It's time for the MacGeekCab, and listener Tony brings us our quick tip of the week. Anyone using ListViews sorted by dates will be vexed by how the finder doesn't change the modified date of an aliased folder. When items within that folder are actually changed, added, or deleted, you can easily change the modified date of that aliased folder using Terminal. Just open the terminal window and type touch. That's the word touch, T-O-U-C-H.
Add a space and then drag that aliased file or I'm sorry, aliased folder into the terminal window. That's giving it the path. Now the aliases date is changed to today. I use keyboard maestro to create a shortcut to bring up a terminal window and type the touch command.
but it shouldn't be too hard for someone with a lot more skills than me to create a shortcut automator script or apple script to do this for you more tips like this plus your questions answered today on mech geek gab number 1063 for monday november 11th veteran's day armistice day, metal day 24.
Greetings, folks, and indeed, welcome to MacGeekGab number 1063, the show where you send in your quick tips, you send in your cool stuff found, you send in your questions, we share them, we answer them, we discuss them, we use them to ensure that each of us learns at least five new things every single time we get together.
sponsors for today's episode include glean.com slash mgg their powerful ai connects and understands all your company's data and pulls in like slack and all kinds of other things so that you just have this smart thing that just sees everything that you want it to see and also bbedit at barebones.com my favorite text editor it's running all the time on my mac i use it to manage the show notes i use it to do all kinds of things we'll talk more about all that in a little bit and as many
of you know i have chat gpt uh write me the ad scripts and i tell it to put something a little easter egg in each time that we can all listen for and a lot of times you're hearing me read it cold for the first time so we'll do that a little bit later for now here in durham new hampshire i'm dave hamilton and
Here in south dakota i'm adam christensen and
Here also in New Hampshire. It's Pilot Pete. Police code 1063. Subject positive. Prepare to copy. That's it. Get your pens and paper out, folks. We got a lot of good stuff coming your way today.
What was that?
Prepare to copy. 1063. Prepare to copy. Get ready to write this down.
That's the police code. Yeah, yeah.
For a transcript of this show, write down every word you hear.
Yep pete's back yeah pete thank you for your service uh thank you yeah and thanks everyone uh for your service veterans day here um
Yes indeed and you know dave let me go on a personal note for about 10 seconds here and say thank you also to all the families because without the family supporting the veterans that did it it wouldn't have been able to be done a lot of birthdays and anniversaries and funerals and weddings and all that kind of stuff missed and sacrificed family sacrifices as much as the veterans often. Yeah. So thank you to them.
Yeah. Thank you indeed. Yeah. Very much so. Yeah. Yeah. Uh, I want to talk about our, uh, monthly giveaway this month. It is, uh, if you go to mackiecap.com slash giveaway, it is the OWC express one M two SSD enclosure. Lots of interest in that. It's a cool thing. I actually got to see one of those at Pepcom last week. Lightweight. Yeah, it's everything you think it is. And I want to give a quick congratulations to our October giveaway winners.
Silver Teed, Andy Dolph, Mikhail Rappaport, Richie Lillies, and Cassandra Darensburg. And my apologies if I mispronounced any of your names. but uh yeah that was the one with eternal storms so great stuff great stuff uh shall we continue with quick go ahead pete
We should but actually i want to go back to the opening quick tip and ask a question dave because she was talking about you're in an aliased folder which means that the original file is somewhere else if you change something within that alias folder does it not change that file back in the original folder.
So what they were saying is that the modified date of the folder would change, does change the modified date of the original folder of the, of the actual folder of the, of the folder itself. But the alias, the modified date of the alias doesn't change. And that makes sense because the alias was created at a certain time. But I also understand why if it's an alias of a folder, you would want the modified date of that to match the folder.
Yeah, you could even write a little script that you could schedule with Lingon or something that every five minutes or so ran and checked to see if the modified date of the destination folder, the original folder, was newer than the modified date of the alias. And if so, then run your little touch script so that it, uh, touch terminal command so that it's just always within five minutes or so it's, it's up to date. Yeah. That'd be another way to do it.
There's a great idea.
Yeah.
Okay. Cool.
You could do the, you could do the other thing and make a dangerous alias, but don't do that.
Well, now that you've mentioned dangerous aliases, Adam, pray tell, what do you mean?
I'm trying to remember, cause I'm going to get myself in trouble cause I don't remember the exact terms, but there's two kinds of aliases. There's the alias. That's just like a pointer. The shortcut. You can also make it.
Yeah. Yeah.
And there's also in the terminal, you can make an alias and I forget the command. So Linux people will let me know what it is and tell me the term, but basically you can create an alias that's it acts exactly like the original thing
Oh soft links are links
Yes yeah yeah and i bet in that scenario it would update because it's basically it's like a clone of that thing in essence
Yeah yeah so like
If you were to delete your alias folder normally you know if it's soft when you delete it you're just deleting the alias if you made one of these and deleted it you'd be deleting it
Not necessarily so soft links are um what
Am i getting am i confused i never
Know no not really but but what you but but a little bit i i think so soft links are um symlinks we also call them right where it's a symbolic link and an alias is a type of symbolic link it's like sort of special in the finder but but you're right if you go into the terminal and you create a symbolic link it effectively acts the same as an alias it is a uh a pointer to the original folder but if you delete the original folder in that case,
the alias will, or the symbolic link will now be orphaned. A hard link is actually what happens when you create a file or a folder where there's there's the directory entry for it, like in the table of contents. And that points to the location on the media where the data actually is. Right. And so every file and folder on your Mac essentially already has one hard link to it.
You can point a second hard link to it. And that way, if you were to delete the original, the second would still point to your data. If you delete the second, the first would still point to your data. If you delete both, then the data is gone.
Dave did a much better job explaining it than I did.
It's really confusing, though. And Time Machine, I'm pretty sure still, but certainly initially, relies on hard links to do all of this. and that's how it can expire old versions of your backup but if the same file exists in a new one the hard link points to it and it persists right like that that's kind of the the the magic if you will underneath time machine and it's it's versioning so yeah and
Just use the just use the shortcut thing and you what you won't get yourself in too much trouble
What that was i I woke up less than an hour ago.
Yeah, you did. Good job.
Yeah, well, you just twisted a lobe in my brain.
The same.
Let's move on.
Shall we?
Hey, yeah, Patrick wrote in with a really cool one here. He says, I'm not sure if everyone already knows this or not. He didn't, but he discovered it. I typically listen to podcasts on my iPhone with a single AirPod in my ear. I'm not a big fan of CarPlay, but often plug my phone in so it can charge. and every time I do, the audio switches off in my ear. So I have to go to Overcast, navigate to Overcast, choose the alternative output, not USB, and move it back to my AirPods.
Ha ha ha, how do I fix that? Recently, he says, I just pinched my AirPods and the audio restarted in my ear. Boom. One quick touch, done.
Nice.
Great tip. And I tried it, works like a champ. Huh. That's cool.
So tell me why you would want why you would not want it to just stay on your car.
If I'm alone, I do. But if my kids are in the car and they want to listen to music, they don't want to listen to dad's aviation show or political show or tech show. Then I put it in one ear.
This makes sense.
Yeah.
Interesting. And you don't, now I know I've been in a plane with you.
I don't do it with both ears.
No, no. I figured you didn't do it with both ears, but the question I was going to ask was, you don't find it confusing to hear music and conversation in the car and also listen to the thing. But I know from being in a plane with you that you can pay attention to tower chatter in one ear and my chatter in the other.
and even though i also was hearing tower chatter in my ear you would catch i would catch maybe 15 of the times that the tower talked to us and you would catch really maybe more but certainly not as many as you there were a lot of times we were in conversation you were like hang on i was like wait okay yeah maybe it wasn't 15 maybe it was maybe it was you know 60 and you caught 98 but But, yeah.
Right.
Yeah.
Well, I still, but the biggest problem I still have in that realm is when I'm flying my own airplane. Instead of using November 1-2 Tango Romeo, I'll go, yeah, FedEx, November 1-2. Guess what I do for a living? Yeah.
I've seen that. I can confirm. Can confirm. Especially after landing. that seems to be the point where you are on such uh your your voice is on such an autopilot because you're the thing you're paying attention to is is
Where i am and not having a runway or taxiway incursion or something like that.
Yeah right so the chatter becomes becomes the the automatic which listen as a as a passenger in the plane if that's the part that becomes automatic i'm here for it And like, yeah, you much rather have your, your front of mind attention, your, your foreground processes focused on not banging the plane into someone else.
So, yeah. So as I said, I'm talking without thinking much like I do here every week.
Oh, same.
Yeah. All right. Let me take us to Patrick's tip. He's got one for us.
The second one from Patrick. All right.
Let's do it. Is it the same? I don't know if it's the same Patrick.
I don't know if it's. Maybe it is. Yeah, it's the second Patrick. I don't know.
Yeah. I've, he says, I've never heard this one before. So I thought I'd pass it along. Well, thank you very much. You can use quick look in an open save dialogue box. I use default folder, but I don't think that affects this. I don't think it does either. Cause I use quick look in a open save dialogue boxes all the time. So what you do is he says he uses it, especially with opening up Excel documents. He says, I usually have a few versions of the spreadsheet I'm working on.
So I key command open when the dialog box opens. uh, appears, I click the link or click on the file rather that I think is the correct version. And I hit the space bar and then you get quick look, another touch of the space bar dismisses quick look. And from there you can open or move on. And I use this all the time to, uh, exact same reason. Sometimes you're like, is this the right file? You know, if you, I try to be good with my file naming, but you know, occasionally you aren't.
So great tip, patrick yeah
You know that's one of those that you know we just do and we assume everybody else just do right.
That's it's the epitome of a quick tip yeah
Of the quick tip right you know hey this is it wait how'd you do that oh i just did oh man i.
I don't this sounds new to me but i'm sure i do it without thinking about
It without even thinking yes.
Yeah i can almost guarantee you do which
File do i want oh that's the one that's the one.
Yeah because i'm so used to quick look is a part of my fingers and the way that i use the finder so i would assume i've done it in a open safe dialogue but it sounds new to me so it it might be i don't
Know here's where it gets confusing i'll find myself in in an open safe dialogue and it looks so much like finder i'll try to start doing finder Well.
You can do some Finder level things in there, you know, so, you know, another tip that I think people know, but maybe don't know is you can, you know, drag a folder or a file into an open dialog box from the Finder to get there. So if you already have something on your desktop or something, you can just like drag it in there and it'll jump right to that location.
Yes. And one, an extension of that feature is something default folder adds, which is if you, if you're in an open or save dialogue and you have default folder running, you can float over a finder window and it will like, it kind of like you're taking a screenshot of it, of a window. it'll it'll highlight and if you click it you don't even have to drag it it will just put it as your as your destination which i use that's probably the feature of default folder that i use the most i think uh
See now there you go i had not heard of default folder.
Seriously is
It a yeah wow.
John and i used to talk about default folder all the time um i don't know if it's in setup uh it's from i'll look while
We move on.
Yeah yeah yeah yeah but i'll put a link in the show notes it's it's one of those things it also lets you do a lot more finder commands in the in the open save dialogues uh so you can you know rename and and duplicate and do all kinds of stuff and then there is it's it's you know titular purpose which is that it allows you to set a default folder for each application so you can that's that's kind of the one that that you know was initially created for so
So here's the thing uh not only is it in setup it's already installed and the permissions.
And
The permissions are already allowed and so yeah Thank you, Setapp.
There you go. There you go.
That's how quick and easy it is to use this stuff with Setapp. It's true. Although I was, I got to say, I got a notification from them this week. Did you see it, Dave, about Jump Desktop?
No.
Yeah. Jump Desktop is leaving Setapp. So he says as long as you have it installed, you'll continue to be able to use it until such update that it doesn't work anymore. But they are leaving Setapp. Don't get it.
Don't.
I don't get it don't.
Do that it happens that happens uh henry has our next quick tip this one's for your iphone he says if you search for an app and get the results listed at the top of the screen then press and hold on an app icon you'll get menu of little actions but that's not the feature if at this point you start dragging your finger you can move that app out of the search results, your home screen will reappear and you can place that app icon on any of your home screens or in the folders on them.
But if you already had that app on one of your home screens, it will remain there and you can place this duplicate app icon anywhere you want, including right next to the original icon. This confused me at first because I thought dragging the app had removed it from its usual spot. But I was searching through my home screens, looking for the screen where this app had gone missing from, but I couldn't find it because it wasn't missing.
This does not work if you start your search from the lock screen. Makes sense. He says, I suppose this could be useful if you wanted to create different screens for use with different focus modes and yet have the same app in both. But if you need to remove one, remember to remove from the home screen rather than deleting the app. Yes. Very good advice.
Whoops.
Yeah. Don't get caught. Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah this this this was added for focus modes i think that was the main reason right is because you can have different screens set up like i have one i that was just like a weekend screen or whatever that would become my default home screen you know when i'm not during the week so it had more casual apps that i would use yep or new in like news widgets or i figure what i put on now i think i put the apple tv widget so i could see my up next stuff and yeah yeah
yeah i don't use it very much but that was the idea when i set it up yeah
Right right right fun stuff that's
For those of you that still use home screens they've showed me how he does nothing on your home screen.
Oh i have i have well i
Have one or two a couple apps like i have maps and two shortcuts.
Oh interesting see i don't even have maps on my home screen because it comes up i should probably
Lose that too yeah.
Yeah i i do have i have one home screen that has like settings and photos and my sonos app and safari uh but that's basically it i everything else i run from search if i if i need to yeah
You've got to remember the name of the app and that you even have it.
That it's true it's true i've also found a change i i when ios 18 came out or when the beta when i got the betas i started using there's if you hold down i'm pretty sure this is how you do this um if you hold down on an app icon you can choose um what is the what's the feature you can choose to oh it well you can choose to require face id for an app uh that's on the home screen oh yeah you also can which is cool like so that an app can't launch if you happen to hand your phone to someone
they you know they would they you
Don't want them going through your photos.
Exactly right or whatever your email or your messages or whatever yeah any app you can do that that's one thing that's not where i would wanted to go with this um but i i went there so the other thing that you can do is if you go into uh now it's well on 18 2 or whatever it's Apple Intelligence and Siri but if you go into either the settings for an app or the settings for Siri you can go and tell any given app learn from this app show on home screen let you know let Siri
Search this app those kinds of things and if you turn off Suggest this app is one of the options with iOS 18. It would still show up when you searched for it in, you know, just pull down and type that app name. Either 18.1 or 18.2. I can't remember which took this away. So if you have an app that you told it, you just turned off all of those things for the Siri, you know, privacy settings for an app. You turned off, learn from this app, show on home screen, suggest apps,
suggestion notifications, use with Siri requests. If you turn that off for an app, it will no longer show up in your search results. So that app, if you do that to an app, I highly recommend putting it on a home screen somewhere so that you can launch it.
Well, there's that.
Yeah. Yeah. So yeah.
Otherwise, how would you ever even find it and get rid of it?
Um i think you could still i will confirm this list if you go to the app library which is the past your last home screen um let me make sure it's there yeah it's
Probably searchable still there
Oh let's see if it's searchable there that's a great i
Would assume it is because that's its own search separate from series search which is the global search
You're 100 correct it's still there so so yes it's searchable that's interesting that that's a different search than the search on every other page of your iphone
Okay well i'm pretty sure the setting that you would not want to turn off if you wanted to show up in siri search is the suggest app one right i would think that's that's the key one to not disable if you want it searchable by sir siri to surface it in a search
Yeah let's see because
Siri is suggesting that app when you're when you're doing your search suggesting it i think you mean this i think is the idea well
It didn't work initially but maybe over time yeah yeah or
Maybe which one which flag it is then maybe
It's show on home screen um yeah let's see i'll try it again nope i'll have to
Here we play Guess the Engineer's Intent. It's a fun game. You can play at home.
Yeah, you too can play this game. We have yet to figure it out. So let us know feedback at MacGeekGab.com if you figure it out.
Hold on. Feedback at MacGeekGab.com? Yeah.
That's what I heard. Feedback at MacGeekGab.com.
Guess the Engineer's Intent. There's a show title, Dave.
That is the show title.
I don't know if that's the best one, But we could we could do better
This tip from this tip from Paul that we have teed up next, Adam. Yes, we already did this or no. Kind of.
We did not. OK, did we?
I don't know. Go ahead and read it. Oh, did I?
I did. I do a spoiler.
You might have done it.
We did a spoiler.
A little spoiler. Yeah. But go ahead. Yeah. Yeah.
Paul says, interestingly enough, I thought of you guys when I was recently doing some work in Illustrator. After finishing my photos, I had to save them out into a very specific file organization system. However, I was having trouble navigating to where to save in the export to window. I knew I had the folder open in my finder. So from the finder, something told me to click the correct folder location and drag it into the export to window in Illustrator.
Voila, it popped it populated in the window with exactly where i needed to save my file all i had to do was click save p.s this also works in open document window oh really yep and this is throughout the os not just in adobe yes you're right paul and that is a great tip we should tell people about that
I like it we're
Having fun that is weird i i swear to you i did not i did not even And I hadn't pre-read that. Connect the dots.
Yeah.
Great minds think alike, Paul. That's what it is.
That's actually what it is. Yeah. It's what it is. I love it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And, you know, it's not uncommon for us to get the same tip, you know, especially after we have a conversation like we just did where someone's like, I can't believe you talked about this and didn't also then mention this tip.
And often it's because we didn't know about the tip. but uh and then we get to share it which is great but sometimes yeah it'll be you know 10 15 emails about the same thing it's like yeah which is great like i i love that we do that that's awesome yeah don't assume that someone else will send in the tip that is obvious to you though please because it that that's not necessarily true yeah as we've all learned todd says uh i accidentally discovered that now on watch watch
os 11 from the watch face i can scroll down with the digital crown or swipe up from the bottom of the screen to open the smart stack i'm not sure if this was possible before but i like the swipe up better than rolling of the crown yeah i think that is new in watch os 11 of all the operating systems that apple makes watch os is the one where with each annual iteration, they take huge liberties with changing like fundamental user interface yeah yes they
Do it's
Interesting right some of them are good some of them are not but you know yeah like the one i i find i get this calendar and a tiny analog, watch face and then notifications up all the time but the other thing you talked about rolling up on the crown what happens if you roll down on the crown do you know uh you get you get all your notifications take the crown and pull down and you get.
All the well yeah because it's right it's the equivalent it's the equivalence of the swipes right if you swipe down don't you get the i can't because again they change it all the time i can't remember yeah
If you swipe down on the face so essentially the crown is the same as swiping on the on the screen.
Yes that's the right swipe yeah yeah the the idea there originally and i think it still kind of holds true mostly was that you know you could use the digital crown instead of your finger for whatever thing so like you know if you're in an app that scrolls it does the scrolling and the idea was that you're not blocking the ui well and also you're not blocking the ui with your finger so if you want to like actually see what's on the screen because the screen was you know relatively
small your finger is pretty large so you're blocking a good portion of the screen but yeah no i hate that i hate the changes like the when they when they got rid of um the swipe up is now the stack instead of uh control center i wish i could change that back yeah because i i still to this day will like swipe up expecting to get to control center to like toggle bluetooth or turn my speaker off or put it into theater mode you know, the things that I do comment.
And then I have to remember which, which button did they move it to? I think it's, and I still don't remember now, right? Is it the side button or the crown?
Well, what the crown gets you to all your apps, at least on, this is on the altar.
No, no, yeah, yeah, yeah.
And then the side button gets you to control center. And then the action button turns on my nightlight.
Yeah. Yeah.
Stop changing it.
Yeah. Well, this is really interesting. Like, what a commentary on, I mean, I know we're having this discussion, but like the fact that we're having this discussion is a commentary on how confusing this is because here's three people who, at our own levels, but very fairly are early adopters with things, and I certainly don't want to call us technically astute, but technically interested, right? And like to be aware of the little nitpicks because we do this show, right?
Our minds are trained to be aware of the little nitpicks, and yet none of the three of us would know the answer to wait what does that button do on your watch right that's that's like i said it's a commentary on it they
Take wild liberties with the operating system on the watch.
Yeah just
On the watch overall i mean they have with with other operating systems obviously you know nothing is sacred no but you know that historically that's where apple started and And they've changed that behavior.
Yeah. You know. Even the no buttons thing is not sacred on the iPhone anymore.
Yeah, right. Yeah.
Look how many we have.
Can we get 16 more?
Two to five.
Yeah, it's interesting. Speaking of buttons that do things you might not have known, this is a software button on the macOS calendar. Steve says, if you juggle multiple calendar accounts like I do, did you know that if you click and hold the plus button at the top of calendar, you can choose which specific calendar you want to add your quick event to? Try it. That's fascinating. That's helpful.
I like that. That's good. Yeah. Because for some reason, it always seems to be my wife, and then I have to go in and delete it or move it to my calendar.
Yeah.
She's like, why did you set me up for an appointment at the urologist? I didn't, honey. Never mind.
I didn't. That's right. But can you drive me? Yeah.
Bingo.
I was on the phone with our friend Doc Rock this week, actually talking to him about Ecamm Live, which is what he does as his day job. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And we were talking about how... You know, on Instagram, we were lamenting the fact that you can't you still can't put a clickable link in an Instagram post. Right. You it's you can you can put you can type a URL into the text field when you create an Instagram post. But Instagram does not make it clickable. Right.
It's and that's long been the thing. It's probably to keep people in the river of things on Instagram and not encourage people to leave. And I'm sure there's lots of thoughts behind it or not. But it is the way that it is. And he's like, yeah, but all you have to do now if you want to click a link that someone put in an Instagram post is take a screenshot of the post. And then in the screenshot thing, everything, nothing is sacred.
you can you can tap text and if it's a link it will become a link and you can click it and off you go brilliant and this obviously works elsewhere other than instagram it's not it's not just limited to that but it is a thing and i've done it ever since he told me about it it has just become a default part of my workflow because so many people put urls in there so yeah
With the feature that apple added where you don't have to save the screenshot right you get the preview you just delete it and you're
Done you're done yeah yeah yeah yeah yep yep um another thing that lisa i think it was lisa was it was oh no it was you last week talking about the um the making the camera button because we we all we all forget to use the camera buttons for as our camera we still use the old gesture was it on this show last week am i rehashing something where you said maybe make the camera button just your QR code scanner? Was that you, Adam, that said that to me?
Yeah, yeah. We were talking about that you can, there's a bunch of settings for that. The tip was that you can change it to a double press so you're not actually accidentally activating it. So that was the tip from a listener. And then when we were in looking at the settings, I noticed, oh, you can actually assign it to any quote unquote camera app because it supports third-party apps. So if you prefer a third-party camera versus Apple's, you can change it to that.
But you can also change it to Apple's QR scan app. So just to bring up QR scan. And I might change mine to that.
I did that. Or Instagram. Or Instagram, if you want. Sure.
Yeah.
Right. Oh, that's interesting. If you wind up sharing. Oh, I hadn't thought about it that way, Pete. That's interesting.
Yeah. I'm trying to think. Now I'm recording. I'm recording this.
I'm recording it too we'll save it for the listeners yeah yeah yeah
Warning, this conversation is being recorded. I can't get it. Yeah. Dang nabbit. Oh, well.
And in our chat at MacGeekUp.com slash Discord, Porthos John says, the press and hold on the camera button for image intelligence is actually pretty cool. And he says that might be in beta 18.2. I forget which one is live now. It's 18. can you get image playgrounds and image intelligence image intelligence I think is only 18.2 but yes yeah I
Think they're still on beta for 18.1 yeah okay so that's been released yet 18.2
You can do image intelligence oh it is live yeah the beta is you can because 18.1 is out now I think 18.1 yes it is live it's so it's so rare for me to still be on ios betas at this point but because of all the apple intelligence stuff i i want to be so that i'm getting those new features but yeah pressing and holding the camera button to get into image intelligence mode and have it tell you about things that uh it sees is is pretty darn cool so so
Here's another function of that though that was pretty cool if if you press light i should say light touch on the camera button, I think the default is zoom, but it comes down and it shows zoom.
But if you put your finger up there and pull down on it, you can then switch between exposure, f-stop or depth, zoom, which cameras you want, the 0.5, 1, 2, or 5, or the back camera, or, uh the tone or the style does that make sense yes yeah yeah okay so yeah it comes up there and you just you just swipe down on that there it is of course we're doing it on video here so all you listeners are kind of out of luck sorry yeah
they'll see it you pull down on it and it allows you to to switch between those options because what happened and i haven't discovered this because i was trying to zoom with it and it kept changing the f-stop and i'm going how did that happen so somehow I changed it from zoom to f-stop but and I actually like the f-stop better I can zoom with my thumbs on the screen, faster more efficiently than the camera button so and.
Yeah you can change all kinds of things there yeah it's pretty cool It's, um, I'm eager to see halides, as we mentioned now three times, uh, already added support for being, for the camera button. I I'm eager to see how that continues to evolve with third party developers kind of, you know, building in those features too.
So yeah, I'm still not a fan of the camera button, but I didn't bet.
But yeah, it's warming up to it. I think it's going to be one of those things that takes a while to get used to.
Yeah.
I'm, I'm, I'm surprised. I'm not really, I hadn't really become enamored with the action button, but I probably need to hook it to a shortcut is probably what I need to do. I just don't know what I, what shortcut I want to hook it to. So I still have it set to the stupid default.
Yeah silent yeah yeah yeah i it i like i know we've had this conversation on the show but the idea of having context sensitive actions happening all triggered from one sort of monolithic you know cascading shortcut thing where if it's you know if my phone's in do not disturb and i press it and it's dark out you know turn on the flashlight and like all of those things and and i'll use this as a reminder, you know,
that you can have shortcuts respond differently depending on the orientation of your phone too. So if it's face down or in portrait mode or in landscape mode, like shortcuts can have that... information is available to shortcut so you can create uh if statements based on you know conditional logic in there so
Nerd yeah.
Yeah well no that's what i need i mean that's that's what would make the action button actually useful for me having it be a one trick pony isn't isn't great
That ain't it
Yeah oh yeah yeah yeah and it was dave you asked me at haunted overload how i was because i was struggling to pull up the camera huh why don't you use the camera button I'm like, oh, yeah, I haven't gotten used to that yet. Right. And now I have, because you asked me that.
Right. Well, that's the thing. And that's why I brought this topic back up, because I didn't realize, I forgot that we had had it on the show, because I was talking to Lisa about it, and she's like, oh, yeah, I don't use the camera button. I'm like, well, what about for a QR scanner? She's like, oh, that would be amazing. I thought she came up with it, but it was you, Adam. And as soon as I started saying it, I knew. Pete, you want to take us to our final quick tip of the week here?
I do. I discovered this quite by accident. When you swipe down from the top right in iOS, you get the control center. If you notice off to the side, there's a heart, musical notes, a home, and apparently an antenna. If you touch any one of those, it will bring up the next screen. Or your other option is to swipe up or down, and you get different versions of control center.
Which I'm like, whoa. So especially like the network one, instead of having to press and hold and turn airplane mode on or off or Bluetooth or anything, takes you right there to the whole thing. So, yeah. So four screens of control center now because one wasn't enough. Yeah.
And they're editable, right? You can figure whatever you want. I think you can have more than four screens, right, Adam? Correct me if I'm wrong.
I bet you could.
I don't know. I haven't played with it yet. Yeah, I wanted to say that, but I was holding off because I haven't validated that. So I didn't want to give misinformation again.
Well, see, that's why I said it and asked you to confirm because that way. All right look ai is all around us right but here's a question has it really made your work day easier well enter our sponsor glean i checked out their site and they've got a great demo video and here's the scoop glean takes the apps you already use like slack jira google drive and turns them into one super smart ai search need to find that meeting note from three months ago
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Awesome. Okay. Very cool. Well, now it's time for Don't Get Caught. And this week's Don't Get Caught first one comes from user listener Jeff, who says, I just thought I'd share an experience I had that might be helpful for someone else. I started using iOS 18 public beta this past summer on my iPhone 13 Pro. One of the features I immediately started using was protecting one particular app with Face ID, as we just discussed a few minutes ago.
And I found that it worked quite well and Spotlight had no issues finding it still. However, a few weeks ago, I upgraded to the 16 Pro Max and migrated all of my data to it, and that same app was still protected by Face ID. But when I searched for the app using Spotlight, it would not find it.
Initially, I thought that perhaps it was still indexing things on the new phone, and it would eventually get there, but even software updates and a couple weeks of Spotlight use, it still wasn't finding the app. Finally, I removed the Face ID lock. Spotlight immediately found the app, then re-enabling the lock Spotlight is still able to find the app. I'm not sure if this is expected behavior. Try and guess what the engineers are trying to do.
Right?
From Apple's point of view, but I thought it might be helpful for someone. It seems that having the app locked from an iPhone backup prevents Spotlight from finding the app until that feature is disabled for a short time. It can re-index in there. So he says, I guess I got caught, but brilliant, Jeff, in figuring out how to get past that. Unlock it briefly, let Spotlight index it, then relock it. It doesn't seem like it should be that way, but.
Yeah, I would not have expected that behavior, especially if you're telling it to use it. Like the conversation we just had about, you know, if it's allowed to be used that way and it's just locked. Huh. Good to know that. Yes, this is why we have the don't get caught section. Yeah, segment, whatever. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Huh. All right. Yeah. there's
Some magic incantation there's some magic combination of the things we were talking about earlier and this because i when you started reading it i'm like oh we must have missed it so the the key for it not getting you know not surfacing is not the settings we were talking about earlier it's the uh face id lock thing right which would make sense you've locked that app from you know being launched so why yeah basically but obviously that's not exactly it so it's something else
Weird i don't know um i was having an email exchange with listener kent and we were talking about classifying things as spam and and this that and the other thing and a lesson came out of it that is perfect here for our don't get caught segment and and it is be careful the be careful when classifying email bounce messages as spam now the context of this is sometimes people spoof your email address as the from address right and and send spam to someone
right so the the initial attempt is spam and it winds up in some cases going to an email address that doesn't exist or doesn't exist anymore. And so there is a bounce that happens. And of course, the bounce goes back to whatever the original email address was. And if they spoofed you, then it's you. So yes, the content of the outbound message that triggered the bounce was spam, but the bounce is a real thing.
And if you tell your spam filter to classify bounce messages as spam, it will start classifying all bounce messages as spam. I don't know about you, but if I send an email to someone, I assume it got to them unless I see a bounce message and the timeliness of that bounce message, at least for me in, in like work life, it could be important. Yeah, exactly.
And so, Oh, I mistyped that address or right.
And you know, I check my, I check my spam folder pretty frequently. I've talked about it on the show. I check it basically every two days. And the reason I do that is that the amount of spam I get, if I waited any longer than that, and when I do wait longer than that, instead of taking me 90 seconds to go through my spam, now it takes me five minutes or 10 minutes to go through my spam.
And like 90 seconds every two days is a good pace. But if I have just gone through my spam and it's going to be another two days, knowing that that bounce message actually bounced that or the message actually bounced, that's bad. So I am judicious with what I train as spam in my spam filters because these days, all of them that I use, I use FastMails, I use Gmails, and they all seem to be a little overaggressive. so that's that's my that's my tip right was
Was this the uh sorry
Go ahead
No i was just saying i hadn't even thought of that i'm just i'm just talking out loud talking without thinking as i said earlier i.
Wanted to ask dave this was the this was the at google mail.com one right So the address, one of the things he was confused by, if I'm remembering the email right, was the from address that they had used was he has a Gmail address. And this was the same thing at googlemail.com. And they were using that as the sender. So that was bouncing that back then to his regular Gmail. And he was a little confused, I think, by that thinking, that's why it looked more like spam or something like that.
And I just wanted to point out for people who don't know that googlemail.com is Gmail in countries where Gmail was already registered as a trademark. So I think Russia is one of those countries. So Google couldn't go in and get. So it's basically the similar thing to like, if you have an old, like I have my old original, you know, at mac.com address or at me.com address or at iCloud. So when you have one of those old addresses, those are all equivalents, basically.
so likely what was happening is you know some buddy in some country was just scrolling through and you know sending messages out spam messages out with the from address from various different gmail accounts basically gmail accounts yeah but if you see google mail.com that's just that's also gmail it's they're like the same equivalence i think
Yep yep thank you it's
The exact same only.
Different it's just it's just yeah but you're right it's it's like like at me.com and at mac.com and at iCloud and yeah it's all it all goes same box uh we got some reviews in and i want to read two of them yep macgeekup.com slash reviews makes it super easy now for you to send your reviews in these were uh both into apple podcast the first one from kenneth s in the uk says informative entertaining and enjoyable top quality podcast with entertaining hosts who
cover a broad range of topics and are true experts in all things Apple they truly enjoyable and engaging podcast filled with great tips and insights I have and continue to learn lots of tips and insights in an enjoyable and entertaining format thank you Kenneth S that is that is our goal every single time we sit down to do this and then uh Ringwood here in the United States says, great podcast is the title. Five stars.
Great weekly podcast and super helpful to listen to after Apple has an event for new devices or software. Adam and Pete have added so much great content and humor to the podcast. Thank you, Dave. Your continuing efforts on the listener's behalf. Yeah. Thanks. Thanks to you guys. You make this like, yeah, it's awesome. And thanks to everybody.
And I got a comment.
Go.
If you can't give us a five-star review, write the feedback at MattGeekGab.com and tell us what do you need to improve, and then you can give us a five-star.
Yeah, we'll earn your five-star review.
And we're trainable.
We are trainable. Yeah, it's not uncommon that we get emails from you folks that are constructive criticism, and it's fantastic. we try to be aware of the flow of the show and the things that would be valuable, but candidly, this shows for you. So like, please send that stuff in. If there's something you don't like that one of us is door, all of us are doing. Tell us it's okay.
Hold on. Hold on. I still want to keep doing this show folks. So go easy. Just saying.
Yeah.
And it was a listener who came up with the don't get caught segment.
How cool is that? The segment, yes, that's right.
Yeah. That's right.
Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Yeah. I don't know how, I know I said this when we started the segment, but I don't know how we didn't think, because we'll, you know, over the years we'd bake like the PSAs, the warnings into like quick tips. And it was like, ah, I guess we just shove this here. How we didn't think to call it the don't get caught segment is beyond me.
Yeah.
It was right. It's right there. It was sitting there in front of you.
It was right there.
In plain sight.
Yeah, for sure.
All right i think we i can i can i i want to throw my uh my plug in here my new announcement uh since we're doing show business and i might i might need to drop off here in a bit um because i got a hard out today but uh i want to announce that i i have a new podcast or really my daughter has a new podcast that i'm on called the debut film podcast at debut film podcast or debut film dot com i almost got the address wrong uh just launched its debut film uh podcast
on all you your uh all of your favorite podcast apps uh so we're should be in all of them now if i've done my job right if not let me know and i'll make sure it gets added where it needs to get added uh but basically the show is we take a look at actors first films so we take different actors and we watched their very first film. There's some rules that'll be covered in the opening of the show. We don't do horror. We don't do made for TV movies.
It actually has to be a film and they actually have to have a speaking part. And so my daughter, Kenny, and myself do it. It's gonna be every two weeks, there'll be a new episode. So let us know what you think. The first episode is Ryan Reynolds and he did a film called Ordinary Magic.
a lot of times these these films are very very hard to find they're not on streaming like we that's been a challenge we had to order a copy of one i can't remember which episode now from like australia on dvd and i had to rip it because it just wasn't available so
That's cool so it is you you're you were you were correct the first time it's debut film podcast.com so that is okay that is your url yeah yeah yeah yeah thank you yeah of course i've got it linked in the show notes oh congratulations that i can't wait to uh to subscribe and listen yeah that'll
Be fun how long is it roughly and how long do you expect them to be.
Roughly an hour 45 minutes an hour yeah
Yeah very cool.
That's what matt geekab started as and we are currently like the idea of matt geekab was 45 minutes we're at 55 right now uh and we're about to go into questions you've got like you've got like 17 minutes for us adam
Yeah yeah yeah okay great yeah yeah bruce has a question for for us and i will get to that now okay he says hi guys as recently as mac 14 sonoma a person could hold the option key and click the green circle in any mac window and that would have the window go to full screen height this was an easy way to open a full height window without taking over the entire screen with the changes in mac os 15 sequoia that no longer seems to be an option I've tried every key combination I could think of,
but my favorite window resizing action seems to no longer be no longer available. Any help here?
Dave, you had an answer, and I've got one.
Yeah, go ahead.
Do you remember? Yeah.
Yeah, I do remember this. Yeah, yeah, I just had the flow in my head that you were going to take the...
Oh, okay. I'm happy to go first. So I found a way to do it, sort of. In Finder and System Settings, if you just double-click the title bar at the top of the window, it goes to full height without taking over the full screen. If you double-click it again, it goes back to its original size. Now, try that in any browser, in messages, in anything else, and it just takes over the whole gosh-darn screen. Huh. But Finder and system settings. I don't know about Safari. I wonder if it's Mac App-specific.
Nope. Do it in Safari, and you're going to wind up taking over the whole screen.
Huh.
So, why it behaves one way on two that I've been able to find and not everything else, I don't know.
Thank you, Apple.
Guess what the engineers were trying to...
Yeah, exactly. So, if you float over and don't click, if you hover your mouse over that green bubble in Sequoia, in Mac OS 15, It's different than it used to be.
uh but you you get what eight options i think for where you can place a window and so you could one of two of those options are full height half screen so if what you want is that window to be full height on one half of the screen or the other then you can just click that uh there is an app called magnet and magnet enhances this in a sense they were a little bit Sherlocked by by what Apple did here but not really because these features have
always been there they just look a little different but with magnet uh you can it's one of these screen management things that allows you to do this that there's no yet not there is not yet a way to say leave this window centered wherever it is and make it full height uh same width same location just you know go top to bottom uh right there's not but i wonder if an app like magnet or an app like uh what's the other one moom is that it um yep yeah yeah yeah so it this seems like an opportunity
for a third-party developer or to step right in and do it. And maybe, maybe Moom has a way. I don't know.
I'm a little confused by this one because this actually still works for me. the option click on the green icon it will instead of taking it into full screen mode it just maximizes the window on my on my screen but that's not the way you can tell he wants to go full height oh just full height yeah
Uh going to full width.
Huh i don't remember it ever going to full height but maybe it's a different thing but what i did notice is that what the new hover thing dave yeah If you use the trick when you're hovering and hit the option key, it changes all of those options, those resize and arrange options. Really? So like fill becomes move my window exactly to the center of the screen or to the left of the screen or the right of the screen. And the resize, you can now go down into quarter sizes instead of half sizes.
Ooh, very nice. oh could we do that before i'm still running mac os 14 up here in the studio yes option does change things here there's more options in in mac os 15 but but yes the option key does do some things love that Yeah, I don't, I, but I, but that's the thing. I am on Mac OS 14 and I don't see if I option click that it does not go full height for me. So interesting. Yeah.
Okay.
Yeah. It always went, it always went full. Like it takes up as much space on the screen as it can. I mean, that's how it always behaved for me. I use that all the time because I don't like, I don't like full screen mode, but I do like to maximize certain windows to use my entire display.
Oh, I've broken Finder on my computer here, so hopefully this doesn't, yeah. I option clicked it and it just kind of froze. So that part was fun. Welcome to whatever it is Dave's doing to his computer today. Shall we move on to the next question? Yeah, but if anybody knows, before we move on, if anybody knows of a third-party app that does this, because I'm thinking Bruce might have been using one. Right. Right? So if you know what app that might have been or it could be, let us know.
Feedback at MacGeekup.com. All right. Moving on.
You heard him. Hey, so John writes in, Dave P. Adam, I would like your suggestions on a 27-inch 4K or higher resolution monitor for a new Mac Mini. I currently have a 2019 iMac, and I like the size and integration of computer and monitor, but now I want to decouple them from each other. Insights, opinions would greatly be appreciated. Love your show, John.
So like with printer recommendations, the best thing I can do is tell you what I use and what's currently available.
In my office, to start with this, there is always the lg 5k display which i i think has been discontinued but at least it's rarely available brand new but is always available on refurb and i'll put a link to the refurb and uh on amazon when i bought mine it was 900 bucks or almost a thousand maybe over a thousand nowadays As I'm checking while we're doing this episode, it's seven hundred and three dollars. This is a twenty seven inch five K display, just like they used to put in IMAX.
And it's gorgeous. And all of the things right there's there's there's to argue it could be argued that there is nothing better. However, there are things that are quite similar and cost less. What I'm looking at here in the studio is the Philips Creator Series 27, I don't know, whatever the model number is, 27-inch display. And that is available right now on Amazon for $346 in a used scenario, $413 in like new. However, I will point out that this is a 4K display, not a 5K display like the LG.
Because in 27 inches, you can tell the difference. Well, if you've got 63-year-old eyes, man.
That's the thing, right? To my eyes, this display is absolutely fantastic. And for me, indistinguishable from the LG 5K. I don't have them right next to each other because I like them both so much that they are each my primary displays, one in the studio, one in the office. But when I got this one, of course, I put it next to the LG 5K. Colors, every monitor displays colors a little differently. So I could easily tell the difference between them.
But in terms of which one I preferred, it was like, yeah, sure. Either one's fine by me. So, um, yeah. So, but you can also then go to Monoprice and look at, uh, 27 inch monitors there too. And Monoprice, you know, for 330 bucks makes some fantastic monitors. Uh, ViewSonic also makes fantastic 27 inch displays. So, you know, you're not going to go wrong.
Well, and my son just bought himself a 48-inch 4K TV and put that on his desk for a display. I'm like, that's a little big. No, I like it. All right.
So here's my thing about displays that are larger than 27 inches. The issue... Is that, you know, at 27 inches, a UHD display, which is what we would call a retina-ish resolution, right? At 4K, 27-inch 4K is 2560 by 1440 or whatever it is. And that, oh, no, it's not. Yeah, it is. No. Oh, it's 4096, isn't it? No, no, no. It's, oh, shoot.
I want to get this right. what is the resolution i'll come back to it phillips thing make your point 38 38 40 by 2160 right okay so if you um that resolution at 27 inches allows you in mac os to retinize the display giving you a pixel density that Makes it such that you don't see the edges of of you know you don't see the actual pixels right and it it's it's pretty and gorgeous and that's why apple did the 5k display because i think there's probably
some people at 27 inches that maybe can see the difference depending on the monitor maybe but at 5k no as you take that 4k display and stretch it from 27 to 43 the pixels naturally get bigger if it's still a 4k display now if it's an 8k display that's different but you got to make sure your mac can drive that 8k display the way you want it to and etc etc so this is a big reason why i haven't gone larger than 4k or then then 32 is because displays have
basically at least in my price range been 4k displays right and when 8k is normalized sure maybe then but putting two 4k displays next to each other is awesome so you know Yeah i think
He did it for gaming you know he.
Said oh i get that across
It sometimes it's right in front of him and he can crunch it down but yeah for gaming sits across the room yeah and can still do it.
Yeah yeah yeah oh
That's a great option oh.
Man yeah and i i
Know i put a head on my mac mini here in the basement.
I you know i sort of i know i sort of glossed over the the um view sonics but like that's what i have to my right here is the view sonic whatever it is the vp2768 4k monitor and also looks fantastic like it is moving things from the phillips display to that or the lg display to that like it they they all just look great so there are a lot of options out there i've given you you know four brands be careful at mono price not like quality at
mono price on the glass has been great a lot of times their stands are a little flimsier that's how they save money there but um just make sure you're buying a 4k sometimes called uhd display make sure that that's what you're getting um when you do this yeah so with any of these with any of the brands yeah all right cool all
Right i just uh real quick on that last tip for the window thing yeah i think i figured
It out oh if
You hold down the option key and double click on the edge of the window it will full hide it top or bottom edge and it also works for the left or right edge if you want to go that direction
Option double click like
Right on the edge of the window yeah you'll see your cursor change to a little arrow boom
You done did it.
Oh, this also works in Mac OS 14 as well. Yep. Oh, nice.
So here's the question. If you now you've got a smaller window and you go to the left to right side option, it goes to full width, but not full height.
Right. That's what he just said. Yeah.
Oh, I thought you said you were talking about full height.
Well, he said both. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Oh, okay.
Yeah. And it behaves differently if you don't hold option down. It does a bunch of different stuff. I've been playing around with it, trying to figure out all of the engineering's intents. But yeah, I mean, you can click on the corners, you can click on, and you can double click or option double click and different things happen.
Nicely done. Huh.
I like it.
Yeah. Yeah. If you don't option key and you do the left side, it goes to the left edge of the screen. And yeah, play with that.
There it is.
I'm just glad you didn't blow us all up, Adam.
I think if i'm remembering right too i think you can also hold the option key and drag and it will constrain in that direction i believe in like go both both directions that kind of stuff oh you're right these
Things man oh that's awesome
Oh i forgot i i knew these way back when and then i just something came back to my memory nicely
Done that's
Actually going to be useful that's very cool.
Yeah oh wow um on the monitor thing the old guy in not the old guy old guy in our chat recommends the asus pro art 5k 27 inch screen
Thought he was talking
About me but uh 799 from bnh for a 5k screen so there you go i will i will put a link to that in the show notes too so
My biggest issue with with displays is none of them seem to have dual thunderbolt ports so if you want to do one cable to two monitors daisy chain together not an option in a lot of cases i am pretty sure which just frustrates the heck out of me i
Am pretty sure this phillips display that i am on has multiple ports i yeah that's cool
Yeah it looks like it yeah yeah ben q had one for a long time yeah right yeah that was the only one so maybe it's gotten more prevalent i haven't looked in a few years but a few years back i was getting so frustrated because it was like yeah can you make these things daisy chainable i don't want to have to use two thunderbolt ports for two displays right right right right right
I know you need to split, Adam. All right, I am going to have to drop. You know what? We're at the end of the show here. We're at 112. We can call it the end. We don't need to take everyone's time.
This is the end, my friend.
Well, Pete's going to sing.
That's definitely a end.
He doesn't want to leave now, folks. Trust me.
It's not the worst.
It's fine. I've heard Pete sing. At MaxDoc, Pete sang.
I sang last show.
Yeah, Adam sang last show. Pete sang at MaxDoc. It's all fine. I like it. It's good. That's right. I forgot you sang in the last show. That was fun. Thanks for hanging out with us, folks. Make sure to enter the giveaway. MattGeekGov.com slash giveaway. Thanks to Cashfly for providing all the bandwidth to get the show from us to you. Make sure you check out Adam's new show, the debut film podcast. Pete's show, so there I was. My show's business brand and gig gab.
Fun stuff coming up. uh just had just recorded with parthenon huxley what an interesting guy fascinating stuff fun and he wrote he actually sang in the middle of this he wrote a little theme song for gig gab on the spot like all right sweet yeah i know sweet thank you so much folks feedback at macdcub.com and uh yeah we'll see you next week adam before you go quickly do you have any advice words of wisdom go absolutely
Don't get caught
Those are the words thank you for hanging out folks i think we almost made it to the end we're here later