It's time for Mac Geek Cab and listener Jamie brings us our quick tip of the week by sharing that we can name or rename group chats in the messages app on the iPhone. You tap the top of the group chat. You'll see a contact card for the group where you can change the name. You can even assign it a picture. You can assign it a custom logo or one of Apple's defaults. faults. You can also do this on the Mac or the iPad. These changes flow through and are seen by all members of the group.
So it becomes kind of a thing where you can create one for work or you can create one for, you know, your family and different groups of your family and all those things. More quick tips like this, plus your questions answered today on MacGeekGab 1017 for Monday, January 8th, 2024. Music. Greetings, folks, and welcome to MacGeekGab, the show where you send in tips like that and you send in cool stuff found, you send in your questions. We try to answer your questions.
We share your cool stuff found in your tips. We share some questions and cool stuff found of our own. We mix it all together into an agenda so that each of us has a fantastic opportunity to learn at least five new things every single time we get together. This is CES week, which means our sponsors for this week are our CES 2024 coverage and travel sponsors. That includes Collide at KOLIDE.com slash MGG. Mac Updater at CoreCode.io slash MGG. And CarbonCopyCloner.com slash MGG.
Where you can go and get 15% off CCC with code MGGCES24. We will spend a minute for each of them a little bit later in the show, talking a little bit more in depth to thank them for their sponsorship of the episode and CES and all that good stuff for now before jetting off to Las Vegas in Durham, New Hampshire. I'm Dave Hamilton. In South Dakota, I'm Adam Christensen. And also in New Hampshire, it's pilot peak where it may be cold, but at least it's windy.
Greetings gents. Yeah, it's cold, it's windy, and we are recording this as usual on Friday before, so it's the 5th for us. And Pete and I are hoping that the snow that's due to hit New England hits just after we leave the ground tomorrow evening. Exactly. I hope the same for you guys. Yeah. That's not fun. No, it's... And the only other easy alternative is a flight at like 7.30 a.m. Which means leaving the house at 1 a.m. Pacific time because I will be going
to sleep on Pacific time on Saturday night. Right. So I always think of it that way. And that's actually one of those one of my little travel hacks is the day I am leaving, I wake up and think of myself on the time that I will end the day at. And I do the same coming home if, you know, like on Thursday when we fly back from CES, Pete, I think of that as waking, you know, as waking up on Eastern time that day. And it, it, it, I find it helps frame my brain a little better.
I don't know. Yeah, probably. Yeah, probably shifts you a little bit. A little bit. Yeah. Just like, okay, well, it's much better to say that I have a 10 a.m. Eastern flight leaving the West Coast than a 7 a.m. Pacific flight. You see, cause I would happily take a 10 AM Eastern flight tomorrow morning, but taking a, you know, seven AM, it just makes for, I've just found it starting a trade show by waking up in the middle of the night to catch a flight.
I always kind of hurts me. It'll make for a long week. It makes for a long week. Yeah, exactly. So I don't know. Yeah. I think the time it'll work out well on this one. I have lost a few races against nor'easters trying to work over the years. And the worst one was April Fool's Day of 96. I spent 30 hours in the ramp office at work. Trapped. Every plan I came up with fell through. And I wound up starting my trip two days late.
Fortunately, they had me cold dead to rights on that one. And they were like, yeah, get out there to Anchorage, catch your trip, and you can finish it. So, yep. Whereas they could have pulled me off without pay. Oh, okay. All right. Okay. Okay, so, all right. But they didn't have to burn a 10-day reserve when they did that. So I was able to go and fly my trip, which was good. But then Continental Airlines lost my luggage. So I was somewhere out Asia for four days, buying skivvies at every stop.
Yeah, there was no way that Continental was going to get you your luggage after you had flown another plane out. Yeah. Right. Yeah. Oh, that sucks. and no air tags in those days to know where your luggage was no not even close like i i. I know when I share quick tips that there's, it's new to someone. This is one of these that I feel like every travel should be, would be evident to many travelers. But if you haven't put an air tag in your luggage, I, I put air tags and everything.
I put it even in my carry on bag. Like why not? You know, but certainly in your checked luggage, there are just countless stories that you can read all over the internet. And I can share, too, like when my daughter flew back from Canada a year and a half ago, she was pretty convinced. Like there was a quick connection or something in Montreal that she had to do, and she was pretty sure her luggage wouldn't make it.
And so she goes to get in line, you know, to like register a claim so that they can drive the luggage to our house the next day or that night, you know, whenever it finally arrives.
And they were like well you have to wait until all the bags are on the carousel before you can file a claim and i said to her i'm like it's like show them your air tag thing and so she did and they're like oh you have a tracker in there and it's like yeah and they were like great we can start your claim now and by the time we had finished filling out her claim and the the luggage had finished coming off the rack there was a line of 25 people at this right the gate so it It really,
it did save us quite a bit because we were able to just, well, screw it, get in the car, go home, wait for them to show up with the luggage. Right. So, yeah. Yeah. It's handy to know. It's handy to know. Yeah. Ben has a quick tip that is bizarre in Sonoma to help with Time Machine not backing up. Ben says, I use Time Machine Editor to control the frequency of my Time Machine backups on my Mac. So that's a cool stuff found that we've mentioned on the show many times.
Upon upgrading to Sonoma, I was finding that the backups would not automatically run some of the time, Especially if I was away from my Mac and the screen was asleep. I found my way to an article on Mac Observer that explains some things that can be done to fix this. And we'll link to this TMO article here. I assume they still call it TMO. You know, it's weird for me reading the Mac Observer and not recognizing the name of an author, let alone the article. Wait, I didn't write that.
Yeah, I mean, obviously it's been written in the last two years, so I had nothing to do with it. But it's still weird for those of you who are wondering. But one of the bits of advice in this article, which worked for Ben, was excluding find my data. And there's, you know, the article articulates which files to put in the time machine exclusion. And that did it. What a weird thing to.
Too and it it must be that this file remains open by some agent on the system i mean i don't adam do you have any like speculation as to why time machine would bork no but i mean that's that's really interesting i know one thing that i i've always done with my time machines is i always just to exclude like all of my system files huh yeah that's interesting because i know i have other backups of those and plus you know if i'm that borked i'm gonna be reinstalling the operating system anyway
so like all that stuff's gonna come back you know like yeah standard system files and i'm assuming that's where those are i don't i don't didn't look at this to see exactly where those are but i believe so as a rule because i have i have ccc or i have other bootable backups backups, you know, that are going to have all my system files.
So I just figure I don't need them in time machine. So. Yeah, these are, the exclusion is, no, it's actually in your home library containers, and then there is a com.apple.findmy folder. So those are the things. I can't remember if I exclude, I'd have to go look at my time machine settings, but I might exclude my home library folder too. Like anything like system low level related, I think I tend to just have always excluded.
So I've never run into issues, but that's, yeah, that's really interesting. Interesting yeah is it is it the kind of thing where i think your theory makes sense in my opinion is if like it's got something open at that time maybe that's blocking the scheduled thing from running but that would seem weird a little bit it seems weird be intentional it wouldn't be intentional i don't think yeah i would be just to revisit your um blocking of the home library folder.
I certainly do that if, if, if you like folks, but take a look in there and understand what you're excluding, because I'm pretty sure Apple mail still stores your mail data, not just its preferences in the home library folder. It does. And I think by default, like things like Thunderbird and even Safari have some, there's a lot of your user preferences and, And even data, like your mail data is stored in there.
So just take a look and make sure you know what you're excluding. And then by all means. Yeah. And I don't do the live. I don't do a home library stuff. I do. Got it. It's just system. System. Yeah, for sure. Yes. That I'll buy. Time machine might not even. I'm trying to remember if time machine by default backs up like the core system stuff. I don't think it does. Selectively, selectively exclude. There might be things in there you want to
selectively exclude. good but yeah I would not not the whole library folder yeah, Yep. Or the whole, or definitely not your home phone. And not, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's yeah. You kind of want to lean in on that. That's right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Our next quick tip comes from Jim who says when opening a Safari or PDF expert document window, the tabs from the last time I had the app open would load.
Not what I want. Internet searching yielded nothing, but poking around in system settings did under system settings, desktop and dock windows. I was able to check the box close windows when quitting an application and that fixed it. I have no idea how this setting was the opposite. I think the opposite is the default of this. Yeah. So that when you open a window, everything just comes back. I kind of like it. But again, personal preference.
It's just my workflow. I trust that it's going to be there. And I'm actually kind of, you know, thrown off when it's like, wait, that app didn't return to its previous state. Oh no. What did I have open? So, uh, I'm the exact opposite when they added this feature years and years and years ago. I mean, it's been that way for, yeah, for a while, how long I immediately flipped it around because that's what I was used to. Like that's how my Mac worked and now you've changed it.
And I'm also kind of, I like a fresh start when I open an app. You know, I don't want the thing I was working on, you know, when I closed that window or I quit the app, I, I, I'm expecting it to come up fresh. Clean desktop for me to start working in whatever app Photoshop or my code editor or whatever. Yeah. Interesting. Yeah. I, I, I remember, I remember the change because BB edit had this functionality before Apple added it to the system.
And i so i so therefore that was the first app where i came to rely on it it was like this is great because i can quit bb edit and relaunch it and it's exactly as i left it and that's what i want if i have to reboot you know all of those times where it was like well i don't want to because i don't want to lose like my my the state of things you know and uh yeah so when when it was Yeah. And remember, you can one-off change this on a per-app basis by using your option key when you're quitting.
So do an option quit or option go to the menu and select quit, and it will toggle. So if you have it set to always keep windows open and just for that one time, you want to make sure all the windows close, just hold down your option key. And for you having this disabled or whatever, you have the opposite setting for me. The quit option with the option key, it toggles it back and forth between them. Yeah. So if I hold down option, it'll say quit and keep windows.
Whereas I think if you have it the other way, it'll say quit and close all windows or something. That's exactly what it says. You are correct. Yes. Yeah. Oh, look at the C, the bonus little tip. This is why we do this show. Yeah. I had no idea. That's great. Because there are times when I want that fresh start. And yeah. All right. And I think now I'm out of bounds here.
But I think if you launch an app with the option key down or there's some way to get it to not inherit its prior state, is that the shift key down? Someone at feedback at MattKeyCab.com will let us know.
I know that I have recollections that there was a way to do this and just say, because when Apple introduced this feature, there were then the scenarios where somebody would be in pages, it would crash, they would relaunch pages, it would open the document that caused it to crash, and it would crash. And so there needed to be a way of saying, no, no, no, no, just open like you were doing it fresh. And so I think that's there.
I can't test that right now because I got this thing I'm doing, but, um, yep. Yeah. But I think that's the thing. So hopefully somebody either in the discord chat real time while we're doing the show or certainly feedback at Mackie cab.com. And that goes for anything. Uh, you know, if you've got other quick tips or questions or cool stuff found, that's where you send them feedback at Mackie cab.com. Feedback at MacEcap.com. Scott says, I just created a Safari web app for ForeFlight,
one of the apps you use in your plane, Pete. I watched you use it. It's a great app. It is a great app. I agree. He says, unlike the rest of the apps residing in the dock, I couldn't just click and grab it to move. Oh, that's interesting. Instead, inspired by the dialogue in a recent episode about trying various modifier keys to see what they do, seems like this is a recurring theme. Uh, I option clicked to grab and hold the app in the dock to move for flight to a different spot.
That's interesting because I have created many web apps and have had no trouble moving them. But if you create one and you have trouble moving it, that, uh, is it Scott goes on to to share. And I, I would agree that these web apps seem to just work. They start with the site as it was when I created it and then allow me to navigate within the web as normal. He says, and what's great is when I click a link in it, it opens it in regular
Safari, so it doesn't try to do things. I have found the same thing. This is one of those features that the new Safari web apps or save to dock or whatever the feature is, but it's in the file. You get to a website in the file menu, you choose add to dock, and then it will put it in the dock, and then you just use it as an app. It's great. I love it. I love it. I love it.
Uh thank you for that scott nice tip yeah i i'm still curious as to why his wouldn't move but right yeah it doesn't it's odd i wonder no that wouldn't be it i was thinking i'll share my thought process sorry um i i wonder if scott uses a non-admin account as his primary like like daily driver user. Yeah, right. And if that's a difference. I don't know. But if that were the case, the option, but where I, why I dismissed it before
sharing it. Cause the option key, the option key doesn't just magically make you an admin. You're an admin. Yeah. Yeah. You're an admin and you're an admin, you know? No, like, uh, but, uh, yeah, I don't know. What were you going to say, Adam? You had, you were just something pithy. I was going to say, remember when Steve thought we only needed web apps on the iPhone? I said, we've really come full circle here. We are happy about these stupid things.
Oh i like that no kidding yeah yeah those are good times yep he was wrong on that he was wrong he was very wrong but i see i don't one of the few times i don't think well he believed that we didn't need web apps because if he believed that then there would have been no native apps on the phone there would not have been mail there would not have been safari right i mean well i I guess you'd have to have Safari,
but like there were native apps on the phone or they just weren't open for third parties to make. And so I don't think he believed that we didn't need apps. I think he believed he didn't trust anybody else to write them responsibly. Correct. Yeah. Which is why we have the app store and all those other things that came after the sandboxing. That was the solution.
Correct. And we're all better off for it. I mean, And honestly, it pushed the engineering teams to figure out a way to make that stuff available. And there were a lot of bumps along the road. Oh, yeah. Nobody will discount that. And there still are bumps. Yeah. There's plenty ahead, too. I mean, isn't there a big lawsuit in Europe over third-party stores? Like a third-store company. Which then, now the security issues all become back to the front. Yeah.
Fair. Without sandboxing properly. Without Apple gatekeeping and all that. Yeah. But I don't know. We've been around long enough to remember the days when, you know, you had all kinds of conflicts and crashing things and stuff like that. And, you know, it still happens. But in this day and age, a lot less frequent, if you ask me, from what I remember. I'll be curious to see, because this still happens on the Android side.
Like if you sideload apps that are not, you know, vetted and approved and, and policed by, by the Google play store, you can get yourself into a scenario where you're burning your battery, you know, three times as fast as you normally would with, with, you know, responsible apps. And, and you can get things to crash just like, like I could on my Palm trio. Right. Like, so I get where Steve, Steve's logic.
Logic you could probably be sending your data all over the planet too to everybody and anybody who wants it fair yeah yeah yeah so yeah it'll be interesting to see that then the nice part is even if apple and i think they will be even if they're forced to open up the you know third, party apps sure to be installed outside of apple's app store it doesn't force users to do that it It just allows users. It doesn't shut down the app store, right?
So I think the majority of people will simply keep doing what they're currently doing. Yeah. I guess I would liken it to jailbreaking in the early days. It is. Yeah. So you do it knowing the risks that you have lowered some security barriers. You know Apple's going to make you, just like they do on the Mac. You have to go into settings and tell it, no, I'm going to allow apps that don't come from the app store. Right. Right. We've all done that, I think.
So we take it for granted that we've enabled that setting, but that's not the default. Like you have to go and do that. Yeah, very good point. Yeah. So my guess is it'll be the same on the phone and you'll choose whether or not you want to suffer the consequences. And then we'll get a whole lot more questions about it here on the show. And we'll have to do this for another 20 years. There you go. Yep. It's not a bad thing. I kind of enjoy it. I'll be here if you will. Same.
Yeah, exactly. I got nothing else to do. I mean, actually, that's not true. I have a million other things to do. This is one of my favorite things. There you go. So I'm going to keep doing that. One last quick tip comes from Ben, who reminds us that if you've scrolled up a ways in your photos library, and want to jump back to the bottom, AKA most recent photo, simply tap the word library. A good quick tip. I love all these quick tips. Send them in feedback at mackiecap.com.
All right. As you know, this is CES week, and I want to take a second to thank each of our CES sponsors right now. I want to thank CCC Backup from Bombic. We've known this as Carbon Copy Cloner, and that's still what CCC stands for. But CCC is more than just a cloning tool. It's an advanced backup and file copying application for our Macs. If you're looking for something better than Time Machine, well, with just a few clicks, You can set up CCC to make hourly or daily backups of your Mac.
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We'll put this in the show notes at Mackey. So you don't have to remember, but it's MGG CES 24 to get 15 percent off. Amazing stuff. And our thanks to CCC and the folks at Bombic Software for sponsoring all our CES coverage this week. Want to take us to Rich there, Adam? Yeah, Rich has a travel question, and he knows where to turn to. He says, I know, Pilot Pete, you travel quite a bit.
He's hoping you can help him out. He says his daughter and him are going to be traveling a lot this year, and he wanted to get her one of those MagSafe chargers that are like the all-in-one, where you can charge your watch, your phone, your AirPods, all in a single thing with one USB cable. Be great if it folded up, he says. And he was looking at Amazon, seeing brands like Mophie, Anker, websites. He didn't see anything with really great reviews. So he's looking for a recommendation.
He says, should I do that? Or should I just get a set of extra cables, like traveling cables and chargers that she can keep separate from her home cables so she always has them for traveling? And doesn't forget to pack them. So he wants to know, do you have some suggestions for him? I don't know why he thinks I travel a lot. I haven't been anywhere this year, but it is only the fifth. So, yeah.
So, well, first of all, I have to have somewhat of an apology to everybody because I had a cool stuff found several weeks back, an R-Tops Qi charger that folded. And I found it, I like it to charge the Apple Watch and I like it to charge my AirPods. And I found it less than 100% reliable to charge my phone. I've put it on the charger, wake up in the morning and it's mag safe. So it's not like it's misaligned and the phone is up, you know,
3%. You know, went to bed with 44%, wake up, it's 47% going, really? Come on. Yeah. Now I'm hosed. Yeah. So that was a little frustrating. That was the RTOPS charger that I mentioned is a cool stuff found several weeks back. The quick answer to your question, Rich, is cables. cables. You cannot go wrong with a second set of travel cables that is always in your backpack or your suitcase. I have that anyway. I just always do that because I don't never want to get caught short.
The once or twice I've been out and on the road in my entire career without a charging cable from my phone, it just drives you nuts. Ah, quick tip thrown in here in the answer to the question. Go to the front desk of the hotel and say, hey, do you have a spare iPhone cable? More often than not, they've got a drawer full of the damn things. That they've pulled out of rooms. Out of rooms over the years. Yeah. Oh, I left the charging cable here last week. Oh, here you go.
That's it. Was it a white cable about six feet long? That's the one. Right. Right. I see. I bet you could even ask for an Apple Watch charger and they would have one. I'm sure they would. There's no doubt in my mind anymore that, you know, those things are so prolifically lost and that the hotel is bound to have some. Prolifically lost. That's right. I don't know if that's grammatically correct, but it's oh so right in my heart.
I communicated the point, whether or not it's grammatically correct. I communicated there. there. So yeah, extra cables, always a good idea to have in your bag. And then I did do some looking around on Amazon again, and I agree, every one of them has some negative reviews on it. I don't think you can sell 10,000 units and not have somebody cheesed at what you've sold them, but there's a license, L-I-S-E-N, three in one for Apple devices.
And I meant to have that link Sorry, Dave. I got it. Oh, you got it. I got you. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Of course. So it looks like it does the job, and it looks like it's priced right. Of course, it's not coming up, right? No, Amazon, the internet's broken this morning. Yeah. Sorry, didn't mean to break the internet. It's okay. It's normally $65, $66 on sale right now as we record this for $40. Plus a $10 coupon, Pete, so you get it for $30. Oh, yeah. Yeah,
yeah. They're even down to $30. So, um, it looks robust enough to. That it will probably work again. I hesitate to say cool stuff found now that, uh, it happens charger and it, and it just was frustrating that, uh, it wasn't. And, and Dave, you know, we talked to briefly in the pre-show about, well, was it the, was it the, the, the O snap, but I have not had any issues with my O snap on any other G charger. Yep.
Now this one you found from Lyson, Leeson, whatever it's called, looks interesting for a travel charger. And i always travel with something like this i don't have this particular one i have this uh anchor three in one cube that i sometimes will travel with that does the same kind of thing it it you know it it'll it'll charge everything but like you man i i make sure that i have cables to to charge everything.
And some of that is just because I, I, it sucks at home when I know I'm going to spend my day on the other side of the driveway at my office.
It sucks at home when I wake up and my phone hasn't charged, but it's certainly manageable because I can plug it in at my office, waking up in a hotel, especially when I know that I'm either, you know, going to go like next week you know out all day yes but or even you know on vacation or whatever like we rely on our phones so much that i just can't bring myself to risk the uh waking up with an uncharged phone because it decided oh i got too hot on the
charger so i'm just gonna you know chill out or whatever it's it the amount of convenience that i get for the four nights that that I'm away with my mag safe thing. Like it's no, I just plug it in and I'm fine. And the nice part is cables weigh a whole lot less than mag safe travel. Chargers. You know, I don't know. I like, I always bring one of these things with me. Cause I love the idea of it. Like, Oh, I can set up my hotel room and it's just like home and I can chill and like all that.
However, I, anytime I want to charge, I want it on a cable, either because of what I said, I want to wake up with it fully charged, or I know I've got 20 minutes while I'm in the room to like, you know, chill before I got to head out for the evenings events. And I'm going to use a cable there, too, because it's going to charge faster on a cable. Right. So... Here's where you might be able to save some travel space. I'll add to this.
You guys have probably seen these Anker Prime gallium nitride wall chargers. They have them up to like 67 watts. So I don't know what Mac he has or she has, but if you have one of the newer M series, you know, MacBook Airs or something like that. You can get 67 watt charger, super tiny, folds up, has three ports, so you can charge anything on it from a single tiny charger. And then you could potentially swap that out for your big Mac wall charger.
Because I don't know if you're like me, but like I'm working during the day, I have my Mac plugged in, my devices are charged. I'm usually charging the devices at night and have the Mac shut down, right? So you can work on your Mac during the day, get 67 watts from a teeny tiny charger through your USB-C. And then at night, plug all three of your cables in for your iPhone, your Apple Watch, your AirPods, and charge those up overnight all in the same little tiny wall charger.
So you don't have to carry your big brick. You don't need all the things. You can mix and match. Yep. Yep. And actually, you know, now I need to make it a cool stuff. I bought this at Best Buy last time I forgot my home charger before I started carrying two chargers on the road. And I have this brick that I bought at Best Buy, and it has a USB-C and two USB-As.
And it's i want to say it's like 80 85 watts something like that and that's that stays in my bag that's my laptop charger on the road yeah right right yep and then i will i will say i do take an anchor i don't travel as much as you guys but i take one of this just this the cheap anchor it's not foldable but it's a three-in-one that i have by my bedside you know it it. It's hard plastic and it's at the iPhone things at a specific angle.
Can't fold it flat. But what I do is when I pack, I have everything stacked up and I have the space between, you know, my pants and shorts and my T-shirts. And I just slide that in diagonally and it sits flat right at the top of my bag. So it doesn't fold flat, but I just use that's OK. Space on my clothes to make it flat. Yep. I like it. And that thing always works. It's actually really good.
And I think it's one of their cheaper chargers. I think you can probably get older versions for like $20, $30. I like it. I forget what it's called. It's like that Anker 3, and it's got a terrible name. Yeah. Anker 3-in-1. Yeah. Whatever. Charger. Yeah. Fan for iPhone.
Sweet. Well, and I've actually found it. I found one on Best Buy that it's actually now, it's an Insignia 100-watt 4-port USB-C and usba uh i'm trying to get it to the trying to share it i'm trying to share it, don't worry about we can share it later we'll record the show now that's where i need to put it not on the screen that's right yeah macgeekup.com and uh yeah and you can find this particular episode either at mgg.fm slash 1017 or in your email box if you go sign up for the mailing
list which is primarily used just to send you those, the show notes every week. So yeah. All right. Uh, what is now you want to take us to Mark Pete? Uh, I do, I do, but, uh, I got a vamp. Will I find Mark? Cause I was looking for the link instead of where I was supposed to be. You know, that's okay. We're playing with chat GPT to make an image for what is obviously at least at this moment in time, the running contender for show title, which is prolifically lost. So, yeah.
So, yeah. Good. There we are. And I am prolifically lost at the moment, but I'm back. It's a theme. It's a theme. Oh, man. So Mark writes in and says, Pobox is an email redirection service that I've been using for decades. I'd not heard of this, so there's a cool stuff found while you're at it.
Originally, because I was a postmaster for a software house that was expanding globally, and I needed to be able to give people one email and then change the back-end email as often as I needed for testing, etc. So, how do I tell Mac Mail to send as my pull box email? And the only options I can find are in the main account emails. And he has a second question. He says, my wife is happy for me to start helping her clean up her 40,000 inbox items. Oh, what a slacker. I got to lease that. Oh, man.
No, I'm not going to wait that up there, but wow. Yeah, so she's got a full inbox. I'm going to need to breathe for a second, Pete. Sorry. Yeah, continue, please. So she said, one thing she would like me to do is an auto move incoming email to a folder. All good. But then she would like emails in that folder to auto delete after a set number of days. No idea how to do that. Do you have any suggestions? And I bet we do. I would guess that we do. I will.
So yeah, Pobox or P.O. Box is the name I always kind of had in my head is one of these mail forwarding sort of services. If you want Apple Mail to be able to send as that via your Gmail sort of construct, the first thing you need to do is go into the web interface for Gmail, go to settings and accounts. It's actually settings and then accounts and import. That's just the name of it. And click the button that says add another email address.
This will walk you through a process which essentially asks you for the email address and then the SMTP credentials to send through that email address. The end result of this is that in the Gmail web interface, you can choose another email address that's not a Gmail address as your from address and send us that. But they need to make sure it's yours first, and then also they need the credentials to send through it. Now, if P.O.
Box or whatever your provider is, if you're listening, has SMTP credentials for you to use, then you could put those in and everything's going to be fine. Lots of providers, forwarding only providers are just that forwarding only. They don't have outbound mail. They just take inbound mail and they don't have SMTP credentials. So I'm going to teach you a trick that has worked for several decades with Gmail. And I don't think we'll ever break. at least I have my fingers crossed.
What you do is you put in when it asked you for the SMTP server, you put in smtp.gmail.com. And then when it asked you for the credentials, you put in the credentials of that Gmail account that you're adding this to. I know it seems like a circular thing. It is, but it's a hack that works and it works great. So once you get that in there, test it from the web interface, make sure you can choose the from address and send and all that that stuff.
At this point, you have a couple of options. Number one is you could use the Gmail app. You know, Apple, it turns out, allows third-party apps in the store now. And so you can go find the Gmail app in the store and run that, and it will inherit all of the extra addresses that you have added to your Gmail account. Apple Mail is capable of doing this. However, it does not inherit the addresses from a Gmail account. In fact, it doesn't even let you add a new from address to a Gmail account.
So you have to create a new mail account on your Mac that is an IMAP mail account and log that into Gmail with IMAP.gmail.com. So just don't click the Google box. You got to go through and set it up as an IMAP account because then it will act the same. But it allows Apple Mail will allow you to then go into the settings and accounts and on your Gmail account or your new IMAP account that happens to point to Gmail. You get to add more from addresses.
Addresses it will attempt to send those through your gmail account which is why you have to do the first step to get all that set up and allow that to happen if you just randomly put an address in there and try to send it through gmail that it doesn't already know about it's going to push it away.
So that's that, but it is, yeah, that adding of the, the Gmail SMTP to itself is the reason it dawned on me to try that is you used to just be able to choose, do you want to use external SMTP or should we just send it from the Google mail servers? Are you okay with that? And then they stopped allowing that on new accounts, but they, like, they didn't change it on old ones. I'm like, well, can I just type in that, that data? And it's like, yep, no problem.
All good. Works. It works. Yeah. So, so that's the first part of the question is, do we have anything to talk about that before we talk about, I just want to clear something up. So I called it PO box. You called it PO box, but I have a reason. I lived in Louisiana for a lot of years and I could go for a shrimp po' boy right now. I understand. I knew that that's where that was coming from. That's how I read it. It didn't even occur to me that it was PO box. Of course. It was PO box.
It's PO box. Just like a po' boy. boy, just change the last letter. Don't know why they changed the letter. Poe boy is just fine as it is. Exactly. Auto deleting messages in mail is an interesting little thing. It is doable with Apple script, or at least chat GPT tells me that it is. I believe it largely because I know that mail is scriptable. I've done things like this in mail with scripts and in reading the the script that chat GPT sort of wrote for me, it, it fits.
You might need to do a little tweaking to it as you test it. But I put a link to my chat GPT session where I had it create this script for me and you can copy the script right out of there and it'll even kind of teach you how to, you know, how to do these things. But, but I think that would be the, I would use Apple script to delete the, the mail. I don't know what, what about you guys? Yeah.
I I'll jump in. I'm sorry. I thought that anything in your out or in your trash bin automatically deleted after a certain amount of time. Anyway, trash. Yes. But he's talking about moving his wife's new mail into just another box, not a trash box. And then having that go. Correct. If, if not read in so many days. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Um, all right. Yep. Yep. So I don't, I don't ever delete mail.
I am an inbox zero person so my inbox always has nothing in it but i move everything to folders and just let it build up same yeah i don't i don't delete anything i did recently i i i don't know if i talked about this on the show i i would always you know i only have certain amount of storage on my mail accounts because like on the servers and so i was archiving stuff to on my mac on my one one main Mac. And it dawned on me that, well, this is only on one computer.
Is it backed up? Yes, of course, but it's only on one computer. And that at times is a pain in the neck. Like when I'm traveling, if I want to look at something that's more than like two years old, which seems to happen more often than, than you would think, uh, I have to like, you know, VPN into my home network and screen share my one Mac that has acts, you know, has that data.
So I set up a mail server on my Synology, which I don't recommend ever running your own mail server again, but I've broken that rule. And I use it. Mainly, I set it up a couple of years ago just to test, you know, to see what that was like. Because somebody, I think one of you folks was asking about that. So I set it up and it lives and it has a domain that no one knows about. And I do get some mailing address, you know, mailing lists into it so I can make sure it actually works. And it does.
But it hit me. It was like, wait, I have. An IMAP account on a server that I own and I get to pay for the storage on. I don't have to like rent the storage from Google or fast mail or anybody. And so I archive everything to that now and it works great. So I, you know, so that's interesting. I know. Yeah. Yeah. When I had that thought, I think I had it like while we were having a discussion on the show last year and it was like, Oh, wait a minute.
There's, there's an answer here. So, I used to use Mail Steward for handling my archives. This is a Mac app that you can buy, and it basically runs an index on your inboxes, whatever mailboxes you want to point at it.
And stores everything in a SQLite or MySQL database and makes it searchable, indexable, and also because it's a mysqlite database it is a file that lives on your mac and i used to just back that up yeah and so i would have that archive all my emails i think m for borton told me about this decades ago and i had used it for years and years and years i subsequently stopped i'm not really sure why but that that was a great way to have a local backup of all of
my email that i knew was safe no matter what yeah and and you like the user interface of it i i've been aware of mail steward for a long time but i've just never it's very nerdy okay very nerdy okay it doesn't require setting up your own mail server which is even also nerdy yes yeah that's fair i i wonder though i know mail steward the the way from what i remember of it please correct me if i'm wrong you kind of set up rules for what you want it to archive off right so that could
solve mark's wife's problem of wanting to archive off things that are of a certain age and at least get it out of her mailbox and then you know you could go in and delete it from mail steward if you want like you know later but at least it gets it out of there well and what's nice about the mail steward Again, it stores it in a database. And then I think it has the ability to export back out to, you know, an Mbox file. And so you could restore stuff.
Right. Like, it had a lot of really great features. It is not a simple interface to deal with. It's not too bad, but, you know, it is a little bit techy, I will be honest. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. All right. I actually thought of another way to do this, and I think it may be more difficult or less efficient, but using Hazel. And I was thinking, well, you can export mail to a folder on your Mac and then Hazel will kill it after a certain amount of time.
Mm-hmm. Yeah. But that then allows you, you could back up that mail using any number of, you know, Carbon Copy Cloner or Time Machine or any of those would grab those emails and then the mail client isn't holding on to them. But that may be adding a level of complexity that's not worth it or it may work out well. I know every other solution we've mentioned is pretty nerdy, Pete. So there's, there's just. Just a nerdy thing. Sorry. No, you're right. Oh, the database is a, it's a goopy mess.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yep. All right. Well, again, if you've got questions, let us know. Feedback at MacGeekGab.com. Well, it's CES coverage week, and I want to take a second and thank one of our CES coverage sponsors, Mac Updater. Mac Updater is one of my favorite apps. I have it running on my Macs, all of my Macs, all of the time, so that I know when there's new software updates.
Because there's nothing worse than going to launch an app that I only use maybe once every month or two and finding at that moment, the moment I launch it, that it's got an update. And I probably want the update, but I really don't want it in that moment. I already wanted it. Well, the good news, that's what Mac Updater does for me. It scans my apps, tells me when there's an update, and then really makes the process of updating so simple.
I just select the apps that I want to update, or I can just tell it to quick select the ones that it thinks I should select. And it's almost always right. And then I tell it go and it goes and installs everything and updates it. I can see release notes in there and it maintains backup copies of a lot of the apps so that if something with an update doesn't go so well, I've got the backup there. It's amazing. You got to go check this out and you can go to corecode.io slash MGG to test it all out.
Go there, corecode.io slash MGG. And our thanks to the folks at CoreCode who make Mac Updater for sponsoring our CES coverage this week. All right. All right. All right. Go ahead yeah we're we're gonna jump to dan here here pete uh yeah that's okay.
Dan says i currently have three ups's one on my mac one uh my tivo and my cable box which is my modem and router no idea why but we frequently get quick dips in power which would cause these devices to restart yep it happens says i've had no problems since i put the ups in great it's doing its job. My issue is that I buy replacement batteries on Amazon for about $37 and they only last about two years.
I'm wondering if it's better to keep buying the batteries or if I should try another UPS thoughts on this, Adam.
Great, great question. Uh, well, first I have to, uh, to throw this out and say do as i say not as i do because i know that i should have ups's on everything and i do not have ups's i have one ups it was provided by my company for my work computer so it does sit here and when my mac's connected to it it's all connected to everything so it's kind of part of my setup now but it was provided by work and i actually had this exact situation happened where it was an old UPS when I got it.
And then when we went remote and I ended up moving out here, it eventually, the battery died, right? I don't know how old that battery is. Sure, it happens. Yeah. And so I just requested a new UPS from my company and they happily sent me one, which is great. So they sent me a brand new one. And it was only when I was taking the other one down that I realized, oh, these things, the batteries, you can just swap them out really easy. There's a little door and battery pops in there.
And it's like, I wonder why they didn't just give me a new battery. Probably cheaper but I also did some research at that time too and so I think just like he mentioned the big dilemma I had with and have with batteries in general this is batteries for anything right is you can find the really really cheap ones. Right? That don't come from the manufacturer. They're not the OEM one. They're coming out of some factory out of China somewhere.
And it seems like a really, really good deal, but I don't know the quality. I don't know, you know, these sorts of things. And it's another reason why, you know, people complain about Apple and the cost of their battery replacements and stuff like that. There is a difference in batteries. There's huge differences in batteries. And how would you know what brand is good?
What brand isn't bad? It isn't. And if you go with the the manufacturer's battery a lot of times it might end up being as much or very close to just a brand new ups so i would tend to probably fall on the line of have the ups once the battery dies get a new one it's going to have newer features it's going to have newer technology if the price isn't that different than replacing the battery so i think it for me it would come down to.
How much is that replacement battery from the oem versus just buying a new ups that that that is the The question I ask every time and it, my, my, uh, my rule of thumb is if the cost of the battery is more than 50% of the replacement cost of the UPS, I replaced the UPS. And the reason for that is I know that it's possible for UPSs to, uh, for their, their their surge protecting capabilities to diminish over time.
And it's impossible, at least for me at home, to be able to tell whether that has happened yet. Like they say that, you know, they're good for X number of surges, after which point they might start to not be quite as great about it. Because they, you know, like they are taking sometimes massive hits from like lightning and those sorts of things.
Like that's their job. and so i like i said i use the 50 rule i probably wind up replacing the battery once on each ups and then it seems like the replacement battery price goes up as the ups gets older probably supply demand you know that whole thing so yeah i i followed the same rule and i have been burned by the wow that battery's you know uh super inexpensive or as i like to say cheap and worth worth it. So. Yeah.
Right. Well, here's the thing. My observation about UPSs is people don't have them that should have them. And the reason is that they're not sexy. You spend a lot of money for something that doesn't really do much for you. It's doing a lot for you, but just, you know, it isn't a configurable router. It isn't a cool new phone. It isn't a powerful laptop. It's a a piece of gear that sits there and protects you. It's just not exciting. No, it's not. You plug it in and forget about it. Yeah.
Yeah. And so if you don't have one, I highly recommend just for the surge protection alone on the darn things. But to prevent the brownout issues. It's the brownouts for me. It's the backup. It's the backup thing, right? I'm a huge backup person, and I'm only a huge backup person now because I had an incident where we lost a lot of valuable data. And from that point forward, I learned my lesson. So sometimes you just have to be taught a hard lesson and that might be the
case with a UPS. Yeah. Right. I just need to do it. I just need to bite the bullet and I just haven't wanted to spend the time or deal with it. And I just haven't done it. And again, don't be like me. I know it's wrong. I know the risks I'm taking and I'm taking it knowingly. So hear that. Like if you want to be like me and take the risk knowingly, I'm going to get burned one day and then I'm going to be really sad. And then I will have a UPS on everything.
Yeah. though i i learned the lesson from my clients when i was in austin uh because i watched their computers blow up like we would have a lightning storm one night and our voicemail would be full the next morning because we ran a computer you know on-site computer repair shop called computer nerds um and so i i didn't have to learn that lesson the hard way i have unfortunately learned that lesson the hard way since then but it's not but like I've had UPS is now though I put them
on every piece of electronic gear that I have and there's one. Again, not a sexy benefit. It's the long-term benefit. But there's one thing that I've noticed, and that's that my electronics last longer than most people's comparable electronics do. TVs, you know, like audio gear that I have, all of that stuff. And one of the features that most UPSs have just as a matter of course is power conditioning.
Like they are keeping the voltage steady that, you know, if there's a dip in the circuit, they are, the battery is there to, to add it back in, to compensate. And of course it limits it on the top end too. With electronics getting, you know, less and less expensive, more and more bulk manufacturing, those transformers in the power supplies for them are a, a point of cost savings for many manufacturers.
Manufacturers and they're cheap and so babying those transformers it turns out has been a good thing for me in general now do i have a control group where i can specifically say i get an extra five years or no but it sure seems like that um so i'm gonna knock on some wood one second yeah no i mean that literally that literally makes sense right you're protecting the circuitry in your devices from abuse and doing it constantly so yes it follows i mean the logic follows the logic follows
yeah even if even if i might be wrong that's right anecdotally you're right dave i feel right pete and i i think when when when one is prolifically lost feeling unlost is the most important thing absolutely i think so you want to take us to ron adam. Yeah, Ron says he has a weirdo, which is interesting. But he is using BusyCal and Calendar and getting an odd message lately. It tells him your event couldn't be refreshed. There's insufficient storage
space for a specific meeting. I don't want to out him on his meeting. In a specific, it looks like Calendar and in iCloud. So it's this little dialogue that pops up. And he says he sees it in BusyCal. And it's when he's trying to put a new event in and he's done some Googling, looked around, done all the usual stuff of updating and making sure he's got adequate local storage. He's got two terabytes in his iCloud with plenty of extra memory on his computer and is just baffled.
Calendarandicloud.com isn't any help and the iCloud app is just showing these warnings. So he wants to know about that And then he also asks about bulk deleting old events. He says, I can't find a way to accomplish this. I want to, you know, again, I think the idea is something's going on with this storage, at least according to this dialogue. And how do we clear this up? Interesting. See, we've got a theme. We want to delete old mail. We want to delete old calendar events.
I mean, I realize that's to deal with the symptom, not necessarily the problem of this one. But but to answer that question, I would do it the same way. I would Apple script calendar to delete old events.
And you can absolutely do that. and in fact i went to chat gpt and had it mock up an apple script that certainly looks like it would work and i've linked that from the show notes for the second part of the question so if you want to bulk delete old events apple script calendar is you know apple's calendar app is scriptable and you can do that um yeah this error message that you read he says he's getting the same thing in both busy cal and calendar the the screenshot he sent us
is from you know apple's calendar calendar yeah and it's you know this thing about insufficient storage space tells me that this is more about an issue on his mac locally than it is on icloud and in fact he confirmed that he's not running out of storage space in icloud uh calendar calendar events don't generally take up a lot of storage space they're just usually just text you can add lots of text to them you can also add images to calendar events i don't know if you knew that but you can and so
that sometimes will get you there um but uh but i you know i so i would look i would do the obvious thing and look and just make sure that your mac isn't like you know running close to its storage limits i feel like you would see other warning signs of this other than your your calendar telling you, you know, I don't have four extra bites. We're full. We're full, you know, um, but it's, which, but it, you know, when an app thinks it can't write to something, um.
The error message is sometimes based upon an assumption that the developer or developers made. And so when I see this, there is insufficient storage space. Think, OK, well, is it truly looking at the amount of storage space and calculating that there isn't enough to do this?
Or is it trying to write to it and getting an error that says I can't write to this file and it's assuming that because it's an open calendar the only reason you could not write to that file is if there's not room to write to it but there might be other reasons you might not be able to write to that file like permissions issues or you know is the file corrupt so that's It's the I would first check to make sure that you aren't out of storage space. And then I would start looking at permissions.
And one of the easiest things to do to sort of test all of these at once would be to export the events in that calendar to you can, you know, in calendar, you can just export them to a file and then import them into a new calendar on iCloud. So that you've essentially duplicated your calendar, but you've created a brand new file for that calendar. Does it all just work there? If so, okay, we had some corruption, whatever, just delete the, the, you know, now duplicate slash original calendar
and you're good to go. I don't know. That's, that's where my brain goes in the. Where might one go and fix those permissions? Would that be a path worth trying? It would. Yeah, fair. So I believe that they are in home library calendars is where that stuff is stored. And I feel confident saying that. I'm looking on this Mac in the studio in home library calendars. I never use the Apple Calendar app. I only use busy Cal.
However, I do sync with my iCloud calendar and I know that my Mac sort of keeps that up to date regardless. If I happen to launch calendar, all my stuff's there and I can see that six minutes ago there were eight files in my home library calendars folder that were updated. So I feel like this might be the, um, the, the right place to go. Yeah. Okay. And then the other thing I was going to ask, and you said, you know, right, how much does a given event take up?
The leading old events, I wouldn't do it because it's a few bites at most on most events. And I've, at least for me, I found it necessary, for instance, when I have to do my medical for the FAA, I have to tell them when I went to visit a given doctor. And I can always look back and see over the years when a given doctor's appointment was. And so I find it a great historical record to go, oh yeah, I was at this place on that date.
I, I wouldn't, I, I mean, we just said, I just, you know, admitted that I never delete mail either, but, um, I would, I I've, I've never deleted a calendar event. I can go all the way back to 1993 when I first started using now up to date. Um, cause that was my first digital calendar. Wow. Yeah. I know I'm crazy though. Like, so it, you know, Where were you on July 12th, 1993 Dave? Wait, wait, say, say, yeah, Pete, Adam, what, what were you saying?
I said, I don't, I don't delete anything in calendar either. I just, I've always just let it do whatever it does and don't worry about it. Don't worry about it. Yeah. It's not the thing that's going to eat up all your storage on iCloud, on your Mac, on any of that. You, you, if you get to that point, you've, it's probably time to get more storage.
Like, yeah, yeah. No, I mean, I, I, I realized, you know, we're making some assumptions here based on our our own experiences, but, um, I'd be curious if somebody's got like, oh no, I have to delete calendar events because, you know, I'd be curious, you know, cause I'm just interested in, uh. And those kinds of things. All right. As you know, it is CES weekend. I want to take a minute to thank Collide, one of our CES sponsors, for our coverage here.
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Plus, you can use Collide on devices without MDM, like your Linux fleet, contractor devices, and every BYOD phone and laptop in your company. You gotta check this out. visit collide.com slash MGG to watch a demo and see how it all works. Again, that's K O L I D E.com slash MGG and our thanks to collide for sponsoring all of our CES coverage this week. All right, let's do some cool stuff found before we come back from CES with a bunch of cool stuff found. Yep.
In fact, I think we're probably going to release a couple of shorter episodes from our, uh, from CES Pete. I'm I'm, I called them because last year we had this great suite where the, you know, John was out there with us actually last year. And, and we had this great suite where we had, you know, our rooms to sleep in, but we had a living room where we could congregate and like do work together. I have been at pool. Well, that's
the thing. I had it like I had been in a suite like this before there. It's called the hospitality suite. It's it's fantastic. It's here's the weird part. It's the same price for this hospitality suite with two bedrooms and a living room that it is to buy two king bed rooms. And so it's like, well, that's like easy math to me. I'll take the living room. Yeah, of course. course.
Well, I'd always had like a regular table with chairs this time or last year we got there and walked in the room and it was quite impressive to see there was a pool table in the middle of our room. So sure. We enjoyed some tequila one night and, and, and played some pool, but it meant we didn't have a table to like record or do work at this year. I, uh, sent our friends at the Mirage a request that they give us a table with chairs instead of a table with balls.
So, you know, yep, yep, yep. Exactly. And for what it's worth, folks know that tequila did not improve our pool game. No, no, that is correct. Yes, that's correct. That's correct. So hopefully we will be releasing. The plan is to release a couple of episodes, you know, many episodes with things that kind of we find.
Uh if you remember back in the you know uh the the pre-sale days when uh when we had tmo we would do a takeover of uh daily observations one or two days of ces and and use that as our vehicle to share our like cool stuff found of the day we don't have that anymore a because i i'm no longer involved in the mac observer and b because that show no longer exists which is which is a a shame. I think that was a fantastic show.
I was really proud of what we created there, but anyway, uh, not my decision to make and, uh, and it's fine, but, uh, so, but we can still do it and we just release it to this feed. Like it's all good. Nothing really changed. Right. Exactly. Yeah. I think we'll have some good, some cool stuff. I'm looking forward to it. For now, we have Matt who shares that there was actually somebody in our Discord that asked, I'm looking for a place to jot down information.
I usually default to paper and pen, but I'm wondering if there is a scratchpad type app that I can use so that I can jot down notes on my computer.
And matt in our discord answered this saying well without knowing more specifics i can recommend the mac app unclutter at unclutter app.com it's mostly invisible until you need it when you do you just swipe down using your mouse or your trackpad and a little shelf drops into view from the top of your screen ready to take your text-based notes it's very straightforward and uh additional Additional features include clipboard history and files,
a shelf, like files that you can just pull down and get to, like things that you might actually put on your desktop, but you want to get to quickly or you want to drag into an app. You drag it to the shelf. It doesn't actually move it anywhere. And then you can drag it into a mail message. Actually, I need to revisit on clutter. I'd forgotten about that feature of this app. That looks cool. Yeah. I forgot about this. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Yep. And the price is 20 bucks. Okay. 20 bucks. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Huh? Yeah. I like that. Yeah. Talk to the way to keep your desktop clean and yet still have it all in one place. And still have it all where you need it. Yeah. Very cool. All right. Yeah. Thank you for that, Matt. I, I'm sure we've talked about unclutter on the show before, but I forgot about it. So I, I know we, you know, whatever.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. uh the next little app in cool stuff found comes from pharmacist foster so we've got pilot pete now we got pharmacist foster and i like the the the wordplay there the alliteration there yeah yeah yeah he doesn't spell it with an f though that's the funny part right um the uh it's called shortcut detective and he uses it to suss out keyboard shortcuts he was trying to he found it when he was trying to use a keyboard shortcut that he knew existed in an app and it didn't work.
He could go to the menu and choose the option and that would work and it even showed the little shortcut next to it, but it wouldn't work. Shortcut Detective, which is from Irradiated Software and I believe is free, I believe. Yeah. Figures out which app is seeing and intercepting, if you will, any given keyboard shortcut And he was able to narrow it down to, you know, some third party app that he had installed years ago that was intercepting
that one keyboard shortcut. So he just went in and changed it. But shortcut detective allows you to know. And that's pretty cool. So that's why it's part of cool stuff. Yeah. Have you ever used shortcut detective, Adam? Sorry, I'm trying to stay muted because it is the first Friday of the month and they are testing the tornado sirens. I don't know if people are hearing that or not. I hear that. Oh, yeah. Because it's very close to my house.
Yeah. No, I've never used this app, but it sounds super handy because I've run into this problem where you have a conflict with some shortcut that you're used to using. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. What were you going to say, Pete? Sorry. It looks like it also has the ability to block a given global keyboard shortcut. Is that what I'm reading on there? Oh, shortstop, which can block global hotkeys. Yes. There's all kinds of great little apps on the irradiated software site.
So yeah, go check them out. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, shortstop can do that. And that's not from them, I don't think. I think that's from a different company called shortstop. Yeah, but we'll put that in the show notes too. Why not? That's what we do. Huh? Interesting. Shortstop. All right. Cool. Yeah, I love all these. Like these single purpose apps are, they can be so handy. So, yep. Yep.
Dom has our next cool stuff found, and it is related to our discussion about smart home and specifically garage doors that we had last week. He says, one thing worth considering to solve your garage door opener, your smart garage door opener problems or smart that became dumb garage door opener problems is by using a switch bot bot to use any brand of garage door opener with HomeKit, whether it's smart or not. All you need is a garage door that has a remote control, which is likely all of them.
The SwitchBot bot can be used to physically activate the appropriate remote button via HomeKit or Siri with no extra software apps, HomeBridge or anything else. It doesn't care about brands, makes or models. No, that's true. And if you change your garage door opener, then nothing needs to change in your HomeKit setup. You just put the little SwitchBot bot on it. This is a push button bot is essentially what this thing does.
I joked a couple of weeks ago about how I think it was I was either in pre-show may have been pre-show or during the show that my son was home for like an extended period over maybe it was Thanksgiving and uh. There was one day he works about he works and lives about two hours from here. And he said, yeah, I think on Monday I'm going to have to do a round trip to work because there's this one button that needs to be pushed to reset this device that they write the software for.
And and I'm like, you know, this feels like something that could be scripted. Sure enough, like the switch. I'm going to send him this and say, look, man, for 30 bucks, you could have saved yourself a round trip. The probably less to buy one of these than the fuel that it cost him to go back and forth. But, uh, yeah. Yeah. So that's awesome. And this was, uh, that's a cool piece of gear.
I mean, it's, uh, for those not watching, uh, looking on the screen, that little button comes up and pushes the button, physically pushes the button and it sticks on. Yeah. Go ahead. I was just going to say, it reminds me of the, what are those things called? The useless device. Yes. You know, that people make where, and you could probably use this to make one of those. It's a box, right? And it has a switch on it and you flip the switch and then another bot comes
out and then flips the switch the other way. Yes. The useless machine. Yeah. But this one isn't useless. No, that's right. That's right. We will put, but we will put a link to the useless machine. Yeah. But, but this could be the ingredients in creating a useless machine. That's right. Correct. Yeah. Yeah. Push the buttons back and forth. You could do something within it and a raspberry pie or a Arduino or something.
And this thing probably, and create a, a wireless useless machine. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. I love it. That's great. I'm going to, and it looks like it can stick onto things on the, on their website. They have it on like a light switch, but they've also got it on your coffee machine. Like, so it's, it's versatile. I don't even know that you would need a remote control for your garage.
If I was going to use one of these things and let's be very clear, I may be getting one of these things to use for my garage doors. This might be the simplest solution that anybody's come up with is I would just stick it on the opener, like on the wall in the garage, the hardwired opener in the garage. I see. It seems like it would work at least for the ones I have. It seems like it would work for that. The geofence to activate when you get in the area and open your door.
Yeah, I don't do that. I didn't do the geofence. We have three garage doors here. So if I'm in my wife's car, I don't need it opening the garage door for my car just because I'm like, and I did think about, well, I could do a geofence thing that only happens if I'm connected to CarPlay and I approach the neighborhood. Like it's probably, there's probably. Yeah. You'd have to get it pretty granular or else, you know, it loses, briefly loses signal and then find you at home
and it opens your garage door. Oh yeah, that's true. Yeah. That'd be fun. Yeah. Yeah. So.
The upper. Yeah. And somebody wrote in, and I can't find it now, but told us that all these garage door, openers are owned by the same parent company it's all chamberlain yeah yeah yeah all the various brands yeah it's like i'm really upset with them i hope they're at at ces i don't generally go to ces to like meet with vendors and get tech support you know i i go to let them talk right like learn about things but if i see the chamberlain people i'm gonna ask them why
they're gonna have a chat yet why they broke well i want to know why did they reduce the functionality of their devices like i just don't understand how i'm supposed to use this i will ask them this if i see them this week i'll ask them if i don't see them i will ask them via other channels because like i'm curious as to what their intentions are like why can i not use this with my smart home anymore more i bet they're gonna say security but but then but like okay hey
it's a bs excuse and they're gonna stick with it i'm just saying yeah but but like if i can't use it with my smart home.
What's the point of having a smart garage door opener yeah fair enough i like why you why you break it like i don't know yeah yeah why you gotta be like that because we could yeah exactly one last one is uh for me i mentioned in last week's episode that i was uh taking my liberating my audiobooks and giving them their freedom so that i could put them wherever i wanted and i had an audible book and i wanted to put it in my apple books on my phone so that i could instead of using the
audible app i was using the apple app so i put it in books on my mac and expected it to sync via icloud and i am still expecting it to sync via icloud in that i'm waiting but i'm really the expectation is is is less falling off rapidly yeah because that's not how it works evidently i can put a pdf in the in in books and it syncs to all my devices but but audio books, not so much.
So in theory, I could do it with a wired or if I had previously set it up, a wireless connection to my Mac via the Finder, aka the old iTunes functionality that syncs over a wire or wirelessly. And I tried to do that and it never started syncing the book. Like it showed me the book and I could select it and say, Say yes, please put that over there on that phone that you see. I don't know, whatever was going on, it never did. And so I'm like, gosh, what's going on?
So I did some Googling and was reminded of one of my apps that I used a long time ago, which was Walter Pro, which is just built to take media and put it on your phone. Even media that Apple says you can't do. Of course, with this one, Apple says I could do it. It just didn't do it.
Not only did this do it, it would do all kinds of other media. i i'm thinking i'm amazing may have have let me do some version of this too but uh but walter pro certainly did so yeah have you ever tried this adam with i'm amazing uh maybe long time ago it does have some functions and features for putting them on to uh putting files onto your device but i think what's great about walter pro is it kind of automates everything right you can set up encoding settings and
you can say for this type of file this is how i want it going over there and, on the fly encode it and it just takes care of everything and it's like drag and drop simple like yes yeah it was set it and forget it i was done like once i saw it was like a youtube video that i think the title of it was use walter pro to transfer audiobooks to your iphone it was like right of course like i didn't even need to watch the video it's like ah walter pro and i i I had simply
had fallen off my radar for years. I'm glad it still exists. And, uh, yeah, it, it, from the moment I saw that video title to being finished with the, the project was, you know, probably four minutes and that included downloading Walter pro. So yeah, yeah, yeah, it's good stuff. It is good stuff. Either. You guys got anything else to add or, or shall we say that we're done? Uh, Uh, one, if we can circle back to one thing on the quick, quick note thing.
Yeah. That when, when you guys were going through that, it reminded me about, you know, notes as a quick note feature, right? And it's on your iOS device. If you're using a pencil, you can use a gesture where you swipe up from the corner to write a quick note. You can enable that on your Mac with hot corners.
So if you go into your system settings, go into desktop and doc, and then go down to to the bottom and click on hot corners one of the hot corner options is something called quick note and once you set that up when you go to that corner a little like white thing will peek out from the corner you click on that and it pop pops open a sheet to make a note and notes very quickly.
Oh, that's, I never, obviously Apple thought about this because otherwise the option wouldn't be there in, in hot corners, but I, I never even thought to look there. Oh, that's brilliant. I love it. So mine's turned on somehow I've hidden it because it says it's there for the bottom right corner for quick note, but man, I'm not, I'm not getting it. I don't know what I'm doing wrong. Can I ask if you have multiple screens on your Mac, Pete?
Because if you do, you have to go to the bottom right corner of the virtual screen. There it is, of the right screen. Yep. Yeah, there you go. See? That's why I come here for my tech support, folks. That's one of those tough things to troubleshoot because I can't see your setup. But I have been there before. I have done exactly that. And it's like, why doesn't it? Oh, it's over there. Yeah, where'd my mouse go? Right, yeah, exactly. I still have my mouse. It was probably a year ago.
We talked about on the show how you can use accessibility, Adam, to change the size of your mouse, which most of us sort of have experienced, but also the color of your mouse cursor. And mine is now like hot purple, and I can see it anywhere it is on the screen. It's awesome. Yes. Mine's larger, and I have it outlined in red. It's black, but I have it outlined in red. Yeah, there you go. Same thing. Yep. Yep. So, yeah, there's your... I just always use the wiggle trick.
The wiggle trick works, for sure. Yeah. But when I do that now, I get a big, hot purple mouse. That's right. Yeah.
Yapper oh man yapper thanks for hanging out with us everybody indeed time flies when you're having fun man it like it we're at 124 which is long for us and i feel like we could just go longer but we have things to do and and you have things to do and we're respectful of your time as well as our own so we kind of treat you like we treat ourselves which is you know i feel like the the best thing thing anybody any of us can do is that wasn't there the golden rule about that you know yeah uh yeah
thanks for hanging out with us folks thanks to cash fly for providing all the bandwidth to get the show from us to you thanks to all of our ces sponsors of course collide ccc backup, mac updater follow us on our various socials we put all of them in our uh show notes so you can And go there and just click, click, click, click, click and follow us and enjoy whatever that might be.
Music. I, uh, I feel like, you know, we're, we, we recorded this episode and, uh, before we travel with this assumption that we're going to be able to travel. And I, I, I, you know, the superstitious person in me says that, that we've, we're dancing very close to the edge of taunting the universe. So Pete, uh, let us, let us make sure that we, uh, make it to Vegas and don't get caught. Music.