Put That In Your Tinfoil Hat and Smoke It

It's time for the MacGeekGab, and listener Patrick brings us our first cool stuff found of the week with fast SDXL lighting. So this is a crazy fast image generator. If you've played with Dolly or anything like that, you put in your prompt and you wait about 30 seconds to a minute and you get your image. This thing does it on the fly, I'm telling you. As you're typing red car, a red car is coming up, and then you say floating in the river,

and the river materializes. before you finish typing it sometimes. It's absolutely nuts. Go try it at fastsdxl.ai. Cool stuff found. More cool stuff found like this, plus your questions answered today on MacGeekGab 1028 for Monday, March 11th, 2024. Music. Greetings, folks, and welcome to MacGeekGab, the show where you send in cool stuff found like that. You send in quick tips. You send in questions. We answer your questions. We share your cool stuff found. We share your quick tips.

And we do it loosely organized into an agenda such that it is hopefully conducive to meeting our goal of each of us learning at least five new things. Every single time we get together, sponsors for this episode include hymns.com slash mgg, where you can start your free online visit, 100% online for men's health care, convenient quality care. We'll talk more about that in the episode. And we'll also talk about our sponsor,

BB Edit, the power text tool from Bare Bones. It now has chat GPT integration. We'll talk more about all of it. But for now, here in Durham, New Hampshire, at least when we recorded this, I'm Dave Hamilton. And here in South Dakota, I'm Adam Christensen. And here, yeah, when we recorded this in Lee, New Hampshire, is Pilot Pete. By the time you hear it, I'm somewhere in Europe. I'm sure of it. I'm sure. Great to see you guys. It's good. It's good to see you too, Pete. Yeah. Yeah.

I, um. You guys. Go ahead, Adam. I was just going to say, you guys travel around. I'm always at home. Yeah. I, you know, my travels come and go. No, this month will be crazy because I'm going to Austin for South by Southwest. I'll actually be there the week that this episode is released. And then I'm home for a week and then to Los Angeles, almost certainly for podcast movement evolutions. But then I think I'm home for a couple of months, which is not a bad thing because

I've been I traveled, obviously, January and then February. And so, yeah, right. I like to say, look, my job is glamorous until you do it. Yeah. That's fair. It just sounds tiring to me. Like, I don't know if I could do it. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know how you do it. I admire you. I admire you. Because like, I don't know, especially at my age now. Like, mm-mm. Yeah. Well, I kind of look at it like this. We used to say this about being a Marine on a Navy ship, but now I've done it to my job here.

It's basically sleep till you're hungry, eat till you're sleepy. I see. That's good life advice. Yeah, it's not terrible. I mean, I don't know. I think if you did that and did not have, you know, 14 hours of flying or something to do in between, if all you did was sleep till you were hungry and ate till you were sleepy, we might live in Wally world. Well, there's that. There's some big boys doing my job. Just saying. Well, or you'd just be a cat. Or you'd be a cat.

Oh man i'm gonna run that through the xdsl lightning image generator and see what it comes up with for that you know what the heck this is driving me no did you guys hear that there's squirrel i am infested with uh little chipmunks not squirrels chipmunks crawling all all over inside my uh like around my studio here i'm up on the second floor of this building and um there's like attic space unfinished attic space outside of my studio and i hear these

things like i went out there earlier when we took our little break and between pre-show and the show and uh i saw them like running on the floor that i could just hear it like it must be like like breeding day or something. I don't know. They're going nuts. Yeah. Despite what, uh, you know, Punxsutawney Phil said spring is actually here. Spring is here. Yeah. I got to somehow figure out how to get these chipmunks to not, uh, to move their residence.

I was going to say to not take up residence in my, in my structure, but I believe it is too late for that. Yeah. Yep. Anyway, let's get back to cool stuff. Found. Shall we get your wallets folks? Here we come. Here we come with cool stuff found and we're sorry. That's right. Yep. Um, Um, my face is too big. No, that may or may not be true. That's your opinion.

Uh, that is the, uh, discord handle of the person who shared this next one who says, uh, I haven't seen anybody mentioned particulars app, which is particulars dot app. Particulars is a super customizable way to add system information about your Mac in your menu bar, desktop shortcuts, or your command line. He says, I preferred particulars to do some of the newer desktop widgets because of how customizable it is. And it simply overlays text on top of my desktop wallpaper.

This is a thing that you could do. I remember in one of the like early Linux GUI incarnations where you just get like data about something just floating on your desktop.

Like not in a window not anything it just appears there but evidently it can do more than just that but you know one of the screenshots from particulars app shows system data right so it shows what the what the chip is uh what the uptime is how much space is free on the hard drive what the ip address is of the you know wi-fi adapter what dns is like network information that sort of thing um and again you can just have it sort of floating there all the time and uh that's interesting huh overlay

top data and stuff on top of your test yeah but also like particulars and i guess that's the type of data particular shows and you can have it show in different places there is a command line that gets installed or that you can install alongside this that is just you know know, particulars at the terminal and, and show things like that too. So different network data. I mean, I was simplifying it, but yeah, it looks like you got all kinds of like storage information, like, yeah.

Cool. That's cool. And it can sit in your menu bar. Yeah, Pete. I've got a question because I'm assuming that's your screen. No, it's not my screen. I was showing the screen of particulars.app, what you might see if you visited that. I was wondering if you were running your own DNS server there. Oh, are they running their own DNS server? Apparently, yeah.

Yeah, I mean, so are you. this is like our yeah my guess is by default your synology router runs its own dns uh caching server right yeah fair enough and then it tells all of your computers to point to the router as their primary dns servers so that you're saving all the external dns lookups like if you know one computer in my house looks up www.macgeekgab.com and then another computer goes to look it up within the time that it has to live.

It just grabs it from the router instead of the internet. Exactly. So that's why your router address and your DNS address are usually the same. Now, you are the astute viewer will notice that the.

Router address in this particular screenshot is different from the dns address but they are both on the same local network and that tells me that maybe they have a secondary machine running dns you could run a dns server on your synology you could run a pie hole dns server you can run all kinds of things and then that second dns server just because you know i i need that memory for something else but i can't seem to clear it uh i can't

seem to clear that cache that second dns server address they've.

Got there is open dns that is correct 67 i noticed that too i wasn't gonna say anything but yes but i need that memory for something else and i can't seem to flush that cache it's stuck in my brain forever i know yeah i knew i knew instantly i'm like oh and they're using open dns as their backup dns server which is a weird thing go ahead adam i said i think i i switched to fast but yeah fast dns well then it's uh cloudflare it's 1.1.1.1.1.1.1 yeah that that is the dns that i

use as my secondary dns but in a in a sense cloudflare is also what my router uses um the synology routers allow you to set up dns over https so that all your dns queries are done securely and that way your isp does not even know what dns lookups you're doing but that's something i set up on my router so if your router supports dns over https that's not a bad thing to to use and this is how nerdy this episode's gonna be folks sorry no it's like it's totally fine

like this is what we do here it's great yeah dns over https it actually goes over 443.

Was that noise am i hearing like yeah i'm hearing the chipmunks again if you hear when i talk like it sounds like somebody's rustling papers get out of here guys no i can't okay all right i hear it when the noise gate opens so yeah god so there you go anyway yeah and mike lerman wants to know if it's chip and dale if it is maybe they'll put on a show for me later i don't know i don't if i'm supposed to say that oh yeah you don't want that kind of a show do you

i don't think so i don't know chippendale dancers i've never i've never been to one of those shows maybe i would like it i don't i don't know don't knock it till you tried it right okay well.

They are running around naked out there pete well you had to say it i did i did wind up saying it yeah well all right uh you want to take us to to uh the next one adam please please god take us there now says hey i heard the discussion on a recent i'm doing a little edit because i think this one's been around for a while on a recent episode about how to log everything that happens with apple home whether manually triggered in the home app or through

automations the home log for For HomeKit, app does exactly that. You can get it for iPhone, iPad, and Mac, but you'd want to run it on Mac since it can run in the background there. So I think I've heard of this. I don't think I've ever used it, but yeah, they will grab, you run it in the background and it will grab all that information and create a log for you that you can review. So somebody figured it out. Somebody just, somebody wrote the app to do the thing that we were talking about.

Out they didn't write it after we talked about it like it pre-existed but wow huh yeah i think it's been around for a bit i've never really tried but i agree i would agree with the advice you'd want it on something that is sitting there all the time sort of running it so you can grab you know as much information as yes as much yeah right because it's only able to collect it's not it's not giving you visibility into some log that home kit keeps it

is the engine that is doing the logging so right you would yeah yeah ah not exactly sure how it works but i would yeah i would assume it's watching network traffic and stuff for specific kinds of messages maybe not, because all that would be encrypted too i would think so yeah i don't know what kind of magic it Well, but I mean, things can have access to HomeKit. I don't know how much access they get, but yeah, it's interesting. All right.

Cool and that's 4.99 on the app store 4.99 it it has not been updated in about 18 months it looks like but uh but t latkins says that it uh you know it still works so maybe it's one of these if it ain't broke things and it might be they can't up and i'm i'm truly speculating here so So like, please, but it's possible that Apple has since August of 22, when this was last updated, Apple might have introduced restrictions that would make it less useful.

And so by not updating it, they allow its usefulness to continue. I don't know that, but you know, there are some things out there that for which that is true. Yeah. Apple likes to break things when you're kind of end running around things. They don't want you doing right. Yeah, exactly. I think that's why the, um, it's, I've been told that's why the Twitter app is for the Mac is still Twitter and not updated to say X or, or have any of the new features.

And it's that it currently participates in some data collection practices that would not be permitted if the app were to be re-reviewed today.

Day yes so you know put put that in your tinfoil hat and smoke it but uh sneaky yeah yeah um i i don't know if that's true i i emotionally support all conspiracy theories um i i don't i don't necessarily believe in all of them but some are fantastic but some i cheer them on i i i love them i that's i emotionally support i'll be on the sidelines rooting you on whether or not i can can join your cause. I it's, it's rare, but it happens. Like there's some conspiracy theories.

I'm, you know, I believe are, are not our actual, actually in the case, but anyway, not most of them. If you want to be able to increase your knowledge base while still leaving time to spend most of your energy researching conspiracy theories, JG has a great set app for us. He says, anyone who is or was a fan of Blinkist and is a set app subscriber should check out Headway. The catalog seems comparable as does the app interface.

And I just wanted to share. So Blinkist and Headway are apps that summarize books for you. Oh, yeah. Yeah, and so if you've been interested, if you've seen all the Blinkist ads, but you haven't subscribed to Blinkist and you are a Setapp subscriber, well, Headway might be your answer. This is so cool. Right? So you get, uh, summarized nonfiction bestsellers is the, is the whole idea. So it's the, uh, it's the father Guido Sarducci, five minutes of college,

you know, everybody Pope. Yeah, that's right. Uh, yeah. Interesting. Interesting. There's a book here called psychopath free. I'm not going to read that guys. Cause I don't want to, I don't want to have to do this show solo. No, just kidding. Right. Um, but yeah, like, you know, all of those self-help books, business books, those kinds of things are the ones that are in the, um, in the headway out there.

So I'm, I'm stoked about that. I, I will, I will definitely be using this because I've, I've been tempted by Blinkist, but, um, the worst part is that I feel like I haven't had time to install and run Blinkist. Well, you know, there's that, and then there's the cost. But if you've got a set app, you're already paying for it. I'm already paying for it. It's already there. It's beautiful. Yeah. Yep.

Those guys are brilliant. Man, I wish I'd thought of that. And there is set app coming to iPhone in the form of an EU-only app store alternative. Oh, okay. Yep. Yep. I didn't, I didn't hear about that. Yeah. It's, you know, because Apple is forced to. Right. Right. You know, forced to allow it. And so set up, they were the first ones that I heard from that were like, Hey, by the way, here we go. So yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Which is pretty good. I like it. I like it. I like it.

Uh, all right. We've got more cool stuff found. Cause it's what we promised at the end of 1027 that we were going to do today. So let's do it. but you want to take us to Daddy Japan, Adam? Yeah, Daddy Japan was helping out Porthos John in the Discord, and Porthos John said, Hey, after an update to the latest 14.3.1, I noticed that my volume and spaces keys no longer worked. I checked if the F key default was set, and it was not.

I went into desktops and spaces and was able to reassign the F3 alt to show spaces again, but I don't know where to start to reassign F10 through F12 for the audio.

And big daddy japan came back and said hey if you use carabiner elements you may set the keys as you want so this is a little app for customizing uh your your function keys it looks like i don't know if it does more than that super familiar with it but it looks pretty cool um i don't have a screenshot of it here but uh but the screenshot that that that daddy japan shared yeah you can can it i i don't know that i've seen a keyboard enhancement app that

does that goes this far with function keys it's possible that maybe like i guess keyboard maestro could be programmed to do these but this is yeah i like this that's great. Cool. I, uh, yeah, I love it. I love doing these. Go ahead. Yeah. I'm just curious. I didn't, I don't, am I running 14.3.1? I didn't have this issue. I don't think of it messing up my F keys, but where my function keys or whatever. I'm trying to think I did just update Mac OS.

I am on 14.4 now, Adam. So I, I wonder if that fixed it. I don't know. Yeah. Oh, I'm on 14, three, three one. And I think, I think they all work. Okay. I know my volume keys work and stuff like that. So it's, I mean, who knows what the, you know, the original person who asked the question might have going, like we all have our own little unique setups that, you know, the, the combination of different things that we have often leads to, Hey, this broke.

Did it break for anybody else? Nope. You know, Nope. Well, I'm like a Neanderthal. I'm only running 14 too. So I'm really, Oh yeah. Huh? I got to fix that. You got to fix that. Yeah. Get yourself up to 14 for, I did update all my max. We're recording this on Friday, the eighth. It, uh, I, I updated them, you know, prior to this and they so far knock on wood and that'll, that'll get the, the chipmunks moving around again, uh, that things, things, uh, things go well.

All right, folks, you know how we're always on the hunt for the ultimate tools to boost our tech game. Well, Well, our sponsor, BB Edit, is like the Swiss army knife for anyone who tangles with text. It's open on my Mac right now. Seriously, I don't leave my digital house without it. BB Edit 15, it's not just an update. It's a revolution in text editing with features like a mini map palette to navigate through your code like you're scrolling through your contacts.

And those cheat sheets, they're like having a coding mentor on call ready to whisper sweet nothings of markdown and clipping support right in your ear. It's amazing. Developers, imagine setting up projects with the efficiency of a finely tuned app. And for the data scientists among us, switching between Anaconda environments like you're flipping channels. Plus, with ChatGPT worksheets, it's like having a chat with your code, making BBEdit not just a tool, but a team member.

Don't get caught coding without it. With BBEdit, you're not just editing text, you're crafting your next masterpiece.

Piece and with a generous eval model plus discounted upgrades for the faithful it's like bb edit it is rewarding us for our loyalty so whether you're scripting the next blockbuster app or wrestling with regex make bb edit your co-pilot check it out at barebones.com and see why it's the preferred tool for tech aficionados everywhere don't just edit bb edit barebones.com and our thanks to bb edit for sponsoring this episode.

All right. You know that moment of panic when your Mac won't boot and you fear you didn't back up your latest project? Well, there are other parts of your life where you definitely don't want to get caught unprepared. I'm talking about those personal health issues like ED and hair loss that many of us techies quietly navigating through tabs might face but rarely chat about over our keyboards. Enter HIMS, the game changer in men's health care and our sponsor Here, imagine handling E.D.

Or that receding hairline with the same ease that you use command shift N for a new incognito window. That's right. Hims brings the doctor to your screen, offering science backed treatments without the awkward waiting room playlist. With hims, you're not just rebooting your health, you're upgrading your entire system. No insurance puzzles to solve here. Just straightforward care at a price that makes even the most budget conscious geek nod in approval.

And with the HIMS app, tracking your health progress is as satisfying as hitting that last line of code right before a deadline. So don't let any of these things be the glitch in your matrix. Start your free online visit today at HIMS.com slash MGG. That's H-I-M-S dot com slash MGG for your personalized treatment options. All right, Pete, you want to take us to our next cool stuff found, my friend? Que no te pillen. And it didn't take. I didn't have the button down. Que no te pillen.

Don't get caught. Oh! And there you have it. So what I'm holding here is the Vasco V as in Victor 4 translator. It's available on vasco-translator.com. It's $389. Seems a little steep, but here's the cool thing about it. It's got 76 voice languages in there that you can have a conversation with somebody. There's two microphone buttons you hold yours down say what you want to say let go it translates it to their language you hold down their mic button oh now she's won't now she won't be quiet.

And then uh they speak and you let go of the mic button and translates it back to english for for me in this case um there's some other cool things about this one of the best is that you don't have to pay extra for any of the languages it has a learning mode to help you brush up or learn a new language in, I think, 28 of the languages. It has 108 languages total. It will take photos of text. So if you want to read a menu, it'll translate a menu for you.

My nephew was kind enough to send me a postcard and he is, I'm going to hold it up to the screen there. He's fluent in Japanese. So he wrote it all in kanji. Wow. Basically his message was, I speak, read, and write Japanese fluently, you do not, Uncle Pete. Well, Uncle Pete. And I'm enjoying the food, and it's raining in Osaka and yada, yada, yada. But I was able to use the Vasco translator, and it translated the whole postcard for me right away.

That was kind of cool. Here's the best deal about it, though. It comes with a SIM card pre-installed, over 200 countries, free data for the life of the translator. So you aren't having to find Wi-Fi when you're out in town in a foreign country and hoping that you get some way to translate your line. It's there. It works. The battery lasts about four days under normal use. It's a little smaller than an iPhone. Okay. Big iPhone. What's the big one? The Max, Pete. The max, thank you. You got it.

So, a great little piece of gear. Having an absolute ball with this. Like I say, translate menus. When I get to a restaurant in Japan and there's no one that speaks any English, I could still get by and get directions. So how is this compared to like Google Translate on your phone or on your phone, I guess, or Apple's Translate? Apple's Translate being far more limited in its language, especially for visual stuff.

Yeah. Well, Google Translate is good, but I think that where this shines is that you'd get that free data for life. Got it. If you're out in town and you don't need data, it's there. You've got the data. Yeah. But that being said, I also think that this one just seems to work. And I've had some issues with Google. Google's not bad. No, Google's definitely better than Apple Translate.

In terms just in terms of the the uh the amount of languages that are supported both by the the text you know type it in the audible recognition and of course the camera so yeah right yeah and then uh yeah just dozens and dozens and dozens of of languages that's you know yeah interesting so yeah cool yeah a little video on it uh so it should come up on on the, on the YouTube feed for the next few days. Yeah. Cool. Very cool. All right. Cool.

Uh, you taking us to our next one, Adam? Yeah. Drew ski. He's got a great tip for saving some money, which is always great. So it says, hate hopping from site to site, comparing prices. Me too. Until I discovered the CNET shopping best deal and coupon finder extension. It's a free extension for Safari, Chromium, and other browsers that automatically searches the web for prices on the item being viewed in the current online store.

It takes a few seconds to report a hot-linked list of vendors with competitive prices and a note if you've already found the lowest price. For me, it has worked great with Amazon, Best Buy, and Home Depot sites, my most frequent visits, and it's saved me a fair amount of money already. Huh.

I like the idea of this. Yeah. I would caution just like we found with like the PayPal or I found with the PayPal honey extension where I literally almost replaced my computer in the office because I thought that 16 gigs of Ram on an M one Mac mini wasn't enough.

And it turns out it's still fine. mine um the issue with the paypal honey extension was that i had it running all the time and access to every website i visited and i think it was google drive that really blew it out of the water um it because you know it was parsing the the dom the doc document object model whatever it is the code right of the web the javascript of the website and it was really slowing things down Like I couldn't use my computer.

Uh, so I turned it off and everything was fine. Then I went back and I turned it back on, but I only gave it access to specific websites. So again, for this CNET shopping thing, you know, give it access to the sites where you're actually shopping and don't let it, you know, run on others that that's a Safari feature. So it's not like you have to, you have to expect the, you don't have to expect the extension to honor those choices.

Safari will honor them for you. um yeah yeah so do that but then yeah i i think i'm gonna use this yeah absolutely if if you're worried you know like you can pop open your web inspector as you're browsing and look at the network tab and kind of watch what's going on you could also you know use a network sniffing tool or something like that if you're really curious you know the kinds of traffic that it's doing and where it's reporting

things and stuff like that yeah that's the only thing i don't like about this sort of thing. I mean, it's great. It's a value for value proposition, right? You have to know that you're like, you're allowing CNET to like see everything you're browsing and shopping and they're going to use that data for whatever they're going to use that data for. And in exchange, you get this convenience, right? That's true. That's the right, eyes wide open. Yeah, yeah. And, you know, I...

That's fine it's the performance of it with the with the honey one at least that obviously was the major issue and had i not had a performance issue i wouldn't i wouldn't have even stopped to think about the privacy issues but i did and i did and so now now it doesn't get to see all the things that i type into like google docs which is probably best not to have paypal harvesting all that information the point is you know if you're happy like apple has all that on third-party cookie

blocking stuff right for reasons yes and this is there's different ways to get around that stuff and that's how you know and i'm a fan of cnet not that they're bad or nefarious no out of the box but like you know they're obviously using this for marketing purposes for their own gain you know but and my guess is they're also using the data to in to feed the the engine yeah yeah absolutely well you know it's like it does it how does it know that it's cheaper at amazon versus home depot well it's

because somebody else was on amazon and saw this and the data got sent back to cnet's database again that like that's helpful use of the data but be aware that that's what it's using yeah yeah yeah yeah all right uh next up pete you.

Want to take us to jim or i i didn't i okay great do that so yeah so well jim brought us a cool stuff found that i i'm sure we've talked about at some point uh but it may not have been since uh it was updated where you can share so the it's the 12 south airfly pro and so it's it's for sharing audio with other people but the cool thing about this thing is it basically it's a bluetooth dongle that you plug into the screen on the airplane or for for that matter

anything yeah that has your eighth inch jack that you would normally plug in with your little headphones to listen to you plug this in it's a bluetooth dongle that then connects to your airpods. And, but it doesn't connect to your AirPods only. It connects to yours and with whomever you are. And you can both watch a movie on the airplane at the same time without having to hit the start button at the same time and hope that it works if you're sitting next to each other.

Yeah, you can watch it and share the audio. And these AirFly's are so nice because you can get up and go to the lab with your AirPods in and you're still hearing the movie as it's going on.

Or you know you don't have to or if the person next to you needs to get up and go to the lab you don't have to unplug your headset so that they can get by and and rip your headphones out of your ears yeah we've talked i don't know that we talked about the pro which is the what the pro ads is the sharing feature we've certainly talked about the airfly on the show over the years and and it works it's it's amazing i had one of these when you and i flew

to vegas pete yes and uh and some lucky Lucky flight attendant wound up waiting up here. She saw it and was like, does that really work? And we were like, well, we'll let you know by the end of the flight. And she's like, yeah, I've been thinking about getting one. And so Pete and I wound up, not only did we wind up testing it, we had to. I think there was something wrong with the volume or the output on your speaker. On my screen, yeah. Yeah, there was a football game to watch.

So we paired up and, you know, I just set the sound and we both watched it. And then at the end of the flight, I gave it to her and she was like, really?

I'm like, yeah, yeah. They send me these things for free. i'm happy to pass them along happy to share we already tested it like we checked the box it's all good um so yeah great great piece of gear yeah the fly pros are yeah yeah nice piece of gear yeah thank you for the reminder of that jim that that would have solved the issue that my daughter and uh and her fiancee needed when uh when they were traveling on the train and wanted to both both hear the sound of a movie from her,

from her iPad, which has a headphone out. But as it turns out, AirPods, iPad OS and AirPod OS is whatever they call that. I don't know. They do like, it does work. You can, you can share the audio from an Apple device to two sets of AirPods for exactly this reason. And it worked out great for them. Yeah. Nice. Yeah. Yeah. Speaking of traveling, I was recently in Mexico as we, uh, as we discussed, and I had to pick a SIM, an eSIM to use, to have data in Mexico.

And, you know, we've gone every year and we've used different eSIMs and they're always just, I wind up oftentimes picking like, what's the least expensive one.

Uh, and this time I, I picked one that wasn't the most expensive, but it probably wasn't the very very least expensive mexico's weird for data for e-sims i don't know why but it's it's expensive like way more expensive than buying data in certainly europe but also even in the u.s like i i it might have been with some of the companies it might have been cheaper to buy a north american plan that would have gotten where we were in mexico would have covered that uh versus

Versus a Mexico-only plan. It's weird. So Mexico is the most expensive eSIM data that I generally buy. And I wound up using GigSky this time. G-I-G-S-K-Y. And it was absolutely the best. It felt like I was home. I don't think I ever saw it go to 5G. But it was on LTE the whole time.

The data was smooth. you know sometimes you get an e-sim and it's like janky or i had an e-sim when we were in europe the last time where we had to manually choose the roaming network to use and that was no good um, this gig sky sim it felt great like just you know smooth and easy and all of those things so i just wanted to share that that uh if you're certainly if you're going to mexico uh there you go but But GigSky is built into the Apple eSIM ecosystem too. So it makes life easy.

That's all I have to say about it. Unless, unless either of you have a question. Yeah. Yeah. It was good. It was good. What's next on our cool stuff found list. I think it's Glenn, right? Yeah. Let's go to Glenn. I see it. Yeah. Glenn, I'm going to summarize this a little bit. Cause he's given some feedback on 1027. Uh, we were talking, Pete was talking about his volume issue and I think we mentioned it earlier in the show. Maybe. No, we'll mention it later in the show.

Oh, later in the show. We will have mentioned it later in the show.

Yeah. It's a volume issue coming up on, during the process he mentions a really cool app for your airpods on the mac called air buddy and this is version two i think i had version one back in the day and it was a really quick way to just connect to your airpods this was kind of before apple i think implemented the you know more seamless version with icloud but what's really cool about this little app is a number of things you can get it

in a status bar it also adds you know the functionality where you flip open your airpods and it pops up battery connection and your airpod information on your iphone or ios device this does it on your mac so if you're near your mac and flip your airpods open you'll get like information it's got a menu bar app to you know see your devices and battery levels and a A bunch of other cool little quick things. It looks like it has shortcut support, which I don't think they had in version one. Huh?

Yeah. So, and it. That's pretty cool. Yeah. A bunch of cool features. And it works with other like Bluetooth devices too. It looks like. Right. Yeah. It's not just limited to AirPods. Magic mouse and magic trackpad. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Huh. It's so cool little thing there. Wow. All right. Yeah. I got to check this out.

AirBuddy. Okay. Slick. That is slick. like yeah oh it looks it says it's also available on your setup subscription it's 13 bucks 13 bucks us but um also in uh yeah i think that's where i actually started using it from originally somebody recommended it to me and then it was in version one yeah right yeah yeah yeah interesting this is version two look that looks like it really expands the features and updates the ui quite a bit yeah this

looks really cool yeah interesting huh cool i like it wow huh. This is what I love about doing these Cool Stuff Found episodes. We get to learn a lot. You know, I think we could do an entire two weeks just on the Setapp apps alone. I swear to God. That's probably true. Yeah. Or more. It's incredible. The opportunist in me thinks, well, they should sponsor that.

Like, you know. Right? It's been a long time. I'm, I think there's been a time when, when set up was a, a, you know, when they, they paid to sponsor the show, it's been a long time. Now they're getting it free. They've been getting it free for a very long time, but that, you know, I, I, I'll take a minute and, and, and share a little bit of the insight into this.

We happily mention things because solely because they are good uh or that we've used them or or sometimes very rarely we will mention things because they're terrible but you know we generally the stuff that we mention if it's if it's something we've brought to the show you know one of the three of us is brought to the show it's because we really really are blown away by it uh obviously you know this episode's

kind of a mix of things we've brought and things that you've brought But you do the same thing. You know, you don't tell us about, hey, I have this mediocre product. I should tell you about it. Like, I always think, you know, if it's if you rate it between one and five, we talk about the fives. You send in your fives. We bring our fives. And occasionally a one needs to be discussed because of like a public service announcement. Right. You know, like it's so bad that you shouldn't use this.

But otherwise, you know, we don't have room for the threes and fours. And, and, and so we, you know, that is our litmus test for when we discuss things on the show. It's it, and, and it really, in a sense, it's our litmus test with picking sponsors too. We, we have declined sponsors that are like, I don't know that we want to share that, you know, with our listeners kind of thing. But, but yeah, but there is the opportunist in me that says,

well, here's a great product. and they could also, you know, help support the show if we're doing a thing for them. So there's, you know, there's a world where that could work. Somebody else asked, and I don't have the question prepped, so I forget who it was that asked, but do you get, they asked, do you get money? You know, do you get paid or whatever when you, do we get paid when you folks visit our sponsors?

And the answer is no. No, generally speaking, our, our sponsorships are flat rates here. So somebody pays X to, for us to do, you know, the, the, we usually sell a 60 second mention into the show. It winds up being about 90 or a hundred seconds. Cause that's just how I work. How long it takes, how long it takes. Yeah. Yeah. And, uh, but we try to be respectful of the scenario, your time,

what they've, you know, all those things. But as I always say, it's our job to get to convince you to go and visit the sponsor. Beyond that, it's between you and them. And certainly many of our sponsors like to track where the visitors came from. And that's why you'll hear that, you know, slash MGG or use coupon code MGG or whatever it is so that they know. And hopefully you get something out of that, too. Yeah.

And they, and so when you visit, we don't get paid for that, but if they see lots of visitors coming from the show, they may be more apt to renew and that sort of thing. So it, yes, it does help us when you visit, uh, but, but not, so you get paid as a qualified. No, no, not per. Yes. Not per hit. Not per hit. When you go visit, they come back as an advertiser.

Yes, it helps. Yeah, exactly. Another one that I always found really helpful, I would have audience members who already used the products that the sponsors were, you know, so they weren't going to go visit. But often those folks would let that sponsor know, hey, I appreciate that you support this podcast, you know, either through a tweet or an email to support or whatever. And that was always really appreciated. Oh, that's a great idea.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So that, yeah, yeah. That's a great way to support the show is, is to just reach out and say thanks to a sponsor that, that be sincere about it. I mean, if it's not a sponsor that you're thankful having sponsored, don't go out of your way for that. But yeah, if you're, if you're thankful that either you heard about it or it's a product, like you said, Adam product you like, but you still want them to know that you appreciate the sponsorship.

Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. And you can go to macgeekup.com slash sponsors. We list automatically all the sponsors from, I think, the recent 10 episodes on there. And also then a manually curated list of deals and things that that you can take advantage of, too, that came from sponsors, whether they are current or not. So. All right. Enough on that. We've covered that. Check that box. Okay, cool. I didn't mean to go down that rabbit hole, that chipmunk nest, whatever it is.

I did want to talk about right before, right, like an hour and a half before I came to pick you up to take you to the airport for us to go to CESP. I was going through my backpack, uh, that I've used for years, uh, you know, like probably five years and it's still in great shape. It was an odd sort of detour for spec after it was a spec backpack that came out, I think after their merger or acquisition, I forget how it was with Samsonite, but great, great backpack.

And I love this thing. And I reached in there to like clean through it and say like, okay, if there's some like snacks or something in here that I don't need anymore. And as I'm cleaning through it, I noticed that like the back of one of my hands is just black. And I'm like, oh, no. And a pen that I had had in there, I think it was too close to the fireplace in our house and it melted and just, you know, like the ink everywhere.

And I'm like, okay, wait a minute. Like I, now this is an emergency. And so I took, you know, I got the pen out, threw it away. And then I got some like paper towel and sopped up the, the wet ink and then needed to make a judgment call. Like, do I want to bring this with me? Or does, is this like not functional for me right now? And I, it, it was the latter.

Like I couldn't sop up enough of it for it to just be done. It's like, all right, I need to switch to a new backpack, you know, 90 minutes before I'm leaving on a very sort of crazy, stressful trip. This is the wrong time to be reviewing backpacks, folks. But yet that's what I was in. So there were two that I had in my review queue to choose between. And the first one that I looked at was and they were like I would have been and still today would be happy with either of these.

The first one that I looked at was the Targus Cypress Hero backpack.

It's it's cool. uh it's got all the pockets that you would want i like a backpack that has you know a laptop sleeve in the back and then three separate pockets one for like the the small little things in the very front and one for slightly bigger things you know with maybe some organizational stuff and then the big sort of dump everything in here and then you know and then the laptop uh kind of behind it and uh and the cypress hero was great it uh i'm

pulling up the wrong link here so i will i will update this but the there there is a version of it that which is the one that i use or i had uh and that has find my capabilities built into it which i really liked yeah uh so it's got it it's It's got a little, you know, whatever, an AirTag-ish thing that you pair with your phone and it stays inside the backpack. But it's got a siren and all of that stuff. And it's hard to take out. So a thief can't just like quickly grab it and toss it.

They'd need to do some, you know, zipper maneuvering and like really get in there and do it. But that was the Cypress Hero. And then the other one that I had to look at, it was... From Hyper, which Hyper and Targus are, you know, kind of the same. The Hyper Pack Pro, and this is the one I wound up going with. This one also has a Find My module. It has all of the pockets that are important.

Both of them have the strap that will let it easily sit on top of your roller suitcase so that you don't have to wear your backpack if you're rolling a suitcase through the airport.

Port so they both got that um i just liked the configuration of the multiple pockets on this hyper pack slightly better than the than the other one but i think it's you know that's just a judgment um you know personal preference kind of thing but um i this hyper pack it's i like a as you might imagine saying i want you know three separate pockets plus the laptop i like a backpack pack that's big you know i i want to be able to carry stuff with me and

i i want to be able to buy a sandwich in the airport and and put the sandwich in my backpack before i get on the plane i don't want to have to carry an extra bag on the plane um but uh but this this hyper pack pro it stayed with me i i used it obviously for ces because because that was the choice i made and it was frustrating uh first it's switching to a new backpack is it's something i would rather do over like a you know a low stakes weekend getaway kind of thing where if i decide oh i don't

like the configuration of this or even i need time to adapt to this i i would rather do it on a thing where i'm not like relying on it all day every day you know the frustrating part is. You know, you have to learn how the zippers work. You have to learn where you put all the things. And so it's like, oh, I need that one quick thing. I know it's in my backpack. I need a minute, you know, like that, you know, that it's just these things work their ways into our lives.

And and that's why I've used the same suitcase for 28 years. Exactly. You know, because I can get up in the middle of the night in a hotel room in China and go, I know where the Tums is. I know which pocket it's in. And I can get it without turning on a light. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And the more external pockets, the better to all you who are making suitcases. Yes. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. I don't know why I can't find the, uh, I gotta find the, it's part of the Cypress collection is the one that I, I found the link that I got is it's just the one without find my, but, um, but yeah, that, that I like that one. And like I said, the HyperPak Pro is the one that won my heart. And now I've come to like it. I used it for Mexico. I will be using it for South by.

And it's great. One thing I like about both of these, and I also liked a lot about my spec one, which I could go back to, like the ink has now dried. And so it's just the inside, is that the insides are not black. black. I do not like a black interior to a backpack because if I'm, there's no lights in there, you know, unless I put one, actually that would be an interesting thing. Put a little flashlight to dangle from the key hook kind of thing.

This might not be a bad idea, but you know, when I'm digging around in there, I want it to have some contrast. I want to be able to see. So these have light gray interiors that I think is fantastic. I love being able to like look in there and see things so uh that that was that was a um a deciding factor for me as well so.

Yes yes indeed so yeah those are the uh those are the two that uh that i have do we go ahead yeah when you mentioned the the lights i think you could probably search on amazon but i think there there are actually like bag lights that people make for women's purses or bags. And I think some of them even have like sensors on them. So when you open the bag, the led light just turns on. Like, I think these are a thing. It sure sounds like it could be a thing.

Like, why wouldn't it be a thing? Yeah. Yeah. It's a led rope lights that are available now. And right. Yeah. I don't think I can order one in time before I leave for Austin. and... I, I, I need to remember there was one hotel in Austin that charged me 25 bucks to receive a package. And I think it's the one that was staying at. Yeah, man. Like that's not cool. But, um, but I, the one, the backpack that I'm using is, is black on the outside.

Um, I like having a gray backpack. That's what my, my previous one was. And, uh, just because it, it looks different. You know, most, most backpacks are black or a lot of them are. So, but the, uh, that Cypress hero one that I did not choose is, is sort of a, uh, you know, Heather gray kind of thing. So yeah, it's good. I did having the find my in it. I love that. I mean, what it means is that my backpack has probably three different find

my sensors most of the time, right? Right. Cause I have one on my AirPods. I have one in the wallet that I keep in my backpack. Now I keep one of those, you know, flat wallet ones that we talked about on the show. And then, uh, and then now it's got its own thing, but it, you know, that's not, that's, you know, not a bad thing. The more the merrier. Someone thinks they've gotten rid of it. That's yeah. Yeah. These are backups. That's right. Yeah. You're probably going

to want to keep my wallet if you've stolen my backpack. So, you know, yeah. Yep. We have some quick tips that you prepped, Pete. And since you're almost certainly schedule-wise not going to be able to make the recording of 1029, you want to take us to a quick tip or two? I will so do at this time. Thank you, sir. Steve wrote in, and it turns out he was on a flight. He says, I was on a flight without Wi-Fi, and I only had one episode of the

show downloaded. It was the one where yours truly, Pilot Pete, was trying to solve an issue of keeping his wife updated without sending her a message or an email in the middle of the night and disturbing her. The solution is easier than many suggested. I actually like this solution. Create a note called What's Pete Up To Now? And share the note with his wife, and then add any text you want.

He said, okay, I'll read this. Quote, it's true, helicopter pilots are so much more skilled than flat-wing pilots, unquote. ICloud will capture the updates, and his wife can open the note anytime and see the updated text. So, lies, damn lies, and statistics there, Steve.

Just saying. in steve despite the uh any opinions about the statement that he suggested you put in there to test this his idea is solid and sound i like this mama just needs to know to go check the note in the morning you know when she wakes up and and uh and she could see the update time to see did you make the did you update it right like that's the beauty of that yeah well we And generally speaking.

It's blocking out means that the chocks are removed and the airplane's being pushed back for taxi. And so, you know, it's zero three twenty two. I could write blocking out now. Boom. Close out. Oh, no. You could do better than that because we know because of how we prep Mac Geek Gab that shortcuts can either append text to or replace text in a note.

So you could have the blocking out shortcut that all you have to do is trigger the shortcut and boom it updates the note so you don't even have to launch notes and this is perhaps this is something that i keep meaning to mention in the show and that now is a great time we know i think we know that we can trigger shortcuts with a like running like launching the shortcuts app and saying and go uh you can also trigger a shortcut with uh the s lady uh you some shortcuts

this wouldn't apply to this one can be created as uh share sheet capable so you can share things into them so that they can you know do that actually you could create this shortcut to be share sheet capable so that if you had something you wanted to share with your wife that was like a url you You just share it and boom, it puts it in there. But also perhaps the most obvious one that I forget about all the time is you can put a shortcut on your home screen like an app and just press the button

and launch the shortcut. Yeah. So, yeah. So that would be good for your blocking out shortcut. You just, you know, have it on the home screen. Boom, done. Now you don't have to think about it. Now you can go do your job and you know, you're off to the races. Perfect. Yeah. Yeah. Perfect. Yeah. We've got another quick tip, speaking of shortcuts, from Patrick. He says, hi, guys. Thanks for the show and the continued wealth of information.

A shortcuts tip might be helpful to some. I've been a keyboard maestro user forever, and actually, quick keys before that, if you're old enough to remember. Yeah, and I've created a ton of macros over the years, and some of them ridiculously complicated. In any case, I didn't get all the enthusiasm around Apple Watch's shortcuts app since it seemed a step backwards from what I've been using until I had a recent problem to solve.

Typically, I have my Apple Watch's display off to save battery, but I go to the gym in the morning and I prefer to have the display always on. And since I can't always flip my wrist up to turn it on, so I created a shortcut that turns on the Apple Watch display to always on at 5 a.m. And then turns it back off again at 8 a.m. This would not be possible with Keyboard Maestro, so it gave me a new appreciation for shortcuts.

And by the way, this is for Dave. If you pair Keyboard Maestro with grep functions of bbedit, you can create macros that will parse almost any file, no matter how bad the formatting is. Oh, you could, unless you were completely petrified of regular expressions like I am. Well, therein lies the chat GPT interaction. Yes, yeah, that's fair. That's right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. This is an irrational fear of mine, I admit. Not to keep going back to Setapp, but for expressions, there is an app called

Expressions that I'm pretty sure I got from Setapp. Hopefully, I'm not lying about that. But regardless, there is an app for your Mac called Expressions that lets you do regular expressions and has helpful tips and stuff. Indeed, there is. All the time. It's in Setapp. Yeah. My problem, it's not that I fear regular expressions. You know, it's it's that I don't use them often enough to have any working knowledge of them.

So every single time that I go and use, you know, need to use regular expressions, I have to relearn. Like, how does it start? How does it end? Like, what's the carrot for? What does an equal sign mean? Like all of them, they're just lost. They there are. I know the the open DNS IP address.

I do not seem to be i want to flush that out of my brain and use that memory space to put in the bare bones of a regular expression thing so yeah yeah yeah yeah that's talk about nerdy talk about nerdy i mean it's okay like that's what we do here yeah yeah i i i thought of it and i hate i'm gonna go back to the backpack light thing because i thought of this and i don't know why I've never thought of this before. You know what would work perfect for seeing in a dark bag?

The flashlight on your Apple watch. Oh my gosh. And I even have already reaching in there with your hand. I even have that is my, my action button on my Apple watch ultra turns on the flashlight. Yeah. My grape is still, I used the red light in the middle of the night.

Yeah you know the red the red watch face and when i hit the flashlight it comes on bright white and i'm like guys if you have the red face on it should default to the red flashlight red light yeah yep but it doesn't unless you're in theater mode yeah and i tried looking at that as doing that with a shortcut and it doesn't seem like there's a way to do that to default it to the red light so you're totally right though adam unfortunately these will arrive one day too late for

me um but looking up purse light on uh uh on amazon is it you know there's a lot of them that are sensor activated and they even are on like a little chain like they're built exactly, for what i would want i just need a little heart shape for you there dave and everything that's fine i it's you know what a heart shape is great no rough edges uh i'm not gonna like you know brush across the thing and catch my my sleeve on it or whatever that's totally

i don't care it's fine yeah i need i need to get three of them though because i have three different pockets in my backpack you understand. I just use the Apple Watch, man. Yeah, I'm going to try that. That's my choice. Lights up everything. That's my choice for this week. So I'm definitely going to try that. Feedback at MacGeekGab.com, folks. Send in, if you know the right, you know, purse light, backpack light, or anything else. Feedback at MacGeekGab.com.

Send it in. Whoa, whoa, whoa. Where? Feedback at MacGeekGab.com? Yep, that's feedback at MacGeekGab.com. Okay.

Yep, it sure is. is thinking of one other quick use while we're on it the flashlight for the watch walking across that dark street on the way to the hockey game at night i turn on my watch to the to the flashing mode so when i'm walking across the street in dark clothes at night cars can see there's something there so it's a good safety oh that's smart yeah i like that yep yep you know where i'm going to to use it is if i'm riding a a like bird scooter which i will do

in austin it's the best way to get around downtown austin which is just clogged with traffic um but uh you know while i'm riding a bird scooter i will if it's if it's like dusky yeah that's a great idea you know having the apple watch flashing the whole time not a bad idea oh man yeah i'm probably gonna have to charge my my Apple watch every day. Well, you know, there's terrible, terrible cave, man.

Hey, we talked earlier in the episode about supporting the, supporting the show by visiting our sponsors, really supporting the show by sending in your questions and cool stuff, found all of those things. One additional way for, uh, that you can support the show if you wish is, uh, by contributing financially directly to the show. And you would do that at Mackey cub.com slash premium.

Uh, I've been holding off on having this discussion for a couple of weeks until Adam was able to dig in and repair the system that lets you subscribe because it was not letting people subscribe in a certain way. That's now repaired, we believe. So I wanted to take a minute and thank all the folks whose contributions have come in in the last few weeks here to MacGeekUp.com slash premium.

We've had $10 contributions from Michael in Robbins, Matthew in Forked River, Bill in, he's got an APO address, so I don't know where he is. Jeff in Chesterton, James in Amity Harbor, Joseph in Marietta, Paul in Lawrenceville, Stephen in Plainfield, Joseph, Jonathan, sorry, in Plainsboro, John in Vienna, Stephen in Costa Mesa, James in Melbourne, Olga in Bellevue, Robert in Columbiana, Jason in Charlestown, Corey in Midlothian.

I love saying Midlothian. Nick in Mount Clemens, Jeremiah in Edgewater, Cal in Russellville, and Donald in Furlong. And then a $15 contribution thanks to roger in blaine a $20 contribution thanks to jeffrey in bainbridge and then $25 contributions from uh i moved too fast albert in san francisco mark and centennial alan in montgomery john in enrico russell in jefferson william wesson ed Ed in Vancouver, Stuart, Michael in Bristol.

Kershen, Martine, Peter in Sudbury, Jonathan, Larry in Southborough, Matt in Midlothian, two different states. There are multiple Midlothians. Eric in Trondheim, Jonathan in Tempe, Robert in Oro Valley, John in Houston.

Bruce, Jeff and Joe in Parts Unknown, Daniel in London, Drake in Honolulu, and uh then a 30 contribution from john in dana point 50 contributions from bradford and sparta kenneth in white plains 60 contributions from walter in kansas city and rich in peach tree city and topping it out for this week 100 contribution from richard in galesville thanks to each and every one of you you rock and if you are interested in this mackeycup.com premium it is not expected nor is it an obligation but

it is very much appreciated and with that we still have some time. To do some questions. So Adam will light up the lasers and Dom has our first question. I think that's you, Pete. Yeah, he does. Dom wrote in and said, I have an Apple Watch Series 8, which was getting great battery life and can make it 24 hours no problem until a couple weeks ago. Maybe around the time of the update to 10.3.1, but ever since then, I can't even get a whole day and it's getting worse.

At the moment, and I can't get more than about four to six hours before it dies. Oh, my gosh. It's horrible. It says I've tried restarting it, but that hasn't helped. Is there a way to reset the watch where I can restore all of my settings and faces? Is there any way to see the process that's using up my battery? Thanks. Yeah. Yeah. I have seen this. It is – the first place I would start is on the watch itself, Go to settings, battery and battery health.

You there is not an analog for this on your Mac, but but it is there on your watch and is a good place to start just to see, you know, what's what's going on. And it will show you, you know, the its opinion of the the watch's battery. And I'm pulling this up on my watch now, which I generally don't wear during the show for perhaps obvious reasons.

Uh, it's got a little chart that shows you how the battery has fared over the last, I think, 24 hours, which can be helpful to see if it's a, you know, sort of gradual decline or if it's falling off the cliff at times, because that might be an indication as to, you know, did you have it left in workout mode or something where it was, you know, burning lots of power for a long, for a period of time. and then sort of, you know, plateaued. So check that. And then, um...

If it looks like it's just declining all the time, one thing I have found over time is that the watch will burn battery. This is going to sound obvious. Bear with me. The watch will burn battery when it's syncing on your Mac to your Mac or to your iPhone, rather. You know, it's got all kinds of data that it syncs. One of the things that it sinks is your contacts.

Multiple times in my experience as an Apple Watch owner, I have found that that sometimes gets so out of sync that it never stops sinking my contacts. And that, of course, causes the battery to burn.

The solution to that and thus far i have seen no negative uh repercussions from doing this is to go now you're on your phone into the watch app on your phone go into your watch go into general and go to reset and you will see one of the options there is reset sync data choose that and see if 24 hours later your watch battery life has settled in at that that's now the first place that i go and it's probably happened three or four times uh for me so there you go yeah that's that's what that's what

i have do you guys have any other thoughts on this i i actually while you were talking about that i don't think i'd ever gone there and looked and i went and checked my my battery health. And here I am 18 months later with the Apple ultra Apple watch ultra one with 93% battery health, which is fantastic for 18 months. That is fantastic. Yeah. Yeah. You know, this it's an incredible, I still get, I can get,

if I turn the screen off, it's on all the time. If I turn the screen off, I'll get four days. Oh, that's a really good point. Yeah. And if I leave it on, I get two, two and a half days before from a hundred percent to zero and that's under normal usage. You're right. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Huh. I didn't even think about that for like, for traveling or, or whatever, just like turn the screen off on the watch and, uh, yeah, yeah.

I've, I've, I've rarely like one time, probably close to a year ago now I forgot my charger. Sure. So I just turned the screen off and I made it, you know, four days before I wound up before it was Yeah, right. Right. No, that's yeah. That's a really good. Yeah. Interesting. Yeah. Cool. Well, hopefully that helps Tom. Craig has a response for you, Pete. Yeah. A couple people came in with this thought on a little bit of a geek challenge that I put out there.

You know, why am I, I'm just listening to my podcast, and out of the blue, the volume turns up. I have since discovered that this is not the entire solution, but I will say that it's probably happened to me that way a couple of times, what you're about to hear. But I also think that it's other people not using Auphonic or some other sound leveling on their podcast.

I think it may be the producers, not, not just me. You know, all of a sudden the volume comes up because they're leaning in and talking more louder. Now you're going to run this through Auphonic. So people won't have heard that, that hear the show. They'll hear a little bit of it, but we try to, we try to keep it from being too varied. Yeah. It does a nice job of leveling everything, but if you'll play what Craig sent in as a sound, I think he's got a good answer.

Hello, geeks. This is Craig from Costa Mesa, California, long-term premium subscriber and listener. Thank you, sir. I was just finishing up listening to episode 1027, in which Pete claimed he was having trouble with podcast volumes going up and down randomly and intermittently. I had the same problem a while back, and I discovered that when I'm listening to audio, and podcasts in particular, my Apple Watch usually has a little audio playback app going.

A very handy app which you can fast-forward, pause, and so on, but you can also change the volume by rotating the crown. I was inadvertently rotating the crown when I would shove my hand in a pocket, possibly a long-sleeved shirt, possibly rubbing on an armrest, and causing my volume to increase and decrease seemingly intermittently. Of course, I discovered the problem and do not have that problem any longer. I do not think it would be a problem if you were rotating a tiara or a scepter.

However, crowns definitely can be rotated, causing volume problems. You guys being the three kings of MacGateGab, I can see rotating a crown occasionally might be a problem. Thanks very much, and keep up the good work. Bye-bye. That's awesome, Rick. I get the tiara. I'm just saying. Adam calls dibs on the tiara. No, don't give Pete a scepter. There was a thing that happened in Vegas. We're not going to talk about it, but no scepters for Pete. Okay. Okay.

You get the crown. You're stuck with the crown rotating or not. That's right. There you go. There might be a show title in there. Yeah. Yeah. There's a lot of those. We've got stuff about the squirrels. We've got, what did somebody, somebody suggested one earlier. Chipmunks. Chipmunks. Oh, the chipmunks. Why do I keep calling them squirrels? I know they're chipmunks. I saw them. This is going to turn into a Caddyshack thing. Like there's no one. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

When, when you hear about man blows up his outbuilding in Durham, New Hampshire, don't bother reading anymore. You, you know exactly what happened. That's right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Oh my gosh. All right. Uh, thank you for that, Craig. I bet you are correct. Um, we got time for one more. Yeah. Um, sure. It's might be a bit of a geek challenge. So I'm curious to see what we all come up with here.

Bronson asked, he says, um, my wife has a subscription to the two terabyte iCloud plus service while I separately have an annual subscription to Apple TV plus. Plus, I'm thinking of switching everything to a single single Apple one subscription to get not only both of those services, but all of the other great services as well for both of us. I think we will end up saving some money by canceling other non Apple services. OK, my question is, what would be the best path to do this?

Our whole family uses iCloud storage for backups, photos, et cetera. So we definitely don't want to lose those. Would it be best to cancel my Apple TV Plus subscription and then upgrade to Apple One on my wife's account? Or do you have another solution that might work better? I don't. I have. I can come up with an opinion on this. I don't. But I don't know a definitive answer. Do either of you have like a thought on this? How would you do it, Adam?

I have thoughts. thoughts. So we went through this sort of in a way recently. So we, way back when, all had separate iCloud accounts, obviously. And for reasons, because my wife and I were sharing like a music account that was a separate, not iCloud account, but an Apple ID. When I switched, I got a new iCloud account and I moved over to my own iCloud package. And it was It was about the time my kids were getting online, so I added my kids as part of the family plan.

This is pre, you know, the new big packages and all that stuff. But so... Myself and my kids have always been on like the same family share iCloud account, but my wife's account has been separate like for forever. And we said, we need to get you on the family land. We need you to, cause we, cause she'll be like, can you guys find my phone? And it's like, no, I can't. Cause you got to log into your iCloud account. Cause you're not on our family plans. Right. Right. So all those things.

So like we finally got her on there and the way you do it it is, you know, so I don't think it matters necessarily which account you choose to be the like the primary account, but know that the primary account does have extra privileges. Right. So, you know, like the very primary holder, I can designate my wife and my family plan as, you know, having control over my kids accounts, but like, I still am the like primary account or whatever.

And so once you've set up the primary account, you invite, you know, you invite other family members, you say, you know, send them an invitation and then they opt in. Where it gets weird, especially in the case of my wife's, and this is where my question comes into play, I think I kind of know the answer, is she had her own, so we have a two terabyte, you know, Apple Plus plan. My wife has her own 200, you know, gigabytes or whatever on her storage.

So when I invited her, she's in our plan with everything, but she's still on her own storage oh so i still have to go do there is a way to do the merge thing but i am nervous about that because like i don't know how the stuff all gets merged into our main account and like syncing and i i think i think i might have some some insight there not not well sort of personal experience because but i've also heard this from from listeners so i i think this is how it works The storage is not shared.

It is the allocation is what is shared. Right. Because you don't have even even like I don't have access to Lisa's data just because we're part of the shared two terabytes of storage. It's we have an allocation of two terabytes and each one of us has our individual storage that, you know, is counted against that or as part of that allocation.

So i i think that if you were to invite your wife to your your icloud plan and then cancel her paying for her 200 gigs of storage she would then just be naturally part of your allocation and she wouldn't lose data because it's not like it's it's not like there's two separate drives it's like she has her 200 gig drive and then she has to move the data it's all in icloud so i think I think it's just like it's a billing adjustment, not a you know what I mean? Not a technical adjustment.

So, yeah. And I might not switch it because here's the other half of this that I didn't disclose, which is. We're close on the, the three of us are close on our two terabyte allocation. Right. I think we're at like 1.2 gigs or something like that. My wife's going to be bringing in another like 200. Yeah. It's still less than 1.5. We're getting close to the cap. And, and unfortunately there's no, I wish there was like three terabytes or four terabytes or five terabytes on the family plan.

You can't go that way. What you have to get is another separate plan. And I think you can only do that individually. You can. No, no, no. They changed that Adam. They, Okay, good. Yeah, they updated that. I'm going to look here in real time, and hopefully I don't screw this up. Perfect. Just as an aside, Brian says you are correct about your allocation thing, so that may be less scary. But getting back to the original question, why do you do that,

too? I think the best way to do it is pick the account that you want to be the primary Apple premium family account, assign that user, and then just invite everybody to the family thing. And I think it just kind of all works itself out. Yeah. So I might have to, I didn't realize we were as close as we were here because we are using 1.86. Of our two terabytes here. Yeah. So I have 140.5 gigabytes available. So if I go into change storage plan, I can go. Yes.

And this is where I thought you were going. You said there isn't a three, four or five terabyte. There is a six terabyte option and I pay $9.99 per month for my two terabytes. Oh, wait. No, that's not true. I can add to this. So if I were to add six terabytes to my existing two terabytes, that would be $30 a month. But I can add 50 gigs for an extra 99 cents. I can add 200 gigs for $3 a month. I can add two terabytes to be four terabytes to for $10 a month.

So you can add even in, you know, as little as 50 gigs, which seems a little. And that will make it cumulative because I was. It will make it cumulative. You had to like say, no, Dave is getting the extra. Extra. It will make it cumulative. It even says, I took a screenshot, which is why my audio hiccuped. I don't know why that's the case, but it is. I don't think it used to be that way. Yeah, but no, it didn't used to be that way. They changed it. So I finally listened on that one. Correct.

Because I know that was a problem. So even like on the 50 gig thing where it says 99 cents per month, it says your total storage will be 2.05 terabytes.

So i think i'm going to be spending at least 99 cents if not 200 if not three dollars a month to add to get up to 2.2 terabytes some point soon um but wow i didn't realize i was that close i thought i was like you at like you know 1.2 1.4 like yes no we'll never hit this turns out maybe we will but yes so bronson i think we do have an answer for you the mac ecap community comes alive i love the real-time feedback from everybody in the chat room on this one like you said brian confirmed that the

allocation is the right way to think of it so yeah yeah good. Fun. I love doing this show. We're, we're, we've, we've overstayed our welcome gentlemen, but at least we had fun doing it just by a little bit, just by a little bit, just by we're at one 21. Now I'd like to be ending at the one 15 mark. I don't know why it's, it's like a, it's a thing. I don't know. It's a lot to listen to. So. Well, consistency. We will have more to say next week is what that means.

So thanks for hanging out with us folks. Folks, thanks to CashFly for providing all the bandwidth to get the show from us to you. Make sure to go listen to our other shows in the extra time that we are leaving you with here, Pete. So there I was for aviation enthusiasts, easy for me to say. And I do two shows, Business Brain for entrepreneurs and Gig Gab for working musicians. So go check those out, please. And you can follow Adam. Is Twitter still the right place to follow you,

Adam? Is that right? MacCast on Twitter? It's MacCast wherever you prefer. I'm on Mastodon and Instagram and Facebook. Facebook is the MacCast if you want that one. Okay. Yeah, it's MacCast every place else. He doesn't do the show MacCast anymore, but it will be your identity ad infinitum. That's great. Yeah. Sweet. Thank you so much. Make sure to check out our sponsors, of course, hymns.com slash mggbarebones.com. And like we said in the episode, go to mackeycap.com slash sponsors and you

can see them all. And if you want to spend a few minutes and click through to each one, you know that that has a ripple effect of helping us. Music. And we appreciate that, too. Thanks for hanging out, everybody. Well, we have on our shirts today, we have 25 years of the Mac. I love pinball and keep Austin weird. Wait, I love pinball and cats. I missed that, Adam. Thank you. Yep. But is there any advice in three words? words, no more, no less that we might be able to share.

Pete, do you have anything since you won't be here next week to, uh, to share? Oh, I started the thing. I started the, oh man, I am, I, uh, I got caught. Do you have any advice for me, Pete? Yeah. Dave, don't do that. Don't get caught. Push the buttons. May not. Later. See ya.