel like if somebody were doing that during church service, there might be someone upstairs that would want to have a word with them. That's all I'm going to say. In the balcony, you mean? That's what I meant. Yeah, in the balcony. Correct. Yes, Pete.
I don't know. It just seems like, you know, maybe if somebody's spending most of church service trying to manually brute force hack the Wi-Fi password, there's maybe another lesson to be learned here. That's right. Yeah. You're into today's lesson. Yes. Right. I don't know. It seems like, I don't know if there's a certain chapter and verse that addresses this, but maybe there is. It's been a while since I've read the Bible. It is a fascinating read.
I read it in college. I loved it. It's fascinating. And it's like the most popular book. Why not? Yeah. It is the bestseller of all time. So, all right. Where are we here? So, yeah, there you go. That's the thing. But, yeah, I don't think hiding the SSID is as helpful as we like to make it. We like to think that it is. All right. Moving on to David. Yeah. Yep. OK. Yeah. David has a simple question. If I can ever. Oh, I know where I put it. And now I know why I can't find it. Great.
David says, can I teach my iPhone to change its default way of spelling a word that is dictated to it? My example is if I verbally fill in a message field, like in iMessage, and I say the word OK, in my mind, I am thinking of that as the four-letter version of OK, O-K-A-Y. IOS will invariably replace it with the two-letter version of OK. I realize this is a fairly trivial problem. However, apparently I use that word more than I would have thought when I'm messaging people.
And it turns out I really don't like it when my iPhone sends it with the shorthand spelling abbreviation. I guess I don't like looking lazy when I'm typing things out. So can I change this default spelling? It's not really an autocorrect issue because if I type out the word OKAY, iOS does not have any issue, nor does it offer to replace it.
But when I say it out loud, it thinks I am saying it as the letters, no matter how many times I've previously overridden that spelling choice or typed out OKAY manually. I think I've also encountered this occasionally with the spelling of a name, but I can't recall now which words those would have been. But I do remember wondering if I could teach the app how to spell a name that I know I will be using again and again. Any thoughts, Adam?
Yeah, I mean, my immediate thought when I saw this was to use text replacements, the default text replacements with, I would assume you'd have to do like the same word, like instead of doing an autocorrect or maybe both invocations where okay equals okay spelled out and okay equals, I don't, it seems odd to do the second one. I don't know if that would be required or not.
I've never played around with this, but that you can't, you can't really teach or you can't really, there's nothing to like to define the dictionary that apple uses so i would think you'd have to go into settings general keyboard text replacements and play around with that and see if some combination of that i'm only hesitating because you know normally the way that would work is you're typing right and it makes this it makes the suggestion
or you finish it and it does the auto replacement so i i would assume that works with dictation as well so you would hope it does Yeah, I would think I like your idea of putting two entries into text replacements replacement. So one would be, you know, the letters. Okay. And then the replacement would be okay. A Y. And then the second would be okay.
A Y replaced with okay. A Y. And we've found that force it that we found that second version is the answer to the I want to teach my iPhone that my last name is a correct spelling.
Even though you think it's not or you know something like that right i was gonna say yeah a weird place name or an individual's name yeah yeah so you put the same thing in twice for that but i don't know if that informs the dictation engine right yeah that's the only that's the question mark that i have so you might have to play around with it um and we may have to come back to this if that's not the solution but it's worth trying yeah yeah the the
other thing i'll mention and i think i mentioned that i do this with text replacements is if you're like me and just a bad typer there's certain words that i constantly mistype download is one of them for some reason i always swap the o and the a yeah so i put text replacements in for that like that, i'm gonna type this wrong fix it for me yeah right right yeah yeah yeah yeah. Huh. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I don't know. Well, I think what we've learned from this is that okay is a four-letter
word. Yes. Yes. That's right. And that's okay. And that's okay. Now, when you said it, though, you said okay with just the two letters, right, Pete? Yes. Okay. Just making sure. Block Tech has a question. This is going to be, I would call it a geek challenge. And if someone does have an answer for this, great. But I don't know that an answer even exists for this.
He shares, when someone calls me for Mac support that isn't particularly tech savvy, my go-to screen sharing method is to request screen sharing through messages, through iMessage. When it works, it is brilliant. Brilliant. All it requires is that the remote back be set up to receive messages on the user's iCloud account.
And I can go from there. Don't have to waste a lot of time talking the client through installation and registration of a special app or talking them through how to share their screen via Zoom and turning on permissions and all of that. If it's someone I work with often, I will install the Splashtop client and all they have to do is enter my email address and password for me to get access. However, screen sharing via messages only seems to work about 50% of the time.
Often the sharing request doesn't even appear on the client's thread on my machine, or if it does, they simply never get the request. I've played around a lot with various settings on my client's machines, sharing, privacy, etc., but nothing seems to enable sharing this way on a Mac that doesn't initially and reliably just work. When Apple needs to remote control their customer screens, it also seems to just work flawlessly.
I suspect they're using the same method or something similar, though maybe they have a little backdoor built in that supersedes any settings that would normally block screen sharing. Any ideas? I know I've seen this.
How about you guys? is it so i haven't used this feature too much i'm assuming when you request screen sharing there's a notification that maybe pops up that the person needs to accept maybe maybe being the operative word yes okay it sometimes shows up sometimes it doesn't at all well that's what i'm getting at yeah that's what i'm getting that's where my thought is going is so sometimes it's not showing up is it possible the client has do not
disturb or some other folks mode turned on that's blocking the notification it's i i mean i'll answer your question yes it's possible i know i've done it with people where i've had them request to let me share their screen so that i'm controlling the the the system that should be and it yeah it's like i know that i'm getting notifications like Like, I know what I've got on my computer. No. And even when the notification does appear and you say, yes, let's go.
Sometimes I would say more frequently it's at that point that it just to say that it beach balls or spins would imply that there's indication that something is waiting to happen. It's not. You click the thing and it's like. Gone. That's it. It's like, it's like quick time or FaceTime screen sharing all over again. What, what we had back in the day, it's like, they've never gotten this right.
Like they've implemented screen sharing and different apps over the years in different ways over the years. And for some reason, Apple can't seem to get it reliable. It's what I'm feeling like here. You're right. And my guess is it is the same underlying engine that we had in FaceTime because now FaceTime and messages are sort of, you know, related to each other.
The fact, though, that he says and I agree with this, that it does seem to just work when Apple invokes it makes me wonder if there's something specific about networks like, you know, holes poked in the firewall, some sort of port map, whatever magic that needs to happen, because there is some magic that needs to happen there. And I wonder if Apple has their network set up to be the most friendly for that. Like, I wonder if that is the clue to the answer here.
Well, he said the question is, how can I make messages screen sharing? Yeah. More reliable. So I'm not sure that you can or that it has to be messages, but there is the screen sharing app. And once you have their Apple ID, that always seems to work. I've never had a problem with that. That gets really tricky. Okay. You've had good luck with the screen sharing app? I have.
Because the thing is, when you're on messages, now are you trying to screen share their iPhone, their iPad, their laptop, their iMac?
You know, then it becomes... so so i my answer is i don't know that you can make messages screen sharing more reliable it depends on the on their side which device they're on and are they signed into all four devices at the same time that sort of thing whereas the screen sharing app when you have their apple id i've just again they could be signed into all four devices but i think they're going to see interesting i that i never thought about that but you're right like if
i open up So the screen sharing app is, let's see, where is it buried? Oh, it's in utilities. Is it in utilities now? It is now. It used to be way buried in some weird place. Yeah, but you can invoke it with Spotlight, assuming you've taken our previous tips and made your Spotlight work. But yeah, you can invoke it with Spotlight or just launch it from utilities.
And interestingly pete i launched my screen sharing app and i have two entries in there one is for the uh office the mini the mac mini i have in my office and the second is for you uh like just your apple id showing up there so that's interesting i never thought about huh and and i'll add this too there's a thing called screen sharing menu let which kind of It puts it up into the bar. So that's a quick way to invoke the screen sharing app. Huh.
I think you have to install that separately. I don't know that that's native to the app. No, I think that's a third party thing. But yeah. Interesting. All right. Well, I'll put a link to that in the show notes too. Huh. Yeah. I don't know. Kiwi Graham put in the Discord chat that, you know. I like his idea.
I just fall back to Zoom. like zoom these days it's easy enough to install and i don't think it's that complex for most people to get set up like you launch it and if you try to share the screen i'm pretty sure it says, it gives you the message hey you need to go into system preferences and allow this but like.
Allow it and it just always just seems to i agree that's that's one of the silver linings of the covid lockdowns we all went through is that most everyone already has zoom is comfortable using it like all of those things kind of happened uh and it was a really i mean obviously zoom made a lot lot of money from that but uh but yeah i i agree with you that zoom is is that my my path with people is all right let's try this in messages but we're probably going to need to move to
zoom and i will try once in messages but i might try in the screen sharing app the next time messages fails for me yeah i've been able to get help my mother-in-law and all that with with that and then just real quickly brian monroe points out that um you know the way apple has their network set up as long as the tool is built for modern os's he thinks it's um it's a it does not require a login unlike screen sharing uh the way screen sharing does and he thinks that that's the key uh and i will
point out anyone who's ever done this apple does something different because if you get to something that has a password window it automatically disconnects them so they can't see your password right you can't even if you tell them hey look just you know i don't care If you see the password to this one, they can't, it's not possible for them to stay connected if a password window comes up. That's true. Yeah, that's true.
The one caveat to, I think, screen sharing in Zoom, though, is, right, you can't control, remote control on an iOS device. No. No. Yeah. No. Where I think with messages, I think you can, right? Can you? Or control an iPad? I think so. Oh, that I don't know. Apple can. I didn't know that you or I could. We'll have to test that. Or send us a note. I thought you could these days. Maybe you can. Feedback at MacGeekGab.com. If so, that passed me by. Wow.
All right. Hold on. You said Feedback at MacGeekGab.com. That's what you said? Yeah. Feedback at MacGeekGab.com. Okay. All right. Yeah. Feedback. At macgeekapp.com. Yeah. All right. Should we. Oh, man, I have something brilliant to say about that. And then we went into the shtick. All right. If I think of it, I'll come back to it, I promise. All right, good. We are running short on time in a variety of ways, but let's see if we can do
Mark's question quickly here for us, please. Oh, we could do that. Yeah. Yeah, so Mark wrote in. He says, I'm spending a lot of time outside of the U.S. and my roaming charges are out of control. Well, I can use a local eSIM to get cheap local data and calls. It's the cost of receiving calls or texts to my roaming U.S. Number that are killing me.
I had thought about switching to a Skype in number or even a VoIP provider and giving that to everyone instead, but I'm concerned about all those services that insist on sending you a six-digit text code to verify you. Skype explicitly says they don't support that. And from what I read, the VoIP providers suffer the same problem. Their numbers are blacklisted for verification purposes. Does anyone have any suggestions?
Suggestions um i do because i do this with some things and my daughter does it with way more things she recently moved to italy as i think i've mentioned uh she took her phone number and ported it to a google voice number so that she still retains her old u.s phone number even though her current phone number is an italian number uh she can get all the 2fa text messages to her google Google voice number.
And then, of course, anybody that sends her a text message, you know, if they if they forget or they don't know that her number changed years ago, she still gets all that stuff. But I was just working with her the other day. And her bank text, her U.S. based bank texted her a 2FA authentication code to Google Voice and it, you know, just showed up in her email because we that's how that works.
But it would show up in the Google Voice app on the phone. So I think Google Voice might be your best bet for for this. And then you can make calls with Google Voice using IP, you know, using like data as opposed to, you know, voice minutes.
So that would be that's my thought. also does a really nice job of screening calls for you it does if you set it up to do that yeah it's got a fun little interface for that date your name and i'll get back to you yeah yeah it's pretty good that's pretty good yep yeah all right and then whatsapp is almost universal in europe and asia and yeah but that but that's different because that's different yeah because someone's still texting
his numbers that's a problematic yeah is part of the issue so you can You can port a cell phone number into Google Voice. So if you still have an old landline or a VoIP number from another provider, you often are going to have to make the hop via a cell phone number. When I did it for myself, but also with my daughter, we jumped.
Oh, well, hers was her cell phone, so that didn't matter. But just getting a short use SIM and, you know, I ported my whatever it was, my Xfinity voice number or something to a T-Mobile number for three days, which and then as soon as it became a T-Mobile number, I could port it to Google Voice and it's just parked there forever. And Google Voice is still free. So, you know.
There you go all right i remembered my brilliant oh god brilliant point from the last one so let me not i'm sorry adam did i cut you off no you're good okay jump desktop just jump desk top okay we'll put that link in the show notes another way to yeah quickly control other computers and ios devices yep great and that that does a lot of hole poking through firewalls and ports and all that it. Yeah. Cool.
And, and my correction is, as Brian pointed out in discord, you cannot remote control an iOS device in any way because of security. What I was confused about is I said, a remote control. I use the screen share feature, which you can enable from FaceTime. When you're on a FaceTime call, you can have the other person at least share their iPad or iPhone screen and walk them through. So you can see what they're doing.
I've had to use it with my mom in the past. It's like, because I'm trying to explain without that, no, go here, go there. And if I can get her to bring up the screen, then I can say, see that there? Because I often can't specifically remember where things are either. And if I'm talking on my phone, I can't look at my phone or I've got to go get a headphone. So you can share the screen.
You cannot control the screen on an iOS device. And, and zoom will also zoom actually makes it pretty smooth to share your iPhone screen, either in a wired capacity or a wireless airplay capacity with zoom on your Mac. So you can do the same thing. There's no controlling of it remotely, but you can share it, uh, which can be, yeah. So, so it, yeah, it's there. So, yeah. Yeah. There's a share content button when you're in a FaceTime call. It looks like a little screen with a little person by it.
Cool. All right, folks, thanks for hanging out with us. I do want to take a minute and thank everybody whose contributions came into MacGeekGab Premium. We had CJ ask, do you take contributions via Discord? We don't yet. We've talked about that. There's so many different paths. Right now, the best path, I think, is to use our premium system at MacGeekGab.com slash premium. You can use Apple Pay there. You can do whatever you want. But again,
it's as I always say, it is optional. It is appreciated, not required. So I want to thank the following people for $10 contributions. Let's see. We have Daniel in San Diego, John in Wake Forest, Michael in Robbins, Felix in Princeton, Joseph in Marietta, Paul in Lawrenceville, Kevin in Edison, Barry in Des Plaines, Jeff in Chesterton, Bill with an APO box, James in Amity Harbor. Thank you all for your $10 contribution.
And $25 contributions in the past week or so from Rick in Traverse City, Harvey in Shoreham, Monroe in Morgantown, Mark in Knoxville, Jim in Harvard, John in Fredericton, and Timothy in Coralville. So thanks to all of you for your contributions. And again, it's mattgeekab.com slash premium if you want to learn more about all of that. We didn't get to everything we wanted to this week, guys, so we're going to have to do another show next week. That's just how it's going to be. All right. I guess.
We get to do another show next week. Let me put it that way. Yeah, all right. Exactly. Yeah, that's how I feel about it, too. Thanks to Cashfly for providing all the bandwidth to get the show from us to you. Make sure you check out Pete's other shows. So there I was. My other shows, Gig Gab, which Pete mentioned earlier in the episode, and Business Brain. They're all linked in the show notes. You can follow us on all the socials. That's all linked in the show notes too.
Make sure to check out our sponsors. You can go to macgeekab.com slash sponsors. That lists everything and is routinely updated. But for this episode, of course, ecam.live and fastmail.com slash mgg. Music. One last piece of advice, Adam, anything? I would say don't get caught. Made on a Mac. See ya. Later.