It's time for Mac Geek Cab, and listener Nick brings us our quick tip of the week. He says, just to piggyback onto the user who last week discovered that highlighting text in the terminal will let you copy it to another terminal window with a command right click. Did you know that if you have a mouse with a scroll wheel, you can just click the scroll wheel, i.e. the middle button, to copy text? No command key needed.
I use it all the time to copy things like long file paths from one command to another without needing to tab my way down a path tree. This is typical behavior in Linux terminal apps, just to give you some indication of the Mac OS's terminal pedigree. More tips like this, plus your questions. Oh, no, no, no, not yet. More tips like this, plus your questions answered today on Mac Geek Hub 1080 for Monday, March 10th, National If Pets Had Thumbs Day 2025. I don't think that's right.
No, it's not.
That's not. No. You're going to have to pick what the day is. Greetings, folks, and indeed, welcome to MacGeekGab, I think, the show where you send in your quick tips, your cool stuff found, your questions, we share them all, we answer your questions. The goal being so that each of us can learn at least five new things every single time we get together.
MacAudio.com slash MGG where code GeekGab saves you 20% on anything Rogue Amoeba makes is one of our sponsors today and BareBones.com where you can go get BBEdit from our friends at BareBones is another one we'll talk more about those in a little bit, here on Phil R. Staplers Day in Durham, New Hampshire I'm Dave Hamilton.
Hey, Dave, I think you ran a little long on that intro and you were getting played off. I don't know what happened there, but anyway.
I think that's right.
But here in South Dakota, I'm Adam Christensen.
And here also in windy, breezy New Hampshire, where it's gusting at 37 knots. And I'm hoping that either one or both of us manages to stay with you throughout the show. Where code 1080 is pursuit in progress. We're pursuing excellence. so far we're uh
Not hitting the mark.
But we'll do our best you know what time it is
Well it's time for quick tips time well it's time to remind people that our monthly giveaway oh the giveaway that's right at macgeekup.com slash giveaway is unite six from bzg apps uh this is the second full episode of mac geek cab that i am recording using unite and because of unite and how well it works unite is the app that uh lets you take web pages and make them into their own standalone apps but it works better than apple's thing uh i couldn't use
apple's thing in mac os 15 so i had not yet been able to upgrade to mac os 15 this episode is being recorded not just with unite 6 but because of unite 6 also Mac OS 15 here in the studio so I'm stoked about that and you can win yourself a copy at MackeyCab.com slash giveaway this week is also South by Southwest week we are recording this.
Early in that it comes out on Monday we're recorded on Friday morning which is typical for us what is atypical, is that today, in the middle of this episode, there will be a time, and it's actually in about 17 minutes, 16 minutes now, when I need to, at what would be 10 a.m. Central Time, request express passes, essentially skip the line passes for some events on Sunday, because they go, and they go quickly when they come online.
But there's one, there's a session with Eddie Q and Ben Stiller talking about severance that I want to make sure I get a skip the line pass for. And also a documentary on the Rocky Horror Picture Show. So I want to get passes for both of those. And I need to do it mid-show. So I'll either let you guys talk while I'm doing that for the 90 seconds or less that it takes, or I'll talk about it when it happens. But yeah, we'll have a lot to say about South by imagining next week.
Yeah. That's what I have as far as our show intro. We can go to Quick Tips now, Pete, if you so desire.
Well, I think we should. It's just kind of the format.
Let's do it.
We've gotten caught already several times.
Let's do it.
Yeah. So I guess I'm up with, with a crampy here, huh?
Yep.
So crampy says activate Siri from your steering wheel. You can press and hold on your steering wheels, voice call button to bring up Siri when car play is displayed on the main screen. So quick way to activate the S lady. I guess I've said her name already too many times.
It's already, it's already happened. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I, I forget about this one all the time. My, we just got a new um a 25 subaru outback and it has its own wireless car play in it and, my son was driving and he went to do something and he's like i'll just do it and and suddenly siri was active i was like all right you can press that little button on the steering wheel to do this i forget about these things so.
Yeah i found i found that um now that you don't have to say the hey part anymore that i just use her name and it works great even in the car oh
I i do too i don't know why he did it that way like it but it was like oh yeah you can do that.
I well less fumbling less fumbling it means every once in a while it doesn't pick up so this is i mean that's an easy way you're guaranteed and i've had to do this a little bit more on my phone especially like when i'm here in my office and you know the home pods behind me yeah and it's like no i want it on my phone because you know that now has the apple intelligence and sometimes i want to you know get that versus that one back there yes yes right
targeted way to do it so same in the car you know you can guarantee that right carplay is going to pick up right yep
Uh, and I just answered my question as to why my CPU was pegged for the last minute and a half. And it's because I went to my special national today website, the one where I find the days, cause I had to figure it out in real time and whatever JavaScript or ads they'd have on that website, just leave it pegged. So activity monitor, we'll answer that question for you. If you're using Safari, because it launches a separate process for each website.
I was just thinking one of your pets had uh thumbs and changed all the days to national if pets had thumbs days but no it
That was a um that.
Was last week a
Workflow snafu where the way i do it i come back and the last thing i do is pick the day and it's just because of the way i edit the template for the show so.
Real quickly one one last one last thing on the s lady i discovered kind of the hard way yesterday um i had gotten out of the shower and my phone was face down on the bed and i wanted the light in the living room on and i'm like hey yes lady you know yes but when it's face down it ignores you yes that is correct i forgot about that so yeah so i assume like if it's in the center console or something like that as long as it's plugged in and doing carplay it's going
to be listening and even if it's wireless carplay it's probably listening yeah that face down issue goes away but for
Sure yeah adam i don't know that i've ever used the steering wheel button with the carlink kit adapter but i'm assuming it works have you tried it with your carlink kit adapter i don't.
Think i have but i would assume it would yeah to again like it's in carplay the key is you have to have the carplay obviously up on your display i don't think this obviously won't work if you're in your main cars right system or whatever like that right
Right right yeah yeah yeah yeah um that that wireless that carlink kit um adapter it's like what it's now is it 53 dollars is that right i'm.
Pretty sure coming down i've got one for sale yeah all my cars are now wireless car sure yeah
We um yeah Yeah, it's amazing how well that actually works.
They keep making different versions. Oh my gosh. So I don't, you can get like the, I mean, mine's like version five or whatever.
I think that's the version to get is, I think it's still version five is the one. If I have that correct from them.
Actually, Max Car has no CarPlay, so you can't make it wireless CarPlay. Well, you can retroactively have one installed that does CarPlay. I asked him if he wanted it. He's like, no, don't need it. I got navigation. I got Bluetooth.
Or what we did for Lisa's car is we bought a $80 screen that does wireless CarPlay.
Right, right.
Like, this was a flyer. I did not know if this was going to work at all for her. Right. And we put it in what I got it for her two Christmases ago. So Christmas of 2023. And I mean, she's been using it constantly for over a year now. She loves it. The only issue. And we discovered this about, I don't know, two weeks ago. She's like, yeah, I just can't make phone calls with it. I'm like, well, that's weird.
Like it hears you for Siri. it it like plays music well what's the problem it wires right into the aux port so i'm in the car and i'm like well she's driving i'm like well let me see about this the problem was her phone was still paired to the bluetooth in the car so anytime she got a phone call it jumped to bluetooth but the the phone's audio system stayed on the aux thing with the the the you know carplay screen so i was like oh well if we just unpair your phone from this and she's like
i can't believe I should have asked you about this a year ago like yeah works great but so for like 80 bucks I'll find the one that we that we did that we got for Lisa but I mean I just kind of picked it based on reviews I had no um but it works great like if it was and it was 80 bucks so did.
You get it from Amazon
Yeah yeah yeah I'll just I'll find it.
It'll be easy to
Find in my yeah I'm kind of doing it while we're talking here um, seven inch double din screen is what it's called oh i said it was 80 my mistake it was when i bought it it's now 45 for this same screen so um yeah i'll put a link to to beautiful in the show notes too yeah that's good stuff i know i know speaking of using things that we don't always use adam um teeing this up and vamping while you're getting coffee preparing yourself to share to divulge it's.
Nice to share
You did something this.
Week i used i used ai i used chat gpt so i'm in a community theater play and it's this norm foster thing called the foursome and it's about a bunch of guys playing golf and so it's 19 different little scenes and it's basically each at the tee of each thing. And if people are wondering why 19, I didn't know this, the 19th hole is like the clubhouse when you're done golfing and you're back having beers or whatever. So the thing is, each scene is more or less the same kind of thing.
The guys come out, they kind of chat around about golf and their lives and stuff like that. And it's like being on a golf course and just playing a game of golf.
And the problem is is like it's really hard to keep straight like what scene is what like they get jumbled in your head so I was like oh I'd really like to just have a summary quick summary of each little scene and I was going to sit down and you know write one for each one write it out for myself and I thought no I bet you I could do this with technology so I have a brother like laser printer that will auto scan so I scanned the entire script in I broke
each of the 19 scenes into a little PDF file, and I used ChadGPT and told it, give me a summary of this scene. And I did that 19 times, and I had 19 little summaries, and they were perfect and short and It worked out great, and I didn't have to do any of the work. Right.
I mean, that to me is one of the perfect use cases of where AI is today, is that the summarization of things, it's excellent at it. Now, if you were going to publish that summary of it.
You would be in trouble.
Well, I mean, if you acknowledge that it was from chat GPT, it'd be fine. But I find that at least for a while, unless you iterate with it like in Canvas, which is that thing in ChatGPT where you can collaborate on writing especially, it does not get your style of writing right. So it will seem very – but it sounds like it's ChatGPT's. It's your assistant's writing style, and then it's fine.
Yeah, no, I was more worried about it. I honestly was worried that it was going to copyright strike me or something like recognize that, oh, this is copyrighted material. But I figured I was just using it for personal, you know, so it kind of falls under that fair use thing. Like I wasn't going to publish it. I wasn't going to share it out. It was just, you know, internal to me.
The only time I've had it push back on me with copyrighted stuff is if I ask it to make an image that the instructions could be interpreted as me saying, please draw me a picture of Mickey Mouse, you know, and it'll be like, we can't do that. Right. But what's really interesting is like for the images that I create for our episodes, you know, our individual episode images, I oftentimes will say, hey, create something depicting three Apple nerds doing a thing like whatever that might be.
And often more often than not it will put a computer with an apple logo a perfect apple logo in there it's like you know i didn't ask for that and i think if i did you would have told me you couldn't do it however right so yeah give.
Me one of a mouse that lives in florida
Yes, where he and his wife have the same birthday and our brother and sister or something i don't know There was a weird thing. Right.
Oh, too funny. Should I take us to Andrew?
Please.
So Andrew writes in, and I would say it's a little more of a long tip, but it's a great tip. This one blew me away when I saw it. That's why I stole it from you, Dave. Yeah. He writes in, he says, hi, over the last few years, I have experimented with non-Apple calendars, mail notes to do and read later apps, such as Microsoft, Evernote, Trello, and Doist, and GoodLinks. Living in the Apple ecosystem, I sooner or later return to the included Apple apps.
They just work, integrate with the S-Lady, and have improved considerably over recent years. Further, new features appear to be a priority for Apple. Most of the time. Editorial mine.
Sure.
One such app is Reminders. And if you take the time to go beyond the basics, it's fantastic. Indeed, much of my life organization now occurs in this app, which plays an important role in my personal, financial, and home-running workflows and reminds me to pick up groceries on the way home. A few things above the basics that I use are saving bookmarks. Instead of saving links to read later in Safari or good links, I save them as reminders. I have specific lists for different interest areas.
Projects, like using the Kanban methodology for projects. I move tasks along or through the columns as they get done. This can be done in reminders. And he puts a link that we'll put in the show notes that tells you about that, which I go is a hidden tip in and of itself. I didn't even know that notes could or that reminders could do this. So there's your tip within a tip. Very cool. Groups. You can group your lists into groups. I have personal, business, projects, household, and interest.
If you click on the group header, it lists all of the various reminders in those lists. Or if you want to see just the reminders in the list rather than the group, click on the list. Tags. You can tag notes to group them across various lists. For example, you could tag people's names and by clicking on their names, see everything related to them. Repeating, obviously a fundamental feature that genuinely assists in keeping you focused on your task.
Setting location. I always assign tasks a date, time, and or location. Otherwise, they get lost in the sea of reminders. Shopping list. It has a daily built-in template for grocery shopping. And then S-Lady is awesome with reminders. Hey, S-Lady, when I get home, remind me to. Hey, S-Lady, at midday today, remind me to do that. that AS lady on Thursday remind me to, you know, and so on and so forth. I'm sure there are many other great features, but I use these to make my life easier.
Andrew. So some great stuff in there. I had no idea Reminders was so versatile. I'll be playing with that more this week. And Dave, you're down to about 90 seconds before you have to.
I'm aware. Thank you. I'm watching the clock and I appreciate that you're watching the clock too.
Yeah. I did not know that you could do Kanban boards in reminders right that's fascinating yeah i mean anybody that has to live uh within kanban boards in fact i was talking to somebody yesterday who has worked for the company that they're with for 30 years and he said by the way i'm retiring in april i was like what are you gonna do he's like i don't know but what i do know is i'm never gonna look at another kanban board again so
uh you know there is that part of things but um but yeah i had no idea that you can create right like this is pretty cool creating kind of a pipeline similar to trello or or what have you huh, i i'm.
Assuming that's with
Sections yeah that's exactly right you create uh a list and then you make a standard list and then um and then what do you do and then you view it oh you just view it as columns is what it's saying yeah huh cool really interesting yeah i'm 15 seconds away so i'm gonna let you guys talk about this and go ahead and jump us uh to uh to mark when, when we're ready here. So.
Well, I think, yeah, I just have that comment that I had no idea it was there. And that's why it's a tip within a tip. And, you know, he wants to get away from Kanban Kanban, uh, potato patata. And, uh, I want to move towards it. It's all perspective.
Yes.
Yeah. I mean, it's a good system. And we obviously use it in our development work. Um, And it works great for that, but I can totally understand after doing it for many, many years, wanting to get away from it and never see another one again, too. I can appreciate both sides of this equation.
And the website is having problems, which is awesome.
Of course it is, Dave.
Well, while you have that problem, why don't we move to Mark, who has a great tip. He says, I test my UPSs quarterly. Unplug it for a fixed amount of time, four or so minutes, and log the percent capacity and runtime remaining. Over time, this may reveal the decay in battery capacity, which will eventually accelerate. And you can buy a replacement battery before its runtime gets too low.
UPS batteries can also swell when they get near end of life, which can make replacement difficult to impossible, i.e. getting stuck inside the case. I've only lost one UPS due to non-battery failure. So that's great advice.
That is great advice.
Yeah. Well, especially since pre-show I was talking about it, we had the power flicker three times within a minute. I've got a UPS that's just a year old this month, and it crapped out on me. You've got to be kidding me. Nice. Power flickered three times, and boom, down it goes. So now I can use the quick tip above, get reminders to remind me to quarterly check.
Right.
It is good advice. Yeah.
It's great advice i
Got all five of my passes by the way so i'm i'm i'm very happy here.
Well played sir thanks
Yeah yeah thanks.
For actually use reminders to have me go out and quarterly run my generator my portable generator so i don't yes so it doesn't gum up the carburetor and then it will actually run when i need it because the one time i needed it in the middle of a winter storm it had probably been a year and a half since i started it guess what didn't start yeah right
I I had an almost one of those moments and was like, oh, yep, quarterly reminders to run the portable generator. However, I think we're moving to a world where we don't have to have portable gasoline generators as our primary backup source anymore. We can have portable batteries. And Karsten sort of walks us down this path. It's a wonky segue that I've done here, but he says, in a recent episode, you mentioned having several UPSs connected to different types of hardware throughout your house.
He says, I used to buy APC 1500 model units around $450 to $500, and they always seem to have a lower runtime compared to their cost. And, of course, no app integration with no notification options. The best you could do is maybe plug it into your computer. The battery would just fail. Now there is a new player in town. He says, I have recently referred several friends to the EcoFlow Plus units. They're more efficient. You can monitor the units via an app. And in my opinion, they're way better.
This is similar to the larger unit that you got with the solar for your house, Adam.
He says uh i like ecoflow since our entire home is connected to three ecoflow pro units each with an additional battery and uh and connected to an eco transfer switch panel so using it like a generator like we're talking about here uh so maybe it really wasn't a ham-fisted segue in the end it's a whole home setup he says both pro and plus models are instant on much the same way ups is and the plus units are much less expensive compared
to the pro models of course the plus model is a great alternative to a ups and in the event of a power outage you can use the pro and plus units to power your fridge or freezer and charge your phones you can't do that with an apc or a similar type of ups. And that is true. Yeah. These, these, these little kind of the, the, the mini battery backup units that are essentially meant to be portable are great UPS replacements for your house. Cause you plug it in, it remains charged all the time.
And then it has its own outlets that, you know, can do whatever you want. And it's portable if you really want to bring it with you somewhere too. So yeah.
Yeah yeah i was going to actually tie this somewhat back to the previous segment with my my units because you know a reminder i probably need to do on my units is you don't want to like if you are storing them just sitting um you obviously don't want them at a full charge because they're still you know like lipo batteries or whatever battery technology is in there so i need to probably go to mine once in a while run them down to about 75 or
something like that and you know that way they can sit there and then also probably a reminder that a charge them back up if i haven't used them like just like pete said with you know needing to start his generator i'll need to at some point if i haven't used them in a year or two charge them back up but yeah mine are the same as as this pretty much um which which remind
Me which brand yours are.
That i have adam oh i'm blanking on jackery jackery
That's it yeah.
Yeah um they're black and orange is kind of their color scheme and and um but you know i can get a transfer panel so like it sounds like he has his just you know dedicated to a transfer panel so power goes out it will you know just kick kick on and put you on battery yep so that's it that is an option for mine that you have to buy the you know panel to hook everything up but yeah yeah well
What's cool about these is you can get and yours too i mean you know ecoflow and jackery are are making similar products competing with each other in this market which is great and you know you can get the sort of little portable one but if you want it to have more juice you can buy an add-on just larger battery that feeds that that other unit and you can do that with with the one you have too adam you can you know you can stack them up so that they can um they can you know.
Power that's exactly what i have i have i have the main unit and then i have two extra batteries for it and my thought process there too is each extra battery can be solar charged so if i do have a longer power outage situation i can have the main unit with one battery on it that'll go for a certain amount of time and i can be solar charging the extra battery while that went in and i can just swap batteries out and kind of get more longevity out of it yeah
Yeah it's a it's a great solution and it's quiet as opposed to running a portable generator you know when you're doing a power outage like yeah it's way quieter neighbors.
Will like you better
Yeah for sure for sure yeah, All right, folks, this episode is powered by the software from Rogue Amoeba. And I mean that literally. I record this show using their software. Loopback wrangles all my audio sources. Farago triggers my sound clips and Audio Hijack. Well, that's the thing that records the audio that allows you to hear this episode, this very ad that I'm reading for them, and literally have been using Audio Hijack to record every episode all the way back to episode one.
So over a thousand episodes of this show and thousands of other episodes of the other shows that I do. It's crazy. If I didn't have these apps, I think we'd have to start sending out this show via Carrier Pigeon and I don't think Hector would like having another bird in the house. The folks at Rogue Amoeba have been crafting powerful Mac audio tools for over 20 years. They understand how to do this. They have a deep knowledge of it.
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Our thanks to our friends at Rogue Amoeba for making all this great software and for sponsoring this episode. All right. Speaking of our friends in the Mac software industry, I was on the phone with Ken Case from Omni the other day. They were sponsors of our CES coverage, and so we were kind of talking about that. And he said something, Adam, that was counter to something you had said in the episode kind of right before he and I had this.
And he's like, well, yeah, you know, and I have my obviously my Mac and my iPhone and my iPad, and I use my Vision Pro every day. And we were like knee deep in a conversation. So I couldn't just put the brakes on and say, hey, what? and so I emailed them afterwards. And asked him, how do you use your Vision Pro every day? Because so many of the people that I hear from that have them either are treating them as their dust collectors or their experimental things that they use occasionally
or maybe watching movies with it. Right. And he says, I generally keep mine right next to my MacBook. So often when I pull out the laptop to do some work, usually in the early morning or evening, I'll also put on the Vision Pro and have a large portable display using Mac virtual display in wide mode. I love that I can position that display wherever. Right now, I'm laying on my back while typing on the laptop and looking up at that wide screen.
It's also great for entertainment, primarily for watching shows that nobody else in our home is interested in watching. Our family has long enjoyed Parallel Play, where we spend time together in the same room enjoying each other's company while doing independent activities such as reading books, crafting, working on a puzzle, or playing games on portable devices. With the AVP, watching a show becomes a practical addition to that range of Parallel Play activities.
I might be the only person interested in watching Severance, but I can still spend time with everyone else while watching it on a big virtual screen with great sound, courtesy of my AirPods Pro. Thanks to its great pass-through mode, I don't feel cut off from the other people in the room, but my watching doesn't have to disturb them.
When I run errands that involve waiting, such as taking a family member to a class, I'll often throw the AVP in my MacBook Pro in my shoulder bag just in case I want to get some work done or watch a show while I'm waiting. I might just end up reading instead, but it's nice to have options. So yes, I end up using it quite a bit, both for work and for fun. So thank you, Ken, for sharing all that with us. i'm curious how everybody uses it i'm i'm curious how much of that resonates with you adam.
Yeah i mean uh definitely the whole movie watching experience um for sure i mean again the biggest issue i have and this might lead into some of the other topics that we're going to get into is that my main personal mac is can't do the virtual display thing so like that i think would really be a game changer once i invest finally in some sort of m series machine for myself sure but But I just haven't been able to pull the trigger on that money because
I just don't have a good justification for it, especially when my trusty old 2019 Intel MacBook Pro is running just fine and doing everything, including recording this show with you guys, just fine. So it's hard when you don't... It's probably going to have to die before I replace it,
To be honest. Got it. That's fair.
I have another thing to add. When we get into the new machines, because I was looking at the new machines, I have another thing to add related to that.
Well, let's go.
I actually have a quick question. Are there not apps like Immerse that could give you virtual displays? I played with it on the Quest, and the resolution is obviously not there on the Quest than it is on the Apple Vision Pro. At least I don't believe it is. No, no, it's not. Yeah, not even close right now.
Yeah, I don't want to stick native anyway. Again, I need to get an M-series. I mean, we're on M4 now, right?
There's a new M4 MacBook Air. and that's the machine i would probably end up getting i would well no i don't need to go that high i mean i'm on an in i'm on a 20 i'm on a 2019 intel jesus like yeah the upgrade to a m4 is going to be like astronomical like it's not even not even close um and i like the price point on the macbook air i don't do a lot of stuff out you know my my work provides me a computer for my work stuff so you know this would just
be like little personal things and i've been looking at the macbook air i thought about getting and they had an m2 or an m3 did they skip the m3 on the air i don't remember i think they had an m3 i
Think there was an m3.
Yeah yeah anyway this
M4 air you're right i mean it starts at 999 right so um which is which is 100 bucks less than where the m3 air started so yeah yeah.
And sorry
But and 16 gigs of ram as the baseline which i love so now I will stop talking over you. Please, go.
No, so, but the issue is Apple is still... This just gets me the storage.
Yes.
The freaking storage. It's expensive. It is a crime, an absolute crime that the base level in 2025 is 256. Give me a freaking break.
Yep.
Sorry. For only $300, you can make it 512.
200.
200, but it's still ridiculous. list i mean what can you buy i can buy a maybe four terabyte drive for 200 bucks yeah yeah these days maybe even bigger i don't even i haven't priced this stuff out recently but like give me a break so is that the
Thing to do
Buy it no buy
An external drive with a
I don't want external having an air yeah the whole point of having an airs so that's the problem is my my current machine has a terabyte i need at least a terabyte yeah and you know it's 400 bucks more
500 more i don't know uh no no 400 more you're oh yeah no 500.
Yeah because you can get the mid tier if you get i was pricing it out so i think it'd be about i want to say 16.99 if you get the mid-tier and then add the extra 512 storage to it.
No, the mid-tier comes with 512. Well, wait. I'm looking at the 13-inch. You want the 15-inch. Got it.
I need the bigger display for what I do.
You start with the 15-inch and are you going to stick with 16 gigs of RAM or are you going to go to 24?
Yeah, that's fine.
16 gigs and one terabyte is $1,600.
That's the one I would buy. $1,600, which is still pretty good. I mean, that's not too bad.
Oh, no. Considering that that machine is a smoking hot machine.
Well, and here's my advice. If you don't need it today and you have just articulated that you do not, wait until, what, June when it's going to be on the refurb store and you save, what, you know?
At least 10%.
It's usually 15%. Yeah. So, you know, you're saving, what, $250 on that? What's that math? Am I doing public math? It turns out I am.
$160 is 10%.
Yeah, $240.
$240. $240.
So I was close.
There you go. So it covers the storage. But again, that's not the point. I know. The point of this is Apple is being ridiculous, absolutely ridiculous in 2025 with what they're charging for storage.
Why do you think they have hundreds of billions of cash on hand?
That's fine. That's fine. But, I mean, it's not going to kill. Again, we know the cost of this stuff. It would not kill their bottom line by any stretch of the imagination to bump those by 256 across the board.
Listen, I'm glad it's got 16 gigs of RAM. They're moving in the right direction, finally. I know that it's got to be for Apple intelligence. That's the only reason they would have agreed to do it.
Yeah, they had to. They had to because they could not have, and they want that on everything. Yeah.
And which I get.
I mean, that's smart. I mean, maybe I don't even want to get into the whole Apple non-intelligence.
Well, yeah, I think Pete and I ranted about that last week or maybe the three of us two weeks ago. Yeah. No, it's not. It's not. Well, it's just not there yet. And but Apple does have a track record of being late to the party and delivering excellence.
Over the last four decades so you know they weren't the first smartphone they weren't even the first computer i mean they kind of arguably were but but but only arguably because they took what people were calling a computer and made it into what people wanted as a computer right so yeah you know they.
Weren't even the first mp3 player
Turns out they weren't but they got it right i but the privacy that and i love i really mean this is not sarcastic i love apple's commitment to privacy but i think that's the that's what's that's the hamstring right now so we'll see how they navigate around it yeah i.
Will i will go to this i'm on the latest beta for ios and i don't know if it's only the latest beta but the s lady is 20 less frustrating when you ask questions and she can actually provide some answers now the you know i would say 20 less i'm hearing uh i found this on the web
You know got it so while we're talking about this adam i'm just curious where is the cpu on your current mac right now because you have been cutting out the wrong word to use but your connection has been sort of the quality of it has been fading up and down especially the video and occasionally audio it's perfectly intelligible it's totally fine but i'm wondering if this is a connectivity problem or if it is a cpu problem that is i think it's.
Connectivity problems i noticed okay that when we got on earlier yeah yeah the cpu is only at uh where are we at right now Yeah, it's 87% idle.
Okay, so you're not having CPU issues, even doing full-on video recording and all that stuff. So, yeah, okay. So you definitely don't need a new Mac Studio, which was also announced this week. I do.
You can send one to Pilot Pete. Yeah.
I mean, it's pretty cool what they've done with it. I mean, this is, you know, they're calling it the most powerful Mac ever if you get it with that that um m4 max or m3 ultra yeah exactly yep yep it's pretty good, you know i i have i am running here in my studio on an og m1 max max studio with uh 32 gigs of ram and of course because it's the base model because that's what they had available the day i needed a computer uh 512 gigs on the hard drive so i have like everything offloaded
to external drives but here it doesn't matter like the the setup doesn't move so i can have i mean you know all that stuff but yeah this um this new mac studio if that's what you need what a great what a great piece of gear yeah man yeah.
But it all gets so confusing that the m the m3 ultra is a hotter chip than the m4
The m4 max yeah you know yeah yeah yep i know wait yep yep yep and uh and speaking of the m3 chip you can now get the new ipad air with the uh with the m3 chip so yeah.
I'm jonesing for one of those
Is that right? You use your, you know, I'm an iPad mini person. My iPad usage is very sort of compartmentalized. So, but you use your, how do you use your iPad, Pete?
So for navigation, that provides my charts when I'm flying. You know, my GPS in the airplane is obviously there.
But the the ability to track out changes and pull up weather in front of me that's sort of my gps won't give me weather the map on my ipad will give me weather um i don't use a cellular ipad well i actually happen to have one from work and i can do it that way but i just tether my phone to my ipad and when i've got cell coverage and often i do as you saw we you know it's intermittent But I can get radar weather right up on the iPad, right on the map. So it's a beautiful thing.
Cool. Yeah. No, it's amazing. Yeah, that works. Okay. Yeah, that makes sense then. But do you need, I mean, what we used last summer, you know, the last time you saw your plane. Thank you. You're welcome. Worked fine, like CPU-wise on that iPad. Oh, absolutely. I'm just curious what, other than it being new and shiny, what use cases are people out there using that require this? And I know they exist. I just want to know of, I want to hear your real world stuff.
Well, you know, when we were in Vegas, I was tempted to go grab one.
Yeah, I remember.
Because I would like to be able to take that on the road and have that be a production machine to do my other show or even this show.
Sure. Yeah. Good luck with that.
You know? Yeah. I think take a little hub, take a microphone.
Yeah. Yeah.
Because I'm not recording to the machine. I'm recording to StreamYard.
Right. Can you do that? Can you host in StreamYard? I know you can be a guest.
I don't know. So those are the things I have to research before I attempt it. But yeah.
And that's kind of the thing about, you know, an iPad or an iPhone, but certainly the iPad with bigger screen sort of brings this up more often.
Is that you really if you want to do something with it you have to sit down and figure out the one workflow that is available with ipad os to get that particular thing done it's not right it's not as flexible as a mac where you can just be like i'll figure it out on the fly it's like no no if i if you're going to travel and rely on your ipad to be able to record your show you're gonna test it before you leave and you're gonna sit down and figure it out
oh and iterate through it and and that's the i mean it's it's the beauty of the elegance of ipad os but it's also the fundamental limitation of it is you just don't have you what you know you're you're one step shy of that flexibility to do everything you want so yeah.
Yeah we actually i got a quick question on youtube there's how do i get self coverage when i'm playing i i don't know we you know it Was it perfect? No, we didn't always get good cell coverage, but you were able to text back and forth with folks. Well, there were times when we were intermittent cell coverage.
Yeah, never enough to do anything more than messaging. Right.
But it will also call up, you know, if you're tethered, it should call up the updated radar screen on.
Yeah, yeah.
Not flight aware.
Well, if you're tethered to what, though?
Oh, my iPhone. If I tether the iPad to my iPhone.
Right. And your iPhone occasionally gets enough signal at whatever, you know, 5,000 to 8,000 feet to grab a full chart or whatever it is. Okay.
Well, actually, so the charts are pre-downloaded. But when you plan a flight, ForeFlight downloads those charts for you. And so you're good to go and your GPS will track along. So you get moving map. I mean, we get stuff that we couldn't get 25 years ago in a fighter jet is now standard for everybody and anybody moving along. And in fact, one gal we had on our show who's now flown her single-engine light civil across the Atlantic four times, count them four, uses an old iPhone for
her charting. I'm like, oh, my God.
Yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, why not, right?
If that's all you need, okay.
If that's what you need, yeah.
She's so far out that it's all blue in every direction as far as you can see on her chart.
Well there's that yeah yeah for sure for sure uh yeah yeah okay yeah so let us know feedback at macgeekab.com how you're using your ipad in in a way that it really is using these new cpus and and that sort of thing where.
Did you say feedback at macgeekab.com
I did i said feedback at macgeekab.com and hopefully soon Adam's tech issues will have resolved and we'll have him back with us. All right, look, I use BBEdit every single day. It's part of my begin the day script. It's in my start podcasting script. And if I could, I'd put it in my convince my cats to do my taxes script because BBEdit makes everything easier.
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Barebones.com and our thanks to Barebones and BB Edit for sponsoring this episode. All right. We still don't know where Adam is. I mean, we know what he's doing. We're hearing from him, but we will plod forward until we hear more. So Andy has a question, Pete. Andy asks, he says, what mail clients do you all use on the Mac? I'm particularly looking for a non-Outlook alternative to Apple Mail.
I use Mail.app for work stuff, but I'm using a tool for another project that would integrate better with a non-web-based mail client. As I'm writing this, I'm wondering if there's a way to use Shortcuts or Automator or something else to intercept Mail.to links and pop up a dialog box.
In the best of all worlds, this would give me the choice to open the message in Mail.app or in any of my Gmails, or to strip a URL from it and just put the actual email address on the clipboard to paste someplace else. It's times like these that I wish I was an actual programmer. He says, it seems like it should be a pretty doable thing, but I know if I try to learn to do it myself, I will likely be going down a very large rabbit hole that I probably can't afford the time to do.
So, Pete, you want to take this one?
Yeah. Yeah, so there's this, I think we mentioned it once or twice before on the show, you can get this program through the App Store or directly from their website or from this other thing called Set App. Yeah, you know, we mentioned it once or twice. And it's called OpenIn. It's not just for browsers. So OpenIn, as the name implies, you make that your default browser so that when you click on a hyperlink, it comes up, OpenIn comes up and goes, which browser would you like to use?
Well, the mail to link is similar. You can set open in to come up and say, make that your default mail client. And it comes up and says, which mail client would you like to use to send this mail? And it gets really smart. You can set it based on a given address to automatically go towards, for instance, Thunderbird or Apple Mail or Gmail.
So open in is pretty smart yeah huh um so yeah you could uh you can set as i as i read it here you can set rules so open in remembers your choice per app or per email address and you can figure it automatically to pick an option in certain cases but still prompt you when needed
Huh that's great i i don't i use a similar software for web browsers only called velia v l j a and i and i looked it does not seem that that would do mail to links but to know that open in will that's pretty good and it looks like open in doesn't just do web and mail links it does all kinds of different things so oh yeah yeah yeah.
It's super powerful so uh
Yeah backups javascript like all the all the kinds of things call apps for your messaging or your your calling yeah or.
Even individual files if you want to open certain files
And sure you.
Know much like you know i used to go to finder and hit command i and then you could tell it you know give to your info window and say i want to open all these
Files yeah right open.
In let you choose
Uh he did ask what mail apps we're each using and i feel i skipped over that now that's okay i well i i put it back in you and you kind of taught me to skip over it and and i did not and it's because i have a little bit of a don't get caught to share and if you're using thunderbird it might be a massive don't get caught i noticed i have thunderbird running on three max and i noticed that my search results for the global search,
which just searches everything inside Thunderbird, were different and incomplete on each of them. And I couldn't figure out what the heck was going on. And on one of them, it was only showing me results from my sent folder. I was like, well, what is this? Why only that folder? And I started looking and I realized when I opened up Thunderbird's activity window, which kind of shows what it's doing that it was trying to index the sent folder and had gotten about halfway through.
And stopped so i quit thunderbird and relaunched which i knew wasn't going to fix it because i knew this problem had been going on for several days but you know honor the troubleshooting method it did not fix it when it got back to the scent folder which was the first thing it tried to index it stopped in its tracks again uh and i did some research and i looked on all of my machines and they all were just stopped in the middle of some folder somewhere and the
only way to fix it was to essentially rebuild the folder there's a repair folder option which blows away the mail folder and redownloads the contents all of them from the server so for like my archive folders it was for an annual an annual archive it was like 17 000 messages it had to redownload from the server and then it would index them but if it got stuck on another folder which it did it got stuck on probably 15 to 20 folders per Mac, it would just die.
No warning, no error, no attempt at resolving the issue. And even once I rebuilt the folder, it didn't restart the indexing process. I had to quit Thunderbird and relaunch to restart the indexing process. So I've reported this as a bug to Thunderbird because this seems like a massive issue. At the very least, it should throw up a warning and say, hey, your index is having trouble. You should research this. But it doesn't. So I'm just telling you.
And the way to check to see if you're having this problem if you're a Thunderbird user is just open up the tools activity manager window and clear the list of all the previous things that it's completed and look to see if there's an indexing operation where the number of messages indexed is not slowly incrementing as it's actually doing. Its job so there's my that's my don't get caught for the week adam welcome back.
Thanks yeah yeah we're all good okay good had to reset some things all
Right cool nothing about your cpu though you're still okay you don't need the m4.
I mean my network's definitely running slower than it should i probably need to go reboot the router got
It got it but that also wasn't still getting right.
200 to 300 up so or down and up seems fine so like i don't know we should be fine yeah i don't know what's going on
But it was your audio interface is that what i understand died.
Yeah the the moat who just i don't know i had to reboot it yep yep
These things happen that's how it works yeah yeah yeah.
Bad technology day is what's happening uh yeah am i up
You're up you want to take us to david.
Yeah david says help I need a new meeting calendar. I have a personal calendar, iCloud, a temporary calendar, Google, and my work calendar, Zoho. I need all three to schedule appointments for various partners. I've tried Doodle, Calendary, Appointly, Zoho, BusyCal, but not Google nor Exchange. For some reason, I haven't been able to find one scheduler that works with all three. Happy to use a work around so long as it's stable. Your assistance greatly appreciated. David.
Yeah. So this is a great question. And I'm surprised that Calendly doesn't do all three. It would seem that that would be, well, its job.
Um because i think but it's okay because i think there's a solution um i think that in zoho you can go into the settings to sync your calendar so it's settings calendar sync and sync your calendar from zoho to google and you could even sync it to a different google account so that you're not intermingling the two and you know they're they're completely separate and then you have Calendly, look at your two Google calendars and iCloud. So that was, as I did some research, that's where I got.
And then I also figured, well, let's ask ChatGPT about this and what to do. And when we get those in, generally what I do is I take your question, copy, paste it into ChatGPT and say, look, a Mac Geekab listener has this question. Any ideas? And it found a couple of workarounds.
Um i i still think the zoho to google is probably the simplest but uh reclaim.ai says that it syncs multiple calendars including icloud google and zoho via caldav um so but even that says if zoho integration with reclaim is imperfect or is problematic sync it with google calendar first so that seems to be the thing there's a couple of others out there but uh it sure seems that, you know zoho to google and then calendly is your thing i'll put a link to the
chat gpt um thoughts in there of course you would need to confirm them because sometimes uh with tech support chat gpt hallucinates things don't exist at all but you know that's just how things go so.
So does zoho not link into just like the internet accounts or i don't know what we called these days i can't remember where caldav you mean no just yeah well well i don't know caldav where it's just centralized like i know that i have my and i have most of it turned off but like you know i think all the different services have like excuse me my exchange has you know calendar mail yeah this that and the other my iCloud has calendar
mail reminders my google has calendar mail reminders and they all plug into my accounts on my Mac. I am opposite of what he's trying to do. I don't want my Google Calendar intermixed with my calendar. So I turn that off and I don't sync notes from the other systems and I don't sync. So, but when it all ties in together, like I use Fantasticale, And I can intermix all of those different calendars in Fantastic Hal just fine.
I think his issue is he wants to offer other people a link to schedule with him.
This is specifically meeting advice.
Specifically for, well, not even just meeting invites, but saying, hey, book a time on my calendar. Here's a link. And Calendly is generally great for that, but Calendly can't see Zoho, right? Right. And so that's kind of the, the, the issue. And so he needs something that works with all of them. And, and that's the, that, that, that's at least what I understood to be the issue. And, and so got you. Yeah.
Yeah. Well, you know, he doesn't want to just like me, write a PHP app with a Zoho API integration.
Yeah i don't know it i didn't dig into this adam but it seems like zoho is is limited in terms of what their api allows because otherwise these things would probably just link into it and and a little bit of the research that i did made it seem like you used to be able to do these kinds of things with zoho and not anymore so i'm.
Working on zoho integrations at work right now are you it was not fun
Okay all.
Right php sdk is is a beast but it worked yeah yeah yeah yeah
And in it and does it support caldav or uh i.
Haven't done really anything with calendar stuff so i've been working mostly with with the crm you know so like it was got sales orders and customer accounts and yep accounts and all that fun stuff. Yeah. I mean, they have extensive APIs for most of their stuff. I'd be surprised if you couldn't do something with calendars. Huh?
That's weird then that Calendly doesn't just, you haven't, hasn't solved that problem because it's Oho's pretty. I mean, pretty widely used, so.
Yeah.
Yeah. Adam, GW has a question for you.
All right. We'll try to answer it.
What exactly does it mean when you sign in with Apple on sites? I hope we're not giving away our Apple ID and password or anything. I use this sign in with Day One and a few other services. Main question, is it safe?
Yes, it's actually a really, well, okay. Again, safe is going to be relative. So maybe I need to back this out a little bit. Assuming your Apple account password and all that stuff is a good one and you practice all those safe practices. Yes, because essentially this is single sign on. I mean, you have them for all kinds of things. Like you could use probably, I don't know if X has one, but definitely like face, you know, sign in with Facebook sign and with Google sign and with Apple.
Um so these are all single sign-on systems the idea here is they use tokens i don't know if apple i've never done specifically i'm assuming it's using standard oauth kind of things behind the scenes but oauth is one technology i don't know if apple's developed their own but the point is is what's happening is when you go to that site they've integrated it in a way where you basically get handed off to Apple's servers and Apple's systems to sign into your Apple account.
And then what happens is once Apple has authenticated you, then you're kicked back with a token saying, hey, yes, we validated this person as an account, this is the account. And then you can generally control what information gets passed back and forth. I think with Apple, it's your name, your email, and I think that's about it by default is from what I remember. And even with email, Apple has their private relay, so you don't even have to pass back your real email.
Apple can create a email that's tied to your iCloud account that's not your actual email. And then what the service you're using gets is this aliased email. That's not your real email. They can still send to it, but then it's relayed over to your iCloud account. So you can even hide your email from that service. So I think signing with Apple is a really great option for single sign-on, especially if you don't trust other companies like Google with your private data.
So I'm opting more and more to use single sign-on with Apple just because it's convenient. It's easy. I trust apple um and it's definitely yeah secure
So i while you were talking here i i thought about finding an answer to your question does it use oauth and their apple's developer site never ever uses the words oauth or the word right exactly however uh a developer paper article at Okta, and these folks would know what they were doing about single sign-on, says it uses OAuth and OIDC. It says, thankfully, Apple adopted existing open standards OAuth 2 and OpenID Connect to use as the foundation for their new API.
While they don't explicitly call out OAuth or OIDC in their documentation, they use all the same terminology and API calls. so it's using OAuth and OIDC which is great.
That was my suspicion that was happening behind the scenes but I just didn't have any evidence of it so thank you for finding
That yeah I've worked with Apple on some of these behind the scene things with that podcast um private pixel that I developed I've yeah I've explained I've sat down with Apple and and explained it to them because they're part of the podcast industry and they wanted to know how I was doing it and all stuff and they liked it which is great and they you know they are very eager to be part of standards, they just like to have their own brand names on things that's right that's really
all it's right the the engineers and and really the whole company likes to be able to play nice with all of the and interact with all of the services in a private way and a you know in a way that's responsible and all those things, but they, they're not looking to force everyone to adapt. And in fact, when they said, okay, well tell us what headers you're using in your thing so that when we, if not, when let me, let me make sure they did not commit to anything.
But if we were to roll something like this out, uh, if your headers make sense for us to use, we might as well just use the ones that are already out there. And I said, that's great. I said, I ask a favor. If you decide to use different headers, would you just please tell me? Because whatever you use becomes the standard. I just would like to adapt my stuff quickly. And they're like, of course, you know, so. Yeah, yeah.
Yeah. So, I mean, in summary, like if using sign-in with Apple is going to be more private than, you know, use and secure than using whatever the service that you signed into built, because you don't know what they're doing or how they're storing things or not implying that, you know, any service you're signing into isn't keeping your stuff secure.
But you're going to be more secure using a single sign-on system with apple because you have a single trusted source you know that you're going to and you're in your choosing who that trusted source is and again apple has already agreed not to to only pass back the minimal information to that service that they need to you know be and again at this point it's really probably just going to be your name username so they can set up an actual account on that service because most of
them require at least a name and an email address but again you can create a aliased email address so they don't even have your real real email address porthos
John in our discord chat has what i think is a clever way to explain single sign on to people he says i love to explain it to our new staff, like presenting your driver license at a bar. The license is issued by a trusted authority, the state, and the bar trusts that they have done, the state, has done all the verification, and therefore the bar lets you in based on what the state has done.
So you don't need an ID for each bar you go to. You just need the one issued by the trusted authority, and that lets you into the bar. In a general sense, I like this. Yeah, yeah, that's good. The only issue is the one you articulated first, Adam, and that is so long as your Apple ID credentials are safe. And my issue with Apple ID credentials is that at some level, for most of us, the way that it works, we wind up having to use an Apple ID password that is something easily rememberable.
Because it's storing it in your password manager. Like there are times where you have to type in your Apple ID password and it's just got to come either from a note that you've saved somewhere or, you know, hopefully it's securely, but then you got to know that password. So it like the Apple ID password is the one thing that it's kind of weird that it still needs to be something you remember.
It can't just be some, you know, random string of characters that's stored in a password manager that you never see.
That's why i use padding in my passwords explain that so uh for instance uh i might use uh open bracket close back at open bracket close back at four times you know a standard password that i would use a lot easily guessed but then i'll use padding that makes it longer and much more difficult to guess guess that's fair because now it's a 16 character password or 32 or 50 or whatever, but it's just repeating characters over and over and over again to pad it.
I suppose somewhat more guessable than something that's completely random, but it goes back to grc.com, Gibson Research, Steve Gibson. Yeah, and he calls it haystack, I think, looking for the needle in the haystack, and you pad your passwords. Makes them, in theory, harder to guess.
Yeah. Yeah.
The other thing I want to add to this single sign on thing, that's another powerful way where it's potentially more secure is say you find out one of the services that you single signed on to was breached in some way or compromised, or maybe you just don't even want to use it anymore. You don't want an account there anymore. You can go into your system settings, into your iCloud account, you know, by clicking on your iCloud account at the top of the settings.
Go to sign in with Apple and you can see all the places that you signed into Apple with and you can delete that sign on. You can revoke it. From your Mac at any time. So you have full control over all of those accounts and you can review and see which ones that you've allowed single sign on for, for Apple and all that sort of stuff.
So yeah, good stuff. Of course.
Perfect.
Oh, yeah. And then this integrates with the password app. I didn't notice this at the top. It's saying you can share your account passwords through. So if you need to share them with family members through Apple's new password app, you know?
Yeah. Yep.
So lots of advantages to setting this up.
We have two questions left that might wind up each being geek challenges. Pete, I'll start with David's and we'll see where we go. David in our Discord asked, does anyone know a way to get Apple Mail messages back sorted alphabetically besides manually moving them? I'm using the wife's laptop temporarily, and my sort list is creating mailboxes and not putting the mailboxes. Ah, so this is mailboxes, not mail. So how do I get mailboxes in alphabetical order?
And there was a discussion that ensued, Pete, of which you were a part.
Yeah, he didn't want to drag them, and I get that. Now, my method is arguably more labor-intensive than dragging. However, I thought it was pretty clever because I looked around. I could not find a way to sort your mailboxes alphabetically. But if you rename your mailboxes and put a number in front of them, they will automatically sort numerically.
Really?
Yeah. So if you go into your mailboxes to find two or three and rename them 1.AAA
And 2.CCC.
Well, now you're kind of hosed if you want a BBB to go in between them. So I would say name 1AAA. Three yeah ccc and then you could put two bbb in between them to make it even more flexible name them intervals of every 10 that was just
Gonna say do.
It mailbox in between do it like we used to do in there with
Uh with basic line numbers when when when coding right you would use 10 20 30 and that way if you had to squeeze something in between you had you had nine nine opportunities to do so right yeah yeah.
So yeah so that that's one way to do it that being said it's more labor intensive to go in and rename each mailbox here's the thing that i just discovered when i was pre-looking at it i went into mail and played with it and i named um one two and or actually one ten and twenty and then i took the one and i put it between i dragged it down between ten and twenty and it stayed but when you initially name it it pops uh to to
where you would want it to be yeah yeah so that's uh labor intensive not super easy it would be nice to be able to right click and go hey sort these alphabetically i agree but
Why does it sort them numerically but not alphabetically.
He don't know yeah yo i don't know you don't maybe maybe it does initially and you've dragged them out of order i don't know i don't think it does though oh i wonder what you're saying yeah oh yeah yeah let's see because if i create a new mailbox and call it aaa um it yeah yeah it put it up it put it under a mailbox so uh man you
Know here's i this week.
The other option is smart mailboxes play play with that a little bit i would think sorry i didn't mean to interrupt no
I don't but how would smart mailboxes solve this they're still not going to be.
Alphabetical no probably not yeah
So you could i mean smart mailboxes you could create a mailbox with specific messages if that's the right i don't know what the what the end game here is like why do you need them alphabetically versus not alphabetically probably
Just ease of of visually locating them i would think yeah, Yeah. Yeah. There's an argument to be made to have less mailboxes and rely on search.
Right.
So long as you're not having the search problem with Thunderbird that I was having that I talked about earlier. I was thinking about this again this week, and this is a thought that I have had many times over the last three decades. No mail client is perfect. I have learned that I generally do not like to use a mail client that's built by a single developer because that mail client is built for one person and it is that single developer.
And as long as you want to use mail exactly like they do, then it's great. But the moment you want something a little different, they will explain to you why you're wrong. And it's like, okay, great. I get it. Awesome. You built this for yourself. You sell it to other people. It's great. No problem. And that's kind of why I liked Apple Mail as much as I do. I still like Apple Mail because it's built by a team and lots of people build this.
There's no one like I'm sure there's a project manager of Apple Mail, but it's not built for that person. Right. You know, it's built for all the Apple users out there. And and that's where I've run into problems because they stopped letting people build extensions and it doesn't do the things I want. And so I moved to Thunderbird, which does.
And it's the same kind of thing, except Thunderbird is built by a team of developers that similar to Apple developers, actually, will love to tell you that any bug you report is 100 percent wrong. And you have to get into like an emotionally taxing argument with them to paint them into a corner and force them to see that this bug actually exists.
But that's just how teams of engineers often work certainly at apple too uh thunderbird i've experienced it i think i'm about to experience it again with this new bug i've reported but anyway yeah no mail clients is perfect uh adam you have a little bit of your own geek challenge.
Yeah, I had a little rant at Siri, because the other day I was trying to do, I had a note, and I wanted to dictate, basically have Siri add some things to it. And so I couldn't figure out how to get this lady to add to an existing note.
So I did what any sane person would do and I went to the MGG help desk in our Discord to ask for help and this is what I said I wrote please help me before I murder Siri how is she so incredibly glad in 2025 I'm trying to add text to a note using Siri according to the internet I should be able to say S lady add text and then dictate my text to the note titled and then the title of the note and that should allow text to be added to it. He says, no, nothing I did. And this is on iOS to be clear.
Nothing I did would make that work. Now, the tip that I saw on the internet, I did note that it was, it looked like it was on the Mac. So I don't know if this is maybe possible on the Mac. I haven't tested it yet. But all I kept getting response from Siri when I was trying to do this was no matter how I phrased it, how I said it, I'm sorry, I can't do that. It was getting incredibly frustrating.
So I asked and Lee came back. And I think Dave, you also gave a similar tip when I brought this up earlier. He says, Hey, Adam, here's a screenshot from a video I did recently for screencasts online, I had to set up individual shortcuts for individual notes, but it does work fine.
So you can go into shortcuts, you can start with a dictate text action, and then append to a specific note using and you'd have to do this for each note that you wanted to be able to append to but you could set up a shortcut for it and obviously probably trigger that shortcut with siri i would assume so um that's the workaround i just don't understand why in 2025 this isn't just a simple bill and i seem to remember i thought way way back in the day like when s lady
first became available that this was a thing but maybe that's just confirmation bias and in the back of my head i don't know i
Know that it's doable with a shortcut because our Mac E-Cab prep workflow shortcut uses that step to append text to a note so that we have our agenda starting to be built and all that stuff. And I just used it the other day. I built another shortcut for something. I was like, oh, I want to be able to, oh, I can do it that way. So it definitely works. But like you said, you have to target a specific note. Now you could build a.
I don't know how that would work with Siri. I've never done, can you have it ask you things? Yeah, I think so. I guess you can, right, because I used to have, before I got a scale that would automatically put my weight and stuff into Apple Health, I had to log my weight script where it would ask me what my weight was, and I could tell it.
So you might be able to say, you know, which of these three notes do you want to append this to kind of thing, But probably easier to do bespoke shortcuts for each so that you can just say, hey, you know, append to my Mac Geekab note the following text or whatever, you know. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But you're right. Like if if if it's one. And this is where, you know, I want Apple intelligence to do the work for me because and it's all on device.
But like if there's one action one step in a shortcut that can do something why can't i just have siri effectively build me that shortcut on the front it's not advanced it should be able to do a three or four step thing but we'll start with one you know yeah yeah that's uh that's where we're at but we're also at the end yeah because we've my recollection.
Is she would do grocery lifts you could say hey put on the grocery list yes thing
So you know you can that's right yeah yeah yeah well good news it means that we have reason to do another episode again next week, so that we shall same bat channel that's right, thanks for hanging out with us everybody Adam I'm glad that A. You were able to do the show today and B. that your audio was only temporarily an issue.
Remember, it's an issue again, because the air raid is happening.
Oh, well, that's exactly. That's a different issue, isn't it?
Oh, that's right. 10 o'clock central.
Yeah. Remember to go to MacGear.com slash giveaway and sign up to win your copy of Unite 6 from BZG Apps. Thanks to them for doing that with us this month. Thanks to Cashfly for providing all the bandwidth to get the show from us to you. Make sure to check out our other podcasts, Adam's debut film podcast, Pilot Pete's So There I Was podcast and my business brand and gig gab podcast. They're all linked from the Mackie Gab show notes.
Every episode we put them there and make sure to go check out our merch. Mackie cub dot com slash merch. There's some fun stuff out there. And we made it, I think, through this episode. It looks like it's recorded. My power only flickered here like twice due to the wind. but it seems the connection all the ups's and batteries in the path did their jobs It's all good. Mm. Ah. Ah. Ah. Ah. Ah. Adam you got something to say.
Uh i would say unlike me with the siren that's going off right now, don't get caught.