It's time for Mac Geek Cab and listener Bob brings us our quick tip of the week by reminding us that Apple put into Mac OS the Wi-Fi or wireless diagnostics. You option click on the Wi-Fi icon in the menu bar and choose open wireless diagnostics.
And then from that you select window and scan to find all the Wi-Fi access points around your Mac and that'll include the network name, the signal strength, the noise, the channel, the band, the channel width, and you can then go to Wireless Diagnostics window performance and get a real time graph of your Wi-Fi connections with transfer rate and all the other stuff. You can walk around with your Mac and watch the signal change and all of that stuff.
Check out Wireless Diagnostics window and see all the entries there. And there's some cool stuff. More quick tips like this and cool stuff found today on Mac Geek of 992 for Monday, July 24th, 2022, 2023. Music. Greetings, folks, and welcome to Mac Geek of 992 in 2023. I don't know what blew me off. A year, any year. Don't tell me what it is. Yeah, I don't know. It doesn't matter.
This is the show where you send in, regardless of the year, you send in your questions, your tips, your cool stuff found. We usually answer your questions, but today we're really focusing on a few quick tips that are key and some cool stuff found that we've been piling up for a while. The goal is, regardless of how we organize the agenda, that each of us, me, Pete, you, all of us together, we each learn at least five new things every time we get together, which is usually weekly.
Sponsors for this episode include hellofresh.com slash MGG50 where code MGG50 gets you, guess what? 50% off plus free shipping and notion.com slash MacGeekGab where you can go for a limited time to try Notion projects for free. We'll talk more about both of those in a little bit. For now here in Durham, New Hampshire before I head off to Mac stock. I'm Dave Hamilton. And here in Pensacola, Florida, it's Pilot Pete. Dave, you actually broke up for about 15 seconds
there. Not to the people listening. Not to the people listening. No, no, I'm telling you, because I get to hear what people hear. The podcast, that's right. The actual podcast is totally fine. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I saw a little hiccup with the bandwidth. So for the video,
folks, we're aware of it and we're moving on. Pilot Pete here in Pensacola. Dave, I want to Can I take a minute here and say, on that opening quick tip, folks, when you do that, the window comes up, you click on Open Wireless Diagnostics, there's a window that comes up that's continuing all that. Ignore that. Dave talked about it. The menu says window, go click on that and pull it down. Because it's so tempting. That's why I never found it for the longest time.
It's so tempting to click on that continue, and this is going to take time, and so it's real tempting to go on that. It's the menu at the top that you want to go grab window and pull that stuff down. There's amazing there's a plethora for the fancy word of the day of Options in there to find your wireless settings. Yeah, cool. Cool. I love it. I love it.
We do have more quick tips to go through and Yeah, Tony says, It took me a while to notice that I could do this but first in watch settings so this is on your Apple Watch, you go and enable dictation. So that's step one. Then when you're looking at a message that you've received on your watch, tap in what looks like an empty field with a faded iMessage, like the word iMessage faded in it.
That's where you can start doing like the little, you know, palm scratchy kind of thing that, you know, you start sort of scratching out letters. But in the lower right corner is a microphone icon, and you can dictate your response right there on your watch. So you don't have to like, you know, draw out the letters and, uh, yeah, there you go. Great, uh, great tip. Thank you, Tony. I, yeah, yeah, yeah. When I do that, I, I stayed out. I say out Dave comma, thanks. Period.
I will get right on that, period, starting with the list in this order, colon, one period. So Siri's good about not having to do that, but I find it is much more accurate when I do that. Yeah, I remember, I guess it was iOS 16 where Apple said we didn't need to do that anymore, and I stopped doing it and then realized, I still kind of want to do this more.
So I continue to do that now. Yeah, I It's really not a terrible habit to be in where where I noticed that I do it is if I have someone else in the car with me and I'm replying via car play, because that's where I'm doing most of my dictation, especially for like replies to messages. And they're like, wow, you're really anal about the commas and the exclamation points and this, that, and the other thing. And I'm like, yeah, it's, you know.
It can change the entire meaning of a sentence. Absolutely. Punctuation is wrong. That's right. As I referred to in the pre-show, there's a book called eats, shoots and leaves. It's about elephants, isn't it? It's panda bears. Panda bears. That's it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's the joke. The panda bear walks into the bar and each shoots and leaves and everybody's dead. Yeah. Because of the misplaced comma. That's right. Yeah. Yeah. The Oxford comma has, hopefully, has no place in that phrase.
Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Hey, I've got another quick tip. this week comes from me, from a self-inflicted stupidity wound. Okay, sure. What happened was, I was flying my drone and I wanted to clean everything off of it and reformat the card. So I did, and I did it in the drone itself. It gives you an option to do that. And then when I put the micro SD card into the adapter and then put it into my computer, I found that it was named Untitled.
I'm like, well, that's not what I name it, but okay. And then I tried to rename it, and it wouldn't let me rename it. I'm like, what's going on? tried disk utility, and then it hit me. The micro SD card does not have a little switch on it, but the SD cards do and the SD card adapter does as well. So at some point I managed to slide the little slider that locks your ability to rename the volume name, in this case the SD card.
So I put that back to unlock, stuck the card back in, right-clicked it and was able to rename my SD card. So, yeah. Yeah, yeah. I, okay. Yep. I, I, I, yep. That's. Rename was great out. I'm going, what's going on here? Why is it great out? Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Yeah. You know what I'm doing? Stop it. Yeah. Stop it. Right. Yeah. No, that makes sense. I, yeah. That makes sense. I like it. I like it. That's good, man. Yeah. Okay. All right. Yeah. I'll have to remember this. That's good.
Yeah. Um, I have another, I have a quick tip that comes from my own, from a bad habit that I developed. It's really the right way to say it. I noticed recently, and I mentioned this on Business Brain last week, so my apologies for the duplicate if you listen to both shows, but I figured it was important enough to share here because it's been truly life-changing in not a massive way, but in a meaningful way.
I noticed a couple of weeks ago that because I have an iPhone, I have lots of times in my, or lots of opportunities in my day where I use my iPhone to keep myself from being what I'll call bored, right? Waiting in line, doing all those things. And I know the value of... Having downtime, I call it brain percolation time, right? Like when you're in the shower or you're driving, right?
Any of those sort of routine, hypnotic things, you wind up, your brain winds up working in the background and like solving problems and coming up with ideas and this is valuable brain time. And with our phones, it's very easy to take that away from ourselves, right?
And and what I noticed is I was and for years have been missing out on what I call, urinal inspiration and, That is every time I went to pee I'd grab my phone and I would be looking at my phone, While I was peeing cuz listen, I've been doing this for you know over 50 years I kind of know how to how it works and you know, I don't necessarily need. You know to be like fully focused on it, but that's the beauty of it is is in those moments.
And I, just in the last couple of weeks, I have had so many great ideas and like worked out so many little things. I'm actually finding that like my overall like general wellbeing, I'm happier, believe it or not, because I'm giving myself those moments periodically throughout every day. So I know this sounds weird to say, look, prioritize urinal inspiration, but I think it might help. So it certainly has helped me. So I share.
And if you want to experiment with it, I absolutely encourage the experiment. So as close as I'm going to get to saying should Pete. Right? Yep. So yeah, yeah. All those little moments, they're good for us. I think, you know, the downtime moments. Yeah. The screen time, we're all guilty of it, right? Totally. The vast majority of us are very guilty of too much screen time. And it's changing how society interacts and will make the AI takeover of the world that much easier.
That much easier, right, yeah. And it's not just changing how society interacts. It is doing that. It's also changing how we interact with ourselves. Like that's the part where I'm really, I mean, I'm trying to be aware of all of it and I fail at it constantly. And I will say that even this little change, it's been a couple of weeks, It's only been the past couple of days where I don't actively have to remind myself, hey, put your phone back in your pocket.
Like, this is the moment where you're not doing this anymore, remember? You know, like it's just the habit is so strong. Yeah, so. It is, and we've gotten to the point where at some point I finally said, all right, no more phones at the dinner table. Yeah, yeah. You know, I mean, that's- Yeah, yeah. Let it go for 30 minutes. Someone text you to get back to him. Yep. Yep. Yeah. Yeah. No, it's good. All right, Ben has a quick tip for us,
He says once in a blue moon. I right-click the trash and empty the trash, but nothing, Happens the quick fix is to quit the dock. I've never I never even knew that this would fix the trash emptying issue Yeah, you learn something new every day. And that's the point of the show. To do so, open, there you go. Open activity monitors, search for dock, select and quit the process. The quit process command is in the view menu, which is odd to me. I would have put it in the file menu.
The keyboard shortcut is command option Q. The dock will quit and relaunch automatically. And then the empty trash command works for me again. Fascinating, Ben, thank you for that. Again, that's news to me, and I love it. At the risk of inflicting this on myself and angering the gods, I've never experienced that. I've never had the trash non-empty. I've had things say, you can't access that file because it's in the trash, or the trash is emptying right now, so you can't do something.
But I've never had the trash. Ignore me. Interesting. Interesting. Yeah. Yeah. Well, at least not the trash. I've had other trash ignore me, but that's a different show. Well, I've also ignored the trash, too. And Lisa will remind me of that sometimes. So, yeah. Yep. Bob has a quick tip that sort of harkens back to episode nine. Ninety.
Bob says we were talking about remembering ideas. And Bob says, before PDAs and smartphones, I carried a small shirt pocket sized book that I could write ideas into because I found that I would forget them or forget some key detail, etc. I would also capture ideas from computer books I was browsing in a bookstore. Oh, interesting. I kept the book and pen on my bedside nightstand for those middle of the night inspirations.
I abandoned the book when PDAs came along. My first was a handspring edge in 2001. Nice. Then I moved to the iPod touch for a while. And now, of course, the iPhone and Apple Watch. I get ideas in the middle of the night and i'll write it down generally by sending myself an email,
When i'm riding my bike or out for a walk. I currently use my apple watch and say hey s lady Remind me when I get home to whatever whatever and the watch sets a geolocation, Triggered reminder that shows up in my iphone reminders app. Yeah Uh, and he says of course Yeah, same as you not all my ideas are great when I review them, but that's that's fine, like the you know that the idea is you captured it, but yeah, I like the They'll remind me when I get home.
That's, I, yeah. That's the, you buried the headline there. Yeah, exactly, exactly. Because I will frequently, hey, tomorrow morning at nine o'clock, remind me. Yeah. Or, you know, something along those lines. I hadn't thought about geofencing it. Yeah, I, you know, I hadn't either until a couple of weeks ago, I was driving to a gig and we were using the house drum set. So I had room in my car, our guitar player and I went together because it was about two hours away or whatever. And uh...
He he got in the car and, you know, settled in because we were going to be in the car for four hours, you know, two there, two back. And he's he like put his keys into like the pocket in the door of the car and all that. And he's like, hey, man, help me remember to get my keys out of your car when we get back to my house. And I'm like, well, you'll know you'll need to unlock your door.
He's like, yeah, but I'll mess around in the in the studio shed for a little bit and then you'll be long gone before I realize I don't have the keys to the house. I'm like, ah, yeah, OK. I'm like, well use your phone and set a geolocated reminder that when we get back to your house, you know And of course, he didn't have home set. He didn't have a my contact record said he didn't have an address set
So we had lots to do over the two hours where we were driving together. So it was fine I just kind of you know coached him through it or whatever while I was driving It shouldn't take you two hours to set your home and your no, it did not No, it did not but it gave us a fodder for conversation. Yeah But yeah, I get it and so that's sort of the bonus quick tip is go in and set a my contact record for yourself if you haven't done that already.
You can do it on your phone or on your Mac and then that way you can do these sort of geolocation things without having to then go through the trouble that our guitar player went through. So, yeah, yeah. Beautiful yeah, I got one last one that I realized recently not everyone Knows about it came up at our our zoom hangout
I mentioned that I was leaving my therapist's office and he says hey, I've got a question for you. I was like, yeah He's like, how come there's no app that I can use to like call 911 and send my location location if I was in trouble. He's like, I was just having a walk with my wife or whatever. And we were talking about this and, you know, we were both like, why doesn't this exist? Like these devices have this.
And I was like, yep, it's right there in your phone. And so I showed him and figured I would share here, too, that your phone does have this capability.
You on sort of current and late model iPhones, I think anything from iPhone eight and forward, You hold the volume up button on one side of the phone, and then the button on the other side of the phone, whatever that we are supposed to call that, and it will put your phone into the emergency mode, where you can see someone's medical ID, but you can also just swipe to call, or you can swipe to power off, but you can press to call 9-1-1.
And of course it has your location and all of that stuff too. So, um, just wanted to make sure everybody, everybody knew about that because, um, I think it's important, right, Pete? Yeah. And I hope you charged your therapist for the time it took to, uh, you know, if only yeah, worth the discount. Barter that out. All right. Our first sponsor is HelloFresh, where you get farm fresh pre-portioned ingredients and seasonal recipes delivered right to your doorstep.
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Which are nice because they help cut down on food waste. And then also these step-by-step instructions to make cooking a breeze and be fun and not a chore, because it's not just one person driving the bus. All three of you are all four of us or however many people you've got. You just take a look at the recipe and you just start going through it. It's like, OK, I got step number one. Great. I'll do step number two. And you're having this
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for sponsoring this episode. Next up is Notion. You know, we talk on this show about all the tools that we can use to be efficient, and project management tools are supposed to help us move faster and stay organized, right? But if you're still jumping between like 50 different tabs and different apps to do your job, then maybe that means you haven't found the right tool yet. And that's where our sponsor Notion comes in. And today I'm excited to share that they just launched Notion Projects.
Which includes new powerful ways to manage projects and leverage the power of their built-in AI features too. Notion Projects combines project management with your docs, your knowledge base, and AI so you can stop jumping between tools and stop paying too much for them too. You get to do this all in just one workspace. You can do everything you need from brainstorming to drafting launch plans to organizing sprints and keeping everyone on deadline. It's so handy to be able to use this.
You've got to check it out. You can do your most efficient work with Notion projects and you can try it for free today at Notion.com slash MacGeekGab. That's all lowercase letters, right? Notion.com slash MacGeekGab. And when you use our link, of course, you're supporting our show and that's great for all of us. Go right now to Notion.com slash MacGeekGab and our thanks to Notion for sponsoring this episode.
And while I got you here, I want to recommend another show. We all know Leo Laporte, right? And he is the host of a show called This Week in Tech, which is probably one of the longest running tech shows in the world. They started This Week in Tech in 2005, just like we did here with Matt Gietkamp. And in the 18 years since, they've covered every major tech story with some of the biggest names, the smartest people covering technology every week.
It's a different round table, a different panel of experts talking about the week's tech news. And they have a lot of fun while they're doing it. And I've joined them for this sometimes. It is a blast. They deal with the biggest issues in the world, not just computing and Windows and Mac and Linux, but AI and Twitter and search and social and on and on and on and on. Of course, it's all for you every week.
This Week in Tech, you can find out more by going to twit.tv and subscribing to This Week in Tech. And our thanks to Leo and the team for doing this swap with us. All right. Well, we got some cool stuff found coming your way now. And David wrote to us about show 98080. He says, I noticed that you asked for information about a Qi charging mouse. I purchased one a couple of years ago that I really like. It's called the
Corsair Dark Core RGB Pro SE, that's Sierra Echo, available through Amazon. And we'll put that link and the show notes. One thing I like about it is it has RGB LEDs inside so you can customize the look. You can set a single color or change its color depending on which mode it's in. You can also map custom functions to the buttons through something like Keyboard Maestro or presumably Better Touch Tool. It's currently listed on Amazon for $81, though he got it for
a little less when it was on sale. He says one weird and frustrating quirk is that it won't connect to an iPad, but he was able to do so, I think, with a USB dock later in time. But it doesn't do it via the Bluetooth. Got it. It's not a Bluetooth mouse. It's its own wireless dongle type of mouse. Got it. Okay. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. So, and I'm seeing it today for $70 on Amazon. You know, these prices change every day, folks.
Obviously, we'll put a link in the show notes so you can see what the price is the day you get to hear about this. But, um, what is it, uh, I think honey is the one that will track prices dropping for you. Right. Yeah. And, uh, there's something else to put in notes. You know, I'll put it in there. I w they, they were a sponsor here for a while when they were doing some brand building. So I'll put the, uh, the MGG link in, I think it gets you something extra.
They're not, they're not a sponsor now, but I think it's, I think it was joined honey.com slash MGG. If I'm not, if I'm not mistaken. Has saved me dollars. Totally. On numerous occasions, they'll watch for price drops and then other times they'll put in codes when you go to check out. Yeah. If you have that. Extension put into your browser. Yep. And you'll get those codes. Yeah. It's interesting with
hunting. I certainly am a fan of it and I install it, but I also remove it at times or turn it off at times. Well, because it, it does like intentionally sort of gets in the way. And sometimes like when I'm booking a flight or something, it's like, dude, I need like go, Go, go, go, go, go. Like I wish, and maybe I can, I wish I could tell it, go away for 15 minutes. Like that's all I need is just give me the next 15 minutes without you and then I want you back.
You know, like, like, like Michael Jackson and his brother saying, right? You know, I definitely, I want you back. But- Well, it sure seems to me there's some way to script that. But it's bigger brain than mine. Oh, wait a minute. Can you script safari extensions? That would be the trick, right? Ah, I should look at that. Huh? There may be.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, you got me thinking hey chat GPT yeah yeah actually that's not a bad place to start with that yeah we've got some chat GPT and AI cool stuff found coming up the next one though is not that but it is something i never heard about before from listener matt who says he tells us about expanso which is a free github hosted text expansion tool like text expander.
Uh and others but is hosted on github free but open to donations and cross-platform mac windows and linux um you can see it at expanso.org i haven't installed it yet but man it sure seems like if you haven't if you aren't already committed to a text expansion tool i would i would jump and check this out. Um, yeah, it looks, it looks fair. Not only does it look like what he says, but it also like even just the website for it is very well fleshed out. It feels like a
commercial product. Um, yeah. Yeah. Oh yeah. And shell and script support. In other words, you know, it can take information as to the, you know, today's date. Yes. Yes. Yeah. Right. Yeah. No, Oh, it's, yeah, it's, it's, it, it, when he says it's like text expander, I, you know, I see why, because text expander has a lot of these sort of scripting ish things in it. So yeah, yeah, it's worth, it's worth checking out.
So, and then, and then of course you, it just because it is free, doesn't mean you don't have to, it doesn't mean you can't pay, right. You don't have to pay, but, but you can, you could choose to pay and that's not, uh, that's not a bad thing. So, uh, yeah, I know I'm stoked about it. Uh, Donna brings us our next one, assuming we're done with that one. Yeah. Pete. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. You Donna brings us our next one and it is the Aldi. She founded it. All the, it is a wood grain,
wireless charging clock. And this is one that's worth clicking on. And if, if. If for no other reason, these cool stuff found episodes are a fantastic, uh, a fantastic way to experience them. Fantastic wallet drain. Just kidding. No, no, I don't mean wallet drain. I mean, a good reason to go and subscribe to our MacGeekUp newsletter at MacGeekUp.com because you get all the links that we are putting in the show notes delivered right to your email box. And we really don't spam you.
And I know I say that all the time. I'm happy to say that I have yet to be a liar on that. So I'll let you know when we've changed our minds on that. The neat thing about this, and I know the vast majority of you are listening and not looking, but this wood grain clock looks like a block of wood with the time and the temperature printed on the front of it.
Yeah, and then it's a cheap hat on the top of it. Yeah. Exactly, that's the other thing is it's hard to see until you look at the photo where the phone is on top of it. But, yeah, that looks great. It's always like when I'm watching the NFL game, it's like, man, how'd they get out there and paint that, you know, eight yards ago, you know, second Nate. Yeah, yeah, right. Right, you know, yeah, it just it looks like it's there in the middle of the woods for no apparent reason. Yep,
Yep, really? That's a neat display. Yeah, I agree. The The next thing speaking of watching the NFL or watching anything Pete you've got one for us. Yeah, I do we, Were all looking for outdoor movie screens back when code was big and couldn't go anywhere very much and I didn't get one then because they were hard to get, but recently put my hands on a Kodak giant inflatable projector screen. I got mine at Best Buy. From the bottom corner of the stand to the top corner of diagonally
of the screen, it's 17 feet. The screen itself is about 14 feet diagonal, and it comes with a pump like, you know, like a kid's bounce house. The pump runs quietly in the background. I was going to say, is the pump quiet enough that it doesn't bother you when you're watching It is now that being said what we did use was the Sonos move for the speaker Which was okay for two or three people, but I need to find a better sound system. Yeah.
To, you know, to really thump us when we're watching, you know, Top Gun Maverick or something like that. And were you connecting to the Sonos Move over Bluetooth, is that right? We were, yeah. So I wonder if it would drive it faster or harder. Well, I mean, you know, I had it later
in the list, but I will jump it up. I was going to talk about the JBL Flip, which I will now talk about um but it uh all of the JBL speakers are able to be like paired together and so you can you just over bluetooth right sort of kind of like you can do with with Sonos uh but you know but not over wi-fi right like this is um and so the Flip 6 is the 6th gen of their um, they're, you know, portable Bluetooth speakers. This is a small speaker.
It's like the, you know, the pill shaped, if you will, speaker. And I've been messing with this and it's great. It's, you know, waterproof, it's IP7, I believe. It's got a ton of battery life. It sounds great, but it has what JBL calls JBL Party Boost. And so I wonder if for your outdoor movie viewing, and I haven't tried this because we have an outdoor screen we bought too on Amazon for like a hundred bucks. It was like a hundred inch screen or whatever. It works great. But.
I've thought about doing this where you get like a few of these JBL speakers and put one next to each person or in between each pair of people. Oh, yeah. And if you've got them all linked up together, well, now you don't have to broadcast sound to cover your, you know, entire backyard. You just kind of give people it's like, oh, you need a speaker over here. Here's a speaker. Here's a speaker. And I mean, these aren't super inexpensive.
They're 99 bucks. So, you know, you're gonna like it does add up.
But if you've got a few of these and it might be the kind of thing like we each keep a, flip in our cars right because it's great the batteries last forever and then if you're out and about you find yourself at the beach or you know some kind of picnic type scenario boom you're good to go you just you know oh yeah you want some sound great we'll just bring the speaker it's it's awesome so you know if you've got a few of these anyway then you can you know pull them them together.
So yeah, I know the, the flip six is awesome. Um, but, but yeah, that party boost mode might solve your, um, right. No, your issue there. Yeah. I don't know. It's, it's worth, there's always a way to solve these problems, right? That's right. Yeah. So, um, yeah, so there we go. Yes. Uh, uh, let me see who and what is next. It looks like listener Greg is next with another piece of software. Called MakePass. Greg tells us that, oh no, I gotta get back to my notes.
He says, it's a piece of software that makes passes that go in your wallet. He says, it requires a subscription. I bought the $16 subscription for a year because I wanted the full features, but it works great and appears that the privacy is good with this app too. So basically you can take your membership cards, your tickets, anything with a barcode and load it into your Apple wallet on your phone so that you don't have to carry the paper thing with the barcode or even like the card.
Like if you've got a membership card, like he said, you know that you would put like literally physically in your wallet. Take this bar take its barcode and turn it into a pass that lives in your Apple wallet. And now it's always with you as long as your phone is with you and charged obviously, you know, but but yeah, it's a pretty Cool. I like that a lot. I love the idea, yeah. How many times, you know, when you.
I use, well, here we go, another cool stuff found, I guess. I think we might have talked about this one time before. Genius Scan is an app that I've used to make, you know, take a photo of a document and it turns it into a PDF or as a JPEG or anything along those lines. Sure. But there are many times when I put something in Genius Scan, I would much rather have it in my Apple wallet and having the ability to do that with MakePass.
Yeah, I like this idea. I'm putting a barcode into your Apple wall. Yeah, I'm into this. That's nice. Yeah, yeah, for sure. Yeah, yeah, it's I know I never, I never even thought of it. I mean, I'm sure I have thought of it in frustration in those moments of like, gosh, I wish, you know, this one thing that I use occasionally, like my library card. How often do I go to the, I rent books or I borrow books from the library using Libby, right?
But if I'm going to go into the library, it's like, oh my gosh, where is my library card? Like, oh, I have no idea. Like I got to, it's probably in like the wallet that I keep for all of the things that I never bring with me, you know? And so to just be able to, to, you know, load those all into my phone. I love it. Yeah. Yeah. So, so there you go. That's yep. That's where we're at with this. Um, the next one comes from Blake. And this sort of started as the result of a conversation in Discord.
Blake in Arizona was having... It was really a conversation that followed on from our How do I remove things and clear up space on my Apple TV? Which seems now clearly to be a recurring topic here. It's affecting a lot of us. My guess is it's affecting way more of us than already know because if we haven't looked, we don't know. Or we haven't had symptoms, we don't know. So Blake says, I did further digging it.
And for me, the apps didn't save any, you know, removing apps didn't save much space because I didn't have many apps to begin with, but it stopped, it saved enough to stop the freezing. But the overall experience and feel was still laggy. Further research suggested screensavers. Yep.
Which we talked about in a previous episode and after digging a bit more I saw a recommendation for an app for 99 cents called space reclaimer And I ran that app and was able to reclaim over eight gigabytes of space on his Apple TV, My guess is this would work on your iPhone and iPad as well as the Apple TV because we have seen.
All of you know where it just fills up and it won't it won't clean itself out You know that the garbage collection that we as users would want to happen on our, Ios based devices so I you know iPhone iPad Apple TV does not happen the way we would like it to and so, It's kind of a bummer to have to pay 99 cents for something that Apple should be doing it. Yeah, there's my should for you, Yeah, but but they're not doing it so 99 cents is a small price to pay pay to have this.
And so I have not bought it yet, but I fully intend to the next time that this kind of thing comes up for me and I know it will. I should remember after this show is over to go into Discord. There was actually a thread in the MGG help desk and Discord this morning talking about that very thing. How do I free up? Yeah. Find out what space is being used and free it up. Again, something that should be native to Apple OS, Apple TV OS is not, and there are a couple apps out there.
One, I guess, is now defunct, but there's another app in there. I was trying to answer the question on the fly without going in and playing with it in my Apple TV, so I gave them a link to an article that's a few years old. One was dead, one is not, but. Right, right, right, right. No, let's hope that it works as well on iOS, because I would love to clean out photos from two years ago on my phone. And messages, in particular. Oh, yeah. You know, the cruft in there is just mind boggling.
Yeah, yeah, yeah Pete I promised that we had some AI chat GPT things and listener Tony kicks us off with this with a, Shortcut that's been around for a little bit a few months It was published. I believe it was over at max stories was kind of the first place that I heard about it. It's called, SGPT is the the the shortcut and And, uh, and it, it's pretty cool. It, like...
It's it's a shortcut for your phone that uses chat GPT to take your temp text input, Prompt it into chat GPT and spit out its response So you get chat GPT via your shortcuts and you get access to it that way, And you know the people that have been using it say that it is a game changer so Yeah, yeah, yeah, I, I, I have not put it on there yet on my phone yet, but I, but that's really just an oversight. It's, you know, it's been on the list for a while.
I forget what I did, you know, I pay the cat GPT fee. So I get the premium and are it was there not a shortcut for putting it in messages to what was the, you have to lead it in somehow though. Oh, remember what that is? Yeah, it's like a text expander type shortcut. I think I use slash GPT or something, but it only works on my Mac, but in any text field on your Mac, it's just sort of there. But there might be an app now for the phone. I don't know. Send in your stuff.
It's been a little while since we talked about chat GPT, just because, you know, we try to, you know, dig into topics and then sort of let them breathe for a little bit, and then we'll come back to them and we pile the stuff up that you send in like we're doing now. So, but yeah, no, this SGPT thing, you know, It takes a little bit of time to set up because you need to go and like fetch your API key.
One piece of advice, I know that someone's going to tell me that this violates all kinds of security practices. I don't think you're violating any terms of service, but it does violate good security practices. When you get that API key from chat, GPT or anywhere else, you know, they will show it to you once. The idea is they show it to you and then you put it into whatever the app or services that you want to give it to, and then you never get to see it again.
And that keeps anyone else from ever seeing it again because it essentially bypasses your password, right? That API key lets someone use your account as long as they have that key. So there is absolutely a security repercussions.
Security repercussions to this, right? I take those API keys because I know they're a pain in the neck to generate and I don't want to have to like expire one to add a new service and then have to go to another service and re-add it back in, I put those API keys in 1Password. Bingo, ditto, absolutely. So that's, you know, again, I know that there's probably some world. It's secure in there, it's secure in 1Password. That's the thing, I trust it, yeah, exactly.
If somebody gets into 1Password, I'm screwed in every way. So it's totally fine. Right. You know, I'm just, I'm just, it is, you know, a deck chair off the Titanic to have the, you know, the API key for chat GPT in there. That's all I'm gonna, that's kind of my feeling on it, so.
Yeah the next worry i the next year i think i have is opera now has aria which is operas browser ai, all fully integrated into the opera browser so you get instant access to chat gpt and all of that stuff and it's web connected because it's right there in your browser so if if you are are someone who finds yourself using chat GPT often, using the opera browser to do this is gonna be an easy way to make that happen.
So yeah, it's cool stuff found, I like to share. So it's how it works, you know, so. And Robert wrote in. Yeah, Robert. More AI tools. More, all the AI tools. In fact, he found a link for us that has all the AI tools and chat GPT prompts in one article. And I promise, as soon as I can copy the link, I will put it, this is my one issue with notes is it makes it really difficult to do anything with links. Yeah, it's, but I swear we will get it there somehow. somehow, yeah, yeah, yeah.
So, but, um, but yeah, yeah, he's got, you know, all of these, I got this, this really bumming me out that I didn't, um, couldn't prep this the way I wanted to prep it. Yeah. There it goes. I think you've got it now. I think I've got it now. Yes, I got it now. He's got it.
Yeah. So it's this article over, I mean, it's at artificial corner.com, but it's a reposting of a medium article that lists all of these tools like chat PDF and, all kinds of things over there at, At medium, so we will link to this and now that I have the link on my clipboard I am putting it in the show notes as I speak because by golly, No one needs to go through what I just went through and you dear listener can have it in your email That's subscribed to that is correct.
At the mailing list mailing list yeah mackey cab.com that's uh that's that's uh that's all you got to do the next thing is from rawl 605 which is a heads up or a reminder that zapier the i call zapier the glue of the internet it's it's like shortcuts um that that live in the cloud right and but it's it's it's platform agnostic or i don't want to say platform agnostic it works with pretty much every platform out there. It's certainly not limited to Apple devices by any stretch.
So Zapier is great. Like I, we use Zapier for all kinds of things. I take the show notes as after they've been sort of finalized and I have a Zapier thing that grabs them and saves them to a folder. It like, it does all of these things. And because we do the show notes in Google Docs. So it grabs the Google Docs show notes and saves it to a file on my Dropbox actually, which then syncs to other places for me. And so I'm able to keep them, even if Google Docs goes away,
I know I've got the archive show notes in a special folder. That's just a drop in the bucket for what Zapier can do. And RAL 605 reminds us or tells us that OpenAI and ChatGPT can be linked via Zapier. To all kinds of other things. So, you've got these different services, like Google Docs and Dropbox don't work together, but Zapier glues them together. That's why I call it the glue of the internet. So now you've got open AI can be one of those pieces that Zapier can glue to other things.
And so if you haven't messed with Zapier, that's a cool thing. We just did that shortcuts hangout and Zapier never came up. We wound up talking about a bunch of other things and yet we probably could have done 90 minutes on just Zapier. Well, there you go. There's your topic for your next. For the next one. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's really. That looks really cool. Yep. Hence cool stuff. We did one video and I became a channels user out of that.
Yeah. Which is now my primary means of watching television. There you go. But this looks like a primary means of using AI. Yep. One of my primary means of using AI is to write blog posts And listener Ari wrote in, and when I say blog posts, I mean, very specifically the Mackie Keb show notes. And Ari wrote in and asked, you know, how are you writing blog posts with chat GPT and how good is it? Um, and I would say, for me.
What the way up the quick answer is it is good enough to do a rough draft is is really that's as far as i found i'm comfortable trusting it today but. That rough draft creation is something that i don't generally take the time to do, Which means then I have nothing to edit and therefore nothing gets published, you know, I would I would put together for, you know, 18 years, almost 18 years I put together very, very sparse descriptions of what happened in the show.
And I know that that's not great for people searching for things, even just searching on our website, but also potentially SEO, you know, bringing in new listeners. It's not good for anybody. And so now what we do is we take the transcript of the show, which is of course AI generated, and then we feed the transcript into ChatGPT and tell it to distill that down into two paragraphs, actually we have an engine called Authonic that distills it down into about six or eight paragraphs.
I then take that, feed it back into chat GPT. And again, you can be transformative with this. So it's fine to just keep telling chat GPT to continually transform your results. So I feed that back in and I say, all right, great. Hey, and I have a text expander snippet for this, but it could be, what's the other thing called? Expanso snippet.
So, I, um... I feed that back into my my snippet is says take this um and summarize it down to two paragraphs, of the mac geek ab podcast hosted by and i list whoever that you know is the the people that were in the show you know it's for this one it'll be by you know pilot p and dave hamilton uh keep it punchy keep it interesting and omit all mention of sponsors right because it the sponsors of course in the transcript. And of course, we link the sponsors in the show notes and all that.
But I don't need the narrative to include the sponsors. It just it sort of breaks up the flow and I wound up editing it out every time. So it's like, well, let's just skip that. That's fine. And and it comes up, you know, that gets me really, really close. And then from there,
I do some minor edits. But I guess I guess it thinking about this now, the advice I would give is come, you know, figuring out what those prompts are are and then really honing down your prompts so that you get yourself to a point where you're not editing as much. And one way to do that is to be aware of what you are editing repeatedly as you do each of these things. And like for me, I knew I was taking out the sponsors every time.
So I was like, well, wait a minute. I can just tell chat GPT don't include mention of the sponsors and then I don't have to edit that out.
You know, add that to your to your prompts and it will start you will start to build a prompt that really gets you there. So. Uh, just sort of paying attention and honing it down and then i'll tell it once it does that I say great, Now build me 120 character meta description because you know wordpress wants that and it does that too And then it's just like i'm good to go And it takes a little time, but it doesn't take a whole lot of mental energy,
Which is kind of the key and so I can you know, it leaves me time for uh, journal inspiration pete So great and it also does it. Grammatically correct But mostly well mostly yeah, but I find I do the same thing for for my show. Yep, Occasionally, it'll get something wrong. It'll put like the interviewee in first person as opposed to oh, Those are the things that you have to fix. Yeah, that's one of the things I I put in my prompt now is make it
Third person. Yeah. Oh, there you go, right, you know, so yeah Yeah, so I found it, but it does a really nice job about hitting things that were even briefly mentioned, but were very funny. I was like, oh, okay, let's emphasize that. And then I tell it, make it very persuasive for someone to want to listen, or those things along those lines. And I've also found it useful when I write letters. All right, these are the three points I want to cover. Give me a letter.
And I've found that it writes wonderful letters. Yeah. Now it's such a useful tool when you... Start employing it, play with it a little bit, and you'll find that it does such a nice job. Yeah, let yourself play. I think that's really the advice that I can give. The first time you use it, even if you use it for a purpose that ChatGPT is good at, and you might not, like you might find, oh, this is a terrible way to use ChatGPT. Great.
Don't give up just because you tried a way and found it to be terrible. Know that that's terrible, try something else, um, would be the kind of the thing. So, or let me offer this. You should write to us at feedback at Matt geek app.com with a way that you find it's very useful that we haven't covered here. Did you say feedback at Mac geek app.com? Pete? I did say feedback at Mac geek app.com. That is one way. The other way is you could
join Mac geek app.com slash discord. We have an AI, uh, channel there where we discuss all this this stuff. So you would get to learn from each other, which is I, I love learning from each other. Like this is, this is my favorite part of the show as, as I'm sure is like painfully obvious at times. So, uh, speaking of learning things, uh, listener Jamie has a travel hack, cool stuff, found thing to share AP. Yeah, he did. He wrote in and I found that I had, uh, already done one of these things.
Okay. It's basically this, I'm not seeing Jamie's letter, but I'll tell you what it is. He sent us a link and we put it in the show notes. It's a hotel thermostat hack. And he used one for what's called an Amana. Cooling heating unit that is usually, it's like a split, usually under a window is the Amana ones. The other one is Honeywell slash Incom in thermostat. I put a link in there for the hack on that.
It's great. He likes to turn on the Amana and make sure that it has the fan on all the time so that he's got white noise that he sleeps through the children running down the hall that sort of thing which is great and he does put in his video. By the way, be sure to put it back the way you found it when you're done. You know, that's that's kind of the courtesy thing to do. The Honeywell one in there is also under the brand Incom
I N N C O M and I put that hack in there. That's the one that's been most annoying to me Yeah, I want to hear about this hack Pete because that one as soon as I saw the picture of it I knew that I needed to know what we're about to talk about. So yeah, So what frequently these hotels will do is have they have a motion sensor on their thermostat? Yes Well, guess what you don't do a lot of when you're sleeping?
Yeah, right. Some people do. Some people do, and good on you if you can do that and sleep, but some people don't. I'm one who doesn't. So I wake up in the middle of the night either freezing or in a sweat. Yeah, right. Because the thermostat has decided, well, there's nobody in here. I don't need to cool the room or heat the room to the desired temperature. And as soon as I get up to change the temperature, it's like, ah, it kicks on. It kicks back on.
Yeah, you don't have to do anything. Yeah, right. Well, I'll be up again in two hours or I can apply this hack and in this case, it's. It's in the video But you touch the display hold the display button touch the on off and then hit the volume or the temperature, Down I think and it'll go into a VIP mode or an LEN. I don't know what LEN stands for but, Then you can set it to override you're setting it to override the motion detector.
Yeah, oh This is great. This is the best tip you've ever shared Pete. I love this, Wow But again, don't be a jerk. Yes. Oh, you found it when you're done. Yeah. Yeah, So but there's the links in there the show notes to get to these two different types of thermostats to make the room more comfortable. For you. Wow. You're paying for the room. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. As you see fit and then put it back when you're done and everybody's happy. I, I, um, I walked into a hotel room in New York. This was
15 years ago and it was, you know, a July or August day. It was hot. And I walked in and the room must've been 90 degrees. Right. And, but I knew I was going out for the night. I was in New York to attend an event. So it was just like, I'm going to throw my stuff and, and literally walk walk out the door, cause I got to go, you know, meet these people for dinner at this event or whatever. And, but I was like, I can't get back here with it being 90 degrees.
And, and cause I know when I get back, I'm just going to go straight to sleep. Like I'm, I'm in this room for one reason. And it's like, I thought I'm barely going to use the lights. I, but I- So you shut the thermostat down and left. No, I started to, and I looked and it was already set down and I was like, oh crap. Like this is how it's like, there's nothing I can do because the motion sensor, like as soon as I walked in the room, it kicked on. Cause it, you know, sensed my presence.
I was like, okay, all right. I got to think about this. And I saw where the, the, like the, the air vent was. And I'm like, okay, so, and don't do this at home or in a hotel, but I'll tell you what I did.
I saw that like the where the vent was it was blowing sort of you know across the the bed and there was a sprinkler hanging you know over the bed and so I was like alright well wait a minute it and and the line of fire from the motion sensor also sort of aimed over the bed and the reason for all this is because it was a new york city hotel room there was room for the bed that was it right so obviously everything happened over the bed because that's all that you get in the room.
You got like you have to shimmy along or climb across the bed to get to from one side of the room to the other and so I haven't thought about this in a long time so I grabbed I had a shirt that I was going to wear the next day I took that out of my bag I grabbed a clothes hanger from the closet and I hung the clothes hanger from the sprinkler again I was aware of the risk of coming back to a soaking wet bed right like I yes I knew this I took the chance I hung my
shirt lightweight just a t-shirt from this hanger but what would happen is, when the air stopped that like when the air was blowing it was strong enough to put the t-shirt at an angle and when it stopped blowing the t-shirt would swing back and forth trigger the motion sensor kick it back on it would hold it still until it's kicked it back off again and then it would start swinging kick it back on and I'm like all right this has got this is good it's gonna get I got to go, hopefully this works.
And I came back to a really comfortable, pleasant room. Good for you. Yeah, man. Yeah. There's always a way to, uh, when there's a will, there's a way. I was pretty proud of myself that night. Well, I'm assuming it was a regular hanger, not one of those anti-theft hangers. You know, I don't know, but it didn't matter. It was a very small little thing to hook it on. Get it in there. Yeah, I got it. Whatever it was, I got it in there.
And the columnist George Will used to say he was so insulted by those anti-theft hangers, he would take them. That's awesome. You know, Chuck Joyner, I'm sure this is a tip that many people know, and I know Chuck from Mac Voices learned it from somebody else years ago, but Chuck posted a picture of a tip and blew my mind probably ten years ago. I am someone who likes it to be dark in my hotel room when I sleep.
And the curtains are rarely engineered such that you get enough overlap to hide the light gap that I'll call it. It's not an air gap, but it's the light gap. And what Chuck does, and lots of people do this, is you take the hanger that has the the clips for your pants, the pants clips, and you clip those to clip the two ends of the curtains together, and you're good to go. So if you didn't already know about that tip, that might be even more important for you than messing with the thermostat.
So, all right, back to tech-based cool stuff found, back to, you know, tech-based cool stuff found, not travel-based cool stuff found. That was helpful though, the travel-based cool stuff found. I hope it was helpful for you folks. It was certainly helpful for me. Rob tells us about something called Shortery that allows you to automate your shortcuts on your Mac. Because the Mac app for shortcuts does not have automations in it, like the shortcuts app on iPhone and iPad does.
And Shortery fixes that problem by letting you automate your shortcuts on your Mac. It is available for free with some in-app purchases. I have not messed with this largely because I automate my shortcuts with Keyboard Maestro, but I figured there were several folks in the Discord using this, And I figured, uh, that's the beauty of a cool stuff found is we get to share it. So thank you for that. Absolutely. Yeah. I hadn't heard of that one.
No, same. It looks interesting. It solves a problem, right. That's, you know, my guess is this will be solved at some point by our friends at Apple, but I, you know, I've learned to not apply a, an expect an ETA to those, um, to those guesses. So. Yeah, uh, yeah, Tony has a, um, I don't know if it's a CFSF or if it's a rumor, but it seemed interestingly enough, interesting enough that I figured I'd put it in.
That, uh, earlier this month, ours reported that Apple might be launching a monitor that stays on when you shut down your Mac so that you get like smart home displays and things like that on your monitor. Think, um, whatever that mode, the echo. Yeah. Kind of like the echo, but also like your iPhone in, in bed stand mode, whatever it's called the new thing that's coming in iOS 17, right. Where it's going to show you the weather and the time and all that while it's on your, you know,
yeah, while it's charging. So that kind of thing, um, you know, it's, and, and it's the always on display kind of, uh, idea. So, yeah, I thought that was, I thought that, I hope they release an improvement to the s-lady to well at least compete with the a-lady, If you're gonna have a smart home display make it smart for goodness sake yeah, Yeah, I've messed around I have I was. 17 on a test device. I'll I know I said I'm freshly that this is coming out right after Mac stock of course
I'm I'm about to go to Mac stock. We're recording this a little early. We also also Also, we'll be doing a live MacGeekGab at MacStock, or by the time most of you hear this, we'll have done a live MacGeekGab at MacStock. I don't know. Including Stump the Dummies. Including Stump the Dummies, but also we'll do the MacGeekGab Caucus is the idea, where we go through a bunch of issues together. There'll be like six of us on stage, it'll be a blast.
But I don't know if the audio from that is going to be good enough to call an official episode or if we need to just release it as like, hey, here's something that you might want to listen to. So, uh, I don't know if that'll be a nine 93 or not, but we'll, you know, we'll find out. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Um, all right. Uh, let's see, what else do we have here? Oh, speaking of travel, we talked about this after CES. It's the snap three pro.
I have had this on my phone since CES, and I take it for granted every single day. What it is- You've never taken it off. I've never taken it off, and Pete- You were gonna. You were gonna. I was gonna take it off. I don't put these things on my phone. I don't like them. want them. Pete is not wrong folks. Pete is not he did not he goes. All right, so we can record the video of. Installing it for the review. I'll put it on my phone, but it's coming right off. Yep,
It has not left my phone in over six months at this point neither. Yeah, I love these it is, It is if you know what a pop socket is That's the function that this snap 3 pro from osnap.com, That's what it provides however, It is much better than a pop socket because it's so thin that, A, I don't notice it in my pocket and B, my MagSafe charger works going through it. So I'm able to leave this on my phone full time.
I put it on my case, right? So I've had the same case on my phone too, which, uh, speaks to the case. I think it's the, yeah, it's a spec case. It's the clear Presidio grip, which is, I love, It's awesome. Um, and, and it, the back, even though the back has grip, the grip indentations on the, on this case, and I'll put the model, the specific model number in the show notes, the indentations go down in it.
So it still works with mag safe. And obviously with the, uh, with this snap three pro thing, it's awesome. If you're watching the video, I'll, I'll pop it up, but just go and check it out on. Oh, snap.com freely. You can spin the phone while holding it. it. Yep. I can, I can hold my phone with it. It, it like, I love this thing so much and I, I've had it queued up to mention in the show for quite a while now because of how amazing it is. And, uh, and so I am super happy to find it in my list.
I completely forgot that I had it in the list and I'm so excited. I do remember that you can take, it's got both, it grabs your case through both magnetic and glue and it, but it's a reusable glue. In other words, if you take it off, you, I think you just wipe it off and the Stick'Em re-engages. That's what they say. You get dust off it. I have yet to test this. I've never taken mine off to find out. Exactly.
Yeah, I guess when the iPhone's 15 come out, that will be the day that I want to move it. So I will move it, move it. But, you know, there you go. All right. Yeah, home run there. Yeah, yeah. Ah, Steve Hammond, speaking of phones in a sense, tells us about a thing called YouGetSignal. He says, I wanted to, it is an open port check tool to check your network. He says, I wanted to make sure that port 80 and ports 443 were open on my router.
And I used this tool called YouGetSignal. And we've got a link in the show notes, of course, And it's at you get signal.com and he says, uh, now I know what ports my ISP is blocking and not letting me use and all of that stuff. So yeah, thank you. I, I love tools like this. Super, super handy. Thank you for sharing that stuff. At the risk of mentioning something else that needs to go in the show notes, is that similar to shields up?
Probably, but I think with a different intent, okay. Shields Up will tell you what's open and its intent is to help you secure your network. This is, its intent is to tell you, yes, you've got your port forwarding set right. I can get through into your network. Both are going to tell you the same thing, just with a different color. Different approach to it, sure. Correct. Yeah. But I'll put Shields Up from GRC in the show notes too. That's a great tool.
Yep. For checking out your network. Yeah, exactly. You got one for us, Pete? I do. So I stumbled across this not long ago when my daughter asked me, is there any way that you can take the watermark out of this photo for me? And I said, yeah, you know, I'm thinking I'm going to take something like acorn and, and, you know, smudge and work all that. And I'm like, you know, but no, it just didn't going to work. And I, so I did a quick little search and I found watermarkremover.io. Interesting.
It comes with a whole ethical host. Oh yeah, yeah, this is, this is, this is a, um, a tool with very limited, uh, morally acceptable use cases. Yeah. Yeah. There's no doubt, it does an amazing job of taking the watermark out of the photos. Yeah. Um, and the, the problem was she had this photo that she wanted for, she liked this photo of herself. She wanted to keep one copy for herself on her iPhone. They wanted a hundred bucks for a photo set to get to get any of it. Yep, and it's like so.
To me I want to say to the photographers. Okay offer something else Yeah, besides the hundred dollar package give someone a five dollar or ten dollar or a twenty dollar package Yeah, that one photo of themselves. Did she offer that to the photographer because that that's the other side of this is saying hey I just can I get a low-res version of this just to use on my phone? Like she did ask and they said nope, that's it. Okay. Yeah, and it's like yeah, so, you know, I.
Don't know. Is it theft is it intellectual property theft? Maybe technically I mean, yeah Yeah, if you're gonna ask that question, I will answer it. But yeah. Yeah, I think I think it is technically Yeah, I'm the same token photographers offer something to somebody for, or what they're asking. Make that possible. Yeah.
Because, yeah. Yeah. Because otherwise you're gonna lose out on 100 bucks and someone's gonna go remove their watermarks and, or you're gonna, I'm sorry, you're gonna lose out on the five or 10 bucks or 20 bucks for the one photo that they want.
And that's money you could have. It is fair, right? I mean, the conversation is interesting to have to have, because with these kinds of tools out there, the only thing stopping people from doing this is, A, there's two things, right, ethics, and B, ease of use, right? So as the tools get easier to use, you know, friction, right? So there's ethical friction, and then there's sort of logistical friction.
Technical. Yeah, technical friction, right? find one of these tools, either probably 16 of them and and 14 of them don't do a great job. And you write like you, you know, you're you're going to spend some time going through a headache and all that. And it reminds me, as I'm sure it reminds many of you of like the days of, say Napster, right? And then Apple Music showed up and.
Napster, as the service that allowed for peer-to-peer file sharing of songs, saw a huge decline the day that Apple Music started its, you know, buy-a-song-for-a-dollar service, because people were like, oh great, for a dollar, I'm not going to go through the headache of dealing with Napster, right, right, you know, but I don't want to buy an album for 20 bucks just to pay for- I want two songs off it. For 14 songs that I don't want for the two songs that I do want. Yeah, exactly.
And you know, that really hit home for me when my dad, I was at my dad's house and I'm like, dad, you're running Napster on your computer? He's like, oh yeah, this is how I get, my friends and I share music with each other. And I'm like, okay, yeah, you're friends, right, got it. 300 million of them. But he said, listen, you know, all my life, I've had to buy nine, I've paid for nine songs I didn't want to get the one song I did want.
Now I'm just recouping that investment. It's like, you know, like, but obviously he knew that, that there was a, you know, that legally that was not actually what would, that would not hold up in court, but it was an interesting thing to see. What did Apple do? They offered what I'm saying. They offered something legal at a better price. Yep.
And a better, yeah. Because people, most people will take the moral, ethical route, that which is quote unquote right, if you make it easy for them to do that. And that, like, so, you know, is what you did here morally wrong? I mean, I think objectively, yes. But like I said, it brings up an interesting conversation. Yeah, yeah. And it's, here's the thing, whether or not I did it, the fact is watermarkremover.io is there and it will swipe your clothes clean photographers.
And I'm not here judging, by the way. I'm being objective about this. I mean, it's a fair conversation to have. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That, you know, people make good money as photographers and I think it's getting harder and harder in this digital age for them to continue to make good money and not have their work. Ripped off. Yep for lack of I agree agreed. Oh, yeah, I agree but Be flexible in your packaging and people will pay people will pay I think I know I I think so
I think so for sure. Yeah, I got at least two things. I want to mention number one I talked about the Eve weather device the one that I'm hanging outside and I said that it was Wi-Fi. It's not. It's matter and thread Correct. So I was like, oh yeah, it's connecting via wifi to my network. No, it's connecting via matter and thread to my network.
And so that was an important distinction I wanted to make. I need to, I need to do like from a technical standpoint, I think I could describe what matter is, but from a, like I don't grok it. I need to work on that. So I will, and then I'll come back and explain it to you. And if one of you like has already grokked it, I'm sure you're out there. I'm sure I'm probably in the minority at this point. I just, it doesn't, it's like regular expressions. I'm not, my brain doesn't like it.
Doesn't want to let it in, but it will. I'll force it to let it in. Feedback at MacEcob.com. So thank you for bearing with me on that. And then the next one I wanted to mention while we're here is a service that's probably not going to seem like it's going to hit my 20% mark, right? I have this 20% rule that things I'd like to have them hit at least what I believe would be 20% of you. This one might not, but it's a service called SMTP, the number two, G-O, SMTP2go.com.
SMTP is the protocol via which we send email, right? If you have your own domain and you want to send mail with it, but you're just getting it say forwarded from your ISP, right? You know, you got a domain, you're just saying forward everything from this domain into my Gmail account, right? And there sometimes are ways that you can convince Gmail to send as your domain, but not always. It sometimes will ask you for an SMTP server.
And if your, you know, domain host doesn't offer that or you're not paying for that, then you don't have that. Enter SMTP to go. What this does is it becomes your SMTP server for you. And what's really cool about it is certainly, you know, you can send lots and lots of mail and pay, you know, anywhere from, you know, fifteen dollars a month all the way up. But if you go to SMTP to go and this is something Rod L. pointed out in our discord. So thank you, Rod.
And you drag the little slider all the way to the left to the thousand thousand. Not the thousand dollar. That's the other. That's the other way. the thousand emails per month slider, it is zero dollars per month. So if you're not sending very much from whatever this custom domain is you have, this might be your magic answer. So I wanted to put it out there. Um, it is SMTP to go. And of course it's linked in, uh, in the show notes.
And as I said, free for up to a thousand emails per month, which every now and then intermittently with PIA VPN, I will get the, hey, I can't send mail from this SMTP, or can't send it from this server. And if I turn off the VPN, then it'll go. I'm wondering if I could use that. See, and here's, so Rod is actually in the live chat as we speak. And Rod says it's a great solution for Synology notifications. Oh yeah. Oh, right, because you need to send through an SMTP server.
What are you going to send through? Bingo. Here you go. So, you know, like I said, hearing it, you might not think it applies to you. But now that you know about it, the next time you hit that little hurdle, you're going to be like, wait, wait, wait, the guys talked about this. What's it called? It's SMTP to go. So hopefully that helps. Hopefully something in the episode today has has helped. Oh, Rod L also points out SMTP to go for those scanners that want to scan to email, right?
You know, you scan something and it sends you an email. You need to put an SMTP server in. Here you go. So. The sign-up is free, no credit card, they're obviously not sponsoring the episode, if that's not clear. Only $1,000 a month. Only $1,000, yeah, you could slide, actually, you know, can we slide the slider over and get it to $1,000 a month? What's the number? So at a million- You get to 520 professional, a million emails, 3 million custom.
Yeah, 3 million goes to custom. So I can get it up to 520 a month for a million emails. That's really not that bad, to be candid. Oh, you're sending some serious traffic downrange at a million emails. Yeah, but if you're... You're spamming somebody. Well, or if you've got a mailing list of millions of people, right? Sure. Oh, yeah. I mean, it'd be huge enterprise, you know, companies, absolutely, to get sent out. I like it. And pretty soon, Dave, we're going to have that many listeners.
That's correct. That's correct. And you're going to need that. We're going to need it. That's right. Yeah, sign up at our... Hey, make us hurt. Sign up for our email at macgeekup.com. We want to feel that pain. Absolutely. Sharing the show with your friends. Yes, please, please, please share the best. The world needs more geeks. Yeah, as I like to say, you don't have to be a geek to listen, but if you listen long enough, you'll become one.
Now I are one. And now Pete, yeah, that's right, Pete. You're a perfect example of this. That's very true. Thanks to Cashfly for providing all the bandwidth to get the episode from us to you. You can follow us everywhere. You can follow us on threads and Twitter. Mastodon. We'll put the links for Mastodon in the show notes. And yeah, it's fun. And thanks for hanging out. Make sure to check out Pete's other show called So There I Was.
My other two shows, of course, I mentioned Business Brain earlier and Gig Gab for, Musicians or people who are into music and kind of want to peek behind the curtain, if you will, check out our sponsors, of course, HelloFresh.com slash MGG50 and Notion.com slash MacGeekGab. Thank you so much for hanging out with us, folks. It's been a blast. We'll do it again. This weekend, I bet. You will do it again. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. We will have done it at MaxTalk by the time most people hear from it.
And one thing I like to say and we've been saying it for years is what you've got written right there on our shirt Pete And that is folks. Please take care of yourselves, Please be kind to one another. Please share the show with your friends and most of all, please, Don't get caught I did say it, it's true. Later!